Part 11
The tender care and loving kindness with which Queen Victoria treated all those, from the highest to the humblest, who were in any sense dependent upon her, is a matter of common knowledge. She shared in their joys, she sympathized with their sorrows, interesting herself in all the everyday changes and chances of their lives. The unclouded happiness of her own all too brief married life had penetrated her soul with the belief that nothing could compare with the bliss of a loving union. This she showed even in a case where a young man in whom she took a deep interest, and for whom she had destined what would have been a very advantageous marriage, disappointed her by making an unsuitable match. Her answer to one who spoke unkindly of this was characteristic and touching. “After all,” she said, sweetly excusing him, “perhaps they loved one another.” That in her mind was obviously the essential.
The account of the marriage of the Austrian Empress’s favourite tirewoman is worth recording, not only as showing a parallel to this sweetly indulgent nature of our Queen, but also as giving us a curious picture of the formalities of the old Court of Vienna.
Upon her maidens the Empress spent an almost motherly care. When not on duty they might go out, but must tell Her Majesty whither they were bound, and then an Imperial carriage was placed at their disposal; when not on duty, they were always allowed to receive visitors—even men, but their names must be submitted to their mistress, and the privileged swains must be of unblemished repute. It was in that way, during the Seven Years’ War, when the detested Prussian Drill-Sergeant Frederic was pushing forward and yet further forward in Moravia and was besieging Olmütz, that Charlotte made the acquaintance of Herr von Greiner, at that time a secretary in the Bohemian-Austrian Chancellerie. He was accepted as a suitor, but must wait till he could offer his wife a better position.
In spite of what her daughter says, Charlotte, unless her portraits wickedly malign her, was no beauty, and she was tocherless to boot; but she was clever and the favourite protégée of the Empress. What could not a capable man of business in the public service hope from such an alliance? We are told that, doubtless in view of this advantage, there had been many suitors for her hand, but the Empress had always stood in the way. Charlotte was in terror lest in this case also she should interfere. She was too useful to her mistress to be lightly spared. There was nothing for it but patience.
Meanwhile, in the year 1765 the Court moved to Innsbruck for the marriage of the second prince, afterwards the Emperor Leopold II., and there suddenly the Emperor Francis fell a victim to an apoplectic stroke. The Empress was stricken dumb with grief. She could not weep, but passed the night in spasmodic sobbing, till at last in the morning the doctors, who were alarmed at her condition, bled her, and then the merciful tears came and brought relief. Charlotte was ordered to cut off all her mistress’s hair, and in her dress, as well as in the furniture of her apartments, the widow put on the trappings of woe. Of the beauty that largely remained to her, since her husband was no longer there to see, she took no account. On every 18th of August, the day of his death, she remained shut up in her room, confessed, fasted, and passed the day in sad remembrances, in prayer and in pious exercises. If the stones of Windsor Castle could prate, they might tell just such a story.
Now that the lovely fair hair, that crown of glory, had been shorn off, and the Empress no longer cared for her old elaborate toilette, there was less for the favourite tirewoman to do, and the wedding with Herr von Greiner was allowed. The future bridegroom was presented to the great lady, who was surprised to find in him a rather commonplace man, and said afterwards to Charlotte: “I thought that you would have chosen some gallant gentleman—a Chevalier.” However, the commonplace man was one in whom she later recognized a thoroughly honest and capable official, whom she respected and promoted for his worth.
The year of mourning for the dead Emperor was not yet at an end, and the Court had laid aside none of the trappings and the suits of woe. But Charlotte, as bride that was to be, was allowed to dress in colours. The wedding was celebrated with all the ceremonies which were at that time prescribed by Court etiquette. It was still the fashion to make a special function of the betrothal, which in Charlotte’s case was celebrated eight days before the marriage. On the wedding day she had to go and show herself in her bridal attire to the Empress, who added several presents of jewellery to what she was wearing, and lent her a priceless rope of pearls from the Imperial Treasury, to be returned after the ceremony, an ornament which was commonly used on such occasions.
The service was held in the private chapel, and the Mistress of the Robes led the bride to the altar. When the priest came to the place where the bride is told to answer “Yes,” she was compelled by etiquette to curtsey to the Mistress of the Robes and ask her permission to do so. Then the Mistress of the Robes stood up, turned herself round to face the chapel in which the Empress was, and in her turn curtsied, and in dumb show asked Her Majesty’s consent. This was also given by signs, and the Mistress of the Robes, in the same silent way, transmitted the pleasure of the Empress, who had taken upon herself the duties of mother, upon which the bride gratefully curtsied, turned to the priest and uttered the fateful “Yes.”
There is something touching in the way in which the Empress mothered the orphan whom she had almost kidnapped from the Wolfenbüttel officers. She surely did not perform her duty by halves! When I read the account of the wedding ceremony, my mind went back fifty-two years to another wedding, when in St. George’s Chapel another Queen, recently widowed, sat in a little gallery and acknowledged the curtsey of her new daughter-in-law, one of the loveliest brides that ever sun shone upon. At every step in this sketch of the Austrian Empress we are met by something that speaks of our own great Queen.
In this wise was the wedding of one of the Imperial handmaidens celebrated in the days of Marie Theresia. Charlotte, now Frau von Greiner, entered happily upon her new life. The change from the excitement and publicity of the brilliant Austrian Court, to the quiet and narrower society of the upper middle-class, for whom the Imperial surroundings were a thing of awe and mystery, must have been very striking. But the bride found her account in it, and, as we shall see, Herr von Greiner, being a man of quite exceptional talent and artistic gifts, was able to attract to his house all that was most brilliant among the literary and musical celebrities of that time.
In the year 1769 Caroline—afterwards Frau Pichler—was born. In the meantime the Empress had by no means relaxed her friendship for her mother. The von Greiners were not “hoffähig,” they could not go to court officially, but Frau von Greiner constantly visited her old mistress privately, and Von Greiner himself had, as I have said, won the great lady’s favour, and she not only kept him in her eye for advancement, but frequently sent for him and sought his advice. With a salary of four thousand gulden—two hundred pounds, I suppose—and a spacious official residence, the family was well able to maintain a good appearance, and Herr von Greiner’s exceptional attainments and artistic gifts as pastelist and poet made the house a trysting-place for all that was most notable in literature and music—especially music; for at Frau von Greiner’s weekly assemblies were frequently seen and heard Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Paesiello and Cimarosa. Painters and sculptors, poets and authors less known to fame than those great musicians, were welcome visitors, and the _salon_ became so popular that even a sprig of nobility—the condescension duly acknowledged—might now and then be found there. It is curious to see what a hard and fast line Vienna drew (and, to a certain extent, still draws) between the upper middle-class and the aristocracy—a line as deferentially recognized on the one side as it was haughtily imposed on the other. We know how to this day, in an Austrian ballroom, “die kleinen Komtessen” look with supercilious eyes upon any would-be partner who may be introduced to them unless his quarterings are fully satisfactory. The favour in which Frau von Greiner was held in high quarters had no doubt some effect in bridging over the gulf which was fixed between the noblesse and the bourgeoisie.
But I have been straying far away from the goal which I set before me. It would be fascinating to follow Frau Pichler’s story, for it is the story of a woman who lived through stirring times, who was present during the three attacks upon Vienna, who tells us the one story of courteous chivalry of the young Napoleon; who heard Haydn, Weber, Mozart, Beethoven play their own compositions, and, living on till near the middle of the last century, could compare their execution with that of Liszt and Thalberg. She knew and rather disliked Madame de Staël, despising her for tricking out the charms of a woman “fair, fat and forty” in a too youthful attire; but was charmed by the music of a speaking voice, her description of which reminds us of Sarah Bernhardt. She corresponded at least once with Goethe, and was snubbed by the Humboldts, which rankled not a little. But all this is beside the mark. I am only concerned to show how to the end the lives of the two great Queen-Empresses followed similar lines.
Life is like a drawing in black and white, in which, of necessity, the black predominates. The stronger the drawing, the darker are the shadows; as in an etching by Rembrandt—the more powerful the life, the more violent the contrasts. The high lights were high indeed in the early days of the two august ladies; the deep gloom of the long night of widowhood, which in each case followed some twenty years of ideal home sunshine, must have weighed all the more heavily for the glory of the mornings which had ushered in their young days; for true it is that “the sorrow’s crown of sorrow is the remembering happier things!” In facing the inevitable, women sometimes show higher courage than men. Nothing could be more brave than the way in which these two Queens bowed to the decrees of fate. The world’s work must be done, though hearts be broken and the joy of life extinguished. They felt that they had duties to their people, and they braced themselves to harness. The death of the Prince Consort was really a far heavier blow to the Queen than that of the Emperor Francis was to Marie Theresia—or, rather, perhaps I should say a more searching blow, with much further-reaching consequences. The Queen lost not only a tenderly worshipped husband and lover, but a mainstay upon which she leant, an adviser in all matters of State, a guiding hand in trouble. Marie Theresia lost a husband whom, little as he deserved it, she loved with all her soul; a man who was all in all to her in her home life, but who in her public life was a mere cypher, playing no part in her queendom. It was, therefore, a braver act of devotion for our great lady in that loneliest of all solitudes, the solitude of a widowed queen, immediately to take up the threads of her complicated statecraft without the assistance of her loving helper, than it was for the Empress to remain as pilot, bereaved indeed, but no more unaided than she had always been. Both laid aside their personal and poignant grief to devote themselves to their work. What remained to them of life—a cruel length of years: in the one case fifteen, in the other forty—was given without reserve to the promotion of the welfare of the fatherland. Duty was to them the supreme call, a voice that only became silent in death. Both are held in grateful and undying memory, for surely no women ever went to their rest with cleaner consciences or with better claim to be hailed as good and faithful servants.
THE WALLACE COLLECTION
One day, as I was talking to a friend in my garden of memory, he, looking round at the fine bronzes by which we were surrounded, remarked what a pity it was that Oriental art should be so poorly represented in the Wallace Collection; and how much it was to be regretted that no specimens of the work of the great Eastern metal-workers and famous potters were to be found at Hertford House. As a matter of fact, cheek by jowl with the glories of the English, French, Spanish and Dutch art, there are only some half-dozen very poor specimens of Chinese cloisonné enamel, practically no pottery, none of the grand old Chinese bronzes, and not a single example of the work of such masters as the Japanese Miyochin, Seimin, To-un, and others, men as famous in their way as Benvenuto Cellini. It is curious that three men so catholic in their tastes as the two Lords Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace should have paid no attention to the art of the Far East.
From the collections we naturally passed to discussing the men, and my friend began asking me many questions about the great legacy, of which I am a trustee, eager to gather something of the truth out of the network of fable and falsehood by which it is surrounded. Here is what I told him. There is, of necessity, some guesswork, but guesswork not unsupported by a reasonable foundation of fact and probability. The strange jumble of truth and lies is but one more proof of the danger of throwing over all those conventionalities which are but so much ballast to keep straight the family ship. There are plenty of wreckers in the world, and they are never slack in their dirty work; but, above all, they love breaking up the big ships.
When the ’seventies were still young, I, being at the time still in the Diplomatic Service, but “En disponibilité,” became a director of a foreign railway company, the business of which often took me to Paris, where our head offices were. One day, on the return journey to London—in 1872—I first met Sir Richard Wallace on board the steamer from Calais. The Duke of Sutherland, with whom I was travelling, knew him, and so we became acquainted—I little thinking that one day I should be brought into very intimate connection with the art treasures which he had inherited eighteen months earlier. Mr. Scott—afterwards Sir John—then a tall, slim, very pleasing youth, was with him as his secretary and confidential friend. Sir Richard was at that time a strikingly handsome man, about fifty-four years of age, with a very attractive expression, greyish hair, shaved, like his patron, Lord Hertford, more or less in the fashion set by the Emperor of the French. We had a good deal of talk, and, later, I got to know him pretty well. When he was Member for Lisburn, he was appointed to the Committee of the House of Commons which sat under Mr. Baillie Cochrane, afterwards Lord Lamington, to consider the question of new buildings to be erected for the accommodation of the various Government departments. He used often to come and see me at the Office of Works, in order to study the different plans, and very warmly took up a scheme which I put forward, and which, if it had been adopted, would have saved the country a huge sum of money.
Unfortunately, Sir Stafford Northcote, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was afraid of submitting the first expense to the House of Commons. He never realized how complete was the trust which the House placed in him, and so my proposals fell through, to the great disappointment of Sir Richard Wallace, and to the vastly increased cost which the country has ultimately had to pay. There has seldom been a more flagrant case of penny wisdom and pound folly. The value of the land went up by leaps and bounds, and the patient tax-payer has suffered, as usual, without a murmur.
My proposal, briefly stated, was to build a chain of Public Offices between Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square, purchasing such land as did not already belong to the State. Drummond’s Bank was then pulled down, and Messrs. George and Edgar Drummond, as a favour to myself, very patriotically delayed rebuilding for six months, in order to give the Government time to consider the question. The Public Offices were at that time housed in a very haphazard manner, and it was evident that some comprehensive scheme must be initiated. My plan was generally approved, but it was not adopted owing to the costly timidity of Ministers.
Who and what was Sir Richard Wallace? That is a question which excited great interest forty-five years ago, an interest which has not altogether died out even now. That he was the private secretary and _âme damnée_ of Lord Hertford everybody knew.
How he came to occupy that position, and what led his patron to alienate from his family in Sir Richard’s favour so much of his great fortune as was in his power, together with the whole of the art treasures which he and his father and grandfather had collected during three-quarters of a century, at a time when beautiful things were to be had for what would now be considered an old song—that was a mystery to which no one had a clue, and which only now can be solved with absolute accuracy. Much that has been suggested is undoubtedly false, based upon conjecture without any knowledge of such facts as have been brought to light.
[Illustration: RICHARD, MARQUIS OF HERTFORD, K.G.
_From a bust in the Wallace Collection._
[_To face p. 158._]
Having been a trustee of the so-called Wallace Collections since the death of Lady Wallace in 1897, and having lived in great intimacy with Sir John Scott, who was her heir and had been so long the fidus Achates of Sir Richard, I have come to the conclusion that such evidence as exists and was known to Sir John, to Lord Esher and others, entirely disposes of the scandalous story that he was the illegitimate son of Lady Hertford, and therefore half-brother to Lord Hertford.
The true story, vouched for by people who were intimately acquainted with the scandals of the first half of the last century, is that Richard Lord Hertford, when a mere boy, had an intrigue with a Scotch girl of low birth—Agnes Wallace, afterwards Jackson. The result was Sir Richard Wallace. As the girl was older than himself, Lord Yarmouth, as he then was, had been rather the seduced than the seducer, and soon tired of the whole connection. He was quite willing to pay, but he had no mind to start in life saddled with the dead weight of an uneducated mistress and a natural son. Lady Hertford, however, got wind of the affair through Colonel Gurwood, a brother officer and intimate friend of Lord Yarmouth. She took a fancy to the child, who responded with an affection that was almost filial. Lord Hertford, to whom his mother’s slightest wish was law, took up the boy at her bidding, and educated him until he grew up and became entirely indispensable. The lad was well known in Paris as “Monsieur Richard,” Lord Hertford’s shadow and agent, his representative at auctions and sales of works of art.
The name Richard seems to me to have some significance in confirmation of the above story. Is it likely that if the child had been Lady Hertford’s, she should have chosen the name of her eldest legitimate and deeply-loved son, to bestow it upon an inconvenient accident? To me it seems utterly incredible. Moreover, would it not have been far more likely that she should have tried to smuggle away an unnecessary infant of her own than that she should have dragged the child into all the publicity of the home about which there had already been too much slanderous gossip? Again, Lady Hertford was a woman possessed of great wealth in her own right. Why, if Sir Richard was her son, did she leave the whole of her fortune to her second son, Lord Henry Seymour, and a mere trifle to the favourite to whom she was so kind a patroness? Obviously she relied upon Lord Hertford, as his father, to do everything for him. Not only the facts, but even the whole probabilities, are against the preposterous and malicious story that he was her son.
That the old lady was devotedly attached to Sir Richard and made a great pet of him, and that he returned her affection with interest, was a matter of common knowledge. I have seen many letters of hers which attest the fact. When she travelled, he made all the arrangements for her, and took entire charge of her comfort, his bed being made outside her door when they slept at inns in the old posting days. He was her devoted slave, her most faithful watch-dog.
Upon his services as secretary, Lord Hertford, as I have said, placed entire reliance, but his office was not altogether a bed of roses. The great man, as a patron, was strict and sometimes severe. Sir Richard, with a taste for speculation on the Bourse, was sometimes in rather strait circumstances, out of which his patron helped him, not without reproof, to the tune of a good many thousand pounds. I have seen a document showing that Lord Hertford in 1854 paid twenty thousand pounds on this account through Messrs. Rothschild. There is in the Wallace Collection a certain engraved crystal tazza of Italian workmanship, a very lovely little gem. Sir Richard, in his poor days, picked it up for a few francs in an old sort of rag-and-bone shop in a street in the neighbourhood of the Temple. Some time afterwards, being rather hard up, he took it to Lord Hertford and asked him to buy it. “No,” was the answer, “I won’t have it. I will not encourage your extravagance; you must learn to be more economical.”
Sir Richard sold the tazza to a dealer for two hundred and fifty francs, and a year or two later had the luck to buy it back, but he had to pay ten times the price and more. Often he had hard times enough, as he himself said when he told the story, but when Lord Hertford died in 1870 his day had come. The fortune which he inherited was in those days considered colossal. It would look less now compared with the huge riches of American plutocrats, but in 1870 these were yet in the making. Two very rich marriages, the second and third marquesses having both married heiresses, had, in addition to great landed estates, placed the Hertfords in an altogether exceptional position.