Books, Modern Era, William de Morgan and his Wife Chapter 5

THE STORY OF THE PICKERINGS

For a brief space we must turn from the life-story of William De Morgan to consider that of his wife, since for thirty years she was destined to be the most prominent factor in the moulding of his later career. But in order to measure the quahty of her influence it is necessary first to understand something of her own temperament and its development, derived alike from her immediate ancestry and environment.

Mary Evelyn Pickering was the eldest daughter of Percival Andree Pickering (age 45), Q.C., Recorder of Pontefract, Attorney General for the County Palatine and sometime Treasurer of the Inner Temple. He married in 1853 Anna Maria Spencer-Stanhope (age 31), who was herself the eldest daughter of John (age 68) and Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope (age 60), of Cannon Hall, Yorkshire.

Of the intellectual qualifications of the Pickerings as a race it is possible to speak with an unusual degree of certainty from a remote period. 'I apprehend,' said Sir Isaac Heard, Garter King of Arms, writing to Evelyn's grandfather. 'that there is scarcely any family in England so well descended as yours, and who can so well authenticate it, not merely by the pedigree, but by the records of the kingdom, combining ancient nobihty and royalty.' Nor, he might have added, were there many families the record of which — other than this cursory glance which is all that we can here devote to it — might prove so entertaining to posterity and full of lively incident.

We have seen how the De Morgans belonging to the earlier generations regarded life very seriously. They were willing to sacrifice all worldly advantage to their convictions— alike to orthodoxy or heterodoxy; and we have seen, too, how William, with his versatile genius and his happy Bohemianism, was, in much, the product of a collateral inheritance. The same may be said of his wife and her forbears. But while the Pickerings, as a race, regarded life with an equal gravity, this did not, in their case, engender any placid indifference to worldly advantage. Brilliant, comely and self-assertive through the generations, their constant prominence in the angry world of politics was, it must be admitted, usually on the side of aggression — occasionally mis-named liberty; but neither did they despise the plums of existence.

Only one noted member of the family seems to have left behind him an entirely peaceful memory; Sir James Pickering¹, one of the earliest recorded Speakers of the House of Commons, circa 1378, who placidly represented the Counties of Westmorland and Yorkshire as Knight of the Shire from 1362 to 1497. For the rest, where there was a turmoil in the State, the Pickerings figured in it, and sank or swam with the swaying of the tide. Their crest, a bear's paw with the claws somewhat in evidence, and the suggestive motto Pax tua, requies mea remained singularly well chosen.

Note 1. I am here following the pedigrees compiled by the late W. Vade Walpole and by Edward Rowland Pickering, which are obviously correct.

Thus John Pickering, B.D., Prior of the Dominican House of Cambridge, helped to organize and was a leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, in consequence of which Henry VIII wrote that 'Dr. Pickering should be sent up to him,' and Dr. Pickering was duly executed at Tyburn in 1537. Another learned Dr. Pickering, a kinsman, at the same date and for the same cause, long languished in the Tower; while a few years later Sir William Pickering (age 34), Ambassador to France in 1551, celebrated as a courtier and diplomatist, narrowly escaped a similar fate by being concerned in Wyatt's conspiracy.

1605. By the sixteenth century, the Pickerings, who had previously been landowners in Westmorland and Yorkshire, were inhabiting the fine old Tudor mansion of Tichmarsh in Northamptonshire, now completely disappeared. There, in 1605, Sir Gilbert Pickering (age 50) gained for himself great kudos for his activity in apprehending the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot, although amongst them was his own brother-in-law, Robert Keyes (age 40)¹, who, in consequence, suffered for such 'apish behaviour ' by being executed in company with Guy Fawkes at Westminster.

Note 1. Who married Margaret Pickering.

Sir Gilbert died in 1613; and in Cromwellian times his grandson. Sir Gilbert, Baronet of Nova Scotia, and a brother John, of Gray's Inn, were prominent Parliamentarians. The former, to whom his cousin John Dryden, the poet¹, was secretary, sat in the Long Parliament, being also one of the Protector's Council, and of his House of Lords. He was moreover one of the Judges of Charles I, but he attended the trial only at the outset, and was not of those who signed the death warrant. Thus at the Restoration, although he was declared incapable of holding pubhc office, he escaped more drastic punishment through the intervention of his brother-in-law, Edward Montague, Earl of Sandwich; indeed Pepys tells us how he received from Lady Pickering 'wrapped up in a paper, £5 in silver' to induce him to use his influence with her brother, 'my Lord, on behalf of her misguided husband.'

Note 1. The connexion between the two Puritan famihes of Dryden and Pickering was a double one. Not only did a Dryden take to wife a Pickering [Mary Pickering], who became the mother of the poet, but a Pickering took to wife a Dryden. 'The home of John Dryden,' we are told,' was at Tichmarsh, where his father, a younger son of the first baronet of Canons Ashby, had settled. Here he had married into the leading family of the place, the Pickerings, who resided at the great house. His wife was Mary, first cousin of Sir Gilbert, the head of the family, and daughter of Henry Pickering, rector of Aldwincle All Saints, and it was at her father's rectory that, in 1631, John, the eldest of her fourteen children, was born. An alliance between the Drydens and the Pickerings was the more natural in that both familes were strongly Puritan, and took the side of the Parliament in the Civil War.' — Highways and Byways in Northamptonshire, by Herbert A. Evans, p. 71.

During the Civil War, John, the brother of this Sir Gilbert, had raised the 'Pickering regiment' for the Parliament among his Northamptonshire neighbours, and distinguished himself at Naseby and elsewhere. He is described as 'a little man, but of great courage'; nevertheless, he seems to have been wanting in tact and a fanatic of more pronounced type than his brother; for in 1645 he caused a mutiny in the regiment which he commanded by insisting on delivering to his troopers a rousing sermon at a moment when they were not in a suitable frame of mind to appreciate such an attention! Another brother, Edward, was a lawyer, and is described by Roger North as a 'subtle fellow, a money-hunter, a great trifler, and avaricious, but withal a great pretender to puritanism, frequenting the Rolls Chapel, and most busily writing the sermon in his hat that he might not be seen.' In brief, the Pickerings at that date, like others of their generation, seemed to have battened on a curious mixture of sermons and sanctity, of shrewdness and time-serving; and to have sought Heaven dihgently with one eye still firmly fixed on their worldly advantage.

Nevertheless, save for the daughter of Sir Gilbert Pickering, the beautiful and talented Mistress Betty (age 26), afterwards wife to John Creed of Oundle, who was acclaimed as an amateur artist of considerable local fame, we find no trace through the passing of the centuries that the family at Tichmarsh distinguished themselves in the gentler arts of literature or painting; wherefore it is curious to reflect that from the Puritan Pickerings and the Huguenot De Morgans should have sprung two descendants both so unlike their ancestors in this respect as these whose lifestory we are here reviewing.

Glancing on, therefore, swiftly down the generations, we come to Edward Lake Pickering (age 43), of the Exchequer, the greatgrandfather of Evelyn De Morgan, who died in 1788. His wife Mary Umfreville (age 45), lived till 1836, when she expired in her 93rd year, a wonderful old lady who boasted, approved by Burke, that she was the last of the direct branch of the Umfrevilles, exhibiting a pedigree which begins with the Saxon Kings of England, and in which William the Conqueror figmcs as a less important unit over a century and a half later. This couple had two sons, who survived them, of whom the second was Edward Rowland Pickering (age 9), of Lincoln's Inn. He married Mary Vere (age 5), one of the most beautiful women of her day; and to them were born eight sons and three daughters.

The portraits of Edward Rowland which are extant exhibit him as a man of middle age, shrewd and kindly of countenance, and stately of pose; though of necessity they fail to convey the quaint courtliness and old-world dignity with which he impressed all who came in contact with his attractive personality.

'I delight in him,' [wrote Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope enthusiastically, after meeting him for the first time at the date of her daughter's engagement to his son].... 'He is exactly like the description of an old novel of Miss Burney's... an unmistakable high-born and high-bred gentleman, in a brown scratch-wig, all on end on his head, with an indescribable mixture of kind-heartedness, slirewdness and humour in his countenance, standing on his own foundation, and feeling that his son and his family are at least on a par with any nobleman in the land.... He is of the same class of original as Lord Stanhope and Lord Suffolk — a sort of quaint, clever creature.... His pert little daughter-elect cannot think of him without laughing, and he seemed inclined to laugh at himself!'

And later she writes yet more enthusiastically:—

'I cannot tell you how delightful Mr. Pickering père is, quite like what one reads about in books, but never meets in real life... how you would delight in him, with his great good-breeding and extreme quaintness. He is very clever and unusual in his integrity; I long for you to meet him, with his charming old-world manners and that brown scratch-wig standing straight upright from his head!'

As to his wife [Mary Vere], 'my dearest partner' as he generally termed her. Lady Elizabeth, on first meeting her, pronounced her to be 'one of the most gentle, lovely, loving, and I should think loveable of human beings' — a description which aptly summed up the characteristics, and possibly the limitations, of the beautiful woman who won admiration from all whom she encountered. Throughout the passing years. Time never perceptibly printed a wrinkle on the smoothness of her exquisite skin, nor ruffled her placid outlook on a world where, for her, all combined to make the rough ways pleasant. Gentle, yielding, and charming from youth to age, generous without stint, and extravagant to a fault, she was likewise fastidious in many ways which, to a later generation would appear difficult of credence, but which nevertheless seemed a necessary complement to her own individuality. For one, she had a horror of what, to her, was literally 'filthy lucre' and refused ever to soil her hands by touching money which had been used before. Coins fresh from the bank were kept by her in little round boxes of horn or ivory, suited to their size, or dainty bags of wash-leather tied by coloured ribbon, and to these still cling the faint aroma of the attar of roses which once scented the pieces of shining gold or silver which they guarded so carefully from any chance of vulgar contamination.

Edward Rowland worshipped his beautiful wife; they remained lovers to the end of their days; and as an old man, on the rare occasions when he was separated from her, he wrote to her letters which still breathe all the passionate devotion and tender reverence of romantic youth.

Of the many sons and daughters born to this couple, seven survived infancy; and of these Percival Andree, the father of Evelyn De Morgan, was the second.

1808An anecdote of his childhood has survived which at least bespeaks imagination and kindliness of heart. Percy, as he was called, had been receiving religious instruction from his mother, who had imparted to him the sad fate of Adam and Eve, summed up in that melancholy sentence 'Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.' The words sank into the child's mind and made an impression which his elders little suspected. Afterwards, seated at the window gazing out on to the chill March day, he was heard to be weeping bitterly. Kind arms enclosed him, and sympathetic inquiries were made respecting the cause of his woe. But the child wept on unrestrainedly; till at length, pointing to the street where the chill winds were blowing the dust in clouds past the house, he exclaimed tragically, 'Oh! poor, poor Adam and Eve! — how they are blowing about!' The Divine vengeance which had apparently condemned our first parents to drift helplessly— and dirtily — through the ages appalled his tender heart and left him so crushed with despair that for long he refused to be comforted.

In those days the custom still prevailed of concentrating all care and expenditure upon the education of the eldest son, while furnishing the younger members of the family only with the good solid instruction suitable to whatever profession they were destined to pursue. Edward Rowland (age 13) did not follow this system. Each of the young Pickerings went to Eton, where several were distinguished both as scholars and cricketers, and then to the University. At Eton, Percy was known by the name of 'Mop-stick' on account of his curly hair, and his good looks were proverbial. He became a great friend of young William Ewart Gladstone (age 14), who for many years subsequently kept up a conespondence with him, in which he expressed himself enthusiastically Tory in principle; and only his change of politics, later in life, made a severance between the friends. At Cambridge, after going to Trinity College, Percy, like his elder brother, became a Fellow of St. John's. By and by, at the Bar, he was noted for his eloquence, his penetration and his sense of humour.

He was past forty when the event occurred which was destined to alter all the remainder of his days. The story has already been told in The Letter-bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope; but so pretty a romance may be briefly recapitulated.

While on the Northern Circuit Mr. Pickering went to stay with his friend Mr. Milnes Gaskell at Thornes House, near Wakefield, who, one day, suggested that they should go over to Cannon Hall, a few miles off, to call upon Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope and her charming daughters. Arrived at their destination, however, they found the family had gone to attend a school-treat which was taking place that afternoon, so the two men walked down through the sunny park in search of the scene of festivity.

Now it happened that, a short time before, the village schoolchildren had presented Anna Maria Stanhope (age 24), Lady Elizabeth's eldest daughter, with a little bonnet of white plaited straw which they had made for her, and thinking to please them she had decided to wear it on this occasion. The prim little headgear, shadowing her dark hair and brilliant eyes, proved singularly becoming, but her sisters had laughed at her for wearing it. 'You look a perfect Lucilla!' they declared, referring to Mrs. Hannah More's novel; ' All that is wanted is Cœlebs in search of a wife!'

And as though their words were prophetic, Cœlebs appeared in the person of the unknown visitor, and as instantly fell in love with the girl whom he saw thus for the first time enacting the role of Lucilla — suitably employed playing with the village children in the park, her pretty face framed in the simple bonnet of white plaited straw.

But the course of the romance did not at first run smoothly; and three or four years passed before, at his third proposal [Percival Andrée Pickering (age 42) and Anna Spencer-Stanhope (age 28)], his devotion found its reward. After their marriage the young couple lived first in Green Street, in a little house with a bay window, now pulled down, which during a former generation had sheltered another romance, for there had resided the beautiful Miss Farren who became Lady Derby.

Later they removed to No. 6 Upper Grosvenor Street; and there their eldest daughter, Mary Evelyn, was born, while there also during the years which followed, two sons and then another daughter — the present writer — came into existence.

'There was no hope for Evelyn from the first!' her mother used to say laughingly, in view of an episode which occurred at the child's christening. A great-uncle, Mr. Charles Stanhope, officiated on that occasion, a venerable and charming person, who nevertheless was noted for many a malapropism which severely taxed the gravity of his congregation. At the period in the service when the sponsors are called upon to renounce all evil on behalf of the unconscious infant, Mr. Stanhope turned to them, and demanded in a stentorian voice — 'Do you, in the name of this child, promise to remember the devil and all his works?' The perplexed god-parents, faced with such an unexpected dilemma, and feeling it useless to argue the point, glanced helplessly at each other and responded fervently — 'We do!'

In view, however, of the question of heredity, it may be well to glance at the heritage which the young mother brought to her children from her own forbears, and which, in the case of her eldest daughter, seems to have been a determining factor both in regard to temperament and career.

Mrs. Pickering, on her father's side, came of two families, the Spencers and the Stanhopes, who had been settled in Yorkshire since the Middle Ages — a race of fine old country Squires of a type now rapidly becoming extinct, men who, generation after generation, trod reputably, each in the footsteps of his predecessor, and proved themselves, as occasion dictated, shrewd magistrates, bold sportsmen, brave soldiers, stout topers, profound scholars or fine gentlemen. But they were apparently men of simple lives and of single aims, for the two houses which they inhabited show little trace of the inveterate dilettante or collector, nor of any keen lover of art having resided in them.

It is therefore when we turn to the family of Lady Elizabeth, the wife of John Stanhope, that it becomes evident whence came the artistic element which was to develop in both her child and grandchild.

The story of this lady's family has been told, at length, elsewhere¹; for our present purpose it must suffice to say that she was a direct descendant of Thomas, Earl of Leicester, the great dilettante of the mid-eighteenth century, and coadjutor of another famous dilettante and architect. Lord Burlington. Thomas Coke, who on a barren part of the Norfolk coast erected a palace of Italian art and filled it with choice treasures of antiquity, was the possessor of a master-mind, and left the impress of genius on all with which he dealt. His nephew and successor, the father of Lady Elizabeth, better known as 'Coke of Norfolk,' although his best energies were concentrated on agriculture and questions of practical utility, exhibited gifts which equalled those of his predecessor.

Note 1. Coke of Norfolk and his friends, by A. M. W. Stirling.

Throughout his life he [Wenman Roberts aka Coke] was the liberal patron of art and literature, and showed a fine discriminating taste in regard to both, while the masterly manner with which he enhanced the work that Thomas Coke had commenced, and transformed the bleak, barren land surrounding his home, is matter of history But a passionate love of beauty seemed inherent in his race, the joy in exquisite colour, in grace of outline, in perfection of detail — the striving after idealism even in the most commonplace accessories of daily life — combined with a hunger for creation and a tireless endeavour.

Brought up in such an atmosphere. Coke's daughters developed a resultant love of art which early bore fruition. His eldest daughter [Jane Elizabeth Coke (age 14)], afterwards Lady Andover, was only fifteen when she painted a most remarkable picture with about five life-sized figures, of Belisarius begging — an ambitious and successful work even for an artist of more mature age; while the second daughter, afterwards Lady Anson (age 12), also showed great artistic talent. Some of her pictures, painted when she was quite young, both original portraits and copies from the old Masters, are extraordinarily clever; while the exquisite manner in which, later in life, she copied and renovated some of the delicate illuminations in the old missals at Holkham, filled Roscoe with admiration.

Both she and her sister were pupils of Gainsborough, who stayed at Holkham to teach them; and although it is impossible to tell if the master's brush improved the pupil's work, it is certainly difficult in some instances to distinguish between the paintings of the former and of the latter.

Although Lady Elizabeth did not herself develop a faculty for Art to the same extent as did her two elder sisters, the talent for which her family had become conspicuous showed itself again in the person of her second son. Roddam Spencer-Stanhope, whom we have already had occasion to mention, became an artist of no mean repute who, a friend of the members of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, is classed by posterity as one of that famous band. ' He is the finest colourist in Europe,' Burne-Jones said of him; and his works show an almost Southern love of deep, glowing colour, and a dainty imagery which drifted into fairy-tales so that he was aptly described as 'a painter of dreams.'

It is interesting, therefore, to note that the passion for Art, combined with the creative faculty, descended in three successive generations of Mrs. Pickering's family, yet in each instance it was a case of collateral, not direct, descent.

Mrs. Pickering herself did not inherit the talent which her brother developed, although as a pupil of Harding her drawings and sketches are remarkable for facility and breadth of character. But to her, as to so many of her generation. Art was primarily a question of routine, to be developed by careful instruction and conscientious training, while the imagination exhibited by the so-called pre-Raphaehte School always remained a subject for amusement rather than appreciation.

Nevertheless, she was a woman of exceptional intellect, whose cleverness lay, not in superficial accomplishments, but in deep thought and extensive study, and early did she devote herself to the development of her children's minds. To the influence of her mentality must principally be attributed the love of intellectual pursuits and the thirst for knowledge which may be said to have characterized each member of her little family. She recognized that, during her own childhood, she had suffered much from the narrowing influence of the governesses of her day, with their limited education and their restricted outlook upon life, and she therefore determined that while her children should have every benefit of an education aided by professional teachers, they should not be abandoned to its disadvantages. No resident governess, therefore, was ever admitted into the house: masters came and went, the most efficient that money could procure, and from the first Evelyn profited by the same instruction as her brother; she learnt Greek and Latin, besides French, German and Italian; she studied classical literature, and became deeply versed in mythology: but it was the mother who inspired the actual love of knowledge as distinct from the drudgery of lessons.

30 Aug 1872. On her seventeenth birthday she [Evelyn de Morgan aka Mary Evelyn Pickering (age 17)] wrote:—

'At work a little after 7; after breakfast worked again till 12 when we started on an expedition. It rained hard and was very dismal. Got back late... 17 to-day, that is to say 17 years wasted; three parts at least wasted in eating, dawdling and flittering [frittering] time away. I dread getting older, at the beginning of each year I say "I will do something" and at the end I have done nothing. Art is eternal, but life is short, and each minute idly spent will rise, swelled to whole months and years, and hound me in my grave. This year every imaginable obstacle has been put in my way but slowly and tediously I am mastering them all. Now I must do sometliing — I will work till I do something.

'Lost during the year 4 months through illness, 5 through being prevented in every possible way, I in flittering time away, add aboot 2 only in genuine work and that frequently diminished by inapplication! — I will make up for it now, I have not a moment to lose.'

At length leave was reluctantly given for her to attend the Slade Schools, where women had only recently been admitted, and she prepared to throw herself heart and soul into this new adventure. One thing she determined — if the future held any success for her this should be achieved on the merits of her work alone. She would start at the lowest rung of the ladder, she would dress shabbily, and slave like any poor student whose bread depended on her labour, and the petty conventions which had hitherto hedged her about and hampered her should b€ for ever ignored.

The first check which her ardour received was the discovery that she was not to be allowed to walk alone either to or from Gower Street. It was unheard of, she was told, that a girl oi her age and class should go about utterly unprotected. To an embryo Art-student this savoured too much of the youngladyism from which she was determined to escape; but she still had to learn that convention was a myth which died hard. 'It is not done' was, in her day, a verdict from which there was no appeal.

Trivial as was the point at issue, perhaps nothing serves to mark more completely the gulf which exists between past and present than the liberty which the girl of to-day enjoys when compared with that permitted to her predecessor in a former generation. It is only necessary to glance at the pages of Punch — that invaluable record of passing phases and foUies — to recreate the social atmosphere of that time. For those were days when the single went nowhere unchaperoned by the married; when only a fast girl went alone in a hansom, or, worse stiU, drove in a hansom with the doors unclosed; and when the jest never palled of the incredible woman who wished to have a latch-key.

It must be borne in mind, moreover, that, only twenty years earlier, elderly spinsters without any adult male protector saw no absurdity in the fact that they had to keep some small pageboy to attend their walks abroad through quiet, respectable regions. No matter how minute and youthful this male escort might be, his guardianship was necessary to placate the proprieties. Nor could matrons be too venturesome. Mrs. Pickering used to relate how, as a woman of forty, tempted by the beliel that she should meet her husband immediately, she had once rashly walked a few yards down Upper Grosvenor Street without a footman, and, in consequence — even in that irreproachable locality — had been promptly accosted by a gay rake who had perforce misunderstood her improtected condition. Thus, in the seventies, it still scarcely provoked a smile, that a friend of hers, who was a septuagenarian and a great-aunt, never, for fear of being deemed unlady-like, ventured anywhere unattended by her old coachman — indeed the latter in slippery weather during the winter might be seen solemnly preceding his mistress to church, strewing sand upon the pavement upon which she was about to tread. 'It is not done' still defined the correctitudes; and if you were indiscreet enough to defy what was 'not done,' you must be prepared to pay the penalty!

So Evelyn, to her indignation, was sent off to her classes in a carriage and pair. But she soon stopped the carriage and walked the rest of the way on foot. Next, a maid was engaged to accompany her — a woman of matronly proportions whose whole appearance exhaled respectability, and who received orders never to lose sight of her charge. The latter surveyed the portly frame of her proposed escort with secret satisfaction — a woman with that figure could be easily out-distanced!