§ iii
We come now to the period when “the gay Duke of Dorset became ambassador in Paris,” and “his encouragement of the Parisian ballet was the amazement and envy of his age.” It is entertaining, and rather sad, to read both his official despatches from Paris and his private letters to his friends, and to reflect that while he was writing to the Duchess of Devonshire, “I suppose you will hear talk of my ball, it has made a great noise at Paris”; or to the Foreign Office, “It is hardly possible to conceive a moment of more perfect tranquility than the present, the French government, free from the late causes of its anxiety, appears entirely bent upon improving the advantages of peace,”—it is sad, and certainly ironical, to reflect that the taking of the Bastille was distant by a paltry three years. With no foreboding of those tremendous events, which more than any war, more even than the career of Napoleon, were to change the fortunes of humanity, the Court of France and the English envoy continued on their course of enjoyment. The Duke of Dorset became, naturally, extremely popular in Paris. He was himself not sure that he wholly liked the French:
All the French are aimable, si vous voulez, but they are capricious and inconstant, especially the women [he wrote home to the Duchess of Devonshire]; in short, I have really no friend here but Mrs. B. [Marie Antoinette], and then I see her so seldom that I forget half what I want to say to her. The Frenchmen are all jealous and treacherous, so that between the capriciousness of the fair sex and the want of confidence I have in the other je me sens vraiment malheureux, I assure you, my dearest duchess.
But the French had no corresponding fault to find. The English ambassador was princely and lavish; he was spending money, as he himself owned, at the rate of £11,000 a year; he was greatly in the Queen’s favour, so greatly that he has been included by certain authorities (notably Tilly) in their lists of her lovers. Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who, although an inaccurate was yet a contemporary writer, says that this was not so, and that he has seen a letter-case, preserved by the duke, full of Marie Antoinette’s notes addressed to him. Wraxall says that they were written on private concerns, commissions that she requested him to execute for her, principally regarding English articles of dress or ornament, and other innocent and unimportant matters. Whether Dorset was or was not her lover is not of the smallest importance; and surely no one would grudge, at this distance of time, any pleasure that a princess so young and so unfortunate might have enjoyed in life.
A question in which the Duke was naturally much interested was the affair of the diamond necklace. His despatches to the Foreign Office are full of references to the story, from August 1785 onwards:
The usually credited account is, that the Cardinal [de Rohan] has forged an order from the Queen to the Jeweller of the Crown to deliver to him diamonds to the amount of 1,600,000 livres, and which diamonds he actually received. What makes this event the more extraordinary is that the Cardinal is known to be a man of extremely good parts, and is in the enjoyment of the greatest honour and revenues to which any subject in the Church can aspire.
And again:
Mme. de la Motte, from an apprehension that her life is in danger, affects to have lost her senses. The jailer, upon entering her room the day before yesterday, was some time before he discovered her, and at length found her under her bed, quite naked.
It would, of course, take up too much space to give all Dorset’s despatches on this subject. I mention them chiefly because a large proportion of the diamonds composing the original necklace are at Knole, one half having been purchased by the Duke of Dorset after the necklace had been split up and brought to England, and the other half by the Duke of Sutherland. This, at least, is the tradition; and there is some evidence to support it, in a receipt among the Knole papers:
Received of his Grace the DUKE of DORSET nine hundred and seventy-five pounds for a brilliant necklace.
| £975 | For Mr. JEFFERYS and self, W M JONES. |
and this receipt is endorsed “Paid 1790,” which tallies with the date when the necklace was sold by De la Motte to Jefferys, a jeweller in Piccadilly. They are beautiful diamonds, small, but very blue, and are set at present in the shape of a tasselled diadem.
Another topic which temporarily exercised the duke while in Paris was the “very extraordinary proposal” made to the French Government by a M. Montgolfier to
construct a balloon of a certain diameter to carry sixteen persons. The project [the despatch continues] is to carry on a trade between this part and the South of France; Paris and Marseilles are the two places named. The balloon is to be freighted with plate glass, and the return to be made in reams of paper. M. de Calonne has hitherto received the proposal with great coolness, as M. Montgolfier requires an advance of 60,000 livres Tournais. It is, however, under contemplation, as M. Montgolfier has declared his intention of making the offer to our government in case he does not meet with encouragement here. It is said that the Comptroller General rather discourages enterprises of this sort, as any further progress in the art of conducting balloons might tend to prejudice the revenues of the City of Paris, which will shortly be surrounded by a wall, the cost of which is estimated at four or five millions.
The duke naturally thought M. Montgolfier’s plans nonsensical:
I should almost scruple to mention to your Lordship an undertaking so extraordinary [he says] had I not heard from exceedingly good authority that such a plan is seriously in agitation. Great credit is given to M. Montgolfier’s superior skill in these matters, and that gentleman’s friends are sanguine in their expectations of his success. The weight he proposes to carry exceeds that of a waggon-load!
He gives some further details of what M. Montgolfier, who “pretends to have at last discovered means of directing the course of Balloons,” proposes to do:
He has obtained the sanction of M. de Calonne for his first experiment, which is to be made the first day of next May, when he engages to depart from a town in Auvergne, distant from Paris 150 miles, and to descend at or near this City in the space of seven hours.
A month later he writes:
The government has at last accepted M. Montgolfier’s proposal. 30,000 livres are to be granted to him in advance for the experiment, and if it succeeds the whole of his expenses will be paid without any examination of his accounts, a pension granted to him, and every honorary recompense bestowed on him to which he can aspire. He pretends to have discovered the means of guiding his machine, but it was not till after his project to England, in case of refusal here, that it was accepted.
On such topics as the diamond necklace and M. Montgolfier and current affairs Dorset beguiled his leisure and that of the Foreign Office. There is no indication that he detected any signs of the trouble in store. It is true that occasionally he writes in this strain:
Their Majesties, the Dauphin, and the rest of the Royal family, are removed from Fontainebleau to Versailles. The expenses attending these journeys of the Court is incredible. The duc de Polignac told me that he had given orders for 2115 horses for this service.... Besides this, an adequate proportion of horses are ordered for the removal of the heavy baggage.... It is asserted that M. de Calonne will be under the necessity of borrowing at least eight millions of livres next year,
and that after the fall of the Bastille he was moved to write: “I really think it necessary that some public caution be given to put those upon their guard who may propose to visit this part of the continent.” But beyond these occasional comments he does not seem to have been troubled by any thoughts of the future. He did not foresee that his friend “Mrs. B.,” to whom after his return to England he continued to supply English gloves, would lose upon the scaffold that little head which had carried so gaily the butterfly or the frigate, or that within two or three years’ time the English newspapers would be writing: “The Duke of Dorset’s seat at Knole is a place of rendezvous for the banished French noblesse at this time resident in England,” or that he would be entertaining there as a fugitive his friend Champcenetz, a young officer in the Swiss Guards and author of a “Petit traité de l’amour des femmes pour les sots.” Dorset would no doubt have proved a perfectly adequate ambassador in normal times, but that vast situation with its infinite ramifications was beyond an intellect that accepted for granted the existing régime under which dukes were born for pleasure and labourers were not. But with all the foresight in the world it is difficult to see what he could have done, or how the course of history could have been affected, had he sent home grave warnings instead of babbling of the diamond necklace and M. Montgolfier.
There was another distraction for him in Paris: Giannetta Baccelli, an Italian dancer. The duke seems to have lost his head completely over her for the time being, for he gave her his Garter to wear as a hair-ribbon, with “HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE” in diamonds, brought her home to England with him, sent her to a ball in Sevenoaks wearing the family jewels—which provoked a great scandal in the county—and gave her one of the towers at Knole, which to this day remains, through the mispronunciation of the English servants, “Shelley’s Tower.” It was for this lady, or so the rumour ran, that he finally rejected the faithful and unfortunate Lady Derby. There was nothing that Dorset would not do for Baccelli. He had her painted by Reynolds, and painted and drawn by Gainsborough, and sculpted from the nude. He even wrote to his friend the Duchess of Devonshire asking her to do what she could for his protégée, “I don’t ask you to do anything for her openly,” he wrote, “but I hope que quand il s’agit de ses talents you will commend her. I assure you,” he adds rather pathetically, “she is une bonne fille, very clever, and un excellent cœur, and her dancing is really wonderful.”
Gainsborough’s large full-length portrait of Baccelli, originally at Knole, has been sold; but his pencil sketch for it remains, rather faded and very delicate of line. It is drawn in the ball-room: Baccelli stands on a model’s throne, pointing her toe and lifting up her skirt; Gainsborough himself stands in front of her, a palette in his hand, so that he turns his back towards the person looking at the drawing; the Chinese page, in a round hat, stands by. It reconstructs with great vividness the scene of her posing in the ball-room. The only pity is that the artist should not have drawn in the duke, who was surely there, looking on, and criticizing and making suggestions. The receipt for the big picture is at Knole, though no mention is made of the drawing (see illustration facing p. [208]):
Received of his Grace the DUKE of DORSET one hundred guineas in full for two ¾ portraits of his Grace, one full-length of Madsle Baccelli, two Landskips, and one sketch of a beggar boy and girl.
| £105 | THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, June 15, 1784. |
One of the “two ¾ portraits of his Grace” mentioned in this receipt is the one now in the ball-room, one of the most beautiful Gainsboroughs I know—included with five other pictures for the ludicrous sum of £105.
Reynolds’ portrait of the dancer shows a mischievous and attractive face, with slightly slanting eyes, peeping out from behind a mask which she holds up in her hand. The duke even went to the length of ordering the portraits of the servants he had provided for her, and among the collection of servants’ portraits in Black Boy Passage are Daniel Taylor and Elinor Law, servants of Madme Baccelli; Mrs. Edwards, attendant on Madme Baccelli; and Philip Louvaux, servant to Madme Baccelli. She evidently, with her servants and her tower, had a regular establishment at Knole, and many receipts bearing her signature witness the duke’s generosity towards her: “Received 7th April 1786 of Mr. Burlington [the agent] the sum of fifty pounds on account of his Grace the Duke of Dorset, Jannette Baccelli,” and so on. They had several children, all of whom died in babyhood, except one, alluded to in the following letter: “The duke has a very fine boy to whom Baccelli is mother, now at school near Knole. This, we think, is the only surviving progeny of the alliance,” but, much as I should like to know, I have no idea what became of this romantically-begotten scion, or even of whether he lived to grow up.
Perhaps the “heterogenous housekeeper” of Horace Walpole’s letter was Baccelli’s importation, for in another place he writes disgustedly of “Knole, which disappointed me much. But unless you know how vast and venerable I thought I remembered it, I cannot give you the measure of my surprise; but then there was a trapes of a housekeeper, who, I suppose, was the Baccelli’s dresser, and who put me out of humour....”
The connection seems to have lasted for a long time, for it is not until the end of 1789 that we come across an old newspaper cutting announcing with curious candour that “the Duke of Dorset and the Baccelli have just separated, and she is said to have behaved very well,” so that she eclipsed the records of Nancy Parsons, of Mrs. Elizabeth Armistead, and of poor Lady Derby. It is, I think, a not unpicturesque incident in the story of Knole—the dancer sitting in those stately rooms to Reynolds and Gainsborough, or descending from her tower to walk in the garden with the duke, attended by the Chinese boy carrying her gloves, her fan, or her parasol. Those were the days when the Clock Tower, oddly recalling a pagoda, was but newly erected; when the great rose-and-gold Chinese screen in the Poets’ Parlour was new and brilliant in the sun; when the Coromandel chests were new toys; and the Italian pictures and the statuary brought back by the duke from Rome were still pointed out as the latest acquisitions. And no doubt then the statue of the Baccelli reposing in her lovely nudity on her couch was not relegated to the attic, where a subsequent and more prudish generation sent it, but stood somewhere in the living-rooms, where it might be seen and admired in the presence of the smiling model. Amusement was caused too, no doubt, among the guests of the duke and the dancer by Sir Joshua’s portrait of the Chinese boy squatting on his heels, a fan in his hand, and the square toes of his red shoes protruding from beneath his robes. It was more original to have a Chinese page than to have a black one; everybody had a black one: “Dear Mama,” wrote the Duchess of Devonshire to her mother, “George Hanger has sent me a Black boy, eleven years old and very honest, but the duke don’t like me having a black, and yet I cannot bear the poor wretch being ill-used; if you liked him instead of Michel I will send him, he will be a cheap servant and you will make a Christian of him and a good boy; if you don’t like him they say Lady Rockingham wants one.” But the black page at Knole, of which there had always been one since the days of Lady Anne Clifford, and who had always been called John Morocco regardless of what his true name might be, had been replaced by a Chinaman ever since the house steward had killed the John Morocco of the moment in a fight in Black Boy’s Passage. This particular Chinese boy whom I have mentioned, whose real name was Hwang-a-Tung, but whom the English servants, much as they called Baccelli Madam Shelley, more conveniently renamed Warnoton—fell on fortunate days when he came to Knole, for not only was he painted by Sir Joshua, but he was educated at the duke’s expense at the Grammar School in Sevenoaks.
HWANG-A-TUNG
A Chinese boy, page to the 3rd Duke of Dorset
From the portrait at Knole by Sir Joshua Reynolds