It is unlikely that many, if any of the women present, had thoughts of lobbying for the extension of the franchise to women. That task was left to a few radical critics, such as Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, who presented to the House of Commons a petition from a wealthy Yorkshire woman, Miss Mary Smith, proposing that unmarried women who met the bill’s property requirements should be given the vote. Smith and Hunt saw this as an attempt to recover old rights, as during the Tudor and early Stuart monarchies, women freeholders and burgesses had been entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. In response to the attempted amendment, MPs in the Commons had the wording changed so that it referred to ‘male persons’ instead of simply ‘persons’. Like most women of her acquaintance, Harriet identified primarily with her class, rather than her sex. If she had reservations about extending the franchise to the upper middle class, she would have been even less ready to support its extension to women. In this respect, she conformed to the 19th-century prejudice that held politics to be a ‘male’ domain.
Harriet’s fears about reform were well represented in the Lords, where the second bill was also defeated, this time by 41 votes, prompting widespread rioting and disorder across the country. The spectre of ‘mob rule’ hung over Britain as rioters set fire to Nottingham Castle and another group gained control of Bristol for three days. In London, stones were thrown at Apsley House, the residence of the Duke of Wellington, who had been a symbol of resistance to reform since his ministry collapsed. George found a stone in his carriage and Harriet’s mother was jeered at, which made Harriet fear that ‘we should all go about in omnibuses soon, without livery servants, and one’s coronet in one’s heart.’8 On 16 October, Harriet saw Wellington at a party thrown by Madame de Lieven, and felt deeply sorry for him, ‘since I heard the groans and hooting that accompanied the crash of his broken panes; 2 stones struck Lady Lyndhurst’s picture in the throat’.9 Against threats like these, the old divide between Whigs and Tories seemed insignificant. The world they shared was under attack.
The violence took on an even more frightening edge when viewed alongside recent events in France. On 29 July 1830, shortly before the battle for reform had begun in Britain, revolution had broken out in Paris. The absolutist tendencies of Charles X’s monarchy had finally become too much for the French people, who rose up after the king issued ordonnances that dissolved the Chamber of Deputies and muzzled the press. Paving stones were pulled up and thrown at soldiers, barricades sprang up around the city, and on 2 August, Charles was forced to abdicate. Harriet wrote sympathetically, ‘What a journey the unfortunate King of France’s must be, and the Duchess of Berri’s, and the empty titles! … I dread the cold blooded executions as much as other horrors.’10 Events in France intensified fears that the contagion of revolution would spread to England. Convinced that reform was the only antidote, the Whigs pressed on with their mission; in the spring of 1832, they made a third attempt at passing a reform bill. They had, however, learnt from their previous experience. Knowing that the bill would fail in the Lords, the Whigs tried to persuade William IV to create a raft of new Whig peers with a view to establishing a pro-reform majority in the upper house. The king was uneasy about making such a bold move. Against the advice of his entire cabinet, he refused to create the necessary peers. At this news, Grey resigned and Wellington was invited to form a new government. Public anger at these developments led to a violent ten-day period of rioting known as the ‘Days of May’, with some protesters advocating the non-payment of taxes, and others encouraging a run on the banks.
Amid all the chaos and despite promising moderate parliamentary reforms, Wellington found himself unable to form a government. William had no choice but to recall Grey, assent to the creation of new Whig peers, and write to the Tory peers, pleading them to cease their opposition to the reform bill. In the end, enough Tories abstained from the vote for the bill to pass through both houses. The Representation of the People Act – also known as the Great Reform Act – became law on 7 June 1832, irrevocably changing the character of British politics. Seats were redistributed to better represent the populations of constituencies, and the worst of the rotten boroughs were abolished. Some in the upper middle classes found themselves newly enfranchised. Debate about parliamentary reform was far from over, but Harriet’s apocalyptic fears had been allayed; reform had stopped revolution in its tracks.
Harriet was too preoccupied with the drama of her own life to observe the passage of the third bill. By November 1832 she was back at Lilleshall, fraught and anxious about illness, chiefly cholera. Her letters are written in an entirely different key from those first heady years of marriage. However, it was not cholera but a common virus that was to be the cause of Harriet’s greatest misery yet. In December 1831, shortly after the failure of the second reform bill, she wrote that baby Blanche had developed a fever and was steadily deteriorating. ‘I have found my baby hardly better, if at all,’ Harriet wrote, ‘her nature is excessively altered, she is so quiet and melancholy.’ It seems that six-month-old Blanche was not strong enough to withstand the regular ‘fits of hot and cold fever’; she was, said Harriet, ‘so fractious that it makes it difficult for the doctors to judge [her condition], as she will seldom allow herself to be touched’.11 For a time there was some improvement and Harriet wrote optimistically that her ‘little woman’ was getting better, but this hope proved misplaced. Blanche died in February 1832 and was buried at Trentham Hall on 19 March.
Events both on the national stage and within Harriet’s own family were conspiring to force the intelligent young girl from Castle Howard to grow up. With this would come both maturity and a new pessimism. ‘I no longer possess the zest and freshness, and to say the truth, the happiness of former days,’ she wrote. In the space of a decade, the light-heartedness of her honeymoon days had evaporated, to be replaced with a persistent ‘melancholy’, a word that would recur in so many of her letters over the next ten years: Harriet was suffering from what would now be diagnosed as depression.
Chapter 4
NORTH AND SOUTH
HOPEFUL THAT A change of scene would alleviate their anguish, the bereaved Gower family headed to Scotland for the summer. But Harriet was more afraid than ever of cholera, which continued to claim victims among her circle of friends and acquaintances. She began a July letter to Caroline with a reference to Mrs Robert Smith, whose sudden death from cholera sent shock waves throughout London society: ‘Mrs Smith’s death had given one to see in the most striking way the melancholy liability of all.’1 Her depression cannot have been helped by a visit to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, where the deposed king of France, Charles X, and his family were spending their exile. Scotland seemed a safe place to Charles, who had lived at Holyrood between 1796 and 1803, but he and his wife were vastly changed from the resplendent figures whose ceremonial entry into Paris Harriet had witnessed in 1825. In particular, Harriet was shocked by the degeneration of the dauphine, who ‘had a great deal of grey hair about her face’ and whose ‘abord is graceless, her voice and manner rough’.2 To Harriet, the exiled monarch was the living incarnation of the carnage wrought by revolution.
At the end of July Harriet, her family and their trusted maid Mrs Penson travelled to Uppat, a village near Dunrobin. Two decades later this journey would be transformed by the construction of the Highland Railway, in which the Sutherlands invested heavily. But in 1832, the entire trip still had to be undertaken by road. After a few days Harriet, already in a despondent mood, became claustrophobic. ‘A great deal is very dreary,’ she wrote to her sister, ‘it inclined one to feel melancholy… One might fancy that the mountains would close about one and not allow one to return.’ In the same letter, Harriet reports the news that cholera had appeared in Sutherland. It would be the late 1840s before John Snow deduced that cholera was transmitted through the drinking of contaminated water and was not, as presumed in the early 1830s, a ‘miasmic’ disease.3 The paucity of medical knowledge about the disease rendered it particularly
terrifying to Harriet, who wrote that ‘I feel very low at the first news of it’.
The Highland landscape that stretched before Harriet had undergone traumatic changes in the last century. In the wake of the failed Jacobite uprising of 1745, whole communities of crofters and farmers had been forced off their land by new landlords who had been installed by the Hanoverian Crown and wished to make their estates more profitable. In the process of this brutal agricultural revolution, much of the clan culture was obliterated and all feudal obligations swept aside, in favour of a capitalist system that focused on the ‘improvement’ of land to yield greater profit. These ‘improvements’ were not solely directed at estate revenues, but also at the Highlanders themselves, who were thought to be ill-bred and uncivilised.4
George’s father, the 1st Duke of Sutherland, had invested heavily in the Highland clearances, but Harriet had been familiar with this displacement scheme long before her marriage. Her childhood letters make several references to Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, whose accounts of travelling around the Highlands in 1773 brought attention to the subject of the transformation of that region. Johnson’s opinion on the new Highland landlordism was ambivalent. While he endorsed the ‘improving’ cause, he was moved by the remnants of the older feudal society and was concerned that increasing rents were depopulating the Highlands. Overall, his analysis of the ‘Highland problem’ (as it was commonly referred to at the time) championed gradual improvement, while objecting to the severe measures of some landlords in pursuit of profit.5
In reality, change was anything but gradual or moderate. The Sutherland clearances were the most extreme of all the so-called ‘improvements’ in the early 19th century. In the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the Sutherland estates had forgone drastic change due to the relative poverty of the Sutherland dynasty. In 1785, George, Harriet’s father-in-law, married Elizabeth Gordon, Countess of Sutherland in her own right, but it was not until 1803, when George inherited his father’s fortune, that the process of ‘improvement’ began. It was Elizabeth and not her husband, as has been traditionally thought, who masterminded the Sutherland campaign. Influenced by the work of agricultural theorists George Dempster and Sir John Sinclair, Elizabeth became confident that a radical redistribution of farmers would transform the productivity of the region. She hoped that sheep farmers, who were willing to pay vastly increased rents, would settle in the mountains and glens, while the displaced tenant population could be used to advance the fishing and manufacturing industries in coastal areas. Elizabeth’s vision of modernisation involved not just the resettlement of a large number of tenants and the reassignment of land to more profitable consolidated sheep farms, but also the creation of new industrial centres populated by displaced crofters. She was certain that the industrial success of Lancashire and Lanarkshire could be replicated in faraway Sutherland and the West Highlands.
Such confidence turned out to be misguided. The Sutherlands failed to convince existing tenants that resettlement plans would provide them with a better life and, after some relatively peaceful early clearances, crofters began to resist eviction. Opposition only served to further convince Elizabeth that her tenantry was backward and ignorant. ‘Our efforts are being rejected’, she fulminated, ‘and as the people resist by force, no one can complain if they are bought to reason by the same means.’6 Elizabeth forced through the clearances at a frantic pace. Between 1813 and 1816 several thousand people were cleared, their pastures burnt and their villages razed. Despite public controversy over the way in which the clearances had been conducted, efforts were renewed in 1817 and there were further waves of clearances in 1818, 1819 and 1820. Some starved or froze to death in the ruins where their houses had once been, or in the new coastal resettlement areas which were bedevilled by famine, unemployment and disease.
By 1821, most of the clearances were complete. The final ‘improvements’ occurred amid growing public condemnation and widespread allegations of cruelty and violence. Wounds from the clearances are still felt to this day: in the 1990s a campaign was launched to have a statue of Harriet’s father-in-law, which stands on top of Ben Bhraggie, a peak near Dunrobin, destroyed, ‘preferably by dynamite’. The campaign failed but the statue is perennially defaced, and there are frequent vigilante attempts to bring it down.
It was an inheritance that one might expect to have been thought-provoking to the liberal-minded, compassionate Harriet. Yet none of her correspondence appears to question the Sutherlands’ cavalier disregard for their tenants. During her 1825 trip to Paris, she ‘could not help quarrelling’ with her dinner companion Lord Glenlyon, on account of his ‘advocating the cause of ignorance, and declaring himself against all the improvements in Scotland’.7 Whether she was demonstrating her loyalty to her family, simply ignorant of the scale of the human suffering wrought by the Highland clearances, or truly thought this suffering was justified by the increased rent yield, it is difficult to reconcile Harriet’s casual acceptance of the ‘improvements’ with her empathetic character and her later humanitarian views on the abolition of slavery.
Perhaps it is too much to expect Harriet to have addressed these issues by the time of her trip to Scotland; in 1832, she was an anxious and recently bereaved young mother, and still in her early twenties. While staying at Uppat House, her little boy, George, was taken ill. Initially there were fears that he had contracted cholera, but it turned out to be a mild complaint, and George made a full recovery. Nevertheless, the episode deeply affected Harriet, who wrote often of her anxiety during her son’s illness. Perhaps the most telling sign of her honesty here is that her prose became refreshingly straightforward and her various affectations, in particular her use of French phrases, were abandoned. ‘I shall be ashamed,’ she wrote, ‘at least if he gets well I shall be so, to think how terribly nervous I have been, and to feel how unfitted I am now for the care of my sick children.’8 When she turned to other subjects, such as her children’s lessons, the 16th-century house at Uppat and dinners at Dunrobin, she reverted to her customary, more florid style. ‘I find that the children’s lessons take the day entirely d’un bout a l’autra [from one end to the other]. I wonder how people manage who take no governess.’ Harriet took great pleasure in watching her children play, but like so many other things around this time, the sight led her to darker thoughts. Of a fishing trip in September she wrote that ‘the children enjoyed themselves extremely and it is twice the enjoyment having them, particularly after the flower of one’s own zest has left one, I should think, forever.’9 As time passed in the Highlands, Harriet showed signs of recovering her appetite for food as well as life, attending dinners where she was served ‘four different sorts of fish, red deer and excellent common fruits’. Glimmers of Harriet’s joie de vivre were beginning to shine through the bleakness of the previous months. ‘I think the country with a few of those loved ones would be perfect, and je me porte sourven en idee [I often have thoughts] to the being here with you,’ she wrote warmly to Caroline.10
Later in September, the Gowers set off on their journey back to the south. On the way they made several visits that would inform Harriet’s architectural and artistic taste and shape her vision for Cliveden. She admired the neoclassical style of Lord and Lady Grey’s Northumberland residence, Howick Hall, which she described as ‘a most comfortable, liveable modern house’. In the gardens, Harriet appreciated ‘the good trees down to the sea and quantities of flowers about it’: later, she would enjoy a similar effect in the wooded Thames-side slopes of Cliveden. At Alnwick, the seat of the Duke of Northumberland, Harriet was greatly impressed by the reception they received: ‘Crowds of footmen await one at the door and lead one to the Duke and Duchess who are models of good humour and cordiality.’ She also liked her bedroom, which was ‘beautifully furnished and had means of being well lighted, having 16 candles’, but otherwise disapproved of the castle’s Gothic interior, which she thought ‘ill decorated’.11
In late October, Harriet
received news that her maternal uncle Lord Devonshire, known affectionately as ‘Uncle D’, had organised a series of ‘sumptuous entertainments’ for the young Princess Victoria at Chatsworth House. At the time of her birth in 1819, Victoria had not been particularly high in the line of succession. She was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, who was the fourth son of George III. (George himself was, of course, the son of a former mistress of Cliveden, Augusta). Edward was preceded in the succession by his elder brothers, George, Frederick, and William. Victoria languished fifth in line to the throne, with little expectation of acceding, and it was only through a series of young deaths and childless marriages that she became heir apparent. At the time of Lord Devonshire’s ‘entertainments’, Harriet was heavily pregnant with her sixth child and so was unable to attend the party to meet the princess. It would be another year before Harriet and Victoria met, and formed an intense friendship that became central to both their lives.
At the start of 1833, after the difficult birth of her second son, Frederick, Harriet and her family went to the fashionable spa resort of Brighton, where they were joined by her sister Georgiana and her husband, Lord Dover. Brighton had long been a popular seaside resort, and in the 19th century George IV’s fondness for the town had cemented its reputation as an aristocratic holiday destination. George’s ambitious building projects in the town culminated in John Nash’s Indo-Saracenic Royal Pavilion: a bold, fantastical building renowned for the opulence of its decor, which included a pendulous dragon chandelier in the dining room, and for the exotic entertainments hosted there. After George’s death, William IV continued to stage events at the Pavilion. While inveterate guests derided William’s dinners as puritanical compared to the orgiastic entertainments of his elder brother, the Brighton season remained an early-year fixture in the aristocratic calendar.12
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 24
