FOOTNOTE:
[2] Graham first appeared in London in 1782. He was a graduate of Edinburgh, wrote in a bombastic style, and possessed a great fluency of elocution. He opened in Pall Mall a mansion which he called the ‘Temple of Health.’ The front was ornamented with an enormous gilt sun, a statue of Hygeia, &c. The rooms were superbly furnished, and the decorations, mirrors, &c., gave to the whole the appearance of an enchanted palace. Single admission to his lectures on health and the birth of children cost two guineas—a sum readily given. The Goddess of Health usually delivered a supplementary lecture when the doctor concluded. When two guinea auditors were exhausted, his two gigantic porters, decked in gorgeous liveries, deluged the town with bills stating that the lectures would be delivered at one guinea each. The descending scale ultimately reached half-a-crown, and at last he exhibited the Temple of Health itself at one shilling per head. Its chief attraction was a ‘celestial bed,’ with rich hangings and glass legs. The quack promised such results from merely sleeping on this enchanted couch that married persons of high rank and respectability were known to have given one hundred pounds for the accommodation. Persons more foolish still and as highly exalted were found who gave him one thousand pounds for a supply of his ‘elixir of life.’ He then, when dupes were not grown scarce, but required variety in the means of imposition, took to the practice and public exhibition of earth-bathing. He and his goddess stood an hour each day immersed to the chin in earth, above which their heads appeared, dressed in the extravagant fashion of the day. In this position he delivered a lecture on the salubrity of the practice at sums for single admissions which commenced at a guinea and ended at a shilling. When all London had heard and seen him he made a provincial tour; but, in spite of his elixir of life, he died at the early age of fifty-two; and, in spite of the facility with which he gained money, he died in poverty. The famous Mrs. Macaulay married his brother, and Dr. Arnold, of Leicester, the author of an able treatise on insanity, married his sister. In the profession of the most impudent quackery Dr. Graham has never been equalled, either for impudence or the success which attended it.
EDWARD WORTLEY MONTAGU.
Lady Mary Pierrepont, when she wrote to Mr. Wortley touching the death of his sister, said she had lost what she loved most, and could thenceforth only love those who were nearest and dearest to her departed friend. Out of this hint, it may be, came the marriage of Lady Mary and Mr. Wortley. It seemed a disinterested match on both sides, but it was not fruitful in happiness. Of this union were born a son and daughter; the mother reserved all her love for the latter.
The son was born in May 1713. Within two months from that date Lady Mary had left her firstborn to mercenary, but perhaps efficient and kindly care. In July she wrote to her husband, ‘I heard from your little boy yesterday, who is in good health.’ In that phrase, so cold in its unmotherly temper, may perhaps be found the cause why that ‘little boy’ became so wayward, and why he developed into a man so wilful and so irreclaimable. In 1717 the boy was taken by his parents to Constantinople, where Mr. Wortley acted, for a few months, as English representative. On the return from this embassy, Lady Mary tarried for a while at Belgrade. At that time the small-pox was a deadly scourge in England. In Turkey it was less mortal. The infidel Turk anticipated and modified the disease by inoculation. Lady Mary had the courage to submit her child to the novel system of ‘engrafting,’ as it was called. In a letter written at Belgrade in March 1718 she says: ‘The boy was engrafted last Tuesday, and is at this time singing and playing, very impatient for his supper. I pray God my next may give as good an account of him.’ For society at large the step which Lady Mary took was most beneficial; but few mothers, however courageous, would have had the heart, in a foreign land too, to suffer such an experiment to be made on an only son, not yet five years of age. She had, however, full confidence in the efficacy of the proceeding: and she remarked that she would have imparted the matter to the doctors generally, only that they were too selfish to sanction a course which would diminish their incomes!
In the following year commenced the daring escapades of this young gentleman. In 1719 he became a Westminster Scholar. Within six months he was missing from the school, and his friends had such knowledge of his tastes that they searched for him in the lowest purlieus of London. They sought for this mere child in vain; till after some time a Mr. Foster and a servant of Mr. Wortley, being in the neighbourhood of Blackwall, heard a boy crying ‘Fish!’ The voice was familiar, the boy, on being seen, was recognised, and his master, a fisherman, to whom the child—so it is said—had bound himself to help to sell the fish which they had caught together, parted from him with a regret that was felt on both sides. The truant was reinstated at school, if not at home, but in a brief time the bird was flown and left no trace behind him. A year or two, perhaps more, had elapsed when the Quaker captain of a ship trading to Oporto, and the British consul in that city, were looking at a young fellow driving some laden asses from the vineyards through the city gates. The captain saw in the lad a sailor who had come on board in the Thames, and run away from his ship on its arrival at Oporto. He had gone up country and found employment, although he was ignorant of the language. The consul knew him in his real personality, and the adventurous hero was shipped for home, where he was kept not so strictly as if the keepers would be sorry at his again escaping. Edward Wortley took a convenient opportunity to do so, and when he was next recognised he was acting diligently, as he had always done, this time as a common sailor in the Mediterranean. There was the making of a hero in this resolute boy, if he had only been allowed to follow his inclinations. On the contrary, he was exiled to the West Indies, with Foster to attend him as teacher and guardian. They spent several years there; and the boy, who preferred to battle with and for life, to spending it in ease and luxury, had nothing to do but to study the classics, which he did, as he did most things, with energy and a certain success. How he failed, or neglected to leave Foster in the lurch, is not explained. Neither do we know anything of his actual life after his return to England, for many years. Had he been left at sea, Edward Wortley would probably have distinguished himself. As it was he abused life, but only as other ‘young sparks’ did in England; and he filled up the measure of his offences by marrying a handsome honest laundress, older than himself, of whom he got tired in a few weeks. A small annuity reconciled her to living comfortably by herself. After this, all is dark, and we cannot come again upon the trail but by the help of Lady Mary’s letters.
There are few references made to her son by Lady Mary, except in letters to her husband when she was living abroad, ranging from 1741 to 1752. In a letter from Genoa, in 1741, she regrets having to bring before her husband ‘so disagreeable a subject as our son.’ The son was then anxious to procure a dissolution of his marriage with the laundress, but the laundress was a decent woman, living a blameless life, and she could defy Parliament to pass an Act annulling her marriage, even if the father had been willing to help the son to such purpose, which he was not. The mother was unmotherly severe on the son. ‘Time,’ she writes, ‘has no effect, and it’s impossible to convince him of his true situation.’ The son then passed by an assumed name. The name being mentioned to Lady Mary by a stranger, with reference to the responsibility of the bearer of it, she replied, ‘the person was, to my knowledge, not worth a groat, which was all I thought proper to say on the subject.’
In 1742 this ‘fool of quality’ was now wandering, now tarrying on the Continent, under the name of M. de Durand. In the June of that year his mother encountered him, and passed two days with him at Valence, an ancient city on the Rhone. In various letters to her husband, she speaks of ‘our son’ as altered almost beyond recognition, with beauty gone, a look of age not warranted by his years, and, though submissive, with an increase of the old wildness in his eyes that shocked her, as it suggested some fatal termination. He had grown fat, but was still genteel and agreeably polite. She was charmed with his fluently-expressed French, but she noted a general volubility, yet without enthusiasm, of speech, which inconsiderate people took for wit; and a weakness of understanding and of purpose, exposing him to be led by more resolute spirits. ‘With his head,’ she says, ‘I believe it is possible to make him a monk one day and a Turk three days after.’ Flattering and insinuating, he caught the favour of strangers, ‘but,’ says the not too-indulgent lady, ‘he began to talk to me in the usual silly cant I have so often heard from him, which I shortened by telling him I desired not to be troubled with it; and that the only thing that could give me hopes of good conduct was regularity and truth.’ She credited him with ‘a superficial universal knowledge,’ as the result of what he had seen. His acquaintance with modern languages was undoubted, but she did not believe that he knew Arabic and Hebrew. He promised to proceed to Flanders, and there wait his father’s orders; adding, that he would keep secret the interview with his mother; but M. de Durand ‘rode straight to Montélimart, where he told at the Assembly that he came into this country purely on my orders ... talking much of my kindness to him, and insinuating that he had another name, much more considerable than that he appeared with.’
Edward Wortley was in England in the early part of the above year. In the latter part he went to Holland, where he resided, a sort of prisoner at large, by desire of his father, who allowed him a small income on condition of submission to the paternal will. ‘I hear,’ wrote Lady Mary, ‘he avoided coming near the sharpers, and is grown a good manager of his money. I incline to think he will, for the future, avoid thieves and other persons of good credit.’ When persons of really ‘good credit’ spoke well of him, as Lord Carteret did, the mother rather doubted than accepted the testimony. ‘Whenever,’ she wrote to her husband, ‘he kept much company, it would be right to get him confined, to prevent his going to the pillory or the gallows;’ and she described his excuses for his conduct as ‘those of murderers and robbers!’ Young Wortley was desirous of joining the army in Flanders; his mother doubted his sincerity, and insisted that he should go as a volunteer. If his father bought him a commission, she was sure it would be ‘pawned or sold in a twelvemonth.’ Whether as volunteer or commissioned officer, he did serve in Flanders. No news to grieve a parent’s heart came thence; upon which circumstance Lady Mary wrote to her husband in 1744: ‘I think it is an ill sign you have had no letters from Sir John Cope concerning him. I have no doubt he would be glad to commend his conduct if there were any room for it;’ and she was inclined to blame the father for over-indulgence to his son. She had no sympathy even for the amiable weaknesses of the latter; and yet she was so sentimentally affected by the tragedy of ‘George Barnwell,’ the rascal hero of which murders his real uncle in order to gratify the rapacity of a harlot, that she said, whoever could read the story or see the play without crying, deserved to be hanged.
Edward Wortley’s countrymen did not think so ill of Lady Mary’s son; for in 1747 the electors of Huntingdonshire returned him, with Mr. Coulson Fellowes, member for the county. He was a silent but highly respectable member. In the year 1748 Mr. Wortley, the father, wrote to his wife some pleasant news he had heard of their son. The mother coldly replied, ‘I should be extremely pleased if I could depend on Lord Sandwich’s account of our son. As I am wholly unacquainted with him, I cannot judge how far he may be either deceived or interested.’ This singular mother cultivated her antipathies rather than her sympathies. The father seems to have considered his paternal duty was discharged by, wisely perhaps, keeping his son on a small allowance. The son lived as if he had already his inheritance in hand, and for a year or two he found society in London quite to his mind.
Among the ladies who figured on the Mall by day, who drew crowds around them at Vauxhall by night, and who were never out of the ‘Scandalous Chronicle’ of the period, was the ‘Pollard Ashe,’ as she was called. This miniature beauty was in some measure a mysterious individual. She was the daughter of a high personage, it was said, and such affinity was all she had to boast of in the way of family. In the June of 1750, Walpole thus wrote of her to George Montagu:
I had a card from Lady Caroline Petersham, to go with her to Vauxhall. I went accordingly to her house, and found her and the little Ashe ... they had just finished their last layer of red, and looked as handsome as crimson could make them.... We issued into the Mall to assemble our company, which was all the town.... We mustered the Duke of Kingston, Lord March (the old Second Duke of Queensbury of later years), Mr. Whitehead, a pretty Miss Beauclerc, and a very foolish Miss Sparre.... We got into the best order we could, and marched to our barge, with a boat of French horns attending and little Ashe singing. We paraded some time up the river, and at last debarked at Vauxhall.... A Mrs. Lloyd, seeing the two girls following Lady Petersham and Miss Ashe, said aloud, ‘Poor girls! I am sorry to see them in such bad company!’ Miss Sparre, who desired nothing so much as the fun of seeing a duel—a thing which, though she is fifteen, she has never been so lucky to see—took due pains to make Lord March resent this ... but he laughed her out of this charming frolic. Here we picked up Lord Granby ... very drunk.... He would fain have made love to Miss Beauclerc, who is very modest; and did not know what to do at all with his whispers or his hands. He then addressed himself to the Sparre, who was very well disposed to receive both.... At last, we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in our front, with the vizor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously jolly and handsome.... We turned some chicken into a china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp, with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring, and rattling, and laughing, and were every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears.... The whole air of our party was sufficient to take up the whole attention of the garden.... It was three o’clock before we got home.
Very early in the year 1751 our hero made love to Miss Ashe, and at the same time appeared in public as the first ‘macaroni’ of the day, but with science and philosophy enough to render him worthy of being taken into brotherhood by the Royal Society. On February 9, 1751, Walpole writes:
Our greatest miracle is Lady Mary Wortley’s son, whose adventures have made so much noise; his parts are not proportionate, but his expense is incredible. His father scarce allows him anything; yet he plays, dresses, diamonds himself, even to distinct shoe-buckles for a frock, and has more snuff-boxes than would suffice a Chinese idol with a hundred noses. But the most curious part of his dress, which he has brought from Paris, is an iron wig; you literally would not know it from hair; I believe it is on this account that the Royal Society have just chosen him of their body.
His father, however, made no complaint of his son in his letters to his wife. The anxious mother invariably concluded that when nothing was said there was something to be dreaded. Accordingly, in a letter to her husband, dated May 1751, Lady Mary writes:
(May 24, 1751.) ‘I can no longer resist the desire I have to know what is become of my son. I have long suppressed it, from a belief that, if there was anything good to be told, you would not fail to give me the pleasure of hearing it. I find it now grows so much upon me, that whatever I am to know, I think it would be easier for me to support than the anxiety I suffer from my doubts. I beg to be informed, and prepare myself for the worst with all the philosophy I have.’
Her son was not in such a desperate condition as his mother supposed. The new Fellow of the Royal Society was simply making love to ‘the Pollard Ashe.’ In the summer of this year, 1751, Vauxhall and the Mall missed her; but the world knew very well whither she had wended, and with whom. In September 1751 Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her husband: ‘Young Wortley is gone to France with Miss Ashe. He is certainly a gentleman of infinite vivacity; but methinks he might as well have deferred this exploit till the death of his father.’ Walpole wrote to Mann that ‘Wortley, who, you know, has been a perfect Gil Blas, is thought to have added the famous Miss Ashe to the number of his wives.’
While London was busy with the story of the elopement of Miss Ashe with Edward Wortley Montagu, and this rather airy couple were on their amorous way to Paris, there was a young Mr. Roberts, not yet quite twenty-one years of age, sojourning at the Hôtel d’Orléans in that city, with a Miss Rose for a companion, Miss Rose’s sister for a friend, and various servants to wait on all three. Roberts lived like a milor, and he gave out that he was about to make the grand tour to Italy and back. Montagu’s quarters were at the Hôtel de Saxe. Roberts was a stranger to him, but Montagu not only called upon the wealthy traveller, on September 23, but sent him an invitation to dinner. The company consisted of Roberts, Lord Southwell, Mr. Taafe, M.P., and Montagu, who was also a member of the House of Commons. After coffee the party adjourned to Montagu’s room. Taafe produced dice and proposed play. Roberts declined, on the ground of being without money; but this and other pleas were overruled, and, ‘flustered with wine,’ which he said he had been made to drink, he sat down to tempt fortune. Fortune used this gambler ill; when he rose to return to his hotel he had lost 870 louis d’ors—400 to Taafe, 350 to Southwell, and 120 to Montagu. Taafe speedily demanded the amount he had won, and not finding it forthcoming the British legislator, with Lord Southwell, broke into his room about midnight, and under dreadful threats, made with swords drawn, compelled him to give drafts for the entire sum. The crafty Roberts, however, drew upon bankers with whom he had no effects; and, probably that he might be out of reach of arrest till he could give an explanation, he hurriedly set off for Lyons.
The bird had just flown when the three more fortunate gamblers, their drafts having been dishonoured, forcibly entered Roberts’s rooms and rifled them of everything valuable—a large sum in gold and silver, a very valuable assortment of jewellery and precious stones, and the two Miss Roses. There was 40,000 livres’ worth in all, not including the sisters. One of these ladies consented with alacrity to accompany Mr. Taafe, with his other booty, to his quarters at the Hôtel de Pérou. The sister went thither also, for society’s sake, and after a three days’ sojourn Taafe kissed their hands and sent them to England under the guardianship of another gentleman.
Perfect tranquillity prevailed among those who remained in Paris, but on Sunday night, October 25, just before one o’clock, as Montagu was stepping into bed with, as he says, ‘that security that ought to attend innocence,’ a commissary of police, backed by an armed force, entered his room, and, despite all protest, carried him off to the Châtelet. Before they locked him up for the night, the gaolers would scarcely utter a word save a rough one, and he could not get even a cup of water. The night was cold, and a small bit of candle enabled him the better to see the horrors of his cell. ‘The walls were scrawled over,’ he says in the memoir he published, ‘with the vows and prayers of the vilest malefactors before they went to the axe or the gibbet.’ Under one of the inscriptions were the words: ‘These verses were written by the priest who was hanged and burned, in the year 1717, for stealing a chalice of the Holy Sacrament.’
On November 2 the charge made by Roberts—namely, that Montagu’s party had made him half drunk, the better to cheat him at dice, and had subsequently plundered his rooms—was made known to him. ‘I answered,’ he says, ‘in a manner that ought to have cleared my own innocence, and to have covered my antagonist with confusion.’ But he was remanded to prison. Some amelioration of his condition was permitted, and he was allowed to be visited. Consequently it was the fashion to go and look at him, but the solaces of his friends could not compensate for the cruel wit, jeers, and sarcasms cast at him by curious strangers. Influential persons interested themselves in this notorious case. The English ambassador interfered with effect. The king, on being moved, replied that he could not meddle in a private case; but a king can do many things without appearing to meddle. The charge was again looked into, and the method of examination may be seen in the result. The sentence of the court, delivered on January 25, 1752, was to the effect that the accused be discharged; that Roberts be compelled to confess the accusation to be false, also to pay 20,000 livres damages to Montagu and Taafe; and pay all the costs of suit on both sides, including the expense of publishing the judgment.
As soon as Montagu was free, he published a memoir, explanatory and defensive. It was not so much a denial as an evasion. It was made up of assertions that he had ‘never deviated from the sentiments and conduct of a man of honour;’ that regard ought to be had to ‘the probability of the charges, the rank of the accused, and the character of the prosecutor;’ that he was of ‘distinguished condition,’ and that his accuser was infamous in character and inconsistent in his evidence; that Lord Albemarle, the English ambassador, had told him that he was as convinced of his innocence as he was of his own. Montagu protested that the whole thing was a conspiracy ‘against his Honour and Person,’ at the head of which was the so-called Roberts, whom he had discovered to be a fraudulent bankrupt Jew, Payba by name, who had fled from England to avoid the gallows. Montagu acknowledged that he had invited this ‘infamous bankrupt’ to dinner, but that, instead of winning 120 louis d’ors of him, he had formerly lent that sum to the Jew, who had ‘trumped up this story in order to evade payment.’ He had made the first call on the soi-disant Mr. Roberts, taking him for a man of fashion, and it was the custom for the last comer to make such calls in his neighbourhood, and not to wait to be called upon; and the visit having been returned the invitation to dinner naturally followed. As to playing after dinner, Montagu does not deny it; but he says that the imputation of playing with loaded dice filled him with horror. The conclusion of the so-named defence is that, as the judgment of the court was so completely in favour of Montagu and Taafe, the innocence of those two gentlemen was perfectly established.
Before we see if this was exactly the case, let us see what was thought of the affair in England. The public press barely alluded to the scandal, and were not at all grieved at the locking up of a couple of British senators in a French prison. Private individuals noticed the scandal in their letters.
In October 1751, Mrs. Montagu wrote to Gilbert West some details of the gambling affair and its consequences. She described the offence of Montagu and Taafe as ‘playing with a Jew at Pharaoh, with too much finesse.’
Finesse (she adds) is a pretty improvement in modern life and modern language. It is something people may do without being hanged, and speak of without being challenged. It is a point just beyond fair skill and just short of downright knavery; but as the medium is ever hard to hit, the very professors of finesse do sometimes deviate into paths that lead to prisons and the galleys, and such is the case of those unhappy heroes. The Speaker of the House of Commons will be grieved to see two illustrious senators chained at the ignoble oar. The King of France has been applied to, but says he does not interpose in private matters. So how it will go with them no one can tell. In the meantime, poor Miss Ashe weeps like the forsaken Ariadne on a foreign shore.
The conduct of Edward Wortley in England was noticed by his father, in a letter to Lady Mary, who, replying to it in a letter from Louveres (November 10, 1751), when the Paris scandal was known, says:—‘I will not make any reflections on the conduct of the person you mention; ’tis a subject too melancholy to us both. I am of opinion that tallying at bassette is a certain revenue (even without cheating) to those who can get constant punters and are able to submit to the drudgery of it; but I never knew any one pursue it long and preserve a tolerable reputation.’ Therewith, the mother dismissed further notice of her wayward son to talk of an old woman at the baths of Louveres, who in her hundredth year had recovered sight, teeth, and hair, and who had died ten years later, not of age, but of tumbling down a stone staircase; something like the apocryphal Countess of Desmond:—
Who lived to the age of a hundred and ten,
And died of a fall from a cherry-tree then.
Even after the son had escaped the galleys, the mother made no references to the circumstance in a letter to her daughter, the Countess of Bute (February 1752), but was full of ‘Peregrine Pickle’ and of the rather lively sayings and doings of Lady Vane.
As the maternal susceptibilities were not much ruffled, the sympathy of the public was not to be expected. We learn more from Walpole than from Lady Mary. In November 1751, Walpole, writing to Mann, remarks that all the letters from Paris were very ‘cautious of relating the circumstances.’ He styles Montagu and Taafe as the ‘two gentlemen who were pharaoh-bankers to Madame de Mirepoix’ in England, and ‘who had travelled to France to exercise the same profession.’ Walpole adds that they had ‘been released on excessive bail, are still to be tried, and may be sent to the galleys or dismissed home, where they will be reduced to keep the best company; for,’ says Walpole, ‘I suppose nobody else will converse with them.’ The letter-writer describes Montagu as having been a ‘perfect Gil Blas,’ and as having added ‘the famous Miss Ashe to the number of his wives.’ Walpole says of Taafe, ‘He is an Irishman, who changed his religion to fight a duel, as you know in Ireland a Catholic may not wear a sword.’ But as Taafe was M.P. for Arundel when Catholics could not sit in Parliament, it is quite as probable that Taafe changed, or professed to change, his religion—if he had any religion—that he might become a borough member. ‘He is,’ writes Walpole, ‘a gamester, usurer, adventurer, and of late has divided his attentions between the Duke of Newcastle and Madame de Pompadour; travelling with turtles and pineapples in post-chaises to the latter, flying back to the former for Lewes races and smuggling burgundy at the same time.’ The Speaker was railing at gaming and White’s apropos to these two prisoners. Lord Coke, to whom the conversation was addressed, replied: ‘Sir, all I can say is, that they are both members of the House of Commons, and neither of them of White’s.’
While ‘society’ was discussing this matter, Miss Ashe reappeared in England and reassumed her former distinguished position. In December 1751, the town witnessed the happy reconciliation of Miss Ashe with the gay Lady Petersham, who had been offended at the indiscretion of the younger nymph. Lady Petersham’s principles were very elastic: she pardoned the Pollard Ashe on her own assurances that she was ‘as good as married’ to Mr. Wortley Montagu, who, according to Lord Chesterfield, seemed ‘so puzzled between the châtelet in France and his wife in England, that it is not yet known in favour of which he will determine.’
Soon after Lord Chesterfield’s flying comment on the Ariadne who had really abandoned her Theseus, ‘society’ received her to its arms as readily as Lady Petersham. The example of both was followed by one individual. A certain naval officer, named Falconer, made an honest woman of the Pollard Ashe; and with this marriage ends our interest in one of the many ‘wives’ of the English Gil Blas.
If some surprise was raised by the judgment given in favour of Montagu and Taafe, none need exist at present. The two gentlemen who were such useful friends at the pharaoh tables of Madame de Mirepoix, the French ambassadress in England, and one of whom supplied Madame de Pompadour, the French King’s mistress, with turtle and pineapples, could dispense with the good offices of Louis the Fifteenth, or perhaps obtained them through the mistress and the ambassadress. But Abraham Payba, alias James Roberts, possessed as influential friends as Taafe and Montagu. Payba appealed against the judgment, his appeal was successful, and the two English members of Parliament stood very much in danger of the galleys. In their turn, however, they appealed against the legality of quashing the judgment given in their favour. The question came once or twice before the courts, and then it ceased to be argued. It would seem as if powerful friends on both sides had interfered. Each party could claim a decision in its favour and could boast of honour being saved, but the public feeling was that they were all rogues alike.
After the lapse of a few years, Wortley Montagu came into the possession of a fixed income by the death of his father in 1755. He had sold a reversion of 800l. a-year. His father now left him an annuity of 1,000l. The disgrace of the Paris adventure was not altogether forgotten, but Taafe was in favour at Versailles (by what lucky chance nobody could tell), and Montagu, after a few years of pleasure, took to better ways than of old. There seems to have come over the half-outcast a determination to show the better side of his nature and his ability. In 1759, he published his ‘Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republics; adapted to the present State of Great Britain.’ In this work—an able and spirited review of the republics of Greece, Rome, and Carthage—the author probably stated his own idea of religion in the words, ‘To search out and adore the Creator in all his works is our primary duty, and claims the first place in every rational mind.’ Two years subsequent to the publication of this most creditable work, certain Cornish men thought that Edward Wortley would be their most fitting representative. In 1761, he was elected member for the borough of Bossiney. But he was weary of England and the legislature, and he resolved to leave both for ever.
Before Mr. Montagu left England ‘for good’ in 1762, he made necessary preparations for at least a long residence abroad. Among those preparations the most curious may be said to be indicated in the following copy of a bill of articles purchased at an optician’s. Moses’s gross of green spectacles sinks into insignificance by the side of the assortment of spectacles, reading-glasses, pocket telescopes, &c., with which Mr. Montagu provided himself to meet the exigencies of foreign travel. The bill is now in the possession of Lord Wharncliffe, as are some of the articles enumerated. I am greatly indebted to his lordship for a sight of both, and to the prompt courtesy of his permission to copy and reproduce this very singular bill.
The bill being duly discharged, Edward Wortley took, as it proved, a final farewell of England. But his friends there soon heard of his whereabout. He proved that he was not a mere ignorant traveller, by addressing to the Earl of Macclesfield two letters on an ancient bust at Turin, the quality of which is warranted by the fact that they were thought of sufficient importance to be read before the Royal Society. Wortley Montagu was in a fair way to be a votary of science, but he might have said with Southwell,
Tho’ Wisdom woo me to the saint,
Yet Sense would win me to the shrine.
He had some reason, perhaps, to feel careless and embittered, for in this year, 1762, his mother died, showing her cruel contempt for him by leaving him a guinea, which he gave to Mr. Davison, a friend and companion in his wayfaring. It was from his mother, said Mrs. Piozzi, that the ‘learned’ and accomplished Edward Wortley Montagu inherited all his ‘tastes and talents for sensual delights.’
In the same year, 1762, the English consul at Alexandria was a Scandinavian, a native either of Denmark or Sweden, named Feroe. His wife was a beautiful young woman, born at Leghorn in 1741. Her father (sometimes said to be an innkeeper) was English, or of English descent. His name was Dormer, the name of a family that had once given a duchess to one of the Italian states, and that has given a line of barons to the English peerage since the year 1615 to the present day. The mother of the lady in question was an Italian; her maiden name was Maria Sciale. There were several children of this marriage, but we have only to notice the beautiful Caroline Dormer, who married Consul Feroe, of Alexandria. This Caroline is said to have been as much distinguished for her virtue as for her beauty. The Dormer family record (in Lord Wharncliffe’s possession), in which this double distinction is chronicled, perhaps, ‘doth protest too much’ with respect to the virtue, as that quality would now be understood; but of this the reader may judge for himself.
The consul and his wife were happily settled at Alexandria, when Wortley Montagu was sojourning in that city. Her beauty, as the Scripture phrase expresses it, took his mind prisoner. The object he had in view—that of carrying her off from her husband—seemed unattainable; but Montagu did not allow himself to be deterred by difficulties, and he found a way to surmount them. It was the way of a very unscrupulous man, but he had few scruples in compassing any end. He appeared as the friend of the family. He made no advances to the lady, but he manifested great interest in the welfare of her husband. Egypt was too dull a place for a man of such abilities. Montagu succeeded in inducing Feroe to leave it for a while on some pretended mission to Europe, which was to prove very lucrative to the poor consul, who took men and things for what they seemed to be. After Feroe’s departure there came news of his sudden illness. A little additional time elapsed, and then came intelligence of his death. The decease of the consul in Holland was officially attested, and in 1763 Montagu presented the mournful document to the beautiful young widow. After she had made herself mistress of its contents, and saw herself left alone in a strange land, he took pity on her exquisite grief, made love to her at once, and proposed a remedy for her loneliness by her taking him for husband. The fair young widow was not hard to woo. She did not indeed yield at once. She suggested some becoming objections. She, a Roman Catholic, had erred, she thought, in marrying Mr. Feroe, who was a Protestant. She could not bring herself to repeat the error, but she intimated that she might be won if her handsome lover would turn from his heretical ways and become a true son of the true church. As nothing more than this trifle stood as an obstacle to his success, Montagu resolved to become Roman Catholic. Perhaps he reflected long enough on the matter to persuade himself that he had a true call to that church. At all events, he professed to be somewhat divinely driven. He repaired to Jerusalem, and made his profession at the fountain-head of Christianity. In October 1764 Montagu presented himself in the Holy City to Father Paul, prefect of the missions in Egypt and Cyprus. The traveller said that he had come to Jerusalem rather out of curiosity than devotion, but that the hand of God had fallen upon him. From his youth up, he stated (truly enough) that he had been the dupe of the devil. He made the statement with manifestations of grief, especially as he had obstinately resisted the impulses of the Holy Spirit, for which he now expressed penitence and humbly sought pardon. Father Paul gave heed to the repentant sinner’s statement, and finding him cleansed from all heretical depravity, freed him from all pains and penalties decreed by the church against heretics, gave him plenary absolution, and received him into communion with Rome. Father Paul thought much of his convert, whom he styles, in the official certificate of Montagu’s conversion, ‘Dominus Comes de Montagu’ (as every Englishman abroad in those days used to be called ‘mi lord,’) and the good father bids all the faithful to refrain from snubbing the convert, but on the contrary, to rejoice and be merry over him, as they would be over the unexpected finding of a treasure. A copy of the original document, which still sparkles with the silver dust showered over the finely written Italian letters, was printed in ‘Notes and Queries,’ January 4, 1873.
There is no reason to doubt that soon after this act was accomplished Mr. Wortley Montagu and Madame Feroe née Dormer, were duly married. Their conjugal felicity, however, was slightly disturbed by the reappearance of the consul Feroe, who very naturally expressed the greatest surprise at the household arrangements which had taken place in his absence, and he laid claim to his beautiful wife. The Catholic lady was persuaded that her first marriage with the Protestant consul was null and void, the validity of such a union not being recognised by her church. At the same time she looked with some doubt, or she affected so to look, on the contract with her second husband. Appeal was made to the law tribunals of Tuscany, and pending the appeal, the wife of two husbands retired to a religious house at Antoura, in Syria. Montagu solaced himself with travel: he possibly knew that Italian judges were tardy in coming to conclusions. Whither he wended is quite easy to tell, for in 1765 Mr. Montagu was encountered at Venice. Mr. Sharp, in his Letters from Italy, has one dated Venice, September 1765, in which he gives the following account:
One of the most curious sights we saw among these curiosities, was the famous Mr. Montagu, who was performing quarantine at the Lazaretto. All the English made a point of paying him their compliments in that place, and he seemed not a little pleased with their attention. It may be supposed that visitors are not suffered to approach the person of any who is performing quarantine. They are divided by a passage of about seven or eight feet wide. Mr. Montagu was just arrived from the East; he had travelled through the Holy Land, Egypt, Armenia, &c., with the Old and New Testaments in his hands for his direction, which, he told us, had proved unerring guides. He had particularly taken the road of the Israelites through the Wilderness, and had observed that part of the Red Sea which they had passed through. He had visited Mount Sinai, and flattered himself he had been on the very part of the rock where Moses spake face to face with God Almighty. His beard reached down to his breast, being of two years and a half growth; and the dress of his head was Armenian. He was in the most enthusiastic raptures with Arabia and the Arabs. Like theirs, his bed was the ground, his food rice, his beverage, water, his luxury, a pipe and coffee. His purpose was to return once more among that virtuous people, whose morals and hospitality, he said, were such, that were you to drop your cloak in the highway, you would find it there six months afterwards, an Arab being too honest a man to pick up what he knows belongs to another; and, were you to offer money for the provision you meet with, he would ask you, with concern, why you had so mean an opinion of his benevolence, to suppose him capable of accepting a gratification. ‘Therefore, money,’ said he, ‘in that country, is of very little use, as it is only necessary for the purchase of garments, which, in so warm a climate, are very few and of very little value.’ He distinguishes, however, between the wild and the civilised Arab, and proposes to publish an account of all that I have written.
In 1765, Wortley Montagu (while sojourning at Pisa), wrote his well-known account of his journey to ‘The Written Mountains’ in the East. It is a clever and modest record; his conclusion being that the rock inscriptions were undecipherable, and probably would not, if interpreted, be worth the outlay of means. This account was read before the Royal Society. In March 1766 he was still at Pisa, whence he wrote to M. Varsy, a merchant from Marseilles, established at Rosetta, and married to a sister of Mrs. Feroe, or Mrs. Montagu, as the Tuscan judges might decide. The letter in French (now, with others quoted below, in Lord Wharncliffe’s possession,) contains the following personal matter:—
... On my way back I shall go through Alexandria and Rosetta to see you, and also to see whether I cannot establish myself at Rosetta rather than in Syria. As my father-in-law sets out for Syria next week, I shall not be obliged to take the shortest road; my wife will be at ease, and I shall have at least time to assure you how charmed I shall be to find opportunities of testifying to you my gratitude, and of renewing our old and dear friendship—a friendship which will always be dear to me, and with which I shall never cease to be, &c., &c.
D. Montaigu.
I have before me the original ‘dispensation,’ to enable him to neglect keeping Lent in the usual abstinent way. That he should take the trouble to procure such a power would seem to be warrant for a sincerity for which we can hardly credit him. It is dated ‘March 6, 1767,’ and he is styled ‘Excellentissimus Dominus Eduardus de Comitibus Montagu.’ Meanwhile the question of the marriage was still undecided. The ecclesiastical and civil judges were perhaps not long in forming, but they were very slow in delivering judgment. Mrs. Montagu, however, or ‘the Countess,’ as she was sometimes called, seems to have formed a judgment of her own; or, at all events, to have accepted that of her second husband. They lived together at Smyrna, where for two years both applied themselves to the study of Turkish, in which language, as in others of the East, Montagu became a proficient scholar. On New Year’s day, 1769, he addressed a joyous letter to his brother-in-law Varsy. The Tuscan and the Roman tribunals had at length pronounced on the great question. The rich and orthodox second husband was declared to be the legal possessor of the lady, and her previous marriage with the poor heretical consul was decreed to be no marriage at all.
You cannot imagine, thus runs the letter, the great joy I feel at being able to tell you that Mr. Feroe has the final decree of the Court of the Nuncio at Florence. Accordingly, as Madame is already here (Smyrna), we reckon on being as soon as possible at Rosetta. But prudence requires that we should first write to you to beg you to find us a suitable house. That in which we were before would be good enough, but I think and fear that the consul may have it. Without the servants, there are myself, my wife, and her father (monsieur son père). We live more in the Turkish fashion than ever. Accordingly, the women’s apartments must be comfortable and convenient for the salamlike (sic), and there must be a chamber for my father-in-law. You know what is necessary. The quarter in which we live must be free from disturbance, from plague, and from robbers. Have the kindness to inform me if the country is tranquil, and if you believe that there is no danger from the government; for here no end of stories is being circulated. Write by the first ship. Be convinced of the constant friendship with which I am, my very dear friend, entirely yours,
D. Montaigu.
There seems to have been some obstruction to impede the desired settlement in Egypt. In a letter, dated ‘Antoura’ (Syria), ‘January, 1771,’ there is the following passage:—
Many accidents have prevented me from following my design and my inclination for Rosetta; and indeed it seems more prudent to wait till the government (in Egypt) is authorised (affirmé) by the consent of the Ottoman Porte, before we establish ourselves in Egypt. However, here I am nearer to you, and I shall not fail to follow my first plan as soon as circumstances will allow. Madame thanks you for your souvenir, and sends many compliments. Keep yourself well, continue to love me, and be assured of the constant and perfect friendship of your very humble servant,
Chev. De Montaigu.
It may be mentioned by the way, that Wortley Montagu reckoned among his friends men not at all likely to entertain respect for worthless individuals. ‘My learned friend, the Bishop of Ossory,’ is a phrase which bears one of these indications. It was written at Cairo. Meanwhile, here is another characteristic note from Cyprus. The writer speaks of his wife, as if the laundress of old no longer existed.
À. M. Joseph Varsy, négociant français, à Rosette.
Chipre, 24 juin 1771.
Monsieur,—Enfin, mon très-cher ami, je touche au moment de vous embrasser. Cette lettre vous sera envoyée d’Alexandrie par ma femme, qui va à Rosette avec M. son père et Mademoiselle sa sœur. Je vous supplie de leur procurer ou une maison commode, ou un appartement suffisant dans l’oquel (?), où ils attendront jusqu’à ce que je leur écrive du Caire, où je vais par voie de Damiette.
Chev. De Montaigu.
In July, he writes thus from Damietta:—
À M. Joseph Varsy, négociant français, à Rosette.
Damiette, 14 juillet 1771.
Me voici, mon tres-chèr ami, arrivé proche de vous; aussi je me flatte que dans peu j’aurai l’honneur de vous embrasser. Ma femme doit être arrivée à Alexandrie, et elle m’attendra à Rosette. Ayez la bonté de lui faire avoir un appartement, ou deux, s’il le faut, et de l’assister en ce dont elle aura besoin pour la maison. Je crois être assez assuré de votre amitié pour être persuadé que vous ne me refuserez pas ce service. Je vous écrirai du Caire le moment que j’arriverai. En attendant soyez assuré que je serai toujours, comme vous m’avez toujours connu,
Votre très-humble serviteur et véritable ami,
Chev. De Montaigu.
Five days later, he acknowledges, from Alexandria, the arrival of a box of pipes, from Constantinople. Soon after, the Egyptian home was established. It was on a thoroughly Eastern footing, and the two chief inmates seem to have devoted themselves to the study of Eastern languages and literature. But in August 1772 the home seems to have been abandoned by Montagu. There was a report that he had embraced Mohammedanism, in order to visit Mecca in safety, and that his wife having refused to follow his example, or to recognise a negro boy who was with him as his heir, he separated from her. The following note shows that he was again roaming, but also that he was careful for his wife’s comforts and on friendly terms with her family.
(À Varsy.)
Alexandrette, août 4, 1772.
Nous voici, mon très-cher ami, après une heureuse navigation de trois jours, arrivés à Alexandrette. C’est un village précisément comme Tor. Nous y avons trouvé des chevaux et un domestique de M. Belleville. Ainsi, nous partons ce soir pour Aleppe, sans attendre l’escorte. Les gens que l’on dit obsèdent le chemin ne sont que cinq ou six; et nous sommes trois, bien armés, sans compter M. Belleville: ainsi nous n’avons rien à craindre. Il n’y a pas de peste, ni rien de semblable. Le Pacha est à Aleppe et non à Damas; assez loin de votre maison. Je vous prie d’avoir toutes les attentions que vous pouvez pour ma femme. Mes complemens à ce que vous avez de plus cher. M. Raymond vous enverra ... une pellisse neuve; il vous en dira aussi le prix; si ma femme la trouve belle et le prix honnête elle la prendra, et M. Raymond vous la passera avec compte; si non, vous en disposerez selon les ordres de M. R. Adieu. Je monte à cheval.
Similar notes tell of his progress, of certain inconveniences from being too long in the saddle, exposed to the sun; and in the autumn, of his approaching return home. In September he writes to Varsy:
I am well persuaded of the care you take of our house, and I beg you to hurry on the workmen, and that everything be done absolutely in accordance with my wife’s inclinations. Let the men put up the paper as she orders it, but let no one touch my room below, unless he can paint it perfectly in the Arab fashion.
After expressing surprise that Mohammed Kiaja, a supposed friend, is intriguing against him, and stating that if his return to Rosetta should create any difficulties or perils, it would be better to have them smoothed away while he is at a distance, he writes:
... J’ai dépensé ici 800 piastres; il est vrai que je les ai dépensés en des choses qui valent plus chez nous, et quand les dames auront pris ce qui les accommode, nous ferons faire de l’argent du reste; mais en attendant cela vous incommode; il faut en ce cas-là prendre de l’argent à intérêt pour mon compte, et disant que c’est pour moi pour ne pas prodiguer mon nom. Quand la cuisine est finie, il faut blanchir toute l’ancienne cuisine et autres endroits qui sont sur son niveau....
In a letter from Latackia, October 1, 1772, he speaks of projects promising great results; ‘broad rivers’ (he says) ‘are the sum of narrow streams.’ In a still later letter the project seems to refer to pearls and rich stuffs. The letter concludes thus:
Je vous prie de me faire faire, par Schieck Ali, un catalogue de tous mes livres arabes, turcs, et persans, qui sont manuscrits, et qu’il mette vis-à-vis de chacun le prix suivant qu’il les estime.
This indicates an approaching break up. The cause of it does not appear, except as far as can be made out in a letter from
Alexandrie, 13 oct. 1772.
... Je vois que M. Dormer veut rester à Rosette, et en ce cas je n’y resterai pas. J’ai dit autant à Madame, pour lui donner le tems de se retirer à Alexandrie avant mon arrivée. Je coucherai demain à Raimhé; dimanche à Aboukir, lundi à Etikon, et mardi, s’il plaît à Dieu, je serai à Rosette, et si j’y trouve M. Dormer je n’y resterai qu’autant qu’il faudra pour empaqueter quelques livres, car je ne veux pas rester dans la même ville avec M. Dormer. J’aurais été charmé de le voir ici, mais je ne veux pas le voir à Rosette; ainsi, mon cher, persuadez-le de partir immédiatement; car si je le trouve je n’y coucherai pas; cela est certain.
What the ground of dissension was that induced Montagu to declare that he would not remain in the same city with Dormer is not known. Whatever it was, the Egyptian home was broken up. The wife and her sister subsequently established themselves, temporarily, at Marseilles, definitively at Nancy. Montagu moved about the Continent in moody restlessness. In 1773 and the following year he settled for awhile in Venice. He lived in frequent retirement, and to all outward appearance in as truly a Turkish fashion as if he were a faithful child of Islam.
While Mr. Montagu was residing at Venice an illustrious traveller, the Duke of Hamilton, arrived in that city, under the care of his physician, Dr. John Moore, afterwards the author of ‘Zeluco,’ and the father of a glorious son, Sir John Moore the hero of Corunna. The Doctor had probably talked with his patron or ward about the more eccentric traveller, of whom he had more to say than most people as to the affair between Montagu and the Jew Payba, Moore having been official medical man at the English Embassy in France, when Lord Albemarle was ambassador, and Montagu was appealing to him for aid and protection. At Venice, the Duke, according to Moore, ‘had the curiosity’ (he does not say the courtesy) ‘to wait on this extraordinary man.’ ‘Montagu,’ says the Doctor, in his published letters,
met his Grace at the stair-head, and led us through some apartments furnished in the Venetian manner, into an inner room in quite a different style. There were no chairs, but he desired us to seat ourselves on a sofa, whilst he placed himself on a cushion on the floor, with his legs crossed in the Turkish fashion. A young black slave sat by him, and a venerable old man, with a long beard, served us with coffee. After this collation some aromatic gums were brought, and burnt in a little silver vessel. Mr. Montagu held his nose over the steam for some minutes, and sniffed up the perfume with peculiar satisfaction; he afterwards endeavoured to collect the smoke with his hands, spreading and rubbing it carefully along his beard, which hung in hoary ringlets to his girdle.... We had a great deal of conversation with this venerable looking person, who is, to the last degree, acute, communicative, and entertaining, and in whose discourse and manners are blended the vivacity of a Frenchman with the gravity of a Turk.
Moore does not say that Montagu had assumed the Mohammedan faith, but simply that he considered the Turkish way of life to surpass that of all other nations. Indeed they deserved to be ‘the happiest of mankind,’ if they were, as Montagu held them to be, distinguished for integrity, hospitality, and most other virtues. Egypt was, in his eyes, ‘a perfect paradise,’ to which he was longing to return; and he was convinced that if the Israelites of old could have had their own way they would have stuck to the land and the flesh-pots and driven the Egyptians into Canaan. But he added, with a fine sense of what the occasion required, that ‘it had been otherwise ordered, for wise purposes, of which it did not become us to judge.’
Subsequently Montagu returned the visit of the Duke and his medical guardian. He seated himself on a sofa with his legs drawn up under him, as the most natural and convenient position that a gentleman could take. Moore, in the course of the conversation which ensued, slily adverted to the Mohammedan views with regard to women. The quasi Turk became Oriental to the very ends of his fingers, and grew eloquent on this delicate question. Of course, he defended polygamy and concubinage, even as Solomon had wisely observed it. Women liked neither, and but for this foolish objection they would have had influence enough to have spread Islam as one religion throughout Europe. The men hated Christianity on more valid ground. Auricular confession they abhorred. ‘No Turk of any delicacy would ever allow his wife (particularly if he had but one) to hold private conference with a man on any pretext whatever.’ When the Doctor (for the Duke seems to have been generally silent) insinuated that the Turks had not the same grounds to hate Protestantism, Montagu remarked that the Turks could not tolerate the Christian idea of the equality of women and men, nor accept the Christian view of an exceedingly dull heaven, where the souls of ordinary women were to be assembled, instead of the graceful bodies of Houris, who were to welcome the sons of Islam to a joyous paradise.
The self-exile continued to be the observed of all curious travellers; but he directed his steps at last in the direction of home, if with no decided resolution to return thither. The cause, perhaps, is found in a phrase of a letter from Mrs. Delany, written in February 1776: ‘Mr. Wortley Montagu’s wife is dead.’ This was the laundress, his only legitimate wife, who had married him in his youthful time. Her husband had recently been entertaining Romney, and Romney had painted the portrait of his friend in Turkish costume, which bespeaks the talent of the artist and the sad yet manly beauty of the friend. The latter had been the victim of more lies and jests than any man of his time, and these were multiplied now, but they are not worth repeating. The wanderer himself was near the end of his course. Two months subsequent to his lawful wife’s decease he died, after a brief illness, at Padua. He is said to have expressed a hope that he should die as a good Moslem; but that he was held to have died in the Roman Catholic faith is best proved by the fact that he lies beneath a church roof in Padua, and with a Latin inscription over him, which describes him as ‘ubique civis,’ and which credits him with nearly all the qualities that can dignify humanity. If much eccentricity has been ascribed to him by the world, it is because his acts and words gave some warrant for it. There was scarcely any condition in life but in some country or another he had assumed it. He used to boast that he had never committed a small folly; and his gambling was certainly, at one time, of gigantic proportions. A memoir of him, published in Dublin two years after his death, reckoned among his boyish assumptions those of link-boy, chimney-sweep, and shoe-black! The same veracious volume numbered among his wives, with the English laundress, a Dutch Jewess, a Turkish lady, a Greek girl, a Circassian damsel, and an Arabian maiden. Even to the English laundress he is said to have been married by an official of the Fleet prison. His old tutor, Forster, claimed the merit of having written the work on Ancient Republics, but this claim, made when the author could not answer it, was universally scouted, as was the contemptible pretender. Lady Louisa Stuart, referring to the various ladies who assumed a right to bear his name, remarks:—
More than one lady took the title of his wife, with or without the pretext of a ceremony which, it is to be feared, he would not scruple to go through any number of times, if requisite for the accomplishment of his wishes. But the last person so circumstanced, and the loudest in asserting her claims, met him upon equal ground, having herself a husband living, from whom she had eloped; therefore, she at least could not complain of deception.
The above lady was the ci-devant Miss Dormer. She appeared in London soon after Edward Wortley Montagu’s death; and in her family papers it is stated that she received one hundred pounds annually from Coutts’s out of her alleged husband’s estate. For a long period she resided at Nancy, and she may yet live in the recollection of not very old persons, English and others, who dwelt in that pleasant city in their youth, for the last of the wives of Wortley Montagu survived till January 1821. She lived and died as Countess of Montagu, and her death finally closed a romance of real life, the unfortunate hero of which would probably have won honourable fame if he had been blessed with a mother of a different quality.
ROYAL AND IMPERIAL JOKERS.
In that marvellous work of history, the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ Gibbon somewhere remarks, in reference to sovereign ladies in love, that they are by their social position, or rather by their position above society, placed at a manifest disadvantage, inasmuch as the first advances must come from themselves. If this was the case in the olden time, it is not exactly so now—though, of course, the outer world knows little about the matter. Many princesses have not been at all troubled at the idea of having to speak, or look, first; and the great Russian Czarina had as little embarrassment in choosing her lovers as she had in murdering that holy and august madman, her husband.
The well-favoured individuals on whom high and mighty princesses have been ready to smile had a delicate task to perform. They had to look more than twice before they leaped, and were compelled to feel their way very cautiously lest a false step or a too boldly ventured word should cost them their head. But after all this perilous condition of aspiring lovers was as nothing compared with the dangers of too wittily endowed courtiers who should indulge in jesting with a king, especially of the olden type and of mediæval and morose temper. When the courtiers of Amarose, King of Little Britain, gently awoke him with the glee—
‘Awake, awake your royal nob,
The kettle boils upon the hob’—
his surly and too suddenly aroused majesty descended to his tea, toast, and eggs, entered the breakfast-room with the gracious greeting, ‘My lords and gentlemen, get out!’ King Arthur, in ‘Tom Thumb,’ returns homage in much the same civil humour. These, however, are but stage kings—kings of shreds and patches. The flesh-and-blood, genuine, despotic monarch was a far more dreadful animal.
Jesting with kings, particularly uninvited—why, it was as if a swimmer, however experienced, should venture within the smooth but death-bearing current of Niagara, which inevitably carries all within its power over the Falls. People have played little teasing jokes with elephants, and when the jokers have forgotten all about it the gravely majestic beast has put his foot upon the offender, and crushed the humour out of him for ever. It has been just so with malice-bearing monarchs, and with courtiers who thought they might joke with them. The incarnation of all such monarchs existed in the person of an African king named Chaka. He was given to joking at others, and woe betide them if they did not burst with ecstacy at the joke; but if a ‘fellow of infinite humour’ happened to cap the royal joke with a better, Chaka broke into hilarity, which he ended by exclaiming, ‘Cut off that wretch’s head; he has made me laugh.’
The Cæsars must have been almost as dreadfully dangerous men to joke with as Chaka. The great Julius, indeed, after he became great, had no leisure for jesting, but was the object of some popular jokes which he took with indifference. The guests of Augustus were afraid to ‘crack a joke’ in his presence. They would whisper one to a neighbour, and then turn pale if the emperor invited them to ‘speak up.’ The imperial table was as grand and dull as that of the copper Augustus, Louis the Fourteenth, and the emperor had recourse to merryandrews, just as the Grand Monarque had to harlequins. But the harlequins of those days were gentlemen and scholars. The grim Tiberius, on the other hand, was remarkably facetious. His delight was to puzzle his learned guests with unanswerable questions, such as, ‘What was the name of the song the Syrens sang?’ and the like. Fancy half a dozen members of the Society of Antiquaries dining with her Majesty and being gravely asked who built the marble halls the Bohemian girl dreamt she dwelt in? or what was the Christian name of the ‘Minstrel Boy?’ and at what period ‘Auld lang syne’ had been young? Nevertheless, Tiberius was a nicer man to deal with than Caligula, all of whose jests were brutally cruel, in words, and oftener in deeds. What a serious joke was that when, having nothing on but the linen apron of a victim-slayer, he raised the mallet, and instead of slaying the beast, knocked out the brains of the sacrificing priest! Claudius was too huge a feeder to have appetite for wit; but he would have eaten the whole beast that his predecessor should have killed. Yet Claudius, half beast himself, had a good deal of the scholar in him; as Nero had, who loved science, admired art, was mildly witty, and therewith as savage as an insane hyæna. We must except the occasions of his visiting the theatre, when he sat in an upper seat, and found delight in flinging nuts down upon the bald head of the prætor below. That official was as proud of the attention as if every nut had been an especial honour. Joyless Galba had none of the Neronic fun in him. But though not mirthful himself, Galba could smile when he heard the popular slang name, in allusion to his flat nose, ‘Simius.’ His successor, Otho, was just such a wit as a man might be expected to be who washed his face in asses’ milk. If witty men went away from him feeling dull and heavy, it was the result of their exchanging ideas with their imperial master. He had his wit at second-hand, as Vitellius had, who got his jokes from a stage-player and charioteer. In more modern times, when Astley’s was in its glory, and the clown of the ring a joker that people went to listen to, that circus clown got his jokes, not from his own brains, but from the Westminster boys. Jokes used to be made at Westminster as they now are at the Stock Exchange, where fresh batches are served each morning, like hot rolls. But to return to the Cæsars. Perhaps Vespasian was a greater joker than any of them, but his jokes were often broad and scurrilous. Titus was rather gracious than given to jesting, though he enjoyed one sorry joke, in promising to every suitor that his request should be granted. They went away radiant. ‘Every one,’ he said, ‘ought to depart joyfully from the presence of his prince;’ and then, ‘the delight of mankind’ thought no more of his promise. The chief recreation of the gloomy Domitian was in playing dice; but he always won. Every antagonist knew what the joke would cost him if he beat the emperor.
Altogether, those Twelve Cæsars were men compounded of the most opposite qualities, with a small modicum of what is called wit among the whole of them. Out of all those who followed, one alone, Hadrian, made a standing and a sterling joke—a joke which has descended to us and added a slang phrase to our vulgar tongue. To ‘scrape acquaintance’ comes to us from Hadrian. He was at the public baths one day when he saw one of his veteran soldiers scraping his body with a tile. That was such poor luxury that Hadrian ordered that his old comrade should be supplied with more suitable cleansing materials, and also with money. On a subsequent occasion when the emperor again went to the bath, the spectacle before him was highly amusing. A score of old soldiers who had fought under Hadrian were standing in the water, and each was currying himself with a tile and wincing at the self-inflicted rubbing. The emperor perfectly understood what he saw and what was the purpose of the sight. ‘Ha! ha!’ he exclaimed, ‘you had better scrape one another, my good fellows!’ He added, ‘You certainly shall not scrape acquaintance with me!’
Heliogabalus was perhaps the most practical joker among the imperial jesters. We have seen at the Surrey Oval, in old days, eleven one-legged Greenwich pensioners playing cricket against eleven pensioners with only one arm. By the way, the one-legged men had the advantage, as the one-armed men often fell in stooping for the ball, wanting the missing arm to balance themselves withal. It was the humour of Heliogabalus to get together companies of individuals all marked by the same peculiarity. He would now have at dinner a dozen baldheaded men, or twelve ladies with one eye each; he would have been delighted to have got hold of triple assortments of the three famous sisters who had but one eye and one tooth between them! Failing that, the ‘lord of the sun,’ as he called himself, was content to have a score of hunchbacks, or of flat-nosed men, or squinting women. He is said on one occasion to have put into a very small chamber, where dinner was prepared, so many excessively fat and hungry men that they had no room for anything but to perspire, and not much for that. Heliogabalus was an expensive joker, but then his good people paid for the fun, and he might therefore indulge his humour without restraint at the time, or remorse after it. His supremely imperial joke lay in placing a number of guests on table-couches (guests reclined, and did not sit down to dinner) which were blown up with air instead of being stuffed with wool. At a moment when the cups were filled to the brim with the choicest wine, and the guests were lifting them to their lips with anticipations of liquid Elysium, a tap was drawn beneath the carpet, which suddenly emptied the couches of their air, and consequently tumbled all the recliners on to the floor, where they lay pell-mell, with wine spilt, goblets lost, and utter confusion prevailing, except on the face of Heliogabalus, who looked on and indulged in laughter inextinguishable. Having but indifferent appetite himself, he was fond of sauces, and he highly rewarded any inventor of a sauce that was to the imperial liking. But if it failed to tickle his very sacred majesty’s palate he had recourse to a joke of a very practical character indeed; that is to say, he condemned the unlucky candidate for his favour to live upon nothing else but the sauce in question until he had discovered another more successful in its object. Fancy having to live on anchovy, without fish, for a twelvemonth, or catsup and a little bread, from the Ides of March to the Kalends of December! Think of what your palate and liver would be had you nothing to sit down to but pickled walnuts without the chop, or mustard without the beef, from Christmas to Easter, even if your wits enabled you to make deliverance then.
There was grim but honest joking in the Emperor Carus. The frugal man was once seated, as was his wont, on the grass, supping on dry bread, grey peas, and stale bacon. He gave audience at the same time to Persian ambassadors who came to sue for peace. As the emperor was about to reply, he opened his mouth for the reception of a huge spoonful of peas, but he paused to say—at the same time taking off his skull-cap with his disengaged hand—‘Look here! If your master does not confess the superiority of Rome, I will render Persia as destitute of trees as my head is of hair.’ Having said which, he swallowed his shovelful of peas, and chuckled as the Persian legates went homeward with that significant message.
After all, this joke was made up of the rudest boasting. There is something in it and its attending circumstances which remind one of the last war in Europe. Rome declared war against Persia, and the Roman cry was ‘The Tigris for a boundary!’ ‘To Susa!’ ‘To Ecbatana!’ and so forth. The later cry of the enraptured Gauls, ‘Le Rhin! le Rhin!’ ‘À Berlin! à Berlin!’ seem like Irish echoes of the old cry. What disaster came of it Gibbon tells and readers of history remember, but even among the degenerate Romans there was no one ignoble enough to set an example to the poor French feuilletonist, who said of the brave German officers that they would be too proud to brush French boots with their blonde moustaches. Brave Frenchmen must have shuddered at this wretched jest, and Louis Napoleon, who loved a good joke though he never made one, must have curled his lip with indignation if he read the piece of miserable wit over his coffee at Metz.
In Prussia, which dates as a kingdom from the year 1702, there is not one of its seven kings who can be called a wit, though more than one had what is far better, strong, far-seeing, uncommon sense. Unclean in their vagaries the Prussian royal jokers have assuredly been, and one or two admitted of no liberty whatever being taken with them, as far as repartee went. So stern were the most of the Prussian margraves, electors, and dukes, that, to express the peril of joking with them, there arose the well-known popular proverb, ‘It is advisable not to eat cherries with princes.’ The queens of Prussia, on the other hand, brought their own wit with them into the royal family, and there was not a sharper lady among them than Queen Sophia Charlotte, the first queen of Prussia. Leibnitz, whom she delighted to honour as a man and a philosopher, once asked her if she could imagine the infinitely little? ‘Why, of course I can!’ exclaimed the hilarious queen. ‘What a question to ask the wife of Frederick the First!’
There was good common sense in the humour of Frederick the Great of Prussia. In his hours of joviality with his boon companions, smoking and drinking around a table, in a cottage specially devoted to such recreation, the king was understood to be absent. Frederick gave the loosest rein to his own spirit of jesting, and took the roughest jokes of his guests with perfect good temper. He has been immoderately praised for this control over himself; but in truth there was none. He could always escape from raillery that was tinged with bitterness. At critical moments, when an ordinary mortal, hard pressed by satirical assailants, would lose his equanimity and fly into a rage, Fritz could quietly remark, ‘Friends, the king has come back;’ after which observation he neither joked himself nor was attacked by the jokers. Neither did the king bear any ill-will if his own jesting was turned roughly against him, and he was made to smart by a repartee more stinging than the royal sarcasm which gave it birth.
There was often a childlike simplicity about the old soldier-king. He would joke and laugh with the children in the streets of Potsdam, as he slowly rode along on his veteran Molwitz gray. He loved to have them at his stirrup, and watch them struggling to kiss his boot or pat the proud old horse; and he would laugh joyously if their young throats set up the famous chorus:
Victoria! with us is God!
The haughty foe lies there!
One Saturday afternoon they carried the matter further than his patience would tolerate, and Fritz, raising his crutched cane menacingly, cried out in affected anger, ‘Young rascals! to school with you all! to school!’ The cry was met by a counter-shout from the ragamuffins of ‘Ha! ha! Papa Fritz don’t know that there’s no school on Saturday afternoon!’ At which the absolute king rode away rebuked. His humour, however, made such rebuffs welcome. He took truths from the popular tongue with alacrity. After the Seven Years’ War, riding towards Sans Souci, he recognised an old fruit-woman near the Brandenburg Gate, whom he remembered to have seen there before the war broke out. Fritz at once greeted her with a ‘Well, mother, how have the times been treating you?’ ‘Middling,’ was the concise reply; ‘but where have you been for this ever so long?’ ‘Don’t you know, mother, I have been making war for these seven years past?’ ‘How should I know?’ asked the venerable Pomona, ‘and why should I care?
“Rabble fight, and rabble slay;
And rabble are friends another day.”’
Fritz laughed aloud, and rode away in high good humour. Do you think it would be safe, say, for a prince of the blood to enter into colloquy with the apple women at the Marble Arch or the fruit-sellers at St. James’s Gate, when the guard is being relieved? Frederick William the Third had a quiet humour of his own. There is one sample of it which reminds one of what Henry the Fourth said to the mayor of a town whose speech the king could hardly hear for the accompanying braying of a donkey: ‘One at a time, gentlemen, if you please!’ When Frederick William visited one of his provincial towns for the first time, the chief clerical official of the district read to him a bombastically inflated address. The king grew uneasy as the flattery was piled, and at length he cut it all short, with an angry observation to his adjutant, Colonel von Witzleben, ‘Can’t stand any more of it! The man is pelting me with untruths.’ The king and the crown prince were good mimics, and both brought their powers into play at a moment when a farce was being acted in Berlin, which attracted all play-goers who loved a laugh, king and court included. There was a favourite scene in this farce, wherein a workman and his master quarrelled and were reconciled. Great fun was caused by the way in which the workman propitiated his wrathful master, by awkwardly holding out his hand, and saying, in dialect, ‘Now, measter, nevertheless, no animosity on no account!’ To this, said again and again, the master invariably replied, ‘You know me better; am I not always that one which’—— In the expression given to these phrases by the two low comedians there was a world of stage humour which delighted their audience, the sovereign and his family, as much as any there. It happened at this time that the king was kept waiting for his dinner by the tardiness of the crown prince to appear. Now if we common mortals can bear only with impatience being kept so waiting, you may judge if a king with an appetite considers such an offence to be much below high treason. Frederick William at last sat down in dudgeon; all his family sat down too, in silence, looking at the crown prince’s vacant chair, with a feeling that there was a storm coming. When his majesty had just concluded his soup, his tardy royal highness entered the room. Seeing how matters stood, he put on the sheepish look of the actor who played the workman in the farce, approached the king in a loutish fashion, extended his hand awkwardly, and exclaimed with country accent, ‘Now, measter, nevertheless, no animosity on no account!’ Frederick William took up the joke immediately. He put on the look of the other actor, assumed his air and accent, and answered in his very voice, squeezing his son’s hand the while, ‘Fritz, thou knowest me better; am I not always that one which’—— You may suppose what a satisfied audience listened to that bit of dialogue; and may lose yourself in conjecture as to how a similar scene might be gone through with H.R.H. the Prince of Wales and H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh giving imitations of Mr. Compton and Mr. Buckstone in ‘Box and Cox.’
Kings of England in the olden time seldom made jokes, and more seldom allowed them to be made by others, excepting professional jesters. When we come to the Norman time we find the Conquistor so little able to digest a joke that he declared war against the King of France for making one at the expense of William’s obesity. The latter, indeed, did try to answer the jest, but the answer missed its aim, and William lost his life because he could not understand humour. Rufus, on the contrary, indulged in such jesting as one might expect in an ill-bred bachelor king of loose principles and looser companions. The first Henry is handed down to us by successive historians as a man of very facetious humour, but they afford no samples of the humorous expression. Stephen had little leisure for anything but to keep his seat in the saddle into which he had leaped after a severe struggle. The humour of Henry the Second was of a sad-coloured hue; as it well might be. It was sardonically indulged when he caused to be painted on the wall of a chamber at Windsor and on the ceiling of a room at Winchester a singular picture. The artist is nameless, but he must have been the Landseer or the Ansdell of his day. The subject was an old eagle attacked by his four eaglets. The youngest and fiercest of the four was savagely picking at the parent eagle’s eyes. The king used to smile a melancholy smile as courtiers gazed at this picture, and did not penetrate, or seemed not to penetrate, the allegory which it presented. Probably when they were beyond royal sight and hearing they made good guesses at it, or the king interpreted it, and then it was no treason to give circulation to Henry’s interpretation. The old eagle was the monarch himself. The four eaglets were his obstinately rebellious sons. The ruffianly youngest bird savagely trying to peck the parent’s eyes out was the youngest and most ruffianly of his sons, John. In that form the half-mad and most melancholy Henry manifested his humour with regard to family affairs—an example which has not been generally followed. In one of his sons, Richard the First, there was much readiness of wit; and he especially loved to turn it against the priests. To make a joke at the cost of an ecclesiastic was as good to him as slaying an infidel. John’s jokes took a cruel form, drawing Jews’ teeth to accelerate their disposition to lend money, and behaving noisily at divine worship with an idea of humiliating some priest or bishop who had offended him. His son Henry loved the arts and good company. Of the three Edwards not one has come to our knowledge as a joker, but the son of the last, the Black Prince, did once so far stoop from his dignity as to, half jocularly, half angrily, call an archbishop an ass. The second Richard never had an opportunity for joking; and of the next three kings, Henry the Fifth alone, when Prince of Wales, is said to have aired his wit a-nights about Eastcheap. But what Shakespeare has made witty in relation never took place in point of fact. All the Eastcheap doings are apocryphal, and the Boar’s Head never had beneath its roof-tree those joyous princely spirits in whom we shall nevertheless continue to believe. Again, of the third Richard’s jesting humour we have no other example than what Shakespeare and Colley Cibber have invented for him. The seventh Henry was a dull deep man; the eighth, one to laugh with if you felt especially sure it would not shake your head off your shoulders. His son and his daughters are not recorded in the annals of wit, and such stories as have descended to us of James the First are of an unclean tendency, and the best of them in point of mirth are by far the uncleanest. His son Charles was too gentlemanlike and too grave to be such a joker as his unkingly sire. His refinement of manner did not admit of coarseness, with whatever wit it might be gilded, and the royal martyr is but known, in respect of humour, for ‘King Charles’s Golden Rules,’ of which, of course, he was not the author.
If ever there was a man in whom we should not expect to find the jesting spirit, that man is Oliver Cromwell. At the wedding festival, however, of his daughter Frances with Mr. Rich, Oliver entered joyously into all the jesting; so joyously that, in a moment of excitement, the Protector whipt off his son Richard’s wig and pretended to throw it into the fire. This he appeared to have done, but he had dexterously conveyed it under him, and was sitting upon it, when the company were looking for the wig upon the top of the coals. No clown, not even thou, oh Joseph Grimaldi!—not even thou who wast an artist, true actor, in whose every look there was a purpose, in every movement a meaning—not even thou, oh best and greatest of the old pantomime clowns! couldst have executed this trick with more rapidity, cleverness, and impudent imperturbability than Oliver Cromwell exhibited on that occasion. It was an occasion, by the way, when spilling of blood had like to have happened through immoderate excess of the spirit of fun. Old Sir Thomas Hillingsby was solemnly dancing, according to the fashion of his younger days. He looked so like an insensible statue in motion, that some daring young Puritan lads thought they might molest him with impunity. They tried, as he slowly moved to and fro in measured pace, to blacken his lips with burnt cork. They roused the old lion to fury. The ex-gentleman usher to the Queen of Bohemia pulled out his dagger, which he would have plunged between the ribs of the fellow most actively concerned but for general interference. Some time elapsed before harmony was restored.
It may be here objected that Cromwell was neither a royal nor an imperial joker. He was nevertheless sovereign master of England, and as despotic as any of them. We place him among them for much the same reason which Richardson, the painter, gave to Queen Caroline, when she went to see Richardson’s series of portraits of English kings, and seeing Cromwell’s portrait among them, angrily asked how he, who was no king, was placed in such company. ‘He was no king, indeed, madam,’ said Richardson, ‘but it is good for kings to have him among them.’
George the Second was not a humourist, but he would have made a first-rate actor of ‘genteel comedy’ had not fate cast him for another line of characters in the drama of life. Shortly after his accession he commanded a play at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house was full, but as the king kept it waiting, the murmurs of their displeasure fell upon his ear as he entered his box, three-quarters of an hour behind time. As he caught the unwelcome sounds he turned to Mr. Rich, the manager, who waited on him, as if he might gather from that official some explanation of the phenomenon. The greatest of the intellectual harlequins of England honestly told the king that his majesty was late, and that the audience did not seem to like it. Whereupon the sovereign assumed the air of an unrighteously suspected prince. He advanced to the front of his box, took out his watch with the apparent conviction that it was an arbitrator which would render him justice, and looking upon it, saw that it showed the time which he knew it to be. Then he appeared in a change of character. He gazed at the audience with an expression bespeaking a guilty but a repentant prince. He put himself as much outside of his box as the laws of balancing would allow, and shaking his wigged head and very much powder out of it, he laid his jewelled hand on the heart side of his sky-blue velvet coat, and made a bow to the house, so superb in its apologetic pantomime that the audience burst forth into hilarious hurrahing and applauding, and all other possible symptoms, to demonstrate their gladness and to express their consent to a full reconciliation of prince and people.
The Thespian element was very strong too in the eldest son of George the Third. If the first gentleman in Europe had not been born a prince he might have made a very good livelihood as an actor. High or low comedy, it would have been all the same to a player of such versatility. He could have played Rover like Elliston, and his imitations were as good as Mr. Toole’s. The best-wigged prince in Christendom has, fortunately, had an historian who makes record of his royal hero in the histrionic part of his profession. Raikes is the chronicler, but the Duke of Wellington was the fountain of intelligence.
‘When the king sent for me,’ said F.M. the Duke of Wellington to Raikes, ‘to form a new Administration in 1828, he was then seriously ill, though he would never allow it. I found him in bed, dressed in a dirty silk jacket and a turban night-cap, one as greasy as the other; for, notwithstanding his coquetry about dress in public, he was extremely slovenly and dirty in private. The first words he said to me were, “Arthur, the Cabinet is defunct;” and then he began to describe the manner in which the late Ministers had taken leave of him on giving in their resignations. This was accompanied by the most ludicrous mimicry of the voice and manner of each individual, so strikingly like that it was quite impossible to refrain from fits of laughter.’
This exhibition has been considered a proof of the king’s bad taste; which it may be allowed to be. But there was equal bad taste on the part of the Duke. If he had looked grave, the old bedridden prince-actor would have been rebuked. Moreover, the king was quite as capable and quite as willing to give an imitation of Arthur. Inimitable as the latter was in certain respects, there were certain peculiarities about him which the king would have hit off with as intense delight as he felt when mimicking his majesty’s servants, Viscounts Goderich and Palmerston.
With George the Fourth’s successor there was no indisposition to joke, but the royal humour was of an ordinary quality. And yet it was eccentric too. King William would not, like his brother of Cambridge, have said to a chaplain at a public dinner, ‘Come, d—— it, do say grace, and let us begin!’ but he could not resist heightening a jest by a strong expletive; as, for instance, in the case of Captain and Mrs. Marryat, who were at a royal reception at the Pavilion, in King William’s time, and from which they were anxious to get away at a certain hour, in order to fulfil another engagement. Mrs. Marryat looked anxiously at the clock, and King William, catching her more than once in the fact, good-humouredly asked her the cause of her uneasiness. The lady frankly replied. ‘Well,’ said his majesty, ‘then why do you not leave at once?’ Mrs. Marryat had to inform him that it would be a breach of etiquette to leave the room while their majesties were still there. ‘Oh, d—— it!’ said the bluff monarch; ‘if that’s the case, come along o’ me; I’ll smuggle you out.’ On state occasions, however, a breach of etiquette would fairly take the king’s breath away. This is exemplified by what occurred at one of his first levées. Seeing an admiral, with whom he had been shipmate, bowing before him, the king cordially expressed his gladness at seeing his old comrade; adding, ‘and I hope you are quite well?’ The proper course would have been to simply answer the remark made. But the over-polite admiral replied, ‘Quite well, your majesty. I hope your majesty is well?’ The breach of etiquette was in making a remark to the king which implied the necessity of an answer. King William quite blushed with confusion, and did not recover himself till dinner-time. One of his own jokes he enjoyed amazingly; and notably one which he played off soon after his accession. After his arrival at St. James’s Palace the populace summoned him again and again to the window to offer him the congratulations of their sweet voices. King William presented himself again and again, till twilight came on and he was tired of it. As the ‘gloaming’ thickened, and identity was a matter of difficulty, the king sent an old naval officer to bow for him at the window. At every summons the officer stepped forward and acted king, bowing and retiring, till it became too dark to make out whether any one was at the window or not. Then the loyal mobile dispersed, and the affair was a joke for the remainder of the night at the jovial monarch’s table.
And now we are called upon to pause, just as we had finished only the prologue to our drama. But if people will make prologues as long as plays, editors will call out, Lusisti satis! and the play is deferred to a more convenient opportunity.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
