Lady Granville’s assertion in January 1824 that Harriet was ‘blooming’ was truer than she realised. Harriet was pregnant. ‘I am going to make you a very premature disclosure of my hopes,’ she wrote to her mother-in-law in November 1823. ‘I cannot resist communicating the expectations of that, which it gives me such pleasure to tell and that I know will be very pleasant and welcome intelligence to you dear [Elizabeth].’ The contrast between Harriet’s warm and open relationship with her mother-in-law and Princess Augusta’s stiff, contrived and infrequent communications with Queen Caroline could not be more stark. Harriet’s first child, named Elizabeth after her paternal grandmother, was born in May 1824.
Motherhood did not prevent Harriet from venturing abroad. At the beginning of March 1825, the Gowers set sail for Paris and Harriet, who was already pregnant again, made the difficult decision to leave her baby daughter behind in England. ‘The parting with one’s child is most dreadful,’ she lamented to her sister Caroline. ‘You have no idea of the treasure her little likeness is to us; we have it out and look at it constantly when by ourselves.’ In the same letter Harriet also recounts her crossing. Her stress-free and relatively short trip across the Channel was an entirely different experience from that of Anna Maria 200 years earlier. The first mistress of Cliveden had endured a wretched crossing to France, lasting more than eight hours; Harriet embarked at Dover and reached ‘le beau pays de France in the space of four hours and a half. When she arrived on the French mainland she was greeted with the charming sight of French ladies ‘in white caps and long gold earrings’. She headed straight to ‘a very good inn, l’Hotel de Bains’, where she rested and ‘had some broth’. Afterwards, she took a gentle stroll around the ramparts of the town and was amused by the locals, who reminded her of ‘an exaggerated French play’.4
For ten years now, Britain and France had enjoyed peace, even if relations were still a little strained. After Napoleon Bonaparte’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, Louis XVIII of the Bourbon monarchy returned to the French throne. During this time, the French were more concerned with the shape of their own constitution than with antagonising their old rivals, and the British had no reason to resume hostilities since Louis had been their preferred candidate to rule France. Jokes and insults were tossed back and forth over the Channel, but Britain and France would never again be at war with each other. France quickly became a popular destination for English holidaymakers intrigued to discover more about the sights and culture of their erstwhile foe.
Paris proved to be a social merry-go-round of parties, balls and plays. Harriet enjoyed the theatre, which she attended ‘beautifully coiffée in heron’s plumes’. However, she was not impressed with the Parisian balls, which she found crowded, and neither was she particularly taken with French fashion: ‘their dress is nothing remarkable here,’ she wrote to Caroline. She also remarked on the dubious dancing skills of her hostess the Duchesse de Berri, whose steps were ‘entirely composed of an ungainly sort of jump, given with the look of a country girl’, acerbically adding that ‘her manner is most like Miss [Maria] Foote’s in that play where she tries to disgust her love, only that our Duchesse is uncommonly aided by nature to produce that end’.5 Despite extensive commentary on her social escapades, family was never far from Harriet’s mind: she concluded one of her letters from Paris by asking if Caroline had yet weaned her ‘little man’.
At the time of Harriet’s visit, Paris was ablaze with opulent celebrations surrounding the coronation of Charles X, brother of Louis XVIII, who had died without an heir in the autumn of 1824. On Monday 6 June 1825, Harriet watched from an oculist’s balcony as the new king made his ceremonial entry into Paris. ‘The prettiest part almost was seeing all the ambassadors defile on their way to Notre Dame,’ she wrote. Despite the music and ‘the gayest looking crowd’, and the firing of guns at the Tuileries, Harriet observed that Charles X was ‘evidently not popular’. The ultra-royalist principles of the king did not sit well with a public who remembered the vicious battle for popular sovereignty that was the first French Revolution of 1789. After several more weeks of entertainment, including a trip to Versailles ‘to see the grand eaux play for the ambassadors extraordinary’, the Gowers left Paris at the end of June.6
High child-mortality rates and the importance of producing a steady succession of heirs meant that serial pregnancies were desirable among women of Harriet’s class and generation. Just over a month after their return to England, on 8 August, Harriet gave birth to another daughter, Evelyn, and two years later had a third girl, who was christened Caroline. ‘I was called this morning with the delightful news of dearest Harriet’s safe confinement,’ recorded the baby’s namesake, Harriet’s sister. ‘We went up to town [from Roehampton] immediately after breakfast, and found her and the little girl (not quite so welcome this time) going on as well as possible … It is the finest child she has had, but it ought to have been a boy.’ Caroline’s acknowledgment that a boy would have been ‘more welcome’ highlights the pressure on aristocratic women to provide their husbands with a son. Thankfully, George was less exacting than the husband of Harriet’s grandmother Georgiana, who had been notoriously impatient and unforgiving about her inability to produce a male heir. Harriet adored her girls and was amused by Lady Granville’s dictum: ‘All boys and men are odious’.7 Nevertheless, she finally fulfilled her dynastic duty when, on 19 December 1828, she gave birth to her first son, George, Viscount Trentham.
During this period of intensive childbearing, Harriet and George were based at Lilleshall, a Shropshire estate that Lord Stafford had given to his son at the time of his marriage. Harriet’s days at Lilleshall were full of nursery and household management, on which subjects she frequently wrote to Caroline. Maternal pride shone throughout her correspondence. Of their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, Harriet wrote that she ‘grows a young woman; feeds herself and has a great spirit of order and neatness’, and also, a few days later, that she ‘becomes very accomplished; digs, plants, waters, and nods to the [village] children’. Although content, Harriet at times found her daily routine banal and repetitive. ‘The only part of this life I do not approve is that it gives one nothing to tell, as one day is strictly like another,’ she wrote, adding that she did not disapprove of this in reality, ‘because the one day is pleasant’.8 In the ensuing years of emotional upheaval, Harriet would yearn for these days of simple domesticity.
Harriet’s letters at this time also give an insight into the elements that Lilleshall lacked, and what she might have been looking for in Cliveden. She warned Caroline, who was about to visit Lilleshall, that ‘you are not to expect this place the most enjoyable or loveable, naturally and instinctively… you know that we are in a manufacturing district and we must see smoke. Still love and enjoy it I will; tho’ the dove perhaps would not have rested here after the deluge.’ At the time, however, what Harriet truly desired was not a new country home, but a grand house in London. When Lord Stafford purchased the lease to York House for £72,000 in 1827, she must have had high hopes that her father-in-law would give them the property as a London residence. But he kept it for himself and, worse, decorated it not in Harriet’s preferred modern style, but with a selection of his many pictures. Under Lord Stafford’s ownership, the house became known as Stafford House. In letters to Caroline, Harriet wrote with aching restraint on the subject of her deprivation: ‘I must be all candour with you; I do not feel the not having [Stafford House] a welcome respite, tho’ I hope you will believe in the same candour, that I am not discontented.’9
On 24 June 1830, Harriet delivered her fifth child, another daughter, Blanche. She was confined at Hamilton Place in Mayfair, and had a succession of visitors, including her parents-in-law, Lord and Lady Stafford. But this happy event was soon to be overshadowed by worrying developments in national politics. Two days after Blanche’s birth, King George IV died without an heir and his younger brother, William IV, ascended the throne. Not strong enough to leave
the house, Harriet watched the celebrations from her window, wistfully observing to Caroline that ‘the dense crowd, the waving of les panaches blancs [white feathers], the applause and the troops made a beautiful sight.’10
At the time, the death of a monarch necessitated a general election, and this took place during July and August 1830. Although the Tories had dominated government for the last 18 years, the election came at a bad time for the Duke of Wellington and his party. The Tories were divided over policy, and the pressures of industrialisation and a post-war economic downturn had created tensions that were now reaching boiling point. In southern England, from Dorset to East Anglia and Lincolnshire, agricultural disturbances and distress were rife: arson had broken out in April 1830 as furious labourers on starvation wages burned hayricks and smashed threshing machines.11 Many among the aristocracy recognised that – for their own protection as much as anything – something had to change. The electoral franchise was already severely restricted, and rising populations in urban areas coupled with the depopulation of some rural constituencies had made Parliament even more unrepresentative of the country than it had been in the previous century. Though Wellington was able to cling on to his position as prime minister, there was a significant shift in the balance of power, with his party losing 30 seats to the Whigs and to a new parliamentary group, the Radicals.
Harriet watched the world around her being stripped of its old certainties with a mix of alarm and incredulity. In London, the establishment of the ‘New Police’, instituted by Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary, was ‘intensely resented’ by many people, including many Whigs. In a letter of 30 October, however, Harriet made it clear that she was a supporter of the new police force, whom she imagined as a bulwark against the mob. She showed little sympathy for traditional Whig views that the police were a threat to liberty; the main influence upon her politics was raw, undiluted fear. ‘I think there is no danger that restraining our liberties can be attempted in days like these, and I think all is to be feared from the people,’ she wrote. Popular resistance to Peel’s method of law enforcement was, in her opinion, ‘blood-boiling and odious’.12
Harriet viewed advances in technology with a similar sense of foreboding; change of any sort frightened rather than excited her. In September 1830, just a week before the inauguration of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Britain’s first ticketed railway line, Harriet hosted a dinner at Trentham Hall for William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool, and his wife, Emily. The Sutherlands were heavily involved in the Liverpool–Manchester railway: Lord Stafford was an early investor, having purchased a fifth of the railway’s shares in December 1825. George, his younger brother Francis, and Huskisson were among the dignitaries invited on the maiden journey between Liverpool and Manchester. Their train, pulled by the Northumbrian, would be one of a number running in the ‘gala’ day. ‘The drive on the railway has an alarming sound,’ Harriet wrote, adding that Huskisson’s wife ‘seems to dread Liverpool’.13 Their apprehension proved prophetic.
On 15 September the line was officially opened by the Duke of Wellington and the celebratory journey from Liverpool Crown Street to Manchester Liverpool Road was soon underway. The Northumbrian had to stop at Parkside, halfway to Manchester, in order to take on more water. Ignoring safety advice, ‘twelve or fourteen of the party’, Huskisson among them, got out onto the tracks to view the water-supplying apparatus and to visit the Duke of Wellington in his carriage at the front of the train.14 Then disaster struck. Another train, pulled by Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, was coming in the opposite direction. Most of the men on the track rushed to a position of safety, either away from the trains or between the tracks, which were far enough apart to leave a safe gap between passing trains. But Huskisson panicked and grabbed the door of a carriage being pulled by the Northumbrian. The door swung open and he was hit by the oncoming train. He was thrown forward onto the track where the Rocket crushed his legs, leaving them ‘weltering in blood’.15 He was taken to Eccles for medical treatment in a train driven by Stephenson himself. Huskisson was given a large dose of laudanum, but died soon afterwards, becoming the first railway fatality in history.
For Harriet, Huskisson’s demise became symbolic of the high price of progress in a brave new world. As the railways were expanding across England, connecting communities up and down the country, Harriet’s own world of aristocratic privilege and entitlement seemed to be unravelling. For the first time, she feared the future.
Chapter 3
FEAR IN A TIME OF CHOLERA
HARRIET ANXIOUSLY FOLLOWED the violent clashes that raged between London crowds and the newly created police force, viewing the whole episode as a struggle to defend aristocratic power and values. She was particularly upset by the use of knives – as distinct from swords, which were only carried by the higher orders – as weapons: ‘The anti-police cry is most barbarous against these unfortunate unarmed people; one was said to have been struck with many knives the other night, and this use of the knife, if it becomes habitual, is frightful.’1 The threat of disorder and dispossession continued to dominate Harriet’s correspondence and many other aristocrats echoed her fears: on 29 November her sister-in-law Lady Carlisle wrote of an acquaintance who ‘is altogether in a most desponding state since his expedition into Hampshire [where there had been riots]… he talks as if it was all over with the landed property’.2
One way to avoid such a dramatic outcome, political pragmatists of the day argued, was parliamentary reform. The electorate in 1830 was three per cent smaller than it had been in 1640, despite a threefold rise in the population. The smallest and most underpopulated constituencies were known as ‘rotten boroughs’; with an electorate consisting of just seven people, Old Sarum in Salisbury still returned two MPs to every Parliament. Given the depth of these problems, it seemed to many at the top of society, as well as those further down the social hierarchy, that change needed to be made. But addressing the House of Lords, Wellington declared that the parliamentary system could not be improved upon, and absolutely ruled out any reform bill, even one of a moderate character.3 In the aftermath, according to Harriet, the town was ‘full of reports’ that Wellington was ‘going out’ of power; ‘after that unaccountable speech on reform, I do not see how he can stay in,’ she wrote.4
Harriet was right: Wellington could not sustain his government and, on 16 November 1830, he resigned his premiership. The new prime minister was Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, who as a young man had an infamous affair with Harriet’s grandmother. In February 1831, as the campaign for reform was gaining momentum, Harriet dined with Grey and his wife, Mary. She also attended many dinners at which Grey’s new government was the main topic of conversation. ‘I wish you had been in town for this most interesting of all times,’ Harriet wrote to Caroline, commenting on the debates surrounding the first reform bill, introduced to the Commons by Lord John Russell on behalf of the Whig administration in March 1831.5 The bill was more radical than both the Tory opposition and some Whig ministers expected.
Harriet was undecided as to whether she supported the bill. Though she sympathised with the Whig idea of reform and still referred to the parliamentary opposition as ‘the enemy’, she did not think that it was safe to give ‘the people’ any more of a voice than they had already – which was, of course, no voice at all. ‘I admire the plan more than I can express,’ she wrote, but continued, ‘I fear the results and certainly do not think these are times in which the voice of the people ought to be more heard.’ Harriet’s ambivalence towards electoral reform highlights her cautious politics and desire to preserve the status quo. She must, then, have been somewhat relieved when progress proved difficult: the bill eventually passed by one vote in the House of Commons, but failed in the House of Lords.
Undeterred, the Whigs continued to push for reform, aided by ever-increasing public support and their Commons majority. In September 1831, the second reform bill passed through the Commons, and in October it was debated in the Lords.
Harriet went to watch the debates; it was the first time she had visited the Lords and, despite the gravity of the topics under discussion, her letters recall a somewhat frivolous enjoyment of the occasion. ‘I went at ½ past 3 with George and Morpeth to the House of Lords, the 1st time I had ever done it, and staid till 11,’ she wrote, ‘I never was more entertained; there was a great deal of lively talk upon petitions.’ With the same unforgiving wit she had brought to bear on Parisian high society, she mocked the oratorical style of the key parliamentary players: ‘Lord Grey’s manner is very fine, but over haughty, and I think I see his great vanity constantly piercing. Lord Holland was very violent – gesticulation, that must make it immense physical labour, and Lord Goderich is the same in this respect; it would be dreadful to come within the rioché of his strong arm.’ Her own father’s efforts she treated with a dutiful kindness that bordered on damning with faint praise: ‘Papa said a few words very well, and hardly gave one time to be nervous.’6
Harriet was not the only aristocratic woman attending the Lords to support members of her family. ‘I was pretty well placed next to [Lady] Clanricarde; we had a wall to lean against and saw very well when standing up, but… it made me very ill indeed, and it is melancholy and humiliating not to be able to do these things without impunity.’ Evidently struggling with the long parliamentary sittings, Harriet and a group of ladies retired briefly to drink tea. But here too, politics seems to have dominated their discussion, rather to Harriet’s discomfort. She complained of feeling ‘very out of my water’ in the group of 40 women, ‘a terrible number’, and all Tories. Despite her reservations about the bill, in a group of opposition wives, she felt her political identity strongly. Party political affiliations were not the only factor which determined the women’s opinions on reform. Over tea, Lady Clanricarde, ‘a very clever person with un esprit très mâle’ came out in support of the bill, not because of its content, but because she took a ‘liking [to] the Ministers’.7
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