Lady Roehampton should pass their
Christmas at Gaydene with Mr. Sidney Wilton, stay as long as they liked,
go where they chose, but make it their headquarters. It was a most
successful visit; for a great deal of business was done, as well as
pleasure enjoyed. The ambassadors, who were always a little uneasy at
Christmas when everybody is away, and themselves without country homes,
were all invited down for that week. Lord Roehampton used to give them
audiences after the shooting parties. He thought it was a specific
against their being too long. He used to say, "The first dinner-bell
often brings things to a point." After Christmas there was an
ever-varying stream of company, chiefly official and parliamentary. The
banquet and the battue did not always settle the business, the clause,
or the schedule, which the guests often came down to Gaydene ostensibly
to accomplish, but they sent men back to town with increased energy and
good humour, and kept the party in heart. Towards the end of the month
the premier came down, and for him the Blue Ribbon Covert had been
reserved, though he really cared little for sport. It was an eighteenth
century tradition that knights of the garter only had been permitted to
shoot this choice preserve, but Mr. Sidney Wilton, in this advanced age,
did not of course revive such an ultra-exclusive practice, and he was
particular in arranging the party to include Mr. Jorrocks. This was
a Radical member to whom considerable office had been given at the
reconstruction of 1835, when it was necessary that the Whigs should
conciliate the Mountain. He was a pretentious, underbred, half-educated
man, fluent with all the commonplaces of middle-class ambition, which
are humorously called democratic opinions, but at heart a sycophant
of the aristocracy. He represented, however, a large and important
constituency, and his promotion was at first looked upon as a
masterpiece of management. The Mountain, who knew Jorrocks by heart, and
felt that they had in their ranks men in every sense his superior, and
that he could be no representative of their intelligence and opinions,
and so by degrees prepare for their gradual admission to the sacred
land, at first sulked over the promotion of their late companion, and
only did not publicly deride it from the feeling that by so doing they
might be playing the game of the ministry. At the time of which we are
writing, having become extremely discontented and wishing to an