The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (3 page)

Dear Sir,

I am not unwilling to give you facts relating to my brother Frederick William Rolfe, but I fear I cannot spare much time for the purpose. I am certainly anxious that whatever may be written about him may be correct. You might perhaps send me a list of the facts you require. Or would you prefer to see me in chambers here? If so please come before term begins. An appointment could be arranged by telephone. I shall probably be in from about 11.30 to 4.0 p.m. most ensuing days. I presume you would let me see a proof of whatever you may write. Did you know my brother personally?

I should warn you that I may not be able to furnish you with precise dates for each of his movements.

Yours faithfully,

Herbert Rolfe

Before I could reply to Mr Rolfe’s guarded offer, however, another letter arrived:

Dear Sir,

My brother opened your letter by mistake, and has only just forwarded it. I put all I could collect about Baron Corvo into a
Mercury
article illustrated by his writings. His novel
Hadrian the Seventh
was discovered by R. H. Benson, and had a great influence on us at Cambridge twenty years ago. I was entirely carried away by his tyrianthine style. Grant Richards had a book of letters of Corvo. After the failure of his firm it passed to More and Co., who showed me stacks of coloured script. Apply to Grant Richards, who published the Borgia book for Rolfe. You will have to get his leave to use the letters.

Yours sincerely

Shane Leslie

I wrote forthwith to ‘More and Co.’, whom I had no difficulty in identifying as the De la More Press, publishers of a series of King’s Classics which had been very familiar to my boyhood. While I was waiting for a reply, yet another avenue was disclosed to me:

Dear Sir,

If you will let me know what day will suit, I will call upon you at 5
 
p.m. on that day to talk about Baron Corvo.

Yours faithfully

Harry Pirie-Gordon

Looking back, I find in each of these letters a reflection of its writer, from the legal caution of Mr Rolfe, the ready helpfulness of Mr Swinnerton, Mr Leslie’s use of the word ‘tyrianthine’, Mr Pirie-Gordon’s brevity. The most urgent letter seemed to be Mr Rolfe’s; and, obeying his instruction, I telephoned to fix an appointment next day. But meanwhile a new woodcock fell to my springe: Mr Kains-Jackson was announced. He had answered my letter promptly and in person.

*

My white-haired visitor had a very interesting story to tell; for he had known Rolfe intimately, and, as I found later, nearly everyone who knew Rolfe thought him the most remarkable man of his acquaintance. This particular connection came about by chance in the very early ’nineties, when Mr Jackson, then a City solicitor, was taking a customary holiday at Christchurch in Hampshire, at that time a quiet village quite separated from Bournemouth, much patronized in the summer by the artistic. For both personal and business reasons Mr Jackson had called on a local client, the late Gleeson White, then well known as an art critic; and in Gleeson White’s house he encountered a slim, clean-shaven, slightly clerical man who was introduced as the Baron Corvo. Baron Corvo, despite his foreign name, did not affect Italian blood. He proclaimed himself an Englishman and an artist. On closer knowledge he proved to have many gifts: to be an excellent sculler, swimmer and fisherman, a skilful musician, photographer and scribe, a man of taste with a pleasant turn of the tongue. Gleeson White was a good talker, even for those days, when conversation was practised as an amusement; but when he fell silent the Baron was always ready with a topic, and he could hold the company with tales of Italy and England, even better than his host’s. Corvo owed his title, or said that he owed it, to an elderly English lady, the Duchess Sforza-Cesarini, like himself a convert to Catholicism, who had met him in Italy, more or less adopted him as a grandson, and bestowed on him a small estate carrying the baronial title much as certain English properties carry the privilege of being Lord of the Manor. There seemed no reason to doubt his claims. He certainly received remittances from the Duchess in Italy, for Mr Jackson could remember cashing her lira cheques, which the Baron received more or less monthly. Corvo was living in a house let out in apartments by a retired butler; he had made a studio on the first floor, and was usually busily engaged with his art. The local Catholic church had been liberally adorned by his brush in a fresco of figures still to be seen by the curious, and it was said that churches elsewhere also rejoiced in his work. Perhaps the oddest thing about the Baron as he lived and worked at Christchurch was his method of painting. Conscious of a weakness in figure drawing, it was his custom to photograph his models, make lantern slides from the photographs, and then project the image on to the painting area so that he could sketch in an outline. The Byzantine eikon was his ideal, and some of his oil-paintings were enhanced with needlework, and spangled with sequins. Corvo appeared to be a very pious Catholic, who required his brushes to be blessed before he used them. His subjects were almost invariably ecclesiastical, and Mr Jackson delighted and diverted me with a reproduction of one of Rolfe’s more ambitious pictures. Some years afterwards I showed a head of St William of Norwich, painted by Corvo, to Rickets and Shannon, who thought it showed an interesting touch. The fresco at St Michael’s, Christchurch, though damaged by damp, is still, in its way, impressive.

I was surprised to find that in these early days Rolfe was not in the least regarded as a writer: he gave himself out, and was accepted, as a painter; indeed, it was his promise in that art which had persuaded the Duchess to support him. He did, however, write occasional verses, mostly inspired by his own pictures.

The Baron continued for some time to enjoy the pleasures of local society, to take part in the picnics of others, and to return this modest form of hospitality. But his growing friendship with Mr Jackson, who found the companionship more and more inspiring, was broken off by an unfortunate transaction which ended Corvo’s Christchurch stay. Gleeson White was the owner of a stationers’ business and lending library, occupying two freehold premises known as Caxton House; and these the Baron proposed to buy. It became Mr Jackson’s duty to act for White; and in his professional capacity he could not help becoming aware that Baron Corvo’s finances were overstrained.

Rolfe also was represented by a solicitor, whom he summoned in unusual fashion. Hearing that John Withers was a good lawyer, he despatched a telegram to the effect: ‘Please come to Christchurch Hampshire immediately for important conveyancing transaction. You will be met at station by barouche with white horse. Baron Corvo.’ The young solicitor hurried off with visions of an important client, but his illusions were dispelled when he found that the ‘barouche with white horse’ was only the station fly drawn by a fleabitten grey hack.

Corvo had proposed to complete the purchase by the sale of his own properties at Bristol and Oxford; but these proved to be already mortgaged to the hilt; and so the deal was off. Moreover, rumour began to be busy with the Baron’s name. His debts to local tradesmen were mounting skywards; the Duchess’s allowance ceased; and it was said that Baron Corvo was not a Baron at all, but only Frederick Rolfe. The gossip thickened; and some time between December 1891 and June 1892 ‘Baron Corvo’ vanished from Hampshire, leaving his paintings, his brushes, and his debts to look after themselves.

Nevertheless the Baron regarded himself as the injured party. The last that Mr Jackson heard of him was an extract from a letter to a friend, written by Rolfe ten years later:

If you are writing to K-J, you should say this: he made a ghastly blunder; and there is no evidence before me that he ever has attempted or desired to set it right. Were I aware of any such disposition on his part, I hope I am not ungenerous enough to withstand him. But at present he appears to me as an avoidable person, expressing opinions based on no sure warranty and obviously false to facts. I much regret it; for, though I owe my ten years’ hell to him, I like his personality. Please do not give him the slightest unnecessary information about me or my doings.

This Christchurch story was disturbing in its implications. Mr Jackson seemed to have no doubt that Rolfe’s plan had not been an honest one; and mentioned that he had thought it necessary to warn his friends against any financial dealings with ‘the Baron’. Still, I had heard one side of the story only; I needed further material for any judgement. The material was at hand. From the file in which he had kept Corvo’s letters, Mr Jackson produced two long newspaper cuttings, dated 1898, taken from the
Aberdeen Free Press.
He had noticed them at the time of their appearance, and kept them as curiosities. To me they were almost as engrossing as Millard’s Venice letters: a wonderful piece of luck at the outset of my labours. Here was a detailed account, seen through the eyes of an enemy, of the early adventures of the erratic being whose life I had set myself to trace. As I read it, I began to understand Rolfe’s embittered later years, to glimpse the inner misery of his life.

CHAPTER 3: THE NEWSPAPER ATTACK

The ostensible cause of the articles which Mr Jackson left with me for study was a pseudo-reminiscence by Rolfe, published in the
Wide World Magazine,
a monthly that for a short time, and very rashly, guaranteed the veracity of its contributors. The tall stories of Louis de Rougemont which appeared in its pages brought, however, so much ridicule upon its assertion that it provided nothing but the truth that the claim was speedily withdrawn. In the last number to carry the short-lived guarantee there appeared the harmless and entertaining fiction, to which I shall refer later, which afforded Rolfe’s enemy his opening point.

The first part of the attack is headed

BARON CORVO

MORE ‘WIDE WORLD’ ADVENTURES

EXTRAORDINARY STORY

A NOBLEMAN FROM ABERDEEN

and opens thus:

The world was recently startled by the discovery by the
Wide World Magazine
– a new periodical devoted to the promulgation of true statements of thrilling adventure – of a greater than Robinson Crusoe in the person of M. Rougemont, and a little later the public was equally amused when it was shown what manner of man that great explorer and anthropologist really is. Being about done with the Rougemont affair, the
Wide World Magazine
has discovered another personage. This time it is a nobleman, and in this month’s issue of the magazine he is presented with the customary editorial flourish which, at the head of an article, is understood to give a keener relish to the tale. The new writer tells a story of his experiences with great minuteness, but there are many experiences of his much more striking than the statements of the
Wide World Magazine,
which it would be well for the world to know. The article in question is entitled
How I was Buried Alive
and is ‘By Baron Corvo’ – though no quotation marks will be found beside his name anywhere in the Magazine to indicate that he is not the real quality. And the patent of nobility is further endorsed in the serious editorial statement already mentioned, in which the story is described as ‘Baron Corvo’s fearful experience described in minute detail by himself and illustrated with drawings done under his own supervision’. A picture of a youngish man is given in the front of the article as a photo of Baron Corvo. It may be said that it is a very good photo, and has been recognized by many people in Aberdeen and neighbourhood, who can tell something regarding him vastly more interesting than what appears in the
Wide World Magazine
under His Excellency’s signature. . . . The merit of [that] story lies in its being an actual experience of this nobleman, and . . . it will be well, for many reasons, to indicate how far His Excellency the Baron Corvo is to be taken
au sérieux.

And first as to title. People will look in vain in the peerage of this or any other country for the lineage of Baron Corvo. But ‘the Baron’ has not now used the title for the first time; nor does he use it without being well warned by those with whom he was acquainted as to the complications likely to result if he persisted in doing so. It was all right so long as he employed the title to those who knew what value to put upon it, but he has been fond of subscribing himself in formal communications ‘very truly, Corvo’, and even as ‘Frederick Baron Corvo’. Those who knew him pointed out the folly, to say the least of it, of this kind of thing.

So far the attack had proceeded with menacing restraint. Now, however, the author opened his hand. Evidently he was well informed; for he turns to the Christchurch incident, and relates in detail how ‘the Baron’ had attempted to purchase Gleeson White’s property and was ‘treated seriously in the negotiations – for a while’. He gives, too, the text of a taunting and sarcastic letter written to Rolfe by Mrs White which concludes:

‘As regards your persistence in maintaining that you could buy our property, I can only hope you were self-deceived. No other excuse can justify the extreme and unnecessary worry you have caused us both. Are you leaving on Saturday? An absurd report has reached me that you are to be sold up then and are going to the workhouse. Under the circumstances I hope your old friend Mr T. and your priest will come to the rescue – but how about that £100
you have told us repeatedly you have still at your London bank under your real name Rolfe? which let me advise you to re-adopt for the future, for the very fact of your assuming a new and foreign title has, I find now, given rise from the first to suspicions here and elsewhere. . . . Deeply regretting that you have made it impossible for us to assist you further, I am, etc. etc.’

This [continues the article] shows something of the nature of the Baron, and it may simply be added that the title Baron Corvo, as His Excellency told on various occasions to those who knew him, is ‘a distinction I picked up in Italy’.

Having (it must be admitted, quite skilfully) thus thrown cold water on ‘His Excellency’s’ rank, the unknown commentator asks ‘Who, then,
is
Baron Corvo?’, a rhetorical question which he proceeds to answer:

This gentleman is Frederick William Rolfe, and his history prior to his emergence in Aberdeen may be briefly told. While an undermaster at Grantham School he became a Roman Catholic and had to leave his mastership. This was in 1886. At times, as he himself put it, he ‘starved in London’, alternated with short periods of tutorship. At one time the Marquess of Bute, having founded a school for outcast boys at Oban, appointed Rolfe the master. There were two priest chaplains, and among the three matters did not move smoothly. In a month or two Rolfe was out again. After a while he decided to go in for the priesthood. The Bishop of Shrewsbury was induced to look into his case, with the result that in the end of 1887, as an ecclesiastical subject of the prelate, he went to Oscott (Roman Catholic) College, but in a few months was discharged.

After more ‘starving in London’ he came across Mr Ogilvie-Forbes, of Boyndlie in Aberdeenshire, and stayed at Boyndlie for three or four months. Another temporary tutorship and then the late Archbishop Smith of Edinburgh, well known for his softness of heart in such cases, was induced to take him up, and sent him to the Scots College in Rome, to be trained for the priesthood. After five months he was expelled. It was owing to his lack of Vocation . . . [and] because – as is averred on authority which the Baron is not likely to challenge – he was regarded as a general nuisance in the place, to say the least of it. Even there he contracted large debts, which he said the Lord Archibald Douglas had agreed to pay, but which Lord Archibald would have nothing to do with. However, Mr Rolfe has always been characterized with a polished manner, backed up by such accomplishments as a little music, some capacity for art, and a considerable expertness as an amateur photographer. As a student he contrived to make himself very agreeable to a Roman Catholic old English lady with an Italian title, the Duchess Carolina Sforza, from whom he got considerable sums of money; and by her he was maintained for some time after his expulsion from the Scots College. However, that, like many another kindness to Mr Rolfe, came to an end. He returned to England towards the end of 1890, and, maintaining that he had been promised by the Duchess an income – which he variously stated as from £150 to £300 a year – for two years to enable him to prosecute his art studies, he went to Christchurch.

There follows a further dig at the Gleeson White episode, with a conclusion that amplifies Mr Jackson’s recollection:

The Duchess declined, however, to rise to the occasion in the matter of the promised income, though Rolfe continued for years to write to her begging her aid, until the letters were either not answered or were replied to by communications on which there was neither the prefix ‘Mr’ nor the affix ‘Esq.’, to say nothing of the lordly title of ‘Baron’, which he soon came to be constantly using. It may just be noted in passing that the title which the Baron selected is of the following signification – Latin, corvus; Italian, corvo; French, corbeau; Scotch, corbie; English, crow.
[1]

Even this well-informed critic was unaware, it appeared, of Rolfe’s ancestry. I found his story intensely interesting; not the less so because as I went on I found that this press attack had been very largely Mr Leslie’s authority on Corvo’s early years.

And now we come to 1892, when this gentleman began to honour with his residence the Northern city of Aberdeen. Sold out at Christchurch, he did the ‘starving’ again for some months – or was charitably maintained by the Fathers of the Roman Catholic Church, Ely Place, London. About the middle of that year, however, and continuing to look about among well-to-do Roman Catholic families for aid, he was given the post of tutor to the young Laird of Seaton, at Seaton Old House, Aberdeen. For a brief space he lived in clover, driving out and in to the city, being able to invite his friends to lunch and so forth, all as becometh one with lordly aspirations; though here it ought to be said that for a time he followed Mrs White’s sensible advice, and went under his own name of Frederick William Rolfe. . . . However, he had to depart from Seaton, and a curious story may be told as showing the light in which he was regarded after his departure. A few months afterwards he found his way into the Seaton grounds. Nobody saw him enter; but as he was coming out again by a different gateway, he found the gate locked. ‘Gate’, he shouted to the old woman in the lodge. The old body looked out, inquiring who it was, and, on being told, ‘Well,’ she drily observed, ‘I suppose I may let you out, though I have orders not to let you in’.

Mr Rolfe, looking about for a friend in need, found one in the Rev. Fr. Gerry, Roman Catholic priest of Strichen (now Dufftown), who kept him for some weeks. Father Gerry found it extremely hard to get rid of him – as did many another – for on the day fixed for his departure the guest usually fell sick and was unable to go.

About . . . the beginning of November 1892 Mr Rolfe made application to Messrs G. W. Wilson and Co., photographers, to be taken on their staff. He did not care a pin for money. All he desired was opportunity to improve and perfect himself in the photographic art. He was told that no improvers were taken on there; but he persisted, and ultimately on being told that there was a boy’s place vacant, which he might have if he cared to take it, and be subject to the ordinary rules of the works, he accepted. For fully three months he was in Messrs Wilson’s works at 12s. 6d. a week, but merely messing about, coming and going when he liked, pretty much doing what he liked, telling enormous yarns to his fellow-workers of his father’s property in England and abroad – for by this time he was reverting to the use of the baronial title. . . . At length the firm could endure His Excellency no longer and he received his notice. But again the difficulty was to get rid of him. After being told not to come back, he would return and start work smilingly as usual. It was thought advisable, therefore, to send him a formal intimation to his lodgings (which he had not paid for months) that the thing could go on no longer, and he must go. He immediately sent back to Messrs Wilson a letter, of which the following is an extract: ‘Dear Sir, It is a curious thing that at the moment I received your note I was about to carry out an intention I have been forming for some time past, viz. to ask you whether one would be allowed to invest a small sum, say
£
1000, in your business, and to secure a permanent and congenial appointment suited to my capacities. Perhaps it is inopportune now, but I think I had better mention it.’ Even after this he turned up at the works, and had ultimately to be threatened with ejection by the police if he did not clear out. Then Mr Rolfe proposed to sue the firm. He went to one of the principal legal firms in Aberdeen and got them to write to Messrs G. W. Wilson intimating a claim of about £300 for the retention, he said, of certain property of his, and for breach of contract. A single communication from Messrs Wilson showed the lawyers the kind of man with whom they had to deal, and they dropped the case. Mr Rolfe tried to get another to take up the case ‘on spec’, as he put it, but failed, and so that matter passed away.

The expression ‘passed away’ was much favoured by whosoever wrote the attack on Rolfe; indeed, there are many repeated turns of phrase which must have revealed to the victim the identity of his enemy.

The Baron chiefly occupied himself in what he called ‘beating up’ all the well-to-do Catholics, from the Duke of Norfolk downwards, for money to aid him in carrying out schemes which he put forward of colour-photography, submarine photography, new light for instantaneous photography, and all the rest. But he did not confine his attention to Catholics. . . . He did not hesitate to attempt even the highest flights, as the following communication will show: ‘Baron Corvo presents compliments to Sir Henry Ponsonby, and is desirous to offer Her Majesty the Queen a small picture of the Nativity at Christmas. It is his own work, and is quite unique, being photographed from the living model by magnesium light. He would be very grateful to Sir Henry Ponsonby for directions as to the necessary form to be observed on these occasions.’

But, after all, it was to Roman Catholics that [Corvo] chiefly made his epistolary appeals. One of those upon whom he bestowed unsleeping attention was the late Roman Catholic Bishop of Aberdeen, Hugh Macdonald. Writing to the Bishop on one occasion acknowledging the loan of £1, which the kind-hearted Bishop had sent him, Rolfe wrote: ‘My Lord Bishop – I regret that I have made a mistake as to the funds at your Lordship’s disposal, but I was informed . . . that a sum of £4,600 had been inherited by the Catholic Cathedral clergy “for the relief of the Catholic poor”. I repeat my apologies for having troubled your Lordship about a matter on which I was misinformed.’ The note from the Bishop in reference to this matter was pointed and not without a touch of ecclesiastical humour: ‘My dear Mr Rolfe, As I told you on Saturday, I have no funds at my disposal for the relief of the Catholic poor. No such sums have been left lately, so that you must have been misinformed. May our Lord help you out of your difficulties, for I have no faith in submarine photography. Hugh C. SS. R. Bishop of Aberdeen.’

But the further adventures of Baron Corvo must wait for another day.

Not, however, for long. One article did not satisfy the spleen of Rolfe’s first biographer. He returned to the attack in the next issue of the
Aberdeen Free Press,
pleading, in the fashion that I recognized, that ‘It will be well’ to give some further particulars of the Baron’s residence in Aberdeen. It is unnecessary to repeat in full all the instances he gives of the ways in which Rolfe struggled to keep his head above water. He appealed all round for aid to finance inventions of which there is no longer any record. Perhaps a hint of one can be gleaned from the letter to Sir Henry Ponsonby quoted above, and another to Mr W. Astor in which Rolfe claims to have ‘invented a portable light by which I can dispense with the sun’. His reference is to photography by magnesium light, at that time (the early nineties) still a novelty. It is charitable, and reasonable, to suppose that Rolfe, who, even in the admission of the Aberdeen writer, was an ‘expert’ photographer, had stumbled upon some advance, or improvement, on the methods then employed. Even his other inventions, so called, seem to have had at least
prima-facie
claims. They so far impressed Commander Littledale, then in charge of H.M.S.
Clyde,
that the Commander undertook to bring some of Rolfe’s submarine schemes before the United Service Institution; though even that minor triumph brings its sting, for