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The King's Cavalier
by Samuel Shellabarger
Part 1: 1694 - 1715
Chapter 1
Savile and Stanhope At the close of the seventeenth century, London, externally at least, was not much more than thirty years old. The great fire of 1666 had erased the Gothic past and cleared the ground for sensible modern architecture. Gone were gables and overhanging house fronts, oak beams, undulating walls, and round-bellied windows, the whole rabbit warren of courts and alleyways. St. Paul’s and other churches were gone with faith, legend, and memory; the very churchyards were consumed. In place of this, new house fronts, conventional, neat, and sober, stood rigidly in line along wider and better-paved streets. Miles of red brick,1 leagues of cobblestones, stretched out between colonnaded and stone-faced public buildings and noblemen’s mansions. New St. Paul’s arose, no longer spired, but domed — everything orderly and correct, a brand-new, up-to-date city. The poet Dryden burst into raptures over it. He sang:
More great than human now, and more august,
Now deify’d she from her fires does rise:
Her widening streets on new foundations trust,
And opening into larger parts she flies.2
But as we study the prints, now more than two centuries old, of this revived and modern London, a cold smell of new mortar and masonry seems to cling to them; it is all a little stiff and chilly, gaunt and hard.
The city was not only up-to-date materially, but spiritually. Puritan zeal and Cavalier loyalty having been equally discarded, common sense had once more come into her own. Locke and Newton, Butler and Dryden, were all promoting in one way or another the new cult of rationalism. Virtue had become conventionality; religion had been pigeonholed as theology; the reaction to Puritanism did not restore mirth or sensuousness or joie de vivre, but it established wit, sensualism, and worldliness. Of this indwelling spirit, the distinct, angular architecture was a reflection.
Upon such a stage, in such an atmosphere, Philip Dormer Stanhope, the future Chesterfield, was born on September 22, 1694.
The newness of London and what that newness represented will account for many phenomena of the period. It should be remembered as the background of Chesterfield’s life. He would grow up in a city more spick-andspan and staringly modern than any metropolis of the present day — the setting within which a new epoch, freed from the superstitions and prejudices of the past, had recently begun.
His parents were Lord Philip and Lady Elizabeth Stanhope. His paternal grandfather, who lived nineteen years after his birth, was likewise Philip Stanhope, second Earl of Chesterfield, a picturesque survival of Restoration days, a duelist, a Jacobite, an old fire-eater who did not belong to the new age.* But the Stanhope inheritance would play no role spiritually or intellectually in the life of the most distinguished of the Stanhopes.** It was his mother’s father to whom he would remain indebted to an almost uncanny degree.*** There can be no better approach to Chesterfieldianism than by way of this grandparent, of whom the grandson seems rather a reincarnation than the offspring. He was George Savile, Marquis of Halifax. Let us consider him briefly.
* He had been naïve enough to show jealousy of the Duke of York in Charles II’s time and to remove his wife from that prince’s attentions; he had been loyal enough to hold by King James and refuse all allegiance to King William. He was a sturdy sentimentalist of the romantic order. In his comments on Macky’s Character (Works, Bohn edition, vol. x, p. 279) Swift writes of him unjustly that he had heard he was the greatest knave in England. Certainly he had had a checkered career — exile, squire of dames, and very minor statesman. He was typically of the Restoration in appearance, morals, manners, and interests. He beautified his estates, wrote entertaining letters, and patronized Dryden. The latter dedicated his translation of the Georgics to him, after flattering letters to which the Earl returned a ‘noble present’ (Letters of Philip, 2nd Earl of Chesterfield, London, 1829: Dryden to Chesterfield, Aug. 18, 1697). To the end, in spite of the gout, he enjoyed “a mate at chess, a bottle of Burgundy, and a friend by the fireside.” He differed from many of his rank and age in maintaining a steady loyalty to the House of Stuart. He was also a man of strict honor according to the code of the time, had never sold himself or groveled to anyone, and died a notable, if not an eminent, person. On almost every count, except that of political probity, no two people could be more unlike than this nobleman and his grandson. As the latter seems to have seen practically nothing of his grandfather, who in latter years remained almost entirely on his Derbyshire estate, and as the second Earl presumably had not the slightest influence on Philip Stanhope’s career, any account of him beyond the briefest mention appears unnecessary.
** “We believe, taking the blood all together, not one race in Great Britain has produced within the last two hundred and fifty years so many persons of real and deserved eminence; but still for the brilliant variety of his talents and attainments, the general splendour of his career, influence, and fame, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield remains the facile princeps of his house and name.” Lord Brougham, Quarterly Review, 1845, vol. 76, p. 459.
*** There is, of course, nothing new in pointing this out. It impressed contemporaries such as Lord Hervey and Dr. Maty (Hervey, Memoirs, 1931, vol. i, p. 7; Maty, ed., Miscellaneous Works of Chesterfield, 1777, vol. i, pp. 268- 269) and has since been often repeated, though it seems to me insufficiently emphasized.
From the throng of smiling, cold-eyed courtiers which surrounded the last two Stuarts, he stands forth as a model and beau ideal. He had been Privy Councilor and an intimate of three kings, Lord Privy Seal, President of the Council, Speaker of the House of Peers. For a while, in parliament and at court, he had been supremely powerful. He was wise, witty, rich, and fortunate, a favorite in society, a patron of letters, and oddly enough both patriotic* and incorruptible. He set the golden mean at the center of his philosophy, temperate in good and evil, personally fearless, but seldom so much involved with any loyalty as to burn his bridges for it, prudent in safeguarding retreat, proud to style himself a trimmer, the “skillful pilot” of Dryden’s eulogy.3
* Though fashionably hard, thoughts of his country would sometimes tempt him to a warmth of sentiment. “The earth of England,” he exclaimed, “. . . there is divinity in it!”; or with hearty gusto, “There is a smell in our native earth, better than all the perfumes of the East.” Halifax, Miscellanies, 1704, pp. 151, 176, “Character of a Trimmer.”
He was a man of the world in the greatest sense, a politician in the greatest sense, schooled by the intrigues of three courts, adroit in parliamentary management. But, more than this, he achieved finally a permanent rank among statesmen by giving direction to a new political epoch. The Revolution of 1688 was not only supported and in large measure presided over by Halifax, but it and the subsequent constitutional trend remain forever identified with his stubborn Protestantism and his hatred for autocracy. His thought, coloring it at the source, became integral with the Whig Party.
There is something Januslike about him. His appearance, as we study it in the engraving by Houbraken or on the mortuary bust in Westminster Abbey, recalls, in spite of its peruke, the stout, jack-booted Cavaliers of the sixteen-thirties; and Burnet reports of him that “he was a man of a great and ready wit, full of life and very pleasant.” But his writings bear a curious discrepancy to this appearance. They announce rather the eighteenth than the seventeenth century. We would expect, as more appropriate to them, the passionless face of a Marlborough or an Addison. The judicial quality of his mind, its freedom from emotion, his emphasis on common sense, his religious skepticism, were all prophetic of the oncoming time.
While hating France in a traditional manner as the arch foe of England,4 it was in French culture that he found himself at home; it was French clarity and realism that best suited his own attitude. He would cavil on the ninth part of a hair for the advantage of England; but he dispatched his sons for their training to Switzerland and Paris. In his opinion it was Montaigne who had written the most entertaining book in the world,5 and he and the great French skeptic would have seen eye to eye in religious matters.Regarding the latter, he asserted “that he believed as much as he could, and hoped that God would not lay it to his charge if he could not digest iron as an ostrich did.”6 But with reference to Popery, he was a zealous Protestant, not from conviction, but from politics.
His wit, too, was Latin. He could not resist the temptation of an epigram, whatever the recoil of it upon himself might be. Lord Hervey, writing forty years later of Chesterfield’s passion for raillery, declared that “no sex, no relation, no rank, no power, no profession, no friendship, no obligation, was a shield from those pointed, glittering weapons, that seemed to shine only to a stander-by, but cut deep in those they touched.”7 And the same might equally have been affirmed of Halifax. He was quite aware of the danger of this, and advised others against it,* but in his own case the thirst for satire prevailed.
* He lost his place on the council in Lord Danby’s time because of an alluring quip at that minister which he was unable to repress. It had been said that Danby had been offered a huge bribe for the farm of the taxes, and had courteously declined it though not so as to discourage a second attempt. It was exactly, remarked Halifax, as if a man should ask another for the use of his wife, and should be refused, “but with great civility.” Bishop Burnet, History of My Own Time, 1818, vol. i, p. 448.
As they grow older, men of the world and of great experience sometimes yield to the subtle form of self-indulgence which consists in parading their age and the results of their long observation of life before other people — usually young people. They abound in maxims or instructive reminiscences, or they write admonitory essays or letters. These are at times so charming and valuable that they eclipse all other achievements of their authors, who live for posterity largely on the score of them. In the case of Halifax, it was his daughter Elizabeth, the future mother of Chesterfield, who enjoyed the fruit of his wisdom. For her he composed a little treatise called Advice to a Daughter, of which he thought highly enough to publish it. Within a century it had gone through sixteen editions, and long after his political triumphs had been forgotten he remained a mentor of young ladies.
In this pamphlet may be found the quintessence of Halifax’s philosophy — his emphasis on reputation, his cynical opinion of human nature, his praise of calculation and reserve.* The Marquis’s standard of morality stood high relative to that of his political cronies or rivals, the Rochesters, Buckinghams, Danbys, Montagus, and Sunderlands, but it was comfortable rather than exacting. His advice to Lady Betty adequately expresses it. He pointed out that adultery and drunkenness had become so common that a good wife should overlook them in her husband, and indeed, my dear, should thank God for such faults as these which would blind him to hers, and gradually give her an advantage over him. “For nothing,” continued the Marquis, “softneth the arrogance of a man like a mixture of some frailties . . . so that when the errors of the masculine sex make up for the inferiority of yours, it is more your part to make use of the benefit, than to quarrel at the fault.”
* His daughter should abandon a friend who has incurred the censure of society rather than share that censure. She should avoid intimacies for fear that they would be betrayed. She must be eager to surpass others in virtue and all such other things so as to gain a greater share of the good opinion of the world. Halifax, Miscellanies, pp. 60, 62, 78, “Advice to a Daughter.”
During the few years of retirement before his death he had every reason to look back over his life with satisfaction. Baronet, earl, and marquis, he had had his finger in all the important pies, had acquired a fortune outrivaling the King’s, had trimmed his sails to every popular gale, and finally, reefing them still more, had run victorious into port — his splendid Halifax House9 on the new ‘piazza’ of St. James. He had buried his first wife and two sons; but he had still an heir to his title, and no one could excel Lady Gertrude, the present Marchioness, in charm and savoir-faire. A number of his friends were dead, and others had dropped away; but old age at best is apt to be lonely.
It was the Stanhope alliance which may well have been his only vexation at the end. His former intimate, the old Earl of Chesterfield, with whom he had dined, wined, and talked bawdry and politics so often,* having at length been unable to follow his political veerings, had told him to his face that he would “rather be a plain, honest country gentleman, than a cunning, false, court knave,” and had broken with him. The ancient ruffler had actually forbidden his son and daughter-in-law to have dealings with the Marquis. Lady Betty, who was something of a scold and had benefited no whit by the sage pamphlet which had been dedicated to her, was on strained terms with her husband. Her father-in-law, old Chesterfield, had derisively scribbled “labour in vain” on her copy of the famous treatise. Her husband, Lord Stanhope, begged the Marquis to help him manage her, persuade her to leave town for the winter, complained of her coldness.10 He was a sour, moody fellow, a Jacobite like his father, and completely overshadowed by him. He was certainly not to the taste of Halifax, who sided with dear Betty.**
* Letters of Philip, 2nd Earl of Chesterfield, London, 1829. Halifax seems for years to have been the Earl’s most intimate and trusted friend. Their correspondence forms a considerable part of the extant letters. The following may be regarded as an instance of Halifax’s vein: “Your birds,” he writes to Chesterfield in the country, “have, no doubt, made a new tune to bid you welcome, and your flowers strew you with their perfumes, to cleans you from any remainder of London ayre, which may yet hang about you. I must not forget the tame creature with black eyes, who maketh such an essential part of your lordship’s entertainment, that I wish you may, in some reasonable measure, contribute to hers.” — Oct. 1685. The second Earl appears at times to have condescended to his maidservants. See his letter to Bates, Jan. 7 [1673].
** In February [1695?] Lord Stanhope seems to have been away from England. Perhaps he was not even present at the birth of his son. At any rate, the Marquis refers to him as being abroad. Historical Manuscripts Commission, MSS. of the Marquess of Downshire, vol. i, p. 461, Halifax to Sir William Trumbull. See also, with regard to the strained relations between Lord Stanhope and his wife, the richly documented opening chapters of Willard Connely’s The True Chesterfield, London, 1939.
Labor in vain? Was it all labor in vain — his title and wealth, ambition, renown, the endless days and ways up and down court stairs, attending levees, whispering in alcoves, debating at council boards, speaking in parliament, changing from side to side, juggling, scheming? We may imagine him sometimes standing at his windows and looking out at the new, fine, bleak London; and it would be strange if the mood of Ecclesiastes did not occasionally descend upon him. But after all, what more could he want who had everything? . . . Youth, perhaps? The old faces? Or something else — something inexpressible? Years later his grandson would in his turn stand looking out upon the emptiness of age, and would watch the falling leaves, and sigh over the dust and ashes of past illusions.11
Shortly before Halifax died, there was published a booklet called A Proposal for a National Reformation of Manners. “Our light,” it declared, “looks like the evening of the world.”12 Realistic, superficial, hard, England was approaching the new century. The trim, angular city expressed her soul. “Our light looks like the evening of the world. . . .”
But there was no trace of heaviness even at this period in the Marquis’s essays, which were as forceful as ever. He was not concerned with a reformation, ethical or religious, but left that to fanatics. What interested him was British naval strength and the channel. “It may be said now to England,” he wrote, “ ‘Martha, Martha, thou art busy about many things, but one thing is necessary to the question, What shall we do to be saved in this world? There is no answer but this, Look to your moat.’ ”13
He had neglected an old hernia; gangrene set in. They told him he could not recover. For once no trimming would solve the problem, no wealth nor title nor any other thing. But he died as he lived, conventional and prudent, calmly receiving the Sacrament in which he did not greatly trust. Still, who could tell? Burn no bridges. And at least it was a polite gesture. They buried him with considerable éclat in Westminster Abbey.
It was under the shadow of this great name that the future Chesterfield began life. At the time of the Marquis’s death, on April 5, 1695, his sonin- law, Lord Stanhope, occupied a house14 nearby on St. James’s Square, so that, from the very day of his birth six months earlier, Philip Stanhope had belonged to the Halifax circle. It was to him that the dying statesman bequeathed his richest properties, not of title and wealth, indeed, but more valuable gifts — a strong will, a retentive memory, a cool head and docile heart, wit, grace, eloquence, the most exquisite sense of propriety — a splendid inheritance, of which his father’s family would fill up the measure by contributing the externals of rank and lands.
But Philip Stanhope was not only born in St. James’s Square under the Halifax aegis; he was brought up there or in the neighborhood, and environment completed heredity. His grandmother, Lady Halifax, took charge of his education. He remained with her until he left for the university; and it was, therefore, steeped in the Savile tradition, democratic and liberal, in a house haunted by the memory of Lord Halifax’s urbanity and skepticism, that the formative period of his life was passed.
These are the positive elements that determined his youth; a negative element no less important has been indicated. That he was brought up by Lady Halifax, separated from his parents,* deserves far more attention than it has hitherto received; for the absence of one of life’s normal influences must have, and certainly had in his case, a distinctive effect upon character.
* On Lady Betty’s occasional visits to her mother and equally occasional supervision of her son’s education, see Connely, op. cit., chap. I.
The reason for this separation remains obscure. Early biographers have evaded the point by incorrectly affirming that Lady Betty died in her son’s early childhood. But this is obviously untrue; he was fourteen years old at the time of her death in 1708. Originally, no doubt, Philip Stanhope was kept by his grandmother to avoid his being moved from place to place; for his father seems never to have been long contented anywhere. But his sister Gertrude, afterwards Lady Hotham, who was three years younger, was also educated together with him by Lady Halifax. On the other hand his brother William, born in 1702, and his sister Elizabeth, born in 1703, remained with their parents in the country. Family friction had certainly a part in it, Savile disputing with Stanhope,* Lady Halifax and her daughter on one side, the old Earl of Chesterfield and his son on the other — all the venom of an unhappy marriage. Although, after the Marquis’s death, a rapprochement apparently took place between his widow and Lord Chesterfield,15 relations were never very cordial, for the fundamental antipathy between Lady Betty and her husband remained. Lord Stanhope was an ill-tempered, defeated man, cut off at thirty by deafness and ill-health from any active life, though valuing himself as a patron and critic of letters. Low-spirited, pedantic, and at times dissipated, he was given to classical allusions and to girding at ‘degenerated Britons’.** He disliked London and preferred the country, where, at his house in Lichfield or at Brisancoate, Bretby or another of the many Stanhope holdings,16 he led a featureless life to the end of the chapter. On the other hand, Lady Betty was the spoiled and spirited daughter of a great man, was devoted to the city, but condemned, after her father’s death at least,17 to exile in Derbyshire,18 to isolation and childbearing,*** and to smolder out in domestic monotony. It was perhaps to save Philip and her namesake, Gertrude, from the miasma of such a relationship that Lady Halifax kept them in London.
* The second Earl refers to Lady Betty’s dowry as a great fortune; the desires of the Saviles would receive a certain amount of consideration.
** Recalling once that Caesar had inquired regarding some Roman matrons, who were fond of lap dogs, whether they were past childbearing, he felt inspired by such an example to ask a fine and pet-loving lady of his acquaintance the same question, and seems to have been surprised at her resentment. Francis Bickley, An English Letter Book, two letters from the third Earl of Chesterfield to Matthew Prior. The Earl sent money to Prior in return for some verses and a portrait. Prior, however, was not his only literary friend. He made a point of mentioning to the latter his friendship for Dryden. Other letters from the Earl to Prior are to be found in Hist. MSS. Comm., MSS. of the Marquis of Bath, vol. iii, pp. 447, 465, 474, 480, 494, 497.
*** There were six children who lived: Philip, b. 1694; Gertrude, b. 1697; William, b. 1702; Elizabeth, b. 1703; John, b. 1704; Charles, b. 1708. There were also two miscarriages and a son who lived only a week. Lady Betty died following the birth of Charles in 1708.
Whether because of Philip’s education in the Savile camp, or by reason of a natural dislike, Lord Stanhope seems early to have felt an aversion for his eldest son. Not only was the boy a virtual orphan, but his absent father hated him into the bargain. Writing in 1703 to Dr. Atterbury, the subsequent Bishop of Rochester, his lordship, rancorous as usual, could not resist jeering at the eight-year-old boy then under the roof of his grandmother, who in 1698 had moved from St. James’s Square to a large house in Park Place, several blocks distant, off St. James’s Street.* The Doctor had apparently offered his services to smooth over some domestic difficulty. “I am very much obliged to you,” wrote Stanhope, “for the service you offer to do for me at St. James’s; but in that undertaking I do really think you will only lose your time to no purpose; for I expect nothing from the gentleman that is there, but to see him bred up an ignorant, worthless, amorous fop.”19 With this paternal benediction the future Chesterfield is first encountered. But Lord Stanhope’s ill will did not stop at words. When he came to his title in 1713 it was upon his second son, William, that he showered his favors, deeding him for life his Buckinghamshire estate with its income of eight thousand pounds, while he restricted his eldest son to a bare five hundred.20
* Upon the death of Halifax in 1695, his mansion was inherited by his son William, the second Marquis, who in his turn died in 1700, and with whom the title became extinct. The Dowager Lady Halifax occupied the former house of her stepson, William, on the south part of the square until 1697. It is to be noted that after Halifax House was pulled down Chesterfield acquired in 1727 one of the two houses (No. 18) erected on its site, and continued to live there until his marriage in 1733, when he moved to Grosvenor Square. If this means anything, it might indicate an attachment to a neighborhood with which he was long familiar. See Chancellor, History of the Squares of London.
His dislike was reciprocated. Years later Chesterfield declared that his father neither desired nor was able to advise him;21 and at the time of the latter’s death, while he waited, kicking his heels at Bretby, and filling in time with graceful letters to the Prince of Wales’s mistress, he observed that when pious Aeneas took such care of his father, that old gentleman was “turned of fourscore, and not likely to trouble him long,” but if he had been “of the same age as mine, he would not have been quite so well looked after.”22
Probably the account was balanced in the end.
This lack of parental influence, of the normal filial ties, is important to an estimate of Chesterfield. His contempt for women, his aversion to matrimony, his emotional skepticism, may well have been owing in part to this early privation. Lady Halifax could not wholly replace what under happier circumstances might have been. The times at best did not favor the gentler relationships of a home, but still for many the memory of a father’s solicitude, a mother’s love, must have softened and colored experience. It would not be so with him.
From the outset, a curious isolation marks him. Just as his only son would be illegitimate, and his marriage a mere social bargain, so that in terms of ordinary family life he may be said to have had neither wife nor child, in the same fashion he had no parents. He stood always alone; nor would it have occurred to him to repine. Any domestic bonds would have been inappropriate to his personality.
