"she looked in at the little gate as I was passing through the court. She called and I went to her, when she told me she was come to wait on the Duke with her children. I proposed to open the gate and carry in her Ladyship; but she said she would not go in till I acquainted his Grace."
The Duke, however, after consulting with his minion Stockbrigg, who still ruled the castle and its lord alike, sent word that he refused to see his sister; and the broken-hearted woman walked sadly away. To a letter in which she begged "to speak but a few moments to your Grace, and if I don't, to your own conviction, clear up my injured innocence, inflict what punishment you please upon me," he returned no answer.
Trouble now began to fall thickly on Lady Jean. Her delicate child, Sholto, died after a brief illness. She was distracted with grief, and cried out in her deep distress: "O Sholto! Sholto! my son Sholto! if I could but have died for you!" This last blow of fate seems to have completely crushed her. A few months later, she gave up her gallant and hopeless struggle, but only with her life. Calling her remaining son to her bedside she said, with streaming eyes: "May God bless you, my dear son; and, above all, make you a worthy and honest man; for riches, I despise them. Take a sword, and you may one day become as great a hero as some of your ancestors." Then, but a few moments before drawing her last breath, she said to those around her: "As one who is soon to appear in the presence of Almighty God, to whom I must answer, I declare that the two children were born of my body." Thus passed "beyond these voices" a woman, who, whatever her faults, carried a brave heart through sorrows and trials which might well have crushed the proudest spirit.
Lady Jean's death probably did more to advance her son's cause than all her scheming and courage during life. Influential friends flocked to the motherless boy, whose misfortunes made such an appeal to sympathy and protection. His father succeeded to the family baronetcy and became a man of some substance. His uncle, the Duke, took to wife, at sixty-two, his cousin, "Peggy Douglas, of Mains," a lady of strong character who had long vowed that "she would be Duchess of Douglas or never marry"; and in Duchess "Peggy" Archibald found his most stalwart champion, who gave her husband no peace until the Duke, after long vacillation, and many maudlin moods, in which he would consign the "brat" to perdition one day and shed tears over his pathetic plight the next, was won over to her side. To such good purpose did the Duchess use her influence that when her husband the Duke died, in 1761, Colonel (now Sir John) Stewart was able to write to his elder son by his first marriage:
"DEAR JACK,—I have not had time till now to acquaint you of the Duke of Douglas's death, and that he has left your brother Archie his whole estate."
Thus did Lady Jean triumph eight years after her scheming brain was stilled in death.
The rest of this singular story must be told in few words, although its history covers many years, and would require a volume to do adequate justice to it. Within a few months of the Duke's death the curtain was rung up on the great Douglas Case, which for seven long years was to be the chief topic of discussion and dispute throughout Great Britain. Archibald's title to the Douglas lands was contested by the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Selkirk, the former claiming as heir-male, the latter under settlements made by the Duke's father. Clever brains were set to work to solve the tangle in which the birth of the mysterious twins was involved. Emissaries were sent to France to collect evidence on one side and the other; notably Andrew Stewart, tutor to the young Duke of Hamilton, who seems to have been a perfect sleuth-hound of detective skill; and it was not until 1768 that the Scottish Court of Session gave its verdict, by the Lord-President's casting-vote (seven judges voting for and seven against) against Lady Jean's son.
"The judges," we are told, "took up no less than eight days in delivering their opinions upon the cause; and at last, by the President's casting-vote, they pronounced solemn judgment in favour of the plaintiffs."
Meanwhile (four years earlier) Sir John Stewart had followed his wife to the grave, declaring, just before his death:
"I do solemnly swear before God, as stepping into Eternity, that Lady Jean Douglas, my lawful spouse, did in the year 1748, bring into the world two sons, Archibald and Sholto; and I firmly believe the children were mine, as I am sure they were hers. Of the two sons, Archibald is the only one in life now."
But Archibald Douglas was not long to remain out of his estates. On appeal to the House of Lords, the decree of the Scottish Court was reversed, and the victory of Lady Jean's son was final and complete.
Of his later career it remains only to say that he entered Parliament and was created a Peer; and that he conducted himself in his exalted position with a dignity worthy of the parentage he had established. But, although he became the father of eight sons, four of whom succeeded him in the title, no grandson came to inherit his honours and estates; and to-day the Douglas lands, for which Lady Jean schemed and fought and laid down her life, have the Earl of Home for lord.
For many a century, ever since her history emerged from the mists of antiquity, Germany never lacked a Schulenburg to grace her Courts, to lead her armies, or to wear the mitre in her churches. They held their haughty heads high among the greatest subjects of her emperors; their family-tree bristled with marshals and generals, bishops and ambassadors; and they waxed so strong and so numerous that they came to be distinguished as "Black Schulenburgs" and "White Schulenburgs," as our own Douglases were "black" and "red."
But not one of all the glittering array of its dignitaries raised the family name to such an eminence—a bad eminence—as one of its plainest daughters, Ehrengard Melusina von der Schulenburg (to give her full, imposing name), who lived not only to wear the coronet of a Duchess of England, but to be "as much a Queen as ever there was in England."
Fräulein Ehrengard and her brother, who, as Count Mathias von der Schulenburg, was to win fame as the finest general in Europe of his day, were cradled and reared at the ancestral castle of Emden, in Saxony. The Schulenburg women were never famed for beauty; but Ehrengard was, by common consent, the "ugly duckling" of the family—abnormally tall, angular, awkward, and plain-featured, one of the last girls in Germany equipped for conquest in the field of love.
When she reached her sixteenth birthday, Ehrengard's parents were glad to pack her off to the Court of Herrenhausen, where the family influence procured for her the post of maid-of-honour to the Electress Sophia of Hanover. At any rate she was provided for—an important matter, for the Schulenburgs were as poor as they were proud—and she was too unattractive to get into mischief. But it is the unexpected that often happens; and no sooner had the Elector's son and heir, George, set eyes on the ungainly maid-of-honour than he promptly fell head over ears in love with her, to the amazement of the entire Court, and to the disgust of his mother, and of his newly-made bride, Sophia Dorothea of Zell. To George—an awkward, sullen young man of loutish manners and loose morals—the gaunt girl, with her plain, sallow face, was a vision of beauty. She appealed in some curious way to the animal in him; and before she had been many weeks at Herrenhausen she was his avowed mistress—one of many.
"Just look at that mawkin," the Electress Sophia once exclaimed to Lady Suffolk, who was a guest at the Hanoverian Court, "and think of her being my son's mistress!" But to any other than his mother, George's taste in women had long ceased to cause surprise. The ugly and gross appealed to a taste which such beauty and refinement as his young wife possessed left untouched. He had markedly demonstrated this perverseness of fancy already by showering his favours on the Baroness von Kielmansegg—who was reputed to be his natural sister, by the way—a lady so ugly that, as a child, Horace Walpole shrieked at sight of her.
She had, he recalls,
"two fierce black eyes, large and rolling, beneath two lofty arched eyesbrows; two acres of cheeks spread with crimson; an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distingushed from the lower part of her body, and no part of it restrained by stays. No wonder," he adds, "that a child dreaded such an ogress!"
Such were the two chief favourites of this unnatural heir to the throne of Hanover, who, by a curious turn of Fortune's wheel, was to wear the English crown as the first of the Georges. In the company of these ogresses and of a brace of Turkish attendants, George loved to pass his time in beer-guzzling and debauchery, while his beautiful and insulted wife sought solace in that ill-starred intrigue with Königsmarck, which was to lead to his tragic death and her own thirty years' imprisonment in the Schloss Ahlden, where she, who ought to have been England's Queen, ate her heart out in loneliness and sorrow.
To George his wife's intrigue was a welcome excuse for getting rid of her—a licence for unfettered indulgence in his low tastes; and the tragedy of her eclipse but added zest and emphasis to his unfettered enjoyment of life. In the hands of Von der Schulenburg the weak-minded, self-indulgent Prince was as clay in the hands of the potter. She moulded him as she willed, for she was as crafty and diplomatic as she was ill-favoured. Madame Kielmansegg was relegated to the shade, while she stood in the full limelight. She bore two daughters to her Royal lover—daughters who were called her "nieces," although the fiction deceived nobody—and as the years passed, each adding, if possible, to her unattractiveness, her hold on the Prince became still stronger.
Thirty years passed thus at the Herrenhausen Court, when the death of Queen Anne made "the high and mighty Prince George, Elector of Hanover, rightful King of Great Britain, France and Ireland." The sluggish sensual life of the Hanoverian Court was at an end. George was summoned to a great throne, and no King ever accepted a crown with such reluctance and ill-grace. He would, and he would not. For three weeks the English envoys tried every artifice to induce him to accept his new and exalted rôle—and finally they succeeded.
But even then he had not counted on the "fair" Ehrengard. She refused point-blank to go with him to that "odious England," where chopping off heads seemed to be a favourite pastime. She was quite happy in Hanover, and there she meant to stay. She fumed and raged, ran about the Palace gardens, embracing her dearly-loved trees and clinging hysterically to the marble statues, declaring that she could not and would not desert them. And thus George left her, to start on his unwelcome pilgrimage to England.
Madame von Kielmansegg, however, was of another mind. If her great rival would not go, she would; and after giving the Elector a day's start, she raced after him, caught him up, and, to her delight, was welcomed with open arms. The moment Von der Schulenburg heard of the trick "that Kielmansegg woman" had played on her, she, too, packed her trunks, and, taking her "nieces" with her, also set out in hot pursuit of her Royal lover and tool, and overtook him just as he was on the point of embarking for England.
George was now happy and reconciled to his fate, for his retinue was complete. And what a retinue! When the King landed at Greenwich with his grotesque assortment of Ministers, his hideous Turks, his two mistresses—one a gaunt giant, the other rolling in billows of fat—and his "nieces," the crowds thronging the landing-place and streets greeted the "menagerie" with jeers and shouts of laughter. They nicknamed Schulenburg the "Maypole," and Kielmansegg the "Elephant," and pursued the cavalcade with strident mockeries and insults.
"Goot peoples, vy you abuse us?" asked the Maypole, protruding her gaunt head and shoulders through the carriage window. "Ve only gom for all your goots." "And for all our chattels, too, —— you!" came the stinging retort from a wag in the crowd.
But Schulenburg soon realised that she could afford to smile and shrug her scraggy shoulders at the insolence of those "horrid Engleesh." She found herself in a land of Goshen, where there were many rich plums to be gathered by far-reaching and unscrupulous hands such as hers. If she could not love the enemy, she could at least plunder them; and this she set to work to do with a good will, while the plastic George looked on and smiled encouragement. There were pensions, appointments, patents—boons of all kinds to be trafficked in; and who had a greater right to act as intermediary than herself, the King's chère amie and right hand?
She sold everything that was saleable. As Walpole says, "She would have sold the King's honour at a shilling advance to the best bidder." From Bolingbroke's family she took £20,000 in three sums—one for a Peerage, another for a pardon, and the third for a fat post in the Customs. Gold poured in a ceaseless and glittering stream into her coffers. She refused no bribe—if it was big enough—and was ready to sell anything, from a Dukedom to a Bishopric, if her price was forthcoming. She made George procure her a pension of £7,500 a year (ten times as much as had long contented her well in Hanover); and when valuable posts fell vacant she induced him to leave them vacant and to give her the revenues.
Not content with filling her capacious pockets, she sighed for coronets—and got them in showers. Four Irish Peerages, from Baroness of Dundalk to Duchess of Munster, were flung into her lap. And yet she was not happy. She must have English coronets, and the best of them. So George made her Baroness of Glastonbury, Countess of Feversham, and Duchess of Kendal. And, to crown her ambition for such baubles, he induced the pliant German Emperor to make her a Princess—of Eberstein. Thus, with coffers overflowing with ill-gotten gold, her towering head graced with a dazzling variety of coronets, this grim idol of a King, who at sixty was as much her slave as in the twenties, was the proudest woman in England, patronising our own Duchesses, and snubbing Peeresses of less degree. She might be a "maypole"—hated and unattractive—but at least she towered high above all the fairest and most blue-blooded beauties of her "Consort's" Court.
When the South Sea Bubble rose to dazzle all eyes with its iridescent splendours, it was she more than any other who blew it. She was the witch behind the scenes of the South Sea and many another bubble Company, whether its object was to "carry on a thing that will turn to the advantage of the concerned," "the breeding and providing for natural children," or "for planting mulberries in Chelsea Park to breed silk-worms."
Every day of this wild, insane gamble, which wrecked thousands of homes, and filled hundreds of suicides' graves, brought its stream of gold to her exchequer; and when the bubbles burst in havoc and ruin she smiled and counted her gains, turning a deaf ear to the storm of execration that raged against her outside the palace walls. She knew that she had played her cards so skilfully that all the popular rage was impotent to harm her. Only one of her many puppets—Knight, the Treasurer of the South Sea Company—could be the means of doing her harm. If he were arrested and told all he knew, impeachment would probably follow, with a sentence of imprisonment and banishment. But the crafty German was much too old a bird to be caught in that way. She packed Knight off to Antwerp; and, through the influence of her friend, the German Empress, the States of Brabant refused to give him up to his fate.
The Duchess of Kendal was now at the zenith of her power and splendour. While Sophia Dorothea, the true Queen of England, was pining away in solitude in distant Ahlden, the German "Maypole" was Queen in all but name, ruling alike her senile paramour and the nation with a tactful, if iron hand. It is said that she was actually the morganatic wife of George, that the ceremony had been performed by no less a dignitary than the Archbishop of York; but, whether this was so or not, it is certain that this "old and forbidding skeleton of a giantess" was more England's Queen than any other Consort of the Georges.
She was present at every consultation between the King and his Ministers—indeed the conferences were invariably held in her own apartments, every day from five till eight. She understood and humoured every whim of her Royal partner with infinite tactfulness, to the extent even of encouraging his amours with young and attractive women, while she herself, to emphasise her platonic relations with him, affected an extravagant piety, attending as many as seven Lutheran services every Sunday. The only rival she had ever feared—and hated—Madame Kielmansegg, had long passed out of power, and as Countess of Darlington was too much absorbed in pandering to her mountain of flesh, and filling her pockets, to spare a regret for the Royal lover she had lost.
When George, on hearing of the death of his unhappy wife, Sophia Dorothea, set out on his last journey to Hanover, his only companion was the Duchess of Kendal, the woman to whose grim fascinations he had been loyal for more than forty years; and it was she who closed his eyes in the Palace of Osnabrück, in which he had drawn his first breath sixty-seven years earlier.
A French fortune-teller had warned him that "he would not survive his wife a year"; and, as he neared Osnabrück, the home of his brother, the Prince Bishop, his fatal illness overtook him.
"When he arrived at Ippenburen, he was quite lethargic; his hand fell down as if lifeless, and his tongue hung out of his mouth. He gave, however, signs enough of life by continually crying out, as well as he could articulate, 'Osnabrück!' 'Osnabrück!'"
As night fell the sweating horses galloped into Osnabrück; an hour later George died in his brother's arms, less than twelve months after his wife had drawn her last breath in her fortress-prison of Ahlden.
The Duchess of Kendal was disconsolate.
"She beat her breasts and tore her hair, and, separating herself from the English ladies in her train, took the road to Brunswick, where she remained in close seclusion about three months."
Returning to England, to the only solace left to her—her money-bags—she spent the last seventeen years of her life alternating between her villas at Twickenham and Isleworth. George had promised her that if she survived him, and if it were possible, he would revisit her from the spirit world.
"When," to quote Walpole again, "one day a large raven flew into one of the windows of her villa at Isleworth, she was persuaded that it was the soul of the departed monarch, and received and treated it with all the respect and tenderness of duty, till the Royal bird or she took their last flight."
Thus, shorn of all her powers and splendour, in obscurity, and hoarding her ill-gotten gold, died the most remarkable woman who has ever figured in the British Peerage. Her vast fortune was divided between her two "nieces," one of whom, created by her father, George, Countess of Walsingham, became the wife of that polished courtier and heartless man of the world, Philip, fourth Earl of Chesterfield.
Such are a few of the scenes which arrest the eyes as the panorama of our aristocracy passes before them; but it would require a library of volumes to do anything like adequate justice to the infinite variety of the dramas it presents. There is for instance a whole realm of romance in the origins of our noble families whose proud palaces are often reared on the most ignoble of foundations; and whose family trees flaunt, with questionable pride, many a spurious branch, while burying from view the humble roots from which they derive their lordly growth.
Although Cobden's assertion that "the British aristocracy was cradled behind city counters" errs on the side of exaggeration, there is no doubt that in the veins of scores of the proudest English peers runs the blood of ancestors who served customers in City shops.
When, a couple of centuries ago, John Baring, son of the Bremen Lutheran parson, Dr Franz Baring, opened his small cloth manufactory on the outskirts of Exeter, his most extravagant ambition was to build up a business which he could hand over to his sons, and to provide a few comforts for his old age; if any one had told him that he was laying the foundations of four families which should hold their heads proudly among the highest in the land he would no doubt have laughed aloud.
Yet John Baring lived to see his only daughter wedded to John Dunning, who made a Baroness of her. Of his four sons, Francis was created a Baronet by William Pitt, and found a wife in the cousin and co-heir of his Grace of Canterbury. The second son of this union, Alexander, was raised to the Peerage as Baron Ashburton, won a millionaire bride in the daughter of Senator Bingham, of Philadelphia, and, from the immense scale of his financial operations, was ranked by the Duc de Richelieu as "one of the six great powers of Europe"—England, France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia being the other five. Sir Francis's eldest grandson, after serving in the exalted offices of Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Admiralty, was created Baron Northbrook, a peerage which his son raised to an earldom; a second grandson qualified for a coronet as Baron Revelstoke; and a third is known to-day as Earl Cromer, the maker of modern Egypt, with half an alphabet of high dignities after his name.
At least three dukes (Northumberland, Leeds, and Bedford) count among their forefathers many a humble tradesman. Glancing down the pedigree of his Grace of Northumberland, we find among his direct ancestors such names as these, William le Smythesonne, of Thornton Watlous, husbandman; William Smitheson, of Newsham, husbandman; Ralph Smithson, tenant farmer; and Anthony Smithson, yeoman. It was this Anthony whose son, Hugh, left the paternal farm to serve behind the counter of Ralph and William Robinson, London haberdashers, and thus to take the first step of that successful career which made him a Baronet and a man of wealth. From Hugh, the London 'prentice sprang in the fourth generation, that other Hugh who won the hand of Lady Elizabeth Seymour, and with it the vast estates and historic name of Percy.
Some years before Hugh Smithson, the farmer's son, set foot in London streets, Edward Osborne left the modest family roof at Ashford, in Kent, to serve his apprenticeship to, and sit at the board of, William Hewitt, a merchant of Philpot Lane, who shortly after moved his belongings to a more fashionable home on London Bridge. One day it chanced that while his only daughter, the fair "Mistress Anne," was hanging her favourite bird outside the parlour window she lost her balance and fell into the river, then racing in high tide under the arches of the bridge. Fortunately for Mistress Anne the young apprentice saw the accident; quick as thought he threw off his shoes and surcoat, and, plunging into the swollen waters, caught the maiden by her hair as she was being swept away, and with difficulty dragged her to a passing barge, on which both found safety.
There was only one proper sequence to this romantic incident; Mistress Anne lost her heart to her gallant rescuer, the grateful parents smiled on his wooing, and one fine August morning, not many months later, the wedding-bells of St Magnus Church were spreading far and wide the news that young Osborne had found a bride in one of the fairest and richest heiresses of London town. In due time Osborne became, as his father-in-law had been before him, Lord Mayor of London; the son of this romantic alliance was knighted for prowess in battle; Edward Osborne's grandson was made a Baronet; and his great-grandson, Sir Thomas, added to the family dignities by becoming in turn, Baron, Viscount, Earl and Marquis, and, finally, Duke of Leeds. Thus only two generations separated the 'prentice lad of Philpot Lane from his descendant of the strawberry-leaves, the first of a long and still unbroken line of English dukes, whose blood has mingled with that of many noble families.
The noble house of Ripon has its origin in Yorkshire tradesmen who carried on business in York, some of whom were Lord Mayors of that city two or three centuries ago. These early Robinsons added to their fortune and enriched their blood by alliances with some of the oldest families in the north of England—such as the Metcalfes of Nappa and the Redmaynes of Fulford—and slowly but surely laid the foundation of one of the wealthiest and most distinguished of great English houses. For four generations the head of the family was a Cabinet Minister, while one of them was Prime Minister of England.
The Marquises of Bath derive descent from one John o' th' Inne, who was, probably, a worthy publican of Church Stretton, and who was descended in the seventh generation from William de Bottefeld, an under-forester of Shropshire in the thirteenth century; while, through his mother, the late Marquis of Salisbury derived a strain of 'prentice blood from Sir Christopher Gascoigne, the first Lord Mayor of London to live in the Mansion House.
Until a few years ago there might be seen in the main street of the village of Appletrewick, in Yorkshire, a single-storey cottage, little better than a hovel, which was the cradle of the noble family of Craven. It was from this humble home that William Craven, the young son of a husbandman, fared forth one day in the carrier's cart to seek fortune in far-away London town. Like many another boy who has taken a stout heart and an empty pocket to the Metropolis as his sole capital, he fought his way to wealth; and before he died he was addressed as "My lord," in his character of London's chief magistrate. The eldest son of this peasant boy won fame as a soldier, became the confidential friend of his Sovereign, and was created in turn a Baron, a Viscount, and Earl of Craven. He died unwed, and all his wealth and dignities passed to a kinsman who, like himself, traced his descent from the peasant stock of Appletrewick.
The Earls of Denbigh have for ancestor one Godfrey Fielding, who served his apprenticeship in London city, made a fortune as a Milk Street mercer, and was Lord Mayor when Henry VI. was King. Five years later, we may note in passing, London had for chief magistrate Godfrey Boleyn, whose great-grand-daughter wore the crown of England as Queen Elizabeth.
The present Earl of Warwick, whose title was once associated with such names as Plantagenet, Neville, Newburgh, and Beauchamp, has in his veins a liberal strain of 'prentice blood. The founder of the family fortunes was William Greville, citizen and woolstapler of London, who died five centuries ago, after amassing considerable wealth; while another ancestor was Sir Samuel Dashwood, vintner, who as Lord Mayor entertained Queen Anne at the Guildhall in 1702, and found a husband for his daughter in the fifth Lord Broke.
The father of the noble house of Dudley was William Ward, the son of poor Staffordshire parents, who was apprenticed to a goldsmith and made a fortune as a London jeweller.
In the latter half of the seventeenth century Nottingham had among its citizens a respectable draper named John Smith, who, it is said, made himself useful to his farmer customers, in the intervals of selling tapes and dress materials to their wives, by helping them with their accounts. John lived and died an honest draper, and never aspired to be anything else; but his descendants were more ambitious. From drapers they blossomed into bankers and Members of Parliament; and in 1796 George III. departed for once from his rule never to raise a man of business to the Peerage, by converting Robert Smith into Baron Carrington. His successor abandoned the patronymic Smith for his title-name; and the present-day representative of John Smith, the Nottingham draper is Charles Robert Wynn Carrington, first Earl Carrington, P.C., G.C.M.G., and joint Hereditary Lord Chamberlain of England.
When William Capel left the humble paternal roof at Stoke Nayland, in Suffolk, to see what fortune and a brave heart could do for him in London, it certainly never occurred to him that his name would be handed down through the centuries by a line of Earls, Viscounts, and Barons. Fortune had indeed strange experiences in store for the Suffolk youth; for, while she made a Knight and Lord Mayor of him, she consigned him on a life sentence to the Tower for resisting the extortions of the mercenary Henry VII. Sir William's son won his knightly spurs on French battlefields, wedded a daughter of the ancient house of Roos of Belvoir, and became the ancester of the Barons Capel, Viscounts Malden, and Earls of Essex.
The Earls of Radnor owe their rank and wealth to the enterprise which led young Laurence des Bouveries from his native Flanders to a commercial life at Canterbury in the days of Queen Bess. From this humble Flemish apprentice sprang a line of Turkey merchants, each of whom in turn added his contribution to the family dignities and riches, until Sir Jacob, the third Baronet, blossomed into a double-barrelled peer as Lord Longford and Viscount Folkestone. Not the least, by any means, of the descendants of Laurence des Bouveries was Canon Pusey, the great theologian, who was grandson of the first Lord Folkestone.
Lord Harewood springs from a stock of merchants who accumulated great wealth in the eighteenth century; and Lord Jersey owes much of his riches to Francis Child, the industrious apprentice who, in Stuart days, married the daughter of his master, William Wheeler, the goldsmith, who lived one door west of Temple Bar.
Other peers who count London apprentices among their ancestors are Lord Aveland and Viscount Downe, both descendants of Gilbert Heathcote, whose commercial success was crowned by the Lord Mayoralty in 1711; the Marquis of Bath, a descendant of Lord Mayor Heyward, whose sixteen children are all portrayed in his monument in St Alphege Church, London Wall; and also of Richard Gresham, mercer, who waxed rich from the spoils of the monasteries, and whose son was founder of the Royal Exchange. The Earl of Eldon owes his existence to that runaway exploit which linked the lives of John Scott, the Newcastle tradesman's son, and Miss Surtees, the banker's daughter.
If George III. during his lengthy reign only raised one business man to the Peerage, later years have provided a very liberal crop of coroneted men of commerce. To mention but a few of them, banking has been honoured—and the Peerage also—by the baronies granted to Lords Aldenham and Avebury; Lords Hindlip, Burton, Iveagh, and Ardilaun owe their wealth and rank to successful brewing; Baron Overtoun was proprietor of large chemical works; Lord Allerton's riches have been drawn from his tan-pits; Lord Armstrong's millions come from the far-famed Elswick engine-works at Newcastle; and Lord Masham's from his mills at Manningham. The Viscounty of Hambleden has sprung from a modest news-shop in the Strand; the Barony of Burnham was cradled in a newspaper office; and Lords Mount-Stephen and Strathcona were shepherd boys seventy years or more ago, before they found their way through commerce to the Roll of Peers.
Although these lowly origins are as firmly established as Holy Writ, and are in most cases as well known to the noble families who trace rank and riches from them as to the expert in genealogy, they are often as carefully excluded from the family tree as the poor and undesirable relation from the doors of their palaces. Not content with a lineage extending over long centuries, and with a score of strains of undoubted blue blood, many of our greatest nobles and oldest gentle families strain after an ancestry which is not theirs, and throw overboard some obscure forefather to find room for a mythical Norman marauder, who in many cases exists nowhere but in the place of honour on their own pedigrees.
"What are pedigrees worth?" asks Professor Freeman. "I turn over a 'Peerage' or other book of genealogy, and I find that, when a pedigree professes to be traced back to the times of which I know most in detail, it is all but invariably false. As a rule it is not only false, but impossible. The historical circumstances, when any are introduced, are for the most part not merely fictions, but exactly that kind of fiction which is, in its beginning, deliberate and interested falsehood."
This scathing criticism refers to pedigrees which profess to be based on existing records; what shall we say, then, of those family trees which have their ambitious roots in the dark centuries which no ray of genealogical light can possibly pierce? Take, for instance, that amazing pedigree of the Lyte family of Lytes Cary, at the head of which is "Leitus (one of the five captains of Beotia that went to Troye)," whose ancestors came to England first with Brute, "the most noble founder of the Britons." (It is only fair to say that the present representative of this really ancient family, Sir H. Maxwell-Lyte, an expert genealogist, turns his back resolutely on the Beotian captain, and even on Brute himself, and generally lops his family tree in a merciless but most salutary fashion.)
The College of Arms, among many amazing pedigrees, treasures one of a family "whose present representative is sixty-seventh in descent in an unbroken male line from Belinus the Great (Beli Mawr), King of Britain," which actually exhibits the arms of Beli, who, poor man, died long centuries before heraldry was even cradled.
Of families who derive descent from Charlemagne the name is legion; but even such elongated pedigrees are quite contemptible in their brevity compared with others which have at their head no other progenitor than Adam, the father of us all. At Mostyn Hall, we learn, there is a vellum roll, twenty-one feet long, of pedigrees, some of which "are traced back to 'Adam, Son of God,' without any conscious sense of the incongruous"; and these records, we must remember, are in the hand of "a man thoroughly trustworthy as to the matters of his own time." There is in the College of Arms a similar family tree which commences boldly with Adam and the Garden of Eden; and an authority on Welsh pedigrees declares,
"A Welshman whose family was in any position in the sixteenth century can, as a rule, without much trouble find a pedigree thence to Adam; an Englishman who is unable to do the same has a natural tendency to regard all Welsh pedigrees with distrust, not to say contempt."
Mr Horace Round gives some startling examples of flagrant dishonesty, where forgery is only one of the implements used. Take, for example, that shameful story of the "Shipway frauds," which is thus referred to by a clergyman of the parish.
"In the fall of 1896, by an elaborate system of impudent frauds, an unscrupulous attempt was made to claim these monuments for one who was an entire stranger to the parish. An agent from London was employed in a search for a pedigree. He, by fraudulent means, concocted a very plausible story. Genealogies were manufactured, tombs were desecrated, registers were falsified, wills were forged—in a word, various outrages were committed, with many sacred things in this parish and elsewhere. These two figures, as part of the pedigree, were deposited in a niche in the chantry; on either side were huge brass tablets on which were engraven various untruthful and unfounded statements."
In another case Hughenden Church was desecrated to gratify the vanity of a family of Wellesbourne, anxious to trace their descent from the Montforts.
"They caused a monumental effigy of an imaginary ancestor to be carved in the style of the thirteenth century ...they adapted the plate-armour effigy to their purpose by cutting similar arms on the skirts, and they had three rude effigies fabricated by way of filling up the gaps between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries."
To give but two more out of many cases of similar imposture, the Deardens, many years ago, actually had a family chapel constructed in Rochdale Church with sham effigies, slabs, and brasses to the memory of wholly fictitious ancestors; while in two Scottish churches altar-tombs were placed to the memory of successive apocryphal lairds of Coulthart. Such are the lengths to which a craze for ancestry has carried some unprincipled persons; and there is no doubt that the arts of the forger are still enlisted in the service of people who crave long descent and do not scruple as to the methods by which they attain it.
Happily, however, the mania for ancestors does not often take such extreme and reprehensible forms; its manifestations are usually rather amusing than criminal. A common weakness is, however plebeian and obvious in its origin a surname may be, to dignify it with a Norman or at least French cradle. Thus we are solemnly assured that the Smithsons (a name which bluntly proclaims its own derivation) are "a branch of the baronial family of Scalers, or De Scallariis, which flourished in Aquitaine as long ago as the eighth century." The first Cooper was not, as the unlearned might imagine, a modest if respectable tradesman of that name—no, he was a member of the great house of De Columbers, one of whom was "Le Cupere, being probably Cup-bearer to the King"; Pindar, the patronymic of the Earls Beauchamp, is, of course, a translation of the Norman Le Bailli, and its bearers are "probably descended from William, a Norman of distinction"; while at least one family of Brownes springs lineally from "Turulph, a companion of Rollo," founder of the Ducal House of Normandy. After this, one learns with meek resignation that the honourable cognomen Smith is derived from Smeeth, "a level plain"; and that some, at least, of the Parker family had for ancestors certain De Lions, who flourished bravely under William the Conqueror.
Another favourite vanity is to glorify a name by the prefix De:
"a particle which has been all but unknown in England since the first half of the fifteenth century, and which has never possessed in Great Britain that nobiliary character which the French nation have chosen to assign to it. De Bathe, De Trafford, and the rest are restorations in the modern Gothic manner."
It is, we fear, a similar vanity which has displaced such modest surnames as Bear, Hunt, Wilkins, Mullins, Green, and Gossip in favour of De Beauchamp, De Vere, De Winton, De Moleyns, De Freville, and De Rodes.
This ludicrous yearning for a Norman ancestry is responsible for many of the absurdities in the pedigrees of even our most exalted families. Thus it is that we find such statements as this widely circulated, and accepted with a quite childlike credence:
"This noble family (Grosvenor) is descended from a long train in the male line of illustrious ancestors, who flourished in Normandy with great dignity and grandeur from the time of its first erection into a sovereign Dukedom, A.D. 912, to the Conquest of England. The patriarch of this ancestral house was an uncle of Rollo, the famous Dane...."
And again:
"The blood of the great Hugh Lupus, Duke (sic) of Chester, flows in the Grosvenor veins."
This pleasing fiction still rears its head unabashed in spite of all attempts to destroy it; in its honour the late Duke of Westminster was actually named "Hugh Lupus" at the baptismal font, while his younger brother was labelled Richard "de Aquila"; and yet it is an indisputable fact that the Grosvenor ancestors cannot be carried beyond a Robert de Grosvenor, of Budworth, who lived a good century after the Conquest, and who has no more traceable connection with Rollo than with the Man in the Moon.
The Ducal House of Fife, we are told, "derives from Fyfe Macduff, a chief of great wealth and power, who lived about the year 834, and afforded to Kenneth II., King of Scotland, strong aid against his enemies, the Picts." The present Duke, however, has the good sense to disclaim any hereditary connection with the old Earls of Fife, and to place at the top of his family tree one Adam Duff, who laid the foundation of the family prosperity in the seventeenth century. The Spencers, it is claimed, spring lineally from the old baronial Despencers, "being a branche issueing from the ancient family and chieffe of the Spencers, of which sometymes were the Earles of Winchester and Glocester, and Barons of Glamorgan and Morgannocke." This, no doubt, is a very distinguished origin; but, alas! the earliest provable ancestors of this "noble" family were respectable and well-to-do Warwickshire graziers, and the first authentic title on the true pedigree is the knighthood conferred on John Spencer in 1519, less than four centuries ago. Similarly the Russells, Dukes of Bedford, are said to be derived from one Hugh de Russell, or Rossel (who took that name from his estate in Normandy), one of the Conqueror's attendant barons on his invasion of England. Here, again, facts fail lamentably to support the descent claimed, since the earliest known progenitor of this "great house" was that Henry Russell who was sent to Parliament to represent Weymouth in the fifteenth century, and whose great-grandson blossomed into the first Earl of Bedford. (It may, perhaps, be well to state that, although the pedigrees here criticised are those that have been or are widely accepted, they are not necessarily approved by the families whose descent they profess to give.)
Another Norman ancestor who must go overboard is the alleged founder of the "noble" house of Bolingbroke—that "William de St John who came to England with the Conqueror as grand master of the artillery and supervisor of the wagons and carriages," since it can be positively shewn that the St John family first set foot in England a good many years after William I. was safely underground; and with this mythical William must also go that equally nebulous progenitor of the Fortescue family, "who" according to the venerable and almost uniform tradition, "landed in England with his master in the year 1066, and, protecting him with his shield from the blows of an assailant, was graciously dubbed 'Fortescu,' the man of the stout shield." The Stourtons, so the "Peerages" say, were "of considerable rank before the Conquest, and dictated their own terms to the Conqueror"; but, as Canon Jackson, the learned antiquary, truly points out, "of this there is no evidence. The name is found, apparently for the first time, among Wiltshire landowners, in the reign of Edward I., when a Nicholas Stourton held one knight's fee under the Lovells of Castle Cary."
The Duke of Norfolk has a family tree of very stately growth, and can well afford to repudiate a good many of the ancestors provided for him by "Peerage" editors. Certainly, if he ever read the following statement he must have smiled aloud:
"The Duke's proudest boast is that his name of Howard is merely that of an ancestor, Hereward the Wake, whose representative, Sir Hereward Wake, is still in Northamptonshire."
As a matter of fact, his Grace's earliest known ancestor was Sir William Howard, "who was a grown man and on the bench in 1293, whose real pedigree is very obscure"; and who, no doubt, would have laughed as heartily as his descendant of to-day at his imaginary derivation from the Conqueror's stubborn foe of the fens, Hereward the Wake.
In the Fitzwilliam pedigree we encounter another nebulous knight of the Conqueror. "The Fitzwilliams," we are informed, "date so far back that their record is lost, but Sir William, a knight of the Conqueror's day, married the daughter of Sir John Elmley," and so on; and further, that at Milton Hall, Peterborough, one may actually look on an antique scarf which "was presented to a direct ancestor of the Fitzwilliams by William the Conqueror." The most skilled of our genealogists have sought in vain for an authentic trace of this gallant knight of Conquest days; and Professor Freeman does not hesitate to dismiss the story of his existence as "pure fable." But if Sir William of Normandy must fall from the family tree, his place is most creditably taken by Godric, a Saxon Thane, who, as a forefather, is at least as respectable as any Norman warrior in William's train.
The house of Fitzgerald is credited with an ancestor, one Dominus Otho, "who is supposed to have been of the family of the Gherardini of Florence. This noble passed over into Normandy, and thence, in 1057, into England, where he became so great a favourite with Edward the Confessor that he excited the jealousy of the Saxon Thanes." Dominus Otho must too pass, with many another treasured ancestor, into the crowded genealogical land of the rejected; for the real founder of the Fitzgerald house was Walter, son of "Other," whose name is first met with in Domesday Book in 1086. The Otho story is shown to be "absolute fiction."
In view of such examples of misplaced ingenuity exhibited by the makers of pedigrees for our noble families, one can almost read without a smile that