And while you glow with more than virtue’s flame,
And all admire from whence such virtue came,
Each literary Swiss shall dread thy rage,
Dismiss their weapons, and no more engage.[34]
But man cannot live by wit alone. In the next two years Tickell wrote two more satirical tracts for the ministry, which, though not dull, were scarcely inspired; and in August 1781 he was appointed a commissioner of the Stamp Office. Here, with other beneficiaries of ministerial generosity and a salary of 500l., he stayed. A year earlier (25 July 1780) he had married Miss Mary Linley, a charming and witty young lady if less renowned than her sister Elizabeth (Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan). In September 1782, doubtless through the good offices of Lord North, they settled in an apartment in the Gold Staff Gallery at the top of Hampton Court Palace.[35] Tickell’s talents were useful in the Linley-Sheridan family enterprise of Drury Lane Theatre. He served in the capacity of Mr. Puff as “a Practitioner of Panegyric” in the newspapers, refurbished old plays, and tried his hand, with mild success, at composing librettos. When Fox and North formed their coalition government (of unhappy memory), Tickell’s political allegiance was transferred to the Whigs. That he had long had a preference for Whig society appears from the satirical-affectionate picture of Brooks’s Club in his Epistle from the Honourable Charles Fox, Partridge-Shooting, to the Honourable John Townshend, Cruising, 1779. The devoted but sharp-tongued Mrs. Tickell informed her sister in a letter of 1785: “So I find the election has taken a happy turn at last and I am to congratulate myself with being the wife of a member of Brooks’s.... T. is delighted; the great point of his ambition is gained.”[36] To which she added, at the thought of her husband’s increased opportunities for conviviality: “Farewell, a long farewell to all my comforts.”[37] From the many fragments of Mary Tickell’s spritely letters that have been printed here and there, it is impossible not to give at least one representative passage showing both husband and wife in character. In an undated letter from Hampton Court she wrote:
The men stayed last night or rather this morning till four or five tho’ I entreated T⸺. to think of to-night’s fatigue for me and let them go, but ’twas all in vain, for the moment my back was turn’d off they march’d into the other room with their Bottles and Glasses and order’d Stephen to bring the fire after them—so at least they had the grace to think of not disturbing me, for you are to know since the cold wether we dine and sup in the Drawing Room. However unfortunately my ears were quick enough to reach to Stephen’s Pantry where I heard every cruel Pop of that odious five shilling claret which entirely hindered my closing my eyes, so here I am at half past one just after breakfast and thinking of my evening’s dissipation. Don’t you think that I should cut a figure in the great world?[38]
As a member of the glittering Whig fraternity that moved about Fox, Sheridan, and the Prince of Wales, Tickell became a large contributor to the great collective (and perennial) satire known as The Rolliad, a shilling edition of which, George Saintsbury once remarked, if properly annotated, would keep one amused from London to York. He also produced a number of more or less serious pamphlets attacking Pitt’s government; and during the regency crisis of 1788-89 he worked feverishly with the other Foxites in the expectation of a Whig triumph. But the King recovered, the Whigs’ hopes were dashed, and Tickell never obtained his expected seat in Parliament.[39]
Mary Tickell died in July 1787. Two years later Tickell eloped with the daughter of a captain in the East India Company’s service, Miss Sarah Ley, a reigning beauty who was for a time the rival of Emma Hamilton as Romney’s model.[40] She was very young, very extravagant, and without any fortune. In a year or two her husband, who was chronically improvident and was now deprived of Mary Tickell’s common sense, found himself overwhelmed with debts. In May 1793 he appealed to Warren Hastings for a loan of 500l. and obtained it.[41] Hastings was a friend of the Ley family, but that an intimate of the Fox-Sheridan circle and a contributor to The Rolliad should have turned to him for help is an indication of Tickell’s desperate straits. The loan was evidently not sufficient for his needs. On the 4th of November his lifeless body was found below the parapet outside his Hampton Court apartment. Two days later Joseph Farington recorded in his Diary: “Distressed circumstances and an apprehension of being arrested, it is said, is the cause of this momentary phrenzy.”[42]
6
As a successful parody of parliamentary proceedings and eloquence at the time of the American Revolution, Anticipation retains historical interest. One reviewer went so far as to say that a comparison of the actual debate with Tickell’s anticipated version would show that between the two “the difference as to the material grounds of disputation is trifling.”[43] This is scarcely an exaggeration, though, as it turned out, the House was less full and the debate less animated than had been expected from the presence in town of so many generals and admirals known to be at odds with one another and the ministers. As a parodist, however, Tickell was less concerned to present the substance of a particular debate than the idiosyncracies of those who spoke frequently in the House, whether from Opposition or Administration benches. The verisimilitude of his subjects’ accents, attitudes, and hobby-horses of theme was unanimously acknowledged and praised by contemporaries. Anticipation is in short a speaking picture of that House of Commons in which, as well as in America, a bitter conflict was in progress. Here are Burke’s rumbling periods on the decline of the British Empire, and Fox’s skilful arguments to show that neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be successfully continued in America. David Hartley the younger quotes the recent sentiments of his friend Benjamin Franklin in Paris, and a radical Member from the City praises Washington and threatens ministers with the Tower and the block. Other Whigs attack profiteering army contractors, false news in the Gazettes, and the employment of Indians to butcher the colonists; others demand parliamentary inquiries that government officials suggest deferring until “about six months after Christmas.” Late in the evening Lord North rises and, after invoking the mighty shade of Chatham, takes up his secretary’s notes on speeches by the Opposition and urges upon an unruly House the need of unanimity.