Footnote 3: [(return)]
Witham, which is not far from Fonthill, became in 1763 the property of Alderman Beckford, the millionaire father of the celebrated author of Vathek.
Footnote 4: [(return)]
Lord Suffolk probably applied the purchase-money (thirteen thousand pounds) to help build the palace, called Audley End or Inn, he raised in Essex. It stands on abbey-land granted by Henry VIII. to his wife's father, Lord Audley of Walden, near Saffron-Walden in Essex, and was generally regarded as the most magnificent structure of its period, although Evelyn gives the preference to Clarendon House, that grand mansion of the chancellor's which provoked so much jealousy against him, and came to be called Dunkirk House, from the insinuation that it was built out of the funds paid by the French for Dunkirk. Abbey-lands are supposed by many to carry ill-luck with them, and quickly to change hands. Audley End has proved no exception to this hypothetical fate. Only a portion of it now remains, but this, though much marred by injudicious alterations, is amply sufficient to show how grand it was. It has long since passed out of the hands of the Howards, and now belongs to Lord Braybrooke, whose family name is Nevill. A relation of his, a former peer of the name, edited the best edition of Pepys' Diary, in which and in Evelyn is frequent reference to Audley End.
Footnote 5: [(return)]
The order of proceedings was subsequently inverted.
Footnote 6: [(return)]
The Newcomers: "Founder's Day at Gray Friars." On one of the last Founder's Days of his life Thackeray came with a friend early in the day, and scattered half sovereigns to the little gown-boys in "Gown-boys' Hall."
Footnote 7: [(return)]
Heriot's Hospital at Edinburgh.
Footnote 8: [(return)]
Simon Baxter was his only sister's son. Sutton had left him an estate which in 1615 he sold to the ancestor of the present earl of Sefton for fifteen thousand pounds—equal to about seventy-five thousand pounds now—and a legacy of three hundred pounds.
Footnote 9: [(return)]
This was a post which Thackeray coveted, and had he lived might possibly have filled. The master's lodge, a spacious antique residence, lined with portraits of governors in their robes of estate, by Lely, Kneller, etc., would in his hands have become a resort of rare interest and hospitality.
Footnote 10: [(return)]
In what is known as "The Charter-House Play," which describes some boyish orgies and their subsequent punishment, the latter is described in the pathetic lines:
Now the victim low is bending,
Now the fearful rod descending,
Hark a blow! Again, again
Sounds the instrument of pain.
Goddess of mercy! oh impart
Thy kindness to the doctor's heart:
Bid him words of pardon say—
Cast the blood-stained scourge away.
In vain, in vain! he will not hear:
Mercy is a stranger there.
Justice, unrelenting dame,
First asserts her lawful claim.
This is aye her maxim true:
"They who sin must suffer too."
When of fun we've had our fill,
Justice then sends in her bill,
And as soon as we have read it,
Pay we must: she gives no credit.
There is some rather fine doggerel too, in which the doctor—the Dr. Portman Pendennis—apostrophizes a monitor in whom he had believed, but finds to have been as bad as the rest. The Doctor (with voice indicative of tears and indignation):
Oh, Simon Steady! Simon Steady, oh!
What would your father say to see you so?—
You whom I always trusted, whom I deemed
As really good and honest as you seemed.
Are you the leader of this lawless throng,
The chief of all that's dissolute and wrong?
Then with awful emphasis:
Bad is the drunkard, shameless is the youth
Who dares desert the sacred paths of truth;
But he who hides himself 'neath Virtue's pall,
The painted hypocrite, is worse than all!
In acting this play the manner of the real doctor (Mr. Gladstone's old tutor, now dean of Peterborough) was often imitated to the life, which of course brought down the house.
Footnote 11: [(return)]
In his curious London and the Country, Carbonadoed and Quartered into severall Characters (1632), Lupton writes under the head of
"CHARTER-HOUSE.
"This place is well described by three things—magnificence, munificence and religious government. The first shows the wealth of the founder; the second, the means to make the good thing done durable; the third demonstrates his intent that thus established it.... This one place hath sent many a famous member to the universities, and not a few to the wars. The deed of this man that so ordered this house is much spoken of and commended; but there's none (except only one—Sion College) that hath as yet either striven to equal or imitate that, and I fear never will."