THE ROMANCE OF THE VILLIERS
The Villiers have had a liberal share of romance, ever since the
far-away days, three centuries and more ago, when the fourth son of Sir
George opened his eyes at Brookesby, in Leicestershire. From being a
"threadbare hanger-on" at Court this son of an obscure knight rose to be
the boon companion of two kings and the lover of a Queen of France.
Honours and riches were showered on this spoiled child of fortune. He
was created, in rapid succession, Viscount and Marquis, and finally Duke
of Buckingham; he won for bride an Earl's daughter, the richest heiress
in the land; and for some years dazzled the world by his splendours and
wealth as he alienated it by his arrogance. And just when his meteoric
career had reached its zenith, his life was closed in tragedy by the
assassin's knife.
His mantle of romance, however, fell on his son and successor, the
second Duke, who was brought up in a Palace nursery, and had for
playmates the children of Charles I.; and who, after a career which in
its dramatic adventure outstripped fiction, ended his turbulent life, if
not, as Pope says,
"In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,"
at least in extreme poverty and suffering in a Yorkshire inn, at Kirby
Moorside. Of all the vast estates he had inherited, his kinsman, Lord
Arran, said: "There is not so much as one farthing towards defraying the
expense of his funeral."
Nor have the men of Villiers' blood had any monopoly of adventure. Their
wives and daughters have seldom been content to lead the unromantic life
which happily contents so many of their sex. From Barbara Chaffinch,
whose intrigues secured the Earldom of Jersey for her husband in William
III.'s reign, to the Lady Adela Villiers who ran away with Captain
Ibbetson, a handsome young officer of Hussars, to Gretna Green and the
altar, they have played many diverse and sensational _rôles_ on the
stage of their time.
It was but fitting that George Villiers, fifth Earl of Jersey, should
make a Countess of the Lady Sarah Sophia Fane, in whose veins was an
adventurous strain as marked as in his own; for she was the fruit of one
of the most dramatic unions recorded in the annals of our Peerage. A
year before she was cradled her mother was Anne Child, the richest
heiress in England--the only daughter of Robert Child, head of the great
banking firm at Temple Bar, and a descendant of Francis Child, the
industrious London apprentice who married the daughter of his master,
William Wheeler, goldsmith, whose riches and business he inherited.
"Old Child," as Anne's father was familiarly known, had many
aristocratic clients who used his cheques and overdrew their accounts;
but the most prodigal, as also the most ingratiating, of them all was
the young Earl of Westmorland, who, not content with making large
demands on the banker's exchequer and patience, had the audacity to
aspire to all his wealth through his daughter's hand.
Anne was perhaps as naturally flattered by the attentions of a lord as
she was fascinated by his handsome face and figure and his courtly
manners; but the father had other designs for his heiress than marrying
her to a prodigal young nobleman. "Your blood, my lord, is good," he
once told him; "but money is better."
Lord Westmorland was not, however, the man to be turned aside from the
gilded goal on which he had set his heart. If he could not wed the
heiress with her father's blessing, he would dispense with the
benediction. That he _would_ marry her he was determined; and Anne was
just the girl to assist a bold lover in such an ambition.
One day, so the story is told, Lord Westmorland decided to bring the
matter to a crisis. He had been dining with Mr Child, and, after the
wine had circulated freely, he said, "Now, sir, that we have discussed
business thoroughly, there is another matter on which I should be
grateful for your opinion." "What's that?" enquired the banker, beaming
benevolently on his guest, as a man who has dined well and is at peace
with the world. "Well, sir, suppose you were deeply in love with a girl
who returned your love, and that her father refused his consent. What
would you do?" "What should I do?" laughed the banker, "why, run away
with her, of course, like many a better man has done!"
What more direct encouragement could an ardent lover want? It is
possible that the next morning the banker had completely forgotten the
conversation, and his vinous approval of runaway matches; but, two days
later, he was destined to have a rude awaking. In the middle of the
night he was aroused by the watchman to learn that his front door had
been found open; and a little later the alarming discovery was made that
his daughter had flown. His suspicions fell at once on that "rascally
young lord"; and they were confirmed when he found that the Earl, too,
had disappeared, and that a chaise, with four galloping horses, had been
seen dashing northwards as fast as whip and spur could drive them.
The banker was furious. He raged and stormed as he ordered his servants
to procure the fastest horses money could command; and with lavish
promises of reward to the postboys he set out in hot pursuit of the
fugitives. Luckily they had no long start; and, with better horses, more
frequent changes, and a heavier purse, he had little doubt that he would
soon overtake them. But the chase was sterner and longer than he had
imagined. Cupid lends wings to runaway lovers. Fast as Mr Child's
sweating horses raced, they gained but little on the pursued. Through
the long night, the next day, and the following night the desperate race
continued--through sleeping villages and startled towns, over hill and
moor, until the borderland grew near. Then, between Penrith and
Carlisle, the quarry was at last sighted.
Mr Child's horses, urged to a final effort by the postboys, slowly but
surely reduced the interval; and now inch by inch they draw abreast of
the runaway chaise. The moment of triumph has come. Mr Child, with body
half protruding from the chaise, calls loudly on the fugitives to halt,
shaking his fist at the smiling face of the Earl, who with one hand
waves a graceful adieu, with the other presents a pistol at Mr Child's
near leader. A flash, a report, and the horse falls dead. A few minutes
later the Earl's chaise is a distant dark speck in a cloud of dust, at
which the baffled banker impotently shakes his fist.
Before the fallen horse could be removed and the chase resumed the
runaways had got so long a start that they could laugh at further
pursuit; and by the time Child's chaise rattled impotently through the
street of Gretna village, his daughter had been a Countess a good hour.
For three years the banker kept his vow that he would never forgive her
and her shameless husband. The Earl, indeed, he never did forgive, but
his daughter won her way back into his heart, and to her he left the
whole of his colossal fortune, amounting, it is said, to little less
than £100,000 a year.
It was from this romantic union that the Lady Sarah Sophia Fane came,
who was to unite the 'prentice strain of Francis Child with the blood of
the proud Villiers. As a young girl the Lady Sarah needed no such rich
dower as was hers to commend her to the eyes of wooers. From the Fanes
she inherited a full share of the beauty for which their women were
noted, and to it she added many charms of her own. She had a figure,
tall, commanding, and of exquisite grace, eyes blue as violets, a
luxuriant crown of dark hair, and a complexion pure and beautiful as a
lily.
It is little wonder that a young lady so dowered with gold and good
looks should attract lovers by the score, all anxious to win so fair a
prize. But to one only of them all would she listen, Lord Villiers, heir
to the Earldom of Jersey, a man of towering stature and handsome face,
aristocrat and courtier to his finger-tips, a fearless and graceful
rider, and an expert in manly sports. Such a combination of attractions
the daughter of Anne Child could not long, nor was she at all disposed
to, resist. And one May day in 1804--almost twenty-two years to the day
after her parents' dramatic flight to Gretna Green--the Lady Sarah
became Vicountess Villiers. A year later she was Countess of Jersey.
From her first entry into society the child-countess (for she was little
more than a child) took the position of a Queen, to which her rank,
wealth, and beauty entitled her, and which she held, supreme and
unassailable, as long as life lasted. Her _salon_ was a second Royal
Court to which flocked all the greatest in the land, proud to pay homage
to the "Empress of Fashion." She entertained kings with a regal
splendour. Their Majesties of Prussia and Belgium, Holland and Hanover,
and the Tsar Nicholas I. were all delighted to do honour to a hostess so
captivating and so queenly.
At Middleton Park, her lord's Oxfordshire seat, she dispensed a
hospitality which was the despair of her rivals. Her retinue of servants
seldom numbered less than a hundred, and many a week her guests, with
their attendants, far exceeded a thousand. Money was squandered with a
prodigal hand. The very servants, it is said, drank champagne and hock
like water; her housemaids had their riding horses, and dressed in silks
and satins. Among her thousands of guests were such men as Wellington
and Peel, Castlereagh and Canning, all humble worshippers at her shrine;
and Lord Byron who, in his gloomy moods, would shut himself in his
bedroom for days, living on biscuits and water, and stealing out at dead
of night to wander ghost-like through the neighbouring woods. These
moods of black despondency he varied by turbulent spirits, when he would
be the gayest of the gay, and would challenge his fellow-guests to
drinking bouts, in which he always came off the victor.
Lady Jersey had no more ardent admirer than Byron, whose muse was
inspired to many a flight in honour of
"The grace of mien,
The eye that gladdens and the brow serene;
The glossy darkness of that clustering hair,
Which shades, yet shows that forehead more than fair."
And among her army of guests the Countess moved like a Queen, who could
stoop to frivolity without losing a shred of dignity. Surely never was
such superabundant energy enshrined in a form so beautiful and stately.
"Shall I tell you what Lady Jersey is like?" wrote
Creevey. "She is like one of her numerous gold and silver
dicky-birds that are in all the showrooms of this house.
She begins to sing at eleven o'clock, and, with the
interval of the hour when she retires to her cage to
rest, she sings till twelve at night without a moment's
interruption. She changes her feathers for dinner, and
her plumage both morning and evening is the most
beautiful I ever saw."
She seemed indeed incapable of fatigue. Tongue and body alike never
seemed to rest, from rising to going to bed.
"She is really wonderful," says Lady Granville; "and how
she can stand the life she leads is still more wonderful.
She sees everybody in her own house, and calls on
everybody in theirs. She is all over Paris, and at all
the _campagnes_ within ten miles, and in all _petites
soirées_. She begins the day with a dancing-master at
nine o'clock, and never rests till midnight.... At ten
o'clock yesterday morning she called for me, and we never
stopped to take breath till eleven o'clock at night, when
she set me down here more dead than alive, she going to
end the day with the Hollands!"
A life that would have killed nine women out of ten seemed powerless to
touch her. When far advanced in the sixties she was acknowledged to be
still one of the most beautiful women in England, retaining to an
amazing degree the bloom and freshness of youth. And when she appeared
at a fancy-dress ball arrayed as a Sultana, in a robe of sky-blue with
coral embroideries and a turban of gold and white, she was by universal
consent acclaimed as the most beautiful woman there. It may interest my
lady readers to learn that she attributed her perpetual youth to the use
of gruel as a substitute for soap and water.
Although Lady Jersey had admirers by the hundred among the most
fascinating men in Europe, no breath of scandal ever touched her fair
fame. Indeed, she carried her virtue to the verge of prudery, and
repelled with a freezing coldness the slightest approach to familiarity.
So prudish was she that on one occasion she declined to share a carriage
alone with Lord John Russell, one of the least physically attractive of
men, and begged General Alava to accompany them. "Diable!" laughed the
General, "you must be very little sure of yourself if you are afraid to
be alone with little Lord John!"
She was merciless to any of her lady friends who lapsed from virtue, or
in any way, however slight, offended the proprieties. But the vials of
her fiercest anger were reserved for her mother-in-law, the
Dowager-Countess, whose shameless intrigue with the Prince Regent
scandalised the world in an age of lax morals; and the outraged Princess
Caroline had no more valiant champion. She not only declined to have
anything to say to her husband's mother, she carried her disapproval to
the extent of refusing point blank to appear at Court. So furious was
the Regent at this slight that "the dotard with corrupted eye and
withered heart," as Byron calls him, had her portrait removed from the
Palace Gallery of Beauties, and returned to its owner.
A few days later, however, the Countess had her revenge. At a party in
Cavendish Square she was walking along a corridor with Samuel Rogers
when she saw the Regent coming towards them. As he approached he drew
himself to his full height, and passed with an insolent and disdainful
stare, which Lady Jersey returned with a look even more cold and
contemptuous. Then, with a toss of her proud head, she turned to Rogers
and laughingly said, "I did that well, didn't I?"
It was, perhaps, as Queen and Autocrat of "Almack's" that Lady Jersey
won her chief fame--Almack's, that most exclusive and aristocratic club
in Berkeley Street, Piccadilly, the membership of which was the supreme
hall-mark of the world of fashion. No rank, however exalted, no riches,
however great, were a passport to this innermost social circle, over
which Lady Jersey reigned like a beautiful despot.
Scores of the smartest officers of the Guards, men of rank and fashion,
and pets of West End drawing-rooms, clamoured or cajoled for admission
to this jealously-guarded temple, but its doors only opened to receive,
at the most, half a dozen of them. Even such social autocrats as Her
Grace of Bedford and Lady Harrington were coldly turned away from the
doors by the male members of the club; while the ladies shut them in the
face of Lord March and Brook Boothby, to the amazed disgust of these men
of fashion and conquest--for, by the rules of the club, male members
were selected by the ladies, and _vice versâ_. But beyond all doubt the
destinies of candidates were in the hands of the half dozen Lady
Patronesses who formed the Committee of the club--Princess Esterhazy,
Princess von Lieven, Ladies Jersey, Sefton and Cowper, and Mrs Drummond
Burrell; and of these my Lady Jersey was the only one who really
counted.
"Three-fourths even of the nobility," says a writer in
the _New Monthly Magazine_, "knock in vain for admission.
Into this _sanctum sanctorum_, of course, the sons of
commerce never think of intruding; and yet into the very
'blue chamber,' in the absence of the six necromancers,
have the votaries of trade contrived to intrude
themselves."
"Many diplomatic arts," writes Captain Gronow, "much
_finesse_, and a host of intrigues were set in motion to
get an invitation to Almack's. Very often persons whose
rank and fortunes entitled them to the _entrée_ anywhere,
were excluded by the cliqueism of the Lady patronesses;
for the female government of Almack's was a despotism,
and subject to all the caprice of despotic rule. It is
needless to say that, like every other despotism, it was
not innocent of abuses."
The fair ladies who ruled supreme over this little dancing and gossiping
world issued a solemn proclamation that no gentleman should appear at
the assemblies without being dressed in knee-breeches, white cravat, and
_chapeau bras._ On one occasion, the Duke of Wellington was about to
ascend the staircase of the ballroom, dressed in black trousers, when
the vigilant Mr Willis, the guardian of the establishment, stepped
forward and said, "Your Grace cannot be admitted in trousers," whereupon
the Duke, who had a great respect for orders and regulations, quietly
walked away.
Another inflexible rule of the club was that no one should be admitted
after eleven o'clock; and it was a breach of this regulation that once
overwhelmed the Duke of Wellington with humiliation. One evening, the
Duke, who had promised to meet Lady Mornington at Almack's, presented
himself for admission. "Lady Jersey," announced an attendant, "the Duke
of Wellington is at the door, and desires to be admitted." "What o'clock
is it?" she asked. "Seven minutes after eleven, your Ladyship." She
paused for a moment, and then said with emphasis and distinctness, "Give
my compliments--Lady Jersey's compliments--to the Duke of Wellington,
and say that she is very glad that the first enforcement of the rule of
exclusion is such that, hereafter, no one can complain of its
application. He cannot be admitted." And the Duke, whom even Napoleon
with all his legions had been powerless to turn back, was compelled to
retreat before the capricious will of a woman.
Such an autocrat was this "Queen of Almack's."
"While her colleagues were debating," says the author of
the "Key to Almack's," "she decided. Hers was the
master-spirit that ruled the whole machine; hers the
eloquent tongue that could both persuade and command. And
she was never idle. Her restless eye pried into
everything; she set the world to rights; her influence
was resistless, her determination uncontrollable."
"Treat people like fools, and they will worship you," was her favourite
maxim. And as Bryon, her intimate friend, once said, "She was the
veriest tyrant that ever governed Fashion's fools, and compelled them to
shake their cap and bells as she willed."
It was at Almack's, it is interesting to recall, that Lady Jersey first
introduced the quadrille from Paris.
"I recollect," says Captain Gronow, "the persons who
formed the first quadrille that was ever danced there.
They were Lady Jersey, Lady Harriet Buller, Lady Susan
Ryder, and Miss Montgomery; the men being the Count St
Aldegonde, Mr Montgomery, and Charles Standisti."
It was at Almack's, too, that she introduced the waltz, which so
shocked the proprieties even in that easy-going age.
"What scenes," writes Mr T. Raikes, "have we witnessed in
these days at Almack's! What fear and trembling in the
_débutantes_ at the commencement of a waltz, what
giddiness and confusion at the end! It was, perhaps,
owing to the latter circumstance that so violent an
opposition soon arose to the new recreation on the score
of morality. The anti-waltzing party took the alarm, and
cried it down; mothers forbade it, and every ballroom
became a scene of feud and contention."
But through it all Lady Jersey circled round and round the ballroom
divinely, with Prince Paul Esterhazy, Baron Tripp, St Aldegonde, and
many another graceful exponent of the new dance, for partners; and her
victory was complete when the world of fashion saw the arm of the
Emperor Alexander, his uniform ablaze with decorations, round her waist,
twirling ecstatically, if ungracefully, round in the intoxication of the
waltz.
For fifty years, Lord Jersey's Countess reigned supreme in the social
world, carrying her autocracy and her charms into old age. As was
inevitable to such a dominant personality she made enemies, who resented
her airs and scoffed at her graces. Lady Granville called her "a
tiresome, quarrelsome woman"; the Duke of Wellington, one of her most
abject slaves, once exclaimed, "What ---- nonsense Lady Jersey talks!"
and Granville declared that she had "neither wit, nor imagination, nor
humour." But to the last day of her long life she retained the homage
and admiration of hundreds, over whom she cast the spell of her beauty
and personal charm.
The evening of her life was clouded by a succession of tragedies, each
sufficient to break the spirit of a less indomitable woman. One by one,
her children, the pride of her life, were taken from her; but she hid
her breaking heart from the world, and in the intervals between her
bereavements she showed as brave and bright a face as in the days of her
unclouded youth. The death in 1858 of her daughter, Clementina, the
darling of her old age, was a terrible blow; but still the hand of the
slayer of her hopes was not stayed. Her husband, whose devotion had so
long sustained her, followed soon after; three weeks later her eldest
son, the new Earl, died tragically in the zenith of his life; and the
crowning blow fell when, in 1862, her last surviving child was taken
from her.
For five more years she survived her triumphs and sorrows, until, one
January day in 1867, she passed suddenly and painlessly away, and the
world was the poorer by the loss of one of the noblest women who have
ever worn the crown of beauty or held the sceptre of power.