For the Term of His Natural Life | Page 7

live in princely magnificence. But the
old-man-of-the-sea burden of parsimony and avarice which he had
voluntarily taken upon him was not to be shaken off, and the only show
he made of his wealth was by purchasing, on his knighthood, the
rambling but comfortable house at Hampstead, and ostensibly retiring
from active business.
His retirement was not a happy one. He was a stern father and a severe
master. His servants hated, and his wife feared him. His only son
Richard appeared to inherit his father's strong will and imperious
manner. Under careful supervision and a just rule he might have been
guided to good; but left to his own devices outside, and galled by the
iron yoke of parental discipline at home, he became reckless and
prodigal. The mother--poor, timid Ellinor, who had been rudely torn
from the love of her youth, her cousin, Lord Bellasis--tried to restrain
him, but the head-strong boy, though owning for his mother that strong
love which is often a part of such violent natures, proved intractable,
and after three years of parental feud, he went off to the Continent, to
pursue there the same reckless life which in London had offended Sir
Richard. Sir Richard, upon this, sent for Maurice Frere, his sister's
son--the abolition of the slave trade had ruined the Bristol House of
Frere--and bought for him a commission in a marching regiment,
hinting darkly of special favours to come. His open preference for his
nephew had galled to the quick his sensitive wife, who contrasted with
some heart-pangs the gallant prodigality of her father with the
niggardly economy of her husband. Between the houses of parvenu
Devine and long-descended Wotton Wade there had long been little
love. Sir Richard felt that the colonel despised him for a city knight,
and had heard that over claret and cards Lord Bellasis and his friends
had often lamented the hard fortune which gave the beauty, Ellinor, to

so sordid a bridegroom. Armigell Esme Wade, Viscount Bellasis and
Wotton, was a product of his time. Of good family (his ancestor,
Armigell, was reputed to have landed in America before Gilbert or
Raleigh), he had inherited his manor of Bellasis, or Belsize, from one
Sir Esme Wade, ambassador from Queen Elizabeth to the King of
Spain in the delicate matter of Mendoza, and afterwards counsellor to
James I, and Lieutenant of the Tower. This Esme was a man of dark
devices. It was he who negotiated with Mary Stuart for Elizabeth; it
was he who wormed out of Cobham the evidence against the great
Raleigh. He became rich, and his sister (the widow of Henry de
Kirkhaven, Lord of Hemfleet) marrying into the family of the Wottons,
the wealth of the house was further increased by the union of her
daughter Sybil with Marmaduke Wade. Marmaduke Wade was a Lord
of the Admiralty, and a patron of Pepys, who in his diary [July 17,1668]
speaks of visiting him at Belsize. He was raised to the peerage in 1667
by the title of Baron Bellasis and Wotton, and married for his second
wife Anne, daughter of Philip Stanhope, second Earl of Chesterfield.
Allied to this powerful house, the family tree of Wotton Wade grew
and flourished.
In 1784, Philip, third Baron, married the celebrated beauty, Miss Povey,
and had issue Armigell Esme, in whose person the family prudence
seemed to have run itself out.
The fourth Lord Bellasis combined the daring of Armigell, the
adventurer, with the evil disposition of Esme, the Lieutenant of the
Tower. No sooner had he become master of his fortune than he took to
dice, drink, and debauchery with all the extravagance of the last century.
He was foremost in every riot, most notorious of all the notorious
"bloods" of the day.
Horace Walpole, in one of his letters to Selwyn in 1785, mentions a
fact which may stand for a page of narrative. "Young Wade," he says,
"is reported to have lost one thousand guineas last night to that
vulgarest of all the Bourbons, the Duc de Chartres, and they say the
fool is not yet nineteen." From a pigeon Armigell Wade became a hawk,
and at thirty years of age, having lost together with his estates all

chance of winning the one woman who might have saved him--his
cousin Ellinor--he became that most unhappy of all beings, a well-born
blackleg. When he was told by thin-lipped, cool Colonel Wade that the
rich shipbuilder, Sir Richard Devine, had proposed an alliance with
fair-haired gentle Ellinor, he swore, with fierce knitting of his black
brows, that no law of man nor Heaven should further restrain him in his
selfish prodigality. "You have sold your daughter and ruined me," he
said; "look to the consequences." Colonel Wade sneered at his fiery
kinsman: "You will