The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries: To-Day and in Days of Old

XII

Claremont is a house of sad memories, destined, so it might seem to the superstitious, to witness a succession of tragedies and sorrows.

Neither the house nor the estate are of any considerable age; the estate originating in a fancy of Sir John Vanbrugh,—that professional architect and amateur dramatist of Queen Anne’s time,—for a suburban retreat. He purchased some land at Esher, between the village and the common, and, foregoing his usual ponderous style of piling up huge masses of stone and brickwork, put up quite a small and unpretentious brick house upon it. Sir John Vanbrugh died in 1726, and posterity seems still in doubt as to whether he excelled in writing comedies or in designing ponderous palaces of the type of Blenheim and Castle Howard. Certainly his writings are as light as his buildings heavy, and though a wit might justly compose an epitaph for him as an architect,

“Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee,”

the application can extend no further.

Before he died, Vanbrugh’s estate was sold to the Earl of Clare, who added a banqueting-hall to the architect’s modest dwelling, purchased additional land, and, after the custom greatly honoured in the observance during the eighteenth century, stole much more from the neighbouring common, until he brought the palings of the park coterminous (as the political geographers might say) with the Portsmouth Road. In midst of the land he had thus filched from the commoners of Esher, the Earl of Clare built a kind of belvidere on a pleasant eminence overlooking the country-side, and called it Clare Mount. Thus arose the name of the house and park. Soon afterwards, however, the Earl was created Duke of Newcastle, and, to honour his new pomp and circumstance the more, employed Kent, the celebrated landscape gardener, to re-arrange the grounds and gardens, until their magnificence called forth this eulogium from Sir Samuel Garth, a dabbler both in medicine and metre:—

“Oh! who can paint in verse those rising hills,
Those gentle valleys, and their silver rills;
Close groves and opening glades with verdure spread,
Flow’rs sighing sweets, and shrubs that balsams bleed?”

Ah! who indeed? Not Sir Samuel Garth, though, if this be a representative taste of his quality.

The Claremont that we see now was built by the “heaven-born general,” Clive, who purchased the estate upon the death of the Duke of Newcastle in 1768. He built, with the aid of Lancelot Brown (Capability Brown his contemporaries eke-named him), in a grand and massive style that excited the gaping wonder of the country folk. “The peasantry of Surrey,” says Macaulay, in his “Essay on Clive,” “looked with mysterious horror on the stately house which was rising at Claremont, and whispered that the great wicked lord had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily.” This unenviable reputation for wickedness was the work of Clive’s enemies, of whom, perhaps, from one cause and another, no man has possessed so many. The men above whose heads his genius and daring had carried him, and the Little Englanders of that day, both hated the hero of Plassey with a lurid and vitriolic vehemence. They circulated strange tales of his cruelty and cupidity in India, until even well-informed people regarded Clive as an incarnate fiend, and “Capability” Brown even came to wonder that his conscience allowed him to sleep in the same house with the notorious Moorshedabad treasure-chest.

LORD CLIVE.Clive ended his brief but glorious career, slain by his own hand, in November 1774, but none the less murdered by the ingratitude of his country, a country so prolific in heroes that it can afford, for the sport of factions, to hound them occasionally to ruin and to death, coming afterwards in recriminating heart-agony to mourn their loss. Clive died, not yet fifty years of age, killed by constitutional melancholia, aggravated by disease and the yelpings of politicians, eager to drag down in the mire the man who gave us India. The arms of Clive still decorate the pediment of Claremont, the only house, so ’tis said, that “Capability” Brown ever built, though he altered many.

PRINCESS CHARLOTTE

In the forty years that succeeded between the death of Clive and the purchase of the estate by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, Claremont had a succession of owners; and upon the marriage of the Prince Regent’s only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, in 1816, it was allotted to her for a residence. It was in May of that year that the Princess Charlotte of Wales was married to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the petty German Duchy that has furnished princelings innumerable for the recruiting of kingdoms and principalities, and has given the Coburg Loaf its name.

But within a year of her marriage the Princess died in child-birth, and was buried in a mausoleum within the park. Then Claremont was for long deserted. There is a much-engraved portrait of the Princess, painted by Chalon, R.A., which shows a pleasant-faced girl, with fine neck and full eyes,—the characteristic eyes of the Guelphs,—and a strong facial resemblance to her father and grandfather, the Third and Fourth Georges. She is represented as habited in the indecent dress of the period, with ermined robe, and wearing a velvet hat with an immense plume of ostrich feathers. But a much more pleasing portrait is that by an unnamed artist, “a Lady,” reproduced here, which gives a representation of the Princess without those elaborate feathers and showy trappings of Court ceremonial.

CHRONIQUES SCANDALEUSES

The circumstances that attended the death of this Princess, to whom the nation looked as their future Queen, were not a little mysterious, and gave rise to many sinister rumours and scandals. Sir Richard Croft, a fashionable accoucheur of that time, was in attendance upon her with other physicians. He was one who signed the bulletins announcing her steady progress towards recovery after the birth of a dead child; but on the following day the news of the Princess’s death came as a sudden shock upon England, whose people had but recently shared in the joy and happiness of her happy marriage, doubly welcome after the sinister quarrels, estrangements, and espionages that marked the wedded life of the Regent. Scarce had the tidings of the Princess Charlotte’s death at Claremont become public property than all manner of strange whispers became current as to the causes of it. The public mind was, singularly enough, not satisfied with the medical explanations which would ordinarily have been accepted for very truth; but became exercised with vague suspicions of foul play that were only fanned into further life by the mutual recriminations of medicos and lay pamphleteers. Even those who saw no shadow of a crime upon this bad business were ready to cast blame and the bitterest reproaches upon Sir Richard Croft, in whose care the case chiefly lay, for his mistaken treatment. And this was not the first occasion upon which Croft’s conduct had been looked upon with suspicion, for, years previously, a scandalous rumour had been bruited about with regard to two of his noble patients,—the Duchess of Devonshire and an unnamed lady of title,—by which it would seem that he was privy to a supposititious change of children at the Duchess of Devonshire’s accouchement, when it was believed that the Duchess exchanged a girl for her friend’s boy.

PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES.But on this occasion the affair was much more serious, whether blame attached to him solely for mistaken treatment, or whether scandal whispered at criminal complicity. The Princess Charlotte died on November 6, 1817; three months later—on February 13, 1818—Sir Richard Croft, in despair, shot himself. He was but fifty-six years of age.

Years later—in 1832—when Lady Ann Hamilton’s extraordinary scribblings were published in two volumes under the title of “A Secret History of the Court of England, from 1760 to the Death of George IV.,” these old rumours were crystallized into a definite charge of murder against some nobleman whose name is prudently veiled under a blank. The Princess, says Lady Hamilton, was in a fair way of recovery, and a cup of broth was given her; but after partaking of it she died in convulsions. The nurse who handed her the cup noticed a dark red sediment at the bottom, and on tasting it found her tongue blistered! This peer, according to Lady Hamilton, acted with the connivance of the King, George III., and his glorified German hausfrau, and with the approval of the Princess’s father, the Regent, who, it is asserted in those pages, was heard to say some time previously at Esher that “no child of the Princess Charlotte shall ever sit upon the throne of England.” Lady Ann Hamilton, however, was a malevolent gossip, holding the most extreme Radical views, and as a personal friend and uncompromising partisan of Caroline, Princess of Wales,—that silly and phenomenally undignified woman—was eager to believe anything, no matter how atrocious, of her husband and his people.

No member of the Royal Family was present at the Princess Charlotte’s death-bed. She died, with the sole exception of her husband, Prince Leopold, amid physicians and domestics.

The King and Queen were (says Lady Hamilton) a hundred and eight miles away, and the Regent was either at Carlton House or staying with the Marquis of Hertford (or rather the Marchioness, she adds, in significant italics).

It is said that Lady Ann Hamilton’s writings, published as a “Secret History,” were given to the world, without her knowledge or consent, by a gentleman who had obtained the manuscript. Certain it is that when these two volumes appeared, in 1832, they were suppressed; and some four years later, when some other manuscripts belonging to the author were advertised for sale by auction, they were hastily bought up on behalf of a royal personage, and, it is believed, destroyed.

It is difficult to understand the hardihood which asserted at that time that the Princess Charlotte had been the victim of a murderous conspiracy between her nearest relatives; the more especially because her death would not seem to have been any one’s immediate great gain. Had it been of great advantage to any prominent member of the Royal Family, the suspicion might have been better founded, for royalty has no monopoly of virtue, while the temptations of its position are a hundredfold greater than those of lower estate. The history of royal houses shows that murder has frequently altered the line of succession, but surely the House of Brunswick (that heavy and phlegmatic line) never soared to this tragic height, or plumbed such depths of crime in modern times.

‘MR. SMITH’

For many years after the death of the Princess Charlotte, Claremont was closed, the rooms unoccupied, and left in much the condition they were then. Prince Leopold became, by the death of his wife, life-owner of the place, but its sad memories led him to leave it for ever. In after years the Prince became King of the Belgians, and, in 1832, a year after this advancement, married the eldest daughter of Louis Philippe, King of the French. Sixteen years later, during the stress of the French Revolution of 1848, that bourgeois King fled from Paris and crossed the Channel as “Mr. Smith,” and his son-in-law placed Claremont at the disposal of the ÉmigrÉ malgrÉ lui. Here he died in 1850. In 1865 the King of the Belgians died, and Claremont reverted to the Crown. Six years later the Marquis and Marchioness of Lorne stayed here on the occasion of their marriage, and when the Queen’s youngest son, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, was married, Claremont became his home. But the Duke died in 1884, and the house is now in the occupation of his widow.

Claremont, indeed, is a place weighted with memories and sad thoughts of the “might have been.” If only the intrepid Clive had lived to take the field against our rebellious colonists, as it was proposed he should do, it seems likely that the New England States had yet been ours, and Washington surely hanged or shot. Then North America had not become the safe refuge of political murderers commanding sympathetic ears at the White House, nor had we ever heard of the scagliola fripperies of a Presidential Reception. But a dull and obstinate King, a stupid ministry, and incompetent generals combined to lose us those colonies, and death snatched away untimely the foremost military genius of the time, to leave statesmen in despair at what they thought was surely the decay of a glorious Empire.

How changed, too, would have been the succession had the Princess Charlotte lived! The Sailor King—that most unaffected and heartiest of monarchs, whom the irreverent witlings of his day called “Silly Billy,” for no particular reason that I know of—would have still remained Duke of Clarence, and the Princess Victoria would have been but a mere cousin of another Queen. But no matter what Fate has in store for other Houses, the Coburger reaps an advantage, whate’er befalls; and though one is relegated to a less distinguished career by the death of his consort, another of that prolific race becomes the husband of a Queen, and the father of our future Kings.

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