quietness and beauty, "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart."
All worldly cares and pains were laid asleep; while memory, fancy, and
feeling waked. Althorpe does not frown upon us in the gloom of remote
antiquity; it has not the warlike glories of some of the baronial
residences of our old nobility; it is not built like a watch-tower
on a hill, to lord it over feudal vassals; it is not bristled with
battlements and turrets. It stands in a valley, with the gradual hills
undulating round it, clothed with rich woods. It has altogether a look
of compactness and comfort, without pretension, which, with the pastoral
beauty of the landscape, and low situation, recall the ancient vocation
of the family, whose grandeur was first founded, like that of the
patriarchs of old, on the multitude of their flocks and herds.[68] It
was in the reign of Henry the Eighth that Althorpe became the principal
seat of the Spencers, and no place of the same date can boast so many
delightful, romantic, and historical associations. There is Spenser the
poet, "high-priest of all the Muses' mysteries," who modestly claimed,
as an honour, his relationship to those Spencers who now, with a just
pride, boast of _him_, and deem his Faery Queen "the brightest jewel in
their coronet;" and the beautiful Alice Spencer, countess of Derby, who
was celebrated in early youth by her poet-cousin, and for whom Milton,
in her old age, wrote his "Arcades." At Althorpe, in 1603, the queen and
son of James the First were, on their arrival in England, nobly
entertained with a masque, written for the occasion by Ben Jonson, in
which the young ladies and nobles of the country enacted nymphs and
fairies, satyrs and hunters, and danced to the sound of "excellent soft
music," their scenery the natural woods, their stage the green lawn,
their canopy the summer sky. What poetical picturesque hospitality!
In these days it would have been a dinner, with French cooks and
confectioners express from London to dress it. Here lived Waller's
famous Sacharissa, the first Lady Sunderland--so beautiful and good,
so interesting in herself, she needed not his wit nor his poetry to
enshrine her. Here she parted from her young husband,[69] when he left
her to join the king in the field; and here, a few months after, she
received the news of his death in the battle of Newbury, and saw her
happiness wrecked at the age of three-and-twenty. Here plotted her
distinguished son, that Proteus of politics, the second Lord Sunderland.
Charles the First was playing at bowls on the green at Althorpe, when
Colonel Joyce's detachment surprised him, and carried him off to
imprisonment and to death. Here the excellent and accomplished Evelyn
used to meditate in the "noble gallerie," and in the "ample gardens," of
which he has left us an admiring and admirable description, which would
be as suitable today as it was a hundred and fifty years ago, with the
single exception of the great proprietor, deservedly far more honoured
in this generation than was his apostate time-serving ancestor, the
Lord Sunderland of Evelyn's day.[70] When the Spencers were divided,
the eldest branch of the family becoming Dukes of Marlborough and the
youngest Earls Spencer--if the former inherited glory, Blenheim, and
poverty--to the latter have belonged more true and more substantial
distinctions: for the last three generations the Spencers have been
remarked for talents, for benevolence, for constancy, for love of
literature, and patronage of the fine arts.
The house retains the form described by Evelyn--that of a half H:
a slight irregularity is caused by the new gothic room, built by
the present earl, to contain part of his magnificent library, which,
like the statue in the Castle of Otranto, had grown "too big for what
contained it." We entered by a central door the large and lofty hall, or
vestibule, hung round with pictures of fox-chases and those who figured
in them, famous hunters, quadruped and biped, all as large as life,
spread over as much canvass as would make a mainsail for a man-of-war.
These huge perpetrations are of the time of Jack Spencer, a noted Nimrod
in his day; and are very fine, as we were told, but they did not
interest me. I had caught a glimpse of the superb staircase, hung round
with pictures above and below, and not the less interesting as having
been erected by Sacharissa herself during the few years she was mistress
of Althorpe. A face looked at us from over an opposite door, which there
was no resisting. Does the reader remember Horace Walpole's pleasant
description of a party of _seers_ posting through the apartments of a
show-place? "They come; ask what such a room is called?--write it down;
admire a lobster or cabbage in a Dutch market piece; dispute whether the
last room was green or purple; and then hurry to the inn, for fear the
fish should be over-dressed."[71] We were not such a party; but with
imaginations ready primed to take fire, and memories enriched with all
the associations the place could suggest, to us every portrait was a
history. The orthodox style of seeing the house is to turn to the left,
and view the ground-floor apartments first; but the face I have mentioned
seemed to beckon me straight-forward, and I could not choose but obey
the invitation: it was that of Lady Bridgewater, the loveliest of the
four lovely daughters of the Duke of Marlborough: she had the misfortune
to be painted by Jervas, and the good fortune to be celebrated by Pope
as the "tender sister, daughter, friend, and wife;" and again--
"Thence Beauty, waking, all her forms supplies--
An angel's sweetness--or Bridgewater's eyes."
Jervas was supposed to have been presumptuously and desperately in love
with this beautiful woman, who died at the age of five-and-twenty: hence
Pope has taken the liberty--by a poetical licence, no doubt--to call
her, in his Epistle to Jervas, "_thy_ Bridgewater." Two of her fair
sisters, the Duchess of Montagu and Lady Godolphin, hung near her; and
above, her fairer sister, Lady Sunderland. Ascending the magnificent
staircase, a hundred faces look down upon us, in a hundred different
varieties of expression, in a hundred different costumes. Here are Queen
Anne and Sarah Duchess of Marlborough placed amicably side by side,
as in the days of their romantic friendship, when they conversed and
corresponded as Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman: the beauty, the intellect,
the spirit, are all on the side of the imperious duchess; the poor queen
looks like what she was, a good-natured fool. On the left is the cunning
abigail, who supplanted the duchess in the favour of Queen Anne--Mrs.
Masham. Proceeding along the gallery, we are met by the portrait of that
angel-devil, Lady Shrewsbury,[72] whose exquisite beauty fascinates at
once and shocks the eye like the gorgeous colours of an adder. I believe
the story of her holding the Duke of Buckingham's horse while he shot
her husband in a duel, has been disputed; but her attempt to assassinate
Killegrew, while she sat by in her carriage,[73] is too true. So far had
her depravities unsexed her!
----"Lorsque la vertu, avec peine abjuree,
Nous fait voir une femme a ses fureurs livree,
S'irritant par l'effort que ce pas a coute,
Son ame avec plus d'art a plus de cruaute."
She was even less famous for the number of her lovers, than the
catastrophes of which she was the cause.
"Had ever nymph such reason to be glad?
Two in a duel fell, and one ran mad."
Not two, but half a dozen fell in duels; and if her lovers "ran mad,"
it was in despite, not in despair. Lady Shrewsbury is past jesting or
satire; and after a first involuntary pause of admiration before her
matchless beauty, we turn away with horror. For the rest of the
portraits on this vast staircase, it would take a volume to give a
_catalogue raisonnee_ of them. We pass, then, into a corridor hung with
two large and very mediocre landscapes, representing Tivoli and Terni.
Any attempt, even the best, to paint a cataract _must_ be abortive. How
render to the fancy the two grandest of its features--sound and motion?
the thunder and the tumult of the headlong waters? We will pass on to
the gallery, and lose ourselves in its enchantments.
Where shall we begin?--Any where. Throw away the catalogue: all are old
acquaintances. We are tempted to speak to them, and they look as if they
could curtsey to us. The very walls breathe around us. What Vandykes--what
Lelys--what Sir Joshuas! what a congregation of all that is beauteous
and noble!--what Spencers, Sydneys, Digbys, Russells, Cavendishes,
and Churchills!--O what a scene to moralize, to philosophize, to
sentimentalize in!--what histories in those eyes, that look, yet see
not!--what sermons on those lips, that all but speak; I would rather
reflect in a picture-gallery, than elegize in a churchyard. The "poca
polvere che nulla sente," can only tell us we must die; these, with
a more useful and deep-felt morality, tell us how to live.
Yet I cannot say I felt thus pensive and serious the first time I
looked round the gallery at Althorpe. Curiosity, excitement, interest,
admiration--a crowd of quick successive images and recollections
fleeting across the memory--left me no time to think. I remember being
startled, the moment I entered, by a most extraordinary picture,--the
second Prince of Orange, and his preceptor Katts, by Flinck. The eyes of
the latter are really shockingly alive; they stare out of the canvass,
and glitter and fascinate like those of a serpent. If I had been a Roman
Catholic, I should have crossed myself, as I looked at them, to shield
me from their evil and supernatural expression.[74] The picture of the
two Sforzas, Maximilian and his brother Francis, by Albert Durer, is
quite a curiosity; and so is another, by Holbein, near it, containing
the portraits of Henry the Eighth, his daughter Mary, and his jester,
Will Somers,--all full of individuality and truth. The expression in
Mary's face, at once saturnine, discontented and vulgar, is especially
full of character. These last three pictures are curious and valuable as
specimens of art; but they are not pleasing. We turn to the matchless
Vandykes, at once admirable as paintings, and yet more interesting as
portraits. A full-length of his master and friend, Rubens, dressed in
black, is magnificent; the attitude particularly graceful. Near the
centre of the gallery is the charming full-length of Queen Henrietta
Maria, a well-known and celebrated picture. She is dressed in white
satin, and stands near a table on which is a vase of white roses, and,
more in the shade, her regal crown. Nothing can be in finer taste than
the contrast between the rich, various, but subdued colours of the
carpet and background, and the delicate, and harmonious, and brilliant
tints which throw out the figure. None of the pictures I had hitherto
seen of Henrietta, either in the king's private collection, or at
Windsor, do justice to the sparkling grace of her figure, or the
vivacity and beauty of her eyes, so celebrated by all the contemporary
poets. Waller, for instance:--
"Could Nature then no private woman grace,
Whom we might dare to love, with such a face,
Such a complexion, and so radiant eyes,
Such lovely motion, and such sharp replies?"
Davenant styles her, very beautifully, "The rich-eyed darling of a
monarch's breast." Lord Holland, in the description he sent from Paris,
dwells on the charm of her eyes, her smile, and her graceful figure,
though he admits her to be rather _petite_; and if the poet and the
courtier be distrusted, we have the authority of the puritanic Sir
Symond d'Ewes, who allows the influence of her "excellent and sparkling
black eyes." Henrietta could be very seductive, and had all the French
grace of manner; but, as is well known, she could play the virago, "and
cast such a scowl, as frightened all the lords and ladies in waiting."
Too much importance is attached to her character and her influence over
her husband, in the histories of that time. She was a fascinating, but
a superficial and volatile Frenchwoman. With all her feminine love
of sway, she had not sufficient energy to govern; and with all her
disposition to intrigue, she never had discretion enough to keep her
own or the king's secrets. When she rushed through a storm of bullets
to save a favourite lap-dog; or when, amid the shrieks and entreaties
of her terrified attendants, she commanded the captain of her vessel to
"blow up the ship rather than strike to the Parliamentarian,"--it was
more the spirit and wilfulness of a woman, who, with all her faults,
had the blood of Henri Quatre in her veins, than the mental energy
and resolute fortitude of a heroine. Near her hangs her daughter, who
inherited her grace, her beauty, her petulance,--the unhappy Henriette
d'Orleans,[75] fair, radiant, and lively, with a profusion of beautiful
hair; it is impossible to look from the mother to the daughter, without
remembering the scene in Retz's memoirs, when the queen said to him, in
excuse for her daughter's absence, "My poor Henrietta is obliged to lie
in bed, for I have no wood to make a fire for her--et la pauvre enfant
etait transie de froid."
Another picture by Vandyke hangs at the top of the room, one of the
grandest and most spirited of his productions. It represents William,
the first Duke of Bedford, the father of Lord William Russell, when
young, and his brother-in-law, the famous (and infamous) Digby, Earl
of Bristol. How admirably Vandyke has caught the characters of the two
men!--the fine commanding form of the duke, as he steps forward, the
frank, open countenance, expressive of all that is good and noble, speak
him what he was--not less than that of Digby, which, though eminently
handsome, has not one elevated or amiable trait in the countenance; the
drapery, background, and more especially the hands, are magnificently
painted. On one side of this superb picture, hangs the present Earl
Spencer when a youth; and on the other, his sister, Georgiana Duchess
of Devonshire, at the age of eighteen, looking all life and high-born
loveliness, and reminding one of Coleridge's beautiful lines to her:--
"Light as a dream your days their circlets ran
From all that teaches brotherhood to man,
Far, far removed! from want, from grief, from fear!
Obedient music lull'd your infant ear;
Obedient praises soothed your infant heart;
Emblazonments and old ancestral crests,
With many a bright obtrusive form of art,
Detain'd your eye from nature. Stately vests,
That veiling strove to deck your charms divine,
Rich viands and the pleasurable wine,
Were yours unearn'd by toil."----
And he thus beautifully alludes to her maternal character; for this
accomplished woman set the example to the highest ranks, of nursing
her own children:--
"You were a mother! at your bosom fed
The babes that loved you. You, with laughing eye,
Each twilight thought, each nascent feeling read,
Which you yourself created."
Alas, that such a beginning should have such an end!
Both these are whole-lengths, by Sir Joshua Reynolds: the middle tints
are a little flown, else they were perfect; they suffer by being hung
near the glowing yet mellowed tints of Vandyke.
We have here a whole bevy of the heroines of De Grammont, delightful
to those who have what Walpole used to call the "De Grammont madness"
upon them. Here is that beautiful, audacious termagant, Castlemaine,
very like her picture at Windsor, and with the same characteristic bit
of storm gleaming in the background.--Lady Denham,[76] the wife of
the poet, Sir John Denham, and niece of that Lord Bristol who figures
in Vandyke's picture above mentioned--a lovely creature, and a sweet
picture.--Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, who so long
ruled the heart and councils of Charles the Second, in Lely's finest
style; the face has a look of blooming innocence, soon exchanged
for coarseness and arrogance.--The indolent, alluring Middleton,
looking from under her sleepy eyelids, "trop coquette pour rebuter
personne."--"La Belle Hamilton," the lovely prize of the volatile De
Grammont; very like her portrait at Windsor, with the same finely formed
bust and compressed ruby lips, but with an expression more vivacious and
saucy, and less elevated.--Two portraits of Nell Gwyn, with the fair
brown air and small bright eyes they ought to have; _au reste_, with
such prim, sanctified mouths, and dressed with such elaborate decency,
that instead of reminding us of the "parole sciolte d'ogni freno, risi,
vezzi, giuochi"--they are more like Beck Marshall, the puritan's
daughter, on her good behaviour.[77]
Here is that extraordinary woman Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin,
the fame of whose beauty and gallantries filled all Europe, and once the
intended wife of Charles the Second, though she afterwards intrigued in
vain for the less (or more) eligible post of _maitresse en titre_. What
an extraordinary, wild, perverted, good-for-nothing, yet interesting set
of women, were those four Mancini sisters! all victims, more or less, to
the pride, policy, or avarice, of their cardinal uncle; all gifted by
nature with the fervid Italian blood and the plotting Italian brain; all
really _aventurieres_, while they figured as duchesses and princesses.
They wore their coronets and ermine as strolling players wear their
robes of state--with a sort of picturesque awkwardness--and they proved
rather too scanty to cover a multitude of sins.
This head of Hortense Mancini, as Cleopatra dissolving the pearl, is the
most spirited, but the least beautiful portrait I have seen of her. An
appropriate pendant on the opposite side is her lover, philosopher, and
eulogist, the witty St. Evremond--Grammont's "Caton de Normandie;" but
instead of looking like a good-natured epicurean, a man "who thought as
he liked, and liked what he thought,"[78] his nose is here wrinkled up
into an expression of the most supercilious scorn, adding to his native
ugliness.[79] Both these are by Kneller. Farther on, is another of
Charles's beauties, whose _sagesse_ has never been disputed--Elizabeth
Wriothesley, Countess of Northumberland, the sister of that half saint,
half heroine, and _all_ woman--Lady Russell.
There is also a lovely picture of that magnificent brunette, Miss Bagot.
"Elle avait," says Hamilton, "ce teint rembruni qui plait tant quand
il plait." She married Berkeley Lord Falmouth, a man who, though
unprincipled, seems to have loved her; at least, was not long enough
her husband to forget to be her lover: he was killed, shortly after his
marriage, in the battle of Southwold-bay. This is assuredly one of the
most splendid pictures Lely ever painted; and it is, besides, full of
character and interest. She holds a cannon-ball in her lap, (only an
airy emblematical cannon-ball, for she poises it like a feather,) and
the countenance is touched with a sweet expression of melancholy: hence
it is plain that she sat for it soon after the death of her first
husband, and before her marriage with the witty Earl of Dorset.--Near
her hangs another fair piece of witchcraft, "La Belle Jennings," who in
her day played with hearts as if they had been billiard balls; and no
wonder, considering what _things_ she had to deal with:[80] there was
a great difference between her vivacity and that of her vivacious
sister, the Duchess of Marlborough.--Old Sarah hangs near her. One
would think that Kneller, in spite, had watched the moment to take a
characteristic likeness, and catch, not the Cynthia, but the Fury of
the minute; as for instance, when she cut off her luxuriant tresses, so
worshipped by her husband, and flung them in his face; for so she tosses
back her disdainful head, and curls her lip like an insolent, pouting,
spoiled, grown-up baby. The life of this woman is as fine a lesson on
the emptiness of all worldly advantages, boundless wealth, power, fame,
beauty, wit, as ever was set forth by moralist or divine.
"By spirit robb'd of power--by warmth, of friends--
By wealth, of followers! without one distress,
Sick of herself through very selfishness."[81]
And yet I suspect that the Duchess of Marlborough has never met with
justice. History knows her only as Marlborough's wife, an intriguing
dame d'honneur, and a cast-off favourite. Vituperated by Swift,
satirized by Pope, ridiculed by Walpole--what angel could have stood
such bedaubing, and from such pens?
"O she has fallen into a pit of ink!"
But glorious talents she had, strength of mind, generosity, the power to
feel and inspire the strongest attachment,--and all these qualities were
degraded, or rendered useless, by _temper_! Her avarice was not the love
of money for its own sake, but the love of power; and her bitter contempt
for "knaves and fools" may be excused, if not justified. Imagine such
a woman as the Duchess of Marlborough out-faced, out-plotted by that
crowned cypher, that sceptred commonplace, queen Anne! It should seem
that the constant habit of being forced to serve, outwardly, where she
really ruled,--the consciousness of her own brilliant and powerful
faculties brought into immediate hourly comparison with the confined
trifling understanding of her mistress, a disdain of her own forced
hypocrisy, and a perception of the heartless baseness of the courtiers
around her, disgusting to a mind naturally high-toned, produced at
length that extreme of bitterness and insolence which made her so often
"an embodied storm." She was always a termagant--but of a very different
description from the vulgar Castlemaine.
Though the picture of Colonel Russell, by Dobson, is really fine
as a portrait, the recollection of the scene between him and Miss
Hamilton[82]--his love of dancing, to prove he was not old and
asthmatical,--and his attachment to his "_chapeau pointu_," make it
impossible to look at him without a smile--but a good-humoured smile,
such as his lovely mistress gave him when she rejected him with so
much politeness.--Arabella Churchill, the sister of the great Duke of
Marlborough, and mistress of the Duke of York, has been better treated
by the painter than by Hamilton; instead of "La grande creature, pale et
decharnee," she appears here a very lovely woman. But enough of these
equivocal ladies. No--before we leave them, there are yet two to be
noticed, more equivocal, more interesting, and more extraordinary than
all the rest put together--Bianca di Capello, who, from a washerwoman,
became Grand Duchess of Florence, with less beauty than I should have
expected, but as much _countenance_; and the beautiful, but appalling
picture of Venitia Digby, painted after she was dead, by Vandyke: she
was found one morning sitting up in her bed, leaning her head on her
hand, and lifeless; and thus she is painted. Notwithstanding the ease
and grace of the attitude, and the delicacy of the features, there is
no mistaking this for slumber: a heavier hand has pressed upon those
eyelids, which will never more open to the light: there is a leaden
lifelessness about them, too shockingly true and real--
"It thrills us with mortality,
And curdles to the gazer's heart."
Her picture at Windsor is the most perfectly beautiful and impressive
female portrait I ever saw. How have I longed, when gazing at it, to
conjure her out of her frame, and bid her reveal the secret of her
mysterious life and death!--Nearly opposite to the dead Venitia, in
strange contrast, hangs her husband, who loved her to madness, or was
mad before he married her, in the very prime of life and youth. This
picture, by Cornelius Jansen, is as fine as any thing of Vandyke's: the
character expresses more of intellectual power and physical strength,
than of that elegance of face and form we should have looked for in
such a fanciful being as Sir Kenelm Digby: he looks more like one of
the Athletae than a poet, a metaphysician, and a "squire of dames."
There are three pictures of Waller's famed Sacharissa, the first Lady
Sunderland: one in a hat, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, gay and
blooming; the second, far more interesting, was painted about the
time of her marriage with the young Earl of Sunderland, or shortly
after--very sweet and lady-like. I should say that the high-breeding
of the face and air was more conspicuous than the beauty; the neck and
hands exquisite. Both these are Vandyke's. A third picture represents
her about the time of her second marriage: the expression wholly
changed--cold, sad, faded, but pretty still: one might fancy her
contemplating, with a sick heart, the portrait of Lord Sunderland, the
lover and husband of her early youth, who hangs on the opposite side of
the gallery, in complete armour: he fell in the same battle with Lord
Falkland, at the age of three-and-twenty. The brother of Sacharissa,
the famous Algernon Sidney, is suspended near her; a fine head, full of
contemplation and power.