Had it not been for the trenchant pen of his cousin, Anthony Ashley
Cooper, the first Lord Shaftesbury, we should know nothing of Mr.
Hastings; but as it happens, a portrait of Mr. Hastings being painted,
the Earl was amused to pit his pen against the brush of the artist and
append the result to the picture. So that Mr. Hastings used to hang on
the wall at Wimborne St. Giles’s, near Cranbourn, in Dorset (one of the
Shaftesbury seats), doubly limned. Where he is to-day I know not; but
the Earl’s words remain and are accessible. I take them in the form
which follows from the “Connoisseur” for Thursday, 14 August, 1755, and
I may in passing say that in turning over the leaves of this leisurely
little breakfast-table companion it was not a little disquieting to
think what good papers they had in London one hundred and fifty-six
years ago, before the days of amalgamation.
As to the portrait of Mr. Hastings, I have seen an engraving of it in
one of Hutchins’s Dorsetshire books, and it is a crude enough thing--a
little odd old man, with a pointed beard, sharp eyes, and a long staff
in his right hand--not so much a patriarch’s staff as a surveyor’s
pole. Nothing in it to suggest that he loved spaniels, for example, or
knew the best thing to do with a disused pulpit. Yet he did.
Now for the shrewd and cryptic statesman who first made the admirable
remark (since given to others) that “Wise men are of but one religion,”
adding to the lady who inquired what that was, “Wise men never
tell.” He begins thus: “In the year 1638 lived Mr. Hastings; by his
quality son, brother, and uncle to the Earls of Huntingdon. He was
... low, very strong, and very active; of a reddish flaxen hair.
His clothes always green cloth, and never all worth (when new) five
pounds. His house was perfectly of the old fashion, in the midst of
a large Park well stocked with deer; and near the house rabbits to
serve his kitchen; many fish-ponds; great store of wood and timber; a
bowling-green in it, long but narrow, full of high ridges, it being
never levell’d since it was plough’d. They used round sand bowls;
and it had a banqueting house like a stand, built in a tree.”--The
mansion no longer stands in its entirety. It was pulled down, with the
exception of two wings, at the beginning of the last century. One of
these wings, however, contains the kitchen, and gives ample evidence of
the hospitality which, as we shall see, was practised there.
Mr. Hastings “kept all manner of sport hounds, that ran buck, fox,
hare, otter, and badger. And hawks, long and short winged. He had
all sorts of nets for fish. He had a walk in the New Forest, and the
manor of Christ Church. This last supplied him with red deer, sea and
river fish. And indeed all his neighbours’ grounds and royalties were
free to him, who bestowed all his time on these sports, but what he
borrowed to caress his neighbours’ wives and daughters; there being not
a woman in all his walks, of the degree of a yeoman’s wife or under,
and under the age of forty, but it was extremely her fault if he was
not intimately acquainted with her. This made him very popular; always
speaking kindly to the husband, father, or brother, who was, to boot,
very welcome to his house whenever he came.” (“Popular” is a good word,
so good, in this connexion, that one has to pause a little to savour
it.) Thinking of him thus occupied, if ever, you would say, an old,
whimsical bachelor was portrayed, he is portrayed here. But you would
be wrong, for Mr. Hastings was married. It was his wife who brought him
Woodlands, and she did not die till 1638, when he was eighty-seven.
They had, moreover, a son. Lord Shaftesbury, who was something of a
cynic, suppressed this detail. It amused him to eliminate Mrs. Hastings.
His lordship goes on to describe the free-and-easy (and, on the face
of it, wifeless) character of Mr. Hastings’ house. “A house not so
neatly kept as to shame him or his dirty shoes: the great hall strow’d
with marrow bones, full of hawks’ perches, hounds, spaniels, and
terriers; the upper side of the hall hung with foxskins of this and the
last year’s killing; here and there a polecat intermixt; game-keepers’
and hunters’ poles in great abundance. The parlour was a large room
as properly furnished. On a great hearth paved with brick lay some
terriers, and the choicest hounds and spaniels. Seldom but two of the
great chairs had litters of young cats in them, which were not to be
disturbed, he having always three or four attending him at dinner, and
a little white stick of fourteen inches lying by his trencher, that he
might defend such meat as he had no mind to part with to them.” (One
does not feel much room for a Mrs. Hastings here. She kept her own
quarters, I imagine.)
I should like to see a picture of old Mr. Hastings at his meals--with
all his animals about him and his hand holding his little white stick.
Steinlen, who designed that fine poster for Nestlé’s milk--the cats
clamouring for the little girl’s breakfast--could draw the animals; but
for the little old gentleman, with his red hair and green clothes and
great age, you would want a Dendy Sadler or Stacy Marks.
The description of the house continues: “The windows (which were very
large) served for places to lay his arrows, cross-bows, stone-bows,
and other such like accoutrements. The corners of the room full of the
best-chose hunting and hawking poles. An oyster table at the lower end,
which was of constant use twice a day all the year round, for he never
failed to eat oysters, before dinner and supper, through all seasons;
the neighbouring town of Poole supply’d him with them. The upper part
of the room had two small tables and a desk, on the one side of which
was a Church Bible, and on the other the Book of Martyrs. On the
tables were hawks’ hoods, bells, and such like; two or three old green
hats, with their crowns thrust in so as to hold ten or a dozen eggs,
which were of a pheasant kind of poultry, he took much care of and
fed himself. Tables, dice, cards, and boxes were not wanting. In the
hole of the desk were store of tobacco-pipes that had been used.”--Mr.
Hastings must have been one of the earliest of the smokers, since he
was born as far back as 1551.
“On one side of this end of the room was the door of a closet wherein
stood the strong beer and the wine, which never came thence but in
single glasses, that being the rule of the house exactly observ’d.
For he never exceeded in drink or permitted it.” In another account
of Mr. Hastings his iron rule with regard to liquor was suggested
to have caused much unhappiness to his guests. And I must admit that
there seems to be something wrong in a house where you may not see
the bottle, much less handle it. But, on the other hand, it is such
unexpected whims and unreasonableness that are the life-blood of these
old originals. Any dull creature can be reasonable.
Now comes a priceless touch: “On the other side was the door into an
old chapel, not used for devotion. The pulpit, as the safest place, was
never wanting of a cold chine of beef, venison pasty, gammon of bacon,
or great apple pye, with thick crust, extremely baked.” “Never wanting”
is splendid. One longs to know more of the service of this house--of
the cook who fell in so complacently with such a master’s needs and
ways. “Never wanting!”
Like Bishop Corbet’s fairies, Mr. Hastings was of the old profession.
“His table cost him not much, though it was good to eat at. His sports
supplied all but beef and mutton, except Fridays, when he had the best
salt fish (as well as other fish) he could get; and was the day his
neighbours of best quality most visited him. He never wanted a London
pudding, and always sung it in with ‘My part lies therein-a.’” “He
always sung it in.” Here lies an old custom indeed, dead, I suppose, as
Mr. Hastings himself and all his spaniels and kittens. Who sings in a
pudding to-day? And, indeed, what pudding is worth singing in? Not the
rice which I had yesterday, at any rate.
And so we come to the end: “He was well-natured but soon angry....
He lived to be a hundred; never lost his eyesight, but always wrote
and read without spectacles; and got on horseback without help. Until
past four score he rode to the death of a stag as well as any.” He was
buried in Horton church in 1650 at the age of ninety and nine, and
England will never know anything like him again. Gone are such spacious
days and ways; gone such idiosyncrasy and humour. Only, I imagine,
on the bowling-greens are Mr. Hastings’ characteristics to be still
observed; for our old devotees of that leisurely contest, that most
pacific warfare, cannot in their attitudes, gestures and expressions
differ much from the Squire of Woodlands. Just so did he, three hundred
years ago, contort and twist his frame, as he watched his bowl’s
career and bent every nerve and fibre to influence it to swerve at the
last dying moment on the jack between his two rivals. These elemental
anxieties do not change.