“About a fortnight before her death, when Lady Granard and Lady Charlotte Rawdon, her daughters, were sitting up in her room, she awoke suddenly, very ill and very much agitated, saying that she had dreamed that Mrs. Moth came into her room. When she saw her she was so full of the idea that evils always attended her appearance that she said, ‘Ah, Moth, I fear you are come for my Selina’ (Lady G.). Moth replied, ‘No, my Lady, but I am come for Mr. John.’ They gave her composing drops and soothed her; she soon fell asleep, and from that time never mentioned her son’s name nor made any inquiry about him; but he died on the very day of her dream, though she never knew it.”
Old Thomas Cobbe and after him his only son, Charles Cobbe, represented the (exceedingly-rotten) Borough of Swords for a great many years in the Irish Parliament, which was then in its glory, resonant with the eloquence of Flood (who had married Lady Betty’s sister, Lady Jane) and of Henry Grattan. On searching the archives of Dublin, however, in the hope of discovering that our great-grandfather had done some public good in his time, my brother and I had the mortification to find that on the only occasion when reference was made to his name, it was in connection with charges of bribery and corruption! On the other hand, it is recorded to his honour that he was almost the only one among the Members of the Irish Parliament who voted for the Union, and yet refused either a peerage or money compensation for his seat. Instead of these he obtained for Swords some educational endowments by which I believe the little town still profits. In the record of corruption sent by Lord Randolph Churchill to the Times (May 29th, 1893), in which appears a charge of interested motives against nearly every Member of the Irish Parliament of 1784, “Mr. Cobbe” stands honourably alone as without any “object” whatever.
Thomas Cobbe’s two daughters, my great-aunts and immediate predecessors as the Misses Cobbe, of Newbridge, (my grandfather having only sons) differed considerably in all respects from their unworthy niece. They occupied, so said tradition, the large cheerful room which afterwards became my nursery. A beam across the ceiling still bore, in my time, a large iron staple firmly fixed in the centre from whence had dangled a hand-swing. On this swing my great-aunts were wont to hang by their arms, to enable their maids to lace their stays to greater advantage. One of them, afterwards the Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Caroline, likewise wore the high-heeled shoes of the period; and when she was an aged woman she showed her horribly deformed feet to one of my brothers, and remarked to him: “See, Tom, what comes of high-heeled shoes!” I am afraid many of the girls now wearing similarly monstrous foot-gear will learn the same lesson too late. Mrs. Pelham, I have heard, was the person who practically brought the house about the ears of the unfortunate Queen Caroline; being the first to throw up her appointment at Court when she became aware of the Queen’s private on-goings. Her own character stood high; and the fact that she would no longer serve the Queen naturally called attention to all the circumstances. Bad as Queen Caroline was, George the Fourth was assuredly worse than she. In his old age he was personally very disgusting. My mother told me that when she received his kiss on presentation at his Drawing-Room, the contact with his face was sickening, like that with a corpse. I still possess the dress she wore on that occasion.
Mrs. Pelham’s sister married Sir Henry Tuite, of Sonnagh, and for many years of her widowhood lived in the Circus, Bath, and perhaps may still be remembered there by a few as driving about her own team of four horses in her curricle, in days when such doings by ladies were more rare than they are now.
The only brother of these two Miss Cobbes of the past, Charles Cobbe, of Newbridge, M.P., married Anne Power Trench, of Garbally, sister of the first Earl of Clancarty. The multitudinous clans of Trenches and Moncks, in addition to Lady Betty’s Beresford relations, of course thenceforth adopted the habit of paying visitations at Newbridge. Arriving by coachloads, with trains of servants, they remained for months at a time. A pack of hounds was kept, and the whole train de vie was liberal in the extreme. Naturally, after a certain number of years of this kind of thing, embarrassments beset the family finances; but fortunately at the crisis Lady Betty came under the influence of her husband’s cousin, the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, and ere long renounced the vanities and pleasures of the world, and persuaded her husband to retire with her and live quietly at Bath, where they died and were buried in Weston churchyard. Fifty years afterwards I found in the library at Newbridge the little batch of books which had belonged to my great-grandmother in this phase of her life, and were marked by her pencil: Jacob Boehmen and the Life of Madame Guyon being those which I now recall. The peculiar, ecstatic pietism which these books breathe, differing toto cœlo from the “other worldliness” of the divines of about 1810, with whose works the “Good-book Rows” of our library were replenished, impressed me very vividly.[[6]]
I have often tried to construct in my mind some sort of picture of the society which existed in Ireland a hundred years ago, and moved in those old rooms wherein the first half of my life was spent, but I have found it a very baffling undertaking. Apparently it combined a considerable amount of æsthetic taste with traits of genuine barbarism; and high religious pretension with a disregard of everyday duties and a penchant for gambling and drinking which would now place the most avowedly worldly persons under a cloud of opprobrium. Card-playing was carried on incessantly. Tradition says that the tables were laid for it on rainy days at 10 o’clock in the morning in Newbridge drawing-room; and on every day in the interminable evenings which followed the then fashionable four o’clock dinner. My grandmother was so excellent a whist-player that to extreme old age in Bath she habitually made a small, but appreciable, addition to her income out of her “card purse”; an ornamental appendage of the toilet then, and even in my time, in universal use. I was given one as a birthday present in my tenth year. She was greatly respected by all, and beloved by her five sons; every one of whom, however, she had sent out to be nursed at a cottage in the park till they were three years old. Her motherly duties were supposed to be amply fulfilled by occasionally stopping her carriage to see how the children were getting on.
As to the drinking among the men, (the women seem not to have shared the vice) it must have prevailed to a disgusting extent upstairs and downstairs. A fuddled condition after dinner was accepted as the normal one of a gentleman, and entailed no sort of disgrace. On the contrary, my father has told me that in his youth his own extreme sobriety gave constant offence to his grandfather, and to his comrades in the army; and only by showing the latter that he would sooner fight than be bullied to drink to excess could he obtain peace. Unhappily, poor man! while his grandfather, who seldom went to bed quite sober for forty years, lived to the fine old age of 82, enjoying good health to the last, his temperate grandson inherited the gout and in his latter years was a martyr thereto. Among the exceedingly beautiful old Indian and old Worcester china which belonged to Thomas Cobbe and showed his good taste and also the splendid scale of his entertainments (one dessert-service for 36 persons was magnificent) there stands a large goblet calculated to hold three bottles of wine. This glass (tradition avers) used to be filled with claret, seven guineas were placed at the bottom, and he who drank it pocketed the coin.
The behaviour of these Anglo-Irish gentry of the last century to their tenants and dependants seems to have proceeded on the truly Irish principle of being generous before you are just. The poor people lived in miserable hovels which nobody dreamed of repairing; but then they were welcome to come and eat and drink at the great house on every excuse or without any excuse at all. This state of things was so perfectly in harmony with Celtic ideas that the days when it prevailed are still sighed after as the “good old times.” Of course there was a great deal of Lady Bountiful business, and also of medical charity-work going forward. Archbishop Cobbe was fully impressed with the merits of the Tar-water so marvellously set forth by his suffragan, Bishop Berkeley, and I have seen in his handwriting in a book of his wife’s cookery receipts, a receipt for making it, beginning with the formidable item: “Take six gallons of the best French brandy.” Lady Betty was a famous compounder of simples, and of things that were not simple, and a “Chilblain Plaister” which bore her name, was not many years ago still to be procured in the chemists’ shops in Bath. I fear her prescriptions were not always of so unambitious a kind as this. One day she stopped a man on the road and asked his name—“Ah, then, my lady,” was the reply, “don’t you remember me? Why, I am the husband of the woman your ladyship gave the medicine to and she died the next day. Long life to your Ladyship!”
As I have said, the open-housekeeping at Newbridge at last came to an end, and the family migrated to No. 9 and No. 22, Marlborough Buildings, Bath, where two generations spent their latter years, died, and were buried in Weston churchyard, where I have lately restored their tombstones.
My grandfather died long before his father, and my father, another Charles Cobbe, found himself at eighteen pretty well his own master, the eldest of five brothers. He had been educated at Winchester, where his ancestors for eleven generations went to school in the old days of Swarraton; and to the end of his life he was wont to recite lines of Anacreon learned therein. But his tastes were active rather than studious, and disliking the idea of hanging about his mother’s house till his grandfather’s death should put him in possession of Newbridge, he listened with an enchanted ear to a glowing account which somebody gave him of India, where the Mahratta wars were just beginning.