Scrope Lord Howe also had been carefully educated by his ambitious parents. The fashion for aristocratic youths was to complete their education with a grand tour, and in 1716, while in his late teens, Scrope went to Paris with a cousin, William Howe, and William Capel, Earl of Essex. The French were regarded as having the most perfect manners in Europe, and urbane Paris was the place to go to acquire them. During a two-year stay, Lord Howe and his companions engaged dancing masters and French masters, ran up accounts for coffee and wine, and imbibed the polish of Parisian society. Scrope indulged his love of music—a family trait—with lessons on the flute.35
Caroline had parents who clearly valued learning. This was fortunate, for an eighteenth-century education began in the home. Typically, the mother gave her children their first lessons in reading and writing. A boy must next be instructed in Latin, arithmetic, history, the classics of English literature, and attain at least a speaking knowledge of French. At this stage, genteel families either engaged tutors or sent their boys to school.36 Scrope and George almost certainly attended boarding school by the age of six, for their younger brothers Richard and William were to do so.37 The two oldest boys most likely were sent to Nottingham School, an easy distance from Langar, where William would go in a few years’ time. Nottingham School educated a socially mixed set of boys from the town and the sons of local gentry.38 A stint at Eton was the ultimate goal for the Howe boys as for other youths of their rank, a place where they could supposedly acquire the air and refinement of a gentleman. But Eton would come later, and under circumstances that compelled the family to disperse to far corners of the empire.
The end result of the Howe brothers’ education, as in every family, appears to have been uneven. As a grown man, George Augustus, the eldest son and heir, was considered the ideal of a British officer and a well-rounded gentleman, intelligent and a man of action. William, at the height of his military career, was privately described by a brother officer (no friend) as “illiterate and indolent.”39
Middle brother Richard, the steadiest of the lot, left school early to begin his naval career. He certainly suffered from what today are known as speech and language problems. Throughout his life, contemporaries described him as confused or muddled in his writing and speech. A notable scholar of the Howe brothers commented that even friends were sometimes so baffled by him that they doubted his intelligence. Those who knew him well recognized that there was a disconnect between his intellect and his ability to communicate. A brother officer recalled of him, “Lord Howe possessed a very peculiar manner of explaining himself, both in correspondence and conversation, but his mind was always clear, prompt, and willing to communicate with every person who consulted him, and who could get rid of the apparent coldness of his manner.”40 It shall be seen that his actions proved his intelligence and his shrewd grasp of the world in which he lived.
Caroline, on the other hand, could do it all. Without going to school, she acquired Latin; she enjoyed mathematical problems, a quality that surprised Benjamin Franklin when he met her in London many years later. She taught herself several modern languages. She was an avid reader throughout her life, devouring the classics, histories, travel narratives, works of naturalists, novels, newspapers—anything but abstract philosophy. On hearing of a book that set out to prove the existence of the soul, she dismissed it, saying it might be better “not to look more closely into it, for what end could it answer?” Hers was a family of pragmatists. All her life she read for amusement; on a visit to her mother as an adult, she immersed herself in the “new idle books” she found in her mother’s library. “[W]hy have not I writ to you between whiles?” she wrote exultantly to a friend on another occasion; “Why I have got a new book.” By her own admission, she could neither draw nor sing, fatalistically shrugging that “whatever is, is right,” because if she were endowed with either attribute she would be tempted to show off: “I for my part should never be content to hide my talent.”41 But like everyone in the family, she loved music.
Caroline’s eclectic education tells us something about the dynamics between men and women inside the Howe household, for learning was widely considered to be unfeminine. There were plenty of fathers who disliked brainy women, and mothers who feared that too much education would make their daughters unattractive to men.42 A girl’s education in an aristocratic family normally concentrated on the graces required to entertain socially, together with the skills for managing a great house. Dancing, deportment, French, music, and enough arithmetic to keep household accounts were considered ample for one who would not occupy a position of public responsibility.43
Caroline’s home was unusual, then, for there was clearly no message that learning was “unfeminine.” Throughout her life, Caroline stood out to contemporaries as having a “masculine” intellect. Her mind, according to one, “possessed a power and firmness, that some would call masculine.”44 “[A] very clever woman, though very rough, and more like a man than a woman,” ran another description.45 In reality, Caroline was simply an educated female who had not been cautioned sufficiently by her mentors to hide her abilities. She may have shared her brothers’ tutors; she most probably was also instructed by one or both of her parents, or—a pleasing notion—perhaps she learned from her brothers when they were home for the holidays. This fits with her lifelong practice of studying alongside her friend Lady Spencer, with whom over many decades she would keep up with the latest books and master ancient Greek and other languages.
Yet even at Langar Hall, marriage was the most important step of a woman’s life. When Caroline was born in 1722, her aunts Mary, Juliana, and Anne, the younger sisters of Scrope, were spinsters. Over the next six years, they would each go on to acquire husbands, their separate experiences of courtship playing out the full spectrum of Georgian notions of matrimony: Mary, the practical eldest sister; Anne, the flighty youngest; and Juliana, the middle sister, in whom were blended the qualities of common sense and amiability.
Juliana—“an extremely pretty woman”—was first to approach the altar. She married Thomas Page, whose father, Sir Gregory Page, baronet and member of Parliament, had amassed a fantastic fortune as a director of the East India Company. The ceremony took place at the end of May in 1725. The bridegroom was “immensely rich,” commented a contemporary, so much so that he allowed Juliana to give away her marriage portion of £3,000 to her youngest sister Anne.46 The Page family owned several palatial estates and a notable private art collection. What they lacked was the noble lineage of the Howes, so the marriage united blue blood with a lordly income.47 It was also a love match, and thus a perfect union according to Georgian notions of matrimony, blending money, pedigree, and affection—in that order.
The next month, older sister Mary made a very different sort of match. The most ambitious of the Howe girls, she had been appointed a maid of honor to the Princess Caroline in 1720, a post reserved for young unmarried women.48 As we shall see, Mary was alert to the opportunities to find a suitable husband that service at court opened up to her. Yet Alexander Pope, who knew Mary, has left a picture of her that suggests that her planning and scheming was on behalf of family rather than self. Pope wrote of her that she did not love herself “so well as she does her Friends: For those she makes happy, but not Herself. There is an Air of sadness about her which grieves me.”49 It was Mary who would assume responsibility for the dynastic fortunes when disaster struck the Howe family more than ten years later.
Meanwhile she took up her post as maid of honor with the cautionary tale before her of her cousin, Sophia Howe, also in service to the Princess Caroline. Sophia’s legendary reckless behavior began in 1719, when she fell hopelessly in love with Anthony Lowther, brother of Viscount Lonsdale. They consummated their love, but the villain had no intention of marrying her.50 In an act of desperation, she disguised herself as a boy and slipped away from her home to her lover’s house, where she loudly demanded admittance, attracting a large crowd. Lowther made his escape out the back
door.51 Now an outcast, Sophia turned to her mother, Ruperta Howe, and the newlywed Charlotte Lady Howe, hoping they could help her find another place. When that proved futile, she pleaded with Princess Caroline, complaining that she was being “treated as a mad woman” by her family.52 Caroline relented and allowed her the stipend of a maid of honor for the next four years.53 By 1726, Sophia was dead, and her public downfall was dramatic enough to be the subject of gossip for decades after her death. If Caroline Howe never heard the story as a girl, she could not fail to learn about it through the poems and novels based on her unfortunate cousin’s tragedy that continued to appear during her lifetime.54 Anthony Lowther was a real-life villain, like the libertines featured in the pages of contemporary novels; Sophia Howe served as a warning to young lady readers, a giddy girl who rejected the protection of her family. For cynics, the story underscored the emptiness of love—or lust, as they would have it—as a motive for marriage, a brief and unreliable passion that was sure to burn out long before more substantial advantages.55
Mary Howe was not going to make any such mistake when her turn came to serve Princess Caroline. In 1725, she married Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke, who was almost seventy years of age. The earl had already been married twice and had fathered thirteen children. The last wife to share the marital bed had been middle-aged when she died in 1721. In court circles, where no one was spared if any amusement was to be had, the usual jokes were made: The earl’s heart surely could not hold out for long under the stimulation of a young bride. But the earl proved to be more robust than gossips predicted. He survived another eight years. Meanwhile, Mary was mistress of the magnificent Wilton House, its gardens and art collections. One wonders if it was worth it. She could not have married for love, and Lord Pembroke—whom some contemporaries thought a little mad—was an eccentric, controlling figure who insisted that she be home by ten every night (his “supper hour”) and kept the household revolving around his whims.56 But most disappointing was her failure, after maneuvering herself into the heart of an earldom, to conceive a child. She betrayed her mortification in court circles by fancying herself pregnant on several occasions.57 Mary’s best-laid plans had gone awry; above all, it was a woman’s duty to produce offspring. And as their sister-in-law, Charlotte Lady Howe, produced one baby after another, not only Mary but also Juliana remained childless. Juliana is known to have lost one infant; Mary never conceived at all.58 It was the fate of many women during that era, a deficiency in the eyes of the world for which they had no recourse.
If she couldn’t plan for every exigency, Mary Countess Pembroke was nevertheless a commanding figure in the Howe family. She was an intelligent woman who enjoyed educated company. Her close friend at court was the poet Judith Cowper, better known by her married name of Judith Madan, who was a protégée of Alexander Pope.59 She loved opera, her forthright personality coming out in an episode that took place in 1726, at the height of a notorious dispute between two rival Italian sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni. When both singers appeared on stage, the “Countess of Pembroke,” it was reported, “headed the Cuzzoni party,” rallying her supporters to boo and hiss Bordoni until neither performer could be heard. She also had a down-to-earth sense of humor. “I hope the under-butlers will toss him in a blanket,” she once commented when a thrifty-minded lord counted the bottles of wine the maids of honor had consumed at dinner. She was a keen walker in all sorts of weather.60 Above all, she was an astute observer of developments at court, and as such she was part of the Georgian phenomenon of politically involved aristocratic ladies. As we shall see, she would teach both Lady Howe and her niece Caroline the art of drawing-room influence. Lady Pembroke would be a mentor and role model to Caroline, who grew up to be like her in many respects.
Anne, the youngest sister, was the last to marry. Several months after Mary’s marriage, a rumor circulated that Anne was betrothed to Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset.61 The hand of Mary could surely be detected in this. The duke was another ancient widower, and Anne did not want to have her future decided by her sister. She refused. It was a wise choice, for the duke married another young lady of noble birth, who spent the next twenty years nursing him through various ailments.62 Three years later, Anne eloped with Colonel Charles Mordaunt, not waiting for the consent of her mother, the Dowager Lady Howe. “It is an extraordinary good match for her,” remarked a friend of the family, but the Dowager Lady Howe disagreed, banishing her daughter from Langar for some time after the wedding.63
The Mordaunts had wealth and rank, but they also had a reputation for being eccentric.64 The premier member of the family, Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough, had the dubious distinction of being the first peer ever known to marry a stage celebrity, the opera singer Anastasia Robinson.65 Still more awkward was their status as an old Catholic family. The heads of the dynasty had converted to Anglicanism, but they remained embroiled with an English Catholic community in an undignified dispute that brought both sides into ill repute.66 In any case, the Dowager Lady Howe’s resentment did not last. Probably the marriage’s fruitfulness helped, as Anne presented her mother with three grandsons.
For Caroline and her siblings, the first ten years of their childhood were halcyon days as happy, healthy, and privileged members of the aristocracy in the English countryside. Life revolved around sports and games, the almost annual arrival of a new infant, occasional trips to London—where, as MP for Nottinghamshire, Lord Howe stayed during the “season”—and the dilemmas and dramas of marriageable aunts. All of this informed Caroline’s early knowledge of the world and would be reflected in the way she viewed life as an adult. If Lord Howe was the undisputed head of the household, the personalities of the women had a strong influence on its tone. If Caroline was not repressed, neither were her brothers, who grew into active, daring young men, fitted to the notions of masculinity that prevailed in Georgian society. The close, “horizontal” sibling attachments within the family fostered the qualities that made the brothers so admirably suited to lead fellow soldiers into combat. The family bonds were about to draw closer still, for disaster would bind the Howes into a tight-knit group that contemporaries remarked upon.
Two
Diaspora
It was the male world of politics that demolished the idyll of life at Langar. The Langar estate belonged to Nottinghamshire, where the Howes ranked as one of the leading aristocratic families. By the thinking of the day, it was the due of the head of the Howe dynasty to sit in Parliament. The first Viscount Howe had been a member of Parliament, so it was natural that in 1722, when Scrope attained the age of majority, he should follow his father into the House of Commons.
Supporting him in the election was Thomas Pelham-Holles, the Duke of Newcastle, whose considerable holdings in Nottingham and its surrounds gave him a say in the outcome of any election. Newcastle was an eccentric man, a hypochondriac, an obsessive record-keeper, and a compulsive spender, but he was also one of the era’s most powerful political figures, whose notable skill lay in ceaselessly electioneering on behalf of the Whig government. In the election of 1722, the duke aimed to defeat as many Tories as possible. In this, he and his fellow Whigs would succeed, giving them a decided majority in the House of Commons.1 The Hanoverian succession and the failure of the Jacobite rebellion in 1715 had given the Whigs an excuse to smear Tories as supporters of the divine right of kings and the Catholic Stuart succession, and thus drive them from public office. The 1720s would usher in a long period of Whig dominance in British politics.
The Whigs had been born in the political turmoil of the previous century, when the Stuart monarch James II was driven from his throne in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 for being a lover of tyranny and Catholicism. By the middle of the eighteenth century, most politically active men described themselves as Whigs: They all supported the ousting of James in 1688 and the Hanoverian succession that followed the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Ideologically, all Whigs were committed to a const
itutionally limited monarchy and the sovereignty of the king and Parliament. But although Whigs identified themselves as the defenders of revolution and popular liberty, the ensuing years had taken the luster off their zeal. By the 1720s, the aristocratic Whigs were less than enthusiastic about the notion of the right of the subject to resist tyranny. Government of course should protect the rights of all subjects and check the power of the king, but, after all, social inequalities were natural, and the lowest orders were unfit to dabble in politics. In this, Whigs and Tories—more alike than they cared to admit—shared common ground.2
The British Parliament was a representative body with its roots in the Middle Ages. The House of Commons was entirely elected, but the electoral districts had changed little over the centuries. By the eighteenth century, this resulted in such absurdities as Old Sarum, a deserted village that elected two MPs, handpicked by the local landowner. In sharp contrast, newly emerging large cities such as Birmingham and Manchester elected no MP at all. To add to the confusion, voting qualifications varied from one constituency to another. In most places, one needed to be a taxpayer or a property owner; in a few others, it was sufficient not to be on poor relief. The total electorate in Georgian England and Wales probably numbered about 20 percent of all adult males in those lands.3
Despite its eccentricities, the British were proud of their Parliament, unique in Europe and envied abroad. Its byzantine electoral process underscored that this was not a democracy by today’s standards, yet the system was more inclusive than appeared at first sight. Contemporaries believed that elections were a fair indication of the national mood; popular resentment could certainly make itself felt during times of unrest. But it was a rough-and-ready means of collecting the sense of the nation, and it did not come cheap.
The eighteenth-century electoral system has been passed down to the present generation by its Victorian detractors as “Old Corruption,” a system under which the aristocracy controlled elections through outright bribery and vulgar entertainments. It is true that wealthy individuals with a “parliamentary interest” in a constituency could influence the voting of their dependents; in the days before the secret ballot, tenants and working men could often be relied upon to vote as the local landlord or banker directed.
The Howe Dynasty Page 3
