interest. Fashion fluttered the propriety of Scotland when the old
Dowager Countess of Fife gave the first masquerade that ever took place
in that country, at Duff House. In England, people and papers could
talk or write of nothing so frequently as masquerades. ‘One hears so
much of them,’ remarked that lively old lady, Mrs. Delany, ‘that I
suppose the only method not to be tired of them is to frequent them.’
Old-fashioned loyalty in England was still more shocked when the Lord
Mayor of London declined to go to St. Paul’s on the 30th of January to
profess himself sad and sorry at the martyrdom of Charles I. In the
minds of certain religious people there was satisfaction felt at the
course taken by the University of Oxford, which refused to modify
the Thirty-nine Articles, as more liberal Cambridge had done. Indeed,
such Liberalism as that of the latter, prepared ultra-serious people
for awful consequences; and when they heard that Moelfammo, an extinct
volcano in Flintshire, had resumed business, and was beginning to pelt
the air with red-hot stones, they naturally thought that the end of
a wicked world was at hand. They took courage again when the Commons
refused to dispense with subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, by
a vote of 150 to 64. But no sooner was joy descending on the one hand
than terror advanced on the other. Quid-nuncs asked whither the world
was driving, when the London livery proclaimed the reasonableness of
annual parliaments. Common-sense people also were perplexed at the
famous parliamentary resolution that Lord Clive had wrongfully taken to
himself above a quarter of a million of money, and had rendered signal
services to his country!
Again, a hundred years ago our ancestors were as glad to hear that
Bruce had got safely back into Egypt from his attempt to reach the Nile
sources, as we were to know that Livingstone was alive and well and in
search of those still undiscovered head-waters. A century ago, too,
crowds of well-wishers bade God speed to the gallant Captain Phipps,
as he sailed from the Nore on his way to that North-west Passage
which he did not find, and which, at the close of a hundred years, is
as impracticable as ever. And, though history may or may not repeat
itself, events of to-day at least remind us of those a hundred years
old. The Protestant Emperor William, in politely squeezing the Jesuits
out of his dominions, only modestly follows the example of Pope Clement
XIV., who, in 1773, let loose a bull for the entire suppression of
the order in every part of the world. Let us not forget too, that if
orthodox ruffians burnt Priestley’s house over his head, and would have
smashed all power of thought out of that head itself, the Royal Society
conferred on the great philosopher who was the brutally treated pioneer
of modern science, the Copley Medal, for his admirable treatise on
different kinds of air.
But there was a little incident of the year 1773, which has had more
stupendous consequences than any other with which England has been
connected. England, through some of her statesmen, asserted her right
to tax her colonists, without asking their consent or allowing them to
be represented in the home legislature. In illustration of such right
and her determination to maintain it, England sent out certain ships
with cargoes of tea, on which a small duty was imposed, to be paid by
the colonists. The latter declined to have the wholesome herb at such
terms, but England forced it upon them. Three ships, so freighted,
entered Boston Harbour. They were boarded by a mob disguised as Mohawk
Indians, who tossed the tea into the river and then quietly dispersed.
A similar cargo was safely landed at New York, but it was under the
guns of a convoying man-of-war. When landed it could not be disposed
of, except by keeping it under lock-and-key, with a strong guard over
it, to preserve it from the patriots who scorned the cups that cheer,
if they were unduly taxed for the luxury. That was the little seed out
of which has grown that Union whose President now is more absolute
and despotic than poor George III. ever was or cared to be; little
seed, which is losing its first wholesomeness, and, if we may trust
transatlantic papers, is grown to a baleful tree, corrupt to the core
and corrupting all around it. Such at least is the American view--the
view of good and patriotic Americans, who would fain work sound reform
in this condition of things at the end of an eventful century, when
John Bull is made to feel, by Geneva and San Juan, that he will never
have any chance of having the best argument in an arbitration case,
where he is opposed by a system which looks on sharpness as a virtue,
and holds that nothing succeeds like success.
Let us get back from this subject to the English court of a century
since. A new year’s day at court was in the last century a gala day,
which made London tradesmen rejoice. There were some extraordinary
figures at that of 1773, at St. James’s, but no one looked so much
out of ordinary fashion as Lord Villiers. His coat was of pale purple
velvet turned up with lemon colour, ‘and embroidered all over’ (says
Mrs. Delany) ‘with SSes of pearl as big as peas, and in all the spaces
little medallions in beaten gold--_real solid_! in various figures of
Cupids _and the like_!’
The court troubles of the year were not insignificant; but the good
people below stairs had their share of them. If the King continued to
be vexed at the marriages of his brothers Gloucester and Cumberland
with English ladies, the King’s servants had sorrows of their own.
The newspapers stated that ‘the wages of his Majesty’s servants were
miserably in arrear; that their families were consequently distressed,
and that there was great clamour for payment.’ The court was never more
bitterly satirised than in some lines put in circulation (as Colley
Cibber’s) soon after Lord Chesterfield’s death, to whom they were
generally ascribed. They were written before the decease of Frederick,
Prince of Wales. The laureate was made to say--
Colley Cibber, right or wrong,
Must celebrate this day,
And tune once more his tuneless song
And strum the venal lay.
Heav’n spread through all the family
That broad, illustrious glare,
That shines so flat in every eye
And makes them all so stare!
Heav’n send the Prince of royal race
A little coach and horse,
A little meaning in his face,
And money in his purse.
And, as I have a son like yours,
May he Parnassus rule.
So shall the crown and laurel too
Descend from fool to fool.
Satire was, indeed, quite as rough in prose as it was sharp in song.
One of the boldest paragraphs ever penned by paragraph writers of the
time appeared in the ‘Public Advertiser’ in the summer of 1773. A
statue of the King had been erected in Berkeley Square. The discovery
was soon made that the King himself had paid for it. Accordingly, the
‘Public Advertiser’ audaciously informed him that he had paid for his
statue, because he well knew that none would ever be spontaneously
erected in his honour by posterity. The ‘Advertiser’ further advised
George III. to build his own mausoleum for the same reason.
And what were ‘the quality’ about in 1773? There was Lord Hertford
exclaiming, ‘By Jove!’ because he objected to swearing. Ladies
were dancing ‘Cossack’ dances, and gentlemen figured at balls in
black coats, red waistcoats, and red sashes, or quadrilled with
nymphs in white satin--themselves radiant in brown silk coat, with
cherry-coloured waistcoat and breeches. Beaux who could not dance took
to cards, and the Duke of Northumberland lost two thousand pounds at
quince before half a dancing night had come to an end. There was Sir
John Dalrymple winning money more disastrously than the duke lost it.
He was a man who inveighed against corruption, and who took bribes from
brewers. Costume balls were in favour at court, Chesterfield was making
jokes to the very door of his coffin; and he was not the only patron
of the arts who bought a Claude Lorraine painted within the preceding
half-year. The macaronies, having left off gaming--they had lost all
their money--astonished the town by their new dresses and the size
of their nosegays. Poor George III. could not look admiringly at the
beautiful Miss Linley at an oratorio, without being accused of ogling
her. It was at one of the King’s balls that Mrs. Hobart figured, ‘all
gauze and spangles, like a spangle pudding.’ This was the expensive
year when noblemen are said to have made romances instead of giving
balls. The interiors of their mansions were transformed, walls were
cast down, new rooms were built, the decorations were superb (three
hundred pounds was the sum asked only for the loan of mirrors for a
single night), and not only were the dancers in the most gorgeous of
historical or fancy costumes, but the musicians wore scarlet robes,
and looked like Venetian senators on the stage. It was at one of these
balls that Harry Conway was so astonished at the agility of Mrs.
Hobart’s bulk that he said he was sure she must be hollow.
She would not have been more effeminate than some of our young
legislators in the Commons, who, one night in May, ‘because the House
was very hot, and the young members thought it would melt their rouge
and wither their nosegays,’ as Walpole says, all of a sudden voted
against their own previously formed opinions. India and Lord Clive were
the subjects, and the letter-writer remarks that the Commons ‘being so
fickle, Lord Clive has reason to hope that after they have voted his
head off they will vote it on again the day after he has lost it.’
When there were members in the Commons who rouged like pert girls or
old women, and carried nosegays as huge as a lady mayoress’s at a City
ball, we are not surprised to hear of macaronies in Kensington Gardens.
There they ran races on every Sunday evening, ‘to the high amusement
and contempt of the mob,’ says Walpole. The mob had to look at the
runners from outside the gardens. ‘They will be ambitious of being
fashionable, and will run races too.’ Neither mob nor macaronies had
the swiftness of foot or the lasting powers of some of the running
footmen attached to noble houses. Dukes would run matches of their
footmen from London to York, and a fellow has been known to die rather
than that ‘his grace’ who owned him should lose the match. Talking of
‘graces,’ an incident is told by Walpole of the cost of a bed for a
night’s sleep for a duchess, which may well excite a little wonder now.
The king and court were at Portsmouth to review the fleet. The town
held so many more visitors than it could accommodate that the richest
of course secured the accommodation. ‘The Duchess of Northumberland
gives forty guineas for a bed, and must take her chambermaid into
it.’ Walpole, who is writing to the Countess of Ossory, adds: ‘I did
not think she would pay so dear for _such_ company.’ The people who
were unable to pay ran recklessly into debt, and no more thought of
the sufferings of those to whom they owed the money than that modern
rascalry in clean linen, who compound with their creditors and scarcely
think of paying their ‘composition.’ A great deal of nonsense has been
talked about the virtues of Charles James Fox, who had none but such as
may be found in easy temper and self-indulgence. He was now in debt to
the tune of a hundred thousand pounds. But so once was Julius Cæsar,
with whom Walpole satirically compared him. He let his securities, his
bondsmen, pay the money which they had warranted would be forthcoming
from him, ‘while he, as like Brutus as Cæsar, is indifferent about such
paltry counters.’ When one sees the vulgar people who by some means or
other, and generally by any means, accumulate fortunes the sum total
of which would once have seemed fabulous, and when we see fortunes
of old aristocratic families squandered away among the villains of
the most villainous ‘turf,’ there is nothing strange in what we read
in a letter of a hundred years ago, namely: ‘What is England now? A
sink of Indian wealth! filled by nabobs and emptied by macaronies; a
country over-run by horse-races.’ So London at the end of July now is
not unlike to London of 1773; but we could not match the latter with
such a street picture as the following: ‘There is scarce a soul in
London but macaronies lolling out of windows at Almack’s, like carpets
to be dusted.’ With the more modern parts of material London Walpole
was ill satisfied. _We_ look upon Adam’s work with some complacency,
but Walpole exclaims, ‘What are the Adelphi buildings?’ and he
replies, ‘Warehouses laced down the seams, like a soldier’s trull in a
regimental old coat!’ Mason could not bear the building brothers. ‘Was
there ever such a brace,’ he asks, ‘of self-puffing Scotch coxcombs?’
The coxcombical vein was, nevertheless, rather the fashionable one.
Fancy a nobleman’s postillions in white jackets trimmed with muslin,
and clean ones every other day! In such guise were Lord Egmont’s
postillions to be seen.
The chronicle of fashion is dazzling with the record of the doings of
the celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. At her house in Hill Street,
Berkeley Square, were held the assemblies which were scornfully called
‘blue-stocking’ by those who were not invited, or who affected not to
care for them if they _were_. Mrs. Delany, who certainly had a great
regard for this ‘lady of the last century,’ has a sly hit at Mrs.
Montagu in a letter of May 1773. ‘If,’ she writes, ‘I had paper and
time, I could entertain you with Mrs. Montagu’s room of Cupidons, which
was opened with an assembly for all the foreigners, the literati, and
the macaronies of the present age. Many and sly are the observations
how such a _genius_, at her age and so circumstanced, could think
of painting the walls of her dressing-room with bowers of roses and
jessamine, entirely inhabited by little Cupids in all their little
wanton ways. It is astonishing, unless she looks upon herself as the
wife of old Vulcan, and mother to all those little Loves!’ This is a
sister woman’s testimony of a friend! The _genius_ of Mrs. Montagu was
of a higher class than that of dull but good Mrs. Delany. The _age_ of
the same lady was a little over fifty, when she might fittingly queen
it, as she did, in her splendid mansion in Hill Street, the scene of
the glories of her best days. The ‘circumstances’ and the ‘Vulcan’ were
allusions to her being the wife of a noble owner of collieries and a
celebrated mathematician, who suffered from continued ill-health, and
who considerately went to bed at _five_ o’clock P.M. daily!
The great subject of the year, after all, was the duping of Charles
Fox, by the impostor who called herself the Hon. Mrs. Grieve. She
had been transported, and after her return had set up as ‘a sensible
woman,’ giving advice to fools, ‘for a consideration.’ A silly Quaker
brought her before Justice Fielding for having defrauded him. He
had paid her money, for which she had undertaken to get him a place
under government; but she had kept the money, and had not procured
for him the coveted place. Her impudent defence was that the Quaker’s
immorality stood in the way of otherwise certain success. The
Honourable lady’s dupes believed in her, because they saw the style
in which she lived, and often beheld her descend from her chariot
and enter the houses of ministers and other great personages; but it
came out that she only spoke to the porters or to other servants, who
entertained her idle questions, for a gratuity, while Mrs. Grieve’s
carriage, and various dupes, waited for her in the street. When these
dupes, however, saw Charles Fox’s chariot at Mrs. Grieve’s door,
and that gentleman himself entering the house--not issuing therefrom
till a considerable period had elapsed--they were confirmed in their
credulity. But the clever hussey was deluding the popular tribune in
the house, and keeping his chariot at her door, to further delude the
idiots who were taken in by it. The patriot was in a rather common
condition of patriots; he was over head and ears in debt. The lady
had undertaken to procure for him the hand of a West Indian heiress,
a Miss Phipps, with 80,000_l._, a sum that might soften the hearts of
his creditors for a while. The young lady (whom ‘the Hon.’ never saw)
was described as a little capricious. She could not abide dark men, and
the swart democratic leader powdered his eyebrows that he might look
fairer in the eyes of the lady of his hopes. An interview between them
was always on the point of happening, but was always being deferred.
Miss Phipps was ill, was coy, was not ‘i’ the vein’; finally she had
the smallpox, which was as imaginary as the other grounds of excuse.
Meanwhile Mrs. Grieve lent the impecunious legislator money, 300_l._
or thereabouts. She was well paid, not by Fox, of course, but by the
more vulgar dupes who came to false conclusions when they beheld his
carriage, day after day, at the Hon. Mrs. Grieve’s door. The late
Lord Holland expressed his belief that the loan from Mrs. Grieve was
a foolish and improbable story. ‘I have heard Fox say,’ Lord Holland
remarks in the ‘Memorials and Correspondence of Fox,’ edited by Lord
John (afterwards Earl) Russell, ‘she never got or asked any money from
him.’ She probably knew very well that Fox had none to lend. That he
should have accepted any from such a woman is disgraceful enough: but
there may be exaggeration in the matter.
Fox--it is due to him to note the fact here--had yet hardly begun
seriously and earnestly his career as a public man. At the close of
1773 he was sowing his wild oats. He ended the year with the study of
two widely different dramatic parts, which he was to act on a private
stage. Those parts were Lothario, in ‘The Fair Penitent,’ and Sir
Harry’s servant, in ‘High Life below Stairs.’ The stage on which the
two pieces were acted, by men scarcely inferior to Fox himself in rank
and ability, was at Winterslow House, near Salisbury, the seat of the
Hon. Stephen Fox. The night of representation closed the Christmas
holidays of 1773-4. It was Saturday, January 8, 1774. Fox played the
gallant gay Lothario brilliantly; the livery servant in the kitchen,
aping his master’s manners, was acted with abundant low humour, free
from vulgarity. But, whether there was incautious management during the
piece, or incautious revelry after it, the fine old house was burned
to the ground before the morning. It was then that Fox turned more than
before to public business; but without giving up any of his private
enjoyments, except those he did not care for.
The duels of this year which gave rise to the most gossip were, first,
that between Lord Bellamont and Lord Townshend, and next the one
between Messrs. Temple and Whately. The two lords fought (after some
shifting on Townshend’s side) on a quarrel arising from a refusal of
Lord Townshend, in Dublin, to receive Bellamont. The offended lord was
badly shot in the stomach, and a wit (so called) penned this epigram on
the luckier adversary:--
Says Bell’mont to Townshend, ‘You turned on your heel,
And that gave your honour a check.’
‘’Tis my way,’ replied Townshend. ‘To the world I appeal,
If I didn’t the same at Quebec.’
Townshend, at Quebec, had succeeded to the command after Monckton was
wounded, and he declined to renew the conflict with De Bougainville.
The duel between Temple and Whately arose out of extraordinary
circumstances. There were in the British Foreign Office letters from
English and also from American officials in the transatlantic colony,
which advised coercion on the part of our government as the proper
course to be pursued for the successful administration of that colony.
Benjamin Franklin was then in England, and hearing of these letters,
had a strong desire to procure them, in order to publish them in
America, to the confusion of the writers. The papers were the property
of the British Government, from whom it is hardly too much to say that
they must have been stolen. At all events, an agent of Franklin’s,
named Hugh Williamson, is described as having got them for Franklin
‘by an ingenious device,’ which seems to be a very euphemistic phrase.
The letters had been originally addressed to Whately, secretary to
the Treasury, who, in 1773, was dead. The ingenious device by which
they were abstracted was reported to have been made with the knowledge
of Temple, who had been lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire. The
excitement caused by their publication led to a duel between Temple
and a brother of Whately, in whose hands the letters had never been,
and poor Whately was dangerously wounded, to save the honour of the
ex-lieutenant-governor. The publication of these letters was as
unjustifiable as the ingenious device by which they were conveyed from
their rightful owners. It caused as painful a sensation as any one of
the many painful incidents in the Geneva Arbitration affair, namely,
when--it being a point of honour that neither party should publish a
statement of their case till a judgment had been pronounced--the case
made out by the United States counsel was to be bought, before the
tribunal was opened, as easily as if it had been a ‘last dying speech
and confession!’
In literature Andrew Stewart’s promised ‘Letters to Lord Mansfield’
excited universal curiosity. In that work Stewart treated the chief
justice as those Chinese executioners do their patients whose skin they
politely and tenderly brush away with wire brushes till nothing is left
of the victim but a skeleton. It was a luxury to Walpole to see a Scot
dissect a Scot. ‘They know each other’s sore places better than we
do.’ The work, however, was not published. Referring to Macpherson’s
‘Ossian,’ Walpole remarked, ‘The Scotch seem to be proving that they
are really descended from the Irish.’ On the other hand, the ‘Heroic
Epistle to Sir William Chambers’ was being relished by satirical minds,
and men were attributing it to Anstey and Soame Jenyns, and to Temple,
Luttrell, and Horace Walpole, and pronouncing it wittier than the
‘Dunciad,’ and did not know that it was Mason’s, and that it would not
outlive Pope. Sir William Chambers found consolation in the fact that
the satire, instead of damaging the volume it condemned, increased the
sale of the book by full three hundred volumes. Walpole, of course,
knew from the first that Mason was the author; he worked hard in
promoting its circulation, and gloried in its success. ‘Whenever I was
asked,’ he writes, ‘have you read “Sir John Dalrymple?” I replied,
“Have _you_ read the ‘Heroic Epistle’?” The _Elephant_ and _Ass_ have
become constellations, and ‘_He has stolen the Earl of Denbigh’s
handkerchief_,’ is the proverb in fashion. It is something surprising
to find, at a time when authors are supposed to have been ill paid,
Dr. Hawkesworth receiving, for putting together the narrative of Mr.
Banks’s voyage, one thousand pounds in advance from the traveller,
and six thousand from the publishers, Strahan & Co. It really seems
incredible, but this is stated to have been the fact.