CHAPTER IX

The Eighteenth Century Court and Society

For twelve years between 1702 and 1714 a queen was ruling in her own right and English arms were carrying on for most of this period a successful foreign war. It was possible for a woman to write of ‘that great queen who has subdu’d the Proud, and made the pretended Invincible more than once fly before her; who has Rescu’d an Empire, Reduc’d a Kingdom, Conquered Provinces in as little time almost as one can Travel them, and seems to have Chain’d Victory to her Standard’¹. She was clothed in the majesty of her office so that Thomas Madox, in dedicating to the queen his History and Antiquities of the Exchequer, addressed her as ‘most dread soveraigne’² with no sense of incongruity. Her court was conducted with the formality and routine which centuries of use had made familiar. But Queen Anne was no Elizabeth I. She had not the wit to devise for herself a dangerous middle way, to play off one enemy against another, to determine the national policy herself and leave her ministers to follow. She was a simple, kindly, but obstinate, woman, devoted to the Church of England, uneasy about her own right to the throne, full of good intentions, over-involved in domesticities, often ill and in pain, and always anxious for a friend.

Whoever had been the queen’s friend would have been drawn inevitably into politics. She would not have been able to prevent the leaders of opposing parties from trying to influence the queen through her. Long before she became queen, Anne had chosen as her closest friend and confidante Sarah Jennings, who in 1678 at the age of eighteen had married John Churchill, later the Duke of Marlborough. According to the duchess the queen’s friendship for her went back to the days when she entered the household of the second Duchess of York to attend upon the Princess Anne, then a child. When in 1683 the princess married and a household was established for her, Lady Churchill, at the request of Anne herself, became one of the ladies of the bedchamber. In the early days of the princess’s married life Lady Churchill came to such familiarity with her mistress that she was invited to address her as Mrs. Morley, and was called by the princess Mrs. Freeman. The friendship had momentous consequences, for it meant that Marlborough controlled the Government at home during the years of his great campaigns abroad. But it ended, as such friendships generally end, in the revolt of the weaker character against the overbearing authority of the stronger.

The Duchess of Marlborough long outlived her husband and the queen. She spent much time in her declining years in going over again and again the story of this friendship and its end. In 1742, two years before her death, she at last published an account of her conduct¹. The final draft had the benefit of revision by a practised writer, Nathaniel Hooke, who is said to have been rewarded with £5,000 for his trouble. He certainly earned his fee, for the narrative is so seductive that the reader forgets to criticize it. According to the duchess she was supplanted in the queen’s good graces by one who owed everything to the woman whose place she took. Abigail Hill, who was a first cousin of the duchess, had entered the service of Lady Rivers at Chafford, in Kent, when her parents died. The duchess took her into her own household at St. Albans, treated her like a sister, and eventually found her a place in the household of the Princess Anne. But Abigail Hill was also a kinswoman of Robert Harley and was inclined to the Tory side. She was a plain woman of considerable ability, who never made the mistake of trying to dominate the queen. The duchess only realized her danger when she learned some time in the spring of 1707 that Abigail had secretly married Samuel Masham—one of Damaris Masham’s stepchildren—and that the queen had been present at the wedding.

The end of the story was never in doubt, for the duchess ruined her own cause by her untimely and incessant reproaches to the queen and reminders of their former friendship. She even talked of publishing the queen’s letters. Anne at last, on 17 January 1711, requested the return of the duchess’s key of office as groom of the stole within two days. It was returned that evening. The Duchess of Somerset succeeded her as mistress of the robes and groom of the stole and Mrs. Masham was given the privy purse. In May Samuel Masham became cofferer of the household. Masham was one of the Tory peers created in 1712, but the queen only agreed to his elevation on condition that his wife, though now a peeress, remained a bedchamber-woman. She nursed the queen in her last illness and retired from court when she died.

The women about the bedchamber of a failing queen of necessity were the messengers between the queen and her ministers. Much depended on their integrity. They were ladies of position but were bound to perform the humblest offices about the queen’s person. Their place and duties were ruled by a custom which had its roots in the medieval past. When Mrs. Howard, later Countess of Suffolk, was bedchamber-woman to Queen Caroline she enquired of Lady Masham through Dr. Arbuthnot about the duties of her position. Dr. Arbuthnot’s letter of 29 May 1728 shows that Mrs. Howard was particularly interested in the relative position of the bedchamber-women and the bedchamber-ladies. ‘The bedchamber-woman came in to waiting before the queen’s prayers, which was before her majesty was dressed. The queen often shifted in a morning: if her majesty shifted at noon, the bedchamber-lady being by, the bedchamber-woman gave the shift to the lady without any ceremony, and the lady put it on. Sometimes, likewise, the bedchamber-woman gave the fan to the lady in the same manner; and this was all that the bedchamber-lady did about the queen at her dressing.

‘When the queen washed her hands, the page of the back-stairs brought and set down on a side-table the basin and ewer; then the bedchamber-woman set it before the queen, and knelt on the other side of the table over-against the queen, the bedchamber-lady only looking on. The bedchamber-woman poured the water out of the ewer upon the queen’s hands.

‘The bedchamber-woman pulled on the queen’s gloves, when she could not do it herself.

‘The page of the back-stairs was called in to put on the queen’s shoes.

‘When the queen dined in public, the page reached the glass to the bedchamber-woman, and she to the lady-in-waiting.

‘The bedchamber-woman brought the chocolate and gave it without kneeling.

‘In general the bedchamber-woman had no dependence on the lady of the bedchamber’¹. There was certainly rivalry between the bedchamber-women and the ladies of the bedchamber. The bedchamber-women did so much more personal duty about the queen that the ladies of the bedchamber tended to be jealous of them. The etiquette here set out has the flavour of antiquity. Every servant about the queen kept jealous watch over her own rights and duties as each one had done in the time of every sovereign since the days when the duties and perquisites of the members of the royal household were first written down soon after the death of King Henry I.

Even when the sovereign was a woman the only department of the royal household which was wholly staffed by women was the queen’s bedchamber. A place there was extremely valuable to its holder, not only for the salary, but also for the many perquisites which accompanied it. In 1707 there were ten ladies of the bedchamber, each with a salary of £1,000 a year. At their head was the Duchess of Marlborough, who also received £1,000 a year. Her offices were groom of the stole, privy purse, and first lady of the bedchamber. The queen gave the duchess. £5,000 as a marriage portion for each of her four daughters and wished to double the duchess’s salary. In the days of their friendship she refused this increase. But when the queen dismissed her the duchess wrote to ask whether the additional salary which the queen had proposed might now be allowed her on the privy purse accounts, a sum amounting by this time to £18,000. The queen allowed this². The duchess herself admitted that her ‘offices under the Queen were indeed considerable and I have ever acknowledged them to be so, amounting to 5,600 l. a year, deducting only for taxes and fees. But it is to be remembered, that they were only the same employments that I had executed when she was Princess at a salary of 400 l. a year’³. It would be impossible at this distance of time to find out just how much each of the other ten ladies of the queen’s bedchamber received by way of perquisites, grants, and fees from their offices.

Whereas the ladies of the bedchamber were all wives of peers, the bedchamber-women were commoners. In 1707 there were four bedchamber-women, each receiving a salary of £500 a year, Mrs. Danvers, Mrs. Cooper, Mrs. Fielding, and Mrs. Hill¹. The contemporary habit of describing all women as Mrs., an abbreviation of Mistress, makes it difficult to be sure whether these women were, or were not, married. Abigail Hill was a spinster when, in 1707, she married Samuel Masham. In 1691 Queen Mary had only five ladies of the bedchamber, in addition to the Countess of Derby who was groom of the stole and lady of the robes, but she had six women of the bedchamber. Queen Mary’s groom of the stole then received only £1,200, her five ladies of the bedchamber £500 each, and her six women of the bedchamber £200 each². The bedchamber-women certainly earned their salaries by their attendance on the queen at her toilet and throughout the day and night.

Owing to the appointment of a novelist to a post about the person of George Ill’s queen more is known about court routine in her day than in that of any of her predecessors. Fanny Burney, who had published Evelina anonymously in 1778, was provided for with the post of ‘dresser to the queen’ in 1786 in succession to one of the queen’s German women-servants.³ In reporting to a friend the terms of her appointment Fanny Burney said ‘Her Majesty proposed giving me apartments in the palace; making me belong to the table of Mrs. Schwellenberg’—the senior dresser—‘keeping me a footman, and settling on me £200 a year’⁴. She described her office to another friend as ‘a place of being constantly about’ the queen’s ‘own person, and assisting in her toilette,—a place of much confidence, and many comforts’⁵. She also found it a laborious place. She had to rise at six and await her first summons, which generally came at about half-past seven. The queen’s German wardrobe woman, a Mrs. Thielky, had always dressed the queen’s hair before Fanny Burney came. ‘No maid’, she recorded, ‘ever enters the room while the Queen is in it. Mrs. Thielky hands the things to me, and I put them on’. After breakfast Fanny Burney had to arrange her own clothes and was free until a quarter to twelve, except that twice a week she was free only until a quarter to eleven, because of having her hair curled. At a quarter to one the queen began to dress for the day, an operation not concluded until three o’clock. Her dressers then had two hours free. They dined together at five and spent the evening together. Fanny Burney’s last summons to the queen came between eleven and twelve, but her last period of duty seldom exceeded half an hour. ‘The early rising and a long day’s attention to new affairs and occupations cause a fatigue so bodily, that nothing mental stands against it, and to sleep I fall as soon as I have put out my candle and laid down my head’¹.

The queen was always attended by six maids of honour as had been Queen Elizabeth I herself². The Present State of England of 1673 described the six maids of honour who attended the consort of Charles II as ‘all Gentlewomen unmarried, over whom is placed a Governess called the Mother of the Maids; who is the Lady Sanderson’³. The mother of the maids, whose office was already established in the reign of Elizabeth⁴, was both a chaperone and a guide to correct court behaviour. Lady Sanderson had been mother of the maids in the court of Charles I’s queen. She died in 1681 at the age of eighty-nine. The salary of Queen Anne’s maids of honour was £300, but in 1691 only the first of the maids received £300, the rest were paid £200 apiece⁵. Queen Elizabeth’s maids had to be content with £40⁶. In her reminiscences, written in old age, Mrs. Delany, born Mary Granville, described how her aunt Anne Granville, the eldest sister of Lord Lansdowne, had been a maid of honour to Queen Mary II. She ‘was particularly favoured and distinguished by her, and early attained all the advantages of such an education under so great and excellent a princess, without the least taint or blemish incident to that state of life, so dangerous to young minds’⁷. Anne Granville appears in the list of maids of honour of 1691 as Mrs. Anne Greenvill⁸. After Queen Mary died Anne Granville married Sir John Stanley and ‘King William, who bestowed the usual addition to the Maid of Honour’s portion, granted her the apartments in Whitehall which were afterwards the Duke of Dorset’s’⁹. An annual salary, the opportunity of a good marriage, and a marriage portion from the crown were enough to make the post of maid of honour highly coveted.

None of Queen Anne’s maids can have made a better match than Jane Warburton, who had entered the household by 1710¹. Her companions found it hard to understand how she acquired the position, for she had spent her life in rustic retirement in Cheshire and brought with her to court the manners and speech of a simple country environment. Her family was an old one and by birth she was a gentlewoman. But she knew no language except her own and ‘her rusticity, ignorance, and want of breeding’ made her ‘the standing jest of her companions in office.’ To the end of her long life her ‘Pug’ and her ‘Puss’ were ‘pronounced alike’². Nevertheless, the Duke of Argyll fell in love with her, to the mortification of her companions. He had been separated from his wife, but she was still alive. He made offers to Jane Warburton, but she refused them though she remained friendly with him. So close was their friendship that when Queen Anne died, instead of being sent home to Cheshire with or without a small pension, Jane Warburton became one of the maids of honour to the Princess of Wales. When his duchess died the duke, even before she was buried, asked Jane to marry him. She made him wait the proper six months before she would consent.

Mrs. Delany recalled how she had herself been promised a place as maid of honour in Queen Anne’s court. In the expectation of this she was carefully educated. When she was six she was placed in the care of Mlle Puelle, a French refugee, who received twenty pupils, but no more, at a time. It was a select academy, intended for the daughters of men of rank, wealth, or fashion. Among Mary Granville’s twenty contemporaries were the daughters of an earl, a duke, ‘a very considerable brewer’³, and also ‘the daughter of Mrs. Oldfield, the actress, who after leaving school was the pink of fashion in the beau monde, and married a nobleman’⁴. When she was eight Mary Granville left school to live at Whitehall with Lady Stanley. She remained there until Queen Anne’s death in 1714 ended her hopes of a place at court, for the Tories were out of favour in the new Hanoverian age. While she lived with Lady Stanley, Mary Granville’s greatest friend was Catherine Hyde, daughter of one of the ladies of the bedchamber, Lady Hyde. The Hydes lived in the Gatehouse at Whitehall, in the household of the Earl of Rochester. Lord Hyde was his eldest son, grandson of the great Lord Clarendon. Lady Hyde was a kinswoman of the Granville’s. Catherine Hyde grew up to become the beautiful Duchess of Queensberry who died in 1777 of eating too many cherries. Matthew Prior wrote a poem to ‘Kitty beautiful and young’ when she first came out as a girl. Horace Walpole added a verse to it when she was seventy-two. The duchess retained her beauty to old age and remained, in the words of Mrs. Delany ‘to the end of a long life, a general object of animadversion, censure, and admiration’¹.

The accession of George I, which drove Mary Granville’s father to remove his family from London to Gloucestershire, brought back to power the Whigs, who had been out of favour in the last years of Queen Anne. Among them was Lord Cowper, to whom Queen Anne had given the Great Seal in 1705 when, as the Duchess of Marlborough wrote, ‘I prevailed upon her Majesty to take the great seal from Sir Nathan Wright, a man despised by all parties’. Of Lord Cowper the duchess said that ‘he was not only of the whig party, but of such abilities and integrity as brought a new credit to it in the nation’². Lord Cowper became Lord Chancellor in 1707, resigned in 1710, but was restored to office in 1715. He had married in 1706 as his second wife Mary Clavering of Chopwell, County Durham, who in 1714 began to keep a diary of her life at court. She determined to do it because of ‘the perpetual Lies that one hears’³. Her diary was no more than a rough draft, which she intended ‘to revise and digest into a better Method’. Fortunately she never did this, for her jottings give a vivid picture of the court of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Lady Cowper had been in correspondence with the princess for four years before the death of Queen Anne brought her to England as Princess of Wales. On the queen’s death Lady Cowper wrote ‘to offer her my Service, and to express the perfect Resignation I had to whatever she would think fit to do, were it to choose or refuse me’. She did not press for a place as she had ‘resolved not to add to the Number of’ the princess’s ‘Tormentors’⁴. She was delighted to learn from the king’s chief German minister, Baron Bernstorff, that he had orders to offer her a place as a lady of the bedchamber.

Since George I’s wife had been for many years confined in the castle of Ahlen there could be no queen consort’s court and all the ladies competed for a place in the court of the Princess of Wales. Lady Bristol, who went with Lady Cowper to the coronation, ‘had still a greater mind to be a Lady of the Bed-chamber than I had’¹. When Lady Cowper went to kiss the princess’s hand on her appointment she found the Duchesses of St. Albans and Bolton there. The Duchess of Shrewsbury asked the king to get her a place, but he had to ask the princess three times before she agreed to take her. She was the daughter of an Italian marquis by an English mother, and had given up the Roman Catholic faith when, according to the gossip Lady Cowper recorded, her brother ‘forced the Duke to marry her after an Intrigue together’. Even at the moment when the duchess secured her place Lady Cowper said that ‘it was impossible to hate her so much as her Lord, though she had been engaged in the same ill Design’, that is, in supporting the Tory party. ‘She had a wonderful Art at entertaining and diverting People, though she would sometimes exceed the Bounds of Decency. She had a great Memory, had read a good deal, and spoke three languages to Perfection’². The duchess had ignored Lady Cowper since her husband gave up the Great Seal in 1710, but ‘upon corning into the Bedchamber all old Quarrels are laid aside for the Ease and Quiet of our Mistress’³. When Lady Cowper ‘came mighty ill to court’ she found that ‘the Duchess of Shrewsbury had so much Humanity as to wait out my Week for me’⁴. The Duchess of St. Albans was made groom of the stole and the Duchess of Shrewsbury ‘a Lady in Ordinary, as we all are’⁵. Lady Cowper records that the Duchess of St. Albans ‘put on the Princess’s Shift, according to the Court Rules, when I was by, she being Groom of the Stole’⁶. The Duchess of St. Albans had consulted the Duchess of Marlborough about the precedence of the ladies of the bedchamber. The Duchess of Marlborough wrote that ‘in all the courts that I have seen the Groom of the Stole has the first place, and next to her the Lady in waiting, whatever quality she may be of, and after them two all the Ladies are placed according to their own titles’⁷.

It was obviously important for politicians to get their wives into the princess’s bedchamber. Lord Cowper had prepared what his wife describes as ‘a Treatise on the State of Parties’ for the guidance of the new king and his instruction in the virtue of the Whigs and the faults of the Tories. Lady Cowper wrote it out and translated it into French so that the king and his German ministers could read it. She handed it to Baron Bernstorff when he waited upon her to tell her of her appointment to the bedchamber¹. Before the end of the year she recorded that ‘the king is as we wish upon the subject of Parties, and keeps my Lord’s manuscript by him, which he has read several Times’². Before this the princess told Lady Cowper that ‘she had seen the Treatise on the State of Parties, already mentioned, and complimented me mightily on it’³. But the princess, who was a highly intelligent woman, realized that the Whig lords had no intention of allowing the king to have his own way if they could stop him. When Lady Cowper went into waiting on 2 February 1716 and the princess asked her for news she ‘took the Opportunity of asking’ the princess ‘if she continued in her Resolution of being a Tory. She told me that she was till I could give her convincing Arguments that a Whig was more than a Tory for the King’s Prerogative. I said I hoped to do so’⁴. In the following month she recorded that ‘Baron Bernstorff made a Visit to my Lord and me. He is afraid of ill People that influence the Prince and Princess by telling Lies of the Whigs being against the King’s Prerogative. Desired me to use Endeavours to prevent it’⁵.

The zest with which Lady Cowper entered upon her position at court and the pleasure she took in using her influence to perform small services for others had passed when she wrote the last surviving portion of her diary in 1720. Lord Cowper was no longer chancellor, and although Lady Cowper was still a lady of the bedchamber she no longer felt at ease with the princess, who had not made her groom of the stole. In February 1724 Lady Cowper died at the age of thirty-nine, four months after the death of her husband. The editor of her diary describes her, justly, as ‘an exemplary Wife and an attached Mother’. Although, as ‘Mistress Mary Clavering’, she had been one of the toasts of the Kit Cat Club, her time as a girl seems to have been passed in study and practising the harpsichord rather than in a continuous round of gaiety. When her diary was published in 1864 there were still at her country home at Panshanger ‘a numerous Collection of Books belonging to her’. Many of them were ‘on rather abstruse Subjects’ and contained ‘copious Annotations in her Handwriting’¹.

The appearance of the king’s two middle-aged German mistresses at court cannot have pleased English ladies like Lady Cowper. She records the presence of the first to arrive, Madame Kielmansegge, at parties and at court. On 1 November 1714 Lady Cowper described a supper party at Lady Bristol’s before waiting on the king, adding ‘but though I was mightily diverted, and there was a great deal of Music yet I could not avoid being uneasy at the Repetition of some Words in French which the Duchess of Bolton said by Mistake, which convinced me that the two foreign Ladies were no better than they should be’². A week later Madame Kielmansegge sent a book to the princess by the hand of Lady Cowper. One of the bedchamber-women, Mrs. Howard, warned Lady Cowper that ‘there was a mortal Hatred between’ the princess and Madame Kielmansegge and that ‘the Princess thought her a wicked Woman’³. Madame Kielmansegge was the wife of Baron Kielmansegge, master of the horse to the king in Hanover. He died in 1721 when the king created his widow Countess of Darlington. Mademoiselle Schulenberg, the other royal mistress, soon followed the court to England. She had been a maid of honour to the king’s mother, the Electress Sophia. In 1716 she was created Duchess of Munster and in 1719 Duchess of Kendal. Lady Cowper recorded without comment that with Lord Cowper she called on Mademoiselle Schulenberg ‘to wish her Joy’ after her elevation to the English peerage⁴.

In the courts of Charles II and James II the open immorality of the kings, their mistresses and men of fashion shocked a generation which had grown up in days when the rulers of England had been faithful to their own wives. Between 1625 and 1660 no one could excuse his own infidelity by pointing to the king, the protector, or his chief advisers. After 1660 for a hundred years every King of England openly maintained at least one mistress. In that hundred years the Queens of England set a good example to their courts, but they could not prevent recurrent scandals. Maids of honour were subjected to many temptations, which most of them seem to have resisted. The follies of Sophia Howe, who died in 1725 ‘with a blemished reputation and a broken heart’¹, and of Anne Vane, who gave birth to an illegitimate son in 1732², were condemned in their own day, though men were glad to take advantage of them. No scandal was ever attached to the names of the two most beautiful maids of honour in the court of the Princess of Wales. The wit and beauty of Mary Lepell attracted the love of John, Lord Hervey, whom she married in 1720. Mary Bellenden had no difficulty in keeping the Prince of Wales in his place, but thought it best to marry without announcing her wedding until it was over. In 1721 she married Colonel John Campbell, one of the grooms of the bedchamber, who long after his wife’s death became Duke of Argyll. The bedchamber-woman, Mrs. Howard, was so discreet in her management of her intrigue with George II that her many friends could affect to know nothing about it³. When her husband succeeded to the earldom of Suffolk she was made groom of the stole to the queen. Lord Suffolk died in 1733 and Lady Suffolk retired from the court in the next year and married again.

Men of position, who had always believed that they could make their own rules of conduct, were beginning to regard it as unbecoming to acknowledge their illegitimate children. Whether this was a step towards a higher standard of conduct is doubtful. In his will John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham (1648–1721), provided for several children born out of wedlock, ‘a youth, commonly called Charles Herbert, who at present is at Utrecht’ and ‘two Girls called Catherine Sophia, and Charlotte … both of them having been for a great while educated at home by the kindness of my Wife, and since put to a school at Chelsea; and I desire still they may be under my Wife’s care and direction’⁴. The author of the contemporary character of the duke, published with his writings in 1723, wrote of him: ‘He left many natural children, which he had and own’d before his third Marriage: and he has been often heard to say since he had legitimate children, he wish’d he had never had the others, or at least had not own’d them; it being in private families an ill example’⁵. The duke had no children by his first two wives. His third wife was herself an illegitimate daughter of James II. It is a curious reflection on the attitude of great men to their wives and families that it was regarded as a sign of merit in the Duke of Buckingham that ‘he always took care to have an eminent physician to attend on his wife all the time she went with child, and during her lyings-in, having besides advis’d to secure his constant attendance upon his only son’. According to the writer, ‘many people, esteem’d more generous than he, did not do this’¹.

Marriage was still a matter for parents to settle by treaty without regard to the wishes of daughters. Mary Granville, whose long life spanned the years from 1700 to 1788, writing in old age an account of her life for her friend the Duchess of Portland, still remembered bitterly her misery when she was forced at seventeen to marry Alexander Pendarves, a Cornish landowner of nearly sixty. The marriage was arranged by her uncle, Lord Lansdowne, ‘who rejoiced at an opportunity of securing to his interest by such an alliance, one of some consequence in his county, whose services he at that time wanted’². Although she loved someone else and dreaded the marriage she felt bound to agree to it. Lord Lansdowne threatened to have her lover dragged through the horsepond if he dared to appear. Her parents, who were dependent on Lord Lansdowne’s charity, pretended that her tears were caused by sorrow at parting with her home. Pendarves had offered before marriage to settle all his property upon her, but when he died in 1725 she found herself left with only her jointure. Her married life, spent for the first two years in Cornwall and then, after a happy respite with her parents, in London, had been as unsatisfactory as she had expected. Her husband drank, was jealous, wasted his money, and suffered from gout. When he died she was only twenty-three. She was shocked at his death, ‘but my natural good spirits, time, and finding myself freed from many vexations, soon brought me to a state of tranquillity I had not known for many years. As to my fortune, it was very mediocre, but it was at my own command’³. Mary Pendarves’s second marriage in 1743 to the Reverend Patrick Delany was of her own making. Her kinsfolk disliked it, for he was of humble Irish birth, but it brought great happiness to both partners.

The liveliest and most intelligent of the young married women in society in the early years of George I’s reign was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who, unlike Mary Granville, had refused to submit to her father’s choice of a husband. She was born in 1689, the eldest daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, who was created Duke of Kingston in 1715. Lady Mary had the run of her father’s library at Thoresby and in London and was fortunate enough to win the friendship of Bishop Burnet. He encouraged her in her classical studies, and corrected her translation of the Enchiridion of Epictetus. In sending it to him in 1710 she wrote a curious letter for a girl of twenty-one. ‘My sex is usually forbid studies of this nature, and folly reckoned so much our proper sphere, that we are sooner pardoned any excesses of that, than the least pretensions to reading or good sense. We are permitted no books but such as tend to the weakening and effeminating of the mind. Our natural defects are every way indulged, and it is looked upon as in a degree criminal to improve our reason, or fancy we have any…. There is hardly a character in the world more despicable, or more liable to universal ridicule than that of a learned woman; those words imply according to the received sense, a talking, impertinent, vain, and conceited creature. … I am not now arguing for an equality of the two sexes. I do not doubt but that God and nature have thrown us into an inferior rank, we are a lower part of the creation, we owe obedience and submission to the superior sex, and any woman who suffers her vanity and folly to deny this rebels against the law of the Creator’. She concluded a long letter with a quotation in Latin from Erasmus in which he confutes the vulgar belief that a woman should not learn Latin¹. Nearly fifty years after this letter was written Lady Mary recalled that she knew the bishop ‘in my very early youth, and his condescension, in directing a girl in her studies, is an obligation I can never forget’².

Lady Mary’s condemnation of the way in which young women of position were bred is reminiscent of the phrases of Mary Astell. Writing to her daughter in 1752 Lady Mary recalled that the ‘project of an English monastery’ was ‘a favourite scheme of mine when I was fifteen; and had I then been mistress of an independent fortune, would certainly have executed it, and elected myself lady abbess’³. She possessed a sumptuously bound copy of Mary Astell’s treatise about a women’s college, inscribed ‘From the Author’. But her love affair with Edward Wortley Montagu, a grandson of the Earl of Sandwich, soon drove such thoughts from her head. He was eleven years her senior, was in the House of Commons, and hoped for a career in the service of the crown. He was a good scholar and was first attracted by Lady Mary’s interest in the classics. Addison was his friend and dedicated to him the second volume of the Tatler. The courtship began by letters supposedly written by Wortley Montagu’s sister, Anne, and to her Lady Mary addressed her replies. After Anne died in September 1709 Wortley and Lady Mary wrote directly to each other. They were both individualists of strong character. Wortley Montagu feared her wit, admired her beauty, and doubted if she could be happy as his wife. ‘You think if you married me, I should be passionately fond of you one month, and of somebody else the next: neither would happen. I can esteem, I can be a friend, but I don’t know whether I can love’, she wrote before he had approached her father¹. If Wortley Montagu would have made the settlements usual in marriages between people of rank the duke would readily have accepted him as a suitor for his daughter. But Wortley Montagu refused to impoverish himself for the benefit of his heirs².

The duke therefore accepted another offer and preparations for the wedding were made: even the day was fixed and Lady Mary was sent into the country to be out of her lover’s way. She eloped with him from an inn upon her journey. ‘I tremble for what we are doing. Are you sure you shall love me for ever? Shall we never repent? I fear and I hope’³ she wrote on the brink of her elopement. The marriage took place in August 1712. Lady Mary was obliged to spend the early years of her married life in the country and her letters show how much she disliked separation from her husband and the dull round of country life. At the accession of George I she was established in London and even after she had lost her eyelashes in the smallpox she could still play everybody else off the stage. ‘Her ladyship is mighty gay and airy, and occasions a great deal of Discourse. Since her arrival the King has took but little Notice of any other Lady, not even of Madame Kielmansegg, which the Ladies of Hanover don’t relish very well’⁴, wrote a kinsman of Lady Cowper’s, who had attended the king on a visit to his German duchy. With her husband Lady Mary was then on her way to Turkey, for Wortley Montagu had been appointed ambassador to the Porte in 1716.

He was not a successful ambassador and was recalled in 1718, but Lady Mary, who had always wanted to travel, made the most of her adventures. She sent home a stream of carefully written letters, describing her journey, the country, its inhabitants and their customs. Among her correspondents were Lady Rich, Lady Bristol, and Alexander Pope, but most of her letters were sent to her sister, Lady Mar. Copies of her letters, with a few written to her, passed from hand to hand after her return. Mary Astell would have liked to see them in print and on one of the copies wrote a Preface, dated 1724, in which she confessed that she was ‘malicious enough to desire that the world should see to how much better purpose ladies travel than their lords’¹. While she was in Turkey Lady Mary saw the process of inoculation for the smallpox and had her own son inoculated. Her daughter, born in Turkey, could not be treated, because her nurse had never had the smallpox. When the family reached home Lady Mary at once began to advocate inoculation, but met with strong opposition from the medical profession. Her daughter was inoculated with four leading doctors looking on to report on the process-to the Government. Lady Mary said that they were so hostile that she dared not leave the child alone with them². By 1724 the practice was generally accepted, despite its crudity and dangers. An article in The Plaindealer of that year, probably written by Mary Astell, declared that Lady Mary’s introduction of inoculation justified the reflection ‘That England has owed to Women the greatest blessings she has been distinguished by³.

For the next twenty years Lady Mary and her husband lived in London. Wortley Montagu remained a Member of Parliament, but never held office. He must have been a disappointed man. He figures little in his wife’s correspondence, but she showed great anxiety to conceal from him her financial troubles over the South Sea bubble. In all innocence she had taken money from a Frenchman to invest for him, but the stocks fell, his money was lost, and he accused Lady Mary of stealing it. Apart from this, Lady Mary’s letters to Lady Mar suggest that she led a life devoted to heedless pleasure. It is possible that she exaggerated her devotion to amusements and her interest in the love affairs, lawful and unlawful, of the little group which made up high society. Lady Mar, whose husband had led the Scottish rebellion of 1715, was obliged to live abroad and gradually sank into melancholia until in March 1728 she was declared a lunatic. Lady Mary probably hoped it would amuse her sister to read ‘There are but three pretty men in England, and they are all in love with me, at this present writing. This will surprise you extremely; but if you were to see the reigning girls at present, I will assure you, there is little difference between them and the old women’¹. This was in 1725. To her sister Lady Mary hardly ever wrote of books, but always of people, trying to rouse her with amusing bits of scandal. But it is noteworthy that she was silent about the private life of her own friends.

Mrs. Pendarves never approved of Lady Mary, who was too clever for many of her contemporaries. Her poems circulated from hand to hand and were touched up by professional writers like Gay and Pope. Malicious men of fashion, like the Duke of Wharton, put it about that their own scandalous verses were hers, and few accepted her denials². She was impulsive, tactless, and her wit was often searing. But to the end she retained the affection of the virtuous, if dull, Lady Oxford, and the respect of her daughter, the Duchess of Portland. The old Duchess of Marlborough and her daughter, the Duchess of Montagu, were both Lady Mary’s friends, although they had quarrelled with each other. There are hints in her letters to her sister that she wearied of the social round. ‘I leave the great world to girls that know no better’, she wrote in 1726, ‘and do not think one bit the worst of myself for having out-lived a certain giddiness, which is sometimes excusable, but never pleasing’³. She wrote in some depression in the next year: ‘Don’t you remember how miserable we were in the little parlour at Thoresby? We then thought marrying would put us at once into possession of all we wanted. Then came being with child, etc., and you see what comes of being with child’⁴. Her son was a continual trouble: ‘my young rogue of a son is the most ungovernable little rake that ever played truant’⁵. She consoled herself with her daughter, ‘a small damsel, who is at present every thing I like’⁶. Her quarrel with Pope, which began in 1727, was embarrassing, for he mercilessly pursued her with his barbed pen. Lady Mary had kept the friendship of Lord Hervey, though she did not care for his wife. Together, Lady Mary and Lord Hervey wrote verses attacking Pope in reply to his attacks on them. Even her daughter displeased Lady Mary for a time by falling in love with Lord Bute. Since Lady Mary would not agree to the marriage the young couple eloped, as she had done before them¹.

Already in 1727 Lady Mary was thinking of escaping abroad: ‘I have a mind to cross the water, to try what effect a new heaven and a new earth will have upon my spirits’, she wrote to Lady Mar². In 1739 Lady Mary left England and only returned, after twenty-three years abroad, to die. She is the first of a long succession of English women who in modern times have found happiness in living in Italy. Her husband advised her about her journey, which she described in her letters to him stage by stage. To a friend she wrote that she hoped that he would follow her abroad. But they never met again, for even when Wortley Montagu went abroad he did not visit her. But their surviving letters to each other are friendly and she wrote of him to her daughter with respect. Since she had no settlement on marriage she could not have lived abroad without her husband’s help and consent, although her father left her £6,000. She lived on what she described as an allowance, and never complained that it was insufficient. After visiting Venice, Rome, southern Italy, Geneva, Lyons, and Avignon, Lady Mary settled near Brescia, later moving to Padua and to Venice. Her occupations and amusements are vividly described in her letters to Lady Bute, who sent her news and books from England. Lady Mary was a second cousin of Henry and Sarah Fielding and read Henry Fielding’s novels with delight. Sarah’s came in for more tepid praise³. Although she wept over Richardson’s stories, she had a poor opinion of their verisimilitude: ‘I believe this author was never admitted into higher company, and should confine his pen to the amours of housemaids, and the conversation at the steward’s table, where I imagine, he has sometimes intruded, though offener in the servants’ hall.… He has no idea of the manners of high life’⁴. She thought Pamela ‘foolish stuff’, which ‘has met with very extraordinary, and (I think undeserved) success. It has been translated into French and into Italian: it was all the fashion at Paris and Versailles, and is still the joy of the chambermaids of all nations’⁵.

Lady Mary found pleasure not only in reading, and in writing letters, but in gardening, dairy farming, and riding. She enjoyed the society of Italy, a country where ‘the character of being a learned woman is far from being ridiculous’. From her wide experience she declared that ‘there is no part of the world where our sex is treated with so much contempt as in England’¹. She urged Lady Bute, her daughter, to educate her own children well. ‘Learning, if she’, her eldest granddaughter, ‘has a real taste for it, will not only make her contented, but happy in it. No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting’. Again, she says: ‘If she has the same inclination (I should say passion) for learning I was born with, history, geography, and philosophy will furnish her with materials to pass away cheerfully a longer life than is allotted to mortals’. It is possible that Lady Bute may have been irritated to read that ‘the ultimate end of your education was to make you a good wife (and I have the comfort to hear that you are one) hers ought to be, to make her happy in a virgin state’². Lady Mary felt that Lord Bute must have been ‘extremely shocked’ at her recommendation of a learned education for his daughters and proceeded with her usual tactlessness to make matters rather worse by saying, ‘I look upon my granddaughters as a sort of lay nuns: destiny may have laid up other things for them, but they have no reason to expect to pass their time otherwise than their aunts do at present; and I know by experience that it is in the power of study not only to make solitude tolerable, but agreeable’³. Only one of Lady Bute’s six daughters remained unmarried and, curiously enough, she was the only one who inherited something of her grandmother’s brains and ability. The introductory anecdotes to Lord Wharncliffe’s edition of Lady Mary’s works were written by Lady Louisa Stuart, who died at the age of ninety-five in 1851⁴.

In 1761 Wortley Montagu died, leaving his large fortune to his daughter. His death was perhaps the sign for Lady Mary to prepare for her journey home to England. She reached London early in 1762 and people were surprised to find how little changed she was. ‘When Nature is at the trouble of making a very singular person, Time does right in respecting it. Medals are preserved when common coin is worn out; and as great geniuses are rather matters of curiosity than of art, this lady seems reserved to be a wonder for more than our generation. She does not look older than when she went abroad, has more than the vivacity of fifteen, and a memory which, perhaps, is unique’. So wrote Mrs. Edward Montagu, the leader of the new cult of the learned lady. ‘I visited her’, she added, ‘because her cousin and mine were cousin-germans. Tho’ she has not any foolish partiality for her husband or his relations, I was very graciously received, and you may imagine entertained by one who neither thinks, speaks, acts nor dresses like anybody else’¹. But Lady Mary was already smitten with the cancer which killed her on 21 August in the same year.

From time to time among the aristocratic families of this country a woman appears who is a portent among others of her class and generation. Such was Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, in the seventeenth century, and such was Lady Mary Pierrepont. She was unfortunate in living in a time when the literary men used their wit at the expense of anyone who had offended them. Her very virtues meant that Horace Walpole was unfair to her, for she was the close friend of Maria Skerrett, his father’s mistress and second wife². When the malice of Pope and Walpole is discounted she remains the most brilliant of the great ladies of the first half of the eighteenth century, a faithful friend, an affectionate mother to her daughter, and a witty commentator on the world of her day.

The women whose names appear in Lady Mary’s correspondence form a small but representative section of aristocratic society. Her daughter’s marriage to Lord Bute had brought his kinsfolk, the Duke of Argyll and his duchess, formerly Jane Warburton, into the close range of Lady Mary’s family connections. They were brought still closer when, soon after Lady Mary went abroad, Lord Bute’s only brother, James Stuart Mackenzie, married Lady Elizabeth Campbell, one of the duke’s five daughters. Her eldest sister had been happily married to the Earl of Dalkeith, who died in 1750, leaving her a rich widow of thirty-three. Five years later she married Charles Townshend, who was some eight years her junior. He was the second son of Lord Townshend and a rising politician. The news brought prophecies of woe from Lady Mary in a letter to her daughter. ‘I pity poor Lady Dalkeith who, perhaps, thinks herself at present an object of envy: she will be soon undeceived: no rich widow can marry on prudential motives; and where passion is only on one side, every marriage must be miserable. If she thought justly, she would know that no man was ever in love with a woman of forty since the deluge.… All she can hope for is a cold complaisance, founded on gratitude, which is the most uncertain of all foundations for a lasting union.… Lady Dalkeith had fond parents, and, as I have heard, an obliging husband. Her sorrowful hours are now coming on; they will be new to her, and ‘tis a cruel addition to reflect (as she must do) that they have been her own purchasing’¹. Townshend, described by Lady Hervey as ‘an inexhaustible fund of entertainment in all company’², died at the age of forty-two in 1767. His widow did not marry again.

Lady Mary’s favourite among the five sisters was the youngest, also named Mary, whose unhappy story occasioned much moralizing in letters to Lady Bute. The Duke of Argyll died in 1743 and the arrangement of Lady Mary Campbell’s marriage fell to her mother. Although the duchess disliked Lord Leicester and knew that his son, Lord Coke, was addicted to ‘play’, she was persuaded that he would be a good match for her daughter. Lady Mary Campbell disliked and despised Lord Coke and plainly showed her feelings, but her pride and obstinacy made her go through with the marriage, which took place in 1747. Lord Coke retaliated as soon as they were married by ignoring her, and it seems that the marriage was never consummated. After Lady Mary Coke had endured two years of misery her relatives intervened. The duchess, accompanied by her son-in-law, Mr. Stuart Mackenzie, and a lawyer, went down to Holkham to see her daughter. She was refused admission, returned to London and obtained a writ of Habeas corpus from the Judges of the King’s Bench commanding Lord Coke to produce his wife before them. Lady Mary Coke then instituted proceedings for divorce in the spiritual court on the grounds of ill usage, but a separation was arranged without the case coming to judgment. Lord Coke died three years later and Lady Mary was free to arrange her life as she wished. Her relatives were happy to note that she behaved with propriety on her husband’s death, not pretending to grief but wearing mourning and abstaining from amusements for the appropriate period. She enjoyed an income of £2,500 a year³.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing to her daughter, hoped Lady Mary Coke ‘may make use of her bitter experience to escape the snares laid for her: they are so various and so numerous, if she can avoid them I shall think she has some supernatural assistance’⁴. It seemed to the exile in Italy that a young and rich widow was ‘walking blindfold, upon stilts, amid precipices, though perhaps as little sensible of her danger as a child of a quarter old would be in the arms of a monkey leaping on the tiles of a house’. Lady Mary used this simile more than once when a rich widow was under discussion. It seemed to her, writing in 1755, that ‘nothing but a miracle, or the support of her guardian angel’ could protect Lady Mary Coke from the perils about her. Her one protection, thought Lady Mary, was that ‘she had a great turn to economy’¹. The daily life of Lady Mary Coke can be learned in detail, for she kept a diary in the form of letters which she despatched to her sisters Lady Stafford and Lady Betty Mackenzie. It is a naïve record of its author’s passing hours and can only be read continuously with determination. It reveals something of the dangers which beset the rich and independent woman, but it also shows that Lady Mary Coke had enough strength of character to overcome at least some of them.

She loved gardening and she enjoyed reading history. She could spend an evening happily over Selden’s Titles of Honour in the library at her mother’s house² and she read Mrs. Macaulay’s history³. She spent money on books and in 1769 noted ‘I have laid out in books since I came to Town about fifty pounds’⁴. It gave her pleasure to meet the learned Miss Carter of Deal and she would have cultivated her society had they lived nearer to each other. But the social habit of spending the evening, even when a few ladies dined together, at loo or other games of chance was rigid. Lady Mary Coke always noted what she won or lost at ‘lu’. On one occasion she ‘had surprising luck, came off winning seventy-six guineas; and tho’ I won all the money that was lost, the company was civil and good humoured, which does not always happen’⁵. Lady Mary once noted sadly after losing ‘seven and thirty guineas’, ‘it might have been better imploy’d’. But she never played on Sundays and when she asked to be excused waiting on the Princess Amelia on Good Friday she was hurt to hear the princess murmur ‘the Pharasee’⁶.

Long after Lady Mary Coke was dead, Lady Louisa Stuart, the youngest daughter of Lady Bute, wrote her account of the family of John, Duke of Argyll, and without the author’s intention, Lady Mary Coke occupied the centre of the stage. Her character was so firm and definite, her assurance of rectitude so complete, her pride so invincible, that she inevitably created situations ridiculous to others though not to herself. Society was entertained at her assumption that Lord March, who as Old Q. came to symbolize the immorality of the eighteenth century, wished to marry her. Ignoring the fact that his mistress lived in his house and presided at his table, Lady Mary could assume that he intended marriage because, as he said to his friends, ‘thinking her tolerably handsome … he supposed he might try his fortune in making a little love’¹. Even greater amusement was caused by her assumption that the Duke of York, one of George II’s unattractive sons, was in love with her and she with him. Her exaggerated grief when he died is recorded in her diary. Her fury at the marriages of the Dukes of Cumberland and Gloucester to women who were not of royal blood was greater than that of any member of the royal family. Lady Mary had a reverence for royalty which made her persuade herself that George II’s mistress, Lady Yarmouth, was secretly married to him and that the beautiful, but illegitimate, Lady Waldegrave was degrading the royal family by her marriage with the Duke of Gloucester.

According to Lady Mary Coke the young king, George III, was concerned at the immorality of the age. In March 1769 she ‘was told that the King had said to my Lord Chancellor that he was desirous that something should be thought of that might be likely to prevent the very bad conduct among the Ladys, of which there had been so many instances lately; that my Lord Chancellor answered that he should be very glad to second any such proposition, it being highly necessary that something should be done, and ‘tis believed that the Arch Bishop will move in the House of Lords that Ladys who are guilty of Adultery should not be permitted to marry again’². Early in his reign George III had been attracted by the charm and beauty of Lady Sarah Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond, so that her kinsfolk at Holland House hoped that something might come of it³. But the king married a German princess and Lady Sarah married Sir Charles Bunbury in 1762. She was only seventeen and her husband was engrossed in horse-racing. Her daughter, born in December 1768, was the child of Lord William Gordon. She joined him in February 1769 and stayed with him until November, when she returned to her brother at Goodwood House. According to Lady Mary Coke, the duke had tried to prevent her from going to her lover, but ‘she told him that she was determined to go to Lord William Gordon, tho’ it was not her intention to marry him, when She was divorced from Sir Charles Bunbury, for that he had not a good temper, and perhaps she should not live with him six months’¹. It is possible that George III’s concern in March 1769 for the morals of the ladies was, in part at least, caused by this affair’².

It was not from the women of the great eighteenth-century families that attempts to improve the legal position of all women could come. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu might derisively call the unmarried women of such families ‘a sort of lay nuns’, but they were generally free to make what they liked of life. Miss Anne Pitt, Lord Chatham’s sister, had her own establishment, was able to go to Bath or Tunbridge Wells, or to travel on the Continent as she chose. Wives were protected by elaborate marriage settlements and they would depend on their kinsfolk for help if they needed it. Even if they themselves failed to keep their marriage vows their own families stood by them. Widows were equally free to make their own lives. The happiness of widows, as of spinsters, depended entirely on the possession of enough money to buy not only necessities but luxuries, and enough intelligence to find interests. In her widowhood Lady Mary Coke was a decorative figure as she drove about London. In 1784 Lady Louisa Stuart wrote to a friend ‘A loud knock at the door … has interrupted me and called me to the window. ‘Tis a chaise with a magnificent red and silver postilion, and out of it, behold! jumps Queen Mary, as magnificent in green and silver’³. To a twentieth-century woman looking back on those times it seems that there were grievous limitations on the lives of all women, but few who belonged to the great families of England really noticed them. The cries of ‘Wilkes and liberty’ which they deplored were the precursors of an emancipation for all women which was beyond their imagining.

Moreover, the increasing urbanity of eighteenth-century life gave to aristocratic ladies importance of a kind which had not belonged to their predecessors. Those among them who enjoyed great wealth and were blessed with beauty and wit could wield immense influence. They were able to gather about them the most interesting people of the day, both of their own and of the rising middle class. A small group of such ladies succeeded in breaking down the fashion for large assemblies, too noisy for intimate talk, in which the only recreation was cards. Consciously imitating the salons of French hostesses, they set the fashion for parties at which people were expected to engage in conversation. The unfortunate name ‘blue-stockings’ which has been attached to them gives, through its later use, a false impression of the grace and charm of such women as Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey, and Frances Boscawen, to name only the leaders of the movement. Mrs. Montagu seems to have been the first to hold informal parties, for in 1750 she began to give ‘literary breakfasts’ at her husband’s London house. Later she gave evening assemblies and called them conversation parties. She invited only intelligent people who were not expected to come in the elaborate dress of fashion. Blue worsted stockings instead of black silk did not affront any of these hostesses¹. Lord Bath, Lord Lyttelton, and Horace Walpole were frequent guests, who welcomed the opportunity of meeting such men as Dr. Johnson, David Garrick, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Mrs. Vesey, whose friends called her ‘the sylph’, was the daughter of the Bishop of Ossory. Her second husband was her cousin, Agmodesham Vesey, who died in 1755. She caused amusement because to secure informal chat, she set her guests about the room in groups of two and three so that many had their backs to each other². Mrs. Montagu arranged her guests in a semicircle. Mrs. Boscawen, the wife of Admiral Boscawen, was widowed in 1761, but had been holding parties for talk rather than play before her husband’s death. She was a much-loved wife and mother³. Perhaps because of that she was easier in her personal relations than either of the other two ladies. She took literary folk into an inner room for talk, leaving rank and fashion to amuse itself in its accustomed way. Although these ladies and others like them admired learning they were in no sense scholars themselves. They were cultivated women of the world, rich enough to indulge their taste for the society of wits and scholars. Only Mrs. Montagu ventured into print. In 1760 she contributed three dialogues to George Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead and in 1769 published anonymously an essay defending Shakespeare from ‘the Misrepresentations of Mons, de Voltaire’. With the fourth edition of this essay, her three dialogues were reprinted and the name ‘Mrs. Montagu’ appeared upon the title-page.

Of all the women who delighted to entertain the literary world of London the most intelligent was Mrs. Thrale, wife of Henry Thrale, the wealthy owner of the famous Southwark brewery. She was twenty years younger than Mrs. Montagu, and much livelier. Thrale was a masterful husband, who would not allow his wife to ride or take any part in the business of housekeeping. But he encouraged her to give parties, and it was as much by his invitation as hers that Dr. Johnson became for a time a member of their household at Streatham Park. Beside Johnson, the group of which she was the centre included Fanny Burney, whom she introduced into society when everyone was asking who had written Evelina. After Thrale’s death in 1781 Mrs. Thrale fell in love with Gabriel Piozzi, an Italian singer, whom she married three years later. Although she had provided for the comfort and safety of her daughters by Thrale, her second marriage was received with violent criticism within her little world. Her friendship with Fanny Burney came to an end. Johnson wrote to her saying ‘You have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness’¹. In spite of all this unmerited disapproval the marriage was a singularly happy one. With her husband’s encouragement, Mrs. Piozzi took to writing, and her first book—Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D.—was successful in her own day and has secured her a place in literary history.

These ladies welcomed to their houses both to large parties and intimate dinners women of wit and learning as well as men. Miss Carter of Deal was their contemporary and became the close friend of them all. Young women also found no difficulty in entering their world. The young Hannah More, who first came up for the London season in 1774, soon found herself invited to Mrs. Montagu’s parties. She became the poet who praised ‘Vesey! of verse the Judge and Friend’ and ‘Boscawen sage, bright Montagu’ in her poem Bas Bleu, written in 1782. When in 1778 Fanny Burney was ‘invited to Mrs. Montagu’s’ she wrote in her diary ‘I think the measure of my glory full¹. She was delighted to find Mrs. Montagu ‘gratified by hearing’ that Evelina ‘is written by a woman’². At a party given by Miss Monckton and her mother, Lady Galway, in 1782, Fanny Burney met Edmund Burke. He told her that she ‘had done the most wonderful of wonders in pleasing the old wits, the Duchess of Portland and Mrs. Delany’³. The service done to the cause of women by such ladies has often been exaggerated. The givers of conversation parties were too secure to desire to change the accepted relations between men and women. But women owe them a measure of gratitude. They forced contemporary society to admit that there was something admirable in women aspiring to learning and that women who wrote plays and novels could be chaste.

While London society was enjoying, or laughing at conversation parties, there was growing up in the country a brilliant girl whose life was to display out of due season the eccentricity permissible to the great ladies of the eighteenth century. Lady Hester Stanhope was the daughter of the third Earl Stanhope by Lady Hester Pitt, one of the daughters of the great Lord Chatham⁴. Her father was something of a genius; an inventor of a steamship, a calculating machine, and a printing press he, almost alone in the English peerage, welcomed the French Revolution. For a time he called himself Citizen Stanhope and coronets no longer graced his iron gates. His children were the chief sufferers from this passing fad, for Lady Hester’s three half-brothers were apprenticed to a trade. One of her own two sisters married the local surgeon when she was barely sixteen. The other left home and married a penniless army officer. Citizen Stanhope and old Governor Pitt were formidable ancestors and Lady Hester soon showed herself their true daughter. Alone of his children Lady Hester could manage her father, but she could only secure a proper education for her eldest half-brother by smuggling him out of the country to enter a German university under a false name so that his father could not find him. Lord Stanhope allowed his daughters to ride and hunt, and in the Kentish countryside round Chevening Lady Hester became a fine horsewoman. She was born in 1776 and until 1800 remained at home. By that time her two sisters were married and Lady Hester went to live with her grandmother, Lady Chatham, at Burton Pynsent in Somerset. Her skill in breaking in the vicious horses of the neighbourhood was long remembered there¹.

When Lady Chatham died in April 1803 Lady Hester was enjoying a continental tour. On her return her uncle, William Pitt, received her into his house and she remained with him until he died. She acted as his hostess at Putney and at Walmer Castle, reviewed troops with him, riding with him to ‘parade after parade, at fifteen or twenty miles distant from each other…. The hard riding I do not mind, but to remain still so many hours on horseback is an incomprehensible bore, and requires more patience than you can easily imagine’, she wrote to a friend in November 1802 when preparations were being made to repel expected invasion². Pitt showed great generosity to Lady Hester’s two younger half-brothers, procuring them commissions in the army and opening his house to them. Until she died Lady Hester constantly recurred to these years of glory, when, as Pitt’s niece, she was at the heart of politics and flattered by all. Her lively presence cheered her uncle, but she made enemies by her tactless wit. ‘Lady Hester! Lady Hester! what are you saying?’ Pitt was heard to exclaim after she had addressed a general who annoyed her as ‘you nasty kangaroo’³. On his death-bed Pitt expressed the hope that a pension of £1,000 or £1,200 might be allowed to Lady Hester and smaller sums to her two sisters. Parliament accordingly granted £1,200 a year to her and £600 to each of her sisters for their several lives.

In the years between her uncle’s death in 1806 and her own departure from England in 1810 Lady Hester tried to accustom herself to her new unimportance. General Moore became her friend, and ten years later she said that had he returned from Portugal they would have married. Both her brothers were with him there, and the elder was killed almost at the moment when the general was dying at Corunna. For consolation for her double loss she turned to the Welsh hills. For a year she lived in modest lodgings near Builth, keeping two saddle-horses and a cow. She made her own butter and lived as simply as her neighbours. The clergyman’s youngest son and a ‘sprightly, good-tempered girl of thirteen’ attended her as she rode about the Welsh country-side⁴. There she made up her mind about the future. On 10 February 1810, she left England taking with her a manservant, Elizabeth Williams, her maid, and her physician, Dr. Meryon. Her brother James and a friend of his accompanied her to Gibraltar. Thence the party moved on to Malta. The voyage was accomplished in a frigate, and when Lady Hester’s party left Malta it was in a man-of-war. Elizabeth Williams stayed in Malta with her married sister, and another Englishwoman, Mrs. Fry, was engaged to attend Lady Hester.

Lady Hester’s niece, the Duchess of Cleveland, was convinced that her aunt had no intention of leaving England for ever when she embarked at Plymouth in 1810. Her future life was determined by the love affair in which she engaged at Malta with a young man of good family and notable charm named Michael Bruce. Lady Hester had never cared for women. When she was staying with Pitt at Walmer Castle before her grandmother’s death, she wrote to a man friend ‘I am enchanted with everything here. I have never seen the face of a woman till today. Charming !—nothing but pleasant men’¹. And again, after she had joined Pitt’s establishment she wrote ‘There are generally three or four men staying in the house, and we dine eight or ten almost every other day. Military and naval characters are constantly welcome here; women are not, I suppose, because they do not form part of our society. You may guess, then, what a pretty fuss they make with me’². It was unfortunate for Lady Hester that she had no one to teach her that a woman needs friends of her own sex. Michael Bruce was eleven years younger than Lady Hester, who was thirty-four when they met at Malta. He was extremely handsome, with a temperament that made women love him. He wrote to tell his father that on his arrival at Malta he ‘found Lady H. Stanhope and as I find her much cleverer and better informed than my companions, I have left them and adscribed myself to her party’³.

Michael Bruce was completing his education by foreign travel before entering public life in England. His father, Patrick Crawford Bruce, the fifth son of a Scottish baronet, had entered the East India Company, founded a prosperous business in Bombay and returned to England to become a banker in London, the possessor of a country estate and a Member of Parliament. He had made his way by his own exertions and intended his eldest son to go still farther. No expense had been spared on his education and he was allowed to draw on his father freely for funds. The romance between Michael Bruce and Lady Hester ripened quickly. Before the end of June in 1810 they were living together and had determined to continue their travels in company. Lady Hester was by far the stronger character. She wrote to her lover’s father of his son’s ‘elevated and Statesmanlike mind, his brilliant talents, to say nothing of his beautiful person’. She admitted her love, but declared that when the time came she would resign her lover to ‘some thrice happy woman really worthy of him’¹. At the same time Michael wrote to his father assuring him that his feelings for Lady Hester ‘were not called forth by mere personal charms, but by the enlarged powers of her understanding and her most exalted mind’. In a letter to Michael’s father written in December Lady Hester reiterated her determination to leave Michael free to make his own life when their affair should be over. She had made her choice and counted its cost. She declared that she would ‘most scrupulously avoid ever setting eyes upon a modest woman’ and concluded ‘you must not imagine, Sir, because my conduct has been imprudent that my heart is either devoid of sentiments of real delicacy or honor’².

The association lasted three years, and though their letters show signs of strain, they never quarrelled. Michael’s father, proud at first that so great a lady should fall in love with his son and flattered at her deference to himself, soon began to find their travels expensive. In one period of eight months alone he had to supply them with £3,500. His own affairs were not going well and he could not allow such expenditure to continue. Lady Hester had nothing but her pension. She was over-generous and had little idea of the value of money. The party had travelled through Greece and settled in Constantinople. They hired a ship in October 1811 to take them to Alexandria, but suffered shipwreck. Thereafter Lady Hester took to Turkish dress and never abandoned it. From Cairo they went by boat to Jaffa so that they might visit Palestine and the ruined city of Palmyra. It was characteristic of Lady Hester’s attitude to Michael that she wrote a long letter to his father headed ‘on board my boat upon the Nile’³. It is surprising that their association lasted so long. It was she who was in command during the dangerous journey through the desert to Palmyra, where, in her own words, ‘I was crowned Queen of the Desert under the triumphal arch’⁴.

After Bruce unwillingly left her in October 1813 Lady Hester’s finances gradually sank into hopeless confusion. Bruce would gladly have supplied her with money and in the months immediately after his departure expressed his intention of giving her half his income. But his father’s financial troubles became so serious that no more help could be expected from that source. She wrote her last sad letter to her former lover in 1817. But she was undefeated, even when Mrs. Fry and Dr. Meryon had both left her. Elizabeth Williams, learning about her loneliness, came to her in 1816 and remained with her till death in 1828. Lady Hester spent the last twenty years of her life in a rambling house on Mount Lebanon, an object of reverence to the people of the mountains and of curiosity and interest to Europeans and the Syrian Christians of the East. She rarely received visitors, but in 1824 Captain Yorke, later Lord Hardwicke, was cruising in the Levant and asked permission to call. He was concerned at her condition and wrote to Lord Chatham: ‘She is very forlorn, and her mind has taken a serious turn, much impaired, and full of magic and divination’. Obviously fearing that Lord Chatham would take no action, he added a postscript: ‘I do sincerely hope some measures will be taken to make her comfortable. She has not very long to live, depend upon it.—C. Y.’¹ The traveller A. W. Kinglake, whose mother had known her as a girl, was also received by Lady Hester. By that time the doctor had returned to her service and Miss Williams was dead. Lady Hester could still amuse her guest by her powers of mimicry and appear ‘full of audacious fun’, but he found her also a prophetess: ‘she carefully insinuated, without actually asserting, her heavenly rank’².

She died at last in 1839. She had sent Dr. Meryon away some months before her death. According to Kinglake the doctor ‘had sunk into the complete Asiatic’³ and it may be that Lady Hester wearied of his company. He left her as ‘She was about to shut herself up alone, without money, without books, without a soul she could confide in; without a single European, male or female, about her; with winter coming on, beneath roofs certainly no longer waterproof, and that might fall in; with war at her doors, and without any means of defence except in her own undaunted courage’⁴. Nevertheless she did not die alone, for when the British consul came all Lady Hester’s thirty-four native servants were in the house. Dr. Meryon, who found it hard to make a living at his own profession, had kept a record of Lady Hester’s talk and copies of her letters, hoping one day to make a book about her. It appeared in 1845. To Dr. Meryon Lady Hester was a great lady whose memory should be preserved: ‘Peace be with her remains, and honour to her memory! A surer friend, a more frank and generous enemy, never trod this earth. “Show me where the poor and needy are”, she would say, “and let the rich shift for themselves!” As free from hypocrisy as the purest diamond from stain, she pursued her steady way, unaffected by the ridiculous reports that were spread about her by travellers, either malicious or misinformed, and not to be deterred from her noble, though somewhat Quixotic enterprises, by ridiculous abuse, by threats or opposition’¹. Writing in 1850 of the eminent people who died between 1835 and 1841, Harriet Martineau recorded that when Lady Hester’s death was announced in England ‘There was a sense of relief—a sense of comfort that that restless and mysterious mind was asleep, and past the power of annoyance from without, and misgiving from within’².

1 Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage, Preface, unpaged, last paragraph.

2 London, 1711, The Dedication, unpaged, A 2.

1 An account of the conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, from her first coming to court, to the year 1710. In a letter from herself to My Lord—, London, 1742.

1 Letters to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, and her second husband, the Hon. George Berkeley from 1712 to 1767, London, 1824, vol. i, pp. 292–3.

2 Conduct, pp. 293–5.

3 Ibid., p. 297.

1 Chamberlayne, Anglice Notitia, London, 1707, p. 545.

2 Miege, New State of England, 1691, part 2, p. 176. Their names are on pp. 167–8.

3 Diary and Letters of Madame d’ Arblay, ed. Austin Dobson, London, 1904, vol. ii, p. 369 n.

4 Ibid., pp. 363–4,

5 Ibid., p. 370.

1 Diary and Letters of Madame D’ Arblay, vol. ii, pp. 396–400.

2 E.g. Progresses, vol. ii, p. 88.

3 Angliae Notitia, London, 1673, p. 225.

4 In the list of recipients of New Year’s Gifts from the queen the ‘May des of Honour’ each have a piece of plate and their names are followed by that of the ‘Mother of the Mades’ who received a rather better piece. In 1578 she was ‘Mrs. Hyde’; Progresses, loc. cit.

5 Anglice Notitia, 1707, p. 545.

6 Progresses, vol. i, pp. 269–70.

7 Mrs. Delany, vol. i, p. 8.

8 Miege, New State of England, 1691, part 2, p. 168.

9 Mrs. Delany, vol. i, p. 2.

1 Angliae Notitia, 1710, p. 541.

2 Lady Louisa Stuart’s caustic account of Jane Warburton comes from ‘Some account of John, Duke of Argyll and his family’, privately printed in 1863 and reprinted as an introduction to The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, Edinburgh, 1889, vol. i, pp. xv if.

3 Brewing had ceased to be exclusively in women’s hands since the Tudor period, when it was separated from the sale of beer to simplify the collection of excise duty. During the seventeenth century women were gradually put out of business and the trade passed into capitalists’ hands. A. Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 221 ff.

4 Mrs. Delany, vol. i, pp. 2–3.

1 Mrs. Delany, vol. i, p. 4.

2 Conduct, pp. 147–8. The duchess meant that he brought credit to the Chancery.

3 Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper, London, 1864, p. 1. Henceforward quoted as Lady Cowper.

4 Lady Cowper, p. 2.

1 Lady Cowper, p. 3.

2 Ibid., pp. 8–9.

3 Ibid., p. 10.

4 Ibid., p. 47.

5 Ibid., p. 13.

6 Ibid., p. 19.

7 Ibid., p. 177.

1 Lady Cowper, p. 7.

2 Ibid., p. 32.

3 Ibid., p. 14.

4 Ibid., p. 65.

5 Ibid., p. 98.

1 Lady Cowper, p. ix.

2 Ibid., p. 12. The second foreign lady to whom Lady Cowper referred was the Duchess of Shrewsbury, who was Italian by birth.

3 Ibid., p. 13.

4 Ibid., p. 108.

1 Letters to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, and her second husband, London, 1824, vol. i, pp. 35–6.

2 Ibid., p. 407.

3 The editor of Lady Suffolk’s letters maintained^ that she was not the mistress of George II, but his arguments hardly carry conviction.

4 The Works of John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, 2nd ed., London, 1729, vol. ii, A Short Character.…, p. 39.

5 Ibid., p. 21.

1 The Works of John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, vol. ii, A Short Character. …, p. 23.

2 Mrs. Delany, vol. i, p. 26.

3 Ibid., p. 109.

1 The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. by her great-grandson, Lord Wharncliffe, Paris, 1837, vol. i, pp. 115–117

2 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 173.

3 Ibid., p. 105.

1 Letters and Works, vol. i, p. 124.

2 George Paston, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Times, London, 1907, p. 63, quoting an unpublished letter of Wortley Montagu’s.

3 Letters and Works, vol. i, p. 136.

4 Lady Cowper, p. 195.

1 Letters and Works, vol. i, p. 177.

2 Ibid., p. 65.

3 Quoted by George Paston, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, p. 306.

1 Letters and Works, vol. i, p. 365.

2 E.g. Ibid., p. 362.

3 Ibid., p. 372.

4 Ibid., p. 373.

5 Ibid., p. 379.

6 Ibid., p. 374.

1 George Paston, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, pp. 374–6.

2 Letters and Works, vol. i, p. 380.

3 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 132–3 150.

4 Ibid., p. 104.

5 Ibid., p. 64.

1 Letters and Works, vol. ii, p. 99.

2 Ibid., pp. 106–8.

3 Ibid., p. in.

4 Lady Louisa also wrote, completing her work in 1827, ‘Some account of John, Duke of Argyll and his family’, which has already been quoted, see p. 252.

1 Dr. Doran, A Lady of the Last Century (Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu), London, 1873, p. 129.

2 A further reason for Horace Walpole’s hostility was Lady Mary’s friendship with Dolly Walpole, sister of Sir Robert Walpole and later the wife of Lord Townshend. Sir Robert’s first wife, Horace Walpole’s mother, did not get on well with her sister-in-law.

1 Letters and Works, vol. ii, pp. 77–8.

2 Letters of Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey, London, 1821, p. 325.

3 The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, pp. lix—lxxii, from Lady Louisa Stuart’s Introduction.

4 Letters and Works, vol. ii, p. 78.

1 Letters and Works, vol. ii, pp. 141, 143.

2 Lady Mary Coke, vol. i, p. 51.

3 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 155, 159.

4 Ibid., vol. iii, p. 53.

5 Ibid., p. 40.

6 Ibid., p. 49.

1 Lady Mary Coke, vol. i, p. lxxvii.

2 Ibid., vol. iii, p. 52.

3 The Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox, 1743–1826, ed. the Countess of Ilchester and Lord Stavordale, London, 1902, vol. i, pp. 47–51.

1 Lady Mary Coke, vol. iii, p. 31.

2 Lady Sarah in 1781 married Colonel Napier and when in 1804 her husband died, was given a pension of £800 & year. Lady Sarah Lennox, vol. ii, p. 200.

3 Lady Mary Coke, p. cxxxiii.

1 A direct tradition of the origin of the term ‘blue-stockings’ is preserved by Montagu Pennington, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, p. 315, who obtained his information from his aunt, Miss Carter. * A foreign gentleman, who was to go there with an acquaintance, was told in jest that he might appear there, if he pleased, in his blue stockings. This he understood in the literal sense; and when he spoke of it in French called it the Bas Bleu meeting’.

2 Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, vol. i, p. 189.

3 Brig.-General Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, AdmiraVs Wife, London, 1940, and Admiral’s Widow, London, 1942.

1 Autobiography and Literary Remains of Airs. Piozzi (Thrale), ed. A. Hayward, Q.C., 2nd ed., London, 1861, vol. i, p. 239.

1 Diary and Letters of Madame d ‘Arblay, vol. i, p. 125.

2 Ibid., p. 121.

3 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 140.

4 Life and Letters of Lady Hester Stanhope, by her niece, the Duchess of Cleveland, London, 1914.

1 A. W. Kinglake, Eothen, Everyman’s Library, p. 63.

2 Life and Letters of Lady Hester Stanhope, p. 54.

3 Ibid., p. 99.

4 Ibid., p. 89.

1 Life and Letters of Lady Hester Stanhope, p. 37.

2 Ibid., p. 53.

3 Ian Bruce, The Nun of Lebanon, London, 1951, p. 56.

1 The Nun of Lebanon, p. 63.

2 Ibid., p. 77.

3 Ibid., p. 133.

4 Life and Letters of Lady Hester Stanhope, p. 159.

1 Life and Letters of Lady Hester Stanhope, pp. 235–7.

2 Eothen, pp. 73–9.

3 Ibid., p. 79.

4 Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope as related by herself in conversations with her Physician, London, 1845, vol. i, p. vii.

1 Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, vol. i, p. x.

2 Harriet Martineau, The History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace, London, 1850, vol. ii, p. 454.