Читать книгу A Monkey Among Crocodiles: The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of Mrs Georgina Weldon – a disastrous Victorian [Text only] - Brian Thompson, Brian Thompson - Страница 8

The Thomas family arrived in Florence in the type of commercial coach called a diligence on the last leg of a series of dusty and bone-shaking misadventures that dogged them all the way across Europe from Boulogne. They were set down outside the Hôtel du Nord in a state of complete exhaustion after a transit lasting nearly three weeks. Every flea-ridden inn, every insolent customs post had provoked a quarrel. The diligence seated as many as fifteen passengers, inside and out, none of them worthy of Morgan’s attention and on the contrary sweaty, vulgar and for the most part disgustingly foreign. No concession was made to the sun – the Thomases arrived wearing much the same kind of clothing they had worn in England, Georgina in a crushed and dusty miniature of her mother’s crinoline, the newly born infant Morgan Dalrymple swathed in flannel and half-dead with heat. They knew no one in the city. Those who watched them enter the lobby of the hotel saw that they had little luggage and no servants. Though Florence was much more easy-going and welcoming than Rome, the Thomases made no great impression, either at first glance or on later acquaintance. It was not in their nature to be friendly – Morgan could hardly force himself to be civil – and they brought no news of any consequence. As for the little girl running about the lobby of the hotel, though she was plump as a pigeon she evidently gave her parents no pleasure. The days passed; the family still had not visited the Uffizi, the father continued his supercilious silence over dinner: at last they were dismissed as dull. They were Kickleburys.

Morgan came to Florence for a very good reason. It was far from the scenes of his electoral nightmares, but much more to the point the city was one of the cheapest places to live in Europe. A man with a high sense of his own importance but no money could hardly have chosen better. We can get some idea of the attractions from the affairs of another expatriate in much the same boat, Captain Fleetwood Wilson of the 8th Hussars. He happened to be there on a year-long honeymoon when news reached him that he had been utterly ruined by his older brother, to whom he had lent all his money. The Wilsons were in a fix: they already had one child and another was on the way. Abused, betrayed, the gallant Captain (considered by his generation to be one of the greatest horsemen in England) was at his wits’ end. These straitened circumstances, however, did not prevent him from renting the Villa Strozzino. Built by a Strozzi 300 years earlier, the villa, with its elaborate arcaded front and two floors above, sat on a hill overlooking the city. Fine trees decorated its lawns and gardens and cypresses swayed ecstatically in the background. The internal arrangements were such that fifty years later Victoria herself occupied it on her visit to Florence. As Captain Wilson swiftly discovered, penury in Tuscany was a relative affair.

Morgan Thomas, the secretive and unclubbable newcomer, likewise chose his accommodation well. He rented the Villa Capponi, a short carriage drive from the city on its southern side. At one stroke, he entered into the kind of life so emphatically denied him in England. Like Strozzi, Capponi was a famous name in the history of the Republic. Indeed, when Morgan rode into the city through the Porta S. Giorgio, he could see the proud boast set up by Niccolo Capponi above the portals of the Town Hall in 1528: JESVS CHRISTVS REX FLORENTINI POPULI SP DECRETO ELECTVS. Christ might have been the only king the Florentines could accept – the inscription had been a jibe at the departing Charles V – but things were somewhat different now. The Austrians were in occupation, and the greatest man in Florence was not a Medici but the Russian millionaire Demidov, who maintained his new bride, Bonaparte’s niece, in the sumptuously appointed San Donato palace. The nominal ruler of the city and all the lands round about was the Grand Duke of Tuscany, cheerfully dismissed by his subjects as The Grand Ass. At the lower levels of society, the city was festering with every kind of adventurer and charlatan to be found in Europe. Morgan had been put in the unusual position – for him – of being monarch of all he surveyed, but what he saw he did not like very much.

The youthful Lady Dorothy Orford, a member of the Walpole family which had deep roots in Florence, had recently made a much more dashing entrance into the expatriate community, having ridden the son of the 1835 Derby winner, a seventeen-hand horse called Testina, all the way from Antwerp. This was more to the taste of the locals. She later commented. ‘At that time, society in Florence was somewhat mixed: indeed, there were a great many people of shady character, in addition to others of none at all – so much so was this the case that the town had come to be designated “le paradis des femmes galantes”.’

A paradise for whores was superimposed on and undoubtedly drew some of its custom from the well-established British colony. Many before Morgan had the same idea as he, some of them much more romantically motivated. Dante made the city a place of literary pilgrimage and the Brownings were by no means alone in wishing to live and write there. There were many painters and sculptors in residence and a long tradition of amateur theatricals. All the same, the atmosphere inclined to the raffish. Thomas Trollope, brother to Anthony, settled in Florence in 1843 and has left a snapshot of how the Grand Duke’s hospitality was abused at the Pitti Palace. At balls the English would ‘seize the plates of bonbons and empty the contents bodily into their coat pockets. The ladies would do the same with their pocket handkerchiefs.’ The Italian guests went further, wrapping up hams, chickens and portions of fish in newspapers. Trollope saw an Italian countess smuggle a jelly into her purse.

Behind the walls of the Villa Capponi, where he could direct a household with more servants in it than he had ever dreamed possible, Morgan Thomas played out his fantasies of being a rich and indolent aristocrat. He was living in rooms with high ceilings. The trouble was elsewhere. When he looked further abroad – when he looked outside his gates in fact – it was Florence itself that he reprehended – not any bit of it, but all of it. Though the British colony was various, it contained more scribblers and painters than he was accustomed to meeting and was headed by a man he quickly learned to fear and detest.

Her Majesty’s Minister Plenipotentiary for Tuscany was Henry Edward Fox, soon to be fourth Baron Holland. Fox’s wife was the attractive and flirtatious Augusta – ‘decidedly under three feet’, the diarist Creevey once reported, ‘and the very nicest little doll or plaything I ever saw’. It would be difficult to invent two people less likely to entrance the prickly and suspicious Thomas, who knew very well that Fox had learned of him and his political disasters through Ellice.

The author and socialite Lady Blessington drew a brief sketch of Fox as he was in those days. ‘Mr Henry Fox possesses the talent for society in an eminent degree. He is intelligent, lively, and très spirituel; seizes the point of ridicule in all whom he encounters at a glance and draws them out with a tact that is very amusing to the lookers-on.’

At any such meeting, Morgan was much more likely to be the butt of the conversation than an amused onlooker. Though he wore his hair in a dandified centre parting and clung loyally to the blue and yellow favoured by the Regency period, he was too short, too pugnacious and far too provincial to be of any interest to such great men as Fox. Lady Blessington, who was really rather a good journalist, had noticed some years earlier the fascination the British had for the Florentine portrait sculptor, Bartolini.

Every Lord and Commoner who has passed through Florence during the last few years has left here a memorial of his visit; and every lady who has ever heard that she had a good profile (and Heaven knows how seldom the assertion was true) has left a model of it on the dusty shelves of Bartolini … Elderly gentlemen with double chins resembling the breast of the pelican, requiring a double portion of marble in their representation … portly matrons too are ranged in rows with busts as exuberant as those that Rubens loved to lavish on his canvas … young ladies with compressed waists and drooping ringlets, looking all like sisters … and young gentlemen with formal faces and straight hair confront one at every step.

Bartolini stored these effigies on shelves in his studios and they were inspected in much the same way as the work of Michelangelo. They were on the tourist list. Mr Thomas and his wife belonged much more to that world of nameless and dusty nonentities than anything suggested by the glamour of the great Palaces. Georgina later wrote of the Florence years:

My father disliked Society – he loved his home; my mother on the contrary liked Society. My father did not like women to wear low necked dresses; my mother on the contrary wished to be like other people. My father’s opinion was that eleven o’clock at night was a respectable hour for leaving parties; this was the hour at which parties began. He obliged my mother to come home just at the time when she was beginning to amuse herself. My father would not call on this lady or that lady, or visit Madame A because she had a lover, or Madame B because she received Madame A. He would not even set foot at the English Embassy while Lord Holland was Ambassador, because gossip was afloat concerning Lady Holland. He seemed possessed with a passion for virtue, and he had been nicknamed at Florence ‘the policeman of Society’.

This is as good a portrait of Morgan as can be found, but Georgina added another very telling sentence: ‘I had inherited to the full his mania to keep his reputation inviolate. I bristled with virtue.’

When she was six years old she had an early opportunity to support her father’s reproach of local morals. In 1843 a penniless young artist called George Frederick Watts arrived in the city. Quite by chance, he had met Edward Ellice’s brother on the boat from Marseilles, who at once effected an introduction to the Hollands. The policeman of society and his little sausage-curled lieutenant soon learned that Watts was the son of a man who had fallen so low as to be a piano tuner. To their complete amazement, Morgan and Georgina saw Watts being taken up by the Hollands, commissioned to paint portraits by the fabulously rich Demidovs; and the darling of all who met him. While this may have secretly impressed Georgina as a striking example of how fame worked, Morgan had not come to Florence to have anything to do with art. The adoration of Watts, who was not only thin but unutterably gloomy and, to many outsiders, effete in the extreme, left him speechless. Augusta Holland commissioned a portrait by the artist in which she wore a chapeau de paille – ‘some lady having in a joke put one of the country hats on her head’, as a smitten Edward Ellice reported to Lady Holland in London. On New Year’s Day, 1844, Augusta presented the gangly Watts with a gold watch, specially commissioned from Geneva, murmuring, as she placed the chain around his neck, ‘We not only bind you to us, we chain you.’ It was immediately interpreted as the sign of a liaison. Morgan fingered his own Warwickshire timepiece from Messrs Vale and Rotherham and reflected bitterly on the levels to which society had sunk.

The reason her father gave for fleeing London – his wife’s ill health – was a common euphemism for poverty. If Georgina ever was worried about her mother, events were soon to calm her mind. At the Villa Capponi Louisa had another three children in quick succession – Emily, Florence, and the baby of the family, Apsley. Though the heat did not suit her and she never adapted successfully to having such a quiverful of children, she was as healthy as a horse. She lived to be eighty-three, and was on this earth longer than her husband or her eldest daughter. More sociable than Morgan in her timid haphazard way, Louisa made the best she could of Florence. When Georgina was old enough, she took the child with her to the Cascine Gardens, where every day the bon ton gathered to gossip while the more gallant and amorous gentlemen threaded through the mass of carriages bearing messages and making their salutes. This morning concourse was, Georgina learned, to be compared favourably to Rotten Row or the Bois de Boulogne. When the weather was douce enough for walking, Louisa might descend from her carriage and stroll with her daughter under the trees by the banks of the Arno. There she would point out, not without envious longing, the roofs of the great houses on the opposite bank.

From May onwards the town would be refreshed by new faces, birds of passage making the Grand Tour. They were eagerly welcomed by the expatriates. What was happening in London? Was it true that rain and a hundred thousand special constables had turned back the revolutionary Chartist mob – and was Mr Gladstone truly one of those who was sworn in? Was it also true that railway speeds now regularly touched forty miles an hour, without hurt to the internal organs of the passengers? And plum – was that really a colour a lady of fashion might adopt? Sometimes the tedium of the daily corso would be broken by the distant sighting of some scandalous liaison in its early stages, or whispered news of ruination in some other form, like gambling. These intrigues Georgina dutifully reported to her father. She showed an aptitude for similar detective work all her life – not much given to self-analysis, she was a master of the dossier method of investigating others. It was exciting and she was seldom short of material.

To a small girl groomed by her father to find outrage in everything, there was the additional frisson of the Austrian occupation. One afternoon an Italian lawyer absent-mindedly spat on the ground while a patrol passed. The Austrian officer at once dismounted and, having the culprit pinned to the wall, ordered his troopers to line up and, one by one, spit in the unfortunate man’s face. In 1851 there was an even more shocking case. Two young brothers called Mather were following an Austrian military band and darted across the road between it and the accompanying troop of horse. Two officers spurred their mounts and cut one of the brothers to the ground. This was the sort of story to set Morgan bristling with indignation. Yet there was a diminishing return in feeding her father such titbits. She gradually understood what it meant to be part of his police force. The fate of Charles Mather raised disgust and indignation all the way back to the floor of the House of Commons. However, Morgan’s contempt for other people was quite unspecific – he was not minded to like the unfortunate Mather any more than the man who had struck him. In his eyes, the whole world was out of step. When Georgina was very young, her father’s vanity reinforced her own childish sense of superiority. To be a Thomas was to be a thing apart, not different from but better than all the rest. As she grew up, the unwelcoming house and the lack of invitations from others gradually began to cast doubt in her. The possibility existed that there was something seriously wrong with them all.

She was given tutors – a long roll call of them, not one of whom made any great impression or sowed the seeds of inspiration. Georgina learned to play the piano and completed a conventional and undemanding schooling in reading and writing. She once remarked, ‘I am sure if I had but studied Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing I should have made a great artist.’ There is not the slightest nod here to the treasure house of art Florence was. She was intelligent but unlearned. The one gift she did possess she had been born with – a quite remarkably clear soprano voice. It was said in later life that her mother took special interest in her singing. This may have indicated to some that Louisa herself was musical but this was not the case. Every girl child of that time was taught to sing, in the same way that she was taught to brush her hair, or show deference to her elders, or any of a hundred other little things. Singing was a way of moving from the schoolroom to the drawing room and a young girl’s voice was merely a further expression of the taste exhibited in the family’s choice of furniture, its display of pictures and china. The role a well-mannered girl had in a family was almost too obvious to mention. A boy might, within reason, do as he liked and go where he would. No one expected much sense from a boy. For that he was sent away to school. His sister was domesticated as soon as was practicable. Singing was an outward demonstration of her complicity in the affairs of the family. She was in that sense her mother’s child, an expression of her mother’s taste and sensibility.

What is striking about Georgina’s childhood is its extraordinary tedium. The pleasures a young girl of her class might take for granted in an English setting simply did not exist for her – like picnics, visits to relatives, parties, river excursions or a trip to the seaside. She had some idiosyncrasies that stayed with her all her life. From her youngest days she exhibited a mild mania for collecting. She cut out armorial bearings from magazines and pasted them into books. She was among the earliest collectors of stamps. She made lists of Important Things. She kept a diary and recorded the uninspiring events of her day in scrupulous detail. This suggests a secretive and lonely child, but it is more likely that the Villa Capponi days were simply very long. We know from more famous Florence residents – from the Brownings, for example – that in the three summer months that began in June, the heat became enervating and a torpor settled over everything. Even a shaded garden became too hot to endure and those families who could afford it moved up into the hills for air and the chance of a breeze. Once there, improving sightseeing and visits to hilltop monasteries were scheduled for five in the morning. So, to be a child in the stiflingly hot summers, even with siblings, became a little like being the inmate of a prison. Morgan had nothing to say to any of his children – they in turn were terrified to open their mouths in his presence. The rooms of the villa were extensive, there were servants in plenty, but nothing much to do. The only outdoor pleasure Georgina shared with her father was his passion for gardening, which he undertook in the winter months. She showed early on a very un-Latin enthusiasm for pets, especially dogs, treating them as little people, more loyal and certainly more loving than the two-legged inhabitants of the Villa. Late in life she put this feeling into a letter: ‘I feel a horror for exaggerated love or friendship. It’s just too well demonstrated to me that when the moment comes that one asks for something, or has need of something, the response is not worth a biscuit.’

As she grew into womanhood, she became nothing like the submissive little miss of the conventional fashion plate. Nor was she modelled on the enigmatic girls who decorated Leech cartoons in Punch with their smooth wings of hair and ultra-straight noses. The air of obedient calm required of young mid-Victorian women was quite foreign to her and she had little chance to learn by emulation. Morgan saw to that. But if her upbringing had turned out rackety and unhappy great changes were in the offing. Though he had lingered there a very long time, her father had always seen Florence as a makeshift arrangement and its usefulness to him was as good as exhausted. The prime reason for moving on was right there under his nose. Georgina was no longer a child. In her adolescent form she was someone’s future bride. There was much to be accomplished before this could come about, not least the family’s reconciliation to society. Morgan would stir himself to exhibit his daughter to her best advantage and then she herself could crown the family’s fortunes by marrying well. The two things hung together.

This realisation gave her power, perhaps more than she knew how to handle. The mystical writer Edward Maitland made a shrewd remark to Georgina when she was twenty. His opinion was coloured a little by two things, both of them romantic. To begin with, he had fled the family home in Brighton, where his father was perpetual curate of St James’s Chapel. His rebellion took him to the California gold rush, and thence to Australia, where he had married and buried his wife within a twelvemonth. Maitland saw something in Georgina that her father had failed to notice.

I am but one of numbers who would be delighted to see your gifts and prowess winning success; and feel mystified at the waste of them, when we know that with better management it might have been otherwise. You yourself will see it some day, when your stormy youth is spent, and the boy – which you really are now – has developed into the woman which you are only in form.

This insight struck at the heart of the Florence years. All the other Thomas children grew up to be models of dullness. Georgina’s brothers had upper lips as stiff as any in Victorian fiction. Her sisters were dutiful and long-suffering. That she was so different suggests a relationship to her father very far from the Victorian norm of duty and respect; or as was the case with her siblings, fear. It was as if she alone challenged Morgan, returning his systematic cruelties with some of her own. What was hoydenish in her as a child, running about the gardens of the Capponi in petticoats, changed as she grew only a little older into more dangerous forms of recklessness. If Morgan had hoped to crush her, things were turning out very differently. Not at all to his wishes in the matter, he had raised a rebel.

A few years later, she explained her parents’ expectations of her: ‘[They] never wearied of indoctrinating me with the belief that an eldest daughter should marry to the advantage of her younger sisters, from the point of view that if the oldest sister married a rich old man with a title, her siblings would find matches that were rich, young, and titled.’

Many a diary hid the same thoughts. A beautiful young woman was, whether she liked it or not, a commodity; and a good marriage was one in which there was a significant amount of value added. Fifteen was not too young an age to start thinking of these things. Sooner or later she would have to come out in society – was that really to be at the edge of the crowd at the Casa Feroni, or mingling with the demi-mondaines at some sumptuously vulgar rout given by the Demidovs? Or was she instead to wait for a wandering Cambridge graduate or adventurous parson to turn up outside the Hôtel du Nord just as she had done, capture her in the street and carry her off back to England? Her father’s incorrigible vanity would never settle for that.

Morgan’s thinking was way ahead of his daughter’s. Sitting in state in his study, aloof and remote, he had begun to ponder a quite spectacular coup. It came upon him slowly like a gathering religious conviction and once in place nothing would budge it. The details were perfectly simple and seemed to him to brook no abridgement. He would sell her to just that kind of man he most abhorred, and of a class from which he felt himself so bitterly excluded. It was his intention that Georgina should not marry for less than £10,000 a year.

The first time he ever spoke these thoughts out loud there must have been a peal of nervous hilarity at the breakfast table, followed by a plea from Louisa not to repeat them outside the house. The sum involved was ridiculous – to have that much income a prospective suitor would need to be in possession of at least an Earldom. (The letter Lord Conyngsby delivered to Victoria on the day Georgina was born was in fact an offer from the dying King of exactly that amount). Louisa had grown used to her husband’s erratic behaviour. Should this new scheme ever get about among her friends at the Cascine Gardens, they would be ruined socially. Louisa was dutiful and submissive to a fault but even with her limited knowledge of the world she knew they were regarded as Florence’s nobodies. Ten years of Morgan’s disdain had done its work. A £10,000-a-year man for the plump and argumentative Georgina was going to be as easy to find and trap as the Emperor of All the Russias or the Bey of Algiers.

It had of course occurred to both of them, ever since Georgina was a baby, that a shrewd marriage might greatly increase their own social position. That was the way the world was, and that was how what Bagehot called ‘the cousinhood of aristocracy’ came into existence in the first place. Unfortunately, neither Morgan nor Louisa had gifts to bestow on the world. They had no friends of any significance, corresponded with no one, engaged in none of the controversies then in vigorous debate. When he wasn’t gardening, Morgan kept up a desultory study of Dante, presumably for the pleasure of seeing sinners punished. Of the Victorian England he had deserted at its birth, he knew next to nothing. Yet the campaign to marry off Georgina to such advantage to them all had to be fought in London, at balls and soirées or wherever beautiful young women were set out in display.

In Morgan’s day Almack’s Assembly Rooms had been the ground on which the greatest battles were fought. Controlled by the seven super-rich patronesses who managed the guest lists, it was said by the diarist Captain Gronow that in his time only five of the 300 officers of the Foot Guards were admitted. (He happened to be one of them, which was the point of the story.) Though Morgan believed persons of lesser rank were acceptable nowadays, the truth was he had no clear idea how to set about promoting his daughter. Twelve fatal years in Florence among the Waterloo veterans and hapless exiles had done nothing to educate him otherwise. A local example of the old school was a man called St John (‘a scion of a noble house’) who wagered an Austrian cavalry officer to follow him wherever he went through the city. After a hectic chase, St John put his pony at a parapet of a bridge and leaped forty feet into the dried-up river bed, killing the pony outright. The Austrian declined the invitation to follow. St John was the kind of man Morgan was looking for, only with money and in England.

When Georgina was told of her father’s great scheme it probably left her in two minds. On the one hand, the plan was so outrageous, so impossible that it filled her with the same almighty ambition as his and flourished in her that old sense of being born to greatness. For her the Florence years had hardly been distinguished, but now that did not matter, or not as much as it might to a lesser soul. Her destiny beckoned: life in a country seat, with a fine town house, a rich man who loved her and in a circle of jealous and admiring friends. This was the fulfilment of all her wildest daydreams: novels were based on plots like this. The other possibility was that her father had set the bar so high exactly to deny her any kind of marriage at all. In some sombre fashion, it was his method of possessing her. In this way of looking at it she was his and would never be another’s.

In 1852, Morgan and his family left Florence. In the informal history of the expatriate community, as recorded in memoirs and reminiscences, it is as though he had never been there. You did not have to be a poet or a peer to get something from Florence; nor did you have be a roué. But the policeman of society left no record. One of the sidelights cast on the city in those days was the vigorous efforts made by the more pious English to import Protestant bibles to Tuscany, a campaign that might seem close to Morgan’s heart. In 1851, Captain Wilson, who was hardly in the mould of an evangelical bigot, went to visit an Italian friend imprisoned by the Austrians for the possession of a smuggled bible.

‘In the afternoon I paid a visit to Guicciardini in the Bargello. It really makes one’s blood boil to think that even the abuse of justice should enable any Government, however despotic, to incarcerate a man merely for reading a bible and making free use of his conscience.’

This is a recognizably early-Victorian tone. Wilson was a gentleman, who believed like many of his kind – like Morgan Thomas himself – that an English gentleman was the greatest masterpiece ever created by man. But beneath the languid airs and graces, which the Hussar officer certainly had in full, there had to be some fire, some subterranean force. A man must have his demons. Morgan makes a poor comparison with the gallant and penniless Wilson. He had his demons, but there was something empty at the heart of him. A weaker man, or perhaps a poorer one, might have used the Tuscan years to seek preferment at home in England. A more intellectually curious one might have embraced the city for its own sake, or at any rate looked about him. From all that rich stew of society, the only thing Morgan Thomas took away with him from Florence was his butler, the secretive and sardonic Antonio.