Horace Walpole and his World

“July 25, 1781.

“Poor human nature, what a contradiction it is! to-day it is all rheumatism and morality, and sits with a death’s head before it: to-morrow it is dancing!—Oh! my Lady, my Lady, what will you say, when the next thing you hear of me after my last letter is, that I have danced three country-dances with a whole set, forty years younger than myself! Shall not you think I have been chopped to shreds and boiled in Medea’s kettle? Shall not you expect to see a print of Vestris teaching me?—and Lord Brudenell dying with envy? You may stare with all your expressive eyes, yet the fact is true. Danced—I do not absolutely say, danced—but I swam down three dances very gracefully, with the air that was so much in fashion after the battle of Oudenarde, and that was still taught when I was fifteen, and that I remember General Churchill practising before a glass in a gouty shoe.

“To be sure you die with impatience to know the particulars. You must know then—for all my revels must out—I not only went five miles to Lady Aylesford’s ball last Friday, but my nieces, the Waldegraves, desired me there to let them come to me for a few days, as they had been disappointed about a visit they were to make at another place; but that is neither here nor there. Well, here they are, and last night we went to Lady Hertford at Ditton. Soon after, Lady North and her daughters arrived, and besides Lady Elizabeth and Lady Bell Conways, there were their brothers Hugh and George. All the jeunesse strolled about the garden. We ancients, with the Earl and Colonel Keene, retired from the dew into the drawing-room. Soon after, the two youths and seven nymphs came in, and shut the door of the hall. In a moment, we heard a burst of laughter, and thought we distinguished something like the scraping of a fiddle. My curiosity was raised, I opened the door, and found four couples and a half standing up, and a miserable violin from the ale-house. ‘Oh,’ said I, ‘Lady Bell shall not want a partner;’ I threw away my stick, and me voilà dansant comme un charme! At the end of the third dance, Lord North and his son, in boots, arrived. ‘Come,’ said I, ‘my Lord, you may dance, if I have’—but it ended in my resigning my place to his son.

“Lady North has invited us for to-morrow, and I shall reserve the rest of my letter for the second volume of my regeneration; however, I declare I will not dance. I will not make myself too cheap; I should have the Prince of Wales sending for me three or four times a week to hops in Eastcheap. As it is, I feel I shall have some difficulty to return to my old dowagers, at the Duchess of Montrose’s, and shall be humming the Hempdressers, when they are scolding me for playing in flush.

“Friday, the 27th.

“I am not only a prophet, but have more command of my passions than such impetuous gentry as prophets are apt to have. We found the fiddles as I foretold; and yet I kept my resolution and did not dance, though the Sirens invited me, and though it would have shocked the dignity of old Tiffany Ellis, who would have thought it an indecorum. The two younger Norths and Sir Ralph Payne supplied my place. I played at cribbage with the matrons, and we came away at midnight. So if I now and then do cut a colt’s tooth, I have it drawn immediately. I do not know a paragraph of news—the nearer the minister, the farther from politics.

“P.S. My next jubilee dancing shall be with Lady Gertrude.”

Not long after the date of these letters, Mann sends news of further improvements at Florence. Walpole answers:

“The decree88 you sent me against high heads diverted me. It is as necessary here, but would not have such expeditious effect. The Queen has never admitted feathers at Court; but, though the nation has grown excellent courtiers, Fashion remained in opposition, and not a plume less was worn anywhere else. Some centuries ago, the Clergy preached against monstrous head-dresses; but Religion had no more power than our Queen. It is better to leave the Mode to its own vagaries; if she is not contradicted, she seldom remains long in the same mood. She is very despotic; but, though her reign is endless, her laws are repealed as fast as made.”

The frequency of highway robberies only a century ago sounds surprising to the present generation. Horace recounts to Lady Ossory an adventure of this kind which befell him and his friend and neighbour, Lady Browne, in the autumn of this jovial 1781:

“The night I had the honour of writing to your Ladyship last, I was robbed—and, as if I were a sovereign or a nation, have had a discussion ever since whether it was not a neighbour who robbed me—and should it come to the ears of the newspapers, it might produce as ingenious a controversy amongst our anonymous wits as any of the noble topics I have been mentioning. Voici le fait. Lady Browne and I were, as usual, going to the Duchess of Montrose at seven o’clock. The evening was very dark. In the close lane under her park-pale, and within twenty yards of the gate, a black figure on horseback pushed by between the chaise and the hedge on my side. I suspected it was a highwayman, and so I found did Lady Browne, for she was speaking and stopped. To divert her fears, I was just going to say, Is not that the apothecary going to the Duchess? when I heard a voice cry ‘Stop!’ and the figure came back to the chaise. I had the presence of mind, before I let down the glass, to take out my watch and stuff it within my waistcoat under my arm. He said, ‘Your purses and watches!’ I replied, ‘I have no watch.’ ‘Then your purse!’ I gave it to him; it had nine guineas. It was so dark that I could not see his hand, but felt him take it. He then asked for Lady Browne’s purse, and said, ‘Don’t be frightened; I will not hurt you.’ I said, ‘No; you won’t frighten the lady?’ He replied, ‘No; I give you my word I will do you no hurt.’ Lady Browne gave him her purse, and was going to add her watch, but he said, ‘I am much obliged to you! I wish you good-night!’ pulled off his hat, and rode away. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘Lady Browne, you will not be afraid of being robbed another time, for you see there is nothing in it.’ ‘Oh! but I am,’ said she, ‘and now I am in terrors lest he should return, for I have given him a purse with only bad money that I carry on purpose.’ ‘He certainly will not open it directly,’ said I, ‘and at worst he can only wait for us at our return; but I will send my servant back for a horse and a blunderbuss,’ which I did. The next distress was not to terrify the Duchess, who is so paralytic and nervous. I therefore made Lady Browne go into the parlour, and desired one of the Duchess’s servants to get her a glass of water, while I went into the drawing-room to break it to the Duchess. ‘Well,’ said I, laughing to her and the rest of the company, ‘you won’t get much from us to-night.’ ‘Why,’ said one of them, ‘have you been robbed?’ ‘Yes, a little,’ said I. The Duchess trembled; but it went off. Her groom of the chambers said not a word, but slipped out, and Lady Margaret and Miss Howe having servants there on horseback, he gave them pistols and despatched them different ways. This was exceedingly clever, for he knew the Duchess would not have suffered it, as lately he had detected a man who had robbed her garden, and she would not allow him to take up the fellow. These servants spread the story, and when my footman arrived on foot, he was stopped in the street by the ostler of the ‘George,’ who told him the highwayman’s horse was then in the stable; but this part I must reserve for the second volume, for I have made this no story so long and so tedious that your Ladyship will not be able to read it in a breath; and the second part is so much longer and so much less, contains so many examinations of witnesses, so many contradictions in the depositions, which I have taken myself, and, I must confess, with such abilities and shrewdness that I have found out nothing at all, that I think to defer the prosecution of my narrative till all the other inquisitions on the anvil are liquidated, lest your Ladyship’s head, strong as it is, should be confounded, and you should imagine that Rodney or Ferguson was the person who robbed us in Twickenham Lane. I would not have detailed the story at all, if you were not in a forest, where it will serve to put you to sleep as well as a newspaper full of lies; and I am sure there is as much dignity in it as in the combined fleet, and ours, popping in and out alternately, like a man and woman in a weather-house.”

A few months later he writes to his Countess:

“Strawberry Hill, Aug. 31, 1782.

“It is very strange indeed, Madam, that you should make me excuses for writing, or think that I have anything better, or even more urgent, to do than to read your letters. It is very true that the Duchess de la Vallière, in a hand which I could not decypher, has recommended Count Soltikoff and his wife to me: but, oh! my shame, I have not yet seen them. I did mean to go to town to-day on purpose, but I have had the gout in my right eyelid, and it was swelled yesterday as big as a walnut; being now shrunk to less than a pistachio, I propose in two or three days to make my appearance. Luckily the Countess was born in England, the daughter of the former Czernichew, and she is in such terrors of highwaymen, that I shall be quit for a breakfast; so it is an ill highwayman that blows nobody good. In truth, it would be impossible, in this region, to amass a set of company for dinner to meet them. The Hertfords, Lady Holdernesse, and Lady Mary Coke did dine here on Thursday, but were armed as if going to Gibraltar; and Lady Cecilia Johnston would not venture even from Petersham—for in the town of Richmond they rob even before dusk—to such perfection are all the arts brought! Who would have thought that the war with America would make it impossible to stir from one village to another? yet so it literally is. The Colonies took off all our commodities down to highwaymen. Now being forced to mew, and then turn them out, like pheasants, the roads are stocked with them, and they are so tame that they even come into houses.

“I have just been reading a most entertaining book, which I will recommend to you, as you are grown antiquaries: I don’t know whether it is published yet, for the author sent it to me. Part was published some time ago in the ‘Archæologia,’ and is almost the only paper in that mass of rubbish that has a grain of common sense. It is ‘Mr. E. King on ancient Castles.’ You will see how comfortably and delectably our potent ancestors lived, when in the constant state of war to which we are coming. Earls, barons, and their fair helpmates lived pell-mell in dark dungeons with their own soldiers, as the poorest cottagers do now with their pigs. I shall repent decking Strawberry so much, if I must turn it into a garrison.

“Mr. Vernon was your Ladyship’s informant about the Soltikoffs; but he gave me more credit for my intended civilities than I deserved. The French do not conceive, when they address strangers to us, that we do not at all live in their style. It is no trouble to them, who have miscellaneous dinners or suppers, to ask one or two more; nor are they at any expense in language, as everybody speaks French. In the private way in which I live, it is troublesome to give a formal dinner to foreigners, and more so to find company for them in a circle of dowagers, who would only jabber English scandal out of the Morning Post.…

“Just this moment I hear the shocking loss of the Royal George! Admiral Kempenfelt is a loss indeed; but I confess I feel more for the hundreds of poor babes who have lost their parents! If one grows ever so indifferent, some new calamity calls one back to this deplorable war! If one is willing to content one’s self, in a soaking autumn, with a match broken, or with the death of a Prince Duodecimus, a clap of thunder awakens one, and one hears that Britain herself has lost an arm or a leg. I have been expecting a deluge, and a famine, and such casualties as enrich a Sir Richard Baker; but we have all King David’s options at once! and what was his option before he was anointed, freebooting too?

“Drowned as we are, the country never was in such beauty; the herbage and leafage are luxurious. The Thames gives itself Rhone airs, and almost foams; it is none of your home-brewed rivers that Mr. Brown makes with a spade and a watering-pot. Apropos, Mr. Duane,89 like a good housewife, in the middle of his grass-plot, has planted a pump and a watering-trough for his cow, and I suppose on Saturdays dries his towels and neckcloths on his orange-trees; but I must have done, or the post will be gone.”

At the end of 1782, Mrs. Siddons was the talk of the town. Prejudiced as Walpole was apt to be in his judgments of actors, as of authors, his impressions of this famous actress will be read with interest:

“I have been for two days in town, and seen Mrs. Siddons. She pleased me beyond my expectation, but not up to the admiration of the ton, two or three of whom were in the same box with me.… Mr. Crawford asked me if I did not think her the best actress I ever saw? I said, ‘By no means; we old folks were apt to be prejudiced in favour of our first impressions.’ She is a good figure, handsome enough, though neither nose nor chin according to the Greek standard, beyond which both advance a good deal. Her hair is either red, or she has no objection to its being thought so, and had used red powder. Her voice is clear and good; but I thought she did not vary its modulations enough, nor ever approach enough to the familiar—but this may come when more habituated to the awe of the audience of the capital. Her action is proper, but with little variety; when without motion, her arms are not genteel. Thus you see all my objections are very trifling; but what I really wanted, but did not find, was originality, which announces genius, and without both which I am never intrinsically pleased. All Mrs. Siddons did, good sense or good instruction might give. I dare to say, that were I one-and-twenty, I should have thought her marvellous; but alas! I remember Mrs. Porter and the Dumesnil—and remember every accent of the former in the very same part. Yet this is not entirely prejudice: don’t I equally recollect the whole progress of Lord Chatham and Charles Townshend, and does it hinder my thinking Mr. Fox a prodigy?—Pray don’t send him this paragraph too.”

Again:

“Mrs. Siddons continues to be the mode, and to be modest and sensible. She declines great dinners, and says her business and the cares of her family take up her whole time. When Lord Carlisle carried her the tribute-money from Brooks’s, he said she was not maniérée enough. ‘I suppose she was grateful,’ said my niece, Lady Maria. Mrs. Siddons was desired to play ‘Medea’ and ‘Lady Macbeth.’—‘No,’ she replied ‘she did not look on them as female characters.’ She was questioned about her transactions with Garrick: she said, ‘He did nothing but put her out; that he told her she moved her right hand when it should have been her left. In short,’ said she, ‘I found I must not shade the tip of his nose.’”

The war was now over. Lord North had fallen; his successor, Lord Rockingham, was dead; and Lord Shelburne, who had grasped the helm in spite of Fox, had to meet the demands of the victorious Colonists and their French allies, with the certainty that whatever he arranged would be distasteful to his countrymen, and bitterly opposed by the partisans both of his rival and of North. With the first weeks of 1783 came news of peace. Horace writes about it, in almost the same words, to Mann and Lady Ossory, his two chief correspondents at this time: “Peace is arrived. I cannot express how glad I am. I care not a straw what the terms are, which I believe I know more imperfectly than anybody in London. I am not apt to love details—my wish was to have peace, and the next to see America secure of its liberty. Whether it will make good use of it, is another point. It has an opportunity that never occurred in the world before, of being able to select the best parts of every known constitution; but I suppose it will not, as too prejudiced against royalty to adopt it, even as a corrective of aristocracy and democracy.” He anticipates that highway robberies will grow more daring on the disbanding of troops, and that there will be an inundation of French visitors. In less than six months he was able to boast that both his prophecies had been fulfilled. In June, he describes how, on a dark and rainy night, Strawberry Hill was invaded by the French Ambassador at the head of a large party:

“Of all houses upon earth, mine, from the painted glass and over-hanging trees, wants the sun the most; besides the Star Chamber and passage being obscured on purpose to raise the Gallery. They ran their foreheads against Henry VII., and took the grated door of the Tribune for the dungeon of the castle. I mustered all the candlesticks in the house, but before they could be lighted up, the young ladies, who, by the way, are extremely natural, agreeable, and civil, were seized with a panic of highwaymen, and wanted to go. I laughed, and said, I believed there was no danger, for that I had not been robbed these two years. However, I was not quite in the right; they were stopped in Knightsbridge by two footpads, but Lady Pembroke having lent them a servant besides their own, they escaped.”

Shortly afterwards he writes to Mann:

“We have swarms of French daily; but they come as if they had laid wagers that there is no such place as England, and only wanted to verify its existence, or that they had a mind to dance a minuet on English ground; for they turn on their heel the moment after landing. Three came to see this house last week, and walked through it literally while I wrote eight lines of a letter; for I heard them go up the stairs, and heard them go down, exactly in the time I was finishing no longer a paragraph. It were happy for me had nobody more curiosity than a Frenchman; who is never struck with anything but what he has seen every day at Paris. I am tormented all day and every day by people that come to see my house, and have no enjoyment of it in summer. It would be even in vain to say that the plague is here. I remember such a report in London when I was a child, and my uncle, Lord Townshend, then Secretary of State, was forced to send guards to keep off the crowd from the house in which the plague was said to be; they would go and see the plague!”

Walpole apologises to his diplomatic correspondent for dwelling on such trifling topics. “The Peace,” he says, “has closed the chapter of important news, which was all our correspondence lived on.” The period of dulness and inaction, however, came to an end with the close of the Parliamentary vacation. The Coalition Government of Fox and Lord North, which had superseded Lord Shelburne in the spring, was now fairly brought to the bar of public opinion. Walpole, who had offended Fox’s adherents by the part he had played in the intrigues90 which followed on the death of Lord Rockingham, sought to retrieve his character by an eager support of the new Administration. He was loud in his praises of Fox’s masterly eloquence and strong sense. He now disparages Fox’s chief opponent. “His competitor, Mr. Pitt,” says Horace, “appears by no means an adequate rival. Just like their fathers, Mr. Pitt has brilliant language, Mr. Fox solid sense; and such luminous powers of displaying it clearly, that mere Eloquence is but a Bristol stone, when set by the diamond Reason.” The country at this moment was agitated by the debates on Fox’s celebrated India Bill. This measure was being carried by triumphant majorities through the Lower House, and, as Walpole thought, the Opposition did not expect to succeed even in the House of Lords. He goes so far as to add, “Mr. Pitt’s reputation is much sunk; nor, though he is a much more correct logician than his father, has he the same firmness and perseverance. It is no wonder that he was dazzled by his own premature fame; yet his late checks may be of use to him, and teach him to appreciate his strength better, or to wait till it is confirmed. Had he listed under Mr. Fox, who loved and courted him, he would not only have discovered modesty, but have been more likely to succeed him, than by commencing his competitor.” This was written on the 5th of December, 1783. Ten days later the India Bill was defeated in the House of Lords; the King at once dismissed the Coalition; and before the end of the year Pitt was installed as head of the Government, a position which he retained for the rest of Walpole’s life. The struggle which the new Ministry had to maintain for several weeks against an adverse majority in the House of Commons is matter of familiar history which needs not here be dwelt upon.

The intense excitement which these events created throughout the country is faithfully reflected in Walpole’s correspondence. We find them producing a rupture between him and his correspondent of many years’ standing, the poet Mason, which was not healed till shortly before the deaths of the parties. And in writing to Mann, Walpole several times refers to the general ferment. Thus he says: “Politics have engrossed all conversation, and stifled other events, if any have happened. Indeed our ladies, who used to contribute to enliven correspondence, are become politicians, and, as Lady Townley says, ‘squeeze a little too much lemon into conversation.’ They have been called back a little to their own profession—dress, by a magnificent ball which the Prince of Wales gave two nights ago to near six hundred persons, to which the Amazons of both parties were invited; and not a scratch was given or received.” Again, in announcing the dissolution of Parliament: “All the island will be a scene of riot, and probably of violence. The parties are not separated in gentle mood: there will, they say, be contested elections everywhere: consequently vast expense and animosities.… We have no private news at all. Indeed, politics are all in all. I question whether any woman will have anything to do with a man of a different party. Little girls say, ‘Pray, Miss, of which side are you?’ I heard of one that said, ‘Mama and I cannot get Papa over to our side!’… To the present drama, Elections, I shall totally shut my ears. I hated elections forty years ago; and, when I went to White’s, preferred a conversation on Newmarket to one on elections: for the language of the former I did not understand, and, consequently, did not listen to; the other, being uttered in common phrase, made me attend, whether I would or not. When such subjects are on the tapis, they make me a very insipid correspondent. One cannot talk of what one does not care about; and it would be jargon to you, if I did: however, do not imagine but I allow a sufficient quantity of dulness to my time of life. I have kept up a correspondence with you with tolerable spirit for three-and-forty years together, without our once meeting. Can you wonder that my pen is worn to the stump? You see it does not abandon you; nor, though conscious of its own decay, endeavour to veil it by silence. The Archbishop of Gil Blas has long been a lesson to me to watch over my own ruins; but I do not extend that jealousy of vanity to commerce with an old friend. You knew me in my days of folly and riotous spirit; why should I hide my dotage from you, which is not equally my fault and reproach?”

Sir Joshua Reynolds. Pinx. A. Dawson. Ph. Sc. G. Keating. Sc.

The Duchess of Devonshire.

In the middle of the elections, Horace writes once more:

“The scene is wofully changed for the Opposition, though not half the new Parliament is yet chosen. Though they still contest a very few counties and some boroughs, they own themselves totally defeated. They reckoned themselves sure of two hundred and forty members; they probably will not have an hundred and fifty; and, amongst them, not some capital leaders,—perhaps not the Commander-in-Chief, Mr. Fox, certainly not the late Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Conway. In short, between the industry of the Court and the India Company, and that momentary frenzy that sometimes seizes a whole nation, as if it were a vast animal, such aversion to the Coalition and such a detestation of Mr. Fox have seized the country, that, even where omnipotent gold retains its influence, the elected pass through an ordeal of the most virulent abuse. The great Whig families, the Cavendishes, Rockinghams, Bedfords, have lost all credit in their own counties; nay, have been tricked out of seats where the whole property was their own; and in some of those cases a royal finger has too evidently tampered, as well as singularly and revengefully towards Lord North and Lord Hertford; the latter of whom, however, is likely to have six of his own sons91 in the House of Commons—an extraordinary instance. Such a proscription, however, must have sown so deep resentment as it was not wise to provoke; considering that permanent fortune is a jewel that in no crown is the most to be depended upon!