CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.
| PAGE | |
| Life in the Nineteenth Century | [1] |
| The Postman’s Knock | [26] |
| The Twenty-thousand-pound Widow | [53] |
| To Brighton and back again | [78] |
| On some Clubs, and their ends | [105] |
| Through the Parks | [134] |
| Some Scotswomen | [160] |
| The Dibdins | [190] |
| Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton | [222] |
| Edward Wortley Montagu | [285] |
| Royal and Imperial Jokers | [327] |
LIFE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
But for Pepys and Evelyn we should know but little of the social life of the seventeenth century. A host of letter writers—Walpole, Mrs. Delany, and Mrs. Montagu, at the head of them—may be said to have photographed the next century for us. Lord Malmesbury, Lord Auckland, and some others succeeded; and now we are beginning to have revelations exclusively of the first years of the nineteenth century. The most important contributor to our knowledge in this respect is the late Sir George Jackson, whose volumes, ably edited by his widow, will afford us samples of the times in which our grandmothers were young and had swains at their feet—unless war called them away.
Gay people on the Continent had a bad time of it when war broke out in 1803, and the French government issued orders for the arrest of all English persons on whom hands could be laid. Bath expected to be more brilliant than ever by the return of the absentees; but their difficulty was how to return. All who were in France were made prisoners. A precipitate flight of crowds of English travellers from Geneva took place. They were not safe on any part of the Continent; but some, in disguise and on foot, reached Berlin, others got to the sea and arrived in England; but Bath was not sensible of any increase in numbers or gaiety, for the times were out of joint, though dowagers still played whist and young couples danced minuets.
Many of those who were shut up at Verdun chafed under the restraint as intolerable. Some, however, bore it philosophically, others gaily. A few took to French mistresses; other few to French wives. The French officials made ‘a good thing’ out of those who had money, granting them partial liberty for so many days or hours, according to the ‘consideration.’ Two or three, having spent hundreds of pounds in their bribes, at last took ‘French leave,’ and were lucky in not being recaptured. Their course is not to be commended. We have a higher opinion of Sir Sidney Smith, who, when a prisoner in the Temple, refused to have his parole, used to tell the governor to be vigilant, as he would be off on the first opportunity, and ultimately kept his word, broke prison, and found his painful way to England.
The seriousness of the times and their events little affected the Prince of Wales. He was indeed thought to be ill in the early part of 1804; but the illness arose, it was said, from the fact that the Prince and the Duke of Norfolk had been so drunk, for three whole days, that the former at last fell like a pig, and would have died like one, but for prompt and copious bleeding. How rude the ‘first gentleman’ could be, when he chose, to his wife, is well-known. At a drawing-room, held by Queen Charlotte in June 1807, when the Prince and Princess of Wales were present, he took no notice of the Princess. Turning his back upon her, he stood between her and the Queen, and as long as the Princess remained he kept up a conversation with his sisters, thereby preventing them from addressing a word to his wife. This feeling against his wife he paraded everywhere. He was jealous of her popularity—quite unnecessarily, for she made herself ridiculous, and the subject of scornful criticism, by her lavish display at evening parties of her protuberant beauties. At these parties, the Prince would stare at ladies whom he knew, without speaking to them. His condescending speech was addressed only to his first wife, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and her sister, Lady Haggerstone. The first of these ladies lived at Brighton with the state of a queen and the spirit of a goddess of mirth. Meanwhile, his Royal Highness flirted with his ‘future Duchess,’ the Marchioness of Hertford. One of Queen Fitzherbert’s merriest tales related how a man had sent to her some lemonade powders he had invented, on the ground that they were highly approved and constantly used by the Marchioness in question.
In 1802 Bath was surprised by a visit from the Duke of York. He brought the Duchess with him, and left her there next day. Her friends reported that she had been bitten in the hand by one of her numerous pet dogs, and that the wound was privately pumped upon daily. But the public story was, that his Royal Highness had lost 200,000l. at play, and had been compelled to break up his town establishment. The scandalous story of the Duke and Mrs. Clarke, a mistress, who sold places and commissions, is pleasantly balanced by an incident respecting a son of the Duke of Clarence and his mistress, Mrs. Jordan—Lieutenant Fitzclarence, in 1809. He was in Spain with our army in that year, and he reversed La Fontaine’s fable of the mule who was always talking of his mother the mare, but said little of his father the ass. The lieutenant was the foolish aide-de-camp of a foolish General Shaw, who was always showing him about to the Spaniards as the King of England’s grandson.
That grandson was about to be despatched on a mission to the Continent in 1813, but ministers changed their minds. They were afraid he would write every thing to his father, who would publish it in Bond Street; and so the gentleman was kept at home to sun himself in the bow window at White’s.
The grandest fête of sixty years since was the one given by the Prince, at Carlton House, in 1811. The King was in such ill health and the Princess Amelia in such a precarious condition that it was often deferred; and Jekyll remarked that no one could ever again say, ‘Fixed as fate!’ At length it came off, and, for one happy invited guest, made a hundred mad who were not invited. The Queen and Princesses declined to be present; but Louis XVIII. and the sad-looking Duchess of Angoulême appeared there, and the Prince received the former as a sovereign de facto. ‘I am only a Comte de Lille,’ said Louis modestly. ‘Sire,’ said the Prince, ‘you are the King of France and Navarre;’ and he treated his guest accordingly. Both the Prince’s wives (Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Princess of Wales) sat at home by themselves; but the ‘favourite’ was honoured by a command to attend the festival. One of the Prince’s ideas was to divorce his second wife and shut her up in Holyrood House for ever. This grand fête, it may be added, was soon forgotten in the excitement caused by the fight that was to come off between the Baltimore negro, Molyneux, and the chief of English boxers, Tom Cribb! It was a time, moreover, when later hours began to be fashionable. We hear of a ball lasting from twelve till eight; and of another at which the majority of dancers kept it up till ten in the morning.
We go back a couple of years, in order to remark that in 1809, while there was no lack of enjoyment among optimists, the press saw the worst side of everything; and the ‘Times’ especially denied or explained away our victories generally, and that of Talavera in particular. The public seem to have been almost as ill-informed as to what was being done abroad as they are now by ‘our own correspondents,’ who are sent to describe battle-fields or other troublesome matters, and who write columns on the boiling of their eggs and the obstinacy of their laundresses. ‘It is too much,’ says Jackson, ‘to hear the victory of Talavera called in question by the “Times;” a victory as honourable to British arms and British generalship as any they ever achieved. That paper should be offered up as a sacrifice to the manes of the heroes who fell on the Alberche. I have not patience to read it.’
In 1814 the Prince Regent had a narrow escape for his life. On one of his evenings of ennui he sent for George Colman to come from the King’s Bench, where he was a prisoner, to amuse him. Court jester and prince, they passed the night, drinking and fooling, till six o’clock, when his Highness was carried to bed in an apoplexy, from which he only recovered at the cost of seven and twenty ounces of blood! He was as near death at this critical juncture as a man could be and yet live. His constitution, however, carried him through. When the allied sovereigns entered London he was ready for all the duties and eager for all the pleasures that the occasion offered; but he shocked some people on one occasion by presiding at a public dinner on a Sunday.
That English society wanted refinement in the first decade of the present century is not to be disputed. When Mr. Jackson returned from long diplomatic service abroad in 1806, he dined one day at Lord Westmoreland’s. The guests were chiefly Russians. They were as much out of their element in English society as the young diplomatist says he was after the sociability, ease, and elegance of the society at foreign courts to which he had so long been accustomed.
Some of that foreign society was quite as free as it was easy. Jackson and other Englishmen at the Prussian court were admitted to the morning toilette of Madame de Vos, the King of Prussia’s grande maîtresse. While under the hands of her hairdresser she laughed and flirted with the English lords and gentlemen, who paid tribute to her beauty by making her presents of wine and tea, and other English matters, which she greedily accepted. There are three things, says the Welsh proverb, which always swallow and are never satisfied—the grave, the sea, and a king’s concubine.
Austerlitz killed Pitt as surely as Trafalgar killed Nelson. Each died for his country, but that country mourned more deeply for the great admiral, stricken down in the battle where he was the victor, than it did for the great minister who died of a broken heart. The last book he read, at Bath, was Miss Owenson’s (Lady Morgan’s) ‘Novice of St. Dominic.’ That now unreadable romance, Pitt said, he could not lay down till he had finished it, and thence did the ‘Novice’ come to be the rage for a time. People almost fought to obtain it at the libraries, and nothing in literature was talked of but a book which has long since fallen out of literature and of memory altogether. People, too, fought for another novel, ‘A Winter in London,’ in which fashionable life was illustrated by an incapable whose name and whose work are equally wrapt in oblivion.
Fox did not long survive his great rival Pitt. He died on the 13th of September, 1806. A week previously, when he was already dying, he transacted public business. He gave an audience in his bedroom to George Jackson, with instructions as to how the latter was to act on his new mission to Germany. There was a mixture of the solemn and the ludicrous in the scene. When Jackson was announced Mrs. Fox, in complete deshabille, was in the room. In her flurry she slipped into a closet, and, as the interview was prolonged, the lightly-draped lady kept signalling to Mr. Fox, as if he alone could hear her, by little coughs and murmurs, to warn him not to over-exert himself, or to dismiss the envoy, that she might be set free. At a moment when there was a pause in the conversation between the minister and his agent the fair captive tapped at the panel, asked if the young gentleman was not gone, and complained of being cold. The dying statesman looked at Jackson with a languid smile, and with friendly wishes bade him farewell—as it proved, for ever.
Descending to minor legislators, we meet with an Irish M.P., who, being told that the favour he asked would be granted on condition of his supporting government, replied that he would not give his constant support for so paltry a favour. The Irish member obtained the favour, and voted twice for government in payment for it. This was better diplomacy than Sir Charles Stuart’s (Marquis of Londonderry), who, when named to a post in Germany, told people that he was going to Spain, by way of being diplomatic. We were unlucky in our leading diplomatists generally at that time. Lord Aberdeen may serve as an example. He went to Toplitz, as English ambassador, and had the bad taste and idiotic indiscretion to say one day, openly at dinner, that he could not bear the undertaking, and would not go on with it to keep the crowns on the allied heads! One qualification was necessary to even a decently moderate success, namely, the ability to speak French; but Lord Aberdeen not only could not speak two words of French, but had the folly to tell everybody who addressed him in that language that he hated it. There was in some persons as much bad taste in acts as there was in others in words; and it is not without surprise that we hear of gentlemen sightseers who would pass the morning amid the horrors of a field of recent battle, and the evening at the play, philandering with ladies and talking an infinite deal of nothing. On another occasion, we hear of the gayest and most gigantic of picnics, where luxury abounded, while, within a few miles, French soldiers were dropping dead with hunger as they slowly retreated.
Mrs. Fitzherbert was in the early part of the century the Queen of Brighton, if not of England, and she was popularly called ‘Mrs. Prince.’ She certainly was one of the most queen-like women that ever lived; and stood in favourable contrast with Lady Holland, who is justly described as fussy, almost rude, straining at effect, and losing it in the very effort. There was another lady then in England striving to be effective, Madame de Staël; and she (who horrified Henry Brougham) was pronounced by female critics as ‘too anxious to glitter to be intrinsically good.’ A still more remarkable woman of that day was Lady Caroline Lamb. She was at a party at Lady Heathcote’s, had been flirting and quarrelling with Lord Byron, and therefore ‘stabbed herself with a knife at supper, so that the blood flew about her neighbours.’ When she came to, after a faint, a glass of water was handed to her, but she smashed the glass and cut herself with the pieces. ‘A little discipline,’ said Francis Jackson, ‘will bring these school-girl fancies into order.’ A good deal of disorder was to be found at breakfast as well as at supper-tables. Lady Caroline Hood was, probably, counselled not to go to the Regent’s ‘breakfast’; but ladies will, under certain circumstances, disregard friends and doctors also. Lady Caroline went, and had only herself to blame when she had to be carried away wrapped up in blankets.
Mrs. Fitzherbert’s conduct at Brighton was not always in the best taste. Mrs. Gunn, the bathing-woman, invariably addressed her as ‘Mrs. Prince’; but the latter did not live at the level of that dignity. She held afternoon gossips in her little drawing room, hung with black profiles (her salon aux silhouettes). Only guests of distinction were admitted here to exchange the stories of the day for piquant anecdotes and a cup of tea. There, too, M. le Prince was a subject of discussion. His sayings and doings were pretty freely handled. It was all done with gusto and elicited much mirth; but some visitors, who were glad to be there, professed to think it all very naughty and in the worst taste.
The fair one who had the reputation of being fairest where all were fair—the reigning queen of beauty in fact—was Miss Rumbold, daughter of Sir George. She was a ‘dashing’ beauty; but if to be beautiful was not common, to be dashing was to be fashionable. Accordingly, we find Miss Rumbold attended so little to the hints and admonitions of the Bishop of Durham, that the love of showing off an amazingly fine ankle prevented more than one offer from among the crowd of her adorers. The same pretty vanity was strong in the Princess Charlotte, at a later period, but Prince Leopold was not kept thereby from being a suitor. It may be concluded that gentlemen were, after all, not so particular as the adorers of Miss Rumbold, if Texier truly said of his daughter (whose beauty he was always praising in her presence) that there were five hundred lords, any one of whom would have been the happiest of men to have her for his own.
The utmost regularity was not incompatible with much eccentricity in many of the foremost individuals of the time. One of them, the Duke of Bedford, arranged his movements for a whole year in advance; and if one went wrong, his Grace was put out for six or eight months together. The silent Duke was under the thumb of his rattling Duchess, who used to laugh at his announcement, on starting for a long journey, of the precise moment of his return, and what dishes were to be ready for him on his arrival. He would be there, D.V., of course; but in any case, there he would be. The Duchess was as irregular as the Duke was the opposite. His obedience to her was that of Jerry Sneak. She would cry out in a room full of people, Johnny, do this; Johnny, do that; Johnny, I did not see you bow to such a person! Speak to him directly, and speak German, Johnny—and Duke Johnny answered not, but like a good boy, unhesitatingly obeyed.
Lady Holland, fanciful, sharp, and impertinent, did not attract Jackson’s brother Francis. Clever, he allowed that wayward lady to be, but not a wit of the quality she would fain have been thought. ‘There is too much effort—a straining after effect in all she says and does; and the effect is not always what she wishes or imagines it to be.’
In behalf of some of the fine ladies of the time, government officials cheated their own revenue department without scruple. Jackson was, one day in 1810, amused to find the ‘subs’ at the Foreign Office very anxious, at Lord Wellesley’s suggestion, to devise means of getting a box of shoes which had been sent from Spain, for Lady Holland, but which had been seized by the Custom House officers. Lady Holland was capricious, and as often insolent as civil; but she was not mean, like Lady Hyde Parker, who gave a ball to a crowd of guests and sent them home without supper. By the way, when there was a ball at Buckingham House, in the opening years of the century, no guests under the rank of earls’ sons and daughters were invited; but this exclusiveness had to be laid aside.
Nearly sixty years ago there was a queen of hearts in London who broke as many as she could, voluntarily or involuntarily. She was a Miss Acklom, daughter of a Nottinghamshire squire. Down at Exmouth, amid the loveliness and the idleness of the place, the nymph and a gallant officer named Tilson fell in love, or seemed to do so, with each other. The warrior, at all events, was deeply smitten, and marriage was to plunge him still deeper in love; but, almost at the church door, the cruel nymph declined to go further. The lover went straightway abroad. After a while, Miss Acklom was subdued by another wooer, Mr. Maddox; the beauty consented to become his wife. As the time of the nuptials drew near the lady’s grandfather died. She went into mourning, and came out of it with an announcement of a quality to put her lover into it; namely, that she had changed her mind. Like Tilson, Maddox sought solace in going to the stirring scenes abroad. Jackson wrote from his quarters at Dijon, in 1814, that the swain so ill-treated by Venus was ‘trying his luck with Mars, as an amateur.... From being a very handsome and lively-tempered young man, he has become quite the reverse.’ While two lovers were despairing a third presented himself. He was no other than that Lord Althorpe, who became so distinguished in the House of Commons as a statesman and a minister. My lord was accepted. Just as the marriage was about to take place this third lover’s grandmother died; whereupon the nymph put on mourning and went down to Bath to live in retirement. Old Mrs. Jackson prophesied that Miss Acklom would, on coming out of mourning, jilt the heir to an earldom as she had done ‘poor Maddox.’ George replied that Tilson had recently returned to England, a general, and ‘this perhaps may win her smiles again.’ Lord Althorpe proved to be a successful swain. Esther Acklom married him, about a month after Mrs. Jackson had presaged that she would play this lover false. The wedding was celebrated in April 1815, and in little more than three years the once volatile nymph was carried to her grave, leaving a childless widower to mourn a good wife’s loss.
The great scandal in high life within the first ten years of this century was the elopement of Lord Paget, afterwards the celebrated Marquis of Anglesea, with Lady Charlotte, wife of Henry Wellesley, nephew of the subsequently famous Arthur, and better known to us as the first Lord Cowley. All the world of fashion had seen what was going on except the lady’s husband. The guilty parties pleaded uncontrollable passion. The seducer abandoned his wife and eight children, the lady left a husband and four children; but she asked Mr. Arbuthnot to break the matter gently to their father. Lord Paget, who had told his father that he had sought death in battle in order to avoid the social catastrophe, was challenged by Colonel Cadogan, Lady Charlotte’s brother. The Colonel declared that one of them must die; but Lord Paget declined the chance on the ground that his life was devoted to the Colonel’s sister. To this lady he was married in 1810, in which year his union with his first wife was dissolved, and that lady became Duchess of Argyll.
Provincial fine society was somewhat rough but hearty; ‘all very friendly and hospitable; but as regards stuffing it would be difficult, I confess, to excel them.’ The allusion is to a Northumbrian high sheriff’s dinner party. At Brighton, described in 1809 as a dangerous rival to Bath, we are at a ball given by a Mr. and Mrs. Parker, ‘good people who have more money than sense or acquaintances, but who made up for the latter deficiency by giving balls to all whom they did not know and the few whom they did.’ Illustrious strangers went to dance, eat suppers, and drink champagne, and perhaps laugh at Mrs. Parker, who told everybody on coming in, and by way of compliment, that she had been disappointed of the flower of her party—some three or four personages who could not come. The lady was, after all, not such a fool as she looked. There was good satirical humour (when she went up to Lady Boyne, who was then in deep mourning for her daughter) in her request to the exemplary mother to open the ball! And apropos to Brighton, now so rich in vehicles, we smile at the record of the extortion of Brighton chairmen in 1809, and how they were brought to their senses by an ex-coachman to a gentleman. Jehu bought the old blue coach of the Blackburns, with the cock and trumpet upon it, which had been the glory of Bath; putting a pair of horses to it, the owner conveyed people all over the town at a shilling per person for the trip, before midnight, and one-and-sixpence after. While the chairmen stood upon their rights, earning nothing, this clever coachman whipped up a very pretty little fortune.
One of the most pushing and successful men in Bath in 1809 was Sigmond, who, after being a footman in Germany, set up as a dentist in the City of Hot Waters. His wife had been his mistress. The two together made more dash and lived at more expense than almost anybody in that city. They once invited the Duke of Gloucester to a grand supper, and he so far accepted the invitation as to send one of his gentlemen to represent him. People of better standing than the footman-dentist and his married mistress hardly behaved better. The mother of Sir George Jackson remembered Mrs. Piozzi and Dr. Johnson at Bath, and she could not imagine how Mrs. Piozzi could tolerate so coarse and bear-like a person as the Doctor; though the Doctor’s coarseness was matched by the lady’s levity. ‘Their manners,’ Mrs. Jackson wrote to her son, ‘were more disgusting than pleasing to most persons ... they both ought to have been ashamed of themselves.’
Sixty or seventy years ago locomotion was considered rapid when the Newcastle mail left that northern town on a Monday morning and reached London on the ensuing Wednesday at 5 A.M. In these days of electric cables and telegraphs, it is amusing to read of the method taken by a Rothschild to obtain news. We had not then got so far as sending or receiving news by carrier pigeons. In February 1807 Jackson arrived in London from Munich. The head of the Rothschild firm, hearing of the arrival, waited on the diplomatist, and, as the latter said, probed him dexterously to elicit any secrets he might possess relative to Prussian financial difficulties and state affairs generally. The Government was as ill off occasionally as the financier. They at one time depended on the French papers for news from abroad, and for the loan of these, ministers were indebted to the charity of the editor of the ‘Times.’
Looking into private life, we find various illustrations of its character. While war was raging abroad the waltz conquered the prudes of Bath, who, after gracefully battling against it, embraced it and their partners therein with a sort of ecstasy. Those were the days of heavy postage; and we read of a lady who thought to cheat the revenue by stuffing a hare sent to a friend, with letters, which that friend was to hand over according to the addresses. The ingenious method failed, inasmuch as the cook who received the hare tossed all the rumpled and blood-stained letters with which it was lined into the fire.
While Mr. Jackson had the affairs of the world to set down on paper, and often rose from the table where he was writing despatches only to catch a hasty glance at a battle, or to be off in a hurry, hardly pressed by a victorious foe, he was overwhelmed with commissions from thoughtless people. Some asked him to purchase for them carriages and horses, others hammers and nails; and, wrote his mother, ‘If in the course of your rambles through Saxony or Silesia you can meet with a piece of fine cambric for handkerchiefs pray secure it for me, as cambric is now of an exorbitant price in this country.’ Thousands of men were bleeding to death for want of bandages, and the easy-going old lady at Bath could think only of cheap handkerchiefs for herself.
One incident of the times reads like a page or two from Fielding. It refers to the Irish servant, Pat O’Raffer, who was with George Jackson in Bohemia. Pat was as lean as if he had lived for a month at a French table d’hôte. In Bath, when his master fell in love with Miss Rumbold, Pat fell in love with Miss Rumbold’s maid. In his absence, however, the abigail gave her company to another young man, but Pat continued to write to her ‘a very pretty letter’ all the same. As one of these letters especially contained a good deal of political and personal gossip, which began to spread through Bath, old Mrs. Jackson thought it would be well to secure it, and to stop the writing of similar epistles for the future; and she sent for the damsel, with the success narrated below.
The good, stupid wench mentioned regretfully that the postage was two shillings and ninepence. I said, ‘Susan, this long story about things that you know nothing of, and can take no interest in, my good girl, has cost you, it seems, far more than it is worth.’ ‘Yes, indeed, ma’am,’ she answered, ‘it has. I like very well to hear from Mr. Raffer, but I do wish he would pay the postage.’ ‘Has this thoughtless man often put you to the expense?’ I inquired. ‘Oh, no, ma’am; it’s the first since he went; but he says he shall write again.’ ‘Shall you answer it, Susan?’ I asked. ‘Lor, ma’am,’ she said, ‘I should never know where to find a place to begin upon. Doesn’t you think, ma’am, it’s more like a piece of reading in the newspaper than a letter? Then I shouldn’t like to pay another two-and-ninepence.’ ‘Then, Susan,’ I said, ‘as my son’s name is mentioned in this letter, suppose I give you five shillings for it—that will pay the postage, and buy you a nice frilled neckerchief.’ Susan blushed and smiled with delight. The bargain was struck at once for this and any other despatch Mr. Raffer may send, silence on the subject being promised.... My only qualm of conscience in getting hold of the letter was, that I suggested to Susan to buy a frilled neckerchief, never allowing my own maids to wear any but plain ones.
In those days mistresses could rule the costume of their maids. In ours the latter dress in the same ill-taste adopted by their mistresses. But chignons, at last, have gone out, and with them the abominable smell which ‘pervaded’ the atmosphere.
By 1813 the minuet, a knowledge of dancing which Mrs. Montagu thought of more importance than a knowledge of French, ceased to be known in the ball-room. It fingered on the stage. The Coburg Theatre audiences looked upon the Minuet de la Cour and Gavotte, danced by M. and Mdme. Le Clercq, with a sort of wondering delight, and Taglioni and Fanny Elsler danced it on our opera stage, forty years ago, as a lady and cavalier of the time of Louis the Fourteenth. When the waltz first attempted (with its vulgar familiarity and an intimacy which made an Oriental ambassador almost faint) to supplant the minuet, in which the gentleman scarcely touched the tips of the lady’s fingers, and seemed abashed at his own audacity, there was a general outcry of fie upon it. But young ladies soon learned to laugh at the objections of their mothers, and flung themselves on the shirt-fronts of their partners with alacrity. Fashion sanctified it, and the youthful world thought it ill-bred prudery to set its face against what fashionable people of good taste considered innocent and amusing.
The actors of the first half of the century come pleasantly to the memories of some survivors, and to the knowledge of others who will be glad to become acquainted with them. Graceful Elliston, in Octavian, is said to have been superior to John Kemble. George Frederick Cooke was always fine, but never sober; ‘often so drunk as not to be able to come on the stage at all, and generally as not to be able to stand when on.’ We sit with Cooke’s exasperated audience, kept half an hour beyond time, when he was to play Mr. Oakley, and we join in the hissing when he does appear, and enjoy the mingled surprise and indignation that light up his countenance. ‘He, however, recollected himself, and after one violent effort, in which every feature of his speaking countenance had its peculiar expression, made a sort of half-disdainful half-respectful bow, and an exit steadier than his entrée, though hardly steady enough for dignity.’ Cooke’s Oakley, in its way, was as good as Emery’s Tyke, which, as a bit of tragi-comedy, was inexpressibly grand.
In 1809 Kemble was declining. In reference to his Hamlet, Jackson says, ‘Kemble was, of course, great, and his triumph, I believe, complete; but, in my humble opinion, he has gone off a good deal.’ Of the then new Covent Garden (burnt down in 1808), he writes; ‘It appears to me small, and the prevailing colour—brick red—very common and ineffective. The doors too, though they cost a large sum, and will, if they last as long, be very handsome some years hence, have a mean appearance, the mahogany being so very pale.’ Kemble lingered too long upon the stage. In 1801 we read, in reference to his Hotspur, ‘In some parts he warmed up to the situation and was very good; but he is too old for such a character, and the dress only shows off his unfitness the more. It made him appear decidedly aged, and thus, in a great measure, rendered all he had to say ineffective.’ But in those last years of his career Kemble flashed forth gleams of his old glory. In the year last named he and Mrs. Siddons played inimitably in ‘Isabella,’ in which Charles Kemble played Carlos, and showed signs that he was not going to remain the mere ‘stick’ which he had been for many years. Mrs. Siddons was, on the other hand, deteriorating. She had grown enormously large. When she killed herself, in ‘Isabella,’ and fell to the ground, the stage groaned beneath her; and if, in any character, she knelt, it took two good men to get her comfortably on her legs again. The greatest theatrical novelty of the day was when Kemble appeared at court to take leave on his intended departure for America, where he was to play twenty-two nights for six thousand pounds and his expenses paid. After all, Kemble did not go; his appearance at court, ‘a player,’ made some people think the world was coming to an end. But there was a worse sign of the times. When Bellingham, after shooting Mr. Percival, was conveyed in a coach to Newgate, the mob escorted and cheered him, shook hands with him, and congratulated him on having murdered a minister.
It is startling to find Mrs. Siddons accused of want of feeling when she took leave of the stage. As John Kemble continued to linger on it, his power of attracting audiences grew less. In 1812 it is said of his King John, ‘his conception of the character remains, of course, as excellent as ever; but his voice is gone, and I am told when the play is ended he is so exhausted as hardly to be able to speak or move.’
We conclude these desultory samples of by-gone life with an example of the remuneration of a leading barrister of the first years of this century, namely, Garrow. It is said of him that ‘he went into court one morning at York, made a speech of about twenty minutes, then doffed his wig and gown, pocketed four hundred pounds, besides one hundred pounds for his expenses, and drove off again to London.’
Those who have examined these grains from a full measure may find more perfect enjoyment by perusing ‘The Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson,’ and the interesting second series of the work known as ‘The Bath Archives.’
THE POSTMAN’S KNOCK.
‘A foot post doth come from Bury, in Suffolk, to the Green Dragon, in Bishopsgate Street, every Wednesday, by whom letters may be conveyed to and fro.’ So writes the water poet, John Taylor, in his ‘Carrier’s Cosmography,’ A.D. 1637. In like manner we learn that a foot post from Wasingham came every second Thursday to the Cross Keys, Holborn; and one from York, to the Rose and Crown, in St. John Street. Letters, however, could be sent every Monday to Scotland, ‘by the post that doth lodge at the King’s Arms, at the upper end of Cheapside.’ Letters did not travel then as fast as a certain general made one travel, by enclosing it in a cannon ball and firing it into a besieged town, for the purpose of conveying a message. Between the time when the first letter was written and that signalled by the postman’s knock this morning there never was a more singular mode of despatch.
The first letter ever written! Where is it? Let us be content to know, as beyond dispute, that the earliest sample we have of a letter is that of David to Joab. When we remember the contents and the purpose of that letter we may be honestly ashamed of the writer. We could have wished this letter had not been preserved; and we turn from it readily to consider the letters of more recent and less sacred kings.
The earliest royal sign manual existing of our own kings is that of Richard II. The grandest and firmest is that of Richard III. There exists a document of this king’s which was begun under dictation. Richard seems to have grown impatient with his secretary, snatched the pen from his hand, and finished the document with his own hand. His signature, Ricardus Rex, is written with wonderful boldness. The cross line of the ‘x’ looks like a pike-staff, and has a wickedly threatening air with it. There are letters of a far more interesting quality than the above, also written by Richard, in the collection of letters of the time of that king, with others of the later time of Henry VII. The work is one of the series published under the sanction of the Master of the Rolls. Richard’s letters are those of a kind-hearted man, who considers no subject to be too trifling for consideration. Several letters prove that he was an affectionate husband to Lady Anne. When she was Richard’s queen and had fallen sick, her husband wrote to Louis XI., civilly requesting him to send over some Burgundy and wines of Haute France, for the comforting and strengthening of that august lady’s stomach. On another occasion, when the governess of his little son Edward (that boy-prince of Wales whose unexpected death at Middleham nearly drove his father mad) was likely to lose some property through the dishonesty of a kinsman, Richard looked into her affairs and energetically set about seeing her righted. In details like these he comes before us, like a good-natured head of a family, sympathising with all who live under his roof. It is quite curious, too, to see that matters of dress were not beneath his notice. One of his many Irish favourites—favourites because they had supported the cause of Richard’s noble father, the Duke of York—was the Earl of Desmond. Richard was not only generous to the earl, he was desirous of seeing him dressed in the fashion which prevailed in England, but which had not yet reached Ireland. Richard requests Desmond to ‘renounce the wearing and usage of the Irish array, and to use the manner of apparel for his person after the English guise.’ The king sent patterns of dress to Ireland by the hands of a bishop. The right reverend modiste carried with him samples of ‘gowns, doublets, hose, and bonnets,’ of the latest taste, with a fac-simile of the king’s livery, a collar of gold of Richard’s device, and, finally, a neat assortment of ‘hats, kerchiefs, tippets, and shirts.’ In connection with such articles, and with the above household details, we hardly recognise the dark Richard of history and the drama. But light and shade prevail throughout. Richard could stoop to invent the fashion of a coat, and could climb through murder to a throne. Whatever may be his guilt with regard to the young princes in the Tower, he showed his wisdom when he took for wife Lady Anne, the daughter of the fierce Countess of Warwick, by immediately locking up his uncomfortable mother-in-law!
This series of letters is worthy of being studied. Richard appears quite another manner of man than we have been accustomed to take him to be. Henry VII., on the other hand, remains unaltered—mean, cruel, treacherous, and crafty. We will only allude to a letter of James IV. of Scotland to show his intelligence. In one of them, written to the King of Denmark, James announces that a band of Gipsies, pretending to be Christian pilgrims, had been in Scotland, and that he had sent them to Denmark, the latter country being, as he believed, in the vicinity of Egypt, from whence the wanderers had started.
In dealing with old letters, as much caution is necessary as in dealing with old pictures. All are not ancient masters that are called so. Some years ago there was an aged man in a German capital, who, throughout a long life, had made a decent income by painting pictures by any great artist of any time or place. If a rich amateur, travelling that way, wanted a work by some renowned painter of the early times he went to a dealer, and the dealer, undertaking to find him one, went to the old painter of other men’s pictures, who in a week produced a Da Vinci, a Raffaelle, or a Del Sarto, a Rubens, a Claude, or a Wouvermans—it mattered not what; and each party was satisfied. Once the old fellow tried to paint a picture of his own, but there was such a confusion of styles in it he could not offer it for sale, and in order to live respectably he was obliged once more to resort to forgery.
As for forged letters, they are thick as leaves in Vallambrosa. A few years ago a writer in the ‘Athenæum,’ referring to this fact, remarked, ‘In no age has literature been free from the intrusion of spurious records into the domain of truth. One man forges for the pure love of sport, throws his forged papers into a collection, to be found a hundred years later, merely to perplex the pundits. Another forges to sustain a crotchet or a principle. But the most industrious and the most facile are those who forge for profit. Everyone familiar with old papers is aware that the publication of historical documents—letters, plays, poems, maps, charts, and cylinders—has now ceased to be a learned profession, and has become a manufacture. As the Old Bailey had its tribes of rascals ready to witness against anybody and anything for money, so literature has its race of outcasts ready to furnish any document that may be wanted, from a Wardour Street pedigree, derived from scrolls in a Cheshire muniment room, up to a copy of Homer from a monastery at the summit of Mount Athos.’ Of the above there is no doubt. We may add that, in some cases, letters have been authentic and yet have been no more genuine than if they had been forged. That is to say, they misrepresented the feelings of the writers themselves. We have one sample of something intended in this way, though not carried out, by Crebillon and Sterne. Fun, profit, and mystification were at the bottom of it. Sterne, writing to Garrick in April 1762, says: ‘Crebillon has made a convention with me, which, if he be not too lazy, will be no bad persiflage. As soon as I get to Toulouse he has agreed to write me an expostulatory letter upon the indecorums of “Tristram Shandy,” which is to be answered by recriminations upon the coarseness of his own works. These are to be printed together—Crebillon against Sterne: Sterne against Crebillon. The copy to be sold, and the money to be equally divided. This is good Swiss policy!’ Nothing came of this design, but it illustrates how a letter may be authentic and yet not be genuine.
Widows’ letters are rudely said to be sometimes of this quality. This is, no doubt, untrue. The idea, however, is as old as Massinger. That dramatic poet makes his Hilario, in ‘The Picture,’ remark:
There be some
That in their husband’s sicknesses have wept
Their pottle of tears a day; but, being once certain,
At midnight, he was dead, have in the morning
Dried up their handkerchiefs, and thought no more on’t!
But Hilario, who says this, is the fool of the piece.
There are historical personages, whose letters and manuscripts generally we should expect would have disappeared altogether; voluntary destruction having been applied to them. On the other hand, there are personages whose manuscripts and whose letters, we should suppose, would have been preserved with a reverential affection. In each case the expectation is contrary to fact. We will instance Margaret of Anjou and William Shakespeare. When Edward IV. was on the throne he was so desirous to secure every letter or despatch written by that heroic wife of an unheroic king, that the penalty of death was awarded against any person who, receiving a letter, or being in possession of a letter from Queen Margaret, delayed in surrendering the same to the government. One would suppose that such a penalty would lead every individual holding such documents, if not to surrender at least to destroy them. But human nature is perverse, as well as bold, courageous and defiant. Many of Margaret’s correspondents hid the letters she had written to them; some of these have lately been published by the Camden Society. The volume is one of the most interesting of the series published by that Society, and the letters themselves are creditable to the writer. They show her less as a fiercely struggling, deeply sorrowing, terribly avenging queen, than as a sympathising woman, not so busy in her own affairs as to lack time for being interested in the affairs of others. She is ever ready to say a good word for a worthy man seeking advancement, and her heart responds to appeals from young maidens with whom the course of true love does not run smooth. For them, Queen Margaret writes with affectionate urgency to that sort of sire who is apt to say of a suitor to his daughter, who is unwelcome to himself, ‘I can’t imagine what the girl can see in such a fellow, to like him!’ To such stern fathers Margaret of Anjou writes like a wise and affectionate woman. She may be called a ‘matchmaker,’ for she seems to have gone to the work of coupling with great alacrity, but we are sure that many a young couple, in those turbulent times, owed to her a happiness and a harmony in their married life which poor Margaret never enjoyed in her own.
But Shakespeare! It is nothing less than marvellous that a man who wrote as he wrote—and, altogether, no other man ever wrote like him—that a poet, the author of such plays and such poems; that a man possessing so many friends and admirers, with whom his correspondence must have been extensive, should not have left a single line behind him traced by his own hand. Of all his poems and plays there does not exist a page, a line, a single word, in manuscript. All Shakespeare’s manuscript plays could not have perished in the fire which destroyed the Globe Theatre. The author must have made little account of them himself; but how great would our estimation be of a single act of any one of Shakespeare’s plays, in his own handwriting! We have just now got among us a parallel to the tulip mania. Thousands of pounds are willingly paid for a picture which the same number of shillings would once have purchased. Rather, let us say that the shillings were given for the picture, and that the pounds by thousands are given for the painter’s name. Well, what would not be willingly paid (for the sake of Shakespeare’s name) for the original manuscript, say of ‘Hamlet’? There would be a fierce fight among competitors for even a single passage. We fancy that the lines beginning with ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’ or those that open with ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?’ or with ‘She never told her love,’ and hundreds of others, would not be had for guineas covering each letter. What a contention there would be for the first love-letter or for any love-letter which the poet wrote to Anne Hathaway; or indeed for any letter, addressed to anyone. A costly holograph! Alas! there are neither lines nor letters. All that has been saved of Shakespeare’s handwriting is confined to a couple of signatures of his name to certain deeds, and in those subscriptions the name is spelt differently. Even the forgers have not dared to produce a letter by Shakespeare.
There seems to have been at one time a regular manufactory for the production of letters by Shelley, Keats, and Byron. The market was swamped by cleverly forged documents. About twenty years ago, Robert Browning, the poet, edited a volume of letters by Shelley, and critics said that they would prove useful to all future biographers of that wayward genius. These letters turned out to be forgeries. One epistle was found to be a ‘crib’ from an article by Sir Francis Palgrave, in the ‘Quarterly Review.’ Another was slightly altered from a paper in a literary annual. When research was made, the discovery ensued that the supposed originals had been purchased by Mr. Moxon, the publisher, at an auction. The auctioneer had had them consigned to him by a bookseller in Pall Mall, and the bookseller had bought them from two unknown women, who looked as much like ladies as the letters looked like genuine productions. If Mr. Moxon had not sent a copy of the volume to Mr. Tennyson a long time might have elapsed before the fraud could have been discovered. But Mr. Palgrave, on a visit to the Laureate, happened to open the book, and his eye fell on a letter from Shelley to Godwin, written from Florence. Mr. Palgrave recognised in it a portion of an article on Florence, in the ‘Quarterly,’ written by his father, Sir Francis. Mr. Moxon called in all the copies of this volume of pseudo-epistles, and suppressed the publication altogether. A curious result has followed. The volume is worthless, but it is rare; and simply on account of its rarity it is set down in a London bookseller’s catalogue now before us at the price of 1l. 10s.
Stray letters of Shelley continued to turn up in the market. Letters to his wife, of the most confidential nature, containing aspersions on his father, were bought by Sir Percy Shelley, the poet’s son. These too proved to be forgeries and were destroyed. Another letter, addressed to Byron, and bearing Shelley’s signature, contained an assertion against the fidelity of ‘Harriet.’ Whoever bought it paid six guineas for a calumny against a dead and defenceless woman, to which was appended the forged signature of her dead and defenceless husband. Forged letters purporting to be from Byron are, as it were, to be had at every turn. Also books with his alleged manuscript notes in the margin. Good judges assert that these notes and letters are written with a thorough knowledge of Byron’s life and feelings, and that the books are chosen with the most perfect knowledge of his tastes and peculiarities.
There was once a dreadful fashion of writing romances and novels in letters. Nothing seems more wearisome now, but they delighted the age in which they were written, and that says much for the patient endurance of the readers of the period. There is, however, one story told in letters, the humour of which will never grow old, namely, ‘Humphrey Clinker.’ Smollett never showed more ability, or humour, or power in delineating and discriminating character than in that admirable work. For humour, commend us to the letters of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble. The preciseness of that lady, who is satisfied if a suitable reason be given for things she complains of, and who is drolly serious in her logic, is charmingly illustrated in the following passage in one of her various letters addressed to the housekeeper, Mrs. Gwyllym, in the country, at Brambleton Hall: ‘You tell me the thunder has soured two barrels of beer in the seller, but how the thunder should get there, when the seller was double-locked, I can’t comprehend. Howsomever, I won’t have the beer thrown out till I have seen it with my own eyes. Perhaps it will recover. At least it will serve for vinegar for the servants.’
This pretended letter is not beyond the reality of much letter-writing of the last century. Southey, when collecting materials for ‘Espriella,’ came into possession of a letter from a farmer’s daughter. It was written towards the close of the century, and it runs thus:
Dear Miss,—The energy of the races prompts me to assure you that my request is forbidden, the idea of which I had awkwardly nourished, notwithstanding my propensity to reserve. M. T. will be there. Let me with confidence assure you that him and brothers will be very happy to meet you and brothers. Us girls cannot go, for reasons. The attention of the cows claims our assistance in the evening.
Unalterably yours.
In the days of heavy postage no one had the slightest scruple in cheating the revenue. Persons leaving home, whether for inland or foreign travel, were importuned by friends to carry letters for them to other friends. An idea prevailed that, if the letters were carried ‘open’—that is, unsealed—there was no infraction of the law, and that consequently no penalty could be exacted. This was a popular error. The law, moreover, was evaded in another way. A newspaper was sent by post in an envelope; inside the latter a long epistle was often written in invisible ink, generally milk. When this was dry the writing could not be seen. By holding the paper to the fire the writing came out in a sepia colour, and the law was broken. The Post Office authorities discovered this pretty trick, and parties were threatened with prosecution; but as the receivers invariably protested that they did not know who the senders were it was almost impossible to obtain a conviction. Senders indeed grew a little nervous, and many changed their method of conveying information in spite of the law. In place of writing in milk on the covers of the newspapers they made slight dots in ordinary ink under such printed letters as suited their purpose for conveying intelligence. This was troublesome for both sender and receiver, and it was therefore used only for brief messages. The postal tax pressed most heavily on the poor, but the ingenious poor discovered means to evade it. For instance, a son or daughter in town despatched a letter to parents in the country who were too poor to pay the postage. The parents declined to take such letter in, which they had legal right to do. Returned to the General Post Office, the letter on being opened was found to be a blank sheet of paper. The fact is that parents and children had agreed to send these blank sheets as indications that all was well with the sender; the receiver got that much of news and had nothing to pay for it. The letter was never taken in unless a particular mark was on the cover, which intimated that something of importance was to be read within.
Although a high rate of postage fell most heavily upon the poor there was scarcely anyone who did not feel it. Everyone wished to be relieved from it. We can hardly realise how peers, who could frank a large number of letters daily, and how members of Parliament, who could frank, every day except Sunday, a few, were beset by friends for franks for themselves, or for their friends, or for their friends’ friends. We have an illustration of this fact in the ‘Diary, Letters, and Journals of Sir George Jackson.’ Writing to his mother at Bath, in 1802, the then apprentice diplomatist says: ‘My sister tells me Bath was never so thin. I sympathise with her, knowing how voluminous her correspondence is, and that the thinness of Bath means “a dearth of frank men,” there being, she says, only Lords Rosslyn and Harcourt to fly to.’
In those old days heavy postage made long letters. As the receivers paid the postage they naturally expected their money’s worth. Often a sheet of Bath post, or even of foolscap, was crossed and recrossed, and not a hair’s breadth of the paper was left without its line. A letter then was written bit by bit, day after day, till the whole was completed. It was, in its way, a newspaper or a book; it was sent all through the branches of a family; it was lent to friends; it even went to mere acquaintances, and strangers made extracts from the choicest parts of it. In the second series of Miss Mitford’s ‘Letters and Correspondence’ she refers to one of these epistles. It was written by a lord who had been travelling on the Continent, and it was a clever, sensible, and instructive document. Miss Mitford borrowed it for the purpose of copying the contents, to accomplish which cost her six mortal hours, which the lady did not think were ill-spent.
When postage was high, letters were luxuries in which persons, far above the condition of those who are called poor, could not often indulge. We cannot give a better illustration of this than one we find in a letter addressed by Mr. Collins, the artist, to his brother, in 1816, when the landscape painter was twenty-eight years of age. Collins was then at Hastings sketching, and had invited his brother to come down from Saturday to Monday. ‘The whole amount of the expense would be the coach, provided you put two biscuits in your pocket, which would answer as a lunch; and I would have dinner for you, which would not increase my expenditure above tenpence. I shall be at the place where the coach stops for you, should you be able to come. Write me nothing about it unless you have other business, for a letter costs a dinner.’ This was the artist who was overjoyed to receive fifty pounds for his ‘Cromer Sands,’ the picture for which, at the sale of the Gillott collection, a purchaser was found to give, quite as joyously, three thousand seven hundred and eighty guineas.
It has been said that, if heavy postage produced essays, cheap postage makes epigrams. But the latter were not wanting in the very earliest days. Nothing could be more epigrammatic than the note sent by one Irish chief to another: ‘Pay me tribute, or else ——’ To which the equally epigrammatic answer was: ‘I owe you none, and if ——’ Of this sort were the notes between Foote’s mother and Foote. ‘Dear Sam,—I’m in prison. Yours, E. Foote.’ The old lady was under arrest for debt. The son’s answer was: ‘Dear Mother,—So am I. Yours, S. Foote.’ And again, the letters between old Mrs. Garrick and young Edmund Kean: ‘Dear Mr. Kean,—You can’t play Abel Drugger. Yours, &c.’ To which intimation Edmund wrote back: ‘Dear Madam,—I know it. Yours, E. K.’ Instances occur now and then where a joke has been played, the fun of which was to make a man pay heavy postage for very unnecessary information. When Collins, the artist, was once with some friends around him, one of them resisted every attempt to induce him to stay to supper. He withdrew, and the friends in council over their banquet resolved that the sulky guest should be punished. Accordingly on the following day Collins sent him a folded sheet of foolscap, in which was written: ‘After you left we had stout and oysters.’ The receiver understood what was meant, but he was equally resolved to have his revenge. Accordingly, biding his time, he transmitted, in a feigned hand, to Collins, a letter in which the painter read only, ‘Had you?’ Therewith the joke seemed at an end; but Collins would have the last word. He waited and waited till the thing was almost forgotten, and then the writer of the last query opened a letter one morning in which he had the satisfaction of finding an answer to it in the words, ‘Yes, we had.’ We cannot dismiss this part of the subject without expressing our regret that we are unable to remember the name of that British admiral who, after achieving a glorious victory at sea, despatched a letter to the Admiralty, in which there were only these or similar words: ‘ ... Beat the enemy; took, sunk, burned, and destroyed ships named in the margin.’ Tersest of admirals!
The publication of the letters of deceased persons first arose, or began to be so common, about the middle of the last century, that Dr. Arbuthnot declared the knowledge of such a fact added a new terror to death. In 1781 the custom had not improved. ‘It has become so much the fashion to publish letters,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘that I put as little into mine as I can.’ Nevertheless, when Boswell subsequently asked him if it would be proper to publish any of his letters after death, Johnson contented himself by remarking: ‘Nay, sir, when I am dead you may do as you will with mine.’
There has been no little affectation in some notable persons, and a remarkable candour in others, with respect to the publication of these documents. Pope addressed his letters to his friends, but he carefully and elaborately wrote and re-wrote them for posterity, and he was not sorry to see some of them get into print (he rather helping them to that end than obstructing them), that he might have a foretaste of the enjoyment which was more especially intended for after ages. Every line in Walpole’s letters reads as if it were as much intended for us of any year to come as for the happy friend to whom the letter was directed; but this diminishes neither Walpole’s credit nor our appreciation. Pepys never intended his ‘Diary’ to be perused by any mortal eye but his own. The Rev. Mr. Smith, however, deciphered the shorthand, and the best social history of Pepys’ time fell into the hands of a delighted and grateful public. Evelyn wrote his ‘Diary’ for his own satisfaction, indifferent, as Dr. Johnson about his letters, whether it were published or not after his death. Evelyn’s descendants were ignorant of its value, and it is to a stranger we owe those sketches of contemporary men and things which now enrich our literature. Pepys, Evelyn, Walpole—diaries and letters; of how many exquisite stories we should have known nothing but for those three individuals! It matters little whether they intended we should enjoy that knowledge or not; sufficient for us that we do. And let us note in passing another letter-writer—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Her letters are not quite so popular, so much read, or so well known, perhaps, as they used to be; they may have had their day, but the writer was well assured they would at least have that. ‘Keep my letters,’ she once wrote to a friend; ‘they will be as good as Madame de Sévigné’s forty years hence.’
They certainly contain many things worth the knowing. The writer’s descriptions of foreign scenes and incidents are full of life and spirit, generally truthful, and always effective without marring the truth. There is one passage in one of her ladyship’s letters which illustrates the writer’s power in a particularly delicate matter, which is well deserving notice. Mr. Montagu’s sister died. She had been Lady Mary Pierrepont’s dearest friend. Young Montagu had to communicate the news of his sister’s death to the young Lady Mary. In her reply the latter said: ‘I know it is not acting in form, but I do not look upon you as I do upon the rest of the world. You are brother to a woman whom I tenderly loved.’ The young fellow excused the informality; he was proud of being looked upon by the young beauty in a different way from the rest of the world. As that young beauty reminded him that he was brother to the woman she so tenderly loved, he was not dull, and had no difficulty in persuading her to love the brother even better than she had done the sister. The marriage, however, was not made in heaven. The lady herself had some suspicion about the consequences. ‘I tremble,’ she wrote to her intended husband, ‘for what we are doing. Shall we never repent?... I shall come to you only with a nightgown and petticoat, and that is all you will get by me.’ She adds significantly: ‘I had rather die than return to a dependency upon relations I have disobliged.’ In her first letter to her (absent) husband after marriage she alludes to the children of the family in which she was residing, and says: ‘It furnishes my imagination with agreeable pictures of our future life, and I flatter myself with the hopes of one day enjoying with you the same satisfaction ... when the noise of a nursery may have more charms for us than the music of the opera.’
While on the subject of the publication of posthumous letters, we may add that other men besides Johnson have written their own so as to gratify posterity as little as possible. Some are as cautious with respect to contemporaries. One of the most venerable of our peers was once told that several of his letters were catalogued for sale in a London auction room. ‘It is a matter of indifference to me,’ said the noble lord; ‘from the day I became a public man I never wrote a line worth the reading by anyone except the person to whom my letter was addressed.’
The assertion that a lady puts the essence, nay, the very purpose and import of her letter, in the postscript, has had many an ingenious but invented illustration. One of the best is that of a young lady in India to her friends at home, viz.:—‘P.S. You will see by my signature that I am married.’ Cobbett hated writing across already written lines, and declared that it was of French origin. The earliest letter by a lady, in this country, of which a copy exists, is one from Matilda, Queen of Henry I., to Archbishop Anselm. In this she styles him her ‘worthily reverenced lord,’ and herself ‘the lowest of the handmaidens of his holiness;’ phrases which show the mind and hand of some reverend secretary. Anne Boleyn’s last cry of love and anguish to her lord is worth a ream of the letters of earlier date written at second hand. It is genuineness that gives all the interest to the Paston Letters (once so disputed); Agnes Paston’s to her son may be said to be admirable for detail and simplicity. ‘God’s blessing and mine,’ is a fitting double benediction from a mother to her son. How picturesquely descriptive is the passage, ‘On Tuesday last Sir John Heveningham went to his church and heard three masses, and came home again, never merrier, and said to his wife that he would go say a little devotion in his garden and then he would dine; and forthwith he felt a fainting in his legs and slid down. This was at nine of the clock and he was dead ere noon.’ Such were life and death in the middle of the fifteenth century in the county of Norfolk. We may notice, after the above illustration of a letter from a mother to her son, one from a wife to her husband, but of the seventeenth century. In a letter from Susan Montague to her husband Edward, who has announced his being about to leave Madrid for England, the sprightly Susan replied to her ‘sweetheart’ that she fears she may weary his eyes with her ‘tedious scribblement,’ and after many allusions to herself and two ladies, with matters of confidence, Susan Montague concludes by saying: ‘So being very late, as a matter of ten o’clock, I bid you good night, going into the little bed, which I find less than ever it was, and never have no mind to go into it because I cannot find my sweeting there. But when I am there I sleep as little as may be, for I am still riding post to Madrid, which I hope doth presage that you will shortly post from there and come to the little chamber again, which I heartily pray for. So, dear heart, farewell. Your truly loving wife—Su. Montague.’ The orthography of ladies became rather worse than better in the times after Susan Montague wrote. In the last century ladies spelt ‘physician’ with a capital F, and in the old game of ‘loving’ would not be conscious of wrong in saying, ‘I love my love with a G, because he’s a Gustus!’ There are some curious samples of ill spelling in the Delany correspondence. Cacography seemed to be intermittent like the ague. The wrong thing came with the east wind or epidemics. Sometimes an odd word or two would baffle a lady. At the beginning of the present century the exquisite Alison Cockburn referred in one of her letters to some ‘unpareleled boon.’ The word caught her eye, and she gaily added as a postscript, ‘Cannot spell unparaleled.’
The letters of fine gentlemen are written in a fine gentlemanly way. If the fine gentleman be a wit and a poet it does not always improve the style of the letter. Much nonsense has been written upon Waller and his Sacharissa (Lady Dorothy Sidney). The facts of their supposed love passages have grown up out of the imaginations of sentimental writers. When Lady Dorothy married Lord Spencer, Waller wrote to her sister, Lady Lucy, a letter which would now be considered much more impudent than witty. But the poet’s hand is in it as well as the impudent wit’s. After sympathising with Lady Lucy on the loss of her sister ‘bedfellow,’ and expressing a hope that the latter would soon ‘taste of the first curse imposed on woman,’ and often; in due course of time, the poet wishes, ‘May she then arrive at that great curse so much declined by fair ladies, old age. May she live to be very old and yet seem young, be told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform her of the truth. And when she shall appear to be mortal, may her lord not mourn for her, but go hand in hand with her to that place where we are told there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, that being there divorced we may all have an equal interest in her again.’
Letters to children are as difficult to write as books for children. Crabb Robinson stands at the head of all inditers of little epistles to little folk. He is not in the vein of Jeffrey to his granddaughter, as in ‘I send you my blessing and wish I was kissing your sweet rosy lips or your fat finger tips.’ Robinson comes nearer to Hood, only that he could not stoop to use old jokes as well as make new. The two are together in the following paragraph in Hood’s letter to May, one of Dr. Elliot’s daughters: ‘Tell Dunnie that Tom has set his trap in the balcony, and has caught a cold; and tell Jeanie that Fanny has set her foot in the garden, but it has not come up yet.... The other night, when I came from Stratford, the cold shrivelled me up so that when I got home I thought I was my own child.’ The best thing Crabb Robinson did in this way was by surprising a little girl, who said she did not know how to write a letter to her little brother, by proving to her that she was a perfect letter-writer. She had asked Robinson to suggest all the subjects. He proposed purposely something untrue, then something silly, but both were rejected by the child on the ground of their untruthfulness and silliness. This process went on till the child adopted such subjects as were adapted to her purpose, and she found she was a good letter-writer without knowing it.
We conclude with an unpublished letter, from an American lady we believe, who some quarter of a century ago aspired to be the instructor of children. The quaintness and simplicity, for it is all sober earnestness, are worthy of being preserved: ‘Dear Sir,—Having heard that you are in want of a governess for your children, I write to offer myself as a candidate for that post. My acquirements are English in all its branches, French, German, music, which I play well, singing, painting, drawing, and dancing. My age is just 28. I am a lady by birth, high-spirited, and I am sorry to say slightly quick-tempered, but still very fond of children, likewise of gentlemen’s society; I am rather delicate, and when not as well as usual require a few tempting viands. I hope, if you decide in having me for your children as their governess, that you will allow me the entrée of your drawing-room at all times, and that you will also allow me to join in all your domestic amusements. I wish to inform you that I have been in the habit of receiving 60l. (sixty pounds) per annum, or fifty pounds (50l.) with laundress, and all travelling expenses paid. You may be glad to hear that I have an elegant figure, small hands and feet, and am, if my friends and admirers are to be believed, engaging.’
With this sample we may leave our readers to pass on to fresh woods and pastures new.
THE TWENTY-THOUSAND-POUND WIDOW.
In the reign of Charles I. the Old Jewry, which runs from Cheapside to Cateaton Street, was a fashionable locality. Merchant princes lived and died there. The old church, St. Olave Jewry, or St. Olave Upwell, was a fashionable church. Merchant princesses worshipped there, and their daughters were worshipped by the undevout apprentices. The Jewry had its fashionable old hostelry in the Windmill. It lives in Ben Jonson’s drama. It was there that Captain Bobadil told of his heroism at the siege of Strigonium, and there he pished at the idea of Master Stephen’s Provant rapier passing for a Toledo blade. One May morning, A.D. 1628, George Newman, the rich widow Bennett’s first serving-man, was taking his early draught at the Windmill. His master, the rich mercer, a Bennett of the stock from which the Tankerville earls have sprung, was then lying, a month old in his tenantcy, in a grave in St. Olave’s, next to another mercer, Robert Large, the master of one who came to be more famous, namely, Caxton, the father of English printing. Bennett’s widow was then sitting behind her rich curtains in Jewry Street meditating on a world of speculative subjects. ‘She’s a twenty-thousand-pound widow,’ said Newman, as he wiped his lips with the sleeve of his coat. ‘She’ll be a bride, and a lady to boot, before long. She has as many suitors as she has thousands.’ ‘And,’ said a bystander, ‘will maybe marry the biggest knave or the most perfect fool of the lot.’ ‘Not so,’ rejoined the serving-man. ‘Do you see Mr. Recorder passing by from his court? He is a friend of the family, and will see that neither rogue nor ass carries off the wealthy widow.’ ‘Ay!’ cried the host of the Windmill, ‘Mistress Bennett is in safe hands, with Sir Heneage Finch for her guardian and her little son’s guardian.’ And so said all who stood within hearing.
The scene now changes to the widow’s best room, in her mansion in Old Jewry. If you can fancy the three slim Graces rolled into one, with no other result but delicious increase of beauty in form, motion, look, and expression, you may have a very fair idea of this most blooming and best endowed of widows. Physically, morally, materially, she was not to be equalled throughout the realm of mature womanhood. Fair of face, frank of speech, with an inheritance of two-thirds of her late husband’s property, a prosperous business, plate, diamonds, cash, the mansion in which she lived, a coach, six horses, and all things that tend to make life enjoyable, Mistress Bennett took her widowhood with that sort of resignation which is denoted by an air of calm content with providential dispensations. She was in such esteem that at least a score of lovers were contending for the honour of rendering her happy. Even the ladies were busy in commending certain of the suitors. The widow would not be persuaded. The lady advisers were frivolous. She would rely on the grave counsel of a grave man. Mr. Recorder would be her truest support if she ever found herself in any perplexity on the subject of marrying again. At the moment it was a subject that was not in her thoughts.
‘The subject is in the thoughts of young Butler, of Bramfield,’ said Lady Skinner. ‘He is a gentleman——’
‘He is a black, blunt-nosed one,’ interrupted the widow. And indeed Butler was not an Adonis.
‘I pity poor Sir Peter Temple,’ said another of Love’s messengers that morning. ‘Stowe does not make him happy; you might.’
‘Eleanor Tirrell will,’ replied the widow. ‘I wish they were all as well provided for.’
‘All!’ exclaimed Sir Peter’s friend. ‘Why, to what tune does the list run?’
‘First,’ answered the widow, ‘there is Sir Henry Mainwaring, a poor old battered knight, who is not master of as much land as his shoes can cover; and yet he is as proud as if he were a Mainwaring of Over Pecover. His worship was brought hither by the hand of the Countess of Bridgwater, but I speedily rid myself civilly of both. There have been other silly knights, and lords too, who have come and gone, and some of whom come and come again. Lord Bruce took a frank answer, and did not present himself twice. Lord Lumley, all in the glitter of his new title, will not take nay. Dr. Raven has even dared to offer himself without first feeling my pulse, and he swears his daring has not come to an end. Only the other day Sir Sackville Crowe beset me; and, heaven help me! I believed, for a moment, that Sir Heneage Finch himself had views towards me. But Sir Heneage could take an answer, and he besets me with hints of his aspirations no longer.’
‘Crow, Finch, Raven!’ exclaimed the group of ladies who were gathered round the twenty-thousand-pounder in her best room at St. Olave’s. ‘What a singular gathering of birds! You will be flown away with, widow, in spite of yourself.’
Mr. Recorder Finch, erst Speaker of the House of Commons, came into London to perform his legal duties, and returned in the evening to his house at Kensington. The house still stands. It is the kernel round which has grown the shell called Kensington Palace. Heneage Finch’s gardens extended only to what is now called the Broad Walk. The latter was then a pathway through Hyde Park from Kensington to Bayswater. The wicked public loved to connect his name with those of Crowe and Raven as ‘birds of a feather.’ The truth is, that Raven was the real, daring, and most persistent lover. Sir Sackville Crowe, indeed, had been the more serious in his pretensions, as he most needed the widow’s money. He was ‘a thief on the wrong side of Newgate;’ that is, he outspent his income and ruined his tradesmen. He paid them by agreement just a quarter of what he owed those poor fellows, and thus he submitted to be three-quarters kept by his butcher, baker, and tailor. He made an ‘appearance,’ which it was an easy thing to do at other people’s expense. He had been the official keeper of public funds, of which he unluckily failed to give satisfactory account. He alleged that his book-keeping had been done by deputy, and his deputy seems to have been loose in his arithmetic. Altogether, this Crowe was a supreme rogue, but he was one of a very large family. The widow’s fortune would have saved his post, if not his credit, at the Navy Treasury Office. The widow, however, scornfully refused to sit on the same branch with Crowe, and Sir Sackville, thoroughly plucked, was ejected from the office in question.
But, Dr. Raven! The doctor was of another quality. The physician would not be said nay. The nay was decies repetita, but it was not heeded. Still, he was not the nearer to his object by being impeded. One evening he took up a copy of Green’s ‘Quip,’ which was then a work of some thirty years old. His eye fell on these words: ‘Lawyers are troubled with the heat of the liver, which makes the palms of their hands so hot that they cannot be cooled unless they be rubbed with oil of angels.’ Forthwith Dr. Raven bethought him that Abigails were very like lawyers, and that he would try a few angels on the palms of Widow Bennett’s waiting-woman, to gain access to whom, however, he had to oil many a serving-man’s palm also. Abigail was willing to betray her mistress for a consideration, and it was made worth her while to admit Raven (like Iachimo into the chamber of the sleeping Imogen) into the apartment where the widow lay in a lapse of loveliness, buried in lace and rosy slumbers. Raven awoke the sleeping dove with all gentleness; as she did not scream he pressed his suit, craftily pointing out to her that as his presence compromised her reputation, the latter could only be saved by an immediate marriage. Then the thoroughly awakened goddess lifted up her voice to tremendous purpose. ‘Reputation,’ indeed! She knew hers to be safe, and she lustily screamed ‘Thieves!’ and ‘Murder;’ in order to bring in her household to keep it so. The men-servants, seeing no further chance of angels or marks from the physician, flung themselves upon Raven, as if he had really been more intent upon murder than marriage. They held him till the august parish constable arrived, and the constable ‘run him in’ to the Compter for the night. On the following morning Raven was brought up before Mr. Recorder Finch. That impartial judge, sympathising with the insulted widow, whom he so highly respected, committed Dr. Raven for trial at the ensuing sessions. It was not at all likely that Sir Heneage Finch would be slow in protecting the beautiful widow of his deceased friend from such saucy rogues as Dr. Raven, who was subsequently imprisoned for half a year.
The dramatists certainly had their eye upon this escapade of Raven’s. Rowley, especially, adopted the bed-room incident in his ‘City Match,’ where Alexander Bloodhound gets into the Widow Wagge’s chamber. Alexander half-undresses himself, and so frightens the widow that she consents to marry him to save her credit; but she disappoints the audacious wooer at last. Mr. Planché reproduced this scene in 1828 in his ‘Merchant’s Wedding.’ The daring suitor there was Frank Plotwell (C. Kemble); the lady was Aurelia, a wealthy heiress, played by Miss Chester, who was as superb a beauty as Widow Bennett herself. How glorious, too, Charles Kemble looked in his King Charles suit, and how like a jockey in his silks when he half-stripped, are things only to be remembered by old play-goers with good memories.
At this time there was a Kentish knight keeping lonely state in London. He was a widower twice over; but loving matrimony so well from his sweet experience of it that he was dying to find another mate. The Derings were of a very old stock, and Sir Edward, thirty years of age in 1628, might have looked high in search of the mate in question. He was of Magdalen College, Oxford, and was a sound scholar. In religion rather austere, but with an anti-episcopalian bias. His tastes would have made him a very acceptable member of the Society of Antiquaries. In person he was a handsome fellow, was gifted with kindly dispositions, of good carriage and expression in speaking, was fond of applause, and was unaffectedly conscious that he deserved all he could get of it. Some ladies thought so too. Elizabeth Tufton, one of the nine muses—daughters, we should say—of Sir Nicholas, put her hand in his as frankly as he asked for it; and King James made a knight of the bridegroom, who was none the more a gentleman for the dignity conferred on him. The bride died after the birth of a son, and therewith ended a brief day-dream of married happiness. They carried the young mother to the grave when she was little more than twenty, nor was the young widower much older.
That young widower found consolation, however, at a pretty early period of his mourning time. He took to his home a new bride from Sussex, Ann Ashburnham, whose mother was connected with the family of the great Buckingham. Thenceforward, for a season, Sir Edward Dering became a public man. He was busier in Kent than his father, Sir Anthony (a baronet), and he was to be seen about court, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, attending more closely upon the Duke than upon Charles the First, and hoping to get into Parliament under Buckingham’s favour. But fate was against him. The Duke was assassinated in 1626, and Sir Edward was called from court by the sickness of his fair young wife. In one of her letters to him, while he was at Whitehall, she wrote, ‘I cannot send any good news of my couge’s going away, yet I eat joyes of lecarich.’ The ‘couge’s’ signified ‘cough’s.’ The futile remedy was ‘juice of liquorice.’ At the age of twenty-three this second Lady Dering was laid by the side of the first, leaving a son and daughter too young to remember their mother.
Sir Edward was again solitary, and was bearing his solitude impatiently, when chance brought him acquainted with the story of the fair widow in the Jewry. A new act in the City comedy opens, and to gay music ‘enter Sir Edward Dering.’ It is St. Edmund’s day. Raven is in limbo. The widow is alone. The new lover calls in St. Olave’s. Mrs. Bennett, however, declines to receive him. He sends in a letter to her by her servant, who brings it back, but the maid tells him that her mistress had read it. Read it! Then there was hope. Within the next four days Sir Edward had oiled the palms of men-servants and clerks to the tune of eighty shillings. He called again, but was denied. He wrote again, and she kept the letter. Kept the letter! Here was a hint to proceed further. Sir Edward ‘oiled’ more palms, and moved cousins of his own and cousins of the widow—being of his acquaintance—to stir her to be gracious to so handsome and hopeful a lover. He had the widow’s cash-keeper to sup with him; and, perhaps at the cash-keeper’s suggestion, on the last day in November, 1628, Sir Edward was to be seen twice at the Old Jewry Church, near enough to the handsome widow for her to see him without appearing to turn her eyes expressly for that purpose. Reckoning on having made a favourable impression, he, on the following day, wrote a third letter. This Mistress Bennett deigned to keep, which was favour enough for the present. Presuming on that favour the ardent lover (who had lodged himself at a house opposite the widow’s), at the end of two or three days, rang thrice in one forenoon at the widow’s bell. ‘Mrs. Bennett was not at home.’ She was abroad, prosecuting the over-zealous lover, Dr. Raven. A friend, and not a servant of the widow, on Dering repeating his call next day, one Mr. George Loe, brought a very cautious message to the wooer. It was made up of what she said, and what he thought. What she said was to this effect: that a Mr. Steward, from whom she wished to buy the wardship he had had conferred on him of her own child, but who wished, on his side, to have legal marital wardship of the child’s mother, was ‘testy,’ and ‘she could give admittance to none till she had concluded all matters of business with him.’ What Loe added was, ‘She has a good opinion of you. I have spoken nobly of you. You shall hear from me as soon as Steward is disposed of, and,’ said Loe (probably the sly widow had told him to say it), ‘don’t refrain from going to the church where she prays unless you think it disparages yourself.’ Disparagement! It was an honour. On the very first Sunday in December Dering paid double worship at St. Olave’s, Old Jewry. He went as parishioner and lover, uniting, as Mr. Bruce says, in his preface to ‘Proceedings in Kent,’ ‘the worship of Mrs. Bennett with that ordinarily offered at St. Olave’s.’ The interference of servants in the affair here curiously manifests itself. As Sir Edward left the church George Newman, whom he had ‘oiled,’ whispered in Dering’s ear, ‘Good news!’ As Sir Edward was sitting after dinner at his own table Newman entered, and the fellow bade the cavalier be of good cheer. ‘My mistress,’ he said, ‘likes well your carriage, and, if your land is not settled on your eldest son, there is good hope for you.’ The news, true or false, was paid for at the cost of a pound sterling. If he smiled as he went out so also does Sir Edward, as he leans back in his chair, and murmurs to himself, ‘This evening I will seek counsel of Heneage Finch.’
At the Recorder’s house you may see, in the next scene of the drama, Finch and Dering at supper. The friends and kinsmen take their claret and talk of love. The two suitors to the widow were on terms of unlimited confidence and frankness. ‘Ned,’ said Sir Heneage, ‘I wend no more to the widow’s house. I have done. I have no success to look for. I have no desire to go further. I will do or say anything you ask me in this or any other matter.’ Nothing could be kinder than Sir Heneage Finch.
Meanwhile Mr. Steward was at the widow’s feet; or, rather, he stood upright on his own, dictating, rather than asking, terms. The widow’s heart was set, she said, upon having her child’s wardship in her own hands. She was willing to pay fifteen hundred pounds for it. As the words fell from her beautiful lips, Edmund Aspull, Mrs. Bennett’s cash-keeper, advanced, with the amount all ready. If Steward said anything gallant it has not reached the audience. He seems to have had an ‘aside,’ in which he murmured that for nothing less than four thousand pounds would he ever release his right in the ward. ‘With my good will,’ said the widow, ‘I will never look upon that fellow again!’ But, in legal matters she, of course, would consult her good friend, Sir Heneage. To do him justice, Finch was always ready to give prudent counsel whenever he was asked for it.
‘Madam,’ said George Newman, entering the room, ‘Sir Edward Dering is at the door; he prays of your kindness leave to present himself.’
‘Desire Sir Edward,’ replied the widow, ‘to excuse me. I am not willing to entertain discourse of that kind.’
Newman went to the outer door, where Aspull, the cashier, was talking with Sir Edward, and delivered the reply.
The lover stood in sad contemplation, and then he remarked, ‘I am in a wilderness of uncertainty.’
Aspull carried the ‘pretty phrase’ upstairs to his mistress.
‘Tell Sir Edward that I will see him,’ said Mrs. Bennett.
When serving-man and cash-keeper had left the wooer and the wooed to themselves, the latter went methodically to matters of business and matters of sentiment. Sir Edward had the privilege which custom gave a lover, on declaring himself; he ‘saluted’ the lady. He then went into details as to his state and estate, to all of which the widow listened with interest. When he touched on the question of affection, the handsome widow looked at the handsome widower, but she answered neither yea nor nay. She kept him as he was. Indeed, the knight begged her to defer her answer till he again presented himself to her. She consented, but therewith she remarked, ‘I have no present purpose of marrying.’ She would name a second day for the meeting, after her cousin Cradock (a friend of Sir Edward’s) should come to town. Dering saw that she was desirous he should then leave her to herself. He respectfully kissed the formally offered cheek, and bowing, withdrew. He, no doubt, went and told all to Sir Heneage.
Mistress Bennett said of Dering, soon after he had retired, ‘He comes not as boisterous as Steward and Sir Peter come. Steward! As soon as I get from him the broad seal which releases my child, he may be hanged ere I have anything more to do with him.’ What she said of both these suitors was duly reported to the third. Whereupon he pressed his suit and he got friends to press it for him. The widow, however, could not be hurried. Her cousin Cradock was a man it behoved her to consult upon a family question like the present; and the Recorder, being not only her friend but her suitor’s, would be indispensable authority on matters both of law and of property.
Day after day Dering’s patience waned till there was none left. On New Year’s day, 1629, the scene was of the liveliest at the widow’s house. Sir Edward had thought to frighten her into favouring his suit by courteously asking for the returning to him of his letters. The widow sent them back without a word of comment. Her friends standing round her wondered at her decision, and, if the lady and cavalier told their respective stories to Finch he probably looked as wise as a judge while he listened.
The scene is still at the widow’s house, and there again Sir Edward treads the stage. He cannot call on Mistress Bennett, but he can on Mistress Norton, who is his good friend, and the widow’s companion. From her and other household sources he hears that the widow is often sad and silent. If she breaks silence, it is only to remark that she will never marry at all. If Mrs. Norton commends Sir Edward the widow beshrews her companion, and protests that she hears so much of him all day long, she ‘can’t sleep all night for dreaming of him.’ Perhaps in one of those night visions she confounded Dering with Raven, for she dreamed that she ran away from him in her nightgear, out of the bedroom into her great parlour, whereby she caught catarrh. However, Sir Edward could not push his renewed suit to a happy termination. He sat for an hour with Mrs. Norton, talking of the widow, when he would have preferred to be talking with the widow herself. The latter was reported to be sad, in perplexity, and not likely to marry at all—just yet. This did not render Sir Edward’s suit desperate; but he wrote himself ‘fool’ for having asked for the return of his letters, when Newman told him that she had double services of plate, for town and country use, and that she had that glory of all proudly furnished houses of the olden time, beds, worth one hundred pounds the bed.
Again, the scene shifts to the street before Sir George Croke’s house. The lady is about to descend from her chariot, and lo! the lover is there with a petition to be allowed to assist her. He does more, of course; he escorts her into the parlour, where the judge and many ladies are assembled. While general conversation went on, Sir Edward assiduously courted the widow from behind her chair. They talk in whispers, and are let alone. It is all prayer on one side, fencing prettily on the other. Prettily made accusations are humbly answered; she will not be pressed, not she. Her final reply should be made through her cousin, Cradock.
‘Pray,’ said Dering, ‘sweeten the answer with your own breath.’ And then Sir George drank to him in a glass of muscado while Sir Edward kissed the lady’s cheek. As the judge and the lover parted at the door, the former did not hesitate to declare his conviction that the widow was not to be won.
‘Won she must be,’ thought Sir Edward, ‘by one means or another.’ He rather stooped to find them. For instance, on a certain morning the widow’s four-year-old son was walking with his nursemaid, Susan, in Finsbury Fields; Susan was induced by a friend to take the boy to Sir Edward’s lodging, where Dering regaled him with cake, gave him an amber box, treated the maid to a glass of wine, hoped her mistress would not be angry with him, and put in the maid’s hand a five-shilling piece.
‘Lor, sir!’ exclaimed Susan, ‘I, and all the house, pray for you; and young Master Simon here does ever call you Father!’
The widow did not seem to be in haste to ratify the relationship. Viscount Lumley’s chariot was at her door five times in one week. My Lord went to St. Olave’s, and escorted her home after service. All London began to take part in the comedy. New lovers again went to the Old Jewry only to meet denial. Lumley himself, who was but a ragged sort of viscount, was constrained, at last, to take reluctant leave, after his hopes had been buoyed up by interference in his favour by no less a person than the Earl of Dorset, the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain. Sir Edward did not benefit by the withdrawal of the Viscount. Reports reached him that the widow had expressed some liking for him, but not enough to induce her to marry with him. Driven to the extreme of perplexity, Sir Edward engaged another supporter, namely, the Cheapside mercer, Izaak Walton. Izaak celebrated Dering’s praises; mutual friends reported small incidents with much exaggeration. Cousin Cradock knew how Sir Edward might win her; another knew that she was already won, but was coy to confess it. One Master Catesby swore that Dering should both ‘win and wear.’ Lady Cleere told Dering’s father, Sir Anthony, that such a capricious widow was hardly worth the wearing; but Lady Wroth stood up for her as a good and wise gentlewoman, whom any lover might be proud to make his wife.
The grand scene of the comedy occurred when Sir Edward was admitted to see the widow, on condition that he made no reference to the subject of marrying. The interview was a scene for Frith to paint. Sir Edward, with formal low bow, acknowledged the graciousness which admitted him to this interview; but he hoped it would not be the last of that sort of happiness which he might enjoy. Mistress Bennett murmured that chance might still bring them within sight of one another. Then the lover stretched the contract a little, without breaking it. He touched upon his love, her happiness, and cleverly thanked her for forbidding him to pursue making further proposals, as therein might lie the fact that she need not forbid what she, perhaps, had resolved to grant. Some more word-fencing went on; but it ended with a denial on the lady’s part, and a request from the gentleman that she would authorise him to give a public reason for the denial.
‘Say,’ she replied, ‘that you left me, and take the glory of it.’
‘Nay!’ said Sir Edward; ‘I will never withdraw my affection nor my respect till I see you give your hand to another.’
We fear the widow was a dreadful coquette, for subsequent to the above ‘last sight,’ as the interview was called, Mistress Bennett granted an audience to Lord Lumley, when she went so far as to accept a ring from him—a step which almost implied a contract. But this roused the anxiety of her friends, and particularly of Viscount Campden, whose viscountship was just as new as Lumley’s. Lord Lumley, however, was an older member of the peerage. Lord Campden, like the deceased Bennett, had been a mercer; his name then was Baptist Hicks. Even after he had been knighted, Sir Baptist served customers in his open shop in Cheapside. He was now a peer, and people who were unable to attain the same dignity laughed at him. What was the use of Sir Baptist Hicks being a peer, when he had no son to inherit the title? But Lord Campden had a daughter; and the Cheapside mercer’s fair daughter (she was his eldest) was married to Edward, Baron Noel, of Ridlington. The mercer was resolved that Baron Edward should not dream of having derogated by such a match. Accordingly, the ex-shopkeeper succeeded in having the ‘remainder,’ that is, succession to the title, settled in the said son-in-law. In due time, Lord Noel became Viscount Campden, and then gained a step in the peerage by wedding with Juliana, the richest heiress of Cheapside. From them is descended the present Earl of Gainsborough, one of whose daughters, Lady Blanche Noel, made that romantic marriage two years ago with her father’s organist, Mr. Murphy.
But, we have to get back to the first ennobled of the Hickses and his friend, the widow. Lord Campden and Sir George Croke united in insisting that she should return to Lord Lumley the ring she had accepted, and therewith give him his coup de grâce. Ring and letter were despatched on St. Valentine’s Day, and Lord Lumley made his final exit. All London was busy with wondering what the next move would be. It seemed in favour of Sir Edward. Sir Henry Wotton met him in the presence chamber, and wished him ‘full sail.’ The mother of Sir Edward’s late wife, accompanied by that deceased wife’s sister, were indefatigable in lauding Dering’s conjugal virtues in the widow’s ear. Beneficed clergymen, church dignitaries, London gentlemen, country squires, met in the best room in the widow’s house and sang the chorus of his praise. The provoking beauty could not be brought to a decision. She had made a selection, she said, but she really could not say of whom. All in good time. And so this singular love affair proceeded, till the widow consented to grant one more interview, positively for the last time, to her pertinacious suitor, and failed to perform her promise.
‘I will go to Sir Heneage Finch,’ cried the perplexed wooer.
It is very clear that all along Finch perplexed Dering quite as much as the widow did. The Recorder spoke well of Sir Edward to himself and to his friends, and promised to speak well of him to the widow. And perhaps he did; but at the same time Sir Heneage did not neglect his own interests. One morning the bells of St. Dunstan’s in the West, the fashionable church for marriages, rang out a merry wedding peal. Dr. Raven came out of prison, where he was some time in durance for his silly assault, just in time to hear the peal. Sir Edward may be supposed to have put his head out inquiringly from his window. If so, he must have enjoyed a pretty sight—that of Sir Heneage Finch, in holiday array, leading into the beautiful widow Bennett’s house that most tantalising of fair women, as his bride—Lady Finch! Bow bells took up the peal, as if to announce to all Cocagne that they had all the while known what was going on. Cockneydom protested that it had never expected any other issue to the City comedy. Indeed there was a double marriage. While the widow had been playing with her suitors, her niece, pretty Mary Croke, daughter of Sir George, had been indulging in pretty love passages with Harbottle, afterwards Sir Harbottle Grimstone, Master of the Rolls. On April 16, 1629, aunt and niece, with their respective lovers, met at St. Dunstan’s, and were then and there happily married.
The marriage of Sir Heneage with the fair widow was productive of two daughters,[1] of whom one, Anne, married that Earl of Conway so celebrated by Burnet for his ignorance. When a foreign minister once spoke to him of the Circles of Germany, my lord laughed, and asked, ‘What have circles to do with affairs of state?’ We may appropriately add that Mrs. Bennett’s son, Simon, became a man of immense wealth—wealth which his three daughters carried into as many noble families, very much to the satisfaction of the latter. But what of the disappointed lover in this comedy? Well, the curtain went down merrily for him also. He happened to see pretty Unton Gibbes, daughter of the Warwickshire Sir Ralph, and Sir Edward, having an alacrity in falling in love, was ‘over head and ears’ immediately. The lady went straightway to the same depths. They came up together, happy man and wife, and lived like young lovers. He was passionately attached to her to the last; but she survived him full thirty years, finding solace at the affectionate hands of two sons and two daughters. For Unton, Sir Edward had one of those pet names which, outside the circle of love, sound so unlovely. It was Numps! ‘My ever dear Numps,’ he says, in a letter addressed to her from London, in 1640, full of political intelligence, ‘thy pretious and hearty letter I received with that ardor that it was written.... I shall not see thee so soon as I wish.... God preserve my pretty children and send thee ease of thy troublesome cough.... I thank thee for the length of thy welcome letters, wherein I confess that I cannot equal thy love;’ and he ends with ‘Thine, more and more, if possibly,’ &c. One passage of public news in this letter brings a well-known incident before us. ‘The scaffolds are up in Westminster Hall, and Strafford comes to the barre on Monday morning.’ Some of Sir Edward’s letters to his wife are subscribed ‘to thy best self the heart of thine own Edward Dering.’ And if he writes ‘thine in haste,’ he adds, ‘but heartily,’ and writes outside, ‘To my best and dearest friend the Lady Dering,’ while my lady endorses them, ‘From my dearest.’ One letter quaintly begins with ‘My dear and my comfortable Numps, my happiness is (for the greatest part of it in this world) circuited in the same sphere with thine. Love and cheerfulness are blessings invaluable, and if perchance some excentricke motion interpose, all at last (as in the sphaeres) helpe to make up the harmony. So I hope with us every motion shall helpe the tune.’ It would seem that, in absence, they encouraged one another from Scripture. ‘I did presently, as you wished,’ he writes, ‘read over the 91 Spalme (as you call it). I did think to return you a text, but am in haste;’ and ‘Thine own, as ever, for ever.’ The same tone makes musical all his letters, and her own seem to have been attuned to the same melody. The former are full moreover of most interesting public intelligence.
For a troubled time Sir Edward was the much perplexed and ill-requited Lieutenant of Dover Castle. Released from that charge, he was the happy, intellectual, Kentish squire. Next, his county returned him to the Long Parliament, and he commenced his career with fierce opposition to Laud, hoping that ‘His Grace would have more grace, or no Grace at all.’ Sir Edward was what would now be called an Ultra-Radical. He was for abolishing bishops and was ill-affected towards royalty. He took up with the ‘Root and Branch’ party, and they pushed him forward to the proposing of revolutionary measures; and when he withdrew from the course which they had forced him to take they loaded him with execration, and succeeded in turning him out of Parliament for breach of privilege. Subsequently, he lay hid from the pursuit of Parliament, and he is said to have disguised himself as a parson and to have read prayers in a village church. He joined the King. His estate was sequestered, his house at Surrenden was plundered. At a later period the Parliament allowed him to enter on signing the Covenant and paying a composition; but before the affair was concluded the erst lover of the twenty-thousand-pound widow was, in 1644, laid to rest in Pluckley churchyard, which neither covenanting nor compounding can ever disturb.