Habits and men, with remnants of record touching the makers of both

by Dr. Doran

The worthy agents failed to do their hirer’s bidding. He even called at Waddon, under the name of Major-General Villars, and was allowed to see the gardens. He mistook a lady at a window of the house for the lady of whom he was in search, and as she smiled when he put his hand to the left side of his laced waistcoat, and made a bow till his vertebra was horizontal, he concluded that his fortune was made; and the next day he sent letters in his own name, which the servants, knowing the writer, and having their orders, dropped into the fire,—after reading them in the servants’ hall.

The next move was an application to see the grounds at Waddon, professedly from the famous or infamous Duchess of Cleveland, Fielding’s chief patroness,—so low had fallen the mother of dukes and the concubine of a king. Permission was granted, but nothing came of the concession.

In the meantime Mrs. Villars, by no means disposed to lose the promised recompense, persuaded Fielding that the widow had yielded, and would pay him a visit. He was in a state of delight at the intelligence. The lady, however, who was to pass as Mrs. Deleau, was a “Mistress Mary Wadsworth,” who was ready for any joke, and thought the one proposed the best she had ever shared in,—and she had been an actress in many. These two sensitive creatures accordingly repaired to Fielding’s lodgings one soft autumnal eve. The beau was in a flutter of ecstasy, was continually on his knees, and devoted himself to the lowest position in hades if he ever had loved any woman before. The assumed Mrs. Deleau was coy, as became a widow with sixty thousand pounds and no encumbrances. The lover pressed her to be married that night, if she would not have him perish; but she playfully touched his cheek with her fan, and bade him wait and hope,—sad, naughty fellow that he was!

After two more such visits, the soft and tender creature was seduced to sacrifice her scruples, and consented to a private marriage at her lover’s chambers. The party supped joyously together, and then the bridegroom sallied forth in search of a priest. He found one at the Emperor of Germany’s ambassador’s; and his reverence having been introduced to the lady, satisfied her of the reality of his vocation, and in a twinkling buckled beau and belle together in a way, he said, that defied undoing. All the after-ceremonies religiously observed in those refined days ensued; indeed the marriage would not have been half a marriage without them, and so all parties but the dupers were satisfied,—and in fact even they did not complain.

The bride left for home next morning unattended; for family reasons, she averred, it was necessary to keep the union unrevealed, and accordingly she only repaired now and then to see “the Count,” as her husband styled himself, and to eat toasted cheese and drink port and vat-ale with a man who had married her, as he exclaimed at the sacred ceremony, “with all his heart, soul, blood, and everything else!”

There is no comedy of the last century, however absurd the plot, and coarse and ridiculous the incidents, that is more absurd, coarse, and ridiculous than this comedy in which Fielding was the hero and Mistress Wadsworth and the Duchess of Cleveland the heroines. The beau was convinced he had married a widow with a jointure of a golden character. The letters he addressed to the residence of Mrs. Deleau must have caused infinite astonishment to that calm relict of the citizen of Copthall-court; but she held the writer as mad, and thought little more of the matter. In the meantime Fielding, who had patronized half-a-dozen tailors on the strength of his expectations, mysteriously alluded to, acted the strangest of parts. He married her Grace the noble Barbara within three weeks of his union with Mary Wadsworth. He provided himself with two stools for the support of his dignity; and in the very fashion of the proverb, he got very terribly bruised indeed.

The wretched duper turned out to be the dupe. He had expended his cake and wine, his petit soupers, wax-lights, and sconces all to no purpose; he had run in debt for a ring with a posy of his own choosing, “Tibi Soli;” and he had paid an Italian singer Margaretta to come and sing to his beloved, “Ianthe the lovely,” translated by himself from the Greek. He had looked for threescore thousand pounds, and had been deluded into the idea that he was about to be the sire of a little “Lord Tunbridge,” and at the end of all, the bride proves a common jilt; goes boldly to Fielding’s lodgings in Whitehall, claims him, as he walks into the street, by the title of “lawful wife,” and gets an unsavoury name by way of reply, and a thorough thrashing into the bargain.

The affair soon came into the courts. Fielding, a few weeks after his union with Mistress Mary Wadsworth, had espoused les beaux restes of Barbara Duchess of Cleveland. Till he began to beat the Duchess as well as the Dulcinea, he appears to have transferred his “green nightcap and slippers” by the hands of a servant from the bower of one beauty to the boudoir of another. The Duchess, at length, offered the first wife £200 down and £100 annually for fifteen years, if she succeeded in establishing the first marriage. Accordingly, the Beau was indicted for bigamy at the Old Bailey. He endeavoured to prove that his supposed widow had been married to one Brady, who was living at the time of her marriage with Fielding, and something like a forged certificate in the Fleet Register was produced to support it. But with Montague for opposing counsel (Fielding was his own) and Powell for a judge, the Beau could make nothing of a very bad case; and, being found guilty, he was sentenced to be burnt in the hand,—a sentence which he escaped by producing Queen Anne’s warrant to stay execution. He was accordingly set free; and the Duchess of Cleveland, being now also freed from him and his very heavy hand, the ex-beauty, but now be-rouged old flirt, lived unmolested by anything more unpleasant than a very gentle remorse for her péchés mignons.

The Beau soon fell into dire distress; and a sketch of the complexion of this phasis of life will be found in Bulwer’s ‘Devereux.’ He is there described as “terribly fallen, as to fortune, since the day when he drove about in a car like a sea-shell, with a dozen tall fellows in the Austrian livery, black and yellow, running before and behind him. You know he claims relationship to the House of Hapsburg. As for the present, he writes poems, makes love, is still good-natured, humorous, and odd; is rather unhappily addicted to wine and borrowing, and rigidly keeps the oath of the Carthusians, which never suffers them to carry any money about them.”