From the Memoirs of a Minister of France was written by Stanley J. Weyman. The British Weyman (1855-1928) was an unsuccessful lawyer who turned to writing to support himself. With the help of Andrew Lang Weyman’s first book, House of the Wolf (1890), was published and his fortune made. Throughout the 1890s Weyman was enormously successful, producing one memorable historical novel after another and earning himself the nickname “the English Dumas.”

The titular “Minister of France” is a fictionalization of the historical Duc de Sully, Maximilien de Bethune (1560-1641), the adviser to and favorite of King Henry IV of France. The Duc de Sully was a Huguenot, a skilled and honest man of finance, a soldier, and a man widely disliked by nearly everyone but the King.

From the Memoirs is a collection of a dozen short stories set in France from the 1590s through 1610. Weyman obviously researched the era thoroughly for the stories, even reading the Duc de Sully's (heavily fictionalized) memoirs; the stories’ recreation of the time and place is flawless, even assuming that the portrayals of the Duc and of Henry IV are romanticized. (Or in the Duc's case, almost completely fictional). The Duc of From the Memoirs is not a typical swashbuckler, although the historical Duc's earlier career as a gunner and engineer would certainly lend himself to stories like that. The fictional Duc is actually an older man (older in the stories than he was at similar times in real life), and his skill is not with the sword but with the mind. The fictional Duc is clever, a regular at Henry's court and adept at political in fighting. The Duc is an honest man, but he is not stupid and he is always aware of how quickly reputations (and the favor of the King) can be lost, and how quickly the King can be led astray by his heart or groin, so the Duc takes action at the slightest sign of trouble. When a clockmaker schemes to set the King up with his daughter, the Duc sees to it that the King's mistress is assuaged and the clockmaker’s daughter is fobbed off on someone else. When a Spaniard schemes to poison the King, the Duc cleverly sees to it that the Spaniard takes the poison himself. When a special cipher goes missing which only the Duc and the King use, the Duc solves the mystery of who stole it, and why. When peasants are groaning and miserable because of a cruel tax gatherer, the Duc sees to it that the tax gatherer and the rich merchants who give him bribes are punished. And so on.

Weyman’s work is generally seen as the foremost example of the historical romance swashbuckler mode of the Yellow Nineties and to a lesser degree the Aughts. (The majority of Weyman’s historical romances were written in the 1890s). From a broader perspective, Weyman’s work is representative of (and arguably one of the best examples of) the “New Romance.”

Doyle was one of several prominent writers of the fin-de-siècle who reacted against the dominance of literary realism by artfully combining the empiricism and apparent objectivity of the realists with the imaginative fabulations of the early nineteenth-century romantics. Following the precedents set by Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, writers like Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, and others clothed their fantastic tales in the guise of realism, creating the genre of New Romance¼some critics, such as Patrick Brantlinger, have argued that this genre was a reaction against realism and return to the Gothic. But, as Nicholas Daley notes in his rebuttal to this line of argument, this was not how contemporary critics envisaged it¼.¹

The New Romance lasted for approximately forty-years, into the 1930s, but the male-centered swashbuckler of the Weyman sort was overtaken that decade by women-oriented popular historical romances of the sort written by Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland, which would go on to dominate the genre for decades.²

Weyman was known as the “English Dumas,” as mentioned, and certainly the influence of Dumas, especially The Three Musketeers, is evident in Weyman’s work. But in his best work, such as From the Memoirs of a Minister of France, Weyman tends to tell stories of older characters, not the young men of Dumas’ work, and Weyman tends to portray his older protagonists as more mature than Dumas’ characters, and as more destabilizing of the swashbuckler stereotypes than Dumas. Weyman, who was thirty-five when he began writing his historical romance swashbucklers, was an old thirty-five, with middle-aged opinions. The result was twofold: less pure swashbuckling, but a more refined style.

From 1890 onward, he was the lion of a very special & elegant literary form....he was one of only two authors Rafael Sabatini explicitly claimed to have been an influence on his work; the other was mystic historical novelist Mary Johnston [see: To Have and To Hold]¼Weyman's great contribution to perfecting the historical romance in its purest "swashbuckler" mode was to take all that was most thrilling about Alexander Dumas & Sir Walter Scott & get rid of everything that was tedious. That is not to say he made it simpler; he evaded stating the obvious, he used correct history as background without lecturing about it, he was never a blow-hard. He depended on environment & momentous occasion to guide the characters through a story. This resulted in a swift, forward-moving & suspenseful plot punctuated with action, heroism, witticism, & romance both of the high adventure-sort & the sort that requires a leading lady.³

From the Memoirs of a Minister of France is not full of flashing blades and derring-do. It is full of clever mysteries cunningly solved, witty repartee, historical scenes and people vividly recreated, and enjoyable, stylish prose. It is an excellent example of why Weyman is so valued by connoisseurs of historical romances.

Print: Stanley John Weyman, From the Memoirs of a Minister of France. London: British Library, 2011.

Glenda Norquay, “Robert Louis Stevenson and Stanley J. Weyman: Reviving Romancers or Aging Adventurers,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 55, no. 2 (2012): 176-194.

¹ Michael Saler, “’Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes’: Mass Culture and the Re-Enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890-c. 1940,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 3 (Sept. 2003): 611.

² See Helen Hughes’ The Historical Romance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003) for much more information and analysis on this shift.

³ Jessica Amanda Salmonson, “On Stanley Weyman, Greatest of the Yellow Nineties Swashbuckling Romancers,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine, accessed Jan. 28, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20111009060629/http://www.violetbooks.com:80/weyman.html