Love Romances of the Aristocracy written by Thornton Hall

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Trouble now began to fall thickly on Lady Jean. Her delicate child,
Sholto, died after a brief illness. She was distracted with grief, and
cried out in her deep distress: "O Sholto! Sholto! my son Sholto! if I
could but have died for you!" This last blow of fate seems to have
completely crushed her. A few months later, she gave up her gallant and
hopeless struggle, but only with her life. Calling her remaining son to
her bedside she said, with streaming eyes: "May God bless you, my dear
son; and, above all, make you a worthy and honest man; for riches, I
despise them. Take a sword, and you may one day become as great a hero
as some of your ancestors." Then, but a few moments before drawing her
last breath, she said to those around her: "As one who is soon to appear
in the presence of Almighty God, to whom I must answer, I declare that
the two children were born of my body." Thus passed "beyond these
voices" a woman, who, whatever her faults, carried a brave heart through
sorrows and trials which might well have crushed the proudest spirit.

Lady Jean's death probably did more to advance her son's cause than all
her scheming and courage during life. Influential friends flocked to the
motherless boy, whose misfortunes made such an appeal to sympathy and
protection. His father succeeded to the family baronetcy and became a
man of some substance. His uncle, the Duke, took to wife, at sixty-two,
his cousin, "Peggy Douglas, of Mains," a lady of strong character who
had long vowed that "she would be Duchess of Douglas or never marry";
and in Duchess "Peggy" Archibald found his most stalwart champion, who
gave her husband no peace until the Duke, after long vacillation, and
many maudlin moods, in which he would consign the "brat" to perdition
one day and shed tears over his pathetic plight the next, was won over
to her side. To such good purpose did the Duchess use her influence
that when her husband the Duke died, in 1761, Colonel (now Sir John)
Stewart was able to write to his elder son by his first marriage:

"DEAR JACK,--I have not had time till now to acquaint you
of the Duke of Douglas's death, and that he has left your
brother Archie his whole estate."

Thus did Lady Jean triumph eight years after her scheming brain was
stilled in death.

The rest of this singular story must be told in few words, although its
history covers many years, and would require a volume to do adequate
justice to it. Within a few months of the Duke's death the curtain was
rung up on the great Douglas Case, which for seven long years was to be
the chief topic of discussion and dispute throughout Great Britain.
Archibald's title to the Douglas lands was contested by the Duke of
Hamilton and the Earl of Selkirk, the former claiming as heir-male, the
latter under settlements made by the Duke's father. Clever brains were
set to work to solve the tangle in which the birth of the mysterious
twins was involved. Emissaries were sent to France to collect evidence
on one side and the other; notably Andrew Stewart, tutor to the young
Duke of Hamilton, who seems to have been a perfect sleuth-hound of
detective skill; and it was not until 1768 that the Scottish Court of
Session gave its verdict, by the Lord-President's casting-vote (seven
judges voting for and seven against) against Lady Jean's son.

"The judges," we are told, "took up no less than eight
days in delivering their opinions upon the cause; and at
last, by the President's casting-vote, they pronounced
solemn judgment in favour of the plaintiffs."

Meanwhile (four years earlier) Sir John Stewart had followed his wife to
the grave, declaring, just before his death:

"I do solemnly swear before God, as stepping into
Eternity, that Lady Jean Douglas, my lawful spouse, did
in the year 1748, bring into the world two sons,
Archibald and Sholto; and I firmly believe the children
were mine, as I am sure they were hers. Of the two sons,
Archibald is the only one in life now."

But Archibald Douglas was not long to remain out of his estates. On
appeal to the House of Lords, the decree of the Scottish Court was
reversed, and the victory of Lady Jean's son was final and complete.

Of his later career it remains only to say that he entered Parliament
and was created a Peer; and that he conducted himself in his exalted
position with a dignity worthy of the parentage he had established. But,
although he became the father of eight sons, four of whom succeeded him
in the title, no grandson came to inherit his honours and estates; and
to-day the Douglas lands, for which Lady Jean schemed and fought and
laid down her life, have the Earl of Home for lord.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE MAYPOLE DUCHESS

For many a century, ever since her history emerged from the mists of
antiquity, Germany never lacked a Schulenburg to grace her Courts, to
lead her armies, or to wear the mitre in her churches. They held their
haughty heads high among the greatest subjects of her emperors; their
family-tree bristled with marshals and generals, bishops and
ambassadors; and they waxed so strong and so numerous that they came to
be distinguished as "Black Schulenburgs" and "White Schulenburgs," as
our own Douglases were "black" and "red."

But not one of all the glittering array of its dignitaries raised the
family name to such an eminence--a bad eminence--as one of its plainest
daughters, Ehrengard Melusina von der Schulenburg (to give her full,
imposing name), who lived not only to wear the coronet of a Duchess of
England, but to be "as much a Queen as ever there was in England."

Fraeulein Ehrengard and her brother, who, as Count Mathias von der
Schulenburg, was to win fame as the finest general in Europe of his day,
were cradled and reared at the ancestral castle of Emden, in Saxony.
The Schulenburg women were never famed for beauty; but Ehrengard was, by
common consent, the "ugly duckling" of the family--abnormally tall,
angular, awkward, and plain-featured, one of the last girls in Germany
equipped for conquest in the field of love.

When she reached her sixteenth birthday, Ehrengard's parents were glad
to pack her off to the Court of Herrenhausen, where the family influence
procured for her the post of maid-of-honour to the Electress Sophia of
Hanover. At any rate she was provided for--an important matter, for the
Schulenburgs were as poor as they were proud--and she was too
unattractive to get into mischief. But it is the unexpected that often
happens; and no sooner had the Elector's son and heir, George, set eyes
on the ungainly maid-of-honour than he promptly fell head over ears in
love with her, to the amazement of the entire Court, and to the disgust
of his mother, and of his newly-made bride, Sophia Dorothea of Zell. To
George--an awkward, sullen young man of loutish manners and loose
morals--the gaunt girl, with her plain, sallow face, was a vision of
beauty. She appealed in some curious way to the animal in him; and
before she had been many weeks at Herrenhausen she was his avowed
mistress--one of many.

"Just look at that mawkin," the Electress Sophia once exclaimed to Lady
Suffolk, who was a guest at the Hanoverian Court, "and think of her
being my son's mistress!" But to any other than his mother, George's
taste in women had long ceased to cause surprise. The ugly and gross
appealed to a taste which such beauty and refinement as his young wife
possessed left untouched. He had markedly demonstrated this perverseness
of fancy already by showering his favours on the Baroness von
Kielmansegg--who was reputed to be his natural sister, by the way--a
lady so ugly that, as a child, Horace Walpole shrieked at sight of her.

She had, he recalls,

"two fierce black eyes, large and rolling, beneath two
lofty arched eyesbrows; two acres of cheeks spread with
crimson; an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not
distingushed from the lower part of her body, and no part
of it restrained by stays. No wonder," he adds, "that a
child dreaded such an ogress!"

Such were the two chief favourites of this unnatural heir to the throne
of Hanover, who, by a curious turn of Fortune's wheel, was to wear the
English crown as the first of the Georges. In the company of these
ogresses and of a brace of Turkish attendants, George loved to pass his
time in beer-guzzling and debauchery, while his beautiful and insulted
wife sought solace in that ill-starred intrigue with Koenigsmarck, which
was to lead to his tragic death and her own thirty years' imprisonment
in the Schloss Ahlden, where she, who ought to have been England's
Queen, ate her heart out in loneliness and sorrow.

To George his wife's intrigue was a welcome excuse for getting rid of
her--a licence for unfettered indulgence in his low tastes; and the
tragedy of her eclipse but added zest and emphasis to his unfettered
enjoyment of life. In the hands of Von der Schulenburg the weak-minded,
self-indulgent Prince was as clay in the hands of the potter. She
moulded him as she willed, for she was as crafty and diplomatic as she
was ill-favoured. Madame Kielmansegg was relegated to the shade, while
she stood in the full limelight. She bore two daughters to her Royal
lover--daughters who were called her "nieces," although the fiction
deceived nobody--and as the years passed, each adding, if possible, to
her unattractiveness, her hold on the Prince became still stronger.

Thirty years passed thus at the Herrenhausen Court, when the death of
Queen Anne made "the high and mighty Prince George, Elector of Hanover,
rightful King of Great Britain, France and Ireland." The sluggish
sensual life of the Hanoverian Court was at an end. George was summoned
to a great throne, and no King ever accepted a crown with such
reluctance and ill-grace. He would, and he would not. For three weeks
the English envoys tried every artifice to induce him to accept his new
and exalted _role_--and finally they succeeded.

But even then he had not counted on the "fair" Ehrengard. She refused
point-blank to go with him to that "odious England," where chopping off
heads seemed to be a favourite pastime. She was quite happy in Hanover,
and there she meant to stay. She fumed and raged, ran about the Palace
gardens, embracing her dearly-loved trees and clinging hysterically to
the marble statues, declaring that she could not and would not desert
them. And thus George left her, to start on his unwelcome pilgrimage to
England.

Madame von Kielmansegg, however, was of another mind. If her great rival
would not go, she would; and after giving the Elector a day's start, she
raced after him, caught him up, and, to her delight, was welcomed with
open arms. The moment Von der Schulenburg heard of the trick "that
Kielmansegg woman" had played on her, she, too, packed her trunks, and,
taking her "nieces" with her, also set out in hot pursuit of her Royal
lover and tool, and overtook him just as he was on the point of
embarking for England.

George was now happy and reconciled to his fate, for his retinue was
complete. And what a retinue! When the King landed at Greenwich with his
grotesque assortment of Ministers, his hideous Turks, his two
mistresses--one a gaunt giant, the other rolling in billows of fat--and
his "nieces," the crowds thronging the landing-place and streets greeted
the "menagerie" with jeers and shouts of laughter. They nicknamed
Schulenburg the "Maypole," and Kielmansegg the "Elephant," and pursued
the cavalcade with strident mockeries and insults.

"Goot peoples, vy you abuse us?" asked the Maypole, protruding her gaunt
head and shoulders through the carriage window. "Ve only gom for all
your goots." "And for all our chattels, too, ---- you!" came the
stinging retort from a wag in the crowd.

But Schulenburg soon realised that she could afford to smile and shrug
her scraggy shoulders at the insolence of those "horrid Engleesh." She
found herself in a land of Goshen, where there were many rich plums to
be gathered by far-reaching and unscrupulous hands such as hers. If she
could not love the enemy, she could at least plunder them; and this she
set to work to do with a good will, while the plastic George looked on
and smiled encouragement. There were pensions, appointments,
patents--boons of all kinds to be trafficked in; and who had a greater
right to act as intermediary than herself, the King's _chere amie_ and
right hand?

She sold everything that was saleable. As Walpole says, "She would have
sold the King's honour at a shilling advance to the best bidder." From
Bolingbroke's family she took L20,000 in three sums--one for a Peerage,
another for a pardon, and the third for a fat post in the Customs. Gold
poured in a ceaseless and glittering stream into her coffers. She
refused no bribe--if it was big enough--and was ready to sell anything,
from a Dukedom to a Bishopric, if her price was forthcoming. She made
George procure her a pension of L7,500 a year (ten times as much as had
long contented her well in Hanover); and when valuable posts fell vacant
she induced him to leave them vacant and to give her the revenues.

Not content with filling her capacious pockets, she sighed for
coronets--and got them in showers. Four Irish Peerages, from Baroness of
Dundalk to Duchess of Munster, were flung into her lap. And yet she was
not happy. She must have English coronets, and the best of them. So
George made her Baroness of Glastonbury, Countess of Feversham, and
Duchess of Kendal. And, to crown her ambition for such baubles, he
induced the pliant German Emperor to make her a Princess--of Eberstein.
Thus, with coffers overflowing with ill-gotten gold, her towering head
graced with a dazzling variety of coronets, this grim idol of a King,
who at sixty was as much her slave as in the twenties, was the proudest
woman in England, patronising our own Duchesses, and snubbing Peeresses
of less degree. She might be a "maypole"--hated and unattractive--but at
least she towered high above all the fairest and most blue-blooded
beauties of her "Consort's" Court.

When the South Sea Bubble rose to dazzle all eyes with its iridescent
splendours, it was she more than any other who blew it. She was the
witch behind the scenes of the South Sea and many another bubble
Company, whether its object was to "carry on a thing that will turn to
the advantage of the concerned," "the breeding and providing for natural
children," or "for planting mulberries in Chelsea Park to breed
silk-worms."

Every day of this wild, insane gamble, which wrecked thousands of homes,
and filled hundreds of suicides' graves, brought its stream of gold to
her exchequer; and when the bubbles burst in havoc and ruin she smiled
and counted her gains, turning a deaf ear to the storm of execration
that raged against her outside the palace walls. She knew that she had
played her cards so skilfully that all the popular rage was impotent to
harm her. Only one of her many puppets--Knight, the Treasurer of the
South Sea Company--could be the means of doing her harm. If he were
arrested and told all he knew, impeachment would probably follow, with a
sentence of imprisonment and banishment. But the crafty German was much
too old a bird to be caught in that way. She packed Knight off to
Antwerp; and, through the influence of her friend, the German Empress,
the States of Brabant refused to give him up to his fate.

The Duchess of Kendal was now at the zenith of her power and splendour.
While Sophia Dorothea, the true Queen of England, was pining away in
solitude in distant Ahlden, the German "Maypole" was Queen in all but
name, ruling alike her senile paramour and the nation with a tactful, if
iron hand. It is said that she was actually the morganatic wife of
George, that the ceremony had been performed by no less a dignitary than
the Archbishop of York; but, whether this was so or not, it is certain
that this "old and forbidding skeleton of a giantess" was more England's
Queen than any other Consort of the Georges.

She was present at every consultation between the King and his
Ministers--indeed the conferences were invariably held in her own
apartments, every day from five till eight. She understood and humoured
every whim of her Royal partner with infinite tactfulness, to the extent
even of encouraging his amours with young and attractive women, while
she herself, to emphasise her platonic relations with him, affected an
extravagant piety, attending as many as seven Lutheran services every
Sunday. The only rival she had ever feared--and hated--Madame
Kielmansegg, had long passed out of power, and as Countess of Darlington
was too much absorbed in pandering to her mountain of flesh, and filling
her pockets, to spare a regret for the Royal lover she had lost.

When George, on hearing of the death of his unhappy wife, Sophia
Dorothea, set out on his last journey to Hanover, his only companion was
the Duchess of Kendal, the woman to whose grim fascinations he had been
loyal for more than forty years; and it was she who closed his eyes in
the Palace of Osnabrueck, in which he had drawn his first breath
sixty-seven years earlier.

A French fortune-teller had warned him that "he would not survive his
wife a year"; and, as he neared Osnabrueck, the home of his brother, the
Prince Bishop, his fatal illness overtook him.

"When he arrived at Ippenburen, he was quite lethargic;
his hand fell down as if lifeless, and his tongue hung
out of his mouth. He gave, however, signs enough of life
by continually crying out, as well as he could
articulate, 'Osnabrueck!' 'Osnabrueck!'"

As night fell the sweating horses galloped into Osnabrueck; an hour
later George died in his brother's arms, less than twelve months after
his wife had drawn her last breath in her fortress-prison of Ahlden.

The Duchess of Kendal was disconsolate.

"She beat her breasts and tore her hair, and, separating
herself from the English ladies in her train, took the
road to Brunswick, where she remained in close seclusion
about three months."

Returning to England, to the only solace left to her--her
money-bags--she spent the last seventeen years of her life alternating
between her villas at Twickenham and Isleworth. George had promised her
that if she survived him, and if it were possible, he would revisit her
from the spirit world.

"When," to quote Walpole again, "one day a large raven
flew into one of the windows of her villa at Isleworth,
she was persuaded that it was the soul of the departed
monarch, and received and treated it with all the respect
and tenderness of duty, till the Royal bird or she took
their last flight."

Thus, shorn of all her powers and splendour, in obscurity, and hoarding
her ill-gotten gold, died the most remarkable woman who has ever figured
in the British Peerage. Her vast fortune was divided between her two
"nieces," one of whom, created by her father, George, Countess of
Walsingham, became the wife of that polished courtier and heartless man
of the world, Philip, fourth Earl of Chesterfield.

CHAPTER XXV

THE ROMANCE OF FAMILY TREES

Such are a few of the scenes which arrest the eyes as the panorama of
our aristocracy passes before them; but it would require a library of
volumes to do anything like adequate justice to the infinite variety of
the dramas it presents. There is for instance a whole realm of romance
in the origins of our noble families whose proud palaces are often
reared on the most ignoble of foundations; and whose family trees
flaunt, with questionable pride, many a spurious branch, while burying
from view the humble roots from which they derive their lordly growth.

Although Cobden's assertion that "the British aristocracy was cradled
behind city counters" errs on the side of exaggeration, there is no
doubt that in the veins of scores of the proudest English peers runs the
blood of ancestors who served customers in City shops.

When, a couple of centuries ago, John Baring, son of the Bremen Lutheran
parson, Dr Franz Baring, opened his small cloth manufactory on the
outskirts of Exeter, his most extravagant ambition was to build up a
business which he could hand over to his sons, and to provide a few
comforts for his old age; if any one had told him that he was laying the
foundations of four families which should hold their heads proudly among
the highest in the land he would no doubt have laughed aloud.

Yet John Baring lived to see his only daughter wedded to John Dunning,
who made a Baroness of her. Of his four sons, Francis was created a
Baronet by William Pitt, and found a wife in the cousin and co-heir of
his Grace of Canterbury. The second son of this union, Alexander, was
raised to the Peerage as Baron Ashburton, won a millionaire bride in the
daughter of Senator Bingham, of Philadelphia, and, from the immense
scale of his financial operations, was ranked by the Duc de Richelieu as
"one of the six great powers of Europe"--England, France, Russia,
Austria, and Prussia being the other five. Sir Francis's eldest
grandson, after serving in the exalted offices of Chancellor of the
Exchequer and First Lord of the Admiralty, was created Baron Northbrook,
a peerage which his son raised to an earldom; a second grandson
qualified for a coronet as Baron Revelstoke; and a third is known to-day
as Earl Cromer, the maker of modern Egypt, with half an alphabet of high
dignities after his name.

At least three dukes (Northumberland, Leeds, and Bedford) count among
their forefathers many a humble tradesman. Glancing down the pedigree of
his Grace of Northumberland, we find among his direct ancestors such
names as these, William le Smythesonne, of Thornton Watlous, husbandman;
William Smitheson, of Newsham, husbandman; Ralph Smithson, tenant
farmer; and Anthony Smithson, yeoman. It was this Anthony whose son,
Hugh, left the paternal farm to serve behind the counter of Ralph and
William Robinson, London haberdashers, and thus to take the first step
of that successful career which made him a Baronet and a man of wealth.
From Hugh, the London 'prentice sprang in the fourth generation, that
other Hugh who won the hand of Lady Elizabeth Seymour, and with it the
vast estates and historic name of Percy.

Some years before Hugh Smithson, the farmer's son, set foot in London
streets, Edward Osborne left the modest family roof at Ashford, in Kent,
to serve his apprenticeship to, and sit at the board of, William Hewitt,
a merchant of Philpot Lane, who shortly after moved his belongings to a
more fashionable home on London Bridge. One day it chanced that while
his only daughter, the fair "Mistress Anne," was hanging her favourite
bird outside the parlour window she lost her balance and fell into the
river, then racing in high tide under the arches of the bridge.
Fortunately for Mistress Anne the young apprentice saw the accident;
quick as thought he threw off his shoes and surcoat, and, plunging into
the swollen waters, caught the maiden by her hair as she was being swept
away, and with difficulty dragged her to a passing barge, on which both
found safety.

There was only one proper sequence to this romantic incident; Mistress
Anne lost her heart to her gallant rescuer, the grateful parents smiled
on his wooing, and one fine August morning, not many months later, the
wedding-bells of St Magnus Church were spreading far and wide the news
that young Osborne had found a bride in one of the fairest and richest
heiresses of London town. In due time Osborne became, as his
father-in-law had been before him, Lord Mayor of London; the son of this
romantic alliance was knighted for prowess in battle; Edward Osborne's
grandson was made a Baronet; and his great-grandson, Sir Thomas, added
to the family dignities by becoming in turn, Baron, Viscount, Earl and
Marquis, and, finally, Duke of Leeds. Thus only two generations
separated the 'prentice lad of Philpot Lane from his descendant of the
strawberry-leaves, the first of a long and still unbroken line of
English dukes, whose blood has mingled with that of many noble families.

The noble house of Ripon has its origin in Yorkshire tradesmen who
carried on business in York, some of whom were Lord Mayors of that city
two or three centuries ago. These early Robinsons added to their fortune
and enriched their blood by alliances with some of the oldest families
in the north of England--such as the Metcalfes of Nappa and the
Redmaynes of Fulford--and slowly but surely laid the foundation of one
of the wealthiest and most distinguished of great English houses. For
four generations the head of the family was a Cabinet Minister, while
one of them was Prime Minister of England.

The Marquises of Bath derive descent from one John o' th' Inne, who
was, probably, a worthy publican of Church Stretton, and who was
descended in the seventh generation from William de Bottefeld, an
under-forester of Shropshire in the thirteenth century; while, through
his mother, the late Marquis of Salisbury derived a strain of 'prentice
blood from Sir Christopher Gascoigne, the first Lord Mayor of London to
live in the Mansion House.

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