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CHAPTER V
ROYAL AUTOGRAPHS PAST AND PRESENT—THE COPY-BOOKS OF KINGS AND PRINCES

Some unpublished specimens of the handwriting of Royal Personages present and past

The autographs of Royalty have, for more than a century, formed a favourite subject for collection, not only in the United Kingdom, but on the Continent and in the United States, where I am told the finest examples of this fascinating branch of the autograph cult (Mr. Adrian Joline calls it frankly a hobby) are to be found. Royal letters and signatures figure conspicuously and plentifully in all books of facsimiles, but the young collector would do well to study carefully two volumes devoted exclusively to this particular branch of calligraphy.[24] Examples of Royal handwriting abound in both the Record Office and the British Museum, although a good many were either turned into jelly, burned, or otherwise wasted in consequence of such regrettable transactions as the "waste-paper" deals between the officials of Somerset House and Mr. Jay, and those of the new India Office and the pulping-mills.[25] It is clear that Royal autographs may be looked for in all sorts of out-of-the-way and unexpected places. Henry VIII.'s love-letters to Anne Boleyn are said to be hidden away in the Vatican, and Sir H. Maxwell Lyte found the sign manuals of monarchs amongst the dÉbris of the Belvoir hay-loft.

In no class of autographs is the rise of prices and increase of value so remarkable as in those now under discussion. I cannot precisely ascertain the present worth of the signature of Richard II., with whom the English series is supposed to commence, but M. NoËl Charavay tells me that a document signed by John II., the first of the French Royal signers, would fetch £10. Before me lie some interesting details as to the value of Royal autographs in 1827, and a group of catalogues, containing a good many desirable items of this kind, issued in London between 1875 and 1885.

It will be instructive to note the prices which choice specimens fetched at these comparatively recent periods. In The Archivist of December, 1889, we are informed that according to the price-currents of 1827 the autographs of "Elizabeth the adored of her people" are worth £2 2s., while Charles I., "worshipped as a martyr," commands the same price. Charles II., with his Queen, Catharine of Braganza, thrown in, fetches no more than £1 5s. James II. is worth £3 8s., owing to a limited supply. William III. yields less than half that figure, but a whole letter of Queen Mary was knocked down for £3 10s.

The expert of this excellent journal continues: "George I., 'a heavy, dull German gentleman,' is reckoned worth only £1 1s., and George II., I am ashamed to say it, only 14s. Our beloved monarch George III., being well remembered, rises to £3 10s. George IV., the most complete gentleman of his age,[26] rises above all his Royal predecessors and reaches £4 14s. 6d.; it is also curious to see how so great a king and so fine a gentleman wrote when he was a boy and to possess a leaf of his copybook. Here I fain would conclude this estimate of British rulers, but truth compels me to add that Oliver Cromwell is deemed worth £5 15s. 6d. French kings are sadly degraded. Five Grands Monarques, among whom are Francis I. and Louis XIV., are estimated at the average price of 4s. 1½d. each; Henry IV. advanced to 14s., but Napoleon, in the very teeth of French legitimacy, reaches 20s. higher. A French Queen, Anne of Austria, is worth 7s., while Josephine, the shadow of a French empress, is worth more than five times this sum. A great and wise Emperor of Russia, and the brave King of Prussia, require the aid of a French prince, an English princess, and seven English peers to push them up to 16s." These were indeed halcyon days for the collectors, but at that period they were few and far between. Mr. William Upcott, the doyen of modern autograph collectors, reigned almost supreme at "Autograph Cottage," Islington, his only possible competitors being Mr. Young and Mr. John Dillon.

In the mid "eighteen-seventies" Mr. John Waller, the conscript father of London autograph-dealers, was about to move from 58, Fleet Street to Harley House, Artesian Road, Westbourne Grove. A little later the late Mr. Frederick Barker began to issue catalogues of autograph letters and historical documents from Rowan Road, Brook Green. He became the agent of Mr. William Evarts Benjamin, now the doyen of the autograph merchants in New York, then residing at 744, Broadway. In Mr. Waller's first catalogues I find the following "Royalties": Charles II. Royal Sign Manual, 7s. 6d.; letter from Charles II. of Spain to William III., 4s. 6d.; George Sign Manual when blind, 7s. 6d.; George I. Sign Manual, 1 p. folio, 12s. 6d.; Henry II. of France, fine D.S. with State seal, 12s. 6d.; King of Siam, 7s. 6d.; Papal Bull of Urban VIII., 30s.; Warrant of Privy Council of Edward VI. with numerous rare signatures, 25s.; Duke of Sussex, interesting letter on the trial of Queen Caroline, 4s. 6d.; Queen Victoria, two Royal Sign Manuals at 10s. each; Henry VIII. Royal Sign Manual on "vellum, document of great beauty," 48s.; Henry VII. Royal Sign Manual on "document of greatest interest," 70s.; Frederick Prince of Wales, L.S., 10s.; Charles I. when Prince of Wales, D.S., 34s.; Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette—signatures on two "important documents," 24s. the pair; Napoleon I. L.S. 2 pp. 4to to Prince of Neuchatel, Valladolid, January 11, 1809, 25s.; Papal Bull Alexander III., 1181, 47s. 6d.; Mary II. Royal Sign Manual, 30s.; Original Orders for Arrest of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III.), June 13, 1848, 52s. 6d.; Napoleon II. (King of Rome), 4 pp. of an original historical essay, 48s.; Royal Sign Manual of Philip and Mary, ten guineas; A.L.S. of Charles II., 1½ pp., Whitehall, September 26, 1660, À sa chÈre soeur, 73s. 6d. I will not pursue this list further. The reader can judge of the relative value of Royal autographs in 1827 and 1875-80.

In the price of the autographs of sovereigns of minor importance there has been no striking rise since 1880. Indeed, I note that on December 17th, 1909, letters and documents signed by Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Louis XVIII. of France, Mathias de Medicis, also of Tuscany, and Rudolph II., Emperor of Germany, were knocked down in one lot at Sotheby's for five shillings. But letters of the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns are fetching as many pounds in 1910 as they did shillings eighty years ago. A pardon granted by James II. to Edward Strode, of Downside, "on account of his entertaining the Duke of Monmouth for one night immediately after his defeat at Sedgemoor," sold on December 17, 1909, for £57. Mr. Waller in 1876 would assuredly have catalogued it at 57s. or less. Four years ago I purchased for Sir George White, Bart., of Bristol, an order, signed by the same sovereign, enjoining the Duke of Beaufort to burn Keynsham Bridge on the approach of Monmouth and his followers, at the modest price of 42s. Amongst other letters or documents belonging to this category figuring in the last sale of 1909 may be mentioned a letter signed by Cromwell addressed to the Genevan Senate on the recent Protestant massacres in the Alps (July 28, 1655), for which Mr. Sabin gave £31, and two A.L.S.—one of George IV. and one of William IV., which went to Mr. W. V. Daniell for 12s. To what indignation would this startling fall in value have moved the righteous soul of the chronicler of the sale-prices of 1827! MSS. of "The First Gentleman in Europe" rank no longer amongst the high-priced autographs, but I shall have more to say of them presently. Experience has taught me to look in Munich and Paris for bargains in the matter of seventeenth-century Stuart letters. At Munich I quite lately came across a fine A.L.S. of Charles I. for £10, and a delightful L.S. of his eldest son while in exile to the Elector Palatine, with seals and silken cords intact, for 50s. Good William III. letters now average £10, but I obtained the following characteristic letter written from the Camp before Namur for less than half that sum:—

Letters of the Electress Sophia of Hanover very rarely turn up, and I consider the following quaint epistle addressed to that astute "trimmer," the Duke of Leeds, when she was over eighty, a great bargain at 30s.:—

Letters of Frederick the Great, be they holograph or merely signed, are cheaper in England than on the Continent. Even the L.S. are often witty, and I have met with many good specimens at from 10s. to 15s. One of the greatest treasures in my collection is a superb letter of the Empress Catharine II. of Russia, dated July 28, 1767, and addressed to Madame de Bielke, of Hamburg, who gave it to a Foreign Office official, Sir Charles Flint, from whose descendant it passed into my possession. It was submitted by M. NoËl Charavay[27] to M. Rambaud, ex-Minister of Public Instruction, Professor at the Sorbonne, who discovered it to be one of an important series, of which sixteen are published in the "Collection de la SociÉtÉ impÉriale d'histoire de Russie." Sir Charles Flint was an early collector of autographs, and his duties as a King's Messenger gave him excellent opportunities of picking up treasures like this. I think it best to give the letter in the original French, instead of following the modernised version adopted in Paris:—

A ma Terre de Kolominska a Sept Werste de Moscou

For the following translation I am indebted to Professor Maurice A. Gerothwohl, Litt.D., of the University of Bristol:—

At my Estate of Kolominska, Seven Versts from Moscow.

What a contrast does the vigorous letter of Catharine "Slay-Czar," as Horace Walpole was pleased to call her, present to the following letter of Louis XVI., written to Lavoisier, the Physicist, while the premonitory grumblings of the coming storm were still audible!

[Translation].

The old Princess Amelia, Aunt to George III., the legends of whose snuff-taking and card-playing still linger at Gunnersbury and in Cavendish Square, was a wit in her way. Horace Walpole yawned incontinently at one of her whist parties, and made amends in verse. This is what she wrote him in return:—

Princess Amelia to Horace Walpole.

At the back, in the handwriting of Walpole, "From Her Royal Highness Princess Amelia June 17 1786."

Few Royal letters interest me more than those of George III., upon whose worth of character, in my opinion, they throw a strong light. Five years ago they were comparatively rare, although Farmer George was his own Secretary, and appears to have been at his desk at all hours of the day and night from 1760 until his Jubilee in 1809, when blindness fell upon him, and his signature became an undecipherable scrawl. His writing was peculiarly neat and legible. Only when under the influence of illness or strong emotion did he omit to add the hour and minutes to the day of the week and month. Here is an early letter written to the future Lord Hood, when the future King William IV. went to sea as a boy of twelve.[30]

George III. to Sir Samuel Hood,

Nine years later he goes to Cheltenham with the threatenings of his first attack of mental affliction upon him. He writes thus banteringly to his daughter the Princess Sophia, who lived down to our own time, and whom my mother remembered seeing in a sedan chair in Bond Street:—

Lady Reed was one of those persons who followed the Court everywhere—a peculiarity not wholly extinct. There is a curious caricature of her making her bow to Royalty on the Weymouth Esplanade, surrounded by a bevy of spaniels, the companions of the "Mackaws, Parrots and Paroqueets" mentioned by the King, who evidently understood her. In the late autumn the King's affliction declared itself, but in the following April he became convalescent, and the following is one of the first letters he wrote on his recovery:—

George III to Lord Sydney.

Here is a letter of seven years later, when the strained relations of the "First Gentleman in Europe" and his wife, the Princess Caroline, became a public scandal:—

George III. to Caroline, Princess of Wales.

The finest letters of George III. from a moral and patriotic point of view are unquestionably those written during the "Great Terror," when for nearly ten years the practical realisation of Napoleon's threatened invasion of our shores was expected at any moment. Some years ago, at the cost of £5, I obtained the following letter addressed by the King to Lord Mulgrave just four days before Trafalgar:—

Shortly after the death of the late Duke of Cambridge a vast number of George III.'s letters suddenly flooded the market. The average price fell from £5 and more to £2 and less. Every autograph dealer in London had a stock, so there could be no "corner" in "Georges." I contrived to get thirty or forty—mostly written from Weymouth. It seems that during the great crisis King George wrote almost daily to "Dear Frederic" (his son the Duke of York, Commander-in-Chief), and many of these letters are of the greatest interest. For 10s. I picked up the King's holograph draft of a plan for mobilising an army of defence between Dorchester and Weymouth.[31] Between 1789 and 1805 George III. paid fourteen visits to Weymouth. Many momentous acts of State were carried out at the Royal Lodge, now transformed, with hardly any structural change, into the Gloucester Hotel. If it had not been for the death of the Duke of Gloucester, the King would have received the news of Trafalgar in the same place where he had talked a few weeks previously with "Nelson's Hardy." Some day these letters will help materially the telling of the story of the "Court by the Sea." I thank Thackeray for the lines which made George III., when old, blind, and forsaken, say:—

The letters of the Princess of Wales (1796-1819), the Queen Caroline of 1820-21, are not very valuable, but they are curious.[32] They are now quite as valuable as those of her worthless husband and his successor, of whom I possess several interesting examples, beginning in the days when he was sailing with Digby and earning the sobriquet of "Jolly Young Tarry-breeks." At the sale of the library of the Princess Edward of Saxe-Weimar (June 21, 1904) I purchased three volumes, bound in green calf, full of Prince William's early notes and exercises. One of these is docketed by the youthful sailor "Remarks on Countries, Harbours, Towns, etc. on board the Prince George, Feb 8 1780 William Henry." Some day my friends in the United States will read a description of New York from the pen of a future King of England, written a century and a quarter ago, and the romantic story connected with it. Here is a letter he wrote home to his tutor, Dr. Majendie, from Sandy Hook. It speaks volumes, at any rate, for his good intentions:—

There is nothing more astonishing than the manner in which the letters of the late Queen Victoria have got into the autograph market on either side of the Atlantic. Mr. Joline gives a very startling instance of this, and I believe all her late Majesty's correspondence with Mr. Gladstone went to America, and that for a very inadequate consideration. The examples I give of the writing of living members of the Royal Family are only fragments reproduced as specimens of calligraphy. I can never quite understand how the Royal letters came to figure in dealers' catalogues, notwithstanding in many cases the confidential nature of their contents. In his "Collections and Recollections" (1898) Mr. George W. E. Russell gives the following autograph anecdote:—

"Like many other little boys, Prince Alexander of Battenberg ran short of pocket-money and wrote an ingenious letter to his august Grandmother, Queen Victoria, asking for some slight pecuniary assistance. He received in return a just rebuke, telling him that little boys should keep within their limits and that he must wait till his allowance next became due. Shortly afterwards the undefeated little Prince resumed the correspondence in something like the following form: 'My dear Grandmama, I am sure you will be glad to know that I need not trouble you for any money just now, for I sold your last letter to another boy here for thirty shillings.'"

Within the last few years the death of two or three trusted couriers and upper servants accounts for the sale of a great many papers of this kind, including whole bundles of telegrams in the handwriting of their employers. From a similar source came one of the last letters Queen Victoria ever penned, and a very touching relic it is, showing the care for others and deep womanly sympathy which characterised the whole of her life. I have since learned that it is customary to retranscribe the originals of telegrams penned by illustrious personages. If this is so the practice is most reprehensible. The telegrams from H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught to the late Queen Victoria have nothing in them of a confidential character. The first telegram is reproduced by permission of the Editor of The Country Home; the second runs as follows:—

The Duke of Connaught at Moscow to Queen Victoria, Balmoral.

The autograph of the late Prince Albert Victor will some day become exceedingly rare and costly. The only example I have of his writing is the telegram he sent to his grandmother, Queen Victoria, at Darmstadt, from that caravanserai of kings, the HÔtel Bristol, in the Place VendÔme, Paris. It is not often that Royalty honours one of those irritating social tortures entitled "An Album of Confessions to Record Thoughts and Feelings." The late Duke of Coburg (Prince Alfred of England) fell a victim to the possessor of one thirty-seven years ago, and the results figured at the modest price of £1 in a London catalogue:—

Confessions.

Some years ago, when I first took up autograph collecting as a serious occupation, I bought from Mr. James Tregaskis, of the "Caxton Head," a copy-book of George, Prince of Wales, filled up when he was in his thirteenth year. Few boys of that age could, in this twentieth century, emulate the copper-plate of the then industrious Heir Apparent. With the copybooks went his first cap and frock, both edged with the daintiest Valenciennes lace. The genuineness of these relics of Royalty was attested by the Dowager Countess of Effingham, Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Charlotte, and their subsequent possessor, Mr. F. Madan, of the Bodleian Library. A little later I purchased the Prince's "exercise-book" of three years later, which begins with an "Extract of the First Oration of Cicero against Catiline, spoken before their Majesties in the Picture Gallery at Windsor, August 12, 1778." At the same time I acquired the Duke of York's "Translations from Terence." On the first page, the student of fifteen writes: "Frederick. This volume begun January 9th, 1778. Dimidium facti, qui bene coepit, habet." It is sad to think they were within measurable distance of the "Perdita" entanglement of 1780-81. I was already in a position to satisfy the curiosity of the expert of 1827 as to a page of the copy-book, "of the best king that ever lived," but some time later I became the owner of a whole collection of Royal letters relating to the early married life of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, and the up-bringing of their elder children. There was nothing of a confidential nature in these MSS. Everything tended to demonstrate the beauty and simplicity of the home-life of the Sovereign at Windsor and Buckingham Palace in the now far away "eighteen-forties," and the care bestowed on the up-bringing of his late Majesty King Edward VII. These documents formed the nucleus of a book, and by the permission of Messrs. Harper & Brothers several of them are now reproduced. The Édition de luxe of this book[33] has been extra-illustrated by two ladies in New York. I have also treated a copy very elaborately in this way, and I venture to think it will make history some day. Many of the "unconsidered trifles" it contains are not likely to be soon met with again, and the ensemble reconstitutes the Court atmosphere of 1840-45. In the opening chapters of the "Boyhood of a Great King," I have given a brief account of the upbringing of five generations of the British Royal Family. Since then I have come across an interesting bundle of papers once in possession of the Earl of Holdernesse, for some years governor of the children of George III. In 1776 the King writes thus to Lord Holdernesse:—

Three years previously the Earl, during a period of temporary absence, had received a good many letters from his pupils, in which good feeling seemingly vies with excellence of calligraphy. Here are some examples:—

The Duke of York, aged ten, to his tutor, the Earl of Holdernesse.

Prince William (afterwards Duke of Clarence and King William IV.), aged eight, to the Earl of Holdernesse [1773].

Prince Edward (afterwards Duke of Kent), aged six, to the Earl of Holdernesse.

In the following year the Prince of Wales, aged twelve, thus addresses his absent tutor:—

The following letter of the Duke of Sussex, aged fourteen, and already at the University of GÖttingen, came from the same source:—

The Princess Charlotte, for some years heiress to the British Crown, was apparently as diligent as her uncles and aunts of the previous generation. The following letter was sold at Sotheby's for a few shillings. It is difficult to imagine the Queen Caroline of the pro-Georgian caricaturist playing blindman's buff with her little daughter! Possibly it afforded her one of the few happy hours of her vie orageuse:—

The Princess Charlotte, aged 8 years and 6 months, to her Aunt the Electress Charlotte of WÜrtemberg.

The daughters of George III. and Queen Charlotte were all excellent letter writers, but their ordinary letters fetch absurdly low prices, although many of them are historically important. Queen Adelaide, the consort of William IV., was fond of writing texts on cards edged with filigree to be sold for philanthropic purposes. Her autographs are, in consequence, exceedingly common. The copy-book, page, and drawing of the still-living Empress Charlotte of Mexico have a melancholy interest. Her autograph and that of her ill-fated husband sell well abroad. The late Comte de Chambord and the late Comte de Paris wrote better hands as boys than the King of Rome or the Prince Imperial, of whose autographs I shall speak in connection with Napoleonic MSS. The rough sketch of soldiers drawn by the Prince Imperial and the artillery essay written by him at the Royal Military College, Woolwich, certainly form interesting items in that portion of my autograph collection which I label the Copy-books of Kings.

While the present volume was going through the press a most important sale of Royal autographs took place at Sotheby's. At the sale of May 4, 1910, no less a sum than £5,446 6s. was realised for 195 lots. Amongst the letters of Royal personages then dispersed, an A.L.S. of Mary Queen of Scots, dated Chatsworth, June 13, 1570, and addressed to her brother-in-law, Charles IX. of France, fetched £715; a D.S. of Edward VI., £370; an A.L.S. of Queen Mary I., £205; an A.L.S. of Queen Elizabeth, £160; 7 A.L.S. of Catherine de Medicis, £145; a L.S. of Henry VII., £24; a L.S. of Henry VIII., £25; three A.L.S. of Charles I., £55, £49, and £39 respectively, and three A.L.S. of Charles II., £25, £23 10s., and £22 respectively. The account of the expenses incurred at the "Meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold," signed by Francis I., was sold for £130.

The following examples of the handwriting of the late Prince Consort, the late King Edward VII., the late Duke of Coburg, King George V., Queen Mary, and the late Empress Frederick of Germany may prove interesting to my readers, as well as useful to collectors:—

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