THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
IN THE SAME SERIES
THE OLD DOMINION MARY JOHNSTON.
THE PROFESSIONAL AUNT Mrs. GEORGE WEMYSS.
IN THE QUARTER
R. W. CHAMBERS.
BY ORDER OF THE COMPANY MARY JOHNSTON.
THE CORNER OF HARLEY STREET PETER HARDING, M.D.
SIR MORTIMER
MARY JOHNSTON.
THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT GEORGE GISSING.
SELECTED POEMS.
GEORGE MEREDITH.
AUDREY
MARY JOHNSTON
QUEED
HENRY SYDNOR HARRISON.
LEWIS RAND
MARY JOHNSTON
THE
GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
BY
G. S. STREET
ST
AUTHOR OP
'THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BOY,' 'THE TRIALS OF THE BANTOCKS, ETC.
LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
DA
608323
First Published . . August 1907 Reprinted , . . March 1914
NOTE
SEVERAL of the chapters of this book have appeared in The Monthly Review, and some of them in Putnam's Monthly, and the usual acknowledgments are offered. G. S. S.
PKEFACE
WHEN prefaces are read at all they are read most often after the rest of the book. And nearly always, I imagine, they are written after it. But I am writing this before a line else of my book is done, and on this ground I venture to approach the courteous reader with the hope that he also, if this beginning should catch his eye, will be unusual and read the preface before the book. I wish to place before myself, as well as before him, precisely, more or less, what I shall try to accomplish.
There is no new, salient fact to be told of Piccadilly. The keen eyes of the late Mr. Peter Cunningham and of Mr. H. B. Wheat- ley have noted practically every house where a great man lived, and have told us the complete story of Piccadilly's origin and
TU
viii THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
early eventfulness. I wish at the outset to express my great and essential obligation to them and to other writers on the subject, more especially to Mr. Wheatley's Round about Piccadilly and Pall Mall, to which book my own is indebted for a great many facts and references. At this point, too, I wish to thank the Rev. W. J. Loftie for many useful hints in my work. But other writers, occupying a much wider field than mine, have had of necessity to confine them- selves, for the most part, to telling us that in such and such houses lived such and such men, of whom such and such anecdotes are told. My local limitation enables me to attempt something more, and that is to recall in some fashion, if I may, the atmospheres that were about these men, and the tales told of them. I have space to elaborate and gossip, and so I propose to fill it.
I trust there is no immodesty in avowing this desire to add something, in a sense, to the work of men much superior to me in antiquarian knowledge. The rest of the book will show if the hope was foolish. But I would claim the antecedent excuse
PREFACE ix
of fairly wide and constant study in our social history since Piccadilly began to be built, of a great love for these associations, and — for this helps, I think — that my feet have trod its pavement most days for years whose number is beginning to de- press me.
A local limitation of this sort may not be obviously useful. On a gossip, however, some limit must be put, and this one sug- gests a more variously interesting book than if I had chosen a wider space and a shorter period. Having taken it, I shall keep to it strictly. We shall walk up no streets on the right or left. The Albany, I think, one may take as a single house rather than a street : if that be an exception, it is the only one. And surely, if any part of any city deserves a book to itself, it is Piccadilly We shall stand, the reader and I, before some house in the hours when the traffic is stilled, and I shall tell him of its history, of the men and women who dwelt there, and talked and loved and gambled and lived and died. And since to interest him I must interest myself, I shall follow the lines of my tem- perament and tastes rather than those of
x THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
completeness and impartiality : it is likely I shall be voluble about Byron and reticent about Macaulay. If the tale bores him, he can to bed without discourtesy.
G. S. STREET.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAQK
I. A GENERAL VIEW ... 1 II. CONTRASTED FATES . . .17
III. ANOTHER CONTRAST OF NEIGHBOURS : 81
AND 82 .... 41
IV. OLD Q. . . . .58 V. THE GHOSTS OF ALBANY . . .75
VI. BYRON ..... 91
VII. OF BURLINGTON HOUSE . . .107
VIII. THE PALMERSTONS AND CAMBRIDGE
HOUSE . . . . .126
ix. 105, 106, AND 107 ... 141
X. THE GREAT DUKE . . .157
XI. EMMA HAMILTON . . . .176
XII. SIR WALTER IN LONDON . 192
xii CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
XIII. HARRIOT MELLON. . . . 205
XIV. SOME OTHER PEOPLE . . .221 XV. SOME OTHER HOUSES . . .237
XVI. THE SHOPS AND THE TAVERNS . .254
XVII. THE CHURCH AND THE END . . 269
INDEX 279
CHAPTEK I
A GENERAL VIEW
STANDING to-day in Piccadilly, in any ordinary hour of the traffic, or sitting in a room facing it with the window open, we remark that we cannot hear ourselves speak. So my book is m some measure an epitaph ; for a place where we cannot hear ourselves speak is not likely to be favoured with fresh associations of the sort I commemorate. People will cease to live in it or to walk in it for pleasure. Even clubs will disappear from it, and hurry up side-streets in search of comparative quietude. The advocates of motor-omnibuses claim that the main thoroughfares must be given up to them, and people who value peace live elsewhere. Either that, or the machines must be made noiseless, which even their advocates do
2 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
not contemplate, or our nerves must become insensible. It is true that a hundred years ago, with the innumerable street cries and the freer voices of our ancestors — nay, even thirty years ago, when the cobble-stones were still used — the actual volume of sound was greater. But one can grow used to the continual rumble over stones, and cries which irritate the nerves do not deafen the ears ; spasmodic machinery, suddenly grunt- ing and shrieking, defeats and routs us finally. It is probable, then, that the melancholy prophecy is right, and that the true Piccadilly of history is fast dying. Let us leave it forthwith and go back to the day when that history was beginning. Let us stand at the top of St. James's Street, enter Mr. Wells's Time Machine, and go back to the year 1664.
I choose that year (let me say as we go) because then began the building of great houses in Piccadilly, and its entrance into the main current of our social history. The name, of course, is older; and here it be- hoves me, I suppose, to give an account of it — reluctantly, and overcoming a tempta- tion to refer my readers to the authorities
PICCADILLY HALL 3
and leave them alone in that company, for the facts are obscure, without being interesting.
In the early part of the seventeenth cen- tury, then, there was a house in this district — near the top of the Hay market — known as Piccadilly Hall. It belonged to one Robert Baker, who made a will, dated April 14, 1623, in which he left two pounds ten shillings in money and ten shillings in bread to the poor of the parish, namely, that of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. In this will he speaks of a tenement in his own occupation, with its garden and cow-house, and land of the extent of two acres * in two fields behind the Mews/ all enclosed with a brick wall, but without a name. In the entry of the charity in the accounts of the Overseers of the Poor, the donor is described as ' Robte Baeker of Pickadilley Hall/ and from this it is possible to infer that Robert Baker did not care for the name, which must in that case have been a nickname.
There was also a gaming-house hereabouts also known as Piccadilly, and otherwise as Shaver's Hall. That is, according to Mr. Wheatley, who thinks that Piccadilly Hall
4 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
was a private house, and that, the district having got the name of Piccadilly, the gaming-house was also so called. If, how- ever, there is anything in Mr. Baker's omitting the name from his will, it seems probable that his house was in some way public, otherwise it would hardly have been given a nickname he regarded as derogatory. Be that as it may, I think it is clear that Shaver's Hall was not originally called Piccadilly, because George Garrard writes to Lord Conway, May 30, 1636— 'Simone Austbiston's house is newly christened. It is called Shaver's Hall, as other neighbour- ing places thereabouts are nicknamed Tart Hall, Pickadell Hall ' ; and he goes on to say that the nickname was not derived from the builder's profession— he was barber to Lord Pembroke — but because Lord Dunbar lost £3000 at a sitting and was said to be shaved. Well, but in 1641 Lord Clarendon, then Mr. Hyde, went to ' a place called Piccadilly, which was a fair house for entertainment and gaming, with handsome gravel walks with shade, and where were an upper and lower bowling-green, whither very many of the nobility and gentry of the best quality
SIR JOHN SUCKLING 5
resorted both for exercise and conversation/ I opine that either this was a development of Baker's house, or that Shaver's Hall had come later to be confused with it and called Piccadilly, or that this was a house distinct from both. To it, at any rate, resorted Sir John Suckling — 'natural, easy Suckling/ as Millamant calls him in The Way of the World — the poetical gallant who was famous for bowling and card-playing. ' He did use/ says Aubrey, ' to practise by himselfe a-bed, and then studyed the best way of managing the cards/ That has something of a sinister air, but in spite of it we find his sisters 'comeing to the Peccadillo bowling-green crying, for feare he should lose all their portions/ and the end of it all was suicide in Paris. Other gallants of less interest came to grief 'at Piccadilly/ but we need not linger over their fortunes.
Very early the name seems to have been extended to the district, for in the second edition of Gerarde's Herbal, published in 1633, we have 'The little wild Buglosse grows upon the drie ditche banks about Pickadilla, and almost everywhere/ It grew, that is, in the fields by the Western
6 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
Road, on the way to Reading — fields that in 1633 came up to Piccadilly Circus.
Yes ; but still, why Piccadilly ? Well, pickadil, says Thomas Blount in 1656, was * the round hem, or the several divisions set together about the skirt of a garment, or other thing ; also a kind of stiff collar made in fashion of a band. Hence, perhaps, that famous ordinary near St. James, called Pickadilly, took denomination ; because it was then the outmost or skirt house of the suburbs that way. Others say that it took its name from this, that one Higgins, a tailor, who built it, got most of his estate by Pickadilles, which, in the last age, were much worn in England.' Higgins, says Mr. Wheatley, is a myth, and the former deriva- tion the more probable. I confess it seems to me unlikely that a house should be called the skirt house because it was the outmost house, and it hardly amounts to a nickname, as Piccadilly seems to have been. On the other hand, without wishing to revive Higgins, I think it more or less natural to nickname a place of resort from an obtrusive piece of fashionable raiment, like a stiff collar, worn by its frequenters. I remember
PECCADILLO 7
that in my boyhood there was a popular satirical song called ' Captain Cuff/ from the habit of shooting out the cuffs alleged to mark military officers. In the same way, I can imagine a place frequented by gallants in remarkably stiff pickadilles coming to be called Pickadille or Pickadilly Hall. (In the impartial spelling of the seventeenth century it was written Pakadilla, Pickadilla, Pecka- dille, Pickedille, and even Piccadilly.) But it is not an attractive explanation.
More so is the idea that a Spaniard, coming over with Philip in Queen Mary's time, opened a gambling-house and called it — as with a shrug and a smile — his pecca- dillo. Unfortunately there is no more evidence for the Spaniard's existence than for Higgins's. That Aubrey, as we have seen, writes Peccadillo, and Evelyn on one occasion Piqudillo, does not signify much. But I cannot help thinking that some association in people's minds with peccadillo and its pleasant suggestions helped the rapid popu- larity and extension of the name. From being originally confined to what is now Coventry Street and the extreme east of Piccadilly — the part west to St. James's
8 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
Street being called Portugal Street in com- pliment to Catherine of Braganza — it was rapidly applied to the whole thoroughfare, as it was built over, to Hyde Park Corner. It is, indeed, a pleasant sound, Piccadilly, conveying to us the idea of a sunny spring morning and what lightness and gaiety there was in English life and manners.
And now, clearing our minds from these intricacies of origin — which are not much in my way to expound, but which I trust are tolerably clear in this brief statement — let us descend from our Time Machine, at the top of St. James's Street, in 1664.
Into a clearer air than now, although the sootiness of it was already a matter of com- plaint. As the sense of greater space and clarity refreshes our eyes, the noise of building and the cheerful voices of Caroline workmen strike our ears. For directly opposite us, where now is the bottom of Albemarle Street, my Lord Chancellor Clarendon is building him the great house whose sad fortune I shall talk to you about presently. And hard by this im- posing edifice, with its projecting centre
IN 1664 9
and Extremes, if we look eastwards we see Burlington House also a-building, less ornately than it was afterwards made, but clearly destined for a great man's occupation. If we walk to the east we shall notice some ordinary houses and shops of the period, notably one at the corner of Sackville Street, now Lincoln Bennett's, the hatters, where dwells Sir William Petty, great at the Ad- miralty and a friend of Mr. Pepys. If we like to go so far as the site of the Criterion, we shall find that Stuart London, too, thought it a good place for refreshment, and may enter the White Bear Inn, unless you be so nice about dates as to object (to fore- stall my critics) that the first mention of it is 1685.
In this eastern part of Piccadilly there are many people afoot, bustling and talk- ing, sometimes kissing one another on meeting, all alert with that determination to enjoy life which marked the early years of the Restoration. I am sorely tempted to bid you mark yonder tall, dark man, with harsh features oddly contrasting with his good-humoured laugh as he talks with his companions, walking swiftly — bid you
10 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
mark him and uncover as he passes. It is the King, going without ceremony to look at his Chancellor's new house ; the King to whose love of mixing with his people we owe it that St. James's Park has been free to the public since his day. The women are prettily dressed, and so for that are the men, though their dress has already declined from the punctilious elegance of Charles the First's time to overmuch lace and finery. The King was to try to change it for a plain Persian vest, but in clothes English- men have been always intractable. On the verge of the open country, however, as we are, we may well see a country gentleman or so coming into town in his manly and sensible country habit — his Devonshire kersey suit, his Dutch felt hat, his worsted stockings and his strong shoes.
We walk westwards again. If we had come a year later Berkeley House, which is now Devonshire House, would be building also, but to gain it we should have to pass the turnpike at the corner of Berkeley Street. Thenceforward is open country, the Western Road, without pavement and apt to be miry. The mud gets worse as we
THE STONE BRIDGE 11
pass what now is Brick Street, at the side of the Isthmian Club, where the Tyburn stream flows right across Piccadilly. But that we may not leave Piccadilly, we might follow the course of the stream up for a little way and understand why the pave- ment still rings hollow in Lansdowne Passage. There is a stone bridge over the Tyburn in Piccadilly, with an evil reputa- tion. For the historian Norden had written in 1593, of * Kinges-bridge, commonly called Stonebridge, near Hyde Park Corner, where I wish no true man to walke too late without good garde, unles he can make his partie good, as did Sir H. Knyvet, Knight, who valiantlye defended himself e, there being assaulted, and slew the master theefe with his own handes.' If it happens to be May Day we might cross the bridge and go on to Hyde Park, where the people will be flocking from all parts near. Otherwise it is hardly worth our while, unless you would like to go to one of the many public-houses near Hyde Park Corner, built to assuage the outlying thirst of Knightsbridge.
Let us, then, move forward into the third decade of the next century. We shall find
12 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
the eastern quarter much the same, but many more houses and consequent bustle in the western. Devonshire House conceals its front from us — mercifully or not — by the unbroken brick wall we remember before the present Duke fetched his gates from Chis- wick. It has lost what it had when it first was built — the most splendid and spacious gardens in London, stretching all over the site of Lansdowne House and Berkeley Square. Clarendon House is gone, and Bond Street, Albemarle Street, and Dover Street are come. The turnpike is gone from the end of Berkeley Street ; it was taken to Hyde Park Corner in 1721. But our Stone Bridge over the Tyburn remains : in the hollow where the Isthmian Club is there was a flood in 1726, and carriages overset there. Piccadilly is not yet urban enough to be free from highwaymen, and of course it is dark at night ; we had best walk down it in the morning. Just as we cross our bridge there is a yard for statuary, at the corner of Engine Street, now stupidly called Brick Street. We notice several more of these depressing places, where now are famous houses, exhibiting the contemporary
IN 1730 13
English taste in statues and most offensive to Mr. Horace Walpole. They are now happily gone to the decent obscurity of the Marylebone Road. But other houses than warehouses— and of course public-houses— there are in plenty, mostly mean, however, and devoted to lodgings. Houses enough to attract street-criers, each with his tune, more or less melodious ; men and women offering to sell us everything and do almost anything for us — apple- women, bandbox men, bellows-menders, heaven knows what. With luck we shall see a tumbler and a dancing-girl, and may listen to a ballad- singer. We may get a speedy cure for agues of all sorts from William Denman at ' The Golden Ball, near Hyde Park Corner, and nowhere else/ as an advertisement tells us ; and, by the way, as late as 18 34 I have noticed in Boyle's Guide that Piccadilly was a great place for surgeons. As we walk thither we may see all kinds of people : powdered and patched ladies in sedan-chairs, and men too in them, powdered also and elaborately dressed, for the careless fashion set by Fox (who had been a Macaroni) and his friends is still some fifty years off. We
14 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
may see the earliest umbrellas carried abroad — perhaps the Duchess of Bedford with a black holding one over her, as she is seen in a print of 1730.
But let us speed our machine some forty years onwards and come at length to the true glory of Piccadilly. It is a comely street now, indeed. The statuaries have disappeared, and in their place stand many fair houses, much as we know them now — Coventry House, which is now the St. James's Club ; and Egremont House, which be- came Cholmondeley House, and Cambridge House for George the Third's son, and is now the Naval and Military or ' In-and-Out ' Club, and many another. They look over the slope down the Green Park, with no other side of the street to block the view, only the ' sulky side ' — ' Sulky Terrace ' as the late Admiral Macdonald called it — where one might stroll when one would not be greeted. In the Green Park itself, oppo- site Down Street, stands the Ranger's Lodge, which is gone. Humbler houses, too, there are still, like the lodging - house whither Fielding's Squire Western was sent bv the landlord of ' The Pillars of Hercules '
THE GLORIOUS TIME 15
at Hyde Park Corner— 'The Pillars of Hercules/ where Sheridan went when he was interrupted in his duel with Captain Mathews over the beautiful Miss Linley.
From this time onwards Piccadilly be- comes a centre, and by far the fairest, of our articulate history. Great names, greatly suggestive to all who care for that history, it may claim for its own, dotted up and down it, by right of housing them ; and if we add the men and women who for clubs or their friends' houses frequented it, there is hardly a great name that is absent. In my pages only those who had an essential connection with Piccadilly may appear, but they may serve the purpose of the least continent gossip.
1 A Piccadilly Beauty Went out on canvassing duty,'
in 1780, for Charles Fox — Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the most admired and perhaps the best-loved woman of her time. She goes out from Devonshire House ; and we, strolling down Piccadilly, pass Fanny Burney's lodgings at 89, and go on to the Duke of Queensberry's house at 138.
16 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
We might wait twenty years or more for our stroll back and still * old Q.' is at 138 — a very old man leering on his balcony ; and we may see Scott going into his friends the Dumergues' house, 96 (it was 15 Piccadilly, West); and, three doors off, Nelson's won- derful Emma coming out of her husband Sir William Hamilton's. Yet a few years and Brummell, finally ' dished,' is leaving Watier's famous club at 81, or Lady Byron is leaving, for good or evil, the same house where ' old Q.' died. Or we turn our machine another half- century, and Palmer- ston is living at Cambridge House, and the Ashburtons at Bath House are entertaining Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle, and — but it is time to be more particularly local and to take the houses in detail.
CONTKASTED FATES 17
CHAPTEE II
CONTRASTED FATES : CLARENDON HOUSE AND DEVONSHIRE HOUSE
THREE years or less from its building Clarendon House was a monument of fallen greatness. Within twenty years it was gone for ever. Devonshire House, built a year later, has been for two hundred years the home of one of the very few most pros- perous families in England, and shelters still perhaps the most distinguished head of that family. For eighteen years they stood side by side. I do not know that there is any moral in particular to be drawn from the circumstance, unless that it is safer to go slowly, but the contrast must needs arrest the eye of a moralist.
The building of Clarendon House in itself seemed to show a man whose head was turned by high position. In 1664 Hyde
18 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
was at the summit of his power, Lord Chan- cellor of England, and still overawing his sovereign. His daughter was wife to the heir-apparent. But Charles was already wearying of this tutelage, and anxious to escape from it ; and two great shadows were on their way, the arrival of an unhappy war and the non-arrival of a child to the Queen, which were to darken the Chancellor's head in the eyes of the people. ' He has married his daughter to the Duke of York, and looks to be grandfather of kings, curse him/ said the people.
However, in 1664, Charles granted him a large tract of land eastwards to Swallow Street, which now is, and uncertainly but generously, westwards; and later, the City of London gave him (practically) a lease of the Conduit Mead, covered now by New Bond Street, Brook Street, and so forth. He chose the spot at the top of St. James's Street, fronting St. James's Palace, which to the envious this upstart palace might seem to rival, and began building with the stones intended to repair old St. Paul's — in itself a tactless proceeding. The admir- ing Pepys and the complimentary Evelyn
CLARENDON 19
recorded the erection in diaries and letters. Evelyn wrote to Lord Cornbury, Clarendon's son, a most eloquent panegyric on it, and pronounced it ' the first palace in England, deserving all I have said of it, and a better encomiast,' and ended with the pious wish that when Clarendon ' shall have passed to that upper building not made with hands/ his posterity (' as you, my Lord') might inherit the palace — and the rest of his great- ness. Alas for the builder, so soon to be ruined, and his posterity to be impoverished ! In 1667 the deluge began. The Dutcl* sailed up to Gravesend, and the mob broke the windows of Clarendon House. They called it Holland House, suggesting bribes from the Dutch ; Dunkirk House, with the idea that Clarendon was bribed to sell Dunkirk ; and Tangier Hall, because they had no use for Tangier, which he had acquired for England. A most unpopular edifice. ' They have cut down the trees before his house/ writes Pepys, ' and broke his windows ; and a gibbet either set up before or painted upon his gate, and these words writ : " Three sights to be seen — - Dunkirke, Tangier, and a barren Queen." '
20 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
This last accusation, as Mr. Wheatley says, was unjust, because Clarendon could not help it, had even opposed the marriage with Catherine of Braganza. But the mob was not alone in giving him the blame of the unlucky non-result. The Court did so too, and Rochester, challenged by the King to find a rhyme to Lisbon, fired off:
1 Here 's health to Kate, Our Sovereign's mate,
Of the royal house of Lisbon : But the devil take Hyde, And the Bishop beside,
Who made her bone of his bone.'
An impromptu, let us hope, for then the rhyme is brilliant.
Two months later, Sir William Morrice was sent to the fine new house to demand the Great Seal from its owner.
So he sat in his great house, with its wings and its turret in the middle, and its low wall running along Piccadilly, and its fine gates ; sat there and wondered how long he might sit there still. The workmen were not yet out of the place altogether, and I dare say Clarendon guessed with what gibes they were building for him. Evelyn visited
CLAKENDON 21
him in December, and found him * in his garden, at his new-built palace, sitting in his gowt wheel-chayre, and seeing the gates setting up towards the north and the fields. He looked and spoke very disconsolately.' The picture is pathetic enough, for if Claren- don fell short of being a great man, he was at least a zealous and strenuous man ; he had shared his master's exile, and had seen the cause of his master triumph, only him- self to fall. He was impeached for high treason, and wrote humbly to Charles, * I do upon my knees beg your pardon for any over-bold or saucy expressions I have used to you ... a natural disease in old servants who have received too much countenance.' For a sensualist Charles was not hard- hearted, but Clarendon had gone too far and too long against his comfort, and he let his old servant's enemies have their way.
Clarendon fled to Calais, to die in exile seven years later, and pious versifiers took care to dwell on the affair of those unlucky stones. ' God/ wrote one,
1 God will revenge, too, for the stones he took From aged Paul's to make a nest for rooks.'
The house was leased by his sons, Cornbury
22 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
and Lawrence Hyde — who was a favourite and companion of Charles — to the Duke of Ormonde. There, again, is a figure sorrow- ful in a way, though not disastrous. At the Court of Charles the Second Ormonde was out of date. He was a great noble — too great, unless indeed he had overtly com- bated the Government — to be sent the way of Clarendon, a new man ; and Charles himself never failed in respect to this old and potent servant of his father. It is recorded that Buckingham once asked him whether the Duke of Ormonde had lost his favour or he the Duke's, since it was the King who was embarrassed when they met. But this was a parvenu Court. His ancient nobility fatigued the King, and he set about him new people, male and female, who could amuse him. The Duke of Ormonde must have chafed at the upstarts and foreigners who were more powerful than he, and must have known that there was something ironical in their deference to him ; that his stateliness and older fashion were ridiculed behind his back. It was fated that no happy man should be master in Clarendon House.
THE DUKE OF ORMONDE 23
It was while he lived there that a most extraordinary outrage was done on him, and that perhaps the most extraordinary scene that ever happened in Piccadilly took place ; it was finished there, if it was be- gun in St. James's Street, and so comes scrupulously into my pages.
In the year 1670, less than two centuries and a half ago, this powerful noble, driving up St. James's Street towards his house fronting it, in his coach with six footmen attending him, was set upon by ruffians, seized and hurried along Piccadilly towards Tyburn, where they proposed to hang him.
I am tempted to digress into the history of Colonel Blood, that most melodramatic villain with the most convenient name — a history which no romancer would have dared to invent. It would colour my quiet pages to relate how he stole the crown from the Tower, and very nearly got off with it, and other surprising feats. But it is not in the bond, and the reader may go to no more recondite a source than Scott's notes to his Peveril of the Peak, and the adventure I may tell is startling enough.
The Duke of Ormonde had been dining
24 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
in the City, in attendance on the Prince of Orange, then in England, and was returning home. It was a dark night. He always took six footmen abroad with him, but did not allow their weight on his coach, having spikes on it to prevent their clambering up ; they went on either side of the street. Blood's ruffians contrived to stop the foot- men, while Blood and his son dragged the Duke from the coach.
And now, if Blood had been content with simple murder he might have done it. But the Duke was his old enemy ; he had attributed to Ormonde the Act of Settle- ment in England of 1663 which had in- convenienced Lieutenant Blood, as he was then, and by a plot had nearly captured Dublin Castle, and Ormonde, the Lord Lieu- tenant of the time, within it. Like a proper villain of melodrama, Blood never quite succeeded in his fell purposes. So now his artist villainy prompted a finer revenge than mere stabbing. He would hang the Duke at Tyburn. They forced him on horseback, and buckled him to one of the ruffians, and then Blood rode off, saying he would tie a rope to the gallows. The
...
AND COLONEL BLOOD 25
coachman, meanwhile, drove on to Clarendon House and gave the alarm, telling the porter — all this is from Thomas Carte, who wrote a history of Ormonde, — ' that the Duke had been seized by two men who had carried him down Pickadilly.'
Blood's swagger undid him. For the Duke, though sixty, which was old age in those days, was still a man of his hands, and struggled valiantly, so that the ruffian in front of him made but slow progress. They had got a good way past Devonshire House, however, on the road between the fields towards Knightsbridge, when the Duke cleverly got his foot under the ruffian's and fell with him into the mud. By now the neighbourhood was alarmed, and rescue was arriving, and the ruffian made off, so that Blood coming impatiently back from Tyburn to meet his victim, found his followers in flight. The Duke, exhausted, had to be carried home to Clarendon House, and lay ill there for some days. I fear Piccadilly is no pleasant haunting-place for his ghost.
No happy person ever possessed Claren- don House. It was sold, after Clarendon's death, to the young Duke of Albemarle —
26 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
the second, Monk's son — and he was a spendthrift and a drunkard. (Clarges Street, by the way, is called after his uncle, Sir Thomas.) He went out to Jamaica to seek a sunken Spanish galleon, found his galleon, but lived not to enjoy the gold. His widow was a madwoman, whose illusion, that she should marry the Grand Turk, made the fortune of the first Duke of Montagu ; but her history belongs not to Piccadilly.
The Duke of Albemarle sold Clarendon House, which he had called Albemarle House, to a 'little syndicate' — as we now affectionately call such bodies — which gave £35,000 for the house and the ground about it. The syndicate seems to have known its business, since Evelyn tells us that it re- covered this money by the sale of the old materials alone. Its leading spirit was Sir Thomas Bond, of Peckham.
So the ill-fated house was pulled down, and four new streets — Dover, Albemarle, Bond, and Stafford — were built on its site ; the name of one of the earliest of those speculators who are the pride of our country immortalised among them. It was being
THE CAVENDISHES 27
pulled down when Evelyn drove by with Lord Clarendon, the Chancellor's son, and tactfully, as he tells us, turned his head the other way. Evelyn, too, moralises very beautifully over the demolition. ' See/ says he, and so say I, ' the vicissitudes of earthly things I '
Turn we to a happier theme. Devonshire House was at first Berkeley House, built in 1665 for Lord Berkeley of Stratton, who has left both these names to the streets on either side. With him I need not linger, nor do more than mention the fact that Queen Anne lived here in 1695.
The Cavendishes began their long posses- sion in 1697 with William, the first Duke of Devonshire.
There seems ever to have been a sort of dignified reticence about this family, which greatly impresses me as a man, but rather baffles me as a scribbler.
' The roaring generations flit and fade,'
and there is ever a Devonshire filling his eminent position, calm, retiring, imperturb- able, and never an amusing thing to tell of any one of them. The first Duke, to be
28 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
sure, is said by Horace Walpole to have been ' a patriot among the men, a Corydon among the ladies/ and a lady complimented him in a poem as one
* Whose soft commanding looks our breasts assailed,'
but those dashing qualities resulted in no history we can chuckle over now. He did indeed cause a public scandal, but it was in a curiously lugubrious manner. Being a very religious man — as Major Pendennis said of his friend who played piquet all day except on Sundays — the Duke insisted on putting up a monument in a church to the memory of his mistress, Miss Anne Campion, the singer. The public was indignant, and Pope's ready lash fell on the Duke, who was dead by then, and probably would not have paid much attention had he been alive.
The third Duke had the pleasure of re- building the house, which was destroyed by fire in 1733, after a design by William Kent. Many severe criticisms have been passed on it, and ironical compliments on the wall which till lately hid it. Mr. Max Beerbohm once wrote an eloquent essay protesting against the insertion of the gates
GEORGIANA 29
in the wall, but his reason, I think, was that the unbroken brick conveyed an agreeable air of mystery. For my part, the ugliness of Devonshire House, if it is ugly, does not displease me. Plainness and severity of design suit the climate, the atmosphere, the tone and temperament generally, of London. If architecture, as Goethe said, is as frozen music, then that of London should be solemn marches and simple airs, not roulades and fandangoes. Devonshire House is well enough.
And so, I do not doubt, were the third Duke and the fourth ; but there is nothing to say of them.
But the fifth Duke has a lustre about him time cannot dim, for he married Lady Georgiana Spencer.
I wonder no one as yet has written a 'Book of Duchesses.' The very title would make it popular, and it might really be full of the most excellent differences. To my mind, the most interesting figure in it would not be Georgiana, Duchess of Devon- shire. Force of character, strength of will, and single-hearted selfishness of purpose
30 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
exalt the great Sarah, Duchess of Marl- borough, beyond all other duchesses. I sometimes fancy that she, with her harsh common sense and her overbearing ways, created that popular tradition of a duchess which humorists and comedies hare fixed in the public mind. But most fascinating of duchesses to imagine — far more so than any of those jolly but a little coarse wantons who were made duchesses by Charles the Second — Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, beyond question was.
Lineally descended from the great duchess I have named, she is said to have been like her, but assuredly must have had a kindness and softness in her face which the other lacked. Faultlessly beautiful she was not, though that 'her hair was not without a tinge of red/ as Sir Nathaniel Wraxall re- marked, would not now prevent our thinking her so. But with her freshness and grace, her sensitive, intelligent features, we can picture the outward setting as fit enough for the soul that led and sweetened and held the hearts of that great aristocratic society.
And what a society it was ! Many writers, this one among the least of them,
A GREAT SOCIETY 31
have tried to express it, but none has quite succeeded. A society, coherent, small, as it were a large family, of unquestioned authority and power, and therefore free from the nervous assert iveness which marks aristocracies apparent but unreal ; punc- tilious in a way, but to our conception free- spoken to the last degree ; sure of itself, and therefore not superficially exclusive, as in- deed the best of English society has seldom been ; cultivated sometimes, and always wishing to be thought so, which is at least a better mood than the pride of ignorance so common in England now; amorous, adven- turous, free-living, and with the humour ever running to eccentricity, which till lately was always characteristic of our people, 'high or low' — can any one deny the charm of such a society ? It had the vices, I know, which have characterised leisure and abundance in every age. It gambled persistently, and not infrequently broke its marriage vows. Indeed, one may regret that certain preachers of our day were not alive then for a proper field for their abilities. The 'smart set' they castigate now is a trivial bogey. Our society is an
32 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
incoherent mass split up into coteries, and possibly of one coterie or another it may be said with truth that it practises the vices named as a regular habit. But not — and this is the important point — a coterie with power and prestige. Our society is special- ised, and the people with political influence are hard-working, innocently recreating folk. What the unimportant ' smart ' people do may matter to themselves, but is not the national concern the preachers would have it. The evils of our community are not to be found in such matters — they are evils beside which these are trumpery.
In this eighteenth century it was other- wise. It was the men ruling the country, or at least having its ear, who were the gamblers and libertines. The Duke of Grafton and Lord Sandwich were important politicians ; Charles Fox was the most reck- less prodigal of his age. Even matched with our own delinquents, not with our statesmen, these sinners were dreadful. Two years ago there was a great scandal in London because a young man lost ten thousand pounds at a club, playing ecarte\ but when Fox and FitzPatrick held their
GEORGIANA AND CHARLES 33
faro-bank at Brooke's — the now so impres- sively respectable Brooks' s — such losses were daily or nightly events.
Ah, well ! I am a socialist, and am far from setting up this old English society as an ideal state of things. Yet it was not in itself more harmful than many a ring of respectable plutocrats now, and that it had an agreeable tone — an ironical, tolerant, life-loving tone— all its letters show, not only those of intellectual connoisseurs of life like Horace Walpole, but those of all the casual sporting men and women who wrote to George Selwyn.
It was, of course, the Whig branch of it over which her Grace of Devonshire pre- sided, a more charming hostess, one imagines, than a little later Whig society found in the imperious Lady Holland. One of her closest intimates was Charles Fox himself, and that alliance must have been pleasant indeed to watch — Charles with his heavy frame and his big-featured, swarthy face, lit up with that indescribably gay twinkle of fun and good temper his best portrait shows us ; and she, blonde and arch and eager — what would not one give to listen to them ?
34 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
She came of a clever and spirited family. Her cousin and friend was the Lady Diana who was divorced by the second Lord Boling- broke, the ' Bully ' of the Selwyn letters, and married Topham Beauclerk, Dr. John- son's strangely chosen companion — the Lady Diana who was so clever at drawing Cupids. She was loved at home, and there is a touch- ing anecdote told by Wraxall of her sister Lady Bessborough's grief for her death. So we picture her, gay, clever, a little spoiled perhaps, marrying at seventeen the fifth Duke of Devonshire. ' She is a lovely girl/ wrote Horace Walpole, 'natural and full of grace; he, the first match in England.'
And what was he besides ? Calm — that is the note struck in the accounts of him beyond all others. ' A nobleman/ Wraxall describes him, ' whose constitutional apathy formed his distinguishing characteristic. His figure was tall and manly, though not animated or graceful ; his manners always calm and unruffled. He seemed to be in- capable of any strong emotion, and destitute of all energy or activity of mind/ This apathy, it would seem, did not yield to the charms of conversation in Devonshire House;
THE CALM DUKE 35
the Duke, to rouse himself, had to repair to Brooks's and play at whist or faro. It is agreeable to know, however, that he c pos- sessed a highly improved understanding, and was regarded as an infallible referee at Brooks's when there was any dispute about passages in the Roman poets or historians. (What place in our day combines gambling with discussions on the Roman poets ?) He possessed, also, 'the hereditary probity characteristic of the family of Cavendish/ which perhaps was made a little easier by the more than comfortable circumstances also characteristic of that family. George the Fourth passed a severe judgment on him in his famous criticism of the way in which people had come forward to be invested with the Garter, saying that ' the Duke of Devon- shire advanced up to the Sovereign with his phlegmatic, cold, awkward air, like a clown.' We may as well take the more complimen- tary view, and believe that he was simply calm. But even so, it seems a figure of somewhat excessive calmness, and it is almost a relief to learn that beneath all this apathy he was not ' insensible to the seduction of female charms/
36 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
It might be supposed that a woman so active and emotional as his Duchess would not be happily joined to a man normally so unruffled, and roused only by cards and female charms, which, unfortunately, it seems were not necessarily those of his wife, and we might look for scandal. Happily, however, these contrasting tem- peraments not infrequently agree well enough, and it is not on record that the Duke's calm was unpleasantly ruffled by his wife. That she was wild and inclined to be dissipated is true. There is a letter from Lady Sarah Bunbury, in which the writer laments the Duchess's preposterous hours, but there is no hint in it of the mistake into which Lady Sarah herself, alas I was soon to fall. She played cards, of course, like all her world ; but the play does not seem to have been serious enough to keep the Duke at home, or perhaps he preferred masculine methods at the card-table. Also, if we may believe the writer of a Second Letter to the Duchess of Devonshire, a pam- phlet which the curious will find in the British Museum, she sometimes made un- desirable acquaintances. It must have been
THE DUCHESS AND DR. JOHNSON 37
agreeable to have such kind and intimate things printed and published about one as this : ' I am disposed to think, nay, I have very substantial reasons for thinking, that your Grace places an unreserved confidence in persons whom the Duke of Devonshire does not approve, and from whom Lady Spencer has in vain endeavoured to separate you/ But I think we need gather only that even this Duchess of Devonshire did not please everybody. While the curious, by the way, are in the British Museum, they might ask also for a poem of the period, called ' The Duchess of Devonshire's Cow/ and admire the appalling insipidity from which the print of no age is free.
I trust the censor quoted above did not allude to Dr. Johnson. ' I have seen the Duchess of Devonshire/ writes Wraxall again, ' then in the first bloom of youth, hanging on the sentences that fell from Johnson's lips, and contending for the nearest place to his chair/ Is there any man of letters on whose sentences duchesses hang now ? If there be, I doubt he is not so sound as Dr. Johnson. Let us remember, when we think of this lady and her friends,
38 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
that their homage to genius was not a mere fashion ; that they read and understood and thought ; it is a quality which we may surely set against much else that they did unwisely. As the English aristocracy has been gradu- ally commercialised, its sport has been con- tinued with enthusiasm, but its culture has sadly fallen away. As for vices, they were never very difficult to learn. It is a pleasant side to this duchess, who had * far more of manner, politeness, and gentle quiet' than Fanny Burney had expected in so dashing a great lady.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, is chiefly remembered now as the prototype of lady canvassers, for her exertions in behalf of Charles Fox in the Westminster election of 1784. When 'the Piccadilly Beauty' had done her work,
' The butchers and the bakers, The grocers, undertakers, The milliners and toymen, All vote for Carlo Khan.'
She entered, the Cornwallis Correspondence tells us, ' some of the most blackguard houses in the Long Acre/ and as we all know — but I am not afraid of being hackneyed — bought
THE KINDEST HEART ... 39
Steel the butcher's vote with a kiss. She had then one of the finest compliments ever paid a woman, when an Irish mechanic ex- claimed, * I could light my pipe at her eyes ! ' Which, madam, would you like best : that, or the famous compliment which Steele — not the butcher, but Dick Steele — paid another woman ? Would you rather a pipe could be lit at your eyes, or that to love you were a liberal education ? I wonder.
Four years earlier, in the Gordon Riots, she had to flee from Devonshire House to Lord Clement's in Berkeley Square, where she slept in the drawing-room on a sofa or small tent-bed.
She died in 1806, and Charles Fox said they had lost the kindest heart in England. There is nothing, I think, to be added about the calm Duke, except that he married again — the Elizabeth, Duchess of Devon- shire, about whose portrait by Gainsborough there was a fuss some years ago. She let Byron his house in Piccadilly, and I regret to say had some difficulty in getting the rent paid.
So Clarendon House, with nothing to its memory but the story of a fall, is gone ; and
40 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
Devonshire House, the scene of a thousand great festivals, the home of important dukes in unfailing line, stands still, lordly and prosperous. Yet I doubt if any ghost but one comes from its gates and haunts Picca- dilly with an interest for us so arresting as that of the beaten old statesman, whom we may picture in some solitary night sitting somewhere in Albemarle Street, where his garden was, in his 'gowt wheel-chair/ look- ing disconsolately.
Which of those calm, unruffled dukes appeals to us now? They had character, for the most part, to stand well with their contemporaries, and sense not to fling away the gifts which by accident of birth were theirs. A worthy and impressive line, it cannot fascinate our imagination. One gracious and fair ghost comes out of Devon- shire House and rewards our homage with a smile. I am sure if she goes his way, and sees poor Clarendon in his wheel-chair, she says something kind to him.
ANOTHER CONTRAST OF NEIGHBOURS 41
CHAPTER III
ANOTHER CONTRAST OF NEIGHBOURS I 81 AND 82
I WOULD not weary the reader with con- trasts, but when side by side, with only the width of Bolton Street between them, there stand two houses in Piccadilly, of which one is most famous as a ruinous gambling club, and the other as a scene of blameless lionising, with Thomas Carlyle for the chief king of beasts — why, then, I cannot help myself.
Captain Gronow, whose reminiscences no lover of gossip about great names and no student of strange differences in manners should miss reading, gives the following account of Watier's Club. He says that some members of White's and Brooks's were dining with the Prince Regent, and were
42 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
asked by him what sort of dinners they got at their clubs. They grumbled, of course, as members of clubs are wont to grumble, and Sir Thomas Stepney told him that their dinners were always the same : * the eternal joints, or beefsteaks, the boiled fowl with oyster sauce, and an apple tart — this is what we have, sir, at our clubs, and very monotonous fare it is/ The Prince, ' without further remark/ continues Gronow — no doubt he was too deeply moved to speak — * rang the bell for his cook, Wattier, and in the presence of those who dined at the royal table, asked him whether he would take a house and organise a dinner club. Wattier assented, and named Madison, the Prince's page, manager, and Labourie, the cook, from the royal kitchen/ (The usual accounts, by the way, speak of Watier's Club as one originally established, in 1807, by Lord Headford and other young men, for musical concerts. But it can hardly have been * Watier's ' before the advent of the Prince's cook.)
Hence the famous Watier's Club, where the dinners were exquisite — ' the best Paris- ian cooks could not beat Labourie' — and
GEORGE BRUMMELL 43
where Captain Gronow had the happiness of frequently seeing his Royal Highness the Duke of York. And hence, alas ! many tears, for the play was terrible, and in a few years had ruined most of the members, among them the prince of all dandies.
George Brummell was made perpetual president of the club. One cannot say that justice has never been done to Brummell — is there not Barbey d'Aurevilly's classic, Du Dandy sme et de Georges Brummell? — but in English, at least, he has more often been written about in a slighting manner, which seems to me to show little judgment of character. It is absurd to suppose that Brummell, whose grandfather let lodgings in Bury Street, achieved his position in the English society of that time by foppery and impudence. It is possible that to strive and care for such a position is hardly the mark of a great mind ; that is another question ; the point is that it was most difficult to achieve, and that Brummell achieved it. True, that the best of English society has seldom been superficially exclusive, but it did not in the early nineteenth century open
44 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
its doors to men of ' no birth ' merely because they knocked at them in smart clothes. Also, it is one thing to dine with or visit a society, and another to lay down laws for it and be really intimate with its governing members. Even after Brummell had been cut by the Regent, he continued to stay with his brother the Duke of York at Oat- lands, and was the friend of the Duchess till lier death. The Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana herself, Erskine, Sheridan, Fitz- Patrick (Charles Fox's greatest friend), William Lamb, afterwards the Prime Minis- ter, Lord Melbourne, and Byron all wrote verses for Brummell's album — which is quite a different thing from his writing in theirs. Beyond doubt he was a popular leader of the society he lived in. He did not achieve this by foppery. Brummeirs foppery, indeed, consisted merely in a quite artistic effort to improve the ugly dress of Ms time, and in seeking something of grace and elegance in the common things men used. The Regent was his enthusiastic pupil in these matters, and was for ever trying his bulky person in coats designed by Mr. Brummell and executed by Mr.
A MODE OF HUMOUR 45
Weston of Old Bond Street, the artist whom Mr. Brummell favoured. Alas ! As the delightful Captain tells us, ' The hours of meditative agony which each dedicated to the odious fashions of the day have left no monument save the coloured caricatures in which these illustrious persons have appeared/ But Brummell's ideal of dress was never extravagant, rather was it a sort of finished simplicity — ' exquisite propriety ' was Byron's phrase for it — and his leading maxim, ' fresh linen and plenty of it/ might be commended to the sternest of rationalists. Nor did he gain his position by impudence. Impudent he was on occasion, no doubt, with that sort of comical self-exaggeration, or emphasis of the foibles accredited to him, which has been the gay humour characteristic of other poseurs on the surface — Irishmen, as a rule, and I cannot help thinking that nobody who had not Irish blood in him could push folly with a serious face as did Brummell now and then. Only a man's enemies, or too intensely Saxon people, call that kind of humour effrontery. As for a different sort of impudence, the sort of the famous ' Who 7s your fat friend ? ' given the
46 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
circumstances, I call that courage and a kind of practical wit.
Brummell was handsome — he broke his nose, being thrown from his horse, at Brighton, while his regiment, the 10th Hussars, was being reviewed, but that did not signify — handsome and well-made, and with an address that commended him to women. At Eton he was an Admirable Crichton — apparently both a wet bob and a dry bob — ' the best scholar, the best boat- man, the best cricketer/ and laid there the foundation of his social success. He was a man of taste in other things than dress : could sing and draw, dance beautifully, and write agreeable verses. Recorded jokes of another age are always stupid, and Brum- mell's are no exception. Real wit that endures, cut and dried, is rare. I am happy to have known some of the wittiest people of my time, and don't remember half a dozen jokes that were worth writing down : it is always the manner, the humour of the occa- sion, the right touch of folly, that makes one's merriment. It is little against the wit of another age that we, who were not there, cannot laugh at it, and it is certain that
1 DISHED' 47
George Brammell had the essentials of good company.
Beyond all that, however, I think we must credit him with some genuine force of character, and a sense of perspective and values which kept his head steady where another's might have been easily turned. I grant the triviality of the ambition to which these qualities were applied. Yet I cannot imagine Brummell as the ordinary aspiring snob, rather would I say that he collected dukes and duchesses as he collected snuff-boxes — and there 's a difference. Cer- tainly he had character. Lady Hester Stanhope — she who led that strange life in the East — a woman of independent judg- ment, and the last person to be in- fluenced by fashion and foppery, wrote that ' the man was no fool/ and ' I should like to see him again/
Brummell died mad, as we know, and it is likely that his affliction was coming on him before his ruin in London. The reck- lessness of his latter course there looks like it, and it is quite possible that when his saner balance was gone the gay mock- assertiveness became bare impudence, and
48 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
i
the wit buffoonery. He was ruined at Watier's, in the same year that saw Byron's voluntary but inevitable banishment. Scrope Davies, the buck and ' man about town/ who was Byron's intimate, had this letter from him at the last. ' My dear Scrope, lend me two hundred pounds ; the banks are shut, and all my money is in the three per cents. It shall be repaid to-morrow morning. — Yours, George Brummell.' And Scrope Davies answered : ' My dear George, 'tis very unfortunate, but all my money is in the three per cents. — Yours, S. Davies.' One is disposed to like Scrope Davies because he stuck to Byron, with Hobhouse, Lady Jersey, and very few more, in the time of the scandal, but the heartlessness of that note offends taste as much as sentiment, and one remembers that even in Byron's case many stories of absurdities came from this same Scrope Davies.
The two most famous stories about Brum- mell illustrate the uncertainty of such traditions. There is that about his telling the Regent to ring the bell, and the Prince's doing so and ordering his guest's carriage. He denied it, and Jesse in his Life gives the
OLD STORIES 49
explanation, that being asked at Carlton House by the Prince to ring the bell, and being deep in talk with Lord Moira at the moment, he said without thinking, 'Your Royal Highness is close to it/ whereupon the easily enraged Prince rang the bell and ordered Brummeirs carriage, but was placated by Lord Moira. Captain Gronow, however, gives a different story, which was told him by Sir Arthur Upton, present at the time. The Regent heard that Brummell had won £20,000 from George Drummond — a partner in the famous bank, and turned out for this exploit — playing whist at White's, and, characteristically impressed, asked the Beau to dinner. They had quarrelled, but Brummell, I suppose, who was certainly the better gentleman of the two, thought it a reconciliation and went. The Prince's bad blood and bad breeding — I call his great champion Mr. Beerbohm's attention to these phrases, which are mine, not Gronow's — came out in full force : he took advantage of BrummeH's growing a little gay with wine to say to the Duke of York, ' I think we had better order Mr. Brummeirs carriage before he gets drunk.'
50 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
Both stories, of course, may be true. As for the * fat friend '' anecdote, Jesse says the Prince was walking with Lord Moira and Brummell with Alvanley; but Gronow makes the scene a ball and the Prince's companion Lady Worcester, in which case ' Prinney's ' wrath is the more intelligible.
Poor Brummell ! We get a last vivid glimpse of him at Calais in 1830 in the memoirs of Charles Greville, who must have met him often at Oatlands. * I found him in his old lodging, dressing : some pretty pieces of old furniture in the room, an entire toilet of silver, and a large green macaw perched on the back of a tattered silk chair with faded gilding/ and he adds in a phrase of rare eloquence, ' full of gaiety, impudence, and misery/ He was to sink lower, in the ten years left of his existence, to a debtor's prison at Caen, and its asylum of the Bon Sauveur. God rest him I but if his ghost walks he shakes his fist at 81 Piccadilly.
It is time that we returned there. Byron was a member, as he tells us in his * detached thoughts.' ' I liked the Dandies ; they were
BYRON AT PLAY 51
always very civil to ine. ... I knew them all more or less, and they made me a member of Watier's (a superb Club at that time), being, I take it, the only literary man (except two others, both men of the world, M. and S.) in it.' He means Thomas Moore and William Spencer, and the passage is a little odd, since to a * literary man,' qua that, Watier's could hardly have been a desirable resort. Byron, however, did not play then, or not to any extent. He had given it up since cards replaced dice, and macao was the game at Watier's. ' I was very fond of it when young, that is to say, of "Hazard"; for I hate all card games, even Faro. When Macco (or whatever they spell it) was introduced, I gave up the whole thing ; for I loved and missed the rattle and dash of the box and dice, and the glorious uncertainty, not only of good luck or bad luck, but of any luck at all, as one had sometimes to throw often to decide at all. ... Since one and twenty years of age, I played but little, and then never above a hundred or two, or three/ which would not have gone far at Watier's.
So it was not all gambling there ; some
52 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
men, no doubt, went for the good eating as some went in later years to Crockford's. We hear also of a masquerade given by Watier's to the Duke of Wellington and the conquering sovereigns — f Wellington and Co/ is Byron's irreverent phrase — in 1814. There was a curious representation of this masquerade given at Drury Lane a year later, when some of the Drury Lane Com- mittee— it was run something as Covent Garden is now — Byron included, went on the stage among the supers.
Watier's came to an end in 1819 ; apparently the members had succeeded in ruining each other. But the association of gambling with 81 Piccadilly was not over, and one great name yet illustrates the house. That is none other than Crockford himself. It is not quite certain, but I believe is almost so, that among other hells in which this financial genius was interested, en route from the fish-shop where his fortunes began to the most famous of all English gambling places in St. James's Street, was one held at 8 1 Piccadilly. It was a ' French hazard' bank, and the partners cleared £200,000. The use of false dice was charged
<LOKD FANNY' 53
against them ; indeed actual false dice, said to have been used at 81, were exhibited later in Bond Street.
So much for 81 Piccadilly. I know not who lives there now, but I trust that in honour of Watier's an occasional game of cards is played on the premises.
We cross from the east to the west side of Bolt on Street, and come to 82, which was and is Bath House. The original house was built by the Earl of Bath, William Pulteney, the statesman of George the Second's time, Sir Robert Walpole's opponent. His is not a personality of much interest to me, but I am glad he lived in Piccadilly, because by virtue of a quarrel he gives me fair ground to linger for one brief moment over an old study of mine, John, Lord Hervey. Besides, they fought their duel in the Green Park opposite,
John, Lord Hervey — Baron Hervey of Ickworth, the second title of Lord Bristol, whose eldest son he was, not Lord John Hervey, as inaccurate writers have called him — has left us some of the best memoirs in the language. You must skip the details
54 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
of politics no longer alive for us, but you have left one of the most real and living pictures of a Court and society round it ever penned. He was most intimately of the world he shows us, but by gift of intellect and an ironical temperament could stand apart and take a view of it. Something of a pessimist and with a native scorn of humanity, he offended the sentiment of Thackeray. ' There is John Hervey, with his deadly smile and ghastly, painted face — I hate him.' I cannot hate people who interest and amuse me so much, and I doubt if he was hateful. A man intellectually and personally fastidious in a coarse age is sure to be accused of effeminacy. Hervey married a famous beauty, Molly Lepel, and fought his duel — though he thought it a silly custom — like a man ; and as for painting his face, he did it to save his friends the horror of the intense white illness had painted it first. Truly a remarkable family, those eighteenth-century Herveys. ' God made men, women, and Herveys,' as Lady Towns- hend said. One of them was said by rumour to be the real father of Horace Walpole, another was the first husband of the
LORDS OF FINANCE 55
bigamous Duchess of Kingston — there were giants of scandal in those days ! — and another was the Tom Hervey who printed rude advertisements about his wife, but was so beloved by Dr. Johnson that ' if you called a dog Hervey/ said the Doctor, ' I should love him.'
I come back with a sigh and an apology to my Lord Bath. Hervey wrote the dedi- cation to a pamphlet attacking him ; he replied with another, in which Pope may have found hints for his own epithets for Hervey — ' Sporus,' the Emperor Nero's eunuch, and ' Lord Fanny ' ; Hervey had no option but to fight him, and a bloodless duel in the Green Park followed, and Lord Bath had only to cross the road to be at home again.
The Barings succeeded the Pulteneys, and Alexander Baring, the first Lord Ashburton, built the house we know — or at least can see for a moment if we turn up Bolton Street when its gates are open — in 1821. He was, of course, the head of Baring Brothers, so that with Sir Julius Wernher, the present occupant, Bath House does but continue a tradition of successful finance.
56 THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY
It is from Harriet, the wife of the second Lord Ashburton, that Bath House has its celebrity ; the Lady Ashburton who, there and at the Grange, was the admired hostess of all the literati and illuminati, poets, philosophers, men of science, of her day — or ' Lady Ashburton's printers/ as Lady Jersey, quite sublimely exclusive, preferred to call them. She, truly, is a gracious presence among the shades of Piccadilly. Her name sounds in a chorus of praise through the letters of the time. ' A magnanimous and a beautiful soul/ said Carlyle ; andMonckton Milnes, that ' one hardly knew whether it was the woman or the wit that was so charming/ It is provoking of Charles Greville to have dropped his acid into this cup, to have left us his opinion that she was capricious and quarrelsome. Let us be sure that their quarrel was his fault ; he had the grace to admit her goodness when she was dead.
Lady Ashburton's ghost has a right to walk in Piccadilly. But I am doubtful about her society of geniuses. It was, on the whole, so sure that the wisdom of all the ages had flowered in it, so convinced of
OUT OF PLACE 57
the golden time of 'progress,' so truly respectable and really good, that I doubt it would frighten away some other shades we have met, and, still more, some of whom later on I shall remind you. That is, it ought to frighten them ; but I fear they would be stubborn, have their point of view, and hold their ground. No ; Tennyson and Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle and Bishop Wilberforce do not belong to Piccadilly. More peaceful spaces, less worldly memories, are theirs.
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CHAPTER IV
OLD Q.
IF one wanted to fix, among the eminent figures of our history, on a presiding genius for Piccadilly, one might wish, in a soft and gracious mood, to choose the Duchess Georgiana. Or if one wanted a world- wide name, that left a deep mark on England and Europe, one might think of the Duke of Wellington. One might wish and one might think, but one would have to fix on Old Q. He is there by right of familiarity and inveterate tradition. Old Q.'s is alto- gether too strong a case, and, in fact, over some less lovely aspects of Piccadilly Old Q.'s is quite the proper spirit to preside. Devonshire House and Apsley House must give way to No. 138.1 Half a century ago
1 And 139. They -were one house in his day ; the famous outside stairs to the first floor, and the lift for his senile con- venience being at 138. It was at 139, then « 13 Piccadilly Terrace,' Lord Byron lived.
A FAMOUS SIGHT 59
there were scores of Londoners living who remembered the figure of him as he sat on a balcony of the house close to Hyde Park Corner, a parasol in his hand if the sun was hot, intent on observation since he could no longer act, up to the last moment of his life : a ruined monument of such open licence as London could never see again.
From the middle of the eighteenth century until ten years after its close, first as Lord March and Eaglan, and after 1778, when he succeeded his cousin, husband of Prior's 'Kitty, beautiful and young,' as Duke of Queensberry, he stood high, ad- mired or offending, against the gaze of the world. It is only fair to state, however, that in the prime of life his conduct was not more scandalous than that of many contem- poraries. Horace Walpole was afraid he had scandalised his neighbourhood by har- bouring Lord March and c the Rena,' the Italian singer who was his mistress at the time ; but then Strawberry Hill was a quiet and decorous place. Lord Sandwich, the Duke of Grafton, the second Lord Boling- broke, and many others, were quite as open in their unblessed amours in London and at
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Newmarket. Old Q.'s excessive reputation came merely from his continuing these manners into a generation which saw no other exemplars of them. Nor was he a man of uniquely extravagant passions at all. Many men in all ages and countries have led and lead essentially the same life, only no man of any position in this country has led it openly since he died. Monster for monster, for example, we may find a worse in the Lord Hertford who was the Regent's friend, ' Red Herrings/ the original of Thackeray's Steyne and Disraeli's Mont- fort, and who married Old Q.'s daughter 'Mie Mie.' A bad man, an immoral man, this Old Q. no doubt was, but I do not think his memory calls for any especial effort of denunciation on my part. I much prefer the elegant deprecation of Sir Nathaniel Wraxall : ' Unfortunately, his sources of information' — he is speaking of the Duke's good judgment — 'the turf, the drawing-room, the theatre, the great world, were not the most pure, nor the best adapted to impress him with a favourable idea of his own species.' That is really the nice way of putting these things.
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Not profligacy but racing made him famous as a young man. At this pursuit he was indefatigable, as the long series of his letters to George Selwyn constantly shows. He is always just come from New- market, or is -at Newmarket, or going to Newmarket — with the Rena or the Zam- perini, to be sure, but still in a spirit of business. He was a gentleman jockey in his early days, riding his own horses in the matches which were so prominent a part of the racing in these times. He seems to have been generally lucky, but not always. 'My dear George, I have lost my match and am quite broke/ begins a letter undated, but apparently from Newmarket. He gave up the turf when he succeeded — at fifty- three — to the Queensberry title and estates, but he was still associated with it in the public mind. Two years later, when there was a rumour that he was to marry Lady Henrietta Stanhope, there was a lampoon of him full of puns on his late avocation.
* Say, Jockey Lord, adventurous Macaroni,
So spruce, so old, so dapper, stiff, and starch, Why quit the amble of thy pacing pony ? Why on a filly risk the name of March ?
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Ah! think, squire Groom, in spite of Pembroke's tits
An abler rider oft has lost his seat ; Young should the jockey be who mounts such bits,
Or he '11 be run away with every heat.'
And so forth — all very hard on a man of fifty-three, who was to live another thirty years.
Betting, of course, went on in this sport- ing set all day. They bet about most things, but their favourite subjects, as any one who has read the Betting Book at White's or Brooks's will remember, were marriage and death. One would bet that a number of his friends would all be married before him— * or dead ' is cautiously inserted in one such bet — or that old So-and-so would survive another year, and so on. It was about a bet of this last dismal kind that Old Q., then Lord March, and a friend went to law. Lord March bet Mr. Pigot five hundred guineas that Sir William Codrington would outlive Mr. Pigot's father. He did ; but Mr. Pigot's father was actually dead when the bet was made, though, of course, neither wagerer knew it ; and Mr. Pigot refused to pay, and Lord March sued him before Lord Mansfield
A SHOCKING SCENE 63
in the Court of Queen's Bench. In our time, of course, no such action would lie. The case was of great interest to the betting world, and Lord Ossory and other eminent sportsmen gave evidence. Mr. Pigot argued that his deceased father was in the position of a horse which had died before the day of a race : the wager in that case would be invalid. But Lord Mansfield charged the jury otherwise, and poor Pigot lost five hundred guineas, costs, father, and all.
Precisely when ©Id Q. settled in Picca- dilly I have been unable to discover, but certainly by 1767, though perhaps not at 138. Neither precisely do I know when he enacted in the drawing-room there his famous reproduction of the scene on Mount Ida, with three of the most beautiful women in London to represent the goddesses (in the same dress, so to speak), and himself as Paris to give the apple. As -Wraxall remarks, it was a scene would have been appropriate to the days of Charles the Second, though when he marvels at it in the ' correct days of George the Third/ we marvel also at the epithet.
He seems never to have been really keen
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about politics, though the details of ap- pointments are frequent in the news parts of his letters. He was a Lord of the Bed- chamber for twenty-eight years, but lost that post in 1788, in consequence of a rare error in judgment. George the Third was insane, and Old Q., after careful inquiries among the doctors — with the caution of an old sportsman — thought it safe to bet on his not recovering. So he had conferences with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York in Piccadilly, regaling them, we are told, with ' plentiful draughts of champagne/ and finally went over to the side of the Prince and Fox. But George the Third did recover, and the Duke was dismissed.
That seems to have been his one personal move in politics, but political interest brought him under the satire of Robert Burns, who seems to have had a virtuous horror for the Duke's libertine character. Old Q. went down to canvass for the Dumfries Burghs, and Burns, who was on the other side, let him have it.
4 1 '11 sing the zeal Drumlanrig bears, Wha left the all-important cares Of Princes and their darlin's,'
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— on ' Lrumlanrig ' the editor of my Burns has 'the fourth Duke of Queensberry, of infamous memory/ which is harsh. Burns' s memory is, of course, immaculate. And again :
* The laddies by the banks o' Nith
Wad trust his Grace wi' a', Jamie ; But he '11 sair them as he sair'd the King, Turn tail and rin awa', Jamie.
The day he stood his country's friend,
Or gied her faes a claw, Jamie, Or frae puir man a blessin' wan,
That day the duke ne'er saw, Jamie.'
Wordsworth, by the way, denounced the ' degenerate Douglas ' for felling the trees at Drumlanrig.
And now for his character ; for no man's character is really summed up in calling him a profligate, or saying that his memory is infamous.
It was agreed among his friends that from early days this voluptuary was remarkable for strong common sense. The letters are full of it — a sort of rough sagacity, and a cynicism that was not of the affected type, a usual green sickness of youth, but the clear-eyed recognition of certain unfortunate
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facts in the humanity surrounding him. So when George Selwyn, who was rather given to many words about misfortune, wrote to tell him of losing a thousand pounds, he re- plied— and I quote a little fully, because here certainly the style is the man — ' When I came home last night I found your letter on my table. So you have lost a thousand pounds, which you have done twenty times in your lifetime, and won it again as often, and why should not the same thing happen again? I make no doubt that it will. I am sorry, however, that you have lost your money ; it is unpleasant. In the meantime, what the devil signify the le fable de Paris or the nonsense of White's ! You may be sure they will be glad you have lost your money ; not because they dislike you, but because they like to laugh/ And here is a glimpse of the punishment which comes to every clear-headed sensualist, that sentiment falls away from his emotions. He writes to George of the Zamperini : ' You see what a situation I am in with my little Buffa. She is the prettiest creature that ever was seen : in short, I like her vastly, and she likes me because I give her money. I wish
LOGIC 67
I had never met with her' — because she broke his heart, or anything of that kind ? Well, no — * because I should then have been at Paris with you, where I am sure I should have been much happier than I have been here.' To be sure, my Lord March was over forty by then, — a fact, by the way, which made Sir George Trevelyan, in his Life of Fox, very rightly angry for these frank- nesses.
But the Duke of Queensberry was some- thing more than merely shrewd and cynical. He carried a sense of logic to an extreme point, and applying it to an unusual sphere of human activity gained thereby a reputa- tion of eccentricity which was not properly his. There is a logic of the passions, I know, which even commonly is sterner than the logic of the intellect ; but this last, which is usually at war with the passions, Old Q. made their active and vigilant servant. He made up his mind that certain pleasures were, for him, the highest good in life, and to have them in abundance and for the longest possible time he used every means at his disposal — wealth, a great position, and all his faculties. All this calmly, relent-
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lessly, even with a certain Scotch canniness, and with an indifference to the world's opinion so complete that eren in an eighteenth - century duke it should gain him some credit for courage. I do not know of any voluptuary in history quite of this distinction in his profession. One or two in the early Roman Empire come to mind, but in them one finds a sort of headstrong savagery, a vulgarity of magni- ficence, which you may parallel in some of our own millionaires but not in the Duke of Queensberry. He, at least, was a man of taste, and if you can waive the moral point, a gentleman. At the very lagt, worn out and diseased, we find him writing an apology to a friend for a passing touch of irritation. An evil type of aristocracy, it may be, but at least an authentic aristocrat. Few men indeed, even sensualists, go through life without some softness of feel- ing, and this one had one real affection — for his friend George Selwyn. In letters so curt and business-like and intolerant of affectation as his, a touch of feeling carries its truth with it. In the letter about the thousand pounds from which I have quoted,
THE ONE FRIENDSHIP 69
after saying that he would put it right at the bank, and ' there will be no bankruptcy without we are both ruined at the same time ' — this, remember, was long before Lord March came into his kingdom, in days when he himself could be ' quite broke ' — he goes on : ' How can you think, my dear George, and I hope you do not think, that anybody, or anything, can make a tracasserie between you and me ? I take it ill that you can even talk of it, which you do in the letter I had by Ligonier. I must be the poorest creature upon earth — after having known you so long, and always as the best and sincerest friend that any one ever had — if any one alive can make any impression upon me, where you are concerned. I told you, in a letter I wrote some time ago, that I depended more upon the continuance of our friendship than anything else in the world, which I certainly do, because I have so many reasons to know you, and I am sure I know myself/ He could make this last statement with more truth than most of us.
But sensualists harden, and the Rev. Dr. Warner found him, many years later, most unfeeling on the subject of Mie Mie. The
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reader, I do not doubt, knows all about Mie Mie, but perhaps he will forgive me if, in the interest of scientific thoroughness, I tell him an oft-told tale. Mie Mie was the daughter of the Marchesa Fagniani; and George Selwyn, who loved all children, con- ceived for her a devotion which touched and amused and slightly bored his friends. Gos- sips of that day and a later have said it was doubtful whether he himself or the Duke of Queensberry was her real father. I think, however, that nobody who knows the world, and reads the Selwyn correspondence, can doubt that George could not have believed he was her father, and that, whoever it was in fact — and let us hope it was the Marquis Fagniani after all — he, and the Duke too, believed it was his friend. Letters from Warner to Selwyn assume the parentage of Old Q. Well, Selwyn wanted the child to be given up to him, to adopt her, and Madame Fagniani refused, and half accepted, and refused again, and led poor George a cruel dance over Europe in his pathetic and slightly ridiculous quest. In all this Old Q. — who certainly professed no parental interest in the child — was sympathetic,
MIE MIE 71
though his common sense could not but be in arms, and he pointed out that the more eager George showed himself, the more Madame Fagniani, a capricious woman who thought herself a neglected beauty, would torment him ; also that he, the Duke, was the last person who profitably could inter- fere.
However, when George at last succeeded, and the child was given up to him, the Duke began a little to pooh-pooh his friend's excessive tenderness and the fuss that was made over Mie Mie. Dr. Warner used to call on him in Piccadilly with accounts of her progress, and was indignant at his want of tenderness. Warner, by the way, was a good man strangely maligned by Thackeray, who said he was a parasite and licked Old Q.'s boots ; whereas he said plainly he dis- liked Old Q., and only frequented him to oblige Selwyn, for whom it is quite clear he had a sincere regard. Warner's letters are by far the wittiest in the whole collection.
' Well, and how does Mie Mie go on ? ' asked the Duke, and Warner expatiated on her talents, ' in the fond hope to please him/ and said she was learning everything.
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* Pshaw ! she will be praised for what the child of a poor person would be punished. Such sort of education is all nonsense/ and so on. In this I detect an unwillingness on the Duke's part to let the Rev. Dr. Warner assume too much. Another time George had written from the country to Warner about ' the little flannel petticoat ' Mie Mie was wearing, and Warner read the letter to Old Q., * with which he ought to have been pleased, but which he treated with a pish or a damn/
Dr. Warner was severe on him for this levity. 'I have many acquaintance/ says he, 'in an humbler sphere of life, with as much information, with as strong sense, and, as far as appears to me, with abund- antly more amiable qualities of the heart, than his Grace of Queensberry.'
Well, I am fond of children, and am not a wicked duke, but I confess that if my morning avocations were interrupted by clergymen reading letters about little flannel petticoats, even my own daughter's, I might pish too. Selwyn and Warner expected too much of a voluptuary.
Old Q., however, left Mie Mie a fortune.
THE LAST YEARS 73
And that brings me betimes, since I grow garrulous, to the end.
George Selwyn and all his old friends were long dead. He was blind of an eye and deaf of an ear, toothless and infirm. For his estates in Scotland he had never cared ; Amesbury in Wiltshire, a place of most beautiful surroundings, he had ceased to visit ; even his villa at Richmond, where he had grown tired of the Thames with its ' flow, flow, flow/ he had given up ; Picca- dilly was his home, and there he sat in the sun under his parasol. But this old man, much over eighty, was still keen to see life, still ready to talk if he could not hear.
' Never did any man,' says Wraxall, who saw him much in these days, ' retain more animation, or manifest a sounder judgment. Even his figure, though emaciated, still remained elegant ; his manners were noble and polished ; his conversation gay, always entertaining, generally original, rarely in- structive, frequently libertine, indicating a strong, sagacious, masculine intellect, with a thorough knowledge of man.' And the statesman Windham notes in his diary two years before Old Q.'s death, how he 'went
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in to the Duke of Queensberry, whom I saw at his window ; full of life but very difficult to communicate with, and greatly declined in bodily powers.'
There he sat on his balcony, and the world saw him as it went by and moralised over him. Leigh Hunt, for example, often saw him there, ' and wondered at the longevity of his dissipation and the prosperity of his worthlessness.' Many tales of him went about. They said he took baths of milk, and quite a prejudice against drinking milk arose in the neighbourhood. It seems to be true that he kept a groom, Jack Radford, ready mounted to follow ladies whose ap- pearance interested him as he looked down on Piccadilly.
There he sat, with his neat peruke, and his strong- featured, lively, sharp old face. It seemed as though he would sit there for ever ; but at last, in 1810, at the age of eighty-six, he died, and was buried under the altar in St. James's Church, Piccadilly, and his will, with its various bequests to favourites, caused much more sensation than that of Mr. Cecil Rhodes. * The Star of Piccadilly/ as a rhyme of the day called him, was set.
THE GHOSTS OF ALBANY 75
CHAPTER V
THE GHOSTS OF ALBANY
NOT 'The Albany': the definite article, though now universal, was not used by the earliest tenants of the chambers, and it becomes a writer who gossips about them to respect their custom.
We need not linger overmuch on the history of the building. There were origin- ally three houses on the site, and the most eastern of them was occupied by the third Lord Sunderland, son of that arch-traitor whose elaborate disloyalty to James the Second is one of the darker studies in the psychology of politics. He bought the other two houses and made one of the three, with a fine room for a finer library now at Blenheim. Stephen Fox, the second Lord Holland, lived here afterwards, who was like his brother Charles in most things save genius, fat, good-
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natured, fond of cards and a bottle. It was the birth of a son to him that brought the Jews upon poor Charles, no longer next heir to the large family fortune, ill-gotten by their father, who speculated with the country's money (in his possession as paymaster) on his knowledge as a minister. By no means an unamiable ghost to collogue withal on a quiet night, Stephen Fox, a little breathless with bulkiness and good living, crossing Piccadilly, where his house was, to haunt Brooks's in St. James's Street. He sold it to the first Lord Melbourne, who rebuilt it with a ballroom ceiling by Cipriani, and then changed houses with the Duke of York and Albany, son of George the Second, and hence the name. It was turned into chambers for bachelors, the garden being built over for more profit, in 1804.
There is a rare and unaffected dignity about Albany still. The courtyard and the house do much to shut out the railway- station noises of contemporary Piccadilly, and Vigo Street at the other end is tolerably quiet, so that it is possible to muse there, even in the daytime. Walking through the arcade with its low roof I have often agreed
MAT LEWIS 77
with Macaulay's remark when he went to live there, that it was a college life in the West End of London. That is to say, for Macaulay and for me, if I were rich enough to live in Albany ; other famous tenants have led lives there not possible in colleges,
' If ancient tales say true nor wrong those holy men.7
Many an interesting man has lived in Albany. One of the most attractive of them all to me, and one who more than most of the others may be supposed to haunt Piccadilly, is Mat Lewis, ' the Monk/ and since his fame is something dimmed now I will treat him with some circumstance.
Most of us, as we grow older, abandon any feud we may have had, or been thought to have, with Mrs. Grundy. Now and then, however, I still feel a stir of my young dis- like of her exploits, and it is an attraction for me in poor Mat Lewis that he was notable among Mrs. Grundy's victims.
Matthew Gregory Lewis was born in 1775, the son of a rich man, and was sent to "Westminster and Christ Church, and after that to Weimar and Paris. He plunged into writing early, and had written poems,
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a novel, a comedy — all by seventeen, and all forgotten. He was an attache at the Hague in 1794, and there he wrote his most famous work, now also forgotten, Ambrosio, or the Monk, which was ultimately to destroy him socially. At first, however, it made him fashionable — very fashionable, and that pre- cisely was what Mat Lewis, a harmless, vain, good-natured creature, most wished to be. A literary lion in 'Society/ he was a fashionable lion among authors. It was a great event for an aspiring author to be presented to Mat Lewis, as we know from the confession of one of them, namely — who do you think it was ?— Walter Scott. Of all the revenges of time in the matter of authorship I think this one of the oddest — that Walter Scott was proud to know Mat Lewis, and to receive his quite good-natured patronage.
Mat was bringing out his Tales of Wonder, and Erskine told him that one Walter Scott, a young advocate in Edinburgh, had trans- lated some stirring things from the German. A correspondence followed, and later Mat went down to Edinburgh and asked Scott to dinner, and Scott confessed — with the
LITTLE WEAKNESSES 79
utter absence of conceit native to that noble character — confessed, thirty years later, that he had never felt such elation before. He had seen Burns when he was seventeen, and this was the first poet he had seen since. Poor Mat !
So Mat Lewis was a lion in the literary world and the fashionable, enjoying it vastly, being, as Scott tells us, 'fonder of great people than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent, or as a man of fashion. He had always dukes and duchesses in his mouth, and was pathetically fond of any one that had a title. You would have sworn he had been a parvenu of yesterday, yet he had lived all his life in good society.' Byron, too, has a story of Lewis crying at Oatlands because the Duchess of York had 'said something so kind ' to him. ' Never mind, Lewis, don't cry. She could not mean it/ said a brutal listener.
Mat was also a bore ; ' a good man/ says Byron, ' a clever man, but a bore, a damned bore, one may say/ Scott tells us — and it is something for a man's memory that it is kept alive, so far as it is so, by Scott and Byron — of Charles Fox in his latter days, very
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fat and lethargic, enduring an attack from Lewis, lying 'like a fat ox which for some time endures the persecution of a buzzing fly, rather than rise to get rid of it ; and then at last he got up and heavily plodded his way to the other side of the room/
Yet this absurd little snob and bore was the kindest creature alive, sharing his in- come with his mother, who was separated from his lather, and when his father, enraged, cut it down by half, sharing that, and doing good by stealth. Imagination he had, not of a broad and sweeping kind, fantastic, weird, rather morbid, but yet imagination, and after all the hobgoblin terrors which seem childish to us struck a serious note for those days. Clever, too, was Mat Lewis, and a man of taste, with a notable ear for rhythm.
We can see him in Albany, K.I, in his glory, an extremely small and boyish figure ; ' the least man I ever saw to be strictly well and neatly made/ says Scott, with queer eyes which 'projected like those of some insect, and were flattish in their orbit/ He had the panels of his bookcases filled with looking-glasses, and kept a black servant.
MAT AND MRS. GRUNDY 81
It was cruel and wanton in Mrs. Grundy to persecute this harmless little personage, with his snobbery and tediousness, and pro- jecting eyes and kindly heart — cruel because, for a clever man, he must have ft It it so bitterly, and wanton because she really could not have cared. Mathias, in the Pursuits of Literature, attacked his famous book The Monk on the score of blasphemy and indecency, and Mrs. Grundy, who had never read it, but had exalted Lewis on the strength of its brilliant reputation, took alarm. There was a fierce outcry against Mat ; an injunction was moved for against his book, and — oh dear ! oh dear I — ' young ladies/ says the invaluable Captain Gronow, 'were forbidden to speak to him/ The Monk, one remembers, though a wealthy, was not a marrying man, and conceivably the matrons had a spite against him. It was all very like Mrs. Grundy, but it was hard in her to do it to Mat Lewis who so loved her smiles.
Perhaps the Monk was embittered by this treatment, or perhaps he hated Sheridan anyhow, but his verses on Sheridan were not characteristic of his good-nature.
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1 For worst abuse of finest parts
Was Misophil begotten ; There might indeed be blacker hearts, But none could be more rotten.'
I am sure it was not because Sheridan had scored off him about his play Castle Spectre — a fine name, is it not ? — replying to Mat's offer to bet on some occasion what Sheridan owed him for it as manager, that he never made large bets, but would bet him what it was worth.
Mat's kindliness, however, co-existed with some capacity for quarrelling, and indeed one commonly finds the two qualities to- gether : he who never quarrels is apt to be a little cold-blooded or so, and not much given to active benevolence. Lord Mel- bourne told Charles Greville an odd tale of the Monk's quarrel with Sir Henry Lush- ington. It was convenient to Mat to stay with Lushington and his sister at Naples ; so he wrote to suspend the quarrel, and after the visit wrote to resume it — the status quo ante pacem — and did so ' with rather more acharnement than before.' There is a sugges- tion of character in this, I think — of some- thing solid below the folly and vanity.
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The Monk's father died in 1812, leaving plantations in the West Indies, whither Mat journeyed in 1815. He made Byron a parting present of some preserved ginger, which his affectionate friend said he could never eat without tears — it was so hot. He visited Byron at Venice on his return, and went riding with the poet by the Brenta, the greater and absent-minded poet leading the way, the lesser and short-sighted poet following — into a ditch, and into the river, and into collision with the diligence, but all the time 'talking without intermission, for he was a man of many words.' On an expedition with Walter Scott poor Mat grew weary, and had to be carried, * in his shooting array of a close sky-blue jacket, and the brightest red pantaloons I ever saw on a human breech. He also had a kind of feather in his cap/
This dear, ridiculous creature went again to Jamaica in 1817, with the characteristic intention of improving the condition of the slaves, and died on the voyage home of yellow fever. They buried his body at sea, but his spirit must have gone on to England, and stayed awhile in Albany, K.I, with the
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mirror- panelled bookcases. It is strange that this sham great author, with his bubble reputation of a day, should be yet alive for us, not pilloried by some Pope, but gently and affectionately recorded and pictured by two authentic giants of his trade.
' I would give many a sugar cane, Monk Lewis were alive again ! '
said Byron, and ' I would pay my share/ added Scott. They are gone to him now, and one ftncies their ghosts in Piccadilly, stumping with the limp both had in life, smiling protectingly, and this absurd little figure, wonderfully dressed, strutting garru- lous between them.
Another vanished memory, so far as work of his own is concerned, is that of Henry Luttrell, who lived in 1.5. But Albany and Piccadilly seem to belong more to our social than our literary history, and from no gossip that has to do with the social life of his time can Henry Luttrell be omitted. Yet there is little to say of him now. ' Where are the snows of yester year ? ' one may ask of dead wits almost as surely as of dead beauties.
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Luttrell was a great wit of his day, the first half or so of the nineteenth century, and one meets him in memoirs far more respectfully noticed than poor Mat Lewis. He was one of those men, unhappily less frequently met now than then, who are of real and definite account in the society of their day for purely social merits — without position or money, or a mob-acclaimed repute. He was the author, it is true, of the Letters to Julia, which had a fashionable vogue, and were a guarantee of mental parts in the eyes of his contemporaries, but his reputation could not have endured long on this one achievement. By birth he was illegitimate — a son of Lord Carhampton. His means were slender, and he had no political importance.
Luttrell owed his social position simply to his social qualities : he was agreeable, a good talker, and had a fund of sound sense at the service of his friends. He and Samuel Rogers hunted in couples ; it was said they were seldom seen apart, but that when they were, either abused the other. But if he abused Sam Rogers he abused no one else : his wit was said to be as kind as the banker- poet's was malignant. It is a pleasant
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memory to have left behind one. Pity it should be faded.
Greater men, of course, than Mat Lewis or Henry Luttrell have lived in Albany. Of Byron I shall write elsewhere. Bulwer Lytton afterwards lived in Byron's rooms, A. 2, as no doubt he was delighted to live. You can picture him, if you like, putting on the stays which so greatly annoyed Tenny- son, and otherwise making the most of him- self. Other men, too, whose names mean something, but either I do not see their ghosts in Piccadilly, or I have nothing to say of them in this sort of light narration. It is clearly impossible, however, to pass over Thomas Babington Macaulay.
I do not pretend to believe, personally, for a moment, that Macaulay 's ghost wastes time in haunting any scene of his labour on earth. Wherever he is, I am sure he is talking hard, or writing earnestly, for the instruction of his companions, and has no leisure to muse on the accidents of his past. He is ready to furnish, I am sure, the exact and complete dates of his residence in Albany, the amount of his rent — it was £90,
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by the way, if you care to know — and a vigorous analysis of its advantages and defects. You cannot expect any hovering from this matter-of-fact intelligence, and your illusion of his presence must be entirely subjective. Still, if you like to imagine him in Albany, it is easy to do so.
We know the furniture of his sitting- room in E.I, when he went to live there in 1840. He had, Sir George Trevelyan tells us, 'half a dozen fine engravings from his favourite great masters ; a handsome French clock, provided with a singularly melodious set of chimes, the gift of his friend and publisher, Mr. Thomas Longman ; and the well-known bronze statuettes of Voltaire and Rousseau (neither of them heroes of his own) which had been presented to him by Lady Holland as a remembrance of her husband/ And we can imagine the his- torian himself seated at his desk amid these agreeable surroundings — a short, stout man, with a homely face and a fine forehead. There he wrote the first two volumes of his history, and there he got for them the £20,000 at which later historians marvel and weep. We can imagine him, further, in
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his dressing-room, making clumsy efforts to tie his neckcloth, and trying to shave with an unskilful hand, since these physical peculiarities are recorded of him. Complet- ing his toilet and looking round his apart- ment, he reflected with pleasure on the college life in the West End of London, to which I have already referred, and also — I quote from the same letter of his — to the fact that it was ' in a situation which no younger son of a duke would be ashamed to be put on his card.' It was rather a trivial reflection for a philosopher, but the greatest of us have our trivial moments.
Perhaps it is best, however, to imagine Macaulay at one of his famous breakfasts. There he sits, and if you have the critical temper of Mr. Charles Greville, you would notice that his voice was unmusical and monotonous, and his face heavy and dull — • with nothing about him, in fact, to bespeak the genius and learning within. But much evidence of the genius and learning would have been given you had you really been there. Any subject you mentioned your host would know all about, and tell all about, until some one who might take
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liberties, like Lady Holland, would say it was enough, when he would stop as one re- places a book on the shelf, and take down another. If you put a question to him while the conversation was general, he would wait for a pause, and then repeat it, and give his answer to the table : that, at least, was Mrs. Brookfield's experience. Presently, if you were lucky, you would enjoy one of his ' brilliant flashes of silence,' as Sydney Smith called them. One of Macaulay 's breakfasts is described by the late Duke of Argyll. (It is pleasing to know that so very cocksure a personage as Macaulay was admired by the Duke, who was not diffi- dent.) It was the day of table-turning, and they tried the experiment with a heavy table. Macaulay pooh-poohed the idea, but for all that the table had the temerity to turn violently. Did any one give it a push ? was the question put to each guest by the host. One of them was Bishop Wilberforce, * Soapy Sam/ renowned for saying the com- forting thing, and so when all the rest denied, he admitted that he might have un- consciously given a slight push. It would have been quite insufficient for the effect,
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but Macaulay's great mind was relieved. A scene for an observer of comic character.
I notice with regret that I have not written of Macaulay so genially as I am wont to write. His personality does not attract me, I fear ; and then he was a par- tisan in history, and in my own little read- ing I incline to be a partisan on the other side. Well, we all have our prejudices, and Macaulay's memory can afford mine. Besides, as I said, I am in no fear of meeting his ghost.
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CHAPTEE VI
BYRON
ALBANY saw the last of Byron's bachelor life, and 139 Piccadilly the last of his life in England.
He went to live in Albany, in the original house on the ground floor, set A. 2, on March 28, 1814. 'This night/ he writes in his journal of that date, 'got into my new apartments, rented of Lord Althorpe, on a lease of seven years. Spacious, and room for my books and sabres. In the house, too, another advantage/ His landlord was about to be married. March of the following year saw him also married at 139 Piccadilly, and so many references to him in other people's memoirs and stories refer to his rooms in Albany, where he lived only this one year, that I imagine they are confused with his other lodgings — in Bennet Street and St.
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James's Street — about town. His life in Albany is typical, however — unhappily, the reader may suppose — of his bachelor life in London.
He continued there his alternation be- tween excess and a frightened — lest he should grow fat — and unwise abstinence. The very night before he settled in Albany, he dined tete-a-t£te with his friend, Scrope Da vies, at the Cocoa Tree — 64 St. James's Street, where there is still a club of the name — and, he tells us in the journal, ' sat from six till midnight — drank between us one bottle of champagne and six of claret, neither of which wines ever affect me.' Poor Scrope was less immune (it was Scrope Davies, by the way, who said that Byron was only 'a fair holiday drinker'), for he became ' tipsy and pious, and I was obliged to leave him praying to I know not what purpose or pagod/ And his first letter from Albany, April 9, to Thomas Moore, con- tains an account equally distressing to us. ' I have also been drinking, and on one occasion ' — he was so proud of it ! which I think in itself proves it was no habit, and remember, censor, he was only twenty-six —
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' on one occasion, with three other friends at the Cocoa Tree, from six till four, yea, unto five in the matin. We clareted and cham- pagned till two — then supped, and finished with a kind of regency punch composed of madeira, brandy, and green tea, no real water being admitted therein. There was a night for you ! ' It would have been a last night for me !
Then he would live for days on biscuits and soda-water, which he ordered in two dozen at a time — there is a bill for it yet extant — and drank copiously. Byron's genius as a poet came at the right moment for its full effect on Europe, but his stomach was born out of due time. Were he living in our day, the apostles of new diets would have found in him their most attentive listener, their most enthusiastic practi- tioner.
Whether claret or soda-water was his drink, however, he satisfied a large part of our contemporary morality by severe phy- sical exercise. He boxed for an hour a day in Albany with Gentleman Jackson, and practised the broadsword with Henry Angelo. This famous master records an
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occasion when they were so engaged and Hobhouse entered the room ; how Byron, characteristically, 'did not desist from ad- vancing on me, but seemed more determined to show his friend how well he could beat his broadsword master,' And he adds this curious account : ' His preparation for his exercise was rather singular ; first stripping himself, then putting on a thick flannel jacket, and over it a pelisse lined with fur, tied round with a Turkish shawl. When he had taken a sufficient gymnastic sodorific, if he did not go directly and increase it between the blankets, he had his valet to rub him down/ There is a picture for you to imagine, if you visit Albany, A. 2.
All such things are significant in the life of a great man, as we know on Carlyle's authority ; but let us turn to matters more immediately of the spirit — although the boxing was done ' to keep up the ethereal part of me/ There is not much to be gained from the journal, however. He wrote no more in it, having kept it some five months, after April 19. There is a passage no bookish man can read without sympathy in praise of solitude and getting home to one's
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own room. ' I do not know that I am happiest when alone ; but this I am sure of, that I never am long in the society even of her I love (God knows too well, and the devil probably too), without a yearning for the company of my lamp and my utterly confused and tumbled-over library.' Venimus larem ad nostrum. That big room in Albany was a comfort to the poet, though 'Lara' and 'The Ode to Napoleon' was all the poetry he wrote there. It was the time of the first abdication, and Napoleon was much in Byron's mind. He and other Whigs were, of course, ' pro-Boers/ and expressed their feelings with an immunity at which our extreme Imperialists to-day must marvel. ' April 8. — Out of town six days. On my return, found my poor little pagod, Napo- leon, pushed off his pedestal ; — the thieves are in Paris.' . . . And the journal ends excitedly on the same subject : I cannot help wondering if the poet had been in the society of Scrope Davies. ' And to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume, and write, in Ipecacuanha, "that the Bourbons are restored!!!" —
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" Hang up philosophy ! " To be sure, I have long despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my species before — " O fool ! I shall go mad ! " ' Some faint touch of the Cocoa Tree there, one is forced to think, but in no mental condition did Byron forget his Shakespeare.
At this time the rage of his lionising was over, but he was still going much into society, sending verses to Lady Jersey, mixing with Rogers and Moore ; making love unwisely, and I think, in spite of the turmoil he professed to dislike, taking more pleasure in life than it gave him often. Lady Caroline Lamb's affair was over ; Lady Oxford's and Lady Frances Webster's had been since. According, however, to a letter from Lady Caroline to Captain Medwin — Thackeray's Captain Sumph, with his banal stories of the poet — written after Byron's death, it was in Albany they parted for the last time. 'But it is also true, that, the last time we parted for ever, as he pressed his lips on mine (it was in the Albany), he said, " Poor Caro, if every one hates me, you, I see, will never change — no, not with ill-usage ! " And I said, " Yes, I am changed,
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and shall come near you no more/' For thsn he showed me letters, and told me things I cannot repeat, and all my attach- ment went. This was our last parting scene — well I remember it. It had an effect upon me not to be conceived — three years I had worshipped him.' It is touching, but I hope the lady's warm imagination played her false — at least about the telling things and the showing letters. And yet, I know, there were two Byrons — he who felt and thought deeply, and acted generously ; and the unworthy Byron, who was fanfaron de ses vices and wanted to startle and shock : it is possible, this showing of letters, but I hope she was mistaken. Here, in any case, is another scene in Albany for the reader's, fancy.
The letters of Byron from Albany are not- of any especial interest. They are charac- teristic, however; there is the authentic- Byron in them, egotistical, unselfish, vain, modest, generous — we find him giving" £3000 to his sister Augusta — humorous, affectionate. Much of his tenancy of these rooms he spent in the country, and, as we know, his ill-fated proposal of marriage
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to Miss Milbanke was written from Nev- stead, and there he received his answer. On March 31, 1815, he writes from Piccadilly a married man.
4 13 Piccadilly Terrace ' was half of Old Q.'s house, and is now 139 Piccadilly. Old Q., who died in 1810, left it to 'Mie Mie,' Lady Hertford ; but Byron rented it from Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire. The rent was £700 a year, and the payment in- volved some correspondence when Byron was settled in Italy. A short while after- wards the house passed to the family of Lord Rosebery, to whom, I believe, it still belongs. Old Q., Byron, Lord Rosebery — to be sure, a house of varied distinctions.
While Byron lived there he wrote 'Parisina' and ' The Siege of Corinth/ met Walter Scott for the first time, served on the Drury Lane Committee, was served with sixteen writs, had an execution in his house, and separated from his wife.
Of all these experiences, perhaps the best to tell of are those on the Committee, of which Byron had a lively recollection, and wrote of years afterwards in his ' Detached Thoughts.1 His letters of the time are full
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of the Committee's perplexities, which, as any reader with a knowledge of theatres may guess, were many and various.
His colleagues on the Committee were Lord Essex, George Lamb, Douglas Kin- naird, and Peter Moore — 'all very zealous and in earnest to do good, and so forth/ Of course they were ; and the experiment, not often seen since, of a theatre run by edu- cated people with an interest in contem- porary literature, was certainly an attractive one. Committees seldom do much, however, and this had an intractable subject-matter. ' We were but few, and never agreed ! There was Peter Moore, who contradicted Kinnaird, and Kinnaird, who contradicted everybody/
It was not from the actors that their troubles chiefly came. In Byron's time actors did not expect all the reverence which is not paid to cabinet ministers, and Byron's 'bonhomie and humour no doubt conciliated them. ' Players/ says he, ' are said to be an impracticable people. They are so. But I managed to steer clear of any disputes with them ; and, excepting one debate with the Elder Byrne about Miss Smith's Pas de
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(something — I forget the technicals), I do not remember any litigation of my own. I used to protect Miss Smith, because she was like Lady Jane Harley in the face ; and likenesses go a great way with me ' — Byron's idea of impartial casting in the interests of the theatre seems to have been odd. His colleagues reproved him for 'buffooning with the Histrions, and throwing things into confusion by treating light matters with levity/ Edmund Kean was their star, and for him Byron had an enthusiasm ; his emotion over Kean's ' Sir Giles Overreach ' is an old story.
I am sorry to say it was the authors, not the players, who gave most trouble. The Committee, and Byron in particular, were anxious to induce writers of reputation to do something for the stage. But even then it seemed already fated that the stage in England could only be served by — how can one put it inoffensively ? — well, by people who were not otherwise of account as writers. Here, however, was a rare oppor- tunity for writers of account at least to be considered with a bias in their favour, and not the other way, and it was a thousand
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pities it was not taken. Walter Scott would do nothing, neither would Thomas Moore, nor, indeed, Byron. There was, to be sure, a consideration which now has an opposite reason: to a popular author the stage offered nothing like the money he could make in other ways. Walter Scott wrote a note on the passage in the 'De- tached Thoughts ' in which Byron laments that he was asked in vain, recollecting the occasion, and how he declined, partly from the probability of not succeeding, and partly from dislike of being kept in subjection by ' the good folks of the green room : ceteraque ingenio non subeunda meo,' and how Byron emphatically agreed with him. Whereon Lockhart has a note of his own, saying that this was nonsense : 'neither player nor manager has lived in our time that durst have stood erect' — they are braver in our time 1 — ' in the presence of either of these men/ etc. : that ceteraque meant 'to say nothing of money matters/ It may have been so, but times are altogether changed in this respect, and yet our best men have nothing to do with the theatre. The trend of their thought and labour had set away
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from it then, and still so sets, though there may be signs of a return.
However, Byron tried Coleridge also, and Maturin, recommended by Scott, sent Bertram, which afterwards succeeded, and 'Mr. Sotheby obligingly offered all his tragedies/ and Byron got Ivan accepted, and had a long correspondence with the author, and then Kean didn't like it, and the author was angry, and so forth and so on. It is odd to think of a man who — criti- cise his poetry as you will — had beyond cavil one of the greatest and most masculine intellects England has known, frittering away his time over these futilities. But he seems to have enjoyed them. ' Then the scenes I had to go through 1 The authors and the authoresses, the Milliners, the wild Irishmen, the people from Brighton, from Black wall, from Chatham, from Cheltenham, from Dublin, from Dundee, who came in upon me ! . . . Miss Emma Somebody, with a play entitled the " Bandit of Bohemia," or some such title or production ; Mr. O'Higgins, then resident at Richmond, with an Irish tragedy, in which the unities could not fail to be observed, for the protagonist
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was chained by the leg to a pillar during the chief part of the performance.' Mr. O'Higgins was 'a wild man, of a salvage appearance/ and Byron was afraid to laugh. Social pressure was of course applied to him, and we find him writing to Mrs. George Lamb, who had written to him on behalf of some protege, and said she would ' try to soften ' his colleagues, Kinnaird and George Lamb, that he was the most obdurate, and insisted on being softened first. It was altogether an amusing game.
More so than the writs, though from these too Byron managed to get instruction and amusement. When the bailiff descended on 139 Piccadilly Byron wanted to know if he had nothing for Sheridan. ' Oh, Sheridan ? Ay, I have this,' and a ' dismal pocket- book/ as Thackeray called it, was produced. ' But, my Lord, I have been in Mr. Sheri- dan's house a twelvemonth at a time ; a civil gentleman — knows how to deal with us.' Byron took the hint, and happily did not have the bailiff for a year with him. Of Sheridan, by the way, he was seeing much at this time — Sheridan woefully in his decline, drunken, maudlin, quarrelsome.
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Byron always liked and admired him, and said 'his very dregs are better than "the first sprightly runnings " of others,' but as he appears in the records of this day there seems to me little to value in him. He never laughed ; he would sit silent for long, and then attack some fellow-guest ; and he would weep and complain that he had never had a shilling of his own — though, as Byron said, he had extracted a good many of other people's. There have been more amiable ruins than this; but, no doubt, when you have supported a man in his cups ' down a damned corkscrew staircase, which had cer- tainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors/ you feel kindly towards him. How strange now and boyish seem these orgies of orators and poets ! The dinner - party in question had been * first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then alto- gethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk.' What a life!
Well, it was soon to end for Byron. On the 10th of December 1815 his daughter Ada was born, and on the 25th of April 1816 he sailed for Ostend. There has been too much
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of debate and theory about Byron's separa- tion from his wife that I should add to it in this casual place. A dreadful reason in the background may or may not have decided Lady Byron ; it is difficult to believe from her letters that it was so. But tempers which could not agree, which were doomed never to agree, were reason enough for the separation. Many an argument, shot through with pain and heart-burning, must there have been in that house in Piccadilly ; many a sad and anxious debate when she had gone, and his sister and his friends came to him. If houses harbour the passions and sorrows of the dead, I should not like to live there. A great heart and a great brain stabbed by great trouble, racked by little troubles — it is an evil memory.
In those last days Byron wrote the beautiful verses to his wife, * Fare you well/ and the bitter verses on her confidante, Mrs. Clermont, ' Born in the garret, in the kitchen bred' — which some fool or traitor sent to the newspapers, and which was the signal for the public outcry on him. The private outcry had been long set going, and had barred him from every great house
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in London but Lady Jersey's. In these last days, too, that the inevitable touch of farce should not be absent, little Nathan the Jew singer was continually in the house — Nathan, who had persuaded him to write the ' Heb- rew Melodies/ and drew Tom Moore's chaff on him ; ' Sun-burn Nathan/ says Byron in a letter — and Nathan got £50 from him and sent him a present of Passover cakes. Byron's polite acknowledgment of this gift seems to be the last letter he wrote in London.
Byron had signed the deed of separation, delivering it as * the act and deed/ as a rare bit of gossip in a dull book of letters pub- lished lately tells us, not of himself but ' of Mrs. Clermont.' He had parted from Au- gusta, ' almost the last being/ as he wrote to his wife, * whom you have left me to part with/ and the end of his life in England came. There is a last scene from 139 Picca- dilly : you see him come out, his beautiful pale face without the light that made it, said Walter Scott, ' a thing to dream of/ and limp into his carriage.
OF BURLINGTON HOUSE 107
CHAPTEE VII
OF BURLINGTON HOUSE
THE memories of Burlington House are mostly commingled with the arts, so much so that as one muses on its history an im- pression rather of art than of humanity is predominant. One thinks of one art or another, exampled in varying degrees of excellence, from the time of its first renown until now when the art of painting flourishes or languishes in its halls. Indeed, if horrid rumour be credited, its first existence is made lurid by an ancient art, that of poison- ing, to wit. As a practitioner or patron of an art almost everybody who lived in Bur- lington House is known, if known at all. Yet from the haze of dilettantism or achieve- ment some humanity does emerge, enough to furnish me a chapter.
The first Lord Burlington was living here in 1668, and the house was not built until
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1665, so that it seems likely that he was the first occupant. According to Pepys, however, the house was built by Sir John Denham, and if that was so, and if he did not build it for the earl, he may have lived there a year or two. In that case the house began with a note of humanity only too sharp and recognisable — the comedy or tragedy of an old man and a young wife and a lover. The third person was a king's brother, which for some minds may give a touch of romance to a squalid story of human weakness and vice.
It is all in Grammont, a story most con- genial to that lively Count, or to Hamilton his biographer. Sir John Denham was an old man. Grammont says seventy-nine, and rather tiresome research says only fifty; still, fifty counted for old in love-affairs when Charles the Second was king. In May 1665 he married Margaret Brook, who was only seventeen. She was a pretty toy. The Duke of York had been in love with her, on and off, other ladies intervening, for some time. His latest mistress had been Lady Chesterfield, whose lord — it was an act which amazed and disgusted Grammont —
A SAD STORY 109
carried her off into the country. So he was on with the old love again, and Lady Den- ham was to be given a place in the Duchess's household, and the usual routine of these affairs was to be followed. Only she died in January 1667. Grammont says that Sir John Denham, unable to follow Lord Ches- terfield's example for ]ack of a country house, sent her on a longer journey. The populace thought he had poisoned her, and was infuriated — why it should have cared I know not — and had to be appeased with a large distribution of burnt wine at her funeral. It also accused the Duchess of York, or at least Andrew Marvell did, who should have known better. Perhaps it was rather sad, as the pretty toy was so young, and had only acted after her kind. Anyhow, she was dead, and the Duke of York promptly fell in love with some one else.
When I was a very young man I used to read such stories as those in Grarnmont's memoirs with much pleasure. Nowadays I find them a little banal and monotonous, too unrelieved by fancy or subtlety. They are disagreeable, but this one of Sir John Denham and Margaret Brook and the Duke
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of York seems more so than probably it was, for one need not suppose she really was poisoned. In the seventeenth century there were many cases of alleged poisoning which might have been only cases of medical ignor- ance. People had appendicitis and were bled for it, and naturally expired. Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans, the most fascinating woman of her days, who was thought to have been poisoned with the con- nivance of that wretched cretin, her husband — Charles the Second, her brother, refused to open the Duke's letter announcing her death — probably died of peritonitis. As for Lady Denham, that simple wanton, if her ghost emerges from Burlington House into Piccadilly, save for its dress it will be quite undistinguished in the crowd.
The original house seems to have been large, but comparatively plain, built of red brick. It had a big garden behind, which of course touched the open country. Horace Walpole has been censured for attributing to the first Lord Burlington the wish to have no building beyond him ; that is said to be absurd, since Clarendon House and
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Berkeley House in the west were already standing, but he might well have referred to the north. There is nothing to say of this Lord Burlington, but I should like to think that his brother Robert Boyle, that gentle and lovable man of science, the in- ventor of the air-pump and an original founder of the Royal Society, came some- times from Pall Mall, where he lived, to dine in Piccadilly.
It was the third earl, great-grandson of the first, who renewed and embellished and made everything of Burlington House, with the assistance of Colin Campbell and in imitation of Palladio. I do not propose to go into architectural merits and differences. The reader can go look for himself: that is to say, he can still see the first floor, which with the ground floor (only that is hidden by a portico) was left in 1866, when the rest of the buildings and a beautiful colon- nade were destroyed, and the present wall and wings, such as they are, were built For my part, in my bigoted love for the plain and simple in London houses, I wish the old house of red brick had been left exposed to view : it was left, encased in
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stone, as the nucleus of the grander mansion. The new Burlington House and its art-loving owner were the theme of much eulogy and satire. The satire in Martial, of the fine house with nowhere to eat or sleep, was Englished for Burlington House as it had been for Blenheim ; and Hogarth drew two plates caricaturing the ' Taste of the Town/ and 'The Man of Taste/ In the latter Pope is spattering the Duke of Chandos (whom he had depreciated as an amateur to exalt his own patron) with whitewash, and Burlington is going up a ladder like a workman.
This third Earl of Burlington was the patron of Pope and Gay and Handel. He was intimate with Swift, but you can hardly be said to be the patron of a man whom you allow to bully your wife. The characteristic anecdote of the Dean is something musty. ' Lady Burlington, I hear you can sing : sing me a song/ She refused, and Swift said, ' I suppose you take me for one of your poor hedge parsons ; sing when I bid you.' She wept and left the room. . . . ' Pray, madam, are you as proud and as ill-natured as when I saw you last ? ' ' No, Mr. Dean ; I will
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sing to you, if you please.' No modern thinks more of Swift's greatness as a writer than I, but I wish the lady had answered differently.
She was Lady Dorothy Savile, a clever daughter of a clever family, and I think the most interesting memories of Burlington House are of her and two other women — her unhappy daughter, Dorothy, and Mademoiselle Violette, who became Mrs. Garrick.
Poor Lady Dorothy Boyle's is the story of a foolish marriage, which ended tragic- ally, of bitter sorrow and untimely death. It is something of a coincidence for the house that she, like Margaret Brook, was seventeen when she married, and died not a year afterwards, and that her death was laid at her husband's door. But here the charge was all too probable, and here the victim was innocent.
She fell in love with Lord Euston, heir of the second Duke of Grafton, and therefore great-grandson of Charles the Second, whose kindly qualities of heart were, alas ! sadly to seek in him. He was, in fact, a brute of the worst reputation. Report had it that he
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wanted to marry his brother's widow, Lady Augustus FitzRoy, but he did marry, un- happily for her, this poor Lady Dorothy Boyle. Horace Walpole and others agree about the softness and gentleness of her character, and the attraction of opposites — which may be an excellent provision of Nature in the main, but when it takes an ill turn is red-hot iron on our nerves — may have worked in both at the beginning. Of her affection, at least, there seems to be no doubt, and one wishes to believe it was that, and not the dukedom, which persuaded her parents. If worldliness it was in them, . then worldliness has seldom been punished so savagely and so swiftly. Horace Walpole writes to his friend, Horace Mann : ' I wrote you word that Lord Euston is married ; in a week more I believe I shall write you word that he is divorced. He is brutal enough, and has forbad Lady Burlington his house, and that in very ungentle terms. The whole family is in confusion ; the Duke of Grafton half-dead, and Lord Burlington half-mad. The latter has challenged Lord Euston, who accepted the challenge, but they were prevented. ... Do you not pity
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the poor girl? of the softest temper, vast beauty, birth, and fortune ! to be so sacrificed ! '
In less than a year this soft, affectionate wife was dead of her husband's brutality. We read of her from time to time in the interval, meeting Horace Walpole here and there, dancing and supping, and on one occasion 'quite honey-moonish ' with her husband — which shows us that the cleverest of social observers do not always observe. When she was dead her mother drew her picture and sent it among her friends with an inscription Pope was said to have written for her.
LADY DOROTHY BOYLE, Born May the 14th, 1724.
She was the comfort and joy of her parents, the delight of all who knew her angelick temper, and
the admiration of all who saw her beauty.
She was marry'd October the 10th, 1741, and
delivered (by death) from misery
May the 2nd, 1742.
This picture was drawn seven weeks after her death
(from memory) by her most affectionate mother,
Dorothy Burlington.
So Lady Burlington fell back on her art — for which she had a genuine taste ; E
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Horace Walpole attributed the design of one of Hogarth's prints to her — on her art and her artistic protege's, and, let us hope, found consolation. It is some slight comfort to know that Lord Euston died young, in his father's lifetime.
It would be little reproach to human nature if this fate of her daughter had soured Lady Burlington's nature. Sour she appears in Walpole's letters, but he may have had some personal spite against her, since magnanimity does not shine among his virtues. He announces her death in 1758 in a spirit his best friends must deplore. ' You know that the wife of Bath ' —Lord Bath's wealthy spouse — 'is gone to maunder at St. Peter, and before he could hobble to the gate, my Lady Burlington, cursing and blaspheming, overtook t'other Countess, and both together made such an uproar . . .' Shocking bad taste, is it not ?
One gathers the idea of a masterful woman who hated her foes and managed her friends. Such women are apt to be but poorly requited, for the foes return the hatred, and the friends may forget the kind- ness and staunchness while they remember
THE VIOLETTA 117
the criticism and regiment. Lady Burling- ton had many favourites among artists, but the most famous, and I think interesting, of them is ' the Violetta/
This fascinating dancer was one of that numerous band of foreigners who have taken London by storm, been petted by its society, and finally have had the kindness to settle in comfort among us — in spite of the climate and cold manners they have continued to reproach us withal. There seems to me to be some lack of balance in this matter, for we so seldom hear of English people taking other countries by storm and being furnished with comfortable livelihoods in them by their admirers. I mean, that it is almost unjust to themselves that other countries should export to us so much attractive humanity and leave us all our own as well. Mademoiselle Violette came to us in 1744, and was welcomed by Lady Burlington, who gave her quarters in Burlington House and took her everywhere.
Who was she ? Mr. Joseph Knight, in his excellent book on David Garrick, says that probably she herself was in the dark as to her origin and early history. But
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contemporary gossips, of course, had plenty of light. One obvious story was that she was Lord Burlington's natural daughter, and they said her mother was an Italian of position. And, of course, they said this was absolutely confirmed when on her marriage Lady Burlington settled £6000 on her, though the reasoning appears a little faulty in psychology. She always denied this origin, but according to ' Rainy Day Smith ' she admitted, late in life, to one of her husband's relations that, although Lord Burlington was not her father, she was of noble birth. In that case she could not have approved of the other story the gossips had, which was that she was the daughter of a Viennese citizen called Veigel. Veigel = Veilchen = violet, and hence her name at the request, so they said, of Maria Teresa herself. The Empress admired her, and so, unfortunately, did the Emperor Frederick i., on which account she was packed off to England, travelling in male attire, and so seen on the packet by Dr. Carlyle. The latter part of this story, at least, the Violetta seems to have admitted. However these things were, and whether she came from
SYMBOLIC 119
Florence or Vienna or elsewhere, she must have had, as Mr. Knight points out, some experience as a dancer, since she was en- gaged immediately for the Haymarket.
The King was present at her first per- formance, and she was soon the rage. She had the fine advertisement of a riot, when she gave an audience two dances instead of the three promised. 'The fame of the Violetta,' writes Horace Walpole in 1740, 'increases daily; the sister-countesses of Burlington and Thanet exert all their stores of sullen partiality in competition for her.' And two years later : ' The old monarch at Hanover has got a new mistress. . . . Now I talk of getting, Mr. Fox has got the ten thousand pound prize; and the Violetta, so it is said, Coventry for a husband. It is certain that at the fine masquerade he was following her, as she was under the Countess's arm, who, pulling off her glove, moved her wedding ring up and down her finger . . . which it seems was to signify that no other terms would be accepted/ I rather like this homely significance on the part of my Lady Burlington. The Coventry mentioned, by the way, is not the earl who
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married the beautiful Maria Gunning, but plain Mr. Coventry, who was no great pcvrti. She did better when she married David Garrick in 1749. His wooing, however, had not been all roses, for Lady Burlington seems not to have approved him at first. Mr. Walpole writes to George Montagu that, at another entertainment, ' Lady Bur- Hngton brought the Violetta, and the Bich- monds had asked Garrick, who stood ogling and sighing the whole time, while my Lady kept a most fierce look out.' But married they were, and it was a marriage of marriages. Garrick's lines on his wife are well known :
* 'Tis not, my friend, her speaking face, Her shape, her youth, her winning grace, Have reached my heart ; the fair one's mind, Quick as her eyes, yet soft and kind — A gaiety with innocence,'
and other delightful qualities he enumerates. She seems really to have deserved the praise. Sir Theodore Martin, in his monograph on Garrick, has collected quite a bouquet of nice things said of her by famous men. To be praised — and cordially and sincerely praised — by Wilkes and Sterne and Gibbon, a woman must have been worth knowing.
A HAPPY MARRIAGE 121
We must be allowed to follow her for one moment into her married life, though she passes from Piccadilly after her honeymoon, which was partly spent in Burlington House. Contemporaries were very hard on David Garrick's vanities and foibles. The moderns I have lately mentioned have defended him ably, and so, as was right and proper, has Mr. H. B. Irving. He had his share of the conceits and jealousies common in his vocation — and not unknown in others — but as a man there was more to respect in him than by ordinary standards we find in many great artists. And whatever virtue he lacked, in love and care for his wife he was not lacking. For twenty-eight years they were never a day apart. She went with him on his famous tour in Europe, and whatever and wherever his triumphs his wife enjoyed and sweetened them. We must not linger over them, but one last glance at Violetta we will have — in 1795, eighteen years after her husband's death. We see her thoroughly domesticated, in Horace Walpole's neighbourhood (having conciliated the regard of that exigent expert in society), with ' an hundred head of nieces
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with her,' of whom, 'an elderly fat dame affected at every word to call her Aunt.' It is pleasant to chronicle a good fortune and domesticity so complete and so well deserved. And now we must go back to Burlington House.
It seems unkind to have lingered over Lady Burlington and her friendships and to say nothing of her lord, who was much considered by so many considerable men. He was a splendid host, housing Handel for three years, and William Kent, the architect, for thirty-two — a sort of hospitality I regret has become obsolete. But beyond his hos- pitality and his interest in art little emerges of personal quality, and we may let the sands of time run on. After his death Burlington House passed to the Cavendishes. Lord George of that family bought it from the current Duke in 1815, and lived there many years, latterly with the revived title of Burlington, and with his son-in-law, Lord Charles FitzRoy — thus establishing for the house a happier connection with the family from which poor Lady Dorothy had her atrocious husband. A daughter of Lord Charles remembers that in her girlhood at
CALM CAVENDISHES 123
Burlington House bloodhounds went loose in the court at nights, — terrific beasts, chained up by day. Lord George was a fine example of the taciturnity remarkable in the Cavendishes, and I take a charming story of him and his brother, the fifth Duke — famous for his calmness and as the husband of Georgiana — from the reminiscences of Sir Algernon West. They stopped for the night at an inn on their way north, and were shown into a room with three beds, one of which had its curtains drawn. Both brothers in turn went and looked into the curtained bed and chose another. Not a word they said until late in the next day as they continued their journey. Then at last : * Did you see what was in that bed last night? ' asked the Duke. ' Yes, brother/ said Lord George, and again they were silent. The bed had contained a corpse.
It was Lord George who made the Bur- lington Arcade, to prevent people from throwing things over his garden wall, and, as the Gentleman's Magazine rather curiously puts it, ' for the gratification of the publick, and to give employment to industrious females.' When I was a boy at college it
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was the custom, if one went to London for the day, to take a turn in this Arcade, which, I am afraid, we called the ' drain-pipe/ of an afternoon, but I doubt no very gracious ghosts come out of it into Piccadilly.
I think there are no other personal memories about Burlington House. It was a great Whig centre at one time, but even ghosts cannot be in two places at once, and Devonshire House claims Fox and Burke far more insistently. We fall back on art again. The Elgin Marbles were once in a shed in the courtyard, and the pictures of Messrs. X, Y, and Z, with more distinguished artists, have hung regularly on its walls since the Royal Academy of Arts was housed there. Does the noise of past * soirees/ interesting and miscellaneous, revive in the nights ? Or the passions and rivalries and exclusions and tardy admissions which have made such a coil in its history — does the atmosphere of them hang about the house ? Let us hope that the ghosts of dead banquets and stereotyped speeches walk not. But one likes to think of Disraeli lauding the pictures he had just been abusing to his neighbour, with a hypocritical humour Mr.
OF BURLINGTON HOUSE 125
Gladstone thought ' devilish.' Hogarth caricatured the builder of the house. I wonder what he would have thought of its present possessors — mixed thoughts, it is probable.
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CHAPTER VIII
THE PALMERSTONS AND CAMBRIDGE HOUSE
WALKING along Piccadilly with my reader, I stop him at No. 94, the Naval and Military, or ' In and Out ' Club, and, press- ing his arm with one emphatic hand, I point with t'other through the open gate across the courtyard to the plain stone house, and 'Here,' says I to him, 'here, reader, for fifteen years lived an Englishman and English- woman than whom you may search history through to find two examples more satisfying, more splendidly and completely true, of our national type. Other dwellers in Piccadilly may or may not impress you more acutely. There 's Emma Hart, and Byron, and Old Q., and the great Duke ; there 's romance and passion, poetry and wickedness and military glory, matters in which from time to time we English have been great; but if you
A GLIMPSE OF AN UGLY FACE 127
would reflect to what fine pass the quite ordinary qualities of our countrymen may arrive, how noble a show may come of mere genial tempers and solid understandings, stand here in front of Cambridge House and muse on the Palmerstons.'
Before the reader does that, however, we must make our bow to chronology and attend a moment to Pam's predecessors in Cambridge House, of whom one was a great noble and another a royal duke — the third Earl of Egremont, to wit, and the Duke of Cambridge. The house was built for the Egremonts in 1760 or so, and had the honour, during the reign of the second Earl, of receiving John Wilkes after the arrest of that firebrand for No. 45 of the North Briton. He had been arrested by the Earl's order, and the interview, we may be sure, was lively. Wilkes wrote an energetic account of the business to the Duke of Grafton from Paris. But this is only a brief incident, and Wilkes's ugly face, which, as he said, was only half an hour's handicap in the rivalries of love, is but a flash on the canvas. With the third Lord Egremont we may stay longer. It is true that his name belongs
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more to Petworth, that beautiful old place in Sussex, than to Piccadilly : it was there he lived almost entirely in his later life, practising that hospitality, at once casual, lordly, and kindly, for which he was re- nowned. But in his younger days he had been a leader of London fashion, and this house in Piccadilly knew him at intervals through most of his long life.
George O'Brien Wyndham, who was born in 1751 and died in 1837, was a type of what a great English noble, with fine taste, much intelligence, sincere public spirit, but little aptitude for party politics, can be in these latter days. Perhaps this does not amount to very much. Even in his time, and still more in ours, the position is something of an empty survival. ' Your nobles/ said the German professor to Harry Richmond, ' are merely rich men/ That may be nearly true, but it is not quite true. Enough flesh remains on the bones of a system that hi its day was logical and efficient to make a wealthy noble potentially a more useful person than a bare representative of indivi- dualist success in making money. His direct beneficence — given our traditions — may be
THE LAST LORD EGREMONT 129
easier and more graceful, and his example shines. Easy for him to be beneficent, but then, as it seems, it is easier still not to be. Lord Egremont, for instance, gave away £20,000 a year in charity. His income was £80,000 a year, and so of course he did not miss the money : the gift was less to him than if I gave away sixpence. Still, he gave it, and might not have given it, and many a richer man has been honoured for smaller gifts. He was a magnificent and helpful friend of painters, who were at home at Petworth, and whose works are now its distinction. In particular he cherished Turner. They agreed well, and naturally so, for there was in both the simplicity of life and of attitude to life which belongs to true art and true aristocracy. This simplicity shone at Petworth, where host and guests went their own way all day, and met at dinner, at which Lord Egremont in the cordial — if rather dilatory — old fashion carved for each guest himself. In one matter, indeed, he fell short of a model nobleman, though convention was not out- raged by his conduct so much then as it would be now : he was an avowed father
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without being a husband. He was not a rake ; on the contrary, was an affectionately domestic man. His children lived with him, and inherited all but his title after him. Pity that circumstances left the relation short of complete fitness. His not marrying in early life made Horace Walpole describe him as a worthless young fellow. The fact was that he had been going to, but did not, marry Horace Walpole's niece. Pity, as I said, that in this matter he defied conven- tion, but that he did so shows at least that his virtues of charity and kindness were his own, not assumed in compliance with it.
On the monument in Pet worth church to his predecessors, the Percies, is the inscrip- tion Mortuis moriturus. I hope that he thought of it ; in any case he adopted it, and you may search wide for an inscription of a moral taste, so to say, so perfect and final. There was much to say of the Percies and himself, but in that place what was fitting to say was just that : they were dead and he would die. I would trust the feeling for art in a man who felt that propriety. Lord Egremont, however, would not have been a type of ' a great English noble ' if the art of
THE OLD DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE 131
painting and the cherishing of painters had been all his interests. He was not energetic in politics, though he was ready to back his views with his purse. But, to fill the popular ideal of his position (which takes little account of the arts) he was a good sportsman, and, above all, a splendid patron of the turf. Mr. Theodore Cook, in his de- lightful history of that great institution, has much to say of Lord Egremont. Take him all in all, then, he was a worthy possessor of a great Piccadilly house, and his name must be honoured as we stand before it.
The same may be said in a way of the royal duke who lived there afterwards (Lord Cholmondeley intervening) till 1850. The Duke of Cambridge was not conspicuous among the brothers of George the Fourth, who went the pace so merrily as young men, and were so eccentric, laughable, and on the whole amiable as old ones. He was not clever, which perhaps was just as well, since the Duke of Cumberland, who — with the slightly dubious exception of George himself — had the brains of that royal generation, was detested. All the stories of these royal dukes are of homely, innocent, individual
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oddities, the amusement of their society, which had little of the reverence for royalty now so fashionable. Those of the Duke of Cambridge are not remarkable. The best of them are of his conduct in church, where he was accustomed to give a cordial and audible support to the officiating clergyman. ' Let us pray/ said the clergyman : * By all means, by all means/ said the Duke of Cambridge. On one commandment his comment would be, ' Quite right, quite right ; but very difficult sometimes/ and on another — I won't say which — c No, no ; it was my brother Ernest did that/ Rather a dear old gentleman, he should not be omitted from a talk about the house which bears his name, but there is little to say of him.
And now we come to the Palmerstons. I join them in my gossip, even as they were so thoroughly joined in life, for both were splendid examples, as I said, of our ordinary national type at its best. It may be that the spirit of Palmerston's policy lives here and there among our politicians, but his actual politics is dead, is as a wind that has blown by, so that the figure of the man, as a man, is the greater part that is left of him,
LADY PALMERSTON 133
and so his wife, as a woman, stands by his side in history, as in her way almost equally remarkable. The secret of both was in a vitality and cheerfulness that never so much as faltered. Hour after hour in the House of Commons the old man — he was old when he comes into the story of Piccadilly — could attend to the dullest business, patient, business-like, polite. Hour after hour at the famous receptions at Cambridge House, he could stand with a smile and kindly handshake for innumerable guests, repeating the handshake in forgetfulness now and then (it is recorded) as he grew older, but never flagging in cordiality. And so Lady Palmerston filled up her countless invitation cards with her own hand, and kept her visiting-book, says Abraham Hay ward, 'as regularly as a merchant's ledger.' But the formal part was the least of her tasks : she had to please all the good, dull people when they came. 'Her good-nature/ says Hay- ward again — and the tribute of the eulogy he wrote of her in the Times at her death is great, for it came from a critical temper — ' her good- nature was inexhaustible, nor was it ever known to give way under any extent
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of forwardness or tiresomeness . . . instead of interrupting or abruptly quitting weari- some or pushing visitors, she would listen till they ceased of their own accord, or were superseded and went away.' All this must have been trying indeed to her. She was the daughter of a clever house — sister to Lord Melbourne — and had lived all her life in a lively, well-bred, and intimate society, a society which is most familiarly reflected, I think, in the letters of Harriet, Lady Gran- ville. These are some of the best woman's letters in English, and they paint the best of the society which followed the genera- tion of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who was Lady Granville's mother : a society unaffected, conversible, given to jokes and games. To come from that to the enter- taining of average Members of Parliament and their womenkind must have been a discipline much more severe than the r61e of an ambassador's wife in Paris, which greatly tried the patience of Lady Granville. Nor did Lady Palmerston care for politics, apart from personalities. She was her husband's invaluable ally, but only as another ear and mouth. When politics were brought to her,
A FALSE PROPHECY 135
she made a careful note or sent at once for the great man. Devotion to him and his interests was all her inspiration, and a good heart, good wits, good manners, and — one is glad to know — good health and digestion, carried her through.
There had been stories about them — * old stories, my dear ! ; — in other days. She was the widow of Lord Cowper, and there was trouble about her second marriage. Palmerston was volage and gay, and was not (as a young man) called Cupid Palmer- ston for nothing. Her friends prophesied unhappiness. Lady Granville wrote : ' Lady Cowper has courage to face her angry children. I cannot say how much I blame them for telling what they feel, but I wonder she can encounter their antipathy. What a happy mother she might have been, and what an unhappy existence will she have, I fear 1 Her understanding never has been of the slightest use to her.' Well, well, the wisest of us are poor prophets. Her existence was most happy, and her understanding exceeding useful, and her children came dearly to love Lord Pam.
He was a lovable man. A hearty, un-
,
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affected, easy, joyous man. Really a con- summate type of good average qualities. Not interested in art or literature (which was easily forgiven him) but interested in almost everything else ; a man of whom it was characteristic that he never passed a dish at table, and played a bad game of billiards with infinite zest — loving much to win, and especially if his wife were looking on. The affection of his countrymen gener- ally was won by their rough appreciation of this simple nature perhaps almost as much as by their belief that he stood for England, and the rights and dignity of England, without compromise or exception. The respect and prestige he had in Parlia- ment and among those who came in contact with him were founded, above all, on his absolute command of his business. He was like the late Lord Randolph Churchill in this, that being a pleasure-loving man, and having lived hard as a man of pleasure, when ambition sent him to business he gave himself wholly to it and lived hard as a man of business. He was something of a gourmet, yet when Parliament was sitting he dined at three, and but for some tea at
PAM 137
the House touched nothing more till he came home to bed at one o'clock. As a result, he knew what he was about when he rose to answer questions or make a speech, and he could express his knowledge lucidly and in that easy conversational tone which to Englishmen, and especially in the House, is most acceptable. Many an English statesman has been wrecked in public life from sheer inability to get on with his colleagues at close quarters : that, of course, was not the case with Palmerston, yet it is not true to say that the reverse was the case. People who are offended by down- rightness and occasional brusquerie — timid and punctilious people like Lord John Russell — he scandalised. His success came not from any one quality, as was shrewdly remarked of him, but from an unusual combination of qualities — gaiety and sense, lucidity and fire — but he had the defects of those qualities too. »
That reminds me that he had critics in private life, and that I have been straying to the House of Commons from Cambridge House. His jollity and fun and laughter could grate on the fastidious. Henry
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Greville, for example, as fastidious, though not as articulate, a critic as his brother Charles, has recorded his exceptions. 'Although he was a most cordial and courteous host, he never struck me as an agreeable man ; he was always good- humoured and ready to talk, but his style was too jocose, and his jests were for the most part flat, and one felt in his society a constant disappointment that the con- versation of a man who was playing so important and conspicuous a part in the world, and who must necessarily have so much to communicate, should be made up of puns and bad jokes/ etc., etc. The idea crosses one's mind that possibly Pam had not 'much to communicate' to Mr. Henry Greville, and preferred to chaff him. Still, one knows too well that high spirits and empty jests — a mere expression of high spirits to the jester, like singing in his bath — may be a bore when one is not attuned to them, and no doubt Pam may so have sinned. I think, however, had I been there, that delight in an octogenarian vitality, in a humour and kindness which had survived so much toil, so many rows
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in public, and so much zest of life in private, would have reconciled me to any number of puns and bad jokes.
Alas ! I was not there. As I write of these ghosts in Piccadilly I strain my imagination to visualise them as they were. The help is all too little. Letters and diaries of contemporaries, however graphic and acute they may be, seem ever to leave out those simple, elementary things we seek. Familiar with appearances, and voices, and manners, they forget to describe them, or not having our interests in mind have no reason for the description. We are left guessing and inferring. Palmerston, too, perhaps, died too lately for his vie intime to be easily at our service. I get a picture or two of him at Cambridge House from Lord Lome's (the present Duke of Argyll) book on him. One (sent to Lord Lome by a correspondent) is of Palmerston in his workroom, standing at a high desk, ' almost unapproachable from the fortification of office boxes piled around him/ And then Lord Lome, more careful than most bio- graphers, gives us some details of his looks, and — yes — I can see him at the top of
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the staircase in Cambridge House, shaking hands with his guests, an upstanding figure, neither short nor tall, very neatly dressed, the head erect on the shoulders, framed with grey, short hair, brushed forward, and grey whiskers, greyer close to the cheek — the hair was black and the face round when he was ' Cupid Palmerston/ He whispers to one man an account of a famous prize fight, which happened that day, not admit- ting that he was there, and greets another cordially for the second time, and I hear his jolly laugh as he repeats a bad pun to the disappointed Henry Greville.
105, 106, AND 107 141
CHAPTEE IX 105, 106, AND 107
I WONDEB if my reader is fond of practical jokes. I hope not : I should not despise him for it — necessarily or altogether — but I should pity him, because they are almost passed out of our manners, and he will find but few, and with difficulty, to share his merriment. They were still rife a genera- tion ago, especially in theatrical society, but now they are dead, and few of us in an age of nerves are sorry for their passing. For my part — nerves or no nerves — I dislike them extremely, because my mind craves lucidity and simple dealing, and hates mysticism and uncertainty and confusion and make-believe. If, however, the reader should be fond of practical jokes, he will be interested in the Lord Barrymore for whom 105 (now the Isthmian Club) was
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built in 1780, on the site of one of those statuary yards (that of John Van Nost) which used to deface Piccadilly.
An agreeable family, the Barry s, of whom this gentleman was the head. Hellgate and Cripplegate (one brother was lame) were of their nicknames, and there was a sister whose mode of conversation caused the Regent to call her Billingsgate. They appear to have lived for the object of doing extravagant and eccentric things with the maximum of discomfort and annoyance to other people, and, of course, they were great devotees of the practical joke. Lord Barry- more, indeed, deserves to rank as the prince or patron saint of the custom. One finds mention of him from time to time in memoirs and letters ; contemptuous mention, as a rule, and if laudatory, then a little parasitical. He was the sort of roystering, uncontrolled creature who fatigues his equals, and whose friends are apt to be parasites. Henry Angelo, the famous fencing-master, is, I think, the chief authority for the practical jokes, and on him the mark of the parasite is pretty clear. Most of the jokes were enacted at Wargrave, but no doubt the
THE BAKRY FAMILY 143
house in Piccadilly must have seen a good many. One or two were rather amusing. To ask a respectable tradesman to your house as your guest and then make your other guests greet him as somebody else, and insist that he is somebody else, until you yourself say you don't know what to think, is not the perfection of hospitality, but one can imagine that the confusion of the victim might be entertaining. As a rule, however, I find the stories merely tedious, my boredom relieved only by dislike of the jokers and sympathy with the jokees. Barrymore and his brothers and friends and parasites called themselves the Humbugging Club and invited people to be humbugged.
1 1 see no worth in the hob-nailed mirth,' but, if the reader does, I refer him to The Last Earls of Barrymore, . by Mr. J. R. Robinson, where he will find all about it.
Lord Barrymore, however, was more than a mere practical- joking buffoon. He was distinguished as a gambler with cards and horses, and in the twenty-four years of his life got through £300,000. Remembering his age, poor boy, perhaps I was wrong to be superior about his practical jokes. The
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one really interesting thing about him is that he was one of the first, if not the first, of our aristocracy to act in public. His enthusiasm for the stage, like all genuine enthusiasms, should be noted with respect. He built a theatre next to his house at Wargrave, and made up mixed companies of amateurs and professional players. But he by no means confined his histrionic gifts — which seem really to have existed — to his private theatre. George Selwyn writes, rather testily, of ' that etourdi Lord Barry- more playing the fool in three or four differ- ent characters upon our Richmond theatre/ There is a print of him as ' Scrub/ a black - a-vised, impish-faced young fellow with bushy eyebrows. Just before his death he went into the Berkshire Militia — for another diversion, or to begin a reform, I know not — and was becoming a zealous and efficient officer when a gunshot accident finished him. More than one young man of his class has run much the same course in our time. We may deplore the end of him or not, remembering that profligates sometimes settle into happiness, and also that pigeons sometimes turn into ineffectual rooks. On
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the whole it is fitting, I think, that such boys should never grow old. The revenge of such a youth is most often painful to endure and ugly to see.
As for 105 Piccadilly, it was dismantled in 1792 and sold by auction, with the stables, where was room for twenty-one horses and two coach-houses. Mr. Christie knocked down house and stables (for 3050 and 1300 guineas) to the representative of Old Q., who had known better than to die at twenty-four. Old Q. left the house to Lady Hertford, but we find it, after being burnt and repaired, as the * Old Pulteney Hotel/ And as such it was witness of an intrigue among * exalted personages ' in 1814. This is to be found in the Recollections from 1803 to 1837, which were given to a not much interested world by the Honourable Amelia Murray in 1868. It is rather an insipid little work, to be sure, but this story of the Pulteney Hotel — which she does not name, but it is identified by Mr. Wheatley — sug- gests a plot, and a plot attracts most of us. In 1814 London was simply swarming with po- tentates and their relations, and among them were Prince Leopold of Coburg, the Prince
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pf Orange, the Czar of Russia and his sister, the Grand Duchess Catherine of Olden- burg. Now the Princess Charlotte of Wales was engaged to the Prince of Orange, but the Duchess of Oldenburg, for political reasons, wished the marriage not to take place, but contrariwise that the Prince of Orange should marry a sister of her own, and the Princess Charlotte should marry Prince Leopold of Coburg. Poor Princess Char- lotte ! an avowed sentimentalist cannot but lament her in passing. To be the child of parents both deplorable in their different ways, who loathed one another and tore her between them; to be the centre of these miserable intrigues ; to be withal an amiable and high-spirited girl, on whom England, even the Whigs — you remember Byron's lines — looked with some affection and hope when she should be queen ; to gain a little happiness, and to die painfully after so brief a spell of it — assuredly it was a pathetic for- tune. Well, the Prince of Orange was not ' particularly attractive/ says Miss Murray — it was indeed common rumour that the Prin- cess disliked him — and Prince Leopold was 'a handsome young man.' The Duchess deter-
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mined to aid these favourable circumstances with a little art. 'She took a hotel in Piccadilly,' our Pulteney Hotel, to wit, ' she earnestly sought the acquaintance of Miss Elphinstone, who was known to be on intimate terms with the Princess. She gave grand dinners, and took care to invite: the Prince of Orange the night he was to waltz in public with the Princess, as her fiance*. The Grand Duchess plied him well with champagne, and a young man could hardly refuse the invitations of his hostess ; he was made tipsy, and of course the Princess was disgusted. Then, in Miss Elphinstone's apartments, the charming Prince Leopold was presented.' And so this delicate scheme was accomplished.
Number 105 has something better in its history than Lord Barry more's practical jokes and the Duchess of Oldenburg's cham- pagne, for when it became a private house again the Lord Hertford who made the great collection lived there for some time and kept there his beautiful possessions. Sir Julian Goldsmid was its last private tenant, a figure of respectability to balance its first owner.
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Number 106 narrowly missed being a most interesting house. It might have harboured, but for an untimely death, one of the most famous beauties in the social history of England, and so have given to the history of Piccadilly a pendant to Lady Hamilton. It, or rather its site, was origin- ally an inn called ' The Greyhound,' and was bought by the sixth Earl of Coventry from Sir Hugh Hunlock in 1764 for ten thousand guineas with a yearly ground-rent of seventy- five pounds. He bought it soon after his marriage. But, alas and alas ! this was his second marriage and not his first, which had been to Maria Gunning. For once I chafe against the limitations of my theme. There is so much that is interesting, amusing, pathetic to be written of the Gunnings, those Irish girls who by sheer force of beauty — for it seems they had neither wit nor manners — sent all London mad about them, caused people to crowd and stand on chairs to have a glimpse of them, and had their choice of coronets and fortunes. What unobservant fool first called the English cold and phlegmatic? In what other country of Western civilisation have mere good looks
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brought such splendour to their possessors ? and why, why did neither Gunning live in Piccadilly ? I would rather have written about Elizabeth, who married duke after duke, and according to her grandson, the late Duke of Argyll, was a woman of courage and character. But I should have been con- tent to write about Maria, Countess of Coventry only, and only a beautiful, foolish, ignorant, good - natured creature, whom Horace Walpole laughed at and rather liked. George Selwyn was devoted to her and to her daughters ; for George, a passionately paternal man who was never a father, seems always to have loved his friends' children more than his friends. As it is, however, I must write of neither.
The actual Lady Coventry who lived at 106 may or may not have been an interest- ing person : we do not know. Miss Mary Townshend wrote to Selwyn : ' The beauty of the new countess was for some days set above that of your old friend, and at present, with equal injustice, she is scarcely allowed to be pretty/ If her portrait by Sir Joshua was like her, I fear I should have inclined to the latter verdict. Pretty or not, I can
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only dislike her for not being Maria. Lord Coventry himself seems to have been no great matter. Horace Walpole hated him for some reason or other, and is severe on his character and intelligence. He was remarkable for gaucherie in Paris, it would appear, but probably, like many another good Englishman, he was only struggling with the French language. We have a picture of him, also in Horace, chasing his wife (Maria) round a dinner-table to rub off the rouge he accused her of wearing; but I do not object to people romping, so they do not bump against me, so much as did Horace. Et voila pour the sixth Lord Coventry, who probably was just an ordinary fool.
The history of 106 is at least varied. From an inn it became a * nobleman's man- sion/ as we have seen, and then it was turned into a gambling club. This was the ' Coventry House Club/ an attempt to revive the glories and profits of Crockford's : happily or unhappily, it was not a success, and came to an end in 1854. After that 106 was for a short time the residence of the French Ambassador, and now, of course,
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it still has a diplomatic atmosphere about it as the St. James's Club.
The Comte de Flahault, French Am- bassador here in 1860, was a man of distinc- tion, a handsome and attractive man. He began life as aide-de-camp to the first Napoleon, and ended it as Chancellor of the Legion of Honour. It is his wife, however, who comes naturally into these pages, who may be supposed to have come to Piccadilly with joy and to have quitted it with re- gret. She was a Scotswoman, Margaret Mercer, who became Baroness Keith in her own right, and afterwards Baroness Nairne. Eather a superfluity of titles : she had to sign herself M. M. de Flahault, K. N., and Harriet, Lady Granville, who lived much with her in Paris, calls her in her letters indifferently Meg, Mercer, Madame de Fla- hault, and Lady Keith. Called by whatever name, she was, if not a sweet woman, a clever, sincere, and staunch one, and it is perhaps one of the many pities of Byron's life that he did not marry her. Idle to guess, no doubt, and it may not have been in Byron's character to live happily with any wife. Yet I think it is one's experience of life that
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where two poor human things who must live together obviously exasperate one another, the trouble comes not of any glaring fault of character or conduct on this side or that so often as from some subtle opposition of view or temper beyond recognition and analysis. Miss Mercer (as she was then) and Byron might not have agreed together as he, too late, thought they would have, but there was the chance. In any case, there was a tim e when the world gave them to one another, and the lady, it seems, would not have refused. She was one of the few who stood by him when the world took his separation from his wife so indignantly. There is a story that at Lady Jersey's, when the other women drew back their skirts — those virtuous skirts of 1816 ! — to avoid touching him, she said, ' You ought to have married me/ It is certain that when he took ship at Dover he turned to Scrope Davies and gave him a little parcel for Miss Mercer, and said, ' Tell her that if I had been fortunate enough to marry a woman like her, I should not now be obliged to exile myself from my country.' I wonder : certainly she was a woman of kindness and spirit.
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These qualities are well attested by Harriet, Lady Granville, whose long periods as ambassadress in Paris led to an intimacy with her countrywoman. A bond between them must have been a secret dislike — or expressed only to their friends at home — of the French society of the Restoration, and afterwards of the Louis Philippe regime, in which they lived perforce. One is so used to hearing the manners of English people sharply criticised by foreigners — who like to take this odd method of showing the excellence of their own — that it refreshes one to find in Lady Granville's correspon- dence the tables turned. I take it, her authority is unquestionable. She was a most popular and successful ambassadress, and cannot have written out of pique ; and her good-nature, the kindly humour she had for all, or very nearly all, her acquaintance is evident on every page. But she could not abide the airs and rudenesses of French aristocracy in those periods, and gives instances of atrocities which more than justify her. One of these concerns Madame de Flahault. 'I think Lady Keith,1 she writes, ' is more popular than she was, and
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she deserves to be so, for she is very civil and very sensible, and is always delighted to open her house ; but her manner is hard, and the French part of the society evidently go to see Flahault and not her. Some of the pretty women treat her with a neglect that makes my blood boil. The other even- ing I went there to a small soiree of about a dozen people. One of these impertinent women came, shook hands with Flahault, came straight up to me with a profound curtsey and pretty speech, and then sat down with her back turned to Margaret. It was so marked that she had the good sense to burst into a loud laugh, which made the woman turn round and apologise, during which Margaret nodded to me as much as to say, " You see now all I told you is true." I think Madame Boni de Castellane felt ashamed of herself/ Flahault did much to atone for the b&tises of his countrywomen. ' He pays her the greatest attentions, and left many an anxious sufferer after dinner yesterday to go and sit two hours with her/ when she was ill. Still one cannot doubt she was glad to be among her old friends again when she came to 106 Piccadilly,
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though I fear many of them must have been dead by then. Lady Granville describes her in 1842 (she had lost a child) as 'much softened in manner, very much subdued in spirits, very agreeable, and a handsome woman, the asperity of her countenance gone, and the finest teeth in the world.' So we can imagine her fairly well at 106 Piccadilly, a shrewd, sensible woman, as I take it, with a touch of brusquerie probably — a Scotswoman of the rather severe type, contrasted effectively with a very lively and engaging French husband, perpetually young. I wish she had lived forty years earlier at 139 with Byron.
The last of this trinity, 107, I would had all the romantic and glorious associations of Piccadilly in itself. For, reader, it happens now to be a club, to which I have most resorted these dozen years and more. Associations are being made for it, doubt you not, and have been since the club was there : perhaps if my reminiscences are pub- lished in the middle of this century you shall read of them. Meanwhile, all there is to say of the house is that it has a delight- ful association with Lord Rosebery, since it
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was a present to him on his marriage from his father-in-law, Baron Meyer de Roths- child, and that otherwise it is connected wholly with that great family. Shall I try my hand at the romance of money ? Well, I confess I find the humanity of the subject a thought too difficult. Nathan Meyer Rothschild, for example, who was the third son of the founder, and who lived at 107 till his death in 1836, was the sort of man whom a previous generation held up to the reverence and imitation of the young. He was entirely engrossed in making money. He told Spohr that the only music he cared for was the rattle of money. He also said (if I remember rightly) that he could not afford to know an unlucky man. That he had the humour to say ' take two chairs ' to a self-important visitor is to his credit, but I am not disposed at the moment to write an ' appreciation ' of him.
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CHAPTER X
THE GREAT DUKE
MY concern with the Duke of Wellington is not as he moved in battle or the council- chamber, but in drawing-rooms and dining- rooms and the public street ; as he appeared to his friends and others who sought him in Apsley House, or to the world at large as he rode or walked in Piccadilly ; I am concerned to picture him, if I may, in his habit as he lived familiarly. Even so, I might well be fearful that the range of my local theme had brought me to a point where I had best make a silent reverence and pass on. The weight of so forceful a tradition as this lies heavy on one still. This man has stood to England as a very incarnation of eminence and greatness, and in truth he was, in character as in achieve-
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ment, emphatically and beyond question a great man.
* O civic muse, to such a name, To such a name for ages long, To such a name,
Preserve a broad approach of fame, And ever-echoing avenues of song.'
But who am I that I should gossip of him in conversational prose? Well, he comes into the subject I have chosen, and would have been the last man living to be patient with me if I stand niggling before it. I can say that whether or no I interest my readers in my view, at least I am pro- foundly interested myself.
One word of the background. The first- known occupant of the site of Apsley House was, appropriately enough, an old soldier named Allen, to whom (so tradition goes) George the Second gave a piece of ground at Hyde Park Corner, having recognised him as an old acquaintance of Dettingen, of which battle George was not unreasonably proud. Allen's wife kept a stall here, and when Lord Chancellor Apsley, afterwards Lord Bathurst, started building in 1771
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(from designs by the Adams) she brought an action against him, and forced him to compensate her handsomely. It was un- kindly said to be a suit between two old women. That is all the pre-Wellington history of Apsley House. The Duke en- larged it, and cased the old house, which was of red brick, with Bath stone. I will not cavil at his taste : it was characteristic of him to be enchanted with his possessions, and his opinion of this result was extremely high. At anyrate he could hardly have had his dwelling on a more delightful spot, parked on two sides, and in his day with a much more open run than now to Kensington. 1 Number 1, London/ was then an appropriate description of it.
Let us first look hard at the Duke in the mind's eye. Happily in this case the light is good, for we have portraits and minute descriptions, and the memory of living men. The late Duke of Argyll, who went to call on him at Apsley House in 1847, tells us that * what struck one most in his appearance was not his high aquiline nose, which is so prominent in all the pictures, but his splendid eyes. They were blue in colour,
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and very round and very large . . . the eyelids cutting across them very high up, but not leaving them uncovered. They arrested all one's attention in a moment. One thought no more of the beaky nose, or of the small and firm mouth. . . .' I do not remember any other description that insists so exclusively on his eyes, but with a copy of the engraving after Lawrence before me as I write I can well believe in it. Splendid, forthright, well-opened eyes they are, with the fine prominence of their own quality, not at all protruding. 'Blue/ simply says the Duke of Argyll ; ' a dark violet blue or grey/ says Mr. Gleig, his biographer : exact agreement about eyes is rare to find, but a deep blue we may take them to have been. Then, of course, there is the aquiline nose : ' beaky/ even too beaky, on a mean face, but merely giving point and command to his. The eyebrows straight and thick, but not bushy; the forehead almost low, but broad and square; the mouth small, a little tight at the corners ; the jaw strong, the chin prominent and firm. A grave expression habitually, a winning smile on occasion. He was five feet nine inches
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high, very erect, at least until his latter years, when observers differ : probably he bore himself like a soldier still by instinct, and drooped in inattention. He was broad- shouldered and deep-chested, with finely made hands and feet.
Then you must regard his dress. Pro- bably Thackeray — in Pendennis, you re- member, when he stops to speak to the Major walking with Pen — describes him as he was most familiar to Londoners, ein a blue frock-coat and spotless white duck trousers, in a white stock, with a shining buckle behind.' Mr. Gleig adds to this, as his civilian dress in summer, a low- crowned, narrow-brimmed hat, and a white waistcoat. In winter the hat and stock and frock-coat remained the same, but the trousers were blue, and blue or red the waistcoat. Sir William Eraser tells us that the hat had a very clean lining of pale yellow leather : I like to think of Sir William taking it up in the hall and making his note on it. He confuses us a little about the trousers — surely this does not bore you? — with the statement that they were of ' Oxford mix- ture/ except on the first of May, when they
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were white : I believe he is wrong, but for- give him for the knowledge that the Duke always carried two cambric pocket-handker- chiefs. . . . You are watching the Duke in Piccadilly, and you are to add to your observation the curiosity and deep respect with which all his fellow-citizens regarded him in passing. Pen, for example, on the occasion I have quoted, was in ecstasy over the encounter. 'The Duke gave the elder Pendennis a finger of a pipe-clayed glove to shake, which the Major embraced with great veneration ; and all Pen's blood tingled, as he found himself in actual communication, as it were, with this famous man (for Pen had possession of the Major's left arm, whilst that gentleman's other wing was engaged with his Grace's right), and he wished all Grey Friars School, all Oxbridge University, all Paternoster Row and the Temple, and Laura and his mother at Fairoaks, could be standing on each side of the street, to see the meeting between him and his uncle, and the most famous duke in Christendom.' A friend of mine remembers seeing the Duke in 1851, the year of the exhibition, and the year before his death, cantering along Picca-
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dilly on a small white cob, upright in the saddle, with his cane held to his hat in salute, and the people uncovering as to royalty.
Even the late Duke of Argyll felt diffi- dent and nervous when, as a young man, he went to ask a favour of the venerable hero. He takes us with him, by the way, into Apsley House, into 'a large room on the ground floor, to the eastern side of the Picca- dilly front. It was full of articles in much confusion — of writing-tables with blue-books, of articles of clothing hung on screens, and of furniture with no definite arrangement. The Duke presently entered by a side door. . . .'
And what manner of man, truly and intimately, was it behind the white stock and the blue frock-coat? Had we been present invisible at this interview, we should have heard him putting his nervous visitor at ease, giving sound advice on the matter in question, readily promising his aid. Yes ; but the Duke of Argyll was of his own class and society. It is certain that he lived, by choice, almost exclusively in that class. Even his biographer — Mr. Gleig again —
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admits that ' the circle in which he chiefly moved was that of fashionable ladies and gentlemen, who pressed themselves upon him.' It is said that he liked their flattery, which is true to some extent, no doubt, and it is hinted that he was something approach- ing to a snob, which is ridiculous. He was born in that class, he had a strong sense of caste, which in his time was a reality, and he was most at home in it : that is all. But it is curious to note the different reports of him from those in and outside it. When we have allowed for the immense prestige of him from Waterloo onwards, we still must think there was something of superficial coldness and aloofness in his personality to leave so much awe in the minds of those who merely spoke with him, as it were, at a distance. And then turn for contrast to his letters to ' Dearest Georgy ' — the late Lady de Ros, who died a nonagenarian, and was one of his girl-favourites — about the romping at Mont St. Martin, the men harnessed and dragging the ladies about on rugs : ' The night before, the ladies drew me the petty tour, and afterwards Lord Hill the grand tour, but the "fat, fair, and forty" and M.
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were so knocked up that some of us were obliged to go into the harness, although we had already run many stages/ Or follow him through Lady Granville's letters : ' the Duke as merry as a grig/ ' the bonhomie and adorable qualities of the Duke/ the Duke acting in charades, or * the poor Beau/ his significant nickname, 'is much hurried, being considered to go along with favours and cakes when a Tory marries/ and so forth. And then my mind goes back to Hay don's account of him at Walmer, reading the paper after dinner, while the painter sat gazing at his grey head in silent reverence, admiring him as something near divine.
Again : the popular tradition of him, much supported by evidence, is of a stern man, something hard, curt, a foe to emotion. Even some of those who knew him more or less familiarly report him blunt, matter-of- fact, and if not unfeeling, certainly this side sensibility. There is Thomas Creevey's interview with him in Brussels, immediately after Waterloo. * He made a variety of observations in his short, natural, blunt way, but with the greatest gravity all the time, and without the least approach to
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anything like triumph or joy. " It has been a damned serious business," he said. " Blucher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. . . . By God 1 I don't think it would have done if I had not been there."' That is not exactly unfeeling, and it is thoroughly of his nation and class in its sporting metaphor and its plain statement. One admires the absence of personal triumphing on the one side, of false modesty on the other. But one misses the imaginative feeling for the horror of all that slaughter. Well, it merely was not for Mr. Creevey. We know from Raikes that when, at this same time, the Duke went to the rooms of his niece, Lady FitzRoy Somerset, he burst into a flood of tears. When Mrs. Arbuthnot, his most intimate friend among women, died, he was called unfeeling because, as Charles Greville says, ' he had the good taste and sense to smooth his brow and go to the House of Lords with a cheerful aspect/ But we know how he could feel the death of a friend : he who sat with the tears streaming down his cheeks at the funeral service for Arbuthnot.
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We know, too, from Gleig how, when that friend's fatal illness was told to him, he seized the doctor's hand and protested brokenly, ' No, no ; he 's not very ill, not very bad — he 11 get better, he '11 not die.'
One remembers these and many stories like them, and one looks at the portrait and one sees surely that those eyes and that mouth are not of an unfeeling man. Very greatly otherwise. It is no wild guess that this was a man who felt both strongly and readily ; and, living in high places with curious eyes ever on him, had the habit of cloaking his feelings as best he might. Many appeals to feeling were not for him, of course. He was blind to art and books. Also — that, too, is in the eyes — he was proud and by nature contemptuous of what to him was little. Those were intellectual limitations to feeling : when the passage was clear there was no hard substance of nature to check it.
And if one thinks of his pride of class, of his contempt for the mob, one should re- member some facts about him and it. All his life he had done his duty to his country single - heartedly, with immense personal
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success, to be sure, but also with much hardship and strain of energies, and in the teeth of calumny. In 1831 he was honestly opposed to reform. The King was to dissolve Parliament, but the Duke could not go to the House of Lords because his wife was dying in Apsley House. She died as the guns in the Park began to fire. And presently came a yelling crowd before Apsley House, and hi a while stones crash- ing through the windows, breaking them in pieces and destroying pictures within. What wonder that he kept the iron shutters to his windows to the day of his death ? Twelve years later an immense mob, cheering this time, followed him up Constitution Hill. The Duke took no notice whatever, but trotted leisurely to Apsley House : then he stopped at the gate, pointed to those iron shutters, bowed to the mob, and silently rode into the court. He was not a demo- cratic politician.
Remember also that if he despised the common man, he was punctiliously courteous to him. No great man ever took so much trouble about small men as he. Those in- numerable autograph letters beginning *F.M.
MR TOMKINS 169
the Duke of Wellington presents his compli- ments to ' Mr. Buggins, or Master Brown, or whatnot! His peculiar humour, half play- ful, half grim, no doubt made him sometimes rejoice in his answers. ' Field-marshal the Duke of Wellington has received a letter from Mr. Tomkins, stating that the Marqueas of Douro is in debt to his .mother, Mrs. Tomkins. The Duke of Wellington is not the Marquess of Douro. The Duke regrets to find that his eldest son has not paid his washerwoman's bill. Mrs. Tomkins has no claim upon the Duke of Wellington. The Duke recommends her, failing another appli- cation, to place the matter in the hands of a respectable solicitor/ In this case he was hoaxed : Mr. Tomkins, the distressed washerwoman's son, was a collector of auto- graphs. And of course he was often hoaxed over his charities, which were large and incessant : he admitted once that an officer of the Mendicity Society had given him the severest scolding he had ever had in his life. If he despised common people, he never pandered to great personages. It was to the credit of George the Fourth that he always had a great respect for the Duke, whom he
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called ' Arthur ' ; it is not much to the dis- credit of the Duke that he had little or no respect for George the Fourth, of whom he once told Creevey — condemning the Regent's bulk and blasphemy in pretty forcible lan- guage of his own — that he was ashamed to enter a room with him. And he told Lady de Ros that when George and Charles the Tenth were together, George, with ' his flourish and display, might have passed for his valet.' I must not repeat stories at large, but, if the reader has not heard it, this one — it is irrelevant, I know — helps to fix the Duke's manner and humour : ' Were you surprised at Waterloo, Duke ? ' asked some fool at a dinner. 'No,'