Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

I worked hard, and I enjoyed my toil. While earning bread and butter by special articles and short stories, I devoted much time and infinite labor to the most unprofitable branch of literature, which is history, and my first love. Goodness knows how many books I read in order to produce my Men and Women of the French Revolution, published in magnificent style, with a superb set of plates from contemporary prints, and almost profitless to me.

It was by casual acquaintance with one of the queer old characters of London that I obtained the use of those plates. He was a dear, dirty old gentleman, who had devoted his whole life to print collecting and had one of the finest collections in England. He lived in an old house near Clerkenwell, which was just a storehouse for these engravings, mezzotints, woodcuts, and colored prints of the eighteenth century. He kept them in bundles, in boxes, in portfolios, wherever there was floor space, chair space, and table space. To reach his desk, where he sat curled up in a swivel chair, one had to step over a barricade of those bundles. At meal times he threw crumbs to the mice who were his only companions, except an old housekeeper, and whenever the need of money became pressing, as it did in his latter years, he used to take out a print, sigh over it as at the parting of an old friend, and trot round to one of the London print sellers who would “cash it” like a cheque.... I think I made £150 out of Men and Women of the French Revolution, and my best reward was to see it, years later, in the windows of the Paris bookshops. That gave me a real thrill of pride and pleasure....

I made less than £150 by my life of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, one of the most romantic characters in English history, and strangely unknown, except for Scott’s portrait in The Fortunes of Nigel, and the splendid figure drawn by Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers, until, with prodigious labor, which was truly a labor of love, I extracted from old papers and old letters the real life story of this man, and the very secrets of his heart, more romantic, and more fascinating, in actual fact, than the fiction regarding him by those two great masters.

I think it was £80 that I was paid for King’s Favorite, in which again I searched the folios of the past for light on one of the most astounding mysteries in English history—the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury by the Earl of Somerset and the Countess of Essex—and discovered a plot with kings and princes, great lords and ladies, bishops and judges, poisoners, witch doctors, cutthroats and poets, as hideously wicked as in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. I was immensely interested in this work. I gained gratifying praise from scholars and critics. But I kept myself poor for knowledge sake. History does not pay—unless it is a world history by H. G. Wells. Never mind! I had a good time in writing it, and do not begrudge the labor.

My book on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, brought me the friendship of the very noble and charming family of the Earl and Countess of Denbigh. Lord Denbigh is the descendant of Susan Villiers—the sister of George Villiers—who married the first Earl of Denbigh, and he has in his possession the original letters written by the Duke of Buckingham to his devoted wife, and her beautiful letters to him, as well as a mass of other correspondence of great historical value. Lord Denbigh invited me down to Newnham Paddox, his lovely Warwickshire home, founded by his ancestors in the reign of James I, and in the long gallery I saw the famous VanDyck portraits of the Duke of Buckingham, the “hero” of my book, which have now been sold, with other priceless treasures, when war and after-war taxation have impoverished this old family, like so many others in England to-day. I always look back to those visits I paid to Newnham Paddox as to a picture of English life, before so much of its sunshine was eclipsed by the cost and sacrifice of that great tragedy. They were a large and happy family in that old house, with three sons and a crowd of beautiful girls, as frank and merry and healthy in body and soul as Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Katherine, Rosamond and Celia. I remember them playing tennis below the broad terrace with its climbing flowers, and the sound of their laughter that came ringing across the court when Lady Dorothy leapt the net, or Lady Marjorie took a flying jump at a high ball. On a Sunday afternoon they captured some tremendous cart horses, grazing on the day of rest, mounted them without reins or bridle, rode them astride, charged each other like knights at a tourney, fearless and free, while Lady Denbigh laughed joyously at the sight of their romps. There was an exciting rat hunt in an old barn, which was nearly pulled down to get at the rats.... No one saw a shadow creeping close to those sunlit lawns, to touch the lives of this English family and all others. They played the good game of life in pre-war England. They played the game of life and death with equal courage when war turned Newnham Paddox into a hospital and called upon those boys and girls for service and sacrifice. The eldest son, Lord Feilding, was an officer in the Guards, and badly wounded. Two of the boys were killed, one in the Army, one in the Navy. Lady Dorothy led an ambulance convoy in Belgium, and I met her there when she was under fire, constantly, in ruined towns and along sinister, shell-broken roads, injecting morphia into muddy, bloody men, just picked up from the fields and ditches, crying aloud in agony. Lady Denbigh herself wore out her health and spirit, and died soon after the Armistice. It was the record of many families like that, who gave all they had for England’s sake.

During that time of free lancing I enlarged my list of acquaintances by friendly encounter with some of the great ones of the world, its passing notorieties, and its pleasant and unpleasant people.

In the first class was that curious old gentleman, the Duke of Argyll, husband of Princess Louise. As poor as a church mouse, he was given house-room in Kensington Palace, where I used to take tea with him now and then, and discuss literature, politics, and history, of which he had a roving knowledge. I was a neighbor of his, living at that time in what I verily believe was the smallest house in London, at Holland Street, Kensington, and it used to amuse me to step out of my doll’s house, with or without eighteenpence in my pocket, and walk five hundred yards to the white portico on the west side of the old red brick palace, to take tea with a Royal duke. The poor old gentleman was so bored with himself that I think he would have invited a tramp to tea, for the sake of a little conversation, but for the austere supervision of Princess Louise, of whom he stood in awe. As the Marquis of Lorne, and one of the handsomest young men in England, he had gained something of a reputation as a poet and essayist. His poetry in later years was ponderously bad, but he wrote idealistic essays which had some touch of style and revealed a mind above the average in nobility of purpose.

As an editor I had bought some of his literary productions, and had put a number of useful guineas into the old man’s pockets, so that he had a high esteem for me, as a man with immense power in the press, though, as a free lance, I had none.

This acquaintanceship startled some of my brother journalists on the day of King Edward’s funeral at Windsor Castle. The Duke of Argyll was a grand figure that day, in a magnificent uniform, with the Order of the Garter, decorations thick upon his breast, and a great plumed hat. After the ceremony, standing among a crowd of princes, he hailed me, and walked arm in arm with me along the ramparts. I felt somewhat embarrassed at this distinction, especially as I was in the full gaze of my comrades of Fleet Street, who stood at a little distance. They saw the humor of the situation when I gave them a friendly wink, but afterward accused me of unholy “swank.”

It was about this time that I came to know Beerbohm Tree, in many ways the greatest, and in more ways the worst, of our English actors. He was playing Caliban in “The Tempest” when I sought an interview with him on the subject of Shakespeare.