Books: The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2

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The difficulties in settling the Prince's family are far from
surmounted; the council met on Wednesday night to put the last
hand to it, but left it as unsettled as ever.

Pray do dare to tell me what French and Austrians say of their
treaty: we are angry--but when did subsidies purchase
gratitude! I don't think we have always found that they even
purchased temporary assistance. France declared, Sweden and
Denmark allied to France, Holland and Austria neuter, Spain not
quite to be depended on, Prussia--how sincerely reconciled!
Would not one think we were menaced with a league of Cambray?
When this kind of situation was new to me, I did not like it-I
have lived long enough, and have seen enough, to consider all
political events as mere history, and shall go and see the
camps with as unthinking curiosity as if I were a simpleton or
a new general. Adieu!

(701) His father, Lord Torrington, had made a great figure
there against the Spaniards.

(702) It was at that time believed that General Blakeney had
acted with great spirit; but it appeared afterwards that he had
been confined to his bed, and had not been able to do any
thing.

331 Letter 190
To George Montagu, Esq.
Strawberry Hill, July 12, 1756.

When I have told you that Mr. Muntz has finished the drapery of
your picture, and the copy of it, and asked you whither and how
they must be sent, I think I have done all the business of my
letter; except telling you, that if you think of conveying them
through Moreland, he is gone a soldiering. All the world is
going the same road, except Mr. Muntz, who had rather be
knocked on the head for fame, than paint for it. He goes to
morrow to Kingston, to see the great drum pass by to Cobham, as
women go to take a last look of their captains. The Duke of
Marlborough, and his grandfather's triumphal car are to close
the procession. What would his grandame, if she were alive,
say to this pageant? If the war lasts, I think well enough of
him to believe he will earn a sprig; but I have no passion for
trying on a crown of laurel, before I had acquired it. The
French are said to be embarked at Dunkirk--lest I should seem
to know more than any minister, I will not pretend to guess
whither they are bound. I have been but one night in town, and
my head sung ballads about Admiral Byng all night, as one is
apt to dream of the masquerade minuet: the streets swarm so
with lampoons, that I begin to fancy myself a minister's son
again.

I am going to-morrow to Park-place; and the first week in
August into Yorkshire. If I hear that you are at Greatworth,
that is, if you will disclose your motions to me for the first
fortnight of that month, I will try if I cannot make it in my
road either going or coming. I know nothing of roads, but Lord
Strafford is to send me a route, and I should be glad to ask
you do for one night--but don't expect me, don't be
disappointed about me, and of all things don't let so uncertain
a scheme derange the least thing in the world that you have to
do. There are going to be as many camps and little armies, as
when England was a heptarchy. Adieu!

332 Letter 191
To Sir Horace Mann.
Strawberry Hill, July 24, 1756.

Because you desire it, I begin a letter to-day, but I don't
fancy I shall be able to fill to the bottom of this side. It
is in answer to your long one of the 3d. In answer?--no; you
must have Patience till next session before your queries can
be resolved, and then I believe you will not be very
communicative of the solutions. In short, all your questions
of, Why was not Byng sent sooner? Why not with more ships? Why
was Minorca not supported earlier? All these are questions
which all the world is asking as well as you, and to which all
the world does not make such civil answers as you must, and to
which I shall make none, as I really know none.(703) The
clamour is extreme, and I believe how to reply in Parliament
will be the chief business that will employ our ministry for
the rest of the summer--perhaps some such home and personal
considerations were occupying their thoughts in the winter,
when they ought to have been thinking of the Mediterranean.
We are still in the dark; we have nothing but the French
account of the surrender of St. Philip's: we are humbled,
disgraced, angry. We know as little of Byng, but hear that he
sailed with the reinforcement before his successor reached
Gibraltar. if shame, despair, or any human considerations can
give courage, he will surely contrive to achieve some great
action, or to be knocked on the head--a cannon-ball must be a
pleasant quietus. compared to being torn to pieces by an
English mob or a House of Commons. I know no other
alternative, but withdrawing to the Queen of Hungary, who
would fare little better if she were obliged to come hither--
we are extremely disposed to massacre somebody or other, to
show we have any courage left. You will be pleased with a
cool, sensible speech of Lord Granville to Coloredo, the
Austrian minister, who went to make a visit of excuses. My
Lord Granville interrupted him, and said, "Sir, this is not
necessary; I understand that the treaty is only of neutrality;
but what grieves me is, that our people will not understand it
so; and the prejudice will be so great, that when it shall
become necessary Again, as it will do, for us to support your
mistress, nobody will then dare to be a Lord Granville."

I think all our present hopes lie in Admiral Boscawen's
intercepting the great Martinico fleet of a hundred and fifty
sail, convoyed by five men-of-war Boscawen has twenty. I see
our old friend Prince Beauvau behaved well at Mahon. Our old
diversion, the Countess,(704) has exhibited herself lately to
the public exactly in a style you would guess. Having
purchased and given her lord's collection of statues to the
University of Oxford, she has been there at the public act to
receive adoration. A box was built for her near the
Vice-Chancellor, where she sat three days together for four
hours at a time to hear verses and speeches, to hear herself
called Minerva; nay, the public orator had prepared an
encomium on her beauty, but being struck with her appearance,
had enough presence of mind to whisk his compliments to the
beauties of her mind. Do but figure her; her dress had all
the tawdry poverty and frippery with which you remember her,
and I dare swear her tympany, scarce covered with ticking,
produced itself through the slit of her scowered damask robe.
It is amazing that she did not mash a few words of Latin, as
she used to fricasee French and Italian! or that she did not
torture some learned simile, like her comparing the tour of
Sicily, the surrounding the triangle, to squaring the circle;
or as when she said it was as difficult to get into an Italian
coach, as for Caesar to take Attica, which she meant for
Utica. Adieu! I trust by his and other accounts that your
brother mends.

P. S. The letters I mentioned to you, pretended to be Bower's,
are published, together with a most virulent pamphlet, but
containing affidavits, and such strong assertions of facts as
have staggered a great many people. His escape and account of
himself' in Italy is strongly questioned. I own I am very
impatient for the answer he has promised. I admire his book
so much, and see such malice in his accusers, that I am
strongly disposed to wish and think him a good man. Do, for
my private satisfaction, inquire and pick up all the anecdotes
you can relating to him, and what is said and thought of him
in Italy. One accusation I am sure is false, his being a
plagiary; there is no author from whom he could steal that
ever wrote a quarter so well.

(703) "However the case may be with regard to Byng," writes
Mr. George Grenville to Mr. Pitt, on the first intelligence of
the disaster, "what can be the excuse for sending a force,
which at the utmost is scarcely equal to the enemy, upon so
important and decisive an expedition? Though, in the venality
of this hour, it may be sufficient to throw the whole blame
upon Byng, yet I will venture to say, the other is a question
that, in the judgment of every impartial man, now and
hereafter, will require a better answer, I am afraid, than can
be given. I believe be was not reckoned backward in point of
personal courage, which makes this affair the more
extraordinary, and induces me to wait for his own account of
it, before I form an opinion of it." Chatham Correspondence,
vol. i. p. 163.-E.

(704) Of Pomfret.

334 Letter 192
To George Montagu, Esq.
Arlington Street, August 28, 1756.

As you were so kind as to interest yourself about the issue of
my journey, I can tell you that I did get to Strawberry on
Wednesday night, but it was half an hour past ten first-
-besides floods the whole day, I had twenty accidents with my
chaise, and once saw one of the postilions with the wheel upon
his body; he came off with making his nose bleed. My castle,
like a little ark, is surrounded with many waters, (and
yesterday morning I saw the Blues wade half way up their
horses through Teddington-lane.

There is nothing new but what the pamphlet shops produce;
however it is pleasant to have a new print or ballad every
day--I never had an aversion to living in a Fronde. The
enclosed cards are the freshest treason; the portraits by
George Townshend are droll--the other is a dull obscure thing
as can be. The "Worlds" are by Lord Chesterfield on Decorum,
and by a friend of yours and mine, who sent it before he went
to Jersey; but this is a secret: they neglected it till now,
so preferable to hundreds they have published--I suppose Mr.
Moore finds, what every body else has found long, that he is
aground. I saw Lovel to-day; he is very far advanced and
executes to perfection; you will be quite satisfied; I am not
discontent with my own design, now I see how well it succeeds.
It will certainly be finished by Michaelmas, at which time I
told him he might depend on his money, and he seemed fully
satisfied. My compliments to your brother, and adieu!

334 Letter 193
To Sir Horace Mann.
Arlington Street, August 29, 1756.

A journey of amusement into Yorkshire would excuse my not
having writ to you above this month, my dear Sir, but I have a
better reason,--nothing has happened worth telling YOU. Since
the conquest of Minorca, France seems to have taken the wisest
way for herself, and a sure one too of ruining us, by sitting
still, and yet keeping us upon our guard, at an outrageous
expense. Gazettes of all countries announce, as you say,
almost a league of Cambray against us; but the best heads
think, that after all Europe has profited of our profusion,
they will have the sense only to look on, while France and we
contend which shall hereafter be the Universal Merchant of
Venal Princes. If we reckon at all upon the internal
commotions in France, they have still a better prospect from
ours: we ripen to faction fast. The dearness of corn has even
occasioned insurrections: some of these the Chief Justice
Willcs has quashed stoutly. The rains have been excessive
just now, and must occasion more inconveniences. But the
warmth on the loss of Minorca has opened every sluice of
opposition that has been so long dammed up. Even Jacobitism
perks up those fragments of asses' ears which were not quite
cut to the quick. The city of London and some counties have
addressed the King and their members on our miscarriages. Sir
John Barnard, who endeavoured to stem the torrent of the
former, is grown almost as unpopular as Byng. That poor
simpleton, confined at Greenwich, is ridiculously easy and
secure, and has even summoned on his behalf a Captain Young,
his warmest accuser. Fowke, who of two contradictory orders
chose to obey the least spirited, is broke. Pamphlets and
satirical prints teem; the courts are divided; the ministers
quarrel-indeed, if they agreed, one should not have much more
to expect from them! the fair situation!

I do not wonder that you are impertinenced by Richcourt;(705)
there is nothing so catching as the insolence of a great proud
woman(706) by a little upstart minister: the reflection of the
sun from brass makes the latter the more troublesome of the
two.

Your dear brother returns from Bristol this week; as I fear
not much recovered, I shall have good reason to press his
going abroad, though I fear in vain. I will tell you
faithfully, after I have seen him a few days, what I think of
him.

I never doubt your zeal in executing any commission I give
you. The bill shall be paid directly; it will encourage me to
employ you; but you are generally so dilatory in that part of
the commission, that I have a thousand times declined asking
your assistance. Adieu! my dear Sir.

(705) Count Richcourt, a Lorrainer, prime minister at Florence
for the Great Duke.

(706) The Empress Queen, wife of the Great Duke.

335 Letter 194
To Richard Bentley, Esq.
Wentworth Castle, August.

I always dedicate my travels to you. My present expedition
has been very amusing, sights are thick sown in the counties
of York and Nottingham; the former is more historic, and the
great lords live at a prouder distance: in Nottinghamshire
there is a very heptarchy of little kingdoms elbowing one
another, and the barons of them want nothing but small armies
to make inroads into one another's parks, murder deer, and
massacre park-keepers. But to come to particulars: the great
road as far as Stamford is superb; in any other country it
would furnish medals, and immortalize any drowsy monarch in
whose reign it was executed. It is continued much farther,
but is more rumbling. I did not stop at Hatfield(707) and
Burleigh(708) to seek the palaces of my great-uncle-ministers,
having seen them before.

Budgen palace(709) surprises one prettily in a little village;
and the remains of Newark castle, seated pleasantly, began to
open a vein of historic memory. I had only transient and
distant views of Lord Tyrconnells at Belton, and of Belvoir.
The borders of Huntingdonshire have churches instead of
milestones, but the richness and extent of Yorkshire quite
charmed me. Oh! what quarries for working in Gothic! This
place is one of the very few that I really like; the
situation, woods, views, and the improvements are perfect in
their kinds; nobody has a truer taste than Lord Strafford.
The house is a pompous front screening an old house; it was
built by the last lord on a design of the Prussian architect
Bott, who is mentioned in the King's M`emoires de Brandenburg,
and is not ugly: the one pair of stairs is entirely engrossed
by a gallery of 180 feet, on the plan of that in the Colonna
palace at Rome: it has nothing but four modern statues and
some bad portraits, but, on my proposal, is going to have
books at each end. The hall is pretty, but low; the
drawing-room handsome: there wants a good eating-room and
staircase: but I have formed a design for both, and I believe
they will be executed--that my plans should be obeyed when
yours are not! I shall bring you a groundplot for a Gothic
building, which I have proposed that you should draw for a
little wood, but in the manner of an ancient market-cross.
Without doors all is pleasing: there is a beautiful
(artificial) river, with a fine semicircular wood overlooking
it, and the temple of Tivoli placed happily on a rising
towards the end. There are obelisks, columns, and other
buildings, and above all, a handsome castle in the true style,
on a rude mountain, with a court -,and towers: in the
castle-yard, a statue of the late lord who built it. Without
the park is a lake on each side, buried in noble woods. Now
contrast all this, and you may have some idea of Lord
Rockingham's. Imagine now a most extensive and most beautiful
modern front erected before the great Lord Strafford's old
house, and this front almost blocked up with hills, and every
thing unfinished around it, nay within it. The great
apartment, which is magnificent, is untouched -. the
chimney-pieces lie in boxes unopened. The park is traversed
by a common road between two high hedges--not from necessity.
Oh! no; this lord loves nothing but horses, and the enclosures
for them take place of every thing. The bowling-green behind
the house contains no less than four obelisks, and looks like
a Brobdignag nine-pin-alley: on a hill near, you would think
you saw the York-buildings water-works invited into the
country. There are temples in corn-fields; and in the little
wood, a window-frame mounted on a bunch of laurel, and
intended for an hermitage. In the inhabited part of the
house, the chimney-pieces are like tombs; and on that in the
library is the figure of this lord's grandfather, in a night-
gown of plaster and gold. Amidst all this litter and bad
taste, I adored the fine Vandvek of Lord Strafford and his
secretary, and could not help reverencing his bed-chamber.
With all his faults and arbitrary behaviour, one must worship
his spirit and eloquence: where one esteems but a single
royalist, one need not fear being too partial. When I visited
his tomb in the church (which is remarkably neat and pretty,
and enriched with monuments) I was provoked to find a little
mural cabinet, with his figure three feet high kneeling.
Instead of a stern bust (and his head would furnish a nobler
than Bernini's Brutus) one is peevish to see a plaything that
might have been bought at Chenevix's. There is a tender
inscription to the second Lord Strafford's wife, written by
himself; but his genius was fitter to coo over his wife's
memory than to sacrifice to his father's.

Well! you have had enough of magnificence; you shall repose in
a desert. Old Wortley Montagu lives on the very spot where
the dragon of Wantley did, only I believe the latter was much
better lodged: you never saw such a wretched hovel; lean,
unpainted, and half its nakedness barely shaded with harateen
stretched till it cracks. Here the miser hoards health and
money, his only two objects: he has chronicles in behalf of
the air, and battens on tokay, his single indulgence, as he
has heard it is particularly salutary. But the savageness of
the scene would charm your Alpine taste - it is tumbled with
fragments of mountains, that look ready laid for building the
world. One scrambles over a huge terrace, on which mountain
ashes and various trees spring out of the very rocks; and at
the brow is the don, but not spacious enough for such an
inmate. However, I am persuaded it furnished Pope with this
line, so exactly it answers to the picture:

"On rifted rocks, the dragon's late abodes."

I wanted to ask Pope if he had not visited Lady Mary Wortley
here during their intimacy, but could one put that question to
Avidien himself? There remains an ancient odd inscription
here, which has such a whimsical mixture of devotion and
romanticness that I must transcribe it:-

"Preye for the soul of Sir Thomas Wortley. Knight of the body
to the kings Edward IV., Richard III., Henry VII., Henry
VIII., whose faults God pardon. He caused a lodge to be built
on this crag in the midst of Wharncliff (the old orthography)
to hear the harts bell, in the year of our Lord 1510." It was
a chase, and what he meant to hear was the noise of the stags.

During my residence here I have made two little excursions and
I assure you it requires resolution . the roads are
insufferable: they mend them--I should call it spoil them--
-with large pieces of stone. At Pomfret I saw the remains of
that memorable castle "where Rivers, Vaughan, and Gray lay
shorter by the head;" and on which Gray says,

"And thou, proud boy, from Pomfret's walls shalt send
A groan, and envy oft thy happy grandsire's end!"(710)

The ruins are vanishing, but well situated; there is a large
demolished church and a pretty market-house. We crossed a
Gothic bridge of eight arches at Ferrybridge, where there is a
pretty view, and went to a large old house of Lord
Huntingdon's at Ledstone, which has nothing remarkable but a
lofty terrace, a whole-length portrait of his Grandfather in
tapestry, and the having belonged to the great Lord Strafford.
We saw that monument of part of poor Sir John Bland's
extravagance,(711) his house and garden, which he left orders
to make without once looking at either plan. The house is a
bastard- Gothic, but Of not near the extent I had heard. We
lay at Leeds, a dingy large town; and through very bad black
roads, (for the whole country is a colliery, or a quarry,) we
went to Kirkstall Abbey, where are vast Saxon ruins, in a most
picturesque situation, on the banks of a river that falls into
a cascade among rich meadows, hills, and woods: it belongs to
Lord Cardigan: his father pulled down a large house here '.
lest it should interfere with the family seat, Deane. We
returned through Wakefield, where is a pretty Gothic chapel on
a bridge,(712) erected by Edward IV., in memory of his father,
who lived at Sandal castle just by, and perished in the battle
here, There is scarce any thing of the castle extant, but it
commanded a rich prospect.

By permission from their graces of Norfolk, who are at
Tunbridge, Lord Strafford carried us to WorkSop,(713) where we
passed two days. The house is huge, and one of the
magnificent works of old Bess of Hardwicke, who guarded the
Queen of Scots here for some time in a wretched little
bedchamber within her own lofty one: there is a tolerable
little picture of Mary's needlework. The great apartment is
vast and triste, the whole leanly furnished: the great
gallery, of above two hundred feet, at the top of the house,
is divided into a library, and into nothing. The chapel is
decent. There is no prospect, and the barren face of the
country is richly furred with evergreen plantations, under the
direction of the late Lord Petre.

On our way we saw Kiveton, an ugly neglected seat of the Duke
of Leeds, with noble apartments and several good portraits! I
went to Welbeck. It is impossible to describe the bales of
Cavendishes, harleys, Holleses, Veres, and Ogles: every
chamber is tapestried with them; nay, and with ten thousand
other fat morsels; all their histories inscribed; all their
arms, crests, devices, sculptured on chimneys of various
English marbles in ancient forms (and, to say truth, most of
them ugly). Then such a Gothic hall, with pendent fretwork in
imitation of the old, and with a chimney-piece extremely like
mine in the library. Such water-colour pictures! such
historic fragments! In short, such and so much of every thing
I like, that my party thought they should never get me away
again. There is Prior's portrait, and the column and
Varelst's flower on which he wrote; and the authoress Duchess
of Newcastle in a theatric habit, which she generally wore,
and, consequently,, looking as mad as the present Duchess; and
dukes of the same name, looking as foolish as the present
Duke; and Lady Mary Wortley, drawn as an authoress, with
rather better pretensions; and cabinets and glasses wainscoted
with the Greendale oak, which was so large that an old steward
wisely cut a way through it to make a triumphal passage for
his lord and lady on their wedding, and only killed it! But it
is impossible to tell you@ half what there is. The poor woman
who is just dead passed her whole widowhood, except in doing
ten thousand right and just things, in collecting and
monumenting the portraits and relics of all the great families
from which she descended, and which centred in her. The Duke
and Duchess of Portland are expected there to-morrow, and we
saw dozens of cabinets and coffers with the seals not yet
taken off What treasures to revel over! The horseman Duke's
man`ege is converted into a lofty stable,. and there is still
a grove or two of magnificent oaks that have escaped all these
great families, though the last Lord Oxford cut down above an
hundred thousand pounds' worth. The place has little pretty,
distinct from all these reverend circumstances.

(707) Hatfield, the seat of the Earl of Salisbury, was
exchanged by King James I. with Robert Cecil, first Earl of
Salisbury, for Theobald's, in the same county. Evelyn visited
Hatfield in March 1643: "I went," he says, "to see my Lord
Salisbury's palace at Hatfield, where the most considerable
rarity, besides the house," (inferior to few then in England
for its architecture,) " was the garden and vineyard, rarely
well-watered and planted. They also showed us the picture of
Secretary Cecil in mosaic work, very well done by some Italian
hand."-E.

(708) built by the great Lord Burleigh, lord treasurer to
Queen Elizabeth, who visited him at this place, and where
several articles still remain which had belonged to her.-E.

(709) The episcopal palace of the Bishops of Lincoln.-E.

(710) "August 14, 1654.-Passed through Pontefract; the castle,
famous for many guests, both of late and ancient times, and
the death of that unhappy king murdered in it (Richard II.),
was now demolishing by the rebels: it stands on a mount, and
makes a goodly show at a distance." Evelyn, vol. ii. p. 88.-E.