St. James's Park and its associations. -- Unhealthiness of the
Place and neighbourhood. -- Leper Hospital of St. James. --
Henry the Eighth builds St. James's Palace and the Tilt Yard.
-- Original State and Progressive Character of the Park. --
Charles the First. -- Cromwell. -- Charles the Second; his
Walks, Amusements, and Mistresses. -- The Mulberry Gardens. --
Swift, Prior, Richardson, Beau Tibbs, Soldiers, and Syllabubs.
-- Character of the Park at present. -- St. James's Palace
during the Reigns of the Stuarts and two first Georges. --
Anecdotes of Lord Craven and Prince George of Denmark. --
Characters of Queen Anne and of George the First and Second. --
George the First and his Carp. -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and
the Sack of Wheat. -- Horace Walpole's Portrait of George the
First. -- The Mistresses of that King, and of his Son. --
Mistake of Lord Chesterfield. -- Queen Caroline's Ladies in
Waiting. -- Miss Bellenden and the Guineas. -- George the
Second's Rupture with his Father, and with his Son. --
Character of that Son. -- Buckingham House. -- Sheffield and
his Duchess. -- Character of Queen Charlotte. -- Advantages of
Queen Victoria over her predecessors.
St. James's Park is associated in contemporary minds with nothing but
amusing recollections of bands of music, marching soldiers,
maid-servants and children, drinkings of "milk from the cow," the
hoop-petticoats of the court days of George the Third, and fading
images of passages in novels, or of shabby-genteel debtors sitting
lounging on the benches. A little further back in point of time we see
a novelist himself, Richardson, walking in it, with other invalids,
for his health; then Swift crossing it from Suffolk Street in his way
to Chelsea, or thinking of the _Spectator_ and _Rosamond's Pond_; then
the gallants of the time of Charles the Second, with Charles himself
feeding his ducks and playing at mall; then his unhappy father led
through it from St. James's Palace on his way to the scaffold at
Whitehall; and then the chivalresque sports of the Tudors in the
famous tilt-yard, which occupied the site of the Horse Guards. To all
these points we shall return for the purpose of entering into a few
particulars; but as geographers begin their accounts of a place with
the soil, we shall first make a few remarks of a like nature.
The site of this park, which must always have been low and wet, is
said in the days before the Conquest to have been a swamp. Yet so
little understood, not only at that time but any time till within
these few years, were those vitalest arts of life which have been
disclosed to us by the Southwood Smiths and others, that the good
citizens of London in those days built a hospital upon it for lepers
(by way of purifying their skins), and people of rank and fashion have
been clustering about it more and more ever since, especially of late
years. "If a merry-meeting is to be wished," says the man in
Shakspeare, "may God prohibit it." If our health is to be injured
while in town by luxury and late nights, say the men of State and
Parliament, let us all go and make it worse in the bad air of
Belgravia. Nay, let us sit with our feet in the water, while in
Parliament itself, and then let us aggravate our agues in Pimlico and
the park.--There is no use in mincing the matter, even though the
property of a great lord be doubled by the mistake. The fashionable
world should have stuck to Marylebone and the good old dry parts of
the metropolis, or gone up hill to Kensington gravel-pits, or into any
other wholesome quarter of the town or suburbs, rather than have
descended to the water-side, and built in the _mush_ of Pimlico.
Building and house-warming doubtless make a difference; and wealth has
the usual advantages compared with poverty: but the malaria is not
done away. A professional authority on the subject gave the warning
five and twenty years ago in the _Edinburgh Review_; but what are
warnings to house-building and fashion? "It is not suspected," he says
(vol. xxxvi. p. 341) "that St. James's Park is a perpetual source of
malaria, producing frequent intermittents, autumnal dysenteries, and
various derangements of health, in all the inhabitants who are subject
to its influence. The cause being unsuspected, the evil is endured,
and no further inquiries are made." The malaria (he tells us in
another passage of the same article) "spreads even to Bridge Street
and Whitehall. Nay, in making use of the most delicate _miasmometer_
(if we may coin such a word) that we ever possessed, an officer who
had suffered at Walcheren, we have found it reaching up to St. James's
Street even to Bruton Street, although the rise of ground is here
considerable, and the whole space from the nearest water is crowded
with houses."
This statement, corroborated as it is by the obvious nature of the
soil and air in the park, where the people to any eye coming from
higher ground seem walking about only in a thinner kind of water--a
perpetual haze and _mugginess_--ought to settle the question
respecting the doom of Buckingham Palace. Her Majesty, whose life and
comfort are precious to her subjects, should have her town residence
in quite another sort of place. Almost everything indeed, artificial
as well as natural, conspires to render the spot unwholesome. See what
the royal lungs receive on all sides of the present abode whichever
way the windows are opened. In front of it is the steam of the mushy
ground and the canal; on the left comes draining down the wet of
Constitution Hill; and on the right and at the back are the vapours of
the river and the pestilential smokes of the manufactories. What an
air in which to set forth the colours of the royal flag and refresh
the anxieties of the owner! We never look down on the flag from
Piccadilly, but we long to see it announcing the royal presence on
higher ground and in a healthy breeze.
The Leper Hospital, being the ancientest known domicile in the spot
before us, stood on the site of the present St. James's Palace; so
that where state and fashion have congregated, and blooming beauties
come laughing through the trees, was once heard the dismal sound of
the "cup and clapper," which solicited charity for the most revolting
of diseases. The spot was probably selected for the hospital, not only
as being at the greatest convenient distance from the habitations of
the good citizens its founders (lepers being always put as far as
possible out of the way), but because it suggested itself to the
imagination as possessed of an analogous dreariness and squalidity.
Unfavourable circumstances in those days were only thought fit for one
another, not for the super-induction of favourable ones. The lunatic
was to be exasperated by whips and dark-keeping, and the leper thrust
into the ditch. The world had not yet found out that light,
cleanliness, and consolation were good for all. Imagine this "lake of
the dismal swamp," now St. James's Park, with not another house nearer
to it than the walls at Ludgate, presenting to the timid eyes of the
Sunday pedestrian its lonely spital, which at once attracted his
charity and repelled his presence (for leprosy was thought
infectious), the wind sighing through the trees, and the rain mingling
with the pestilential-looking mud.
The endowment of St. James's Hospital is said to have been originally
for women only, fourteen in number, to whom were subsequently added
eight brethren "to administer divine service." They were probably,
however, in a good condition of life--"leper ladies," as an old poem
styles the companions of Cressida; but ladies, according to the poem,
were not exempt from the duty of asking alms with the "cup and
clapper;" and as it was probably a part of their business and
humiliation to watch for the appearance of wayfarers, and accost them
with cries and clamour, scenes of that kind may have taken place in
the walk now constituting the Mall.
The hospital was exchanged with Henry the Eighth for "a
consideration;" and upon its site, or near it, that soul of leprosy
built a manor, and transferred into it his own bloated and corrupted
body. He was then in the forty-third year of his age, and in the same
year (1532) he married poor Anne Boleyn. The town-residences (as they
would now be called) of the kings of England had hitherto been at
Kensington, or on the banks of the Thames at London and Westminster
(such as the Tower, Westminster Hall, &c.) What it was that attracted
Henry to the Leper Hospital it is difficult to conceive; though the
neighbourhood, no doubt, had become a little cleansed and refined by
the growth of Westminster and Whitehall. Much neatness was not
required by a state of manners, which, according to Erasmus, must have
been one of the dirtiest in Europe, and which allowed the refuse of
meats and drinks, in gentlemen's houses, to collect under the rushes
in the dining-rooms. Perhaps the new palace was to be a place of
retirement for the King and his thoughtless victim, whom four years
afterwards he put to death. Most likely, however, his great object was
to grasp all he could, and add to the number of his parks and
amusements; for the whole of the St. James's Fields (as they were
called) fell into his hands with the house, and he stocked them with
game, built a tilt-yard in front of Whitehall, on the site of the
present Horse Guards, together with a cock-pit in its neighbourhood;
and on the downfall of Wolsey took possession of Whitehall itself,
which thenceforth became added to the list of royal abodes. The new
palace could never have been handsome. It had the homely look which it
retains to this day, as the reader will see in the print before him;
the gateway looking up St. James's Street being evidently a remnant of
it.
[Illustration: ST. JAMES'S PALACE. 1650.]
The Tilt Yard, as its name implies, was the chief scene of knightly
amusement in the reigns of the Tudors. Here Henry jousted till he grew
too fat; and here Elizabeth sat at the receipt of chivalrous
adulation. The spot is full of life and colour in the eyes of one's
imagination, with heralds and coats of arms, plumed champions,
caparisoned steeds, and courts looking on from draperied galleries.
The present tranquil exercises on parade may be considered as a
remnant of the old military shows. But the people had no admittance
within the court grounds, except on favour.
The new park seems to have remained strictly enclosed as a nursery for
game till the period of the civil wars of the Commonwealth. A new
palace by Inigo Jones was intended to overlook it at Whitehall, of
which only the Banqueting House was erected. Charles the First was
brought to this house across the Park, from St. James's Palace, in
order to suffer death. Cromwell is then discerned in the park grounds
taking the air in a sedan; but its popular history does not commence
till the Restoration, when Charles the Second, who seems not to have
known what to do with the quantity of life and animal spirits that had
been suppressed during his exile, took to improving and enjoying it
with great vivacity. The walks with him became real walks, for he was
a great pedestrian. He had got the habit, perhaps, when he could not
afford a horse. He let the people in to see him feed his ducks in the
canal, a branch of which, called Duck Island, he pleasantly erected
into a "Government" for the French wit and refugee, St. Evremond. He
made an aviary on the south-east side of the park, thence called
Birdcage Walk; turned the north side into a mall for the enjoyment of
the pastimes so called, in which he excelled; introduced skating from
Holland on the canal and Rosamond's Pond (which was another branch of
it on the south-west); had mistresses in lodgings east and west of him
(Cleveland at Whitehall and Nell Gwyn in Pall Mall); and saw, in the
course of his reign, new streets rising and old places of
entertainment flourishing in other quarters of his favourite district;
Spring Gardens (which became famous for the tavern called
"Lockett's"), at Charing Cross, and the Mulberry Gardens and
noblemen's mansions between Pimlico and Piccadilly. It has been a
question whether the site of the Mulberry Gardens was on the spot now
occupied by Arlington Street, or on that of the Queen's Palace. We
suspect it is difficult to say which, and that they extended along the
whole space between the two. Particular sites are too often confounded
with places near them; and houses are said to displace one another,
which only occupied successive neighbourhoods. By some writers, for
instance, the sites of Arlington and Old Buckingham Houses are
considered as identical, while others represent them in one another's
vicinity. At all events, the Mulberry Gardens appear to have included
the site of both those houses. Ladies came there in masks to eat
syllabubs, and converse with their lovers. Sedley made them the scene
of a play. The whole park, indeed, in Charles's reign, may be said to
have been the scene of a play, especially towards evening, when the
meetings took place which Sedley and Etherege dramatised. In the
morning all was duck-feeding and dog-playing and playing at mall; in
the evening all intrigue and assignation. At one time Waller is
admiring the King's masterly use of the small stick; at another Pepys
is asking questions of the park-keepers, or transported at sight of
the court ladies on horseback; at another Evelyn is horrified (though
he seems to have sought occasions for such horrors) at overhearing a
"very familiar discourse" between his Majesty and that "impudent
comedian," Nelly Gwyn, who is standing at her garden-wall at the back
of Pall Mall (near the present Marlborough House).
Matters in this respect mended, though not suddenly, at the
Revolution. Whitehall Palace was then accidentally burnt down, and
that of St. James's becomes one of the chief residences of the
sovereign, which it remains till the reign of the present. Swift and
Prior are now seen walking for their health in the park,--Swift to get
thin, and Prior to get fat. The heroes and hungry debtors of the
novelists (for the park was privileged from arrest) make their
appearance, the former with their wives or friends, the latter sitting
starving on the benches. Staid ladies have Sunday promenades under the
eye of staid sovereigns. Something of a new license returns with the
first and second Georges; but it comes from Germany, is discreet, and
makes little impression. The greatest assignation we read of is an
innocent one of Richardson with a Lady Bradshaigh, who is "mighty
curious" to know what sort of man he is, and accordingly moves him to
describe himself in the formal terms of an advertisement, in order
that he may be recognised when she meets him. Goldsmith's Beau Tibbs,
who "blasts himself with an air of vivacity" at seeing "nobody in
town," is now the pleasantest fellow we encounter in the park for many
a day. The ducks, and the dogs, and the birdcages, and Rosamond's
Pond, dismal for drowning lovers, have long vanished; and the place
begins to look as it used to do forty years ago. The gayest
entertainment in it is "the soldiers," with their bands of music; and
the most sensual pleasure a glass of milk from the cow. A mad woman
(Margaret Nicholson) makes a sensation, by attempting to stab George
the Third at the palace door; but all is quiet again, sedate and
orderly, even when court-days bring together a crowd of beauties.
George the Fourth just lives long enough to turn Buckingham Palace
into a toy, and the site of Carlton Gardens into something better.
With his successors comes the greatest of all the park improvements--the
conversion of the poor fields and canal into a public pleasure-ground
and an ornamental piece of water. Upon this King Charles's ducks have
returned, equally improved; and if it did but possess a good
atmosphere, St. James's Park would now be as complete a place of
recreation for the promenaders of its neighbourhood, as it is handsome
and well-intended.
One of the most popular aspects of St. James's Park is that of a
military and music-playing and milk-drinking spot. The milk-drinkings,
and the bands of music, and the parades, are the same as they used to
be in our boyish days; and, we were going to add, may they be
immortal. But though it is good to make the best of war as long as war
cannot be helped, and though music and gold lace, &c., are wonderful
helps to that end, yet conscience will not allow us to blink all we
know of a very different sort respecting battlefields and days after
the battle. We say, therefore, may war turn out to be as mortal, and
speedily so, as railroads and growing good-sense can make it; though
in the meantime, and the more for that hope, we may be allowed to
indulge ourselves as we did when children, in admiring the pretty
figures which it cuts in this place--the harmlessness of its glitter
and the transports of its beholders. Will anybody who has beheld it
when a boy ever forget how his heart leaped within him when, having
heard the music before he saw the musicians, he issued hastily from
Whitehall on to the parade, and beheld the serene and stately regiment
assembled before the colonel, the band playing some noble march, and
the officers stepping forwards to the measure with their saluting
swords? Will he ever forget the mystical dignity of the band-major,
who made signs with his staff; the barbaric, and as it were,
Othello-like height and lustre of the turbaned black who tossed the
cymbals; the dapper juvenility of the drummers and fifers; and the
astounding prematureness of the little boy who played on the triangle?
Is it in the nature of human self-respect to forget how this little
boy, dressed in a "right earnest" suit of regimentals, and with his
hair as veritably powdered and plastered as the best, fetched those
amazing strides by the side of Othello, which absolutely "kept up"
with his lofty shanks, and made the schoolboy think the higher of his
own nature for the possibility? Furthermore, will he ever forget how
some regiment of horse used to come over the Park to Whitehall, in the
midst of this parade, and pass the foot-soldiers with a sound of
clustering magnificence and dancing trumpets? Will he ever forget how
the foot then divided itself into companies, and turning about and
deploying before the colonel, marched off in the opposite direction,
carrying away the school-boy himself and the crowd of spectators with
it; and so, now with the brisk drums and fifes, and now with the
deeper glories of the band, marched gallantly off for the court-yard
of the palace, where it again set up its music-book, and enchanted the
crowd with Haydn or Mozart? What a strange mixture, too, was the crowd
itself--boys and grown men, gentlemen, vagabonds, maid-servants--there
they all went listening, idling, gazing on the ensign or the
band-major, keeping pace with the march, and all of them more or less,
particularly the maid-servants, doting on the "sogers." We, for one,
confess to having drunk deep of the attraction, or the infection, or
the balmy reconcilement (whichever the reader pleases to call it).
Many a holiday morning have we hastened from our cloisters in the city
to go and hear "the music in the park," delighted to make one in the
motley crowd, and attending upon the last flourish of the hautboys and
clarionets. There we first became acquainted with feelings which we
afterwards put into verse (if the recollection be not thought an
impertinence); and there, without knowing what it was called, or who
it was that wrote it, we carried back with us to school the theme of a
glorious composition, which afterwards became a favourite with
opera-goers under the title of _Non più andrai_, the delightful march
in _Figaro_. We suppose it is now, and has ever since been played
there, to the martialisation of hundreds of little boys, and the
puzzlement of philosophy. Everything in respect to military parade
takes place, we believe, in the park just as it used to do, or with
little variation. The objects also which you behold, if you look at
the parade and its edifices, are the same. The Admiralty, the
Treasury, the back of the Minister's house in Downing Street, and the
back-front of the solid and not inappropriate building, called the
Horse Guards, look as they did fifty years ago; and there also
continue to stand the slender Egyptian piece of cannon, and the dumpy
Spanish mortar, trophies of the late war with France. The
inscriptions, however, on those triumphant memorials contain no
account of the sums we are still paying for having waged it.
"The soldiers" and the "milk from the cow" do not at all clash in the
minds of boyhood. The juvenile imagination ignores what it pleases,
especially as its knowledge is not very great. It no more connects the
idea of village massacre with guns and trumpets, than it supposes the
fine scarlet coat capable of being ragged and dirty. Virgil may say
something about ruined fields, and people compelled to fly for their
lives; but this is only part of a "lesson," and the calamities but so
many nouns and verbs. The maid-servants, and indeed the fair sex in
general, till they become wives and mothers, enjoy the like happy
exemption from ugly associations of ideas; and the syllabub is taken
under the trees, with a delighted eye to the milk on one side, and the
military show on the other.
The late Mr. West, the painter, was so pleased with this pastoral
group of cows and milk-drinkers in the park, that he went out of the
line of his art to make a picture of it.
Saint James's Palace was not much occupied by the Tudor and Stuart
sovereigns. Their principal town residence was Whitehall. The first of
the Stuarts may have intended to make St. James's the residence of the
Princes of Wales; for he gave it his son Henry, who died there. We
have spoken of this prince and his doubtful "promise" already. The
best thing known of him is the astonishment he expressed at his
father's keeping "such a bird" as Walter Raleigh locked up in a cage.
Charles the First spent the three last days of his life in this
palace, occupying himself in devotion, and preparing to fall with
dignity;--happy if he had but known how to value the dignity of truth,
which would have saved him from the necessity. The Stuarts,
unfortunate everywhere in proportion to the gravity of their
pretensions, had their customary bad fortune in this palace; at least
the male portion of them. James the Second's daughters, who got his
throne, were born and married there; but here also was born his son,
the first Pretender, whose mother's chamber being situate near some
backstairs gave colour to the ridiculous story of his having been a
spurious child smuggled into the palace in a warming pan; and here his
unlucky and narrow-minded father partly resided when he _per force_
invited his ouster and son-in-law William to take up his abode in it,
and received in return notice to quit his throne. The old romantic
Lord Craven, who was supposed to have been privately married to James
the First's daughter, the luckless Queen of Bohemia, and who was thus
destined to witness the whole of the troubles of the English dynasty
of the Stuarts, happened to be on duty at St. James's when the Dutch
troops were coming across the park to take possession of it. Agreeably
to his chivalrous character, and to his habit of taking warlike steps
to no purpose, the gallant veteran would have opposed their entrance;
but his master forbade him; and he marched away, says Pennant, "with
sullen dignity."
"_Est-il-possible_" got the house after James;--we mean his daughter
Anne's husband, George of Denmark, who being no livelier a man than
his father-in-law, made no other comment than these three words (_Is
it possible?_) on the accounts given him by the poor King of every
successive desertion from his cause. In due time the man of one remark
followed the deserters; upon which James observed to one of the few
friends left him, "Who do you think is gone now? Little
_Est-il-possible_ himself."
St. James's was given to Anne and her husband by the new sovereign
William the Third. She made it her chief palace when she came to the
throne, and such it continued to be with the sovereigns of England
till the reign of George the Third, with whom its occupation was
divided with Buckingham house. Lady Strafford, the wild daughter of
Rochester, who lived in France because England, she said, was "too
dull" for her, used to relate stories of the "orgies" in Anne's
palace. Palaces for the most part have been places of greater license
than the world supposes, owing to the natural results of luxury,
privilege, and the bringing of idle and agreeable people together; but
the orgies which the rattle-headed Lady Strafford talked of, were
probably never anything much greater than a drinking-bout of her
husband, who unluckily taught his wife to drink too. Anne, between her
Protestant accession and her exiled Popish kindred, her imperious
favourite the Duchess of Marlborough, and her quarrelling and
fluctuating Administrations, had an anxious time of it. There is an
old French story of a sage but ugly cavalier, who married a handsome
fool, in the persuasion that his children would inherit their mother's
beauty and his own wisdom. Unfortunately, they turned out to be
specimens of his own ugliness, combined with the mother's folly. We do
not say that Queen Anne was a fool, though she was not very wise; but
when her grandfather, Lord Clarendon, saw the match between his clever
daughter and the future James the Second, he probably hoped that their
offspring would possess the father's figure combined with the mother's
wit; whereas neither Mary nor Anne possessed the latter, and Anne
inherited the mother's fat with the father's dulness. She was a
well-meaning and fond, but sluggish-minded woman, with no force of
character; her temperament was heavy and lax; she did not know what to
do with her political perplexities; and the screw-up of her nerves
with strong waters appears to have become irresistible. Swift gives a
curious account of her levees, in which she would sit with a parcel of
courtiers about her, silently giving glances at them, and putting the
end of her fan in her mouth for want of address. She was glad to get
the whole set away, that she might sink into her easy chair, and
complain of the troubles of human life.
St. James's thus began with being a dull court, and dull for the most
part it remained to the last--quite worthy of its external appearance.
George the First and Second were both dull gentlemen, with a
difference; the former a pale round-featured man, content to appear
the insipid personage he was; the latter, aquiline-nosed, affecting
spirit and gallantry, and attaining only to rudeness. They were people
of the then German schools of breeding, very different from the
present; and St. James's at that time combined a tasteless air of
decorum with gallantries equally unengaging. George the First had two
German mistresses, one as lean as the other was fat; and George the
Second another, remarkable for nothing but making money. Lady Wortley
Montagu and Horace Walpole have given some amusing notices of the
palace in connection with their Majesties and the court.
"This is a strange country," said George the First on his coming to
England. "The first morning after my arrival at St. James's, I looked
out of the window and saw a park with walks, a canal, &c., which they
told me were mine. The next day, Lord Chetwynd, the ranger of _my_
park, sent me a fine brace of carp out of _my_ canal; and I was told I
must give five guineas to Lord Chetwynd's servant for bringing me _my
own_ carp out of _my own_ canal in _my own_ park."
We are not to suppose that the King delivered this speech in the smart
good English of its reporter, or in any English; for he was not
acquainted with the language. He and his Minister Sir Robert Walpole
used to converse, even on the most important matters of state, in such
Latin as their school recollections furnished, the Minister
understanding German or French as little as the King did English.
His Majesty, in the first days of his new court, was more agreeably
surprised one evening by the sudden return of Lady Mary Wortley to the
party which were assembled in his rooms, and which she had somewhat
strangely pleaded a previous engagement for quitting. She returned,
borne in the arms of Mr. Secretary Craggs, junior, who had met her
going away, and seized hold of the fugitive. He deposited her in the
ante-room; but the doors of the presence-chamber being hastily thrown
open by the pages, she found herself so astonished and fluttered that
she related the whole adventure to the no less astonished king; who
asked Mr. Craggs whether it was customary in England to carry ladies
about "like sacks of wheat." "There is nothing," answered the adroit
secretary, "which I would not do for your Majesty's satisfaction."
Towards the close of this monarch's reign, the future court historian,
Horace Walpole, then a boy of ten years of age, had a longing "to see
the King;" and as he was the son of the Minister, his longing was
gratified in a very particular manner. A meeting was arranged on
purpose the day before his Majesty took his last journey to Hanover:--
"My mother," says Walpole, "carried me at ten at night to the
apartments of the Countess of Walsingham, on the ground floor,
towards the garden of St. James's, which opened into that of
her aunt the Duchess of Kendal's; apartments occupied by George
the Second after his Queen's death, and by his successive
mistresses, the Countesses of Suffolk and Yarmouth. Notice
being given that the King was come down to supper, Lady
Walsingham took me alone into the Duchess's ante-room, where we
found alone the King and her. I knelt down and kissed his hand.
He said a few words to me, and my conductress led me back to my
mother. The person of the King is as perfect in my memory as if
I saw him but yesterday. It was that of an elderly man, rather
pale, and exactly like his pictures and coins, not tall, of an
aspect rather good than august, with a dark tie-wig, a plain
coat, waistcoat, and breeches, of snuff-coloured cloth, with
stockings of the same colour, and a blue ribband over all. So
entirely was he my object that I do not believe I once looked
at the Duchess; but as I could not avoid seeing her on entering
the room, I remember that just beyond his Majesty stood a very
tall, lean, ill-favoured old lady."
This lady, the Duchess of Kendal, a German, was the king's lean
mistress. The fat one, another German, whom he made Countess of
Darlington, was "as corpulent and ample as the duchess was long and
emaciated." Walpole, who gives this account of her, adds, that he
remembered being "terrified" in his infancy at her enormous figure.
She had "two fierce black eyes, large and rolling between two lofty
arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of
neck," &c., "and no part restrained by stays." "It was not," says
Horace, "till the last year or two of his reign, that this foreign
sovereign paid the nation the compliment of taking openly an English
mistress." This was Miss Brett, daughter of Savage's reputed mother
the Countess of Macclesfield, by her second husband, Colonel Brett,
whom we have seen, in our accounts of the Streets of London, keeping
company with Addison. Miss Brett was a very lively and aspiring
damsel. During the visit to Hanover just mentioned, she took it upon
herself to break out a door from her apartments in St. James's Palace
into the Royal garden. The eldest of the king's grand-daughters, also
a very spirited person, ordered it to be closed up again. Miss Brett,
more spirited, again broke it open, and we hear of the matter no
further. But the king died on his journey, and the new mistress's
empire was over.
The new King, George the Second, while Prince of Wales, had quarrelled
with his father, and had been ordered to quit St. James's with all his
household. Though a great formalist, he was also a great, and indeed
somewhat alarming, pretender to gallantry, being of opinion, according
to Lady Wortley Montagu, that men and women were created solely to be
"kicked or kissed" by him at his pleasure. It is of him that stories
were told of the King's cuffing his ministers, and kicking his hat
about the room; and he is understood to be the King Arthur of
Fielding's Tom Thumb. He had a wife, however, of some real pretensions
to liveliness of mind, afterwards Queen Caroline, the friend of men of
letters, and a very excellent wife too, for she was charitable to her
husband's irregularities, and is said to have even shortened her life
by putting her rheumatic legs into cold water in order to be able to
accompany him in his walks. Here, in St. James's Palace, as well as at
Kensington, she held her literary and philosophico-religious levees
(being fond of a little theological inquiry); and here also she had
brought together the handsomest and liveliest set of ladies in waiting
ever seen on these sober-looking premises before or since. For, though
Lady Winchelsea, the poetess, was among those of James the Second, the
ladies about that sombre personage and his Queen seem, for the most
part, to have been both dull and ugly. His first Queen, Anne Hyde, had
been a maid of honour herself, and did not encourage the sisterhood;
and his second Queen, the young and handsome Mary of Modena, who had
heard of the doings at Whitehall when her husband was Duke of York,
condescended to be jealous of him, in spite of their difference of
years; James being comparatively an old gentleman, while she was not
out of her teens. Indeed, he gave cause for the jealousy, and added no
hopes of amendment; for being a Papist as well as a solemn gallant, he
divided his time between the ugly mistresses he was fond of, and the
priests who absolved him from the offence; an absolution that was
superfluous, according to his brother Charles; the "merry monarch"
having been of opinion that the mistresses themselves were penance
enough.
George the Second's German mistress was a Baroness de Walmoden. On the
death of Queen Caroline, he brought her over from Germany, and created
her Countess of Yarmouth. She had two sons, the younger of whom was
supposed to be the King's; and a ludicrous anecdote connected with the
supposition and with the abode before us, is related of the famous
Lord Chesterfield. On the countess's settlement in her state
apartments, his lordship found one day in the palace ante-chamber a
fair young gentleman, whom he took for the son in question. He was
accordingly very profuse in his compliments. The shrewd lad received
them all with a grave face, and then delightfully remarked, "I suppose
your lordship takes me for 'Master Louis;' but I am only Sir William
Russell, one of the pages." Chesterfield piqued himself on his
discernment, particularly in matters of intercourse; and it is
pleasant to catch the heartless man of "the graces" at a disadvantage
that must have extremely mortified him.
There is another St. James's anecdote of Chesterfield, which shows him
in no very dignified light. Mrs. Howard, afterwards Countess of
Suffolk, a very amiable woman, supposed to have been one of the
mistresses of George the Second, was thought to have more influence
with his Majesty than she possessed. Sir Robert Walpole told his son
Horace that Queen Caroline saw Lord Chesterfield one night, after
having won a large sum of money at court, steal along a dark passage
under her window that was lighted only by a single lamp, in order to
deposit it in Mrs. Howard's apartment, for fear of carrying it home in
the dark. Sir Robert (his son adds) thought that this was the occasion
of Chesterfield's losing his credit with the Queen; but the conclusion
has shown it to be unfounded. Chesterfield, however, though really a
very sharp-sighted man, was rendered liable by his bad principles to a
failure in what he thought his acutest views; and Caroline's better
nature may have seen through his lordship's character without the
help of the lamp and the dark passage.
The Queen's ladies above alluded to were the famous bevy of the
Howards, Lepells, and Bellendens, celebrated in the pages of Swift and
Pope. They have become well known to the public by the appearance of
the _Suffolk Correspondence_, and _Lady Hervey's Letters_. George the
Second, when Prince of Wales, and living in this palace with his
father, had probably made love to them all, fluttering more than
flattering them, between his attentions as a prince and his unengaging
qualities as a brusque and parsimonious man. Miss Bellenden, who
became Duchess of Argyle, is said to have observed one day to him as
he was counting his money in her presence (probably with an intimation
of his peculiar sense of the worth of it), "Sir, I cannot bear it. If
you count your money any more, I will go out of the room." Another
version of the story says that she tilted the guineas over, and then
ran out of the room while the Prince was picking them up. This is
likely, for she had great animal spirits. When the Prince quarrelled
with his father, and he and his household were ordered to quit St.
James's, Miss Bellenden is described, in a ballad written on the
occasion, as taking her way from the premises by jumping gaily
down-stairs.
The occasion of this rupture between George the First and his son was
curious. Palaces are very calm-looking things outside; but within,
except in very wise and happy, or very dull reigns, are pampered
passions, and too often violent scenes. George the First and his son,
like most sovereigns and heirs apparent, were not on good terms. The
Princess of Wales had been delivered of a second son, which was to be
christened; and the Prince wished his uncle the Duke of York to stand
godfather with his Majesty. His Majesty, on the other hand,
peremptorily insisted on dividing the pious office with the officious
Duke of Newcastle. The christening accordingly took place in the
Princess's bed-chamber; and no sooner had the bishop shut the book
than the Prince, furiously crossing the foot of the bed, and heedless
of the King's presence, "held up his hand and forefinger to the Duke
in a menacing attitude (as Lady Suffolk described the scene to
Walpole) and said, 'You are a rascal, but I shall find you' (meaning
in his broken English, 'I shall find a time to be revenged')." The
next morning Lady Suffolk (then Mrs. Howard), while about to enter the
Princess's apartment, was surprised to find her way barred by the
yeomen with their halberds; and the same night the Prince and Princess
were ordered to quit so unexpectedly, that they were obliged to go to
the house of their chamberlain, the Earl of Grantham, in Albemarle
Street. The father and son were afterwards reconciled, but they never
heartily agreed.
Nor was the case better between George the Second and the new Prince
of Wales, his son Frederick. If George the First was a common-place
man of the quiet order, and George the Second of the bustling,
Frederick was of an effeminate sort, pretending to taste and
gallantry, and possessed of neither. He affected to patronise
literature in order to court popularity, and because his father and
grandfather had neglected it; but he took no real interest in the
literati, and would meanly stop their pensions when he got out of
humour. He passed his time in intriguing against his father, and
hastening the ruin of a feeble constitution by sorry amours.
Not long after the marriage of George the Third, Buckingham House was
settled on his young Queen in the event of her surviving him; and the
King took such a liking to it as to convert St. James's Palace wholly
into a resort for state occasions, and confine his town residence to
the new abode. Buckingham House was so called from John Sheffield,
Duke of Buckinghamshire, who built it. It was a dull though ornamented
brick edifice, not unworthily representing the mediocre ability and
stately assumptions of the owner, who was a small poet and a
fastidious grandee, nearly as mad with pride as his duchess. This lady
was a natural daughter of James the Second (if indeed she was even
that, for a Colonel Godfrey laid claim to the paternity), and she
carried herself so loftily in consequence, as to wish to be treated
seriously as a princess, receiving visitors under a canopy, and going
to the theatre in ermine. She and the Duchess of Marlborough, who had
a rival palace next door to St. James's, used to sit swelling at one
another with neighbourly spite. Sheffield, her husband, is said to
have first made love to her sister Anne (afterwards Queen), for which
her uncle, Charles the Second, has been accused of sending him on an
expedition to Tangier in a "leaky vessel." The duke wrote a long
complacent description of Buckingham House, that has often been
reprinted, recording, among other things, the classical inscriptions
which he put upon it and the princely chambers which it contained for
the convenience of the births of his illustrious house. The births
came to nothing in consequence of the death of his only legitimate
child; a natural son inherited the property, and Government bought it
for Queen Charlotte. Henceforward it divided its old appellation of
Buckingham House with that of the "Queen's House;" almost all the
Queen's children were born there; and there, as at Kew and Windsor,
she may be said to have secreted her husband as much as she could from
the world, partly out of judicious consideration for his infirmities,
and partly in accordance with the pride as well as penuriousness that
were at the bottom of manners not ungentle, and a shrewd though narrow
understanding. The spirit of this kind of life was very soon announced
to the fashionable world after her marriage by the non-appearance of
certain festivities; and it continued as long as her husband lived,
and as far as her own expenditure was concerned; though when her son
came to the throne she astonished the public by showing her
willingness to partake of festivities in an establishment not her own.
A deplorable exhibition of her tyrannous and unfeeling habits of
exaction of the attentions of those about her is to be found in the
_Diary of Madame d'Arblay_ (Miss Burney), whom they nearly threw into
a consumption. It is clear that they would have done so, had not the
poor waiting-gentlewoman mustered up courage enough to dare to save
her life by persisting in her request to be set free. Queen Charlotte
was a plain, penurious, soft-spoken, decorous, bigoted, shrewd,
over-weening personage, "content" through a long life "to dwell on
decencies for ever," inexorable "upon principle" to frailty, but not
incapable of being bribed out of it by German prepossessions, and
whatever else might assist to effect the miracle, as was seen in the
instance of Mrs. Hastings, who had been Warren Hastings's mistress,
and who was, nevertheless received at court. Pleasant as her Majesty
might have been to Miss Burney, who seems to have loved to be
"persecuted," she was assuredly no charmer in the eyes of the British
nation; nor was she in the slightest degree lamented when she died.
Nevertheless she was a very good wife, for such we really believe her
to have been; we mean not merely faithful, (for who would have tempted
her?) but truly considerate, and anxious, and kind; and besides this
she had another merit, not indeed of the same voluntary description,
but one for which the nation is strongly indebted to her, though we
are not aware that it has ever been mentioned. We mean that her cool
and calculating brain turned out to be a most happy match for the
warmer one of her husband, in ultimate as well as immediate respects;
for it brought reason back into the blood of his race, and drew a
remarkable line in consequence between him and his children; none of
whom, however deficient in abilities, partook of their father's
unreasonableness, while some went remarkably counter to his want of
orderliness and self-government. The happy engraftment of the Cobourg
family on the stock, completed this security in its most important
quarter; and if ever a shade of more than ordinary sorrow for the
necessity should have been brought across the memory in that quarter
by a ridiculous pen, the sense of the security ought to fling it to
the winds, with all the joy and comfort befitting the noblest brow and
the wisest reign that have yet adorned the annals of its house.
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