Opening…

Introduction

Thackeray In His Study At Onslow Square. From a painting by E. M. Ward

We know exceedingly little of the genesis and progress of Esmond. “It did not seem to be a part of our lives as Pendennis was,” says Lady Ritchie, though she wrote part of it to dictation. She “only heard Esmond spoken of very rarely”. Perhaps its state was not the less gracious. The Milton girls found Paradise Lost a very considerable part of their lives—and were not the happier.

But its parallels are respectable. The greatest things have a way of coming “all so still” into the world. We wrangle—that is, those of us who are not content simply not to know—about the composition of Homer, the purpose of the Divina Commedia, the probable plan of the Canterbury Tales, the Ur-Hamlet. Nobody put preliminary advertisements in the papers, you see, about these things: there was a discreditable neglect of the first requirements of the public. So it is with Esmond. There is, I thought, a reference to it in the Brookfield letters; but in several searches I cannot find it. To his mother he speaks of the book as “grand and melancholy”, and to Lady Stanley as of “cut-throat melancholy”. It is said to have been sold for a thousand pounds—the same sum that Master Shallow lent Falstaff on probably inferior security. Those who knew thought well of it—which is not wholly surprising.

It is still, perhaps, in possession of a success rather of esteem than of affection. A company of young men and maidens to whom it was not long ago submitted pronounced it (with one or two exceptions) inferior as a work of humour. The hitting of little Harry in the eye with a potato was, they admitted, humorous, but hardly anything else. As representing another generation and another point of view, the faithful Dr. John Brown did not wholly like it—Esmond’s marriage with Rachel, after his love for Beatrix, being apparently “the fly in the ointment” to him. Even the author could only plead “there’s a deal of pains in it that goes for nothing”, as he says in one of his rare published references to the subject: but he was wrong. Undoubtedly the mere taking of pains will not do; but that is when they are taken in not the right manner, by not the right person, on not the right subject. Here everything was right, and accordingly it “went for” everything. A greater novel than Esmond I do not know; and I do not know many greater books. It may be “melancholy”, and none the worse for that: it is “grand”.

For though there may not be much humour of the potato-throwing sort in Esmond, it will, perhaps, be found that in no book of Thackeray’s, or of any one else’s, is that deeper and higher humour which takes all life for its province—which is the humour of humanity—more absolutely pervading. And it may be found likewise, at least by some, that in no book is there to be found such a constant intertwist of the passion which, in all humanity’s higher representatives, goes with humour hand in hand—a loving yet a mutually critical pair. Of the extraordinarily difficult form of autobiography I do not know such another masterly presentment; nor is it very difficult to recognize the means by which this mastery is attained, though Heaven knows it is not easy to understand the skill with which they are applied. The success is, in fact, the result of that curious “doubleness”—amounting, in fact, here to something like triplicity—which distinguishes Thackeray’s attitude and handling. Thus Henry Esmond, who is on the whole, I should say, the most like him of all his characters (though of course “romanced” a little), is himself and “the other fellow”, and also, as it were, human criticism of both. At times we have a tolerably unsophisticated account of his actions, or it may be even his thoughts; at another his thoughts and actions as they present themselves, or might present themselves, to another mind: and yet at other times a reasoned view of them, as it were that of an impartial historian. The mixed form of narrative and mono-drama lends itself to this as nothing else could: and so does the author’s well-known, much discussed, and sometimes heartily abused habit of parabasis or soliloquy to the audience. Of this nothing has yet been directly said, and anything that is said would have to be repeated as to every novel: so that we may as well keep it for the last or a late example, The Virginians or Philip. But its efficacy in this peculiar kind of double or treble handling is almost indisputable, even by those who may dispute its legitimacy as a constantly applied method.

One result, however, it has, as regards the hero-spokesman, which is curious. I believe thoroughly in Henry Esmond—he is to me one of the most real of illustrious Henrys as well of Thackeray’s characters—but his reality is of a rather different kind from that of most of his fellows. It is somewhat more abstract, more typical, more generalized than the reality of English heroes usually is. He is not in the least shadowy or allegoric: but still he is somehow “Esmondity” as well as Esmond—the melancholy rather than a melancholy, clearsighted, aloofminded man. His heart and his head act to each other as their governing powers, passion and humour, have been sketched as acting above. He is a man never likely to be very successful, famous, or fortunate in the world; not what is generally called a happy man; yet enjoying constant glows and glimmers of a cloudy happiness which he would hardly exchange for any other light. The late Professor Masson—himself no posture-monger or man of megrims, but one of genial temper and steady sense—described Thackeray as “a man apart”; and so is the Marquis of Esmond. Yet Thackeray was a very real man; and so is the Marquis too.

No. 36 Onslow Square, Brompton, Where Thackeray Lived From 1853 to 1862.

The element of abstraction disappears, or rather retires into the background, when we pass to Beatrix. She also has the Ewigweibliche in her—as much of it as any, or almost any, of Shakespeare’s women, and therefore more than anybody else’s. But she is very much more than a type—she is Beatrix Esmond in flesh and blood, and damask and diamond, born “for the destruction of mankind” and fortunately for the delight of them, or some of them, as well. Beatrix is beyond eulogy. “Cease! cease to sing her praise!” is really the only motto, though perhaps something more may be said when we come to the terrible pendant which only Thackeray has had the courage and the skill to draw, with truth and without a disgusting result. If she had died when Esmond closes I doubt whether, in the Wood of Fair Ladies, even Cleopatra would have dared to summon her to her side, lest the comparison should not be favourable enough to herself, and the throne have to be shared.

But, as usual with Thackeray, you must not look to the hero and heroine too exclusively, even when there is such a heroine as this. For is there not here another heroine—cause of the dubieties of the Doctor Fidelis as above cited? As to that it may perhaps be pointed out to the extreme sentimentalists that, after all, Harry had been in love with the mother, as well as with the daughter, all along. If they consider this an aggravation, it cannot be helped: but, except from the extreme point of view of Miss Marianne Dashwood in her earlier stage, it ought rather to be considered a palliative. And if they say further that the thing is made worse still by the fact that Harry was himself Rachel’s second love, and that she did not exactly wait to be a widow before she fell in love with him—why, there is, again, nothing for it but to confess that it is very shocking—and excessively human. Indeed, the fact is that Rachel is as human as Beatrix, though in a different way. You may not only love her less, but—in a different sense of contrast from that of the Roman poet—like her a little less. But you cannot, if you have any knowledge of human nature, call her unnatural. And really I do not know that the third lady of the family, Isabel Marchioness of Esmond, though there is less written about her, is not as real and almost as wonderful as the other two. She is not so fairly treated, however, poor thing! for we have her Bernstein period without her Beatrix one.

As for my Lords Castlewood—Thomas, and Francis père et fils—their creator has not taken so much trouble with them; but they are never “out”. The least of a piece, I think, is Rachel’s too fortunate or too unfortunate husband. The people who regard Ibsen’s great triumph in the Doll’s House as consisting in the conduct of the husband as to the incriminating documents, ought to admire Thackeray’s management of the temporary loss of Rachel’s beauty. They are certainly both touches of the baser side of human nature ingeniously worked in. But the question is, What, in this wonderful book, is not ingeniously worked in—character or incident, description or speech?

If the champions of “Unity” were wise, they would take Esmond as a battle-horse, for it is certain that, great as are its parts, the whole is greater than almost any one of them—which is certainly not the case with Pendennis. And it is further certain that, of these parts, the personages of the hero and the heroine stand out commandingly, which is certainly not the case with Pendennis, again. The unity, however, is of a peculiar kind: and differs from the ordinary non-classical “Unity of Interest” which Thackeray almost invariably exhibits. It is rather a Unity of Temper, which is also present (as the all-pervading motto Vanitas Vanitatum almost necessitates) in all the books, but here reaches a transcendence not elsewhere attained. The brooding spirit of Ecclesiastes here covers, as it were, with the shadow of one of its wings the joys and sorrows, the failures and successes of a private family and their friends, with the other the fates of England and Europe; the fortunes of Marlborough and of Swift on their way from dictatorship, in each case, to dotage and death; the big wars and the notable literary triumphs as well as the hopeless passions or acquiescent losses. It is thus an instance—and the greatest—of that revival of the historical novel which was taking place, and in which the novel of Scott(1)—simpler, though not so very simple as is sometimes thought—is being dashed with a far heavier dose of the novel-element as opposed to the romance, yet without abandonment of the romance-quality proper. Of these novel-romance scenes, as they may be called, the famous mock-duel at the end is of course the greatest. But that where the Duke of Hamilton has to acknowledge the Marquis of Esmond, and where Beatrix gives the kiss of Beatrix, is almost as great: and there are many others. It is possible that this very transcendence accounts to some extent for the somewhat lukewarm admiration which it has received. The usual devotee of the novel of analysis dislikes the historic, and has taught himself to consider it childish; the common lover of romance (not the better kind) feels himself hampered by the character-study, as Émile de Girardin’s subscribers felt themselves hampered by Gautier’s style. All the happier those who can make the best of both dispensations!

Nothing, however, has yet been said of one of the most salient characteristics of Esmond—one, perhaps, which has had as much to do with the love of its lovers and the qualified esteem of those who do not quite love it, as anything else. This is, of course, the attempt, certainly a very audacious one, at once to give the very form and pressure of the time of the story—sometimes in actual diction—and yet to suffuse it with a modern thought and colour which most certainly were not of the time. The boldness and the peril of this attempt are both quite indisputable; and the peril itself is, in a way, double. There is the malcontent who will say “This may be all very fine: but I don’t like it. It bothers and teases me. I do not want to be talked to in the language of Addison and Steele”. And there will be the possibly less ingenuous but more obtrusive malcontent who will say that it ought never to have been done, or that it is not, as it is, done well. With the first, who probably exists “in squadrons and gross bands”, argument is, of course, impossible. He may be taught better if he is caught young, but that is all: and certainly the last thing that any honest lover of literature would wish would be to make him say that he likes a thing when he does not. That may be left to those who preach and follow the fashions of the moment. Nor, perhaps, is there very much to do with those who say that the double attempt is not successful—except to disable their judgement. But as for the doctrine that this attempt deserves to fail, and must fail—that it is wrong in itself—there one may take up the cudgels with some confidence.

So far from there being anything illegitimate in this attempt to bring one period before the eyes of another in its habit as it lived, and speaking as it spoke, but to allow those eyes themselves to move as they move and see as they see—it is merely the triumph and the justification of the whole method of prose fiction in general, and of the historical novel in particular. For that historical novel is itself the result of the growth of the historic sense acting upon the demand for fiction. So long as people made no attempt to understand things and thoughts different from those around and within them; so long as, like the men of the Middle Ages, they blandly threw everything into their own image, or, like those of the Renaissance to some extent and the Augustan period still more, regarded other ages at worst with contempt, and at best with indulgence as childish—the historical novel could not come into being, and did not. It only became possible when history began to be seriously studied as something more than a chronicle of external events. When it had thus been made possible, it was a perfectly legitimate experiment to carry the process still further; not merely to discuss or moralize, but to represent the period as it was, without forfeiting the privilege of regarding it from a point of view which it had not itself reached. The process of Thackeray is really only an unfolding, and carrying further into application, of the method of Shakespeare. Partly his date, partly his genius, partly his dramatic necessities, obliged Shakespeare to combine his treatment—to make his godlike Romans at once Roman and Elizabethan, and men of all time, and men of no time at all. Thackeray, with the conveniences of the novel and the demands of his audience, dichotomizes the presentation while observing a certain unity in the fictitious person, now of Henry Esmond, now of William Makepeace Thackeray himself. If anybody does not like the result, there is nothing to be said. But there are those who regard it as one of the furthest explorations that we yet possess of human genius—one of the most extraordinary achievements of that higher imagination which Coleridge liked to call esenoplastic.(2) That a man should have the faculty of reproducing contemporary or general life is wonderful; that he should have the faculty of reproducing past life is wonderful still more. But that he should thus revive the past and preserve the present—command and provide at once theatre and company, audience and performance—this is the highest wizardry of all. And this, as it seems to me, is what Thackeray had attempted, and more, what he has done, in the History of Henry Esmond.(3)

He could not have done it without the “pains” to which he refers in the saying quoted above; but these pains, as usual, bore fruit more than once. It has been thought desirable to include in the present volume the two main after-crops,(4) The English Humourists and The Four Georges. Exactly how early Thackeray’s attention was drawn to the eighteenth century it would, in the necessarily incomplete state of our biographical information about him, be very difficult to say. We have pointed out that the connexion was pretty well established as early as Catherine. But it was evidently founded upon that peculiar congeniality, freshened and enlivened with a proper dose of difference, which is the most certain source and the purest maintainer of love in life and literature.

At the same time, the two sets of lectures are differentiated from the novel not so much by their form—for Thackeray as a lecturer had very little that smacked of the platform, and as a novelist he had a great deal that smacked of the satiric conversation-scene—as by their purport. Esmond, though partly critical, is mainly and in far the greater part creative. The Lectures, though partly creative—resurrective, at any rate—are professedly and substantially critical. Now, a good deal has been said already of Thackeray’s qualities and defects as a critic: and it has been pointed out that, in consequence of his peculiar impulsiveness, his strong likes and dislikes, his satiric-romantic temperament, and perhaps certain deficiencies in all-round literary and historical learning, his critical light was apt to be rather uncertain, and his critical deductions by no means things from which there should be no appeal. But The English Humourists is by far the most important “place” for this criticism in the literary department; and The Four Georges (with The Book of Snobs to some extent supplementing it) is the chief place for his criticism of society, personality, and the like. Moreover, both have been, and are, violently attacked by those who do not like him. So that, for more reasons than one or two, both works deserve faithful critical handling themselves.

It is always best to disperse Maleger and his myrmidons before exploring the beauties of the House of Alma: so we may take the objections to the Humourists first. They are chiefly concerned with the handling of Swift and (in a less degree) of Sterne. Now, it is quite certain that we have here, in the first case at any rate, to confess, though by no means to avoid. It is an instance of that excessive “taking sides” with or against his characters which has been noticed, and will be noticed, again and again. Nor is the reason of this in the least difficult to perceive. It is very doubtful whether Thackeray’s own estimate of average humanity was much higher than Swift’s: nor is it quite certain that the affection which Swift professed and (from more than one instance) seems to have really felt for Dick, Tom, and Harry, in particular, as opposed to mankind at large, was very much less sincere than Thackeray’s own for individuals. But the temperament of the one deepened and aggravated his general understanding of mankind into a furious misanthropy; while the temperament of the other softened his into a general pardon. In the same way, Swift’s very love and friendship were dangerous and harsh-faced, while Thackeray’s were sunny and caressing. But there can be very little doubt that Thackeray himself, when the “Shadow of Vanity” was heaviest on him, felt the danger of actual misanthropy, and thus revolted from its victim with a kind of terror; while his nature could not help feeling a similar revulsion from Swift’s harsh ways. That to all this revulsion he gives undue force of expression need not be denied: but then, it must be remembered that he does not allow it to affect his literary judgement. I do not believe that any one now living has a greater admiration for Swift than I have: and all that I can say is that I know no estimate of his genius anywhere more adequate than Thackeray’s. As for Sterne, I do not intend to say much. If you will thrust your personality into your literature, as Sterne constantly does, you must take the chances of your personality as well as of your literature. You practically expose both to the judgement of the public. And if anybody chooses to take up the cudgels for Sterne’s personality I shall hand them over to him and take no part on one side or another in that bout. To his genius, once more, I do not think Thackeray at all unjust.

The fact is, however, that as is usual with persons of genius, but even more than as usual, the defects and the qualities are so intimately connected that you cannot have one without the other—you must pay the price of the other for the one. All I can say is that such another live piece of English criticism of English literature as this I do not know anywhere. What is alive is very seldom perfect: to get perfection you must go to epitaphs. But, once more, though I could pick plenty of small holes in the details of the actual critical dicta, I know no picture of the division of literature here concerned from which a fairly intelligent person will derive a better impression of the facts than from this. Addison may be a little depressed, and Steele a little exalted: but it is necessary to remember that by Macaulay, whose estimate then practically held the field, Steele had been most unduly depressed and Addison rather unduly exalted. You may go about among our critics on the brightest day with the largest lantern and find nothing more brilliant itself than the “Congreve” article, where the spice of injustice will, again, deceive nobody but a fool. The vividness of the “Addison and Steele” presentation is miraculous. He redresses Johnson on Prior as he had redressed Macaulay on Steele; and he is not unjust, as we might have feared that he would be, to Pope. “Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding” is another miracle of appreciation: and I should like to ask the objectors to “sentimentality” by what other means than an intense sympathy (from which it is impossible to exclude something that may be called sentimental) such a study as that of Goldsmith could have been produced? Now Goldsmith is one of the most difficult persons in the whole range of literature to treat, from the motley of his merits and his weaknesses. Yet Thackeray has achieved the adventure here. In short, throughout the book, he is invaluable as a critic, if not impeccable in criticism. His faults, and the causes of them, are obvious, separable, negligible: his merits (the chief of them, as usual, the constant shower of happy and illuminative phrase) as rare in quality as they are abundant in quantity.

The lectures on The English Humourists must have been composed very much pari passu with Esmond; they were being delivered while it was being finished, and it was published just as the author was setting off to re-deliver them in America. The Four Georges were not regularly taken in hand till some years later, when The Newcomes was finished or finishing, and when fresh material was wanted for the second American trip. But there exists a very remarkable scenario of them—as it may be almost called—a full decade older, in the shape of a satura of verse and prose contributed to Punch on October 11, 1845; which has accordingly been kept back from its original associates to be inserted here. All things considered, it gives the lines which are followed in the later lectures with remarkable precision: and it is not at all improbable that Thackeray actually, though not of necessity consciously, took it for head-notes.

No book of his has been so violently attacked both at the time of its appearance and since. Nor—for, as the reader must have seen long ago, the present writer, though proud to be called a Thackerayan stalwart, is not a Thackerayan “know-nothing”, a “Thackeray-right-or-wrong” man—is there any that exposes itself more to attack. From the strictly literary side, indeed, it has the advantage of The Book of Snobs: for it is nowhere unequal, and exhibits its author’s unmatched power of historical-artistic imagination or reconstruction in almost the highest degree possible. But in other respects it certainly does show the omission “to erect a sconce on Drumsnab”. There was (it has already been hinted at in connexion with the Eastern Journey) a curious innocence about Thackeray. It may be that, like the Hind,

He feared no danger for he knew no sin;

but the absence of fear with him implied an apparent ignoring of danger, which is a danger in itself. Nobody who has even passed Responsions in the study of his literary and moral character will suspect him for one moment of having pandered to American prejudice by prating to it, as a tit-bit and primeur, scandal about this or that King George. But it was quite evident from the first, and ought to have been evident to the author long beforehand, that the enemy might think, and would say so. In fact, putting considerations of mere expediency aside, I think myself that he had much better not have done it. As for the justice of the general verdict, it is no doubt affected throughout by Thackeray’s political incapacity, whatever side he might have taken, and by that quaint theoretical republicanism, with a good deal of pure Toryism mixed, which he attributes to some of his characters, and no doubt, in a kind of rather confused speculative way, held himself. He certainly puts George III’s ability too low, and as certainly he indulges in the case of George IV in one of these curious outbursts—a Hetze of unreasoning, frantic, “stop-thief!” and “mad-dog!” persecution—to which he was liable. “Gorgius” may not have been a hero or a proper moral man: he was certainly “a most expensive Herr”, and by no means a pattern husband. But recent and by no means Pharisaical expositions have exhibited his wife as almost infinitely not better than she should be; the allegations of treachery to private friends are, on the whole, Not Proven: if he deserted the Whigs, it was no more than some of these very Whigs very shortly afterwards did to their country: he played the difficult part of Regent and the not very easy one of King by no means ill; he was, by common and even reluctant consent, an extremely pleasant host and companion; and he liked Jane Austen’s novels. There have been a good many princes—and a good many demagogues too—of whom as much good could not be said.

Admitting excess in these details, and “inconvenience” in the circumstances of the original representation, there remains, as it seems to me, a more than sufficient balance to credit. That social-historic sense, accompanied with literary power of bodying forth its results, which we noticed as early as the opening of Catherine has, in the seventeen years’ interval, fully and marvellously matured itself. The picture is not a mere mob of details: it is an orderly pageant of artistically composed material. It is possible; it is life-like; the only question (and that is rather a minor one) is, “Is it true?”

Minor, I say, because the artistic value would remain if the historical were impaired. But I do not think it is. I shall bow to the authority of persons better acquainted with the eighteenth century than I am: but if some decades of familiarity with essayists and novelists and diarists and letter-writers may give one a scanty locus standi, I shall certainly give my testimony in favour of “Thackeray’s Extract”. The true essence of the life that exhibits itself in fiction from Pamela and Joseph Andrews down to Pompey the Little and the Spiritual Quixote; in essay from the Tatler to the Mirror; in Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary and Horace Walpole; in Pope and Young and Green and Churchill and Cowper, in Boswell and Wraxall, in Mrs. Delany and Madame d’Arblay, seems to me to deserve warrant of excise and guarantee of analysis as it lies in these four little flaskets.

And, as has been done before, let me finish with an almost silent indication of the wonderful variety of this volume also. In one sense the subject of its constituents is the same. Yet in another it is treated with the widest and most infinite difference. Any one of the three treatments would be a masterpiece of single achievement; while the first of the three is, as it seems to me, the masterpiece of its entire class.(5)

THE MS. OF “ESMOND”

The MS. is contained in two volumes and was presented to Trinity College, Cambridge, by the author’s daughter; it is now deposited in the College Library. Sir Leslie Stephen, in writing to the Librarian about it on June 11, 1889, says:—

“There are three separate handwritings. Thackeray’s own small upright handwriting; that of his daughter, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, a rather large round handwriting; and that of an amanuensis whose name I do not know. The interest is mainly this, that it shows that Thackeray dictated a considerable part of the book; and, as Mrs. Ritchie tells me, he dictated it without having previously written anything. The copy was sent straight to press as it stands, with, as you will see, remarkably little alteration. As Esmond is generally considered to be his most perfect work in point of style, I think that this is a remarkable fact and adds considerably to the interest of the MS.”

The four facsimiles which follow, and which appear here by the very kind permission of Lady Ritchie and of the authorities of the College, have been slightly reduced to fit the pages.

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THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND, ESQ

THE HISTORY OF

HENRY ESMOND, ESQ.

A COLONEL IN THE SERVICE OF HER MAJESTY QUEEN ANNE

WRITTEN BY HIMSELF

Servetur ad imum Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet

[First edition in three volumes, 1852. Revised edition, 1858]

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Dedication

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

WILLIAM BINGHAM, LORD ASHBURTON

MY DEAR LORD,

The writer of a book which copies the manners and language of Queen Anne’s time, must not omit the Dedication to the Patron; and I ask leave to inscribe this volume to your lordship, for the sake of the great kindness and friendship which I owe to you and yours.

My volume will reach you when the Author is on his voyage to a country where your name is as well known as here. Wherever I am, I shall gratefully regard you; and shall not be the less welcomed in America because I am

Your obliged friend and servant,

W. M. THACKERAY.

LONDON, October 18, 1852.

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Preface. The Esmonds Of Virginia

The estate of Castlewood, in Virginia, which was given to our ancestors by King Charles the First, as some return for the sacrifices made in his Majesty’s cause by the Esmond family, lies in Westmoreland county, between the rivers Potomac and Rappahannoc, and was once as great as an English Principality, though in the early times its revenues were but small. Indeed, for near eighty years after our forefathers possessed them, our plantations were in the hands of factors, who enriched themselves one after another, though a few scores of hogsheads of tobacco were all the produce that, for long after the Restoration, our family received from their Virginian estates.

My dear and honoured father, Colonel Henry Esmond, whose history, written by himself, is contained in the accompanying volume, came to Virginia in the year 1718, built his house of Castlewood, and here permanently settled. After a long stormy life in England, he passed the remainder of his many years in peace and honour in this country; how beloved and respected by all his fellow citizens, how inexpressibly dear to his family, I need not say. His whole life was a benefit to all who were connected with him. He gave the best example, the best advice, the most bounteous hospitality to his friends; the tenderest care to his dependants; and bestowed on those of his immediate family such a blessing of fatherly love and protection, as can never be thought of, by us at least, without veneration and thankfulness; and my son’s children, whether established here in our Republick, or at home in the always beloved mother country, from which our late quarrel hath separated us, may surely be proud to be descended from one who in all ways was so truly noble.

My dear mother died in 1736, soon after our return from England, whither my parents took me for my education; and where I made the acquaintance of Mr. Warrington, whom my children never saw. When it pleased Heaven, in the bloom of his youth, and after but a few months of a most happy union, to remove him from me, I owed my recovery from the grief which that calamity caused me, mainly to my dearest father’s tenderness, and then to the blessing vouchsafed to me in the birth of my two beloved boys. I know the fatal differences which separated them in politics never disunited their hearts; and as I can love them both, whether wearing the king’s colours or the Republick’s, I am sure that they love me, and one another, and him above all, my father and theirs, the dearest friend of their childhood, the noble gentleman who bred them from their infancy in the practice and knowledge of Truth, and Love, and Honour.

My children will never forget the appearance and figure of their revered grandfather; and I wish I possessed the art of drawing (which my papa had in perfection), so that I could leave to our descendants a portrait of one who was so good and so respected. My father was of a dark complexion, with a very great forehead and dark hazel eyes, overhung by eyebrows which remained black long after his hair was white. His nose was aquiline, his smile extraordinary sweet. How well I remember it, and how little any description I can write can recall his image! He was of rather low stature, not being above five feet seven inches in height; he used to laugh at my sons, whom he called his crutches, and say they were grown too tall for him to lean upon. But small as he was he had a perfect grace and majesty of deportment, such as I have never seen in this country, except perhaps in our friend Mr. Washington, and commanded respect wherever he appeared.

In all bodily exercises he excelled, and showed an extraordinary quickness and agility. Of fencing he was especially fond, and made my two boys proficient in that art; so much so, that when the French came to this country with Monsieur Rochambeau, not one of his officers was superior to my Henry, and he was not the equal of my poor George, who had taken the king’s side in our lamentable but glorious War of Independence.

Neither my father nor my mother ever wore powder in their hair; both their heads were as white as silver, as I can remember them. My dear mother possessed to the last an extraordinary brightness and freshness of complexion; nor would people believe that she did not wear rouge. At sixty years of age she still looked young, and was quite agile. It was not until after that dreadful siege of our house by the Indians, which left me a widow ere I was a mother, that my dear mother’s health broke. She never recovered her terror and anxiety of those days, which ended so fatally for me, then a bride scarce six months married, and died in my father’s arms ere my own year of widowhood was over.

From that day, until the last of his dear and honoured life, it was my delight and consolation to remain with him as his comforter and companion; and from those little notes which my mother hath made here and there in the volume in which my father describes his adventures in Europe, I can well understand the extreme devotion with which she regarded him—a devotion so passionate and exclusive as to prevent her, I think, from loving any other person except with an inferior regard; her whole thoughts being centred on this one object of affection and worship. I know that, before her, my dear father did not show the love which he had for his daughter; and in her last and most sacred moments, this dear and tender parent owned to me her repentance that she had not loved me enough: her jealousy even that my father should give his affection to any but herself; and in the most fond and beautiful words of affection and admonition, she bade me never to leave him, and to supply the place which she was quitting. With a clear conscience, and a heart inexpressibly thankful, I think I can say that I fulfilled those dying commands, and that until his last hour my dearest father never had to complain that his daughter’s love and fidelity failed him.

And it is since I knew him entirely, for during my mother’s life he never quite opened himself to me—since I knew the value and splendour of that affection which he bestowed upon me, that I have come to understand and pardon what, I own, used to anger me in my mother’s lifetime, her jealousy respecting her husband’s love. ’Twas a gift so precious, that no wonder she who had it was for keeping it all, and could part with none of it, even to her daughter.

Though I never heard my father use a rough word, ’twas extraordinary with how much awe his people regarded him; and the servants on our plantation, both those assigned from England and the purchased negroes, obeyed him with an eagerness such as the most severe taskmasters round about us could never get from their people. He was never familiar, though perfectly simple and natural; he was the same with the meanest man as with the greatest, and as courteous to a black slave-girl as to the governor’s wife. No one ever thought of taking a liberty with him (except once a tipsy gentleman from York, and I am bound to own that my papa never forgave him): he set the humblest people at once on their ease with him, and brought down the most arrogant by a grave satiric way, which made persons exceedingly afraid of him. His courtesy was not put on like a Sunday suit, and laid by when the company went away; it was always the same; as he was always dressed the same whether for a dinner by ourselves or for a great entertainment. They say he liked to be the first in his company; but what company was there in which he would not be first? When I went to Europe for my education, and we passed a winter at London with my half-brother, my Lord Castlewood and his second lady, I saw at her Majesty’s Court some of the most famous gentlemen of those days; and I thought to myself, “None of these are better than my papa”; and the famous Lord Bolingbroke, who came to us from Dawley, said as much, and that the men of that time were not like those of his youth:—“Were your father, madam,” he said, “to go into the woods, the Indians would elect him Sachem;” and his lordship was pleased to call me Pocahontas.

I did not see our other relative, Bishop Tusher’s lady, of whom so much is said in my papa’s memoirs—although my mamma went to visit her in the country. I have no pride (as I showed by complying with my mother’s request, and marrying a gentleman who was but the younger son of a Suffolk baronet), yet I own to a decent respect for my name, and wonder how one, who ever bore it, should change it for that of Mrs. Thomas Tusher. I pass over as odious and unworthy of credit those reports (which I heard in Europe, and was then too young to understand), how this person, having left her family and fled to Paris, out of jealousy of the Pretender, betrayed his secrets to my Lord Stair, King George’s ambassador, and nearly caused the prince’s death there; how she came to England and married this Mr. Tusher, and became a great favourite of King George the Second, by whom Mr. Tusher was made a dean, and then a bishop. I did not see the lady, who chose to remain at her palace all the time we were in London; but after visiting her, my poor mamma said she had lost all her good looks, and warned me not to set too much store by any such gifts which nature had bestowed upon me. She grew exceedingly stout; and I remember my brother’s wife, Lady Castlewood, saying—“No wonder she became a favourite, for the king likes them old and ugly, as his father did before him.” On which papa said—“All women were alike; that there was never one so beautiful as that one; and that we could forgive her everything but her beauty.” And hereupon my mamma looked vexed, and my Lord Castlewood began to laugh; and I, of course, being a young creature, could not understand what was the subject of their conversation.

After the circumstances narrated in the third book of these memoirs, my father and mother both went abroad, being advised by their friends to leave the country in consequence of the transactions which are recounted at the close of the volume of the memoirs. But my brother, hearing how the future bishop’s lady had quitted Castlewood and joined the Pretender at Paris, pursued him, and would have killed him, prince as he was, had not the prince managed to make his escape. On his expedition to Scotland directly after, Castlewood was so enraged against him that he asked leave to serve as a volunteer, and join the Duke of Argyle’s army in Scotland, which the Pretender never had the courage to face; and thenceforth my lord was quite reconciled to the present reigning family, from whom he hath even received promotion.

Mrs. Tusher was by this time as angry against the Pretender as any of her relations could be, and used to boast, as I have heard, that she not only brought back my lord to the Church of England, but procured the English peerage for him, which the junior branch of our family at present enjoys. She was a great friend of Sir Robert Walpole, and would not rest until her husband slept at Lambeth, my papa used laughing to say. However, the bishop died of apoplexy suddenly, and his wife erected a great monument over him; and the pair sleep under that stone, with a canopy of marble clouds and angels above them—the first Mrs. Tusher lying sixty miles off at Castlewood.

But my papa’s genius and education are both greater than any a woman can be expected to have, and his adventures in Europe far more exciting than his life in this country, which was past in the tranquil offices of love and duty; and I shall say no more by way of introduction to his memoirs, nor keep my children from the perusal of a story which is much more interesting than that of their affectionate old mother,

Rachel Esmond Warrington.

CASTLEWOOD, VIRGINIA, November 3, 1778.

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I. The Early Youth Of Henry Esmond, Up To The Time Of His Leaving Trinity College, In Cambridge

The actors in the old tragedies, as we read, piped their iambics to a tune, speaking from under a mask, and wearing stilts and a great head-dress. ’Twas thought the dignity of the Tragic Muse required these appurtenances, and that she was not to move except to a measure and cadence. So Queen Medea slew her children to a slow music: and King Agamemnon perished in a dying fall (to use Mr. Dryden’s words): the Chorus standing by in a set attitude, and rhythmically and decorously bewailing the fates of those great crowned persons. The Muse of History hath encumbered herself with ceremony as well as her Sister of the Theatre. She too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks to measure. She too, in our age, busies herself with the affairs only of kings; waiting on them obsequiously and stately, as if she were but a mistress of Court ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registering of the affairs of the common people. I have seen in his very old age and decrepitude the old French King Lewis the Fourteenth, the type and model of kinghood—who never moved but to measure, who lived and died according to the laws of his Court-marshal, persisting in enacting through life the part of Hero; and, divested of poetry, this was but a little wrinkled old man, pock-marked, and with a great periwig and red heels to make him look tall—a hero for a book if you like, or for a brass statue or a painted ceiling, a god in a Roman shape, but what more than a man for Madame Maintenon, or the barber who shaved him, or Monsieur Fagon, his surgeon? I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be court-ridden? Shall we see something of France and England besides Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne at the latter place tearing down the Park slopes after her staghounds, and driving her one-horse chaise—a hot, red-faced woman, not in the least resembling that statue of her which turns its stone back upon St. Paul’s, and faces the coaches struggling up Ludgate Hill. She was neither better bred nor wiser than you and me, though we knelt to hand her a letter or a washhand-basin. Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time? I am for having her rise up off her knees, and take a natural posture: not to be for ever performing cringes and congees like a Court-chamberlain, and shuffling backwards out of doors in the presence of the sovereign. In a word, I would have History familiar rather than heroic: and think that Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding will give our children a much better idea of the manners of the present age in England, than the Court Gazette and the newspapers which we get thence.

There was a German officer of Webb’s, with whom we used to joke, and of whom a story (whereof I myself was the author) was got to be believed in the army, that he was eldest son of the Hereditary Grand Bootjack of the Empire, and heir to that honour of which his ancestors had been very proud, having been kicked for twenty generations by one imperial foot, as they drew the boot from the other. I have heard that the old Lord Castlewood, of part of whose family these present volumes are a chronicle, though he came of quite as good blood as the Stuarts whom he served (and who as regards mere lineage are no better than a dozen English and Scottish houses I could name), was prouder of his post about the Court than of his ancestral honours and valued his dignity (as Lord of the Butteries and Groom of the King’s Posset) so highly, that he cheerfully ruined himself for the thankless and thriftless race who bestowed it. He pawned his plate for King Charles the First, mortgaged his property for the same cause, and lost the greater part of it by fines and sequestration: stood a siege of his castle by Ireton, where his brother Thomas capitulated (afterwards making terms with the Commonwealth, for which the elder brother never forgave him), and where his second brother Edward, who had embraced the ecclesiastical profession, was slain on Castlewood tower, being engaged there both as preacher and artilleryman. This resolute old loyalist, who was with the king whilst his house was thus being battered down, escaped abroad with his only son, then a boy, to return and take a part in Worcester fight. On that fatal field Eustace Esmond was killed, and Castlewood fled from it once more into exile, and henceforward, and after the Restoration, never was away from the Court of the monarch (for whose return we offer thanks in the Prayer-book) who sold his country and who took bribes of the French king.

What spectacle is more august than that of a great king in exile? Who is more worthy of respect than a brave man in misfortune? Mr. Addison has painted such a figure in his noble piece of Cato. But suppose fugitive Cato fuddling himself at a tavern with a wench on each knee, a dozen faithful and tipsy companions of defeat, and a landlord calling out for his bill; and the dignity of misfortune is straightway lost. The Historical Muse turns away shamefaced from the vulgar scene, and closes the door—on which the exile’s unpaid drink is scored up—upon him and his pots and his pipes, and the tavern-chorus which he and his friends are singing. Such a man as Charles should have had an Ostade or Mieris to paint him. Your Knellers and Le Bruns only deal in clumsy and impossible allegories: and it hath always seemed to me blasphemy to claim Olympus for such a wine-drabbled divinity as that.

About the king’s follower the Viscount Castlewood—orphan of his son, ruined by his fidelity, bearing many wounds and marks of bravery, old and in exile, his kinsmen I suppose should be silent; nor if this patriarch fell down in his cups, call fie upon him, and fetch passers-by to laugh at his red face and white hairs. What! does a stream rush out of a mountain free and pure, to roll through fair pastures, to feed and throw out bright tributaries, and to end in a village gutter? Lives that have noble commencements have often no better endings; it is not without a kind of awe and reverence that an observer should speculate upon such careers as he traces the course of them. I have seen too much of success in life to take off my hat and huzza to it as it passes in its gilt coach: and would do my little part with my neighbours on foot, that they should not gape with too much wonder, nor applaud too loudly. Is it the Lord Mayor going in state to mince-pies and the Mansion House? Is it poor Jack of Newgate’s procession, with the sheriff and javelin-men, conducting him on his last journey to Tyburn? I look into my heart and think that I am as good as my Lord Mayor, and know I am as bad as Tyburn Jack. Give me a chain and red gown and a pudding before me, and I could play the part of alderman very well, and sentence Jack after dinner. Starve me, keep me from books and honest people, educate me to love dice, gin, and pleasure, and put me on Hounslow Heath, with a purse before me and I will take it. “And I shall be deservedly hanged,” say you, wishing to put an end to this prosing. I don’t say no. I can’t but accept the world as I find it, including a rope’s end, as long as it is in fashion.

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I. An Account Of The Family Of Esmond Of Castlewood Hall

When Francis, fourth Viscount Castlewood, came to his title, and presently after to take possession of his house of Castlewood, county Hants, in the year 1691, almost the only tenant of the place besides the domestics was a lad of twelve years of age, of whom no one seemed to take any note until my lady viscountess lighted upon him, going over the house, with the housekeeper on the day of her arrival. The boy was in the room known as the book-room, or yellow gallery, where the portraits of the family used to hang, that fine piece among others of Sir Antonio Van Dyck of George, second viscount, and that by Mr. Dobson of my lord the third viscount, just deceased, which it seems his lady and widow did not think fit to carry away, when she sent for and carried off to her house at Chelsey, near to London, the picture of herself by Sir Peter Lely, in which her ladyship was represented as a huntress of Diana’s court.

The new and fair lady of Castlewood found the sad lonely little occupant of this gallery busy over his great book, which he laid down when he was aware that a stranger was at hand. And, knowing who that person must be, the lad stood up and bowed before her, performing a shy obeisance to the mistress of his house.

She stretched out her hand—indeed when was it that that hand would not stretch out to do an act of kindness, or to protect grief and ill-fortune? “And this is our kinsman,’” she said; “and what is your name, kinsman?”

“My name is Henry Esmond,” said the lad, looking up at her in a sort of delight and wonder, for she had come upon him as a Dea certè, and appeared the most charming object he had ever looked on. Her golden hair was shining in the gold of the sun; her complexion was of a dazzling bloom; her lips smiling, and her eyes beaming with a kindness which made Harry Esmond’s heart to beat with surprise.

“His name is Henry Esmond, sure enough, my lady,” says Mrs. Worksop the housekeeper (an old tyrant whom Henry Esmond plagued more than he hated), and the old gentlewoman looked significantly towards the late lord’s picture, as it now is in the family, noble and severe-looking, with his hand on his sword, and his order on his cloak, which he had from the emperor during the war on the Danube against the Turk.

Seeing the great and undeniable likeness between this portrait and the lad, the new viscountess, who had still hold of the boy’s hand as she looked at the picture, blushed and dropped the hand quickly, and walked down the gallery, followed by Mrs. Worksop.

When the lady came back, Harry Esmond stood exactly in the same spot, and with his hand as it had fallen when he dropped it on his black coat.

Her heart melted I suppose (indeed she hath since owned as much) at the notion that she should do anything unkind to any mortal, great or small; for, when she returned, she had sent away the housekeeper upon an errand by the door at the farther end of the gallery; and, coming back to the lad, with a look of infinite pity and tenderness in her eyes, she took his hand again, placing her other fair hand on his head, and saying some words to him, which were so kind and said in a voice so sweet, that the boy, who had never looked upon so much beauty before, felt as if the touch of a superior being or angel smote him down to the ground, and kissed the fair protecting hand as he knelt on one knee. To the very last hour of his life, Esmond remembered the lady as she then spoke and looked, the rings on her fair hands, the very scent of her robe, the beam of her eyes lighting up with surprise and kindness, her lips blooming in a smile, the sun making a golden halo round her hair.

As the boy was yet in this attitude of humility, enters behind him a portly gentleman, with a little girl of four years old in his hand. The gentleman burst into a great laugh at the lady and her adorer, with his little queer figure, his sallow face, and long black hair. The lady blushed, and seemed to deprecate his ridicule by a look of appeal to her husband, for it was my lord viscount who now arrived, and whom the lad knew, having once before seen him in the late lord’s lifetime.

“So this is the little priest!” says my lord, looking down at the lad; “welcome, kinsman.”

“He is saying his prayers to mamma,” says the little girl, who came up to her papa’s knee; and my lord burst out into another great laugh at this, and kinsman Henry looked very silly. He invented a half-dozen of speeches in reply, but ’twas months afterwards when he thought of this adventure: as it was, he had never a word in answer.

“Le pauvre enfant, il n’a que nous,” says the lady, looking to her lord; and the boy, who understood her, though doubtless she thought otherwise, thanked her with all his heart for her kind speech.

“And he shan’t want for friends here,” says my lord, in a kind voice, “shall he, little Trix?”

The little girl, whose name was Beatrix, and whom her papa called by this diminutive, looked at Henry Esmond solemnly, with a pair of large eyes, and then a smile shone over her face, which was as beautiful as that of a cherub, and she came up and put out a little hand to him. A keen and delightful pang of gratitude, happiness, affection, filled the orphan child’s heart, as he received from the protectors, whom Heaven had sent to him, these touching words, and tokens of friendliness and kindness. But an hour since he had felt quite alone in the world: when he heard the great peal of bells from Castlewood church ringing that morning to welcome the arrival of the new lord and lady, it had rung only terror and anxiety to him, for he knew not how the new owner would deal with him; and those to whom he formerly looked for protection were forgotten or dead. Pride and doubt too had kept him within doors: when the vicar and the people of the village, and the servants of the house, had gone out to welcome my Lord Castlewood—for Henry Esmond was no servant, though a dependant; no relative, though he bore the name and inherited the blood of the house; and in the midst of the noise and acclamations attending the arrival of the new lord (for whom you may be sure a feast was got ready, and guns were fired, and tenants and domestics huzzaed when his carriage approached and rolled into the courtyard of the hall), no one ever took any notice of young Henry Esmond, who sat unobserved and alone in the book-room, until the afternoon of that day, when his new friends found him.

When my lord and lady were going away thence, the little girl, still holding her kinsman by the hand, bade him to come too. “Thou wilt always forsake an old friend for a new one, Trix,” says her father to her good-naturedly; and went into the gallery, giving an arm to his lady. They passed thence through the music-gallery, long since dismantled, and Queen Elizabeth’s rooms, in the clock-tower, and out into the terrace, where was a fine prospect of sunset, and the great darkling woods with a cloud of rooks returning; and the plain and river with Castlewood village beyond, and purple hills beautiful to look at—and the little heir of Castlewood, a child of two years old, was already here on the terrace in his nurse’s arms, from whom he ran across the grass instantly he perceived his mother, and came to her.

“If thou canst not be happy here,” says my lord, looking round at the scene, “thou art hard to please, Rachel.”

“I am happy where you are,” she said, “but we were happiest of all at Walcote Forest.” Then my lord began to describe what was before them to his wife, and what indeed little Harry knew better than he—viz., the history of the house: how by yonder gate the page ran away with the heiress of Castlewood, by which the estate came into the present family, how the Roundheads attacked the clock-tower, which my lord’s father was slain in defending. “I was but two years old then,” says he, “but take forty-six from ninety, and how old shall I be, kinsman Harry?”

“Thirty,” says his wife, with a laugh.

“A great deal too old for you, Rachel,” answers my lord, looking fondly down at her. Indeed she seemed to be a girl; and was at that time scarce twenty years old.

“You know, Frank, I will do anything to please you,” says she, “and I promise you I will grow older every day.”

“You mustn’t call papa Frank; you must call papa my lord, now,” says Miss Beatrix, with a toss of her little head; at which the mother smiled, and the good-natured father laughed, and the little, trotting boy laughed, not knowing why—but because he was happy no doubt—as every one seemed to be there. How those trivial incidents and words, the landscape and sunshine, and the group of people smiling and talking, remain fixed on the memory!

As the sun was setting, the little heir was sent in the arms of his nurse to bed, whither he went howling; but little Trix was promised to sit to supper that night—“and you will come too, kinsman, won’t you?” she said.

Harry Esmond blushed: “I—I have supper with Mrs. Worksop,” says he.

“D—n it,” says my lord, “thou shalt sup with us, Harry, to-night! Shan’t refuse a lady, shall he, Trix?”—and they all wondered at Harry’s performance as a trencherman, in which character the poor boy acquitted himself very remarkably; for the truth is he had no dinner, nobody thinking of him in the bustle which the house was in, during the preparations antecedent to the new lord’s arrival.

“No dinner! poor dear child!” says my lady, heaping up his plate with meat, and my lord filling a bumper for him, bade him call a health; on which Master Harry, crying “The King”, tossed off the wine. My lord was ready to drink that, and most other toasts: indeed, only too ready. He would not hear of Doctor Tusher (the Vicar of Castlewood, who came to supper) going away when the sweetmeats were brought: he had not had a chaplain long enough, he said, to be tired of him: so his reverence kept my lord company for some hours over a pipe and a punchbowl; and went away home with rather a reeling gait, and declaring a dozen of times, that his lordship’s affability surpassed every kindness he had ever had from his lordship’s gracious family.

As for young Esmond, when he got to his little chamber, it was with a heart full of surprise and gratitude towards the new friends whom this happy day had brought him. He was up and watching long before the house was astir, longing to see that fair lady and her children—that kind protector and patron; and only fearful lest their welcome of the past night should in any way be withdrawn or altered. But presently little Beatrix came out into the garden, and her mother followed, who greeted Harry as kindly as before. He told her at greater length the histories of the house (which he had been taught in the old lord’s time), and to which she listened with great interest; and then he told her, with respect to the night before, that he understood French, and thanked her for her protection.

“Do you?” says she, with a blush; “then, sir, you shall teach me and Beatrix.” And she asked him many more questions regarding himself, which had best be told more fully and explicitly, than in those brief replies which the lad made to his mistress’s questions.

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II. Relates How Francis, Fourth Viscount, Arrives At Castlewood

’Tis known that the name of Esmond and the estate of Castlewood, com. Hants, came into possession of the present family through Dorothea, daughter and heiress of Edward, Earl and Marquis of Esmond, and Lord of Castlewood, which lady married, 23 Eliz., Henry Poyns, gent.; the said Henry being then a page in the household of her father. Francis, son and heir of the above Henry and Dorothea, who took the maternal name which the family hath borne subsequently, was made knight and baronet by King James the First; and, being of a military disposition, remained long in Germany with the Elector-Palatine, in whose service Sir Francis incurred both expense and danger, lending large sums of money to that unfortunate prince; and receiving many wounds in the battles against the Imperialists, in which Sir Francis engaged.

On his return home Sir Francis was rewarded for his services and many sacrifices, by his late Majesty James the First, who graciously conferred upon this tried servant the post of Warden of the Butteries and Groom of the King’s Posset, which high and confidential office he filled in that king’s, and his unhappy successor’s, reign.

His age, and many wounds and infirmities, obliged Sir Francis to perform much of his duty by deputy; and his son, Sir George Esmond, knight and banneret, first as his father’s lieutenant, and afterwards as inheritor of his father’s title and dignity, performed this office during almost the whole of the reign of King Charles the First, and his two sons who succeeded him.

Sir George Esmond married rather beneath the rank that a person of his name and honour might aspire to, the daughter of Thos. Topham, of the city of London, alderman and goldsmith, who, taking the Parliamentary side in the troubles then commencing, disappointed Sir George of the property which he expected at the demise of his father-in-law, who devised his money to his second daughter, Barbara, a spinster.

Sir George Esmond, on his part, was conspicuous for his attachment and loyalty to the royal cause and person, and the king being at Oxford in 1642, Sir George, with the consent of his father, then very aged and infirm, and residing at his house of Castlewood, melted the whole of the family plate for his Majesty’s service.

For this, and other sacrifices and merits, his Majesty, by patent under the Privy Seal, dated Oxford, Jan., 1643, was pleased to advance Sir Francis Esmond to the dignity of Viscount Castlewood, of Shandon, in Ireland: and the viscount’s estate being much impoverished by loans to the king, which in those troublesome times his Majesty could not repay, a grant of land in the plantations of Virginia was given to the lord viscount; part of which land is in possession of descendants of his family to the present day.

The first Viscount Castlewood died full of years, and within a few months after he had been advanced to his honours. He was succeeded by his eldest son, the before-named George; and left issue besides, Thomas, a colonel in the king’s army, that afterwards joined the Usurper’s government; and Francis, in holy orders, who was slain whilst defending the house of Castlewood against the Parliament, anno 1647.

George, Lord Castlewood (the second viscount) of King Charles the First’s time, had no male issue save his one son Eustace Esmond, who was killed, with half of the Castlewood men beside him, at Worcester fight. The lands about Castlewood were sold and apportioned to the Commonwealth men; Castlewood being concerned in almost all of the plots against the Protector, after the death of the king, and up to King Charles the Second’s restoration. My lord followed that king’s Court about in its exile, having ruined himself in its service. He had but one daughter, who was of no great comfort to her father; for misfortune had not taught those exiles sobriety of life; and it is said that the Duke of York and his brother the king both quarrelled about Isabel Esmond. She was maid of honour to the Queen Henrietta Maria; she early joined the Roman Church; her father, a weak man, following her not long after at Breda.

On the death of Eustace Esmond at Worcester, Thomas Esmond, nephew to my Lord Castlewood, and then a stripling, became heir to the title. His father had taken the Parliament side in the quarrels, and so had been estranged from the chief of his house; and my Lord Castlewood was at first so much enraged to think that his title (albeit little more than an empty one now) should pass to a rascally Roundhead, that he would have married again, and indeed proposed to do so to a vintner’s daughter at Bruges, to whom his lordship owed a score for lodging when the king was there, but for fear of the laughter of the Court, and the anger of his daughter, of whom he stood in awe; for she was in temper as imperious and violent as my lord, who was much enfeebled by wounds and drinking, was weak.

Lord Castlewood would have had a match between his daughter Isabel and her cousin, the son of that Francis Esmond who was killed at Castlewood siege. And the lady, it was said, took a fancy to the young man, who was her junior by several years (which circumstance she did not consider to be a fault in him); but having paid his court, and being admitted to the intimacy of the house, he suddenly flung up his suit, when it seemed to be pretty prosperous, without giving a pretext for his behaviour. His friends rallied him at what they laughingly chose to call his infidelity. Jack Churchill, Frank Esmond’s lieutenant in the royal regiment of foot guards, getting the company which Esmond vacated, when he left the Court and went to Tangier in a rage at discovering that his promotion depended on the complaisance of his elderly affianced bride. He and Churchill, who had been condiscipuli at St. Paul’s School, had words about this matter; and Frank Esmond said to him with an oath, “Jack, your sister may be so-and-so, but by Jove, my wife shan’t!” and swords were drawn, and blood drawn, too, until friends separated them on this quarrel. Few men were so jealous about the point of honour in those days; and gentlemen of good birth and lineage thought a royal blot was an ornament to their family coat. Frank Esmond retired in the sulks, first to Tangier, whence he returned after two years’ service, settling on a small property he had of his mother, near to Winchester, and became a country gentleman, and kept a pack of beagles, and never came to Court again in King Charles’s time. But his uncle Castlewood was never reconciled to him; nor, for some time afterwards, his cousin whom he had refused.

By places, pensions, bounties from France, and gifts from the king, whilst his daughter was in favour, Lord Castlewood, who had spent in the royal service his youth and fortune, did not retrieve the latter quite, and never cared to visit Castlewood, or repair it, since the death of his son, but managed to keep a good house, and figure at Court, and to save a considerable sum of ready money.

And now, his heir and nephew, Thomas Esmond, began to bid for his uncle’s favour. Thomas had served with the emperor, and with the Dutch, when King Charles was compelled to lend troops to the States, and against them, when his Majesty made an alliance with the French king. In these campaigns Thomas Esmond was more remarked for duelling, brawling, vice, and play, than for any conspicuous gallantry in the field, and came back to England, like many another English gentleman who has travelled, with a character by no means improved by his foreign experience. He had dissipated his small paternal inheritance of a younger brother’s portion, and, as truth must be told, was no better than a hanger-on of ordinaries, and a brawler about Alsatia and the Friars, when he bethought him of a means of mending his fortune.

His cousin was now of more than middle age, and had nobody’s word but her own for the beauty which she said she once possessed. She was lean, and yellow, and long in the tooth; all the red and white in all the toy-shops in London could not make a beauty of her—Mr. Killigrew called her the Sibyl, the death’s-head put up at the king’s feast as a memento mori, &c.—in fine, a woman who might be easy of conquest, but whom only a very bold man would think of conquering. This bold man was Thomas Esmond. He had a fancy to my Lord Castlewood’s savings, the amount of which rumour had very much exaggerated. Madam Isabel was said to have royal jewels of great value; whereas poor Tom Esmond’s last coat but one was in pawn.

My lord had at this time a fine house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, nigh to the Duke’s Theatre and the Portugal ambassador’s chapel. Tom Esmond, who had frequented the one as long as he had money to spend among the actresses, now came to the church as assiduously. He looked so lean and shabby, that he passed without difficulty for a repentant sinner; and so, becoming converted, you may be sure took his uncle’s priest for a director.

This charitable father reconciled him with the old lord his uncle, who a short time before would not speak to him, as Tom passed under my lord’s coach window, his lordship going in state to his place at Court, while his nephew slunk by with his battered hat and feather, and the point of his rapier sticking out of the scabbard—to his twopenny ordinary in Bell Yard.

Thomas Esmond, after this reconciliation with his uncle, very soon began to grow sleek, and to show signs of the benefits of good living and clean linen. He fasted rigorously twice a week to be sure; but he made amends on the other days: and, to show how great his appetite was, Mr. Wycherley said, he ended by swallowing that fly-blown rank old morsel his cousin. There were endless jokes and lampoons about this marriage at Court: but Tom rode thither in his uncle’s coach now, called him father, and having won could afford to laugh. This marriage took place very shortly before King Charles died: whom the Viscount of Castlewood speedily followed.

The issue of this marriage was one son, whom the parents watched with an intense eagerness and care; but who, in spite of nurses and physicians, had only a brief existence. His tainted blood did not run very long in his poor feeble little body. Symptoms of evil broke out early on him; and, part from flattery, part superstition, nothing would satisfy my lord and lady, especially the latter, but having the poor little cripple touched by his Majesty at his church. They were ready to cry out miracle at first (the doctors and quack-salvers being constantly in attendance on the child, and experimenting on his poor little body with every conceivable nostrum)—but though there seemed from some reason a notable amelioration in the infant’s health after his Majesty touched him, in a few weeks afterward the poor thing died—causing the lampooners of the Court to say, that the king in expelling evil out of the infant of Tom Esmond and Isabella his wife, expelled the life out of it, which was nothing but corruption.

The mother’s natural pang at losing this poor little child must have been increased when she thought of her rival Frank Esmond’s wife, who was a favourite of the whole Court, where my poor Lady Castlewood was neglected, and who had one child, a daughter, flourishing and beautiful, and was about to become a mother once more.

The Court, as I have heard, only laughed the more because the poor lady, who had pretty well passed the age when ladies are accustomed to have children, nevertheless determined not to give hope up, and even when she came to live at Castlewood, was constantly sending over to Hexton for the doctor, and announcing to her friends the arrival of an heir. This absurdity of hers was one amongst many others which the wags used to play upon. Indeed, to the last days of her life, my lady viscountess had the comfort of fancying herself beautiful, and persisted in blooming up to the very midst of winter, painting roses on her cheeks long after their natural season, and attiring herself like summer though her head was covered with snow.

Gentlemen who were about the Court of King Charles and King James, have told the present writer a number of stories about this queer old lady, with which it’s not necessary that posterity should be entertained. She is said to have had great powers of invective; and, if she fought with all her rivals in King James’s favour, ’tis certain she must have had a vast number of quarrels on her hands. She was a woman of an intrepid spirit, and it appears pursued and rather fatigued his Majesty with her rights and her wrongs. Some say that the cause of her leaving Court was jealousy of Frank Esmond’s wife: others, that she was forced to retreat after a great battle which took place at Whitehall, between her ladyship and Lady Dorchester, Tom Killigrew’s daughter, whom the king delighted to honour, and in which that ill-favoured Esther got the better of our elderly Vashti. But her ladyship for her part always averred that it was her husband’s quarrel, and not her own, which occasioned the banishment of the two into the country; and the cruel ingratitude of the sovereign in giving away, out of the family, that place of Warden of the Butteries and Groom of the King’s Posset, which the two last Lords Castlewood had held so honourably, and which was now conferred upon a fellow of yesterday, and a hanger-on of that odious Dorchester creature, my Lord Bergamot(6); “I never,” said my lady, “could have come to see his Majesty’s posset carried by any other hand than an Esmond. I should have dashed the salver out of Lord Bergamot’s hand, had I met him.” And those who knew her ladyship are aware that she was a person quite capable of performing this feat, had she not wisely kept out of the way.

Holding the purse-strings in her own control, to which, indeed, she liked to bring most persons who came near her, Lady Castlewood could command her husband’s obedience, and so broke up her establishment at London; she had removed from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Chelsey, to a pretty new house she bought there; and brought her establishment, her maids, lap-dogs, and gentlewomen, her priest, and his lordship, her husband, to Castlewood Hall, that she had never seen since she quitted it as a child with her father during the troubles of King Charles the First’s reign. The walls were still open in the old house as they had been left by the shot of the Commonwealth men. A part of the mansion was restored and furnished up with the plate, hangings, and furniture, brought from the house in London. My lady meant to have a triumphal entry into Castlewood village, and expected the people to cheer as she drove over the Green in her great coach, my lord beside her, her gentlewomen, lap-dogs, and cockatoos on the opposite seat, six horses to her carriage, and servants armed and mounted, following it and preceding it. But ’twas in the height of the No-Popery cry; the folks in the village and the neighbouring town were scared by the sight of her ladyship’s painted face and eyelids, as she bobbed her head out of the coach window, meaning no doubt to be very gracious; and one old woman said, “Lady Isabel! lord-a-mercy, it’s Lady Jezebel!” a name by which the enemies of the right honourable viscountess were afterwards in the habit of designating her. The country was then in a great No-Popery fervour, her ladyship’s known conversion, and her husband’s, the priest in her train, and the service performed at the chapel of Castlewood (though the chapel had been built for that worship before any other was heard of in the country, and though the service was performed in the most quiet manner), got her no favour at first in the county or village. By far the greater part of the estate of Castlewood had been confiscated, and been parcelled out to Commonwealth men. One or two of these old Cromwellian soldiers were still alive in the village, and looked grimly at first upon my lady viscountess, when she came to dwell there.

She appeared at the Hexton Assembly, bringing her lord after her, scaring the country folks with the splendour of her diamonds, which she always wore in public. They said she wore them in private, too, and slept with them round her neck; though the writer can pledge his word that this was a calumny. “If she were to take them off,” my Lady Sark said, “Tom Esmond, her husband, would run away with them and pawn them.” ’Twas another calumny. My Lady Sark was also an exile from Court, and there had been war between the two ladies before.

The village people began to be reconciled presently to their lady, who was generous and kind, though fantastic and haughty, in her ways; and whose praises Dr. Tusher, the vicar, sounded loudly amongst his flock. As for my lord, he gave no great trouble, being considered scarce more than an appendage to my lady, who as daughter of the old lords of Castlewood, and possessor of vast wealth, as the country folks said (though indeed nine-tenths of it existed but in rumour), was looked upon as the real queen of the Castle, and mistress of all it contained.

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III. Whither In The Time Of Thomas, Third Viscount, I Had Preceded Him As Page To Isabella

Coming up to London again some short time after this retreat, the Lord Castlewood dispatched a retainer of his to a little cottage in the village of Ealing, near to London, where for some time had dwelt an old French refugee, by name Mr. Pastoureau, one of those whom the persecution of the Huguenots by the French king had brought over to this country. With this old man lived a little lad, who went by the name of Henry Thomas. He remembered to have lived in another place a short time before, near to London, too, amongst looms and spinning-wheels, and a great deal of psalm-singing and church-going, and a whole colony of Frenchmen.

There he had a dear, dear friend, who died and whom he called aunt. She used to visit him in his dreams sometimes; and her face, though it was homely, was a thousand times dearer to him than that of Mrs. Pastoureau, Bon Papa Pastoureau’s new wife, who came to live with him after aunt went away. And there, at Spittlefields, as it used to be called, lived Uncle George, who was a weaver too, but used to tell Harry that he was a little gentleman, and that his father was a captain, and his mother an angel.

When he said so, Bon Papa used to look up from the loom, where he was embroidering beautiful silk flowers, and say, “Angel! she belongs to the Babylonish Scarlet Woman.” Bon Papa was always talking of the Scarlet Woman. He had a little room where he always used to preach and sing hymns out of his great old nose. Little Harry did not like the preaching; he liked better the fine stories which aunt used to tell him. Bon Papa’s wife never told him pretty stories; she quarrelled with Uncle George, and he went away.

After this Harry’s Bon Papa, and his wife and two children of her own that she brought with her, came to live at Ealing. The new wife gave her children the best of everything, and Harry many a whipping, he knew not why. Besides blows, he got ill names from her, which need not be set down here, for the sake of old Mr. Pastoureau, who was still kind sometimes. The unhappiness of those days is long forgiven, though they cast a shade of melancholy over the child’s youth, which will accompany him, no doubt, to the end of his days: as those tender twigs are bent the trees grow afterward; and he, at least, who has suffered as a child, and is not quite perverted in that early school of unhappiness, learns to be gentle and long-suffering with little children.

Harry was very glad when a gentleman dressed in black, on horseback, with a mounted servant behind him, came to fetch him away from Ealing. The noverca, or unjust stepmother, who had neglected him for her own two children, gave him supper enough the night before he went away, and plenty in the morning. She did not beat him once, and told the children to keep their hands off him. One was a girl, and Harry never could bear to strike a girl; and the other was a boy, whom he could easily have beat, but he always cried out, when Mrs. Pastoureau came sailing to the rescue with arms like a flail. She only washed Harry’s face the day he went away; nor ever so much as once boxed his ears. She whimpered rather when the gentleman in black came for the boy; and old Mr. Pastoureau, as he gave the child his blessing, scowled over his shoulder at the strange gentleman, and grumbled out something about Babylon and the scarlet lady. He was grown quite old, like a child almost. Mrs. Pastoureau used to wipe his nose as she did to the children. She was a great, big, handsome young woman; but, though she pretended to cry, Harry thought ’twas only a sham, and sprung quite delighted upon the horse upon which the lackey helped him.

He was a Frenchman; his name was Blaise. The child could talk to him in his own language perfectly well: he knew it better than English indeed: having lived hitherto chiefly among French people: and being called the little Frenchman by other boys on Ealing Green. He soon learnt to speak English perfectly, and to forget some of his French: children forget easily. Some earlier and fainter recollections the child had, of a different country; and a town with tall white houses; and a ship. But these were quite indistinct in the boy’s mind, as indeed the memory of Ealing soon became, at least of much that he suffered there.

The lackey before whom he rode was very lively and voluble, and informed the boy that the gentleman riding before him was my lord’s chaplain, Father Holt—that he was now to be called Master Harry Esmond—that my Lord Viscount Castlewood was his parrain—that he was to live at the great house of Castlewood, in the province of ——shire, where he would see madame the viscountess, who was a grand lady. And so, seated on a cloth before Blaise’s saddle, Harry Esmond was brought to London, and to a fine square called Covent Garden, near to which his patron lodged.

Mr. Holt the priest took the child by the hand, and brought him to this nobleman, a grand languid nobleman in a great cap and flowered morning-gown, sucking oranges. He patted Harry on the head and gave him an orange.

“C’est bien ça,” he said to the priest after eyeing the child, and the gentleman in black shrugged his shoulders.

“Let Blaise take him out for a holiday,” and out for a holiday the boy and the valet went. Harry went jumping along; he was glad enough to go.

He will remember to his life’s end the delights of those days. He was taken to see a play by Monsieur Blaise, in a house a thousand times greater and finer than the booth at Ealing Fair—and on the next happy day they took water on the river, and Harry saw London Bridge, with the houses and booksellers’ shops thereon, looking like a street, and the Tower of London, with the armour, and the great lions and bears in the moats—all under company of Monsieur Blaise.

Presently, of an early morning, all the party set forth for the country, namely, my lord viscount and the other gentleman; Monsieur Blaise, and Harry on a pillion behind them, and two or three men with pistols leading the baggage-horses. And all along the road the Frenchman told little Harry stories of brigands, which made the child’s hair stand on end, and terrified him; so that at the great gloomy inn on the road where they lay, he besought to be allowed to sleep in a room with one of the servants, and was compassionated by Mr. Holt, the gentleman who travelled with my lord, and who gave the child a little bed in his chamber.

His artless talk and answers very likely inclined this gentleman in the boy’s favour, for next day Mr. Holt said Harry should ride behind him, and not with the French lacky; and all along the journey put a thousand questions to the child—as to his foster-brother and relations at Ealing; what his old grandfather had taught him; what languages he knew; whether he could read and write, and sing, and so forth. And Mr. Holt found that Harry could read and write, and possessed the two languages of French and English very well; and when he asked Harry about singing, the lad broke out with a hymn to the tune of Dr. Martin Luther, which set Mr. Holt a-laughing; and even caused his grand parrain in the laced hat and periwig to laugh too when Holt told him what the child was singing. For it appeared that Dr. Martin Luther’s hymns were not sung in the churches Mr. Holt preached at.

“You must never sing that song any more, do you hear, little manikin?” says my lord viscount, holding up a finger.

“But we will try and teach you a better, Harry.” Mr. Holt said; and the child answered, for he was a docile child, and of an affectionate nature, “That he loved pretty songs, and would try and learn anything the gentleman would tell him.” That day he so pleased the gentlemen by his talk, that they had him to dine with them at the inn, and encouraged him in his prattle; and Monsieur Blaise, with whom he rode and dined the day before, waited upon him now.

“’Tis well, ’tis well!” said Blaise, that night (in his own language) when they lay again at an inn. “We are a little lord here; we are a little lord now: we shall see what we are when we come to Castlewood where my lady is.”

“When shall we come to Castlewood, Monsieur Blaise?” says Harry.

“Parbleu! my lord does not press himself.” Blaise says, with a grin; and, indeed, it seemed as if his lordship was not in a great hurry, for he spent three days on that journey, which Harry Esmond hath often since ridden in a dozen hours. For the last two of the days, Harry rode with the priest, who was so kind to him, that the child had grown to be quite fond and familiar with him by the journey’s end, and had scarce a thought in his little heart which by that time he had not confided to his new friend.

At length on the third day, at evening, they came to a village standing on a green with elms round it, very pretty to look at; and the people there all took off their hats, and made curtsies to my lord viscount, who bowed to them all languidly; and there was one portly person that wore a cassock and a broad-leafed hat, who bowed lower than any one—and with this one both my lord and Mr. Holt had a few words. “This, Harry, is Castlewood church,” says Mr. Holt, “and this is the pillar thereof, learned Doctor Tusher. Take off your hat, sirrah, and salute Doctor Tusher.”

“Come up to supper, doctor,” says my lord; at which the doctor made another low bow, and the party moved on towards a grand house that was before them, with many grey towers, and vanes on them, and windows flaming in the sunshine; and a great army of rooks, wheeling over their heads, made for the woods behind the house, as Harry saw; and Mr. Holt told him that they lived at Castlewood too.

They came to the house, and passed under an arch into a courtyard, with a fountain in the centre, where many men came and held my lord’s stirrup as he descended, and paid great respect to Mr. Holt likewise. And the child thought that the servants looked at him curiously, and smiled to one another—and he recalled what Blaise had said to him when they were in London, and Harry had spoken about his godpapa, when the Frenchman said, “Parbleu! one sees well that my lord is your godfather”; words whereof the poor lad did not know the meaning then, though he apprehended the truth in a very short time afterwards, and learned it and thought of it with no small feeling of shame.

Taking Harry by the hand as soon as they were both descended from their horses, Mr. Holt led him across the court, and under a low door to rooms on a level with the ground; one of which Father Holt said was to be the boy’s chamber, the other on the other side of the passage being the father’s own; and as soon as the little man’s face was washed, and the father’s own dress arranged, Harry’s guide took him once more to the door by which my lord had entered the hall, and up a stair, and through an ante-room to my lady’s drawing-room—an apartment than which Harry thought he had never seen anything more grand—no, not in the Tower of London which he had just visited. Indeed the chamber was richly ornamented in the manner of Queen Elizabeth’s time, with great stained windows at either end, and hangings of tapestry, which the sun shining through the coloured glass painted of a thousand hues; and here in state, by the fire, sat a lady to whom the priest took up Harry, who was indeed amazed by her appearance.

My lady viscountess’s face was daubed with white and red up to the eyes, to which the paint gave an unearthly glare: she had a tower of lace on her head, under which was a bush of black curls—borrowed curls—so that no wonder little Harry Esmond was scared when he was first presented to her—the kind priest acting as master of the ceremonies at that solemn introduction—and he stared at her with eyes almost as great as her own, as he had stared at the player-woman who acted the wicked tragedy-queen, when the players came down to Ealing Fair. She sat in a great chair by the fire-corner; in her lap was a spaniel-dog that barked furiously; on a little table by her was her ladyship’s snuff-box and her sugar-plum box. She wore a dress of black velvet, and a petticoat of flame-coloured brocade. She had as many rings on her fingers as the old woman of Banbury Cross; and pretty small feet which she was fond of showing, with great gold clocks to her stockings, and white pantofles with red heels; and an odour of musk was shook out of her garments whenever she moved or quitted the room, leaning on her tortoiseshell stick, little Fury barking at her heels.

Mrs. Tusher, the parson’s wife, was with my lady. She had been waiting-woman to her ladyship in the late lord’s time, and, having her soul in that business, took naturally to it when the Viscountess of Castlewood returned to inhabit her father’s house.

“I present to your ladyship your kinsman and little page of honour, Master Henry Esmond,” Mr. Holt said, bowing lowly, with a sort of comical humility. “Make a pretty bow to my lady, monsieur; and then another little bow, not so low, to Madam Tusher—the fair priestess of Castlewood.”

“Where I have lived and hope to die, sir,” says Madam Tusher, giving a hard glance at the brat, and then at my lady.

Upon her the boy’s whole attention was for a time directed. He could not keep his great eyes off from her. Since the Empress of Ealing he had seen nothing so awful.

“Does my appearance please you, little page?” asked the lady.

“He would be very hard to please if it didn’t,” cried Madam Tusher.

“Have done, you silly Maria,” said Lady Castlewood.

“Where I’m attached, I’m attached, madam—and I’d die rather than not say so.”

“Je meurs où je m’attache,” Mr. Holt said, with a polite grin. “The ivy says so in the picture, and clings to the oak like a fond parasite as it is.”

“Parricide, sir!” cries Mrs. Tusher.

“Hush, Tusher—you are always bickering with Father Holt,” cried my lady. “Come and kiss my hand, child,” and the oak held out a branch to little Harry Esmond, who took and dutifully kissed the lean old hand, upon the gnarled knuckles of which there glittered a hundred rings.

“To kiss that hand would make many a pretty fellow happy!” cried Mrs. Tusher: on which my lady crying out, “Go, you foolish Tusher,” and tapping her with her great fan, Tusher ran forward to seize her hand and kiss it. Fury arose and barked furiously at Tusher; and Father Holt looked on at this queer scene, with arch grave glances.

The awe exhibited by the little boy perhaps pleased the lady to whom this artless flattery was bestowed; for having gone down on his knee (as Father Holt had directed him, and the mode then was) and performed his obeisance, she said, “Page Esmond, my groom of the chamber will inform you what your duties are, when you wait upon my lord and me; and good Father Holt will instruct you as becomes a gentleman of our name. You will pay him obedience in everything, and I pray you may grow to be as learned and as good as your tutor.”

The lady seemed to have the greatest reverence for Mr. Holt, and to be more afraid of him than of anything else in the world. If she was ever so angry, a word or look from Father Holt made her calm: indeed he had a vast power of subjecting those who came near him; and, among the rest, his new pupil gave himself up with an entire confidence and attachment to the good father, and became his willing slave almost from the first moment he saw him.

He put his small hand into the father’s as he walked away from his first presentation to his mistress, and asked many questions in his artless childish way. “Who is that other woman?” he asked. “She is fat and round; she is more pretty than my Lady Castlewood.”

“She is Madam Tusher, the parson’s wife of Castlewood. She has a son of your age, but bigger than you.”

“Why does she like so to kiss my lady’s hand? It is not good to kiss.”

“Tastes are different, little man. Madam Tusher is attached to my lady, having been her waiting-woman, before she was married, in the old lord’s time. She married Doctor Tusher the chaplain. The English household divines often marry the waiting-women.”

“You will not marry the French woman, will you? I saw her laughing with Blaise in the buttery.”

“I belong to a church that is older and better than the English Church,” Mr. Holt said (making a sign whereof Esmond did not then understand the meaning, across his breast and forehead); “in our Church the clergy do not marry. You will understand these things better soon.”

“Was not St. Peter the head of your Church?—Dr. Rabbits of Ealing told us so.”

The father said, “Yes, he was.”

“But St. Peter was married, for we heard only last Sunday that his wife’s mother lay sick of a fever.” On which the father again laughed, and said he would understand this too better soon, and talked of other things, and took away Harry Esmond, and showed him the great old house which he had come to inhabit.

It stood on a rising green hill, with woods behind it, in which were rooks’ nests, where the birds at morning and returning home at evening made a great cawing. At the foot of the hill was a river with a steep ancient bridge crossing it; and beyond that a large pleasant green flat, where the village of Castlewood stood and stands, with the church in the midst, the parsonage hard by it, the inn with the blacksmith’s forge beside it, and the sign of the “Three Castles” on the elm. The London road stretched away towards the rising sun, and to the west were swelling hills and peaks, behind which many a time Harry Esmond saw the same sun setting, that he now looks on thousands of miles away across the great ocean—in a new Castlewood by another stream, that bears, like the new country of wandering Aeneas, the fond names of the land of his youth.

The Hall of Castlewood was built with two courts, whereof one only, the fountain court, was now inhabited, the other having been battered down in the Cromwellian wars. In the fountain court, still in good repair, was the great hall, near to the kitchen and butteries. A dozen of living-rooms looking to the north, and communicating with the little chapel that faced eastwards and the buildings stretching from that to the main gate, and with the hall (which looked to the west) into the court now dismantled. This court had been the most magnificent of the two, until the protector’s cannon tore down one side of it before the place was taken and stormed. The besiegers entered at the terrace under the clock-tower, slaying every man of the garrison, and at their head my lord’s brother, Francis Esmond.

The Restoration did not bring enough money to the Lord Castlewood to restore this ruined part of his house; where were the morning parlours, above them the long music-gallery, and before which stretched the garden-terrace, where, however, the flowers grew again, which the boots of the Roundheads had trodden in their assault, and which was restored without much cost, and only a little care, by both ladies who succeeded the second viscount in the government of this mansion. Round the terrace-garden was a low wall with a wicket leading to the wooded height beyond, that is called Cromwell’s battery to this day.

Young Harry Esmond learned the domestic part of his duty, which was easy enough, from the groom of her ladyship’s chamber: serving the countess, as the custom commonly was in his boyhood, as page, waiting at her chair, bringing her scented water and the silver basin after dinner—sitting on her carriage step on state occasions, or on public days introducing her company to her. This was chiefly of the Catholic gentry, of whom there were a pretty many in the country and neighbouring city; and who rode not seldom to Castlewood to partake of the hospitalities there. In the second year of their residence the company seemed especially to increase. My lord and my lady were seldom without visitors, in whose society it was curious to contrast the difference of behaviour between Father Holt, the director of the family, and Doctor Tusher, the rector of the parish—Mr. Holt moving amongst the very highest as quite their equal, and as commanding them all; while poor Doctor Tusher, whose position was indeed a difficult one, having been chaplain once to the Hall, and still to the Protestant servants there, seemed more like an usher than an equal, and always rose to go away after the first course.

Also there came in these times to Father Holt many private visitors, whom after a little, Henry Esmond had little difficulty in recognizing as ecclesiastics of the father’s persuasion; whatever their dresses (and they adopted all) might be. These were closeted with the father constantly, and often came and rode away without paying their devoirs to my lord and lady—to the lady and lord rather—his lordship being little more than a cipher in the house, and entirely under his domineering partner. A little fowling, a little hunting, a great deal of sleep, and a long time at cards and table, carried through one day after another with his lordship. When meetings took place in this second year, which often would happen with closed doors, the page found my lord’s sheet of paper scribbled over with dogs and horses, and ’twas said he had much ado to keep himself awake at these councils: the countess ruling over them, and he acting as little more than her secretary.

Father Holt began speedily to be so much occupied with these meetings as rather to neglect the education of the little lad who so gladly put himself under the kind priest’s orders. At first they read much and regularly, both in Latin and French; the father not neglecting in anything to impress his faith upon his pupil, but not forcing him violently, and treating him with a delicacy and kindness which surprised and attached the child; always more easily won by these methods than by any severe exercise of authority. And his delight in our walks was to tell Harry of the glories of his order, of its martyrs and heroes, of its brethren converting the heathen by myriads, traversing the desert, facing the stake, ruling the courts and councils, or braving the tortures of kings; so that Harry Esmond thought that to belong to the Jesuits was the greatest prize of life and bravest end of ambition; the greatest career here, and in heaven the surest reward; and began to long for the day, not only when he should enter into the one Church and receive his first communion, but when he might join that wonderful brotherhood, which was present throughout all the world, and which numbered the wisest, the bravest, the highest born, the most eloquent of men among its members. Father Holt bade him keep his views secret, and to hide them as a great treasure which would escape him if it was revealed; and proud of this confidence and secret vested in him, the lad became fondly attached to the master who initiated him into a mystery so wonderful and awful. And when little Tom Tusher, his neighbour, came from school for his holiday, and said how he, too, was to be bred up for an English priest, and would get what he called an exhibition from his school, and then a college scholarship and fellowship, and then a good living—it tasked young Harry Esmond’s powers of reticence not to say to his young companion, “Church! priesthood! fat living! My dear Tommy, do you call yours a Church and a priesthood? What is a fat living compared to converting a hundred thousand heathens by a single sermon? What is a scholarship at Trinity by the side of a crown of martyrdom, with angels awaiting you as your head is taken off? Could your master at school sail over the Thames on his gown? Have you statues in your church that can bleed, speak, walk, and cry? My good Tommy, in dear Father Holt’s Church these things take place every day. You know St. Philip of the Willows appeared to Lord Castlewood and caused him to turn to the one true Church. No saints ever come to you.” And Harry Esmond, because of his promise to Father Holt, hiding away these treasures of faith from T. Tusher, delivered himself of them nevertheless simply to Father Holt, who stroked his head, smiled at him with his inscrutable look, and told him that he did well to meditate on these great things, and not to talk of them except under direction.

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IV. I Am Placed Under A Popish Priest And Bred To That Religion.—Viscountess Castlewood

Had time enough been given, and his childish inclinations been properly nurtured, Harry Esmond had been a Jesuit priest ere he was a dozen years older, and might have finished his days a martyr in China or a victim on Tower Hill: for, in the few months they spent together at Castlewood, Mr. Holt obtained an entire mastery over the boy’s intellect and affections; and had brought him to think, as indeed Father Holt thought with all his heart too, that no life was so noble, no death so desirable, as that which many brethren of his famous order were ready to undergo. By love, by a brightness of wit and good humour that charmed all, by an authority which he knew how to assume, by a mystery and silence about him which increased the child’s reverence for him, he won Harry’s absolute fealty, and would have kept it, doubtless, if schemes greater and more important than a poor little boy’s admission into orders had not called him away.

After being at home for a few months in tranquillity (if theirs might be called tranquillity, which was, in truth, a constant bickering), my lord and lady left the country for London, taking their director with them: and his little pupil scarce ever shed more bitter tears in his life than he did for nights after the first parting with his dear friend, as he lay in the lonely chamber next to that which the father used to occupy. He and a few domestics were left as the only tenants of the great house: and, though Harry sedulously did all the tasks which the father set him, he had many hours unoccupied, and read in the library, and bewildered his little brains with the great books he found there.

After a while the little lad grew accustomed to the loneliness of the place; and in after days remembered this part of his life as a period not unhappy. When the family was at London the whole of the establishment travelled thither with the exception of the porter, who was, moreover, brewer, gardener, and woodman, and his wife and children. These had their lodging in the gate-house hard by, with a door into the court; and a window looking out on the green was the chaplain’s room; and next to this a small chamber where Father Holt had his books, and Harry Esmond his sleeping-closet. The side of the house facing the east had escaped the guns of the Cromwellians, whose battery was on the height facing the western court; so that this eastern end bore few marks of demolition, save in the chapel, where the painted windows surviving Edward the Sixth had been broke by the Commonwealth men. In Father Holt’s time little Harry Esmond acted as his familiar, and faithful little servitor; beating his clothes, folding his vestments, fetching his water from the well long before daylight, ready to run anywhere for the service of his beloved priest. When the father was away he locked his private chamber; but the room where the books were was left to little Harry, who, but for the society of this gentleman, was little less solitary when Lord Castlewood was at home.

The French wit saith that a hero is none to his valet de chambre, and it required less quick eyes than my lady’s little page was naturally endowed with, to see that she had many qualities by no means heroic, however much Mrs. Tusher might flatter and coax her. When Father Holt was not by, who exercised an entire authority over the pair, my lord and my lady quarrelled and abused each other so as to make the servants laugh, and to frighten the little page on duty. The poor boy trembled before his mistress, who called him by a hundred ugly names, who made nothing of boxing his ears—and tilting the silver basin in his face which it was his business to present to her after dinner. She hath repaired, by subsequent kindness to him, these severities, which it must be owned made his childhood very unhappy. She was but unhappy herself at this time, poor soul, and I suppose made her dependants lead her own sad life. I think my lord was as much afraid of her as her page was, and the only person of the household who mastered her was Mr. Holt. Harry was only too glad when the father dined at table, and to slink away and prattle with him afterwards, or read with him, or walk with him. Luckily my lady viscountess did not rise till noon. Heaven help the poor waiting-woman who had charge of her toilet! I have often seen the poor wretch come out with red eyes from the closet, where those long and mysterious rites of her ladyship’s dress were performed, and the backgammon-box locked up with a rap on Mrs. Tusher’s fingers when she played ill or the game was going the wrong way.

Blessed be the king who introduced cards, and the kind inventors of piquet and cribbage, for they employed six hours at least of her ladyship’s day, during which her family was pretty easy. Without this occupation my lady frequently declared she should die. Her dependants one after another relieved guard—’twas rather a dangerous post to play with her ladyship—and took the cards turn about. Mr. Holt would sit with her at piquet during hours together, at which time she behaved herself properly; and, as for Dr. Tusher, I believe he would have left a parishioner’s dying bed, if summoned to play a rubber with his patroness at Castlewood. Sometimes, when they were pretty comfortable together, my lord took a hand. Besides these my lady had her faithful poor Tusher, and one, two, three gentlewomen whom Harry Esmond could recollect in his time. They could not bear that genteel service very long; one after another tried and failed at it. These and the housekeeper, and little Harry Esmond, had a table of their own. Poor ladies! their life was far harder than the page’s. He was found asleep tucked up in his little bed, whilst they were sitting by her ladyship reading her to sleep, with the News Letter or the Grand Cyrus. My lady used to have boxes of new plays from London, and Harry was forbidden, under the pain of a whipping, to look into them. I am afraid he deserved the penalty pretty often, and got it sometimes. Father Holt applied it twice or thrice, when he caught the young scapegrace with a delightful wicked comedy of Mr. Shadwell’s or Mr. Wycherley’s under his pillow.

These, when he took any, were my lord’s favourite reading. But he was averse to much study, and, as his little page fancied, to much occupation of any sort.

It always seemed to young Harry Esmond that my lord treated him with more kindness when his lady was not present, and Lord Castlewood would take the lad sometimes on his little journeys a-hunting or a-birding; he loved to play at cards and tric-trac with him, which games the boy learned to pleasure his lord: and was growing to like him better daily, showing a special pleasure if Father Holt gave a good report of him, patting him on the head, and promising that he would provide for the boy. However, in my lady’s presence, my lord showed no such marks of kindness, and affected to treat the lad roughly, and rebuked him sharply for little faults—for which he in a manner asked pardon of young Esmond when they were private, saying if he did not speak roughly, she would, and his tongue was not such a bad one as his lady’s—a point whereof the boy, young as he was, was very well assured.

Great public events were happening all this while, of which the simple young page took little count. But one day, riding into the neighbouring town on the step of my lady’s coach, his lordship and she and Father Holt being inside, a great mob of people came hooting and jeering round the coach, bawling out, “The bishops for ever!” “Down with the Pope!” “No Popery! no Popery! Jezebel, Jezebel!” so that my lord began to laugh, my lady’s eyes to roll with anger, for she was as bold as a lioness, and feared nobody; whilst Mr. Holt, as Esmond saw from his place on the step, sank back with rather an alarmed face, crying out to her ladyship, “For God’s sake, madam, do not speak or look out of window, sit still.” But she did not obey this prudent injunction of the father; she thrust her head out of the coach window, and screamed out to the coachman, “Flog your way through them, the brutes, James, and use your whip!”

The mob answered with a roaring jeer of laughter, and fresh cries of, “Jezebel! Jezebel!” My lord only laughed the more: he was a languid gentleman: nothing seemed to excite him commonly, though I have seen him cheer and halloo the hounds very briskly, and his face (which was generally very yellow and calm) grow quite red and cheerful during a burst over the Downs after a hare, and laugh, and swear, and huzza at a cockfight, of which sport he was very fond. And now, when the mob began to hoot his lady, he laughed with something of a mischievous look, as though he expected sport, and thought that she and they were a match.

James the coachman was more afraid of his mistress than the mob, probably, for he whipped on his horses as he was bidden, and the postboy that rode with the first pair (my lady always went with her coach-and-six) gave a cut of his thong over the shoulders of one fellow who put his hand out towards the leading horse’s rein.

It was a market day and the country people were all assembled with their baskets of poultry, eggs, and such things; the postilion had no sooner lashed the man who would have taken hold of his horse, but a great cabbage came whirling like a bombshell into the carriage, at which my lord laughed more, for it knocked my lady’s fan out of her hand, and plumped into Father Holt’s stomach. Then came a shower of carrots and potatoes.

“For heaven’s sake be still!” says Mr. Holt; “we are not ten paces from the ‘Bell’ archway, where they can shut the gates on us, and keep out this canaille.”

The little page was outside the coach on the step, and a fellow in the crowd aimed a potato at him, and hit him in the eye, at which the poor little wretch set up a shout; the man laughed, a great big saddler’s apprentice of the town. “Ah! you d—— little yelling Popish bastard,” he said, and stooped to pick up another; the crowd had gathered quite between the horses and in the inn door by this time, and the coach was brought to a dead standstill. My lord jumped as briskly as a boy out of the door on his side of the coach, squeezing little Harry behind it; had hold of the potato-thrower’s collar in an instant, and the next moment the brute’s heels were in the air, and he fell on the stones with a thump.

“You hulking coward!” says he; “you pack of screaming blackguards! how dare you attack children, and insult women? Fling another shot at that carriage, you sneaking pigskin cobbler, and by the Lord I’ll send my rapier through you!”

Some of the mob cried, “Huzza, my lord!” for they knew him, and the saddler’s man was a known bruiser, near twice as big as my lord viscount.

“Make way, there,” says he (he spoke in a high shrill voice, but with a great air of authority). “Make way, and let her ladyship’s carriage pass.” The men that were between the coach and the gate of the “Bell” actually did make way, and the horses went in, my lord walking after them with his hat on his head.

As he was going in at the gate, through which the coach had just rolled, another cry begins of “No Popery—no Papists!” My lord turns round and faces them once more.

“God save the king!” says he at the highest pitch of his voice. “Who dares abuse the king’s religion? You, you d——d psalm-singing cobbler, as sure as I’m a magistrate of this county I’ll commit you!” The fellow shrunk back, and my lord retreated with all the honours of the day. But when the little flurry caused by the scene was over, and the flush passed off his face, he relapsed into his usual languor, trifled with his little dog, and yawned when my lady spoke to him.

This mob was one of many thousands that were going about the country at that time, huzzaing for the acquittal of the seven bishops who had been tried just then, and about whom little Harry Esmond at that time knew scarce anything. It was assizes at Hexton, and there was a great meeting of the gentry at the “Bell”; and my lord’s people had their new liveries on, and Harry a little suit of blue and silver, which he wore upon occasions of state; and the gentlefolks came round and talked to my lord; and a judge in a red gown, who seemed a very great personage, especially complimented him and my lady, who was mighty grand. Harry remembers her train borne up by her gentlewoman. There was an assembly and ball at the great room at the “Bell”, and other young gentlemen of the county families looked on as he did. One of them jeered him for his black eye, which was swelled by the potato, and another called him a bastard, on which he and Harry fell to fisticuffs. My lord’s cousin, Colonel Esmond of Walcote, was there, and separated the two lads, a great tall gentleman with a handsome, good-natured face. The boy did not know how nearly in after-life he should be allied to Colonel Esmond, and how much kindness he should have to owe him.

There was little love between the two families. My lady used not to spare Colonel Esmond in talking of him, for reasons which have been hinted already; but about which, at his tender age, Henry Esmond could be expected to know nothing.

Very soon afterwards my lord and lady went to London with Mr. Holt, leaving, however, the page behind them. The little man had the great house of Castlewood to himself; or between him and the housekeeper, Mrs. Worksop, an old lady who was a kinswoman of the family in some distant way, and a Protestant, but a stanch Tory and king’s-man, as all the Esmonds were. He used to go to school to Dr. Tusher when he was at home, though the doctor was much occupied too. There was a great stir and commotion everywhere, even in the little quiet village of Castlewood, whither a party of people came from the town, who would have broken Castlewood Chapel windows, but the village people turned out, and even old Sievewright, the republican blacksmith, along with them: for my lady, though she was a Papist, and had many odd ways, was kind to the tenantry, and there was always a plenty of beef, and blankets, and medicine for the poor at Castlewood Hall.

A kingdom was changing hands whilst my lord and lady were away. King James was flying, the Dutchmen were coming; awful stories about them and the Prince of Orange used old Mrs. Worksop to tell to the idle little page.

He liked the solitude of the great house very well; he had all the play-books to read, and no Father Holt to whip him, and a hundred childish pursuits and pastimes, without doors and within, which made this time very pleasant.

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V. My Superiors Are Engaged In Plots For The Restoration Of King James II

Not having been able to sleep, for thinking of some lines for eels which he had placed the night before, the lad was lying in his little bed, waiting for the hour when the gate would be open, and he and his comrade, Job Lockwood, the porter’s son, might go to the pond and see what fortune had brought them. At daybreak Job was to awaken him, but his own eagerness for the sport had served as a réveille long since—so long, that it seemed to him as if the day never would come.

It might have been four o’clock when he heard the door of the opposite chamber, the chaplain’s room, open, and the voice of a man coughing in the passage. Harry jumped up, thinking for certain it was a robber, or hoping perhaps for a ghost, and, flinging open his own door, saw before him the chaplain’s door open, and a light inside, and a figure standing in the doorway, in the midst of a great smoke which issued from the room.

“Who’s there?” cried out the boy, who was of a good spirit.

“Silentium!” whispered the other; “’tis I, my boy!” and, holding his hand out, Harry had no difficulty in recognizing his master and friend, Father Holt. A curtain was over the window of the chaplain’s room that looked to the court, and Harry saw that the smoke came from a great flame of papers which were burning in a brazier when he entered the chaplain’s room. After giving a hasty greeting and blessing to the lad, who was charmed to see his tutor, the father continued the burning of his papers, drawing them from a cupboard over the mantelpiece wall, which Harry had never seen before.

Father Holt laughed, seeing the lad’s attention fixed at once on this hole. “That is right, Harry,” he said; “faithful little famuli see all and say nothing. You are faithful, I know.”

“I know I would go to the stake for you,” said Harry.

“I don’t want your head,” said the father, patting it kindly; “all you have to do is to hold your tongue. Let us burn these papers, and say nothing to anybody. Should you like to read them?”

Harry Esmond blushed, and held down his head; he had looked as the fact was, and without thinking, at the paper before him; and though he had seen it, could not understand a word of it, the letters being quite clear enough, but quite without meaning. They burned the papers, beating down the ashes in a brazier, so that scarce any traces of them remained.

Harry had been accustomed to see Father Holt in more dresses than one; it not being safe, or worth the danger, for Popish ecclesiastics to wear their proper dress; and he was, in consequence, in no wise astonished that the priest should now appear before him in a riding dress, with large buff leather boots, and a feather to his hat, plain, but such as gentlemen wore.

“You know the secret of the cupboard,” said he, laughing, “and must be prepared for other mysteries;” and he opened—but not a secret cupboard this time—only a wardrobe, which he usually kept locked, and from which he now took out two or three dresses and perukes of different colours, and a couple of swords of a pretty make (Father Holt was an expert practitioner with the small sword, and every day, whilst he was at home, he and his pupil practised this exercise, in which the lad became a very great proficient), a military coat and cloak, and a farmer’s smock, and placed them in the large hole over the mantelpiece from which the papers had been taken.

“If they miss the cupboard,” he said, “they will not find these; if they find them, they’ll tell no tales, except that Father Holt wore more suits of clothes than one. All Jesuits do. You know what deceivers we are, Harry.”

Harry was alarmed at the notion that his friend was about to leave him; but “No”, the priest said; “I may very likely come back with my lord in a few days. We are to be tolerated; we are not to be persecuted. But they may take a fancy to pay a visit at Castlewood ere our return; and, as gentlemen of my cloth are suspected, they might choose to examine my papers, which concern nobody—at least, not them.” And to this day, whether the papers in cipher related to politics, or to the affairs of that mysterious society whereof Father Holt was a member, his pupil, Harry Esmond, remains in entire ignorance.

The rest of his goods, his small wardrobe, &c., Holt left untouched on his shelves and in his cupboard, taking down—with a laugh, however—and flinging into the brazier, where he only half burned them, some theological treatises which he had been writing against the English divines. “And now,” said he, “Henry, my son, you may testify, with a safe conscience, that you saw me burning Latin sermons the last time I was here before I went away to London; and it will be daybreak directly, and I must be away before Lockwood is stirring.”

“Will not Lockwood let you out, sir?” Esmond asked. Holt laughed; he was never more gay or good-humoured than when in the midst of action or danger.

“Lockwood knows nothing of my being here, mind you,” he said; “nor would you, you little wretch, had you slept better. You must forget that I have been here; and now farewell. Close the door, and go to your own room, and don’t come out till—stay, why should you not know one secret more? I know you will never betray me.”

In the chaplain’s room were two windows; the one looking into the court facing westwards to the fountain; the other, a small casement strongly barred, and looking on to the green in front of the Hall. This window was too high to reach from the ground; but, mounting on a buffet which stood beneath it, Father Holt showed me how, by pressing on the base of the window, the whole framework of lead, glass, and iron stanchions, descended into a cavity worked below, from which it could be drawn and restored to its usual place from without; a broken pane being purposely open to admit the hand which was to work upon the spring of the machine.

“When I am gone,” Father Holt said, “you may push away the buffet, so that no one may fancy that an exit has been made that way; lock the door; place the key—where shall we put the key?—under Chrysostom on the book-shelf; and if any ask for it, say I keep it there, and told you where to find it, if you had need to go to my room. The descent is easy down the wall into the ditch; and so, once more farewell, until I see thee again, my dear son.” And with this the intrepid father mounted the buffet with great agility and briskness, stepped across the window, lifting up the bars and framework again from the other side, and only leaving room for Harry Esmond to stand on tiptoe and kiss his hand before the casement closed, the bars fixing as firm as ever seemingly in the stone arch overhead. When Father Holt next arrived at Castlewood, it was by the public gate on horseback; and he never so much as alluded to the existence of the private issue to Harry, except when he had need of a private messenger from within, for which end, no doubt, he had instructed his young pupil in the means of quitting the Hall.

Esmond, young as he was, would have died sooner than betray his friend and master, as Mr. Holt well knew; for he had tried the boy more than once, putting temptations in his way, to see whether he would yield to them and confess afterwards, or whether he would resist them, as he did sometimes, or whether he would lie, which he never did. Holt instructing the boy on this point, however, that if to keep silence is not to lie, as it certainly is not, yet silence is, after all, equivalent to a negation—and therefore a downright No, in the interest of justice or your friend, and in reply to a question that may be prejudicial to either, is not criminal, but, on the contrary, praiseworthy; and as lawful a way as the other of eluding a wrongful demand. For instance (says he), suppose a good citizen, who had seen his Majesty take refuge there, had been asked, “Is King Charles up that oak-tree?” His duty would have been not to say, Yes—so that the Cromwellians should seize the king and murder him like his father—but No; his Majesty being private in the tree, and therefore not to be seen there by loyal eyes: all which instruction, in religion and morals, as well as in the rudiments of the tongues and sciences, the boy took eagerly and with gratitude from his tutor. When, then, Holt was gone, and told Harry not to see him, it was as if he had never been. And he had this answer pat when he came to be questioned a few days after.

The Prince of Orange was then at Salisbury, as young Esmond learned from seeing Doctor Tusher in his best cassock (though the roads were muddy, and he never was known to wear his silk, only his stuff one, a-horseback), with a great orange cockade in his broad-leafed hat, and Nahum, his clerk, ornamented with a like decoration. The doctor was walking up and down, in front of his parsonage, when little Esmond saw him, and heard him say he was going to pay his duty to his highness the prince, as he mounted his pad and rode away with Nahum behind. The village people had orange cockades too, and his friend the blacksmith’s laughing daughter pinned one into Harry’s old hat, which he tore out indignantly when they bid him to cry, “God save the Prince of Orange and the Protestant religion!” but the people only laughed, for they liked the boy in the village, where his solitary condition moved the general pity, and where he found friendly welcomes and faces in many houses. Father Holt had many friends there too, for he not only would fight the blacksmith at theology, never losing his temper, but laughing the whole time in his pleasant way, but he cured him of an ague with quinquina, and was always ready with a kind word for any man that asked it, so that they said in the village ’twas a pity the two were Papists.

The director and the Vicar of Castlewood agreed very well; indeed, the former was a perfectly bred gentleman, and it was the latter’s business to agree with everybody. Doctor Tusher and the lady’s maid, his spouse, had a boy who was about the age of little Esmond; and there was such a friendship between the lads, as propinquity and tolerable kindness and good humour on either side would be pretty sure to occasion. Tom Tusher was sent off early however to a school in London, whither his father took him and a volume of sermons in the first year of the reign of King James; and Tom returned but once, a year afterwards, to Castlewood for many years of his scholastic and collegiate life. Thus there was less danger to Tom of a perversion of his faith by the director, who scarce ever saw him, than there was to Harry, who constantly was in the vicar’s company; but as long as Harry’s religion was his Majesty’s, and my lord’s, and my lady’s, the doctor said gravely, it should not be for him to disturb or disquiet him: it was far from him to say that his Majesty’s Church was not a branch of the Catholic Church; upon which Father Holt used, according to his custom, to laugh and say, that the Holy Church throughout all the world, and the noble army of martyrs, were very much obliged to the doctor.

It was while Dr. Tusher was away at Salisbury that there came a troop of dragoons with orange scarfs, and quartered in Castlewood, and some of them came up to the Hall, where they took possession, robbing nothing however beyond the hen-house and the beer-cellar; and only insisting upon going through the house and looking for papers. The first room they asked to look at was Father Holt’s room, of which Harry Esmond brought the key, and they opened the drawers and the cupboards, and tossed over the papers and clothes—but found nothing except his books and clothes, and the vestments in a box by themselves, with which the dragoons made merry, to Harry Esmond’s horror. And to the questions which the gentleman put to Harry, he replied, that Father Holt was a very kind man to him, and a very learned man, and Harry supposed would tell him none of his secrets if he had any. He was about eleven years old at this time, and looked as innocent as boys of his age.

The family were away more than six months, and when they returned they were in the deepest state of dejection, for King James had been banished, the Prince of Orange was on the throne, and the direst persecutions of those of the Catholic faith were apprehended by my lady, who said she did not believe that there was a word of truth in the promises of toleration that Dutch monster made, or in a single word the perjured wretch said. My lord and lady were in a manner prisoners in their own house; so her ladyship gave the little page to know, who was by this time growing of an age to understand what was passing about him, and something of the characters of the people he lived with.

“We are prisoners,” says she; “in everything but chains, we are prisoners. Let them come, let them consign me to dungeons, or strike off my head from this poor little throat” (and she clasped it in her long fingers). “The blood of the Esmonds will always flow freely for their kings. We are not like the Churchills—the Judases, who kiss their master and betray him. We know how to suffer, how even to forgive in the royal cause” (no doubt it was to that fatal business of losing the place of Groom of the Posset to which her ladyship alluded, as she did half a dozen times in the day). “Let the tyrant of Orange bring his rack and his odious Dutch tortures—the beast! the wretch! I spit upon him and defy him. Cheerfully will I lay this head upon the block; cheerfully will I accompany my lord to the scaffold: we will cry, ‘God save King James!’ with our dying breath, and smile in the face of the executioner.” And she told her page a hundred times at least of the particulars of the last interview which she had with his Majesty.

“I flung myself before my liege’s feet,” she said, “at Salisbury. I devoted myself—my husband—my house, to his cause. Perhaps he remembered old times, when Isabella Esmond was young and fair; perhaps he recalled the day when ’twas not I that knelt—at least he spoke to me with a voice that reminded me of days gone by. ‘Egad!’ said his Majesty, ‘you should go to the Prince of Orange, if you want anything.’ ‘No, sire,’ I replied, ‘I would not kneel to a usurper; the Esmond that would have served your Majesty will never be groom to a traitor’s posset.’ The royal exile smiled, even in the midst of his misfortune; he deigned to raise me with words of consolation. The viscount, my husband, himself, could not be angry at the august salute with which he honoured me!”

The public misfortune had the effect of making my lord and his lady better friends than they ever had been since their courtship. My lord viscount had shown both loyalty and spirit, when these were rare qualities in the dispirited party about the king; and the praise he got elevated him not a little in his wife’s good opinion, and perhaps in his own. He wakened up from the listless and supine life which he had been leading; was always riding to and fro in consultation with this friend or that of the king’s; the page of course knowing little of his doings, but remarking only his greater cheerfulness and altered demeanour.

Father Holt came to the Hall constantly, but officiated no longer openly as chaplain; he was always fetching and carrying: strangers, military and ecclesiastic (Harry knew the latter though they came in all sorts of disguises), were continually arriving and departing. My lord made long absences and sudden reappearances, using sometimes the means of exit which Father Holt had employed, though how often the little window in the chaplain’s room let in or let out my lord and his friends, Harry could not tell. He stoutly kept his promise to the father of not prying, and if at midnight from his little room he heard noises of persons stirring in the next chamber, he turned round to the wall and hid his curiosity under his pillow until it fell asleep. Of course he could not help remarking that the priest’s journeys were constant, and understanding by a hundred signs that some active though secret business employed him: what this was may pretty well be guessed by what soon happened to my lord.

No garrison or watch was put into Castlewood when my lord came back, but a guard was in the village; and one or other of them was always on the Green keeping a look-out on our great gate, and those who went out and in. Lockwood said that at night especially every person who came in or went out was watched by the outlying sentries. ’Twas lucky that we had a gate which their worships knew nothing about. My lord and Father Holt must have made constant journeys at night: once or twice little Harry acted as their messenger and discreet little aide de camp. He remembers he was bidden to go into the village with his fishing-rod, enter certain houses, ask for a drink of water, and tell the good man, “There would be a horse-market at Newbury next Thursday,” and so carry the same message on to the next house on his list.

He did not know what the message meant at the time, nor what was happening: which may as well, however, for clearness’ sake, be explained here. The Prince of Orange being gone to Ireland, where the king was ready to meet him with a great army, it was determined that a great rising of his Majesty’s party should take place in this country: and my lord was to head the force in our county. Of late he had taken a greater lead in affairs than before, having the indefatigable Mr. Holt at his elbow, and my lady viscountess strongly urging him on; and my Lord Sark being in the Tower a prisoner, and Sir Wilmot Crawley, of Queen’s Crawley, having gone over to the Prince of Orange’s side—my lord became the most considerable person in our part of the county for the affairs of the king.

It was arranged that the regiment of Scots Greys and Dragoons, then quartered at Newbury, should declare for the king on a certain day, when likewise the gentry affected to his Majesty’s cause were to come in with their tenants and adherents to Newbury, march upon the Dutch troops at Reading under Ginckel; and, these overthrown, and their indomitable little master away in Ireland, ’twas thought that our side might move on London itself, and a confident victory was predicted for the king.

As these great matters were in agitation, my lord lost his listless manner and seemed to gain health; my lady did not scold him, Mr. Holt came to and fro, busy always; and little Harry longed to have been a few inches taller, that he might draw a sword in this good cause.

One day, it must have been about the month of July, 1690, my lord, in a great horseman’s coat, under which Harry could see the shining of a steel breastplate he had on, called little Harry to him, put the hair off the child’s forehead, and kissed him, and bade God bless him in such an affectionate way as he never had used before. Father Holt blessed him too, and then they took leave of my lady viscountess, who came from her apartment with a pocket-handkerchief to her eyes, and her gentlewoman and Mrs. Tusher supporting her.

“You are going to—to ride,” says she. “Oh, that I might come too!—but in my situation I am forbidden horse exercise.”

“We kiss my lady marchioness’s hand,” says Mr. Holt.

“My lord, God speed you!” she said, stepping up and embracing my lord in a grand manner. “Mr. Holt, I ask your blessing:” and she knelt down for that, whilst Mrs. Tusher tossed her head up.

Mr. Holt gave the same benediction to the little page, who went down and held my lord’s stirrups for him to mount; there were two servants waiting there too—and they rode out of Castlewood gate.

As they crossed the bridge Harry could see an officer in scarlet ride up touching his hat, and address my lord.

The party stopped, and came to some parley or discussion, which presently ended, my lord putting his horse into a canter after taking off his hat and making a bow to the officer who rode alongside him step for step: the trooper accompanying him, falling back, and riding with my lord’s two men. They cantered over the Green, and behind the elms (my lord waving his hand, Harry thought), and so they disappeared.

That evening we had a great panic, the cow-boy coming at milking-time riding one of our horses, which he had found grazing at the outer park wall.

All night my lady viscountess was in a very quiet and subdued mood. She scarce found fault with anybody; she played at cards for six hours; little page Esmond went to sleep. He prayed for my lord and the good cause before closing his eyes.

It was quite in the grey of the morning when the porter’s bell rang, and old Lockwood waking up, let in one of my lord’s servants, who had gone with him in the morning, and who returned with a melancholy story.

The officer who rode up to my lord had, it appeared, said to him, that it was his duty to inform his lordship that he was not under arrest, but under surveillance, and to request him not to ride abroad that day.

My lord replied that riding was good for his health, that if the captain chose to accompany him he was welcome, and it was then that he made a bow, and they cantered away together.

When he came on to Wansey Down, my lord all of a sudden pulled up, and the party came to a halt at the crossway.

“Sir” says he to the officer, “we are four to two; will you be so kind as to take that road, and leave me to go mine?”

“Your road is mine, my lord,” says the officer.

“Then,” says my lord, but he had no time to say more, for the officer, drawing a pistol, snapped it at his lordship; as at the same moment Father Holt, drawing a pistol, shot the officer through the head.

It was done, and the man dead in an instant of time. The orderly, gazing at the officer, looked scared for a moment, and galloped away for his life.

“Fire! fire!” cries out Father Holt, sending another shot after the trooper, but the two servants were too much surprised to use their pieces, and my lord calling to them to hold their hands, the fellow got away.

“Mr. Holt, qui pensoit à tout,” says Blaise, “gets off his horse, examines the pockets of the dead officer for papers, gives his money to us two, and says, ‘The wine is drawn, monsieur le marquis,’—why did he say marquis to monsieur le vicomte?—‘we must drink it.’

“The poor gentleman’s horse was a better one than that I rode,” Blaise continues; “Mr. Holt bids me get on him, and so I gave a cut to Whitefoot, and she trotted home. We rode on towards Newbury; we heard firing towards midday: at two o’clock a horseman comes up to us as we were giving our cattle water at an inn—and says, All is done. The Ecossois declared an hour too soon—General Ginckel was down upon them. The whole thing was at an end.

“ ‘And we’ve shot an officer on duty, and let his orderly escape,’ says my lord.

“ ‘Blaise,’ says Mr. Holt, writing two lines on his table-book, one for my lady, and one for you, Master Harry; ‘you must go back to Castlewood, and deliver these,’ and behold me.”

And he gave Harry the two papers. He read that to himself, which only said, “Burn the papers in the cupboard, burn this. You know nothing about anything.” Harry read this, ran upstairs to his mistress’s apartment, where her gentlewoman slept near to the door, made her bring a light and wake my lady, into whose hands he gave the paper. She was a wonderful object to look at in her night attire, nor had Harry ever seen the like.

As soon as she had the paper in her hand, Harry stepped back to the chaplain’s room, opened the secret cupboard over the fireplace, burned all the papers in it, and, as he had seen the priest do before, took down one of his reverence’s manuscript sermons, and half burnt that in the brazier. By the time the papers were quite destroyed it was daylight. Harry ran back to his mistress again. Her gentlewoman ushered him again into her ladyship’s chamber; she told him (from behind her nuptial curtains) to bid the coach be got ready, and that she would ride away anon.

But the mysteries of her ladyship’s toilet were as awfully long on this day as on any other, and, long after the coach was ready, my lady was still attiring herself. And just as the viscountess stepped forth from her room, ready for departure, young Job Lockwood comes running up from the village with news that a lawyer, three officers, and twenty or four-and-twenty soldiers, were marching thence upon the house. Job had but two minutes the start of them, and, ere he had well told his story, the troop rode into our courtyard.

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VI. The Issue Of The Plots.—The Death Of Thomas, Third Viscount Of Castlewood; And The Imprisonment Of His Viscountess

At first my lady was for dying like Mary, Queen of Scots (to whom she fancied she bore a resemblance in beauty), and, stroking her scraggy neck, said, “They will find Isabel of Castlewood is equal to her fate.” Her gentlewoman, Victoire, persuaded her that her prudent course was, as she could not fly, to receive the troops as though she suspected nothing, and that her chamber was the best place wherein to await them. So her black japan casket which Harry was to carry to the coach was taken back to her ladyship’s chamber, whither the maid and mistress retired. Victoire came out presently, bidding the page to say her ladyship was ill, confined to her bed with the rheumatism.

By this time the soldiers had reached Castlewood. Harry Esmond saw them from the window of the tapestry parlour; a couple of sentinels were posted at the gate—a half-dozen more walked towards the stable; and some others, preceded by their commander, and a man in black, a lawyer probably, were conducted by one of the servants to the stair leading up to the part of the house which my lord and lady inhabited.

So the captain, a handsome kind man, and the lawyer, came through the ante-room to the tapestry parlour, and where now was nobody but young Harry Esmond, the page.

“Tell your mistress, little man,” says the captain kindly, “that we must speak to her.”

“My mistress is ill abed,” said the page.

“What complaint has she?” asked the captain.

The boy said, “the rheumatism!”

“Rheumatism! that’s a sad complaint,” continues the good-natured captain; “and the coach is in the yard to fetch the doctor, I suppose?”

“I don’t know,” says the boy.

“And how long has her ladyship been ill?”

“I don’t know,” says the boy.

“When did my lord go away?”

“Yesterday night.”

“With Father Holt?”

“With Mr. Holt.”

“And which way did they travel?” asks the lawyer.

“They travelled without me,” says the page.

“We must see Lady Castlewood.”

“I have orders that nobody goes in to her ladyship—she is sick,” says the page; but at this moment Victoire came out. “Hush!” says she; and, as if not knowing that any one was near, “What’s this noise?” says she. “Is this gentleman the doctor?”

“Stuff! we must see Lady Castlewood,” says the lawyer, pushing by.

The curtains of her ladyship’s room were down, and the chamber dark, and she was in bed with a nightcap on her head, and propped up by her pillows, looking none the less ghastly because of the red which was still on her cheeks, and which she could not afford to forgo.

“Is that the doctor?” she said.

“There is no use with this deception, madam,” Captain Westbury said (for so he was named). “My duty is to arrest the person of Thomas, Viscount Castlewood, a nonjuring peer—of Robert Tusher, Vicar of Castlewood—and Henry Holt, known under various other names and designations, a Jesuit priest, who officiated as chaplain here in the late king’s time, and is now at the head of the conspiracy which was about to break out in this country against the authority of their Majesties King William and Queen Mary—and my orders are to search the house for such papers or traces of the conspiracy as may be found here. Your ladyship will please to give me your keys, and it will be as well for yourself that you should help us, in every way, in our search.”

“You see, sir, that I have the rheumatism, and cannot move,” said the lady, looking uncommonly ghastly as she sat up in her bed, where however she had had her cheeks painted, and a new cap put on, so that she might at least look her best when the officers came.

“I shall take leave to place a sentinel in the chamber, so that your ladyship, in case you should wish to rise, may have an arm to lean on,” Captain Westbury said. “Your woman will show me where I am to look;” and Madame Victoire, chattering in her half-French and half-English jargon, opened while the captain examined one drawer after another; but, as Harry Esmond thought, rather carelessly, with a smile on his face, as if he was only conducting the examination for form’s sake.

Before one of the cupboards Victoire flung herself down, stretching out her arms, and, with a piercing shriek, cried, “Non, jamais, monsieur l’officier! Jamais! I will rather die than let you see this wardrobe.”

But Captain Westbury would open it, still with a smile on his face, which, when the box was opened, turned into a fair burst of laughter. It contained—not papers regarding the conspiracy—but my lady’s wigs, washes, and rouge-pots, and Victoire said men were monsters, as the captain went on with his perquisition. He tapped the back to see whether or no it was hollow, and as he thrust his hands into the cupboard, my lady from her bed called out with a voice that did not sound like that of a very sick woman, “Is it your commission to insult ladies as well as to arrest gentlemen, captain?”

“These articles are only dangerous when worn by your ladyship,” the captain said with a low bow, and a mock grin of politeness. “I have found nothing which concerns the Government as yet—only the weapons with which beauty is authorized to kill,” says he, pointing to a wig with his sword-tip. “We must now proceed to search the rest of the house.”

“You are not going to leave that wretch in the room with me,” cried my lady, pointing to the soldier.

“What can I do, madam? Somebody you must have to smooth your pillow and bring your medicine—permit me——”

“Sir!” screamed out my lady—

“Madam, if you are too ill to leave the bed,” the captain then said, rather sternly, “I must have in four of my men to lift you off in the sheet: I must examine this bed, in a word; papers may be hidden in a bed as elsewhere; we know that very well and——”

Here it was her ladyship’s turn to shriek, for the captain, with his fist shaking the pillows and bolsters, at last came to “burn”, as they say in the play of forfeits, and wrenching away one of the pillows, said, “Look, did not I tell you so? Here is a pillow stuffed with paper.”

“Some villain has betrayed us,” cried out my lady, sitting up in the bed, showing herself full dressed under her night-rail.

“And now your ladyship can move, I am sure; permit me to give you my hand to rise. You will have to travel for some distance, as far as Hexton Castle to-night. Will you have your coach? Your woman shall attend you if you like—and the japan-box?”

“Sir! you don’t strike a man when he is down,” said my lady, with some dignity: “can you not spare a woman?”

“Your ladyship must please to rise and let me search the bed,” said the captain; “there is no more time to lose in bandying talk.”

And, without more ado, the gaunt old woman got up. Harry Esmond recollected to the end of his life that figure, with the brocade dress and the white night-rail, and the gold-clocked red stockings, and white red-heeled shoes sitting up in the bed, and stepping down from it. The trunks were ready packed for departure in her ante-room, and the horses ready harnessed in the stable: about all which the captain seemed to know, by information got from some quarter or other; and, whence, Esmond could make a pretty shrewd guess in after-times, when Dr. Tusher complained that King William’s Government had basely treated him for services done in that cause.

And here he may relate, though he was then too young to know all that was happening, what the papers contained, of which Captain Westbury had made a seizure, and which papers had been transferred from the japan-box to the bed when the officers arrived.

There was a list, of gentlemen of the county in Father Holt’s handwriting—Mr. Freeman’s (King James’s) friends—a similar paper being found among those of Sir John Fenwick and Mr. Coplestone, who suffered death for this conspiracy.

There was a patent conferring the title of Marquis of Esmond on my Lord Castlewood, and the heirs male of his body; his appointment as lord lieutenant of the county, and major-general.(7)

There were various letters from the nobility and gentry, some ardent and some doubtful, in the king’s service; and (very luckily for him) two letters concerning Colonel Francis Esmond; one from Father Holt, which said, “I have been to see this colonel at his house at Walcote near to Wells, where he resides since the king’s departure, and pressed him very eagerly in Mr. Freeman’s cause, showing him the great advantage he would have by trading with that merchant, offering him large premiums there as agreed between us. But he says no: he considers Mr. Freeman the head of the firm, will never trade against him or embark with any other trading company, but considers his duty was done when Mr. Freeman left England. This colonel seems to care more for his wife and his beagles than for affairs. He asked me much about young H. E., ‘that bastard,’ as he called him: doubting my lord’s intentions respecting him. I reassured him on this head, stating what I knew of the lad, and our intentions respecting him, but with regard to Freeman he was inflexible.”

And another letter was from Colonel Esmond to his kinsman, to say that one Captain Holton had been with him offering him large bribes to join, you know who, and saying that the head of the house of Castlewood was deeply engaged in that quarter. But for his part he had broke his sword when the K. left the country, and would never again fight in that quarrel. The P. of O. was a man, at least, of a noble courage, and his duty and, as he thought, every Englishman’s, was to keep the country quiet, and the French out of it: and, in fine, that he would have nothing to do with the scheme.

Of the existence of these two letters and the contents of the pillow, Colonel Frank Esmond, who became Viscount Castlewood, told Henry Esmond afterwards, when the letters were shown to his lordship, who congratulated himself, as he had good reason, that he had not joined in the scheme which proved so fatal to many concerned in it. But, naturally, the lad knew little about these circumstances when they happened under his eyes: only being aware that his patron and his mistress were in some trouble, which had caused the flight of the one, and the apprehension of the other by the officers of King William.

The seizure of the papers effected, the gentlemen did not pursue their further search through Castlewood house very rigorously. They examined Mr. Holt’s room, being led thither by his pupil, who showed, as the father had bidden him, the place where the key of his chamber lay, opened the door for the gentlemen, and conducted them into the room.

When the gentlemen came to the half-burned papers in the brazier, they examined them eagerly enough, and their young guide was a little amused at their perplexity.

“What are these?” says one.

“They’re written in a foreign language,” says the lawyer. “What are you laughing at, little whelp?” adds he, turning round as he saw the boy smile.

“Mr. Holt said they were sermons,” Harry said, “and bade me to burn them;” which indeed was true of those papers.

“Sermons, indeed—it’s treason, I would lay a wager,” cries the lawyer.

“Egad! it’s Greek to me,” says Captain Westbury. “Can you read it, little boy?”

“Yes, sir, a little,” Harry said.

“Then read, and read in English, sir, on your peril,” said the lawyer. And Harry began to translate:—

“Hath not one of your own writers said, ‘The children of Adam are now labouring as much as he himself ever did, about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, shaking the boughs thereof, and seeking the fruit, being for the most part unmindful of the tree of life.’ O blind generation! ’tis this tree of knowledge to which the serpent has led you”—and here the boy was obliged to stop, the rest of the page being charred by the fire: and asked of the lawyer—“Shall I go on, sir?”

The lawyer said—“This boy is deeper than he seems: who knows that he is not laughing at us?”

“Let’s have in Dick the Scholar,” cried Captain Westbury, laughing; and he called to a trooper out of the window—“Ho, Dick, come in here and construe.”

A thick-set soldier, with a square good-humoured face, came in at the summons, saluting his officer.

“Tell us what is this, Dick,” says the lawyer.

“My name is Steele, sir,” says the soldier. “I may be Dick for my friends, but I don’t name gentlemen of your cloth amongst them.”

“Well then, Steele.”

“Mr. Steele, sir, if you please. When you address a gentleman of his Majesty’s Horse Guards, be pleased not to be so familiar.”

“I didn’t know, sir,” said the lawyer.

“How should you? I take it you are not accustomed to meet with gentlemen,” says the trooper.

“Hold thy prate, and read that bit of paper,” says Westbury.

“’Tis Latin,” says Dick, glancing at it, and again saluting his officer, “and from a sermon of Mr. Cudworth’s,” and he translated the words pretty much as Henry Esmond had rendered them.

“What a young scholar you are,” says the captain to the boy.

“Depend on’t, he knows more than he tells,” says the lawyer. “I think we will pack him off in the coach with old Jezebel.”

“For construing a bit of Latin?” said the captain very good-naturedly.

“I would as lief go there as anywhere,” Harry Esmond said, simply, “for there is nobody to care for me.”

There must have been something touching in the child’s voice, or in this description of his solitude—for the captain looked at him very good-naturedly, and the trooper, called Steele, put his hand kindly on the lad’s head, and said some words in the Latin tongue.

“What does he say?” says the lawyer.

“Faith, ask Dick himself,” cried Captain Westbury.

“I said I was not ignorant of misfortune myself, and had learned to succour the miserable, and that’s not your trade, Mr. Sheepskin,” said the trooper.

“You had better leave Dick the Scholar alone, Mr. Corbet,” the captain said. And Harry Esmond, always touched by a kind face and kind word, felt very grateful to this good-natured champion.

The horses were by this time harnessed to the coach; and the countess and Victoire came down and were put into the vehicle. This woman, who quarrelled with Harry Esmond all day, was melted at parting with him, and called him “dear angel”, and “poor infant”, and a hundred other names.

The viscountess, giving him her lean hand to kiss, bade him always be faithful to the house of Esmond. “If evil should happen to my lord,” says she, “his successor I trust will be found, and give you protection. Situated as I am, they will not dare wreak their vengeance on me now.” And she kissed a medal she wore with great fervour, and Henry Esmond knew not in the least what her meaning was; but hath since learned that, old as she was, she was for ever expecting, by the good offices of saints and relics, to have an heir to the title of Esmond.

Harry Esmond was too young to have been introduced into the secrets of politics in which his patrons were implicated; for they put but few questions to the boy (who was little of stature, and looked much younger than his age), and such questions as they put he answered cautiously enough, and professing even more ignorance than he had, for which his examiners willingly enough gave him credit. He did not say a word about the window or the cupboard over the fireplace; and these secrets quite escaped the eyes of the searchers.

So then my lady was consigned to her coach, and sent off to Hexton, with her woman and the man of law to bear her company, a couple of troopers riding on either side of the coach. And Harry was left behind at the Hall, belonging as it were to nobody, and quite alone in the world. The captain and a guard of men remained in possession there; and the soldiers, who were very good-natured and kind, ate my lord’s mutton and drank his wine, and made themselves comfortable, as they well might do, in such pleasant quarters.

The captains had their dinner served in my lord’s tapestry parlour, and poor little Harry thought his duty was to wait upon Captain Westbury’s chair, as his custom had been to serve his lord when he sat there.

After the departure of the countess, Dick the Scholar took Harry Esmond under his special protection, and would examine him in his humanities, and talk to him both of French and Latin, in which tongues the lad found, and his new friend was willing enough to acknowledge, that he was even more proficient than Scholar Dick. Hearing that he had learned them from a Jesuit, in the praise of whom and whose goodness Harry was never tired of speaking, Dick, rather to the boy’s surprise, who began to have an early shrewdness, like many children bred up alone, showed a great deal of theological science, and knowledge of the points at issue between the two Churches; so that he and Harry would have hours of controversy together, in which the boy was certainly worsted by the arguments of this singular trooper. “I am no common soldier,” Dick would say, and indeed it was easy to see by his learning, breeding, and many accomplishments, that he was not. “I am of one of the most ancient families in the Empire; I have had my education at a famous school, and a famous university; I learned my first rudiments of Latin near to Smithfield, in London, where the martyrs were roasted.”

“You hanged as many of ours,” interposed Harry; “and, for the matter of persecution, Father Holt told me that a young gentleman of Edinburgh, eighteen years of age, student at the college there, was hanged for heresy only last year, though he recanted, and solemnly asked pardon for his errors.”

“Faith! there has been too much persecution on both sides: but ’twas you taught us.”

“Nay, ’twas the pagans began it,” cried the lad, and began to instance a number of saints of the Church, from the Protomartyr downwards—“this one’s fire went out under him: that one’s oil cooled in the cauldron: at a third holy head the executioner chopped three times and it would not come off. Show us martyrs in your Church for whom such miracles have been done.”

“Nay,” says the trooper gravely, “the miracles of the first three centuries belong to my Church as well as yours, Master Papist,” and then added, with something of a smile upon his countenance, and a queer look at Harry—“And yet, my little catechizer, I have sometimes thought about those miracles, that there was not much good in them, since the victim’s head always finished by coming off at the third or fourth chop, and the cauldron, if it did not boil one day, boiled the next. Howbeit, in our times, the Church has lost that questionable advantage of respites. There never was a shower to put out Ridley’s fire, nor an angel to turn the edge of Campion’s axe. The rack tore the limbs of Southwell the Jesuit and Sympson the Protestant alike. For faith, everywhere multitudes die willingly enough. I have read in Monsieur Rycaut’s History of the Turks, of thousands of Mahomet’s followers rushing upon death in battle as upon certain Paradise; and in the Great Mogul’s dominions people fling themselves by hundreds under the cars of the idols annually, and the widows burn themselves on their husbands’ bodies, as ’tis well known. ’Tis not the dying for a faith that’s so hard, Master Harry—every man of every nation has done that—’tis the living up to it that is difficult, as I know to my cost,” he added, with a sigh. “And ah!” he added, “my poor lad, I am not strong enough to convince thee by my life—though to die for my religion would give me the greatest of joys—but I had a dear friend in Magdalen College in Oxford; I wish Joe Addison were here to convince thee, as he quickly could—for I think he’s a match for the whole College of Jesuits; and what’s more, in his life too. In that very sermon of Dr. Cudworth’s which your priest was quoting from, and which suffered martyrdom in the brazier,” Dick added, with a smile, “I had a thought of wearing the black coat (but was ashamed of my life you see, and took to this sorry red one)—I have often thought of Joe Addison—Doctor Cudworth says, ‘A good conscience is the best looking-glass of Heaven’—and there’s a serenity in my friend’s face which always reflects it—I wish you could see him, Harry.”

“Did he do you a great deal of good?” asked the lad, simply.

“He might have done,” said the other—“at least he taught me to see and approve better things. ’Tis my own fault, deteriora sequi.”

“You seem very good,” the boy said.

“I’m not what I seem, alas!” answered the trooper—and indeed, as it turned out, poor Dick told the truth—for that very night, at supper in the hall, where the gentlemen of the troop took their repasts, and passed most part of their days dicing and smoking of tobacco, and singing and cursing, over the Castlewood ale—Harry Esmond found Dick the Scholar in a woful state of drunkenness. He hiccuped out a sermon; and his laughing companions bade him sing a hymn, on which Dick, swearing he would run the scoundrel through the body who insulted his religion, made for his sword, which was hanging on the wall, and fell down flat on the floor under it, saying to Harry, who ran forward to help him, “Ah, little Papist, I wish Joseph Addison was here!”

Though the troopers of the king’s Life Guards were all gentlemen, yet the rest of the gentlemen seemed ignorant and vulgar boors to Harry Esmond, with the exception of this good-natured Corporal Steele the Scholar, and Captain Westbury and Lieutenant Trant, who were always kind to the lad. They remained for some weeks or months encamped in Castlewood, and Harry learned from them, from time to time, how the lady at Hexton Castle was treated, and the particulars of her confinement there. ’Tis known that King William was disposed to deal very leniently with the gentry who remained faithful to the old king’s cause; and no prince usurping a crown, as his enemies said he did (righteously taking it as I think now), ever caused less blood to be shed. As for women-conspirators, he kept spies on the least dangerous, and locked up the others. Lady Castlewood had the best rooms in Hexton Castle, and the gaoler’s garden to walk in; and though she repeatedly desired to be led out to execution, like Mary Queen of Scots, there never was any thought of taking her painted old head off, or any desire to do aught but keep her person in security.

And it appeared she found that some were friends in her misfortune, whom she had, in her prosperity, considered as her worst enemies. Colonel Francis Esmond, my lord’s cousin and her ladyship’s, who had married the Dean of Winchester’s daughter, and, since King James’s departure out of England, had lived not very far away from Hexton town, hearing of his kinswoman’s strait, and being friends with Colonel Brice, commanding for King William in Hexton, and with the Church dignitaries there, came to visit her ladyship in prison, offering to his uncle’s daughter any friendly services which lay in his power. And he brought his lady and little daughter to see the prisoner, to the latter of whom, a child of great beauty, and many winning ways, the old viscountess took not a little liking, although between her ladyship and the child’s mother there was little more love than formerly. There are some injuries which women never forgive one another; and Madam Francis Esmond, in marrying her cousin, had done one of those irretrievable wrongs to Lady Castlewood. But as she was now humiliated, and in misfortune, Madam Francis could allow a truce to her enmity, and could be kind for a while, at least, to her husband’s discarded mistress. So the little Beatrix, her daughter, was permitted often to go and visit the imprisoned viscountess, who, in so far as the child and its father were concerned, got to abate in her anger towards that branch of the Castlewood family. And the letters of Colonel Esmond coming to light, as has been said, and his conduct being known to the king’s council, the colonel was put in a better position with the existing Government than he had ever before been; any suspicions regarding his loyalty were entirely done away; and so he was enabled to be of more service to his kinswoman than he could otherwise have been.

And now there befell an event by which this lady recovered her liberty, and the house of Castlewood got a new owner, and fatherless little Harry Esmond a new and most kind protector and friend. Whatever that secret was which Harry was to hear from my lord, the boy never heard it; for that night when Father Holt arrived, and carried my lord away with him, was the last on which Harry ever saw his patron. What happened to my lord may be briefly told here. Having found the horses at the place where they were lying, my lord and Father Holt rode together to Chatteris, where they had temporary refuge with one of the father’s penitents in that city; but the pursuit being hot for them, and the reward for the apprehension of one or the other considerable, it was deemed advisable that they should separate; and the priest betook himself to other places of retreat known to him, whilst my lord passed over from Bristol into Ireland, in which kingdom King James had a Court and an army. My lord was but a small addition to this; bringing, indeed, only his sword and the few pieces in his pocket; but the king received him with some kindness and distinction in spite of his poor plight, confirmed him in his new title of marquis, gave him a regiment, and promised him further promotion. But titles or promotion were not to benefit him now. My lord was wounded at the fatal battle of the Boyne, flying from which field (long after his master had set him an example), he lay for a while concealed in the marshy country near to the town of Trim, and more from catarrh and fever caught in the bogs than from the steel of the enemy in the battle, sank and died. May the earth lie light upon Thomas of Castlewood! He who writes this must speak in charity, though this lord did him and his two grievous wrongs: for one of these he would have made amends, perhaps, had life been spared him; but the other lay beyond his power to repair, though ’tis to be hoped that a greater Power than a priest has absolved him of it. He got the comfort of this absolution, too, such as it was: a priest of Trim writing a letter to my lady to inform her of this calamity.

But in those days letters were slow of travelling, and our priest’s took two months or more on its journey from Ireland to England: where, when it did arrive, it did not find my lady at her own house; she was at the king’s house of Hexton Castle when the letter came to Castlewood, but it was opened for all that by the officer in command there.

Harry Esmond well remembered the receipt of this letter, which Lockwood brought in as Captain Westbury and Lieutenant Trant were on the green playing at bowls, young Esmond looking on at the sport, or reading his book in the arbour.

“Here’s news for Frank Esmond,” says Captain Westbury; “Harry, did you ever see Colonel Esmond?” And Captain Westbury looked very hard at the boy as he spoke.

Harry said he had seen him but once when he was at Hexton, at the ball there.

“And did he say anything?”

“He said what I don’t care to repeat,” Harry answered. For he was now twelve years of age: he knew what his birth was and the disgrace of it; and he felt no love towards the man who had most likely stained his mother’s honour and his own.

“Did you love my Lord Castlewood?”

“I wait until I know my mother, sir, to say,” the boy answered, his eyes filling with tears.

“Something has happened to Lord Castlewood,” Captain Westbury said, in a vary grave tone—“something which must happen to us all. He is dead of a wound received at the Boyne, fighting for King James.”

“I am glad my lord fought for the right cause,” the boy said.

“It was better to meet death on the field like a man, than face it on Tower Hill, as some of them may,” continued Mr. Westbury. “I hope he has made some testament, or provided for thee somehow. This letter says, he recommends unicum filium suum dilectissimum to his lady. I hope he has left you more than that.”

Harry did not know, he said. He was in the hands of Heaven and Fate; but more lonely now, as it seemed to him, than he had been all the rest of his life; and that night, as he lay in his little room which he still occupied, the boy thought with many a pang of shame and grief of his strange and solitary condition:—how he had a father and no father; a nameless mother that had been brought to ruin, perhaps, by that very father whom Harry could only acknowledge in secret and with a blush, and whom he could neither love nor revere. And he sickened to think how Father Holt, a stranger, and two or three soldiers, his acquaintances of the last six weeks, were the only friends he had in the great wide world, where he was now quite alone. The soul of the boy was full of love, and he longed as he lay in the darkness there for some one upon whom he could bestow it. He remembers, and must to his dying day, the thoughts and tears of that long night, the hours tolling through it. Who was he and what? Why here rather than elsewhere? I have a mind, he thought, to go to that priest at Trim, and find out what my father said to him on his death-bed confession. Is there any child in the whole world so unprotected as I am? Shall I get up and quit this place, and run to Ireland? With these thoughts and tears the lad passed that night away until he wept himself to sleep.

The next day, the gentlemen of the guard who had heard what had befallen him were more than usually kind to the child, especially his friend Scholar Dick, who told him about his own father’s death, which had happened when Dick was a child at Dublin, not quite five years of age. “That was the first sensation of grief,” Dick said, “I ever knew. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping beside it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa; on which my mother caught me in her arms, and told me in a flood of tears papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again. And this,” said Dick kindly, “has made me pity all children ever since; and caused me to love thee, my poor fatherless, motherless lad. And if ever thou wantest a friend, thou shalt have one in Richard Steele.”

Harry Esmond thanked him, and was grateful. But what could Corporal Steele do for him? take him to ride a spare horse, and be servant to the troop? Though there might be a bar in Harry Esmond’s shield, it was a noble one. The counsel of the two friends was, that little Harry should stay where he was, and abide his fortune: so Esmond stayed on at Castlewood, awaiting with no small anxiety the fate, whatever it was, which was over him.

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VII. I Am Left At Castlewood An Orphan, And Find Most Kind Protectors There

During the stay of the soldiers in Castlewood, honest Dick the Scholar was the constant companion of the lonely little orphan lad Harry Esmond: and they read together, and they played bowls together, and when the other troopers or their officers, who were free-spoken over their cups (as was the way of that day, when neither men nor women were over-nice), talked unbecomingly of their amours and gallantries before the child, Dick, who very likely was setting the whole company laughing, would stop their jokes with a maxima debetur pueris reverentia, and once offered to lug out against another trooper called Hulking Tom, who wanted to ask Harry Esmond a ribald question.

Also, Dick seeing that the child had, as he said, a sensibility above his years, and a great and praiseworthy discretion, confided to Harry his love for a vintner’s daughter, near to the Tollyard, Westminster, whom Dick addressed as Saccharissa in many verses of his composition, and without whom he said it would be impossible that he could continue to live. He vowed this a thousand times in a day, though Harry smiled to see the lovelorn swain had his health and appetite as well as the most heart-whole trooper in the regiment: and he swore Harry to secrecy too, which vow the lad religiously kept, until he found that officers and privates were all taken into Dick’s confidence, and had the benefit of his verses. And it must be owned likewise that, while Dick was sighing after Saccharissa in London, he had consolations in the country; for there came a wench out of Castlewood village who had washed his linen, and who cried sadly when she heard he was gone: and without paying her bill too, which Harry Esmond took upon himself to discharge by giving the girl a silver pocket-piece, which Scholar Dick had presented to him, when, with many embraces and prayers for his prosperity, Dick parted from him, the garrison of Castlewood being ordered away. Dick the Scholar said he would never forget his young friend, nor indeed did he: and Harry was sorry when the kind soldiers vacated Castlewood, looking forward with no small anxiety (for care and solitude had made him thoughtful beyond his years) to his fate when the new lord and lady of the house came to live there. He had lived to be past twelve years old now; and had never had a friend, save this wild trooper perhaps, and Father Holt; and had a fond and affectionate heart, tender to weakness, that would fain attach itself to somebody, and did not seem at rest until it had found a friend who would take charge of it.

The instinct which led Henry Esmond to admire and love the gracious person, the fair apparition of whose beauty and kindness had so moved him when he first beheld her, became soon a devoted affection and passion of gratitude, which entirely filled his young heart, that as yet, except in the case of dear Father Holt, had had very little kindness for which to be thankful. O Dea certè, thought he, remembering the lines out of the Aeneis which Mr. Holt had taught him. There seemed, as the boy thought, in every look or gesture of this fair creature, an angelical softness and bright pity—in motion or repose she seemed gracious alike; the tone of her voice, though she uttered words ever so trivial, gave him a pleasure that amounted almost to anguish. It cannot be called love, that a lad of twelve years of age, little more than a menial, felt for an exalted lady, his mistress: but it was worship. To catch her glance, to divine her errand and run on it before she had spoken it; to watch, to follow, adore her; became the business of his life. Meanwhile, as is the way often, his idol had idols of her own, and never thought of or suspected the admiration of her little pigmy adorer.

My lady had on her side her three idols: first and foremost, Jove and supreme ruler, was her lord, Harry’s patron, the good Viscount of Castlewood. All wishes of his were laws with her. If he had a headache, she was ill. If he frowned, she trembled. If he joked, she smiled and was charmed. If he went a-hunting, she was always at the window to see him ride away, her little son crowing on her arm, or on the watch till his return. She made dishes for his dinner: spiced his wine for him: made the toast for his tankard at breakfast: hushed the house when he slept in his chair, and watched for a look when he woke. If my lord was not a little proud of his beauty, my lady adored it. She clung to his arm as he paced the terrace, her two fair little hands clasped round his great one; her eyes were never tired of looking in his face and wondering at its perfection. Her little son was his son, and had his father’s look and curly brown hair. Her daughter Beatrix was his daughter, and had his eyes—were there ever such beautiful eyes in the world? All the house was arranged so as to bring him ease and give him pleasure. She liked the small gentry round about to come and pay him court, never caring for admiration for herself; those who wanted to be well with the lady must admire him. Not regarding her dress, she would wear a gown to rags, because he had once liked it: and, if he brought her a brooch or a ribbon, would prefer it to all the most costly articles of her wardrobe.

My lord went to London every year for six weeks, and the family being too poor to appear at Court with any figure, he went alone. It was not until he was out of sight that her face showed any sorrow: and what a joy when he came back! What preparation before his return! The fond creature had his arm-chair at the chimney-side—delighting to put the children in it, and look at them there. Nobody took his place at the table; but his silver tankard stood there as when my lord was present.

A pretty sight it was to see, during my lord’s absence, or on those many mornings when sleep or headache kept him abed, this fair young lady of Castlewood, her little daughter at her knee, and her domestics gathered round her reading the Morning Prayer of the English Church. Esmond long remembered how she looked and spoke kneeling reverently before the sacred book, the sun shining upon her golden hair until it made a halo round about her. A dozen of the servants of the house kneeled in a line opposite their mistress; for awhile Harry Esmond kept apart from these mysteries, but Doctor Tusher showing him that the prayers read were those of the Church of all ages, and the boy’s own inclination prompting him to be always as near as he might to his mistress, and to think all things she did right, from listening to the prayers in the antechamber, he came presently to kneel down with the rest of the household in the parlour; and before a couple of years my lady had made a thorough convert. Indeed, the boy loved his catechizer so much that he would have subscribed to anything she bade him, and was never tired of listening to her fond discourse and simple comments upon the book, which she read to him in a voice of which it was difficult to resist the sweet persuasion and tender appealing kindness. This friendly controversy, and the intimacy which it occasioned, bound the lad more fondly than ever to his mistress. The happiest period of all his life was this; and the young mother, with her daughter and son, and the orphan lad whom she protected, read and worked and played, and were children together. If the lady looked forward—as what fond woman does not?—towards the future, she had no plans from which Harry Esmond was left out; and a thousand and a thousand times in his passionate and impetuous way he vowed that no power should separate him from his mistress, and only asked for some chance to happen by which he might show his fidelity to her. Now, at the close of his life, as he sits and recalls in tranquillity the happy and busy scenes of it, he can think, not ungratefully, that he has been faithful to that early vow. Such a life is so simple that years may be chronicled in a few lines. But few men’s life-voyages are destined to be all prosperous; and this calm of which we are speaking was soon to come to an end.

As Esmond grew, and observed for himself, he found of necessity much to read and think of outside that fond circle of kinsfolk who had admitted him to join hand with them. He read more books than they cared to study with him; was alone in the midst of them many a time, and passed nights over labours, futile perhaps, but in which they could not join him. His dear mistress divined his thoughts with her usual jealous watchfulness of affection: began to forebode a time when he would escape from his home-nest; and, at his eager protestations to the contrary, would only sigh and shake her head. Before those fatal decrees in life are executed, there are always secret previsions and warning omens. When everything yet seems calm, we are aware that the storm is coming. Ere the happy days were over, two at least of that home-party felt that they were drawing to a close; and were uneasy, and on the look-out for the cloud which was to obscure their calm.

’Twas easy for Harry to see, however much his lady persisted in obedience and admiration for her husband, that my lord tired of his quiet life, and grew weary, and then testy, at those gentle bonds with which his wife would have held him. As they say the Grand Lama of Thibet is very much fatigued by his character of divinity, and yawns on his altar as his bonzes kneel and worship him, many a home-god grows heartily sick of the reverence with which his family devotees pursue him, and sighs for freedom and for his old life, and to be off the pedestal on which his dependants would have him sit for ever, whilst they adore him, and ply him with flowers, and hymns, and incense, and flattery;—so, after a few years of his marriage, my honest Lord Castlewood began to tire; all the high-flown raptures and devotional ceremonies with which his wife, his chief priestess, treated him, first sent him to sleep, and then drove him out of doors; for the truth must be told, that my lord was a jolly gentleman, with very little of the august or divine in his nature, though his fond wife persisted in revering it—and, besides, he had to pay a penalty for this love, which persons of his disposition seldom like to defray: and, in a word, if he had a loving wife, had a very jealous and exacting one. Then he wearied of this jealousy: then he broke away from it; then came, no doubt, complaints and recriminations; then, perhaps, promises of amendment not fulfilled; then upbraidings not the more pleasant because they were silent, and only sad looks and tearful eyes conveyed them. Then, perhaps, the pair reached that other stage which is not uncommon in married life, when the woman perceives that the god of the honeymoon is a god no more; only a mortal like the rest of us—and so she looks into her heart, and lo! vacuae sedes et inania arcana. And now, supposing our lady to have a fine genius and a brilliant wit of her own, and the magic spell and infatuation removed from her which had led her to worship as a god a very ordinary mortal—and what follows? They live together, and they dine together, and they say “my dear” and “my love” as heretofore; but the man is himself, and the woman herself: that dream of love is over, as everything else is over in life; as flowers and fury, and griefs and pleasures, are over.

Very likely the Lady Castlewood had ceased to adore her husband herself long before she got off her knees, or would allow her household to discontinue worshipping him. To do him justice, my lord never exacted this subservience: he laughed and joked, and drank his bottle, and swore when he was angry, much too familiarly for any one pretending to sublimity; and did his best to destroy the ceremonial with which his wife chose to surround him. And it required no great conceit on young Esmond’s part to see that his own brains were better than his patron’s, who, indeed, never assumed any airs of superiority over the lad, or over any dependant of his, save when he was displeased, in which case he would express his mind, in oaths, very freely; and who, on the contrary, perhaps, spoiled “Parson Harry”, as he called young Esmond, by constantly praising his parts, and admiring his boyish stock of learning.

It may seem ungracious in one who has received a hundred favours from his patron to speak in any but a reverential manner of his elders; but the present writer has had descendants of his own, whom he has brought up with as little as possible of the servility at present exacted by parents from children (under which mask of duty there often lurks indifference, contempt, or rebellion): and as he would have his grandsons believe or represent him to be not an inch taller than Nature has made him: so, with regard to his past acquaintances, he would speak without anger, but with truth, as far as he knows it, neither extenuating nor setting down aught in malice.

So long, then, as the world moved according to Lord Castlewood’s wishes, he was good-humoured enough; of a temper naturally sprightly and easy, liking to joke, especially with his inferiors, and charmed to receive the tribute of their laughter. All exercises of the body he could perform to perfection—shooting at a mark and flying, breaking horses, riding at the ring, pitching the quoit, playing at all games with great skill. And not only did he do these things well, but he thought he did them to perfection; hence he was often tricked about horses, which he pretended to know better than any jockey; was made to play at ball and billiards by sharpers who took his money; and came back from London wofully poorer each time than he went, as the state of his affairs testified, when the sudden accident came by which his career was brought to an end.

He was fond of the parade of dress, and passed as many hours daily at his toilette as an elderly coquette. A tenth part of his day was spent in the brushing of his teeth and the oiling of his hair, which was curling and brown, and which he did not like to conceal under a periwig, such as almost everybody of that time wore (we have the liberty of our hair back now, but powder and pomatum along with it. When, I wonder, will these monstrous poll-taxes of our age be withdrawn, and men allowed to carry their colours, black, red, or grey, as nature made them?) And, as he liked her to be well dressed, his lady spared no pains in that matter to please him; indeed, she would dress her head or cut it off if he had bidden her.

It was a wonder to young Esmond, serving as page to my lord and lady, to hear, day after day, to such company as came, the same boisterous stories told by my lord, at which his lady never failed to smile or hold down her head, and Doctor Tusher to burst out laughing at the proper point, or cry, “Fie, my lord, remember my cloth,” but with such a faint show of resistance, that it only provoked my lord further. Lord Castlewood’s stories rose by degrees, and became stronger after the ale at dinner and the bottle afterwards; my lady always taking flight after the very first glass to Church and King, and leaving the gentlemen to drink the rest of the toasts by themselves.

And, as Harry Esmond was her page, he also was called from duty at this time. “My lord has lived in the army and with soldiers,” she would say to the lad, “amongst whom great licence is allowed. You have had a different nurture, and I trust these things will change as you grow older; not that any fault attaches to my lord, who is one of the best and most religious men in this kingdom.” And very likely she believed so. ’Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

And as Esmond has taken truth for his motto, it must be owned, even with regard to that other angel, his mistress, that she had a fault of character, which flawed her perfections. With the other sex perfectly tolerant and kindly, of her own she was invariably jealous, and a proof that she had this vice is, that though she would acknowledge a thousand faults that she had not, to this which she had she could never be got to own. But if there came a woman with even a semblance of beauty to Castlewood, she was so sure to find out some wrong in her, that my lord, laughing in his jolly way, would often joke with her concerning her foible. Comely servant-maids might come for hire, but none were taken at Castlewood. The housekeeper was old; my lady’s own waiting-woman squinted, and was marked with the small-pox; the housemaids and scullion were ordinary country wenches, to whom Lady Castlewood was kind, as her nature made her to everybody almost; but as soon as ever she had to do with a pretty woman, she was cold, retiring, and haughty. The country ladies found this fault in her; and though the men all admired her, their wives and daughters complained of her coldness and airs, and said that Castlewood was pleasanter in Lady Jezebel’s time (as the dowager was called) than at present. Some few were of my mistress’s side. Old Lady Blenkinsop Jointure, who had been at Court in King James the First’s time, always took her side; and so did old Mistress Crookshank, Bishop Crookshank’s daughter, of Hexton, who, with some more of their like, pronounced my lady an angel; but the pretty women were not of this mind; and the opinion of the country was, that my lord was tied to his wife’s apron-strings, and that she ruled over him.

The second fight which Harry Esmond had, was at fourteen years of age, with Bryan Hawkshaw, Sir John Hawkshaw’s son, of Bramblebrook, who advancing this opinion, that my lady was jealous, and henpecked my lord, put Harry into such a fury, that Harry fell on him, and with such rage, that the other boy, who was two years older, and by far bigger than he, had by far the worst of the assault, until it was interrupted by Doctor Tusher walking out of the dinner room.

Bryan Hawkshaw got up, bleeding at the nose, having, indeed, been surprised, as many a stronger man might have been, by the fury of the assault upon him.

“You little bastard beggar!” he said, “I’ll murder you for this!”

And indeed he was big enough.

“Bastard or not,” said the other, grinding his teeth, “I have a couple of swords, and if you like to meet me, as a man, on the terrace to-night——”

And here the doctor coming up, the colloquy of the young champions ended. Very likely, big as he was, Hawkshaw did not care to continue a fight with such a ferocious opponent as this had been.

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VIII. After Good Fortune Comes Evil

Since my Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought home the custom of inoculation from Turkey (a perilous practice many deem it, and only a useless rushing into the jaws of danger), I think the severity of the small-pox, that dreadful scourge of the world, has somewhat been abated in our part of it; and remembering in my time hundreds of the young and beautiful who have been carried to the grave, or have only risen from their pillows frightfully scarred and disfigured by this malady. Many a sweet face hath left its roses on the bed, on which this dreadful and withering blight has laid them. In my early days this pestilence would enter a village and destroy half its inhabitants: at its approach it may well be imagined not only the beautiful but the strongest were alarmed, and those fled who could. One day in the year 1694 (I have good reason to remember it), Doctor Tusher ran into Castlewood House, with a face of consternation, saying that the malady had made its appearance at the blacksmith’s house in the village, and that one of the maids there was down in the small-pox.

The blacksmith, beside his forge and irons for horses, had an alehouse for men, which his wife kept, and his company sat on benches before the inn door, looking at the smithy while they drank their beer. Now, there was a pretty girl at this inn, the landlord’s men called Nancy Sievewright, a bouncing fresh-looking lass, whose face was as red as the hollyhocks over the pales of the garden behind the inn. At this time Harry Esmond was a lad of sixteen, and somehow in his walks and rambles it often happened that he fell in with Nancy Sievewright’s bonny face; if he did not want something done at the blacksmith’s he would go and drink ale at the “Three Castles”, or find some pretext for seeing this poor Nancy. Poor thing, Harry meant or imagined no harm; and she, no doubt, as little, but the truth is they were always meeting—in the lanes, or by the brook, or at the garden-palings, or about Castlewood: it was, “Lord, Mr. Henry!” and “How do you do, Nancy?” many and many a time in the week. ’Tis surprising the magnetic attraction which draws people together from ever so far. I blush as I think of poor Nancy now, in a red bodice and buxom purple cheeks and a canvas petticoat; and that I devised schemes, and set traps, and made speeches in my heart, which I seldom had courage to say when in presence of that humble enchantress, who knew nothing beyond milking a cow, and opened her black eyes with wonder when I made one of my fine speeches out of Waller or Ovid. Poor Nancy! from the mist of far-off years thine honest country face beams out; and I remember thy kind voice as if I had heard it yesterday.

When Doctor Tusher brought the news that the small-pox was at the “Three Castles”, whither a tramper, it was said, had brought the malady, Henry Esmond’s first thought was of alarm for poor Nancy, and then of shame and disquiet for the Castlewood family, lest he might have brought this infection; for the truth is that Mr. Harry had been sitting in a back room for an hour that day, where Nancy Sievewright was with a little brother who complained of headache, and was lying stupefied and crying, either in a chair by the corner of the fire, or in Nancy’s lap, or on mine.

Little Lady Beatrix screamed out at Dr. Tusher’s news; and my lord cried out, “God bless me!” He was a brave man, and not afraid of death in any shape but this. He was very proud of his pink complexion and fair hair—but the idea of death by small-pox scared him beyond all other ends. “We will take the children and ride away to-morrow to Walcote:” this was my lord’s small house, inherited from his mother, near to Winchester.

“That is the best refuge in case the disease spreads,” said Dr. Tusher. “’Tis awful to think of it beginning at the alehouse. Half the people of the village have visited that to-day, or the blacksmith’s, which is the same thing. My clerk Simons lodges with them—I can never go into my reading-desk and have that fellow so near me. I won’t have that man near me.”

“If a parishioner dying in the small-pox sent to you, would you not go?” asked my lady, looking up from her frame of work, with her calm blue eyes.

“By the Lord, I wouldn’t,” said my lord.

“We are not in a Popish country: and a sick man doth not absolutely need absolution and confession,” said the doctor. “’Tis true they are a comfort and a help to him when attainable, and to be administered with hope of good. But in a case where the life of a parish priest in the midst of his flock is highly valuable to them, he is not called upon to risk it (and therewith the lives, future prospects, and temporal, even spiritual welfare of his own family) for the sake of a single person, who is not very likely in a condition even to understand the religious message whereof the priest is the bringer—being uneducated, and likewise stupefied or delirious by disease. If your ladyship or his lordship, my excellent good friend and patron, were to take it——”

“God forbid!” cried my lord.

“Amen,” continued Dr. Tusher. “Amen to that prayer, my very good lord! for your sake I would lay my life down”—and, to judge from the alarmed look of the doctor’s purple face, you would have thought that that sacrifice was about to be called for instantly.

To love children, and be gentle with them, was an instinct, rather than a merit, in Henry Esmond, so much so, that he thought almost with a sort of shame of his liking for them, and of the softness into which it betrayed him; and on this day the poor fellow had not only had his young friend, the milkmaid’s brother, on his knee, but had been drawing pictures, and telling stories to the little Frank Esmond, who had occupied the same place for an hour after dinner, and was never tired of Henry’s tales, and his pictures of soldiers and horses. As luck would have it, Beatrix had not on that evening taken her usual place, which generally she was glad enough to have, upon her tutor’s lap. For Beatrix, from the earliest time, was jealous of every caress which was given to her little brother Frank. She would fling away even from the maternal arms, if she saw Frank had been there before her; insomuch that Lady Castlewood was obliged not to show her love for her son in the presence of the little girl, and embrace one or the other alone. She would turn pale and red with rage if she caught signs of intelligence or affection between Frank and his mother; would sit apart, and not speak for a whole night, if she thought the boy had a better fruit or a larger cake than hers; would fling away a ribbon if he had one; and from the earliest age, sitting up in her little chair by the great fireplace opposite to the corner where Lady Castlewood commonly sat at her embroidery, would utter infantine sarcasms about the favour shown to her brother. These, if spoken in the presence of Lord Castlewood, tickled and amused his humour; he would pretend to love Frank best, and dandle and kiss him, and roar with laughter at Beatrix’s jealousy. But the truth is, my lord did not often witness these scenes, nor very much trouble the quiet fireside at which his lady passed many long evenings. My lord was hunting all day when the season admitted; he frequented all the cockfights and fairs in the country, and would ride twenty miles to see a main fought, or two clowns break their heads at a cudgelling match; and he liked better to sit in his parlour drinking ale and punch with Jack and Tom, than in his wife’s drawing-room: whither, if he came, he brought only too often bloodshot eyes, a hiccuping voice, and a reeling gait. The management of the house and the property, the care of the few tenants and the village poor, and the accounts of the estate, were in the hands of his lady and her young secretary, Harry Esmond. My lord took charge of the stables, the kennel, and the cellar—and he filled this and emptied it too.

So it chanced that upon this very day, when poor Harry Esmond had had the blacksmith’s son, and the peer’s son, alike upon his knee, little Beatrix, who would come to her tutor willingly enough with her book and her writing, had refused him, seeing the place occupied by her brother, and, luckily for her, had sat at the further end of the room, away from him, playing with a spaniel dog which she had (and for which, by fits and starts, she would take a great affection), and talking at Harry Esmond over her shoulder, as she pretended to caress the dog, saying, that Fido would love her, and she would love Fido, and nothing but Fido, all her life.

When, then, the news was brought that the little boy at the “Three Castles” was ill with the small-pox, poor Harry Esmond felt a shock of alarm, not so much for himself as for his mistress’s son, whom he might have brought into peril. Beatrix, who had pouted sufficiently (and who whenever a stranger appeared began, from infancy almost, to play off little graces to catch his attention), her brother being now gone to bed, was for taking her place upon Esmond’s knee: for, though the doctor was very obsequious to her, she did not like him, because he had thick boots and dirty hands (the pert young miss said), and because she hated learning the catechism.

But as she advanced towards Esmond from the corner where she had been sulking, he started back and placed the great chair on which he was sitting between him and her—saying in the French language to Lady Castlewood, with whom the young lad had read much, and whom he had perfected in this tongue—“Madam, the child must not approach me; I must tell you that I was at the blacksmith’s to-day, and had his little boy upon my lap.”

“Where you took my son afterwards,” Lady Castlewood said, very angry, and turning red. “I thank you, sir, for giving him such company. Beatrix,” she said in English, “I forbid you to touch Mr. Esmond. Come away, child—come to your room. Come to your room—I wish your reverence good night—and you, sir, had you not better go back to your friends at the alehouse?” Her eyes, ordinarily so kind, darted flashes of anger as she spoke; and she tossed up her head (which hung down commonly) with the mien of a princess.

“Hey-day!” says my lord, who was standing by the fireplace—indeed he was in the position to which he generally came by that hour of the evening—“Hey-day! Rachel, what are you in a passion about? Ladies ought never to be in a passion. Ought they, Doctor Tusher? though it does good to see Rachel in a passion—Damme, Lady Castlewood, you look dev’lish handsome in a passion.”

“It is, my lord, because Mr. Henry Esmond, having nothing to do with his time here, and not having a taste for our company, has been to the alehouse, where he has some friends.”

My lord burst out with a laugh and an oath—“You young sly-boots, you’ve been at Nancy Sievewright. D—— the young hypocrite, who’d have thought it in him? I say, Tusher, he’s been after——”

“Enough, my lord,” said my lady, “don’t insult me with this talk.”

“Upon my word,” said poor Harry, ready to cry with shame and mortification, “the honour of that young person is perfectly unstained for me.”

“Oh, of course, of course,” says my lord, more and more laughing and tipsy. “Upon his honour, doctor—Nancy Sieve——”

“Take Mistress Beatrix to bed,” my lady cried at this moment to Mrs. Tucker her woman, who came in with her ladyship’s tea. “Put her into my room—no, into yours,” she added quickly. “Go, my child: go, I say: not a word!” And Beatrix, quite surprised at so sudden a tone of authority from one who was seldom accustomed to raise her voice, went out of the room with a scared countenance and waited even to burst out a-crying, until she got to the door with Mrs. Tucker.

For once her mother took little heed of her sobbing, and continued to speak eagerly—“My lord,” she said, “this young man—your dependant—told me just now in French—he was ashamed to speak in his own language—that he had been at the ale-house all day, where he has had that little wretch who is now ill of the small-pox on his knee. And he comes home reeking from that place—yes, reeking from it—and takes my boy into his lap without shame, and sits down by me, yes, by me. He may have killed Frank for what I know—killed our child. Why was he brought in to disgrace our house? Why is he here? Let him go—let him go, I say, to-night, and pollute the place no more.”

She had never once uttered a syllable of unkindness to Harry Esmond; and her cruel words smote the poor boy, so that he stood for some moments bewildered with grief and rage at the injustice of such a stab from such a hand. He turned quite white from red, which he had been.

“I cannot help my birth, madam,” he said, “nor my other misfortune. And as for your boy, if—if my coming nigh to him pollutes him now, it was not so always. Good night, my lord. Heaven bless you and yours for your goodness to me. I have tired her ladyship’s kindness out, and I will go;” and, sinking down on his knee, Harry Esmond took the rough hand of his benefactor and kissed it.

“He wants to go to the ale-house—let him go,” cried my lady.

“I’m d——d if he shall,” said my lord. “I didn’t think you could be so d——d ungrateful, Rachel.”

Her reply was to burst into a flood of tears, and to quit the room with a rapid glance at Harry Esmond. As my lord, not heeding them, and still in great good humour, raised up his young client from his kneeling posture (for a thousand kindnesses had caused the lad to revere my lord as a father), and put his broad hand on Harry Esmond’s shoulder—

“She was always so,” my lord said; “the very notion of a woman drives her mad. I took to liquor on that very account, by Jove, for no other reason than that; for she can’t be jealous of a beer-barrel or a bottle of rum, can she, doctor? D—— it, look at the maids—just look at the maids in the house” (my lord pronounced all the words together—just-look-at-the-maze-in-the-house: jever-see-such-maze?) “You wouldn’t take a wife out of Castlewood now, would you, doctor?” and my lord burst out laughing.

The doctor, who had been looking at my Lord Castlewood from under his eyelids, said, “But joking apart, and, my lord, as a divine, I cannot treat the subject in a jocular light, nor, as a pastor of this congregation, look with anything but sorrow at the idea of so very young a sheep going astray.”

“Sir,” said young Esmond, bursting out indignantly, “she told me that you yourself were a horrid old man, and had offered to kiss her in the dairy.”

“For shame, Henry,” cried Doctor Tusher, turning as red as a turkey-cock, while my lord continued to roar with laughter. “If you listen to the falsehoods of an abandoned girl——”

“She is as honest as any woman in England, and as pure for me,” cried out Henry, “and as kind, and as good. For shame on you to malign her!”

“Far be it from me to do so,” cried the doctor. “Heaven grant I may be mistaken in the girl, and in you, sir, who have a truly precocious genius; but that is not the point at issue at present. It appears that the small-pox broke out in the little boy at the ‘Three Castles’; that it was on him when you visited the ale-house, for your own reasons; and that you sat with the child for some time, and immediately afterwards with my young lord.” The doctor raised his voice as he spoke, and looked towards my lady, who had now come back, looking very pale, with a handkerchief in her hand.

“This is all very true, sir,” said Lady Esmond, looking at the young man.

“’Tis to be feared that he may have brought the infection with him.”

“From the ale-house—yes,” said my lady.

“D—— it, I forgot when I collared you, boy,” cried my lord, stepping back. “Keep off, Harry, my boy; there’s no good in running into the wolf’s jaws, you know.”

My lady looked at him with some surprise, and instantly advancing to Henry Esmond, took his hand. “I beg your pardon, Henry,” she said; “I spoke very unkindly. I have no right to interfere with you—with your——”

My lord broke out into an oath. “Can’t you leave the boy alone, my lady?” She looked a little red, and faintly pressed the lad’s hand as she dropped it.

“There is no use, my lord,” she said; “Frank was on his knee as he was making pictures, and was running constantly from Henry to me. The evil is done, if any.”

“Not with me, damme,” cried my lord. “I’ve been smoking”—and he lighted his pipe again with a coal—“and it keeps off infection; and as the disease is in the village—plague take it—I would have you leave it. We’ll go tomorrow to Walcote, my lady.”

“I have no fear,” said my lady; “I may have had it as an infant, it broke out in our house then; and when four of my sisters had it at home, two years before our marriage, I escaped it, and two of my dear sisters died.”

“I won’t run the risk,” said my lord; “I’m as bold as any man, but I’ll not bear that.”

“Take Beatrix with you and go,” said my lady. “For us the mischief is done; and Tucker can wait upon us, who has had the disease.”

“You take care to choose ’em ugly enough,” said my lord, at which her ladyship hung down her head and looked foolish: and my lord, calling away Tusher, bade him come to the oak parlour and have a pipe. The doctor made a low bow to her ladyship (of which salaams he was profuse), and walked off on his creaking square-toes after his patron.

When the lady and the young man were alone, there was a silence of some moments, during which he stood at the fire, looking rather vacantly at the dying embers, whilst her ladyship busied herself with her tambour-frame and needles.

“I am sorry,” she said, after a pause, in a hard, dry voice,—“I repeat I am sorry that I showed myself so ungrateful for the safety of my son. It was not at all my wish that you should leave us, I am sure, unless you found pleasure elsewhere. But you must perceive, Mr. Esmond, that at your age, and with your tastes, it is impossible that you can continue to stay upon the intimate footing in which you have been in this family. You have wished to go to the University, and I think ’tis quite as well that you should be sent thither. I did not press this matter, thinking you a child, as you are, indeed, in years—quite a child; and I should never have thought of treating you otherwise until—until these circumstances came to light. And I shall beg my lord to dispatch you as quick as possible: and will go on with Frank’s learning as well as I can (I owe my father thanks for a little grounding, and you, I’m sure, for much that you have taught me),—and—and I wish you a good night, Mr. Esmond.”

And with this she dropped a stately curtsy, and, taking her candle, went away through the tapestry door, which led to her apartments. Esmond stood by the fireplace, blankly staring after her. Indeed, he scarce seemed to see until she was gone; and then her image was impressed upon him, and remained for ever fixed upon his memory. He saw her retreating, the taper lighting up her marble face, her scarlet lip quivering, and her shining golden hair. He went to his own room, and to bed, where he tried to read, as his custom was; but he never knew what he was reading until afterwards he remembered the appearance of the letters of the book (it was in Montaigne’s Essays), and the events of the day passed before him—that is, of the last hour of the day; for as for the morning, and the poor milkmaid yonder, he never so much as once thought. And he could not get to sleep until daylight, and woke with a violent headache, and quite unrefreshed.

He had brought the contagion with him from the “Three Castles” sure enough, and was presently laid up with the small-pox, which spared the Hall no more than it did the cottage.

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