Hesketh Pearson Read online

  The main social event that month was the reception of Ellen at Court. She began to prepare for it at 11:30 A.M., “and had my hair dressed with blond lace lappets, two white plumes one side, and a large bunch of roses and rosebuds the other, and in spite of the horrid sound I assure you it all looked pretty.” At 1 o’clock her sister-in-law called for her and they drove through streets lined with people before reaching St. James’s Palace. Penetrating various rooms full of officials they arrived at a large hall, and Ellen was able to inspect the dresses of those about to be received. “The most splendid jewels were emeralds and diamonds, tiara, earrings, sleeve-trimmings, and stomacher worn by one of the most horrible-looking old women one ever saw—a Mrs. F.N., who is for the third time married, at present, and from all I hear is as horrid as she looks.”

  They waited in the hall for at least an hour and a half while Queen Victoria and her husband were receiving the King and Queen of Hanover and other priorities; then the door opened and they passed through another room into the presence-chamber. Let Ellen continue:

  Here you enter at the left corner, take a long sweep round, and make your exit at the right-hand corner. The Queen stands at the head of the curve, and the lane which you walk in is formed of all the Court-dignitaries, officers in waiting, etc. Your card reaches the Queen just as you do, and the Lord Chamberlain reads it in a low distinct voice, just loud enough for the Queen, Prince Albert and yourself to hear—“The Hon. Mrs. Edward Twisleton, on her marriage, by her sister-in-law, the Hon. Mrs. Twisleton.” You take off your right-hand glove before entering, and on arriving before the Queen you make your curtsey, put your hand just under the Queen’s and kiss it, curtsey to Prince Albert, and to the Duchess of Kent, and are off again before you know it. Your train is spread out at the entrance for you, and given you over your arm again as soon as you have made your curtseys, and then you back out, which is not difficult, for it’s a very little way....My only trouble was that you must pass so quickly between those before you and those after you that it was impossible to have a good stare at the Queen and Prince Albert. I could only see that she looked like her pictures, and looked pleasant and gracious, and I think I feel rather more loyal, after having kissed her hand!! Prince Albert has grown rather stout, which makes him look different from his portraits.

  One peeress told Ellen that her dress was the prettiest at the Drawing Room, and Edward said it was very nearly so, which pleased her. “The flowers made the beauty of it,” she thought, “but the corsage was exquisitely fitted and trimmed, the jupe festooned with the most exquisite garlands of roses, and bouillonnée with tulle more than halfway up, and the whole train lined with satin....The train is about twice your whole height in length; mine was white silk, like the dress, trimmed with three puffs of tulle all round, and at intervals exquisite bunches of roses....The train is not ugly or awkward, as I thought it would be, when held over your arm; you wear a good stiff skirt, which keeps the lower dress out, and then the train is so handsome, inside and outside, that whatever way it turns is no matter.”

  Again Ellen met everyone of note in the worlds of art and fashion, including Monckton Milnes, a red-faced, good-natured, tactful person famous for his breakfast and dinner parties, at one of whose gatherings Ellen saw Tennyson, who “keeps himself rather shaggy....I had not a word with him, and hardly heard him speak, except to abuse a cup of green tea after dinner, for being so strong.” They heard Disraeli make “a claptrap speech,” inevitably clap-trap because they disapproved of his politics; dined at Lord Lansdowne’s; and saw many notabilities at Lady Ashburton’s ball. In July they stayed with the Ashburtons at Addiscombe and met among others James Spedding, who “is always engaged on a Life of Lord Bacon, and is an amiable, clever, cultivated person to whom I have no objection except when he gets on to American subjects, where I find him intolerable with his air of authoritative information and his ill-concealed sneers.” He must have got upon American subjects fairly often because a year later she called him “my aversion.”

  Lady Ashburton had a habit of collecting literary lions, Carlyle being one of them, and the conversation at her table was considered intellectual. Ellen described her as “tall, stout and plain...a woman whose life is in society, and with whom conversation is an art and an occupation.” She had read much, traveled extensively, knew “all the most distinguished people in England, in all lines,” and liked “to talk to five or six gentlemen at once, and for an endless length of time.” Her wealthy husband, head of the house of Baring’s, was liked by everybody including his wife, whose jokes he highly appreciated. Ellen thought Lady Ashburton artificial, unlike Jane Carlyle who had a heart and was not fashionable. All the same the glitter of fashionable life could make the Carlyles seem rather dreary.

  When not otherwise engaged, Edward and Ellen sometimes went down to Greenwich for a whitebait dinner at the Ship, partly for the sake of the drive in their brougham and partly because the dinners at their hotel were so expensive; but as a rule they were full up with invitations. Occasionally they met Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, who was considered “one of the most agreeable men in London society,” reported Ellen, “but he has the most Jesuitical mouth, and his manner, when Lords are in presence, richly merits his popular sobriquet of ‘Soapy Sam.’” She called him “a tuft-hunter” and “the greatest Sham I know,” and thought that the American ministers being dependent on their congregations were in a better position than the English clergy who were dependent on the nobility, “which makes them look as if they had been touched by a torpedo!” Ellen herself was inclined to be tickled by the nobles she met, for example Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert, who would some day be the Earl and Countess of Pembroke. They provoked Ellen with the self-satisfaction of their attitude which seemed to imply: “We are both cultivated, handsome and aristocratic; we are also perfectly moral, we attend the services of the Established Church twice on a Sunday; we are also charitable, and have had much to do with promoting emigration to Australia; we are really very much above you in rank, but we are not proud of it, etc.” Edward’s brother Lord Saye and Sele was a Canon Residentiary of Hereford Cathedral, and in August 1853 they paid him a visit. “From Worcester we took the coach to Hereford, the road taking us right over the Malvern Hills, up into that refreshing air, and through that beautiful scenery.” She thought her brother-in-law a very pleasant, unaffected but unintelligent person, and she found the clergy to whom she was introduced “all amiable and well-behaved, believing all the 39 Articles without ever thinking of what they mean, I suppose.”

  After that she and her husband made another continental tour. They went through Holland, Belgium and the Rhine country, stayed at Bonn, saw Cologne Cathedral, and stopped at Weimar, where Ellen wrote to say that the German mode of life appealed to her more than the English, whose class-distinctions were inhuman: “England is a luxurious country for the rich, the educated (or the truly Episcopalian) to live in—but I am afraid a hard one for the poor.” They visited Dresden, Berlin, Nuremberg and Munich, reading the plays of Goethe on their way, and Ellen thought the Germans “much in advance of any other country now in Art,” their music and poetry being of the best. The travelers heard of the outbreak of the Crimean War, and thereafter Ellen’s letters were full of it. They saw Vienna and Budapest, and Ellen was delighted to receive letters from her sister so quickly:

  It is to the praise of steamboats and railroads, is it not, that I, in Vienna, am answering a letter, written in Boston only 20 days ago, and received in 18 days after the date. I wonder if you appreciate as forcibly as I do what a difference it makes in life to live after the invention of steam, instead of before. I bless the much-abused nineteenth century!

  They reached Venice via Trieste, saw everything they had previously missed, and read Ruskin avidly. Then on to Padua, Verona and Turin, accompanied by Scott’s Life of Napoleon and Mignet’s French Revolution, and across the south of France by diligence to Spain, where they stopped for a few days at Barcelona. In Catalonia t
en horses were harnessed to a coach and kept at a gallop by the united shoutings, whippings, screamings and howlings of three men, “and the manner in which, at this pace and with this length of team and vehicle, one gets round the corners of narrow village-streets, and whisks in and out of hotel courtyards, is absolutely amazing to the Anglo-Saxon mind, and, for some time, equally amusing.”

  They traveled to Valencia early in February ‘54, part of their journey having been undertaken in a springless wagon; but as it was 8:30 P.M. when they got to the capital, the gates were shut for carriages and baggage, and a certain amount of bribery was necessary before they could gain admission on foot, carrying two carpetbags. The road thereafter to Alicante was bumpy: “To say that it was a succession of pitfalls and paving-stones is too mild—chasms and precipices, rather, over and into which we were dragged for twelve hours, in a one-horse cart without springs! Oh, ‘twas an unimaginable day! In fact, it was a very bad mountain bridle-road, which would have been good only for a brook or a chamois.” The Spanish inns (posadas) were extremely primitive, but there was something picturesque about the company of muleteers round a courtyard fire on which everyone’s supper was being cooked.

  They were entranced by the Alhambra at Granada and of course Cordova had to be seen as well as Seville. At Gibraltar the air was heavy with the Crimean War, French and English troops in the streets, parts of their fleets visible on the sea. They enjoyed an excursion to San Roque in the company of Captain and Mrs. Grey, who had a house there. Grey was Captain of the Port, his wife a one-time famous beauty. She still looked attractive, and Ellen declared, “No American woman could possibly attain to such an air of repose as hers, under the combination of six children and a salary of only 800 pounds a year! and my admiration is still fresh of the blessed and marvellous temperaments and constitutions of these English women.”

  Back through Spain they sipped innumerable sherries at Jerez and stayed at Toledo, which evoked memories of Don Quixote and Cervantes. Ellen thought the Spaniards much cleaner than either the French or the Italians, but objected to the way in which the men rudely stared at her and addressed her in the streets. They got to Madrid in the middle of April and remained there for a month, Edward having letters of introduction to Lord Howden the English Ambassador and to Pasenal de Gayangos, a Spanish writer of eminence.

  Needless to say they took lessons in the language every day, and unnecessary to add that they rhapsodized in the Museo over the paintings by Murillo, Raphael, Velasquez, Titian, Vandyke, Rembrandt, etc.: “I certainly never felt so overwhelmed by visions of delight!” At the time of their arrival in Madrid there was a strained atmosphere in the diplomatic world caused by a duel between the American Minister, Pierre Soulé, and the French Ambassador, the Marquis de Turgot. It seems that Turgot’s wife had made disparaging comments on a dress worn by Soule’s wife. In the duel which followed, Turgot was lamed for life, and there was much bad feeling, large parties among the diplomatic corps being abandoned because the hostile groups would not blend. But the English Ambassador took advantage of Ellen’s presence and invited the warring factions to a reception, at which there was some sort of reconciliation. Ellen’s black eyes and hair made many mistake her for a Spaniard, the result being that the master of ceremonies sent her tickets for a Court concert. They also saw a bullfight, “which began at half past four and ended at seven, in which time nine bulls were cruelly killed before the eager eyes of 12,000 people, and from which I came away feeling nearly sick with the painful shuddering excitement, and a firm determination never to see another.”

  A lengthy social round included invitations from the Comtesse de Montijo, whose daughter Eugénie was then Empress of the French. The Comtesse was very beautiful, had charming manners and dressed exquisitely, but then “all the other ladies, also, were dressed to the nines.” Wherever they went in Spain they were struck by the violent contrasts of luxury and misery, the beauty of the churches and the vileness of the poor people’s dwellings. Leaving Madrid in the middle of May, they visited the Escorial and crossed the Guadarrama to Segovia on horseback. Then via Salamanca, Valladolid and Burgos to Bayonne, utter poverty and excessive wealth side by side all the way.

  A short stay in Paris, another sight of Rachel in Les Horaces (“I never saw such a superb piece of acting”), and they were back in London at the Brunswick Hotel just in time for Ascot week, after which they “continued the occupation most worthy of irrational beings, of ringing perpetual door-bells and leaving perpetual little pieces of pasteboard.” One afternoon they drove down to Sydenham to see the Crystal Palace, which impressed Ellen, and one evening they called to see the Murillos at Stafford House, where the hostess laid herself open to Ellen’s pen: “The Duchess of Sutherland herself was there, all smiles and affability as usual, and dressed as hideously as I have always seen her—in a blue and white brocade open in front, a Honiton lace mantelet, all done up with little funny pink-ribbon bows, and a cap of point-de-Venise, ornamented in the same frightful manner. She must have been very handsome before she grew so very stout.” Edward’s relations could be very trying, because when Lady Leigh at a dinner party complimented Ellen enthusiastically on her personal appearance “all her daughters got up a chorus of the Leigh giggle, which rises like a fountain whenever anything is done, said or referred to with which they are not perfectly familiar, at any peculiarity of manner or expression, and which drives me nearly frantic, while Edward calmly quotes an old Latin line to the effect that ‘nothing is sillier than a silly giggle’ and thinks nothing more about it.”

  They went everywhere and met everyone, from the editor of The Times, J. T. Delane, to Napoleon’s one-time mistress, Countess Walewska. Lunch with Christopher Wordsworth, nephew of the poet and Canon of Westminster Abbey, aroused reflections out of tune with the beautiful cloisters in which he lived, for he was “a person of very harsh, strong, sincere convictions, which prove to him, past doubt, that Edward and you and I are lost equally and beyond all hope and 99/100ths of the human race with us.”

  In the summer of ‘54 they stayed at Brighton and Ryde, saw Chichester and Winchester, paid a round of family visits, and finished up at Weymouth and Torquay. They took a London house at No. 3 Rutland Gate, and kept up their literary studies: “In the evening we read Job and Ecclesiastes, neither of which are very helpful, I think; they do nothing toward solving the problems of human life, only discuss and exhibit them.” The siege of Sebastopol was the main topic of conversation and Ellen feared that the subject might bore her sisters in Boston, but she could not help adverting to it in her letters. Edward discussed it fully at his clubs and returned home with the assorted opinions of his fellow members. “I cannot imagine women’s wishing their husbands to give up their clubs,” Ellen reflected; “I only wish we ladies had some such way of meeting our friends.”

  They breakfasted with Dean Milman of St. Paul’s at the end of the year and met Macaulay, whose conversation was “as fluent and full of easy entertaining information as his writing is, and he talks off chapter upon chapter.” He demolished Ruskin, discussed architecture, told anecdotes, and closed with a parody of Carlyle’s style which set the table into a roar, “and before one had done laughing, he left skilfully, having said his best thing.” He was shorter, stouter, and more genial than Ellen had anticipated, smiled winningly, and interrupted others so charmingly that no one seemed annoyed by his way of monopolizing the conversation.

  Edward and Ellen spent the winter of 1854-55 in Paris, improving their knowledge of the language by taking French lessons, walking in the Tuileries, calling on people on whom it was necessary to call, and after dinner usually reading works of an elevating nature such as the histories of Hallam and Hume, or works of an entertaining order like Pickwick Papers. But the last had to be read aloud by Ellen “as a sort of fancy-work before the regular duty begins”; that is, before Edward began the Hume or Hallam treatment. Their passion for knowledge embraced chemistry, which they studied in the laboratory of a working chemis
t for three hours a day, four days a week. “We have been separating water into its elements, ascertaining the properties of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbonic acid gas.” But she begged her sister: “Don’t tell anybody, or they will think me learned and blue.” She remained as fond as ever of her husband, of whom she wrote: “He is perfectly well and perfectly lovely—do forgive me, but he is so good to me, and that slipped off my pen.”