Part 18

He seemed to be in a room which a bird flew into; the bird changed into a woman in white, who told him he should die in three days.

He ‘did not much regard it, because he could in some measure account for it; for that a few days before he had been with Mrs. Dawson, when a robin-redbreast flew into her room.’ On the morning of Saturday he told the same ladies that he was very well, and believed he should ‘BILK THE GHOST.’ The dream has become an apparition! On that day--Saturday--he, with the ladies, Fortescue, and Wolsley, went to Pitt Place; he went to bed after eleven, ordered rolls for breakfast, and, in bed, ‘died without a groan,’ as his servant was disengaging him from his waistcoat. During dinner he had ‘a rising in his throat’ (a slight sickness), ‘a thing which had often happened to him before.’ His physician, Dr. Fothergill, vaguely attributed his death to the rupture of some vessel in his side, where he had felt a pain in summer.

From this version we may glean that Lord Lyttelton was not himself very certain whether his vision occurred when he was awake or asleep. He is made to speak of a ‘dream,’ and even to account for it in a probable way; but later he talks of ‘bilking the GHOST.’ The editor of ‘Notes and Queries’ now tries to annihilate this contemporary document by third-hand evidence, seventy years after date. In 1851 or 1852 the late Dowager Lady Lyttelton, Sarah, daughter of the second Earl Spencer, discussed the story with Mr. Fortescue, a son of the Mr. Fortescue who was at Pitt Place, and succeeded to the family title six years later, in 1785. The elder Mr. Fortescue, in brief, is said to have averred that he had heard nothing of the dream or prediction till ‘some days after;’ he, therefore, was inclined to disbelieve in it. We have demonstrated, however, that if Mr. Fortescue had heard nothing, yet the tale was all over the town before Lord Lyttelton died. Nay, more, we have contemporary proof that Mr. Fortescue HAD heard of the affair! Lyttelton died at midnight on the Saturday, November 27. In her diary for the following Tuesday (November 30), Lady Mary Coke says that she has just heard the story of the ‘dream’ from Lady Bute, who had it from Mr. Ross, WHO HAD IT FROM MR. FORTESCUE!* Mr. Fortescue, then, must have told the tale as early as the Monday after the fatal Saturday night. Yet in old age he seems to have persuaded himself that the tale came later to his knowledge. Some irrelevant, late, and fourth-hand versions will be found in ‘Notes and Queries,’ but they merely illustrate the badness of such testimony.

*See The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, iii. 85. Note--She speaks of ‘a dream.’

One trifle of contemporary evidence may be added: Mrs. Delany, on December 9, 1779, wrote an account of the affair to her niece--here a bird turns into a woman.

In pursuit of evidence, it is a long way from 1780 to 1816. In November of that year, T. J. wrote from Pitt Place, Epsom, in ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine;’ but his letter is dated ‘January 6.’ T. J. has bought Pitt Place, and gives ‘a copy of a document in writing, left in the house’ (where Lyttelton died) ‘as an heirloom which may be depended on.’ This document begins, ‘Lord Lyttelton’s Dream and Death (see Admiral Wolsley’s account).’

But where IS Admiral Wolsley’s account? Is it in the archives of Sir Charles Wolseley of Wolseley? Or is THIS (the Pitt Place document) Admiral Wolsley’s account? The anonymous author says that he was one of the party at Pitt Place on November 27,1779, with ‘Lord Fortescue,’ ‘Lady Flood,’ and the two Misses Amphlett. Consequently this account is written after 1785, when Mr. Fortescue succeeded to his title. Lord Lyttelton, not long returned from Ireland, had been suffering from ‘suffocating fits’ in the last month. And THIS, not the purpose of suicide, was probably his reason for executing his will. ‘While in his house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, he DREAMT three days before his death he saw a bird fluttering, and afterwards a woman appeared in white apparel, and said, “Prepare to meet your death in three days.” He was alarmed and called his servant. On the third day, while at breakfast with the above-named persons, he said, “I have jockeyed the ghost, as this is the third day.”’ Coulton places this incident at 10 P.M. on Saturday, and makes his lordship say, ‘In two hours I shall jockey the ghost.’ ‘The whole party set out for Pitt Place,’ which contradicts Coulton’s statement that they set out on Friday, but agrees with Lord Westcote’s. ‘They had not long arrived when he was seized with a usual fit. Soon recovered. Dined at five. To bed at eleven.’ Then we hear how he rebuked his servant for stirring his rhubarb ‘with a tooth-pick’ (a plausible touch), sent him for a spoon, and was ‘in a fit’ on the man’s return. ‘The pillow being high, his chin bore hard on his neck. Instead of relieving him, the man ran for help: on his return found him dead.’

This undated and unsigned document, by a person who professes to have been present, is not, perhaps, very accurate in dates. The phrase ‘dreamt’ is to be taken as the common-sense way of stating that Lord Lyttelton had a vision of some sort. His lordship, who spoke of ‘jockeying the GHOST,’ may have believed that he was awake at the time, not dreaming; but no person of self-respect, in these unpsychical days, could admit more than a dream. Perhaps this remark also applies to Walpole’s ‘he dreamed.’ The species of the bird is left in the vague.

Moving further from the event, to 1828, we find a book styled ‘Past Feelings Renovated,’ a reply to Dr. Hibbert’s ‘Philosophy of Apparitions.’ The anonymous author is ‘struck with the total inadequacy of Dr. Hibbert’s theory.’ Among his stories he quotes Wraxall’s ‘Memoirs.’ In 1783, Wraxall dined at Pitt Place, and visited ‘the bedroom where the casement window at which Lord Lyttelton asserted the DOVE appeared to flutter* was pointed out to me.’ Now the Pitt Place document puts the vision ‘in Hill Street, Berkeley Square.’ So does Lord Westcote. Even a bird cannot be in two places at once, and the ‘Pitt Place Anonymous’ does seem to know what he is talking about. Of course Lord Lyttelton MAY have been at Pitt Place on November 24, and had his dream there. He MAY have run up to Hill Street on the 25th and delivered his speech, and MAY have returned to Pitt Place on the Friday or Saturday.** But we have no evidence for this view; and the Pitt Place document places the vision in Hill Street. Wraxall adds that he has frequently seen a painting of bird, ghost, and Lord Lyttelton, which was executed by that nobleman’s stepmother in 1780. It was done ‘after the description given to her by the valet de chambre who attended him, to whom his master related all the circumstances.’

*It was a ROBIN in 1779.

**Coulton says Friday; the Anonymous says Saturday, with Lord Westcote.

Our author of 1828 next produces the narrative by Lord Lyttelton’s widow, Mrs. Peach, who was so soon deserted. In 1828 she is ‘now alive, and resident in the south-west part of Warwickshire.’ According to Lady Lyttelton (who, of course, was not present), Lord Lyttelton had gone to bed, whether in Hill Street or Pitt Place we are not told. His candle was extinguished, when he heard ‘a noise resembling the fluttering of a bird at his chamber window. Looking in the direction of the sound, he saw the figure of an unhappy female, whom he had seduced and deserted, and who, when deserted, had put a violent end to her own existence, standing in the aperture of the window from which the fluttering sound had proceeded. The form approached the foot of the bed: the room was preternaturally light; the objects in the chamber were distinctly visible. The figure pointed to a clock, and announced that Lord Lyttelton would expire AT THAT VERY HOUR (twelve o’clock) in the third day after the visitation.’

We greatly prefer, as a good old-fashioned ghost story, this version of Lady Lyttelton’s. There is no real bird, only a fluttering sound, as in the case of the Cock Lane Ghost, and many other examples. The room is ‘preternaturally light,’ as in Greek and Norse belief it should have been, and as it is in the best modern ghost stories. Moreover, we have the raison d’etre of the ghost: she had been a victim of the Chief Justice in Eyre. The touch about the clock is in good taste. We did not know all that before.

But, alas! our author of 1828, after quoting the Pitt Place Anonymous, proceeds to tell, citing no named authority, that the ghost was that of Mrs. Amphlett, mother of the two Misses Amphlett, and of a third sister, in no way less distinguished than these by his lordship. Now a ghost cannot be the ghost of two different people. Moreover, Mrs. Amphlett lived (it is said) for years after. However, Mrs. Amphlett has the preference if she ‘died of grief at the precise time when the female vision appeared to his lordship,’ which makes it odd that her daughters should then have been revelling at Pitt Place under the chaperonage of Mrs. Flood. We are also informed (on no authority) that Lord Lyttelton ‘acknowledged’ the ghost to have been that of the injured mother of the three Misses Amphlett.

Let not the weary reader imagine that the catena of evidence ends here! His lordship’s own ghost did a separate stroke of business, though only in the commonplace character of a deathbed wraith, or ‘veridical hallucination.’

Lord Lyttelton had a friend, we learn from ‘Past Feelings Renovated’ (1828), a friend named Miles Peter Andrews. ‘One night after Mr. Andrews had left Pitt Place and gone to Dartford,’ where he owned powder-mills, his bed-curtains were pulled open and Lord Lyttelton appeared before him in his robe de chambre and nightcap. Mr. Andrews reproached him for coming to Dartford Mills in such a guise, at such a time of night, and, ‘turning to the other side of the bed, rang the bell, when Lord Lyttelton had disappeared.’ The house and garden were searched in vain; and about four in the afternoon a friend arrived at Dartford with tidings of his lordship’s death.

Here the reader with true common sense remarks that this second ghost, Lord Lyttelton’s own, does not appear in evidence till 1828, fifty years after date, and then in an anonymous book, on no authority. We have permitted to the reader this opportunity of exercising his acuteness, while laying a little trap for him. It is not in 1828 that Mr. Andrews’s story first appears. We first find it in December 1779--that is, in the month following the alleged event. Mr. Andrews’s experience, and the vision of Lord Lyttelton, are both printed in ‘The Scots Magazine,’ December 1779, p. 650. The account is headed ‘A Dream,’ and yet the author avers that Lord Lyttelton was wide awake! This illustrates beautifully the fact on which we insist, that ‘dream’ is eighteenth-century English for ghost, vision, hallucination, or what you will.

‘Lord Lyttelton,’ says the contemporary ‘Scots Magazine,’ ‘started up from a midnight sleep on perceiving a bird fluttering near the bed-curtains, which vanished suddenly when a female spirit in white raiment presented herself’ and prophesied Lord Lyttelton’s death in three days. His death is attributed to convulsions while undressing.

The ‘dream’ of Mr. Andrews (according to ‘The Scots Magazine’ of December 1779)* occurred at Dartford in Kent, on the night of November 27. It represented Lord Lyttelton drawing his bed-curtains, and saying, ‘It is all over,’ or some such words.

*The magazine appeared at the end of December.

This Mr. Andrews had been a drysalter. He made a large fortune, owned the powder-mills at Dartford, sat in Parliament, wrote plays which had some success, and was thought a good fellow in raffish society. Indeed, the society was not always raffish. In ‘Notes and Queries’ (December 26, 1874) H. S. says that his mother, daughter of Sir George Prescott, often met Mr. Andrews at their house, Theobalds Park, Herts. He was extremely agreeable, and, if pressed, would tell his little anecdote of November 27, 1779.

This proof that the Andrews tale is contemporary has led us away from the description of the final scene, given in ‘Past Feelings Renovated,’ by the person who brought the news to Mr. Andrews. His version includes a trick played with the watches and clocks. All were set on half an hour; the valet secretly made the change in Lord Lyttelton’s own timepiece. His lordship thus went to bed, as he thought, at 11.30, really at eleven o’clock, as in the Pitt Place document. At about twelve o’clock, midnight, the valet rushed in among the guests, who were discussing the odd circumstances, and said that his master was at the point of death. Lord Lyttelton had kept looking at his watch, and at a quarter past twelve (by his chronometer and his valet’s) he remarked, ‘This mysterious lady is not a true prophetess, I find.’ The real hour was then a quarter to twelve. At about half-past twelve, by HIS watch, twelve by the real time, he asked for his physic. The valet went into the dressing-room to prepare it (to fetch a spoon by other versions), when he heard his master ‘breathing very hard.’ ‘I ran to him, and found him in the agonies of death.’

There is something rather plausible in this narrative, corresponding, as it does, with the Pitt Place document, in which the valet, finding his master in a fit, leaves him and seeks assistance, instead of lowering his head that he might breathe more easily. Like the other, this tale makes suicide a most improbable explanation of Lord Lyttelton’s death. The affair of the watches is dramatic, but not improbable in itself. A correspondent of ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’ (in 1815) only cites ‘a London paper’ as his authority. The writer of ‘Past Feelings Renovated’ (1828) adds that Mr. Andrews could never again be induced to sleep at Pitt Place, but, when visiting there, always lay at the Spread Eagle, in Epsom.

Let us now tabulate our results.

At Pitt Place, Epsom, or Hill Street, Berkeley Square, On November 24, Lord Lyttelton Dreamed of, or saw, A young woman and a robin. A bird which became a woman. A dove and a woman. Mrs. Amphlett (without a dove or robin). Some one else unknown.

In one variant, a clock and a preternatural light are thrown in, with a sermon which it were superfluous to quote. In another we have the derangement of clocks and watches. Lord Lyttelton’s stepmother believed in the dove. Lady Lyttelton did without a dove, but admitted a fluttering sound.

For causes of death we have--heart disease (a newspaper), breaking of a blood-vessel (Mason), suicide (Coulton), and ‘a suffocating fit’ (Pitt Place document). The balance is in favour of a suffocating fit, and is against suicide. On the whole, if we follow the Pitt Place Anonymous (writing some time after the event, for he calls Mr. Fortescue ‘Lord Fortescue’), we may conclude that Lord Lyttelton had been ill for some time. The making of his will suggests a natural apprehension on his part, rather than a purpose of suicide. There was a lively impression of coming death on his mind, but how it was made--whether by a dream, an hallucination, or what not--there is no good evidence to show.

There is every reason to believe, on the Pitt Place evidence, combined with the making of his will, that Lord Lyttelton had really, for some time, suffered from alarming attacks of breathlessness, due to what cause physicians may conjecture. Any one of these fits, probably, might cause death, if the obvious precaution of freeing the head and throat from encumbrances were neglected; and the Pitt Place document asserts that the frightened valet DID neglect it. Again, that persons under the strong conviction of approaching death will actually die is proved by many examples. Even Dr. Hibbert says that ‘no reasonable doubt can be placed on the authenticity of the narrative’ of Miss Lee’s death, ‘as it was drawn up by the Bishop of Gloucester’ (Dr. William Nicholson) ‘from the recital of the young lady’s father,’ Sir Charles Lee. Every one knows the tale. In a preternatural light, in a midnight chamber, Miss Lee saw a woman, who proclaimed herself Miss Lee’s dead mother, ‘and that by twelve o’clock of the day she should be with her.’ So Miss Lee died in her chair next day, on the stroke of noon, and Dr. Hibbert rather heartlessly calls this ‘a fortunate circumstance.’