Love Romances of the Aristocracy written by Thornton Hall

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"No wit, to flatter, left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
There reft of health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends."

To my Lady Shrewsbury, as to her paramour, the condemnation of the Lords
marked the setting of her sun of splendour. The slumbering rage of
England against her long career of iniquity awoke to fresh life in this
hour of her humiliation, and she was glad to escape from its fury to the
haven of a convent in France, where she spent some time in mock
penitence.

But the Countess was, by no means, resigned to end her days in the odour
of a tardy and insincere piety. As soon as the sky had cleared a little
across the Channel, she returned to England, and tried to repair her
shattered fame by giving her hand to a son of Sir Thomas Bridges, of
Keynsham, in Somerset, who was so enslaved by her charms that he was
proud to lead the tarnished beauty to the altar. And with this mockery
of wedding bells "Messalina's" history practically ended as far as the
world, outside the Somersetshire village, where the remainder of her
life was mostly spent, was concerned. The fires of her passion had now
died out, and the restless and still ambitious woman exchanged love for
political intrigue. She became the most ardent of Jacobites, and plotted
as unscrupulously for the restoration of the Stuarts, as in earlier
years she had planned the capture and ruin of her lovers.

Not content with treading the shady and dangerous path of intrigue
herself, she set to work to undermine the loyalty of her only son, the
young Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the most trusted ministers and friends
of the Orange King; and such was her influence over the high-principled,
if weak Earl that she infected him with her own treachery, until the
man, whom William III. had called "the soul of honour," stood branded to
the world as a spy, leagued with the King's enemies, and was compelled
to leave England for ten years of exile and disgrace.

This corruption and ruin of her own son was the crowning infamy of one
of the worst women who ever enlisted their beauty, of their own free
will, in the service of the devil.

CHAPTER VII

A PROFLIGATE PRINCE

Of the sons of the profligate Frederick, Prince of Wales, Henry
Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, was, by universal consent, the most
abandoned, as his eldest brother, George III., of "revered memory," in
spite of his intrigue with the fair Quakeress, was the least vicious.
Each brother had his amours--many of them highly discreditable; but for
unrestrained and indiscriminate profligacy Henry Frederick took the
unenviable palm.

Even the verdict of posterity is unable to credit this Princeling with a
solitary virtue, unless a handsome face and a passion for music can be
placed to his credit. In his career of female conquest, which began as
soon as he had emancipated himself from his mother's apron strings, he
left behind him a wake of ruined lives; not the least tragic of which
was that of the lovely and foolish Henrietta Vernon, Countess Grosvenor,
whom he dragged through the mire of the Divorce Court, only to fling her
aside, a soiled and crushed flower of too pliant womanhood.

And yet, when his passion was in full flame, no woman was ever wooed
with apparently more sincere ardour and devotion.

"My dear Angel," he once wrote to her, "I got to bed
about ten. I then prayed for you, my dearest love, kissed
your dearest little hair, and lay down and dreamt of you,
had you ten thousand times in my arms, kissing you and
telling you how much I loved and adored you, and you
seemed pleased.... I have your heart, and it is warm at
my breast. I hope mine feels as easy to you. Thou joy of
my life, adieu!"

In another letter he exclaims:

"Oh, my dearest soul ... your dear heart is so safe with
me and feels every motion mine does. How happy will that
day be to me that brings you back! I shall be unable to
speak for joy. My dearest soul, I send you ten thousand
kisses."

So irrepressible was his passion that it burst the bounds of prose, and
gushed forth in verses such as this:

"Hear, solemn Jove, and, conscious Venus, hear!
And thou, bright maid, believe me while I swear,
No time, no change, no future flame shall move
The well-placed basis of my lasting love."

When the fair and frail Countess, in a fit of alarm, took refuge at
Eaton Hall, her Royal lover followed her in disguise, installed himself
at a neighbouring inn, and continued his intrigue under the very nose of
her jealous husband, who at last was driven to sue for divorce. He won
an easy verdict, and with it L10,000 damages--a bill which George III.
himself had ultimately to pay. Within a few months the incorrigible Duke
had another "dearest little angel" in his toils, and pursued his
gallantries without a thought of the Countess he had left to her shame.

Such was this degenerate brother of the King when the most memorable of
his victims crossed his blighting path one summer day in the year 1771,
at Brighton--a radiantly beautiful young woman who had just discarded
her widow's weeds, and was arrayed for fresh conquests.

Anne Luttrell, as the widow had been known in her maiden days, was one
of the three lovely daughters of Lord Irnham, in later years Earl of
Carhampton, and a member of a family noted for the beauty of its women,
and the wild, lawless living of its men. Her brother, Colonel Luttrell,
was the most reckless swashbuckler and the deadliest duellist of his
time--a man whose morals were as low as his temper and courage were
high.

At seventeen Anne had become the wife of Christopher Horton, a
hard-drinking, fast-living Derbyshire squire, who left her a widow at
twenty-two, in the prime of her beauty, and eager, as soon as decency
permitted, to enter the matrimonial lists again.

About this time Horace Walpole, who had a keen eye for female charms,
describes her as

"extremely pretty, very well-made, with the most amorous
eyes in the world, and eyelashes a yard long. Coquette
beyond measure, artful as Cleopatra, and completely
mistress of all her passions and projects. Indeed,
eyelashes three-quarters of a yard shorter would have
served to conquer such a head as she has turned."

In another portrait Walpole says:

"There was something so bewitching in her languishing
eyes, which she could animate to enchantment if she
pleased, and her coquetry was so active, so varied, and
yet so habitual, that it was difficult not to see through
it, and yet as difficult to resist it. She danced
divinely, and had a great deal of wit, but of the satiric
kind."

Such were the charms and witchery of Mrs Horton when the lascivious
young Prince, who was still a boy, was first dazzled by her beauty at
Brighton; and when, in fact, she was on the eve of smiling on the suit
of one of the legion of lovers who swelled her retinue, one General
Smith, a handsome man with a seductive rent-roll to add to his
attractions. But the moment the Prince began to cast admiring eyes at
the young widow the General's fate was sealed. She had no fancy to go to
her grave plain "Mrs Smith" when a duchess's coronet (and a Royal one to
boot) was dangled so alluringly before her eyes.

For from the first she had made up her mind that she would be the
Prince's legal wife, and no light-o'-love to be petted and flung aside
when he chose, butterfly-like, to flit to some other flower; and this
she made abundantly clear to Henry Frederick. Her favours--after a
period of coquetry and coy reluctance--were at his disposal; but the
price to be paid for them was a wedding-ring--nothing less. And such was
the infatuation she had inspired that the Duke--flinging scruples and
fears aside, consented. One October day they took boat to Calais, and
were there made man and wife. The widow had caught her Prince and meant
the world to know she was a Princess.

For a few indecisive weeks the Duke put off the evil day of announcing
his marriage to his brother, the King, and to his mother, the Dowager
Princess of Wales, whose frowns he dreaded still more. But his Duchess
was inexorable. She declined to play any longer the _role_ of "virtuous
mistress" in an obscure French town, when she ought, as a Princess of
the Blood Royal, to be circling in splendour and state around the
throne.

Between his wife's tears and tantrums on one side of the Channel and the
Royal anger on the other, the Duke was driven to the extremity of his
exiguous Royal wits; until finally, in sheer desperation, he decided to
make the plunge--to break the news to the King. Had he but known how
inopportune the time was he would surely have taken the first boat back
to Calais rather than face his brother's anger. George was distracted by
trouble at home and abroad. His mother was dying; across the Atlantic
the clouds of war were massing; the political atmosphere was charged
with danger and unrest. And when the quaking Duke presented himself
before his brother as he was moodily walking in his palace garden,
George was in no mood to accept quietly any addition to his burden of
worries.

No sooner had the King read the ill-spelled, clumsily-worded note which
the Duke shamefacedly placed in his hand than his anger blazed into
flame. "You idiot! You blockhead! You villain!" he shouted, purple in
face and hoarse with passion. "I tell you that woman shall never be a
Royal Duchess--she shall never be anything." "What must I do, then?"
gasped the Duke, quailing before the Royal outburst. "Go abroad until I
can decide what to do," thundered the King, waving his brother
imperiously away.

It was a very crestfallen Duke who returned to Calais to face the
upbraiding of Duchess Anne on his failure. But it took much more than
this to cow a Luttrell. She at least was not afraid of any king. She
would defy him to his face, and compel him to acknowledge her--before
her child was born. And within a few weeks she was installed at
Cumberland House, with all the state and more than the airs of a Royal
Princess. The days of concealment were over; she stood avowed to the
world, Duchess of Cumberland and sister-in-law to the King; and she only
smiled when George, in his Royal wrath at such insolence, announced
through his Chamberlain that "there was no road between Cumberland House
and Windsor Castle--that the Castle doors would be closed against any
who dared to visit his repudiated sister-in-law."

There were some, however, who dared to brave George's displeasure by
paying court to the Duchess, whose beauty and grace surrounded her with
a small body of admirers. The daughter of an Irish nobleman played to
perfection her new and exalted _role_ of Princess. "No woman of her
time," says Lord Hervey, "performed the honours of her drawing-room with
such grace, affability, and dignity." And, in spite of George's frowns,
the only real thorn in her bed of roses was the knowledge that the
Duchess of Gloucester, who, as the daughter of a Piccadilly sempstress,
was infinitely her inferior by birth, and not even her superior in
beauty, was received with open arms at the Castle, and drew to her court
all the greatest in the land.

She even made overtures to her rival and enemy, and proposed that they
should appear together in the same box at the opera--an overture to
which the Duchess of Gloucester retorted contemptuously: "Never! I would
not smell at the same nosegay with her in public!"

By sheer effrontery Duchess Anne at last forced her way into the Royal
Court and public recognition as a member of George's family; and the
fact that both the King and the Queen snubbed her mercilessly for her
pains, detracted little from her triumph and gratification. What her
Grace of Gloucester had won by submission and ingratiating arts, she had
won by brazen defiance and importunity. But the goal, though so
differently reached, was the same. Her triumph was complete.

To her last day, however, she never forgave the King and Queen. While
they had smiled on the sempstress's daughter, who had been guilty of
precisely the same offence as herself--that of wedding a Royal Prince
without the King's sanction--they had scorned her, a Luttrell, the
daughter of a noble house; and terrible was the revenge she took. She
deliberately set herself to debase the Prince of Wales--a youth whose
natural tendencies made him a pliant tool in her hands. She enmeshed him
in the web of her beauty and charms; she pandered to his vanity and his
passions; while her husband initiated him into the vices of which he
himself was a past-master--drinking, gambling, and lust. Notorious
profligate as George IV. became, there is little doubt that he would
have been a much better man if he had not fallen thus early into the
hands of a revengeful and unprincipled woman. Thus infamously the
Duchess of Cumberland repaid George and his Consort for their slights;
and her shameless reward was when she witnessed their grief at the moral
degradation of their eldest son.

But even in the hour of her greatest triumph and splendour Anne Luttrell
was an unhappy woman. She had climbed to the dizziest heights of the
social ladder; her pride was more than satisfied; but her heart was
empty and desolate. Her fickle husband soon wearied of her charms, and
flaunted his fresh conquests before her face. In the royal family
circle, into which she had forced her way, she was an unwelcome
stranger; and such homage as she received was conceded to her rank and
not to herself. "Of all princesses," she once wrote to a friend, "I
really think I am the most miserable."

Her husband died at the age of forty-five, worn out with excesses,
regretted by none, execrated by many. Of his father it had been written
by way of epitaph:--

"He was alive and is dead,
And, as it is only Fred,
Why, there's no more to be said."

Henry Frederick's epitaph, if it had been written by the same hand,
would have been much more scathing. His Duchess survived him a score of
years--unhappy years of solitude and neglect, a Princess only in
name--harassed and shamed by her eldest sister, Elizabeth, a woman of
coarse tastes and language, a confirmed gambler and cheat, whose
failings, which she tried in vain to conceal, brought shame on the
Duchess.

The fate of Elizabeth--one of the "three beautiful Luttrells"--is among
the most tragic stories of the British Peerage. When her Duchess-sister
died she drifted into low companionships, was imprisoned for debt, and
actually bribed a hairdresser to marry her, in order to recover her
liberty. On the Continent, to which she escaped, she fell to still lower
depths--was arrested for pocket-picking, and for a time cleaned the
streets of Augsburg chained to a wheelbarrow, until a dose of poison set
her free from her fetters.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GORGEOUS COUNTESS

If, a century ago, Edmund Power, of Knockbrit, in County Tipperary, had
been told that his second daughter, Marguerite, would one day blossom
into a Countess, and live in history as one of the "most gorgeous"
figures in the fashionable world of London under three kings, he would
certainly have considered his prophetic informant an escaped lunatic,
and would probably have told him so, with the brutal frankness which was
one of his most amiable characteristics.

The Irish squire was a proud man--proud of his pretty and shiftless
wife, with her eternal talk of her Desmond ancestors; proud of two of
his three daughters, whose budding beauty was to win for them titled
husbands--one an English Viscount, the other a Comte de St Marsante; and
proudest of all of his own handsome figure and his local dignities. But
he was frankly ashamed to own himself father of his second daughter,
Marguerite, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, and with no
gifts or promise to qualify her plainness.

But the squireen was probably too full of his own self-importance to
waste much thought or regret on an insignificant, unattractive girl,
though she was his own child. He loved to strut about among his humble
neighbours in all the unprovincial glory of ruffles and lace, buck-skins
and top-boots, and snowy, wide-spreading cravat. He was the king of
Tipperary dandies, known far beyond his own county as "Buck Power" and
"Shiver-the-Frills"; and what pleased his vanity still more, he was a
Justice of the Peace, with authority to scour the country at the head of
a company of dragoons, tracking down rebels and spreading terror
wherever he went. That he was laughed at for his coxcombry and hated for
his petty tyranny only seemed to add to the zest of his enjoyment of
life; and he saw, at least, a knighthood as the prospective recognition
of his importance, and his services to the King and the peace.

Such was the father and such the home of Marguerite Power, who was one
day to dazzle the world as the "most gorgeous Lady Blessington."

As with many another "ugly ducking" Marguerite Power's beauty was only
dormant in these days of childhood; and before she had graduated into
long frocks, the bud was opening which was to grow to so beautiful a
flower. If her father was blind to the change, it was patent enough to
other eyes; and she had scarcely passed her fourteenth birthday when she
had at least two lovers eager to pay homage to her girlish
charm--Captains Murray and Farmer, brother-officers of a regiment
stationed at Clonmel. To the wooing of Captain Murray, young, handsome,
and desperately in earnest, she lent a willing ear; but when thus
encouraged, he asked her to be his wife, she blushingly declined the
offer, on the ground that she was yet much too young to think of a
wedding-ring. To the rival Captain, old enough to be her father, a man,
moreover, whose evil living and Satanic temper were notorious, she
showed the utmost aversion. "I hate him," she protested in tears to her
father, who supported his suit; "and I would rather die a hundred times
than marry him."

But "Beau Power" was the last man to be moved from his purpose by a
child's tears or pleadings. Captain Farmer was a man of wealth and good
family, and also one of his own boon companions. And thus, tearful,
indignant, protesting to the last, the girl was led to the altar, by the
biggest scoundrel in Tipperary--a "maiden tribute" to a lover's lust and
a father's ambition.

[Illustration: MARGUERITE, COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON]

The child's fears were more than realised in the wedded life that
followed. Before the honeymoon had waned, the Captain began to treat his
young wife with all the brutality of which he was such a past-master.
Blows and oaths were her daily lot; and when his cruelty wrung tears
from her, her husband would lock her in her room, and leave her for
days, without fire or food, until she condescended to beg for mercy.

After three months of this inferno the Captain was ordered to a distant
station; and, as his wife refused point-blank to accompany him, was by
no means reluctant to "be rid of the brat" by sending her back to her
home. Here, however, the child-wife found herself less welcome than, and
almost as unhappy as in her wedded life; and, driven to despair, she
left the home in which she had been cradled, and fared forth alone into
the world, which could not be more unkind than those whose duty it was
to shield and care for her.

How, or where, Beau Power's daughter lived during the next twelve years
must always remain largely a mystery. At one time she appears in Dublin;
at another, in Cahir; but mostly she seems to have spent her time in
England. Over this part of her adventurous life a curtain is drawn;
though some have endeavoured to raise it, and have professed to discover
scandalous doings for which there seems to be no vestige of authority.
We know that, by the time she was twenty, Sir Thomas Lawrence was so
struck by her beauty that he immortalised it on canvas; but it is only
in 1816 that the curtain is actually raised, and we find her living with
her brother in London, where, to quote her sister,

"she received at her house only those whose age and
character rendered them safe friends, and a very few
others, on whose perfect respect and consideration she
could wholly rely. Among the latter was the Earl of
Blessington, then a widower."

Whatever may have been her life during this obscure period, when her
charms were maturing into such exquisite beauty, it is thus certain that
at its close she was moving in a good circle, and was as irreproachable
as she was lovely. Of her rascally husband she had happily seen nothing
during all those years of more or less lonely adventure; and the end of
this tragic union was now near. One day in October 1817, the Captain
ended his misspent days in tragedy. He had drifted through dissipation
and crime to the King's Bench prison; and in a fit of frenzy--or, as
some say, in a drunken quarrel--had flung himself to his death through a
window of his gaol.

Thus, at last, the nightmare that had clouded the young life of the
squireen's daughter was over, and she was free to plan her future as she
would. What this future was to be was soon placed beyond doubt. The
widowed Earl of Blessington had long been among the most ardent admirers
of the lovely Irishwoman; and before Farmer had been many months in his
prison-grave, he had won her consent to be his Countess. The "ugly
duckling" had reached a coronet through such trials and vicissitudes as
happily seldom fall to the lot of woman; and her future was to be as
radiant as her past had been ignoble and obscure.

Seldom has a woman cradled in comparative poverty made such a splendid
alliance. Lord Blessington was a veritable Croesus among Irish
landlords, with a rent-roll of L30,000 a year; allied, it is true, to an
extravagance more than commensurate with his revenue. He had a passion
for all things theatrical, and an almost barbaric taste in the gorgeous
furnishings with which he loved to surround himself; and this taste his
wife seems to have shared.

When the Earl took his bride to his ancestral home, Mountjoy Forest, she
revelled in her boudoir, with its hangings of "crimson Genoa
silk-velvet, trimmed with gold bullion fringe; and all the furniture of
equal richness." But she had had enough of Irish life in the days of her
childhood, and soon sighed to return to London and to a wider sphere for
her beauty and her social ambition; and before she had been a bride six
months we find her installed in St James's Square, drawing to her
_salon_ all the greatest and most famous in the land, and moving among
her courtiers with the dignity and graciousness of a Queen.

Royal Dukes kissed her hand; statesman basked in her smile; Moore sang
his sweetest songs for her delight; and all the arts and sciences
worshipped at her shrine, and raved about her beauty of face and graces
of mind.

Sated at last with all this splendour and adulation, my Lady Blessington
yearned for more worlds to conquer; and so, one August day in 1822, she
and her lord set out on a triumphal progress through Europe, with a
retinue of attendants, and with luxurious equipages such as a king might
have been proud to boast. In France they added to their train Count
d'Orsay, who threw up his army-commission under the lure of the
Countess's beautiful eyes; and seldom has fair lady had so devoted and
charming a cavalier as this "Admirable Crichton" of Georgian days.

"Count d'Orsay," says Charles James Mathews, the famous
comedian, who knew him well, "was the beau-ideal of manly
dignity and grace. He was the model of all that could be
conceived of noble demeanour and youthful candour;
handsome beyond all question; accomplished to the last
degree; highly educated, and of great literary
acquirements; with a gaiety of heart and cheerfulness of
mind that spread happiness on all around him. His
conversation was brilliant and engaging, as well as
instructive. He was, moreover, the best fencer, dancer,
swimmer, runner, dresser, the best shot, the best
horseman, the best draughtsman, of his age."

Such was the Count, then a youth of nineteen, who thus entered Lady
Blessington's life, in which he was to play such an intimate part until
its tragic close.

From France the regal progress continued to Italy, everywhere greeted
with wonder at its magnificence and admiration of my lady's beauty. Two
spring months in 1823 were passed at Genoa, where Lord Byron loved to
sit at the Countess's feet and pay homage to her with eye and tongue.
From Genoa the procession fared majestically to Rome, of which her
ladyship, in spite of the sensation she produced and the adulation she
received, soon wearied; she sighed for Naples, where she was regally
lodged in the Palazzo Belvidere, a Palace, as she declared, "fit for any
queen." And how the squire's daughter revelled in her new
pleasure-house, with its courtyard and plashing fountain, its arcade
and its colonnade, "supporting a terrace covered with flowers"; its
marvellous gardens, filled with the rarest trees, shrubs and plants; and
long gallery, "filled with pictures, statues, and bassi-relievi."

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