his
objections to the bill appear to me to be
founded on certain apprehensions that he and his coadjutors might be
mistaken for the "
original advisers
" (to quote him) of the
measure. For my own part, I consider the manufacturers as a much injured
body of men, sacrificed to the views of certain individuals who have
enriched themselves by those practices which have deprived the
frame-workers of employment. For instance;—by the adoption of a certain
kind of frame, one man performs the work of seven—six are thus thrown
out of business. But it is to be observed that the work thus done is far
inferior in quality, hardly marketable at home, and hurried over with a
view to exportation. Surely, my Lord, however we may rejoice in any
improvement in the arts which may be beneficial to mankind, we must not
allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism. The
maintenance and well-doing of the industrious poor is an object of
greater consequence to the community than the enrichment of a few
monopolists by any improvement in the implements of trade, which
deprives the workman of his bread, and renders the labourer "unworthy of
his hire."
My own motive for opposing the bill is founded on its palpable
injustice, and its certain inefficacy. I have seen the state of these
miserable men, and it is a disgrace to a civilized country. Their
excesses may be condemned, but cannot be subject of wonder. The effect
of the present bill would be to drive them into actual rebellion. The
few words I shall venture to offer on Thursday will be founded upon
these opinions formed from my own observations on the spot. By previous
inquiry, I am convinced these men would have been restored to
employment, and the county to tranquillity. It is, perhaps, not yet too
late, and is surely worth the trial. It can never be too late to employ
force in such circumstances. I believe your Lordship does not coincide
with me entirely on this subject, and most cheerfully and sincerely
shall I submit to your superior judgment and experience, and take some
other line of argument against the bill, or be silent altogether, should
you deem it more advisable. Condemning, as every one must condemn, the
conduct of these wretches, I believe in the existence of grievances
which call rather for pity than punishment. I have the honour to be,
with great respect, my Lord, your Lordship's
Most obedient and obliged servant,
Byron
.
P.S.—I am a little apprehensive that your Lordship will think me too
lenient towards these men, and half a
frame-breaker myself
.
List of Letters
Contents
8, St. James's Street, March 5, 1812.
My Dear Hodgson
,—
We
are not answerable for reports of speeches
in the papers; they are always given incorrectly, and on this occasion
more so than usual, from the debate in the Commons on the same night.
The
Morning Post
should have said
eighteen years
. However,
you will find the speech, as spoken, in the Parliamentary Register, when
it comes out. Lords Holland and Grenville, particularly the latter, paid
me some high compliments in the course of their speeches, as you may
have seen in the papers, and Lords Eldon and Harrowby answered me. I
had many marvellous eulogies
repeated to me since, in person
and by proxy, from divers persons
ministerial
—yea,
ministerial!
—as well as oppositionists; of them I shall only
mention Sir F. Burdett.
He
says it is the best speech by a
lord
since the "
Lord
knows when," probably from a
fellow-feeling in the sentiments. Lord H. tells me I shall beat them all
if I persevere; and Lord G. remarked that the construction of some of my
periods are very like
Burke's!!
And so much for vanity. I spoke
very violent sentences with a sort of modest impudence, abused every
thing and every body, and put the Lord Chancellor very much out of
humour: and if I may believe what I hear, have not lost any character by
the experiment. As to my delivery, loud and fluent enough, perhaps a
little theatrical. I
not recognize myself or any one else in the
newspapers
.
I
myself unto Griffiths, and my poesy
comes out on Saturday.
Hobhouse is here; I shall tell him to write. My stone is gone for the
present, but I fear is part of my habit. We
all
talk of a visit
to Cambridge.
Yours ever,
B.
For Byron's speech, February 27, 1812, see
.] Grenville said,
"There never was a maxim of greater wisdom than that uttered by the
noble lord [Byron] who had so ably addressed their lordships that
night for the first time"
(
Hansard
, vol. xxi. p. 977). Moore quotes a passage from Byron's
Detached Thoughts
:
"Sheridan's liking for me (whether he was not mystifying me I do not
know, but Lady Caroline Lamb and others told me that he said the same
both before and after he knew me) was founded upon English Bards,
and Scotch Reviewers. He told me that he did not care about poetry
(or about mine—at least, any but that poem of mine), but he
was sure, from that and other symptoms, I should make an
orator, if I would but take to speaking, and grow a parliament man. He
never ceased harping upon this to me to the last; and I remember my
old tutor, Dr. Drury, had the same notion when I was a boy; but
it never was my turn of inclination to try. I spoke once or twice, as
all young peers do, as a kind of introduction into public life; but
dissipation, shyness, haughty and reserved opinions, together with the
short time I lived in England after my majority (only about five years
in all), prevented me from resuming the experiment. As far as it went,
it was not discouraging, particularly my first speech (I spoke
three or four times in all); but just after it, my poem of Childe
Harold was published, and nobody ever thought about my
prose afterwards, nor indeed did I; it became to me a secondary
and neglected object, though I sometimes wonder to myself if I should
have succeeded."
Byron, writing to John Hanson, February 28, 1812, says:
"Dear Sir,—In the report of my speech (which by the bye is given very
incorrectly) in the M[orning] Herald, Day, and
B[ritish] Press, they state that I mentioned Bristol, a
place I never saw in my life and knew nothing of whatever, nor
mentioned at all last night. Will you be good enough to send to
these papers immediately, and have the mistake
corrected, or I shall get into a scrape with the Bristol people?
"I am, yours very truly,
"B."
Childe Harold
, Cantos I., II.
List of Letters
Contents
St. James's Street, March 5, 1812.
My Lord
,—
I request your Lordship to accept a copy of the thing
which accompanies this note
?
have already so fully proved the truth of the first line of Pope's
couplet
,
"Forgiveness to the injured doth belong,"
that I long for an opportunity to give the lie to the verse that
follows. If I were not perfectly convinced that any thing I may have
formerly uttered in the boyish rashness of my misplaced resentment had
made as little impression as it deserved to make, I should hardly have
the confidence—perhaps your Lordship may give it a stronger and more
appropriate appellation—to send you a quarto of the same scribbler. But
your Lordship, I am sorry to observe to-day, is troubled with the gout;
if my book can produce a
laugh
against itself or the author, it
will be of some service. If it can set you to
sleep
, the benefit
will be yet greater;
as some facetious personage observed half a
century ago, that "poetry is a mere drug,"
I offer you mine as a humble assistant to the
eau medicinale
. I
trust you will forgive this and all my other buffooneries, and believe
me to be, with great respect,
Your Lordship's obliged and sincere servant,
Byron
.
Childe Harold
was published March 1, 1812. Another
copy of
Childe Harold
was sent to Mrs. Leigh, with the following
inscription:
"To Augusta, my dearest sister, and my best friend, who has ever loved
me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her
father's son, and most affectionate brother, B."
The effect which the poem instantly produced is best expressed in
Byron's own memorandum:
"I awoke one morning and found myself famous."
He was only just twenty-three years old.
"The subject," says Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire (Two
Duchesses, pp. 375, 376), "of conversation, of curiosity, of
enthusiasm almost, one might say, of the moment is not Spain or
Portugal, Warriors or Patriots, but Lord Byron!" "He returned," she
continues, "sorry for the severity of some of his lines (in the
English Bards), and with a new poem, Childe Harold,
which he published. This poem is on every table, and himself courted,
visited, flattered, and praised whenever he appears. He has a pale,
sickly, but handsome countenance, a bad figure, and, in short, he is
really the only topic almost of every conversation—the men jealous of
him, the women of each other."
"Lord Byron," writes Lady Harriet Leveson Gower to the Duke of
Devonshire, May 10, 1812 (Letters of Harriet, Countess
Granville, vol. i. p. 34), "is still upon a pedestal, and Caroline
William doing homage. I have made acquaintance with him. He is
agreeable, but I feel no wish for any further intimacy. His
countenance is fine when it is in repose; but the moment it is in
play, suspicious, malignant, and consequently repulsive. His manner is
either remarkably gracious and conciliatory, with a tinge of
affectation, or irritable and impetuous, and then, I am afraid,
perfectly natural."
Rogers (
Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers
, pp.
232, 233) says,
"After Byron had become the rage, I was frequently amused at
the manoeuvres of certain noble ladies to get acquainted with him by
means of me; for instance, I would receive a note from Lady ——,
requesting the pleasure of my company on a particular evening, with a
postscript, 'Pray, could you not contrive to bring Lord Byron with
you?' Once, at a great party given by Lady Jersey, Mrs. Sheridan ran
up to me and said, 'Do, as a favour, try if you can place Lord Byron
beside me at supper!'"
"Forgiveness to the injured does belong,
But they ne'er pardon, who have done the wrong."
Dryden's
Conquest of Grenada
, part ii. act i. sc. 2.
Murphy, in sc. 1 of
The Way to Keep Him
(1760), uses
the word in the same sense;
"A wife's a drug now; mere tar-water, with every virtue under heaven,
but nobody takes it."
List of Letters
Contents
Chapter VI—The Idol of Society—The Drury Lane Address—Second Speech in Parliament
March, 1812-May, 1813
regard to the passage on Mr. Way's loss, no unfair play was hinted
at, as may be seen by referring to the book
; and it is expressly
added that the managers
were ignorant
of that transaction. As to
the prevalence of play at the Argyle, it cannot be denied that there
were
billiards
and
dice
;—Lord B. has been a witness to
the use of both at the Argyle Rooms. These, it is presumed, come under
the denomination of play. If play be allowed, the President of the
Institution can hardly complain of being termed the "Arbiter of
Play,"—or what becomes of his authority?
Lord B. has no personal animosity to Colonel Greville. A public
institution, to which he himself was a subscriber, he considered himself
to have a right to notice
publickly
. Of that institution Colonel
Greville was the avowed director;—it is too late to enter into the
discussion of its merits or demerits.
Lord B. must leave the discussion of the reparation, for the real or
supposed injury, to Colonel G.'s friend and Mr. Moore, the friend of
Lord B.—begging them to recollect that, while they consider Colonel
G.'s honour, Lord B. must also maintain his own. If the business can be
settled amicably, Lord B. will do as much as can and ought to be done by
a man of honour towards conciliation;—if not, he must satisfy Colonel
G. in the manner most conducive to his further wishes.
Byron, in
English Bards, etc.
(lines 638-667), had
alluded to Colonel Greville, Manager of the Argyle Institution:
"Or hail at once the patron and the pile
Of vice and folly, Greville and Argyle," etc.
In a note he had also referred to "Billy" Way's loss of several thousand
pounds in the Rooms. On his return from abroad, Colonel Greville
demanded satisfaction through his friend Gould Francis Leckie. Byron
referred Leckie to Moore, and sent Moore the above paper for his
guidance. The affair was amicably settled.
In his
Detached Thoughts
occurs the following passage:—
"I have been called in as mediator, or second, at least twenty times,
in violent quarrels, and have always contrived to settle the business
without compromising the honour of the parties, or leading them to
mortal consequences, and this, too, sometimes in very difficult and
delicate circumstances, and having to deal with very hot and haughty
spirits,—Irishmen, gamesters, guardsmen, captains, and cornets of
horse, and the like. This was, of course, in my youth, when I lived in
hot-headed company. I have had to carry challenges from gentlemen to
noblemen, from captains to captains, from lawyers to counsellors, and
once from a clergyman to an officer in the Life Guards; but I found
the latter by far the most difficult:
'to compose
The bloody duel without blows,'
the business being about a woman: I must add, too, that I never saw a
woman behave so ill, like a cold-blooded, heartless b——as she
was,—but very handsome for all that. A certain Susan C——was she
called. I never saw her but once; and that was to induce her but to
say two words (which in no degree compromised herself), and which
would have had the effect of saving a priest or a lieutenant of
cavalry. She would
not say them, and neither Nepean nor myself
(the son of Sir Evan Nepean, and a friend to one of the parties) could
prevail upon her to say them, though both of us used to deal in some
sort with womankind. At last I managed to quiet the combatants without
her talisman, and, I believe, to her great disappointment: she was the
damnedest b—— that I ever saw, and I have seen a great many. Though
my clergyman was sure to lose either his life or his living, he was as
warlike as the Bishop of Beauvais, and would hardly be pacified; but
then he was in love, and that is a martial passion."
One challenge from a gentleman to a nobleman was that of Scrope Davies
to Lord Foley, in 1813; but Byron succeeded in arranging the matter.
That from a lawyer to a counsellor was in 1815, from John Hanson to
Serjeant Best, afterwards Lord Wynford, and arose out of the marriage of
Miss Hanson to Lord Portsmouth; this quarrel was also settled by Byron.
The case of the clergyman was that of the Rev. Robert Bland, whose
mistress, during his absence in Holland, left him for an officer in the
Guards (see
Letters
, vol. i. p. 197, end of
note
[Footnote 1 of Letter 102] on
Francis Hodgson). Byron was himself a fair shot with a pistol.
"When in London," writes Gronow (Reminiscences, vol. i. p.
152), "Byron used to go to Manton's shooting-gallery, in Davies
Street, to try his hand, as he said, at a wafer. Wedderburn Webster
was present when the poet, intensely delighted with his own skill,
boasted to Joe Manton that he considered himself the best shot in
London. 'No, my lord,' replied Manton, 'not the best; but your
shooting to-day was respectable.' Whereupon Byron waxed wroth, and
left the shop in a violent passion."
List of Letters
Contents
My dear Bankes,—My eagerness to come to an explanation has, I trust,
convinced you that whatever my unlucky manner might inadvertently be,
the change was as unintentional as (if intended) it would have been
ungrateful. I really was not aware that, while we were together, I had
evinced such caprices; that we were not so much in each other's company
as I could have wished, I well know, but I think so
acute an
observer
as yourself must have perceived enough to
explain
this
, without supposing any slight to one in whose society I have
pride and pleasure. Recollect that I do not allude here to "extended" or
"extending" acquaintances, but to circumstances you will understand, I
think, on a little reflection.
And now, my dear Bankes, do not distress me by supposing that I can
think of you, or you of me, otherwise than I trust we have long thought.
You told me not long ago that my temper was improved, and I should be
sorry that opinion should be revoked. Believe me, your friendship is of
more account to me than all those absurd vanities in which, I fear, you
conceive me to take too much interest. I have never disputed your
superiority, or doubted (seriously) your good will, and no one shall
ever "make mischief between us" without the sincere regret on the part
of your ever affectionate, etc.
P.S.—I
see you, I hope, at Lady Jersey's
.
Hobhouse goes also.
George Child-Villiers (1773-1859), "in manners and
appearance
le plus grand seigneur
of his time," succeeded his
father, "the Prince of Maccaronies," in 1805, as fifth Earl of Jersey.
He was twice Lord Chamberlain to William IV., and twice Master of the
Horse to Queen Victoria. He married, in 1804, Lady Sarah Sophia Fane,
eldest daughter of John, tenth Earl of Westmorland, and heiress, through
her mother,
née
Sarah Anne Child, of the fortune of her
grandfather, Robert Child, the banker.
Lady Jersey for many years reigned supreme, by her beauty and wit, in
London society,
"the veriest tyrant," said Byron, "that ever governed Fashion's fools,
and compelled them to shake their caps and bells as she willed it."
At Almack's, where, according to Gronow (
Reminiscences
, vol. i.
p. 32), she introduced the quadrille after Waterloo, she was a despot.
Almack's
, the very clever and personal picture of fashionable
life, published in 1826, is dedicated
"To that most Distinguished and Despotic Conclave, composed of their
High Mightinesses the Ladies Patronesses of the Balls at Almack's, the
Rulers of Fashion, the Arbiters of Taste, the Leaders of Ton,
and the Makers of Manners, whose Sovereign sway over 'the world' of
London has long been established on the firmest basis, whose Decrees
are Laws, and from whose judgment there is no appeal."
Over this "Willis Coalition Cabinet" Lady Jersey, as "Lady Hauton," is
described as reigning supreme.
"She knew more than any person I ever met with, and both everything
and everybody; she could quiz and she could flatter."
"Treat people like fools," she is supposed to say, "and they will
worship you; stoop to make up to them, and they will directly tread
you underfoot."
Ticknor (
Life
, vol. i. p. 269) speaks of her as a "beautiful
creature, with a great deal of talent, taste, and elegant knowledge." He
was at Almack's, in 1819, and standing close to Lady Jersey, then at the
height of beauty and brilliant talent, a leader in society, and with
decided political opinions, when she refused the Duke of Wellington
admittance. The lady patronesses had made a rule to admit no one after
eleven o'clock. When the rule first came into operation, Ticknor heard
one of the attendants announce that the Duke of Wellington was at the door.
"What o'clock is it?" Lady Jersey asked. "Seven minutes after eleven,
your ladyship." She paused a moment, and then said, with emphasis and
distinctness, Give my compliments,—give Lady Jersey's compliments to
the Duke of Wellington, and say that she is very glad that the first
enforcement of the rule of exclusion is such that hereafter no one can
complain of its application. He cannot be admitted."
(
ibid
., vol. i. pp. 296, 297).
Politically, Lady Jersey was a power. Such an entry as the following
sounds strange to modern readers: Dining at Lord Holland's, in 1835, in
company with Lord Melbourne, Lord Grey, and other prominent politicians,
Ticknor notes that
"public business was much talked about—the corporation bill, the
motion for admitting Dissenters to the universities, etc., etc.; and
as to the last, when the question arose whether it would be debated on
Tuesday night, it was admitted to be doubtful whether Lady Jersey
would not succeed in getting it postponed, as she has a grand dinner
that evening."
(
Life
, vol. i. pp. 409, 410).
Lady Jersey, whose mother-in-law,
née
Frances Twyden, had
been a bitter opponent of the Princess of Wales, provoked the wrath
of the Regent by espousing the cause of his wife. The Prince
was determined to break off this friendship with his wife's champion,
and sent a letter to her by the hand of Colonel Willis, announcing
his determination. Some time later they met at a great party given
by Henry Hope in Cavendish Square. Lady Jersey was walking
with Rogers in the gallery, when they met the Prince, who
"stopped for a moment, and then, drawing himself up, marched past her
with a look of the utmost disdain. Lady Jersey returned the look to
the full; and, as soon as the Prince was gone, said to me, with a
smile, 'Didn't I do it well?'"
(
Table Talk of Samuel Rogers
, pp. 267, 268).
From this same change of feeling arose the incident which Byron
celebrated in his Condolatory Address "On the Occasion of the
Prince Regent Returning her Picture to Mrs. Mee." The lines
were enclosed with a letter which is printed at the date May 29,
1814. "Pegasus is, perhaps, the only horse of whose paces," said
Byron (
Conversations with Lady Blessington
, p. 51), "Lord [Jersey]
could not be a judge." Of Lady Jersey he says (
ibid
., p. 50),
"Of all that coterie, Madame [de Stael], after Lady [Jersey], was the
best; at least I thought so, for these two ladies were the only ones
who ventured to protect me when all London was crying out against me
on the separation, and they behaved courageously and kindly ... Poor
dear Lady [Jersey]! Does she still retain her beautiful cream-coloured
complexion and raven hair? I used to long to tell her that she spoiled
her looks by her excessive animation; for eyes, tongue, head, and arms
were all in movement at once, and were only relieved from their active
service by want of respiration," etc., etc.