But Hilario, who says this, is the fool of the piece.
There are historical personages, whose letters and manuscripts generally we should expect would have disappeared altogether; voluntary destruction having been applied to them. On the other hand, there are personages whose manuscripts and whose letters, we should suppose, would have been preserved with a reverential affection. In each case the expectation is contrary to fact. We will instance Margaret of Anjou and William Shakespeare. When Edward IV. was on the throne he was so desirous to secure every letter or despatch written by that heroic wife of an unheroic king, that the penalty of death was awarded against any person who, receiving a letter, or being in possession of a letter from Queen Margaret, delayed in surrendering the same to the government. One would suppose that such a penalty would lead every individual holding such documents, if not to surrender at least to destroy them. But human nature is perverse, as well as bold, courageous and defiant. Many of Margaret’s correspondents hid the letters she had written to them; some of these have lately been published by the Camden Society. The volume is one of the most interesting of the series published by that Society, and the letters themselves are creditable to the writer. They show her less as a fiercely struggling, deeply sorrowing, terribly avenging queen, than as a sympathising woman, not so busy in her own affairs as to lack time for being interested in the affairs of others. She is ever ready to say a good word for a worthy man seeking advancement, and her heart responds to appeals from young maidens with whom the course of true love does not run smooth. For them, Queen Margaret writes with affectionate urgency to that sort of sire who is apt to say of a suitor to his daughter, who is unwelcome to himself, ‘I can’t imagine what the girl can see in such a fellow, to like him!’ To such stern fathers Margaret of Anjou writes like a wise and affectionate woman. She may be called a ‘matchmaker,’ for she seems to have gone to the work of coupling with great alacrity, but we are sure that many a young couple, in those turbulent times, owed to her a happiness and a harmony in their married life which poor Margaret never enjoyed in her own.
But Shakespeare! It is nothing less than marvellous that a man who wrote as he wrote—and, altogether, no other man ever wrote like him—that a poet, the author of such plays and such poems; that a man possessing so many friends and admirers, with whom his correspondence must have been extensive, should not have left a single line behind him traced by his own hand. Of all his poems and plays there does not exist a page, a line, a single word, in manuscript. All Shakespeare’s manuscript plays could not have perished in the fire which destroyed the Globe Theatre. The author must have made little account of them himself; but how great would our estimation be of a single act of any one of Shakespeare’s plays, in his own handwriting! We have just now got among us a parallel to the tulip mania. Thousands of pounds are willingly paid for a picture which the same number of shillings would once have purchased. Rather, let us say that the shillings were given for the picture, and that the pounds by thousands are given for the painter’s name. Well, what would not be willingly paid (for the sake of Shakespeare’s name) for the original manuscript, say of ‘Hamlet’? There would be a fierce fight among competitors for even a single passage. We fancy that the lines beginning with ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’ or those that open with ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?’ or with ‘She never told her love,’ and hundreds of others, would not be had for guineas covering each letter. What a contention there would be for the first love-letter or for any love-letter which the poet wrote to Anne Hathaway; or indeed for any letter, addressed to anyone. A costly holograph! Alas! there are neither lines nor letters. All that has been saved of Shakespeare’s handwriting is confined to a couple of signatures of his name to certain deeds, and in those subscriptions the name is spelt differently. Even the forgers have not dared to produce a letter by Shakespeare.
There seems to have been at one time a regular manufactory for the production of letters by Shelley, Keats, and Byron. The market was swamped by cleverly forged documents. About twenty years ago, Robert Browning, the poet, edited a volume of letters by Shelley, and critics said that they would prove useful to all future biographers of that wayward genius. These letters turned out to be forgeries. One epistle was found to be a ‘crib’ from an article by Sir Francis Palgrave, in the ‘Quarterly Review.’ Another was slightly altered from a paper in a literary annual. When research was made, the discovery ensued that the supposed originals had been purchased by Mr. Moxon, the publisher, at an auction. The auctioneer had had them consigned to him by a bookseller in Pall Mall, and the bookseller had bought them from two unknown women, who looked as much like ladies as the letters looked like genuine productions. If Mr. Moxon had not sent a copy of the volume to Mr. Tennyson a long time might have elapsed before the fraud could have been discovered. But Mr. Palgrave, on a visit to the Laureate, happened to open the book, and his eye fell on a letter from Shelley to Godwin, written from Florence. Mr. Palgrave recognised in it a portion of an article on Florence, in the ‘Quarterly,’ written by his father, Sir Francis. Mr. Moxon called in all the copies of this volume of pseudo-epistles, and suppressed the publication altogether. A curious result has followed. The volume is worthless, but it is rare; and simply on account of its rarity it is set down in a London bookseller’s catalogue now before us at the price of 1l. 10s.
Stray letters of Shelley continued to turn up in the market. Letters to his wife, of the most confidential nature, containing aspersions on his father, were bought by Sir Percy Shelley, the poet’s son. These too proved to be forgeries and were destroyed. Another letter, addressed to Byron, and bearing Shelley’s signature, contained an assertion against the fidelity of ‘Harriet.’ Whoever bought it paid six guineas for a calumny against a dead and defenceless woman, to which was appended the forged signature of her dead and defenceless husband. Forged letters purporting to be from Byron are, as it were, to be had at every turn. Also books with his alleged manuscript notes in the margin. Good judges assert that these notes and letters are written with a thorough knowledge of Byron’s life and feelings, and that the books are chosen with the most perfect knowledge of his tastes and peculiarities.
There was once a dreadful fashion of writing romances and novels in letters. Nothing seems more wearisome now, but they delighted the age in which they were written, and that says much for the patient endurance of the readers of the period. There is, however, one story told in letters, the humour of which will never grow old, namely, ‘Humphrey Clinker.’ Smollett never showed more ability, or humour, or power in delineating and discriminating character than in that admirable work. For humour, commend us to the letters of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble. The preciseness of that lady, who is satisfied if a suitable reason be given for things she complains of, and who is drolly serious in her logic, is charmingly illustrated in the following passage in one of her various letters addressed to the housekeeper, Mrs. Gwyllym, in the country, at Brambleton Hall: ‘You tell me the thunder has soured two barrels of beer in the seller, but how the thunder should get there, when the seller was double-locked, I can’t comprehend. Howsomever, I won’t have the beer thrown out till I have seen it with my own eyes. Perhaps it will recover. At least it will serve for vinegar for the servants.’
This pretended letter is not beyond the reality of much letter-writing of the last century. Southey, when collecting materials for ‘Espriella,’ came into possession of a letter from a farmer’s daughter. It was written towards the close of the century, and it runs thus:
Dear Miss,—The energy of the races prompts me to assure you that my request is forbidden, the idea of which I had awkwardly nourished, notwithstanding my propensity to reserve. M. T. will be there. Let me with confidence assure you that him and brothers will be very happy to meet you and brothers. Us girls cannot go, for reasons. The attention of the cows claims our assistance in the evening.
Unalterably yours.
In the days of heavy postage no one had the slightest scruple in cheating the revenue. Persons leaving home, whether for inland or foreign travel, were importuned by friends to carry letters for them to other friends. An idea prevailed that, if the letters were carried ‘open’—that is, unsealed—there was no infraction of the law, and that consequently no penalty could be exacted. This was a popular error. The law, moreover, was evaded in another way. A newspaper was sent by post in an envelope; inside the latter a long epistle was often written in invisible ink, generally milk. When this was dry the writing could not be seen. By holding the paper to the fire the writing came out in a sepia colour, and the law was broken. The Post Office authorities discovered this pretty trick, and parties were threatened with prosecution; but as the receivers invariably protested that they did not know who the senders were it was almost impossible to obtain a conviction. Senders indeed grew a little nervous, and many changed their method of conveying information in spite of the law. In place of writing in milk on the covers of the newspapers they made slight dots in ordinary ink under such printed letters as suited their purpose for conveying intelligence. This was troublesome for both sender and receiver, and it was therefore used only for brief messages. The postal tax pressed most heavily on the poor, but the ingenious poor discovered means to evade it. For instance, a son or daughter in town despatched a letter to parents in the country who were too poor to pay the postage. The parents declined to take such letter in, which they had legal right to do. Returned to the General Post Office, the letter on being opened was found to be a blank sheet of paper. The fact is that parents and children had agreed to send these blank sheets as indications that all was well with the sender; the receiver got that much of news and had nothing to pay for it. The letter was never taken in unless a particular mark was on the cover, which intimated that something of importance was to be read within.
Although a high rate of postage fell most heavily upon the poor there was scarcely anyone who did not feel it. Everyone wished to be relieved from it. We can hardly realise how peers, who could frank a large number of letters daily, and how members of Parliament, who could frank, every day except Sunday, a few, were beset by friends for franks for themselves, or for their friends, or for their friends’ friends. We have an illustration of this fact in the ‘Diary, Letters, and Journals of Sir George Jackson.’ Writing to his mother at Bath, in 1802, the then apprentice diplomatist says: ‘My sister tells me Bath was never so thin. I sympathise with her, knowing how voluminous her correspondence is, and that the thinness of Bath means “a dearth of frank men,” there being, she says, only Lords Rosslyn and Harcourt to fly to.’
In those old days heavy postage made long letters. As the receivers paid the postage they naturally expected their money’s worth. Often a sheet of Bath post, or even of foolscap, was crossed and recrossed, and not a hair’s breadth of the paper was left without its line. A letter then was written bit by bit, day after day, till the whole was completed. It was, in its way, a newspaper or a book; it was sent all through the branches of a family; it was lent to friends; it even went to mere acquaintances, and strangers made extracts from the choicest parts of it. In the second series of Miss Mitford’s ‘Letters and Correspondence’ she refers to one of these epistles. It was written by a lord who had been travelling on the Continent, and it was a clever, sensible, and instructive document. Miss Mitford borrowed it for the purpose of copying the contents, to accomplish which cost her six mortal hours, which the lady did not think were ill-spent.
When postage was high, letters were luxuries in which persons, far above the condition of those who are called poor, could not often indulge. We cannot give a better illustration of this than one we find in a letter addressed by Mr. Collins, the artist, to his brother, in 1816, when the landscape painter was twenty-eight years of age. Collins was then at Hastings sketching, and had invited his brother to come down from Saturday to Monday. ‘The whole amount of the expense would be the coach, provided you put two biscuits in your pocket, which would answer as a lunch; and I would have dinner for you, which would not increase my expenditure above tenpence. I shall be at the place where the coach stops for you, should you be able to come. Write me nothing about it unless you have other business, for a letter costs a dinner.’ This was the artist who was overjoyed to receive fifty pounds for his ‘Cromer Sands,’ the picture for which, at the sale of the Gillott collection, a purchaser was found to give, quite as joyously, three thousand seven hundred and eighty guineas.
It has been said that, if heavy postage produced essays, cheap postage makes epigrams. But the latter were not wanting in the very earliest days. Nothing could be more epigrammatic than the note sent by one Irish chief to another: ‘Pay me tribute, or else ——’ To which the equally epigrammatic answer was: ‘I owe you none, and if ——’ Of this sort were the notes between Foote’s mother and Foote. ‘Dear Sam,—I’m in prison. Yours, E. Foote.’ The old lady was under arrest for debt. The son’s answer was: ‘Dear Mother,—So am I. Yours, S. Foote.’ And again, the letters between old Mrs. Garrick and young Edmund Kean: ‘Dear Mr. Kean,—You can’t play Abel Drugger. Yours, &c.’ To which intimation Edmund wrote back: ‘Dear Madam,—I know it. Yours, E. K.’ Instances occur now and then where a joke has been played, the fun of which was to make a man pay heavy postage for very unnecessary information. When Collins, the artist, was once with some friends around him, one of them resisted every attempt to induce him to stay to supper. He withdrew, and the friends in council over their banquet resolved that the sulky guest should be punished. Accordingly on the following day Collins sent him a folded sheet of foolscap, in which was written: ‘After you left we had stout and oysters.’ The receiver understood what was meant, but he was equally resolved to have his revenge. Accordingly, biding his time, he transmitted, in a feigned hand, to Collins, a letter in which the painter read only, ‘Had you?’ Therewith the joke seemed at an end; but Collins would have the last word. He waited and waited till the thing was almost forgotten, and then the writer of the last query opened a letter one morning in which he had the satisfaction of finding an answer to it in the words, ‘Yes, we had.’ We cannot dismiss this part of the subject without expressing our regret that we are unable to remember the name of that British admiral who, after achieving a glorious victory at sea, despatched a letter to the Admiralty, in which there were only these or similar words: ‘ ... Beat the enemy; took, sunk, burned, and destroyed ships named in the margin.’ Tersest of admirals!
The publication of the letters of deceased persons first arose, or began to be so common, about the middle of the last century, that Dr. Arbuthnot declared the knowledge of such a fact added a new terror to death. In 1781 the custom had not improved. ‘It has become so much the fashion to publish letters,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘that I put as little into mine as I can.’ Nevertheless, when Boswell subsequently asked him if it would be proper to publish any of his letters after death, Johnson contented himself by remarking: ‘Nay, sir, when I am dead you may do as you will with mine.’
There has been no little affectation in some notable persons, and a remarkable candour in others, with respect to the publication of these documents. Pope addressed his letters to his friends, but he carefully and elaborately wrote and re-wrote them for posterity, and he was not sorry to see some of them get into print (he rather helping them to that end than obstructing them), that he might have a foretaste of the enjoyment which was more especially intended for after ages. Every line in Walpole’s letters reads as if it were as much intended for us of any year to come as for the happy friend to whom the letter was directed; but this diminishes neither Walpole’s credit nor our appreciation. Pepys never intended his ‘Diary’ to be perused by any mortal eye but his own. The Rev. Mr. Smith, however, deciphered the shorthand, and the best social history of Pepys’ time fell into the hands of a delighted and grateful public. Evelyn wrote his ‘Diary’ for his own satisfaction, indifferent, as Dr. Johnson about his letters, whether it were published or not after his death. Evelyn’s descendants were ignorant of its value, and it is to a stranger we owe those sketches of contemporary men and things which now enrich our literature. Pepys, Evelyn, Walpole—diaries and letters; of how many exquisite stories we should have known nothing but for those three individuals! It matters little whether they intended we should enjoy that knowledge or not; sufficient for us that we do. And let us note in passing another letter-writer—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Her letters are not quite so popular, so much read, or so well known, perhaps, as they used to be; they may have had their day, but the writer was well assured they would at least have that. ‘Keep my letters,’ she once wrote to a friend; ‘they will be as good as Madame de Sévigné’s forty years hence.’
They certainly contain many things worth the knowing. The writer’s descriptions of foreign scenes and incidents are full of life and spirit, generally truthful, and always effective without marring the truth. There is one passage in one of her ladyship’s letters which illustrates the writer’s power in a particularly delicate matter, which is well deserving notice. Mr. Montagu’s sister died. She had been Lady Mary Pierrepont’s dearest friend. Young Montagu had to communicate the news of his sister’s death to the young Lady Mary. In her reply the latter said: ‘I know it is not acting in form, but I do not look upon you as I do upon the rest of the world. You are brother to a woman whom I tenderly loved.’ The young fellow excused the informality; he was proud of being looked upon by the young beauty in a different way from the rest of the world. As that young beauty reminded him that he was brother to the woman she so tenderly loved, he was not dull, and had no difficulty in persuading her to love the brother even better than she had done the sister. The marriage, however, was not made in heaven. The lady herself had some suspicion about the consequences. ‘I tremble,’ she wrote to her intended husband, ‘for what we are doing. Shall we never repent?... I shall come to you only with a nightgown and petticoat, and that is all you will get by me.’ She adds significantly: ‘I had rather die than return to a dependency upon relations I have disobliged.’ In her first letter to her (absent) husband after marriage she alludes to the children of the family in which she was residing, and says: ‘It furnishes my imagination with agreeable pictures of our future life, and I flatter myself with the hopes of one day enjoying with you the same satisfaction ... when the noise of a nursery may have more charms for us than the music of the opera.’
While on the subject of the publication of posthumous letters, we may add that other men besides Johnson have written their own so as to gratify posterity as little as possible. Some are as cautious with respect to contemporaries. One of the most venerable of our peers was once told that several of his letters were catalogued for sale in a London auction room. ‘It is a matter of indifference to me,’ said the noble lord; ‘from the day I became a public man I never wrote a line worth the reading by anyone except the person to whom my letter was addressed.’
The assertion that a lady puts the essence, nay, the very purpose and import of her letter, in the postscript, has had many an ingenious but invented illustration. One of the best is that of a young lady in India to her friends at home, viz.:—‘P.S. You will see by my signature that I am married.’ Cobbett hated writing across already written lines, and declared that it was of French origin. The earliest letter by a lady, in this country, of which a copy exists, is one from Matilda, Queen of Henry I., to Archbishop Anselm. In this she styles him her ‘worthily reverenced lord,’ and herself ‘the lowest of the handmaidens of his holiness;’ phrases which show the mind and hand of some reverend secretary. Anne Boleyn’s last cry of love and anguish to her lord is worth a ream of the letters of earlier date written at second hand. It is genuineness that gives all the interest to the Paston Letters (once so disputed); Agnes Paston’s to her son may be said to be admirable for detail and simplicity. ‘God’s blessing and mine,’ is a fitting double benediction from a mother to her son. How picturesquely descriptive is the passage, ‘On Tuesday last Sir John Heveningham went to his church and heard three masses, and came home again, never merrier, and said to his wife that he would go say a little devotion in his garden and then he would dine; and forthwith he felt a fainting in his legs and slid down. This was at nine of the clock and he was dead ere noon.’ Such were life and death in the middle of the fifteenth century in the county of Norfolk. We may notice, after the above illustration of a letter from a mother to her son, one from a wife to her husband, but of the seventeenth century. In a letter from Susan Montague to her husband Edward, who has announced his being about to leave Madrid for England, the sprightly Susan replied to her ‘sweetheart’ that she fears she may weary his eyes with her ‘tedious scribblement,’ and after many allusions to herself and two ladies, with matters of confidence, Susan Montague concludes by saying: ‘So being very late, as a matter of ten o’clock, I bid you good night, going into the little bed, which I find less than ever it was, and never have no mind to go into it because I cannot find my sweeting there. But when I am there I sleep as little as may be, for I am still riding post to Madrid, which I hope doth presage that you will shortly post from there and come to the little chamber again, which I heartily pray for. So, dear heart, farewell. Your truly loving wife—Su. Montague.’ The orthography of ladies became rather worse than better in the times after Susan Montague wrote. In the last century ladies spelt ‘physician’ with a capital F, and in the old game of ‘loving’ would not be conscious of wrong in saying, ‘I love my love with a G, because he’s a Gustus!’ There are some curious samples of ill spelling in the Delany correspondence. Cacography seemed to be intermittent like the ague. The wrong thing came with the east wind or epidemics. Sometimes an odd word or two would baffle a lady. At the beginning of the present century the exquisite Alison Cockburn referred in one of her letters to some ‘unpareleled boon.’ The word caught her eye, and she gaily added as a postscript, ‘Cannot spell unparaleled.’
The letters of fine gentlemen are written in a fine gentlemanly way. If the fine gentleman be a wit and a poet it does not always improve the style of the letter. Much nonsense has been written upon Waller and his Sacharissa (Lady Dorothy Sidney). The facts of their supposed love passages have grown up out of the imaginations of sentimental writers. When Lady Dorothy married Lord Spencer, Waller wrote to her sister, Lady Lucy, a letter which would now be considered much more impudent than witty. But the poet’s hand is in it as well as the impudent wit’s. After sympathising with Lady Lucy on the loss of her sister ‘bedfellow,’ and expressing a hope that the latter would soon ‘taste of the first curse imposed on woman,’ and often; in due course of time, the poet wishes, ‘May she then arrive at that great curse so much declined by fair ladies, old age. May she live to be very old and yet seem young, be told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform her of the truth. And when she shall appear to be mortal, may her lord not mourn for her, but go hand in hand with her to that place where we are told there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, that being there divorced we may all have an equal interest in her again.’
Letters to children are as difficult to write as books for children. Crabb Robinson stands at the head of all inditers of little epistles to little folk. He is not in the vein of Jeffrey to his granddaughter, as in ‘I send you my blessing and wish I was kissing your sweet rosy lips or your fat finger tips.’ Robinson comes nearer to Hood, only that he could not stoop to use old jokes as well as make new. The two are together in the following paragraph in Hood’s letter to May, one of Dr. Elliot’s daughters: ‘Tell Dunnie that Tom has set his trap in the balcony, and has caught a cold; and tell Jeanie that Fanny has set her foot in the garden, but it has not come up yet.... The other night, when I came from Stratford, the cold shrivelled me up so that when I got home I thought I was my own child.’ The best thing Crabb Robinson did in this way was by surprising a little girl, who said she did not know how to write a letter to her little brother, by proving to her that she was a perfect letter-writer. She had asked Robinson to suggest all the subjects. He proposed purposely something untrue, then something silly, but both were rejected by the child on the ground of their untruthfulness and silliness. This process went on till the child adopted such subjects as were adapted to her purpose, and she found she was a good letter-writer without knowing it.
We conclude with an unpublished letter, from an American lady we believe, who some quarter of a century ago aspired to be the instructor of children. The quaintness and simplicity, for it is all sober earnestness, are worthy of being preserved: ‘Dear Sir,—Having heard that you are in want of a governess for your children, I write to offer myself as a candidate for that post. My acquirements are English in all its branches, French, German, music, which I play well, singing, painting, drawing, and dancing. My age is just 28. I am a lady by birth, high-spirited, and I am sorry to say slightly quick-tempered, but still very fond of children, likewise of gentlemen’s society; I am rather delicate, and when not as well as usual require a few tempting viands. I hope, if you decide in having me for your children as their governess, that you will allow me the entrée of your drawing-room at all times, and that you will also allow me to join in all your domestic amusements. I wish to inform you that I have been in the habit of receiving 60l. (sixty pounds) per annum, or fifty pounds (50l.) with laundress, and all travelling expenses paid. You may be glad to hear that I have an elegant figure, small hands and feet, and am, if my friends and admirers are to be believed, engaging.’
With this sample we may leave our readers to pass on to fresh woods and pastures new.
In the reign of Charles I. the Old Jewry, which runs from Cheapside to Cateaton Street, was a fashionable locality. Merchant princes lived and died there. The old church, St. Olave Jewry, or St. Olave Upwell, was a fashionable church. Merchant princesses worshipped there, and their daughters were worshipped by the undevout apprentices. The Jewry had its fashionable old hostelry in the Windmill. It lives in Ben Jonson’s drama. It was there that Captain Bobadil told of his heroism at the siege of Strigonium, and there he pished at the idea of Master Stephen’s Provant rapier passing for a Toledo blade. One May morning, A.D. 1628, George Newman, the rich widow Bennett’s first serving-man, was taking his early draught at the Windmill. His master, the rich mercer, a Bennett of the stock from which the Tankerville earls have sprung, was then lying, a month old in his tenantcy, in a grave in St. Olave’s, next to another mercer, Robert Large, the master of one who came to be more famous, namely, Caxton, the father of English printing. Bennett’s widow was then sitting behind her rich curtains in Jewry Street meditating on a world of speculative subjects. ‘She’s a twenty-thousand-pound widow,’ said Newman, as he wiped his lips with the sleeve of his coat. ‘She’ll be a bride, and a lady to boot, before long. She has as many suitors as she has thousands.’ ‘And,’ said a bystander, ‘will maybe marry the biggest knave or the most perfect fool of the lot.’ ‘Not so,’ rejoined the serving-man. ‘Do you see Mr. Recorder passing by from his court? He is a friend of the family, and will see that neither rogue nor ass carries off the wealthy widow.’ ‘Ay!’ cried the host of the Windmill, ‘Mistress Bennett is in safe hands, with Sir Heneage Finch for her guardian and her little son’s guardian.’ And so said all who stood within hearing.
The scene now changes to the widow’s best room, in her mansion in Old Jewry. If you can fancy the three slim Graces rolled into one, with no other result but delicious increase of beauty in form, motion, look, and expression, you may have a very fair idea of this most blooming and best endowed of widows. Physically, morally, materially, she was not to be equalled throughout the realm of mature womanhood. Fair of face, frank of speech, with an inheritance of two-thirds of her late husband’s property, a prosperous business, plate, diamonds, cash, the mansion in which she lived, a coach, six horses, and all things that tend to make life enjoyable, Mistress Bennett took her widowhood with that sort of resignation which is denoted by an air of calm content with providential dispensations. She was in such esteem that at least a score of lovers were contending for the honour of rendering her happy. Even the ladies were busy in commending certain of the suitors. The widow would not be persuaded. The lady advisers were frivolous. She would rely on the grave counsel of a grave man. Mr. Recorder would be her truest support if she ever found herself in any perplexity on the subject of marrying again. At the moment it was a subject that was not in her thoughts.
‘The subject is in the thoughts of young Butler, of Bramfield,’ said Lady Skinner. ‘He is a gentleman——’
‘He is a black, blunt-nosed one,’ interrupted the widow. And indeed Butler was not an Adonis.
‘I pity poor Sir Peter Temple,’ said another of Love’s messengers that morning. ‘Stowe does not make him happy; you might.’
‘Eleanor Tirrell will,’ replied the widow. ‘I wish they were all as well provided for.’
‘All!’ exclaimed Sir Peter’s friend. ‘Why, to what tune does the list run?’
‘First,’ answered the widow, ‘there is Sir Henry Mainwaring, a poor old battered knight, who is not master of as much land as his shoes can cover; and yet he is as proud as if he were a Mainwaring of Over Pecover. His worship was brought hither by the hand of the Countess of Bridgwater, but I speedily rid myself civilly of both. There have been other silly knights, and lords too, who have come and gone, and some of whom come and come again. Lord Bruce took a frank answer, and did not present himself twice. Lord Lumley, all in the glitter of his new title, will not take nay. Dr. Raven has even dared to offer himself without first feeling my pulse, and he swears his daring has not come to an end. Only the other day Sir Sackville Crowe beset me; and, heaven help me! I believed, for a moment, that Sir Heneage Finch himself had views towards me. But Sir Heneage could take an answer, and he besets me with hints of his aspirations no longer.’
‘Crow, Finch, Raven!’ exclaimed the group of ladies who were gathered round the twenty-thousand-pounder in her best room at St. Olave’s. ‘What a singular gathering of birds! You will be flown away with, widow, in spite of yourself.’
Mr. Recorder Finch, erst Speaker of the House of Commons, came into London to perform his legal duties, and returned in the evening to his house at Kensington. The house still stands. It is the kernel round which has grown the shell called Kensington Palace. Heneage Finch’s gardens extended only to what is now called the Broad Walk. The latter was then a pathway through Hyde Park from Kensington to Bayswater. The wicked public loved to connect his name with those of Crowe and Raven as ‘birds of a feather.’ The truth is, that Raven was the real, daring, and most persistent lover. Sir Sackville Crowe, indeed, had been the more serious in his pretensions, as he most needed the widow’s money. He was ‘a thief on the wrong side of Newgate;’ that is, he outspent his income and ruined his tradesmen. He paid them by agreement just a quarter of what he owed those poor fellows, and thus he submitted to be three-quarters kept by his butcher, baker, and tailor. He made an ‘appearance,’ which it was an easy thing to do at other people’s expense. He had been the official keeper of public funds, of which he unluckily failed to give satisfactory account. He alleged that his book-keeping had been done by deputy, and his deputy seems to have been loose in his arithmetic. Altogether, this Crowe was a supreme rogue, but he was one of a very large family. The widow’s fortune would have saved his post, if not his credit, at the Navy Treasury Office. The widow, however, scornfully refused to sit on the same branch with Crowe, and Sir Sackville, thoroughly plucked, was ejected from the office in question.
But, Dr. Raven! The doctor was of another quality. The physician would not be said nay. The nay was decies repetita, but it was not heeded. Still, he was not the nearer to his object by being impeded. One evening he took up a copy of Green’s ‘Quip,’ which was then a work of some thirty years old. His eye fell on these words: ‘Lawyers are troubled with the heat of the liver, which makes the palms of their hands so hot that they cannot be cooled unless they be rubbed with oil of angels.’ Forthwith Dr. Raven bethought him that Abigails were very like lawyers, and that he would try a few angels on the palms of Widow Bennett’s waiting-woman, to gain access to whom, however, he had to oil many a serving-man’s palm also. Abigail was willing to betray her mistress for a consideration, and it was made worth her while to admit Raven (like Iachimo into the chamber of the sleeping Imogen) into the apartment where the widow lay in a lapse of loveliness, buried in lace and rosy slumbers. Raven awoke the sleeping dove with all gentleness; as she did not scream he pressed his suit, craftily pointing out to her that as his presence compromised her reputation, the latter could only be saved by an immediate marriage. Then the thoroughly awakened goddess lifted up her voice to tremendous purpose. ‘Reputation,’ indeed! She knew hers to be safe, and she lustily screamed ‘Thieves!’ and ‘Murder;’ in order to bring in her household to keep it so. The men-servants, seeing no further chance of angels or marks from the physician, flung themselves upon Raven, as if he had really been more intent upon murder than marriage. They held him till the august parish constable arrived, and the constable ‘run him in’ to the Compter for the night. On the following morning Raven was brought up before Mr. Recorder Finch. That impartial judge, sympathising with the insulted widow, whom he so highly respected, committed Dr. Raven for trial at the ensuing sessions. It was not at all likely that Sir Heneage Finch would be slow in protecting the beautiful widow of his deceased friend from such saucy rogues as Dr. Raven, who was subsequently imprisoned for half a year.
The dramatists certainly had their eye upon this escapade of Raven’s. Rowley, especially, adopted the bed-room incident in his ‘City Match,’ where Alexander Bloodhound gets into the Widow Wagge’s chamber. Alexander half-undresses himself, and so frightens the widow that she consents to marry him to save her credit; but she disappoints the audacious wooer at last. Mr. Planché reproduced this scene in 1828 in his ‘Merchant’s Wedding.’ The daring suitor there was Frank Plotwell (C. Kemble); the lady was Aurelia, a wealthy heiress, played by Miss Chester, who was as superb a beauty as Widow Bennett herself. How glorious, too, Charles Kemble looked in his King Charles suit, and how like a jockey in his silks when he half-stripped, are things only to be remembered by old play-goers with good memories.
At this time there was a Kentish knight keeping lonely state in London. He was a widower twice over; but loving matrimony so well from his sweet experience of it that he was dying to find another mate. The Derings were of a very old stock, and Sir Edward, thirty years of age in 1628, might have looked high in search of the mate in question. He was of Magdalen College, Oxford, and was a sound scholar. In religion rather austere, but with an anti-episcopalian bias. His tastes would have made him a very acceptable member of the Society of Antiquaries. In person he was a handsome fellow, was gifted with kindly dispositions, of good carriage and expression in speaking, was fond of applause, and was unaffectedly conscious that he deserved all he could get of it. Some ladies thought so too. Elizabeth Tufton, one of the nine muses—daughters, we should say—of Sir Nicholas, put her hand in his as frankly as he asked for it; and King James made a knight of the bridegroom, who was none the more a gentleman for the dignity conferred on him. The bride died after the birth of a son, and therewith ended a brief day-dream of married happiness. They carried the young mother to the grave when she was little more than twenty, nor was the young widower much older.
That young widower found consolation, however, at a pretty early period of his mourning time. He took to his home a new bride from Sussex, Ann Ashburnham, whose mother was connected with the family of the great Buckingham. Thenceforward, for a season, Sir Edward Dering became a public man. He was busier in Kent than his father, Sir Anthony (a baronet), and he was to be seen about court, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, attending more closely upon the Duke than upon Charles the First, and hoping to get into Parliament under Buckingham’s favour. But fate was against him. The Duke was assassinated in 1626, and Sir Edward was called from court by the sickness of his fair young wife. In one of her letters to him, while he was at Whitehall, she wrote, ‘I cannot send any good news of my couge’s going away, yet I eat joyes of lecarich.’ The ‘couge’s’ signified ‘cough’s.’ The futile remedy was ‘juice of liquorice.’ At the age of twenty-three this second Lady Dering was laid by the side of the first, leaving a son and daughter too young to remember their mother.
Sir Edward was again solitary, and was bearing his solitude impatiently, when chance brought him acquainted with the story of the fair widow in the Jewry. A new act in the City comedy opens, and to gay music ‘enter Sir Edward Dering.’ It is St. Edmund’s day. Raven is in limbo. The widow is alone. The new lover calls in St. Olave’s. Mrs. Bennett, however, declines to receive him. He sends in a letter to her by her servant, who brings it back, but the maid tells him that her mistress had read it. Read it! Then there was hope. Within the next four days Sir Edward had oiled the palms of men-servants and clerks to the tune of eighty shillings. He called again, but was denied. He wrote again, and she kept the letter. Kept the letter! Here was a hint to proceed further. Sir Edward ‘oiled’ more palms, and moved cousins of his own and cousins of the widow—being of his acquaintance—to stir her to be gracious to so handsome and hopeful a lover. He had the widow’s cash-keeper to sup with him; and, perhaps at the cash-keeper’s suggestion, on the last day in November, 1628, Sir Edward was to be seen twice at the Old Jewry Church, near enough to the handsome widow for her to see him without appearing to turn her eyes expressly for that purpose. Reckoning on having made a favourable impression, he, on the following day, wrote a third letter. This Mistress Bennett deigned to keep, which was favour enough for the present. Presuming on that favour the ardent lover (who had lodged himself at a house opposite the widow’s), at the end of two or three days, rang thrice in one forenoon at the widow’s bell. ‘Mrs. Bennett was not at home.’ She was abroad, prosecuting the over-zealous lover, Dr. Raven. A friend, and not a servant of the widow, on Dering repeating his call next day, one Mr. George Loe, brought a very cautious message to the wooer. It was made up of what she said, and what he thought. What she said was to this effect: that a Mr. Steward, from whom she wished to buy the wardship he had had conferred on him of her own child, but who wished, on his side, to have legal marital wardship of the child’s mother, was ‘testy,’ and ‘she could give admittance to none till she had concluded all matters of business with him.’ What Loe added was, ‘She has a good opinion of you. I have spoken nobly of you. You shall hear from me as soon as Steward is disposed of, and,’ said Loe (probably the sly widow had told him to say it), ‘don’t refrain from going to the church where she prays unless you think it disparages yourself.’ Disparagement! It was an honour. On the very first Sunday in December Dering paid double worship at St. Olave’s, Old Jewry. He went as parishioner and lover, uniting, as Mr. Bruce says, in his preface to ‘Proceedings in Kent,’ ‘the worship of Mrs. Bennett with that ordinarily offered at St. Olave’s.’ The interference of servants in the affair here curiously manifests itself. As Sir Edward left the church George Newman, whom he had ‘oiled,’ whispered in Dering’s ear, ‘Good news!’ As Sir Edward was sitting after dinner at his own table Newman entered, and the fellow bade the cavalier be of good cheer. ‘My mistress,’ he said, ‘likes well your carriage, and, if your land is not settled on your eldest son, there is good hope for you.’ The news, true or false, was paid for at the cost of a pound sterling. If he smiled as he went out so also does Sir Edward, as he leans back in his chair, and murmurs to himself, ‘This evening I will seek counsel of Heneage Finch.’
At the Recorder’s house you may see, in the next scene of the drama, Finch and Dering at supper. The friends and kinsmen take their claret and talk of love. The two suitors to the widow were on terms of unlimited confidence and frankness. ‘Ned,’ said Sir Heneage, ‘I wend no more to the widow’s house. I have done. I have no success to look for. I have no desire to go further. I will do or say anything you ask me in this or any other matter.’ Nothing could be kinder than Sir Heneage Finch.
Meanwhile Mr. Steward was at the widow’s feet; or, rather, he stood upright on his own, dictating, rather than asking, terms. The widow’s heart was set, she said, upon having her child’s wardship in her own hands. She was willing to pay fifteen hundred pounds for it. As the words fell from her beautiful lips, Edmund Aspull, Mrs. Bennett’s cash-keeper, advanced, with the amount all ready. If Steward said anything gallant it has not reached the audience. He seems to have had an ‘aside,’ in which he murmured that for nothing less than four thousand pounds would he ever release his right in the ward. ‘With my good will,’ said the widow, ‘I will never look upon that fellow again!’ But, in legal matters she, of course, would consult her good friend, Sir Heneage. To do him justice, Finch was always ready to give prudent counsel whenever he was asked for it.
‘Madam,’ said George Newman, entering the room, ‘Sir Edward Dering is at the door; he prays of your kindness leave to present himself.’
‘Desire Sir Edward,’ replied the widow, ‘to excuse me. I am not willing to entertain discourse of that kind.’
Newman went to the outer door, where Aspull, the cashier, was talking with Sir Edward, and delivered the reply.
The lover stood in sad contemplation, and then he remarked, ‘I am in a wilderness of uncertainty.’
Aspull carried the ‘pretty phrase’ upstairs to his mistress.
‘Tell Sir Edward that I will see him,’ said Mrs. Bennett.
When serving-man and cash-keeper had left the wooer and the wooed to themselves, the latter went methodically to matters of business and matters of sentiment. Sir Edward had the privilege which custom gave a lover, on declaring himself; he ‘saluted’ the lady. He then went into details as to his state and estate, to all of which the widow listened with interest. When he touched on the question of affection, the handsome widow looked at the handsome widower, but she answered neither yea nor nay. She kept him as he was. Indeed, the knight begged her to defer her answer till he again presented himself to her. She consented, but therewith she remarked, ‘I have no present purpose of marrying.’ She would name a second day for the meeting, after her cousin Cradock (a friend of Sir Edward’s) should come to town. Dering saw that she was desirous he should then leave her to herself. He respectfully kissed the formally offered cheek, and bowing, withdrew. He, no doubt, went and told all to Sir Heneage.
Mistress Bennett said of Dering, soon after he had retired, ‘He comes not as boisterous as Steward and Sir Peter come. Steward! As soon as I get from him the broad seal which releases my child, he may be hanged ere I have anything more to do with him.’ What she said of both these suitors was duly reported to the third. Whereupon he pressed his suit and he got friends to press it for him. The widow, however, could not be hurried. Her cousin Cradock was a man it behoved her to consult upon a family question like the present; and the Recorder, being not only her friend but her suitor’s, would be indispensable authority on matters both of law and of property.
Day after day Dering’s patience waned till there was none left. On New Year’s day, 1629, the scene was of the liveliest at the widow’s house. Sir Edward had thought to frighten her into favouring his suit by courteously asking for the returning to him of his letters. The widow sent them back without a word of comment. Her friends standing round her wondered at her decision, and, if the lady and cavalier told their respective stories to Finch he probably looked as wise as a judge while he listened.
The scene is still at the widow’s house, and there again Sir Edward treads the stage. He cannot call on Mistress Bennett, but he can on Mistress Norton, who is his good friend, and the widow’s companion. From her and other household sources he hears that the widow is often sad and silent. If she breaks silence, it is only to remark that she will never marry at all. If Mrs. Norton commends Sir Edward the widow beshrews her companion, and protests that she hears so much of him all day long, she ‘can’t sleep all night for dreaming of him.’ Perhaps in one of those night visions she confounded Dering with Raven, for she dreamed that she ran away from him in her nightgear, out of the bedroom into her great parlour, whereby she caught catarrh. However, Sir Edward could not push his renewed suit to a happy termination. He sat for an hour with Mrs. Norton, talking of the widow, when he would have preferred to be talking with the widow herself. The latter was reported to be sad, in perplexity, and not likely to marry at all—just yet. This did not render Sir Edward’s suit desperate; but he wrote himself ‘fool’ for having asked for the return of his letters, when Newman told him that she had double services of plate, for town and country use, and that she had that glory of all proudly furnished houses of the olden time, beds, worth one hundred pounds the bed.
Again, the scene shifts to the street before Sir George Croke’s house. The lady is about to descend from her chariot, and lo! the lover is there with a petition to be allowed to assist her. He does more, of course; he escorts her into the parlour, where the judge and many ladies are assembled. While general conversation went on, Sir Edward assiduously courted the widow from behind her chair. They talk in whispers, and are let alone. It is all prayer on one side, fencing prettily on the other. Prettily made accusations are humbly answered; she will not be pressed, not she. Her final reply should be made through her cousin, Cradock.
‘Pray,’ said Dering, ‘sweeten the answer with your own breath.’ And then Sir George drank to him in a glass of muscado while Sir Edward kissed the lady’s cheek. As the judge and the lover parted at the door, the former did not hesitate to declare his conviction that the widow was not to be won.
‘Won she must be,’ thought Sir Edward, ‘by one means or another.’ He rather stooped to find them. For instance, on a certain morning the widow’s four-year-old son was walking with his nursemaid, Susan, in Finsbury Fields; Susan was induced by a friend to take the boy to Sir Edward’s lodging, where Dering regaled him with cake, gave him an amber box, treated the maid to a glass of wine, hoped her mistress would not be angry with him, and put in the maid’s hand a five-shilling piece.
‘Lor, sir!’ exclaimed Susan, ‘I, and all the house, pray for you; and young Master Simon here does ever call you Father!’
The widow did not seem to be in haste to ratify the relationship. Viscount Lumley’s chariot was at her door five times in one week. My Lord went to St. Olave’s, and escorted her home after service. All London began to take part in the comedy. New lovers again went to the Old Jewry only to meet denial. Lumley himself, who was but a ragged sort of viscount, was constrained, at last, to take reluctant leave, after his hopes had been buoyed up by interference in his favour by no less a person than the Earl of Dorset, the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain. Sir Edward did not benefit by the withdrawal of the Viscount. Reports reached him that the widow had expressed some liking for him, but not enough to induce her to marry with him. Driven to the extreme of perplexity, Sir Edward engaged another supporter, namely, the Cheapside mercer, Izaak Walton. Izaak celebrated Dering’s praises; mutual friends reported small incidents with much exaggeration. Cousin Cradock knew how Sir Edward might win her; another knew that she was already won, but was coy to confess it. One Master Catesby swore that Dering should both ‘win and wear.’ Lady Cleere told Dering’s father, Sir Anthony, that such a capricious widow was hardly worth the wearing; but Lady Wroth stood up for her as a good and wise gentlewoman, whom any lover might be proud to make his wife.
The grand scene of the comedy occurred when Sir Edward was admitted to see the widow, on condition that he made no reference to the subject of marrying. The interview was a scene for Frith to paint. Sir Edward, with formal low bow, acknowledged the graciousness which admitted him to this interview; but he hoped it would not be the last of that sort of happiness which he might enjoy. Mistress Bennett murmured that chance might still bring them within sight of one another. Then the lover stretched the contract a little, without breaking it. He touched upon his love, her happiness, and cleverly thanked her for forbidding him to pursue making further proposals, as therein might lie the fact that she need not forbid what she, perhaps, had resolved to grant. Some more word-fencing went on; but it ended with a denial on the lady’s part, and a request from the gentleman that she would authorise him to give a public reason for the denial.
‘Say,’ she replied, ‘that you left me, and take the glory of it.’
‘Nay!’ said Sir Edward; ‘I will never withdraw my affection nor my respect till I see you give your hand to another.’
We fear the widow was a dreadful coquette, for subsequent to the above ‘last sight,’ as the interview was called, Mistress Bennett granted an audience to Lord Lumley, when she went so far as to accept a ring from him—a step which almost implied a contract. But this roused the anxiety of her friends, and particularly of Viscount Campden, whose viscountship was just as new as Lumley’s. Lord Lumley, however, was an older member of the peerage. Lord Campden, like the deceased Bennett, had been a mercer; his name then was Baptist Hicks. Even after he had been knighted, Sir Baptist served customers in his open shop in Cheapside. He was now a peer, and people who were unable to attain the same dignity laughed at him. What was the use of Sir Baptist Hicks being a peer, when he had no son to inherit the title? But Lord Campden had a daughter; and the Cheapside mercer’s fair daughter (she was his eldest) was married to Edward, Baron Noel, of Ridlington. The mercer was resolved that Baron Edward should not dream of having derogated by such a match. Accordingly, the ex-shopkeeper succeeded in having the ‘remainder,’ that is, succession to the title, settled in the said son-in-law. In due time, Lord Noel became Viscount Campden, and then gained a step in the peerage by wedding with Juliana, the richest heiress of Cheapside. From them is descended the present Earl of Gainsborough, one of whose daughters, Lady Blanche Noel, made that romantic marriage two years ago with her father’s organist, Mr. Murphy.
But, we have to get back to the first ennobled of the Hickses and his friend, the widow. Lord Campden and Sir George Croke united in insisting that she should return to Lord Lumley the ring she had accepted, and therewith give him his coup de grâce. Ring and letter were despatched on St. Valentine’s Day, and Lord Lumley made his final exit. All London was busy with wondering what the next move would be. It seemed in favour of Sir Edward. Sir Henry Wotton met him in the presence chamber, and wished him ‘full sail.’ The mother of Sir Edward’s late wife, accompanied by that deceased wife’s sister, were indefatigable in lauding Dering’s conjugal virtues in the widow’s ear. Beneficed clergymen, church dignitaries, London gentlemen, country squires, met in the best room in the widow’s house and sang the chorus of his praise. The provoking beauty could not be brought to a decision. She had made a selection, she said, but she really could not say of whom. All in good time. And so this singular love affair proceeded, till the widow consented to grant one more interview, positively for the last time, to her pertinacious suitor, and failed to perform her promise.
‘I will go to Sir Heneage Finch,’ cried the perplexed wooer.
It is very clear that all along Finch perplexed Dering quite as much as the widow did. The Recorder spoke well of Sir Edward to himself and to his friends, and promised to speak well of him to the widow. And perhaps he did; but at the same time Sir Heneage did not neglect his own interests. One morning the bells of St. Dunstan’s in the West, the fashionable church for marriages, rang out a merry wedding peal. Dr. Raven came out of prison, where he was some time in durance for his silly assault, just in time to hear the peal. Sir Edward may be supposed to have put his head out inquiringly from his window. If so, he must have enjoyed a pretty sight—that of Sir Heneage Finch, in holiday array, leading into the beautiful widow Bennett’s house that most tantalising of fair women, as his bride—Lady Finch! Bow bells took up the peal, as if to announce to all Cocagne that they had all the while known what was going on. Cockneydom protested that it had never expected any other issue to the City comedy. Indeed there was a double marriage. While the widow had been playing with her suitors, her niece, pretty Mary Croke, daughter of Sir George, had been indulging in pretty love passages with Harbottle, afterwards Sir Harbottle Grimstone, Master of the Rolls. On April 16, 1629, aunt and niece, with their respective lovers, met at St. Dunstan’s, and were then and there happily married.
The marriage of Sir Heneage with the fair widow was productive of two daughters,[1] of whom one, Anne, married that Earl of Conway so celebrated by Burnet for his ignorance. When a foreign minister once spoke to him of the Circles of Germany, my lord laughed, and asked, ‘What have circles to do with affairs of state?’ We may appropriately add that Mrs. Bennett’s son, Simon, became a man of immense wealth—wealth which his three daughters carried into as many noble families, very much to the satisfaction of the latter. But what of the disappointed lover in this comedy? Well, the curtain went down merrily for him also. He happened to see pretty Unton Gibbes, daughter of the Warwickshire Sir Ralph, and Sir Edward, having an alacrity in falling in love, was ‘over head and ears’ immediately. The lady went straightway to the same depths. They came up together, happy man and wife, and lived like young lovers. He was passionately attached to her to the last; but she survived him full thirty years, finding solace at the affectionate hands of two sons and two daughters. For Unton, Sir Edward had one of those pet names which, outside the circle of love, sound so unlovely. It was Numps! ‘My ever dear Numps,’ he says, in a letter addressed to her from London, in 1640, full of political intelligence, ‘thy pretious and hearty letter I received with that ardor that it was written.... I shall not see thee so soon as I wish.... God preserve my pretty children and send thee ease of thy troublesome cough.... I thank thee for the length of thy welcome letters, wherein I confess that I cannot equal thy love;’ and he ends with ‘Thine, more and more, if possibly,’ &c. One passage of public news in this letter brings a well-known incident before us. ‘The scaffolds are up in Westminster Hall, and Strafford comes to the barre on Monday morning.’ Some of Sir Edward’s letters to his wife are subscribed ‘to thy best self the heart of thine own Edward Dering.’ And if he writes ‘thine in haste,’ he adds, ‘but heartily,’ and writes outside, ‘To my best and dearest friend the Lady Dering,’ while my lady endorses them, ‘From my dearest.’ One letter quaintly begins with ‘My dear and my comfortable Numps, my happiness is (for the greatest part of it in this world) circuited in the same sphere with thine. Love and cheerfulness are blessings invaluable, and if perchance some excentricke motion interpose, all at last (as in the sphaeres) helpe to make up the harmony. So I hope with us every motion shall helpe the tune.’ It would seem that, in absence, they encouraged one another from Scripture. ‘I did presently, as you wished,’ he writes, ‘read over the 91 Spalme (as you call it). I did think to return you a text, but am in haste;’ and ‘Thine own, as ever, for ever.’ The same tone makes musical all his letters, and her own seem to have been attuned to the same melody. The former are full moreover of most interesting public intelligence.
For a troubled time Sir Edward was the much perplexed and ill-requited Lieutenant of Dover Castle. Released from that charge, he was the happy, intellectual, Kentish squire. Next, his county returned him to the Long Parliament, and he commenced his career with fierce opposition to Laud, hoping that ‘His Grace would have more grace, or no Grace at all.’ Sir Edward was what would now be called an Ultra-Radical. He was for abolishing bishops and was ill-affected towards royalty. He took up with the ‘Root and Branch’ party, and they pushed him forward to the proposing of revolutionary measures; and when he withdrew from the course which they had forced him to take they loaded him with execration, and succeeded in turning him out of Parliament for breach of privilege. Subsequently, he lay hid from the pursuit of Parliament, and he is said to have disguised himself as a parson and to have read prayers in a village church. He joined the King. His estate was sequestered, his house at Surrenden was plundered. At a later period the Parliament allowed him to enter on signing the Covenant and paying a composition; but before the affair was concluded the erst lover of the twenty-thousand-pound widow was, in 1644, laid to rest in Pluckley churchyard, which neither covenanting nor compounding can ever disturb.
[1] It was his son, by a former marriage, who became Lord Chancellor and Earl of Nottingham.
Some few years ago, philosophers were jostling excursionists in once gay Brighthelmstone; they discussed the prospects of science, and united archæology with a considerable amount of picnicking and claret-cup. We here submit for the general recreation a paper that was not read at the meeting of the British Association in that town, but which will be perused in the larger Elsewhere. Its staple commodity will consist of the anecdotal waifs and strays connected with old Brighton, which philosophers do not regard, but which have an especial value and interest of their own. Accordingly we pass by the Druidical mistletoe, British barrows, Roman coins, and Saxons, Danes, and Normans, and we come at once to the Brighton of the middle of the last century, when rumours of wars from abroad connected themselves with a literary question and song-writing at home.
About the year 1758 fears of invasion caused several camps to be established on our south coast. There was one at Brighton. Martial spirit attuned the popular lyre to both warlike and sentimental strains. One of the airs then composed has remained popular to this day. ‘The Girl I left behind me’ was originally known by that and also by a second name, ‘Brighton Camp,’ to which reference is made in the following verse:—