Part 20
Chesterfield was, nevertheless, much more of a man than his fellow peer who crossed the Stygian ferry in the same year, namely, the Duke of Kingston. The duke had been one of the handsomest men of his time, and, like a good many handsome men, was a considerable fool. He allowed himself, at all events, to be made the fool, and to become the slave, of the famous Miss Chudleigh--as audacious as she was beautiful. The lady, whom the law took it into its head to look upon as _not_ the duke’s duchess--that is, not his wife--was resigned to her great loss by the feeling of her great gain. She was familiar with her lord’s last will and testament, and went into hysterics to conceal her satisfaction. She saw his grace out of the world with infinite ceremony. To be sure, it was nothing else. The physicians whom she called together in consultation _consulted_, no doubt, and then whispered to their lady friends, while holding their delicate pulses, ‘Mere ceremony, upon my honour!’ The widow kept the display of grief up to the last. When she brought the ducal corpse up from Bath to London, she rested often by the way. If she could have carried out her caprices, she would have had as many crosses to mark the ducal stations of death as were erected to commemorate the passing of Queen Eleanor. As this could not be, the widow took to screaming at every turn of the road, and at night was carried into her inn kicking her heels and screaming at the top of her voice.
Among the other deaths of the year 1773, the following are noteworthy. At Vienna, of a broken heart, from the miseries of his country, the brave Prince Poniatowski, brother to the King of Poland, and a general in the Austrian service, in which he had been greatly distinguished during the last war. The partition of Poland was then only a year old, and the echoes of the assertions of the lying Czar, Emperor, and King, that they never intended to lay a finger on that ancient kingdom, had hardly died out of the hearing of the astounded world. England is always trusting the words of Czars and their Khiva protestations, always learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth. A name less known than Poniatowski may be cited for the singularity attached to it. ‘Hale Hartson, Esq., the author of the “Countess of Salisbury” and other ingenious pieces--a young gentleman of fine parts, and who, though very young, had made the tour of Europe three times.’ An indication of what a fashionable quarter Soho, with its neighbourhood, was in 1773, is furnished by the following announcement: ‘Suddenly, at her house in Lisle Street, Leicester Fields, Lady Sophia Thomas, sister of the late Earl of Albemarle, and aunt of the present.’ Foreign ambassadors then dwelt in Lisle Street. Even dukes had their houses in the same district; and baronets lived and died in Red Lion Square and in Cornhill. Among those baronets an eccentric individual turned up now and then. In the obituary is the name of Sir Robert Price, of whom it is added that ‘he left his fortune to seven old bachelors in indigent circumstances.’ The death of one individual is very curtly recorded; all the virtues under heaven would have been assigned to her, had she not belonged to a vanquished party. In that case she would have been a high and mighty princess; as it was, we only read, ‘Lately, Lady Annabella Stuart, a relation of the late royal family, aged ninety-one years, at St.-Omer.’ A few of us are better acquainted with the poet, John Cunningham, whose decease is thus quaintly chronicled: ‘At Newcastle, the ingenious Mr. John Cunningham. A man little known, but that will be always much admired for his plaintive, tender, and natural pastoral poetry.’ Some of the departed personages seem to have held strange appointments. Thus we find Alexander, Earl of Galloway, described as ‘one of the lords of police;’ and Willes, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who died in Hill Street when Mrs. Montague and her blue stockings were in their greatest brilliancy, is described as ‘joint Decypherer (with his son, Edward Willes, Esq.) to the king.’ We believe that the duty of decypherer consisted in reading letters that were opened, on suspicion, in their passage through the post-office. Occasionally a little page of family history is opened to us in a few words, as, for instance, in the account of Sir Robert Ladbroke, a rich City knight, whose name is attached to streets, roads, groves, and terraces in Notting Hill. After narrating his disposal of his wealth among his children and charities, the chronicler states that ‘To his son George, who sailed a short time since to the West Indies, he has bequeathed three guineas a week during life, to be paid only to his own receipt.’ One would like to know if this all but disinherited young fellow took heart of grace, and, after all, made his way creditably in the world. Such sons often succeed in life better than their brothers. Look around you _now_. See the sons born to inherit the colossal fortune which their father has built up. What brainless asses the most of them become! Had they been born to little instead of to over-much, their wits would perhaps have been equal to their wants, and they would have been as good men as their fathers.
It was a son of misfortune, who, on a July night of 1773, entered the _King’s Head_ at Enfield, weary, hungry, penniless, and wearing the garb of a clergyman. He was taken in, poor guest as he was, and in the hospitable inn he died within a few days. It was then discovered that he was the Rev. Samuel Bickley. In his pockets were found three manuscript sermons, and an extraordinary petition to the Archbishop of Canterbury, dated the previous February. The prayer of the petition was to this effect: ‘Your petitioner, therefore, most humbly prays, that if an audience from your Grace should be deemed too great a favour, you will at least grant him some relief, though it be only a temporary one, in our deplorable necessity and distress; and,’ said the petitioner with a simplicity or an impudence which may have accounted for his condition, ‘let your Grace’s charity cover the multitude of his sins.’ He then continues: ‘There never yet was anyone in England doomed to starve; but I am nearly, if not altogether so; denied to exercise the sacred functions wherein I was educated, driven from the doors of the rich laymen to the clergy for relief; by the clergy, denied; so that I may justly take up the speech of the Gospel Prodigal, and say: ‘How many hired servants of my father have bread enough and to spare, while I perish with hunger!’ Here was, possibly, an heir of great expectations, who, scholar as he was, had come to grief, while, only a little while before him, there died a fortunate impostor, as appears from this record: ‘Mr. Colvill, in Old Street, aged 83. He was much resorted to as a fortune-teller, by which he acquired upwards of 4,000_l._;’ at the same time, a man in London was quintupling that sum by the invention and sale of peppermint lozenges.
Let us look into the newspapers for January 1773, that our readers may compare the events of that month with January 1873, a hundred years later. We find the laureate Whitehead’s official New Year Ode sung at court to Boyce’s music, while king, queen, courtiers and guests yawned at the vocal dulness, and were glad when it was all over. We enter a church and listen to a clergyman preaching a sermon; on the following day we see the reverend gentleman drilling with other recruits belonging to a regiment of the Guards, into which he had enlisted. The vice of gambling was ruining hundreds in London, the suburbs of which were infested by highwaymen, who made a very pretty living of it--staking only their lives. We go to the fashionable noon-day walk in the Temple Gardens, and encounter an eccentric promenader who is thus described: ‘He wore an old black waistcoat which was quite threadbare, breeches of the same colour and complexion; a black stocking on one leg, a whitish one on the other; a little hat with a large gold button and loop, and a tail, or rather club, as thick as a lusty man’s arm, powdered almost an inch thick, and under the club a quantity of hair resembling a horse’s tail. In this dress he walked and mixed with the company there for a considerable time, and occasioned no little diversion.’ The style of head-decoration then patronised by the ladies was quite as nasty and offensive as that which was in vogue about ten years ago. It was ridiculed in the popular pantomime ‘Harlequin Sorcerer.’ Columbine was to be seen in her dressing-room attended by her lover, a macaroni, and a hairdresser. On her head was a very high tower of hair, to get at which was impossible for the _friseur_ till Harlequin’s wand caused a ladder to rise, on the top rung of which the _coiffeur_ was raised to the top surface of Columbine’s chignon; having dressed which they all set off for the Pantheon. While pantomime was thus triumphant at Covent Garden there was something like cavalry battles close to London; that is to say, engagements between mounted smugglers and troops of Scots Greys. The village Tooting in this month was a scene of a fight, in which both parties shot and cut down antagonists with as much alacrity as if they were foreign invaders, where blood, and a good deal of it, was lavishly spilt. Sussex was a favourite battle-field; a vast quantity of tea and brandy, and other contraband, was drunk in Middlesex and neighbouring counties where there was sympathy for smugglers, who set their lives on a venture and enabled people to purchase articles duty free.
At this time the union of Ireland with the other portions of the British kingdom was being actively agitated. The project was that each of the thirty-two Irish counties should send one representative to the British Parliament. Forty-eight Irish Peers were to be transferred to the English Upper House. One very remarkable feature in the supposed government project was, that Ireland should retain the shadow of a parliament, to be called ‘The Great Council of the Nation.’ The Great Council was to consist of members sent by the Irish boroughs, each borough to send one representative, ‘their power not to apply further than the interior policy of the kingdom.’ The courts of law were to remain undisturbed. It will be remembered that something like the above council is now asked for by those who advocate Home Rule; but as some of those advocates only wish to have the council as the means to a further end, the Irish professional patriot now, as ever, stands in the way to the real improvement and the permanent prosperity of that part of the kingdom.
In many other respects the incidents of to-day are like the echoes of the events a hundred years old. We find human nature much the same, but a trifle coarser in expression. The struggle to live, then as now, took the guise of the struggle of a beaten army, retreating over a narrow and dangerous bridge, where each thought only of himself, and the stronger trampled down the weaker or pushed him over into the raging flood. With all this, blessed charity was not altogether wanting. Then, as in the present day, charity appeared on the track of the struggle, and helped many a fainting heart to achieve a success, the idea of which they had given up in despair.
END OF VOL. I.
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