Edward Vernon

“ Is a son of the Right Hon. Edward Venables Vernon, D.C.L. Lord Archbishop of York, Primate of England, and Lord High Almoner to the King, &c. &c. &c. by Lady Anne Leveson Gower, third daughter of Granville, first Marquis of Stafford. He is consequently descended from William de Vernon, sole proprietor of the town and district of Vernon, in Normandy, anno 1052, whose eldest son, Richard de Vernon, came over to England with William the Conqueror, in 1066. The Archbishop of York is the youngest son of the first Lord Vernon, and brother to the present peer. ”

“ I shall know how to appreciate your delicacy."
"Miss Clavering," answered Vernon, with a touch of the St. John haughtiness, "I am in despair that you should even think so grave an appeal to my honour necessary. I am well aware of your expectations and my poverty. And, believe me, I would rather rot in a prison than enrich myself by forcing your inclinations. You have but to say the word, and I will (as becomes me as a man and gentleman) screen you from all chance of Sir Miles's displeasure, by taking it on myself to decline an honour of which I feel, indeed, very undeserving." ”

“ Sir John Vernon, Knt., married Helen, daughter and co-heiress of John Montgomery, of Sudbury, in Derbyshire, with whom he received the Sudbury and other estates, and thus founded the family of Lords Vernon. He was one of the King’s Council in Wales, and Custos Rotulorum of Derbyshire, and dying in 1540, was buried at Clifton Camville. He was succeeded by his son, Henry Vernon, who, in his turn, was succeeded by his son, John Vernon, who married Mary, widow of Walter Vernon, of Houndhill, and daughter of Sir Edward Littleton, of Pillaton Hall, by whom, however, he had no issue. ”

“ With the slow step and self-possessed air of womanhood, but with a far haughtier and far colder mien than women commonly assume, Constance Vernon walked through the long apartment, and greeted her future guardian. Though every eye was on her, she did not blush; though the Queens of the London World were round her, her gait and air were more royal than all. Every one present experienced a revulsion of feeling. They were prepared for pity; this was no case in which pity could be given. Even the words of protection died on Lady Erpingham's lip, and she it was who felt bashful and disconcerted. ”

“ Vernon; but though wholly without that nameless distinction which sometimes characterizes those conscious of pure race and habituated to the atmosphere of courts, he had at least Nature's stamp of aristocracy in a form eminently noble, and features of manly, but surpassing beauty, which were not rendered less engaging by an expression of modest timidity. He seemed to be listening with thoughtful respect to his companion, a young female by his side, who was speaking to him with an earnestness visible in her gestures and her animated countenance. ”

“ Though, from motives of obvious delicacy, Vernon had not said expressly that he had seen the letter to Mainwaring, the unfamiliar and formal tone which he assumed indirectly declared it, and betrayed the impression it had made, in spite of his reserve. A living man then was in possession of a secret which justified his disdain, and that man was master of Laughton! The suppressed rage which embraced the lost lover extended darkly over this witness to that baffled and miserable love. ”

“ Poor Constance! You will have good friends when I am dead! they will be proud enough to be kind to Vernon's daughter, when Death has shown them that Vernon is a loss. You are very handsome. Your poor mother's eyes and hair—my father's splendid brow and lip; and your figure, even now so stately! They will court you: you will have lords and great men enough at your feet; but you will never forget this night, nor the agony of your father's death-bed face, and the brand they have burned in his heart. ”

“ His society became not only a relief, it grew almost a want, to that stern sorrower. But whether alarmed or not by the influence she felt him gradually acquiring, or whether, through some haughty desire to rise once more aloft from the state of her rival and her lover, she made one sudden effort to grasp at the rank from which she had been hurled. The only living person whose connection could re-open to her the great world, with its splendours and its scope to ambition, was Charles Vernon. ”

“ To him descended the ancient heritage of Laughton, and he promised to enjoy it long.
It is Vernon’s widow who walks alone in the stately terrace; sad still, for she loved well the choice of her youth, and she misses yet the children in the grave. From the date of Vernon’s death, she wore mourning without and within; and the sorrows that came later broke more the bruised reed,—sad still, but resigned. One son survives, and earth yet has the troubled hopes and the holy fears of affection. ”

“ Vernon's spendthrift habits and dissipated if not dissolute life had certainly confirmed the old baronet in his intentions to trust the lands of Laughton to the lesser risk which property incurs in the hands of a female, if tightly settled on her, than in the more colossal and multiform luxuries of an expensive man; and to do him justice, during the flush of Vernon's riotous career he had shrunk from the thought of confiding the happiness of his niece to so unstable a partner. ”

“ Those fat squires had heard nothing of Mr. Vernon, except that he would not have Laughton,—he had no acres, no vote in their county; he was a nobody to them. Those ruddy maidens, though now and then, indeed, one or two might steal an admiring glance at a figure of elegance so unusual, regarded him not with the female interest he had been accustomed to inspire. They felt instinctively that he could be nothing to them, nor they to him, —a mere London fop, and not half so handsome as Squires Bluff and Chuff. ”

“ And for myself, the thought of all that the Countess of Albany endured at the hands of Charles Edward awakens less pity, though pity mixed with indignation at the fate which humiliated her so deeply, and with shame for that deep humiliation, than that sudden cry with which she stops in the midst of the light-headed gabble about her miseries, and seems to start back ashamed as at the sight of her passion and tear-defiled face in a mirror: "What a cruel thing to expect one's happiness from the death of another! ”

“ Few could so closely approach vulgarity without being vulgar: of that privileged few, Mr. Vernon was one of the elect.
Farther on, and near the steps descending into the garden, stood a man in an attitude of profound abstraction, his arms folded, his eyes bent on the ground, his brows slightly contracted; his dress was a plain black surtout, and pantaloons of the same colour. Something both in the fashion of the dress, and still more in the face of the man, bespoke the foreigner.
Sir Miles St. John was an accomplished person for that time of day. ”

“ How awful an event may hang over our hearts! The sword is always above us, seen or invisible!
And with this life—this scene of darkness and dreadsome men would have us so contented as to desire, to ask for no other!
Constance was now without a near relation in the world. But her father predicted rightly: vanity supplied the place of affection. Vernon, who for eighteen months preceding his death had struggled with the sharpest afflictions of want—Vernon, deserted in life by all, was interred with the insulting ceremonials of pomp and state. ”

“ But she became superior by a certain single-heartedness which made truth so habitual to her that the light in which she lived rendered all objects around her clear. One who is always true in the great duties of life is nearly always wise. And Vernon, when he had fairly buried his faults, had felt a noble shame for the excesses into which they had led him. ”

“ Be this as it may, Charles Edward, however degraded, was able to command himself when he chose, and, for one reason or another, he did choose to command himself and behave like a tolerably decent man and husband during the first few months following on his marriage. Besides the redness of his face, the leaden suffused look of his eyes, the vague air of degradation all about him, there was perhaps nothing, at first, that revealed to Louise, Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, that her husband was a drunkard and well-nigh a maniac. ”

“ As if all the stupid selfishness bred of centuries of royalty had accumulated in this man who might be king only through his own and his adherents' magnanimity, Charles Edward seemed, in the second period of his life, to feel as if he had a right over everything, and nobody else had a right over anything ”

“ Royal-souled Charles Edward Stuart had certainly been in his youth; brilliant with all those virtues of endurance, clemency, and affability which the earlier eighteenth century still fondly associated with the divine right of kings; and royal-souled, hard and weak with all the hardness and weakness, the self-indulgence, obstinacy, and thoughtlessness for others of effete races of kings, he had become no less certainly, in the second part of his life; branded with God's own brand of unworthiness, which signifies that a people, or a class, or a family, is doomed to extinction. ”

“ Charles Edward was dancing at Versailles in his crimson silk dress and diamonds, with his black-eyed boast the eldest-born Princess of France. Nay, worse, if we remember how the man, for whose love and whose right so much needless agony had been expended, let himself become a disgrace to the very memory of the men who had died for him: if we bear all this in mind, Charles Edward seems to become a mere irresponsible and fated representative of some evil creed ”

“ At that day the word blast was unknown; men had not enough sentiment for satiety. There was a kind of Bacchanalian fury in the life led by those leaders of fashion, among whom Mr. Vernon was not the least distinguished; it was a day of deep drinking, of high play, of jovial, reckless dissipation, of strong appetite for fun and riot, of four-in-hand coachmanship, of prize-fighting, of a strange sort of barbarous manliness that strained every nerve of the constitution,—a race of life in which three fourths of the competitors died half-way in the hippodrome. ”

“ Charles Edward, as I have already had occasion to remark, while absolutely callous to the rights which self-sacrifice and heroism might give others over him, was extremely alive to the rights which, as a Stuart and as an obstinate and wilful man, he imagined himself to possess over other folk ”

“ The letter was one merely of business, but it was a sufficient test of the friendly feelings of her former suitor.
She sent this letter to Vernon’s house in London, and the next day came the answer.
Vernon, we must own, entirely sympathized with Sir Miles in the solemn injunctions the old man had bequeathed. Immediately after the death of one to whom we owe gratitude and love, all his desires take a sanctity irresistible and ineffable; we adopt his affection, his dislikes, his obligations, and his wrongs. ”

“ She took a bold step,—she wrote to Vernon: not even to allude to what had passed between them; her pride forbade such unwomanly vulgarity. The baseness that was in her took at least a more delicate exterior. ”

“ Vernon, it might ripen matters; for I have heard it said by French mothers—and our Frenchwomen understand the female heart, sir—that a girl having no other affection is often prepossessed at once in favour of a man whom she knows beforehand is prepared to woo and to win her, whereas without that knowledge he would have seemed but an ordinary acquaintance."
"It is shrewdly said, my dear Monsieur Dalibard; and for more reasons than one, the sooner I speak to her the better. Lend me your arm. It is time for supper; I see the dance is over." ”

“ Putting aside, we say, however, all such considerations, Vernon had sought her friendship, called her "cousin," enforced the distant relationship between them. Not as lover, but as kinsman,—the only kinsman of her own rank she possessed,—his position in the world, his connections, his brilliant range of acquaintance, made his counsel for her future plans, his aid in the re-establishment of her consequence (if not—as wealthy, still as well-born) , and her admission amongst her equals, of price and value. ”

“ We scarcely know ourselves till we have children; and then, if we love them duly, we look narrowly into failings that become vices, when they serve as examples to the young.
The inborn gentleman, with the native courage and spirit and horror of trick and falsehood which belong to that chivalrous abstraction, survived almost alone in Vernon St. John; and his boys sprang up in the atmosphere of generous sentiments and transparent truth. The tutor was in harmony with the parents,—a soldier every inch of him ”

“ To the elder was destined the father’s inheritance,—to the younger the maternal property. One house is not large enough for two heirs. Nothing could exceed the pride of the father as a St. John, except the pride of the mother as a Vernon. Jealousies between the two sons began early and rankled deep; nor was there peace at Laughton till the younger had carried away from its rental the lands of Vernon Grange ”

“ No praise from my pen can do adequate justice to this lamented young man; as an officer, he was active, correct, and zealous, to the highest degree; the leader in every kind of enterprise, and regardless of danger; he delighted in whatever could tend to promote the glory of his country: his last words were, ‘huzza! push on! England for ever!’
“Mr. Hawkey had been away in the boats on different services, since last Monday, accompanied by Lieutenant Vernon, whose conduct in this affair has been highly exemplary, and shewn him worthy to be the companion of so heroic a man ”