It was on such a day as I have seen in Italy in the month of December, but which, in our chill climate, seemed so unseasonably, so ominously beautiful, that it was like the hectic loveliness brightening the eyes and flushing the cheek of consumption,—that I found myself in the domains of Althorpe. Autumn, dying in the lap of Winter, looked out with one bright parting smile;—the soft air breathed of Summer; the withered leaves, heaped on the path, told a different tale. The slant, pale sun shone out with all heaven to himself; not a cloud was there, not a breeze to stir the leafless woods—those venerable woods, which Evelyn loved and commemorated:[ 67] the fine majestic old oaks, scattered over the park, tossed their huge bare arms against the blue sky; a thin hoar frost, dissolving as the sun rose higher, left the lawns and hills sparkling and glancing in its ray; now and then a hare raced across the open glade—
"And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist, which glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run."
Nothing disturbed the serene stillness except a pheasant whirring from a neighbouring thicket, or at intervals the belling of the deer—a sound so peculiar, and so fitted to the scene, that I sympathized in the taste of one of the noble progenitors of the Spencers, who had built a hunting-lodge in a sequestered spot, that he might hear "the harte bell."
This was a day, an hour, a scene, with all its associations, its quietness and beauty, "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart." All worldly cares and pains were laid asleep; while memory, fancy, and feeling waked. Althorpe does not frown upon us in the gloom of remote antiquity; it has not the warlike glories of some of the baronial residences of our old nobility; it is not built like a watch-tower on a hill, to lord it over feudal vassals; it is not bristled with battlements and turrets. It stands in a valley, with the gradual hills undulating round it, clothed with rich woods. It has altogether a look of compactness and comfort, without pretension, which, with the pastoral beauty of the landscape, and low situation, recall the ancient vocation of the family, whose grandeur was first founded, like that of the patriarchs of old, on the multitude of their flocks and herds.[ 68] It was in the reign of Henry the Eighth that Althorpe became the principal seat of the Spencers, and no place of the same date can boast so many delightful, romantic, and historical associations. There is Spenser the poet, "high-priest of all the Muses' mysteries," who modestly claimed, as an honour, his relationship to those Spencers who now, with a just pride, boast of him, and deem his Faery Queen "the brightest jewel in their coronet;" and the beautiful Alice Spencer, countess of Derby, who was celebrated in early youth by her poet-cousin, and for whom Milton, in her old age, wrote his "Arcades." At Althorpe, in 1603, the queen and son of James the First were, on their arrival in England, nobly entertained with a masque, written for the occasion by Ben Jonson, in which the young ladies and nobles of the country enacted nymphs and fairies, satyrs and hunters, and danced to the sound of "excellent soft music," their scenery the natural woods, their stage the green lawn, their canopy the summer sky. What poetical picturesque hospitality! In these days it would have been a dinner, with French cooks and confectioners express from London to dress it. Here lived Waller's famous Sacharissa, the first Lady Sunderland—so beautiful and good, so interesting in herself, she needed not his wit nor his poetry to enshrine her. Here she parted from her young husband,[ 69] when he left her to join the king in the field; and here, a few months after, she received the news of his death in the battle of Newbury, and saw her happiness wrecked at the age of three-and-twenty. Here plotted her distinguished son, that Proteus of politics, the second Lord Sunderland. Charles the First was playing at bowls on the green at Althorpe, when Colonel Joyce's detachment surprised him, and carried him off to imprisonment and to death. Here the excellent and accomplished Evelyn used to meditate in the "noble gallerie," and in the "ample gardens," of which he has left us an admiring and admirable description, which would be as suitable today as it was a hundred and fifty years ago, with the single exception of the great proprietor, deservedly far more honoured in this generation than was his apostate time-serving ancestor, the Lord Sunderland of Evelyn's day.[ 70] When the Spencers were divided, the eldest branch of the family becoming Dukes of Marlborough and the youngest Earls Spencer—if the former inherited glory, Blenheim, and poverty—to the latter have belonged more true and more substantial distinctions: for the last three generations the Spencers have been remarked for talents, for benevolence, for constancy, for love of literature, and patronage of the fine arts.
The house retains the form described by Evelyn—that of a half H: a slight irregularity is caused by the new gothic room, built by the present earl, to contain part of his magnificent library, which, like the statue in the Castle of Otranto, had grown "too big for what contained it." We entered by a central door the large and lofty hall, or vestibule, hung round with pictures of fox-chases and those who figured in them, famous hunters, quadruped and biped, all as large as life, spread over as much canvass as would make a mainsail for a man-of-war. These huge perpetrations are of the time of Jack Spencer, a noted Nimrod in his day; and are very fine, as we were told, but they did not interest me. I had caught a glimpse of the superb staircase, hung round with pictures above and below, and not the less interesting as having been erected by Sacharissa herself during the few years she was mistress of Althorpe. A face looked at us from over an opposite door, which there was no resisting. Does the reader remember Horace Walpole's pleasant description of a party of seers posting through the apartments of a show-place? "They come; ask what such a room is called?—write it down; admire a lobster or cabbage in a Dutch market piece; dispute whether the last room was green or purple; and then hurry to the inn, for fear the fish should be over-dressed."[ 71] We were not such a party; but with imaginations ready primed to take fire, and memories enriched with all the associations the place could suggest, to us every portrait was a history. The orthodox style of seeing the house is to turn to the left, and view the ground-floor apartments first; but the face I have mentioned seemed to beckon me straight-forward, and I could not choose but obey the invitation: it was that of Lady Bridgewater, the loveliest of the four lovely daughters of the Duke of Marlborough: she had the misfortune to be painted by Jervas, and the good fortune to be celebrated by Pope as the "tender sister, daughter, friend, and wife;" and again—
"Thence Beauty, waking, all her forms supplies—
An angel's sweetness—or Bridgewater's eyes."
Jervas was supposed to have been presumptuously and desperately in love with this beautiful woman, who died at the age of five-and-twenty: hence Pope has taken the liberty—by a poetical licence, no doubt—to call her, in his Epistle to Jervas, "thy Bridgewater." Two of her fair sisters, the Duchess of Montagu and Lady Godolphin, hung near her; and above, her fairer sister, Lady Sunderland. Ascending the magnificent staircase, a hundred faces look down upon us, in a hundred different varieties of expression, in a hundred different costumes. Here are Queen Anne and Sarah Duchess of Marlborough placed amicably side by side, as in the days of their romantic friendship, when they conversed and corresponded as Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman: the beauty, the intellect, the spirit, are all on the side of the imperious duchess; the poor queen looks like what she was, a good-natured fool. On the left is the cunning abigail, who supplanted the duchess in the favour of Queen Anne—Mrs. Masham. Proceeding along the gallery, we are met by the portrait of that angel-devil, Lady Shrewsbury,[ 72] whose exquisite beauty fascinates at once and shocks the eye like the gorgeous colours of an adder. I believe the story of her holding the Duke of Buckingham's horse while he shot her husband in a duel, has been disputed; but her attempt to assassinate Killegrew, while she sat by in her carriage,[ 73] is too true. So far had her depravities unsexed her!