The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Late in life, when the mood of retribution was upon her, Georgina published a letter from her brother Dalrymple. It read in part: “If you think to alarm me by threatening to unveil the fact that our grandfather Thomas was a drunken and dissolute lawyer and that Mother was a bastard you enormously mistake yourself.”

  Dal was by then a colonel of militia straight from the pages of a Thackeray novel. His exasperation was well merited. No one more than his sister had cultivated the legend of glorious Welsh and Scottish ancestry. But he also knew there was truth in at least the second allegation. John Apsley Dalrymple died unmarried. This clashes painfully with the entry in the cherished family copy of Burke’s Landed Gentry, where Louisa is shown as wife to Morgan and “only child of John Apsley Dalrymple, Esq., of Gate House in the parish of Mayfield, Sussex.” The discrepancy is only interesting to us because for Georgina to have learned about it must have been as a consequence of some bitter family accusations. We do not have to look very far for the major culprit. All the cruel candor in the family came from Morgan. As she grew up, it was a style very much to his daughter’s taste. Both parents made her lofty, but she learned her recklessness from him. In her Mémoires, which were a settling of all the scores, Georgina went out of her way to explain to the world how her fearsome and aloof father ended his days in Dr. Blandford’s asylum in Long Ditton, restrained night and day by four burly attendants. Without her testimony, this was a secret that might have followed the poor man into the grave. All in all, when the parents gazed down into the crib that first May evening, they were looking unknowingly at a wild child.

  2

  Imagine her hand lax and pink against the linen of the crib. Who she is, what she will be, is written there in that moist palm as plainly as in any book. Many years later, one sultry afternoon in Paris, the palmist and psychic Desbarolles, who said so many interesting things to her, was the first to interpret a very pronounced line that ran from her Lifeline and ended in a fork or trident under the little finger. “Madame,” the palmist explained, “you will write the most celebrated memoirs of the century, and at the same time, useful.” He repeated this word to her several times, an instance, if any were needed, of his amazing powers. For had she not already begun these memoirs? The word “useful” rang like a gong in the stuffy room. It was exactly the adjective she herself would have chosen. The nineteenth century had done her wrong, not because she was a ninny, but because she was a woman of genius in a man’s world. There was a vital subtext. The very people who ought to have championed her, her parents, the aristocracy to which she believed she belonged, had cast her aside. Her class had betrayed her. Another palmist, Madame de Thèbes, had also studied the curious branchings and forkings and came up with a different reading, but one that brought the story nearer to home. It was clear to her, she said, before giving Georgina back her mitten, that what the hand indicated was that she would most assuredly be divested of her £27,000 inheritance—if that had not already happened. The glorious thing about palmistry was that both statements were true, one not less than the other.

  3

  Until Georgina came along, Morgan was a man who cherished political ambitions. After leaving Cambridge he had gone on a journey through Persia with a friend, and this at least showed some enterprise (or was an example of his famous bloody-mindedness) since that country was then at war with Russia. In 1830, with this slight claim to fame and sponsored by his uncle, he stood as a Whig at the Cambridge parliamentary election, where he made an utter fool of himself and was soundly trounced at the hustings. Two years later he went up to Coventry with his mind a little clearer to stand as a Tory in elections to the first Reformed Parliament. His campaign throws great light on his character and helps explain the man he was to his children.

  The task before him was a daunting one. Coventry was an uncommonly prosperous borough returning two members. One of these had enjoyed the confidence of the town for many years. Edward Ellice was a fifty-one-year-old politician of great distinction who had held office under the outgoing Grey administration and was a Whig whip. His son—also of Trinity—was a rising young star in the diplomatic service. Ellice’s running mate was Henry Lytton Bulwer (briefly of Trinity), a man the same age as Morgan but already infinitely more experienced. Bulwer had that maddening aristocratic languor his opponent so much envied. As a twenty-three-year-old idler, he had been entrusted with £80,000 in gold by the Greek Committee, which he carried across Europe to the insurgents. As a special agent of the Foreign Office in Belgium in the revolution of 1830, he had an amusing story to tell of how the doorman of the hotel he was staying in was shot dead at his side by a stray bullet while he, Bulwer, was politely inquiring directions. He was hugely rich, apparently completely indolent, and already a very highly regarded diplomat.

  Morgan arrived in Coventry on December 8 and made his way to the King’s Head. The Tory favors were light blue, and as he peered over the balcony at the mob, he could see at a glance they were greatly outnumbered by the dark blue and yellow ribbons of the Whigs. He and his fellow Tory had hired some balladeers, who sang, hopefully:

  Morgan Thomas and Fyler are two honest men

  They are not like Ellice and that East India grappler;

  I hope Ellice and Bulwer may ne’er sit again,

  But let’s return Fyler and young Morgan Rattler.

  Unfortunately, the Rattler was no great speech maker, and his manifesto made dull reading. It began, “I shall strenuously support the most rigid Economy and Retrenchment, the Reformation of every Abuse in Church and State, and all such Measures as may tend to promote the Happiness and alleviate the Burdens of the People.” His one piece of acumen was to declare himself for the retention of tariffs on foreign imports. This was an important and popular point to make in Coventry, for the town was getting rich on the manufacture of ribbons and watches, and free trade would flood the market with French goods. Overall, however, it was a lackluster candidature. Then, quite suddenly, he was illuminated by the sort of forked lightning his daughter was one day to draw down.

  Making his way from the King’s Head to the hustings, he was attacked by the mob. This wasn’t an unexpected turn of events; in fact, it was the norm. A contemporary Coventry innkeeper with experience of these matters has left his unfailing recipe for election days: “To thirty six gallons of ale and four gallons of gin, add two ounces of ginger and three grated nutmegs. Boil the liquid warm in a copper; place in tubs or buckets and serve in half pints; with a large cigar for each voter.” The army pensioners recruited by the magistrates to keep order were soon swept aside, or were maybe themselves victims of this nutmeg surprise. However, Morgan was not quite so green as he looked. On his way to Coventry he had noticed six hundred Irish laborers digging the Oxford Canal near Brinklow, and these he now recruited to his cause. To give some generalship to his forces, he sent to Birmingham for half a dozen prizefighters. The Whigs responded by alerting their own local pugilist, Bob Randall, who ran a pub in Well Street. Randall massed his forces. His orders were perfectly simple. He was not to murder anyone, but leave as many as possible hardly alive.

  Inflamed by drink and religious bigotry, the riots Morgan Thomas managed to incite were remembered in Coventry for fifty years. His Irishmen suffered a terrible defeat. The local paper reported: “Many, thoroughly stripped, were knocked down like sheep, or escaped into the King’s Head for their lives, in a wretchedly maimed condition, and the yard of the hotel presented the appearance of a great slaughter house, but the gates were closed and the place secured, whilst doctors were sent for to attend those injured.”

  When the dust settled and the vote was finally taken, in a booth festooned with his supporters’ trousers, the Rattler found himself at the bottom of the poll, bested even by his running mate, Fyler.

  Then as now, there was no disgrace in failing at your first attempts to enter Parliament. What marked out the Coventry election of 1832 was not just the scale of the rioting but its aftermath. To the disgust of the Whig
Ministry and the outrage of the battered townsfolk, Morgan at once petitioned the House of Commons, contesting the result on the grounds that the electors had been intimidated. This was particularly rich coming from him. In the following year, after the case had been thrown out in committee, Halcomb, the member for Dover and a fellow lawyer of the Inner Temple, raised the issue on the floor of the House. When they found they could not silence him, the Ministry departed en masse to watch the boat race. As he left the Chamber, Ellice was heard to remark of Morgan with awful prescience: “That man will never represent Coventry as long as I draw breath.”

  The Rattler’s humiliation was complete, but the victors had failed to identify something it would be his daughter’s misfortune to emulate. No shame was too great for a man possessed of manic powers. Morgan Thomas contested Coventry another four times in his life, finally being elected in 1863. His stubbornness was comical, but it was also touching. The Tory interest in Coventry took early pity on him, and he made a second attempt at the seat in the year of Georgina’s birth. Perhaps this time there was slightly more urgent reason to do well, and in one sense he was to be admired for going up there again to put his head in the lion’s mouth. The Whigs were waiting for him. One of the broadsheets read: “And they went to the man Morgan, who is commonly called Tommy the Truckler, because he weareth two faces—one for Cambridge which looketh blue, and one for Coventry which is an orange yellow . . .”

  Again he lost. His supporters softened the blow by presenting him with a Warwickshire watch. He wore it like a campaign medal. Just before the opening of the new Parliament in 1838, Sir Robert Peel invited more than three hundred jubilant new Tory members to his London house. Some of them had been Morgan’s contemporaries at Trinity; some of them he had met through the Inner Temple. Counseled by Peel in small meetings, cajoled, flattered, cosseted, and inspired, the new members were in no doubt they were the breaking wave of an almighty sea change. Three hundred of them fresh from the hustings, shoulder-to-shoulder in Peel’s house at Whitehall Gardens and surely soon to be the government of the country! Morgan was left on the outside looking in.

  His participation in the age was to be more or less confined to such disastrous outings. When the entail on her father’s estate was settled, Louisa’s inheritance would give him that small portion of England—a few acres of East Sussex—sufficient to allow him to describe himself as a landed proprietor. Wanting to be the member for Coventry was a personal and not a political goal: he wanted it because it had been denied to him. His Toryism was of the old-fashioned and reactive kind. What he saw of what was happening around him he did not like and would not join. Yet behind the hauteur and exasperated bad temper was another more small-minded calculation—for all his disappointments, this was a world in which he did not absolutely have to compete. He was—but only just—a private gentleman. He could not fall; he need not rise. Even as early as 1837, there was a kind of redundancy about his position. He had no friends, the fashionable world outraged him, and in his own family he had been made to look a fool—not once, but several times.

  The search for a place in England appropriate to his idea of himself was too much for him to contemplate. In 1840 he took himself and his wife off to Florence, along with Georgina and a new child, a solemn boy called Morgan Dalrymple. The ostensible reason for their flight was the state of Louisa’s health. In fact, they stayed off and on in Florence for twelve years, and the consequences to Georgina were to be enormous. Nothing blossomed in Florence: a dangerously narrow man took his bitterness with him and, as his children grew up, inflicted it upon them.

  Florence

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  The Thomas family arrived in Florence in the type of commercial coach called a diligence on the last leg of a series of dusty and bone-shaking misadventures that dogged them all the way across Europe from Boulogne. They were set down outside the Hôtel du Nord in a state of complete exhaustion after a transit lasting nearly three weeks. Every flea-ridden inn, every insolent customs post, had provoked a quarrel. The diligence seated as many as fifteen passengers, inside and out, none of them worthy of Morgan’s attention and on the contrary sweaty, vulgar, and for the most part disgustingly foreign. No concession was made to the sun—the Thomases arrived wearing much the same kind of clothing they had worn in England, Georgina in a crushed and dusty miniature of her mother’s crinoline, the newly born infant, Morgan Dalrymple, swathed in flannel and half dead with heat.

  They knew no one in the city. Those who watched them enter the lobby of the hotel saw they had little luggage and no servants. Though Florence was much more easygoing and welcoming than Rome, the Thomases made no great impression, either at first glance or on later acquaintance. It was not in their nature to be friendly—Morgan could hardly force himself to be civil—and they brought no news of any consequence. As for the little girl running about the lobby of the hotel, though she was plump as a pigeon, she evidently gave her parents no pleasure. The days passed, the family had still not visited the Uffizi, the father continued his supercilious silence over dinner: at last they were dismissed as dull. They were Kickleburys.

  Morgan came to Florence for a very good reason. It was far from the scenes of his electoral nightmares, but much more to the point, the city was one of the cheapest places to live in Europe. A man with a high sense of his own importance but no money could hardly have chosen better. We can get some idea of the attractions from the affairs of another expatriate in much the same boat, Captain Fleetwood Wilson of the 8th Hussars. He happened to be there on a yearlong honeymoon when news reached him that he had been utterly ruined by his older brother, to whom he had lent all his money. The Wilsons were in a fix: they already had one child and another was on the way. Abused, betrayed, the gallant captain (considered by his generation one of the greatest horsemen in England) was at his wit’s end. Then he found the Villa Strozzino. Built by a Strozzi three hundred years earlier, the villa sat on a hill with an elaborate arcaded front and two floors above. Fine trees decorated its lawns and gardens, and cypresses swayed ecstatically in the background. The internal arrangements were such that fifty years later Victoria herself occupied it on her visit to Florence. As Captain Wilson swiftly discovered, penury in Tuscany was a relative affair.

  Morgan Thomas, the secretive and unclubbable newcomer, likewise chose his accommodation well. He rented the Villa Capponi, a short carriage drive from the city on its southern side. At one stroke, he entered into the kind of life so emphatically denied him in England. Like Strozzi, Capponi was a famous name in the history of the republic. Indeed, when Morgan rode into the city through the Porta S. Giorgio, he could see the proud boast set up by Niccolo Capponi above the portals of the Town Hall in 1528: JESVS CHRISTVS REX FLORENTINI POPULI S P DECRETO ELECTVS. Christ might have been the only king the Florentines could accept—the inscription had been a jibe at the departing Charles V—but things were somewhat different now. The Austrians were in occupation, and the greatest man in Florence was not a Medici, but the Russian millionaire Anatoly Demidov, who maintained his new bride, Bonaparte’s niece, in the sumptuously appointed San Donato palace. The nominal ruler of the city and all the lands round about was the Grand Duke of Tuscany, cheerfully dismissed by his subjects as the Grand Ass. At the lower levels of society, the city was festering with every kind of adventurer and charlatan to be found in Europe. Morgan had been put in the unusual position—for him—of being monarch of all he surveyed, but what he saw he did not like very much.

  The youthful Lady Dorothy Orford, a member of the Walpole family, which had deep roots in Florence, had recently made a much more dashing entrance to the expatriate community, having ridden the son of the 1835 Derby winner, a seventeen-hand horse called Testina, all the way from Antwerp. This was more to the taste of the locals. She later commented, “At that time, society in Florence was somewhat mixed: indeed, there were a great many people of shady character, in addition to others of none at all—so much so was this the case that the town had come to be des
ignated ‘le paradis des femmes galantes.’”

  A paradise for whores was superimposed on, and undoubtedly drew some of its custom from, the well-established British colony. Many before Morgan had the same idea as he, some of them much more romantically motivated. Dante made the city a place of literary pilgrimage, and the Brownings were by no means alone in wishing to live and write there. There were many painters and sculptors in residence and a long tradition of amateur theatricals. All the same, the atmosphere inclined to the raffish. Thomas Trollope, brother to Anthony, settled in Florence in 1843 and has left a snapshot of how the Grand Duke’s hospitality was abused at the Pitti Palace. At balls the English would “seize the plates of bonbons and empty the contents bodily into their coat pockets. The ladies would do the same with their pocket handkerchiefs.” The Italian guests went further, wrapping up hams, chickens, and portions of fish in newspapers. Trollope saw an Italian countess smuggle a jelly into her purse.

  Behind the walls of the Villa Capponi, where he could direct a household with more servants in it than he had ever dreamed possible, Morgan Thomas played out his fantasies of being a rich and indolent aristocrat. He was living in rooms with high ceilings. The trouble was elsewhere. When he looked farther abroad—when he looked outside his gates, in fact—it was Florence itself that he reprehended: not any bit of it, but all of it. Though the British colony was various, it contained more scribblers and painters than he was accustomed to meet and was headed by a man he quickly learned to fear and detest.