Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad with Tales and Miscellanies Now First Collected Volume II Part 10

ALTHORPE.

A FRAGMENT.

It was on such a day as I have seen in Italy in the month of December, but which, in our chill climate, seemed so unseasonably, so ominously beautiful, that it was like the hectic loveliness brightening the eyes and flus.h.i.+ng the cheek of consumption,--that I found myself in the domains of Althorpe. Autumn, dying in the lap of Winter, looked out with one bright parting smile;--the soft air breathed of Summer; the withered leaves, heaped on the path, told a different tale. The slant, pale sun shone out with all heaven to himself; not a cloud was there, not a breeze to stir the leafless woods--those venerable woods, which Evelyn loved and commemorated:[67] the fine majestic old oaks, scattered over the park, tossed their huge bare arms against the blue sky; a thin h.o.a.r frost, dissolving as the sun rose higher, left the lawns and hills sparkling and glancing in its ray; now and then a hare raced across the open glade--

"And with her feet she from the plashy earth Raises a mist, which glittering in the sun, Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run."

Nothing disturbed the serene stillness except a pheasant whirring from a neighbouring thicket, or at intervals the belling of the deer--a sound so peculiar, and so fitted to the scene, that I sympathized in the taste of one of the n.o.ble progenitors of the Spencers, who had built a hunting-lodge in a sequestered spot, that he might hear "the harte bell."

This was a day, an hour, a scene, with all its a.s.sociations, its quietness and beauty, "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart."

All worldly cares and pains were laid asleep; while memory, fancy, and feeling waked. Althorpe does not frown upon us in the gloom of remote antiquity; it has not the warlike glories of some of the baronial residences of our old n.o.bility; it is not built like a watch-tower on a hill, to lord it over feudal va.s.sals; it is not bristled with battlements and turrets. It stands in a valley, with the gradual hills undulating round it, clothed with rich woods. It has altogether a look of compactness and comfort, without pretension, which, with the pastoral beauty of the landscape, and low situation, recall the ancient vocation of the family, whose grandeur was first founded, like that of the patriarchs of old, on the mult.i.tude of their flocks and herds.[68] It was in the reign of Henry the Eighth that Althorpe became the princ.i.p.al seat of the Spencers, and no place of the same date can boast so many delightful, romantic, and historical a.s.sociations. There is Spenser the poet, "high-priest of all the Muses' mysteries," who modestly claimed, as an honour, his relations.h.i.+p to those Spencers who now, with a just pride, boast of _him_, and deem his Faery Queen "the brightest jewel in their coronet;" and the beautiful Alice Spencer, countess of Derby, who was celebrated in early youth by her poet-cousin, and for whom Milton, in her old age, wrote his "Arcades." At Althorpe, in 1603, the queen and son of James the First were, on their arrival in England, n.o.bly entertained with a masque, written for the occasion by Ben Jonson, in which the young ladies and n.o.bles of the country enacted nymphs and fairies, satyrs and hunters, and danced to the sound of "excellent soft music," their scenery the natural woods, their stage the green lawn, their canopy the summer sky. What poetical picturesque hospitality!

In these days it would have been a dinner, with French cooks and confectioners express from London to dress it. Here lived Waller's famous Sacharissa, the first Lady Sunderland--so beautiful and good, so interesting in herself, she needed not his wit nor his poetry to enshrine her. Here she parted from her young husband,[69] when he left her to join the king in the field; and here, a few months after, she received the news of his death in the battle of Newbury, and saw her happiness wrecked at the age of three-and-twenty. Here plotted her distinguished son, that Proteus of politics, the second Lord Sunderland.

Charles the First was playing at bowls on the green at Althorpe, when Colonel Joyce's detachment surprised him, and carried him off to imprisonment and to death. Here the excellent and accomplished Evelyn used to meditate in the "n.o.ble gallerie," and in the "ample gardens," of which he has left us an admiring and admirable description, which would be as suitable today as it was a hundred and fifty years ago, with the single exception of the great proprietor, deservedly far more honoured in this generation than was his apostate time-serving ancestor, the Lord Sunderland of Evelyn's day.[70] When the Spencers were divided, the eldest branch of the family becoming Dukes of Marlborough and the youngest Earls Spencer--if the former inherited glory, Blenheim, and poverty--to the latter have belonged more true and more substantial distinctions: for the last three generations the Spencers have been remarked for talents, for benevolence, for constancy, for love of literature, and patronage of the fine arts.

The house retains the form described by Evelyn--that of a half H: a slight irregularity is caused by the new gothic room, built by the present earl, to contain part of his magnificent library, which, like the statue in the Castle of Otranto, had grown "too big for what contained it." We entered by a central door the large and lofty hall, or vestibule, hung round with pictures of fox-chases and those who figured in them, famous hunters, quadruped and biped, all as large as life, spread over as much canva.s.s as would make a mainsail for a man-of-war.

These huge perpetrations are of the time of Jack Spencer, a noted Nimrod in his day; and are very fine, as we were told, but they did not interest me. I had caught a glimpse of the superb staircase, hung round with pictures above and below, and not the less interesting as having been erected by Sacharissa herself during the few years she was mistress of Althorpe. A face looked at us from over an opposite door, which there was no resisting. Does the reader remember Horace Walpole's pleasant description of a party of _seers_ posting through the apartments of a show-place? "They come; ask what such a room is called?--write it down; admire a lobster or cabbage in a Dutch market piece; dispute whether the last room was green or purple; and then hurry to the inn, for fear the fish should be over-dressed."[71] We were not such a party; but with imaginations ready primed to take fire, and memories enriched with all the a.s.sociations the place could suggest, to us every portrait was a history. The orthodox style of seeing the house is to turn to the left, and view the ground-floor apartments first; but the face I have mentioned seemed to beckon me straight-forward, and I could not choose but obey the invitation: it was that of Lady Bridgewater, the loveliest of the four lovely daughters of the Duke of Marlborough: she had the misfortune to be painted by Jervas, and the good fortune to be celebrated by Pope as the "tender sister, daughter, friend, and wife;" and again--

"Thence Beauty, waking, all her forms supplies-- An angel's sweetness--or Bridgewater's eyes."

Jervas was supposed to have been presumptuously and desperately in love with this beautiful woman, who died at the age of five-and-twenty: hence Pope has taken the liberty--by a poetical licence, no doubt--to call her, in his Epistle to Jervas, "_thy_ Bridgewater." Two of her fair sisters, the d.u.c.h.ess of Montagu and Lady G.o.dolphin, hung near her; and above, her fairer sister, Lady Sunderland. Ascending the magnificent staircase, a hundred faces look down upon us, in a hundred different varieties of expression, in a hundred different costumes. Here are Queen Anne and Sarah d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough placed amicably side by side, as in the days of their romantic friends.h.i.+p, when they conversed and corresponded as Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman: the beauty, the intellect, the spirit, are all on the side of the imperious d.u.c.h.ess; the poor queen looks like what she was, a good-natured fool. On the left is the cunning abigail, who supplanted the d.u.c.h.ess in the favour of Queen Anne--Mrs.

Masham. Proceeding along the gallery, we are met by the portrait of that angel-devil, Lady Shrewsbury,[72] whose exquisite beauty fascinates at once and shocks the eye like the gorgeous colours of an adder. I believe the story of her holding the Duke of Buckingham's horse while he shot her husband in a duel, has been disputed; but her attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate Killegrew, while she sat by in her carriage,[73] is too true. So far had her depravities uns.e.xed her!

----"Lorsque la vertu, avec peine abjuree, Nous fait voir une femme a ses fureurs livree, S'irritant par l'effort que ce pas a coute, Son ame avec plus d'art a plus de cruaute."

She was even less famous for the number of her lovers, than the catastrophes of which she was the cause.

"Had ever nymph such reason to be glad?

Two in a duel fell, and one ran mad."

Not two, but half a dozen fell in duels; and if her lovers "ran mad,"

it was in despite, not in despair. Lady Shrewsbury is past jesting or satire; and after a first involuntary pause of admiration before her matchless beauty, we turn away with horror. For the rest of the portraits on this vast staircase, it would take a volume to give a _catalogue raisonnee_ of them. We pa.s.s, then, into a corridor hung with two large and very mediocre landscapes, representing Tivoli and Terni.

Any attempt, even the best, to paint a cataract _must_ be abortive. How render to the fancy the two grandest of its features--sound and motion?

the thunder and the tumult of the headlong waters? We will pa.s.s on to the gallery, and lose ourselves in its enchantments.

Where shall we begin?--Any where. Throw away the catalogue: all are old acquaintances. We are tempted to speak to them, and they look as if they could curtsey to us. The very walls breathe around us. What Vand.y.k.es--what Lelys--what Sir Joshuas! what a congregation of all that is beauteous and n.o.ble!--what Spencers, Sydneys, Digbys, Russells, Cavendishes, and Churchills!--O what a scene to moralize, to philosophize, to sentimentalize in!--what histories in those eyes, that look, yet see not!--what sermons on those lips, that all but speak; I would rather reflect in a picture-gallery, than elegize in a churchyard. The "poca polvere che nulla sente," can only tell us we must die; these, with a more useful and deep-felt morality, tell us how to live.

Yet I cannot say I felt thus pensive and serious the first time I looked round the gallery at Althorpe. Curiosity, excitement, interest, admiration--a crowd of quick successive images and recollections fleeting across the memory--left me no time to think. I remember being startled, the moment I entered, by a most extraordinary picture,--the second Prince of Orange, and his preceptor Katts, by Flinck. The eyes of the latter are really shockingly alive; they stare out of the canva.s.s, and glitter and fascinate like those of a serpent. If I had been a Roman Catholic, I should have crossed myself, as I looked at them, to s.h.i.+eld me from their evil and supernatural expression.[74] The picture of the two Sforzas, Maximilian and his brother Francis, by Albert Durer, is quite a curiosity; and so is another, by Holbein, near it, containing the portraits of Henry the Eighth, his daughter Mary, and his jester, Will Somers,--all full of individuality and truth. The expression in Mary's face, at once saturnine, discontented and vulgar, is especially full of character. These last three pictures are curious and valuable as specimens of art; but they are not pleasing. We turn to the matchless Vand.y.k.es, at once admirable as paintings, and yet more interesting as portraits. A full-length of his master and friend, Rubens, dressed in black, is magnificent; the att.i.tude particularly graceful. Near the centre of the gallery is the charming full-length of Queen Henrietta Maria, a well-known and celebrated picture. She is dressed in white satin, and stands near a table on which is a vase of white roses, and, more in the shade, her regal crown. Nothing can be in finer taste than the contrast between the rich, various, but subdued colours of the carpet and background, and the delicate, and harmonious, and brilliant tints which throw out the figure. None of the pictures I had hitherto seen of Henrietta, either in the king's private collection, or at Windsor, do justice to the sparkling grace of her figure, or the vivacity and beauty of her eyes, so celebrated by all the contemporary poets. Waller, for instance:--

"Could Nature then no private woman grace, Whom we might dare to love, with such a face, Such a complexion, and so radiant eyes, Such lovely motion, and such sharp replies?"

Davenant styles her, very beautifully, "The rich-eyed darling of a monarch's breast." Lord Holland, in the description he sent from Paris, dwells on the charm of her eyes, her smile, and her graceful figure, though he admits her to be rather _pet.i.te_; and if the poet and the courtier be distrusted, we have the authority of the puritanic Sir Symond d'Ewes, who allows the influence of her "excellent and sparkling black eyes." Henrietta could be very seductive, and had all the French grace of manner; but, as is well known, she could play the virago, "and cast such a scowl, as frightened all the lords and ladies in waiting."

Too much importance is attached to her character and her influence over her husband, in the histories of that time. She was a fascinating, but a superficial and volatile Frenchwoman. With all her feminine love of sway, she had not sufficient energy to govern; and with all her disposition to intrigue, she never had discretion enough to keep her own or the king's secrets. When she rushed through a storm of bullets to save a favourite lap-dog; or when, amid the shrieks and entreaties of her terrified attendants, she commanded the captain of her vessel to "blow up the s.h.i.+p rather than strike to the Parliamentarian,"--it was more the spirit and wilfulness of a woman, who, with all her faults, had the blood of Henri Quatre in her veins, than the mental energy and resolute fort.i.tude of a heroine. Near her hangs her daughter, who inherited her grace, her beauty, her petulance,--the unhappy Henriette d'Orleans,[75] fair, radiant, and lively, with a profusion of beautiful hair; it is impossible to look from the mother to the daughter, without remembering the scene in Retz's memoirs, when the queen said to him, in excuse for her daughter's absence, "My poor Henrietta is obliged to lie in bed, for I have no wood to make a fire for her--et la pauvre enfant etait transie de froid."

Another picture by Vand.y.k.e hangs at the top of the room, one of the grandest and most spirited of his productions. It represents William, the first Duke of Bedford, the father of Lord William Russell, when young, and his brother-in-law, the famous (and infamous) Digby, Earl of Bristol. How admirably Vand.y.k.e has caught the characters of the two men!--the fine commanding form of the duke, as he steps forward, the frank, open countenance, expressive of all that is good and n.o.ble, speak him what he was--not less than that of Digby, which, though eminently handsome, has not one elevated or amiable trait in the countenance; the drapery, background, and more especially the hands, are magnificently painted. On one side of this superb picture, hangs the present Earl Spencer when a youth; and on the other, his sister, Georgiana d.u.c.h.ess of Devons.h.i.+re, at the age of eighteen, looking all life and high-born loveliness, and reminding one of Coleridge's beautiful lines to her:--

"Light as a dream your days their circlets ran From all that teaches brotherhood to man, Far, far removed! from want, from grief, from fear!

Obedient music lull'd your infant ear; Obedient praises soothed your infant heart; Emblazonments and old ancestral crests, With many a bright obtrusive form of art, Detain'd your eye from nature. Stately vests, That veiling strove to deck your charms divine, Rich viands and the pleasurable wine, Were yours unearn'd by toil."----

And he thus beautifully alludes to her maternal character; for this accomplished woman set the example to the highest ranks, of nursing her own children:--

"You were a mother! at your bosom fed The babes that loved you. You, with laughing eye, Each twilight thought, each nascent feeling read, Which you yourself created."

Alas, that such a beginning should have such an end!

Both these are whole-lengths, by Sir Joshua Reynolds: the middle tints are a little flown, else they were perfect; they suffer by being hung near the glowing yet mellowed tints of Vand.y.k.e.

We have here a whole bevy of the heroines of De Grammont, delightful to those who have what Walpole used to call the "De Grammont madness"

upon them. Here is that beautiful, audacious termagant, Castlemaine, very like her picture at Windsor, and with the same characteristic bit of storm gleaming in the background.--Lady Denham,[76] the wife of the poet, Sir John Denham, and niece of that Lord Bristol who figures in Vand.y.k.e's picture above mentioned--a lovely creature, and a sweet picture.--Louise de Querouaille, d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth, who so long ruled the heart and councils of Charles the Second, in Lely's finest style; the face has a look of blooming innocence, soon exchanged for coa.r.s.eness and arrogance.--The indolent, alluring Middleton, looking from under her sleepy eyelids, "trop coquette pour rebuter personne."--"La Belle Hamilton," the lovely prize of the volatile De Grammont; very like her portrait at Windsor, with the same finely formed bust and compressed ruby lips, but with an expression more vivacious and saucy, and less elevated.--Two portraits of Nell Gwyn, with the fair brown air and small bright eyes they ought to have; _au reste_, with such prim, sanctified mouths, and dressed with such elaborate decency, that instead of reminding us of the "parole sciolte d'ogni freno, risi, vezzi, giuochi"--they are more like Beck Marshall, the puritan's daughter, on her good behaviour.[77]

Here is that extraordinary woman Hortense Mancini, d.u.c.h.ess of Mazarin, the fame of whose beauty and gallantries filled all Europe, and once the intended wife of Charles the Second, though she afterwards intrigued in vain for the less (or more) eligible post of _maitresse en t.i.tre_. What an extraordinary, wild, perverted, good-for-nothing, yet interesting set of women, were those four Mancini sisters! all victims, more or less, to the pride, policy, or avarice, of their cardinal uncle; all gifted by nature with the fervid Italian blood and the plotting Italian brain; all really _aventurieres_, while they figured as d.u.c.h.esses and princesses.

They wore their coronets and ermine as strolling players wear their robes of state--with a sort of picturesque awkwardness--and they proved rather too scanty to cover a mult.i.tude of sins.

This head of Hortense Mancini, as Cleopatra dissolving the pearl, is the most spirited, but the least beautiful portrait I have seen of her. An appropriate pendant on the opposite side is her lover, philosopher, and eulogist, the witty St. Evremond--Grammont's "Caton de Normandie;" but instead of looking like a good-natured epicurean, a man "who thought as he liked, and liked what he thought,"[78] his nose is here wrinkled up into an expression of the most supercilious scorn, adding to his native ugliness.[79] Both these are by Kneller. Farther on, is another of Charles's beauties, whose _sagesse_ has never been disputed--Elizabeth Wriothesley, Countess of Northumberland, the sister of that half saint, half heroine, and _all_ woman--Lady Russell.

There is also a lovely picture of that magnificent brunette, Miss Bagot.

"Elle avait," says Hamilton, "ce teint rembruni qui plait tant quand il plait." She married Berkeley Lord Falmouth, a man who, though unprincipled, seems to have loved her; at least, was not long enough her husband to forget to be her lover: he was killed, shortly after his marriage, in the battle of Southwold-bay. This is a.s.suredly one of the most splendid pictures Lely ever painted; and it is, besides, full of character and interest. She holds a cannon-ball in her lap, (only an airy emblematical cannon-ball, for she poises it like a feather,) and the countenance is touched with a sweet expression of melancholy: hence it is plain that she sat for it soon after the death of her first husband, and before her marriage with the witty Earl of Dorset.--Near her hangs another fair piece of witchcraft, "La Belle Jennings," who in her day played with hearts as if they had been billiard b.a.l.l.s; and no wonder, considering what _things_ she had to deal with:[80] there was a great difference between her vivacity and that of her vivacious sister, the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough.--Old Sarah hangs near her. One would think that Kneller, in spite, had watched the moment to take a characteristic likeness, and catch, not the Cynthia, but the Fury of the minute; as for instance, when she cut off her luxuriant tresses, so wors.h.i.+pped by her husband, and flung them in his face; for so she tosses back her disdainful head, and curls her lip like an insolent, pouting, spoiled, grown-up baby. The life of this woman is as fine a lesson on the emptiness of all worldly advantages, boundless wealth, power, fame, beauty, wit, as ever was set forth by moralist or divine.

"By spirit robb'd of power--by warmth, of friends-- By wealth, of followers! without one distress, Sick of herself through very selfishness."[81]

And yet I suspect that the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough has never met with justice. History knows her only as Marlborough's wife, an intriguing dame d'honneur, and a cast-off favourite. Vituperated by Swift, satirized by Pope, ridiculed by Walpole--what angel could have stood such bedaubing, and from such pens?

"O she has fallen into a pit of ink!"

But glorious talents she had, strength of mind, generosity, the power to feel and inspire the strongest attachment,--and all these qualities were degraded, or rendered useless, by _temper_! Her avarice was not the love of money for its own sake, but the love of power; and her bitter contempt for "knaves and fools" may be excused, if not justified. Imagine such a woman as the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough out-faced, out-plotted by that crowned cypher, that sceptred commonplace, queen Anne! It should seem that the constant habit of being forced to serve, outwardly, where she really ruled,--the consciousness of her own brilliant and powerful faculties brought into immediate hourly comparison with the confined trifling understanding of her mistress, a disdain of her own forced hypocrisy, and a perception of the heartless baseness of the courtiers around her, disgusting to a mind naturally high-toned, produced at length that extreme of bitterness and insolence which made her so often "an embodied storm." She was always a termagant--but of a very different description from the vulgar Castlemaine.

Though the picture of Colonel Russell, by Dobson, is really fine as a portrait, the recollection of the scene between him and Miss Hamilton[82]--his love of dancing, to prove he was not old and asthmatical,--and his attachment to his "_chapeau pointu_," make it impossible to look at him without a smile--but a good-humoured smile, such as his lovely mistress gave him when she rejected him with so much politeness.--Arabella Churchill, the sister of the great Duke of Marlborough, and mistress of the Duke of York, has been better treated by the painter than by Hamilton; instead of "La grande creature, pale et decharnee," she appears here a very lovely woman. But enough of these equivocal ladies. No--before we leave them, there are yet two to be noticed, more equivocal, more interesting, and more extraordinary than all the rest put together--Bianca di Capello, who, from a washerwoman, became Grand d.u.c.h.ess of Florence, with less beauty than I should have expected, but as much _countenance_; and the beautiful, but appalling picture of Venitia Digby, painted after she was dead, by Vand.y.k.e: she was found one morning sitting up in her bed, leaning her head on her hand, and lifeless; and thus she is painted. Notwithstanding the ease and grace of the att.i.tude, and the delicacy of the features, there is no mistaking this for slumber: a heavier hand has pressed upon those eyelids, which will never more open to the light: there is a leaden lifelessness about them, too shockingly true and real--

"It thrills us with mortality, And curdles to the gazer's heart."

Her picture at Windsor is the most perfectly beautiful and impressive female portrait I ever saw. How have I longed, when gazing at it, to conjure her out of her frame, and bid her reveal the secret of her mysterious life and death!--Nearly opposite to the dead Venitia, in strange contrast, hangs her husband, who loved her to madness, or was mad before he married her, in the very prime of life and youth. This picture, by Cornelius Jansen, is as fine as any thing of Vand.y.k.e's: the character expresses more of intellectual power and physical strength, than of that elegance of face and form we should have looked for in such a fanciful being as Sir Kenelm Digby: he looks more like one of the Athletae than a poet, a metaphysician, and a "squire of dames."

There are three pictures of Waller's famed Sacharissa, the first Lady Sunderland: one in a hat, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, gay and blooming; the second, far more interesting, was painted about the time of her marriage with the young Earl of Sunderland, or shortly after--very sweet and lady-like. I should say that the high-breeding of the face and air was more conspicuous than the beauty; the neck and hands exquisite. Both these are Vand.y.k.e's. A third picture represents her about the time of her second marriage: the expression wholly changed--cold, sad, faded, but pretty still: one might fancy her contemplating, with a sick heart, the portrait of Lord Sunderland, the lover and husband of her early youth, who hangs on the opposite side of the gallery, in complete armour: he fell in the same battle with Lord Falkland, at the age of three-and-twenty. The brother of Sacharissa, the famous Algernon Sidney, is suspended near her; a fine head, full of contemplation and power.

Among the most interesting pictures in the gallery is an undoubted original of Lady Jane Grey. After seeing so many hideous, hard, prim-looking pictures and prints of this gentle-spirited heroine, it is consoling to trust in the genuineness of a face which has all the sweetness and dignity we look for, and ought to find. Then, by way of contrast, we have that most curious picture of Diana of Poitiers, once in the Crawfurd collection: it is a small half-length; the features fair and regular; the hair is elaborately dressed with a profusion of jewels; but there is no drapery whatever--"force pierreries et tres peu de linge," as Madame de Sevigne described the two Mancini.[83] Round the head is the legend from the 42d Psalm--"Comme le cerf braie apres le decours des eaues, ainsi brait mon ame apres toi, O Dieu," which is certainly an extraordinary application. In the days of Diana of Poitiers, the beautiful mistress of Henry the Second of France, it was the court fas.h.i.+on to sing the Psalms of David to dance and song tunes;[84] and the courtiers and beauties had each their favourite psalm, which served as a kind of _devise_: this may explain the very singular inscription on this very singular picture. Here are also the portraits of Otway and Cowley, and of Montaigne; the last from the Crawfurd collection.

I had nearly omitted to mention a magnificent whole-length of the Duc de Guise--who was stabbed in the closet of Henry the Third--whose life contains materials for ten romances and a dozen epics, and whose death has furnished subjects for as many tragedies. And not far from him that not less daring, and more successful chief, Oliver Cromwell: a page is tying on his sash. There is a vulgar power and boldness about this head, in fine contrast with the high-born, fearless, chivalrous-looking Guise.