Chapter II: Introduction (2)

My mother’s father was Captain Thomas Conway, of Morden Park, representative of a branch of that family. Her only brother was Adjutant General Conway, whose name Lord Roberts has kindly informed me is still, after fifty years, an “honoured word in Madras.” My father’s progenitors were, from the fifteenth century, for many generations owners of Swarraton, now Lord Ashburton’s beautiful “Grange” in Hampshire; the scene of poor Mrs. Carlyle’s mortifications. While at Swarraton the heads of the family married, in their later generations, the daughters of Welborne of Allington; of Sir John Owen; of Sir Richard Norton of Rotherfield (whose wife was the daughter of Bishop Bilson, one of the translators of the Bible); and of James Chaloner, Governor of the Isle of Man, one of the Judges of Charles I. The wife of this last remarkable man was Ursula Fairfax, niece of Lord Fairfax.[4]

On one occasion only do the Cobbes of Swarraton seem to have transcended the “Dedlock” programme. Richard Cobbe was Knight of the Shire for Hants in Cromwell’s short Parliament of 1656, with Richard Cromwell for a colleague. What he did therein History saith not! The grandson of this Richard Cobbe, a younger son named Charles, went to Ireland in 1717 as Chaplain to the Duke of Bolton with whom he was connected through the Norton’s; and a few years later he was appointed Archbishop of Dublin,—a post which he held with great honour until his death in 1765. On every occasion when penal laws against Catholics were proposed in the Irish House of Lords Archbishop Cobbe contended vigorously against them, dividing the House again and again on the Bills; and his numerous letters and papers in the Irish State-Paper office (as Mr. Froude has assured me after inspection) bear high testimony to his liberality and integrity in that age of corruption. Two traditions concerning him have a certain degree of general interest. One, that John Wesley called upon him at his country house,—my old home, Newbridge;—and that the interview was perfectly friendly; Wesley approving himself and his work to the Archbishop’s mind. The other is; that when Handel came to Dublin, bringing with him the MS. of the _Messiah_, of which he could not succeed in obtaining the production in London, Archbishop Cobbe, then Bishop of Kildare, took lively interest in the work, and under his patronage, as well as that of several Irishmen of rank, the great Oratorio was produced in Dublin.

Good Archbishop Cobbe had not neglected the affairs of his own household. He bought considerable estates in Louth, Carlow, and Co. Dublin, and on the latter, about twelve miles north of Dublin and two miles from the pretty rocky coast of Portrane, he built his country house of Newbridge, which has ever since been the home of our family. As half my life is connected with this dear old place, I hope the reader will look at the pictures of it which must be inserted in this book and think of it as it was in my youth, bright and smiling and yet dignified; bosomed among its old trees and with the green, wide-spreading park opened out before the noble granite _perron_ of the hall door. There is another country house on the adjoining estate, Turvey, the property of Lord Trimleston, and I have often amused myself by comparing the two. Turvey is really a _wicked-looking_ house, with half-moon windows which suggest leering eyes, and partition walls so thick that secret passages run through them; and bedrooms with tapestry and _ruelles_ and hidden doors in the wainscot. There were there, also, when I was young, certain very objectionable pictures, beside several portraits of the “beauties” of Charles II.’s court, (to the last degree _decolletées_) who had been, no doubt, friends of the first master of the house, their contemporary. In the garden was a grotto with a deep cold bath in it, which, in the climate of Ireland, suggested suicide rather than ablution. Altogether the place had the same suggestiveness of “deeds of darkness” which I remember feeling profoundly when I went over Holyrood with Dr. John Brown; and it was quite natural to attach to Turvey one of the worst of the traditional Irish curses. This curse was pronounced by the Abbess of the neighbouring convent (long in ruins) of Grace-Dieu when Lord Kingsland, then lord of Turvey, had by some nefarious means induced the English Government of the day to make over the lands of the convent to himself. On announcing this intelligence in his own hall to the assembled nuns, the poor ladies took refuge very naturally in malediction, went down simultaneously on their knees, and repeated after their Abbess a denunciation of Heaven’s vengeance on the traitor. “There should never want an idiot or a lawsuit in the family; and the rightful heir should never see the smoke of the chimney.” Needless to add, lawsuits and idiots have been plentiful ever since, and, after several generations of absentees, Turvey stands in a treeless desert, and has descended in the world from lordly to humble owners.

How different was Newbridge! Built not by a dissolute courtier of Charles II., but by the sensible Whig, and eminently Protestant Archbishop, it has as open and honest a countenance as its neighbour has the reverse. The solid walls, about three feet and a-half thick in most parts, keep out the cold, but neither darken the large, lofty rooms, nor afford space for devious and secret passages. The house stands broadly-built and strong, not high or frowning; its Portland-stone colour warm against the green of Irish woods and grass. Within doors every room is airy and lightsome, and more than one is beautiful. There is a fine staircase out of the second hall, the walls of which are covered with old family pictures which the Archbishop had obtained from his elder brother, Col. Richard Chaloner Cobbe, who had somehow lost Swarraton, and whose line ended in an heiress, wife of the 11th Earl of Huntingdon. A long corridor downstairs was, I have heard, formerly hung from end to end with arms intended for defence in case of attack. When the Rebellion of 1798 took place the weapons were hidden in a hole into which I have peered, under the floor of a room off the great drawing-room, but what became of them afterwards I do not know. My father possessed only a few pairs of handsome pistols, two or three blunderbusses, sundry guns of various kinds, and his own regimental sword which he had used at Assaye. All these hung in his study. The drawing-room with its noble proportions and its fifty-three pictures by Vandyke, Ruysdael, Guercino, Vanderveldt and other old masters, was the glory of the house. In it the happiest hours of my life were passed.

Of this house and of the various estates bought and leased by the Archbishop his only surviving son, Thomas Cobbe, my great-grandfather, came into possession in the year 1765. Irreverently known to his posterity as “Old Tommy” this gentleman after the fashion of his contemporaries muddled away in keeping open house a good deal of the property, and eventually sold one estate and (what was worse) his father’s fine library. _Per contra_ he made the remarkable collection of pictures of which I have spoken as adorning the walls of Newbridge. Pilkington, the author of the _Dictionary of Painters_, was incumbent of the little Vicarage of Donabate, and naturally somewhat in the relation of chaplain to the squire of Newbridge, who had the good sense to send him to Holland and Italy to buy the above-mentioned pictures, many of which are described in the _Dictionary_. Some time previously, when Pilkington had come out as an Art-critic, the Archbishop had remonstrated with him on his unclerical pursuit; but the poor man disarmed episcopal censure by replying, “Your Grace, I have preached for a dozen years to an old woman who _can’t_ hear, and to a young woman who _won’t_ hear; and now I think I may attend to other things!”

Thomas Cobbe’s wife’s name has been often before the public in connection with the story, told by Crabbe, Walter Scott and many others, of the lady who wore a black ribbon on her wrist to conceal the marks of a ghost’s fingers. The real ghost-seer in question, Lady Beresford, was confounded by many with her granddaughter Lady Eliza Beresford, or, as she was commonly called after her marriage, Lady Betty Cobbe. How the confusion came about I do not know, but Lady Betty, who was a spirited woman much renowned in the palmy days of Bath, was very indignant when asked any questions on the subject. Once she received a letter from one of Queen Charlotte’s Ladies-in-Waiting begging her to tell the Queen the true story. Lady Betty in reply “presented her compliments but was sure the Queen of England would not pry into the private affairs of her subjects, and had _no intention of gratifying the impertinent curiosity of a Lady-in-Waiting_!” Considerable labour was expended some years ago by the late Primate (Marcus Beresford) of Ireland, another descendant of the ghost-seer in identifying the real personages and dates of this curious tradition. The story which came to me directly through my great-aunt, Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady Betty’s favourite daughter, was, that the ghost was John Le Poer, Second Earl of Tyrone; and the ghost-seer was his cousin, Nichola Hamilton, daughter of Lord Glerawly, wife of Sir Tristram Beresford. The cousins had promised each other to appear,—whichever of them first departed this life,—to the survivor. Lady Beresford, who did not know that Lord Tyrone was dead, awoke one night and found him sitting by her bedside. He gave her (so goes the story) a short, but, under the circumstances, no doubt impressive lesson, in the elements of orthodox theology; and then to satisfy her of the reality of his presence, which she persisted in doubting, he twisted the curtains of her bed through a ring in the ceiling, placed his hand on a wardrobe and left on it the ominous mark of five burning fingers (the late Hon. and Rev. Edward Taylor of Ardgillan Castle told me he had seen this wardrobe!) and finally touched her wrist, which shrunk incontinently and never recovered its natural hue. Before he vanished the Ghost told Lady Beresford that her son should marry his brother’s daughter and heiress; and that she herself should die at the birth of a child after a second marriage, in her forty-second year. All these prophecies, of course, came to pass. From the marriage of Sir Marcus Beresford with the ghost’s niece, Catharine, Baroness Le Poer of Curraghmore, has descended the whole clan of Irish Beresfords. He was created Earl of Tyrone; his eldest son was the first Marquis of Waterford; another son was Archbishop of Tuam, created Lord Decies; and his fifth daughter was the Lady Betty Cobbe, my great-grandmother, concerning whom I have told this old story. In these days of Psychological Research I could not take on myself to omit it, though my own private impression is, that Lady Beresford accidentally gave her wrist a severe blow against her bedstead while she was asleep; and that, by a law of dreaming which I have endeavoured to trace in my essay on the subject, her mind instantly created the _myth_ of Lord Tyrone’s apparition. Allowing for a fair amount of subsequent agglomeration of incidents and wonders in the tradition, this hypothesis, I think quite meets the exigencies of the case; and in obedience to the law of Parsimony, we need not run to a preternatural explanation of the Black Ribbon on the Wrist, no doubt the actual nucleus of the tale.

I do not _dis_believe in ghosts; but unfortunately I have never been able comfortably to believe in any particular ghost-story. The overwhelming argument against the veracity of the majority of such narrations is, that they contradict the great truth beautifully set forth by Southey—

“They sin who tell us Love can die!—
With life all other passions fly
All others are but vanity—
In Heaven, Ambition cannot dwell,
Nor Avarice in the vaults of hell.
Earthly these passions as of earth,
They perish where they had their birth—
But Love is indestructible....”

The ghost of popular belief almost invariably exhibits the survival of Avarice, Revenge, or some other thoroughly earthly passion, while for the sake of the purest, noblest, tenderest Love scarcely ever has a single Spirit of the departed been even supposed to return to comfort the heart which death has left desolate. The famous story of Miss Lee is one exception to this rule, and so is another tale which I found recorded in an MS. Memorandum in the writing of my uncle the Rev. Henry Cobbe, Rector of Templeton (_died_ 1823).

“Lady Moira[5] was at one time extremely uneasy about her sister, Lady Selina Hastings, from whom she had not heard for a considerable time. One night she dreamed that her sister came to her, sat down by her bedside, and said to her, ‘My dear sister, I am dying of fever. They will not tell you of it because of your situation’ (she was then with child), ‘but I shall die, and the account will be brought to your husband by letter directed like a foreign one in a foreign hand.’ She told her dream to her attendant, Mrs. Moth, as soon as she awoke, was extremely unhappy for letters, till at length, the day after, there arrived one, directed as she had been told, which contained an account of her sister’s death. It had been written by her brother, Lord Huntingdon, and in a feigned hand, lest she should ask to know the contents.

“She had many other extraordinary dreams, and it is very remarkable that after the death of her attendant, Moth, who had educated her and her children, and was the niece of the famous Bishop Hough, that she (Moth) generally took a part in them, particularly if they related to any loss in her family. Indeed, I believe she never dreamed of her except when she was to undergo a loss. Lady Granard told me an instance of this: Her second son Colonel Rawdon died very suddenly. He had not been on good terms with Lady Moira for some time. One night she dreamed that Moth came into the room, and upon her asking her what she wanted she said, ‘My lady, I am come to bring the Colonel to you.’ Then he entered, came near her, and coming within the curtains, sat on the bed and said, ‘My dearest mother, I am going a very long journey, and I cannot bear to go without the assurance of your forgiveness.’ Then she threw her arms about his neck and said, ‘Dear Son, can you doubt my forgiving you? But where are you going?’ He replied, ‘A long journey, but I am happy now that I have seen you.’ The next day she received an account of his death.

“About a fortnight before her death, when Lady Granard and Lady Charlotte Rawdon, her daughters, were sitting up in her room, she awoke suddenly, very ill and very much agitated, saying that she had dreamed that Mrs. Moth came into her room. When she saw her she was so full of the idea that evils always attended her appearance that she said, ‘Ah, Moth, I fear you are come for my Selina’ (Lady G.). Moth replied, ‘No, my Lady, but I am come for Mr. John.’ They gave her composing drops and soothed her; she soon fell asleep, and from that time never mentioned her son’s name nor made any inquiry about him; but he died on the very day of her dream, though she never knew it.”

Old Thomas Cobbe and after him his only son, Charles Cobbe, represented the (exceedingly-rotten) Borough of Swords for a great many years in the Irish Parliament, which was then in its glory, resonant with the eloquence of Flood (who had married Lady Betty’s sister, Lady Jane) and of Henry Grattan. On searching the archives of Dublin, however, in the hope of discovering that our great-grandfather had done some public good in his time, my brother and I had the mortification to find that on the only occasion when reference was made to his name, it was in connection with charges of bribery and corruption! On the other hand, it is recorded to his honour that he was almost the only one among the Members of the Irish Parliament who voted for the Union, and yet refused either a peerage or money compensation for his seat. Instead of these he obtained for Swords some educational endowments by which I believe the little town still profits. In the record of corruption sent by Lord Randolph Churchill to the _Times_ (May 29th, 1893), in which appears a charge of interested motives against nearly every Member of the Irish Parliament of 1784, “Mr. Cobbe” stands honourably alone as without any “object” whatever.

Thomas Cobbe’s two daughters, my great-aunts and immediate predecessors as the Misses Cobbe, of Newbridge, (my grandfather having only sons) differed considerably in all respects from their unworthy niece. They occupied, so said tradition, the large cheerful room which afterwards became my nursery. A beam across the ceiling still bore, in my time, a large iron staple firmly fixed in the centre from whence had dangled a hand-swing. On this swing my great-aunts were wont to hang by their arms, to enable their maids to lace their stays to greater advantage. One of them, afterwards the Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Caroline, likewise wore the high-heeled shoes of the period; and when she was an aged woman she showed her horribly deformed feet to one of my brothers, and remarked to him: “See, Tom, what comes of high-heeled shoes!” I am afraid many of the girls now wearing similarly monstrous foot-gear will learn the same lesson too late. Mrs. Pelham, I have heard, was the person who practically brought the house about the ears of the unfortunate Queen Caroline; being the first to throw up her appointment at Court when she became aware of the Queen’s private on-goings. Her own character stood high; and the fact that she would no longer serve the Queen naturally called attention to all the circumstances. Bad as Queen Caroline was, George the Fourth was assuredly worse than she. In his old age he was personally very disgusting. My mother told me that when she received his kiss on presentation at his Drawing-Room, the contact with his face was sickening, like that with a corpse. I still possess the dress she wore on that occasion.

Mrs. Pelham’s sister married Sir Henry Tuite, of Sonnagh, and for many years of her widowhood lived in the Circus, Bath, and perhaps may still be remembered there by a few as driving about her own team of four horses in her curricle, in days when such doings by ladies were more rare than they are now.

The only brother of these two Miss Cobbes of the past, Charles Cobbe, of Newbridge, M.P., married Anne Power Trench, of Garbally, sister of the first Earl of Clancarty. The multitudinous clans of Trenches and Moncks, in addition to Lady Betty’s Beresford relations, of course thenceforth adopted the habit of paying visitations at Newbridge. Arriving by coachloads, with trains of servants, they remained for months at a time. A pack of hounds was kept, and the whole _train de vie_ was liberal in the extreme. Naturally, after a certain number of years of this kind of thing, embarrassments beset the family finances; but fortunately at the crisis Lady Betty came under the influence of her husband’s cousin, the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, and ere long renounced the vanities and pleasures of the world, and persuaded her husband to retire with her and live quietly at Bath, where they died and were buried in Weston churchyard. Fifty years afterwards I found in the library at Newbridge the little batch of books which had belonged to my great-grandmother in this phase of her life, and were marked by her pencil: _Jacob Boehmen_ and the _Life of Madame Guyon_ being those which I now recall. The peculiar, ecstatic pietism which these books breathe, differing _toto cœlo_ from the “other worldliness” of the divines of about 1810, with whose works the “Good-book Rows” of our library were replenished, impressed me very vividly.[6]

I have often tried to construct in my mind some sort of picture of the society which existed in Ireland a hundred years ago, and moved in those old rooms wherein the first half of my life was spent, but I have found it a very baffling undertaking. Apparently it combined a considerable amount of æsthetic taste with traits of genuine barbarism; and high religious pretension with a disregard of everyday duties and a _penchant_ for gambling and drinking which would now place the most avowedly worldly persons under a cloud of opprobrium. Card-playing was carried on incessantly. Tradition says that the tables were laid for it on rainy days at 10 o’clock in the morning in Newbridge drawing-room; and on every day in the interminable evenings which followed the then fashionable four o’clock dinner. My grandmother was so excellent a whist-player that to extreme old age in Bath she habitually made a small, but appreciable, addition to her income out of her “card purse”; an ornamental appendage of the toilet then, and even in my time, in universal use. I was given one as a birthday present in my tenth year. She was greatly respected by all, and beloved by her five sons; every one of whom, however, she had sent out to be nursed at a cottage in the park till they were three years old. Her motherly duties were supposed to be amply fulfilled by occasionally stopping her carriage to see how the children were getting on.

As to the drinking among the men, (the women seem not to have shared the vice) it must have prevailed to a disgusting extent upstairs and downstairs. A fuddled condition after dinner was accepted as the normal one of a gentleman, and entailed no sort of disgrace. On the contrary, my father has told me that in his youth his own extreme sobriety gave constant offence to his grandfather, and to his comrades in the army; and only by showing the latter that he would sooner fight than be bullied to drink to excess could he obtain peace. Unhappily, poor man! while his grandfather, who seldom went to bed quite sober for forty years, lived to the fine old age of 82, enjoying good health to the last, his temperate grandson inherited the gout and in his latter years was a martyr thereto. Among the exceedingly beautiful old Indian and old Worcester china which belonged to Thomas Cobbe and showed his good taste and also the splendid scale of his entertainments (one dessert-service for 36 persons was magnificent) there stands a large goblet calculated to hold _three bottles_ of wine. This glass (tradition avers) used to be filled with claret, seven guineas were placed at the bottom, and he who drank it pocketed the coin.

The behaviour of these Anglo-Irish gentry of the last century to their tenants and dependants seems to have proceeded on the truly Irish principle of being generous before you are just. The poor people lived in miserable hovels which nobody dreamed of repairing; but then they were welcome to come and eat and drink at the great house on every excuse or without any excuse at all. This state of things was so perfectly in harmony with Celtic ideas that the days when it prevailed are still sighed after as the “good old times.” Of course there was a great deal of Lady Bountiful business, and also of medical charity-work going forward. Archbishop Cobbe was fully impressed with the merits of the Tar-water so marvellously set forth by his suffragan, Bishop Berkeley, and I have seen in his handwriting in a book of his wife’s cookery receipts, a receipt for making it, beginning with the formidable item: “Take six gallons of the best French brandy.” Lady Betty was a famous compounder of simples, and of things that were not simple, and a “Chilblain Plaister” which bore her name, was not many years ago still to be procured in the chemists’ shops in Bath. I fear her prescriptions were not always of so unambitious a kind as this. One day she stopped a man on the road and asked his name—“Ah, then, my lady,” was the reply, “don’t you remember me? Why, I am the husband of the woman your ladyship gave the medicine to _and she died the next day. Long life to your Ladyship!_”

As I have said, the open-housekeeping at Newbridge at last came to an end, and the family migrated to No. 9 and No. 22, Marlborough Buildings, Bath, where two generations spent their latter years, died, and were buried in Weston churchyard, where I have lately restored their tombstones.

My grandfather died long before his father, and my father, another Charles Cobbe, found himself at eighteen pretty well his own master, the eldest of five brothers. He had been educated at Winchester, where his ancestors for eleven generations went to school in the old days of Swarraton; and to the end of his life he was wont to recite lines of Anacreon learned therein. But his tastes were active rather than studious, and disliking the idea of hanging about his mother’s house till his grandfather’s death should put him in possession of Newbridge, he listened with an enchanted ear to a glowing account which somebody gave him of India, where the Mahratta wars were just beginning.

Without much reflection or delay, he obtained a cornet’s commission in the 19th Light Dragoons and sailed for Madras. Very shortly he was engaged in active service under Wellesley, who always treated him with special kindness as another Anglo-Irish gentleman. He fought at many minor battles and sieges, and also at Assaye and Argaum; receiving his medal for these two, just fifty years afterwards. I shall write of this again a little further on in this book.

At last he fell ill of the fever of the country, which in those days was called “ague,” and was left in a remote place absolutely helpless. He was lying in bed one day in his tent when a Hindoo came in and addressed him very courteously, asking after his health. My father incautiously replied that he was quite prostrated by the fever. “What! Not able to move at all, not to walk a step?” said his visitor. “No! I cannot stir,” said my father. “Oh, in that case, then,” said the man,—and without more ado he seized my father’s desk, in which were all his money and valuables, and straightway made off with it before my father could summon his servants. His condition, thus left alone in an enemy’s country without money, was bad enough, but he managed to send a trusty messenger to Sir Arthur Wellesley, who promptly lent him all he required.

Finding that there was no chance of his health being sufficiently restored in India to permit of further active service, and the Mahratta wars being practically concluded, my father sold his commission of Lieutenant and returned to England, quietly letting himself into his mother’s house in Bath on his return by the latch-key, which he had carried with him through all his journeys. All his life long the impress made both on his outward bearing and character by those five years of war were very visible. He was a fine soldier-like figure, six feet high, and had ridden eighteen stone in his full equipment. His face was, I suppose, ugly, but it was very intelligent, very strong willed, and very unmistakeably that of a gentleman. He was under-jawed, very pale, with a large nose, and small, grey, very lively eyes; but he had a beautiful white forehead from which his hair, even in old age, grew handsomely, and his head was very well set on his broad shoulders. The photograph in the next volume represents him at 76. He rode admirably, and a better figure on horseback could not be seen. At all times there was an aspect of strength and command about him, which his vigorous will and (truth compels me to add) his not seldom fiery temper, fully sustained. On the many occasions when we had dinner parties at Newbridge, he was a charming, gay and courteous host; and I remember being struck, when he once wore a court dress and took me with him to pay his respects to a Tory Lord Lieutenant, by the contrast which his figure and bearing presented to that of nearly all the other men in similar attire. _They_ looked as if they were masquerading, and he as if the lace-ruffles and plum coat and sword were his habitual dress. He had beautiful hands, of extraordinary strength.

One day he was walking with one of his lady cousins on his arm in the street. A certain famous prize-fighting bully, the Sayers or Heenan of the period, came up hustling and elbowing every passenger off the pavement. When my father saw him approach he made his cousin take his left arm, and as the prize-fighter prepared to shoulder him, he delivered with his right fist, without raising it, a blow which sent the ruffian fainting into the arms of his companions. Having deposited his cousin in a shop, my father went back for the sequel of the adventure, and was told that the “Chicken” (or whatever he was called) had had his ribs broken.

After his return from India, my father soon sought a wife. He flirted sadly, I fear, with his beautiful cousin, Louisa Beresford, the daughter of his great-uncle, the Archbishop of Tuam; and one of the ways in which he endeavoured to ingratiate himself was to carry about at all times a provision of bon-bons and barley-sugar with which to ply the venerable and sweet-toothed prelate; who was generally known as “The Beauty of Holiness.” How the wooing would have prospered cannot be told, but before it had reached a crisis a far richer lover appeared on the scene—Mr. Hope. “Anastasius Hope,” as he was called from the work of which he was the author, was immensely wealthy, and a man of great taste in art, but he had the misfortune to be so excessively ugly that a painter whom he offended by not buying his picture, depicted him and Miss Beresford as “Beauty and the Beast,” and exhibited his painting at the Bath Pump-room, where her brother, John Beresford (afterwards the second Lord Decies) cut it deliberately to pieces. An engagement between Mr. Hope and Miss Beresford was announced not long after the arrival of Mr. Hope in Bath; and my mother, then Miss Conway, going to pay a visit of congratulation to Miss Beresford, found her reclining on a blue silk sofa appropriately perusing _The Pleasures of Hope_. After the death of Mr. Hope (by whom she was the mother of Mr. Beresford-Hope, Mr. Adrian and Mr. Henry Hope), Mrs. Hope married the illegitimate son of her uncle, the Marquis of Waterford—Field Marshal Lord Beresford—a fine old veteran, with whom she long lived happily in the corner house in Cavendish Square, where my father and brothers always found a warm welcome.

At length, after some delays, my father had the great good fortune to induce my dear mother to become his wife, and they were married at Bath, March 13th, 1809. Frances Conway was, as I have said, daughter of Capt. Thomas Conway, of Morden Park. Her father and mother both died whilst she was young and she was sent to the famous school of Mrs. Devis, in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, of which I shall have something presently to say, and afterwards lived with her grandmother, who at her death bequeathed to her a handsome legacy, at Southampton. When her grandmother died, she being then sixteen years of age, received an invitation from Colonel and Mrs. Champion to live with them and become their adopted daughter. The history of this invitation is rather touching. Mrs. Champion’s parents had, many years before, suffered great reverses, and my mother’s grandfather had done much to help them, and, in particular, had furnished means for Mrs. Champion to go out to India. She returned after twenty years as the childless wife of the rich and kindly old Colonel, the friend of Warren Hastings, who having been commander-in-chief of the Forces of the East India Company had had a good “shake of the Pagoda tree.” She repaid to the grandchild the kindness done by the grandfather; and was henceforth really a mother to my mother, who dearly loved both her and Col. Champion. In their beautiful house, No. 29, Royal Crescent, she saw all the society of Bath in its palmiest days, Mrs. Champion’s Wednesday evening parties being among the most important in the place. My mother’s part as daughter of the house was an agreeable one, and her social talents and accomplishments fitted her perfectly for the part. The gentle gaiety, the sweet dignity and ease of her manners and conversation remain to me as the memory of something exquisite, far different even from the best manner and talk of my own or the present generation; and I know that the same impression was always made on her visitors in her old age. I can compare it to nothing but the delicate odour of the dried rose leaves with which her china vases were filled and her wardrobes perfumed.

I hardly know whether my mother were really beautiful, though many of the friends who remembered her in early womanhood spoke of her as being so. To me her face was always the loveliest in the world; indeed it was the one through which my first dawning perception of beauty was awakened. I can remember looking at her as I lay beside her on the sofa, where many of her suffering hours were spent, and suddenly saying, “Mamma you are so pretty!” She laughed and kissed me, saying, “I am glad you think so my child;” but that moment really brought the revelation to me of that wonderful thing in God’s creation, the _Beautiful_! She had fine features, a particularly delicate, rather thin-lipped mouth; magnificent chestnut hair, which remained scarcely changed in colour or quantity till her death at seventy years of age; and the clear, pale complexion and hazel eyes which belong to such hair. She always dressed very well and carefully. I never remember seeing her downstairs except in some rich dark silk, and with a good deal of fine lace about her cap and old-fashioned _fichu_. Her voice and low laughter were singularly sweet, and she possessed both in speaking and writing a full and varied diction which in later years she carefully endeavoured to make me share, instead of satisfying myself, in school-girl fashion, with making one word serve a dozen purposes. She was an almost omnivorous reader; and, according to the standard of female education in her generation, highly cultivated in every way; a good musician with a very sweet touch of the piano, and speaking French perfectly well.

Immediately after their marriage my parents took possession of Newbridge, and my father began earnestly the fulfilment of all the duties of a country gentleman, landlord and magistrate. My mother, indeed, used laughingly to aver that he “went to jail on their wedding day,” for he stopped at Bristol on the road and visited a new prison with a view to introducing improvements into Irish jails. It was due principally to his exertions that the county jail, the now celebrated Kilmainham, was afterwards erected.

Newbridge having been deserted for nearly thirty years, the woods had been sorely injured and the house and out-buildings dilapidated, but with my father’s energy and my mother’s money things were put straight; and from that time till his death in 1857 my father lived and worked among his people.

Though often hard pressed to carry out with a very moderate income all his projects of improvements, he was never in debt. One by one he rebuilt or re-roofed almost every cottage on his estate, making what had been little better than pig-styes, fit for human habitation; and when he found that his annual rents could never suffice to do all that was required in this way for his tenants in his mountain property, he induced my eldest brother, then just of age, to join with him in selling two of the pictures which were the heirlooms of the family and the pride of the house, a Gaspar Poussin and a Hobbema, which last now adorns the walls of Dorchester House. I remember as a child seeing the tears in his eyes as this beautiful painting was taken out of the room in which it had been like a perpetual ray of sunshine. But the sacrifice was completed, and 80 good stone and slate “Hobbema Cottages,” as we called them, soon rose all over Glenasmoil. Be it noted by those who deny every merit in an Anglo-Irish landlord, that not a farthing was added to the rent of the tenants who profited by this real act of self-denial.

All this however refers to later years. I have now reached to the period when I may introduce myself on the scene. Before doing so, however, I am tempted to print here a letter which my much valued friend, Miss Felicia Skene, of Oxford, has written to me on learning that I am preparing this autobiography. She is one of the very few now living who can remember my mother, and I gratefully quote what she has written of her as corroborating my own memories, else, perhaps, discounted by the reader as coloured by a daughter’s partiality.

April 4th, 1894.

My dearest Frances,—

I know well that in recalling the days of your bright youth in your
grand old home, the most prominent figure amongst those who surrounded
you then, must be that of your justly idolised mother, and I cannot
help wishing to add my testimony, as of one unbiassed by family ties,
to all that you possessed in her while she remained with you; and all
that you so sadly lost when she was taken from you. To remember the
_châtelaine_ of Newbridge is to recall one of the fairest and sweetest
memories of my early life. When I first saw that lovely, gracious lady
with her almost angelic countenance and her perfect dignity of manner,
I had just come from a gay Eastern capital,—my home from childhood,
where no such vision of a typical English gentlewoman had ever
appeared before me; and the impression she made upon me was therefore
almost a revelation of what a refined, high-bred lady could be in all
that was pure and lovely and of good report, and yet I think I only
shared in the fascination which she exercised on all who came within
the sphere of her influence. To me, almost a stranger, whom she
welcomed as your friend under her roof, her exquisite courtesy would
alone have been most charming, but for your sake she showed me all the
tenderness of her sweet sympathetic nature, and it was no marvel to me
that she was the idol of her children and the object of deepest
respect and admiration to all who knew her.

Beautiful Newbridge with its splendid hospitality is like a dream to
me now, of what a gentleman’s estate and country home could be in
those days when ancient race and noble family traditions were still of
some account.

Ever affectionately yours,
F. M. F. SKENE.

13, New Inn Hall Street, Oxford.

CHAPTER
II.
_CHILDHOOD._

_Newbridge, Co. Dublin._
]

I was born on the morning of the 4th December, 1822; at sunrise. There had been a memorable storm during the night, and Dublin, where my father had taken a house that my mother might be near her doctor, was strewn with the wrecks of trees and chimney pots. My parents had already four sons, and after the interval of five years since the birth of the youngest, a girl was by no means welcome. I have never had reason, however, to complain of being less cared for or less well treated in every way than my brothers. If I have become in mature years a “Woman’s Rights’ Woman” it has not been because in my own person I have been made to feel a Woman’s Wrongs. On the contrary, my brothers’ kindness and tenderness to me have been unfailing from my infancy. I was their “little Fà’,” their pet and plaything when they came home for their holidays; and rough words not to speak of knocks,—never reached me from any of them or from my many masculine cousins, some of whom, as my father’s wards, I hardly distinguished in childhood from brothers.

A few months after my birth my parents moved to a house named Bower Hill Lodge in Melksham, which my father hired, I believe, to be near his boys at school, and I have some dim recollections of the verandah of the house, and also of certain raisins which I appropriated, and of suffering direful punishment at my father’s hands for the crime! Before I was four years old we returned to Newbridge, and I was duly installed with my good old Irish nurse, Mary Malone, in the large nursery at the end of the north corridor—the most charming room for a child’s abode I have ever seen. It was so distant from the regions inhabited by my parents that I was at full liberty to make any amount of noise I pleased; and from the three windows I possessed a commanding view of the stable yard, wherein there was always visible an enchanting spectacle of dogs, cats, horses, grooms, gardeners, and milkmaids. A grand old courtyard it is; a quadrangle about a rood in size surrounded by stables, coach-houses, kennels, a laundry, a beautiful dairy, a labourer’s room, a paint shop, a carpenter’s shop, a range of granaries and fruitlofts with a great clock in the pediment in the centre; and a well in the midst of all. Behind the stables and the kennels appear the tops of walnut and chestnut trees and over the coach-houses on the other side can be seen the beautiful old kitchen garden of six acres with its lichen-covered red brick walls, backed again by trees; and its formal straight terraces and broad grass walks.

In this healthful, delightful nursery, and in walks with my nurse about the lawns and shrubberies, the first years of my happy childhood went by; fed in body with the freshest milk and eggs and fruit, everything best for a child; and in mind supplied only with the simple, sweet lessons of my gentle mother. No unwholesome food, physical or moral, was ever allowed to come in my way till body and soul had almost grown to their full stature. When I compare such a lot as this (the common lot, of course, of English girls of the richer classes, blessed with good fathers and mothers) with the case of the hapless young creatures who are fed from infancy with insufficient and unwholesome food, perhaps dosed with gin and opium from the cradle, and who, even as they acquire language, learn foul words, curses and blasphemies,—when I compare, I say, my happy lot with the miserable one of tens of thousands of my brother men and sister women, I feel appalled to reflect, by how different a standard must they and I be judged by eternal Justice!

In such an infancy the events were few, but I can remember with amusement the great exercise of my little mind concerning a certain mythical being known as “Peter.” The story affords a droll example of the way in which fetishes are created among child-minded savages. One day, (as my mother long afterwards explained to me), I had been hungrily eating a piece of bread and butter out of doors, when one of the greyhounds, of which my father kept several couples, bounded past me and snatched the bread and butter from my little hands. The outcry which I was preparing to raise on my loss was suddenly stopped by the bystanders judiciously awakening my sympathy in Peter’s enjoyment, and I was led up to stroke the big dog and make friends with him. Seeing how successful was this diversion, my nurse thenceforward adopted the practice of seizing everything in the way of food, knives, &c., which it was undesirable I should handle, and also of shutting objectionably open doors and windows, exclaiming “O! Peter! Peter has got it! Peter has shut it!”—as the case might be. Accustomed to succumb to this unseen Fate under the name of Peter, and soon forgetting the dog, I came to think there was an all-powerful, invisible Being constantly behind the scenes, and had so far pictured him as distinct from the real original Peter that on one occasion when I was taken to visit at some house where there was an odd looking end of a beam jutting out under the ceiling, I asked in awe-struck tones: “Mama! is that Peter’s head?”

My childhood, though a singularly happy, was an unusually lonely one. My dear mother very soon after I was born became lame from a trifling accident to her ankle (ill-treated, unhappily, by the doctors) and she was never once able in all her life to take a walk with me. Of course I was brought to her continually; first to be nursed,—for she fulfilled that sacred duty of motherhood to all her children, believing that she could never be so sure of the healthfulness of any other woman’s constitution as of her own. Later, I seem to my own memory to have been often cuddled up close to her on her sofa, or learning my little lessons, mounted on my high chair beside her, or repeating the Lord’s Prayer at her knee. All these memories are infinitely sweet to me. Her low, gentle voice, her smile, her soft breast and arms, the atmosphere of dignity which always surrounded her,—the very odour of her clothes and lace, redolent of dried roses, come back to me after three-score years with nothing to mar their sweetness. She never once spoke angrily or harshly to me in all her life, much less struck or punished me; and I—it is a comfort to think it—never, so far as I can recall, disobeyed or seriously vexed her. She had regretted my birth, thinking that she could not live to see me grow to womanhood, and shrinking from a renewal of the cares of motherhood with the additional anxiety of a daughter’s education. But I believe she soon reconciled herself to my existence, and made me, first her pet, and then her companion and even her counsellor. She told me, laughingly, how, when I was four years old, my father happening to be away from home she made me dine with her, and as I sat in great state beside her on my little chair I solemnly remarked: “Mama, is it not a very _comflin_ thing to have a little girl?” an observation which she justly thought went to prove that she had betrayed sufficiently to my infantine perspicacity that she enjoyed my company at least as much as hers was enjoyed by me.

My nurse who had attended all my brothers, was already an elderly woman when recalled to Newbridge to take charge of me; and though a dear, kind old soul and an excellent nurse, she was naturally not much of a playfellow for a little child, and it was very rarely indeed that I had any young visitor in my nursery or was taken to see any of my small neighbours. Thus I was from infancy much thrown on my own resources for play and amusement; and from that time to this I have been rather a solitary mortal, enjoying above all things lonely walks and studies; and always finding my spirits rise in hours and days of isolation. I think I may say I have _never_ felt depressed when living alone. As a child I have been told I was a very merry little chick, with a round, fair face and abundance of golden hair; a typical sort of Saxon child. I was subject then and for many years after, to furious fits of anger, and on such occasions I misbehaved myself exceedingly. “Nanno” was then wont peremptorily to push me out into the long corridor and bolt the nursery door in my face, saying in her vernacular, “Ah, then! you _bould Puckhawn_ (audacious child of Puck)! I’ll get _shut_ of you!” I think I feel now the hardness of that door against my little toes, as I kicked at it in frenzy. Sometimes, when things were very bad indeed, Nanno conducted me to the end of the corridor at the top of a very long winding stone stair, near the bottom of which my father occasionally passed on his way to the stables. “Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir! She’ll be good immadiently, Sir, you needn’t come upstairs, Sir!” Then, _sotto voce_, to me, “Don’t ye hear the Masther? Be quiet now, my darlint, or he’ll come up the stairs!” Of course, “the Masther” seldom or never was really within earshot on these occasions. Had he been so Nanno would have been the last person seriously to invoke his dreaded interference in my discipline. But the alarm usually sufficed to reduce me to submission. I had plenty of toddling about out of doors and sitting in the sweet grass making daisy and dandelion chains, and at home playing with the remnants of my brother’s Noah’s Ark, and a magnificent old baby-house which stood in one of the bedrooms, and was so large that I can dimly remember climbing up and getting into the doll’s drawing-room.

My fifth birthday was the first milestone on Life’s road which I can recall. I recollect being brought in the morning into my mother’s darkened bedroom (she was already then a confirmed invalid), and how she kissed and blessed me, and gave me childish presents, and also a beautiful emerald ring which I still possess, and pearl bracelets which she fastened on my little arms. No doubt she wished to make sure that whenever she might die these trinkets should be known to be mine. She and my father also gave me a Bible and Prayer Book, which I could read quite well, and proudly took next Sunday to church for my first attendance, when the solemn occasion was much disturbed by a little girl in a pew below howling for envy of my white beaver bonnet, displayed in the fore-front of the gallery which formed our family seat. “Why did little Miss Robinson cry?” I was deeply inquisitive on the subject, having then and always during my childhood regarded “best clothes” with abhorrence.

Two years later my grandmother, having bestowed on me, at Bath, a sky-blue silk pelisse, I managed nefariously to tumble down on purpose into a gutter full of melted snow the first day it was put on, so as to be permitted to resume my little cloth coat.

Now, aged five, I was emancipated from the nursery and allowed to dine thenceforward at my parents’ late dinner, while my good nurse was settled for the rest of her days in a pretty ivy-covered cottage with large garden, at the end of the shrubbery. She lived there for several years with an old woman for servant, who I can well remember, but who must have been of great age, for she had been under-dairymaid to my great great-grandfather, the Archbishop, and used to tell us stories of “old times.” This “old Ally’s” great grandchildren were still living, recently, in the family service in the same cottage which poor “Nanno” occupied. Ally was the last wearer of the real old Irish scarlet cloak in our part of the country; and I can remember admiring it greatly when I used to run by her side and help her to carry her bundle of sticks. Since those days, even the long blue frieze cloak which succeeded universally to the scarlet—a most comfortable, decent, and withal graceful peasant garment, very like the blue cotton one of the Arab fellah-women—has itself nearly or totally disappeared in Fingal.

On the retirement of my nurse, the charge of my little person was committed to my mother’s maid and housekeeper, Martha Jones. She came to my mother a blooming girl of eighteen, and she died of old age and sorrow when I left Newbridge at my father’s death half-a-century afterwards. She was a fine, fair, broad-shouldered woman, with a certain refinement above her class. Her father had been an officer in the army, and she was educated (not very extensively) at some little school in Dublin where her particular friend was Moore’s (the poet’s) sister. She used to tell us how Moore as a lad was always contriving to get into the school and romping with the girls. The legend has sufficient verisimilitude to need no confirmation!