The Captain's Death Bed & Other Essays. Virginia Woolf
have been, no reasonable woman could refuse or help loving and respecting. Althorp as he is, no reasonable woman can for a moment think of but as an eager huntsman. He has no more importance in society now (as he is, remember) than the chairs and tables…. Evenings and Sundays are to him a visible penance…. But when he appears at breakfast in his red jacket and jockey cap, it is a sort of intoxicating delight that must be seen to seem credible, and one feels the same sort of good-natured pleasure as at seeing a Newfoundland dog splash into the water, a goldfinch out of his cage, or a mouse run out of his trap. This is the man that I cannot wish to marry….
Shocked, puzzled yet charmed, Selina stayed on. But she preserved her own standards. In that intimate society where every lord and lady had a nickname, Trimmer had hers. She was called Raison Sévère, Triste Raison, Vent de Bise. Lady Bessborough lamented “… rigidly right, she forgets that one may do right without making oneself disagreeable to everyone around”. And Bess, Lady Elizabeth Foster, shivered in her presence. “Bess … says she always affects her like a North-East wind.” Trimmer was no sycophant. By degrees she assumed the part that is so often played by the humble retainer; from governess she became confidante. In that wild whirling life of incessant love-making and intrigue she represented reason, morality—something that Hary-o as she grew up missed in her mother and needed. Mama, she owned to her sister when Duncannon pestered her, was “not prudent”; mama did not mind putting her daughter into a “most awkward situation”. But Selina, on the other hand, “gave me a most furious lecture that my coquetry was dreadful, and that, without caring for my cousin, I had made him fall in love with me.” It was “merely to enjoy the triumph of supplanting Lady E.”, Trimmer said. Lady Harriet was angry at Trimmer’s plain speaking, but she respected her for it nevertheless.
More and more, as Hary-o grew older, the extraordinary complications of Devonshire House morality involved her in tortures of doubt—what was her duty to her father, what, after her mother’s death, to his mistress, and what did she owe to society? Ought she to allow Lady Liz to drag her into the company of the abandoned Mrs. Fitzherbert? “And yet I have no right to be nice about the company I go into; or rather no power, for I think no blame can be attached to me for that I so reluctantly live in.” Strangely, it was not to the Bessboroughs or to the Melbournes that Hary-o turned in her dilemma; it was to Trimmer. Though companion now to old Lady Spencer, Trimmer came back to bear Harriet company at Devonshire House when Lady Liz was queening it there, saying “we” and “us” all the time, and fondling the Duke’s spotted and speckled puppies in her shawl. Trimmer alone had the courage to show that the dogs bored her. Trimmer compelled the Duke and George Lamb to talk about “the Quaker persuasion and Mr. Boreham’s scruples about giving the oath”. In those tortured days Trimmer, “arch advocate of reason”, was the greatest blessing to her distracted pupil. And it was finally to Trimmer that Harriet turned when the crucial question of her life had to be decided. Was she to marry her aunt’s lover, Lord Granville? He had two children by Lady Bessborough. They had always been in league against her. She had hated him; yet there had come over her the spell of his wonderful almond-shaped eyes, and it would mean escape—from Lady Liz, from the ignominies and insults that her father’s mistress put upon her. What was she to do? What she did was to marry Granville—“Adored Granville, who would make a barren desert smile.” And it proved, on the face of it, an ideal union. Lord Granville became a model of the domestic virtues. Harriet developed into the most respectable of Victorian matrons, wearing a large black bonnet, setting up old orange women with baskets of trifles, illuminating book markers with texts, and attending church assiduously. She survived till 1862. But did Trimmer suffer a Victorian change? Or did Trimmer remain immutably herself? There was something hardy and perennial about Trimmer. One can Imagine her grown very old and very gaunt, dwindling out her declining years in discreet obscurity. But what tales she could have told had she liked—about the lovely Duchess and the foolish Caro Ponsonby, and the Melbournes and the Bessboroughs—all vanished, all changed. The only relic of that wild world that remained was the bracelet on her wrist. It recalled much that had better be forgotten, and yet, as Trimmer looked at it, how happy she had been in Devonshire House with Hary-o, her dearest friend.
[New Statesman and Nation, Jul 6, 1940, as “Hary-o: The Letters of Lady Harriet Cavendish”]
The Captain’s Death Bed.
The Captain lay dying on a mattress stretched on the floor of the boudoir room; a room whose ceiling had been painted to imitate the sky, and whose walls were painted with trellis work covered with roses upon which birds were perching. Mirrors had been let into the doors, so that the village people called the room the “Room of a Thousand Pillars” because of its reflections. It was an August morning as he lay dying; his daughter had brought him a bunch of his favourite flowers—clove pinks and moss roses; and he asked her to take down some words at his dictation:—
’Tis a lovely day [he dictated] and Augusta has just brought me three pinks and three roses, and the bouquet is charming. I have opened the windows and the air is delightful. It is now exactly nine o’clock in the morning, and I am lying on a bed in a place called Langham, two miles from the sea, on the coast of Norfolk…. To use the common sense of the word [he went on] I am happy. I have no sense of hunger whatever, or of thirst; my taste is not impaired…. After years of casual, and, latterly, months of intense thought, I feel convinced that Christianity is true … and that God is love. … It is now half-past nine o’clock. World, adieu.
Early in the morning of August 9th, 1848, just about dawn he died.
But who was the dying man whose thoughts turned to love and roses as he lay among his looking-glasses and his painted birds? Singularly enough, it was a sea captain; and still more singularly it was a sea captain who had been through the multitudinous engagements of the Napoleonic wars, who had lived a crowded life on shore, and who had written a long shelf of books of adventure, full of battle and murder and conquest. His name was Frederick Marryat. Who then was Augusta, the daughter who brought him the flowers? She was one of his eleven children; but of her the only fact that is now known to the public is that once she went ratting with her father and seized an enormous rat—“You must know that our Norfolk rats are quite as large as well-grown guinea pigs”—and held on to him with her bare hands much to the amazement of the onlookers and, we may guess, to the admiration of her father, who remarked that his daughters were “true game”. Then, again, what was Langham? Langham was an estate in Norfolk for which Captain Marryat had exchanged Sussex House over a glass of champagne. And Sussex House was a house at Hammersmith in which he lived while he was equerry to the Duke of Sussex. But here certainty begins to falter. Why he quarrelled with the Duke of Sussex and ceased to be his equerry; why, after an apparently pacific interview with Lord Auckland at the Admiralty he was in such a rage that he broke a blood vessel; why, after having eleven children by his wife, he left her; why, being possessed of a house in the country, he lived in London; why, being the centre of a gay and brilliant society he suddenly shut himself up in the country and refused to budge; why Mrs. B refused his love and what were his relations with Mrs. S——; these are questions that we may ask, but that we must ask in vain. For the two little volumes with very large print and very small pages in which his daughter Florence wrote his life refuse to tell us. One of the most active, odd and adventurous lives that any English novelist has ever lived is also one of the most obscure.
Some of the reasons for this obscurity lie on the surface.
In the first place there was too much to tell. The Captain began his life as a midshipman in Lord Cochrane’s ship the Impérieuse in the year 1806. He was then aged fourteen. And here are a few extracts from a private log that he kept in July, 1808, when he was sixteen:—
24th. Taking guns from the batteries.
25th. Burning bridges and dismantling batteries to impede the French.
August 1 st. Taking the brass guns from the batteries.
15th. Took a French despatch boat off Cette.
18th. Took and destroyed a signal post.
19th.