Chapter XV (2)

Another Coronation Committee yesterday, and, I am happy to say, the last, for this business is the greatest of all bores. There is a furious squabble between the Grand Chamberlain and the Earl Marshal (who is absent and has squabbled by deputy) about the box of the former in Westminster Abbey. At the last coronation King George IV. gave Lord Gwydir _his_ box in addition to his own, and now Lord Cholmondeley claims a similar box.[6] This is resisted. The present King disposes of his own box (and will probably fill it with every sort of _canaille_); the Lords won't interfere, and the Grand Chamberlain protests, and says he has been shamefully used, and there the matter stands. The Grand Chamberlain is in the wrong.

[6] [Lord Gwydir and Lord Cholmondeley filled the office of
Lord High Chamberlain for alternative lives as the
representatives of the joint claimants of the office.]

September 3rd, 1831 {p.188}

On Wednesday a Council was held. Very few of the Ministers stay for the Councils; small blame to them, as the Irish say, for we are kept about three times as long by this regular, punctual King as by the capricious, irregular Monarch who last ruled over us. This King is a queer fellow. Our Council was principally for a new Great Seal and to deface the old Seal. The Chancellor claims the old one as his perquisite. I had forgotten the hammer, so the King said, 'My Lord, the best thing I can do is to give you the Seal, and tell you to take it and do what you please with it.' The Chancellor said, 'Sir, I believe there is some doubt whether Lord Lyndhurst ought not to have half of it, as he was Chancellor at the time of your Majesty's accession.' 'Well,' said the King, 'then I will judge between you like Solomon; here (turning the Seal round and round), now do you cry heads or tails?' We all laughed, and the Chancellor said, 'Sir, I take the bottom part.' The King opened the two compartments of the Seal and said, 'Now, then, I employ you as ministers of taste. You will send for Bridge, my silversmith, and desire him to convert the two halves each into a salver, with my arms on one side and yours on the other, and Lord Lyndhurst's the same, and you will take one and give him the other, and both keep them as presents from me.' The Duchess of Kent will not attend the coronation, and there is a report that the King is unwilling to make all the Peers that are required; this is the current talk of the day.

September 5th, 1831 {p.189}

At Gorhambury since Saturday; the Harrowbys, Bathursts, Frankland Lewes's, Lady Jersey, Mahon, Lushington, Wortleys; rather agreeable and lively; all anti-Reformers, so no quarrelling about that, though Lord Harrowby is ready to squabble with anybody either way, but furiously against the Bill.

September 8th, 1831 {p.189}

Dined with the Duke of Wellington yesterday; thirty-one people, very handsome, and the Styrian Minstrels playing and singing all dinner time, a thing I never saw before. I sat next to Esterhazy and talked to him (a very little) about Belgian affairs. He said Talleyrand had given positive assurances that the French troops should be withdrawn whenever the Dutch retired, that the other Powers were aware of Perier's difficulties, and were ready to concede much to keep him in power, but that if he had not sufficient influence to repress the violent war faction there was no use in endeavouring to support him. Our Government had behaved very well and had been very strong in their remonstrances.

[Page Head: ANECDOTES OF GEORGE IV.]

After dinner I had much talk with the Duke, who told me a good deal about the late King and the Duchess of Kent; talked of his extravagance and love of spending, provided that it was not his own money that he spent; he told an old story he had heard of Mrs. Fitzherbert's being obliged to borrow money for his post-horses to take him to Newmarket, that not a guinea was forthcoming to make stakes for some match, and when on George Leigh's[7] entreaty he allowed some box to be searched that L3,000 was found in it. He always had money. When he died they found L10,000 in his boxes, and money scattered about everywhere, a great deal of gold. There were about 500 pocket-books, of different dates, and in every one money--guineas, one pound notes, one, two, or three in each. There never was anything like the quantity of trinkets and trash that they found. He had never given away or parted with anything. There was a prodigious quantity of hair--women's hair--of all colours and lengths, some locks with the powder and pomatum still sticking to them, heaps of women's gloves, _gages d'amour_ which he had got at balls, and with the perspiration still marked on the fingers, notes and letters in abundance, but not much that was of any political consequence, and the whole was destroyed. Of his will he said that it was made in 1823 by Lord Eldon, very well drawn, that he desired his executors might take all he had to pay his debts and such legacies as he might bequeath in any codicils he should make. He made no codicils and left no debts, so the King got all as heir-at-law. Knighton had managed his affairs very well, and got him out of debt. A good deal of money was disbursed in charity, a good deal through the medium of two or three old women. The Duke, talking of his love of ordering and expense, said that when he was to ride at the last coronation the King said, 'You must have a very fine saddle.' 'What sort of saddle does your Majesty wish me to have?' 'Send Cuffe to me.' Accordingly Cuffe went to him, and the Duke had to pay some hundreds for his saddle. (While I am writing the King and Queen with their _cortege_ are passing down to Westminster Abbey to the coronation, a grand procession, a fine day, an immense crowd, and great acclamations.)

[7] [Colonel George Leigh, who managed his race-horses; he
was married to Lord Byron's half-sister.]

[Page Head: THE DUCHESS OF KENT.]

We then talked of the Duchess of Kent, and I asked him why she set herself in such opposition to the Court. He said that Sir John Conroy was her adviser, that he was sure of it. What he then told me throws some light upon her ill-humour and displays her wrong-headedness. In the first place the late King disliked her; the Duke of Cumberland too was her enemy, and George IV., who was as great a despot as ever lived, was always talking of taking her child from her, which he inevitably would have done but for the Duke, who, wishing to prevent quarrels, did all in his power to deter the King, not by opposing him when he talked of it, which he often did, but by putting the thing off as well as he could. However, when the Duchess of Cumberland came over, and there was a question how the Royal Family would receive her, he thought he might reconcile the Cumberlands to the Duchess of Kent by engaging her to be civil to the Duchess of Cumberland, so he desired Leopold to advise his sister (who was in the country) from him very strongly to write to the Duchess of Cumberland and express her regret at being absent on her arrival, and so prevented from calling on her. The Duchess sent Leopold back to the Duke to ask why he gave her this advice? The Duke replied that he should not say why, that he knew more of what was going on than she possibly could, that he gave her this advice for her own benefit, and again repeated that she had better act on it. The Duchess said she was ready to give him credit for the goodness of his counsel, though he would not say what his reasons were, and she did as he suggested. This succeeded, and the Duke of Cumberland ceased to blow the coals. Matters went on quietly till the King died. As soon as he was dead the Duchess of Kent wrote to the Duke, and desired that she might be treated as a Dowager Princess of Wales, with a suitable income for herself and her daughter, who she also desired might be treated as Heiress Apparent, and that she should have the sole control over the allowance to be made for both. The Duke replied that her proposition was altogether inadmissible, and that he could not possibly think of proposing anything for her till the matters regarding the King's Civil List were settled, but that she might rely upon it that no measure which affected her in any way should be considered without being imparted to her and the fullest information given her. At this it appears she took great offence, for she did not speak to him for a long time after.

When the Regency Bill was framed the Duke desired the King's leave to wait upon the Duchess of Kent and show it to her, to which his Majesty assented, and accordingly he wrote to her to say he would call upon her the next day with the draft of the Bill. She was at Claremont, and sent word that she was out of town, but desired he would send it to her in the country. He said she ought to have sent Sir John Conroy to him, or have desired him to go to her at Claremont, which he would have done, but he wrote her word that he could not explain by letter so fully what he had to say as he could have done in a personal interview, but he would do so as well as he could. In the meantime, Lord Lyndhurst brought on the measure in the House of Lords, and she sent Conroy up to hear him. He returned to Claremont just after the Duchess had received the Duke's letter. Since that he has dined with her.

[I must say the King is punctual; the cannon are now firing to announce his arrival at the Abbey, and my clock is at the same moment striking eleven; at eleven it was announced that he would be there.]

His Majesty, I hear, was in great ill-humour at the levee yesterday; contrary to his usual custom he sent for nobody, and gave no audiences, but at ten minutes after one flounced into the levee room; not one Minister was come but the Duke of Richmond. Talleyrand and Esterhazy alone of the _Corps Diplomatique_ were in the next room. He attacked the officer of the Guards for not having his cap on his head, and sent for the officer on guard, who was not arrived, at which he expressed great ire. It is supposed that the peerages have put him out of temper. His Majesty did a very strange thing about them. Though their patents are not made out, and the new Peers are no more Peers than I am, he desired them to appear as such in Westminster Abbey and do homage. Colonel Berkeley asked me what he should do, and said what the King had desired of him. I told him he should do no such thing, and he said he would go to the Chancellor and ask him. I don't know how it ended. Howe told me yesterday morning in Westminster Abbey that Lord Cleveland is to be a duke, though it is not yet acknowledged if it be so. There has been a battle about that; they say that he got his boroughs to be made a marquis, and got rid of them to be made a duke.[8]

[8] [The Earl of Darlington had been made Marquis of
Cleveland in 1827, and was raised to the dukedom in
January 1833.]

September 17th, 1831 {p.193}

The coronation went off well, and whereas nobody was satisfied before it everybody was after it. No events of consequence. The cholera has got to Berlin, and Warsaw is taken by the Russians, who appear to have behaved with moderation. Since the deposition of Skrznecki, and the reign of clubs and mobs and the perpetration of massacres at Warsaw, the public sympathy for the Poles has a good deal fallen off. The cholera, which is travelling south, is less violent than it was in the north. It is remarkable that the common people at Berlin are impressed with the same strange belief that possessed those of St. Petersburg that they have been poisoned, and Chad writes to-day that they believe there is no such disease, and that the deaths ascribed to that malady are produced by poison administered by the doctors, who are bribed for that purpose; that the rich finding the poor becoming too numerous to be conveniently governed have adopted this mode of thinning the population, which was employed with success by the English in India; that the foreign doctors are the delegates of a central committee, which is formed in London and directs the proceedings, and similar nonsense.

[Page Head: A DINNER AT ST. JAMES'S.]

The talk of the town has been about the King and a toast he gave at a great dinner at St. James's the other day. He had ninety guests--all his Ministers, all the great people, and all the foreign Ambassadors. After dinner he made a long, rambling speech in French, and ended by giving as 'a sentiment,' as he called it, 'The land we live in.' This was before the ladies left the room. After they were gone he made another speech in French, in the course of which he travelled over every variety of topic that suggested itself to his excursive mind, and ended with a very coarse toast and the words 'Honi soit qui mal y pense.' Sefton, who told it me said he never felt so ashamed; Lord Grey was ready to sink into the earth; everybody laughed of course, and Sefton, who sat next to Talleyrand, said to him, 'Eh bien, que pensez-vous de cela?' With his unmoved, immovable face he answered only, 'C'est bien remarquable.'

In the meantime Reform, which has subsided into a calm for some time past, is approaching its termination in the House of Commons, and as it gets near the period of a fresh campaign, and a more arduous though a shorter one, agitation is a little reviving. The 'Times' and other violent newspapers are moving heaven and earth to stir up the country and intimidate the Peers, many of whom are frightened enough already. The general opinion at present is that the Peers created at the coronation will not be enough to carry the Bill (they are a set of horrid rubbish most of them), but that no more will be made at present; that the Opposition, if united, will be strong enough to throw out the Bill, but that they are so divided in opinion whether to oppose the Bill on the second reading or in Committee that this dissension will very likely enable it to pass. Up to this time there has been no meeting, and nothing has been agreed upon, but there would have been one convened by the Duke of Wellington but for Lady Mornington's death, and this week they will arrange their plan of operations. From what Sefton says (who knows and thinks only as Brougham and Grey direct him) I conclude that the Government are resolved the Bill shall pass, that if it is thrown out they will do what the Tories recommended, and make as many Peers as may be sufficient, for he said the other day he would rather it was thrown out on the second reading than pass by a small majority. With this resolution (which after having gone so far is not unwise) and the feeling out of doors, pass it must, and so sure are Government of it that they have begun to divide the counties, and have set up an office with clerks, maps, &c., in the Council Office, and there the Committee sit every day.

Stoke, September 18th, 1831 {p.194}

I came here yesterday with the Chancellor, Creevey, Luttrell, my father and mother, Esterhazy, Neumann. Brougham was tired, never spoke, and went to bed early. This morning I got a letter from the Lord President enclosing an order from the King for a copy of the proceedings in Council on the marriage of the Duke of Sussex and Lady Augusta Murray. The Chancellor told me that the young man Sir Augustus d'Este had behaved very ill, having filed a bill in Chancery, into which he had put all his father's love letters, written thirty years ago, to perpetuate evidence; that it was all done without the Duke of Sussex's consent, but that D'Este had got Lushington's opinion that the marriage was valid on the ground that the Marriage Act only applied to marriages contracted here, whereas this was contracted at Rome. He said Lushington was a great authority, but that he had no doubt he was wrong. The King is exceedingly annoyed at it.

September 19th, 1831 {p.195}

Came to town. Talleyrand, Madame de Dino, and Alava came to Stoke yesterday. Talleyrand had a circle, but the Chancellor talked too much, and they rather spoilt one another. He said one neat thing. They were talking of Madame d'Abrantes's 'Memoirs,' and of her mother, Madame Pernon. My father said, 'M. de Marboeuf etait _un peu_ l'amant de Madame Pernon, n'est-ce pas?' He said, 'Oui, mais je ne _sais pas dans quelles proportions_.'

September 20th, 1831 {p.195}

[Page Head: STATE OF FRANCE.]

News arrived of great riots at Paris, on account of the Polish business and the fall of Warsaw. Madame de Dino (who, by-the-bye, Talleyrand says is the cleverest _man_ or _woman_ he ever knew) said last night that she despaired of the state of things in France, that this was no mere popular tumult, but part of an organised system of disaffection, and that the Carlists had joined the ultra-Republicans, that the National Guard was not to be depended upon, that 'leur esprit etait fatigue.' Talleyrand himself was very low, and has got no intelligence from his Government. This morning I met Lord Grey, and walked with him. I told him what Madame de Dino had said. He said he knew it all, and how bad things were, and that they would be much worse if the Reform Bill was thrown out here. I asked him how they would be affected by that. He said that a change of Ministry here would have a very bad effect there, from which it may be inferred that if beaten they mean to resign. He said the French Ministry had been very imprudent about Poland. I said, 'How? for what could they have done? They could only get at Poland through Prussia.' He said they might have sent a fleet to the Baltic with our concurrence, though we could not urge them to do so. I asked him what he thought would be the result of the dissolution of Perier's Government; I said that there appeared to me two alternatives, a general _bouleversement_ or the war faction in power under the existing system. He replied he did not think there would now be a _bouleversement_, but a Ministry of Lafayette, Lamarque, and all that party who were impatient to plunge France into war. I said I did not think France could look to a successful war, for the old alliance would be re-formed against her. He rejoined that Russia was powerless, crippled by this contest, and under the necessity of maintaining a great army in Poland; Austria and Prussia were both combustible, half the provinces of the former nearly in a state of insurrection; that the latter had enough to do to preserve quiet, and the French would rouse all the disaffected spirit which existed in both. I said 'then we were on the eve of that state of things which was predicted by Canning in his famous speech.' Here we met Ellis, and I left them.

I afterwards saw George Villiers, who told me that he knew from a member of the Cabinet that there had been a division in it on the question of going out if the Reform Bill should be rejected, and that it had been carried by a majority that they should. He told me also a curious thing about Stanley's Arms Bill: that it had never been imparted to Lord Anglesey, nor to the Cabinet here, and that Lord Grey had been obliged to write an apology to Lord Anglesey, and to tell him he (Lord Grey) had himself seen the Bill for the first time in the newspapers. This he had from Lord C., who is a great friend of Lord Anglesey's, and who had seen Lord Grey's letter before he left Ireland; but the story appears to me quite incredible, and is probably untrue.