free from all such distractions, in study and in the performance of
happy and healthful filial and housewifely duties. Destiny, too, was
kind to me, likewise, by relieving me from care respecting the other
great object of human anxiety,—to wit, Money. The prophet’s prayer,
“Give me neither poverty nor riches” was granted to me, and I have
probably needed to spend altogether fewer thoughts on £ s. d. than could
happen to anyone who has either to solve the problems “How to keep the
Wolf from the door” and “How to make both ends meet?” or “How, justly
and conscientiously, to expend a large income?” Wealth has only come to
me in my old age, and now it is easy to know how to spend it. Thus it
has happened that in early womanhood and middle life I enjoyed a degree
of real _leisure_ of mind possessed by few; and to it, I think, must be
chiefly attributed anything which in my doings may have worn the
semblance of exceptional ability. I had good, sound working brains to
start with, and much fewer hindrances than the majority of women in
improving and employing them. _Voilà tout._
I began by saying that I was well-born in the true sense of the words,
being the child of parents morally good and physically sound. I reckon
it also to have been an advantage,—though immeasurably a minor one,—to
have been well-born, likewise, in the conventional sense. My ancestors,
it is true, were rather like those of Sir Leicester Dedlock, “chiefly
remarkable for never having done anything remarkable for so many
generations.”[3] But they were honourable specimens of county squires;
and never, during the four centuries through which I have traced them,
do they seem to have been guilty of any action of which I need to be
ashamed.
My mother’s father was Captain Thomas Conway, of Morden Park,
representative of a branch of that family. Her only brother was Adjutant
General Conway, whose name Lord Roberts has kindly informed me is still,
after fifty years, an “honoured word in Madras.” My father’s progenitors
were, from the fifteenth century, for many generations owners of
Swarraton, now Lord Ashburton’s beautiful “Grange” in Hampshire; the
scene of poor Mrs. Carlyle’s mortifications. While at Swarraton the
heads of the family married, in their later generations, the daughters
of Welborne of Allington; of Sir John Owen; of Sir Richard Norton of
Rotherfield (whose wife was the daughter of Bishop Bilson, one of the
translators of the Bible); and of James Chaloner, Governor of the Isle
of Man, one of the Judges of Charles I. The wife of this last remarkable
man was Ursula Fairfax, niece of Lord Fairfax.[4]
On one occasion only do the Cobbes of Swarraton seem to have transcended
the “Dedlock” programme. Richard Cobbe was Knight of the Shire for Hants
in Cromwell’s short Parliament of 1656, with Richard Cromwell for a
colleague. What he did therein History saith not! The grandson of this
Richard Cobbe, a younger son named Charles, went to Ireland in 1717 as
Chaplain to the Duke of Bolton with whom he was connected through the
Norton’s; and a few years later he was appointed Archbishop of Dublin,—a
post which he held with great honour until his death in 1765. On every
occasion when penal laws against Catholics were proposed in the Irish
House of Lords Archbishop Cobbe contended vigorously against them,
dividing the House again and again on the Bills; and his numerous
letters and papers in the Irish State-Paper office (as Mr. Froude has
assured me after inspection) bear high testimony to his liberality and
integrity in that age of corruption. Two traditions concerning him have
a certain degree of general interest. One, that John Wesley called upon
him at his country house,—my old home, Newbridge;—and that the interview
was perfectly friendly; Wesley approving himself and his work to the
Archbishop’s mind. The other is; that when Handel came to Dublin,
bringing with him the MS. of the _Messiah_, of which he could not
succeed in obtaining the production in London, Archbishop Cobbe, then
Bishop of Kildare, took lively interest in the work, and under his
patronage, as well as that of several Irishmen of rank, the great
Oratorio was produced in Dublin.
Good Archbishop Cobbe had not neglected the affairs of his own
household. He bought considerable estates in Louth, Carlow, and Co.
Dublin, and on the latter, about twelve miles north of Dublin and two
miles from the pretty rocky coast of Portrane, he built his country
house of Newbridge, which has ever since been the home of our family. As
half my life is connected with this dear old place, I hope the reader
will look at the pictures of it which must be inserted in this book and
think of it as it was in my youth, bright and smiling and yet dignified;
bosomed among its old trees and with the green, wide-spreading park
opened out before the noble granite _perron_ of the hall door. There is
another country house on the adjoining estate, Turvey, the property of
Lord Trimleston, and I have often amused myself by comparing the two.
Turvey is really a _wicked-looking_ house, with half-moon windows which
suggest leering eyes, and partition walls so thick that secret passages
run through them; and bedrooms with tapestry and _ruelles_ and hidden
doors in the wainscot. There were there, also, when I was young, certain
very objectionable pictures, beside several portraits of the “beauties”
of Charles II.’s court, (to the last degree _decolletées_) who had been,
no doubt, friends of the first master of the house, their contemporary.
In the garden was a grotto with a deep cold bath in it, which, in the
climate of Ireland, suggested suicide rather than ablution. Altogether
the place had the same suggestiveness of “deeds of darkness” which I
remember feeling profoundly when I went over Holyrood with Dr. John
Brown; and it was quite natural to attach to Turvey one of the worst of
the traditional Irish curses. This curse was pronounced by the Abbess of
the neighbouring convent (long in ruins) of Grace-Dieu when Lord
Kingsland, then lord of Turvey, had by some nefarious means induced the
English Government of the day to make over the lands of the convent to
himself. On announcing this intelligence in his own hall to the
assembled nuns, the poor ladies took refuge very naturally in
malediction, went down simultaneously on their knees, and repeated after
their Abbess a denunciation of Heaven’s vengeance on the traitor. “There
should never want an idiot or a lawsuit in the family; and the rightful
heir should never see the smoke of the chimney.” Needless to add,
lawsuits and idiots have been plentiful ever since, and, after several
generations of absentees, Turvey stands in a treeless desert, and has
descended in the world from lordly to humble owners.
How different was Newbridge! Built not by a dissolute courtier of
Charles II., but by the sensible Whig, and eminently Protestant
Archbishop, it has as open and honest a countenance as its neighbour has
the reverse. The solid walls, about three feet and a-half thick in most
parts, keep out the cold, but neither darken the large, lofty rooms, nor
afford space for devious and secret passages. The house stands
broadly-built and strong, not high or frowning; its Portland-stone
colour warm against the green of Irish woods and grass. Within doors
every room is airy and lightsome, and more than one is beautiful. There
is a fine staircase out of the second hall, the walls of which are
covered with old family pictures which the Archbishop had obtained from
his elder brother, Col. Richard Chaloner Cobbe, who had somehow lost
Swarraton, and whose line ended in an heiress, wife of the 11th Earl of
Huntingdon. A long corridor downstairs was, I have heard, formerly hung
from end to end with arms intended for defence in case of attack. When
the Rebellion of 1798 took place the weapons were hidden in a hole into
which I have peered, under the floor of a room off the great
drawing-room, but what became of them afterwards I do not know. My
father possessed only a few pairs of handsome pistols, two or three
blunderbusses, sundry guns of various kinds, and his own regimental
sword which he had used at Assaye. All these hung in his study. The
drawing-room with its noble proportions and its fifty-three pictures by
Vandyke, Ruysdael, Guercino, Vanderveldt and other old masters, was the
glory of the house. In it the happiest hours of my life were passed.
Of this house and of the various estates bought and leased by the
Archbishop his only surviving son, Thomas Cobbe, my great-grandfather,
came into possession in the year 1765. Irreverently known to his
posterity as “Old Tommy” this gentleman after the fashion of his
contemporaries muddled away in keeping open house a good deal of the
property, and eventually sold one estate and (what was worse) his
father’s fine library. _Per contra_ he made the remarkable collection of
pictures of which I have spoken as adorning the walls of Newbridge.
Pilkington, the author of the _Dictionary of Painters_, was incumbent of
the little Vicarage of Donabate, and naturally somewhat in the relation
of chaplain to the squire of Newbridge, who had the good sense to send
him to Holland and Italy to buy the above-mentioned pictures, many of
which are described in the _Dictionary_. Some time previously, when
Pilkington had come out as an Art-critic, the Archbishop had
remonstrated with him on his unclerical pursuit; but the poor man
disarmed episcopal censure by replying, “Your Grace, I have preached for
a dozen years to an old woman who _can’t_ hear, and to a young woman who
_won’t_ hear; and now I think I may attend to other things!”
Thomas Cobbe’s wife’s name has been often before the public in
connection with the story, told by Crabbe, Walter Scott and many others,
of the lady who wore a black ribbon on her wrist to conceal the marks of
a ghost’s fingers. The real ghost-seer in question, Lady Beresford, was
confounded by many with her granddaughter Lady Eliza Beresford, or, as
she was commonly called after her marriage, Lady Betty Cobbe. How the
confusion came about I do not know, but Lady Betty, who was a spirited
woman much renowned in the palmy days of Bath, was very indignant when
asked any questions on the subject. Once she received a letter from one
of Queen Charlotte’s Ladies-in-Waiting begging her to tell the Queen the
true story. Lady Betty in reply “presented her compliments but was sure
the Queen of England would not pry into the private affairs of her
subjects, and had _no intention of gratifying the impertinent curiosity
of a Lady-in-Waiting_!” Considerable labour was expended some years ago
by the late Primate (Marcus Beresford) of Ireland, another descendant of
the ghost-seer in identifying the real personages and dates of this
curious tradition. The story which came to me directly through my
great-aunt, Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady Betty’s favourite daughter,
was, that the ghost was John Le Poer, Second Earl of Tyrone; and the
ghost-seer was his cousin, Nichola Hamilton, daughter of Lord Glerawly,
wife of Sir Tristram Beresford. The cousins had promised each other to
appear,—whichever of them first departed this life,—to the survivor.
Lady Beresford, who did not know that Lord Tyrone was dead, awoke one
night and found him sitting by her bedside. He gave her (so goes the
story) a short, but, under the circumstances, no doubt impressive
lesson, in the elements of orthodox theology; and then to satisfy her of
the reality of his presence, which she persisted in doubting, he twisted
the curtains of her bed through a ring in the ceiling, placed his hand
on a wardrobe and left on it the ominous mark of five burning fingers
(the late Hon. and Rev. Edward Taylor of Ardgillan Castle told me he had
seen this wardrobe!) and finally touched her wrist, which shrunk
incontinently and never recovered its natural hue. Before he vanished
the Ghost told Lady Beresford that her son should marry his brother’s
daughter and heiress; and that she herself should die at the birth of a
child after a second marriage, in her forty-second year. All these
prophecies, of course, came to pass. From the marriage of Sir Marcus
Beresford with the ghost’s niece, Catharine, Baroness Le Poer of
Curraghmore, has descended the whole clan of Irish Beresfords. He was
created Earl of Tyrone; his eldest son was the first Marquis of
Waterford; another son was Archbishop of Tuam, created Lord Decies; and
his fifth daughter was the Lady Betty Cobbe, my great-grandmother,
concerning whom I have told this old story. In these days of
Psychological Research I could not take on myself to omit it, though my
own private impression is, that Lady Beresford accidentally gave her
wrist a severe blow against her bedstead while she was asleep; and that,
by a law of dreaming which I have endeavoured to trace in my essay on
the subject, her mind instantly created the _myth_ of Lord Tyrone’s
apparition. Allowing for a fair amount of subsequent agglomeration of
incidents and wonders in the tradition, this hypothesis, I think quite
meets the exigencies of the case; and in obedience to the law of
Parsimony, we need not run to a preternatural explanation of the Black
Ribbon on the Wrist, no doubt the actual nucleus of the tale.
I do not _dis_believe in ghosts; but unfortunately I have never been
able comfortably to believe in any particular ghost-story. The
overwhelming argument against the veracity of the majority of such
narrations is, that they contradict the great truth beautifully set
forth by Southey—
“They sin who tell us Love can die!—
With life all other passions fly
All others are but vanity—
In Heaven, Ambition cannot dwell,
Nor Avarice in the vaults of hell.
Earthly these passions as of earth,
They perish where they had their birth—
But Love is indestructible....”
The ghost of popular belief almost invariably exhibits the survival of
Avarice, Revenge, or some other thoroughly earthly passion, while for
the sake of the purest, noblest, tenderest Love scarcely ever has a
single Spirit of the departed been even supposed to return to comfort
the heart which death has left desolate. The famous story of Miss Lee is
one exception to this rule, and so is another tale which I found
recorded in an MS. Memorandum in the writing of my uncle the Rev. Henry
Cobbe, Rector of Templeton (_died_ 1823).
“Lady Moira[5] was at one time extremely uneasy about her sister, Lady
Selina Hastings, from whom she had not heard for a considerable time.
One night she dreamed that her sister came to her, sat down by her
bedside, and said to her, ‘My dear sister, I am dying of fever. They
will not tell you of it because of your situation’ (she was then with
child), ‘but I shall die, and the account will be brought to your
husband by letter directed like a foreign one in a foreign hand.’ She
told her dream to her attendant, Mrs. Moth, as soon as she awoke, was
extremely unhappy for letters, till at length, the day after, there
arrived one, directed as she had been told, which contained an account
of her sister’s death. It had been written by her brother, Lord
Huntingdon, and in a feigned hand, lest she should ask to know the
contents.
“She had many other extraordinary dreams, and it is very remarkable that
after the death of her attendant, Moth, who had educated her and her
children, and was the niece of the famous Bishop Hough, that she (Moth)
generally took a part in them, particularly if they related to any loss
in her family. Indeed, I believe she never dreamed of her except when
she was to undergo a loss. Lady Granard told me an instance of this: Her
second son Colonel Rawdon died very suddenly. He had not been on good
terms with Lady Moira for some time. One night she dreamed that Moth
came into the room, and upon her asking her what she wanted she said,
‘My lady, I am come to bring the Colonel to you.’ Then he entered, came
near her, and coming within the curtains, sat on the bed and said, ‘My
dearest mother, I am going a very long journey, and I cannot bear to go
without the assurance of your forgiveness.’ Then she threw her arms
about his neck and said, ‘Dear Son, can you doubt my forgiving you? But
where are you going?’ He replied, ‘A long journey, but I am happy now
that I have seen you.’ The next day she received an account of his
death.
“About a fortnight before her death, when Lady Granard and Lady
Charlotte Rawdon, her daughters, were sitting up in her room, she awoke
suddenly, very ill and very much agitated, saying that she had dreamed
that Mrs. Moth came into her room. When she saw her she was so full of
the idea that evils always attended her appearance that she said, ‘Ah,
Moth, I fear you are come for my Selina’ (Lady G.). Moth replied, ‘No,
my Lady, but I am come for Mr. John.’ They gave her composing drops and
soothed her; she soon fell asleep, and from that time never mentioned
her son’s name nor made any inquiry about him; but he died on the very
day of her dream, though she never knew it.”
Old Thomas Cobbe and after him his only son, Charles Cobbe, represented
the (exceedingly-rotten) Borough of Swords for a great many years in the
Irish Parliament, which was then in its glory, resonant with the
eloquence of Flood (who had married Lady Betty’s sister, Lady Jane) and
of Henry Grattan. On searching the archives of Dublin, however, in the
hope of discovering that our great-grandfather had done some public good
in his time, my brother and I had the mortification to find that on the
only occasion when reference was made to his name, it was in connection
with charges of bribery and corruption! On the other hand, it is
recorded to his honour that he was almost the only one among the Members
of the Irish Parliament who voted for the Union, and yet refused either
a peerage or money compensation for his seat. Instead of these he
obtained for Swords some educational endowments by which I believe the
little town still profits. In the record of corruption sent by Lord
Randolph Churchill to the _Times_ (May 29th, 1893), in which appears a
charge of interested motives against nearly every Member of the Irish
Parliament of 1784, “Mr. Cobbe” stands honourably alone as without any
“object” whatever.
Thomas Cobbe’s two daughters, my great-aunts and immediate predecessors
as the Misses Cobbe, of Newbridge, (my grandfather having only sons)
differed considerably in all respects from their unworthy niece. They
occupied, so said tradition, the large cheerful room which afterwards
became my nursery. A beam across the ceiling still bore, in my time, a
large iron staple firmly fixed in the centre from whence had dangled a
hand-swing. On this swing my great-aunts were wont to hang by their
arms, to enable their maids to lace their stays to greater advantage.
One of them, afterwards the Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady-in-Waiting to
Queen Caroline, likewise wore the high-heeled shoes of the period; and
when she was an aged woman she showed her horribly deformed feet to one
of my brothers, and remarked to him: “See, Tom, what comes of
high-heeled shoes!” I am afraid many of the girls now wearing similarly
monstrous foot-gear will learn the same lesson too late. Mrs. Pelham, I
have heard, was the person who practically brought the house about the
ears of the unfortunate Queen Caroline; being the first to throw up her
appointment at Court when she became aware of the Queen’s private
on-goings. Her own character stood high; and the fact that she would no
longer serve the Queen naturally called attention to all the
circumstances. Bad as Queen Caroline was, George the Fourth was
assuredly worse than she. In his old age he was personally very
disgusting. My mother told me that when she received his kiss on
presentation at his Drawing-Room, the contact with his face was
sickening, like that with a corpse. I still possess the dress she wore
on that occasion.
Mrs. Pelham’s sister married Sir Henry Tuite, of Sonnagh, and for many
years of her widowhood lived in the Circus, Bath, and perhaps may still
be remembered there by a few as driving about her own team of four
horses in her curricle, in days when such doings by ladies were more
rare than they are now.
The only brother of these two Miss Cobbes of the past, Charles Cobbe, of
Newbridge, M.P., married Anne Power Trench, of Garbally, sister of the
first Earl of Clancarty. The multitudinous clans of Trenches and Moncks,
in addition to Lady Betty’s Beresford relations, of course thenceforth
adopted the habit of paying visitations at Newbridge. Arriving by
coachloads, with trains of servants, they remained for months at a time.
A pack of hounds was kept, and the whole _train de vie_ was liberal in
the extreme. Naturally, after a certain number of years of this kind of
thing, embarrassments beset the family finances; but fortunately at the
crisis Lady Betty came under the influence of her husband’s cousin, the
Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, and ere long renounced the vanities
and pleasures of the world, and persuaded her husband to retire with her
and live quietly at Bath, where they died and were buried in Weston
churchyard. Fifty years afterwards I found in the library at Newbridge
the little batch of books which had belonged to my great-grandmother in
this phase of her life, and were marked by her pencil: _Jacob Boehmen_
and the _Life of Madame Guyon_ being those which I now recall. The
peculiar, ecstatic pietism which these books breathe, differing _toto
cœlo_ from the “other worldliness” of the divines of about 1810, with
whose works the “Good-book Rows” of our library were replenished,
impressed me very vividly.[6]
I have often tried to construct in my mind some sort of picture of the
society which existed in Ireland a hundred years ago, and moved in those
old rooms wherein the first half of my life was spent, but I have found
it a very baffling undertaking. Apparently it combined a considerable
amount of æsthetic taste with traits of genuine barbarism; and high
religious pretension with a disregard of everyday duties and a
_penchant_ for gambling and drinking which would now place the most
avowedly worldly persons under a cloud of opprobrium. Card-playing was
carried on incessantly. Tradition says that the tables were laid for it
on rainy days at 10 o’clock in the morning in Newbridge drawing-room;
and on every day in the interminable evenings which followed the then
fashionable four o’clock dinner. My grandmother was so excellent a
whist-player that to extreme old age in Bath she habitually made a
small, but appreciable, addition to her income out of her “card purse”;
an ornamental appendage of the toilet then, and even in my time, in
universal use. I was given one as a birthday present in my tenth year.
She was greatly respected by all, and beloved by her five sons; every
one of whom, however, she had sent out to be nursed at a cottage in the
park till they were three years old. Her motherly duties were supposed
to be amply fulfilled by occasionally stopping her carriage to see how
the children were getting on.
As to the drinking among the men, (the women seem not to have shared the
vice) it must have prevailed to a disgusting extent upstairs and
downstairs. A fuddled condition after dinner was accepted as the normal
one of a gentleman, and entailed no sort of disgrace. On the contrary,
my father has told me that in his youth his own extreme sobriety gave
constant offence to his grandfather, and to his comrades in the army;
and only by showing the latter that he would sooner fight than be
bullied to drink to excess could he obtain peace. Unhappily, poor man!
while his grandfather, who seldom went to bed quite sober for forty
years, lived to the fine old age of 82, enjoying good health to the
last, his temperate grandson inherited the gout and in his latter years
was a martyr thereto. Among the exceedingly beautiful old Indian and old
Worcester china which belonged to Thomas Cobbe and showed his good taste
and also the splendid scale of his entertainments (one dessert-service
for 36 persons was magnificent) there stands a large goblet calculated
to hold _three bottles_ of wine. This glass (tradition avers) used to be
filled with claret, seven guineas were placed at the bottom, and he who
drank it pocketed the coin.