Cullenstown, Dec. 27, 1879
DEAREST FRED,
We have found three letters, which I enclose. They were in a drawer labelled ‘Miscellaneous’ and must, I think, have been written by Cousin Ludovic. I daresay they were with the Lufton papers originally, but there is nothing to identify them, and whoever put them into the library (I think it was Aunt Honoria) did not connect them with the others.
Forgive this hasty scribble. We have still our Christmas house-party on our hands. I am afraid you must have been very dismal at Brailsford – I wish you could have been here. Please to tell me how you are, when next you write. You never do.
Yours affectly,
EMILY
Enclosures
1
Can you dine with me in Town on Thursday? At A. House of course. I shall be there to see Woodward who is very hopeful about Tito. I believe that we may hear it in London next year. If we do I shall cry Nunc Dimittis! for the efforts of a lifetime will have been rewarded. Pray don’t tell me that you would rather have D.G., for it is indubitably inferior. You never heard it in full, only some airs which I agree to be very fine. But I heard it, as you know, when my father was in Vienna and I can assure you that opera Buffa was not in M’s vein, nor should he ever have stooped to the comic. He excelled in the solemn and the sublime. Come on Thursday.
2
Your insulting note has just arrived. I waited dinner for at least five minutes before deciding that you never got mine. What keeps you in Gloucestershire? Oh, I remember! One of your sisters is to be married. An Irish baronet, did you not say? Pray wish her joy from me.
I could not believe that you were not in Town. Everybody here is in the greatest agitation and I should have expected you to have ‘catched the contagious fire.’ Canning, Castlereagh, Wilberforce, and some saints, deserted last night; the Gvt. defeated 226-213. So much has even forced itself upon my intelligence, and you know how ignorant I manage to be. No quarter is expected from C. House. Perceval however is quite calm and grows almost witty, for he said: ‘I do not think there are many rats, only a few mice.’ My mother, also, refuses to disturb herself. She believes that the K. will get well and we are having all this trouble for nothing. She also says that: Les ministres Jacobins ne seront pas les Jacobins ministres. I believe her to mean that a Prince Regent will not be the same as a Prinney. Perhaps you take the same view? But I wonder you a’nt here, mouse hunting.
What do you mean by my fantastic precocity? I will allow that I was but five years old when I heard D.G. My opinions upon every subject were formed at that age, and I have seldom found reason to change.
3
Thank you for your letter. To your question: Did my mother suffer much during the final stages of her complaint? I must answer that she did. She bore it with the fortitude that you might expect of her. The end was so dreadful that I could not wish her life prolonged by a single instant. I should have prayed for her death, had intercession with the Being who ordains such agony struck me as a rational proceeding.
What you say of her is very just. She was genuinely fond of you and your progress gave her as much satisfaction as anything in her life. In a way, you were the son I ought to have been. Her disappointment in me was not so bitter when she was making plans for you.
My father feels it more than I should have expected. I hope that his strongest emotion is one of remorse. He is at Colesworth and at present behaves as he ought. I hope the Beaumonts may keep him in order, for if a certain person is now brought to live openly at B’ford I shall quit the place. I shall not remain under the same roof with one whose existence, so flagrantly recognised, was for years an insult to my mother.
I cannot but compare my family with yours, that knew a like loss but a few months ago. I think often of your father, and of his desolation. And I envy you, for you can have none save happy memories.
Brailsford, Jan. 5, 1880
DEAREST EMMIE,
Thank you so very much for sending those letters, and for hunting them up. They must certainly have been written by Chalfont to Lufton; the first two I put in 1810-11, the last must have been written in 1816, when his mother died.
I am getting on famously with Jim’s great-uncle. He has just bought Troy Chimneys. The papers give me some invaluable information about Chalfont. I feel that I quite understand the poor little man. It is a wonder that he was not much madder than that, with such a father. I once read a description of breaking on the wheel, and it gave me nightmares for a week.
Cunningham is now here with me and is enthusiastically wrestling with the Chalfont boxes, some of which are too heavy for me to lift. We have done wonders in the last day or two. We have waded through a ton of recorded dreams, tailors’ bills, sketches of cottages which he never built, and letters from poets, some famous, some now forgotten. We have kept our eyes open for the name of Lufton, but have found nothing yet.
Cunningham is now reading the Lufton memoir, the early part. He says that Lufton should have been a Whig – that he would have been perfectly happy if he could have got up a hero-worship for Fox. It was a piece of bad luck that the Amershams were Tories. If he had struck up a friendship with the son of a great Whig family, it would have suited him much better.
But I don’t know. I imagine that Pronto would have been pretty much the same among the Whigs, though he could have spouted more about Emancipation and Reform. There was that kind of climber on both sides.
Cunningham says he might have gone in with humanitarian reformers, and instanced Romilly and Whitbread, who were much ahead of their age. I told him that he had not selected very happy examples, for they both succumbed to melancholy. One cut his own throat, I believe, and the other shot himself. Castlereagh was not the only man in public life to commit suicide during the Regency.
It was a melancholy age. Everything I read convinces me of that. To survive it one had to be thick-skinned, or a fanatic, like Wilberforce, able to hammer away at one point and overlook the rest. Reforms of every kind were overdue, but it was the less sensitive, the men who did not suffer from too much imagination, who took the first steps. The poets secluded themselves, or got out of the country, and the humanitarians blew out their brains.
I thank heaven that I was born in 1850! So much has been accomplished, that we may be sure the rest will follow. We have got rid of oppression, injustice and tyranny. Another fifty years may see the whole Continent as far advanced as we, and then we may hope to ‘Ring out the thousand wars of old, – Ring in the thousand years of peace!’ There’s a New Year message for you!
Your loving brother
FRED