Читать книгу The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (Vol. 1&2) - Lady Isabel Burton - Страница 7

Autobiographers generally begin too late.

Elderly gentlemen of eminence sit down to compose memories, describe with fond minuteness babyhood, childhood, and boyhood, and drop the pen before reaching adolescence.

Physiologists say that a man's body changes totally every seven years. However that may be, I am certain that the moral man does, and I cannot imagine anything more trying than for a man to meet himself as he was. Conceive his entering a room, and finding a collection of himself at the several decades. First the puking squalling baby one year old, then the pert unpleasant schoolboy of ten, the collegian of twenty who, like Lothair, "knows everything and has nothing to learn." The homme fait of thirty in the full warmth and heyday of life, the reasonable man of forty, who first recognizes his ignorance and knows his own mind, of fifty with white teeth turned dark, and dark hair turned white, whose experience is mostly disappointment with regrets for lost time and vanished opportunities. Sixty when the man begins to die and mourns for his past youth, at seventy when he ought to prepare for his long journey and never does. And at all these ages he is seven different beings not one of which he would wish to be again.

Family History.

First I would make one or two notes on family history.

My grandfather was the Rev. Edward Burton, Rector of Tuam, in Galway (who with his brother, eventually Bishop Burton, of Killala, were the first of our branch to settle in Ireland). They were two of the Burtons of Barker Hill, near Shap, Westmoreland, who own a common ancestor with the Burtons of Yorkshire, of Carlow, and Northamptonshire. My grandfather married Maria Margaretta Campbell, daughter, by a Lejeune, of Dr. John Campbell, LL.D., Vicar-General of Tuam. Their son was my father, Lieut.-Colonel Joseph Netterville Burton, of the 36th Regiment, who married a Miss (Beckwith) Baker, of Nottinghamshire, a descendant, on her mother's side, of the Scotch Macgregors. The Lejeune above mentioned was related to the Montmorencys and Drelincourts, French Huguenots of the time of Louis XIV. To this hangs a story which will be told by-and-by. This Lejeune, whose real name was Louis Lejeune, is supposed to have been a son of Louis XIV. by the Huguenot Countess of Montmorency. He was secretly carried off to Ireland. His name was translated to Louis Young, and he eventually became a Doctor of Divinity. The royal, or rather morganatic, marriage contract was asserted to have existed, but has disappeared. The Lady Primrose of that date, who was a very remarkable personage, and a strong ally of the Jacobites, protected him and conveyed him to Ireland.

The Burtons of Shap derive themselves from the Burtons of Longnor, like Lord Conyngham and Sir Charles Burton of Pollacton, and the two above named were the collateral descendants of Francis Pierpoint Burton, first Marquis of Conyngham, who gave up the name of Burton. The notable man of the family was Sir Edward Burton, a desperate Yorkist who was made a Knight Banneret by Edward IV. after the second battle of St. Albans, and who added to his arms the Cross and four roses.

The Bishop of Killala's son was Admiral J. Ryder Burton, who entered the Navy in 1806. He served in the West Indies, and off the North Coast of Spain, when in an attack on the town of Castro, July, 1812, he received a gunshot wound in the left side, from which the ball was never extracted. From 1813 to 1816 he served in the Mediterranean and Adriatic, and was present at the bombardment of Algiers, when he volunteered to command one of the gunboats for destroying the shipping inside the Mole. His last appointment was in May, 1820, to the command of the Cornelian brig, in which he proceeded in early 1824 to Algiers, where, in company with the Naiad frigate, he fell in with an Algerine corvette, the Tripoli, of eighteen guns and one hundred men, which, after a close and gallant action under the batteries of the place, he boarded and carried. This irascible veteran at his death was in receipt of a pension for wounds. He was Rear Admiral in 1853, Vice Admiral in 1858, and Admiral in 1863. He married, in 1822, Anna Maria, daughter of the thirteenth Lord Dunsany; she died in 1850, leaving one son, Francis Augustus Plunkett Burton, Colonel of the Coldstream Guards. He married the great heiress Sarah Drax, and died in 1865, leaving one daughter, Erulí, who married her cousin, John Plunkett, the future Lord Dunsany.

My father, Joseph Netterville Burton, was a lieutenant-colonel in the 36th Regiment. He must have been born in the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, but he had always a superstition about mentioning his birthday, which gave rise to a family joke that he was born in Leap Year. Although of very mixed blood, he was more of a Roman in appearance than anything else, of moderate height, dark hair, sallow skin, high nose, and piercing black eyes. He was considered a very handsome man, especially in uniform, and attracted attention even in the street. Even when past fifty he was considered the best-looking man at the Baths of Lucca. As handsome men generally do, he married a plain woman, and, "Just like Provy," the children favoured, as the saying is, the mother.1

In mind he was a thorough Irishman. When he received a commission in the army it was on condition of so many of his tenants accompanying him. Not a few of the younger sort volunteered to enlist, but when they joined the regiment and found that the "young master" was all right, they at once ran away.

The only service that he saw was in Sicily, under Sir John Moore, afterwards of Corunna, and there he fell in love with Italy. He was a duellist, and shot one brother officer twice, nursing him tenderly each time afterwards. When peace was concluded he came to England and visited Ireland. As that did not suit him he returned to his regiment in England. Then took place his marriage, which was favoured by his mother-in-law and opposed by his father-in-law. The latter, being a sharp old man of business, tied up every farthing of his daughter's property, £30,000, and it was well that he did so. My father, like too many of his cloth, developed a decided taste for speculation. He was a highly moral man, who would have hated the idea of rouge et noir, but he gambled on the Stock Exchange, and when railways came out he bought shares. Happily he could not touch his wife's property, or it would speedily have melted away; yet it was one of his grievances to the end of his life that he could not use his wife's money to make a gigantic fortune. He was utterly reckless where others would be more prudent. Before his wedding tour, he passed through Windermere, and would not call upon an aunt who was settled near the Lakes, for fear that she might think he expected her property. She heard of it, and left every farthing to some more dutiful nephew.

He never went to Ireland after his marriage, but received occasional visits from his numerous brothers and sisters.

The eldest of the family was the Rev. Edward Burton, who had succeeded to the living. He wasted every farthing of his property, and at last had the sense to migrate to Canada, where he built a little Burtonville. In his younger days he intended to marry a girl who preferred another man. When she was a widow with three children, and he a widower with six children, they married, and the result was eventually a total of about a score. Such families do better than is supposed. The elder children are old enough to assist the younger ones, and they seem to hang together. My father's sisters, especially Mrs. Mathews, used to visit him when in England, and as it was known that he had married an heiress, they all hung to him, apparently, for themselves and their children. They managed to get hold of all the Irish land that fell to his share, and after his death they were incessant in their claims upon his children. My mother was Martha Baker, one of three sister co-heiresses, and was the second daughter. The third daughter married Robert Bagshaw, Esq., M.P. for Harwich, and died without issue. The eldest, Sarah, married Francis Burton, the youngest brother of my father. He had an especial ambition to enter the Church, but circumstances compelled him to become military surgeon in the 66th Regiment. There was only one remarkable event in his life, which is told in a few very interesting pages by Mrs. Ward, wife of General Ward, with a short comment by Alfred Bate Richards, late editor of the Morning Advertiser, who, together with Andrew Wilson, author of the "Abode of Snow," who took it up at his death, compiled and put together a short résumé of the principal features of my life, of which some three hundred copies were printed, in pamphlet form and circulated to private friends.

The Napoleon Romance.