 Chapter 6 of The Ghosts of Piccadilly Albany saw the last of Byron's bachelor life, and 139 Piccadilly the last of his life in England. He went to live in Albany, in the original house on the ground floor, set A2, on March 28, 1814. This night, he writes in his journal of that date, got into my new apartments, rented of Lord Althorpe, on a lease of seven years, spacious and room for my books and sabers, in the house, too, another advantage. His landlord was about to be married. March of the following year saw him also married at 139 Piccadilly, and so many references to him in other people's memoirs and stories refer to his rooms in Albany, where he lived only this one year, that I imagine they are confused with his other lodgings, in Bennett Street and St. James Street, about town. His life in Albany is typical, however, unhappily the reader may suppose, of his bachelor life in London. He continued there his alternation between excess and a frightened, lest he should grow fat, and unwise abstinence. The very night before he settled in Albany, he dined tête-à-tête with his friend Scrope Davies at the cocoa tree, 64 St. James Street, where there is still a club of the name, and he tells us in the journal, Sat from six till midnight, drank between us one bottle of champagne and six of claret, neither of which wines ever affect me. Poor Scrope was less immune. Note, it was Scrope Davies, by the way, who said that Byron was only a fair holiday drinker. End of note. For he became tipsy and pious, and I was obliged to leave him praying to, I know not what purpose or pay God. And his first letter from Albany, April the 9th, to Thomas Moore, contains an account equally distressing to us. I have also been drinking, and on one occasion he was so proud of it, which I think in itself proves it was no habit, and remember, censor, he was only 26. On one occasion, with three other friends at the cocoa tree, from six till four, yea, until five in the matin, we clareted and champagneed till two, then sapped and finished with a kind of regency punch, composed of Madeira, Brandy and green tea, no real water being admitted therein. There was a night for you. It would have been a last night for me. Then he would live for days on biscuits and soda water, which he ordered in two dozen at a time. There is a bill for it, yet extant, and drank copiously. Byron's genius as a poet came at the right moment for its full effect on Europe, but his stomach was born out of due time. Were he living in our day, the apostles of new diets would have founded him their most attentive listener, their most enthusiastic practitioner. Whether claret or soda water was his drink, however, he satisfied a large part of our contemporary morality by severe physical exercise. He boxed for an hour a day in Albany with gentlemen Jackson and practised the broadsword with Henry Angelo. This famous master records an occasion when they were so engaged and Hobhouse entered the room. How Byron, characteristically, did not desist from advancing on me but seemed more determined to show his friend how well he could beat his broadsword master. And he adds this curious account. His preparation for his exercise was rather singular, first stripping himself, then putting on a thick flannel jacket and over it a pelles lined with fur tied round with a Turkish shawl when he had taken a sufficient gymnastic sodrific. If he did not go directly and increase it between the blankets, he had his valet to rub him down. There is a picture for you to imagine if you visit Albany A2. All such things are significant in the life of a great man, as we know on Carlisle's authority, but let us turn to matters more immediately of the spirit, although the boxing was done to keep up the ethereal part of me. There is not much to be gained from the journal, however. He wrote no more in it, having kept it some five months, after April the 19th. There is a passage no bookish man can read without sympathy in praise of solitude and getting home to one's own room. I do not know that I am happiest when alone, but this I am sure of, that I never am long in the society even of her I love, God knows too well, and the devil probably too, without a yearning for the company of my lamp and my utterly confused and tumbled-over library. Venomous Laramad Nostrum Readers' Note Translation from the Latin We come to our own home End Readers' Note That big room in Albany was a comfort to the poet, though Lara and the ode to Napoleon was all the poetry he wrote there. It was the time of the first abdication, and Napoleon was much in Byron's mind. He and other wigs were, of course, pro-boers and expressed their feelings with an immunity at which our extreme imperialists today must marvel. April the 8th Out of town six days, on my return found my poor little Pagod, Napoleon, pushed off his pedestal. The thieves are in Paris, and the journal ends excitedly on the same subject. I cannot help wondering if the poet had been in the society of Scrope Davies, and to prevent me from returning like a dog to the vomit of memory I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume and write in Ipicacuana that the bourbons are restored. Hang up, philosophy! To be sure, I have long despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my species before. Oh, fool, I shall go mad! Some faint touch of the cocoa tree there one is forced to think, but in no mental condition did Byron forget his Shakespeare. At this time the rage of his lionising was over, but he was still going much into society, sending verses to Lady Jersey, mixing with Rogers and Moore, making love unwisely, and, I think, in spite of the turmoil he professed to dislike, taking more pleasure in life than it gave him often. Lady Caroline Lamb's affair was over. Lady Oxford's and Lady Francis Webster's had been since. According, however, to a letter from Lady Caroline to Captain Medwin, Thackeray's Captain Sumpf with his banal stories of the poet, written after Byron's death, it was in Albany they parted for the last time. But it is also true that the last time we parted for ever, as he pressed his lips on mine, it was in the Albany, he said, poor Carrow, if everyone hates me, you, I see, will never change. No, not with ill usage. And I said, yes, I am changed, and shall come near you no more. For then he showed me letters and told me things I cannot repeat, and all my attachment went. This was our last parting scene. Well, I remember it. It had an effect upon me not to be conceived. Three years I had worshipped him. It is touching, but I hope the Lady's warm imagination played her false, at least about the telling things and the showing letters. And yet I know there were two Byrons, he who felt and thought deeply and acted generously, and the unworthy Byron, who was Phampharon de Sevice, and wanted to startle and shock. Reader's Note Phampharon de Sevice is boastful of his vices. End Reader's Note. It is possible this showing of letters, but I hope she was mistaken. Here, in any case, is another scene in Albany for the Reader's Fancy. The letters of Byron from Albany are not of any special interest. They are characteristic, however. There is the authentic Byron in them, egotistical, unselfish, vain, modest, generous. We find him giving three thousand pounds to his sister Augusta, humorous, affectionate, much of his tenancy of these rooms he spent in the country, and, as we know, his ill-fated proposal of marriage to Miss Milbank was written from Newstead, and there he received his answer. On March the 31st, 1815, he writes from Piccadilly, a married man. Thirteen Piccadilly terrorists was half of Old Q's house, and is now one hundred and thirty-nine Piccadilly. Old Q, who died in 1810, left it to Mie Mie, Lady Hartford, but Byron rented it from Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire. The rent was seven hundred pounds a year, and the payment involved some correspondence when Byron was settled in Italy. A short while afterwards, the house passed to the family of Lord Rosebury, to whom I believe it still belongs. Old Q, Byron, Lord Rosebury, to be sure a house of varied distinctions. While Byron lived there, he wrote Parisina and The Siege of Corinth, met Walter Scott for the first time, served on the Drury Lane Committee, was served with sixteen rits, had an execution in his house, and separated from his wife. Of all these experiences, perhaps the best to tell are of those on the committee, of which Byron had a lively recollection and wrote of years afterwards in his Detached Thoughts. His letters of the time are full of the committee's perplexities, which, as any reader with a knowledge of theatres may guess, were many and various. His colleagues on the committee were Lord Essex, George Lamb, Douglas Kinnead, and Peter Moore, all very zealous and in earnest to do good and so forth. Of course they were, but the experiment not often seen since, of a theatre run by educated people with an interest in contemporary literature, was certainly an attractive one. Committees seldom do much, however, and this had an intractable subject matter. We were but few and never agreed. There was Peter Moore, who contradicted Kinnead, and Kinnead, who contradicted everybody. It was not from the actors that their troubles chiefly came. Byron's time actors did not expect all the reverence, which is not paid to cabinet ministers, and Byron's bonomy and humour, no doubt, conciliated them. Players, says he, are said to be an impracticable people. They are so, but I managed to steer clear of any disputes with them, and, accepting one debate with the elder Byron about Miss Smith's Pada, something I forget the technicals, I do not remember any litigation of my own. I used to protect Miss Smith because she was like Lady Jane Harley in the face, and likenesses go a great way with me. Byron's idea of impartial casting in the interests of the theatre seems to have been odd. His colleagues reproved him for buffooning with the historians and throwing things into confusion by treating light matters with levity. Edmund Keane was their star, and before him Byron had an enthusiasm. His emotion over Keane's Sir Giles Overreach is an old story. I am sorry to say it was the authors, not the players, who gave most trouble. The committee and Byron in particular were anxious to induce writers of reputation to do something for the stage, but even then it seemed already fated that the stage in England could only be served by, how can one put it inoffensively? Well, by people who were not otherwise of account as writers. Here, however, was a rare opportunity for writers of account, at least to be considered with a bias in their favour and not the other way, and it was a thousand pities it was not taken. Walter Scott would do nothing, neither would Thomas Moore, nor indeed Byron. There was, to be sure, a consideration which now has an opposite reason. To a popular author, the stage offered nothing like the money he could make in other ways. Walter Scott wrote a note on the passage in the detached thoughts in which Byron laments how he was asked in vain, recollecting the occasion and how he declined partly from the probability of not succeeding and partly from dislike of being kept in subjection by the good folks of the green room and how Byron emphatically agreed with him. Reader's note Queteracque ingenio nonce be under mayo translates as and the rest is not to be suggested to my mind. End Reader's note Whereon Lockhart has a note of his own saying that this was nonsense. Neither player nor manager has lived in our time that Durst have stood erect. They are braver in account in the presence of either of these men, etc. That Queteracque meant to say nothing of money matters. It may have been so, but times are altogether changed in this respect, and yet our best men have nothing to do with the theatre. The trend of their thought and labour had set away from it then and still so sets, so there may be signs of a return. However, Byron tries to collage also and Maturin, recommended by Scott, sent Bertram, which afterwards succeeded and Mr Sotheby obligingly offered all his tragedies and Byron got Ivan accepted and had a long correspondence with the author and then Keane didn't like it and the author was angry and so forth and so on. It is odd to think of a man who criticises poetry as you will had, beyond cavill, one of the greatest and most masculine intellects England has known, frittering away his time over these futilities, but he seems to have enjoyed them. Then the scenes I had to go through, the authors and the authoresses, the milliners, the wild Irishmen, the people from Brighton, from Blackwall, from Chatham, from Cheltenham, from Dublin, from Dundee, who came in upon me, Miss Emma, somebody with a play entitled The Bandit of Bohemia, or some such title or production, Mr O Higgins then resonated Richmond with an Irish tragedy in which the unities could not fail to be observed, for the protagonist was chained by the leg to a pillar during the chief part of the performance. Mr O Higgins was a wild man of a salvage appearance and Byron was afraid to laugh. Social pressure was of course applied to him and we find him writing to Mrs George Lamb, who had written to him on behalf of some protege and said she would try to soften his colleagues, Kinnead and George Lamb, that he was the most obdurate and insisted on being softened first. It was altogether an amusing game. More so than the rits, though from these two Byron managed to get instruction and amusement. When the bailiff descended on 1989 Piccadilly, Byron wanted to know if he had nothing for Sheridan. Oh, Sheridan, I have this. And a dismal pocket-book, as Thackeray called it, was produced. But my Lord, I have been in Mr Sheridan's house a twelve month at a time. A civil gentleman knows how to deal with us. Byron took the hint and happily did not have the bailiff for a year with him. Of Sheridan, by the way, he was not seeing much at this time. Sheridan woefully in his decline, drunken, maudlin, quarrelsome. Byron always liked and admired him, and said his very dregs are better than the first sprightly runnings of others. But as he appears in the records of this day there seems to me little to value in him. He never laughed. He would sit silent for long and then attack some fellow guest, deep, and complain that he had never had a shilling of his own. Though, as Byron said, he had extracted a good many of other peoples. There have been more amiable ruins than this. But no doubt when you have supported a man in his cups down a damned corkscrew staircase which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors you feel kindly towards him. How strange now and boyish seems these orgies of orators and poets. The dinner-party in question had been first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk. What a life! Well, it was soon to end for Byron. On the 10th of December 1815 his daughter Ada was born, and on the 25th of April 1816 he sailed for Ostend. There has been too much of debate and theory about Byron's separation from his wife that I should add to it in this casual place. A dreadful reason in the background may or may not have decided Lady Byron. It is difficult to believe from her letters that it was so. But tempers which could not agree which were doomed never to agree were reason enough for the separation. Many an argument, shot through with pain and heart-burning, must there have been in that house in Piccadilly. Many a sad and anxious debate when she had gone, and his sister and his friends came to him. If houses harbour the passions and sorrows of the dead, I should not like to live there. A great heart and a great brain stabbed by great trouble, wracked by little troubles. It is an evil memory. In those last days Byron wrote the beautiful verses to his wife, Fare you well, and the bitter verses on her confidante, Mrs. Clermont, born in the garret in the kitchen bread, which some fool or traitor sent to the newspapers, and which was the signal for the public outcry on him. The private outcry had been long set going, and had barred him from every great house in London but Lady Jersey's. In these last days, too, that the inevitable touch of farce should not be absent, little Nathan, the Jew singer, was continually in the house. Nathan, who had persuaded him to write the Hebrew melodies, and drew Tom Moore's chaff on him. Sunburn Nathan, says Byron in a letter, and Nathan got fifty pounds from him, and sent him a present of letters. Byron's polite acknowledgement of this gift seems to be the last letter he wrote in London. Byron had signed the deed of separation, delivering it as the act and deed, as a rare bit of gossip in a dull book of letters published lately tells us, not of himself, but of Mrs. Clermont. He had parted from Augusta almost the last being as he wrote to his wife, who have left me to part with, and the end of his life in England came. There is a last scene from 139 Piccadilly. You see him come out, his beautiful pale face without the light that made it, said Walter Scott, a thing to dream of, and limp into his carriage. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 The Ghosts of Piccadilly by G. S. Street Chapter 7 of Burlington House The memories of Burlington House are mostly co-mingled with the arts, so much so that, as one muses on its history, an impression rather of art than of humanity is predominant. One thinks of one art or another, example in varying degrees, of excellence, from the time of its first renown until now when the art of painting flourishes or languishes in its halls. Indeed, if horrid rumour be credited, its first existence is made lurid by an ancient art that of poisoning to wit. As a practitioner or patron of an art, almost everybody who lived in Burlington House is known, if known at all, from the haze of dilettantism or achievement some humanity does emerge. Enough to furnish me a chapter. The first Lord Burlington was living here in 1668 and the House was not built until 1665 so that it seems likely that he was the first occupant. According to Peeps, however, the House was built by Sir John Denham and if that was so and if he did not build it for the Earl he may have lived there a year or two. In that case the House began with a note of humanity only too sharp and recognisable the comedy or tragedy of an old man and a young wife and a lover. The third person was a king's brother which, for some minds, may give a touch of romance to a squalid story of human weakness and vice. It is all in Grimont a story most congenial to that lively count Walter Hamilton, his biographer. Sir John Denham was an old man. Grimont says 79 and rather tiresome research says only 50 still 50 counted for old in love affairs when Charles II was king. In May 1665 he married Margaret Brooke who was only 17. She was a pretty toy. The Duke of York had been in love with her on and off, other ladies intervening for some time. His latest mistress had been Lady Chesterfield whose lord it was an act which amazed and disgusted Grimont carried her off into the country. So he was on with the old love again and Lady Denham was to be given a place in the Duchess's household and the usual routine of these affairs was to be followed. Only she died in January 1667. Grimont says that Sir John Denham, unable to follow Lord Chesterfield's example for lack of a country house sent her on a longer journey. The populace thought he had poisoned her and was infuriated why it should have cared I know not and had to be appeased with a large distribution of burnt wine at her funeral. It also accused the Duchess of York or at least Andrew Marville did who should have known better. It was rather sad as the pretty toy was so young and had only acted after her kind. Anyway, she was dead and the Duke of York promptly fell in love with someone else. When I was a very young man I used to read such stories as those in Grimont's memoirs with much pleasure. Nowadays I find them a little banal and monotonous too unrelieved by fancy or subtlety. They were disagreeable. But this one of Sir John Denham and Margaret Brooke and the Duke of York seems more so than probably it was for one need not suppose she really was poisoned. In the 17th century there were many cases of alleged poisoning which might have been only cases of medical ignorance. People had appendicitis and were bled for it and naturally expired. Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans the most fascinating woman of her days who was thought to have been poisoned with the connivance of that wretched cretin her husband. Charles II her brother refused to open the Duke's letter announcing her death probably died of peritonitis. As for Lady Denham that simple wanton if her ghost emerges from Burlington House into Piccadilly save for its dress it will be quite undistinguished in the crowd. The original House seems to have been large but comparatively plain built of red brick. It had a big garden behind which of course touched the open country. Horace Walpole has been censured for attributing to the first Lord Burlington the wish to have no building beyond him. That is said to be observed since Clarendon House and Barclay House in the west were already standing but he might well have referred to the north. There is nothing to say of this Lord Burlington but I should like to think that his brother Robert Boyle that gentle and lovable man of science the inventor of the air-pump and an original founder of the Royal Society came sometimes from Palmal where he lived to die in Piccadilly. It was the third Earl great-grandson of the first who renewed and embellished and made everything of Burlington House with the assistance of Colin Campbell and in imitation of Palladio. I do not propose to go into architectural merits and differences. The reader can go look for himself that is to say he can still see the first floor which with the ground floor only that is hidden by a portico was left in 1866 when the rest of the buildings and a beautiful colonnade were destroyed and the present wall and wings such as they are were built for my part in my bigoted love for the plain and simple in London houses I wish the old house of Red Brick had been left exposed to view it was left encased in stone as the nucleus of the grand mansion the new Burlington House and its art-loving owner were the theme of much eulogy and satire. The satire in Marshall of the fine house with nowhere to eat or sleep was English for Burlington House as it had been for Blenheim after two plates caricaturing the taste of the town and the man of taste in the latter Pope is splattering the Duke of Chandos whom he had depreciated as an amateur to exalt his own patron with whitewash and Burlington is going up a ladder like a workman. This third earl of Burlington was the patron of Pope and gay and handle he was intimate with Swift but you can hardly be said to be the patron of a man whom you allow to bully your wife the characteristic anecdote of the Dean is somewhat musty Lady Burlington, I hear you can sing sing me a song she refused and Swift said I suppose you take me for one of your poor hedge Parsons sing when I bid you she wept and left the room Pray, madam, are you as proud and as ill-natured as when I saw you last? No, Mr. Dean I will sing to you, if you please No modern thinks more of Swift's greatness as a writer than I but I wish the Lady had answered differently She was Lady Dorothy Saville a clever daughter of a clever family and I think the most interesting memories of Burlington House are of her and two other women her unhappy daughter Dorothy and Madam Moselle Violette who became Mrs. Garrick Poor Lady Dorothy Boyles is the story of a foolish marriage which ended tragically of bitter sorrow and untimely death it is something of a coincidence for the house that she, like Margaret Brooke was seventeen when she married and died not a year afterwards and that her death was laid at her husband's door but here the charge was all too probable and here the victim was innocent she fell in love with Lord Euston heir of the second Duke of Grafton and therefore great grandson of Charles II whose kindly qualities of heart were, alas, sadly to seek in him he was in fact a brute of the worst reputation report had it that he wanted to marry his brother's widow Lady Augustus Fitzroy but he did marry unhappily for her this poor Lady Dorothy Boyle Horace Walpole and others agree about the softness and gentleness of her character and the attraction of opposites which may be an excellent provision of nature in the main but when it takes an ill turn is red hot iron on our nerves may have worked in both at the beginning of her affection at least there seems to be no doubt and one wishes to believe it was that and not the dukedom persuaded her parents if worldliness it was in them then worldliness has seldom been punished so savagely and so swiftly Horace Walpole writes to his friend Horace Mann I wrote you word that Lord Euston is married in a week more I believe I shall write to you word that he is divorced he is brutal enough and has forbad Lady Burlington his house and that in very un-gentle terms the whole family is in confusion the Lord of Grafton half dead and Lord Burlington half mad the latter has challenged Lord Euston who accepted the challenge but they were prevented do not pity the poor girl of the softest temper vast beauty, birth and fortune to be so sacrificed in less than a year this soft affectionate wife was dead of her husband's brutality we read of her from time to time in the interval of Horace Walpole here and there and on one occasion quite honeymoonish with her husband which shows us that the cleverest of social observers do not always observe when she was dead her mother drew her picture and sent it among her friends with an inscription Pope was said to have written for her Lady Dorothy Boyle born May the 14th 1724 she was the comfort and joy of her parents the delight of all who knew her angelic temper and the admiration of all who saw her beauty she was married October the 10th 1741 and delivered by death from misery May the 2nd 1742 this picture was drawn seven weeks after her death from memory by her most affectionate mother Dorothy Burlington so Lady Burlington fell back on her art for which she had a genuine taste Horace Walpole attributed the design of one of Hogarth's prints to her on her art and her artistic proteges and let us hope found consolation it is some slight comfort to know that Lord Euston died young in his father's lifetime it would be little reproach to human nature if this fate of the daughter had soured Lady Burlington's nature sour she appears in Walpole's letters but he may have had some personal spite against her since magnanimity does not shine among his virtues he announces her death in 1758 in a spirit his best friends must deplore you know that the wife of Bath Lord Bath's wealthy spouse is gone to mourn her at St. Peter and before he could hobble to the gate my Lady Burlington cursing and blaspheming overtook other Countess and both together made such an uproar shocking bad taste is it not one gathers the idea of a masterful woman who hated her foes and managed her friends such women are apt to be but poorly requited for the foes return the hatred and the friends may forget the kindness and staunchness while they remember the criticism and regiment Lady Burlington had many favourites among artists but the most famous and I think interesting of them is the violetta this fascinating dancer was one of that numerous band of foreigners who have taken London by storm been petted by society and finally have had the kindness to settle in comfort among us in spite of the climate and cold manners they have continued to reproach us with all there seems to me to be some lack of balance in this matter for we so seldom hear of English people taking other countries by storm and being furnished with comfortable livelihoods in them by their admirers I mean that it is almost unjust to themselves that other countries should export to us so much attractive humanity and leave us all our own as well Madame Waselle Violette came to us in 1744 and was welcomed by Lady Burlington who gave her quarters in Burlington house and took her everywhere who was she Mr. Joseph Knight in his excellent book on David Garrick says that probably she herself was in the dark as to her origin and early history but contemporary gossips of course had plenty of light one obvious story was that she was Lord Burlington's natural daughter and they said her mother was an Italian of position and of course they said this was absolutely confirmed when on her marriage Lady Burlington settled £6,000 on her though the reasoning appears a little faulty in psychology she always denied this origin but according to Rainy Day Smith she admitted late in life to one of her husband's relations that although Lord Burlington was not her father she was of noble birth in that case she could not have approved of the other story the gossips had which was that she was the daughter of a Viennese citizen called Weigel Weigel equals Violet equals Violette and hence her name at the request so they said of Maria Theresa herself the Empress admired her and so unfortunately did the Emperor Frederick I on which account she was packed off to England travelling in male attire and so seen on the packet by Dr Carlisle the latter part of this story at least the Violette seems to have admitted however these things were and whether she came from Florence or Vienna or elsewhere as Mr Knight points out some experience as a dancer since she was engaged immediately for the Haymarket the King was present at her first performance and she was soon the Rage she had the fine advertisement of a riot when she gave an audience two dances instead of the three promised the fame of the Violetta writes Horace Walpole in 1740 increases daily the sister countesses of Burlington and Thanet exert all their stores of sullen partiality in competition for her and two years later the old monarch at Hanover has got a new mistress now I talk of getting Mr Fox has got the ten thousand pound prize and the Violetta so it is said Coventry for a husband it is certain that at the fine masquerade he was following her as she was under the countess's arm who pulling off her glove moved her wedding ring up and down her finger which seems was to signify that no other terms would be accepted I rather like this homely significance on the part of my Lady Burlington the Coventry mentioned by the way is not the Earl who married the beautiful Maria Gunning but plain Mr Coventry who was no great party she did better when she married David Garrick in 1749 his wooing however had not been all roses so Lady Burlington seems not to have approved him at first Mr Walpole writes to George Montague that at another entertainment Lady Burlington brought the Violetta and the richmans had asked Garrick who stood ogling and sighing the whole time while my Lady kept a most fierce look out but married they were and it was a marriage of marriages Garrick's lines on his wife are well known her heart my friend her speaking face her shape her youth her winning grace have reached my heart the fair one's mind quick as her eyes yet soft and kind a gaiety with innocence and other delightful qualities he enumerates she seems really to have deserved the praise Sir Theodore Martin in his monograph on Garrick the head of her by famous men to be praised and cordially and sincerely praised by Wilkes and Stern and Gibbon a woman must have been worth knowing we must be allowed to follow her for one moment into her married life though she passes from Piccadilly after her honeymoon which was partly spent in Burlington house contemporaries were very hard on David Garrick's fanaties and foibles the moderns I have lately mentioned and so as was right and proper as Mr H. B. Irving he had his share of the conceits and jealousies common in his vocation and not unknown in others but as a man there was more to respect in him than by ordinary standards we find in many great artists and whatever virtue he lacked in love and care for his wife he was not lacking for twenty eight years they were never a day apart she went with him on his famous tour in Europe and whatever and wherever his triumphs his wife enjoyed and sweetened them we must not linger over them but one last glance at Violetta we will have in 1795 eighteen years after her husband's death we see her thoroughly domesticated in Horace Walpole's neighborhood having conciliated the regard of that exigent expert in society with an hundred head of nieces with her of whom an elderly fat dame affected at every word to call her aunt it is pleasant to chronicle a good fortune and domesticity so complete and so well deserved and now we must go back to Burlington house it seems unkind to have lingered over Lady Burlington and her friendships and to say nothing of her lord who was much considered by so many considerable men he was a splendid host housing handled for three years and William Kent the architect for 32 a sort of hospitality I regret has become obsolete but beyond his hospitality and his interest in art little emerges of personal quality and we may let the sands of time run on after his death Burlington house passed to the Cavendishes Lord George of that family brought it down to Duke in 1815 and lived there many years latterly with the revived title of Burlington and with his son-in-law Lord Charles Fitzfroy thus establishing for the house a happier connection with the family from which poor Lady Dorothy had her atrocious husband a daughter of Lord Charles remembers that in her girlhood at Burlington house bloodhounds went loose in the court at nights terrific beasts chained up by day Lord George was a fine example of the taciturnity remarkable in the Cavendishes and I take a charming story of him and his brother the Fifth Duke famous for his calmness and as the husband of Georgiana from the reminiscences of Sir Algernon West they stopped for the night at an inn on their way north and were shown into a room with three beds one of which had its curtains drawn both brothers in turn went and looked into the curtain to bed and chose another not a word they said until late in the next day as they continued their journey then at last did you see what was in that bed last night asked the Duke yes brother said Lord George and again they were silent the bed had contained a corpse it was Lord George who made the Burlington arcade to prevent people from throwing things over his garden war and as the gentleman's magazine rather curiously puts it for the gratification of the public and to give employment to industrious females when I was a boy at college it was the custom if one went to London for the day to take a turn in this arcade which I am afraid we called the drain pipe of an afternoon but I doubt no very gracious ghosts come out of it into Piccadilly I think there are no other personal memories about Burlington house great wig centre at one time but even ghosts cannot be in two places at once and Devonshire house claims Fox and Burke far more insistently we fall back on art again the Elgin marbles were once in a shed in the courtyard and the pictures of Monsieur X, Y and Z with more distinguished artists have hung regularly on its walls since the Royal Academy of Arts was housed there does the noise of past soirees, interesting and miscellaneous revive in the nights or the passions and rivalries and exclusions and tardy admissions which have made such a coil in its history does the atmosphere of them hang about the house let us hope that the ghosts of dead banquets and stereotyped speeches walk not but one likes to think of Disraeli lauding the pictures he had just been abusing to his neighbour with a hypocritical humour Mr Gladstone thought devilish Hogarth caricatured the builder of the house I wonder what he would have thought of its present possessors mixed thoughts it is probable End of Chapter 7 Chapter 8 of the ghosts of Piccadilly this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Peter Yersley the ghosts of Piccadilly by G.S. Chapter 8 the Palmerstons and Cambridge House walking along Piccadilly with my reader I stop him at number 94 the naval and military or in and out club and pressing his arm with one emphatic hand I point with T other through the open gate across the courtyard to the plain stone house and here says I to him here reader for 15 years lived an Englishman and English woman than whom you may search history through to find two examples more satisfying more splendidly and completely true of our national type other dwellers in Piccadilly may or may not impress you more acutely there's Emma Hart and Byron and Old Q and the Great Duke there's romance and passion poetry and wickedness and military glory matters in which from time to time we English have been great but if you would reflect to what find past the quite ordinary qualities of our countrymen may arrive how noble a show may come of mere genial tempers and solid understandings stand here in front of Cambridge House and muse on the Palmerstons before the reader does that however we must make our bow to chronology and attend a moment to Pam's predecessors in Cambridge House of whom one was a great noble and another a royal Duke the third Earl of Egremont to it and the Duke of Cambridge the house was built for the Egremont in 1760 or so and had the honour during the reign of the second Earl of receiving John Wilkes after the arrest of that firebrand for number 45 of the North Britain he had been arrested by the Earl's order and the interview we may be sure will be lively Wilkes wrote an energetic account of the business to the Duke of Grafton from Paris but this is only a brief incident and Wilkes' ugly face which as he said was only half an hour's handicap in the rivalries of love is but a flash on the canvas with the third Lord Egremont we may stay longer it is true that his name belongs more to Petworth than to Piccadilly it was there he lived almost entirely in his later life practising that hospitality had once casual, lordly and kindly for which he was renowned but in his younger days he had been a leader of London fashion and this house in Piccadilly knew him at intervals through most of his long life George O'Brien Wyndham who was born in 1751 and died in 1837 was a type of what a great English noble with fine taste, much intelligence sincere public spirit but little aptitude for party politics can be in these latter days perhaps this does not amount to very much even in his time and still more in hours the position is something of an empty survival your nobles said the German professor to Harry Richmond are merely rich men that may be nearly true but it is not quite true enough flesh remains on the bones of a system that in its day was logical and efficient to make a wealthy noble potentially a more useful person than a bare representative of individualist success in making money his direct beneficence given our traditions may be easier and more graceful and his example shines to be beneficent but then as it seems it is easier still not to be Lord Egremond for instance gave away £20,000 a year in charity his income was £80,000 a year and so of course he did not miss the money the gift was less to him than if I gave away sixpence still he gave it and might not have given it and many a richer man has been honoured for smaller gifts he was a magnificent and helpful friend of painters who were at home at Petworth and whose works are now its distinction in particular he cherished Turner they agreed well and naturally so for there was in both the simplicity of life and of attitude to life which belongs to true art and true aristocracy this simplicity shone at Petworth where host and guests went their own way all day and met at dinner at which Lord Egremond in the cordial if rather dilatory old fashion carved for each guest himself in one matter indeed he fell short of a model nobleman though convention was not outraged by his conduct so much then as it would be now he was an avowed father without being a husband he was not a rake on the contrary was an affectionately domestic man his children lived with him and inherited all but his title after him pity that circumstances left the relation short of complete fitness his not marrying in early life made Horace Walpole describe him as a worthless young fellow the fact was that he had been going to but did not marry Horace Walpole's niece pity as I said that in this matter he defied convention but that he did shows at least that his virtues of charity and kindness were his own not assumed in compliance with it on the monument in Petworth church to his predecessors the purses is the inscription mortuus moriturus I hope that he thought of it in any case he adopted it and you may search wide for an inscription of a moral taste so to say so perfect and final there was much to say of the purses and himself but in that place what was fitting to say was just that they were dead and he would die I would trust the feeling for art in a man who felt that propriety Lord Egremont however would not have been a type of a great English noble if the art of painting and the cherishing of painters had been all his interests he was not energetic in politics so he was ready to back his views with his purse but to fill the popular ideal of his position and to take little account of the arts he was a good sportsman and above all a splendid patron of the turf Mr Theodore Cook in his delightful history of that great institution has much to say of Lord Egremont take him all in all then he was a worthy possessor of a great Piccadilly house and his name must be honoured as we stand before it the same may be said in a way of the royal duke who lived there afterwards Lord Chumbly intervening till 1850 the Duke of Cambridge was not conspicuous among the brothers of George IV who went the pace so merrily as young men and were so eccentric laughable and on the whole amiable as old ones he was not clever which perhaps was just as well since the Duke of Cumberland who, with the slightly dubious exception of George himself had the brains of that royal generation was detested all the stories of these royal dukes are of homely, innocent individual oddities the amusement of their society which had little of the reverence for royalty now so fashionable those of the Duke of Cambridge are not remarkable the best of them are of his conduct in church where he was accustomed to give a cordial and audible support to the officiating clergyman let us pray said the clergyman by all means, by all means to the Duke of Cambridge on one commandment his comment would be quite right, quite right but very difficult sometimes and on another I won't say which no, no, it was my brother Ernest did that rather a dear old gentleman he should not be omitted from a talk about the house which bears his name but there is little to say of him and now we come to the Palmerstons I join them in my gossip as they were so thoroughly joined in life for both were splendid examples as I said of our ordinary national type at its best it may be that the spirit of Palmerstons policy lives here and there among our politicians but his actual politics is dead, is as a wind that has blown by so that the figure of the man as a man is the greater part that is left of him and so his wife as a woman stands by his side in history as in her way almost equally remarkable the secret of both was in vitality and cheerfulness that never so much as faulted hour after hour in the House of Commons the old man, he was old when he comes into the story of Piccadilly could attend to the dullest business, patient, business like polite hour after hour at the famous receptions at Cambridge House would stand with a smile and kindly handshake for innumerable guests repeating the handshake in forgetfulness now and then it is recorded as he grew older but never flagging in cordiality and so Lady Palmerston filled up her countless invitation cards with her own hand and kept her visiting book says Abraham Hayward as regularly as a merchant ledger but the formal part was the least of her tasks she had to please all the good dull people when they came her good nature says Hayward again and the tribute of the eulogy he wrote of her in the Times at her death is great for it came from a critical temper her good nature was inexhaustible nor was it ever known to give way under any extent of forwardness or tiresomeness instead of interrupting or abruptly quitting wearysome or pushing visitors she would listen till they ceased of their own accord or were superseded and went away all this must have been trying indeed to her she was the daughter of a clever house sister to Lord Melbourne and had lived all her life in a lively well-bred and intimate society a society which is most familiarly reflected I think in the letters of Harriet Lady Granville these are some of the best women's letters in English and they paint the best of the society which followed the generation of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire who was Lady Granville's mother a society unaffected conversable given to jokes and games to come from that to the entertaining of average members of parliament and their women kind must have been a discipline much more severe than the role of an ambassador's wife in Paris which greatly tried the patience of Lady Granville nor did Lady Palmerston care for politics apart from personalities she was her husband's invaluable ally but only as another ear and mouth when politics were brought to her she made a careful note or sent it once for the great man devotion to him and his interests was all her inspiration and a good heart good wits, good manners and what is glad to know good health and digestion carried her through many stories about them old stories, my dear in other days she was the widow of Lord Cooper and there was trouble about her second marriage Palmerston was and was not as a young man called Cupid Palmerston for nothing her friends prophesied unhappiness Lady Granville wrote Lady Cooper has courage to face her angry children I cannot say how much I blame them for telling what they feel but she can encounter their antipathy what a happy mother she might have been and what an unhappy existence will she have I fear her understanding never has been of the slightest use to her well well the wisest of us are poor prophets her existence was most happy and her understanding exceeding useful and her children came dearly to love Lord Pam he was a lovable man a hearty, unaffected, easy joyous man really a consummate type of good average qualities not interested in art or literature which was easily forgiven him but interested in almost everything else a man of whom it was characteristic that he never passed a dish at a table and played a bad game of billiards with infinite zest loving much to win and especially if his wife were looking on the affection of his countrymen generally was won by their rough appreciation of this simple nature perhaps almost as much as by their belief that he stood for England and the rights and dignity of England without compromise or exception the respect and prestige he had in Parliament and among those who came in contact with him were founded above all on his absolute command of his business he was like the late Lord Randolph Churchill in this that being a pleasure loving man having lived hard as a man of pleasure when ambition sent him to business he gave himself wholly to it and lived hard as a man of business he was something of a gourmet yet when Parliament was sitting he dined at three and but for some tea at the house touched nothing more till he came home to bed at one o'clock as a result he knew what he was about when he rose to answer questions or make a speech and he could express his knowledge lucidly his easy conversational tone which to Englishmen and especially in the house is most acceptable many an English statesman has been wrecked in public life from sheer inability to get on with his colleagues at close quarters that of course was not the case with Palmerston yet it is not true to say that the reverse was the case people who are offended by downrightness and occasional briskery timid and punctilious people like Lord John Russell he scandalised his success came not from any one quality as was shrewdly remarked of him but from an unusual combination of qualities gaiety and sense lucidity and fire but he had the defects of those qualities too that reminds me that he had critics in private life and that I have been straying to the House of Commons from Cambridge House his jollity and fun and laughter could grate on the fastidious Henry Greville for example as fastidious though not as articulate a critic as his brother Charles has recorded his exceptions although he was a most cordial and courteous host he never struck me as an agreeable man he was always good humoured and ready to talk but his style was too jocose and his jests were for the most part flat and one felt in his society a constant disappointment that the conversation of a man who was playing so important and conspicuous a part in the world and who must necessarily have so much to communicate should be made up of puns and bad jokes etc etc the idea crosses one's mind that possibly Pam had not much to communicate to Mr Henry Greville and preferred to chaff him still one knows too well that high spirits and empty jests and their expression of high spirits to the jester like singing in his bath may be a bore when one is not attuned to them and no doubt Pam may so have sinned I think however had I been there that delight in an octogenarian vitality in a humour and kindness which had survived so much toil so many rows in public and so much zest of life in private would have reconciled me to any number of puns and bad jokes alas I was not there as I write of these ghosts in Piccadilly I strain my imagination to visualise them as they were the help is all too little letters and diaries of contemporaries however graphic and acute they may be seem ever to leave out those simple elementary things we seek familiar with appearances and voices and manners they forget to describe them or not having our interests in mind have no reason for the description we are left guessing and inferring Palmerston too perhaps died too lately for his v-antime to be easily at our service I get a picture or two of him at Cambridge house from Lord Lawn's the present Duke of Argyle book on him one sent to Lord Lawn by a correspondent is of Palmerston in his work room standing at a high desk almost unapproachable from the fortification of office boxes piled around him and then Lord Lawn more careful than most biographers gives us some details of his looks and yes I can see him at the top of the staircase in Cambridge house shaking hands with his guest an upstanding figure neither short nor tall very neatly dressed the hair direct on the shoulders framed with gray short hair brushed forward and gray whiskers gray are close to the cheek and the face round when he was cupid Palmerston he whispers to one man an account of a famous prize fight which happened that day not admitting that he was there and greets another cordially for the second time and I hear his jolly laugh as he repeats a bad pun to the disappointed Henry Greville End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of the Ghosts of Piccadilly Deborah Vox recording is in the public domain recording by Peter Yersley The Ghosts of Piccadilly by G. S. Street Chapter 9 105, 106 and 107 I wonder if my reader is fond of practical jokes I hope not I should not despise him for it necessarily or altogether but I should pity him as they are almost passed out of our manners and he will find but few and with difficulty to share his merriment they were still rife a generation ago especially in theatrical society but now they are dead and few of us in an age of nerves are sorry for their passing for my part nerves or no nerves I dislike them extremely because my mind craves lucidity and simple dealing and hates mysticism and uncertainty and confusion and make-believe if however the reader should be fond of practical jokes he will be interested in the Lord Barrymore for whom 105 now the Isthmian club was built in 1780 on the site of one of those statutory yards that of John Van Nost which used to deface Piccadilly an agreeable family the Barrys of whom this gentleman was the head Hellgate and Cripplegate one brother was lame were of their nicknames and there was a sister whose mode of conversation caused the regent to call her Billingsgate they appear to have lived for the object of doing extravagant and eccentric things with the maximum of discomfort and annoyance to other people yes they were great devotees of the practical joke Lord Barrymore indeed deserves to rank as the prince or patron saint of the custom one finds mention of him from time to time in memoirs and letters contemptuous mention as a rule and if lordetry then a little parasitical he was the sort of roistering uncontrolled creature who fatigues his equals and whose friends are apt Henry Angelo the famous fencing master is I think the chief authority for the practical jokes and on him the mark of the parasite is pretty clear most of the jokes were enacted at Wargrave but no doubt the house in Piccadilly must have seen a good many one or two were rather amusing to ask a respectable tradesman to your house as your guest and then make your other guests greet him as somebody else he is somebody else until you yourself say you don't know what to think is not the perfection of hospitality but one can imagine that the confusion of the victim might be entertaining as a rule however I find the stories merely tedious my boredom relieved only by dislike of the jokers and sympathy with the jokies Barrymore and his brothers and friends and parasites a humbugging club and invited people to be humbugged I see no worth in the hobnailed mirth but if the reader does I refer him to The Last Earls of Barrymore by Mr. J. R. Robinson where he will find all about it Lord Barrymore however was more than a mere practical joking buffoon he was distinguished as a gambler with cards and horses and in the 24 years of his life he went through 300,000 pounds remembering his age poor boy perhaps I was wrong to be superior about his practical jokes the one really interesting thing about him is that he was one of the first if not the first of our aristocracy to act in public his enthusiasm for the stage like all genuine enthusiasm should be noted with respect he built a theatre next to his house at Wargrave and made up mixed companies with amateurs and professional players but he by no means confined his histrionic gifts which seem really to have existed to his private theatre George Selwyn writes rather testily of that iturdi Lord Barrymore playing the fool in three or four different characters upon our Richmond theatre there is a print of him as Scrubb a black aviised impish faced young fellow with bushy eyebrows but before his death he went into the Barkshire militia for another diversion or to begin a reform I know not and was becoming a zealous and efficient officer when a gunshot accident finished him more than one man of his class has run much the same course in our time we may deplore the end of him or not remembering that profligates sometimes settle into happiness and also that pigeons sometimes turn into ineffectual rooks on the whole it is fitting I think that such boys should never grow old the revenge of such a youth is most often painful to endure and ugly to see as 4105 Piccadilly it was dismantled in 1792 and sold by auction with the stables where was room for 21 horses and two coach houses Mr. Christie knocked down house and stables 1050 and 1300 guineas to the representative of old Q who had known better than to die at 24 old Q left the house to Lady Hartford but we find it after being burnt and repaired as the old Poultony hotel and as such it was witness of an intrigue among exalted personages in 1814 this is to be found in the recollections from 1803 to 1837 which were given to a not much interested world by the honourable Amelia Murray in 1868 it is rather an insipid little work to be sure but this story of the Poultony hotel which she does not name but it is identified by Mr. Wheatley suggests a plot and a plot attracts most of us in 1814 London was simply swarming with entates and their relations and among them were Prince Leopold of Coburg the Prince of Orange, the Tsar of Russia and his sister the Grand Duchess Catherine of Oldenburg now the Princess Charlotte of Wales was engaged to the Prince of Orange but the Duchess of Oldenburg for political reasons wished the marriage not to take place but contrary wise that the Prince of Orange should marry a sister of her own the Princess Charlotte should marry Prince Leopold of Coburg poor Princess Charlotte an avowed sentimentalist cannot but lament her in passing to be the child of parents both deplorable in their different ways who loathed one another and tore her between them to be the centre of these miserable intrigues to be with all an amiable and high-spirited girl on whom England even the Whigs you remember Byron's lines looked with some affection and hope when she should be queen to gain a little happiness and to die painfully after so brief a spell of it assuredly it was a pathetic fortune well, the Prince of Orange was not particularly attractive says Miss Murray it was indeed common rumour that the Princess disliked him and Prince Leopold was a handsome young man the Duchess determined to aid Prince Leopold's favourable circumstances with a little art she took a hotel in Piccadilly our Poultony hotel to wit she earnestly sought the acquaintance of Miss Elphinstone who was known to be on intimate terms with the Princess she gave grand dinners and took care to invite the Prince of Orange the night he was to waltz in public with the Princess as her fiance the grand Duchess plied him well with champagne and a young man with the presence of his hostess he was made tipsy and of course the Princess was disgusted then in Miss Elphinstone's apartments the charming Prince Leopold was presented and so this delicate scheme was accomplished number 105 has something better in its history than Lord Barrymore's practical jokes and the Duchess of Oldenburg's champagne for when it became a private house again the Lord Hartford who made the great collection lived there for some time and kept there his beautiful possessions Sir Julian Goldsmith was its last private tenant a figure of respectability to balance its first owner number 106 narrowly missed being a most interesting house it might have harboured but for an untimely death one of the most famous beauties in the social history of England was given to the history of Piccadilly a pendant to Lady Hamilton it or rather its site was originally an inn called the Greyhound and was bought by the 6th Earl of Coventry from Sir Hugh Hunlock in 1764 for 10,000 guineas with a yearly ground rent of 75 pounds he bought it soon after his marriage but alas and alas this was his second marriage and not his first being to Maria Gunning for once I chafe against the limitations of my theme there is so much that is interesting amusing, pathetic to be written of the gunnings those Irish girls who buy sheer force of beauty for it seems they had neither wit nor manners sent all London mad about them caused people to crowd and stand on chairs to have a glimpse of them and had their choice of coronets and fortunes what unobservant fool first called the English cold and phlegmatic in what other country of western civilisation have mere good looks brought such splendour to their possessors and why, why did neither Gunning live in Piccadilly I would rather have written about Elizabeth who married Duke after Duke and according to her grandson the late Duke of Argyle was a woman of courage and character but I should have been content to write about Maria Countess of Coventry only and only a beautiful foolish ignorant good-natured creature whom Horace Walpole laughed at and rather liked George Selwyn was devoted to her and to her daughters for George a passionately paternal man who was never a father seems always to have loved his friends' children more than his friends as it is however I must write neither the actual Lady Coventry who lived at 106 may or may not have been an interesting person we do not know Miss Mary Townsend writes to Selwyn the beauty of the new Countess was for some days set above that of your old friend and at present with equal injustice she is scarcely allowed to be pretty if her portrait by Sir Joshua was like her I fear I should have inclined to the latter verdict pretty or not I can only dislike her for not being Maria Lord Coventry himself seems to have been no great matter Horace Walpole hated him for some reason or other and is severe on his character and intelligence he was remarkable for Gauchyrie in Paris it would appear but probably like many another good Englishman he was only struggling with the French language we have a picture of him also in Horace chasing his wife Maria rounds a dinner table to rub off the rouge he accused her of wearing but I do not object to people romping so they do not bump against me so much as did Horace et voila pour the sixth Lord Coventry who probably was just an ordinary fool the history of 106 is at least varied from an inn it became a nobleman's mansion as we have seen and then it was turned into a gambling club this was the Coventry House Club an attempt to revive the glories and profits of Crockford's happily or unhappily it was not a success and came to an end in 1854 after that 106 was for a short time the residence of the French ambassador and now of course it still has a diplomatic atmosphere about it as the St. James's Club the Comte de Flou French ambassador here in 1860 was a man of distinction a handsome and attractive man he began life as an ed to come to the First Napoleon and ended it as Chancellor of the Legion of Honor it is his wife however who comes naturally into these pages who may be supposed to have come to Piccadilly with joy and to have quitted it with regret she was a Scotswoman, Margaret Mercer who became Baroness Keith in her own right and afterwards Baroness Neon a superfluity of titles she had to sign herself M M de Flou K N and Harriet Lady Granville who lived much with her in Paris calls her in her letters, indifferently Meg Mercer Madame de Flou and Lady Keith called by whatever name she was if not a sweet woman a clever, sincere and staunch one and it is perhaps one of the many pitties that he did not marry her idle to guess, no doubt and it may not have been in Byron's character to live happily with any wife yet I think it is one's experience of life that where two poor human things who must live together obviously exasperate one another the trouble comes not of any glaring fault of character or conduct on this side or that so often as from some subtle opposition of view or temper recognition and analysis Miss Mercer, as she was then and Byron might not have agreed together as he too late thought they would have but there was the chance in any case there was a time when the world gave them to one another and the lady it seemed would not have refused she was one of the few who stood by him when the world took his separation from his wife so indignantly there is a story that at Lady Jersey's when the other women drew back their skirts, those virtuous skirts of 1816 to avoid touching him she said, you ought to have married me it is certain that when he took ship at Dover he turned to Scrope Davies and gave him a little parcel for Miss Mercer and said, tell her that if I had been fortunate enough to marry a woman like her I should not now be obliged to exile myself from my country certainly she was a woman of kindness and spirit these qualities are well attested by Harriet Lady Granville whose long periods as ambassadress in Paris led to an intimacy with her country woman a bond between them must have been a secret dislike or expressed only to their friends at home of the French society of the restoration and afterwards of the Louis-Philippe regime in which they lived per force one is so used to hearing the manners of English people sharply criticised by foreigners who like to take this odd method of showing the excellence of their own that it refreshes one to find in Lady Granville's correspondence the tables turned I take it her authority is unquestionable she was a most popular and successful ambassadress and cannot have written out of peak and her good nature the kindly humour she had for all or very nearly all her acquaintance is evident on every page but she could not abide the heirs and rudenesses of French aristocracy in those periods and gives instances of atrocities which more than justify her one of these concerns Madame de Flau I think Lady Keith she writes is more popular than she was and she deserves to be so for she is very civil and very sensible and is always delighted to open her house but her manner is hard and the French part of the society evidently go to see Flau and not her some of the pretty women treat her with a neglect that makes my blood boil the other evening I went there to a small soiree of about a dozen people one of these impertinent women came shook hands with Flau came straight up to me with a profound curtsy and pretty speech and then sat down with her back and said to Margaret it was so marked that she had the good sense to burst into a loud laugh which made the woman turn round and apologise during which Margaret nodded to me as much as to say you see now all I told you is true I think Madame Boni de Castellane felt ashamed of herself Flau did much to atone for the bétis of his country women he pays her the greatest attentions she was to be an anxious sufferer after dinner yesterday to go and sit two hours with her when she was ill still one cannot doubt she was glad to be among her old friends again when she came to 106 Piccadilly though I fear many of them must have been dead by then Lady Granville describes her in 1842 she had lost a child as much softened in manner very much subdued in spirits very agreeable the woman the asperity of her countenance gone and the finest teeth in the world so we can imagine her fairly well at 106 Piccadilly a shrewd sensible woman as I take it with a touch of brusquery probably a Scots woman of the rather severe type contrasted effectively with a very lively and engaging French husband perpetually young I wish she had lived 40 years earlier in 1909 with Byron the last of this trinity 107 I would had all the romantic and glorious associations of Piccadilly in itself for reader it happens now to be a club to which I have most resorted these dozen years and more associations are being made for it doubt you not and have been since the club was there perhaps if my reminiscences are published you shall read of them meanwhile all there is to say of the house is that it has a delightful association with Lord Rosebury since it was a present to him on his marriage from his father-in-law Baron Mayer de Rothschild and that otherwise it is connected wholly with that great family shall I try my hand at the romance of money well I confess I find the humanity of the subject a thought too difficult Nathan Mayer Rothschild for example who was the third son of the founder and who lived at 107 till his death in 1836 was the sort of man whom a previous generation held up to the reverence and imitation of the young he was entirely engrossed in making money he told Spore that the only music he cared for was the rattle of money he also said if I remember rightly that he could not afford to know an unlucky man that he had the humor to say take two chairs to a self-important visitor is to his credit but I am not disposed at the moment to write an appreciation of him End of chapter 9 Chapter 10 of Ghosts of Piccadilly this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Peter Yersley The Ghosts of Piccadilly by G. S. Street Chapter 10 The Great Duke My concern with the Duke of Wellington is not as he moved in battle or the council chamber but in drawing-rooms and dining-rooms and the public street as he appeared to his friends and others who sought him in Apsley House or to the world at large as he rode or walked in Piccadilly I am concerned to picture him as a habit as he lived familiarly even so I might well be fearful that the range of my local theme had brought me to a point where I had best make a silent reverence and pass on the weight of so forceful a tradition as this lies heavy on one still This man has stood to England as a very incarnation of eminence and greatness and in truth he was in character as in achievement and beyond question a great man O civic muse to such a name to such a name for ages long to such a name preserve a broad approach of fame and ever echoing avenues of song But who am I that I should gossip of him in conversational prose? Well, he comes into the subject I have chosen and would have been the last man living to be patient with me and niggling before it I can say that whether or no I interest my readers in my view at least I am profoundly interested myself One word of the background the first known occupant of the site of Apsley house was appropriately enough an old soldier named Allen to whom so tradition goes George II gave a piece of ground at Hyde Park corner having recognized him as an old acquaintance of Dettingen of which battle George was not unreasonably proud Allen's wife kept a stall here and when Lord Chancellor Apsley afterwards Lord Bathurst started building in 1771 from designs by the Adams she brought an action against him and forced him to compensate her handsomely it was unkindly said to be a suit between two old women that is all the pre-Wellington history of Apsley house the duke enlarged it and cased the old house which was of red brick with bath stone I will not caviel at his taste it was characteristic of him to be enchanted with his possessions and his opinion of this result was extremely high at any rate he could hardly have had his dwelling on a more delightful spot parked on two sides and in his day with a much more open run than now to Kensington number one London was then an appropriate description of it let us look hard at the duke in the mind's eye happily in this case the light is good for we have portraits and minute descriptions and the memory of living men the late Duke of Argyle who went to call on him at Apsley house in 1847 tells us that what struck one most in his appearance was not his high aquiline nose which is so prominent in all the pictures but his splendid eyes they were blue in colour and very round and very large the eyelids cutting across them very high up but not leaving them uncovered they arrested all one's attention in a moment one thought no more of the beaky nose or of the small and firm mouth I do not remember any other description that insists so exclusively on his eyes but with a copy of the engraving after Lawrence before me as I write I can well believe in it splendid, force-right well-opened eyes they are with the fine prominence of their own quality not at all protruding blue simply says the Duke of Argyle a dark violet blue or grey says Mr. Gleeg his biographer exact agreement about eyes is rare to find but a deep blue we may take there to have been then of course there is the aquiline nose beaky even too beaky on a mean face but merely giving point and command to his the eyebrows straight and thick but not bushy the forehead almost low but broad and square the mouth small a little tight at the corners the jaw strong, the chin prominent and firm a grave expression habitually a winning smile on occasion he was five feet nine inches high very erect at least until his latter years when observers differ probably he bore himself like a soldier still by instinct and drooped in inattention he was broad-shouldered and deep-chested with finely made hands and feet then you must regard his dress probably Zachary in Pendenis you remember when he stops to speak to the major walking with pen describes him as he was most familiar to Londoners in a blue frock coat and spotless black trousers in a white stock with a shining buckle behind Mr. Gleeg adds to this as his civilian dress in summer a low-crowned narrow brimmed hat and a white waistcoat in winter the hat and stock and frock coat remained the same but the trousers were blue and blue or red the waistcoat Sir William Fraser tells us that the hat had a very clean lining of pale yellow leather I like to think of Sir William taking it up in the hall and making his note on it he confuses us a little about the trousers surely this does not bore you with the statements that they were of Oxford mixture except on the 1st of May when they were white I believe he is wrong but forgive him for the knowledge that the Duke always carried two cambrick pocket handkerchiefs you are watching the Duke in Piccadilly and you are to add to your observation the curiosity and deep respect with which all his fellow citizens regarded him in passing Penn for example on the occasion I have quoted was in ecstasy over the encounter the Duke gave the elder Pendenis a finger of a pipe-clade glove to shake which the major embraced with great veneration and all Penn's blood tingled as he found himself in actual communication as it were with this famous man for Penn had possession of the major's left arm whilst that gentleman's other wing was engaged with his graces right and he wished all Greyfriars school all Oxford University all Paternoster Row and the temple and Laura and his mother at Fair Oaks could be standing on each side of the street to see the meeting between him and his uncle and the most famous Duke in Christendom a friend of mine remembers seeing the Duke in 1851 the year of the exhibition and the year before his death cantering along Piccadilly on a small white cob upright in the saddle with his cane held to his hat in salute and the people uncovering as to royalty even the late Duke of Argyle felt diffident and nervous when as a young man he went to ask a favour of the venerable hero he takes us with him by the way into Apsley House into a large room on the ground floor to the western side of the Piccadilly front it was full of articles in much confusion of writing tables with blue books of articles of clothing hung on screens and of furniture with no definite arrangement the Duke presently entered by a side door and what manner of man truly and intimately was it behind the white stock and the blue frock coat had we been present invisible at this interview we should have heard him putting a piece of paper at ease giving sound advice on the matter in question readily promising his aid yes but the Duke of Argyle was of his own class and society it is certain that he lived by choice almost exclusively in that class even his biographer Mr. Gleeg again admits that the circle in which he chiefly moved was that of fashionable ladies and gentlemen who pressed themselves upon him it is said that he liked their flattery which is true to some extent no doubt and it is hinted that he was something approaching to a snob which is ridiculous he was born in that class he had a strong sense of caste which in his time was a reality and he was most at home in it that is all but it is curious to note the different reports of him from those in and outside it when we have allowed for the immense prestige of him from Waterloo onwards we still must think there was something of superficial coldness and aloofness in his personality to leave so much in awe in the minds of those who merely spoke with him as it were at a distance and then turn for contrast to his letters to Dearest Georgie the late Lady De Ross who died a non-agenarian and was one of his girl favourites about the romping at Mont Saint-Martin the men harnessed and dragging the ladies about on rugs the night before the ladies drew me the petty tour and afterwards Lord Hill the grand tour but the fat, fair and faulty and M was so knocked up that some of us were obliged to go into the harness although we had already run many stages or follow him through Lady Granville's letters the Duke as merry as a Grig the Bonomi and adorable qualities of the Duke the Duke acting in charades or the poor beau his significant nickname is much hurried being considered to go along with favours and cakes when a Tory marries and so forth and then my mind goes back to Haydn's account of him at Walmer reading the paper after dinner while the painter sat gazing at his grey head in silent reverence admiring him as something near divine again the popular tradition of him much supported by evidence is of a stern man hard, curt, a foe to emotion even some of those who knew him more or less familiarly report him blunt, matter of fact and if not unfeeling certainly this side of sensibility there is Thomas Crevy's interview with him in Brussels immediately after Waterloo he made a variety of observations in his short natural blunt way but with the greatest gravity all the time and without the least approach anything like triumph or joy it has been a damn serious business he said that is not exactly unfeeling and it is thoroughly of his nation and his class in its sporting metaphor and its plain statement one admires the absence of personal triumphing on the one side but one misses the imaginative feeling for the horror of all that slaughter well it merely was not for Mr. Crevy we know from rakes that when at this same time the Duke went to the rooms of his niece Lady Fitzroy Somerset he burst into a flood of tears when Mrs. Arbuthno his most intimate friend among women died he was called unfeeling because as Charles Greville says he had the good taste and sense to smooth his brow and go to the House of Lords with a cheerful aspect but we know how he could feel the death of a friend he who sat with the tears streaming down his cheeks at the funeral service for Arbuthno we know too from Gleeg how when that friend's fatal illness was told to him he seized the doctor's hand and protested brokenly no no he's not very ill not very bad he'll get better let's die one remembers these and many stories like them and one looks at the portrait and one sees surely that those eyes and that mouth are not of an unfeeling man very greatly otherwise it is no wild guess that this was a man who felt both strongly and readily and living in high places with curious eyes ever on him had the habit of cloaking his feelings as best he might his feelings were not for him of course he was blind to art and books also that too is in the eyes he was proud and by nature contemptuous of what to him was little those were intellectual limitations to feeling when the passage was clear there was no hard substance of nature to check it and if one thinks of his pride of class of his contempt for the mob one should remember some facts about him and it all his life he had done his duty to his country single-heartedly with immense personal success to be sure but also with much hardship and strain of energies and in the teeth of Calumny in 1831 he was honestly opposed to reform the king was to dissolve parliament but the Duke could not go to the House of Lords because his wife was dying in Apsley House she died as the guns in the park began to fire and presently came a yelling crowd before Apsley House and in a while stones crashing through the windows breaking them in pieces and destroying pictures within what wonder that he kept the iron shutters to his windows to the day of his death twelve years later an immense mob cheering this time followed him up Constitution Hill the Duke took no notice whatever but trotted leisurely to Apsley House then he stopped at the gate pointed to those iron shutters bowed to the mob and silently rode into the court he was not a democratic politician remember also that if he despised the common man he was punctiliously courteous to him no great man ever took so much trouble about small men as he those innumerable autograph letters beginning F.M. the Duke of Wellington present his compliments to Mr. Buggins or Master Brown or what not his peculiar humour half playful half grim no doubt made him sometimes rejoice in his answers Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington has received a letter from Mr. Tompkins stating that the Marquis of Duro is in debt to his mother Mrs. Tompkins the Duke of Wellington is not the Marquis of Duro the Duke regrets to find that his eldest son has not paid his washerwoman's bill Mrs. Tompkins has no claim upon the Duke of Wellington the Duke recommends her failing another application to place the matter in the hands of a respectable solicitor in this case he was hoaxed Mr. Tompkins the distressed washerwoman's son was a collector of autographs and of course he was often hoaxed over his charities which were large and incessant he admitted once that an officer of the mendicity society had given him the severest scolding of his life if he despised common people he never pandered to great personages it was to the credit of George IV that he always had a great respect for the Duke whom he called Arthur it is not much to the discredit of the Duke that he had little or no respect for George IV of whom he once told Crevy condemning the regent's bulk and blasphemy in pretty forcible language of his own that he was ashamed to enter a room with him and he told Lady DeRosse that when George and Charles X were together George with his flourish and display might have passed for his valet I must not repeat stories at large but if the reader has not heard it this one it is irrelevant I know helps to fix the Duke's manner and humour were you surprised at Waterloo Duke asked some fool at a dinner no with his charming smile I am now and now I come to what after all is most to the purpose in my sketch of the Duke in his social side his relations with women he was susceptible as it used to be called in an extreme degree and like most susceptible people he was inconstant his marriage was finally characteristic the lady's family disapproved of the engagement and he serving abroad had not seen her for years she suffered disfigurement from the smallpox and wrote to release him whatever the sentimental traditions of romance might require I fancy that most men given the circumstances would have acquiesced in their freedom but though another person might release Arthur Wellesley from a promise he could not release himself he returned to England and married the lady and they lived unhappily more or less ever after I hope that this conduct may balance in my moralizing reader's mind something at least of conduct that he will condemn I believe that most of the Duke's intimacies with women were innocent he was soft about them was amused by them liked to indulge them but there is no use in pretending that he thought much of chastity or that his life was chased we will not pursue an argument which might annoy the reader and to me would be stupid and tiresome as we study great men of the active and commanding sort in history we find that most of them seem not to have been naturally monogamous if we must judge we should judge comparatively our modern habit of reticence and silence has induced a false perspective that is all I feel disposed to say the great Duke got himself into little scrapes no doubt whatever he never escapes the consequences of a fault by committing what he would have considered a greater one we know the famous answer to the threat of exposure publish and be damned in the year 1825 there were published the memoirs of Harriet Wilson a celebrated courtesan Walter Scott notes the occurrence in his journal and says it had kept the gay world in hot water he recollects having met Miss Wilson and congratulates himself that her memory was not so good as his it is I must confess a most amusing book written really I suppose by some hack of letters from Harriet's confidences and suggestions but it's attempts at pathos and sentiment are exceedingly nauseous the Duke figures largely in it in 1816 Lady Francis Webster Byron's old friend was accused by one Baldwin of misconduct with the Duke she prosecuted for libel and got 2000 pounds damages but I fear the world must have smiled there were other scrapes but I am sure it was softness and kindness not Libertinism which most often involved him Lady Caroline Lamb also Byron's old friend set her cap at him in 1815 Nothing is Agissant writes Lady Granville from Paris but Caroline William in a purple riding habit tormenting everybody but I am convinced ready primed for an attack upon the Duke of Wellington and I have no doubt that she will to a certain extent succeed as no dose of flattery is too strong for him to swallow or her to administer There it was you see he had this reputation for softness and accessibility to women once when he left Woburn prematurely on the plea of cabinet business in London the indignant Duchess of Bedford wrote after him Dear Duke for cabinet read Boudoir yours GB Yes I fear he had this reputation Charles Greville who knew him well and whose brother Algernon was his secretary for 35 years writing about his intimacy with Madame Grasini adds that these habits of female intimacy and gossip led him to take a great interest in a thousand petty affairs in which he delighted to be mixed up and consulted a pity perhaps that he so wasted valuable time but I do not think there was much harm in it all and what return did women make him for all his interest and devotion one of low degree made copy out of him as we have seen another of high degree according to Sir William Fraser but then Sir William was wrong about the trousers threatened him with an action but on the good side I suppose Duke said a woman to him once you have inspired a great deal of admiration and enthusiasm among women during your life Oh yes plenty of that, plenty of that but no woman ever loved me never in my whole life it is a sad commentary on all the stories and scandals likely as not he spoke the truth for the Duke's nature was above all things masculine one of which that very softness about women is an indication and masculine men when they achieve great things before the world have as he said admiration and enthusiasm from women in plenty one of men most commonly as I believe for weaknesses they understand and share I may be wrong and I rather fear to pursue the analysis let us hope the Duke was deceived I was the only thing he ever loved said the complacent lady Jersey after his death let us hope that somewhere or other lived a woman who might have said the converse so we see the great Duke as he was loving friends, gay affectionate, generous loving a simple joke loving flattery a little over much loving women a few too many we may fancy him in his dining room at Apsley house courteous, talking freely without the least preoccupation with his own reputation or position downright, prejudiced and to the best of his understanding just we may follow him in his daily habits at all hearty we may imagine him with strangers and slight acquaintances punctilius, humorous a little oddly blunt and grim at times and thanks to painted and written records we see him vividly all the time and so we part with him but Piccadilly has a memory of him other than of the living man a great memory of one of the two great funeral processions of our time and reverent crowd the strains of the dead march and more solemn than all else the silent tramp of his soldiers the end of chapter 10