that was ever put upon record is the one which tells us of a regular
performance by professional actors in a public theatre, before an
ordinary audience, who had extraordinary interest in the drama. The
locality was in Paris, in the old theatre of the Porte Saint-Martin.
The piece was the famous melodrama, ‘La Pie Voleuse,’ on which Rossini
founded ‘La Gazza Ladra,’ and which, under the name of ‘The Maid
and the Magpie,’ afforded such a triumph to Miss Kelly as that lady
may remember with pride; for we believe that most accomplished and
most natural of all actresses still survives--or was surviving very
lately--with two colleagues at least of the olden time, Mrs. W. West
and Miss Love. When ‘La Pie Voleuse’ was being acted at the above-named
French theatre, the allied armies had invaded France; a portion of the
invading force had entered Paris. The circumstance now to be related
is best told on French authority. An English writer might almost
be suspected of calumniating the French people by narrating such
an incident, unsupported by reference to the source from which he
derived it. We take it from one of the many dramatic _feuilletons_ of
M. Paul Foucher, an author of several French plays, a critic of French
players and play-writers, and a relative, by marriage, of M. Victor
Hugo. This is what M. Paul Foucher tells us: ‘On the evening of the
second entry of the foreign armies into Paris, the popular melodrama
“La Pie Voleuse,” was being acted at the Porte Saint-Martin. There was
one thousand eight hundred francs in the house, which at that time
was considered a handsome receipt. During the performance the doors
were closed, because the rumbling noise of the cannon, rolling over
the stones, interrupted the interest of the dialogue, and it rendered
impossible the sympathetic attention of the audience.’ Frenchmen there
were who were ashamed of this heartless indifference for the national
tragedy. Villemot was disgusted at this elasticity of the Parisian
spirit, and he added to his rebuke these remarkable words:--‘I take
pleasure in hoping that we may never again be subjected to the same
trial, and that, in any case, we may bear it in a more dignified
fashion.’ How Paris bore it, when the terrible event again occurred,
is too well known to be retold; but the incident of ‘La Pie Voleuse’
is perhaps the most eccentric of the examples of dramatic and popular
eccentricity to be found in the annals of the French stage.
_NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE AND THE PERCYS._
When Hotspur treads the stage with passionate grace, the spectator
hardly dreams of the fact that the princely original lived, paid taxes,
and was an active man of his parish, in Aldersgate Street. _There_,
however, stood the first Northumberland House. By the ill-fortune of
Percy it fell to the conquering side in the serious conflict in which
Hotspur was engaged; and Henry IV. made a present of it to his queen,
Jane. Thence it got the name of the Queen’s Wardrobe. Subsequently it
was converted into a printing office; and in the course of time, the
first Northumberland House disappeared altogether.
In Fenchurch Street, not now a place wherein to look for nobles, the
great Earls of Northumberland were grandly housed in the time of Henry
VI.; but vulgar citizenship elbowed the earls too closely, and they
ultimately withdrew from the City. The deserted mansion and grounds
were taken possession of by the roysterers. Dice were for ever rattling
in the stately saloons. Winners shouted for joy, and blasphemy was
considered a virtue by the losers. As for the once exquisite gardens,
they were converted into bowling-greens, titanic billiards, at which
sport the gayer City sparks breathed themselves for hours in the summer
time. There was no place of entertainment so fashionably frequented as
this second Northumberland House; but dice and bowls were at length to
be enjoyed in more vulgar places, and ‘the old seat of the Percys was
deserted by fashion.’ On the site of mansion and gardens, houses and
cottages were erected, and the place knew its old glory no more. So
ended the second Northumberland House.
While the above mansions or palaces were the pride of all Londoners
and the envy of many, there stood on the strand of the Thames, at
the bend of the river, near Charing Cross, a hospital and chapel,
whose founder, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, had dedicated it to
St. Mary, and made it an appanage to the Priory of Roncesvalle, in
Navarre. Hence the hospital on our river strand was known by the name
of ‘St. Mary Rouncivall.’ The estate went the way of such property at
the dissolution of the monasteries; and the first lay proprietor of
the forfeited property was a Sir Thomas Cawarden. It was soon after
acquired by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, son of the first Earl
of Surrey. Howard, early in the reign of James I., erected on the site
of St. Mary’s Hospital a brick mansion which, under various names,
has developed into that third and present Northumberland House which
is about to fall under pressure of circumstances, the great need of
London, and the argument of half a million of money.
Thus the last nobleman who clung to the Strand, which, on its south
side, was once a line of palaces, has left it for ever. The bishops
were the first to reside on that river-bank outside the City walls.
Nine episcopal palaces were once mirrored in the then clear waters of
the Thames. The lay nobles followed, when they felt themselves as safe
in that fresh and healthy air as the prelates. The chapel of the Savoy
is still a royal chapel, and the memories of time-honoured Lancaster
and of John, the honest King of France, still dignify the place. But
the last nobleman who resided so far from the now recognised quarters
of fashion has left what has been the seat of the Howards and Percys
for nearly three centuries, and the Strand will be able no longer to
boast of a duke. It also recently possessed an English earl; but _he_
was only a modest lodger in Norfolk Street.
When the Duke of Northumberland went from the Strand, there went with
him a shield with very nearly nine hundred quarterings; and among them
are the arms of Henry VII., of the sovereign houses of France, Castile,
Leon, and Scotland, and of the ducal houses of Normandy and Brittany!
_Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus_, might be a fitting motto for
a nobleman who, when he stands before a glass, may see therein, not
only the Duke, but also the Earl of Northumberland, Earl Percy, Earl
of Beverley, Baron Lovaine of Alnwick, Sir Algernon Percy, Bart., two
doctors (LL.D. and D.C.L.), a colonel, several presidents, and the
patron of two-and-twenty livings.
As a man who deals with the merits of a book is little or nothing
concerned with the binding thereof, with the water-marks, or with the
printing, but is altogether concerned with the life that is within,
that is, with the author, his thoughts, and his expression of them,
so, in treating of Northumberland House, we care much less for notices
of the building than of its inhabitants--less for the outward aspect
than for what has been said or done beneath its roof. If we look with
interest at a mere wall which screens from sight the stage of some
glorious or some terrible act, it is not for the sake of the wall or
its builders: our interest is in the drama and its actors. Who cares,
in speaking of Shakespeare and Hamlet, to know the name of the stage
carpenter at the Globe or the Blackfriars? Suffice it to say, that
Lord Howard, who was an amateur architect of some merit, is supposed
to have had a hand in designing the old house in the Strand, and
that Gerard Christmas and Bernard Jansen are said to have been his
‘builders.’ Between that brick house and the present there is as
much sameness as in the legendary knife which, after having had a new
handle, subsequently received in addition a new blade. The old house
occupied three sides of a square. The fourth side, towards the river,
was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century. The portal
retains something of the old work, but so little as to be scarcely
recognisable, except to professional eyes.
From the date of its erection till 1614 it bore the name of Northampton
House. In that year it passed by will from Henry Howard, Lord
Northampton, to his nephew, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, from
whom it was called Suffolk House. In 1642, Elizabeth, daughter of
Theophilus, second Earl of Suffolk, married Algernon Percy, tenth Earl
of Northumberland, and the new master gave his name to the old mansion.
The above-named Lord Northampton was the man who has been described as
foolish when young, infamous when old, an encourager, at threescore
years and ten, of his niece, the infamous Countess of Essex; and who,
had he lived a few months longer, would probably have been hanged for
his share, with that niece and others, in the mysterious murder of Sir
Thomas Overbury. Thus, the founder of the house was noble only in name;
his successor and nephew has not left a much more brilliant reputation.
He was connected, with his wife, in frauds upon the King, and was
fined heavily. The heiress of Northumberland, who married his son, came
of a noble but ill-fated race, especially after the thirteenth Baron
Percy was created Earl of Northumberland in 1377. Indeed, the latter
title had been borne by eleven persons before it was given to a Percy,
and by far the greater proportion of the whole of them came to grief.
Of one of them it is stated that he (Alberic) was appointed Earl in
1080, but that, _proving unfit for the dignity_, he was displaced, and
a Norman bishop named in his stead! The idea of turning out from high
estate those who were unworthy or incapable is one that might suggest
many reflections, if it were not _scandalum magnatum_ to make them.
In the chapel at Alnwick Castle there is displayed a genealogical
tree. At the root of the Percy branches is ‘Charlemagne;’ and there
is a sermon in the whole, much more likely to scourge pride than to
stimulate it, if the thing be rightly considered. However this may be,
the Percys find their root in Karloman, the Emperor, through Joscelin
of Louvain, in this way: Agnes de Percy was, in the twelfth century,
the sole heiress of her house. Immensely rich, she had many suitors.
Among these was Joscelin, brother of Godfrey, sovereign Duke of
Brabant, and of Adelicia, Queen Consort of Henry the First of England.
Joscelin held that estate at Petworth which has not since gone out
of the hands of his descendants. This princely suitor of the heiress
Agnes was only accepted by her as husband on condition of his assuming
the Percy name. Joscelin consented; but he added the arms of Brabant
and Louvain to the Percy shield, in order that, if succession to those
titles and possessions should ever be stopped for want of an heir, his
claim might be kept in remembrance. Now, this Joscelin was lineally
descended from ‘Charlemagne,’ and, _therefore_, that greater name lies
at the root of the Percy pedigree, which glitters in gold on the walls
of the ducal chapel in the castle at Alnwick.
Very rarely indeed did the Percys, who were the earlier Earls of
Northumberland, die in their beds. The first of them, Henry, was slain
(1407) in the fight on Bramham Moor. The second, another Henry (whose
father, Hotspur, was killed in the hot affair near Shrewsbury), lies
within St. Alban’s Abbey Church, having poured out his lifeblood in
another Battle of the Roses, fought near that town named after the
saint. The blood of the third Earl helped to colour the roses, which
are said to have grown redder from the gore of the slain on Towton’s
hard-fought field. The forfeited title was transferred, in 1465, to
Lord John Nevill Montagu, great Warwick’s brother; but Montagu soon
lay among the dead in the battle near Barnet. The title was restored
to another Henry Percy, and that unhappy Earl was murdered, in 1489,
at his house, Cucklodge, near Thirsk. In that fifteenth century there
was not a single Earl of Northumberland who died a peaceful and natural
death.
In the succeeding century the first line of Earls, consisting of six
Henry Percys, came to an end in that childless noble whom Anne Boleyn
called ‘the Thriftless Lord.’ He died childless in 1537. He had,
indeed, two brothers, the elder of whom might have succeeded to the
title and estates; but both brothers, Sir Thomas and Sir Ingram, had
taken up arms in the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace.’ Attainder and forfeiture
were the consequences; and in 1551 Northumberland was the title of the
dukedom conferred on John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who lost the dignity
when his head was struck off at the block, two years later.
Then the old title, Earl of Northumberland, was restored in 1557,
to Thomas, eldest son of that attainted Thomas who had joined the
‘Pilgrimage of Grace.’ Ill-luck still followed these Percys. Thomas
was beheaded--the last of his house who fell by the hands of the
executioner--in 1572. His brother and heir died in the Tower in 1585.
None of these Percys had yet come into the Strand. The brick house
there, which was to be their own through marriage with an heiress, was
built in the lifetime of the Earl, whose father, as just mentioned,
died in the Tower in 1585. The son, too, was long a prisoner in
that gloomy palace and prison. While Lord Northampton was laying the
foundations of the future London house of the Percys in 1605, Henry
Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was being carried into durance. There
was a Percy, kinsman to the Earl, who was mixed up with the Gunpowder
Plot. For no other reason than relationship with the conspiring Percy,
the Earl was shut up in the Tower for life, as his sentence ran, and
he was condemned to pay a fine of thirty thousand pounds. The Earl
ultimately got off with fifteen years’ imprisonment and a fine of
twenty thousand pounds. He was popularly known as the Wizard Earl,
because he was a studious recluse, companying only with grave scholars
(of whom there were three, known as ‘Percy’s Magi’) and finding
relaxation in writing rhymed satires against the Scots.
There was a stone walk in the Tower which, having been paved by the
Earl, was known during many years as ‘My Lord of Northumberland’s
Walk.’ At one end was an iron shield of his arms; and holes in which he
put a peg at every turn he made in his dreary exercise.
One would suppose that the Wizard Earl would have been very grateful to
the man who restored him to liberty. Lord Hayes (Viscount Doncaster)
was the man. He had married Northumberland’s daughter, Lucy. The
marriage had excited the Earl’s anger, as a _low match_, and the proud
captive could not ‘stomach’ a benefit for which he was indebted to a
son-in-law on whom he looked down. This proud Earl died in 1632. Just
ten years after, his son, Algernon Percy, went a-wooing at Suffolk
House, in the Strand. It was then inhabited by Elizabeth, the daughter
and heiress of Theophilus, Earl of Suffolk, who had died two years
previously, in 1640. Algernon Percy and Elizabeth Howard made a merry
and magnificent wedding of it, and from the time they were joined
together the house of the bride has been known by the bridegroom’s
territorial title of Northumberland.
The street close to the house of the Percys, which we now know as
Northumberland Street, was then a road leading down to the Thames, and
called Hartshorn Lane. Its earlier name was Christopher Alley. At the
bottom of the lane the luckless Sir Edmundsbury Godfrey had a stately
house, from which he walked many a time and oft to his great wood wharf
on the river. But the glory of Hartshorn Lane was and is Ben Jonson.
No one can say where rare Ben was born, save that the posthumous child
first saw the light in Westminster. ‘Though,’ says Fuller, ‘I cannot,
with all my industrious inquiry, find him in his cradle, I can fetch
him from his long coats. When a little child he lived in Hartshorn
Lane, Charing Cross, where his mother married a bricklayer for her
second husband.’ Mr. Fowler was a master bricklayer, and did well with
his clever stepson. We can in imagination see that sturdy boy crossing
the Strand to go to his school within the old church of St. Martin
(then still) in the Fields. It is as easy to picture him hastening of a
morning early to Westminster, where Camden was second master, and had
a keen sense of the stuff that was in the scholar from Hartshorn Lane.
Of all the figures that flit about the locality, none attracts our
sympathies so warmly as that of the boy who developed into the second
dramatic poet of England.
Of the countesses and duchesses of this family, the most singular was
the widow of Algernon, the tenth Earl. In her widowhood she removed
from the house in the Strand (where she had given a home not only to
her husband, but to a brother) to one which occupied the site on which
White’s Club now stands. It was called Suffolk House, and the proud
lady thereof maintained a semi-regal state beneath the roof and when
she went abroad. On such an occasion as paying a visit, her footmen
walked bareheaded on either side of her coach, which was followed
by a second, in which her women were seated, like so many ladies in
waiting! Her state solemnity went so far that she never allowed her son
Joscelin’s wife (daughter of an Earl) to be seated in her presence--at
least till she had obtained permission to do so.
Joscelin’s wife was, according to Pepys, ‘a beautiful lady indeed.’
They had but one child, the famous heiress, Elizabeth Percy, who
at four years of age was left to the guardianship of her proud and
wicked old grandmother. Joscelin was dead, and his widow married
Ralph, afterwards Duke of Montague. The old Dowager Countess was a
matchmaker, and she contracted her granddaughter, at the age of twelve,
to Cavendish, Earl of Ogle. Before this couple were of age to live
together, Ogle died. In a year or two after, the old matchmaker engaged
her victim to Mr. Thomas Thynne, of Longleat; but the young lady had no
mind to him. In the Hatton collection of manuscripts there are three
letters addressed by a lady of the Brunswick family to Lord and Lady
Hatton. They are undated, but they contain a curious reference to part
of the present subject, and are thus noticed in the first report of
the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts: ‘Mr. Thinn has proved
his marriage with Lady Ogle, but she will not live with him, for fear
of being “rotten before she is ripe.” Lord Suffolk, since he lost his
wife and daughter, lives with his sister, Northumberland. They have
here strange ambassadors--one from the King of Fez, the other from
Muscovett. All the town has seen the last; he goes to the play, and
stinks so that the ladies are not able to take their muffs from their
noses all the play-time. The lampoons that are made of most of the
town ladies are so nasty that no woman would read them, else she would
have got them for her.’
‘Tom of Ten Thousand,’ as Thynne was called, was murdered (shot dead
in his carriage) in Pall Mall (1682) by Königsmark and accomplices,
two or three of whom suffered death on the scaffold. Immediately
afterwards, the maiden wife of two husbands _really_ married Charles,
the proud Duke of Somerset. In the same year, Banks dedicated to her
(_Illustrious Princess_, he calls her) his ‘Anna Bullen,’ a tragedy.
He says: ‘You have submitted to take a noble partner, as angels have
delighted to converse with men;’ and ‘there is so much of divinity and
wisdom in your choice, that none but the Almighty ever did the like’
(giving Eve to Adam) ‘with the world and Eden for a dower.’ Then, after
more blasphemy, and very free allusions to her condition as a bride,
and fulsomeness beyond conception, he scouts the idea of supposing that
she ever should die. ‘You look,’ he says, ‘as if you had nothing mortal
in you. Your guardian angel scarcely is more a deity than you;’ and so
on, in increase of bombast, crowned by the mock humility of ‘my muse
still has no other ornament than truth.’
The Duke and Duchess of Somerset lived in the house in the Strand,
which continued to be called Northumberland House, as there had long
been a _Somerset_ House a little more to the east. Anthony Henley once
annoyed the above duke and showed his own ill-manners by addressing
a letter ‘to the Duke of Somerset, over against the trunk-shop at
Charing Cross.’ The duchess was hardly more respectful when speaking
of her suburban mansion, Sion House, Brentford. ‘It’s a hobbledehoy
place,’ she said; ‘neither town nor country.’ Of this union came a son,
Algernon Seymour, who in 1748 succeeded his father as Duke of Somerset,
and in 1749 was created Earl of Northumberland, for a particular
reason. He had no sons. His daughter Elizabeth had encouraged the
homage of a handsome young fellow of that day, named Smithson. She was
told Hugh Smithson had spoken in terms of admiration of her beauty, and
she laughingly asked why he did not say as much to herself. Smithson
was the son of ‘an apothecary,’ according to the envious, but, in
truth, the father had been a physician, and earned a baronetcy, and
was of the good old nobility, the landowners, with an estate, still
possessed by the family, at Stanwick, in Yorkshire. Hugh Smithson
married this Elizabeth Percy, and the earldom of Northumberland,
conferred on her father, was to go to her husband, and afterwards to
the eldest male heir of this marriage, failing which the dignity was to
remain with Elizabeth and her heirs male by any other marriage.
It is at this point that the present line of Smithson-Percys begins.
Of the couple who may be called its founders so many severe things
have been said, that we may infer that their exalted fortunes and best
qualities gave umbrage to persons of small minds or strong prejudices.
Walpole’s remark, that in the earl’s lord-lieutenancy in Ireland ‘their
vice-majesties scattered pearls and diamonds about the streets,’ is
good testimony to their royal liberality. Their taste may not have
been unexceptionable, but there was no touch of meanness in it. In
1758 they gave a supper at Northumberland House to Lady Yarmouth,
George II.’s old mistress. The chief ornamental piece on the supper
table represented a grand _chasse_ at Herrenhausen, at which there was
a carriage drawn by six horses, in which was seated an august person
wearing a blue ribbon, with a lady at his side. This was not unaptly
called ‘the apotheosis of concubinage.’ Of the celebrated countess
notices vary. Her delicacy, elegance, and refinement are vouched for
by some; her coarseness and vulgarity are asserted by others. When
Queen Charlotte came to England, Lady Northumberland was made one of
the ladies of the queen’s bed-chamber. Lady Townshend justified it to
people who felt or feigned surprise, by remarking, ‘Surely nothing
could be more proper. The queen does not understand English, and can
anything be more necessary than that she should learn the vulgar
tongue?’ One of the countess’s familiar terms for conviviality was
‘junkitaceous,’ but ladies of equal rank had also little slang words
of their own, called things by the very plainest names, and spelt
_physician_ with an ‘f.’
There is ample testimony on record that the great countess never
hesitated at a jest on the score of its coarseness. The earl was
distinguished rather for his pomposity than vulgarity, though a vulgar
sentiment marked some of both his sayings and doings. For example, when
Lord March visited him at Alnwick Castle, the Earl of Northumberland
received him at the gates with this queer sort of welcome: ‘I believe,
my lord, this is the first time that ever a Douglas and a Percy met
here in friendship.’ The censor who said, ‘Think of this from a
Smithson to a true Douglas,’ had ample ground for the exclamation.
George III. raised the earl and countess to the rank of duke and
duchess in 1766. All the earls of older creation were ruffled and angry
at the advancement; but the honour had its drawback. The King would not
allow the title to descend to an heir by any other wife but the one
then alive, who was the true representative of the Percy line.