III
Country houses—Letter from Lord Beaconsfield—Political influence of landowners—Guests down with the fish—Longleat—Hinchingbrooke—Goodwood—Old-time country visitors—Colonel Nelthorpe and “Wulliam”—the Norfolk Militia in the ’fifties—My father and Casanova—A good-natured giant—Old Lady Suffield—Lord George Bentinck—Admiral Rous—George Payne and Lord Alexander Lennox—Religion of the former—The Duchess of Cleveland and Battle Abbey—Anecdotes—Duke William of Normandy.
The country houses in England may be said to be a unique national possession, for in no other land does the same sort of mansion exist—that is to say, a more or less commodious dwelling for the most part of considerable antiquity, surrounded by an estate which affords, or rather did afford, the owner sufficient and congenial occupation in the form of sport. France has her historic châteaux, and before the Revolution had a certain number of country houses with parks approximating somewhat to those existing in the England of to-day; but few have survived the great upheaval of 1789, and little land remains attached to most of those that have.
The old houses and stately mansions of England form a valuable artistic possession, and many of them have been utilised as the scene of their work by our authors and novelists. Who can forget Brambletye House and the Mistletoe Bough of Harrison Ainsworth? Thackeray also drew his picture of the palace of the Marquis of Carabas from some stately, though it must be admitted, cheerless country mansion; whilst, as the following letter shows, the grounds of Bulstrode furnished Lord Beaconsfield with his description of Armine in Henrietta Temple:—
Hughenden Manor, April 17, 1865.
Dear Dorothy—We came down here with our own horses; the first time for many years. How delightful after railroads! We baited at Gerrard’s Cross, twenty miles from town, and then strolled into Bulstrode Park to see the new house the Duke of Somerset is building in that long-neglected but enchanting spot. There, though they told us we should find nobody but the clerk of the works, we found the Duke and Duchess, who had come down for a couple of hours by rail from Slough, and so they lionised us over all their new creation, which is a happy and successful one—a Tudor pile, very seemly and convenient, and built amid the old pleasance which I described thirty years ago in Henrietta Temple; for Bulstrode, then mansionless and deserted, was the origin of Armine. Excuse this egotism, the characteristic of scribblers even when they had left off work. Adieu, dear Dorothy.
D.
OLD COUNTRY LIFE
In the days when landlords were able to live upon their estates and were content with a more or less simple country life, enlivened only by an occasional party of their friends, the country house was no inconsiderable political force. The views of its possessor, indeed, greatly influenced the neighbourhood, whilst as a rule a fairly contented tenantry followed their landlord—Whig or Tory—and voted according to his lead; besides this they took a genuine interest in everything which concerned him or his family. To-day this has ceased to be, for the rich city men or American millionaires are but seldom in touch with those living around their mansions, hired either for sport or pleasure. The modern standpoint as regards country life is well demonstrated by the remark of a lady whose husband had bought a country house, and was told that some pleasant people lived in the country-side near by. “Pleasant or not, it matters little to us,” was the retort; “we shan’t see anything of them,—we shall get our friends down from London with the fish.” Nor is such a standpoint to be wondered at when it is remembered how little a permanent resident in the country can be in touch with those whose whole life is a rush for pleasure and amusement, a habit of which they not unnaturally cannot divest themselves even when far away from town. Formerly country-house life was very quiet, perhaps even humdrum, but within the last thirty or forty years it has undergone a complete transformation.
In old days the possessors were wont to reside upon their estates for the greater portion of the year, whilst the people who hire country houses merely run down for week-ends in the summer and shooting parties in the winter.
The modern practice of letting one’s country house would have appalled the landed proprietors of other days when such a thing was yet undreamt of. There was then, of course, a real bond of connection (very often one of respectful sympathy) between a landlord and his tenants, which, except on a very few estates, has now quite ceased to exist.
At present the majority of country squires are far too poor to resist letting their places, which are naturally regarded much in the light of a commercial asset, their sale-value for the most part consisting in their capacity for affording some city magnate or American millionaire the shooting or hunting necessary to amuse him in the intervals of a life of business and speculation. Country life, or rather short spells of it, has now become a sort of luxury of the rich; but few of any considerable means care to reside for long periods in the country, as was the case in old days when people regularly settled down there.
In the late Lord Bath’s time I used to go a great deal to Longleat, the beautiful palace—for it is little less—built by Sir John Thynne, the favourite of Somerset, some of whose letters beginning “Edward, Protector by the Grace of God,” are still preserved in the house. The fourth Lord Bath was very much interested in politics, and many interesting people used to assemble under his hospitable roof. I well remember being at Longleat on the occasion of an election at which the present Lord Bath was standing as a candidate. His successful election was greatly assisted, every one in the house believed, by a canvasser of a race which has always been prominently to the front in political matters—a donkey—over whose back two panniers were slung, in each of which reclined one of Lord Weymouth’s children, whilst the legend, “Vote for Papa,” was prominently displayed.
Lady Bath and her husband were the very perfection of what a host and hostess should be, and besides the social pleasures of these visits there was always the beautiful park to drive about in, a veritable feast to the eye in itself, especially the picturesque spot very appropriately known as “Heaven’s Gate.”
HINCHINGBROOKE
It was only the other day that I was once more at Hinchingbrooke, the lovely old place where many years ago I used to go and stay with a most delightful friend of mine—the mother of the present Lord Sandwich. Besides being a charming conversationalist, she had a most unusually lovely voice—indeed the famous Costa used to say that he had hardly ever heard a finer. The house is a wonderful old place, filled with magnificent pictures, whilst there is a quantity of marvellous old letters and manuscripts in the library. I remember going there to meet the present Duchess of Devonshire just about the time that she made her first appearance in England. She was then in the full radiance of youth and beauty, creating a sensation wherever she went.
Another country place of which I have many pleasant memories is Goodwood House. Especially well do I remember the elaborate and splendid festivities which took place at the coming of age of the present Duke of Richmond, on which occasion the old English custom of roasting an entire ox was observed. The rejoicings lasted an entire week.
OLD COLONEL NELTHORPE
It was no uncommon thing before the days of easy railway travelling for a friend of the family to reside almost permanently in a country house. I remember such a one at my father’s house in Norfolk—Colonel Nelthorpe by name—an old bachelor who might well have stepped out of one of Fielding’s novels. This old colonel had a room known as Colonel Nelthorpe’s room, and a stall for his horse in the stables, both of which were always kept vacant and ready in view of his arrival during such brief periods as he might choose not to reside at Wolterton. His servant, whom he addressed in tones such as we might fancy Squire Western would have employed, he called “Wulliam,” and to “Wulliam” went the whole of Colonel Nelthorpe’s not inconsiderable fortune, a bequest which somewhat staggered my poor mother, who, though as a rule a most unworldly woman, had in this instance conceived an idea that the old colonel would be sure to leave his fortune to her two little girls (my sister and myself), for whom she declared he had always shown a distinct partiality. When we were alone with this old veteran in the country all the tit-bits were for him; but her attentions were lavished in vain, for, as I have said, nothing came to us, and all went to “Wulliam.”
My father’s friendship with Colonel Nelthorpe (one of the ugliest men, by the way, I ever remember) had been in a great measure caused by their being jointly associated for a very long time in the command of the West Norfolk Regiment of Militia, now the 4th Battalion Norfolk Regiment.
My father commanded this battalion for years, whilst Colonel Nelthorpe was its lieutenant-colonel right up to his death, at a great age, in 1854, having served in that capacity for about forty years. In 1815 he had commanded a detachment of the regiment which had been sent to Ireland, and the year before he died, at the age of eighty-two, he took part in the annual training, on which occasion, the Peace Society having circulated much anti-military literature, the militiamen were openly reproached, hooted, and ridiculed in the streets of Norwich. It was to this battalion of militia that Captain Borrow, the father of the celebrated author of Lavengro, acted as adjutant for forty-two years, whilst one of George Borrow’s brothers, who died in Mexico, also served in it as a lieutenant.
Colonel Nelthorpe belonged to another age, and my father also had a wide experience of a world the ways of which are now almost totally forgotten. As a very young man, in the first years of the nineteenth century, he had met Casanova at Vienna, where he had a prolonged interview with him—an interview which impressed him unfavourably and gave him but an unpleasant opinion of that prince of adventurers, whom he declared to be testy and disagreeable. In justice to Casanova, however, it must be added that my father would fly into a rage upon the slightest opportunity, and in addition nurtured a supreme contempt for all foreigners. The meeting, therefore, between the diminutive and irritable English peer and the gigantic Venetian (who, in his last years, as is well known, was in the habit of constantly getting into tempers on account of imaginary insults) could hardly have been expected to pass off in perfect peace.
The sight of a foreigner, indeed, as a rule sent my father into a rage, for he seemed almost to resent the presence on earth of any other nationality except the British. Notwithstanding this, however, he for some years had a Russian valet—an importation from St. Petersburg, where he had been chargé d’affaires three years before the battle of Waterloo. This valet, of colossal height and formidable appearance, was by nature the mildest of men, as was shown by the sweet and almost caressing smile which he would oppose to the storms of abuse which were wont to rage around him when anything had gone wrong. Never, perhaps, were his looks sweeter than when, as a finale to a tirade of unusual vehemence, my father would say, “Let it happen again, and as sure as I stand here I will throw you out of the window.”
THE “DOUBLE DOW”
My father was well known as a character in that part of Norfolk in which he lived, and his friend, old Lady Suffield, known as the “Double Dow,” who resided not far away, was another. This old lady had most aristocratic ideas,—quite those of another age, indeed, for she simply could not bear to think of people of inferior birth being allowed to break down the social barriers, which, according to her, should rigidly fence in the aristocracy, and more especially the person of herself.
On one occasion, when present at an assembly at the county town (Aylsham), she was horrified to discover that two local men, sons of a successful miller and merchant in that place, had obtained admission, and it was not long before she gave a very pointed demonstration of her resentment by exclaiming in a loud voice, “It is most unpleasant here. I can hardly see across the room for the flour dust.”
She herself at her advent into this world had been the victim of great resentment on the part of her father, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, who, when he was apprised of her birth by his butler, is said to have somewhat gloomily replied, “Then you had better go and drag the baby through the horse-pond.” He was, it must be added, not unnaturally very much annoyed at the birth of a girl, instead of a male heir who should succeed to his estates.
Old Lady Suffield, besides presenting my father with her picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence, also gave him a mat or rug which she herself had worked. In old days ladies spent a good deal of time in making carpets and the like. At Wolterton was a carpet, cross-stitch, worked all in one piece, by my great-grandmother, Lady Walpole; whilst a tablecloth and twelve dinner napkins were reverently preserved on account of having been spun by her.
Needlework carpets were much valued by the families to whom they belonged. There is still, I believe, at Croome a portion of such a carpet which once covered the floor of a boudoir in the family mansion in Piccadilly, now long since passed into other hands; whilst at Apethorpe, in Northamptonshire, there used to be a very large needlework carpet which had been presented to that Lord Westmoreland who was Ambassador in Vienna, having been worked by the ladies of that city by way of especial compliment.
The “Double Dow” and her ways carried one right back to the eighteenth century, to which she in reality belonged, having been married in 1792. Nevertheless she lived well into comparatively modern days, dying only in 1850.
Living at Blickling in stately splendour, old Lady Suffield always drove up to London, despising the railroad as being a vulgar innovation. In my youth the post-chaise still flourished, and my father constantly travelled in one.
Well do I remember seeing Lord George Bentinck waiting for him in a post-chaise standing outside our house in London. He had come to fetch my father, as they were both going to drive down to Newmarket together. This, I think, was the only occasion on which I got a good look at this handsome pillar of the Turf, as he was in those days, and the two things I remember about him were his voluminous cravat and the delicate moulding of his hands, one of which (the very perfection of form, I thought) rested on the ledge of the open window of the chaise.
In 1846 a great dinner was given to Lord George at Lynn, at which my father, who was then High Steward of the town, presided. Mr. Disraeli was present, and made a speech which received a most enthusiastic reception.
ADMIRAL ROUS
Two great friends of my father were Admiral Rous and George Payne, both staunch supporters of the Turf, and therefore in complete sympathy with his desire to win the Derby.
Admiral Rous, who died in June 1877, had left the Navy some forty years before, principally, I believe, on account of the scant recognition which a considerable feat of seamanship performed by him, under the very greatest difficulties, had received from the authorities at Whitehall.
Setting sail from Quebec in command of the Pique, his ship struck upon a reef off the coast of Labrador, and was only got off in a terribly damaged condition, the rudder being practically torn away. Notwithstanding this, Captain Rous ran three thousand miles to Spithead in twenty days, the vessel making about two feet of water an hour the whole time, which entailed tremendous exertions at the pumps on the part of the crew, who would undoubtedly have abandoned hope had it not been for the indomitable spirit of their commander.
Admiral Rous was a great opponent of high betting, which he always declared meant ruin to the Turf. Like many of his contemporaries he hated tobacco, the smoking of which he considered almost an ungentlemanly act. Besides being devoted to racing, the old Admiral would never acquiesce in the modern view of cock-fighting, which he defended to the end in the most uncompromising manner. To-day the race of men of whom he was a type has totally disappeared, for modern England does not breed them; but whether such a state of affairs is for the country’s good seems to me a very doubtful question. Bluff and straightforward, totally devoid of superficial sentimentality, such men expressed the very spirit which has made that British Empire which a feebler and more sentimental generation, prone to much prattle of humanitarian and socialistic fads, would seem desirous of destroying.
George Payne, who lived not far away from us in Queen Street, Mayfair, was another man whose whole existence may be said to have centred in the Turf, though, unlike Admiral Rous, the attraction with him lay a good deal in the betting. Nevertheless, unflinchingly honourable and high-minded, Mr. Payne was a great deal more than a mere gambler.
GEORGE PAYNE’S RELIGION
Many are the stories that have been told of his distaste for going to church; yet at heart he was anything but an irreligious man, as the following anecdote will show. The late Lord Alexander Gordon Lennox was one night returning from some party with Mr. Payne; it was very late, and both were very tired. Reaching the latter’s house, Lord Alexander said, “Now, old fellow, you will be in bed in five minutes”; to which the answer was “No.” “Why,” continued the original speaker, “whatever are you going to do?” To which George Payne replied, “I am going to say my prayers. I always have a bucket of cold water in my room, and if I am very tired, put my head in it to waken me up to say my prayers.”
Lord Alexander also used to say that George Payne would never stand any young fellow saying anything against religion at the club, but would at once flare out at the offender.
There are, indeed, many people like George Payne, who, whilst they may not be regular churchgoers, are yet at heart religious in the best sense of the word. A certain gallant officer, for instance, who commanded a battalion of the Guards, though not very fond of going to church, used, when in the country, to make a practice of going for a long walk alone, during which he would indulge in meditation. On one occasion he was attacked by some one who, in the course of his oration, said, “Why, one would think you soldiers had no souls to save!” The author of this somewhat impertinent homily was, however, completely routed by the good-humoured answer which the Colonel in question made. He calmly looked the lecturer in the face, and merely remarked, “Mayn’t a man save his soul by the way he likes best?”
As a matter of fact Satan is willing enough to let men go to church on Sunday provided they work for him the rest of the week, as I fear many outwardly religious people do!
In his career upon the Turf George Payne was peculiarly unfortunate from a financial point of view; as is well known, he completely dissipated two fortunes. By no means really astute, he would back a number of horses in a race in the—usually delusive—hope of making sure of the winner, a mania which cost him much.
It used to be computed by those well able to judge that Mr. Payne had spent a fortune alone in the hire of chaises and horses in the time previous to the introduction of railways, for it was his practice to spare no expense in order to get from one place to the other with the greatest speed possible.
My father himself was never particularly successful at racing, though he won the Two Thousand Guineas and once ran second for the Derby. When he did win a race, however, every one on the estate knew it, for he would at once set to work upon his favourite project of enlarging the lake in the Park. On the other hand, whenever fortune chanced to show herself in an especially unkind mood, which was very often the case, all the men employed at this work would be at once dismissed, whilst the most rigid economy would prevail till such time as another horse managed to get first past the post.
By no means an uncultivated man, fond of pictures and of art generally, racing and its attendant betting was, nevertheless, my father’s master passion. To him Newmarket was a very Mecca and, wherever he chanced to be, at home or abroad, the loadstone towards which his thoughts were perpetually directed.
THE DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND
The old Duchess of Cleveland (mother of Lord Rosebery), a lady dowered with no mean intellectual gifts, lived to a very great age, being well over ninety at her death. She was possessed of a considerable sense of humour, and used to tell several entertaining stories of the many visitors who were always coming over from Hastings to see Battle Abbey. When the Duke of Cleveland first took possession, he naturally acceded to the request of the Hastings Corporation that the Abbey ruins should be open to the public once every week, and on the first public day eight hundred people arrived, swarmed all over the place, and were only prevented from entering the Duchess’s own boudoir by the determined attitude which she assumed, advancing against the intruders with the fury of her eye rendered doubly formidable by the huge pair of spectacles which she habitually wore. The notes she used to receive from visitors were sometimes very curious; one individual, for instance, wrote saying that he considered he had a right to go over the Abbey at all times, as one of his ancestors had fought at Hastings, and he himself had been christened “Norman”! Another, a lady, wanted to know if anything very pretty had been found at the spot where Harold fell, as in Rome she had seen such lovely ornaments found in the tombs there. This rather reminds me of another lady whom I once heard saying that her favourite study was the history of the Moors in Mexico, and the relics they had left behind there.
People used to be very fond of boasting to the Duke and Duchess of their Norman descent, amongst others Mrs. Grote, who, when at Battle in 1867 with her aunt and the celebrated historian, declared that she was a lineal descendant of Harold’s younger brother, “Earl Leofwine,”—a name which in the course of time had been transformed into Lewin.
At one time, over the fireplace in the Abbots’ Hall was a stuffed black horse, which used to be pointed out to visitors as the identical animal which had carried William the Conqueror at the battle of Hastings. In reality the horse in question had never carried any one more celebrated than Sir Godfrey Webster, and then only at a review.
BATTLE ABBEY
The arrangements at Battle Abbey in the time of the Duke and Duchess did not err in the direction of excess of comfort. The Duke was inclined to economy, and the Duchess, an extremely clever woman, was so much immersed in various intellectual interests, mostly of an archæological kind, that she did not trouble to give much attention to household management. Matters were allowed to take their own course more or less, with the result that on one occasion the French Ambassador, on his way from the station to the Abbey, was delayed by the breaking of the carriage pole, which collapsed owing to extreme and untended old age. It was, certainly, no place for sybarites, who generally agreed with the quotation from the Litany which a witty and luxurious member of the Foreign Office once wrote in the visitors’ book—
From Battle, murder, and sudden death, Good Lord deliver us.
At the same time great care was devoted to the remains of the old buildings, which, wherever possible, were as judiciously restored as the taste of that day permitted.
There is something singularly attractive in the country-side around Battle Abbey, by reason of its having been the site of that great struggle which really created England—the battle of Hastings. It was on Caldbeck Hill, on the evening of the 14th of October 1066, that the Norman trumpets blared forth their pæan of victory.
The right of power, as an old historian says, had been tried by the great assize of God’s judgment in battle. England had been beaten, but by the very fact of her defeat was to develop into a greater England than ever any of Harold’s Saxon thanes would have dreamed possible.
Here on this hill Duke William, having caused his standard to be set up, stood amongst his Barons and Knights “solemnly rendering thanks to the King of Glory, through whom he had the victory—mourning also frequently for the dead.” An appropriate place, indeed, would this be for a statue to the great Norman whose memory as the real maker of England deserves a recognition which it has never obtained. Underneath might well be inscribed the words which he addressed after the battle to his faithful old follower, Walter Giffard, Lord of Longueville, near Dieppe—
I thank God we have done well hitherto, and if such be God’s will, we will go on and do well henceforward.