George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life | Page 3

and a friend of Sir Robert Walpole, was a man of character and ability, well known in the courts of the first and second Georges. Selwyn, however, probably inherited his wit and his enjoyment of society from his mother, who was Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte. Horace Walpole writes of her as "Mrs. Selwyn, mother of the famous George, and herself of much vivacity, and pretty."
Selwyn's elder brother died in 1751, and grief at his loss seems to have hastened the death of his father, which occurred in the same year.
His sister Albinia married Thomas Townshend, second son of Charles Viscount Townshend. By this marriage the families of Selwyn and Walpole were connected.
The home of the family was at Matson, a village two and a half miles south-east of Gloucester, on the spurs of the Cotswold hills, looking over the Severn valley--once called Mattesdone. There is a good deal of obscurity as to the ownership of the manor in mediaeval times, but it appears to have been in the possession of what may popularly speaking be called the family of Mattesdone. The landowner described himself by the place; "Ego Philippus de Mattesdone" are the words of an ancient document preserved among the records of the Monastery of St. Peter at Gloucester.*
* "Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestria," edited by W. Hart, vol. i. p. 100.
To come to more recent times, the manor house was built in 1594 by Sir Ambrose Willoughby. From him the estate was purchased in 1597 by Jasper Selwyn, Counsellor at Law, of Stonehouse, who was the fourth in descent from John Selwyn, one of a Sussex family.
In 1751 the direct entail was broken by Colonel Selwyn, and the property was re-entailed on the descendants of his daughter, Mrs. Townshend, though it was left by will to George Selwyn for his life. On his death it devolved on Thomas, Lord Sydney, and has since remained in the possession of the Townshend family.** Walpole has given a description of the place in the days when he used to visit it.
** Bigland, "History of Gloucestershire," vol. ii. p. 200.
"I stayed two days at George Selwyn's house, called Matson, which lies on Robin Hood's Hill; it is lofty enough for an Alp, yet it is a mountain of turf to the very top, has wood scattered all over it, springs that long to be cascades in twenty places of it, and from the summit of it beats even Sir George Lyttleton's views, by having the city of Gloucester at its foot, and the Severn widening to the horizon. His house is small, but neat. King Charles lay here at the siege, and the Duke of York, with typical fury, hacked and hewed the window-shutters of his chamber, as a memorandum of his being there. Here is a good picture of Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in his later age, . . . and here is the very flower pot and counterfeit association for which Bishop Sprat is taken up, and the Duke of Marlborough sent to the Tower. The reservoirs on the hill supply the city. The late Mr. Selwyn governed the borough by them, and I believe by some wine too. . . .
"A little way from the town are the ruins of Lantony Priory; there remains a pretty old gateway, which G. Selwyn has begged to erect on the top of his mountain, and it will have a charming effect."*
* "The Letters of Horace Walpole," vol. ii. p. 354.
Selwyn's schooldays were passed at Eton with Gray and Walpole. In 1739 he became an undergraduate of Hertford College, Oxford, or Hart Hall as it was called. It was to Hertford also that later Charles Fox went, "a college which has in our own day been munificently re-endowed as a training school of principles and ideas very different from those ordinarily associated with the name of its greatest son." Hertford was in the middle of the eighteenth century a college where the so-called students neither toiled at books nor at physical exercise. They passed a short and merry time at the University, fashioned as nearly as might be on the mode of life of a man about town. In 1740 he was appointed to the vague-sounding office of Clerk of the Irons and Surveyor of the Meltings in the Mint, a sinecure which, after the manner of the time, required no personal attention from the holder. Even in those early days Selwyn, who went by the sobriquet of "Bosky," had many friends--not only among college boys, but in London society. "You must judge by what you feel yourself," wrote Walpole to General Conway, the soldier and statesman, on the occasion of a severe illness from which Selwyn suffered in 1741, "of what I feel for Selwyn's recovery, with