STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 045
Brother James Robertson in the Baltic, 1808
7. Tales of Secret Service (6)
Brother James Robertson in the Baltic, 1808
This tale, like that of Louis Guttierez soi-disant Baron de Agra, deals with one who started life as a novice in a monastery. But James Robertson was not a renegade who fled to the secular world in disgrace like the Spanish friar. When his strange episode of secret service was over, he returned to the community in which he had been reared, and lived there to the end of his days, much respected, and the patron of a benevolent institution of which he had become the founder.
There was an ancient house of Scottish Benedictines in the free imperial city of Ratisbon on the Danube. Ever since its foundation in the XVIth century it was maintained by the sons of Scottish Catholic families, who could not enter into the monastic life in their own land, where the black frock of the monk was anathema. To this house of exiles there came, in the quiet years just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792, a young Scot of old Catholic lineage, James Robertson, introduced by his uncle, Father Marianus Brockie.
The Scottish Benedictines of Ratisbon had long ceased to be Jacobites or enemies to the British Government. Ratisbon was, before the break up of the Holy Roman Empire, a frequent meeting-place of its Diets, and to these Diets British envoys often came, for there were Ministers accredited to the Diet as well as Ministers accredited to the Austrian Kaiser. Robertson tells us, in his little book of adventure, that when British diplomats came to Ratisbon they had fallen into the habit of applying to his superior, Abbot Arbuthnot, for assistance in the secretarial and interpreting line. One of his contemporaries, Father Horn, was so frequently employed by Mr. Drake, that when Napoleon started the cry of “murder” against that unlucky gentleman, and kidnapped his colleague Rumbold, the good father had to disappear forthwith.
Now, among casual visitors to Ratisbon there had come in 1795 Colonel Charles Lennox of the 35th Foot, one of the M.P.’s for the County of Sussex, and next of kin to the aged Duke of Richmond. He called on the Superior of the Scottish Benedictines and asked for a cicerone and interpreter, for German was to him a tongue unknown. Father Arbuthnot put him in charge of James Robertson, who was a plump, merry young monk, with a gift for getting on with everybody, and an inexhaustible flow of conversation. The Colonel and the Benedictine agreed excellently, and parted after a few days—never likely to meet again.
In 1806 Colonel Lennox succeeded to the Dukedom of Richmond, and in 1807 he was made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Meanwhile Brother James had discovered that he had no great vocation for a sedentary life in Ratisbon, and had applied for missionary work. He was sent to his native Scotland in 1797, and laboured for eight years ministering to a scattered congregation in Galloway. In 1805 he was transferred to Ireland, and was working in Dublin when the Duke of Richmond came over St. George’s Channel as Viceroy.
With some trepidation Brother James (or to be more correct Brother Gallus, for he had taken that name “in religion”, in memory of St. Gall, the Celtic Apostle of the Alps), resolved that he would venture to recall his existence to the Viceroy. He did so, and found that he was remembered and that pleasantly: he and the Duke interchanged opinions on Germany, then in the abyss of Rheinbund degradation. And the monk remarked to the Duke that if ever he wanted information about things on the Danube or the Elbe under French domination, he himself was the man who could get it, for he could pass as a German anywhere, and as a priest he could slip from one religious house to another unsuspected. Nothing came of this for a year, and Robertson thought that he had passed out of the Viceroy’s mind.
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