I have been every day in expectation of a reply from Sir F. Burdett respecting a large property which is said to have been left me in Ireland, and which has been concealed from me for many years. In case of its coming into my hands, I shall still not keep my pension, in order to cut off every communication with the English Government, from whom only proceed acts of folly, which any moment may rebound upon an individual. I chose Sir Francis Burdett to look into my affairs, because I believe him to be a truly conscientious honest man. Although we always disagreed upon politics, we were always the best friends, and it appears to me that he is beginning to see things in their proper light. * * * * All that I have to entreat of your Grace is to allow me to appear in the light in which I really stand—attached to humanity, and attached to royalty, and attached to the claims that one human being has upon another. Nor can I allow myself to be deemed an intriguer; because I have said here, in all societies, that persons who abet those who attempt to shake the throne of Sultan Mahmoud shake the throne of their own sovereign, and, therefore, commit high treason: and among that class of persons I do not choose to rank myself. Nor am I to be reckoned an incendiary, when I seek to vindicate my own character, that never was marked with either baseness or folly:—it may have been, perhaps, with too little consideration for what are called by the world my own interests, and which I, in fact, despise, or at least only consider in a secondary point of view. There is nobody more capable of making the Queen understand that a Pitt is a unique race than your Grace: there is no trifling with them.
I have sent a duplicate of the enclosed letter to Her Majesty to my Lord Palmerston, through the hands of the English Consul, Mr. Moore. If it has not reached her safe, I hope that you will see that this one does: or otherwise I shall put it in the Augsburg Gazette, or in an American newspaper.[33]
* * * * *
Hester Lucy Stanhope.
At eleven at night I joined her at tea in her bed-room. She then asked me to read all the letters over, to see if anything wanted correction. After that, calling for her old parchment-covered blotting-book, she took them one by one, and folded them herself, “in order,” as she said, “to give me instructions on that head.” Generally speaking, she never seemed more happy than when she had a huge packet of despatches to put up: I dare say it reminded her of former times.
She began—“Now, doctor, a letter to a great man should fold over exactly to the middle—thus. Lord! what counting-house paper have you got here?—this will never do” (it was the thin paper common in France as letter-paper). I told her it was the very best there was in the house, and added, to quiet her, that thick paper, when fumigated in quarantine, as this must be, generally seemed to me to suffer more than thin; which is the fact. “Humph—ah! well, it is too late now to alter it; so it must go as it is.” She then folded the cover with great exactitude; but, looking round her, she cried, “There, now, that black beast has not given me the seal!” (ding, ding). “Zezefôon, where’s the seal?” Zezefôon was the only servant who was permitted to touch the seal, and she always had orders to put it away carefully, so that the other maids should not know where it was, for fear they should lend it to some rascal, (like Girius Gemmel, she would say,) who would put her signature to some forged letter or paper: and Zezefôon, as is customary with uneducated persons, hid it very often so carefully that she could not find it herself. After turning books and papers upside down, at last she produced it.
Whilst melting the wax in the candle, Lady Hester went on:—“Doctor, you never now can seal a letter decently: you once used to do it tolerably well, but now you have lost your memory and all your faculties, from talking nothing but rubbish and empty nonsense to those nasty women; and that’s the reason why you never listen to anything one says, and answer ‘yes,’ and ‘no,’ without knowing to what.”
I gave her the letters in succession to seal, until exhausted by the effort—for now the least thing was too much for her—she fell back in her bed. She roused herself again, and said, “Now let’s direct them: where is the one to the Queen? Write Victoria Regina—nothing else—in the middle ... that will do very well. Whose is that?—the Speaker’s: very well. I wonder if it is the brother I used to play driving horses with; for there were several brothers. Now, look for his address—James—ah! that’s him: direct ‘To the Right Hon. Speaker’ ... no, stop: put ‘To the Right Hon. James Abercrombie, with three et ceteras, Carlton Gardens.’”
The next letter was the Duke of Wellington’s. Lady Hester said, “Let me see—he’s a field marshal—ah, never mind: you must begin—‘To His Grace the Duke of Wellington, K.G.’” I accordingly did so, and, not knowing how much more was coming to complete the superscription, I put it all, for fear of wanting room, into one line. Her eye was on me as I wrote. “What’s that?—show it me?” she cried out; and, taking the letter in her hands, she put on her spectacles. What an exclamation burst from her! “Good God, doctor! are you mad?—what can you mean?—what is this vulgar ignorance, not to know that ‘His Grace’ should be in one line, and ‘The Duke of Wellington, K.G.’ in the other: what people will he fancy I am got among! why, the lowest clerk in the Foreign Office would not have made such a blunder: this is your fine Oxford education!” and then she gave a deep sigh, as if in utter despair, to think that a letter should go forth from her hands so different in paper, seal, and address, from those of her early days, when she reigned in Downing Street, co-equal with Mr. Pitt. Now it was a rickety old card-table, a rush-bottomed chair, a white pipe-clay inkstand, wax that would not be used in a counting-house in Cheapside; and both the Sultaness and her vizir (for so I shall presume to style her and myself), fitting their spectacles on their noses, equally blind, equally old, and almost equally ailing.