The honeymoon was spent at Berrymead Priory, a house that the bridegroom owned at Acton. This was a substantial Gothic building, with several acres of well timbered ground and gardens. Some distance, perhaps, from the Cornet's barracks. Still, one imagines he did not take his military duties very seriously; and leave of absence "on urgent private affairs" was, no doubt, granted in liberal fashion. Also, he possessed a phæton, in which, with a spanking chestnut between the shafts, the miles would soon be covered.
The Priory had a history stretching back to the far off days of Henry III, when it belonged to the Chapter of St. Paul's Cathedral. Henry VII, in high-handed fashion, presented it to the Earl of Bedford; and a subsequent occupant was the notorious Elizabeth Chudleigh, the bigamous spouse of the Duke of Kingston. Another light lady, Nancy Dawson, is also said to have lived there as its châtelaine, under the "protection" of the Duke of Newcastle.
At the beginning of the last century the property was acquired by a Colonel Clutton. He was followed by Edward Bulwer, afterwards Lord Lytton, who lived there on and off (chiefly off) with his wife, until their separation in 1836. On one occasion he gave a dinner-party, among the guests being John Forster, "to meet Miss Landon, Fontblanque, and Hayward." To the invitation was added the warning, "We dine at half-past five, to allow time for return, and regret much having no spare beds as yet." A spare bed, however, was available for Lord Beaconsfield, when he dined there in the following year.
On the departure of Bulwer, the house had a succession of tenants; and for a short period it even sheltered a bevy of Nuns of the Sacred Heart. It was when they left that the estate was purchased by Mr. George Heald, a barrister with a flourishing practice. He left it to his booby son, the Cornet: and it was thus that Lola Montez established her connection with Berrymead Priory.
While the original house still stands, the garden in which it stood has gone; and the building itself now serves as the premises of the Acton Constitutional Club. But the committee have been careful to preserve some evidence of Cornet Heald's occupancy. Thus, his crest and family motto, Nemo sibi Nascitur, are let into the mosaic flooring of the hall, and the drawing-room ceiling is embellished with his initials picked out in gold.
III
Prejudice, perhaps, but unions between the sons of Mars and the daughters of Terpsichore were in those days frowned upon by the military big-wigs at the Horse Guards. Hence, it was not long before an inspired note on the subject of this one appeared in the Standard: We learn from undoubted authority that, immediately on the marriage of Lieutenant Heald with the Countess of Landsfeld, the Marquess of Londonderry, Colonel of the 2nd Life Guards, took the most decisive steps to recommend to Her Majesty that this officer's resignation of his commission should be insisted on; and that he should at once leave the regiment, which this unfortunate and extraordinary act might possibly prejudice.