Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  It was an inauspicious military debut, but with more sovereigns squirrelled away in his shoes, a despatch to carry to Sir James Graham, an enviable knack of survival, and the hide of Jane Austen’s Mr Collins, Stonestreet was launched on a career and a style of living that he could never have maintained at home. He had begun his service at the moment when peace seemed assured, and for the best part of a year he had had nothing worse to complain of than the irredeemable shallowness of the Belgian population, the embonpoint of their women, their ‘swarthy complexions’, the ‘Jewish cast’ of their features, the sad paucity of guillotinings in the Grande Place and the utter absence – one can hear the voice of Mr Collins expounding the virtues of Lady Catherine De Burgh’s patronage – of ‘a quiet evening with a good family’. ‘The Theatre and the Balls seem to constitute the great happiness of the People,’ he complained, ‘they begin a ball with a perfect froideur, they go on with their dangerous Waltz (in which all the English women join) and finish with the Galloparde, a completely indecent & violent romp.’

  The great influx of British civilian émigrés – Thomas Creevey and his family, the Capels and the other indigent aristocrats who had come abroad in search of cheap living – had irritatingly pushed up local prices, but the news of Bonaparte’s escape came ‘like a flash of lightning’ out of clear sky. The first reports had reached Brussels on 8 March, and within weeks the city had been transformed, with the arrival of the Duke of Wellington and his personal chaplain – that ‘pearl of parsons’ and ‘great coxcomb’, the Reverend Samuel Briscall, as Stonestreet dubbed him – putting an end to the cosy spiritual monopoly he had so far enjoyed.

  Stonestreet despised Briscall, and particularly his habit of aping Wellington’s haughty manner with subordinates, but he was far too shrewd a courtier to ‘think of fighting the Duke’ for the post at headquarters, and had instead set about securing for himself the next best thing on offer. ‘I am appointed Chaplain to the Guards,’ he reported back to George Trower on 16 May, ‘A beautiful body of more than 4,000 men … My brethren are not a little sulky that I have obtained what is considered very justly the best appointment in our department after Head Quarters. At present I combine them both. On Sunday last I performed service at nine to Sir Geo. Byng’s brigade, 3 miles from Enghien, at 11 to General Maitland’s Brigade (both Guards) at Enghien, afterwards jumped again on my saddle, and rode to Brussels in time to do duty to the English families at Three who gave me some credit for my zeal.’

  There were more solid perks that went with the job – £500 a year, fuel and rations for two servants, an occasional ‘dejeune set after marriages of great people’, a pair of silver candlesticks at Lord John Somerset’s wedding – and if it was all a long way from his placid Emsworth curacy on Chichester harbour, he had, on the whole, good reason to be pleased with the way things had turned out since the escape of Bonaparte. One of the great blessings of his new position with the Guards was the access it gave to some of the ‘leading families of the land’, and long before the campaign had opened he had indulged himself with dreams of the future: of a triumphant march into France perhaps, the possibilities of a little ‘pillaging in Paris’ and a return to Brussels, clerical preferment, a ‘bigger house’ and – who knows? – the one thing he had always wanted, ‘a good wife’ to share in his fortunes.

  It was an agreeable fantasy for a man who combined a prickly sense of his clerical rights with a healthy respect for the good things of this world, and had not ‘Old Blücher’ sworn at the great cavalry review that ‘every man of them should have a Parisian Beauty’? ‘The only hope of saving France to society,’ a pleasurably alarmed Stonestreet had reported old Marschall Vorwärts’ solution to Europe’s problems, ‘was engendering a new race, and bringing England and France together by a second rape of the Sabine Women!! Such is the bribe and there are those that reckon on it. Indeed there was so much expected when the last allies entered, that I have been informed by a young lady, she was two days bricked up in a cellar with meat and wine and bedding. All our lads call for at least three days pillage, but the general idea here is, that Paris must burn.’

  These were curious ambitions for a chaplain, even an army chaplain, but war had opened up possibilities that went far beyond a pair of silver candlesticks, and over the last three days it had been hard not to rue the missed chance of making a killing out of a little shrewd insider dealing. He knew that his brother-in-law George would feel ‘at least £10,000 out of pocket’ by his failure to keep him informed, but Stonestreet had been telling him for weeks that they knew in London what was going on in Belgium before they knew it themselves in Brussels. ‘The Gentlemen in England seem like other men, insensible of their good fortune,’ he had joshed Trower; ‘No sooner does any political event of importance take place, than couriers are hurried, their mouths and bags sealed, to London. They traverse provinces and cities, and … like the English Ladies, never suffer themselves to be brought to bed, but in London … Besides, you are such a gambling fellow, with so much sly leaning towards Omnium, I do not know how many ⅛ths I may turn the market in the morning.’

  George Stonestreet had not been exaggerating when he bandied about figures like ‘£10,000’ because the Trowers were not just marginal figures in the London financial world. In her journals John Trower’s wife Sophia might talk casually of a ‘loan’ as if it might be for the purchase of an extra bit of paddock for their new pony, but ‘the loan’ she is talking about was the £26 million loan to the government that her husband and his consortium had successfully bid for on the morning of the budget that week.

  And George Stonestreet was right about the flow of intelligence. It was nine o’clock. At La Belle Alliance, Wellington and Blücher were shaking hands, and as Stonestreet sat at the bedsides of the wounded through the night, and men across the battlefield came to terms with the fact that they were still alive, and wondered what had happened beyond the tiny world in which each had fought, and whether they would have to fight again tomorrow – and some, indeed, if what they had been through that Sunday could count as a real battle – a rider was making his way via Ghent and the court of Louis XVIII to London with the news of the allied victory. He was, it was believed, in the pay of the Rothschild family. At the Channel ports, waiting for the first news of the battle, would be Rothschild boats. Three months earlier the same network of couriers and agents had been first with the news of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba and they were determined that they would be first again. And in London not just the Trowers – their thoughts torn between Sophia’s young brother in the 16th Light Dragoons and more mercenary interests – but all the City waited on the intelligence from Brussels, fretting over the markets and their ‘eighths’, desperate for information. ‘Great anxiety,’ James Gallatin, the son of the American envoy to London, was writing in his diary: ‘Consols have fallen terribly. I have never seen greater depression. A rumour today that a battle had been fought and that the Duke of Wellington was crushed; tonight that is contradicted. One cannot believe anything. They say Monsieur Rothschild has mounted couriers from Brussels to Ostend, and a fast clipper ready to sail the moment anything is decisive one way or another.’

  9 p.m.

  Religionis Causa

  It had been a quiet day for William Wilberforce at Taplow after the parliamentary business of the last week, but it could only be the shortest of respites. He was going to have to go back to town in the morning for the Rosebery Divorce Bill, and if it was an ugly business, it was not one that the founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice could dodge.

  Wilberforce would not be reading the report of the case in this Sunday’s Examiner – he disapproved of newspapers on the Sabbath – but he must have been one of the few Londoners that day who was not wallowing in the lurid details. For the last six months the salacious revelations of Lady Rosebery’s adultery had been amusing the capital, and if ever a case was designed to satisfy every conceivable shade of public curiosity – the insatiable appetite for
aristocratic gossip, the prurient taste for scandal, the radicals’ contempt for their social betters, the moral outrage of the emerging middle classes, the deepest fears of those who detected a country sunk in degeneracy – it was the Rosebery Divorce Bill, religionis causa.

  Seven years earlier, in 1808, the eighteen-year-old Harriet Bouverie, the granddaughter of the Earl of Radnor and a young woman ‘in possession of every charm that could captivate, of every ornament and accomplishment that could constitute the happiness of married life’, had met and married the twenty-five-year-old heir to the Earl of Rosebery, Archibald Primrose. For the first years of their married life no couple could have been happier, and with three young children – a boy, Archibald, born in 1809, a daughter also named Harriet in 1810 and a second son Bouverie in 1813 – and ‘a most affectionate, indulgent, and tender husband’, the young Countess of Rosebery, as she became in the spring of 1814 on the death of the third earl, seemed to have everything she could possibly want.

  ‘O my friend,’ the Attorney General told the Solicitor General, the new Lord Rosebery ‘was such a man that if any person of the highest rank had a daughter of marriageable age, he could not have found a better husband’, and the Hon. Bartholomew Bouverie never had any reason to think otherwise of his son-in-law. During the old earl’s last illness Harriet had stayed with her mother at their place in Norfolk, and it was only when Rosebery returned from Scotland to find Harriet changed and the twenty-seven-year-old widower MP for Winchester, Sir Henry St John Mildmay, installed with the run of the house, the nursery and his wife’s affections, that the Rosebery world began to crumble.

  The husband was reluctant to believe what he saw was going on, but things became bad enough for him eventually to ban Mildmay from seeing his wife, and in the autumn of the same year he took her and the dowager countess with him to their estate near Dalmeny on Edinburgh’s Firth of Forth. For a while Lord Rosebery might have hoped that the move had broken her seducer’s spell, but unbeknown to the Primroses, Mildmay had followed them up to Scotland, travelling under the guise of ‘Colonel de Grey of the Foot Guards’, taken a room in an Edinburgh inn, grown a beard – or worn a false one – hired a boatman and, dressed as a sailor, had himself rowed up the Forth under the cover of darkness each evening to meet Harriet.

  The Roseberys dined in the country at six each evening, with the ladies leaving the table at seven, only to be joined by the men again at about nine. Lady Rosebery had lately found one sort of pretext or another for slipping away from the dowager countess, and one night in December, Rosebery’s younger brother, joining the ladies earlier than usual and suspicious at Harriet’s absence, had gone up to her room only to find it locked and noises coming from inside.

  Before he could hammer the door down, a flustered Lady Rosebery, her dress undone, had opened it from the inside and there in the guise of ‘a common sailor, and armed with a brace of pistols’ was Sir Henry Mildmay. The centre of the bed showed a deep depression where the two of them had clearly been lying, but Harriet’s only concern was to prevent bloodshed and not detection, and with expressions of remorse and promises that she would quit the house and return penitent to her father’s, she managed to get her lover out of the window through which he had climbed.

  Lady Rosebery kept to her word, leaving first thing the next day without seeing the family, except that it was not her father’s she was heading for but Sir Henry’s Mayfair house in Brook Street. The two lovers were traced, inn by inn, along the coach route down to London, but any pretence of secrecy had gone out the window with Sir Henry, and before they could be tracked down they were out of the country and safe on the continent, that abiding refuge of early nineteenth-century bankrupts, runaways, divorcees, homosexuals and hard-up aristocrats bent on continuing the more licentious days of the eighteenth century by other means.

  In 1815 the only way of getting a divorce that permitted the remarriage of either party was by private act of Parliament, and then only after it had gone through the Church court and a civil court for criminal conversation first, so by the middle of June the public had had every chance to soak up the details. In the civil court enormous damages of £20,000 against Sir Henry were a fair reflection of popular indignation, and in speech after speech lawyers and politicians at every stage of the process had competed in their denunciations of the adulterous pair.

  For the press and public at large, the details of the adultery in themselves had a coarsely comic appeal – the beard, the sailor’s outfit, the dent in the bed ‘as if pressed by an extraordinary weight’, etcetera – but Lady Rosebery’s lover was also her brother-in-law and the husband of her recently dead sister, and that gave Moral England all the excuse for vindictive outrage it needed. There was nothing that anyone could actually do either to enforce damages or prevent them from marrying abroad if they chose, but that was not going to stop society, in the form of the two Houses of Parliament, ventilating its outrage over a crime ‘than which’ – in the ubiquitous Lord Ellenborough’s words to the Lords – ‘nothing short of the higher felonies could be more atrocious’.

  There were those who wanted Harriet stripped of all the usual claims to alimony, to see her sent out on to the streets as ‘bare and naked as her crime had left her’, but above all they were determined to include a clause that made sure that the offending parties should never be allowed to marry. There was already a standing order in the Lords imposing such bans on all adulterers, but in a case as heinous as this, Ellenborough told the House, ‘they owed it to the security of civilised society, to the happiness of families, to the purity and honour of domestic life’, to the holiness of the nursery, to the laws of ‘nature’ and the ‘law of God’ itself to protect ‘the interests of sound morality with a specific clause that publicly signalled the abhorrence of society’.

  The only thing to be said in Lady Rosebery’s mitigation was that the crime of Sir Henry Mildmay was blacker still, and no one was in any doubt as to what that crime had been. ‘Stripped of all its adventitious deformity, of all peculiar and more odious characteristics,’ the Attorney General, Sir John Garrow, had asked the Commons, what precisely was the offence? ‘It was the crime’ – he answered the question himself – ‘of depriving a worthy and innocent man of what was most consoling to him in life; it was the crime of depriving four young children of the care and attentions of their maternal parent … Was there, then, no incest in this crime – was there no blood in it? … To him it appeared that it would have been more natural and excusable in Sir Henry Mildmay, to have poisoned the mind and debauched the body of his own sister, born of the same womb, and trained by the same hand, than to have planned, conducted and consummated the ruin of Lord Rosebery’s family, under all the circumstances by which the ruin was accomplished and attended.’

  Morality was on the march, and as William Wilberforce gathered his children around him for family prayers, and respectable Edinburgh settled down to another of that most emollient of clergymen Dr Hill’s Sabbath lectures, a young man in his late twenties seated at a dinner table in Piccadilly’s St James’s Place would have done well to take notice. Ten years before Sydney Smith had suggested that Wilberforce’s Society should be renamed the ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice among those with an income of less than £500 a year’. The day of the rake was passing, though, and whatever the Duke of Wellington got up to in Brussels, the England of Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, Sabbath Day observance, Thomas Bowdler’s Shakespeare and Hannah More’s evangelical tracts demanded better of its leaders as well as its poor.

  It would seem unlikely that Byron had been looking forward to an evening at the home of the banker-poet and connoisseur Samuel Rogers, and still less one when William Wordsworth was going to be there. He had only ever met Wordsworth once before and that had also been at Rogers’s, but try as he might to be fair to him, try as he did to make up for the juvenile attack of his English Bards – and he could see Wordsworth’s powers – every effort at generosity or recantation only end
ed in the same old irritation. ‘I still think his capacity warrants all you say of it,’ he told Leigh Hunt, ‘there is undoubtedly much natural talent spilt over the “the Excursion” but it is rain upon rocks where it stands & stagnates – or rain upon sands where it falls without fertilising – who can understand him? – let those who do make him intelligible – Jacob Behman – Swedenborg – & Joanna Southcote are mere types of the Arch-Apostle of mystery and mysticism – but I have done.’

  There might have been a certain malicious pleasure in meeting the poet of nature in the most self-consciously cultured house in Piccadilly, but then in the summer of 1815 any house that was not his own had its attractions for Byron. Three months earlier he had taken a place across Green Park from Rogers, and if he needed any reminder of the mistake he had made – any reminder of the chaos his life was descending into – then there it was, visible through the trees on the north side of Piccadilly, the sober-fronted, ruinously expensive house of the Duchess of Devonshire that, in some fatal moment of deluded grandeur, he had allowed his wife’s aunt and Caroline Lamb’s mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, to take for him and his newly married wife.

  It might have amused him once that it had belonged to the duchess – the former Elizabeth Foster who had lived for many years in a ménage à trois with the duke and his first duchess, Georgiana – but by the middle of June any amused appreciation of the irony would have been lost on Byron. When he had married Annabella Milbanke at the beginning of the year he had imagined life in terms of some semi-detached co-existence among the hereditary ruins of Newstead Abbey, and instead of that here he was, walled up in a house they could not afford, with a coach and coachman they could not afford, servants they could not afford, a rent of a massive £700 a year and debts of £30,000 to ensure that the bailiffs would never be far away.