Collected Essays (28 page)

Miss Thomson in a book of great fascination – with little but account books to draw on she has composed a picture of a family as complete as that contained in the Verney Memoirs – analyses the duties and expenditure of the various officials belonging to a household more than regal in its wealth: the receiver-general dealing with the money chest in Bedford Street, the steward of the west looking after the estates in Devon and the neighbouring counties, the steward of the household, the gentleman of the horse, the clerk of the kitchen, the tutor buying books for the library, the gardener plants for the Woburn gardens. The household leaps into life in the small details: the maid Rose lending her master five shillings at a moment of sudden need, sixpence given to a scolding woman who wasn’t satisfied with the bargain struck for the hire of a horse, a ‘hawk called Tomson’.

Historically the chief interest is in the financial change towards the technique of modern banking from the early cumbrous method by which all the money for the household was kept in the great chest (the income from the western estates being paid by bills of exchange drawn on a London goldsmith, the money fetched by porters, a thousand pounds at a time, in sacks from Lombard Street to Bedford Street). For the first time in the middle ’60s the money for the chest was laid out first on deposit and then on credit account with the goldsmith, and modern banking methods may be said really to have started in 1687, when the rents were paid directly into the account with Child and Rogers and the great chest lay almost empty. We watch other changes: the first appearance in the wine cellars of glass bottles instead of stone (1658), in 1664 the purchase of ‘Shably’, the first mention of the wine in any account book known to M. André Simon, in 1665 the first purchase of ‘Shampaigne’, and in 1684 of port. It is like the gradual development of a family photograph. William Russell may still in his studied scaffold gestures belong to the obscure heroic age, but the details of a life we share are springing up all round him.

I have only one complaint to make of this ingenious book, and that is that Miss Thomson does not print, in an appendix, the complete catalogue of the 152 books in the Duke’s library at Woburn and the 247 in Bedford House. A great many Baxters and other divines (curiously enough Miss Thomson mentions nothing by Burnet, that popular death-bed vulture who was with William Russell at the end), a few books of ceremony, a little travel, the usual crop of anti-Catholic works published at the time of the Plot, and for light relief a few ‘twopenny dreadfuls’,
Murder in Gloucestershire, The Murder in Essex, The Prentice that Murdered his Mistress:
it is a sombre collection and compares oddly with another contemporary library known to us, with its Juvenal and Homer, Dryden and Burton, Milton, Donne, Denham and Montaigne and ‘the Matchless Orinda’. A family library is a breeding-place of character, and the great Puritan family would have felt justified in their aversion to poetry and the humanities if they had been able to contrast the library in which the political martyr studied with that of ‘Apollo’s Viceroy’, Sir Charles Sedley, ‘a very necessary man among us women’.

1937

A HOAX ON MR HULTON

N
O
one, I suppose, will ever discover the authors of the odd elaborate hoax played on Mr Hulton, the elderly printseller of Pall Mall, in 1744; the story itself has been hidden all these years in an old vellum manuscript book I bought the other day from a London bookseller. With its vivid unimportance it brings alive the geography of eighteenth-century tradesman’s London, the wine-merchants at Wapping, the clockmakers in Fleet Street, the carriers and printers and bust-makers, all the aggrieved respectable victims of an anarchic imagination, and in the background memories of Layer’s conspiracy and the word ‘Jacobite’ and a vague uneasiness.

The story is told in letters and occasional passages of dialogue with notes in the margin on the behaviour of the characters. It might be fiction if these people did not all belong to fact. Who copied it out? It is hard to believe that any innocent person could have known so much. Mr Hulton suspected his apprentices, and the whole world; there was a young man called Mr Poet Rowzel, who knew more than he should have done; and an auctioneer, for some reason of his own, spoke of an upholsterer.

It began quite childishly on 21 January 1744, with a letter which purported to come from Mr Scott, a carpenter of Swallow Street, who wrote that he had many frames to make for the Prussian Ambassador, that he was ill of the gout and his men were overworked, and would Mr Hulton call on him. Mr Hulton had the gout himself, but he limped to Mr Scott’s house, when ‘finding the whole was an imposition upon him and Scott, he hobbled back again muttering horrible imprecations against the letter-writer all the way’. Two days later the hoax really got under way. A stream of unwanted people arrived at Mr Hulton’s shop: Mr Hazard, a cabinet maker of the ‘Hen and Chickens’ in London’s Inn, with a quantity of Indian paper; Mr Dard, a toy maker from the King’s Arms in the Strand, who had received a letter from the pseudo-Hulton offering to sell him a curious frame; a surgeon to bleed him, and a doctor from Bedlam. It would take too long to describe the events of these crowded days, how a Mr Boyd brought snuffboxes and Mrs Hulton had to buy one to quiet him before her husband returned, how Mr Scarlett, an optician, arrived loaded with optic glasses, and was so ill-used by Mr Hulton that he threatened proceedings, how Mr Rutter, a dentist of Fleet Street, came to operate on an impostume, and was turned away by Mrs Hulton, who pretended her husband had died of it. Three pounds of anchovies arrived, and the printer of the
Harlaeian Miscellany
, who was pushed roughly out of doors, and Mr Cock, an auctioneer in the Great Piazza, who ‘muttered something of an Irish upholsterer’, and a female optician called Deane – Mrs Hulton bolted the door against her, and spoke to her through the pane, which Mrs Deane broke. ‘Mr Hulton at the noise of breaking glass came forth from his little parlour into the shop, and was saluted by a porter with a dozen of port wine.’ By this time he was losing control, and when Mr Rogers, a shoemaker of Maiden Lane, wanted to measure him, ‘Mr Hulton lost all temper . . . and cursing, stamping and swearing, in an outrageous manner, he so frightened Mr Rogers that the poor man, who is a Presbyterian, ran home to Covent Garden without once looking behind him.’ After that Mr Hulton shut up his shop, and went to bed for three days, so the man who had been told he had a perukemaker’s shop to dispose of failed to get him. Even when the shop reopened, Mr Hulton thought it safer to stay upstairs and leave things to his son. His son too was choleric and what he did to a young oculist who thought his father needed spectacles is unprintable here.

On 2 February there is a break in the record, twenty-seven pages missing: but when the story begins again on 4 September Mr Hulton is still on the run. Three dozen bottles of pale ale arrived that day; Mr Hulton was obliged to pay for them, and ‘Mrs Hulton and her maid were fuddled while it lasted’. We must pass over the incident of the silversmith’s wife, who pulled off Mrs Hulton’s nightcap, and the venison-pasty man who saw through the deceit, and enclosed the pseudo-Hulton’s letter in piecrust and sent it to Mr Hulton (the crust was given to the dog Cobb as they suspected poison). A more subtle form of hoax was in train. It began with an illiterate letter to Mr Pinchbeck (son of Edward Pinchbeck, inventor of the alloy), accusing Hulton of having abused him ‘in a monstrous manner’ at a tavern, but this plot misfired; the two victims got together over a four-shilling bowl of punch.

It was then that the Reverend Aaron Thompson, of Salisbury, came on the scene (he who had baptized the conspirator Layer’s child and allowed the Pretender to be a godparent by proxy). Somebody using his name ordered a number of articles which he said his agent Hulton would pay for – four canes with pinchbeck heads, a bust of Mr Pope, a set of
The Gentleman’s Magazine
, ‘the books (of which you know the titles) against Bishop Berkley’s Tar-Water’, a complete set of Brindley’s Classics, and even a chariot. This persecution caused Mr Hulton to write to Mr Thompson accusing him of being a Papist and a Jacobite and threatening him with the pillory, and the amazed Mr Thompson ‘receiving this letter kept himself three weeks in a dark room lest he should see a letter of any kind: by the persuasion of his wife, he at length came forth; but wore a thin handkerchief over his eyes for about a month’. A lot of people’s nerves were getting jumpy as the hoax enlarged its scope, taking in Bath and such worthy local characters as Mr Jeremy Peirce, author of an interesting little book about a tumour, and Mr Archibald Cleland, the surgeon who, it may be remembered, was concerned with Smollett in a controversy over the Bath waters. They all received letters from the pseudo-Hulton, Cleland being told that Thompson had libelled him and Peirce that Thompson had ordered him a set of
The Rake’s Progress.
The real Aaron Thompson was by now convinced that he was the victim of a mad printseller, just as Hulton believed he was the victim of a mad clergyman, and they both – egged on by their pseudoselves – appealed to a Mr Pitt of Salisbury, who assumed they both were mad. The story becomes inextricably confused with counter-accusations, the pseudo-Hulton writing to the real Aaron Thompson:

You write, you read, you muzz or muse as you call it, till you are fitter for Bedlam than the Pulpit: poor man! poor Aaron Thompson. I remember you in Piccadilly knocking at the great Gates and returning bow for bow to the bowing Dean, your lean face, your awkward bow, your supercilious nod of the head are still in my mind . . .

and the pseudo-Thompson would send the accusation flying back, regretting to hear that Hulton and all his family had gone mad, and recalling his strange way of walking about his shop ‘and turning his thumbs one over another, a sure sign of madness’. And all the while goods continued to pour in, particularly drink – three gallons of the best Jamaica rum from Wapping New-Stairs, which Mrs Hulton drank and paid for, a gallon of canary, a gallon of sherry, and a pint of Madeira.

We shall never know the end – the last pages are torn out with any clue they might have contained to the hoaxer. It was an age of practical jokes, and he may have been one of those who baited Pinchbeck because he was a ‘King’s friend’, mocking at his nocturnal remembrancers and writing odes about his patent snuffer. Perhaps Hulton, by his careful prosperity, had aroused the same balked malice of men who sympathize with the defeated and despise the conqueror and dare do nothing but trivial mischief to assert their independence – as next year proved when Charles Stuart turned back from Derby.

1939

A JACOBITE POET

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N
1679 the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena, visited Cambridge University. She was a little over twenty, very graceful and witty and cunning. Even Burnet found it hard to speak ill of her at that time: ‘all her diversion was innocent cheerfulness, with a little mixture of satirical wit’. George Granville, a thirteen-year-old Master of Arts and already a poet, read her an address in couplets in the library of Trinity College. The couplets were more formal and sedate than the poems ‘to Myra’ which followed, for these later poems were the fruit of his eyes, and if we remember his age and the rank and beauty of the girl, it is not hard to recapture the emotion of that moment when he dedicated himself, like a troubadour, to her service:

he wrote in a poem which I wish Miss Handasyde
*6
had quoted for she has been a little less than just to her subject. Her biography is a brilliant example of by-way scholarship, comparable to Miss Waddell’s
The Wandering Scholars
and Miss Tomkins’s
The Popular Novel in England
for its grace and erudition; she writes with insight of Granville’s verse:

The general impression made by his songs is of something sweet and sad and infinitely faint, like the tinklings of the musical boxes whose glassy roulades come slightly muffled from the dust of last century. He was old-fashioned even in his own day; for his poems, published in the cold dawn of the Age of Reason, belong by sentiment and even by date to the warm uncritical twilight of the Restoration.

But she has, I think missed that touch of fatality which raises Lansdowne’s life to the level of tragedy; minor tragedy, for everything he touched from a play to a conspiracy was doomed to be a minor.

Mary of Modena ruined him as she ruined many more important men. If she had not visited Cambridge that year Granville would have found a safer inspiration; he might have lived and died quite happily a minor poet and dramatist. During the reign of William he passed a pleasant exile from court, writing poetry and improving Shakespeare. He had admirers and flatterers; Pope immortalized him in
Windsor Forest:
“What Muse for Granville can refuse to sing?’; Dryden in beautifully-weighted verse resigned him his laurels – a gesture a little spoilt by the actor Powell’s comment (one remembers Colley Cibber’s study of ‘giddy’ Powell, how ‘he naturally lov’d to set other people wrong’): ‘this great Wit, with his Treacherous Memory, forgets, that he had given away his Laurells upon record, no less than twice before,
viz.
, once to Mr Congreve, and another time to Mr Southerne’. But during that swift moment in Trinity Library Granville had mortaged his future. Inevitably when William died he was drawn into politics, trying to hold a balance between the brilliant and erratic Bolingbroke and cautious, trimming Harley. He married, too, unluckily, to become later, through his hopeless idealism, a complaisant husband, shutting his eyes with miserable fidelity to his wife’s affairs. With that instinct for doing the right thing, which sometimes conflicted with the still deeper instinct for being on the wrong side, he inscribed these lines on a glass in which her toast was drunk: