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Updated: May 6, 2025
Of this recent accession, Geneva, for a brief term part of France, had previously long been a pure oligarchy, and more remotely a dictatorship; Neuchâtel had been a dependency of the crown of Prussia, never, in fact, fully released until 1857; Valais and the Grisons, so-called independent confederacies, had been under ecclesiastical rule; Ticino had for three centuries been governed as conquered territory, the privilege of ruling over it purchased by bailiffs from its conquerors, the ancient Swiss League "a harsh government," declares the Encyclopædia Britannica, "one of the darkest passages of Swiss history."
He did not know where he was gone. Towards the end of the same year I learnt at Paris that the wretched man had taken refuge at Coire, the capital of the Grisons, where he asked to be made a member of the Calvinistic Church, and to be recognized as lawful husband of the woman with him; but in a short time the community discovered that the new convert was no good, and expelled him from the bosom of the Church of Calvin.
He likewise desired the friendly offices of the Queen to protect the principality of Orange against the possible designs of the French monarch, and intimated that occasions might arise in which the confiscated estates of the family in Burgundy might be recovered through the influence of the Swiss cantons, particularly those of the Grisons and of Berne.
The Austrians called the Swiss, in derision, Kühmelkers a term more opprobrious than bouviers; and it is said that, after the battle of Frastens one of the battles of the Suabian war, a Frenchman threw himself at the feet of some Grisons soldiers, and innocently prayed thus for quarter; 'Très-chers, très-honorables, et très-dignes Kühmelkers! au nom de Dieu, ne me tuez pas!
The people of the Grisons, who had taken possession of the Valtelline, and the people of Uri, who had seized the Livinenthal, had been respectively driven out of those territories by the Austrians. The Valais, Geneva, Neufchatel, and Pruntrut were, on the other hand, desirous of joining the confederation. The democratic peasantry were almost everywhere at war with the aristocratic burghers.
Some years' residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiar with all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough Inferno, generous Forzato, delicate Sassella, harsher Montagner, the raspberry flavour of Grumello, the sharp invigorating twang of Villa.
"No," said Carlo Ammiani, who chimed to his humour more readily than the rest, and affected to inspect the Grisons' peak through a diminutive opera-glass. "No, he is not there." "Perhaps, my son, he is like a squirrel, and is careful to run up t'other side of the stem. For he is on that mountain; no doubt of it can exist even in the Boeotian mind of one of his subjects; myself, for example.
I had occasion to pass a week in the autumn in the little old town of Coire or Chur, in the Grisons, where lies buried that very ancient British king, saint, and martyr, Lucius,* who founded the Church of St. Peter, on Cornhill. Few people note the church now-a-days, and fewer ever heard of the saint. In the cathedral at Chur, his statue appears surrounded by other sainted persons of his family.
One instance of his dealing will suffice. A gentleman of Bellano, Polidoro Boldoni, in return to his advances, coldly replied that he cared for neither amity nor relationship with thieves and robbers; whereupon Il Medeghino extirpated his family, almost to a man. Soon after his settlement in Musso, Il Medeghino, wishing to secure the gratitude of the Duke, his master, began war with the Grisons.
With two Spanish regiments, two thousand Swiss, the Walloon troops of De Grisons, and the Irish regiment of Stanley in all seven thousand foot and thirteen hundred horse Mondragon marched straight across Brabant and Gelderland to the Rhine. At Kaiserworth he reviewed his forces, and announced his intention of immediately crossing the river.
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