Part 17

As a study in Russian scandal, and the growth and development of stories, this anecdote of Lord Lyttelton deserves attention. So first we must glance at the previous history of the hero. Thomas Lord Lyttelton was born, says Mr. Coulton (in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ No. 179, p. 111), on January 30, 1744.* He was educated at Eton, where Dr. Barnard thought his boyish promise even superior to that of Charles James Fox. His sketches of scenery in Scotland reminded Mrs. Montagu of the vigour of Salvator Rosa, combined with the grace of Claude Lorraine! At the age of nineteen, already affianced to Miss Warburton, he went on the Grand Tour, and excelled the ordinary model of young debauchery abroad. Mr. James Boswell found a Circe at Siena, Lyttelton found Circes everywhere. He returned to England in 1765; and that learned lady, Mrs. Carter, the translator of Epictetus, ‘admired his talents and elegant manners, as much as she detested his vices.’ In 1768 he entered the House of Commons, and, in his maiden speech, implored the Assembly to believe that America was more important than Mr. Wilkes (and Liberty). Unseated for bribery in January 1769, he vanished from the public view, more or less, for a season; at least he is rarely mentioned in memoirs, and Coulton thinks that young Lyttelton was now engaged--in what does the reader suppose? In writing ‘The Letters of Junius’!**

*The writer was not Croker, but Mr. Coulton, ‘a Kentish gentleman,’ says Lockhart, February 7, 1851, to his daughter Charlotte.

**If Lyttelton went to Italy on being ejected from Parliament, as Mr. Rigg says he did in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography,’ Coulton’s theory will be hard to justify.

He was clever enough; his rank was like that assumed as his own by Junius; his eloquence (as he proved later in the House of Lords) was vituperative enough; he shared some of Junius’s hatreds, while he proclaimed, like Junius, that the country was going to the dogs. Just as Junius was ending his Letters, the prodigal, Thomas Lyttelton, returned to his father’s house; and Chatham wrote to congratulate the parent (February 15, 1772). On May 12, 1772, Junius published his last letter in ‘The Public Advertiser;’ and on June 26 Mr. Lyttelton married a widow, a Mrs. Peach. He soon left his wife, and was abroad (with a barmaid) when his father died in 1773. In January 1774 he took his seat in the Lords. Though Fox thought him a bad man, his first speech was in favour of securing to authors a perpetual copyright in their own works. He repeated his arguments some months later; so authors, at least, have reason for judging him charitably.

Mr. Carlyle would have admired Lyttelton. His politics (at one juncture) were ‘The Dictatorship for Lord Chatham’! How does this agree with the sentiments of Junius? In 1767-69 Junius had exhausted on Chatham his considerable treasury of insult. He is ‘a lunatic brandishing a crutch,’ ‘so black a villain,’ ‘an abandoned profligate,’ and he exhibits ‘THE UPSTART INSOLENCE OF A DICTATOR!’ This goes not well with Lyttelton’s sentiments in 1774. True, but by that date (iii. 305) Junius himself had discovered ‘that if this country can be saved, it must be saved by Lord Chatham’s spirit, by Lord Chatham’s abilities.’ Lyttelton and Junius are assuredly both of them ruffianly, scandal-loving, inconsistent, and patrician in the manner of Catiline. So far, the likeness is close.

About America Lyttelton wavered. On the whole, he recognised the need of fighting; and his main idea was that, as fight we must, we should organise our forces well, and fight with our heads as well as with our hands. He disdained the policy of the ostrich. The Americans were in active rebellion; it could not be blinked. He praised Chatham while he opposed him. He was ‘fighting for his own hand.’ Ministers felt the advantage of his aid; they knew his unscrupulous versatility, and in November 1775 bought Lyttelton with a lucrative sinecure--the post of Chief Justice of Eyre beyond the Trent. Coulton calls the place ‘honourable;’ we take another view. Lyttelton was bought and sold, but no one deemed Lyttelton a person of scrupulous conscience.

The public prospects darkened, folly was heaped on folly, blunder on blunder, defeat on defeat. On April 24, 1779, Horace Walpole says that Lord Lyttelton ‘has again turned against the Court on obtaining the Seals’ * November 25, 1779, saw Lyttelton go boldly into Opposition. He reviewed the whole state of the empire. He poured out a torrent of invective. As to his sinecure, he said, ‘Perhaps he might not keep it long.’ ‘The noble Lords smile at what I say!’

*Is this a slip, or misprint, for ‘on NOT obtaining the Seals’?

They need not have smiled. He spoke on Thursday, November 25; on Saturday, November 27, the place in Eyre was vacant, and Lord Lyttelton was a dead man.

The reader will keep in mind these dates. On Thursday, November 25, 1779, the first day of the session, Lyttelton overflows in a volcanic speech against the Court. He announces that his place may soon be vacant. At midnight on November 27 he is dead.

On all this, and on the story of the ghostly ‘warning’ to Lord Lyttelton, delivered in the night of Wednesday, November 24, Coulton builds a political romance. In his view, Lyttelton, expelled from Parliament, lavished his genius and exuded his spleen in the ‘Letters of Junius.’ Taking his seat in the Lords, he fights for his own hand, is bought and muzzled, wrenches off his muzzle, blazes into a fierce attack on the wrongs which he is weary of witnessing, the hypocrisy which he is tired of sharing, makes his will, sets his house in order, plays one last practical joke by inventing the story of the ghostly warning, surrounds himself with dissolute company, and at midnight on November 27 deliberately fulfils his own prediction, and dies by his own hand. It is a tale creditable to Coulton’s fancy. A patrician of genius, a wit, a profligate, in fatigue and despair, closes his career with a fierce harangue, a sacrilegious jest, a debauch, and a draught of poison, leaving to Dr. Johnson a proof of ‘the spiritual world,’ and to mankind the double mystery of Junius and of the Ghost.

As to the identity of Junius, remembering the warning of Lord Beaconsfield, ‘If you wish to be a bore, take up the “Letters of Junius,”’ we shall drop that enigma; but as to the alleged suicide of Lord Lyttelton, we think we can make that seem extremely improbable. Let us return to the course of events, as stated by Coulton and by contemporaries.

The warning of death in three days, says Coulton, occurred (place not given) on the night of November 24, 1779. He observes: ‘It is certain that, on the morning after that very day’ (November 25), ‘Lord Lyttelton had related, not to one person alone, but to several, and all of them people of credit, the particulars of a strange vision which he said had appeared to him the preceding night.’ On Thursday, the 25th, as we saw, he spoke in the Lords. On Friday, the 26th, he went down to his house at Epsom, Pitt Place, where his party, says Coulton, consisted of Mr. (later Lord) Fortescue, Captain (later Admiral) Wolsley, Mrs. Flood, and the Misses Amphlett. Now, the town had no kind of doubt concerning the nature of Lord Lyttelton’s relations with two, if not three, of the Misses Amphlett. His character was nearly as bad, where women were concerned, as that of Colonel Charteris. But Walpole, writing to Mann on November 28 (the day after Lord Lyttelton’s death), says: ‘Lord Lyttelton is dead suddenly. SUDDENLY, in this country, is always at first construed to mean BY A PISTOL... The story given out is, that he looked ill, AND HAD SAID HE SHOULD NOT LIVE THREE DAYS; that, however, he had gone to his house at Epsom... with a caravan of nymphs; and on Saturday night had retired before supper to take rhubarb, returned, supped heartily, went into the next room again, and died in an instant.’

Nothing here of a dream or ghost. We only hear of a prophecy, by Lyttelton, of his death.

Writing to Mason on Monday, November 29, Walpole avers that Lord Lyttelton was ‘attended only by four virgins, whom he had picked up in the Strand.’ Here Horace, though writing from Berkeley Square, within two days of the fatal 27th, is wrong. Lord Lyttelton had the Misses Amphlett, Captain Wolsley, Mr. Fortescue, and Mrs. Flood with him. According to Walpole, he felt unwell on Saturday night (the 27th), ‘went to bed, rung his bell in ten minutes, and in one minute after the arrival of his servant expired!’ ‘He had said on Thursday that he should die in three days, HAD DREAMT SO, and felt that it would be so. On Saturday he said, “If I outlive to-day, I shall go on;” but enough of him.’

Walpole speaks of a DREAM, but he soon has other, if not better, information. Writing to Mason on December 11, he says that ghost stories from the north will now be welcome. ‘Lord Lyttelton’s vision has revived the taste; though it seems a little odd that an APPARITION should despair of getting access to his Lordship’s bed, in the shape of a young woman, without being forced to use the disguise of a robin-redbreast.’ What was an apprehension or prophecy has become a dream, and the dream has become an apparition of a robin-redbreast and a young woman.

If this excite suspicion, let us hasten to add that we have undesigned evidence to Lord Lyttelton’s belief that he had beheld an APPARITION--evidence a day earlier than the day of his death. Mrs. Piozzi (then Mrs. Thrale), in her diary of Sunday, November 28, writes: ‘Yesterday a lady from Wales dropped in and said that she had been at Drury Lane on Friday night. “How,” I asked, “were you entertained?” “Very strangely indeed! Not with the play, though, but the discourse of a Captain Ascough, who averred that a friend of his, Lord Lyttelton, has SEEN A SPIRIT, who has warned him that he will die in three days. I have thought of nothing else since.”’

Next day, November 29, Mrs. Piozzi heard of Lord Lyttelton’s death.*

*Notes and Queries. Series V., vol. ii. p. 508. December 26,1874.

Here is proof absolute that the story, with apparition, if not with robin, was current THE DAY BEFORE LORD LYTTELTON’S DECEASE.

Of what did Lord Lyttelton die?

‘According to one of the papers,’ says Coulton, vaguely, ‘the cause of death was disease of the heart.’ A brief ‘convulsion’ is distinctly mentioned, whence Coulton concludes that the disease was NOT cardiac. On December 7, Mason writes to Walpole from York: ‘Suppose Lord Lyttelton had recovered the breaking of his blood-vessel!’

Was a broken blood-vessel the cause of death? or have we here, as is probable, a mere inference of Mason’s?

Coulton’s account is meant to lead up to his theory of suicide. Lord Lyttelton mentioned his apprehension of death ‘somewhat ostentatiously, we think.’ According to Coulton, at 10 P.M. on Saturday, Lord Lyttelton, looking at his watch, said: ‘Should I live two hours longer, I shall jockey the ghost.’ Coulton thinks that it would have been ‘more natural’ for him to await the fatal hour of midnight ‘in gay company’ than to go to bed before twelve. He finishes the tale thus: Lord Lyttelton was taking rhubarb in his bedroom; he sent his valet for a spoon, and the man, returning, found him ‘on the point of dissolution.’

‘His family maintained a guarded and perhaps judicious silence on the subject,’ yet Lord Westcote spoke of it to Dr. Johnson, and wrote an account of it, and so did Lord Lyttelton’s widow; while Wraxall, as we shall see, says that the Dowager Lady Lyttelton painted a picture of the ‘warning’ in 1780.

Harping on suicide, Coulton quotes Scott’s statement in ‘Letters on Demonology:’ ‘Of late it has been said, and PUBLISHED, that the unfortunate nobleman had determined to take poison.’ Sir Walter gives no authority, and Coulton admits that he knows of none. Gloomy but commonplace reflections in the so-called ‘Letters’ of Lyttelton do not even raise a presumption in favour of suicide, which, in these very Letters, Lyttelton says that he cannot defend by argument.* That Lyttelton made his will ‘a few weeks before his death,’ providing for his fair victims, may be accounted for, as we shall see, by the threatening state of his health, without any notion of self-destruction. Walpole, in his three letters, only speaks of ‘a pistol’ as the common construction of ‘sudden death;’ and that remark occurs before he has heard any details. He rises from a mere statement of Lord Lyttelton’s, that he is ‘to die in three days,’ to a ‘dream’ containing that assurance, and thence to apparitions of a young woman and a robin-redbreast. The appearance of that bird, by the way, is, in the folk-lore of Surrey, an omen of death. Walpole was in a position to know all current gossip, and so was Mrs. Piozzi.

*Coulton’s argument requires him to postulate the authenticity of many, at least, of these Letters, which were given to the world by the author of ‘Doctor Syntax.’

We now turn to a narrative nearly contemporary, that written out by Lord Westcote on February 13, 1780. Lord Westcote examined the eldest Miss Amphlett, Captain (later Admiral) Charles Wolsley, Mrs. Flood, Lord Lyttelton’s valet, Faulkner, and Stuckey, the servant in whose arms, so to speak, Lord Lyttelton died. Stuckey was questioned (note this) in the presence of Captain Wolsley and of MR. FORTESCUE. The late Lord Lyttelton permitted the Westcote narrative to be published in ‘Notes and Queries’ (November 21, 1874). The story, which so much pleased Dr. Johnson, runs thus:--On Thursday, November 25, Mrs. Flood and the three Misses Amphlett were residing at Lord Lyttelton’s house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square. Who IS this Mrs. Flood? Frederick Flood (1741-1824) married LADY Julia Annesley in 1782. The wife of the more famous Flood suits the case no better: his wife was LADY F. M. Flood; she was a Beresford. (The ‘Dictionary of National Biography’ is responsible for these facts.) At all events, on November 25, at breakfast, in Hill Street, Lord Lyttelton told the young ladies and their chaperon that he had had an extraordinary DREAM.