THE STANHOPES.—FIRST TWO HUNDRED YEARS.
THE STANHOPES stand at the head of all the Peers of the drawing-room. Modern society has given birth to a class of magnates who are neither " of the robe" nor " of the sword," seldom soldiers or statesmen, yet great and useful in their way— men in whom strong will and keen brain is half concealed by external polish, who make of culture a means of ascendancy, use repartees like duelling-pistols, and fight social campaigns as difficult as those of the field. They have a tendency to cosmopoli- tanism, display a singular aptitude for diplomacy of a practical kind, the diplomacy which really settles things—and are apt to exhibit in emergencies the iron will and unscrupulous audacity of their true exemplars, the princes of the early Italian States. The late Lord Elphinstone was a perfect specimen of the kind—a man who could purr so softly till it seemed to him necessary to act, and then strike so savagely hard. The modern French Legitimists all tend to this type, and though the class is limited in England, still it exists, and in it the Stanhopes are unquestionably the first. Their whole history is in the career of the forgotten Chesterfield, the strange being whose wit, and insolence, and brutal amours, and courtly gallantry, and life of perils from water, and bandits, and outraged husbands, and jealous women, make up so strange a chapter in the story of that Carnival of Belial the Stuart Restoration.
Time family of Stanhope, or, as it used to be spelt, Stanhop, which now possesses three Earldoms, sprung, like the Cavendishes, from a man who grew fat on the great Sequestration. Who he was by birth is still, in some degree, uncertain. The heralds, of course, have given him a long pedigree, stretching up to a Stanhope who, in 1373, was Escheater (collector for the legacy duty, as we should say) in Derbyshire and Nottingham, but the story must be dismissed as probably forged, and certainly not proven. If Earl Stanhope is anxious about it he had better rewrite it, for at pre- sent the pedigree makes a father and son marry the same woman, slurs over some heraldic impossibilities about arms, invents reasons to account for dispositions of property inconsistent with itself, and generally wears the appearance of a very clumsy romance.*
The real founder was one Michael Stanhope, probably a cadet of a decent house, his sister marrying well, certainly a landless roan without arms, for he took those of the Newcastle Stanhopes, being the best of his name. He " having served King Henry VIII. from his tender years," obtained from that King by letters patent, bearing date January 28, in the 29th year of his reign, a grant of Eveshall forest, in the county of Nottingham ; and on the 24th of November in the same year the King granted the house and site of the priory of Shelford, in the same county, and one hundred and sixty-four acres of land, thirty of meadow and sixty of pasture, with the appurtenances, to Michael Stanhope, Esq., and Anne his wife, and the heirs male of Michael. In a similar manner, on the 5th February, in the 31st year of this reign, Michael Stanhope received a royal grant of the manor of Shelford, and the rectories of the parish churches of Shelford, Saxendale, Gedling, Burton-Joys and North Maskham, in Not- tinghamshire; Ronceby and Westburgh in Lincolnshire ; and Elvaston and Okbrook, in Derbyshire ; and all manors, messuages, lands, and tenements, &c., in Shelford, Saxendale, Newton, Brig- ford, Gunthorp, Loudham, Calthorpe, Horingham, Balcote, Gedling, Carlton, Stoke, Lambecote, Flintham, Long-Collingham, Caunton„ the town of Nottingham, Newark, Burton-Joys, and North Mask- ham, in Nottinghamshire, late belonging to the monastery of Shel- ford. In the thirty-fifth year of Henry VIII., February 25, Michael Stanhope was constituted the King's steward of the great lordship of Holdeness, and of Cottingham, in Yorkshire. Two years later he was knighted by the King at Hampton Court. He had been before that time appointed Governor of Hull. We can account for the rapid rise and aggrandisement of Sir Michael, if the state- ment be true of his connection with Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford—brother of Queen Jane Seymour, and afterwards Protector of England, and Duke of Somerset—whose second wife was Anne Stanhope, daughter of Sir Edward Stanhope, and, if the genealogists are right, sister of Sir Michael. This lady, whose pride and insolent demeanour are said to have precipitated the fall of her husband, was the ancestor of the first line of Seymours, Dukes of Somerset, and Earls and Marquises of Hertford, which terminated in 1750. Burnet seems not to be aware of the connection between the Duke and Stanhope ; but sup- posing it to be proved, it is not to be wondered at that Sir Michael Stanhope's fortunes culminated under Somerset's protectorate, and came to a violent catastrophe along with his brother-in-law's. He was appointed chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and in the first year of Edward VI. was returned as one of the knights for the shire of Nottingham, and in the third year of this reign was appointed with others a commissioner to examine the state of the guild lands in the kingdom. He involved himself deeply in the administrative measures of Somerset, and when the latter's power was undermined and subverted by Dudley, Lord Lisle (Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland), " on the 13th, of October (1549)," says Burnet, " Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Michael Stanhope, Sir John Thynne, and Edward Wolfe, called adherents of the Duke of Somerset, and the principal instruments of his ill-government, were sent to the Tower ; and on the 14th he himself was sent thither." In the following year, after the fall of the Earl of Arundel, who had been one great agent in their overthrow, the adherents of Somerset were discharged, on the 22nd of February, on their own recognizances, Sir Michael Stanhope " acknowledging he owed the King 3,0001." Two years later, how- ever, having engaged with Somerset and some of his friends in plans to overturn Northumberland, and being betrayed by Sir Thomas Palmer, they were all, with the Duchess of Somerset, thrown • Erery pedigree is open to suspicion, fcr it must es necessitate ref assume the chastity of the wives for successive hundreds of years, and that assumption, if tested by the history of the be•t known magnates, i.e., the small royal caste, Ma demonstrable blunder. A break of the kind can be almost proved in every royal pedigree. Etut English pedigrees are further vitiated by the fact that the local reverence attaching to property rather than birth, heralds have been allowed to lie ad libitum, to suppress all inconvenient facts, and even invent whole records for families which, like the Walleee3s, were recently of the rank of little tradesmen.
into prison. The charges against them, though based on facts, were exaggerated, and the trials were conducted with the gross unfairness characteristic of the time, and on 26th February, 1552, Sir Michael was beheaded on Tower Hill. Burnet says he died unpitied, and hints that the unpopularity was, at least in part, deserved. He says, " Sir Michael Stanhop, Sir Thomas Arundel, Sir Ralph Vane, and Sir Allies Partridge, were next brought to their trials. The first and the last of these were little pitied. For as all great men have people about them who make use of their greatness only for their own ends, without regarding their master's honour or true interest, so they were the persons upon whom the ill things which had been done by the Duke of Somerset were chiefly cast. But Sir Thomas Arundel was much pitied, and Sir Ralph Vane was the most lamented of them all."
Sir Michael had three daughters and four sons, Sir Thomas (of Shelford), Sir Edward, who was one of Elizabeth's Queen's Counsel on the York circuit, and died childless, Sir Michael of Sudbury, and Sir John, who fixed his seat at Harrington, in Northamptonshire. This gentleman rose to Court favcur, under Elizabeth, was a Privy Councilor of James I., was one of the commissioners of the first treaty of union with Scotland, and on May 4th, 1605, was created Baron Stanhope of Harrington. He died March 9th, 1620, and was succeeded by his son Charles, who passed through the Civil War as a lukewarm supporter of the Parliament, and died in 1675 without issue, the peerage, the first gained by the House, thus becoming extinct. They had, however, iu the interim, gained another, Sir Thomas Stanhope of Shelford, eldest son of the founder, having prospered as, pace Cardinal Wise- man, almost all the holders of abbey lands have done. He was knighted by Elizabeth on her visit to Kenilworth, purchased the manors of Whatton, Bingham, and Toveton, acquired by marriage with the co-heiress of Sir John Post, Etwell, and Cubley, in Derbyshire, and bought of the Berkeleys the castle and manor of Bretby, still the seat of his descendants, the Chesterfield family. He is the Stanhope alluded to in the distich attributed to the Queen upon the. Derbyshire knights- " Gervase the gentle, Stanhope the stout,
Markhani the lion, and Sutton the lout."
Sir Thomas Stanhope died August 3rd, 1596, and his eldest son, Sir John, was knighted by James I., and resided usually at Elva.ston, in Derbyshire, a property which he left to his second son, John, ancestor of the Earls of Harrington, who, again, the third son's family ending suddenly, inherited Linby from them. Sir John's eldest son Philip was knighted in 1605, on November 7th, 1616, raised to the peerage as Baron Stanhope, of Shelford, and, on August 4th, 1628. created Earl of Chesterfield. These honours bound him to the King, and from this time forward the Shelford Stauhopes were consistent and ardent royalists. The Earl and his sons were among the first in the field for King Charles, but their military career was unfortunate. One of his sous fortified Shelford and held it till October 27th, 1645 ; but it was taken by storm, and the son of the Earl slain in the attack. Another son, who was at Edgehill, was slain at Bridgeford, in Nottinghamshire, and the Earl himself, with a third son and 300 dependents, was taken prisoner in Lichfield, and died a prisoner on parole, September 12th, 1656. Several of his sons had preceded him" to the grave,—one by his second wife was, as we shall show, father of the first Earl Stanhope,—and the Earldom of Chester- field fell to a grandson, Philip Stanhope.
This extraordinary person, whose life reads like a Spanish comedy, is the " Milord Chesterfield " of " Grammont's Ii emoirs " and must have been one of the strangest characters even of that strange age. The materials for his biography are unusually ample, for while Anthony Hamilton, the writer of " Grammont's Memoirs," has devoted more pages to him than to any man not royal or of his own family, he himself left notes of the principal events in his own life and correspondence of the most private character. The drawback is that half these notes are visible exaggerations, and there is an air of romance thrown over all the remainder. To judge from these accounts he was the very repre- sentative man of the age—an able, dissolute man, with strong poli- tical principle, who had seen half the countries of Europe and almost every phase of life, who was drowned half-a-dozen times and robbed as many,- who once begged his way to Paris only to find himself a great Earl,.and who, after wanting almost every woman he saw, and winning almost every woman he wanted, fell in love with his own wife, and commenced a new series of adventures to cure her of her disgust. We mart tell the story as we find it, but it is with the reservation that we believe it nearly as little as we' believe Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Philip's father, who never came to the title, .died when his son was one year old, leaving a widow, who was daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Lord Wootton, and governess to Princess Mary, eldest daughter of Charles I., and mother of William of Orange. The widow married a Dutch gentleman, and the lad was brought up in Hol- land, where we find him, after being dragged out of the water by his shoestrings—so he says, at least—an attendant on the Princess. At fifteen he was drowned again, fifteen vessels having sunk around his own between Delft and Antwerp, and at sixteen he and the " messenger" to Paris rescued a coachful of ladies who had been set upon by fifteen soldiers of fortune. Travelling to Paris he put himself into an academy, but was compelled to leave it in consequence of a duel, in which he hurt and dis- armed his antagonist. In 1649 he went to Italy ; on his return through Germany he was robbed and nearly killed, but got at length to Holland, and thence repaired to England, which country he had not seen since he was seven years old. In 1650, according to his own dates (the Peerage Rolls differ by two years), be married Lady Anne Percy, eldest daughter of Algernon, Earl of Northum- berland, and lived in retirement at Petworth for some time sub- sequently to this event. After two supernatural incidents or warnings, which he vouches for and earnestly believes in, though he makes a feint of reasoning them away, his wife died in 1654, in childbed, and her infant son soon followed her. He then tells us he left England, taking with him only a little foot-boy, and in- tended to have gone " with pilgrims to Jerusalem," but not,find- ing this practicable, went to Rome instead, having, of course, a fight with the Majorcan pirates on the voyage. Ile stayed about a year in Rome, and here again was nearly drowned from an attack of cramp. " I sank down," he says, "to the bottom, and not being able to rise again upon the water, and feeling the bank under the water to slope, I crept on all fours till I came out at the side, to the amazement of the Lord Lindsey and many more, who were standers-by "—as one can well believe! A plague soon broke out, and five persons died in the house in which he lodged; at the same time he heard from England that a decree in Chancery had been given against him, and that his uncle, Arthur Stanhope,. youngest sou of the first Earl by his first marriage, and ancestor of the present Earl of Chesterfield, had seized his estate, and there would be no more remittances of money. His uncle also claimed a debt from him of 10,0001., and as Arthur Stan- hope, he tells us, stood well with the Protector Cromwell, the young adventurer feared imprisonment if he returned home. He left home with 251. iu his pocket for Paris, but fell ill, lost all his money, and after a period of actual begging was rescued by a Jesuit priest, who paid his way to the capital. There he found the news of his grandfather's death and his own accession to the Earl- dom. He immediately compromised matters with his uncle, re- gained his estates, and was pressed by Cromwell to marry his daughter with a portion of 20,0001. and a command by land or sea. He refused, and Cromwell's love immediately turned to hate, a story which will deceive no one acquainted with Cromwell's real mode of negotiating matches for his children. The truth in all probability is that the Earl, with half the young nobility, was a suitor for Cromwell's daughter, and also for Fairfax's, and was rejected by both on account of his notorious licence, a licence so great that it produced his imprisonment. A gross act of indecency towards a lady involved him in a duel with Colonel Whalley, in which the Earl, being utterly in the wrong, was, of course, the victor, and Cromwell sent him to the Tower. Next year (1658) he was three times impri- soned, the Earl of Stamford accusing him of treason ; but " at great charge and trouble he got off," only to kill a gentleman in a duel, and abscond to Holland. There he obtained the pardon of the "King of Scots," Charles II., and returned with him to England, in fair favour from a relationship which now seems almost impossible. The Earl had years before formed a connection with Barbara Villiers, Charles's proud and dissolute mistress, better known as Lady Castlemaine, and Duchess of Cleveland,— the Dukes of Grafton are her descendants. The intrigue had commenced when she was Miss Villiers, continued after her marriage with Mr. Palmer, and lasted up to her desertion of her first lover for the restored King. Piqued at this desertion, Chesterfield paid his court to Lady Elizabeth Butler, daughter of the celebrated Duke of Ormond, and contrived, in spite of his character, to con- vince her of his devotion. ' She married him, and he neglected her, till she, enraged at his open contempt, began to intrigue in her turn. George Hamilton, the biographer's brother, became her lover, and when she threw him off for the Duke of York, betrayed her to her husband, who suddenly carried her off to Bretby. All London rang with the scandal, and all the mothers in England declared that their sons should not visit Italy, " lest they should bring back with them that infamous custom of laying restraint upon their wives." The upshot of the affair was curious. The Earl fell deeply in love with his wife, and, being one of the men who always succeed, won back her affection, and the mutual confidence became complete. He learnt George Hamilton's real relation to his wife, and she that George had betrayed her, and the two laid a plot which tempted the culprit down to Bretby. There the lady kept him for hours in the garden, nearly frozen to death, till, discovering the trick, he rode sharply back to London, only to find all town jeering at his expense, and to hear the King sarcastically compliment him on his journey. It was a delightful state of manners, and Paridisaical in the absence of shame, if not quite in that of covering.
In 1667, Charles II. gave the Earl a regiment, which he raised in ten days, and then stationed among the swamps till half the men died of ague, and the Archbishop gave the Earl himself his farewell blessing. Chesterfield recovered, however, and we gladly turn from scenes of intrigue to his more creditable poli- tical character. The Earl was from first to last, except for one short period, a strong and consistent Tory. He opposed the Exclusion Bill, declined to give evidence in favour of Lord Russell without the King's consent, was excluded from the death-bed of Charles II. as too determined a Protestant, disapproved all James' concessions to Roman Catholics, and when the Revolution broke out interfered only, as he said, to protect the Princess Anne. William, who had been bred up with him as a boy, would have taken him into favour ; but the Earl, though anxious always for his own personal fortunes, resisted his preten- sions in every debate, and steadily refused every offer of office or emolument. He resided at Bretby, which he had rebuilt, and added to the family property by purchases such as Brisancoate and Hartshorn. He had, moreover, obtained by third marriage with the heiress of the Dormers all their Bucking- hamshire estates, Wing Park, Ascot, Eythorpe, and Timer, and he latterly nursed his affairs with some care. Despite his magnificent constitution, however, the penalty of a life like his overtook him in a complication of diseases, of which gout was, probably, the least formidable. He died at last in his 80th year, tormented by scurvy, at his house in Bloomsbury Square, on 28th January, 1713. After all deductions for exaggeration, he had lived a life which in romance would be pronounced absurd. Roderick Random is true to nature, and so is Earl de Guest ; but a man who was both at once would be pronounced a failure. Yet that was Lord Chesterfield, page and wanderer, beggar and earl, who asked the hand of a Cromwell, lived with Barbara Villiers, after a life of roué excitement fell in love with his own wife, and with a ruined reputation was still one of the few men whom Catherine of Braganza, Charles II.'s " swarthy Kate," dared ask to be her executor.
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