Devonshire House is dead and gone. I hope that its name may be
perpetuated by the new commercial building, but I do not know.
When the workmen were performing acute surgical operations on old
Devonshire House I was interested to hear people, who knew the Duke
quite well by his photographs, express intimate regret at this deed.
"Dear old Devonshire House!" they said. "What a shame it is that
these grand old...." And so on and so forth. They were wistful.
They gave the impression that they knew the pink bedroom awfully well
(don't you know); they that had lingered on every inch of the famous
staircase. They were like people who mourned the downfall of the old
home.
You see, for nearly five years Devonshire House was, in the name of
charity, thrown open to the public, so that probably more people were
acquainted with the geography of this mansion than with any other
ducal house which has not become either an hotel or a museum. So:
"Poor old Devonshire House!"
"Yes, it looks just like a bombed château during the war!"
* * *
It did.
Workmen swarmed over it, stood on walls picking at it, sending it
earthwards in clouds of dry, white dust. Great gashes had been cut
in the sides, windows had been knocked out, the daylight shone into
the out-buildings, exposing the discreet wall-paper of the servantry,
and that wide-walled courtyard through which swung the coaches of
Fox, Burke, and the "New Whigs" in the days when men, and many a
pretty woman, plotted against Pitt, was the loading spot for
builders' carts and a place in which anyone could light a bon-fire to
burn lath and plaster.
There was great interest in this patch of changing London. Not one
person passing on an omnibus but remarked about it; and no wonder,
for this is Piccadilly's most dramatic assassination. In the sound
of the picks you could hear the voice of the new age--or the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, which ever you liked! These great
houses round which centred the wit, the beauty, the scholarship, the
politics, and the art of the eighteenth century have outlived their
day. London has crept up from Ludgate Hill like a tidal wave and
over-whelmed them.
Devonshire House stood, strange and incongruous behind its feudal
wall, like the Lord Mayor's coach in a traffic hold-up. Great hotels
and shops grew up and shouldered it, and still it stood there
dreaming, it seemed, of a vanished paddock; aware, it seemed, in its
gated caution, that once upon a time highwaymen rode out of
Kensington with masks over their faces.
I admit that it was ugly--entirely gloomy in its grey, stiff,
barrack-like way; but it did mean something--it had character.
Though nobody, as far as I am aware, ever did anything splendidly bad
or remarkably good in it, Devonshire House could never be neutral.
The National Anthem is pretty bad music, but it could never be
neutral!
* * *
So, as the workmen consumed their sandwiches in halls through which
for two centuries passed a delicious trickle of royalties, as they
heard the whistle and rose heavily to grasp their picks and do some
more damage, I more than once stood there among a tangle of builders'
carts and saw visions rise out of the white dust.
What a procession!
I saw the hackney coach of Charles James Fox trundle under the
portico. Burke, of course, was there too, the practical, wise Burke;
for here they conspired with the Coalition Whigs to hit at Pitt,
whispering and plotting with the lovely Georgiana, third Duchess of
Devonshire, who enjoyed placing her white finger into this political
pie. There had been a tea-party at Boston. And the French
Revolution was gathering like a storm to split them. Among these
crumbling stones Georgiana must have heard of that scene, one of the
most dramatic the House of Commons has ever witnessed, when these
two, Fox and Burke, broke their long friendship in a thrilled hush,
Fox with tears in his eyes and his voice breaking, Burke grim and
firm, and the House of Commons looking on at a quarrel that never
healed.
George IV, as Prince of Wales, with his card-table fingers also in
the Fox pie, and all the brains and elegance of that time, wits who
have been forgotten, a few who live, laughter, music, and the flash
of white shoulders, eyes above a fan.... What a procession!
All this you could see in the dust of Devonshire House--two hundred
years of it, duke succeeding duke; and all the time the new
generations of wealth, power, and art moving up to that grey old
portico.
As I passed it late one night I wondered if there are spirits--a
queer doubt to express to-day! If so, I am certain that on calm
nights fit for a lady's walk Georgiana, third Duchess of Devonshire,
must have visited the ruin, looking with very straight brows and
considerable "tut-tutting" at a big board on which was printed: "The
magnificent building to be erected on this site will include offices,
restaurants, and flats."
* * *
Poor Georgiana! Time is a queer thing, and--you, in your time, would
never have believed it, would you?