FOOTLIGHTS AND CORONETS
Ever since that tough old soldier Charles, first Earl of Monmouth and
third Earl of Peterborough, hauled down his flag before the battery of
Anastasia Robinson's charms, and made a Countess of his victor, a
coronet has dazzled the eyes of many an actress with its rainbow
allurement, and has proved the passport by which she has stepped from
the stage to the gilded circle which environs the throne.
The hero of the Peninsula and the terror of the French was an old man,
with one foot in the grave, when the "nightingale" of the London
theatres brought him to his gouty knees; but so resolute was he to give
her his name that, to make assurance doubly sure, he faced the altar
twice with her, before starting on his honeymoon journey across the
Channel.
Pope, who was a friend of the amorous Earl, draws a pathetic picture of
him in the latter unromantic days of his romance. During a visit to
Bevis Mount, near Southampton, the poet writes:
"I found my Lord Peterborough on his couch, where he gave
me an account of the excessive sufferings he had passed
through, with a weak voice, but spirited. He next told me
he had ended his domestic affairs through such
difficulties from the law that gave him as much torment
of mind as his distemper had done of body, to do right to
the person to whom he had obligations beyond expression
(Anastasia Robinson). That he had found it necessary not
only to declare his marriage to all his relations, but
since the person who married them was dead, to re-marry
her in the church at Bristol, before witnesses. He talks
of getting toward Lyons; but undoubtedly he can never
travel but to the sea-shore. I pity the poor woman who
has to share in all he suffers, and who can, in no one
thing, persuade him to spare himself."
Pope, however, understated the Earl's vigour or his indomitable spirit;
for he not only succeeded in getting to the sea-shore, but as far as
Lisbon, where he died in the following October, but a few months after
his second nuptials. My Lady Peterborough and Monmouth lived to see many
more years, and by her dignity and sweetness to win as much approval in
the Peerage as in the lowlier sphere of the stage.
Anastasia Robinson was the first star of the stage to wear a coronet,
but where she led the way, there were many dainty feet eager to follow;
and, curiously enough, it was Gay's famous _Beggar's Opera_ that pointed
the way to three of them.
Any one who chanced to drop in at a certain coffee-house at Charing
Cross, kept by a Mr Fenton, in the days when the first George was King,
might--indeed, he could not have failed to--have made the acquaintance
of a "little witch" (as Swift called her) with a voice of gold, who was
destined one day to be a Duchess. This little elf with the merry eyes,
dancing feet, and the voice of an angel, was none other than Mrs
Fenton's daughter by a former husband, a naval officer, and the prime
favourite of all the wits and actors whom her fame drew to the
coffee-house.
She sang for her stepfather's customers, danced for them, charmed them
with her ready wit, and sent them into fits of laughter by her childish
drolleries. Of course there was only one career possible for her, they
all declared. She must go on the stage, and then she could not fail to
take London by storm. She had the best masters money could secure for
her; and when she reached her eighteenth birthday Lavinia Fenton made
her first curtsy on the Haymarket stage as Monimia, in _The Orphan_. Her
_début_ was electrifying, sensational. Such beauty, such grace, such
wonderful acting were a revelation, a fresh stimulus to jaded appetites.
Within a few days she had London at her feet. She was the toast of the
gallants, the envy and despair of great ladies. Titled wooers tumbled
over each other in their eagerness to pay her homage; but Lavinia
laughed at them all. She knew her value; and her freedom was more to her
than luxury which had not the sanction of the wedding-ring.
Her real stage triumph, however, was yet to come. After appearing in the
_Beaux's Stratagem_ with brilliant success she was offered the part of
Polly Peachum in Gay's Opera, which was about to make its first bow to
the public. The salary was but fifteen shillings a week (afterwards
doubled); but the part was after Lavinia's own heart. For a few
intoxicating weeks she was the idol and rage of London; her picture
filled the windows of every print-shop; the greatest ladies had it
painted on their fans. Royalty smiled its sweetest on her.
Then, at the very zenith of her triumph, the startling news went
forth--"The Duke of Bolton has run away with Polly Peachum." And the
news was true. The popular idol, who had turned her back on so many
tempting offers, had actually run away with Charles Paulet, third Duke
of Bolton and Constable of the Tower of London; and the stage knew her
no more. For twenty-three years she was a Duchess in all but name, until
the Duke, on the death of his legal wife, daughter of the Earl of
Carberry, was at last able to put Lavinia in her place.
As Duchess, a title which she lived nine years to enjoy, she won golden
opinions by her modest dignity, her large-heartedness, and by the
cleverness and charm of her conversation, which none admired more than
Lord Bathurst and Lord Granville.
Duchess Lavinia had been dead thirty years when Mary Catherine Bolton,
who was to follow in her footsteps, was obscurely cradled in Long Acre
in 1790. Like Lavinia Fenton, Mary Bolton was born for the stage. As a
child the sweetness of her voice and the grace of her movements charmed
all who knew her. The greatest teachers of the day taught her to sing,
and when only sixteen she made a brilliant _début_ as Polly, recalling
all the triumphs of her famous predecessor.
But it was as Ariel that she made her real conquest of London. "So
pretty and winning in pouting wilfulness, so caressing, her voice having
the flowing sweetness of music, she bounded along with so light a foot
that it scarcely seemed to rest upon the stage." It is little wonder
that Ariel danced her way into many hearts, and that even such a sedate
personage as Edward, second Lord Thurlow, should so far succumb to her
fascinations as to offer her marriage. Her wedded life was only too
brief, but she rewarded her lord with three sons; and a liberal share of
her blood flows in the veins of the Baron of to-day, her grandson.
Not many years after Mary Bolton had danced her way into the Peerage
London was losing its head over still another "Polly Peachum"--Catherine
Stephens, daughter of a carver and gilder in the West of London. Miss
Stephens, who like her predecessors in the _rôle_, sang divinely even as
a child, was but seventeen when she made her first stage curtsy, and won
fame at a bound, as Mandano in _Artaxerxes_. One triumph succeeded
another until she reached the pinnacle of success as Polly of the
_Beggar's Opera_.
Catherine Stephens had no lack of gilded and titled lovers; but she was
too much wedded to her art to listen to any vows or to be lured from it
even by a coronet. Although, however, she eluded her destiny until the
verge of middle age she was fated to die a Countess; and a Countess she
became when George Capel, fifth Earl of Essex, asked her to be his wife.
The Earl had passed his eightieth birthday, and was nearly forty years
her senior; but he made her his bride, though he left her a widow within
a year of their nuptial-day.
Since Catherine Stephens wore her coronet--and before--many an actress
has found in the stage-door a portal to the Peerage. Elizabeth Farren,
who was cradled in the year before George III came to his Throne, was
the daughter of a gifted and erratic Irishman, who abandoned pills and
potions to lead the life of a strolling actor, a career which came to a
premature end while his daughter was still a child. Fortunately for
Elizabeth, her mother was a woman of capacity and character, who made a
gallant struggle to give her children as good a start in life as was
possible to her straitened means; and by the time she was fourteen the
girl, who had inherited her father's passion for the stage, was able to
make a most creditable first appearance at Liverpool, as Rosetta, in
Bickerstaff's _Love in a Village._
So adept did she prove in her adopted art that within four years she
made her curtsy at the Haymarket as Miss Hardcastle, in _She Stoops to
Conquer_; and at once, by her grace and brilliant acting, won the hearts
of theatre-going London; while her refinement, at that time by no means
common on the stage, and her social graces won for her a welcome in high
circles. Many a lover of title or eminence sought the hand of the
sparkling and lovely Irishwoman, and none of them all was more ardent in
his wooing than Charles James Fox, then at the zenith of his career as
statesman; but she would have naught to say to any one of them all. Her
fate, however, was not long in coming; and it came in the form of Edward
Stanley, twelfth Earl of Derby, who, before his first wife, a daughter
of the Duke of Hamilton, had been many months in the family-vault, was
at the knees of the beautiful actress. He had little difficulty in
persuading her to become his Countess; and one May day, in 1797, he
placed the wedding-ring on her finger in the drawing-room of his
Grosvenor Square house.
For more than thirty years Lady Derby moved in her new circle, a
splendid and gracious figure, received at Court with special favour by
George III and his Queen, before she died in 1829, transmitting her
blood, through her daughter, Lady Mary Stanley, to the Earl of Wilton of
to-day.
While my Lady Derby was still new to her dignities, Eliza O'Neill was
beginning to prattle in the most charming brogue ever heard across the
Irish Channel, and to grow through beautiful childhood to witching
girlhood. The daughter of a strolling actor who led his company of
buskers through every county in Ireland from Cork to Donegal, the love
of things theatrical was in her veins; and while she was still playing
with her dolls she was impersonating the Duke of York to her father's
Richard III. Everywhere the little witch, with the merry dancing eyes,
won hearts and applause by her sprightly acting, until even so excellent
a judge of histrionic art as John Kemble sought to carry her away to
London and to a wider sphere of activity.
From Dublin, he wrote to Harris, manager of Covent Garden Theatre:
"There is a very pretty Irish girl here, with a touch of
the brogue on her tongue; she has much talent and some
genius. With a little expense and some trouble we might
make her an object for John Bull's admiration in the
juvenile tragedy. I have sounded the fair lady on the
subject of a London engagement. She proposes to append a
very long family, to which I have given a decided
negative. If she accepts the offered terms I shall sign,
seal and ship herself and clan off from Cork direct. She
is very pretty, and so, in fact, is her brogue, which, by
the way, she only uses in conversation. She totally
forgets it when with Shakespeare and other illustrious
companions."
And thus it was that John O'Neill's daughter carried her charms and
gifts to London town in the autumn of 1812, when she justified Kemble's
discernment by one of the most brilliant series of impersonations,
ranging from Juliet to Belvidera, that had been seen up to that time on
the English stage. For seven years she shone a very bright star in the
firmament of the drama, winning as much popularity off as on the stage,
before she consented to yield her hand to one of the many suitors who
sought it--Mr William Wrixon Becher, a Member of Parliament of some
distinction. Eliza O'Neill lived to be addressed as "my Lady," and to
see her eldest son a Baronet, and her second boy wedded to a daughter of
the second Earl of Listowel.
Five years before Miss O'Neill's Juliet came to captivate London,
another idol of the stage was led to the altar by William, first Earl of
Craven. Louisa Brunton, for that was the name of Craven's Countess, was
cradled, like her successor, on the stage; for her father was well known
at every town on the Norwich Circuit as manager of a popular company of
actors, as devoted to his family of eight children as to his art. When
Louisa made her entry into the world she was the sixth of the clamorous
flock who roamed the country in the wake of their strolling father; and
it would have been odd indeed if she had not acquired a love of the
theatre to stimulate the acting strain in her blood.
Such were the charms and talent that the child developed that, by the
time she came to her eighteenth birthday she was carried off to London
to appear at Covent Garden Theatre as Lady Townley in _The Provoked
Husband_; and the general verdict was that no such clever acting had
been seen since Miss Farren was lured from the stage by a coronet. And
not only did she create an immediate sensation by her acting; her
beauty, which a contemporary writer tells us, "combined the stateliness
of Juno with the gentler and beauty of a Venus," made her a Queen of
Hearts as of actresses. So seductive a prize was not likely to be long
left to adorn the stage; and although Miss Brunton consistently turned a
blind eye to many a seductive offer, she had to succumb when his
Lordship of Craven joined the queue of her courtiers. Four years of
stage sovereignty and then the coronet of a Countess; such was the
record of this daughter of a strolling player, whose greatest ambition
had been to provide food enough for his hungry family. Lady Craven lived
nearly sixty years to enjoy her dignities and splendours, surviving long
enough to see her grandson take his place as third Earl of his line.
[Illustration: HARRIET, DUCHESS OF ST ALBANS]
For twenty years the English stage had no star to compare in brilliancy
with Harriet Mellon, whose life-story is one of the most romantic in
theatrical annals. From the January day in 1795 when she made her bow on
the Drury Lane stage as Lydia in _The Rivals_, to her farewell
appearance in February 1815, a month after she had become a wife, her
career was one unbroken sequence of triumphs. To quote the words of a
chronicler,
She shone supreme, splendid, unapproachable, not only by
her brilliant genius, but by her beauty and social
fascinations.
That she revelled in her conquests is certain; for to not one of her
army of wooers, many of them men of high rank, would she deign more than
a smile, until old Thomas Coutts came, with all the impetus of his
money-bags behind him, and literally swept her off her feet The lady who
had spurned coronets could not resist a million of money, qualified
though it was by the admiration of a senile lover.
Nor did she ever have cause to regret her choice; for no husband could
have been more devoted or more lavish than this shabby old banker who
used to chuckle when he was taken for a beggar, and alms were thrust
into his receptive hand. Wonderful stories are told of Mr Coutts'
generosity to his beautiful wife, for whom nothing that money could buy
was too good.
One day--it is Captain Gronow who tells the tale--Mr Hamlet, a jeweller,
came to his house, bringing for the banker's inspection a magnificent
diamond-cross which had been worn on the previous day (of George IV's
Coronation) by no less a personage than the Duke of York. At sight of
its rainbow fires Mrs Coutts exclaimed: "How happy I should be with such
a splendid piece of jewellery!" "What is it worth?" enquired her
husband. "I could not possibly part with it for less than £15,000," the
jeweller replied. "Bring me a pen and ink," was the only remark of the
doting banker who promptly wrote a cheque for the money, and beamed with
delight as he placed the jewel on his wife's bosom.
Upon her breast a sparkling cross she wore
Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore.
And this devotion--idolatry almost--lasted as long as life itself,
reaching its climax in his will, in which he left his actress-wife
every penny of his enormous fortune, amounting to £900,000, "for her
sole use and benefit, and at her absolute disposal, without the
deduction of a single legacy to any other person."
That a widow so richly dowered with beauty and gold should have a world
of lovers in her train is not to be wondered at. For five years she
retained her new freedom, and then yielded to the wooing of William
Aubrey de Vere, ninth Duke of St Albans (whose remote ancestor was Nell
Gwynn, the Drury Lane orange-girl and actress), who made a Duchess of
her one June day in 1827.
For ten short years Harriet Mellon queened it as a Duchess, retaining
her vast fortune in her own hands and dispensing it with a large-hearted
charity and regal hospitality, moving among Royalties and cottagers
alike with equal dignity and graciousness. At her beautiful Highgate
home she played the hostess many a time to two English Kings and their
Queens.
"The inhabitants of Highgate still bear in memory," Mr
Howitt records, "her splendid fêtes to Royalty, in some
of which, they say, she hired all the birds of the
bird-dealers in London, and fixing their cages in the
trees, made her grounds one great orchestra of Nature's
music."
When her Grace died, universally beloved and regretted, in 1837, she
proved her gratitude and loyalty to her banker-husband by leaving all
she possessed, a fortune now swollen to £1,800,000, to Miss Angela
Coutts (grand-daughter of Thomas Coutts and his first wife, Eliza Stark,
a domestic servant) who, as the Baroness Burdett-Coutts of later years,
proved by her large munificence a worthy trustee and dispenser of such
vast wealth.
Such are but a few of the romantic alliances between the peerage and the
stage, of which, during the last score of years, since Miss Connie
Gilchrist blossomed into the Countess of Orkney and Miss Belle Bilton
into my Lady Clancarty, there has been such an epidemic.