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

by Frances Power Cobbe

Another man who sometimes came to our house, was Dr. Longley, then Bishop of Ripon, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a very charming person, without the slightest episcopal morgue or affectation, and with the kindest brown eyes in the world. His wife was niece, and, I believe, eventually heiress, of our neighbour Mrs. Evans; and he and his family spent some summers at Portrane in the Fifties when we had many pleasant parties and picnics. I shall not forget how the Bishop laughed when the young Longleys and I and a few guests of my own, inaugurated some charades, and our party, all in disguise, were announced on our arrival at Portrane, as “Lady Worldly,” “Miss Angelina Worldly,” “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead,” and the “Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims.”

Our word was “Novice.” I, as Lady Worldly, in my great-grandmother’s petticoat and powdered toupee, gave my daughter Angelina a lecture on the desirability of marrying “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead” who was rich, and of dismissing Captain Algernon who was poor. Sir Bumpkin then made his proposals, to which Angelina emphatically answered “No.” In the second scene I met Sir Bumpkin at the gaming table, and fleeced him utterly; the end of his “Vice” being suicide on the adjacent sofa. Angelina then, in horror took the veil, and became a “No-vice,” duly admitted to her Nunnery by the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims (my youngest brother in a superb scarlet dressing gown) who pronounced a Sermon on the pleasures of fasting and going barefoot. Angelina retired to her cell, but was soon disturbed by a voice outside the window (Henry Longley’s); and exclaiming “Algernon, beloved Algernon!” a speedy elopement over the back of the sofa concluded the fate of the Novice and the charade.

There was another charade in which we held a debate in Parliament on a Motion to “abolish the sun and moon,” which amused the bishop to the last degree, especially as we made fun of Joseph Hume’s retrenchments; he being a particular friend and frequent guest of our hostess. The abolition of the Sun would, we feared, affect the tax on parasols.

At Ripon, as Dr. Longley told me, the Palace prepared for him (the first bishop of the new see) had, as ornaments of the front of the house, two full-sized stone (or plaster) Angels. One day a visitor asked him: “Pray, my Lord, is it supposed by Divines that Angels wear the order of the Garter?” On inspection it proved that the Ripon Angels had formerly done service as statues of the Queen and Prince Albert, but that wings had been added to fit them for the episcopal residence. Sufficient care, however, had not been taken to efface the insignia of the Most Illustrious Order; and “Honi soit qui mal y pense” might be dimly deciphered on the leg of the male celestial visitant.

A lady nearly related to Mrs. Longley, who had married an English nobleman, adopted the views of the Plymouth Brothers (or as all the Mrs. Malaprops of the period invariably styled them, the “Yarmouth Bloaters”), which had burst into sudden notoriety. When her husband died leaving her a very wealthy woman, she thought it her duty to carry out the ideas of her sect by putting down such superfluities of her establishment as horses and carriages, and a well appointed table. She accordingly wrote to her father and begged him to dispose of all her plate and equipages. Lord C—— made no remonstrance and offered no arguments; and after a year or two he received a letter from his daughter couched in a different strain. She told him that she had now reached the conviction that it was “the will of God that a peeress should live as a peeress,” and she begged him to buy for her new carriages and fresh plate. Lord C——’s answer must have been a little mortifying. “I knew, my dear, that you would come sooner or later to your senses. You will find your carriages at your coachmakers and your plate at your bankers.”

Mrs. Evans, née Sophia Parnell, the aunt of both these ladies, and a great-aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell, was, as I have said, our nearest neighbour and in the later years of my life at Newbridge my very kind old friend. For a long time political differences between my father and her husband,—George Hampden Evans, M.P., who had managed to wrest the county from the Tories,—kept the families apart, but after his death we were pleasantly intimate for many years. She often spoke to me of the Avondale branch of her family, and more than once said: “There is mischief brewing! I am troubled at what is going on at Avondale. My nephew’s wife” (the American lady, Delia Stewart) “has a hatred of England, and is educating my nephew, like a little Hannibal, to hate it too!” How true was her foresight there is no need now to rehearse, nor how near that “little Hannibal” came to our Rome! Charles Parnell was very far from being a representative Irishman. He was of purely English extraction, and even in the female line had no drop of Irish blood. His mother, as all the world knows, was an American; his grandmother was one of the Howards of the family of the Earls of Wicklow, his great-grandmother a Brooke, of a branch of the old Cheshire house; and, beyond this lady again, his grand-dames were Wards and Whitsheds. In short, like other supposed “illustrious Irishmen”—Burke, Grattan, Goldsmith, and Wellington—Mr. Parnell was only one example more of the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon intellect in every land of its adoption.

Mrs. Evans had known Madame de Stael, Condorcet and many other interesting French people in her youth, and loved the Condorcets warmly. She described to me a stiff, old-fashioned dinner at which she had been present when Madame de Stael was a guest. After dinner, the ladies, having retired to the drawing-room, sat apart from Madame de Stael in terror, and she looked them over with undisguised contempt. After a while she rose and, without asking the consent of the mistress of the house, rang the bell. When the footman appeared, she delivered the startling order: “Tell the gentlemen to come up!” The sensation among the formal and scandalized ladies upstairs, and the gentlemen just settling down to their usual long potations below, may be well imagined.

When her husband died, Mrs. Evans built in his memory a fine Round Tower on the plan and of the size of the best of the old Irish towers. It stands on high ground on what was her deer-park, and is a useful landmark to sailors all along that dangerous coast, where the dreadful wreck of the Tayleur took place. On the shore below, under the lofty black cliffs, are several very imposing caverns. In the largest of these, which is lighted from above by a shaft, Mrs. Evans, on one occasion, gave a great luncheon party, at which I was present. The company were all in high spirits and thoroughly enjoying the pigeon-pies and champagne, when some one observed that the tide might soon be rising. Mrs. Evans replied that it was all right, there was plenty of time, and the festival proceeded for another half-hour, when somebody rose and strolled to the mouth of the cavern and soon uttered a cry of alarm. The tide had risen, and was already beating at a formidable depth against both sides of the rocks which shut in the cave. Consternation of course reigned among the party. A night spent in the further recesses of that damp hole, even supposing the tide did not reach the end (which was very doubtful), afforded anything but a cheerful prospect. Could anybody get up through the shaft to the upper cliff? Certainly, if they had a long ladder. But there were no ladders lying about the cave; and, finally, everybody stood mournfully watching the rising waters at the mouth of their prison. Mrs. Evans all this time appeared singularly calm, and administered a little encouragement to some of the almost fainting ladies. When the panic was at its climax, Mrs. Evans’ own large boat was seen quietly rounding the projecting rocks and was soon comfortably pushed up to the feet of the imprisoned party, who had nothing to do but to embark in two or three detachments and be safely landed in the bay outside, beyond the reach of the sea. The whole incident, it is to be suspected, had been pre-arranged by the hostess to infuse a little wholesome excitement among her country guests.

Our small village church at Donabate was not often honoured by this lady’s presence, but one Sunday she saw fit to attend service with some visitors; and a big dog unluckily followed her into the pew and lay extended on the floor, which he proceeded to beat with his tail after the manner of impatient dogs under durance. This disturbance was too much for the poor parson, who did not love Mrs. Evans. As he proceeded with the service and the rappings were repeated again and again, his patience gave way, and he read out this extraordinary lesson to his astonished congregation:—“The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. Turn out that dog, if you please! It’s extremely wrong to bring a dog into church.” During the winter Mrs. Evans was wont to live much alone in her country house, surrounded only by her old servants and multitudes of old books. When at last, in old age, she found herself attacked by mortal disease she went to Paris to profit by the skill of some French physician in whom she had confidence, and there, with unshaken courage she passed away. Her remains, enclosed in a leaden coffin, were brought back to Portrane, and her Irish terrier who adored her, somehow recognised the dreadful chest and exhibited a frenzy of grief; leaping upon it and tearing at the pall with piteous cries. Next morning, strange to say, the poor brute was, with six others about the place, in such a state of excitement as to be supposed to be rabid and it was thought necessary to shoot them all. One of them leaped the gate of the yard and escaping bit two of my father’s cows, which became rabid, and were shot in my presence. Mrs. Evans was buried beside her beloved husband in the little roofless and ruined church of Portrane, close by the shore. On another grave in the same church belonging to the same family, a dog had some years previously died of grief.

A brother of this lady, who walked over often to Newbridge from Portrane to bring my mother some scented broom which she loved, was a very singular and pathetic character. He was a younger brother of that sufficiently astute man of the world, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards Lord Congleton, but was his antipodes in disposition. Thomas Parnell, “Old Tom Parnell,” as all Dublin knew him for forty years, had a huge ungainly figure like Dr. Johnson’s, and one of the sweetest, softest faces ever worn by mortal man. He had, at some remote and long forgotten period, been seized with a fervent and self-denying religious enthusiasm of the ultra-Protestant type; and this had somehow given birth in his brain to a scheme for arranging texts of the Bible in a mysterious order which, when completed, should afford infallible answers to every question of the human mind! To construct the interminable tables required for this wonderful plan, poor Tom Parnell devoted his life and fortune. For years which must have amounted to many decades, he laboured at the work in a bare, gloomy, dusty room in what was called a “Protestant Office” in Sackville Street. Money went speedily to clerks and printers; and no doubt the good man (who himself lived, as he used to say laughingly, on “a second-hand bone,”) gave money also freely in alms. One way or another Mr. Parnell grew poorer and more poor, his coat looked shabbier, and his beautiful long white hair more obviously in need of a barber. Once or twice every summer he was prevailed on by his sister to tear himself from his work and pay her a few weeks’ visit in the country at Portrane; and to her and all her visitors he preached incessantly his monotonous appeal: “Repent; and cease to eat good dinners, and devote yourselves to compiling texts!” When his sister—who had treated him as a mother would treat a silly boy—died, she left him a small annuity, to be paid to him weekly in dribblets by trustees, lest he should spend it at once and starve if he received it half-yearly. After this epoch he worked on with fewer interruptions than ever at his dreary text-books in that empty, grimy office. Summer’s sun and winter’s snow were alike to the lonely old man. He ploughed on at his hopeless task. There was no probability that he should live to fill up the interminable columns, and no apparent reason to suppose that any human being would use the books if he ever did so and supposing them to be printed. But still he laboured on. Old friends—myself among them—who had known him in their childhood, looked in now and then to shake hands with him, and, noticing how pale and worn and aged he seemed, tried to induce him to come to their homes. But he only exhorted them (like Tolstoi, whom he rather resembled), as usual, to repent and give up good dinners and help him with his texts, and denounced wildly all rich people who lived in handsome parks with mud villages at their gates, as he said, “like a velvet dress with a draggled skirt.” Then, when his visitor had departed, Mr. Parnell returned patiently to his interminable texts. At last one day, late in the autumn twilight, the porter, whose duty it was to shut up the office, entered the room and found the old man sitting quietly in the chair where he had laboured so long—fallen into the last long sleep.