In looking over a collection of manuscript letters of the times of James the First, I was struck by the contradictory reports of the result of the famous battle of Lutzen, so glorious and so fatal to Gustavus Adolphus; the victory was sometimes reported to have been obtained by the Swedes; but a general uncertainty, a sort of mystery, agitated the majority of the nation, who were staunch to the protestant cause.  This state of anxious suspense lasted a considerable time.  The fatal truth gradually came out in reports changing in their progress; if the victory was allowed, the death of the Protestant Hero closed all hope!  The historian of Gustavus Adolphus observes on this occasion, that “Few couriers were better received than those who conveyed the accounts of the king’s death to declared enemies or concealed ill-wishers; nor did the report greatly displease the court of Whitehall, where the ministry, as it usually happens in cases of timidity, had its degree of apprehensions for fear the event should not be true; and, as I have learnt from good authority, imposed silence on the news-writers, and intimated the same to the pulpit in case any funeral encomium might proceed from that quarter.”  Although the motive assigned by the writer, that of the secret indisposition of the cabinet of James the First towards the fortunes of Gustavus, is to me by no means certain, unquestionably the knowledge of this disastrous event was long kept back by “a timid ministry,” and the fluctuating reports probably regulated by their designs.

The same circumstance occurred on another important event in modern history, where we may observe the artifice of party writers in disguising or suppressing the real fact.  This was the famous battle of the Boyne.  The French catholic party long reported that Count Lauzun had won the battle, and that William the Third was killed.  Bussy Rabutin in some memoirs, in which he appears to have registered public events without scrutinising their truth, says, “I chronicled this account according as the first reports gave out; when at length the real fact reached them, the party did not like to lose their pretended victory.”  Pere Londel, who published a register of the times, which is favourably noticed in the “Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres,” for 1699, has recorded the event in this deceptive manner:  “The Battle of the Boyne in Ireland; Schomberg is killed there at the head of the English.”  This is “an equivocator!” The writer resolved to conceal the defeat of James’s party, and cautiously suppresses any mention of a victory, but very carefully gives a real fact, by which his readers would hardly doubt of the defeat of the English!  We are so accustomed to this traffic of false reports, that we are scarcely aware that many important events recorded in history were in their day strangely disguised by such mystifying accounts.  This we can only discover by reading private letters written at the moment.  Bayle has collected several remarkable