Stories of highwaymen are excellent Links with the Past, and here is one.  The fifth Earl of Berkeley, who died in 1810, had always declared that any one might without disgrace be overcome by superior numbers, but that he would never surrender to a single highwayman.  As he was crossing Hounslow Heath one night, on his way from Berkeley Castle to London, his travelling carriage was stopped by a man on horseback, who put his head in at the window and said, “I believe you are Lord Berkeley?” “I am.”  “I believe you have always boasted that you would never surrender to a single highwayman?” “I have.”  “Well,” presenting a pistol, “I am a single highwayman, and I say, ‘Your money or your life.’” “You cowardly dog,” said Lord Berkeley, “do you think I can’t see your confederate skulking behind you?” The highwayman, who was really alone, looked hurriedly round, and Lord Berkeley shot him through the head.  I asked Lady Caroline Maxse (1803-1886), who was born a Berkeley, if this story was true.  I can never forget my thrill when she replied, “Yes; and I am proud to say that I am that man’s daughter.”

Sir Moses Montefiore was born in 1784, and died in 1885.  It is a disheartening fact for the teetotallers that he had drunk a bottle of port wine every day since he grew up.  He had dined with Lord Nelson on board his ship, and vividly remembered the transcendent beauty of Lady Hamilton.  The last time Sir Moses appeared in public was, if I mistake not, at a garden-party at Marlborough House.  The party was given on a Saturday.  Sir Moses was restrained by religious scruples from using his horses, and was of course too feeble to walk, so he was conveyed to the party in a magnificent sedan-chair.  That was the only occasion on which I have seen such an article in use.

When I began to go out in London, a conspicuous figure in dinner-society and on Protestant platforms was Captain Francis Maude, R.N.  He was born in 1798 and died in 1886.  He used to say, “My grandfather was nine years old when Charles II. died.”  And so, if pedigrees may be trusted, he was.  Charles II. died in 1685.  Sir Robert Maude was born in 1676.  His son, the first Lord Hawarden, was born in 1727, and Captain Francis Maude was this Lord Hawarden’s youngest son.  The year of his death (1880) saw also that of a truly venerable woman, Mrs. Hodgson, mother of Kirkman and Stewart Hodgson, the well-known partners in Barings’ house.  Her age was not precisely known, but when a schoolgirl in Paris she had seen Robespierre executed, and distinctly recollected the appearance of his bandaged face.  Her granddaughters, Mr. Stewart Hodgson’s children, are quite young women, and if they live to the age which, with such ancestry, they are entitled to anticipate, they will carry down into the middle of the twentieth century the account, derived from an eye-witness, of the central event of the French Revolution.

One year later, in 1887, there died, at her house in St. James’s Square, Mrs. Anne Penelope Hoare, mother of the late Sir Henry Hoare, M.P.  She recollected being at a children’s party when the lady of the house came in and stopped the dancing because news had come that the King of France had been put to death.  Her range of conscious knowledge extended from the execution of Louis XVI. to the Jubilee of Queen Victoria.  So short a thing is history.