The Age of Elegance
Page 41
No class had ever enjoyed such riches as the landed gentry of England. "I have no occasion to think of the price of bread and meat where I am now," wrote Jane Austen from Godmersham; "let me shake off vulgar cares and conform to the happy indifference of East Kent wealth!" In Cheshire alone there were fifty landed estates of from £3000 to £10,000 a year, with a purchasing power equivalent to an untaxed income of at least five times as much in our present money. The greatest of all commanded revenues larger than those of reigning Continental princes; in July, 1813, the United States, then at war with Britain, was unable to borrow as much money as more than one English nobleman could raise on his private credit. The Duke of Northumberland's annual rental was over £150,000; the owner of Berkeley Castle's £180,000. Four-fifths of the House of Commons and almost the entire hereditary personnel of the House of Lords were landowners. Such was the respect for landed wealth that Englishmen felt reluctant to entrust political power to any man without it; Creevey, a radical Whig without birth or means, wrote with contempt of Canning and Lord Wellesley as "fellows without
1 Lady Shelley, I, 38-9. See Aberdeen, I, 30; Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 28th March, 1820; Clapham, 1,223; Cobbett, Rural Rides, I, 97-8; Dixon, 240-1,248-52; Ernie, 195-223; Fremantle, L 140; Hamilton of Dalzell MS., 151-4; Howitt, 88-106; Newton, 107-8; Paget Brothers, 179-81; Simond, I, 331; Smart, 153-4; Toynbee, 92.
an acre," comparing them with his own Party's princely leaders, "the Earl Grey . . . the Russells and the Cavendishes and all the ancient nobility and all the great property of the realm."1
One saw that wealth displayed in the west end of the capital, with its mile after mile of splendid mansions, wonderful clothes and horses, liveried servants and glittering barouches and landaus; in the new Edinburgh—a paradise, it seemed to contemporaries, of order, light and neatness—which had risen near Calton Hill, away from the crooked closes and stench of Auld Reekie; in the county towns with their crescents and railed squares aping London's West End, their exquisitely windowed shops and classical assembly rooms and fine ancestral residences, where the less metropolitan-minded county families spent the winter season for balls, local business and race meetings; in the watering places, Bath and Tunbridge Wells of the mannered past and Cheltenham and Leamington of the dashing present, where the well-to-do flocked as much for pleasure as health. At Bath, wrote Pierce Egan, all was bustle and gaiety, "numerous dashing equipages passing and repassing . . . the shops capacious and elegant . . . libraries to improve the mind, musical repositories to enrich the taste . . . and tailors, milliners of the highest eminence in the fashionable world to adorn the male and beautify the female." In the Pump Room bands of music played almost continuously while the crowds promenaded. Elsewhere, along the sea coast, remote fishing villages were turning overnight into watering places of a new kind, with elegant villas, piers, assembly rooms, libraries, theatres, and bathing boxes where the genteel, and moneyed would-be genteel, could enjoy "aquatic gratification." The greatest of these was Brighton, which, with its royal palace, its half-hourly coaches to the capital, its immense promenade, its fashionable domes, bow windows and cupolas, was a kind of miniature West End by the sea.2
The dominant desire of all classes was to "cut a dash"; to show "style," to be "elegant." From Lady Londonderry going to a ball so covered with jewels that she could not stand and had to be followed round with a chair, to the poor Edinburgh widow who
1 Creevey, Life and Times, 55. Austen, II, 243-4; Dudley, 211; Farington, VTII, 174; Shakerley MSS.; Simond, II, 56, 250, 295; Woodward, 87.
2 Ashton, I, 143-4; Bury, I, 99; Clapham, I, 8-9; Creevey, Life and Times, 115; Daniel], I, 79; English Spy, I, 285, 305; Farington, VIII, 197, 201, 260; Leslie, Constable; Sea-Bathing Places, passim; Hill, Austen, 104-5; Simond, I, 266; Sydney, I, 39.
pinched to be buried in a coach and six surmounted with black plumes and followed by carriages and hired mourners, the British were increasingly becoming martyrs to display. "The necessity of acquiring, not merely the real necessaries and comforts of life, but the means of living in style, a certain inveterate habit of luxury, inexorable vanity," wrote Simond, "answer in England the same purpose as the conscription in France; and the fondest mother thinks as little of resisting the one as the other." To this universal principle of activity, though he doubted whether it secured private happiness, he attributed the country's strength, seeing it drive each generation as fast as it reached manhood into the Army, Navy, East and West Indies, and, he might have added, the Bar, the counting-house and factory.
Almost everything the English rich did served the ends of style. It created both the external beauty whose survivals—houses, streets, gardens, parks, vistas, furniture, china, silver—still linger on into our own age, and the commercial, colonial, and industrial wealth that the Victorians both enhanced and exploited. It filled London and Brighton, Cheltenham, Leamington and St. Leonards, and the new suburbs of every ancient city with tree-lined avenues and Grecian and Pompeian crescents and terraces of white stucco with railed and green-painted jalousies, and fine assembly rooms, and Gothic lodges and cottages ornées. It spread itself across the countryside, adorning it with park-walls, crested gates and castellated lodges, with Ionic arches and obelisks and Corinthian pillars, with metal turnpike roads traversed by beautiful equipages harnessed in all the pride of the loriner's art, with silver trappings and coloured housings and outriders in yellow and scarlet jackets. It filled the houses of the gentry with showy, lovely, and sometimes not so lovely furniture, with buhl and bronzes and damask hangings, with great glasses and embroidered stools and rosewood tambour-frames; with Italian paintings and native portraiture, now reaching its high evening in Lawrence and Raeburn; with engravings and aquatints and the lovely art of the miniaturist; with Athenian marbles rescued by wealthy connoisseurs from the lime-burners in the pasha-ruled, robber-haunted Aegean.1 At Powderham Castle, according to the guide
1 Among them the Elgin marbles. "There is not a classical nook," wrote Simond, "unexplored by these restless wanderers—they dispute with each other for the remains of Greece and Egypt, purchase antique marbles for their weight in gold, pack up and ship home a Grecian temple as other people would a set of china." Simond, II, 148. See idem, II, 64-6; Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 10th April, 1822; Sea-Bathing Places, 217, 246-7, 286, 336-7, 447-8; Harriet Granville, I, 130;
book, the music-room was adorned with marbles and bassi-relievi; the chimney-piece represented Apollo and the Muses and was copied from the sarcophagus of Homer.
Everyone who could afford it—and many who could not—was engaged in rebuilding and improving and emparking; "my prodigious undertaking of a west wing at Bowhill," wrote the Duke of Buccleuch, "is begun." Owners of ancient country houses, inspired by Repton's book on landscape gardening, were talking, like Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, of foregrounds, distances, second distances, side-screens and perspective, lights and shades. At Mamhead, Lord Lisburne's seat in Devonshire, the old error of torturing nature by raising gardens with terraces and making ponds and fountains on the sides of hills was corrected, we are told, and the ground restored —with infinite expense and labour—to its pristine natural beauty, with varied prospects of sea, river and the country.[1] At Knowsley, Lord Derby's new dining-room, paid for by the rising wealth of Lancashire, measured fifty-three feet by thirty-seven, with an immense Gothic window at one end and two huge church-like doors at the other; "Pray," asked a guest, "are those great doors to be opened for every pat of butter that comes into the room?" At Fonthill the interior was like a Gothic cathedral, only larger, fitted up with crimson and gold, with statues in every niche and immense gilded and jewelled boxes for relics. In the vast pseudo-mediaeval castle—a thousand feet in length with avenues radiating for miles in every direction—which the seventh Earl of Bridgewater employed Wyatt to build in place of the older Ashridge, the central staircase, flanked with statues by Westmacott, rose to nearly a hundred feet, and the walls—a shrine to victorious aristocracy—were
covered with immense pictures of the Allied triumphs at the close of the Revolutionary wars. The orangery was a hundred and thirty feet in length, and the conservatory, with its eleven Gothic windows, almost as long, and in the chapel, where daily services were held and two chaplains maintained, the elegance and snobbery of Regency England reached an almost sacred apogee. "The perforated oak screen which divides it from the ante-chapel; the mighty wrought Gothic ceiling,
1 Gronow, I, 90-1; Hill, Austen, 40-2; Lockhart, IV, 337; McCausland, 22-4, 66; Lady Shelley, I, 48-9; Simond, I, 337; Wansey, 116.
the windows filled with beautifully painted glass," the house's contemporary historian wrote, "demand our particular notice. . . . The Pulpit and the Reading-Desk are well placed, opposite to each other, and somewhat elevated"—a delicate compliment to the deity— "above ... the richly carved canopies... which form the seats of the Earl and Countess of Bridgewater. Beneath these stalls are the seats for servants. ... In this chapel was preached, in November, 1817, the first sermon by the Chaplain of the Earl of Bridgewater, who has had the honour of compiling the pages of this history."1
The assured, unquestioning snobbery of the rich which sprang from all this seemed as unalterable as the great palaces which housed them. The very approach to a nobleman's house was surrounded with an aura of respect; at Castle Howard visitors—for most of these places were open to gentlefolk on stated days—were expected to alight and respectfully walk the last half-mile through an avenue and deer-park.2 An American staying at Gordon Castle wrote of the delightful consciousness that, whichever way the Duke's guests drove, the horizon scarcely limited their host's domains. "The ornamental gates flying open at your approach, miles distant from the castle; the herds of red deer trooping away from the sound of wheels in the silent park; the stately pheasants feeding tamely in the immense preserves; the stalking gamekeepers hfting their hats in the dark recesses of die forest—there was something in this perpetually reminding you of privileges." When Harriet Granville and her husband stayed by themselves at Trentham, six servants waited on them at dinner while a gentleman-in-waiting and a housekeeper hovered round the door in case they should express any wish. Too often noblemen, building their lives on such deference, surrounded themselves with a horde of sycophants—led captains, toady dandies and semi-professional wits—who obscured for them both their duties and interests; the fat, pasty-faced chaplain at Castle Howard scarcely dared give an opinion on the weather lest his patron, Lord Carlisle, should disagree.3
1 H. J. Todd, The History of the College of Bonhommes at Ashridge, 1823.
2Simond, II, 73, see also idem, 65. It took a banker, however, Sir Richard Hoare of Stourhead, to invent the rule that visitors viewing the house should not be allowed to sit down. Simond, I, 200.
3 Harriet Granville, I, 48. See idem, I, 8-9; Creevey Papers, II, 49-50; Lockhart, 2-3; Willis, cit. Howitt, Rural Life, 27.
The rich had become almost too rich for reason. Lord Alvanley, whose dinners were said to be the best in London, had an apricot tart on his table every day of the year and, when his maitre d'hotel expostulated at the expense, sent him to Gunter's, the confectioner, to buy up his entire stock. At one fashionable breakfast-party the strawberries alone cost £150. The whole world, wrote a foreigner, was ransacked for the wealthy Englishman's dinner: Perigord pie and truffles from France, sauces and curry powder from India, hams from Westphalia and Portugal, caviare from Russia, reindeer tongues from Lapland, olives from Spain, cheese from Parma, sausages from Bologna. "To live expensive and elegant" had become the end of existence; Lord Grey said he would not dress Lady Londonderry for -£5000 a year. Her very handkerchiefs cost fifty guineas the dozen; a guest at Wynyard complained of being unable to sleep because the lace on the pillows and sheets so tickled his face. No one had any use for what was old-fashioned; everything in the haut ton had to be new, to use the Corinthian slang, "prime and bang up to the mark." A Colonel of the Guards used to give Storr and Mortimer, the Regent Street goldsmiths, .£25 a quarter to furnish him with a new set of studs every week during the season.1
The acme of perfection, the summum honum of style, was the dandy. The bright glories of the past were beginning to fade a little; even blue coats and brass and gold buttons were going out in London and being replaced by a sober black and white. But the quality of the cloth and the elegance and fit of the tailoring were superlative. A dandy was a formidable figure—the wide-brimmed glossy hat, always new, the spotless, white-starched cravat so tight and high that the wearer could scarcely look down or turn his head, and was for ever pulling it up and running his fingers along the bottom of his chin;2 the exquisitely cut coat worn wide open to display the waistcoat of buff, yellow or rose and the snowy embroidered cambric shirt; the skin-tight pantaloons or "inexpressibles," gathered up into a wasp's waist and bulging like a succession of petticoats under the stays; the fobs, jewels, chains and spotless gloves; the white-thorn cane—a hint of the broad acres that sustained the type—the wonderfully made boots whose shine rivalled the cuirasses of the Life
1 Gronow, II, 83, 268-9; Creevey Papers, II, 132; English Spy, II, 19, 219; Gaussen, II, 3 55; Letts, 206; Lockhart, IV, 169; Real Life in London, I, 42; II, 67; Simond, I, 46-7.
2 Dandies sometimes cut their ears with their collars through moving their heads. Newton, 246-7. See also Harriet Granville, I, 158-9.
Guards. Hoby, the famous bootmaker at the top of St. James's Street —a Methodist preacher in private life—told the Duke of York that if Wellington had had any other bootmaker, he could scarcely have won his victories. The blacking of tops was a high art and mystery: two rival advertisers in a West End street, each holding up a varnished boot on a pole, claimed, the one, that his was the best polish in the world, and the other that it was so good that it could be eaten. Beau Brummell, asked for the secret of his, replied that it was made from the finest champagne.1
These bucks or swells—some of whom in youth had shared the friendship of the Prince Regent—ruled the world of fashion from their favourite vantage point in White's bow window. Their court was bordered on the north by Oxford Street, on the east by Bond Street, on the south by Pall Mall and west by Park Lane, but their influence extended far beyond its borders. Byron rated Brummell's importance above Napoleon's. When, after bringing the Regent's soft muslin, bow and wadding neck-piece into contempt by appearing, to the amazement of the town, in a stiff collar, this remarkable man fled overseas from his creditors, he left his secret as a legacy to his country, writing on a sheet of paper on his dressing-table, "Starch is the man!" The long morning hours spent by his disciples with their valets completing their toilets; their sublime lounge with every eye upon them down Bond Street, St. James's or Pall Mall; their exquisite French dinners; their invariable habit of being im-perturbably late for every appointment; their condescending appearances at the great summer evening parades in Kensington Gardens or Hyde Park; their extravagant gambling and love of play; their generosity and occasional surprising kindnesses, and their unshakable self-confidence, were as much part of the England of the time as the fat cattle in the shires and the thoroughbreds on the turnpike roads.2
They shared their empire with the great ladies who controlled the entree to Almack's assembly rooms and the balls and routs of high society. As evening fell the streets of London's West End became filled with an endless stream of wonderful carriages, each with its
1 Gronow, I, 271-3; II, 52-3.
2 One of the greatest of all, "King" Allen, had shown almost incredible energy and courage in the attack on Talavera. Gronow, II, 86. See Byron, Letters and Journals, U, 128; Corr., I, 142; Broughton, II, 177; Lamington, 5-7; English Spy, I, 330-1; II, 218; Farington, VIII, 238; Harriet Granville, I, 158; Gronow, I, 52-3; II, 1-2, 58-9. 86, 238, 252-3, 268-9, 271-3, 294; T. Moore, Fudge Letters; Nevill, 169; Newton, 246-7; Real Life in London, I, 42; Lady Shelley, I, 53, 64.
eyes of flame twinkling in the darkness. As with a sudden flurry of horses each drew up at its destination, the tall
liveried footmen leapt down and set up a great rapping on the door. From six to eight, and again from ten till midnight, the noise of the wheels in cobbled May-fair, Simond wrote, was like the fall of Niagara. The houses were lit from top to bottom; the windows from the streets framed a concourse of nodding feathers and stars under chandeliers, while gaping crowds stood at the doors and powdered, gold-laced footmen lined the steps. Every night in the season there were a dozen or more of such assemblies, in which there was seldom any room to sit, no conversation, cards or music, nothing but glittering clothes and jewels and lights, shouting, elbowing, turning and winding from room to room, vacant, famous, smiling or evasive faces, and, at the end of an interval, a slow descent to the hall where the departing guests, waiting in their orders and diamonds for their carriages, spent more time among the footmen than they had spent above with their hosts. "To the Duchess of Gloucester's rout," Cam Hobhouse wrote in his diary, "where was all London, and such a sight as was never seen. The Duke of Wellington and three Lord Mayors there; spent the night hustling to get the Misses Byng and Lady Tavistock to her carriage." Lady Shelley, who was also present, mentioned that she was nearly squeezed to death and that many cried out in alarm: "the Duke of Wellington, who was standing half-way up the stairs, called out to the ladies below that there was not the slightest danger, but the pressure was so great that many of them fainted. More than sixteen hundred persons had been invited to a house which is not capable of holding more than six hundred."1