The Wanganui Chronicle. " Nulla Dies Sine Linea." THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1909. INDISCREET REMINISCENCES.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume L, Issue 12383, 2 December 1909, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle. " Nulla Dies Sine Linea." THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1909. INDISCREET REMINISCENCES.

The Countess of Cardigan and Lancastre, who, having attained the ripe ygc of 84 years might reasonably be expected to be old enough to know better, has scandalised London society by the publication of & daring volume of reminiscences. The book will certainly be the most widely read book of the year, for at latest advices tho publishers were finding it a by no means easy matter to keep pace with* the demand. Lady Cardigan confesses that she kept no diaries on which such a collection of reminiscences might be based. This in itself, as ono reviewer points out, would be enough to lay her very risque stories ol bygone leaders of society under suspicion. There is a slang word sometimes used by women which most nearly expresses the spirit of these recollec-j tions, and that is "catty." A feline touch, for example, is decidedly apparent in the many references to Maria Marchioness of Ailesbury, her alleged lovo affairs, her scrnggmess, which led crude wit to describe a dispute over her between the Earls of Wilton and Cardigan as "only a case of two dogs quarrelling over a bone," her gambling propensities, and her anxiety to secure the succession of Lord Cardigan's property for her son Lord Charles Bruce. Lady Cardigan seems to regard breaches or\ tho seventh commandment as matters of cpurse in the society of her young clays. She tells with frankness —one is tempted to believe also with relish—of such lapses on the part of her husband, the handsome and popular Earl who led the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Even her own father is not spared, for she tells an anecdote which is really amusing, in spite of its gross filial disrespect, of her discovering hijn at tho play with a lady of doubtful reputation, after he had declined to take his daughter to that particular performance because, forsooth, he objected to public exhibitions of lax morals. She was a daughter of Spencer Horsey de Horsey, and sister of tho distinguished naval officer, Admiral de Horssy, but, owing to her relations with Lord Cardigan before the death of his first wifej she was ever afterwards more or less under a social ban. Those relations may, as" she claims, have been quite innocent, but, rather than break them off at her family's request, she left her. father's house, and set up an establishment of her own, riding daily.in the park with Cardigan, in defiance of the averted glances of her former friends. All this she relates at length-in her "Recollections." She also tells how he rushed unceremoniously into her bedroom from Jus wife's deathbed at 8 o'clock in the morning. She had only just time to put on a dressinggown, sho says, as she heard his voice: at" tha front door before he was with her, clasping her in his arms, and exclaiming, "She's dead—let's be married at once." In ten wesks the marriage took place at Gibraltar, whither Miss de i Horsey had gone .with'Lord'Cardigan" in his yacht. The union appears to have been a happy one, and when Lord Cardigan died ten yearis later he left her his Deene Estat?, in Northamptonshire, and practically all his other property, to the manifest chagrin of the Ailesbury family, which inherited his barren title. Society never forgave Lady Cardigan, despita her wealth and her lavish hospitality, and she gave further offence to many by her subsequent marriage to the Count de Lancastre, a Portuguese nobleman. Lady Cardigan suggests that Queen Victoria, who was already alienated from her because of her pre-marital friendship, with Cardigan, was greatly annoyed at her taking the • Lancastre title, which the Queen herself used when travelling abroad incognito! Still worse from the ', standpoint of Court manners are Lady Cardigan's statements about her friendship with the present King, then Prince of Wales. It is customary to submit to the Sovereign any references to conversations with him be-j fore publication, and it goes without; saying that this could not have been! done in the case of Lady Cardigan's: ■" Recollections." Members of many' noble families figure unpleasantly in her. truly scandalous stories — Ailesbury, Bruces, Dudley .Wards, Westminster! Grosvenors, and Rutland Manners

among the number. Of William Lord Ward and his wife Constance she tells particularly gruesome stories. Even truth could not justify their publication. How much of the book is true, how much of it is due to the delusive memories of old age, how much to the effect of an imagination brooding long over supposed wrongs at the hands of society it is, perhaps, impossible to gauge exactly. At any.rate, one would need better proof before one could believe that society in the fifties Mas as profligate as Lady Cardigan makes it appear. In her widowhood' she received, according to her own account, numerous offers of marriage, and she appears to have had

">, fascination for bereaved husbands." There was Lord Sherborne, a, widower with ten children; the Duke of Leeds, a widowor, eleven children ; Christopher Maiuisell Talbot, a member of the House of Commons, with four children. Prince Soltykoff, the- Duke of St. Alban's, Harry Howard and Disraeli were other widowers who proposed to the attractiva Miss do Horsey <as she then was). She gives a full list of them. The brilliant Disraeli was momentarily considered, and she does not hesitate to disclose why she refused him. "I had known Disraeli all my life," she says, "and I liked him very well. He had,

however, one drawback, as far as I was concerned, and that was his breath —the ill odor of politics perhaps!" . While wondering whether she could possibly manage to put up with "this unfortunato attribute in a great man," she consulted the Prince of Wales, who replied that he did not think that the marriage would be a happy one. So the Disraeli affair came to nothing, like many others. But the lady seems to have had no misgivings when Lord Cardigan (another widower) came along; or, if there were, ho carried the fort by storm, as befitted the hero of Balaclava. Perhaps some of those who escape untouched by the breath of scandal with which this old woman's book simply reeks, will regard her stories as merely spicy and amusing gossip; but the majority of decent people will agree that no one would have been any the poorer if the ancient and venemous Countess and her spiteful "recollections" had been respectably buried before her scandalous and perhaps largely untruthful revelations were committed to print. "It is common to regard the mid-Victorian era as the age of wax-flowers, antimacassars, and rigid propriety," as one writer puts it, but according to Lady Cardigan the follies of to-day were apparently anticipated a generation ago, and it is perhaps comforting to discover that a certain section of modern society, about which we hear a good deal, is at least no worse than it was. As for Lady Cardigan, one indignant correctly sums up the character and value of her " work" when he says: "Such an amazing collection of unsavoury anecdotes about well-known persons lately dead, and with near relatives still alive, has, we should think, never bafore been published in England. In her octogenarian literary effort, Lady Cardigan'has defied society and its conventions as boldly as she did in her conduct fifty years ago."