Leaving Woolwich, I went on a long visit to my relations, the Wallingers,
with whom I had passed so many happy holidays while at school.
Seaford occupies a line on the southern coast most charming to the eye,
but its beauty has been its ruin. A picturesque expanse of back water
extends from its magnificent cliff to Newhaven, and the time came when
its decaying vegetation generated typhoid fever, which destroyed the
reputation of the place, while it decimated the inhabitants.
Another calamity followed: a high spring tide, not so many years ago,
washed away the houses in front of the sea, and overflowed the streets.
Repairs have been made, new structures raised, private houses, hotels,
and a convalescent hospital; but it is no longer the Seaford it was of
old, in its rotten-borough days.
I was once more there with my kind aunt, and an uncle whose brow smiled
while it frowned. There were two branches of Wallinger; my uncle was a
cadet of the elder branch, then represented by the Rev. John Wallinger,
the disinherited heir of Hare Hall, who went from the law to the Church
for the love of Calvin.
The younger branch was represented more to one’s taste by the Rev.
William Wallinger and his brother Arnold, a sergeant-at-law. John was
too busily engaged on Calvin’s affairs to visit Seaford at this time,
but William was in a manner settled there with his pupil, the young Lord
Pelham. Other members of the family came there to make up a seaside
season; among them the wife and daughters of William Roberts, who was
Teller of the Exchequer, an office held by his father before him, both
renowned epicures, who held to the axiom that a good cook was three
hundred and sixty-five blessings a year. Mrs. Roberts was a sister of the
Rev. John, and brought with her a string of seven daughters, all less
beautiful than their mother. Then the family of Mr. Nussey, the king’s
apothecary, added to the list of visitors, he being an old friend of all.
Mrs. Nussey was a very lovely woman. She was the daughter of Mr. Walker,
her husband’s predecessor at court; in fact, the Walkers and Nusseys, in
turn or together, had been apothecaries to the royal family time out of
mind, and it was said that the late Mr. Walker was the only man who knew
how to reach the vein in George the Fourth’s fat arm.
Nussey, whom I knew very intimately later in life, told me that the king
confided to him all his secrets, and that the knowledge, if written down,
would set all England in a blaze. He was with the royal patient to the
last, the king never letting go of his hand for twenty-four hours, which
gave him an agony of cramp all but insupportable.
Nussey was a man deservedly esteemed; he had that gracious manner which
comes often from enjoying the confidence of the great.
I must say a few words more about William Wallinger. Any attempt to
describe his countenance would be made utterly in vain; it is in this
that the artist may assert his superiority to the writer. No one ever
saw him without surprise to find himself in company with so much grace
and manly beauty. He was too gentlemanly for a king, too quietly
self-possessed for a noble, too impressive in manner for any other
human being but himself. He inherited a good fortune; he might have had
the pick of the country in preferment had he so chosen, but he refused
profitable livings, among others that of Stanmer, a village in Lord
Chichester’s park, preferring modest pulpits and independence. He was
much thought of by the people at Hastings for a period. There Lord
Chichester had a chapel built for him; but he often changed his residence
and varied his duties. He was attached to Tunbridge Wells, where his
sister, Mrs. Jederé Fisher, resided at her seat called Great Culverden.
She was the widow of Mr. Jederé Fisher, of Ealing Park, Middlesex, a
charming residence, sold later on to Sir William Lawrence, the eminent
surgeon, now cut up into streets and villas.
Her son is a well-known Kentish magnate.