Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

Without much reflection or delay, he obtained a cornet’s commission in the 19th Light Dragoons and sailed for Madras. Very shortly he was engaged in active service under Wellesley, who always treated him with special kindness as another Anglo-Irish gentleman. He fought at many minor battles and sieges, and also at Assaye and Argaum; receiving his medal for these two, just fifty years afterwards. I shall write of this again a little further on in this book.

At last he fell ill of the fever of the country, which in those days was called “ague,” and was left in a remote place absolutely helpless. He was lying in bed one day in his tent when a Hindoo came in and addressed him very courteously, asking after his health. My father incautiously replied that he was quite prostrated by the fever. “What! Not able to move at all, not to walk a step?” said his visitor. “No! I cannot stir,” said my father. “Oh, in that case, then,” said the man,—and without more ado he seized my father’s desk, in which were all his money and valuables, and straightway made off with it before my father could summon his servants. His condition, thus left alone in an enemy’s country without money, was bad enough, but he managed to send a trusty messenger to Sir Arthur Wellesley, who promptly lent him all he required.

Finding that there was no chance of his health being sufficiently restored in India to permit of further active service, and the Mahratta wars being practically concluded, my father sold his commission of Lieutenant and returned to England, quietly letting himself into his mother’s house in Bath on his return by the latch-key, which he had carried with him through all his journeys. All his life long the impress made both on his outward bearing and character by those five years of war were very visible. He was a fine soldier-like figure, six feet high, and had ridden eighteen stone in his full equipment. His face was, I suppose, ugly, but it was very intelligent, very strong willed, and very unmistakeably that of a gentleman. He was under-jawed, very pale, with a large nose, and small, grey, very lively eyes; but he had a beautiful white forehead from which his hair, even in old age, grew handsomely, and his head was very well set on his broad shoulders. The photograph in the next volume represents him at 76. He rode admirably, and a better figure on horseback could not be seen. At all times there was an aspect of strength and command about him, which his vigorous will and (truth compels me to add) his not seldom fiery temper, fully sustained. On the many occasions when we had dinner parties at Newbridge, he was a charming, gay and courteous host; and I remember being struck, when he once wore a court dress and took me with him to pay his respects to a Tory Lord Lieutenant, by the contrast which his figure and bearing presented to that of nearly all the other men in similar attire. They looked as if they were masquerading, and he as if the lace-ruffles and plum coat and sword were his habitual dress. He had beautiful hands, of extraordinary strength.

One day he was walking with one of his lady cousins on his arm in the street. A certain famous prize-fighting bully, the Sayers or Heenan of the period, came up hustling and elbowing every passenger off the pavement. When my father saw him approach he made his cousin take his left arm, and as the prize-fighter prepared to shoulder him, he delivered with his right fist, without raising it, a blow which sent the ruffian fainting into the arms of his companions. Having deposited his cousin in a shop, my father went back for the sequel of the adventure, and was told that the “Chicken” (or whatever he was called) had had his ribs broken.

After his return from India, my father soon sought a wife. He flirted sadly, I fear, with his beautiful cousin, Louisa Beresford, the daughter of his great-uncle, the Archbishop of Tuam; and one of the ways in which he endeavoured to ingratiate himself was to carry about at all times a provision of bon-bons and barley-sugar with which to ply the venerable and sweet-toothed prelate; who was generally known as “The Beauty of Holiness.” How the wooing would have prospered cannot be told, but before it had reached a crisis a far richer lover appeared on the scene—Mr. Hope. “Anastasius Hope,” as he was called from the work of which he was the author, was immensely wealthy, and a man of great taste in art, but he had the misfortune to be so excessively ugly that a painter whom he offended by not buying his picture, depicted him and Miss Beresford as “Beauty and the Beast,” and exhibited his painting at the Bath Pump-room, where her brother, John Beresford (afterwards the second Lord Decies) cut it deliberately to pieces. An engagement between Mr. Hope and Miss Beresford was announced not long after the arrival of Mr. Hope in Bath; and my mother, then Miss Conway, going to pay a visit of congratulation to Miss Beresford, found her reclining on a blue silk sofa appropriately perusing The Pleasures of Hope. After the death of Mr. Hope (by whom she was the mother of Mr. Beresford-Hope, Mr. Adrian and Mr. Henry Hope), Mrs. Hope married the illegitimate son of her uncle, the Marquis of Waterford—Field Marshal Lord Beresford—a fine old veteran, with whom she long lived happily in the corner house in Cavendish Square, where my father and brothers always found a warm welcome.

At length, after some delays, my father had the great good fortune to induce my dear mother to become his wife, and they were married at Bath, March 13th, 1809. Frances Conway was, as I have said, daughter of Capt. Thomas Conway, of Morden Park. Her father and mother both died whilst she was young and she was sent to the famous school of Mrs. Devis, in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, of which I shall have something presently to say, and afterwards lived with her grandmother, who at her death bequeathed to her a handsome legacy, at Southampton. When her grandmother died, she being then sixteen years of age, received an invitation from Colonel and Mrs. Champion to live with them and become their adopted daughter. The history of this invitation is rather touching. Mrs. Champion’s parents had, many years before, suffered great reverses, and my mother’s grandfather had done much to help them, and, in particular, had furnished means for Mrs. Champion to go out to India. She returned after twenty years as the childless wife of the rich and kindly old Colonel, the friend of Warren Hastings, who having been commander-in-chief of the Forces of the East India Company had had a good “shake of the Pagoda tree.” She repaid to the grandchild the kindness done by the grandfather; and was henceforth really a mother to my mother, who dearly loved both her and Col. Champion. In their beautiful house, No. 29, Royal Crescent, she saw all the society of Bath in its palmiest days, Mrs. Champion’s Wednesday evening parties being among the most important in the place. My mother’s part as daughter of the house was an agreeable one, and her social talents and accomplishments fitted her perfectly for the part. The gentle gaiety, the sweet dignity and ease of her manners and conversation remain to me as the memory of something exquisite, far different even from the best manner and talk of my own or the present generation; and I know that the same impression was always made on her visitors in her old age. I can compare it to nothing but the delicate odour of the dried rose leaves with which her china vases were filled and her wardrobes perfumed.

I hardly know whether my mother were really beautiful, though many of the friends who remembered her in early womanhood spoke of her as being so. To me her face was always the loveliest in the world; indeed it was the one through which my first dawning perception of beauty was awakened. I can remember looking at her as I lay beside her on the sofa, where many of her suffering hours were spent, and suddenly saying, “Mamma you are so pretty!” She laughed and kissed me, saying, “I am glad you think so my child;” but that moment really brought the revelation to me of that wonderful thing in God’s creation, the Beautiful! She had fine features, a particularly delicate, rather thin-lipped mouth; magnificent chestnut hair, which remained scarcely changed in colour or quantity till her death at seventy years of age; and the clear, pale complexion and hazel eyes which belong to such hair. She always dressed very well and carefully. I never remember seeing her downstairs except in some rich dark silk, and with a good deal of fine lace about her cap and old-fashioned fichu. Her voice and low laughter were singularly sweet, and she possessed both in speaking and writing a full and varied diction which in later years she carefully endeavoured to make me share, instead of satisfying myself, in school-girl fashion, with making one word serve a dozen purposes. She was an almost omnivorous reader; and, according to the standard of female education in her generation, highly cultivated in every way; a good musician with a very sweet touch of the piano, and speaking French perfectly well.

Immediately after their marriage my parents took possession of Newbridge, and my father began earnestly the fulfilment of all the duties of a country gentleman, landlord and magistrate. My mother, indeed, used laughingly to aver that he “went to jail on their wedding day,” for he stopped at Bristol on the road and visited a new prison with a view to introducing improvements into Irish jails. It was due principally to his exertions that the county jail, the now celebrated Kilmainham, was afterwards erected.

Newbridge having been deserted for nearly thirty years, the woods had been sorely injured and the house and out-buildings dilapidated, but with my father’s energy and my mother’s money things were put straight; and from that time till his death in 1857 my father lived and worked among his people.

Though often hard pressed to carry out with a very moderate income all his projects of improvements, he was never in debt. One by one he rebuilt or re-roofed almost every cottage on his estate, making what had been little better than pig-styes, fit for human habitation; and when he found that his annual rents could never suffice to do all that was required in this way for his tenants in his mountain property, he induced my eldest brother, then just of age, to join with him in selling two of the pictures which were the heirlooms of the family and the pride of the house, a Gaspar Poussin and a Hobbema, which last now adorns the walls of Dorchester House. I remember as a child seeing the tears in his eyes as this beautiful painting was taken out of the room in which it had been like a perpetual ray of sunshine. But the sacrifice was completed, and 80 good stone and slate “Hobbema Cottages,” as we called them, soon rose all over Glenasmoil. Be it noted by those who deny every merit in an Anglo-Irish landlord, that not a farthing was added to the rent of the tenants who profited by this real act of self-denial.