Cliveden had been reduced to a charred ruin. Following the fire, Mary lived alone, a tragic figure, residing in the dilapidated wing that had escaped the flames. The remains of the house, along with their lone inhabitant, became a source of morbid fascination to the public. Her fallen situation and the ruins in which she lived fitted well with the late 18th-century trend for Gothic sites. In the latter part of the century, under the influence of writers such as Horace Walpole and William Sotheby, ‘picturesque’ and ‘melancholy’ settings began to attract artists, writers, and, as the fashion for the Gothic took hold, crowds of tourists. People visited ruins in order to gaze upon the collapsed grandeur of past ages, and in the hope of experiencing a profound sympathy for the previous inhabitants. For the melancholy, Gothic settings were also a reminder of the ephemerality of their own civilisation. Religious ruins were particularly popular: George Keate’s 1764 poem ‘The Ruins of Netley Abbey’ would spark an enduring public obsession with his subject, a dissolved abbey near Southampton. But a house like Cliveden with its romantic history and its pathos-evoking decline was also a natural site for pilgrimage.
Mrs Lybbe Powys visited the ruins of Cliveden on 29 July 1795. She recorded climbing up the ‘very steep hill’ and seeing ‘a scene of ruin’ – ‘the flight of stone steps all fallen in pieces… the hall, which had fell in, and was a mass of stone pillars and bricks all in pieces’. In the middle of the scene, a pair of doors remained standing, eerily untouched by the fire. Powys went on to record a story about a mystery will, lost to the flames: ‘It seems she [Mary] was much affected by a will that was deposited in a place where the flames were too fierce for anyone to venture, tho’ she tried herself, and a man offer’d to venture too. The contents were not known.’15 Whether the will was real or another Gothic prop borne out of rumour and local imagination, we will never know.
In 1805 Mary commissioned for the house a design that has since been attributed to John Nash and George Stanley Repton, but the cost was prohibitive.16 Instead she continued living alone among the ruins. In the autumn of 1811, the writer Charles Knight visited the house to ‘make a catalogue of a large collection of books that had been long neglected’, and that must have weathered the fire in the surviving wing. Like many 18th-century visitors, Knight approached the house with Alexander Pope’s description in mind. Although the ‘principal front’ had been burnt down, he wrote, the ‘flame’ of the house ‘was imperishable, as the “Cliefden’s proud alcove” of Pope’.17 Knight enjoyed his time at Cliveden, rambling in the woods and boating on the Thames, and was moved by Mary’s stoicism and ‘unaffected courtesy’, which he saw as ‘the memorial of a stately but genial aristocracy that was passing away’.18 Whether or not the old aristocracy had been genial, its decline – or transformation – would become increasingly evident over the course of the century as it played out, sometimes to disastrous effect, in the lives of the house’s subsequent mistresses.
Although unable to finance the rebuilding of the main house, Mary commissioned Peter Nicholson to design a riverside summer house, which would later be altered by George Davey and named Spring Cottage, on the sight of a natural spring that been used as a spa by the Orkneys. In the 20th century, the hideaway was to become infamous as the retreat of society osteopath Stephen Ward, who achieved celebrity during the Profumo Affair.
Then, on 10 July 1821, Mary sold Cliveden in an auction at Garraway’s Coffee House in Cornhill, London. The sale marked the end of the Orkneys’ ownership of the estate, which had lasted over a century. Thanks to the relatively high standing of women in Scottish inheritance rights, the earldom of Orkney had been able to pass down the female line, and for three generations up to 1821, Cliveden had been owned by women. But at the start of the 19th century the house was in a bleak state of neglect. It was only under the nurturing care of the next chatelaine, Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, that Cliveden would be raised up from the ashes.
After Cliveden was gutted by a fire in the late eighteenth century, the ruins of the house became popular among tourists of Gothic locations.
PART IV
HARRIET
1806–1868
Chapter 1
‘GOODBYE, CASTLE HOWARD!’
A PORTRAIT OF Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, still presides over the dining room at Cliveden. The artist, German court painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter, has immortalised Harriet as a classic Victorian beauty: a garland of leaves adorns her auburn hair; her eyes are warm and smiling, her cheeks plump and her complexion milky white. Winterhalter has succeeded in capturing the majesty of Harriet’s public demeanour, as well as the warmth and maternal instinct that sustained her long, happy marriage. Majesty came easily to Harriet. Unlike her predecessors, she did not have to toil to reach Cliveden.
Harriet was the fifth of twelve children, her parents’ third daughter, and the progeny of ‘Grand Whiggery’ – an elite tribe of grandee families who were arbiters of taste, champions of statecraft, patrons of the arts and connoisseurs of refined pleasure. Harriet’s grandmother was the fashion icon, Whig activist and noted political hostess Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. In marriage, Harriet augmented her great political inheritance with a great industrial one. Her husband George Leveson-Gower was heir to a fortune unrivalled among the aristocracy of the early 19th century: his father had transformed a phenomenal portfolio of canal investments – inherited from his uncle the Duke of Bridgewater – into an even bigger fortune based in railways, and was known as a ‘leviathan of wealth’. His mother, a countess in her own right, held Sutherland, an isolated million-acre territory in Highland Scotland. The family also owned vast swathes of property in England, including Trentham Hall, their main seat in Staffordshire. Between them, Harriet’s ancestry and the family she married into represented two great aristocratic traditions: high politics and capital.
It was clear from the beginning that Harriet had inherited a balance of her mother’s determination and her father’s gentle nature. Her formative years were spent at the seat of her paternal grandparents, Castle Howard in Yorkshire. Built on the site of the ruined Henderskelfe Castle, it had come into the family in 1571. In 1699, the architect Sir John Vanbrugh – also the architect of Blenheim Palace, the building that had done so much to inspire the Orkneys’ vision of Cliveden – had been charged with the redesign and had produced a baroque palace comprising two symmetrical wings and a central dome. Later, a further wing in the Palladian style was added. ‘I have seen gigantic palaces before, but never a sublime one,’ enthused the historian and purveyor of all things Gothic, Horace Walpole. The Whig writer and politician Macaulay declared it ‘the most perfect specimen of the most vicious style’.1 It was within this spectacular setting that Harriet was educated alongside her elder sisters, Caroline and Georgiana.
Even as a toddler, Harriet eclipsed her siblings both in character and talent. ‘Remarkably intelligent, talking more than her year-older brother, Harriet already, so their nurse puts it, “masters them all”,’ wrote her aunt.2 Like Elizabeth Villiers more than a century earlier, Harriet learned French and was taught to draw, but Harriet’s education also included history and literature. She wrote, ‘I like Oreste [the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy]; like Athalie [Racine’s masterpiece], it has shown me that a play can be interesting without love’, while her history lessons allowed her to reflect on the nature of female power. In December 1820 she recorded a conversation with her grandfather where they discussed Queen Elizabeth, Lady Jane Grey and Marie Antoinette. Harriet’s precocious intellect clearly engaged her grandfather, who was ‘in good spirits and particularly kind’. Prolific and self-conscious letter writers, the sisters hoped their correspondence would be read by subsequent generations. With this in mind, after her sisters’ deaths, Caroline spent years copying their letters into a series of books, a challenging task given Harriet’s seismographic scrawl.
As the Howard sisters reached their mid-teens, their thoughts inevitably turned to marriage. In 1821, Harriet’s el
dest sister, Georgiana, became engaged to George Agar Ellis, the only son of Lord Clifden, a wealthy Irish peer. The match was thought by some to be rather ‘business like’, but it seems to have pleased Georgiana, who, after the wedding on 7 March 1822, wrote to Caroline saying that she was ‘perfectly happy, so very much so… it is delightful thought to think of passing the whole of one’s life with a person whom one adores’.3 Georgiana’s new husband was a serious-minded young man who occupied himself with historical literature and became something of a connoisseur in art, as well as an author and a politician.4 From oblique references in letters, it appears that Ellis, although devoted, ‘was rather a difficult husband’. But Georgiana admired his attainments and aspirations, and ‘upheld him against adverse criticism, if and when she came across it’.5
A year later, in April 1823, aged 16, Harriet journeyed from Castle Howard to make her society debut in London. More than ready to be unleashed from the schoolroom and start her adventure, as the carriage pulled away from her childhood home, she cried: ‘Goodbye, Castle Howard! You will never see me Harriet Howard again.’ At her inaugural ball she caught the eye of ‘one of the most eligible bachelors of the day’, her cousin George Granville Leveson-Gower, then Earl Gower and heir to his father’s marquessate of Stafford. George was entranced by Harriet, and only a week later, the couple became engaged. The pocket diary of Harriet’s mother records the breathless pace of events: Friday, April 25: ‘My brother’s Ball for Harriet.’ Tuesday, April 29: ‘Hope of Lord Gower.’ Thursday, May 1: ‘Lord Gower’s note. Esterhazy’s Ball.’ Friday, May 2: ‘Lord Gower proposed and was accepted.’ Harriet’s family was thrilled with the match.6
Aged 36 at the time of the engagement, George was nearly 20 years older than Harriet and, unlike his future bride, he had led a cosmopolitan life. George was educated first at Harrow and later at Christ Church, Oxford, but his passion was for travel. When he left Oxford in 1806 he was unable to take the Grand Tour, beloved of so many young aristocratic men in this period, as France and Italy were under the control of Napoleon Bonaparte and Germany was well within the emperor’s sights, blocking the route across Europe. George’s hopes were not completely dashed, however. His cousin had been ordered to the Prussian court, which was desperately seeking allies against an advancing Napoleon. Resourceful George managed to persuade his cousin to allow him to join the mission as a dispatch carrier.7 The political mission failed, but George was able to use the opportunity to travel to Hamburg, then Copenhagen, and finally on to Prussia.8
Harriet’s husband, the cultured George Granville, 2nd Duke of Sutherland.
While at the Prussian court, George became infatuated with King William Frederick Ill’s ‘amiable, charming’ wife, Queen Louise. On 7 February 1807 he wrote to his mother saying ‘you would like her so very much’.9 But while Louise clearly enjoyed George’s company, she remained happily married. After a period serving his uncle, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, British ambassador in St Petersburg, George returned to England in 1808. He was not to venture abroad again until December 1813, by which time Louise had succumbed to a mysterious illness and died – in her husband’s arms.
During the next six years, George showed little inclination to marry; he twice visited Italy, and in 1812, was among the founder members of the Roxburghe Club, an elite association of bibliophiles. More than a decade after his friendship with Queen Louise, he eventually showed a brief interest in Lord Clanwilliam’s sister during a visit to Vienna in 1821, but his advances came to nothing. Later that year, George made his first visit to Castle Howard. ‘He is bouché [silent] completely on the subject of the [Howard] girls,’ Harriet’s aunt Lady Granville (who was married to George’s uncle) wrote to her sister, ‘and I dare not ask questions’.10 But some months later, he admitted to Lady Granville that he liked Harriet and her elder sister, Georgiana, so much that ‘were it not for youth he would think of one of them’.11
On Wednesday 28 May 1823, a month after their first dance, Harriet and George were married. At 16 years old, Harriet was the same age Anna Maria had been on the day of her wedding to the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was also, like George, 20 years the senior of his bride. Yet unlike Anna Maria, Harriet was no young girl leaping into the unknown. Despite her tender age, she displayed a sense of serene self-assurance that would shape her life and future relationships.
The wedding was received with the enthusiasm usually reserved for a royal wedding. The Caledonian Mercury of Saturday 14 June 1823 reported that ‘the nuptials of the heir of the noble family of Trentham is an event which has excited, during the past week, the liveliest feelings of gratulation, attachment, and respect, throughout an extensive district in this county, and in that of Stafford’. The ceremony itself took place in the green drawing room at Devonshire House and was conducted by the Archbishop of York. Harriet was radiant in a ‘magnificent robe of Valenciennes lace, with a veil of the same material, extending to the feet from the head’.12 George’s ‘lovely bride’ was thought to be ‘highly endowed with mental attainments, and very beautiful’.13
The celebrations were conducted on a grand scale befitting the union of two such noble Whig households. An elaborate Gothic arch was constructed for the occasion, its turrets draped with garlands of ivy and oak. It was emblazoned with the motto ‘Happiness and perpetuity to the House of Trentham’; on one side a banner was hung that bore the legend ‘Gower’ in gold lettering on a crimson background, and on the other, one that bore the name ‘Howard’. The Caledonian Mercury reported that between two and three hundred guests had been invited to attend a ‘splendid ball’ to celebrate the wedding, and that they were provided with ‘every refreshment’.14 Provision was also made for the estate workers and their families to enjoy the festivities, which were as much an act of charity as a display of wealth. There was dancing and feasting, bonfires and the sounding of cannon, and a maypole was erected for the local children. ‘Upwards of 200 persons partook of tea in a spacious booth erected for the purpose’ and two roasted sheep, as well as ‘plenty of bread, potatoes, and plumb pudding’ were supplied for the cottagers on the estate.15
After the ceremony, George and Harriet set off in a ‘beautiful chariot and four horses’ for the family retreat in Richmond, where they were to spend their honeymoon.16 As a wedding present from George’s father, the couple received estates to the value of £20,000. It was a significant endowment, though tiny compared to what they stood to inherit on his death. Moreover, it had been bequeathed at a time of widespread popular protest, much of which was directed at extremes of wealth and the exclusiveness of political power. It was this protest, as much as the endowment itself, that would shape Harriet and George’s first decade together.
Chapter 2
REFORM AND REVOLUTION
‘THERE IS SOMETHING so beautiful, so interesting and so lovable in this place, that I feel every day more fond of it,’ Harriet wrote effusively to her mother-in-law, Elizabeth, of her first stay at the family’s Sutherland seat, Dunrobin Castle. By September 1823, Harriet had settled happily into married life. In the months following the wedding she communicated regularly with Elizabeth. Her letters are warm, lively, full of anecdotes and peppered with literary allusions and French phrases. The couple had visited Trentham Hall in August, which Harriet thought ‘the most palace like thing I have ever seen’, and later that month Chatsworth House. ‘I have been delighted with all I have seen, and much interested with all that has been and is still doing,’ she enthused.
Harriet’s self-assuredness was palpable; in January 1824 her maternal aunt Lady Granville came to stay and ‘found her a very handsome, blooming, somewhat matronly woman, whom I should have pronounced to be about twenty-five’. Harriet was in fact only 17. George also thrived in the relationship. ‘As to his happiness, I never saw anything like it,’ Lady Granville commented, observing that ‘his mind and manner have expanded under her influence.’ Harriet also inspired the ardour of her mother-in-law, who ‘quite worships her… [and] says
she has not the shadow of a fault’.1 The sheltered teenager who had barely ventured beyond the walls of Castle Howard had proved herself to be more than capable of rising to the demands of her new role. This must have come as a relief to the Howard family, who continued to be haunted by the spectre of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s unhappy marriage; despite being charming, stylish and intelligent, Harriet’s maternal grandmother had famously struggled with the pressures of being a duchess. Harriet could not have been more different. She flourished, so much so that she incurred the jealousy of some society women who felt that her head seemed ‘nearly turned by the splendour and independence of her new situation’.2
One aspect of her new life that perplexed the young bride was other people’s cynicism about her marriage. She confided to Lady Granville about her ‘danger in society’, and asked why it was that ‘just married and passionately fond of her husband, flirting with her should occur to others; and that, unlike other brides, everybody was speculating whether she would flirt or no’. Lady Granville replied that although she knew Harriet was sincerely in love with George, ‘nobody believes it’. In a society where marriage was considered to be more of a transactional arrangement than a matter of the heart, Harriet’s devotion to her husband was unusual, especially given the wide age gap. Writing to Lady Morpeth, Lady Granville explained how Harriet’s strong moral compass, her innate sense of right from wrong, was the bedrock of her character. ‘With such excellence, such freedom from all wrong, her conduct can never err,’ she wrote, adding that her niece was not of the disposition ‘to be amused by the mere mechanical apparatus of society, dress, light, crowd, small talk’. But as the gossip died down, even the harshest social critics were charmed by the vivacious and amiable Howard daughter. Madame de Lieven declared that ‘il est impossible d’avoir des manières plus distinguées [it is impossible to have more distinguished manners]’ while Lady Granville herself concluded that her niece simply ‘wins all hearts’.3
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 22
