COUNTESS OF FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT
A formal notification from the earl, addressed to the Countess of
Fleetwood in the third person, that Esslemont stood ready to receive
her, autocratically concealed her lord’s impatience to have her there;
and by the careful precision with which the stages of her journey were
marked, as places where the servants despatched to convey their lady
would find preparations for her comfort, again alarmed the disordered
mother’s mind on behalf of the child she deemed an object of the
father’s hatred, second to his hatred of the mother. But the mother
could defend herself, the child was prey the child of a detested wife
was heir to his title and estates. His look at the child, his hasty one
look down at her innocent, was conjured before her as resembling a kick
at a stone in his path. His indifference to the child’s Christian names
pointed darkly over its future.
The distempered wilfulness of a bruised young woman directed her
thoughts. She spoke them in the tone of reason to her invalid friend
Rebecca Wythan, who saw with her, felt with her, yearned to retain her
till breath was gone. Owain Wythan had his doubts of the tyrant guilty
of maltreating this woman of women. ‘But when you do leave Wales,’ he
said, ‘you shall be guarded up to your haven.’
Carinthia was not awake to his meaning then. She sent a short letter of
reply, imitating the style of her lord; very baldly stating, that she
was unable to leave Wales because of her friend’s illness and her part
as nurse. Regrets were unmentioned.
Meanwhile Rebecca Wythan was passing to death. Not cheerlessly, more and
more faintly, her thread of life ran to pause, resembling a rill of
the drought; and the thinner-it grew, the shrewder were her murmurs for
Carinthia’s ears in commending ‘the most real of husbands of an unreal
wife’ to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow
he had wedded. She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor
rules and restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock
husband-no husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife,
she said; and spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to
record a promise or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that
the wishes should be heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man’s
remaining one chance of happiness. On the theme touching her husband
Owain, it was verily to hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the
broader range, the rich interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit
past the flesh can find. Her mind was at the same time alive to our
worldly conventions when other people came under its light; she
sketched them and their views in her brief words between the gasps, with
perspicuous, humorous bluntness, as vividly as her twitched eyebrows
indicated the laugh. Gower Woodseer she read startlingly, if correctly.
Carinthia could not leave her. Attendance upon this dying woman was a
drinking at the springs of life.
Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady
Fleetwood’s consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months
old,--and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord
had made provision. Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little
conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.
In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the
inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of ‘the four and
twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned
green coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess
of Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the
Kentish gates of Esslemont,’ has a foundation, though the story is not
the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets,
printed when London’s wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the
doings. of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly
depended on whispers.
Enthusiasm sufficient to troop forth four and twenty and more hundreds
of Cambrian gentlemen, and still more of the common folk, as far as they
could journey afoot, was over the two halves of the Principality,
to give the countess a reputable and gallant body-guard. London had
intimations of kindling circumstances concerning her, and magnified them
in the interests of the national humour: which is the English way of
exalting to criticize, criticizing to depreciate, and depreciating to
restore, ultimately to cherish, in reward for the amusement furnished by
an eccentric person, not devoid of merit.
These little tales of her, pricking cool blood to some activity, were
furze-fires among the Welsh. But where the latter heard Bardic strings
inviting a chorus, the former as unanimously obeyed the stroke of their
humorous conductor’s baton for an outburst from the ribs or below. And
it was really funny to hear of Whitechapel’s titled heroine roaming
Taffyland at her old pranks.
Catching a maddened bull by the horns in the marketplace, and hanging to
the infuriate beast, a wild whirl of clouts, till he is reduced to be a
subject for steaks, that is no common feat.
Her performances down mines were things of the underworld. England
clapped hands, merely objecting to her not having changed her garb for
the picador’s or matador’s, before she seized the bull. Wales adopted
and was proud of her in any costume. Welshmen North and South, united
for the nonce, now propose her gallantry as a theme to the rival Bards
at the next Eisteddfod. She is to sit throned in full assembly, oak
leaves and mistletoe interwoven on her head, a white robe and green sash
to clothe her, and the vanquished beast’s horns on a gilded pole behind
the dais; hearing the eulogies respectively interpreted to her by
Colonel Fluellen Wythan at one ear, and Captain Agincourt Gower at the
other. A splendid scene; she might well insist to be present.
There, however, we are at the pitch of burlesque beyond her illustrious
lord’s capacity to stand. Peremptory orders from England arrive,
commanding her return. She temporizes, postpones, and supplicates to
have the period extended up to the close of the Eisteddfod. My lord’s
orders are imperatively repeated, and very blunt. He will not have her
‘continue playing the fool down there.’ She holds her ground from August
into February, and then sets forth, to undergo the further process
of her taming at Esslemont in England; with Llewellyn and Vaughan and
Cadwallader, and Watkyn and Shenkyn and the remains of the race of
Owen Tudor, attending her; vowed to extract a receipt from the earl her
lord’s responsible servitors for the safe delivery of their heroine’s
person at the gates of Esslemont; ich dien their trumpeted motto.
Counting the number at four and twenty, it wears the look of an
invasion. But the said number is a ballad number, and has been since the
antique time. There was, at a lesser number, enough of a challenge about
it for squires of England, never in those days backward to pick up a
glove or give the ringing rejoinder for a thumb-bite, to ride out and
tilt compliments with the Whitechapel Countess’s green cavaliers, rally
their sprites and entertain them exactly according to their degrees of
dignity, as exhibited by their ‘haviour under something of a trial; and
satisfy also such temporary appetites as might be excited in them by
(among other matters left to the luck of events) a metropolitan play
upon the Saxon tongue, hard of understanding to the leeky cocks until
their ready store of native pepper seasons it; which may require a
corresponding English condiment to rectify the flavour of the stew.
Now the number of Saxe-Normans riding out to meet and greet the Welshmen
is declared to have not exceeded nine. So much pretends to be historic,
in opposition to the poetic version. They would, we may be sure, have
made it a point of honour to meet and greet their invading guests in
precisely similar numbers a larger would have overshot the mark of
courtesy; and doubtless a smaller have fallen deplorably short of it.
Therefore, an acquaintance with her chivalrous, if less impulsive,
countrymen compels to the dismissing of the Dame’s ballad authorities.
She has every right to quote them for her own good pleasure, and may
create in others an enjoyment of what has been called ‘the Mackrell
fry.’
Her notion of a ballad is, that it grows like mushrooms from a scuffle
of feet on grass overnight, and is a sort of forest mother of the pied
infant reared and trimmed by historians to show the world its fatherly
antecedent steps. The hand of Rose Mackrell is at least suggested in
more than one of the ballads. Here the Welsh irruption is a Chevy Chase;
next we have the countess for a disputed Helen.
The lady’s lord is not a shining figure. How can an undecided one be a
dispenser of light? Poetry could never allow him to say with her:
‘Where’er I go I make a name,
And leave a song to follow.’
Yet he was the master of her fortunes at the time; all the material
power was his. Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the
fact) denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the
position between the driven and the driver. Poetry, however erratic, is
less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History. The
Muse of History has neither the same divination of the intrinsic nor
the devotion to it, though truly, she has possession of all the positive
matter and holds us faster by the crediting senses.
Nine English cavaliers, then, left London early on a January or February
morning in a Southerly direction, bearing East; and they were the Earl
of Fleetwood’s intimates, of the half-dependent order; so we may suppose
them to have gone at his bidding. That they met the procession of the
Welsh, and claimed to take charge of the countess’s carriage, near
the Kentish border-line, is an assertion supported by testimony fairly
acceptable.
Intelligence of the advancing party had reached the earl by courier,
from the date of the first gathering on the bridge of Pont-y-pridd;
and from Gloucester, along to the Thames at Reading; thence away to the
Mole, from Mickleham, where the Surrey chalk runs its final turfy spine
North-eastward to the slope upon Kentish soil.
Greatly to the astonishment of the Welsh cavaliers, a mounted footman,
clad in the green and scarlet facings of Lord Fleetwood’s livery, rode
up to them a mile outside the principal towns and named the inn where
the earl had ordered preparations for the reception of them. England’s
hospitality was offered on a princely scale. Cleverer fencing could not
be.
The meeting, in no sense an encounter, occurred close by a thirty-acre
meadow, famous over the county; and was remarkable for the punctilious
exchange of ceremonial speech, danger being present; as we see
powder-magazines protected by their walls and fosses and covered alleys.
Notwithstanding which, there was a scintillation of sparks.
Lord Brailstone, spokesman of the welcoming party, expressed comic
regrets that they had not an interpreter with them.
Mr. Owain Wythan, in the name of the Cambrian chivalry, assured him of
their comprehension and appreciation of English slang.
Both gentlemen kept their heads uncovered in a suspense; they might
for a word or two more of that savour have turned into the conveniently
spacious meadow. They were induced, on the contrary, to enter the
channel of English humour, by hearing Chumley Potts exclaim: ‘His nob!’
and all of them laughed at the condensed description of a good hit back,
at the English party’s cost.
Laughter, let it be but genuine, is of a common nationality, indeed a
common fireside; and profound disagreement is not easy after it. The
Dame professes to believe that ‘Carinthia Jane’ had to intervene as
peacemaker, before the united races took the table in Esslemont’s
dining-hall for a memorable night of it, and a contest nearer the mark
of veracity than that shown in another of the ballads she would have
us follow. Whatever happened, they sat down at table together, and the
point of honour for them each and every was, not to be first to rise
from it. Once more the pure Briton and the mixed if not fused English
engaged, Bacchus for instrument this time, Bacchus for arbiter of the
fray.
You may imagine! says the Dame. She cites the old butler at Esslemont,
‘as having been much questioned on the subject by her family relative,
Dr. Glossop, and others interested to know the smallest items of the
facts,’--and he is her authority for the declaration that the Welsh
gentlemen and the English gentlemen, ‘whatever their united number,’
consumed the number of nine dozen and a half of old Esslemont wine
before they rose, or as possibly sank, at the festive board at the hour
of five of the morning.
Years later, this butler, Joshua Queeney, ‘a much enfeebled old man,’
retold and enlarged the tale of the enormous consumption of his best
wine; with a sacred oath to confirm it, and a tear expressive of
elegiacal feelings.
‘They bled me twelve dozen, not a bottle less,’ she quotes him, after
a minute description of his countenance and scrupulously brushed black
suit, pensioner though he had become. He had grown, during the interval,
to be more communicative as to particulars. The wines were four. Sherry
led off the parade pace, Hock the trot into the merry canter, Champagne
the racing gallop, Burgundy the grand trial of constitutional endurance
for the enforced finish. All these wines, except the sparkling, had
their date of birth in the precedent century. ‘They went like water.’
Questioned anxiously by Dr. Glossop, Queeney maintained an impartial
attitude, and said there was no victor, no vanquished. They did not
sit in blocks. The tactics for preserving peace intermingled them. Each
English gentleman had a Welsh gentleman beside him; they both sat firm;
both fell together. The bottles or decanters were not stationary for the
guest to fill his glass, they circulated, returning to an empty glass.
All drank equally. Often the voices were high, the talk was loud. The
gentlemen were too serious to sing.
At one moment of the evening Queeney confidently anticipated a
‘fracassy,’ he said. One of the foreign party--and they all spoke
English, after five dozen bottles had gone the round, as correct as the
English themselves--remarked on the seventy-years Old Brown Sherry,
that ‘it had a Madeira flavour.’ He spoke it approvingly. Thereupon
Lord Simon Pitscrew calls to Queeney, asking him ‘why Madeira had been
supplied instead of Esslemont’s renowned old Sherry?’ A second Welsh
gentleman gave his assurances that his friend had not said it was
Madeira. But Lord Brailstone accused them of the worse unkindness to a
venerable Old Brown Sherry, in attributing a Madeira flavour to it. Then
another Welsh gentleman briskly and emphatically stated his opinion,
that the attribution of Madeira flavour to it was a compliment. At this,
which smelt strongly, he said, of insult, Captain Abrane called on the
name of their absent host to warrant the demand of an apology to the Old
Brown Sherry, for the imputation denying it an individual distinction.
Chumley Potts offered generally to bet that he would distinguish
blindfold at a single sip any Madeira from any first-class Sherry, Old
Brown or Pale. ‘Single sip or smell!’ Ambrose Mallard cried, either for
himself or his comrade, Queeney could not say which.
Of all Lord Fleetwood’s following, Mr. Potts and Mr. Mallard were, the
Dame informs us, Queeney’s favourites, because they were so genial; and
he remembered most of what they said and did, being moved to it by ‘poor
young Mr. Mallard’s melancholy end and Mr. Potts’s grief!’
The Welsh gentlemen, after paying their devoirs to the countess next
morning, rode on in fresh health and spirits at mid-day to Barlings, the
seat of Mr. Mason Fennell, a friend of Mr. Owain Wythan’s. They shouted,
in an unseemly way, Queeney thought, at their breakfast-table, to hear
that three of the English party, namely, Captain Abrane, Mr. Mallard,
and Mr. Potts, had rung for tea and toast in bed. Lord Simon Pitscrew,
Lord Brailstone, and the rest of the English were sore about it; for it
certainly wore a look of constitutional inferiority on the English side,
which could boast of indubitably stouter muscles. The frenzied spirits
of the Welsh gentlemen, when riding off, let it be known what their
opinion was. Under the protection of the countess’s presence, they
were so cheery as to seem triumphantly ironical; they sent messages of
condolence to the three in bed.
With an undisguised reluctance, the countess, holding Mr. Owain Wythan’s
hand longer than was publicly decent, calling him by his Christian name,
consented to their departure. As they left, they defiled before her;
the vow was uttered by each, that at the instant of her summons he would
mount and devote himself to her service, individually or collectively.
She waved her hand to them. They ranged in line and saluted. She kissed
her hand. Sweeping the cavaliers’ obeisance, gallantest of bows, they
rode away.
A striking scene, Dame Gossip says; but raises a wind over the clipped
adventure, and is for recounting what London believed about it. Enough
has been conceded for the stoppage of her intrusion; she is left in the
likeness of a full-charged pistol capless to the clapping trigger.
That which London believed, or affected to believe about it, would fill
chapters. There was during many months an impression of Lord Fleetwood’s
countess as of a tenacious, dread, prevailing young woman, both intrepid
and astute, who had, by an exercise of various arts, legitimate in open
war of husband and wife, gathered the pick of the Principality to storm
and carry another of her husband’s houses. The certification that her
cavaliers were Welsh gentlemen of wealth and position required a
broader sneer at the Welsh than was warranted by later and more intimate
acquaintance, if it could be made to redound to her discredit. So,
therefore, added to the national liking for a plucky woman, she gained
the respect for power. Whitechapel was round her like London’s one
street’s length extension of smoky haze, reminder of the morning’s fog
under novel sunbeams.
Simultaneously, strange to say, her connubial antagonist, far from being
overshadowed, grew to be proportionately respected, and on the strength
of his deserts, apart from his title and his wealth. He defended
himself, as he was bound to do, by welcoming the picked Welsh squires
with hospitable embrace, providing ceremonies, receptions, and most
comfortable arrangements for them, along the route. But in thus gravely
entering into the knightly burlesque of the procession, and assisting
to swell the same, he not only drew the venom from it, he stood forth
as England’s deputed representative, equal to her invasive challengeing
guests at all points, comic, tragic, or cordial. He saw that it had to
be treated as a national affair; and he parried the imputation which
would have injured his country’s name for courtly breeding, had they
been ill-received, while he rescued his own good name from derision by
joining the extravagance.
He was well inspired. It was popularly felt to be the supreme of
clever-nay, noble-fencing. Really noble, though the cleverness was
conspicuous. A defensive stroke, protecting him against his fair one’s
violent charge of horse, warded off an implied attack upon Old England,
in Old England’s best-humoured easy manner.
Supposing the earl to have acted otherwise, his countess would virtually
have ridden over him, and wild Wales have cast a shadow on the chivalry
of magisterial England. He and his country stood to meet the issue
together the moment the Countess of Fleetwood and her escort crossed
the Welsh border; when it became a question between the hot-hearted,
at their impetuous gallop, and the sedatively minded, in an unfortified
camp of arm-chairs. The earl’s adroitness, averting a collision fatal or
discomforting to both, disengaged him from an incumbent odium, of which,
it need hardly be stated, neither the lady nor her attendant cavaliers
had any notion at the hour of the assembly for the start for England on
the bridge of Pont-y-pridd. The hungry mother had the safety of her babe
in thought. The hotheaded Welshmen were sworn to guard their heroine.
That is the case presented by the Dame’s papers, when the incredible
is excised. She claims the being a good friend to fiction in feeding
popular voracity with all her stores. But the Old Buccaneer, no
professed friend to it, is a sounder guide in the maxim, where he says:
Deliver yourself by permit of your cheque on the ‘Bank of Reason, and
your account is increased instead of lessened.
Our account with credulity, he would signify.
The Dame does not like the shaking for a sifting. Romance, however, is
not a mountain made of gold, but a vein running some way through; and it
must be engineered, else either we are filled with wind from swallowing
indigestible substance, or we consent to a debasing of the currency,
which means her to-morrow’s bankruptcy; and the spectacle of Romance in
the bankruptcy court degrades us (who believe we are allied to her) as
cruelly as it appals. It gives the cynic licence to bark day and night
for an entire generation.
Surely the Countess of Fleetwood’s drive from the Welsh borders to
Esslemont, accompanied by the chosen of the land, followed by the vivats
of the whole Principality, and England gaping to hear the stages of
her progress, may be held sufficiently romantic without stuffing
of surprises and conflicts, adventures at inns, alarms at midnight,
windings of a horn over hilly verges of black heaths, and the rape of
the child, the pursuit, the recovery of the child, after a new set of
heroine performances on the part of a strung-wire mother, whose outcry
in a waste country district, as she clasps her boy to her bosom again:
‘There’s a farm I see for milk for him!’ the Dame repeats, having
begun with an admission that the tale has been contradicted, and is not
produced on authority. The end in design is to win the ear by making a
fuss, and roll event upon event for the braining of common intelligence,
until her narrative resembles dusty troopings along a road to the races.
Carinthia and her babe reached Esslemont, no matter what impediments.
There, like a stopped runner whose pantings lengthen to the longer
breath, her alarms over the infant subsided, ceasing for as long as
she clasped it or was in the room with it. Walking behind the precious
donkey-basket round the park, she went armed, and she soon won a fearful
name at Kentish cottage-hearths, though she ‘was not black to see, nor
old. No, she was very young. But she did all the things that soldiers
do,--was a bit of a foreigner;--she brought a reputation up from the
Welsh land, and it had a raven’s croak and a glow-worm’s drapery and a
goblin’s origin.
Something was hinted of her having agitated London once. Somebody
dropped word of her and that old Lord Levellier up at Croridge. She
stalked park and country at night. Stories, one or two near the truth,
were told of a restless and a very decided lady down these parts as
well; and the earl her husband daren’t come nigh in his dread of her, so
that he runs as if to save his life out of every place she enters. And
he’s not one to run for a trifle. His pride is pretty well a match for
princes and princesses.
All the same, he shakes in his shoes before her, durst hardly spy at
Esslemont again while she’s in occupation. His managing gentleman comes
down from him, and goes up from her; that’s how they communicate. One
week she’s quite solitary; another week the house is brimful as can be.
She ‘s the great lady entertaining then. Yet they say it ‘s a fact,
she has not a shilling of her own to fling at a beggar. She ‘ll stock
a cottage wanting it with provision for a fortnight or more, and she’ll
order the doctor in, and she’ll call and see the right things done for
illness. ‘But no money; no one’s to expect money of her. The shots you
hear in Esslemont grounds out of season are she and her maid, always
alongside her, at it before a target on a bank, trying that old Lord
Levellier’s gunpowder out of his mill; and he’s got no money either; not
for his workmen, they say, until they congregate, and a threatening to
blow him up brings forth half their pay, on account. But he ‘s a known
miser. She’s not that. She’s a pleasant-faced lady for the poor. She has
the voice poor people like. It’s only her enemy, maybe her husband, she
can be terrible to. She’d drive a hole through a robber stopping her on
the road, as soon as look at him.
This was Esslemont’s atmosphere working its way to the earl, not so very
long after the establishment of his countess there. She could lay
hold of the English, too, it seemed. Did she call any gentleman of the
district by his Christian name? Lord Simon Pitscrew reported her doing
so in the case of one of the Welshmen. Those Welshmen! Apparently they
are making a push for importance in the kingdom!