Lady Holland, fanciful, sharp, and impertinent, did not attract Jackson’s brother Francis. Clever, he allowed that wayward lady to be, but not a wit of the quality she would fain have been thought. ‘There is too much effort—a straining after effect in all she says and does; and the effect is not always what she wishes or imagines it to be.’
In behalf of some of the fine ladies of the time, government officials cheated their own revenue department without scruple. Jackson was, one day in 1810, amused to find the ‘subs’ at the Foreign Office very anxious, at Lord Wellesley’s suggestion, to devise means of getting a box of shoes which had been sent from Spain, for Lady Holland, but which had been seized by the Custom House officers. Lady Holland was capricious, and as often insolent as civil; but she was not mean, like Lady Hyde Parker, who gave a ball to a crowd of guests and sent them home without supper. By the way, when there was a ball at Buckingham House, in the opening years of the century, no guests under the rank of earls’ sons and daughters were invited; but this exclusiveness had to be laid aside.
Nearly sixty years ago there was a queen of hearts in London who broke as many as she could, voluntarily or involuntarily. She was a Miss Acklom, daughter of a Nottinghamshire squire. Down at Exmouth, amid the loveliness and the idleness of the place, the nymph and a gallant officer named Tilson fell in love, or seemed to do so, with each other. The warrior, at all events, was deeply smitten, and marriage was to plunge him still deeper in love; but, almost at the church door, the cruel nymph declined to go further. The lover went straightway abroad. After a while, Miss Acklom was subdued by another wooer, Mr. Maddox; the beauty consented to become his wife. As the time of the nuptials drew near the lady’s grandfather died. She went into mourning, and came out of it with an announcement of a quality to put her lover into it; namely, that she had changed her mind. Like Tilson, Maddox sought solace in going to the stirring scenes abroad. Jackson wrote from his quarters at Dijon, in 1814, that the swain so ill-treated by Venus was ‘trying his luck with Mars, as an amateur.... From being a very handsome and lively-tempered young man, he has become quite the reverse.’ While two lovers were despairing a third presented himself. He was no other than that Lord Althorpe, who became so distinguished in the House of Commons as a statesman and a minister. My lord was accepted. Just as the marriage was about to take place this third lover’s grandmother died; whereupon the nymph put on mourning and went down to Bath to live in retirement. Old Mrs. Jackson prophesied that Miss Acklom would, on coming out of mourning, jilt the heir to an earldom as she had done ‘poor Maddox.’ George replied that Tilson had recently returned to England, a general, and ‘this perhaps may win her smiles again.’ Lord Althorpe proved to be a successful swain. Esther Acklom married him, about a month after Mrs. Jackson had presaged that she would play this lover false. The wedding was celebrated in April 1815, and in little more than three years the once volatile nymph was carried to her grave, leaving a childless widower to mourn a good wife’s loss.
The great scandal in high life within the first ten years of this century was the elopement of Lord Paget, afterwards the celebrated Marquis of Anglesea, with Lady Charlotte, wife of Henry Wellesley, nephew of the subsequently famous Arthur, and better known to us as the first Lord Cowley. All the world of fashion had seen what was going on except the lady’s husband. The guilty parties pleaded uncontrollable passion. The seducer abandoned his wife and eight children, the lady left a husband and four children; but she asked Mr. Arbuthnot to break the matter gently to their father. Lord Paget, who had told his father that he had sought death in battle in order to avoid the social catastrophe, was challenged by Colonel Cadogan, Lady Charlotte’s brother. The Colonel declared that one of them must die; but Lord Paget declined the chance on the ground that his life was devoted to the Colonel’s sister. To this lady he was married in 1810, in which year his union with his first wife was dissolved, and that lady became Duchess of Argyll.
Provincial fine society was somewhat rough but hearty; ‘all very friendly and hospitable; but as regards stuffing it would be difficult, I confess, to excel them.’ The allusion is to a Northumbrian high sheriff’s dinner party. At Brighton, described in 1809 as a dangerous rival to Bath, we are at a ball given by a Mr. and Mrs. Parker, ‘good people who have more money than sense or acquaintances, but who made up for the latter deficiency by giving balls to all whom they did not know and the few whom they did.’ Illustrious strangers went to dance, eat suppers, and drink champagne, and perhaps laugh at Mrs. Parker, who told everybody on coming in, and by way of compliment, that she had been disappointed of the flower of her party—some three or four personages who could not come. The lady was, after all, not such a fool as she looked. There was good satirical humour (when she went up to Lady Boyne, who was then in deep mourning for her daughter) in her request to the exemplary mother to open the ball! And apropos to Brighton, now so rich in vehicles, we smile at the record of the extortion of Brighton chairmen in 1809, and how they were brought to their senses by an ex-coachman to a gentleman. Jehu bought the old blue coach of the Blackburns, with the cock and trumpet upon it, which had been the glory of Bath; putting a pair of horses to it, the owner conveyed people all over the town at a shilling per person for the trip, before midnight, and one-and-sixpence after. While the chairmen stood upon their rights, earning nothing, this clever coachman whipped up a very pretty little fortune.
One of the most pushing and successful men in Bath in 1809 was Sigmond, who, after being a footman in Germany, set up as a dentist in the City of Hot Waters. His wife had been his mistress. The two together made more dash and lived at more expense than almost anybody in that city. They once invited the Duke of Gloucester to a grand supper, and he so far accepted the invitation as to send one of his gentlemen to represent him. People of better standing than the footman-dentist and his married mistress hardly behaved better. The mother of Sir George Jackson remembered Mrs. Piozzi and Dr. Johnson at Bath, and she could not imagine how Mrs. Piozzi could tolerate so coarse and bear-like a person as the Doctor; though the Doctor’s coarseness was matched by the lady’s levity. ‘Their manners,’ Mrs. Jackson wrote to her son, ‘were more disgusting than pleasing to most persons ... they both ought to have been ashamed of themselves.’
Sixty or seventy years ago locomotion was considered rapid when the Newcastle mail left that northern town on a Monday morning and reached London on the ensuing Wednesday at 5 A.M. In these days of electric cables and telegraphs, it is amusing to read of the method taken by a Rothschild to obtain news. We had not then got so far as sending or receiving news by carrier pigeons. In February 1807 Jackson arrived in London from Munich. The head of the Rothschild firm, hearing of the arrival, waited on the diplomatist, and, as the latter said, probed him dexterously to elicit any secrets he might possess relative to Prussian financial difficulties and state affairs generally. The Government was as ill off occasionally as the financier. They at one time depended on the French papers for news from abroad, and for the loan of these, ministers were indebted to the charity of the editor of the ‘Times.’
Looking into private life, we find various illustrations of its character. While war was raging abroad the waltz conquered the prudes of Bath, who, after gracefully battling against it, embraced it and their partners therein with a sort of ecstasy. Those were the days of heavy postage; and we read of a lady who thought to cheat the revenue by stuffing a hare sent to a friend, with letters, which that friend was to hand over according to the addresses. The ingenious method failed, inasmuch as the cook who received the hare tossed all the rumpled and blood-stained letters with which it was lined into the fire.
While Mr. Jackson had the affairs of the world to set down on paper, and often rose from the table where he was writing despatches only to catch a hasty glance at a battle, or to be off in a hurry, hardly pressed by a victorious foe, he was overwhelmed with commissions from thoughtless people. Some asked him to purchase for them carriages and horses, others hammers and nails; and, wrote his mother, ‘If in the course of your rambles through Saxony or Silesia you can meet with a piece of fine cambric for handkerchiefs pray secure it for me, as cambric is now of an exorbitant price in this country.’ Thousands of men were bleeding to death for want of bandages, and the easy-going old lady at Bath could think only of cheap handkerchiefs for herself.
One incident of the times reads like a page or two from Fielding. It refers to the Irish servant, Pat O’Raffer, who was with George Jackson in Bohemia. Pat was as lean as if he had lived for a month at a French table d’hôte. In Bath, when his master fell in love with Miss Rumbold, Pat fell in love with Miss Rumbold’s maid. In his absence, however, the abigail gave her company to another young man, but Pat continued to write to her ‘a very pretty letter’ all the same. As one of these letters especially contained a good deal of political and personal gossip, which began to spread through Bath, old Mrs. Jackson thought it would be well to secure it, and to stop the writing of similar epistles for the future; and she sent for the damsel, with the success narrated below.