Memoirs of an aristocrat, and reminiscences of the Emperor Napoleon

Preface

" Go forth, my little book, I cast thee on the waters."

SIR WALTER SCOTT somewhere writes a postscript, which he says should have been a preface, which showed Sir Walter's usual tact. Now, I shall take a shorter way still, for I shall write neither preface nor postscript ; for if my book cannot stand upon its own legs, it is quite needless to try and prop it up by a preface ; for, of all the bores on earth, a dull preface to a duller book, is the most horrible bore. " What I have written, I have written," and that, too, with a confounded deal of trouble, let me tell you, kind sir or madam ; and if, as I believe, the vein be good, let the world find it after many

IV PEEFACE.

days, or few days, or not at all, just as that same world shall think most fit ; and should the patient reader, or impatient reader, for we have both kinds of them, ever get to the end of it, (I mean the book, not the world), if he throws it to the other end of the room, and swears he never was as tired of any thing in his life, permit me to assure him, that I am as tired of writing as he can be of reading, for the soul of him.

MEMOIRS OF AN ARISTOCRAT.

Chapter I

" But I have lived, and have not lived in vain. My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire, ] And my frame perish even in conquering pain : But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and time, and breathe when I expire."

I MEAN, friend reader (as a Quaker would say), to make a sudden skip over the first twelve years of my life, as it contains nothing that can either amuse or instruct (I think that is the common phrase) ; but I must not omit informing you, that I was born on the 8th December 1794, in a wretched cottage, situated on the edge of one of the most barren moors in Scotland — without almost a vestige of fire in the house, owing to the stupidity of an old woman, who came for the kindly purpose of attending my mother, and sharing in the good tilings that might be going upon the occasion. This good old dame, in order to make a rousing fire " to warm the Doctor whan he cam, an"1 the bairn, whan it was born," as she kindly said — first heaped on a quantity of large coals, and then, by way of backing, applied a bucketful of earth, which she mistook for small coals, and which very soon performed its office, leaving all hands in a state of starvation. What *my poor mother experienced, I do not know, but, like a blockhead, as I have always been since, I left my good warm comfortable quarters, and without the assistance of Doctor or any one else (for I have always hated assistance), popped into this scene of misery, half frozen, motionless, and stiff as a poker. The old custom of suspending me by the heels, and laying upon my nether man, a mode of application which I have instinctively held in abhorrence from that day to this, was immediately had recourse to, which, despite of the good intentions of " General Frost, to nip me in lifers porch," restored animation, as the doctors say, which has always continued in full force ever since, and whirled me through as many scenes of this vile existence, in my own small way, as would have done honour to the great Napoleon himself. You must know, most patient sir, or madam, that, notwithstanding this humble ushering into existence, I am, as my title-page bears, of no mean descent. My father, an old naval officer, who had faced death and danger from Hawke's action off Brest, to the termination of the first war with our disobedient son

" Jonathan,1" and who had got for his deserts a pair of half-sightless eye-balls, and half-a-crown a-day, besides some twenty or thirty splinter and cutlass wounds, merely by way of remembrancers, was, as we say in Scotland, the heir-male and representative of one of the most ancient families in the annals of Border history. Through a period of five hundred years, they had killed more than an ordinary proportion of Englishmen, even for those warlike times, and hanged every Frenchman they could lay their hands upon ; they had, moreover, pilfered wherever good booty was to be found, either from friends or foes. Scotch or English, and by way of keeping their hands in, and shewing their loyalty, of which they had a great stock, had figured at Flodden, at Pinky, and Dunbar, and upon each of those memorable days, the father, and two or three sons, with heaven knows how many vassals, left their bodies on the field, and marched off to the other world to join their warlike ancestors, in those regions which the brave inhabit. But to have done with the sublime, and to return to my narrative, and my worthy old game-cock of a father, whose powerful hard-a-weather figure, I think I still see erect before me, now that he has been many years consigned to the dust,

" A fine old fellow was he, if you please, As ever scuttled ship, or cut a throat."

He was full of narrative, had circumnavigated the glohe under the great Cook, and was with him when he was killed at Owyhee, he had, at least, a story of the voyage for every day in the year, and two or three always at hand, if he found an audience ; but in this he was sometimes rather unfortunate, for, taking advantage of his blindness, we, his hopeful offspring, slipped quietly off, one by one, leaving the old Commodore in his arm-chair, direct before the fire, with his feet resting on the upper jamb of the fire-place, to finish his tale of Cook, or descant upon the swarthy beauties of Tongataboo (of which, by the way, he always made most kindly mention), much at his ease, with the tables and chairs, and sometimes a solitary glass of grog, his sole auditors. He was, however, a philosophic old fellow, and took such little neglects coolly, as well as the greater misfortunes of life. He made no remark on our rudeness ; but if a more than ordinary offence was given, he quietly watched his time, and having always a good oak bludgeon hung to his chair, he had a sort of instinctive feeling when the culprit came within reach of his lower deckers, to use his own expression, when a knock-down blow, very scientifically laid on, generally inflicted full punishment for past offences. But no sooner was he led into any act of severity of this kind, than he repented next moment, and the hand of the

AN ARISTOCRAT. O

friend and father, rough as he was, was extended to the unfortunate sufferer.

Although his life of toil and danger had only brought him a miserable hut and a lieutenant's half-pay, he was related to the chief families of the county of B — . The Earl of H — and the Earl of M — t styled him cousin, not german, but in the thirteenth degree, and the H — 's of W — n, to whom he was nearly related, and who hated the whole race of us, with that deadly hatred which interlopers always entertain towards those they have supplanted, still received him with an outward shew of kindness when he deigned to visit their princely mansion. I say deigned, for such an intrinsic dignity rested about him, that every thing he did or said seemed an act of condescension, even to the putting on of his night-cap (an old Kilmarnock, by the way), and adjusting his reverend white hair, when both seemed honoured by the head they surmounted.

The broad lands of his ancestors had slipped out of their grasp, from their having turned out for the Chevalier de St. George, in 1 715. They owed their rise to the House of Stuart, and they fell with them, along with

" The gallant cavaliers who fought in vain For those who knew not to resign or reign."

Both brothers, his grandfather, sheriff of the county of B— , under the Hanoverian succession, and his grand-uncle, the Baron of W — n, found their way with the rebel army to Preston, were seized and sent pinioned to the Tower for their extreme heroism and loyalty to the good old cause, but escaped hanging or beheading through the artifices of the family factor, not a second Bailie M'Wheeble, for the Bailie had at bottom a good heart, and withal attached to the Baron, but a crafty priest, who seized this as a famous opportunity of transferring his patron's lands to himself. Fictitious bills and bonds were made out, acknowledging large sums of money, lent to the Baron of W — n by his factor, Ninian Griphard, (who by the way, had never been worth a shilling in his life), these were carefully and legally laid before the commissioners of enquiry, by the said Ninian Griphard, and adjudications led accordingly, (I think that is the cursed legal term), upon which the estate of W — n was declared exempt from the crown's right, and found to belong, all and whole, to the said Ninian Griphard. It is said a man will do much for his life, and this was certainly doing much, for by the relinquishment of all he possessed in the world, and abandoning his family to the mercy of this unprincipled sharking ex -priest, the unfortunate Baron of W — n saved his life ; and the government finding him and his brother not worth hanging, ordered them to be liberated, and left them to seek their miserable fortune where they best could. Old Griphard behaved, however, tolerably well upon the occasion ; being a widower, he graciously condescended to marry one of the Barents daughters ; allowed the old gentleman and his sons, of whom he had six, still to occupy the family mansion, and generously gave them a scanty existence out of their own rents, while my great grandfather, I am correct, reader, my great grandfather, the no less unfortunate brother, found his way to America, and died in a year or two, leaving behind him two sons and a wife, who died of a broken heart almost immediately after her husband's departure, leaving her poor boys, not only orphans, but wholly destitute.

All the Baron's sons died out in a few years, and the children of Griphard became undisputed masters of the extensive domains of W — n ; hence they always looked with a jealous eye upon my father, who they knew to be a male heir, and possessing certain rights, which, if properly ripped up, might have cost them a great deal of trouble, so that although they acknowledged him as a relation, they were in one general conjunction to keep him down. I cannot leave old Griphard, without mentioning that he acquired, during his own lifetime, by every species of fraud and chicanery, an immense landed property, and lived and died entirely free from any qualms of conscience for the misery he had brought to the unfortunate family, who had raised him from rags and beggary.

His wife, the Baron of W — n's daughter, survived him some years, and was murdered by her man-servant, N. R. who secreted himself in her bed-room, with the intention of carrying off a sum of money, which he knew she had in her drawers, after she fell asleep ; but the noise of opening her desk having awoke her, he, for fear of detection, seized a knife, which by accident had been left on the drawerVhead, and mangled her throat so dreadfully, that she died next day ; he then leaped from the window of the second storey, but fractured one of his legs so much in the fall, that he was unable to walk, and sustained himself several days in the fields, eating pease and turnips, until his hiding-place was discovered. He afterwards graced a gibbet on Leith Walk, where his body hung many a long year ; and the name of N. R. and the bloody deed became a theme for mothers to frighten their children into good behaviour.

Thus, gentle reader, hare I given you a short sketch of my father's family ; and I think you will allow, that I have raised and demolished them at a tolerably quick march ; but certainly not faster than those fiery and misguided spirits contrived to demolish themselves, and spread desolation and ruin amongst their ill-fated progeny. The old Commodore, however, gave himself little concern about the misconduct of his progenitors ; nay, he sometimes hinted (though himself a staunch King George man) that they had acted like noble fellows, and used to dwell with peculiar pleasure on a story of one of his relations, who had been out in the same cause, and who had been wounded in one of the first skirmishes with the King's troops : being unable in consequence to keep pace with the rapid movement of the rebel army, he generally found himself some miles minus at night close ; but so zealous was he in the cause he had espoused, that by continuing his march an hour or two longer, he always got up to the army, and was ready to start fair with it in the morning. This exploit, and the appellation of Scanderbeg, which Manderston retained during the remainder of his life, from the wound having occasioned a similarity in his gait to that famous hero of Turkish story, was no small source of amusement to my father, who had an instinctive love of fighting, the justice or injustice of the cause being a matter of the utmost indifference to him, so as a man was found to appear, as he used to say, regular at quarters when the drum beat.

In his choice of a wife, my father displayed most prominently his independence of principle, and utter disregard of wordly advantages. On his return from sea in his forty-fifth year, still hale and vigorous, but half blind, he was set upon by some score of old maids and dowagers of the class yclept the aristocracy and landed interest of the county of B ,

a report having prevailed, that at the death of the Earl of M., then in his 80th year, my father was next heir to the earldom and estates. Various schemes of aggrandisement and matrimonial bliss with the tough old Seahorse, was brooded over in secret by those solitary maidens, and the idea of an earl's coronet surmounting their faded temples, in unison with the fear-nothing hard-a-weather Commodore, was a vision of bliss that there was no withstanding ; hence, as he used to say, he found himself in danger of being boarded every instant, and was obliged to keep a good offing to steer clear

of these d d old she-sharks. Little did these

dames know the man they had to deal with, or they would soon have known their case to be hopeless. An Indian wigwam, and a young copper-coloured dark-eyed savage of the Friendly Islands, conveyed infinitely more charms to my good old father ; and to free himself of their fooleries, he cast his eyes upon my mother, a buxom, yellow-haired, redcheeked damsel, just turned of sweet sixteen, with not one drop of aristocratic blood in her veins, or a shilling in her pocket ; and, as the Gascon said to Louis the Fifteenth, with her whole wardrobe on her back. The matrimonial signal was no sooner hove out to this child of nature, than it was duly answered, the priest was sent for, and the indissoluble knot tied in as quick time, and as ship-shape a style, as my father declared himself, as ever he had worked a seventy-four, tack and half-tack up Channel, or close reefed top-sails in a gale of wind. Whether the priest or my mother had pleased him on this occasion, I cannot say, but he used to declare, that from that hour his opinion of the sacred cloth greatly improved, having till then looked upon them as a parcel of psalm-singing, hypocritical, lubberly scoundrels, enough to sink the best ship in the service, if you allowed one of them to clap his foot on board ; but he now discovered that they could at least do one good job ; and such a soul of a priest was the fellow that married him, that he swore, d — n his eyes if he didn't believe he would take a game at long twenty-fours with Johnnie Crappo, as well as any man in the fleet : hence they were inseparable friends ever afterwards.

Having thus wived him, so contrary to the ways of this selfish world, one universal hue and cry was

raised against him throughout the county of B ,

particularly by the she- expectants thus wofully disappointed : — " What degradation of his noble and ancient house, what an utter confounding of all his future great prospects, surely the man could never

12 MEM01ES OF

hold up his head more ; what a barbarous choice, a vile illiterate plebeian to have the chance of becoming a countess, and her son, if the wretch had one, an earl, the very idea was revolting,1"1 and to none did this worldly error of my father give more secret satisfaction than the H — "s of W — n, the descendants of old Ninian Griphard. Although Griphard had long gone to his place, his spirit survived in full vigour in the young generation, and they saw with secret delight, and an outward appearance of regret, that the male heir of W — n and M-«— t had committed an error so gross, that it was more than likely he would never be able to surmount it.

But while all this was going on, you will naturally say, what thought the commodore himself? why, nothing at all about it. Their cry and their speculations were nothing to him, and if he ever lowered his head a single inch to make good their surmises, it must certainly have been that inch too high before ; for within the compass of my recollection, his head sate in the most bolt upright position, upon his immense square shoulders, and even when stone-blind (this is a bull, reader, but not the less true), looked stern defiance, alike to his enemies and the fooleries of this world; he went on superintending the erection of his wigwam in C — m Moor, in which he afterwards kenneled a whole swarm of

AK ARISTOCRAT. IS

us, kept tearing up the thrice barren soil of the few acres he had purchased, with plough, spade, and mattock, telling tales of the wars to his labourers, and occasionally half breaking their backs when they had the misfortune to offend him, which was no difficult matter at any time ; repairing daily to the adjoining village of C — m, where the shoemakers, the tailors, the weavers, and the shopkeepers awaited with equal anxiety a " ca1 and a crack wi1 the Captain ;" and if, per accident, a day passed without his making his appearance, the wonder grew, " what could ha1 become o1 the Captain the day ? — they trusted naething ailed him."

A disappointment of this kind seldom happened, as wind and weather on no occasion were allowed to interfere with my father's plan of operations ; and his health being always exuberant, the good villagers of C — m rarely missed their daily treat, of which, 1 can venture to say, they never tired through a period of nearly forty years. He was by no means ceremonious in his costume, but when, after a new rig out, he appeared in the half-dress old naval uniform, with the white standing neck and lapel, (what, in the name of wonder, tempted William the Fourth to put red cuffs and collars on our modern naval officers, making them look like as many artillery-men ! surely, if Nelson could look back, he would put out the other eye not to see the degrading change ;) I say, when my father appeared iu a new rig out, with ruffles at hand and breast, (by the way, his hands, or rather paws, for they quite exceeded the dimensions of us commonplace mortals,) when properly ruffled, always brought to my recollection a certain native of the Polar regions taken captive, and trucked out for the amusement of the public in a similar piece of finery. Thus rigged, with the old fashioned lapelled waistcoat, and white breeches, with buckles at the knee and in his shoes, the long queue, and staff hi hand, he looked and moved the figure of a gentleman from top to toe. When by accident he lost his stick, which, from his blindness, often happened, he had an unfailing resource in the handle of the long duster or besom, which he at once unshipped and marched off to his daily rounds with as much dignity as though it had been a gold headed cane of the newest fashion.

Although the youngest of " five comely sons,11 from the coincidence of the old Earl of M — t. having taken his course and departure for the other world a few hours before I was ushered into this, a superstition prevailed in the family that I was doomed to be the future Earl, and as such, I was always held up as a peculiar person in the family, particuarly by my good-natured mother, who declared she saw something about me quite different from all the rest of my brothers.

This prophecy of future greatness by no means improved my present situation ; for my brothers, looking upon me as very unjustly favoured, allowed no opportunity to slip of visiting me with very visible marks of their displeasure ; but having a large portion of the devil in me from the time I was able to crawl, I rarely failed to retaliate in one shape or another the injuries thus received.

Before proceeding, as the gentlemen of the long robe say, to matters of greater weight, I must digress a little, to mark the demise of the Earl of M — t. This precious specimen of aristocratic intolerance, reached his ninety-fourth year before he was summoned above to render an account of his malversations here below ; his whole life had been made up of political intrigue and self aggrandisement, without feeling, without remorse, a hater of his species, and, towards the latter stage of his existence, he turned even against his own children. His only son, Lord P — th, a mild inoffensive young man, with little talent, and less ambition, quite disappointed his father's hopes and views ; and, hence, he conceived an utter contempt and hatred even of his own son. The young Lord P — th married, but had no family, and died in his fortieth year. Only one of the Earl's daughter's, Lady Diana, had posterity. She too incurred her unnatural father's displeasure, from having set up her son as a candidate for the county of B in opposition to a

creature of the Earl's choice, for which the savage unprincipled tyrant, with one fell swoop cut off the whole of his posterity from the succession to his princely estates, and bequeathed them to the descendants of his sister, trampling upon all former settlements, by which the estates were strictly entailed to heirs-male, and relying upon the utter depression of my father's family, who were the next heirs of entail, and, according to the terms of his Earl's patent, had right to his titles, over which he had no control ; but he calculated that such was our poverty, that there was no chance of our ever being able to overturn his new settlements. Long before his death he fell into utter disgrace with his sovereign, was dismissed from the Keepership of the Great Seal of Scotland, and all the lucrative offices he had held for many years under government, and became universally hated and despised, both in his own county and by all who knew him. His conduct to his own children, as well as to us his male heirs, raised every well thinking person against him ; and in his extreme old age, he found himself deserted and shunned as some infectious reptile; but being in no way deficient in courage, either moral or physical, he nobly met the storms of state, and the contempt of mankind, betook him to a small villa in Kent, and passed his few remaining years without sorrow or remorse, declaring to the last that he was happy his son had not survived him, as he said, " he would only have disgraced his honours ;" declaring it to be his opinion, " that we H — 's of W — n would never make out our right to the titles, our relationship being too distant, and hoping, that at his death his titles and honours would return to the fountain from whence they flowed, pure and untainted."

Whether they did so or not, gentle reader, thou shalt know before the close of this eventful and veracious history. " But to our tale." No sooner had the Earl breathed his last, than the hue and cry arose that my father was next in succession. The gentlemen of the county sought him out in his miserable wigwam, tendered their friendship and support, accompanied by a thousand protestations and felicitations, that fell to the ground the moment they were pronounced. Amongst the foremost I must class the sons of Old Griphard, who, not exactly sure how to steer their course in this suddenly opened prospect of the family they had supplanted and ruined, again emerging from obscurity, they thought it as well to sail with the current, and to be the first to tender their services and support to establish the newborn rights of the fallen house. The researches requisite to establish the claim were therefore entrusted to their care, without suspicion or hesitation on the part of my father, who having no guile in himself, never suspected others, which they determined to prosecute or retard, precisely as it best suited their own interest ; and by a skilful system of management they contrived to retard the process for many years. Meanwhile my father's offspring multiplied and grew upon him ; and, by way of bracing our nerves, he turned us out to spade, plough, and harrow as soon as we were able for the employment ; this, he said, would give us strength and action to fit us for the fatigues of the service for which he afterwards intended us, and enable us to hold our own with a Frenchman when he came in our way. Of our education he took little care. Greek and Latin he held in contempt as a mere waste of time, though himself complete master of those languages ; he therefore contented himself with packing off the young aristocrats to the village school, with directions to the Dominie to teach us to read and write, and give us enough of arithmetic to enable us to learn navigation, which he declared was the primum mobile of human attainments.

It is generally agreed that our schoolboy days form the happiest part of our existence; it may be so, but as far as I am concerned, I must certainly give it a direct negative. Some glimpses of delight I certainly experienced in a most exquisite degree, which even at this distance thrills every vein when I cast my

AN AAISTOCRAT. 19

mind's eye back on the smiling countenances, clean glancing cheeks and laughing eyes of two or three of my little schoolmates of the softer sex, with whom that busy jade, Mother Nature, was beginning to toy, and giggle, and whisper, heaven knows how, the wise purposes for which, no doubt, she had created them, with a modest hint or two that she had been kinder to them than their compeers in certain externals, intimated through the lookingglass, when, by chance, they took the trouble to tie on their white, long- fronted, face-concealing bonnets, before that silent flatterer ; but, with this exception, this solitary but delightful rose amidst the thorns, • I say my schoolboy days, short as they were, I can only look back to with pain. The peculiar situation of my family was, perhaps, in a great measure the cause of this ; the dignity of our birth, in the midst of all our poverty, had been carefully inculcated upon us from our infancy, and we therefore looked upon the boys of the village school with certain patrician ideas, which they soon discovered; and, not being able to distinguish any real difference in point of rank, which made us thus assuming, the flag of defiance was hoisted at once; and being the strongest party, as those rascally plebeians always are when fairly roused into action, we were, in consequence, most unmercifully thrashed on all occasions, though certainly not without a most untameable resistance.

which, considering the fearful odds against us, rendered us no disgrace to the fierce and warlike ancestors from whom we were descended. Some little agreeable variety, however, did occasionally occur, to the great amusement, not only of the school, but the whole village.

Smollett and Scott have given us from their powerful pens samples of a dominie, which can never be excelled, still, though I bow submission to these master spirits, I shall not bate one jot from the Dominie of our village of C — m, when placed either in contrast or comparison with Smollett's tyrant pedagogue, or the kind-hearted Dominie Sampson; nay, I protest he rose superior to both in real life, (for he is no fictitious character,) as well in his eccentricities as personal appearance.