Fifty-One Years of Victorian Life. Countess of Margaret Elizabeth Leigh Child-Villiers Jersey
in the intervening years that an iron framework had to be made outside it to hold the little lamps. There was a very large family party in the house, and naturally my affairs increased the general excitement and I shared with my brother addresses and presentations. As my mother said—it could never happen to her again to have a son come of age and a daughter married in the same month. She was to have launched the Lady Leigh lifeboat in the middle of September, but my sister was commissioned to do it instead—and we returned to Portman Square for final preparations. Like most girls under similar circumstances I lived in a whirl during those days, and my only clear recollections are signing Settlements (in happy ignorance of their contents) and weeping bitterly the night before the wedding at the idea of parting from my family, being particularly upset by my brother Dudley’s floods of fraternal tears. However, we were all fairly composed when the day—September 19th, 1872, dawned—and I was safely married by my Uncle Jimmy at St. Thomas’s Church, Orchard Street. It was not our parish, but we had a special licence as it was more convenient. My bridesmaids were my two sisters, Frances Adderley, one of the Cholmondeleys, Minna Finch (daughter of my father’s cousin Lady Aylesford), and Julia Wombwell’s eldest little girl Julia—afterwards Lady Dartrey.
When all was over and farewells and congratulations ended, Jersey and I went down for a short honeymoon at Fonthill, which my grandmother lent us. So ended a happy girlhood—so began a happy married life. I do not say that either was free from shadows, but looking back my prevailing feeling is thankfulness—and what troubles I have had have been mostly of my own making.
My father was so good—my mother so wise. One piece of advice she gave me might well be given to most young wives. “Do not think that because you have seen things done in a particular way that is the only right one.” I cannot resist ending with a few sentences from a charming letter which Aunt Fanny wrote me when I went to Stoneleigh after my engagement:
“I have thought of you unceasingly and prayed earnestly for you. I could not love you as I do, did I not believe that you were true and good and noble—and on that, more than on anything else, do I rest my faith for your future. Oh, Marky my darling child, cling to the good that is in you. Never be false to yourself. I see your little boat starting out on the sea of life, anxiously and tremblingly—for I know full well however smooth the water may be now there must come rocks in everyone’s life large enough to wreck one. Do you call to mind, dear, how you almost wished for such rocks to battle against a little time ago, wearying of the tame, even stream down which you were floating? God be with you when you do meet them.”
CHAPTER IV
EARLY MARRIED LIFE
It is more difficult to write at all consecutively of my married life than of my girlhood, as I have less by which I can date its episodes and more years to traverse—but I must record what I can in such order as can be contrived.
We did not stay long at Fonthill, and after a night or two in London came straight to our Oxfordshire home—Middleton Park.
My husband’s grandfather and father had both died in the same month (October 1859) when he was a boy of fourteen. He was called “Grandison” for the three weeks which intervened between their deaths, having been George Villiers before, so when he returned again to Eton after his father died, the boys said that he came back each time with a fresh name. His grandmother, however, the well-known Sarah, Lady Jersey, continued to reign at Middleton, for the largest share of the family fortune belonged to her as heiress of her grandfather Mr. Child—and, I suppose, in recognition of all he had enjoyed of hers, her husband left her the use of the Welsh property and she alone had the means to keep up Middleton. She was very fond of my husband, but when she died, soon after he came of age and inherited the place, he did not care to make many changes, and though his mother paid lengthened visits she had never really been mistress of the house. Therefore I seemed to have come straight upon the traces of a bygone generation. Even the china boxes on my dressing-table and the blotters on the writing-tables were much as Lady Jersey had left them—and there were bits of needlework and letters in the drawers which brought her personally vividly before me. The fear and awe of her seemed to overhang the village, and the children were still supposed to go to the Infant School at two years old because she had thought it a suitable age. She had been great at education, had built or arranged schools in the various villages belonging to her, and had endowed a small training school for servants in connection with a Girls’ School at Middleton. Naturally the care of that school and other similar matters fell to my province, and I sometimes felt, as I am sure other young women must have done under similar circumstances, that a good deal of wisdom was expected from me at an age which I should have considered hardly sufficient for a second housemaid. Some of the schools of that date must have been quaint enough. An old lame woman still had charge of the Infant School at the neighbouring hamlet of Caulcot, whom we soon moved into the Almshouses. In after years one of her former pupils told me that she was very good at teaching them Scripture and a little reading, but there was no question of writing. If the old lady had occasion to write a letter on her own account she used a knitting-needle as a pen while my informant held the paper steady. If a child was naughty she made him or her stand crouched under the table as a punishment. She never put on a dress unless she knew that Lady Jersey was at the Park, and then, she being crippled with rheumatism, her pupil had to stand on a chair to fasten it up, lest the great lady should pay a surprise visit.
LORD JERSEY’S MOTHER
Sarah, Lady Jersey, had a great dislike to any cutting down or even lopping of trees. She had done much towards enlarging and planting the Park, and doubtless trees were to her precious children. Therefore the agent and woodmen, who realised the necessity of a certain amount of judicious thinning, used to wait until she had taken periodical drives of inspection amongst the woods, and then exercised some discretion in their operations, trusting to trees having branched out afresh or to her having forgotten their exact condition before she came again.
In one school, Somerton, I was amused to find a printed copy of regulations for the conduct of the children, including injunctions never to forget their benefactress. But she was really exceedingly good to the poor people on the property and thoughtful as to their individual requirements. One old woman near her other place, Upton, told me how she had heard of her death soon after receiving a present from her, and added, “I thought she went straight to heaven for sending me that petticoat!” Also she built good cottages for the villagers before the practice was as universal as it became later on. The only drawback was that she would at times insist on the building being carried on irrespective of the weather, with the result that they were not always as dry as they should have been.
Lady Jersey was well known in the world, admired for her beauty and lively conversation, and no doubt often flattered for her wealth, but she left a good record of charity and duties fulfilled in her own home.
As for her beautiful daughter Lady Clementina, she was locally regarded as an angel, and I have heard that when she died the villagers resented her having been buried next to her grandmother, Frances Lady Jersey, as they thought her much too good to lie next to the lady who had won the fleeting affections of George IV.
I soon found home and occupation at Middleton, but I confess that after being accustomed to a large and cheerful family I found the days and particularly the autumn evenings rather lonely when my husband was out hunting, a sport to which he was much addicted in those days. However, we had several visitors of his family and mine, and went to Stoneleigh for Christmas, which was a great delight to me.
Soon after we went abroad, as it was thought desirable after my chest attack of the previous winter that I should not spend all the cold weather in England. We spent some time at Cannes, and I fancy that it really did my husband at least as much good as myself—anyhow he found that it suited him so well that we returned on various occasions.
Sir Robert Gerard was then a great promoter of parties to the Ile Ste Marguerite and elsewhere, and the Duc de Vallombrosa and the Duchesse de Luynes helped to make things lively.
IN