THE TWO GEORGES

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 August 1933, Page 10

THE TWO GEORGES

BEAU BRUMMELL’S FALL The Bayeux tapestry, of which I was recently writing, breaks off with the victory of the Normans, when there were twenty-three years of the Conqueror’s life still to run; and thereafter the centre of gravity, so far as the Duke of Normandy, as distinguished from King of England, was concerned, shifted to Caen, which, on his frequent crossings from realm to realm, William made his French headquarters and considered his home town (writes E. V. Lucas in the London, “Sunday Times”). His Queen and Duchess, Matilda, although the tapestry so identifies her with Bayeux, was also attached to Caen, where in 1062 she had begun the great nunnery of the Trinity as her. contribution to the expiatory deed demanded by the Pope for committing the offence of marrying her first cousin; William, on his part, having to give Caen the monastery of St. Stephen. Later he was to build the abbey at Battle; but his heart was in the Caen foundation, where he designed one day to lie. * * * But you can see to-day only the last resting-place of Matilda, in the middle of her abbey choir, for William’s grave was twice violated, once by the Huguenots in 1562 and again, by the revolutionists, in 1793, and not a vestige remains; merely, in the pavement before the high altar, a record of the position it once occupied. It might be thought that, the Conqueror would have wished to be buried in Westminster Abbey, as his predecessor and cousin, Edward the Confessor, had been, not mly because he was King of England but because he had won to that upreme honour by might; but it must be remembered that he was a Irenchman before everything and the French ike their own soil best.

) But it was less of Norman Kings i nd Queens that I was thinking as I ' moved about the so noisy city of Caen, .han of that pitiable husk of a man who a hundred years ago was a amiliar figure in its streets, a shadow f his former insolence and splendour: George Bryan Brummell, condemned i y his extravagance and want of concience to a degraded exile in a foreign land. A king, too. in his time; ■:ot, like the Conqueror, a legislator for ■ nation, but for his. fellow dandies. Let. whoso will make the laws of a ■ ■.ountry,” he might have said, “so long s I can devise its neckties.” And it. ■ as an English vice-king, too, who for ; while allowed him to share his premim,nee and prestige: for, until the break came, George the Prince Regent nd George the Bean might be called wo oilier Kings of Brentford, their Brentford being St. James’ Street; heir sceptres, clouded canes; their >rbs, snuff-boxes: and their crowns, ilted hats. In his great days at 4, ChesmTield Street the Beau, while dress’ng, was frequently visited by the Reamt; and it is on record that once, when Brummell was unable to extend is approval to the cut of one of the Regent’s new coats, the Regent. ■ blubbered.” Brummell’s rise to power is, perhaps, the most remarkable thing about him, for, although he had wit, he had, beside his ext erior, little but effrontery; and I cap find no record of his ever doing anything for anyone but

himself. “Love yourself, and the world will love you,” say the French; but I doubt if Brummell won much of that divine quality. Of comparative humble extraction, he made the fullest use of associations formed at Eton, and his patrimony and an amusing sense of words helped him still further. Some of his carefully planned speeches, always made in the presence of the right listener, are perfect of their kind; as when, after his return from a tour of the Hugh Walpole country, on a noble visitor asking what, scenery had most pleased him, he rang the bell for his man “Pray tell his Lordship which lake we liked best.” Again, when asked by a beggar for a halfpenny, he replied that he knew nothing of any coin of that name, but “Here is a shilling for you”; and on being given by a shopkeeper three or four pennies as change, he sent for a porter and, handing him a half-crown, bade him “carry this luggage to my hotel.” But he lives, and will live, by the colossal impudence of his comment on his former and now alienated associate, the Regent, when, overtaking him on horseback with a companion in the Row, he nodded in the direction of the First Gentleman in Europe, asking “Who’s your fat friend?”

j It was over a snuffbox that the break came. The Prince had wished to give the Beau one of these articles as a personal souvenir, and it was to have the Royal features on the lid, surrounded by diamonds. While the goldsmiths were busy with it, Brummell arrived at Claremont, where the Prince was giving a party, and was met by his host with the request that he would return to London, as Mrs Fitzherbert did not wish his company. He re-entered his chaise without a word, and was never anything but the Prince’s enemy, and a very provocative and disdainful one, after. He sent, however, at once for the snuffbox, but was told that the Prince had countermanded it. Strangely enough, it was one of these receptacles that brought about the only semblance of reconciliation that ever occurred, for when, in 1821, the Prince, now King of England, passed through Calais, where Brummell had taken refuge from his creditors, and was told by one of his suite that his ancient crony was there, and was even reminded of the gift that had failed, he sent him, in another ami inferior snuffbox, a. hundred guineas.

From Calais Brummell moved on, in 1830, to Caen, first as British Consul, with some kind of status, and, after, as a kind of professional guest of everyone who stayed at the Hotel d’Angleterre, with none. It was the habit of English visitors to see the wreck of this flambuoyant. figure and to offer him food and drink. Even in France, however, although safe from the fellow-countrymen whom he had defrauded, he ran into debt, and for a while was in the Caen prison. Later he declined into a. condition first, of repulsive self-neglect, and then into insanity, and he died in the Bon Sauveur in 1810, aged G2, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.