In the ‘Historical Chronicle’ of the Gentleman’s Magazine, under the date of January 1, 1773, it is recorded: ‘This day the Right Hon. Lord Mansfield entertained at his house at Caen Wood, near Hampstead, about four hundred people, and gave each a half-crown and a quartern loaf after dinner.’
Years of scarcity were but too common in the last century, and this might have been one. Under any circumstances such seasonable hospitality was calculated to make the donor popular with the masses, yet seven years later, in the course of the Gordon Riots, when, under pretence of religious zeal, the mob resented his lordship’s supposed favour of Catholicism,[212] we find Horace Walpole writing to the Countess of Ossory, June 7, 1780, that Lord Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury was in ashes, and that George Selwyn had just told him that 5,000 men were marching on Kane Wood. ‘It is true,’ he adds, ‘and that 1,000 of the Guards are gone after them.’ Then, by way of postscript: ‘Kane Wood is saved! It will probably be a black night. I am decking myself with blue ribbands like a May-day garland.’
But Horace Walpole was not alone in adopting blue ribands on that occasion. Every wayfarer donned the same colour, and every house had a blue flag or favour hung out. The very Jews inscribed on their dwellings, ‘This house true Protestant’; and chalk was in great request, affording as it did an easy washable way of asserting ‘No Popery!’ The father of Grimaldi chalked up, ‘No Religion!’
We already know the result of the raid on Ken Wood, and the enterprise of the quick-witted landlord of the Spaniards.[213]
Literature still deplores the loss of his lordship’s fine library, his splendid collection of law books and autograph letters, but most of all his private notes and papers, which it is said had been accumulating for fifty years.
The Spaniards.
All his contemporaries bear witness to the calmness and dignity with which he bore this irreparable loss,[214] nor (for all that is said of his love of money) would he accept of any pecuniary compensation for it. His hard, inflexible animosity to his noble opponent, Lord Chatham, whose death ‘he witnessed without compassion, whose funeral he refused to attend, and when the House moved for a pension to be granted to the widow and her children had kept silence, voting neither one way nor the other,’[215] was the great moral blot on Lord Mansfield’s character. But on this occasion of keen mental pain and bitter personal disappointment—far beyond his great monetary loss—he exhibited no vindictiveness against the perpetrators of it, and himself directed the acquittal of Lord George Gordon.
One wonders if he came face to face in the hour of his calamity with the memory of his own past want of mercy, and recognised in fire and the devastation of his best-prized treasures the form of a protean Nemesis.
Not long after this event Mrs. Boscawen, writing to her friend Mrs. Delany, tells her that she has called at Ken Wood; that Lord Mansfield appears to bear his trial with great equanimity, but that Lady Mansfield is looking very ill.