Even though the exhibition failed to usher in Prince Albert’s lofty vision of an age of universal peace and prosperity, the experience of contributing to its organisation had bolstered Harriet’s confidence and given her a new-found sense of purpose. Not only was she beginning once again to enjoy her place in society, but for the first time she realised she was in a position to take an active role. Harriet’s Ladies’ Committee was her first step towards becoming one of the most prolific political and social campaigners of her time. Aged 48, she had evolved from a young woman fearfully watching events at a distance to a formidable force ready to create her own agenda.
Chapter 9
‘THOU HYPOCRITE’
ON FRIDAY 26 November 1852, Harriet confidently claimed her place in history, though not without controversy. As dusk settled over London, a large party of women, including the Duchesses of Bedford and Argyll, the Countess of Shaftesbury, Lady Ruthven and many more, convened in the grand hallway at Stafford House. Silence descended as Harriet climbed to the top of the staircase to make her inaugural speech. ‘Perhaps I may be allowed to state the object for which this meeting has been called together,’ she began.
But very few words will be required, as all, I am sure, assembled here must have heard and read much of the moral and physical suffering inflicted on the race of negroes and their descendants, by the system of slavery prevalent in many of the States of America. Founded on such information, a proposition appeared a short while ago in several of the newspapers, that the women of England should express to the women of America the strong feeling they entertained on the question, and earnestly request their aid to abolish, or at least to mitigate, so enormous an evil.1
It was an elegant, somewhat restrained battle cry, but Harriet had declared war on slavery. In doing so, she would cross swords with formidable foes, including the wife of a former US president and the author of The Communist Manifesto.
The ‘proposition’ that Harriet referred to in her speech was the cumbersomely titled Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of the Women in England to their Sisters, the Women of the United States of America. She went on to recite this in its entirety. In language redolent of Prince Albert’s utopian vision – and strikingly similar to the rhetoric employed in the US constitution of 1789 – the address spoke of a new world of freedom, liberty and ‘inalienable rights’. At its root, the address was a deeply religious document; it decreed that slavery was wrong because it contradicted the teachings of the Bible and the ‘spirit of the Christian religion’. Drawing particular attention to the way in which the American system of slavery prevented lawful marriage between slaves and stopped the children of slaves from receiving a religious education, Harriet declared that it was the moral responsibility of women to speak out against slavery. In a passage that recalls Victoria’s reasoning during the bedchamber crisis, Harriet argued that her cause related ‘altogether to domestic, and in no respect to national feelings’, and therefore fell into the female sphere of interest.2 Having delivered her mission statement, Harriet mapped out her plan of action: a committee, with an office at 13 Clifford Street, off Bond Street, would be formed with the responsibility of collecting signatures for the petition and then of transporting it to the United States. ‘There is every reason,’ Harriet concluded, ‘to hope that the matter should be terminated in a short space of time.’
Although sincerely committed to the cause, Harriet did not claim to have written the proposal herself. The author was, in fact, a man. Like Harriet, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, boasted an impeccable Whig pedigree. In 1852 Shaftesbury read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and was, as he wrote in his diary, ‘touched to the very core’.3 As an influential politician, his own ability to protest against American slavery was circumscribed by the recent history between England and America. The American War of Independence had ended only a generation previously and attempts by British politicians to foist policy onto their former territory were still likely to be rebuffed as colonial. The commonplace that women were not intellectually equipped to deal with politics provided Shaftesbury with an alternative and potentially very effective means of protest.
On 6 November 1852, Shaftesbury penned an ‘Address from the Women of England to the Women of America’ to ‘try to stir their souls and sympathies’. The same day, he circulated his work to the newspapers.4 It was only after writing the draft that Shaftesbury looked around for a woman who could front the operation. Harriet was the natural choice. She came from an illustrious liberal family, she had entertained leading American delegates during the World Anti-Slavery Conference in 1840 (with a few special exceptions, women were banned from attending the event as delegates, and generally found themselves acting as hostesses), and she was already sufficiently associated with the anti-slavery cause that she had been asked, in the 1840s, to subscribe to a ‘Negro College at Bermuda’.5
In the following months, 571,325 British women signed the petition, making it the largest anti-slavery document ever drawn up.6 In the spring of 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the novel that had first inspired Shaftesbury to write the address, came to England in order to collect the signatures. On 7 May, Beecher Stowe was received in magnificent style at Stafford House. She was particularly enamoured with her hostess, describing the duchess as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’.7 Later that evening, Harriet presented Stowe with ‘a gold bracelet formed like a slave’s shackle, with the date of the abolition of slavery in the British colonies inscribed on one of the links’. Space had been left on another link, so that the date of American abolition could be inscribed when it came to pass.8
The reception for Beecher Stowe, and the array of establishment figures in attendance – William Gladstone, Lord and Lady Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and Harriet’s brother Lord Carlisle to name just a few – did much to make the British abolitionist campaign respectable. Plans were even mooted for the writer to be received by Queen Victoria, but this was abandoned after the American Embassy intervened, arguing that such a reception would be interpreted as an official royal endorsement of the abolitionist cause.9 Nevertheless, Beecher Stowe triumphantly returned to America where she presented the petition to an anti-slavery meeting. The signatures ran to 26 volumes and the address was ‘splendidly illuminated on vellum’.10
The London response to the address was mixed. Several papers, including the Standard, ran supportive accounts of the event, but others were highly critical. A piece in the Spectator rebutted the women’s pretensions to being apolitical, countering that their argument was inescapably political, and therefore that they, being women, were not qualified to make it. ‘To meddle with the internal institutions of a foreign country’ was ‘a doubtful step even for men; much more so for women unversed in public affairs’.11 Not all of the critical or misogynistic responses came from men: in the letter pages of The Times, a writer who simply signed herself ‘An English-woman’ reasoned that because slavery was a subject for legislation, it was not a subject for women. She expressed concern at the idea that women might ‘show so entire a misconception of their own peculiar character as to force themselves into their exercise of functions for which their merits and their defects especially disqualify them’.12
The Americans did not wait for the illuminated vellum copy of the address before wading in on the debate. Within two weeks of the Stafford House meeting, the complete text of the address appeared in the New York Times, and was quickly the subject of criticism in the United States.13 Some replies from America were printed in English newspapers, including one that drew attention to the great social inequalities of England. Everything was listed, including the abundance of starving, overworked needlewomen, the lack of public education facilities, the high rate of illegitimacy in rural areas, the general state of immorality, and the scarcity of Bibles in some parishes. In a parody of the address’s hortatory style, one American respondent urged English women to ‘raise
your voices to your fellow-citizens and your prayers to God, for the removal of England’s shame from the Christian world’.14 Given that she had married into such extreme industrial wealth, and had done little until this point to address the lamentable conditions experienced by Victorian factory workers (women and children included), Harriet was particularly vulnerable to such objections.
Perhaps the single most interesting riposte to the address came from Julia Gardiner Tyler, the second wife of John Tyler, the tenth president (1841–5) of the United States. As ‘Mrs Presidentress’, the youthful Julia Tyler (at 24, she was 30 years younger than her husband) had a reputation for enjoying the high life, and after her husband’s retirement to his James River plantation, on which he kept some 70 slaves, Mrs Tyler maintained her extravagant lifestyle. Tyler’s response to Harriet first appeared in the Richmond Enquirer of 28 January 1853, and was soon reprinted in several publications on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout the piece, she addressed Harriet personally and laconically, accusing her of hypocrisy of the highest order:
Go, my good Duchess of Sutherland, on an embassy of mercy to the poor, the stricken, the hungry and the naked of your own land – cast in their laps the superflux of your enormous wealth; a single jewel from your hair, a single gem from your dress would relieve many a poor female of England, who is now cold, and shivering, and destitute… Leave it to the women of the South to alleviate the sufferings of their dependents, while you take care of your own.15
Tyler’s response was not alone in addressing Harriet by name. Personal hostility towards the duchess spilt over into popular culture and ballads, such as in the following song, which would have been sung to the tune of ‘Oh Susanna’:
Oh, Lady Sutherland
To comfort you I’ll try.
Mrs. Tyler gave you what was right
But Duchess don’t you cry.16
Unsurprisingly, it was only a short time before Harriet’s association with the Highland clearances began to gather attention. In January 1853, the Boston Post gave an account of how, during the clearances, 15,000 crofters were evicted, to be replaced by 29 families and 100,000 sheep; a short time later, in the Richmond Dispatch, the number of evicted crofters appeared as 20,000. Even though she was a child of five years old at the time and not yet affiliated to the Sutherland family, the duchess was lambasted for ‘standing idly by’ while these abuses took place.17 The more effective critics avoided overstating Harriet’s personal responsibility for the clearances, and were content to point out that her current wealth arose in part from these historical abuses. Such was the argument of a polemic that appeared in the New York Tribune and the radical British publication, the People’s Paper, written by Karl Marx. The bulk of Marx’s tirade against the duchess was taken up by an account of the various ‘usurpations’ that culminated in the transformation of what was previously clan property into private property. His brief history climaxed in an emotive description of the clearances ordered by the Countess of Sutherland, Harriet’s mother-in-law, whom Marx accused of ‘systematic’ expulsion and extermination. ‘All their villages were demolished and burned down,’ Marx wrote of the dispossessed Highlanders, ‘… An old woman refusing to quit her hut was burned in the flames of it.’
Given the explicitly Christian nature of Harriet’s ‘address’, and the appeal within it to the ‘spirit’ of the Bible and the Christian religion, Marx’s attack was pertinent. Looming large in the subtext of his criticism was the Christian interdiction on hypocrisy, as most famously expressed in Matthew 7:5: ‘Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’ It was this ethic, or some secularised version of it, that informed Marx’s peroration: ‘The enemy of British Wage-Slavery has a right to condemn Negro-Slavery; a Duchess of Sutherland, a Duke of Atholl, a Manchester Cotton-lord – never!’ Harriet was not in the least perturbed by Marx’s excoriating article. When Harriet Beecher Stowe arrived at Stafford House in May, she was greeted at the door by two Highlanders in full costume. The duchess would continue to present herself unabashedly as both an opponent of slavery, and a benefactor of the Highland culture from whose destruction she was accused of profiting.
In the course of Harriet’s heated fight for abolition, Charles Barry completed most of his work on Cliveden. It was now in a fit state to receive guests and, on Tuesday 20 April 1854, Queen Victoria made her first visit to the house. ‘The Duchess showed us all over the house, which is finished & being fast furnished,’ Victoria recorded, ‘it is quite beautiful, in strictly Italian style & the rooms so light & cheerful. They are arranged without actual splendour, but with all the Duchess’s rare taste.’ The rooms upstairs were also ‘charming, such pretty wall papers & chintzes, all so well chosen’. The queen was equally delighted by ‘the view of the valley of the Thames’, which she thought ‘very lovely’.18 After the guided tour, Harriet and Victoria took the first of what would be many walks around the estate. The women’s gentle meanders through the ‘beautiful woods’ along the river would become a motif of their friendship; they would both relish Cliveden’s riverside landscape until the end of their lives.
In a neat historical irony, the original Italianate vision of the Duke of Buckingham, a man who heavily invested in slavery, was only realised by a mistress whose mission was to abolish this ‘enormous evil’. By 1855, Barry’s work at Cliveden was nearly at an end. The following year, Beecher Stowe returned to England, and this time visited Harriet at Dunrobin. Despite the very public controversy surrounding her participation in the anti-slavery movement, Harriet’s devotion to the cause continued to grow. Abolition would become one of the most frequent subjects of debate at her famous Cliveden weekends of the early 1860s. Harriet had finally found her voice, her vocation, and her ideal home, but was about to lose her husband.
Chapter 10
‘WHAT A HOLD A PLACE HAS UPON ONE’
IN JANUARY 1855, Charles Barry presented the Duke of Sutherland with a bill for his work at Cliveden. Outraged by its contents, George dispatched a furious letter to his financial controller James Loch: ‘Sir C. Barry has taken me by surprise,’ he fulminated. ‘Journeys and travelling expenses [to Cliveden] £105.6.0!!! … Arrangement of Statues! … what statues he has had to place I do not know… the choice of place seems more expensive than the cost of the statue – if the charges were not so provoking they would be ridiculous.’1 George paid the bill, but fired Barry.
At the time of the Sutherlands’ falling-out with Barry, there were still further works the couple wanted done in the house and grounds, and two years later they approached new architects, George Devey and Henry Clutton, with a view to completing the project. The former was known for his vernacular cottages, and was commissioned to design several new buildings for the grounds of the house; the latter would work on completing structures left unfinished by Barry, including the offices, the kitchens, and the stables. Clutton’s greatest task at Cliveden was, however, one that Harriet did not foresee: the erection of a water tower. There is an irony in Barry being dismissed before the construction of a tower became necessary, because he was famous for adding towers to everything he touched. A joke on the subject by Lord Melbourne even made its way into Victoria’s diary. In an entry in August 1839, the queen recalled Harriet’s visit to Walton House, which had been altered by Barry. ‘Talked of the duchess of Sutherland’s having been to Walton, and it’s being such a fine house, though rather too large for the place,’ she wrote. ‘“Mr Barry always builds a tower”, said Lord M. “It’s exactly like the Houses of Parliament in small”; which made us laugh very much.’2
Spring Cottage, on the banks of the Thames. The construction of vernacular outhouses was very fashionable when Harriet commissioned the cottage from George Devey in 1857.
The water tower, disguised as a clock tower, was added to the house in 1861 by Henry Clutton.
The joke was ultimately on Harriet. Although Barry’s initial designs
for Cliveden did not include a single tower, the changes made by Clutton increased the need for a better system of water storage and supply. In the late 1850s, Clutton mocked up images for a water tower, to be situated adjacent to the kitchens and stables. The design for the tower was based on Barry’s 1840 clock tower at Trentham: it would be 100 feet tall, with a head large enough to create room for 15,000 gallons of water.
Meanwhile, Devey was adapting Spring Cottage, and designing a number of new outhouses, including a dairy and a boathouse. The construction of vernacular outhouses was becoming increasingly fashionable in this period – they were the mid-19th-century equivalent of the rather grander, often commemorative pavilions that were popular in Elizabeth and Orkney’s time. Aristocratic gardens such as Kew were, by the end of the century, littered with cottages and faux-rustic dwellings. While the British landscape was changed beyond recognition by the ‘dark satanic mills’ of urban manufacturing and industrialised agriculture, the aristocracy commissioned follies that evoked an idealised, pre-industrial past.
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 28
