Glorious Gossip

In my piece on Elizabeth Grant, ‘The Highland Lady’ (SF no.44), I said that I had lighted on her when working at the publisher John Murray, and it was there that I also first bumped into Thomas Creevey. A glance at the back of the title page of The Creevey Papers showed that Murray had reprinted it ten times in as many years following the book’s first appearance in 1903 – a good indication that he was something special, and worth enquiring about within.

This bright young lawyer from Liverpool entered Parliament in 1802 and then for thirty years or more filled the corridors, dining-rooms and drawing-rooms of power with fresh air, sharp comment and hilarity. That same year he married a well-to-do widow but after she died in 1818, for many years he had £200 p.a. or less to live on. His younger friend and contemporary, the diarist Charles Greville, said in 1829 that he was ‘certainly living proof that a man may be perfectly happy and exceedingly poor’. He might possess no property of any sort, but what he did have were ‘a great many acquaintances, a good constitution and extraordinary spirits . . . He leads a vagrant life, visiting a number of people who are delighted to have him.’ And all the time he was writing letters to his stepdaughter Elizabeth Ord recording the gossip, the political manoeuvrings and back stabbings, the follies and triumphs of both friends and enemies. His interest in all going on around him was insatiable, sometimes fuelling his anger but much more often his incredulity and amusement. There is a mystery about his parentage. On the face of it his father was captain of a Liverpool slave ship, but he died soon after Creevey’s birth in 1768. Who paid for him to board at a fashionable school in Hackney, to go to Cambridge, then to read for the Bar? Among his best friends in later life was the 2nd Earl of Sefton, to whom he bore a considerable physical likeness: John Gore, who produced further selections from Creevey’s letters in the 1930s and ’40s, was convinced his father was the 1st Earl, of Croxteth Hall just to the east of Liverpool. But The Houses of Parliament, that mammoth ongoing compilation (41 volumes so far) of biographies of everyone ever elected to Parliament, together with studies of all elections in each constituency, will have none of this. As far as it is concerned Creevey ‘achieved no mean feat in inducing the world to believe at length that he was a bastard brother of his noble admirer’. In his politics Creevey was always a radical, prepared to attack and obstruct not merely the Pittites and later the administration of Lord Liverpool, but the Whig opposition too, even though he worshipped Charles James Fox and was found a post in Grenville’s short-lived Ministry of All the Talents in 1806–7. His targets were corruption, sinecures, any increase in Crown patronage and the conduct of the East India Company. But this did not prevent him from entering the Commons as member for Thetford, a typical pocket borough with all of 31 electors, thanks to ‘Jockey’, the Duke of Norfolk – dirty, drunken and a devoted follower of Fox. Neither did it prevent the grand and lesser Whiggery from constantly asking him to dine and to stay at their country houses. Another more critical contemporary, Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse, said, ‘Raillery of the present and detraction of the absent were his weapons for general talk’, but Society lapped it up, loving his jokes, his anecdotes and his impersonations, while his optimism and gaiety were a tonic for the jaded and a lifeline for hostesses anticipating a sticky evening. And he was no mere buffoon or court jester. Hobhouse went on to admit that ‘when serious he showed sound and honest views’. He could be bitter when roused by some particular injustice or double dealing, but his judgement was very often shrewd and well informed. Why else did figures of the stature of Wellington, Earl Grey and Brougham relish his company and advice, in Brougham’s case mixed in with recriminations about his trickery and opportunism? He delighted in being in the swim, being on good dining terms with the aristocracy, but while he sang for his supper, he was no flattering toady. After the radical but immensely rich Earl of Durham was stupid enough to say one could jog along on £40,000 a year, Creevey instantly christened him ‘Jog’ and remarked later how ‘we are very much indebted to these grandees for the damned fools they make of themselves’. Creevey’s letters only get into their stride in 1820, but before that there are a few highlights among the papers, like Mrs Creevey’s account of entertainment at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton in 1805, where Creevey’s friendship with R. B. Sheridan gained them the entrée: ‘The Prince led all the party . . . to see him shoot with an air-gun at a target placed at the end of the room. He did it very skilfully, and wanted all the ladies to attempt it . . . Lady Downshire hit a fiddler in the dining-room, Miss Johnstone a door and Bloomfield the ceiling.’ In 1813 Creevey had debts of £7,000 after an expensive election and a libel case, so to save money he and his family went to live in Brussels for six years. There he had two famous encounters with Wellington. At the first a fortnight or so before Waterloo, the conversation went: ‘“Will you let me ask you, Duke, what you think you will make of it?” He stopt and said in the most natural manner: “By God! I think Blücher and myself can do the thing.”  . . . Then, seeing a private soldier . . . “There, it all depends upon that article whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.”’ Just after Wellington had returned to Brussels victorious, he saw Creevey passing and beckoned him to come in: ‘He made a variety of observations in his short, natural, blunt way, but with the greatest gravity all the time, and without the least approach to anything like triumph or joy . .  . “It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life . . . By God! I don’t think it would have done if I had not been there.”’ In 1818 Creevey had to give up his seat at Thetford, but in 1820 the Earl of Thanet gave him Appleby instead, so he went out of one pocket and into another. Thanet was a gambler on a heroic scale as well as something of a radical, and indeed in 1798 had spent a year in the Tower of London after causing a riot at the trial of an Irish patriot. His new seat meant Creevey could join Thanet and, more especially, Brougham in support of George IV’s estranged wife Queen Caroline. Ever since George had failed to call on the Whigs to form a government on becoming Prince Regent in 1812, Brougham had sought vengeance, seeing the Queen as an ideal method of making political capital, and so persuading her to come back to England once her husband was fully on the throne. George, the pot calling the kettle black, demanded she be brought to trial in the House of Lords for her scandalous behaviour. Brougham’s first speech in her defence was perfection, according to Creevey, concluding with an exhortation to the Lords ‘to save themselves – the Church – the Crown – the Country, by their decision in favour of the Queen’. The next night he was at Brooks’s Club in St James’s Street, the Whig stronghold,

where as you may suppose the monde talked of nothing but Brougham and his fame, and the comers-in from White’s [the Tory club on the other side of the street] said the feeling was equally strong there . . . [The speech] not only astonished but has shaken the aristocracy, though Lord Granville did tell me at parting this morning not to be too confident of that, for that the House of Lords was by far the stupidest and most obstinate collection of men that could be selected from all England.

In March 1822 Creevey told of a typical London evening, beginning with dinner at Lady Anson’s where Thomas Coke of Holkham, the Norfolk grandee, was his target. ‘I kept up a running fire on Coke, and Ly Anson kept her hand on my arm all the time, pinching me and keeping  me in check when she thought I was going too far . . . Then I came here [Brooks’s] and was fool enough to sit looking over a whist table till between 4 and 5 this morning. Sefton and I walked away together, he having won by the evening £1200 pounds.’ Country-house dinners might be grander but they had their disadvantages. Lord Derby’s splendiferous new dining-room was entered via two colossal Gothic doors. One guest asked, ‘“Pray are these to be opened for every pat of butter that comes into the room?” . . . There are two fireplaces, with 36 wax candles over the table, 14 on it, and ten great lamps on tall pedestals about the room; and yet those at the bottom of the table said it was quite petrifying in that neighbourhood.’ Apart from good company, what Creevey said he wanted was ‘excellent and plentiful dinners, a fat service of plate, a fat butler, and a barrel of oysters and a hot pheasant, etc, wheeled into the drawing room every night at half past ten.’ In 1824 he was at Ascot: ‘Our old acquaintance Prinney was at the races each day, and tho’ in health he appeared perfect, he had all the appearance of a slang leg [a racecourse swindler] – a plain brown hat, black cravat, scratch wig, and his hat cocked over one eye. There he sat, in one corner of his stand, Lady Conyngham [his last mistress] rather behind him, hardly visible but by her feathers.’ Creevey lost his seat again in 1826, but there were consolations, like observing the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury. ‘It is impossible to do justice to the antiquity of her face . . . the most cracked, or rather furrowed piece of mosaic you ever saw, but her dress, in the colours of it at least, is absolutely infantine . . . She is reclining on a sofa reading the Edinburgh Review without spectacles or glass of any kind, and she has just put off a very large bonnet, profusely gifted with bright lilac ribbons.’ Once the Whigs finally got into power things really looked up and Creevey’s great friend Earl Grey was able to find him a sinecure post at the Tower of London in 1830; in 1831 he was back in the Commons, for a West Country seat he never even bothered to visit, so could relish the Reform Bill battle there, even if its passing meant the end of his seat, and his sinecure. Another was soon found at Greenwich Hospital, so he could meet the new era in comfort, in 1837 even dining at Brighton Pavilion with the young Queen – showing too much gum when she laughed and rather gobbling her food, but otherwise passing muster. At Christmas he reported proudly that he had danced ‘down twenty-five couples in a country dance’ at the servants’ ball at Holkham as the guest of his old butt, Thomas Coke, now Earl of Leicester, but by February 1838 he was dead. So the pompous, solemn and consequential figures that proliferated in the Victorian age were spared the attentions of this gadfly on the flanks of the establishment.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 52 © Roger Hudson 2016