Old days and new 1923

Front matter

G C6001L180 LOZL E

IIIA

Jdresented to Che Library of the University of Coronts by the Estate of

Contents

GREAT-GRANDMAMMA ‘ 2 DON MAGNIFICO : : i : ‘* LAURA, LAURA, FREDERICK’S COME ”’ MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF YE ENGLISH NOW AND THEN : ; 4 ; FROM JOSHUA TO JOHN . : STRANGE PHANTOM SHAPES OF YORE.

STET FORTUNA DOMUS : : t SOME THOUGHTS OF EATON HALL

THE RAUMA : A

Chapter I Great-grandmamma

THE title of this book is not, as some might suppose, intended to suggest any inquisitorial pryings into the manners and customs, virtues or shortcomings of remote ancestry. The “ old days ”’ are not very old days, for of these we really know very little. The distant mist which hangs around them blurs their outline so that they come down to us as very hazy pictures and are by so much the less interesting. We may read as many Memoirs as we will of Elizabethan days and of Jacobean days and even of early Georgian days, but I doubt greatly whether the impressions left on our minds by these Memoirs is, in the very smallest degree, like the real thing. We get an indistinct impression of externals, but of the underwear we get never so much as a glimpse, and perhaps it is as well. We can reproduce Lady Castlemaine and the Duchess of Richmond from Lely’s canvasses and Anthony Hamilton’s tales, but what do we know of the real behind-the-scenes life of these people or of the true conditions of Society in the days when Charles IT bred spaniels in his bedroom at Whitehall and borrowed half-crowns from his Chamberlain ?

Those distant days are buried beyond the reach of the spade, and to dig for them is a wearisome and unprofitable task. But, when we come down to the latter days of good King George III, we begin to see a little more clearly. We get a fairly clear view of the powdered, patched, wigged, quilted and flounced ladies who minced and swooned and cried ‘‘ La!” at the sight of the rollicking beaus and dandies in their blue, brass-buttoned, swallow-tailed coats and heavily frilled shirt-fronts. We are getting nearer home when we get to these bucks and beauties of the pre-Revolution days and even nearer still when we get to the early days of the nineteenth century. Some of the marionettes who frisked and jerked about on life’s stage in these days of the later Georges were even our own progenitors in the third or fourth degree, which seems to bring them within the bounds of more or less reasonable relationship. Anyone beyond the fourth degree seems to be almost outside these bounds. We may take a perfunctory interest, as ancestors, in these people who bore our name two hundred years ago, and, in some cases, we may even feel a certain pride in their achievements, good, bad or indifferent; but it is difficult to look upon them as relations. They are too far off and too indistinct.

When, however, we draw down to the days of great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers it is different. There is a homely ring about these names which seems to lift them right out of the common herd of peruked and lace-collared ancestors into our near domestic circle. We no longer think of them as the third earl or the wife of the fifth baronet, but as great-grandpapa and great-grandmamma. We can even trace back to them some of the personal peculiarities of which we are ourselves conscious. The common inheritance of these peculiarities gives us a fellow-feeling, and we regard even their shortcomings with a sympathetic eye.

It would be outside all reason to imagine that these more or less remote relatives of ours can prove as interesting to others as they are to ourselves, nor do I cherish any such fond illusion with regard to the two great-grandparents of my own whom I propose to pass in quick review before those whose eyes may fall upon these pages. But it does so happen that, entirely outside any question of family interest, fate has endowed me with two great-grandparents—one on the father’s side and one on the mother’s—who were, in their own day, conspicuous and much-discussed public characters and who are therefore interesting, even to the outside world, as types of Society one hundred and twenty years or so ago.

When memory has the misfortune to be long enough to span half the distance between George III and George V, it has at least the compensating advantage of affording a stepping-stone from which the retrospector (if indeed there be such a word) may scan more closely the other and unknown half. From the half-way house, from the sign-board of which the portrait of Queen Victoria in her meridian gazes coldly down, we may look back, on the one hand, to the Fannys, Charlottes, and Harriets of the early nineteenth century and forward, on the other, to the Sybils, Daphnes and Irises of to-day and, from our post of vantage between the two, we are in a position to draw comparisons, favourable or unfavourable as the case may be.

The men offer sharper contrasts than the women, that is to say, there seems to be a wider gap between Reggie and his great-grandfather than there is between Daphne and her great-grandmother. The Duke of to-day is but a pale shadow of what the Georgian Duke was. He is a better fellow, perhaps, and more of a gentleman, but, as a mere radiator of urban and sylvan splendour, he is not to be mentioned in the same breath as his great-grandfather who gambled away his patrimony at Crockford’s and drank himself nightly under the table in silk stockings and the full insignia of the Garter. A Duke was a Duke in those days, and looked down from his haughty eminence upon an Earl, who, in turn, looked down upon a Viscount; and they were all addressed as “‘my lord” by baronets and squires and other inferior persons who now slap them on the back and call them Bull,” |

The two relations to whom I, personally, am able to look back with more or less pride and certainly with undiluted interest are my great-grandmother Jane, Duchess of Gordon and my great-grandfather John James, ninth Earl and first Marquis of Abercorn. Both of these forbears of mine were, beyond doubt, remarkable personalities in their own particular way, the latter on account of the amazing magnificence of his person and establishment and the former because of her beauty, fearlessness of action, and originality of thought. The lady naturally claims our first consideration.

** Jennie of Monreith ’”? was the second daughter of Sir William Maxwell of Monreith in Wigtonshire. She and her two sisters were all accounted great beauties and, judging from the three portraits of them by Romney, now in possession of Sir Herbert Maxwell, the claim was fully justified. They were all three, according to their portraits, extremely good-looking, but it is to be assumed that, by her contemporaries, Jane was accounted the greatest beauty of the three, for she was commonly known as “the Flower of Galloway.’’ In any event she completely overshadowed both her sisters in animation and vivacity, as indeed she did most other people, and of her fearlessness and originality of outlook she gave early and sufficient proof in the streets of Edinburgh where she and her younger sister Eglantine (afterwards Lady Wallace) introduced the so-far neglected sport of pig-riding. Little Jennie and Eglantine were, of course, mere children at the time when their superfluous energy found relief in this unusual exercise. The probability is that they were very small children, for it is fairly obvious that no one of even half-grown dimensions could ride a pig. One of the children used to jump on the pig’s back while the other guided and encouraged the expostulating porker with a long stick. Apparently they only rode down the Wynds as far as Prince’s Street and there dismounted. It is just as well to publish to the world the real truth about this pig-riding business, as the prevalent idea seems to be that Jane, after she was Duchess of Gordon, frequently and solemnly rode a pig through the streets of Edinburgh for the edification of the populace.

The taste for pig-riding seems to have deserted little Jane at a very early age, and her maidenhood would appear to have been quite uneventful up to the age of eighteen, when she married the young Duke of Gordon, who was six years her senior, and settled down to the quiet domestic life of a wife and mother. There is no doubt that she was immensely admired when she first made her appearance aS a married woman in Society. Pryse Gordon, in his memoirs, writes that, in 1775, that is to say six years after her marriage, “she was unquestionably the most beautiful and fascinating woman in Great Britain.”

The first twenty-two years of the Duchess’s married life may be said to have passed off uneventfully, and it was not till she was forty that the combination of circumstances arose out of which she emerged with such immortal celebrity. In 1790 her son, the Marquis of Huntly, raised a company of the Black Watch, and in defiance of the laws which, since the Battle of Culloden, had made it a penal offence to wear tartan, dressed his company in kilts. Not content with this rather daring step, he himself, shortly afterwards, had the temerity to appear at Court in a kilt of the Black Watch tartan, apparently without bringing down on his head any very terrible penalties at the hands of the House of Hanover. |

The Duchess was herself, of course, a Lowland Scot, if ever there was one. Her upbringing had been partly in Wigtonshire and partly in Edinburgh. However, she had married the greatest Highlander in the land and, as his wife, she flung herself into the cause of tartans, sporrans and bagpipes with all that tremendous energy and enthusiasm of which she was capable. Fired by her son’s example, she now resolved to go even one better. She had a silk dress of the same tartan made for herself at Spitalfields and appeared in it at a Drawing Room, thereby creating an absolutely unparalleled sensation. It must be borne in mind, in reflecting on her action, that at the close of the eighteenth century tartan was a thing of the very meanest reputation. The House of Hanover, as may be supposed, looked upon it, or were supposed to look upon it, with feelings of undisguised nausea. The Whigs detested it as the emblem of the Jacobites, and the smart lords and ladies of Society looked down upon it as the distinguishing mark of bare-legged savages. A lady of the Court would as soon have thought of appearing with a ring through her nose as of wearing anything so barbaric as a strip of tartan. The Duchess’s venture, therefore, was little less daring than if a member of the Dail Eireann were to take his seat on St. Patrick’s day in a full suit of orange. Contrary to general expectation, however, the King took this flaunting in his face of irritant colours most philosophically, and, encouraged by his goodhumoured tolerance, a number of others quickly followed the Duchess’s example. In a very short time, the wearing of tartan became the rage of London, and the Spitalfields weavers were kept working at the highest possible pressure in order to cope with the incessant demand. Ladies wore dresses, scarves, stockings, sashes and petticoats of tartan, while the men affected waistcoats of the same striking material. The fashion quickly spread to Paris, where the rage for tartan was even greater than in London; and the climax was finally reached when the Duchess of Cumberland—bearing a name which will always be bracketed sanguinarily with that of Culloden—herself appeared in all the gaudy panoply of a complete tartan dress. As_ the Duchess was an extremely handsome woman, with a very fine figure, her enlistment in the ranks of the clans created a sensation little inferior to that caused by my great-grandmother’s first appearance in the forbidden colours.

Flushed by the amazing success of her first Caledonian innovation, the Duchess next directed her energies toward the introduction of reels and other step-dances into London Society, where even waltzes and quadrilles were as yet unknown, and where such wild romps as the dances of the Highlands were absolutely unheard of. Her success was just as rapid and pronounced in this second venture as in the first. According to Wraxall, the Duchess herself and all her daughters were most beautiful and graceful dancers, besides being the possessors of various other external attractions.

‘‘When the daughters all appeared together,” he writes, ‘in a box at the opera or in a theatre with their mother, their extraordinary attractiveness became the source of universal admiration.” Their dancing prowess was first exhibited at Almack’s to the music of an imported Scotch orchestra conducted by the famous Neil Gow, and so artistically did the mother and daughters execute their reels that the whole of London Society was infected with the craving to spring into the air and shout ‘** Hech !” with the same grace and agility as these fair Aberdonians.

It cannot be otherwise than gratifying for a ereat-grandson—and indeed I may truly come a generation closer and say a grandson, for one of the fair dancing daughters was my grandmother— to be able to place on record the fact, as to which there is very general testimony, that the dancing efforts of the Duchess and her daughters were in a ereat measure responsible for killing, or at all events ‘* scotching,”’ the then prevalent vice of gambling. For it appears that, with the agile and enthusiastic help of the Jenkins, father and son, they created such a rage for dancing that men began to find that more pleasure was to be got out of flinging a reel with the gay Gordons than in losing all their money at White’s or Crockford’s.

However, for the moment we may leave great-grandmamma, grandmamma and my four greataunts footing it merrily at Almack’s, while we turn our enquiring eye upon the Duchess’s most famous exploit, which unquestionably was the raising of the Gordon Highlanders. At the time when she set out on this undertaking there was no such thing as a Gordon tartan in existence, for the country of the Gordons was not held to be, strictly speaking, in “the Highlands,’ which, as even the semi-educated Sassenach probably knows, is not a geographical term, but one which literally signifies the high lands, 7.e., the mountains. However, what were such academic distinctions to our enterprising Duchess? Any regiment which she had a hand in raising was going to be a Highland regiment and to wear a bonnie, braw tartan of its own. In this highly commendable spirit she sought the col- Jaboration of a sympathetic clothier in Huntly, and, as a result of their combined efforts, the present Gordon tartan was evolved, which is, of course, nothing more than the Black Watch tartan glorified with a yellow skeleton check.

The next business clearly was to give the regiment which was to wear the tartan a name worthy of it. The first three regiments which the Duke of Gordon had been called upon to raise off his estates had been distinguished by the unbecoming and ignoble title of the ‘‘ Northern Fencibles.”’ In 1794 he was ordered to raise yet another regiment. The undertaking seemed an impossible one, for the country had been already practically drained dry of young men. Furthermore, there was no enthusiasm in the country for the service. Culloden was not forgotten and the House of Hanover was ' still held in patriotic abhorrence by the peasantry of Aberdeenshire. Only eleven young men were found ready to volunteer for service in the fourth regiment of Northern Fencibles. Then it was that, with Lord Huntly in absolute despair, his mother and sisters came forward and volunteered their services as recruiting-sergeants. Dressed in the newly created Gordon tartan, they scoured the country in all directions in search of strong and hardy young men who were amenable to the persuasion of fair lips. By this division of labour the whole of north-east Scotland was canvassed. Lady

Madeline, the second daughter, even travelled as far north as Thurso in the zeal of her quest for recruits. The country lads were told that they were no longer to be mere common Fencibles, but gay Gordon Highlanders, wearing the same chaste but decorative tartan which the Duchess and her daughters were now so effectively displaying on their own handsome persons. When all other arts of persuasion failed, it is said that both the Duchess and Lady Madeline placed guineas between their lips and challenged the stand-off lads in the market-place to come and take them with their lips. Many accepted the challenge, but to their honour be it recorded that, in the majority of cases, they threw the guinea to the crowd, saying that a kiss from the Duchess or one of her daughters was quite reward enough by itself.

In this way was the famous 92nd regiment of Gordon Highlanders enlisted and endowed with its inimitable tartan; and, as is only fitting in the case of a regiment raised with such tremendous ardour and—one may almost say—self-sacrifice, the reputation which it has consistently maintained for valour in the face of the enemy can challenge comparison with that of any other regiment in the service.

As to the method said to have been practised, in the last resort, by the Duchess and her daughters in order to raise a regiment worthy of the King’s needs, it must be remembered that such practices were by no means unusual in the days of George ITI, for is it not on record in the Chronicles of Long Acre that Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, secured for Charles Fox the solid vote of that plebeian thoroughfare by offering her fair mouth to its beery denizens? It was nothing accounted of in the days of George III. The kiss of a Duchess, and especially of a very handsome Duchess, was considered good and sufficient exchange not only for a vote, but even for a wound, for when one of the Gordon Highlanders lay wounded and groaning on the battlefield at the Adour, a comrade reminded him of the kiss which the Duchess had given him, and his groaning ceased. He felt that he had been well paid for his wound.

On the whole I am inclined to be rather proud of my great-grandmother. There can be no doubt that, apart from all other considerations, she was of an extraordinarily lovable disposition. We get testimony to this effect from every quarter. Miss Grant of Rothiemurcus, who was a close neighbour of hers in Scotland, wrote of her that ‘“ her sallies of wit enlivened the table; her precepts and example animated the ball-room. She was_ peculiarly skilled and successful in gladdening life and in diffusing delightful feelings.”

This last sentence leads me to the belief that the Duchess must have had many points in common with her granddaughter, who was my mother. It is probable in the extreme that the famous Jennie of Monreith actually held my mother in her arms ’ before she died, for the Duchess of Bedford, who was my mother’s mother, was her youngest and favourite daughter. It is also of distinct interest to me, as a descendant, to note how Jennie’s dancing talent descended even to the third generation; for my mother in her youth was famed for her graceful step-dancing and, as a child, was several times called upon to perform tambourine-dances before George IV and William IV, from both of whom she gained much noisy applause. I think that the grandmother and granddaughter must have been alike in many other respects and especially in their unquenchable joie de vivre and in the diffusion of the

“ delightful feelings ” of which Miss Grant speaks ; in the adoration in which they were held by all the lower orders with whom they came in contact, and in the love of the simple life which was so strong in both of them. In London the Duchess of Gordon was the acknowledged leader of fashion, completely eclipsing by her superior animation and vivacity the two rival Duchesses of Rutland and Devonshire. These were both six or seven years her junior, but the Duchess of Rutland—although very beautiful—was too stupid to exercise any — great influence on Society, and the poor amiable and gracious Duchess of Devonshire (Gainsborough’s) was prematurely cut off by death at the height of her popularity. The Duchess of Gordon, then, reigned supreme. “If,” writes Dr. Bulloch, “the fourth Duke of Gordon was rightly described as the greatest subject in Britain, his consort could, with even greater justification, be called the greatest lady.” Yet among the hills and glens of Aberdeenshire this great lady’s life was of the very simplest. After she had successfully married off her five daughters, she retired to a small farmhouse at Kinrara, where she lived the simplest life imaginable in the most perfect contentment. She no doubt felt that, her duty to her family having now been accomplished, she was at liberty to enjoy herself to her heart’s content over gardening and poultryfarming and other pastoral pursuits of the kind. With the settlement of her daughters in life she had indeed every reason to feel satisfied, for, out of the five, she had succeeded in marrying three to Dukes. Elizabeth, the eldest, married the Duke of Richmond; Susan, the third, married the Duke of Manchester, and Georgiana, the fifth, who was my grandmother, married the Duke of Bedford. Louisa, the fourth daughter, was also within 20 measurable distance of imitating her sisters, for she was engaged to Francis, fifth Duke of Bedford, but he died and Louisa had to be content herself with the Marquis Cornwallis, while her younger sister married the next Duke of Bedford. Before this happened, however, I had narrowly escaped being a Frenchman, for the match-making Duchess very nearly succeeded in marrying my grandmother to Prince Eugéne Beauharnais. Mercifully, however, Napoleon put his foot down and vetoed the marriage, whereupon matters took the course already described.

Justly satisfied then with these matrimonial exploits, the Duchess retired to her cottage at Kinrara, which lay near the high-road between Perth and Inverness and about thirty miles from the latter place. Round this cottage and running down to the glen below, she fashioned a delightful wild garden, the forerunner, no doubt, of the modern rock-garden. To the perfecting of this garden she devoted the whole of her spare time. ** She rose at five,’’ writes Miss Grant of Rothiemurcus, “‘and bustled about all day, employing thirty labourers.”’ But her main aim in life, from ’ the marriage of her last daughter to the day of her death, was the improvement and care of the surrounding poor, who, from the tenor of her many letters on the subject, would appear to have been very sorely in need of such care and improvement. The whole of her untiring energy was thrown into this great work, and the results which she achieved appear to have been very far-reaching. After a day of labour among the peasantry she would often find relaxation in the old dancing spirit. ‘“‘ A few candles lighted up the bare walls; fiddles and whiskey punch were always on hand and gentles and simples reeled away in company.”

The Duchess died in the Pulteney Hotel, Piccadilly, at the age of sixty-four. Her coffin was drawn by six jet-black Belgian horses the whole way from London to Kinrara, where she was buried amidst the peaceful and romantic scenery that she loved so well.

Chapter II Don Magnifico

ALTHOUGH my paternal great-grandfather could not, strictly speaking, lay claim to be reckoned, on all points, an exemplary character, he was, beyond question, an interesting one, and, as he was one of the most prominent social figures of the latter half of George III’s reign, I am emboldened to introduce him to a world that as yet knows him not—probably even by name. But he is worth knowing for this reason, if for no other, that—even in his own day—he stood for an extinct species, being in fact one of the few surviving specimens of those inflexible pre-Revolution aristocrats who looked upon the toilers of the world as dirt, and one who, if called upon to do so, would have climbed the guillotine steps without a tremor of the eyelid, withered the howling mob below with his scornful eye and given the executioner a princely bribe to put on white kid gloves before pinioning his hands, so that no plebeian touch should fall upon his noble wrists. It is a strange thing that a man with so compelling a personality and one so tremendously discussed in his own day should have dropped almost completely out of history, but the explanation lies, no doubt, in the fact that he took no prominent part in politics. The politician—no matter how despised and execrated he may be in his own day, and no matter how insignificant a personality he may be outside politics—lives for ever in the history of his country; but the mere social star sinks below the horizon when his day is done and reappears no more. So it was with John James Hamilton. He had his baptism of politics, for he was originally a member of Parliament and—according to Pitt— the best orator of his day, but he was frankly bored with the whole business, and, after he had reached the House of Lords, held himself superbly aloof from the acrimonious debates which were such a feature of the long duel between Pitt and Fox.

John James Hamilton was nephew and heir to the eighth Earl of Abercorn and was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, where he formed a life-long friendship with William Pitt. In addition to the remarkable oratorical powers to which Pitt bears testimony, he was gifted with a strikingly handsome person, immense physical strength, and a will so domineering that Kings, Queens and Prime Ministers, to say nothing of the ordinary ruck of men and women, bent before it as rushes bend before the Borealic blast. As far as available records go, he never failed in any purpose to which he set his mind—either with men or women. Such a man, even though open to certain reproaches which no biographical skill can push entirely out of sight, is still deserving of commemoration or, at any rate, of a certain amount of posthumous notice at the hands of a generation whose ways are not what his ways were.

For the majority of the following facts I am indebted to the researches of my cousin the late Lady Baillie Hamilton, who drew them up in book form without ever publishing them to the world.

John James Hamilton, who from the day that he came of age was allowed £4,000 a year by his uncle, was lionised by Society from the moment that he alighted in its midst from Cambridge, partly because of his own remarkable personality and partly because he was known to be heir to what was, in those days, considered an immense fortune. He had, however, to wait until he was thirty-three before his uncle died and the opportunity was his to break out into that display of magnificent hospitality which made him the most conspicuous figure in the Society of his day. Before this happened he had married a very lovely lady in the person of Miss Catherine Copley, whose portrait by Romney shows her to have had dark auburn hair, a faultless complexion and an expression of wonderful sweetness. It is not too much to say that, throughout their married life, her conduct, as his consort, was as exemplary as his was the reverse. She died at the age of thirty-two, leaving him five very beautiful children, none of whom lived to reach their mother’s age. Before her death, however, her husband had become the ninth Earl of Abercorn and had succeeded to a large income and £200,000 in ready money. These advantages—great as they were—appeared to the new Ear! to fall far short of his merits, and, within three years of his succession, he had persuaded Pitt to make him a Marquis and a Knight of the Garter. Then it was, with the blue ribbon stretched across his spotless waistcoat, that he began to blaze forth in his true magnificence.

His first wife had died and he proposed to fill her place with his cousin, Miss Cecil Hamilton, a young lady who had been resident in his house for some time and whom everyone agreed that he ought to marry. The new Marquis, however, saw one insuperable difficulty standing in the way. As plain Mr. Hamilton he 25 had been quite content to marry plain Miss Copley, but as Marquis of Abercorn and a Knight of the Garter he found it quite impossible to demean himself by marrying anyone who had not the distinction of a title. He accordingly summoned the Prime Minister and told him that, in order to enable him to do the right thing, he must procure from the King the rank of an Earl’s daughter for his intended bride, Miss Hamilton. Pitt, little liking his job, agreed to do his best, but, as was only to be expected, the King stubbornly refused his request on the grounds that there was absolutely no precedent for such an extraordinary step. On receiving news of this the infuriated Marquis called on George III in person and so terrified the poor monarch by his dictatorial manner that, before the audience closed, he had extracted a promise that everything should be as the Marquis wished. Pitt once more saw the King, the whole matter was satisfactorily arranged and Lord Abercorn married the Lady Cecil Hamilton under the pretence that she was an Earl’s daughter, although everyone, including the bridegroom, knew that she was no more than a parson’s daughter. Pitt gave the bride away.