The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. ... With illustrations by T. H. Robinson

Front matter

THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND, Esq Where the beautiful Maid of Honour was the light about which a thousand beaux came and fluttered. — Page 386. 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. " WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY T. H. ROBINSON LONDON GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD 1896 [All rights reserved] To the Right Honourable William Ttingbam, Lord nAsbburton My Dear Lord, The writer of a booh which copies the manners and language of Queen lime, mast not omit the Dedication to the Tatron ; and I ask leave to inscribe these volumes to your Lordship for the sake of the great kindness and friendship which I owe to you and yours. DÆy volumes will reach you when the is on his voyage to a country where your name is as well known as here.

Wherever I am, 1 shall gratefully regard you ; and shall not be the less welcomed in because I am Your obliged friend and servant, W. OtC. THACKERAY. London, October 18, 1852. PAGE DEDICATION vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii

Introduction

Book I

The early youth of Henry Esmond, up to the time of his leaving Trinity College, in Cambridge CHAP. I. AN ACCOUNT OF THE FAMILY OF ESMOND OF CASTLEWOOD HALL 7 II. RELATES HOW FRANCIS, FOURTH VISCOUNT, ARRIVES AT CASTLEWOOD 1 3 III. WHITHER IN THE TIME OF THOMAS, THIRD VISCOUNT, I HAD PRECEDED HIM, AS PAGE TO ISABELLA . . 22 g&IKAIte Where the beautiful Maid of Honour was the light about which a thousand beaux came and fluttered ....

Frontispiece PAGE Heading to Contents ......... ix Heading to List of Illustrations ....... xiii Heading to Introduction ........ xvii Heading to Preface ......... xxix My Lady Viscountess lighted upon him ... in the book-room . 7 As the boy was yet in this attitude of humility .... 9 A hanger-on of ordinaries . . . . . . ■ .13 While his nephew slunk by . . . . . . .18 Where he always used to preach and sing hymns .... 22 Or on public days introducing her company to her . . . 31 The next moment the brute's heels were in the air . . . -34 I have often seen the poor wretch come out with red eyes . . 37 The Conspiracy .......... 42 Which he tore out indignantly 47 With the exception of this good-natured Corporal Steele ... 54 Lord Castlewood's stories rose by degrees . . . . .69 He had consolations in the country 71 List of Illustrations XIV PAGE Her cruel words smote the poor boy ...... 79 Nancy Sievewright . . . . . . • - .81 The happiest hours of young Esmond's life ..... 89 Doctor Tusher .....••••• 91 And Harry rememljered all his life after how he saw his mistress at the window '°8 She received the young man with even more savour 1 han she -In. wed I., the elder '"O And, with a sort of groan, rose up, and went on! . . . 118 After dinner they played bowls . . . . • ■ • ' 32 Beatrix 14° " By G — , my lord, you shall !" . . ■ . . • ■ 143 And so my lord was carried to a surgeon . . . . 157 Some things he said concerned Harry Esmond as much as they astonished him . . . . . . . . 171 But the Lady Castlewood went back from him . . 1 77 Here the fair Beatrix entered from the river ..... 187 " For who would not speak well in such a cause?". . . 192 My Lady Viscountess ......... 197 Tale-bearers from St. Germains ....... 203 Father Holt 208 The only blood which Mr. Esmond drew in this shameful campaign 215 She gave him her hand ......... 227 Calling his dogs about him ........ 235 " The Duchess found him on his knees to Mistress 'Trix " . . 244 Miss Beatrix had brought out a new gown for that day's dinner . 246 " And young Sir Wilmot Crawley, of Queen's Crawley, and Anthony Henley, of Alresford, were at swords drawn about her" . 250 Rushing up to the very guns of the enemy ..... 254 " Gloriana at the Harpsichord " ....... 264 And be ready to hand her to her chair if she deigned to accept of his services ........... 272 Dick, after reading of the verses, was fain to go off . . . . 275 There sat my young lord, having taken off his cuirass . . . 287 Esmond came to this spot in one sunny evening of spring . . 293 " How in half-an-hour's time, and before a bottle was drunk, he had completely succeeded in biting poor Pastoureau "... 303 Lieutenant-General Webb ........

List of Illustrations XV PAGE " Permit me to hand it to your Grace " . . . . . .316 " Kneel down," says she : " we dub you our knight with this" . 334 And was down to piquet with her gentlewoman before he had well quitted the room ......... 345 Here, as he lay nursing himself, ubi<[iiitous Mr. Holt/ reappeared A joint composition from himself mid his wife, who rould no better than her young scapegrace of a husband .... 300 '■ Vour constant reader. Cymon Wyldoals" ..... Rushing to the looking-glass and examining the effect they produced He . . . who had injured him and kept him dangling in his ante-chamber ........... 406 " Who the devil are ye, sir?" cries the Doctor .... 415 "Vanity ! " says she haughtily.

" What is vanity in you, sir, is propriety in me" . .' . .421, The street-criers were already out with their broadsides . . . 427 Years ago, on that very bed, she had blessed him and called him her knight 429 Beatrix came out to them just as their talk was over . . . 436 The Vicar of Castlewood vowed he could not see any resemblance in the piece. .......... 441 The Prince seized hold of the glass and drank the last drop of it . 452 And preparing paste and turning rolling-pins in the housekeeper's closet .....■■•■•• 454 She swept out of the room with the air of an empress . . 467 "Has your lordship anything to say?" says the Prince, turning to Frank Castlewood ......... 482 The two worthies . . . were scared by seeing Colonel Esmond gallop by them 4^5 The night before*hat he had passed in his boots at the Crown at Hounslow * 493 The whole assembly of officers seemed to swim away before Esmond's eyes as he read the paper 499 The talk was scarce over when Beatrix entered the room . . . mm± ESMOND is the very Thackeray, Thackeray as he would have liked always to be, if he had not been obliged to grin through a collar at the British public in order to make the domestic pot boil.

It concentrates his love for the eighteenth century ; it gives that curious amalgam of "detachment" and senti ment which makes up his Weltanschauung. It combines the two attitudes of modern man and country gentleman, which make Thackeray such a characteristic product of the period in our history when the hegemony was passing from the one to the other. Above all, it gives in places perfect specimens of Thackeray's style — that style that made the man. Thackeray in his own day was regarded on the one hand, and most frequently, as an ironical cynic; on the other, and mainly by Charlotte Bronte, as a great moral teacher. It is difficult to understand either opinion. Cynic ! Why, if there ever was a man who was steeped in sentiment, and at times xvii fr Introduction XVIII even in sentimentality, it was Thackeray ; and as for his moral teaching, it was manly enough, or rather, gentlemanly enough, but it never glows — it never climbs the heights.

He himself owned that there was a bit of snobbery in his crusade against snobs. Alone of almost all that he did, Esmond shows no trace of this failing ; it is written in the grand manner, almost without faltering from beginning to end. Its genre is of the historic novel, but it is not altogether like the historic novel of any one else. It is not romantic ; nor, for all its adven tures, is it entirely a novel of adventure. It is in some ways realistic ; yet it is wanting in one of the main characteristics of the realistic novel — absence of comment on what is going on. Colonel Esmond, in writing out his memories of his life before he left England, has a way of dropping into ironic comment very similar to that in which Arthur Pendennis has his say on what is passing about him in his life in London.

It is, therefore, Thackeray as Chorus, speaking through a Queen Anne mask, that makes Esmond sui generis. Even when Colonel Esmond is not talking by way of comment, he often introduces long speeches which are nothing else than Thackerayan. These he puts in the mouth of his hero, or of Lady Castlewood, or even at times allows to issue from the ruby lips of Beatrix herself. This is undramatic, to say the least, and a person taking up the book and coming across one of these passages would despair of finding any action in its pages. But he would be mistaken. Nowhere else in Thackeray is there so much bustle of real life. An artist can have no difficulty in finding subjects for his pencil. Thomas, third Viscount Castlewood, defending his Jezebel of a wife from the insults of the mob ; the search for treason able papers in the said Jezebel's bedroom ; the three duels with Mohun, and the final crossing of swords with the elder Pretender ; General Webb and the Duke of Marlborough at the Lille dinner, — any and all of these have as much Introduction XIX movement in them as Dumas at his best.* Yet these are interspersed with passages which help the action on not at all.

The chapter on the Wits (the fifth of the Third Book) is quite a hors cfœuvre, and yet what a kitcat of Swift it gives ! That chapter has wandered away from the Lectures on the English Humourists (delivered in 1 85 1, the year before Esmond was published), and is only fitted into the frame of Esmond by the announcement of Hamilton's death, dragged in at the end. So, too, the Addison bits. Full of truth and life as they are, they have absolutely nothing to do with the evolu tion of Henry Esmond's career, yet they help to produce the atmosphere which is as necessary a part of a historic novel as the fighting or the intrigue. The same defence can scarcely be given for the military details of Marlborough's campaigns, for these have even still less to do with the plot of the story, and — fatal defect — are dull in themselves.

Only one scene out of these stands out and really has vital connec tion with the plot, and that is the rencontre with the Pretender at the banks of the Canihe. Truth to tell, there is no plot in Esmond till we reach the Third Book, to which the two preceding ones are merely pro legomena. That is your difficulty with the autobiographic novel : in form it is biography, and hence you have to deal with periods of life which have little bearing upon the central plot — if there is to be one. Thackeray is perhaps more ingenious than usual in securing a separate interest for the earlier stages of Esmond's career. The first two books, so far as they have a common interest, deal with the mystery of Esmond's birth, and so in some sort prepare the way for the prominent position he takes in the intrigues of Book III. ; but in themselves they are little more than a set of disconnected * It is perhaps worth while remarking that Mr. Robinson, when de picting these and other scenes in the present edition, has endeavoured to reproduce the actual features of Webb and Marlborough, and the other historic personages, wherever they occur.

Introduction XX episodes, the only artistic purpose of which is to bring out the characters of the hero, of the woman who loved him, and of the woman he loved. Here we have indeed the crux of the book. It is part of the novelist's stock-in-trade to place his hero in this position of unstable equilibrium, but among English novels, so far as I can recollect, only Esmond makes the two women between whom the hero hesitates mother and daughter. To some there is something repulsive and unnatural in the rivalry ; but perhaps the real cause of objection is not so much in the rela tionship of the two heroines (if we may call them so), as in the disparity of age between Esmond and Lady Castlewood. True, Esmond is older than his age ; and his lady, from her country breeding and tender purity, is younger than hers.

If the scene had been placed in the present day, there would not have been so much incongruity in recording a match, which, after all, is by no means infrequent in daily experience ; but it ill accords with our notions of the historic novel, which, for one reason or another, we require to be romantic in tone. We cannot, how ever much we try, associate any romance with such a union ; but Esmond alone, of all historic novels, does not claim to be romantic. It is perhaps unfair to deny Thackeray the right of choosing his tone. It is perhaps in the character of Esmond himself that the chief fault lies. " Esmond is a bit of a prig," said Thackeray to Anthony Trollope, and Beatrix says something like it in the book itself. We want our heroes in novels to be bright and brave, but we do not want them faultless.

Esmond is brave, but he is Don Dismallo, and he is dangerously near being faultless. One is tempted to like young Frank Castle wood better than Esmond ; and it is certainly unnatural and not too artistic, to make Esmond so uniformly superior to his company. Whatever society he is in, he seizes and exposes its weaknesses and failings. To a certain extent this is justified by the fact that it is Colonel Esmond in his Introduction XXI old age writing of the times of his youth, but still more is it due to the choice of the autobiographic form for the historic novel in this instance. When he drops into " I's " and " me's " Thackeray could not help putting his own comments into the mouth of Henry Esmond, who is thereby made to view life with the "detachment" of the professional novelist. He tries to avoid it by a somewhat curious procedure.

He is perpetually confounding the persons in his narrative between the first and the third when he is speaking of Esmond. While at times he says "the Colonel" said this, or "Mr. Esmond " did that, the titles of his chapters run, " I am in prison," and very often the first person is used in comments. A curious instance of this confusion occurs in perhaps the best-known passage of the book — the visit of Esmond to his mother's grave. It commences, " Esmond came to this spot in one sunny evening of spring," and finishes, " I felt as one who had been walking below the sea, and treading amidst the bones of shipwrecks." In this particular instance the change is by no means inartistic, for the statement of fact is put in the third person, the expression of feeling in the first. But in the rest of the book it indicates a vacillating attitude of the author towards his hero, which is not without its effects on the impression he makes upon us.

In particular, the wit combats between Beatrix and Esmond, and the passages of tenderness between her mother and him, lose much of their convincing character by the adoption of the third person for the conversations, with the interpolation of the first person for the comments. Beatrix is undoubtedly a good foil for Esmond. No one can accuse her of being faultless, no one is less of a prig than she. It is curious how definite an impression her character makes on one, considering the few appearances she makes in the story ; but she is drawn in bold outline from the first, and from the day she sets her father and Lord Mohun by the ears she plays consistently the part of Eris. Of the two Introduction XXII alternatives, " Ye cannot serve God and Mammon," she early makes her choice and sticks to it.

There is something of tragic intensity in the pitiless way in which Thackeray draws her relentless ambition. Yet with it all she charms, for she is a woman. She could kindle at a heroism, as when she is told of Esmond's great renunciation before the Duke of Hamilton. She offers Esmond her cheek, though she knew it would make the Duke furious ; but probably she knew her power over him — the witch ! — and so we cannot put this womanly touch down to any faltering in her purpose. There can be no doubt that such a Beatrix might have grown old as the Baroness Bernstein. I am not sure that Lady Castlewood is not a greater achievement in character-drawing than Beatrix herself. We are too apt, perhaps, to judge of the success of a character in a novel by the simple test of whether we should like the person described or not.

That would place the drawing of fools or villains at a discount, and where should we be without fools or villains ? It does not follow, because any one would like Beatrix better than her mother, that the drawing of the latter is not a greater triumph of artistic skill. It was, at any rate, a more difficult character to draw, because more complex. She is to be described as wife, as mother, as widow, and as lover — mistress we can scarcely call her, for almost to the last page Beatrix holds that position. The explanation, perhaps, is that Beatrix is a man's woman, while Lady Castlewood is a woman's woman. Now, for the post of heroine we obviously want the former kind of woman rather than the latter : hence Lady Castlewood, though really much more elaborately drawn than her daughter, holds throughout the book a subordinate position.

Yet with what fine touches is her character built up ! In her way she is the first New Woman in English fiction. By what natural gradations does she become aware of her superiority to her lout of a husband ! She is just the sort of woman to love a prig, and the growth of her affection Introduction XXIII for Esmond is most subtly and naturally indicated. We could have wished, perhaps, that she had' not confessed it so openly on that Silvester-night, but in this absence of the higher reti cences she is perhaps still more markedly a prefigurement of the New Woman. Then the hectic play of jealousy is admirably described, and the theme of matre pulcra filia pulcrior is played out in all its variations without our ever losing our respect. She doubles the role of admiring mother and jealous rival with consistent fidelity to each character.

She is indeed a triumph of Thackeray's art. Esmond and the two ladies fill the stage throughout, but many of the minor characters are drawn with equal firmness, and often strut the stage with convincing life. Father Holt, in particular, strikes one as an etching from life. He is drawn, perhaps, with a touch of malice, and reminds us that his portrait was painted at the time when England was in an uproar about Papal Aggression. He goes to and fro upon the earth with his semi-omniscience, and never devours any one. He is what Jews call a Shlemihl, one who never succeeds in what he attempts, yet it is not his own fault. So, too, Steele is brought upon the stage as large as life, and quite as natural, but even a feebler pen than Thackeray's would have made something amusing out of Sir Richard's foibles.

It was natural, too, that Swift and Atterbury and St. John should be put in with firm touches, for Thackeray had lived with them all his life, and had just been doing injustice to them in his English Humourists. But the chief success in portraiture among the minor characters — if we may call him one — is the three-quarter-length of the elder Pretender. His was a character after Thackeray's own heart. There was a touch of the Republican in the author of Vanity Fair ; he was never so well pleased as when he could draw Louis the Fourteenth without his wig, or Queen Anne blowzed at her stag-hunting. The Stuarts were a race of Shlemihls. Except the Merry Monarch, they always succeeded Introduction XXIV in failing in what they undertook. The Divine Right of Kings to govern wrongly never received a more convincing Nemesis, and of all the Stuarts James the Third appears to have been the most despicable.

He was exactly one of Daudet's Rots en Exile. One need not so much object to his harem, for the first two Georges could not claim any superiority over him in that regard ; but his tippling and his treachery, his want of dignity and lack of character, were enough to have ruined the most righteous of causes. One does not know if Thackeray had any warrant in making him so personally attractive as the Chevalier de St. George certainly appears in Esmond. He has certainly succeeded in giving him just those qualities which would attract the fidelity of his followers, and ruin their best laid schemes for his restoration. Beatrix and he are well matched. I have spoken above of the fidelity with which the wits of the period are portrayed in Thackeray's pages. He had just been studying them for his Lectures, but besides this it is clear from his style that he had been studying them all his life.

He was, in a way, a Queen Anne man writing under Victoria. His style, even outside his historic romances, has all the best qualities of the Queen Anne period — perfect ease and lucidity, a sure balance between the Saxon and Latin elements, together with a not too obtrusive reminiscence of the classic studies of boyhood.* All this we find in Addison, and Steele, and Swift, and we find it again in Thackeray. He shared even in what they lacked, if one can manage to do that. The imaginative qualities of his style are poor, the epithets are conventional, and the rhythm thin. But notwithstanding this, after the ponderosities of the Johnsonian school men hailed Thackeray's style as a model of perspicuity and grace. But when Thackeray's admirers go further and indulge in * The first edition of Esmond even adopted the long s's of the Queen Anne printers.

These have been omitted in the present reprint, which in all else follow that edition. Introduction XXV raptures on the historic suitableness of the style for a romance dealing with the Queen Anne period, they seem somewhat to overstate their case. Though modelled on the Queen Anne style, it is far too correct for an imitation. There was a touch of the sloven about their style ; their sentences often do not parse, and clear as their meaning is they often defy analysis in the technical sense of the word. Thackeray was too much of a scholar in English to follow them in this characteristic of their style, and hence his imitation, by being in a sense better than the original, fails to be an imitation. The following sentence in the first chapter of Book III. is almost the only one that fails to analyse, and thereby approaches the laxity of the Queen Anne period : "And one fine day of June riding thither with the officer who visited the outposts (Colonel Esmond was taking an airing on horseback, being too weak for military duty), they came to this river, where a number of English and Scots were assembled, talking to the good natured enemy on the other side."

The subject of the preceding sentence is "the sentries of the two armies," and cannot therefore be referred to by the mysterious " they " of this sentence. Thackeray himself rebukes his admirers in this regard by offering them a specimen of what he could do when he was of set purpose imitating the Queen Anne writers. In his pseudo- Spectator he writes out a fair copy in this style, and one can see that it is of a different tenor to the rest of the work. It has its inaccuracies ("showing a very fine taste both in the tailor and wearer ") ; yet even here his hand falters for a moment, and when he would prophesy of the Baroness Bernstein he drops into the rhythm and phraseology of his own century : " 'Tis admiration such women want, not love that touches them; and I can conceive, in her old age, no more wretched creature than this lady will be, when her beauty hath deserted her, when her admirers have left her, and she hath neither friendship nor religion to console her."

Introduction Had Thackeray The Virginians in mind when he wrote Esmond I The sentence just quoted would seem to indi cate his intention to draw Beatrix in her old age. It was a favourite theme of his — the once wit and beauty, now old and rich, as witness Miss Crawley, Lady Kew, and the Baroness Bernstein. But this is the only time that he went back and showed the character in the making. The three books, Esmond, The Virginians, and Pendennis, give us a sort of family history of the Esmond- Warringtons. (I suppose the George Warrington of Pendennis is supposed to be the grandson of the George of The Virginians.) It is indeed an ingenious way of writing a family history, which shall, technically, form a page out of the social history of Eng land. A German historian, Dahn, has done the thing on an even larger scale, and written, in an innumerable series of volumes, the history of a German family, from the time when wild in wood they ran about as savages, up to (if I remember rightly) the War of Liberation in 1S11.

But Thackeray knew his limitations as well as his powers, and was wise in keeping himself to the times he knew thoroughly. He has, at any rate, almost entirely avoided the great pitfall of the historical novelist, anachronism. I have only noticed a single one of these in the whole book. Beatrix, in 17 14, could not have understood Esmond's reference to the Glawrie of Peter Wilkins which appeared in 1750. Yet even this inaccuracy might conceivably be due to a lapse of Colonel Esmond's memory, writing somewhere in the Fifties. So too, according to one passage, " Mr. Esmond's commission was scarce three years old when the accident befell King William," yet in the amusing Anglo-French letter which the Jezebel of a viscountess writes to Esmond while in prison, there is a reference to "la reine Anne."

Again, Mohun is made to marry both before and after Castlewood's death. But these slight dis crepancies, which are the only ones I have noticed, might be put down to lapses of memory on the part of Colonel Esmond Introduction XXVII instead of failure to make the "flats join" on the part of Thackeray.* But in reality the book is one huge anachronism of tone and sentiment, if not of statement of fact. A man can no more get out of his century than he can get out of his skin. The sceptical and " detached " tone in which Colonel Esmond reviews the events of his early life would have been impossible for any one writing in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Age of Reason may have had different ideals from those of the former centuries, but it believed in its own, however thin and unsubstantial they may have been.

It was only in the middle of this century that men began to doubt of all ideals, and so the hesitancies and dubieties of Colonel Esmond about religious and political ideals represent fairly enough perhaps Thackeray's own attitude towards the deeper problems, but they would not have been possible for a Colonel Esmond of the early part of the eighteenth century. It is this incongruity between the spirit of the age in which he writes and the spirit of the one of which he writes that perhaps is the principal and all-pervading blemish of Esmond. After all, Thackeray was writing of an age when men still wore swords at their sides. Burke had not yet had occasion to sign the dirge of the age of chivalry, yet Thackeray wrote of this period in the spirit of the age when Manchester ruled supreme in England — of what we may call " the coal-scuttle-bonnet period."

There is something borne and bourgeois in Thackeray's attitude towards both the present and the past. He is the London cit judging of the world's affairs. He never kindles, though he sometimes gushes. It is all this that has repelled Mr. Henley, who judges Thackeray perhaps too harshly on that account. But Mr. Henley, for so manly a man, often takes very womanly prejudices, and Thackeray's attitude was * The fact that there was a Duchess of Hamilton living at the time of the Duke's death stands on a different footing. That is a legitimate author's license. Introduction XXVIII perfectly justified when he dealt with his contemporaries at a period which was pre-eminently bourgeois. He was one of the products of the Reform Bill of 1832, but the England of his time was also one of its products, and so he has full right to speak for it.