‘At Hatfield House Conservatives Become quite harum-scarum, For Radical could do no more Than overturn Old Sarum.’[33]
“In ‘Oliver Twist,’ Bill Sykes is described as having seen the fire at Hatfield as he was escaping from London.
“In the dining-room there is a portrait by Wilkie of the Duke of Wellington, painted when he was here after the battle of Waterloo. There is also at Hatfield a beautiful picture of Mary Queen of Scots at fifteen.[34] This, however, is not the authentic portrait. There is another, a replica of that at Hardwicke, taken in a widow’s dress shortly before her execution, which is one of the three portraits certainly painted from life. It was sent by the Queen to the Duke of Norfolk and intercepted by Lord Burleigh. One of the other two portraits belonged to Louis Philippe. As Sir Henry Bulwer was waiting for an audience of the king, another gentleman was in the room with him. The portrait of Queen Mary hung on the wall. The stranger looked at it, walked backwards and forwards to it, and examined it again and again. At last he walked up to Sir Henry Bulwer and said, ‘Can you tell me, sir, whom that portrait represents?’--‘Yes, I can,’ said Sir Henry; ‘but will you tell me why you ask?’--‘Because it is the lowest type of criminal face which is known to us.’ The stranger was Fouché the famous detective.
“In Lady Salisbury’s own room is a picture of Miss Pine, Lord Salisbury’s other grandmother, by Sir Joshua; also the Earl and Countess of Westmoreland and their child, by Vandyke; also a curious picture of a lady.
“‘She looks dull but good,’ said Miss Palmer.
“‘She _was_ desperately wicked,’ said Lady Salisbury, ‘and therefore it is quite unnecessary to say that she was very religious. She endowed almshouses--‘Lady Anne’s Almshouses,’--they still exist, and she sent her son to Westminster with especial orders that he should be severely flogged, when he was seventeen, and so soured his temper for life and sent him to the bad entirely; and none but ‘a thoroughly highly-principled woman’ could do such a villainous action as that. The son lived afterwards at Quixwold, and led the most abominably wicked life there, and died a death as horrible as his life. He sold everything he could lay hands on, jewels and everything, all the old family plate except one very ugly old flat candlestick and six old sconces, which were painted over mahogany colour, and so were not known to be silver. His is the phantom coach which arrives and drives up the staircase and then disappears. Lord Salisbury heard it the other night when he was in his dressing-room, and dressed again, thinking it was visitors, and went down, but it was no one.’