There is a noble German ballad, written (if we remember rightly}- by a certain Von Zedlitz (Powder), which describes, with all the weird imagination of a Doré, how at the twelfth hour of the night a little ghostly drummer once clattered his little drum-sticks and went through the world summoning the soldiers, who, whether in the Nile slime, the desert sand, or the Russian snow-drift, had fallen victims to the ambition of Napoleon. Last of all, when the dark leagues of ghosts had gathered, the dim squadrons had mounted their phantom horses, and the long lines of bayonets had moved into form, mile after mile, there came the stately horseman in the gray coat and the cocked-hat, and passed between the murmuring ranks just as the moon gleamed for a moment and showed the fleshless arms holding the muskets that rattled at his approach.
At such a review of our own summoning we now seem to be spectators ; but our ghosts are not the Imperial Guard, or the legions of Davout, Lannes, Massena, and Murat, but the faded beaux and dead dandies of two centuries for ever past. We see, through the fog of the past time and the mists of memory, the shrivelled silk coats, the tarnished sword-knots, the disconsolate periwigs, looming mile after mile, from Holland House to Piccadilly. Bladk, coffin-like boats of ghostly dandies ferry fast over the gloomy Styx, and Charon drives herds more to the dismal ferry that leads to the ivory gate of dreams. Toupees tower through the mist of cloudland ; strawberry-spotted coats rise before our vision ; maccaronies in simpering crowds mince past us, all eager for a record of their transient butterfly follies. We sit, like Pluto, enthroned among the shadows.
But, dreams avaunt! let us get back to daylight. One of the foremost idols of the Park in the reign of James II. and Queen Anne was that eccentric man whom Steele has so pleasantly immortalised in the Tatler, Beau Fielding, a gentleman of good Warwickshire family, who raised a regiment for James II., and exerted himself in a fashionable way for the dull and bitter bigot, who had made him colonel. Beau Fielding appears to have been a man of some wit and of intense vanity, proud and defiant in his eccentricities as became a count of the German Empire, and a soldier (according to his own account) of the most incomparable chivalry. His complexion was fair; his cascade of a wig auburn; his countenance manly; his stature tall; his form of exquisite proportions, as firm and strong as marble. He was the Adonis of the day, and eventually married the proud, and not too virtuous, Barbara Villiers, daughter and heiress of Lord Viscount Grandison, an Irish nobleman. His first stately proposal to this lady is said to have begun with true humility, thus: ” Madame, it is not only that nature has made us two the most accomplished of each sex,” &c.
The Beau, when nearly fifty, returned from exile as vain and humorous as ever. If we are not mistaken, he especially rejoiced in yellow plumes and remarkable liveries of extraordinary and obtrusive colours. He did not cringe for homage or admiration ; he claimed it as a right. He moved a pattern, a model, an ornament, the very sultan of his sex. He appeared in the Park in an open chariot, so small that it was a mere walnut-shell, emblazoned with the imperial spread-eagle, the better to display his symmetrical limbs and commanding figure.
It must be confessed, indeed, that the old Beau’s pomp, vanity, and grandeur trenched at last a trifle on the insane. If we can believe the Tatler, Fielding called for tea by beat of drum, and ordered his valet to shave him by trumpet-call. His vanity had reached the point of sublimity ; his dress and manner grew every day more and more exotic, and he became so old-fashioned that the boys used to collect and shout round his chariot in the streets. The Beau treated their acclamations with a superb indifference. Steele saw him one day harangue a party of Westminster boys, and has recorded the Beau’s irresistible exhortation.
” Go to school,” he said, ” and do not lose your time in following my wheels. I am loth to hurt you, because some of you might be my children., Here, you sirrah with the white hair, there is half-a-crown. Why, you young dogs, did you never see a man before ?”
“Never such a one as you, noble general!” cried an artful truant from Westminster.
” Sirrah, I believe thee !” cried the Beau, still not impervious to delicate flattery; ” there is a crown for thee., Drive on, coachman.”
Alas for the old battered Beau!, a previous marriage was eventually proved against the old Adonis ; and the duchess left him to seek shelter in a garret, and there write bad verses of a gallant nature.
About 1770 some fashionable young exquisites immortalised themselves, conferred a blessing on the nation, and earned an undying name by introducing maccaroni as an addition to the subscription-table at Almack’s. It was about this time that even the folly of modern chignons and crinoline was outdone by the extravagant luxury of the Park dandies. The military maccaronies appeared with red stocks, canes heavy with tassels, and small toy scimitars peeping from under the skirts of their lapelled coats. Their knee-breeches were of striped silk, and their wigs hang down behind in enormous clubs of plaited hair, bound together with black ribbon. A portrait of a fashionable nobleman of 1773 (George III.) shows us the sort of man who just before the commencement of the American war disported in Hyde Park. A vast cocked-hat, looped up with a very small button, shows the taste of the extreme fop. The hair of the wig is combed back from the smug, empty features into a club as large as a ship’s cable, which looks not unlike a dumb-bell. The collarless waistcoat, no longer square-flapped, as in Hogarth’s time, is bound with gold lace; the cane is double-tasselled; the coat is not much larger than our own frock-coat, and evidently aims at smart airiness and lightness. The small watch-ribbon and pendent seals fall over a pair of silk knee-breeches adorned with coloured spots. A small sword, richly hilted, hangs by the side.
Another character in the Park in those tunes, not many years before the execution of Dr. Dodd, was that odious and detestable anomaly, the maccaroni parson, whom Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has recently dissected so ruthlessly and cleverly. He often appeared sweeping the Hyde-Park turf with his glossy canonicals, his neatly-formed legs adorned with the closest-fitting black silk stockings, very small gold buckles in his shoes, and a one-tiered snowy wig setting off the soft rosiness of his plump cheeks. To the Park the maccaroni parson repaired to ogle countesses who frequented his chapel, and ducal ministers whose patronage lay chiefly in the way of church preferments.
We met the other day with an old book of fashions dated 1773. It was a faded old book, the paper yellow and tattered; but there was still a certain perfume about it as in an old pot-pourri jar. What a vast interval of folly it shows between the absurdities of 1773 and those of 1867 ! Par exemple :
” Gentlemen : Spotted velvet coat and breeches, with fancy coloured frocks for undress. Full dress: light-coloured spotted velvet, lined with pink ; satin, fine ratteens, or silks; full-trimmed suit, to walk out; the sleeve on the increase ; silk shoes fashionable.
” Ladies : Maroon silk nightgowns, with jewel breast-knot on white ribbons, the ion for undress; the upright sausage-curl on the temple is extending. Full dress : dark-grounded silks in flounces, with silver trimmings; stomacher and robings; large hoops, long flowering lappets and deep ruffles. Full-dress sacques: maroon, garnet, crimson, or purple satin, with trains longer than usual. French trimming; high shoes.”
Only imagine Mr. Gladstone in a cinnamon-coloured silk coat, and the maids of honour in hoops, sacques, and high-heeled shoes!
But we must pass on to the dandies and other oddities of the Regent’s time, dandies whom our own fathers have shaken hands with. In 1815 the Park was more rural-looking than it is now. Captain Gronow describes cows and deer grazing there under the trees. The paths were fewer, the borders less built on; the air was purer, the company smaller and more select. The middle classes, who now acknowledge no one above themselves, then abandoned the Park to the leaders of fashion and to old money; no shabby-genteel hired carriage then, but the old régime of emblazoned hammer-cloths with massive silver badges; solid coachmen in powdered wigs sunk into their downy seats; and plump-legged footmen, powdered gorgeously, hanging in a cluster behind. The dandies who then met in the Park at five wore blue coats with shiny brass buttons, deep stiff white cravats, leather breeches, and top-boots; and a manly dress it was, if a man had a leg worth showing.
The chief beauties in those days were the Duchesses of Rutland, Argyle, Gordon, and Bedford; Ladies Cowper, Foley, Heathcote, Louisa Lambton, Hertford, and Monntjoy. There was the Prince himself, debonnaire and (when he chose) amiable, conspicuous for his fine curly wig and portly figure, with Sir Benjamin Bloomfield as his companion on horseback; the florid stout Duke of York and his friend Warwick Lake ; the Duke of Dorset on his white horse ; the Marquis of Angle : and his beautiful daughters ; Brummell, of course ; Lord Harrowby and the Ladies Ryder; the Earl of Sefton and the Lady Molyneux ; the Earl of Moreton and his long-tailed grays. Those were the three-bottle days, the days of high play, of pugilism, stagecoach driving, and duelling.
About 1801, one of the most conspicuous characters in the Park was a tall, thin, elderly West Indian, with a sallow wrinkled face, who, wrapped up in costly furs, paraded in the drives in a shell-shaped carriage drawn by two fine white horses. The eccentric but handsome vehicle was covered with the owner’s heraldic device, a cock crowing. This shallow, inane, yet cunning-looking man was that celebrated amateur tragedian, Mr. Romeo Coates. He was supposed incorrectly to be a second Croesus; and he appeared at London balls covered with as many diamonds as Count Esterhazy, who was popularly supposed to drop three-hundred-pounds’ worth of them every night he went out. His buttons, even his knee-buckles, glistened with diamonds. Insanely vain and utterly foolish, Romeo Coates appeared on the stage as Shakespeare’s youthful lover, first at Bath, and then at the Haymarket. The ridiculous being wore a spangled cloak of sky-blue silk, red pantaloons much too tight, a white-muslin vest, an enormous bolster cravat, a Charles-the-Second wig, and an opera-hat. No burlesque was ever naif so funny. He bowed to the audience in the most extravagant way and with a hideous grin; he took snuff in the middle of the balcony scene, and on some one asking him for a pinch handed round his box to the nearest spectators. He dragged Juliet from the tomb as if she were a sack of potatoes. When, finally, he had to die, he put down his opera-hat for a pillow, and swept a place clean with a dirty silk handkerchief. Three times did this extraordinary idiot die for the amusement of the house. This half fool, half cheat, was at last driven from the stage for pocketing money he had obtained under pretence of playing for a charitable object; he retired to Boulogne, and there married some foolish woman, who was probably duped by his pretended wealth.
But men like Romeo Coates and Peagreen Haine (so called from his favourite costume) were mere passing meteors in Hyde Park; Beau Brummell was the central sun, the Regent’s favourite, ” the glass -of fashion and the mould of form,” the cynosure of everybody’s eyes, and the best-dressed man of his day. Lord Petersham might invent a coat, and Lord Spencer an eccentric garment; but Beau Brummell was the king of the dandies, the emperor of society, and the successful rival of the proudest nobles of England. Brummell was the son of a steward: having a handsome person, considerable wit and sound tact, and being known at Eton as a good scholar, boatman, and cricketer, he cultivated friends among the young noblemen; and on leaving school entered a crack regiment, and, under the auspices of the Duchess of Devonshire, was soon launched into society. Everything he did, said, and wore was admired as a matter of course. He had the finest Sevres china snuff-boxes, the most exquisite walking-canes; his horses were of the best blood, his carriages of the highest style. His cravat was a marvel (it is supposed he threw away armfuls every day before he attained his success). Men of fashion felt a sort of religious awe as they passed over the threshold of Weston, Brummell’s tailor, in Old Bond-street. The incomparable creature used jokingly to declare his very blacking was mixed with champagne. His library in Chapel-street was fall of the most recherché books; the choicest editions, and, above all, the most exquisite bindings. His furniture was the result of years of study. Nothing could equal the elegance of his manners except his contempt for Bloomsbury-square and the middle class, from a very humble station of which he himself had sprung. Throned in the bay-window at White’s Club, with the Duke of Rutland on one side and Lord Alvanley on the other, his frown could destroy the reputation of a passing dandy, and his approval insure success in the beau-monde. He was a lawgiver as to pantaloons, and a legislator in the matter of boots. In our degenerate days nothing appears so vulgar as the coarse and offensive impudence of his bon-mots, but they were the rage in the three-bottle days; and against this fribble’s decision in matters of taste there was for years no appeal. The Regent, who was haughty with a duke, was familiar with Brummell. The tide turned at last, and the Phaeton of Carlton House fell. He dared to thwart Divine Right in its pleasures. He objected to the cruel discarding of Mrs. Fitzherbert for another and a less worthy favourite. The Regent at once broke in two the glass idol of Bond-street. He struck him two blows; one was for standing between him and the new siren, the second for asking, at Lady Cholmondeley’s ball, “Who is your fat friend ?” The second blow was struck in a way worthy of the Regent’s mean spirit of revenge. He asked the Beau to dinner, under the garb of reconciliation, and when the Beau had taken rather too much wine, rang the bell, saying to the Duke of York, ” I think we had better order Mr. Brummell’s carriage before he gets drunk.”
It was a strange rise, it was a miserable fall. The tuft-hunter’s debts had accumulated like an avalanche, and like an avalanche they soon came rolling down upon him. He became consul at Caen, lost the appointment by some imprudence; and, retaining to the last, even when poor, paralysed, and imbecile, his old affectations, died in Calais, a poor forlorn, drivelling, beggared exile.
Parson Ambrose was another celebrity of the glorious and lamented days of the Regency. He was a natural son of Lord de Blaquiere. He had been a friend of the Duke of Wellington in his early wild days in Dublin, and when in distress in Paris the Duke on one occasion gave him 100 pounds to take him back to town. Captain Gronow describes meeting Parson Ambrose at the Duchess of Orleans’ Sunday soirées in 1816. The parson, who had the manners of the old regime, wore black-silk breeches with buckles at the knees, buckles on his shoes, and shirt-frolls of the finest Malines lace.
Lord Petersham was another celebrity of the Park. He was a tall, handsome, hearty-looking man, with a very gracious smile, an affected manner, and a slight lisp. He chose brown as a colour (it is said from his having once been in love with a fair widow named Brown): his carriages were brown, his horses brown, his livery was brown. The shelves of his favourite room were covered with tin canisters, snuff-boxes, and snuff-jars. When some friend one day praised his light-blue Sevres snuff-box, Lord Petersham said in his dainty, tip-toe sort of way, ” Yes, it’s a nice summer box, but it would not really do for winter wear.” Such was the extravagant foppery, sometimes humorously -conscious of itself, that distinguished the gentlemen of the Regency.
In those days, the Four-in-hand Club was one of the great shows and wonders of Hyde Park, for to drive, a stage-coach was then considered the perfection of human felicity. Lords and baronets at that period handled the ribbons and took the passengers’ fees; and to wear a heavy drab box-coat with six capes, and to talk the slang of the Gravel-lane Cockpit and the jargon of Cribb and Belcher, was to become worthy of Lord Barrymore’s friendship, and of the esteem of the excellent Lord Yarmouth and Lord Harborough. Lord Sefton’s four bays were as well known then as the stylish turns-out of Sir Bellingham Graham and Mr. Cholmondeley of Vale Royal. The pace of this fashionable club never exceeded a trot, and it was a rule that no coach in their procession should try to pass another.
A little later and we see in the Park, among the smaller celebrities, ” King” Allan, a tall, stout, portly viscount, who was a special support of Crockford’s. In his youth he had fought well at Talavera, but latterly became merely an authority with tailors, and an oracle at the Opera house. He was the man who could not sleep away from the noise of London, and who, when he went to Dover with Lord Alvanley, hired a coach to drive up and down before the hotel-door all night, and the boots to shout at proper intervals, ” Past , , and a stormy night!” Like most of the dandies, Lord Allan broke down financially at last, and he ended his days at Gibraltar.
Ball Hughes, “Golden” Ball, as he was generally called, was another character of 1820 or thereabouts. He was a handsome, agreeable man, who had been in the 7th Hussars: he married Mademoiselle Mercandotti, a Spanish opera-dancer. He also died abroad impoverished, after a reckless life of gambling and extravagance.
Of the same date was Byron’s friend, Scrope Davis, a scholar, wit, and dandy of the first class. The son of a Gloucestershire clergyman, he played very high, and eventually, half ruined, retired to Paris. He is said on one occasion to have won the entire fortune of a young man of property, and to have returned it to him on his promise to abandon for ever the fatal green cloth.
But in this rapid resumé of the dandies of the Regency and later, we must not forget that handsome son of one of Napoleon’s generals, Count d’Orsay. To judge from Mr. Chalon’s sketches of him, he must have been very handsome. That glory of the Parks thirty years ago was a man six feet high, with a broad chest, narrow waist, and finely- formed feet. His chestnut hair fell in long waving masses; his eyes were hazel; his forehead was high and broad; his features were regular. He was a good swordsman, a fine horseman, and a fair shot. Captain Gronow, who knew him well, says that he was in the habit of taking perfumed baths, and that his enormous gold dressing-case required two men to carry it. He also got over head and ears in debt, and died in Paris in comparative obscurity.
But the ghosts of the dandies press on us in phantom crowds, and clamour for notice. There is Sir Lumley Skeffington, with his high shoulders, and old Q. himself – amorous patriarch; Sir Godfrey Webster, handsome and stalwart dashing Captain Claggett, and elegant Sir Roger Gresley. Beautiful Lady Jersey and enchanting Lady Blessington, you too we must, ungallantly, leave unrecorded, for the whole Magazine would not be large enough even to chronicle the names of the Park beauties of the last half century.
From: Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Belgravia. (1868)
We must now rapidly pass on, and recapitulate a few remaining facts about the Park as it now is, and leave our dandy dreamland regretfully behind us. The colossal Achilles (really not Achilles at all, bnt a copy from a nameless statue at Rome) was erected in 1822, by the ladies of England, to record the four chief victories of Wellington. It was made from twelve French twenty-four pounders, was cast by Westmacott, and cost 10,0007. It is still unfinished, such is national gratitude and official expedition!