It was not until two or three days after tranquillity had been restored that Lord George Gordon was apprehended. Ministers were justly reproached for not having sent him to the Tower on the 2d of June, when he had assembled and excited the mob to extort compliance with their wishes from the House of Commons. Such a step, when the House was surrounded by multitudes, and when, every moment, it was expected that the door would be broken open, would have been hazardous; had that occurred, Lord George would have suffered instant death. General Murray, afterward Duke of Atholl, held his sword ready to pass it through Lord George’s body the instant the mob rushed in. The Earl of Carnarvon, the grandfather of the present earl, followed him closely with the same intent.
The indignation of the insulted Commons was extreme, and the distress and displeasure of Lord George’s own family doubtless excessive. The House of Commons had never been thus insulted before. It is difficult to determine what could be Lord George’s motives for the conduct which led to these awful results, during the whole of which he preserved a composure that bordered on insensibility; he was a perfect master of himself whilst the city was in flames. Much may be laid to fanaticism, and the mental derangement which it either produced or evinced. When too late he tried in vain to abate the fury he had excited, and offered to take his stand by Lord Rodney’s5555 side when the Bank was attacked, to aid that officer, who commanded the Guards, in its defence.
Lord George then lived in Weibeck Street, Cavendish Square, and tradition assigns as his house that now occupied by Mr. Newby, the publisher, No. 30, and for many years the house of Count Woronzoff, the Russian ambassador, who died there. Lord George there prepared for his defence, which was entrusted to the great Erskine, then in his prime, or, as he was called in caricatures, with which the shops were full, from his extreme vanity, Counsellor Ego. In February, 1781, the trial took place, and Lord George was acquitted. He retired to Birmingham, became a Jew, and lived in that faith, or under the delusion that he did so. The hundreds who perished from his folly or insanity were avenged in his subsequent imprisonment in Newgate for a libel on Marie Antoinette, of which he was convicted. He died a very few years after the riots of 1780, in Newgate, generally condemned, and but little compassionated.
It appears from the letters addressed by Doctor Beanie to the Duchess of Gordon, that she was not in London during the riots of June, 1780. The poet had been introduced to her by Sir William Forbes, and frequently visited Gordon Castle. We find him, whilst London was blazing, sending thither a parcel of Mirrors, the fashionable journal, “Count Fathom,” “The Tale of a Tub,” and the fanciful, forgotten romance by Bishop Berkeley, “Gaudentio di Lucca,” to amuse her solitude. “‘Gaudentio,’” he writes, “will amuse you, though there are tedious passages in it. The whole description of passing the deserts of Africa is particularly excellent.” It is singular that this dream of Bishop Berkeley’s of a country fertile and delicious in the centre of Africa should have been almost realised in our own time by the discoveries of Doctor Livingstone.
To his present of books, Doctor Beattie added a flask of whisky, which he sealed with his usual seal, “The three graces, whom I take to be your Grace’s near relations, as they have the honour, not only to bear one of your titles, but also to resemble you exceedingly in form, feature, and manner. If you had lived three thousand years ago, which I am very glad you did not, there would have been four of them, and you the first. May all happiness attend your Grace!”
This graceful piece of adulation was followed by a tender concern for “her Grace’s” health. A sportive benediction was offered whilst the duchess was at Glenfiddick, a hunting seat in the heart of the Grampian Hills — a wild, sequestered spot, of which Doctor Beattie was particularly fond.
“I rejoice in the good weather, in the belief that it extends to Glenfiddick, where I pray that your Grace may enjoy all the health and happiness that good air, goats’ whey, romantic solitude, and the society of the loveliest children in the world can bestow. May your days be clear sunshine; and may a gentle rain give balm to your nights, that the flowers and birch-trees may salute you in the morning with all their fragrance! May the kids frisk and play tricks before you with unusual sprightliness; and may the song of birds, the hum of bees, and the distant waterfall, with now and then the shepherd’s horn resounding from the mountains, entertain you with a full chorus of Highland music! My imagination had parcelled out the lovely little glen into a thousand little paradises; in the hope of being there, and seeing everyday in that solitude, what is
‘Fairer than famed of old, or fabled since,
Of fairy damsels, met in forests wide
By errant knights.’
But the information you received at Cluny gave a check to my fancy, and was indeed a great disappointment to Mrs. Beattie and me; not on account of the goats’ whey, but because it keeps us so long at such a distance from your Grace.”
When at Gordon Castle, the duchess occupied herself with pursuits that elevated whilst they refreshed her mind. She promised Doctor Beattie to send him the history of a day. Her day seems to have been partly engaged in the instruction of her five daughters, and in an active correspondence and reading. It is difficult to imagine this busy, flattered woman reading Blair’s sermons — which had then been recently published — to her family on Sundays; or the duke, whom Doctor Beattie describes as “more astronomical than ever,” engrossed from morning to night in making calculations with Mr. Copland, Professor of Astronomy in Marischal College, Aberdeen. Beattie’s letters to the duchess, although too adulatory, were those of a man who respects the understanding of the woman to whom he writes. The following anecdotes, the one relating to Hume, the other to Handel, are in his letters to the Duchess of Gordon, and they cannot be read without interest.
“Mr. Hume was boasting to the doctor (Gregory) that among his disciples he had the honour to reckon many of the fair sex. ‘Now tell me,’ said the doctor, ‘whether, if you had a wife or a daughter, you would wish them to be your disciples? Think well before you answer me; for I assure you that whatever your answer is, I will not conceal it.’ Mr. Hume, with a smile and some hesitation, made this reply: ‘No; I believe skepticism may be too sturdy a virtue for a woman.’ Miss Gregory will certainly remember she has heard her father tell this story.”
Again, about Handel:
“I lately heard two anecdotes, which deserve to be put in writing, and which you will be glad to hear. When Handel’s ‘Messiah’ was first performed, the audience were exceedingly struck and affected by the music in general; but when the chorus struck up, ‘For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth,’ they were so transported that they all, together with the king (who happened to be present), started up, and remained standing till the chorus ended; and hence it became the fashion in England for the audience to stand while that part of the music is performing. Some days after the first exhibition of the same divine oratorio, Mr. Handel came to pay his respects to Lord Kinnoul, with whom he was particularly acquainted. His lordship, as was natural, paid him some compliments on the noble entertainment which he had lately given the town. ‘My lord,’ said Handel, ‘I should be sorry if I only entertained them — I wish to make them better.’”
Beattie’s happiest hours are said to have been passed at Gordon Castle, with those whose tastes, in some respects differing from his own, he contributed to form; whilst he was charmed with the beauty, the wit, the cultivated intellect of the duchess, and he justly appreciated her talents and virtues. Throughout a friendship of years her kindness was unvaried;
“Ne’er ruffled by those cataracts and breaks
Which humour interposed too often makes.”
The duchess felt sincerely for poor Beattie’s domestic sorrows; for the peculiarities of his wife, whom he designated as “nervous;” for the early death of his son, in whom all the poet’s affections were bound up, and to whose welfare every thought of his was directed.
One would gladly take one’s impressions of the Duchess
of Gordon’s character from Beattie, rather than from the pen of political writers, who knew her but as a partisan. The duchess, according to Beattie, was feelingly alive to every fine impulse; demonstrative herself, detesting coldness in others; the life of every party; the consoling friend of every scene of sorrow; a compound of sensibility and vivacity, of strength and softness. This is not the view that the world took of her character. Beattie always quitted Gordon Castle “with sighs and tears.” It is much to have added to the transient gleams of happiness enjoyed by so good and so afflicted a man. “I cannot think,” he wrote, when under the pressure of dreaded calamity — that of seeing his wife insane; “I am too much agitated and distrait (as Lord Chesterfield would say) to read anything that is not very desultory; I cannot play at cards; I could never learn to smoke; and my musical days are over. My first excursion, if ever I make any, must be to Gordon Castle.”
There he found what is indispensable to such a man — congeniality. Amusement was not what he required; it was soothing. It was in the duchess’s presence that he wrote the following “Lines to a Pen:”
“Go, and be guided by the brightest eyes,
And to the softest hand thine aid impart;
To trace the fair ideas as they arise,
Warm from the purest, gentlest, noblest heart;”
lines in which the praise is worth more than the poetry. The duchess sent him a copy by Smith of her portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, a picture to which reference has been already made.
In 1782 the duchess grieved for the death of Lord Kaimes, for whom she had a sincere friendship, although the religious opinions of that celebrated man differed greatly from those of Beattie. Lord Kaimes was fifty-six years an author, in company with the eccentric Lord Monboddo, the author of the theory that men have had tails. Lord Kaimes passed some days at Gordon Castle shortly before his death. Monboddo and he detested each other, and squabbled incessantly. Lord Kaimes understood no Greek; and Monboddo, who was as mad and as tiresome about Greek and Aristotle, and as absurd and peculiar on that score as Don Quixote was about chivalry, told him that without understanding Greek he could not write a page of good English. Their arguments must have been highly diverting. Lord Kaimes, on his death-bed, left a remembrance to the Duchess of Gordon, who had justly appreciated him, and defended him from the charge of skepticism. Lord Monboddo compared the duchess to Helen of Troy, whom he asserted to have been seven feet high; but whether in stature, in beauty, or in the circumstances of her life, does not appear.
The happiness of the duchess was perfected by the blessings granted to her in her family. In 1770 the birth of her eldest son George, long beloved in Scotland whilst the Marquis of Huntley, took place. Doctor Beattie describes him as “the best and most beautiful boy that ever was born.” He proved to be one of the most popular of the young nobility of that period. Doctor Beattie strongly advised the duchess to engage an English tutor, a clergyman, for him, recommended either by the Archbishop of York, or by the Provost of Eton. When it afterward became a question whether the young heir should go to Oxford or to Cambridge, the doctor, who seems to have been a universal authority, allowed that Cambridge was the best for a man of study, whilst Oxford had more dash and spirit in it: so little are matters altered since that time.
Fifteen years appear to have elapsed before the birth of a second son, Alexander. Both these scions of this ducal house became military men: the young marquis was colonel of the Scots Fusileer Guards, and served in the Peninsular war, and was eventually Governor of Edinburgh Castle. Long was he remembered by many a brother officer, many an old soldier, as a gallant, courteous, gay-hearted man; with some of the faults and all the virtues of the military character. He married late in life Elizabeth, daughter of Alexander Brodie, Esq., of Arnhall, N. B., who survived him. Lord Alexander Cordon died unmarried; but five daughters added to the family lustre by noble and wealthy alliances.
Wraxall remarks “that the conjugal duties of the Duchess of Gordon pressed on her heart with less force than did her maternal solicitudes.” For their elevation she thought, indeed, no sacrifice too great, and no efforts too laborious. In the success of her matrimonial speculations she has been compared to Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who numbered among her sons-in-law two dukes and three earls. But the daughters of the proud Sarah were, it has been observed, the children of John Churchill, and on them were settled, successively, Blenheim and the dukedom. The Ladies Gordon were portionless, and far less beautiful than their mother. To her skilful diplomacy alone were these brilliant fortunes owing.
Lady Charlotte, the eldest, was eighteen years of age when her mother first entertained matrimonial projects for her, and chose for their object no less a personage than Pitt, then prime minister. Her schemes might have proved successful had not Pitt had that sure impediment to maternal management, — a friend. This friend was the subtle Henry Dundas, afterward Lord Melville; one of those men who, under the semblance of unguarded manners and a free, open bearing, conceal the deepest designs of personal aggrandisement. Governing India, governing Scotland, the vicegerent in Edinburgh for places and pensions, Dundas was looking forward to a peerage, and kept his eye steadily on Pitt, whom he guided in many matters, adapting his conduct and his conversation to the peculiar tone of the minister’s mind. Flattery he never used — dictation he carefully avoided; both would have been detrimental to his influence with the reserved statesman.
Pitt was by no means calculated to win the affection of a blooming girl of eighteen, who, whatever Wraxall may have thought, lived to be one of the most beautiful and graceful women of her time. Many years ago, during the life of Sir Thomas Lawrence, his portrait of the Duchess of Richmond, formerly Lady Charlotte Cordon, was exhibited at Somerset House. So exquisite were the feminine charms of that lovely face, so elegant the form he had portrayed, that all crowded to look upon that delineation of a woman no longer young; whilst beauties in the bloom of youth were passed by as they hung on the walls in all the glowing colours of girlhood.
On most intimate terms with the duchess, Pitt seems to have been touched with the attractions of Lady Charlotte, and to have paid her some attentions. He was one of the stiffest and shyest of men, finely formed in figure, but plain in face; the last man to be fascinated, the last to fascinate. Drives to Dundas’s house at Wimbledon when Pitt was there; evenings at home, in easy converse with these two politicians; suppers, at which the premier always finished his bottle, as well as the hardier Scotchman, failed to bring forward the reserved William Pitt. The fact was, that Dundas could not permit any one, far less the Duchess of Gordon, to have the ascendency over the prime minister that so near a relationship would occasion. He trembled for his own influence. A widower at that time, — his wife, a Miss Rennie of Melville, who had been divorced from him, being dead, — he affected to lay his own person and fortune at Lady Charlotte’s feet. Pitt instantly retired, and the sacrifice cost him little; and Dundas’s object being answered, his pretensions also dropped through. Two years afterward, Lady Charlotte became the wife of Colonel Lennox, afterward Duke of Richmond, and in the course of years the mother of fourteen children; one of whom, Henry Adam, a midshipman, fell overboard from the Blake in 1812, and was drowned. According to Wraxall, the Duke of Richmond had to pay the penalty of what he calls “this imprudent, if not unfortunate marriage,” being banished to the snowy banks of St. Lawrence under the name of governor.
In modern times, our young nobility of promise have learned the important truth, ably enforced by Thomas Carlyle, that work is not only man’s appointed lot, but his highest blessing and safeguard. The rising members of various noble families have laid this axiom to heart; and, when not engaged in public business, have come grandly forward to protect the unhappy, to provide for the young, to solace the old. The name of Shaftesbury carries with it gratitude and comfort in its sound; whilst that of him who figured of old in the cabal, the Shaftesbury of Charles II’s time, is, indeed, not forgotten, but remembered with detestation.
Ragged schools; provident schools; asylums for the aged governess; homes in which the consumptive may lay their heads in peace and die; asylums for the penitent; asylums for the idiot; homes where the houseless may repose, — these are the monuments to our Shaftesbury, to our younger sons. The mere political ascendency — the garter or the coronet — are distinctions which pale before these, as does the moon when dawn has touched the mountains’ tops with floods of light. As lecturers amid their own people, as the best friends and counsellors of the indigent, as man bound to man by community of interests, our noblemen in many instances stand before us — Catholic and Protestant zealous alike.
“Jock of Norfolk” is represented by a descendant of noble impulses. Elgin, Carlisle, Stanley — the Bruce, the Howard, the Stanley of former days — are our true heroes of society, men of great aims and great powers.
The Duchess of Gordon was indefatigable in her ambition, but she could not always entangle dukes. Her second daughter, Madelina, was married first to Sir Robert Sinclair; and secondly, to Charles Fyshe Palmer, Esq., of Luckley Hall, Berkshire. Lady Madelina was not handsome, but extremely agreeable, animated, and intellectual. Among her other conquests was the famous Samuel Parr, of Hatton, who used to delight in sounding her praises, and recording her perfections with much of that eloquence which is now fast dying out of remembrance, but which was a thing à part in that celebrated Grecian. Susan, the third daughter of the duke and duchess, married William, Duke of Manchester, thus becoming connected with a descendant of John, Duke of Marlborough.
Louisa, the fourth daughter, married Charles, second Marquis Cornwallis, and son of the justly celebrated Governor of India; and Georgiana, the fifth and youngest, became the wife of John, the late Duke of Bedford.
Collected Poetical Works of Mary Robinson Page 69