Manual The Marquis de Leuville: A Victorian Fraud?

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online The Marquis de Leuville: A Victorian Fraud? file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with The Marquis de Leuville: A Victorian Fraud? book. Happy reading The Marquis de Leuville: A Victorian Fraud? Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF The Marquis de Leuville: A Victorian Fraud? at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF The Marquis de Leuville: A Victorian Fraud? Pocket Guide.
The Marquis de Leuville: A Victorian Fraud? by [Weindling, Dick, Colloms Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month? Browse Best Books.
Table of contents

The Victorian Age

If you do not place something of your family history on record it is sometimes invented for you, and it generally does you less justice than you would do yourself. For instance, I read not long ago in a weekly publication that I was of Semitic origin and foreign extraction, and I think the editor, a playful Irishman, was anxious to convey the impression that the foreign extraction was Teutonic. People will hint at anything in war-time.

Let me then say at once that I am not only a Londoner, but quite English, you know. And yet I suppose there is a little foreign blood in me just a wee drappie and it came about in this way. My great-grandfather, Robert Sims, was a sturdy, hand- some and well-to-do Berkshire yeoman.


  • The Marquis de Leuville by Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms - Book - Read Online.
  • Correspondence?
  • A HISTORY OF BABYLON FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE MONARCHY TO THE PERSIAN CONQUEST.
  • The Marquis de Leuville | Independent Publishers Group.
  • Full text of "My life; sixty years' recollections of Bohemian London".
  • Jack. - Horntip.
  • The Break-In (Good Reads)!

To the Berkshire town into which he rode regularly on market days there came a Spanish grandee, Count Jose de Montijo, who was of the family which gave us the Empress Eugenie. He had left Spain as a political refugee, and his daughter, the Countess Elizabeth de Montijo, had come with him. My great-grandfather fell in love with the beautiful Spanish girl, and married her. She was quite a young girl when she became his wife, but she " lived happily ever afterwards," and died a dear old English lady at the age of eighty-five.

That is the drop of foreign blood. There is no more, and the rest of me is quite as English as it could be.

Account Options

She was one of the Hopes of Brighthelmstone, or Brighton as we call it now. The Hopes were the Pickfords of Brighton in the days before the railways. They were strict Nonconformists, and mortally offended the Prince Regent by refusing to convey his race-horses on Sunday. Many a pious pilgrimage did I have to make as a child to see the tomb of John Bunyan " with the Hopes around him. Macaulay bore testimony to this fact when he said, " Many Puritans, to whom the respect paid by Roman Catholics to the reliques and tombs of their saints seemed childish or sinful, are said to have begged with their dying breath that their coffins might be placed as near as possible to the coffin of the author of ' The Pilgrim's Progress.

These are days when any man may be forgiven if he takes pride in tracing himself back to Nelson. I cannot do that, but on my mother's side I can get into very close touch with the national hero. Among my ancestors is an Admiral Parker. I was always under the impression that it was Sir Hyde Parker, but I find on consulting the family archives that it was not that famous sea-dog. It afterwards passed into the possession of the Allsopps, and gave Lord Hindlip his title. Both of them had something to do with my early introduction to journalism and the stage. Charles Yardley had by his marriage with Elizabeth Partridge a daughter, Mary Yardley, who married John Dinmore Stevenson, and was my maternal grandmother.

My father was riding through a London street one day when his horse shied at something and nearly threw him. He heard a musical female voice exclaim " Oh! He thought she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen, and determined to find out who she was, and obtain an introduction. He found that she was Miss Stevenson, a Worcestershire girl who was on a visit to London. The shying of my father's horse provided the introduction, and gave me an old English sea-dog for an ancestor. Having disposed of my ancestors, and proved that in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations I have remained an Englishman, I am now free to indulge in my own reminiscences of the " Hungry Forties " and after.

My own experiences were rather monotonous, but there was plenty of adventure going on around me. Among the family relics that I have preserved is a rather elaborate staff of a special constable. It looks like a ruler with a brass crown on the business end of it. This staff is connected with a period of intense anxiety through which my mother passed when I was still an infant in her arms. My grandfather, John Dinmore Stevenson, was one of the leaders of the Chartist movement.

An oil painting of him with the Charter rolled up under his arm hangs in my bedroom to-day, and whenever I gaze at it I remember that he was looked upon as a very dreadful person simply because he advocated reforms almost every one of which has since been accepted as essential to the public well- being.

Favorite Persons

The Chartists demanded : i The extension of the right of voting to every male native of the United Kingdom ; 2 equal electoral districts ; 3 voting by ballot ; 4 annual Parliaments ; 5 no property qualification for members ; 6 payment of Members of Parliament for their services. But in the Chartists made the strategic mistake of threatening to use force in order to obtain their demands. That is where the story of the special constable's staff comes in. My maternal grandfather went off to join the Chartists in the great demonstration on Kennington Common, and to act as one of their leaders in the threatened advance upon Westminster, and my father was at the same time sworn in as a special constable, and armed with his staff of office went 9 io MY LIFE forth with Louis Napoleon to protect London from my grandfather.

The Kennington Common affair was a terrible fiasco. The heavens, I believe, wept over it so profusely that the ardour of the rebels was damped in the deluge. At any rate, the fates preserved my father from having to use his staif upon the head of his father-in-law. My grandfather came back to our house soaked to the skin, changed his clothes, and sat down to tea with the special constable. And there was peace between them. I was the olive branch on that occasion. I do not know whether it was that my mother and father were considered to be too young to have the direction of my babyhood, but I know that during the first few years of my life my grandfather was my constant companion, my guide, philosopher, and friend.

In those days naughty little boys were always denounced as " little Radicals. What have you been up to now? But my grandfather's companionship made me a little Radical in the sense in which the word is used to-day.

California Digital Newspaper Collection

It was my grandfather, the old Chartist, who shaped my early political views. I have a dim remembrance of his reading aloud to me from certain of the Radical papers of the period, and a vivid remembrance of his reading to me the story of Garibaldi's sufferings, and I can see the tears running down his cheeks as he read. I remembered that incident very distinctly when I saw Garibaldi drive in triumph through the streets of London amid the frantic cheers of the people, and I regretted that my grandfather had not lived to see his hero face to face.


  • Introducing a New Look and New Features.
  • Nabbing Thieves.
  • Books by Marianne Colloms.
  • Catalogue of books printed for private circulation - PDF Free Download.
  • Londonist » spoken word.

Garibaldi remained in the memory of the English people for years after that. It revived old memories when I saw some of the ancient Red Shirts turn out and march through London under the Italian flag when Italy had decided to throw in her lot with the Allies in the great fight for the freedom of the world from the tyranny of the Huns. Of the very early days my memories are naturally rather misty, but I have a vivid remembrance of an event that happened when I was five years old.

Marquis de Leuville: A Victorian Fraud?

On November 18, , the great Duke of Wellington was buried at St. Paul's, and I was taken by my father and mother and my grandfather to see the funeral procession pass. I think it must have been very early in the morning when we left our home in Islington, for the impression of a grey atmosphere has always remained with me. I can see the soldiers now as I saw them then, misty figures in that grey atmosphere.

But clearly and distinctly I can see the funeral-car bearing the body of the great Duke, and more clearly still a riderless charger that was led immediately behind the car. The reversed boots that hung from the empty saddle stirred my childish imagination so strongly that the picture has never faded. The silence of the great crowd, the car, and the riderless horse are all that I can remember distinctly of the funeral, but there are details connected with the day which I also remember.

We had seats in a shop window in Fleet Street. I believe it was a coffee-shop.

Londonist » spoken word

The shop was closed in by an old-fashioned window with a number of panes of glass. Every seat behind that window was occupied, and after an hour or two the occupants began to feel the effect of the atmosphere. It was suggested that some panes of glass in the window should be broken to admit a little fresh air, and it was proposed that every one should make a small contri- bution to compensate the proprietor.

It was decided to do without his contribution and admit the fresh air, and the moment the first pane had been knocked out the old Scotsman thrust his head through the aperture and gasped, " Thank goodness. In another minute I should have been suffocated. As soon as the procession had passed, my father and my grandfather left us the one to go to the office in the City and the other to the office of the Reform Freehold Land Society, in which he was interested.

And then my mother took me home to Islington. I was very tired. I had been up since four in the morning, and I began to cry.