Lord Granville's stories gained enormously, of course, by the telling restraint of his raconteur' style, which had a certain dryness and bouquet not to be surpassed, so it is perhaps as well that I only remember one of them. Lord Granville had bought a very expensive horse from Anderson. Some little time after he met Anderson and said to him, Well, you know the price was quite extravagant, but I am bound to say the horse is worth it.' Anderson made a little bow and said, I can assure you, my lord, your approval is our only profit in the transaction.' In a speech which Lord Granville made many years ago at a farmers' dinner at Windsor, he went back to the pleasant days when he hunted the Queen's Hounds, and he told them that Mr. Disraeli had taunted Lord John Russell with having taken a young riding peer all boot and spur and pitched him into the prosaic office of the Board of Trade. His political services to his generation and to his party are in no danger of being forgotten. Speaking from recollection, I think one of the most persuasive speeches made on our side at the fever point of the first Home Rule crusade and cleavage was made by Lord Granville at Manchester. There he was amongst old friends and brave associations. In 1851, Lord Granville was sworn in as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, a rapid promotion. Madame de Lieven wrote 'in transports of joy' of the appointment. Granville,' she writes, 'is very popular at Manchester and with the Free Traders, which is a great thing.' In 1855 he became the Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords, a position which in the face of hopeless odds he felicitously held for thirty-six years without interruption. I can speak from grateful experience of the kindness and encouragement he knew how to bestow upon those who, like myself, succeeded very young, and knew very few people. Addison's Tory fox-hunter was of opinion that being able to talk French was prejudicial to a hunting seat. But he had never met a Lord Granville. At the Exhibition banquet at the Hôtel de Ville in 1851, England. owing to the ill-health of the Prince Consort, was represented by Lord Granville. On this occasion he charmed his hosts by responding for the Commissioners in a French speech free and flowing and full of telling points. 'Had he been Demosthenes himself,' Sir Theodore Martin tells us, 'speaking with the purest French accent, he could not have commanded more genuine applause.' The late Lord Hardwicke's popular Mastership was marked by its debonnair magnificence. It was to some extent a sort of renaissance of the Chesterfieldian splendours. Nothing stopped him if it were a question of getting there to help a deer. Dr. Croft once saw him jump some high iron hurdles in an emergency of this kind. His recent death will be regretted by all who knew him in the Queen's Country. Lord Suffield has the art of galloping like steam between his fences and yet jumping the place almost from a stand. He thus negotiates the trappiest obstacles with safety and despatch, without upsetting high-couraged and even fractious animals, and-for this is the real point-without giving spectators the faintest impression of sticky 'come-up' sort of riding. This means fine hands. The first time Lord Suffield went out with the Duhallow, a country which in the opinion of the natives is only practicable to those brought up within a few miles of Cork, they never could catch him for twenty minutes, a surprised top-sawyer of the Hunt being overheard thus to exhort his friend: For God's sake, Mike, ride at the man in the beard!' Unsurpassed as a judge of a horse or a hound, and one of the most undeniable cross-country riders of his day, Lord Coventry brings knowledge and experience to bear upon every practical detail of his office. The ancient honour and everyday welfare of the Royal Hunt are in safe keeping. CHAPTER XIV VÉNERIE AND THE VALOIS Pour le plaisir des rois je suis donné, A tous les chiens qui sans cesse me chassent. (Bouchet's Complainte du Cerf, 16th century.) THE sixteenth century in France is the Velasquez period of stag-hunting. It formed the grand style. Woodcraft huggermuggered along with poverty and privilege in the provinces, but Vénerie, at once an art and a science, came to Court. Like some daughter of the gods visiting the sons of men, she disputed precedence with everybody and everything. Even the king's mistresses had to reckon with her. Diane de Poitiers, conscious of the attractions of an enchanting rival, spent large sums of money in building hunting stables and mews, and laid out her demesne at Anet to suit hunting. Meeting gallantry and intrigue on equal terms, hunting became the instrument of political ambition. It conducted and controlled the great affairs of state.' It challenged diplomacy and plenipotentiaries. The main current of politics, or what we should call politics in these days, streamed along the alleys of Fontainebleau and Compiègne and flooded the level plains of the Loiret and Seine-et-Marne. François I., according to that eminent and polite Hellenist 1 Documents Inédits: Négociations avec la Toscane, t. iii, p. 421. 6 Budé, did a great deal for hunting. In his Treatise on Vénerie,' Budé tells him in the dedication, Sire, vous avez tellement dressé et poli l'exercice de la vénerie, qu'elle semble estre parvenue à sa perfection.' At all events, he put all the gilding on just as he did to the doors and ceilings of Fontainebleau. Tornabuoni, the Tuscan ambassador, evidently 'un homme grave,' writes to the Grand Duke Cosmo I. de' Medicis: This Court is not as other Courts are; here they only think of hunting, pretty women, entertainments, and change of scene. The Court only stays in a place as long as the herons last. They hunt the stag twice, then one day's deer catching ('aux toiles '), and then on again somewhere else.' 2 Everyday life was one long hunting progress. This is how he describes the invasion of the country by the scarletclad locusts : 'Quelquefois le roi, outre ses cent pages, ses deux cents écuyers, piqueurs ou chevaucheurs, mène avec lui quatre ou cinq cents gentilshommes, quelquefois il est accompagné de la reine ou des reines, suivies de leurs nombreuses dames et filles d'honneur. Alors tous les appartements d'en haut, toutes les salles d'en bas, tous les étages, tout le château, toute la cour, toute à chevals, toute en habits rouges, semble au milieu de la campagne trotter, galoper à la suite du roi, aussi en habit rouge, courant le cerf ou le sanglier.' This to-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new' way of going on quite upset all the Venetians. How swift we go, how softly, ah! Were life but as the gondola ! It certainly was not so at the Court of France to the homesick envoys and secretaries. 'Our embassy,' cries this indignant and saddle-sore am Traité de Vénerie de Budé, translated from the Latin, Paris, 1864. 2 Documents Inédits: Négociations diplomatiques avec la Toscane, t. iii. p. 17. 6 bassador, who was presumably little accustomed to horseexercise, has lasted forty-five months; during that time we have never been a fortnight in the same place.' Cavalle, another Venetian diplomatist, informed his Government that François I.'s hunting expenses amounted to 150,000 écus a year. But even this unfriendly critic admitted he got value for his money. If,' he adds, 'you could see what the Court of France means, and what is done for the money, you wouldn't think it dear.' Francis II.'s reign was in many ways anxious and uncomfortable. But the Tuscan ambassador Tornabuoni writes thus to the Grand Duke Cosmo I. in the thick of a storm centre: In the midst of the most serious anxieties hunting goes on just the same. No one knows where it will all end, but stag-hunting is the great business of the Court; it is the only way apparently of getting things into motion '; and again he writes, 'It would appear that MM. de Guise force this poor devil of a prince into these amusements. They wish to see him entirely absorbed in them, as this will mean that they can keep the direction of affairs in their own hands.' 2 Early in March 1560 the air was full of disquieting rumours. Privy conspiracy whispered in the corridors of Amboise. Any and every night one half of society at Court expected to wake up with its throat cut next morning by the other half. Yet nothing was allowed to stand in the way of hunting. In the middle of it all, when men's hearts were failing them for fear, both conspirators and conspired against set out for a week's hunting at Chenonceaux with a levity worthy of the chorus in Madame Angot.' Chantonnay, a keen observer, writes to his friend Cardinal de Granvelle : In three days these people seem to have got rid of all their 1 Documents Inédits: Négociations avec la Toscane, t. iii. p. 421. |