Horace Walpole and his World

“On coming home I visited the Duchess Dowager and my fair ward; and am heartily tired with so many expeditions, for which I little imagined I had youth enough left.

“We expect three or four more regiments to-morrow, besides some troops of horse and militia already arrived. We are menaced with counter-squadrons from the country. There will, I fear, be much blood spilt before peace is restored. The Gordon has already surpassed Masaniello, who I do not remember set his own capital on fire. Yet I assure your ladyship there is no panic. Lady Aylesbury has been at the play in the Haymarket, and the Duke and my four nieces at Ranelagh, this evening. For my part, I think the common diversions of these last four-and-twenty hours are sufficient to content any moderate appetite; and as it is now three in the morning, I shall wish you good night, and try to get a little sleep myself, if Lord George Macbeth has not murdered it all. I own I shall not soon forget the sight I saw from the top of Gloucester House.

“Thursday morning, after breakfast.

“I do not know whether to call the horrors of the night greater or less than I thought. My printer, who has been out all night, and on the spots of action, says, not above a dozen were killed at the Royal Exchange, some few elsewhere; at the King’s Bench, he does not know how many; but in other respects the calamities are dreadful. He saw many houses set on fire, women and children screaming, running out of doors with what they could save, and knocking one another down with their loads in the confusion. Barnard’s Inn is burnt, and some houses, mistaken for Catholic. Kirgate82 says most of the rioters are apprentices, and plunder and drink have been their chief objects, and both women and men are still lying dead drunk about the streets: brandy is preferable to enthusiasm. I trust many more troops will arrive to-day. What families ruined! What wretched wives and mothers! What public disgrace!—ay! and where, and when, and how will all this confusion end! and what shall we be when it is concluded? I remember the Excise and the Gin Act, and the rebels at Derby, and Wilkes’s interlude, and the French at Plymouth; or I should have a very bad memory; but I never till last night saw London and Southwark in flames!

“After dinner.

“It is a moment, Madam, when to be surprised is not surprising. But what will you say to the House of Commons meeting by twelve o’clock to-day, and adjourning, ere fifty members were arrived, to Monday se’nnight! So adieu all government but the sword!

“Will your Ladyship give me credit when I heap contradictions on absurdities—will you believe such confusion and calamities, and yet think there is no consternation? Well, only hear. My niece, Mrs. Keppel, with her three daughters, drove since noon over Westminster Bridge, through St. George’s Fields, where the King’s Bench is smoking, over London Bridge, passed the Bank, and came the whole length of the City! They have been here, and say the people look very unquiet; but can one imagine that they would be smiling? Old Lady Albemarle, who followed me in a few minutes from Gloucester House, was robbed at Mrs. Keppel’s door in Pall Mall, between ten and eleven, by a horseman. Sparrow, one of the delivered convicts, who was to have been hanged this morning, is said to have been shot yesterday as he was spiriting up the rioters. Kirgate has just heard in the Park, that the Protestant Association disavow the seditious, and will take up arms against them. If we are saved, it will be so as by fire.

“I shall return to my own castle to-morrow: I had not above four hours’ sleep last night, and must get some rest. General Conway is enraged at the adjournment, and will go away too. Many coaches and chaises did leave London yesterday. My intelligence will not be so good nor so immediate; but you will not want correspondents. Disturbances are threatened again for to-night; and some probably will happen, but there are more troops, and less alacrity in the outlaws.

“Berkeley Square, June 9, at noon, 1780.

“All has been quiet to-night, as far as we know in this region; but not without blood being spilt yesterday. The rioters attacked the Horse Guards about six in Fleet Street, and, not giving them time to load, were repelled by the bayonet. Twenty fell, thirty-five were wounded and sent to the hospital, where two died directly. Three of the Guards were wounded, and a young officer named Marjoribank. Mr. Conway’s footman told me he was on a message at Lord Amherst’s when the Guards returned, and that their bayonets were steeped in blood.

“I heard, too, at my neighbour Duchess’s, whither I went at one in the morning, that the Protestant Associators, disguised with blue cockades as friends, had fallen on the rioters in St. George’s Fields, and killed many. I do not warrant the truth, but I did hear often in the evening that there had been slaughter in the Borough, where a great public-house had been destroyed, and a house at Redriffe, and another at Islington. Zeal has entirely thrown off the mask, and owned its name—plunder. Its offspring have extorted money from several houses with threats of firing them as Catholic. Apprentices and Irish chairmen, and all kinds of outlaws, have been the most active. Some hundreds are actually dead about the streets, with the spirits they plundered at the distiller’s; the low women knelt and sucked them as they ran from the staved casks.

“It was reported last night that the primate, George Gordon, is fled to Scotland: for aught I know he may not be so far off as Grosvenor Place. All is rumour and exaggeration; and yet it would be difficult to exaggerate the horrors of Wednesday night; a town taken by storm could alone exceed them.

“I am going to Strawberry this instant, exhausted with fatigue, for I have certainly been on my feet longer these last eight-and-forty hours than in forty days before.…

“Adieu! Madam; allow my pen a few holidays, unless the storm recommences.”

On hearing that Lord George Gordon had been arrested, he writes again:

“Strawberry Hill, Saturday night, late.

“Was not I cruelly out of luck, Madam, to have been fishing in troubled waters for two days for your Ladyship’s entertainment, and to have come away very few hours before the great pike was hooked? Well, to drop metaphor, here are Garth’s lines reversed,

‘Thus little villains oft submit to fate,That great ones may enjoy the world in state.’

Four convicts on the eve of execution are let loose from Newgate, and Lord George Gordon is sent to the Tower. If he is hanged, the old couplet will recover its credit, for Mr. Wedderburn is Chief Justice.

“I flatter myself I shall receive a line from your Ladyship to-morrow morning: I am impatient to hear what you think of black Wednesday. I know how much you must have been shocked, but I long to read your own expressions; when you answer, then one is conversing. My sensations are very different from what they were. While in the thick of the conflagration, I was all indignation and a thousand passions. Last night, when sitting silently alone, horror rose as I cooled; and grief succeeded, and then all kinds of gloomy presages. For some time people have said, where will all this end? I as often replied, where will it begin? It is now begun, with a dreadful overture; and I tremble to think what the chorus may be! The sword reigns at present, and saved the capital! What is to depose the sword?—Is it not to be feared, on the other hand, that other swords may be lifted up?—What probability that everything will subside quietly into the natural channel?—Nay, how narrow will that channel be, whenever the prospect is cleared by peace? What a dismal fragment of an empire! yet would that moment were come when we are to take a survey of our ruins! That moment I probably shall not see. When I rose this morning, I found the exertions I had made with such puny powers, had been far beyond what I could bear; I was too sick to go on with dressing myself. This evening I have been abroad, and you shall hear no more of it. I have been with Lady Di, at Richmond, where I found Lady Pembroke, Miss Herbert, and Mr. Brudenell. Lord Herbert is arrived. They told me the melancholy position of Lady Westmorland. She is sister of Lord George Gordon, and wife of Colonel Woodford, who is forced to conceal himself, having been the first officer who gave orders to the soldiers to fire, on the attack of Lord Mansfield’s house. How many still more deplorable calamities from the tragedy of this week that one shall never hear of! I will change my style, and, like an epilogue after a moving piece, divert you with a bon-mot of George Selwyn. He came to me yesterday morning from Lady Townshend, who, terrified by the fires of the preceding night, talked the language of the Court, instead of Opposition. He said she put him in mind of removed tradesmen, who hang out a board with, ‘Burnt out from over the way.’ Good-night, Madam, till I receive your letter.

“Monday morning, the 12th.

“Disappointed! disappointed! not a line from your Ladyship; I will not send away this till I hear from you. Last night, at Hampton Court, I heard of two Popish chapels demolished at Bath, and one at Bristol. My coachman has just been in Twickenham, and says half Bath is burnt; I trust this is but the natural progress of lies, that increase like a chairman’s legs by walking. Mercy on us! we seem to be plunging into the horrors of France, in the reigns of Charles VI. and VII.!—yet, as extremes meet, there is at this moment amazing insensibility. Within these four days I have received five applications for tickets to see my house! One from a set of company who fled from town to avoid the tumults and fires. I suppose Æneas lost Creüsa by her stopping at Sadlers’ Wells.

“13th.

“The letter I have this moment received is so kind, Madam, that it effaces all disappointment. Indeed, my impatience made me forget that no post comes in here on Mondays. To-day’s letters from town mention no disturbance at Bristol or anywhere else. Every day gained is considerable, at least will be so when there has been time for the history of last week to have spread, and intelligence from the distant counties to be returned. All I have heard to-day is of some alteration to be made to the Riot Act, that Lord George cannot be tried this month, and that the King will go to the House on Monday. I will now answer what is necessary in your Ladyship’s and take my leave, for, as you observe, the post arrives late, and I have other letters that I must answer. Mr. Williams interrupted me, and has added a curious anecdote,—and a horrible one, to my collection of the late events. One project of the diabolical incendiaries was to let loose the lions in the Tower, and the lunatics in Bedlam. The latter might be from a fellow-feeling in Lord George, but cannibals do not invite wild beasts to their banquets. The Princess Daskiou will certainly communicate the thought to her mistress and accomplice, the Legislatress of Russia.

“P.S. I like an ironic sentence in yesterday’s London Courant, which says, all our grievances are red-dressed.”

To complete the misfortunes of these years, Walpole lost his “blind old woman” in the autumn of 1780. Under date October 9th, he writes from Strawberry Hill to Mann:

“I have heard from Paris of the death of my dear old friend Madame du Deffand, whom I went so often thither to see. It was not quite unexpected, and was softened by her great age, eighty-four, which forbad distant hopes; and, by what I dreaded more than her death, her increasing deafness, which, had it become, like her blindness, total, would have been living after death. Her memory only began to impair; her amazing sense and quickness, not at all. I have written to her once a week for these last fifteen years, as correspondence and conversation could be her only pleasures. You see that I am the most faithful letter-writer in the world—and, alas! never see those I am so constant to! One is forbidden common-place reflections on these misfortunes, because they are common-place; but is not that, because they are natural? But your never having known that dear old woman is a better reason for not making you the butt of my concern.”

Three weeks later we have the following from London to Lady Ossory:

“As I have been returned above a fortnight, I should have written had I had a syllable to tell you; but what could I tell you from that melancholy and very small circle at Twickenham Park, almost the only place I do go to in the country, partly out of charity, and partly as I have scarce any other society left which I prefer to it; for, without entering on too melancholy a detail, recollect, Madam, that I have outlived most of those to whom I was habituated, Lady Hervey, Lady Suffolk, Lady Blandford—my dear old friend [Madame du Deffand], I should probably never have seen again—yet that is a deeper loss, indeed! She has left me all her MSS.—a compact between us—in one word I had, at her earnest request, consented to accept them, on condition she should leave me nothing else. She had, indeed, intended to leave me her little all, but I declared I would never set foot in Paris again (this was ten years ago) if she did not engage to retract that destination. To satisfy her, I at last agreed to accept her papers, and one thin gold box with the portrait of her dog. I have written to beg her dog itself, which is so cross, that I am sure nobody else would treat it well; and I have ordered her own servant, who read all letters to her, to pick out all the letters of living persons, and restore them to the several writers without my seeing them.”

Walpole’s liking for accomplished French women like Madame du Deffand was equalled by his dislike of the English “Blue-stockings.” At the beginning of 1781, he seems to have been a good deal in company with the latter, and we have some amusing passages: “I met Mrs. Montagu t’other night at a visit. She said she had been alone the whole preceding day, quite hermetically sealed—I was very glad she was uncorked, or I might have missed that piece of learned nonsense.… I was much diverted with your setting Mrs. Montagu on her head, which indeed she does herself without the help of Hermes. She is one of my principal entertainments at Mrs. Vesey’s, who collects all the graduates and candidates for fame, where they vie with one another, till they are as unintelligible as the good folks at Babel.”

“Mr. Gilpin83 talks of my researches, which makes me smile; I know, as Gray would have said, how little I have researched, and what slender pretensions are mine to so pompous a term. Apropos to Gray, Johnson’s ‘Life,’ or rather criticism on his Odes, is come out; a most wretched, dull, tasteless, verbal criticism—yet, timid too. But he makes amends, he admires Thomson and Akenside, and Sir Richard Blackmore, and has reprinted Dennis’s ‘Criticism on Cato,’ to save time, and swell his pay. In short, as usual, he has proved that he has no more ear than taste. Mrs. Montagu and all her Mænades intend to tear him limb from limb for despising their moppet Lord Lyttelton.”

“I saw Dr. Johnson last night at Lady Lucan’s, who had assembled a blue-stocking meeting in imitation of Mrs. Vesey’s Babels. It was so blue, it was quite Mazarine-blue. Mrs. Montagu kept aloof from Johnson, like the West from the East. There were Soame Jenyns, Persian Jones, Mr. Sherlocke, the new court with Mr. Courtenay, besides the out-pensioners of Parnassus. Mr. Wraxall84 was not, I wonder why, and so will he, for he is popping into every spot where he can make himself talked of, by talking of himself; but I hear he will come to an untimely beginning in the House of Commons.”

CHAPTER VIII

Walpole in his Sixty-fourth Year.—The Royal Academy.—Tonton.—Charles Fox.—William Pitt.—Mrs. Hobart’s Sans Souci.—Improvements at Florence.—Walpole’s Dancing Feats.—No Feathers at Court.—Highwaymen.—Loss of the Royal George.—Mrs. Siddons.—Peace.—Its Social Consequences.—The Coalition.—The Rivals.—Political Excitement.—The Westminster Election.—Political Caricatures.—Conway’s Retirement.—Lady Harrington.—Balloons.—Illness.—Recovery.

“I never remonstrate against the behests of Dame Prudence, though a lady I never got acquainted with till near my grand climacteric.” So wrote Horace soon after passing the mystic period, compounded of seven and nine, which was once regarded as the topmost round in the ladder of human life. He would have his correspondents believe that his attention to the dame’s commands was not very regular at first. In the spring of 1781, he is able to report to Conway, “My health is most flourishing for me.” Accordingly, he goes about a good deal, and enjoys a sort of rejuvenescence. Of course, he visits the Exhibition of the Royal Academy at Somerset House, where Reynolds’s picture of the Ladies Waldegrave was shown. “The Exhibition,” he writes to Mason, “is much inferior to last year’s;85 nobody shines there but Sir Joshua and Gainsborough. The head of the former’s Dido is very fine; I do not admire the rest of the piece. His Lord Richard Cavendish is bold and stronger than he ever coloured. The picture of my three nieces is charming. Gainsborough has two pieces with land and sea, so free and natural that one steps back for fear of being splashed. The back front of the Academy is handsome, but like the other to the street, the members are so heavy, that one cannot stand back enough to see it in any proportion, unless in a barge moored in the middle of the Thames.” The same day, May 6, he writes to Conway from Strawberry Hill:

“Though it is a bitter north-east, I came hither to-day to look at my lilacs, though à la glace; and to get from pharaoh, for which there is a rage. I doated on it above thirty years ago; but it is not decent to sit up all night now with boys and girls. My nephew, Lord Cholmondeley, the banker à la mode, has been demolished. He and his associate, Sir Willoughby Aston, went early t’other night to Brooks’s, before Charles Fox and Fitzpatrick, who keep a bank there, were come; but they soon arrived, attacked their rivals, broke their bank, and won above four thousand pounds. ‘There,’ said Fox, ‘so should all usurpers be served!’ He did still better; for he sent for his tradesmen, and paid as far as the money would go. In the mornings he continues his war on Lord North, but cannot break that bank.…

“I told you in my last that Tonton was arrived. I brought him this morning to take possession of his new villa, but his inauguration has not been at all pacific. As he has already found out that he may be as despotic as at St. Joseph’s, he began with exiling my beautiful little cat; upon which, however, we shall not quite agree. He then flew at one of my dogs, who returned it by biting his foot till it bled, but was severely beaten for it. I immediately rung for Margaret to dress his foot; but in the midst of my tribulation could not keep my countenance; for she cried, ‘Poor little thing, he does not understand my language!’ I hope she will not recollect, too, that he is a Papist!”

Sir Joshua Reynolds. Pinx. A. Dawson. Ph. Sc. S. W. Reynolds. Sc.

Sir Joshua Reynolds.

We have a further anecdote of Charles Fox told a few days later, also in a letter to Conway:

“I had been to see if Lady Aylesbury was come to town: as I came up St. James’s Street, I saw a cart and porters at Charles’s door; coppers and old chests of drawers loading. In short, his success at faro has awakened his host of creditors; but unless his bank has swelled to the size of the Bank of England, it could not have yielded a sop apiece for each. Epsom, too, had been unpropitious; and one creditor has actually seized and carried off his goods, which did not seem worth removing. As I returned full of this scene, whom should I find sauntering by my own door but Charles? He came up, and talked to me at the coach-window on the Marriage Bill,86 with as much sang-froid as if he knew nothing of what had happened. I have no admiration for insensibility to one’s own faults, especially when committed out of vanity. Perhaps the whole philosophy consisted in the commission. If you could have been as much to blame, the last thing you would bear well would be your own reflections. The more marvellous Fox’s parts are, the more one is provoked at his follies, which comfort so many rascals and blockheads, and make all that is admirable and amiable in him only matter of regret to those who like him as I do.87

“I did intend to settle at Strawberry on Sunday; but must return on Thursday, for a party made at Marlborough House for Princess Amelia. I am continually tempted to retire entirely; and should, if I did not see how very unfit English tempers are for living quite out of the world. We grow abominably peevish and severe on others, if we are not constantly rubbed against and polished by them. I need not name friends and relations of yours and mine as instances. My prophecy on the short reign of faro is verified already. The bankers find that all the calculated advantages of the game do not balance pinchbeck parolis and debts of honourable women. The bankers, I think, might have had a previous and more generous reason, the very bad air of holding a bank:—but this country is as hardened against the petite morale, as against the greater.—What should I think of the world if I quitted it entirely?”

Again a few days, and we come upon an early mention of the youthful William Pitt: “The young William Pitt has again displayed paternal oratory. The other day, on the Commission of Accounts, he answered Lord North, and tore him limb from limb. If Charles Fox could feel, one should think such a rival, with an unspotted character, would rouse him. What if a Pitt and Fox should again be rivals!” Some time later, Walpole asks Lady Ossory: “Apropos of bon-mots, has our lord told you that George Selwyn calls Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt ‘the idle and the industrious apprentices’? If he has not, I am sure you will thank me, Madam.”

In the summer of 1781, Horace has a touch of rheumatism, but still he keeps up his juvenile tone. Witness the two following letters to Lady Ossory:

“Strawberry Hill, July 7, 1781.

“You must be, or will be, tired of my letters, Madam; every one is a contradiction to the last; there is alternately a layer of complaints, and a layer of foolish spirits. To-day the wind is again in the dolorous corner. For these four days I have been confined with a pain and swelling in my face. The apothecary says it is owing to the long drought; but as I should not eat grass were there ever such plenty, and as my cows, though starving, have no swelled cheeks, I do not believe him. I humbly attribute my frequent disorders to my longevity, and to that Proteus the gout, who is not the less himself for being incog. Excuses I have worn out, and, therefore, will not make any for not obeying your kind invitation again to Ampthill. I can only say, I go nowhere, even when Tonton is invited—except to balls—and yet though I am the last Vestris that has appeared, Mrs. Hobart did not invite me to her Sans Souci last week, though she had all my other juvenile contemporaries, Lady Berkeley, Lady Fitzroy, Lady Margaret Compton, and Mrs. French, etc. Perhaps you do not know that the lady of the fête, having made as many conquests as the King of Prussia, has borrowed the name of that hero’s villa for her hut on Ham Common, where she has built two large rooms of timber under a cabbage. Her field officers, General French, General Compton, etc., were sweltered in the ball-room, and then frozen at supper in tents on the grass. She herself, as intrepid as King Frederic, led the ball, though dying of the toothache, which she had endeavoured to drown in laudanum; but she has kept her bed ever since the campaign ended.

“This is all I know in the world, for the war seems to have taken laudanum too, and to keep its bed.

“I have received a letter to-day from Sir Horace Mann, who tells me the Great-Duke has been making wondrous improvements at Florence. He has made a passage through the Tribune, and built a brave new French room of stucco in white and gold, and placed the Niobe in it; but as everybody is tired of her telling her old story, she and all the Master and Miss Niobes are orderly disposed round the chamber, and if anybody asks who they are, I suppose they answer, Francis Charles Ferdinand Ignatius Neopomucenus, or Maria Theresa Christina Beatrice, etc. Well, Madam, have I any cause to sigh that the pictures at Houghton are transported to the North Pole, if the Tribune at Florence is demolished by Vandals, and Niobe and her progeny dance a cotillon? O sublunary grandeur, short-lived as a butterfly! We smile at a clown who graves the initials of his name, or the shape of his shoe, on the leads of a church, in hopes of being remembered, and yet he is as much known as king I don’t know whom, who built the Pyramids to eternise his memory. Methinks Anacreon was the only sensible philosopher. If I loved wine, and should look well in a chaplet of roses, I would crown myself with flowers, and go tipsy to bed every night sans souci.