“I beg, sir, you will make no apology,” he said, with an innocent and reassuring air.
His neighbour stared in blank amazement. “Apology, sir! Apology for what?” he demanded angrily.
“Why,” said “Blue,” pointing to the offending boots, “that you did not bring your horse with you into the box.”
“Perhaps it is lucky for you I did not bring my horsewhip,” retorted the other, in a fine frenzy of passion; “but I have a remedy at hand, and I will pull your nose for your impertinence.” Whereupon he threw himself upon Lord Coleraine, only to be dragged away by persons sitting on the other side of him.
Cards were exchanged between the combatants, and a duel seemed imminent. “Blue” went at once to his brother to beg his assistance. “I acknowledge I was the first aggressor,” he said, in anything but a humble frame of mind; “but it was too bad to threaten to pull my nose. What had I better do?” To which the unfeeling Colonel made reply, “Soap it well, and then it will easily slip through his fingers!”
This characteristic advice George Hanger was never weary of repeating, and he insisted that when anyone wished to calumniate another gentleman, he ought to be careful to take the precaution to soap his nose first. “Since I have taken upon myself the charge of my own sacred person,” he said, returning to the subject in his “Memoirs,” “I never have been pulled by the nose, or been compelled to soap it. Many gentlemen of distinguished rank in this country are indebted to the protecting qualities of soap for the present enjoyment of their noses, it being as difficult to hold a soaped nose between the fingers as it is for a countryman, at a country wake, to catch a pig turned out with his tail soaped and shaved for the amusement of the spectators.”
“Blue” Hanger died on 11th December 1814, when the title and estates devolved upon the Colonel, who, however, could never be persuaded to change his name. “Plain George Hanger, sir, if you please,” he would say to those who addressed him in the more formal manner. It has generally been supposed that this was merely another of the peer’s many eccentricities, but there was a kindly reason for it. “Among the few nobility already named,” wrote Westmacott in the long-forgotten “Fitzalleyne of Berkeley,” “more than one raised modest birth and merit to their own rank; one made a marriage of reparation; nay, even the lord rat-catcher,[3] life-writer (and it was his own), and vendor of the black article of trade, was faithful to his engagements where the law bound him not; and one of his reasons for forbidding his servants to address him as ‘My Lord’ was that she might bear his name as Mrs Hanger.”
Hanger, now in the possession of a competence, made little change in his manner of living, and though death did not claim him until 31st March 1824, at the age of seventy-three, he never again went into general society. At the time of his succession to the peerage he was residing, and during the last years of his life he continued to reside, at Somers Town, whence he would occasionally wander, shillelagh in hand, to the “Sol Arms,” in Tottenham Court Road, to smoke a pipe. This has been so often repeated, to the exclusion of almost any other particulars of his life, that the comparatively few people who have heard of Hanger think of him as a public-house loafer; but this was far from being the case, for if he went sometimes to the “Sol Arms” he would also go to Dr Wolcot to converse with the veteran satirist, or to Nollekens, the sculptor; or he would ride on his grey pony so far as Budd & Calkin’s, the booksellers in Pall Mall, where, leaving his horse in charge of a boy—for he never took a groom with him—he would sit on the counter, talking with the shopkeepers and their customers.
Nor was Hanger illiterate, as were so many of the associates of his early years, and he wrote very readable letters; but his intelligence does not rest only on his correspondence, for he was an industrious writer on military subjects. Reference has already been made to his autobiography, which appeared in 1801 under the title of “The Life, Adventures, and Opinions of Colonel George Hanger”; but though it was stated on the title-page that the volumes were “Written by Himself,” it has since transpired that they were compiled from his papers and suggestions by William Combe, the author of “The Tours of Dr Syntax.” It is an unpleasant work, and deals frankly with subjects tacitly avoided by present-day writers; but it is not without value, for it contains, besides excellent descriptions of debtors’ prisons and the rogueries of attorneys at the end of the eighteenth century, common-sense views on social subjects—views much in advance of the general opinions of the day—and a frank avowal of hatred of hypocrisy. This last quality induced Hanger maliciously to relate a story of a dissenter who kept a huxter’s shop, where a great variety of articles were sold, and was heard to say to his shopman, “John, have you watered the rum?” “Yes.” “Have you sanded the brown sugar?” “Yes.” “Have you wetted the tobacco?” “Yes.” “Then come in to prayers.” The “Memoirs” will perhaps best be remembered for Hanger’s famous prophecy that “one of these days the northern and southern Powers [of the United States] will fight as vigorously against each other as they have both united to do against the British.”