Rowlandson the Caricaturist; a Selection from His Works. Vol. 2

by Joseph Grego

It seems tolerably clear, on sifting the motives of the several actors and puppets in this matter, who had personally nothing to gain by the Duke's dismissal, and who were obviously, with one or two exceptions, corrupt agents in the first instance by their own confessions, and therefore likely to be actuated by no higher principles in the proceedings at issue, that they were (involuntarily in some cases) exposing their own misdeeds to forward the purpose of a greater personage, who did not appear, but to whose influence and purse they looked for their reward.

Mrs. Clarke was, as everyone recognised, acting from the common impulse of personal aggrandisement, and she frankly acknowledged her principles. The year following the investigation, and the destruction of her Memoirs, she thought proper to revenge the want of faith which, according to her account, had characterised the proceedings of the 'conspirators' in her own case, by exposing the true intentions of the Duke's assailants; her motives, as she admitted, were in this second exposure prompted by the same interested spirit which had actuated the previous prosecution of her late friend and protector.

According to her account Colonel Wardle was simply a tool in the hands of the Duke of Kent; his allies were Major Dodd and Mr. Glennie, the former being the Duke of Kent's secretary—who engaged himself without scruple to forward the projects of his employer. According to all accounts Colonel Wardle had bribed the assistance of an ambitious woman who fancied herself aggrieved, and who was, above all, amenable to sordid incentives: the Duke had left her in debt, had broken his word in more than one instance, and had used threats of the pillory and the Bastille in reply to her applications; she was tired of living in obscure retirement, and was irritated by the menaces of creditors, whose demands she had no means of satisfying. The chief temptation held out to her was, however, a promise that she should once more enjoy that command of ease, and power of shining in the world of fashion, which had been Mrs. Clarke's weakness through life. The arrears she claimed were to be made up, her debts were to be paid, the allowance she sought from the Duke of York (400l. per annum), was to be doubled by his brother; she was to have a carriage and four, with a residence and state in proportion; and she was to exercise her own taste in furnishing a house with the elegance and splendour which had marked her late establishment at Gloucester Place. To do the lady justice, she hesitated before inflicting the grave injuries which must attend the public exposure of her whilom benefactor, although she was by no means habitually given to sentimentality. She wrote to the Commander-in-Chief, asked for the allowance which, as she avowed, she had done nothing to forfeit, and at the same time mentioned the overtures which two factions were making her: one party for political purposes—the Radical Reformers to wit, headed by Sir Francis Burdett (who she declared had proposed to treat for the papers and letters in her possession, some sixty of which, as she informed the Duke, were in his own handwriting); the other influence brought to bear on her was of a more subtle and covert description, and she went so far as to indicate the disastrous consequences to himself which would inevitably follow if she lent herself to the schemes of his personal antagonists.

The Duke of York remained obdurate, and thus played into the hands of his personal and political enemies. Colonel Wardle seized the opportunity. He gave Mrs. Clarke 100l. for present necessities, to induce reliance in those liberal promises which were later repudiated. The lady's natural sagacity, and her experience of life, furnished her with strategic abilities almost equal to the combined talents of the respective factions between which she found herself; and on the strength of the assistance which she finally consented to afford to Colonel Wardle and his supporters through Major Dodd—who, though less seen, was the more active agent in organising the attack on the Commander-in-Chief—she secured the house in Westbourne Place as an earnest of the benefits she was to receive hereafter, and succeeded in making Colonel Wardle become security for the furniture. In her disappointment it must have proved at least somewhat of a consolation to have out-manœuvred the Colonel; who, for his reward, reaped in the end the obloquy attending exposure and ridicule instead of the glorification which at first appeared likely to crown his exertions. Thus the combination was successfully set in motion, and, in spite of all its discordant elements, compelled to work with something like consistent unison, or its individual members were left to take the consequences of any attempted retrogression, as in the instances of Captain Sandon (Mrs. Clarke's ally), on the one hand, and General Clavering,[17] whose sympathies were with his chief, on the other. The opponents of the Duke of York were thus prepared to open the campaign in the manner we have seen.

In 1810 Mrs. Clarke took up her pen to endeavour to prove that the Duke of York's fall was actually brought about by the successful ingenuity and masterly tactics of his brother the Duke of Kent. In a pamphlet entitled The Rival Princes she argued there was feud between the two Dukes, a fact which was sufficiently accepted out of doors, before the appearance of her publication, and that of the refutation which followed it under the title of The Rival Dukes. It will be remembered that early in 1802 the Duke of Kent obtained the governorship of Gibraltar, and that when possessed of the supreme command he determined to introduce all the rigour of German discipline, in accordance with the school in which he had received his military education. His efforts to remodel the existing regulations, and to substitute a system of severer subordination and rigid restraint, were not attended with auspicious results; on the contrary, a mutiny took place, December 24, 1803, in which, it is said, the Governor's life was actually aimed at. On this occasion several officers distinguished themselves by their zeal and activity; while the timely arrival of a detachment of artillery under Captain Dodd, not only endeared that officer to his royal highness through the remainder of his life, but contributed not a little to restore order in the garrison. The Duke of Kent was soon after recalled, and although he requested that the Commander-in-Chief should hold a court-martial on his conduct, the Duke of York declined to sanction the proceedings—Mrs. Clarke alleged out of fraternal kindness, as he declared to her, that if he had acceded to his brother's wishes, the Duke of Kent would certainly have been dismissed, which would have resulted in the loss of his emoluments, and this would have occasioned a reduction of some 2,000l. per annum in his income, at a time too when he was in sufficiently straitened circumstances.

From the date of his return his royal highness remained unemployed, and all efforts to obtain a restoration to his governorship, or attain any command in the army, proved unavailing, although he had received the baton of a field-marshal in 1805.

Between the Commander-in-Chief and his brother a jealousy had for some time subsisted, and Mrs. Clarke did not hesitate to state that the intrigue to which she had been induced to lend herself as the most conspicuous figure, was prompted by a desire on the part of the principal agitator—who remained discreetly in the background—to humiliate the Duke of York, in the expectation that the office of Commander-in-Chief, vacated by his brother's dismissal, would descend on himself in the natural order of things: an expectation which was not realised. One wild surmise attributed to 'the party' the belief that the Duke of York, smarting under his disgrace, would commit suicide, and thus afford the Duke of Kent a chance of being appointed his successor, as in the event of his brother's decease, there seems little doubt that the Duke of Kent, in spite of certain prejudices against which he struggled through his prematurely closed life, would have filled the office, almost by family right. The character of the Duke of Kent has been dispassionately reviewed since that date, and the calumnies of his detractors disallowed; beyond a natural leaning to discipline pushed to severity, through the fruits of his training, it is clear that his disposition was remarkably free from the guilty personal weaknesses which marked his age, and from those unrestrained self-indulgences which disfigured many of the brightest luminaries of the last century in nearly every phase of society.

It will perhaps be interesting, after having thus attempted to trace the involutions of this complicated and scandalous intrigue, which, however, belongs to history, to add a word on the ultimate careers of the principal actors. Mrs. Clarke chiefly spent her later years in Paris, where it is understood she died, leaving a fortune amounting to some thousands of pounds. It is a redeeming point in her character, that when a certain nobleman (best known by the fictitious title of the 'Marquis of Steyne,' under which he figures in a famous novel, perhaps the finest in the world), presuming on the reputation of the mother, made princely overtures, with the object of converting one of her daughters—who, we are informed, were unusually handsome young ladies—into his mistress, the proposal was treated with the indignation its nature merited.

Mr. Clarke, who was by no means the sinner, according to another account which has reached us, that his detractors have painted, became for a time, as we learn, a Brother of the Charter House. He lived to a very venerable age; and he, too, from the circumstances of his family, was able to leave some property at his decease.