Part 4
He went no farther than Calais. “Here I am _restant_ for the present, and God knows solitary enough is my existence; of that, however, I should not complain, for I can always employ resources within myself, was there not a worm that will not sleep, called _conscience_, which all my endeavours to distract, all the strength of coffee, with which I constantly fumigate my unhappy brains, and all the native gaiety of the fellow who brings it to me, cannot lull to indifference beyond the moment; but I will not trouble you upon that subject.” He wrote to Tom Raikes on 22nd May 1816, soon after his arrival: “You would be surprised to find the sudden change and transfiguration which one week has accomplished in my life and _propriâ personâ_. I am punctually off the pillow at half-past seven in the morning. My first object--melancholy, indeed, it may be in its nature--is to walk to the pier-head, and take my distant look at England. This you may call weakness; but I am not yet sufficiently master of those feelings which may be called indigenous to resist the impulse. The rest of my day is filled up with strolling an hour or two round the ramparts of this dismal town, in reading, and the study of that language which must hereafter be my own, for never more shall I set foot in my own country. I dine at five, and my evening has as yet been occupied in writing letters. The English I have seen here--and many of them known to me--I have cautiously avoided; and with the exception of Sir W. Bellingham and Lord Blessington, who have departed, I have not exchanged a word. Prince Esterhazy was here yesterday, and came into my room unexpectedly without my knowing he was here. He had the good nature to convey several letters for me upon his return to London. So much for my life hitherto on this side of the water.”
At first he put up at the famous Dessein’s, but soon he went into apartments at the house of M. Leleux. His friends came to the rescue--Alvanley, Worcester, Sefton, no doubt Raikes too, and others--and sent him a good round sum of money. But his habits had grown upon him, and he could not live economically. If he saw buhl or marqueterie or Sèvres china that he liked he bought it; and he could not accustom himself to the penny-wise economies of life. He would not give way to despair, and, naturally high-spirited, he fought bravely against depression. He wished to be appointed consul at Calais, and his friends’ influence would have secured him the position, but no vacancy occurred.
He had a gleam of hope on hearing of the accession to the throne of his old companion. “He is at length King,” he wrote; “will his past resentments still attach themselves to his Crown? An indulgent amnesty of former peccadilloes should be the primary grace influencing newly throned sovereignty; at least towards those who were once distinguished by his more intimate protection. From my experience, however, of the personage in question, I must doubt any favourable relaxation of those stubborn prejudices which have, during so many years, operated to the total exclusion of one of his _élèves_ from the royal notice: that unfortunate--I need not particularise. You ask me how I am going on at Calais. Miserably! I am exposed every hour to all the turmoil and jeopardy that attended my latter days in England. I bear up as well as I can; and when the mercy and patience of my claimants are exhausted I shall submit without resistance to bread and water and straw. I cannot decamp a second time.”[12]
[12] Brummell still interested himself in fashion. He wrote in 1818 from Calais to Raikes: “I heard of you the other day in a waistcoat that does you indisputable credit, spick and span from Paris, a broad stripe, salmon colour and cramoisi. Keep it up, my dear fellow, and don’t let them laugh you into a relapse so Gothic as that of your former English simplicity.”
The new King made no sign. But soon came the news that he was going abroad, and would stay a night at Calais. The pulse of the exiled dandy must have beat quickly. It was the time for forgiveness; and, after all, his offence had not been very rank. If there were generosity in the heart of the monarch, surely, surely he would hold out the right hand of fellowship to the vanquished foe. The meeting came about unexpectedly. Brummell went for a walk out of the town in the opposite direction to that on which the King would enter it. On his return he tried to get across the street, but the crowd was so great that he remained perforce on the opposite side. The King’s carriage passed close to him. “Good God, Brummell!” George cried in a loud voice. Then Brummell, who was hat in hand at the time, crossed the road, pale as death, and entered his room.
George dined in the evening at Dessein’s, and Brummell sent his valet to make the punch, giving him to take over a bottle of rare old maraschino, the King’s favourite liqueur. The next morning all the suite called except Bloomfield, and each man tried to persuade him to ask for an audience. Brummell signed his name in the visitors’ book. His pride would let him do no more. He had taken the first steps; would the King send for him? George left without a word. Afterwards he actually boasted he had been to Calais without seeing Brummell! So the men went their ways, never to meet again. The King had won. He had seen his old friend, his old foe--which you will--his old comrade, beaten, bankrupt, humbled, and he had passed him by. The King had won, yet perhaps for once it was better to be the vanquished than to win at such a price. Perhaps in the last years of his life George thought once more of Brummell, as himself half blind, half mad, utterly friendless, he went down to the grave unwept and unhonoured.
Others were more generous than the King. The Duke of Wellington invited two successive Ministers for Foreign Affairs to do something for the exile. Both hesitated on the ground that his Majesty might disapprove, whereupon Wellington went to Windsor and spoke to the King, “who had made objections, abusing Brummell--said he was a damned fellow and had behaved very ill to him (the old story--_moi_, _moi_, _moi_); but after having let him run his tether, he had at last extracted his consent.” Still, nothing was done until after Charles Greville was at Calais in 1830: “There I had a long conversation with Brummell about his consulship, and was moved by his account of his own distresses to write to the Duke of Wellington and ask him to do what he could for him. I found him in his old lodging, dressing--some pretty pieces of old furniture in the room, an entire toilet of silver, and a large green macaw perched on the back of a tattered silk chair with faded gilding--full of gaiety, impudence, and misery.”
The consulate at Caen, to which a salary of four hundred a year was attached, was secured for him. Brummell arranged that part of his income should be set aside to pay his debts (which amounted to about a thousand pounds), and his creditors allowed him to leave Calais. He had not long been installed when he wrote a formal letter to Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, stating that the place was a sinecure and the duties so trifling that he should recommend its abolition. It has never been made clear why he took this remarkable step. Was it in the hope of being appointed to a better position? Was it in the desire to evade the payment of his debts? Was it honesty? Whatever the cause, his action recoiled on himself. Lord Palmerston was regretfully compelled to take the consul at his word, and the place was reduced.
Brummell continued to live at Caen; but, being without resources, he sank deeper into debt, and in 1835 his creditors put him into prison. For the last time his friends came to his assistance. William IV. subscribed a hundred pounds. Palmerston gave twice that amount from the public purse. Enough was obtained to secure his liberation and to settle upon him an annuity of one hundred and twenty pounds. Soon he sank into a state of imbecility, and he ended his days in the asylum Bon Sauveur. He died on 30th March 1840.
A moral can easily be drawn from the story of this unfortunate man, and many writers have dwelt upon the lesson it furnishes. Yet there were many worse than he in the circle of which he was the arbiter. He lived his life: he paid the price. Let him rest in peace.
With the departure from England of Brummell the cult of the dandy began to decline. Count D’Orsay the Magnificent, however, galvanised it into fashion for a while. “He is a grand creature,” Gronow described him; “beautiful as the Apollo Belvedere in his outward form; full of health, life, spirits, wit, and gaiety; radiant and joyous; the admired of all admirers.”
He had an amusing _naïveté_ in speaking of his personal advantages. “You know, my dear friend, I am not on a par with my antagonist,” he said to his second on the eve of a duel. “He is a very ugly man, and if I wound him in the face he won’t look much the worse for it; but on my side it ought to be agreed that he shall not aim higher than my chest, for if my face should be spoiled _ce serait vraiment dommage_.”
The dandies of a later day were but poor things--pinchbeck. Captain Gronow, in his youth a _beau_ of no mean order, pours contempt upon their pretensions in no measured terms. “How unspeakably odious--with a few brilliant exceptions, such as Alvanley and others--were the dandies of forty years ago [1822]! They were generally middle-aged, some even elderly, men, had large appetites and weak digestions, gambled freely, and had no luck. They hated everybody and abused everybody, and would sit together in White’s bay window or the pit-boxes at the opera weaving tremendous crammers. They swore a good deal, never laughed, had their own particular slang, looked hazy after dinner, and had most of them been patronised at one time or other by Brummell and the Prince Regent.... They gloried in their shame, and believed in nothing good or noble or elevated. Thank Heaven, that miserable race of used-up dandies has long been extinct! May England never look upon their like again!”
The prayer may well be echoed. The bad influence of the dandies can scarcely be over-estimated; and the effect upon their own class of society was terrible. Their morals were contemptible, and they were without principle. Prodigality was their creed, gambling their religion. The list of those who died beggared is not much longer than the list of those who died by their own hands. They indulged in no manly exercises, and devoted their days to their personal decoration and to the card-table. Extravagance of all kinds was fashionable. Clothes, canes, snuff-boxes, must be expensive to be worthy of such distinguished folk, whose sole aim it was to outvie each other. A guinea was the least that could be given to the butler when dining out; but this was an improvement upon the day when Pope, finding it cost him five guineas in tips whenever he dined with the Duke of Montagu, informed that nobleman he could not dine with him in future unless he sent him an order for the tribute-money.
There was Wellesley Pole, who, after the opera, gave magnificent dinners at his home at Wanstead, where rare dishes were served and the greatest luxury obtained. He married Miss Tylney Pole, who brought him fifty thousand a year; and he died a beggar. There was “Golden Ball” Hughes, with forty thousand a year, who, when the excitements of the gaming-room were not to be had, would play battledore and shuttlecock through the whole night, backing himself for immense sums. He married a beautiful Spanish _danseuse_, Mercandotti, who appeared in London in 1822. Whereupon Ainsworth made an epigram:
“The fair damsel is gone, and no wonder at all That, bred to the dance, she is gone to a Ball.”
The honeymoon was spent at Oatlands, purchased from the Duke of York. It was thought to be a foolish investment; but when Hughes fell upon evil days he was able to sell the estate for a large sum, as the new railway skirted it, and speculative builders were anxious to acquire the land, and so some of his old prosperity returned. There was Lord Fife, an intimate friend of the Regent’s, who spent forty thousand pounds on Mademoiselle Noblet the dancer. A chapter would not suffice for an account of the vicious and foolish habits of these men.
The clubs were then a far more important feature in social life than they are to-day. They were accessible only to those who were in society, which in those days was exclusive, and consisted of a comparatively small body in which everyone knew everyone else, if not personally, at least by name. There were then no clubs for professional men save those of the first rank, or for merchants, or for the _hoi polloi_.
In more or less direct rivalry with the clubs were some of the hotels, and men such as Wellington, Nelson, Collingwood and Sir John Moore used them as a meeting-place--at the beginning of the eighteenth century about fifteen in number, not including, of course, the large coaching inns, coffee, eating, and the _à la mode_ beef houses, most of which had beds for customers. First and foremost of these, kept by a French _chef_, Jacquiers, who had served Louis XVIII. and Lord Darnley, was the Clarendon, built upon a portion of the gardens of Clarendon House, between Bond Street and Albemarle Street, in each of which the hotel had a frontage. This was the only place in England where a French dinner was served that was worthy of mention in the same breath with those obtainable in Paris at the Maison Doré or Rocher de Cancalle’s. The prices were very high. Dinner cost three or four pounds a head, and a bottle of claret or champagne was not obtainable under a guinea. A suite of apartments was reserved for banquets, and it was in these that the famous dinner, ordered by Count D’Orsay, was given to Lord Chesterfield when he resigned the office of Master of the Buckhounds. Covers were laid for thirty, and the bill, exclusive of wine, came to one hundred and eighty guineas.
Limmer’s was another well-known hotel, the resort of the sporting world and of rich country squires. It was gloomy and ill-kept, but renowned for its plain English cooking and world-famous for gin-punch. The clergy went to Ibbetson’s, naval men to Fladong’s in Oxford Street, and army officers and men about town to Stephen’s in Bond Street. Most of these hostelries had their regular frequenters, and strangers were not, as a rule, encouraged to use them as a house of call.
Clubs were few in number. There was “The Club” of Johnson; the Cocoa-Tree, which arose out of the Tory Chocolate House of Anne’s reign; the Royal Naval Club, a favourite haunt of the Duke of Clarence; and the Eccentrics, which numbered among its members such well-known men as Fox, Sheridan, Lord Petersham, Brougham, Lord Melbourne, and Theodore Hook. Graham’s was second rate; nor was Arthur’s in the first flight. When Arthur died, his son-in-law, Mackreth, became the proprietor. He prospered, became a member of Parliament in 1774, and was afterwards knighted. His name is preserved in a very good epigram:
“When Mackreth served in Arthur’s crew, He said to Rumbold, ‘Black my shoe’; To which he answered, ‘Ay, Bob.’ But when return’d from India’s land, And grown too proud to brook command, He sternly answered, ‘Nay, Bob.’”[13]
[13] It was said Sir Thomas Rumbold was originally a waiter at White’s, obtained an appointment in India, and rose to be Governor of Madras. This, however, has been demonstrated to be merely a legend by his descendant, Sir Horace Rumbold.
An institution of a somewhat different class was the Beefsteak Society, which flourished so long ago as the early years of the eighteenth century. The Prince of Wales became a member in 1785, when the number of the Steaks was increased from twenty-four to twenty-five in order to admit him; and subsequently the Dukes of Clarence and Sussex were elected. The bill of fare was restricted to beefsteaks, and the beverages to port wine and punch; but the cuisine on at least one occasion left something to be desired, for when, in 1830, the English Opera House was burnt down, Greville remarked in his diary: “I trust the paraphernalia of the Beefsteak Club perished with the rest, for the enmity I bear that society for the dinner they gave me last year.” Charles Morris was the bard of the Beefsteak Society, and he has come down to posterity on the strength of four lines:
“In town let me live then, in town let me die, For in truth I can’t relish the country, not I. If one must have a villa in summer to dwell, Oh, give me the sweet, shady side of Pall Mall!”
In spite of his prayer, he spent the last years of his life in the rural retreat of Brockham, in Surrey, in a little place presented to him by his fellow-Steak, the Duke of Norfolk. He lived to the great age of ninety-two, and was so hale and hearty and cheerful that, not long before his death, Curran said to him, “Die when you will, Charles, you will die in your youth.”
The greatest club of its day was Almack’s, at 5 Pall Mall, founded in 1740 by Macall, a Scotsman. This institution was nicknamed the “Macaroni Club,” owing to the fashion of its members; and Gibbon remarked that “the style of living, though somewhat expensive, is exceedingly pleasant, and notwithstanding the rage of play, I have found more entertainment and rational society here than in any other club to which I belong.” The high play, which was the bane of half the English aristocracy, ruined many members. The club fell upon evil days, and was absorbed by Brooks’s.
White’s and Brooks’s took the place of Almack’s. The former, established in 1698 as “White’s Chocolate-House,” five doors from the bottom of the west side of St James’s Street, became a club in 1755, when it moved to No. 38, on the opposite side of the street. It was owned successively by Arthur Mackreth, John Martindale, and in 1812 by Raggett, whose son eventually inherited it. Brooks’s was founded by a wine merchant and money-lender of the name, who has been described by Tickell in verses addressed to Sheridan, when Charles James Fox was to give a supper at his rooms near the club:
“Derby shall send, if not his plate, his cooks; And know, I’ve bought the best champagne from Brooks, From liberal Brooks, whose speculative skill Is hasty credit and a distant bill; Who, nursed in clubs, disdains a vulgar trade, Exults to trust, and blushes to be paid.”
Both clubs, although more or less instituted for the purpose of gambling, were at first political. White’s, however, soon took down the Tory flag and received members without reference to their political opinions. Brooks’s, on the other hand, remained true to its Whig traditions; and it was to counterbalance the influence of this institution--the “Reform” of that time--that the Carlton Club was organised by Lord Clanwilliam and others. These, with Boodles’, were the great resorts of the dandies; and the bay window at White’s, when Brummell was the lion, was one of the sights of the town. The Prince of Wales was a member of Brooks’s; but when his boon companions Tarleton and Jack Payne were blackballed he withdrew, and on his own account founded a new club, of which the manager was Weltzie, his house-steward.
Watier’s, the great macao gambling-house, was founded in 1807; but play was very high, and it lasted only for twelve years. According to Gronow it came into existence in a somewhat curious way. When some members of White’s and Brooks’s were dining at Carlton House, the Prince of Wales asked what sort of dinners were served at these institutions. One of the guests complained: “The eternal joints and beefsteaks, the boiled fowl with oyster sauce, and an apple-tart. This is what we have, sir, at our clubs, and very monotonous fare it is.” The Prince sent for Watier, his _chef_, and asked if he would take a house and organise a club-dinner. Watier was willing. The scheme was carried out, and the club was famed for its exquisite cuisine.
Another and more circumstantial account of the founding of the club is given by Raikes. He says it was originally instituted as a harmonic meeting by the Maddochs, Calverts and Lord Headfort, who took a house in Piccadilly, at the corner of Bolton Street, and engaged Watier as master of the revels. “This destination of the club was soon changed. The dinners were so _recherché_ and so much talked of in town that all the young men of fashion and fortune became members of it. The catches and glees were then superseded by cards and dice; the most luxurious dinners were furnished at any price, as the deep play at night rendered all charges a matter of indifference. Macao was the constant game, and thousands passed from one to another with as much facility as marbles.”
The Duke of York was a member of Watier’s, and so too was Byron, who christened it “The Dandy Club.”
Another member was Robert Bligh, whose eccentricities were already verging upon insanity. One night, at the macao-table, Brummell was losing heavily, and in an affected tone of tragedy he called to a waiter to bring him a pistol. Thereupon Bligh, who was his _vis-à-vis_, produced from his coat pockets a pair of loaded pistols, and laying them on the table, said, “Mr Brummell, if you are really desirous to put a period to your existence, I am extremely happy to offer you the means without troubling the waiter.” The feelings of the members may be imagined when the knowledge was forced upon them that in their midst was a madman who carried loaded firearms.
Brummell, Raikes has recorded, was the supreme dictator at Watier’s, “the club’s perpetual president.” At the height of his prosperity, one night when he entered, the macao-table was full. Sheridan was there trying his luck with a few pounds he could ill spare, for he had fallen upon evil days. Brummell, whose good luck was notorious at this time, offered to take Sheridan’s seat and go shares in his deal. He added two hundred pounds in counters to the ten pounds in front of him, took the cards, dealt, and in a quarter of an hour had won fifteen hundred pounds. Then he left the table and divided his gains with Sheridan. “Go home, Sheridan,” he said quietly; “go home and give your wife and brats a supper, and never play again.” It is good to be able to record a generous act, delicately done, of a much-abused man.
Of Brummell’s witty insolence mention has already been made, but the laugh was once at least against him. He was at the card-table playing with Combe the brewer, an Alderman who had passed the chair. “Come, Mashtub,” he said, being the caster, “what do you set?” “Twenty-five guineas.” “Well, then, have at the mare’s pony” (twenty-five guineas). The game progressed, and Brummell won twelve times in succession. “Thank you, Alderman,” he said; “for the future I shall never drink any porter but yours.” “I wish, sir,” retorted Combe, “that every other blackguard in London would say the same.”