Some of the houses thus celebrated still stand, or their names at least are preserved. Twickenham Park, at the Richmond Bridge end, a seat of Lord Bacon, has given place to humbler homes. But Marble Hill, built for the Countess of Suffolk, George II.‘s mistress, and at one time the home of Mrs. Fitzherbert, another George’s left-handed wife, has been saved from the jerry-builder to become a public pleasure-ground, that will not debase the view from Richmond Hill. This house is haunted by the shades of Pope, Swift, and Gay, as its neighbour by more
recent memories of princely exiles. Orleans House was so renamed as making an asylum for Louis Philippe, escaped from the storm of the Revolution which Madame de Genlis had taught him to hail with youthful enthusiasm. Half a century later, after his second banishment, this mansion again gave refuge to the Orleans family; then for a time it was turned into a club. Members of the same family have more than once occupied the adjacent York House, whose earliest dignity was as home of Lord Clarendon, by him given to his son-in-law, James II.; and so it came to be the birthplace of two English Queens. It has now been bought from the Duke of Orleans by a Parsee gentleman, son of the late Mr. Tata of Bombay, that millionaire of princely public spirit who lies buried in the next county.
This connection with our Eastern Empire is not altogether a new one for York House. A visitor here in his day was the Brahmin reformer Rammohun Roy, founder of the Brahmo-Somaj church, who is said to have designed writing a philosophical dialogue with the scene laid on the terrace of York House. For a good many years towards the end of the century it was occupied by Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff, ex-Governor of Madras, as will be remembered by all readers of the later extracts from his Diaries, published in more than a dozen volumes. These volumes, abridged as they are, have been criticized as too voluminous; but they make excellent reading for judicious skippers, and after a century or two, one can imagine a further abridgment being treasured like Evelyn’s Diary or Horace Walpole’s Letters. This diarist was a keen amateur of good company and of good stories, which stud his pages like plums in a pudding of political suet and botanical crumbs. His anecdotes were collected from all quarters, even from the steps of the throne. There is one, for instance, of a South African millionaire, whose accent led to him being addressed in German by a very eminent personage: “Sind Sie Baier?” “Not at present prices, your Majesty!” stammered the confused courtier. In the same volume we are told how a whist player held thirteen trumps, yet did not win a trick, for it was in the far West, and his partner shot him dead as remonstrance against the trumping of his own ace.
But one must not deck one’s pages with plumes borrowed from a writer whom I met as fellow-member of two among his many clubs. I can recall a wet afternoon we killed together shortly before his death, when, to cheer what seemed a fit of depression, I told him all the stories I could think of as likely to stir his sense of humour. Only afterwards did it occur to me, in a flash of esprit d’escalier, that I had been drawing on one of his own lately published volumes; and I shall never know, on this side of Jordan, whether it were out of courtesy or obliviousness that the old gentleman let himself appear to be amused. With one maiden anecdote, however, now for the first time blushing in print, I had been able to tickle him exceedingly, as it dealt with a colonial governor, a kind of personage bulking as largely in his interest as a schoolmaster did for Parson Adams. In the suite of such a temporary potentate served an officer, whose wife told me how at home, years later, making a third-class railway journey, they had brought considerations to bear upon the guard that they should have the compartment to themselves. But at one station he came to explain: “Very sorry—train crowded—must put someone in with you—but I have picked out a respectable couple—quite decent people; you won’t mind them”—with which apology were bundled in the very decent couple my friends had last seen viceregally enthroned in a distant clime. So much for the transitoriness of official glory!
A tale which Grant-Duff might not have thought worth recording has been told of Mr. Labouchere, but an older date is ascribed to it: that an Englishman travelling in Germany, called upon to declare his Stand, could describe himself by no other title than “Elector of Middlesex,” then was astonished to be received with honours due to a prince. Mr. Labouchere comes to mind here as for a time occupying Pope’s Villa, of which the name survives, but little else, among the riverside mansions at the further end of Twickenham. It stands above Eel-pie Island, a leafy atoll of the Thames, that makes a screen or barrier-reef for this town, and has at its lower end a ferry not unknown to song.