A SKETCH OF THE LIVES OF THE LORDS STOWELL AND ELDON, TOGETHER WITH SOME CORRECTIONS, AND ADDITIONS, TO MR. TWISS'S LIFE OF THE LATTER. Look here upon this picture and on this; The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. HAMLET. ACT III. THE great interest which the public has taken in the successful careers of the Lords Stowell and Eldon, since it has been presented with the life of the latter from the pen of Mr. Twiss, has induced us to commit to paper some anecdotes, which, from private sources, we happen to possess respecting these distinguished brothers: and we are led to hope that they may have some value, as addenda, at any rate, to the more considerable work to which we have alluded. We do not pretend to follow here any strict biographical arrangement; but shall jot down such savings and doings as we have to relate, nearly in the same order in which they occur to our recollection. Nevertheless, let us commence with the earliest period of which we have to speak, and start with the family ab ovo. The first authenticated ancestor of the Lords Stowell and Eldon is their grandfather, William Scott, of Sandgate, whom, according to Mr. Twiss, family tradition describes as a "fitter ;" and whom, from other sources, we have heard to have been, in the latter part of his life, himself the owner of several "keels." We must now hasten to interpret a language but little known beyond the banks of the Tyne. The "keels" are large barges belonging to those who exercise the trade of "fitters," a sort of water-carriers of coal. They are manned by two swarthy sailors, who navigate them freighted with the native "black diamond" from the higher part of the Tyne to its ports, either at Newcastle or Shields, for exportation or for consumption on the spot. The business of a fitter was a very profitable one; and there are several families amongst the more important gentry of Northumberland and Durham, who owe the creation or the increase of the fortune that has been transmitted to them to the exercise of that trade by their ancestors. So productive indeed was it found, that now it is little known as a separate calling; those who "work," preferring also themselves to "fit" their coal. It was not as the original "habitat" of the Scotts that we first became acquainted with the name of Sandgate. We recollect, in the days of our early youth, at a little temporary theatre in Newcastle-onTyne, where horsemanship was exhibited, hearing the band strike up the tune peculiar to the town, which had for centuries been appropriated to the following words: As I cam thro' Sandgate, thro' Sandgate, thro' Sandgate, As I cam thro' Sandgate, I heard a lassie sing, The burst of enthusiasm with which the rude audience simultaneously hailed their well-known tune, thrilled us through. There seemed not a voice that did not join the chorus, nor a foot that did not beat the time. The walls of wood trembled, and the roof rung again. We then learned that Sandgate, where the incantation of the lassie called down so appropriate a blessing on her laddie's labours, taking its name from a gate in the ancient town-wall of Newcastle, near the sandy shore of the Tyne, was an old street in the suburbs running parallel to the river, and opening to it by narrow lanes. It is (to compare small things with great) the Strand of Newcastle; but a Strand leading to Wapping instead of to the West End. The barrier gate on the sand, which in the border conflicts" had oft rolled back the tide of war," has at length yielded to modern convenience, and the suburb of Sandgate now mingles with Newcastle. William Scott of Sandgate, who has before been mentioned, was, in the indenture of apprenticeship of his son, dated Sept. 1, 1716, described as being of the degree of yeoman-a style not necessarily, or there by any means, signifying the cultivator of his own farm, as we commonly understand it; but simply a householder, of too poor estate to allow of his designation either as gentleman or merchant, yet raised above the ranks of servile drudgery. It was applied alike to the reduced cadets of gentle blood and to the aspiring scions of the successful labourer. The history of the family of Scott well exemplifies the quaint definition which the venerable Fuller thus gives of the class comprised under this term. "The good yeoman is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see refined; and is the wax capable of a gentle impression when the Prince shall stamp it." William Scott, the second of that name (the date of whose apprenticeship we have already mentioned), became by service a member of his master's company in Newcastle, the guild of Hoastmen, which comprised, from an early period, those engaged in the loading and selling of coal and grindstones, the subterranean wealth of the neighbourhood. The latter part of his apprenticeship was spent under Mr. Joseph Colpitts, an opulent coal-fitter, whose fortune has descended, through his sister, Mrs. Harrison, to the family of Reay, and is now enjoyed, through his marriage with the heiress of that line, by Matthew Bell, Esq., M.P. for South Northumberland. This William Scott, according to a natural and pleasing family progression, engaged as a principal in that business in which his father had been a clerk. Not content, however, with the profits of a coalfitter, he is said to have kept, at one time, a sort of public-house near the Quay, at Newcastle, for the purpose, it is presumed, of supplying his own keel-men with their liquor, and thus realising the returns of the modern truck system. He entered also into speculations in shipping generally, and in the maritime insurance called bottomry. The book, into which Mr. Scott copied his letters of business still exists, and is in the possession of Mr. John Bell, a land-surveyor at Gateshead, who has found means, amid laborious application to his profession, to amass a rare manuscript collection of antiquarian and legendary lore. By his industry and frugality Mr. Scott was in time raised to consideration amongst the trading community of his native town; and, though he seems seldom to have mixed in society, or to have been heard of beyond his counting-house or the Exchange, there is no reason * Fuller's Holy State. to suppose the high opinion entertained by his descendants of his prudence and probity exaggerated. He died, 6th of November, 1776, aged, according to Mr. Twiss, 79 years, and soon after the youngest of his family had attained to man's estate. But we shall hereafter have occasion to show that there is strong reason for believing that the fortune he left behind him fell considerably short of the amount at which Mr. Twiss has been instructed to lay it. And now that we have named Mr. Twiss, let us turn aside for one moment to consider his volumes. A temple was to be erected to the fame of Lord Chancellor Eldon: well was the architect selected: his plan has been conceived with genius and executed with skill. But for his material he was necessarily dependent upon others; and some of the petty contractors who engaged to supply it, have occasionally foisted on him the imperfect or new for that which was well preserved and seasoned by age. The work, however, deserves to live; and its popularity will afford the opportunity of correction in subsequent editions. The family, at the time of the father's death, consisted of the mother, three sons, and two unmarried daughters, besides a grand-daughter of the name of Cramlington. The sons were William, afterwards Lord Stowell, Henry, a coal-fitter and merchant of Newcastle, and John, afterwards Earl of Eldon. And here we may remark, that Lords Stowell and Eldon, were each born with a twin sister. For a history of the schoolboy days of the Scotts we are possessed of but little original information. All three brothers went to the grammar-school at Newcastle, and all are acknowledged to have possessed high talent. According to Lord Eldon's own account, he used to be foremost amongst the "idle progeny" That chas'd the rolling circle's speed, Or urg'd the flying ball. However, be that as it may, there is no doubt that both the eldest and youngest son so contrived to spend their time as to acquire a considerable store of learning, and to become in turn, great favourites with the head master, the Rev. Hugh Moises. Mr. Moises was an able and worthy man, and had generally the good fortune to win the regard of his pupils. In society he used to lay himself out to talk smartly, after the manner of diners out; yet he would not unfrequently mix his conversation with grave appeals to his conscience and his God, in the line of a somewhat more questionable gentry. The eldest Scott successfully attempted the former accomplishment; while the youngest seems, in after life at any rate, to have been by no means unmindful of the graces or advantages of the the latter. An accident, of which we have no doubt the correct version is that adopted by Mr. Twiss, had, by shifting the scene of William Scott's birth from Northumberland to the county of Durham, rendered him eligible for a Durham scholarship in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and of this he did not fail, probably at the suggestion of Mr. Moises, to avail himself. Having been born Oct. 17, 1745, old style, he obtained his scholarship at Corpus, Feb. 24, 1761; thus, according to an article in the Law Magazine, "narrowly escaping the age, sixteen, at which the statutes of that college, made-one would presume, for the encouragement of such precocious boy-bachelors as Cardinal Wolsey-superannuated candidates." From his scholarship at Corpus he was, in December, 1764, elected to a fellowship in University College, where, as a tutor, he resided many years, with great advantage, not only to his college but to Oxford itself, which he softened by his amenity and instructed by his erudition. And here let us leave him to spend some years on the classic, though monotonous, banks of Isis, while we hasten back to the shores of the Tyne, in order thence to accompany his youngest brother, John, through the changes and chances of his early career. John Scott was born on the 4th of June, 1751, in his father's house in Love Lane, Newcastle, being nearly six years younger than his eldest brother. When he had gone through the education afforded by the local grammar school, his father, uncertain to what business it might be best to devote him, talked of placing him in his own trade of coal-fitting; but that was also the destination of his brother Henry: and William Scott, who seems to have been always tenderly attached to his youngest brother, suggested that he should be sent to his own college, University, under his patronage; and there he was entered as a commoner 15th of May, 1766. And well, with such a brother to direct his studies and stimulate his perseverance, might, When first the college rolls received his name, Caught from the strong contagion of the gown.t Accordingly in the following year we find him acquiring a fellowship in his college, and, in the summer of 1771, gaining the English prize essay-the only prize then held out by the university. The subject of this essay was the advantages and disadvantages of foreign travel. Its language is deficient neither in strength nor grace; and its phrases and turns remind us not unfrequently of those of his brother's friend, the great Doctor Johnson, with whose writings he must undoubtedly have been very familiar. Its matter and arrangement indicate the strong sense of its author, with a disposition to heap conflicting doubts into each scale, and then to watch with delight the trembling of the uncertain balance; but we have not found in it an originality of thought or imagination which can entitle it to the highest praise; namely, that it is a work of genius. This essay will afford an interesting key to the earlier mental developments of this distinguished lawyer, if we apply to it the rule laid down by Gibbon : "The style * No. XXXIII. (Aug. 1836) in which there is a single article on the life of Lord Stowell, by Mr. Townsend, the recorder of Macclesfield, who has, in communicating such information as was then within his reach, evinced the learning of the scholar and the delicacy of the gentleman. We trust that the interesting series of Lives of the Lawyers, of which this forms a part, may eventually be given to the public in a more permanent form than the pages of a magazine afford. † Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes." June.-VOL. LXXIV. NO. CCXCIV. T of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise." His plan of life now was to be, when old enough, ordained, and eventually to retire from Oxford on a college living. About this time, however, we find his heart much interested in Miss Surtees, the lady whom he subsequently married. So romantic were the circumstances that attended, so important were the events that followed, this marriage, that we feel we shall be excused if we avail ourselves of our original sources of information to make a somewhat lengthy digression upon it. Elizabeth Surtees was the eldest daughter of a large family. Her father, Mr. Aubone Surtees, was a banker of Newcastle, and her mother, the beauty of a preceding generation, was the child of Mr. John Stephenson, of Knaresdale Hall, Northumberland. A wine merchant of Newcastle, and a man of great commercial ability generally, Mr. Stephenson had directed and shared the extensive speculations in the hop trade of his elder brother, Sir William Stephenson, of London,* and became one of the richest men in Newcastle, then the commercial capital of the north of England. He left a large family, the two elder sonst of which he placed by his will in a position of independent affluence. Henry, the eldest by birth, had a house in Park-lane, which he occupied in the London season, and he used to spend the principal part of the summer at a residence which he rented in Berkshire. He had an only child, a girl of surpassing beauty, of whom in a short time we shall have occasion to make further mention. His son-in-law, Alderman John Sawbridge, M.P. for London, from 1774 till his death in 1793, received, we have been told, from the easy sarcastic wit of Lord North, this answer to some violent speech, "I understand that, in the civic parliament, the honourable member represents the ward of Billingsgate; and I must do him the justice to acknowledge, that he speaks the language of his constituents." We have inserted this anecdote to preserve its point, but we will not be vouched for its authenticity. It may perhaps have been his predecessor in the representation of London, Beckford, who was really the subject of this sarcasm, for he was actually the alderman for the ward of Billingsgate; whereas (according to the Gent. Mag., vol. lxv., p. 217), Sawbridge represented only the adjoining ward of Langborne. The third son, Mr. Edward Stephenson, who held an important civil situation at Patna, in the East Indies, realised a good fortune. The last time he went out to India, stopping on his voyage at St. Helena, he was smitten with Miss Bazett, a young, and, we believe, portionless, lady of great personal attractions: and he made her his wife. Himself advanced in life, he survived the marriage only a very few years, and died in India childless; but, as is no uncommon case in the alliances of age to youth, he bequeathed to her his fortune absolutely. She returned to England, and married the fifth Earl of Essex, whose embarrassments (for he had lived much in the extravagant set of the young Prince of Wales) made a wealthy alliance indispensable to him. The earl was a man of great accomplishment and fascination; and so courteous was his manner generally, that one, who knew him well in private life, informed us that his wife was the only person to whom he was ever heard to speak rudely, and added (shame to our sex!) that she never deserved it. We have heard that on the day of his marriage, the earl acquired from her 60,000l., besides other sums afterwards, all of which went to the payment of his debts. In time her means of affording fresh supplies ceased, and a union, unfruitful unless in disappointment, ended in a formal separation. She died the 16th of January, 1838, and on the 14th of the ensuing April, he married the accomplished professional singer, Miss Stephens, to whom, in anticipation of her death, he had long been engaged. The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables! |