Mr. Hastings

Mr. Hastings by E.V. Lucas (1910)

Mr. Hastings, by E.V. Lucas, is a short biographical essay drawing on a written portrait of one Mr. Hastings composed by his cousin Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Lord Shaftesbury, as a companion piece to a painted portrait of the man. The Earl, amused to set his pen against the artist's brush, appended his written character study to the picture, which once hung at Wimborne St. Giles's near Cranbourn in Dorset, one of the Shaftesbury seats. Lucas encountered the Earl's words in the Connoisseur for Thursday, 14 August, 1755, and notes in passing that the quality of London papers a hundred and fifty-six years earlier was not a little disquieting to reflect upon. He also mentions having seen an engraving of the portrait in one of Hutchins's Dorsetshire books, describing it as a crude enough thing showing a little odd old man with a pointed beard, sharp eyes, and a long staff. The subject himself, Mr. Hastings, was alive in 1638, born in 1551, a man of low stature, very strong and active, with reddish flaxen hair and clothes always of green cloth, never worth five pounds new. He was by family connection son, brother, and uncle to the Earls of Huntingdon. His house stood in the midst of a large park well stocked with deer, with rabbit warrens near the kitchen, many fish-ponds, great stores of timber, a banqueting house built in a tree, and a bowling-green that had never been levelled since it was first ploughed, where round sand bowls were used. He kept hounds for buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger, hawks both long and short winged, and all sorts of nets for fish. He held a walk in the New Forest and the manor of Christ Church, which supplied him with red deer and sea and river fish, and his neighbours' grounds were freely open to him. Whatever time he did not spend in these sports he devoted to caressing his neighbours' wives and daughters, every woman in his walks of yeoman's wife degree or under and under forty being, the Earl dryly observes, extremely at fault if Hastings was not intimately acquainted with her. He always spoke kindly to the husband, father, or brother concerned, who was in turn welcome at his house. Lucas pauses to savour the Earl's use of the word popular in this connection. He also notes that, despite the portrait of an archetypal whimsical bachelor, Hastings was in fact married, his wife having brought him the estate of Woodlands and not dying until 1638 when he was eighty-seven. They had a son. Lord Shaftesbury, being something of a cynic, suppressed these details and eliminated Mrs. Hastings from his account entirely. The great hall of Hastings's house was strewn with marrow bones, hung with foxskins, and full of hawks' perches, hounds, spaniels, and terriers, with game-keepers' and hunters' poles in great abundance. The parlour had terriers and the choicest hounds and spaniels lying on the hearth, and two of the great chairs were almost always occupied by litters of young cats, which were not to be disturbed. Three or four cats attended Hastings at dinner, and he kept a small white stick of fourteen inches by his trencher to defend such meat as he did not wish to share with them. The windows of the room served as storage for arrows, cross-bows, and stone-bows. An oyster table stood at the lower end, constantly in use twice a day all year round, the neighbouring town of Poole supplying him with oysters before both dinner and supper. On the upper side of the room sat a Church Bible and the Book of Martyrs, alongside hawks' hoods and bells, old green hats with their crowns thrust in to hold eggs of a pheasant kind of poultry he took much care of, cards, dice, tables, and a store of used tobacco-pipes, Hastings having been among the earliest smokers given that he was born as far back as 1551. A closet held the strong beer and wine, but these were dispensed only in single glasses by strict rule of the house, Hastings never exceeding in drink nor permitting it in others, a practice Lucas allows was hard on guests though characteristic of the unreasonableness that gives such originals their life. Opening off the same room was an old chapel no longer used for devotion, whose pulpit served as the safest place in the house and was never without a cold chine of beef, a venison pasty, a gammon of bacon, or a great apple pie with thick crust, extremely baked. His table cost him little, his sports supplying almost everything but beef and mutton. On Fridays he had the best salt fish he could get and received his neighbours of best quality. He never lacked a London pudding, which he always sang in with the words My part lies therein-a. He was well-natured but soon angry, lived to be a hundred, never lost his eyesight, always wrote and read without spectacles, and got on horseback without help until past fourscore riding to the death of a stag as well as any. He was buried in Horton church in 1650 at the age of ninety and nine. Lucas closes by reflecting that such spacious days, such idiosyncrasy and humour, are gone from England entirely, though something of Hastings's character may still be glimpsed in the attitudes and gestures of old devotees of the bowling-green, whose elemental anxieties as they watch a bowl's career and will it to swerve at the last dying moment have not changed in three hundred years.

By E.V. Lucas · First published 1910 · Genre: Biography, Historical Fiction, Essay · 1,958 words

First lines

Had it not been for the trenchant pen of his cousin, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Lord Shaftesbury, we should know nothing of Mr. Hastings; but as it happens, a portrait of Mr. Hastings being painted, the Earl was amused to pit his pen against the brush of the artist and append the result to the picture. So that Mr. Hastings used to hang on the wall at Wimborne St. Giles's, near Cranbourn, in Dorset (one of the Shaftesbury seats), doubly limned. Where he is to-day I know not; but the Earl's words remain and are accessible. I take them in the form which follows from the "Connoisseur" for Thursday, 14 August, 1755, and I may in passing say that in turning over the leaves of this leisurely little breakfast-table companion it was not a little disquieting to think what good papers they had in London one hundred and fifty-six years ago, before the days of amalgamation.

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Tags

eccentric characters · 17th-century England · English countryside · Dorset · country squire · hunting · field sports · falconry · hunting dogs · spaniels · cats · domestic animals

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