“Ampthill Park, August 29, 1876.—I came here on Monday, stopping some hours in London on the way, and finding out ancient treasures in the purlieus of Soho and St. Giles’s, which, black and filthy as they are, are still full of reminiscences.
“At St. Pancras Station I saw a very ancient lady in a yellow wig step into a railway carriage by herself, and her footman guard the door till the train started, and I felt sure it was the Dowager Duchess of Cleveland. At Ampthill Station the Lowther carriage was waiting for both of us, and we drove off together. She talked the whole way, but the carriage rumbled so that I could hardly hear a word she said, except that when I remarked ‘What a fine tree!’ as we entered the park, she answered rather sharply ‘That was a fine tree.’ She spoke too of the Lowther boys—‘They are having their vacancies. I like that word vacancies,’ she said.
“It is a fine wild park, with most unexpected ups and downs and a great deal of grand old timber, on a ridge rising high above the blue Bedfordshire plain, in the midst of which a spire rising out of a little drift of smoke indicates the town of Bedford. On one of the highest points of the ridge a cross raised on steps marks the site of the royal residence where Katherine of Arragon lived for most of her semi-widowhood, and where Anne Boleyn shot stags in a green velvet train. The later house, approached on the garden side by a narrow downhill avenue half a mile long, is in the old French style, with posts and chains, broad steps widening at the top, and a perron.... The Duchess, at eighty-four, talked most pleasantly and interestingly all evening. Lady Wensleydale, in her high cap and large chair, with her sweet face and expression, sat by like an old picture. There is a picture of her thus, by Pointer, surrounded by great white azaleas, but it does not do her justice.
“Yesterday I drove with James, Mildred, and Cecil Lowther to Wrest. It is a most stately place, one of the stateliest I have ever seen. The gardens were all laid out by Le Nôtre, and the house was of that period. Lord De Grey pulled down the house, and found it rested on no foundations whatever, but on the bare ground. It was so thin, that when the still-room maid complained that her room was rather dark, the footman took out his penknife and cut her a square hole for a window in the plaster wall. Capability Brown was employed to rearrange the gardens, which were thought hideous at one time; but though he spoilt so many other places, he had sense to admire the work of Le Notre so much here, that he made no alterations, except throwing a number of round and oblong tanks into one long canal, which, on the whole, is rather an improvement. The modern house is magnificent, and like what Chantilly must have been.
“On the vast flagged terrace in front of the windows we found Lady Cowper[214] sitting in an old-fashioned black silk dress and tight white bonnet. She has a most sweet face, and was very kind and charming in her manner. I walked with her for a long time on the terrace, looking down on the brilliant gardens, and beyond them upon equally brilliant groups of people, for it was the annual meeting of the great Bedfordshire tennis club, for which she always gives a breakfast. She told the whole story of the place, and took me to see all the finest points of view and the great collection of fine orange-trees brought from Versailles. She greatly lamented the prudishness of her great-aunt (Lady De Grey), through whom her grandmother had derived the place, who thought most of the old French statues—which, according to the custom of that day, were made of lead—to be insufficiently dressed, and so sold them for the value of the metal, at the same time that she sold an incomparable collection of old plate, for the same reason, for its weight in silver. She showed one of the statues, backed by a yew hedge some centuries old. ‘That poor lady, you see, was saved when all the others were sent away, because she had got a few clothes on.’ Lord De Grey had replaced some of the statues, and Lady Cowper herself had added a most beautiful fountain from Carrara, with a very flat basin.
“Lady Cowper talked much of my mother and the ‘Memorials’ and of ‘my sister Lady Jocelyn.’ She spoke of the extreme quietude of her own life. ‘A day like this (pointing out the crowd below) shows me that what this place wants is—people, and I never have any. I think I must hire some puppets to walk about and represent them.’ There are a number of inscriptions in the grounds to different past-members of the family and their friends. Lady Cowper said that Lady Palmerston, who was very matter-of-fact, thought that of course they were buried there, and said, ‘How I do pity Anne, living alone at Wrest, surrounded by all those graves of her family.’ Graves, however, there are, but of deceased dogs, a regular burial-ground, with headstones like those in a churchyard, surrounded by a wall of clipped yew.
“I was very glad to find Henry Cowper, who showed me the rooms, which were full of people for the ‘breakfast,’ but I saw the two great Sir Joshuas, which are magnificent, especially that of Lady Lucas and Lady Grantham, as very young girls, with a bird.