“At last there was a stir; the monarchs came up the inclined approach and the band struck up. They took their places facing the ship’s bows, and Cranmer on panel by Holbein blessed the ship in as nearly a Catholic way as was possible, with the sign of the cross left out. A subordinate held his crozier before him. A hymn had previously been sung and a psalm, followed by the Lord’s Prayer. Then came the ‘christening’ (strange word), a picturesque Pagan ceremony. The Queen brightened up after the last ‘Amen’ and, nearing the table, reached over to the flower-decked bottle; then, stepping back, swung it from her against the monstrous ram, saying, ‘God bless this ship and all that sail in her.’ I heard a little crack, and only a few red drops trickled down. This wouldn’t do, for she immediately seized the bottle again and, stepping well back this time and holding the bottle as high over her head as the ropes would allow, flung it with such violence that it smashed all to pieces and the red wine gushed over her hands and sleeves and poured out its last drops on the table. A great cheer rang out at this, and the King laughingly seemed to say to her, ‘You did it this time with a vengeance!’ She flushed up, looking as though she enjoyed the fun. Then came the great moment of the cutting by the Queen of the little ropes that held the monster bound as by silken threads. Six good taps with the mallet, severing the six strands across a ‘turtle back’ in the centre of the table, and away flew the two ropes down amongst the cheering crowd of workmen and, automatically, down came the two last supports on either side of the yet impassive hull. Still impassive – not a hair’s breadth of movement! A painful pause. Some men below were pumping the hydraulic apparatus for all they were worth. I kept my eye on the nose of the ram, gauging it by some object behind. Firm as a rock! At last a tiny movement, no more than the starting of a snail across a cabbage leaf. ‘She’s off!’ A hurricane of cheers, and with the most admirable and dignified acceleration of speed the great ship, seeming to come into life, glided down the slips and, ploughing through the parting and surging waters, floated off far into the Hamoaze to the strains of ‘Rule Britannia.’ Queen Alexandra, in her elation, made motions with her arms as though she was shoving the ship off herself. Scarcely had the battleship Queen passed into the water than the blocks displaced by her passage were rolled back, still hot as it were from the friction, into the position they had occupied before she moved, and the King, stepping forward, turned a little electric handle at the table, and lo! the keel plate of the Edward VII. slowly moved forward and stopped in its position on the blocks as the germ of the new battleship. The King, in a loud voice, proclaimed that the keel plate of the Edward VII. was ‘well and truly laid,’ and a great cheer arose and ‘God Save the King,’ and all was over. A new battleship was born.14 We met Their Majesties at the Port Admiral’s at tea, and Will dined with them, together with some of his staff.
“March 10th. – Saw Their Majesties off. I wonder if they were getting tired of seeing always the same set of faces and smiles? I am going to present C. at Court on the 14th, and my function twin, Lady Charles, is going there, too, so I shall feel it will be a case of ‘Here we are again,’ when I meet the royal eye that night. In the evening the news of Methuen’s defeat and capture by Delarey. To think this horror was going on the day we received the King and Queen at North Road Station!
“March 14th. – The King’s Court was much better arranged than formerly, as we had only to make two curtseys – nothing more – instead of having to run the gauntlet of a long row of princes and princesses who were abreast of Queen Victoria (or her representative), and who used to inspect one from head to foot. These were now grouped behind the monarchs, and formed a rich, subdued background to the two regal figures on their thrones. (What a blessing to the aforesaid princes and princesses to be spared the necessity of passing all those nervous women in review, and by daylight, too!) Altogether the music and the generally more festive character of the function struck one as a great and happy improvement on the old dispensation. The King and Queen didn’t exactly say, ‘How do you do again?’ as I appeared, but looked it as I met their smiling eyes. This is the first Court of the King’s reign.
“March 27th. – Cecil Rhodes died yesterday. I am glad I saw him at the Cape. One morning just at sunrise I and the children were driving to Mass during the mission and, as we passed over the railway line, we saw people riding down from ‘Grootschuur.’ The foremost horseman was Cecil Rhodes, looking very big and with a wide red face. He gave me a searching look or stare as if trying to make out who I was in the shade of the carriage hood. So I saw his face well.
“April 3rd. – Will and I are invited by the King and Queen to see them crowned at Westminster. I am to wear ‘court dress with plumes but without train.’ But what if the nightmare war still is dragging on in June? The time is getting short! We hear the King is getting anxious. Lord Wolseley’s trip to the Cape (for his health!) is supposed to have really to do with bringing about peace. But ‘’ware politics’ for me. They are not in my line. What a wet blanket would be spread as a pall over all the purple canopies in Westminster Abbey if war was still brooding over us all! Imagine news of a new Methuen disaster on the morning of June 26th!”
On Varnishing Day that spring at the Royal Academy I found that my tent-pegging picture could not look to greater advantage, but it was in the last room, where the public looks with “lack-lustre eyes,” being tired.
On June 21st I left to attend the Coronation of Edward VII., spending two days at Dick’s monastery at Downside on the way, high up in the Mendip Hills. I note: “I had a bright little room at the guest house just outside the precincts. That night the full moon, that emblem of serenity, rose opposite my window, and I felt as though lifted up above that world into which I was about to plunge for my participation in the pomp of the Coronation in a few hours. It is inexpressibly touching to me to see my son where he is. A hard probation, for the Benedictine test is long and severe, as indeed the test is, necessarily, throughout the Religious Orders.
“June 24th. – Memorable day! I was passing along Buckingham Palace Road at 12.30 when I saw a poster: ‘Coronation Postponed’! Groups of people were buying up the papers. Of course, no one believed the news at first, and people were rather amusedly perplexed. No one had heard that the King was ill. On getting to Piccadilly I saw the official posters and the explanation. An operation just performed! and only yesterday Knollys telling the world there was ‘not a word of truth in the alarming rumours of the King’s health.’ I and Mrs. C. went to a dismal afternoon concert at 2.30 to which we were pledged, and which the promoters were in two minds about postponing, and we left in the middle to stroll about the crowded streets and watch the effect of the disastrous news. There was something very dramatic in the scene in front of the palace – the huge crowd waiting and watching, the royal standard drooping on the roof (not half-mast yet?), and the sense of brooding sorrow over the great building, which held the, perhaps, dying King. What a change in two or three hours!
“June 26th. – This was to have been the Coronation Day. General dismantling. Those dead laurel wreaths still lying in the gutters are said to be the same that were used at the funeral of King Humbert. What a weird thought! The crowds are thinning, but still, at night, they gaze at the little clumps of illuminations which some people exhibit, as the King is going on well. ‘Vivat Rex’ flares in great brilliancy here and there. The words have a deeper meaning than usual. May he live!
“June 27th. – This was to have been the day of the royal procession. Where is that rose-colour-lined coach I so looked forward to? Lying idle in its cover. Every one is moralising. Even the clubmen, Will tells me, are furbishing up little religious platitudes and texts; many are curiously superstitious, which is strange.”
On our return home I was very busy in the studio. There was much galloping and trotting of horses up and down in the Government House grounds for my studies of movement for my next Academy picture (dealing with Boer War yeomanry) and others.
“August 9th. – King Edward VII. was crowned to-day. At about 12.40 the guns firing in the Sound and batteries announced that, at last, the Coronation was consummated. We were asked to the ceremony, but could not go up this time.”
A little tour in France, with my husband and our two girls, made in September, 1902, gave us sunny days in Anjou on the Loire. The majestic rivers of France are her chief attraction for the painter, and to us English Turner’s charm is inseparably blended with their slowly flowing waters. We were visitors at a château at Savonnières, near Angers, for most of the time, and our hosts took care that we should miss none of the lovely things around their domain. The German “Ocean Greyhounds” of the Hamburg-Amerika line used to call at Plymouth in those days, huge, three-funnel monsters which, I think, we have since appropriated, and one of these, the Augusta Marie, bore us off to Cherbourg in all the pride of her gorgeous saloons, flower-decked tables, band, and extraordinary bombastic oleographs from allegorical pictures by the Kaiser William II. As we boarded her the band played “God Save the King,” the captain receiving Sir William with finished regulation attention, and hardly had the great twin engines swung the ship into the Sound to receive her passengers, than with another swing forward, which made the masts wriggle to their very tops, she was off. It was the “Marseillaise” as we reached France. That band played us nearly the whole way over. A really pretty idea, this, of playing the national air of each country where the ship touched.
It was vintage time at Savonnières, which was a French “Castagnolo,” a most delightful translation into French of that Italian patriarchal home. There were stone terraces garlanded with vines bearing – not the big black grapes of Tuscany, but small yellow ones of surpassing sugariness. We were in a typical and beautiful bit of France, peaceful, plenteous, and full of dignity. They lead the simple life here such as I love, which is not to be found in the big English country houses, as far as I know. I was truly pleased at the sight of the peasantry at Mass on the Sunday. The women in particular had that dignity which is so marked in their class, and the white lace coifs they wore had many varieties of shape, all most beautiful, and were very soignées and neatly worn. Not an untidy woman or girl amongst these daughters of the soil.
I was anxious to see “Angers la Noire,” where we stayed on our way from Savonnières to Amboise. But the black slate houses which gave it that name are being turned into white stone ones, and so its grim characteristic is passing away. Give me character, good or bad; characterless things are odious. I don’t suppose a more perfect old Angevin town exists than Amboise. It fulfilled all I required and expected of it. How Turner understood these towns on the broad, majestic Loire! He occasionally exaggerated, but his exaggerations were always in the right direction, emphasising thus the dominant beauties of each place and their local sentiment. Which recalls the deep charm of the rivers of France more subtly to the mind, Turner’s series or an album of photographs? Turner’s mind saw more truly than the camera. The castle of Amboise is superb and its creamy white stone a glory. Then came Blois, with a quite different reading of a castle, where plenty of colour and gilding and Gothic richness gave the character – not so restful to eye and mind as Amboise. Through both the châteaux we were marshalled along by a guide. I would sooner learn less of a place, by myself, than be told all by a tiresome man in a cicerone’s livery. Plenty of horrors were supplied us at both places, vitiating my otherwise simple pleasure as a painter in the sight of so much beauty.
We returned to Plymouth Sound on a lovely day, and there our blue launch, with that bright brass funnel I had so long agitated for, was awaiting us, and we landed at the steps of Mount Wise as though we had merely been for a trip to Penlee Point.
I found my picture of the yeomanry cantering through a “spruit” in the Boer War, “Within Sound of the Guns,” admirably placed this time at Burlington House, in the spring of 1903. I had greatly improved in tone by this time. Millais’ remark once upon a time, “She draws better than any of us, but I wish her tone was better,” had sunk deep.
On July 14th, 1903, the Princess Henry of Battenberg (as the title was then), with a suite of six, paid us a visit of two days at Government House, and we had, of course, a big reception, which was inevitable. Our guest hated the ordeal of all those presentations, being very retiring, and I sympathised. I heard her murmur to her lady, Miss Bulteel, “I shall die,” as the first arrival was announced. And there she had to stand till I and the A.D.C. had finished terrifying her with about 250 people in succession. What a tax royalty has to pay! There was the laying of a foundation stone, a trip in the launch up the Tamar, and something to be done each day, but with as many rests as we could squeeze in for our very simpatica princess. The drive through the streets of Plymouth showed me what the crowd looks like from royalty’s point of view as I sat by her side in the carriage. I remarked to her what bad teeth the people had. “They are nothing to those in the north,” the poor dear said. How often royalty has to run that gauntlet of an unlovely and cheering crowd!
I was now to go through the great ordeal of witnessing our dear Dick’s15 taking his vows. This was on September 4th, 1903, at Belmont Minster, Hereford.
On July 10th, 1904, a German squadron of eighteen men-of-war came thundering into the Sound, and on the 12th we assembled a Garden Party of about three hundred guests to give the three admirals and their officers a very proper welcome. Eighteen beautiful ships, but all untried. I lunched on board the flagship, the Kaiser Wilhelm II., on the previous day, and anything to equal the dandified “get up” of that war vessel could not be found afloat. Wherever there was an excuse for a gold Imperial crown, there it was, relieved by the spotless whiteness of its surroundings. The fair-haired bluejackets were extremely clean and comely, but struck me as being drilled too much like soldiers, and wanting the natural manner of our men. The impression on my mind at the time was that immense care and pains had been taken to show off these brand-new ships and to rival ours, but that they were not a bit like their models. The General dined in state on board that evening. Oh! the veneer of politeness shown to us these days; the bowings, the clicking of heels, the well-drilled salutes; and all the time we were joking amongst ourselves about the certainty we had that they were taking soundings of our great harbour. As usual, they were allowed to do just as they liked there. It is a tremendous thought to me that I have lived to hear of the surrender of Germany’s entire navy. How often in those days we allowed ourselves to imagine a modern possible Trafalgar, but such a cataclysm as this was outside the bounds of any one’s imagination.
I devoted a great deal of my time to getting up a “one-man-show,” my first of many, composed of water colours, and in accomplishing the Afghan picture I have already mentioned as being so much honoured by the Hanging Committee at the Academy in the spring of 1904. My husband’s command of the Western District terminated on January 31st, 1905, and with it his career in the army, as he had reached the retiring age. The Liberal Party was very keen on having him as an M.P., representing East Leeds. I am glad the idea did not materialise. I know what would have happened. He would have set out full of honest and worthy enthusiasm to serve the Patria. Then, little by little, he would have found what political life really is, and thrown the thing up in disgust. An old story. Non Patria sed Party! So utterly outside my own life had politics been that I had an amused sensation when I saw the Parliamentary world opening before me, like a gulf!
“January 31st, 1905. – Will is to stand for East Leeds. It is all very sudden. Liberals so eager that he has almost been (courteously) hustled into the great enterprise. Herbert Gladstone, Campbell-Bannerman and other leaders have written almost irresistible letters to him, pleading. When he goes to the election at Leeds he is to be ‘put to no expense whatever,’ and they are confident of a ‘handsome majority.’ We shall see! Besides all this he is given a most momentous commission at the War Office to investigate certain ugly-looking matters connected with the Boer War stores scandal that require clearing up. I am glad they have done him the ‘poetical justice’ of selecting him for this.
“February 13th. – We went to a very brilliant and (to me) novel gathering at the Campbell-Bannermans’. All the leaders of the Liberal Party there, an interesting if not very noble study. All so cordial to Will. Tremendous crush, but nice when we got down to the more airy tea room. The snatches of conversation I got in the general hubbub all sounded somewhat ‘shoppy.’ Winston Churchill, a ruddy young man, with a roguish twinkle in his eye, Herbert Gladstone and his lovely wife, our bluff, rosy host and other ‘leaders’ were very interesting, and we met many friends, all on the ‘congratulate.’ All these M.P.’s seem to relish their life. I suppose it has a great fascination, this working to get your side in, as at a football match.”
The general election in course of time swept over England and brought in the Liberal Party with an overwhelming majority. My husband did not stand for East Leeds. He had to abandon the idea, as a Catholic, on account of the religious difficulties connected with the Education Act.
Our life in the glorious west of Ireland, which followed our retirement from Devonport, has been so fully described by this pen of mine in “From Sketch-book and Diary” that I give but a slight sketch of it here. Those were days when one could give one’s whole heart, so to speak, to Erin, before the dreadful cloud had fallen on her which, as I write, has lent her her present forbidding gloom. That will pass, please God!
To come straight through from London and its noise and superfluous fuss and turmoil into the absolute peace and purity of County Mayo in perfect summer weather was such a relief to mind and body that one felt it as an emancipation. Health, good sleep, enjoyment of pure air and noble scenery; kindly, unsophisticated peasantry – all these things were there, and the flocks and herds and the sea birds. In the midst of all that appealing poetry, so peculiar to Ireland, I had a funny object lesson of a prosaic kind at romantic Mulranny, on Clewe Bay. In the little station I saw a big heap in sackcloth lying on the platform – “Hog-product from Chicago” – and the country able to “cure” the matchless Irish pig! I went on to get some darning wool in the hamlet – “Made in England” – and all those sheep around us! Outside the shop door a horse had the usual big nose-bag —”Made in Austria”! All these things, with a little energy, should have come out of the place itself, surely? I thought to encourage native industry, when found, by ordering woollen hose at the convent school. No two stockings of the same pair were of equal length. The bay was rich in fish, and one day came a little fleet of fishing boats —from France! There was Ireland to-day in a nutshell. What of to-morrow? Is this really Ireland’s heavy sleep before the dawn?
I have seen some of the most impressive beauties of our world, but never have I been more impressed than by the solemn grandeur of the mountain across Clewe Bay they call Croagh Patrick, as we saw it on the evening of our arrival at Mulranny. The last flush of the after-glow lingered on its dark slopes and the red planet Mars flamed above its cone, all this solemn beauty reflected in the sleeping waters. At Mulranny I spent nearly all my days making studies of sheep and landscape for the next picture I sent to the Academy – “A Cistercian Shepherd.” This gave me a period of the most exquisitely reposeful work. The building up of this picture was in itself an idyll. But the public didn’t want idylls from me at all. “Give us soldiers and horses, but pastoral idylls – no!” People had a slightly reproachful tone in their comments after seeing my poor pastoral on the Academy walls. Some one said, “How are the mighty fallen!”
We made our home in the heart of Tipperary, under the Galtee Mountains. It seemed time for us to seek a dignified repose, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” but we did not succeed in our intention. In 1906 my husband went on a great round of observation through Cape Colony and the (former) Boer Republics on a literary mission. I and E. went off to Italy, meanwhile; Rome as our goal. There I had the great pleasure of the companionship of my sister, and it may be imagined with what feelings we re-trod the old haunts in and about that city together.
“April 9th, 1906. – We had a charming stroll through the Villa d’Este gardens, where the oldest, hoariest cypresses are to be seen, and fountains and water conduits of graceful and fantastic shape, wherever one turns, all gushing with impetuous waters. The architects of these gardens revelled in their fanciful designs and sported with the responsive flood. Cascades spout in all directions from the rocks on which Tivoli is built. We had déjeuner under a pergola at the inn right over one of these waterfalls, where, far below us, birds flew to and fro in the mist of the spray. Nature and art have joined in play at Tivoli. I always have had a healthy dislike of burrowing in tombs and catacombs. The sepulchral, bat-scented air of such places in Egypt – the land, of all others, of limpid air and sunshine and dryness – is not in any way attractive to me, and I greatly dislike diving into the Roman catacombs out of the sunny Appian Way. On former occasions I went through them all, so this time I kept above ground. I learnt all that the catacombs teach in my early years, and am not likely to lose that tremendous impression.
“April 10th. – A true Campagna day, as Italianised as I could make it. We had a frugal colazione under the pergola of an Appian Way-side inn, watched by half a dozen hungry cats, that unattractive, wild, malignant kind of cat peculiar to Italy. The girl who waited on us drew our white wine in a decanter from what looked like a well in the garden. It had, apparently, not ‘been cool’d a long age in that deep-delved earth,’ but it did very well. I was perfectly happy. This old-fashioned al fresco entertainment had the local colour which I look for when I travel and which is getting rarer year by year. Our Colosseum moonlight was more weird than ever. At eleven we had our moon. It was a large, battered, woeful, waning old moon, that looked in at us through the broken arch. An opportune owl, which had been screeching like a cat in the shade, flitted across its sloping disc just at the supreme moment.”
To receive Holy Communion at the hands of the Holy Father is a privilege for which we should be very thankful. It was mine and E.’s on Easter morning that year, at his private Mass in the Sistine Chapel. There I saw Pius X. for the first time. Goodness and compassion shine from that sad and gentle face. It is the general custom to kiss the ‘Fisherman’s ring’ on the Pope’s hand before receiving, but Pius X. very markedly prevents this. One can understand! Our audience with the Holy Father took place on the eve of our departure. There was a never-absent look with him of what I may call the submissive sense of a too-heavy burden of responsibility. No photographs convey the right impression of this Pope. He was very pale, very spiritual, very kind and a little weary; most gentle and touching in his manner. The World War at its outset broke that tender heart. I sent him my “Letters from the Holy Land,” for which I received very urbane thanks from one of the cardinals. I don’t think the Holy Father knows a single word of English, and I wonder what he made of it.
As to our tour homeward, taking Florence and Venice on the way, I think we will take that as read. I revel in the Diary in all the dear old Italian details, marred only by the change I noticed in Venice as regards her broken silence. The hurry of modern life has invaded even the “silent city,” and there is too much electric glare in the lighting now, at night, for the old enjoyment of her moonlights. It annoyed me to see the moon looking quite shabby above the incandescent globes on the Riva.
From Venice to the Dublin Castle season is a big jump. We had an average of twenty-one balls in six weeks in each of the two seasons 1907 – 1908. Little did I think that it would be quite an unmixed pleasure to me to do chaperon for some five hours at a stretch; but so it turned out. It all depends what sort of daughter you have on the scene! The Aberdeens were then in power.
Lady Aberdeen was untiring in her endeavours to trace and combat the dire disease which seemed to fasten on the Irish in an especial manner. She went about lecturing to the people with a tuberculosis “caravan.” She brought it to Cashel, and my husband made the opening speech at her exhibition there. But her addresses came to nothing. The lungs exhibited in the “caravan” in spirits of wine appealed in vain. She actually asked the people that day to go back to their discarded oatmeal “stir-about”! They prefer their stewed tea and their artificially whitened, so-called bread, with the resultant loss of their teeth. My experiences at the different Dublin horse shows were sociable and pleasant. There you see the finest horses and the most beautiful women in the world, and Dublin gives you that hospitality which is the most admirable quality in the Irish nature.
Sir William spent the remaining days of his life in trying, by addresses to the people in different parts of the country, to quicken their sense of the necessity for industry, sobriety, and a more serious view of existence. They did not seem to like it, and he was apparently only beating the air. I remember one particularly strong appeal he made in Meath at a huge open-air meeting. I thought to myself that such warnings, given in his vivid and friendly Irish style, touched with humour to leaven the severity, would have impressed his hearers. The applause disappointed me. Well, he did his best to the very last for the country and the people he loved. He had vainly longed all his life for Home Rule within the Empire. Was this, then, all that was wanting?
I recall in this connection an episode which was eloquent of the hearty appreciation of his worth, quite irrespective of politics. At a banquet given in Dublin to welcome Lord and Lady Granard, after their marriage, he was called upon to respond for “the Guests.” For fully one minute the cheers were so persistent when he rose that he had to wait before his opening words could be heard. The company were nearly all Unionists.
After all the misunderstandings connected with Sir William’s association with the Boer War and its antecedents had been righted at last, these words of a distinguished general at Headquarters were spoken: “Butler stands a head and shoulders above us all.”
The year 1910 is one which in our family remains for ever sacred. My dear mother died on March 13th.
On June 7th a very brave soldier, who feared none but God, was called to his reward. Here my Diary stops for nearly a year.16