BEAU FIELDING.
“He pass’d his easy hours, instead of prayer,
In madrigals and Philising the fair.”—Garth’s Dispensary.
Goldsmith once shed tears from his simple, unsophisticated eyes, as he passed through a village at night, and thought that the sleeping inhabitants were unconscious how great a man was journeying that way. I fancy that most people who pass the Reigate station are in a similarly ignorant state of unconsciousness, and are not at all aware that they are close upon the cradle of Orlando the Fair.
I have heard the pleasant author of that pleasant story, ‘Crewe Rise,’ remark that the worthies of Suffolk count in greater numbers than the worthies of any other county. If worthiness be “greatness,” in the sense of Jonathan Wild, Suffolk may envy Surrey such a son as Robert Fielding.
The father of this incomparable youth was a cavalier squire, with something like £500 per annum to nourish his dignity. “Bob” was early entered at the Temple, where he behaved like a Templar; was too idle to study the constitution of England, but very actively worked at the ruin of his own. He thought Fleet-street vulgar, and removed to Scotland-yard, next door to the court, which then rioted at Whitehall.
The “beauty” of his neighbour attracted the notice of that other scamp, Charles II.; and as Fielding was too handsome for anything, the King only made him a Justice of the Peace.
The women however left him none; and their importunities induced him to abandon justice, and devote himself to wine, love-making, and living upon pensions from female purses. In a succeeding reign he gave up the Church, as he had before surrendered justice; and when James II. was King, Fielding assumed Romanism as a good speculation, and was especially zealous not only in protecting Popish chapels from the populace, but in giving asylum to the prettiest devotees of that faith who flew to his bosom for refuge.
He stuck to his profession under William III.; that is, he made none at all; and as he was accounted of no religion, his friends had no difficulty in getting him nominated Major-General. I think this must have been in the Horse Marines. The gallant officer was, at all events, never in fray more serious than with sleepy watchmen and slip-shod waiters, whom he ran through (he was an excellent runner, when peril pursued) with the most astonishing alacrity.
He was the handsomest man and the most extravagantly splendid dresser of his day. When he passed down the Mall at the fashionable hour, there was a universal flutter and sensation. “O’Carroll,” he would then say to his servant, “does my sword touch my right heel? Do the ladies ogle me?”
“It does, Sir. They do, Sir.”
“Then, O’Carroll,” would the beau exclaim aloud, “let them die of love, and be d—d!”
“What a perfect gentleman! what a delicious creature!” chorused the ladies.
“Ay, ay,” said the beau, “look and die! look and die!”
He was not kicked off the public promenade, but he was occasionally so ejected from the public stage. It was the habit or the fashion then for a portion of the audience to stand upon the stage, and the actors played, like mountebanks, in a crowd. It was further the habit of this superlative beau to make remarks aloud upon the ladies in the boxes. The latter,—not the boxes, but the ladies,—were not slow in flinging back retorts; and the players, enraged at being unheeded, would then fairly turn upon Fielding and turn him out, with the ceremony, or want of it, observed in ejecting ill-bred curs.
But the beau was amply compensated for such treatment as this by the favour dealt to him by “officers and gentlemen.” He was once being pursued by bailiffs sent after him by tailors whom he had ruined. As hare and hounds approached St. James’s Palace, the officers on guard turned out, attacked the myrmidons of the law, pinked them all over till they looked like ribbed peppermint, and finally bore Fielding in triumph into the Palace!
The equipage of “Orlando” was not less singular than he was himself. He kept a hired chariot, drawn by his own horses, and attended by two footmen in bright yellow coats and black sarsnet sashes. Maidens sighed as he rode by, and murmured “Adonis!” Admiring widows looked at him and exclaimed, “Handsome as Hercules!” He really did unite the most exquisite beauty both of feature and stature, with the most gigantic strength. Boys followed him in crowds, and hailed him father. He showered among them as many curses as blessings. “Did you never see a man before?” he once asked the foremost urchin of a youthful mob. “Never such a one as you, noble general,” answered the lad, an embryo beau from Westminster School. “Sirrah, I believe thee; there is a crown for thy wit.”
Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff states that the beau called himself an antediluvian, in respect of the insects which appeared in the world as men; and the ‘Tatler’ further says, that “he sometimes rode in an open tumbril of less size than ordinary, to show the largeness of his limbs and the grandeur of his personage to the greater advantage. At other seasons all his appointments had a magnificence, as if it were formed by the genius of Trimalchio of old, which showed itself in doing ordinary things with an air of pomp and grandeur. Orlando therefore called for tea by beat of drum; his valet got ready to shave him by a trumpet to horse; and water was brought for his teeth when the sound was changed to boot and saddle.”
Amid all this, the prince of beaux was speculatively looking abroad. At Doctors’ Commons he had seen the will of a Mr. Deleau, who left to his widow a town residence in Copthall-court, a country mansion at Waddon, in Surrey, and sixty thousand pounds, at the lady’s absolute disposal. Fielding resolved to woo, and of course to win her.
His first application was made through an agent, to a Mrs. Villars, who used to act as hair-dresser to the much-sought-after widow. Her services were asked for, under promise of great reward, to bring matters about so that Mrs. Deleau should see Fielding, if it were only, as it were, by accident. The beau thought that if the widow saw, he would conquer. Were a marriage to follow, Fielding promised hundreds out of his wife’s money.
The worthy agents failed to do their hirer’s bidding. He even called at Waddon, under the name of Major-General Villars, and was allowed to see the gardens. He mistook a lady at a window of the house for the lady of whom he was in search, and as she smiled when he put his hand to the left side of his laced waistcoat, and made a bow till his vertebra was horizontal, he concluded that his fortune was made; and the next day he sent letters in his own name, which the servants, knowing the writer, and having their orders, dropped into the fire,—after reading them in the servants’ hall.
The next move was an application to see the grounds at Waddon, professedly from the famous or infamous Duchess of Cleveland, Fielding’s chief patroness,—so low had fallen the mother of dukes and the concubine of a king. Permission was granted, but nothing came of the concession.
In the meantime Mrs. Villars, by no means disposed to lose the promised recompense, persuaded Fielding that the widow had yielded, and would pay him a visit. He was in a state of delight at the intelligence. The lady, however, who was to pass as Mrs. Deleau, was a “Mistress Mary Wadsworth,” who was ready for any joke, and thought the one proposed the best she had ever shared in,—and she had been an actress in many. These two sensitive creatures accordingly repaired to Fielding’s lodgings one soft autumnal eve. The beau was in a flutter of ecstasy, was continually on his knees, and devoted himself to the lowest position in hades if he ever had loved any woman before. The assumed Mrs. Deleau was coy, as became a widow with sixty thousand pounds and no encumbrances. The lover pressed her to be married that night, if she would not have him perish; but she playfully touched his cheek with her fan, and bade him wait and hope,—sad, naughty fellow that he was!
After two more such visits, the soft and tender creature was seduced to sacrifice her scruples, and consented to a private marriage at her lover’s chambers. The party supped joyously together, and then the bridegroom sallied forth in search of a priest. He found one at the Emperor of Germany’s ambassador’s; and his reverence having been introduced to the lady, satisfied her of the reality of his vocation, and in a twinkling buckled beau and belle together in a way, he said, that defied undoing. All the after-ceremonies religiously observed in those refined days ensued; indeed the marriage would not have been half a marriage without them, and so all parties but the dupers were satisfied,—and in fact even they did not complain.
The bride left for home next morning unattended; for family reasons, she averred, it was necessary to keep the union unrevealed, and accordingly she only repaired now and then to see “the Count,” as her husband styled himself, and to eat toasted cheese and drink port and vat-ale with a man who had married her, as he exclaimed at the sacred ceremony, “with all his heart, soul, blood, and everything else!”
There is no comedy of the last century, however absurd the plot, and coarse and ridiculous the incidents, that is more absurd, coarse, and ridiculous than this comedy in which Fielding was the hero and Mistress Wadsworth and the Duchess of Cleveland the heroines. The beau was convinced he had married a widow with a jointure of a golden character. The letters he addressed to the residence of Mrs. Deleau must have caused infinite astonishment to that calm relict of the citizen of Copthall-court; but she held the writer as mad, and thought little more of the matter. In the meantime Fielding, who had patronized half-a-dozen tailors on the strength of his expectations, mysteriously alluded to, acted the strangest of parts. He married her Grace the noble Barbara within three weeks of his union with Mary Wadsworth. He provided himself with two stools for the support of his dignity; and in the very fashion of the proverb, he got very terribly bruised indeed.
The wretched duper turned out to be the dupe. He had expended his cake and wine, his petit soupers, wax-lights, and sconces all to no purpose; he had run in debt for a ring with a posy of his own choosing, “Tibi Soli;” and he had paid an Italian singer Margaretta to come and sing to his beloved, “Ianthe the lovely,” translated by himself from the Greek. He had looked for threescore thousand pounds, and had been deluded into the idea that he was about to be the sire of a little “Lord Tunbridge,” and at the end of all, the bride proves a common jilt; goes boldly to Fielding’s lodgings in Whitehall, claims him, as he walks into the street, by the title of “lawful wife,” and gets an unsavoury name by way of reply, and a thorough thrashing into the bargain.
The affair soon came into the courts. Fielding, a few weeks after his union with Mistress Mary Wadsworth, had espoused les beaux restes of Barbara Duchess of Cleveland. Till he began to beat the Duchess as well as the Dulcinea, he appears to have transferred his “green nightcap and slippers” by the hands of a servant from the bower of one beauty to the boudoir of another. The Duchess, at length, offered the first wife £200 down and £100 annually for fifteen years, if she succeeded in establishing the first marriage. Accordingly, the Beau was indicted for bigamy at the Old Bailey. He endeavoured to prove that his supposed widow had been married to one Brady, who was living at the time of her marriage with Fielding, and something like a forged certificate in the Fleet Register was produced to support it. But with Montague for opposing counsel (Fielding was his own) and Powell for a judge, the Beau could make nothing of a very bad case; and, being found guilty, he was sentenced to be burnt in the hand,—a sentence which he escaped by producing Queen Anne’s warrant to stay execution. He was accordingly set free; and the Duchess of Cleveland, being now also freed from him and his very heavy hand, the ex-beauty, but now be-rouged old flirt, lived unmolested by anything more unpleasant than a very gentle remorse for her péchés mignons.
The Beau soon fell into dire distress; and a sketch of the complexion of this phasis of life will be found in Bulwer’s ‘Devereux.’ He is there described as “terribly fallen, as to fortune, since the day when he drove about in a car like a sea-shell, with a dozen tall fellows in the Austrian livery, black and yellow, running before and behind him. You know he claims relationship to the House of Hapsburg. As for the present, he writes poems, makes love, is still good-natured, humorous, and odd; is rather unhappily addicted to wine and borrowing, and rigidly keeps the oath of the Carthusians, which never suffers them to carry any money about them.”
The Austrian livery however had disappeared after the break with the Duchess. The Beau’s den is probably more correct in its details. “The chamber looked like a place in the other world, set apart for the ghosts of departed furniture. The hangings were wan and colourless; the chairs and sofas were most spiritually unsubstantial; the mirrors reflected all things in a sepulchral sea-green; even a huge picture of Mr. Fielding himself, placed over the chimney-piece, seemed like the apparition of a portrait, so dim, watery, and indistinct had it been rendered by neglect and damp. On a huge, tomb-like table in the middle of the room lay two pencilled profiles of Mr. Fielding, a pair of ruffles, a very little muff, an immense broadsword, a Wycherly comb, a jack-boot, and an old plumed hat; to these were added, a cracked pomatum pot, containing ink, and a scrap of paper, ornamented with sundry paintings of hearts and torches. Upon the ground lay a box of patches, a periwig, and two or three well-thumbed books of songs.” The Beau himself, half bully, half fribble, a poet, a fop, a fighter, a beauty, is described as wearing an old morning dressing-gown of once gorgeous material; a little velvet cap with tarnished gold tassel, military boots, and with a coarse and florid complexion as the remains of a beauty, the expression of which “had settled into a broad, hardy, farcical mixture of effrontery, humour, and conceit.”
But all his effrontery could not keep him afloat, and he finally disappeared altogether from the “world;” and so little was known of his end that men disputed of his burial-place, as of another Atala, and it was quite undetermined whether he died in Hampshire or in Holland. The estimation, however, in which he was held is amply demonstrated in the annexed epitaph by a friend:—
“If Fielding is dead,
And rests under this stone,
Then he is not alive,
You may bet two to one.
But if he’s alive,
And does not lie here,
Let him live till he’s hang’d,
For which no man will care.”
In the 113th number of the ‘Tatler,’ under the motto of “Ecce iterum Crispinus,” the catalogue is given of the effects of a defunct beau: and probably with some allusion to Fielding. Among the articles cited are “A very rich tweezer case, containing twelve instruments for the use of each hour in the day.” To this succeed gilt snuff-boxes, with looking-glasses in the lid, or portraits of equivocal ladies; “a sword with a steel-diamond hilt, never drawn but once at May Fair;” eyebrow brushes, a “pocket perspective,” a dozen pair of red-heeled shoes, three pair of red silk stockings, and an amber-headed cane. The beau’s “strong box” contains “five billets-doux, a Bath shilling, a crooked sixpence, a silk garter, a lock of hair, and three broken fans.” His book-case is instructive: on the upper shelf there are three bottles of diet-drink, two boxes of pills, a syringe, and other mathematical instruments; on the second, there is a miscellaneous collection of lampoons, plays, tailors’ bills, and an almanack for the year 1700; the third shelf holds a bundle of unopened letters, indorsed “from the old gentleman,” with Toland’s ‘Christianity not Mysterious,’ and a paper of “patterns of several fashionable stuffs,”—Toland’s ‘Christianity’ being stuff that was very fashionable at that time. The lowest shelf of all reveals an odd shoe, a pair of snuffers, a French grammar, a mourning hatband, and half a bottle of usquebagh. These “effects” paint the beau of a by-gone time; and Fielding was the grand master of the petits-maîtres, who were the proprietors of this very varied property.
There was however as great, as impudent, and as renowned a beau as he. He comes this way in a white hat, and his name is Nash.