tenants and dependants seems to have proceeded on the truly Irish
principle of being generous before you are just. The poor people lived
in miserable hovels which nobody dreamed of repairing; but then they
were welcome to come and eat and drink at the great house on every
excuse or without any excuse at all. This state of things was so
perfectly in harmony with Celtic ideas that the days when it prevailed
are still sighed after as the “good old times.” Of course there was a
great deal of Lady Bountiful business, and also of medical charity-work
going forward. Archbishop Cobbe was fully impressed with the merits of
the Tar-water so marvellously set forth by his suffragan, Bishop
Berkeley, and I have seen in his handwriting in a book of his wife’s
cookery receipts, a receipt for making it, beginning with the formidable
item: “Take six gallons of the best French brandy.” Lady Betty was a
famous compounder of simples, and of things that were not simple, and a
“Chilblain Plaister” which bore her name, was not many years ago still
to be procured in the chemists’ shops in Bath. I fear her prescriptions
were not always of so unambitious a kind as this. One day she stopped a
man on the road and asked his name—“Ah, then, my lady,” was the reply,
“don’t you remember me? Why, I am the husband of the woman your ladyship
gave the medicine to _and she died the next day. Long life to your
Ladyship!_”
As I have said, the open-housekeeping at Newbridge at last came to an
end, and the family migrated to No. 9 and No. 22, Marlborough Buildings,
Bath, where two generations spent their latter years, died, and were
buried in Weston churchyard, where I have lately restored their
tombstones.
My grandfather died long before his father, and my father, another
Charles Cobbe, found himself at eighteen pretty well his own master, the
eldest of five brothers. He had been educated at Winchester, where his
ancestors for eleven generations went to school in the old days of
Swarraton; and to the end of his life he was wont to recite lines of
Anacreon learned therein. But his tastes were active rather than
studious, and disliking the idea of hanging about his mother’s house
till his grandfather’s death should put him in possession of Newbridge,
he listened with an enchanted ear to a glowing account which somebody
gave him of India, where the Mahratta wars were just beginning.
Without much reflection or delay, he obtained a cornet’s commission in
the 19th Light Dragoons and sailed for Madras. Very shortly he was
engaged in active service under Wellesley, who always treated him with
special kindness as another Anglo-Irish gentleman. He fought at many
minor battles and sieges, and also at Assaye and Argaum; receiving his
medal for these two, just fifty years afterwards. I shall write of this
again a little further on in this book.
At last he fell ill of the fever of the country, which in those days was
called “ague,” and was left in a remote place absolutely helpless. He
was lying in bed one day in his tent when a Hindoo came in and addressed
him very courteously, asking after his health. My father incautiously
replied that he was quite prostrated by the fever. “What! Not able to
move at all, not to walk a step?” said his visitor. “No! I cannot stir,”
said my father. “Oh, in that case, then,” said the man,—and without more
ado he seized my father’s desk, in which were all his money and
valuables, and straightway made off with it before my father could
summon his servants. His condition, thus left alone in an enemy’s
country without money, was bad enough, but he managed to send a trusty
messenger to Sir Arthur Wellesley, who promptly lent him all he
required.
Finding that there was no chance of his health being sufficiently
restored in India to permit of further active service, and the Mahratta
wars being practically concluded, my father sold his commission of
Lieutenant and returned to England, quietly letting himself into his
mother’s house in Bath on his return by the latch-key, which he had
carried with him through all his journeys. All his life long the impress
made both on his outward bearing and character by those five years of
war were very visible. He was a fine soldier-like figure, six feet high,
and had ridden eighteen stone in his full equipment. His face was, I
suppose, ugly, but it was very intelligent, very strong willed, and very
unmistakeably that of a gentleman. He was under-jawed, very pale, with a
large nose, and small, grey, very lively eyes; but he had a beautiful
white forehead from which his hair, even in old age, grew handsomely,
and his head was very well set on his broad shoulders. The photograph in
the next volume represents him at 76. He rode admirably, and a better
figure on horseback could not be seen. At all times there was an aspect
of strength and command about him, which his vigorous will and (truth
compels me to add) his not seldom fiery temper, fully sustained. On the
many occasions when we had dinner parties at Newbridge, he was a
charming, gay and courteous host; and I remember being struck, when he
once wore a court dress and took me with him to pay his respects to a
Tory Lord Lieutenant, by the contrast which his figure and bearing
presented to that of nearly all the other men in similar attire. _They_
looked as if they were masquerading, and he as if the lace-ruffles and
plum coat and sword were his habitual dress. He had beautiful hands, of
extraordinary strength.
One day he was walking with one of his lady cousins on his arm in the
street. A certain famous prize-fighting bully, the Sayers or Heenan of
the period, came up hustling and elbowing every passenger off the
pavement. When my father saw him approach he made his cousin take his
left arm, and as the prize-fighter prepared to shoulder him, he
delivered with his right fist, without raising it, a blow which sent the
ruffian fainting into the arms of his companions. Having deposited his
cousin in a shop, my father went back for the sequel of the adventure,
and was told that the “Chicken” (or whatever he was called) had had his
ribs broken.
After his return from India, my father soon sought a wife. He flirted
sadly, I fear, with his beautiful cousin, Louisa Beresford, the daughter
of his great-uncle, the Archbishop of Tuam; and one of the ways in which
he endeavoured to ingratiate himself was to carry about at all times a
provision of bon-bons and barley-sugar with which to ply the venerable
and sweet-toothed prelate; who was generally known as “The Beauty of
Holiness.” How the wooing would have prospered cannot be told, but
before it had reached a crisis a far richer lover appeared on the
scene—Mr. Hope. “Anastasius Hope,” as he was called from the work of
which he was the author, was immensely wealthy, and a man of great taste
in art, but he had the misfortune to be so excessively ugly that a
painter whom he offended by not buying his picture, depicted him and
Miss Beresford as “Beauty and the Beast,” and exhibited his painting at
the Bath Pump-room, where her brother, John Beresford (afterwards the
second Lord Decies) cut it deliberately to pieces. An engagement between
Mr. Hope and Miss Beresford was announced not long after the arrival of
Mr. Hope in Bath; and my mother, then Miss Conway, going to pay a visit
of congratulation to Miss Beresford, found her reclining on a blue silk
sofa appropriately perusing _The Pleasures of Hope_. After the death of
Mr. Hope (by whom she was the mother of Mr. Beresford-Hope, Mr. Adrian
and Mr. Henry Hope), Mrs. Hope married the illegitimate son of her
uncle, the Marquis of Waterford—Field Marshal Lord Beresford—a fine old
veteran, with whom she long lived happily in the corner house in
Cavendish Square, where my father and brothers always found a warm
welcome.
At length, after some delays, my father had the great good fortune to
induce my dear mother to become his wife, and they were married at Bath,
March 13th, 1809. Frances Conway was, as I have said, daughter of Capt.
Thomas Conway, of Morden Park. Her father and mother both died whilst
she was young and she was sent to the famous school of Mrs. Devis, in
Queen Square, Bloomsbury, of which I shall have something presently to
say, and afterwards lived with her grandmother, who at her death
bequeathed to her a handsome legacy, at Southampton. When her
grandmother died, she being then sixteen years of age, received an
invitation from Colonel and Mrs. Champion to live with them and become
their adopted daughter. The history of this invitation is rather
touching. Mrs. Champion’s parents had, many years before, suffered great
reverses, and my mother’s grandfather had done much to help them, and,
in particular, had furnished means for Mrs. Champion to go out to India.
She returned after twenty years as the childless wife of the rich and
kindly old Colonel, the friend of Warren Hastings, who having been
commander-in-chief of the Forces of the East India Company had had a
good “shake of the Pagoda tree.” She repaid to the grandchild the
kindness done by the grandfather; and was henceforth really a mother to
my mother, who dearly loved both her and Col. Champion. In their
beautiful house, No. 29, Royal Crescent, she saw all the society of Bath
in its palmiest days, Mrs. Champion’s Wednesday evening parties being
among the most important in the place. My mother’s part as daughter of
the house was an agreeable one, and her social talents and
accomplishments fitted her perfectly for the part. The gentle gaiety,
the sweet dignity and ease of her manners and conversation remain to me
as the memory of something exquisite, far different even from the best
manner and talk of my own or the present generation; and I know that the
same impression was always made on her visitors in her old age. I can
compare it to nothing but the delicate odour of the dried rose leaves
with which her china vases were filled and her wardrobes perfumed.
I hardly know whether my mother were really beautiful, though many of
the friends who remembered her in early womanhood spoke of her as being
so. To me her face was always the loveliest in the world; indeed it was
the one through which my first dawning perception of beauty was
awakened. I can remember looking at her as I lay beside her on the sofa,
where many of her suffering hours were spent, and suddenly saying,
“Mamma you are so pretty!” She laughed and kissed me, saying, “I am glad
you think so my child;” but that moment really brought the revelation to
me of that wonderful thing in God’s creation, the _Beautiful_! She had
fine features, a particularly delicate, rather thin-lipped mouth;
magnificent chestnut hair, which remained scarcely changed in colour or
quantity till her death at seventy years of age; and the clear, pale
complexion and hazel eyes which belong to such hair. She always dressed
very well and carefully. I never remember seeing her downstairs except
in some rich dark silk, and with a good deal of fine lace about her cap
and old-fashioned _fichu_. Her voice and low laughter were singularly
sweet, and she possessed both in speaking and writing a full and varied
diction which in later years she carefully endeavoured to make me share,
instead of satisfying myself, in school-girl fashion, with making one
word serve a dozen purposes. She was an almost omnivorous reader; and,
according to the standard of female education in her generation, highly
cultivated in every way; a good musician with a very sweet touch of the
piano, and speaking French perfectly well.
Immediately after their marriage my parents took possession of
Newbridge, and my father began earnestly the fulfilment of all the
duties of a country gentleman, landlord and magistrate. My mother,
indeed, used laughingly to aver that he “went to jail on their wedding
day,” for he stopped at Bristol on the road and visited a new prison
with a view to introducing improvements into Irish jails. It was due
principally to his exertions that the county jail, the now celebrated
Kilmainham, was afterwards erected.
Newbridge having been deserted for nearly thirty years, the woods had
been sorely injured and the house and out-buildings dilapidated, but
with my father’s energy and my mother’s money things were put straight;
and from that time till his death in 1857 my father lived and worked
among his people.
Though often hard pressed to carry out with a very moderate income all
his projects of improvements, he was never in debt. One by one he
rebuilt or re-roofed almost every cottage on his estate, making what had
been little better than pig-styes, fit for human habitation; and when he
found that his annual rents could never suffice to do all that was
required in this way for his tenants in his mountain property, he
induced my eldest brother, then just of age, to join with him in selling
two of the pictures which were the heirlooms of the family and the pride
of the house, a Gaspar Poussin and a Hobbema, which last now adorns the
walls of Dorchester House. I remember as a child seeing the tears in his
eyes as this beautiful painting was taken out of the room in which it
had been like a perpetual ray of sunshine. But the sacrifice was
completed, and 80 good stone and slate “Hobbema Cottages,” as we called
them, soon rose all over Glenasmoil. Be it noted by those who deny every
merit in an Anglo-Irish landlord, that not a farthing was added to the
rent of the tenants who profited by this real act of self-denial.
All this however refers to later years. I have now reached to the period
when I may introduce myself on the scene. Before doing so, however, I am
tempted to print here a letter which my much valued friend, Miss Felicia
Skene, of Oxford, has written to me on learning that I am preparing this
autobiography. She is one of the very few now living who can remember my
mother, and I gratefully quote what she has written of her as
corroborating my own memories, else, perhaps, discounted by the reader
as coloured by a daughter’s partiality.
April 4th, 1894.
My dearest Frances,—
I know well that in recalling the days of your bright youth in your
grand old home, the most prominent figure amongst those who surrounded
you then, must be that of your justly idolised mother, and I cannot
help wishing to add my testimony, as of one unbiassed by family ties,
to all that you possessed in her while she remained with you; and all
that you so sadly lost when she was taken from you. To remember the
_châtelaine_ of Newbridge is to recall one of the fairest and sweetest
memories of my early life. When I first saw that lovely, gracious lady
with her almost angelic countenance and her perfect dignity of manner,
I had just come from a gay Eastern capital,—my home from childhood,
where no such vision of a typical English gentlewoman had ever
appeared before me; and the impression she made upon me was therefore
almost a revelation of what a refined, high-bred lady could be in all
that was pure and lovely and of good report, and yet I think I only
shared in the fascination which she exercised on all who came within
the sphere of her influence. To me, almost a stranger, whom she
welcomed as your friend under her roof, her exquisite courtesy would
alone have been most charming, but for your sake she showed me all the
tenderness of her sweet sympathetic nature, and it was no marvel to me
that she was the idol of her children and the object of deepest
respect and admiration to all who knew her.
Beautiful Newbridge with its splendid hospitality is like a dream to
me now, of what a gentleman’s estate and country home could be in
those days when ancient race and noble family traditions were still of
some account.
Ever affectionately yours,
F. M. F. SKENE.
13, New Inn Hall Street, Oxford.
CHAPTER
II.
_CHILDHOOD._
[Illustration:
_Newbridge, Co. Dublin._
]
I was born on the morning of the 4th December, 1822; at sunrise. There
had been a memorable storm during the night, and Dublin, where my father
had taken a house that my mother might be near her doctor, was strewn
with the wrecks of trees and chimney pots. My parents had already four
sons, and after the interval of five years since the birth of the
youngest, a girl was by no means welcome. I have never had reason,
however, to complain of being less cared for or less well treated in
every way than my brothers. If I have become in mature years a “Woman’s
Rights’ Woman” it has not been because in my own person I have been made
to feel a Woman’s Wrongs. On the contrary, my brothers’ kindness and
tenderness to me have been unfailing from my infancy. I was their
“little Fà’,” their pet and plaything when they came home for their
holidays; and rough words not to speak of knocks,—never reached me from
any of them or from my many masculine cousins, some of whom, as my
father’s wards, I hardly distinguished in childhood from brothers.
A few months after my birth my parents moved to a house named Bower Hill
Lodge in Melksham, which my father hired, I believe, to be near his boys
at school, and I have some dim recollections of the verandah of the
house, and also of certain raisins which I appropriated, and of
suffering direful punishment at my father’s hands for the crime! Before
I was four years old we returned to Newbridge, and I was duly installed
with my good old Irish nurse, Mary Malone, in the large nursery at the
end of the north corridor—the most charming room for a child’s abode I
have ever seen. It was so distant from the regions inhabited by my
parents that I was at full liberty to make any amount of noise I
pleased; and from the three windows I possessed a commanding view of the
stable yard, wherein there was always visible an enchanting spectacle of
dogs, cats, horses, grooms, gardeners, and milkmaids. A grand old
courtyard it is; a quadrangle about a rood in size surrounded by
stables, coach-houses, kennels, a laundry, a beautiful dairy, a
labourer’s room, a paint shop, a carpenter’s shop, a range of granaries
and fruitlofts with a great clock in the pediment in the centre; and a
well in the midst of all. Behind the stables and the kennels appear the
tops of walnut and chestnut trees and over the coach-houses on the other
side can be seen the beautiful old kitchen garden of six acres with its
lichen-covered red brick walls, backed again by trees; and its formal
straight terraces and broad grass walks.
In this healthful, delightful nursery, and in walks with my nurse about
the lawns and shrubberies, the first years of my happy childhood went
by; fed in body with the freshest milk and eggs and fruit, everything
best for a child; and in mind supplied only with the simple, sweet
lessons of my gentle mother. No unwholesome food, physical or moral, was
ever allowed to come in my way till body and soul had almost grown to
their full stature. When I compare such a lot as this (the common lot,
of course, of English girls of the richer classes, blessed with good
fathers and mothers) with the case of the hapless young creatures who
are fed from infancy with insufficient and unwholesome food, perhaps
dosed with gin and opium from the cradle, and who, even as they acquire
language, learn foul words, curses and blasphemies,—when I compare, I
say, my happy lot with the miserable one of tens of thousands of my
brother men and sister women, I feel appalled to reflect, by how
different a standard must they and I be judged by eternal Justice!
In such an infancy the events were few, but I can remember with
amusement the great exercise of my little mind concerning a certain
mythical being known as “Peter.” The story affords a droll example of
the way in which fetishes are created among child-minded savages. One
day, (as my mother long afterwards explained to me), I had been hungrily
eating a piece of bread and butter out of doors, when one of the
greyhounds, of which my father kept several couples, bounded past me and
snatched the bread and butter from my little hands. The outcry which I
was preparing to raise on my loss was suddenly stopped by the bystanders
judiciously awakening my sympathy in Peter’s enjoyment, and I was led up
to stroke the big dog and make friends with him. Seeing how successful
was this diversion, my nurse thenceforward adopted the practice of
seizing everything in the way of food, knives, &c., which it was
undesirable I should handle, and also of shutting objectionably open
doors and windows, exclaiming “O! Peter! Peter has got it! Peter has
shut it!”—as the case might be. Accustomed to succumb to this unseen
Fate under the name of Peter, and soon forgetting the dog, I came to
think there was an all-powerful, invisible Being constantly behind the
scenes, and had so far pictured him as distinct from the real original
Peter that on one occasion when I was taken to visit at some house where
there was an odd looking end of a beam jutting out under the ceiling, I
asked in awe-struck tones: “Mama! is that Peter’s head?”
My childhood, though a singularly happy, was an unusually lonely one. My
dear mother very soon after I was born became lame from a trifling
accident to her ankle (ill-treated, unhappily, by the doctors) and she
was never once able in all her life to take a walk with me. Of course I
was brought to her continually; first to be nursed,—for she fulfilled
that sacred duty of motherhood to all her children, believing that she
could never be so sure of the healthfulness of any other woman’s
constitution as of her own. Later, I seem to my own memory to have been
often cuddled up close to her on her sofa, or learning my little
lessons, mounted on my high chair beside her, or repeating the Lord’s
Prayer at her knee. All these memories are infinitely sweet to me. Her
low, gentle voice, her smile, her soft breast and arms, the atmosphere
of dignity which always surrounded her,—the very odour of her clothes
and lace, redolent of dried roses, come back to me after three-score
years with nothing to mar their sweetness. She never once spoke angrily
or harshly to me in all her life, much less struck or punished me; and
I—it is a comfort to think it—never, so far as I can recall, disobeyed
or seriously vexed her. She had regretted my birth, thinking that she
could not live to see me grow to womanhood, and shrinking from a renewal
of the cares of motherhood with the additional anxiety of a daughter’s
education. But I believe she soon reconciled herself to my existence,
and made me, first her pet, and then her companion and even her
counsellor. She told me, laughingly, how, when I was four years old, my
father happening to be away from home she made me dine with her, and as
I sat in great state beside her on my little chair I solemnly remarked:
“Mama, is it not a very _comflin_ thing to have a little girl?” an
observation which she justly thought went to prove that she had betrayed
sufficiently to my infantine perspicacity that she enjoyed my company at
least as much as hers was enjoyed by me.