FullReads

As Played at Tunbridge Wells, April 3, 1750

“I am thinking if some little, filching, inquisitive poet should get my story, and represent it to the stage, what those ladies who are never precise but at a play would say of me now,–that I were a confident, coming piece, I warrant, and they would damn the poor poet for libelling the sex.
“

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

DUKE OF ORMSKIRK.

COLONEL DENSTROUDE, }
SIR GRESLEY CARNE,  } Gentlemen of the town.
MR. BABINGTON-HERLE, }

VANRINGHAM, a play-actor and a Jacobite emissary.

MR. LANGTON, secretary to Ormskirk.

MISS ALLONBY, an heiress, loves Captain Audaine.

LOTTRUM, maid to Miss Allonby.

BENYON, MINCHIN, and OTHER SERVANTS to Ormskirk.

SCENE

Tunbridge Wells, shifting from Ormskirk’s lodgings at the Mitre to Vanringham’s apartments in the Three Gudgeons.

ACTORS ALL

PROEM.–To Explain Why the Heroine of This Comedy Must Wear Her Best

I quit pilfering from the writings of Francis Audaine, since in the happenings which now concern us he plays but a subsidiary part. The Captain had an utter faith in decorum, and therefore it was, as he records, an earth-staggering shock when the following day, on the Pantiles, in full sight of the best company at the Wells, Captain Audaine was apprehended. He met disaster like an old acquaintance, and hummed a scrap of song–“O, gin I were a bonny bird,”–and shrugged; but when Miss Allonby, with whom he had been chatting, swayed and fell, the Captain caught her in his arms, and standing thus, turned angrily upon the emissaries of the law.

“Look you, you rascals,” said he, “you have spoiled a lady’s afternoon with your foolish warrant!”

He then relinquished the unconscious girl to her brother’s keeping, tenderly kissed one insensate hand, and afterward strolled off to jail en route for a perfunctory trial and a subsequent traffic with the executioner that Audaine did not care to think of.

Tunbridge buzzed like a fly-trap with the ensuing rumors. The Captain was at the head of a most heinous Jacobitical uprising. The great Duke of Ormskirk was come hastily from London on the business. Highlanders were swarming over the Border, ten thousand French troops had landed at Pevensey, commanded by the Chevalier St. George in person, and twenty thousand friars and pilgrims from Coruña had sailed for Milford Haven, under the admiralty of young Henry Stuart. The King was locked in the Tower; the King had been assassinated that morning by a Spanish monk, with horse-pistols and a cast in his left eye; and the King and the Countess of Yarmouth had escaped three days ago, in disguise, and were now on their way to Hanover.

These were the reports which went about Tunbridge, while Dorothy Allonby wept a little and presently called for cold water and a powder-puff, and afterward for a sedan chair.

I

Miss Allonby found my Lord Duke of Ormskirk deep in an infinity of papers. But at her entrance he rose and with a sign dismissed his secretary.

It appears appropriate here to afford you some notion of Ormskirk’s exterior. I pilfer from Löwe’s memoir of him, where Horace Calverley, who first saw Ormskirk at about this time, is quoted:

“His Grace was in blue-and-silver, which became him, though he is somewhat stomachy for such conspicuous colors. A handsome man, I would have said, honest but not particularly intelligent…. Walpole, in a fit of spleen, once called him ‘a porcelain sphinx,’ and the phrase sticks; but, indeed, there is more of the china-doll about him. He possesses the same too-perfect complexion, his blue eyes have the same spick-and-span vacuity; and the fact that the right orb is a trifle larger than its fellow gives his countenance, in repose, much the same expression of placid astonishment…. Very plump, very sleepy-looking, immaculate as a cat, you would never have accorded him a second glance: covert whisperings that the stout gentleman yonder is the great Duke of Ormskirk have, I think, taxed human belief more than once during these ten years past.”