Coronation Summer Read online

  All in his scarlet gown and goulden chain.

  The great Lord May’r, too, sat in his chair too,

  But mighty sarious, looking fit to cry,

  For the Earl of Surrey, all in his hurry

  Throwing the thirteens, hit him in his eye.

  Then there was preaching, and good store of speeching,

  With Dukes and Marquises on bended knee;

  And they did splash her with raal Macasshur,

  And the Queen said, ‘Ah! then, thank ye all for me!’ —

  Then the trumpets braying, and the organ playing,

  And sweet trombones with their silver tones,

  But Lord Rolle was rolling; — ’twas mighty consoling

  To think his Lordship did not break his bones.

  Then the crames and the custards, and the beef and mustard,

  All on the tombstones like a poultherer’s shop,

  With lobsters and white-bait, and other swate-meats,

  And wine, and nagus, and Imparial Pop!

  There was cakes and apples in all the Chapels,

  With fine polonies, and rich mellow pears,

  Och! the Count Von Strogonoff, sure he got prog enough,

  The sly ould Divil, underneath the stairs.

  Then the cannons thunder’d, and the people wonder’d,

  Crying, ‘God save Victoria, our Royal Queen!’

  Och! if myself should live to be a hundred,

  Sure it’s the proudest day that I’ll have seen!

  And now I’ve ended, what I pretended,

  This narration splendid in swate poe-thry,

  Ye dear bewitcher, just hand the pitcher,

  Faith, it’s meself that’s getting mighty dhry!

  Having come to an end, I paused. Emily, who had made several attempts to interrupt me, but had been checked by an occasional look from me, now burst forth into a torrent of speech.

  ‘Heavens!’ she cried. ‘I am more puzzled than ever. The vulgar creature’s account of the procession is perfectly exact. Do you not remember, Fanny, how we admired Prince Esterhazy, so covered with pearls that one could have said he was a knight in coat of mail of jewels?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ I replied, ‘his narrative appears to tally exactly with our own impression of that eventful day. But how ignorant the fellow is! He calls the Prince de Putbus the Prince of Potboys. Surely Mr. Tom Ingoldsby could not be guilty of such a solecism.’

  ‘And surely his brother-in-law’s man, that Irish servant of Charles Seaforth’s, could never have got into the Abbey. I must ask Tom Ingoldsby about it when we next meet. But Fanny, does it not bring it all back to you, that mad, delightful month we spent in London, in the summer of the Coronation, when I through you and you through me became acquainted with our future husbands.’

  ‘We were indeed wild young things then, Emily,’ said I with a sigh. ‘How we expected to find one of our dear Boz’s characters at every street corner! How we thrilled over the great balloon! How we squeezed and jammed to get to our seats for the procession! How very angry my dear Papa was when we went to see Fanny Elsler dance!’

  ‘And who would have thought then,’ said Emily, almost mournfully, ‘that but two years later I would be engaged to be married to your brother, and you would be the mother of your dear little Victoria, who will doubtless be by no means the last.’

  Provoked at this way of alluding to my future hopes, I was about to retort with one of my more crushing remarks, when a manly footstep in the passage outside caused us both to start.

  ‘Give me the book,’ cried Emily in a whisper, ‘and I will keep it at the Rectory, where Mr. Darnley will never see it.’

  ‘No indeed,’ cried I in my turn, indignantly. ‘It is not your book, Emily. Give it to me.’

  Another regrettable incident then occurred. Emily retained two pages (luckily they were only the preface) in her grasp, while I thrust the book, mangled but my own, into a large bag of tapestry work in which I carried my sewing; sewing, I may say, of a minute nature, and undertaken with a view to the future rather than the present.

  Mr. Darnley then entered. It is not his habit to make use of the library before dinner except on rare occasions such as the visit of an old college friend for whose company he has no particular wish. On such occasions I have known him leave the entertainment of the visitor to me while he, under pretext of estate business, wiles away an hour or so before dinner in perusing the Athenaeum or the Spectator. Often have I found one of these two periodicals laid with seeming carelessness over one of the Comic Novels, or some other light work. Mr. Darnley’s appearance was therefore a warrant that something out of the ordinary had happened.

  ‘Well, my love,’ were his words to me, after he had greeted Emily, ‘what next, do you think?’

  I replied that I was really at a loss; as indeed I was, for anything might happen next.

  ‘What would you say if I told you that there is talk of the railway being brought to Dover within the next few years?’

  Neither of us spoke, for it is very difficult to foretell my dear Henry’s views on any subject of public interest, and by speaking too soon, before he has fully made up his mind to which side he will give his support, one is often the innocent cause of his uttering sentiments foreign to his real nature.

  ‘Well, Mrs. Darnley,’ said Henry, turning to the table on which lay the fatal parcel of books, ‘have you nothing to say on a matter that may gravely affect us both?’

  His harsh words so wounded me that I could not utter a word.

  Emily, who is a devoted friend, though sometimes provoking past all belief, seeing my nervous condition, nobly came to the rescue.

  ‘Really, Henry,’ she cried, ‘you do not expect Fanny, especially in her present condition, to ride in one of those railway coaches? You will be saying next that the railway is to come through your property.’

  ‘I have not yet said that it would not,’ replied Mr. Darnley, who had by now undone the parcel and was looking through the books, comparing them with a paper that he held in his hand. ‘The bookseller has not sent a copy of a book that I have heard highly recommended, The Ingoldsby Legends. I confess I am curious to see whether it really has any connexion with our friends at Tappington Everard. I was sure I had ordered it, and here is a note of the books in my own hand, but I do not see it in the parcel. I will write to London directly, and when the book arrives, you, my Fanny, shall read it to me in the evenings.’

  At these words I could no longer restrain my feelings and burst into silent tears. Emily, like the mother bird who flutters before the sportsman to distract his attention from her offspring, cried out,

  ‘What, Henry! Do you mean that you will let the railway come anywhere near Tapton? Are we to see our fields cut up, our woods burnt by the sparks from those hideous tall chimneys? Will you indeed allow the railway contractors and their horrid Irish navigators to come to this neighbourhood? Think of the effect on the lower orders. We have had trouble enough in the village with Chartists, though I must say that the Wesleyans cause very little annoyance, but what will it be now? Instead of going to church, or even chapel, on Sunday, they will drink, gamble, and probably they will poach your pheasants. And as for the village girls and the servant maids, we shall have the workhouse full of natural children in no time.’

  Mr. Darnley contented himself with looking steadily at Emily.

  ‘Nay, you cannot so put me down,’ she continued. ‘Had you visited the poor as I have done in my father’s parish, you would know the truth of what I say.’

  ‘You are speaking, Emily,’ said Mr. Darnley with admirable temper, ‘of subjects beyond you. If this railway runs through my property, I shall be well compensated, and as I have among my friends several highly influential gentlemen in the city, it is probable that I shall also obtain shares in the projected undertaking, and be able to support my family in even more comfort than I have hitherto been able to give them.’

  ‘Lassy me!’ exclaimed Emily, who certai
nly does use the oddest expressions. ‘Then you can put a new kitchen range into the Rectory, for I am sure we need one. Farewell, my dearest Fanny.’

  Before Henry could ring for the footman to show her out, she had glided from the room, and we shortly saw her walking across the terrace towards the Rectory.

  ‘I sometimes feel,’ said Mr. Darnley, ‘that Emily is hardly the wife for a young rector. But doubtless your brother Ned will form and improve her character. Why these many my love? Come, let us go upstairs, for it is nearly time to dress for dinner. I will carry your work-bag myself.’

  My feelings as Henry picked up the bag, repository of my guilty secret, may be imagined. Luckily he suspected nothing, and when alone in my room I locked it safely away in my desk.

  A few weeks later Mr. Darnley was obliged to go to Canterbury on some business arising from those wretched riots of two years ago. During his absence I took the opportunity of reading Mr. T. Ingoldsby’s book, and so vividly did the poem before-mentioned bring back to me the events of the summer of 1838, that I determined to employ my leisure in writing what I could recollect of that year. Luckily the letters which I had written to my dear Mamma had been preserved and sent to me after her lamented death, so I am able to refresh my memory from them. When I think of all the letters I wrote during that period I wonder that I was not ruined in steel nibs. But then anyone who was anyone could get their letters franked. Now that franking has been abolished, the exchange of letters between friends and relatives in various parts of the country will undoubtedly decrease greatly. It is true that there is the new Penny Postage, but there is something low about a thing that every farmer’s daughter can afford.

  No, my days of letter writing are past, and I shall now employ myself in writing down for my dear Victoria, namesake of our young Queen, though personally unknown to Her Majesty, a mother’s memories of the great Coronation year of 1838.

  Chapter Two — I Visit the Metropolis

  Let me first give a brief account of myself and my family, as it will be through their eyes that this period of history will be seen. My father, Mr. Harcourt, was at that period a gentleman of independent means, living in Norfolk. Here, with the help of my mother, whose weak state of health, however, prevented her from taking any very active part in our education, nor would my father have permitted it even had her health been more robust, myself, my elder brother Ned, and my younger brother William passed our childish days. My parents lived in handsome style and no expense was spared in our education. My brother Ned was at this time, that is in the year 1838, in his third year at Magdalene College, Cambridge. My brother William was at Eton and about to proceed to Christ Church, Oxford, and subsequently to study law. My father had wished to send him to Magdalene, to follow Ned, but William, a youth of determined character, had acquired some prejudice against Cambridge and said that rather than enter that haunt of learning he would go to London, to that very low Radical place, the new London University. At this defiance of his authority my dear father was quite beside himself with rage. At length more reasonable counsels prevailed. It was discovered that my father thought that William, by entering the University of Oxford, was bound sooner or later to be perverted to the Romish faith, but on finding that in order to matriculate William must subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, his fury abated, much to all our comfort. For, as he very truly observed, at least at Oxford William would not have to move among Dissenters, and as for the Wesleyans that go there, they are quite a gentlemanly kind of person, and staunch supporters of our Constitution. Thus Passion’s reign came to an end and Peace, the smiling and serene, spread her downy wings in our home.

  As for myself, by the time I was seventeen I had so well succeeded in keeping six successive governesses in their places, that my parents, anxious for my good, resolved to send me to a boarding-school for a year. The school chosen was Miss Twinkleton’s school at Cloisterham, and here it was that I had the good fortune to meet Emily Dacre, motherless daughter and only child of the aged Rector of Tapton, also in the county of Kent. With Emily I formed a bond of attachment that has never weakened, though it has sometimes been sorely tried by Emily’s provoking ways. It was while at school that the overpowering news of the death of our Sailor King and the accession of the young Queen Victoria, a girl scarcely older than ourselves, was received. How vividly were our imaginations affected by this event! How often did we again enact the scene at Kensington Palace, myself in my dressing-gown taking the part of the young Queen, and others of my companions assuming for the nonce the characters of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain, until Authority intervened and stopped these representations.

  Emily and I vowed solemnly that in the following year, when the Coronation was to take place, we would give our respective parents, or in her case parent, no rest till we had persuaded them to take us to London to see that festivity.

  When I went home at Christmas, a young lady prepared to enter the world, I therefore spared no pains to persuade my father and mother that a visit to the metropolis was but suitable to people in their position. To my mother the hope of visiting William at Eton, and receiving a visit in London from her beloved Ned were attractions enough. Alas, that she could not see these wishes fulfilled! My father, like every father that I have ever heard of, made an outcry about the cost of such an expedition, but an appeal to his loyalty was not in vain, and the thought of seeing William at Eton, where he himself had been, was not unpleasant. My dear Emily, who was visiting us for Christmas, added her entreaties to mine, and as she had frequently visited London with her father, who held a senior cardinal’s stall in St. Paul’s Cathedral, she undertook to procure lodgings for us. All was thus in train for our visit.

  Had I known then that my dear papa was spending the capital of his considerable fortune and would, after my mother’s death, have barely enough left to live on himself, with no prospect of doing anything for Ned or William, I might not have pressed him so fervently to take us to town. But who can foretell the future? Who could have foreseen that Ned, brought up as the heir to a fortune, would find himself obliged to take orders? Not that the prospect was in any way unpleasant to him, for a country life is quite in his style, and I daresay he will perform the duties at Tapton at least as well as anyone else. Luckily he is to have a curate who will take the major part of the duties, and there is so far but little dissent or poverty in the village. William, having, much to my father’s annoyance, come into a little money at the death of his mother, is continuing his studies for the Law and is spoken of as likely to do well. He intends to enter a firm in Doctors’ Commons, and it will doubtless solace his hours of study to remember that it is here that our dear Boz makes Alfred Jingle procure the marriage licence to marry the old maid Rachael Wardle. But I may say that my dear father would never have denied himself anything on which he had set his heart, so we should doubtless have gone to London in any case.

  As for myself, my dear Mr. Darnley has done everything that is handsome, just as though I had come to him with the large portion that he might have been justified in expecting, and has made a very good settlement on me in the event of his predeceasing me. My brothers will always be welcome here, and as for Papa, though it would be my pleasure as well as my duty to receive him, the expense of the journey is luckily a consideration which, combined with his gout, as I said before, will probably keep him at a distance where affection can still hold her sway, unchecked by propinquity.

  The winter and spring passed rapidly away. My parents took me to Norwich from time to time to see the actors at the Theatre Royal, or to balls given for or by the military at the Assembly Rooms. The drive of fourteen miles to our home in the early hours of the morning was not too long when enlivened by the remembrance of an arm pressing my waist, or a flower from my bouquet begged for and bestowed. My mother, alas, was usually unable to attend these festive gatherings, as the illness which finally reft her from us and which prevented her from accompanying us to London was already in possessio
n of her frame.

  Nor did I, in the midst of these distractions, neglect my studies. My voice, which though not powerful is said to be sweet and true, was exercised in our English melodies, for my father would hear of no other, while what slight talent I may have had for water-colour drawing was fostered under a pupil of the celebrated Cotman, one of whose later drawings, a view in Norfolk near my old home, was purchased by Mr. Darnley and now hangs in my morning room. I flatter myself that my own efforts, though they are but those of one of the weaker sex, do not compare unfavourably with the works of the professional artist.

  It was decided that we were to take rooms for six weeks in London, from the middle of May to the end of June. Emily had procured for us, on very reasonable terms, apartments over a shop in Queen Street, Mayfair. My father had intended to take myself and my mother to London, but a fortnight before our departure a blow fell on me. My dear mother was overcome by a more than usually violent access of her malady, and all was in confusion. My father sent a groom on his best horse to Norwich to require the attendance of the physician who usually attended us, but he had been called away to a confinement at some distance, and could not possibly reach us till the following day. When the groom returned with the message my father flew into such a transport of rage as frightened the poor fellow almost out of his wits. D—d blockhead was the least harsh of the words he used, and indeed he went so far as to threaten the unlucky groom with the treadmill, being a respected county magistrate.

  ‘Papa,’ I cried, for I had been listening with horror to the painful scene, and my poor mother’s sufferings were becoming every moment more acute, ‘why do you not send for Mr. Perch, the apothecary in the village? He is a very respectable person, and has frequently attended Lady D.’s upper servants. At such a moment we cannot stand on ceremony.’

  My dear father then made use of an expression relating to Lady D. and her servants and a certain sable gentleman, which I will not repeat. After he had stormed and raged and dismissed all the servants, who were, however, well used to what they called the master’s tantrums, he at length consented to send for Mr. Perch, who after examining my mother, announced that her indisposition was of a kind that would make it impossible for her to visit London without grave risk. The Norwich physician confirmed this view, I resigned myself to the inevitable disappointment, and shutting myself up in my room wrote a long letter to my dear Emily, acquainting her with the sad news. My mother, however, displayed her usual sweet unselfishness and insisted that my father and myself should go to town without her, provided that Emily’s father would consent to allow her to be our guest in Queen Street, so that we might act as mutual chaperones. Thanking my mother warmly I hastily added a postscript to my letter to Emily, acquainting her with the change in our plans and imploring her to obtain her father’s consent. Within a few days I received a reply from her in the affirmative.