Beau Brummell [First Edition] 0884055930, 9780884055938

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Citation preview

BY THE

SAME AUTHOR

History and Biography Josephine Laval Things for the Surgeon First Gentleman of the Bedchamber Christophe: King of Haiti Fouche: The Unprincipled Patriot The Betrayers: Joachim and Caroline Murat The Wars of the Roses The Black Prince Fiction Hawkwood Hawkwood in Paris Hawkwood and the Towers of Pisa

Beau Brummell

HUBERT COLE

..~,>~)}}),,

. , MASON/ CHARTER

NEW YORK 1977

Copyright© 1977 by Hubert Cole All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published in the United States by Mason/Charter Publishers, Inc. Printed in Great Britain Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cole, Hubert. Beau Brummell. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Brummell, George Bryan, 1778-1840. 2. Great Britain-Court and courtiers-Biography. 3. LondonSocial life and customs. DA538.B6C54 1977 941.07'3'0924 [BJ 77-2462 ISBN 0-88405-593-0

To

RICHARD

~

---

Contents ~

1

Con1ing Up in the World

II

z Prince/y Patronage

34

3 The Dandy Club

65

4 Who's Your Fat Friend?

89

5 A Man of Fashion, Gone to the Continent

IZZ

6 His Britannic Majesty's Consul 7 Hotel d' Angleterre

164

8

183

Stra111 and Bran Bread, My Good Fel/0111/

Sources Index

zo6 zz6 zz9

vii

---------------

Illustrations ~

Frontispiece: Beau Brummell Britifh M11reum

William Brummell, the Beau's father

facing page 32.

Private Collection

The Brummell children: William and George The GLC at Tmrteer of the Iveagh Beq11ert, Kenwood

George III, with the Prince of \Vales in his uniform as Colonel of the 10th Light Dragoon Guards

33

Reproduced by gracio11t permiuion of HA1 the Queen

The entrance to Hyde Park on a Sunday

33

Radio Timer H11lto11 Picture Library

An aristocratic soiree at Almack's

33

Radio Timer Hulton Picture Library

The first quadrille danced in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century

33

Radio Timer Hulton Picture Library

Frederica Duchess of York with some of her dogs

64

Reproduced by graciout permiuion of HM the Queen

Great Subscription Rooms at Brooks's, St. James's, 1808

65

Afa,ue/1 Collection

A game of whist Radio Timer Hulton Picture Library

65

ILLUSl'RAl'IONS

Full dresses for May 1808

facing page 96

Radio Ti,1,es Hulton Picture Library

Dandies and dandiyettes in Hyde Park, 1818 Radio Times Hulton Picture Library

Sporting inclinations

97

Mansell Collection

The dandy's toilette and the dandy in public

128

Radio Times Hulton Piclztre Library

Brummell in 181 5

129

Collection of the late Major]. C. Daniell

'A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion': the Prince Regent 160 Radio Times Hulton Picture Library

The Pavilion at Brighton, c. 1810

161

Radio Times H1ilton Picture Library

Mrs Fitzherbert

192

Reprod11ced by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection

Queen Caroline Victoria and Albert M11seum

A banquet in the Royal Pavilion Radio Times Hulto11 Picture Library

Extract from Brummell's letter to Palmerston Public Record Office, Lo11do11

The broken Beau-Bow; sketch by Brummell The British Library

Brummell walking in Caen The British Library

...

1 92

CHAPTER ONE

Coming Up in tbe World

-------------------- -

-----

·-

It was a warm Wednesday night in June 1780 and London was in flames. On the previous Friday the Member of Parliament for Luggershall, Lord George Gordon, had summoned a great rally of the Protestant Association in St George's Fields to support his petition for the repeal of Lord North's Catholic Relief Act of 1778. The 50,000 demonstrators marched eight abreast to Westminster, going the long way round over London Bridge and the City and sweeping up the riff-raff of the rookeries and grogshops as they went. In New Palace Yard they assaulted Members and prevented them from leaving Parliament until ten o'clock at night. The drunks and mischiefmakers then began smashing the Catholic chapels attached to foreign embassies. They did the same on three succeeding nights, destroying private houses in Moorfields, where there was a large Irish Catholic colony. On Tuesday they set fire to Newgate and released three hundred prisoners. They moved farther afield to Clerkenwell, where they broke into the Bridewell and the New Prison, and to Bloomsbury, where they burned the houses of the Archbishop of York and the Lord Chief Justice. Any citizens in the neighbourhood who did not illuminate their houses in honour of these achievements had their windows shattered. On Wednesday morning regular soldiers and militiamen marched in from the Home Counties; on the advice of the Privy Council the King issued a Royal Proclamation authorising troops to fire without the presence of magistrates; artillery rumbled through the streets; by lI

lZ

BEAU BRUMMELL

evening all was calm. Until suddenly a mob attacked the Bank of England, troop:.; opened fire, rioting broke out in a score of places, in the City, at Southwark, at the prisons across the river, the toll-houses on Blackfriars Bridge, a distillery which the drunken looters set on fire, thus burning themselves alive. In Downing Street Lord North was entertaining friends to dinner. Earlier the rioters had been cleared from outside the house by a troop of dragoons, and those who returned were informed that twenty Grenadiers were stationed on the top floor with loaded muskets and orders to use them. The situation was not new to Lord North, who the previous year had been forced to take refuge upstairs when another mob attacked the house in protest against the court-martialling of Admiral Keppel; the London slums hid some of the most violent ruffians in Europe and they never missed an opportunity to run amok. Before his guests left for home, the Prime Minister took them up to where the soldiers still stood on watch. 'We beheld London blazing in seven places', recalled John Macpherson, the Member of Parliament for Cricklade, 'and could hear the Platoons regularly firing in various directions.' They had their fill of the sound and spectacle and then went downstairs, got into their carriages and were driven peaceably home, the West End having been closely patrolled throughout the disturbances. A short time later they were followed by 'Mr Brummell, Lord North's private secretary, who was in attendance but did not make one of the Company.' For him it was an evening of more than usual significance. The rioting had brought nearer the resignation of the master whom he had closely and faithfully served for more than ten years; it was also forcing him to spend the night at the house he rented a few paces away, next to that of Lord Sheffield, North's son-in-law. A devoted family man, William Brummell would have much preferred to leave earlier and ride out to Hampton Court, to join his wife and children in celebrating the birthday of his younger son, who was one day to be famous throughout Europe as 'Beau' Brummell. The boy had been born here in Downing Street two years before and christened George Bryan at St Margaret's, Westminster. Later in life, when the Beau's extraordinary domination

COMING UP IN THE \VoRLD

of fashionable society attracted the inevitable envy, the snobs put it about that he was the son of a footman, a pastrycook, jumped up from the gutter. There were similar rumours about his father, briskly efficient William, who was known to have such a strong influence with the Prime Minister when it came to allocating sinecures and places and distributing bribes. When Lord North came under fire in the Commons for partiality in farming out the Budget Loan to his friends and supporters, the Public Advertiser carried a small paragraph stating that 'the Exaltation of Mr Brummell, the Secretary of Lord North, is entirely the Creation of Mr Jenkinson; Mr l l - - being the Son of the Person with whom Mr J--, when a Commis, and very early in life, used to lodge.' That same day, Saturday z1 March 1781, the editor, Mr Woodfall, received a note signed 'Veritas' and sent from St James's: 'Your account of Mr Brummell, Lord North's secretary, is by no means correct. I have sent you his origin: his father was footman to Mr Pelham and his mother an industrious washerwoman-the late Charles Townshend gave him the run of the kitchen and after that he became an under commis in the Treasury thro that gent's interest.' Mr Woodfall's original item was accurate; but the vindictive Veritas, except that he got all the names wrong, was not far off the trail either. Little George Bryan had been born into the comfortably padded lap of upper middle class luxury, but the two previous generations of Brummells had made a very rapid rise in the world. The William Brummell who was George Bryan's grandfather and father to Lord North's secretary had a close connection with the Monson family: Charles Monson, MP for Lincoln, his elder brother the first Lord Monson, and his younger brother Henry Monson, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge. A letter published in Notes andQ11eries in 18~0 shows this William Brummell to have been on intimate terms with Charles and Henry in 1757; a letter in the British Museum addressed either to him or to his son refers to advice given about the sale of Lord Monson's house in 1763. Lady Monson claimed that he had been a servant in the family and it seems likely that, at whatever level he may

14

BEAU BRm.BfELL

have begun, he ended as a sort of major-domo to Charles Monson. Somewhere along the way he acquired a house on the east corner of Bury Street and Jermyn Street, which he first rented and then bought leasehold from the Crown. He married a Miss Jane Garret who bore him a son and daughter, William and Mary, and some years later the appropriately named Benjamin. In 1761 he decided to take as a lodger at his Bury Street house the newly elected MP for Cockermouth, Charles Jenkinson. It was one of the most important decisions of his life. Jenkinson had made his way to Parliament without money or influence. For his services in increasing the King's control over the Cabinet he was to be created the first Earl of Liverpool. He was a scholarly, humourless man of great application; and he recognised many of his own qualities in his landlord's elder son, William. \v'hen he was made Joint Secretary to the Treasury in 1763 he took young Brummell with him as a sort ofunestablished office-boy. In February 176 5 William Brummell senior, describing himself as a 'Gentleman, being sick of body but of sound mind, memory and understanding', made a will leaving his house, furniture and an annuity of £Go a year to his wife, with the reversion of this and the rest of the property to be divided equally between his three children. As executors he appointed 'my said wife and my honoured friend Charles Jenkinson Esq' (of whom he desired 'his acceptance of Twenty Guineas for his trouble') and gave them 'liberty to apply any reasonable part of the share of my said son Benjamin during his minority to bring him out apprentice or Clerk to some Trade or Profession'. Sick though he was, William Brummell did not die for another five years, during which Jenkinson proved himself to be a friend indeed. In July he got young William Brummell officially appointed to the Treasury establishment as a Supernumerary Clerk, and when he lost his office a year later he ensured that Brummell should be raised to the grade of Under Clerk at a salary of £100 a year. 'I cannot conclude this letter', he wrote to Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new government, 'without returning you thanks for having taken under your protection Mr Brummell. He acted under me as a dark for many years with great

CoMING

UP

IN THE WORLD

15

diligence, skill and fidelity, and I am persuaded that you will have the same reasons to be satisfied with him.' Townshend died and was succeeded in October 1767 by the Tory Lord North; by the time North became Prime Minister he had been so impressed with Brummell's diligence and discretion that he appointed him his private secretary. On the last day of March that year, 1770, old WilliamBrummell died and was buried in the churchyard of St James's, Piccadilly. His wife lived for another eighteen years, during which Charles Jenkinson continued to discharge his duties as executor. North, like Jenkinson, was a leading member of the 'King's Friends'. He was an amiable man of considerable ugliness, exceeded only by that of his family. A popular story of the time described how a man at a party asked North, '\Vho is that frightful woman?' 'That,' North replied, 'is my wife.' 'Good heavens, no,' said the man, trying to cover up his faux pas, 'I didn't mean her-I meant the monster next to her.' 'Oh,' said North, 'that monster is my daughter.' (A later Prime Minister, Frederick Robinson, told the story one evening to his dinner partner, Lady Charlotte Lindsay. 'I know,' she replied, 'I am Lord North's daughter.') North's policy as Prime Minister was simple: he regarded himself as the King's servant with the duty of carrying out the King's wishes by the extensive use of bribery. Because of this he was much criticised but also well rewarded. In June 1771 the King gave him the Rangership of Bushey Park (an appointment he held in his wife's name to avoid having to resign from the Commons). With the Rangership went the attractive Ranger's House in Bushey Pai;_k. It was convenient for Lord North to have his private secretary living near at hand, and in March 1772. William Brummell was allotted grace and favour apartments in the royal palace of Hampton Court. The King disliked the place and never lived there (it was said he had unhappy memories of his grandfather, George II, boxing his ears in the State Apartments). The rooms were neglected, and some of them considerably defaced by tenants converting them into sculleries and kitchens. But they still provided good accommodation as well as an excellent address. (Dr Johnson unsuccessfully applied for 'such rooms as shall seem proper' to the Lord Chamberlain four years later.)

r6

BEAU BRUMMELL

William Brummell moved into Suite Thirty, second floor on the east side of Clock Court, bringing his mistress with him. The King, however, was a man of high moral standards with a sharp eye for goings-on of this sort, even in those of his palaces which he did not frequent. It was made clear to Mr Brummell that he must either regularise the situation or move out again. Thus he came to marry the youngest daughter of the Keeper of the Lottery Office and they lived happily and devotedly ever after and were rewarded with the additional accommodation of Suite Twenty-five in which to bring up their family of William, Maria and the yet-to-be-famous George Bryan. The bride claimed descent from Sir Thomas Richardson who had been a Chief Justice in the reign of James I; she had at least two brothers and three sisters, one of whom married an actor, Joseph Vernon, and another an innkeeper named Samuel Brawne, who later moved from his hostelry in the Strand to a farm at Kilburn. One of the earliest anecdotes about George Bryan Brummell is that on a visit to Aunt Brawne he ate so much of her delicious damson tart that he could eat no more-yet had enjoyed it so much that he could not bear to leave off, and consequently broke into howls of tearful frustration. Aunt Brawne's granddaughter Frances was later to inspire unrequited passion of a more refined nature in the heart of John Keats. Lord North's administration endured for twelve years. He had taken over the King's quarrel with the American coloniststhey resenting the foolish policy of taxation without representation introduced five years before, George III outraged at their ingratitude after he had spent so much in men and money saving them from conquest by the French. This North fomented by allowing the full blast of the King's high-principled vindictive indignation to play upon it. In India he substituted systematic control for the East India Company's chaos by his Regulation Act, but the fighting and confusion was still fierce and general when he decided to resign. His noble and overdue measures for lifting some of the more extreme penalties from Roman Catholics resulted in the Gordon Riots. He was in many ways a luckless man.

COMING UP IN THE WORLD

17

Not so his private secretary, whose position gave him influence among politicians of all colours and friendship with many of them-with the brilliant spendthrift Charles James Fox for instance, who quarrelled with North and surrendered his post as a Lord of the Treasury in 1774; with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright, who became Secretary to the Treasury. He was on calling terms with two of the best-known painters of the day; the President of the Royal Academy and the Americanborn Historical Painter to the King. 'Breakfast with me tomorrow, after which I shall be happy to accompany you to Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mr [Benjamin] West's,' he said in a letter to Caleb Whitefoord at the end of December 178 1. A short time afterwards he commissioned Sir Joshua to paint the portrait of the two Brummell boys that now hangs in Kenwood. He busied himself with favours for his friends and his friends' friends. 'Dear Brummell, if you can be of any use to the poor man who is the bearer of this, I shall be much obliged to you,' wrote his old benefactor, Charles Jenkinson, now Secretary of State at War. 'I have always pitied his case, yet have no means of making any provision for him.' Brummell could always find the means. For Sheridan's brother-in-law, the poet Richard Tickell, he procured a commissionership of stamps and also handed over to him an extra set of apartments that he had acquired at Hampton Court (Suite Seventeen in the Gold Staff Gallery on the South Front). He told another suitor 'I have just received the enclosed from Sheridan [then Secretary to the Treasury]. If I have not soon some other and more explicit answer from the same quarter, I shall renew my attacks and I doubt not that they will meet with success.' With ministers he used polite persistence; with ordinary members of both houses he adopted a more direct approach. He was the principal channel of governmental corruption. It was accepted practice. For fifty years the second edition of the Geneva Bible had been known as the Whig Bible because of its misprint, 'Blessed are the placemakers.' Politicians were of two kinds: the leaders who jockeyed for power and the Garter, the draff who could be bought with places and hard cash. There was very little hypocrisy about it. A man elected with votes bought or bullied from the pot-wallopers and forty-shilling freeholders who

18

BEAU BRUl\l:MELL

made up less than four per cent of the population was unlikely to waste his breath denying that he was the corrupt product of a corrupt system, though he would vehemently claim it was in the public interest that the system be preserved. Consequently the political scene, though just as dirty as it is today, was a great deal less disgusting. Dining at Lord Bessborough's house in 1790, and well filled with champagne, Ross Mackay admitted that when he was Treasurer and Paymaster of the Ordnance in 1763 the House of Commons had been persuaded to accept the unsatisfactory terms of the Treaty of Paris only by 'a pecuniary distribution. I was myself the channel through which the money passed. With my own hand I secured above one hundred and twenty Votes. Eighty thousand pounds were set apart for the purpose. Forty members of the House of Commons received from me a thousand Pounds each. To eighty others I paid five hundred Pounds apiece.' Sir William Wraxall, who recorded the conversation, added: 'The same system certainly continued during the period of the American War when John Robinson [Junior Secretary of the Treasury], and under him Brummell, were its Agents.' A recent historian has denied the truth of this story on the odd ground that no corroborative evidence can be found in government records, but there can be little doubt that, as Mackay insisted, money in one guise or another-lottery tickets, bonds, jobs, contracts-'formed the only certain and effectual method' of controlling the House of Commons. With so many sweetmeats passing through Brummell's hands it was natural that some should stick to his fingers. He had in addition many opportunities to collect commissions and percentages. In one year, for instance, the Treasury bill for stationery totalled £5000, an enormous sum-and the contracts had all been placed by William Brummell. He feathered his nest with such efficiency that, when Lord North finally left politics in 1783, Brummell was rich enough to quit at the same time. With him into retirement Brummell took a fine collection of sinecures: Joint-Receiver of the Duties on Inhabited Houses in London and Middlesex, Comptroller of the Hawkers' and Pedlars' Office, Agent and Paymaster to the Out-Pensioners of

Cm.UNG

UP

IN THE WORLD

Chelsea Hospital, Agent to the Navy. They brought him £2.500 a year-an income probably not surpassed by more than six hundred people in the United Kingdom, and well ahead of the many country squires and substantial merchants who rightly regarded themselves as rich, and may indeed have had greater capital assets. In addition Brummell had the dividends from the savings that he had built up over the years and invested in government stock and \Vest Indian ventures, and a number of smaller sources of income, such as the agency for the Horse Grenadiers, which the King gave him when appointing his son, the Duke of York, to the colonelcy in March 1782.. He gave up the Downing Street house and moved to the more fashionable area of Charles Street, J\fayfair. He was still paying the rates on 10 Bury Street (they had gone up from tenpence to half-a-crown in the pound during the North administration) though his sister Mary, now Mrs Tombs, was the occupant. He exchanged Suite Thirty at Hampton Court for Number Twentynine in the Silver Staff Gallery, on the top floor north side of Fountain Court. And as his principal home he bought and enlarged a house called The Grove at Donnington in Berkshire. He acquired the neighbouring manor of Church Spleen in 1784 and the manor of Chieveley in 1787, and in 1788 he was appointed High Sheriff for the county. To set the final seal on a successful life, he sent both his boys to Eton. George Bryan was eight, William nearly two years older, when they entered the First Form in 1786, and were introduced to the system of fagging, flogging and construing or composing Latin and Greek which formed the backbone of eighteenth-century education. They lodged with the parsimonious Dame Yonge, and on ordinary schooldays (there were partial holidays on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, plus many red-letter days, Founder's Day and Royal Birthdays) they attended school from eight to nine, from eleven to twelve, from three to four, and from five to six. In the summer the Lower School had also to get up early for a lesson from a quarter to seven until half past. The First Form learned nothing but Latin grammar on regular days, with an hour or so of writing or arithmetic on holidays.

20

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The Headmaster, Jonathan Davies, was noted for his wit, his loud voice, his habit of monopolising the conversation and his delight in spending much time in London when he should have been at Eton. He got on so badly with his dozen or so assistant masters that three years before the Brummell boys arrived the masters had walked out of the school. This left Dr Davies facing a mob of boys who soon realised they had nothing to fear from him, chased him out of Upper School and, while he took refuge in Provost's Lodge, split the birching-block into pieces with redhot pokers. The Lower r.faster, William Langford, was also Canon of Windsor and Chaplain to the King. It was his practice not to punish boys individuaily at the time of their offences, but to wait until there was a sufriciently large batch to be marched up the hill to the Castle and flogged in his residence. This must have delighted the King, who took a great interest in the school and had a thoroughly Teutonic belief in the efficacy of corporal punishment. He enjoyed living at Windsor (in the Queen's Lodge, which he had specially built to accommodate his family while the Castle, neglected by both his predecessors, was refurbished) and whenever he crossed the river to Eton he would rein in his horse and jovially shout: 'Well, well, well, my boy! When were you flogged last, eh eh?' or 'Put him in the bill, Praeposter; he must be flogged.' George III practised on his own sons what he preached for others. His daughter, Princess Sophia, retained throughout her life the memory of seeing her two brothers, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, 'when they were boys of thirteen and fourteen, held by their arms to be flogged like dogs, with a long whip'. Another brother, Augustus Frederick, was 'afflicted with asthmatic breathing, which his tutor "required him to stop"'. He failed to do so; this defiance of authority, 'after various rebukes and threats, ended in a sound flogging'. If the young Etonian managed to avoid the birch for indiscipline or inattention in school, he still ran the risk of a beating for failing in his duties as a fag when he returned to the boardinghouse kept by his Domine or Dame. There were forty boarders at Dame Y onge's. George had the good fortune to have as his fag-master the (louse Capt.1in, a good-natured boy ,\·ho remem-

COMING UP IN THE WORLD

1.(

bered him long after as an excellent toaster of bread and cheese. 'As head of the house I had two suppers of cold meat and pastry, and a double portion of bread aad cheese. George Brummell nightly toasted mine most delicately for three years.' The task could be much more luzardous than it sounds: a future Duke of Bedford suffered permanent damage to his fingers because his fag-master beat him every time he found him effeminately using a toasting fork. On the other hand it could bring benefits-the House Captain used to share the toasted cheese with George, a boy of naturally large appetite who claimed that the seaiors at his table took all the meat and left the juniors with nothing but bread and gravy. 'He was a gc:1eral favourite. I do not remember that he ever fought or quarrelled with anyone; indeed, it was impossible for anybody to be mare good-natured than he was.' He did as little work as possible, but was smart enough to keep level with his older brother all through the school. 'He was a very clever and a very idle boy, and very frank; and then, whatever he became afterwards, not in the least conceited, though nature seemed to have supplied him with a quadruple portion of amusing repartee.' This earned him special attention from one of the assistant masters, Joseph Goodall, later to become Headmaster and then Provost. Goodall combined 'a dignified demeanour, a tall and well-shaped figure, a sincerity of manner and a pleasing, and occasionally humorous, mode of expression'. It was a pattern that George copied and refined. Out of school hours there was a wide choice of activities. The Ram Hunt, in which an unfortunate animal provided by the college butcher was chased through the street (latterly carted, hamstrung, to Weston's Yard) and battered to death with clubs, had been discontinued; but there was cricket and football, boating and real tennis, fives played between the chapel buttresses, marbles and hide-and-seek, hare-and-hounds, swimming, shooting and billiards, badger-baiting on Eton Common and cockfighting in Bedford's Yard. Among the spectator sports for those willing to risk a birching for being caught out of bounds, there was horse-racing at Datchet or Ascot, bull-baiting at Windsor. In his school-work, George :nove