Relics

by WILMARTH SHELDON LEWIS

I

IN 1769 Horace Walpole visited Saint-Cyr, the convent founded by Mme de Maintenon for the education of noblemen’s daughters. The Bishop of Chartres gave him an order to be admitted, and Mme du Deffand wrote to the Superior to ensure that he should see everything. He stayed above four hours in a state of enchantment. When he left, a nun presented him with “a piece of Mme de Maintenon’s own writing" and a lock of her hair. They are before me now. “ Il faut s’ent housiasmer, Walpole wrote Mine du Defland of this visit, “à de certaines visions, comme je fais, sans quoi tout est fade.”

Walpole had other hair, all of it irreproachable. He kept his mother’s and father’s in two lockets in the shape of hearts set with diamonds; he had a bit of the hair of Mary Tudor, Queen of France, which he acquired when her tomb was opened at St. Edmundsbury in 1784. Five years later when Edward IV’s coffin was discovered in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, presented a few wisps of the king’s hair to Walpole. It was “darkish brown, not auburn,” Walpole wrote Miss Berry. He kept it in the rosewood cabinet he designed “of most chaste and elegant form, richly carved, ornamented with ivory and a rare specimen of art.”

Hair is a powerful evoker of visions. Certain dealers go in for it, enshrining it, as did Walpole, in jewelled lockets. Shelley (who had a fine head of hair) is a favorite with hair-collectors and so is Napoleon (who had less hair, but produced it longer). Of all relics, hair is perhaps the “truest “: because its genuineness is the most dubious, the purchaser demands reasonable assurance of its authenticity.

What is a relic? The Oxford Dictionary’s shade of meaning that comes nearest to the collector’s use of the word is, “An object invested with interest by reason of its antiquity or associations with the past,” and above all, it should be added, with a person. Shelley’s guitar in the Bodleian is a relic; Dr. Johnson’s teapot, which was formerly A. E. Newton’s and now belongs to Mr. Douglas Hyde, is a relic. These are very fine relics because they truly represent their original owners and thus communicate the sense of intimacy that the collector seeks.

At Strawberry Hill there were many objects that are indubitable relics: Cardinal Wolsey’s hat, the spurs worn by King William at the Battle of the Boyne, the clock Henry V111 gave Anne Boleyn as a wedding present. Once when Strawberry was “in great glory —I have given a festino there that will almost mortgage it,” Walpole received his guests “at the gates of the castle" wearing “a pair of gloves embroidered up to the elbows that had belonged to James I. The French servants stared, and firmly believed this was the dress of English country gentlemen.”Macaulay, who often saw Strawberry Hill before its contents were dispersed in 1842, wrote of it, “There is a story about the fire tongs and another about the bell-rope.”The thousands of objects at Strawberry Hill — the books, prints, pictures, miniatures, coins, glass, china, chairs, tables, armor, snuff boxes, ossuaria, and lachrymatoria— have in their turn become Bits of the True Cross.

The identification of these objects, which arc now scattered about the world, is in many cases certain because of Walpole’s habit of writing on the backs of his pictures, prints, and drawings and of having inscriptions placed upon objects of art. On the inside of the door of a Strawberry Hill cabinet is a gold plaque that states: “This Cabinet was ordered by and made at the Expence of Mr Horace Walpole in 1784, to receive the Drawings which were all design’d and executed by the Right Honourable Lady Diana Beauclerc. The Cabinet was design’d by Mr E. Edwards.” Inside the lid of one of his snuff boxes Walpole had inscribed: “ This snuff box, with the portrait of her dog Tonton, was bequeathed by Mme la Marquise du Deffand to Mr Horace Walpole, 1780.”

The 1842 Sale Catalogue proves Walpole’s ownership of many pieces not marked by him. When Sir Osbert Sitwell told me that he had two plates of Faïence with the stories of Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac and that he wanted to give them to me if they really had been Walpole’s, the Sale Catalogue reassured us completely. Should “the tortoise-shell case, mounted with silver, in which the celebrated Admiral Van Tromp used to carry his pipes to sea,” turn up we could recognize it, and probably also the “needle case in fine old Japan with Monkeys.” The Sale Catalogue would help us with scores of objects, but is hardly enough for scores of others. “A broken patera” is inadequate, and so is “an antique cow.”I have been offered enough furniture from Strawberry Hill to furnish a house, for owners and dealers are sanguine in their attributions.

2

THE first relics I ever bought were the chairs that belonged to Dr. Johnson, the pillow made for William Blake by his wife, Gainsborough’s easel, and Charles Lamb’s tea caddy, all of them phoney. The humiliation of that experience temporarily cooled my enthusiasm for relics. It revived one day in February 1925 when, killing half an hour in the library of the University Club in New York, I looked, for the first time in my life, at an auction sale catalogue of pictures. It was the catalogue of the Arthur Tooth Sale, which was that night. Lot 26 was a portrait of a Lady Mary Churchill, by, the catalogue said, Francis Cotes. I realized that there were doubtless more than one Lady Mary Churchill in the eighteenth century, but Walpole had a half-sister of that name, and I who had been collecting Walpole for three months hurried to the Anderson Galleries to see lot 26.

The portrait is a half-length of a woman of about thirty, leaning on an open music book. She has a veil over her head and is wearing a green velvet dress upon which is a brooch with an enormous diamond. “Lady Mary Churehill” is painted on the canvas. Lady Mary was the natural daughter of Sir Robert Walpole by the woman who subsequently became his second wife. Doubt of Horace Walpole’s relationship to her was raised years after his death when Lady Louisa Stuart printed the suggestion that he was the son, not of Sir Kobert Walpole, but of Carr Lord Hervey. If it were true, Rorace Walpole and Lady Mary Churchill would be no blood relation and would, presumably, have no physical resemblance. This portrait of Lady Mary shows that she might have been Horace Walpole’s twin.

That night I bought the portrait with only one opposing bid. The following morning, after paying my bill, I bundled Lady Mary into a taxi instead of sending her to Farmington by express. I was sailing for England in a few days and wanted to get the picture home before I left, but the wisdom of carting it myself seemed doubtful when I got to the Grand Central. It was noon and a Saturday. The Anderson people, after recovering from their surprise at such unorthodox delivery, had advised me not to wrap the picture up: if it were wrapped up people might slick their umbrellas through it, but if they saw that it was a picture they would keep respectfully away. As I walked down the wide stairs on to the main flour of the station I became, to coin a phrase, the cynosure of every eye. The porter who had my bag slumped along in front, painfully embarrassed. One youth regarding me with awe asked, “Is that over a hundred years old?” Another asked, “Say, did that come from Athens?” A friend who was going with me to Farmington for the week-end looked at me with horror and hurried on without Speaking.

When I got to the gate of my train the gateman sprang to attention. “ Yon can’t take that thing on here,” he said, and threw a chain across the entrance. I rested Lady Mary on my toes. What was I to do? The train was leaving in a few minutes. My faithless friend was already on it; there was not another train for two hours. “I have my ticket on this train,” I said, and added with what I hoped was an effective blend of authority and pitifulness, “I’ve got to make it.”

The gateman hesitated, then said in a low, conspiratorial voice, “Follow me.” We dashed off in the direction of the Graybar Building, my porter gloomily following. Our guide stopped before a little door I had never noticed before, opened it, said, “Jeez, I’d get hell for this. What would happen to the express companies if everybody carried things like that ?” accepted my dollar bill as I sped through the gate with the porter, and hurried back to his post, none the worse, I hope, for circumventing the express companies.

At home I sought for the first time confirmation of a Walpolian relic in the Strawberry Hill Catalogue. I found it among the family portraits in the Great Parlour, Twenty-first Day’s Sale, lot 39: “A half length of Lady Maria Walpole, only child of Sir Robert and Maria Skerret, and wife of Charles Churehill, only son of General Churchill. Eckardt. She is represented in a veil, with a music book before her, a very charming picture.”

Eckardt was a young German whom Van Loo had brought over to help him with draperies. Walpole, who at that time could not afford more expensive artists, commissioned him to paint some two dozen of his friends for Strawberry Hill. He also addressed a poem, “The Beauties,” to Eckardt and did what he could to launch him as a fashionable portrait painter, without much success; at their best his pictures pass for early pictures by Francis Cotes. His portrait of Lady Mary remains the chief link with that tantalizingly dim woman, for the hundreds of letters she wrote and received from her brother were allegedly burned by a mad descendant.

Walpole doubtless planned the Eckardt portrait, the details of which are therefore significant. “Lady Mary,” he wrote to Mann, “has a remarkable knowledge of music and can sing,” which she did to her own accompaniment on the harpsichord, but only before intimate friends. The second striking detail is explained in another letter to Mann, winch was written forty-one years after the first. Lord Hardwicke had just repeated the old charge that George II gave Sir Robert Walpole a large sum of money towards building Houghton, the Walpole palace in Norfolk. “For presents,” writes Walpole, “the king never made Sir Robert any but two”; one of which was “a very large diamond, but with a great flaw in it, which Lady Mary had.” This is undoubtedly the diamond that Lady Mary is wearing in the brooch that Eckardt painted with such fidelity.

Lady Mary was presently followed by two water-colour drawings, copies by Walpole of Watteaus, signed and dated by him, 1736 and 1738, when he was eighteen and twenty; four panes of painted glass formerly in the windows at Strawberry Ilill; and the portraits of his mother and father painted by Eckardt in a frame that was carved for Sir Robert by Grinling Gibbons, the frame, in the words of the Sale Catalogue, “displaying with wonderful effect the arms of the family, enriched with Cupid figures as supporters, birds, fruit, grapes, and foliage.” Among later relics to arrive from Strawberry Hill is a vast ormolu chest so hideous that it is kept out of sight.

Then there is the clock that proved to be a sort of relic, although it had been at some distance — half a block, to be exact — from Walpole’s town house in Berkeley Square where he died. This is a Parliament Act clock, so called because Parliament in the middle of the eighteenth century decreed that public houses should have a large clock to remind their patrons who were drinking themselves to death with gin that it was time to go home. We found it in a shop in the Brompton Road. It has Chinese Chippendale figures lacquered on it: the dealer assured us it went, and I bought it. After buying it I was pleased to find that its maker was J. Dwerryhouse of Berkeley Square. This hardly made it a relic, but it moved it into the neighborhood of relics. Two years later I got the draft of Walpole’s last codicil, and when I collated it with the executed will at Somerset House I found that John Dwerryhouse of Berkeley Square was one of the witnesses. Since Walpole had left legacies to everyone in his house, outsiders were needed to witness the will, and there was old Dwerryhouse just down the Square. The clock is still not a relic, yet it is more than just another clock.

Walpole’s Berkeley Square house was torn down in 1937 to make way for the Air Ministry. We know comparatively little about the house, but Walpole had lived and died there, and rather than have it sink without a trace, I decided to have something from it. The owners of it in the twenties once told me that at the time of the Gordon Riots in 1780, when the mob broke into Lord Mansfield’s house and burned his great library, Walpole re-enforced the door of his own house with iron bars. He says nothing about them in his letters, which show that, far from being terrified by the Riots, he rather enjoyed them, but “il faut s’enthousiasmer.” The door was more manageable than a flight of stairs or a chimney would have been; the door I decided to have. Sproule of Pickering and Chatto kindly offered to get it from the wreckers for me and did so, not revealing for whom he was acting. This is the sort of story that flourishes in the English “Silly season.” It was printed in the London papers and reprinted all over England, as we learned from friends who sent us cuttings from their local papers. The story even pursued us to the middle of the Atlantic where one morning we read in the “boiler plate” part of the Mid-Ocean News that the door to Walpole’s house in Berkeley Square had been bought, in the familiar English phrase, by “an eccentric American millionaire” and taken to America.

The door lay forgotten in its crate for eleven years, until 1948 when we added two stack rooms to the library and my wife remembered the door in our cellar. We decided to use it not as a door, but in place of a wall that would otherwise have had to be built. This was done, but not until an awkwardness had been corrected. The back of the door does have iron bars, and, throwing historical nicety to the winds, I told the contractor who was building the new rooms the story of the bars as it had been told to me. These eighteenth-century bars and the occasion that allegedly inspired their use worked so powerfully on his imagination that when the door was put in place the bars were outward and the handsome panelled door inward and invisible. When you deal with relics of such power as this door, anything can happen.

3

SHORTLY before we left for home in 1935, Mr. R. M. Holland-Martin asked us down to Worcestershire for a week-end. It seemed that Sudeley Castle, in his neighborhood, had many things formerly at Strawberry Hill. Frequent disappointment has cautioned me against transports on hearing such news, but there is always the possibility that it is true, and the collector must not ignore it.

The first thing we saw when we walked into the hall at Sudeley was the familiar set of Holbein’s drawings of Jane Seymour, Colet, and the rest. Were they the copies “taken off on oil-paper by Vertue” for the Holbein Chamber at Strawberry? I asked. The owner, Major Dent-Brocklehurst, not being sure we clambered on chairs, got the drawings down, and found that Walpole had written long notes on the back of all of them.

The house was filled with Walpolian relics. The fine Mabeuse of Henry VII’s marriage was there, miniatures of Henry VIlI’s Queens by Holbein, “Hangings for a State Bed.”Our host showed me a list of the things from Strawberry. As I copied it off, I came to “Gothic lantern.”

“Is that the famous Gothic lantern?" I asked.

“I don’t know whether it’s the famous Gothic lantern or not, but it is the ugliest blasted lantern that ever was.”

That sounded like it, and I said, truthfully, that I would rather see it than anything in England, that I had the original design for it and two drawings of it after Walpole had fitted it with bits of painted glass, some of it English glass of the early fifteenth century. It hung in the stair-well at Strawberry Hill and was one of the most admired features of the house.

“I am afraid,”replied its owner, “that you have come too late.”

I was appalled, and said so.

“My wife wouldn’t have it hanging about any longer and threw it out.”

“Threw it out!”

“It just may not have gone.” We hurried away through the house and through the cloisters to a lumber room. There on a bench, next to the door and oblivion, stood the lantern, the epitome of Strawberry Hill, and the neo-Gothic movement, a flimsy thing with a tin cross, ugly and original, a story connected with each of its bits of painted glass.

“Well,” said Mrs. Dent-Brocklehurst, who had joined us, “I won’t have it back in the house. Perhaps we should give it to the Cheltenham Museum.”

“What should I do now?” I asked Mr. HollandMartin on the ride home. On his advice I wrote to Major Dent-Brocklehurst to say that if he and his wife ever decided to get rid of the lantern I hoped that they would let me know about it. The lantern is now at Farmington where, alas, it is also in disfavor with its châtelaine, but relics should be reserved for the faithful, and it is fitting that the lantern should cast its electric beam only upon those who are willing to seek it out, well removed from the ordinary life of the house, in the stacks.

The most important Walpolian relic is Strawberry Hill itself. My first visit to it was in April 1925. Two American friends and I took a taxi down to Twickenham, rang the doorbell, and talked ourselves in, a crass piece of intrusion. Strawberry had recently come under the direction of the Congregation of St. Vincent de Paul, which was soon to open there a training college (St. Mary’s) for teachers. As the Fathers had not yet taken up residence, it was not open to the public, but an army with banners is not more terrible than a collector who wants to see something.

My second and subsequent visits were conducted in an orderly manner, by means of a proper introduction from Lady Lavery to the Vice-Principal, Father J. Leonard, the editor of Nincent’s letters. We soon found that he had a keen interest in America, reading our novels and poetry and memoirs, and studying our daily life as it is shown in the movies. NVe doubled his American acquaintance, our predecessors having been Lady Lavery and Henry James. He later supplemented his American studies by making a trip across the Atlantic, a regrettably short one, for his stay in the United States was limited to three days, of which he had barely one for Farmington, Horace Walpole has been the cause of much travelling in the twentieth century.

In the Red Bedchamber at Strawberry Hill on my first authorized visit Father Leonard pointed to a tiny fragment of moulding on the mantel of the fireplace. I forget now where it had come from, but it was a bit of the original moulding, Father Leonard explained to us. “I am now going out of the room,”he said, and went.

I looked at my wife. “The intention is clear,”I said, “but what do you think?”

“Oh, no!”

We stood transfixed by moral rectitude. Father Leonard returned and saw t he moulding untouched. “The New England conscience, is it? Now, I am going out again.”

When he returned the second time, the moulding had disappeared. It has been followed to Farmington by other bits and pieces of Strawberry that Father Leonard sent over before the war, a strip of the painted ceiling in the library, a window from the Great Bedchamber. It would have been much simpler and cheaper for the College to have torn down the house and started afresh, since Walpole built it of lathe and plaster (“Gilly” Williams said of it long before Walpole died, “Mr Walpole has already outlived three sets of his battlements”), yet consideration for a landmark of English architecture has moved the College to keep as much of the original fabric as possible. London has reached and passed Strawberry’s gates, suburban villas cut off its views of the Thames and curtail the sweep of its lawns, but now that the damage caused by two German incendiaries has been repaired, the lover of the eighteenth century may again visit the toy castle on which the England of George III could discern, in the words of Strawberry Hill’s creator, “the true rust of the Barons’ Wars.”