Epilogue
Legacy
Richard embarked on his final cruise less than a year after the Glorious First, in February 1795, when the fleet left Torbay, in Devon, to escort outward-bound convoys. The Glorious First of June was the pinnacle of his career, but it was not the last time he would be called into the service of his country. He would command the Channel Fleet for another three years. If waning health meant that he was unable to perform his duty to the full, he was nevertheless given a central role in the resolution of the Spithead Mutiny of 1797, a major protest by British sailors during wartime against pay and conditions. Once more, in a lifetime of service, Richard would use his personal popularity and leadership qualities with the seamen at Spithead in a negotiation to restore the fleet to active service in a time of national crisis.
Richard’s gout became so severe that, by the end of his final cruise, he was confined to his bed. When he returned to Portsmouth, he asked to be relieved of his command. In Bath taking the waters by April, he confided to a friend that he was unable to stand without crutches. The next month, although still nominally commander in chief of the Channel Fleet, he was allowed to remain ashore. Admiral Alexander Hood was deputized to execute his orders, a situation that chafed, unsurprisingly, with that veteran sea officer. Richard did not improve, and in January 1797, he was still writing that he could only “walk across the room three or four times on my Crutches at Intervals.”1
Richard’s middle daughter, Mary, now stayed at home to support her father. Family tradition held that Mary was the favorite child of Lord and Lady Howe. In 1791, at the age of twenty-six, she had been appointed as a lady-inwaiting to the royal princesses, the daughters of George III, but her duties took her to court for alternate months only, leaving her time with her parents.2 Mary was intelligent and educated, with a wide range of interests, and was much approved of by Lady Spencer, who wrote of her after a visit at Porter’s Lodge: “I could not help telling her I was sorry she was too old for any of my Grandsons.__she is a dear thing.”3 Yet Mary, beneath her sweetness, was a typical Howe woman. Queen Charlotte wrote to Lady Howe that, while in service at court, the “mild and civil little Mary” beat the king at backgammon every night. When Queen Charlotte humorously chided her for disloyalty, she replied that she did the same to her father. “[U]pon that,” concluded Her Majesty, “we settled that what was respectful and dutiful to Papa, must prove towards the King.”4
Mary had resigned her post at court and was at Grafton Street in April 1797 when Lord Spencer, now First Lord of the Admiralty, called on Richard to accept his resignation. She described the gloom that reigned in the household as Richard confronted the reality of “shutting up forever the Prospect on what has been his Pursuit for above 63 years.”5 It was not easy for a man of his temperament to bring his naval career to a close.
Yet no sooner had Richard resigned when he was summoned back into service. There had been rumblings of mutiny within the Channel Fleet at Spithead since early March. The sailors’ fundamental grievance was easy to understand, as sailors in the Royal Navy had not had a pay increase since 1652. Their protests were ignored at first, and when the fleet was ordered out in mid-April 1797, the men refused to set sail. Determined to show, however, that they were not traitors, the sailors stipulated that if a French fleet should appear, they would return to their duties.
The government acceded to most of the mutineers’ demands and offered a royal pardon, for Britain was in grave danger. The alliances formed in 1793 against revolutionary France were collapsing. In 1795, the Dutch government of the United Provinces allied itself with France, and both Prussia and Spain concluded peace treaties with the revolutionary republic. A year later, Britain again was at war with Spain, and heavily outgunned in the Mediterranean. Admiral Sir John Jervis and a new naval hero, Captain Horatio Nelson, won the second great naval battle of the French Revolutionary Wars at Cape St. Vincent in February 1797.
The Battle of Cape St. Vincent had prevented Spanish reinforcements from joining with a French fleet to invade Ireland. It is no wonder that a few short months later, desperate to get the Channel Fleet to sea, the government offered a royal pardon for the Spithead mutineers. The seamen returned to their duty, only to go on strike again on May 7. The issue was trust. In an age when naval discipline was severe, they feared that government promises might not be honored, or, still worse, they feared reprisals.6 The government needed someone beyond suspicion to talk with the mutineers, and Admiral Howe was their choice, as he was both popular and admired within the Channel Fleet, whose men well remembered the Glorious First of June.
This time, Richard’s duty called him to a place where Lady Howe could also venture. They set out for Portsmouth together, arriving on May 11. Richard immediately visited several ships, including his old flagship, the Queen Charlotte. The Admiralty had shied away from recognizing the delegates appointed by the mutineers, but Richard accepted their petitions. He repeatedly read aloud the royal pardon for their past actions, and patiently reassured them over and over that the government intended to grant their demands. Finally, in order to allay their suspicions, he obtained printed copies of the royal pardon from the Admiralty.
The mutineers had another, highly irregular demand: that more than a hundred unpopular officers, notorious for their poor treatment of the men, were not to be returned to their ships. Richard sided with the sailors and requested the Admiralty to concede. For several days, Richard went unwearyingly from ship to ship at Spithead and St. Helens, addressing the malcontents. Gradually, by the force of his personality, he persuaded the men that they could trust the government. By May 14, the mutiny was over.7
Admiral Howe was heavily criticized for making the concession regarding unpopular officers, and he even acknowledged that it was not desirable for sailors to have “the assumed right of rejecting their officers.” But he recognized this sticking point in the negotiations and solved it by stipulating that the officers should remain on full pay.8 Britain had her fleet back, and the sailors’ grievances were assuaged. Richard had sized up the situation correctly and used his leadership skills and the ability to win the trust of men in the ranks.
With the mutiny now over, Lord and Lady Howe were enveloped in another joyous celebration on May 15 in Portsmouth. Richard was hoisted onto the shoulders of exuberant seamen and carried to the Governor’s House, a gratifying but perhaps painful experience for a gouty seventy-one-year-old.9 General Sir William Pitt and Lady Mary Pitt arrived to participate in the celebration, and Lady Howe and Lady Pitt shook the work-roughened hands of the delegates for the mutineers, now lauded as “brave tars” by the press. Lord Howe was “the only man,” declared the admiring delegates, who could have ended the dispute.10
May 1797 was a very busy month for Richard’s family. Just days after the celebrations in Portsmouth, Lady Howe saw her daughter Mary act as a bridesmaid at the wedding of Princess Charlotte, the Princess Royal, to Frederick, Prince of Württemberg, at St. James’s Palace in London. This was a dynastic marriage, but it suited the princess, who had long chafed at her confined life, referring to her home as “the nunnery.” Princess Charlotte was thirty and unromantically plump; the bridegroom was even older and fatter. Nevertheless, this was a royal wedding with appropriate splendor. Bridesmaid Mary Howe was arrayed in finery that was second only to that of the princess, white silk trimmed in silver, diamonds and an ostrich feather on her headdress. The heat was so intense that she nearly fainted; it must have been worse for Princess Charlotte, who trailed a robe of crimson velvet trimmed in fur.11
Less than a week after the wedding, on May 23, a fête was put on at the royal retreat of Frogmore House. Nominally in honor of the royal newlyweds, it became virtually a tribute to Admiral Howe.12 “[T]here was absolutely more Fuss made about [Lord Howe] than about the Würtembergs,” recalled his daughter Mary, who was present. Her father was “the Courted Object of every body,” she enthused. “Saviour of his Country was his common Appellation.” The que
en ordered her own carriage and pony to transport the infirm Richard around the walks, saying, “Nothing can be too much for the conqueror of the first of June and May,” for the date of the fête fell between the date of Richard’s recent triumph at Spithead and the anniversary of the Glorious First three years earlier.
In what would be Richard’s final public accolade, King George III personally led him down the steps of Frogmore House to the lawn, where the royal princes and princesses were waiting, and pushed him among them. The royal family formed a circle around the old admiral and sang James Hook’s popular song “The Glorious First of June.” George, Prince of Wales, was in the middle of the royal grouping, with his siblings and Queen Charlotte gathered around. Mary was delighted:
I never saw such a Scene, or any thing so thoroughly pleasing as the Wish of pleasing him shown upon every Countenance. He looking remarkably well, so much so that all the People in the Gardens (half [of] Windsor) were running after him and calling him “that Dear old Man, that D[ea]r Lord Howe.”
The company all walked together through the grounds, as Mary recalled, “[M]y Dear Father with a Stick and Mama’s Arm (how happy did she look).”13 On such a high note, Richard’s career finally came to a close.
Richard was now fully retired and could rest as much as he pleased, but he never recovered his health. Two years after the fête at Frogmore, and growing characteristically impatient with his invalid status, he tried an experimental new treatment for gout, which involved the administration of electric shocks.14 Surprisingly, his mobility began to improve under this crude procedure, and he was walking around at Porter’s Lodge with just a cane when he suddenly fell ill late in the evening of Sunday, August 4, 1799. By midmorning the next day, he was gone.15
Richard Howe’s final resting place was in the family vault in St. Andrew’s Church, Langar, whose country fields and lanes he had not visited for many years. Lady Howe, together with her daughters Mary and Louisa, remained at home in London. As the funeral procession set out, crowds gathered in front of 3 Grafton Street, shedding tears. The procession was scheduled to reach Langar on August 18, and Lady Howe wept copiously as she imagined the hearse arriving at the village, where the tenants of the Howe estate were to carry the coffin to the church.
Aunt Caroline Howe of course assisted her nieces in supporting their mother, visiting every evening for several hours, “& during that time I never open my Lips being worn [out],” wrote the grateful Louisa.16 The king waited until a fortnight after the funeral to send his condolences to Caroline, knowing her to be “fully employed in acts of attentive kindness to her relations.” Like everyone, he saw her as the natural mainstay in the midst of a Howe family crisis.17
Lady Mary Howe was sixty-seven when she became a widow. With a weak heart, she moved to Porter’s Lodge to recuperate over the winter, her three daughters at her side. There she learned that Parliament had voted for a monument of Admiral Lord Howe to be raised in London’s iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral. Some of her old spirit reasserted itself when she wrote waspishly to a friend that the MPs would have done better to have shown their appreciation during the lifetime of her husband, rather than “to cover their ill-conduct to him by this outward show of respect to his memory.”18 Lady Howe had not forgotten the political attacks on Richard by his own countrymen during the American War of Independence.
In an age when sudden death could strike the young as well as the old, Richard and Mary’s daughter Mary, after an illness of just a few weeks, died on March 9, 1800. She had just become engaged to George Douglas, Earl of Morton. Within the extended Howe family, the shock of Mary’s death was devastating. Caroline predicted that it would prove fatal to Lady Howe, and so it was. “On the 9th of August 1800,” wrote Caroline sadly, her sister-in-law and old friend, the companionable “Dickess” of her younger years, “was released from a year of sad sorrow, but her death was an easy one. Her two affectionate and dutiful daughters never left her side till the last scene was closed.”19
Less than three years later, Caroline’s younger sister Julie died. At seventy-one, she had lived a full life by the standards of the day. By nature retiring, she had spent much of her time since her mother’s death staying in the homes of her various siblings, especially Caroline and the Pitts. For reasons that Caroline’s letters do not disclose, at times Julie took laudanum—that universal remedy of the day for physical and mental suffering. Julie appears as an unassuming presence throughout Caroline’s family chronicles: rather childlike in her interests, ill at ease in fashionable company, yet passionate in her private affections, notably her adoration for Lady Spencer.
It is a testimony to the close, affectionate nature of the Howe family that Julie remained central to her busy siblings’ lives, though she shared none of their social or political ambitions. Caroline left a charming account of Julie at her home in Richmond, where she conscientiously fed the wild birds in her garden throughout September, the season when many birds migrate south and sparrows leave town for the countryside to take advantage of the harvest. “Julie has vast numbers flocking about,” wrote Caroline, “which she used to feed with breadcrumbs when breakfasting in her tent, but they were many days before she could get them to eat at the little house before it’s door.”20
Old age was overtaking many of her generation, but Caroline Howe was destined to live many years longer. Decades prior to Julie’s death, Caroline had commented on the sadness of aging. But it was not like Caroline to give in to circumstances. She surely had herself in mind when she added the caveat, “[W]hilst a person can read & entertain themselves alone it is a different story.” She was certainly in this favored category. All her life, Caroline had been an avid reader, sometimes reading in tandem with Lady Spencer. In her sixties, she was mastering ancient Greek; in her eighties, she was learning Spanish.
With advancing age, Caroline continued to make efforts to remain physically active as well. She still walked and went visiting into her final years. In her sixties, she confessed to feeling like an outsider in gatherings of young people, but she was still attending parties twenty years later, despite experiencing diminished mobility. She explained how she managed the crowded spaces: “I sit without moving in a corner, and can, by coming away a short time before they are over, avoid difficulty.” Yet, just a few weeks after writing this, on the occasion of a ball to celebrate the Queen’s Birthday, Caroline did not bother to make an early escape. She had just turned eighty-one, but she stayed out till 5 a.m., not “too much tired, but of course not up by Cockcrow.”21 She remained close to the royal family, boasting to Lady Spencer that the king had arranged for modifications to a colonnade adjoining Buckingham House in order to shelter her from the elements as she entered, walling it up and adding windows. “I have done it for you,” said the king, “& I call it the Howe Gallery.”22
Caroline once wrote to her friend Lady Spencer, “[W]hat unfortunate beings are all those, born with a bad temper, for a persons own private happiness I look upon as one of the best Gifts bestowed upon mortals, do you not feel it so?” She was indeed endowed with a resilient nature, one that saw her through the many vicissitudes of life. When she was almost ninety years old, she was still talked about in fashionable society; her sharp mind, her unremitting quest for knowledge, and her youthful enthusiasm for cards were remarkable enough to be the topic of discussion around a London dinner table.23
This was in May 1811, a few months after the Prince of Wales had been declared regent. George III had recently descended into his final, tragic period of mental illness that only ended with his death in 1820. Caroline would live long enough to have the satisfaction of seeing Napoleon Bonaparte imprisoned on the island of Elba in May 1814, vanquished after twelve years of bloody warfare. For more than a third of her life, Britain had been at war. Her brother William would in effect die in harness at age eighty-four, still undertaking limited military duties as governor of Plymouth.
The only surviving portrait of Caroline Howe was painted by th
e artist Henry Howard when she was around ninety years of age. She is seated at a desk, a copy of The Times before her, pen in hand.24 What looks to be an Egyptian artifact of the god Horus is upon her newspaper, and her chess pieces are visible under a glass dome. Behind her is a glazed bookcase protecting her extensive library. Perhaps the neat bundle of documents tucked into the wooden organizer to the left of The Times are the results of the days she spent cataloging her book collection with the assistance of her maid.25 Seated in her Grafton Street drawing room, she is portrayed here as her many callers would typically have found her, at her writing desk busy with the thousands of letters she wrote over a lifetime. “I literally have not been above ½ an hour since I came down[stairs] without a Pen in my hand,” was a typical self-description. Close friends looked forward to her literary productions; next-door-but-one neighbor John Crawfurd, stopping in to invite her to dinner, “tore away my letter & would read as far as I had got,” a charming picture of how she united her dedicated letter-writing with an atmosphere of informal sociability in her drawing room.26
Caroline died in her Grafton Street home on June 29, 1814. She lies buried at St. Botolph’s Church, Shenleybury, in Hertfordshire.27 Lady Spencer had died three months earlier, and William only survived his elder sister by two weeks. Both William and his wife, Fanny, who outlived him by three years, are buried near their home in Twickenham.28 The Irish peerage that William inherited from Richard became extinct upon his death. And the title of Baroness Howe, now held by Richard’s eldest daughter, Charlotte Curzon, was in a precarious situation, for, of her four children, only two were still living at the time of her Uncle William’s death. Tragically, her promising eldest son, George Augustus Curzon, had died in 1805 at the age of sixteen, and her title ultimately passed to her youngest, Richard Penn Curzon.29 He and Louisa Lady Altamont’s son, Howe Peter Browne, were ultimately the sole survivors to carry on the line.
The Howe Dynasty Page 45
