It did Caroline no good to be exiled to Somerley, where she could not be useful. As soon as she arrived, William showed her a letter from Richard, reporting that Tom was much worse. Isolated and deeply unhappy, her self-possession slipped. Imagining that Lady Spencer had transferred her affections to a recent new acquaintance, she wrote what was perhaps the most insecure letter of her life:
I can no longer flatter myself in being the first in your affection, after Lord Spencer, [Lady Spencer’s mother] Mrs Poyntz, and the dear GAH [George, Georgiana, and Harriet], as I used to tell you I was. Do not think I reproach you, indeed I do not mean it, far from it, friendship[,] affection is no more in one’s power than love is. . . . Do not be angry this one time I will never write so again.96
Lady Spencer’s reply has not survived, but she could hardly have had the heart to be angry toward the forlorn Caroline. Tom died a month later, in November 1771.
The loss of another brother must have given the Howe siblings a brutal reminder of the passage of time. Caroline was approaching fifty. They were a vigorous generation, but, despite five marriages among them, only Richard had children and none were boys who could carry on the family title. It is striking that children of such fertile parents were unproductive, but it was not unusual. Only in the case of Charlotte could marital discord have been the cause—hers was an unhappy marriage.
And thence came the next family crisis. Charlotte’s husband, Robert Fettiplace, had learned nothing from the disaster that befell him in 1762, when he had been obliged to flee across the English Channel to the Continent to escape debts incurred while gambling on horses. In August 1772, he was arrested and sent to debtors’ prison. Richard, as head of the family, had to deal with his bickering creditors. When Fettiplace was released, he left the country again. “Mr Fettiplace has somehow or other contrived to get at liberty,” wrote the exasperated Caroline, “& is gone abroad but we hope it will not prevent the agreement going on with the creditors, who at last have all consented to the propositions made them in the summer,” the result of Richard’s frustrating negotiations. It would be many years before he returned, and Charlotte meanwhile was forced to board with her brother-in-law or stay from time to time with her mother and sisters.97
But Caroline, now ensconced in Grafton Street and an established figure in London society, began a new phase of her life with zest. Most unexpectedly, she would soon make her mark on history by taking the first step that drew her brothers into the American War of Independence.
Seven
A Game of Chess
The full story of the involvement of the Howes in the American War of Independence began months before the outbreak of hostilities in Lexington and Concord in April 1775. And it began not on any battlefield, but in Caroline Howe’s Grafton Street drawing room. In December 1774, Benjamin Franklin, in London as agent for several American colonies, found himself being drawn into a series of highly secret talks with two private individuals, David Barclay and John Fothergill. Both men, by profession a banker and a physician respectively, claimed to have unofficial links to the British cabinet. Their objective was to find a way of stopping the slide toward armed conflict.
These talks were so secret that Franklin’s “Journal of Negotiations in London,” written on his homeward journey in March 1775, remains the only evidence that they ever took place. Franklin never fully understood who Barclay and Fothergill were working for, or how close they were to government policymakers. But his bemusement deepened when, weeks after the first talks began, he was approached by Richard Howe, seeking to undertake what appeared to be a separate and parallel negotiation. By what route had Lord Howe become involved? How closely associated was he with the two original negotiators and their shadowy government contacts? Franklin never found out, and historians have proclaimed it “an enigma.” But within Caroline’s letters are clues revealing that she was the one who was working behind the scenes, facilitating her brother’s activities in this last-ditch and secret government peace initiative.
Benjamin Franklin, the self-made polymath from Pennsylvania who began his career as a printer and rose to become a renowned scientist, inventor, politician and author, did not move in the aristocratic circles of the Howes during his years in London. Yet from the start of 1774, his name was to be heard in every fashionable drawing room. “The American business at present engrosses the whole talk of the town,” noted one of the Cavendish brothers on January 29, 1774. It was on that day that Franklin, as agent for the colony of Massachusetts, appeared before His Majesty’s Privy Council in Whitehall with a petition requesting the removal of the colony’s unpopular governor, Thomas Hutchinson.1
Just nine days earlier, the metropolis had been shocked by the news of the so-called Boston Tea Party of December 1773: a riot in Massachusetts, in which colonial activists, opposing British taxes on tea, had dumped a shipload of the beverage into Boston Harbor to prevent it from being unloaded. When the news reached London, it brought rebellious Massachusetts into the limelight. Franklin’s imminent meeting with the Privy Council was transformed into a showcase for metropolitan outrage at the Bostonians, who, ever since the Stamp Act, had distinguished themselves for violent protest.
On January 29, the gallery was crowded with members of the public, eager to witness the dressing-down of the irritating Doctor Franklin, that too-vocal champion of American rights. In a tirade lasting an hour, the government’s solicitor general, Alexander Wedderburn, publicly demolished Franklin’s character. Wedderburn roared that the American was “malignant,” a man without honor, an incendiary who inflamed the innocent people of Massachusetts against British rule. Onlookers laughed as the agent was humiliated.2 West End card parties buzzed with “the American business” for a week, but it would be many months before the full implications of Franklin’s ordeal before the Privy Council would become clear. A serious crisis with America was indeed brewing, and the most influential colonial spokesman ever to serve in London had been discredited at the outset.3
Franklin, for his part, considered going home to Philadelphia. He had been in London on colony business for ten years, and his wife, Deborah, was ill and wanted to see him again. But his private travails were quickly engulfed by the response in London to the Boston Tea Party. Most MPs were outraged at the wanton destruction of the tea by the Massachusetts protesters, so there was little opposition on March 14 to the Port Act, which proposed closing the port of Boston until the town paid for the tea.4 This was the first of the four so-called Coercive Acts—introduced over a period of three months and all passed by large majorities—which would lead directly to the War of Independence. Together with the Quebec Act, they were known in America as the Intolerable Acts.
But war was very far from the expectations of the British government in the spring of 1774. The intention was simply to isolate and punish Boston, long seen as the instigator of colonial defiance, a troublemaking locality whose restraint surely would restore imperial harmony. This plan backfired spectacularly across the Atlantic, where many leading patriots from the other colonies, who had initially been disgusted by the Boston Tea Party, swung around in support of beleaguered Massachusetts when they learned of the British government’s heavy-handed punitive measures.5 Twelve of the thirteen colonies that would become the United States endorsed a proposal to hold a Continental Congress, scheduled to meet in Philadelphia in September.
As the crisis deepened, Franklin found that there were some who wished him to remain in London. Over the summer of 1774, there were rumors on both sides of the Atlantic that the First Continental Congress would send a panel of delegates to England to represent colonial grievances. An optimistic few hoped that a “constitutional line” could be negotiated that would ensure the rights of the colonies and put an end to a decade of Anglo-American discord.6 If such talks took place, Benjamin Franklin would have an important role to play in the proceedings. Despite the debacle at the Privy Council, he was still seen in British government circles as the foremost spokesm
an for the colonies in London, and the best informed.7 John Pownall, a government undersecretary in the American Department—the ministerial department responsible for the American colonies—quietly consulted with Franklin in August about what to expect from the Congress, because, as he put it to a colleague, the delegates in Philadelphia “will probably do what [Dr. Franklin] bids them to do.”8
Pownall’s interest in Franklin was purely professional, but old friends also urged him to overlook his poor treatment and stay. One of these was Jonathan Shipley, the Bishop of St. Asaph, a close friend whom Franklin often visited in the Shipley family home in Twyford, Hampshire.9 The Shipley family shared his love of books and chess—and the bishop shared his American friend’s support for colonial rights. In his sermons, he described the colonists as “the only great nursery of freemen left on the face of the earth”; in the House of Lords, Shipley voted against coercive measures.10 The unfailing hospitality of the Shipleys in rural Hampshire would be a refuge for Franklin while he hung on in Britain.
Another was Dr. John Fothergill, like Franklin a Fellow of the Royal Society, and also a member of Franklin’s favorite London club, the Club of Honest Whigs. Fothergill was an eminent Quaker physician whose clientele included the aristocracy. He was a distinctive figure in his characteristic broad-brimmed hat, which, according to Quaker practice, he did not remove in the presence of ladies. “An old prig,” one fashionable woman called him, but Fothergill was a kindly, intense man with strong principles. He hoped that the Continental Congress would be a vehicle for peacefully settling the question of American rights, and he thought Franklin should remain in Britain in case talks took place.11
It would be Fothergill and another long-term Quaker associate of Franklin’s, banker and merchant David Barclay, who initiated Franklin’s secret negotiations in London. They began in earnest early in December 1774, when the two Quakers approached Franklin with a request that he set out on paper a list of terms—“Hints,” as they came to be called—that might be acceptable to the American Congress.12 Fothergill and Barclay undertook to convey Franklin’s paper to moderate British ministers, who wanted to avoid war, without revealing its author. All three agreed that Franklin’s involvement should remain a “dead Secret,” as he was persona non grata with the ministry since his public dressing-down in January.
Who in the government would wish to read the “Hints”? David Barclay suggested Thomas Villiers, Lord Hyde, a member of the Privy Council who had influence in the cabinet of Prime Minister Lord North. Another whose name was mentioned was American Secretary of State William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth. Fothergill volunteered that he had daily access to Dartmouth in his role as the family’s physician.13
But Franklin, looking back months later, realized that the first contact made by the band of peacemakers had actually taken place earlier, in what seemed to be a totally unrelated event. In early November 1774, Franklin was attending a Royal Society dinner when he was approached by fellow member Matthew Raper. “[T]here was a certain Lady,” Mr. Raper told him, “who had a Desire of Playing with me at Chess, fancying she could beat me.” Mr. Raper thought Franklin would be flattered when he found out the identity of this lady—no less than Mrs. Caroline Howe, the sister of Lord Howe. If Dr. Franklin accepted the challenge, he was instructed to wait upon her at her house in Grafton Street as soon as possible, and “without farther Introduction.” Franklin agreed, but he found the whole business “a little awkward,” and put it off.14 The timing of that first, inconclusive contact with Mrs. Howe, weeks before his meeting with Barclay and Fothergill, never made sense to Franklin. He knew nothing of the lady and, even if he had known her, it would have given him no inkling of what was to come.
For it was the unlikely conjuncture of a ladies’ charity, a newborn baby, and a childhood illness that was the route by which Caroline—and, through her, the Howe brothers—became involved in the American crisis. The episode is a case study in how the overlap of public and private spheres enabled aristocratic women to become deeply engaged with politics.
IN THE SPRING OF 1774, while the Coercive Acts were coming before Parliament, Caroline Howe was generally avoiding politics in her letters. Only Lord Spencer’s vote against the Massachusetts Government Act on May 11 found its way into her news to Lady Spencer. “They sat till eleven,” Caroline reported, and Lord Spencer found himself “in the minority 20 to 70 odd,” after which he sought consolation at the fashionable Almack’s Club “& played at Quinze and won.”15
Instead of politics, Caroline’s letters were full of a unique business that was almost entirely undertaken by women: The Ladies’ Charitable Society. The brainchild of Lady Spencer, the society was a response to the steady stream of begging letters that were delivered to her door.16 In Lady Spencer were united two qualities that made her irresistible to beggars: a reputation for benevolence, and a husband who was one of the richest men in England. Not only was she genuinely moved by Georgian England’s widespread poverty, she also was a sincerely religious woman in an age when religion was unfashionable among the aristocracy.
But a compassionate heart was not enough to relieve the sufferings of the Georgian poor. The era saw the proliferation of private charitable institutions, and with them, inevitably, arose new controversies over the impact of charity on public morality. Especially in London, that Babylon of the modern world, philanthropists quickly found their good intentions mired in controversy.17 Two of the best-known charities of the century—the Foundling Hospital, established in 1739, which took in abandoned, poor, and illegitimate children, and the Lock Hospital, established in 1746, which treated venereal disease—found themselves under fire for promoting vice.
Despite the protests of the governors of the Lock Hospital that some of their patients were under the age of ten, theirs remained a relatively unpopular cause. The Foundling Hospital, which attracted a great deal of public support, also took its share of criticism. Abandoned infants and children were appallingly commonplace in Georgian London, but there seemed to be no alternative—no effective birth control existed, and a large number of parents lived in poverty, unable to support their families.18 Critics predicted that such organizations would encourage sex outside of wedlock and irresponsible sensuality in the lower orders, who would no longer need to worry about ridding themselves of unwanted offspring.
More novel to modern ears was the view that orphanages would encourage laziness in poor married couples, who would seize the opportunity to cast off their legitimate progeny and “lead lives of idle abandon.” This was a public concern that affected patterns of fundraising; wealthy ladies in particular carefully avoided the association of their names with any cause that could be construed as encouraging immorality.19
Lady Spencer’s new society addressed a different moral dilemma: how to separate the deserving from the undeserving in the mountain of appeal letters arriving at her door. Begging letters were a part of everyday life for Georgian London’s wealthy, some of whom instructed their servants to discard them unopened. Lady Spencer, however, who received more than her share, took them all seriously.
Unfortunately, it was both easy and profitable for the dishonest to send fake hardship letters to the wealthy. Lady Spencer was no fool, and she sometimes employed agents to weed out fraudulent or undeserving cases. But she also refused simply to lapse into cynicism. By 1773, Lady Spencer had decided to organize The Ladies’ Charitable Society, one of the first philanthropic organizations that tested the means and characters of applicants to determine their eligibility for charitable assistance.20
However enthusiastic Lady Spencer was about her new project, in 1774 she was obliged to curtail her involvement. Her eldest daughter Georgiana was about to be married. By mid-March, the London papers were carrying the rumor that “a treaty of marriage is on foot” between “his Grace the Duke of Devonshire, and Lady Georgiana Spencer, eldest daughter of Earl Spencer.”21 Georgiana was only sixteen. Lady Spencer had once declared that she feared her little Ge
e would be “snatched” from her while still a child, but she and Lord Spencer could not resist when their daughter caught the eye of the Duke of Devonshire, probably the most eligible bachelor in the kingdom. Immensely rich and powerful, he was also undemonstrative and aloof; friends argued that he had hidden depths, but others suspected he was simply dull and self-absorbed.
Lord and Lady Spencer would never consciously subject their daughter to an arranged marriage. It was supposedly a love match, but Georgiana barely knew the duke and was probably more in love with the idea of a marriage. In any case, the wedding date was set for June 1774, by which time Georgiana would be seventeen. Lady Spencer collected a trousseau for her daughter that cost more than a thousand pounds (around a quarter of a million pounds today), a foreshadowing of the future duchess’s role as a paragon of fashion.22
The bustle surrounding the wedding was not made easier by Lady Spencer’s slow recovery from a miscarriage suffered the previous November. Since giving birth to Harriet in 1761, she had lost two other infant daughters, and was apparently unable to carry a pregnancy past the first trimester.23 Now in her mid-thirties, each miscarriage took its toll, the painful event itself followed by the characteristic hormone-induced depression, “my usual Miserable lowness & Sleepless nights,” as she described it to Caroline.24 In April 1774, while she was in Bath recovering from a recent miscarriage, Caroline took charge of the Ladies’ Charitable Society in her absence.25
By August, Caroline was handed the reins of the society; Lady Spencer wrote that she was miscarrying yet again, this time while visiting her newly married daughter at Chatsworth, the magnificent Derbyshire estate of the Duke of Devonshire. Ten days later, she admitted that she seldom passed a day without “Violent fits of crying.” Caroline tried to comfort her friend: “if this was to happen, & I believe we none of us had much hopes that it would not, it is better it should be thus early, than later.” And yet she cautioned Lady Spencer about having had two miscarriages within ten months. Take a cure at Bath, she enjoined her, or whatever the physicians advise, if it would restore “to your constitution what your frequent miscarriages take from it.”26
The Howe Dynasty Page 18
