"The scene opened on Wednesday with all its pomp," wrote Walpole, who although not present seems to have followed the trial with the keenest interest, "and the doubly-noble prisoner went through her part with universal admiration. Instead of her usual ostentatious folly and clumsy pretensions to cunning, all her conduct was decent, and even seemed natural. Her dress was entirely black and plain; her attendants not too numerous; her dismay at first perfectly unaffected. A few tears balanced cheerfulness enough, and her presence of mind and attention never deserted her. This rational behaviour and the pleadings of her Counsel, who contended for the finality of her Ecclesiastical Court's sentence against a second trial, carried her triumphantly through the first day, and turned the stream much in her favour."
The following day proved a much more severe test to her Grace's composure; and no sooner had the Court risen than "she had to be blooded, and fell into a great passion of tears." And each succeeding day added to the tension and anxieties which she struggled so bravely to conceal.
On the third day of the trial Walpole says:
"The plot thickens, or rather opens. Yesterday the judges were called on for their opinions, and una voce dismantled the Ecclesiastical Court. The Attorney-General, Thurlow, then detailed the 'Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Chudleigh, alias Hervey, alias the most high and puissante Princess, the Duchess of Kingston.' Her Grace bore the narration with a front worthy of her exalted rank. Then was produced the first capital witness, the ancient damsel who was present at her first marriage. To this witness her Grace was benign, but had a transitory swoon at the mention of her dear Duke's name; and at intervals has been blooded enough to have supplied her execution if necessary. Two babes were likewise proved to have blessed her first nuptials, one of whom, for aught that appears, may exist and become Earl of Bristol."
Three days later Horace Walpole concludes his narrative of the trial, which we are afraid his antipathy to the adventurous Duchess has coloured a little too vividly:
"The wisdom of the land," he writes, "has been exerted for five days in turning a Duchess into a Countess, and yet does not think it a punishable crime for a Countess to convert herself into a Duchess. After a pretty defence, and a speech of fifty pages (which she herself had written and pronounced very well), the sages, in spite of the Attorney-General (who brandished a hot iron) dismissed her with the single injunction of paying the fees, all voting her guilty; but the Duke of Newcastle, her neighbour in the country, softening his vote by adding 'erroneously, not intentionally.' So ends the solemn farce. The Earl of Bristol, they say, does not intend to leave her that title.... I am glad to have done with her."
A few days later, in spite of a writ, ne exeat regno, which had been issued against her, she was back in France, travelling in state as "Madame la Duchesse de Kingston." From Calais she made her magnificent progress to Rome, where Pope and Cardinals vied in doing honour to so exalted and charming a lady, and entertained her as regally as if she had been a Queen. Returning to Calais she installed herself in a palatial house where she dispensed a lavish hospitality, and flung her gold about with prodigal hands.
But Calais soon palled on her exacting taste. It was too dull, too cabined for her activities. So away she sailed in a splendid yacht to St Petersburg where Catherine received her as a sister-Empress, and gave balls, banquets, and receptions in her honour. From St Petersburg she continued her journey to Poland, and made a conquest of Prince Radzivill, who exhausted his purse and ingenuity in devising entertainments for her, including the excitement of a bear-hunt by torchlight.
Back again in France, flushed with her triumphs, she purchased a Palace in Paris, and the château of Sainte Assize in the country, at which alternately she held her Court, and moved among her courtiers an obese Queen, alternately charming them with her graciousness and shocking them by her profanity and indelicacies. Here she made her will, leaving most of her jewels to her "dear friend," the Russian Empress; a large diamond to her equally good friend the Pope; and an extremely valuable pearl necklace and earrings to my Lady Salisbury, for no other reason than that they had been originally worn some centuries earlier by a lady who bore the same title.
But the career of the profligate and eccentric Duchess was nearing its close, and she died as she had lived, game and defiant. While she was sitting at dinner news came that a lawsuit had been decided against her. She broke out in a violent passion and burst a blood-vessel. But, even dying as she was, she refused to remain in bed. "At your peril, disobey me!" she said to her protesting attendants. "I will get up!" She got up, dressed, and walked about the room. Then, calling for wine, she drained glass after glass of Madeira. "I will lie down on the couch," she then said. "I can sleep, and after that I shall be quite well again."
From that sleep she never awoke. The maidservants who held her hands felt them grow gradually cold. The Duchess was dead. After life's fitful fever, she had found rest. Thus died, in the sixty-ninth year of her life Elizabeth, Duchess of Kingston, who had drunk deep of life's cup of pleasure; who had alternately shocked and dazzled the world; and who had found that the greatest triumphs of her beauty and the most prodigal indulgence of her appetites were "all vanity."
If ever woman was born to romance it was surely the Lady Sarah Lennox, whose beauty and witchery nearly won for her a crown as England's Queen a a century and a half ago; and who, after ostracising herself from Society by a flagrant lapse from virtue, lived to become the mother of heroes, and to end her days in blindness and a tragic loneliness.
There was both passion and a love of adventure in the Lady Sarah's blood; for had she not for great-grandfather that most fascinating and philandering of monarchs, the second Charles; and for great-grandmother, the lovely and frail Louise Renée de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, the most seductive of the beautiful trio of women—the Duchesses of Portsmouth, Morland, and Mazarin—who spent their days in "open dalliance" with the "Merrie Monarch," and their nights at the basset-table, winning or losing guineas by the thousand.
As an infant, too, she drank in romance from her mother's breast—the mother whose marriage is surely the most romantic in the annals of our Peerage. One day, so the story runs, the Duke of Richmond, when playing cards with the first Earl of Cadogan, staked the hand and fortune of his heir, the Earl of March, on the issue of the game, which was won by Lord Cadogan. On the following day the debt of honour was paid. The youthful Earl was sent for from his school, Cadogan's daughter from the nursery; a clergyman was in attendance, and the two children were told they were immediately to be made husband and wife.
At sight of the plain, awkward, shrinking girl who was to be his bride the handsome school-boy exclaimed in disgust, "You are surely not going to marry me to that dowdy!" But there was no escape; the demands of "honour" must be satisfied. The ceremony was quickly performed; and within an hour of first setting eyes on each other, the children were separated—Lord March being whisked back to his school-books, and his bride to her nursery toys.
Many years later Lord March returned to London after a prolonged tour round the world—a strikingly handsome, cultured young man, by no means eager to renew his acquaintance with the "ugly duckling" who was his wife. One evening when he was at the opera his eyes were drawn to a vision of rare girlish loveliness in one of the boxes. He had seen no sight so fair in all his wide travels; it fascinated him as beauty never yet had had power to do.
Turning to a neighbour he asked who the lovely girl was. "You must indeed be a stranger to London," was the answer, "if you do not know the beautiful Lady March, the toast of the town!" Lady March! Could that exquisite flower of young womanhood be the ugly, awkward girl he had married so strangely as a boy? Impossible! He proceeded to the box, introduced himself, and found to his delight that the beautiful girl was indeed none other than Lady March, whom he had every right to claim as his wife. A few too brief years of happy wedded life followed; and when the Earl died in the prime of manhood his Countess, unable to live without him, began to droop and, within a few months, followed him to the grave.
Such was the singular romance to which Lady Sarah Lennox owed her being, a romance which was to have a parallel in her own life. As a child in the nursery she gave promise of charms at least as great as those of her mother. And she was as merry and full of mischief as she was beautiful.
One day (it is her son who tells the story) she was walking with her nurse and her aunt, Lady Louisa Conolly, in Kensington Gardens, when George II. chanced to stroll by. Breaking away from her guardian the pretty little madcap ran up to the King and exclaimed in French: "How do you do, Mr King? You have a beautiful house here, n'est-ce pas?" George was so delighted with the child's naïveté that he took her up in his arms, gave her a hearty kiss, and would not release her until she had promised to come and see him.
And how the King and his "little sweetheart," as he called her, enjoyed these visits! and the merry romps they had together!
"On one occasion," says Captain Napier (Lady Sarah's son of much later days), "after a romp with my mother, the King suddenly snatched her up in his arms, and, after squeezing her in a large china jar, shut down the cover to prove her courage; but soon released her when he found that the only effect was to make her, with a merry voice, begin singing the French song of Malbruc, with which he was quite delighted."
But these happy days of romping with a King came too soon to an end. On her mother's death Lady Sarah, then only five years old, was carried off to Ireland, to the home of Lady Kildare. There she remained for eight years, when she returned to England and the guardianship of her eldest sister, Lady Holland. As soon as George heard of the return of his little playmate he sent for her, hoping to resume the romps of early years. But Lady Sarah, though prettier than ever, proved so shy and so embarrassed by the King's familiarities that at last he exclaimed in disgust: "Pooh! she has grown too stupid!"
But if Lady Sarah's shyness had cost her the King's favour, her beauty and girlish grace quickly won for her another Royal friend—none other than George's grandson and heir to the throne, then a handsome boy little older than herself, and at least equally diffident. Every time the young Prince saw her he became more and more her slave, until his conquest was complete. He was only happy by her side; while she found her dogs and squirrels more entertaining company than the King-to-be.
Lady Sarah was now blossoming into young womanhood. Every year added some fresh touch of beauty and grace. She was the pet and idol of the Court, captivating young and old alike by her charms and winsomeness. Horace Walpole raved about her. When she took part in a play at Holland House, of which he was a spectator, he wrote:
"Lady Sarah was more beautiful than you can conceive.... When she was in white, with her hair about her ears and on the ground, no Magdalen by Correggio was half so lovely and so expressive."
And Lord Holland, her brother-in-law, draws this alluring picture of her:
"Her beauty is not easily described otherwise than by saying she had the finest complexion, most beautiful hair, and prettiest person that was ever seen, with a sprightly and fine air, a pretty mouth, and remarkably fine teeth, and excess of bloom in her cheeks."
Although the Prince's passion for her was patent to all the Court, she seems either not to have seen it or to have been indifferent to it—an indifference which naturally only served to feed the flames of his love. One day shortly after he had succeeded to the throne, George, the shyest of Royal lovers, determined to unbosom himself to Lady Sarah's friend, Lady Susan Strangways, since he could not summon up courage to declare his passion to the lady herself. After turning the conversation to the Coronation, "Ah!" he exclaimed with a sigh, "there will be no Coronation until there is a Queen." "But why, sir?" asked Lady Susan in surprise. "They want me to have a foreign Queen," George answered, "but I prefer an English one; and I think your friend is the fittest person in the world to be my Queen. Tell her so from me, will you?"
A few days later when the King met Lady Sarah, he asked: "Has your friend given you my message?" "Yes, sir." "And what do you think of it? Pray tell me frankly; for on your answer all my happiness depends. What do you think of it?" "Nothing, sir," Lady Sarah answered demurely, with downcast eyes. "Pooh!" exclaimed the King, as he turned away in dudgeon, "nothing comes of nothing."
Thus foolishly Lady Sarah turned her back on a throne, which there is small doubt might have been hers for a word. Why that word was not spoken will always remain a mystery. It was said that her heart had already been won by Lord Newbattle, a handsome young gallant of the Court; but what was taken for a conquest seems to have been but a passing flirtation. How little Lord Newbattle's heart was involved was shortly proved when, on learning that Lady Sarah had been thrown from her horse and had broken her leg, he made the heartless remark, "That will do no great harm, for her legs were ugly enough before!"
The news of this accident, however, had a very different effect on the young King, who was consumed with anxiety about the girl he still loved passionately, in spite of her coldness. He promptly sent the Court surgeon to attend to her; kept couriers constantly travelling to and fro to bring the latest bulletins, and knew no peace until she was restored to health again. When at last she was able to return to London he was unremitting in his attentions to her. He was never happy apart from her; and, in fact, his intentions became so marked that his mother, the Princess-Dowager, and the ministers were reduced to despair.
Secret orders were given that the young people were never to be allowed to be together. The Princess, indeed, carried her interference to the extent of breaking in on their conferences, and rudely laughing in Lady Sarah's face as she led her son away. "I felt many a time," the insulted girl said in later years, "that I should have loved to box her ears." But Lady Sarah, who seems at last to have awakened to the attractions of the alliance offered to her, was not the girl to sit down tamely under such interference with her liberty. Her spirit was aroused, and she brought all her arts of coquetry to her aid.
If she could not see the King at Court she would see him elsewhere. When George took his daily ride he was sure to meet or overtake Lady Sarah, attired in some bewitching costume; or to see her daintily plying her rake among the haymakers in the meadows of Holland House, a picture of rustic beauty well-calculated to make his conquest more complete.
Once, it is said, when she had not seen her Royal lover for some days she even disguised herself as a servant and intercepted him in one of the corridors of the Palace. The coy and cold maiden who had told the King that she "thought nothing" of his advances, had developed into the veriest coquette who ever set her heart on winning a man. Such is the strange waywardness of woman; and by such revolutions she often courts her own defeat.
That King George still remained as infatuated as ever is quite probable. Had it been possible for him to have his own way, Lady Sarah Lennox might still have won a crown as Queen of England. But the forces arrayed against him were too strong for so pliant a monarch. In a weak moment, despairing of winning the girl he loved, he had placed his matrimonial fate unreservedly in the hands of the Privy Council; and from this surrender of his liberty there was no escape.
Colonel Graeme had been despatched to every Court on the Continent, in quest of a suitable bride for him; and his verdict had been given in favour of Charlotte Sophia, the unattractive daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg Strelitz. The die was cast; and George, just when happiness was within his reach, was obliged to bury the one romance of his young life and to sacrifice himself to duty and his Royal word. To Lady Sarah the news of the arranged marriage was no doubt a severe blow—to her vanity, if not to her heart. It was a "bolt from the blue," for which she was not prepared. But she was too proud to show her wounds.
"I shall take care," she wrote to her friend, Lady Susan, on the very day on which the blow fell, "I shall take care to show that I am not mortified to anybody; but if it is true that one can vex anybody with a reserved, cold manner, he shall have it, I promise him. Now as to what I wish about it myself, excepting this little message, I have almost forgiven him. Luckily for me I did not love him, and only liked, nor did the title weigh with me. So little, at least, that my disappointment did not affect my spirits more than an hour or two, I believe. I did not cry, I assure you, which I believe you will, as I know you were more set on it than I was. The thing I am most angry at is looking so like a fool, as I shall, for having gone so often for nothing, but I don't much care. If he was to change his mind again (which can't be, tho') and not give me a very good reason for his conduct, I would not have him; for if he is so weak as to be governed by everybody, I shall have but a bad time of it."
A few days later, the Royal betrothal was made public. At the wedding Lady Sarah tasted the first fruits of revenge, when she was by common consent, the most lovely of the ten beautiful bridesmaids who, in robes of white velvet and silver and with diamond-crowned heads, formed the retinue of George's homely little bride. During the ceremony George had no eyes for any but the vision of peerless beauty he had lost, who, compared with his ill-favoured bride, was "as a queenly lily to a dandelion."
The ceremony was marked by a dramatic incident which crowned Lady Sarah's revenge, and of which her son tells the following story. Among the courtiers assembled to pay homage to the new Queen was the half-blind Lord Westmorland, one of the Pretender's most devoted adherents.
"Passing along the line of ladies, and seeing but dimly, he mistook my mother for the Queen, plumped down on his knees and took her hand to kiss. She drew back startled, and deeply colouring, exclaimed, 'I am not the Queen, sir.' The incident created a laugh and a little gossip; and when George Selwyn heard of it he observed, 'Oh! you know he always loved Pretenders.'"
But if Lady Sarah had lost a crown there was still left a dazzling array of coronets, any one of which was hers for the taking. Her beauty which was now in full and exquisite flower drew noble wooers to her feet by the score; but to one and all—including, as Walpole records, Lord Errol—she turned a deaf ear. Picture then the amazement of the world of fashion when, within a year of refusing a Queendom, she became the bride of a mere Baronet—Sir Thomas Bunbury, who had barely reached his majority, and who, although he was already a full-blown Member of Parliament and of some note on the Turf, was scarcely known in the circles in which Lady Sarah shone so brilliantly.
More disconcerting still, Lady Sarah was avowedly happy with her baronet-husband.
"And who the d——," she wrote to her bosom-friend, Lady Susan, "would not be happy with a pretty place, a good house, good horses, greyhounds for hunting, so near Newmarket, what company we please in the house, and £2,000 a year to spend? Pray now, where is the wretch who would not be happy?"
And no doubt she was happy, with her dogs and horses, her peacocks and silver-pheasants, and her genial sport-loving husband who simply idolised her. Even after five years of this rustic life she wrote to Lady Susan, who was now also a wife:
"Good husbands are not so common, at least I see none like my own and your description of yours, from which I reckon that we are the two luckiest women living. As for me, I should be a monster of ingratitude if I ever made a single complaint and did not thank God for making me the happiest of beings."
It was fortunate that she had an idolatrous husband; for even in Arcadia she could not, or would not, keep her coquetry within decent bounds. She flirted outrageously with the neighbouring squires and with such men of rank as drifted her way; but the baronet saw no cause for alarm or resentment. He was frankly delighted that his wife had so many admirers. He basked genially in the reflected glory of his wife's conquests!
And Lady Sarah might have lived and died the baronet's adored wife had not Lord William Gordon crossed her path. Lord William was young, handsome, full of romance, a dangerous rival to the bucolic and stolid baronet, under whose unobservant eyes he carried on an open flirtation with his wife. Before Lady Sarah realised her danger, she had drifted into a liaison with the handsome Scot, which could only have one termination. One morning in February 1769 Sir Thomas awoke to find his nest empty. Lady Sarah had flown, and Lord William with her.
Then followed for Lady Sarah a brief period of fearful joy, of intoxicating passion. Far away near the Scottish border she and her lover spent halcyon days together. Their favourite walk by the banks of the Leader is known to-day as the "Lovers' Walk." It was a foolish paradise in which they were living, and a rude awaking was inevitable. After three months of bliss Lord William's family brought such pressure to bear on him that the lovers were compelled to separate—he to travel abroad, she to find a refuge from her shame under the roof of her brother, Charles, Duke of Richmond, at Goodwood, where, with her child (but not Sir Thomas Bunbury's), she spent a dozen years in penitence and isolation.
The life which had dawned so fairly seemed to be finally merged in night. Her betrayed husband had procured a divorce; and although he was chivalry itself in his forgiveness of and kindness to her, she realised that there was no hope of reunion with him. Days of weeping, nights of remorse, were her portion. But though she little dared to hope it, bright days were still in store for her—a happy and honourable wifehood, and the pride and blessing of children to rise up to do her honour.
It was the coming of the Hon. George Napier, an old Army friend of her brother, that heralded the new dawn for her darkened life. There were few handsomer men in England than this tall, stalwart son of the sixth Lord Napier, who is described as "faultless in figure and features." When he met Lady Sarah, under the roof of his old friend, her brother, he was still mourning the wife whom he had recently buried in New York; but the sight of such suffering and beauty allied touched a heart which he had thought dead to passion. That she was as poor as he was, and many years older mattered nothing to him. He soon realised that his only hope of happiness lay in winning her. In vain the lady protested that she was not fit to be his wife.
"He knows," she wrote to Lady Susan, "I do love him; and being certain of that, he laughs at every objection that is started, for he says that, loving me to the degrees he does, he is quite sure never to repent marrying me."
Lady Sarah's family put every possible obstacle in the way of the proposed union, but the masterful soldier had his way; and one August day in 1781 Captain Napier led his tarnished but loved and loving bride to the altar. For many years poverty was their lot; but they laughed at their empty purse and found their reward in mutual devotion and the sight of their children growing in strength and beauty by their side. Of their five sons, three won laurels on many battlefields and died generals; one of the trio was the famous conqueror of Scinde, another was the historian of the Peninsular War.
When, after twenty-three years of ideally happy life together, Colonel Napier (as he had become) died, his widow was disconsolate.
"How I wish I could go with him," she wrote; "the gentlest, bravest man who ever brought sunshine and solace into a woman's darkened heart."
But Lady Sarah was destined to walk life's path alone for nearly twenty years longer, finding her only comfort in watching the careers of her gallant boys.
To add to her misfortunes her last days were spent in darkness. The eyes that had melted with love and sparkled with mischief, could no longer even look on the sons she loved.
A pathetic story is told of these last clouded days of Lady Sarah's life. In the year 1814, when, although an old woman she had still twelve years to live, she was present at a sermon preached by the Dean of Canterbury in aid of an Infirmary for the cure of diseases of the eye. As the preacher drew a pathetic picture of King George, a liberal patron of the Infirmary, spending his days in darkness among the splendours of his palace, tears were seen to stream down Lady Sarah's cheeks, until, overcome by emotion, she asked her attendant to lead her out of the church.
Who shall say what sad and tender memories were evoked by this picture of her lover of fifty years earlier, in his darkness and isolation, shut out like herself by a dark barrier from the joy and light of life. Among the mental pictures that thronged her brain was, probably, that of a dainty maiden, rake in hand, glancing archly from under her bonnet at a gallant young Prince, whose eyes spoke love to hers as he rode lingeringly by; and that other picture of the same maid, with downcast eyes, declaring that she "thought nothing" of her Royal lover's vows, though they carried a crown with them.
Life has seldom dawned for any daughter of a noble house more fair or full of promise than for the infant Lady Susanna Cochrane, second daughter of John, fourth Earl of Dundonald. All that rank and wealth and beauty could give were hers by birth. Her mother was an Earl's daughter, and had for grandfather the Duke of Atholl. Her paternal grandmother was Lady Susanna Hamilton, daughter of the Duke of Hamilton; and on both sides she came from a line of fair women, many of whom, like her mother, had ranked among the most beautiful in all Scotland.
Such was the splendid heritage of Lady Susanna when she opened her eyes on the world two centuries ago; and, during the earlier years of her life, it seemed that Fortune, who had already dowered her so richly, could not smile too sweetly on her. She grew to girlhood and young womanhood more beautiful even than her mother or her two sisters, Anne and Catherine, of whom the former became a Duchess at sixteen; while Catherine was not long out of the schoolroom before her hand was won by the Earl of Galloway.
As for Susanna, the loveliest of the "three Graces"—"Scotland's fairest daughter," to quote a chronicler of the time—she counted her high-placed lovers by the score almost before she had graduated into long frocks; and Charles, sixth Earl of Strathmore, was accounted the luckiest man north of the Tweed when he won her for his bride.
It was an ideal union, this of the beautiful Lady Susanna with the stalwart and handsome young Earl—"the fairest lass and bonniest lad" in all Scotland; and none who saw their radiant happiness on their wedding-day could have dreamt how soon tragedy was to close so bright a chapter of romance.
For a few short years the young Earl and his Countess were ideally happy.
"I never thought," Lady Strathmore wrote to a friend, "that life could be so sweet. The days are all too short to crowd my happiness into."
Then, when the sky was fairest, the blow fell.
One May day in the year 1728, the young Earl went to Forfar to attend the funeral of a friend, and among his fellow-mourners were two men of his acquaintance, James Carnegie, of Finhaven, and a Mr Lyon, of Brigton, the latter a distant relative of the Earl.
After the funeral the three men sat drinking together, as was the custom of the time, and then adjourned to a tavern in Forfar, where they continued their potations until all three were, beyond all doubt, in an advanced state of intoxication, and ripe for any mischief.
From the tavern they went, uproariously drunk, to call on a sister of Carnegie, where Mr Lyon not only became quarrelsome, but with drunken jocularity, had the audacity to pinch his hostess's arms. It was with the utmost difficulty that Lord Strathmore induced his two companions to leave the house, in which one of them had so far forgotten what was due from him as a gentleman; and it was scarcely to be wondered at that an unseemly brawl began almost as soon as they were in the street.
Mr Lyon began to conduct himself more outrageously than before, now that the modified restraint of a lady's presence was removed. With boisterous horseplay, he pushed Carnegie into a deep gutter which ran by the roadside, and from which Carnegie emerged covered with mud and raging with fury. Such an insult could only be wiped out with blood; and, drawing his sword, Carnegie rushed at his tormentor. The Earl, in order to avert a tragedy, imprudently threw himself between the two antagonists, with the intention of diverting the blow. Carnegie's sword entered his body, passing clean through it; and he fell to the ground a dying man. Two hours later the young Earl gasped his life out in the tavern, where he had drunk "not wisely, but too well."
Thus a drunken brawl, following on a funeral, made a widow of the beautiful Countess of Strathmore just when life was at its brightest and best, and when the days seemed all too short to hold her happiness.
As for James Carnegie of Finhaven, he was brought to trial on a charge of murder, and every nerve was strained to bring him to the gallows. That this was not his fate, in spite of the terrible provocation he had received, and the obviously accidental nature of the tragedy, he owed entirely to the skill and eloquence of his counsel, Robert Dundas of Arniston, who played so cleverly on the feelings and self-importance of the jury that they returned a verdict of acquittal.
The widowed Countess mourned her lord deeply and sincerely. More beautiful than ever (she was barely twenty when this tragedy came to cloud her life), and richly dowered, many a wooer sought to console her with a new prospect of wedded happiness. She had naught to say to any of them. She preferred to live alone with her memories, and to find solace in good works. And thus for seventeen years she lived, a model of all that is beautiful in womanhood, captivating all hearts by her sweetness and graciousness, and by a beauty which sorrow only served to refine and make more lovely still.
Thus we find her in 1745, a gracious and lovely woman, still young, dispensing her charities and hospitalities, and esteemed everywhere as a model of all the proprieties. But she was still a woman. Romance and passion were by no means dead in her; and to this "eternal feminine" we must look for an explanation of the strange event which now follows in her story.
Among the Countess's many servants was one George Forbes, a young and strikingly handsome groom, who had been taken on as stable-boy by her late husband. Forbes was a simple, manly fellow, a peasant's son, and with no ambition beyond the state of life to which he had been born. He was proud of the fact that he had served his mistress well, and that she liked him. That Lady Strathmore valued her groom was proved by the fact that she chose him as her escort whenever she went riding, and that she promoted him to the charge of her stables—a proof of confidence which no doubt he had earned. But that his high-placed mistress should regard him otherwise than as a servant was an absurd idea which never entered his head.
One day, however, the Countess summoned the groom to her presence, and, to his amazement and embarrassment, told him that she had long grown to love him, and that she asked nothing better of life than to become his wife. Overcome with surprise and confusion, Forbes protested—"But my lady, think of the difference between us. You are one of the greatest ladies in the land, and I am no better than the earth you tread on." "You must not say that," the Countess replied. "You are more to me than rank or riches. These I count as nothing, compared with the happiness you have it in your power to bestow."
In the face of such pleading, from one so beautiful and so reverenced, what could the poor groom do but consent, fearful though he was of the consequences of such an ill-assorted union? And thus strangely and romantically it was that, one April day in 1745, the Countess of Strathmore, the descendant of dukes and kings, gave her hand at the altar to the ex-stable-lad and peasant's son.
What followed this singular union was precisely what was to be expected. The Countess was disowned by her noble relatives; her friends with one consent gave her the cold shoulder; and, unable to bear any longer the constant slights and her complete isolation, she was thankful to escape with her low-born husband to the Continent.
Here familiarity with the groom quickly, and naturally, perhaps, bred contempt and disillusion. His coarseness offended every susceptibility; he was frankly impossible in such an intimate relation; and after she had given birth to a daughter in Holland, she arranged a separation, for which the groom was, at least, as grateful as herself. The child—the very sight of whom, reminding her as she did of the father, she could not bear—was placed in a convent at Rouen, where she was tenderly cared for by the abbess and nuns. As for the mother, weary and disillusioned, she rambled aimlessly and miserably about the Continent until, after nine years of unhappiness, death came to her at Paris as a merciful friend. Such was the sordid close of a life that had opened as fairly as any that has fallen to the lot of woman.
And what of the child who drew from her mother royal and ducal strains, and from her father the blood of stablemen and peasants? At the Rouen convent she grew up to girlhood, perfectly happy, among the nuns she learned to love. The sad and beautiful lady who had come once or twice to see her, and who, she was told, was her mother, had become a dim memory of early girlhood. Who the great lady was, and who was her father, she did not know. This knowledge the nuns, in their wisdom, kept from her—if, indeed, they knew themselves.
One day, in 1761, her days of childish happiness came to an abrupt and sensational end. A rough seafaring man called at the convent with a letter from her father demanding the return of his daughter. The bearer was sent by the captain of a merchant-vessel, who had instructions to convey the girl from Rouen to Leith; and, after an affecting farewell to the abbess and nuns, who had been so kind to her, Susan Janet Emilia (for that was the girl's name) started with her strange escort on the long journey to a parent whom she had never consciously seen. The father, released by the death of the Countess, had married a second wife of his own station, and had settled as a livery-stable keeper at Leith, where, with his rapidly-growing family, he had now made his home for some years.
At last Emilia was handed over to the custody of her groom-father, who conducted her to his home, which, as may be imagined, was a pitiful and sordid exchange for the peace and happiness of her convent life. From the first day the new life was impossible. Emilia was treated by her stepmother with coarseness and brutality; she was daily taunted with her dependent position, and shown in a hundred ways that her presence was unwelcome.
Can one wonder that the proud spirit of the girl rebelled against such ignominy? It was better far to trust to the mercy of the world than to bear the brutal treatment of her low-born stepmother. And thus it came to pass that, early one morning, before the household was awake, Emilia slipped stealthily away with a few shillings, all her worldly possessions, in her pocket. Walking a few miles along the shore, she took the packet-boat, and crossed to the Fife coast, thus placing a broad arm of the sea between herself and the house of misery and oppression she had left for ever.
For days this descendant of Scotland's proudest nobles tramped aimlessly through the country, sleeping in barns or craving the shelter of the humblest cottage, and, when her money was exhausted, even begging her bread from door to door.
At last human nature reached its limit. Late one night, footsore and fainting from exhaustion and hunger, she presented herself at a remote farmhouse, and begged piteously for a meal and a night's rest. None but the hardest heart could have resisted such a pathetic appeal, and Farmer Lauder and his good wife had hearts as large as their bodies. At last the waif had fallen among good Samaritans. She was received with open arms; and instead of being sent away in the morning, was cordially invited to make her home with them.
The rest of Emilia's strange life-story can be told in few words. After a few years of peaceful and happy life in the hospitable farmhouse, she married the farmer's only son, an honest and worthy young fellow who loved her dearly. She became the mother of many children, who in their humble life knew nothing of their high-placed cousins, the Dukes and Earls of another world than theirs.
When, in process of time, her husband died—many of her children had died young, the rest were far from prosperous—Mrs Lauder retired to spend her last days in a small cottage at St Ninian's, near Stirling, where for a time she lived in the utmost poverty. Then, when her life was almost flickering out in destitution, a few of her great relatives condescended to acknowledge her existence. The Earls of Galloway and Dunmore, the Duke of Hamilton, and Mrs Stewart Mackenzie combined to provide her with an annuity of £100; and, thus secure against want, the old lady contrived to spin out the thread of her days a few years longer. Thus died, at the advanced age of eighty-five, eating the bread of charity, the woman who had in her veins the blood of Scotland's greatest men and her fairest women.
The circle of the British Peerage has included many "vagabonds," some of whom have worn coronets in our own day; but it is doubtful whether any one of them all has had the wanderlust in his veins to the same degree as Edward Wortley Montagu, whose adventurous life was ignominiously ended by a partridge-bone more than a century and a quarter ago.
It would have been strange if this blue-blooded "rolling-stone" had been a normal man, since he had for mother that most wayward and eccentric woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who dazzled England by her beauty and brilliant intellect, and amused it by her oddities in the days of the first two Georges. This grandson of the Duke of Kingston, and great-grandson of the first Earl of Sandwich was "his mother's boy"—with much of his mother's physical and mental charms, and more than her eccentricities, as his story abundantly proves.
As a child of three he accompanied his parents to Constantinople, where his father, the Hon. Sydney Montagu, was sent as our Ambassador; and there he won a place in history at a very early age as the first English child to be inoculated for the small-pox. Probably, too, it was his boyish life in Turkey that inoculated him with the passion for all things Eastern, that so largely influenced his later life.
His adventures began when his parents returned to London, and the boy was sent as a pupil to Westminster. It was not long before he rebelled against the discipline and trammels of school-boy life; and one day he threw down his Euclid and Cæsar and vanished as completely as if the earth had swallowed him. Every street, court, and alley was searched in vain for the truant; advertisements and handbills offering a reward for his recovery were equally futile. Not a trace of the runaway was to be found anywhere.
One day, a good twelve months after his family had concluded that the lad was dead, or, at least, lost for ever, Mr Foster, a friend of his father, chanced to be in Blackwall when he heard a familiar voice crying fish. "That is the voice of young Montagu," he exclaimed, and promptly despatched his servant to bring the boy to him. The fish-seller innocently came back, his basket of plaice and flounders on his head, and was at once recognised by Mr Foster as the truant son of Lady Mary.
For a time he denied his identity with the utmost coolness; then, seeing that denial was useless, he flung away his basket and took to his heels. It was not, however, difficult to trace him; he was tracked to his master's shop, where it was found that he had been a model apprentice and fish-hawker for a year; and he was induced to return to his parents and to school. Thus ignominiously ended Edward's first adventure, the precursor of a hundred others.
He had, however, only been back at his books a few months when he vanished again—this time as apprentice on a vessel bound to Oporto, the captain of which, a Quaker, treated the lad with all kindness and consideration. Arrived at Portugal he ran away again, and, tramping into the interior, begging food and shelter on the way, he found work in the vineyards, where for two years or more he shared the life of the peasants. One day, as good or ill luck would have it, he was ordered to drive some asses to the nearest seaport, where he was recognised both by the English Consul and his old friend, the Quaker; and once more the prodigal was induced to return to his father's roof.
For a time he proved a model student, to the surprise and delight of his parents; but once more "hope told a flattering tale." For the third time he disappeared, and was soon on his way to the Mediterranean as a sailor working before the mast, and ideally happy in his vagabond life. This time his father's patience was quite exhausted. He refused to trouble any more about his prodigal son, declaring that "he had made his bed and must lie on it."
Mr Foster, however, the rescuer from the fish-basket, was of another mind. He went in chase of the fugitive, ran him to earth, and brought him again triumphantly home, submissive but unrepentant. It was quite clear that the boy would never settle down to the humdrum life of home and school, and, with his father's permission, Mr Foster took the restless youth for a long visit to the West Indies, where it seemed that at last he was cured of his passion for straying. A few years later we find him back in England, a model of stability, a student and a scholar, who, in 1747, blossomed into a knight of the shire for the County of Huntingdon. The rolling-stone had come to rest at last, and had actually developed into a pillar of the State!
But this eminently respectable chapter in Montagu's chequered life was destined to be a short one. He soon found himself so uncomfortably deep in debt that he vanished again—this time to escape from his creditors. He turned up smiling in Paris, where the sedate legislator blossomed into the gambler and roué, dividing his time between the seductive poles of the gaming-table and fair women.
His course of dissipation, however, received a sudden and severe check one Sunday morning in the autumn of 1751, when he was rudely disturbed by the entry of a posse of officials into his room, armed with a warrant for his imprisonment.
"On Sunday, the 31st of October 1751," Mr Montagu records, "when it was near one in the morning, as I was undressed and going to bed, I heard a person enter my room; and upon turning round and seeing a man I did not know, I asked him calmly what he wanted? His answer was that I must put on my clothes. I began to expostulate upon the motive of his apparition, when a commissary instantly entered the room with a pretty numerous attendance, and told me with great gravity that he was come, by virtue of a warrant for my imprisonment, to carry me to the Grand Chatelêt. I requested him again and again to inform me of the crime laid to my charge; but all his answer was, that I must follow him. I begged him to give me leave to write to Lord Albemarle, the English Ambassador, promising to obey the warrant if his Excellency was not pleased to answer for my forthcoming. But the Commissary refused me the use of pen and ink, though he consented that I should send a verbal message to his Excellency, telling me at the same time that he would not wait the return of the messenger, because his orders were to carry me instantly to prison. As resistance under such circumstances must have been unavailable, and might have been blameable, I obeyed the warrant by following the Commissary, after ordering one of my domestics to inform my Lord Albemarle of the treatment I underwent.
"I was carried to the Chatelêt, where the jailors, hardened by their profession, and brutal for their profit, fastened upon me as upon one of those guilty objects whom they lock up to be reserved for public punishment; and though neither my looks nor my behaviour betrayed the least symptom of guilt, yet I was treated as a condemned criminal. I was thrown into prison, and committed to a set of wretches who bore no character of humanity but its form. My residence—to speak in the jail dialect—was in the SECRET, which is no other than the dungeon of the prison, where all the furniture was a wretched mattress and a crazy chair. The weather was cold, and I called for a fire; but I was told I could have none. I was thirsty, and called for some wine and water, or even a draught of water by itself, but was denied it. All the favour I could obtain was a promise to be waited on in the morning; and then was left by myself under a hundred locks and bolts, with a bit of candle, after finding that the words of my jailors were few, their orders peremptory, and their favours unattainable.
"I continued in this dismal dungeon till the 2nd of November, entirely ignorant of the crime I was accused of; but at nine in the morning of that day, I was carried before a magistrate, where I underwent an examination by which I understood the heads of the charge against me, and which I answered in a manner that ought to have cleared my own innocence."
The story of the charge and trial is a long one; but it can be briefly outlined as follows:—It seems that one, Abraham Paya, a Jew, who, disguised as "Mr Roberts," was staying with a Miss Rose who was not his wedded wife, accused Montagu and two of his friends, Mr Taafe and Lord Southwell, of making him drunk as a preliminary to inveigling him into play and winning 870 louis d'or from him.
As the Jew, whom his losses had sobered, refused to pay, Montagu and his associates had compelled him by violence and threats to give them drafts for the sums owing to them. Then, knowing that payment would be refused, "Roberts" shook the dust of Paris off his feet, turned his back on lady and creditors alike, and ran away to Lyons. Whereupon, so said the complainant, Montagu and his fellow-thieves had ransacked his baggage (which he had foolishly left behind him), and appropriated all his money and jewels, to the value of many thousands of livres.
To quote Mr Montagu again, the latter part of the charge was that Mr Taafe