"At length they fixed on an evening when Mr Linley, his eldest son and Miss Mary Linley were engaged at the concert (Miss Linley being excused on the plea of illness) to set out on their journey. Sheridan brought a sedan-chair to Mr Linley's house in the Crescent, in which he had Miss Linley conveyed to a post-chaise that was waiting for them on the London road. A woman was in the chaise who had been hired to accompany them on this extraordinary elopement."
For elopement it really was, although ostensibly Sheridan was merely playing the part of a friendly escort to a distressed lady, whatever deeper scheme, unknown to her, may have been in his mind. After a brief stay in London a boat was taken to Dunkirk, and the journey resumed towards Lille.
It was during this last stage of the journey that Sheridan disclosed his hand. With consummate, if questionable, cleverness he explained that he could not, in honour, leave her in a convent except as his wife; that he had loved her since first he met her more than anything else in life, and that he could not bear the thought of her fair name being sullied by the scandal that would surely follow this journey taken in his company.
To such plausible arguments, pleaded by one who confessed that he loved her, and to whom she was (as she now realised) far from indifferent, Miss Linley could not remain deaf. And before the coach had travelled many miles from Calais the runaways found an accommodating priest to make them one. The would-be nun thus dramatically ended her journey to the convent at the altar.
"It was not," she wrote to him later, "your person that gained my affection. No, it was that delicacy, that tender interest which you seemed to take in my welfare, that were the motives which induced me to love you."
The honeymoon that followed these strange nuptials was of short duration; for, a few days later, Mr Linley arrived, in a high state of anger, to reclaim and carry off his runaway daughter; and Sheridan was left to follow ignominiously in their wake. When he reached Bath it was to find his hands full. During his absence the irate Major, quick to discover his perfidy, had published the following notice in the local Chronicle:—
"Mr Richard S., having attempted, in a letter left behind him for that purpose, to account for his scandalous method of running away from this place, by insinuations derogating from my character and that of a young lady, innocent as far as relates to me or my knowledge, since which he has neither taken notice of my letters, nor even informed his own family of the place where he has hid himself, I cannot longer think he deserves the treatment of a gentleman, than in this public manner to post him as a Liar and a treacherous Scoundrel.—THOMAS MATTHEWS."
Such a public insult could, of course, only have one issue. Sheridan promptly challenged Matthews to a duel, the result of which was that the Major was compelled to make an apology, as public as his insult. But, so far was he from penitence, that within a few weeks he demanded a second meeting—and this proved a much more serious matter for Sheridan.
The rivals met the following morning on Claverton Down; and after a few furious exchanges both swords were broken, and the opponents were struggling together on the ground. Matthews, however, being much the stronger, was able to pin Sheridan down, and with a piece of the broken sword stabbed him repeatedly in the face. "Beg your life, and I will spare it," he demanded of the prostrate and defenceless man. "I will neither beg it, nor receive it from such a villain," was the unflinching answer.
"Matthews then renewed the attack, and, having picked up the point of one of the swords, ran it through the side of the throat and pinned him to the ground with it, exclaiming, 'I have done for him.' He then left the field, accompanied by his second, and, getting into a carriage with four horses which had been waiting for him, drove off."
Sheridan, unconscious and apparently dying, was driven from the Downs to a neighbouring inn, "The White Hart," where for a time he hung betwixt life and death. On hearing of his condition Miss Linley (who at the time was singing at Cambridge) travelled post-haste to his bedside; and, tenderly nursed by his wife and his sister, the wounded man slowly fought his way back to strength.
One would have thought that, after such a tragic experience and observing the mutual devotion of the young couple, their parents would have relented and given their approval of the union, however improvident and inexcusable it might appear to them. But, on both sides, they were obdurate; and Mr Sheridan carried his opposition to the extent of extracting from his son a promise that he would not even see his wife.
But love laughs at parents' frowns and usually triumphs in the end. When Elizabeth Linley went away to London to sing in oratorio, her husband followed her; and, in the rôle of hackney coachman, had the pleasure of driving not only his wife but her father, home nightly from the concert-room, without either of them suspecting his identity. When at last he revealed himself to his wife, her delight was so great as to leave no doubt of the sincere love she bore him. Many a secret meeting followed; a final joint appeal ultimately broke down the obduracy of the parents; and once again Sheridan led his bride to the altar, to make her finally and securely his own.
For a time Richard Sheridan and his Nightingale found a haven in a remote, rose-covered cottage at East Burnham. These were days of unclouded happiness, when, the "world forgetting and by the world forgot," they lived only for love, caring nothing of the future. They were days of simple delights; for their entire income was the interest of Mr Long's £3000, which proved ample for their needs. Mrs Sheridan, now at the zenith of her fame, might have won thousands by her voice—she actually refused offers of nearly £4000 for one short season—but her husband wished to keep the Nightingale's voice for his own exclusive delight; and she was only too happy in thus turning her back on fame and fortune.
But such halcyon days could not last long. Even Paradise might pall on such a restless temperament as that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He began to sigh for the outer world in which he felt that it was his destiny to shine, for an arena in which he could do justice to the gifts which were clamouring for scope and exercise. And thus, to Mrs Sheridan's lasting regret, cottage and roses and simple delights of the country were left behind, and she found herself installed in a Portman Square house, in the heart of the world of fashion.
Here Sheridan, always the most improvident of men, launched out into extravagances more suited to an income of £5000 a year than the paltry £150 which was all he could command. He entertained on a lavish scale; and his wit and charm, supplemented by his wife's beauty and gift of song, soon surrounded them with a fashionable crowd eager to eat his dinners and to attend his wife's soirées. Sheridan was in his element in this environment of luxury and prodigality; but the Bath Nightingale would gladly have changed it all for "a little quiet home that I can enjoy in comfort," as she told her husband—above all, for the Burnham cottage where she had been so idyllically happy.
Perhaps if Sheridan had never left the cottage and the roses, his name would never have been known to fame. His ambition needed some such stimulus as this spasm of extravagance to wake it to activity. He must now make money or be submerged by debts; and under this impulse of necessity it was that he wooed fortune with The Rivals, and awoke to find himself famous and potentially rich. Other comedies followed swiftly from his eager and inspired pen—The School for Scandal, The Duenna, and The Critic—each greeted with enthusiasm by a world to which such dramatic triumphs were a revelation and a delight. Sheridan was not only the "talk of the town"; he was hailed universally as the brightest dramatic star of the age.
It is needless to say that Sheridan's fame was a delight to his wife.
"Not long ago," she wrote to a friend, "he was known as 'Mrs Sheridan's husband.' Now the tables are turned, and, henceforth, I expect I shall be just Mr Sheridan's wife. Nor could I wish any more exalted title. I am proud and thankful to be the wife of the cleverest man in England, and the best husband in the world!"
That Mrs Sheridan adored her husband is evident from every letter she wrote to him. She addresses him as "my dearest Love" and "my darling Dick," and vows that she cannot be happy apart from him. "I cannot love you," she declares, "and be perfectly satisfied at such a distance from you. I depended upon your coming to-night, and shall not recover my spirits till we meet." But through her letters runs the same hankering after the old simple, peaceful days—the days of love in a cottage. "I could draw," she writes, "such a picture of happiness that it would almost make me wish the overthrow of all our present schemes of future affluence and grandeur."
But greatly as he loved his wife, Sheridan was now too much wedded to his ambition to listen to such tempting. He had conquered fame with his pen; now he aspired to subdue it with his tongue. In 1780, while he was still in the twenties, he was sent to Parliament by Stafford suffrages; and from his first appearance at Westminster captivated his fellow law-makers by the magic of his eloquence. A new star had arisen in the oratorical firmament, and soon began to pale all other luminaries. Within two years he was a Minister of the Crown; and in another year he had electrified the world by the most brilliant oratory that had ever been heard in our tongue—notably by his historic speech in the trial of Warren Hastings, to the preparation of which his wife had devoted herself body and soul.
Fresh from listening to this latest sensational triumph of her husband in Westminster Hall, she wrote:—
"It is impossible to convey to you the delight, the astonishment, the admiration he has excited in the breasts of every class of people. Every party prejudice has been overcome by this display of genius, eloquence and goodness.... What my feelings must be, you can only imagine. To tell you the truth, it is with some difficulty that I can 'let down my mind,' as Mr Burke said afterwards, to talk or think on any other subject. But pleasure too exquisite becomes pain; and I am at this moment suffering from the delightful anxieties of last week."
But Mrs Sheridan's day of happiness and triumph was soon to draw near to its close. She saw her husband climb to the dizziest pinnacle of fame, and she watched with pain his brilliance dimmed, and his marvellous intellect clouded by excessive drinking, before the fatal seeds of consumption, which had already carried off her dearly-loved sister, began to show themselves in her. Her illness was as swift as it was, happily, painless. She simply drooped and faded and died, tenderly watched over to the last by her husband with a silent anguish that was pitiful to see.
"During her last days," says Mrs Canning, her devoted friend, "she read sometimes to herself, and after dinner sat down to the piano. She taught Betty (her little niece) a little while, and played several slow movements out of her own head, with her usual expression, but with a very trembling hand. It was so like the last efforts of an expiring genius, and brought such a train of tender and melancholy ideas to my imagination, that I thought my poor heart would have burst in the conflict."
And one June day, when the world she had loved so well was flooded with a glory of sunlight, her beautiful spirit sped silently away to join the "choir invisible." Nine days later she was laid to rest in Wells Cathedral, thousands flocking to pay farewell homage to the closest link the world has ever known "between an angel and a woman." As for Sheridan he survived his grief twenty-four years, to end his days in poverty, and to crown his life's drama with a stately funeral in Westminster Abbey.
CHAPTER III
THE ROMANCE OF THE VILLIERS
The Villiers have had a liberal share of romance, ever since the far-away days, three centuries and more ago, when the fourth son of Sir George opened his eyes at Brookesby, in Leicestershire. From being a "threadbare hanger-on" at Court this son of an obscure knight rose to be the boon companion of two kings and the lover of a Queen of France. Honours and riches were showered on this spoiled child of fortune. He was created, in rapid succession, Viscount and Marquis, and finally Duke of Buckingham; he won for bride an Earl's daughter, the richest heiress in the land; and for some years dazzled the world by his splendours and wealth as he alienated it by his arrogance. And just when his meteoric career had reached its zenith, his life was closed in tragedy by the assassin's knife.
His mantle of romance, however, fell on his son and successor, the second Duke, who was brought up in a Palace nursery, and had for playmates the children of Charles I.; and who, after a career which in its dramatic adventure outstripped fiction, ended his turbulent life, if not, as Pope says,
at least in extreme poverty and suffering in a Yorkshire inn, at Kirby Moorside. Of all the vast estates he had inherited, his kinsman, Lord Arran, said: "There is not so much as one farthing towards defraying the expense of his funeral."
Nor have the men of Villiers' blood had any monopoly of adventure. Their wives and daughters have seldom been content to lead the unromantic life which happily contents so many of their sex. From Barbara Chaffinch, whose intrigues secured the Earldom of Jersey for her husband in William III.'s reign, to the Lady Adela Villiers who ran away with Captain Ibbetson, a handsome young officer of Hussars, to Gretna Green and the altar, they have played many diverse and sensational rôles on the stage of their time.
It was but fitting that George Villiers, fifth Earl of Jersey, should make a Countess of the Lady Sarah Sophia Fane, in whose veins was an adventurous strain as marked as in his own; for she was the fruit of one of the most dramatic unions recorded in the annals of our Peerage. A year before she was cradled her mother was Anne Child, the richest heiress in England—the only daughter of Robert Child, head of the great banking firm at Temple Bar, and a descendant of Francis Child, the industrious London apprentice who married the daughter of his master, William Wheeler, goldsmith, whose riches and business he inherited.
"Old Child," as Anne's father was familiarly known, had many aristocratic clients who used his cheques and overdrew their accounts; but the most prodigal, as also the most ingratiating, of them all was the young Earl of Westmorland, who, not content with making large demands on the banker's exchequer and patience, had the audacity to aspire to all his wealth through his daughter's hand.
Anne was perhaps as naturally flattered by the attentions of a lord as she was fascinated by his handsome face and figure and his courtly manners; but the father had other designs for his heiress than marrying her to a prodigal young nobleman. "Your blood, my lord, is good," he once told him; "but money is better."
Lord Westmorland was not, however, the man to be turned aside from the gilded goal on which he had set his heart. If he could not wed the heiress with her father's blessing, he would dispense with the benediction. That he would marry her he was determined; and Anne was just the girl to assist a bold lover in such an ambition.
One day, so the story is told, Lord Westmorland decided to bring the matter to a crisis. He had been dining with Mr Child, and, after the wine had circulated freely, he said, "Now, sir, that we have discussed business thoroughly, there is another matter on which I should be grateful for your opinion." "What's that?" enquired the banker, beaming benevolently on his guest, as a man who has dined well and is at peace with the world. "Well, sir, suppose you were deeply in love with a girl who returned your love, and that her father refused his consent. What would you do?" "What should I do?" laughed the banker, "why, run away with her, of course, like many a better man has done!"
What more direct encouragement could an ardent lover want? It is possible that the next morning the banker had completely forgotten the conversation, and his vinous approval of runaway matches; but, two days later, he was destined to have a rude awaking. In the middle of the night he was aroused by the watchman to learn that his front door had been found open; and a little later the alarming discovery was made that his daughter had flown. His suspicions fell at once on that "rascally young lord"; and they were confirmed when he found that the Earl, too, had disappeared, and that a chaise, with four galloping horses, had been seen dashing northwards as fast as whip and spur could drive them.
The banker was furious. He raged and stormed as he ordered his servants to procure the fastest horses money could command; and with lavish promises of reward to the postboys he set out in hot pursuit of the fugitives. Luckily they had no long start; and, with better horses, more frequent changes, and a heavier purse, he had little doubt that he would soon overtake them. But the chase was sterner and longer than he had imagined. Cupid lends wings to runaway lovers. Fast as Mr Child's sweating horses raced, they gained but little on the pursued. Through the long night, the next day, and the following night the desperate race continued—through sleeping villages and startled towns, over hill and moor, until the borderland grew near. Then, between Penrith and Carlisle, the quarry was at last sighted.
Mr Child's horses, urged to a final effort by the postboys, slowly but surely reduced the interval; and now inch by inch they draw abreast of the runaway chaise. The moment of triumph has come. Mr Child, with body half protruding from the chaise, calls loudly on the fugitives to halt, shaking his fist at the smiling face of the Earl, who with one hand waves a graceful adieu, with the other presents a pistol at Mr Child's near leader. A flash, a report, and the horse falls dead. A few minutes later the Earl's chaise is a distant dark speck in a cloud of dust, at which the baffled banker impotently shakes his fist.
Before the fallen horse could be removed and the chase resumed the runaways had got so long a start that they could laugh at further pursuit; and by the time Child's chaise rattled impotently through the street of Gretna village, his daughter had been a Countess a good hour.
For three years the banker kept his vow that he would never forgive her and her shameless husband. The Earl, indeed, he never did forgive, but his daughter won her way back into his heart, and to her he left the whole of his colossal fortune, amounting, it is said, to little less than £100,000 a year.
It was from this romantic union that the Lady Sarah Sophia Fane came, who was to unite the 'prentice strain of Francis Child with the blood of the proud Villiers. As a young girl the Lady Sarah needed no such rich dower as was hers to commend her to the eyes of wooers. From the Fanes she inherited a full share of the beauty for which their women were noted, and to it she added many charms of her own. She had a figure, tall, commanding, and of exquisite grace, eyes blue as violets, a luxuriant crown of dark hair, and a complexion pure and beautiful as a lily.
It is little wonder that a young lady so dowered with gold and good looks should attract lovers by the score, all anxious to win so fair a prize. But to one only of them all would she listen, Lord Villiers, heir to the Earldom of Jersey, a man of towering stature and handsome face, aristocrat and courtier to his finger-tips, a fearless and graceful rider, and an expert in manly sports. Such a combination of attractions the daughter of Anne Child could not long, nor was she at all disposed to, resist. And one May day in 1804—almost twenty-two years to the day after her parents' dramatic flight to Gretna Green—the Lady Sarah became Vicountess Villiers. A year later she was Countess of Jersey.
From her first entry into society the child-countess (for she was little more than a child) took the position of a Queen, to which her rank, wealth, and beauty entitled her, and which she held, supreme and unassailable, as long as life lasted. Her salon was a second Royal Court to which flocked all the greatest in the land, proud to pay homage to the "Empress of Fashion." She entertained kings with a regal splendour. Their Majesties of Prussia and Belgium, Holland and Hanover, and the Tsar Nicholas I. were all delighted to do honour to a hostess so captivating and so queenly.
At Middleton Park, her lord's Oxfordshire seat, she dispensed a hospitality which was the despair of her rivals. Her retinue of servants seldom numbered less than a hundred, and many a week her guests, with their attendants, far exceeded a thousand. Money was squandered with a prodigal hand. The very servants, it is said, drank champagne and hock like water; her housemaids had their riding horses, and dressed in silks and satins. Among her thousands of guests were such men as Wellington and Peel, Castlereagh and Canning, all humble worshippers at her shrine; and Lord Byron who, in his gloomy moods, would shut himself in his bedroom for days, living on biscuits and water, and stealing out at dead of night to wander ghost-like through the neighbouring woods. These moods of black despondency he varied by turbulent spirits, when he would be the gayest of the gay, and would challenge his fellow-guests to drinking bouts, in which he always came off the victor.
Lady Jersey had no more ardent admirer than Byron, whose muse was inspired to many a flight in honour of
The eye that gladdens and the brow serene;
The glossy darkness of that clustering hair,
Which shades, yet shows that forehead more than fair."
And among her army of guests the Countess moved like a Queen, who could stoop to frivolity without losing a shred of dignity. Surely never was such superabundant energy enshrined in a form so beautiful and stately.
"Shall I tell you what Lady Jersey is like?" wrote Creevey. "She is like one of her numerous gold and silver dicky-birds that are in all the showrooms of this house. She begins to sing at eleven o'clock, and, with the interval of the hour when she retires to her cage to rest, she sings till twelve at night without a moment's interruption. She changes her feathers for dinner, and her plumage both morning and evening is the most beautiful I ever saw."
She seemed indeed incapable of fatigue. Tongue and body alike never seemed to rest, from rising to going to bed.
"She is really wonderful," says Lady Granville; "and how she can stand the life she leads is still more wonderful. She sees everybody in her own house, and calls on everybody in theirs. She is all over Paris, and at all the campagnes within ten miles, and in all petites soirées. She begins the day with a dancing-master at nine o'clock, and never rests till midnight.... At ten o'clock yesterday morning she called for me, and we never stopped to take breath till eleven o'clock at night, when she set me down here more dead than alive, she going to end the day with the Hollands!"
A life that would have killed nine women out of ten seemed powerless to touch her. When far advanced in the sixties she was acknowledged to be still one of the most beautiful women in England, retaining to an amazing degree the bloom and freshness of youth. And when she appeared at a fancy-dress ball arrayed as a Sultana, in a robe of sky-blue with coral embroideries and a turban of gold and white, she was by universal consent acclaimed as the most beautiful woman there. It may interest my lady readers to learn that she attributed her perpetual youth to the use of gruel as a substitute for soap and water.
Although Lady Jersey had admirers by the hundred among the most fascinating men in Europe, no breath of scandal ever touched her fair fame. Indeed, she carried her virtue to the verge of prudery, and repelled with a freezing coldness the slightest approach to familiarity. So prudish was she that on one occasion she declined to share a carriage alone with Lord John Russell, one of the least physically attractive of men, and begged General Alava to accompany them. "Diable!" laughed the General, "you must be very little sure of yourself if you are afraid to be alone with little Lord John!"
She was merciless to any of her lady friends who lapsed from virtue, or in any way, however slight, offended the proprieties. But the vials of her fiercest anger were reserved for her mother-in-law, the Dowager-Countess, whose shameless intrigue with the Prince Regent scandalised the world in an age of lax morals; and the outraged Princess Caroline had no more valiant champion. She not only declined to have anything to say to her husband's mother, she carried her disapproval to the extent of refusing point blank to appear at Court. So furious was the Regent at this slight that "the dotard with corrupted eye and withered heart," as Byron calls him, had her portrait removed from the Palace Gallery of Beauties, and returned to its owner.
A few days later, however, the Countess had her revenge. At a party in Cavendish Square she was walking along a corridor with Samuel Rogers when she saw the Regent coming towards them. As he approached he drew himself to his full height, and passed with an insolent and disdainful stare, which Lady Jersey returned with a look even more cold and contemptuous. Then, with a toss of her proud head, she turned to Rogers and laughingly said, "I did that well, didn't I?"
It was, perhaps, as Queen and Autocrat of "Almack's" that Lady Jersey won her chief fame—Almack's, that most exclusive and aristocratic club in Berkeley Street, Piccadilly, the membership of which was the supreme hall-mark of the world of fashion. No rank, however exalted, no riches, however great, were a passport to this innermost social circle, over which Lady Jersey reigned like a beautiful despot.
Scores of the smartest officers of the Guards, men of rank and fashion, and pets of West End drawing-rooms, clamoured or cajoled for admission to this jealously-guarded temple, but its doors only opened to receive, at the most, half a dozen of them. Even such social autocrats as Her Grace of Bedford and Lady Harrington were coldly turned away from the doors by the male members of the club; while the ladies shut them in the face of Lord March and Brook Boothby, to the amazed disgust of these men of fashion and conquest—for, by the rules of the club, male members were selected by the ladies, and vice versâ. But beyond all doubt the destinies of candidates were in the hands of the half dozen Lady Patronesses who formed the Committee of the club—Princess Esterhazy, Princess von Lieven, Ladies Jersey, Sefton and Cowper, and Mrs Drummond Burrell; and of these my Lady Jersey was the only one who really counted.
"Three-fourths even of the nobility," says a writer in the New Monthly Magazine, "knock in vain for admission. Into this sanctum sanctorum, of course, the sons of commerce never think of intruding; and yet into the very 'blue chamber,' in the absence of the six necromancers, have the votaries of trade contrived to intrude themselves."
"Many diplomatic arts," writes Captain Gronow, "much finesse, and a host of intrigues were set in motion to get an invitation to Almack's. Very often persons whose rank and fortunes entitled them to the entrée anywhere, were excluded by the cliqueism of the Lady patronesses; for the female government of Almack's was a despotism, and subject to all the caprice of despotic rule. It is needless to say that, like every other despotism, it was not innocent of abuses."
The fair ladies who ruled supreme over this little dancing and gossiping world issued a solemn proclamation that no gentleman should appear at the assemblies without being dressed in knee-breeches, white cravat, and chapeau bras. On one occasion, the Duke of Wellington was about to ascend the staircase of the ballroom, dressed in black trousers, when the vigilant Mr Willis, the guardian of the establishment, stepped forward and said, "Your Grace cannot be admitted in trousers," whereupon the Duke, who had a great respect for orders and regulations, quietly walked away.
Another inflexible rule of the club was that no one should be admitted after eleven o'clock; and it was a breach of this regulation that once overwhelmed the Duke of Wellington with humiliation. One evening, the Duke, who had promised to meet Lady Mornington at Almack's, presented himself for admission. "Lady Jersey," announced an attendant, "the Duke of Wellington is at the door, and desires to be admitted." "What o'clock is it?" she asked. "Seven minutes after eleven, your Ladyship." She paused for a moment, and then said with emphasis and distinctness, "Give my compliments—Lady Jersey's compliments—to the Duke of Wellington, and say that she is very glad that the first enforcement of the rule of exclusion is such that, hereafter, no one can complain of its application. He cannot be admitted." And the Duke, whom even Napoleon with all his legions had been powerless to turn back, was compelled to retreat before the capricious will of a woman.
Such an autocrat was this "Queen of Almack's."
"While her colleagues were debating," says the author of the "Key to Almack's," "she decided. Hers was the master-spirit that ruled the whole machine; hers the eloquent tongue that could both persuade and command. And she was never idle. Her restless eye pried into everything; she set the world to rights; her influence was resistless, her determination uncontrollable."
"Treat people like fools, and they will worship you," was her favourite maxim. And as Bryon, her intimate friend, once said, "She was the veriest tyrant that ever governed Fashion's fools, and compelled them to shake their cap and bells as she willed."
It was at Almack's, it is interesting to recall, that Lady Jersey first introduced the quadrille from Paris.
"I recollect," says Captain Gronow, "the persons who formed the first quadrille that was ever danced there. They were Lady Jersey, Lady Harriet Buller, Lady Susan Ryder, and Miss Montgomery; the men being the Count St Aldegonde, Mr Montgomery, and Charles Standisti."
It was at Almack's, too, that she introduced the waltz, which so shocked the proprieties even in that easy-going age.
"What scenes," writes Mr T. Raikes, "have we witnessed in these days at Almack's! What fear and trembling in the débutantes at the commencement of a waltz, what giddiness and confusion at the end! It was, perhaps, owing to the latter circumstance that so violent an opposition soon arose to the new recreation on the score of morality. The anti-waltzing party took the alarm, and cried it down; mothers forbade it, and every ballroom became a scene of feud and contention."
But through it all Lady Jersey circled round and round the ballroom divinely, with Prince Paul Esterhazy, Baron Tripp, St Aldegonde, and many another graceful exponent of the new dance, for partners; and her victory was complete when the world of fashion saw the arm of the Emperor Alexander, his uniform ablaze with decorations, round her waist, twirling ecstatically, if ungracefully, round in the intoxication of the waltz.
For fifty years, Lord Jersey's Countess reigned supreme in the social world, carrying her autocracy and her charms into old age. As was inevitable to such a dominant personality she made enemies, who resented her airs and scoffed at her graces. Lady Granville called her "a tiresome, quarrelsome woman"; the Duke of Wellington, one of her most abject slaves, once exclaimed, "What —— nonsense Lady Jersey talks!" and Granville declared that she had "neither wit, nor imagination, nor humour." But to the last day of her long life she retained the homage and admiration of hundreds, over whom she cast the spell of her beauty and personal charm.
The evening of her life was clouded by a succession of tragedies, each sufficient to break the spirit of a less indomitable woman. One by one, her children, the pride of her life, were taken from her; but she hid her breaking heart from the world, and in the intervals between her bereavements she showed as brave and bright a face as in the days of her unclouded youth. The death in 1858 of her daughter, Clementina, the darling of her old age, was a terrible blow; but still the hand of the slayer of her hopes was not stayed. Her husband, whose devotion had so long sustained her, followed soon after; three weeks later her eldest son, the new Earl, died tragically in the zenith of his life; and the crowning blow fell when, in 1862, her last surviving child was taken from her.
For five more years she survived her triumphs and sorrows, until, one January day in 1867, she passed suddenly and painlessly away, and the world was the poorer by the loss of one of the noblest women who have ever worn the crown of beauty or held the sceptre of power.
CHAPTER IV
THE STAIN ON THE SHIRLEY 'SCUTCHEON
The Shirleys have been men of high honour and fair repute ever since the far-away days when the conqueror found their ancestor, Sewallis, firmly seated on his broad Warwickshire lands at Eatington; but their proud 'scutcheon, otherwise unsullied, bears one black, or rather red, stain, and it was Laurence Shirley, fourth earl of his line, who put it there.
Horace Walpole calls this degenerate Shirley "a low wretch, a mad assassin, and a wild beast." He was, as my story will show, all this. He was indeed an incarnate fiend. But was he to blame? He was possessed by devils; but they were devils of insanity. The taint of madness was in his blood before he uttered his first cry in the cradle. His uncle, whose coronet he was to wear, was an incurable madman. His aunt, the Lady Barbara Shirley, spent years of her life shut up in an asylum. And this hereditary taint shadowed Laurence Shirley's life from his infancy, and ended it in tragedy.
As a boy, he was subject to violent attacks of rage, when it was not safe to approach him; and his madness grew with his years. Strange tales are told of him as a young man. We are told that he would spend hours pacing like a wild animal up and down his room, gnashing his teeth, clenching his fists, grinning diabolically, and uttering strange incoherent cries. He would stand before a mirror, making horrible grimaces at his reflection, and spitting upon it; he walked about armed with pistols and dagger, ready at a moment to use both on any one who annoyed or opposed him; and in his disordered brain he nursed suspicion and hatred of all around him.
When he was little more than thirty, and some years after he had come into his earldom, he wooed and won the pretty daughter of Sir William Meredith; but before the honeymoon was ended he had begun to treat her with such gross brutality that, before she had long been a wife, she petitioned Parliament for a divorce, which set her free. And as he was obviously quite unfit to administer his estates, it became necessary to appoint some one to receive his rents and control his revenue.
Such was the pitiful plight to which insanity had reduced Laurence, Earl Ferrers, while still little over the threshold of manhood; and these calamities only, and perhaps naturally, accentuated his madness. He became more and more the terror of the neighbourhood in which he lived, and few had the courage to meet him when he took his solitary walks.
"I still retain," writes a Mr Cradock in his "Memoirs," "a strong impression of the unfortunate Earl Ferrers, who, with the Ladies Shirley, his sisters, frequented Leicester races, and visited at my father's house. During the early part of the day his lordship preserved the character of a polite scholar and a courteous nobleman, but in the evening he became the terror of the inhabitants; and I distinctly remember running upstairs to hide myself when an alarm was given that Lord Ferrers was coming armed, with a great mob after him. He had behaved well at the ordinary; the races were then in the afternoon, and the ladies regularly attended the balls. My father's house was situated midway between Lord Ferrers's lodgings and the Town Hall, where the race assemblies were then held. He had, as was supposed, obtained liquor privately, and then became outrageous; for, from our house he suddenly escaped and proceeded to the Town Hall, and, after many violent acts, threw a silver tankard of scalding negus among the ladies. He was then secured for that evening. This was the last time of his appearing at Leicester, till brought from Ashby-de-la-Zouche to prison there.
"It has been much regretted by his friends that, as Lady Ferrers and some of his property had been taken from him, no greater precaution had been used with respect to his own safety as well as that of all around him. Whilst sober, my father, who had a real regard for him, always urged that he was quite manageable; and when his sisters ventured to come with him to the races, they had an absolute reliance on his good intentions and promises."
Once he disappeared for a time, and made his way to London, where he lodged obscurely in the neighbourhood of Muswell Hill. Here he surrounded himself with grooms and ostlers, and other low company of both sexes, abandoning himself to orgies of debauchery. Among his milder eccentricities he would, we are told, mix mud with his beer, and drain tankard after tankard of the nauseating mixture. He drank his coffee from the spout of the coffee-pot, and wandered about, a grotesque figure, with one side of his face clean-shaven.
But even then he had sane moments, when the raving madman of yesterday became the courteous, polite, shrewd man of to-day, charming all by his wit and high-bred geniality. It was, of course, inevitable that a career such as this, marked by a madness which grew daily, should lead sooner or later to tragedy. And tragedy was coming swiftly. It came early in the year 1760, before Lord Ferrers had reached his fortieth birthday. And this is how it came.
The Court of Chancery had ordered that his lordship's rents should be received and accounted for by a receiver, who, by way of concession to his feelings, was to be appointed by himself. The Earl, who rarely lacked shrewdness, looked round for the most suitable person to fill this delicate post—for a man who should be as clay in his hands; and such a "tool" he thought he had found in his steward, Mr John Johnson, who had known him since boyhood, and who had never thwarted him even in his maddest caprices. Mr Johnson was duly appointed receiver; but the Earl's self-congratulation was short-lived. The steward proved that he was possessed of a conscience, and that neither cajolery nor threats could make him swerve from the straight path of honesty.
In vain the Earl coaxed and blustered and bullied. The receiver was adamant. He had a duty to perform, and at any cost he would discharge it. His lordship's rage at such unlooked-for recalcitrancy was unbounded. He began to hate the too honest steward with a murderous hatred; behind his back he loaded him with abuse, and vowed that, of all his enemies, the steward was the most virulent and implicable. But while the Earl was nursing this diabolical hatred, he showed little sign of it to Johnson, who was so unsuspectingly walking to meet tragedy.
One January day, in 1760, Lord Ferrers sent a polite message to his steward to come to Staunton Harold on an urgent matter of business. It was on a Friday; and punctually at two o'clock, the hour appointed, Mr Johnson made his appearance, and was ushered into his Lordship's study. Unknown to him, Lord Ferrers had sent away his housekeeper and his menservants on various pretexts; and, apart from the Earl and the steward (the spider and the fly), there was no one in all the great house but three maidservants, whose chief anxiety was to keep as far away as possible from their mad master.
With a courteous greeting Lord Ferrers invited Mr Johnson to take a seat; and then, placing before him a document, which proved to be a confession of fraud and dishonesty in his office of receiver, he commanded his steward to sign his name to it.
On reading the confession which he was ordered to sign, Mr Johnson indignantly refused to comply with such an outrageous demand. "You refuse to sign?" asked the Earl with ominous calmness. "I do," was the emphatic reply. "Then," continued his lordship, producing a pistol, "I command you to kneel." Mr Johnson, now alarmed and awake to his danger, looked first at the stern, cold eyes bent on him, and then at the pistol pointed at his heart, and sank on one knee. "Both knees!" insisted the Earl. Mr Johnson subsided on the other knee, looking calmly at his would-be murderer, though beads of perspiration were standing on his forehead. A moment later a shot rang out in the silent room, and the steward fell to the floor mortally wounded. Laying down the smoking weapon, Lord Ferrers opened the door and called loudly for assistance. The horrified servants, who had heard the report, came, huddled and fearful, at his bidding. One he despatched for a doctor, and, with the assistance of the other two, he carried the fast-dying man to a bedroom. When the doctor arrived he found the Earl standing by the bedside, trying to stop the flow of blood which was ebbing from the steward's chest; but the victim was beyond all human aid. He had but a few hours at the most to live. An hour later Lord Ferrers was lying dead drunk on the floor of his bedroom, while Mr Johnson's life was ebbing out in agony at his house, a mile away.
"As soon as it became known," to quote the account given by an eye-witness in the Gentleman's Magazine, "that Mr Johnson was really dead, the neighbours set about seizing the murderer. A few persons, armed, set out for Staunton, and as they entered the hall-yard they saw the Earl going towards the stable, as they imagined, to take horse. He appeared to be just out of bed, his stockings being down and his garters in his hand, having probably taken the alarm immediately on coming out of his room, and finding that Johnson had been removed. One Springthorpe, advancing towards his lordship, presented a pistol, and required him to surrender; but his lordship putting his hand to his pocket, Springthrope imagined he was feeling for a pistol, and stopped short, being probably intimidated. He thus suffered the Earl to escape back into the house, where he fastened the doors and stood on his defence.
"The crowd of people who had come to apprehend him beset the house, and their number increased very fast. In about two hours Lord Ferrers appeared at the garret window, and called out: 'How is Johnson?' Springthorpe answered: 'He is dead,' upon which his lordship insulted him, and called him a liar, and swore he would not believe anybody but the surgeon, Kirkland. Upon being again assured that he was dead, he desired that the people might be dispersed, saying that he would surrender; yet, almost in the same breath, he desired that the people might be let in, and have some victuals and drink; but the issue was that he went away again from the window, swearing that he would not be taken.
"The people, however, still continued near the house, and two hours later he was seen on the bowling-green by one, Curtis, a collier. 'My lord' was then armed with a blunderbuss and a dagger and two or three pistols; but Curtis, so far from being intimidated, marched boldly up to him, and his lordship was so struck with the determinate resolution shown by this brave fellow, that he suffered him to seize him without making any resistance. Yet the moment that he was in custody he declared that he had killed a villain, and that he gloried in the deed."
The tragedy is now hastening to its close. The assassin was kept in custody at Ashby until a coroner's jury brought in a verdict of "Wilful Murder" against him, when he was transferred to Leicester, and a fortnight later to London, making the journey in his own splendid equipage with six horses, and "dressed like a jockey, in a close riding-frock, jockey boots and cap, and a plain shirt." He was lodged in the Round Tower of the Tower of London, where, with a couple of warders at his elbow night and day, with sentries posted outside his door, and another on the drawbridge, he passed the last weeks of his doomed life.
In mid-April he was duly tried by his Peers at the Bar of the House of Lords; and, although he tried with marvellous skill and ingenuity to prove that he was insane when he committed the murder, he was, without a dissentient voice, pronounced "Guilty," and sentenced to be "hanged by the neck until he was dead," when his body should be handed over to the surgeons for dissection. One concession he claimed—pitiful salve to his pride—that he should be hanged by a cord of silk, the privilege due to his rank as a Peer of the realm; and this was granted as a matter of course.
One day in early May the scaffold was reared at Tyburn, where so many other malefactors had looked their last on the world; and at nine o'clock in the morning Lord Ferrers started on his last journey—the most splendid and most tragic of his chequered life. He was allowed, as a last favour, to travel to his death, not in the common hangman's cart as an ordinary criminal, but in his own landau, drawn by 'six beautiful horses; and thus he made his stately progress to Tyburn.
Probably no man ever journeyed to the scaffold under such circumstances of pomp and splendour. It might well, indeed, have been the bridal procession of a great nobleman that the black avenues of curious spectators in London's streets had come to see, and not the last grim journey of a malefactor to the hangman's rope. His very dress was that of a bridegroom, consisting, as it did, to quote again from the Gentleman's Magazine,