“When I recollect how differently servants conduct themselves in England! There was the groom of the chamber at Mr. Pitt’s—I don’t think I ever held half an hour’s conversation with him the whole time he was there; he was, however, a man with quite a distinguished look, and ten times more of a gentleman than half those who call themselves so. He came in, delivered a note or a message with a proper air; and, if I had one to send anywhere, I threw it along the table to the end, so,” (and here Lady Hester put on one of those—what shall I call them?—queen-like airs, which she was fond of assuming)—“or else gave it into his hand, telling him, or not telling him—for he could see by looking at it—where it was to go. Do you think servants ever dared to smile, or scratch themselves, or seem to notice anything, as these beasts do? He afterwards married one of the maids, and took Thomas’s, or some such named, hotel, where he was well patronized by the great.
“Servants work twice as hard in England as they do here. Why, there was the boy of twelve or thirteen years old that used to go to Sevenoaks to fetch papa’s letters. Every day but one in the week did that boy ride backward and forward; and sometimes I have seen him lifted off his horse, with his fingers so benumbed that he could not even ring the bell; and his face and hands were rubbed with snow, and he was walked about for a quarter of an hour before he was allowed to go into the servants’ hall. There was the shepherd’s daughter, who would take up a sheep over her shoulders, and carry it like a nothing; ay, and whilst it was struggling, too, pretty stoutly, I can tell you. Then the washerwomen, who used to begin on Monday morning half an hour after midnight, and work all through the day and the next night until eleven or twelve, without ever sitting down, except to their meals:—there was hard work! Here they have their sleep in the middle of the day, and will not eat or drink when they are warm, for fear of getting the lampas.”
Thursday, May 3.—I read a few more pages of Lady Charlotte Bury’s novel. The Duchess of Rochester was now set down as Lady J. “Those girls of hers,” observed Lady Hester, “were brought up so prim. I recollect seeing three of them sitting together in a box at the Opera, and nothing could be more beautiful. They had charming countenances, with fine eyes, very good teeth, and complexions quite ravishing; but none of them were remarkably clever.”
The narrative comes to where Mrs. Fitzirnham regrets how she was taking her pleasure, and putting her husband to the expense of hiring a country-house for her, when she should have been at home saving his money. “Ah!” said Lady Hester, “she should have been making his shirts;” and this text afforded her an opportunity of pronouncing an encomium on Lady Mahon,[18] her brother’s wife. “She had,” said Lady Hester, “one good point about her, that, after her marriage, whilst my brother was poor, she was not extravagant:” then, reverting to other branches of her family, she dwelt for some time on the merits and demerits of them all, until she came round again to her brother and to his father-in-law. “Yes,” she said, “giving Lord Carrington a peerage was one of Mr. Pitt’s errors. I once asked Mr. Pitt if he did not repent of making so many peers; and he answered, if he had to go over his time again, he never would; ‘Age, Hester,’ said he, ‘brings experience.’ But he was in such a situation, that, to prevent a revolution in England, or to hinder England from becoming a province of France, he was obliged to patch up things as he could. He was like an ambassador, going in ill-health to some distant court on a mission of importance, and who would say to his physician, ‘You must patch me up in the best way you can for this journey; so that I get to the end of it, never mind what becomes of me.’ England at that time was not like France: the latter was obliged to go through a salivation; the former only wanted a dose of physic. Besides, fancy, what a revolution would have been in England. I have seen what an English mob is at an election: they are the most horrid set I have ever beheld: a word will lead them any way; and as for reason, they will never listen to it. But there, doctor, go on with the book: it interests me, when I think who wrote it, and what we are both come to.”
I read on, until we came to where mention is made of a footman’s nosegay on a levée day. Upon this, Lady Hester remarked, “My footman always used to give a guinea for his on the Queen’s birthday. When you consider,” she added, “what those footmen spent in nosegays and silk stockings, and bags, and shoe-buckles, it was a pretty round sum. As for the fine ladies who make such a show in the fashionable world, I have known some of them borrow five guineas of their footmen. I sometimes went down to Putney, and shut myself up not to be seen, that I might not spend all my money on rich dresses; but I saved it for other purposes, to give away to poor people.”
As the work proceeded, I came to the account of Fitzirnham’s sufferings and his approaching dissolution: she told me to skip all that—“I don’t wish to hear it,” she said; “it is too melancholy.” Alas! I felt it applied to Mr. Pitt’s and to her own situation too much not to give her pain: so, shutting the book, I tried to converse on some other subject, but her thoughts still reverted to what I had been reading about. At last she broke out in these words: “Poor Mr. Pitt! one of the nourishing things they gave him before his death was the yolk of an egg beat up so thick with pounded sugar that it was quite stiff: ‘I wonder,’ said the footman who prepared it for him, ‘that they persist in giving him the egg; for he brings it up every time.’” Lady Hester went on:—“Mr. Pitt died in the night, doctor.[19] Dr. Bailey acquainted me with his impending death the day before: Sir Walter Farquhar kept saying to the last that I need not afflict myself—always giving me hopes. The carriages had been waiting at the door, ready for a long time: as soon as all was over, Williams and James,” (her brother) “set off for Downing Street, and sealed up everything. Miss Williams then took just what clothes she wanted for me, and they both returned to Putney, bringing with them Mr. Adams, Mr. Pitt’s secretary, whom they called up at his house in Queen Street, Westminster. On their way back they met the doctors going to town.”
I happened to observe that I had read an account of Mr. Pitt’s last moments in Gifford’s Life of him, and that his dying words, praying for forgiveness through the merits of his Redeemer, or words to that effect, together with the whole scene of his death-bed, appeared, as I thought, too much made up, and too formal to be true: leaving the impression that the author, and those from whom he gathered his information, had considered it a duty to make the close of a great man’s life conformable to their religious feelings rather than to facts and reality.[20] “Who is it that says it of him?” asked Lady Hester. “Dr. Prettyman and Sir Walter Farquhar.”—“Oh! it’s all a lie,” she replied, rather indignantly:—“Dr. Prettyman was fast asleep when Mr. Pitt died: Sir Walter Farquhar was not there; and nobody was present but James. I was the last person who saw him except James, and I left him about eight o’clock, for I saw him struggling as if he wanted to speak, and I did not like to make him worse.” After a short pause, she resumed:—“What should Mr. Pitt make such a speech for, who never went to church in his life? Nothing prevented his going to church when he was at Walmer: but he never even talked about religion, and never brought it upon the carpet.
“When I think of poor Mr. Pitt, I am the more and more persuaded that the greater part of mankind are not worth the kindness we bestow on them. Never did so pure an angel enter upon life as he: but, good God! when he died, had he had to begin the world again, he would have acted in a very different manner. The baseness and ingratitude that he found in mankind were inconceivable. All the peers that he had made deserted him, and half those he had served returned his kindness by going over to his enemies.
“Then see, doctor, what fortune and luck are! Mr. Pitt, during his life spent in his country’s service, could seldom get a gleam of success to cheer him, whilst a Liverpool and a Castlereagh have triumphs fall upon them in showers. Oh! it makes me sick to think that Mr. Pitt should have died through hard labour for his country; that Lord Melville, so hearty as he was, should almost have sunk under it, and should have had nothing but difficulties and disappointments; whilst such fellows as H. and C., who do not care if the country were ruined, provided they kept their places, should have nothing but good fortune attend them, as if it was the effect of their stupid measures. But, not contented with that, they must even bring discredit on his memory by attributing to him a line of conduct he never pursued. To think of Canning’s going about and saying, ‘This is the glorious system of Pitt;’ and the papers echoing his words—‘this is the glorious system of Pitt!’ Why, when Louis XVIII. came to England, Mr. Pitt would not receive him as King, but only as Count Somebody, (I declare I forget what, it made so slight an impression on me;) and when I used to say to Mr. Pitt, ‘Oh, Lord! what does it signify?—do let him be king if he wants it’—‘No,’ replied Mr. Pitt, ‘I am not fighting to re-establish the Bourbons on the throne: only let the French have some stable government that we can make peace with, that’s all; I am not going to sacrifice the interests of my country to the Bourbons, Hester.’”
I quitted her about three o’clock, when she said she was going into the bath, which she did about every third day; no proper place certainly for her in her state of health.