All allowances made for the near alliance of great wits--"the lunatic,
the lover, and the poet"--there comes a point where the vagaries of
temperament overlap and are confounded, and where the historian, at
least, must take a line. None of Sheridan's biographers, and he has
had, as I think, more than his share, refer to an eclipse of his
rational self which he undoubtedly suffered; probably because it
was not made public until the other day. Yet there have always been
indications of the truth, as when, on his death-bed, he told Lady
Bessborough that his eyes would be looking at her through the
coffin-lid. Being the woman she was, she probably believed him, or
thought that she did. It is from her published letters that we may now
understand what reason she had for believing him.
These letters are contained in the correspondence of Lord Granville
Leveson-Gower, who was our Ambassador in Paris on and off between 1824
and 1841, a correspondence published in 1916, in two hefty volumes.
The period covered is from 1781 to 1821, and the documents are mainly
the letters to him of Lady Bessborough, which reveal a relation
between the pair so curious that, to me, it is extraordinary that
nobody should have called attention to them before. I can only account
for that by considering that the letters, which are very long, and
the volumes, which are very heavy, do not readily yield what store of
sweetness they possess, and that those in particular of Lord Granville
Gower have no store of sweetness to yield. They are the wooden letters
of a wooden young man. He may have been a beautiful young man, and
an estimable young man; but he was insensitive, dull, and a prig.
The best things he ever did in his days were to be belettered by Lady
Bessborough and married, finally, to her witty and sensible niece.
Meantime, there is no need to disguise the fact, since we have it in
cold print, that the acquaintance of the couple, begun at Naples in
1794 as a flirtation, developed rapidly, on the lady's side, into a
love affair which was only ended by her death. In 1794, when it all
began, Lady Bessborough was thirty-two, had been married for fourteen
years, and had four children. Granville Gower was twenty, well born,
rich, exceedingly good-looking, and with no excuse for not knowing all
about it. In fact, he knew it perfectly, and was not afraid to allude
to himself as Antinous. We hear more than enough of his fine blue eyes
from Lady Bessborough--and perhaps he did too. She, in her turn, was
to hear, poor soul, more than her own heart could bear. All that need
be said about that is that, being the woman she was, it was to be
expected. And exactly what sort of woman she was she herself puts upon
record, in April, 1812, in the following words:--
"_Pour la rareté du fait et la bizarrerie des hommes_, I must
put down what I dare tell nobody--I should be so much ashamed
of it were it not so ridiculous. At this present April, 1812,
in my fifty-first year, I am courted, follow'd, flatter'd, and
made love to _en toutes les formes_, by four men--two of them
reckoned sensible, and one of the two whom I have known half
my life--Lord Holland, Ward, young M----n, and little M----y.
Sir J.C. wanted to marry me when I was fifteen; so from that
time to this--36 years, a
pretty long life--I have heard or spoke that language; and for
17 years of it lov'd almost to Idolatry the only man from whom
I could have wish'd to hear it, the man who has probably lov'd
me least of all those who have profess'd to do so--tho' once I
thought otherwise."
Arrant sentimentalist, born and trained flirt, as this confession
shows her to have been, it also shows that she lived to rue it. She
rued more than that, for she was the mother of Lady Caroline Lamb; and
if anything more need be said of her misfortunes, let it be added
that she was sister to Georgiana of Devonshire. Nevertheless, it is
impossible to read her letters with her wooden young lord without
seeing that she had a good heart, if a very weak head. She loved much;
and for those whom she loved--her sister, her children, Granville
Gower--she was ready to dare all things, and fail in most. Of her
husband there is nothing to tell, for she hardly names him, except to
say that he has the gout. Not much is known of him, and nothing but
good. Horace Walpole wrote of his marriage in 1780: "I know nothing to
the prejudice of the young lady; but I should not have selected for so
gentle and very amiable a man a sister of the empress of fashion, nor
a daughter of the Goddess of Wisdom." The goddess of wisdom was her
formidable and trenchant mother, Lady Spencer.
But I don't intend to follow the vain stages of her sentimental
pilgrimage in pursuit of Lord Granville Gower's heart, vain because
apparently the young man had not such an organ at her disposal. It was
not, perhaps, for nothing that they exchanged reflections upon _Les
Liaisons Dangereuses_. A new Choderlos de Laclos would get a new
sentimental novel out of the Granville Gower correspondence; or it
may be taken as it stands for a recovered Richardson, quite as long
as _Sir Charles Grandison_ and much more amusing--for the poor lady is
often witty. The affair dragged on, with much scandal, much whispering
about it and about, until 1809, when the hero of it married Lady
Harriet Cavendish, his mistress's niece. J.W. Ward, one of her lovers,
according to her, sharply sums it up in a letter to Mrs. Dugald
Stewart: "Lord Granville Leveson is going to marry Lady Harriet
Cavendish. Lady Bessborough resigns, I presume, in favour of her
niece. I have not heard what are supposed to be the secret articles of
the treaty, but it must be a curious document." It was in 1812, as I
have said, that she wrote out the pathetic confession of what we must
suppose to have been the truth.
But I intended to write about Sheridan. This correspondence reveals
him as the evil genius of Lady Bessborough's life; and perhaps, if all
the truth were known, she may have been the evil genius of his, or one
of them, anyhow. She had adventures with him behind her in 1794, when
she began adventures anew; for they became intimate at Devonshire
House, where, as the crony of Charles Fox, he was always at hand. The
Duchess herself was one of his familiars. His initials for her, in
letter-writing, were T.L., which a biographer pleasantly interprets as
"True Love." The sisters, Countess and Duchess, shared in all good and
evil things, and they seem to have shared Sheridan. His chosen initial
for Lady Bessborough's address was "F," her second name being Frances.
Mr. Sichel prints a letter from him to her, and guesses it to be
of 1788. Extracts will suffice for the judicious: "I must bid 'oo
good-night, for by the light passing to and fro near your room I
hope you are going to bed and to sleep happily with a hundred little
cherubs fanning their white wings over you in approbation of your
goodness. Yours is the sweet, untroubled sleep of purity." It is to be
feared that she could swallow this over-succulent stuff. A very little
more will do for us: "And yet, and yet--Beware! Milton will tell
you that even in Paradise serpents found their way to the ear of
slumbering innocence. Then, to be sure, poor Eve had no watchful
guardian to pace up and down beneath her windows.... And Adam, I
suppose--was at Brooks's ... I shall be gone before your hazel eyes
are open to-morrow...."
Lady Duncannon, as she was then, lived in Cavendish Square. Sheridan's
leaguer of the house is thus betrayed. He never again left either her
or it alone for long, but beset them until his death. Bitterly enough
she was to rue that dalliance with the vainest sentimentalist ever
begotten in Ireland or fostered in England. His wife, as lovely as
a Muse and with the voice of a seraph, was to die; he was to adore,
pursue, and capture another; but he never let Lady Bessborough go, and
the antics of his mortified vanity were to lead her as far into the
mire as any woman could go without suffocation. Such experiences may
be common enough; it is rare to have them so nakedly portrayed as they
are in this lady's letters, and not easy to avoid the conclusion
that she made use of them to pique her wooden Antinous into some more
active kind of pose than that of allowing himself to be adored.
Sheridan was forty-three and married to his second wife when Lady
Bessborough fell in with Antinous at Naples; but it was not until the
attachment of those two had become a notoriety that he began to make
scenes about it. In 1798, when Granville Gower was in Berlin,
Lady Bessborough writes to him that she had been at a concert at
Sheridan's. "It was as pleasant as anything of the sort can be to me,
as I sat by Fitzpatrick and Grey, who always amuse me. Sheridan
says, when he found I did not come to town, he imagined that you
had interdicted my coming till your return, and is always asking me
whether what I am doing is allowed." That was March 12th; between that
and the 17th she seems to have met Sheridan every day and nearly every
night. "I must tell you, by the by ... that I am in great request this
year.... I have had three _violent_ declarations of love--one from
an old man, another from a very young one, and the third between the
other two.... Pray come back. If you stay long in Prussia, Heaven
knows what may happen."
In August of the same year she writes again. "Sheridan call'd in the
morning and found out that I was alone, and told me he would dine with
me. I thought, of course, he was in joke, but, _point du tout_, he
arriv'd at dinner, dined, and stayed the whole evening. He was very
pleasant, but--it was not you, and the seeing anybody only increas'd
my regrets, which I suppose were pretty visible, for every five
minutes he kept saying: 'How I am wasting all my efforts to entertain
you, while you are grieving that you cannot change me into _Lord
Leveson_. You would not be so grim if he was beaming on you.' At
length, as I thought he was preparing to pass the night as well as the
evening with me, and as he began to make some fine speeches I did not
quite approve of, I order'd my Chair, to get rid of him. This did
not succeed, for as I had no place to go to, he follow'd me about to
Anne's and Lady D----'s, where I knew I should not be let in, and home
again. But, luckily, I got in time enough to order every one to be
denied, and ran upstairs, while I heard him expostulating with the
porter...." It does not appear, from this narrative, that the hunted
fair was seriously annoyed at being hunted, and the implication of
Lord Granville in the unpleasant business is patent. Next year she has
asked her persecutor to help Antinous at his election, for his reply,
beginning "Dear Traitress," is given here.
After that, peace or silence, until 1802, when Sheridan changed his
tactics.
"The opera was beautiful.... The Prince paid us two visits,
but our chief company were Hare, Grey, and Sheridan, the
latter persecuting me in every pause of the music and
telling me he knew such things of you, could give me such
incontrovertible proofs of your falsehood, and not only
falsehood but treachery to me, that if I had one grain of
pride or spirit left I should fly you. And guess what I
answered, you who call me jealous. I told him I had such
entire reliance on your faith, such confidence in your truth,
that I should doubt my own eyes if they witness'd against your
word. He pitied me, and said: 'How are the mighty fallen,' and
then went on telling me things without end to drive me mad."
That was in March. In August she writes, actually under siege:
"Here I am quite alone in C. Square ... no carriage to watch
for, no rap at the door ... and alas! no chance of hearing
your step upon the stair.... Whilst I was regretting all this,
suddenly, the knock did come, to my utter astonishment. I ran
to the stair, and in a moment heard Sheridan's voice. I do
not know why, but I took a horror of seeing him, and hurried
Sally down to say I was out. I heard him answer: 'Tell her I
call'd twice this morning, and want particularly to see her,
for I know she is at home.' Sally protested I was out, and S.
answered: 'Then I shall walk up and down before the door till
she comes in,' and there he is walking sure enough. It is
partly all the nonsense he talk'd all this year, and the
hating to see any one when I cannot see you, that makes me
dislike letting him in so much."
He solemnly did sentry-go for nearly an hour, she goes on to say. In
that hour he was in his fifty-first year, she in her fortieth.
If she revealed these sorry doings to Antinous with the view of
fanning embers, she did not succeed in drawing more than a languid
protest from him. "As to Sheridan, in the morning I purposely staid
in my room till the time of our setting out, and only saw him as I was
getting into the carriage, so had nothing more to tell.... You say I
am not angry enough. I am provok'd, vex'd, and asham'd. To feel more
deeply I must care for the person who offends me...." I cannot myself
read either vexation or shame in her reports. Provocation I can and do
read--but it is not she who is provoked.
In 1804, Antinous in Petersburg, there are new antics to record. "You
will think I live at the play; I am just return'd from Drury Lane....
Sheridan persists in coming every night to us. He says one word to my
sister; then retires to the further corner of the box, where with
arms across, deep and audible sighs, and sometimes _tears_! he remains
without uttering and motionless, with his eyes fix'd on me in the most
marked and distressing manner, during the whole time we stay. To-night
he followed us in before the play begun, and remained as I tell you
thro' the play and farce. As we were going I dropped my shawl
and muff; he picked them up and with a look of ludicrous humility
presented them to Mr. Hill to give me." And this was the author of
_The School for Scandal_.
Next year, being that of Trafalgar, and Sheridan's fifty-fourth, he
began a course of persecution which definitely marks an access of
dementia. The affair took an acute turn suddenly, and I don't intend
to say more about it than that it took the form of anonymous and
obscene letters, some of them addressed to Lady Bessborough's
daughter, Caroline, then a child, some to herself, some to the
children of the Duchess of Devonshire. The letters, which continued
throughout the year, were signed with the names of friends--a Mr.
Hill, J.W. Ward, and others. Some were sent out signed with her name.
The editor of the correspondence says that "Lady Bessborough was
subsequently convinced by evidence which appeared to her conclusive
that Sheridan was the writer." There can be no doubt of that whatever,
and as all the detail is in the published correspondence, little
more need be said. The wooden Antinous, in Petersburg, for his sole
comment, writes as follows: "I learn with sorrow that you are still
subjected to vexations from anonymous letters, etc. I suppose that
Sheridan is the author, though one would have imagined that, however
depraved his morals, and however malignant might be his mind, he would
have had _good taste_ enough not to have resorted to such a species of
vengeance." And that was all the fire to be blown into Antinous. "Good
taste" in the circumstances is comic.
By the end of the season of the same year, however, Sheridan seems to
have found out what he had done, and Lady Bessborough also sufficient
self-respect to have helped him find it out. This is what happened on
July 12th, at a ball. "I sat between Prince Adolphus and Mr. Hill at
supper; Sheridan sat opposite, looking by turns so supplicating and
so fiercely at me that everybody round observ'd it and question'd me
about it. I could only say what was so, that he was very drunk. When
I got up, he seiz'd my arm as I pass'd him, begging me to shake hands
with him. I extricated myself from his grasp and pass'd on; he soon
after follow'd and began loudly reproaching me for my _cruelty_, and
asking why I would not shake hands. I was extremely distress'd, but at
last told him his own sagacity might explain to him why I never would,
and that his conduct to-night did not tend to alter my determination.
I then hurried out of the room, and by way of completely avoiding him,
cross'd a very formal circle of old ladies, and went and seated myself
between Lady Euston and Lady Beverly. He had the impudence to follow
me, and in face of the whole circle to enter into a loud explanation
of his conduct, begging my pardon for all the offences he had ever
committed against me, either on this night or in former times, and
assuring me that he had never ceased loving, _respecting_ and adoring
me, and that I was the only person he ever really loved...." "Think,"
she says, "of the dismay of all the formal ladies." But the formal
ladies, no doubt, had every reason to know their Devonshire House set;
and if society in 1805 would allow Sheridan to be drunk and stay at a
ball, it would prefer him maudlin drunk to drunk and disorderly. One
is bound to add, too, that Lady Bessborough was a fool, though
that, to be sure, is no excuse for Sheridan proving himself both old
blackguard and old fool in one.
Next year the Duchess died, and her sister's active persecution
appears to have ceased. But Sheridan by no means let her alone. On the
contrary, he had the assurance to send as intercessor no less a person
than the Prince Regent. "The Prince sent so repeatedly to me, and has
been throughout so kind and feeling that I thought it wrong to persist
in refusing to see him, so to-day he came soon after two and stayed
till six!... He gave me a very pretty emerald ring, which he begg'd me
to wear, _to bind still stronger the tie of Brotherhood which he has
always claim'd_. In the midst of all this he brought me a message from
Sheridan." This, which she describes as a "well-timed Petition for
Forgiveness," she had the prudence to wave aside. She said that she
had no wish to injure him, and only asked him to keep out of her way,
or, if they happened to meet, to cease to persecute her. And that was
very well, or would have been so, if she had had any character at
all, a quality which she unfortunately had not. In 1807, the following
year, she goes out to spend the evening with her daughter, Lady
Caroline, now married to William Lamb. "The entrance is, you know,
very dark; to my dismay, I saw a ruffian-like looking man following
me into the house. I hasten'd upstairs, but to my great dismay he also
ascended and enter'd the room immediately after me. It was so dark
I could not at first make out who he was. When I did, I was not the
better pleas'd with his establishing himself and passing the whole
evening with us; but much as I was displeased with him, I was still
more so with myself for being unable to resist laughing and appearing
entertained (he was so uncommonly clever), tho' I persevered in my
determination of not speaking to him. I do not like his having got
the entrée there, and think him, even old as he is, a dangerous
acquaintance for Caroline. Of course you perceive it was Sheridan."
Considering that she suspected him of having written and sent grossly
indecent letters to that girl of hers, one would have said that he was
even more than a dangerous acquaintance. Light-mindedness here spills
over into something rather worse. However, there he was, established,
and it was no way to dispossess him to laugh at his jokes.
I must now invite the reader to a farce, and, if he can forget that
Sheridan was a grandfather and fifty-six, a very good farce it is. It
is 1807, the 28th July. Lady Bessborough is staying with her daughter
for her first confinement, and receives a message from Mrs. Sheridan,
a rather wild young woman in her way, known to all Devonshire House as
Hecca. She goes at midnight,
"... and was carried up to her bedroom, where we had not sat
long when a violent burst at the door announc'd the arrival
of Sheridan, not perfectly sober. The most ridiculous scene
ensued--that is, ridiculous it would have been if I had not
felt myself too indignant and disgusted to be entertain'd. He
began by asking my pardon, entreating my mercy and compassion,
saying that he was a wretch, and was even at that moment more
in love with _me_ than with any woman he had ever met with, on
which Hecca exclaimed: 'Not excepting me? Why, you always tell
me that I am the only woman you were ever in love with.'
'So you are, to be sure, my dear Hecca; you know _that_, of
course--you _know_ that I love you better than anything
on earth.' '_Except_ her!' 'Pish, pish, child! Do not talk
nonsense.' Then he began again at me, upbraiding me for my
cruelty, both for quarrelling with him and setting Hecca
against him. The first, I said, I did in my own defence, the
other was false, Hecca every now and then coming in with:
'Why, S----, I thought Lady B---- pursued you, and that you
reviled all her violence like a second Joseph? So you us'd
to tell me.' I cannot give you all the conversation, for it
lasted till near three in the morning.... Getting away was the
difficulty; he wanted to come down with me, and seiz'd my arm
with such violence once before Hecca, that I was obliged to
call her maid to help me, and at last only escaped by locking
him in."
This sort of thing happened once more, in the same year, at Brocket.
On this occasion Sheridan pursued his victim into the nursery, and
threw himself on his knees. It gave Lady Bessborough an opportunity
which even she could not fail to perceive--and she used it. "I
interrupted the most animated professions by showing him the child and
asking him if his grandchildren were as pretty as mine. He jump'd up,
but with such fury in his looks that I was really frighten'd..." And
that may very well be the end: _solvuntur tabulæ risu_. Lord Granville
Gower married in 1809, and the confidential correspondence died the
death; but Sheridan lingered until 1816, and actually carried on his
desperate pursuit within three days of the end. She visited him, and
described what took place to Lord Broughton. He assured her, she said,
that he should visit her after his death. She asked, "Why, having
persecuted her all her life, would he now carry it into death?'
'Because I am resolved you shall remember me.'"[A] The story of his
telling her that his eyes would see her through the coffin-lid is well
known, and may be apocryphal; but the melodrama is Sheridan all over.
[Footnote A: Mr. Sichel, in his monumental book on Sheridan, doubts
the lady's memory, one of his grounds of doubt being that Sheridan
"would not have been likely to have thus behaved before his wife." But
Mr. Sichel did not then know what Sheridan was capable of doing before
his wife.]
Curiosity rather than edification is served by the publication of such
frank revelations as Lady Bessborough's, but that is a matter for her
descendants, and was probably considered. What relates to Sheridan is
quite another thing. On his death Byron hailed him with eloquent if
extravagant praise; he was buried in Westminster Abbey; three long
biographies have been written round him, not one of which has failed
to do justice to his abilities, and not one pointed out the extent of
his moral aberration. Mr. Sichel, the latest of them, says that "he
had pursued his own path and spurned the little arts of those who
twitted him with roguery." But if the Granville Gower correspondence
is to be believed--and how can it not--he was either a very bad rogue
or a madman. Sheridan, after all's said, made a great figure in
his day, and must stand the racket of it, so to speak. Gossip about
Harriet may be left to the idle; but Sheridan belongs to History.