The Wallace Collection
One day, as I was talking to a friend in my garden of memory, he, looking round at the fine bronzes by which we were surrounded, remarked what a pity it was that Oriental art should be so poorly represented in the Wallace Collection; and how much it was to be regretted that no specimens of the work of the great Eastern metal-workers and famous potters were to be found at Hertford House. As a matter of fact, cheek by jowl with the glories of the English, French, Spanish and Dutch art, there are only some half-dozen very poor specimens of Chinese cloisonné enamel, practically no pottery, none of the grand old Chinese bronzes, and not a single example of the work of such masters as the Japanese Miyochin, Seimin, To-un, and others, men as famous in their way as Benvenuto Cellini. It is curious that three men so catholic in their tastes as the two Lords Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace should have paid no attention to the art of the Far East.
From the collections we naturally passed to discussing the men, and my friend began asking me many questions about the great legacy, of which I am a trustee, eager to gather something of the truth out of the network of fable and falsehood by which it is surrounded. Here is what I told him. There is, of necessity, some guesswork, but guesswork not unsupported by a reasonable foundation of fact and probability. The strange jumble of truth and lies is but one more proof of the danger of throwing over all those conventionalities which are but so much ballast to keep straight the family ship. There are plenty of wreckers in the world, and they are never slack in their dirty work; but, above all, they love breaking up the big ships.
When the ’seventies were still young, I, being at the time still in the Diplomatic Service, but “En disponibilité,” became a director of a foreign railway company, the business of which often took me to Paris, where our head offices were. One day, on the return journey to London—in 1872—I first met Sir Richard Wallace on board the steamer from Calais. The Duke of Sutherland, with whom I was travelling, knew him, and so we became acquainted—I little thinking that one day I should be brought into very intimate connection with the art treasures which he had inherited eighteen months earlier. Mr. Scott—afterwards Sir John—then a tall, slim, very pleasing youth, was with him as his secretary and confidential friend. Sir Richard was at that time a strikingly handsome man, about fifty-four years of age, with a very attractive expression, greyish hair, shaved, like his patron, Lord Hertford, more or less in the fashion set by the Emperor of the French. We had a good deal of talk, and, later, I got to know him pretty well. When he was Member for Lisburn, he was appointed to the Committee of the House of Commons which sat under Mr. Baillie Cochrane, afterwards Lord Lamington, to consider the question of new buildings to be erected for the accommodation of the various Government departments. He used often to come and see me at the Office of Works, in order to study the different plans, and very warmly took up a scheme which I put forward, and which, if it had been adopted, would have saved the country a huge sum of money.
Unfortunately, Sir Stafford Northcote, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was afraid of submitting the first expense to the House of Commons. He never realized how complete was the trust which the House placed in him, and so my proposals fell through, to the great disappointment of Sir Richard Wallace, and to the vastly increased cost which the country has ultimately had to pay. There has seldom been a more flagrant case of penny wisdom and pound folly. The value of the land went up by leaps and bounds, and the patient tax-payer has suffered, as usual, without a murmur.
My proposal, briefly stated, was to build a chain of Public Offices between Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square, purchasing such land as did not already belong to the State. Drummond’s Bank was then pulled down, and Messrs. George and Edgar Drummond, as a favour to myself, very patriotically delayed rebuilding for six months, in order to give the Government time to consider the question. The Public Offices were at that time housed in a very haphazard manner, and it was evident that some comprehensive scheme must be initiated. My plan was generally approved, but it was not adopted owing to the costly timidity of Ministers.
Who and what was Sir Richard Wallace? That is a question which excited great interest forty-five years ago, an interest which has not altogether died out even now. That he was the private secretary and âme damnée of Lord Hertford everybody knew.
How he came to occupy that position, and what led his patron to alienate from his family in Sir Richard’s favour so much of his great fortune as was in his power, together with the whole of the art treasures which he and his father and grandfather had collected during three-quarters of a century, at a time when beautiful things were to be had for what would now be considered an old song—that was a mystery to which no one had a clue, and which only now can be solved with absolute accuracy. Much that has been suggested is undoubtedly false, based upon conjecture without any knowledge of such facts as have been brought to light.
Having been a trustee of the so-called Wallace Collections since the death of Lady Wallace in 1897, and having lived in great intimacy with Sir John Scott, who was her heir and had been so long the fidus Achates of Sir Richard, I have come to the conclusion that such evidence as exists and was known to Sir John, to Lord Esher and others, entirely disposes of the scandalous story that he was the illegitimate son of Lady Hertford, and therefore half-brother to Lord Hertford.
The true story, vouched for by people who were intimately acquainted with the scandals of the first half of the last century, is that Richard Lord Hertford, when a mere boy, had an intrigue with a Scotch girl of low birth—Agnes Wallace, afterwards Jackson. The result was Sir Richard Wallace. As the girl was older than himself, Lord Yarmouth, as he then was, had been rather the seduced than the seducer, and soon tired of the whole connection. He was quite willing to pay, but he had no mind to start in life saddled with the dead weight of an uneducated mistress and a natural son. Lady Hertford, however, got wind of the affair through Colonel Gurwood, a brother officer and intimate friend of Lord Yarmouth. She took a fancy to the child, who responded with an affection that was almost filial. Lord Hertford, to whom his mother’s slightest wish was law, took up the boy at her bidding, and educated him until he grew up and became entirely indispensable. The lad was well known in Paris as “Monsieur Richard,” Lord Hertford’s shadow and agent, his representative at auctions and sales of works of art.
The name Richard seems to me to have some significance in confirmation of the above story. Is it likely that if the child had been Lady Hertford’s, she should have chosen the name of her eldest legitimate and deeply-loved son, to bestow it upon an inconvenient accident? To me it seems utterly incredible. Moreover, would it not have been far more likely that she should have tried to smuggle away an unnecessary infant of her own than that she should have dragged the child into all the publicity of the home about which there had already been too much slanderous gossip? Again, Lady Hertford was a woman possessed of great wealth in her own right. Why, if Sir Richard was her son, did she leave the whole of her fortune to her second son, Lord Henry Seymour, and a mere trifle to the favourite to whom she was so kind a patroness? Obviously she relied upon Lord Hertford, as his father, to do everything for him. Not only the facts, but even the whole probabilities, are against the preposterous and malicious story that he was her son.
That the old lady was devotedly attached to Sir Richard and made a great pet of him, and that he returned her affection with interest, was a matter of common knowledge. I have seen many letters of hers which attest the fact. When she travelled, he made all the arrangements for her, and took entire charge of her comfort, his bed being made outside her door when they slept at inns in the old posting days. He was her devoted slave, her most faithful watch-dog.
Upon his services as secretary, Lord Hertford, as I have said, placed entire reliance, but his office was not altogether a bed of roses. The great man, as a patron, was strict and sometimes severe. Sir Richard, with a taste for speculation on the Bourse, was sometimes in rather strait circumstances, out of which his patron helped him, not without reproof, to the tune of a good many thousand pounds. I have seen a document showing that Lord Hertford in 1854 paid twenty thousand pounds on this account through Messrs. Rothschild. There is in the Wallace Collection a certain engraved crystal tazza of Italian workmanship, a very lovely little gem. Sir Richard, in his poor days, picked it up for a few francs in an old sort of rag-and-bone shop in a street in the neighbourhood of the Temple. Some time afterwards, being rather hard up, he took it to Lord Hertford and asked him to buy it. “No,” was the answer, “I won’t have it. I will not encourage your extravagance; you must learn to be more economical.”
Sir Richard sold the tazza to a dealer for two hundred and fifty francs, and a year or two later had the luck to buy it back, but he had to pay ten times the price and more. Often he had hard times enough, as he himself said when he told the story, but when Lord Hertford died in 1870 his day had come. The fortune which he inherited was in those days considered colossal. It would look less now compared with the huge riches of American plutocrats, but in 1870 these were yet in the making. Two very rich marriages, the second and third marquesses having both married heiresses, had, in addition to great landed estates, placed the Hertfords in an altogether exceptional position.
The way in which the third and fourth lords elected to spend their wealth had woven round them a whole tissue of legends, chiefly founded upon mere vulgar gossip. Virtuous and highly-respectable London delighted in crowning them with a halo of ill-fame, and when Lord Yarmouth, afterwards fourth Marquess, bought Bagatelle, it was declared to be the scene of orgies compared with which the mysteries of the Bona Dea were as innocent as nursery teas. Many of the stories were started by the rather second-class, or even demirep, English Society which was gathered together at Paris, jealous at being kept out from the intimacy of a very exclusive man.
These stories when repeated, we may be sure, lost nothing in the telling, and so Bagatelle came to be looked upon as a sort of Parc aux Cerfs, while Bishop Luscombe’s congregation stalked with virtuously uplifted noses along the Rue d’Aguesseau, thanking Heaven that they were not as Lord Hertford. Such a reputation, even if it were a mere scandalous libel, was hardly such as would commend itself to General Sir Francis Seymour, the proud patrician who was to succeed to the title as fifth Marquess. Indeed, it must have been gall and wormwood to a man trained as he had been for many years in the solemn dignity of the staid Victorian Court. There could be no sympathy, still less affection, between the cousins. But there was more than all this to influence Lord Hertford when he made his will, which left his successor practically nothing but the broad acres of Warwickshire, with a great costly palace to keep up, at a moment when land was falling in value every day and agriculture was drifting no man could tell whither.
Whatever shape Richard Lord Hertford’s eccentricities may have taken, he had one redeeming virtue. He was a model son, and his love for his mother was the great passion of his life. To attack her, to be in any way wanting in respect for her, was in his eyes the one crime for which there was no forgiveness, and that was precisely the crime of which Sir Francis Seymour was guilty. It was a pity, to say the least of it, that the unkind things, sure to be repeated, of which he was so prodigal in speaking of Lady Hertford, should ever have been uttered. However much he might disapprove of Lord Hertford’s way of life, it would have been wise to remember that a man is not responsible for his grandmother’s indiscretions, and the shady parentage of Maria Fagnani might well have been allowed the benefit of silence. At any rate, it was not the business of Sir Francis to trumpet that or any other scandal about her.
Her story was curious. All the actors in the play have long been dead, but it is so intimately connected with the history of the Wallace Collection that, while there is no one left to whom its relation could give pain, it still retains a special interest. Anything that can throw light upon the passing of all those treasures into the possession of the nation is worth recording; and it is, moreover, an act of justice to clear the memory of a lady who has been somewhat roughly—and, as I believe, without foundation—handled in the “Dictionary of National Biography.”
Under the blessing of the law, Maria was the daughter of the Marchese and Marchesa Fagnani, and the adopted child of George Selwyn. But the Marchesa, who was said to have been a ballet-dancer, must have been none too faithful to her husband; for, as a matter of fact, George Selwyn was said to dispute with the Duke of Queensberry, the wicked “Old Q,” the honour of being her father. As to that there seems to be no certain evidence, but one would have thought that such a rivalry, or partnership—whichever it might be—would have bred a jealousy between the two men. Not a bit of it! They remained fast friends, were constantly together, and, when apart, wrote to one another in the most affectionate terms.
At George Selwyn’s death in 1791 he left thirty-three thousand pounds to Maria and the rest of his fortune to “Old Q.” When the Duke, in his turn, came to an end of his stormy life, dying in the odour of iniquity in 1810, he bequeathed to Maria, who had married Lord Yarmouth in 1798, a fortune of between three and four hundred thousand pounds, together with the famous house opposite the Green Park in Piccadilly, in the window of which, when he was too old to walk, he used to sit ogling the pretty women as they passed below him. That window, with its leering old tenant, was one of the sights of London.
The Marchese Fagnani (Fagniani is a misspelling in all the English books) belonged to an old Milanese family. In the sixteenth century there was a poet of the name who gained some literary fame; others of the family were well-known lawyers, archæologists, mathematicians and churchmen in the seventeenth century—all men of good repute; and as Maria was undoubtedly born in holy wedlock, the mésalliance was not so very great.
In spite of this there must have been some doubt as to the desirability of alliance with the Fagnanis, for the marriage with Lord Yarmouth was a hole-and-corner affair, hustled through at Southampton on the 18th of May, 1798. Southampton was then quite a small country town, very different from what it is now, just the sort of place where a marriage could be celebrated without fuss and in some secrecy. Indeed, when I remember it fifty years later it was still in its infancy and very primitive, with at least one delightful old house standing in its own grounds in the High Street above Bar. Altogether it was not the sort of wedding that certainly would have been arranged for the heir of the proud and royal Seymours had the magnates of the family not disapproved of the match. The French writers in newspapers, who made great capital out of the whole romance at the time of Lord Hertford’s death in 1870, went out of their way to associate the Prince Regent with the Fagnani mystery. They hinted that the prince also claimed the paternity of Maria, and that he even attended the marriage. But that is an utter absurdity, for which there was no foundation. Immediately after the marriage Lord and Lady Yarmouth made their home in Piccadilly, next door to “Old Q,” who did not die till twelve years later.
It is pretty clear that the marriage with Maria did not lower Lord Yarmouth’s social position, otherwise Lord Castlereagh would hardly have chosen him as his second in his famous duel with Mr. Canning, for whom Mr. Charles Ellis, afterwards Lord Seaford, acted. Both men missed their first shots; in the second shot Mr. Canning was grazed in the leg. A duel between the Minister of War and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs was a matter of too great importance to be entrusted to a gentleman who was under a cloud. After Lord Yarmouth succeeded to the Marquisate in 1822, he received the Garter himself, and was sent by George the Fourth as special ambassador to carry the same order to the Emperor Nicholas in 1827.
At the time of her marriage the bride was no longer in her first youth; she was at least twenty-seven years old. For the correspondence between George Selwyn and the Duke of Queensberry shows that in 1772 she was already teething, and under the care of the former at Paris as his adopted child; and he was fretting himself into bad health lest the mother should take the little creature—Mie Mie, as she was called—away from him. The Duke, then Lord March, while abounding in good advice to his friend, promised his good offices, saying at the time that the Marchesa was sure to act in opposition to his (the Duke’s) wishes and advice. The child was taken away by her mother for a time, but ultimately and permanently given back to her adoring guardian or father. From that time forth the noble Italian lady seems to have troubled herself about her baby no more.
As I have already said, there is no certainty as to Maria’s parentage; indeed, the published letters leave the whole story in a state of confusion which is perfect. Robinson, in his Life of “Old Q” (page 143), says:
“Jesse, who was privileged to go over Selwyn’s correspondence, though refusing as a false affectation of delicacy to pass over in complete silence the mysterious reports respecting the true parentage of Selwyn’s infantine charge, asserts that although references occur in the most private papers of Selwyn which unquestionably lead to the supposition that either Lord March (Old Q) or Selwyn was, or, rather, that each severally believed himself to be, the father of the child, yet no certain proofs exist. Further, a letter addressed by Madame Fagnani to Selwyn, July 31st, 1772 (of which Jesse gives a translation), does not express any but the most polite feelings of friendship for the guardian of her child. Lest I may be misrepresented in alluding to a matter that a faithful record of established facts incident to my subject warrants, Madame Fagnani’s letter is inserted in justice to all concerned:
“‘My very dear and respectable Friend,
“‘I cannot find terms sufficiently expressive to thank you for all your kindness, and more particularly for the pains you take in regard to my daughter. I can assure you that nothing is more sensibly felt by me than the proofs of friendship which I have received from you on this occasion. The more I know the world, the more I perceive the difficulty of finding a person who resembles you, and I consider myself the happiest of mortals solely from the happiness I have had in forming your acquaintance and obtaining your friendship.
“‘I am enchanted in learning that my daughter is in good health, though I fear she will suffer much in cutting her teeth. I venture to beg of you to continue to give me tidings of her, as without your kindness in writing to me from time to time, I should have been ignorant for the last three months of the fate of ma petite. My lord,14 on his part, is a little indolent, but I forgive him this little fault on account of the many good qualities of his heart which he has to counterbalance it.
“‘I hope that your health is good. Pray present my compliments to Lord March, and tell him that I expect to hear from him. Preserve your friendship for me, and do not forget the most grateful and affectionate of all your friends, who makes it her duty and pleasure to be,
“‘Your very sincere servant and friend,
“‘Costanza Fagnani.’”
Surely that is a letter which must have been written without any idea that it would ever be published, and it certainly gives no sunlight to clear away the clouds of the story. To add to the mystery of Maria’s parentage, Roscoe, in his book on Selwyn, publishes two letters, one from Dr. Warner, the witty Chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris in 1780, when she was nine years old, in which, writing to Selwyn, he makes no disguise of his belief in the paternity of the Duke. The letter is also interesting as giving some slight idea of the impression which the child created:
“That freshness of complexion I should have great pleasure in beholding. It must add to her charms, and cannot diminish the character, sense and shrewdness which distinguish her physiognomy, and which she possesses in a great degree, with a happy engrafting of a high-bred foreign air upon an English stock. But how very pleasant to me was your honest and naïve confession of the joy your heart felt at hearing her admired. It is, indeed, most extraordinary that a certain person who has great taste (would he had as much nature)15 should not see her with very different eyes from what he does. I can never forget that naïve expression of Madame de Sévigné: ‘Je ne sais comment l’on fait de ne pas aimer sa fille.’”
The other letter to which I allude is one from George Selwyn to Lord Carlisle, written at a time when complaining that he was “le jouet des autres,” and was being annoyed beyond all bearing by the way in which Madame Fagnani behaved to him about Maria, threatening to take her away from him altogether. In that letter he writes: “Hélas! rende mi figlia mis!” That may have meant no more than that the child was very dear to him, and need not necessarily imply that he believed himself to be her father. That he did so believe, however, is pretty certain. He educated her, placed her at school with Mrs. Terry at Campden House in Kensington, then a beautiful old house almost in the country, and having finally succeeded in getting rid of the mother’s importunities, kept her with him until his death in 1791, introducing her into the best society. Gainsborough painted her portrait, as did Sir Joshua Reynolds, but the pictures no longer exist, or, at any rate, are lost.
Of the legal father, the Marquis Fagnani, we hear very little. The only notice I have found of him is in a letter from Selwyn to Lord Carlisle dated June 19th, 1781:
“Belgiojoso told me last night that he had had letters from Milan, by which he was informed that the M. [Marquis] Fagnani was gone quite mad. He has been stone blind for a considerable time, and I take it for granted that both these misfortunes are come from the same cause—that is, mercury. His experiments to ease the one probably occasioned the other. I never hear one syllable from any of the family. I hope in God that I never shall, nor poor Mie Mie either. It grows every day less likely, and yet when I am out of spirits, that dragon, among others, comes across me and distresses me, and the thought of what must happen to that child if I am not alive to protect her.”
George Selwyn was no further molested in the possession of the child. He lived for ten years after that letter was written, and by that time Maria had grown to woman’s estate. She was twenty years of age, and had, under George Selwyn’s will, a snug little fortune of her own, besides expectations, amply to be realized, of further benefits from the Duke of Queensberry. He doubtless took paternal care of the young lady who was to inherit all that he could alienate from the Douglas family. She became one of the greatest heiresses, if not the greatest, of her day.
In her youth Maria Fagnani must have been a very fascinating girl. To George Selwyn, as we have seen, she was as the apple of his eye. He simply adored her. If she had a cold in the head, or an infantile ailment, however trivial, it was torture to him, provoking sympathy from his correspondents, who themselves seemed to be quite under the spell of the delightful child; and as he apparently never destroyed a note, there are plenty of these condolences in the budget of letters published by Jesse. To have won the heart of Thackeray’s Marquess of Steyne, if that fastidious personage ever possessed such an organ, was another feather in her cap, and in her old age we know how tenderly her son and Richard Wallace both loved her.
In 1803 Lord and Lady Yarmouth were detained in France—he interned at Verdun—when war was again declared after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, and their second son, Lord Henry Seymour, was born in Paris in 1805. Scandal declared that he was the son of Junot, Duc d’Abrantès, with whom Lady Yarmouth was very intimate. There is a note in Roscoe, page 8, which says: “She led a life of pleasure (1802-1807), travelling on the Continent with the Marshal Andoche.” That was Junot’s Christian name—but that he never was a marshal was his great grievance against Napoleon.
This Lord Henry is not to be confounded, as is commonly done, with the Lord Henry Seymour, son of the first Marquess, who lived at Norris Castle, near Cowes, and spent a fortune in building the famous sea-wall. The Lord Henry with whom we have to deal was a very eccentric personage. Unlike his brother, Richard Lord Hertford, who was a handsome man, and in his youth a dandy of the 10th Hussars, Lord Henry was singularly ugly, even grotesque. There was in the Rue Lafitte a sketch or caricature of him, which I have seen, in which he was represented as a sort of Quilp, stunted, misshapen, and of prodigious strength. He was a hero of the various Salles d’Armes, a famous fencer and athlete, and the founder, or, at any rate, one of the founders, of the French Jockey Club. A kindly man withal, for by his will, in which his horses appeared as legatees—never to be crossed again—he left the bulk of his fortune to the hospitals of Paris. He died in 1859, three years after the loss of his mother. It used to be said that he never even set foot in England, but that was probably only one of the many fables set afloat about the two brothers. So curious a quartet as the mother, the two sons, and the enigma that was M. Richard, afterwards Sir Richard Wallace, furnished fine food for eavesdroppers and gossip-mongers.
For twenty-eight years after the death of his father in 1842, Richard Lord Hertford lived practically altogether in Paris, passing his time between the Rue Lafitte and Bagatelle, the little toy house on the outskirts of the Bois de Boulogne, which in 1780 was built by Bellanger in a few weeks at the order of the Comte d’Artois (Charles the Tenth), for a bet, in order to entertain Queen Marie Antoinette on a fixed day. The repetition in one of the rooms of the decoration of peacocks with spread tails in the boudoir of the Queen at Versailles was probably a delicate compliment—a little surprise—addressed to her on her visit. When I first saw it some fifteen years ago, although the house was empty and the famous statues had been removed and sold, it was still instinct with a certain eighteenth-century charm. The daintily laid-out grounds were still beautifully kept, and I should hardly have been surprised had I suddenly come upon one of Fragonard’s idylls, with shepherdesses powdered and hooped, and gentle shepherds to match, appropriately dressed in spotless pink and blue silk.
In that house, as in those idylls, there are tears when we remember how soon so many of those pretty, frivolous, powdered heads were to fall into the basket of Monsieur de Paris. Although the famous “Nelly O’Brien” of Sir Joshua, and perhaps Romney’s “Perdita,” were bought by the second Marquess, the foundation of the collection of art treasures which, since the militant ladies three or four years ago took to fighting pictures in the National Gallery, have been stored away in the cellars of Hertford House, was laid by Francis, third Lord Hertford, who bought the glorious “Perseus and Andromeda” by Titian, which the keen eyes of Sir Claude Phillips rescued from a bath-room, where it had been stored away and forgotten, a number of the Dutch pictures and two of the Vandycks. But by far the greater part of it was acquired by his son Richard, the fourth Marquess.
Very important additions, especially in the armoury, were made by Sir Richard Wallace, who was himself a born collector, and had acquired no little experience, both on his own account, and as Lord Hertford’s representative at the great auction sales of Paris. His taste in Oriental art was distinctly bad. He bought a few very inferior specimens of Chinese cloisonné enamel, and two porcelain bowls of the Chia Ching reign, 1796-1821, a period when the art of China reached almost its lowest level, with very inferior mounts by some English bungler. Of these he was inordinately proud. There are two or three very fine céladon vases, with exquisitely chiselled French mounts, in one of the glass cases, but there is no evidence as to who bought them.
The reason of the fourth Lord Hertford’s self-condemned exile in Paris, when he owned five palatial houses in London, besides Ragley, Sudbourne and other places, is not easy to ascertain. There was a story, firmly believed in my youth, and confirmed by Sir Richard Wallace to Sir John Scott, that his father tried to force him into a cruel marriage with the daughter of one of his mistresses, with whom he conspired to make it appear that Lord Yarmouth, as he then was, had compromised the girl. The young man deeply resented this outrage, and took refuge in Paris, where his mother was living. Certainly he had established himself there during his father’s lifetime, for it was as Lord Yarmouth that he bought Bagatelle in 1830, and he did not succeed to the marquisate until twelve years later.
Yriarte’s story that he left London on account of a quarrel with the parish over the rates of his house in Piccadilly, is hardly to be accepted. It is far more likely that he left England in order to free himself from his father, for whom he had no love or respect, and made Paris his home that he might be with his mother, whom he adored. She, with Lord Henry Seymour and Monsieur Richard, lived at No. 1, Rue Taitbout, Lord Hertford’s head-quarters being hard by at No. 2, Rue Lafitte. There he lived the life of an invalid and sybarite, hardly to be called happy in spite of his great possessions—a recluse, the darkness of whose hypochondria was only cheered by his correspondence with Mr. S. Mawson, who was his agent in London for the purchase, restoration and care of pictures, or by some brilliant triumph at Christie’s or in the Paris auction-rooms.
Few people saw him, and still fewer knew him. And yet he had all the qualifications which would have enabled him to shine among his fellows. Yriarte said of him: “Causeur célèbre, très spirituel, très lettré, d’une politesse accomplie, d’un raffinement rare, ses goûts personnels l’éloignaient cependant de la société, et il a vécu toute sa vie dans un milieu inférieur. Il y apportait même avec ses intimes une manière d’être dissimulée, peu conforme avec le cant anglais, et il affichait une sorte de cynisme que les deux ou trois amis intimes qu’il a conservés jusqu’à sa mort regardaient comme son masque d’emprunt.” His wit, if sometimes a little cynical, or even a little risky, was undeniable, and what are called “good stories” of him were the joy of clubs.
That he suffered acutely there can be no doubt, for Sir Richard Wallace once told me that he went with him to Contrexéville—we know what that means—which fifty years ago was a very different place from what it is now, and where all the sordid details of life at that time must have been torture to a man of his exquisite refinement. With public life he had no concern. As a young man he was for a few years in the House of Commons, and on succeeding to the title, he delivered a maiden speech in the House of Lords, and that was all. His one and only participation in affairs was in 1855, when he consented to act as one of the jury at the Exhibition of Paris.
Upon this subject he wrote a characteristic letter to Mawson:
“Only think of my being at the Champs-Elysées every morning at nine o’clock. Hard work for an old fellow who has very different habits. I am obliged to get up every morning between six and seven o’clock to be at the exhibition in proper time to preside over a group composed of four classes. I remain there almost all day doing my work, and as I am not accustomed to this sudden activity, I am very tired, and, in consequence, neglect my own affairs.”
It was, of course, his intimacy with Louis Napoléon which caused him to accept such a violent break in his habits, but he owed the Emperor some gratitude, for it was by his friendly help that he was enabled to add to the grounds of Bagatelle, and again to employ Dasson to copy the famous bureau in the Louvre. Apropos to Bagatelle, Mr. MacColl, in his introduction to the catalogue of pictures at Hertford House, to which I owe great obligation, has a good story. It is said “that two acquaintances asked leave to fight a duel in the grounds. The Marquess politely replied that he had not the slightest objection to their shooting one another, but could not trust their skill so far as to risk his statues.” Perhaps most people would have endorsed his view of the comparative value of masterpieces by Pigalle, Lemoyne and Houdon, and the lives or limbs of the would-be Bobadils. Hardly could they be worth Houdon’s famous “Baigneuse.”
Lord Hertford’s letters to Mawson, which were sold to the trustees by Mr. Mawson’s daughter, show how keenly he watched the great sales both in London and Paris. The English sales he, of course, very rarely attended, and when he did so, it was Mawson who did the bidding, guided by a code of signals given by motions of Lord Hertford’s hat. Nor was he personally more active if he was present at a French sale; he seems to have carried his dislike of all publicity into every phase of life, and to have conducted all his business by agents.
The correspondence with Mawson, of which many extracts are given by Mr. MacColl in his catalogue of the pictures, is interesting, not only as showing Lord Hertford’s great personal interest in art and the extraordinary difference in prices between now and then, but also as revealing at least one charming side in a character which, owing to its eccentricity, was, I honestly believe, cruelly maligned. No mere selfish voluptuary, such as Lord Hertford was described by the evil tongues of those who did not know him, could have inspired the affection which was felt for him by those who did. Sir Richard Wallace more than once spoke to me of him in terms of the strongest respect and affection, and, on the other hand, his gratitude to Sir Richard is expressed with pathetic feeling in the codicil to his will of June 7th, 1850: “To reward as much as I can Richard Wallace for all his care and attention to my dear mother, and likewise for his devotedness to me during a long and painful illness I had in Paris in 1840, and on all other occasions, I give such residue to the said Richard Wallace now living at the Hôtel des Bains, Boulogne-sur-Mer, in France, and whose domicile previous to the Revolution of 1848 was in my mother’s house, Rue Taitbout No. 3, formerly No. 1, absolutely.”
The man who wrote those words had a heart. The letters to Mawson are often worded as if he—Mawson—were conferring the most signal favours upon his employer. The most formal commissions of the earlier days of their connection soon grew to be letters of absolute affectionate gratitude. Lord Hertford had the most complete confidence in the judgment, taste and good faith of his agent. Well might he trust him, for Aladdin was not more faithfully served by the slaves of the ring and the lamp. But it is only a kindly nature and sweet disposition which is capable of dealing with a subordinate without the slightest tinge of patronizing condescension. Two or three examples will suffice to show the nature of the intimacy between the employer and the employed.
The Duke of Buckingham’s sale at Stowe, in 1848, created an immense sensation. I remember it well, for although I was only eleven years old, I used to hear much art talk even in those days between my father and his friends. It is the subject of a characteristic letter from Lord Hertford to Mawson, quoted by Mr. MacColl, dated September 10th, 1848; it was written from Boulogne:
“I intended being at Stowe on the fifteenth, but I find that it is not certain whether I shall be able to attend the sale on that day. I think we must have the ‘Unmerciful Servant,’ by Rembrandt, and hope the price will not be as unmerciful as the subject; but you know that I place all confidence in you, and depend upon your kindness on this occasion.
“The Rembrandt and the Domenichino are my favourites, and I depend upon you for doing the best. Pray have the kindness not to mention to anybody that you buy on my account. I am very anxious my name should not appear. In the event of my being in time for the sale, you would see me there, and my hat would play the same part it has already acted in similar circumstances.”
On September 24th, Lord Hertford wrote to thank Mr. Mawson for the transaction, adding: “I hope and trust we have not paid our pictures much too dear. I am very glad you like them, as I have a very high opinion of your judgment.”
The great Rembrandt was bought for two thousand three hundred pounds. What would it fetch to-day?
In July, 1855, the contents of St. Dunstan’s, in the Regent’s Park, were sold, and were the subject of the enclosed letters:
“Rue Lafitte, Paris.
“July 5th, 1855.
“There are a few things I should like to have at the sale of my father’s villa in the Regent’s Park on the 9th inst.”
“Paris, July 6th, 1855.
“In anticipation that you will have the kindness to attend the sale at the Regent’s Park for me, and having no time to spare, I send you the list of things I wish to have, and that I hope you will have the kindness to buy for me:
“Pictures.
“118. P. Veronese—Not more than £40 or £50.
“120. Ruysdael—What you think it is worth and a little more.
“122. Northcote—‘Portrait of George IV. when Prince of Wales.’ I am anxious to have it.”
“Paris, July 20th, 1855.
“I am extremely obliged to you for having had the kindness to buy my ‘caprices’ at the Regent’s Park sale. You did it all beautifully and just what I wished. I depend on your usual kindness for having the ‘Prince of Wales’’ portrait repaired for me. I rather regret the landscape (i.e., the Ruysdael), though an indifferent picture, because it was in my room when I was a boy a few years ago. What prices people give now for all these old affairs! It is ridiculous!”
Only once does Lord Hertford sound a note of disquiet at the price paid by his commissioner, and that was for the famous portrait by Velasquez of “Don Baltasar Carlos in Infancy,” which fetched £1,680 at the Louis Philippe sale at Christie’s in May, 1853. He writes:
“As for the Velasquez, I do not remember it at all, ainsi je ne puis rien dire. What frightens me is that it appears never to have struck me at the Louvre, as I do not remember it at all. You gave a prodigious price for it, but as I have great confidence in your taste and judgment, as well as in everything else, I dare say I shall like it, and I long to have a look at it, which I hope soon to be able to do.”
It was certainly not a bad investment at the prodigious price.
Other letters are full of the most flattering expressions:
“April 11th, 1856.
“I have only a moment to thank you a thousand times for your great kindness in giving me some details of the Sibthorpe sale.”
“April 23rd, 1856.
“A thousand thanks for your kindness.”
But these expressions are too numerous to quote; still, I will give one more because it really testifies to something like friendship.
Writing from Paris, December 11th, 1863, Lord Hertford says:
“I was in hopes that I should have had the pleasure of seeing you in Brussels something like a couple of months ago. There was a goodish portrait by Rubens that I bought. I shall be delighted to show it you some day, and I hope you will like it.”
Certainly Lord Hertford was a great gentleman, one whom it must have been a pleasure to serve.
It is easy to imagine the sava indignatio of Lord Hertford if he could come to life again and see “the prices which people give now for these old affairs.” Money could hardly have been better invested than it was by himself, his father and his grandfather, when they paid what were deemed wild sums for their works of art. Fancy Sir Joshua’s “Nellie O’Brien” being bought by the second Marquess for £64 1s. at the Caleb Whitefoord sale. Think of the third Marquess buying Vandyck’s “Young Italian Nobleman,” a glorious portrait of the Genoese period, for £409 10s. In the second half of the nineteenth century prices went up madly, but, even so, Lord Hertford, when he gave £1,795 10s. for “Mrs. Carnac,” was purchasing gold for silver. Why, the first state of the mezzotint engraving of that picture by J. R. Smith was sold a few years ago, if I remember aright, for eleven hundred guineas. For the “Strawberry Girl” the price paid at the Rogers sale was £2,205. “No man,” said Sir Joshua, “could ever produce more than half a dozen original works, and that is one of mine.”
Lord Hertford was delighted with the acquisition. He wrote to Mawson:
“You have done admirably, and I return you most sincere thanks for your kindness. The ‘Strawberry,’ is dear. I should be sorry to have a large basket at that price; but it seems it is beautiful, and in this affair, as in others, I have completely followed your good advice, and you have added to my collection pictures I have never seen, which shows, more than words can express, the great and friendly confidence I have in you. I am sure I shall be delighted with what you have acquired. I am very sorry your honourable name was not coupled with our ‘Girl’ when she was knocked down. It is not fair that you should not enjoy the little glory of having secured in a gallant manner the gem of this interesting sale, so you are at full liberty to use my name with yours respecting this painting. Was it not an immense price? I don’t regret it at all; on the contrary, I am delighted to have so fine a Sir Joshua, as I am extremely fond of them, and they cannot always be had when wanted.”
Another notable picture bought at the Rogers sale was the “Don Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School,” by Velasquez, for which Mawson paid £1,210 1s. A wonderful bargain at the Stowe sale was Murillo’s “Assumption of the Virgin,” knocked down for £58 16s.
I have no space to go into details, but we can form some idea of the value of these purchases when we see that Lord Hertford bought five of the very finest Sir Joshuas for £7,974 5s. The six finest Rembrandts cost him £5,453 15s.; five of the best Watteaus, £2,037. What superb investments—to speak of no others!
It is something of an anti-climax to find Lord Hertford giving £4,000, and Sir Richard Wallace £2,400, for works by Ary Scheffer. Well might Lord Hertford write to Mawson in 1853: “You know, fancy has a great deal to do with pictures as with anything else.” £1,680—a “prodigious price” for a Velasquez! £4,000—given without hesitation for a picture by that most namby-pamby of artists, Ary Scheffer!
The desire to surround himself with beautiful works of art was one of the crimes laid to the charge of Lord Hertford. He was extravagant, he was selfish. As to the first of these accusations, the prices which he paid were surely no more than what was permissible to a man with an income of nearly a quarter of a million sterling; and, as I have shown, from the mere investor’s point of view the money was well laid out. As for the cry of selfishness, what could be more natural than that a man endowed with the most refined taste and judgment, debarred by health no less than by inclination, from the more active relaxations in which rich men find pleasure—the turf, sport of all kinds, hunting, and, of late years certainly, shooting, should be captivated by the excitement of the auction-rooms. It was in them that he found the pleasures of the chase. He was deprived of much, and it were scurvy treatment to reproach him for what harmed no living being at the time, but has ended by giving joy to millions of his countrymen. The amusement with which he solaced long days and years of physical pain, aching under a complaint which notoriously affects the spirits perhaps more than any other, has borne fruit for which we should be grateful, even though it be only indirectly that we owe it to him. He might fairly have written in his will like Bacon: “For my name and memory, I leave it to men’s charitable speeches and to foreign nations, and to the next age.” We are “the next age”; it behoves us to be not only just but generous. To our shame we have been neither.
There can be very few men now alive who knew Richard Lord Hertford personally. From Lord Esher, who as a youth did know him, I have a letter, which he very kindly allows me to quote, giving more than one of those little intimate touches which lend a spice to narration. But it does more than that. It furnishes direct evidence of the truth of what I have written about the calumnies by which Lord Hertford’s character was poisoned by people for whom his chief crime was that he did not choose to know them. Is it likely, is it even possible, that two ladies in a high position like Lord Esher’s grandmother and mother should have visited him in the Rue Lafitte and in the much-talked-of Bagatelle had those vile slanders been true? The story of Sir Richard Wallace’s birth and upbringing is conclusive.
Let the letter speak for itself.
“Roman Camp, Callander.
“March 17th, 1916.
“My dear Redesdale,
“I remember being taken, by my grandmother, to tea with Richard Marquis of Hertford. He lived at the corner of the Rue Lafitte, and his fine rooms were crowded with objets d’art—although not smothered in clocks, as they afterwards became when Wallace and Scott occupied them. Everything was most sumptuous, but I recollect perfectly that when the tea was brought in by a very solemn major-domo, whose long grey whiskers I can see to this day, Lord Hertford went to a beautiful Louis XVI. secrétaire, which he unlocked, and brought out the sugar-basin, which he carefully put away again after tea. (Lord Hertford was a very handsome man, but frail and delicate.) Not long afterwards my mother and I were invited to spend an afternoon at Bagatelle, where Richard Wallace entertained us, as Lord Hertford was engaged—so he sent word—in Paris. The gardens were beautiful—as they still are—but the house was not so full as the Rue Lafitte.
“My grandfather, Colonel Gurwood, who had served through the Peninsular War in the Light Division, was given a captaincy in the 10th Hussars in 1814, and Richard Seymour joined the regiment when he was seventeen years old and ten years’ junior to my grandfather, who became much attached to him. This friendship lasted through life.
“I possess three volumes of bound letters to Colonel Gurwood from Lord Yarmouth, by which name Lord Hertford was know from 1822 to 1842, when he succeeded his father, Francis, the third Marquess of Steyne of ‘Vanity Fair.’
“These letters are interesting, as they contain many references to the collection of bric-à-brac which Lord Yarmouth and Wallace, his secretary, had already commenced to form. Many fine things which belonged to my grandfather, and are now the property of my sister, were purchased by Lord Yarmouth and Wallace or by their advice. In return, my grandfather always bought for Lord Yarmouth his riding and driving horses. He used to send them to Paris, where Lord Yarmouth lived with his mother, Lady Hertford, Maria Fagnani.
“Many times have I heard my grandmother and my mother tell the story of Sir Richard Wallace’s adoption by Lord Hertford. Wallace was the son of Lord Yarmouth by a girl, Agnes Jackson by name, who was a kind of fille du régiment of the 10th Hussars, and young Seymour made a home for her in Paris while the liaison lasted. There Wallace was born, and when Seymour parted from his mistress, the child was placed with a concierge in the Rue de Clichy, where he ran wild under a porte cochère until he was about six years old.
“My grandfather, who had known Agnes Jackson and all about her short-lived liaison with Lord Yarmouth, hunted up the boy, and finding he was a smart child, showed him to Lady Hertford, Maria Fagnani, and induced her to bring him up, much against the inclination of her son.
“There is, and never was, the slightest foundation for the absurd legend that Maria Fagnani was Sir Richard Wallace’s mother, although the writer in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography,’ who cannot possibly know anything of the facts, adopts it.
“One of the reasons sometimes given for assuming that Lord Hertford could not be Wallace’s father was that there was not more than eighteen or nineteen years between their ages. On the other hand, it was overlooked that Maria Fagnani was very nearly, if not quite, fifty years of age when Wallace was born. Anyway, I have no doubt whatever that the facts are as I have stated them.
“They were corroborated, as far as I am concerned, by the evidence of Madame O—— de B——, a lady who for forty years lived on the deuxième étage of the Rue Lafitte and in a beautiful villa, called St. James, close to Bagatelle.
“She was a lady of irreproachable life, and virtue as stern as that of Madame de Maintenon, whom she resembled in many ways. I inherited some of the gifts which she had received from Lord Hertford; among them a fine ‘Garter George,’ which belonged to Prince Charles Edward, and was acquired by Francis, third Marquis, from the collection of Cardinal York.
“It was destined for my grandfather and his children, and Madame O—— fulfilled her obligation.
“I perfectly remember Sir Richard Wallace’s son, whose liaison with a French girl bitterly offended Sir Richard, although, as he was told by the young man when the quarrel was irremediable, he had only followed his father’s example.
“Young Wallace came once or twice to London after 1870. He died of typhoid fever when still a young man. But Wallace would never recognize his son’s children or their mother; the former were amply provided for by Lady Wallace. Madame O—— de B—— had no children of her own, but she showed great kindness to her connections de la main gauche. I perfectly remember the advent of Sir John Scott into the Wallace household, and the subsequent course of a lifelong devotion to the interests of his employers that deserved and obtained its reward.
“There is no need to enter into the story of Lady Wallace, a very refined, shy and excellent lady, although the facts were well known to my family.”
“My French relations were intimate with Lord Hertford, Sir Richard Wallace and Sir John Scott, over a period extending from 1817 to Scott’s death.”
“Yours ever,
“Esher.”
In a further letter to me Lord Esher very justly calls attention to the remarkable likeness between Lord Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace. The busts at Hertford House demonstrate this.
Richard, fourth Marquess of Hertford, who never married, died at Paris on the 25th of August, 1870. His successor in the title, Sir Francis (or, as his familiars called him, “Franco”) Seymour, as was natural, hurried over to Paris, not yet beleaguered by the Prussians, to look after his interests. He was accompanied by his eldest son and his solicitor. The fortune at stake in lands and money was great, but, if the value of the works of art be taken into account, enormous even in these days of plutocratic dominion. The real estate and the personalty, taken together, would have reached a sum “beyond the dreams of avarice;” indeed, by comparison, the boilers and vats of Mr. Thrale would have represented no more than a modest competence.16
It must have been a rude shock for the new Lord Hertford when the will was read at Bagatelle after the funeral, and he found that, barring the settled estates, which without the money were almost a white elephant, there was nothing for him. The wealth which had given his two predecessors such power that, in spite of manifest drawbacks, they were propitiated with the Garter, had vanished like Alnaschar’s dream, and he was left with the unredeemed anxieties and responsibilities of a country squire. Equally, it must have been a startling shock for Sir Richard to find that he was the heir to all that wealth.
With the exception of a handsome property which Lord Hertford bequeathed to his cousin, Sir Hamilton Seymour, the famous ex-Ambassador, or rather Minister, to Russia, practically everything was left to the future Sir Richard Wallace.
Sir Richard (I call him “Sir” for convenience’ sake, though he was not created a baronet until the following year) lost no time in turning his newly-acquired wealth to good account. He was one of the most generous men that ever lived. Bravely he stood by Paris and the French in their troubles, started ambulances, founded the Hertford Hospital for poor Englishmen, and set money flowing like water in aid of all sufferers by the war. His charities in France were boundless, and continued throughout his life, and indeed beyond it. But he felt it his duty to come to England, and for thirteen years represented Lisburn in Parliament—Lisburn, which he made the headquarters of his vast Irish domain.
In recognition of the great services which he had rendered to the English in Paris during the siege he was created a baronet in 1871, when he married a French lady, Mademoiselle Castelnau, with whom he had lived for many years, and by whom he had one son who was an officer in the French Army. That son, now long since dead, was the great sorrow of Sir Richard’s life. The breach between them was irreparable, and it made the father miserable. He told a friend of mine, an Italian gentleman, who was breakfasting with him one day and found him in a state of utter dejection, how it irked him that people should look upon him as one of the happiest of men, when in truth he was the most wretched. The sympathy of a good son was the solitary thing wanting, and that he never had.
One friend he had in Mr. Scott, afterwards Sir John, who became his private secretary, and whose affection stood to him almost in lieu of that of a son. Sir John’s father was a distinguished physician, a great personal friend of Sir Richard’s. One day this gentleman’s father-in-law, Mr. Murray, was calling upon him, shortly after his inheritance of Lord Hertford’s possessions, and he happened to say that he was badly in need of a private secretary, and did not know whom to choose. The post would require some unusual qualifications—amongst others, a perfect knowledge of French. Mr. Murray said that perhaps his grandson, a very young barrister just called, might fulfil the conditions. Sir Richard jumped at the offer, and the young man was sent to be looked at. The result was that he found favour in Sir Richard’s eyes, and, after probation, was appointed. No happier choice could have been made, no more devoted and faithful friend could have been found; he remained with Sir Richard until his death at Paris in 1890, and continued to keep watch over Lady Wallace until her end came seven years later.
The nation hardly knows how much it owes to the chivalrous self-effacement of Sir John Scott. When Lady Wallace, to whom Sir Richard had left everything, was about to make her will, she was anxious to bequeath her whole property to Sir John in gratitude for the devotion with which he had managed her affairs and cared for her interests. Sir John persuaded her that it would be a good thing if she were, at any rate, to leave the contents of Hertford House to the nation, and, moreover, that if he were to inherit the entire fortune, there might be some suspicion of undue influence. If, on the other hand, she gave her chief art treasures to England, her memory would be venerated as perhaps the country’s greatest benefactress, while he could gratefully and honourably accept whatever else she might be pleased to bequeath to him. The lady followed his advice. He was a large-minded and generous man, and though, as it turned out, he became the heir to a great fortune, it must never be forgotten that he might have inherited property worth at that time, according to the late Mr. Charles Davis’s computation, at least seven millions sterling, and now, in view of the amazing rise in the value of all works of art, perhaps as much more. It was a most courageous and loyal piece of self-sacrifice. One day, when I said this to a man who was inclined to scoff, his answer was: “Yes, but look at the Death Duties that he would have had to pay.” He could have met those by the sale of half a dozen pictures. Nothing, to my mind, can detract from the patriotic wisdom and generosity of Sir John’s conduct.
When the greatest collection of art treasures that ever was in any private hands became the property of the nation, the next question was how and where to house it. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, and he appointed a Committee, of which he asked me to be a member, to consider the matter. Lord Lansdowne was our chairman, and, after careful discussion, we came to the conclusion that the best plan to adopt would be, if possible, to purchase the freehold of Hertford House from the Portman Estate, and house the collection in its old home, turning the bedrooms on the first floor and the stables into galleries.
There was an idea favoured by Sir Edward Poynter that it would be wise to separate some of the pictures—the Spanish paintings, for example—and place them in the National Gallery; but that scheme would have been against the provisions of the will, which insisted upon nothing being taken from, and nothing added to, the collection as it stood, so the proposal could not be entertained. Sir Edward would have wished the whole collection placed in a building to be erected adjoining the National Gallery; this was also overruled.
Upon this subject Lord Esher writes:
“The Committee to which you allude was appointed under a Treasury Minute of the 3rd of May, 1897.
“The opponents of the Hertford House scheme, headed by Sir Edward Poynter, made a very determined resistance. Lord Chilston was First Commissioner of Works, and I, as you know, occupied the post which you had filled with so much distinction and permanent advantage to the nation.
“We, who were fighting for the retention of Hertford House, owe a heavy debt of gratitude to King Edward, then Prince of Wales, who, with unerring instinct in such matters, grasped at once the historical and æsthetic advantages of keeping the collections intact and in situ.
“We were also largely indebted to Sir Francis Mowatt, then Secretary to the Treasury, who afforded us unfailing and generous support.
“The purchase of the leasehold and freehold interest in the house cost £74,620.
“The structural alterations about £28,000, and electric light, heating and painting, £259 16s.
“In August, 1898, at your instance, I took the decorative work, to a very great extent, out of the hands of the Office of Works’ contractor. I remember that the paper used in the large picture gallery, the selection of which had given us a great deal of trouble, was copied from a piece of Italian silk which we borrowed from Bertram, who lived in Dean Street, Soho. Alfred Rothschild then, as always, took a deep interest in Hertford House, and his advice was invaluable to us all.”
A Board of Trustees was then appointed, consisting of Lord Rosebery, as chairman, who gave way to Sir John Scott, Sir Edward Malet, Sir John Stirling Maxwell, Sir Arthur Ellis, Mr. Alfred de Rothschild and myself. Mr.—now Sir—Claude Phillips, that distinguished connoisseur and critic, was appointed keeper. The Office of Works constructed the new Galleries according to our plan, and a Committee of the Trustees undertook the arrangement of the collection. Sir John Scott, Mr. Alfred de Rothschild and myself, with Sir Claude Phillips, worked day after day for many months, evolving kosmos out of a chaos of packing-cases. It was a huge task, but when the Galleries were finally thrown open, we were rewarded by a chorus of approbation, and the praise of foreign critics was no less loud than that of our own friends. Our leading idea was, as far as possible, to avoid the museum aspect, and to show the pictures, clocks, furniture, porcelain, etc., as the collection of a great connoisseur set out as if he were still living in the house. The trustees were fortunate in securing the generous co-operation of Sir Guy Laking in the arrangement and cataloguing of the armour. It may readily be believed that it was no small sorrow to us when, owing to the war, all our work had to be undone in order to stow away our treasures in safety. I, for one, can hardly expect to live to see the reawakening of the old glory. I can only hope that when that time comes something of the former order may be restored.
One morning—it was the 17th of January, 1912—I received an urgent message by telephone, begging me to go to Hertford House at once. Sir John Scott had died there suddenly. When I reached Manchester Square, I found him lying in the Trustees’ room. He had been discussing business with Mr. MacColl, who had succeeded Sir Claude Phillips as keeper, when all of a sudden he began to have a difficulty in breathing. He said it was nothing, but he grew worse. Doctors were sent for, but there was nothing to be done. That large-hearted man died in the house where he had lived so long, and surrounded by all the beautiful things which he loved and which he had been the means of securing for the nation when he might have had them for himself. The Government had made him a baronet. Lord Rosebery, with a keen appreciation of what he had done, said to me in righteous jest: “They have made him a baronet when they ought to have made him a duke.”