Recollections of a Respectable Mediocrity

VOLUME 155

NUMBER 4

APRIL 1935

BY ESME HOWARD

THERE was nothing remarkable about my childhood except its complete happiness. This, naturally, like all children, who are the first and greatest philosophers, I took as a matter of course, and could never understand what my elders meant when they said I ought to be grateful to God, who had given me so many good things. The good things came to me, it seemed, as of right, and I saw no reason why I should be grateful to anyone — least of all, perhaps, to one who was so far from my own day and world as God, who was then mainly connected in my mind with family prayers and long services in the parish churches at Greystoke and Thornbury on Sundays. God had also ordered, on pain of some unknown penalty, that on Sundays, when there were no lessons, there should be no play, which to my childish mind seemed both vexatious and tantalizing.

I had no relaxation in the country but the German songs and fairy tales (mostly Grimm’s, which I adored) of my beloved old German nurse, Jacobina Bottner, who came from St. Goar am Rhein, almost opposite the Lorelei. From her I learned to sing ‘Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten ’ and ‘ Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den schönen deutschen Rhein.’ She also read me the poems and plays of Schiller, — Wallenstein, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Das Lied von der Glocke, — and the patriotic poems of Uhland. It is no wonder that I became almost a little German. When the War of 1870 broke out between France and Germany, we were all passionately united in favor of Germany, and my dear old ‘Binchen,’ as I called Jacobina, was like a coq en pâte in the midst of so pro-German a family. The French stood for all that was evil, the Germans for all that was virtuous. The Almighty naturally supported the virtuous side, which settled all doubts.

Binchen was very devout in a strict Lutheran sense, and used to tell me of the enormities practised by Catholics in St. Goar and the neighboring villages. They even had dances on Sundays, and one of her Lutheran cousins, a worldly young man, had been tempted to go to such a dance at Boppard. He died a few weeks later of smallpox, an obvious punishment for godlessness.

Copyright 1935, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

These and similar instances of the wickedness of Catholics made me feel that they were people too dangerous to be allowed abroad, and, being of a somewhat adventurous and imaginative disposition, I at an early age hesitated in the choice of a future career between that of an Indian Chief like Pau-Puk-Keewis (I loved the tale of Hiawatha) and that of an eloquent Protestant missionary who should convert the Chief, and save him, above all, from the wiles of the Church of Rome.

One night, after I had gone to bed, Binchen returned from supper and caught me standing on my bed in my nightgown, with a pillow on my head, preaching to an imaginary congregation. She naturally wanted to know what this meant. I explained that I was converting Red Indians and warning them especially against false prophets who wore mitres and things of that kind on their heads. I imagine this must have given the dear old thing much satisfaction, but as, more teutonico, she was more afraid of colds in the head than even of the Devil, she just hustled me into bed.

Of the dramatis personœ of my early youth my mother, of course, stands out head and shoulders above all. I was much spoiled, I fear, as a child, being the son of the old age of my father, who was sixty at my birth, while my mother was forty. My mother was the eldest of a beautiful bevy of daughters of Henry Lawes Long of Hampton Lodge, Farnham, which she inherited on the death of her brother Henry at an early age. Her mother was Lady Catherine Walpole, daughter of the Earl of Orford.

My father, when I first remember him, was already between sixty and seventy and an old man for his age, being a confirmed invalid. Though he was always most kind and affectionate to me, he could not be anything of a companion. He used to like me to accompany him when he hobbled about on two sticks, and I used to go up to his room when he had his supper and get titbits from him, especially marrowbones, and read him a Psalm before I went to bed. But otherwise I remember little. He had been a great rider and fox hunter in his day.

My father remembered well old Charles, Duke of Norfolk (known in his day as ‘The Jockey of Norfolk’), from whom my family had inherited the castle of Greystoke. Being an ardent Whig and a supporter of and friend of Charles James Fox, the Jockey took the side of the American Revolution. He even went so far as to call the farms which he built at Greystoke, in the Strawberry Hill Gothic style fashionable at that time, ‘Putnam,’ after the American General, and ‘Bunker’s Hill’ after that General’s first success over the British troops; and he also called a wood he planted, near the Castle at Greystoke, ‘Jefferson,’ after the author of the Declaration of Independence.

When I had to address the Daughters of the American Revolution for the first time after becoming Ambassador at Washington, I was able to tell them quite truly that, owing to these names at my birthplace, I had grown up, so to speak, under the shadow of the first makers of the United States.

Greystoke, when I was a child, was a strange mixture of Whig and Stuart traditions, of Protestant and Catholic atmosphere. The Whig and Protestant traditions and atmosphere came from the Jockey, who still, many years after his death, dominated the scene for us children, and whose portrait by Romney hung in the dining room. The Stuart and Catholic atmosphere came from the place itself.

Had not Greystoke been bombarded and three of the old towers been destroyed by General Lambert on behalf of Cromwell? And had not his troops also broken to pieces the magnificent thirteenth-century east window in the parish church, the pieces of which were collected and later put together as far as possible by my father and Mr. Askew, the then Rector of Greystoke? My mother used to show me the places in the park where Lambert’s guns were put for the bombardment and told me about the window, and I hated him and all his works. My prejudice against him extended to Oliver Cromwell and all his works. They became for me gross destroyers of beautiful things, which were among the things that really mattered.

Parts of the house were very old, going back, it was said, to the twelfth century. Of the old house but little remains except one tower, spared by the cannon of General Lambert, and some parts of the old walls on the south side. There is still an old stair in the thickness of the wall, known as the ‘priest’s hole,’ by which the priest who lived there all through the years of the Protestant Inquisition could escape.

The exterior of the house was first ‘restored’ by the Jockey in the Strawberry Hill Gothic style which he loved, and then by my father, with the help of the well-known architect Mr. Salvin, in half Tudor, half Perpendicular, which, with odd bits of the old fortress sticking out here and there, produces a general effect that is quite pleasing. We all adored it and thought there was nothing more beautiful in the world.

But what made Greystoke a paradise for us children was the park, an enclosed area of some six thousand acres, thirteen miles round, with no public road running through it. It was not a park in the South of England sense, but a series of pastures and moorland, with woods and tarns and marshes, and some limestone cliffs at the highest part, which reached an elevation of twelve hundred feet.

This was our kingdom. Here we could do what we liked. There was every variety of game in small quantities: grouse, black game, duck, teal, snipe and woodcock, partridges and pheasants, some hares and thousands of rabbits, besides foxes and badgers.

Though I have lived in many lands, I have never felt that completely satisfied feeling that ‘coming home’ gives until I had crossed over Shap. The South of England could never be really home to me. It was not the beauty of any particular spot, but just the Cumberland scene in general, which, more often than not, strikes the newcomer as gloomy, harsh, and gray. Perhaps the only non-Cumbrian who has caught the real spirit of this country, and certainly the only man, Cumbrian or not, who has known how to describe its astonishingly fleeting beauties, is Hugh Walpole.

The first thing I can remember is the fire at Greystoke in 1868, when I was not quite five years old. I was sleeping with my mother in a four-poster in the old tower room and was awakened choking with smoke. Then there was a general bustle. I was wrapped up in a blanket and carried to the schoolroom at the end of the northwest wing, where, to my surprise, I found all the rest of the family. I was held up to a window to see the flames coming out of the roof of another part of the house. The wing we were in and the tower were saved by filling the archways leading to the rest of the house with wet mattresses. Unfortunately the old part, with its beautiful hall and staircase and many pictures, tapestries, and so forth, was burnt.

At the age of ten, to my immense sorrow I was sent to school. It took me a long time to get accustomed to the ways of boys of my own age, which at first I thought most disagreeable. My next brother was nine years older than I, and though my eldest brother at times teased me unmercifully with the idea of preparing me for the joys of school life, I had no conception of what life among boys of my age implied.

The school, Farnborough, kept by the Reverend A. H. A. Morton, was what would be called ’extremely select’ by an agent. It was known at the time as the ‘House of Lords.’ I have a vivid recollection of the Reverend A. H. A. Morton, one Sunday afternoon when we were all walking out in Eton jackets and collars and top hats, clasping his hands in ecstasy and exclaiming: ‘In what other school would you see the sons of three Cabinet Ministers walking together!’

From Farnborough school I passed to Harrow. Dr. Montagu Butler, the head master, remains strongly impressed on my memory. A wonderful teacher and great classic scholar, he made the classics live as no other master at Harrow. His curiously ultra-polite manner, even, I believe, to boys he was going to swish, — an honor I never attained to, — and his high falsetto way of talking, made him an easy object of ridicule and a target for imitation; but we all realized that under the velvet glove there was really a hand of iron, with which it might be very unpleasant to come into too active contact.

One other Harrow master — Mr. Glazebrook, a sarcastic gentleman — remains in my memory for something he said. When I was in the Fifth, he took me in Latin verses, in which I, without just cause, somewhat fancied myself. One day 1 showed up a set to him which I thought rather good. Having glanced at them, he said: —

‘I thought at one time, my dear Howard, that I should be able to make something of you, but I am afraid now that you will never be more than a respectable mediocrity.’

He was quite right, and not only in regard to Latin verses. Having recognized that fact in time has stood me in good stead, and I have chosen this epithet for the title of these recollections, being convinced of its fortunate truth. For surely it is a far happier thing to be ‘a respectable mediocrity’ than a genius of any kind.

I left Harrow with no regret.

My mother offered me the choice of going to Cambridge or starting at once to prepare for the diplomatic examination. As I had, by that time, settled on a diplomatic career, I sacrificed Cambridge to the advantage of getting young into diplomacy, and have regretted it ever since. On the whole, however, things turned out as well for me or even better than I had any right to expect.

After a holiday in Italy, I went to study French in Paris. The two figures that remain principally in my memory of that time are those of Lord Lyons, our Ambassador in Paris, and my cousin, Alan Herbert.

There never was a kinder man than Alan Herbert. He was a doctor, and lived in a little comfortable flat as an old bachelor. He was essentially English in his thoughts and feelings, but his long hair and rather unkempt beard, his seedy frock coat with the rosette of the Legion of Honor always stuck in the buttonhole, and even his manner of speech — when speaking English, not French — would have made anybody who did n’t know him believe at first sight that he was a Frenchman. His habits of life had become completely French, and it was always a special joy to me to go and dine with him, which I used to do frequently, on account of the excellence of the cuisine bourgeoise and the vin rouge, which was always supplied in liberal quantities.

He used to tell me most interesting stories of the siege of Paris in 1870, which he had gone through, and of the days of the Commune. During the siege, his cook had bought a white hen, intending to fatten it up so that her beloved M. le Docteur would have a good dinner once at least, instead of eating rats and other things which were then common. But the hen had become so attached to him, and he to it, that it used to wander about in his dining room, sit on the back of his chair, and share his scraps of food. It was, I believe, the only hen that lived through the siege of Paris and the days of the Commune. After those tragic days were over he gave Una, as the hen was called, to my sister Maud and me, and we treasured it carefully until it died of old age. It was stuffed as a curiosity and remained for years in our schoolroom.

The great figure in my mind, however, was that of Lord Lyons. He was by far the greatest figure among ambassadors of that date, and it was not without considerable trepidation that I went to see him, having been invited to do so because his mother, I think, was a cousin of my father. I had never seen anything so gorgeous as the interior of the British Embassy; there were innumerable footmen in plush breeches, and with aiguillettes hanging from their shoulders. Lord Lyons himself was the reverse of gorgeous. He was so extraordinarily shy that he never dared to look any of his footmen in the face, and when he was dining alone he used to try and remember their names by memorizing the contours of the calves of their legs.

He was extremely kind to me as a young man and invited me occasionally to some of the big dinners at the Embassy. This was my first lesson in the proper manner of running these rather terrific functions. His cook was famous, his wines also, and the turnout of his horses and carriages. But I only really learned to know something about the man himself from my Chief in Berlin, Sir Edward Malet, who had been his private secretary in Paris during the War of 1870 and whom Lord Lyons had left behind in charge of the Embassy when he himself followed the French Government to Bordeaux.

Malet had the most profound respect and affection for Lord Lyons, whom he looked upon as the model of everything that a diplomatist should be, and he often used to tell me little stories about him, for my benefit. One or two of these deserve to be rescued from oblivion.

During the American Civil War, when Lord Lyons was British Minister at Washington, great difficulties, of course, arose between the British and American Governments over the question of contraband. On one occasion Lord Palmerston wrote a very violent dispatch to Lord Lyons, instructing him to make a communication in the same sense to the American Government. Lord Lyons, who fortunately had been able to secure the friendship of President Lincoln, went straight to the President, instead of making the communication to Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State. He showed President Lincoln the dispatch, which, he felt, would so aggravate the situation as to make it almost hopeless, and begged the President to give him some more or less friendly message which he could send on to the Foreign Office and, with the help of this, dissuade them from insisting upon the instructions to present this vigorous Note. The President immediately fell in with the suggestion, and the result was that the Note was never presented and the tension became very much less acute.

I remember another delightful story that Malet told me about Lord Lyons. President Lincoln once asked him to go down and see him at the front, somewhere in Virginia, possibly at the time of what is called ‘The Battle of the Wilderness.’ They stayed together at a little country shanty, and in the early morning Lord Lyons went out into what in houses in the Southern States is called the ‘piazza,’ and there found the President busy polishing his boots. Lord Lyons, who was a stickler for etiquette, held up his hands in horror and said: ‘Mr. President, do you think it right that the President of the United States should polish his own boots?’ Lincoln looked at him, with a curious humorous twinkle in his eyes, and said: ‘Mr. Minister, if he doesn’t polish his own boots, whose boots, in the name of all that’s holy, should he polish?’

One more Lyons story, told me by Malet, is worth remembering.

When, in 1870, the French Government left Paris for Bordeaux, naturally Lyons also left; he took Malet with him on the journey, sending him back to Paris afterwards. They spent the night at some small provincial town on the way and in the morning, having some time to spare, went out for a walk. Some zealous gendarmes, hearing them speak English, arrested them both as German spies and got the police to march them through the streets to the local prison, absolutely refusing to believe that their papers were correct. When the head of the prison saw the papers and realized who they were, he was, of course, profuse in his apologies. The fact remained, nevertheless, that the British Ambassador and his secretary had been arrested as spies by an overzealous gendarme, and marched through the streets amidst the hooting of crowds with police on cither side of them, in order to be lodged in jail.

Lord Lyons, instead of making trouble about the indignities offered to him and reporting the matter home, not only accepted, in the friendliest way, the apologies of the master of the prison, but as they left he made Malet promise that he would not say a word about the incident to anybody. He then impressed on his mind this lesson: that it is the business of a diplomat, wherever he is, to avoid unpleasant incidents. If a diplomat unfortunately becomes the centre of an incident of this kind, it is probably largely his fault and he had best keep quiet about it.

There was nothing striking or brilliant about Lord Lyons, either in his conversation or in his appearance. Short, stout, with a round face, plump hands, and mutton-chop whiskers, he was the ideal of a kindly, amiable John Bull. As to his conversation, I doubt if one single witty remark of his has ever been handed down amongst his staff or in his family circle. He seemed to be, outwardly at any rate, just a typical, kindly, commonplace old bachelor. To what, then, can we attribute his extraordinary success in diplomacy and the reputation he had of being head and shoulders above every other ambassador of his time?

Many years after my sojourn in Paris I came across a pertinent reference to a letter by John Quincy Adams. Writing of Sir Charles Bagot’s success as British Minister in the United States from 1818 to 1819, and of his having succeeded in persuading the United States Government of the time to accept the famous Rush-Bagot Treaty,— which prohibited the maintenance of armed forces on the great lakes between the United States and Canada, and is probably the first and unquestionably, up to date, the most successful disarmament treaty ever entered into, — John Quincy Adams declared himself puzzled about this success, because Sir Charles ‘had neither great intellectual powers nor profound learning, yet he made himself universally acceptable.’ Mr. Adams reached the truly Adamsian and paradoxical conclusion that Sir Charles’s success was due to the mediocrity of his talents, and that perhaps second-rate men make the best diplomatists. I have often wondered if Mr. Adams’s explanation was not really the true one.

But there was, of course, more than this. Lord Lyons was indeed the exact opposite of Charles II, and his epitaph might have been written thus: —

He was without prejudices, patient and very courteous, and endowed to an extraordinary degree with what Americans call ‘sound horse sense.’ These were the qualities which, together with what to the brilliant of the world might seem mediocrity, gave him such an outstanding position among diplomatists of his day.

In the spring of 1884, I started regular work in London with Mr. Scoones, who was at that time the great crammer for the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service Examinations, as well as for other branches of the Civil Service. All the time I had been abroad I had been reading and making notes of books which he had previously recommended to me, in addition to learning languages, and the plan was that I should spend a year at his establishment before the examination, which I intended to take as soon as possible after my twenty-first birthday.

This year was one of hard study and little relaxation, except when I went up to Greystoke for a short holiday and shooting in the summer and at Christmas.

The examination took place, if I remember right, at the end of February or the beginning of March, 1885, and I went down immediately afterwards to stay with my sister and her husband, Carnarvon, at Pixton, near Dulverton. Here I spent most of my time fishing in the Exe and the Barle, and it was one cold morning when I was wading in the Barle, as usual without waders, that a boy came down from the house with a telegram for me, informing me that I was one of the four lucky ones who had passed the examination.

My marks, if I am not mistaken, were ‘fair average’ in all subjects with the exception of précis writing, in which I was at the top. I suppose this indicated that I had a rather exceptional gift for picking out the pith and marrow of any diplomatic paper, and I imagine that this stood me in good stead in later years.

I never expected to pass my first examination, but once I had done so it all seemed, like nearly everything that has happened to me in life, to be a part of the natural order of things.

I joined the Foreign Office immediately after receiving the news.

The Liberal Government fell in June 1885, and a Conservative Government, under Lord Salisbury, took its place. My brother-in-law, Carnarvon, who had been twice Secretary for the Colonies under Beaconsfield, was offered and accepted the extremely difficult and even at that time personally dangerous post of Viceroy of Ireland.

It may well be imagined with what zest and excitement, as a young man of twenty-one, I accepted Carnarvon’s offer to go to Dublin with him as assistant private secretary, if this could be arranged with the Foreign Office. It was arranged, and it was with high anticipations of much more interesting work, with the prospect of considerable distraction and adventure, that I left Euston Station to catch the night boat at Holyhead.

I remember that on the bookstall at Euston I picked up a little paperbound book called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, just out, by a certain Robert Louis Stevenson, whom I had till then not heard of. This so fascinated me that I could n’t drop it, and went on reading it, both in the train and on the boat, until it was finished. That was my first introduction to the great R. L. S., who since then has remained one of my favorite authors. Kidnapped has always been particularly interesting to me, with its delightful psychological picture of the Scotch lowlander in David Balfour, and of the highlander in Alan Breck — types, as it has always seemed to me, of their respective nationalities. Indeed it was the recognition of these types in Kidnapped that afterwards caused me to make a list for myself of books which, so far as I could see, particularly represented different nationalities.

England, curiously enough, seems to be better represented by Tristram Shandy than by any other book that I know; Spain, of course, by Don Quixote; Germany by Wilhelm Meister; Russia by The Brothers Karamazov; and the United States by Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Both of these, in their inimitable way, give a picture of the youthful and, to a great extent, still pioneer spirit of that extraordinary country, which is, as yet, far too little understood on this side of the Atlantic. As regards France and Italy, I have never yet come across the book that I was satisfied to place in my library of representative books. Sweden might, perhaps, be represented by Selma Lagerlöf’s Gösta Berling, but of this I don’t feel sure. In any case, it is an amusing game to try to discover the books one thinks worthy to be placed on such a list, and it is a game which I can confidently recommend to those who not only enjoy the literature of other countries but also enjoy studying their national characteristics.

Life at the Viceregal Lodge in Dublin was an extremely busy one, both officially and socially. There was something of the ceremonial of a court; all the aides-de-camp, the controller of the household, and the members of the staff wore for dinner their dark blue coats with gilded buttons engraved with a shamrock and the motto ‘Quis separabit?’

One ceremony that I remember especially was that which marked the investiture of four Knights of St. Patrick. Carnarvon, dressed in a frock coat, and with his staff aides-decamp in uniform about him, stood at one end of the room. At a given moment three loud knocks, struck as if with the pommel of a sword, were heard on the door. The principal aidede-camp then asked: ‘Who is without?’ Ulster King-of-Arms, who was waiting outside, replied that Ulster was without with Knights waiting to come into the Presence. The aide-de-camp then said: ‘Advance, Ulster, and introduce the Knights.’ Ulster, in his uniform and embroidered tabard of office, then entered, followed by the four knights about to be invested.

One of the knights was very tall, another very short and fat, another very lame, and the fourth of ordinary dimensions. They all wore what appeared to be blue silk dressing gowns which clearly had not been made for them. The very tall knight’s dressing gown reached only a short way below his knees, showing large black and white check trousers and shiny boots below. The very short and fat knight’s dressing gown trailed on the ground, so that in approaching the Viceroy he had to hold it up like a lady who was going to curtsy to the Queen. The poor lame knight, having got down on his knees, was unable to rise again and had to be pulled up by two aides-de-camp. The only one who went through the performance with anything like dignity was the knight of ordinary dimensions. It struck me that if the knights could not pay for their own dressing gowns the Government of Ireland might at least provide garments suitable for all sizes.

I left Ireland when Carnarvon left after the General Election in January 1886, a convinced believer in the necessity, if we were ever to have peace, of giving local autonomy to Ireland, which then went under the rather elastic name of Home Rule.

After a month or two more at the Foreign Office, I was sent to Rome at the beginning of 1886 as unpaid attaché, a chrysalis condition which even those who had taken their examination were expected, in those days, to go through for two years. During this period I met a very remarkable Englishman, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, who with his wife, Lady Anne, was spending the winter in Rome.

Wilfrid Blunt was a well-known figure in English society, and also in Egypt. Tall, dark, and exceedingly handsome, he had been in the diplomatic service in his youth and was said, with what truth I do not know, to have been the only Englishman who had killed a bull in the bull ring at Madrid. He was a poet of no mean order, and his sonnets, published by the Kelmscott Press, are many of them extremely beautiful. Immensely proud, but at the same time a born revolutionary, he gave endless trouble to the British authorities in Egypt by continually and actively taking up the cause of those who, like Arabi Pasha, were using every means in their power, even to the extent of open rebellion against the Khedive, to get the English out of Egypt. At one time he made such fiery and revolutionary speeches in Ireland that he was sent to prison for some months. This, however, rather damped his ardor, because, though he did not mind the discomforts of travel in the desert in Egypt or Arabia, he distinctly objected to those of an Irish prison. It was his particular joy to dress up as an Arab chief and to be considered as half an Arab, although I believe his knowledge of the language was not nearly so thorough as that of his wife, Lady Anne, who, by frequent travel in the East, had come to look almost like an Arab herself.

Owing to my acquaintance with Wilfrid Blunt and his wife, which rapidly ripened into friendship, I used to go and stay with them at their country house in Sussex, Crabbet Park. While the house had all the comforts of the time, there was a curious artificial effort to give it a look of wildness, by leaving the drive up to the door unweeded and allowing the lawns and shrubberies to grow absolutely as Nature willed. Both Wilfrid and Lady Anne were passionately fond of Arab horses, and kept, indeed, the only stud of pure-bred Arabs in England. Every year there was a great sale of Arabs at Crabbet, which numbers of people in London society attended. It was really a cheery picnic rather than anything else, and Wilfrid Blunt used to provide his guests with a sumptuous luncheon at which he always harangued them in a little speech. In order to keep up his reputation as a revolutionary, with a profound contempt for all class differences, — which he was far from feeling, — he would often begin by saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ and then, looking round him, would add, as an afterthought, ‘and Lords,’ which was always greeted with laughter and cheers.

There was also an institution of the early nineties called the Crabbet Club, to which I had the honor to belong. A certain number of young men, I forget how many, and one or two old ones, used to meet for a week-end in June under Wilfrid’s hospitable roof, and he gave a prize for the champion lawn-tennis player and for the best poem.

On the Saturday evening the business of the Club was first transacted; new members were elected, and speeches were made, generally in a vein of pleasantry and satire, proposing and seconding the candidates. As president of the Club, Wilfrid Blunt sat at the head of the table dressed in gorgeous silks, like an Arab sheik, with an enormous turban.

We had among us many of the brilliant young men of that time. Those who stood out most conspicuously were George Curzon, afterwards Lord Curzon of Kedleston; George Wyndham and his cousin Percy; Monckton Milnes’ son, now Lord Crewe; the three Peels, William, George, and Sidney, sons of the Speaker; Harry Cust; my own distant kinsmen and great friends, Morpeth and his adventurous brother, Hubert Howard; Mark Napier; George Leveson Gower; and old Godfrey Webb, who was a sort of society wit of the day. George Curzon, whom I used to meet in Cumberland, stands out particularly among all these in my memory. When I came up for the Club at one Saturday evening dinner, being myself present, Mark Napier was given the task of proposing me. He did it more or less in these terms: —

‘I hardly know this fellow, Esme Howard, whom I have been told to propose, and it matters little to me whether one fool more or less joins this Club, but there is one matter which may be of great importance to you all. It is that I have, in Westminster, a charming little house that I want to let.’

With that he went on to describe, amidst loud laughter and in great detail, the charms of his house, and ended by formally proposing me for the Club. I was then told to get up and say what I could for myself.

I said, as far as I can remember, that I was overwhelmed by finding myself in the midst of such a company and being proposed as one to have the honor of joining such a galaxy of wit and beauty. Well knowing my own limitations, I would only throw myself upon the mercy of the company as a Respectable Mediocrity, and hope that I might be allowed to join their ranks and enjoy their society.

Upon this George Curzon jumped up and in a voice trembling with righteous indignation said: —

‘I must really protest against this outrage, with all the vigor of which I am capable. We have had, hitherto, all sorts of people elected to the Club, of whom the less said, perhaps, the better. But we have never yet had one who laid claim to the title of a Respectable Mediocrity. A mediocrity I might, perhaps, à la rigueur, have put up with, but a respectable one would be past endurance.’

In spite of this I was elected, and enjoyed to the uttermost the two or three Crabbet Club week-ends which I was able to attend.

On the Sunday afternoon the tennis competitions took place, amidst much chaff and uproarious applause for the victor, and in the evening the poems were read out and more speeches made. George Curzon’s poems were unquestionably the outstanding ones, and when he declaimed them I always felt that he would have made a marvelous actor. One year the subject of the poem, which was always set by Wilfrid Blunt, was ‘Sin.’ George Curzon’s poem described the sad degeneracy of an age in which the more flagrant forms of sin and political corruption, which flourished so beneficently in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, were now only too often punished severely by hard-hearted judges and idiotic laws; and he concluded with a verse in which he hoped that we might again look forward to a sort of millennium in which it might be possible freely to enjoy all the advantages of, as he put it, ’frank, uncompromising, and premedicated sin.’ He, of course, obtained the prize, by universal acclamation.

One night, I remember, we went on listening to poems and extempore speeches — that is to say, those of us, like myself, who did not speak and were in the minority — until long after the June sun rose, and then, since it was very warm, we all went up to our rooms, stripped, threw bath towels round us, and trooped down to swim in the lake, returning for a hot breakfast in time for those who wished to catch an early train to London.

Such was the Crabbet Club.

One year Wilfrid Blunt invited me down to Crabbet for Derby Day, which it was his habit to attend in a break with a four-in-hand of Arab horses, which he drove himself. We arrived rather late at Epsom, and his entrance to the course — which he wanted to cross in order to get to a point inside the ring which was always reserved for him — was blocked by the police because a race was shortly to be run. With his usual utter disregard of law, Wilfrid whipped up his horses and charged straight at the police, who, fortunately, gave way. He tried to cross, but found that the usual opening on the other side was too compactly blocked by crowds even for him; so he swished his team round and started galloping up the course.

For a few minutes we were the centre of all attraction, cheers, hoots, and catcalls mingling in a strange symphony. The police, however, were, as usual, alive to the necessities of the moment, and a little way farther up they cleared a space where there was an entrance on the inner side. This Wilfrid’s quick eye detected, and he again swished his team round to the left and galloped his horses triumphantly to the place reserved for him. I never heard that he got into any trouble for this little adventure, which was singularly typical of him.

lake most strange and unconventional people, Wilfrid Blunt had a fascination for me, and it always rather amused me, in after years, to praise him to Sir Edward Grey, to whom he was anathema because of the trouble he had caused in Egypt when Sir Edward was Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. It would be difficult to imagine two men further apart; and, while Sir Edward had all my affection, admiration, and respect, I must admit I always had more than a sneaking inclination toward men of unusual type, like Wilfrid Blunt, whatever their faults may have been.

My two and a half years at Rome passed delightfully and uneventfully, and they had the effect of binding me definitely to Italy, and especially to Rome. I spent two full summers there, and learned to love Italy as much in the summer as at any other time of the year.

In April of 1888, Queen Victoria came to spend some weeks in Florence. She came with her Indian munshi, and John Brown, in his Highland kilt. These attendants greatly interested the Florentines, and the papers of Florence suggested that Her Majesty must have made a mistake in the dates and thought that she was coming out for the Carnival. She lived at the Villa Palmieri, famous as having been the scene of Boccaccio’s Decameron; at this time it was the property of Lord Crawford, by whom it was lent to Her Majesty.

My Chief was, naturally, required to be in attendance for some time, and asked me if I would accompany him as private secretary, to which, of course, I readily agreed. My duties were not onerous, as he was the least exacting of chiefs. I went two or three times to lunch at the Villa Palmieri with the Household, amongst whom was Arthur Bigge, afterwards Lord Stamfordham, and private secretary to the Queen and to King George. We used to go out for long walks together, all round Florence, which I knew fairly well, having spent two winters there. In this way we laid the foundations of a sincere friendship which lasted until he died. I think I never met a man of better counsel and less self-interested. He knew, I suppose, more than any other living man of the things that had passed in political life, during the long period of his service with two Sovereigns. He was entirely trusted not only by them, but also by all political leaders, no matter to what party they belonged, and no man ever sought less for publicity. I hope that some day his memoirs and papers may be published, for they should certainly prove a gold mine to the historians of our time.

I saw Queen Victoria, of course, several times, but was only presented to her once. She made an ineffaceable impression on my mind. There was an extraordinary dignity, and even grace, in that short, round figure. All traces of beauty had left her face by then, but she had a very attractive clear low voice, which made up entirely for any lack of attraction in the face itself. She very kindly talked to me for some time about the benefit which the Emperor Frederick, who was then known to be dying of cancer, had received from his sojourn at Alta Chiara, Portofino, which Carnarvon had lent to him and to the Empress for some months during the winter. The Queen wanted to know all about it, and how it had come into Carnarvon’s possession; it was evident that anything which had been closely connected with her eldest daughter and the tragedy of her life interested her profoundly.

One other little incident of the Queen’s sojourn in Florence has impressed itself on my mind. King Humbert came up to Florence to see her, although she was not officially in Italy, but only there incognito, so to speak, as the ‘Countess of Balmoral.’ His visit, therefore, was not official and was extremely quiet. He was accompanied by Signor Crispi, then Prime Minister, and they both lunched with Her Majesty at the Villa Palmieri. Sir John Lumley lunched with their Majesties and I lunched with the Household. After lunch we all gathered in the principal drawing-room. Signor Crispi, before he left, put on a pair of tight yellow dogskin gloves, with which, on taking leave of the Queen, he shook her warmly by the hand. I shall never forget the Queen’s almost imperceptible smile and slightly arched eyebrows, as she turned and looked at Princess Beatrice, after this unexpected salutation.

(To be continued)