Another inflexible rule of the club was that no one should be admitted after eleven o'clock; and it was a breach of this regulation that once overwhelmed the Duke of Wellington with humiliation. One evening, the Duke, who had promised to meet Lady Mornington at Almack's, presented himself for admission. "Lady Jersey," announced an attendant, "the Duke of Wellington is at the door, and desires to be admitted." "What o'clock is it?" she asked. "Seven minutes after eleven, your Ladyship." She paused for a moment, and then said with emphasis and distinctness, "Give my compliments—Lady Jersey's compliments—to the Duke of Wellington, and say that she is very glad that the first enforcement of the rule of exclusion is such that, hereafter, no one can complain of its application. He cannot be admitted." And the Duke, whom even Napoleon with all his legions had been powerless to turn back, was compelled to retreat before the capricious will of a woman.
Such an autocrat was this "Queen of Almack's."
"While her colleagues were debating," says the author of the "Key to Almack's," "she decided. Hers was the master-spirit that ruled the whole machine; hers the eloquent tongue that could both persuade and command. And she was never idle. Her restless eye pried into everything; she set the world to rights; her influence was resistless, her determination uncontrollable."
"Treat people like fools, and they will worship you," was her favourite maxim. And as Bryon, her intimate friend, once said, "She was the veriest tyrant that ever governed Fashion's fools, and compelled them to shake their cap and bells as she willed."
It was at Almack's, it is interesting to recall, that Lady Jersey first introduced the quadrille from Paris.
"I recollect," says Captain Gronow, "the persons who formed the first quadrille that was ever danced there. They were Lady Jersey, Lady Harriet Buller, Lady Susan Ryder, and Miss Montgomery; the men being the Count St Aldegonde, Mr Montgomery, and Charles Standisti."
It was at Almack's, too, that she introduced the waltz, which so shocked the proprieties even in that easy-going age.
"What scenes," writes Mr T. Raikes, "have we witnessed in these days at Almack's! What fear and trembling in the débutantes at the commencement of a waltz, what giddiness and confusion at the end! It was, perhaps, owing to the latter circumstance that so violent an opposition soon arose to the new recreation on the score of morality. The anti-waltzing party took the alarm, and cried it down; mothers forbade it, and every ballroom became a scene of feud and contention."
But through it all Lady Jersey circled round and round the ballroom divinely, with Prince Paul Esterhazy, Baron Tripp, St Aldegonde, and many another graceful exponent of the new dance, for partners; and her victory was complete when the world of fashion saw the arm of the Emperor Alexander, his uniform ablaze with decorations, round her waist, twirling ecstatically, if ungracefully, round in the intoxication of the waltz.
For fifty years, Lord Jersey's Countess reigned supreme in the social world, carrying her autocracy and her charms into old age. As was inevitable to such a dominant personality she made enemies, who resented her airs and scoffed at her graces. Lady Granville called her "a tiresome, quarrelsome woman"; the Duke of Wellington, one of her most abject slaves, once exclaimed, "What —— nonsense Lady Jersey talks!" and Granville declared that she had "neither wit, nor imagination, nor humour." But to the last day of her long life she retained the homage and admiration of hundreds, over whom she cast the spell of her beauty and personal charm.