It is in
this last transaction that her history, almost in the moment when she
ceased to have a history of her own, links to that of the modern world,
and that it came home to the Marches in their national character; for two
thousand of those poor Ansbach mercenaries were bought up by England and
sent to put down a rebellion in her American colonies.
Humanly, they were more concerned for the Last Margrave, because of
certain qualities which made him the Best Margrave, in spite of the
defects of his qualities. He was the son of the Wild Margrave, equally
known in the Ansbach annals, who may not have been the Worst Margrave,
but who had certainly a bad trick of putting his subjects to death
without trial, and in cases where there was special haste, with his own
hand. He sent his son to the university at Utrecht because he believed
that the republican influences in Holland would be wholesome for him, and
then he sent him to travel in Italy; but when the boy came home looking
frail and sick, the Wild Margrave charged his official travelling
companion with neglect, and had the unhappy Hofrath Meyer hanged without
process for this crime. One of the gentlemen of his realm, for a
pasquinade on the Margrave, was brought to the scaffold; he had, at
various times, twenty-two of his soldiers shot with arrows and bullets or
hanged for desertion, besides many whose penalties his clemency commuted
to the loss of an ear or a nose; a Hungarian who killed his hunting-dog,
he had broken alive on the wheel.
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