Several ex-M.P.’s may be here mentioned. Passing over Beckford, of whom we shall speak hereafter, there was Philip Champion de Crespigny, King’s Proctor, who sat for Sudbury in 1796. Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh had sat in two Parliaments for Portsmouth. Sir Abraham Hume, an F.R.S., had represented Petersfield from 1774 to 1780. He collected old paintings, fossils, and minerals, and ultimately published a biography of Titian. Sir Elijah Impey, ex-Chief-Justice of Bengal, had sat for New Romney in 1790. He was solicitous of recovering money invested in the French funds, and Madame Grand is said to have welcomed his arrival as likely to facilitate proof of the divorce required for her marriage to Talleyrand, for Impey had tried Grand’s suit against her. Sir John Ingilby was elected for East Retford in 1781. Temple Luttrell, who sat for Melbourne Port from 1774 to 1780, was son of Lord Irnham and brother to the Earl of Carhampton. His sister Anne, widow of Christopher Horton, had married the Duke of Cumberland, so that when Luttrell was arrested at Boulogne in 1793 he was styled George III.’s brother-in-law. In 1789, as a member of the Jamaica Council, he drew up a remonstrance to Parliament against the suppression of the slave-trade. He had shown more enlightenment in the House of Commons in advocating conciliation to the American colonies and in predicting their indomitable resistance. Matthew Montagu, nephew and heir of the great society leader Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson), to whose gatherings the term blue-stocking was first applied, had sat in Parliament from 1786 to 1790 and was destined to re-enter it in 1806. In 1820 he succeeded his brother as Lord Rokeby. Richard Oliver had in 1790 represented the County Limerick, for which his son now sat; we shall hear of him again. William Maule Ramsay, younger son of the Earl of Dalhousie, regained his seat in Parliament in 1805. In 1831 he was created Lord Panmure, and afterwards succeeded his cousin in the title of Lord Dalhousie. We shall hear of him, too, again. Henry Seymour, a kinsman of the Duke of Somerset, had been the penultimate lover of Madame Dubarry.[50] He arrived with his daughter Georgina, widow of Comte de Durfort, as early as the 1st November 1801, but did not think it necessary or feasible, it seems, to claim the restitution of his private papers, confiscated on his flight in 1792. Even if he had claimed them he would have missed a bundle of Madame Dubarry’s love-letters, which had somehow been abstracted, and was discovered many years afterwards in a Paris bookstall. Possibly having been registered as an émigré, as though a foreigner could logically be so treated, he feared that to claim his papers might have entailed a denial of his right to revisit France. His French wife, whom he had dismissed on good grounds, was probably the ‘Lady’ Seymour who in 1806 was living on a handsome income at Cleves. Sir Robert Smyth, who had been unseated at Cardigan in 1775, but had sat for Colchester in 1785–1790, had, like Luttrell, suffered imprisonment in Paris during the Revolution, but through Paine, with whom his wife corresponded while he was in prison, had in 1796 obtained a passport for Hamburg. He now returned to Paris to open a bank, but making a journey back to London he suddenly died there in April 1802.
Prospective M.P.’s may here be mentioned. There was Lord Althorp, who, just of age, was sent by his father Earl Spencer, the great bibliophile, to France and Italy in order to cease running into debt and to acquire polish; but he refused to go into Continental society, was bored by pictures, and came home as unmannerly as ever, without having even learned French. He nevertheless developed into a prominent Whig statesman, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Grey Cabinet. His accession to the Upper House in 1835 gave William IV. a pretext for dismissing the ministry. He then retired into private life. Alexander Baring, son of Sir Francis and afterwards Lord Ashburton, sat in the House of Commons from 1806 to 1835, was President of the Board of Trade in 1834, and in 1842 negotiated the Maine Boundary Treaty with America. A Mr. Benyon was probably Benjamin Benyon, M.P. for Stafford in 1819. Lord Blayney, who in 1806 was returned for Old Sarum, was shortly destined to revisit France against his will. Sir Charles Burrell, another visitor, was elected in the same year for Shoreham. Arthur Harrington Champernowne, elected for Saltash in 1806, was a friend of Samuel Rogers. Cæsar Colclough, who, imprisoned in 1793–1794,[51] had apparently remained in France, became in 1818 M.P. for Wexford. William Congreve, the inventor of the rocket bearing his name, became in 1812 member for Gatton, and in 1814 succeeded to his father’s baronetcy. Sir Arthur Chichester sat for Carrickfergus in 1812. General Sir Charles Grogan Craufurd, son of Sir Alexander and nephew of Quintin Craufurd, translated Tieck’s History of the Seven Years’ War, and in 1800 had married the Dowager-Duchess of Newcastle. Sent as Commissioner to the Austrian army, he was wounded, and resigned his post in favour of his brother Robert, M.P. for East Retford in 1806. He died in 1821.
Lord Duncannon, who in 1844 succeeded his father as Earl of Bessborough, but in 1802 was only just of age, supported Catholic Emancipation, introduced O’Connell to the House of Commons when he refused to take the oath, and helped to frame the Reform Bill. In 1831 he was Commissioner of Woods and Forests; in 1834 he was called up to the Lords, and from 1846 till his death in 1848 he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Robert Ferguson of Raith was a Scottish member in 1806–1807 and again in 1831–1841. Of him we shall hear, not to his credit. Hudson Gurney, a Norwich banker, of a famous Quaker family, had an uncle Bartlett Gurney, F.S.A., who in 1796 all but defeated Windham at Norwich. Bartlett had turned Unitarian, but in 1803 was buried with the Quakers. Hudson also renounced Quakerism, or rather Quakerism renounced him, on account of his contributing to the war patriotic fund of 1804, yet friendly relations were afterwards revived. He sat in six parliaments, and died in 1864 at the age of eighty-nine. I remember seeing him as a corpulent old man, who had to be lifted in and out of his carriage.
William Haldimand, son of a Swiss merchant settled in London, was so precocious a financier that at twenty-five years of age—seven years after his Paris visit—he became a director of the Bank of England. His brother, who accompanied him, apparently died young. William represented Ipswich from 1820 to 1826. He was munificent in his gifts to charities and to the Greek war of liberation. In 1828 he retired to Lausanne, and on his death in 1862 bequeathed most of his property to a blind asylum there. His sister was Mrs. Marcet, the friend of Sydney Smith, and well known as a populariser of science and political economy. Hugh Hamersley, M.P. for Helston in 1812, will come under another category. Richard Heber, elder brother of the bishop, and a great book-collector, was member for Oxford University from 1821 to 1826. Sir Thomas Liddell, elected for Durham in 1806, became Lord Ravensworth and father of a Dean of Christchurch. James Mackintosh, who in 1813, on his return from Bombay, where he had been recorder, was elected for Nairn, and retained the seat till his death in 1832, was the author of the famous answer to Burke. Napoleon, unaware that he had since ‘abhorred, abjured, and for ever renounced the French Revolution, the greatest scourge of the world, and the chief stain upon human annals,’ complimented Mackintosh on his pamphlet,—or rather intended to have done so—for the order of presentations having been altered he addressed the compliment to some other Englishman. Shortly after his return Mackintosh defended Peltier, prosecuted for libelling Napoleon. Viscount Maitland, afterwards Earl of Lauderdale, was returned for Camelford in 1806. William (afterwards Sir William) Oglander sat for Bodmin. Viscount Ossulston sat for Berwick in 1820. Samuel Romilly, who in 1806 became Solicitor-General and M.P. for Queensborough, was the great advocate of the mitigation of the penal code, so as to limit capital punishment to cases of murder. He had seen Paris in August 1789. Sir William Rowley represented Suffolk in 1812, Sir Thomas Turton, Southwark in 1810–1820, and Sir Walter Stirling, St. Ives in 1807. William Young, whose father wrote a history of Athens, sat for St. Mawes and became Governor of Tobago.
There was a perfect swarm of peers and peers’ sons;[52] the elderly or middle-aged anxious to see how Paris looked after the Revolution, the younger eager to make acquaintance with it. Some, moreover, were on their way to Italy, for Lemaitre found at Naples, in February 1803, Lords Aberdeen, Mount Cashell, Grantham, Althorp, Brooke, and Beverley, besides Sir Charles Douglas, Sir Thomas Tancred, and the Cheshire Egertons, with Lady Hester Stanhope in their charge. The Dowager-Duchess of Cumberland, whose marriage led to the Royal Marriage Act, a widow since 1790, was also on her way to Nice, but stayed a month in Paris for medical advice. According to the Times she paid a hundred guineas a month for second-rate apartments, and not having been presented at the Court of St. James’s was not received by Madame Bonaparte, although previously to the Revolution she had been treated at Metz as a royal personage.
The Duke of Bedford interests us chiefly as the father of Lord John Russell, then a boy of eleven, who was left behind with his two brothers at school. The Duke was not a stranger to France. In March 1788 he and his wife, the latter on the verge of her confinement, were staying at Montpellier and waiting for that event. Her father, Viscount Torrington, who was apparently living in Paris, wrote to Louis XVI.’s Minister of the Household to ask what should be done to certify the expected birth. This was of some importance, for the traveller’s elder brother was unlikely to marry. The Minister advised him to call in two local notaries, adding that it might be well to get a certificate also from the British Embassy at Paris.[53] The child was born on the 13th May, and became heir to the Duke of Bedford, for his father had in March 1802 succeeded his brother, who bequeathed £5000 to Fox. He had learned French when a youth at Orleans, together with the Duke of Cleveland, and the Duke of Dorset then took them both to Versailles, where Marie Antoinette played billiards with them. Both went on to Rome where they went to Cardinal York’s weekly receptions. Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh was now his travelling companion. The Duke’s arrival on the 20th April 1803 was considered a sign of the duration of peace, but he apparently went over to fetch the Duchess of Gordon and her daughter Lady Georgina, whom he, a widower since October 1801, took for his second wife five weeks after his return. Georgina had been engaged to his deceased brother, who left her a lock of his hair, and her mother made her go into mourning for him, saying, ‘It is a feather in a girl’s cap to have been intended for the Duke of Bedford.’[54] The Duchess was reported to have said that she hoped to see Napoleon breakfast in Ireland, dine in London, and sup at Gordon Castle, but this is a manifest invention. There may be more truth in the story that she obtained recruits in 1794 for her son’s Highland regiment (now the 2nd Gordon Highlanders) by placing a shilling between her lips to be kissed by them, yet this seems a variation of the Duchess of Devonshire’s kiss to a Westminster elector. She died in 1812. As for her daughter Georgina, who had an illness in Paris, she was a great dancer, and frequently danced, as Napoleon told Lord Ebrington at Elba in 1814, with his step-son Eugène Beauharnais. The Times, indeed, insinuated that she set her cap at the step-father himself. ‘It is certain,’ said that journal on the 12th January 1803,
‘that some of our travelling Nudes of Fashion intended to conquer the Conqueror of the Continent. What glory would it have brought to this Country, if it could have boasted of giving a Mistress, or a Wife, to the First Consul. How pretty would sound Lady G—— (we mean Lady Godiva) Bonaparte?’
Wraxall’s story that the Duchess wanted to wed her daughter to Eugène is confirmed by Maurice Dupin, George Sand’s father, who met them at a dinner-party, and wrote to his mother that they were in love with each other, but that Napoleon would not listen to the match. Georgina, he added, was reputed a beauty, but like Eugène lacked a good mouth and teeth.[55]
The Duke of Newcastle, afterwards famous for justifying the eviction at Newark of forty tenants who refused to vote for his nominee by saying, ‘May I not do what I will with my own?’ was destined to give Gladstone his first seat in the House of Commons; which Gladstone, however, resigned in 1846 on joining Peel in free-trade. The Duke was yet only a youth of seventeen, in charge of his step-father Sir Charles Craufurd, who has been already mentioned. The Duke of Somerset deserves notice only as the father of the Duke of our time, who was first Lord of the Admiralty and an agnostic writer.
The Marchioness of Donegal was accompanied by her sisters Mary and Philippa Godfrey, friends of Thomas Moore. The Marquis and Marchioness of Tweeddale (she was daughter of Lord Lauderdale) took with them their young son, Lord James Hay.