A HANDBOOK 
 
 TO TUB 
 
 BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY 
 
 IN TUB 
 
 Art (Measures dfcrliilntion. 
 
 ' o 
 
 BEING A REPRINT OF CRITICAL NOTICES ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 
 IN “THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN.” 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 BRADBURY AND EVANS, 11, BOUVERIE STREET. 
 
 18o7. 
 
ERADBURY AND EVANS, 
 
 PRINTERS TO THE MANCHESTER ART TREASURES EXHIBITION, 
 WHITEFRIARS, LONDON. 
 
HANDBOOK 
 
 TO TUB 
 
 BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY 
 
 IN THE 
 
 ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 Of all portions of the Exhibition this is the one which most 
 requires the aid of a catalogue raisonne. These portraits, for 
 those who know the great points of the lives of their originals, 
 have a great interest; for those who do not, they have little or 
 none. It is impossible within the narrow limits which, in a 
 series of newspaper notices, must be assigned to each part of the 
 Exhibition, to do more than take the most cursory survey of this 
 large gallery. It is, therefore, to be especially regretted that the 
 promised official guide or handbook to the Portrait Gallery is not 
 yet published. We cannot pretend to supply its place in the 
 flying comment on these pictures, which is all we have room for. 
 But we would most respectfully press on the committee, and on 
 Mr. Cunningham, that so loug as the promised handbook to the 
 Portrait Gallery is delayed, a public want is left unsatisfied. 
 This is the more necessary because, so far as we can judge from 
 these pictures, no very definite principle has guided the selection 
 of them. We do not, throughout the series, find grouped under 
 the portrait of the sovereign, the representations of the real 
 notables of the time—the men who set their stamp on the reign 
 by statesmanship, arts, arms, or letters. This has, it is true, been 
 done in an imperfect degree for the reign of Henry Till., 
 Elizabeth, and her successors; and, no doubt, it was easier to do 
 it for them than the sovereigns who preceded Elizabeth. What 
 there is earlier than Elizabeth is not only fragmentary, with 
 reference to its illustrative value, but is also hung on the walls, 
 
 b 2 
 
4 
 
 ani numbered in the maimae. wichont etr: n:_:kcal semen::. 
 .1 -115 Z1TM' ~5 t * O 2 2.11711H2_ 0257._Lc_f‘5 IZL. Hr 572 hrtlt 5 We 
 
 are no* aware cf tae eimemties which ame imnedei Mr. 
 Cunningham. in me ecOedim of his materials. -~ i ~~~ ? t e 
 collection itself. we shoald infer mat mem sene houses be 
 has teen altogether excluded: from otters permitted :: mbe 
 EwiaglT; while in otters, again, te has teen showed *-v? 
 ZJtsaeie. ant would seem almost to have stripped tie w-fh. 
 Cask: tinny. Hatnell ani ?r~;rtt—three :: tie imses ~ 
 contain tie most valuable treasures of historical art in Znk • i 
 —contribute nothing. Xtere are tere only three ricruras front 
 tie unrivalled eoDeetion at me Grcve—me remains :: ne 
 gaZerv ot Ensiist wortmes fomtei tyme great _atra C_are: i n— 
 and which still numbers no less titan 2-3 or 26 Vandyc-he test s 
 Honmtrsts. .Jansens, ant Zelys. even after ah it tas snnVrer ~ 
 Leri f tmtnry's f treed sales t: t ay hs tetts—in tie • a 
 
 of -v'hc-t. ant treating tas premises to pay. te tat wine Burnet 
 calls " - tarthahr art "—aai :y tie hstersim :: tie : ' . 
 
 which followed cn tie death of tie Dane of Queer stemy 'til 
 
 Q." . tv which so many were transferred to BottweU Ca-rie. 
 Bat en. reranehe. the Duke o: Pcrtm-a _as gtven Mr. Can - : g- 
 t-i- tie fullest liberty at Weliect ant tie vast historical 
 
 ;f that rage it ase . . teen m .. .—a:: : : n 
 
 rooms. or bedrooms, or earrilors omy. tat tae attics, an: >m - 
 rooms, art grooms art coachmen's k agmgs ever stat.r— na 
 some of tie most an teres tin r transferred to tiese vrs—s. B s: s 
 this unexampled ureraaty in p attire tae Zrelbecx p.crams at *. e 
 service of the committee, tie duke nas sent nere ms cart sd-I 
 collection of miniatures, which may be seen in tae gallery t: tae 
 left of the orchestra, and which wit repay tae closest examina¬ 
 tion. ITe cannot help thinking it a pity that Mr. Cunning., m. 
 in making this collection, should have allowed eonstietations f 
 art to interfere with those of history. He srmrn not. sc: mm 
 to ear view of the matter, have hung even a Tartyck if t e 
 orhinh tad not some historical importance; stnd less s mm: e 
 have t r-.n J - inferior pictures of unit : wn people ty imc:o»a 
 painters, as the “ Sir John and La ly Langham (161 ana 162 . 
 from Lord Stamford’s collection. 
 
THE EiUTISU POltTilAIT UALLE11Y. 
 
 i) 
 
 There is no country in the world so rich in historical portraits as 
 England, except Italy. But there is this difference between the 
 countries,—the Italian portraits are confined to the galleries in the 
 palaces of great families, and have, many of them, been transferred 
 to collections of pictures all over the world, to aid the needs of their 
 impoverished proprietors. In England, on the other hand, our 
 counties are filled with old families and ancestral houses, many 
 of them dating back to the Tudors, and earlier still; and every 
 one of these old houses is filled with old pictures, some as early 
 as Henry YI.; but abounding especially from the reign of 
 Elizabeth downward, and becoming still more overpowering in 
 amount when we get to the times of Charles II., Anne, and the 
 earlier Georges. Eor, during the first half of last century, there 
 seems to have been a race of travelling portrait painters, workmen 
 of very fair skill, trained as assistants in the ateliers of Ivueller 
 and his Dutch contemporaries, whose practice it was to go from 
 country house to country house transferring to canvas the faces 
 and figures of two generations—the setting and the rising— 
 sometimes in huge family groups, oftener in separate pictures. 
 The means of historical illustration by portraiture in England 
 may be called almost inexhaustible ; and rich as this historical 
 portrait gallery is, there is no part of the Manchester Exhibition 
 which gives a more inadequate notion of the real value and bulk 
 of the art treasures of the couutry. This, however, is a way of 
 expressing the wealth of England, and not the poverty of our 
 gallery, which includes far more than we can hope to indicate to 
 our readers in the space at our command, and far more than most 
 visitors of the Exhibition will ever contrive to see. There is 
 nothing earlier than Diehard II., and it would be difficult, except 
 in the shape of monumental effigies, paintings on glass, or illu¬ 
 minations in manuscript, to find any genuine portraiture of an 
 earlier date. From one or the other of these sources, are derived 
 the traditional portraits of our earlier kings, familiar to us all in 
 the shape of those circular illustrations in the school histories of 
 England. The lxichard 11. here (15), from Westminster Abbey, 
 though Walpole may choose to describe the picture as preserving the 
 person of the king “ in the most lively manner,” has been reduced 
 by the repaintiugs of generations to a state in which nothing but 
 
G 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 the contour of the original can he said to survive. It exhibits 
 those regular and handsome but weak and insipid features, of 
 which we see the germs, really well-conveyed, in the curious 
 Wilton picture (42, Saloon A). If the gallery could have been 
 complete, we should have had the portrait of Chaucer here. The 
 only contemporary likenesses of the poet, however, are two, one by 
 Occleve himself, in a manuscript in the British Museum, and the 
 other, probably also contemporary, not by Occleve, but in a copj'- 
 of Occleve’s poems in the same collection. The greatest figure 
 of Bichard’s reign, after Chaucer, is Wicklif—the father of 
 protestantism, the opponent of priestcraft and papal tyranny, and 
 the true precursor of Luther. Here he is (4), the plain Yorkshire 
 scholar of Queen’s and Merton, who stood against friars and 
 pardons, more than 150 years before Luther nailed his articles 
 on the church door of "Wittemberg,—the sturdy controversialist, 
 who was borne down neither by the Anglican episcopacy, when it 
 cited him to answer charges of heresy, in St. Paul’s, in 1377, nor 
 by the four papal bulls launched against him in the same year,— 
 the parish priest who, in his quiet parsonage at Lutterworth, held 
 up to scorn the pretensions of the rival successors of St. Peter 
 by his “ Schism of the Popes ” in 1381,—the scholar who made the 
 first complete translation of the Bible into “ the vulgar tongue,’* 
 —the reformer who, by the establishment of his order of “ Poure 
 Priestes,” spread through the land a body of faithful preachers 
 and teachers, preaching the word unbeneficed, in their grey gowns 
 girt about them, a staff in their hands—such men as Chaucer 
 has described in his admirable picture of the “poure persone; ”— 
 
 He coude in litel thiug have sufiisance. 
 
 Wide was his parish, and houses fer asonder, 
 
 But he ne left nought for no rain ne thonder, 
 
 In sikenesse and in mischief to visite 
 The ferrest in his parish, moclie and lite, 
 
 Upon his fete, and in his hand a staf. 
 
 This noble ensample to his shepe he yaf, 
 
 That first he wrought, and afterward he taught. 
 
 Out of the gospel he the wordes caught. 
 
 In this very garb Wicklif is here painted,—whether by a 
 contemporary hand may be doubtful—staff in hand, with a mild 
 but firm face, and a venerable white beard. What was it to 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 7 
 
 nun that Oxford condemned his opinions, deprived him of his 
 divinity professorship, and banished him the university ? He 
 had his work to do and his word to speak. He wrought the one, 
 and wrote and spoke the other, fearlessly and faithfully, and died 
 in 1384 in his parish of Lutterworth, at the age of sixty-four. 
 Forty years later the Council of Constance condemned his doc¬ 
 trines, and ordered his bones to be dug up and burnt. It was 
 done, and the ashes flung into the Swift, a little brook that runs 
 by the foot of the hill on which Lutterworth stands, and “thus,” 
 says quaint Thomas Fuller, “ this brook hath conveyed his ashes 
 into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they 
 into the main ocean. And so the ashes of Wickliff are the emblems 
 of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the w r orld over.” 
 
 Here hangs the shrewd, sad, stern face of Henry IV. (1), “an 
 undoubted original ”—from the gallery of the Earl of Essex—the 
 king whose best historian is Shakspere, in whose reign parliament 
 rose to importance under the influence of the sovereign’s pecu¬ 
 niary embarrassments and defective title, which compelled him to 
 reign by the aid of the Commons. Henry V. is absent; but here 
 are his two luckless successors, Henry VI. (23) and Edward 
 IV. (5), the Kings of the Loses; the first in two heads, equally 
 marked by that weak irresolute expression which is reflected in 
 his unhappy life and death; the second handsome and volup¬ 
 tuous, hanging here, as he did in life, by the side of one of his 
 mistresses, .lane Shore, not represented, however, as the un¬ 
 happy heroine of the old ballad and Lowe’s Tragedy should have 
 appeared, with wan face, and white penitential robe, and the 
 candle of expiation in her hand, or sinking for lack of bread in 
 Shoreditch, but naked, save for the circlet of jewels round her 
 neck. This portrait is sent by Eton College, of which foundation 
 she was an early patroness. This face has no beauty, certainly, 
 nor indeed auy of the three expressions we might choose for it 
 from the King’s description of his three mistresses,—“ One the 
 merriest, the other the wittiest, and the third the holiest, for she 
 is always 'in a church but when he sends for her.” The popular 
 myth of Jane Shore’s death, under the cruel penance imposed on 
 her by crook-backed Gloucester, is without foundation. She lived 
 many years after, and was seen by Sir Thomas More, in the reign 
 
8 
 
 THE AM TEEAS0T1E3 EXHIBITION. 
 
 of Henry VIII. in extreme old age,—poor, decrepit, shrivelled, 
 and with no trace of the beauty that had won the love of the 
 voluptuous Edward. Here, too, hangs one of the many portraits 
 of Richard III. (7), sent by James Gibson Craig, Esq.; how 
 proved authentic we know not, but looking as crafty and as cruel 
 as we could desire the bloody king to look. Whether Shakspere 
 was right in his conception of the crook-back, or Walpole in his 
 re-instatement of him as a wise, politic, and rather ill-used 
 monarch, is a “ historic doubt ” not yet solved. This portrait has 
 the characteristic action of drawing off and on the ring, ascribed 
 to this king in all the extant portraits of him. Beside him hangs 
 the pale ascetic face (8) of the virtuous Margaret, Countess of 
 Eichmond, and mother of Henry VII. by her first husband, 
 Edmund Tudor, the foundress of God’s House, afterwards Christ’s 
 College, and of St. John’s College, both at Cambridge. She was a 
 type of all the feminine virtues of her time, distinguished alike, 
 as Eisher, bishop of Rochester, said of her in her funeral sermon, 
 “ for nobility of person, discipline of her body, ordering her soul 
 to God, and, fourthly, in hospitality and charity.” She had thirty 
 kings and queens within the four degrees of marriage to her, 
 besides dukes, marquises, earls, and other princes. Her father 
 was John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and her mother, Margaret 
 Beauchamp. Thus, as Puller says in his punning way, “fair fort 
 and/air field met in this lady, who w'as fair body and fair soul, 
 being the exactest pattern of the best devotion those days 
 afforded; taxed for no personal faults, but the errors of the age 
 she lived in.” She died June 29, 1509, not surviving to witness 
 the completion of St. John’s College, from whose library this por¬ 
 trait comes. She saw, however, both her son and grandson on the 
 throne. Of the former there is no portrait here. Of the latter 
 there is one of the Holbein portraits (48) from the Duke of Man¬ 
 chester, a duplicate of the Warwick picture which hangs in the 
 gallery of old masters. It is a pity that the personages of Henry’s 
 reign have not been hung together. We should have liked to see 
 the lustful king surrounded by his six ill-fated wives—of whom 
 here are only “Anne Boleyn ” (10, 11), “Katherine Parr” (16), 
 “Jane Seymour” (50)—and “Anne of Cleves” (the last in minia¬ 
 ture, in frame 17), and accompanied by his creatures and his victims, 
 
THIS BKIXIS1I POJUTBAIT GALLEliV. 3 
 
 or the large array of those who began by being the former to end 
 as the latter. Why, for example, is Charles Brandon (Id), the 
 luxurious, accomplished, and unscrupulous husband of Mary (14), 
 the wicked widow of Louis of France, so far from the master he 
 served but too well ? Charles Brandon was one of the most 
 graceful gentlemen and most skilful jousters in the pageant of 
 the Field of the Cloth of Gold—a leading member of the odious 
 commission established to raise money for the royal needs, with¬ 
 out resort to parliament—one of the most active and heartless 
 of the persecutors of Queen Catherine—the messenger of death 
 to Anne Boleyn, of separation to Anne of Cleves, of disgrace to 
 Wolsey. He commanded the ill-starred invasion to France, and 
 sat in Smithfield to see Friar Forest slowly burned, in the fire 
 which consumed the wonder-working crucifix of David Darvel 
 Gatheren; and, finally, he was the dexterous conductor of the 
 intrigues which dissolved the rebellion of the north. That the 
 accomplice in so many of the crimes of his royal master should have 
 died quietly in his bed in 1545, two years before the king, shows 
 a dexterity or a good fortune equally rare in those bloody days. 
 
 Here, too, by the side of luckless Anne Boleyn, hangs her 
 eldest sister Mary (12), with whom also the King was accused of 
 having intrigued, apparently not without considerable reason. 
 She is not less fair than her sister, whom she nearly resembles, 
 though fuller in face and fleshier in figure. Those who are in¬ 
 clined to feel with Mr. Froude, the last historian of the 
 reign of Henry VIII. who has proposed to himself the Her¬ 
 culean task of cleansing the memory of that sovereign from the 
 foul stain of lust and blood with which it is so deeply encrusted, 
 may try to discover in this fair face of Anne Boleyn the sen¬ 
 suality and deceitfulness which Mr. Froude finds in it. We 
 confess we see nothing of the kind, but rather the most engaging 
 feminine sweetness and softness. At the same time it is evident 
 that poor Anne was no heroine, but a weak girl, who succumbed 
 to the mixed influence of terror and vanity, though she must have 
 known the ruthless nature of the man into whose hands she was 
 putting her lair and slender neck, and might have anticipated 
 her own dark and dismal future from the fate of the poor queen 
 whom she supplanted. 
 
10 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 There is here no portrait of the Duke of Norfolk, the head of 
 the papist party iu the reign of Henry, who, though he never 
 forfeited his faith for royal favour, seems, in all else, to have 
 been the willing instrument of the King’s worst purposes, and 
 inferior in every respect to his noble and accomplished son, 
 Henry Howard,—the friend of the King’s youth—the poet-lover 
 of the fair Geraldine, whose image the great wizard, Cornelius 
 Agrippa, showed to the enamoured youth in a magic mirror, at 
 the court of the Emperor—the gallant tilter in the lists, at the 
 jousts given in honour of the King’s marriage with Anne of 
 Cleves, in 1540—the wild feaster on flesh in Lent—the 
 night brawler and window breaker, committed to the Eleet in 
 1543—a volunteer under his father in 1544, in the army that 
 invaded Erance and took Boulogne—governor afterwards of that 
 fortress for England—arrested in 1548, by the influence of 
 Hertford, on the same day as his father—sent with him to 
 the Tower, on a frivolous charge of having quartered the King’s 
 arms in his armorial bearings—found guilty and beheaded in his 
 thirtieth year, in 1547, on Tower Hill, that scene of death, which 
 so seldom went a week all through Henry’s reign, without 
 its block being baptised with blood. Altogether, Surrey is 
 one of the most interesting figures of that singular time, by 
 his various accomplishments in arts and arms, and by his prema¬ 
 ture and unhappy fate. Walpole believed this fine portrait of 
 him (17) to be by Holbein, and we know not to what other 
 hand it can reasonably be attributed. 
 
 The visitor should pause before the portrait of Sir John More 
 (51), one of the justices of the Queen’s Bench, in the reign of 
 Henry VII., and father of the more illustrious chancellor. Sir 
 John lived to the age of 90, dying in 1533, only two years before 
 his son, who, when he passed as lord high chancellor ol England 
 through Westminster Hall to the Chancery, failed not on his 
 knees to ask his old father’s blessing, as he sat in his court. 
 There is no portrait of the chancellor here,—a grievous want, 
 considering the place he fills in the reign of Henry VIII. 
 
 William Warham (60) and Wolsey (49) should have hung side 
 by side, instead of being separated by a whole range of Elizabethan 
 portraits. Such historic “ dislocation ” materially impairs the 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 11 
 
 interest and instructional value of this gallery. This Wolsey 
 (49) is described in the catalogue as “ the earliest contemporary 
 portrait of the founder of any college.” But what are we 
 to say to the portrait of the Lady Margaret (8), who surely 
 founded Christ’s and St. John’s, before 1525, when Wolsey founded 
 Cardinal College? Wolsey’s is a wretched portrait now, what¬ 
 ever it may have been before it was ruined by repainting, and 
 represents the cardinal in profile, as he would always be painted, 
 to conceal his blind eye. 
 
 Archbishop Warham’s portrait (from Lambeth) purports to be 
 a work of Holbein’s, and is an inferior repetition of the head in 
 the Louvre. The face has a good deal of the patient shrewdness 
 one might look for in this sagacious opponent of Wolsey’s, “the 
 prime advocate,” as Luller calls him, “ for Queen Catherine, who 
 carried it so cautiously, that he neither betrayed the cause of his 
 client nor incurred the King’s displeasure.” He long foiled and 
 eventually survived AVolsey, and was archbishop twenty-eight 
 years, dying in 1533. 
 
 Iu frame 17, in the transept gallery, is the very miniature of 
 Anne of Cleves which Holbein painted at her father’s court, and 
 which was despatched by Cromwell to the King in the same ivory 
 box in which it is still enclosed. This picture precipitated, if it 
 did not cause, Cromwell’s downfal. The King decided to con¬ 
 tract the marriage on the faith of this portrait; but was so dis¬ 
 gusted with the original on her arrival, that he broke out in full 
 council at Greenwich, abusing Cromwell for bringing him a 
 “ great Inlanders mare,” coarse, clumsy, and “ unfit to nourish 
 love.” This was in January, 1540, and in June of the same year 
 Cromwell was attainted of high treason, without being heard in 
 his defence, and beheaded on Tower Hill. There should have 
 been a portrait of him in this gallery. 
 
 The portrait by Holbein of Sir Henry Guildford (52), the 
 accomplished master of the horse to Henry VIII., is a noble work 
 of the master. 
 
 Here (53) is the portrait of Lady Grey (Margaret Wooton), 
 wife to Sir Thomas Grey, and grandmother, by the father’s side, 
 to Lady Jane Grey. Lady Jane Grey’s maternal grandmother 
 was the Princess Mary, daughter to Henry VII., the wife, first of 
 
12 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 Louis XII. of France, and afterwards of Charles Brandon, whose 
 portrait (14) we have already referred to. We would willingly 
 have spared the paternal grandmother, at all events, to have had a 
 a portrait of sweet, ill-starred Lady Jane herself. But Avhy four 
 portraits of Edward YI. (54, 55, 55a, and 56), besides that by 
 Gwillim Street, in the Gallery of Old Masters ? The Holbein (54) 
 would surely have been record enough of this gentle boy-kiug 
 —especially as his reign is otherwise unrepresented. We have 
 neither the ambitious protector Somerset, nor the crafty Northum¬ 
 berland, nor Cranmer, nor Latimer, nor Bonner, nor Gardiner, nor 
 Bidley. 
 
 The reign of Philip and Mary is illustrated only by the curious 
 small full-lengths of the Queen and her consort (58), representing 
 two very ugly and ill-proportioned people. Could not a single 
 portrait of a protestant martyr have been found P One, at least, 
 of Sir Antonio More’s pictures should have been hung here, to 
 represent the art of Mary’s reign. The half-length of the bloody 
 Queen, by De ITeere (59), is characteristic. To us, that face of 
 Mary’s seems full of sadness and perplexity, as of a woman striving 
 at once to satisfy and stifle conscience. 
 
 If, however, the reign of Mary be sparingly illustrated, that of 
 Elizabeth is even profusely represented. AH the painters who 
 worked at her court—Zucchero, Ketel, De Heere, Marc Gerhard, 
 Hilliard, and the elder Oliver, may be studied here; the first, in 
 the curious portrait of the Virgin Queen, standing on the map of 
 England (18), with her noblest favourite, the ill-starred Essex (19), 
 at her side. Another picture, still more odd in respect of costume, 
 represents the Queen in a kind of Persian dress, standing in a 
 forest, the trees of which are inscribed with verses and mottoes, 
 the import and application of which it is not easy to discover. 
 Queen Elizabeth was very vain, and loved to be painted, though 
 she would trust her face to none but “ special cunninge painters,” 
 and forbade all persons, by royal proclamation (the original draft 
 of which is extant in Cecil’s own hand-writing), to attempt the 
 royal physiognomy, until some special person that shall be by her 
 allowed shall have first finished a portraiture thereof. This was 
 in 1563, when she was only 32, and still handsome enough, one 
 would have thought, to have rendered such precautions unnecessary. 
 
TIIE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 13 
 
 We may refer one of these portraits of her by Zucchero (18) to 
 about the date of this proclamation. Both have, however, suffered 
 so much, that it is difficult to say anything in their praise, as 
 pictures, now, whatever they may have been once. Zucchero was 
 an accomplished painter, and may be judged by a better specimen 
 than any of these grotesque likenesses of Elizabeth, his portrait of 
 Don Carlos, when young (226), in the Gallery of Old Masters. 
 Nothing can be more unbecoming than the dress of both these 
 portraits of the Virgin Queen. She was one of the most coquet¬ 
 tish of women, though her taste in dress, judging by the specimens 
 here, does not seem to have been equal to her love of it. The 
 “ Book of the Queen’s Wardrobe” is still extant. Exclusively of 
 coronation, mourning, and parliament robes, and of the Garter 
 robes, 90 in all, it enumerates “ French gowns, 102; round ditto, 
 67; loose ditto, 100: kirtles, 126; fore-parts, 136; petticoats, 
 125; cloaks, 96; safeguards (query, crinolines), 13; jupes, 43; 
 doublets, 85; lap-mantles, 18; fans, 27; pantoufles, 9.” But to 
 estimate properly the incredible ungracefulness of the female 
 Elizabethan fashions, we must go to Marc Gerhard’s picture of 
 the Queen on her progress to Hunsdon House (64). This picture 
 is of great interest for its likenesses as well as its costume. Henry 
 Carey, created Viscount Hunsdon on the Queen’s accession, was 
 Elizabeth’s cousin, the son of Mary, sister of Anne Boleyn. The 
 Queen bestowed upon him Hunsdon House, built by King 
 Henry VIII. as a nursery for the royal children, with £4,000 
 a-year in land. He was “ a valiant man,” says Fuller, “ and lover 
 of men of their hands—very choleric, but not malicious”—a 
 rough, tearing, swearing, honest soldier, “who might have been 
 with the Queen whatsoever he would, but would be no more than 
 what ho was.” He suppressed the first northern rebellion in 
 1569. He had served the Queen faithfully from boyhood, and 
 she loved and trusted him, addressing him in a letter, under her 
 own hand, as “ my Harry.” 
 
 Bobert Dudley, the first and most unworthy of her favourites, 
 is represented in this picture walking near the royal litter; Lord 
 Hunsdon carries the sword of state ; Lord Burleigh the white 
 staff as lord treasurer. The character of the cold and cruel 
 Dudley is more clearly written in the portrait (69), which seems 
 
14 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 to us to have a better claim to be called a Zucchero, than most of 
 the pictures here which go under that name. The face wears even 
 a low brutal expression, in spite of the regularity of the features. 
 This might be the murderer of poor Amy Robsart (to the real 
 facts of whose history Sir Walter Scott has added no circumstance 
 of cruelty), and the deceiver of the scarcely less unhappy Lady 
 Douglas Howard, wife of Lord Sheffield. That lord died suddenly 
 of the mysterious disease then well known as “ Leicester’s rheum,” 
 because it was wont to fall strangely and suddenly on the favou¬ 
 rite’s enemies. Tired of Lady Sheffield, and anxious to clear his 
 way to marriage with Lettice, countess of Essex—whose husband 
 also died of “Leicester’s rheum”—Dudley administered a slow 
 poison to the unhappy Lady Douglas, whom he had wedded by 
 the rites of the church at Esher; but who, to save her life, was 
 compelled to renounce her wedded rights, and to marry again 
 during Dudley’s lifetime. Leicester was hypocrite, too, as well 
 as seducer and poisoner. Amy Robsart was cold in her grave, 
 and Lady Douglas was pining at Offington, in Sussex ; when, in 
 1575, Dudley received the Queen at Kenilworth, with the magni¬ 
 ficent hospitality recorded in Scott’s novel. He lived to be 
 supplanted in the Queen’s affections by his own step-son, the 
 Earl of Essex (19),—-a worthier favourite than himself—and died 
 suddenly at Cornbury, in 1588, not without suspicion of poison, 
 accidentally administered by his own hand, but prepared by some 
 of his enemies. A more detestable character does not figure in 
 English history. 
 
 We seek in vain, in Ketel’s portrait of Sir Christopher Hatton 
 (20), for any indication of the grace which made the Queen single 
 out the briefless young barrister in a court mask “ for his stately 
 dancing”—though the picture shows the “proper person” for 
 which he was famous, and the face bears the stamp of those great 
 abilities which enabled him to discharge the duties of chancellor 
 without knowledge of the law, in spite of the sullen sei’jeants who 
 refused, at first, to plead before him. 
 
 Here hangs Zucchero’s Raleigh (27), with the map of Cadiz at 
 the back of the picture, in allusion to Sir Walter’s services, which 
 mainly secured the destruction of the Spanish fleet in that harbour 
 in 1596 ; and by his side his wife, Elizabeth Throgmorton, to 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 15 
 
 whom lie was privately married in 1595, thereby incurring the 
 grave displeasure of the Queen, and a short imprisonment in the 
 Tower. She was a woman worthy of such a husband. We have 
 always fancied in lialeigh a likeness to Shakspere, and have often 
 imagined that if the latter had pursued a life of action, no likelier 
 parallel could be found for what he might have been than Raleigh 
 —so dextrous in all his undertakings, whether in court or camp, 
 by sea or by land, with sword or with pen, that “ he seemed to be 
 bom to that only which he went about,” and is perhaps the most 
 brilliant figure in that time of great-hearted and large-brained 
 men. "With all its coarseness, and all its crimes, the age of Eliza¬ 
 beth is one of which the study must fill every English heart with 
 pride. Such statesmen, soldiers, navigators, scholars, merchants, 
 philosophers, poets have never before or since flourished together. 
 Think of a galaxy in which Burleigh, lialeigh, Drake, Howard, 
 Bacon, Spenser, Shakspere shone at the same time. The only 
 likeness of Burleigh here is an atrocious picture of him (73) riding 
 on a mule, from the Bodleian, destroyed by repainting, and utterly 
 unworthy of a place here, either as a likeness or as a work of art. 
 The Duke of Richmond’s picture of Burleigh in the Court of 
 Wards is interesting, but too small to supply the want of a really 
 satisfactory portrait of the politic Cecil, the man who, for forty 
 years, bore the chief burden of administration in most difficult 
 times, and of whom the historian of his life tells us, that— 
 “ Besides all business in council or other weighty causes, and 
 such as were answered by word of mouth, there was not a day in 
 term whereon he received not three-score, four-score, or a hundred 
 petitions, which he read at night, and gave every man an answer 
 the next morning as he went to the hall.” Truly, in business, 
 in war, in poetry, in love, in ambition, in craft, and in crime there 
 were giants in those days. The magnificent Howard, the lord 
 high admiral, who conquered the Armada and took Cadiz, should 
 surely have been here, surrounded by a cluster of those gallant 
 captains, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, Drake, and Grenville, who, 
 with their comrades, made the name of England so mighty upon 
 all seas, and added so much to the known world by their daring 
 voyages of discovery. It is mortifying to find these gallant 
 hearts entirely unrepresented here, except by Sir A. More’s por- 
 
1G 
 
 THE AET TEEASUBES EXniEITIOH. 
 
 trait called Drake (500), in the Gallery of Old Masters, but not in 
 the least resembling the well-known face of that sea-scourge of 
 the Spaniard. It is much to be lamented that the Gorham bury 
 portrait gallery should have contributed nothing to the Exhibition. 
 To this, we presume, must be ascribed the singular dearth here 
 of portraits of the Yerulam family. Here is neither the lord- 
 keeper, Sir Nicholas, nor his more illustrious son, Erancis Bacon, 
 Yiscount of St. Alban’s—an irreparable lacuna in such a collec¬ 
 tion as this. The gallant adventurers who corresponded on laud, 
 to sucli men as Blunt, Cary, Eennar, and Willoughby at sea— 
 deadly enemies of the Spaniard, and fearing neither man nor 
 devil, when there was gold or honour to be won—and who con¬ 
 stitute so characteristic a feature of the brilliant reign of Eliza¬ 
 beth, are here represented only by Sir Francis Yere (75), and his 
 younger brother, Horatio (76), who survived him, and was created 
 Baron Yere of Tilbury in 1625. Sir Erancis Yere’s is a keen 
 sharp face, but with none of the sternness and ruggedness one 
 would expect in the look of one who “ served on the scene of all 
 Christendom where war was acted.” The Englishmen he com¬ 
 manded were so ill-provided that they were christened “the 
 ragged regiment.” But they did good service against the Spaniard, 
 through the Low Country wars, especially at the battle of Nieu- 
 port, and in the gallant three years’ defence of Ostend. Sir 
 Horace “had more meekness,” says Fuller, “and as much valour 
 as his brother; so pious, that he first made his peace with God 
 before he went out to war with man: one of an excellent temper, 
 neither elated nor depressed with success or failure. Had one 
 seen him returning from a victory, he would by his silence have 
 suspected that he had lost the day; and had he beheld him in a 
 retreat, he would have collected him a conqueror, by the cheer¬ 
 fulness of his spirit.” This is a noble character, and it is reflected 
 in this calm face. 
 
 Here, too, is the noble head of Thomas Howard (6S), which 
 fell on the scaffold in 1572, for its owner’s partisanship of the 
 desperate cause of Mary Queen of Scots, into which lie was urged 
 by the double motive of love and ambition. And here (61), is 
 that old fox, “William Paulet, who, from a simple laiight, rose to 
 be Marquis of Winchester, holding his upward path, without 
 
TIIB BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERV. 
 
 17 
 
 once forfeiting favour, under Henry VIII. Edward VI. and Mary, 
 and for 30 years officiated as lord treasurer to Edward VI. and 
 Elizabeth. His own key to his rare success was summed in the 
 words, “ I was the willow and not the oak.” He lived to be 97, 
 and of his 103 descendants not one died upon the scaffold—a 
 remarkable distinction in those bloody days, and which seems to 
 show that something of the ancestor’s craft had passed to the 
 stock. He built Basing House, and received the Queen there 
 with a splendour which must have taxed the careful old treasurer’s 
 purse severely. Elizabeth was so delighted with her reception 
 that she is said to have declared, “ If m}' lord treasurer were but 
 a young man I could find in my heart to have him for a husband 
 before ever a man in England.” The Earl of Lincoln (70 and 71), 
 lord high admiral and K.G. was scarcely a person of such dis¬ 
 tinction as to entitle him to two portraits, though he was member 
 of the wisest privy council that ever sat round a table. AVe must 
 say, generally, that in a gallery where space was so precious, we 
 should have preferred a little less of this sort of reduplication. 
 Two Henry the Eighths, five Edward the Sixths, two Marys, 
 seven Elizabeths, and five Charles the Eirsts is decidedly an over¬ 
 dose of sovereigns. 
 
 Sir Henry Lee (72) is interesting as an example of the gallant 
 loyalist—the ancestral stock of the men who sacrificed life and 
 fortune so cheerfully for Charles the First. One delights to 
 imagine this venerable old gentleman appearing year after vear 
 armed and mounted in the tilt yard at Whitehall to naintain the 
 Queen’s honour against all comers. For the anecdote which 
 explains the dog and the lines in the picture we refer our readers 
 to the catalogue. As an example of the “Koval Merchants,” 
 who make the reign of Elizabeth not less memorable in the annals 
 of commerce, than in those of literature, war, and statesmanship, 
 we have here Holbein’s fine portait of Sir Thomas Gresham (67a), 
 the builder of the first Exchange or Bourse, of which, however, 
 the idea was his father’s, Sir Richard Gresham’s, who was Lord 
 Mayor in 1537. Sir Thomas was the greatest financier of bis 
 time, and was sent for, in 1551, to restore the ruined credit of 
 the King, then in the hands of the Protector Somerset, to whose 
 rapacity, and not to any fault of poor young Edward’s, the royal 
 
 o 
 
18 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXIIIEITIOA'. 
 
 embarrassments of that time were owing. For this purpose, 
 Gresham went to Antwerp, and most amusing were the shifts he 
 was reduced to to keep up the weekly payments to lenders, and 
 transmit enough to satisfy the cravings of the English court. 
 Most of the fine old church bells in England are said to have been 
 melted down at this time, and transmitted to Gresham to raise 
 money upon. The history of Gresham’s expedients and projects 
 in this business is a summary of all the ludicrous politico-econo¬ 
 mical blunders of the time. He continued to act in the same 
 capacity for Queen Mary; for he was a supple courtier, and made 
 small scruple of shifting even his faith to suit court winds. 
 Accordingly, the zealous papist under Mary appears as a zealous 
 protestant under Elizabeth, for whom he continued to negotiate 
 foreign loans. He was made ambassador to the court of the 
 Archduchess governing the Netherlands in 1560. All this while, 
 however, he kept open his mercer’s shop in Lombard-street, with 
 its sign of the Grasshopper, which afterwards figured on the 
 pinnacle of the Exchange, built at his suggestion and under his 
 care, by aid of subscriptions among the merchants of London, 
 between 1565 and 1569. Sir Thomas seems rather to have made 
 “a good thing” out of the Exchange than to have bestowed any 
 gift on the city; for at his death the rent from the shops outside 
 and above the building was 700Z. When the Exchange had been 
 finished for more than a year, Sir Thomas, finding that most of 
 the shops still stood empty, procured tenants by the ingenious 
 “ dodge,” new at that day, but since worn threadbare, of inducing 
 the Queen to pay a visit to the edifice in 1571. After getting 
 the Queen’s intention well noised about, Sir Thomas went round 
 to the few shops that were already let, and promised their occu¬ 
 piers that they should have rent free for the year as many shops 
 as they would light up and furnish with goods on the occasion of 
 the royal visit. The Queen came accordingly, and after dining at 
 Gresham’s house, in Bishopsgate-street, w r ent round the Exchange, 
 admiring especially “The Pawne,” or upper storey of shops, 
 “richly furnished”—thanks to Sir Thomas’s little ruse—“with 
 all sorts of the finest w T ares in the city,” and “caused the same 
 Bourse by a herald and trumpet to be proclaimed the Eoyal 
 xchange, and so to be called from henceforth and not other- 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 19 
 
 wise.” This building was burnt in the great fire in 1G66, and its 
 successor shared the same fate in 1838, the statue of Sir Thomas 
 Gresham, strange to say, escaping on both occasions. 
 
 Sir Thomas, at his death, in 1579, left his great house in 
 Bishopsgate-street, where he long had as his prisouer poor little 
 Mary Grey, sister of Lady Jane, as the seat of a college to be 
 called, by his name, with four professorships of divinity, astronomy, 
 music, and geometry—almost the old “quadrivium”—endowed 
 with the rents of the Exchange. It is a pity, considering the 
 way this bequest has been turned—or, rather, not turned—to 
 account, that he did not put his money to some better use. Old 
 Euller has his quip as usual, when he describes Sir Thomas “as 
 the founder of two stately fabrics, the old Exchange, a kind of 
 college for merchants; and Gresham College, a kind of exchange 
 for scholars.” Gresham built Osterley House, in Middlesex, 
 where he magnificently entertained the Queeu. “ Her Majesty,” 
 says Euller, “found fault with the court of the house as too great, 
 affirming that it would appear more handsome if divided with a 
 wall in the middle. What doth Sir Thomas, but in the night 
 time sends for workmen to London (money commands all things), 
 who so speedily and silently apply their business that the next 
 morning discovered that court double, which the night had left 
 single before. It is questionable whether the Queen, next day, 
 was more contented with the conformity to her fancy, or more 
 pleased with the surprise and sudden performance thereof; whilst 
 her courtiers disported themselves with their several expressions, 
 some avowing ‘ it was no wonder that he could so soon change a 
 building who could build a 'Change; ’ others (reflecting on some 
 known differences in the knight’s family), affirmed ‘that any 
 house is easier divided than united.’ ” In explanation of the last 
 joke, we are sorry to inform our readers that the good knight’s 
 lady was a shrew. 
 
 As records of the ill-starred Mary Queen of Scots, here, we 
 may mention the Cavendish and Harley portrait of her ('25 ),— 
 not one of the handsomest, though in truth none bear out Mary’s 
 traditional renown for beauty ; the curious full lengths by Lucas 
 de Heere (13) of the unhappy Darnley and his brother Charles 
 Stuart, father of that innocent sufferer Arabella Stuart, whose 
 
20 
 
 'HIE AET TEEASTJBES EXHIBITIONS 
 
 touching history must be noticed when we come to the reign 
 of James I.; and the very interesting picture (29), contain¬ 
 ing the cenotaph of the murdered Darnley, with the Earl of 
 Lenox and his wife, Charles, the victim’s brother, and Darnley’s 
 son James, afterwards King of England, kneeling beside it. In 
 connection, also, with Mary, visitors should notice here the 
 portrait of Bess of Hardwick (33), the “ Building Bess,” of Derby¬ 
 shire tradition, who was for a while gaoler of the Queen of Scots, 
 at her magnificent seat of Hardwick. It is a legend of the 
 Cavendish family, that a fortune-teller prophesied of this mascu¬ 
 line lady, that she should not die while she was building, so she 
 spent the best part of three great fortunes, inherited from her 
 leash of husbands—Sir William Cavendish, Sir William St. Loe, 
 and George Earl of Shrewsbury—in erecting the stately mansions 
 of Hardwick, Chatsworth, Bolsover, Oldcotes, and Worksop, but 
 died nevertheless in a hard frost, when the workmen were forced 
 to suspend their building—thus saving the gipsy’s credit, and 
 immortalising her own weakness for bricks and mortar. Hard¬ 
 wick still remains furnished as she left it, one of the grandest, 
 and certainly the ghostliest of old English manor houses. It 
 is easy to imagine the ghosts of Elizabeth and Mary still pacing 
 the sixty yards length of that noble old gallery, when the moon 
 shines in at the great windows, and the tattered arras waves 
 along the walls. 
 
 The worthies of the reigns of James and Charles next engage 
 our attention. 
 
 Painting in England during the reign of James was still chiefly 
 in the hands of foreigners. Among the principal artists of this 
 period is Nicholas Hilliard, who deserves special notice as being 
 an Englishman. He was a native of Exeter, born in 1547, and 
 brought up as a jeweller and goldsmith, to which callings he 
 added that of a miniature painter. He rose to the highest repute 
 under Elizabeth and her successor, and imitated, on a minute 
 scale, the individuality of Holbein. Queen Elizabeth sat to him 
 often ; as did Mary Queen of Scots, James I., and Prince Henry. 
 Under James he had a patent, giving him a monopoly of “ making, 
 graving, and imprinting any manner of picture,” representing the 
 King or royal family. He died in 1619. Works of more than 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 21 
 
 miniature size by him are rare. Here is a head of Sir Oliver 
 "Wallop (GO), life size, from his hand, of little merit as a picture. 
 Many of his miniatures will be found in the Duke of Portland’s 
 collection, and in frame 8 of the Buccleugh collection. Isaac 
 Oliver a pupil of Nicholas Hilliard, also painted miniatures 
 during the reign of Elizabeth and her successor, dying before 
 his master, in 1617, and leaving a son Peter, who became 
 famous in the same style of art. Works of both father and son 
 are numerous in the miniature gallery. Vansomer and Mytens 
 were both natives of Antwerp. The first painted here between 
 1G06 and 1G20. He was an honest heavy painter, who had but 
 little power of imparting vitality to his portraits, and belongs tc 
 the school which Eubens superseded. Daniel Mytens painted 
 here till the appointment of Vandyck as painter to King Charles 
 I. is said to have so disgusted him that he begged permission to 
 return to Plunders, and was with difficulty induced to remain 
 by the King’s assurance that he would find sufficient employment 
 for both. Mytens was a tame painter in comparison with Eubens 
 or Vandyck; but his colouring was warmer than that of Van¬ 
 somer, and he shows more decidedly the influence of the new 
 school of Antwerp, founded by Eubsns. 
 
 Cornelius Jansen was a native of Amsterdam, who painted in 
 this country between 161S and IGiS, when he retired, under 
 protection of a speaker’s warrant, first to Middleburgh, and 
 finally to Amsterdam, iu which city he died in 1G65. We read also 
 of two English painters—Peake and Marquis—during this reign, 
 but their works cannot now be identified. There are two portraits 
 of James I. here, the one a small full length seated (80), the 
 other in- armour, by Mytens. “ The wisest fool in Europe,” as 
 Sully called the British Solomon, has just that vague, round cha¬ 
 racterless face we might expect in one whose vices even were 
 mean and petty. Inconstant, pusillanimous; slobberingly tender 
 in his unmanly affections; implacable in his groundless hates: 
 a bigot, without genuine beliefs; a pedant, in whom scholarship 
 served only to make learning contemptible; a profligate, without 
 the excuse of strong passions; a lover of pleasure, without grace 
 or gallantry; mean, vindictive, and false,—history has few more 
 hateful figures than James I. who, as he was first of the Stuarts. 
 
22 
 
 THE AET TKEASEItES EXHIBITION. 
 
 summed up the worst faults of the race, with none of their 
 redeeming qualities. 
 
 Here are no fewer than three portraits of his noble son, Henry 
 Prince of Wales (38, 38a, and 39)—another instance of the 
 useless reduplication to which we have already referred. Prince 
 Henry was the idol of the popular affections; but the splendid 
 promise of his youth was nipped by premature death—not without 
 suspicion of poison—in his 19th year, in 1612. Good, gay, gal¬ 
 lant ; full of martial fire, yet not averse to letters ; generous, yet 
 not profuse; as noble in his friendships as his father was nauseous; 
 the staunch friend of llaleigh, of whom he said, “ none but his 
 father would keep such a bird in a cage,” and who, while a pri¬ 
 soner in the Tower, wrote for the prince’s reading, his noble 
 History of the World, Prince Henry seems really to have de¬ 
 served the character which the popular favour has affixed to his 
 memory. 
 
 There is no likeness here of Charles in his youth. His portrait 
 is said to have been painted by Velasquez in 1623, during that 
 romantic visit to the court of Spain, of which a record is to be 
 seen here in the picture of the Infanta (97), said to be the very 
 one brought back by the prince. Howell’s description of her 
 “ as of a fading flaxen hair, big-lipped, and somewhat heavy-eyed,” 
 hardly does her justice. She is by far the prettiest infanta whose 
 portrait has come down to us. Here is no portrait of the most infa¬ 
 mous of the King’s minions—Carr, Earl of Somerset—though there 
 is one (24) of his almost equally infamous wife, the beautiful Prances 
 Howard. Married at thirteen, to the son of Elizabeth’s favourite, 
 Earl of Essex, she was soon after her marriage seduced by Carr, 
 then Lord Kochester. His friend, Sir Thomas Overbuy, though 
 he aided him in the seduction, opposed the favourite’s project for 
 a divorce of the countess, in order to a marriage with Carr. 
 Overbury, by this beautiful devil’s contrivance, was sent to the 
 Tower, where, the day before the divorce was obtained, he died 
 by poison. This was in September, 1614, and before the year 
 was out the King’s favourite, now Earl of Somerset, and Frances 
 Howard were man and wife. But Somerset never held up his 
 head after the murder of his friend. Eager to overthrow the 
 favourite, his enemies at court, headed by Abbot, Archbishop of 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 23 
 
 Canterbury, threw George Villiers into the King’s way. What 
 he was in looks, the visitor to Manchester may judge by no fewer 
 than three portraits—one by Mytens, representing him when 
 young (44) ; another, by Jansen, a full length, in black, more 
 advanced in years (4G) ; and a third, by the same hand, with the 
 date 1G24 (9S), near the Infanta. There is no darker or more 
 disgusting tale in all that evil reign than the whole story of 
 Somerset:—his favour with the King; his marriage; the murder 
 of Overbury ; the loathsome secrets, by virtue of which both the 
 miserable minion and his bloodj r wife were allowed to escape 
 their just doom, and retire to the country, where they are said to 
 have spent the rest of their guilty lives, in mutual hate, recrimi¬ 
 nation, and remorse, abandoned by all, in spite of the 4000Z. 
 a-ycar which the earl wrung from the master whose foul secrets 
 were his safety. Their only child was the mother of the Lord 
 William llussell, who died on the scaffold in the reign of Charles 
 II. ; strange ancestry for such a man. Carr’s predecessor in 
 the King’s favour,—Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery (99), 
 took a blow on Croydon race-course from Viscount Hadding¬ 
 ton, a Scotch rival in the King’s good graces, Avithout offer¬ 
 ing to return it; a piece of cowardice which was felt at the 
 time as a national disgrace. The mother of this poltroon was 
 Mary Sidney, Sir Philip’s sister, celebrated in Ben Jonsou’s 
 famous epitaph:— 
 
 “ Sidney’s sister, Pembroke's mother', 
 
 Death, ere thou hast slain another, 
 
 Learn’d, and fair, and good as she, 
 
 Time shall throw a dart at thee.” 
 
 Her portrait hangs here (74), as she tvould have wished it to 
 hang, far from that of her unworthy son. She is said to have 
 torn her hair with rage Avhen she heard of her boy’s baseness. 
 And yet it should not be forgotten that Philip Herbert, with 
 his nobler brother, was the friend and patron of Shakspere. 
 With too many of those tvho rejoiced in the King’s infa¬ 
 mous favour, here are some who pined under his cruelty. Chief 
 among such sufferers is the ill-fated Arabella Stuart (37). This 
 most unhappy victim of the royal jealousy was the daughter of 
 
24 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 the King’s uncle, Charles Stuart, brother to Darnley. Her ele¬ 
 vation to the throne was said to have been one object of the plot 
 for which Raleigh, Cobham and Grey narrowly escaped death on 
 the scaffold in’1603. But it is certain that she was not privy to 
 such a design, if ever it was really entertained. The charge, 
 however, was enough to excite the cowardly fears of James, to 
 whom this lady w r as, from the first moment of his English reign, 
 an object of dislike and suspicion. She loved and was beloved 
 by William Seymour, son of Lord Beauchamp, in whose veins 
 flov r ed the blood of Henry VII. They were privately married in 
 defiance of the royal prohibition. On discovery of the marriage 
 Seymour was sent to the Tower, and Lady Arabella was con¬ 
 signed, first to the custody of Sir Thomas Parry, at Lambeth, and 
 afterwards to that of the Bishop of Durham, at Highgate, whence 
 she fled in male attire, with the view of joining her husband, who 
 had also contrived to elude his gaolers. Their escape was soon 
 discovered. They missed the appointed rendezvous. The ship 
 in which the Lady Arabella had sailed for Prance was overhauled 
 and captured by an English ship of war in mid-channel, and the 
 lady taken and re-committed to the Tower. Her husband had 
 effected his escape into Elanders. The Lady Arabella remained 
 a prisoner for four years, in spite of the most piteous appeals to the 
 King’s mercy, and the state of her health, which soon sank under 
 captivity and despair. She died a broken-hearted maniac in 1615. 
 
 Of George Villiers, to whose numerous portraits we have 
 already referred, everyone knows that his beauty w r on for him the 
 maudlin tenderness of the King, and secured his rise, from the 
 low estate of a Leicestershire squire’s young person, first to 
 the post of cupbearer to the King (1613); and thence, by 
 quick steps, to the dignities and offices of knight and gentleman 
 of the bedchamber (1615) ; master of the horse, knight of the 
 garter, baron and viscount (1616) ; Earl of Buckingham (1616- 
 17); Marquis of Buckingham (1617—18) ; high admiral, chief 
 justice in Eyre, master of the King’s Bench Office, high steward 
 of Westminster, and constable of Windsor Castle (1617-18). The 
 King nick-named him “ Steenie,” from his supposed resemblance 
 to some picture of Saint Stephen, the proto-martyr. He accom¬ 
 panied Prince Charles on his romantic journey to Spain in 1623, 
 
T1IE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 2 5 
 
 and was created Duke of Buckingham, during his absence on that 
 occasion. In 1G25, he went to Paris to bring over Queen 
 Henrietta Maria. Buckingham retained over Charles almost as 
 absolute an empire as he had established over his father. It was 
 owing mainly to his pernicious counsels that the young King met 
 Avith haughty denial the prayers of his first three parliaments for 
 redress of grievances and limitation of the prerogative, and plunged 
 England into Avars Avith France and Spain. The knife of Felton 
 —exhibited at Manchester—on the 23d of August, 1G28, ridded 
 the country of one of whom Warburton not undeservedly describes 
 as “a minister the most debauched, the most unable, and the 
 most tyrannical that ever was.” Not far from Yilliers the vainest 
 hangs Cecil (84) the craftiest, if not wisest of the councillors of 
 James, nick-named by James his “ little beagle ; ” a name well- 
 earned by the lord treasurer’s keenness, sureness of scent, and 
 power of patiently following up his object. It is rare that such 
 a father as William Cecil, the great Lord Burleigh, has been suc¬ 
 ceeded by a son so nearly his father’s equal, in all that shrewdness 
 and sagacity can supply of statesmanship or rather statecraft. 
 Kobert Cecil died in May, 1G12, worn out with disease, mortified 
 by the unexpected resistance of the parliament of 1G11 to the 
 encroachments of the royal prerogative, and apprehending the 
 worst consequences from what he called “ the desperate hardness 
 of the prejudiced people.” He seems, at the hour of his death, 
 to have had some foreshadowing of the struggle between king and 
 
 o oo o 
 
 commons Avhich reached its consummation 30 years later on the 
 scaffold at Whitehall. 
 
 Here, too, conspicuously among the nobler figures of the reign, 
 is Henry Wriothesley (31), the Earl of Southampton, and his 
 Avife, Elizabeth Vernon (32). This earl Avas the friend and first 
 patron of Shakspere. To him the poet dedicated his “ Venus and 
 Adonis,” in 1593, and his “ .Rape of Lucrece” the year after, in 
 language betokening both gratitude and affection. Imprisoned 
 for his participation in the mad rising of his friend Essex, in 1G06, 
 Southampton remained a prisoner in the ToAver, till released by 
 James. He made a friend of his cat during his imprisonment, 
 and the cat figures in this picture. 
 
 Vansomer’s full-length portrait of Henry Carey, the first Lord 
 
20 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITIONS'. 
 
 Falkland (411)—appointed lord deputy of Ireland in 1620, and 
 father of the great Lord Falkland,—which belonged to Horace 
 Walpole, is celebrated as the picture which suggested to him the 
 incident of the portrait walking out of the frame, in the “ Castle 
 of Otranto,” as he writes to Cole, in March, 1759. Does any¬ 
 body read the “ Castle of Otranto,” now-a-days ? We remember 
 the impression made on our own youthful imagination by the 
 gigantic armour,—the helmet dropped in the courtyard,—the 
 huge mailed hand seen on the balusters of the great staircase. 
 It was a dream of such an apparition of a gigantic hand that 
 suggested the romance,—so Walpole tells his correspondent Cole, 
 —and he sat down and wrote on that hint, without plot or plan, 
 getting more and more engrossed with his story as he went on. 
 Poor Horace Walpole flattered himself that in the tale he was 
 “ retracing with some fidelity the manners of ancient days.” In 
 truth the life described in his “ Otranto ” is about as like the 
 life of feudal times as Strawberry Hill is like Carnarvon Castle. 
 Here, by Mytens, are the founders of the fortune of the Cavendish 
 family—Sir Charles and his wife Lady Ogle (42 and 43), father 
 and mother of the first Duke of Newcastle, whose portrait we 
 shall notice in his proper place, as a notable of the reign of 
 Charles I. 
 
 And near them,—of more interest for ninety-nine Englishmen 
 out of a hundred than all these lords and courtiers,—are a batch 
 of worthies, glories of the reign of James, and inheritors of fame 
 for all time, Camden (34), Shakspere (85), Ben Jonson (86) ? 
 Fletcher (86a), and Harvey (165). The last, the discoverer of 
 the circulation of the blood, was born in 1598, and died in 1657. 
 He was appointed physician extraordinary to James in 1623, five 
 years before his great discovery was given to the world. In 
 1630, he was named physician to Charles, whose fortunes he 
 followed, having been appointed by him warden of Merton in 
 1645. He always maintained that his discovery ruined his prac¬ 
 tice. It was lucky it did not cost him his professorship of 
 anatomy in the lloyal College of Physicians. 
 
 Camden, the most learned and sagacious of antiquarians, whose 
 “ Britannia” still remains a model for all topographical histories, 
 was born in 1551, and died in 1623. His portrait here (34), 
 
TJ1E BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 27 
 
 comes from the Paper Stainers’ Company, of which his father 
 was a member, and to which he bequeathed a silver cup and 
 ■cover, out of which, every St. Luke’s Lay, the old master of the 
 Company drinks to the new one. Whether as St. Paul’s boy, 
 ■servitor at Magdalen, student at Christ-church, second master of 
 Westminster school in 1575, or head master from 1593 to 1598, 
 Camden employed all his leisure in amassing the materials for 
 his great work, the “ Chorographical Description of Britain,” 
 first published in 15SG, of which no less than six editions ap¬ 
 peared in this country during the author’s lifetime, to say nothing 
 of foreign reprints. Up to this day, within the limits which 
 Camden himself assigned to his work, his “ Britannia ” is un¬ 
 rivalled for accuracy and sagacity. Camden was the pearl of 
 antiquarians. Good sense is as prominent in him as love of the 
 past, and he seems to value facts and objects really according 
 to their importance, not their antiquity. As apiece of scholarship 
 his book deserves the highest credit, both for range of research 
 and purity and force of style. In 1598 Camden gave up the 
 head mastership of Westminster for the less laborious office of 
 Clarenceux King of Arms. He died beloved and honoured as a 
 noble type of the scholar, in 1G23, and was buried in Westmin¬ 
 ster Abbey. 
 
 Here is our own Shakspcre—the Chandos portrait (S5)— 
 surrounded by a cluster of contemporaries, and fellows in his 
 art of the stage—Burbage (87), the actor, his fellow-townsman, 
 his predecessor in the theatre, and afterwards joint shareholder 
 with him in the Blackfriars and Globe, his friend through life, 
 and the first actor of Hamlet, Lear, and Othello, and no doubt 
 the other principal tragic parts of Shakspere’s plays—Ben Jonson 
 (SG),witk his sturdy, stubborn, honest face, scarcely visible 
 through the smoke and soot which have been allowed to blacken 
 this interesting portrait—John Taylor, the waterman poet (91), 
 — the “gentleman-like sculler,” as he was called,—who must 
 often have answered Shakspere’s hail of “ Oars, oars,” from the 
 Blackfriars stairs, when the play was done, and pulled him over 
 to the Falcon, on the Bankside, for a merry supper w ith his 
 fellows, Dekker and Chapman, Jonson and Donne, Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, Drayton and Daniel. Who knows how often those 
 
28 
 
 TIIE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 meetings may have been graced by the statelier presence of 
 Essex and Southampton, Ealeigh and Spenser ? 
 
 Here, too, are portraits of Nathaniel Field and John Lowen, 
 both known to have been actors in Shakspere’s plays, and the 
 portrait of Fletcher from the Clarendon Gallery at the Grove, 
 inscribed “ Poet Fletcher.” Evelyn, in his catalogue of the 
 Clarendon Gallery, mentions portraits of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
 “ both in one piece but this picture has disappeared, and there 
 is now no portrait of Beaumont at the Grove. 
 
 Shirley (90) belongs chronologically to a later date ; but as he 
 closes the great gallery of the dramatists, of which Shakspere is 
 the central figure, he is perhaps most fitly placed among them. 
 "With Dry den opens a new and baser epoch in the dramatic art, 
 when the muse of the theatre puts on a dress tagged with rhyme, 
 bedizened with French finery, and bedaubed with French filth, 
 from the entanglement of which she has never since quite extri¬ 
 cated herself. The Chandos portrait of Shakspere, of the many 
 so-called likenesses of the poet, is perhaps the one possessing most 
 claims to authenticity after the portrait prefixed to the edition of 
 1823, the accuracy of which is vouched by Ben Jonson’s lines: — 
 
 “ The figure that thou here seest put 
 Was for the gentle Shakspere cut; 
 
 Wherein the graver had a strife 
 With nature to outdo the Life. 
 
 Oh ! could he have drawn his wit 
 As well in brass, as he hath hit 
 His face, the print would then surpass 
 All that was ever writ in brass. 
 
 But since he cannot, reader, look, 
 
 Not on his picture, but his book.” 
 
 The Chandos picture, here shown, i3 now the property of the 
 nation, having been the first gift to the trustees of the National 
 Portrait Gallery by the late Earl of Ellesmere. It was well that 
 the foundation of the gallery of national portraits should have 
 been laid with Shakspere. This picture belonged to Davenant, the 
 successor of Ben Jonson as poet laureate, and afterwards to the 
 great actor Betterton ; from whose hands it passed to those of 
 Mrs. Barry, and subsequently", by marriage, became the property 
 of the Duke of Chandos. It was bought at the Stowe sale by Lord 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 29 
 
 Ellesmere. We may surely presume that Davenant, as one who 
 knew Shakspere, would not have kept a portrait of him unless it 
 had considerable claims to be considered a good likeness. 
 
 This portrait was copied for Dryden by Kneller, and the poet, 
 in return, sent to the painter these lines :— 
 
 “ Shakspere, thy gift, I place before my sight, 
 
 With awe I ask his blessing as I write ; 
 
 With reverence look on his majestic face, 
 
 Proud to be less, but of his godlike race. 
 
 His soul inspires me, while thy praise I write, 
 
 And I, like Teucer, under Ajax fight: 
 
 Bids thee, through me, be bold, with dauntless breast, 
 
 Contemn the bad, and emulate the best : 
 
 Like his, thy critics in the attempt are lost, 
 
 When most they rail, know then they envy most.” 
 
 It is a pity Dryden did not stop at the end of the second couplet. 
 It was not worth invoking the inspiration of Shakspere’s portrait 
 to pay a roundabout compliment to Kneller. It must not pass 
 without a kindly word, by brave, burly old Ben Jonson ; the honest 
 man who, between 1574 and 1G37, fought his way roughly 
 upwards through a rough life, from bricklayer’s boy to poet 
 laureate ; who was to the comedy of manners what Shakspere is 
 to the comedy of character; the richest of all mines for illustra¬ 
 tion of Elizabethan manners and humours; the independent 
 spirit who, in all his struggles with hard fortune, even when 
 reduced to four-pound loans from prosperous Philip Henslow, 
 that most money-making of Elizabethan managers, still held his 
 head high, and guarded it, at need, with his rapier, with which he 
 killed Gabriel, the actor, in a duel, in Hogsden Fields ; the king 
 of good fellows, who ruled the roast at the Apollo room, in the 
 Devil Tavern, by Temple Bar, where every well-bred town wit 
 was sealed of the tribe of Ben, and was proud to call Jonson 
 “ father; ” and author of the noblest lines that have been 
 written commemorative of Shakspere, including that ever to be 
 remembered one, 
 
 “ He was not for an age, but for all time." 
 
 The concise epitaph on his tombstone in Westminster Abbey, 
 —“ 0, rare Ben Jonson,”—we owe to the accidental kindness 
 of “ Jack Young, afterwards kuighted,” as Aubrey tells us, “ who, 
 
10 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 walking there when the grave was covering, gave the fellow 
 eighteenpence to cut it.” It has often struck us that there is 
 more than one point of striking resemblance between Ben Jonson 
 and his namesake of a century later—the great Samuel. When 
 we read Aubrey’s account of the pitted face, “ punched full of 
 holes like the cover of a warming-pan,”—he, himself, speaks of his 
 “ mountain belly and his rocky face,” of the eyes one lower than the 
 other, and bigger, and the huge coat, like a coachman’s, with slits 
 under the armpits—and add to it other contemporary accounts 
 of Ben’s blustering, overbearing manner, his good-fellowship at 
 bottom, his clubableness, his power of conversation, his learning, 
 and his love of canary, we have recalled to us at almost every point, 
 some closely corresponding trait of the immortal lexicographer. 
 
 Not the least remarkable among the worthies of James the 
 First’s reign whose portraits are here exhibited, are Sir Hugh 
 Myddleton (104), the public-spirited and bold projector, who 
 brought the New Elver to London in 1613, to his own ruin, but 
 the benefit of the capital for ages to come—a service cheaply 
 purchased by a baronetcy. And lastly, Sir Henry Wotton, the 
 learned and accomplished foreign ambassador who served James 
 so well in many of the European courts, and to whom we owe 
 the celebrated definition of an ambassador, “ Vir lonus peregre 
 missus ad mentienduvi reipiiblicce causa” (“A good man sent 
 abroad to lie for the sake of his country”). There is an acute¬ 
 ness and sly humour in the face of his portrait (103) which fits 
 the authorship of this well known mot, which was written in a 
 friend’s album at Augsburg, but which, reaching the King’s ears, 
 very nearly cost Wotton the royal favour for the rest of his life. 
 
 Before dismissing from the stage the actors in that miserable 
 tram-comedy, the reign of James I., we must call attention to the 
 portraits of two more of those magnificent minions, who, like 
 Carr, Herbert, and Buckingham, owed their advancement to 
 beauty and not to brains. These are, James Hay, the Earl of 
 Carlisle (120), and Henry Eich, the Earl of Holland (126), whose 
 portraits, if the historical gallery had been arranged with attention 
 to sequence, should hang rather among the figures which illustrate 
 the reign of James than among those personifying the struggle 
 between King and Commons, under his successor. James Hay 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 01 
 o i. 
 
 was a fair-haired, regular-featured, good-tempered young Scotch¬ 
 man, a gentleman of the Scotch body guard, which had been 
 maintained in the French court since the time of Louis XI. 
 Presented to James by the French ambassador, by his good 
 looks, graciousness, and affability, he rapidly rose to rank, first as 
 Lord Hay of Sawley, afterwards as Viscount Doncaster and Earl 
 of Carlisle. In 1616, he was selected for the embassy to Paris, to 
 convey the congratulations of James to the King of France on 
 his marriage with the Spanish Infanta. Here the magnificence 
 for which Hay was noted had full scope. Besides providing his 
 retinue with the most slendid liveries, he had his horse shod 
 with silver shoes, so slightly fastened on, that as he curvetted 
 from his lodgings to the Louvre, ever and anon one of these silver 
 plates would be cast loose, and left for the crowd to scramble for; 
 while one of his footmen, from a tawny velvet bag, replaced it with 
 another, to be in like manner flung off and fought for. In 1610, 
 on an embassy to Germany, Hay displayed equal splendour. It 
 was on this occasion that the Prince of Orange, on being told of 
 the necessity of doing something to rival the splendour of his 
 magnificent visitor, called for the bill of fare for the day when 
 Lord Carlisle was expected at the Hague, and finding only one 
 pig in the bill, magnanimously ordered his steward to put down 
 another. Ilay was in Spain during the wild scamper of Prince 
 Charles in 1623, and in Paris on the conclusion of the match 
 with Henrietta Maria. For missions of state and ceremony he 
 w r as, probably, not ill selected, provided James were able and 
 willing to pay the bill when Carlisle’s means ran short. 
 
 His honest and admiring historian, Andrew Wilson, tells us 
 that “the meanest of his suits was so fine as to look like romance,” 
 and there are curious examples recorded of such fantastic luxuries 
 at his entertainments, as pies of ambergrease, that cost ten pounds 
 apiece, and fishes “ brought from Muscovy, so huge that dishes 
 had to be made to contain them,” like the famous turbot of 
 Tiberius. James did his best to supply the means for this mad 
 extravagance, by finding rich wives for his favourite; Lady Denny 
 first, and afterwards the lovely Lucy Percy, daughter of the stern 
 and straightforward Earl of Northumberland, whose proud 
 stomach resisted even a life’s imprisonment in the Tower, for 
 
32 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 suspicion of his privity to the gunpowder plot. He refused to 
 consent to his daughter’s marriage with a “ beggarly Scot,” though 
 he knew his own liberation would be the first consequence of it. 
 James is believed, on Clarendon’s estimate, to have given this 
 favourite not less than four hundred thousand pounds. But 
 James Hay was far from the worst of the King’s minions. Henry 
 Rich added to frivolity and folly a baseness of ingratitude to which 
 Hay’s career furnishes no parallel. Raised rapidly by his beauty, 
 within a few years, to the knighthood of the Bath, the captaincy 
 of the King’s Guard, and an office in the bedchamber to the 
 Prince of Wales ; created successively Viscount Fenton in Scot¬ 
 land, Baron Kensington and Earl of Holland, Rich accompanied 
 Hay on his embassies, and rivalled even his splendid follies. For 
 him, too, James found a rich wife, in Isabella, daughter and 
 heiress of Sir Walter Cope, who brought him the manor and 
 house at Kensington, built by her father in 1607, and still known 
 as Holland House. Rich was sent to Paris in 1624, with Hay, to 
 negotiate the marriage of Henrietta Maria with Charles, and 
 there is little doubt that on this occasion he won the affections of 
 the beautiful young princess, and that this passion of hers led to 
 those outbreaks of aversion to her husband which rendered the 
 earliest years of Charles’s wedded life so unhappy. Rich was the 
 basest of men. When the King’s star began to wane in 1641, 
 he joined the party of the opposition, carrying with him the 
 secrets of the court. In 1642, the Queen, now despising as much 
 as she had ever loved him, insisted on his dismissal from the post 
 of first gentleman of the bedchamber. In 1643 Rich turned traitor 
 to his new friends and joined his royal master at the siege of 
 Gloucester, but afterwards deserted again to the parliament from 
 Oxford. In 1648 he was guilty of his last act of apostasy, if it 
 should not rather be called of remorse, drawing the sword for the 
 King, when his cause was hopeless, at Nonsuch House. His 
 defeat, flight, and arrest were followed by his death on the 
 scaffold, before Westminster Hall, in March, 1649, in company 
 with the Duke of Hamilton and the gallant Lord Capell, who 
 neither of them deserved so base a companion in their deaths. 
 
 And now the stage is clear for the actors in a very different strife 
 from that of rival minions in the ante-chamber—for the dark and 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 33 
 
 earnest men —Strafford and Falkland, Hampden, Pym, Eliot } 
 Fairfax, and Cromwell—who in the terrible struggle of the Great 
 Revolution decided the question between the prerogative of the 
 King and the liberties of the people. As if that this mighty 
 political drama might be pictorially set forth as it deserved, 
 Vandyck is the painter of its principal personages. 
 
 Though Rubens visited England in 1629, and painted, during 
 that visit, the picture called “Peace and War,” now in our 
 National Gallery, he was here in the character of a diplomatist, 
 not a painter. The knighthood which he received from the hand 
 of Charles in 1630, before his return to Spain, was the reward for 
 his negotiation of a treaty, not for the decoration of Whitehall. 
 The ceiling of the banqueting-liouse was commissioned during 
 this visit, but not painted till some years after, and sent over 
 finished from Antwerp. The portrait of the Earl of Arundel, the 
 great collector of objects of art and antiquity (107), is the only 
 English portrait here from the hand of Rubens, and this may 
 have been painted during his niue months’ residence in this 
 country. lie had already painted a picture of the earl and his 
 countess, at Antwerp, in 1620, but the two portraits were on 
 the same canvas. Thomas Howard, first Lord Arundel, was 
 bom in 1586, and was made earl marshal in 1621. He incurred 
 the displeasure of Charles, and an imprisonment of some duration 
 in the Tower, by the marriage of his son, Lord Maltravers, with 
 the Lady Elizabeth Lennox, sister of the Duke of Richmond, 
 without the King’s consent, in 1626. He was general of the 
 army sent to Scotland by Charles in 1639, presided as earl 
 marshal at Strafford’s trial in 1610, accompanied the Queen and 
 her daughter to Holland in 1611, and died in exile at Padua in 
 1646. He employed agents on the continent collecting whatever 
 was rarest in the way of pictures and antiques, whether statues, 
 gems, or medals, and was instrumental, probably, in bringing 
 about Vandyck’s second visit to this country. To him we owe 
 that fine collection of marbles now at Oxford, known as the 
 Arundelian marbles. To this portrait of him (127), we may apply 
 the words employed by Clarendon in describing his character: 
 —“ He had in his person, in his aspect aud countenance, the 
 appearance of a great man, which he preserved in his gait and 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 THE AET TEEASUEES EXHIBITION. 
 
 motion.” At the same time, Clarendon tells us “ this was only 
 his outside, his nature and true humour being much disposed to 
 levity.” 
 
 Vandyck was the true painter of the cavaliers. That quality 
 in his work which justifies the description of him as “ pittore 
 cavalieresco ,” peculiarly fitted him to delineate those stately 
 figures, set off by the most graceful of all dresses that have 
 ever been worn in England; those proud and regular faces, with 
 their flowing lovelocks ; those high-bred hands, strong only for 
 the sword-hilt; those proud, self-possessed, yet easy attitudes. 
 
 Vandyck had risen to an eminence only second to his master, 
 Rubens, in 1620, the year before he paid his first visit to 
 England. He stayed but a few months in England on that occa¬ 
 sion, and we cannot point to any work of his executed during 
 these few months. Between 1621 and his next visit to England 
 in 1632, Vandyck had travelled through Italy, studying and 
 leaving numerous records of his pencil in Venice, Genoa, Rome, 
 Elorence, and Turin, and had spent five years in diligent and 
 successful labour at Antwerp, while Rubens was more engrossed 
 by his diplomatic employment at Madrid and London, than by 
 his painting. The Earl of Arundel and Sir Kenelrn Digby were 
 the earliest and warmest English protectors of Vandyck. He 
 rapidly displaced from favour Jansen and My tens, and soon 
 secured a monopoly of court employment—living luxuriously and 
 profusely during the winter in the Blackfriars, and during the 
 summer in a suit of apartments fitted up for him by the king in 
 the old palace at Eltham. He left England for a short visit to 
 Paris in 1610, and returned in broken health to witness the 
 outbreak of civil war. He did not long survive the execution of 
 his friend and patron, Strafford ; dying at the close of 1641. 
 His works are characterised by very unequal degrees of merit. 
 Immeasurably the best, are those of his period of Italian travel, 
 and his five years at Antwerp, from 1626 to 1631. To this 
 period belong the fine pictures of the Hertford collection (6 and 
 7), and the portraits of Snyders and his wife (662, 663), in the 
 gallery of old masters, which are worthy of the painter of that 
 masterpiece of portraiture—the “ Gevartius ’ of the ^National 
 Gallery, and his group of the three children from Earl de Grey’s 
 
TIIE BEITISII POETEAIT GALIjEEY. 
 
 35 
 
 collection (6G0). No work of his painted in England can for a 
 moment stand comparison with these admirable productions. 
 Among the best here are the portraits of Charles I.—the half 
 length (6G1), and the full length on horseback (736). The “ Killi- 
 grew and Carew” (667), and the “ Boyal Family” (683). To the 
 secondary order of merit belong all his pictures in the historical 
 portrait gallery. They vary in excellence, but in no case reach 
 the highest range of the painter’s power. Besides Yandyck we 
 may mention, as contemporary painters, Sir Balthazar Gerbier— 
 though he early abandoned the art for diplomacy—and Dobson, 
 an Englishman, and pupil of Vandyck’s. Dobson’s picture (106), 
 representing Gerbier, Sir Clement Cotterill, and the painter 
 himself, shows the pupil little inferior to his master. King 
 Charles used to call Dobson “the English Tintoret.” Yandyck 
 found him labouring in a garret, and recommended him to the 
 King. Like Vandyck, Dobson was profuse in his habits, and 
 died at thirty-six, in the year 1646. 
 
 And now, let us turn from these painters to their works. 
 Here we may find most of the conspicuous names of the greatest 
 struggle of English history. Of the royal party here are the 
 King, his three arch-evil councillors, Buckingham, — already 
 noticed,— Strafford (110), and Laud (94), besides a long list of 
 the beauties, captains, wits, and courtiers, who marked the few 
 festive years of that troubled reign, and its long continued civil 
 discords. Of the heroes on the side of the parliament here are 
 Cromwell, Hampden, and Pym, Selden, Hollis, and Eliot; but 
 neither Bradshaw, Strode, nor Hazelrigge, Freimes, Yane, nor 
 Grimston; and the parliamentary generals, Fairfax, Essex, and 
 Manchester; but neither Ireton, Ludlow, nor Harrison. To 
 comment on every one of these pictures, at the length to which 
 their importance tempts us, would be to write a volume and not 
 an article. 
 
 We shall probably best prepare visitors for appreciating this 
 part of the gallery by a rapid survey of the principal incidents of 
 the great rebellion in their succession ; noticing, as we proceed, 
 the portraits of the chief actors in the drama here represented. 
 King Charles I. (96, 109, 186, &c.) was born with the century, 
 and succeeded to the throne in March, 1625; marrying, in the 
 
36 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 May of that year, his beautiful queen, Henrietta Maria (108, 
 116). All through the preceding reign, the strife between king 
 and parliament had been going on; but Charles, by the perni¬ 
 cious influence of Buckingham, had been blinded to the lessons 
 which that conflict should have taught him. His first parliament 
 met in June, 1625. Hampden (131) sat in that parliament 
 for Wendover. The King wanted money to carry on the war 
 with Spain. The parliament, instead of voting supplies, arraigned 
 the conduct of Buckingham; and, refusing all subsidies, was 
 dissolved, after three weeks’ sitting. In February, 1626, the 
 second parliament met, and appointed committees for religion, for 
 redress of grievances, and for secret affairs. In May, articles of 
 impeachment were exhibited against Buckingham, when Sir 
 Dudley Digges and Sir John Eliot, who brought up the articles, 
 were committed to the Tower; and in June this second parlia¬ 
 ment, still stubborn, was dissolved without passing a single act. 
 Wentworth was among the leaders of opposition in this parlia¬ 
 ment, and was committed to prison for his conduct in that 
 capacity. Hampden shared his captivity, for resistance to the 
 payment of illegal taxation. In the same month was published a 
 royal declaration of the causes of the dissolution of these two 
 parliaments; and an order for the levying of tonnage and 
 poundage, by means of which, with arbitrary loans and ship 
 money, the King endeavoured to raise the supplies which his par¬ 
 liament refused him. The third parliament of 1628 granted five 
 subsidies; but with them passed the celebrated petition of right, 
 against taxation without consent of parliament, imprisonment 
 without legal process, the billeting of soldiers on people against 
 their wills, and commissions of martial law. The parliament was 
 prorogued in June. In August, the Duke of Buckingham was 
 murdered by Felton; and in March, 1629, the King dissolved his 
 third parliament, in a speech in which he called the patriot 
 members, Hollis (177), Pym (132 a), Eliot (132), Selden (149), 
 and their supporters, “ common vipers.” For eleven years after 
 this no parliament was called, and the King carried on the 
 government by the unconstitutional exercise of his rojal prero¬ 
 gative. Hollis, Eliot, and Valentine were sent to the Tower in the 
 same year, where Eliot, the bosom-friend of Hampden, remained 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 37 
 
 till he died. In 1633 the King held a Scotch parliament in 
 Edinburgh. In 1634, the first writ of ship money was issued ; 
 Wentworth restored order as Lord-deputy in Ireland ; and in 
 1636 John Hampden refused to pay his assessment of thirty-six 
 shillings for ship money—now extended to the inland part of the 
 kingdom—on the plea that the tax was illegally imposed. The 
 influence of Laud was all this time in the ascendant. He was 
 with the king in Scotland in 1633. During the same year he 
 was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, on the death of Abbott, 
 his old enemy, (93); in 1635, he was of the foreign committee of 
 the privy council, and in 1636, he got his creature Juxon, Bishop 
 of London, appointed Lord High Treasurer. The tyrannical pro¬ 
 ceedings of Wentworth, as president of the Northern Council, 
 were of earlier date ; but down to his creation as Earl of Stratford 
 in 1639, he was the chief prompter of the royal resistance to the 
 Commons. In 1638 had been passed the order in council prohi¬ 
 biting emigration to New England without royal license, which 
 arrested in the river the ship, on board of which Hampden 
 and Cromwell had taken their departure for North America. In 
 1638, too, the solemn league and covenant was subscribed in 
 Edinburgh, under the provocation of Laud’s efforts to force 
 the episcopal liturgy on the church of Scotland, and in 1639 
 broke out the war with Scotland, the King giving Strafford the 
 chief command of the army destined to oppose his rebellious 
 Scottish subjects. In 1640, by advice of Laud and Wentworth, 
 the King, in desperate want of resources to carry on the war, 
 determined to summon a parliament which met in April, after 
 eleven years continued silence of the Commons, and uninter¬ 
 rupted tyranny of the King. Of this parliament Hampden (131), 
 Pym, St. John, Denzil Hollis (177), Cromwell, Hyde (afterwards 
 Earl of Clarendon,—175), Falkland (173), and Digbv (123), were 
 leading members. 
 
 The King asked for an immediate supply of money, promising, 
 if it were granted, to give up the prerogative of ship money. But 
 he had deceived his third parliament which coupled the subsidies 
 it gave with the Petition of Bight, and it was felt unsafe to trust 
 him afresh. Besides, the Commons denied the existence of the 
 very prerogative the King offered to surrender. Hampden moved 
 
38 
 
 THE AET TEEASTTBES EXHIBITION. 
 
 the question —“ Whether the house would consent to the King’s 
 offer P ” Hyde moved the question—“ Whether the house would 
 grant or refuse a supply ? ” If the first motion had been carried 
 against consent, the court would have been defeated; by carrying 
 the grant on the second, the court would have gained a victory. 
 The house separated without voting. Next day the King dis¬ 
 solved the parliament in an angry speech. 
 
 By this dissolution the die was cast. The royal tyranny became 
 more active than ever. Ship-money was extracted more rigorously 
 than before. Forced loans were again resorted to. There was 
 even a project entertained for debasing the currency. In August 
 the King marched a second time against the Scots, while the 
 leading members of the opposition invited them southwards. The 
 royal army was disaffected, and gave way before the enemy. Ho 
 shift remained even for the shifty King. He made a truce with 
 the Scots, and summoned a parliament. This was the long par¬ 
 liament which met on the 3rd of ^November, 1610—a day never 
 to be forgotten by Englishmen. The minds of the opposition 
 were embittered. The tone of the House of Commons was very 
 different from that of the short Parliament of the year before, 
 when, with honesty and moderation, the King still had the game 
 in his own hands. The gulf had widened now — was rapidly 
 becoming impassable—and yet there was still a hope, had the 
 King’s eyes not been, as it were, judicially blinded. In the first 
 session of the long Parliament, Strafford and Laud were im¬ 
 peached and imprisoned. The Lord Keeper fled to France. The 
 instruments of royal oppression,— even the judges who had 
 decided for the legality of the writ of ship-money,—Bramston 
 (176), chief justice of the King’s Bench, at their head,—were 
 summoned to answer for their conduct: the Court of Star Cham¬ 
 ber, the Court of High Commission, and the Northern Council 
 were dissolved as arbitrary and unconstitutional tribunals; Laud’s 
 victims were released from prison; the old feudal jurisdictions 
 of the King were abolished; it was provided that Parliament 
 should not be prorogued or dissolved without its own consent, 
 and that parliaments would be held at least once every three 
 years. Laud and Strafford were beheaded, after condemnation, 
 by bill of attainder,—the former in January, the latter in March, 
 
THE BUITISII POKTEAIT CtALLEBT. 
 
 39 
 
 1641. Both executions were clearly justifiable on the strongest 
 of all pleas—the necessities of public safety. 
 
 On the faces of these two great prompters of all that was most 
 fatal in the conduct of their master, in church and state, we quote 
 the well-weighed remarks of Macaulay:—“ Never were faces more 
 strikingly characteristic of the individuals to w r hom they belonged 
 than those of Laud and Strafford, as they remain pourtrayed, by 
 the most skilful baud of the age. The mean forehead, the pinched 
 features, the peering eyes, of the prelate, suit admirably with his 
 disposition. They mark him out as a lower kind of St. Dominic, 
 differing from the fierce and gloomy enthusiast who founded the 
 Inquisition, as we might imagine the familiar imp of a spiteful 
 witch to differ from an archangel of darkness. When we read his 
 grace’s judgments, when we read the report which he drew up, 
 setting forth that he had sent some separatists to prison, and 
 imploring the royal aid against others, w r e feel a movement of 
 indignation. We turn to his diary, and are at once as cool as 
 contempt can make us. But Wentworth—who ever 
 
 names him without thinking of those harsh, dark features, ennobled 
 by their expression, into more than the majesty of an antique 
 Jupiter; of that brow, that eye, that cheek, that lip, wherein as in 
 a chronicle are written the events of many stormy and disastrous 
 years; high enterprise accomplished,frightful dangers braved, power 
 unsparingly exercised, suffering unshrinkingly borne; of that fixed 
 look, so full of serenity, of mournful anxiety, of deep thought, of 
 dauntless resolution, which seems at once to forebode and defy a 
 terrible fate, as it lowers on us from the living canvas of Vandyck.” 
 During the autumn of 1641 the long parliament adjourned. Be¬ 
 fore it re-assembled iu November of the next year, the Irish 
 rebellion had broken out, and had been generally attributed by the 
 Puritans to indirect encouragement afforded to the rebels by the 
 King. When the House met, the breach, not only between the 
 Court and the Commons, but between the more moderate and 
 more thorough-going oppositionists in the House itself, was wider 
 than ever. Iu the debate on the remonstrance setting out all the 
 grievances of the last fifteen years, and calling on the King to 
 employ no ministers in whom the parliament could not confide, 
 which lasted from nine in the morning of November 21 to two of 
 
40 
 
 THE AET TEEAS TTEES EXHIBITION. 
 
 the following morning, party feelings were so exasperated that 
 “but for the sagacity and calmness of Mr. Hampden,” says an 
 eye-witness, “we had sheathed our swords in each others bowels.” 
 The remonstrance was carried by a majority of nine only, and at 
 this the eleventh hour, by honestly and heartily joining with 
 Falkland (173), Hyde (175), Digby (123), and Colepepper, the 
 leaders of the moderate constitutionalists, in the Commons, and 
 with Bedford (123) in the Lords, Charles might still have rallied 
 the nation to his cause. Negotiations were actually on foot for 
 nominating these men to important posts of the Government, 
 under Bedford ; but again the suicidal councils of the supporters 
 of the prerogative prevailed, and the fatal attempt to arrest the 
 five members—-Pym, Hampden, Hollis, Sir Arthur Hazelrigge, 
 and Strode—in January, 1642, was, in effect, a declaration of civil 
 war. Charles left London for York, and after this month never 
 visited his capital again but as a prisoner. 
 
 On March the 2nd, the Commons resolved to embody the 
 militia without the royal assent; and ordered the Duke of Nor¬ 
 thumberland (124), as Lord High Admiral, to equip the uavy for 
 the service of the Parliament. This was war, however disguised 
 by constitutional forms. In this gallery we shall find most of the 
 heroes who took part on either side in that war-—a war such as no 
 other country has ever witnessed: in which the noblest qualities 
 of courage and conduct were displayed on both sides; where the 
 patriotism of the parliamentary party was balanced by the loyalty 
 and devotion of the partisans of the King; and where, in the very 
 fiercest heat of an internecine struggle, the power of law and the 
 principles of social order were never once suspended. 
 
 Taking, as the first overt act of the struggle, the raising of the 
 royal standard, at Nottingham, in August, 1642, we may divide 
 the conflict into two great acts. The first ends with the defeat of 
 the royal army of the west at Stow-on-the-Wold, and the taking 
 of Harlech Castle, early in 1647. This division includes the 
 battles of Edgehili and Brentford, the storm of Cirencester, by 
 Bupert; the skirmish in Chalgrove Field, the taking of Bristol, 
 the siege of Gloucester, the battle of Boundway Doon, the siege 
 of Hull, the actions of Nantwich (in which Monk, then an officer 
 in the royal army, was made prisoner), Cheriton Down, and 
 
TIIE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 41 
 
 Selby ; the more decisive battles of Marston Moor, Newbury, and 
 Naseby, each of which decided the fate of the royal cause in its 
 own quarter of the island ; the taking of Lathom House, Welbeck, 
 Bolsover, Bletchington, Basing, and numerous other manorial 
 strongholds. The war was waged—for the King—in the north 
 by the Earl of Newcastle, in the west by Eupert, Goring, Gren¬ 
 ville, and Hoptofi, and in the midland counties by Lord Capel; 
 and by Essex, Manchester, and Fairfax, successively for the par¬ 
 liament. Cromwell, during this period does not rise above a 
 secondary command of cavalry, uuder all three generals. During 
 this period the King’s head quarters were first at York, after¬ 
 wards at Oxford. He paid a visit to Bristol, and moved about 
 the west, and up and down the southern and midland counties 
 towards its close. 
 
 The second great division of the civil war includes the events 
 between the rendering up of the King to the commissioners of 
 parliament, by the Scots, at the beginning of 1647, and his execu¬ 
 tion in January, 1G49. He was all this time a prisoner, or a 
 fugitive, at Holmby, Hampton Court, Newport, and Carisbrook, 
 returning to London only for his trial and execution. 
 
 Of the chief actors in the first division of the war, we have here 
 —besides the parliamentary notabilities already mentioned, as 
 Hampden, Eliot, Pym, Denzil Hollis, and Cromwell—Sir John Pen¬ 
 nington (133), the admiral of the fleet, appointed by Charles, in 
 lieu of the Earl of Northumberland (124), who had been named to 
 the same post by the parliament; Sir John Byron (111), a black- 
 browed, coarse-featured cavalier, with a slash across his nose, a 
 malignant of the most hard-riding, hard-swearing, hard-drinking, 
 hard-hitting kind,—to whom, as constable of the tower in 1641, 
 the King mainly trusted for arming the forces with which he 
 then hoped to overcome the parliament; but who was forced by 
 the parliament to give up that most important post, when he 
 joined his royal master at York. Sir John commanded a reserve 
 of horse at Edgehill, the first important action of the war, on the 
 23d October, 1642. Essex was the parliamentary general in that 
 battle, which might have been a victory for the King but for the 
 impetuosity of Prince Eupert (115), who, breaking the parlia¬ 
 mentary horse, pursued them so far, besides allowing his men to 
 
42 
 
 THE ABT TEEASTXEES EXHIBITION. 
 
 turn aside from fighting to plunder, that the tide of the battle 
 had turned decisively in favour of the parliamentarians before he 
 reappeared on the field. Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice (114), 
 the King’s nephews, sons of Elizabeth, daughter of James I. 
 Princess Palatine and Queen of Bohemia, are characteristic types 
 of the dashiug, daring cavalier; with all the courage, and 
 impatience of control, that distinguished their class: irresistible 
 in a charge, but incapable ot improving an advantage. Trained 
 in the bloody wars of the Palatinate, they carried on hosti¬ 
 lities, not with the fierce religious fervour of the roundhead 
 captains, or with that sad sense of a terrible duty which weighed 
 upon such royalists as Falkland, but with the wild license of 
 partisans, plundering, burning, and slaughtering, more like chiefs 
 of condottieri than like captains of a king in arms within his own 
 dominions against a parliament resisting his authority. These 
 princes move athwart the bloody scenes of the civil war, like 
 bright but baleful meteors, perpetually winning unavailing advan¬ 
 tages, but unsuccessful in every decisive encounter, and, iudeed, 
 the main cause of the loss of every action in which they held high 
 command,—witness Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Naseby,—by 
 their impetuosity and incapacity to obey. To Rupert, also, was 
 due the surrender of Bristol, in 1645, one of the last and one of 
 the heaviest blows to the royal cause. Of all the servants of the 
 King, these two princes most widened the breach between him 
 and his people, by their reckless forays and harryings of the 
 country. Reduced at last to take refuge on board the fleet, 
 Rupert long kept up a desultory piratical warfare under the royal 
 flag, in both hemispheres, survived the war, and saw the Restora¬ 
 tion, dying quietly in 1684, in his 63d year, at his house in 
 Spring Gardens, where, for the last ten years of his life, he 
 had been busying himself with chemistry and mechanics. He 
 invented the art of mezzotint, but did not discover the philo¬ 
 sopher’s stone, though he wasted the best part of his fortune 
 in looking for it. Pi’ince Maurice,—like, but less than, his 
 brother in all things,—carrying on the same piratical warfare, 
 went to the bottom in the West Indies; none knows precisely 
 when, where, or how. 
 
 The Earl of Bedford (123) was the first commander of the 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 43 
 
 cavalry, for the parliament, under Essex. After a brief defection 
 to the King in 1G43, he returned to the cause of the parliament, 
 and abided by it for the rest of his life. 
 
 Lord Brook (134) was another peer who adhered to the par¬ 
 liamentary cause, and was killed at the siege of Lichfield in 
 March, 1643. 
 
 When Essex, by his slackness, and evident want of hearty zeal 
 in the parliamentary cause, had roused the suspicions of the par¬ 
 liament, the Earl of Manchester (172) who, as Lord Kimbolton, 
 had been the leader of the opposition to the King in the house of 
 lords, and, as such, had shared the danger of the five members of 
 the commons, was appointed serjeant-major of the associated coun¬ 
 ties in 1643, with Colonel Cromwell for his second in command. 
 TJnder them the army of the commonwealth was remodelled— 
 substantial yeomen and sober citizens being substituted gradually 
 for “ drunken tapsters and decayed serving-men,” till at length a 
 force was created composed, as Carlyle says, “ of men that had 
 the fear of Grod, and gradually lost all other fear.” Manchester 
 commanded the parliamentary army of the north, which, in 1644, 
 fought the decisive fight of Marston Moor, where the King’s 
 northern array, under the brave Marquis of Newcastle (121), was 
 shattered never to unite again. Lord Fairfax, and his son, then 
 Sir Thomas Fairfax (138), afterwards commander-in-chief for the 
 parliament, led the Yorkshiremen in that action. The victory 
 of the parliamentary army was due, mainly, to the rashness of 
 Kupert, who, as usual, broke the force opposed to him, and, as 
 usual, pursued it so far that he gave time to the enemy—thanks 
 chiefly to Cromwell and his Ironsides—to retrieve the fortunes of 
 the day. From that date, however, Manchester began to fall 
 under the same suspicion of “ slackness ” which had led to Essex’s 
 gradual retirement from command. Cromwell, in November, 
 1644, exhibited before the commons a charge against the earl “ of 
 indisposition and backwardness to engagements, and the euding 
 of the war by the sword,” which, though the earl made a sufficient 
 answer to it for the time, was one main motive of the self-denying 
 ordinance of 1644, by which the members of both houses declared 
 themselves ineligible to all offices, civil and military, during the 
 war. In pursuance of this ordinance, both Essex and Manchester 
 
44 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 disappeared from command under the Parliament, which from this 
 time fell into the more vigorous bands of Fairfax and Cromwell, 
 in whose favour the self-denying ordinance was suspended. 
 Between 1642 and 1644, the latter had been rising, step by step, 
 in power and influence. By his admirable organisation of the 
 Eastern Counties Association, which included Norfolk, Suffolk, 
 Essex, Cambridge, Herts, and afterwards Huntingdon and Lincoln¬ 
 shire, these parts of Englaud were kept free from civil war. 
 Hampden (131), fell early in the struggle, in a skirmish w r ith 
 Rupert, on Chalgrove field, in June, 1643. Less than three 
 months later, the King’s party had to lament the death of Falk¬ 
 land (173), who, in despair at the prospects of the country, rather 
 threw away than lost his life, in the battle of Newbury. Aubrey, 
 however, attributes his recklessness of life less to public griefs 
 than to sorrow at the death of Mrs. Moray, a handsome lady at 
 court, whom he loved tenderly. Among the cavalier captains of 
 this first epoch of the war, of whom here are portraits, we may 
 mention Sir Charles Goring (166), who, after a short period of 
 hesitation between the cause of King and parliament in 1641— 
 during which he alternately played traitor to both parties— 
 redeemed his credit afterwards by strenuous service under Charles, 
 and showed himself one of his bravest and best captains, especially 
 in the war of the vrest. He ultimately escaped beheading, by the 
 Speaker’s casting vote, when Hamilton, Capel, Holland, and Owen 
 perished on the scaffold in 1649. 
 
 The Earl of Digby (123) is another of those who, at the com¬ 
 mencement of the struggle, sided with the parliament, but went 
 over to the King when he found that civil war was inevitable. It 
 was he who formed, and offered to execute, a plan for seizing the 
 five members, when under the protection of the city; and he was, 
 throughout the war, the most dexterous and daring of the King’s 
 political advisers, and one of the boldest of his captains. He 
 escaped over the sea, after the battle of Worcester, and lived to 
 see the Restoration. 
 
 The gallant Sir Jacob Astley—represented here not by his 
 portrait only (148), but by his breast-plate, buff coat, and sword, 
 exhibited in the collection of armour—was one of the staunchest 
 of the King’s friends. He was major-general at the battle of 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 45 
 
 Edgeliill, under the gallant Lindsay, who, though he held the 
 command, was so disgusted with the overbearing petulance of 
 Eupert, that he declared his post only a nominal one, and carried 
 a pike in the action at the head of his own regiment. Sir Jacob 
 took active part in the war, till he was defeated and taken prisoner 
 as the last distinguished royalist in arms, on the 22d of March, 
 1645, in the battle of Stow-on-the-Wold. The force he com¬ 
 manded was the last that kept the field for the King in England. 
 As he surrendered, he said to his adversaries, “ You have now 
 done your work, and may go play—unless you will fall out among 
 yourselves.” Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart, sons of 
 Lodowick Stuart, the first Duke of Bichmond, kinsman to the 
 King, look a gallant pair of brothers (117) on Vandyck’s canvas, 
 and fell, as loyal gentlemen were wont to fall in those days, 
 fighting for King Charles,—Lord John at Cheriton Downs, near 
 Winchester, in March, 1644, when Sir William Waller defeated 
 the King’s army under Lord Hopton; and Lord Bernard at 
 Eowton Heath, in 1645. We should notice, too, among the 
 most gallant and characteristic illustrations of this sad but stirring 
 time, two ladies, who held, the one her husband’s, the other her 
 father’s, house for the King, as stoutly as husband or father could 
 have done. These are Jane Cavendish (150), eldest daughter of 
 the brave Duke of Newcastle, who, as befitted the daughter of 
 such a father, kept garrison at Welbeck, until it was taken by 
 the parliamentary army under Manchester, in August, 1644; and 
 Charlotte de la Tremouille, the noble Countess of Derby, and 
 Queen of Man, whose sad and stately figure all the readers of 
 Scott must remember in “ Peveril of the Peak.” While her 
 husband (140) defended his territory of Man, she stood the siege 
 of Fairfax, in Lathom House, for three months of hard fighting,— 
 from February to May, 1644,—when Fairfax was fain to draw off 
 his baffled leaguer to Bolton, leaving two thousand dead under 
 those well-defended walls. The house was surrendered by the King 
 in December 1645, when the heroic countess joined her good and 
 loyal husband in his kingdom of Man. His answer to a summons to 
 surrender the island from Cromwell, is worth quoting :—“ I 
 scorn your proffers, I disdain your favours, I abhor your treasons, 
 and am so far from surrendering this island to your advantage, 
 
46 
 
 THE AET TEEASTJEES EXHIBITION. 
 
 that I will keep it to the utmost of my power to your destruc¬ 
 tion. Take this final answer, and forbear any farther solicitations ; 
 for if you trouble me with any more messages on this occasion, I 
 will burn the papers and hang the bearers.” The royal standard 
 still waved on the battlements of Peel Castle, till, after the loyal 
 earl’s death on the scaffold at Bolton, in 1651, Major Christian 
 basely betrayed the island to the parliament. The countess was 
 taken and thrown into prison, where she languished till the Resto¬ 
 ration. Charles refused to this noble woman his consent to a 
 bill which had passed both houses for the restitution of the family 
 estates ; and then “ her great heart,” which had borne up against 
 danger, treachery, a husband’s loss, and the sufferings of a pro¬ 
 tracted imprisonment, “ overwhelmed with grief and endless 
 sorrow, burst in pieces.” In these terms the family historian of 
 the Stanleys describes her death at Knowsley, where the loyal 
 services of the earl and his countess, and the base ingratitude 
 of the King, were commemorated on a tablet, subsequently placed 
 in the front of the house. 
 
 It would have been well could the portraits of Winchester 
 and Worcester, the staunch defenders of Basing House and 
 Raglan Castle, have been hung near the Stanleys. Those sieges 
 of mansions and manor-houses, held generally for the King— 
 of which twenty w r ere taken by the parliamentary avenger in 
 the summer of 1645 alone—are among the most exciting and 
 picturesque incidents of our civil war, and gave occasion for some 
 of the noblest among its many manifestations of loyalty, endur¬ 
 ance, and daring. 
 
 The Earl of Northampton (146) is another cavalier general, 
 killed at Hopton Heath. 
 
 Here, too, are not wanting some of the beauties of the graver 
 court of Charles, and the poets and artists who celebrated or 
 handed down their graces, or invented opportunities for the display 
 of them. Here is Henrietta Maria herself (108), in ohe picture 
 with her favourite dwarf, Sir Geoffrey Hudson, by Vandyck ; again 
 in a family group with the King and their children, by the same 
 painter (116); and again in Lord Galway’s interesting picture 
 by Mytens, representing the King and Queen, dressed, and about to 
 mount fora ride. This beautiful woman, there is reason to believe 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 47 
 
 was not true wife to the King, whom her counsels did much to 
 encourage in that Jesuitical policy with his parliament, which ren¬ 
 dered all faith in him impossible. There seems little doubt that 
 she loved the magnificent Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, who was 
 the King’s proxy at the celebration of the marriage; and that still 
 later, when the royal fortunes had become desperate, she found 
 consolation at Paris in the arms of Henry Jermyn, afterwards 
 Lord St. Albans, who is said to have treated her harshly and 
 contemptuously. Madame de Baviere describes him as “ keeping 
 a good fire in his chamber, and a sumptuous table, while she had 
 not a faggot to warm herself with.” Henrietta Maria was very 
 beautiful. Howell writes to his brother-in-law in raptures with 
 this “ most gallant new Queen of England, who in true beauty is 
 beyond the long-wooed Infanta—for she is of a fading flaxen 
 hair, big-lipped and somewhat heavy-eyed : but this daughter of 
 Erance, this youngest branch of Bourbon, is of a more lovely and 
 lasting complexion—a dark brown; she hath eyes that sparkle 
 like stars; and for her physiognomy, she may be said to be a 
 mirror of perfection.” Even grave, sour Symonds D'Elvves, 
 going to see her dine at Whitehall, describes her as “a most 
 absolute, delicate ladjr; her face much enlivened by her radiant 
 and sparkling black eye. Besides, her deportment amongst her 
 women was so sweet and humble, and her speech and looks to 
 her other servants so mild and gracious, as 1 will not abstain 
 from divers deep-fetched sighs, to consider that she wanted the 
 knowledge of the true religion.” And yet these radiant eyes 
 could flash angry fire too. “ With one frown,” writes an eye¬ 
 witness, “divers of us being at Whitehall to see her, being at 
 dinner, and the room somewhat overheated with the fire and 
 company, she drove us all out of the room ; I suppose none but a 
 queen could have cast such a scowl.” The King had great dif¬ 
 ficulties at first with her imperious temper, and sometimes appears 
 to have almost despaired of procuring from her the respect 
 due from a wife to a husband. At last, when he had summarily 
 dismissed all her huge French household, she was brought into a 
 more manageable frame of mind,—or perhaps the quick-witted 
 woman saw she had mistaken the road to empire over the King, 
 and from that moment changing her tactics from those of self- 
 
48 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 assertion to those of management, guided her weak husband at 
 her will—to the scaffold. And yet, even after this change of 
 tactics, she knew well when to apply the spur pretty sharply to 
 the lagging sides of the royal intent. “ Go, coward,” she is 
 reported to have said to Charles, when he shrunk from seizing 
 the five members, “ and pull out these rogues by the ears, or 
 never see my face again.” Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle, is 
 the authority for the story. Henrietta Maria fled to Holland in 
 1842 with the crown jewels, which she employed in the purchase 
 of arms and ammunition for the King’s service. In 1643 she 
 landed at Burlington Bay, through imminent dangers. The house 
 she slept in was bombarded. She had to leave it “barefoot and 
 bareleg ” and take shelter in a ditch behind the town. While 
 here, discovering that her favourite lap-dog had been left behind, 
 she ran back through the fire and returned in triumph with her 
 pet. The Earl of Newcastle conveyed her to York, where, so 
 long as she remained, her intelligence, no less than her grace 
 and beauty, greatly helped the progress of the royal cause. She 
 subsequently separated from the King, and fled to France, return¬ 
 ing to England in. 1680, after suffering neglect and even privation 
 at the court of her nephew, Louis XIY. She left this country 
 for the last time at the breaking out of the plague in 1665, and 
 died at the castle of Oolombe, near Paris, in 1669. Of her 
 dwarf, Geoffrey Hudson, the readers of “ Peveril of the Peak ” 
 need no description. 
 
 Here from Yandyek’s hand, is one of the loveliest women (164), 
 who ever inspired poet, or turned lover’s head—Lucy Sidney— 
 the wife of the magnificent Lord Carlisle—him of the silver 
 horse’s shoes, mentioned in our last article but one—whom War- 
 burton calls “ the Erinnys of her time.” To youth, beauty, rank, 
 and wit, she was determined to add political influence, and reck¬ 
 less how it was acquired, she was successively the mistress of 
 Strafford,—even before her husband’s death in 1636,-—and after¬ 
 wards of Pyxn, his deadliest enemy. It was to her secret infor¬ 
 mation that the five members owed their timely intelligence of 
 the King’s intentions; and as she betrayed this, so she betrayed 
 every secret of the mistress who loved and trusted her. Alter¬ 
 nately the gayest beauty of the court—be-rhymed by Davenant, 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 49 
 
 Suckling, Carew, and Waller—or in Puritan hood and pinners, 
 taking notes of a conventicle discourse by Pym’s side—she 
 is one of the most unstable figures of that eventful time, 
 so fertile in apostasies and treasons. She just lived to see the 
 Restoration, dying in November, 1G60, at Little Cashiobury 
 House. 
 
 The wife of Lord Mandeville (l(i9), is gayer than beseems the 
 lady of a Puritan generalissimo. But she wears her wedding 
 dress. 
 
 Mrs. Kirk (118), was the most faithful and the most trusted, 
 by her master as well as her mistress, of the Queen’s bedchamber 
 women. The picture has an artistic interest. It was bought at 
 Sir Peter Lely’s sale, and those who are conversant with his colour 
 will see how much use he made of the feuille rnorte satin dress 
 of this picture. 
 
 The charming Henrietta, youngest daughter of Charles, after¬ 
 wards the ill-fated Duchess of Orleans (111), belongs to the suc¬ 
 ceeding reign. 
 
 Lady Ootterill (145), a fine head by Dobson, hangs bv the side 
 of her husband, Sir Charles, master of the ceremonies to the 
 King, in the times that pi-eceded the civil war, while there still 
 were ceremonies to marshal at Whitehall—one of the most 
 decently and nobly ordered courts in Europe while it lasted. The 
 Countess of Oxford (142), and Lady Betty Sidney (157), are two 
 of its not very conspicuous ornaments. More conspicuous is 
 (147), the Duchess of Richmond, Prances Howard, who, though 
 the fairest and proudest woman of her time, with the blood of 
 Howards and Staffords in her veins, by some strange and uu- 
 ('xplaiued chance, married as her first husband one Trannell, a 
 London vintner’s son. On his death, in 1599, after Sir John 
 Rodney had killed himself for love of her—his farewell letter, 
 written in his own blood, still may be read in the British Museum 
 —she married the Earl of Hertford. Left a second time a widow, 
 she was wooed and won by the first Duke of Richmond ; wooed in 
 disguise, however, and in all manner of romantic accompaniments. 
 After her third husband’s death she is said to have aimed at the 
 tough old heart of James himself, but in vain. We hear of her 
 in 1634, drooping very much, “ but still keeping her state of 
 
50 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 sermons and white staves;” for she had private preaching in her 
 household till Laud put it down in her third widowhood. She 
 vowed never to sit at table with a subject, and used to seat herself 
 in public alone, with crowds standing around, at a table spread 
 with costly silver dishes which, if the covers had been lifted, 
 would have been found empty ! 
 
 Of the poets of the court here are Sir John Suckling (83— 
 there is a portrait of his friend Garew, in the gallery of old 
 masters), Waller (154), and Lovelace (146), Cowley (143), and 
 Butler (155), the author of “Hudibras.” Suckling was a true 
 court poet, and preludes in his loose, easy, flowing love verses, 
 the more licentious strains of ltoehester and Dorset; while 
 Carew, a gentleman of the chamber, love poet and dramatist, is 
 the more graceful forerunner of the Sedleys and the Ethereges. 
 Sir John Suckling’s “Lines on a Marriage” will live as long as 
 English poetry, for their sweet and artless description of a rustic- 
 English beauty. Every one knows the description of the bride’s 
 cheek:— 
 
 ‘ ‘ The streaks of red were mingled there, 
 
 Such as are on a Katherine pear 
 The side that’s next the sun.” 
 
 And that tempting picture of her mouth— 
 
 “ Her lips were red, and one was thin, 
 
 Compared with that was next her chin, 
 
 Some bee had stung it newly.” 
 
 And the pretty homely comparison of the feet— 
 
 “-That ’neath her petticoat, 
 
 Like little mice, stole in and out, 
 
 As if they feared the light.” 
 
 Suckling seems to have been a worthless fellow—a gambler, and 
 card-sharper, and worse still, a coward, who, with his gay regi¬ 
 ment, ran away from the Scots in 1639, and pocketed a beating 
 from Sir John Digby, for maligning a lady. He was found guilty 
 of treason, lor his participation in a plot for the release of 
 Strafford from the Tower, and died in France, whither he had 
 made his escape, in 1641. Carew, a poet of the same light, 
 graceful, amatory wit, did not live to see the commencement of 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 51 
 
 civil war, having died in 1G39. His masque of “ Ccelum Britan- 
 nicum ” was prepared at Whitehall in February, IG39, by the 
 King, the Duke of Lennox, the Earls of Devonshire, Holland, 
 Newport, Elgin, and others, when Inigo Jones contrived the 
 scenery and machinery, and Henry Lawes, the friend of Milton, 
 composed the music. Carew’s song— 
 
 “ He that loves a rosy cheek, or a coral lip admires,” 
 
 [s still popular, and indeed the short and troubled beginning of 
 Charles I.’s reign, has produced the best love songs in the language. 
 Lovelace (146) was one of the most brilliant of these poetic triflers, 
 well born, beautiful, accomplished, and brave, the perfect model 
 of the cavalier. His sonnet to Althea from prison, begin¬ 
 ning— 
 
 “ When love with unconfined wings 
 Hovers within my gates,” 
 
 is a sweet, almost heroic embodiment of the cavalier’s religion, 
 which, all compact of love and loyalty, leaves a higher reverence 
 and deeper devotion to the puritan. The last stanza— 
 
 “ Stone walls do not a prison make, 
 
 Nor iron hars a cage; 
 
 Minds innocent and quiet take 
 That for a hermitage. 
 
 If I have freedom in my love 
 And in my soul am free, 
 
 Angels aloue that soar above 
 Enjoy such liberty,” 
 
 will long be quoted by many who know nothing of the writer. 
 
 Lovelace’s Lucasta—Lucy Sacheverell—will go down to posterity 
 with Waller’s Sacharissa—the fair Lady Dorothy Sidney. When 
 Lovelace, after serving the King in both his expeditions against 
 the Scots, left England, he raised and commanded an English 
 regiment in the service of France. He was desperately wounded 
 at Dunkirk, and the news of his death being generally believed, 
 his Lucasta married on the strength of the report, and 
 poor Lovelace returned to England to find her the wife of 
 another, lleckless and broken-hearted, lie fell into melancholy 
 and misery, was long imprisoned, and after his release died in 
 abject wretchedness, at the age of forty, in 165S. 
 
52 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 Waller (154) is a political as well as a poetical personage of 
 the period. Born in 1603, he was a member of Charles’s first 
 parliaments, and though originally a courtier, inclined from his 
 first conspicuous appearance in public life in the parliament of 
 1639, to the cause of the Commons, greatly to the annoyance of 
 the King, who had relied on his support. In the long parliament; 
 he was one of the members chosen to conduct the prosecution of 
 the ship-money judges. But he afterwards fell away from the 
 Parliament, as the breach between parties widened. He sent 
 1000 broad pieces to the King, when he set up his standard at 
 Nottingham in 1642; and when appointed as one of the par¬ 
 liamentary commissioners to treat with Charles for peace, after the 
 battle of Edgehill, he was already in heart a traitor to the Parlia¬ 
 ment. Immediately afterwards he engaged in the plot, known by 
 his name, and, when it was discovered, basely purchased his own 
 life by turning informer. He was expelled from the house, and, 
 after spending the best part of his fortune in bribes, obtained a 
 commutation of his sentence of death, to one of perpetual banish¬ 
 ment, and a fine of ten thousand pounds. He returned to 
 England by permission of Cromwell, in 1652, and employed on 
 panegyrics of the Lord Protector the same pen which after the 
 restoration was as active in fulsome adulation of Charles II. Pie 
 died in 1687, after serving in the only parliament summoned by 
 James. 
 
 Of the second epoch of the civil war, among the most conspicuous 
 personages here is the gallant and loyal Duke of Kichmond (128), 
 who stood by his dying master on the scaffold, and was one of 
 the scanty band that followed the body of Charles, through the 
 falling snow, to his hurried and irreverent interment at Windsor. 
 Here, too, is the Duke of Hamilton (129), the leader of the Presby¬ 
 terian party in Scotland, who invaded England in 1648, at the head 
 of the Scottish forces, which took up in arms against the inde¬ 
 pendent party. Defeated by Cromwell in the battle of Preston, 
 he was beheaded on the same scaffold with the brave Lord Capel 
 and the inconstant Holland. Capel was captured by Fairfax, 
 along with Lord Norwich (formerly Sir Charles Goring), Sir 
 Charles Lucas (135), Sir George Lisle, and Sir Bernard Gascoyne, 
 after their heroic defence of Colchester, in August, 1648. Lucas 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 5 3 
 
 and Lisle were shot, the officers having surrendered without con¬ 
 ditions for their personal safety. Lord Capel and Lord Norwich 
 were tried lor high treason, and their original sentence of banish¬ 
 ment having been reversed by the commons without the concur¬ 
 rence of the lords, they were again tried by a high court of justice 
 specially erected for the purpose, after the execution of the King. 
 Capel had escaped from the Tower before the trial, but was re¬ 
 taken and suffered death with Hamilton and Holland, on March 
 the Oth, 1G49. His closing hours were marked by admirable 
 courage, unflinching loyalty, and Christian resignation. Of the 
 many noble deaths of that terrible time, there is none nobler than 
 Capel’s. One cannot but lament that the casting vote of the 
 Speaker, which saved Goring, was not sufficient to turn the scale 
 for Capel, whose sentence was confirmed but by three or four 
 voices. Had it not been for the stern determination of Ireton 
 and Cromwell, all would probably have been spared except 
 Hamilton, for whom, as an invader of the kingdom, there was no 
 pardon to be expected. There can be no question that these men 
 were all traitors against the Parliament, the only de facto autho¬ 
 rity in the kingdom at that time. 
 
 To this second epoch belongs the great rise of Cromwell from 
 his post of commander of the Parliamentary eavalrv under Fairfax, 
 to the chief command in the Scotch and Irish campaigns, and, 
 later still, to the lord-generalship of all the armies of the Parlia¬ 
 ment, and finally, to the lord protectorate of Great Britain. Of 
 his efficient instruments—Ireton, Fleetwood, Hammond, Pride, 
 "Whalley, and the other major-generals formed under his eye— 
 there are no portraits in our gallery. Only Blake (151), the great 
 sea general, is here ; a bluff, burly man ; of such a lion-like port 
 as we might look for in the unwearied assailant of the Dutch and 
 Spaniards ; a worthy right hand for Cromwell on the sea, where 
 he died, worn out by scurvy, in sight of Plymouth, after his vic¬ 
 tory of Santa Cruz, in 1(557. The omission of a port rait of George 
 Monk is serious. Altogether, we could have wished that in this 
 part of the collection had been included more portraits of the 
 earnest and resolute men who composed the court which con¬ 
 demned Charles, and those who so stoutly supported Cromwell in 
 his troubled protectorate. Mr. Peter Cunningham seems to have 
 
54 
 
 THE AB.T TBEASUBES EXHIBITIONS'. 
 
 laid under contribution the galleries rather of royalist than of 
 roundhead families ; at all events, the leading figures of the pro¬ 
 tectorate are altogether wanting, as well as the fifth monarchy men, 
 Yane and his followers, Cromwell’s most bitter and dangerous 
 antagonists. Nor is there even a portrait of Milton, Latin 
 secretary to the Parliament, who wore his eyes out in that 
 service. 
 
 We have now exhausted our illustrations of the civil wars and 
 the protectorate, and must pass to a very different stage,—the 
 gay and dissolute court of the [Restoration. 
 
 We have but to cross the nave of the Old Trafford Gallery, and 
 we are in a new historical world. The period of the Protectorate, 
 which lies between the first and second Charles, is comparatively 
 unrepresented, as we have said, and thus there is nothing to 
 weaken the force of the contrast between the physiognomies of 
 the two reigns. Instead of the noble Charlotte de la Tremouille, 
 and the heroic Jane Cavendish—women who encouraged the 
 defenders of their castle walls against the cannon and pikes of 
 Fairfax and Cromwell—we must be content, now, with a luxurious 
 Louise de Querouaille (ISO-198), a full-blown Barbara Yilliers 
 (1S4-1S5a), or a roguish Nell Gwynne (197)— heroines of the 
 matted gallery and the alcove, whose warfare was with nothing 
 nobler than a rival favourite, and whose best-fought field of battle 
 was the basset table. Prom the sad, sober, resolute heroes of the 
 mighty struggle between King and commons, we must descend 
 to the intriguers of the Cabal, the titled pensioners of the French 
 King, the sharpers of Whitehall, the sots, bullies, and rake-hells 
 of Covent Garden and Drury Lane—to such ignoble parodies of 
 the statesman as Bennet (186), or Brouncker (230) —such apes 
 of the poet as Rochester (227 a) —such scholars as Busby (228 a) 
 —and such divines as Spratt (228b). If we have here but two 
 of the five members of the Cabal, the politic and versatile Shaftes¬ 
 bury (229), and the plausible and pretentious Arlington (186), 
 have we not en revanche personages whose influence was for that 
 vile reign beyond the power of ministers—Jacob Hall, the rope 
 dancer (226), the favourite of the favourite, and a whole covey 
 of royal mistresses—Madame Carwell (180-198), and La Belle 
 Stuart (181), in the costume of Britannia, as she may have been 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 55 
 
 attired when the King imagined that dedicate compliment of 
 taking her handsome face and figure for the representation of 
 the national nymph, on the copper coinage of the realm—the 
 impetuous imperious “Bab Villiers” (184, 185), better known 
 by her first title of Lady Castlemaiue than by her later addition 
 of Duchess of Cleveland, and “pretty witty Nell” (197),—the 
 most loveable—or, rather, likeable of that wanton troop of brazen 
 beauties. A royal mistress in the costume of Britannia, is the 
 aptest symbol of that reign. It typifies the life of Charles II. (182), 
 in little. His mistress was ever to him more than his kingdom; 
 and all he loved and cared for in the royal diguity was the means 
 it afforded of an easier and more liberal supply of money to 
 squander on the pimps and prostitutes by whom he loved to 
 surround himself. He would have sold his rights to Cromwell 
 for a good round sum. He did sell himself to the French King, 
 and became the hired servant of Louis XIV. to escape the 
 annoyance of a parliament that was always making difficulties 
 about money. 
 
 It was natural in Mr. Cunningham to represent this reign 
 mainly by the lazy, loose-draped, luxurious beauties with whose 
 memory its ignominious annals are most closely interwoven. 
 Besides those we have enumerated, here are, of De Gram- 
 mont’s heroines, La Belle Hamilton (21G) herself—oue of the 
 most respectable of that briliant bevy—and the Countess of 
 Southesk (217), the Lady Carnegie of Antony Hamilton’s lively 
 memoir. Of the former, the story is well known, that, after she 
 had been wooed and won by the lively Philibert Chevalier De 
 Grammont, that worthy, having received his pardon from Louis 
 XIV. was in such a hurry to return to his beloved Versailles, that 
 he forgot poor Elizabeth Hamilton, vows, marriage promise, and 
 all. Luckily, the lady had brothers, who followed and overtook 
 De Grammont, at Dover, just as he was going to embark. They 
 entered the room where he was with stern faces, “ Chevalier de 
 Grammont,” thev said, “have you forgotten nothing in London?” 
 The witty Frenchman read British earnest in the looks, which 
 gave point to the question. “ 1 beg your pardon,” was his reply, 
 “I forgot to marry your sister.” They returned together, aud 
 Elizabeth Hamilton became Madame, afterwards Countess de 
 
56 
 
 THE AET TEE AS USES EXHIBITION". 
 
 Grammont. The story of Lady Carnegie, and the revenge taken 
 by her brutal, bull-baiting, cock-fighting husband, for her infidelity 
 to him with the Duke of York, is too foul to sully our columns. 
 Here, too, is Anne Hyde (206), daughter of Lord Chancellor 
 Clarendon, whose secret marriage with the Duke of York, at 
 Breda, so discomposed her father and so disgusted the royal 
 family, when, in 1660, the pregnancy of the lady rendered longer 
 concealment impossible. The Duke of Gloucester used to leave 
 the room when she entered it, swearing “ she smelt so strong 
 of her father’s green bag ; ” and the impetuous Queen Dowager 
 declared “ whenever that woman should be brought to Whitehall 
 by one door, she would instantly quit it by another, and never 
 enter it again.” Anne Hyde, however, was a woman of much 
 sounder sense, and more good qualities, than ninety-nine out of 
 a hundred in that blackguard court. There is not an incident in 
 all the chronique scarulaleuse of Whitehall in which one can more 
 completely sympathise than the duchess’s triumph over Sir George 
 Berkeley and the other libertines who had maligned her as the 
 duke’s mistress, when the duke presented her to them as his wife. 
 To conceal their surprise and astonishment, Clarendon tells us, 
 “ they fell upon their knees to kiss her hand, which she gave them 
 with as much majesty as if she had been used to it all her life.” 
 Her daughters Mary and Anne were successively queens of 
 England. The duchess died a Homan catholic. That is a striking 
 anecdote in Burnet, of her deathbed, when Blandford, Bishop of 
 Rochester, entering the room suddenly, found Queen Catherine 
 of Braganza sitting by the dying woman. “Blandford,” says 
 Burnet, “was so modest and humble that he had not presence of 
 mind enough to begin prayers, which probably would have driven 
 the Queen out of the room; but that not being done, she pre¬ 
 tended kindness, and would not leave her. He happened to say, 
 
 ‘ I hope you continue still in the truth; ’ upon which she asked, 
 
 ‘ What is truth P ’ and then, her agony increasing, she repeated 
 the word, ‘Truth! truth! truth!’ often; and so died.” She 
 was but thirty-four when she expired, with that awful question 
 on her lips. 
 
 Ho personage of that reign has so good a claim on our sympa¬ 
 thies a3 poor Catherine of Braganza, who sits here (215) by the 
 
THE BRITISH 1'OIITIIAIT GALLERY. 
 
 57 
 
 side of La Belle Stewart, as she must often have done sorely 
 against her will, while she lived. The letter in which Charles 
 gives Lord Clarendon an account of the first impression she made 
 on him is preserved in the British Museum, and is, on the whole, 
 favourable to the Queen. But to liis intimates Charles held a 
 very different language, telling Colonel Legge, that when he first 
 saw her, he “ thought they had brought him a bat instead of a 
 woman.” We may fancy the poor little shy secluded foreigner, 
 standing timidly in the midst of those flaming favourites, sur¬ 
 rounded by her only friends, her Portuguese women, with their 
 olive faces, and huge fardingales, as Lord Hartford's harsh pen has 
 described her “short and broad, of a swarthy complexion; one of 
 her fore teeth standing out which held up her upper lip ; exceed¬ 
 ingly proud, and ill-favoured.” Those nearer her person, however, 
 give a very different account of her, both as to face and character. 
 Her portrait here does not at all bear out Lord Dartford’s repul¬ 
 sive word-painting. She appears in it in the Portuguese costume, 
 which the ridicule of her husband afterwards persuaded her to 
 change for the loose low gown, showing the bare bosom and naked 
 arms, which did not suit her swarthy skin quite so well as it did 
 the alabaster charms of La Belle Querouaille, or the healthy red 
 and white of pretty Nelly. Every manly heart must feel for this 
 poor Queen, when she read the name of Lady Castlemaine, in the 
 list of her ladies of the bedchamber, and indiguantly drew her pen 
 through it. But she was not to be spared even a worse insult, 
 when, a little later, her husband—shame on him—led up the 
 flaunting favourite to Catherine, at Hampton Court, and formally 
 presented the acknowledged mistress, to the young, strange, 
 unfriended wife. Catherine first grew pale; then burst into 
 tears; then the blood gushed from her nose, and she fainted. 
 It is sad to follow the gradual breaking down of this natural 
 disgust, under the combined influence of the King’s coldness, the 
 open neglect of the Court, the solicitations even of Clarendon, the 
 most respectable of the royal advisers, and—stronger than all—the 
 recklessness of despair. We may conceive what we will of the 
 bitter struggles that must have wrung that lonely and friendless 
 heart, in the interval between that fainting-fit at Hampton Court 
 aud her sharing the same coach with Charles and Lady Castle- 
 
o8 
 
 THE AET TEEASUEES EXHIBITION. 
 
 maine. We shall not easily surpass the reality of Catherine’s 
 suffering. Almost more touching than even the thought of these 
 sorrows, are her awkward little efforts to win some place in her 
 husband’s cold and callous heart, by acts and arts such as he loved 
 —by dressing loosely, and low; by breaking out into rude frolics, 
 and practical jokes and excesses, which, however they might 
 become La Belle Jennings, or Winifred Wells, must have looked 
 strangely out of place on the part of the grave, dark-browed, sad¬ 
 eyed Portuguese. And what a past of suppressed sorrow is 
 revealed in that reply to the Duchess of Cleveland, when, entering 
 the Queen’s closet while Her Majesty was under the hands of the 
 hairdresser, she expressed her surprise that the Queen could sit so 
 long. “ I have had so much reason to exercise my patience, that 
 I can bear it very well.” She must have learnt to bear most 
 indignities than can be laid on a woman. La Belle Stewart was 
 one of her maids of honour; but the Queen never ventured into 
 her dressing-room, it is said, without listening to hear if the King 
 were there. 
 
 The distance that separates the England of the Protectorate 
 from the England of the Restoration is not ill measured by 
 the difference between the first and the second Duke of Albe¬ 
 marle ; between George Monk, the stern, silent, thoughtful 
 soldier, never wasting a word, or doing an act, without ulterior 
 meaning ; the sturdiest assertor of English glory on the sea; the 
 rescuer of his country from the perils of anarchy, at the risk of 
 his own head;—and Christopher Monk, the second and last duke, 
 known only by his extravagance, his amours, and his love of the 
 bottle, to which he fell a victim, for he is said to have died drunk 
 in 1688, the year after he had realised 90,000?. of the 300,000?. 
 fished up by Captain Phipps, from the wreck of a Spanish 
 galleon off Hispaniola. When he died he held the governor¬ 
 ship of Jamaica, the conquest of which was so largely due to 
 the prestige and power which his father and Blake had given to 
 the British navy. There must have been Jn the second duke 
 more of his mother,—the coarse, tipsy, foul-mouthed Anne Clarges, 
 the ex-laundress and farrier’s daughter,—than of his sagacious, 
 silent father. Let us record, at this point, one anecdote of the 
 first duke. When the plague of 1666 reached its height, and all 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 59 
 
 that could had fled from the doomed city to the pleasures of the 
 court at Oxford, three men staid behind, visiting the pest-houses, 
 guarding deserted property, comforting and aiding the sick. 
 These three were George Monk, Sheldon Archbishop of Canter¬ 
 bury, and Lord Craven (123), who deserved notice in our article 
 on the reign of' Charles I. as one of the most chivalrous of cava¬ 
 liers, and the devoted and noble lover of the Queen of Bohemia. 
 Lady Ogle (212), afterwards the contracted bride of Thomas 
 Thynne, and eventually Duchess of Somerset, deserved a place 
 here, as the greatest heiress of her time, the heroine of a bloody 
 romance, and the wife of Charles Seymour, the proudest member 
 of the proudest family of the British peerage. She was heiress 
 of Jocelyn Percy, the eleventh Earl of Northumberland, and was 
 left a “virgin widow,” in 1680, by Henry Cavendish, Earl of 
 Ogle, son and heir of Henry, the second Duke of Newcastle (187). 
 She was contracted by her mother to Thomas Thynne, of Long- 
 leat, better known as Tom of Ten Thousand, from his great 
 wealth, the bosom friend of Monmouth, the Issachar of Dryden’s 
 Absalom and Achitophel. In consequence of the bride’s extreme 
 youth her mother interposed a year’s delay between the contract 
 and the marriage. In that interval the young bride expressed a 
 strong distaste of the inchoate union, and this, and her wealth, 
 encouraged Count Konigsmark, the most brilliant type of the 
 courtly adventurer, who, for this age, replaces the knight-errant 
 of the days of chivalry to remove Thynne, in order himself to 
 secure the young bride and her vast possessions. He employed 
 three foreign assassins in his service—Yratz, Boroski, and Stern 
 —who shot Thynne in his coach in Pali Mall, near the corner 
 where the Opera colonnade now stands, on the night of Tuesday 
 the 12th of February, 1682. Konigsmark was tried for the 
 murder, but acquitted. The three bravos were hung on the scene 
 of the deed. It was the younger brother of this Konigsmark who 
 was the lover of the ill-fated Dorothea, Princess of Zell, the wife 
 of our first George. The younger Konigsmark was waylaid and 
 murdered, by the Elector’s orders, while on his way from an 
 assignation in the Eleetress’s apartments; and the guilty wite 
 was consigned to the prison in which she spent the rest of her 
 life. Lady Ogle afterwards married Charles Seymour, the proud 
 
60 
 
 TKE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 Duke of Somerset, so long chancellor of the University of Cam¬ 
 bridge, and one of the principal agents in bringing over the 
 Prince of Orange, after his dismissal from the post of lord of the 
 bedchamber by James, for his refusal to assist at the public 
 reception' of the Count a’Ada, the Pope’s nuncio. He told the 
 King he could not serve him on this occasion, being assured it 
 was contrary to law. The King asked him if he did not know he, 
 the King, was above the law ? The Duke replied that, if the 
 King was above the law, he himself was not; and so retired 
 from his office with all the dignity of a Somerset. 
 
 The portrait of Antony Ashley Cooper is one which, if physio¬ 
 gnomy were a perfect science, ought to find us long employment, 
 in deciphering the puzzling lines in which such a character should 
 be written on the face. One of the most active and valued mem¬ 
 bers of parliament under the Protectorate—he was the centre 
 figure in Oliver’s great council; the principal agent in upsetting 
 Kichard Cromwell, and bringing back Charles II.; the soul of the 
 Cabal, and the most unscrupulous of the court party, as he was 
 afterwards the most daring and determined leader of the opposi¬ 
 tion. Ho hand less masterly than Dryden’s should be called in to 
 unravel the twisted threads of one of the most checkered webs of 
 character ever woven in a human soul: 
 
 “For close designs and crooked counsels fit. 
 
 Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit: 
 
 Restless, unfixed in principles and place. 
 
 In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace. 
 
 A fiery soul, which worketh out its way, 
 
 Fretted the pigmy body to decay, 
 
 And o’er informed the tenement of clay. 
 
 A daring pilot in extremity; 
 
 Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high 
 He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit, 
 
 Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit. 
 
 Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 
 
 And thin partitions do their bounds divide; 
 
 Else, why should he, with wealth and honour blest, 
 
 Refuse his age the needful hours of rest,— 
 
 Punish a body which he could not please,— 
 
 Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease ? 
 
 And all to leave what he with toil had won, 
 
 To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son. 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 Cl 
 
 In friendship false, implacable in hate, 
 
 Resolved to ruin, or to rule the state; 
 
 To compass this, the triple bond he broke, 
 
 The pillars of the public safety shook, 
 
 And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke ; 
 
 Then seized with fear, yet still affecting fame, 
 
 Usurped a patriot’s all-atoning name. 
 ***** 
 
 Held up the buckler of the people's cause 
 Against the crown, and skulked behind the laws.” 
 
 The cool unprincipled nature of the man is well illustrated by his 
 reply to Charles, who said to him one day, “ Shaftesbury, I 
 believe thou art the wickedest follow in my dominions.” “ For a 
 subject, sire,” replied the earl, “ I believe I am.” The one bright 
 point in his career is his having been the main instrument in 
 passing the Habeas Corpus Act, in 1670, at the height of the 
 dangerous days of Popish, Meal-tub, and Rye House plots. 
 
 Here, too,—by the ignominious figures of Arlington (23S), 
 Brouucker (230), and Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (227a), 
 appropriately painted as crowning bis monkey with a laurel 
 crown, in scorn of poetry,— hangs one of the two noblest 
 examples, which even that reign affords, of patriotism and public 
 virtue,—William Lord Russell (227), who, with Algernon Sidney, 
 expiated on the scaffold the crime of loving liberty in slavish 
 times. For the sake of the protest involved iu such lives and 
 deaths, against the baseness of their contemporaries, Sidney 
 should have been here, and Russell’s noble wife, to remind 
 us that all the statesmen of the Restoration were not Shaftes- 
 burys and Lauderdales, and all its women not Castlemaines and 
 Querouailles. 
 
 The short and troubled three years of the reign of James II. are 
 scarcely illustrated here, save by portraits of Janies and his ill-fated 
 Queen, Mary of Modena, and the brilliant, shallow Monmouth— 
 who is represented in the Clarendon picture (174) listening to 
 the pernicious counsels of the arch-plotter Ferguson. Nor is the 
 reign of William much more fully illustrated by the full-lengths 
 of that king and his wife (195 and 196)—the very portraits given 
 by the monarch to his favourite Beutiuck, who is himself 
 represented in a bad picture of Kneller’s (231e), of which nothing 
 but the authenticity can excuse its stiffness and lack of vitality. 
 
62 
 
 THE AET TEEASTTEES EXHIBITION. 
 
 In common with the literature of Charles II., our quaint old 
 friend, Pepys (224), will be welcome to all. Here he is in 
 the original picture, by Hales, who,—after painting Mrs. Pepys, 
 “ poor wretch,” to Samuel’s satisfaction, “ a most pretty picture, 
 and mighty like my wife,” his price being first duly ascertained 
 by the cautious clerk of the Acts,—had the honour of painting 
 Samuel himself. “To Hales’s”—writes Pepys, in that most 
 inimitable of all diaries of his, under the date of March 17, 
 1666—“and paid him 14 1. for the picture, and 1 1. 5s. for the 
 frame. This day I began to sit, and he will make me, I think, 
 a very fine picture. He promises it shall be as good as my 
 wife’s, and I to sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break 
 my neck, looking over my shoulder, to make the picture for him 
 to work by. Home, having a gre:.t cold; so to bed, drinking 
 butter-ale.” Here is the very Indian gown which he hired to 
 be drawn in, and in which he had many a pleasant half hour at 
 the painter’s, with Mrs. Pierce—the sly old rogue—and the 
 “ musique,” Samuel’s own song, “Beauty retire,” in the hand, 
 “painted true,” as the diary duly records. By the side of Pepys 
 hangs his correspondent and brother diarist, the amiable, pedantic 
 Evelyn (225). Here, too, are Newton (222-240), and Locke 
 (223), and Wren (229e) ; and, further off, among the kit-cat 
 portraits, Dryden (265), Vanbrugh (266), and Congreve (267)— 
 all names too great, in their respective walks of philosophy, art, 
 didactic poetry, and wit, to be profaned by comment of ours. 
 
 The reign of Anne is like one of those meetings of tidal waters 
 where the voyager is tossed in the hurly-burly of the opposing 
 forces till he is sickened and confused, and only discovers the 
 overmastering strength of the dominant current when it has borne 
 him out of the broken water of the tide-way. In this reign 
 struggled for the last time, as equal antagonists, the claims of 
 prerogative and the powers of constitutionalism. It is an inter¬ 
 regnum between the arbitrary rule of the Stuarts and the lawr- 
 limited government of the house of Hanover. It is true that the 
 former was put down by the revolution of 1688, but William’s 
 whole reign was a struggle at once with those who repented of 
 the share they had taken in the convention, with the non-jurors 
 and Jacobites who regarded all the convention had done as deadly 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 6;i 
 
 sin, and with the rival ambitions which the Devolution had let 
 loose. The strong will and iron self-control of the Dutch prince 
 kept these enemies down , but during the reign of this weak 
 woman who succeeded him the monarch disappears from the 
 scene as a farce, and holds a place only as a puppet, the mastery 
 of whose strings is the object of contention between the leaders 
 of rival parties. Anne's reign was the hey-day of bed-chamber 
 women and back-stairs influence. If under Charles II. and 
 James II. we see a race of statesmen corrupted by the demora¬ 
 lising influences of a revolutionary time, we find under Anne a 
 set of politicians whose baseness was engendered by the tempta¬ 
 tions and opportunities which a disputed right to the throne 
 opened to men in office, and for which the peculiar weaknesses of 
 a woman left a field open which, under the stern hand of William, 
 had been closely barred from access. Here is Anne herself 
 (230 d)— fat, placid, irresolute—alternately the slave of the im¬ 
 perious Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, or of the more 
 insinuating Mrs. Masham (why are neither of them here F)—the 
 puppet at one time worked by the whig hands of Somers (2G3) 
 and Godolphin ; at another by the tory fingers of Harley (260), 
 St. John, and Harcourt (2IG). In spite of the absence from the 
 gallery of those central figures of the time, the two favourites, 
 fierce Duchess Sarah and supple Mrs. Abigail—of such pro¬ 
 minent politicians as Godolphin, Nottingham and Bolingbroke,— 
 of such partisans as Sacheverell,— of such generals as Mordaunt. 
 Earl of Peterborough,—the reign of Anue may be said to be well 
 illustrated here, in comparison at least with that of William 
 which precedes, and that of the first George which follows it. 
 
 Kneller’s half-length of the great Duke of Marlborough (212) 
 gives but a faint image of that model of manly beauty. Tet, even 
 on this canvas, we may trace something of that serene and sweet 
 expression, which it is so difficult to I’econcile with the current 
 theory of Marlborough’s character for baseness, sordid love of 
 money, and utter lack of truth and honour. There is no historical 
 hero about whom we find it so impossible to satisfy ourselves as 
 Marlborough. That he was one of the greatest generals and most 
 profound masters of statecraft England has ever had, is univer¬ 
 sally admitted. But every other conclusion on the subject of him 
 
64 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 is not only open to, but invites, dispute. We know of no 
 romance equal to the facts of his life. His career as court page, 
 his intrigues with the Duchess of Cleveland, his hair-breadth 
 ’scapes from his royal rival; his dexterous use of his sister 
 Arabella’s influence over her lover the Duke of York, by which 
 he obtained his pair of colours in the Guards; his nice 
 playing for a lead in the Revolution, when he held the issue of 
 the conflict in his own hand; his disgrace under William; his 
 restoration to favour ; his magnificent series of victories in the 
 war of the Succession—Blenheim, Ramiliies, Oudenarde, and 
 Malplaquet; his downfall before the conclusion of the peace of 
 Utrecht; his complete triumph in less than three years after,-— 
 all combine to make up a picture unequalled for brilliance of 
 colour, complexity of action, sharpness of contrast, variety and 
 magnificence of incident. The court, the council-room, and the 
 camp lend to it all they have of the brightest, subtlest, and most 
 stirring. The life of Marlborough still remains to be written. 
 We wish a biographer no better subject. 
 
 By Marlborough’s side hangs the Duchess of Buckingham 
 (243), daughter of James by Catherine Sedley, the one of his 
 mistresses who said pleasantly of her royal lover, “ I wonder why 
 he chooses us. We are none of us beautiful: and if we have wit 
 he is too dull to find it out.” The Duchess of Buckingham 
 affected royal state, and “never ceased,” says Walpole, “labouring 
 to restore the House of Stuart, and to mark her filial devotion to 
 it.” She was, in fact, the very centre of the Jacobite intrigues all 
 her life long. Through her, the Pretender transmitted letters, even 
 to Sir Robert Walpole himself. He always carried them to the 
 King, who used coolly to read, endorse, and return them. The 
 Duchess of Buckingham hated Sarah Duchess of Marlborough with 
 a perfect hatred; Sarah, we can well believe, returned the feeling. 
 When the former, about to bury her son, wrote to Sarah for the 
 loan of the funeral car, w'hich had carried the great duke to the 
 grave, “ It carried my Lord of Marlborough,” replied the Marl¬ 
 borough, “ and shall never be used for anybody else.” I have con¬ 
 sulted the undertaker,” was the Buckingham’s rejoinder, “ and he 
 tells me I may have a finer for twenty pounds.” It is said that Pope, 
 after writing his celebrated character of Atossa., communicated it 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 G5 
 
 to each duchess, pretending it was levelled at the other. “The 
 Buckingham believed him,” says "Walpole; “ the Marlborough had 
 more sense, and knew herself, and gave him a thousand pounds 
 to suppress it ; and yet he left the copy behind him.” Our 
 readers should turn to the passage in the second epistle of the 
 Moral Essays. The lines deserve to be remembered :— 
 
 “ Offend her, and she knows not to forgive ; 
 
 Oblige her, and she’ll hate you while you live. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Strange ! by the means defeated of her ends, 
 
 By spirit robbed of power, by warmth of friends, 
 
 By wealth of followers—without one distress, 
 
 Sick of herself through very selfishness— 
 
 Atossa, cursed with every granted prayer, 
 
 Childless, with all her children, wants an heir. 
 
 To heirs unknown descends the unguarded store, 
 
 Or wanders, heaven directed, to the poor.” 
 
 The absence of a portrait of the fiery Duchess of Marlborough is, 
 as we have said, a serious deficiency in the illustrations of the 
 reign of Anne. 
 
 Here, however, is one of the allies of the Marlboroughs, during 
 the most eventful part of the great duke’s career,—Somers (2G3), 
 as venerable a figure among the whig heroes of the robe as Lord 
 William Eussell is among whig parliamentary worthies—one of 
 the counsel for the seven bishops, the foremost of the framers 
 of the declaration of rights, the most stainless of all the mem¬ 
 bers of the convention, impeached for his share in the par¬ 
 tition treaties in 1701, and owing his escape less to the ground¬ 
 lessness of the charges against him than to the quarrels of the 
 lords and commons. Here is another of the whig “ glories of the 
 gown,” Cowper (234), twice chancellor. He presided as lord 
 steward at the trial of the rebel lords in 1715, and stands only 
 second to Lord Somers among the judicial notables of his party. 
 
 We may as well complete our leash of lord chancellors by 
 Harcourt (216), as determined an assertor of divine right as 
 Somers and Cowper were of Magna Charta; the opposer of the 
 attainder of Sir John Fenwick for his share in the assassination 
 plot, when Cowper was the foremost advocate for attainder ; the 
 attorney-general who conducted the prosecution before the jury 
 
60 THE AET TEEASUBES EXHIBITION. 
 
 which sentenced Defoe to the pillory; the counsel of Dr. Sach- 
 everell; the lord keeper on the return of the tories to power in 
 1711, and chancellor in 1713. Hewas a stately but amiable man, and 
 a lover of letters. His face bespeaks refinement and high breeding. 
 
 Robert Harley (260) is more agreeably remembered as the 
 friend of Swift and Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot—as the minister 
 who could slip away from the cares and quarrels of the council 
 hoard, to make a merry fifth in the concoction of a chapter of 
 ‘‘ Martinus Scriblerus,”—than as the fellow-plotter for power 
 with the brilliant but unprincipled St. John, the head of the tory 
 administration of 1710, and afterwards the Jacobite intriguer at 
 the bedside of the dying Queen. There is no doubt that the 
 party of which Harley was the head really contemplated the pro¬ 
 clamation of the Pretender, as soon as the Queen’s breath was 
 out of her body. But they knew they risked their heads in the 
 game, and they cared more for their heads than for the rights of 
 the house of Stuart. Atterbury (262), bishop of Rochester, the 
 would-be Laud of the expected grandson of Charles I. was for 
 proclaiming James Edward at Chariug Cross ; and said, bitterly, 
 when he found his bold counsel unseconded, “ There is the best 
 cause in England lost by want of spirit.” Atterbury died in 
 that exile from which the mistaken and ill-rewarded leniency of 
 Walpole allowed St. John to return. 
 
 And here are some of that bright cluster of wits, which shone 
 around Harley and St. John, with a lustre which has invested 
 that turbulent, intriguing, ignoble age of Anne with a certain 
 Augustan air. We may not be disposed to go the length of our 
 grandfathers in our estimate of the men who ate Kit Cat’s 
 mutton pies in Shire Lane, or of their rivals round the more aristo¬ 
 cratic board of “ The Brothers ” at the Thatched House. But 
 still Addison (2G9), Pope (271,273), Swift (272), Prior (270, 279), 
 Gay, Arbuthnot, and Steele (268), among didactic poets and 
 essayists; Vanbrugh (266), Congreve (267), and Wycherley, 
 among comic wits, are names not likely soon to be ousted from 
 the front rank of their respective divisions in English literature. 
 These six portraits (263-269) are interesting memorials of that gay 
 and witty whig society which met at Kit Cat’s, the mutton pie¬ 
 man, in the unsavoury region of Shire Lane, while the high-flying 
 
TIIE BRITISH PORTRAIT OALLERY. G7 
 
 tories were drinking “ Tlie King over the water” at the October 
 Club, in King Street, Westminster. We owe the Kit Cats two 
 things—tho use of the word “ toast,” as applied to a reigning 
 beauty, and the name of a canvas of the particular dimensions 
 used for these portraits. Knellcr, as one of his last public works, 
 painted forty of this club in this uniform size, for worthy old 
 Jacob Tonson, Pope’s first publisher, whom we see here (2G4), in 
 his character of secretary of the club—looking very pompous and 
 patronising, with “ Paradise Lost ” in his hand, in everlasting 
 memory, perhaps, of the ten pounds, which is all, as far as we know 
 by certain evidence, that the poem brought in to its author from 
 the booksellers. The kit-cat club was at once convivial, literary, and 
 political. Its glasses were inscribed with the names of celebrated 
 beauties-, and verses in their honour. In a room in that blind 
 alley—“ now tenanted by abandoned women, or devoted to the 
 sale of greengroceries—Halifax has conversed, and Somers unbent, 
 Addison mellowed over a bottle, Congreve Hashed his wit, Van¬ 
 brugh let loose his easy humour, Garth talked and rhymed.” * 
 The leaders of the whig party, as well as its wits and poets, were 
 members of the Kitcat Club. 
 
 Swift (272) had forsaken the whigs in disgust, when the 
 ministerial revolution of 1710 brought Harley and the tories to 
 the top of the wheel. The portrait of the Dean of St. Patrick’s 
 here exhibited represents him, not in one of those frequent savage 
 fits of his—when his dark blue eye, “ rolling resentment,” had 
 something terrific in its intense fierceness and scorn—but in one 
 of those milder moods, in which he exercised such fatal empire over 
 the hearts of his poor victims, Stella and Vanessa. Thackeray, in 
 his “ Lectures on the Humourists,” has painted Swift powerfully, 
 but with a pencil dipped in unmixed gall and lamp-black. Swift’s 
 was a much more checkered character than Thackeray makes out. 
 Much as he loved a lord, there was one thing Swift loved better, 
 and that was power. Por power, or in the exercise of power, he 
 would snub and bully any lord that ever wore a ribbon. That he 
 was foul and fierce in his invectives must be laid to the coarseness 
 of the time rather than of the man. But he was firm in his 
 private friendships, unselfish, and fond of doing kind acts, of which 
 
 * “ National Review,” No. VIII. April, 1857, “The Clubs of London.” 
 
68 
 
 THE AET TEEASUEES EXHIBITION. 
 
 many are recorded, with more self-contempt than self-praise, in 
 his journal to Stella. As for his relations with the other sex they 
 involve a mystery, under which two passionate hearts broke. But 
 who shall say that Swift was not all his life conscious of the 
 dark malady that “ crept like darkness through his blood.” 
 He certainly anticipated madness long before it came, in his 
 sad prophecy, “ I shall die like a tree—at the top first.” He 
 may well have shrunk from involving a loving woman in the 
 shadow of that black cloud. This has always appeared to us the 
 kindest interpretation of his aversion from marriage, and at least 
 as probable an explanation of his peculiar relation to Stella as any 
 that has yet been offered. 
 
 Of the figures around which the statesmen and wits of 
 the first half of the 18th century intrigued and plotted, squibbed 
 and lampooned—the son and grandson of James II.—the 
 first is wanting here. Of the second, and his morganatic wife, 
 the Countess of Albany, here are the portraits from Gfopsal, the 
 home of that sturdy old Jacobite, Charles Jennens, Esq., who kept 
 a bedroom always fitted up for the true heir to the throne, and 
 who was known besides by his friendship for Handel. The 
 Messiah was composed in three weeks, at Gfopsal, in a room 
 for which. Hudson painted the portrait of the mighty composer 
 (238), exhibited here. 
 
 But the young Pretender belongs to the date of the second 
 George. Of the first King of the House of Hanover, there is no 
 portrait here, except a picture of him in infancy, as a Cupid, bow 
 in hand (214), by his clever mother, Sophia, electress of Hanover, 
 youngest daughter of the Queen of Bohemia, and a pupil of 
 Honthorst’s. Though a Jacobite in early life, Sophia became a 
 staunch whig, when the crown was, by the act of settlement 
 secured to her descendants, failing issue of Queen Anne. The pic¬ 
 ture is bad enough for a royal amateur. Of the celebrities of this 
 reign here is Earl Stanhope (245), w'ho succeeded the meteoric 
 Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, as general of the English army 
 in Spain, in the war of the succession, and was subsequently the 
 most influential minister of George I. We should have wished 
 for a portrait of that strange compound of craziness and genius, 
 Mordaunt—the friend of Swift and Pope, the stormer of Barce- 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 GO 
 
 Iona, the general who, at the head of 1,200 men, drove the armies 
 of France and Spain before him from Barcelona to Madrid, and 
 who, had he not been thwarted by his impracticable allies, would 
 have seated Charles on the throne of Spain, in the teeth of odds 
 which it seemed past human skill and courage to struggle against. 
 Nor is there here a portrait of Sunderland, Stanhope’s rival for 
 power under the first George—nor of Craggs—nor of any other 
 of the politicians and projectors, who were implicated in the South 
 Sea scheme, which exploded in this reign—nor, a more serious 
 omission still, of Walpole, that most English of all ministers, who, 
 in spite of the taint which participation in the work of parlia¬ 
 mentary corruption has left upon his name, may safely be pro¬ 
 nounced by far the most patriotic and clear-sighted statesman 
 between Cromwell and the great Lord Chatham. The absence of 
 his portrait is ill supplied by the presence of that of his first wife, 
 Catherine Shorter (287), the sensible and amiable mother of 
 Horace Walpole. 
 
 Under this reign, too, we may place Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montague, here represented (274) by the Chevalier Rusca as the 
 beauty who laughed Pope’s love proposals to scorn, and not as the 
 slatternly blue-stocking of her later years; though the date of the 
 portrait, 1739, shows that the painter must have been representing 
 rather what Lady Mary was twenty years before, than what she 
 was when she sat to him. It was between 1718 and 1720 that her 
 intimacy with Pope began and ended. The principal beauty of 
 this face is in the bright black eyes—so celebrated in their time 
 by Pope, and Prior, and Gay:— 
 
 “What lady’s that to whom he gently bends? 
 
 Who knows not her ? Ah—those are Wortley’s eyes: 
 
 How art thou honoured, numbered with her friends, 
 
 For she distinguishes the good and wise.” 
 
 Of all Lady Mary’s titles to be remembered, one at least deserves 
 still to be borne in mind,—the introduction by her from Turkey 
 of the practice of inoculation for the small-pox, which, though 
 now displaced by the greater discovery of Jenuer, was not the less 
 in its time a mighty blessing to Europe. At some distance from 
 Lady Mary hangs the portrait of her luckless, dare-devil, spend¬ 
 thrift son (254) in a Turkish dress, by Romney, llis adventures 
 
70 
 
 THE ART TREASURES EXHIBITION. 
 
 make one of the richest romances of rascality—something between 
 Ferdinand Count Fathom, Cassandra, and Barry Lyndon. The 
 portraits of Pope (171-273), which hang near that of Lady 
 Mary, are by Kichardson and Kneller. Pope’s friend and 
 master in art, the painter Gervas, is here represented by his 
 portrait of the pleasant and amiable Duchess of Q.ueensberry, 
 the sweet Kitty of Prior, and the true friend and guardian 
 angel of jolly, good-humoured, deyil-may-care Gay. Of honest 
 Mat. Prior here are two portraits—one by Kigaud, of interest 
 for its date (1699), painted in Paris when Mat. was diplomatically 
 busy in arranging the partition treaty. They made diplomatists 
 of poets in those days ; Gay was secretary of embassy in 
 Hanover, Prior filled the same office at the Hague, and after¬ 
 wards rose to be ambassador at Paris, till Queen Anne’s 
 death unseated his friends in the ministry, and lost him his post. 
 Of all the stars of that literary Pleiad, Prior and Gay are perhaps 
 the pleasantest. Wit, good-fellowship, and easy temper in them 
 were not dashed by coldness as in Addison, nor by fierceness as in 
 Swift. Prior’s own character of himself well sums up the man:— 
 
 “ Not to business a drudge, nor to faction a slave, 
 
 He strove to make interest and freedom agree ; 
 
 In public employment industrious and grave, 
 
 And alone with bis friends, Lord, bow merry was he t 
 
 “ Now in equipage stately, now humbly on foot, 
 
 Both fortunes be tried, but to neither could trust; 
 
 And whirled in the round, as the wheel turned about, 
 
 He found riches had wings, and knew man was but dust.” 
 
 The reign of George II. is represented by his own portrait, 
 and that of his shrewd and excellent Queen Caroline, whose rare 
 qualities we of this generation have learnt to appreciate from the 
 Memoirs of Lord Hervey, recently published. Backstairs influ¬ 
 ence was still potent in this reign. Sir Bobert Walpole was not 
 too proud to profit by it. He owed his power quite as mucb to 
 the wise favour of the Queen, as to any appreciation of his 
 patriotism and good sense of which the King was capable. The 
 second Lord Harley (249), to whom we owe the Harleian library 
 and collections, may stand as an illustration of the Mecaenas-ship of 
 this period of titled patronage; but Lady Sundon (275), better 
 
THE BRITISH PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 71 
 
 known as Mrs. Clayton, the all-powerful bed-chamber woman of 
 the Queen, is a more characteristic type of the time. This woman 
 owed her influence not to the weakness of her royal mistress’s 
 will—like Sarah Jennings or Abigail Hill—but to her possession 
 of the secret of a bodily infirmity which Queen Caroline w r as so 
 anxious to conceal, that she dared refuse nothing to the person 
 who might have revealed it. Poor Caroline bore her tortures like 
 a Spartan, and the secret till her death was confined to the King, 
 Lady Sundon, the Queen’s German nurse, and Sir Robert Wal¬ 
 pole, who found it out by the Queen’s questioning him so closely 
 on the death of his first wife about rupture, which he thus dis¬ 
 covered to be the Queen’s mysterious malady. Among the lite¬ 
 rary celebrities of this time here represented, we may distinguish 
 Thomson, the author of “ Tlie Seasons” (278)—just the fat 
 sensual face we might expect in that lazy poet, who loved a soft 
 bed and good table better than aught in the world besides— 
 and Young, the pompous mitre-hunting author of the “ Night 
 Thoughts” (277). The military glories of the reign find their fit 
 representative in William, Duke of Cumberland (252),—whose 
 genuine good qualities are somewhat obscured to us by the recol¬ 
 lections of his stern persecution of the adherents of the Pretender, 
 and in his aide-de-camp, Earl Stair (253) of the family so painfully 
 connected at an earlier date with the bloody massacre of Glencoe. 
 
 Aud now we reach the long and eventful reign of George III. 
 To do more here than to note, in the briefest catalogue fashion, 
 the many illustrations of that reign here presented, is out of the 
 question. Besides the King and Queen (288-289), full-lengths 
 from the hand of Reynolds, here are the King’s early favourite and 
 most unpopular minister Lord Bute (290) ; his more glorious 
 servant, Lord Chatham (281) ; the good Lord Lyttleton (282) ; 
 aud his unworthy successor (239), whose memory is embalmed 
 for futurity by his addition “ the bad,” and by the ghost story 
 connected with his death; Lord Chancellor Camden (311); 
 Warren Hastings (291); and Chatham’s greater son, William 
 Pitt (319). Of the captains of that age, on land and sea, here 
 are Wolfe (315); the Duke of Wellington and Lord Hill (292, 
 293) ; St. Vincent and Howe (29S, 299). The art of the reiguis 
 represented by Reynolds’s own portrait by himself (307); by Gains- 
 
72 
 
 THE ABT TBEASUEES EXHIBITION. 
 
 borough’s, also from his own hand (310); by those of West and Law¬ 
 rence (301,302) ; Baeburn, Wilson, and Hoppner (303, 311, 312) ; 
 by Garrick and his wife (284, 285) ; charming heads, by Gains¬ 
 borough ; and by Mrs. Siddons at 29, and John Kemble (308,309), 
 less satisfactory examples of Lawrence. Its men of letters may 
 fittingly be ranked under the noble presidency of Samuel Johnson 
 (304), who hangs by the side of his faithful Bozzy (305), in the 
 not very congenial neighbourhood of Gibbon (306) ; Hume (313) 
 is not far off his brother sceptic. Gilbert West (295), and Mason 
 (276), ought to have had the company of their friend and Magnus 
 Apollo, Gray, of whom here is no portrait. Coming nearer 
 to our own times, we may salute such familiar great ones as Burns 
 (317), Scott (329), Byron (339), Crabbe, Southey, Coleridge, 
 and Keats (331, 332, 333, and 337). Only Wordsworth and 
 Campbell are wanting to the glorious group; Bogers (336) links 
 these poets to the social life of yesterday. Gifford and Lockhart, 
 successive editors of the “ Quarterly,” hang side by side (334, 
 335), their quarrels ended, their warfare done, their critic pens 
 blunted, and the gall in their ink stinging no longer: while the 
 science of the last half century is nobly recorded in Smeaton (296) 
 and Stephenson (294), in Priestley (321) and Dalton (323), 
 Davy (324), and Wollaston (325), and Banks (322). Lingering 
 on these last links of the glorious past, of which we are the in¬ 
 heritors, we feel proud to think that there were giants in our 
 fathers’ time also ; and that whether we test their generation in 
 arts or arms, in science or in letters, it can boast as great a trea¬ 
 sure of memorable names as any period that has gone before. 
 
 Let us turn from the historical gallery of Old Trafford with the 
 thought of the American poet: — 
 
 “ Forms of great men, all remind us 
 We may make our lives sublime ; 
 
 And, departing, leave behind us 
 Footsteps on the sands of time.” 
 
 BRADBURY AND EVANS, 
 
 PRINTERS TO THE MANCHESTER ART TREASURES EXHIBITION, 
 WHITEFRIAR8, LONDON.