“And the two Counts Löwenjelm went with the Comte de Fersen to the Cardinal Commissary of Police, and the Cardinal also was very much struck, and he said, ‘It is a very extraordinary story, a very extraordinary story indeed, and I am quite inclined to believe that it means something. But, as you know, I am in a great position of trust under Government, and I could not send a body of military down to Radicofani upon the faith of what may prove to have been a dream. At any rate (he said) I could not do it unless the Comte de Fersen proved his sense of the importance of such an action by being willing to return to Radicofani himself.’ And not only was the Comte de Fersen willing to return, but the Count Carl Löwenjelm went with him. The landlord and landlady were excessively agitated when they saw them return with the soldiers who came from Rome. They moved the bed, and found that the flags beneath had been recently upturned. They took up the flags, and there—not sufficiently corrupted to be irrecognisable—was the body of the mason, dressed in the white cap and jacket and trousers, as he had appeared to the Comte de Fersen. Then the landlord and landlady, in true Italian fashion, felt that Providence was against them, and they confessed everything. They were taken to Rome, where they were tried and condemned to death, and they were beheaded at the Bocca della Verità.
“The Count Carl Löwenjelm was present at the execution of that man and woman, and he was the person who told the Marquis de Lavalette, who told Lord Ravensworth, who told me. The by-play of the story is also curious. Those two Counts Löwenjelm were the natural sons of the Duke of Sudomania, who was one of the aspirants for the crown of Sweden in the political crisis which preceded the election of Bernadotte. He was, in fact, elected, but he had many enemies, and on the night on which he arrived to take possession of the throne he was poisoned. The Comte de Fersen himself came to a tragical end in those days. He was very unpopular in Stockholm, and during the public procession in which he took part at the funeral of Charles Augustus (1810) he was murdered, being (though it is terrible to say so of the gallant adherent of Marie Antoinette) beaten to death with umbrellas. And that it was with no view to robbery and from purely political feeling is proved by the fact that though he was en grande tenue, nothing was taken away.”
“Hutton, Yorkshire, Nov. 30.—I came here yesterday, arriving in the dark. It was a great surprise, as I expected to find the place amid the Middlesborough smoke, to see from the window on awaking a beautiful view of high moorland fells beyond the terraced gardens. I laugh when I think how the Duchess of Cleveland rejoiced in giving Mrs. Pease such a pleasant change to Raby, to see this intensely luxurious house by Waterhouse, filled with delightful collections of books, pictures, and carved furniture, and its almost Arabian-Night-like conservatories.
“We have been through bitter wind to Guisborough Abbey—only a grand church front standing lonely near a fine avenue of trees in the grounds of Colonel Challoner.
“Mr. and Mrs. Pease are excellent. He is member for Darlington, son and nephew of the famous Pease Brothers. She, formerly a Fox of Falmouth, is one of the most charming people I ever saw, full of the sweetest and simplest natural dignity. She lives in and for her children, and though the mother of six girls and two boys, looks about six-and-twenty herself.[152]
“There is a Mr. Stover here who is amusing. An uncle of his lives in the haunted house at Biddick. One day when he came in from shooting, he hung his hat on a pole-screen, and sat down by the fire to read his newspaper. Presently, looking over his paper, he saw, to his amazement, his hat on the top of the screen nodding at him. He thought he must be dreaming, but watched, and it certainly nodded again. He got up and walked round it, when it seemed still. Then he sat down again and watched it, and it nodded again, and not only that, but the screen itself seemed to be moving bodily towards him. He watched it, and it certainly crossed part of the pattern of the carpet: of this there could be no doubt. Then he could bear it no longer, and he rushed at the screen and knocked it over. Underneath was his tame tortoise.”
“Wentworth Wodehouse, Dec. 3.—This house has a very stately effect as you approach it, with a truly majestic portico. On the first floor is an immense hall like those in the great Roman houses, and on either side diverge the reception rooms, hung with pictures. Amongst the portraits are several of the great Lord Strafford, with his parents, his son, and his two daughters—Anne and Arabella. Of these, the elder married the Marquis of Rockingham, from whom the present owners are descended. The picture by Vandyke of Lord Strafford and his secretary is glorious. The rooms themselves want colour and effect. Sixty guests can stay in the house, and a hundred and twenty can dine without any crowd, but the place needs great parties of this kind, for smaller ones are lost in these vast suites of too lofty rooms. Lord Fitzwilliam[153] is the very type of a high-bred nobleman, and Lady Fitzwilliam[154] has a sweet and gentle manner; but Lady F. is calm and placid, her two daughters calmer and placider, and Lord F. calmest and placidest.
“To-day we were taken by Lord Fitzwilliam to the two churches. One by Pearson is new and most magnificent; the other is old and very ugly, but has interesting monuments. That of Lord Strafford is mural, with his figure kneeling near the altar. The epitaph does not allude to the manner of his death, but, after setting forth his virtues, simply says ‘he died May 8th, 1641.’ The ghost of Lord Strafford is still said to walk down the oak staircase at Wentworth every Friday night, carrying his head. An old gateway with several fragments of the house of his time remain, and many of his books are preserved in the library. My bedroom is hung with white worked with red by his daughter Lady Rockingham.”
“Dec. 4.—Lady Fitzwilliam has been showing us the house. It contains much of interest, especially in the pictures, and they are repeated so often that one learns to know the family faces—Lord Strafford and his three wives, his son and his two daughters by his second wife, and the second Lord Strafford with his wife, who was the daughter of James, Earl of Derby, and Charlotte de la Tremouille. His inscriptions in the Bibles of her father and mother, which are here, and the many memorials he raised to her, are so touching that it is quite a shock to find he married again after her death; but in his will he always speaks of the second as only his “wife,” the first as his “deare wife.” He restored the old church in her memory, and enjoined upon his descendants always to keep it up for her sake.
“Lady Albreda drove us about the park and to the ‘Mausoleum,’ a commemorative monument raised to the Minister Lord Rockingham by his son. It is copied from the Roman monument at S. Remy near Aries, and contains, in a kind of Pantheon, a statue by Nollekens of Lord Rockingham surrounded by his friends. The face is from a mask taken after death, and the figure is full of power and expression, with a deprecatory ‘Oh, pray don’t say such a thing as that.’ ”
“Temple Newsam, Dec. 6.—This great house is four miles from Leeds, by a road passing through a squalid suburb of grimy houses and muddy lanes, with rotten palings and broken paving-stones, making blackened pools of stagnant water; then black fields succeed, with withered hedges, stag-headed trees, and here and there a mountain of coal refuse breaking the dismal distances. It was almost dark as I drove up the steep park to the house.
“In an immense gallery, hung with red and covered with pictures, like the gallery at Chesney Wold in Bleak House, I found Mrs. Meynell Ingram and Freddie Wood[155] sitting. It was like arriving at a bivouac in the desert; the light from the fire and the lamps gleamed on a little tea-table and a few chairs round it, all beyond was lost in the dark immensity. … Soon other guests arrived—Judge Denman, come for the assizes at Leeds, and his marshal, young Ottaway, the cricketer; Admiral Duncombe, the High Sheriff; Mr. Glyn, Vicar of Beverley, the chaplain; and Sir Frederick Grey and his wife ‘Barberina.’ Some of the pictures are very fine—a portrait by Titian, several Vandykes, Reynolds’ ‘Shepherd Boy,” and some fine Reynolds portraits of Lord and Lady Irvine, the former possessors of this place—the Templar’s Stow of ‘Ivanhoe.’ They left it to their five daughters in turn. The eldest was Lady Hertford, and, if she had two sons, it was to go to the second, but she had only one; the second daughter was Lady Alexander Gordon, who was childless; the third was Mrs. Meynell, mother-in-law of the present possessor.”
“Dec, 7.—Deep snow all to-day and a furious wind. But yesterday we reached Leeds for the assize sermon from the Sheriff’s chaplain, Mr. Glyn,[156]