Who's Horry now?

Spectator, The, Sep 14, 1996 by Hillier, Bevis

You don't have to believe that Judge Jeffreys was a lovable old buffer to realise that Lord Macaulay maligned many historical figures in his pen-portraits. Historians ever since have been busy scrubbing his graffiti off the statues.

A classic example of his technique is his hatchet-job on Samuel Crisp - that beloved 'Daddy' Crisp who taught Fanny Burney how to write. Macaulay's take on Crisp was that he had been so mortified hy the reception of his tragedy Virginia at Drury Lane in 1754, that he retired to Chessington (`one of the wildest tracts of Surrey') and became a hermit: He lost his temper and spirits and became a cynic and a hater of mankind . . . No road, not even a sheepwalk, connected his lonely dwelling with the abodes of men . . . He survived his failure about 30 years. A new generation sprang up around him. No memory of his bad verse remained among men. His very name was forgotten . . . To the last, however, the unhappy man continued to brood over the injustice of the manager and the pit. . . Today we know that in fact Crisp went to Chessington at a friend's invitation and for the sake of his health. And a letter of Tobias Smollett's has been published which shows Virginia being warmly applauded.

Macaulay was interested in Horace Walpole -'Horry' to his friends - as the connoisseur son of the 18th-century prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. In 1833 he was able to give him a doing-over when Horace's letters to Sir Horace Mann, British envoy at the court of Tuscany, were published. Dr Timothy Mowl is, of course, well aware of Macaulay's onslaught on Walpole, but he does not quote the most enjoyably damning part of it:

After the labours of the print shop and the auction room, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons [Walpole was an MP for rotten boroughs]. And, having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions, he returned to more important pursuits, to researches after Queen Mary's comb, Wolsey red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last sea fight, and the spur which King William stuck into the flank of Sorrel.

Mowl does quote Mac-tulay's views that Walpole's writing, like pate de foie gras, owed its excellence to `the diseases of the wretched animal which furnishes it' and that in building his Gothick castle of Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, he decorated a `grotesque house with pie-crust battlements'. Macaulay's Horry was a dilettante, a trifler, a frihble. In redressing this image, Mowl at times goes rather over the top. Few would disagree with him that Walpole was one of the great British taste-makers. But to suggest, as Mowl does, that `Walpole is as commanding a figure in English literature as Proust is in French', is going it a bit.

The main basis of that high claim is the huge series of Walpole's admittedly captivating letters, edited in 48 volumes (193783) by the American Walpole collector, Wilmarth S. Lewis. Lewis was perhaps the finest editor of any literarymanuscripts anywhere - Theodore Besterman running him a close second with his work on Voltaire. As Mowl says, The footnotes are a monument in themselves.' Lewis devoted his life to Walpole and only shied away from writing a biography hiro-himself because he thought Walpole's letters bad done the job so well as to make further comment superfluous.

Macaulay was playfully against Walpole; Lewis was seriously for him. Yet, paradoxically, Walpole's champion did more than his denigrator to distort his image. Walpole was a hit of a cultural gadfly: Macaulay just exaggerated that side of him with brilliant malice. Lewis encountered another side of Walpole's nature which he could not, or would not. accept. and he covered it up. A Protestant born in the lth century and writing in New England, he could not hear to recognise that Walpole was homosexual. To that extent. Mowl writes. -his scholarship was flawed. and he probably made certain that Wyndham Ketton-(`Cremer's Horace Walpole 119401 was flawed in exactly the same way.'

That Horace Walpole was homnserual is not a sensationally new idea. Coleridge (quoted hy Mowl) thought Walpole's novel The Mysterion.us Mother detestahle'. -No one with a spark of true manliness. of which Horace Walpole had none. could have written it.' Macaulay did not deny himself an innuendo or two. Martin S. Briggs, in the chapter on Walpole in Men of Taste (1947), which does not figure in Mowl's bibliography, wrote, `It need hardly be said that he remained a bachelor to the end of his days.' And I myself, a pioneer unawares, used the h-word about Walpole in a book about pottery and porcelain, including collectors, in 1968: Horace Walpole stands in relation to Sir Robert Walpole rather as the rococo to the baroque: the child that grows into the antithesis of its parent. Or one thinks of the delicate flower of a great bristling cactus. He is what the lAth century calls a dilettante the 19th an exquisite, and the 20th a homosexual. Mowl brings Walpole's sexuality to the fore. He suggests that he had a physical affair with the young Lord Lincoln (later second Duke of Newcastle) - the son of one prime minister bedding the nephew of another. A pedant might say the evidence is circumstantial: Horace's having his and Lincoln's pastel portraits done as companion pieces while they holidayed in Venice; Horace's bribing Lincoln's tutor with a pension to make himself scarce, and so on. Lincoln was later robustly heterosexual: Mowl's description of him as a `bedspring-bouncer' suggests that he knows. though he does not quote, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams's ribald ode to Lord Lincoln, replete with four-letter words.