now Friday evening, and the long and the short of the story was that
Emily dined out, Mrs. FitzHugh _teaed_ with the Miss Hamiltons, my party
went to Drury Lane, and I passed the evening alone; and the reason why
this letter was not finished during that lonely evening, my dear, was
that I was sitting working worsted-work for Emily in the parlor
downstairs when my people all went away, and after they were gone I was
seized with a perfect nervous panic, a "Good" fever, and could not bring
myself to stir from the chair where they had left me. As to going up
into the drawing-room, it was out of the question; I fancied every step
of the stairs would have morsels of flesh lying on it, and the banisters
would be all smeared with blood and hairs. In short, I had a fit of the
horrors, and sat the whole blessed evening working heart's ease into
Emily's canvas, in a perfect nightmare of horrible fancies. At one
moment I had the greatest mind in the world to send for a cab, and go to
Covent Garden Theatre, and sit in Adelaide's dressing-room; but I was
ashamed to give way to my nerves in that cowardly fashion, and certainly
passed a most miserable evening.... However, let me leave last night and
its horrors, and make haste to answer your questions....
Another pause, dear Harriet, and here I am at this picturesque old
place, Cranford House, paying another visit to ----'s _venerable_
friend, old Lady Berkeley. I have been taking a long walk this morning
with Lady ----, whose London fine-ladyism gave way completely in these
old walks of her early home, to which all the family appear extremely
attached. Her unfeigned delight at the primroses, oxlips, wild cherry
bloom, and varying greens of the spring season made me think that her
lament was not applicable to herself, just then, at any rate. "What a
pity," cried she, "it is that one cannot be regenerated as the earth is
every spring!" _She_ seemed to me to be undergoing a very pretty process
of regeneration even while she spoke. It is touching to observe natural
character and the lingering traces of early impressions surviving under
the overlaying of the artificial soil and growth of after years of
society and conventional worldly habits. She pointed out to me a
picturesque, pretty object in the grounds, over which she moralized with
a good deal of enthusiasm and feeling--an old, old fir-tree, one of the
cedar tribe, a tree certainly many more than a hundred years old, whose
drooping lower branches absolutely lie upon the lawn for yards all round
it. One of these boughs has struck into the ground, and grown up into a
beautiful young tree, already twelve or fourteen feet high, and the
contrast between the vivid coloring and erect foliage of this young
thing, and the rusty, dusky green, drooping branches of the enormous
tree, which seems to hang over and all round it, with parental
tenderness, is quite exquisite. One of them, however, must,
nevertheless, destroy or be destroyed by the other; a very pretty
vegetable version of the ancient classical, family fate,
superstitions....
Pray, if you know how flowers propagate, write me word. In gathering
primroses this morning, Lady ---- and I exercised our ignorance in all
sorts of conjectures upon the subject, neither of us being botanists,
though she knew, which I did not, the male from the female flowers.
I get a good deal of sleep since you have gone away, as I certainly do
not sit up talking half the night with anybody else. But as for enough,
is there such a thing as enough sleep? and was anybody ever known to
have had it? and who was he or she?
I have had two long letters from Elizabeth Sedgwick, containing much
matter about the abolitionists, in whose movements, you know, she is
deeply interested; also more urgent entreaties that I will "use my
influence" to secure our return home in the autumn!...
My father appears to be quite well, and in a state of great pleasurable
excitement and activity of mind, having (alas! I regret to say) accepted
once more the management of Covent Garden, which is too long a story to
begin just at the end of my paper; but he is in the theatre from morning
till night, as happy as the gods, and apparently, just now, as free from
all mortal infirmity. It is amazing, to be sure, what the revival of the
one interest of his life has done for his health.
I went to the Portland Street Chapel last Sunday, and heard a sermon
upon my peculiar virtue, _humility_, not from the same clergyman we
heard together; and S----, who is too funny, sang the Psalms so loud
that I had to remonstrate with her.
Ever yours,
F. A. B.
[A horrible murder had just been committed by a miserable man of the
name of Good, who endeavored to conceal his crime by cutting to
pieces and scattering in different directions the mangled remains of
his victim--a woman. The details of these horrors filled the public
papers, and were the incessant subject of discussion in society, and
were calculated to produce an impression of terror difficult to
shake off even by so little nervous a person as myself.
The Countess of Berkeley, to whom I have alluded in this letter, was
a woman whose story was a singular romance, which now may be said to
belong to "ancient history." She was the daughter of a butcher of
Gloucester, and an extremely beautiful person. Mr. Henry Berkeley,
the fifth son of Lady Berkeley, for many years Member of Parliament
for Bristol, and as many years the persistent advocate of the system
of voting by ballot, travelled and resided for some time in America,
and formed a close intimacy with ----, who, when we came to England,
accepted Mr. Berkeley's invitation to visit his mother at Cranford,
and took me with him, to make the acquaintance of this remarkable
old lady. She was near eighty years old, tall and stately, with no
apparent infirmities, and great remains of beauty. There was great
originality in all she said, and her manner was strikingly energetic
for so old a woman. I remember, one day after dinner, she had her
glass filled with claret till the liquid appeared to form a rim
above the vessel that contained it, and, raising it steadily to her
lips, looked round the table, where sat all her children but Lord
Fitzhardinge, and saying, "God bless you all," she drank off the
contents without spilling a drop, and, replacing the glass on the
table, said, "Not one of my sons could do that."
One morning, when I was rather indisposed, and unable to join any of
the parties into which the guests had divided themselves on their
various quests after amusement, I was left alone with Lady Berkeley,
and she undertook to give me a sketch of her whole history; and very
strange it was. She gave me, of course, her own version of the
marriage story, and I could not but wonder whether she might have
persuaded herself into believing it true, when she wound up her
curious and interesting account of her life by saying, "And now I am
ready to be carried to my place in the vault, and my place in the
vault is ready for me" (she pointed to the church which adjoined the
old mansion); "and I have the key of it here," and she gave a hearty
slap upon her pocket. She told me of her presentation at Court, and
the uproar it occasioned among the great ladies there, whose
repugnance to admit her of their number she described with much
humor, but attributed solely to the fact of her plebeian descent, of
which she spoke unhesitatingly.
The impression I gathered from her narrative, rather unconsciously
on her part I suspect, was that the Queen, whose strictness upon the
subject of reputation was well known, objected to receiving her
(Lady Berkeley called her, rather disrespectfully, "Old Charlotte"
all the time, but spoke of George III. as "the King"), but was
overruled by the King, who had a personal friendship for Lord
Berkeley.
The strangest thing in her whole account of herself, however, was
the details she gave me of her singular power over her husband. She
said that in a very few years after their marriage (by courtesy) she
perceived that her husband's affairs were in the most deplorable
state of derangement: that he gambled, that he was over head and
ears in debt, that he never had a farthing of ready money, that his
tenantry were worse off than any other in the country, that his
agents and bailiffs and stewards were rogues who ground them and
cheated him, that his farmers were careless and incompetent, and
that the whole of his noble estate appeared to be going
irretrievably to ruin; when the earl complaining one day bitterly of
this state of things, for which he knew no remedy, she told him that
she would find the remedy, and undertake to recover what was lost
and redeem what remained, if he would give her absolute
discretionary power to deal with his property as she pleased, and
not interfere with her management of it for a whole year. He agreed
to this, but, not satisfied with his promise, she made him bind
himself by oath and, moreover, execute documents, giving her legal
power enabling her to act independently of him in all matters
relating to his estate. The earl not unnaturally demurred, but at
length yielded, only stipulating that she should always be prepared
to furnish him with money whenever he wanted it. She bound herself
to do this, and received regular powers from him for the
uninterrupted management of his property and administration of his
affairs for a whole year. She immediately set about her various
plans of reform, and carried them on vigorously and successfully,
without the slightest interference on the part of her dissipated and
careless husband, who had entirely forgotten the whole compact
between them. Some months after the agreement had gone into effect,
she perceived that he was harassed and disturbed about something,
and questioning him, found he had incurred a heavy gambling debt,
which he knew not how to meet. His surprise was extreme when,
recalling the terms of their mutual agreement, she put him in
possession of the sum he required. "He called me an angel," she
said. "You see, my dear, one is always an angel, when one holds the
strings of the purse, and that there is money in it."
She persevered in her twelvemonth's stewardship, and at the end of
that time had redeemed her word, and relieved her husband's estate
from its most pressing embarrassments. The value of the land had
increased; the condition of the tenantry had improved; intelligent
and active farmers had had the farms rented to them, instead of the
previous sleepy set of incumbents; and finally, a competent and
honest agent, devoted to carry out her views, was placed over the
whole. The property never fell from this highly prosperous
condition, for Lord Berkeley never withdrew it from his wife's
supervision; and she continued to administer his affairs till his
death, and maintained an extraordinary influence over all the
members of her family at the time of my acquaintance with her. They
were all rather singular persons, and had a vein of originality
which made them unlike the people one met in common society. I
suppose their mother's unusual character may have had to do with
this.
Lord Fitzhardinge was never at Cranford when I was there, though I
have, at various times, met all the other brothers.
Frederick Berkeley went into the navy, and rose to the important
position of an admiral; Craven Berkeley, Grantley Berkeley, and
Henry Berkeley were all in Parliament. The latter was for many
years Member for the important constituency of Bristol, and,
probably in consequence of opinions acquired during his residence in
the United States, was a consistent advocate for the introduction of
vote by ballot in our elections. This gentleman was an unusually
accomplished person: he had made preparatory studies for two
professions, the Church and the Bar; but though he embraced neither
career (possibly on account of an accident he met with while
hunting, which crippled him for life), the reading he had gone
through for both had necessarily endowed him with a more than common
degree of mental cultivation. He was an excellent musician, played
on the piano and organ with considerable taste and feeling, and had
a much more thorough acquaintance with the science of music than is
usual in an amateur.
Morton Berkeley sought no career; he lived with his mother and
sister, Lady Mary, at Cranford, his principal pleasure and
occupation being the preservation of the game on the estate--an
object of not very easy accomplishment, owing to the proximity of
Cranford to London, the distance being only twelve miles by
railroad, and the facilities thus offered of escape and impunity to
poachers necessarily considerable. The tract immediately round
Cranford was formerly part of the famous, or rather infamous,
Hounslow Heath; and I have heard Mr. Henry Berkeley say that in his
youth he remembered perfectly, when he went to London with his
father, by day or night, loaded pistols were an invariable part of
the carriage furniture.
My first acquaintance with Mr. Morton Berkeley's devotion to the
duties of a gamekeeper was made in a very singular manner, and
accompanied by a revelation of an unexpected piece of sentiment.
---- and myself were visiting at Cranford on one occasion, when the
only strangers there beside ourselves were Lady C----, Lord and Lady
S----, and Lord F---- and his sister, a lady of some pretensions to
beauty, but still more to a certain fashionable elegance of
appearance, much enhanced by her very Parisian elaborateness of
toilette.
One night, when the usual hour for retiring had come, the ladies,
who always preceded the gentlemen by some hours to their sleeping
apartments, had left the large room on the ground-floor, where we
had been spending the evening. As we ascended the stairs, my
attention was attracted by some articles of dress which lay on one
of the window-seats: a heavy, broad-brimmed hat, a large rough
pea-jacket, and a black leather belt and cutlass--a sort of
coastguard costume which, lying in that place, excited my curiosity.
I stopped to examine them, and Lady Mary exclaiming, "Oh, those are
Morton's night-clothes; he puts them on when everybody is gone to
bed, to go and patrol with the gamekeeper round the place. _Do_ put
them on for fun;" she seized them up and began accoutring me in
them.
When I was duly enveloped in these very peculiar trappings, we all
burst into fits of laughter, and it was instantly proposed that we
should all return to the drawing-room, I marching at their head in
my gamekeeper's costume. Without further consideration, I ran
downstairs again, followed by the ladies, and so re-entered the
room, where the gentlemen were still assembled in common council,
and where our almost immediate return in this fashion was hailed by
a universal shout of surprise and laughter. After standing for a
minute, with a huge rough overcoat over my rose-colored satin and
_moire_ skirts, which made a most ludicrous termination to the
pugnacious habit of my upper woman, I plunged my hand into one of
the pockets, and drew forth a pair of hand-cuffs (a prudent
provision in case of an encounter with poachers). Encouraged by the
peals of merriment with which this discovery was greeted, I thrust
my other hand into the other pocket, when Mr. Morton Berkeley,
without uttering a word, rushed at me, and, seizing me by the wrist,
prevented my accomplishing my purpose. The suddenness of this
movement frightened me at first a good deal. Presently, however, my
emotion changed, and I felt nothing but amazement at being thus
unceremoniously seized hold of, and rage at finding that I could not
extricate myself from the grasp that held me. Like a coward and a
woman, I appealed to all the other gentlemen, but they were laughing
so excessively that they were quite unable to help me, and probably
anticipated no great mischief from Mr. Berkeley's proceeding. I was
almost crying with mortification, and actually drew the cutlass and
threatened to cut the fingers that encircled my wrist like one of
the iron handcuffs, but, finding my captor inexorable, I was
obliged, with extreme sulky confusion, to beg to be let go, and
promise to take the coat off without any further attempts to search
the pockets. I divested myself of my borrowed apparel a great deal
faster than I had put it on, and its owner walked off with the
pea-jacket, the right pocket of which remained unexplored. We ladies
withdrew again, rather crestfallen at the termination of our joke, I
rubbing my wrist like Mary Stuart after her encounter with Lord
Ruthven, and wondering extremely what could be the mysterious
contents of that pocket.
The next day Lady Mary told me that her brother had long cherished a
romantic sort of idolatry for Miss F----, and that, as a pendant to
the handcuffs in one pocket of his dreadnought, the other contained
her miniature, which he dreaded the night before that my
indiscretion would produce, to the derision of the men, the distress
and confusion of the young lady herself, and the possible
displeasure of her brother. Mr. Morton Berkeley's manners to me
after that were again, as they always had been, respectful and
rather reserved; the subject of our "fight" was never again alluded
to, and he remained to me a gentle, shy, courteous (and romantic)
gentleman.
He was habitually silent, but when he did speak, he was very apt to
say something apposite, and generally containing the pith of the
matter under discussion. I remember once, when I was reproaching his
brother Henry and his sister with what I thought the unbecoming
manner in which they criticised the deportment and delivery of a
clergyman whose sermon they had just listened to (and who certainly
was rather an unfortunate specimen of outward divinity), Mr. Morton
Berkeley suddenly turned to me, and said, "Why, Mrs. Butler, he is
only the rusty bars the light shines through"--a quotation, in fact,
but a very apposite one, and I am not sure but that it was an
unconscious one, and an original illustration on his part.
Mr. Thomas Duncombe, the notorious Radical Member for Finsbury, very
generally and very disrespectfully designated in the London society
of his day as "Tommy Duncombe," and Mr. Maxse (Lady Caroline
Berkeley's husband), were also among the persons with whom I became
acquainted at Cranford.
Of a curious feat of charioteership performed by the latter
gentleman I was told once by the Duke of Beaufort, who said he had
derived from it the nickname of "Go-along Maxse." Driving late one
night with a friend on a turnpike road after the gates were closed,
he said to his companion, "Now, if the turnpike we are just coming
to is shut, I'll take the horse and gig over the gate." The gig was
light, the horse powerful and swift. As they bowled along and came
in sight of the gate, they perceived that it was closed; when Mr.
Maxse's companion calling out to him, "Go-along, Maxse," that
gentleman fulfilled his threat or promise, whichever it might be,
and put his horse full at the gate, which the gallant creature
cleared, bringing the carriage and its live freight safe to the
ground on the other side; a feat which I very unintentionally
imitated, in a humble degree, many years after, with an impunity my
carelessness certainly did not deserve.
Driving in a state of considerable mental preoccupation out of my
own gate one day at Lenox, in a very light one-horse "wagon" (as
such vehicles are there called), instead of turning my horse's head
either up or down the road, I let him go straight across it, to the
edge of a tolerably wide dry ditch, when, suddenly checking him, the
horse, who was a saddle-horse and a good leaper, drew himself
together, and took the ditch, with me in the carriage behind him,
and brought up against a fence, where there was just room for him to
turn round, which he immediately did, as if aware of his mistake,
and proceeded to leap back again, quite successfully without any
assistance of mine, I being too much amazed at the whole performance
to do anything but sit still and admire my horse's dexterity.
I have adverted to the still existing industry of "gentlemen of the
road," in speaking of Cranford in the days of the Earl of Berkeley,
who used to take pistols in the carriage when he went to London. On
one occasion, when he was riding, unattended but fortunately not
unarmed, over some part of Hounslow Heath, a highwayman rode up to
him, and, saluting him by name, said, "I know, my lord, you have
sworn never to give in to one of us; but now I mean to try if you're
as good as your word." "So I have, you rascal, but there are two of
you here," replied the earl. The robber, thrown off his guard,
looked round for the companion thus indicated, and Lord Berkeley
instantly shot him through the head; owing it to his ready presence
of mind that he escaped a similar fate at the hands of his
assailant.
My mother, I think, had the advantage of a slight personal
acquaintance with one of the very last of these Tyburn heroes. She
lived at one time, before her marriage, with her mother and sisters
and only brother, at a small country house beyond Finchley; to which
suburban, or indeed then almost entirely rural, retreat my father
and other young men of her acquaintance used occasionally to resort
for an afternoon's sport, in the present highly distinguished
diversion of pigeon-shooting. On one of these occasions some one of
her habitual guests brought with him a friend, who was presented to
my mother, and joined in the exercise of skill. He was like a
gentleman in his appearance and manners, with no special peculiarity
but remarkably white and handsome hands and extraordinary dexterity,
or luck, in pigeon-shooting. Captain Clayton was this individual's
name, and his visit, never repeated to my mother's house, was
remembered as rather an agreeable event. Soon after this several
outrages were committed on the high-road which passed through
Finchley; and Moody, the celebrated comic actor, who lived in that
direction, was stopped one evening, as he was driving himself into
town, by a mounted gentleman, who, addressing him politely by name,
demanded his watch and purse, which Moody surrendered, under the
influence of "the better part of valor." Having done so, however, he
was obliged to request his "very genteel" thief to give him enough
money to pay his turnpike on his way into town, where he was going
to act, whereupon the "gentleman of the road" returned him
half-a-crown, and bade him a polite "Good-evening." Some time after
this, news was brought into Covent Garden, at rehearsal one morning,
that a man arrested for highway robbery was at the Bow Street Police
Office, immediately opposite the theatre. Several of the _corps
dramatique_ ran across the street to that famous vestibule of the
Temple of Themis; among others, Mr. Moody and Vincent de Camp. The
latter immediately recognized my mother's white-handed,
gentleman-like pigeon-shooter, and Moody his obliging MacHeath of
the Finchley Common highway. "Halloa! my fine fellow," said the
actor to the thief, "is that you? Well, perhaps as you _are_ here,
you won't object to return me my watch, for which I have a
particular value, and which won't be of any great use to you now, I
suppose." "Lord love ye, Mr. Moody," replied _Captain Clayton_, with
a pleasant smile, "I thought you were come to pay me the half crown
I lent you."]
HARLEY STREET, Friday, April 22nd, 1842.
MY DEAR T----,
_I_ am not in the least indifferent to the advent of L100 sterling....
I am amused with your description of Dickens, because it tallies so
completely with the first impression he made upon me the only time I
ever met him before he went to America.... I admire and love the man
exceedingly, for he has a deep warm heart, a noble sympathy with and
respect for human nature, and great intellectual gifts wherewith to make
these fine moral ones fruitful for the delight and consolation and
improvement of his fellow-beings.
Lord Morpeth is indeed, as we say, another guessman, but quite one of
the most amiable in this world or _that_. He is universally beloved and
respected, so tenderly cherished, by his own kindred that his mother and
sisters seem absolutely miserable with various anxieties about him, and
the weariness of his prolonged absence. He is a most worthy gentleman,
and "goes nigh to be thought so" by all classes here, I can tell you....