Joscelin’s wife was, according to Pepys, ‘a beautiful lady indeed.’ They had but one child, the famous heiress, Elizabeth Percy, who at four years of age was left to the guardianship of her proud and wicked old grandmother. Joscelin was dead, and his widow married Ralph, afterwards Duke of Montague. The old Dowager Countess was a matchmaker, and she contracted her granddaughter, at the age of twelve, to Cavendish, Earl of Ogle. Before this couple were of age to live together, Ogle died. In a year or two after, the old matchmaker engaged her victim to Mr. Thomas Thynne, of Longleat; but the young lady had no mind to him. In the Hatton collection of manuscripts there are three letters addressed by a lady of the Brunswick family to Lord and Lady Hatton. They are undated, but they contain a curious reference to part of the present subject, and are thus noticed in the first report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts: ‘Mr. Thinn has proved his marriage with Lady Ogle, but she will not live with him, for fear of being “rotten before she is ripe.” Lord Suffolk, since he lost his wife and daughter, lives with his sister, Northumberland. They have here strange ambassadors—one from the King of Fez, the other from Muscovett. All the town has seen the last; he goes to the play, and stinks so that the ladies are not able to take their muffs from their noses all the play-time. The lampoons that are made of most of the town ladies are so nasty that no woman would read them, else she would have got them for her.’
‘Tom of Ten Thousand,’ as Thynne was called, was murdered (shot dead in his carriage) in Pall Mall (1682) by Königsmark and accomplices, two or three of whom suffered death on the scaffold. Immediately afterwards, the maiden wife of two husbands really married Charles, the proud Duke of Somerset. In the same year, Banks dedicated to her (Illustrious Princess, he calls her) his ‘Anna Bullen,’ a tragedy. He says: ‘You have submitted to take a noble partner, as angels have delighted to converse with men;’ and ‘there is so much of divinity and wisdom in your choice, that none but the Almighty ever did the like’ (giving Eve to Adam) ‘with the world and Eden for a dower.’ Then, after more blasphemy, and very free allusions to her condition as a bride, and fulsomeness beyond conception, he scouts the idea of supposing that she ever should die. ‘You look,’ he says, ‘as if you had nothing mortal in you. Your guardian angel scarcely is more a deity than you;’ and so on, in increase of bombast, crowned by the mock humility of ‘my muse still has no other ornament than truth.’
The Duke and Duchess of Somerset lived in the house in the Strand, which continued to be called Northumberland House, as there had long been a Somerset House a little more to the east. Anthony Henley once annoyed the above duke and showed his own ill-manners by addressing a letter ‘to the Duke of Somerset, over against the trunk-shop at Charing Cross.’ The duchess was hardly more respectful when speaking of her suburban mansion, Sion House, Brentford. ‘It’s a hobbledehoy place,’ she said; ‘neither town nor country.’ Of this union came a son, Algernon Seymour, who in 1748 succeeded his father as Duke of Somerset, and in 1749 was created Earl of Northumberland, for a particular reason. He had no sons. His daughter Elizabeth had encouraged the homage of a handsome young fellow of that day, named Smithson. She was told Hugh Smithson had spoken in terms of admiration of her beauty, and she laughingly asked why he did not say as much to herself. Smithson was the son of ‘an apothecary,’ according to the envious, but, in truth, the father had been a physician, and earned a baronetcy, and was of the good old nobility, the landowners, with an estate, still possessed by the family, at Stanwick, in Yorkshire. Hugh Smithson married this Elizabeth Percy, and the earldom of Northumberland, conferred on her father, was to go to her husband, and afterwards to the eldest male heir of this marriage, failing which the dignity was to remain with Elizabeth and her heirs male by any other marriage.
It is at this point that the present line of Smithson-Percys begins. Of the couple who may be called its founders so many severe things have been said, that we may infer that their exalted fortunes and best qualities gave umbrage to persons of small minds or strong prejudices. Walpole’s remark, that in the earl’s lord-lieutenancy in Ireland ‘their vice-majesties scattered pearls and diamonds about the streets,’ is good testimony to their royal liberality. Their taste may not have been unexceptionable, but there was no touch of meanness in it. In 1758 they gave a supper at Northumberland House to Lady Yarmouth, George II.’s old mistress. The chief ornamental piece on the supper table represented a grand chasse at Herrenhausen, at which there was a carriage drawn by six horses, in which was seated an august person wearing a blue ribbon, with a lady at his side. This was not unaptly called ‘the apotheosis of concubinage.’ Of the celebrated countess notices vary. Her delicacy, elegance, and refinement are vouched for by some; her coarseness and vulgarity are asserted by others. When Queen Charlotte came to England, Lady Northumberland was made one of the ladies of the queen’s bed-chamber. Lady Townshend justified it to people who felt or feigned surprise, by remarking, ‘Surely nothing could be more proper. The queen does not understand English, and can anything be more necessary than that she should learn the vulgar tongue?’ One of the countess’s familiar terms for conviviality was ‘junkitaceous,’ but ladies of equal rank had also little slang words of their own, called things by the very plainest names, and spelt physician with an ‘f.’
There is ample testimony on record that the great countess never hesitated at a jest on the score of its coarseness. The earl was distinguished rather for his pomposity than vulgarity, though a vulgar sentiment marked some of both his sayings and doings. For example, when Lord March visited him at Alnwick Castle, the Earl of Northumberland received him at the gates with this queer sort of welcome: ‘I believe, my lord, this is the first time that ever a Douglas and a Percy met here in friendship.’ The censor who said, ‘Think of this from a Smithson to a true Douglas,’ had ample ground for the exclamation. George III. raised the earl and countess to the rank of duke and duchess in 1766. All the earls of older creation were ruffled and angry at the advancement; but the honour had its drawback. The King would not allow the title to descend to an heir by any other wife but the one then alive, who was the true representative of the Percy line.
The old Northumberland House festivals were right royal things in their way. There was, on the other hand, many a snug, or unceremonious, or eccentric party given there. Perhaps the most splendid was that given in honour of the King of Denmark in 1768. His majesty was fairly bewildered with the splendour. There was in the court what was called ‘a pantheon,’ illuminated by 4,000 lamps. The King, as he sat down to supper, at the table to which he had expressly invited twenty guests out of the hundreds assembled, said to the duke, ‘How did you contrive to light it all in time?’ ‘I had two hundred lamplighters,’ replied the duke. ‘That was a stretch,’ wrote candid Mrs. Delany; ‘a dozen could have done the business;’ which was true.
The duchess, who in early life was, in delicacy of form, like one of the Graces, became, in her more mature years, fatter than if the whole three had been rolled into one in her person. With obesity came ‘an exposition to sleep,’ as Bottom has it. At ‘drawing-rooms’ she no sooner sank on a sofa than she was deep in slumber; but while she was awake she would make jokes that were laughed at and censured the next day all over London. Her Grace would sit at a window in Covent Garden, and be hail fellow well met with every one of a mob of tipsy and not too cleanly-spoken electors. On these occasions it was said she ‘signalised herself with intrepidity.’ She could bend, too, with cleverness to the humours of more hostile mobs; and when the Wilkes rioters besieged the ducal mansion, she and the duke appeared at a window, did salutation to their masters, and performed homage to the demagogue by drinking his health in ale.
Horace Walpole affected to ridicule the ability of the duchess as a verse writer. At Lady Miller’s at Batheaston some rhyming words were given out to the company, and anyone who could, was required to add lines to them so as to make sense with the rhymes furnished for the end of each line. This sort of dancing in fetters was called bouts rimés. ‘On my faith,’ cried Walpole, in 1775, ‘there are bouts rimés on a buttered muffin by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland.’ It may be questioned whether anybody could have surmounted the difficulty more cleverly than her Grace. For example: