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FIFTY-ONE YEARS OF VICTORIAN LIFE

All Rights Reserved

FIFTY-ONE YEARS
OF VICTORIAN LIFE

BY THE DOWAGER
COUNTESS OF JERSEY

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1922

DEDICATED
TO
MY CHILDREN
AND
GRANDCHILDREN

Printed in Great Britain by
Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIFTY-ONE YEARS OF VICTORIAN LIFE

CHAPTER I

AN EARLY VICTORIAN CHILD

I was born at Stoneleigh Abbey on October 29th, 1849. My father has told me that immediately afterwards—I suppose next day—I was held up at the window for the members of the North Warwickshire Hunt to drink my health. I fear that their kind wishes were so far of no avail that I never became a sportswoman, though I always lived amongst keen followers of the hounds. For many years the first meet of the season was held at Stoneleigh, and large hospitality extended to the gentlemen and farmers within the Abbey and to the crowd without. Almost anyone could get bread and cheese and beer outside for the asking, till at last some limit had to be placed when it was reported that special trains were being run from Birmingham to a neighbouring town to enable the populace to attend this sporting carnival at my father’s expense. He was a splendid man and a fearless rider while health and strength permitted—rather too fearless at times—and among the many applicants for his bounty were men who based their claims to assistance on the alleged fact that they had picked up Lord Leigh after a fall out hunting. It was always much more difficult to restrain him from giving than to induce him to give.

My mother, a daughter of Lord Westminster, told me that from the moment she saw him she had never any doubt as to whom she would marry. No wonder. He was exceptionally handsome and charming, and I believe he was as prompt in falling in love with her as she confessed to having been with him. An old relative who remembered their betrothal told me that she knew what was coming when Mr. Leigh paid £5 for some trifle at a bazaar where Lady Caroline Grosvenor was selling. The sole reason for recording this is to note that fancy bazaars were in vogue so long ago as 1848.

My mother was only twenty when she married, and very small and pretty. I have heard that soon after their arrival at Stoneleigh my father gave great satisfaction to the villagers, who were eagerly watching to see the bride out walking, by lifting his little wife in his arms and carrying her over a wet place in the road. This was typical of his unfailing devotion through fifty-seven years of married life—a devotion which she returned in full measure.

I was the eldest child of the young parents, and as my grandfather, Chandos Lord Leigh, was then alive, our home for a short time was at Adlestrop House in Gloucestershire, which also belonged to the family; but my grandfather died and we moved to Stoneleigh when I was far too young to remember any other home. In those days we drove by road from one house to the other, and on one occasion my father undertook to convey my cradle in his dog-cart, in the space under the back seat usually allotted to dogs. In the middle of a village the door of this receptacle flew open and the cradle shot out into the road, slightly embarrassing to a very young man.

About the earliest thing I can recollect was seeing the Crystal Palace Building when in Hyde Park. I do not suppose that I was taken inside, but I distinctly remember the great glittering glass Palace when I was driving with my mother. Of course we had pictures of the Great Exhibition and heard plenty about it, but oddly enough one print that impressed me most was a French caricature which represented an Englishman distributing the prizes to an expectant throng with words to this effect: “Ladies and Gentlemen, some intrusive foreigners have come over to compete with our people and have had the impertinence to make some things better than we do. You will, however, quite understand that none of the prizes will be given to these outsiders.” It was my earliest lesson in doubting the lasting effects of attempts to unite rival countries in any League of Nations.

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

Somewhere about this time I had the honour of being presented to the great Duke of Wellington in the long Gallery (now, alas! no more) at Grosvenor House. I do not remember the incident, but he was the Hero in those days, and I was told it so often that I felt as if I could recall it. My father said he kissed me, but my mother’s more modest claim was that he shook hands.

My parents were each endowed with nine brothers and sisters—i.e. my father was one of ten who all lived till past middle life, my mother was one of thirteen of whom ten attained a full complement of years. Indeed, when my parents celebrated their golden wedding they had sixteen brothers and sisters still alive. As almost all these uncles and aunts married and most of them had large families, it will be readily believed that we did not lack cousins, and the long Gallery was a splendid gathering-place for the ramifications of the Grosvenor side of our family. Apart from the imposing pictures, it was full of treasures, such as a miniature crystal river which flowed when wound up and had little swans swimming upon it. It was here, later on in my girlhood, that I saw the first Japanese Embassy to England, stately Daimios or Samurai in full native costume and with two swords—a great joy to all of us children.

To go back to early recollections—my next clear impression is of the Crimean War and knitting a pair of red muffetees for the soldiers. Plenty of “comforts” were sent out even in those days. Sir George Higginson once told me that when boxes of miscellaneous gifts arrived it was the custom to hold an auction. On one occasion among the contents were several copies of Boyle’s Court Guide and two pairs of ladies’ stays! So useful! The latter were bestowed upon the French vivandière. No W.A.A.C.s then to benefit.

After the Crimean War came the Indian Mutiny, and our toy soldiers represented English and Sepoys instead of English and Russians. Children in each generation I suppose follow wars by their toys. Despite the comradeship of English and French in the Crimea, I do not believe that we ever quite ceased to regard France as the hereditary foe. A contemporary cousin was said to have effaced France from the map of Europe; I do not think we were quite so daring.

In all, I rejoiced in five brothers and two sisters, but the fifth brother died at fourteen months old before our youngest sister was born. His death was our first real sorrow and a very keen one. Long before that, however, when we were only three children, Gilbert, the brother next to me, a baby sister Agnes, and myself, our adventurous parents took us to the South of France. I was four years old at the time and the existence of a foreign land was quite a new light to me. I well remember running into the nursery and triumphantly exclaiming, “There is a country called France and I am going there!”

TRAVELLING IN THE FIFTIES

My further recollections are vague until we reached Lyons, where the railway ended and our large travelling carriage brought from England was put on a boat—steamer, I suppose—and thus conveyed to Avignon. Thence we drove, sleeping at various towns, until we reached Mentone, where we spent some time, and I subsequently learnt that we were then the only English in the place. I think that my parents were very brave to take about such young children, but I suppose the experiment answered pretty well, as a year later they again took Gilbert and me to France—this time to Normandy, where I spent my sixth birthday, saw the great horses dragging bales of cotton along the quays at Rouen, and was enchanted with the ivory toys at Dieppe.

I think that people who could afford it travelled more in former days than is realised. Both my grandparents made prolonged tours with most of their elder children. My grandfather Westminster took my mother and her elder sisters in his yacht to Constantinople and Rome. My mother well remembered some of her experiences, including purchases from a Turkish shopkeeper who kept a large cat on his counter and served various comestibles with his hands, wiping them between each sale on the animal’s fur. At Rome she told me how she and one of her sisters, girls of some twelve and thirteen years old, used to wander out alone into the Campagna in the early morning, which seems very strange in view of the stories of restraint placed upon children in bygone days. As to my grandfather Leigh, I believe he travelled with his family for about two years, to Switzerland, France and the North of Italy. They had three carriages, one for the parents, one for the schoolroom, and one for the nursery. A courier escorted them, and an avant-courier rode on in front with bags of five-franc pieces to secure lodgings when they migrated from one place to another. On one occasion on the Riviera they met the then Grand Duke Constantine, who thrust his head out of the window and exclaimed “Toute Angleterre est en route!”

GOVERNESSES

After our return from Normandy we were placed in charge of a resident governess, a young German, but as far as I can recollect she had very little control over us. We discovered that the unlucky girl, though of German parentage, had been born in Russia, and with the unconscious cruelty of children taunted her on this account. Anyhow her stay was short, and she was succeeded about a year later by an Englishwoman, Miss Custarde, who kept us in very good order and stayed till she married when I was fourteen. Her educational efforts were supplemented by masters and mistresses during the London season and by French resident governesses in the winter months, but I do not think that we were at all overworked.

I doubt whether Miss Custarde would have been considered highly educated according to modern standards, but she was very good in teaching us to look up information for ourselves, which was just as useful as anything else. Her strongest point was music, but that she could not drive into me, and my music lessons were a real penance to teacher and pupil alike. She would give me lectures during their progress on such topics as the Parable of the Talents—quite ignoring the elementary fact that though I could learn most of my lessons quickly enough I had absolutely no talent for music. She was, however, a remarkable woman with great influence, not only over myself, but over my younger aunts and over other men and women. She was very orderly, and proud of that quality, but she worked too much on my conscience, making me regard trivial faults as actual sins which prevented her from kissing me or showing me affection—an ostracism which generally resulted in violent fits of penitence. She had more than one admirer before she ended by marrying a schoolmaster, with whom she used to take long walks in the holidays. One peculiarity was that she would give me sketches of admirers and get me to write long stories embodying their imaginary adventures. I suppose these were shown as great jokes to the heroes and their friends. Of course she did not think I knew the “inwardness” of her various friendships, equally of course as time went on I understood them perfectly. Miss Custarde is not the only governess I have known who acquired extraordinary influence over her pupils. In Marcel Prevost’s novel Anges Gardiens, which represents the dangers to French families of engaging foreign governesses, he makes the Belgian, Italian, and German women all to a greater or less extent immoral, but the Englishwoman, though at least as detestable as the others, is not immoral; the great evil which she inflicts on the family which engages her is the absolute power which she acquires over her pupil. The whole book is very unfair and M. Prevost seems to overlook the slur which he casts on his own countrymen, as none of the men appear able to resist the wiles of the sirens engaged to look after the girls of their families; but it is odd that he should realise the danger of undue influence and attribute it only to the Englishwoman. Why should this be a characteristic of English governesses—supposing his experience (borne out by my own) to be typical? Is it an Englishwoman’s love of power and faculty for concentration on the object which she wishes to attain?

We liked several of our foreign governesses well enough, but they exercised no particular influence—and as a rule their engagements were only temporary. I do not think that Miss Custarde gave them much opportunity of ascendancy. With one her relations were so strained that the two ladies had their suppers at different tables in the schoolroom, and when the Frenchwoman wanted the salt she rang the bell for the schoolroom-maid to bring it from her English colleague’s table. However, I owed a great deal to Miss Custarde and know that her affection for all of us was very real. She died in the autumn of 1920, having retained all her faculties till an advanced age.

After all no human being could compete with our mother in the estimation of any of her children. Small and fragile and often suffering from ill-health, she had almost unbounded power over everyone with whom she came in contact, and for her to express an opinion on any point created an axiom from which there was no appeal. As middle-aged men and women we have often laughed over the way in which we have still accepted “mama said” so-and-so as a final verdict. As children our faith not only in her wisdom but in her ability was unlimited. I remember being regarded as almost a heretic by the younger ones because I ventured to doubt whether she could make a watch. Vainly did I hedge by asserting that I was certain that if she had learnt she could make the most beautiful watch in the world—I had infringed the first article of family faith by thinking that there was anything which she could not do by the uninstructed light of nature. She was a good musician, and a really excellent amateur artist—her water-colour drawings charming. Her knowledge of history made it delightful to read aloud to her, as she seemed as if the heroes and heroines of bygone times had been her personal acquaintance. Needless to say her personal care for everyone on my father’s property was untiring, and the standard of the schools in the various villages was maintained at a height uncommon in days when Education Acts were not so frequent and exacting as in later years.

“MRS. GAILEY”

Another great character in our home was our old nurse. For some reason she was never called Nanna, but always “Mrs. Gailey.” The daughter of a small tradesman, she was a woman of some education—she had even learnt a little French and had been a considerable reader. Though a disciple of Spurgeon, she had lived as nurse with my mother’s cousin the Duke of Norfolk in the days when the girls of the family were Protestants though the boys were Roman Catholics. When the Duchess (daughter of Lord Lyons) went over to the Roman Church the Protestant nurse’s position became untenable, as the daughters had to follow their mother. She told us that this was a great distress at first to the eldest girl Victoria (afterwards Hope-Scott), for at twelve years old she was able to feel the uprooting of her previous faith. The other sisters were too young to mind. Gailey’s idol, however, was Lord Maltravers (the late Duke), who must have been as attractive a boy as he became delightful a man.

Gailey came to us when I was about four, my first nurse, who had been my wet-nurse, having married the coachman. Our first encounter took place when I was already in my cot, and I announced to her that if she stayed a hundred years I should not love her as I had done “Brownie.” “And if I stay a hundred years,” was the repartee, “I shall not love you as I did the little boy I have just left”—so we started fair. Nevertheless she was an excellent nurse and a fascinating companion. She could tell stories by the hour and knew all sorts of old-fashioned games which we played in the nursery on holiday afternoons.

The great joy of the schoolroom children was to join the little ones after tea and to sit in a circle while she told us either old fairy tales, or more frequently her own versions of novels which she had read and of which she changed the names and condensed the incidents in a most ingenious manner. On Sunday evenings Pilgrim’s Progress in her own words was substituted for the novels. Miss Custarde could inflict no greater punishment for failure in our “saying lessons” than to keep us out of the nursery. Gailey stayed with us till some time after my marriage and then retired on a pension.

The Scottish housekeeper, Mrs. Wallace, was also a devoted friend and a great dispenser of cakes, ices, and home-made cowslip and ginger wine. Rose-water, elder-flower water, and all stillroom mysteries found an expert in her, and she even concocted mead from an old recipe. Few people can have made mead in this generation—it was like very strong rather sweet beer. We all loved “Walley”—but she failed us on one occasion. Someone said that she had had an uncle who had fought at Waterloo, so we rushed to her room to question her on this hero’s prowess. “What did your uncle do at Waterloo?” The reply was cautious and rather chilling: “I believe he hid behind his horse.” She looked after all our dogs and was supposed to sleep with eight animals and birds in her room.

QUEEN VICTORIA AT STONELEIGH

In the summer of 1858 a great event occurred in the annals of Stoneleigh. Queen Victoria stayed at my father’s for two nights in order to open Aston Hall and Park, an old Manor House and property, which had belonged to the Bracebridge family and had been secured for the recreation of the people of Birmingham. Naturally there was great excitement at the prospect. For months beforehand workmen were employed in the renovation and redecoration of the Abbey and its precincts. Many years afterwards an ex-coachpainter met one of my sons and recalled to him the glorious days of preparation for Her Majesty’s visit. “Even the pigsties were painted, sir,” said he.

Stoneleigh is a large mass of buildings—parts of the basement remain from the original Abbey of the Cistercian monks. On these was built a picturesque house about the beginning of the seventeenth century, early in the eighteenth century a large mansion was added in the classical Italian style, and about a hundred years later a new wing was erected to unite the two portions. The old Abbey Church stood in what is now a lawn between the house and the ancient Gateway, which bears the arms of Henry II. To put everything in order was no light task. The rooms for the Queen and Prince Consort were enclosed on one side of the corridor leading to them by a temporary wall, and curtained off where the corridor led to the main staircase. In addition to every other preparation, the outline of the gateway, the main front of the house, and some of the ornamental flower-beds were traced out with little lamps—I think there were 22,000—which were lighted at night with truly fairy-like effect. By that time we were five children—the house was crowded in every nook and corner with guests, servants, and attendants of all kinds. Somehow my brother Gilbert and I were stowed away in a room with two or three maids, but the “little ones,” Agnes and two small brothers Dudley and Rupert, were sent to the keeper’s house in the Deerpark. That house was a delightful old-world building standing on a hill with a lovely view, and we were occasionally sent there for a day or two’s change of air, to our great joy.

On the occasion of the Royal Visit, however, Gilbert and I quite realised our privilege in being kept in the Abbey and allowed to stand with our mother and other members of the family to welcome the Queen as the carriage clattered up with its escort of Yeomanry. My father had, of course, met Her Majesty at the station. The Queen was more than gracious and at once won the hearts of the children—but we did not equally appreciate the Prince Consort. Assuredly he was excellent, but he was very stiff and reserved, and I suppose that we were accustomed to attentions from our father’s guests which he did not think fit to bestow upon us, though the Queen gave them in ample measure.

We were allowed to join the large party of guests after dinner, and either the first or the second evening witnessed with interest and amusement the presentation of the country neighbours to the Queen. Having been carefully instructed as to our own bows and curtsies, we naturally became very critical of the “grown-up” salutations, particularly when one nervous lady on passing the royal presence tossed her head back into the air by way of reverence. I think the same night my father escorted the Queen into the garden in front of the house, which was separated from part of the Park by a stone balustrade. In this park-ground several thousand people had assembled who spontaneously broke into “God save the Queen” when she appeared. Fortunately the glorious hot summer night (July) was ideal for the greeting.

One morning our small sister and brothers were brought to the Abbey “to be presented.” Agnes made a neat little curtsy, though we unkindly asserted that it was behind the Queen’s back, but the baby boys were overcome by shyness and turned away from the Queen’s kisses. Unfortunate children! they were never allowed to forget this!

THE PRINCE CONSORT

Poor Prince Consort lost his last chance of good feeling from Gilbert and myself when he and the Queen went to plant memorial trees. We rushed forward to be in time to see the performance, but he sternly swept us from the royal path. No doubt he was justified in bidding us “stand back,” but he might have remembered that we were children, and his host’s children, and done it more gently.

I shall refer to our dear Queen later on, but may here insert a little incident of her childhood which came to my knowledge accidentally. In the village belonging to my married home, Middleton Stoney, there was a middle-aged policeman’s wife who cultivated long ringlets on either side of her face. She once confided to me that as a child she had had beautiful curls, and that, living near Kensington Palace, they had on one occasion been cut off to make “riding curls” for Princess (afterwards Queen) Victoria, who had lost her own hair—temporarily—from an illness. The child had not liked this at all, though she had been given some of the Princess’s hair as an equivalent. I imagine that her parents received more substantial payment.

Our childhood was varied by a good deal of migration. We were regularly taken each year about May to our father’s London house, 37 Portman Square, where we entertained our various cousins at tea-parties and visited them in return. We were generally taken in the autumn to some seaside place such as Brighton, Hastings, Rhyl, or the Isle of Wight. We estimated the merits of each resort largely according to the amount of sand which it afforded us to dig in, and I think Shanklin in the Isle of Wight took the foremost place in our affections.

A NARROW ESCAPE

Two years, however, had specially delightful autumns, for in each of these our father took a moor in Scotland—once Kingairloch and the second time Strontian. On each occasion I accompanied my parents; to Kingairloch, Gilbert (Gilly he was always called) came also—the second year he spent half the time with us and then returned to his tutor and Agnes, and Dudley took his place for the remainder of our stay. How we enjoyed the fishing, bathing in the loch, and paddling in the burns! Everyone who has spent the shooting season in Scotland knows all about it, and our experiences, though absolutely delightful, did not differ much from other people’s. These visits were about 1860 and 1861. The railroad did not extend nearly so far as at present and the big travelling-carriage again came into play. One day it had with considerable risk to be conveyed over four ferries and ultimately to be driven along a mountainous road after dark. As far as I remember we had postilions—certainly the charioteer or charioteers had had as much whisky as was good for them, with the result that the back wheels of the heavy carriage went right over the edge of a precipice. The servants seated behind the carriage gave themselves over for lost—we children were half-asleep inside and unconscious of our peril, when the horses made a desperate bound forward and dragged the carriage back on to the road. We were taken later to see the place with the marks of the wheels still plain on the rocky edge—and young as we were could quite realise what we had escaped. Both shooting lodges were situated in the midst of the lovely mountain scenery of North Argyllshire, possibly Kingairloch was the more beautiful of the two. One day from dawn to eve the mountains echoed and re-echoed with the plaintive bleating of flocks, and we were told that it was because the lambs were taken from their mothers. I still possess some verses which my mother wrote on that occasion, and transcribe them to show that she had a strong poetic as well as artistic vein:

“Far over the mountains and over the corries
Echoed loud wailings and bleatings the day
When from the side of the mothers that loved them
The lambs at Kingairloch were taken away.
“Vainly, poor mothers, ye watch in the valley
The nook where your little ones gambolled before,
Vainly ye climb to the heights of the mountains—
They answer you not, and shall answer no more!
“Never again from that stream-silvered hill-side,
Seeking fresh grass betwixt harebell and heather,
Shall you and your lambkins look back on Loch Corry,
Watching the flight of the sea-bird together.
“No more, when the storm, striking chords on the mountains,
Drives down the thick mists their tall summits to hide,
Shall you give the sweet gift of a mother’s protection
To the soft little creatures crouched down by your side.

“Past the sweet peril! and gone the sweet pleasure!—
Well might the echoes tell sadly that day
The plaint of the mothers that cried at Kingairloch
The day that the lambs were taken away.”

Visits to Scotland included sojourns at Ardgowan, the home of our uncle and aunt Sir Michael and Lady Octavia Shaw-Stewart on the Clyde. Aunt Occy, as we called her, was probably my mother’s favourite sister—in any case her children were our favourite cousins on the Grosvenor side, and we loved our many visits to Ardgowan both when we went to the moors and in after years. There were excursions on the hills and bathing in the salt-water of the Clyde, fishing from boats, and shells to be collected on the beach. Also my uncle had a beautiful yacht in which he took us expeditions towards Arran and to Loch Long from which we were able to go across the mountain pass to Loch Lomond.

My grandmother Lady Leigh died in 1860, before which time she used to pay lengthened visits to Stoneleigh accompanied by three or four unmarried daughters. She was a fine handsome old lady. Her hair had turned white when she was about thirty-two, but, as old ladies did in those days, she wore a brown front with a black velvet band. She had a masterful temper and held her daughters in considerable awe, but, after the manner of grandparents, was very kind to us. I fancy that so many unmarried sisters-in-law may have been a slight trial to my mother, but we regarded our aunts as additional playfellows bound to provide us with some kind of amusement. The favourite was certainly “Aunt Georgy,” the youngest daughter but one. She had an unfailing flow of spirits, could tell stories and join in games, and never objected to our invasion of her room at any time. Poor “Aunt Gussie” (Augusta) was less fortunate: she had bad health and would scold us to make us affectionate—an unsuccessful method to say the least of it—the natural result was, I fear, that we teased her whenever opportunity offered. Aunt Georgie was very good-looking and I believe much admired. She did not, however, marry till she was about forty. A Colonel Newdigate, whose runaway horse she had stopped when quite a girl, had fallen in love with her and wanted to marry her. She persistently refused and he married someone else. When his wife died, he returned to his first affection and ultimately melted my Aunt’s heart. She had no children of her own, but was a good stepmother to his only son—now Sir Frank Newdegate, Governor of West Australia.

LIFE AT STONELEIGH

Stoneleigh offered every possible amusement to children—long galleries and passages to race up and down, a large hall for battledore and shuttlecock and other games, parks and lawns for riding and cricket, and the River Avon at the bottom of the garden for fishing and boating, not to mention skating in hard winters. People are apt to talk and write as if “Early Victorian” and “Mid-Victorian” children were kept under strict control and made to treat their elders with respectful awe. I cannot recall any undue restraint in our case. As I have already said, our mother was an influence which no one would have attempted to resist, but she never interfered with any reasonable happiness or amusement. Our father was the most cheerful of companions, loving to take us about to any kind of sights or entertainments which offered, and buying us toys and presents on every possible occasion. The only constraint put upon us, which is not often used with the modern child, concerned religious observance. We had to come in to daily Prayers at 10 o’clock even if it interfered with working in our gardens or other out-door amusement—and church twice on Sundays was the invariable rule as soon as we were old enough to walk to the neighbouring villages of Stoneleigh and Ashow, or to attend the ministrations of the chaplain who generally officiated once each Sunday in the chapel in the house. We had to learn some “Scripture lesson” every day and two or three on Sundays, and I being the eldest had not only to repeat these Sunday lessons to my mother, but also to see in a general way that my younger brothers and sisters knew theirs. I was made to learn any number of chapters and hymns, and Scripture catechisms—not to speak of the Thirty-nine Articles! At last when mother and governess failed to find something more to learn by heart I was told to commit portions of Thomas à Kempis to memory. Here, I grieve to confess, I struck—that is to say, I did not venture actually to refuse, but I repeated the good brother’s words in such a disagreeable and discontented tone of voice that no one could stand it, and the attempt to improve me in this way was tacitly abandoned.

STONELEIGH ABBEY.

RECTORS AND VICARS

On the whole I feel sure that the advantages of acquiring so many great truths, and generally in beautiful language, far outweighed any passing irritation that a young girl may have felt with these “religious obligations.” If it is necessary to distinguish between High and Low Church in these matters, I suppose that my parents belonged to the orthodox Evangelical School. I have a vague recollection of one Vicar of Stoneleigh still preaching in the black silk Geneva gown. At Ashow—the other church whose services we attended—the Rector when I was small was an old Charles Twisleton, a cousin of my father’s. He, however, had discarded the black gown long before my day. My father told me that when the new Oxford School first took to preaching in surplices Mr. Twisleton adopted this fashion. Thereupon the astonished family at the Abbey exclaimed, “Oh, Cousin Charles, are you a Puseyite?” “No, my dears,” was the confidential reply, “but black silk gowns are very expensive and mine was worn out.” Probably many poor clergymen were glad to avail themselves of this economical form of ritual. I have an idea that Rudyard Kipling’s Norman Baron’s advice to his son would have appealed to my parents had it been written in their day:

“Be polite but not friendly to Bishops,
And good to all poor Parish priests.”

I feel that they were “friendly to Bishops” when they met, and they were certainly good to all the Rectors and Vicars of the various villages which belonged to my father or of which the livings were in his gift, but they had no idea of giving their consciences into ecclesiastical keeping. In fact my grandmother Westminster once said to my mother, “My dear, you and I spend much of our lives in rectifying the errors of the clergy”; those excellent men often failing in business capacity.

The church services at both our churches were simple to a degree. At Stoneleigh the organ was in the gallery and the hymns were sung by the schoolchildren there. The pulpit and reading-desk were part of what used to be called a “three-decker” with a second reading-desk for the clerk. This was exactly opposite our large “Squire’s Pew” across the aisle. There had from time immemorial been a Village Harvest Home with secular rejoicings, but at last there came the great innovation of service with special decoration and appropriate Psalms and Lessons in church. I do not know the exact year, but think that it must have been somewhere in the sixties, after my Uncle James—my father’s youngest brother—became Vicar of Stoneleigh, as it must have been his influence which induced my father to consent to what he considered slightly ritualistic.

However, all went well till it came to the Special Psalms. The choir had nothing to do with leading responses—these pertained to the clerk—old Job Jeacock—and when the first “special” was given out he utterly failed to find it. The congregation waited while he descended from his desk—walked across the aisle to our pew and handed his Prayerbook to me that I might help him out of his difficulty!

Decorations in the churches at Christmas were fully approved, and of course the house was a bower of holly, ivy and mistletoe—these were ancient customs never omitted in our home. Christmas was a glorious time, extending from the Villagers’ Dinner on S. Thomas’s Day to the Ball on our father’s birthday, January 17th—a liberal allowance. The children dined down on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, and there was always a Christmas Tree one evening laden with toys and sweetmeats. Among other Christmas customs there was the bullet-pudding—a little hill of flour with a bullet on the top. Each person in turn cut a slice of the pudding with his knife, and when the bullet ultimately fell into the flour whoever let it down had to get it out again with his mouth. Snap-dragon was also a great institution. The raisins had to be seized from a dish of burning spirits of wine, presided over by “Uncle Jimmy” (the clergyman) dressed as a ghost in a sheet, who had regularly on this occasion to thrill us with a recitation of “Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene”—the faithless lady who was carried off from her wedding feast by the ghost of her lover. Of course her fate was inextricably mixed up in our minds with the flame of the snap-dragon.

THEATRICALS

Twelfth Night, with drawing for characters, was duly honoured—nor were private theatricals forgotten. Like all children we loved dressing-up and acting. The first “regular” play with family and household for audience in which we performed was Bluebeard, written in verse by my mother, in which I was Fatima. After that we had many performances—sometimes of plays written by her and sometimes by myself. I do not think that we were budding Irvings or Ellen Terrys, but we enjoyed ourselves immensely and the audiences were tolerant.

More elaborate theatricals took place at Hams Hall, the house of Sir Charles Adderley (afterwards Lord Norton), who married my father’s eldest sister. They had a large family, of whom five sons and five daughters grew up. These young people were devoted to acting and some of us occasionally went over to assist—at least I recollect performing on one occasion—and we often saw these cousins either at Hams or at Stoneleigh, the houses being at no great distance apart. The youngest son, afterwards well known as Father Adderley, was particularly fond of dressing up—he was a well-known actor—and I am not sure that he did not carry his histrionic tastes into the Church of which he was a greatly esteemed prop. Another numerous family of cousins were the children of my father’s fifth sister, married to the Rev. Henry Cholmondeley—a son of Lord Delamere—who held the living of my father’s other place—Adlestrop. Uncle Cholmondeley was clever and devoted enough to teach all his five sons himself without sending them to preparatory schools; and between his teaching and their abilities, most, if not all, of them won scholarships to aid their careers at public schools. With their four sisters they were a noisy but amusing set of companions, and we always enjoyed their visits. My father’s youngest sister was not old enough for her children to be our actual contemporaries, but when she did marry—Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower of Titsey—she had twelve sons and three daughters—a good record.

My mother’s sisters rivalled my father’s in adding to the population—one, Lady Macclesfield, having had fifteen children, of whom twelve were alive to attend her funeral when she died at the age of ninety. So I reckoned at one time that I had a hundred first cousins alive, and generally found one in whatever quarter of the globe I chanced to visit.

Speaking of theatrical performances, I should specially mention my father’s next brother, Chandos Leigh, a well-known character at the Bar, as a Member of the Zingari, and in many other spheres. Whenever opportunity served and enough nephews and nieces were ready to perform he wrote for us what he called “Businesses”—variety entertainments to follow our little plays—in which we appeared in any capacity—clowns, fairies, Shakespeare or Sheridan characters, or anything else which occurred to him as suited to our various capacities, and for which he wrote clever and amusing topical rhymes.

CHAPTER II

A VICTORIAN GIRL

The Christmas festivities of 1862 had to be suspended, as my mother’s health again obliged my father to take her to the South of France. This time I was their sole companion, the younger children remaining in England.

We travelled by easy stages, sleeping at Folkestone, Boulogne, Paris, Dijon, Lyons, Avignon, and Toulon. I kept a careful journal of our travels on this occasion, and note that at Lyons we found one of the chief silk manufactories employed in weaving a dress for Princess Alexandra, then engaged to the Prince of Wales. It had a gold rose, shamrock and thistle combined on a white ground. There also we crossed the Rhône and saw in the hospital at Ville Neuve, among other curious old paintings, one by King Réné d’Anjou. It represented the Holy Family, and my childish eyes carried away the impression of a lovely infant patting a soft woolly lamb. So completely was I fascinated that, being again at Lyons after my marriage, I begged my husband to drive out specially to see the picture of my dream. Alas! ten years had changed my eyesight, and instead of the ideal figures, I saw a hard stiff Madonna and Child, with a perfectly wooden lamb. I mention this because I have often thought that the populace who were so enraptured with a Madonna like Cimabue’s in S. Maria Novella at Florence saw as I did something beyond what was actually there. Grand and stately it is, but I think that unsophisticated eyes must have endowed it with motherly grace and beauty, as I gave life and softness to the baby and the lamb.

MENTONE

We went on by train from Toulon as far as Les Arcs and then drove to Fréjus, and next day to Cannes. Whether the train then only went as far as Les Arcs or whether my parents preferred the drive through the beautiful scenery I do not know—anyhow we seem to have thoroughly enjoyed the drive. I note that in April we returned from Cannes to Toulon by a new railroad. Cannes was a little seaside country town in those days, with few hotels and villas such as have sprung up in the last half-century; but even then it attracted sufficient visitors to render hotel accommodation a difficulty, and we had to shorten our intended stay. We went to pay our respects to the ex-Lord Chancellor Brougham, already King of Cannes. He was then eighty-five, and I have a vague recollection of his being very voluble; but I was most occupied with his great-nephew, a brother of the present Lord Brougham, who had a little house of his own in the garden which was enough to fascinate any child. From Cannes we drove to Nice, about which I record that “the only thing in Nice is the sea.” We had considerable difficulty in our next stage from Nice to Mentone, as a rock had in one place fallen from the top of a mountain to the valley below and filled up part of the road with the débris of its fall. At Mentone we spent over three weeks, occupied in walks with my father and drives with him and my mother, or sometimes he walked while I rode a donkey up the mountains. There was considerable political excitement at that time, Mentone having only been ceded by Italy to France in 1861 and the natives being by no means reconciled to French rule. There was a great local feeling for Garibaldi, and though the “Inno Garibaldi” was forbidden I fear that my mother occasionally played it in the hotel, and any listener (such as the waiter) who overheard it beamed accordingly. I happened to have a scarlet flannel jacket for outdoor wear, and remember women in the fields shouting out to me “Petite Garibaldi.”

My mother often sat on the beach or among olive trees to draw while I read, or looked at the sea, or made up stories or poems, or invented imaginary kingdoms to be shared with my sister and brothers on my return—I fear always reserving supreme dominion for my own share.

When we left England the idea had been to continue our travels as far as Rome, but my mother’s health forbade, as the doctor said that the cold—particularly of the Galleries—would be too much for her. It was a great disappointment, above all to her, but she was very good in submitting. As so long a tranquil sojourn anywhere had not been contemplated, our library was rather restricted, but two little volumes which she had brought, one of Dryden, and Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” afforded me happy hours. Also I perpetrated an Epic in six Cantos on the subject of Rienzi! From Mentone we went to San Remo for a week, returning to Mentone February 17th, when preparations began for a Fête to be given by the English and Danish to the inhabitants of the town on the occasion of the Prince of Wales’s marriage. Old Lord Glenelg was, I believe, nominal President, but my father was the moving spirit—entertaining the populace being for him a thoroughly congenial task.

Many years afterwards in Samoa Robert Louis Stevenson told me that he was at Mentone with his father at the time of the festivities, but he was a young boy, and neither he nor I knew under what circumstances we were ultimately to make acquaintance. There were all sorts of complications to be overcome—for one thing it was Lent and my father had to obtain a dispensation from M. le Curé for his flock to eat meat at the festal dinner. This was accorded on condition that fish was not also consumed. Then there appeared great questions as to who would consent to sit down with whom. We were told that orange-pickers would not sit down with orange-carriers. As a matter of fact I believe that it was against etiquette for women to sit down with the men, and that in the end 300 workmen sat down in the garden of the Hôtel Victoria (where we were staying) and I can still recollect seeing the women standing laughing behind them while the men handed them portions of food. Posts were garlanded with heath and scarlet geraniums, and decorated with English, French, and Danish flags and portraits of Queen Victoria and the Prince and Princess of Wales. The festivities included a boat-race and other races, and ended with illuminations and fireworks at night. All went off splendidly, though the wind rather interfered with lighting the little lamps which decorated some of the buildings.

In connection with the Prince’s wedding I heard one story which I believe was told by my aunt Macclesfield—(appointed Lady-in-Waiting to the Princess) to my mother, which as far as I know has never appeared in print.

The present ex-Kaiser, then little Prince William aged four, came over with his parents for the wedding. He appeared at the ceremony in a Scottish suit, whereupon the German ladies remonstrated with his mother, saying that they understood that he was to have worn the uniform of a Prussian officer. “I am very sorry,” said his mother; “he had it on, but Beatrice and Leopold” (the Duke of Albany) “thought that he looked so ridiculous with tails that they cut them off, and we had to find an old Scottish suit of his uncle’s for him to wear!” An early English protest against militarism!

GENOA

Two days after the excitement of these royal festivities we again left Mentone by road for Genoa, which we reached March 16th, having stopped on the way at San Remo, Alassio, and Savona. At Genoa we joined my mother’s sister Agnes and her husband, Sir Archibald Campbell (of Garscube), and saw various sights in their company.

I knew very little of my Uncle Archibald, as he died comparatively young. At Genoa he was certainly very lively, and I fear that I contrived unintentionally but naturally to annoy him—it only shows how Italian politics excited everyone, even a child. He had seen some map in which the Italians had marked as their own territory, not only what they had lately acquired, but all to which they then aspired; I hardly imagine the Trentino, but certainly Venice. Uncle Archy scoffed at their folly—with precocious audacity, and I suppose having heard such Italian views at Mentone, I asserted that they would ere long have both Venice and Rome! He was quite indignant. It was impertinent of me, as I knew nothing of their power or otherwise, but it was a good shot!

I have heard that Sir Archibald’s mother was a stately old Scottish lady who thought a great deal of family, and precedence, and that one day he scandalised her by asking, “Well, mother, what would be the precedence of an Archangel’s eldest son?”

Aunt Aggy was broken-hearted when he died, and always delicate, fell into very ill-health. When the Franco-German War broke out she set to work undauntedly for the sick and wounded, and positively wanted to go abroad to nurse in some hospital—probably in Germany. A certain very clever Dr. Frank, of German-Jewish descent, was to make arrangements. The whole Grosvenor family and all its married connections were up in arms, and my father was dispatched to remonstrate with her. With much annoyance and reluctance she gave in—and soon after married Dr. Frank! The family were again astounded, but after all when they knew him they realised that he made her happy and took to him quite kindly. My aunt and Dr. Frank lived a great deal at Cannes, where they had a nice villa—Grandbois—and many friends, and he had a tribe of admiring patients. Aunt Aggy was very charming and gentle and lived to a good age.

From Genoa we drove in easy stages to Spezia, noting towns and villages on the way. It was a delightful means of travelling, walking up the hills and stopping at little townships for luncheon in primitive inns. Motors have somewhat revived this method of travel, but whirling along at a great pace can never allow you to see and enjoy all the lesser beauties which struck you in the old leisurely days. I have duly noted all sorts of trivial incidents in my journal, but they are much what occur in all such expeditions and I need not dilate on the beauties of mountain, sea, and sky which everyone knows so well. At Spezia we saw the scene of Shelley’s shipwreck, and on one coast of the Gulf the prison where Garibaldi had been interned not very long before. I record that it was a large building, and that his rooms, shown us by a sailor, were “very nice.” I trust that he found them so. After returning to our old quarters we left Mentone on April 15th, evidently with great regret and with a parting sigh to the voiturier who had driven us on all our expeditions, including those to Genoa and Spezia—also to my donkey-man and to the chambermaid. Looking back, I feel that these southern weeks were among the happiest of my life, and that something of the sunlight and mountain scenery remained as memories never effaced.

TRAFALGAR VETERANS

We returned to England by much the same route as our outward journey, only the railroad being now open from Cannes to Toulon a night at Fréjus was unnecessary. I cannot remember whether it was on our outward or our homeward journey, but on one or the other we met at the Palace of the Popes at Avignon an old custodian who had fought at Trafalgar and been for some years prisoner in England. He showed with some pride an English book, and it amused my mother to recognise a translation from a German work of which she did not hold a high opinion. I do not suppose that the French soldier read enough of it to do him much harm.

It is rather curious that my father on two or three occasions took us to see at Greenwich Hospital an old servant of Nelson’s who was with him at Trafalgar, so I have seen both a Frenchman and an Englishman who took part in that battle. Nelson’s servant had a little room hung all round with pictures of the hero. My father asked him whether the Admiral said the prayer which one print represents him as reciting on his knees before the battle. The man said he did not know what words he used, but he saw him kneel down to pray. On our way to Paris we spent a night at Fontainebleau—and finally reached Stoneleigh on May 1st, 1863.

Speaking of my mother’s numerous brothers and sisters, I ought not to omit the eldest, Eleanor, Duchess of Northumberland, who was a very great lady, handsome and dignified till her death at an advanced age. She had no children, but was admired and respected by many nephews and nieces. I believe that her country neighbours regarded her as almost royal, curtsying when she greeted them. I remember her telling me that she could not go and hear some famous preacher in London because she would not have her carriage out on Sunday and had never been in any sort of cab. What would she have thought of the modern fashion of going in omnibuses? However, a year or two before her death the late Duke of Northumberland (grandson of her husband’s cousin and successor) told me with great glee that they had succeeded in getting Duchess Eleanor into a taxi and that she had enjoyed it very much. I cannot think how they managed it. She lived during her widowhood at Stanwick Park, and my youngest sister Cordelia had a rather comical experience when staying with her there on one occasion. My aunt, among other tabooed innovations, altogether objected to motors and would not allow any through her Lodge gates. Previous to her visit to Stanwick, Cordelia had stayed with the Lawsons at Brayton in Cumberland and while there had been stopped by a policeman for riding a tricycle after dark without a light. She left her address with the Lawson family, and while at Stanwick the local policeman appeared, absolutely trembling at having been forced to enter these sacred precincts, to summon her in that she “drove a carriage, to wit a tricycle, between the hours, etc.” The household managed to keep it dark from Aunt Eleanor, and Cordelia sent authority to the Lawson family to settle the case and pay the fine—but what would the aunt have said had she known of her niece’s crime and penalty?

LORD MUNCASTER AND GREEK BRIGANDS

Lady Macclesfield, the second daughter, I have already mentioned. The surviving sister (one having died young) next above my mother in age was Elizabeth Lady Wenlock, who was very clever and, among her nine children, had charming daughters to whom I may refer later on. Then after my mother came Octavia and Agnes—and then Jane, married to Lord Muncaster, who died seven years later at Castellamare, leaving her with one little girl of about two years old. Margaret or Mimi, as we called her, was a great interest when the young widowed mother brought her to stay with us, soon after her father’s death. She was a dear little girl, and we were told that she was a great heiress, and somehow in the hands of the Lord Chancellor. Her father had died without a will, and all the property, including the beautiful Muncaster Castle in Cumberland, went to the child though her uncle succeeded to the title. However, poor little Mimi died when she was eleven years old, so her uncle succeeded to the property after all. He was the Lord Muncaster who was captured by the brigands near Marathon in 1870 with his wife and her sister, Miss L’Estrange, Mr. Vyner, Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd, and two other men. The brigands let the ladies go without injury—Lady Muncaster had hidden her rings in her mouth to protect them—but they would only let one man go to get ransom for the rest. The men drew lots and it fell to Vyner, but he absolutely refused to take the chance, saying that he was a bachelor and Lord Muncaster a married man. Instead of ransom the Greek Government sent troops. The brigands were annihilated, but they first killed Vyner and his companions. It was said that the Government stood in with the brigands, but I have never quite understood why, if so, the former did not prefer the money to the death of their allies—unless they thought that they would have to produce the ransom. Lord Muncaster always had his head hanging a little to one side, and in my youth I had a floating idea that it was from permanent grief at the tragedy. Meantime my Aunt Jane married a second time, a brother of Lord Crawford’s. She was pretty, with green eyes and a nervous manner. She was a beautiful needlewoman and I believe a true musician.

THE GROSVENOR FAMILY

One more Grosvenor aunt must be remembered, my mother’s youngest sister Theodora. I have heard that my grandmother was greatly distressed at the loss of her fourth daughter, Evelyn, who died as a child, although there were seven surviving sisters, therefore when another girl-baby arrived she called her Theodora—the gift of God. Certainly she was greatly attached to the child, and I fancy that the little Theodora was given much more spoiling and freedom than her elder sisters. She was very lively and amusing, and being the only daughter left unmarried when my grandfather died—in 1869—she became her mother’s constant companion. When she ultimately married a brother of Lord Wimborne’s she and Mr. Merthyr Guest continued to live with my grandmother, who endowed them with a large fortune. Mr. Guest died some years ago, but Aunt Theodora still lives—and has one daughter.

My grandfather was a quiet old gentleman as far as I recollect him—he is somehow associated in my mind with carpet slippers and a diffident manner. He was what they call of a “saving” disposition, but I really believe that he was oppressed with his great wealth, and never sure that he was justified in spending much on himself and his family. When he became a thorough invalid before his death he was ordered to take certain pills, and in order to induce him to do so my grandmother would cut them in two and take half herself. After his death his halves were discovered intact done up with red tape!

During his lifetime I stayed with my parents once or twice at the old Eaton Hall, before my uncle (the first Duke) built the present Palace. It was a nice, comfortable house. I have heard, from a neighbour who recollected the incident, that when it was being built the workmen employed would chisel rough representations of each other’s features in the gargoyles which formed part of the decoration. I suppose that was done in ancient times by the men who built the churches and colleges of those days.

My grandparents besides these numerous daughters had four sons—two, both named Gilbert, died, one as a baby, the other, a sailor, as a young man. The late Duke was my godfather and always very kind to me, particularly when, after my marriage, I stayed on more than one occasion at the new Eaton. I never knew a man more anxious to do all he could for the people about him, whether in the country or on his London property. He had very much the feeling of a patriarch and loved nothing better than to have about him the generations of his family. It was a complicated family, as he married first his own first cousin, Constance Leveson-Gower, and after her death the sister of his son-in-law Lord Chesham, husband of his second daughter Beatrice. I cannot quite unravel it, but somehow he was brother-in-law to his own daughter. The youngest son, Richard, a quaint, amusing man, was created Lord Stalbridge.

Having said so much of my mother’s family, I think I should mention the two sisters of my father whom I have hitherto omitted. One was his second sister, Emma—a typical and excellent maiden aunt. She was principally noted for being my sister Agnes’s godmother and feeling it her duty to hear her Catechism—but neither Agnes nor any of us minded; in fact I remember—I suppose on some wet Sunday—that we all insisted on sharing the Scripture lesson and were given figs in consequence. The third sister was Caroline, twin with Augusta, but very different, for whereas Aunt Gussie was delicate and nervous, not to say irritable, Aunt Car was slow and substantial. She ended with marrying when no longer very young an old cousin of my father’s, a clergyman, Lord Saye and Sele, who had actually baptized her early in life. She made him an excellent wife; she had numerous step-children, though none of her own. Looking back on these Early Victorian uncles and aunts with their various wives and husbands, I cannot but claim that they were good English men and women, with a keen sense of duty to their tenants and neighbours rich and poor. Of course they varied immensely in character and had their faults like other people, but I cannot recall one, either man or woman, who did not try to act up to a standard of right, and think I was fortunate to have been brought up among them.

UNCLES AND AUNTS

In my younger days I had also living several great-uncles and aunts on both sides, but the only one whom I can spare time and space to mention here is my Grandfather Leigh’s sister, Caroline Lady East. When she was young Mr. East fell in love with her and she with him, but he was an impecunious youth and my great-grandparents would not permit the marriage. Whereupon he disguised himself as a hay-maker and contrived an interview with his lady-love in which they exchanged vows of fidelity. Then he went to India, where he remained eleven years, and returned to find the lady still faithful, and having accumulated a sufficient fortune married her. They had a nice little country house on the borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, and, though they had no children, were one of the happiest old couples I ever knew. My great-aunt died in 1870, but Uncle East lived till over ninety and went out hunting almost to the end—so eleven years of India had not done him much harm. He stayed with us at Middleton after my marriage when old Lord Abingdon was also a guest. Lord Abingdon must have been over seventy at the time, but a good deal younger than Sir James. They had known each other in youth and were quite delighted to meet again, but each confided separately to my husband and myself that he had thought that the other old fellow was dead. However, they made great friends, and in token of reunion Lord Abingdon sent his servant to cut Uncle East’s corns!

To return to my recollections of my own girlhood. I think that it must have been in 1864 that I had a bad attack of chicken-pox which temporarily hurt my eyes and left me somewhat weak. Either in that autumn or the following one my parents took me to the Isle of Arran and left me there for a time with a maid—while they accompanied my brother Gilbert back to school. I loved the Isle of Arran, and was only disturbed by the devotion of a child-niece of the landlady’s who would follow me about everywhere. The only way of escape was to go—or attempt to go—into the mountains of which she was afraid, knowing that there were giants there.

I must not omit one honour which I enjoyed in 1865. My mother took me to see my Aunt Macclesfield, who was in Waiting at Marlborough House when His present Majesty was born. My aunt welcomed us in the Princess of Wales’s pretty sitting-room hung with a kind of brocade with a pattern of roses. The baby was then brought in to be admired, and to my gratification I was allowed to hold the little Prince in my arms. I did not then realise that in after years I could claim to have nursed my King.

Shortly afterwards we used to hear a good deal of the American Civil War. We were too young to have much opinion as to the rival causes, but there was a general impression conveyed to our minds that the “Southerners were gentlemen.” Some time after the war was over, in December 1868, Jefferson Davis, the Southern (Confederate) President, came to stay at Stoneleigh. He was over in Europe on parole. We were told that he had been in prison, and one of my younger brothers was anxious to know whether we “should see the marks of the chains.” We had a favourite old housemaid who was preparing his room, and we imparted to her the thrilling information of his former imprisonment. Her only response was “Umph, well, I suppose he won’t want these silver candlesticks.” A large bedroom was being prepared for him, but she considered that silver candlesticks were only for ladies, and that presidents and prisoners were not entitled to such luxuries.

He proved to be a benevolent old gentleman who impressed my cousins and myself by the paternal way in which he addressed any elder girl as “daughter.”

After this—but I cannot remember the particular years—we went in the autumn to Land’s End, The Lizard, and Tintagel, and also had villas at Torquay and Bournemouth respectively, but our experiences were too ordinary to be worthy of record. I think I was about seventeen when I went with my parents to Vichy, where my father drank the waters—and we went on to some beautiful Auvergne country. This was my last excursion abroad with my parents before I married.

CONFIRMATION

In 1867 I was confirmed. The church which we attended was in Park Street. It has since been pulled down, but was then regarded as specially the church of the Westminster family. My grandparents sat in a large pew occupying the length of the gallery at the west end of the church. We had a pew in the south gallery with very high sides, and my early recollections are of sitting on a dusty red hassock from which I could see little but the woodwork during a very long sermon. One Sunday when I was approaching years of discretion the clergyman gave out notice of a Confirmation, with the usual intimation that Candidates should give in their names in the Vestry. My mother told me to do this accompanied by my younger brother (Gilbert) as chaperon. The clergyman seemed a good deal surprised, and I rather fancy that I was the only Candidate. He was an old man who had been there for a long time. He said that he would come and see me at my parents’ house, and duly arrived at 37 Portman Square. I was sent in to my father’s sitting-room for the interview, and I believe that he was more embarrassed than I was, for I had long been led to regard Confirmation as the proper sequence to learning my Catechism and a fitting step in religious life. The clergyman somewhat uneasily remarked that he had to ascertain that I knew my Catechism, and asked me to say it. This I could have done in my sleep, as it had for years formed part of my Sunday instruction. When I ended he asked after a slight pause whether I knew why the Nicene Creed was so called. This was unexpected pleasure. I had lately read Milman’s Latin Christianity to my mother, and should have enjoyed nothing better than delivering to my pastor a short lecture on the Arian and Athanasian doctrines. When I began it, however, he hastily cut me short, saying that he saw that I knew all about it—how old was I? “Seventeen and a half.” “Quite old enough,” said he, and told me that he would send me my ticket, and when I went to the church someone would show me where to sit. This ended my preparation as far as he was concerned. I believe he intimated to my parents that he would see Miss Leigh again, but in practice he took care to keep clear of the theological enfant terrible.

I was duly confirmed on May 31st, by Dr. Jackson, Bishop of London. I feel sure that my mother amply supplied any lacunæ left by the poor old clergyman. No doubt in those days Preparation for Confirmation was not regarded as seriously as at present, but I do not think that mine was quite typical, as some of my contemporary cousins underwent a much more serious course of instruction.

“COMING OUT”

That autumn I began to “come out” in the country. We went to a perfectly delightful ball at the Shaw-Stewarts’ at Ardgowan, where the late Duke of Argyll—then Lord Lorne—excited my admiration by the way he danced reels in Highland costume. Thence my brother and I went to Hans Hall to the coming-of-age of my cousin Charles Adderley, now Lord Norton. The whole country-side swarmed to the festivities, and one party unable to obtain any other conveyance chartered a hearse. Miss Ferrier, in her novel The Inheritance, makes one of her female characters arrive at a country house, where she was determined to be received, in a hearse—but she was even more gruesome than my cousin’s guests as she accompanied the corpse!

The following year (1868), May 12th, I was presented—Princess Christian held the Drawing-Room on behalf of the Queen, who still lived in retirement as far as social functions were concerned. She, however, attended this Drawing-Room for about half an hour—receiving the entrée. Her devotion to the Prince Consort and to his memory was unparalleled. No doubt the fact that she had practically never had anyone with whom she could associate on equal terms until her marriage had a good deal to do with it. I know of a lady whom she summoned to sit with her when the Prince Consort was being carried to his funeral on the ground that she was a widow and could feel for her, and she said that her shudders when the guns went off were dreadful, and that she seemed unable to realise that here for the first time was something that she could not control.

To return to my entry in the world. Naturally I went during 1868 and the three or four succeeding years to the balls, dinners, and garden parties usual in the course of the season. The “great houses” then existed—they had not been pulled down or turned into public galleries and offices. Stafford House, Grosvenor House, Northumberland House, and others entertained in royal style, and there were Garden Parties at Argyll Lodge and Airlie Lodge on Campden Hill, at Syon, and at Chiswick, then in possession of the Duke of Devonshire.

In those days there was still a sort of question as to the propriety of waltzing. Valses and square dances were danced alternately at balls, and a few—but very few—girls were limited to the latter. Chaperones were the almost invariable rule and we went back to them between the dances. “Sitting-out” did not come in till some years later. In the country, however, there was plenty of freedom, and I never remember any restriction on parties of girls and young men walking or rowing together without their elders. By the time I came out my brother Gilbert (Gilly) was at Harrow and Dudley and Rupert at Mr. Lee’s Private School at Brighton. My special charge and pet Rowland was still at home, and the youngest of the family Cordelia a baby.

Dudley and Rupy were inseparable. Duddy delicate, Rupy sturdy and full of mischief into which he was apt to drag his elder brother. I had to look after them, and see that they accomplished a few lessons in the holidays—no light task, but I was ready for anything to keep off holiday tutors and, I am afraid, to retain my position as elder sister. Love of being first was doubtless my besetting sin, and my good-natured younger brothers and sisters accepted my rule—probably also because it was easier than that of a real grown-up person. My mother had bad health, and my father took it for granted that it was my business to keep the young ones as far as possible out of mischief. As for my sister Agnes, she was always a saint, and I am afraid that I was a tyrant as far as she was concerned. Cordelia was born when I was over sixteen and was always rather like my child. Rowland was just seven when her arrival delighted the family, and his first remark when he heard that he had a little sister was “I wonder what she will think of my knickerbockers”—to which he had lately been promoted. Boys wore little tunics with belts when they first left off baby frocks, and sailor suits were not introduced when my brothers were children.

IRELAND

My next special recollection is of a visit to Ireland which I paid in company with my parents, Gilbert, and Agnes in August 1869. We crossed in the Leinster and duly lionised Dublin. I kept a journal during this tour in which the sights of the city are duly noted with the remark, after seeing the post office, that we “made the various observations proper to intelligent but tired travellers.”

The country—Bray, Glendalough, and the Seven Churches seem to have pleased us much better. I do not know whether the guides and country people generally are as free with their legends now as they were fifty years ago, but they told us any amount of stories to our great satisfaction. Brough, the guide at the Seven Churches, was particularly voluble and added considerably to the tales of St. Kevin given in the guide-book. St. Kevin, as recounted by Moore in his ballad, pushed Kathleen into the Lake when she would follow him. I remember that Brough was much embarrassed when I innocently asked why he did this. However, he discreetly replied: “If your honourable father and your honourable mother want you to marry a gentleman and you don’t like him, don’t push him into the water!” Excellent advice and not difficult to follow in a general way. When St. Kevin was alive the skylark used to sing early in the morning and waken the people who had been up late the night before at a wedding or merrymaking. When the Saint saw them looking so bad he asked, “What’s the matter?” On hearing that the lark would not let them get any sleep, he laid a spell that never more should lark sing above that lake. This encouragement of late hours seems rather inconsistent with his general asceticism. St. Kevin was more considerate to a blackbird than to the laverock. The former once laid her eggs on his extended hand, and he kept it held out until she had had time to build her nest in it and hatch her young.

Brough was even better acquainted with fairies than with saints. He knew a man at Cork named Jack M’Ginn, a wool-comber, who was carried away by the fairies for seven years. At the end of that time he accompanied them to a wedding (fairies like weddings). There was present a young lady whom the fairies wanted to make sneeze three times, as if they could do so and no one said “God bless her” they could take her away. So they tickled her nose three times with horse-hair, but as they were withdrawing it the third time Jack cried out in Irish “God bless her.” This broke the spell, and Jack fell crashing down amongst the crockery, everyone ran away, and he arose retransformed to his natural shape.

Another acquaintance of Brough’s—a stout farmer—met one evening three fairies carrying a coffin. Said one, “What shall we do for a fourth man?” “Switch the first man who passes,” replied the second. So they caught the farmer and made him carry it all night, till he found himself in the morning nearly dead not far from his own door. Our guide enjoined us to be sure, if fairies passed us in the air, to pick some blades of grass and throw them after them, saying “Good luck to you good folk”: as he sagely remarked, a civil word never does harm. As more prosaic recollections, Brough told us of the grand fights at Glendalough, when the young men were backed up by their sisters and sweethearts. The etiquette was for a young woman to take off her right stocking, put a stone in it and use it as a weapon, “and any woman who fought well would have twenty young farmers wanting to marry her.”

KILLARNEY

We stopped at Cork, whence we drove to see Blarney Castle and its stones. In those days, and probably still, there were two, one called the Ladies’ Stone, which we three children all kissed, and another suspended by iron clamps from the top of the Castle, so that one had to lie down and hold on to the irons with one’s body partly over an open space—rather a break-neck proceeding, particularly in rising again. Only Gilly accomplished this. The railway to Glengariff then went as far as Dunmanway, whence it was necessary to drive. We slept at the Royal Hotel where we arrived in the evening, and to the end of my life I never shall forget the beauty of Bantry Bay as we saw it on waking next morning with all its islands mirrored in purple shadows. But the whole drive to Killarney, and above all the Lakes as they break upon your sight, are beyond description. We saw it all in absolutely glorious weather—possibly rare in those regions, but certainly the Lakes of Killarney impressed me then as more beautiful than either the Scottish or the English Lakes because of their marvellous richness of colour. After fifty years, and travels in many lands, I still imagine that they are only excelled in colour by the coral islands of the Pacific; but of course the Irish Lakes may dwell in my memory as more beautiful than they really are, as I saw them first when I had far fewer standards of comparison. Anyhow, they were like a glorious dream. We spent some enchanting days at Killarney and saw all the surrounding beauties—the Gap of Dunloe with the Serpent Lake in which St. Patrick drowned the last snake in Ireland (in a chest into which he enticed the foolish creature by promising to let it out again), Mangerton, the highest mountain in Ireland but one, and Carrantuohill, the highest of all, which my brother and sister and I were allowed to ascend on condition that the guide would take good care of us. However, when out of our parents’ sight he found that he was troubled with a corn, and lay down to rest, confiding us to a ponyman who very nearly lost us in a fog. The ponies could only approach the base, the rest was pretty stiff climbing.

THE O’DONOGHUES

The Upper, the Middle, and the Lower Lake are all lovely, but the last was particularly attractive from its connection with the local hero—the Great O’Donoghue, whose story we gleaned from our guides and particularly a boy who carried our luncheon basket up Mangerton. He was a magician and had the power of taking any shape he pleased, but he ended by a tremendous leap into the Lake, after which he never returned to his home. Once every seven years, however, between six and seven on May Day morning, he rides from one of the islands in the Lower Lake to the opposite shore, with fairies strewing flowers before him, and for the time his Castle also reappears. Any unmarried man who sees him will marry a rich wife, and any unmarried woman a rich husband. Our boatman pointed out an island where girls used to stand to see him pass, but no one ever saw him except an old boatman, and he had been married a long time, so the apparition did not help him. No O’Donoghue has ever been drowned since the hero’s disappearance. We heard two different versions of the cause of the tragedy. Both attributed it to his wife’s want of self-control. One related that the husband was in the habit of running about as a hare or a rabbit, and as long as she did not laugh all went well, but when he took this flying leap into the water she burst into a fit of laughter and thereby lost him permanently. Our boy guide’s story was more circumstantial and more dramatic. According to him, the O’Donoghue once turned himself into an eel, and knotted himself three times round Ross Castle, where he lived (a super-eel or diminutive castle!). This frightened the lady dreadfully, and he told her that if she “fritted” three times on seeing any of his wonders she would see him no more. Some time after he turned himself into a goose and swam on the lake, and she shrieked aloud, thinking to lose him. Finally he brought out his white horse and told her that this was her last chance of restraining her fears. She promised courage and kept quiet while he rode straight up the Castle wall, but when he turned to come down she fainted, whereupon, horse and all, he leapt into the water. The boy also declared that in the previous year he was seen by two boatmen, a lady and a gentleman, another man, and some “company,” whereupon the lady fainted—recalling the lady of O’Donoghue, it was the least she could do. In the lower Lake may still be seen rocks representing the chieftain’s pigeons, his spy-glass, his books containing the “Ould Irish,” and his mice (only to be seen on Sundays after prayers). In the Bitter Lake, which was pointed out to us from a distance, is the fairy-island where he dances with the fairies.

MYTHS AND LEGENDS

The O’Donoghue in his lifetime had his frivolous moments. He once changed a number of fern fronds into little pigs, which he took to the fair at Killarney and sold to the jobbers. They looked just like other pigs until the purchasers reached some running water. As we all know, running water dissolves any spell, and the pigs all turned back into little blades of fern. As testimony to the authenticity of this tale the water was duly shown to us. The O’Donoghue, however, knew that the jobbers would not remain placid under the trick, so he went home and told his maid to say, if anyone asked for him, that he had gone to bed and to sleep and could only be wakened by pulling his legs. The jobbers arrived, received the message, went in and pulled his legs, which immediately came off! Off they ran in alarm, thinking that they had killed the man, but the good O’Donoghue was only having his fun with them, so called them back and returned their money. We picked up a good deal of fairy-lore during our sojourn in the south of Ireland, and I record it as it may have passed away during the past half-century. The driver who took us to the Gap of Dunloe told me that in his mother’s time a woman working in the fields put down her baby. While she was out of the way the steward saw the fairies change it for a fairy-baby who would have been a plague to her all her life. So as the child was crying and shrieking he stood over it and declared that he would shoot the mother or anyone else who should come near it, and as no one came to comfort it the fairies could not leave their baby to cry like that, so they brought back the stolen child and took away their own. That steward was such a man of resource that one cannot help wishing that he were alive to deal with the Sinn Feiners of the present day. Another piece of good advice which we received was, if we saw a fairy (known by his red jacket) in a field to keep an eye fixed on him till we came up with him—then to take away his purse, and each time we opened it we should find a shilling. I regret to say that I never had the opportunity, but the guide, remarking my father’s tendency to give whenever asked, observed that he thought his lordship had found a fairy purse. It is a commonplace to notice the similarity of folk-lore in many lands pointing to a common origin, but it is rather curious to compare the tale of the O’Donoghue with that of the Physicians of Myddfai in South Wales. Only in that the husband, not the wife, caused the final tragedy. The fairy-wife, rising from the Lake, warns her mortal husband that she will disappear for ever if he strikes her three times. Long years they live in happiness, but thrice does he give her a slight blow to arouse her from unconventional behaviour at a christening, a wedding, and a funeral respectively. Thereupon she wends her way to the Lake and like a white cloud sinks into its waters. She leaves her sons a legacy of wisdom and healing skill, and from time to time a shadowy form and clear voice come to teach them still deeper knowledge.

From the south of Ireland we went to the north, but I regret to say were not nearly so fascinated by the loyal Ulsterman as by the forthcoming sons of the south. Nevertheless we enjoyed the wild scenery of Lough Swilly and the legends connected with Dunluce Castle and the Giant’s Causeway. Among the tales of Dunluce was that of a banshee whose duty it is (or was) to keep clean one of the rooms in the ruin. The old man who showed us over declared that she did not always properly fulfil her task. She is supposed to be the spirit of a cook who fell over the rocks into the water and reappears as a tall woman with red hair. The place of cook must have been a rather trying one in ancient days, for the kitchen pointed out to us was on the edge of a precipice and we were told that once when a good dinner was prepared the attendants let it all fall into the sea! It was not, however, explained whether this was the occasion on which the like fate befell the cook. Possibly she died in a frantic effort to rescue it.

THE GIANT BENADADDA

The Giant’s Causeway was very interesting. We first entered Portcorn Cave, which has fine colours and a great deal of froth said to have been caused by the giant’s washerwoman washing a few collars there. The giant in question was called Fin MacCoul, and at the same time there lived another Giant in Scotland called Benadadda. Wishing to pass backwards and forwards, the two agreed that Fin should pave a way of columns and Benadadda should work it. Hence Fingal’s Cave—gal or gael meaning “the stranger”—presumably the name was given in compliment to the future guest. But the two champions found the work harder than they had expected, and Benadadda sent to tell Fin that if he did not make haste he must come over and give him a beating. Fin returned that he was not to put himself out, but to come if he pleased. Soon after Fin rushed in crying out to his wife, “Goodness gracious! he’s coming. I can’t face that fellow!” And he tumbled into bed.

Soon Benadadda walked in. “Good day, ma’am. Ye’re Mrs. McCoul?”

“Yes, sir; I percave you are Benadadda?”

“I am ma’am. Is Fin at home?”

“He’s just gone into the garden for a few vegetables, but he’ll be back directly. Won’t ye take a cheer?”

“Thank you kindly”—and he sat down.

She continued: “I’ve got a little boy in that cradle and we think he’s taything, fer he won’t give the fayther nor me any raste. Just put your finger along his gums.”

Benadadda, unable to refuse a lady, put his fingers into Fin’s mouth, who promptly bit them off, and then jumping up called on Benadadda to come on. The Scottish giant, unable to fight with his wounded hand, told them, “I wish I’d never come among you craters,” and walked off. Mrs. MacCoul ran after him with an oatcake, but having tasted it he said, “Very good outside, but give the rest to your goodman”; for she had baked the tin girdle inside the cake. This is how I recorded the tale, which I suppose I picked up locally, but I have somewhere heard or read another account in which, without waiting for his fingers to be bitten off, Benadadda exclaimed, “Begorra, is that the baby? then I’ll be but a mouthful to the fellow himself,” and made off.

I am unable to say which version is authentic, but neither seems to attribute undaunted valour to either champion, and both agree that Irish wit got the better of superior Scottish strength. I record these tales rather than attempt description of the Caves and other beauties of the coast, as the physical features remain and the legends may be forgotten. The great rocks shaped like columns are called the Giant’s Organs, and are (or were) supposed to play every Christmas morning. The tune they play is “St. Patrick’s day in the morning,” upon hearing which the whole Causeway dances round three times.

We left Ireland at the end of August, having thoroughly enjoyed our travels there. It was then a peaceful country. The Queen had given her name to Queenstown Harbour in 1849, and I suppose had visited Killarney on the same occasion. Anyhow, memories of her stay still lingered there. I recollect even now the enthusiasm with which a boatman who had been one of those who had taken her on the Lake said, “I passed a long day looking at her.” It was a thousand pities that she did not often revisit Ireland.

CHAPTER III

MARRIAGE

Next year—1870—all thoughts were to a large extent taken up with the Franco-German War. It does not seem to me that we took violent sides in the struggle. Naturally we were quite ignorant of the depths of cruelty latent in the German nature, or of the manœuvres on the part of Bismarck which had led to the declaration of war. We were fond of our sister’s French governess Mdlle. Verdure, and sorry for the terrible collapse of her country, but I think on the whole that the strongest feeling in our family was amazement at the revelation of inefficiency on the part of the French, mingled with some admiration for the completeness of German organisation. Anyhow, everyone was set to work to provide comforts for the sick and wounded on both sides—medical stores which I fancy would have been to a large extent condemned wholesale if submitted to the medical authorities during the late War, but which I am sure were very useful and acceptable in ’70-71. As is well known, that winter was an exceptionally hard one—we had fine times skating, and I remember a very pleasant visit to old Lord Bathurst at Cirencester—but it must have been terrible in Paris. Our French man-cook had some refugee sisters quartered in the neighbourhood who were employed by my mother in dressmaking work for our benefit, but I do not know whether refugees were numerous in England.

What did really excite us in common with all England were the excesses of the Commune. Never shall I forget the papers coming out with terrific headlines: “Paris in Flames—Burning of the Tuileries,” and so on. I passed the morning in floods of tears because they were “burning history,” and had to be rebuked by my mother for expressing the wish that the incendiaries could be soaked in petroleum and themselves set on fire.

The year 1871 was rendered interesting to our family by the marriages of our two Leigh uncles—Chandos, commonly known among us as “Uncle Eddy,” married an amiable and good-looking Miss Rigby, who inherited money from a (deceased) Liverpool father. Uncle Eddy was a great character. A fine, athletic man, successful in every walk of life which he entered, a good horseman, cricketer and actor, he did well at the Bar and seemed to know practically everybody and to be friends with them all. He was blessed with supreme self-confidence and appeared innocently convinced that everyone was as much interested in his affairs as he was himself. This childlike disposition was really attractive, and quite outweighed the boyish conceit which endured to the end of a long and useful life.

His love affairs with Miss Rigby were naturally very public property. I heard all about them from the beginning, and have no doubt that anyone of age to listen and capable of sympathising was similarly favoured. He originally proposed to the young lady after a few days’ acquaintance, and she turned pale and said “You have no right to speak to me in this way.” Ups and downs followed, including a consultation with planchette, which quite properly wavered and shook and spoke with an uncertain voice. This was all in 1870. Some time in January we acted a small farce which I had perpetrated called The Detective. When it was over my uncle informed me that failing his marriage he intended to leave me a thousand pounds in recognition of this play. Fortunately I founded no hopes on that thousand pounds, for I think that it was the following morning when Uncle Eddy came shouting along the top corridor where we slept. “Margaret—you’ve lost your thousand pounds!” The post had come in and the fair lady had relented.

FANNY KEMBLE

James, my father’s youngest brother, called “Uncle Jimmy,” had travelled in the United States and been entertained on her plantation in Georgia by a charming Southern lady—a Miss Butler, daughter of the descendant of an old Irish family who had married the well-known actress Fanny Kemble. Mr. and Mrs. Pierce Butler had separated—not from any wrong-doing, but from absolute incompatibility of temper. For one thing the wife took up a violent anti-slavery attitude—a little awkward when (as she must have known when she married) the husband owned a cotton plantation worked by slave labour. However, the two daughters remained on friendly terms with both parents, and Mr. Butler died during—or shortly after—the war. One daughter married a Dr. Wister and became the mother of the well-known author, Owen Wister; the younger, Frances, married my uncle and was adopted into the family as “Aunt Fanny.” Though some ten or eleven years older than myself, she and I became the greatest friends, and I much liked her somewhat erratic, though withal stately, mother, who was called “Mrs. Kemble.” Both Uncles were married (on different days) in June 1871, my sister Agnes being bridesmaid to Miss Butler and I to Miss Rigby.

Both marriages were very happy ones, though my Uncle Chandos ended his life in a dark cloud cast by the late War—in which he lost his only two sons, and his wife was killed in a motor accident not long after his death.

Since I wrote above I have found an old journal from May 18th, 1868, to November 3rd, 1869. I do not extract much from it, as it largely consists of records of the various balls and entertainments which we attended—but it is rather amusing to note what circumstances, social and otherwise, struck the fancy of a girl in her first two seasons. Politically the Irish Church Bill seems to have been the burning question. We went to part of the Debate on the Second Reading (June 17th, 1869) in the House, and I not only give a summary of Lord Salisbury’s speech, but when the Bill was carried, devote over two pages of my journal to a full description of the details of the measure. The causes célèbres of Madame Rachel, the Beauty Doctor, and of the nun, Miss Saurin, against her Mother Superior, Mrs. Starr, appear also to have been topics of conversation.

AN OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS

One visit is perhaps worth recording. My father’s mother was a Miss Willes of an old family living on the borders of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire—regular country people. One of her brothers, Charles, was married to a certain Polly—I think she was a Miss Waller, but anyhow they were a plump, old-fashioned pair. She was supposed to keep a book in which were recorded the names of over a hundred nephews and nieces, and to sell a pig to give a present to any one of the number who married. On the last day of 1868 my brother Gilly and I went with our Aunt Georgiana to stay with this charming old couple at King-Sutton Manor House near Banbury. This is how I describe the New Year festivities of fifty years ago: “It is a queer old house like one in a storybook, full of corners. My wash-stand was in a recess with a window, separated from the rest of the room by doors so that it looked like a chapel. We had dinner between six and seven, a real Christmas dinner with nearly twenty people—great-uncle Charles, great-aunt Martha, great-aunt Sophy, George Willes, Willie Willes, Stany Waller, the clergyman Mr. Bruce, Aunt Polly herself beaming at the head of the table, turkey and beef stuck with holly, and the plum-pudding brought in, in flaming brandy.... Almost everyone seemed related to all the rest. A few more people came after dinner while we were in the drawing-room and the dining-room was being cleared for dancing. Two fiddlers and a blowing-man were then perched on a table in a corner and dancing began—quadrilles, lancers, jig, reel, and valse carried on with the utmost energy, by Aunt Polly in particular, till about half-past eleven, when muffled bells began to ring in a church close by and the dancing was stopped that we might all listen. At twelve o’clock the muffles were taken off, Aunt Polly charged with Xmas cards into the midst of her company, punch was brought in in great cups, silver, I believe; everyone kissed, shook hands, and wished everyone else a Happy New Year, the bells rang a joy-peal, and we had supper, and then began dancing again till between one and two in the morning. After many efforts Gilly succeeded in catching Aunt Polly under the misletoe and kissing her.” I do not know what a “blowing-man” may have been, but have a vivid recollection of Aunt Polly trying to dance everyone down in a perpetual jig, and of the portly figure of Uncle Charles, who had to be accommodated with two chairs at dinner.

We had other very pleasant visits—and amongst them we stayed with my uncle and aunt Wenlock for my cousin Carry Lawley’s wedding to Captain Caryl Molyneux. This marriage was particularly interesting to all the cousinhood, as it was brought about after considerable opposition. Carry was an extraordinarily pretty, lively, and attractive girl rather more than a year older than myself. She had brilliant eyes and auburn hair and was exceedingly clever and amusing. Her family naturally expected her to make a marriage which would give all her qualities a wide sphere. However, at the mature age of eleven she won the affections of Lord Sefton’s younger brother and he never fluctuated in his choice. I do not know at what exact moment he disclosed his admiration, but he contrived to make the young lady as much in love with him as he was with her. Vainly did her mother refuse consent. Carry stuck to her guns, and I believe ultimately carried her point by setting up a cough! Anyhow the parents gave in, and when they did so, accepted the position with a good grace. Somehow what was considered sufficient provision for matrimony was made and Caryl and Carry were married, on a brilliant spring day in April 1870.

A PRE-MATRIMONIAL PARTY

It was at the Wenlocks’ London house, in the following year, that I made the acquaintance of Lord Jersey. We had unknowingly met as children at an old inn on Edgehill called “The Sunrising”; at that time his parents, Lord and Lady Villiers, lived not far off at Upton House, which then belonged to Sarah, Lady Jersey. While my brother and I were playing outside, a boy with long fair hair looked out of the inn and smilingly lashed his whip at us, unconscious that it was his first salutation to his future wife! I discovered in after years that George Villiers, as he then was, used to ride over for lessons to a neighbouring clergyman and put up his pony at the inn.

At the dinner-party at Berkeley Square Lord Jersey did not take me in, and I had not the slightest idea who he was, but when the ladies left the dining-room I was laughed at for having monopolised his attention when he was intended to talk to his partner. He was reckoned exceedingly shy, and I thought no more of the matter till the following season, to which I shall return in due course.

After our return to Stoneleigh, though I do not recollect in which month (I think August), we had a large and gay party including a dance—it was distinctly a pre-matrimonial party, as three of the girls whom it included were either engaged or married before twelve months were over, though none of them to the men present. The three girls were Gwendolen (then called Gwendaline) Howard, who married Lord Bute; Maria Fox-Strangways, married to Lord Bridport’s son Captain Hood; and myself. Rather oddly, a much older man and a widower, Lord Raglan, who was also of the party, caught the matrimonial microbe and married his second wife in the ensuing autumn.

Among others my cousin and great friend Hugh Shaw-Stewart was there and immortalised our doings in verse. At Christmas time I managed to get slight congestion of the lungs and soon after went to spend some time with my kind uncle and aunt Sir Michael and Lady Octavia Shaw-Stewart at Fonthill, and Hughie, who had also suffered from chest trouble, stayed with his parents there while preparing for Oxford.

FONTHILL ABBEY

Fonthill, as is well known, belonged to the eccentric Beckford and was full of his traditions. After his death the property was divided and my grandfather Westminster bought the portion which included Beckford’s old house, of which the big tower had fallen down, and built himself a modern house lower down the hill. Another part was bought—I do not know when—by Mr. Alfred Morrison. When my grandfather Westminster died in the autumn of 1869 he left the reversion of Fonthill Abbey to Uncle Michael. Perhaps he thought that the Shaw-Stewarts should have an English as well as a Scottish home. However that might have been, Fonthill is a delightful place—and I benefited by their residence there at this time. I think that they were only to come into actual possession after my grandmother’s death—but that she lent it to them on this occasion as my aunt was delicate and it was considered that she would be the better for southern air.

The modern house was a comfortable one with good rooms, but had a peculiarity that no room opened into another, as my grandfather objected to that arrangement—dressing-rooms, for instance, though they might open into the same lobbies, might not have doors into the bedrooms.

Part of Beckford’s old house higher up the hill was preserved as a sort of museum. The story was that he insisted on continuous building, Sundays and weekdays alike. The house had a very high tower which could be seen from a hill overlooking Bath, where he ultimately went to live. Every day he used to go up the hill to look at his tower, but one morning when he ascended as usual he saw it no longer—it had fallen down. It used to be implied that this was a judgment on the Sunday labour. Also we were told that he made the still-existing avenues and drove about them at night, which gave him an uncanny reputation. Probably his authorship of that weird tale Vathek added to the mystery which surrounded him. He had accumulated among many other treasures a number of great oriental jars from the Palace of the King of Portugal, and when these were sold after his death my grandfather, to the best of my recollection, purchased three.

Mr. Morrison had secured a good many of the others, which I saw in after years when I stayed at the other Fonthill House which he had built on his part of the property. Many of the other treasures passed, as is well known, into the possession of Beckford’s daughter who married the 10th Duke of Hamilton. Alas—most of them must have been dispersed ere now!

Mr. Alfred Morrison, when I was at Fonthill with my uncle and aunt, was a subject of much interest, as it was rumoured that he wanted to emulate Beckford. I do not quite know in what way beyond trying to collect the oriental jars. He was a distinctly literary man, and was reported to have married his wife because he found her reading a Greek grammar in the train. Whether or no that was the original attraction I cannot say, but she proved a delightful and amusing person when I met her in after years. Meantime we used to hear of the beautiful horses which he sent to the meets of the local hounds, though he did not ride, and other proofs of his wealth and supposed eccentricity.

My uncle as well as my aunt being far from strong, we led a quiet though pleasant life. Hughie and I shared a taste for drawing and painting of very amateur description and Hughie used to help me with Latin verses, in which I then liked to dabble.

After my return to Stoneleigh I had yet another treat. My Uncle James and his new wife “Aunt Fanny” were kind enough to ask me to share in the spring their first trip abroad after their marriage. We went via Harwich to Rotterdam and thence for a short tour in Holland and Belgium with which I was highly delighted. The quaint canals, the cows with table-cloths on their backs, the queer Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, and still more the cathedrals and picture galleries in Belgium gave me infinite pleasure, but are too well known to describe.

Even the copyist in the Antwerp Gallery who, being armless, painted with his toes was an amusement, as much to my uncle, who loved freaks, as to myself. Ghent and Bruges were a revelation; and I was much entertained by the guide who took us up the Belfry of St. Nicholas (I think it was) at the former city and pointed triumphantly to the scenery as “bien beau, tout plat, pas de montagnes.” He shared the old Anglo-Saxon conception of Paradise.

“Nor hills nor mountains there
Stand steep, nor strong cliffs
Tower high, as here with us; nor dells nor dales,
Nor mountain-caves, risings, nor hilly chains;
Nor thereon rests aught unsmooth,
But the noble field flourishes under the skies
With delights blooming.”

In the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, over the high altar, was an image of the saint with three children in a tub. My uncle asked a priest what he was doing with the children, but all the good man could say was that “St. Nicolas aimait beaucoup les enfants,” quite ignorant of the miracle attributed to his own saint, namely, that he revived three martyred boys by putting them into a barrel of salt.

Shortly after our return to England we moved to Portman Square for the season. At a dinner-party—I believe at Lord Camperdown’s—I again met Lord Jersey, but fancied that he would have forgotten me, and subsequently ascertained that he had the same idea of my memory. So we did not speak to each other. Later on, however, my father told my mother that he had met Lord Jersey and would like him asked to dinner. The families had been friends in years gone by, but had drifted apart. My mother agreed, sent the invitation, which was accepted. In arranging how the guests were to sit I innocently remarked to my mother that it was no good counting Lord Jersey as a young man—or words to that effect—as “he would never speak to a girl”—and I was rather surprised when in the drawing-room after he came across to me and made a few remarks before the party broke up.

After this events moved rapidly for me. Jersey, unexpectedly to many people, appeared at balls at Montagu House, Northumberland House (then still existing), and Grosvenor House. Also he came to luncheon once or twice in Portman Square. He did not dance at balls, but though “sitting-out” was not then the fashion we somehow found a pretext—such as looking at illuminations—for little walks. Then Lord Tollemache drove my mother and me to a garden-party at Syon, where I well recollect returning from another “little walk” across a lawn where my mother was sitting with what appeared to me to be a gallery of aunts.

ENGAGEMENT

We went to a last ball at the Howards of Glossop in Rutland Gate, and discovering that we were about to leave London Jersey took his courage in two hands and came to Portman Square, July 18th, and all was happily settled.

I went next morning—it may have been the same evening—to tell Aunt Fanny, who was then laid up at a house not far from ours. I had been in the habit of paying her constant visits, so she had an idea of what might happen, and I found her mother, Mrs. Fanny Kemble, with her. One word was enough to enlighten my aunt, who then said, “May I tell my mother?” I assented, and she said, “This child has come to tell me of her engagement.” Whereupon Mrs. Kemble demanded, with a tragical air worthy of her aunt Mrs. Siddons, “And are you very happy, young lady?” I cheerfully answered, “Oh yes”—and she looked as if she were going to cry. My aunt said afterwards that any marriage reminded her of her own unfortunate venture. Aunt Fanny was much amused when I confided to her that finding immediate slumber difficult the first night of my engagement I secured it by attempting the longest sum which I could find in Colenso’s arithmetic. My brothers and sisters accepted the news with mixed feelings—but poor little Cordelia, who had been left at Stoneleigh, was quite upset. I wrote her a letter in which I said that Lord Jersey should be her brother and she should be bridesmaid. The nurse told me that she burst into tears on receiving it and said that he should not be her brother, and not take away Markie. She quite relented when she saw him, because she said that he had nice smooth light hair like Rowly—and as time went on, she suggested that if Aggy would only “marry or die” she should be “head girl and hear the boys their lessons.” As the youngest “boy” was seven years older than herself this may be regarded as an exceptional claim for woman’s supremacy in her family.

My future mother-in-law, Jersey’s mother, and his brothers welcomed me most kindly. As for his sisters, Lady Julia Wombwell and Lady Caroline Jenkins, I cannot say enough of their unvarying friendship and affection.

MARRIED TO LORD JERSEY

I was engaged about the middle of July, and shortly we returned to Stoneleigh. My mother was terribly busy afterwards, as my brother Gilbert came of age on the first of September and the occasion was celebrated with great festivities, including a Tenants’ Ball, when the old gateway was illuminated as it had been for the Queen’s visit. The ivy, however, had grown so rapidly in the intervening years that an iron framework had to be made outside it to hold the little lamps. There was a very large family party in the house, and naturally my affairs increased the general excitement and I shared with my brother addresses and presentations. As my mother said—it could never happen to her again to have a son come of age and a daughter married in the same month. She was to have launched the Lady Leigh lifeboat in the middle of September, but my sister was commissioned to do it instead—and we returned to Portman Square for final preparations. Like most girls under similar circumstances I lived in a whirl during those days, and my only clear recollections are signing Settlements (in happy ignorance of their contents) and weeping bitterly the night before the wedding at the idea of parting from my family, being particularly upset by my brother Dudley’s floods of fraternal tears. However, we were all fairly composed when the day—September 19th, 1872, dawned—and I was safely married by my Uncle Jimmy at St. Thomas’s Church, Orchard Street. It was not our parish, but we had a special licence as it was more convenient. My bridesmaids were my two sisters, Frances Adderley, one of the Cholmondeleys, Minna Finch (daughter of my father’s cousin Lady Aylesford), and Julia Wombwell’s eldest little girl Julia—afterwards Lady Dartrey.

When all was over and farewells and congratulations ended, Jersey and I went down for a short honeymoon at Fonthill, which my grandmother lent us. So ended a happy girlhood—so began a happy married life. I do not say that either was free from shadows, but looking back my prevailing feeling is thankfulness—and what troubles I have had have been mostly of my own making.

My father was so good—my mother so wise. One piece of advice she gave me might well be given to most young wives. “Do not think that because you have seen things done in a particular way that is the only right one.” I cannot resist ending with a few sentences from a charming letter which Aunt Fanny wrote me when I went to Stoneleigh after my engagement:

“I have thought of you unceasingly and prayed earnestly for you. I could not love you as I do, did I not believe that you were true and good and noble—and on that, more than on anything else, do I rest my faith for your future. Oh, Marky my darling child, cling to the good that is in you. Never be false to yourself. I see your little boat starting out on the sea of life, anxiously and tremblingly—for I know full well however smooth the water may be now there must come rocks in everyone’s life large enough to wreck one. Do you call to mind, dear, how you almost wished for such rocks to battle against a little time ago, wearying of the tame, even stream down which you were floating? God be with you when you do meet them.”

CHAPTER IV

EARLY MARRIED LIFE

It is more difficult to write at all consecutively of my married life than of my girlhood, as I have less by which I can date its episodes and more years to traverse—but I must record what I can in such order as can be contrived.

We did not stay long at Fonthill, and after a night or two in London came straight to our Oxfordshire home—Middleton Park.

My husband’s grandfather and father had both died in the same month (October 1859) when he was a boy of fourteen. He was called “Grandison” for the three weeks which intervened between their deaths, having been George Villiers before, so when he returned again to Eton after his father died, the boys said that he came back each time with a fresh name. His grandmother, however, the well-known Sarah, Lady Jersey, continued to reign at Middleton, for the largest share of the family fortune belonged to her as heiress of her grandfather Mr. Child—and, I suppose, in recognition of all he had enjoyed of hers, her husband left her the use of the Welsh property and she alone had the means to keep up Middleton. She was very fond of my husband, but when she died, soon after he came of age and inherited the place, he did not care to make many changes, and though his mother paid lengthened visits she had never really been mistress of the house. Therefore I seemed to have come straight upon the traces of a bygone generation. Even the china boxes on my dressing-table and the blotters on the writing-tables were much as Lady Jersey had left them—and there were bits of needlework and letters in the drawers which brought her personally vividly before me. The fear and awe of her seemed to overhang the village, and the children were still supposed to go to the Infant School at two years old because she had thought it a suitable age. She had been great at education, had built or arranged schools in the various villages belonging to her, and had endowed a small training school for servants in connection with a Girls’ School at Middleton. Naturally the care of that school and other similar matters fell to my province, and I sometimes felt, as I am sure other young women must have done under similar circumstances, that a good deal of wisdom was expected from me at an age which I should have considered hardly sufficient for a second housemaid. Some of the schools of that date must have been quaint enough. An old lame woman still had charge of the Infant School at the neighbouring hamlet of Caulcot, whom we soon moved into the Almshouses. In after years one of her former pupils told me that she was very good at teaching them Scripture and a little reading, but there was no question of writing. If the old lady had occasion to write a letter on her own account she used a knitting-needle as a pen while my informant held the paper steady. If a child was naughty she made him or her stand crouched under the table as a punishment. She never put on a dress unless she knew that Lady Jersey was at the Park, and then, she being crippled with rheumatism, her pupil had to stand on a chair to fasten it up, lest the great lady should pay a surprise visit.

LORD JERSEY’S MOTHER

Sarah, Lady Jersey, had a great dislike to any cutting down or even lopping of trees. She had done much towards enlarging and planting the Park, and doubtless trees were to her precious children. Therefore the agent and woodmen, who realised the necessity of a certain amount of judicious thinning, used to wait until she had taken periodical drives of inspection amongst the woods, and then exercised some discretion in their operations, trusting to trees having branched out afresh or to her having forgotten their exact condition before she came again.

In one school, Somerton, I was amused to find a printed copy of regulations for the conduct of the children, including injunctions never to forget their benefactress. But she was really exceedingly good to the poor people on the property and thoughtful as to their individual requirements. One old woman near her other place, Upton, told me how she had heard of her death soon after receiving a present from her, and added, “I thought she went straight to heaven for sending me that petticoat!” Also she built good cottages for the villagers before the practice was as universal as it became later on. The only drawback was that she would at times insist on the building being carried on irrespective of the weather, with the result that they were not always as dry as they should have been.

Lady Jersey was well known in the world, admired for her beauty and lively conversation, and no doubt often flattered for her wealth, but she left a good record of charity and duties fulfilled in her own home.

As for her beautiful daughter Lady Clementina, she was locally regarded as an angel, and I have heard that when she died the villagers resented her having been buried next to her grandmother, Frances Lady Jersey, as they thought her much too good to lie next to the lady who had won the fleeting affections of George IV.

I soon found home and occupation at Middleton, but I confess that after being accustomed to a large and cheerful family I found the days and particularly the autumn evenings rather lonely when my husband was out hunting, a sport to which he was much addicted in those days. However, we had several visitors of his family and mine, and went to Stoneleigh for Christmas, which was a great delight to me.

Soon after we went abroad, as it was thought desirable after my chest attack of the previous winter that I should not spend all the cold weather in England. We spent some time at Cannes, and I fancy that it really did my husband at least as much good as myself—anyhow he found that it suited him so well that we returned on various occasions.

Sir Robert Gerard was then a great promoter of parties to the Ile Ste Marguerite and elsewhere, and the Duc de Vallombrosa and the Duchesse de Luynes helped to make things lively.

IN LONDON

I will not, however, dwell on scenes well known to so many people, and only say that after a short excursion to Genoa and Turin we returned in the early spring, or at the end of winter, to superintend a good deal of work which was then being done to renovate some of the rooms at Middleton. At the beginning of May we moved to 7 Norfolk Crescent—a house which we had taken from Mr. Charles Fane of Child’s Bank—and my eldest son was born there on June 2nd, 1873. He had come into the world unduly soon—before he was expected—and inconveniently selected Whit Monday when the shops were shut and we were unable to supply certain deficiencies in the preparations. Nevertheless he was extremely welcome, and though very small on his arrival he soon made up for whatever he lacked in size, and, as everyone who knows him will testify, he is certainly of stature sufficient to please the most exacting.

THE LIBRARY, MIDDLETON PARK.

MIDDLETON PARK.
From photographs by the present Countess of Jersey.

My mother-in-law and her second husband, Mr. Brandling, were among our frequent visitors. Mr. Brandling had a long beard and a loud voice, and a way of flinging open the doors into the dining-room when he came in in the morning which was distinctly startling. Apart from these peculiarities he did not leave much mark in the world. He was very fond of reading, and I used to suggest to him that he might occupy himself in reviewing books, but I do not think that he had much power of concentration. My mother-in-law was tactful with him, but he had a decided temper, especially when he played whist. As I did not play, this did not affect me.

My younger sister-in-law, Caroline, and I were great friends. She had married Mr. Jenkins, who was well known as a sportsman and an amiable, genial man. His chief claim to fame, apart from his knowledge of horses and their training, was an expedition which he had made to avenge his sister’s death in Abyssinia. His sister had married a Mr. Powell and she and her husband had been murdered by natives when travelling in that country. Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Powell’s brother went to Egypt, collected followers, went into the territory where the murder had taken place, burned the village which sheltered the aggressors, and had the chief culprits handed over to them for execution. It was said that the fact that a couple of Englishmen would not leave their relatives’ death unavenged produced more effect than the whole Abyssinian expedition.

ISOLA BELLA, CANNES

The winter after my boy’s birth Caroline lost hers, who was a few months older than mine, and was herself very ill, so we invited her and Mr. Jenkins to join us at Cannes, where we had this season taken a villa—Isola Bella. We were the first people who inhabited it. It has since been greatly enlarged and its gardens so extended that it is now one of the finest houses in the place. Even then it was very pretty and attractive, and we enjoyed ourselves greatly.

There was a quaint clergyman at that time who had known Caroline when she had been sent as a girl to Hyères, where he then ministered, and where he had been famous for a head of hair almost too bushy to admit of being covered by a hat. He was anxious to re-claim acquaintance, but though civil she was not effusive. He was noted for paying long visits when he got into anyone’s house. I heard of one occasion on which his name was announced to a young lady who was talking to a man cousin whom she knew well. The youth on hearing the name exclaimed that he must hide, and crept under the sofa. The visitor stayed on and on till the young man could stand his cramped position no longer and suddenly appeared. The parson was quite unmoved and unmovable by the apparition of what he took to be a lover, and merely remarked “Don’t mind me!”

We found this house so charming that we sent our courier back to England to bring out our boy. My aunt, Lady Agnes, and her husband, Dr. Frank, with their baby girl, lived not far off—they had found Isola Bella for us and were pleasant neighbours. My husband, Caroline, and myself found additional occupation in Italian lessons from a fiery little patriot whose name I forget, but who had fought in the war against the Austrians. Among other things he had a lurid story about his mother whose secrets in the Confessional had been betrayed by a priest, resulting in the arrest and I believe death of a relative. After which though the lady continued her prayers she—not unnaturally—declined to make further confessions.

Our sojourn on this visit to Cannes was further brightened by Conservative triumphs in the 1874 elections. We used to sit after breakfast on a stone terrace in front of the villa, Mr. Jenkins smoking and Jersey doing crochet as a pastime—being no smoker; and morning after morning the postman would appear with English papers bringing further tidings of success.

The Jenkinses returned to England rather before ourselves—we travelled back towards the end of April in singularly hot weather, and when we reached Dover Jersey left me there for a few days to rest while he went back to Middleton. Unfortunately the journey, or something, had been too much for me, and a little girl, who only lived for a day, appeared before her time at the Lord Warden Hotel. It was a great disappointment, and I had a somewhat tedious month at the hotel before migrating to 12 Gloucester Square—the house which we had taken for the season.

I have no special recollections of that season, though I think that it was that year that I met Lord Beaconsfield at the Duke of Buccleuch’s. It is, however, impossible to fix exactly the years in which one dined in particular places and met particular people, nor is it at all important.

OXFORDSHIRE NEIGHBOURS

I would rather summarise our life in the country, where we had garden parties, cricket matches, and lawn tennis matches at which we were able to entertain our neighbours. Now, alas! the whole generation who lived near Middleton in those days has almost passed away. Our nearest neighbours were Sir Henry and Lady Dashwood at Kirtlington Park with a family of sons and daughters; Lord Valentia, who lived with his mother, Mrs. Devereux, and her husband the General at Bletchington; and the Drakes—old Mrs. Drake and her daughters at Bignell. Sir Henry’s family had long lived at Kirtlington, which is a fine house, originally built by the same architect—Smith, of Warwick—who built the new portion of Stoneleigh early in the eighteenth century. Sir Henry was a stalwart, pleasant man, and a convinced teetotaller. Later on than the year of which I speak the Dashwoods came over to see some theatricals at Middleton in which my brothers and sisters and some Cholmondeley cousins took part. After the performance they gave a pressing invitation to the performers to go over on a following day to luncheon or tea. A detachment went accordingly, and were treated with great hospitality but rather like strolling players. “Where do you act next?” and so on, till finally Sir Henry burst out: “What an amusing family yours is! Not only all of you act, but your uncle Mr. James Leigh gives temperance lectures!” Sir Henry’s son, Sir George Dashwood, had a large family of which three gallant boys lost their lives in the Great War. To universal regret he was obliged to sell Kirtlington. It was bought by Lord Leven, whose brother and heir has in turn sold it to Mr. Budgett. Not long before I married, the then owner of another neighbouring place—Sir Algernon Peyton, M.F.H., of Swift’s House, had died. Lord Valentia took the Bicester hounds which he had hunted, for a time, rented Swift’s from his widow, and ultimately did the wisest thing by marrying her (1878) and installing her at Bletchington. They are really the only remaining family of my contemporaries surviving—and, though they have occasionally let it, they do live now in their own house. They had two sons and six daughters—great friends of my children. The eldest son was killed in the Great War.

Another neighbour was a droll old man called Rochfort Clarke, who lived at a house outside Chesterton village with an old sister-in-law whose name I forget (I think Miss Byrom)—but his wife being dead he was deeply attached to her sister. Soon after our marriage he came to call, and afterwards wrote a letter to congratulate us on our happiness and to say that had it not been for the iniquitous law forbidding marriage with a deceased wife’s sister we should have seen a picture of equal domestic felicity in him and Miss ——. He was very anxious to convert Irish Roman Catholics to the ultra-Protestant faith, and he interpreted the Second Commandment to forbid all pictures of any sort or kind. None were allowed in his house. Once he wrote a letter to the papers to protest against the ritualism embodied in a picture in Chesterton Church—an extremely evangelical place where Moody and Sankey hymns prevailed. Later on the clergyman took me into the church to show me the offending idol. It consisted of a diminutive figure—as far as I could see of a man—in a very small window high up over the west door. The most appalling shock was inflicted upon him by a visit to the Exhibition of 1851, where various statuary was displayed including Gibson’s “Tinted Venus.” This impelled him to break into a song of protest of which I imperfectly recollect four lines to this effect:

“Tell me, Victoria, can that borrowed grace
Compare with Albert’s manly form and face?
And tell me, Albert, can that shameless jest
Compare with thy Victoria clothed and dressed?”

The sister-in-law died not long after I knew him, and he then married a respectable maid-servant whom he brought to see us dressed in brown silk and white gloves. Shortly afterwards he himself departed this life and the property was bought by the popular Bicester banker Mr. Tubb, who married Miss Stratton—a second cousin of mine—built a good house, from which pictures were not barred, and had four nice daughters.

I cannot name all the neighbours, but should not omit the old Warden of Merton, Mr. Marsham, who lived with his wife and sons at Caversfield. The eldest son, Charles Marsham, who succeeded to the place after his death, was a great character well known in the hunting and cricket fields. He was a good fellow with a hot temper which sometimes caused trying scenes. Towards the end of his life he developed a passion for guessing Vanity Fair acrostics, and when he saw you instead of “How d’ye do?” he greeted you with “Can you remember what begins with D and ends with F?” or words to that effect. There was a famous occasion when, as he with several others from Middleton were driving to Meet, one of my young brothers suggested some solution at which he absolutely scoffed. When the hounds threw off, however, Charlie Marsham disappeared and missed a first-class run. It was ultimately discovered that he had slipped away to a telegraph office to send off a solution embodying my brother’s suggestion!

CAVERSFIELD CHURCH

Caversfield Church was a small building of considerable antiquity standing very close to the Squire’s house. The present Lord North, now an old man, has told me that long ago when he was Master of Hounds he passed close to this church out cub-hunting at a very early hour, when the sound of most beautiful singing came from the tower, heard not only by himself but by the huntsmen and whips who were with him—so beautiful that they paused to listen. Next time he met the clergyman, who was another Marsham son, he said to him, “What an early service you had in your church on such a day!” “I had no weekday service,” replied Mr. Marsham, and professed entire ignorance of the “angelic choir.” I have never discovered any tradition connected with Caversfield Church which should have induced angels to come and sing their morning anthem therein, but it is a pretty tale, and Lord North was convinced that he had heard this music.

One thing is certain, the tiny agricultural parish of Caversfield could not have produced songsters to chant Matins while the world at large was yet wrapped in slumber.

Thinking of Caversfield Church, I recollect attending a service there when the Bishop of Oxford (Mackarness, I believe) preached at its reopening after restoration. In the course of his sermon he remarked that there had been times when a congregation instead of thinking of the preservation and beautifying of the sacred building only considered how they should make themselves comfortable therein. This, as reported by the local representative, appeared in the Bicester paper as an episcopal comment that in former days people had neglected to make themselves comfortable in church. However, my old Archdeacon uncle-by-marriage, Lord Saye and Sele, who was a distinctly unconventional thinker, once remarked to my mother that he had always heard church compared to heaven, and as heaven was certainly the most comfortable place possible he did not see why church should not be made comfortable. The old family pew at Middleton Church had been reseated with benches to look more or less like the rest of the church before I married, but was still a little raised and separated by partitions from the rest of the congregation. Later on it was levelled and the partitions removed. From the point of view of “comfort,” and apart from all other considerations, I do think that the square “Squire’s Pew”—as it still exists at Stoneleigh—where the occupants sit facing each other—is not an ideal arrangement.

At Broughton Castle—the old Saye and Sele home—one of the bedrooms had a little window from which you could look down into the chapel belonging to the house without the effort of descending. Once when we stayed there and my mother was not dressed in time for Morning Prayers she adopted this method of sharing in the family devotions.

Broughton Castle, and Lord North’s place, Wroxton Abbey (now for sale) are both near Banbury, which is about thirteen miles from Middleton—nothing in the days of motors, but a more serious consideration when visits had to be made with horses.

LIFE AT MIDDLETON

Mr. Cecil Bourke was clergyman at Middleton when I married and had two very nice sisters, but he migrated to Reading about two years later, and was succeeded by the Rev. W. H. Draper, who has been there ever since. He is an excellent man who has had a good wife and eleven children. Mrs. Draper died lately, to the sorrow of her many friends. Some of the children have also gone, but others are doing good work in various parts of the Empire. Old Lord Strathnairn, of Mutiny fame, was once staying with us at Middleton. He was extremely deaf and apt to be two or three periods behind in the conversation. Someone mentioned leprosy and its causes at dinner, and after two or three remarks that subject was dropped, and another took its place, in which connection I observed that our clergyman’s wife had eleven children. Lord Strathnairn, with his mind still on “leprousy,” turned to me and in his usual courteous manner remarked, “It is not catching, I believe?”

Among other neighbours were Mr. and Mrs. Hibbert at Bucknell Manor, who had six well-behaved little daughters whom, though they treated them kindly, they regarded as quite secondary to their only son. On the other hand, Mr. and Mrs. Dewar at Cotmore were perfectly good to their four sons, but the only daughter distinctly ruled the roost. Moral: if a boy baby has any choice he had better select a family of sisters in which to be born, and the contrary advice should be tendered to a female infant.

To return to our own affairs. The little girl whom we lost in April 1874 was replaced, to our great pleasure, by another little daughter born at Middleton, October 8th, 1875, and christened Margaret like the baby who lay beneath a white marble cross in the churchyard. The new little Margaret became and has remained a constant treasure. Villiers’ first words were “Hammer, hammer,” which he picked up from hearing the constant hammering at the tank in the new water-tower. He was very pleased with his sister, but a trifle jealous of the attentions paid her by his nurse. A rather quaint incident took place at the baby’s christening. When Villiers was born, old Lord Bathurst, then aged eighty-two, asked to come and see him as he had known my husband’s great-grandmother Frances, Lady Jersey (the admired of George IV), and wanted to see the fifth generation. We asked him to stay at Middleton for the little girl’s christening, and after dinner to propose the baby’s health.

He asked her name, and when I told him “Margaret” he murmured, “What memories that brings back!” and fell into a reverie. When he rose for the toast he confided to the family that her great-grandmother on my side—Margarette, Lady Leigh—had been his first love and repeated, “Maggie Willes, Maggie Willes, how I remember her walking down the streets of Cirencester!” He was a wonderful man for falling in love—even when he was quite old he was always fascinated by the youngest available girl—but he died unmarried. Perhaps one love drove out the other before either had time to secure a firm footing in his heart.

Lord Bathurst told me that when he was a middle-aged man and friend of the family Sarah Lady Jersey was very anxious to secure Prince Nicholas Esterhazy for her eldest daughter Sarah (a marriage which came off in due course). She had asked him to stay at Middleton, and it was generally believed that if he accepted the match would be arranged. Lord Bathurst in November 1841 was riding into Oxford when he met Lady Jersey driving thence to Middleton. She put her head out of the carriage and called to him, “We have got our Prince!” At that time the Queen was expecting her second child, and Lord Bathurst, more occupied with Her Majesty’s hopes than with those of Lady Jersey, at once assumed that this meant a Prince of Wales, and rode rapidly on to announce the joyful tidings. These were almost immediately verified, and he gained credit for very early intelligence. He was a gallant old man, and despite his years climbed a fence when staying at Middleton. He died between two and three years later.

On a visit to the Exeters at Burghley, near Stamford, we had met Mr. and Mrs. Finch of Burley-on-the-Hill, near Oakham, and they asked us to stay with them soon after little Margaret’s birth. I mention this because it was here that I met Lady Galloway, who became my great friend, and with whom later on I shared many delightful experiences. She was a handsome and fascinating woman a few months younger than myself.

MR. DISRAELI

It was in this year, May 18th, 1875, that Disraeli wrote to Jersey offering him the appointment of Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen—saying, “I think, also, my selection would be pleasing to Her Majesty, as many members of your family have been connected with the Court.” On May 28th he notified the Queen’s approval. (It is rather quaint that the first letter begins “My dear Jersey”—the second “My dear Villiers.” My husband was never called “Villiers,” but Disraeli knew his grandfather and father, who were both so called.) Jersey used to answer for Local Government in the House of Lords. The Queen was always very kind to him, as she had known his grandmother so well, and told me once that Lady Clementina had been her playfellow. She was his godmother; she records it if I remember rightly in the Life of the Prince Consort, or anyhow in a letter or Diary of the period, and says there that she became godmother as a token of friendship to Sir Robert Peel—his mother’s father. She declared to us that she had held him in her arms at his christening, and of course it was not for us to contradict Her Majesty: but I think that she officiated by proxy. She gave him two or three of her books in which she wrote his name as “Victor Alexander,” and again we accepted the nomenclature. As a matter of fact he was “Victor Albert George” and always called “George” in the family. He had, however, the greatest respect and affection for his royal godmother, and valued her beautiful christening cup. As Lord-in-Waiting he had to attend the House of Lords when in session, and spoke occasionally—he always sat near his old friend Lord de Ros, who was a permanent Lord-in-Waiting.

I used to go fairly often to the House during the years which followed his appointment and before we went to Australia, and heard many interesting debates. Jersey and I always considered the late Duke of Argyll and the late Lord Cranbrook as two of the finest orators in the House. The Duke was really splendid, and with his fine head and hair thrown back he looked the true Highland Chieftain. Several much less effective speakers would sometimes persist in addressing the House. I remember Lord Houghton exciting much laughter on one occasion when he said of some point in his speech “and that reminds me,” he paused and repeated “and that reminds me,” but the impromptu would not spring forth till he shook his head and pulled a slip of paper, on which it was carefully written, out of his waistcoat pocket.

I was told, though I was not present, of a house-party of which the Duke of Argyll and Lord Houghton both formed part. One evening—Sunday evening, I believe—Lord Houghton offered to read to the assembled company Froude’s account of the “Pilgrimage of Grace” in his History of England. Most of them seem to have submitted more or less cheerfully, but the Duke, becoming bored, retired into the background with a book which he had taken from the table. Just when Lord Houghton had reached the most thrilling part and had lowered his voice to give due emphasis to the narrative, the Duke, who had completely forgotten what was going on, threw down his book and exclaimed, “What an extraordinary character of Nebuchadnezzar!” Whereupon Lord Houghton in turn threw down Froude and in wrathful accents cried, “One must be a Duke and a Cabinet Minister to be guilty of such rudeness!”

Froude was rather a friend of ours—a pleasant though slightly cynical man. I recollect him at Lady Derby’s one evening saying that books were objectionable; all books ought to be burnt. I ventured to suggest that he had written various books which I had read with pleasure—why did he write them if such was his opinion? He shrugged his shoulders and remarked, “Il faut vivre.” When Lady Derby told this afterwards to Lord Derby he said that I ought to have given the classic reply, “Je n’en vois pas la necessité,” but perhaps this would have been going a little far.

FROUDE AND KINGSLEY

Froude and Kingsley were brothers-in-law, having married two Misses Grenfell. On one occasion the former was giving a Rectorial Address at St. Andrews and remarked on the untrustworthiness of clerical statements. About the same time Kingsley gave a discourse at Cambridge in which he quoted a paradox of Walpole’s to the effect that whatever else is true, history is not. Some epigrammists thereupon perpetrated the following lines. I quote from memory:

“Froude informs the Scottish youth
Parsons seldom speak the truth;
While at Cambridge Kingsley cries
‘History is a pack of lies!’
Whence these judgments so malign?
A little thought will solve the mystery.
For Froude thinks Kingsley a divine
And Kingsley goes to Froude for history.”

The Galloways when we first made their acquaintance lived at 17 Upper Grosvenor Street. In 1875 we occupied 17a Great Cumberland Street—and in 1876 a nice house belonging to Mr. Bassett in Charles Street—but in 1877 we bought 3 Great Stanhope Street, being rather tired of taking houses for the season. My second (surviving) daughter Mary was born here on May 26th—a beautiful baby, god-daughter to Lady Galloway and Julia Wombwell. My third and youngest daughter, Beatrice, was born at Folkestone October 12th, 1880, and the family was completed three years later by Arthur, born November 24th, 1883, to our great joy, as it endowed us with a second son just before his elder brother went to Mr. Chignell’s school—Castlemount—at Dover.

In the same month, but just before Arthur was born, our tenant at Osterley, the old Duchess of Cleveland (Caroline), died. She was a fine old lady and an excellent tenant, caring for the house as if it had been her own. She had most generous instincts, and once when part of the stonework round the roof of Osterley had been destroyed by a storm she wrote to my husband saying that she had placed a considerable sum with his bankers to aid in its restoration. This was unexpected and certainly unsolicited, which made it all the more acceptable. We should never have thought of disturbing her during her lifetime, and even when she died our first idea was to relet the place to a suitable tenant. I had never lived there (though we once slept for a night during the Duchess’s tenure), so had no associations with, and had never realised, the beauty of, the place. However, after her death we thought we would give one garden-party before reletting, which we did in 1884. The day was perfect, and an unexpected number of guests arrived. We were fascinated with the place and decided to keep it as a “suburban” home instead of letting, and it became the joy of my life and a great pleasure to my husband.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

I will speak of some of our guests later on, but I must first mention some of those whom we knew at Great Stanhope Street and Middleton during the earlier years of our married life. One of our great friends was the American Minister Mr. Lowell. Looking through some of his letters, I recall his perfect charm of manner in speaking and in writing. The simplest occurrence, such as changing the date of a dinner-party in 1882, gave him the opportunity of words which might have befitted a courtier of old days:

“Her Majesty—long life to her—has gone and appointed Saturday, June 3rd, to be born on. After sixty-three years to learn wisdom in, she can do nothing better than take my Saturday away from me—for I must go to drink her health at the Foreign Office! ’Tis enough to make a democrat of any Tory that ever was except you. I have moved on my poor little dinner to 5th. I can make no other combination in the near future, what with Her Majesty’s engagements and mine, but that. Can you come then? Or is my table to lose its pearl? If you can’t, I shall make another specially for you.”

Before I knew Mr. Lowell personally I was introduced to his works by Mr. Tom Hughes (“Tom Brown” of the “Schooldays”) who stayed with us at Middleton at the beginning of 1880 and gave me a copy of Lowell’s poems carefully marked with those he preferred. Four years later in August Lowell stayed with us there. It was a real hot summer, and he wrote into Hughes’ gift these verses which certainly make the volume doubly precious:

“Turbid from London’s noise and smoke,
Here found I air and quiet too,
Air filtered through the beech and oak,
Quiet that nothing harsher broke
Than stockdoves’ meditative coo.
“So I turn Tory for the nonce
And find the Radical a bore
Who cannot see (thick-witted dunce!)
That what was good for people once
Must be as good for evermore.
“Sun, sink no deeper down the sky,
Nature, ne’er leave this summer mood,
Breeze, loiter thus for ever by,
Stir the dead leaf or let it lie,
Since I am happy, all is good!”

T. HUGHES AND J. R. LOWELL

This poem was afterwards republished under the title “The Optimist” in a collection called Heartsease and Rue. Lowell added four additional stanzas between the first and the last two, elaborating the description and the underlying idea. I think, however, that the three original ones are the best, particularly the gentle hit at the “Tory”—with whom he loved to identify me. The “stockdoves” were the woodpigeons whose cooing on our lawn soothed and delighted him. Mr. Hughes told me that he had first made Mr. Lowell’s acquaintance by correspondence, having written to him to express his admiration of one of his works. I have just discovered that in an Introduction to his Collected Works published 1891 Hughes says that Trübner asked him in 1859 to write a preface to the English edition of the Biglow Papers which gave him the long-desired opportunity of writing to the author. He also told me—which he also describes in the Introduction—how nervous he was when about at last to meet his unknown friend lest he should not come up to the ideal which he had formed, and how overjoyed he was to find him even more delightful than his letters. In a fit of generosity Hughes, quite unasked, gave me a very interesting letter which Lowell wrote him on his appointment to England in 1880. It is a long letter, some of it dealing with private matters, but one passage may be transcribed:

“I have been rather amused with some of the comments of your press that have been sent me. They almost seem to think I shall come in a hostile spirit, because I have commented sharply on the pretension and incompetence of one or two British bookmakers! It is also more than hinted that I said bitter things about England during our war. Well, I hope none of my commentators will ever have as good reason to be bitter. It is only Englishmen who have the happy privilege of speaking frankly about their neighbours, and only they who are never satisfied unless an outsider likes England better than his own country. Thank God I have spoken my mind at home too, when it would have been far more comfortable to hold my tongue. Had I felt less kindly toward England, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so bitter, if bitter I was.”

Mr. Hughes records, again in the Introduction, that Lowell said in one of his letters during the American War, “We are all as cross as terriers with your kind of neutrality”—but he rejoices in the gradual increasing warmth of his feeling for England as he grew to know her better during the last years of his life.

While I knew him he was always most friendly, and it is pleasant to recall him sitting in the garden at Osterley on peaceful summer evenings enjoying specially that blue haze peculiar to the Valley of the Thames which softens without obscuring the gentle English landscape.

One more letter, including a copy of verses, I cannot resist copying. In July 1887 he endowed me with Omar Khayyám, and some months later I received this—dated “At sea, 2nd November 1887”:

“Some verses have been beating their wings against the walls of my brain ever since I gave you the Omar Khayyám. I don’t think they will improve their feathers by doing it longer. So I have caught and caged them on the next leaf that you may if you like paste them into the book. With kindest regards to Lord Jersey and in the pleasant hope of seeing you again in the spring,
Faithfully yours,
J. R. Lowell.”

“With a copy of Omar Khayyám.

“These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon:
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.
“Fit rosary for a queen in shape and hue
When Contemplation tells her pensive beads
Of mortal thoughts for ever old and new:
Fit for a queen? Why, surely then, for you!
“The moral? When Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl
Faith’s slender shallop ’neath our reeling feet,
Plunge! If you find not peace beneath the whirl,
Groping, you may at least bring back a pearl.”

He adds beneath the lines: “My pen has danced to the dancing of the ship.”

The verses (of course not the covering letter) appeared in Heartsease and Rue.

Mr. Lowell stayed with us at Osterley in the two summers following his return. He died in America just before we went to Australia.

We knew Robert Browning pretty well, and I recollect one interesting conversation which I had with him on death and immortality. Of the former he had the rather curious idea that the soul’s last sojourn in the body was just between the eyebrows. He said that he had seen several people die, and that the last movement was there. I cannot think that a quiver of the forehead proves it. For immortality, he said that he had embodied his feelings in the “Old Pictures in Florence” in the lines ending “I have had troubles enough for one.” No one, however, can read his poems without realising his faith in the hereafter.

MR. GLADSTONE ON IMMORTALITY

How diverse are the views of great men on this mystery! Lady Galloway wrote to me once from Knowsley of a talk she had had with Mr. Gladstone which I think worth recording in her own words:

“The theory of Mr. Gladstone’s that mostly interested me last night was—that every soul was not of necessity immortal—that all the Christian faith of the immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body was a new doctrine introduced and revealed by our Lord in whom alone, maybe, we receive immortal life. This he only suggests, you understand—does not lay it down—but I don’t think I have quite grasped his idea of the mystery of death, which as far as I can understand he thinks Man would not have been subject to but for the Fall—not that Death did not exist before the Fall—but that it would have been a different kind of thing. In fact that the connection between Sin and Death meant that you lost immortality thro’ Sin and gained it thro’ Christ.”

I might as well insert here part of a letter from Edwin Arnold, author of The Light of Asia, which he wrote me in January 1885 after reading an article which I had perpetrated in The National Review on Buddhism. I had not known him previously, but he did me the honour to profess interest in my crude efforts and to regret what he considered a misconception of Gautama’s fundamental idea. He continues:

“I remember more than one passage which seemed to show that you considered Nirvana to be annihilation; and the aim and summum bonum of the Buddhist to escape existence finally and utterly. Permit me to invite you not to adopt this view too decidedly in spite of the vast authority of men like Max Müller, Rhys David, and others. My own studies (which I am far from ranking with theirs, in regard of industry and learning) convince me that it was, in every case, the embodied life; life as we know it and endure it, which Gautama desired to be for ever done with.... I believe that when St. Paul writes ‘the things not seen are eternal,’ he had attained much such a height of insight and foresight as Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. I even fancy that when Professor Tyndall lectures on the light-rays which are invisible to our eyes, and the cosmical sounds which are inaudible to ears of flesh and blood, he approaches by a physical path the confines of that infinite and enduring life of which Orientals dreamed metaphysically.”

After this Mr. Arnold—afterwards Sir Edwin—became numbered among our friends, and was very kind in giving us introductions when we went to India, as I will record later.

THOUGHT-READING

Meantime I may mention a quaint bit of palmistry or thought-reading connected with him. We had a friend, Augusta Webb of Newstead, now Mrs. Fraser, who was an expert in this line. She was calling on me one day when I mentioned casually that I had met Mr. Arnold, whose Light of Asia she greatly admired. She expressed a great wish to meet him, so I said, “He is coming to dine this evening—you had better come also.” She accepted with enthusiasm. He sat next to me, and to please her I put her on his other side. In the course of dinner something was said about favourite flowers, and I exclaimed, “Augusta, tell Mr. Arnold his favourite flower.” She looked at his hand and said without hesitation, “I don’t know its name, but I think it is a white flower rather like a rose and with a very strong scent.” He remarked, astonished, “I wish I had written it down beforehand to show how right you are. It is an Indian flower.” (I forget the name, which he said he had mentioned in The Light of Asia), “white and strong-smelling and something like a tuberose.” It is impossible that Augusta could have known beforehand. Her sister told me later that she did occasionally perceive a person’s thought and that this was one of the instances.

To return to Thomas Hughes, who originally gave me Lowell’s poems. He was an enthusiast and most conscientious. On the occasion when, as I said before, he stayed at Middleton he promised to tell my boy Villiers—then six and a half years old—a story. Having been prevented from doing so, he sent the story by post, carefully written out with this charming letter:

“February 1st, 1880.

“My dear little Man,

“I was quite sorry this morning when you said to me, as we were going away, ‘Ah, but you have never told me about the King of the Cats, as you promised.’ I was always taught when I was a little fellow, smaller than you, that I must never ‘run word,’ even if it cost me my knife with three blades and a tweezer, or my ivory dog-whistle, which were the two most precious things I had in the world. And my father and mother not only told me that I must never ‘run word,’ for they knew that boys are apt to forget what they are only told, but they never ‘ran word’ with me, which was a much surer way to fix what they told me in my head; because boys find it hard to forget what they see the old folk that they love do day by day.

“So I have tried all my long life never to ‘run word,’ and as I said I would tell you the story about Rodilardus the King of the Cats, and as I can’t tell it you by word of mouth because you are down there in the bright sunshine at Middleton, and I am up here in foggy old London, I must tell it you in this way, though I am not sure that you will be able to make it all out. I know you can read, for I heard you read the psalm at prayers this morning very well; only as Mama was reading out of the same book over your shoulder, perhaps you heard what she said, and that helped you a little to keep up with all the rest of us. But a boy may be able to read his psalms in his prayer book and yet not able to read a long piece of writing like this, though I am making it as clear as I can. So if you cannot make it all out you must just take it off to Mama and get her to look over your shoulder and tell you what it is all about. Well then, you know what I told you was, that I used to think that some people could get to understand what cats said to one another, and to wish very much that I could make out their talk myself. But all this time I have never been able to make out a word of it, and do not now think that anybody can. Only I am quite sure that any boy or man who is fond of cats, and tries to make out what they mean, and what they want, will learn a great many things that will help to make him kind and wise. And when you asked me why I used to think that I could learn cat-talk I said I would tell you that story about the King of the Cats which was told to me when I was a very little fellow about your age. And so here it is.”

The story itself is a variant, very picturesquely and graphically told, of an old folk-tale, which I think appears in Grimm, of a cat who, overhearing an account given by a human being of the imposing funeral of one of his race, exclaims, “Then I am King of the Cats!” and disappears up the chimney.

TOM HUGHES AND RUGBY, TENNESSEE

Tom Hughes, at the time of his visit to Middleton, was very keen about the town which he proposed to found on some kind of Christian-socialist principles, to be called “New Rugby,” in Tennessee. It was to have one church, to be used by the various denominations, and to be what is now called “Pussyfoot.” What happened about the church I know not, but I have heard as regards the teetotalism that drinks were buried by traders just outside the sacred boundaries and dug up secretly by the townsmen. Anyhow, I fear that the well-meant project resulted in a heavy loss to poor Hughes. I recollect that Lord Galloway’s servant suggested that he would like to accompany Mr. Hughes to the States—“and I would valet you, sir.” Hughes repudiated all idea of valeting, but was willing to accept the man as a comrade. All he got by his democratic offer was that the man told the other servants that Mr. Hughes did not understand real English aristocracy. Which reminds me of a pleasing definition given by the Matron of our Village Training School for Servants of the much-discussed word “gentleman.” She told me one day that her sister had asked for one of our girls as servant. As we generally sent them to rather superior situations, I hesitated, though I did not like to refuse straight off, and asked, “What is your brother-in-law?” “He is a gentleman,” was the answer. Observing that I looked somewhat surprised, the Matron hastened to add, “You see, my sister keeps a temperance hotel, and in such a case the husband does not work, only cleans the windows and boots and so on.” Whereby I gather that not to work for regular wages is the hall-mark of a gentleman! But a girl was not provided for the place.

I believe that Henry James was first introduced to us by Mr. Lowell, and became a frequent visitor afterwards. He was an intimate friend of my uncle the Dean of Hereford and of his mother-in-law Mrs. Kemble.

Under the name of Summersoft he gives a delightful description of Osterley in his novel The Lesson of the Master. “It all went together and spoke in one voice—a rich English voice of the early part of the eighteenth century.” The Gallery he calls “a cheerful upholstered avenue into the other century.”

CARDINAL NEWMAN

One dinner at Norfolk House lingers specially in my memory; it was in the summer of 1880 and was to meet Dr. Newman not long after he had been promoted to the dignity of Cardinal—an honour which many people considered overdue. A large party was assembled and stood in a circle ready to receive the new “Prince of the Church,” who was conducted into the room by the Duke. As soon as he entered a somewhat ancient lady, Mrs. W— H—, who was a convert to “the Faith,” went forward and grovelled before him on her knees, kissing his hand with much effusion, and I fancy embarrassing His Eminence considerably. My aunt, the Duchess of Westminster, who was very handsome but by no means slim, was standing next to me and whispered, “Margaret, shall we have to do that? because I should never be able to get up again!” However, none of the Roman Catholics present seemed to consider such extreme genuflections necessary. I think they made some reasonable kind of curtsy as he was taken round, and then we went in to dinner. Somewhat to my surprise and certainly to my pleasure, I found myself seated next to the Cardinal and found him very attractive. I asked him whether the “Gerontius” of the poem was a real person, and he smiled and said “No,” but I think he was pleased that I had read it. I never met him again, but in October 1882 I was greatly surprised to receive a book with this charming letter written from Birmingham:

“Madam,

“I have but one reason for venturing, as I do, to ask your Ladyship’s acceptance of a volume upon the Russian Church which I am publishing, the work of a dear friend now no more. That reason is the desire I feel of expressing in some way my sense of your kindness to me two years ago, when I had the honour of meeting you at Norfolk House, and the little probability there is, at my age, of my having any other opportunity of doing so.

“I trust you will accept this explanation, and am

“Your Ladyship’s faithful servant,
“John H. Cardinal Newman.”

The book was Notes of a Visit to the Russian Church by Lord Selborne’s brother, Mr. W. Palmer, edited and with a Preface by Cardinal Newman. I have never been able to understand what he considered my kindness, as I thought the Great Man so kind to me, a young female heretic.

CHAPTER V

BERLIN AND THE JUBILEE OF 1887