Some few years ago, philosophers were jostling excursionists in once gay Brighthelmstone; they discussed the prospects of science, and united archæology with a considerable amount of picnicking and claret-cup. We here submit for the general recreation a paper that was not read at the meeting of the British Association in that town, but which will be perused in the larger Elsewhere. Its staple commodity will consist of the anecdotal waifs and strays connected with old Brighton, which philosophers do not regard, but which have an especial value and interest of their own. Accordingly we pass by the Druidical mistletoe, British barrows, Roman coins, and Saxons, Danes, and Normans, and we come at once to the Brighton of the middle of the last century, when rumours of wars from abroad connected themselves with a literary question and song-writing at home.
About the year 1758 fears of invasion caused several camps to be established on our south coast. There was one at Brighton. Martial spirit attuned the popular lyre to both warlike and sentimental strains. One of the airs then composed has remained popular to this day. ‘The Girl I left behind me’ was originally known by that and also by a second name, ‘Brighton Camp,’ to which reference is made in the following verse:—
Oh, ne’er shall I forget the night,
The stars were bright above me,
And gaily lent their silv’ry light,
When first she vow’d to love me.
But now I’m bound to Brighton Camp,
Kind Heaven then pray guide me,
And send me safely back again
To the girl I’ve left behind me.
This air has been claimed as Irish by Moore and by Bunting. The former took great liberties with the air. Bunting left it as he found it. But he did not find it till the year 1800, when he heard it played by an Irish harper named O’Neile. The harper had probably picked it up from some regimental band leaving their quarters; but it was popular in England nearly half a century before the date of its first being known in Ireland.
Let those who throng Brighton now just consider what it was about a century ago. In 1761 we read that ‘the men of the town were wholly employed in fishing, and the women in mending their nets.’ There was, however, a free school in Brighton; and boys of twelve years of age, who had learned navigation there, obtained very fair wages in the ‘fishery.’ There was a population, fixed and movable, even at that period. Many of the houses are described as ‘of flint, with windows and doors frequently adorned with very good brick.’ When Brighton took its first step forward for the purpose of attracting visitors we may learn from a contemporary chronicle of 1761, in which we read that ‘Of late the town has become a resort for the drinking of salt water and for bathing. If the town grows in the next seven years as it has done in the last seven, there will be no better in England.’ Brighton then boasted of ‘one or two public rooms that could be equalled only by those of York.’ People could then put up with what was called ‘accommodation,’ which was of a very uncomfortable character; but everything was of a free-and-easy quality, and most visitors were content to take things as they found them.
To this rule, however, there was one notable exception, just where we should expect to find it.
Nearly a hundred years have elapsed since Dr. Johnson wrote to Boswell, in November of the year 1776, ‘I was some weeks this autumn at Brighthelmstone. The place was very dull, and I was not well.’ The fact is, that Johnson cared little for the beauties of nature. He was like Charles Lamb, who once being at the summit of a mountain from which there was a prospect of unsurpassable grandeur, saw nothing but with his mind’s eye, and that was at the moment directed to the ham and beef shop at the corner of St. Martin’s Court. In like manner, Johnson hated prospects and views. We have the authority of Mrs. Piozzi for recording that Johnson used to say the best garden was the one which produced the most roots and fruits, and the river most to be prized was the one which produced the most fish. The Doctor unmercifully laughed at Shenstone for valuing a stream according to its picturesqueness, and not its productiveness. Mrs. Piozzi believed that a walk in a wood when it rained was the only rural image which pleased Johnson. The pleasure then was perhaps derived from the thought that the rain would swell the peas, or make the turnips grow, or in some way or other tend to the comforting of the inward man. The feeling was akin to that of the epicurean who dwelt fondly on the orient gale which prospered the ship freighted with sugar for his gooseberry pie. It was that of Southey’s philosopher, who reverenced pig, and who, feeling a certain amount of poetry in a fragrant breeze, exclaimed,
O’er yon blossom’d field
Of beans it came, and thoughts of bacon rise.
Johnson detested the very sight of Brighton Downs, ‘because it was a country so truly desolate,’ he said, ‘that if one had a mind to hang oneself for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten the rope.’ When the sage uttered this dictum he had certainly overlooked the subject of mutton. He forgot how admirable Sussex land was for turnip husbandry, and that even where the flints lay thickest the corn crops were all the more luxuriant. He did love forest trees, and might have remembered that the Sussex oak has no superior. He was fond of milk, and might have respected the Sussex cows which keep themselves almost beef, while they give rich milk, if so little of it. Hate the Downs! Let all such people remember, especially if they have a liking for a haunch of mutton, that the rot was never known to be caught upon the South Downs; reason sufficient to authorise an epicure’s respect. We see poetry even in a Brighton fish shop. Was it not Sir Wilfred himself who made first-rate fishermen of the primitive Brighton bunglers?
Johnson and Lamb are not the only intellectual persons whose minds could turn from the contemplation of great to the consideration of smaller things. When Charles James Fox was with a party viewing the old master-pieces in the Louvre, he turned from them to bewail the too great effulgence of the sun. ‘This heat,’ he remarked, ‘will burn up all my turnips at St. Anne’s.’ So, Thomas Granville, replying to Rogers, who was referring to the overpowering glory of a sunset at which they were looking, observed that it was ‘handsome.’
Half a century ago, Brighton was as destitute of trees as it was in Johnson’s time. But now, if the Doctor were alive and had a halter, he would find no difficulty in searching for a branch from which he might hang, the very bulkiest of acorns. Where formerly only the hardy tamarisk grew, we may now see, as a local historian (Erredge) points out, that ‘belts and copses of thriving trees have reared their heads, and the elm, fir, sycamore, horse-chestnut, larch, beech, hazel, birch, hawthorn, and the holly, and other evergreens, having, by culture, become acclimatised, thrive so well as to induce the belief that they are indigenous to the south-east coast.’
That Brighton should have changed in a certain number of years is a matter for no surprise at all. The sea rolls its waves over the site on which the primitive village stood exposed to its fury. The cliffs which from behind the village looked proudly over the waves have been in part destroyed by the assailing waters which, it was once thought, were too remote ever to do them harm. But all this has been the work of time, and of a very long time. Yet change quite as remarkable has been accomplished within the lives of many persons still living. They must be old persons indeed, and must have suffered fourscore years at least of change of themselves, in order to have been within the periods of what Brighthelmstone was and what Brighton is. What it was towards the close of the last century, about 1790, when it had ceased to be the secluded fishing village it once had been, can scarcely now be realised. It was no uncommon thing for the town to be then visited by unlicensed rovers of the deep. These thieves, who ranged from Beachy Head to Selsey Bill, would drop anchor after dark, and send a company of rascals on shore in a boat, whose mission it was to break into some rich farmer’s house, or some well-endowed mansion near the coast, and carry off thence every article of value that was portable and could be turned to pirate’s use. There was such terror of these water-rats, that wherever they broke in their coming paralysed honest people, who were powerless through terror. They bound and gagged the inmates of houses which they intended to despoil, caroused without limit, and having plundered the dwelling, staggered down to the beach, and carried on board their burglarious freight. They would then lift anchor and drop down along the coast on their way to a place of refuge, or to attack some other house where there was promise of booty and good cheer. Their audacity is explicable only on the ground that they had confederates among the police authorities, if such things were in those early days. In ancient times, when the French landed there and attacked the town, the Sussex men turned out with alacrity, and often gave the invaders a tremendous thrashing. The sons of those Sussex men quailed in presence of the native rascalry, which was often cruel, but generally avoided murder.
If any archæologist care about the Druidical name for Brighton—if indeed there ever was one—or sigh to learn by what classic term the Romans designated their station on the sea, the care and the sigh are expended in vain. Let such antiquary console himself by laughing at the explanation of its later name, handed down from one local historian to another. Brighthelmstone, as it was called, has not puzzled the easily-satisfied etymologists. To explain it they invent a Saxon bishop who never existed, Brighthelm. They both beatify and canonise him under the title of St. Brighthelm, and having raised him to this dignity, they erect a stone to commemorate him, or a ‘ton,’ i.e., ‘town,’ in which he may dwell, and thus we arrive at ‘Brighthelmstone.’ Some etymologists pooh-poohed this derivation altogether, and they put forth something worse of their own. With them ‘Brighthelmstone’ is born of the shining helms of the Saxon galleys which used (or did not use) to be off the town! Another party sees in the name simply the indication that the town once belonged to a warrior whose family name was Brighthelm. We must frankly confess that one theory is quite as reasonable as the other.
But, whatever the meaning of the name and whencesoever it came, there was a universal outcry of alarm and disgust when people in a hurry, or not much observant of orthography, cut the name down from a stately three- to a little two-decker. When Brighthelmstone began, in 1787, to be called Brighton, and that even in print, there was a howl of reprobation and a general demand to ‘give us back our three syllables!’ Even Sylvanus Urban in that year moved out of his old ways into the new-fangled groove, and talked of ‘Brighton’ as if he were a fashionable young fop wearing a round hat and his own hair, instead of cocked hat and powder. Sylvanus had announced that a certain Mr. Norman of Bromley had recently died at ‘Brighton!’ Instantly Mr. Urban was assailed with an et tu Brute sort of assault. Afflicted archæologists never thought such a blow could come from St. John’s Gate. One gentleman remonstrated in a tone of the deepest suffering. He argued that, if this abbreviating custom be carried on, Brighthelmstone will not only be wronged, but the world at large, and universal in geography particular, will be thrown into utter confusion. Foreign nations, potentates, governments, scholars, foreign humanity generally, we are told, will be bewildered, and will no longer be able to distinguish between Brighthelmstone in Sussex and Brighton a village in Yorkshire! Brighton in Yorkshire seems to have withdrawn itself modestly from the world; and if the Emperor of Germany reads of the demise of Brown, Jones, or Robinson at Brighton, that august person will not be troubled as to its local whereabout.
If Brighton Camps had their picturesque aspect and a certain connection with poetry, they had occasional deep shadows to contrast with their lights. The camp of 1795 is especially remarkable for its dark colouring. The defenders of the country were left by the circumlocution office of that day with an insufficient quantity of bread, and with nasty flour to make it. The hungry Oxford militia plundered a mill, and having got all they wanted for their own stomachs, they seized a quantity of corn at Newhaven, not for their half-starved comrades in camp, but for the pleasure of throwing the whole of it into the river at that place. Eight of the mutineers were tried, of whom two, Cooke (called ‘Captain’) and Parish, were sentenced to be shot, the rest to be flogged. During the eight days of trial the circumlocution office gave them as little food as when the office drove them to mutiny through hunger. If it had not been for the morning and evening supplies passed to them through the bars of their airing ground by Samaritans of Russell Street, the accused militiamen would not have lived through the trial to be shot or flogged. The last ceremony was carried out with much lugubrious pomp. Three of the six men received an instalment of 300 strokes, equivalent to 2,700 lashes, and the other three were respited for future punishment. Then came the more merciful act of putting quickly to death the two men condemned to be shot. There was indeed much slow circumstance before the two culprits were fairly in face of the company of their fellow-militiamen selected to carry out the sentence. For the support and encouragement of the firing party not to shirk their duty and attempt to run, there was drawn up behind them a company of artillery, with shotted cannon and lighted matches, ready to blow the firing party to atoms if they showed any reluctance to destroy their two comrades. They showed nothing but alacrity under the circumstances. Cooke and Parish, kneeling composedly on their own coffins, were shot by what was curiously described as ‘a delinquent platoon of twelve of their own regiment at the distance of only six paces,’ and then did not kill both! One, as he lay on the ground, had to be ‘finished’ by a pistol-shot through the head. Perhaps the ‘delinquent platoon’ were too hungry to aim steadily. One thing is sure, namely, that nobody at the circumlocution office was flogged for famishing the soldiers, nor was the rascal who supplied the filthy so-called flour hanged. Probably he held the plate at the next Brighton Charity Sermons, and sneered at the poor folk who only contributed ‘coppers.’
In the first year of the present century the ‘Crown and Anchor’ in East Street was proudly known as ‘The Hotel’; but the ‘Ship’ soon endeavoured to attract fashionable visitors by a dining-room decorated with ‘The Story of Telemachus’ in bronze on blue. At that time coaches had not learned to run between Brighton and London in five hours. In summer the earliest coach left Brighton at 7 A.M., and arrived in London at 5 P.M. The night coach left at 10 P.M. and was due in London at 7 the next morning, keeping its time when it could. Then for crossing ‘the streak of liquid silver,’ there were ‘pacquets’ advertised to run ‘in time of peace’ three times a week, always setting sail, weather permitting, in the evening. One of these ‘pacquets’ manifested Napoleonic ideas, for it was called the Buonaparte schooner, and it made a great boast of having two cabins, a state room, and the means of making up twenty beds.
At this period it is amusing to read in a local record that ‘literature is not neglected in this town; for in Middle Street there is an academy where young gentlemen are boarded and educated.’ The idea that a boarding-school necessarily implies literary cultivation has long since expired.
While our pulpits, in the early part of the present century were denouncing the stage, and persuading people to leave theatres to the devil, and to brace up their minds and bodies at the seaside, the marine pulpits were busy in bidding people to avoid the coast and to get back to London and their business as speedily as possible. In ‘Their Majesties’ Servants,’ I have alluded to the audiences who ‘were preached down to the coast, and especially to Brighton, and to the zealous pastors in the latter place who preached them back again. One of these, the Rev. Dr. Styles, of Union Street, Brighton, did his best to stop the progress of London on Sea. He left the question of the stage for others to deal with; but he strictly enjoined all virtuously minded people to avoid watering-places generally and Brighton in particular, unless they wished to play into the devil’s hands. He denounced the breaking up of homes, the mischief of minds at rest, and the consequences of flirting and philandering. He looked upon a brief holiday as a long sin at the seaside; and with prophecy of dire results attending on neglect of his counsel, he drove or sought to drive all the hard workers in search of health and in the enjoyment of that idle repose which helps them in their search, back to London. Then, as now, England stood shamefully distinguished for the indecorum of its sea-coast bathers; but, with certain religious principles whereby to hold firmly, the good doctor does not think that much ill may befal therefrom, and he sends all erring sheep with their faces towards London, and with a reference to Solomon’s Song (above all things!) bidding them to wait for a south wind of the Holy Spirit to blow over their spices!’
The list of Brighton notabilities is not a long one, but it invariably contains the name of Phœbe Hassell, who served in the army as a man and who died at an age which is calculated to make Mr. Thoms shake the head of incredulity. But there is a Brighton woman far worthier of being remembered than old Phœbe Hassell. We allude to the mother of James Rooke, a simple young fellow who had been drawn in by a crafty tailor, named Howell, to rob the mail, as it was then carried on horseback, between Brighton and Shoreham. On Phœbe Hassell’s information, the two were hanged and gibbeted. In course of time, the clothes and flesh of the culprits had utterly wasted away. When nothing remained but the skeletons, the aged mother of Rooke, who had often been a pilgrim to the mournful shrine of her son, went nightly to the gibbets in all weathers. Nothing prevented her from performing that sacred duty; and when her object became known it was sacredly respected. It was to collect the bones of her unhappy son, and of the companion in his sad fate, as time, wind, and tempest shook them apart and out of the respective skeletons till nothing was left in the chains. She gathered them, and carried them reverently and affectionately to her poor home; and when there were no more to gather, she deposited all in a little box, and perhaps with some sad memories of the hour when she had rejoiced at the birth of her son, she, all alone, save those memories, buried them in what she considered the hallowed ground of old Shoreham churchyard. Poor mother! Many a woman has been canonised for the performance of duties not half so holy.
The widow Rooke is forgotten, while the annals of fashion still keep warm the memory of people less worthy of being remembered. There was a time when Mrs. Prince, as old Dame Gunn, the bathing woman, used to call Mrs. Fitzherbert, reigned in Brighton. She was one of those women who justify the old saying that beauty is of every age. She was exquisite when young. There are some among us who may remember that she was queenly, when crowned by years. Like a queen, she was surrounded by duchesses at Brighton; the most august dandies worshipped at her shrine in Castle Square; and among those idolaters were the Prince’s own brothers, with men of less degree, yet perhaps higher fame. In the number of the latter must be reckoned Colonel Hanger (late Lord Coleraine), whose first freak was to join a gang of gipsies, and take a dusky bride from among the daughters in the tents. Hanger led such a rollicking life, that when he grew old and tired of it, the new and enforced quiet came upon him like a novel enjoyment.
There were some singular specimens of ladies in the old Brighton days. None more singular than Lady Clermont, who used to take a tea-spoonful of brandy in her tea, by first pouring the brandy over the back of the spoon and then correcting the mistake, which she attributed to defect of sight, by filling the spoon in the ordinary way. Of a different temper was the fair and ambitious Lady Haggerstone. My lady invited the Prince to a rural festival at her villa near the Spa. She received him in character, as a milkmaid, ready to concoct a syllabub for the royal guest. She carried in one hand a silver pail, in the other a milking stool, such as the most ingenious of artistic upholsterers could alone invent. A characteristic hat, with long cherry-coloured ribbons, adorned her head; and the milkmaid’s apron would have fetched hundreds of pounds for its lace. The syllabub, however, was never accomplished. Some absurd accident brought the attempt to an end, which after brief laughter was altogether forgotten. In contrast with this gentle masquerade, was the bold, loudly-brogued, but beautiful Lady Nagle, with her husband Sir Edmund’s miniature suspended from the longest of chains, flinging about as she moved, but always, as she said, near her heart. The Prince loved to have these and other fair ones about him. They made up his table at whist; brought him all sorts of gossip, home and foreign, and made themselves conspicuous in a hundred ways, as they figured on the Steyne and excited the wonder of simple-minded spectators.
Sir Benjamin Bloomfield was another of the old Brighton celebrities. He owed his position as Master of the Household to the Prince of Wales to an accident. ‘Slade,’ said his Royal Highness to the Colonel of that name, ‘do you know any gentleman who plays the violoncello?’ ‘I only know one, sir,’ replied the Colonel, ‘Captain Bloomfield, of the Artillery.’ ‘Bring him here to dinner,’ rejoined the Prince, ‘and tell him to bring his violoncello with him; we’ll play something together after dinner.’ The Captain played to good purpose. The Prince again invited him as a guest; subsequently he attached the violoncello player to his household, and Sir Benjamin became as well-known a figure on and about the Steyne as the Prince himself was.
The story of the Pavilion will be found more amusing in Cobbett’s satirical chronicle of its rise and progress than in any of the local histories. The history of its decline and fall is within the memory of him who never remembers anything—the oldest inhabitant. The noble eccentrics who figured in the Pavilion circle have been stereotyped. But there were eccentrics without, whose eccentricity amused those within that circle. One of these was well known on the Brighton stage.
An ignorant impatience of taxation was manifested at Brighton, especially when the heavy impost was laid on hair-powder. By nearly general resolve people avoided the tax by leaving off the powder. Anyone who ventured to appear in public, powdered, incurred the peril of being pelted. Even on the stage, when genteel comedy required the sword by the side and the powder on the hair, there was a difference of opinion as to the wearing of it, and the actor portant épée et poudre was both hissed and applauded, as sentiment prevailed among the audience. At Brighton, Mr. Fox, the manager’s son, had to appear in a character of the sword and powder period. He took a singular course. He powdered one half of his hair, and left the other au naturel. People laughed at his droll aspect, and also at his reason for putting it on. Mr. Fox explained that he had taken that course in order to please both parties—the powderers and the anti-powderers. It was accepted for wit.
As far less has been said and written of Brighton just as royalty began to tire of its old love, than of the town when it seemed a seventh heaven to the King, George IV., we will look into one year of its sayings and doings—A.D. 1825—when it was learning to go alone.
Brighton had long rejoiced in the sunshine of royalty. It veiled its head, and wore sackcloth, and cast ashes upon itself, when royalty was absent. At least, it would have done all this, but for certain consolatory circumstances. Nevertheless, it affected a very decent horror. This is especially manifested in the fashionable intelligence in the local papers. The first thing thought of there is the condition and prospects of the Pavilion. That shrine of haut ton is spoken of as a most interesting invalid, who is sick only because the sun is absent, and all Brighton is therefore sick with it. Yet will the invalid be convalescent if Hope is the physician, and then sympathetic Brighton will feel itself also ‘very much better, thank you.’ But ‘should the King’—for we now speak of the time when George IV. had grown tired of his gew-gaw—should ‘his most sacred Majesty’ nothing less than ‘graciously condescend to inhabit’ for awhile the ‘marine palace’ which he once both well and wisely loved—in such case Brighton would not only be restored to health, but would enjoy a sensation of stalwart youth and ecstatic immortality.
It is distressing to read the expression of sorrow at the idea that the King, so to speak, continually went on not coming. With the new year (1825) the wail opens to its old solemn tune. ‘There is no change at the Pavilion.’ ‘We hope that the desire to see his Majesty again among us may speedily be realised.’ Alas! the realisation does not speedily come, and the ‘Fashionable Intelligencer’ wept in its imitation lawn handkerchief, and then wiped its loyal eyes and exclaimed, ‘The gloom of silence and desertion continues to envelop the Pavilion.’ Double envelopes of desertion and of silence. Then followed reports that the King was coming soon. The soon was succeeded by ‘a period not yet determined.’ Finally, it was said that his Majesty would visit Brighton and take up his residence there during the Christmas holidays. But before that time and its event arrived, ‘Fashionable Intelligencer’ discovered that, instead of the King coming, his best wine was going. It did not require much logic to enable observers to come to the conclusion that if the best vintage were taking its departure, Sacred Majesty would not be among speedy arrivals. The town could hardly find consolation in the assurance that wherever the monarch might be, his heart was certainly at Brighton. The King never came. The local banks could not bear it. They unanimously broke.
A royal duke and duchess were scarcely equivalent to a king; yet the appearance of the Duke of York relieved in some degree the heart of Brighton from some of its heavings. There was a burst of joy when it was announced that H.R.H. ‘purposed to give an entertainment to his tonish friends.’ Everyone uninvited must henceforth consider himself to be mauvais ton. What a flutter there was when ‘tonish reporters’ proclaimed in the newspapers that the Duke would give a public breakfast at Ireland’s Royal Gardens, and that ‘the whole fashionable world would partake of the repast.’ Meanwhile ‘Fashionable Intelligencer’ watched the Duke and noted his ducal ways. We read with infinite emotion that his royal princeliness not only entered several shops, but that he purchased various articles in the most unassuming manner. The grand breakfast at last came off, and a very jolly affair it was; but Snob, who was not invited, and who felt his ‘fashionable’ honour very much ruffled in consequence, declared that the thing was low, and that the company were vulgar.
The Duchess of Gloucester did not put herself so prominently forward as the Duke of York; but the local observer did not fail to chronicle the proud circumstance, namely, that ‘The Duchess gives importance by her presence to the Steyne.’ Her condescension, too, was eulogised in lofty terms; but in the practice of proud humility the Duchess was nothing in comparison with the Bishop of Chichester. Robert James Carr was then, as prelate, only a year old. In the bloom of his official age the Right Rev. Father, &c., visited Brighton, and on his first Sunday there he repaired to the Royal Chapel. There was the ordinary congregation, but there was no clergyman. He had been taken ill and was unable to attend. But the diocesan was not proud. The fashionable chronicler tells us that the Bishop performed divine worship himself, ‘with his usual kindness and condescension.’
Sometimes high-born and ill-bred personages condescended to much stranger performances. Thus we find Jeames the Chronicler setting down a record of the fact that Sir Godfrey Webster, one of the fastest of the very rapid men of the day, had left the town, and that the regret was universal; but that the baronet would soon return, in order to take the chair of a free-and-easy at the ‘Swan Inn.’ It is to be observed, that whenever a ‘tonish’ person took his departure, all Brighton was filled with the most poignant regret. Also, that when a family or individual of the haut ton or beau monde (nice distinctions!) arrived, all Brighton was stirred with an indescribable sort of happiness. If Mrs. Fitzherbert left the town drowned in tears, the arrival of Lady Berwick brought it again to life and laughter. Sir Matthew Tierney’s post-carriage, galloping out of Brighton, pierced the hearts of all beholders; but there was balm in Gilead. How sympathetic must have been the fashionable reporter of 1825 when he wrote down the fact that, ‘Grateful rumour states that the esteemed Dukes of Richmond and Argyle, and the Marquis of Anglesea, again propose to add to the importance of the “Royal York Hotel” by residing there before the end of the present year.’ Mark the new and original figure, ‘grateful rumour.’ But to indulge in strange figures was the old Brighton reporter’s dearest delight. ‘The Marquis of Granby,’ says our friend, ‘without any feeling of indisposition, enjoys good spirits in Regency Square.’ This might astonish Mark Tapley, whose spirits were highest under prostration, but to us it seems natural enough. Another fashionable record, this time full of simplicity, is to the effect that ‘Lady William Gordon confesses the salutary influence of the coast air.’ Occasionally an unexpected arrival makes the reporter of it facetious. For example, the local chronicler states how the ‘Barossa,’ homeward bound from St. Helena, had dropped her anchor off the town the previous night, without any idea of her being there, and how her gallant captain, Hutchenson, went ashore, and gave joyous surprise to his lady and family, and how he was on board again, and on his way to the Downs, by five in the morning.
Speaking of ladies as well as of captains, let us not forget—indeed it is impossible to overlook—that incarnation of gaiety and beauty, the Lady Berwick of that day. Before her marriage, she was a Miss Sophia Dubouchet. This young lady was married to the second Lord Berwick in 1812. In some peerages she is styled plain ‘Sophia Dubouchet,’ with no more account of her family than if she had been, like Melchizedek, without father and without mother. It is clear that this lady, who died childless, was not of illustrious descent. How she looked at Brighton, in 1825, and what were ‘pretty Fanny’s ways’ in that year, at that place, we may gather from another of the scraps of intelligence. ‘A la mode Lady Berwick,’ says a contemporary local journal, ‘formerly Miss Sophia de Bouchez’ (the chroniclers were not particular as to names), ‘has been the source of attraction for our fashionable promenades during the week. It afforded us much pleasure to observe that the late abuse of the press has in no degree diminished the vivacity so characteristic of her ladyship and family.’ There were two other ladies at Brighton at that time who were of a quieter quality, and whose wealth was the least of their charms. They are thus registered in the fashionable column: ‘We have two of the richest heiresses in the country now with us, Miss Wykeham and Miss Pleydell.’ How little did the chronicler conjecture that the former lady, who died so recently as 1870, was the heroine of a romance, and might have been Queen of England if she had chosen to bear that magnificent title. When Miss Wykeham was at Brighton, at a much earlier period than 1825, she attracted the attention of the Duke of Clarence. She was then the much honoured heiress of an Oxfordshire squire, Wykeham of Swalcliffe, a member of the family of William of Wykeham. The royal Duke had other opportunities of seeing this beautiful and accomplished heiress; and, overcome by her beauty, her intellectual qualities, and her account at her banker’s, he made her the offer of his hand. With good common sense, Miss Wykeham declined the offer. The Duke subsequently married a German princess, but he never ceased to esteem the heiress, whose presence made Brighton so happy nearly half a century ago. As soon as the Duke became William IV., King of England, he, with the glad sanction of Queen Adelaide, prevailed on the lady whom he had once sought to make his wife, to accept a peerage. Miss Wykeham took the title of Baroness Wenman, whereby she revived an old title in her family. Her grandfather had married the sister and heiress of the Viscount Wenman, in the Irish peerage. The Viscount having died childless, in 1800, the dignity became extinct; but Wenman, as an English baronial title, was conferred on Miss Wykeham in 1834. For six and thirty years she wore it with dignity, and when she died, in 1870, there was not a memory more honoured in the three kingdoms than that of Sophia Elizabeth Wykeham, Baroness Wenman, of Thame Park, county Oxon.
When William IV. took up his residence at Brighton, he played the citizen king. He walked and talked in the streets, and knocked at the doors of his personal friends, paying morning visits, and speedily discovering that, altogether, ‘it wouldn’t do.’ Queen Victoria went down to look at the place, to give it a trial, and to come to the same conclusion, that ‘it wouldn’t do.’ When cabmen or their customers stood on the roofs of their cabs to gaze at the Queen over the garden walls, royalty quietly withdrew, and Brighton took good heart, and has since contrived to get on handsomely alone, but she is ever glad, and naturally so, when a prince or princess is to be reckoned among her visitors. Only now the inhabitants do not go out to meet them, as they did in 1815 to meet Queen Charlotte. Large bodies of them then received permission to welcome the Queen at Patcham. They were dressed in buff, and mounted. As they cantered by the side of the Queen’s carriage, as her escort, she smiled and bowed to such of them as were ‘getting a look at her,’ as if she liked it. The Prince Regent, the Duke of Clarence, and a bright array of nobility, waited in the open space before the Pavilion to do honour to her on her arrival. ‘The present,’ says a contemporary historian, ‘is beyond all doubt the most brilliant period in the annals of Brighton.’
Fitting period wherewith to close these remarks. What a contrast is the fuss to get a sovereign into Brighton with the anxiety to get Charles II. out of it! For effecting the escape of the King, Captain Tattersall was rewarded with a pension of 100l. a year to himself and his descendants. We suppose that the most democratic of politicians would not object to a pension being paid which was originally earned by getting his most ‘religious majesty’ out of the kingdom.