* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *

This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please contact a https://www.fadedpage.com administrator before proceeding. Thousands more FREE eBooks are available at https://www.fadedpage.com.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Cindy Beyer & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

THE AGE

OF SCANDAL

 

An Excursion through a Minor Period

 

 

T. H. WHITE

 

 

 

 

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

COPYRIGHT, 1950, BY T. H. WHITE

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

‘Clio is one of the most glorious of the Muses; but, as everyone knows, she (like her sister Melpomene) suffers from a sad defect: she is apt to be pompous. With her buskins, her robes, and her airs of importance she is at times, indeed, almost intolerable. But fortunately the Fates have provided a corrective. They have decreed that in her stately advances she should be accompanied by certain apish, impish creatures, who run round her tittering, pulling long noses, threatening to trip the good lady up, and even sometimes whisking to one side the corner of her drapery, and revealing her undergarments in a most indecorous manner. They are the diarists and letter-writers, the gossips and journalists of the past, the Pepyses and Horace Walpoles and Saint-Simons, whose function it is to reveal to us the littleness underlying great events and to remind us that history itself was once real life.’

Lytton Strachey

THE AGE OF SCANDAL

The Age of Scandal

W ell, we have lived to see the end of civilization in England. I was once a gentleman myself. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, the Master of a college was a fabulous being, who lived in a Lodge of breath-taking beauty and incalculable antiquity, tended by housemaids, footmen and a butler. There he consumed vintage port, wrote abstruse treatises if the spirit moved him, and lived the life of an impressive, cultivated gentleman. Such posts were among the few and noble rewards rightly offered to scholarship by the civilization which then existed.

When I last stayed in Cambridge, I lunched with two Masters of colleges. Both of them had to help with the washing-up after luncheon.

There was a comic story current shortly after the Hitler war—one tried to think that it was comic. It said that there was some conference or other at Lambeth, thronged with Archbishops, Cardinals, Patriarchs, Moderators and so forth. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York were seen to be in earnest consultation in one corner of the room. Were they discussing a reunion with Rome or a revision of the Prayer Book? Thrilled with the ecclesiastical possibilities of such a meeting, one of the stripling curates managed to edge himself within earshot of these Princes of the Church. They were discussing whether it was worse to wash-up or to dry-up.

The Earl of Shrewsbury—the 21st and premier earl of Great Britain—whose ancestors have served the crown, and thus the nation, in one way or another, for about 800 years, has become a ‘barrow-boy’. He sells fruit in the open air at a stall by the roadside.

A deceased female labour Minister has given an interview to an American journalist, after driving the Earl Marshal of England out of his own home. The family pictures have been sold, she said with glee, and I can assure you that the Duke of Norfolk will never again be able to live in this house. ‘We had our revolution during the war. We did not cut off their heads, we only cut off their incomes.’ Yet the family of the Duke of Norfolk had served the crown on the battlefield, in the cabinet, and in the precursor of Miss Bondfield’s ‘Civil Service’, for many and many generations.

They were generations of statesmen and proconsuls, who gave their sons in war more lavishly than any other class. Yet we have lived to see a labour Minister of War stating that he does not give a tinker’s curse for people of that sort, and the Minister of Health describes them indiscriminately as ‘vermin’.

It is useless to whine. It has happened. It is the logical result of our half-baked Victorian humanitarianism. All men are not equal. That ridiculous idea of English democracy was invented in the reign of Queen Victoria, and it has now become bureaucracy.

So, now that it is no longer possible to be a gentleman, now that there is no longer enough time or money to be cultured, now that civilization has vanished along with the Word which gentlemen once kept. Now that glorious palaces like Knowle, Stowe, Wentworth Woodhouse, Bodiam, Montacute, Stourhead, Polesdon Lacey, Blenheim and the rest of them, are, or are likely to be, ‘nationalized’ for the wonderful proletariat, while the owners who gave their ancestors to make them lovely crouch in a couple of rooms in one wing, I have been looking back along the corridors of history, taking stock of that venture which once brought England to the leadership of the world. I believe that the peak of British culture was reached in the latter years of George III: that the rot began to set in with the ‘Romantics’: that the apparent prosperity of Victoria’s reign was autumnal, not vernal: and that now we are done for.

I have been consoling my old age by running away from the Bondfields and the Shinwells and the Bevans, by going back to the grand old days of Horace Walpole, and I have written this book in the effort to give one last, loving and living picture of an aristocratic civilization which we shall never see again.

*    *    *

The old rhinoceros was right, for the Rev. William Mason was a prig to the backbone; though he was a harmless one. But he did invent—or he did adapt from Middleton’s Cicero—a new kind of biography which led to the greatest Life in the English language.

Before Mason, a biographer had been content to write about the subject in his own words. Mason invented the idea of letting the subject speak for himself. In his Life of Gray, he strung together a selection of the poet’s letters—and sometimes even forged them—supplying the necessary links in a running commentary. Horace Walpole was delighted with it.

Later, when Dr. Johnson published a Life of the same poet, Horry was furious.

There was another contemporary who agreed with Walpole that this new kind of Life was a ‘perfect model of biography’, and who thought that, by adding conversations to the letters which he reported verbatim, the idea might be improved.

*    *    *

In this little scrap-book of a nostalgic Tory, I have tried to extend Mason’s kind of biography to an Age, attempting rather to string together a series of quotations from the people themselves, than to speak ‘in my own person’—‘by which’, as Boswell added with self-sacrifice and some regret, ‘I might have appeared to have more merit in the execution of the work’.

In short, I have here tried to picture the nature and history of a minor period in its own words rather than in mine.

*    *    *

People are inclined to write as if the Age of Reason continued until the Romantic Revival, or as if the Augustan period were an unbroken whole. But the eighteenth century was split by a remarkable line of cleavage.

In the first half of the century, the authors became rulers: in the second, the rulers became authors.

If we look at the authors and the rulers before 1750, the difference is striking. On the one hand stand the omnipotent Popes and Swifts, courted or bribed or feared by servile lords, whom they bullied with a will; on the other hand lie the wincing upper classes, who had to buy their peace of mind by preferments or by actual money payment, prostrate before the bitter ink. The wicked old Duchess of Marlborough in the first half had to pay Pope £1000, now worth perhaps ten times that sum, to suppress a satire on herself. He took the money, but did not suppress the satire. Swift bullied the cabinet itself till they did not know whether they were on their heads or their heels. He made the Princess of Wales invite him nine times before he would call at her house.

That was in the true Age of Reason, when Goldsmith could complain that he had been slighted by a mere lord. ‘I met him’, he said indignantly, ‘at Lord Clare’s in the country, and he took no more notice of me than if I had been an ordinary man.’ ‘A nobleman’, agreed the Johnson of that period, ‘ought to have made up to such a man as Goldsmith, and I think it is much against Lord Camden that he neglected him.’ It was thought ‘foolish’ of Pope to give his friendship to ordinary peers, although he always kindly assured them that he did not value them as such.

The writers, in fact, were then full and complex characters. We may still puzzle about the relationship between Stella and her gloomy Dean, still argue about his persecution mania, his crooked personality and the diseases from which he suffered. Pope, with his bent body, stays, deceitful stratagems and delusions of grandeur, is a person whom we would recognize if we met him now—where we should find some difficulty in distinguishing between Lords Marlborough and Chesterfield, except by the eyebrows of the latter.

In short, during the real Age of Reason, it was the Grub Street authors who were articulate, powerful and able to stamp themselves on posterity as people. It was to them that the fluttering cabinet ministers had to act as toad-eaters, and it was the literary standard of culture, dictated from below, which dominated a largely illiterate peerage.

The last fifty years of the century were directly the reverse of this. It was then the fourth Earl of Orford (Horace Walpole) who terrified the leaders of Grub Street and who drove young poets to suicide: it was the kings and the lords who were remembered, not the scribbling commons. George II, suffering from piles, lecturing the royal family, or standing with his sword advanced like a fencing master, after his horse had run away with him at Dettingen: George III with his ‘What, what?’: the fat and rather touching Florizel (George IV): the garrulous Clarence (William IV): these were real people seen in the round. It was the upper classes who now held the stage with their articulacy, the Walpoles, Herveys, Selwyns, Hollands, Boswells or even Brummells. Literature had passed to the aristocracy, and the poets were disregarded people like the clergyman Mason, or like Blake, who was unknown, or like the rusticated Cowper with his pet hares. Toward the end of the new period, Moore was boasting that Sir Walter Scott had called him ‘a truly gentleman poet’, while the plebeian Wordsworth was ‘too much of the poet’. Professional writers, by some strange fatality, had even begun to have ridiculous names, like Crabbe, Hogg, etc. By then the miserable bard was a lank, bony figure, with short black hair, who writhed and showed his teeth in a grin of earnestness while his verses were being criticized, exclaiming: ‘Is that poetry, Sir? Is it Pindar?’

By 1780, Johnson himself, when flattered by Lord Newhaven, was bowing ‘his head almost as low as the table, to a complimenting nobleman’.

Naturally the division between the two ages was not a hard and fast one. Life was inclined to proceed by stages, and there were exceptions to everything. There were many bridges between the two halves. Dr. Johnson was such a bridge; he was the last of the great Moguls of Grub Street, who lived into the patrician period. In the same way, Horace Walpole was a bridge. He was perhaps the first of the great Moguls of aristocracy, born within the Age of Reason. They lay parallel. The last writer and the first lord bound the banks together—as did Chesterfield, Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu—but it remains true, none the less, that the century began with power to the writers, and ended with power to the lords. It was literary power.

The atmosphere of the second epoch was different from the Age of Reason’s: so different that the period seems to require a label of its own. One might suggest, the Age of Scandal.

Between the Classical and the Romantic movements, as they are recognized at present, there existed this other age, which was one of peculiar flavour. It filled the hiatus between Pope and Wordsworth with a distinct and unique culture, none the less real because it is seldom recognized now. It could be roughly dated between the death of Pope and the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, except that such dates are confusing. Periods do not exist between fixed years. They have forerunners in the previous age and laggards in the subsequent one. Although the Age of Scandal was at its height in the seventeen-eighties, under its greatest product, Horace Walpole, yet, between forerunner and laggard, it may be said to have stretched from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Croker or to Creevey.

The people of the late eighteenth century and of the Regency were different from the Augustans. They were not cold and formal like a heroic couplet but, on the contrary, eccentric, individual, sentimental, dramatic, tearful, even doggy. For that matter, they were a good deal more ‘romantic’, in the exact sense of that term, than the unsmiling crocodile of Rydal. Their heiresses frequently ran away with the footmen.

Few people seem to realize how charming and peculiar the Age of Scandal was. We have to dismiss so much from our minds before we can crawl inside theirs: before we can picture the powdered gentlemen in silks and laces, with their jewellery and the swords which they were ready to draw, with their sedan chairs and lap-dogs and immense bets and deep potations. One of the commonest words about male clothes, in the letters of the reprobate Duke of Queensberry, was ‘pretty’. One of his presents to the Prince Regent was a muff. Among the commonest reactions from readers and playgoers was that of tears. They adored their dogs and sent them tender messages in their letters. They were emotional about their friends, catty about their enemies, unusual in their hobbies and singular in themselves. They were perhaps the first people in English literature to be real enough for gossip.

Gossip must be about character. It is useless to gossip about an unknown character, impossible to tell a good story about a person without foibles; for it is the foible which gives the story point. These people had characters, were among the first people in England who were sufficiently peculiar, in a modern way, to be apprehended by us as personalities. They did extraordinary things: puffed and blew like Dr. Johnson, or went to executions like the sinister Selwyn, or constructed the astonishing tower of Fonthill like Beckford, or said that they were about to give birth to the Messiah like Joanna Southcott—or to a litter of rabbits like Mary Tofts. They fought duels in balloons like M. le Pique in 1808—the first human being ever to be shot down in aerial combat—or directed their farm labourers with a megaphone and a telescope like Sydney Smith in his ‘rheumatic armour’. Sometimes they could never be sure whether they were men or women, like the Chevalier d’Eon, and sometimes they dislocated London’s milk supply, as was the case with the fourth Duke of Queensberry—who was supposed to take his early bath in this liquid before it was retailed—with the consequence that for many years nobody in London felt secure about the morning tea.

The Age of Scandal was the reverse of being a pompous one. Gossip is not pompous. It was inevitably an age of intimacy and of nicknames. Creevey was a product of it, and, as Lytton Strachey has pointed out:

It was because these people were aristocrats. The gossips lived in a small society which scarcely touched the middle classes of Wesley, nor the peasantry, nor the Mob. Literature had for the first time since Elizabeth become the medium instead of the plaything of the gentry. They moved in the tight world of the Drawing-rooms and of the Birthdays, knew each other as well as the boys at a public school in England might know each other today, chatted about the latest scandal, and, because they had learned to be literate, they wrote it down. So they remain in literature, even in the days of Attlee, mainly in the literature of letters and memoirs, as individual and as well preserved as they were in life. They were as real as Pepys. There is nothing so false as to suppose that they were a tired remainder from the era of Pope, waiting for the revival of Wordsworth. They were far from being classically cold. Indeed, to the reader of the Newgate Calendar or of Walpole’s news-of-the-day or of the Gentleman’s Magazine, it sometimes seems that there can have been no period so Elizabethan in its drama and tragedy and eccentricity as the end of the so-called Age of Reason.

Agrémens

H orace Walpole, says Cunningham, had ‘seen in the flesh two heroines of De Grammont and the Restoration, La Belle Jennings, and Arabella Churchill, and lived long enough to offer his coronet to two ladies (Mary and Agnes Berry) who lived far into the reign of Queen Victoria’.

So extensive a panorama, stretching from the diamond-hilted sword and ruffle to a group of top-hats standing round a railway train, cannot easily be treated as a whole, unless it is realized that the gap between swords and trains was really a narrow one. In an age whose men had carried muffs and whose women had worn head-dresses so high that they had to sit on low stools in their coaches, swords only began to go out of fashion in 1780, when umbrellas came in. (Umbrellas, indeed, were carried by officers during the battles of the Peninsular war, though Wellington was inclined to disapprove. ‘The Guards may in uniform, when on duty at St. James’s, carry them if they please; but in the field it is not only ridiculous but unmilitary.’) Gentlemen wore wigs or powder till about 1800—Lord Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary, cut off his pigtail in 1828 and sent it round to his colleagues in an official box—while Creevey was inspecting a puffing billy, in a top-hat, in 1829. There was a collision between cultures at the turn of the century, a rapid acceleration, so that at Horace Walpole’s death the old world of the Stuarts and of the Tudors suddenly, rather than gradually, gave way to the new world of the Industrial Revolution. In less than a generation, the male population shed their finery and cosmetics for the eclipse plumage of modern times. The change happened under the guidance of Beau Brummell, though Fox, according to Wraxall, had ‘first thrown a sort of discredit on dress’—and this great alteration, which Walpole had seen to begin, took place within the Age of Scandal. The date was about 1793.

His is consequently a difficult time to imagine; for half its writers were dressed in velvet and brocade—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Hervey and Walpole himself—while the other half, born well within Walpole’s lifetime—Creevey, Greville or Croker—were in morning coats and pantaloons. Its lengthy ascendancy stretched from the last efforts of the Stuarts to regain the throne, through the Spanish and Austrian wars, the campaigns of India and Canada, the Seven Years war, the loss of America, the French Revolution and the struggle with Napoleon, to the days of the Reform Bill.

Perhaps three quotations about transport may serve to stitch the period together.

In 1773, Dr. Johnson, whose idea of bliss was ‘driving briskly in a post-chaise’, gave Boswell a piece of information about the possible speeds of earlier days.

As late as 1784, de la Rochefoucauld was explaining, with reference to English race-horses, that ‘when you are close to them you can hardly follow them with the eye—they travel more swiftly than a flash of lightning. The jockeys are obliged to keep their heads low in order to breathe. Their passage through the air is so swift that otherwise they would be choked’.

In 1829, Creevey had a lark of a very high order.

Whether something damnable came of it or not, whether human happiness has advanced since those days or retrograded, it is true to say that the central king of Walpole’s five, George III, had been ruling over an England which was at one of the peaks of her greatness.

It was an England, however, in which some of the refinements were still at a primitive level. In Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s time, gentlemen had not been expected to shave daily. Washing had been performed in a hand-basin. Chamber-pots had been kept in the dining-room sideboard, for the use of those who sat after the ladies had retired. Instead of the water-closet, which was re-introduced at the end of the century, there was the chaise percée: sometimes in a separate room, as was the case when George II died upon the stool; sometimes only behind a curtain, as it was when Lord Hervey had a contretemps in 1742.

The fixed bath, except at spas, was almost unknown—Dr. Johnson observed of baths, ‘I hate immersion’—and Byron was still quite proud of building a bathroom at Newstead in the nineteenth century. Until the days of Jenner, most people were disfigured by smallpox, and the lack of reliable artificial teeth, though this convenience did exist, produced the Punch-and-Judy profile in old age.

In difficult circumstances, however, the aristocracy did its best. Tooth powder was used, and the choice of scents included Spirit of Ambergris, Otto of Roses, Aqua Mellis and Cordova Water. If a footman touched the sugar for the lemonade with his fingers, even the slovenly Dr. Johnson would throw the glass out of the window. They shifted their clothes frequently, and these were well washed at home. Johnson decided that when he kept a seraglio ‘the ladies should all wear linen gowns—or cotton . . . I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean . . . Linen detects its own dirtiness’. In later days Brummell insisted on ‘country washing’. Their soaps were Joppa, Genoa, Irish, Bristol, Windsor, Black and Liquid. They kept up a diligent campaign against fleas, pared their finger-nails with penknives, used scent with powder and paid attention to their hair. The heads were shaved for the wig or the natural hair worn in a queue, the powder being sometimes tinted when en grande toilette.

The British Army, in the third George’s reign, used 6500 tons of flour for powdering every year.

England was then in advance of the continent. The jeer at the eighteenth century, that its grandeur was in close proximity to a cess-pit, was only true of the court of Versailles. On the continent the diamond necklace and the vaso di notte might be side by side, but English tourists complained of this, or reported it as abnormal.

Wraxall was astonished to find that the King of Naples would ‘select his favoured individuals’ to attend him on the chaise percée, observing: ‘Sono ben pransato. Adesso bisogna un buona panchiata.’ The tedious and unpleasant Chevalier de Grammont—like Madame de Sevigné, one of Walpole’s unaccountable enthusiasms from the previous century—had condescended to regard the court of Charles II as ‘neither savage nor barbarous’ (ni grossière ni sauvage). But now the boot was on the other foot. Horace Walpole, who would sit in the middle of the room at French inns, so far as possible from the wainscot, behind which he pretended that he could hear the ‘old fleas talking of the days of Louis XIV’, was disgusted with Versailles. ‘The very footmen . . . wait behind their master . . . with a red handkerchief about their necks. Versailles, like everything else, is a mixture of parade and poverty.’ ‘There is one [barbarism], alas! I shall never get over—the dirt of this country: It is melancholy after the purity of Strawberry!’

Dr. Johnson was even more emphatic than this. ‘The French are a gross, ill-bred, untaught people; a lady there will spit on the floor, and rub it with her foot. What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country.’

Insanitary conditions on the continent were still rampant during the Napoleonic wars, and they seem to have preyed upon the minds of the English nobility even more. Sir Thomas Styles, who had fought with fists against Shelley at Eton, got a commission in the 1st Foot Guards; but he complained after leaving Lisbon that the ‘fleas and vermin on the march had nearly driven him mad’. Finally they did do so. ‘Our doctor, Mr. Bacot, a very kind fellow, anticipating brain fever, placed Styles in his camp bed, covered his head with wet towels, and desired his batman to watch over his master, and not to leave him for an instant. However, the servant fell asleep, and during the night poor Styles got out of bed, unlocked his trunk where his razors were kept, and with one of them deliberately cut his throat from ear to ear.’ (Gronow.)

If England was cleaner than France, she was more comfortable—less stiff, that is to say—than middle Europe. There was a social ease which was frequently regretted by foreign ambassadors such as Sir Robert Murray Keith, in Vienna, where the hunting forests of Prince Lichtenstein had clean gravel walks and more than three hundred gamekeepers.

The most common foreign word used by the English letter-writers of the Age of Scandal was probably ‘agrémen’. This was a measure of the English interests. They liked to have their agrémens, both physical and mental. They, if not their neighbours across the Channel, were interested in the comfortable pleasures of civilization, without its pomp. ‘I did not mean to make my house so Gothick’, wrote Walpole, as to exclude conveniences and modern refinements in luxury.’ And it was he, as an epicurean amateur of the humanities, who set the tone for the era.

The ‘humanities’: perhaps this was the key word for the seventeen-eighties. It was astonishing how much the upper classes knew. Fox was an authority on Cassandra of Lycophron, known to scholars as ‘the Obscure’: Walpole could read a blazon or print a fine edition or write about the history of Richard III: the classics had been flogged into everybody, so that the Latin poets were quoted as familiarly as educated people now quote Shakespeare: Greek was spouted in the House of Commons, though with no great success: it was in the royal library that Dr. Johnson met the bibliophile King: the main legacy of the coarse Sir Robert Walpole was a fabulous collection of pictures: all society went nightly to hear Handel or the Opera: the business of the country had actually been transacted between George I and his first Minister in dog latin: an Irish Earl had possessed the temerity to argue with Bentley: Selwyn, who was an ignoramus, wrote his unimpressive letters instinctively in a mixture of English, French and Italian: in Paris, at Madame du Deffand’s and at other salons, the visiting English talked almost as easily in the foreign tongue: and the scandalous Wilkes, who had belonged to a Hell-fire Club and who had set all Britain by the ears in Parliament, retired gracefully to edit Theophrastus.

Even in applied science, as opposed to the humanities, there was an attitude of learned dilettantism which is perhaps not unrefreshing when compared with the ‘ologies’ of our own day. Newton had shed his light upon physics: chemistry was concerned with phlogiston, and most of the other branches of learning were a matter for museums like junk-shops, for gentlemanly if dusty antiquaries and for letters to the Royal Society. The typical biologist was not Linnaeus, not Ray, not Pennant, not even the aristocratic Buffon: it was George Edwards—who dedicated his first volume to the President and Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians, and a subsequent volume, as an afterthought, in enormous letters ‘to god’—followed, in tiny print, with the words ‘from his resign’d, humble servant, Geo. Edwards’.

Everything in Edwards’s ‘natural history’ was interesting rather than precise. From all directions the letters poured in to the learned publications—letters about wild boys found in Germany, about people whose skins had petrified like the Giant’s Causeway, about ladies who gave birth to rabbits, about Siamese twins and thunderbolts and shifting bogs and Irish crowns and fat men and people with pigs’ faces and why negroes were black. The full facts about bird migration were unknown even to the immortal Gilbert White—fortunately unknown, since it gave Dr. Johnson the opportunity for one of his more prodigious belly-floppers. ‘Swallows’, he explained tremendously, ‘certainly sleep all the winter. A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lie in the bed of a river.’

But perhaps it was in medicine that their fancy and genteel experiment soared to the highest. Lady Frances Erskine, being struck with aphasia, tried learning a foreign language, thinking she might remember the new words, but the stratagem did not answer. Turnip water, with a poultice of mashed turnip, was used for chilblains. Another poultice used by Joseph Mydelton consisted of ‘a top crust of a threepenny loaf toasted, then spread with soft soap put between a flannel made hot and applied to the part affected’. Lord Fermanagh, when ill for fifteen days in 1716, drank ‘horse-dung posset daily’. The Chevalier Manfredi, ‘an excellent doctor’, recommended chickens fed on frogs to Lady Caroline Lamb. Bacon, the Royal Academician, ‘eat freely of Ice Cream saying He knew of a Lady cured of a complaint in Her stomach by it’. ‘I drank snail tea for breakfast’, wrote Torrington on June 2nd, 1792, ‘for my chest is very sore.’ When wetted by rain this nobleman used to rub himself with brandy or gin, which liquors he also used to sprinkle on his bedclothes if he suspected them of being damp. At Biggleswade, in 1793, he also ‘drank 3 pints [of port] every day, besides ½ pint of brandy’—and this without impairing his energies as a tourist in the least. ‘This morning’, wrote John Baker in his diary on October 2nd, 1755, ‘a negro child of Capn. Dromgoole’s found drowned in a tub of water, with its head down and heels up, how long they knew not; but brought to life by lighting a pipe of tobacco and sticking the small end in its fundament, and blowing it at the bowl.’

There was a good deal of insanity about, nobody knew why, and some of the cures for this malady were no less Draconic. ‘Fuseli mentioned [to Farington] that a Medical man who attended Bedlam had said that the greatest number of those confined were Women in love, and the next class in respect of number was Hackney and Stage Coachmen, caused it was supposed by the constant shaking exercise to which they are subject which affects the pineal gland.’ Musk was given to the mad King George as a medicine for insanity, but the poor fellow ‘begged that it might be discontinued’. ‘Dr. Jenner’, wrote the artist Farington in 1796, ‘has found that in insane patients He has moderated their violence by keeping them sick with tartar emetic . . . Camphor water is an excellent medicine for nervous complaints.’ The waters of many spas, moreover, performed surprising cures. Those of Buxton particularly seem to have been successful. A Mrs. Jessop, with a fortune of £16,000, ‘was last year here’, wrote Egmont in 1744, ‘to be cured of a frenzy, wherein she succeeded. That good success brought her here again this year. She is now very orderly behaved and has got a lover’.

Among proprietary medicines, ‘Velno’s Vegetable Syrup’ brought £5000 a year to its proprietor, and was compounded of Goose-grass. The very greatest of all such brands was Dr. James’s Powder—‘a well-known specific unhesitatingly recommended by Horace Walpole, which seems to have polished off Oliver Goldsmith in 1774. Its active principle was antimony’. Next to this cure came laudanum and calomel. ‘I’ll tell your honour,’ confided a country doctor to Sir Walter Scott, ‘my twa simples are just laudamy and calamy!’ ‘But, John, do you never happen to kill any of your patients?’ ‘Kill? Ou ay, may be sae. Whiles they die and whiles no;—but it’s the will o’ Providence. Ony how, your honour, it wad be lang before it makes up for Flodden!’

Other medicines, according to C. E. Vulliamy, included Bacon’s Cordial Essence of Russia Rhubarb, Dr. Steer’s famous Opodeldoc, Cordial Cephalic Snuff, Petastile Root, Balsam of Tolu and ‘an aphrodisiac known as the Balsamic Corroborant or Restorer of Nature which had received flattering encomiums from a certain Royal and several Noble Personages’.

Whatever else may be urged against them, the patients of the Age of Scandal were ready to try anything once.

Massage was called ‘Champooing’ and the Hon. E. Hamilton begged Lady Charleville not to be shy about going to a masseur called Mahomet. He was black, sixty years old and, besides, her ladyship might wear a mask.

The new force, electricity, was attempted to be used medicinally, for instance by the diarist Barker; and John Yeoman, a country bumpkin, made trial of it in 1774:

There was a belief that the breath of young women might be helpful in prolonging life. According to Mr. Wadd, one physician actually took lodgings in a girls’ boarding-school for this purpose. ‘I am myself,’ wrote Philip Thicknesse in 1779, ‘turned of sixty, and in general, though I have lived in various climates, and suffered severely both in body and mind, yet having always partaken of the breath of young women, wherever they lay in my way, I feel none of the infirmities, which so often strike the eyes and ears in this great city of sickness [Bath], by men many years younger than myself.’

Other cures were as peculiar, but less successful.

The learned, elegant, but at the same time vigorous attitude to every facet of life had been shadowed forth by the gossips and cranks like Lord Hervey under the earlier Georges: it reached its height with Walpole: and persisted at least during the lifetime of Lord Byron—a lord, incidentally, who sorts rather oddly with the ‘romantics’ to whom he is usually assigned—whose forte was on the contrary in satire, whose letters were among the best of his works, who detested the shoddy raptures of Keats, who said of Horace Walpole, ‘my aristocracy, which is very fierce, makes him a favourite of mine’—and the destruction of whose memoirs, by the pseudo-poet Moore, was one of the major tragedies of anecdotal literature.

*    *    *

Such was the cultural and scientific background to a period which has long proved fascinating to romantic novelists like Baroness Orczy, to film producers and to producers of musical comedy. But it would be amusing to notice the reactions of a film producer, if he could really be moved into the Age of Scandal by a time machine.

For one thing, he would probably find some difficulty in understanding what was said to him. The difference in accent between a duke of the 1950s and a duke of the 1750s would be at least as great as the difference between a Cockney accent and a Devonshire one now. Rhymes which were perfect in those days have become what they call ‘eye-rhymes’ today, so that it is possible to reconstruct from them something of the way in which people once spoke. Everybody knows that ‘tea’ was pronounced ‘tay’. ‘Spoil’ rhymed with ‘mile’.

Surnames as well as place-names received a different inflection. Mrs. Thrale would have called Lord Byron ‘Bǐron’ and Horace Walpole pronounced Stowe to rhyme with ‘plough’.

A producer who ventured into the past, in fact, might have been invited to drink tay on the balcóny with Lord Bǐron, where he would have been obleeged to contémplate the unspiled agrémens of Lonnon.

One of the earliest existing phonograph records is of a speech by Gladstone, who stands half-way between ourselves and the eighteenth century. It sounds already like a music-hall imitation of a comic clergyman. In the Age of Scandal itself, it seems reasonably certain that people spoke even more slowly, even more oratorically, with even more pauses for mental punctuation between the concessive clauses. They certainly read more slowly.

Another surprise for the producer would have lain in the matter of attitude. For a gentleman in Walpole’s period was judged not only by his accent but also by his deportment, as if he were a ballet. It was literally true that a gentleman had to move in a stylized way. George III complained that Lord Liverpool’s ‘motions were never very graceful’. The fat Bubb-Doddington, when created Lord Melcombe, was found ‘before a looking glass in his new robes, practising attitudes and debating with himself upon the most graceful mode of carrying his coronet’. (Unfortunately, on being presented to Queen Charlotte, his breeches ‘in the act of kneeling down, forgot their duty, and broke lose from their moorings in a very indecorous manner’.)

Books like The Dancing Master mentioned by M. Delahaute provided ‘the Rules required for walking, saluting and making bows in all kinds of company’, with a chapter entitled ‘How to take off your Hat and replace it’. Frenilly ‘took a month’s course of instruction from the celebrated Petit, at twelve francs a lesson’, in order to learn how to introduce himself to a ‘circle’. ‘It was by no means an inferior science to know how to enter a drawing-room in which some thirty ladies and gentlemen were sitting in a circle round the fire, with both assurance and grace; to penetrate this circle and to make a slight inclination as you walked round it; to make your way to your hostess, and to retire with dignity and without ruffling your fine clothes, for you were dressed in lace, and your hair was dressed in thirty-six curls, all powdered; you were carrying your hat under your arm, your sword reached to your heels, and you were armed with a huge muff, the smallest being two and a half feet wide!’ They moved, said Gronow, ‘with a studied dignity of posture’. The Marquis of Abercorn, though this was more a matter of etiquette than of posture, was ‘stated to have always gone out shooting in his Blue Ribbon, and to have required his housemaids to wear white kid gloves when they made his bed’.

Food and drink, from the enormous quantity in which they were consumed, would have been another of the surprises for a modern mind, and there would have been a hundred lesser reasons to raise the eyebrows. For instance, the people themselves were smaller than we are. ‘The increase in the height of our countrymen’, wrote Miss Hawkins in 1822, ‘attests the superior good sense with which children are now reared.’ ‘From a study of the dresses that do remain’, writes an authority on clothes, ‘we may form the opinion that men and women were on the whole smaller than they are today, the women slighter in build and the men more stocky.’ A Duchess of Rutland must surely have been very slight, when she could compress her waist into the size of an orange and a half.

For the rest, the eye would be taken by scattered curiosities. Peas were correctly eaten with a knife Forks had only three prongs. There were no dessert spoons. The games of ombre, picquet, basset, whisk, brag and lanterloo at which they gambled were played with cards whose Kings, Queens and Knaves had feet.

In the short time that has elapsed between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, a physiological change has taken place in the human body. It has not only grown bigger, but it also moves itself faster—not merely by mechanical means, but of itself. It changes its positions faster—no ‘studied gestures’—runs faster—as one can see by looking at athletic records—boxes faster—for the endless rounds of an eighteenth century match often had only one blow really delivered—speaks faster, reads faster and even eats faster. The eighteenth century managed to eat so much more than we do because it ate more slowly. It could drink more, by drinking all night. Old Lady Dorothy Nevill, who was born in the reign of George IV, survived to complain in 1910 because ‘everything is served at such lightning speed that it is as much as one can do to swallow the few mouthfuls called dinner before one’s plate has been snatched away. The whole system of these hurried modern meals is uncomfortable and unhealthy’. It would be interesting to find out whether the pulse rate has gone up.

Royal Gossip

T he central feature was that the writers were patrician.

The aristocracy was a compact body, less numerous than the peerage of the present day, and it was accustomed to foregather at fixed times and places. When George III’s reign began, there were only 174 peers (there are nearly a thousand now). There were ‘seasons’ at Bath or at Tunbridge Wells or in London, then small enough for its society to be a single unit, and everybody met at the Drawing-rooms and at the Birthdays of the royal family. Their literature was one of personalities. Great thoughts on large political or on moral issues were absent, leaving only the trivialities of life and the anecdotes about character which are nowadays the bane of serious historians. The nature of the ‘bootikins’ worn by Horace Walpole for his gout, or the problem of what Dr. Johnson used to do with his dried orange-peel, were the core of the age. Horry’s bootikins, it has been suspected, were bed-socks made of oiled silk outside and wool within. The orange-peel question, though elucidated in the 358th letter in Mrs. Piozzi’s collection, still remains a vexing mystery to many people in 1950. It came to a head in 1775.

The prime subject for conversation, however, was the idiosyncrasy of the reigning monarch, rather than of his subjects. The literate aristocrats surrounded him on formal occasions several times a year. Twice a week some part of them lined the walls at the levée, while he walked round the room with the Queen, saying something appropriate to everybody who had come.

*    *    *

Horace Walpole met five kings, though he did not live to see the last two on the throne. His recollection of the first was clear but meagre, for he had been only ten years old at presentation.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu added to this description, about his relations with the Schulemberg—his mistress who was created Duchess of Kendal—that ‘he often went to her apartments to cut paper, which was his chief employment there’, and Walpole capped the character-sketch by noting that he was superstitious. George I had been told that he would die within a year of his imprisoned wife, Sophia Dorothea, and she had died before the journey on which he gave his audience to little Horace Walpole.

The next king of Walpole’s, George II, was ruled by his wife, Queen Caroline. He was a touchy, comic, obstinate, small man, with a mania for being thought to be brave and prepotent. He was charming, because he was straightforward. Whether he was in a temper or not, he spoke from his heart. He did not lie about his mistresses to his wife, whom he adored, and his tantrums or his sulks, the small deceptions about his courage or transparent boasts and pathetic tears when Caroline died, were true to himself. Lord Hervey gave a vivid description of him, in relating an evening à trois, when the King had come back from Hanover in a state of exasperation, suffering from the royal piles and furious at having been forced to leave his latest mistress behind him in that country.

These lectures meant nothing at all—as the Queen knew. When she was on her death-bed, and urged him to marry again, poor George was hardly able to sob out: ‘Non, non, j’aurai des maîtresses.’ When she was dead, he

It was the other Horace Walpole, the letter-writer’s uncle, who had pretended to cry so unconvincingly.

The King owned a handsome leg adorned with the Garter; when irritated he had been known to ‘kick his hat and wig about the room’; he was particularly mean with his money, which was why he had been so cross with the Queen about her tips and about the expense of Merlin’s Cave, and he personally presented Sir Robert Walpole with little more than a bad diamond with a flaw in it. He was thought to reward his mistresses by giving them sweepstake tickets.

Of George III, insatiably inquisitive, talkative, silly, repetitive, obstinate, hard-working, kind and nobly tragic, the best descriptions were in Boswell’s account of his conversation with Dr. Johnson, or in Fanny Burney’s story of her meeting with him at Kew, when mad.

The middle-aged, maidenly and short-sighted Alice, with her White King rummaging for the memorandum that might as well have been a hay-sandwich: one wonders whether Charles Dodgson could have been a reader of Fanny Burney, and whether he suspected that her meeting with the King, for all its running, was not entirely disingenuous? What can have been at the back of her head? Did she want to be his Du Barry? They would have made an excellent pair.

George III ‘got loose again’, as he had hoped, but he was subject to returning and to more frequent attacks. Thirty years later, the poor, good old man of eighty-one, blind and deaf and witless—so that they had to lift his chair as the only signal to the imprisoned brain within—died officially, as he had long been dead in practice. It seems impossible to leave him without giving the last paragraph of Jesse’s ‘Life’:

George IV, the ‘first gentleman in Europe’, who had signed himself ‘Florizel’ when wooing an actress in the part of Perdita—whom he subsequently abandoned—and who grew fat and alcoholic before he went to pieces altogether, was best described by Lord Malmesbury and in the Greville, Creevey and other papers. Considered a poltroon by nearly everybody—and his constantly broken word, his trick of being bled by a physician in order to look pale and interesting when pressing an affair of the heart, and his self-inflicted flesh wound when pretending to commit suicide for the love of Mrs. Fitzherbert, these certainly did not tend to raise his reputation—yet there was something to be said for the impulsive Regent after all. The mad King, his father, however kind to his subjects, had been a bad parent, as all the Hanovers were.

Another of the third George’s sons, the Duke of Sussex, had been flogged for having asthma, and the Princess Sophia told the Hon. Amelia Murray ‘that she had seen her two eldest brothers, when they were boys of thirteen and fourteen, held by their arms to be flogged like dogs, with a long whip!’ George III, who thought it his duty to be present at these castigations, was only trying to be democratic, and to give his children the same sort of education as was enjoyed by his other subjects; but it was a mistaken liberalism in the case of Florizel.

Unwisely brought up, badly in debt, entangled with a morganatic marriage and surrounded by cads, the unfortunate Prince of Wales (George IV) was married to Caroline of Brunswick, whom he had never seen.

Malmesbury recommended a glass of water, for the future King was a little drunk already—but it is fair to point out that his intended bride suffered from what is now called body odour. He retired without another word—leaving Caroline to exclaim, ‘Mon Dieu, est ce que le prince est toujours comme cela?’—and he was quite drunk at the marriage.

‘Damn the west! and damn the east! and damn Wellington,’ he cried in later life, in agony, during a discussion of the Duke’s victories at various points of the compass. ‘The question is, how am I to get rid of this damned Princess of Wales?’

The high-jinks at Brighton, in the famous Pavilion which the Regent had called into being, often rose to comic levels.

Mrs. Creevey, who had a still finer eye for the ridiculous than had her husband, wrote to say that

The fact was that Florizel was a weak charmer with a tender heart, who could not help promising assistance to anybody that seemed to need it; and who consequently had to break his promises. His soft nature, when he was King, made it difficult to secure the signature to warrants of execution. ‘There was a Council last Thursday,’ wrote Greville, ‘and the heaviest Recorder’s report that was ever known, I believe; seven people left for execution. The King cannot bear this; and is always leaning to the side of mercy. Lord Tenterden, however, is for severity, and the Recorder still more so. It not unfrequently happens that a culprit escapes owing to the scruples of the King.’ The Regent had started on the journey of life with the pathetic ambition to be loved for himself alone, only to find that princes could never be loved like that, because the subject’s eye perceived preferment through the prince. It is in this light that we ought to read the descriptions of ‘Punch’ Greville. Their drunken and dishonoured figure was a disappointed man, romantic and disillusioned, an old Narcissus trying to forget the reflection of Silenus in the pool.

The unfeeling dog had felt too much, and was tired of feeling.

By the end of his life, what with hot rooms and cherry brandy, he was too fat and too ashamed of his stomach to go out, was partly blind and was afflicted with delusions. They were the delusions of what he would have liked to have been and done. Greville was not acute enough to see that they were pathetic. The King had convinced himself that he had commanded a division at Waterloo and that he had ridden a winning race at Goodwood, to prove his ‘bottom’.

Most pathetic of all—and a proof of the profound love for his father which had wrecked his life by some unconscious tangle—he had convinced himself that he and George III had been models for child and parent. In point of fact, the insane King had once flown at his throat, and they had hated each other.

When he was finally dead, with the dreadful cry of ‘This is death! Oh God, they have deceived me!’ there were found in his wardrobe all the coats, boots and pantaloons of fifty years. He had remembered them all, and could call for any one of them at any moment. There were five hundred pocket books, containing forgotten sums of money amounting to £10,000, together with countless bundles of women’s love-letters and locks of hair. Greville was indignant about this, as he had been indignant when the King spent all his time altering the uniforms of the Guards and seeing more of his tailor, for that purpose, than he had seen of his Prime Minister. But the prerogative of the crown had already been hamstrung by the growth of parliamentary power, and there was little left for kings to do, unbidden, except to alter uniforms and count their clothes.

William IV lay almost outside the scope of the Age of Scandal, but there were good descriptions of him in Fanny Burney and in Greville. He was an honest tar with a foible for after-dinner speeches. He was at a Birthday, when young, in 1791:

Unfortunately, he failed to dance with Mary.

In 1811, in Greville, William IV was proposing toasts again as King, at a dinner which was remarkable for a tactful comment by the impenetrable Talleyrand.

*    *    *

Such were the monarchs who presided over the period of Horace Walpole. There was something warm and ridiculous about all of them, which would have been lost except for the gossip of the age. Whether it was George I appearing as a raven; or George II having a chair pulled from under him; or George III being greeted with the strains of God Save the King as he entered the sea from the royal bathing-machine at Weymouth; or George IV, when very fat, spraining his ankle while dancing the Highland Fling; or William dancing gaily with an admiral and delivering a course of lectures on adultery to the House of Lords—they had a genius for the unexpected. The fracas with George II’s chair may be worth repeating. Walpole sent the news of it to Sir Horace Mann, in 1742.

At the same time, for all the absurdity, it was notable that Walpole’s sovereigns were inclined to conform to the standard of culture enjoyed by their aristocracy. George I was said to have claimed that he was proud to rule in two countries which could boast of Leibnitz and Newton; George II wrote the finest love-letters Lord Hervey had ever seen; George III was a collector of books and a musician who considered that unmusical people were dumb; and George IV was a linguist, singer, art-patron and dilettante, who, so Wraxall said, was ‘competent to peruse the Greek, as well as the Roman poets and historians, in their own language’. William, however, ‘Silly Billy’, had been cheated of the family culture by his naval education. He, according to Beau Brummell, was ‘only fit to walk about on a quarter-deck and cry “Luff”!’

TASTE IN HIGH LIFE

WESTMINSTER SCHOOL

Bottom

I n the eighteenth century, but particularly under the Regency, a gentleman was expected to have ‘bottom’. It was a word of composite meaning, which implied stability, and also what the twentieth century calls ‘guts’. It meant being able to keep one’s head in emergencies, and, in a financial sense, that one was backed by capital, instead of being an adventurer. Bottom, in fact, was synonymous with courage, coolness and solidity. The metaphor was derived from ships.

We are apt to forget how necessary the stoic and solid qualities must have been, in an age before anaesthetics and modern medicine. Childbirth had no palliatives then, and operations were performed either in full consciousness, or else with the patient inebriated, or else, it has been said, after stunning the sufferer with a mallet. ‘Imagining that the dropsical collection of water which oppressed him might be drawn off by making incisions in his body’, Dr. Johnson took matters into his own hands and ‘with his usual resolute defiance of pain, cut deep when he thought that his surgeon had done it too tenderly’. ‘Every day once at least’, said Lord Hervey in describing Queen Caroline’s fatal operation for a rupture, ‘and sometimes oftener, from the first of her being under the surgeons’ hands, they were forced, or thought themselves so, to make some new incision; and before every operation of this kind which she underwent, she always used to ask the King if he approved what the surgeons proposed to do; and when he said they had told him it was necessary, and that he hoped she would consent to anything they thought so, she always submitted immediately, and suffered them to cut and probe as deep and as long as they thought fit, with the utmost patience, resignation and resolution. She asked Ranby once, whilst he was dressing her wound, if he would not be glad to be officiating in the same manner to his own old cross wife that he hated so much; and if any involuntary groans or complainings broke from her during the operations, she used immediately after to bid the surgeons not mind her, and would make them apologies for interrupting them with her silly complaints, when she knew they were doing all they could to help her.’ ‘Poor Lord Digby’, wrote Horace Walpole in 1756, ‘is likely to escape happily at last, after being cut for the stone, and bearing the preparation and execution with such heroism, that waking with the noise of the surgeons, he asked if that was to be the day? “Yes.”—“How soon will they be ready?”—“Not for some time.”—“Then let me sleep till they are.” He was cut by a new instrument of Hawkins, which reduces an age of torture to but one minute.’ In the preceding century Pepys had kept the day of his operation for the stone as an anniversary of the awful deliverance. At sea, a hundred years later, in the navy which Pepys had made, a part of the drill known as ‘clearing decks for action’ consisted in removing the seamen’s chests to the middle of the aisle between the gun-ports. This was done by the Loblolly Men, who made a platform with the chests, on which the surgeons laid out their saws and chisels. When the action began, and the eighty-pound shot began to thump against the wooden walls, and to splinter them, and to enter, the Loblolly Men seized the casualties and hauled them screaming to the platform, where the surgeons sawed off any shattered limb as quickly as possible, tied up the arteries with silk—which was to be tugged daily, if the patient survived, until it rotted and came away—and dipped the stump in hot tar. Those who were too badly wounded were thrown overboard. Shelley’s romancing friend Trelawny said that his ship, the Superb, was uniformly painted red inside at the period of Trafalgar, so that the blood would not show.

Not only were the physical facts of life formidable, but also the spiritual ones. Any husband had to be prepared to see his wife or children carried off, by smallpox before Dr. Jenner and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had made inoculation fashionable, or by childbirth, or by one of the peculiar diseases which then went by different names. The slaughter of bereavement, which kills the previous life of the survivor, was in wait for them. Five of Crabbe’s seven children died: Gibbon was the sole survivor of seven siblings: four of Sterne’s six brothers died: Gray was the only one who lived, from a family of twelve. Conditions had been even worse in earlier times. Defoe, writing in 1722, mentioned an Essex farmer then living with his five-and-twentieth wife, with a son of 35 who had already had fourteen.

To meet these adversaries, and also to meet the minor ones of gout and sudden death by highwaymen and the gallows which held out its arms for many crimes beside the one of murder—200 offences were punishable by death in eighteenth century criminal law—the faculty of Bottom was cultivated. It was felt that, if their heads were to be bloody, it would be a stay to find that they could keep them still unbowed. Those who could keep them so were admired; those who could not, were trained, so far as possible, to achieve the necessary resilience. Perhaps it was the first two Georges who had set the fashion. It was George II who had stood in front of his troops at Dettingen, after his horse had run away with him, with his sword advanced in the attitude of a fencing master, exclaiming in broken English: ‘Now, boys, now for the honour of England; fire and behave bravely, and the French will soon run.’ It was he who had persecuted Byng and Germaine for cowardice.

The earliest training for the faculty was appropriately concentrated on the physical bottom.

It was related of Dr. Parr that:

Yet Samuel Parr considered himself, and was widely considered, a liberal-minded person. He would never flog a boy twice at the same lesson.

Dr. Johnson declared that the awful Dr. Busby (1606-95), who had been the head master of Westminster School, used to say that his rod was his sieve, and that whosoever could not pass through that was not the boy for him. When he retired and was succeeded, after Knipe or Matier, by Dr. Freind, somebody wrote the epigram:

Johnson himself was an ardent advocate of the birch, and said that he owed his knowledge of Latin to the plentiful flogging of his master, Mr. Hunter. ‘My master whipt me very well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing.’ He told Mr. Langton that while Hunter was flogging his boys unmercifully, he used to say, ‘And this I do to save you from the gallows.’ ‘Children,’ said the Doctor, ‘being not reasonable, can only be governed by fear’, and he proceeded to extenuate the activities of a schoolmaster who was being prosecuted for cruelty by explaining that ‘no scholar has gone from him either blind or lame’. In the previous century, Nathaniel Eaton (d. 1674), the drunken master of Harvard College in America, had awarded his pupils thirty stripes at a time, and had beaten his usher for two hours with a ‘walnut-tree plant big enough to have killed a horse’. Dr. Keate, the head master of Eton (1773-1852), flogged more than eighty boys on one day, and only regretted that he had not flogged more. A flogging was applied to the buttocks with a birch, after the sufferer had placed himself on a block, or been ‘horsed’ on another boy’s back, and, if this operation may have taken three minutes, Dr. Keate must have been in action for four hours. ‘He was’, said Kinglake, ‘little more, if more at all, than five feet in height, and was not very great in girth, but in this space was concentrated the pluck of ten battalions. He had a really noble voice, and this he could moderate with great skill, but he had also the power of quacking like an angry duck.’ Dryden had remembered the birch of one of these worthies ‘to his dying day’—but had sent his two eldest sons to the same school—and it was said that another of them, who was accustomed to flagellate boys every morning according to a list provided, contrived to muddle his lists and whipped the confirmation class before the error was corrected. The poet Southey was expelled from Westminster in 1792, for writing against the beatings in the school magazine, and Lawrence, the great Governor-General of India, who went to school in 1811, said bitterly: ‘I was flogged once every day of my life at school except one, and then I was flogged twice.’

It would be a mistake to waste too much sympathy on the average schoolboy, however. So effective was the encouragement of Bottom that full-sized rebellions broke out in more than one Public School, so serious that they had to be quelled by the military. The rebellion at Harrow, about Parr’s claims to be head master, lasted for three weeks. The boys themselves entered into the spirit of the thing, and readers of Tom Jones or Lamb’s essay on Christ’s Hospital, or of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, or of the various lives of the poet Shelley, will know enough about flogging and roasting and boxing-to-death-behind-the-chapel.

Samuel Rogers said that ‘when Lord Holland was a schoolboy, he was forced, as a fag, to toast bread with his fingers for the breakfast of another boy. Lord H’s mother sent him a toasting fork. His fagger broke it over his head, and still compelled him to prepare the toast in the old way. In consequence of this process his fingers suffered so much that they always retained a withered appearance’. Some of the fags survived, and, according to the inexorable law of nature, the survivors were the fittest.

Another way of learning to meet the undauntable ills of life was by pugilism. The snob Byron was proud to be seen in the company of a great boxer, Gentleman Jackson, his ‘old friend and corporeal pastor and master’ who had taught him the noble art. The respect paid to this fighter was sufficient to astonish Moore. Jackson’s claims to fame were that he could lift 10¼ hundredweight, could sign his name with an eighty-four pound weight tied to his little finger, and that he had been employed as a bodyguard at the coronation of Florizel, with eighteen other prizefighters dressed as pages. He had been the champion heavyweight of England for eight years, and had fought the famous battles with Mendoza, Fewterel and George the Brewer. In short, he was worshipped for his Bottom; as well he might be. He had fallen during his fight with the Brewer in 1789, dislocating his ankle and breaking a bone in his leg, but had offered to finish the contest ‘tied to a chair’. He lived to be seventy-seven.

The Fewterel engagement had been fought in the presence of the Prince of Wales—Florizel—and the world of fashion paid its homage to the quality of guts in the persons of these bruisers, in their stockings and knee-breeches of white, with torso bare like a side of beef and fist ungloved, who battered each other with solemn attention for twenty or thirty rounds, before they finally fell to the earth like the oak on Mount Avernus. In 1816, umpired by the Marquis of Queensberry, Tom Oliver was carried from the ring after the thirty-second round ‘in a state of stupor, and completely deprived of sight’. Painter v. Spring, in 1818, continued to the forty-second round. Bendigo and William Looney, 1837, remained upright for ninety-nine rounds.

Another facet of Bottom was the capacity to bet. ‘Our ancestors were men of their hands,’ said G. O. Trevelyan, ‘who regarded a duel as the natural issue of a quarrel, and a bet as the most authoritative solution of an argument.’ They did not find it convenient ‘to spend twenty minutes in confuting a man who had so little faith in his own view that he would not back it with twenty guineas’. The wager was, according to this historian, a kind of reductio ad absurdum, or a cutting of the Gordian knot in controversy. When one man claimed that the world was round, and the other that it was flat, they might save themselves many hours of useless debate by backing their opinions financially, and by leaving it to the concrete decision. This was not, however, the spiritual basis of hazard and loo. In games of chance, at which, for instance, Charles James Fox lost one hundred and forty thousand of their pounds in three years, the young men of the period sought to harden their courage. It was Spartan to take one’s fortune in one’s hands and to risk it on the turn of pitch and toss. When they lost, they paid like men of honour, and it was then their business to start again at their beginnings, and never to breathe a word about their loss. It was in order to be a Man, in order to be a person of endurance, that they risked the hereditary acres so desperately.

‘The gaming’, wrote Walpole in 1770, ‘is worthy the decline of an Empire. The young men lose five, ten, fifteen thousand pounds in an evening. Lord Stavordale, not one-and-twenty, lost eleven thousand last Tuesday, but recovered it by one great hand at hazard. He swore a great oath—“Now, if I had been playing deep, I might have won millions!” ‘When they had lost, to show that they were undaunted, they went peacefully to sleep with their heads on the table beside the dice-box like Selwyn, or pretended to do so. Fox nonchalantly sat down to read Herodotus. They had a special costume at Almack’s. ‘They began by pulling off their embroidered clothes, and put on frieze great-coats, or turned their coats inside outwards for luck. They put on pieces of leather such as are worn by footmen when they clean the knives, to save their laced ruffles; and, to guard their eyes from the light, and to prevent tumbling their hair, wore high-crowned hats with broad brims, and adorned with flowers and ribbons.’ ‘My Lord Rockingham and my nephew, Lord Orford, have made a match for five hundred pounds between five turkies and five geese to run from Norwich to London. Don’t you believe in the transmigration of souls? And are you not convinced that the race is between Marquis Sardanapalus and Earl Heliogabalus?’

Betting, as opposed to the actual games of chance, became a mania. They betted on every subject, not only to back their opinions in the way mentioned by Trevelyan, but also out of bravado. They betted on the life-expectations of their own fathers. They betted that they could produce somebody fatter than the Duke of Cumberland, a bet which turned out to be difficult of solution owing to the delicacy of asking the Duke how much he weighed. They betted on the sex of the Chevalier d’Eon—in all some £120,000—a series of bets which turned out to be impossible of solution, during his lifetime, owing to the reticence of the Chevalier. Thomas Whaley betted that he would jump from his drawing-room window into the first barouche that passed, and kiss the occupant. Another man betted that a human being could live under water, hired a desperado, sank him in some receptacle, and drowned him. He promptly hired another desperado to try again. When a passer-by fell down opposite Brooks’s, apparently dead, they betted whether he was alive or not, and those who said that he was dead objected to the use of restoratives, as affecting the bet. One man betted that he would drive his tandem full speed so as to strike the wheels of the first seven oncoming vehicles on the Brentford Road—the ‘bet’ having by then become equivalent to the ‘dare’—and he contrived to shave the wheels of all seven before he was overset, having proved his Bottom.

Fox-hunting was another sphere for courage. George III insisted that his children should be courageous on horseback, and believed that poor Florizel was a coward—which he was not, for he turned out to be dauntless about surgical operations.

Originally consisting in the patient pursuit of a fox, on steady horses assisted by contemplative and sagacious dogs, the hunt was accelerated in the eighteenth century until it had become a steeplechase. Squire Osbaldeston, in the next century, prostrate in a ditch with the bone of his leg sticking through the boot, after being jumped on by Sir James Musgrave, observed, ‘I am so unlucky that I think I shall give up hunting’—and did not. Mytton’s insane leaps were the cause of his popularity. Jorrocks was able to assert that the sport offered 25 per cent of the danger of war.

Drink was also taken as a form of endurance. Barrington gives an example of ten men who locked themselves in a room with a hogshead of claret and contrived to finish it, together with unspecified amounts of cherry brandy, in a week.

Two friends of Sir Philip Francis drank ten bottles of champagne and burgundy between them, at a sitting, without thinking it exceptional. ‘I have drunk three bottles of port without being the worse for it,’ said Dr. Johnson. ‘University College has witnessed this.’ John Mytton took from four to six bottles a day, beginning while shaving. Tom Paine’s weekly allowance of rum in 1808 was three quarts. Dr. John Campbell informed Boswell, who disbelieved him; that he had once drank thirteen bottles of port at a sitting. Johnson, who rightly perceived that it depended on the length of the sitting, commented that it could be done ‘if a man drinks very slowly and lets one glass evaporate before he takes another’. He summed up the whole question of Bottom in drinking with the magnificent apostrophe: ‘No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero (smiling) must drink brandy.’

Other forms of personal toughness were connected with the childish ‘dare’. Mytton drove a chaise across country, by night, over hedge and ditch, till it collapsed: he jumped the iron railings of his park: he introduced a live bear at a dinner party: he galloped over a rabbit-warren to see whether his horse would fall, which it did: in the end, to cure the hiccoughs, he set light to his own nightshirt, and burned himself to death. It was to prove that he was not afraid.

Physical stamina was valued. Allardyce, born in 1779, once walked thirty miles grouse-shooting, dined at five, walked sixty miles to his house at Ury in eleven hours, attended to business, walked sixteen miles to Laurence Kirk, danced at a ball, returned to Ury by seven a.m., and spent the next day partridge-shooting, having travelled one hundred and thirty miles and been without sleep for two nights and three days.

The duel was the final test of Bottom. In Ireland it was a necessary diploma.

The strange thing about these people, in their aspect as they aspired to be heroes, was that their pistolling, boxing, flogging, gaming, boozing, daring and enduring were combined with qualities which were so remote from being brutal. Their profuse tears in public, gentleness to blind old women like Madame du Deffand or Mrs. Delaney, politeness in the act of fighting, tenderness for lap-dogs, and real enjoyment of literature, together with a hundred other forms of wit, culture, delicacy and eccentricity, made it ridiculous to think of them as bruisers. Bottom was the quality still possessed by certain celluloid toys of our own century—but they are not modern, for Creevey’s step-daughter had one which she called Fanny Royds, and Creevey said that it looked like Queen Caroline—which, being weighted with lead, spring upright when they have been pushed over. The Oxford English Dictionary, which defines the word in this sense as ‘physical resources, “staying power”, power of endurance; said esp. of pugilists, wrestlers, race-horses, etc.’, is perhaps below its high standard in the examples which it offers. In 1774 Goldsmith wrote that ‘though the Savages held out and, as the phrase is, had better bottoms, yet for a spurt the Englishmen were more nimble and speedy’. Bewick in 1790 referred to ‘what is called in the language of the turf, bottom’. In 1822, Byron was writing ‘[He] died all game and bottom’, and in 1835 the Penny Cyclopedia was explaining that horses had ‘their manes and tails cropped . . . under the supposition that it adds to their strength and bottom’. Patterson wrote of the British troops in 1862: ‘For solidity, bottom and courage that never wavers, they are incomparable.’ It was a defensive quality. Horace Walpole had it, with his own addition of humour. When one of the houses next door had caught fire, he was wakened in the middle of the night by his valet, whose first words were that he was not to be frightened. ‘No, Harry,’ said Horace obediently, ‘I am not: but what is it that I am not to be frightened at?’

JOHN, LORD HERVEY (SPORUS)

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE

HORACE WALPOLE

Men, Women and Herveys

T here was even a small scandal about Horace Walpole himself. It is not mentioned in the Everyman edition of his letters, and Dobson glides over it in a couple of pages, so perhaps it is worth repeating.

He was technically the fourth son of the Prime Minister, in those great days when Ministers controlled places. He was early presented to three fat sinecures which brought him about £2200 a year, a sum which would be much greater in modern money. He had nothing to do during all his life, except to divert himself or to amuse his friends. He never married. He wrote the letters, and also the first thriller in the English language; he revived the national interest in Gothic architecture, built the phantasy of Strawberry Hill, the ‘little Ark with pinnacles’ and kept on cramming it with knick-knacks till he died; he had a printing-press of his own, an excellent one; he thrived on gossip, and on playing at loo or at hazard with a duchess or two; when he died, he was eighty, full of years, gout and honours, for he had succeeded his nephew as the fourth Earl of Orford. The Toynbee edition of sixteen volumes contains 3061 long letters, of which the following is one of the shortest samples, written to a friend in Jersey:

This may be a fair summary of what most people know about Horace Walpole. But the fact which they do not mention in the Everyman edition, is that the great gossip might never have been a son of Sir Robert Walpole’s at all.

Lady Louisa Stuart admitted the scandal to print, in her introduction to the letters of her grandmother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1837); but she claimed that it had been a recognized story among people of the ‘ton’ for many years. Creevey had, indeed, already fastened on it in a letter written in 1833: ‘I never knew before that Horace was not the son of Sir Robert Walpole, but of a Lord Hervey, and that Sir Robert knew it and shewed that he did.’ Creevey had obtained his information from Lord Holland, and the bulk of Walpole’s correspondence was preserved at Holland House, so the suspicion rests on fairly good evidence. To understand it properly, however, we have to know a little about the family of Hervey.

Mankind, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had said, was divided into Men, Women and Herveys. She did not mean to imply that the family were perverts by the third category, though less observant people than herself had sometimes been deluded into that idea, by the effeminate appearance, by the eccentric behaviour and by the cultured occupations of this unusual brood.

We have already met the most famous of them, the Duchess of Marlborough’s ‘Lady Fanny’, Pope’s ‘Sporus’—John, Lord Hervey.

Yes, but Sporus was the father of eight children. The exact story of Lord Hailes about the ass’s milk, which Hervey took because he was a sick man, was that he confined himself to a diet of ‘a small quantity of asses’ milk and a flour biscuit . . . Once a week, he indulged himself with eating an apple; he used emetics daily’. He painted his face with rouge in consequence of this terrible discipline—for the epilepsy from which he believed himself to suffer—‘to soften his ghastly appearance’. Far from tripping it as a lady, he had fought a memorable duel with Pulteney, in which both combatants were wounded.

It was not the only duel in which the clan of Hervey became involved, through the stupidity of their opponents in expecting them to be effeminate. Another instance was George, the eldest son of Sporus, whose imbroglio with the bumpkin Lord Cobham was recorded by Walpole.

Another of these Herveys was the Earl-bishop, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, who went to Dublin dressed ‘entirely in purple, with diamond knee- and shoe-buckles, with white gloves fringed with gold lace and fastened with long gold tassels’, and who went, incidentally, with strong suspicions among those who welcomed him that, although a bishop, he was not a Christian. Yet another Hervey was the friend of Dr. Johnson, Thomas Hervey, who wrote the famous postscript, ‘P.S. I am going to part with my wife’, and about whose brother Henry the old blunderbuss of Fleet Street said: ‘Call a dog Hervey, and I would love him.’ Another eccentric was the nautical Hervey who married the notorious Miss Chudleigh with a ring of the bed-curtain. She was the maid-of-honour who had reached the headlines by going to a masquerade in the gauze dress as Iphigenia the Sacrifice, ‘but so naked’, said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu acidly, ‘that the high priest might easily inspect the entrails of the victim’. This Hervey subsequently abetted her bigamous marriage to the Duke of Kingston, during his own lifetime. A final oddity, John’s grandson, used to wear padded waistcoats to fight duels, kept his father tied to a bear and ended by being hanged. It was of him that an Earl of Lonsdale used to relate the anecdote that ‘there was a man who bet a wager he would insult him; so going very near him in a coffee-house, he said—“I smell an Irishman!” to which the other replied—“You shall never smell another!” and, taking up a knife, cut off his nose’.

The Herveys, then, were at least peculiar. They also wrote poetry and history, liked music, paid attention to architecture, did unusual things, were beyond the comprehension of ordinary bullies like Cobham and had a family likeness in the face.

Horace Walpole had the Hervey face, which was unmistakable. ‘No beings in human shape’, said Lady Louisa Stuart, ‘could resemble each other less than the two passing for father and son.’ ‘In every respect’, said Cunningham, ‘he was unlike a Walpole, and in every respect, figure and formation of mind, very like a Hervey.’ This has a special meaning, when one remembers Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s division of the human race: it means that Horry resembled something singular.

And then there was his own description of the Norfolk Walpoles, to whom he believed himself to belong:

Sir Robert, the official father, was such a person. He was startlingly fat—‘avec ce gros corps,’ said the Queen, ‘ces jambes enflées, et ce vilain ventre’—vulgar in his jokes—he always talked bawdry at table, according to Boswell, so that everybody could join in—a good farmer-like statesman and foxhunter, who opened his gamekeepers’ letters first and who might have made an equal fortune as a cattle-dealer. His motto was: Quieta non movere: Leave well alone—just the motto for a husband whose wife may have been unfaithful.

This brings the scandal to its evidence.

Catherine Shorter, Sir Robert Walpole’s first wife, had five children. Four of them were born in a sequence after the marriage; the fifth, Horace, was born eleven years later, at a time when she was known to be on bad terms with Sir Robert, and known to be on romantic terms with Carr, Lord Hervey, an elder half-brother of Pope’s Sporus. Carr himself died young and unmarried, when Horace was six, so we lack his version of the story.

On reviewing these points, it may seem possible that Horry, as he was called by his familiars (behind his back), was a Hervey rather than a Walpole. He did the Hervey things. He built Strawberry just as the Earl-bishop built Downhill. He enjoyed the arts of literature and history like Sporus, arts which seemed contemptible to the Norfolk sirloins of Sir Robert’s race. He was effeminate. He ran on the tips of his toes, they said, like a peewit. He was devoted to gossip, ‘at the ear of Eve’, like Queen Caroline’s pet. Perhaps the best account of him was by Laetitia Matilda Hawkins:

Pope was a malevolent cripple, not noted for telling the truth. If we winnow the venom from his picture of Sporus, there does seem to remain a family resemblance between that picture and Miss Hawkins’. Sporus, like Horace, was abstemious and sparely built—Horace boasts of his own ‘no-weight’, saying that he cannot hurt himself by falling down stairs. Silk dresses naturally figure on both canvases, but in both cases the artist found them special enough to mention, in an age of such costume. Sporus trips like a lady, Horace like a peewit, or as if the floor were wet. Sporus goes in for politics, tales, spite and rhymes: so did Horace. Sporus has a ‘trifling head’, Horace trifles with the bric-à-brac of Strawberry. Both men are fastidious. Sporus is a fop at the toilet, and Horace has a pot of frankincense to take away the smell of dinner.

In another respect they were similar, for Walpole had the Hervey courage. When the Gordon Riots took place, he went to London at the age of sixty-three, to be in them.

When he was attacked by highwaymen, as he was twice, and once dangerously, he behaved with sang-froid.

Both Walpole and Hervey were people of masculine judgment. It is a mistake to think of the former as a dear old gentleman. On the contrary, both were as sharp as Voltaire, and not much easier to get on with. Hervey was the kind of person who could refuse to claim that his own memoirs were not partial, ‘since whoever is so must always be it, either without knowing or without owning it’. Walpole was the kind of person who said of his own works—the Castle of Otranto, the Mysterious Mother, Anecdotes of Painting, Noble Authors, Historic Doubts, etc.—with penetration, humility and apparent sincerity:

There is a point which may be of interest to the biologist, if the irregular parentage should be assumed. It may be of interest that the hereditary tendencies of separate people should have expressed themselves in an identical way, each without the knowledge of the other. For both Hervey and Walpole wrote memoirs of the court, without showing them to each other, and these memoirs were inseparable in tone and content.

On the one hand, then, there was the Hervey family, polished, abstemious and light of bone like birds. Particularly there was Sporus, the younger brother of Horace’s putative father, Carr—‘whose early death’, as Pope said of the latter, ‘deprived the family of as much wit and honour as he left behind in any part of it’. On the other hand there was the Rowlandson figure of the Prime Minister, so gross that he could hardly stand and who had to be accommodated with a chair when talking to the Queen—then a rare distinction—good natured, able at figures—which Horace never could understand—and described by Lord Chesterfield as ‘inelegant in his manners . . . loose in his morals . . . with a strong, coarse wit, which he was too free of for a man in his station, as it is always inconsistent with dignity’. Between them stood Horace, ‘the most eccentric’, according to the pettish Macaulay, ‘the most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capricious of mortals—his mind a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations—his features covered with mask within mask, which, when the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever from seeing the real man’. It is interesting to compare Macaulay on Walpole with Pope on Hervey.

It can make no difference to the devotees of Horry, which of them the father really was, except if it throws any light on his own character. We must be content to be indebted to the one or to the other. It does throw some light, however, for he always treated the official father, Sir Robert, with the deepest gratitude: either because he was grateful for not being treated as a bastard, or else because he wanted to emphasize that he was not a bastard, or else because he was not.

In this connection, there is a point for the psychiatrist. The unconscious mind of Horace once produced a quotation so stunningly apposite, and qualified it so carefully, that it seems to be worth consideration. He was discussing the pleasures of retirement from parliamentary business, when he wrote in one of his letters:

Such is the evidence about paternity, for what it is worth: but the importance of the doyen of the Age of Scandal lay in his life, not in his birth. It was an enviable life, and he himself had possessed the sense, as well as the opportunity, to make it so.

Horace Walpole used to get up late. He would breakfast with the dogs and squirrel, then dress himself and saunter in the gardens of Strawberry, where he would direct the operations of his builders and plasterers, play with Tonton or Patapan, and arrange whatever printing or gilding he happened to have on hand. At twelve o’clock a ‘light-bodied chariot’ would be at the door, with his coachman and valet, and he would drive to London before dinner, to see if there was any news upon the wing. Returned to Strawberry, he would find his dinner waiting at the unfashionable hour of four o’clock. ‘I am’, he wrote in 1789, ‘so antiquated as still to dine at four, though frequently prevented, as many are so good as to call on me at that hour, because it is too soon for them to go home and dress so early in the morning.’ After dinner, or perhaps before it, he might have put on his ‘dress of ceremony’, which might now be called his evening dress. The difference between the two costumes is illustrated by the most delightful of his vulgar stories.

Once Horry was in the full fig, he would set out for his evening call, some visit to a Birthday or to a Drawing-room, or perhaps to play at hazard in the ‘family’ of one of the dowager princesses. When he had returned from this, or if he had stayed at home for the night, he would sit down to write at ten o’clock, taking several cups of coffee while he worked. There, in the Blue Room or the Library, he would ‘write letters of news to Mann or Montagu, acknowledge cards of invitation from peers or peeresses, give life to the antiquarian notes of Vertue the engraver, paste Fairthornes and Hollars into his volumes of English heads, annotate a favourite author, and retire to rest about two in the morning’.

The villa of Strawberry Hill, which he created, has been subjected to a certain amount of ill-natured fun, and, it might be added, to ill-informed fun, by the pomposity of architects. They say that it was not true Gothic, but bastard and degenerate. Walpole was one of the first people who paid attention to ‘Gothick’ architecture at all; it was not to be expected that he would understand its principles from the start. Nor did he intend the house to be taken seriously. It was a fantasy, half a joke: a fairy story in lath and plaster which he called into being like the décor of a Russian ballet: and he himself was the first to be aware of its insolemnity. When the famous printing-press had given birth to a copy of polite verses for the visiting nobility, he would make ‘a private signal’, and French horns and clarinets would accompany the compliment from the lawn. French visitors complained that it was not ‘digne de la solidité anglaise’. He was always threatening to wrap it up, it was so small, and to enclose it in the letter he was writing. ‘It was built’, he said, ‘to please my own taste and in some degree to realize my own visions.’ In the end he wrote pathetically of his ‘poor little Strawberry’, since so prophetically: ‘My buildings are paper, like my writings, and both will be blown away in ten years after I am dead.’

‘We know every room in Strawberry Hill,’ said Cunningham in 1858, after all the ornaments had been auctioned and when nothing remained except the descriptions in the letters or the catalogue, ‘and every miniature and full-length portrait in the Tribune and Gallery. We are admitted to the Holbein chamber and the Beauclerk closet, and as we wander in print over the stripped rooms and now newly furnished walls, we can pass a night in his favourite Blue Room, restore the Roman Eagle, replace the bust of Vespasian and the armour of Francis I; bring back from Knowsley the blue and white china bowl, commemorated in the Odes of Gray, and call up Kirgate, the printer, carrying a proof of the “Anecdotes of Painting” to Conway’s “Elzevir Horace” in the Gothic Library. As we become better acquainted with his letters, we can summon before us the skilful antiquary and virtuoso midwife, and see Strawberry in lilac-tide—that period of the year in which its owner thought Strawberry in perfection.’

Sporus

J ohn, Lord Hervey, was born in 1696, long before the Age of Scandal.

He belonged to a singular family, and had the singular fate to become the hero of the most vituperative verses in the English language. It was not difficult to be an enemy of Pope’s. Hervey’s father was a charming person, who, in spite of political differences, remained on loving terms with his son, only complaining bitterly about the young man’s addiction to tea—‘that detestable and poisonous plant, which had once brought him to death’s door, and if persisted in would carry him through it’. His wife, Mary Lepell, a bold and noted belle who had been the toast of the town, and who had been considered by the Duchess of Marlborough to be ‘extreme forward and pert’, loved him faithfully, and bore him eight children. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a friend till death. The Queen admitted him to her bed-chamber, creating a precedent in this, calling him her ‘child’ and saying: ‘It is well I am so old, or I should be talked of for this creature.’ Princess Caroline loved him vainly. The King trusted him; and so did Sir Robert Walpole, the shrewdest of men.

Hervey was born in Suffolk, the eldest son of the first Earl of Bristol. He went to Westminster and Cambridge, then to France before he was twenty, thence to Hanover, and then home to Ickworth to pass his time in ‘the perpetual pursuit of poetry’. He married at twenty-four, and became attached to the court of the Prince of Wales, who was to become King George II. It is notable that this was his first attachment. In later years, he was to be false to Pulteney or to Sir Robert Walpole, accordingly as these people fell out with Caroline and her husband, but he remained faithful to his milieu, which was the court. His was a personal attachment to the future Queen.

He entered the House of Commons at twenty-nine, joining Pulteney against Walpole. When ‘dapper George’ had succeeded, and had adopted Walpole, against expectation, Hervey left Pulteney and followed Walpole. He had never been a servant of Pulteney’s, as he never was one of Walpole’s. He went with the new King and Queen as before, and not for reasons of preferment.

After a visit to Italy with Stephen Fox, he became involved in a duel with Pulteney, which was fought because of the dedication to a political pamphlet. He would have been killed, except that Pulteney’s foot slipped, and both combatants were wounded.

Hervey was Caroline’s pet, and rendered service to Sir Robert Walpole while they were in alliance—by smoothing difficulties through the back stairs. This was his essential occupation: to help the court, and to help those who happened to be in favour with the court, by the offices of liaison. He was an early and unbribed example of the ‘King’s Friend’, as established in the next reign. Already Vice-Chamberlain of the Household and a member of the Privy Council, he was appointed Lord Privy Seal at the age of forty-four.

His ally Walpole resigned in 1741, and Hervey continued to adhere to his real master, the King, provoking Horry Walpole to bitter remarks, dictated by the filial allegiance of the latter to Sir Robert. Hervey, he said, was ‘too ill to go to the operas, yet, with a coffin face, is as full of his little dirty politics as ever’.

He adhered until he was dismissed—for the Queen had died in 1737 and thus removed his raison d’être—then went into opposition, began to fail himself, and died at the age of forty-six in 1743.

As politicians went, this was a history of fidelity. Hervey was not a place-hunter, but a neighbouring friend who had become attracted to the royal family in the gossiping way. It was for this that the Queen had valued him. He had amused her, and he had known that he did so, and he had been pleased that this should be. He had been sorry for the woman, in her strange predicament of royalty, and he had tried to ease its burden.

His own burdens had not been light. The story of Lord Hailes, that he lived on one biscuit a day, with a little ass’s milk and an apple a week, taking emetics daily, was exaggerated or confined to a brief interlude. He himself wrote to his doctor in 1732:

‘Beef?’ he was supposed to have said once, possibly under one of these attacks by ignorant gluttons. ‘Oh, no! Faugh! Don’t you know I never eat beef, nor horse, nor any of those things?’

He seems to have thought of his disease as epilepsy, though it might have been an unbalanced diet and the green tea of which his father complained, or perhaps one of the toxic conditions so common in his century. He wrote to Stephen Fox:

Whatever it was, the disorder was real, as his early death showed. Pope’s wicked jeers about the ass’s milk, or about Narcissus who ‘look’d a white lily sunk beneath a shower’; the Duchess of Marlborough’s sneers from the same poet about ‘Lady Fanny’; even Horry’s squibs at the ‘coffin face’ and the common titter raised about the rouge with which he tried to colour the lily, must seem distressing against these facts. He had a painted face, said the implacable Duchess, and not a tooth in his head. She did not mention, nor perceive, the courage with which he had faced these disabilities, nor the sensitiveness with which he had tried to hide them.

When he was dying, he wrote to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

Finally, in his last letter, of which the handwriting quavered as it went, he distilled the pessimism of a dying Roman:

The ‘lucky workman’ had died young and suddenly, by falling from a builder’s scaffold.

‘But let me flap’, Pope had said, ‘this bug with gilded wings, this painted child of dirt . . .’ Hervey had been a butterfly, as Pope perceived, and as Beau Brummell was later to seek to be. But he had been a butterfly of cynicism and reservation. Dismissed from the court which he had always served, and writing his memoirs as a dying man, he retained an unemotional disdain. He looked, as he wrote, at Caroline the Queen who had liked him, as a lepidopterist might look at the moth which he was setting. It was the scientific, the noble attitude. Even to the Queen’s daughter, the Princess Caroline, who had died in love with him, he accorded only the politeness of silence. And to Pope’s odious personalities about Sporus, he had replied, with the aid of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

Lord Hervey was one of those people about whom it was difficult to be moderate. If hated, as he was by Pope, he was bound to be hated excessively. If loved, a hysterica passio rises against his detractors. He was, in literature, as dispassionate as Pavlov with his unfortunate dog. He had the Roman fashion, which refused to pity or to distort. At the same time, perhaps for relief from these altitudes, he was a lap-dog who amused himself with tattle. It was, in the main, the Spartan attitude. What was the value of life? He was ill and rich and growing old: the Dictionary of National Biography might come to talk of his ‘continued infidelities’: but he had one criterion unblemished, the devotion to truth so far as he was able to perceive it, and, after that, he was content to amuse a dilettante Queen, with the butterfly gossip of an unbelieving age.

The Mob

T he elegance of the sedan chair, however, ought not to lead us into overlooking the grimy faces of those who often peered through its glasses, or spattered it with mud in a riot, or died on foreign battlefields to preserve the comforts of its patrician owner. It is an astonishing fact that the dilettante and romantic period of Horace Walpole should have also been the period, which brought England to the temporary leadership of the world, and that the generations which bred the owner of Strawberry should also have been breeding the victors of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Walpole was born within sound of Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, lived through Dettingen, Fontenoy and Minden, and heard of Napoleon’s victory at Lodi before he died. He saw America made and lost, India and Canada added, the broad lines of the British Empire laid down. Nelson was thirty-nine at Walpole’s death, Wellington twenty-eight. It was scarcely an era of peaceful decadence, when the letter-writer could observe, in allusion to an assassination committed by the Empress Catherine:

The debts of the species were paid by the inarticulate plebs, and their snail’s-eye view of England’s glory was largely without historians. One witness survived, however, in the Orrery Papers, a yeoman of cavalry who wrote home to his village, to say that he was safe, when George II had done with flourishing his sword at Dettingen—to the amusement of Frederick the Great and to the edification of courtly annalists.

‘No thing is so hard as kiling of Men.’ The truth of this aphorism, and the dread of the ‘whirling of the bols’: these were no secret to the generals who arranged the slaughter. It was Frederick’s policy to keep his infantry at the sticking point by making them more afraid of their officers than of the enemy, and the private soldier who marched up Bunker’s Hill in haversack and great-coat, to be blown away by volley after volley, was known in America as a ‘lobster’ or ‘bloody back’, because of his red coat and the crimson on his naked shoulders when he was flogged. Even the champions of freedom who awaited him at the top of the hill were learning to be regulars. ‘Every one is made to know his place’, wrote a chaplain of Washington’s army, ‘and keep it, or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime.’ So unsuitable to the American climate was the formal uniform of the British soldier, amounting to a ‘livery’ with its leather stock, that three sergeants and fifty-six men fell dead of heat at Monmouth Court House, without a wound. George the King carried a cane, for his own troops, as well as a sword for the enemy. One of his soldiers claimed to have received in all 30,000 lashes, ‘yet the man is hearty and well and in no ways concerned’.

Discipline was draconic. The mercenaries hired out by the Landgrave of Hesse Cassel were attended by an executioner and his assistants as part of the establishment; and the phrase ‘as bold as a liont’, with which Edward Stilman had described his sovereign, happened also to be applied by Thicknesse to an old soldier placed before the firing squad.

Such was the stuff from which the Thomas Atkins of a later age developed, such the ‘article’ to which the Iron Duke referred in Brussels, before the battle of Waterloo:

The situation of the naval rating, recruited perhaps by a press-gang and regarded by his captain as a representative of the ‘bêtes, badauds and blackguards’ which was Lord Auckland’s description of the proletariat (‘Falstaff’s men,’ said Captain Moore affectionately in 1803, ‘decayed tapsters . . . I am already inclined to love them . . . If they fight, I shall worship them’) disciplined with a cat-o’-nine-tails and nourished upon salt pork and grog, paid at the time of the Nore mutiny only one-quarter of the money commanded by a merchant seaman, valued at the same price as one vote in an election, expected since the execution of Admiral Byng to die rather than fail to do, and possibly agreeing with Dr. Johnson that ‘no man will be a sailor, who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned’—the situation of the simple heart-of-oak was not of such a kind as would encourage his self-expression in literature. The voices which have survived from the lower deck are as rare as the voices from the barrack square. One voice, like Edward Stilman’s, remains among the pages of Heneage Jesse’s George the Third:

So rare and splendid an intervention must have seemed to James Richardson a miracle. It was the poor ‘dallar’ which they gave him, the enlistment ‘by terror’ and the necessity to ‘smugle’ his letter for fear of the officers, which threw more light upon the circumstances of the period than the good King’s glorious behaviour. As Richardson balanced Stilman, so it would be possible to find a pair for the executed sergeant of Governor Thicknesse in the fate of the unfortunate Byng; for all ranks shared in the rigours of the day.

In 1797, when reefing topsails, a Captain Pigot of the Hermione called to the men on the mizen-topsail yard that he would flog the last man down. Two of the poor devils, in their hurry to escape the promised flogging, fell to the quarter-deck and were killed. ‘Throw the lubbers overboard,’ said the captain. ‘The master of a slave ship, called the “Zong”,’ says Lecky, ‘finding sickness raging among his negroes, deliberately ordered 132 of them to be flung into the sea.’ It scarcely comes as a surprise to find that when Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man, had joined a privateer in 1753, her name should have been the Terrible, and that her commander should have been Captain Death. Stories even more ghastly are to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography:

These were the savage and stoic ‘articles’ which were employed by Marlborough, Cumberland, Frederick, Germaine, Gates, Rodney, Nelson, Wellington and the rest of them. They were articles which had sprung from a common compost-heap, the eighteenth century Mob.

The political system of the Age of Scandal, a historian has beautifully written, was that of ‘aristocracy tempered by rioting’. So aristocratic was it, that ‘Pitt was at first the only commoner in the Cabinet of 1783’ (Lecky), while Wilberforce refused a peerage because it would exclude his children from intimacy with ‘private gentlemen of moderate fortunes, and clergymen, and, still more, mercantile men’.

Admiral Palliser might use the article, but, if the article’s mother, the Mob, were displeased by the admiral, his windows would be smashed and himself burnt in effigy. Wellington might point at it in Brussels, like a farmer at a pig, but, when the mother-mob found him tardy about the Reform Bill, attempts would be made in Fenchurch Street to drag him from his horse. There was a give-and-take between the highest and the lowest, a personal relationship, and, as the cabinet was said to be the link between parliament and the administration, so the Mob mediated between the victor of the Glorious First of June and the able seaman who had fought there. Also, although the rewards of admirals and generals were out of all proportion superior to those of common men, these great people did at least share and share alike with their followers in the ‘whirling of the bols’, both at sea and on land.

The licence demanded by the Mob, and the good-humour with which that licence was conceded in England were surprising. In France, the lidded pot might eventually boil over and scald the land with blood, but, on the other side of the Channel, there was an openness between the classes which allowed the vessel to let off steam. Throughout the letters of Horace Walpole there was an under-current of rioting, which was borne by the sufferers without the least panic: riots about weaving, in which the indignant Duke of Bedford received a stone weighing six pounds; riots about Wilkes, in which the Austrian Ambassador was taken out of his coach by the trouserless, turned upside down, and the number ‘45’ chalked on the soles of his shoes; riots about an address to the King, in which a hearse was driven into St. James’s Palace, with an executioner and an axe on top, and during which the pugilistic Lord Talbot managed to bag a rioter; riots about printing libels, in which George Selwyn and Charles James Fox were rolled in the gutter, and King George was pelted with an apple; riots about tea, with the American mob dressed as Red Indians: riots about admirals, in which Pitt, Fox and the Duke of Ancaster, drunk, joined the demonstrators and chose the best windows to smash; riots about Popery, in which it was rumoured that the lions had been loosed from the Tower menagerie; and riots about Peace, in which, according to Lord Onslow:

It was this indignation—this comic fuming at the ‘disgraceful’ behaviour of thousands who could easily have torn them limb from limb—this refusal to believe in the destructive capacity or in the seriously ill intentions of such amiable helots as surrounded them, which saved the English aristocracy from the guillotine. They refused to have the sense to realize that they were in danger, and the Mob, for lack of being taken seriously, remained comic.

The interesting feature of the disturbances was that life was seldom lost in them. For the crowd was an English one, with a cockney sense of humour, and the voice in the back row was available, which turned the dangerous situation to a laugh. In France they might massacre an ambassador, but they would hardly have turned him upside down to write on his boots. In England they might towzle the powdered wigs of half the House of Lords, but in France they would have cut their heads off. The sailors, weavers, harlots, chairmen, porters and Protestants of the English metropolis adopted their riots as public holidays. The chairmen particularly seem to have had a sense of humour. Two of them, very drunk, carrying home the prim, terrified and abstemious Mrs. Herbert, opened the top of the chair and told her indistinctly: ‘Madam, you are so drunk, that if you do not sit still, it will be impossible to carry you.’

Serious bloodshed took place only on one occasion, that of the Gordon Riots. Lord George Gordon was a maniac, who ended his life as an orthodox Jew, and he took occasion to foment the excitement arising from an attempt to alleviate the lot of Catholics, at that time labouring under civil disadvantages. The Mob was willing to pose as Protestant. On June 2nd, 1780, they assembled at Southwark to present an address against Popery. They marched to Westminster and commenced proceedings in the usual way. At the House of Lords, the Lords Townshend and Hillsborough had their wigs removed, and were left to enter with their back-hair round their ears; Lord Willoughby’s periwig was violated; the Lord President of the Council had his shins hacked; the Archbishop of York had his sleeves torn off; and the fainting Bishop of Lincoln was scarcely rescued, from a neighbouring house, in female attire.

The scene in the House of Commons was as remarkable; where, with the Mob surging outside, two gentlemen attended the raving Lord George Gordon, to plunge their swords into his heart, if he were to excite the tumult too far.

Next day, the pickpockets, burglars and other disorderly persons began to take charge of the crowd. Looting and burning commenced. By the 6th the situation had passed out of hand, mansions were being stormed, fire employed and jails were being delivered.

Lord Mansfield’s house was burned to the ground, with its priceless library, and so were those of Sir John Fielding and many others. ‘No Popery’, was chalked, in self-defence, on all doors; except on the door of one humorist, who wrote ‘No Religion’. On the 7th there were rumours that the lions from the Tower and the lunatics from Bedlam had been let loose. Horry Walpole came up from Strawberry to see the fun, and found Lord Hertford and his sons loading muskets. The Bank was attacked, the distillery of a rich Roman Catholic was stormed, giving drink to the rioters, and the Fleet, Marshalsea and King’s Bench prisons were broken open. The liberation of one miserable hold in Paris, the Bastille, had been anticipated by nine years.

Wraxall could tell the time by the clock of St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn, in the light of the fires.

On June 8th, the King, by his own efforts, managed to pull the kingdom together, and troops were thrown into the fray. Horace Walpole saw a company of Horse Guards making for home, their bayonets steeped in blood. The Mob was cowed, their Protestant ribbons wrenched from their hats. Two hundred and eighty-five persons were killed by the military. Twenty-nine of those arrested remained to be hanged.

On the last day, an extraordinary change of heart took place. Omne animal, the aristocracy might have quoted—with the rest of the old saw. The wounded withdrew themselves in secrecy, without a word. The dead who had not been found by pickets were surreptitiously lowered into the black waters of the Fleet Ditch. No investigation was asked or offered, by Mob or Parliament. The scarlet road to Blackfriars Bridge was covered with fresh earth, as if by common consent; the bullet-scarred houses were re-plastered, nobody knew by whom, and, when London awoke on June 9th, 1780, the blood-splashed walls of the Bank of England had been white-washed from top to bottom.

GIN LANE

The Necrophilist

O ne evening when he was in high fettle, Horace Walpole sat down to make a catalogue of the latest bons mots. He recorded a joke of Chesterfield’s and two cruel ones by Peter Le Neve and Old Craggs, the latter being about a person called Arthur Moore. Then he went on:

The great letter-writers at the peak of the Age of Scandal were thought to be Walpole and Selwyn—but for a hundred years after their death there existed a curious contrast between them. Horace had preserved his own letters. He had even asked to have them back, edited them, and caused fair copies to be made: a fact which militates against their spontaneity. Selwyn had preserved only the letters which were written to him by others, and had, indeed, left strict instructions that his own were to be destroyed. Horace was a circle which existed by its centre, and Selwyn was defined by his tangents. On a first inspection, this seemed humble and charming on Selwyn’s part, and arrogant on Walpole’s. Besides, it was not impossible to deduce Selwyn’s character from the character of the letters which he received. It was like a parlour game. It may have seemed to people of allusive mind in the nineteenth century that his was the more subtle way of bidding for immortality.

George was born in 1719, the second son in a family of Gloucestershire landowners who returned two members to Parliament for a rotten borough, and who consequently could count on their fair share of sinecures. He was educated at Eton and at Oxford, and was sent down from the latter with full anathema, because he had celebrated the holy communion in a real chalice, pretending to be Jesus Christ.

On the death of the said George Augustus Selwyn’s elder brother, the young man was left heir to the family property, and, at his father’s death, became proprietor of the customary sinecures. He remained a man-about-town all his life, was a famous wit and gambler, and died in 1791 without having accomplished anything further than his scrape at Oxford. He never married. The reputation which he left behind, apart from that of wit, was that he was fond of going to executions, and partial to little girls.

The letters of Selwyn’s friends threw a puzzling light upon his character; for, although all seemed to agree that he was a charming person, the letters themselves had a slight smell of rottenness. His clergyman toady, the Rev. Dr. Warner, was a creature whom no decent being would have countenanced, yet his epistles were familiar and preserved with care, and the tracasseries about the child called Mie-Mie were unpleasant. Madame du Deffand, who was sentimental, said that George had no heart, and Horace Walpole observed in an unguarded moment that he was a bête inspiré. On the other hand, Selwyn long preserved the warm friendship of the Duke of Queensberry, who was honest in his wickedness, and who never would tolerate shams—not even from the Thames.

Selwyn was loved by Horace Walpole himself, who wrote of him at his death:

A better testimonial was the love of Lord Carlisle, a charming youth, but weak and impressionable and younger than the wit. It was better, because Carlisle had a better eye for friends than Walpole. Selwyn’s acquaintances often assured him that they loved him, either because they did so, or else because they feared his tongue. Lord Holland used jokingly to assume, to his face, that he was a eunuch.

There were a dozen stories about Selwyn’s interest in death, torture and execution. He was supposed to frequent exhumations, and to have visited France in order to witness the horrid sufferings of Fr. Damien, who was nipped with red-hot pincers and torn limb from limb by cart-horses, for having attempted the life of Louis XV. On that occasion, he was said to have been accommodated with a grand-stand view by one of the numerous executioners, who had asked, ‘Etes-vous bourreau?’ and who had been told by Selwyn, ‘Non, Monsieur, je na’i pas cet honneur; je ne suis qu’un amateur.’ It was at the same execution, incidentally, that a tender-hearted lady who was interested in the prevention of cruelty to animals was said to have objected to the whipping of the horses, as inhuman, when they were pulling Fr. Damien to bits. The story about Selwyn was apocryphal, and had also been told of La Condamine. Indeed, there was a regular incrustation of legend to this particular martyrdom, for La Condamine, who was deaf, was believed to have asked one of the executioners what Damien was saying? ‘Monsieur, il jure horriblement.’ ‘Ma foi, il a bien raison!’

In the same way, many of the Selwyn stories sounded too good to be true. ‘You know’, said Walpole, ‘George never thinks but à la tête tranchée: he came to town t’other day to have a tooth drawn, and told the man that he would drop his handkerchief for the signal.’ Lord Holland, on his death-bed, told the servant: ‘The next time Mr. Selwyn calls, show him up: if I am alive, I shall be delighted to see him, and if I am dead he will be glad to see me.’ Gilly Williams, George Townshend, Lord Carlisle, even the King, made jokes about his penchant. Wraxall was assured that he went to executions in female attire.

Apart from the jokes, which he seldom resented, there was a substratum of morbidity. Walpole related an unpleasant story of his activities. ‘A footman of Lord Dacre has been hanged for murdering the butler. George Selwyn had a great hand in bringing him to confess it. That Selwyn should be a capital performer in a scene of that kind is not extraordinary: I tell it you for the strange coolness which the young fellow, who was but nineteen, expressed: as he was writing his confession, “I murd—” he stopped, and asked, “How do you spell murdered?” ’

Selwyn received letters such as the following: ‘Harrington’s porter was condemned yesterday. Cadogan and I have already bespoken places at the Brazier’s, and I hope Parson Digby will come time enough to be of the party. I presume we shall have your honour’s company, if your stomach is not too squeamish for a single swing.’ When he was not at a hanging, his friends took care to send him a description.

The best tale of his Ingoldsby-legendary leanings was told by Horace Walpole, in his description of the execution of Lord Lovat—a description which it is impossible not to quote in full.

Selwyn took an interest in more than one small girl, but his complicated relationship with the one called Mie-Mie was the passion of his life. She was the natural daughter of his friend the Duke of Queensberry, by an Italian Marchioness, and it was long thought that Selwyn disputed her paternity in the belief that he was himself the father. It is clear from the letters that this was not the case. So far as his attitude was defined, he appeared to have taken a fancy to the child as a baby, pitied it, disapproved of its parents and taken it under his wing. He ended by fighting a protracted battle with the mother, who wanted to keep it, while Queensberry looked on with amused contempt; and he chased Mie-Mie up and down Europe until he finally secured her person. His letters to harassed head mistresses about her health and spirits were only less funny than the answers from the head mistresses. ‘Mrs. Terry present her best compliments to Mr. Selwyn: is very sorry to find he is so uneasy. The dear child’s spirits are not depressed. She is very lively: ate a good dinner: and behaves just like any other children.’ He spent the rest of his life doting upon her, and left her £33,000, in addition to the £150,000 which was left to her by Old Q. Understandably enough, she grew up to marry the wicked Lord Yarmouth, was separated from him, travelled on the continent with a lover, was believed to be the mother of Sir Richard Wallace and figured in Vanity Fair as the Marchioness of Steyne.

The third main trait deducible from contemporary evidence was Selwyn’s wit.

Humour is an article which seems to have two compartments, permanent and temporary, the latter being the larger. It is subject to fashion. ‘Real mirth’, wrote Dr. Johnson in his Lives of the Poets, ‘must always be natural, and nature is uniform. Men have been wise in very different modes, but they have always laughed the same way.’ Mrs. (Thrale) Piozzi, who was no fool, wrote in the margin: ‘I think not; I think national mirth a great discrimination of national character. Wisdom is dressed up alike by almost all . . . One way of being wise, I think, and a thousand of being merry. . .’ There seem to be some kinds of humour which remain amusing through the centuries and across geography, and perhaps there are some kinds of wit also—usually the wit of abstract ideas rather than of personalities—which may be superior to time and space. Possibly Chinamen, possibly people of the thirtieth century, may smile at Falstaff or at the fun of Sydney Smith, with its affectionate glee. Somebody once asked the latter if a bishop were going to marry. ‘Perhaps he may. Yet how can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is, “I will see you in the vestry after service”.’ Finding a boy stroking a tortoise, he asked, ‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘Oh, to please the tortoise.’ ‘Why, child, you might as well stroke the dome of St. Paul’s, to please the Dean and Chapter.’ When a beautiful young lady cried out in the garden, ‘Oh, Mr. Sydney, you will never bring this pea to perfection’, he took her gravely by the hand and, leading her forward, said: ‘Then allow me to bring perfection to the pea.’

In opposition to this happy fun, there is the wit of personalities and of fashion, which is as impermanent as the fashions themselves. The harsh Jest Books of court Fools under Henry VIII or James I are as dry as blue-books to us. Archie Hamilton cannot raise a grin. Perhaps it was because the wit of fashion was unkind and destructive, where Sydney Smith’s was loving, that ‘wit’ as such did not retain its pleasantry.

It was to the second form of humour that the main body of Selwyn’s wit belonged. His jokes are lamentable now, however successful then. They were in the punning mode, and used as ‘hits’.

A luckless traveller called Bruce, whose truthful stories about Abyssinia were doomed to be disbelieved because nobody else had been there, had been saying that among their musical instruments the Ethiopians played upon a kind of lyre. Selwyn whispered, like any schoolboy, that there was one liar less since Bruce had left the country. When a Mr. Foley had fled to France because of his debts, Selwyn commented that it was a pass-over which would not be relished by the Jews. When a man called Fox had been hanged, and Charles James Fox asked him if he had been to the execution, he observed: ‘No, Charles, I make a point of never attending rehearsals.’ It was heartless stuff—but sometimes he rose to higher levels. Walpole, remarking on the similar governments of George II and George III, mentioned that there was nothing new under the sun. ‘Nor’, said Selwyn, ‘under the grandson.’ Asked if Princess Amelia would have a guard, he replied with some indelicacy, ‘Now and then one, I suppose.’

Wraxall explained Selwyn’s jokes by saying that ‘the effect when falling from his lips became greatly augmented by the listless and drowsy manner in which he uttered them, for he always seemed half asleep’. This was the clue to the enigma. He possessed the play-actor’s flair which made a stupid remark seem funny for the time being: the ‘business’ which actors exhibit by raising their eyebrows, like George Robey, or by looking pained and grieved. Selwyn’s drooping eyelids and demure look, which Reynolds drew with care, helped him to look sleepy.

This, in turn, for those who share Dr. Johnson’s contempt for the essential emptiness of actors, leads to the real Selwyn: to the centre which had been wise enough to exist by its tangents, and to direct the destruction of its letters. By some oversight, his own letters were not destroyed after all. They began to be published in 1897, by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and the mystery of his character was cleared at once.

To put it bluntly, it turned out that the great wit of Almack’s had been a shallow, complaining and ignorant valetudinarian. He had written in a mixture of poor English, bad French and worse Italian. After all the talk of the ‘monstrous good things’ which George had said, the letters which came to light were the ill-spelt and endless chatter of an empty-headed fellow—a laughing stock even, who had suffered the indignity, not only of falling in love with a baby that called him Yan-Yan, but also of catching the whooping cough from it at the age of sixty-one.

GEORGE SELWYN AND HIS DOG ‘RATON’

Romance

S o melodramatic was the latter part of the eighteenth century, so much the reverse of an Age of Reason in which the via media could be followed, that the strain of living in those decades might have intimidated a cowboy. The heaths sprinkled with highwaymen and gibbets, the towns patrolled by window-smashing mobs, the people of the sea-ports ready to fly from the press-gangs or from the smugglers, London rich in brothels which were called bagnios and in gin shops where it was possible to ‘get drunk for a penny or dead drunk for twopence’, the housewives of Edinburgh hurling out their slops from upper windows with the cry of ‘Gardy-loo’ (gardez l’eau) while the foot passengers screamed out ‘Haud yer han’ and ran for their lives, macaronis in the midnight lanes fighting battles with the watchmen, and gentlemen still wearing swords on formal occasions, which were for use as well as for ornament: with these agrémens, the life of the aristocracy was not a sinecure.

Even an old maid like Horace Walpole was prepared to catch a housebreaker for the morbid Selwyn to hang, with the same indulgence as one might collect a caterpillar for a favourite nephew.

The life of alarms and excursions was lived by a society whose outlook, moreover, was ceasing to be classical. They knew too much about the classics to find them novel or exhilarating. On the contrary, it was the Gothic, the Eastern, the Celtic, anything not connected with ancient Rome, which had begun to intoxicate the period. The ‘Druid’ was a special invention of the Age of Scandal. An elderly gentleman in a nightshirt and mistletoe, who denounced the Plantagenet kings from some majestic crag in Snowdonia, the Druid bore little relationship to the cannibals and duk-duk dancers of Gaelic prehistory. It was the age of the grotto. ‘Here, John,’ the Rev. William Bowles (1762-1850) would say, when visitors called, ‘run with the crucifix and the missal to the hermitage, and set the fountain going.’ The ‘awfulness’ of Swiss scenery was what made everybody shudder, and between 1750 and 1795 there were no less than sixty books published about travels in Switzerland. Rasselas, Ossian, Caractacus, Vathek, Percy’s Reliques or the Castle of Otranto were the latest rage, and people were so excited by the non-classical renaissance, at least thirty years before the birth of Keats, that they could scarcely wait to realize the Gothick dream. Indeed, they seldom did wait to realize it. It generally collapsed in ruin upon their infatuated heads, for lack of tiresome details like foundations. Walpole’s vision of Strawberry Hill was erected in such a hurry that there was no time to supply it with real tracery: it had to be painted on paper, which peeled off. Beckford’s nightmare abbey at Fonthill had a tower three hundred feet high, nearly high enough for a pupil to manœuvre an aeroplane with safety, which fell down as soon as it had been put up. He put it up again, with feverish energy, but down it came once more. Even the Lords Mayor were touched with the medieval romance in their banquets, as late as 1819, and even their attempt to realize it fell down.

The slap-stick of the age was balanced by a romantic eccentricity in vice, by a macabre virility, which equalled that of the Restoration or of the Elizabethan dramatists. Webster and Tourneur had not imagined any horrors which were not attempted in the Age of Scandal. ‘I am glad you are aware of Miss Pitt’, wrote Horace Walpole. ‘Her very first slip was with her eldest brother; and it is not her fault that she has not made still blacker trips.’ Incest was the frisson of the century, as homosexuality was to be that of the twentieth. Nearly everybody dealt with it, from Walpole to Byron. The Marquis de Sade, in real life not a very sensational person, would have paled beside Mrs. Brownrigg, who whipped her apprentices to death. A Mr. Waddy in the Irish troubles ate half a priest (Barrington, 1. 264.) A lover of the wife of George I was murdered on leaving her bedroom and buried under the stairs. George II’s brother-in-law was a maniac who tried to kill his son. George III’s sister was nearly beheaded in Denmark, and her lover, Struensee, was beheaded. George IV caused his wife to be tried for adultery, an offence which might have been punishable by the axe, as high treason.

Some of the stories in Walpole are still almost too horrible for print:

If these people were to be considered as cold and classical, if the pathetic bourgeoisie of the succeeding century were to be regarded as ‘romantic’ in opposition to them, then the meaning of words must have lost reality.

As for their women, in contrast to the dowdy blue-stockings who consorted with the poets of the nineteenth century, the beauties who were the contemporaries of Walpole lived through romances of such intricacy and splendour that Hollywood in delirium would scarcely do them justice.

If the little seamstress’s life had been tragic, it had at least been uninhibited, as were the lives of many of her sisters on both sides of the Channel. Some of these ladies, like Lady Harriet Wentworth, eloped with their footmen: some, like Mrs. Murray, were attempted by their footmen to be ravished. A prostitute called Nancy Parsons, after living with the Dukes of Dorset and Grafton, married Lord Maynard and was described in the peerages as ‘widow of —— Horton Esq.’ The illegitimate daughter of a milliner did better than Madame Du Barry, and became the sister-in-law of George III.

A Lady Cathcart who died in 1789 had married a Captain Macguire for her fourth husband, but had displeased him by wearing a ring on which was written.

Why she called herself Cathcart when she was married to M’Guire or Macguire is not explained, and unfortunately she does not figure in the Dictionary of National Biography. But it seems that in the sequel she did have her fifth husband. In any case, she danced at the Welwyn Assembly, a free woman, when past eighty, and lived to be ninety-eight.

In this respect she was more fortunate than the Lady Grant mentioned by Boswell:

All this was small romance, moreover, compared with the stories of the leading stars.

The notorious Miss Chudleigh began by fascinating the Earl of Bath and nearly married the Duke of Hamilton. She became a maid-of-honour, clandestinely wedded the future Earl of Bristol, had a son by him in secret, went to a ball in a gauze dress, and caught the eye of George II. He overcame his meanness to the extent of presenting her with a watch which cost him thirty-five guineas, ‘out of his own privy purse and not charged on the civil list’. She also made a conquest of Frederick II, who admired her ability to swallow two bottles of wine. ‘When reproached by her royal mistress’, said Wraxall, ‘for the irregularities of her conduct, “Votre Altesse Royale sait,” replied she, “que chacun a son But.” ’ (The Altesse Royale was believed to be the mistress of Lord Bute.) Fearing that the Earl of Bristol might die before the marriage could be acknowledged, and that she might lose her secret title, she had taken pains to have the marriage entered by underhand means in the church register. Now, however, she became the whore of the Duke of Kingston, and saw her chance to become a duchess. Complicated tracasseries ended in her marriage to the Duke, while the Earl was still alive. When the Duke died, he left her his immense fortune, and she went off to Italy, to vamp Pope Clement XIV. Unfortunately, the story of her bigamous marriage had got about, and it was in the interest of the Duke’s other heirs to prove that she was really the Countess of Bristol. It became necessary for her to tamper with the marriage register once again, this time in order to destroy it. The coil was too difficult. She was brought to trial before the House of Lords, found guilty, and barely escaped from being branded in the hand. The Countess-Duchess was now demoted to a countess, but for some reason she was left in possession of the fortune. The Earl of Bristol was unable to divorce her, because there was evidence of his collusion in the bigamy. She retired to Russia, where she got on well with her sister in frailty, Catherine the Great, and thence to France, where she purchased a royal palace for £50,000. She died at sixty-eight, in 1788, after other love affairs, and after receiving an offer of marriage from Prince Radzivil. Her picture as she appeared in the gauze dress still survives, wearing a ravishing smirk. It is a single garment, quite transparent, and probably explains her career. Throughout her life, she had enjoyed two or more of everything that was obtainable, counting the husbands and the bottles of wine. When a two-headed calf was born in Essex, Horace Walpole suggested that it must be hers. Sir Robert Keith said that he would be willing to marry her, if a grenadier might be joined with him in the nuptials. Other wags reported that she had given birth to twins, thus offering Lord Chesterfield the opportunity for one of his greatest mots. She mentioned the scandal to him with simulated indignation, on which his Lordship answered politely: ‘Madam, I make a point of never believing more than half of what I hear.’

The high romance of the age was the career of the lovely Misses Gunning.

The two penniless Irish girls had been brought to England by their father, John Gunning of Castle Coote, when they were about eighteen years of age, in 1751. Walpole considered that their beauty depended upon there being two of them, ‘for singly I have seen much handsomer women than either’. Whatever the explanation, they ‘made more noise than any of their predecessors since the days of Helen’. Their loveliness was so great that it was a nuisance to them. Once, when they went to Hampton Court, and were examining the Beauty Room there, the housekeeper brought another party, saying, ‘This way, ladies, here are the Beauties.’ The Gunnings, who had been persecuted by curious mobs already, supposed that this was a reference to their own charms, and flew into a passion, exclaiming that they had come ‘to see the palace, not to be shown as a sight themselves’. The misunderstanding was not unnatural, for on one occasion seven hundred people sat up all night to see them leave an inn in Yorkshire, and, on another, a shoemaker in Worcester made two and a half guineas by exhibiting a shoe which he had made for one of them, at a penny a head. In later life, this one had to be protected by a guard of soldiers, when walking in Hyde Park.

The younger sister’s marriage was the more brilliant, the elder’s the more tragic. Both were dazzling.

The younger of them married the Duke of Hamilton with a ring of the bed-curtain at half-past twelve at night, in Mayfair Chapel, and was presented at Court. ‘The crowd was so great that even the noble crowd in the Drawing Room clambered upon chairs and tables to look at her.’ She was carried to the north by her Duke, where, said Walpole, ‘her history is not unentertaining; Duke Hamilton is the abstract of Scotch pride; he and his Duchess, at their own house, walk in to dinner before the company; sit together at the upper end of the table; eat off the same plate; and drink to nobody beneath the rank of Earl’. Hamilton died in 1758, and she then married the Duke of Argyll, taking with her a good portion of the Hamilton pride. She had a spirited brush with the resilient Boswell when he was trundling Dr. Johnson round Scotland—owing to the fact that Boswell had opposed her in a law-suit. The description of the dinner party at which she dealt with him was a piece of high comedy, but unfortunately too long to quote as an aside, except in fragments:

Evidently poor Bozzy had not been told the story about the ‘rank of Earl’. He got no reply to this either, but, after much more:

It was this double-duchess who sat in the coach with Queen Charlotte, when she was being brought to London to marry George III, and who smiled at her fears of matrimony. ‘You may laugh’, said the Queen. ‘You have been married twice. But to me it is no joke.’

‘Considering’, said Jesse, ‘that personal beauty was the sole dowry of the Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll, it is remarkable that the untitled daughter of an Irish gentleman should have been the wife of two dukes and the mother of four.’ He might have added that she also refused the hand of a third duke, his Grace of Bridgewater.

The elder daughter’s match was with Lord Coventry. Her simple and pathetic story comes through the pages of Walpole clearly; for she was silly, loving, honest and without pretence.

Even if Lord Coventry were ‘silly in a wise way’, there may have been something behind the wisdom when he coursed his wife round the table to remove her make-up. It may have had white lead in it. Her married life lasted only for eight years, before she had to pay the price of being beautiful. Her sister the Duchess was said to have consumption, but it has been suggested that her own disease was due to the cosmetics.

MISS CHUDLEIGH IN THE CHARACTER
OF IPHIGENIA AT THE VENETIAN
AMBASSADOR’S MASQUERADE

ADMIRAL BYNG

A Perfect Tragedy

S omebody asked a Frenchman to describe the Duke of Newcastle, in 1745. This was the statesman who governed England for seven years, and who retired from office poorer than he came. The Frenchman fumbled for some time, muttering about ‘un certain tatillonage’, and ended by suggesting that one ought to imagine a dead body, hanged in chains, which was always fidgeting to be hanged somewhere else.

Thomas Pelham Holles was a buffoon. A pompous, fussy, honest, ambitious but not avaricious nonentity, who lost half an hour every morning when he got up and chased it for the rest of the day—who was nicknamed Permis because he always said ‘Est-il permis?’ before he addressed a remark to the King—it was his sheepish fate to be the butt of every rational being, and to be dismissed in the end, without having meant to do harm, forgotten, foolish, innocent, despicable and still fidgeting to be hung somewhere else—so long as he might be hung in the Garter. The story of his standing on the great Duke of Cumberland’s train, at the funeral of George II, is well known. Other stories were told of his persecution by the wits of the period:

There were several anecdotes about his farcical ability to be in the wrong place, as he was at the coronation of George III.

It was this creature who was the first minister of England, and who was determined to remain in that position, when the Seven Years War began. The French were prepared, the English were not, and it was essential to the Duke that his ministry should remain in power. The French had invaded the English base of Minorca before he had noticed anything amiss; on the island there was an octogenarian governor, and half the officers of the garrison were on leave. Something had to be done, in fear of the Mob’s resentment, so Admiral Byng was sent to stop the gap. The French were already ashore with an army, besieging the doting governor, and the Mediterranean was in the balance.

Admiral Byng was not exactly an impressive person. At all events, he was not flamboyant. He was a son of the great Admiral Lord Torrington, who had won the decisive naval battle of Cape Passero by mistake, and he had probably been oppressed by that tempestuous old tar. His expression, according to his nephew, was like the King of Prussia’s, ‘with the same round, smooth, unmeaning face, and the same little, mischievous nose’. He was subject to faintly comic accidents. ‘Admiral Byng,’ wrote his sister Sarah in 1750, ‘thrown down in his park by a buck; now gone to Bath, and surprisingly recovered.’ But he was a professional sailor who had been at sea since boyhood: he had taken an enemy ship in 1745: and he was no coward, for he had fought a duel to defend his honour.

Byng was dispatched to face the French admiral, with ships too few and too rotten, and with contradictory instructions. He was to relieve Minorca, but also to defend the naval dockyard of Gibraltar—which was in a state of disrepair—after he had passed it.

Until Rodney was to succeed in introducing the novel manœuvre of ‘breaking the line’, the fighting tactics of the English fleet were simple. The admiral was expected to lay his capital ships in a direct line, parallel to the line of the enemy, and then each ship, one against one, was expected to sail down upon her adversary and blow her out of the water. There was a simple book of flag signals, by which the admiral might alter the movements of his fleet, with this end in view.

All ships of both fleets were motivated by air, so that no ship could sail against the wind that moved her. When two lines were placed in combat, the line which happened to be to the windward of the two possessed more power of manœuvre than the other; for it could take the wind from the other’s sails. Consequently it was an advantage to be on the windward side, and, before a battle, there was a vital competition for this position, which was called ‘racing for the weather gage’.

When Byng, after confused negotiations at Gibraltar about his contradictory instructions, had sighted the French fleet off Minorca, he proceeded to race for the weather gage. He was willing to lay his foul bottoms ship to ship, against the French line.

His enemies were newly launched from Toulon, and their clean hulls gave them the legs of the encrusted English. They were also better gunned.

Byng’s adversary, the Marquis de la Galissonière, was a talented commander. He knew that the unwished initiative lay with Byng. His own troops were already landed, and his duty was only to preserve their lines of communication. The English had two duties: to raise the siege and to protect Gibraltar. If Galissonière could keep himself ‘in being’, he would be doing all that was needed. Byng had to keep in being, and also to do something more.

In the last stages of laying the lines abreast of each other, one line of ships was accustomed to await the onslaught, while the possessor of the weather gage sailed down upon it. The attackers were compelled to make the last quarter mile ‘end-on’, while the defenders were in broadside. In the bow of a battleship there were only two guns, called the bow-chasers, while the waiting line could bear with its whole armament.

Galissonière saw his opportunity. He would pretend to race for the weather gage, but would yield it to Byng. Then, with his fleet in line ahead, their broadsides bearing, he would lie-to and await the English.

As they sailed down upon him, but before they came to close quarters, he would rake them with his full metal, while the English guns, except for the bow-chasers, could not be brought to bear. When they did reach close quarters, but before they were near enough to take his wind, he would use his superior speed to withdraw to a distance, would re-form his line, and would again await the suicidal attack. By repeating this manœuvre da capo, he hoped to use his broadsides throughout the engagement, while his enemy’s guns would never bear at all.

It was a measure of Byng’s professional insight that he perceived these tactics before they were brought into action. He knew that Galissonière had the legs of him; he saw that the weather gage had been given on purpose; the rest followed in course, for a French fleet had been known to use the same tactics before. The secondary need to defend Gibraltar made it essential to preserve his fleet from suicide, from the pursuit of a faster enemy who could strike without waiting to be struck.

Byng decided on the spur of the moment to make use of an unorthodox manœuvre called ‘lasking’. A lasking ship was one which shouldered through the water on a crab-wise diagonal, at a slower speed, but with its broadside bearing:

Unfortunately, there was no signal for lasking in the code book. He could only hope to institute the manœuvre by example—and unfortunately an earlier movement of the fleets had placed his own squadron in the rear. There was a one-gun signal in the book, meaning ‘Bear a point to starboard’, which could be used as a hint to intelligent captains. His captains, however, were not intelligent, and they were excited. The unorthodox tactics were misunderstood. One captain, whose head was later taken off by a cannon ball, threw the movement into confusion. The two squadrons, of admiral and rear-admiral, fell foul of each other. Muddle and delay took place, under the guns of the French. The confused fleet, already much shattered, had scarcely been reduced to order, when Galissonière, as he had intended, withdrew, reformed, and awaited a second onslaught.

It was late in the day, too late to resume for the time being. That night a council of war on board the flagship, with the bugbear of Gibraltar at its back, decided unanimously to break off the action.

Angelo visited a warship after Lord Howe’s victory in 1794 (the Glorious First of June) and from him we may extract a verbal picture of the conditions under which that council of war was probably held. ‘When we went below deck, the scene was truly frightful; on each side were hammocks on the floor, with numbers of dying and wounded; many of their comrades were seen praying to them, holding up the cross, and some appeared lifeless. At this moment I fancy I see their pale faces and black beards. Here great havoc must have been made, as the shot appeared, from the grooves on the deck, like that of a ploughshare on the earth, to have raked through the cabin, from stem to stern. Our curiosity did not last long; the smell, with the sight of the dying, and the groans of the wounded, soon put an end to our naval visit.’

Such were the bare bones of a battle which lost Minorca, and which wrecked the Newcastle administration. The miserable Duke, however, was a man who could hanker for authority to the last. In a desperate attempt to retain power, he proceeded to lay the blame on Byng: the blame for a war begun before the ministry was ready for it, for ships not clean nor properly manned, and for instructions from which it was impossible to determine whether Minorca or Gibraltar had been the vital base. Grub Street writers were hired to blast the admiral’s reputation. Mobs were suborned to howl for his death, singing

The fussy George II, with his foible for personal courage, was informed that his commander had been a coward. The octogenarian of Minorca was stifled with honours, much to his delight, after having stood the siege and capitulated in bed.

The wretched sacrifice was relieved of his command. He was haled home in disgrace, locked in a small room with a streaming cold and no assistance or conveniences, burnt in effigy, mocked by the Mob and put up for court martial. The members of the court, like so many old tars, knew nothing of law. They were convinced of Byng’s innocence, but they had been told that the fire-eating King would be furious if he were acquitted. They brought in a verdict which was intended to be a vote of censure, but which turned out to be a verdict of guilty. Their consciences smote them: they asked to be allowed to explain themselves to parliament: they broke down in the explanation. The great men of Europe did their utmost to save the victim. Pitt pleaded for him with the King, but was ‘cut very short’. Lord Temple was so rude to his majesty on the same subject that he was never forgiven. Dr. Johnson rallied to the rescue with his pen. Voltaire, who was later to make the bitter explanation that Byng had been shot ‘pour encourager les autres’, wrote a testimonial from Paris. Galissonière himself spoke to the admiral’s bravery. The fabulous de Richelieu, also an enemy, forwarded a testimonial from France. ‘Je vous assure que tout ce que j’ai vu et su de lui ne devait tourner qu’à sa gloire.’ Rear-Admiral West, Byng’s second-in-command, who had been commended by the court, resigned his flag. But red-tape, Permis, the guttural King and the raving Mob, were not to be turned back.

Meanwhile, the Admiral of the Blue, a solid, not unkindly, ugly and unimportant figure of middle height, who had been popular with his men, had lost hope. Everything from the start had been a muddle. It had been an accumulating confusion which he was too tired to explain. The Fighting Instructions, the behaviour of his captains, the battle itself, the imbecile court martial, all had produced a tangle too complicated to be unravelled. Even the attempt to save the Administration, for which he was to be sacrificed, had gone agley. He did, however, desire to defend his honour. He was willing to be shot, but he wanted not to leave the reputation of a coward. When a tactful friend came to him on board the Monarque, where he was waiting for the firing squad, and asked jestingly, ‘Which of us is the tallest?’ he replied, ‘Why this ceremony? I know what it means: let the man come and measure me for my coffin.’ He offered to open his shirt for the bullets, to show that he was not afraid of them. He begged to be allowed to give the order for his own volley, and that he should not be blindfold. By a strange quirk, on the morning of his execution, he took his usual draught for scurvy.

He had written to Sarah two days before his execution.

A few minutes before he was shot, he handed a paper to the Marshal:

Byng was 53 at death. He was buried at Southill, Bedfordshire, with this inscription on his monument:

Aristotle defined tragedy as an action in which some person of high station should fall, through an error or frailty, and should thus purge the emotions of the audience, by pity and by fear. Byng’s station had been high, for his father had been the famous and fertile Lord Torrington. His fall might have been due to an error, though it had been due to no crime. Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann on March 17th, 1757:

The Church Militant

I t has become an aphorism among scientists that great discoveries are seldom due to the efforts of a single person. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was anticipated by Alfred Russel Wallace, before Darwin was ready to publish, and the Origin of Species began with a list which mentioned dozens of embryo evolutionists, who had preceded them both. The earliest in that list were Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who published c. 1795, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the writer’s eccentric grandfather, 1794, Lamarck, 1801, and apparently Goethe. But these were far from being the first Darwinians.

In the same year, the interesting and unusual Lord Monboddo had begun to publish his work on the origin of language, in which he maintained that the orang-outang was related to human beings, and claimed, to the amusement of Boswell and of Dr. Johnson, that our own species possessed tails.

Similar ideas had been floating about since the seventeen twenties, when Elijah Fenton published a couplet which inverted the modern sequence:

The predominant religious texture of the eighteenth century was that of belief, and the Age of Scandal was perhaps the last period of English history in which persons of the highest education could subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles without hypocrisy. Scholars as learned as Dr. Johnson could be as bigoted in their Christianity as George III—although, incidentally, the learning of Johnson was by no means on a par with that of the high scholars like Gibbon or Person—and philosophers as acute as Berkeley could be bishops.

The gradations of belief were shaded between the definite agnosticism of the few and great, through the doubts of self-dramatizing people who called themselves esprits forts or the ‘deism’ of aristocrats like Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Tolland, Tindal, Collins and Walpole, to the stout conservative Christianity of the middle classes and to the Wesleyan revivalism, or quakerism, or sheer ignorance and ‘ranting’, of the gin-fed Mob.

Agnostics included people like the philosopher Hume, who had removed the Ego to which Berkeley had reduced the Universe by way of the senses; Gibbon, who knew too much about the comparative history of religions to be a devotee of any one of them; Baskerville, the designer of the famous type, an interesting man who was buried in his own garden under a stone which said,

There was also John Fransham, who decided that God was Space; and possibly the early scientists like Tom Paine, Dr. Darwin, Messenger Monsey and Monboddo.

The sages provoked a fervid hostility from all right-thinking people. ‘And as to Hume,’ exclaimed Johnson with fury, ‘—a man who has so much conceit as to tell all mankind that they have been bubbled for ages, and he is the wise man who sees better than they,—a man who has so little scrupulosity as to venture to oppose those principles which have been thought necessary to human happiness . . . He added “something much too rough,” both as to Mr. Hume’s head and heart, which I suppress.’ ‘A wickeder heart than Hume’s,’ said Warburton, ‘and more determined to do public mischief, I think I never knew.’ Boswell, on the other hand, as usual much more sensible than his superiors, was surprised to perceive that Hume was a charming person. ‘Besides, I always lived on good terms with Mr. Hume, though I have frankly told him, I was not clear that it was right in me to keep company with him.’

The esprits forts, who were often young noblemen in revolt against established decency without the backing of scholarship for a foundation, later found their best voice perhaps in Byron—who wrote, in 1811, a letter of mingled nonsense and penetration, that was memorable for at least one sentence about immortality:

The ‘deists’, a branch of these strong spirits to whom perhaps Byron might more properly be said to have belonged, were of opinion that some First Cause must exist, on the argument that ‘somebody must have made the world’, but that no revealed religion could be trusted to tell them about it. Voltaire informed a certain Mr. Higginson that he himself was a Deist, ‘adding, so were most of the noblemen in France and in England’. This section, to which Horace Walpole and others of the educated aristocracy and of the rakes like Wilkes or Queensberry adhered, supposed that the Church of England was beneficial in its restraining effect upon the Mob, and they therefore encouraged its application to others, while retaining an amused detachment themselves.

‘Quel ton!’ observed the Maréchale de Luxembourg, on reading the Bible, ‘Quel effroyable ton! Ah, Madame, quel dommage que le Saint Esprit eût aussi peu de goût!’

The aristocracy was, however, Christian politically and by instinctive prejudice, and probably even Queensberry would have been deeply shocked by the opinions of a modern biologist.

Deists, esprits forts and agnostics, all lumped together, might have made up less than one-hundredth of 1 per cent of the population.

The remainder were Christians of various kinds; many of them were clergymen; and the Established Church in the eighteenth century was an exciting institution. The sinecures and place-hunting of Parliament were duplicated in the life of religion; its prizes were as great and the competitors were as practical. Bishop Chandler was accused of having paid £9000 for the see of Durham. Trollope’s picture of the Warden at Barchester was no fiction.

Plural livings were common. Dignitaries could be bishops in one diocese, deans in another and vicars in a third. The Archbishop of Canterbury had £25,000 a year, the Bishop of London £20,000. Successful clergymen constituted a monied aristocracy who ate and drank well. The Rev. Samuel Ogden considered a goose to be a silly bird: it was too big for one dish and not enough for two. Mason was ashamed to admit that he could only manage one bottle of port at a sitting. ‘The poor’, said a prelate in the House of Lords, ‘have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.’

At the end of this period, according to Sydney Smith, there were 10,478 benefices: of which 297 were worth only £40 per annum; 1629 were worth £75 per annum, and 1602 rose to £125. On 4606 of these livings there were no houses fit for habitation. In short, while Canterbury enjoyed his plum of £25,000 and two palaces, 3528 of his clergy—one-third of the total number—were below the level of farmers, and the average income of the Church, if equally divided, would have worked out at £250 for each minister, bishops included. Sir William Scott’s estimate was even lower. According to him, out of 11,700 livings, ‘there are 6000 under 80L. per annum; many of those, 20L., 30L., and some as low as 2L. or 3L. per annum’. Sydney Smith himself calculated that ’till thirty years of age I never received a farthing from the Church, then 50L. per annum for two years—then nothing for ten years—then 500L. per annum, increased for two or three years to 800L. till, in my grand climacteric, I was made Canon of St. Paul’s; and before that period, I had built a Parsonage-house with farm offices for a large farm, which cost me 4000L., and had reclaimed another from ruins for 2000L.’

It was at this point, however, that the mind of this particular Canon of St. Paul’s performed its usual volte-face. The state of affairs, he proceeded to explain, was right and reasonable. If the revenues of the Church were to be redistributed, so that everybody had £250 a year, then educated gentlemen would no longer become clergymen. ‘Who would go into the Church and spend 1200L. or 1500L. upon his education, if such were the highest remuneration he could ever look to? At present, men are tempted into the Church by the prizes of the Church, and bring into that Church a great deal of capital, which enables them to live in decency, supporting themselves, not with the money of the public, but with their own money, which, but for this temptation, would have been carried into some retail trade. The offices of the Church would then fall down to men little less coarse and ignorant than agricultural labourers—the clergyman of the parish would soon be seen in the squire’s kitchen.’ It was better to leave things as they were. A proposed pillage of Cathedral and College dignitaries would only amount, ‘divided among all the benefices in England, to about 5L. 12s. 6½d. per man’, which ‘would not stop an hiatus in a cassock, and would drive out of the parochial Church ten times as much as it brought into it’. It was wiser to regard the situation as a lottery, possessing great prizes. The revenues of Christ were too small to support his ministers decently, so they must simply take the affair as a sweepstake. Innocents would then enter, under the delusion that they might themselves draw the winning number of Cantuar, and religion would be served by independent gentlemen of education and private means.

To the lottery, then, the clerics of the Age of Scandal resorted, and the barefacedness with which they ran for the prizes, not without dust and heat, was in keeping with the sincerity of an admirable age. Paley, of the Evidences of Christianity, had wished at the University to defend the thesis ‘Aeternitas poenarum contradicit divinis attributis’. The Master of his college objecting, he inserted a ‘non’, and defended that. Later, when the young Pitt attended the University Church, Paley suggested for a text in the sermon: ‘There is a lad here who hath five barley loaves and two small fishes; but what are they among so many?’

Nichols records the epitaph of Mrs. Elizabeth Bate, relict of the Reverend Richard Bate, ‘a woman of unaffected piety and exemplary virtue’:

Sometimes the winners of prizes were a trifle unexpected, as was the case with Dr. Lancelot Blackburne, Walpole’s ‘jolly old Archbishop of York, who had all the manners of a man of quality, though he had been a buccaneer’, and who was said to have kept a seraglio at the Palace. A later Bishop of Norwich was believed to be his natural son.

Sometimes the race for preferment was neck and neck.

Sometimes the strain of competition was too much for those of weaker nerves. Florizel’s flogging tutor Dr. Arnold stood the course till he had achieved the Canonry of Windsor and the Archdeaconry of Lichfield, but then ran mad, and ever afterwards walked about his house in a mitre.

No wonder the successful prelates were proud and pompous. No wonder they disapproved of penniless demagogues like Wesley and were pleased by a church bell, cast during the eighteenth century in defiance of that preacher, which bore the noble inscription: ‘Hurrah for the Church of England and down with Enthusiasm.’ No wonder that Bishop Dawes, on being asked if he had seen a late eclipse of the moon, replied with grandeur: ‘No, Madam, but my chaplain did; I saw the eclipse of the sun.’

While his Lordship consumed his port with a right pride in himself and a due sense of God’s mercies through Christ, the country clergyman, like Parson Adams, lived in penury, the toady chaplain employed as the tutor to a noble family waited for preferment with his tongue hanging out, and the curate related to a bishop, as Sydney Smith remarked, spent his time like the sloth which hung from a tree ‘in a state of suspense’.

But if the struggle for power were internecine, yet the ecclesiastical world was saved from a great strain: it was spared the necessity of averting its mind from the discoveries soon to be promulgated by Darwin. England was solidly Protestant: it was fashionable, usual, nearly unquestionable that the Thirty-nine Articles should be accepted without examination as ‘articles of peace’. Consequently, with the burdens of modern biology not yet imposed upon their minds, the clergy were able to offer a healthier and franker companionship to their fellow men than was to be possible in the twentieth century. ‘Frank’ was sometimes a meiosis. They wrote, sans gêne, about the bodily functions and the harlots of their acquaintance. They betrayed few traces of surprise when their parishioners decamped to the bagnio. Their letters, as published, were peppered with asterisks. ‘Our friend Foljambe has resided in college, and persevered in the ways of godliness till about ten days ago, when he disappeared, and no one knows whether he has gone a hunting or a * * * * .’

Occasionally they stepped a little too far, and were hanged for forgery like Dr. Dodd, or for shooting Lord Sandwich’s mistress like the Rev. James Hackman, or for murdering their pupils like the Rev. Thomas Hunter; but on the whole their deportment was as correct as their language was unhampered. It was an age in which the oratory of the pulpit, the sermon, was relished as oratory, in the same way as were the declamations of Garrick on the boards or the speeches of the playwright Sheridan in Parliament. So long as these graces were achieved, and an outward propriety offered as an example to the plebs, the beneficed clergyman remained a gentleman outside his pulpit, and claimed the privileges of such. This was the background against which the Rev. Laurence Sterne, whose sermons were admired by Gray and whom Society regarded as an amusingly shocking but by no means as a monstrous parson, either pursued his own humiliating amours, or disclosed the details of the night on which Tristram Shandy was conceived, or related the curious story of the latter’s accident with the sash-window. The morals of Sterne, though deprecated in many quarters, were not officially considered as scandalous to his cloth, and, although the King was cross with the Archbishop of Canterbury for holding routs at Lambeth Palace, no objection seems to have been raised by others to the conviviality of a certain Rev. Mr. Porter, vicar of East Hoathly, which was recorded in the diary of the bibulous but remorseful Thomas Turner, shopkeeper of that parish:

It may be noticed that Thomas Turner must have been touched with the new heresy of Methodism, possibly because he was a shopkeeper; for otherwise he would never have bandied texts on the conduct of so convivial a parson. It may have been as a punishment for his dissent that he was made to dance in the petticoats.

Among the lower classes, Methodism was already beginning to substitute the bogy God of the Victorians for the Arch-archbishop of a brighter epocha. The dismal and humourless fanaticism of Wesley—who preached 42,400 sermons during his ministry—was undermining the bishops in their wigs and bands, and the abominable proletariat had begun to go a-whoring after the strange and gloomy gods of guilt and shame. The original Quakers had really quaked, and Wesley’s diary records with pious satisfaction in 1761 that ‘I was scarce come into the room where a few believers were met together when one began to tremble exceedingly, and soon after sunk to the floor’. Sydney Smith, who complained on his death-bed of being so weak that ‘I verily believe, if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have strength or energy enough to stick it into a Dissenter’, made a collection of cuttings from Methodist papers.

To so merry a dignitary as Sydney, writing in 1808, the ludicrous transports of the pleasure-haters were insufferable and ungentlemanly. It will be remembered that it was to a Methodist that the proud Duchess of Argyll had compared poor Bozzy, when she wanted to be rude. Sydney himself was ‘quite sure that happiness will be destroyed, reason degraded, sound religion banished from the world; and that when fanaticism becomes too foolish and too prurient to be endured . . . it will be succeeded by a long period of the grossest immorality, atheism and debauchery’. He had been a Whig all his life, a political shade which might now correspond to Socialism, but he could not stomach the new God. He dipped his pen in irony and scorn, to scotch the scandal with quotations—consoling himself by inventing cutting headlines, to suit the Methodist text. It was the idea that God should be expected to interfere in the pettiest affairs that hurt him most.

The aristocratic attitude of the poco-curante to all these religious emotions was summed by the villainous Thurlow, who, as Lord Chancellor, told a deputation of Non-conformists: ‘I’m against you, by God. I am for the Established Church, damme! Not that I have any more regard for the Established Church than for any other Church, but because it is established. And if you can get your damned religion established, I’ll be for that too!’

It is doubtful whether even establishment would have reconciled Thurlow to the lowest of religious classes then existing—the Ranters, from whom the other dissenting branches may possibly have sprung. These uneducated and generally insane enthusiasts formed a floating sub-normal who were willing to believe in anything that came along: in Joanna Southcott (1750-1814) as the new Virgin Mary, or in Mary Tofts as the mother of dismembered rabbits. They derived from fanatics of the previous century: from people like Reeve and Muggleton (1609-98), who believed that heaven was six miles away; like Abiezer Coppe (1619-72), who claimed to have baptized seven thousand persons and who preached stark naked; like Roger Crab (1621-80), who ate nothing but dock leaves and grass; like John Smith (d. 1612), who baptized himself; or like Thomas Tany (fl. 1649-55), who preferred to circumcise himself, had fits, sentenced Reeve ‘to eternal damnation’ in writing, and tried to fight his way into the House of Commons with a rusty sword. In the Age of Scandal their more amusing representatives were Samuel Best, who diagnosed the diseases of his followers by licking the palms of their hands and drank nothing but gin and rhubarb; and John Finlayson, who explained that the earth was a perfect sphere, ‘not shaped like a garden turnip, as the Newtonians make it’, that the sun was ‘very different from anything we can make here below’ and that the stars were ‘oval-shaped immense masses of frozen water, with their largest ends foremost’.

FAST DAY

CREDULITY, SUPERSTITION AND FANATICISM

The Learned Bargee

O ne day, probably in 1715, a little boy was making his way from school. Somebody was usually sent to fetch him, but on this occasion the conductor had not arrived. In 1715 the child would have been six years old.

This child—who had scrofula, one good eye, an inherited melancholia, St. Vitus’s dance, no money, and other disabilities—emerged from penury and Grub Street about forty years later, as the author of the first English Dictionary. He was finally buried in Westminster Abbey with a simple inscription:

As an author, Johnson’s fame was, to tell the truth, scarcely more than contemporary; for it depended upon novelty of style, in an age which loved personal novelties like the clothes of the later Brummell. To them, the not-ungraceful antithetical balancing feats with which he wrote of ‘amourous propensities’ rather than of ‘love’ were new and strange. As a lexicographer, he was of importance. As a conversationalist, the equivalent of our modern ‘brains trust’—who would have been lost without the microphone of Boswell—he was of the first rank. It seems impossible to say anything about him in this capacity, except in the words of his devoted biographer.

The key to this extraordinary figure, who talked ‘for fame’ in an age of great talkers, lay in its disabilities. Johnson was an ambitious and romantic person.

He could never have been Lord Chancellor with his twitches and his fetters, never a great general with his one bad eye, never anything except a literary stylist and famous speaker, using the two members which remained without disease, his tongue and his pen. ‘That people should endeavour to excel in conversation,’ he said, ‘I do not wonder: because in conversation praise is instantly reverberated.’

He wanted to succeed as a man in spite of his afflictions—to have ‘bottom’ and to sail on his own bottom to success. This was why the little boy turned back to beat his schoolmistress, whose attention had been ‘an insult to his manliness’. It was also why he could not bear to be conquered in conversation, which was his only means of excellence. He attached so much importance to victory in talk, that he dreamed about it. ‘He related, that he had once in a dream a contest of wit with some other person, and that he was very much mortified by imagining that his opponent had the better of him.’ ‘There is no arguing with Johnson,’ said Goldsmith bitterly, ‘for, if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.’ If he were flurried by losing, he would turn round like a beast at bay, and argue ad hominem.

It was indicative that two of the famous people who detested the old law-giver should have been Goldsmith and Horace Walpole: the first, because he belonged to a more ancient and more subtle race, which always argued ad hominem, and which did not share the absolute values premised by Johnson; the second, because he was a gentleman, whose attitude to such values was patrician. Johnson was a middle-class, High Church Tory, who had arranged the universe somehow or other in his own mind; and for whom its Creator was a personage in a brigadier wig, who spent his time, as Walpole might have remarked, drinking Fog to the health of Old England. From such premises, the Doctor proceeded to lay down the law with a strong and facile bluntness, which was wrong as often as it was right. But people like Walpole did not share the same deity. ‘You know,’ said the latter, ‘Sir Francis Dashwood used to say that Lord Shrewsbury’s Providence was an angry old man in a blue cloak: another person that I knew, believed that Providence was like a mouse, because he is invisible . . . It put me in mind of the Dane, who talking of orders to a Frenchman, said “Notre St. Esprit est un elephant”.’ Such lightness about the First Cause precluded too much faith in the argument ad rem, and, indeed, precluded faith in all Absolutes—while the great Lexicographer was pre-eminently the kind of John Bull who enjoyed to ‘shout and bawl the Absolute across the Hall’.

They generally compared him to savage animals. Tom said that he laughed like a rhinoceros. Goldsmith said that if he were a fish, he would talk like a whale. A Glasgow newspaper compared him seriously, as a compliment, to the same mammal, and so did Hayley. Chesterfield called him a ‘respectable Hottentot’, Walpole a ‘Caliban’, Anna Seward an ‘old growler’ and an ‘old elephant’. Boswell told him that he tossed and gored like a bull. Boswell’s father called him Ursa Major.

It was true that the most usual simile for him was that of a Bear, and it was only when his acquaintances grew to love him more closely that they realized, like Boswell, ‘that he had nothing of the bear about him, but the skin’. The old animal had a tender heart.

His house, when he was rich enough to afford it, was a hospital for poor and afflicted people: for Dr. Levett, Mrs. Williams, Desmoulins, Miss Carmichael and for the black servant. He bore no malice for momentary defeats. Sometimes the ‘whiff and wind of his fell sword’ was terrible enough: but sometimes the blow was held back, the pistol-butt not brought into action, and a blush would actually mantle the awful cheek:

Sometimes he would apologize even more touchingly, after the stroke:

Behind the roars and bumps, there was the pathos of the wretched child which had turned to beat its mistress:

In spite of his melancholia, however, it would be idle to think of him as a pathetic character. Cheerfulness, as he remarked, kept breaking in. So did comedy.

There it seems equally pleasant to leave the old Hottentot, angrily rebutting the only failing which could be laid to his charge, and there he died, at the age of seventy-five, after his long reign as the greatest debater in England. The feat by which he had established that claim for ever, was perhaps the hysteron proteron with which he had once defeated a Thames bargee, on his own water:

Tears

H umans have a faculty for believing that their own fashions are right and proper, and that these have been ordained to exist as such since the beginning of time. We have a fashion in the twentieth century of considering tears to be unmanly, so we assume that they have always been effeminate. But there have been periods when it has been correct for males to cry, and when males have cried, loud and long, about a surprising variety of subjects, to the applause and even to the admiration of their friends.

In Chaucer, both sexes weep indiscriminately: Troilus cried, and so did the tedious paladins, Palamon and Arcite. Almost every bruiser in the Morte d’Arthur would burst into tears sooner or later, and Lancelot wept ‘as he had been a child that had been beaten’. The first lachrymose period seems to have reached without interruption to the days of Shakespeare, when there was a slight swing in the opposite direction. ‘Albeit unused to the melting mood’, the tragic hero then explained, with a hint of apology, before proceeding to shed his tears as fast as the Arabian tree her medicinable gum. Curiously enough, the reaction against the accepted fashion began on the continent at about the same time, and Sancho Panza was always boasting that he was not a crying man. There followed a brief Elizabethan or Caroline interlude, when only women and schoolboys who had been whipped were expected to blubber.

It was in the Age of Scandal, however, that a strange unlikelihood began to appear. The eighteenth century, that unromantic, tea-drinking, Pope-reading, road-middling, classical age: surely we would not have expected such dry old sticks as lived in that to cry? But they howled. More than the most dramatic Elizabethans, publicly, for little or nothing, the duelling gentlemen sobbed their eyes out whenever they could. They wrote proudly to Gray, telling him that they had cried on every page of his Elegy. They wailed over the sentimental Sterne. They quarrelled with old friends in the House of Commons, and were led out, in floods of tears, by admiring supporters. ‘Prodigious clamours and interruption arose from Mr. Fox’s friends; but he, though still applauding the French, burst into tears and lamentations on the loss of Burke’s friendship, and endeavoured to make atonement, but in vain, though Burke wept too’—Walpole to Miss Berry, 12.5.1791. As late as 1815, Creevey was relating that ‘there was not a dry eye in the House . . . Tierney sobbed so, he was unable to speak; I never saw a more affecting scene’. They assumed office in the newest Ministry with the same extraordinary emotion. ‘On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams [the Duke of Newcastle] went to court for the first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sank down: the yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the King’s feet, sobbed, and cried, “God bless your Majesty! God preserve your Majesty!” and lay there howling and embracing the King’s knees, with one foot so extended, that my Lord Coventry, who was luckily in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with—“For God’s sake, gentlemen, don’t look at a great man in distress,” endeavouring to shut the door, caught his Grace’s foot, and made him roar out with pain’—Walpole to Bentley, 17.3.1754. (On the same occasion, Selwyn was told that a lady of the Pelham family ‘had not shed one tear!’ ‘And pray,’ said Selwyn, ‘don’t she intend it?’) At the theatre, the whole house had to weep if it were a tragedy; it was de rigueur; if not, the play was considered to have failed. Fox would go to Drury Lane to pay Mrs. Siddons ‘the copious tribute of tears’ (Wraxall). ‘The tears came into my eyes’ (on seeing a play called Aelfrida being very badly performed at Covent Garden) ‘and streamed down the Duchess of Richmond’s lovely cheeks’—Walpole to Mason, 19.11.1773. A play by a certain Dr. Delap was a failure, but he consoled himself by stating that the leading lady had ‘spoilt his Hecuba with sobbing so much, and that she was really so moved that she fell into fits behind the scenes’—Gray to Mason, 17.3.1762.

They cried when they were in love. ‘When he was first in love with Lady Hertford’, wrote Creevey of his Prinney, ‘I have seen tears run down his cheeks at dinner.’ They also cried when they had fallen out of love, and were dismissing their mistresses. ‘I am just preparing to escort the poor little Tondino to Dover’, wrote the old reprobate Queensberry. ‘The sound of her voice fills my eyes with fresh tears. My dear George, j’ai le cœur si serré que je ne suis bon à present qu’à pleurer.’ They cried when their sinecures went wrong. ‘[The Prince] had just given Sheridan the office of Auditor of the Duchy of Cornwall, worth about £1200 per annum, and Sheridan was most anxious that the Prince should transfer the appointment to his son, Tom Sheridan, who was just then married. What Sheridan’s object in this was, cannot be exactly made out; whether it really was affection for Tom, or whether it was to keep the profit of the office out of reach of his creditors . . . he pursued it with the greatest vehemence; so much so, that I saw him cry bitterly one night in making his supplication to the Prince’—Creevey. They had lachrymose highwaymen, who, according to Walpole, cried so much that one could easily have stolen their blunderbusses. Even their executioners were tearful. ‘When the rope was put round his neck, he turned pale, but recovered his countenance instantly, and was but seven minutes from leaving the coach, to the signal given for striking the stage. As the machine was new, they were not ready at it: his toes touched it, and he suffered a little, having had time, by their bungling, to raise his cap; but the executioner pulled it down again, and they pulled his legs, so that he was soon out of pain, and quite dead in four minutes. He desired not to be stripped and exposed, and Vaillant promised him, though his clothes must be taken off, that his shirt should not. This decency ended with him: the sheriffs fell to eating and drinking on the scaffold, and helped up one of their friends to drink with them, as he was still hanging, which he did for above an hour, and then was conveyed back with the said pomp to Surgeons’ Hall, to be dissected. The executioners fought for the rope, and the one who lost it cried’—Walpole to Mann, 7.6.1760. Nor were they in the least ashamed of tears, but proud and jealous of their ability to shed them. According to Lord John Russell, ‘Lord Holland used to relate that on some occasion Lord Egremont hearing at a dinner party of the death of a friend, burst into tears and was obliged to leave the room. While everyone pitied him, Mr. Crawfurd said testily, “If I hear of the death of a friend, I burst into tears, and if I am overcome, I leave the room”.’

The jealousy of accomplished weepers came to a head in Fanny Burney, who became positively cattish about an unfortunate girl called Sophy Streatfield, because the latter was able to cry at will. It was because Fanny herself was probably the second-best weeper in the kingdom, and could not endure to be beaten. (The third-best weeper was Anna Seward who, on revisiting her father’s rectory in 1793, ‘could not restrain the gushing tears, through almost the whole of the five hours I passed in that dear village’.) Large tracts of Fanny’s employment at Court were passed in tears, which she recorded with relish. When a harmless mad woman had attempted to stab the King with a blunt table knife, without doing him any harm whatever, ‘the Queen glanced round upon the Duchess of Ancaster and Lady Charlotte Bertie, both of whom had burst into tears. “How I envy you!” she exclaimed; “I cannot cry!” ’ The news was reported in the Palace, and there was not ‘a dry eye in either of the Lodges, on the recital of his danger’. At the evening concert, ‘the Princesses wept continually. The Queen, still more deeply struck, could only from time to time hold out her hand to the King, and say—“I have you yet!” . . . When I went to the Queen at night, she scarce once oped her lips. Indeed, I could not look at her without feeling the tears ready to start into my eyes’.

The real howl came when George went mad. That old horror Thurlow, a Lord Chancellor of even more duplicity than most Lords Chancellor, spoke to the House ‘in a state of agitation which continued till a flood of tears came to his relief—he happened to be lying—and, when allowed to visit the lunatic monarch, he came out ‘so extremely affected . . . that the tears rolled down his cheeks, and his feet had difficulty to support him’. At Windsor, the Queen glided down a passage ‘drowned in tears’, and ‘the footmen, the housemaids, the porter, the sentinels, all cried, even bitterly, as they looked on’. It was as bad when the King got better, for his loyal subjects began to celebrate. ‘I assure you,’ wrote Fanny proudly, ‘I cried twenty times in the day.’

This was strange, when one comes to think of it, and unlike what ought to have been expected in an un-Romantic age. It was only when the Romantics themselves came along, that people began to dry their eyes. Here again, it was the opposite of the expected. It was the Romantics who began to frown on masculine emotion. They still wept a good deal, but uneasily, like Othello. By Tennyson’s time, people felt shamefaced when they did so. ‘Tears, idle tears’, they had to explain uncomfortably, before they could let them flow. Unpoetical people even tried to hide them under the bedclothes.

In the end, it was positively asserted, even by the poets, that weeping in males was not to be the thing. They were to work instead. For men must work, stated Charles Kingsley firmly, and women must weep, and the sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep. The fiat had gone forth, under which we labour today.

But will the fashion continue? There have been more sobbing centuries in the past, than there have been stoical ones. If this little history of emotion is accurate, then the changes from one fashion to the other have generally happened under a Queen—under Elizabeth, Anne or Victoria. Are we ourselves, under some future Elizabeth II, to revert to tears? Will Lord Lundy be brought back from governing New South Wales? Will the Commons again be drowned in limpid drops? Will some reader of this small anthology write to its author, as Mrs. Thrale wrote to Fanny Burney: ‘My eyes red with reading and crying, I stop every moment to kiss the book and to wish it was my Burney [Mr. White]? It is to be hoped so.

The Injured Queen

P erhaps the most dazzling scandal of the eighteenth century, and for that reason the best hushed up, was one which involved a King of Denmark, his physician in ordinary and a great-aunt of Queen Victoria’s. Her name was Caroline Matilda.

She was the youngest sister of George III, the posthumous daughter of Frederick Prince of Wales—though Glenbervie asserted that her real father was Lord Bute—and she was born in 1751.

‘She was reared’, says the Historical Gallery of Criminal Portraitures (1823), ‘in that secluded, domesticated way that it might be supposed the daughter of an opulent and educated country gentleman would be reared, except that she had a greater number of preceptors. As she improved in years and understanding, she became the darling of all her attendants and domestics. That peculiar cast of beauty developed itself which attaches to those females of robust frames, who grow corpulent as they advance in years. So rapid was her growth, that at fourteen years of age her appearance was more than commonly womanly. At fifteen, this half-blown rosebud was torn from her mother’s arms, and hurried away to a distant land, to be married to a giddy, dissolute, debilitated youth, her first cousin [the King of Denmark]. When she walked to the carriage which waited to convey her to Harwich, the paleness of her cheeks, and her eyes swollen with weeping checked the joyous ebullitions of the spectators.’

‘In her person, Matilda was above middle height, inclining to what the French call en bon point; her complexion was the finest imaginable, her face a regular oval. Her tresses were lighter than auburn.’

Other authorities stated that her hair was lighter than straw, and one of the complaints made by her new husband, after their first night together, was to exclaim pathetically: ‘Elle est si blonde!’

‘Christian the VII, her royal husband, was rather diminutive in person, and effeminate, if not insignificant in his features. His complexion was remarkably fair. He had a handsome mouth, fine set of teeth, and a remarkably small and elegantly formed hand. Had not his constitution been shattered by precocious and destructive indulgencies, he might have been an amorous man; as it was, Matilda found him lascivious and imbecile.—This is all that decency permits being said, the rest must be imagined.’

It need not be imagined, however, by people who understand French. Cabanes explains the oddities of Matilda’s husband:

The Tableau de la Cour de Copenhague, by M. Caillard, adds that although the King was a frequenter of brothels, yet, when he had persuaded a not-unwilling young lady at a masked ball to enter the neighbouring cabinet:

This tiny and effeminate figure—Horace Walpole said he was so small that he must have been cradled in a nutshell like a fairy—was syphilitic into the bargain, and had been brought up by a drunken father who approved of the birch.

As a result of all this, Matilda ‘saw her youthful charms slighted and contemned by her recreant lord, who, in the company of common prostitutes, revealed the secrets of the marriage bed, and spoke of his blooming bride in terms alike indelicate and untrue. Nor did it end here—for it will be seen [in the sequel] that he tainted her wholesome blood with a loathsome disease’.

The blooming bride’s annoyances were not confined to those of the marriage bed. There were social grievances as well, for the old court of Denmark was prudish, feudal and dull. ‘Few of the courtiers dress like gentlemen’, she was supposed to have written to her brother the King of England, ‘and their ladies appear in the circle inanimate, like the wax-figures in Westminster-abbey.’ Also, there stood in the background the traditional bogy of all bad-fairy stories, a stepmother-in-law.

Christian’s father, the tipsy King, had married again after the death of Christian’s mother, and had sired a second son by the second wife. ‘Juliana Maria, Queen Dowager of Denmark, was, when Matilda arrived in Copenhagen, yet in the prime of life, and the ascendancy of her talents had enabled her to form a strong party amongst the Danish nobles and clergy. This ambitious stepmother artfully masked her own eager desire of reigning, under the plausible pretext of regard to the welfare of her son.’ The implication is that the Dowager Queen promoted the tragedy which followed, from the start, in order to reign through her own son, the old King’s second one, Prince Ferdinand.

However that may be, and it seems unlikely, there was the sixteen-year-old Queen from England, surrounded by stuffy nobles and lutheran clergy (the wax-works), envied by the vigorous stepmother, despised by her decadent husband, and regretting the happy family atmosphere of the old palace at Kew. In spite of these drawbacks, the fecundity of the Brunswicks triumphed. Matilda found herself with child.

‘Inexpressible was the mental torture [of the wicked stepmother] when the pregnancy of the young bride was officially announced. As if to complete her dismay, on January 28th, 1768, the thunder of a thousand pieces of ordinance proclaimed the safe delivery of Queen Matilda of a male child.

‘The imbecility of the worn-out monarch, his corrupted morals, and aversion to his wife, were the real sources of that expensive tour which, a few months after the birth of his son, he made through Holland, Great Britain, France and Germany.’ The tour was passed in a ‘dazzling whirl of dissipation’, the actual expense being about two hundred thousand eighteenth century pounds. He was fêted at the various courts he visited—George III danced ‘The Hempdresser’ for two hours, according to Mrs. Montagu, at a Court Ball given in his honour and Madame de Vaucluse translated Hamlet into French at two days’ notice, for his visit to the theatre. He spent his spare time among the adoring populace or strutting in the brothels.

Walpole noted that he had ‘the sublime strut of his grandfather, or of a cock-sparrow’. He was ‘extremely amorous, but stays so short a time, that the ladies who intend to be undone must not haggle. They must do their business in the twinkling of an Allemande, or he will be flown’.

Two important figures had been among the suite which accompanied King Christian. One was Count Holck, the gay and facetious flagellant; the other was the king’s doctor, John Frederick Struensee—whose position can hardly have been a sinecure, what with the syphilis, the debauchery and the insanity upon the horizon. Christian had already taken to aphrodisiacs.

Struensee was the son of a clergyman. He had been born in 1737. He was considered ‘a libertine and a freethinker’, but he was a good doctor. He did his best to reason with the king, to discourage the aphrodisiacs, to restrain the excesses and to cure their results. There is no evidence that he was trying to gain control of Christian for interested motives; but, like many good doctors, he did gain control. A protracted battle between himself and Holck ended in the dismissal of the latter, upon their return to Denmark.

Meanwhile, ‘the fair, forlorn, neglected Matilda, during the absence of her giddy lord, appeared to feel a truly maternal affection for her child and had the infant and nurse to sleep in her apartment. In proportion as the king’s physical and intellectual powers decayed, Matilda had made more than commensurate advances. Her person was much increased in height and breadth; her air and appearance, more womanly, dignified, and imposing; her mind seemed to have acquired firmness; and, on their first interview, her enfeebled husband was almost alarmed at the beautiful and commanding aspect of his Queen: reflecting on his own imbecility, he seemed half reluctant, half ashamed to meet her.

‘Unfortunate victim of the enemies of an unprincipled stepmother, and a train of vicious courtiers—at that moment his whole system was tainted! Like the snail that crawls over the blushing nectarine, he denied his youthful bride. The poison, spreading through her veins, soon displayed its destructive influence.’

Struensee was already an expert in treating syphilis, so Christian recommended the doctor to Matilda, as a last gesture before relapsing into imbecility.

This happened in 1769, and the best commentary on what followed may be to state that in 1770 Struensee was created a Councillor and Maître de requestes, while in 1771 he had become Prime Minister, a count, and a member of the Order of Matilda. The Queen, like her husband, had fallen under the charm of a successful physician, who had cured her of her malady. Hers had not been a happy married life: she was buxom and nubile; perhaps she threw herself at Struensee’s head.

They confined the certifiable monarch to his apartments, and proceeded to behave themselves with the wildest indiscretion. Matilda was nineteen, her doctor thirty-three. He was ‘full five feet ten inches high, and very robust; his complexion fair; his eyes blue; his luxuriant hair was flaxen, rather inclined to yellow’. But ‘his neck was short, and he was a little in-kneed’. He fenced, danced and rode well. ‘He wore his hair dressed like the Queen, namely, two curls on each side, a high toupee, the hair behind plaited, and made fast with a comb.’

‘Even at this period,’ continues the Historical Gallery, several pages later, ‘the disposition of Matilda had lost much of that gentleness and good-nature which had distinguished her on her first arrival in Denmark. Her carriage had become more bold and confident; her temper more quick, severe, and imperious . . . Notwithstanding the daily exercise she took, either hunting or riding on horseback, Matilda grew extremely corpulent . . . Matilda had a bosom such as few men could look on without emotion, or women, without envy; and she displayed more of its naked charms than strict modesty could approve; and far more than the Danes had witnessed in the preceding queens . . . Matilda was a resolute and fearless horsewoman. It is believed that Struensee first led her to sit across her horse like a man. Perhaps her masculine and indelicate appearance, dressed in leathern smallclothes, booted and spurred, riding across a horse, disgraced Matilda in the estimation of the elegant and cultivated of her own sex, more than her undue preference for Struensee . . . That she made a noble figure when mounted on her majestic steed, and dashing through the woods after the chase, her cheeks flushed with ruddy health and violent exercise, may readily be conceded; but when she walked, the charm was dissolved: her abdominal rotundity, and knees that turned, for a male attire, too much inward, spoiled her figure, and gave her an awkward gait. The calves of her legs were of surprising circumference; her ancles large, her foot short and chubby.’

There was an economic reason also, which was working with those fatal leathern smallclothes, with the abdominal rotundity and the calves of surprising circumference, toward the downfall of the unhappy Queen.

The finances of Denmark were in a tottering state, as those at Versailles were to be two decades later. They had not been helped by the £200,000 spent on the King’s tour—a sum which would now be equivalent to two or even to four million. Reform and retrenchment were essential, and Dr. Struensee, the new Prime Minister, was something like a genius. His excellence as a doctor and psychiatrist; the things which they called him, such as ‘freethinker’ and ‘corrupted atheist’; everything now points, not to the conventional conclusion that he was a ‘finished sensualist’ who had seduced an innocent queen, but to the conclusion that he was a statesman and reformer of a high order. He was a radical premier, and that was why there had to be a Tory revolution.

To eighteenth century Denmark, his reforms must have been astounding. They included: liberty of the press, diminution of public tables, power to arrest noblemen for debt, disbanding the foot-guards (which was a blow against serfdom), foundation of charity schools, abolition of various sinecure revenues, a stamp act, foundling hospitals, limitation of reversionary offices, a reform of the marriage law, abolition of the death penalty for robbery, ‘No distinction to be made in christening natural children from those begotten in wedlock’, a reform of the law relating to breach-of-promise-of-marriage, and, perhaps most fatal of all, ‘a regulation for the diminution of law-suits in the courts of justice’. It has never been safe to interfere with the revenues of lawyers.

Struensee at the same time dismissed the incompetent officers of the crown, and appointed competent ones. He accomplished this in one year, which does not seem a bad record for a sensualist who had to satisfy an amorous Queen.

In any case it was clear to every Tory that the Premier and dictator would have to go. They might have got over the smallclothes well enough, leaving Matilda to be a Catherine the Great, if only Struensee had been content to be an Orloff.

While the storm brewed, says the Historical Record, ‘Struensee generally breakfasted in the Queen’s apartment . . . The royal palace of Hirschholm was the scene of high-wrought sensuality in every shape. Everything was there to inflame the passions, and afford immediate gratification! Night and day were alike devoted to revelry; it was usually two or three o’clock in the morning ere the Queen retired to her bed, and eleven before she appeared in her boudoir. The solitary King was served in his own apartment and was considered of little more importance than his dog.

‘The Queen Dowager, Juliana Maria, now began once more to show herself; her hopes again revived! She saw with secret delight, the embers of discontent glowing in every quarter of the kingdom; and if she could not procure the crown for her son Frederick, now in his nineteenth year, she hoped, by the aid of discontented nobles, and the military, during the life of Christian VII, to attain the sole exercise of sovereign power.’

Her intrigue came to a head in 1772, under circumstances of great peril. Juliana, with the assistance of a nobleman called Rantzau, bullied the witless King into signing an instrument for the arrest of Matilda, Struensee and an underling called Brandt. This instrument was necessary before any arrest could take place, yet all depended upon the King keeping silence. Had he revealed the application for this warrant to Matilda, it would have been equally easy for the latter to bully him into signing a new warrant for the arrest of Juliana—on a charge of treason. He could be bullied into anything, and feared both women equally. However, he held his peace.

‘On the night of the 16th of January, a grand ball and masquerade was given by the court. Queen Matilda, magnificently dressed, and full of spirits, danced with Count Struensee. The ball was closed by Queen Matilda and Prince Frederick; when the former, attended by Struensee, retired to her apartments for the last time! Struensee must have gone to the Queen’s room; for there his white bear-skin cloak was found a few hours afterwards; and Matilda must have descended by means of the secret staircase to Struensee’s apartment, where the guilty pair had their last tête-à-tête, and separated never to meet again—at least in this world!’

They had returned to their own beds, and Struensee had read himself to sleep, when the conspirators arrived to make the arrest. The Prime Minister was hurried away at crack of dawn in a hackney coach ‘accompanied by officers armed with loaded pistols and drawn swords’. The Queen, surprised en déshabillé by a posse with lighted tapers and the same drawn swords flashing in the darkness, made a determined effort to reach the King. If she had succeeded, she could probably have reversed the arrest. She was prevented.

‘Scarcely half dressed, wrapped up in a large roquelaine, looking with a stern indifference on the surrounding officers, Matilda descended to the gate; where a coach and four, surrounded by a strong body of dragoons, were waiting to escort her to Cronenborg castle.’

The wicked stepmother had won the game.

It was only too easy to break the sensitive Struensee by torture—by thumb-screws, his page said later. Chained to the wall so that he could scarcely sit or stand, in a dungeon, starved, but with the additional mockery of the use of his own silver chamber-pot, the wretched man confessed that he had been the Queen’s lover. She had given birth to a second child since the days of the thousand-gun salute—a girl—and this was declared to be the doctor’s.

He and his minion Brandt were hustled out of life with all the circumstances of medieval barbarity. At eleven o’clock in the morning of April 28th they were brought to the scaffold. ‘Oh! what a luxury is this fresh breeze!’ said Struensee, blinking from his cell. He trembled, rattling his chains, perhaps from the cold, perhaps because he was a man broken by torture, while Brandt was executed before his eyes.

‘As he sat at the foot of the scaffold waiting his turn to suffer, he saw with unutterable horror streams of blood pour down from the platform above: and so lively were his terrors, that he was unable, without support, to ascend the scaffold. And what a scene awaited him there! Around him lay spread, in horrible disorder, the naked limbs, besmeared with blood, of a man once dearer to him than his own brother!—In the dust there lay his head, the eyes and mouth distended, and the nerves and muscles yet quivering with expiring life. In a small tub were the bowels, heart, lungs, etc.—and the block on which the wretched Struensee had to lay his head, was yet reeking with warm blood!’

But enough of this. They soused the unhappy doctor down in the blood of his predecessor: they chopped off his hand and then his head, with part of his chin by mistake: they disembowelled him and sliced him into four parts: they dragged the carcases to a refuse-heap outside the city: ‘and there, for the four quarters of each body, four stout balks had, at equal distances, been inserted in the earth, with a taller pillar in the centre—upon the central post the head was fixed, a large iron spike passing up the neck, to which it was made fast; the right hand, nailed to a piece of board, was fixed below the head; a common cart or wagon wheel was fixed horizontally on the top of each of the four outward balks, to the nave of which a quarter of the body was chained, and in this state left to be devoured by the fowls of the air. The entrails were interred at the foot of each of the two central balks.’

Meanwhile, with King George’s sister held incommunicando in a northern fortress, opinion in England was topsy-turvy. Incomprehensible foreigners, with their confounded politics and knavish tricks, were insulting the royal blood. Ought not war to be declared on Denmark? Should the English fleet be sent to bombard Copenhagen—as it was in fact to be sent a generation later? How was the injured Queen to be saved? Fortunately for the international situation, George III was a sensible and not bloodthirsty person, and so was his envoy in Denmark, Sir Robert Murray Keith. By a mixture of firmness and moderation a compromise was reached. A frigate or two, but not the entire fleet, were sent across the North Sea, and Matilda, though divorced a mensa et toro, though deprived of the two children whom she loved, was at any rate allowed to sail away alive in an English vessel, to a kind of protective custody in the ancient palace of Zell. The tragedy was complete, and there it might have been allowed to rest.

Not at all. There was an Englishman called Wraxall, who later became a baronet, and whose interests in life were like those of Horace Walpole or of Lord Glenbervie—gossipy interests. Unfortunately, unlike Walpole or Glenbervie, Wraxall was prepared to interfere in the gossip as well as to record it. He was like a slightly fussy figure out of Anthony Hope, a kind of Rudolf Rassendyl. Certainly, considering the fate of Struensee, he was a brave man.

The Danish nobility, now governed by the wicked stepmother, found that they had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. A faction arose which desired the restoration of Matilda. Wraxall was approached, with all the paraphernalia of a Ruritanian intrigue: he was to contact the injured Queen: he was to carry letters, each of them as dangerous as a stick of dynamite, between her and George III: he was to endeavour to secure a loan from the English King, in order to replace his sister upon her rightful throne.

Wraxall threw himself into the conspiracy with delightful zeal. He posted up and down the continent in disguise and the depth of winter, tumbling into swollen rivers, sleeping at ale-houses under assumed names, presenting himself at garden doors in black masks with dark lanterns. King George was cautious, promising aid to a fait accompli—but not otherwise. The exiled Queen was gracious. Wraxall’s account of their last meeting has a certain charm.

‘I set out before eight, at which hour Mantel engaged to meet me. The weather was most tempestuous, accompanied with rain, and such darkness as rendered it difficult to discern any object. When I got to the drawbridge, no valet appeared; and a few moments afterwards, the guard being relieved, passed close to me. Wrapped in my great-coat, I waited, not without considerable anxiety. At length Mantel arrived. He said not a word, but, covering me all over with his large German cloak, and holding an umbrella over our heads, he led me in silence through the arch, into the area of the castle, from whence he conducted me to the queen’s library. There he left me, exhorting me to patience, it being uncertain at what hour her majesty could quit her company. The room was lighted up, and the book cases opened. In about thirty minutes the queen entered the apartment. She was elegantly dressed in crimson satin, and either had, or impressed me as having, an air of majesty, mingled with condescension, altogether unlike an ordinary woman of condition. [They talked for two hours.] When ready to leave me, she opened the door, but retained it a minute in her hand, as if willing to protract her stay. She never perhaps looked more engaging than on that night, in that attitude, and in that dress. Her countenance, animated with the prospect of her approaching emancipation from Zell, (which was in fact only a refuge and an exile) and anticipating her restoration to the throne of Denmark, was lighted up with smiles; and she appeared to be in the highest health.’

In perfect health! Within seven weeks, the unlucky Caroline was dead. All level-headed historians have pointed out with the greatest emphasis that she died from natural causes—‘of a contagious fever’ caught from one of the domestics. But consider: she was young and vigorous: she was at the head of a dynastic conspiracy: the wicked stepmother-in-law was a person of strong character: and Wraxall seldom held his tongue.

Whatever the truth, she died almost overnight, at the age of twenty-three; and the sister of George III, Queen of Denmark and Norway, was laid in the vault of the town church at Zell, near the coffin of her unfortunate grandmother Sophia Dorothea, the victim of George I.

Poor, bouncing, fat and flaxen Brunswick: she provided by no means the last of the scandals connected with the English royal family. The grand scandal of the Duke of Cumberland’s valet was still to come. But at any rate she provided a good one, for her few years, and we may perhaps agree that it is odd to find a great-aunt of Queen Victoria’s so closely connected with the headsman’s axe, with treasons, stratagems and spoils.

DR. JOHNSON

CAROLINA MATILDA

Ears

I f their tears were peculiar, perhaps their ears were even more so.

One of the odd things about the human race is that vices are subject to fashion, like clothes. Between the two German wars of the present century the fashionable vice was probably homosexuality. In Victoria’s day it was something more like bankruptcy. In Byron’s and Horace Walpole’s it was certainly incest: in the Caroline period, perhaps infidelity: in Elizabeth’s parricide, matricide or fratricide: in the Middle Ages, apostasy: in the days of Rome, poisoning: and in Greece, perhaps the greatest wickedness may have been pride against the Gods. The other vices existed, but these were the ones which at those times caught the public eye.

In the Age of Scandal the eminent frisson was incest. Horace Walpole wrote a book about it: Byron was thought to have committed it and so was Franklin: in Vatheck there was a suppressed chapter concerning it: de Sade of course investigated it: the Blue-stockings spoke of it with bated breath: Shelley wrote a play about it, and a sister of the great Lord Chatham was notorious for this peccadillo.

There does, however, seem to have been a small, peculiar and subsidiary devil—connected, astonishingly enough, with what one would have thought to be the least sexual of the human organs: the ear.

‘Modesty’, observes the Encyclopaedia Britannica ‘is not innate in man, and its conventional nature is easily seen from a consideration of the different ideas held by different races on this subject. With Mahommedan peoples it is sufficient for a woman to cover her face; the Chinese women would think it extremely indecent to show their artificially compressed feet, and it is even improper to mention them to a woman; in Sumatra and Celebes the wild tribes consider the exposure of the knee immodest; in central Asia the finger tips, and in Samoa the navel are similarly regarded.’ In just such a manner, the sexual attention of human beings belonging to any country seems to stray, during the course of centuries, from one part of the body to another—as is shown, incidentally, by the varying emphasis laid on different parts of the body in the cut of our clothes: by bustles, or by false bosoms or by stuffed shoulders.

A student of the Age of Scandal cannot fail to be impressed by the number of aural anecdotes which are to be found in its letters and memoirs: a form of anecdote which, in the present century, seems seldom or never to be related.

The explanation of this peculiar interest was evidently a sadistic one. It was the period of the pillory, in which malefactors had their ears cut off—and sometimes sewed them on again, out of defiance. Any part of the body which could be used for punishment was liable to acquire a morbid charm. Selwyn, an unpleasant person, would twit Wilkes about the probable fate of his ears: an elderly general in Fanny Burney, puffing and blowing, would cry out while reading the newspaper, ‘What a fellow is this? I should not be at all surprised if General Burgoyne cut off both his ears!’

Whatever the explanation, it is nice to think that this rather attractive organ, with the delicate pink cartilaginous whorls of helix and antihelix, has had its day of importance. It was so important that they actually went to war about it. A sea-captain whose ear had been amputated by the Spaniards brought it back in a box, and displayed it before the House of Commons, amid scenes of ‘the utmost public indignation’. They asked him what his feelings were when he found himself in the hands of such barbarians? ‘I committed my soul to God’, he nobly replied, ‘and my cause to my country.’ So England went to war with Spain in 1739, the War of Jenkins’s Ear, and this is probably the only war on record which has taken its name from a part of the human body.

Bluebeard

O n Whit-tues day [wrote Madame du Deffand to Horace Walpole on April 12th, 1768], he encountered a woman, about thirty years old, who asked him for alms. He questioned her at length, expressed his sympathy, and, to relieve her poverty, offered her the post of caretaker at his pleasure house near Paris. The woman agreed to come and report next day. On her arrival the Marquis showed her every nook and cranny of the house, and finally conducted her to an attic, where he locked the door and commanded her to undress. She threw herself at his feet, and implored him to spare her, as she was a respectable woman. He pulled a pistol from his pocket and ordered her to obey him; which she did forthwith. Then he bound her hands together, and beat her cruelly until the blood flowed. Producing a box of ointment from his coat he rubbed it into the wounds, then went out, leaving her lying on the floor. I do not know whether he gave her food or drink. In any case he did not return until the next day, when he examined her wounds and made certain that the ointment had taken effect. Then he seized a knife and slashed her whole body, smeared the ointment on again, and went away. The poor wretch succeeded in loosening her bonds, and escaped through the window to the street below. It is not known whether she was hurt by the fall. There was a great uproar, and the Lieutenant-General was informed. De Sade was arrested, and, they say, taken to Saumur prison. He made out that he was testing the healing powers of a certain ointment.

Next day, she added further details:

Louis-Donatien-François-Aldonze, Marquis and later Comte de Sade, though he never styled himself by the higher title, had been born in 1740, of an ancient and noble line which was descended, ironically enough, from Petrarch’s immaculate Laura. He had been educated at the French Eton of the period, had served as a cavalry officer through the Seven Years War, and had been briefly imprisoned for some youthful indiscretion connected with a disgraceful or perhaps with a forbidden publication. His family had decided to settle the young man by marrying him, and they had chosen a daughter of Monsieur de Montreuil, Président de la Cour des Aides, for the patrician alliance. Her name was Renée, and she was twenty years old. But unfortunately she had a younger sister called Louise, who was only thirteen.

The Marquis de Sade had preferred the younger to the older woman, but he had been informed that the elder sister must be married first. Always respectable, with the odd and almost bourgeois respectability of French noblemen, he had submitted to his fate. He had espoused Renée in the presence of the King and Queen, and had consoled himself with a petit maison elsewhere—in which the affaire of the ointment took place. Apart from the previous imprisonment, he had not been lucky enough to enjoy the best of reputations, even before, and there had been minor scandals.

‘I have strictly charged Brissant’, the police inspector Marais had reported in 1764, ‘to supply him with no more girls for his pleasure house.’ Brissant was a brothel keeper.

Well, the female of the ointments was hushed up, as Madame du Deffand predicted. She consented to keep her mouth shut in return for a husband and a pension—no bad return, said contemporary opinion, for a mere whipping. The newly-wedded Marquis retreated to his castle in Provence with the Marquise—and, after some years, with the additional agrémen of her younger sister. The latter became his mistress.

The next excitement was that de Sade paid a visit to a brothel in Marseilles, where he administered aphrodisiac pills, containing cantharides, to the young ladies of the house. He also birched them, and made them birch him, and he coupled with them and with his valet. Two of them thought that they were being poisoned by the pills, and resented this, while they all behaved in a scandalous manner which resulted in a crisis. The Marquis was instantly indicted on various charges, including sodomy, and was sentenced to death. He fled from justice, taking his wife’s younger sister with him. They separated after some time in Italy, where Louise may or may not have died: de Sade was arrested and imprisoned in a castle at Chambéry in Savoy for five months, but escaped with the aid of his wife. He returned, sub rosa, to his castle. In 1774 he was compelled to flee once more, but came back in the same year with a ‘young secretary’, to the enjoyment of two little girls who had been provided by his considerate spouse. In 1775 there was renewed trouble with the little girls—it was difficult to exhibit their persons before aggrieved parents until the knife marks healed—and also there was trouble with a chambermaid called Nanon. There was a mysterious room at the castle, draped in black, with pornographic pictures. The Marquis was compelled to flee once more. But he was back again in 1776, with a new young secretary who could scarcely read or write, and, toward the end of the year, one of the more exasperated fathers of his domestic staff endeavoured to shoot him with a pistol. This resulted in complicated law-suits, after the French fashion, and de Sade was driven into hiding yet again, by the arrival of six horsemen who had been sent to arrest him.

The year 1777 found him still under sentence of death for the cantharides affair, with new troubles about cooks and chambermaids and little girls in the offing, but with great efforts being made to ‘arrange’ the complications. He went to Paris in pursuit of these negotiations.

So far, so good. It was in the best tradition of Gilles de Retz, and the archetypal ‘sadist’ had been living up to his future reputation. But now there began to appear an unfortunate, an even ridiculous rift in the lute. It was the music-hall joke. The Marquis de Sade had a mother-in-law.

Madame la Présidente de Montreuil was a person of strong character and decided opinions. Her elder daughter had been married by a libertine who was decidedly unbalanced: her younger daughter had been debauched by him, a peccadillo which was, in the days of deceased-wife’s-sisters, equivalent to incest: but, worst of all, the Marquis was playing ducks-and-drakes with the family money. Any amount of incest or knife-slashing would have been preferable to this. The écus, the beautiful livres, the rentes themselves were being dissipated by this exasperating pervert, in hush-money to his various victims, and that no mother-in-law in France could reasonably be expected to suffer. Obviously he would have to be muzzled before it was too late—would have to be locked up, somehow or other, so long as there was no loss of honour, to save the gold. Madame la Présidente set herself down to achieve this object—to rescue, she said, her poor daughter from a situation of imminent danger to life and limb.

The poor daughter, however, was recalcitrant. Far from resenting the whips, the knives, the domestics, the little girls, the aphrodisiacs, the younger sister and the Chamber of Horrors, Madame la Marquise de Sade, a rather gauche and gangling person with a face not unlike a horse’s, had settled down to married life with complacency: she was behaving positively as if she were the owner of a private bordello: she had given birth to three children: she was determined, not only not to allow the Marquis to be arrested on any new charge, not only not to deny him his minor pleasures, but also to reverse the condemnation of Marseilles by every means in her power.

From 1777 the Bluebeard sank into the background, eclipsed by the titanic struggle between his wife and his mother-in-law. He was arrested in Paris, transported to Aix, escaped on the way to Vincennes, was re-arrested and consigned to the Bastille. Immured therein, until 1790, he vanished beneath the surface of an incredible correspondence: of lettres de cachet, letters to attorneys, money matters, tracasseries, intrigues, debts, bribes, manœuvres and trouble with the local curé. The horrible old Présidente rode over all, the reins in her hand, and the addlepated wife, struggling on toward the ‘great object’ of his liberation, besieged every possible quarter with every possible style of letter.

But what was the Marquis doing meanwhile? Always a timid and inefficient sadist—‘Punit-on les pensées?’ he once demanded in a pet—hamstrung by French aristocratic ideas about the honour of his ancient line and particularly about its revenues, he had, even in his palmiest days, preferred to have an excuse, an explanation, an alibi, even in the darkest of his aberrations. Now, safely locked away in the Bastille where there was nobody to slash, a transformation began to come over him. His first imprisonment had been for writing. His tendency had always been in a way experimental—experiments with ointments or with Spanish flies. Now the scientific attitude took possession of him. He commenced author.

A German authority, as indefatigable an author as the Marquis himself, and nearly as devoid of humour, has produced a précis of the first great novel, Justine. The extract runs to two chapters, of which the following quotation covers only four paragraphs:

For thirteen years of imprisonment, through multitudinous seas of similar atrocities, but gamboged by them rather than incarnadined, the dauntless nobleman plodded on. ‘Je parricidais,’ cried one of his characters, ‘j’incestuais, j’assassinais, je prostiluais, je sodomais.’ The wild creations of his thoroughgoing Gallic brain violated or submitted to or murdered or were massacred by their fathers, mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins and aunts. They expired singly or in the mass. There was even an apparatus

But the singular thing about all this ridiculous nonsense was that it was unnatural. If there was any fact about real perverts which was indisputable, it was that they were exclusive. Pederasts were uninterested in the opposite sex, masochists were bored by coprophagists, fetishists were out of touch with necrophilists and sadists were quite unmoved by the warmest ardours of the Lesbian urge. The Marquis de Sade, however, was inspired by them all. Scribbling away in his dungeon of the Bastille, where he was allowed a servant and an excellent cuisine, he swept them all into his net: wrote about them with scientific, with classic, with crazy zeal. He must have endured countless hours of dedicated and selfless boredom, in order to make his catalogue complete. He was, in fact, the archetypal Freud.

‘This’, wrote Mr. Geoffrey Gorer of the Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, ‘is not only the first psychopathia sexualis, but by far the most complete ever written, despite the scientific and pseudo-scientific collections of the last fifty years. It includes every range of intellectual, sensual and physical activity which can possibly be brought into this category. Dr. Bloch was undoubtedly justified in claiming for this work a very high place as a scientific document, and claiming that it alone would place de Sade among the very first writers of his century.’ Not only Dr. Bloch. Mr. Gorer himself makes out an excellent case for regarding the Marquis as an ideologist of the school of Marx and as an anthropologist not unworthy of Sir James Frazer. ‘The second [note] is an elaborate discussion of the real meaning of the name Peter and the Holy Pun made on that word in which he decides that the Christian Peter is the same as Arnac, Hermes and Janus of the ancients, all of whom had the gift of opening the gates to some paradise; and he employs Phoenician, Hebrew and Latin etymology to prove that Peter, or Kephas, can mean Opener as well as Rock.’ The novels had become text-books, anything but erotic, and the Marquis had to pay the price.

Once—so a legend of the nineteenth century runs—he had been a fine, upstanding man, fair-haired, blue-eyed, having a particularly gentle manner with women.

It was a misleading legend, for a policeman sent to arrest him had addressed him as ‘petit homme’, and one of the witnesses for his prosecution at Marseilles described him as ‘shorter than his servant, fair-haired and rather plump’.

Now, what with the confinement and the midnight oil, his eyes were hurting him sadly, his stomach had grown obese, and he was suffering from the occupational diseases of the scholar.

So it would have gone on, presumably, with the intransigent mother-in-law on top, the muddled wife gradually fading into the background and the first psychiatrist scratching away with a succession of quill pens, if it had not been for the wheel of history. But the wheel turned, the French Revolution broke out, lettres de cachet were abolished, political prisoners were liberated, and the Marquis de Sade found himself blinking once more in the common light of day.

As a person who had been persecuted by the old regime—nobody remembered why—he became one of the few patricians whose adherence was acceptable to the new order. He was caressed, fêted, adopted by the Reign of Terror, allowed to pronounce an oration on the murder of Marat. Now would have been the time to put his sadism into practice, to be signally revenged upon the family of his mother-in-law—a çi-devant aristocrat—or to try out a few of the mass murders in his own books, and the machines for simultaneous executions, even more spectacular than the guillotine.

On the contrary, the miserable bluebeard, finding the Président de Montreuil standing by his carriage hat in hand, instantly forgave past sharpnesses, assisted his relatives, actually presided at the court which acquitted the Montreuils, refused to set his hand to the more bloodthirsty proscriptions, and was very soon back in prison for ten months, as a protector of émigrés. The ties of honour, property and timidity had triumphed once again.

They let him out. He was old now and as fat as Falstaff. He was living with an elderly tart or actress called Quesnet, who enjoyed eating as much as he did, and he was describing himself as ‘Citizen de Sade, man of letters’. The case books of practical psychology continued, to their fatal end.

Napoleon, it is said, suffered from fatty degeneration of the testicles. Whether it was this attraction—another speciality to add to the catalogue—or whether it was the ignoble birth of the Corsican that had annoyed him, the infatuated Marquis now wrote a new scabrous novel, in which Bonaparte figured as d’Orsec, an anagram for ‘Corse’, and Josephine as Zoloé. It was called Zoloé et ses deux Acolytes. The future Emperor knew how to act.

Off went de Sade to prison once again—he had spent nearly half his life there—and thence to a lunatic asylum. Fortunately it was the best kind of mad-house. He was allowed to keep Quesnet with him: there was a theatre in which the lunatics performed, and he was allowed to run it. A fellow prisoner, long afterward, saw him there.

He died in 1814, at the age of seventy-four, leaving a will ‘written in his sound senses’, in which he pleaded that his body should not be dissected. It was to be left in the coffin for 48 hours, without screwing down, and then was to be transported to one of his territories near Epernon, where it was to be buried in unconsecrated ground. Acorns were to be planted above it, and, when the roots of these and their attendant thicket had amalgamated with his bones, his name, ‘he flattered himself’, would vanish from the surface of the earth.

Not at all. They chopped the gross old body up without a qualm: they buried the remains, just like those of anybody else, in the nearest consecrated soil: his name, far from being forgotten, gave a substantive, adjective and adverb to every civilized language. Nor was this sufficient. An ardent phrenologist dug him up again in the name of Science, examined the skull, and reported gravely that ‘the bumps of tenderness and love of children are as prominent as in the head of Héloïse, that model of tenderness and love’. Sainte-Beuve said that he was as great as Byron; Swinburne said that he was greater. Part of one of his novels was reprinted in 1848 as Communist propaganda. Some of his unpublished works are still in the British Museum. They require the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and of two other trustees, before they can be examined by anybody to this very day.

LE MARQUIS DE SADE

NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

Taste in High Life by Hogarth. A satire on the fashions of 1742. On the left a pyramid of playing cards, with a bill inscribed: ‘Lady Basto, Dr. to Jn. Pip for cards.’ The monkey in a bag wig with a quizzing glass is reading the day’s menu. ‘Pour Dinner, Cox combs, Ducks Tongues, Rabbits Ears, Fricasey of Snails, Grande d’oeuts [sic] Beurre.’ The gentleman with muff who nicely conducts his clouded cane is said to be Lord Portmore, the little black page, Ignatius Sancho. The top left-hand picture shows Monsieur Desnoyer in a ballet, surrounded by ‘insects’ (‘Come, let me flap this bug with gilded wings . . .’) and the top right-hand one shows various ‘exoticks’, including a queue and other wigs, muffs, solitaires, petticoats and French-heeled shoes. The large centre picture shows a classical statue of Venus in stays, high-heeled shoes and hoop petticoat, while in the background a cupid tries to slim a fat lady and in the foreground another cupid burns fashionable garments. The circular pictures are of a lady in a hooped skirt and of a blind man looking towards her. The fire screen shows a hooped lady squashed into a sedan chair. Don’t miss the enormous cup and saucer which are being admired and the prodigious lap-dog on the cushion in right foreground.

Westminster School, by Gillray. This is a political cartoon of Fox punishing the Opposition in Parliament (Westminster). Pitt, the victim, cries, ‘O pardon me & I’ll promise you on my honor that I will Honestly & boldly endeavour to reform . . .’ Fox replies: ‘That’s all Twaddle!—so here’s for your India Task! there! there! there! & there’s for your blocking up the old Women’s Windows & making them drink Tea in the dark! there! there! & here’s for . . . O I’ve a a a hundred accounts to settle, there! there! there! there! there! there!’ In the background a member of the opposition exclaims: ‘Pray forgive us this once and we’ll do so no more!!!’ Underneath is written:

John, Lord Hervey (Sporus) by Vanloo.

Horace Walpole by Rosalba.

Sir Robert Walpole by Hysing.

Gin Lane by Hogarth. Over the door of the public-house called the Gin Royal in left foreground: ‘Drunk for a Penny, Dead Drunk for Two Pence, Clean Straw for Nothing.’ The ballad being sold by the cadaver in right foreground is marked: ‘The Downfall of Mdm. Gin.’ The drunken poxed lady takes snuff and drops her baby. A slothful couple gnaw a bare bone with a dog, while a snail crawls to the woman’s shoulder. At S. Gripe’s pawnshop, a carpenter pledges his tools, a housewife her cooking things. The tipsy old woman in the wheelbarrow is having one for the road. A mother gives her infant a drink: two charity-girls are toasting each other opposite Kilman the Distillers’ where the Mob queues for gin: two drunks fight with crutch and stool: a dancing madman with a bellows has transfixed a naked child with a spit: a barber has hanged himself in a garret: a dead woman is being coffined while her baby weeps, opposite the undertaker’s: the houses are falling down: rather a nice dog is feeling sorry for the ballad-seller. Written beneath:

George Selwyn and his Dog ‘Râton’ by Reynolds.

Miss Chudleigh in the character of Iphigenia at the Venetian Ambassador’s Masquerade. This is not the engraving by J. Cook, mentioned in the text, which showed her with her ravishing smirk.

Admiral Byng by Hudson. He is wearing the great, gold-laced coat which he hurled into the sea off Gibraltar, upon being recalled to England to stand his trial.

Fast Day by Newton. One cleric observes: ‘Here’s to our old Friend.’ To which the other replies: ‘You mean the Church I suppose.’ Underneath is written:

On March 1st, 1793, the King proclaimed ‘a public Fast and Humiliation’ for April 19th for ‘God’s Blessing and assistance on our arms and for restoring and perpetuating peace, safety and prosperity . . . ’.

Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism by Hogarth. On the chandelier, top left: (upper globe) ‘Deserts of New Purgatory’; (lower globe) ‘A New and Correct Globe of HELL by Romaine. Lead Lake. Pitch and Tar Rivers. Bottomless Pit. Horrid Zone. Parts Unknown. The Brimstone Ocean. Eternal Damnation Gulf.’ The Preacher, dangling puppets of witch and demon, inspired by a cherub whose placard says ‘To St. Money-trap’, is so excited by his own oratory—which has cracked the sounding board—that his wig flies off, showing a Jesuit’s tonsure and his gown flies open, showing the actor’s harlequin dress. His fervour is measured by a kind of thermometer on right, hanging from a human nose and graded from ‘Natl. Tone’ up ‘W - d’s scale of Vociferation’ to the ‘Bull Roar’ of ‘Blood, Blood, Blood, Blood’. From the pulpit hang images of Sir Geo. Viliers, Mrs. Veal and (?) Caesar’s Ghost. The clergyman’s text is ‘I speak as a Fool’. His dissenting clerk, whose desk is inscribed ‘Continually do cry’ looks sidelong at a couple of lustful lovers in the pulpit pew, while the hymn on his desk reads: ‘Only Love to us be giv’n, Lord we ask no other Heav’n. Hymn by G. Whitfield page 130.’ The congregation nurses images of the Virgin with candles. A female devil whispers in the sleeping ear of one. A Jew with ‘Bloody’ written on his knife cracks a flea. A charlatan shoeblack spews up rusty nails; his basket, resting on ‘Demonology by King James 1st’, contains ‘Whitfield’s Journal’. The ‘Poors Box’ is a mousetrap. In the right foreground another thermometer, resting on Wesley’s Sermons and Glanvil on Witches, rises out of the human brain from Suicide through Lust to Raving Madness. It is surmounted by the figures of two ghosts—the cock-lane ghost with her hammer, and the Tedworth drummer. Outside the window an Infidel Turk smokes philosophically while he watches the goings-on. In the foreground, Mary Tofts gives birth to a litter of rabbits. This woman, a native of Godalming (1701-63) ‘declared that she had been frightened by a rabbit while at work in the fields’. She convinced the local apothecary and also a royal surgeon that she had given birth to 15 rabbits. Another royal surgeon seemed doubtful, and she was finally exposed as a cheat, after much excitement, by Sir Richard Manningham. She was imprisoned in 1740 for receiving stolen goods, after having attracted the attention of Hogarth (twice), Voltaire, William Whiston, Sir Hans Sloane, Pope, the King and the entire British nation.

Under the engraving is written: ‘Believe not every Spirit but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false Prophets are gone out into the World. 1 John, Ch. 4, V. 1.’

Dr. Johnson by Northcote.

Carolina Matilda by Cotes. 1766.

Le Marquis de Sade. Biberstein sc. ‘De la collection de Mr. H . . . de Paris’. Probably not an actual portrait.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.

[The end of The Age of Scandal by T. H. (Terence Hanbury) White]