Part 8

“I was within an hour once of being his prisoner, and cannot say but I thought it a piece of good fortune to escape that honour, though he has promised to treat all English ladies well that cheerfully submit to the laws of his seraglio. The way of life I’m now in is quite new to me, but not utterly unpleasant. I’m by turns the wife of a Merchant, Soldier, and Innkeeper, for in such different capacities is the Chief of Tellichery destined to act. The War is a bar to Commerce, yet I do a great deal of business in the mercantile way, as my husband’s amanuensis. You know his inability to use the pen, and as he has lost his Clerks and Accountant, without any prospect of acquiring others, I’m necessitated to pass the greatest part of my time in his office, and consent to do so, as it gives me consequence and him pleasure. I really should not be unhappy here if the Motive for which we left England could be as easily accomplished as at Bombay, but that cannot be without an advantageous place--then indeed we should do very well.

“The country is pleasant and healthy (a second Montpelier), our house (a fort and property of the Company) a magnificent one, furnished, too, at our Master’s expense, and the allowance for supporting it creditably, what you would term genteelly, though it does not defray the charge of Liquors, which alone amount to six hundred a year, and such a sum, vast as it seems, does not seem extravagant in our situation. For we are obliged to keep a public table, and six months in the year have a full house of shipping Gentry, that resort to us for traffic and intelligence from all parts of India, China, and Asia. Our Society at other times is very confined, as it only consists of a few factors, and two or three families: and such we cannot expect great intercourse with on account of the heavy rains and terrible thunder with lightning to which this Coast is peculiarly subject six months in the year.... I flatter myself I’m beloved by such of the Malabars as are within reach of my notice. I was born upon their coast, which is an argument in my favour.... I never go out without a guard of six Sepoys (Mahomedan soldiers) armed with drawn sabres and loaded pistols, as some of the natives are treacherous and might be induced to insult a woman of _my Consequence_ without a Veil.”

MRS DRAPER TO THOMAS MATHEW SCLATER

“Surat, _April 5th, 1771_.

“... I received your affectionate letter, my dear Coz, and I prophecy that I shall answer it very stupidly for I danced last night--supped on a cool terrace, and sat up till three o’clock this morning. This may appear nothing very extraordinary to you, my spirits and love of the graceful movement considered, but it was a very great undertaking, the climate, my plan of temperance and exercise considered; for you must know that I find it necessary to live simply mechanical, in order to preserve the remains of a broken constitution and some traces of my former appearance. I rise with the lark daily, and as constantly amble some eight or sixteen miles--after the fox too, occasionally, but field sports have something Royal with them here. What think you of hunting the Antelope with Leopards? This I have frequently done, and a noble diversion it is. Early hours and abstemious Diet are absolutely necessary to the possession of health in India, and I generally conform to the one, and invariably practise the other. Ten or eleven o’clock at the latest, is the usual time of retiring, and soup or vegetables with sherbet and milk constitutes the whole of my regimen. Still I cannot acquire anything like confirmed health or strength here; but if this mode of living preserves my being, my cheerfulness and natural disposition to make the best of things will I hope teach me to bear it.... At least I will not thro’ any fault of my own, return to Europe with the dregs of life only, but endeavour by every honest means to preserve such a position of animating spirit as may qualify me for the character of an agreeable companion; and then, who knows but cool weather, fashionable society and the animating presence of those I love may enable me

‘Formed by their converse happily to steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe.’

“Do you know that I begin to think all praise foreign but that of true desert. It was not always so, but this same solitude produces reflection, and reflection is good.

“It is an enemy to everything that is not founded on truth, consequently I grow fond of my own approbation and endeavour to deserve it by such a mode of thinking and acting as may enable me to acquire it. Seriously, my dear Sclater, I believe I shall one day be a good moralist.”

MRS DRAPER TO MRS RICHARD SCLATER

“Bombay, _February 6th, 1772_.

“I cannot say that we have any immediate hopes of returning to England as independent people. India is not what it was, my dear Madam, nor is even a moderate fortune to be acquired here, without more assiduity and time than the generality of English persons can be induced to believe or think of as absolutely necessary; but this Idea, painful as it is to many adventurers who’ve no notion of the difficulties they are to encounter in the road to wealth, would not affect me considerably, if I had not some very material reasons for wishing to leave the Climate expeditiously. My health is much prejudiced by a Residence in it, my affection for an only child, strongly induces me to bid farewell to it before it is too late to benefit by a change of scene. Mr Draper will in all probability be obliged to continue here some years longer, but, as to myself, I hope to be permitted to call myself an inhabitant of your country before I am two years older.”

MRS DRAPER TO MRS ANNE JAMES

“Bombay, _April 15th, 1772_.

“You wonder, my dear, at my writing to Becket--I’ll tell you why I did so. I have heard some Anecdotes extremely disadvantageous to the Characters of the Widow and Daughter [of Sterne], and that from Persons who said they had been personally acquainted with them, both in France and England.... Some part of their Intelligence corroborated what I had a thousand times heard from the Lips of Yorick, almost invariably repeated.... The Secret of my Letters being in her hands, had somehow become extremely Public: it was noticed to me by almost every Acquaintance I had in the Ships, or at this Settlement--this alarmed me, for at that time I had never communicated the circumstance and could not suspect you of acting by me in any manner which I would not have acted in by myself--One Gentleman in particular told me that both you and I should be deceived, if we had the least reliance on the Honor or Principles of Mrs Sterne, for that, when she had secured as much as she could for suppressing the Correspondence she was capable of selling it to a Bookseller afterwards--by either refusing to return it to you--or taking Copies of it, without our knowledge--and therefore He advised me, if I was averse to its Publication, to take every means in my Power of Suppressing it--this influenced me to write to Becket and promise Him a reward equal to his Expectations if He would deliver the letters to you....

“My dear Friend, that stiffness you complain’d of, when I called you Mrs James I said I could not accost you with my usual Freedom entirely arose from a Depression of Spirits, too natural to the mortified, when severe Disappointments gall the Sense--You had told me that Sterne was no more--I had heard it before, but this Confirmation of it truly afflicted me; for I was almost an Idolator of his Worth, while I found Him the Mild, Generous, Good Yorick, We had so often thought Him to be--to add to my regret for his loss his Widow had my letters in her Power (I never entertained a good opinion of her), and meant to subject me to Disgrace and Inconvenience by the Publication of them. You know not the contents of these letters, and it was natural for you to form the worst judgment of them, when those who had seen ’em reported them unfavourably, and were disposed to dislike me on that Account. My dear girl! had I not cause to feel humbled so Circumstanced--and can you wonder at my sensations communicating themselves to my Pen?

“Miss Sterne’s did indeed, my dear, give me a great deal of pain--it was such a one as I by no means deserved in answer to one written in the true Spirit of kindness, however it might have been constructed.--Mr Sterne had repeatedly told me, that his Daughter was as well acquainted with my Character as he was with my Appearance--in all his letters wrote since my leaving England this Circumstance is much dwelt upon. Another, too, that of Mrs Sterne being in too precarious a State of Health, to render it possible that she would survive many months. Her violence of temper (indeed, James, I wish not to recriminate or be severe just now) and the hatefulness of her Character, are strongly urged to me, as the Cause of his Indifferent Health, the whole of his Misfortunes, and the Evils that would probably Shorten his Life--the visit Mrs Sterne meditated, some time antecedent to his Death, he most pathetically lamented, as an adventure that would wound his Peace and greatly embarrass his Circumstances--the former on account of the Eye Witness He should be to his Child’s Affections having been alienated from Him by the artful Misrepresentations of her Mother under whose Tutorage she had ever been--and the latter, from the Rapacity of her Disposition--for well do I know, says he, ‘that the sole Intent of her Visit is to plague and fleece me--had I Money enough, I would buy off this Journey, as I have done several others--but till my Sentimental Work is published I shall not have a single sou more than will Indemnify People for my immediate Expenses.’ The receipt of this Intelligence I heard of Yorick’s Death. The very first Ship which left us Afterwards, I wrote to Miss Sterne by--and with all the freedom which my Intimacy with her Father and his Communications warranted--I purposely avoided speaking of her Mother, for I knew nothing to her Advantage, and I had heard a great deal to the reverse--so circumstanced--how could I with any kind of Delicacy Mention a Person who was hateful to my departed Friend, when for the sake of that very Friend I wished to confer a kindness on his Daughter--and to enhance the value of it, Solicited her Society and consent to share my Prospects, as the highest Favor which could be shown to Myself--indeed, I knew not, but Mrs Sterne, from the Description I had received of her, might be no more--or privately confined, if in Being, owing to a Malady, which I have been told the violence of her temper subjects her to.”[19]

[19] British Museum, Add. MSS. 34527.

It has been stated by many writers that the cause of the unhappy life led by the Drapers at Bombay was the fault of Sterne, whose insidious flatteries undermined the lady’s moral rectitude. This, not to put too fine a point on it, is a conclusion as absurd as it is unwarrantable. Mrs Draper was far too intelligent not to realise that Sterne was a sentimentalist, and not to understand that such allusions as to her being his second wife were, if in bad taste, at least meant to be playful, seeing that he was, and knew he was, standing on the threshold of the valley of the shadow of death. Mrs Draper left her husband six years after she had said farewell to Sterne, not because of the author’s influence on her, but because her patience, weakened by a long course of unkind behaviour, was finally outraged by her husband’s obvious partiality for her maid, Mrs Leeds. She had long desired to leave Draper, and now a legitimate excuse was furnished, which in the eyes of all unprejudiced persons justified the step.

Draper, who seems to have had some suspicion of her intention, watched her closely, and for a while it was impossible for her to get away. At last she escaped from Mazagon on board a King’s cutter, and it was stated that she had eloped with one of her admirers, Sir John Clark. The truth was that she accepted his escort to the house of her uncle, Thomas Whitehall, who lived at Masulipatam.

MRS DRAPER TO THOMAS MATHEW SCLATER

“Rajahmundy, 80 miles from Masulipatam, “_January 20th, 1774_.

“... I will let you into my present situation. I live entirely with my uncle, and I shall continue to do so to the last hour of my life if he continues to wish it as much as he does at present.”

Whether her uncle did not continue to desire her company, or whether she tired of the life, cannot be determined, but later, in the year 1774, Mrs Draper returned to England. There she took up her friendship with the Jameses from the point at which it had been interrupted by her departure seven years earlier for India, and she was soon the centre of a distinguished circle. The publication, in 1775, of some of Sterne’s letters to her made her somewhat unpleasantly notorious, and she withdrew from London to the comparative seclusion of Bristol, where she remained until her death, three years later. She was buried in Bristol Cathedral, where a monument, depicting two classical figures bending over a shield, one bearing a torch, the other a dove, was erected in her honour. The shield bore the inscription:

Sacred To the Memory of MRS ELIZA DRAPER, in whom Genius and Benevolence were united. She died August 3, 1778, aged 35.

The Demoniacs

’Twas at Jesus College, Cambridge,” Sterne wrote in the last year of his life, “I commenced a friendship with Mr H----, which has been most lasting on both sides.” This “Mr H----” was the notorious John Hall, who added to his patronymic the name of Stevenson after his marriage in 1739 with an heiress, Anne, daughter of Ambrose Stevenson of Manor House, in the parish of Lanchester, county Durham. Born in 1718, the second son of Joseph Hall, counsellor-at-law of Durham, by his wife, Catherine, eldest daughter of Edward Trotter of Skelton Castle, near Guisborough, John Hall-Stevenson, to call him by the name by which he is best known, went in his eighteenth year to the University, for which, though he did not there distinguish himself, he cherished to the end of his days a sincere regard. “I should recommend Cambridge as a place infinitely preferable to the Temple,” he wrote to his eldest grandson, on 17th February 1785, “and particularly on account of the connections you may form with young gentlemen of your own age, of the first rank, men that you must live with hereafter: it is the only time of life to make lasting, honourable, and useful friendships. These advantages were lost to me and blasted by premature marriage, the scantiness of my fortune forced me to vegetate in the country, and precluded me from every laudable pursuit suggested by ambition.”

The friendship between Sterne and Hall-Stevenson must have been of rapid growth, as Hall-Stevenson went to Jesus College in June 1835, and Sterne left the University when he took his degree in the following January. Hall-Stevenson has been, no doubt accurately, described as a very precocious lad, with Rabelaisian tastes, and again and again his influence with Sterne has been made an excuse for the humorist’s lapses from morality and decency. This, however, is most unfair, for when the young men became acquainted Hall-Stevenson was only seventeen years of age, whereas Sterne was two-and-twenty. Be this as it may, of their intimacy at this time there is no doubt, and tradition tells how they studied together--it would be interesting in the light of subsequent events to know what they studied. They called each other cousin, though the relationship, if any, was most remote. “Cousin Anthony Shandy,” Hall-Stevenson in days to come signed himself, and Sterne, in the famous dog-Latin letter written a few months before he died, addressed him: “_mi consobrine, consobrinis meis omnibus carior_.”

Hall-Stevenson remained at Cambridge until 1838, then went abroad for a year, and on his return made the “premature marriage” to which allusion has been made. When he and Sterne met again is a problem not easy to solve. Sterne, writing to Bishop Warburton in June 1760, mentioned that he did not know Hall-Stevenson’s handwriting. “From a nineteen years’ total interruption of all correspondence with him,” he said, “I had forgot his hand.” Since Sterne is so precise in giving the number of years, it would seem as if he and his college friend had written to each other until 1741, and that in this year the youthful intimacy, after the manner of its kind, had lapsed. Probably for some years they may have drifted apart, but there is an abundance of evidence to show that long before 1760 they were again on the best terms.

The threads of the college friendship, it has generally been stated, were gathered together when Skelton Castle came into the possession of Hall-Stevenson, who thenceforth resided there. As to when this happened the writers on Sterne only agree in remarking that it was not until after 1745, in which year, after the rebellion, Lawson Trotter, the owner of the castle and a noted Jacobite, fled the country; some say that then the property passed to his sister, Hall-Stevenson’s mother, and at her death to her son; others that it passed direct to the nephew as the next in tail. All these statements are inaccurate. Lawson Trotter sold Skelton Castle to Joseph Hall in 1727, and Hall-Stevenson, his elder brother having died in childhood, inherited the estate at the death of his father six years later.

Skelton Castle, which is believed to date back before the Conquest, had been added to, a square tower here, a round tower there, by many of its occupiers, Bruces, Cowpers, Trotters, until, when it came into the hands of Hall-Stevenson, it was a quaint patchwork edifice, erected on a platform supported by two buttressed terraces, which raised it high above the surrounding moat. Hall-Stevenson, amused by the picture presented by its medley of architectural styles, christened it “Crazy Castle,” and wrote some humorous verses descriptive of it, well worthy to be preserved, especially as they are almost the only lines from his pen that can be printed in this respectable age:

“There is a Castle in the North, Seated upon a swampy clay, At present but of little worth, In former times it had its day.

This ancient Castle is call’d CRAZY, Whose mould’ring walks a moat environs, Which moat goes heavily and lazy, Like a poor prisoner in irons.”

Skelton Castle was at this date more than half ruined, as the owner was at some pains to indicate:

“Many a time I’ve stood and thought, Seeing the boat upon this ditch, It look’d as if it had been brought For the amusement of a witch, To sail amongst applauding frogs, With water-rats, dead cats and dogs.

The boat so leaky is, and old, That if you’re fanciful and merry, You may conceive, without being told, That it resembles Charon’s wherry.

A turret also you may note, Its glory vanish’d like a dream, Transform’d into a pigeon-coat, Nodding beside the sleepy stream.

From whence, by steps with moss o’ergrown, You mount upon a terrace high, Where stands that heavy pile of stone, Irregular, and all awry.

If many a buttress did not reach A kind and salutary hand, Did not encourage and beseech, The terrace and the house to stand, Left to themselves, and at a loss, They’d tumble down into the foss.

Over the Castle hangs a Tow’r, Threat’ning destruction every hour; Where owls, and bats, and the jackdaw, Their vespers and their Sabbath keep, All night scream horribly, and caw, And snore all day in horrid sleep.

Oft at the quarrels and the noise Of scolding maids or idle boys, Myriads of rooks rise up and fly, Like legions of damn’d souls, As black as coals, That foul and darken all the sky.”

Hall-Stevenson was, as has been remarked, a poor man, and could not afford to undertake the task of repairing the vast structure, though once he thought of making an effort to do so. When Sterne heard of this he wrote protesting against any interference with the fine old structure, and seasoned his letter with a touch of worldly wisdom that comes quaintly from him:

“But what art thou meditating with axes and hammers?--‘_I know the pride and the naughtiness of thy heart_,’ and thou lovest the sweet visions of architraves, friezes and pediments with their tympanums, and thou hast found out a pretence, _à raison de cinq livres sterling_ to be laid out in four years, &c. &c. (so as not to be felt, which is always added by the d----l as a bait) to justify thyself unto thyself. It may be very wise to do this--but ’tis wiser to keep one’s money in one’s pocket, whilst there are wars without and rumours of wars within. St ---- advises his disciples to sell both coat and waistcoat--and go rather without shirt or sword, than leave no money in their scrip to go to Jerusalem with. Now those _quatre ans consecutifs_, my dear Anthony, are the most precious morsels in thy _life to come_ (in this world), and thou wilt do well to enjoy that morsel without cares, calculations, and curses, and damns, and debts--for as sure as stone is stone, and mortar is mortar, &c., ’twill be one of the many works of thy repentance.--But after all, if the Fates have decreed it, as you and I have some time supposed it on account of your generosity, ‘_that you are never to be a monied man_,’ the decree will be fulfilled whether you adorn your castle and line it with cedar, and paint it within side and without side with vermilion, or not--_et cela étant_ (having a bottle of Frontiniac and glass at my right hand) I drink, dear Anthony, to thy health and happiness, and to the final accomplishments of all thy lunary and sublunary projects.”

Notwithstanding this sage counsel, Hall-Stevenson called in an architect, presently to be referred to as “Don Pringello,” who, to his credit, declined to tamper with the building, and succeeded in inducing the owner to abandon the plan of reconstruction.

Hall-Stevenson from time to time visited London, and made acquaintance with Horace Walpole, and also with Sir Francis Dashwood and John Wilkes, who introduced him to the Monks of Medmenham and also gave him a taste for politics, that afterwards found vent in some satirical verses. Lack of means, however, prevented his taking any considerable part in metropolitan gaieties, and he lived most of his life on his estate, making an occasional stay at Scarborough or some other northern watering-place. At Skelton, as William Hutton phrased it happily, he “kept a full-spread board, and wore down the steps of his cellar.” Steeped in Rabelaisian literature, he caught something of the spirit of the books he had perused; and, inspired by the example of the deceased Duke of Wharton and of his friend Dashwood, he gathered round him a body of men with similar tastes, and founded, in imitation of the Hell-fire Club and the Monks of Medmenham, a society which has passed into history as the Demoniacs.