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Home , Anthony Lee, Antonio Corradini, Caroline of Ansbach, Earl of Rosse, Edward Walpole, Godfrey Kneller

LADIES-IN-WAITING:

Art, Sex and Politics at the early Georgian Court

By

Eric Jonathan Weichel

A thesis submitted to the Department of Art

in conformity with the requirements for

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Queen’s University

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

(April 2013)

Copyright © Eric Jonathan Weichel, 2013.

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Abstract

This thesis discusses the cultural contributions – artistic patronage, art theory, art - of four

Ladies-in-Waiting employed at the early eighteenth-century century British court: Mary,

Countess Cowper; Charlotte Clayton, Baroness Sundon; Henrietta Howard, Countess of ; and Mary Hervey, Baroness Hervey of Ickworth. Through a close reading of archival manuscripts, published correspondences and art historical treatises, I explore the cultural milieu, historical legacy and historiographic reception of these individuals. I argue that their writing reveals fresh insight on the switch from Baroque to modes of portraiture in Britain, as it does critical attitudes to sex, religion and politics among aristocratic women. Through the use of satire, these courtiers comment on extramarital affairs, rape, homosexuality and divorce among their peer group. They also show an interest in issues of feminist education, literature, political and religious patronage, and contemporary news events, which they reference through allusions to painting, architecture, , engravings, ceramics, textiles and book illustrations.

Many of the artists patronized by the court in this period were foreign-born, peripatetic, and stylistically unusual. Partly due to the transnational nature of these artist’s careers, and partly due to the reluctance of later historians to admit the extent of foreign socio-cultural influence, biased judgements about the quality of these émigré painters’ work continue to predominate in art historical scholarship. While little-studied themselves, these Ladies-in-waiting were at the center of political, social and cultural life in Britain. Their letters therefore have much of value in reclaiming, not only their own contributions to the development of British cultural life, but those of the French or émigré artists patronized at court. By studying the work of these artists and the lives of their patrons, I examine the intersection between biography and artistic practice at the early eighteenth-century British court.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Janice Helland, for her patience, tact, discretion and support; Stephanie Dickey, who read the manuscript and added comments and help at various stages, and Cathleen Hoeniger and Una D’Elia, for their advice and encouragement.

My colleagues in graduate school, including Susanne McColeman, Heather Merla, Veronica Carter, Casey Lee, Julie Hollenbach and Megan Whitehead have provided so much support, as has my partner in crime, Allison Fisher, to whom I can never express enough gratitude.

Former colleagues Stephanize Azran, Jill Pertulla and Anna Khimasia were role models and pillars of strength for me throughout this process, as were my students in , Jess Leggett, Tori Piccin, Alexandra Kamakas and Hayley Palmer.

My students in Ottawa, including Jane Putnam, Oxana Sawka, Barbara Dorrell and Ken King have been inspirational and encouraging.

While my time at Queen’s has been largely positive, external life events – a divorce, and the terminal illness of a parent – did make this stage in my life a difficult one, and I could never have made it through this frequently dark period without the support of a large number of people. I am terribly grateful to my Kingston ‘family’, Leigh and Rebecca Keffer, Reid Martin, Jonathan Myrie and Mark Collins, for helping me through some of the worst, and the best, moments in life. I’m also grateful to Christina Palubiskie, Laura Francoeur, Jocelyn Bolduc, Brian Anders and Ashley Vanstone for their love, patience and guidance.

My grandparents, Bill and Hazel Wager, and my uncle, Bruce Wager, have shown me the true meaning of family.

And above all, to my beloved parents, Norm and Lorraine Weichel, without whose support none of this would ever have been possible – Mom and Dad, I love you so much.

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Contents

Abstract i

Acknowledgements ii

List of Figures iii

Chapter One: Introduction: Ladies-in-Waiting, their Letters, and the Historiography of early eighteenth-century British Art. 1

Chapter Two: ‘Most Horribly Done, and So Unfortunately Like’: Mary Cowper and Émigré Artists at the Court of St. James. 55

Chapter Three: ‘Whilst my Imagination was Warmed with the Picture’: James Worsdale’s portrait of Charlotte Clayton 82

Chapter Four: ‘Not only increase but embellish the collection’: Political Satire and Lady Hervey’s Imaginary Pictures 107

Chapter Five: ‘Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back’: Literary Allusion, Elite Feminine Education, and the salonnière Tradition. 145

Chapter Six: ‘Some Few I don’t Understand’: Sex, Vision and Violence 188

Chapter Seven: Marital Humour and Visual Imagery 220

Chapter Eight: ‘Jupiter and Ganymede’: Homosexuality and Art at the early Georgian Court 243

Chapter Nine: Beauty and Conflagration: Space and Place 266

Chapter Ten: Conclusion: ‘Portrait of an Unknown Lady’: Ceramics, Sex and Gender in British Art Historiography 301

Bibliography. 344

Appendix One 399

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List of Figures

Figure 2.1. Sir , Mary, Countess Cowper (1685–1724), 1709, oil on canvas, private collection. 59

Figure 2.2. René Auguste Constantyn. Portrait of two sons and four daughters of Don Francisco Lopes Suasso in a garden landscape with a pet dog, an extensive landscape beyond, 1730, oil on Canvas, 647 x 826 mm, private collection. 61

Figure 2.3. , The Schutz Family and their Friends on a Terrace, 1725, oil on canvas, 1022 × 1257 mm, The , . 64

Figure 2.4. Johann Friedrich Künnecke and Hans Casper von Bothmar, Schloss Bothmer, 1726 – 1732, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. 67

Figure 2.5. Christian Friedrich Zincke, Queen Caroline (Caroline of , 1683 – 1737), Enamel on copper in gold frame with ivory backing, c. 1732, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 74

Figure 2.6. Enoch Seeman, Daniel Cajanus (1702/03-1749), 1734, oil on canvas, 3150 x 1830 mm, National Museum of Finland, Helsinki. 79

Figure 3.1. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Charlotte Clayton, Baroness Sundon (c. 1742), oil on canvas, 1252 x 1016 mm, Private Collection. 89

Figure 3.2. James Worsdale, The Limerick Hell Fire Club, c.1736, oil on canvas, 1022 x 770 mm, National Gallery of , . 99

Figure 4.1. Simon Verelst, Still-Life of Flowers in a Glass Vase, c. 1680, oil on canvas, 762 x 635 mm, Philip Mould Historical Paintings, London. 130

Figure 4.2. , The Cartoon Gallery at Hampton Court: detail, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 1720, engraving, full piece 187 x 220 mm, The , London. 136

Figure 4.3. Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Raphael), The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, c. 1515 – 1516, Bodycolour over charcoal on many sheets of paper, mounted on canvas, on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 3190 x 3990 cm, London, since 1865 (formerly Hampton Court). 138

Figure 5.1. Martin Maingaud, Princesses Anne (1709-59), Amelia (1711-1786) and Caroline (1713-57), 1721, oil on canvas, 673 x 793 mm, (Kensington?). 153

Figure 5.2. Martin Maingaud, Prince Frederick (1707-1751) and Princess Amelia (1711-1786), c. 1720, oil on canvas, 1527 x 1200 mm, Royal Collection (Kensington?). 156

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Figure 5.3. James Stephanoff, The Queen’s Drawing Room at , 1817, watercolour over pencil, 19.9 x 25.1 cm, Royal Collection. 159

Figure 5.4. Jean Audran after Nicolas Poilly the elder, Description du Parnasse François: detail of ‘The Three Graces’, Antoinette Deshoulières (1637 – 1694), Henriette de la Suze (1618 -1673), and Madeleine de Scudéry (1607 – 1701), 1760 repr. after 1723 original, Pazzo Books, West Roxbury, Massachusetts. 162

Figure 5.5. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Muses, 1578, oil on canvas, 2067 x 3098 mm, The Royal Collection (Hampton Court). 181

Figure 6.1. Letter showing red wax censorship of contents, John Hervey to Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, dated St. James, 11 November 1732. Hervey MSS 941/47/4, 941/47/2, f. 239. Suffolk Record Office, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, U.K. 189

Figure 6.2 Dosso Dossi, Holy Family with Saints Anne and Joachim, c. 1527, Royal 202 Collection

Figure 6.3. George White, after unknown artist, Frances Charteris (c. 1665 – 1732), after 1730, mezzotint, The National Portrait Gallery, London. 203

Figure 6.3. , A Scene from ‘The Beggar’s ’, VI, 1731, oil on canvas, 572 x 762 mm, The Tate Gallery, London. 215

Figure 7.1. François Chauveau, ‘La Montagne qui Accouche’, in Jean de La Fontaine, Illustrations des choisies mises en Vers (: Claude Barbin, 1668), engraving, p. 219. 225

Figure 7.2. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Mary Calverley Sherard, Countess of Harborough (d.1702), oil on canvas, 1270 x 1020 cm, Philip Mould Historical Portraits, London. 234

Figure 7.3. Michael Rysbrack. Monument to Bennett Sherard (d.1732), Mary Calverley Sherard (d.1702) and their infant son (d.1702), 1732, marble, Stapleford, Leicestershire. 238

Figure 8.1. unknown artist (Jan Swart van Groningen?) after Michelangelo Buonarotti, The Rape of Ganymede, c. 1570 – 1630, oil on panel, 2207 x 1415 cm, The Royal Collection.254

Figure 8.2. , Ganymede and the Eagle, ceiling fresco: oil on plaster, late seventeenth century, Ham House, Richmond. 255

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Figure 8.3. , The Creation of Pandora: detail, Ganymede, oil on plaster, 1718 – 1720, Petworth House, East Sussex (The National Trust). 256

Figure 9.1. Anonymous, A Full and True Account of a Sharp and Bloody Duel, 1731, wood-cut engraving, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 267

Figure 9.2. Anonymous, Mr. Pulteney’s duel with Lord Hervey, 1731, mezzotint in sepia, 190 x 260 mm, The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT. 278

Figure 9.3. Wenceslaus Hollar, The Great Fire of London, 1666, copperplate engraving, 22 x 35 cm, Village Antiques, Switzerland. 269

Figure 9.4. ‘Dutch School’, The Great Fire of London, c. 1666, oil on canvas, 897 mm x 1516 mm, Museum of London. 280

Figure 9.5. Jesmond Hall or ‘Stote’s Hall’, c. 1765, photograph of c. 1910. 289

Figure 9.6. Giacomo Leoni and Sir Thomas Bootle, Lathom Hall, 1724 – 1745 (destroyed 1929), Lancashire, photograph of c. 1920. 292

Figure 9.7. Chinese famille rose porcelain mug from the Bootle armorial service, c. 1730, Rode Hall, UK 343

Figure 10.1. Unknown, Portrait of an Unknown Lady: Possibly Lady Mary Hervey (d. 1768), c. 1730. Oil on canvas, Skinner Art Gallery, New York. 334

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Chapter One: Introduction Ladies-in-Waiting, their Letters, and the Historiography of Early Eighteenth-Century British Art

Why study Ladies-in-Waiting at the early eighteenth-century British court? As first-hand witnesses of the major social and political events of the nation-state, aristocratic women employed as royal attendants have often been excluded from rigorous scholarly cultural histories.

While the basic biographical details of many British court women are used to flesh out popular songs, novels and films, their mention in non-fiction is usually either excessively racy, focused on a few particularly notorious individuals, or rigidly organized around appointments and precedence instead of cultural contributions.1 Early eighteenth-century women especially have been relegated to footnote status in all but the most specialized accounts of the period’s artistic life.

Part of this occlusion is due to the paucity of relevant primary sources for the historian to work from: this is especially true for the generations in which women’s literacy was on the rise.

The relative neglect of the unique cultural contributions of British court women is somewhat surprising, considering that there are many examples of late seventeenth and early eighteenth- century court women who were amateur artists, writers, political hostesses and leaders of fashion. Their artistic choices, habits of consumption and ways of performing gender were all

1 For examples of this kind of literature, see Jean Plaidy, The Lady in the Tower : the Wives of Henry VIII (New York : Three Rivers Press, 1986); Anne Somerset, Ladies-in-Waiting : from the Tudors to the Present Day (New York : Knopf, 1984); Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers: The Cousins’ War (London : Simon & Schuster, 2011); Noreen Malone, ‘Waity Katie's Ladies: A Brief History of British Ladies-in-Waiting’, Slate (15 April 2011), online @ http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/04/waity_katies_ladies.html., Michael Farquhar, Behind the Palace Doors : Five Centuries of Sex, Adventure, Vice, Treachery, and Folly from Royal Britain (New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011); Sandra Byrd, To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (New York : Howard Books, 2011). Lucy Moore, Amphibious Thing: The Life of Lord Hervey (London: Viking, 2000); Lucy Worsley, Courtiers : The secret history of Kensington Palace (London: Faber and Faber, 2010); Stella Tilyard, Aristocrats : Caroline, Emily, Louisa, and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832 (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1994); see also Dulcie M. Ashdown, Ladies in Waiting (London: Arthur Barker Ltd, 1976); and Eleanor Herman, Sex with Kings: 500 years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry and Revenge (New York: Morrow, 2004), for an example of the kinds of ‘light’ writing on the subject, For a rare example of really stellar writing on the theme, which regrettably does not focus on the English court at this time, see Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, ed. by Anne Walthall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

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influential over how aesthetics, morality and class warfare were played out in court spheres.

By ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ I mean the continual use of a repertoire of social and material gestures that, while replicating commonly-held modes of behavior, simultaneously challenged and pushed against the borders of the deviant, the dissident or even the unsayable, or the intentional element in performance which can, in some cases, express an agency outside the prescriptive formulae of dominant social discourse.2 Somatic technologies used to ‘perform’ membership within elite social groups included fashion items like wigs, fans or lace, which were highly charged sites of bodily competition, and the near-ritualized use of these status items signified sexual and social possibilities that were not open to all classes.3 Their representation in painting is useful for interrogating the value individuals attached to these objects in the articulation of class identity and sexual morality. As I argue in this thesis, Ladies-in-Waiting were keenly aware of their wider public appeal beyond the court. Celebrity figures in their own day, their likenesses engraved and widely distributed as exemplars of beauty, personal style and reputation, these individuals were sexualized elite figures.

This thesis examines the cultural contributions – artistic patronage, art theory, art satire - of four early eighteenth-century women who, though their actual titles vary according to their changing social status throughout time, were the ‘Ladies-in-Waiting’ of George II’s Queen,

2 Judith Butler, for example, famously writes that performativity is ‘that power of discourse to produce effects through reiteration’, in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 20. See also Anne Jerslev, ‘Performativity and Documentary: Sami Saif and Phie Ambo’s Family and Performativity’, in Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media, ed. by Anne Jersley (Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press 2005), where Jerslev notes ‘performativity calls attention to processuality and the difficulty of drawing clear demarcatory lines between a level of mediation and a level of reality’, p. 108. 3 For the interaction between ritual and performativity, see Susanna Rostas, ‘From Ritualization to Performativity: the Conchos of Mexico’, in Felicia Hughes-Freeland, Ritual, Performance and Media (London: Routledge, 1998). ‘Performativity and ritualization can and do act together… [an individual] can, at the same time, have the conscious intention of putting something more of themselves into it…. Pushing themselves to the limits (or beyond) of their inculcated habits’, p. 91. Rostas theorizes that when ritualized performativity is present, ‘other additional states of being can then emerge’, which I suggest, is entirely applicable when considering ‘performances’ of aristocratic genders: for example, the use of the term ‘fine lady’ in the period suggests the use of postures, clothing and ritualized behaviours that constructed a kind of sexualized identity radically at odds with ‘normative’ or ‘regular’ female gender.

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Caroline of Ansbach (1683 – 1737), wife of King George II (b.1683, reigned 1727 - 1760). I will argue that cultural hybridity, where distinct elements of cultural forms developed elsewhere were imported into Britain and reworked to meet local needs, was a vital characteristic of early eighteenth-century court life. I am indebted in my understanding of hybridity to Mikhail

Bakhtin’s ideas about dialogical space, where competing elements are fused together, creating a multiplicity of agendas, voices and utterances that destabilize or ‘carnivalize’ the rigidity of imperial behavior norms and systems of thought and expression.4

Bakhtin’s ideas about fusion and syncretism were elaborated by Homi Bhabha, who recognized the ambivalent, dissident and resistance elements inherent within the notional hybrid, and continued by critics like Robert Young, Julia Kristeva, and bell hooks, each of whom stress the role of cross-cultural exchange in reconstituting an autonomous space for intellectual activity. 5 Amaryll Beatrice Chanady’s postulation of hybridity as a ‘constantly changing crucible of heterogenous influences’ instead of a mixture between dominant and dominated alterities has also been useful when interrogating the polynational, pan-global cultural aspect of art objects like Chinese export armorial porcelain, British conversation-piece portraits or floral genre painting rendered à versaillais by London-based itinerant Huguenot artisans.6 Just as these

4 Mikhail. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holoquist (repr. of Voprosy Literatury i Estetiki: Issledovania Razynykh Let, Moscow: Khudozh, 1975. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 359, 360. 5 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New ork: Routledge, 1994), pp. 111 – 11 , 120, 124. See also Néstor Garc a Canclini and Christopher L Chiappari, Hybrid Cultures : Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2005), esp. pp. xii, xxx, where Canclini writes that ‘if we speak of hybridization as a process to which one can gain access and which one can abandon, from which one can be excluded, or to which we can be subordinated, it is possible to understand the various subject positions implicated in cross-cultural relation’. See Julia Kristeva, The Power of Horror: An Essay on Objection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 36; Robert Young, Torn Halves : Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 44 – 55; bell hooks and Cornell West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 2 – 3, 12, 62; Virinder S. Kalra, Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk, ‘Hybrid Connections’ in Diaspora & Hybridity (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2005), pp. 70 – 87 (esp. p. 80, 84). 6 Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. xxxv.

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authors find the liminal space in hybrid cultural utterances, works and acts a useful site for reclaiming often forgotten or suppressed histories, I am similarly inspired by how Francophilia – the emulation of cultural models first articulated in – was a key factor in the aesthetic choices made by many of Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting. Francophile tastes were commemorated in diverse ways by these individuals, including their preferred painting styles, modes of consumption, sartorial fashion, literary habits and even attitudes towards sexuality.

By examining the historiography of early eighteenth-century British art, and by comparing those art histories with the life histories of my selected case studies, I will demonstrate how the eclectic, international character of the early eighteenth-century British art world challenged later art historical and ethno-national concepts of aesthetic quality. I shall also argue that this detrimental towards early eighteenth-century British art, combined with records of sexual habits considered shocking or decadent by later Victorian authors, has contributed to the deliberate suppression of important questions about class, gender, sexuality and art in the period. Through an analysis of surviving letters held in a variety of archival collections, including the , the Suffolk and Record Offices, the Dorset

History Center and the Lewis Walpole Library, I explore the intersection between visual art, sex and politics in the lives of these Ladies-in-Waiting, demonstrating how their writing helps to

‘recover’ or ‘recuperate’ the memory of social and sexual diversity in this formative period.

My focus in this thesis is centered around, but not limited to, the representation of elite identities, largely because the hereditary landowning class of both France and Britain played such a pivotal role in the exchange of visual cultures from one region to the next. The economic security of the nobility made them the target market for the luxury industries, including painting and architecture. The monopoly that they enjoyed over political and administrative

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responsibilities has meant that their letters, accounts, inventories and wills have been most likely to end up in archives, their likenesses to be preserved in galleries, country houses or museums, and their identities to be commemorated, celebrated and remembered among subsequent generations. The focus of noble life, in both France and , was the royal court, where the social structure of the national group was embodied by the hierarchy of people appointed to attend the monarch and his or her household. Court life offered many elite women a rare opportunity for a remunerative career of their own, social prestige, chances to wield political power, and opportunities to mix regularly with a diverse selection of their peer group, unrestricted by geographical distance.

Caroline of Ansbach was the highest-ranking female royal in Britain from 1714, when she became . Her husband succeeded his father as King in 1727. During

George II’s many absences from the country on visits to , Queen Caroline played an active role in the political and cultural life of the nation state, serving as and maintaining the rhythm and structure of court routine. Following Stuart precedents, Caroline normally employed six ‘Ladies of the Bedchamber’, several ‘Women of the Bedchamber’, and between six and eight ‘Maids of Honour’. ‘Ladies-in-Waiting’ is a blanket term used to cover these separate categories of aristocratic female attendants, who were each paid an expensive, and highly sought-after, government salary.7 Caroline of Ansbach’s Ladies-in-Waiting were thus the only female non-royal government officials openly recognized for their political work in this period, though various Hanoverian courtiers, such as the mistresses of Caroline’s father-in-law

George I, were also ‘unofficially’ paid salaries by various factions of the British administration.

Ladies of the Bedchamber were normally the wives of senior peers who held government

7 For the duties and remunerations of various positions, including a comprehensive review of the royal household, see R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 119 – 127.

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office, and were political figures in their own right. Their duties of attendance were rotated throughout the year between individuals, normally on a weekly basis. One of their number served an additional role as ‘’, and was thus the highest-ranking female member of Caroline’s staff, nominally responsible for the conduct of junior colleagues. Women of the Bedchamber fulfilled similar roles, but were of lower social rank, symbolized through elaborate social codes, rituals and performances, such as serving the Queen water on bended knee. While of lower rank, their duties, like those of the Ladies of the Bedchamber, were ceremonial in nature, and the palace employed a range of extraneous ‘necessary women’ as stylists, dressers and cleaning staff.

While Ladies and Women of the Bedchamber were mature married women with extensive political connections, the Maids of Honour were expected to be young, unmarried and personally engaging. Maids of Honour were almost always selected from aristocratic families who had an existing tradition of court service. If chosen for employment, they would be sent by their families to court in their early adolescence, and would only relinquish their appointment on the event of their marriage, extreme illness or social disgrace. While family and marital connections were of considerable importance, an individual’s own deportment, education and physical appearance were also taken into account.

The individuals I have selected as case studies were all particularly prominent courtiers.

They each also represent a different rung of the court hierarchy. I became interested in the group of women appointed as early attendants by Caroline of Ansbach over the course of research for my Master’s Thesis, entitled ‘This Painted Child of Dirt’: Dissident Aristocratic Masculinities in

Early Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture, 1717—1745 (Ottawa: Carleton University, 2007) where I focused on portraits of men associated with the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain, Lord John

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Hervey. The Hervey ‘coterie’ included individuals who, like Hervey himself, performed dissident, queer or otherwise subversive forms of masculinity at the early Georgian Court. After completing my M.A., I was left wondering about the education, social role and potential art patronage of the female members of that group, especially Lord Hervey’s wife and the couple’s early female colleagues at court. My initial research suggested that the emphasis on the cultural history of dissident sexuality present in my previous research could well be extended to an analysis of the role of the early Georgian Lady-in-Waiting.

I have therefore selected from the list of Caroline of Ansbach’s early attendants a number of case studies that each demonstrate a different rank of the court hierarchy, who also were closely associated with the Hervey family, and who – crucially, for my research – were known as educated, erudite individuals whose surviving epistolary correspondences are preserved in a variety of archives. Mary, Countess Cowper (1685 – 1724), the wife of an influential cabinet minister, brought political cachet to Caroline’s household as a . Born into an affluent if not politically notable family, the Claverings of Durham, Mary met her future husband, the lawyer , at the London home of her widowed aunt, Lady Grace

Wood, and charmed her much older suitor with her beauty, intellect and musical abilities. While the Cowpers were secretly married to prevent a jealous female rival – probably a member of the de Vere family – from preventing Cowper’s elevation to the peerage, their later marital life was, in strong contrast to many aristocratic marriages of the time, marked by mutual respect, love and friendship. Cowper’s literate tastes, talent on the harpsichord and fluency in French made her a strong candidate for the position of a royal attendant, and probably on her husband’s advice, she inaugurated a correspondence with Caroline of Ansbach during the last four years of Queen

Anne’s reign. She was one of Caroline’s first appointments, and was thus a first-hand witness to

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the immediate events surrounding the Hanoverian accession. For ten years, from 1714 to 1724,

Mary Cowper had regular access to her royal employer, and hence to the highest circles of administrative power. Her position at court was a sign of the Hanoverian administration’s trust in her husband’s political abilities, but by her own admission, her education, talent and reputation as a literate, convivial woman helped her secure a position at court, highlighting the autonomous cultural role of well-connected court women.

The Queen’s most trusted assistant, Charlotte Clayton, later Baroness Sundon, had by comparison relatively little official backing, yet due to her intense personal friendship with the

Queen, she eventually wielded significant political clout as the most prominent Woman of the

Bedchamber. Like Mary Cowper, Charlotte Clayton came from an affluent if not particularly well-connected political family, but unlike Cowper, Clayton married comparatively late in life

(in her early thirties) and her husband’s political role was initially negligible. While the Cowpers had four young children, Clayton remained childless throughout her life. Through the Clayton couple’s friendship with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, in whose employ William

Clayton started his political career, Charlotte Clayton secured an early appointment at court. Her dedication and devotion to Caroline of Ansbach forged intense bonds of friendship between the two women, resulting in politically motivated criticism from figures like Sir Robert and Horace

Walpole, who attributed to Clayton the Queen’s interest in religious tolerance.

Clayton shared her duties as a Woman of the Bedchamber with the recognized secondary sexual companion of George II, Henrietta Howard, who occupied the almost public office of royal mistress for twenty years. Howard’s lineage was more distinguished than either Clayton or

Cowper. Her father was the Baronet John Hobart of Blicking, and her mother had been an heiress; her step great-grandmother, the Countess of Suffolk, assumed responsibility for her

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upbringing after her parents’ early death. Despite these connections, and a small personal fortune of her own, she was forced to acquiesce to an early marriage of convenience with a younger son of the , and rapidly came to regret her guardians’ choice of a marriage partner.

Charles Howard was a spendthrift, profligate and alcoholic man, and Henrietta Howard found the circumstances of her early marital life excessively degrading. After a succession of misfortunes exacerbated by the abusive conduct of her husband, she persuaded him in 1713 to accompany her to Hanover, where she successfully campaigned for employment at court.

After the death of Queen Anne, Howard returned to England in the suite of Caroline of

Ansbach, and formed an integral part of the circle of men and women who surrounded the Prince and Princess of Wales (as Caroline and her husband George were now known). She was canny enough to remain by George and Caroline’s side during their estrangement from the King, who forbade his court from associating with his son and daughter-in-law. Many courtiers abandoned the royal couple during this period, but Howard’s loyalty was publicly demonstrated by her close attendance to their needs, and Howard’s position of prominence was consolidated after she entered into a sexual relationship with the Prince – a relationship that had the tacit approbation of

Caroline herself. After the death of her estranged husband, Howard was eventually promoted from Woman of the Bedchamber to the top position of Mistress of the Robes.

Howard’s unique role at court, and her day-to-day proximity to the inner workings of the

Royal Household, meant that she was extraordinarily well-connected, and she was also known as a literate, convivial woman whose friendship was avidly sought and maintained by many other aristocrats. She also carefully preserved many letters written to her from other Ladies-in-

Waiting, and I have found it a valuable exercise to compare her surviving epistolarly correspondence with that of her professional ‘rival’, Charlotte Clayton.

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My fourth case study is Mary (Lepell) Hervey, from 1715 to 1720, and from 1723 known as Baroness Hervey of Ickworth. The youngest member of the early circle of court appointees, Mary Lepell was the daughter of a Danish-born nobleman who had arrived in

England as a member of Queen Anne’s husband’s household. He remained in England after

Prince George’s death as an active, serving member of the armed forces, and married Mary

Brooke, a Suffolk heiress who had served as a Maid of Honour at the court during her youth.

Through her father’s close connection with the Duke of Marlborough, and her mother’s court experience, in February of 1715 Mary Lepell was appointed as one of Caroline of Ansbach’s

Maids of Honour. She was about fifteen years of age at the time, and became an integral, even vital part of the learned circle of men and women who surrounded her royal employer. She was thus educated, at a very formative time in her life, in court circles, under the direct tutelage not only of the then-Princess of Wales, but also of other senior female members of Caroline’s household, including Cowper, Clayton and Howard, with whom she retained life-long ties of friendship.

Mary Lepell’s marriage in 1720 to John Hervey, younger son of another Lady-in-

Waiting, the Countess of Bristol, had to be kept secret for many months, in order to allow the new couple to continue to draw on her quarterly-paid salary. Maids of Honour were paid roughly

200 pounds per annum for their attendance while Caroline was Princess of Wales, and 300 after she was Queen. After her husband’s half-brother Carr Hervey died in 1723, the couple were granted the use of the courtesy title Lord and Lady Hervey, marking Lord John Hervey’s new status as the heir presumptive to the Earldom of Bristol. Lady Hervey is known to eighteenth- century cultural history as an intellectual who retained close links with the court over the course

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of her long and eventful life. Her life history and cultural work figure prominently in this thesis.8

To best understand the complexities of their life histories, and the oft-overlooked cultural role played by these early eighteenth-century Ladies-in-Waiting, I consulted a variety of archival sources that held material of relevance to the study of these specific individuals. These included original epistolary manuscripts at the British Library in London, the Dorset Research Center in

Dorchester, the Suffolk Record Office in Bury St. Edmunds, the Norfolk Record Office in

Norwich, the collection of the National Library of Scotland, and the excellent archival holdings of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, in Farmington, Connecticut. By comparing these archival sources against each other, I seek to recuperate the cultural work of these four selected case studies, interrogating the cultural role of the Lady-in-Waiting at the early Georgian court, and using the artists, artistic themes and iconographies referenced in their circle’s letters as a critical tool to explore issues of cultural hybridity, dissident sexuality and Francophilia in early eighteenth-century British visual art and culture.

The daunting obstacles to literacy that faced many aristocratic women in Tudor England were no longer common in the early Georgian period. With the Stuarts came new elite social traditions, including the privileging of female intellectualism through salonnière culture, or the literary gatherings held in at the houses of French elite women, which combined the disparate worlds of aristocratic and literary circles through the mediation and arbitration of leading hostesses. This tradition was known at the English court, as it was more widely throughout

Europe: George II’s grandmother , for example, encouraged the society of learned men and women at her summer palace of Herrenhausen. Caroline of Ansbach continued that tradition in England by the political and literary social events she held at Leicester House

8 The Institute of Historical Research, ‘Household of Princess Caroline 1714-27’, online @ http://www.history.ac.uk/publications/office/caroline#maid [accessed 27 March 2011]

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during her period of ‘exile’ from the court (1717 – 1720), and later in life she similarly stimulated intellectual activity by her active, personal interest in the theatre, literature and arts.

Henrietta Howard cultivated a similarly salon-inspired atmosphere at Marble Hill, and one of her surviving letters from Lady Hervey contains a long, satirical imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, satirizing famous people at court in emulation of the satirical games played by the salon hostesses. This letter is the focus of extensive investigation in the last half of this thesis. I will argue that it demonstrates how Hervey and Howard used art education, modes of looking and political satire to create spaces for autonomous intellectual activity. The letter also shows how knowledge of sexual scandals, and a remarkably frank discussion of sexuality, was communicated through allusion to specific works of visual art. These were used for propaganda purposes, and my analysis therefore demonstrates of how references to art, sex and politics in this imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ were used as socially subversive critical tools.

Many if not all of the women under discussion in this thesis had access to extensive libraries, read voraciously, and were in regular conversation with the best minds, female and male, of their day. The surviving writings of these four women reveal an exquisitely developed aesthetic sensibility shared by each individual, a sensibility capable of political activism, emotional import, and cultural refinement. Ladies-in-Waiting, especially in this period, were not, as they are often construed to be in today’s film and fiction, frivolous or trifling women. Despite working within the masculinist, patriarchal environment of the court, many female courtiers found ways of making that environment exceedingly rewarding, both financially and personally.

These are four individuals who also thought deeply about religion, politics, paintings and literature. All four women are also each associated with career service with Caroline while she was still Princess of Wales (from 1714 – 1727). They each undoubtedly knew each other well,

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formed strong emotional bonds, and were linked by their intellectual tastes.

With the exception of Henrietta Howard, each of the four individuals discussed in this thesis have received comparatively little scholarly attention, in contrast to the life histories and cultural work of some of Caroline’s employees who were later additions to the Royal Household.

These include Dorothy Boyle, Countess of Burlington, an amateur painter whose husband was a lead figure in the Palladian revival movement, Henrietta Fermor, Countess of Pomfret, a classical scholar whose love of learning was mocked by , and Frances Seymour, Countess of Hartford, whose correspondence with Lady Pomfret was published in 1805.9 Each of these figures are the subject of a few rare journal articles and scholarly monographs, mostly in literary and religious history, but the same is not true for the earlier circle of appointees, despite their many talents and high social profile at court.10 Henrietta Howard, as the recognized mistress of the King, is of course the best-known of all Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting, and her house at

Marble Hill is still a well-known tourist attraction in the Richmond- area of greater

London.

Letters and their Uses

Writings by Ladies-in-Waiting about art, visual culture and aesthetics are important because they illuminate the shared intellectual world of the early Georgian court at a crucial time of social and cultural transition, loosely associated with the switch from ‘Augustan’ Baroque to the English

Rococo. Aristocratic women, who competed with each other to attain careers at court, were key participants in these processes of cultural change. Their sartorial choices influenced fashion and

9 Frances Seymour and Louisa Fermor, Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hartford, (afterwards Duchess of Somerset,) and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret, between the years 1738 and 1741, ed. by Charles Harding Firth, 3 vols (London: I. Gold, 1805). 10 See S. Jenkins, ‘Lady Burlington at court’, in Lord Burlington: the Man and his Politics, ed. by E. Corp (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), pp. 149 – 79; M. de Novellis, Pallas Unveil’d: the Life and Art of Lady Dorothy Savile, Countess of Burlington (1699–1758), exh cat. (Twickenham: Gallery, 1999); S. Houfe, ‘A Northamptonshire lady in France: the Travel Diaries of Lady Pomfret, 17 8 and 1749’, Northamptonshire Past and Present, 51 (1998), 33 – 44.

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subsequently the very look of the period itself, while their consumer habits and preferences greatly influenced trade and the economy. Most importantly, their discerning interest in diverse forms of visual art, such as textiles, porcelain and portraiture, seriously impacted the culture sphere, where Ladies-in-Waiting, at least while Queen Caroline lived, were acknowledged as leaders by men and women alike.11 Their letters, especially those deliberately designed to function as cultural criticism, are indicators of the social milieu of the time, and must be regarded as social documents.

I have found the most enriching, scholarly rigorous research on early eighteenth-century court women is most often located in work that is closely engaged with archival collections of primary source material from the period, such as Susan E. Whyman’s Sociability and Power in

Late Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Verneys 1660 – 1720. Whyman not only compares many extant correspondences against each other, but also computes how many times important subjects like matrimony, class membership or debt occur in her body of archival material.12 Couriered letters were the primary means of long-distance communication between members of all ranks of society, and this is especially true for elite individuals associated with the court. Ladies-in-Waiting spent much time travelling back and forth between London’s environs, where the court and Parliament could be found, and the provincial regions, where country houses anchored elite control of the agricultural and resource-rich regions of the

11 For an example of how important Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting were in the importation of Francophile culture to Britain, and the critical value of manuscript correspondences in retrieving their artistic influence, see the letters written by ballet dancer Marie Sallé to Sarah, Duchess of Richmond, discussed in Sarah McCleave, ‘Dancing at the English Opera: Marie Sallé's Letter to the Duchess of Richmond’, Dance Research, 17: 1 (Summer, 1999), 22-46 (pp. 24, 30, 31, 36). Frances Lennox, Duchess of Richmond (1705 – 1751), was a Lady of the Bedchamber to Caroline from 1724 (succeeding Mary Cowper) until the Queen’s death in 17 7. McCleave points out Lennox’s personal role in promoting contemporary French choreography on the London stage, which introduced a new, informal aspect of dance to England. See also Susan Au, Ballet and Modern Dance (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), p. 32. 12 Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Verneys 1660 - 1720 (: , 1999), pp. 125 – 127, 183 – 187.

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hinterland.

Letters provided a direct method of communication and were employed for a wide variety of functions, including financial transactions, instructions for the care of children and other family members, the announcement of deaths, births, and marriages, and, most importantly for this study, the exchange of intellectual ideas associated with sexuality and visual art. Letters allowed for a clear, concrete and tangible assertion of individual identity, with which the writer could use her own voice. Especially among noblewomen, letters were a form of collective social knowledge, in that they were frequently (almost always, in the case of interchanges outside the direct family unit) designed to be read by a group. Indeed, there are many indications that the court letter was thought of almost as collective property. For example, in February of 1733,

Betty Germaine, who had been a Lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne in her youth, received a letter from the well-known author , Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, concerning Swift’s grievances against Howard.13 Swift and the poet were encouraged by Howard, who highly regarded their talent, but her failure to procure them lucrative positions within the royal household had enraged both men. Germaine makes it clear in her reply to Swift that letters from mutual acquaintances were most commonly read together in company. Of his inflammatory letter, Germaine writes that

It was brought to me while at dinner, that very lady sitting close to me whom you seem to think such an absolute courtier [Henrietta Howard]. She knew your hand, and inquired much after you as she always does; but I, finding her name frequently mentioned, not with that kindness I am sure she deserves, put it into my pocket with silence and surprise.14

13 Lady Betty (Berkeley) Germaine (1689 – 1769), Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin (1667 – 1745). 14 Lady Betty Germaine to Jonathan Swift, Letter of 8 February 1732/3, in Jonathan Swift, ‘Epistolary Correspondence’, The Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. by Thomas Roscoe, 2 vols (London: George Bell, 1880), I, p. 696; see also The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation of British and American Subjects, ed. by Justin Winke and Richard Kenin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 393.

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Clearly, Howard had expected to be able to read over the letter with Germaine. The shared enjoyment of such letters was a highlight in the lives of the intellectually sophisticated women who had careers at the English court. Germaine’s spirited response to Swift in defense of

Howard underscores the networks of intense personal friendship and loyalty that bound elite women together, as it does the public, collective nature of court letters at this time.

The material aspect of letters is at once the most valuable and the most detrimental aspect of working in the archive with original epistolary material.15 While letters are invaluable primary documents that can give vivid glimpses of early eighteenth-century social life, many aspects of that life – especially the private, the emotional, and above all the sexual – were either deliberately elided or outright suppressed.16 Economic documents, for example, are preserved at a rate far and above private correspondences. This is most stridently reflected in terms of gender.

Men’s letters, especially the correspondences of political or literary figures, were far more likely to be cherished and curated, preserved away within the vast libraries of private collections and eventually transferred into the care of state-funded archives, than were women’s writings.

Historian Katherine Glover has commented on the comparative lack of available primary source

15 For some of the methodological problems attendant on using primary source records from the eighteenth-century that are couched in a journalistic format, and on the remarkable lack of scholarly interest in domestic diaries, see Philip Woodfine, ‘ “Nothing but Dust and the Most Minute Particles”: Historians and the Evidence of Journals and Diaries,’ in Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Journal, ed. by Dan Dolls and Jessica Munns (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 185 – 210 (p. 200). Woodfine points out the absolute necessity, when reading the letters of the early Hanoverian oligarchy, for comparison between a wide range of related documents, preferably, if at all possible, comparing records of the same event that were kept by different people. See also Dan Doll’s ‘ “Like Trying to Fit a Sponge into a Matchbox”: 20th Century Editing of Eighteenth-Century Journals,’ in Idem, pp. 211 – 228, and Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form, 1660 – 1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 13, 14, 18, 24, who amusingly notes that ‘in contrast with literary scholars, professional historians have always known what to do with diurnal forms. They harvest diaries, newspapers, and periodical essays for data’. 16 See Mary McAlpin, Gender, Authenticity, and the Missive Letter in eighteenth-century France : Marie-Anne de La Tour, Rousseau’s real-life Julie (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 39, 41, 83, 91; Philip Woodfine, ‘ “Nothing but Dust and the Most Minute Particles”: Historians and the Evidence of Journals and Diaries,’ in Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Journal, ed. by Dan Dolls and Jessica Munns (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 185 – 210 (p. 200) and Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form, 1660 – 1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See also Whyman, Sociability and Power, p. 9.

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material for even elite eighteenth-century women, citing as a poignant example the case of

Robert Adam, who destroyed as ‘irrelevant’ all letters from his mothers and sisters that did not specifically deal with ‘Business or importance’.17 While recent decades have seen great strides made in the re-evaluation of all aspects of women’s cultural production, including letter writing, some authors, such as James Rosenheim, simply acknowledge the dearth of materials from which to work and concentrate on those largely male-oriented letters they do have.18

In the case of a comparatively fragile medium like paper, letters are all too prone to both deliberate and inadvertent destruction. Country houses, heated and lit by a multiplicity of hearths, candles and stoves, were alarmingly susceptible to fire. Even if letters from elite women were curated and safely put away in libraries, so many houses, and their contents, have literally gone up in smoke that there are huge absences in the extant corpus of relevant primary material.

It is a testament to the value of letters, then and now, that sometimes such material was saved before many more costly items. Indeed, in April of 1745, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing to her old friend Henrietta, Countess of Oxford from the southern resort city of Avignon, France, reports that ‘my daughter wrote me word the last post, that Thoresby is utterly destroyed by fire;

17 James M. Rosenheim, The Townshends of Raynham: Nobility in Transition in Restoration and early Hanoverian England (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). For the critical reappraisal of women’s letters, see the anthologies Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-Writing, 1750 – 2000, ed. by Caroline Bland and Marie Cross (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-writers, 1600 – 1945, ed. by Rebecca Earle (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1999); and Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, ed. by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999). See also Katherine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), p. 19. 18 In stressing the importance of ‘reclaiming’ deliberately suppressed or ignored histories, Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that ‘subaltern pasts are like stubborn knots that stand out and break up the otherwise evenly woven surface of the fabric’, illustrating the necessity for the academic community to ‘be imaginative and creative both in their research and their narrative strategies. How do you write the histories of suppressed groups?’ Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 98. I respect Gayatri Spivak’s initial postulation of the subaltern, but I reject her limitation of the subaltern to the narrow definition expressed in her lecture ‘The Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work’, and feel that it is possible for an individual, at least in the eighteenth century, to be both colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, patriarch and queer dissident. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work’, Voices (University of Southern California, Santa Barbara Humanities Lecture Series, Sept., 2004), @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZHH4ALRFHw., accessed May, 2009. I am grateful to Andrew Pump for bringing this lecture to my attention.

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I cannot help but feel some concern, and at the same time making many reflections on the vanity of all worldly possessions’.19 In the footnote, the editor points out that Thoresby, her childhood home, seat of the Dukes of Kingston, had burnt to the ground on 4 April of that year, and that

‘nothing was saved but the writings, plate, and a little of the furniture’.20 Thoresby, the luxurious showpiece used by her father to display the family’s political prestige, was the setting for much opulence. Thoresby’s destruction was no doubt poignant, but while the servants seem to have been directed to save the intellectual property of the great manor before its physical contents, a similar preoccupation was not present or possible in many other fires of note, which destroyed much valuable history.

Letters, as objects that survived far beyond the life cycles of their writers and recipients, were subject to the moral values of subsequent curators. Much of my work in this thesis has been to examine how processes of historiography have coloured the memory, and indeed the reputation, of Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting and the often unusual artists that they patronized.

The single most obvious problem in dealing with early eighteenth-century letters is in how they are presented, organized and talked about by later nineteenth-century commentators. Victorian scholars of the period, such as the politician John Wilson Croker, the biographer Katherine

Thomson, and Magdalen College head Martin Joseph Routh, were more temporally proximate to the period than twentieth-century writers, and thus had access to more immediate sources, including oral history and other anecdotal stories, than did their twentieth-century heirs. These critics lived in a world that was conditioned by altogether different sexual and moral possibilities than their historical subjects, and their writing on early eighteenth-century court life often

19 Letter from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Henrietta Harley Cavendish, 13 April 1745, in Mary Wortley Montagu, The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. by Louisa Stuart and James Archibald Stuart- Wortley-Mackenzie (London: George Bell, 1887), p. 147. 20 Ibid., p. 147.

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reflects their social prejudices. Croker, for example, ignores references to dissident sexuality by

Mary Hervey, Thomson expresses a shared sense of ‘disgust and horror’ at the memory of Lord

John Hervey’s presumed homosexuality, and Routh was determined to prove Bishop Gilbert

Burnet ‘a liar’.21

Sexual freedom, political corruption and a host of religious concerns were all highly sensitive issues for Victorian historians, many of whom, when working with primary source materials from the early Georgian court, took great care not to offend or antagonize the descendants of their subjects, in whose possession the archival letters remained. Some of these descendants themselves acted as curators and scholars, and in many cases letters dealing with sexual matters were quite deliberately destroyed. For example, both Giles, 6th and Frederick, 1st Marquess of Bristol destroyed letters from their ancestors Lord John Hervey and Stephen Fox, likely because the correspondence referred too overtly to sexuality. 22 Both

Hervey and Fox are also on record as being very concerned with the paper trail of their relationship, and to have deliberately consigned potentially damaging letters to the fire.23 By comparing surviving original manuscripts to their published versions, it quickly becomes very clear that a substantial amount of politically, sexually or religiously contentious material was destroyed at the moment of reception, or excised by later editors uneasy about their contents. My method, one adopted by many students of epistolary correspondence, such as Whyman, Glover,

21 Katherine Thomson, Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon (London: Colburn, 1847), p. 95; John William Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1889), I, p. 63. 22 See Rictor Norton, ‘John, Lord Hervey: The Third Sex’, The Great Queens of History, updated 3 March 2012 http://rictornorton.co.uk/hervey.htm [15 April 2012]. See also George Haggerty, ‘Literature and Homosexuality in the late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis’, Studies in the Novel, 18: 4 (1986), 167 – 177. 23 Lord John Hervey to Stephen Fox, January 11, 1727/8, Hervey MSS 941/47/4 (Bury St. Edmunds: Suffolk Record Office), f. 78; see also Lord John Hervey to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter from St. James dated November 2, 1739, Hervey MSS 941/47/2, f. 18. References to homosexuality were also expurgated from memoir manuscripts: see Pat Rogers, ‘Dancing Senator’, London Review of Books, 7:19 (7 November 1985), 14, 15 (p.14), referring to Horace Walpole’s comments on the sexuality of George Stone, Archbishop of Armagh, and Lord George Sackville, which were ‘physically removed from the manuscript, either by Lord Holland or the Sixth ’.

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Woodfine, Sherman, Hervey’s biographer Robert Halsband, and epistolary historian Minna

Nevala, has been to at all times compare letters on the same subject, in the same archival collection, closely against one another: the existence of missing pages, or letters referred to by both correspondents but not present in the archival corpus, are by these means sometimes brought to light.24 Another method is to compare letters on the same subject in different collections, particularly if they are written by separate individuals.

Of course, often these options are simply not available, so how do we address gaps in the historical record? How do we take a corpus of fragmentary written collections and get the best possible sense of the individuals who lived in this time – the specificity, the preciousness of their lives, the severity of the challenges they faced, the innovation and creativity with which they responded? Doing this kind of research is important because it demonstrates the unexpected weirdness of history, the strangeness, uniqueness and complexity of lives lived in a vastly different time. The ability to demonstrate this kind of diversity in human life is politically important in our own time, because it pinpoints the historical existence of socio-structures of sexuality and morality vastly different to the ideals that are propagated as ‘normal’. The historical existence of queerness, of documented same-sex eroticism between specific individuals, or of fluidity in gender, of roles of gender that are mutable and liminal, are for example all important historical facts that need to be recorded and preserved for the next generation. So, in a more contentious vein, are disparate attitudes to heterosexual monogamy and fidelity within marriage. The social world of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century

24 Whyman, Sociability and Power; Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society; Woodfine, ‘Nothing but dust’; Sherman, Telling Time; Haggerty, ‘Literature and Homosexuality’, Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey, Eighteenth- Century Courtier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); Minna Nevala, ‘Inside and Out’: Forms of Address in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Letters’, in Letter Writing, ed. by Terttu Nevalainen and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen ( : Benjamin, 2006), pp. 89 – 114, esp. p. 97. For an example of comparative methodologies as applied to the history of collections, see Clare Haynes, Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660- 1760 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), p. 77.

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British aristocracy was sexually diverse, with a near-institutionalized culture of male infidelity challenging the heteronormative monogamy embedded in law and religious tradition. Women were openly held to a double standard of sexual morality, but as the lives and letters of my case studies suggest, there was a surprising degree of (hidden) female sexual freedom in certain court circles. Queen Caroline and her female attendants used Francophile modes of visual culture, literature and education to challenge and subvert these patriarchal social norms. Examples of lived human experiences recorded in their letters demonstrate the variation present within human behavior across time and space.25

Methodologies and Literature Review: Court Memoirs

My method has been to compare archival material, mostly correspondences of early eighteenth- century Ladies-in-Waiting, against roughly eight different strands of research, both historical and art-historical. The most immediately valuable exercise, when confronting a particularly fascinating or challenging archival document, has been to situate it within a context of court epistolary literature as a whole, i.e. to look for its place within valuable, first-hand accounts of the early Georgian court published as memoirs or diaries. While court memoirs have a long tradition, they are subjective to the author’s individual bias, the confusion of recollecting incidents that took place long in the past, and the editorial process, which removes the author from the immediacy and passion that can be present in a rapidly-composed letter.

Court memoirs do have value in that they often deliberately introduce historical figures to the reader, consciously referencing an individual’s place in society. Lord John Hervey, in his

Memoirs of the Reign of George II, for example refers to Thomas, 1st Viscount Gage as a

25 The frankest discussion I have yet seen on sexualities in Whig society is Leslie George Mitchell, The Whig World : 1760 – 1837 (London ; New York : Hambledon Continuum, 2007), pp. 43 – 49. Mitchell, like so many other historians of the eighteenth century, overlooks the development of this climate of sexual tolerance among the Whig grandee families, presenting it as a full-blown phenomenon without any explanation of its genesis among the courtiers of Lady Hervey’s generation.

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‘petulant, silly, meddling, profligate fellow’, pointing out that Gage, whose peerage was Irish, was trying to jump precedence by threatening to refuse to walk behind English peers at the 1734 wedding of the , Anne.26 Hervey’s memoirs illustrate how the rituals of court ceremonial presented the hierarchical world of the court through performance and procession.

Other memoirs are less immediately concerned with the world of the court, and present a more private view of day-to-day life, such as the diary of John, 1st Earl of Egmont. Egmont’s political allegiances were very different than Hervey’s, and his account of his circle of acquaintances, and relation of political events, can provide a contrasting view of an individual’s character, such as

Frederick, , despised by Hervey, but highly respected by Egmont.27 The most famous memoirist of the time is Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, whose Memoirs of the last

Ten Years of George II was first published in 1822.28 Walpole’s ‘acumen and credibility as a witness’ have been questioned by some critics, with one particularly scathing reviewer calling him ‘a biased, petulant and self-indulgent commentator’, but his memoirs still remain a fecund site of scholarly inquiry, especially when used in conjunction with the forty-three volumes of his correspondence, edited by a team of historians from the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale

University.29 Both works discuss hundreds of individuals who lived and worked at the British court, including descriptions of their persons, character and political allegiances.

I have compared these posthumously published memoirs with correspondences from

26 John Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of George II, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1848), I, p. 307. 27 John Perceval, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of Viscount Percival, afterwards First Earl of Egmont, 3 vols, ed. by Historical Manuscripts Commission (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1879 – 1923), III, entry for 22 December 1741, p. 233. 28 Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the last Ten Years of George II, ed. by Henry Richard Vassall Holland (London: John Murray, 1882). 29 Martin Kallich, ‘Memoirs of King George II by Horace Walpole’ and John Brooke, ‘The Strawberry Hill Set: Horace Walpole and His Circle. by Brian Fothergill’, Eighteenth-Century Studies , 20: 4 (Summer, 1987), 509 - 514 (p. 514); Frank O’Gorman, ‘Horace Walpole: Memoirs of King George II’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 18: 2 (Summer, 1986), 299-301 (p. 299); Horace Walpole, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. by W.S. Lewis and the Lewis Walpole Library (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1937), online @ http://images.library.yale.edu/hwcorrespondence/ [accessed 6 June 2012]

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political and literary figures associated with the court. While the letters, , and account- books of many (male) politicians have been issued as historical documents, those of three individuals stand out as exemplary. The Letters of Lord Chesterfield (1777), referring to the voluminous instructions of Philip, 4th Earl of Chesterfield to his illegitimate son, is a testament to the unique tone and tenor of Georgian court society.30 Samuel Shellabarger asserted that the

Letters, written between 1737 – 1768, are ‘an exquisite flower of civilisation, and depend more on the persistence of culture than upon the element of time’, highlighting the value of

Chesterfield’s correspondence in retrieving the social norms, manners and morals of elite behaviour.31 While thus valuable, the bulk of Chesterfield’s material deals with society in mid- century, and I have found it useful to juxtapose Chesterfield’s Letters with the Private and

Original Correspondence of Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury (issued 1821), and Jonathan

Swift’s Journal to Stella, both of which deal with societal developments in the first few decades of the eighteenth century. 32 Lord Shrewsbury’s letters, in particular, are instructive in that they cover the period of the Hanoverian succession, and well illustrate the complex political situation that attended the switch of dynasties, as well as the intercultural, transnational identity cultivated by the Duke of Shrewsbury and other educated, well-travelled aristocrats. Swift’s Journal to

Stella, written 1710 – 171 , is less politically informative than Hervey, Walpole or Shrewsbury’s writing, but his prose style is far more personal, while his records of social life are considerably

30 Philip Dormer Stanhope, Miscellaneous Works of the Late Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield : Consisting of Letters to his Friends, Never Before Printed…, ed. by Matthew Maty and J. O. Justamond (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1777). 31 Samuel Shellabarger, Lord Chesterfield and his World (Boston: Little, Brown and Co. and Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1951), p. 3. 32 Charles Talbot, Private and Original Correspondence of Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, with King William, the Leaders of the Whig party…, ed. by William Coxe (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821); Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 2 vols, ed. by Harold Herbert Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948). See also Report on the Manuscripts of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury, vol. 1, ed. by Sir Ralph Winwood et al. (London: Eyre and Spotiswoode, 1899); Charles Hanbury Williams, The Works of the Right Honourable Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, vol. 1, ed. by Horace Walpole and Edward Jeffery (London: Edward Jeffrey, 1822).

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more vivid. Many of Swift’s friends went on to have careers at the Georgian court, and so the

Journal to Stella has also been useful in retracing their early lives.

In this thesis I make recurring use of published letters, memoirs and diaries written by women. My most informative sources include the diary of Mary Cowper, issued by a descendant of the family in 1864, covering the period 1714 – 1721, with some striking gaps. Cowper herself burnt much of her manuscript relating to the breach between George I and his son in 1722, during a Jacobite crisis, and her case illustrates the issues one faces in dealing with court women’s letters.33 The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is a corpus of material similarly subject to destruction: Wortley Montagu’s daughter, Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute, burnt much of her mother’s diary in 1794, while other manuscripts out of the collection of the family were destroyed later as a concession to Wortley Montagu’s Victorian descendants. The surviving body of work, issued in a scholarly version by Robert Halsband in 1965-7, is still a major source of scholarly inquiry.34

My main focus, however, has been on the published correspondences of women who, unlike Montagu, held direct court appointments under Queen Caroline. The letters of Frances,

Countess of Hartford, and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret, both of whom did hold office, were issued in 1805.35 While informative, their writings were written after the death of the

Queen, and are mostly concerned with travel literature. The Letters of Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey, issued by Croker in 1821, is likewise composed of material written after the Queen’s death, but it

33 Mary Cowper, Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper; Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales, 1714 - 1720 , ed. by Charles Spencer Cowper (London: John Murray, 1865). See Anne Kugler, ‘Cowper, Mary, Countess Cowper (1685–1724)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press: 2004), online @ http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/6506 [accessed February 2010] 34 Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vols, ed. by Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965 – 1967). See also Emily Symonds, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Time (London: Methuen, 1907), pp. 534 – 539. 35 Frances Seymour and Louisa Fermor, Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hartford, (afterwards Duchess of Somerset,) and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret, Between the Years 1738 and 1741, 3 vols, ed. by Charles Harding Firth (London: I. Gold, 1805).

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does add a valuable counterpart to the manuscripts written by Lady Hervey during Caroline’s lifetime. Volumes of great merit for their value in understanding such archival material also include Letters to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, and her Second Husband the Hon.

George Berkeley, from 1712 to 1767, issued in 2 volumes, again by Croker, in 1824; and

Katherine Thomson, Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon: Mistress of the Robes to Queen Caroline, issued in 1847, and savaged in a review of the same year by Croker himself, who pointed out the subject, Charlotte Clayton, was not a Viscountess and never held the title of Mistress of the

Robes (although Clayton certainly acted as favourite Lady-in-waiting of Queen Caroline).36 In all three cases, reference to the original manuscript proved very useful, as Croker’s silences,

Thomson’s outright falsities, and the prejudices of both editors together occlude much of interest. The published volumes, however, do in all three cases reproduce original material held in the archive. Together with some court poetry – especially that of (1688 –

1744), whose compiled poetry was issued in eleven volumes by John Butt from 1939 – 1969, they represent a thorough overview of the individuals and events that shaped early Georgian society.37

Biographies

Such an extensive overview needs interpretation, and my second method was to briefly compare archival letters, and published accounts of letters, with biographies and general court histories.

Biographies and court histories are notoriously prone to trivialization, largely for commercial concerns, as scholars attempt, with varying degrees of success, to tell the complex story of

36 Mary Hervey, Letters of Mary Lepel [sic] Lady Hervey. With a memoir and illustrative notes, ed. by John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1821); Henrietta Howard, Letters to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, and her Second Husband the Hon. George Berkeley, from 1712 to 1767(London: John Murray, 1824); Thomson, Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon. Eighteenth-century newspapers from time to time erroneously reported Clayton had been made Mistress of the Robes, largely because of Queen Caroline’s public affection for her most loyal assistant, but the Sundon baronetcy was never raised to the rank of Viscount, and Thomson’s error is indeed puzzling. 37 Alexander Pope, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 11 vols, ed. by John Butt et al. (London: 1939 – 1969).

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human lives for differing audiences in as easily assimilated format as possible. Some biographies, in contrast, are rich, emblematic tapestries displaying elegant, weighty writing of import – Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, though dealing with a later generation, is a worthy model for such writing. Foreman’s use of many different archives to retrieve letters of relevance, and her intensely personal, and yet rigorous style, is worthy of emulation. Above all, her sensitivity to the political influence that could be wielded by aristocratic women in quietly understated ways, such as hospitality, verse-writing, and by acting as intermediaries, is a skill not respected or understood by some prominent contemporary (male) historians: John Ashton Cannon’s dismissive review of the book, for example, uses language that is offensively gendered.38

One model for a biography of a British Lady-in-Waiting that functions as serious art history, despite its regrettable title, is Carola Hicks, Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of an earlier Lady Diana Spencer, which presents a thorough overview of the political and artistic career of Diana Beauclerk, courtier to a later queen (George III’s wife, Charlotte of

Mecklenburg-Strelitz). Hicks intersperses her analysis of selected epistolary material with a thoughtful account of shifts in women’s art education, technical advances (such as the commercial availability of watercolour) in artistic practice, and the critical reception of women’s

‘amateur’ art production during the period. As with Foreman’s book, her study is mostly limited

38 Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (2nd edn, New York: Random House, 2000); John Cannon, ‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman’, The English Historical Review, 114: 458 (Sep., 1999), 1002-100 . Cannon writes that ‘Georgiana is exhibited, in true romantic style, as a bruised flower… if we must hunt for female pioneers, perhaps we should hail Mary Wollstonecraft, Caroline Norton, Emily Davies and Josephine Butler, who did something, rather than Georgiana, who wrote charming verses’. This comment, I argue, exemplifies the ongoing historiographic rejection of the social, political and cultural contributions of eighteenth-century aristocratic women. For a volume that deals with an earlier figure, and is similarly vigorous, sensitive and comprehensive, see Katie Whitakker, Mad Madge : the Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by her Pen (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

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to the middle to late years of the century.39 Tracy Borman’s Henrietta Howard: King’s Mistress,

Queen’s Servant, from 2007, is a rare example of a book that interweaves art criticism with biography for a figure of primary importance to this thesis.40 Borman is sensitive to Howard’s cultural patronage, highlighting the difficulties of Howard’s position and how her purchases of porcelain, paintings and furniture helped Howard to craft a distinct artistic persona at Marble

Hill. 41 An older biography, Lady Suffolk and Her Circle, is justly called by one Pope scholar

‘informative, but sketchy’.42

As is evident from the above review of biographical literature, a serious lacuna exists in the relevant scholarship, where comprehensive, theoretically challenging, thought-provoking biographies of Caroline herself, let alone her Ladies-in-Waiting, are lacking. Canadian art historian Catherine Tite’s volume Portraiture, Dynasty and Power: Art Patronage in

Hanoverian Britain, 1714-1759 makes considerable efforts to highlight this lacuna, urging for more research to be done not only on Caroline but also on the artistic patronage of her youngest daughters. A decade-long gap separated the Queen’s three eldest daughters from her last two children, Mary and Louisa, and Tite points out that each younger princesses married into a continental royal family, became a patron of music, art and theatre, and was encouraged in her intellectual interests by her mother.43 Andrew Hanham’s essay on the ‘Anglicisation’ of the

Hanoverian royal house demonstrates how genealogy, gender and intellect made the young

39 Carola Hicks, Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of an earlier Lady Diana Spencer (London: Macmillan, 2001, repr. New ork: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). 40 Halsband, Lord Hervey is a major source of inquiry for the life of Lady Hervey, but makes little comment on her cultural patronage, art writing or portraits. 41 Tracy Borman, Henrietta Howard: King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant ( London: Jonathan Cape, 2007). 42 Lewis Melville, Lady Suffolk and her Circle (London: Hutchinson, 1924). See also Pat Rogers, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 161, and Julius Bryant, Mrs. Howard: A Woman of Reason (London: English Heritage for Marble Hill House, 1988). 43 Mary (1773 – 1772) became Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel; Louisa (1724 – 1751) became Queen of Denmark, dying tragically at the age of twenty-seven. Catherine Tite, Portraiture, Dynasty and Power: Art Patronage in Hanoverian Britain, 1714-1759 (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2010). See also Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy : Politics and Culture, 1714-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 91.

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Caroline one of the most sought-after European royal marriage partners. The Queen’s home state in Germany was economically insignificant, but her matrilineal family connections, and her own early, well-publicized intellectual interests, made her much prized. 44 There are several journal articles that do provide specific examples of Caroline’s cultural patronage and intellectual fortitude, such as Judith Coulton, ‘Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as Political

Propaganda’ and Gregory Brown, ‘Leibniz’s Endgame and the Ladies of the Court’.45 Caroline corresponded extensively with the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and introduced new modes of painting, music and landscape design to England. In addition, she was bold in her patronage of unorthodox cultural figures, such as the ‘peasant’ poet, former agricultural labourer

Stephen Duck, who she installed at her purpose-built Gothic library in Richmond’s gardens,

‘Merlin’s Cave’. Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting were well placed to benefit from this atmosphere.46

Social and Political History

Personal correspondences, where individuals often exchange opinions on what is current, new and contemporary, often refer to political or social developments that have been obscured by the

44 John Van der Kiste, King George II and Queen Caroline (Stroud, Gloucester : Sutton Publishing, 1997); Andrew Hanham, ‘Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach and the ‘Anglicisation’ of the ’, in Queenship in Europe 1600 – 1815: The Role of the Consort, ed. by Clarissa Campbell-Orr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 276 – 299. See also R. L. Arkell, Caroline of Ansbach (London: Oxford University Press, 1939); Jeremy Black, ‘George II reconsidered: a consideration of George's influence in the conduct of foreign policy, in the first years of his reign’, Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs, 35 (1982), 35–56; also Andrew Thompson, George II: King and Elector (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 45 Judith Coulton, ‘Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as Political Propaganda’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10: 1 (Autumn, 1976), 1 - 20; Gregory Brown,‘Leibniz’s Endgame and the Ladies of the Court’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 65: 1 (2004), 75 – 100; see also Emma Jay, ‘Queen Caroline’s Library and Its European Contents’, Book History, 9 (2006), 31 - 55; Domenico Bertoloni Meli,‘Caroline, Leibniz, and Clarke’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60: 3 (1999), 469 - 486; Michael I. Wilson, : Architect, Designer, Painter, Gardener, 1685-1748 (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 55. For an explanation of the offices of Ladies-in-waiting at the British court, albeit one that focuses on Queen Anne’s staff without any mention of their collective cultural patronage, see Frances Harris, ‘ “The Honourable Sisterhood”: Queen Anne’s Maids of Honour’, British Library Journal, 19: 2 (1993), 181 – 198 (esp. pp. 187 – 190). 46 Indeed, they collectively helped to construct it. Women selected by Caroline to be part of her staff almost invariably included individuals who had a reputation for literary tastes.

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passage of time. Studies that have been of value in understanding the day-by-day political and social evolution of eighteenth-century Europe include some controversial, if influential, writing.

Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage 1500 – 1800 (1977), a popular, if incendiary, volume, asserted Stone’s overt Marxism in his postulation that economic determinism shaped modern sentiment, and that romantic love and companionate marriage were developments of capitalist society. However Stone’s opinions have been read, his book does comment critically on the distinct attitudes to sexual morality held by early modern British people, while his numerous comparative case studies provide insight on a wide cross-section of British society.47

Long-cherished opinions about the supposedly ‘open’ nature of the social elite of the period were challenged, in a volume called ‘iconoclaustic’ by one reviewer, by John Ashton Cannon in

Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England. Cannon surveys the peerage and the new creations of the eighteenth century, pointing out that although British historiography often vaunts the permeable nature of the eighteenth-century peerage, ‘the traditional picture of continental exclusiveness may need to be modified’.48 Cannon also refers to the lack of serious critical discussion of the British nobility in twentieth-century historiography, which preferred, at least after the ‘70s, to reorient discourse towards the ‘dispossessed, the excluded… poachers, smugglers, rioters, unmarried mothers, anonymous letter-writers, wreckers and body-snatchers.

By a kind of historiographic fluke, the nobility – which, whether one likes them or not, did exercise some influence on events – managed to avoid analysis.’49 Studying the nobility then, as it does now, touched down on the fault-lines of contemporary democratic unease towards the

47 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage 1500 – 1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) 48 John Ashton Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), see pp. 8, 9. 49 Ibid., p. 5.

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historical reality of hereditary castes and their enormous social privilege.50

Religious matters are also frequently cited in the correspondence of Caroline’s intellectual Ladies-in-Waiting. In Tony Claydon’s Europe and the Making of England 1660 –

1760, the author sketches a vivid account of the trajectory of religious belief in early modern

England, using a wide range of scholarly material, from printed sermons and other ephemera to grave theological tomes written in Latin, to show how late seventeentth-century religious politics echoed the turbulence of the early Reformation. Claydon’s theoretical model is one that advocates for notions of transculturation, as opposed to acculturation, and for an increased knowledge of the structures of cooperation and mutually profitable interaction that were vital to the survival of the nascent nation-state in early eighteenth-century Europe. His entire analysis is a sensitive response to the need to acknowledge social hybridity, intercontinental political influence and religious reaction in any overview of British cultural historiography.51

Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 - 1837 is possibly the most contentious, and the most influential, social history of the eighteenth century to appear in the last twenty years, with many subsequent studies either violently agreeing or disagreeing with her insularist position. Colley relies heavily on visual and anecdotal sources to assert that ‘Britishness’ was an identity adopted by disparate ethnic and social classes as a pan-Protestant response to the

50 Henry Horwitz points out that, despite arguments to the contrary, few of even the wealthiest businessmen in eighteenth-century London outlaid the necessary capital investment in land, architecture and art to truly make them new nobility. See Henry Horwitz, ‘The Mess of the Middle Class Revisited: The Big Bourgeoisie of Augustan London’, Continuity and Change, 2 (1987), 263 – 296. Other works of significance include G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992); Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660-1770 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Nicolas Rogers, ‘Money, Marriage, Nobility: The Big Bourgeoisie of Hanoverian London’, Journal of Family History, 24: 1(1999), 19 – 4. For Cannon’s volume being called ‘iconoclastic’, see G. E. Mingay, ‘Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England by John Cannon’, The Economic History Review, 39:1 (Feb., 1986), 132-1 ; see also Roger Howell, Jr., ‘Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England by John Cannon’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History , 17: 3 (Winter, 1987), 660-661. 51 Jeremy Black, Britain as a Military Power 1688 – 1815 (London: UCL Press, 1999); Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England 1660 – 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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challenge of Catholic Europe, pointing to London’s role as Britain’s premier city, and the underpinning of landed privilege through economic investment in overseas trade, as defining factors of British nationalism.52 While Colley’s thesis is persuasive, she does have a tendency to oversimplify the evidence. For example, Lord John Hervey’s anti-Catholic poem of 1729, composed while he was touring Italy, is taken as corroboratory of the anti-French riots in Bristol of 1754, despite Hervey and his wife being two of the most notoriously ‘Frenchified’ aristocrats in all of Britain. In addition, Colley also makes a grave error when she characterizes the British court as ‘parasitic’ on the capital city instead of ‘independent’ of it. George II and his wife, daughters or mistresses might well need to attend public theatres in London instead of private court entertainments comparable to those at Versailles, but the royal patronage vested in the urban theatres helped assure their popularity, as well as their financial success. The relationship between court and town was symbiotic, not parasitic, and Colley’s republicanized view of eighteenth-century British social history is dangerously biased.53

All of these social and political volumes are of more general, rather than specific import to the subject of epistolary writing about art by Caroline’s female courtiers, though they are comprehensive tools with which to contrast and interrogate cultural knowledge. With the exception of Claydon’s book, they are also less avowedly concerned with issues of transnational cultural exchange than some of the literature coming from postcolonial historians of the eighteenth century.54 Nearly all the essays in Felicity Nussbaum’s edited anthology The Global

Eighteenth Century, for example, are models of how to write a different kind of history. Robert

52 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 - 1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For criticism of what has been perceived as Colley’s nationalist bias, see Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century British Patriotisms’, The Historical Journal, 39: 2 (Jun., 1996), 361-382 (p.363); Gerald Newman, ‘Nationalism Revisited’, Journal of British Studies , 35: 1 (Jan., 1996), 118-127 (pp. 123, 124). 53 Colley, Forging the Nation, pp. 199 – 201. 54 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1999).

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Batchelor’s ‘Concealing the Bounds: Imagining the British Nation Through China’ discusses the internalization of East Asian imagery by the British public, and Beth Fowkes Tobin’s ‘The

English Garden Conversation Piece in India’ traces the development of landscape painting and portraiture in colonial India. Both essays stress the hybrid, eclectic form of mid eighteenth- century British aesthetics, pointing out how the ruling elite adapted Asian decorative conventions for their own (imperial) use. Many of Caroline’s female courtiers show a similar interest in export porcelain, ‘new’ species of plants, printed Asian textiles, and other luxury goods imported from India, China and Japan. 55

Art and Cultural History

Visual art in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries in Britain was heavily influenced by innovative forms of culture earlier developed in France. Fête galante painting, characterized by informal eroticism, compositional asymmetry and a reduced sense of sitter scale, signaled a shift in popular taste that commemorates the transition between Baroque and

Rococo aesthetics.56 The Fête galante was a genre originally pioneered by Watteau, showing delicately-coloured scenes of outdoor aristocratic leisure, and named after the impromptu out-of- doors parties held by some French court nobles: Watteau therefore simply capitalized on an already-extant social trend, but brought his talent and creativity to its depiction and even celebration in visual media.

While continuing to be inspired by Greco-Roman precepts of ideal beauty and preferred narrative content, the new ‘modern’ artists in France embraced foreign (and especially East

Asian) decorative principles. Melissa Hyde’s canny recognition of the political and gendered

55 The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. by Felicity Nussbaum et al. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2003). 56 Patricia Crown, ‘British Rococo as Social and Political Style’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23: 3 (1990), 269 – 282. See also Thomas Crow, ‘Codes of Silence: Historical Interpretation and the art of Watteau’, Representations, 12 (1985), 2 – 14.

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meanings inherent in the decorative repertoire of the early French Rococo artists stresses this eclectic character of fête galante painting. For Hyde, the new style was a ‘cultural mode of being, thought and representation, rather than exclusively a formal idiom’, and she points to feminist art historian Eunice Lipton’s acknowledgement of the lack of narrative climaxes, schedules, or one-point perspectives that characterize the work of early French Rococo painters and designers such as Watteau, Audrain, Pater or the Audrans.57 Instead, these artists represent a multiplicity of smaller vignettes in poses of sensual interaction, small social or cultural enjoyment, with sexualized groups enjoying performances of music, dance, and poetry as a particular specialty. This lack of the overarching narrative structure that was such an integral component of more established forms of visual art, such as history painting or didactic religious icons, catered to the sophisticated tastes of a select group of the court aristocracy. These people resisted the ritualized formality of court ceremonial through social interactions that consisted of

‘impromptu performance, amateur theatre, dancing, masquerade’.58 Fête galante painting, in contrast to conversation-piece portraiture, took an aestheticized approach to sensual pleasure as a foundational attribute, leading to a concomitant interest in sexual allusion, tension and fantasy.59

In formal qualities, as in narrative content, such early French Rococo painting is characterized by Hyde as tending ‘towards the abstraction of natural forms in which sibilant (c +

57 Melissa Hyde, Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and his Critics (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2006), p. 11. Eunice Lipton, ‘Women, Pleasure and Painting (e.g. Boucher)’, Genders, 7 (Spring, 1990), 69 – 86 (p. 72). 58 Mary D. Sheriff, ‘Introduction: The Mystique of ’, in Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of his Time, ed. by Mary Sheriff (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2006) pp. 17 – 26 (p. 23). See also Mary Vidal, Watteau’s Painted Conversations: Art, Literature and Talk in Seventeenth and Eighteenth- Century France (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1992). 59 See René Démours, ’Les fêtes galantes chez Watteau et dans les Romans Contemporains’, Dix-Huitième Siècle, 3 (1971), 337 – 357; Oliver T. North, Watteau and the North: Studies in the Dutch and Flemish Baroque Influences on French Rococo Painting (New York: Garland, 1977), Donald Posner, Watteau’s A Lady at her Toilet (London: Viking Press, 197 ), and Idem., ‘Watteau’s ‘Reclining Nude’ and the ‘Remedy’ Theme’, Art Bulletin, 64 (March, 1982), 75 – 88, Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), Antoine Watteau: The Painter, his Age and Legend, ed. by François Moureau and Margaret Grasselli (Paris: Champion-Slatkine, 1987), and Julie-Anne Plax, Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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s shapes and spirals) predominate. Asymmetry and a rejection of linear perspective, or rationalized pictorial space’ are attributes identified by Hyde as characteristic of French Rococo art, and fête galante painting in particular. Hyde also uses gendering language to describe the feminization of this period by subsequent generations of cultural historiographers, highlighting how ‘Rococo painting also tends to prettiness – to a palette of light, sparkling colours where pinks, blues and greens predominate – and to opulent and copiously filled surfaces, all highly finished and detailed’.60 The horror vacui of the early French Rococo artists caught an answering nerve with aristocratic patrons across Europe, including in Germany and in England.

The sexual freedom of the nobles at Versailles, commemorated in the informal scenes of sexualized outdoor leisure and cultural refinement that characterized the fête galante, seems to have been at least a major and much-discussed part of the new genre’s allure. As Thomas

Kavanagh has written in his book Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the

New Epicureanism, ‘putting the viewer’s pleasure first set the stage… for the entire school and style we now refer to as the Rococo’.61 These characteristics of narrative and visual pleasure are also applicable to early British Rococo portraiture, such as the pioneering mode of conversation- piece portraits inaugurated at the British Court by Francophile émigré artists like Philippe

Mercier and Martin Maingaud.

While specific individuals are from time to time named by art critics as identifiable in the fête galante’s scenes of sexual and social fantasy, conversation-piece portraiture was by definition far more concerned with the public face of a sitter. The studied ‘informality’ of the

Mercier conversation pieces, for all that they overtly mimic fête galante painting, is a deliberate political performance of sophistication and taste. By utilizing the formal and narrative qualities

60 Hyde, Making Up the Rococo, p. 11. 61 Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 74.

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of the preferred painting style of the performance-minded court aristocracy at Versailles, ,

Hanover and elsewhere, courtly patrons outside France sought cultural solidarity with the

‘performance of pleasure’ enacted by these early Rococo aristocratic patrons. These newly informal, narratively-interactive and bright-hued British portraits on the French model were not as deliberately elegant or sexualized as were the allegorical scenes of the fête galante, but they were certainly informed by the new genre’s visual and iconographical preoccupations with a multiplicity of stories and sensory appeals.

Unlike the monolithic and static character of Baroque portraiture’s carefully contrived, overtly didactic relationship between sitter or subject and viewer, the new conversation-piece portraits took surprise, delight and whimsy as their leitmotif. Women are portrayed pouring tea, playing cards, picking flowers, or playing with children or pets, while men are normally seen with sporting or hunting accoutrements, scholarly accessories like books or pens, or indications of professional class. Conversation-piece portraits thus borrowed heavily from the fête galante’s insistence on spontaneity and unforced narrative content, but they also set up gendered and political roles for their sitters that were less fluid, and more fixed, than the sexual and social relationships often depicted in the fête galante. Marital roles, for example, are stressed to a far higher degree in British conversation-piece portraits than in the idealized arcadian spaces of early French Rococo genre painting, while references to specific class and occupational social ranks also tend to anchor conversation-piece portraits in the articulation of caste identity, rather than the exploration of egalitarian spaces of fantasy.

Cultural histories are useful in this study for further exploring these issues of social class and visual style. One of the most important early volumes in the field is Roy Porter’s English

Society in the Eighteenth Century, which sets out the social history of the working classes,

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largely in opposition to the ‘pestiferous sharks of high society’ - the Whig elite social class of

Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting. Porter’s Marxist sense of economic determinism seriously skews his reading of religion and society in eighteenth-century Britain.62 An influential volume that critically reappraised aristocratic contributions to British society is John Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination: English culture in the Eighteenth Century, where Brewer, through a methodology that carefully compares printed visual ephemera, diurnal writing and epistolary correspondences with secondary literature, explains how aristocratic individuals were at the cusp of cultural change in Britain, leading to the formation of national academies, lending libraries, collector’s portfolios and other incentives to learning.63

One of the few cultural histories to engage with the role of Queen Caroline as an arbitrator is Gerald Newman’s The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740 –

1830. For Newman, ‘the English spirit in the age of George II lay under the shadow of French and other foreign models. The Queen, patroness of the arts, spoke nothing but French… in such realms as painting and music the native genius suffocated under the influence of foreign-born artists like Kneller and Handel.’64 In this thesis, I argue that Caroline’s Francophilia, far from

‘suffocating’ the evolution of English painting, reinvigorated a moribund genre. The Queen’s use of Francophone artists like Martin Maingaud (d. 1725), who came to England presumably on the recommendation of the Bavarian court, showed a new, Rococo mode of representation that blended mythological allegory with an innovative style of portraiture, bringing British art in line

62 Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1982), p. 73. See also his Enlightenment: Britain and the Modern World (London: Apple Lane, Penguin Press, 2000). 63 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997). For the cultural role of the aristocracy in fashion, dress, grooming and deportment, see Hannah Grieg, ‘Leading the Fashion: The Material Culture of London’s Beau Monde’, in Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700 – 1830, ed. by John Styles and Amanda Vickery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 293 – 313. 64 Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740 – 1830 (New ork: St. Martin’s Press and London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 63. See also Jeremy Black, Culture in Eighteenth-Century: A Subject for Taste (London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2005).

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with developments on the continent, and laying the groundwork for the emergence of the informal, often out-of-doors and narratively interactive conversation-piece, a ‘quintessentially’

British genre of painting. While distinct from the Fête galante genre, conversation-piece portraits took obvious and direct inspiration from the formal and narrative precedents established by

French Rococo artists like Watteau, Jean Bérain the elder, Jean-Baptiste van Loo, and the

Audrans.

In David Solkin’s Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in

Eighteenth-Century England, Solkin expounds the notion that civic humanism, appropriated by the rising middle classes in England, became a class-building discourse that used visual and material technologies, such as portraiture and architecture, to articulate notions of politeness, gentility and moral conformity. Solkin does explore the hybrid nature of conversation pieces, pointing out how English artists synthesized discrete French, Flemish and Italian sources in their early informal group portraits, but he spends little time on the specific peripatetic artists who pioneered the genre, or on their critical reception. A radical attempt to reconsider the conceptual and political frameworks of the very process of art production, commodification, and consumption is found in Marcia Pointon’s Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. Pointon is heavily indebted to Foucault’s ideas about discourse or ‘power-knowledge’, highlighting the role of previously little-discussed material objects, such as wigs, lace and portrait miniatures, in creating and maintaining rigid systems of gender and class.65 Serious art-historical writing about Caroline’s Ladies-in-writing is rare, though there has

65 David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven : Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1992); Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by ale University Press, 199 ). For Foucault’s system of power knowledge, see Robert M. Strozier, Foucault, Subjectivity, and Identity: Historical Constructions of Subject and Self (Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 2002), p. 57. See also Pointon’s ‘Portrait-Painting as a

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been considerable work done on Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, Mistress of the Robes to

Queen Anne.66 One of Pointon’s recent articles, ‘Material Manoeuvres: Sarah Churchill,

Duchess of Marlborough and the Power of Artefacts’, sensitively highlights how some courtiers conflated the use of jewels, textiles, statuary and architecture to evoke the sensory properties of a deceased individual, reminding their public audience of their political power through ritualized display.67 While Pointon’s evocative article recognizes the underappreciated aspect of eighteenth-century court women’s cultural patronage, the article’s focus on Marlborough relegates Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting to a footnote. Charlotte Clayton’s copy book, for example, is cited by Pointon, but she makes no mention of Clayton’s own political or artistic role.68

Historiographic Literature

Any overview of the above literature quickly reveals the extent to which the art of the period is denigrated. The nationalistic bias that has been embedded in British art historiography since its foundation should be acknowledged by historians of early eighteenth-century cultural production. 69 Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England is arguably the most

Business Enterprise in London in the 1780s’, Art History 7:2 (June, 1984), 187– 285, and ‘ “Surrounded by Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Art Bulletin, 83: 1 (March 2001), 48 -71. 66 The Duchess of Marlborough loathed Queen Caroline. For art historical literature on the Duchess, see K. H. Szpila, ‘Sarah Jenyns Churchill at : Setting the Record Straight. A reevaluation of the first Duchess of Marlborough as a patron of the arts’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Temple University, 1997), Ophelia Field, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough: The Queen’s Favourite (London: St. Martin’s Press, 200 ), and Frances Harris, A passion for Government : the Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 67 Marcia Pointon, ‘Material Manoeuvres: Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and the Power of Artefacts’, Art History, 32: 3 (June, 2009), 485 – 515. Another volume that draws attention to the importance of objects and ritual in social setting is Richard D. Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 68 Pointon, ‘Material Manoueuvres’, p. 512, n. 18. 69 John Barrell, in ‘Sir and the Englishness of ’, writes that British art was marked by a ‘failure to make any significant contribution to the highest genre of painting…The Englishness of English art was characterized – and I am concerned neither to endorse nor to question this characterization – as a quality distinctive only by its inadequacy’, in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhaba (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 154 – 176 (pp. 155, 156).

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influential foundational volume in British art history.70 Based upon the manuscript notes of an earlier antiquarian, (1684 – 1756), the Anecdotes set the tone for many subsequent dismissals of the work of these early eighteenth-century émigré artists. The book was dedicated to Lady Hervey. In the preface, Walpole asserts, in a volume dedicated to cataloguing

British painters, that Britain had ‘very rarely given birth to a genius in that profession’.71 His primary criticism of English art was its lack of an indigenous tradition of history painting. Rather than commission living artists to create these expensive and highly-valued types of large narrative painting, most English patrons preferred to import (mostly from Italy, but also from

France, the Low Countries, and Spain) sixteenth or seventeenth-century works depicting subjects from religious or classical mythology. Roger Fry, Reflections on British Painting (1934), Ellis

Waterhouse, Painting in Britain 1530 – 1790 (1953), Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of

English Art (1956) and John Rothenstein, An Introduction to British Painting (1967) were all highly influential volumes of twentieth-century British art historiography, and each heavily criticized what the author saw as the ‘bad’ art of the early years of the eighteenth century.72

These authors were unanimously convinced of the aesthetic decay of the early , seeing the work of most painters as little better than that of ‘journeymen hacks’.73 Few exceptions to this general rule of thumb were allowed, but those artists that were judged as producing the ‘best’ art from the period were invariably discussed by these critics as

70 Horace Walpole and George Vertue, Anecdotes of Painting in England, with Some Account of the Principal Artists… (Strawberry Hill: Thomas Farmer, 1762 – 71). See also Samuel Redgrave and Frances Margaret Redgrave, A Dictionary of the Artists of the English School (London: George Bell and Sons, 1878), p. xiv; Randall Davies, English Society of the Eighteenth Century in Contemporary Art (London and New York: Seely and Co. & E.P. Dutton, 1908), pp. 24 – 37. 71 Walpole, Anecdotes, p. ix. 72 Roger Fry, Reflections on British Painting (London: Faber and Faber, 1934); Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain 1530 – 1790 (London, Melbourne, and Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1953); Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (London: Architectural Press, 1956); John Rothenstein, An Introduction to British Painting (New York: Norton, 1965-67). 73 Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, p. 95.

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representative of national genius, personified by the native-born, such as the portraitists William

Hogarth and his father-in-law Sir .74 Hogarth has been quite deliberately constructed by art historians as a national figure, exemplary of the imagined ‘British’ character, over a period ranging from the mid eighteenth century, when Hogarth himself tried to install a sense of nationalism among the cosmopolitan aristocracy, to late twentieth-century catalogues of his work that draw attention to his work’s location in specific private collections, thus anchoring their attractiveness to a tourist circuit of country-house visiting.75 The highly subjective quality judgments expressed by Fry, Waterhouse, Pevsner and Rothenstein is best explained by their collective distaste towards the foreign origin of many major artists working in early Georgian

England. A defining marker of the period is the permeability of the nation-state to outside political and cultural influences. French court culture, in the form of literature, music and the visual and performing arts, was exported to nearly all the conflicting political centers of Europe throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Madrid, St. Petersburg,

Stockholm and all adopted Francophile aesthetics, despite the shifting political interests of these competing nations.76 London was no different. Francophone artists like the painters

Nicolas de Largillière (1656 – 1746), who spent years painting in London during his youth, till the prejudices surrounding the Rye House plot drove the young Catholic painter back to Paris, or

Jean-Baptiste van Loo (1684 – 1745), who came over twice, Louis Laguerre (1663 – 1721), who decorated some of the most-visited country houses in England, or the engraver Hubert Francois

Bourguignon, called Gravelot (1699-1773), who spent twelve years in London and introduced

74 See Charles Saumarez-Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 199 ), p. 59, where he quotes the Duke of Halifax threatening ‘if Ricci painted it, he would not pay him’, referring to the decoration of the Queen’s bedchamber at Hampton Court. Saumarez- Smith notes that ‘Thornhill, as an Englishman, got the commission’. 75 For an extensive historiographic discussion on Hogarth’s contested legacy, see David A. Brewer, ‘Making Hogarth Heritage’, Representations , 72 (Autumn, 2000), 21 - 63 (pp. 27, 53). 76 See Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, p. 15.

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England to the French engraving style, can be best described as immensely influential over the development of British visual culture. Many of the land-owning nobility saw no inherent complication between their active political rivalry with France and their mass importation of

French or Francophile cultural objects. Even when in Italy, some members of the elite continued to patronize French as well as Italian artists, so that cosmopolitan hybridity is an unexpected feature of many examples of early eighteenth-century art in Britain.

Such hybridity proved troubling to Fry, Waterhouse, Pevsner and Rothenstein, as indeed it had to Walpole himself. The breadth and depth of their collective influence meant the denigration of the early eighteenth-century émigré artists in Britain continued to colour the discipline of art history throughout the twentieth century. Some of the most provocative work to challenge this canonical position are two articles by William Vaughan, ‘The Englishness of

British Art’ (1990), and ‘British Art and Its Histories’ (2004), in which Vaughan points out the unease towards hybridity present in late eighteenth-century and British Victorian art historiography, and the bellicose insistence on racial and ethnic purity seen by twentieth-century historians in quest of a distinct ‘English school’. 77 Douglas Fordham’s article ‘New Directions in British Art History of the Eighteenth Century’ similarly calls for histories of British art that are more inclusive and open, noting that the art historian’s work must ‘merge imperceptibly into that of the sociologist and the cultural, literary and economic historian’, a critical position with which I am in complete agreement.78 One of the most significant criticisms of British art historiography to appear recently is Mark Cheetham’s Art Writing, Nation and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: ‘The ‘Englishness’ of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century. Cheetham

77 William Vaughan, ‘The Englishness of British Art’, Oxford Art Review, 13: 2 (1990), 11 – 23 (pp. 21, 23), and ‘British Art and Its Histories,’ in English Accents: Interactions with British Art, 1776 – 1855, ed. by Christina Payne and William Vaughan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 251 – 257. 78 Douglas Fordham, ‘New Directions in British Art History of the Eighteenth Century’, Literature Compass, 5: 5 (2008), 906 – 917 (p. 915).

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points out, in a review of Fry and Pevsner’s far-reaching influence over British art history, how the so-called ‘New’ Art History, which is heavily inflected by (largely French) precepts of poststructuralist theory, continues to be viewed as an invasive force in British art historiography.79 The dangers of letting nationalist narratives of cultural development remain as preeminent art historical categories of analysis is further expounded by Matthew Rampley, ‘The

Construction of National Art Histories and the “New” Europe’. Rampley’s first few lines from his article’s conclusion are worth reproducing in full:

A central theme within national histories is the construction of narratives that create the impression of a continuous tradition. These help preserve the sense of the nation as a stable, enduring vehicle of cultural, social and political identity. Yet it is widely acknowledged by a reduction in the complexity of historical circumstances; in its most extreme forms, this was attained by a deliberately politically skewed reading of history… Art historians have played an important role in this process.80

Gender

While reappraisals of the nationalistic bias of British art historiography have just begun to rework the traditional canon that disparages émigré artists, self-taught or amateur artistic production, portrait copies, and other trivialized categories of visual culture, much recent writing has been done by feminist historians of gender eager to reclaim and reassert the importance of

79 Mark Cheetham, Art Writing, Nation and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: ‘The ‘Englishness’ of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), p. 119. Cheetham is alluding to Victor Burgin, ‘Something about Photographic Theory’, in The New Art History, ed. by A.L. Rees and Frances Borzello (Camden: Prometheus Books, 1986), pp. 41 – 54. See Michael Hall, ‘Le Gout Francais in Trafalgar Square’ [sic], Apollo, 165:141 (March, 2007), p. 17. As Hall amusingly relates, the announcement that the would finally open a gallery dedicated to British painting, which coincided with the first major exhibition of Hogarth’s work to be shown in France, proved that nationalism is still very much alive and well in Franco-British art historiography. ‘It might be thought’, he writes, ‘that this simply reflects a long overdue adjustment in the Louvre’s oddly parochial outlook, but in Britain the news provoked a curiously embarrassed pleasure’. 80 Matthew Rampley, ‘The Construction of National Art Histories and the “New” Europe’, in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, ed. by Matthew Rampley et al. (: Brill, 2012), pp. 231 – 249 (p. 246).

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elite women in the culture sphere.81 Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter uses the letters and diaries of over 100 women to construct comparative case studies of their lives, a methodology that I assert makes it among the best in its field.82 In Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, Ingrid Tague demonstrates how cultural patronage was always a political act for aristocratic women. Tague’s sensitivity to the mixture of personal and public power wielded by female courtiers is a critical position worthy of emulation.83 One volume that stresses how portraits must be analyzed with awareness of the total life history of the sitter is Kate Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in

Eighteenth-Century England (2006), which is one of the first books to treat the subject of family portraiture with critical seriousness. Retford relies heavily on the case study to contextualize why a work was created, where it was hung, and how it was critically received by subsequent generations of a specific family. 84 In Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the

Georgian Country House (2004), Joanna Martin has compared an extensive list of largely epistolary material to retrieve the cultural choices of three generations of women, providing one of the most exciting departures from the usual brush-off of the Strangways-Fox family in serious art history, while Rosemary Baird’s Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses

81See , The Female Spectator, (London: T. Gardner, 1744-1746), I. Couched in the language of competing characters, this tongue-in-cheek periodical springs from the influence of the much earlier Spectator of (1672 – 1719), and, like the Rococo movement itself, it is in reaction against Augustan monolithic thought and Baroque grandeur, full of eclecticism, fussy wit and self-consciously trivial comments on manners and mores. Haywood has recently received additional critical commentary: see Eve Tavor Bennett, ‘Haywood’s Spectator and the Female World’ and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, ‘Social Conservatism, Aesthetic Education, and the Essay Genre in Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator’ in Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator, ed. by Donald J. Newman and Lynn Marie Wright (Lewsiburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 72 -82, 82 – 104. 82 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 83 See Ingrid Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England (Woodbridge : Boydell Press, 2002), p. 208, where she stresses the ‘value placed on court positions as a means of subsistence’ and ‘the extent and variety of court influence… such power was immediate and public… yet this power was also personal… it was based on individual acquaintance and recommendations, through a system of mutual regard and the obligations of honour’. 84 Kate Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (Newhaven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, 2006), pp. 6, 187, 189, 221.

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1670 – 1830 similarly takes aim at a lacuna in the field by discussing the often-underappreciated cultural role of court women in the sphere of the country house.85 As Baird writes in her preface,

‘much more needs to be said about the achievements of the lady of the house’. She argues that her book ‘goes against the current trend in historic visitor interest by investigating the drawing room rather than the kitchen, the gilded interiors rather than the nursery’. 86 The extent to which subjects of this nature still have to go in winning recognition from the traditionalist, nationalist, patriarchal canon of British art history is amply illustrated by the marginalia on my copy of

Baird’s volume. Beside the dust jacket’s description of the book, which also mentions Baird’s position as curator of art at Goodwood House, country seat of the Dukes of Richmond, the previous owner (Henry Smyth) has written (underneath the phrase ‘this is her last book’) the annotation ‘and I trust her last – well-researched but so what – the subject matter is totally boring, H.S.’87 Elite women’s innovative cultural roles within the sphere of the country house continue to provoke fascination and unease.

Same-sex eroticism and desire is present in the life histories, cultural references and political context of many of the individuals under discussion in my study.88 The landmark study of homosexuality in the period is Randolph Trumbach’s ‘London’s Sodomites: Homosexual

Behaviour and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, where Trumbach points out how the

‘molly houses’, or brothels where primarily lower and middle-class men met to enjoy clandestine performances of dissident masculinity, such as cross-dressing, mock-marriages, and sex with

85 Joanna Martin, Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House (London and New York : Hambledon and London, 2004); Rosemary Baird, Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses 1670 – 1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). 86 Baird, p. xiii. 87 Henry Smyth, marginalia on Baird, Mistress of the House, unpaginated preface (back dust jacket cover). 88 See Hannah Smith and Stephen Taylor, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander’: Lord Hervey, Frederick, Prince of Wales and the Royal Favourite in England in the 17 0s,’ The English Historical Review, 124: 507 (April, 2009), 283 – 312.

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both men and women, did actually function as caste-specific sites of class consciousness.89

These performative elements are recognized and examined by John Thomas Rowland in ‘Swords in Myrtle Dress’d’ : Toward a Rhetoric of Sodom : Gay Readings of Homosexual Politics and

Poetics in the Eighteenth Century, where Rowland, through the close reading of dozens of anti- sodomitical tracts that appeared throughout the period, makes helpful deductions about the presumed equation of queer behaviour with foreign (Italian and French) origin.90 The concomitant blaming of Italy for homosexual behaviour among the French elite at Versailles is discussed in Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection, edited by

Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Raga. While focusing on French material, Merrick and Ragan’s volume contains much of relevance, both in subject matter, and as a methodological model, as the authors compare numerous excerpts from court memoirs (such as the recollections of Louis-

Francois de Bouchet, Marquis de Sourches) to illuminate why and how same-sex eroticism between men was tolerated at the court of Versailles.91

89 See Randolph Trumbach, ‘London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behaviour and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Social History, 11 (1977), 1- 13, and also his Sex and the gender revolution. Vol. 1, Heterosexuality and the third gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); George Haggerty, ‘Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, Lewis’. Studies in the Novel (Winter 1986), 167 – 177. Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed.by Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York and London: Harrington Park, 1989). For a discussion of the class-conscious aspect of the molly houses, where working-class men assumed the allegedly ‘effete’ dress and manners of the aristocracy, see Peter Hennen, Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 54. 90John Thomas Rowland, ‘Swords in Myrtle Dress’d’: Toward a Rhetoric of Sodom: Gay Readings of Homosexual Politics and Poetics in the Eighteenth Century (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 24, 68. See also Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700 – 1830 (2nd edn, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Chalford Press, 2006); A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men since the Middle Ages, ed. by Matt Cook et al. (Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007). 91 Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection, ed. by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Raga (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 118, 240, n. 65. Although not focused specifically on queer history, several volumes have an extended discussion of the subject, such as Timothy Mowl, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (London: Murray, 1996); Ellen Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Cambridge, MA and London : Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 240 – 165; James M. Rosenheim, The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English Landed Society 1650-1750 (London: Longman, 1997); The Other

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Country House Studies

Studies of country houses were themselves useful over the course of my research, largely because of the country house context of many of these letters. The long list of imaginary paintings by Lady Hervey, which was written from Ickworth Park to Marble Hill, and which therefore comes out of a country house context, is therefore heavily informed by contemporary standards of country-house decoration. The standard volume on county houses is Mark Girouard,

Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History. Although general to all country houses across time, Girouard’s work elaborates on French cultural influence in the houses of the nobility, the privileging of increasingly private, distant or reclusive spaces

(bedrooms, parlours) as the century wore on, and the social role of elite women as art patrons, chatelaines and political hostesses within the country house.92 John Martin Robinson, Temples of

Delight: Stowe Landscape Gardens, Kenneth Woodbridge, Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of

English Culture at Stourhead 1718 – 1838 (1970), and especially Charles Saumarez-Smith, The

Building of Castle Howard (1990), all show how individual studies of particular country houses can mingle cultural criticism with biographical analyses, largely through the discussion of sections of published letters, estate inventories, wills, architectural drafts, and other primary source materials.93 Other houses are less fortunate: Blenheim’s portrait collection, for example, is given the lightest of treatments in Jeri Bapasola, Faces of Fame and Fortune: The

Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, ed. by Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 92 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); see also Gervase Jackson-Stops, The English Country House: A Grand Tour (Boston: Little & Brown and Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1985), and Christopher Christie, The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 93 John Martin Robinson, Temples of Delight: Stowe Landscape Gardens (London: George Philip in association with the National Trust, 1990); Kenneth Woodbridge, Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of English Culture at Stourhead 1718 – 1838 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Charles Saumarez-Smith, The Building of Castle Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). See also Timothy Mowl, Gentlemen & Players: Gardeners of the English Landscape (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2000).

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Marlborough Family Portraits at Blenheim Palace (2006), despite this book being one of the only printed sources on the painted likenesses of the younger Churchill women, many of whom attained high rank at court.94

The most informative sources on country houses are often those that are self-consciously politicized, and which carefully examine these residences, not only as cultural loci, but as emblems of the state itself. In ‘The Country House is Just Like a Flag’, Sophia Cross examines

Ulster residences built by the eighteenth-century Anglican landowning class. Cross’ understanding of the country house as a political assertion makes use of the flag as a visual metaphor, pointing out that both flag and country house ‘fulfill an aesthetic function, but on another level, with an understanding of the culture from which they are created, they are potent symbols of the cultural values they are intended to represent’.95 Cross’ analogy is particularly relevant to the third chapter of this thesis, where I examine the prominent display of Charlotte,

Baroness Sundon in the house of the Irish judge John Wainwright.

Histories of Style

I have also sought to interpret my selected excerpts from the letters of Ladies-in-Waiting through a critical lens informed by style-oriented books and journals. Cultural objects like paintings, statues and porcelain are continually mentioned in these letters, and these objects are best thought about, discussed and criticized through reference to extant objects in public and private collections. Exhibition catalogues and general histories of style have been important sources with which to compare written descriptions of objects, both real and fictive, with surviving examples of visual culture. The exhibition catalogue by Michael Snodin, Rococo: Art and Design in

94 Jeri Bapasola, Faces of Fame and Fortune: The Marlborough Family Portraits (Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Blenheim Palace, 2006). 95 Sophia Cross, ‘The Country House is Just Like a Flag,’ in Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness, ed. by Dana Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 53 – 67.

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Hogarth’s England has been useful in its eclectic, wide-reaching demonstration of Rococo design, showing how Francophone craftsmen, and their descendants, were important transmitters of new types of decoration in England. The title of this exhibition also suggests Hogarth’s primacy in the field, and the extent to which foreign-born artists are occluded in British art historiography. While somewhat dated, this catalogue does present a wide variety of artistic media, such silks, porcelain, furniture and musical instruments as well as paintings, engravings and sculpture.96 A Capital Collection: and the Hermitage, edited by Andrew

Moore and Larissa Dukelskaya, is likewise a highly informative source on specific works of art that were very familiar to the Georgian court, and has proven useful in retracing the location of specific works of art in the Walpole family collection, well-known to both the British court and the art-going public as a whole, that may have influenced Mary Hervey and Henrietta Howard’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ discussed in the last half of this thesis. 97

One history of Rococo style that acknowledges the concept of ‘cultural colonialism’ is

Timothy Mowl and Brian Earnshaw’s An Insular Rococo: Architecture, Politics and Society in

Ireland and England, 1710-1770. The authors stress the innovative quality of Rococo art and design, arguing for its consideration, not as a unified movement, but as a series of protests against the cultural conventions of the Baroque era. While some of the vivid language expressed in the book (especially in Mowl’s championing of Irish art and design) is inflammatory, An

Insular Rococo does highlight how Irish modes of decoration infiltrated some west-England

96 Michael Snodin, Rococo: Art and Design in Hogarth’s England, exh cat. (London: The Victoria and Albert Museum, exhibition 18 May – 30 Sept., 1984). 97 A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage, ed. by Andrew W. Moore and Larissa A. Dukelska ia (New Haven: Published for the State and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2002).

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houses, contributing to a trans-regional understanding of cultural exchange.98 A similar focus is present in Elizabeth Einberg’s exhibition catalogue The French Taste in English Painting during the first half of the Eighteenth Century, one of the most important volumes to trace the careers and life histories of the many peripatetic, much-travelled Francophone artists working in London during the early decades of the Georgian era. Einberg is one of the few twentieth-century British art historians to tackle the subject of the émigré painters, and yet her work is riddled with subjective quality judgements that project the myth of nationalist cultural purity.

Of Francophilia in painting, Einberg for example asserts that ‘it never really took root to become a truly English style… the trends begun earlier in the century never developed into a new and independently native style… Boswell’s London never quite saw itself as Moreau's

Versailles’.99 Elsewhere in her work, as I discuss in Chapter Two, there is an overt reification of

Hogarth and native-born, native bred artists against the ‘hash and ragoo’ of Philippe Mercier and his fellow immigrant portraitists.100 Einberg uses gendering language, constructing middle-class

English protestant values as virile and masculine in a narrative that couches aesthetic value firmly within an anti-aristocratic, anti-feminine, moralizing celebration of crassness. 101 In this thesis, I combat these assumptions through continued reference to the life histories of my

98 Timothy Mowl, An Insular Rococo: Architecture, Politics and Society in Ireland and England, 1710-1770 (London: Reaktion, 1999). For example, Russtown House, built for Joseph, 1st Earl Milltown, is described as ‘so sodden with art treasures… that it can hardly afford to be relaxed or charming’, p. 2 5. 99 Elizabeth Einberg, The French Taste in English Painting during the first half of the Eighteenth Century (London: Greater London Council, 1968), p. iv. 100 Einberg, The French Taste, p. iv. 101For other histories of style that address cultural Francophilia in early eighteenth-century British visual culture, see Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Patricia Crown, ‘British Rococo as Social and Political Style’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23: 3 (1990), 269 – 82; Nebahat Avcioğlu, Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1728-1876 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011); Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993); David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Better in France’: The Circulation of Ideas across the Channel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Frédéric Ogée (Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, 2005). See also Desmond Fitzgerald, ‘Gravelot and his Influence on English Furniture’, Apollo, 90 (August, 1969), 140 – 147 and Martin Eidelberg, ‘Watteau Paintings in England in the early 18th century’, The Burlington Magazine, 107 (Sept., 1975), 576 – 581. Robin Simon, Hogarth, France and British Art: The Rise of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2009).

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selected case studies, highlighting how their individual identities as aristocrats allowed for the exercise of autonomous feminine choice, sometimes expressed through an interest in cultural difference. Choices made by court women, including the patronage of Francophone artists, the adoption of French fashions, and the competitive collection of East Asian ceramic art helped to set standards of visual style, as they did habits of consumption, and modes of interior decoration and display. Close case studies of individual choices sample these much larger processes of cultural shift.

Chapters

My first case study focuses on Mary Cowper, known for her musical tastes and interest in French literature. At the request of George I’s Hanoverian ministers, who thus rewarded her husband’s continued political support, Lady Cowper was appointed in 1714 as one of Caroline’s Ladies of the Bedchamber (a senior staff position with considerable political clout, usually granted to the wife of a high-ranking peer). Cowper was a first-hand witness of George and Caroline’s first years in England, and her recorded attitudes towards her contemporaries, and towards new developments in art, vividly illustrate the cosmopolitan character of early eighteenth-century elite culture. In Chapter Two, I discuss Cowper’s comments on the new Rococo style that was coming into the English court, and illustrate how art historiography has contributed to an ongoing elision and disparagement of the work of the international painters favoured there.

My second case study is Charlotte Clayton, later Baroness Sundon, who was a treasured political conduit between certain factions of the Anglican hierarchy and the Queen. Clayton is today relegated to the status of a historical footnote, with little attention paid to her life’s intersections with visual art, especially portraiture. In Chapter Three, I examine how archival sources demonstrate the extent of Clayton’s political patronage, as well as how her portrait was

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thought about and written about by John Wainwright, an Irish judge who consistently acknowledged her influential role in his career. While modern historiographical writing criticizes, on the basis of artistic connoisseurship, the output of many artists favoured by Clayton and other elite women of the time, emotional responses to artwork recorded in letters reiterate the visual delight and political value inherent in these much-maligned objects. For example, James

Worsdale (1692 – 1767), who Clayton commissioned to send a portrait of herself to Wainwright, is an artist associated with dissident sexual and religious practices, including theatrical transvestism, espionage (in drag), and participation in the Hell-Fire club of Dublin. These biographical facts coloured the view of a later generation of connoisseurs, whose judgements are not questioned enough by the modern art historical establishment.

Both these first two chapters illustrate the twin concerns of this dissertation: the cosmopolitan, eclectic and syncretic nature of visual art in this period, and the sexual, political and cultural possibilities of the early Georgian court, witnessed by the life histories of Ladies-in-

Waiting. I argue that the sexual and cultural diversity present in this period was and is inherently troubling to patriarchal attitudes about national purity expressed in quality narratives about art.

These connoisseurial judgements towards elite women, and towards early eighteenth-century

British art as a whole, contribute to the continuing elision of sexual and cultural diversity in art historical narratives of the early eighteenth-century British court. For example, elite female extramarital sexuality, queer identities, and religious dissidence are documented within Ladies- in-Waiting correspondence, as they are within the artwork that these women collected as cherished symbols of class and power.

Throughout Chapters Four through Nine, I use a list of imaginary ‘pictures’, written as a satirical literary exercise by Lady Hervey to Henrietta Howard, to explore how visual art,

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sexuality, literature and politics were interlocking spheres at the early eighteenth-century British court. Lady Hervey wrote the list as a country-house letter, or game, which is similar in tone, style and purpose to other word games played by courtiers in imitation of the literary traditions of the French salon. This text has not been thoroughly studied before. Howard, then in residence at her villa at Marble Hill, where she entertained guests from the intertwined worlds of court, theatre and literature in a smaller-scale salon, was known for writing similar social exercises that invited collaborative participation through a highly politicized form of cultural satire. In Lady

Hervey’s list of imaginary pictures, she juxtaposes the subject of her paintings (listed in forms such as ‘a flower piece’, ‘a Dutch marriage’, or ‘a Jupiter and Ganymede’) with the name of a famous person known at court, creating a series of jokes of various levels of intelligibility that have great iconographic and literary potential. I use thematically grouped life histories of people from the list to interrogate specific paintings, , houses, engravings and collections of porcelain, which I argue Lady Hervey either directly alludes to, or more generally represent the type of visual art she evokes in this text. Part of the value of reading Lady Hervey’s ‘imaginary’ text in such an extended way is in how this imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ demonstrates the eclectic nature of visual art in the period. Italian history painting and Dutch genre scenes are mentioned alongside scenes from French and images of contemporary news events, and many of the collection’s entries have contextual associations with literature. ‘A Mountain in

Labour’, for example, is directly based on the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, while ‘Peter knocking at the door’ is a biblical quotation, as is ‘The Miracle of the Fishes’.

Despite being political figures of some notoriety in their own day, many of the people listed in this extraordinary text have, like Mary Hervey and Henrietta Howard themselves, been neglected by Georgian cultural histories. However, the individuals mentioned in Lady Hervey’s

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‘collection of pictures’ were men and women whose lives were enacted across the major boundaries of sex, gender, culture, and politics at the time. In addition to demonstrating the eclectic nature of visual art at the early eighteenth-century British court, an analysis of this text thus helps to recover the specificity of their collective life histories, which enhances an understanding of the shifts in popular morals that took place during this period. It also stresses the iconographical potential of famous works of art in the Royal Collection, which functioned as political satire and personal caricature when thus referenced. Through the contextual intersection of art, politics, literature and sexuality, Lady Hervey goes beyond a mere literary

‘game’, aiming at the more sophisticated intellectual pursuits of a Francophile salonnière. French court women used similar literary exercises involving wordplay, satire and caricature to stimulate intellectual discussion in an informal group setting. I conclude this thesis with an analysis of china and porcelain, drawing on records of the patronage and collecting habits of other female courtiers to illustrate their interest in East Asian ceramic art. This exercise shows how some noblewomen’s tastes helped popularize cultural alternatives to neoclassicism; it also illustrates the critical reception to their work held by many male connoisseurs. The antagonistic tone towards court women, amateur artists, and foreign-born artists in both eighteenth-century and modern discourse is striking.

Taken together, the corpus of works relevant to this unique text makes for a vivid snapshot of the kinds of works of art that were familiar to early eighteenth-century Ladies-in-

Waiting and which may have shaped their cultural view. The resulting layers of political, artistic and literary complexity which inform these satirical portraits reveal a highly syncretic cultural world in which apparently competing elements are somehow successfully synthesized.102 Lady

102 See Mary Elizabeth Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 2; Dana Harrington, ‘Gender, Commerce, and the Transformation of Virtue in

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Hervey’s text bears testimony to the wit, learning and erudition of court women, but also denotes the challenges they faced in their lives as educated figures whose gender and sex barred them from direct participation in the recognized political machinery of the state. Infighting between different courtiers over issues of taste, including reactions against new styles issuing from France via Huguenot painters travelling to England, was a part of that cultural world. Mary, Countess

Cowper, discussed in the next chapter, was a first-hand witness to the resistance against this

‘Rococo avant-garde’.

Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 31: 3 (Summer, 2001), 33 – 52 (p. 33); Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushdon, ‘Visible bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic world’, Journal of Social History, 39: 1 (Fall 2005), 39 – 64, 297 (esp. p. 46).

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Chapter Two: ‘Most Horribly Done, and So Unfortunately Like’: Mary Cowper and Émigré Artists at the Court of St. James.

Mademoiselle Schutz is sitting for her picture to one Constantine, a French refugee…‘t is most horribly done, and so unfortunately like, that Anybody may know it, and yet the ugliest Thing in the World. Mary Cowper, April 16, 1716103

Histories of British art tend to devote little time to the life, career and oeuvre of the many foreign-born artists who were associated with the early eighteenth century court. While the prolific artistic milieu of the second half of the eighteenth century has deservedly received much critical scholarly attention, émigré artists of the earlier period have suffered from scholarly neglect. These artists have been consistently disparaged by generations of cultural historians in

Britain, particularly by major critics Horace Walpole, Ellis Waterhouse and Roger Fry. Uneasy about ethnic, religious, political and aesthetic slippages between Britain and the continent at this time, nationalist critics constructed a narrative where early eighteenth-century British painting was ‘bad art’ due to foreign influence. Native artists, who spent the majority of their working life in the country, were therefore privileged in these histories above less nationally ‘pure’ figures. Émigré artists who worked at court during this time were, and still are, accused of producing work that was less capable, inspiring and truly ‘representative of national character than that of their native-born colleagues.

103 Mary Cowper, Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper; Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales, 1714 – 1720, ed. by Charles Spencer Cowper (London: John Murray, 1865), p. 106.

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While the memory of native artists – especially William Hogarth - has benefited from this ongoing British myth of self-genesis in art, the first-hand accounts of court life recorded by

Mary, Countess Cowper, Lady of the Bedchamber to Caroline of Ansbach, suggest that early eighteenth-century British cultural development in fact dramatically benefited from an increased exchange with France and with Germany. German artists were important mediators of taste, bringing with them new Francophile modes of artistic expression and popularizing innovations that had been developed by Rococo artists working at Paris or Versailles. These artists were thus key figures in the importation to England, not only of methods of paintings and sculpture that were of French inspiration, but of collecting habits and of new preferences in the acquisition and display of distinct forms of material culture. German visual art itself was likewise an important source of inspiration for many artists working in England during the second decades of the eighteenth century. Margaret Whinney, for example, notes the potential influence of German

Rococo funerary statuary on the work of the British sculptor William Palmer.104 Diaries and letters from the time are important sources that record these stylistic changes, and the quote by

Lady Cowper mentioned above illustrates one courtier’s negative reaction to new forms of portraiture.105 In this chapter, I juxtapose Lady Cowper’s critical attitudes towards the new style with three case studies of the prominent émigré artists Philippe Mercier (1689 – 1760), Christian

Friedrich Zincke (1683 – 1767), and Enoch Seeman (1694 – 1744).

By examining the career histories of these artists, selecting a few examples of their work and exploring how their legacy has been criticized by later art historians, I interrogate Lady

104 Margaret Whinney, Sculpture in Britain : 1530 to 1830 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 246. 105 See Milo Keynes, The Iconography of Sir to 1800 (Rochester, New York: Boydell Press of Trinity College Cambridge, 2005), where Keyes writes that, just as Derek Beales’ inaugural address to Cambridge in 1980 spoke to the necessity of using biography as an analytical tool, ‘in the same way, historical portraits may yield significant biographical information, leading here to worthwhile, if discursive, comment’, p. 1.

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Cowper’s bias, arguing that these artists are exemplary of the cosmopolitan and stylistically extroverted tastes of the Francophile courtiers at St. James’. By ‘cosmopolitan’, I mean the co- existence of mutually discrete discourses with specific ethno-national origins, each of which may be in direct conflict with each other, and yet are in some way complementary. These different forms of extra-national culture are synthesized by writers, artists and other cultural figures to create and express an alternative system of being: Lady Hervey’s use of a specific Raphael at

Hampton Court, or the adoption of modes of writing pioneered by French literary hostesses as a trope for feminist education in Britain, are two strident examples in this thesis of such cosmopolitan hybridity. In the context of political theory, Farah Godrej writes that ‘such struggles and complex encounters with the otherness of texts are increasingly made available to provoke, dislocate, and challenge our own understandings of political life’, and the early eighteenth-century British court was a similar site of discursive competition, synthesis and co- existence. 106

Mary Cowper, the English Court, and the new modes of Painting

The importance of émigré artists in early eighteenth-century England was a direct result of the importance of the German princely state of Hanover. The Act of Settlement, Parliamentary legislation of 1701, confined the succession of the English throne to the descendants of the

Electress Sophia of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1630 – 1714). The , a grand-daughter of King

James I, had spent her adult life in Hanover, and her adult children barely spoke English. The

Hanoverians were Protestant, and with the Catholic descendants of the exiled James II being brought up at Saint-Germain under the wing of Louis XIV, many of the most powerful Protestant

106 Farah Godrej, ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The Hermeneutics of Interpreting the Other’, Polity, 41: 2 (Apr., 2009), 135 – 165 (esp. pp. 145, 147, abstract). See also Craig J. Thompson and Siok Kuan Tambyah, ‘Trying to Be Cosmopolitan’, Journal of Consumer Research , 26: 3 (December 1999), 214 – 241; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital’, in Cosmopolitanism, ed. by Carol A. Breckenridge et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 82 – 110 (p. 82).

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landowners in Britain expressed strong support for Hanover. In 1714 both the Electress Sophia and Queen Anne died, leaving Sophia’s son, the fifty-four year old Elector of Hanover, to succeed as George I (1660 – 1727). While the power of the King to confer estates on his foreign-born courtiers was heavily curtailed by Parliament, many of the Hanoverian court did accompany him to England, including the King’s son, the future George II, installed as the

Prince of Wales. George I’s wife Sophia of Celle had been confined to permanent house arrest in the manor of Ahlden since 1694, and did not accompany her estranged husband to his new dominion, meaning that the new King’s daughter-in-law Caroline of Ansbach became the highest-ranking royal woman in Britain. The women who attended Caroline were expected to fulfill a political as well as a social role at court.

The dominant artistic figure at the time was Sir Godfrey Kneller, retained as chief painter to the crown at the accession of George I. Kneller, himself an émigré artist, produced work that had all the attributes of conventional Baroque portraiture, including a limited number of acceptable poses, standardized formats and sizes, and the static arrangements of sitter placed in the high foreground against a dark and murky background.107 From the time of the Glorious

Revolution of 1689 until Kneller’s death in 1722, this aesthetic was adopted by most English patrons of portraiture, and is amply demonstrated by the Kit-Cat room in the National Portrait

Gallery in London, where a roll-call of the prominent Georgian noblesse are depicted in near-

107 For Kneller, see Walpole and Vertue, Anecdotes of Painting in England, pp. 196 – 214, A. C. Sewter, ‘Kneller and the English Augustan Portrait’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs , 77: 451 (Oct., 1940), pp. 104 – 115; C. H. Collins Baker, ‘The craftsmanship of Kneller’, The Connoisseur, 127 (1951), 29 – 32; J. D. Stewart, ‘William III and Sir Godfrey Kneller’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 33: (1970), 330 – 336 and also his ‘Records of Payment to Sir Godfrey Kneller and His Contemporaries’, The Burlington Magazine , 11 : 184 (Jan., 1971), 28 – , ‘Sir Godfrey Kneller as a Painter of Histories and Portrait Histories’, in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts, ed. by Oliver Millar and David Armine Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 243 – 263 and his monograph Sir Godfrey Kneller and the English Baroque Portrait (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1983); Wisdom, Knowledge and Magic: the Image of the Scholar in seventeenth-century Dutch Art, exh cat. ed. by Volker Manuth et al. (Kingston, ON: The Agnes Etherington Art Center, 1996); Joseph Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns : Baroque culture in Restoration England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 99 – 103, Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation (London: HarperCollins Publishing, 2009), p. 472.

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identical format. Kneller was the artist

patronized by Mary, Countess Cowper (1685 –

1724), one of Caroline’s first Ladies-in-Waiting:

she is shown (Fig. 2.1) depicted in a static,

conventional pose, placed amidst the usual

baroque backdrop of the pillar, curtain and

garden, holding a book that is representative of

her well-known intellectualism. By the time

George and Caroline came to England,

Kneller’s style of portraiture was an ossified,

archaic mode of representation on the continent, where Antoine Watteau, Nicholas Vleughels, Jean Audran, and Claude Audran III, among others, were pioneering a new mode of portraiture ‘released from classicizing constraints, in which softer Venetian and Flemish colours predominated’.108

Cowper’s diary is one of the most Figure 2.1. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Mary, Countess Cowper (1685–1724), 1709, oil on canvas, private collection. important first-hand eyewitness accounts of the English court in the immediate aftermath of the

Hanoverian succession. The Countess had acquired her court position partially through her influence with Baron Andreas von Gottlieb Bernstorff, George I’s paramount German minister in

London. Bernstorff, along with John Robethon, the former secretary of William III, and Count

Hans Casper van Bothmer (1656 - 1732), diplomat and courtier, formed a trio of advisers - the

108 Cynthia Lawrence and Magdalena Kasman, ‘Jean-Baptiste d’Albert de Luynes, Comtesse de Verrue (1670 – 1736): An Art Collector in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs, ed. by Cynthia Lawrence (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 207 – 226 (p. 221).

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so-called ‘Hanoverian junto’ - whose policies were important to an inexperienced George I.

These junto ministers were under heavy scrutiny in England for their administrative decisions, which were criticized by some English politicians as rapacious and self-serving. Others forged close alliances with the junto, including Mary Cowper’s husband, William Cowper, Lord Keeper of the Great Seals.109 Lady Cowper’s compilation of a diary of her personal experiences at court was meant to serve as a semi-public justification for her family’s conduct while in public service.

It is clear her diary was not read by other courtiers at the time, but she was highly aware of the potential public value of her record.

Tension between the English and German courtiers was endemic from the beginning.

German encroachment into the competitive spheres of court influence was bitterly resented, especially since the King’s mistress, Melusine von Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal, was known to be deeply involved in the ‘South Sea Bubble’, a devastating stock market crash of 1720. The prevailing anti-German attitude is echoed in a despairing petition to one of Mary Cowper’s fellow Ladies-in-Waiting by one Susan Lawry, who, after being denied a position in Caroline of

Ansbach’s staff, wrote a bitter diatribe complaining to Charlotte Clayton about immigrant courtiers. Lawry wrote that she wished she were not a Christian, as she had as much courage as

‘ever any Roman dame ‘ere had who made her own exit’, adding that ‘if these places which might be fitt for me to have must be given to Germans….I must take my friends’ advice…there is scarce a country house I have not some friends in it’, a barely-veiled, if ill-advised threat to support the anti-Hanoverian, pro-Stuart activities that were a perpetual counterpoint of the

109 The accounts of James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, record bribes of over twenty-five thousand pounds, a small family fortune in itself, to German courtiers in the years 1715 - 1740, of which 9500 was reserved for the Duchess of Kendal alone. See Matthew Kilburn, ‘Schulenburg, (Ehrengard) Melusine von der, suo jure Duchess of Kendal and suo jure Duchess of Munster (1667–174 )’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Sept 2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/24834 [19 January 2008]

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political climate of the time.110

110 Susan Lawry to Charlotte Clayton, Letter of April 16, 1735, Sundon Correspondance (ADD MS 30516).

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Lady Cowper herself certainly felt frustration with her German political connections. In

October 1715, at the height of the first Jacobite rising, Bernstorff ordered that she desist working on the appointments she had promised several English friends. Cowper was shocked, both at

Bernstorff’s tyrannical assumption of prerogative in an area normally left to Caroline’s staff, and at the behaviour of his niece, known only in Cowper’s diary as ‘Miss Schutz’. Cowper’s condemnation of Miss Schutz as ‘a pretty woman, and had good qualities, but withal was so assuming, that she had made herself mightily hated at court’ illustrates the Anglo-German tension present at court. 111 The Schutzes, her diary records, were some of the first courtiers in

England to break with the old manner of painting. Educated in Hanover, and in touch with the latest developments in contemporary painting that were taking place in Paris, the Schutzes were evidently eager to recreate continental art in England, keen to import fresh blood into the atrophied and self-complacent art world dominated by Kneller and determined to look outside usual London sources for aesthetic satisfaction. Lady Cowper recorded in her diary that

‘Mademoiselle Schutz is sitting for her picture to one Constantine, a French refugee…‘t is most

111 Mary Cowper, Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper; Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales,1714 – 1720, ed. by Charles Spencer Cowper (London: John Murray, 1865), p. 106.

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horribly done, and so unfortunately like, that Anybody may know it, and yet the ugliest

Thing in the World’.112

Remarkably different from the classicizing ‘Augustan’ seriousness and dramatic nature of English art at the time, painting in Paris and Germany appeared Figure 2.2. René Auguste Constantyn. Portrait of Two Sons and Four light, modish and sensual by Daughters of Don Francisco Lopes Suasso in a Garden Landscape with a Pet Dog, an Extensive Landscape Beyond, c. 1730, oil on canvas, 647 x comparison. Miss Schutz’s 826 mm, private collection. employment of a Huguenot artist – identified as the Huguenot painter René Auguste Constantyn

(c. 1680 – after 1730) – and Lady Cowper’s attitude to the new art as ‘most horribly done, and so unfortunately like’ speaks of a certain unease among some members of the English court towards the adoption of new, ‘continental’ Francophile aesthetics in England.113 Compare, for example,

Constantyn’s Portrait of Two Sons and Four Daughters of Don Francisco Lopes Suasso (Private

Collection, Fig. 2.2) with Kneller’s portrait of Lady Cowper, and the innovative nature of the new Rococo art becomes quickly apparent. The sitters, instead of being confined to the usual repertoire of Baroque poses, are instead lively and natural, with the character and features of the children exaggerated almost to the level of caricature, set far back into the middle foreground in the informal, naturalistic setting that evokes the pleasure garden, world of the French painters

112 Ibid., entry for November 1715, p. 59. 113 Dr. Robin Simon, e-mail of April 2010. See Christie’s, ‘Lot 2 1/ Sale 7448’, and British Pictures (7 December 2007) where Dr. Simon identifies Constantyn as having held an official, salaried position with the Hanoverian branch of the Royal Framily, likely both before and after their elevation to the British throne, [accessed 4 June 2012].

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Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 – 1721) and his pupil Jean-Baptiste Pater. The red heels of the boys, in particular, show the influence from French court culture, as the talons rouges were part of formal attire at Versailles, and are used by the painter to signify these children’s membership within the ‘noblesse présentée’.114

Philippe Mercier, the Schutz Family, and the British Conversation-Piece

Another Huguenot painter, Philippe Mercier, exemplifies the transnational influences at play in early Georgian portraiture. Born in Berlin, Philippe Mercier (1689 – 1760) was the son of a

Huguenot tapestry-worker from Aubusson, who had left France due to state-sponsored religious persecution. By 1710 the young Mercier was studying under another Huguenot émigré, the painter Antoine Pesne, who had been invited to Berlin at the special request of Frederick I of

Prussia, founder of the Berlin Akademie der Künste. Pesne encouraged Mercier’s talent but himself monopolized the most senior (and lucrative) positions available to an artist at the

Hohenzollern court. Mercier eventually left Berlin, ending up in England via Hanover. While

Mercier may have briefly visited France, his early working method was developed in Germany: thus it was the Prussian court, and not Versailles, where Mercier imbibed his love of the fête galante. The discerning ability of the sitter to be reflexive, to laugh at oneself, is present in several later British Rococo portraits, and is paralleled by the tendency in these early eighteenth century works for the head to be slightly oversize: the Vauxhall statue of Handel by Louis-

François Roubiliac, for example, is perhaps the best-known of this type of work. Caricature-like representation, intended as such and referenced by Cowper’s attitude to the Schutz portrait, is present as a thematic link in Rococo portraits, where the sitters are depicted in everyday activities like hunting, peopling a rural Arcadia, or engrossed in the fantasy world of the

114 See Philip Mansel, Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 15.

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Commedia dell’Arte.

Mercier’s presence in England was first noted in 172 , when French connoisseur Pierre-

Jean Mariette recorded an engraving of Watteau’s Le Danseur aux Castagnettes as being ‘gravé

à Londres par Pierre Le Mercier’.115 Artists at this time, even those employed by the royal courts of Europe, were not simply creators and educators, but served a vital part within the wider market as collectors, marketers and dealers. Some part of an artist’s personal collection of art was usually up for sale at any given time. Mercier seems to have supplemented his income as a dealer of paintings and prints, some of which were works from Watteau’s own hand. These and other paintings were engraved for wider distribution by Mercier, who thereby profited from the expanding trade in images in this period.116

Watteau’s imaginative, sensitive and innovative painting would have a strong influence on Mercier throughout his oeuvre. Much of Mercier’s work into the 1740s continued to be inspired by or directly based on Watteau’s compositions, such as Comedians in a Fountain, of c.

1735, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor. Early Rococo artists were fascinated by the contemporary vogue for the Commedia dell’Arte, comic drama founded in Italy and exported to the rest of Europe via troops of peripatetic, wandering actors, who played from a repertoire of stock themes and characters; the in Mercier’s Comedians is lifted from a Watteau drawing of the same subject now in the National Museum of Stockholm. It is tempting to think of these painters, many of whom themselves lived hectic lives working for a succession of courts across many nations, as empathizing with the fantasy of ‘bohemian’ freedom idealized by the wandering figures of the Commedia dell’Arte.

115 Elizabeth Einberg, The French Taste in English Painting during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (London: Greater London Council, 1968), p. 9. 116 Martin Eidelberg,‘Watteau Paintings in England in the early Eighteenth Century’, The Burlington Magazine, 117 (September, 1975), 576 – 581.

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Figure 2.3. Philippe Mercier, The Schutz Family and their Friends on a Terrace, 1725, oil on canvas, 1022 × 1257 mm, The Tate Britain, London.

In 1725 Mercier painted the first of two works that greatly influenced the development of

English portraiture throughout the century. The paintings, which adopt the reduced size, informal atmosphere, delicate colouring and outdoor atmosphere of fête galante painting to depict recognizable individuals, are the very first English instances of the conversation-piece, a genre that quickly became quintessentially British. I argue that the earliest of these pieces is the Tate

Britain’s Music Party on a Terrace (Fig. 2.3). Most critics agree the narrative of this piece is the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession, with the architecture at the central background identified as the Banqueting House, tangibly associated with Stuart failures.117 The white horse, given such a direct place in the composition by the pointing arm of one of the courtiers, is

117John Ingamells, ‘A Hanoverian Party on a Terrace by Philip Mercier,’ The Burlington Magazine, 118: 880 (July, 1976), 511 – 515 (p. 513).

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identified by John Ingamells as a reference to the Hanoverian coat of arms, which included ‘un cheval argent’.118 Many of the people represented in the painting had connections with Shotover

House, near Oxford, where it was on display for several hundred years. I assert that this painting functions as a kind of marker of stability for these aristocratic individuals, an anchor thrown down into territory that had welcomed them only begrudgingly, as a last resort of Protestant continuity. Not all are German by birth, but many are, and those who are English are known to have identified completely with the political and cultural affiliations of the incoming German- speaking nobility.

The English sitters are more difficult to identify than the Germans, but what is certain is that Sir James Tyrrell (d. 1742), who had inherited Shotover House in 1718, married his ward and cousin Penelope Madan to Augustus Schutz (1693 – 1757), second cousin of George II and son of the Hanoverian Ambassador to St. James. The Schutzes were thus high-profile

‘newcomers’ at court. By 1727 Shotover was leased to Schutz, who was Master of the Robes to

George II from 1727 to 1757, and whose descendants inherited the property.119 The central figures in this painting are therefore the English bride (Madan) of a German courtier (Schutz).

The ‘Mlle Schutz’ referred to by Mary Cowper in this chapter’s introductory quote was a niece of Bernstorff’s, and does not appear to be depicted in this painting. Augustus Schutz himself was born in England after 1692, during his father’s ambassadorship to King William III, but spent his youth at the court of Hanover before returning to England in the suite of his cousin, the future

George II, in 1714.120 The sheer complexity of the life histories of these figures attests to the

118 Ibid., p. 514. 119 National Trust Collections, Prince Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales (1707–1751) playing the Cello accompanied by his Sisters, Anne (1709 - 1759), Caroline (1713 - 1757) and Amelia (1711 - 1786) making Music at http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/766108.2 [Accessed 4 June 2010]. 120 Robert Raines and John Ingamells, Philip Mercier 1689 – 1760, exh cat. (London: The Paul Mellon Foundation, 1969), pp. 20, 21.

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transnational character of their identities, which simply do not fit within contained nationalistic boundaries constructed by later historians, such as Fry or Waterhouse, and well illustrate the shifting, permeable nature of ethno-national identity among certain members of the aristocracy at this time.

The Schutzes are joined by two other highly prominent members of the Hanoverian court,

Dr. Tessier or Tesier, and Count Bothmer himself, mentioned above. Dr. George Lewis Tessier, a physician from Leyden, who had obtained an act of naturalization, was appointed physician to the household of George I in March 1715.121 Tessier was thus a court doctor, someone who played a very visible role in the administrative hierarchies of the courtly and medical worlds, and who would later be appointed to the role of personal physician to George II.122 The last major

Hanoverian in Mercier’s picture is Bothmer, certainly the most senior of all, whose influence was wide ranging. Shortly after the unification of Celle and Hanover, he was appointed to first the Dutch and then the English ambassadorial positions, where, in the latter capacity, he was a key figure in smoothing the accession of George I after the final illness of Queen Anne.123 Like many other conversation pieces that advertise political and personal allegiances, who is not present is sometimes even more telling than who is. Robethon had died three years earlier, but

Bernstorff had been forced into semi-retirement in Germany, leaving Bothmer as the junto’s sole representative at St. James. Bothmer lived from 1720 to his death in 1732 at number 10 Downing

Street, at that time a kind of semi-official government residence.

121 William Munk, Roll – Call of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861), II, p. 61. 122 Hervey’s memoirs as well as those of Lady Cowper furnish clear indications of just how much the French language was used by this group. One of the most touching instances, for example, occurred on Sunday 20 November 1737, when Queen Caroline was on her deathbed. When the Queen asked Dr. Tessier how much longer she would have to suffer, he responded ‘Je crois que Votre Majesté sera bientot sulagée’, to which she responded, almost the last words that she spoke, ‘tant mieux’. See John Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of George II, ed. by John Wilson Croker, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1848), II, p. 394. 123 Edward Gregg, ‘Marlborough in Exile, 1712 - 1714’, The Historical Journal, 15: 4 (Dec., 1972), 593 – 618.

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Figure 2.4. Johann Friedrich Künnecke and Hans Casper von Bothmar, Schloss Bothmer, 1726 – 1732, Mecklenburg- Vorpommern, Germany. Transculturation flows both ways, and English influences were seeping into Germany at this time, often through the efforts of the same men and women who were criticized for their foreign origins in England.124

At the same time that Bothmer and his

German compatriots sat to Mercier in Music Party on a Terrace, he was building near Klütz ,

Mecklenburg, the Schloss Bothmer (Fig. 2.4), a huge country house set amidst lavish countryside, with avenues of oak trees leading to a structure that, to many eyes, looked remarkably English.125 Restrained of ornament, the red brick walls of the corps de logis, the sharply slanted roof and flanking wings of outbuildings of the Schloss Bothmer all recall English

Jacobean or Queen Anne architecture more than they do the façades of Herrenhausen,

Schönhausen or Charlottenburg. Early scholars of the Schutz painting were so convinced of the painting’s foreign look that they theorized it must have been painted in Hanover, until correspondence with German architectural historians convinced them otherwise.126 The

124 Unlike notions of acculturation, that take a dialectical model of understanding cultural exchange, I prefer the model advocated by historian Tony Claydon, whose theoretical model is one that advocates for notions of transculturation, as opposed to acculturation, and for an increased knowledge of the structures of cooperation and mutually profitable interaction that were vital to the survival of the nascent nation-state in early eighteenth-century Europe. See Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England 1660-1760 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Jeremy Gregory, ‘Introduction: Transforming “the Age of Reason” into “an Age of Faiths”: Or, Putting Religions and Beliefs (Back) Into the Eighteenth Century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32: 3 (Sept., 2009), 287 – 305 (p. 299). 125 D. G. Bond, German History and German Identity: Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Bodopri, 1993), p. 157 for the stylistic individuality of Schloss Bothmer, as well as Petra Dubiliski, Ostseeküste: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Ostfildern: DuMont Reiseverlag, 2002), p. 69, for its architecturally ‘English’ look. The avenue of lime trees forming part of the chateau’s distinctive front approach is also unique in Germany: see Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser und Gärten im Betrieb für Bau und Liegenschaften des Landes Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, ‘Festonallee’, Schloss Bothmer, http://www.schloss-bothmer.info/index.php?id=34 [accessed 14 February 2010] 126 Raines and Ingamells, Philippe Mercier, pp. 20, 21.

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confusion is partially due to the fact that French court culture, in the form of literature, music and the visual and performing arts, was paramount in serving as the vehicle for the exchange of diverse cultural interests between England and Germany.127

The Schutz conversation piece is therefore an innovative work, deftly mingling the aesthetics and visual ideologies of the early French Rococo with the political representation of an influential German-speaking bloc, courtiers and landowners, people who were clearly instrumental in bringing social, political and cultural change to England. Mercier synthesizes a wide range of iconographic meanings, including the role of marriage in smoothing differences between English and German courtiers, the celebration of the Hanoverian succession, the suitability of the new Rococo aesthetics for political representation, and the importance of social hybridity and transnational Protestant interests in the transcendence of narrow ethnic, geographic definitions of political virtue.128 The process of transculturation commemorated in one of the very first English conversation pieces was, then, certainly a nationalist one, organized around a show of support for George I and his ministers. Music Party on a Terrace also shows how the

Hanoverians attracted a wide range of people, some of whom had residences both in England and in Germany. Others, like Dr. Tessier and Mercier himself, were French refugees whose families had fled the religious intolerance propagated by the court of Louis XIV. Yet others, like

Penelope Madan, were members of the old landed English families, who welcomed the

Hanoverian and French Protestant elite as a way of buttressing their own status as upper gentry.

Mercier’s success with the Schutz piece is likely to have been much noted in this highly competitive society, where cultural knowledge was a formidable political tool, and where style

127 See Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740 – 1830 (New ork: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 15. 128 Kate Retford, ‘Sensibility and Geneaology in the Eighteenth-Century Family Portrait: The Collection at Keddleston Hall’, The Historical Journal, 46: 3 (September, 2003), 533 – 560 (p. 542).

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and fashion were the expressive visual signs of who was ‘in’ with the Royal court and who, like many of the Tory families in a time of Whig ascendancy, was falling behind in power and wealth.129

Mercier’s Cultural Role, Then and Now

Philippe Mercier’s sophistication, innovation and sensitivity, as expressed in this early conversation piece, evidently caught the eye of the artistic community in London. Within two years of its completion, he was attending the annual dinners of the St. Luke’s Club, London’s primary artistic organization. Mercier was appointed by warrant to the place of principal painter to Prince Frederick of Wales (1707 – 1751), George II’s son and , and the accounts from this period give us a vivid glimpse into courtly patronage in the Hanoverian era. On 6

March, the Huguenot artist was appointed to the prestigious court position of gentleman page of the bedchamber, ‘with effect from christmas last past’, at eighty pounds per annum. The appointment signalized his good manners, his relationship with the Royal Family, and his suitability to keep aristocratic company. These appointments were aggrandized, on 26 January

1730, by an additional promotion to the place of library keeper to the Prince, at one hundred pounds per annum. In 1731, he received eighty-four pounds from Queen Caroline’s account for a picture, and the next year, he received the large sum of over 660 pounds for books and pictures bought for the Prince’s use. In 17 4, he taught the princesses, sisters to the Prince of Wales, to draw and paint.130 Clearly, the form courtly patronage took in early-eighteenth century Hanover and St. James was diverse.131 Court artists, prominent artists like Mercier, were expected to be

129 Charles Saumarez-Smith, The Building of Castle Howard (London: Pimlico, 1988), p. 154. Vanbrugh writes to the , of the general approbation among the Whig noblesse of the Carrmire Gates of Castle Howard, that ‘I always thought we were sure of that card’, showing what Saumarez-Smith calls the ‘image of the aristocracy seated round the gambling table, deliberately and calculatedly outbidding one another’. 130 Einberg, The French Taste, p. 26. 131 For a view of the Francophile connotations attendant on specific places, such as Pall Mall in St. James’ square during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Christopher Lloyd, Les Tableux de la Reine: Maîtres

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personal companions and attendants as well as painters. Their duties ranged beyond the process of creation to the practice of instruction, amusement and scholarship. Mercier was responsible for being aware of all the latest books and paintings on the market,and for arranging their purchase and delivery. He was also expected to keep abreast of artistic developments on the continent, at home among the peerage, and elsewhere.132

Some artists struggled to fill all their responsibilities successfully, and there are, in consideration of his business as a seller and dealer of pictures in private practice, unsurprising indications that by 17 2 the Prince of Wales was not entirely satisfied with Mercier‘s performance. Only one picture is recorded in the accounts as being certainly by his hand, a ‘P’ss

Mary on Cooper by myself 10 gns’; others bought by the Prince of Wales through Mercier included an Amphitrite by Pater in 1735, work by David Teniers, some royal portraits and many miniatures, ‘both portraits and fancy’, clearly indicating the Rococo tastes favoured by the Prince of Wales.133 By 17 6 he was replaced, being appointed ‘our principal painter in the room of Philip Mercier’, a devastating career blow from which Mercier never quite recovered.

He originally took solace in the country, and moved to York by 1739, where he flourished for a number of years as a portraitist. His later style moved away from Watteau-esque compositions towards the genre scenes of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.134 In 1747, while in York, he subscribed two guineas towards the defense of the city from the Young Pretender, and shortly afterwards he made extended visits to Ireland, Scotland and Portugal, resuming his peripatetic

Anciens de la Collection Royale (Windsor: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. for Royal Collection Enterprises Ltd, 1995), p. 72. ‘Dès le début, le parc fut un lieu de prédilection pur les promenades dans le goût français.’ 132 See David Coombs, ‘The Garden at Carlton House of Frederick Prince of Wales and Augusta Princess Dowager of Wales. Bills in Their Household Accounts 1728 – 1772’, Garden History, 25: 2 (Winter, 1997), 153 – 177. See also Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714 – 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 137. 133 Einberg, The French Taste, p. 26. 134 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (2 November 1699 – 6 December 1779), French painter.

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lifestyle.135 By the time he died in 1760 he was almost forgotten by the artistic establishment, and his widow had to petition the Academy of St. Luke for sustenance. His daughter Charlotte

Mercier, despite showing some talent as an artist, died young in a workhouse. As Mercier’s life history illustrates, courtly patronage could bring brilliant and meteoric rewards, but it could also be as quickly withdrawn in favour of new, more modish, styles and individuals.

The attitude of later historians towards Mercier has not been charitable. Twentieth- century historians, living during a time when England was wracked by decades of conflict with a continent dominated by a unified and radicalized Germany, focused their attention on ‘native talent’. The consensus among the art establishment in Britain for many years is exemplified by

Elizabeth Einberg, who wrote that ‘Art in England was at a low ebb in 1720, although self- conscious steps had been taken to induce the birth of native talent’. Despite Mercier’s innovative and much-repeated work, in Einberg’s narrative ‘by 17 0 Highmore and Hogarth were Mercier’s equals in technical accomplishment, and soon after Hayman and the Frenchman Gravelot were superseding his French ware by a superior brand’.136 William Hogarth, in particular, is favoured in this as in much historiographic writing. Both men were members of the same generation, were both based in London, competed for patronage from the same court circles and from the same bloc of aristocratic connoisseurs. Hogarth is reified in this influential account as ‘a powerful personality, a dissident English Whig, anxious to produce an art free of French or Italian seasoning, commensurate with the English character as he understood it’, whereas Mercier is characterized as ‘an immigrant’ with ‘no such firm roots or convictions and he was left, it would appear, to guess at fashion helped by his experience of continental taste… As it was he was a most attractive and influential minor figure, serving “hash and ragoo” to Hogarth’s plain and

135 Robert Raines, ‘Philip Mercier's Later Fancy Pictures’, Apollo, 22 (July, 1964), 27 – 32. 136 Einberg, The French Taste, pp. 7 – 9.

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simple fare’.137 Hogarth himself did not experiment with the conversation piece, later his most popular form of portraiture, until 1729, four years after Mercier’s completely avant-garde portrait of the Schutzes.138

The glorification of Hogarth and of native-born, native bred artists thus uses gendering language to complement middle-class English protestant values with virility, masculinity and forcefulness. By couching aesthetic value firmly within an anti-aristocratic, anti-feminine celebration of ethnic insularity, such histories mirror the activities of eighteenth-century

Francophobic associations like the Anti-Gallican Society, formed in 1745. Anti-Gallicans aimed to defend traditional English values against French encroachment, largely in response to the popularity of Francophile fashion, art and music among the English gentry.139 In other words, even the historiographies of British art of this time are Protestant, capitalist, bourgeois narratives of artistic capability, when of course it has to be admitted from the outset that Hogarth was far better positioned, ethnically and, through his marriage to Sir James Thornhill's daughter, politically, to succeed where Mercier could not, whereas Mercier’s innovation and persistence, despite his many handicaps, is glossed over as ‘Frenchified elegance’.

The spread of the French Rococo across continental Europe – for example to or

Saxony - was often filtered through a German lens, with the wide-scale adoption of French manners among the courts of the German states lending impetus to the flourishing of Ancien

Régime culture throughout the wider European cultural sphere. As chinoiserie scholar Dawn

Jacobson writes, the German princes ‘spoke French, read French, took mistresses, squeezed

137 Ibid., pp. 7 – 9. 138 Ibid., p. 15. 139 Which, ironically, continued to use portraits by French émigré artists to disseminate their propaganda. The society later issued a snuffbox with a copy of Van Loo’s portrait of Sir as an exemplar of the true patriot. See Egan Mew, ‘Battersea Enamels and the Antigallican Society’, Apollo, 7 (May, 1928), 216 – 221 (p. 216).

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money out of their subjects to build palaces, pavilions, orangeries, follies and opera houses modelled on Versailles’.140 In some ways, it was a very German thing for Prince Frederick of

Wales to champion the French Rococo’s importation into England: he was simply imitating the lives of the rulers and courts in greater Germany, many of whom were his kinsmen, who without ceasing their fierce resistance to French religious or territorial aggression, happily imported the

‘best’, or at least the most stylish, popular or attractive facets of the aristocratic way of life that had been codified by the French nobility at Versailles, Saint-Cloud, and Fountainebleau.

Zincke and Seeman

The historiography of miniature portrait painting in England is similarly skewed towards an ethnic, national view of cultural progress, with most of the scholarly work on English miniatures focusing on the careers of Nicholas Hilliard,

Bernard Lens III, and Richard Cosway. Christian

Friedrich Zincke (1683 – 1767) is not nearly as well known, despite a prolific career that spanned nearly six decades of prominence. Zincke’s portrait of Queen Caroline (Fig. 2.5), for example, encapsulates many of the facets of his oeuvre that made him popular at the time. The Figure 2.5. Christian Friedrich Zincke, Queen Caroline (Caroline of Ansbach, 1683 – 1737), Queen’s features are youthful, delicately Enamel on copper in gold frame with ivory backing, c. 1732, Victoria and Albert Museum, touched with colour, her flaxen hair curled into London.

140 Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon Press, 1993), p. 92.

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an elaborate coiffure. Caroline wears two synthesized elements of royalty in the same costume.

Her purple robes make reference to the Roman imperial family, and are trimmed with ermine fur, emblem (due to a mistaken belief in the animal’s preference for ‘death before defilement’) of both the British crown and other European royalty.141 Zincke’s miniatures are elegant, sophisticated and urbane, generally flattering to the sitter, and imbued with Rococo sensibility.

Born in 1684 as the son of a goldsmith, whose profession offered the young artist plenty of scope to learn studio management and precise attention to minute detail, Zincke showed an early aptitude for painting, and was soon studying with the Dresden master H.C.

Fehling. He emigrated to England in 1704, at the behest of the Swedish-born enamellist Charles

Boit.142 Boit, who needed help with his grandiose vision of a gargantuan miniature commemorating the victory of Blenheim, never saw his project come to fruition, but once Zincke arrived he swiftly won the approval of Kneller, who promoted his interests in rivalry to Michael

Dahl’s promotion of Boit. Zincke’s early career thus demonstrates the international character of painting in England at this time: Swedish and German artists vying for prominence is typical of the aesthetic climate of St. James, where foreign-born portraitists were much in demand. Zincke employed the demanding technique of painting in vitreous glazes on copper for portraits, seemingly from life, and enjoyed so much success that by 1726, the early art historian George

Vertue was able to report that he had more of the nobility and literati sitting to him daily ‘than any painter living’. This remark makes oblique reference to the 172 death of Kneller, who had previously cornered aristocratic patronage in a similar manner.

Zincke’s main artistic rivals were not just other miniaturists like Lens, who worked in watercolour, but also the other portraitists favoured by the Royal Family, not just Mercier or

141Harold Bayley, The Lost Language of Symbolism (London : Williams and Norgate, 1912), p. 335, n. 6. 142 Basil S. Long, British Miniatures 1520 – 1860 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1929), p. 471.

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Ellys but also James Worsdale (1692 – 1767), Sir James Thornhill, and William Hogarth.

Competition between these artists reflects the relative lack of funding available to artists at St.

James. Queen Caroline did her best to promote and encourage artistic activity, but unlike in absolutist France, where the Bourbon monarchs and their favourites were possessed of great wealth and an active, personal interest in contemporary painting, the Hanoverian monarchy was monetarily restricted by Parliament and to some extent by indifference and internecine rivalry.

Family squabbles between George I and the future George II were echoed after 1727 by the violent quarrel between George II and his eldest son Prince Frederick, whose political efforts at opposition were hamstrung by the King curtailing the Prince of Wales’ funding. Despite these difficulties, Frederick was an active and engaged patron of art, music and literature, and his very public championship of new, Francophile forms of early Rococo art was expressed through a policy of patronizing as many Rococo-manner artists as his limited funds made possible.

Royal patronage was stretched thin by the , and so Zincke’s good personal relationship with the various factions of the Royal Family threatened the careers of other professionals, especially that of Mercier. In 1729, Zincke was involved in a struggle for access to the person of Prince Frederick, which Mercier, who had just finished a portrait of the Prince of

Wales in 1728 (now in the Shire Hall, Hertfordshire), had sought to block. Mercier informed

Zincke that the Prince was so impressed with his work that he wished his enamel miniature to be painted from it, a not uncommon practice in the early eighteenth century. Zincke’s refusal, and his emphatic insistence on creating his miniatures from the life, from the living royal model, is, as has been noted, ‘a feature which distinguishes him from most other enamellists’.143 Besides giving his work a certain immediacy and vivacity that is quite unexpected in this genre, Zincke’s insistence on cultivating a personal relationship with his German-speaking patrons allowed him

143 Graham Reynolds, English Portrait Miniatures (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1952), p. 113.

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to mould his work to the sitter’s tastes in much more flexible manner than was the norm. With

King George II and Queen Caroline, he was certainly remarkably adaptable to their idiosyncrasies, telling Vertue in 17 2 that ‘the Queen advised him to be sure to make the King’s picture young, not above 25, and the King commended his works and admonished him not to make the Queen’s picture above 28’.144 Both the King and Queen were 44 when they came to the throne in 1727, exactly the same age as Zincke, so the mutual flattery and concern for their spouse’s physical attractiveness recorded in this incident was, despite the King’s much- publicized series of mistresses, a feature of their entire marital life. Zincke’s portrait of Caroline of Ansbach is thus decisively marked by the personal intervention of the patron, and records his distinctively intimate relationship with the royal pair.

Overwork and the precise attention to microscopic detail necessitated by the small-scale format of the enamel miniature eventually exacted a heavy toll on Zincke’s vision, with several of his later works marred by uncertain glazing techniques, stippling, and similar sight-related defects.145 By 1742, he raised his working price from 20 to 30 guineas in an effort to correct his vision, and another salacious story has the widowed artist prescribed exercise and the consumption of breast milk for the restoration of his eyesight!146 Zincke’s contributions to the development of British art have never been fully recognized, much like many other émigré artists who left the German-speaking world for St. James. Graham Reynolds’ telling description of

Zincke that his work ‘never quite lost the German accent’ illustrates the difficulty many British

144 Zincke to George Vertue qtd. in Ibid., p. 114. 145 Reynolds, Ibid., p. 168. 146 This story has Zincke meeting, while out on a prescribed walk, a beggar woman with a young child. Impressed with her demeanour, he had her and her son installed at his house, discovered the woman’s husband, a soldier, had died on campaign in Germany, and eventually married her. If the anecdote is true, it also speaks to the interconnectivity between England and the German-speaking microstates in the ordinary lives of many men and women at this time, especially those that lived in metropolitan centers.

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critics had in reading these artists.147

Conclusion

While Mercier’s reputation may suffer in comparison to Hogarth’s, there is an almost complete lack of interest by the British art establishment in several other painters, such as the ‘wooden’

Enoch Seeman (1694 – 1744), whose naivety and folk-like quality expressed in his work would almost certainly garner different scholarly adjectives by scholars intrigued by American rural, vernacular, or naïve painters.148 Biographers interested in evoking the atmosphere of the early eighteenth century also heavily rely on reproductions of surviving examples of Seeman’s work, usually through the representations of individuals who found him to be the very best artist available at the time.

147 Reynolds, English Portrait Miniatures, p. 113. 148 Philip Mould Ltd., ‘Portrait of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough’, Historical Portraits Picture Archive, http://www.historicalportraits.com/InternalMain.asp?ItemID=116 [accessed 21 November 2010]. For naïve or self- taught art, see Colin Rhodes, Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Nathalia Brodskaya, Naïve Art (London: Sirrocco, 2011); and the essays in Self-Taught Art: the Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art, ed. by Charles Russell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), esp. Charles Russell, ‘Finding a Place in the Art Worlds for the Self-Taught’, pp. – 34 (esp. pp. 4 – 5, 14 – 16). Russell’s comments, while written about autodidactic artists, are remarkably apropos regarding critical attitudes to Seeman’s work.

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Seeman was an artist favoured by some of the greatest figures of his day, garnering continuing aristocratic patronage, including that of the Churchill, Cavendish, Cust,

Dashwood, Hervey and Fox-Strangways families. Indeed, I argue he may have specialized, more than any other artist in

England in his time, as a painter of so-called

‘scientific’ personages, evidenced by his surviving likenesses of Isaac Newton, the patron Charles Cavendish, and the ‘giant’

Daniel Cajanus. The little information available on Seeman’s life and work is often accompanied, to this day, by derogatory references to his work: the online Grove dictionary of Art terms him a competent but

‘second-rate’ painter, mimicking the nationalist Figure 2.6. Enoch Seeman, Daniel Cajanus (1702/03 – 1749), 1734, oil on canvas, 3150 x tropes espoused by Ellis Waterhouse, Roger Fry 1830 mm, National Museum of Finland, Helsinki. and John Rothenstein. Waterhouse, for example, writes of Mercier that ‘Never a first-rate artist, he had a flair for novelty in the French manner’, while he also calls the émigré painters ‘journeymen hacks’ whose efforts cannot find a place in the history of British painting; Roger Fry, in the late 0s, claimed that ‘there was no painting at all worthy’ of the advancements in taste and design marking the end of the seventeenth and

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beginning of the eighteenth centuries.149 These are simply the most notable examples, with other parallel statements condemning the visual culture of early eighteenth-century Britain en masse.150 Despite these recent efforts, the continuation of these teleological narratives perpetuates, into our own era, the elision of émigré artists and the obscuring of their importance in the early eighteenth-century British art world. Enoch Seeman features prominently in the relevant correspondence of the time, notably in the account of his work recorded by John

Perceval (1683 – 1748), Earl of Egmont, in his diary entry of Saturday, 15 April, 1732.

We went to see the works of Mr. Lens, limner to the King, an enamel painter, who teaches my daughter Helena to draw, and afterwards we went to see Zeaman’s paintings in St. Martin’s Lane, and Mr. Vandest’s in Newport street, both face painters. 151

Illustrating how Seeman’s work was among the must-see exhibitions of the spring of

1732, this quote places Seeman at the center of the London art world of the time. The extant portrait of the coal magnate George Bowes, one of Seeman’s last works, is also an example of this disjunction between modern criticism and Georgian appreciation of the artist. George Bowes and his wife Mary were educated if nouveaux-riches patrons and were discerning collectors of

Old Master paintings who also liked the avant-garde Rococo quality of contemporary art at the time. Their employment of Seeman for such an important commission shows the depth of their continuing respect for this émigré artist.152

149 Waterhouse also calls Mercier a ‘second-rate’ painter. See Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain 1530 –1790 (London: Pelican History of Art, 1953), pp. 91 – 95; Roger Fry, Reflections on British Painting (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 34. See also Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (London: Penguin, 1956). 150 For example, see Peter Kaellgrew’s review of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s exhibition of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century material culture in ‘Courts and Colonies: The William and Mary Style in Holland, England and America’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 47: 2 (April, 1990), 298 – 301. 151 John Perceval, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of Viscount Perceval, afterwards Earl of Egmont, 3 vols (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920), II, p. 257. 152 For Seeman’s work, see the 1726 portrait of Isaac Newton, commissioned by Robert More (170 – 1780), in Milo Keynes, The Iconography of Sir Isaac Newton to 1800 (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press of Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005), p. 7. For the Daniel Cajanus portraits, see John H. Appleby, ‘Human Curiosities and the Royal

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I suggest Seeman’s 17 4 portrait of the ‘giant’ Daniel Cajanus (1704 – 1749) (Fig. 2.6), now in the National Museum of Finland, also shows considerable psychological depth, conveying not simply a record or representation of his elongated limbs or ‘foreign’ aspect, but a certain defiant insouciance that is in keeping with his recorded history of serving as a soldier, actor, poet, moneylender and general ‘man-about-town’. Estimates of Cajanus’s height vary between seven and a half and ten and a half feet tall.153 While Seeman’s composition is very indebted to the conventional format of Kneller’s baroque visual idiom, using the familiar format of static pose, close foreground and dark background, his image is a sympathetic one: it does not rely on the inclusion of a ‘regular’ person for contrast as was customarily done for such images.154 Hand jauntily held on one hip, Cajanus stares at the viewer, asserting his own individuality and using syncretic examples of foreign clothing – the turban, the uniform of the

Polish regiment he briefly served in, a long fur cloak – to negotiate the space between familiar and foreign, exotic and mundane. Like Velazquez’s psychologically complex portraits of

Hapsburg court ‘little people’ or dwarves, such as the 16 4 Portrait of Sebastián de Morra, which focuses on the sitter’s human emotion instead of his role as a court curiosity, Seeman shows Cajanus as an individual, certainly one who is proud of his distinctive idiosyncrasies, but who has to be viewed by himself, on his own terms. Painted in England by an émigré artist who was well positioned to feel empathy for Cajanus’ transnational heritage and professional life, this work is exemplary of the nationally, stylistically and sartorially hybrid identities that circulated

Society, 1699 - 1751’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 50: 1 (Jan., 1996), 13 – 27. For the Cavendish portrait, see Russell McCormmach, ‘Mr. Cavendish weighs the World’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 142: 3 (Sept., 1998), 355 – 66. For the Bowes’ portrait, see Margaret Wills and Howard Coutts, ‘The Bowes Family of Streatlam Castle and Gibside and its Collections’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal, 33 (1998), 231 – 243. See also Richard John Boileau Walker, Audley End, Essex: Catalogue of Pictures in the State Rooms (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1964), p. 11. 153 Jan Bondeson, The Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square & Other Medical Marvels (Stroud : Tempus, 2004), p 288. 154Jan Bondeson, The Two-Headed Boy, and other Medical Marvels (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 221.

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in early Georgian court society. While his painting of Cajanus comes right out of the Van

Dyckian tradition, and is indicative of a certain conservativism in Seeman’s oeuvre, questions of psychological as well as physical likeness were integral to his work, anticipating the stress given later on in the century by artists much concerned with the representation of a sitter’s state of mind or character as well as his or her facial or bodily attributes. Seeman is thus an artist who is underappreciated in current English histories, and a reappraisal of his life and work is long overdue in art history.

As Seeman, Zincke and Mercier’s lives reveal, artistic careers at the courts of Europe in the early eighteenth century could be remarkably transnational, transcultural endeavours, with

German-speaking professionals often driven by lack of economic opportunities to seek employment outside of Germany. French courtly aesthetics served as a cultural lingua franca binding the societies of disparate ethnic and national polities together, as did the visual vocabulary and historicizing tendencies of neoclassicism, which was an alternative kind of international cultural language. Hanover, and through Hanover the richness of English patronage, was a heady target for these artists. The court of St. James, peopled as it was by a mixture of ethnicities, religions (at least, Protestantisms) and political interests, played a decisive role in the importation of the Rococo style into England, and inaugurated the dominant visual mode of self- representation for the elite, the conversation piece.

Mary Cowper’s remark about the Schutz family and their innovative patronage habits, resulting in works of art that appeared strange to the established artistic conventions of the day –

‘most horribly done, and so unfortunately like’ – parallels the nationalist stereotypes inherent in much of twentieth-century British art historiography. Her diary does however highlight the important role played by the peripatetic émigré artist at the early eighteenth-century court. Like

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the little-known, elided or disparaged artists who worked in a transnational style, the court women who appreciated their efforts have also suffered the same historiographic fate. The next chapter thus turns to another of Mary Cowper’s colleagues, Charlotte Clayton, and discusses her patronage of the rakish James Worsdale, another little-known artist who is referred to negatively in the discipline of art history.

Chapter Three: ‘Whilst my Imagination was Warmed with the Picture’: James Worsdale’s Portrait of Charlotte Clayton

While Mary, Countess Cowper’s comments on the new style of portraiture pioneered by émigré artists helps to situate artistic development in relation to dynastic change, other recorded attitudes to the portraits of her fellow Ladies-in-Waiting have much of value to cultural history, especially in an analysis of how those portraits synthesized personal and political meaning. One of Cowper’s most important colleagues at court was Charlotte Clayton, later Baroness Sundon (1679 – 1742), who rose to enjoy political and social success by successively acting as the favourite friend and protégé of two powerful women, Sarah

Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and then Caroline of Ansbach herself. Due to her role as a political conduit between Queen Caroline and the Anglican Church establishment, where she relayed information

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about important matters of church patronage and doctrine to and from the Queen and various dissenting theologians, Clayton was one of the Queen’s most valued public assistants, although as in many matters dealing with court history the unrecorded, informal and necessarily discreet aspects of such assistance makes concrete evidence for her role scarce.

The extant archival correspondence of Clayton with the Irish judge John Wainwright (d. 1741), a successful English lawyer from an established family in Chester, highlights this role, providing tangible proof of the political power wielded by some Ladies-in-Waiting . Clayton and Wainwright’s correspondence also draws attention to the importance of portraiture in conceptualizing the links of political patronage that, through the mediation of female courtiers, bound regional administrators to the

Royal Family.155 The letters discuss Clayton’s portrait by the little-known and much-reviled artist James

Worsdale (c. 1692 – 1767), a prolific portraitist who dabbled heavily in the theatre, and who is described by contemporary art historians in dismissive terms. By re-examining James Worsdale’s career, I argue that the Clayton-Wainwright correspondence allows for a reappraisal of critically disparaged material from the time, including Clayton’s letters and Worsdale’s art. Through such a reappraisal, I explore the interconnection between poetry, friendship and art that existed in the period, highlighting historiographic issues in the discipline of art history towards the ‘quality’ of Worsdale’s work and, given his performances of spiritual and sexual dissidence, the possibility of ‘recuperating’ his memory as part of queer history.

Clayton and Wainwright

Charlotte Clayton’s early life is little known. Born in 1679, she was the granddaughter of Sir Lewis

Dyve, a Bedfordshire-based politician who held office under William III. Her mother came from a

155 See Elaine Chalus, ‘ “To Serve My Friends”: Women and Political Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present, ed. by Amanda Vickery (Stanfield, CA: Stanfield University Press, 2001), pp. 59 – 87, and Idem, Elite Women in English Political Life, c. 1754 – 1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Chalus’ book, while focusing on the late eighteenth century, advocates for the study of women’s political power in Georgian Britain to be reoriented towards the recognition of ‘the personal aspect of politics’, where familial and social relations shape the political world, giving elite women unprecedented political influence. See pp. 5, 78.

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wealthy family in Staffordshire, but her father was a youngest son, meaning her finances - in an age where heiresses made the best matches - were unlikely to attract men of serious political importance. By the standards of noble behaviour in this period, Clayton married very late in life, at the age of 33 or 34.

Her husband, eight years older than herself, was William Clayton of Sundon Hall, Bedfordshire, an MP for Liverpool and close family friend of the Duke of Marlborough.156 Charlotte Clayton was as similarly close to Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough as her husband was to the Duke. Despite its internal dissentions the Marlborough family had dominated court life early in Queen Anne’s reign and the Duchess was well- placed to recommend individuals for employment with the new court. Lady Marlborough advanced

Clayton as a candidate, and this reference, combined with her own beauty, bearing, and intelligence, was enough to grant her a place as ‘Woman of the Bedchamber’ about Caroline.157

From the beginning of her career, Clayton charmed and fascinated her royal employer, rapidly becoming indispensable to Caroline as her most trusted assistant and friend. As an example of how many aristocratic women are easily forgotten by history, no serious attention to Clayton’s life, or her high- profile role at the British court, has emerged in scholarship within the past hundred years. Charlotte

Clayton’s letters are however an integral part of Georgian court history, and provide a valuable counterpoint to the more well-known court memoirs of Lord John Hervey, Lady Mary Cowper, or Sarah

Duchess of Marlborough. The letters survive in the British Library as manuscript correspondences, some

(censored) versions of which were published by Katherine Thomson, Clayton’s Victorian biographer.

Thomson was a prominent writer of popular English histories, which she often accompanied by the publication of voluminous extracts from the correspondence of the subject.158 Thomson’s social prejudices and her scholarly method, however, have erected a difficult historiographic frame around

Clayton’s historical memory, meaning reference to original MSS continues to be important when writing

156 See Philip Carter, ‘Clayton , Charlotte, Lady Sundon (c.1679–1742)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/5568. [accessed 3 May 2011]. 157 Joanna Martin, Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country Home (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), pp. 13, 18. 158 Katherine Thomson, (‘A.T.;). Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon (London: Colburn, 1847).

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about her cultural legacy. The present chapter was written after a review of a selection of the original manuscripts, some of which are held at the British Library, which provide a wealth of detail that is sometimes overlooked or deliberately elided in Katherine Thomson’s presentation of the material.

The Clayton Portrait

In 1732, the lawyer John Wainwright was promoted to one of the highest judicial positions in Ireland, thanks largely to his friendship with and support he received from Clayton and via her from the Queen.

Wainwright was personally known and trusted by many of the senior administrative figures in English courtly life. As an incoming administrator appointed by the crown in a new and foreign posting he must have felt, not only the need to make his powerful connections known, but also a personal sense of nostalgia and loss. Wainwright was eager for a tangible, visible sign of his political affiliations, and portraiture was the most concrete, readable sign of alliance in the visual world of early eighteenth-century society. Clayton promised him a portrait of herself, and after his arrival in Ireland Wainwright wrote to her eagerly looking forward to its arrival.

I can have a true sense of your goodness at any distance, but the pleasure of your presence, I must be without for many a long day, which will seem the longer by reason of my absence from you. I now really grow impatient for the picture, that will not only be an honour, but a companion to me. The view of it will keep me in awe as to my conduct, & keep me not only from improbity, but from lighter offences… I must again say, I wish for the picture, it will be the star to guide me. 159

In a postscript to a later letter, he cryptically adds that he is ‘sure Mr. C will think himself happy if he can please Mr. D, the picture will make Ireland almost England, at least a copy of’.160 Yet again he writes to

Clayton that ‘when the picture comes it will be a perpetual monitor to me of my promise’.161 His duties as a visiting judge of the circuit courts took up a great deal of his time in the spring and summer of 1733, but this expected portrait of his friend and mentor never left his thoughts. He wrote that ‘when I return from the circuit I hope to meet the picture at home for which I must never cease to express my thankfulness. It

159, John Wainwright to Charlotte Clayton, Letter of 1732, found at the British Library in The Sundon Correspondence, vol. 4, BL Add. MSS 20105, hereafter referred to as Sundon Correspondence, ff. 78, 79. 160 Ibid., f. 104. 161 Ibid., f. 111.

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is I hope near its voyage at this time. ‘till I have the happiness of access to you again, that must be the companion of my thoughts, for many a solitary and pleasing hour.’162 Evidently this last entreaty was the most successful, for his next letter to Clayton, dated 3 August 1733, is elated in tone. ‘ our picture, that inestimable pledge, is now at sea. I am more sollicitous (sic) every blast of wind, than ever I was for any cargo. When it arrives I shall place it on the right hand of Doctor Smalbridge.’ Nearly a year after John

Wainwright first expressed a wish for Clayton’s portrait, the painting itself was finally on its way.

Wainwright’s concern for the physical safety of Charlotte Clayton’s promised portrait was no mere gloss to his political patron and go-between with the Queen, but reflected the dangerous eighteenth- century reality of shipping goods across an often stormy Irish sea. Described as ‘the dismally dangerous

Irish sea’ by one Victorian commentator, who produced an large catalogue of fatalities to back up his claim, the waters between Ireland and England were both notoriously bad and heavily travelled during the eighteenth century.163 By the end of the century, over 2300 boats a year made the journey back and forth from Ireland to Liverpool alone, and the cargos of these vessels were a heady target for smugglers and wreckers active along both coastlines, who were often impoverished men and women of Irish descent who turned to maritime crime as a way of subsistence.164 Wainwright, like many other of the gentry, would have been well aware of the risks. One of the Cunningham family ‘procured four little pictures done in miniature…judged to be well done’ in France, but the vessel in which they were shipped out of

Rottderdam was lost, and the commission had to be begun all over again.165 Given the number of times in the Clayton correspondence that Wainwright speaks of his desire for the portrait, which was first mentioned in the autumn of 1732, he was anxious over the delay and length of time it took for him to procure it. No doubt Wainwright was highly conscious of the political cachet attached to the prominent

162 Ibid., unpaginated Letter dated Dublin, June 28th, 1733. 163 ‘An Englishman’, The Review: or the Critical Journal, Jan., 1862 (New York: Leonard Scott & Co., 1862), p. 80. 164 Bella Bathurst, The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (London and New York: Harper Collins for the Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005), p. 167. See also Michael McCaughan and John Appleby, The Irish Sea: Aspects of Maritime History (Belfast: Queen’s University at the Belfast Institute of Irish Studies, 1989). 165 Toby Christopher Barnard, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641– 1770 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 157 – 159.

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display of a portrait of the Queen’s favourite Lady-in-Waiting, which would have rendered his close link to the Crown obvious to his neighbours, friends and political clients. There may also have been an element of competition and rivalry in his fervent desire for the painting, as it is clear his friend Robert

Clayton, Bishop of Killala, was already in possession of a portrait of Clayton by .

On 3 October 1733, nearly a year after the subject is first mentioned in the Wainwright-Clayton correspondence, the long-awaited portrait was finally unpacked at Wainwright’s residence of Mount

Merrion. Excited and inspired, he dashed off a hasty letter to Clayton, the jolting, hurried style at strong odds with the polished style of most of his correspondence, thus betraying his extreme delight, both personal and professional, in its appearance.

I have just receiv’d the Picture how much doe I value it in every light, it is an ornament a credit a pledge to me, and as to the likeness I never look upon it without those sensations of joy and gratitude which your presence always gives me.

To me if life, & spirit shall remain,

Ill tell your virtues in no humble strain.

To future times the knowledge can extend

That I was blessed with such a faithfull Freind (sic)

As from His Sydney Spencer borrow’d fame

To lend me Clayton your Immortal Name

Upon a word that never was forfeited to you whilst my imagination was warmed with mention of the picture & without any previous thought in four minutes, I don't say this to set any value upon them but to excuse their indifference. I would have said Thy instead of Your could I have given myself leave to be some familiar.166

Extant in the archival manuscript correspondence but not published by Thomson, Wainwright’s letter to Clayton shows the very close interconnection between portraiture, poetry and friendship that existed in the eighteenth century. This connection was rendered all the more poignant by the distances between persons who had to rely on the forces of nature, and the luck of indifferent shipping conditions, to send each other letters and images. This letter also points to the network of political patronage exerted

166 John Wainwright to Henrietta Howard, The Sundon Correspondence, unpaginated Letter of October 3, 1733.

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by powerful Ladies-in-Waiting like Charlotte Clayton, whose efforts towards procuring places in the

judicial and administrative systems were recognized

by men who acted as bishops and judges, and

whose own letters are full – very full – of their

gratitude to her support, encouragement and

practical advice. The coolness with which art

historians discuss political patronage and its visual

representation in Georgian portraiture should, I

argue, be mediated through the recognition of the

close emotional bonds of friendship, family and

neighbourhood that were responsible for the rise of

such an ‘emotional’ political system.167 In some

cases, notably in John Wainwright’s, the gratitude of some administrators towards their female political patrons for the career assistance they had rendered is couched in language similar to that of romantic love, likely influenced by the chivalric traditions of an earlier courtly age. Emotional gratitude written in this romantic vein is frequently coupled with poetical ornaments indicative of the writer’s consciousness of the court’s literary sophistication, and reiterates the concrete political influence wielded by Ladies-in-Waiting through such appointments: ‘I need not repeat the assurances, that I shall make no application, nor entertain any thoughts without your knowledge or direction’ (this from a judge!).168

A month after Wainwright first received Clayton’s portrait, John Wainwright is still talking about her portrait: ‘though when I compare my Picture with the Bp of Kilalla’s, Worsdale triumphs much more,

167 See Shearer West, ‘Patronage and Power: the Role of the Portrait in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Culture, politics, and society in Britain, 1660-1800, ed. by Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 131 – 153 (pp. 132, 143); Jeremy Black, Culture in the Eighteenth-Century: A Subject for TasteFigure (London 3.1. Sir and Godfrey New York: Kneller, Hambled Charlotteon Continuum, Clayton, 2005), p. 73; Holger Hoock, The King's artists : the and the politics of British culture, 1760-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 168Baroness Sundon (c. 1742), oil on canvas, 1252 x 1016 mm, John Private Wainwright Colle ction.to Henrietta Howard, Sundon Correspondence, unpaginated letter of 3 October 1733. 90

than when the King commanded him to mend the work of Jervas’.169 As Toby Barnard comments of portraiture in Ireland during this period, ‘clients generally evaluated what they had ordered by verisimilitude to subject…[and] The pains of temporary separation as well as of death were dulled by contemplating the painted image of the absent’.170 This record of Wanwright’s use of portraiture as a competitive visual medium used to advertise his political patronage relationship with a Lady-in-Waiting is therefore a significant art historical document. It underlines the value Wainwright and Clayton had for

James Worsdale, their regard for his abilities as a portraitist, and most importantly clearly demonstrates the political meaning inherent in portraits of Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting. While the portrait itself is today unknown in art historical literature, one image that can function as a proxy, comparable to what

Wainwright’s image probably looked like, is the portrait of Clayton recently sold at Christie’s (Fig. .1).

Christie’s attributes the work to Sir Godfrey Kneller, both due to the inscription and the style. Resembling

Mary Cowper’s image by Kneller, Clayton is shown in a conventional, conservative mode of portraiture.

Her static pose, elongated hands, shimmering green satin robe and upswept ‘bouffant’ hair are all in the best Stuart court tradition, and owe much more to the formal arrangements of Van Dyck and Lely than they do the world of the fête galante. Worsdale was known as a copier of Kneller’s work, and this image by Kneller is likely exemplary of the appearance of Worsdale’s own portrait of Clayton.

James Worsdale, despite being a native-born English artist, has suffered from critical neglect in art history. He was born into poverty, apprenticed as a colour-grinder, and then entered the studio of

Kneller, out of whose house he was thrown ‘for marrying a niece of Lady Kneller, and for stating that the painter was his father’, which enraged the senior artist.171 Kneller’s work was unscrupulously copied by

169 Ibid., unpaginated Letter dated Dublin, 19 November 1733. This letter, unlike the October poem, was mentioned (without comment) by Katherine Thomson: see Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon, Mistress of the Robes to Queen Caroline..., 2 vols (2nd edn, London: Henry Colburn, 1848), II, p. 277. 170 Barnard, Making the Grand Figure, pp. 157 – 159. 171 , when quarreling with James Worsdale over the artist’s anger over her assumption of gentility and gentrified status, says that he told her she ‘should not stay in his house, to show my wit and breeding, when I had neither, nor boast of my Family, when it would have been better for me to have been the daughter of a cobbler. As this fellow always boasted of his being Sir Godfrey Kneller’s bastard, I could not avoid telling him, that some people were so fond of family, that to keep it up, they would prove themselves Sons of Whores.’ Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, ed. by A. C. Elias Jnr. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 277.

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Worsdale, who gallery owner Philip Mould notes ‘gained credit as a painter by passing off a portrait of

Queen Caroline after Kneller as a work of his own painted from memory’.172 For Wainwright’s painting,

Worsdale may well have copied a studio portrait of the Queen’s favourite, by Kneller, from memory and added his own take on Clayton’s personality over the image. The painting’s legacy is the series of questions its enthusiastic reception by Wainwright raises about the status of the copy as an aesthetically legitimate and emotionally autonomous form of art, as it does the processes of political propaganda that involved the hand-copying of a work for client distribution.

The Clayton Portrait as a Colonial Document

When Wainwright first arrived in Dublin, he, like so many other of the Anglo-Irish administrative and social elite, was simultaneously enraptured by the beauty of the physical landscape and repulsed by the truly wretched condition of the indigenous Celtic population, who were living in conditions of extreme poverty unmatched by the comparatively prosperous situation enjoyed by the laboring classes in pre- industrialized England.173 ‘There are in Ireland all the delights that have made the strongest impression on my mind thro' the whole course of my life’, he writes, ‘I mean the beautifull scene and prospects that nature has so liberally prepared for every eye that is disposed to observe them, the Sea, the mountains, the

Rivers & frequent falls of water make this country the fittest object for a hermit to fall in love with, & the lower part of the people will soon give him an aversion to mankind’.174 In this, he could be read as simply

See also , Roger Lonsdale, and John Mullan, Lives of the Poets: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 516. 172 Philip Mould, ‘The Harlequin Portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie,’ Historical Portraits Picture Archives, http://www.historicalportraits.com/Gallery.asp?Page=Item&ItemID=841&Desc=Prince-Charles-Stuart-|-John- Worsdale-Attributed-to [Accessed 28 April 2011]. 173 See Roger Wells, ‘The Irish Famine of 1799 – 1801: Market Culture, Moral Economies and Social Protest’, in Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth Century Britain and Ireland, ed. by Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth (Liverpool: Lincoln University Press, 1996), pp. 163 – 194 (p. 168); David Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815– 1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 11; Jacqueline Hill, ‘Convergence and Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, The Historical Journal , 44: 4 (Dec., 2001), 1039 –1063 (p. 1049); L.A. Clarkson, ‘Armagh Town in the Eighteenth Century’, in Industry, Trade and People in Ireland: 1650 - 1950: Essays in Honour of W. H. Crawford (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2005), pp. 51 – 65 (p. 63). 174 Wainwright to Clayton, Sundon Correspondence, f. 77.

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another example of an indifferent and corrupt English administrator out to make his own fortune at the expense of a subjugated and colonized class of people.175

John Wainwright’s work ethic was however considerably disparate from the venality of most fellow Anglican lawmakers, and as Wainwright grew more accustomed to life in Ireland he had more sympathy for the native Irish inhabitants. Letters from 1735 and 1736 to Clayton reflect his growing worry about the corruption of the Anglo-Irish administration. Although his pleasure in the wild Irish landscape never falters, Wainwright grows increasingly concerned about his own role in a judicial system that used execution as a method of suppressing political dissent.176 Part of the pressure came from his remarkably prominent role in the day-to-day administration of Irish affairs. As one historian of the

Hanoverian regime’s administration in Ireland comments, ‘it is important to acknowledge that those arms of central government which reached directly into the provinces were not conspicuously strong’.177

Throughout the eighteenth century the army was mainly based in Dublin, had a small fighting force and was reluctant to get directly involved in all but the most overt cases of dissent, meaning that much administrative power devolved on corrupt factions of Anglo-Irish juries. Most of these juries were made up of landed gentry with vested interests in their particular region, and these large landowners enjoyed untrammeled power over the indigenous Catholic population.178

Wainwright, as a judge who oversaw these juries, was on the front lines of colonial authority in

Ireland. He was an executive official who went with the assizes that administered government rulings in the rural counties outside Dublin. These assizes were important sites of social confluence, as witnessed by

175 For the venality of the Anglican landowning class in Ireland, see Thomas Tracy, Irishness and Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century British writing (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 51; Anthony Malcolmson, Nathaniel Clements: Government and the Governing Elite in Ireland, 1725 – 75 (Dublin: Fourt Courts Press, 2005), pp. 74, 258; Marjorie Elizabeth Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 106. 176 See Carole Fabricant, ‘Colonial Sublimities and Sublimations: Swift, Burke, and Ireland’, ELH, 72:2 (Summer, 2005), 309 – 337 (pp. 328, 332). 177 Neal Carnham, ‘Local Elite Creation in early Hanoverian Ireland: The Case of the County Grand Journal’, The Historical Journal, 42:3 (Sept. 1999), 623 – 642 (p. 624). 178 Todd B. Quinlan, ‘Big Whigs in the Mobilization of Irish Peasants: An Historical Sociology of Hegemony in Prefamine Ireland (1750s-1840s)’, Sociological Forum, 13: 2 (Jun., 1998), 247 – 264 (p. 253).

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one historian, who points out that ‘between 1716 and 1796 Ireland outside of County Dublin was divided into thirty-eight assize jurisdictions… the biannual courts of assize held in each were great social events and provided the opportunity for a great deal of commercial activity’.179 In this context, Wainwright’s public profile is highlighted as is the notoriety and fame that must have come with it, and thus the portrait of his female political patron symbolized the informal networks of power exercised by the court aristocracy. Given Wainwright’s and Clayton’s combined importance to the nation-state in this period, the portrait’s loss (it is not known in any collection today) is that much more striking.180 Social context also helps to explain why shortly after his arrival in Ireland Wainwright narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Dublin by a disaffected Sheriff’s officer, who he in fact talked down from firing a loaded pistol that had been abruptly produced in a meeting. As a high-ranking representative of the English colonial system he must have been seen as a target by the disaffected indigenous Irish. The situation of

Wainwright’s career and life history further illuminates the poignant nature, so intertwined between the spheres of ecology, colonialism, and personal merit, of the manner of his death.

In the winter of 1739-1740 Ireland, like rest of , was hit by a severe climactic event, beginning with an unusually severe winter in 1739/40 and continuing throughout 1740 to depress agriculture with drought and cool weather. This ecological crisis deepened in the winter of 1740/41.181

Cattle died from want of fodder, Spanish privateers harassed relief grain shipments intended for Ireland, and, most significantly given the retrospective lens of history, the potato harvest completely failed, so that there was an influx of starving people from the country into the better-supplied towns. In its severity, the incident presaged the more well-known Potato famine of 1845 – 1852, causing a vast amount of human

179 Carnham, ‘Local Elite Creation’, p. 625. 180 Surviving portraits of Clayton attributed to Kneller are extant in a few collections: see The Gentleman’s Magazine, 146 (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, July –Dec. 1829), p. 328. 181 See David Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 43; James Lyndon, The Making of Ireland: From Ancient Times to the Present (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 258; Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Economic History, 1800 – 1925 (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 3.

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suffering.182 By 1741 the streets of Cork were lined with beggars, riots seriously threatened the distribution systems of remaining food, and crime rates skyrocketed. Robert Jocelyn, of

Ireland, wrote to an English colleague that ‘one of the consequences of this scarcity has been fluxes and fevers, and the last infectious in many places. The numbers of prisoners have been so great that we were under necessity of sending three judges to Munster and Leinster’, one of whom had already died, and

Jocelyn was gravely worried about the physical health of the other two, including John Wainwright, who in Jocelyon’s words ‘undertook it out of good nature’, obviously feeling it was his duty to go into the

Celtic southwest to alleviate whatever suffering he could.183 This was no easy mission, and would have given pause to even the most dedicated humanitarian. Jocelyn reports that both surviving judges were worn down, and one of Wainwright’s expressions at this time was that they were ‘greviously offended daily with miserable spectacles, expiring wretches, and noisome smells’, the language of which should not deter the modern reader from fully appreciating the very real efforts Wainwright was making to deal with an incredibly difficult situation.184

Wainwright in this period was reporting directly to the government over the heads of men like the

Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire), who was widely seen as a figurehead lacking concrete political abilities, and Hugh Boulter, Bishop of Armagh and head of the

182 See David Dickson, Arctic Ireland: The Extraordinary Story of the Great Frost and Forgotten Famine of 1740 – 1741 (Belfast: White Pine Press, 1997). 183 F. Etherington Ball, The Judge in Ireland, 1221 – 1921 (London, T. Murray, 1926), p. 132. See also Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1891– 1894), p. 244. 184 Ibid., p. 132. An unexpected (from a cultural history point of view) consequence of the famine was that some of the more socially ‘responsible’ members of the Anglo-Irish elite were spurred into opening their purses to commission monumental follies, in a desperate attempt to reconcile charity with the Protestant work ethic. Simply giving money to the afflicted poor would, according to precepts of Protestant benevolence at the time, be an inducement to indolence, and so extraordinary edifices, with no particular function other than commemorative or aesthetic, rose on the grounds of the great landowners. The best known examples are the Baois Uí Chongaile (Conolly’s Folly) and The Great Barn, designed by Richard Cassels, an émigré architect of mixed German and French heritage, and commissioned by Katherine (Conygham) Conolly to provide relief to the poor of Celbridge during the famine. See James Howley, The Follies and Garden Buildings of Ireland (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 16. See also Mariga Guinness et al., ‘The (Deliberate) Follies of Ireland’, Ireland of the Welcomes, 20: 5 (Jan. – April 1972), 19 – 25.

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Church of Ireland, who had been in Ireland for seventeen years and had grown increasingly pro-Irish.185

Jocelyn’s concern for Wainwright’s health was not just personal, although the friendship between the two men was genuine. He was worried that the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, would be left without an effective workhorse in the Irish colonial administration. In the event his concern was fully justified.

Wainwright contracted a fever in Munster and was hastily hurried back to his house at Mount Merrion by his servants. The painted eyes of Charlotte Clayton, by this time raised to the peerage as Lady Sundon, must have watched the poor man’s last entrance into the house, for within a few days he was dead at only fifty-two years of age.186

Wainwright had called the Worsdale portrait of Charlotte Clayton the ‘star’ that would guide him in his conduct in Ireland, a heritage item not only ‘an honour’ to him, or an object that would continually remind him of his duty to the Hanoverian royal family, and to the English interest and administration in

Ireland, but also ‘a companion’ to him. The Clayton portrait was thus simultaneously a political and an emotive item, the meaning of which was completely bound up with his strong personal friendship with the Queen’s favourite Lady-in-Waiting. The complete quote of the passage when he says ‘the view of it will keep me in awe as to my conduct, & keep me not only from improbity, but from lighter offences’ concludes with the words ‘& at the same time will give me a happiness which very few can inspire at the same time, or raise veneration and affection to the highest pitch at once’. The portrait thus was a kind of behavioral inducement, a reminder that privilege was contingent on responsibility. Wainwright, unlike many of the Anglo-Irish landed elite, viewed the ethical treatment of the indigenous population as being part of that responsibility.

The Clayton portrait therefore acted as a concrete, tangible marker of how Clayton – and through

Clayton’s representation Queen Caroline – was part of a circle of elite men and women who were

185 See D. W. Hayton, Ruling Ireland, 1685 – 1742: Politics, Politicians and Parties (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004). For Cavendish, see also Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), p. 168. 186 Francis Elrington Ball, ‘Parish of Taney’, A History of the County Dublin, 6 vols (Dublin: Alexander Thom and Co., 1902 - 1920), II, http://www.chaptersofdublin.com/books/ball1-6/Ball2/ball2.2.htm [accessed 27 November 2009]

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attempting to forge a new kind of ethical responsibility. Religious tolerance was a substantial component of these ethics propagated by the Queen at the British court, sometimes to considerable amounts of disapproval. Caroline was a well-educated, intellectual (far more so than her husband) and socially (and, most important, religiously) tolerant woman, of which there are many instances in the historical record.187

Caroline’s use of Charlotte Clayton as a contact between high-ranking church individuals who espoused differing views on tolerance from the dominant, official, orthodox line is, in fact, one of the most visible markers of the Queen’s open-mindedness towards church heterodoxy.188 Through friendship and patronage two women were personally associated with many of the most important figures of the growing move for religious tolerance within the Anglican church and outside of it, a movement which included the call for so-called ‘rational religion’. Many of these figures such as ‘, Benjamin Hoadley,

William Whiston, , William Talbot, and Alured Clarke’ were known as ‘decidedly low- church’ so that many Tories and high churchmen – including, ironically, Sir Robert Walpole, who was infuriated when the Queen refused the sacrament on her deathbed in 1737 – accused Clayton of

‘latitudinarianism and theological heterodoxy’. 189 I argue that these inclinations towards religious tolerance spilled over into the appointment of men who could fulfill similarly tolerant attitudes within the administration of colonial Ireland. The Clayton portrait quite literally visualized this policy when displayed at Mount Merrion.

Wainwright’s Death and Ecocriticism

187 See Norman Sykes, ‘Queen Caroline and the Church’, History, 11: 44 (1927), 333 – 339 (pp. 337, 338); Stephen Taylor, ‘ “Dr. Codex” and the Whig “Pope”: Edmund Gibson, Bishop of Lincoln and London, 1716 – 1748’, in Lords of Parliament: Studies, 1714 –1914, ed. by R. Gibson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 9 – 28; Idem, ‘Queen Caroline and the Church of England’, in Hanoverian Britain and Empire, ed. by Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors, and Clyve Jones (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press), pp. 82 – 101; Scott Mandlebrote, ‘Eighteenth- Century Reactions to Newton’s Anti-Trinitarianism’, in Newton and Newtonianism, ed. by J. E. Force and S. Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 2004), pp. 93 – 112 (p. 94). For Caroline’s later reputation as a Protestant hero, see Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 265. 188 Robert C. Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), p. 59. 189 Ibid., p. 55. See also Carter, ‘Clayton , Charlotte, Lady Sundon’, par. 4.

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The circumstances surrounding Wainwright’s death also have very real contemporary relevance. The

Irish famine of 1739-41 was part of a larger global climatic event. While the famine itself was caused by

‘a failure of the grain harvest and a shortage of milk, combined with frost damage to potato crops’, its appearance was not an isolated phenomenon.190 That particular winter is on record as affecting England as well, particularly in regions like Norfolk, which relied heavily on agriculture and less on the emerging mining, manufactory and commercial activities that underwrote economic activity in regions like

Pontypool, Liverpool or London.191 Dendrochronological analysis, or the detailed examination of successive growth patterns of trees, called ‘tree-rings’, can enhance any historical reading of culture, including art history.192 In this instance, scientific examination of dendrochronological studies confirms that 1739 was a climatic event year not simply limited to the British Isles, but also affecting geographically distinct ecological zones. One example is a 2005 study from Humboldt State University, where two biologists extracted a sample from over 1500 trees, ironically named ‘Port Orford Cedar’ (Sir

Robert Walpole took the peerage as Lord Orford on his retirement), and used the most up-to-date scientific methodologies to construct a climate data-set for the past five hundred and eight years. In their words, ‘the year 17 9 stood out as a climatic pointer year, with the smallest ring width index for the entire chronology and anatomically distinctive damage to the latewood of 17 8 and the earlywood of 17 9’. 193

Fire and disease could be ruled out since the trauma was limited to only one year and one species, which is particularly susceptible to cold and to drought; the authors acknowledged that there was a volcanic eruption in 1739 on Mount Tarumae, on the north Japanese island of Hokkaido, but cautioned against single-source trauma attribution.

190 L. A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine: A History of Food and Nutrition in Ireland 1500 – 1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 63. 191 See T. Southwell, ‘An Account of the Severe Winter of 17 9-40 and its Effects on the County of Norfolk’, Transactions of the Norwich Naturalists Society, 2 (1875), 125 – 1 0, and Mark Overton, ‘Weather and Agricultural Change in England, 1660 – 17 9’, Agricultural History, 63: 2 (Spring, 1989), 77 – 88. 192 Mike Baillie, A Slice through Time: Dendrochronology and Precision Dating (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 16 – 31. For the importance of the dendrochrologic method for cultural history, and the need to juxtapose such scientific studies with those of art history, see Oleg Grabar, ‘Different but compatible ends’, in ‘The Object of Art History’, by David Freedberg et. al, The Art Bulletin , 76: 3 (Sep., 1994), 394 – 410 (p. 396). 193 Allyson L. Carroll and Erik S. Jules, ‘Climactic Assessment of a 580 year Chamaecyparis Lawsoniana (Port Orford Cedar) Tree Ring Chronology in the Siskiyou Mountains, USA’, Madroño, 52: 2 (2005), 114 – 122 (p. 114).

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The Tarumae eruption was a Plinian eruption, which ejects a massive column of gas and volcanic ash directly into the stratosphere, unlike the recent Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland, and is estimated at a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 5, larger than Mount St. Helens and comparable in eject mass to the

Pinatubo eruption of 1991.194 The point is that this eruption was a climactic event that affected the whole planet, not just Ireland and England. Even if John Wainwright was an elite, high-status, top-ranking member of society who was not at immediate risk of famine, his life was still cut short because of the famine and disease that was attendant on this global climatic event. His life was economically and biologically interconnected to larger societal forces that are in turn heavily dependent on climatic cycles of the planet. As Sarah Cohen notes, ‘ecocritical studies have recognized that human culture is itself part of a larger, perhaps more tortuous ecology that enfolds both the “natural” forces of biological life and the artificial constructions of human production’. 195 Records of Wainwright’s correspondence with Clayton help show how portraits of Ladies-in-Waiting, when read alongside archival writings about their reception, can advance an ecocritical reading of individual human lives.

James Worsdale

Wainwright’s comments on his portrait of Charlotte Clayton have additional significance to art history.

James Worsdale is one of the most colourful figures to emerge from either Irish or English eighteenth- century art, and certainly the combination of his rather ‘naïve,’ formal, hierarchical style – inherited from his training with Sir Godfrey Kneller – and his decidedly rakish, eccentric and flamboyant lifestyle did not endear him to subsequent generations of more prudish historians. Even now, Worsdale is one of the most reviled figures in English art, making Wainwright’s first-hand evidence on the depth and breadth of his abilities even more striking. Horace Walpole, for example, wrote in his Anecdotes of Painting in

194 Ibid., p. 114. See also Teruyoshi Nagamitsu et al., ‘Clonal Diversity, Genetic Structure, and Mode of Recruitment in a Prunus ssiori Population Established after Volcanic Eruptions’, Plant Ecology , 174: 1 (2004), 1 – 10 (p. 2). 195Sarah R. Cohen, ‘Animal Performance in Oudry’s Illustration to the Fables of La Fontaine’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 39 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2010), 35 – 76 (p. 69). See also Christa Greve-Volpp, ‘How to Speak the Unspeakable: The Aesthetics of the Voice of Nature’, Zeitschrift fur Englische Philologie, 124: 1 (2006), 122 – 143, and Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Eco-Criticism, ed. by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R.Wallace (Charlotteville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2001).

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England that Worsdale ‘would have been little known, had he been distinguished by no talents but his pencil’ and the current entry in the Dictionary of National Biography acknowledges that ‘critics have questioned his artistic ability’. 196 Even in the most recent scholarship, Worsdale’s artistic abilities continue to be disparaged. David Ryan, in a 2010 anthology of eighteenth-century Irish clubs and societies, says that Worsdale was a painter of ‘limited artistic ability’ which is exemplary of most current writing on this unique artist.197

Wainwright’s admiration of Worsdale’s work hints at how this little-known painter’s career developed. One nineteenth-century art historian noted that after his apprenticeship ‘as an independent painter he produced portraits in the Kneller manner, painting royal portraits for the Nisi Prius Court,

Chester in 17 ’, but two years later he is recorded in Ireland.198 I argue that Worsdale’s arrival in Dublin is highly significant: Wainwright may very well have ‘talked up’ his reputation following the success of the Clayton portrait at Mount Merrion. Given the strong political and personal links that were physically embodied in the painting, Wainwright undoubtedly made the image a highlight of any tour of his house, and would have been seen by prominent individuals during their visits to his house.

196 See Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, With Some Account of the Principal Artists.., p. 102, and F. M. O’Donoghue, ‘Worsdale, James (c.1692–1767)’, rev. Arianne Burnette, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) ; http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/29979 [accessed May 2008].Wikipedia’s entry on Worsdale (in May 2008) reproduces the criticism, saying ‘his skills as a painter are not widely praised by art historians’. 197 David Ryan, ‘The Dublin Hellfire Club,’ in, Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ed. by James Kelly and Martyn Powell (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010), pp. 322 – 352; see also David Fleming, Politics and Provincial People: Sligo and Limerick 1691 – 1761 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 198 William Benjamin Sarsfield Taylor, The Origin, Progress and Present Condition of the Fine Arts in Great Britain and Ireland (London: Whittaker and Co., 1841), p. 94.

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While in Ireland Worsdale was a central figure in the foundation of the Limerick Hell-fire Club, a rakish, convivial association of mostly elite men of dubious morals and scandalous reputation.199 The club’s activities were no doubt deliberately calculated to provoke the outrage of the morally and religiously conventional segments of society, and included such devices of dissidence as leaving a chair of state at their meetings vacant for the Devil, adopting a black cat as their mascot, and drinking scaltheen, a mixture of whiskey and hot butter. They also leased a hunting lodge built with the stones of a Neolithic passage grave at the summit of Montpelier Hill, in a heavily forested region outlying Dublin. This structure had already been Figure 3.2. James Worsdale, The Limerick Hell associated with spirit manifestations, as the wind blew the Fire Club, c.1736, oil on canvas, 1022 x 770 mm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. roof off soon after its completion. The most exaggerated stories of animal sacrifice, black masses and the ritual murder of a dwarf, as well as sexual excesses of nearly every kind, were soon circulating amongst the outraged citizenry of Dublin, although many of these stories seem dubious. Due to the complete lack of actual records, what actually went on behind the closed doors of the Montpelier Hill Conolly Lodge will forever remain unknown. The groups’ favourite inn, Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill, seems to have witnessed activities that were more or less proper orgies along the lines of the activities of the more famous ‘Brotherhood of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe’ founded fifteen years later by Sir Francis Dashwood. Worsdale’s conversation-piece group portrait of members of the Limerick Hellfire Club (Fig. 3.2), on permanent display at the National Gallery of

199Including Richard Parsons, 1st , Lord Blayney, Colonel Jack St. Leger, Richard Chappell Whaley (known as ‘Burnchapel Whaley’ from his lamentable pyromaniac propensity to set Roman Catholic churches on fire), Harry Barry, Lord Santry (tried and convicted for murder in 1739), Simon Luttrell, Lord Irnham, Colonel Henry Bessborough, Colonel Richard St. George and Colonel Clements. See Constantine George Caffentzis, Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), p. 388, and John Patrick Pendergast, Ireland from the Restoration to the Revolution, 1660 – 1690 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1887), p. 168.

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Ireland, is today one of his best-known and most-viewed works. David Solkin has pointed out how much this image is indebted to the ‘merry company’ tradition and Karen Harvey further groups it with the type of ‘impolite conviviality’ represented by Hogarth’s debauched, drunken inhabitants of A Midnight

Modern Conversation.200 As Harvey remarks, ‘we know little about the Irish Hell-Fire clubs’.201

Wainwight’s potential influence over James Worsdale’s decision to relocate to Ireland deserves further critical attention, as does Worsdale’s formative influence over the development of this sexually and socially dissident organization.

Other stories of Worsdale parallel the reports of his activities with the Limerick Hellfire Club.

George Vertue scathingly castigated him on his return to England in 1744 as ‘a little cringing creature’ who by ‘many artful wayes pushd himself into a numerous acquaintance’, who then furthered his artistic career. 202 Vertue’s severe description appears to be a direct reference to his involvement in the conspiracy by John Cather to blackmail Edward Walpole, younger son of Sir Robert Walpole and elder brother of

Horace, by accusing him of sodomy. According to the Irish Quarterly Review of 1853, Edward Walpole

‘had been accused of a detestable crime, but Worsdale discovered the conspiracy against his patron’s honour, and by great address and incessant pains brought the delinquents to justice. To effect this, he lodged on Saffron-Hill, as a haymaker, from Munster, and in the Mint, Southwark, as the widow of a recruiting Sargeant from Sligo.’ Worsdale had a life-long interest in theatre, not simply limited to the writing (or plagiarising) of plays and songs, but also to appearing on stage in a variety of roles, including, on numerous occasions, those of women. One such role was in Samuel Foote’s 1752 Drury Lane farce

Taste, where he appeared in the role of ‘Lady Pentweazel’, in which capacity, according to the notes of

200 David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1992), p. 100; See also Anne Crookshank and Desmond John Villiers Fitzgerald, The Painters of Ireland, c. 1600 – 1920 (Dublin: Barrie & Jenkins, 1979), p. 29. 201 Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Exotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 71. 202 George Vertue qtd. in Robin Nicholson, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Making of a Myth: A Study in Portraiture, 1720 – 1892 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), p. 149, n. 50. Nicholson here describes James Worsdale as ‘an insignificant and disreputable portraitist’.

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the prompter that night, he was ‘well received’. 203 Foote’s Taste is all about émigré artists: the prologue, recited by Garrick, makes an explicit sexual connection between the lack of interest shown in women by art critics, who are too interested in foreign antiques to satisfy their wives: ‘their blood at the sight of beauty gently flows; their Venus must be old, and want a nose’.204 The play’s thematic link is the lack of opportunities given to native English artists, who band to trick the vain aristocracy into their support. 205

There is other evidence to suggest that Henry Fox, who likely had a vested interest in keeping such scandals as much out of the public eye as possible, either from personal, familial or friendly reasons, could potentially have been connected to the use of Worsdale as a cross-dressing espionage agent. In a letter written from ‘Cartown near Dublin’, his sister-in-law’s estate, Fox writes to Charles Hanbury

Williams that he likes ‘Neddy Walpole the least of the family, but I wish him out of this scrape, & am clear it can only be got well out of by compromise, if anything distracts him it will be to part with the money necessary to compromise it’. 206 By the autumn Hanbury Williams’ friend, the old rake Henry

Harris, in the context of a letter that refers explicitly, even pornographically, to sodomy among their numerous acquaintances – including Frederick II, King of Prussia, and John Savile, 1st Earl of

Mexborough – is sure enough of the success of Worsdale’s mission that he writes ‘Neddy Walpole is got much better out of the scrape than most folks imagined he would – no law, or forms of proof will acquit any man, in this country, but to those who bear him no hatred: and every imputation, according to good justice here, becomes an unalterable record with one’s enemies’.207

203 A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and other Stage Personnel in London, 1660 – 1800, ed. by Philip H. Highfill, Kalmann A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhars, 23 vols (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 199 ), XVI, p. 275. Horace Walpole records that James Worsdale’s performance of ‘Old Lady Scandal’ in The Assembly, A Farce was done ‘admirably well’ and a 1756 account concurs, noting the play was written by Worsdale himself and the role played ‘in the utmost perfection’. See Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, With Some Account of the Principal Artists.., p. 102, and Theatrical Records: Or an Account of English Dramatic Authors and their Works (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1756), p. 124. 204 See Samuel Foote, ‘Prologue’, Taste, in Memoirs of Samuel Foote, Esq: With a Collection of his Genuine bon- mots ..., ed. by William Cook (New York: Peter A. Mesier, 1806), p. 33. 205 Ibid., p. 32. 206 Letter from Henry Fox to Charles Hanbury Williams, dated Dublin, 26 May 1750. Charles Hanbury Williams MSS 52 – 10902, ff 45, 48. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, Farmington, Connecticut. 207 Henry Harris to Charles Hanbury Williams, 3etter dated Tuesday, 16 October 1750. Idem, ff 151, 152.

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Helping to rescue ‘Neddy’ Walpole from a notorious sodomy trial was a shrewd move on

Worsdale’s part, as the Walpole connection was influential, and with the help of his patron he was later appointed Master Painter to the Board of Ordnance.208 Certainly some recorded business transactions of his indicate he was a shrewd and aggressive businessman, with work that was considered ‘above par’ by a discerning and educated clientele, such as the Conolly family, one of the leading Anglo-Irish landowners.

On 21 July 17 8 Conolly’s agent ‘paid Mr. Worsdale for drawing your Grace’s picture for Mrs. Conolly’ and again on 24 April 1740 he again ‘paid Mr. James Worsdale for your grace’s picture and frame, drawn by him for the Royal Hospital’. Two days later there was an addendum recording that the agent ‘paid him in full for the frame, upon Mr. Dance’s enquiring on the value of it’, suggesting Worsdale and his wealthy patron disagreed on the valuation of an elaborate gilded frame.209 The same source that records these payments claim that ‘his talents as an artist were inconsiderable’ 210 as does a recent biographical dictionary of theatrical figures in London which also asserts ‘he was not a very talented artist’. 211

Worsdale and Art Historiography

Worsdale was not a scrupulous man when it came to plagiarism. The Irish author Laetitia Pilkington, after she had been publically disgraced by her husband in an adultery case and rejected by society, claims

Worsdale paid her a shilling a day to sit in a room that adjoined his studio and write prologues and plays for him, all of which he passed off as his own.212 She is obviously a biased source, but her account of meeting the artist in London when still married to her Irish-born husband is an informative view, not only of Worsdale’s temperament, but the sexual pressures that were sometimes put on married women by

208 The London Magazine, or the Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, 28 (London: R. Baldwin, July of 1759), p. 396. For more specific details on the trial, see Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Writing, ed. by Ian McCormick (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 106, and Netta Murray Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1998). 209 ‘The Streets of Dublin, no.VI’, Irish Quarterly Review, 10 (June, 1853), 259 – 299 (p. 261). 210 Ibid., p. 260. 211 Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, p. 275. 212 Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, 2 vols (Athens, GA: University of George Press, 1997 repr. of 1748), I, p. 67.

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wealthy men seemingly in combination with their husbands.213 Pilkington’s husband eventually decided to lodge with Worsdale in his house causing her to return to Ireland to ‘avoid both the temptation and scandal I must have suffered, by going to the house of a person, who, with regard to women, had so avowedly a dissolute character’.214 Just as Worsdale outraged the virtuosi of eighteenth-century Dublin and London with his dissident performances of liminal masculinity, or his ‘artful cringing ways’ both in the theatre and in the art world, his public reputation for sexual freedom alienated him from respectable women. Clayton and Wainwright’s correspondence offers a rare chance to retrieve, reappraise and re- claim his historical memory. 215

213 Ibid, p. 64. 214 Ibid, p. 67. 215 Two other archival documents in the Sundon Correspondence further illustrate the close interconnection between friendship, political patronage and the exchange of portraits, inevitably involving the reproduction and modification of an ‘original’ image through hand-copying, either by a studio assistant or an independent specialist who made a professional living through the duplication of portrait images. The doctor Robert Friend wrote from Oxford on 28 April 17 8, some months after the tragic death of the Queen, that ‘I wish I could hear whither there be any prospect of having a copy of the Queen's picture, I should rather chuse that, as an honourable memorial in the family, than anything else but I must submitt to what is thought proper’. As a more proximate comparison to Irish portrait, a letter from a great Dorset landowner, Susan Strangways-Horner, asking for a place for a friend in the land-writer registry, is a follow-up congratulatory letter on Clayton’s husband’s promotion to the peerage. Her letter is dated from Paris, 8 June 1736, and shows that women exchanged portraits as a political gesture of friendship, just as men did. The letter extends to June 10.

you will (I hope) excuse my importunity in desiring your promise, as soon as you have leisure to sit, since I promise myself no little satisfaction from the entertainment it will give me, as I am at so great a distance from the dear original... whenever you honour me with your picture, if its sent to my people in town to be delivered to Mrs. Mattrevesit will be taken care of and sent me. I shall repeat this form... the more I see of mr. foxe, the more happyness I forsee for my daughter, who is very fond of him, behaves extremely well, and is very much your ladyship’s humbIe servant. I would indeed, dear madam, be very glad to see your ladyships' picture as soon as ever I come to Grosvenor Street, as soon as ever you please to compare it with the original.

Susan Strangways-Horner to Charlotte Clayton, Letters of 8 - 10 June 17 6, and from the Strangways’ hereditary seat and country house of Melbury, October 20, 1736 in Sundon Correspondence, III, f. 7. Considering Strangways- Horner’s marriage had broken down because of her public affair with her thirteen-year old daughter Elizabeth’s new brother-in-law, Henry Fox, and all London talked of her arranging the marriage without her husband’s knowledge or consent (Strangways-Horner and Horner permanently separated soon after), this is an extraordinary document. The prominent display of images of powerful friends at court may well have helped Strangways-Horner to buttress her social position following the scandal, and it is significant that she writes from Paris, the eternal refuge of those eighteenth-century members of the aristocracy who wished, or were compelled, to avoid the fallout from a particularly public scandal. While Wainwright’s painting is lost, Strangways-Horner’s copy of Clayton’s portrait may be one of the only public images of this important and little-known figure left, and consequently has great historical significance. It is mentioned as being on the main staircase of Melbury as late as 1909. Melbury remains one the largest country houses in England to be retained in the original family’s possession, still occupied by Stephen Fox and Elizabeth Strangways-Horner’s descendants. See Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Sir

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The importance of this correspondence is however problematized by the historiographic frame erected over it by Katherine Thomson, who uses the life and writing of Charlotte Clayton and her friends to articulate her own version of revisionist social history. Victorian mores and manners are highly evident in her unease towards the freedom and power evidenced in the life of elite women courtiers, who as these letters prove did wield enormous sway over the distribution of administrative offices through court patronage. Writing of Charlotte Clayton’s time, Thomson claims that ‘the history of England, at this period, is particularly uninteresting… trade, as well as intellect, languished’, 216 indicating her disdain for the century that preceded her own. The history of the Anglican Church in particular caused grave unease.

Of the flattering letters, often seeking preferment, that Charlotte Clayton received from ambitious clergymen, Thomson exclaims that she could not read them without ‘disgust’, aghast that an ‘able and learned man should offer to forgoe his own opinions at the mandate of a woman of the bedchamber – [it] is revolting’.217 Her attitude speaks more to the disjunction between the possibilities offered to elite women in the eighteenth century versus those extended to women of her own time,218 while her opinion of Lord John Hervey is equally biased by the medicalized view of homosexuality that was emerging in the 19th century. She calls his personification as Sporus in Pope’s Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot a

‘disgusting caricature, penned at the dictation of a fiend-like spirit’, adding that Archdeacon Coxe said that the lines could never be read without ‘disgust and horror – disgust, at the indelicacy of the illusions, and horror, in laying the foundation of his abuse on the lowest species of satire, personal invective, and what is still worse, on sickness and debility’, again pointing more to Victorian attitudes towards sexuality

Leslie Stephen, Robert Blake, and Christine Stephanie Nicholls (London and New York: The MacMillan Company, 1909), p. 171. Amateur photographs of the staircase and its beautiful collection of eighteenth-century portraits were briefly available in 2008 on ‘Flickr’, but have since (understandably, given their value) been taken down; Dr. Pierre du Prey remembers visiting the house and seeing them and Melbury’s splendid collection of porcelain. See Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England 1660 – 1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 216 Katherine Thomson, Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon (London: Colburn, 1847), p. 95. 217 Ibid., p. 21. 218 See also Frances Seymour, Countess of Hartford and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret, Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hartford, (afterwards Duchess of Somerset) and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret Between the Years 1738 and 1741, 3 vols (London: Alexander Street Press, 1806), I, p. 217.

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than to real, lived experiences at the Georgian Court. Thomson’s comments about her archival research reveal a fascinating example of the problems inherent in British historiographical writing. 219

Just as Thomson’s editorial judgements reflect more about Victorian attitudes towards the past than they do a real reflection of eighteenth-century social possibilities, so the continuing elision of James

Worsdale’s work in the discipline of art history contributes, not only to an depreciation of his cultural legacy, but also knowledge of the specificities of his sitters’ lives. et, as Wainwright’s letter points out,

Worsdale’s ability to catch the likeness of a sitter, despite his flat awkward compositions and somewhat naïve style, was what mattered most at the time to educated patrons at court. Wainwright’s reference to

George II ordering Worsdale to correct a presumably royal portrait from the hand of his own King’s

Painter, Charles Jervas, is difficult to corroborate in memoirs, but is consistent with the decline in patronage and reputation that Jervas is documented to have suffered in the .220 Wainwright’s own admiration for Worsdale, and his recognition that the Clayton portrait expressed a perceived similarity to her face, character and attitude, is similarly an important record of how James Worsdale’s work was viewed during the artist’s lifetime. Wainwright and Clayton’s correspondence definitely suggests a reappraisal of his work, reputation and cultural contribution to the development of dissident elite masculine conviviality, esoteric spiritualism, cross-dressing in the theatre, eighteenth-century popular

‘farce’ theatre and theatre music as a whole is long overdue. His early career was bolstered by the patronage of a Lady-in-Waiting, but he used the activist strategy of ‘queer’ drag (within an accepted context of theatrical activity) to later criticize British employment of transnational artists.221 This is an artist whose life history shows spaces where ‘queerness’ and same-sex eroticism, and certainly sexual

219Katherine Thomson, Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon, p. 226. 220 George Vertue, ‘Note-books A.f.,B.4, and another’, repr. ‘George Vertue, III’, Journal of the Walpole Society, 22 (London: R. Mackhose, 1933, 1934), p. 59. See also Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714 –1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ‘Ultimately, Jervas was abandoned, but not replaced, by the King after his deeply uninspired state portraits of George II and Queen Caroline’, p. 77. On the same page, Smith claims the ‘work of the early Georgian principal painters never rose above the competent’, a value judgment exemplary of the bias inherent in even recent writing about early Georgian visual culture. 221 See also West, ‘Patronage and Power’, 148.

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dissidence of all kinds, is well-represented, and hence his work and his social role illustrates the diversity of human sexual behaviour in the period.

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Chapter Four: ‘Not only increase but embellish the collection’: Political Satire and Lady Hervey’s Imaginary Pictures

I find there’s a great deal of wit stirring in town, I have seen a collection of pictures, some of wch are admirably good, others I don't understand, & some few I don't much like; I think there might be great & good additions to them, I pray everybody adds something as they read them; there are some originals both in your family and in mine, that would not only increase but embellish the collection, don't you think so?

24 July 1729, Lady Mary Hervey to Henrietta Howard.222

With this provocative quote, Lady Mary Hervey (1699 – 1767) concludes a long letter to her friend and former court colleague Henrietta Howard (1689 – 1767), the recognized mistress of

King George II. Immediately following the end of the letter is a list of names, many of whom were prominent political figures in early eighteenth-century British society. Each person in the list (reproduced in its entirety in Appendix I) is juxtaposed with the title of an imaginary painting, such as the ‘flower piece’ or ‘the miraculous draught of fishes’ discussed in this chapter. While the titles of some of these imaginary ‘pictures’ recall well-known works of art that were on public display in palace spaces, other titles are more general evocations of common artistic tropes, and are less specifically referential, although they are contextually associated with major works of literature and visual art from the period. In Lady Hervey’s narrative, these imaginary works of art ‘picture’ the political abilities, sexual scandals, and social pretensions of a wide range of early Georgian courtiers. In this chapter I introduce the ‘collection’ and its political context by examining the life histories of both the writer and her correspondent, and I discuss the first two entries in the text, ‘a flower piece by ye speaker’ and ‘a miraculous draught

222 Mary Lepell Hervey, Baroness Hervey to Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk. The archival manuscript itself is in the British Library within The Suffolk Papers, ADD MSS 22628 (hereafter referred to as Suffolk Papers), and is located at ff 13 – 39. The list is contained within a letter dated Ickworth, 24 July1729 (although the British Library’s own manuscript cataloguing system erroneously ascribes to it a date from the early 1730s, the letter itself is clearly dated to 1729). I use the term ‘Lady Hervey’ to avoid confusion with her husband, also mentioned in this thesis: ‘Lady Hervey’ is how this was known in her lifetime and continues to be known in current cultural history.

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of fishes by Sir R W’. 223 I will argue that these entries skillfully refer to the administrative abilities and political reputation of , Speaker of the House of Commons, and Sir

Robert Walpole, leader of the ‘Whig’ party. By illustrating the differing critical attitudes towards flower painting and Italian ‘Old Master’ painting held by later generations of art historians, I explore the contrasting critical reception of Francophile still life painting and Raphael’s tapestry cartoons.

Lady Hervey’s Audience

Indicated in the letter by the phrases ‘there might be great and good additions to them’ and ‘I pray everybody adds something when they read them’, Lady Hervey’s letter was designed to appeal not just to Henrietta Howard, but also to a wider social circle who were thus invited to participate in the communal exercise of ‘imagining’ people as paintings. By her clear invitation for a select audience of courtier friends – ‘everybody’– to elaborate on her initial entries, Lady

Hervey was informed by the culture of collective letter reading associated with Henrietta

Howard and her circle. For example, in the summer of 1722, Elizabeth Mordaunt, Lady Mohun wrote to Howard asking for the latest installment of a ‘court journal’, a periodical she occasionally wrote for the amusement of her friends. Lady Mohun’s letter reiterates the boredom, estrangement and oppressive atmosphere of country-house life lamented by some elite women. She writes that ‘the neighbours we are sometimes delivered up to are more disgusting, and less conversable, than our own familiar cattle… our books are out, and our own prodigious fund of wit exhausted… we are not only grown weary of each other’s repeated dulness, but of

223 The full list is reproduced in Appendix One.

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ourselves…’ 224 She ends her letter with a poem, beginning with the lines ‘the wind and rain discordant brawl, and penetrate through chinks of wall, and sound melodious in the wall’, and concluding with ‘ our journal therefore send us soon, to dissipate our clouds at noon, or death will seize your weary – Mohun’.225 Lady Mohun’s missive reiterates many similar themes that occur in Lady Hervey’s own letter. The dominant theme is the sense of boredom and social estrangement experienced by some women during the summer months, when the nobility were immured at country houses. Both women cherished Howard’s friendship and used these communal epistolary exercises, such as a light-hearted court journal or an imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, to alleviate their obvious sense of estrangement from the court.

Found in Henrietta Howard’s correspondences after her death, Lady Hervey’s letter with its imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ was clearly thought to be worth preserving by Howard, and its innate value to Howard was likely the memory of the collectively enjoyed fun, laughter and entertainment that it provided to her circle. This example parallels Betty Germain’s anger towards Swift for abusing Howard in a letter that was expected to be circulated, cited in this thesis’ introduction, and helps explain the reasons why Lady Hervey’s letter was selected for preservation. As Howard no doubt recognized, the imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ is a carefully crafted social document, rich in communicative potential. The political character of the

‘collection’ shows how court women like Ladies-in-Waiting and Maids of Honour wielded real, concrete political influence, and how some courtiers used satirical documents, games and poems as expressions of political agency. Simply because women were excluded from direct political

224 Lady Mohun (Elizabeth Lawrence Griffin Mohun Mordaunt), to Henrietta Howard, Letter of July 1722, in Letters to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, and her Second Husband, the Hon. George Berkeley: from 1712 to 1767, ed. by John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1824), pp. 95, 96. 225 Ibid., p. 95.

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action in the House of Commons did not, by any means, necessarily result in their disenfranchisement from the political process.

As well as demonstrating court women’s personal involvement with politics, Lady

Hervey’s ‘collection of pictures’ also demonstrates the educational prerogatives necessary for its function as a social exercise. With its biblical and literary references, political character and risqué humour, the ‘collection’ is similar to the convivial literary games inaugurated by the literary hostesses – the salonnières - of aristocratic France. Bodek, among others, has recognized the importance of the French salon in educational opportunities for elite women in early eighteenth-century Britain, specifically highlighting how the celebration of feminine intellect that was present in salon culture helped spur the continuation of cultural Francophilia among elite British women throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.226 Originally founded by early seventeenth-century court women who used their homes to stage informal gatherings dedicated to artistic and literary conviviality, the salon became institutionalized as a space for cultural excellence by elite French society. As hostesses, authors and performers in their own right, women played a crucial role at the French salon, and the educational and social opportunities offered to women were part of the salon’s longevity: salon-style gatherings were imported from Italy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and were a vital component of French social life until at least the French Revolution (some authors, such as

Steven Kale, extend its lifespan up until the pan-European revolts of 1848).227 I discuss salon culture more fully in chapter Five, but the thematic links between salon social culture, the formal

226 For the cultural exchange between English noblewomen and French salon hostesses, see Evelyn Gordon Bodek, ‘Salonières and Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating Feminism’, Feminist Studies, 3:3/4 (Spring - Summer, 1976), 185 – 199 (p. 186). 227 Steven D. Kale, French Salons : High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2006).

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characteristic of early Rococo visual art, and Lady Hervey’s letter itself should not be underestimated.

In her article ‘Confounding Conventions: Gender Ambiguity and François Boucher's

Painted ’, Melissa Hyde points to Mary Sheriff’s prescient recognition of how early

Rococo art is made up of a ‘coded visual language, engag[ing] the informed viewer in a pleasurable and amusing game of decoding, unveiling the conceits, recognizing the simultaneous meanings’.228 Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ is a strong parallel to the interests in simultaneous, playful iconographies identified by Sheriff and Hyde. The ‘game of decoding’ that these scholars identify as central to the allure of early eighteenth-century French Rococo art is necessarily a vital characteristic of the entire literary exercise shared by Hervey, Howard and their courtly milieu, and well illustrates the thematic links between the world of the French salon and the literary and artistic gatherings hosted by Henrietta Howard at Marble Hill. For Hyde, these exercises in simultaneous discourse, in meanings that appealed to a select group primed to appreciate iconographical references to politics and sexuality, were a direct challenge to the monolithic character of the era’s socio-cultural norms. Created from within the sexualized atmosphere of the salon, these ‘games of decoding’ showcased lateral movements and contextual associations between texts both written and visual. Hyde points out how ‘the meanings that are produced and the system of values with which they intersect were anathema to the proponents of classicizing history painting’, and the same might be said of literature, architecture, and the norms of elite female education.229

228 Melissa Hyde, ‘Confounding Conventions: Gender Ambiguity and François Boucher's Painted Pastorals’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30: 1 (Fall, 1996), 25 – 57. Hyde refers to Mary Sheriff, Fragonard, Art and Eroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 103. 229 Hyde, ‘Confounding Conventions’, 2.

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Lady Hervey’s ‘collection of pictures’ thus evokes the cultivated world of the French salonnière hostesses, who used similar jeu de mots to create group cohesion and solidarity at their literary gatherings.230 Literary historian Antoine Lilti has pointed out how communal participation in similar ‘word games’ at the salons not only contributed to the entertainment of an erudite elite, but also signalled ‘l’excellence des manières de la bonne société sur lesquelles repose le prestige des élites mondaines’, buttressing the social position of the aristocracy and the social leadership of educated women.231 Lady Hervey’s letter implicitly recognizes the similar social role played by Henrietta Howard as an independent hostess at Marble Hill. Her imaginary collection was akin to the ‘condensed verbal portraits’ identified by historians Anne Duggan and

Susan Herbst as crucial to the salonnière sense of fun, play and enjoyment.232 For Herbst the early eighteenth century was a time of transition for salon culture. Aristocratic hostesses swung away from the parlour games and gambling that had characterized earlier gatherings to a more serious, if equally communal focus on literature and politics, ‘encouraging the reading of poems, plays, and philosophical tracts rather than games’. Lady Hervey’s letter, while containing game- like elements, does fit within this changing paradigm: there are deeper political, literary and artistic allusions at work, raising her letter above the status of a ‘parlour game’. The ‘collection’ is not in the same vein as other communal parlour games like blind man’s buff or charades.

Instead, her invitation to participate in the exercise of satirizing political figures at court through imaginary paintings stressed the educational and aesthetic prerogative of the aristocratic class.

230 See Doridna Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 88. 231 See Antoine Lilti, ‘Sociabilité et mondanité : Les Hommes de Lettres dans les Salons Parisiens au XVIIIe Siècle’, French Historical Studies, 28: 3 (Summer, 2005), 415 – 445 (p. 415). 232 Anne E. Duggan, Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: the Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (Newark, DE : University of Delaware Press, 2005), p. 96. See Susan Herbst, Politics at the Margin: Historical Studies of Public Expression outside the Mainstream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 58.

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The letter in which Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ is located was first published in 1824 by John Wilson Croker, a prominent nineteenth-century politician and historian who issued a heavily edited and annotated volume of Howard’s correspondence. 233 It has not to my knowledge been much discussed in subsequent scholarly literature. After reviewing the original manuscript at the British Library and comparing it to Croker’s edition, I found that Croker’s brief explanations of entries in the ‘collection of pictures’ often overlooked

(and in some cases deliberately silenced) their sexual, political and cultural meanings. Croker also admits ‘suppressing’ some of Lady Mohun’s correspondences dealing with Henrietta

Howard’s ‘court journal’, suggesting the extent to which the word games, social exercises and playful satires of Queen Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting have been occluded in the historical record. Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ is therefore a rare survivor of the informal, collaborative satires created by British court women. Its rarity adds to its critical importance as an analytic document, while the richness of its iconography – the wide range of image types listed, and the possible political, literary and sexual allusions that are contained therein – is indicative of the cultivated nature of the early Georgian court milieu. Lady Hervey clearly expected her innuendos and allusions to be intelligible to Henrietta Howard and their mutual friends who visited her at Marble Hill. The ‘collection’s’ iconographic complexity therefore attests to the social role of Henrietta Howard as a writer, hostess and political figure in her own right.

Henrietta Howard

Henrietta Howard’s career at court started in 171 , when she and her abusive, profligate husband fled their creditors for the Hanoverian court, aiming to ingratiate themselves with the recognized

233 Henrietta Howard, Letters to and from Henrietta, countess of Suffolk, pp. 340 – 346.

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successors to the British throne.234 Court life in Hanover was dominated by the Heiress Apparent to the British throne, Electress Sophia, who was informed and inspired by the literary achievements of the salonnière hostesses in France. Sophia and her granddaughter-in-law

Caroline encouraged literary gatherings of a type similar to those cultivated by the salonnières: they encouraged the attentions of the philosopher Gottfried Liebniz, promoted libraries and learning, and set a personal example through their interest in a wide range of aesthetic and intellectual pursuits. The Hanoverian court was visited by a wide range of similar supplicants during the years leading up to George I’s accession, but despite the competition, Howard’s conversation and demeanour won approval by the royal women at Hanover, and she was formally appointed as a companion of Caroline during that period.

In 1714, after Queen Anne’s death, Caroline became the Princess of Wales and travelled to England with her four youngest children. Howard returned to England in her employer’s entourage and was immediately appointed to the office of Woman of the Bedchamber in

Caroline’s suite. Three years later, following a public breach between George I and his son,

Howard remained with the royal couple, unlike many of Caroline’s other attendants. She removed from court to their new residence at Leicester House, where she helped entertain opposition political figures and consolidated her position of privilege and prominence by entering into a sexual relationship with Caroline’s husband. During this period of estrangement between the new King and the Prince of Wales, George I himself saw Howard as a politically

234 For Howard’s life, and descriptions of her person and character, see Tracy Borman, Henrietta Howard: King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant ( London: Jonathan Cape, 2007); Lewis Melville, Lady Suffolk and her Circle (London: Hutchinson, 1924); Pat Rogers, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 161; Julius Bryant, Mrs. Howard: A Woman of Reason (London: English Heritage for Marble Hill House, 1988). See also See also Marie Draper and William Arthur Eden, Marble Hill House and its Owners (London: Greater London Council, 1970). See also Ingrid Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690 –1760 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), p. 130.

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important figure who George and Caroline used to negotiate and mediate with anti-government

MPs.

By exploiting her estranged husband’s hostility and using his threat of physical violence to insinuate that her forcible removal from Caroline and George’s presence would be welcomed by the Hanoverian junto, the King and his ministers threatened to kidnap her from court. George and Caroline managed to rebuff the King’s schemes for her abduction and forcible removal by keeping much in her company, as even Charles Howard refused to abduct a member of the

Prince of Wales’ household while either the Prince or Princess was yet in the room. A financial settlement on her husband forced the King to withdraw his opposition to her presence in his son’s household, leaving Howard free to act as a mediator between Leicester House and the political and literary figures who, with an eye to the eventual succession, were currying George and Caroline’s favour. She was eventually granted a comparatively modest pension of her own

(2000 pounds a year, certainly a considerable sum, but in no way comparable to the sums lavished on royal mistresses elsewhere in Europe). George and Caroline underwrote her purchase of estate lands on the Thames halfway between Richmond and Twickenham, where she commissioned Roger Morris and the ‘architect Earl’ Henry Herbert to build a Palladian house she called ‘Marble Hill’.

Following George II’s succession to the throne in 1727, Howard’s career at court was finally freed from external threat.235 Howard’s official title was ‘Woman of the Bedchamber’, reflecting her initial status as a low-ranking aristocrat who was not the wife of a titled peer (each of whom occupied the six lucrative positions of Ladies of the Bedchamber). In 1731, after her

235 See Matthew Kilburn, ‘Howard , Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk (c.1688 – 1767)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/13904., [accessed 17 March 2011]. See also Andrew Thompson, George II: King and Elector (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 53.

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estranged husband became the 9th Earl of Suffolk, Howard was promoted to the position of

Mistress of the Robes, first among Queen Caroline’s female staff members. However, when she received the letter containing Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, she was still known at court as ‘Mrs. Howard’. For these reasons, in this thesis I refer to her as ‘Henrietta

Howard’, and not her future title of ‘Lady Suffolk’. Lady Hervey however had been known by that title since her brother-in-law’s death in 172 , and she is widely known as such in eighteenth- century cultural history.

As a royal mistress, Henrietta Howard enjoyed an unusual amount of direct social support from the Queen, who encouraged Howard’s sexual and political relationship with her husband.236

Despite Christian prohibitions on extramarital sex, male royals in this period had almost a social expectation to display a secondary sexual companion as a symbol of their bodily virility, thus illustrating the potency of government and nation through the healthy, sexually active male body.

France was perhaps the one state where the position of court mistress came closest to being institutionalized, and in France, Holland, Russia, Portugal and Spain, mistresses were hallmarks of court life.237 Unlike her immediate predecessor Catherine of Braganza, who detested how her husband’s sexual favourites were employed as her attendants, Queen Caroline tolerated and even openly supported Henrietta Howard, strenuously resisting any efforts to displace her ostensible rival.238 Howard’s very vulnerability made her an asset to Caroline. She lacked the concrete

236 See Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714 – 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 91. 237 See Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 165; Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power’, French Historical Studies, 19: 4 (Autumn, 1996), 1025 – 1044 (p. 1027); Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (New York: Berg, 2004), p. 11; Ruth Dawson and Waltraud Maierhofer, ‘German Rediscovery of Life Writing: Introduction to Essays on German-Speaking Women as Rulers, Consorts, and Royal Mistresses in the long Eighteenth Century’, Biography, 27: 3 (July, 2004), 483 – 494. 238 Mary II and Anne were Queen Regnants, while George I’s wife, Sophia of Celle remained shut up in the Castle of Ahlden under house arrest throughout his reign. See Andrew C. Thompson, ‘The Huguenots in British and

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political and economic support of a powerful peer, whose wives and daughters normally occupied such court offices. Unsupported by powerful male relatives and estranged from her husband, Howard was far less dangerous to Caroline’s own political influence, which was very considerable, than any another potential candidate for the role of royal mistress.239

Caroline seems to have been reluctant to encourage the precedents of the previous regime. Queen Anne’s female attendants were known for the enormous political influence they wielded over all facets of court life, including the distribution of coveted military and religious appointments. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough and Abigail, Lady Masham, the cousin who supplanted her in the Queen’s affections, had not hesitated to badger Anne on behalf of their partisans, and their hegemonic influence was bitterly resented by other members of the nobility.

Anne’s last ‘favourite’, Elizabeth Seymour, Duchess of Somerset was no less involved in political manipulation, being described by the disgraced political leader Robert Harley as ‘the only person who can save us’. The Duchess of Somerset eventually won out over the political intrigues of Anne’s other Ladies-in-Waiting through her tact and discretion, ensuring the dying

Queen relinquished power to leading Whig figures. In contrast to Anne’s use of powerful and wealthy women as attendants, Caroline preferred to retain the comparatively low-ranking

Charlotte Clayton and Henrietta Howard as her ‘Women of the Bedchamber’, thus ensuring their exclusive loyalty. 240

Hanoverian External Relations in the early Eighteenth Century’, in The Huguenots: History and Memory in Transnational Context: Essays in Honour and Memory of Walter C. Utt (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 217 – 240 (esp. pp. 226, 228). 239 See Charles Carlton, Royal Mistresses (repr. London: Routledge, 1990) p. 101 – 103. Anne Boleyn is likely the most significant precedent for a British Lady-in-Waiting who became a royal mistress. 240 Caroline would also have been well aware of the political clout wielded by other well-connected European royal mistresses, such as the Comtesse de Verrue, lover of the King of Sicily.

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Howard was therefore far more reliant on the Queen’s decisions and tastes than any previous French or British royal mistress of long standing, and yet was still an intrinsic part of the King’s every-day personal life. While Howard found this a difficult balance to strike, her unique access to the persons of both the King and the Queen meant that she was very well- connected. Her house at Marble Hill was a gathering-place for men and women of intellectual interests. Like many comparable salons in France, it was deeply interconnected with the royal court, and yet distinct from it, offering an alternative gathering space where fun, informality and spontaneity could be emphasized in contrast to the court’s notoriously predictable routine. Also like the salons, Marble Hill was a place where feminine education and learning were attributes to be celebrated. One of the most learned women at the early Georgian court was Lady Hervey, and the two women forged a lifelong friendship founded on their mutual history of court service and their shared love of French court culture.

Lady Hervey

Mary Hervey, known before her marriage as ‘Molly Lepell’, had served as a Maid of Honour to the future Queen Caroline from early 1715 until the autumn of 1720. Maids of Honour were expected to relinquish their appointment – and its comparatively lucrative salary of 200 pounds per annum, paid in quarterly installments: a boon for any young unmarried woman of the time – after their marriage. Most young women who served as Maids of Honour were born into wealthy landed families who had previously enjoyed a long tradition of court service, and who might be depended on to properly educate their daughters in the successful performance of aristocratic femininity. Lady Hervey’s mother, for example, had herself served as a Maid of Honour in her youth. Young female attendants at court were usually expected to be good-looking, graceful, and educated, and were normally first appointed as adolescents. Their duties, except at specific court

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functions like the , were usually highly symbolic: handing the Queen various items of her dress, for example, acted out the networks of social privilege that bound the nobility together.

Maids of Honour did however also fulfill a much more concrete political role, in that they served as conduits between their family’s political faction and the monarch. They also assisted senior female members of the royal family in hosting events, and served as paid companions, in which capacity they were expected to amuse and care for the royal family. A court position in the household of a high-ranking female royal thus assured young Maids of Honour of their family’s secure position within the oligarchy. At court, Mary Lepell was a particularly successful office holder, and was known by the affectionate nickname of ‘Schatz’, or treasure, by George I and his

German attendants.241 While she was lauded by court poets (including Alexander Pope) as a charitable and well-behaved beauty, her 1720 marriage with John Hervey, second son of the Earl of Bristol, had to be kept secret for some months for the couple to receive the full amount of her salary.242 After 1723, when her husband’s half-brother died, she was known for the rest of her life simply as Lady Hervey. While she stopped being an official court employee after her marriage, Lady Hervey and her husband were highly visible members of court life in the decade after their marriage, regularly attending court social events in the company of her mother-in-law,

241 See R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 104. Alexander Pope, The Twickenham Edition of Alexander Pope: Minor Poems, ed. by Norman Ault and John Butt (London: Taylor and Francis for Methuen, 1954), p. 184, n. 22. For the precedents, some of the formal duties (mainly limited to attendance on the sovereign) and the importance of elite female figures in public ritual of the time, see William John Thomas, The Book of the Court: Exhibiting the Origin, Peculiar Duties, and Privileges of the Several Ranks of the Nobility and Gentry, more particularly of the Great Officers of State and Members of the Royal Household (London: Samuel Bentley, 1838), pp. 349 – 351. The numbers of Maids of Honour fluctuated over time: in 1727, there were six, each with a salary of 200 pounds, paid in quarterly installments throughout the year. See J.C. Sainty, ‘Office-holders: Household of Princess Caroline 1714 -1727’, Institute of Historical Research (London: University of London, 1972) http://www.history.ac.uk/publications/office/caroline#maid, [accessed July 2012]. 242 For an example of the historiographic frame erected, by later authors, over the very mention of young unmarried women who served as courtiers, an 1820 commentator claims that ‘had our English maids of honour been as remarkable for libertinism as they have been for virtue, their name and office would have long since ceased at St. James’. See Belle Assemblée: or, Court and Fashionable Magazine (London: , 1820), p. 95.

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Lady Bristol, who was also one of Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting. Their public profile was so high that Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough suspected Lady Hervey of having been bribed by George I’s mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, who was thought to have been alarmed by the King’s increasingly public interest in Lady Hervey’s company.

While Lord Hervey’s memoirs have long been recognized as a key source of information on the early Georgian court, a detailed examination of Lady Hervey’s writing reveals an individual every bit as fascinating as her more well-known husband, a woman who was certainly possessed of a very subtle, expressive and learned mind.243 Lady Hervey was a key actor on the stage of cultural development in England, both through her own modest artistic patronage and her cosmopolitan role as a mediator and innovator. She was the British court’s most famous

Francophile, known for her fervent dedication to French culture and French society. For example, she was one of ’s earliest subscribers, was personally known to him during his stay in London, and was fervently admired by the famous author. Lady Hervey was on intimate terms with French royalty, such as Louis-Anne de Bourbon-Condé, known as Mademoiselle

Charolais, and later in life she regularly corresponded with leading members of the haute noblesse, including the celebrated salonnière Madame Geoffrin. 244 Lord Chesterfield remarks of her that ‘no woman ever had, more than she has, le ton de la parfaitement bonne compagnie, les manières engageantes, et le je ne sçais quoi qui plait’, and adds to his son that ‘she is also in the best French company, where she will not only introduce, but “puff” you, if I may use so low

243 For more on the life of Mary Lepell, known as Lady Mary Hervey, see Mary Lepell Hervey, Letters of Mary Lepel [sic] Lady Hervey: With a Memoir and Illustrative Notes (London: John Murray, 1821); Dorothy Margaret Stuart, Molly Lepell, Lady Hervey (New York: G. G. Harrap and Co. Ltd, 1936); Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth Century Courtier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); Lucy Moore, Amphibious Thing: The Life of Lord Hervey (London: Viking Press, 2000). 244 See See Nicholas Cronk, ‘Voltaire, Lord Hervey et le Paradoxe du Modèle Anglais’, Revue Française, Numéro special: Numéro élèctronique, http://revuefrancaise.free.fr/Cronk.htm [accessed June 2011], and Horace Walpole, ‘Walpole’s Account of Lady Hervey, ca 1775’: Appendix 1’, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols, ed. by W.S. Lewis (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), XXXI, p. 416.

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a word’.245 Like many other of Caroline’s female attendants, she was a fluent Francophone, read widely in French, and was keenly interested in French fashion, design and aesthetics. Lady

Hervey was also ferociously intellectual. Her literate, educated and wide-ranging interests endeared her to connoisseurs of national importance, like Horace Walpole and Sir Richard

Bateman, who pioneered new modes of collecting and design. Lady Hervey maintained lifelong friendships with these cultivated aesthetes, and was an integral part of their circle for many years.246

The ‘Collection of Pictures’: Social and Temporal Contexts

While her married life and family duties took her away from the court for extended periods,

Lady Hervey’s correspondence reveals her entertaining, sociable character and her fervent desire for the intellectual stimulation and social camaraderie she received at court. Family pressures were acute by the time she composed her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’. Her husband had departed on an extended Grand Tour in the company of his preferred male companion Stephen

Fox, who many contemporaries suspected of being his lover.247 Lady Hervey was left behind to care for the couple’s four children in England. She spent long months of seclusion in the countryside at Ickworth Park, the Hervey family’s hereditary country ‘seat’ near Horringer,

Suffolk. In an earlier letter of October 1728 Lady Hervey wrote to Henrietta Howard that she was tending to the young ‘Lady Ann’, her seriously ill sister-in-law, noting that unfortunate girl’s

245 Philip Dormer Stanhope, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, 4 vols, ed. by Lord Mahun (London: , 1847), pp. 40, 41. 246 Walpole, Correspondence, XXXI, p. 416. 247 For the strongest archival proof of this relationship, see Lord John Hervey to Stephen Fox, Letter of June 18, 1728, Hervey MSS 941/47/4, p. 77, 78. For relevant secondary literature, see Camille Paglia, ‘Lord Hervey and Pope’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 6:3 (Spring, 1973), p. 358, and Hannah Smith and Stephen Taylor, ‘ “Hephaestion and Alexander”: Lord Hervey, Frederick, Prince of Wales and the Royal Favourite in England in the 17 0s’, The English Historical Review, 124 : 507 (April, 2009), 283 – 12. See also Eric Weichel, ‘ “Fixed by so much better a fire”: Wigs and Masculinity in early Eighteenth-Century British Miniatures’, Shift: Queen's Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, 1 (Autumn, 2008), 1 – 25.

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mother did not personally enter the sickroom. Under such circumstances, Lady Hervey’s spirits were prey to depression, and she questioned ‘whether even Hampton-Court’s breakfasts could recover them, or revive the Schatz who is extinguished in a fatigued nurse, a grieved sister, and a melancholy wife’.248 As this passage demonstrates, her relationship with her mother-in-law was always strained and marked with conflict, but she did successfully cultivate an excellent personal friendship with her father-in-law, the 1st Earl of Bristol.249 In striking contrast to many of his

Whig contemporaries, Lord Bristol eschewed the venal corruption and place-seeking of Sir

Robert Walpole’s administration, living a retired life in the country caring for his large family.

As his favourite daughter-in-law, her position of privilege within the extended family was secure, but she was clearly nostalgic for the court, and for the social role she had once enjoyed.250

While Lady Hervey chafed at the social seclusion she experienced at Ickworth, the imaginary images in her ‘collection of pictures’ are heavily dependent on the conventional visual idiom of the country house collection for the expression of their satirical message. Visual art customarily on display in country houses at this time normally included seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch, French and Italian history painting as well as portraiture, genre- scenes, landscapes and even satirical engravings that illustrated contemporary news events. All these disparate types of images made up the customary visual repertoire that was employed by early Georgian society to demonstrate their taste, wealth and learning. In her text, by drawing on this shared repertoire of images, Lady Hervey foregrounds the eclectic nature of collecting in the

248Mary Hervey to Henrietta Howard, Suffolk Papers, letter dated Ickworth, October 28, 1728. 249 Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth Century Courtier (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973) pp. 49 – 54. 250 Ibid., p. 40.

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period.251 Most importantly, by revealing her personal attitudes towards visual art, her

‘collection’ also demonstrates how much Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting were aware of international trends in interior design and decoration, collecting, and style.

Cultural historians investigating early eighteenth-century elite women’s attitudes towards visual art are often forced to rely on impersonal archival evidence, such as probate inventories, estate catalogues, records of payment, or artist agreements, to reconstruct which images directly affected or intersected with an individual’s life. In most cases, in keeping with their basic purpose as business contracts, concerned with monetary object value rather than with intellectual or emotional issues, these documents simply list objects without any indication of what either artist or patron thought about them.252 Lady Hervey’s letter of 1729 and her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ that it contains contrastingly evokes the ideological world of the court nobility, and of the networks of friendship, sex, and shared political interest that bound unrelated individuals together through the collective understanding of cultural symbols like works of art. She does this through the self-conscious adoption of salonnière culture.

Historians of salon culture are often quick to highlight the communal, interactive nature of salonnière writing. Faith Evelyn Beasley, for example, notes that the ‘principal characteristic of salon criticism is the collaborative nature of literary evaluation. Literary criticism is not done

251 Timothy Mowl, An Insular Rococo: Architecture, Politics and Society in Ireland and England, 1710 – 1770 (London: Reaktion, 1999), p. 235; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 172 – 180; A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage, ed. by Andrew W. Moore and Larissa A. Dukelska ia (New Haven: Published for the State Hermitage Museum and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2002), esp. p. 40. 252 For some innovative writing that retrieves personal meaning in inventories from the period, see Cynthia Lawrence and Magdalena Kasman, ‘Jeanne-Baptiste d’Albert de Luynes, Comtesse de Verrue (1670 – 1736): An Art Collector in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs, ed. by Cynthia Miller Lawrence (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 207 – 226. (pp. 210, 212); Marcia Pointon, ‘Material Manoeuvres: Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and the Power of Artefacts’, Art History, 32: 3 (June, 2009), 485 – 515 (esp. pp. 512 – 515).

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in isolation but rather in a group setting and through correspondences’ (italics mine).253 While certainly a ‘gossipy’ text, the letter and its ‘collection’ have great emotive potential, illuminating a private aspect of elite women’s art appreciation that is rarely discussed, and which Mary Ann

Smart calls the much-prized ‘interior aesthetic experiences’ offered by the salon.254 Smart’s perceptive acknowledgement of the ‘considerable cultural power wielded within the loosely-knit institution’ of the salon also recognizes the new emphasis on political machinations, rather than literary prestige, which was transforming salonnière activity throughout the eighteenth century.

For all its satirical content, Lady Hervey’s letter is a socially cohesive intellectual exercise, linking the figureheads of disparate political factions together through artistic allusions known by a tight-knit circle of sophisticated people who are ‘primed to laugh at the same jokes, decode the same veiled meanings’.255 Many of these veiled meanings are political in nature, and the

‘collection’ itself is a heavily politicized one, expressive of Lady Hervey’s support for the court, for the Whig party who dominated it, and for the Whig political ideals of liberty. Lady Hervey opens her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ with the names of two famous Whig politicians, and

I have thematically grouped this chapter around those initial two entries. These initial entries suggest the tongue-in-cheek tone, and the iconographical complexity, of all the other overtly political entries that are also included in the list.

‘A flower piece by ye speaker’

In this inaugural entry in the ‘collection’, ‘ e Speaker’ refers to Arthur Onslow (1691 – 1768), who still holds the record for most consecutive years as Speaker of the House of Commons.

253 Faith Evelyn Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory (Burlington, VT : Ashgate Publishing, 2006), p. 31. 254 Mary Ann Smart, ‘Parlor Games: Italian Music and Italian Politics in the Parisian Salon’, 19th-Century Music, 34: 1(Summer, 2010), 39 – 60 (p. 40). See Smart, ‘Parlour Games’, p. 51, and Beasley, Mastering Memory, p. 30. 255 Smart, p. 51.

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Onslow had been unanimously elected speaker in January of 1728, largely due to his brilliant use of oratory and his careful attention to procedural detail. Onslow was personally responsible for making the post of Speaker into one that, in theory at least, embodies dignity, reverence and good behavior on the part of MPs.256 Onslow’s characteristic style in the speaker’s chair is recorded in one of the earliest known caricatures by the amateur artist (and fellow MP) George

Townshend, showing his renowned, near-theatrical use of authoritarian gesture.257 Just two months before Lady Hervey penned her letter to Howard, Onslow was named chancellor and keeper of the great seal to Queen Caroline, who also stood as godmother to his son.258

Besides his offices, the location and appearance of the Speaker’s estates served to keep him much in the public eye, for in 1720 he had married a notable heiress, Anne Bridges. At the time of the couple’s marriage, Onslow’s wife’s uncle settled on her the estate of Ember Court

(commonly called Imber), a ‘commodious brick dwelling’ in Thames Ditton, .259 Like the neighbouring estates of Esher and Claremont, which were similarly close to Hampton Court,

Ember Court’s fortuitous situation mean that the Onslows, while still maintaining their own independence and autonomy, had regular access to the Royal Family. The estate was considered

256 Philip Laundy, ‘Onslow, Arthur (1691–1768)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online @ http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20788., accessed 24 Aug 2011. See also Paul Seward, ‘Introduction’, in Speakers and the Speakership: Presiding Officers and the Management of Business from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Paul Seward (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 1 – 7 (p. 4); and James Alexander Manning, The Lives of the Speakers of the House of Commons (London: E. Churton, 1850), pp. 435 – 440. 257 Herbert M. Atherton, ‘George Townshend Revisited: The Politician as Caricaturist’, Oxford Art Journal 8: 1 (1985), 3 – 19 (p. 5). The sketch is currently in the National Portrait Gallery: see http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw04747/Arthur- Onslow?LinkID=mp03368&search=sas&sText=onslow&role=sit&rNo=2 [accessed 17 October 2012] 258 C. E. Vulliamy, The Onslow Family, 1528 – 1874, With Some Account of Their Times (London: Chapman and Hall, 1953), p. 94. 259 Frederic Shoberl, The Beauties of England and Wales, 20 vols (London: J. Harris et al., 1813), XIV, p. 206.

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one of the jewels of Surrey in the early eighteenth century,260 and its gardens garnered attention well into the nineteenth century.261 Flowers were part of Onslow’s public persona.

Flower Painting

To Lady Hervey’s courtly world, ‘flower pieces’ or still-life paintings of floral arrangements were a rich source of cultural expression that held meanings embedded beyond the immediate surface value of their alluring physical beauty. By allegorically picturing Onslow as a ‘flower piece’, Lady Hervey refers to the speaker’s flowery, elaborate political speeches and writing

(recorded in ’s famous memoirs, which Onslow annotated). By doing so, she recalls the viewer’s mind to the deeper iconographic associations of still-life painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.262 While many still life paintings were appreciated for their decorative aspect, sophisticated connoisseurs recognized the metaphoric possibilities of ‘flower piece’ painting, which often included vanitas allusions to the transience of life and material possessions, but which could also hint at the allegorical representation of the suffering of Christ,

Mary’s virginity, or the representation of the elements of air and water.263 By drawing a link between Onslow, his office as Speaker, his ‘flowery’ speeches, flower-strewn estate and flower

260 Philip J. Burcell, Historical Sketch of Thames Ditton (Surrey: Thames Ditton and Weston Green Residents Association, 1984), and T.S. Mercer, More Thames Ditton Tales and Scandals (Surrey: Ditton’s Historical Research Society); see also Vullaimy, The Onslow Family, pp. 90, 99, 144. 261 See Gardener’s Chronicle, of Saturday 21 October 1899, in Henry Eliot Walden, The Victoria History of the County of Surrey (London: A. Constable, 1911), p. 441. 262 Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of the reign of King James the Second, ed. by Martin Routh (repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1852), preface. 263 Fred Meijer, The Collection of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Paintings Bequeathed by Daisy Linda Ward, exh cat. (Zwolle: Waanders for the Ashmolean Museum, 2003), pp. 22, 23. See also Alan Chong, ‘Contained under the name of Still Life: the Associations of Still Life Painting’, in Still Life Paintings from the Netherlands, exh. cat. ed. by Alan Chong (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1999) pp. 11 – 8; Eric Jan Sluiter, ‘Didactic and Disguised Meanings? Several Seventeenth-Century texts on paintings and the iconological approach to Northern Dutch paintings of the period’, in Art History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, ed. by A. Freedberg and J. de Vries (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991), pp. 175 – 207; Simon Schama, Perishable Commodities: Dutch Still Life Painting and the ‘Empire of Things’: Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 478 – 488; James A. Welu, ‘Arrangement with Meanings: Dutch and Flemish Still Life’, in 600 Years of Netherlandish Art: Selected Symposium Lectures (Memphis: Memphis State University Art Department, 1982), pp. 31 – 42.

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painting itself, Lady Hervey therefore refers explicitly in her text to a shared awareness of these allegoric and metaphorical representations.

Flowers and gardens were highly politicized sites of social transformation, and the changing appearance of the English landscape garden in this period is reflective of the ideological concerns that motivated estate owners to beautify their environment.264 One exhibition catalogue on floral painting points out that ‘to these people of Anglican faith and of liberal Whig political persuasion’, exactly Lady Hervey and Onslow’s shared milieu, ‘the patterned and forced schematization of the typical continental garden…was synonymous with the Catholic absolutism of Louis XIV’, and still life similarly reflected these changing concerns.265 In one way, Onslow’s well-documented concern with the respect due to his position as Speaker, and his unflagging insistence on the ceremonial rituals due it, similarly reflects Parliamentary resistance to absolutism, as the respect paid to the Chair of the House of

Commons was a continuing reminder of the mutually interdependent relationship between crown and parliament.266

By the late seventeenth century, the heavy religious allegories and vanitas allusions that were so characteristic of early Dutch still life were replaced by an increasing preference for informal, rather than religiously emblematic, depictions of sumptuously-coloured bouquets,

264 Sheena MacKellar Goulty, Heritage Gardens: Care, Conservation and Management (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 112 – 116; Alison Hodges, ‘Painshill Park, Cobham, Surrey (1700 – 1800): Notes for a History of the Landscape Garden of Charles Hamilton’, Garden History, 2: 1 (Autumn, 1973), 39 – 68; Carole Fry, ‘Spanning the Political Divide: Neo-Palladianism and the Early Eighteenth-Century Landscape’, Garden History, 31: 2 (Winter, 2003), 180 – 192 (p. 186); George Plumptree, Garden Makers: The Great Tradition of Landscape Design (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 76; The Genius of the Place: English Landscape Gardens 1620 – 1820, ed. by John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (5th edn: Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988). 265 Cynthia Wolk Nachmani, Say It With Flowers: An Exhibition of the Imagery of Flowers, exh cat. (New York: The Emily Lowe Gallery, 1973), p. 2. See also Marie Arnold, Art Meets Science: Flowers as Images (Capetown, SA: Standard Bank, 1992), p. 4, 8. 266 Atherton, ‘George Townshend Revisited’, p. 5.

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festoons, garlands and floral crowns.267 The Dutch precedent remained all-important, especially given the estimations of economic historians that over a quarter of a million still life paintings were produced in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Many of these pieces found their way to

England, especially in the wake of the of 1689.268 Francophilia, however, was sweeping through Dutch and even Spanish representations of flowers by the latter half of the century.269 Alain Tapié, curator of an exhibition on flower pieces, writes of the early Georgian heyday that ‘Après avoir nourri le symbolisme religieux, la nature métamorphose inexorablement et un symbolisme humanisé et rationnel.’270 The French aristocracy preferred floral compositions in still life painting that were less contrived, more informal, than had previously been the norm.

In a strange inversion of what was happening in garden design, informal floral compositions in still life painting, as taken up by the English, reflect a very courtly, Francophile, even libertine way of seeing botanical depiction. They were directly influenced by developments at Versailles, as the French academic painters of still life hastened to embrace the new style.271

Jean Picart, for example, ‘abandonne les rigoureuses compositions de fleurs, saisies comme des objets naturels, pour adopter le déploiement décoratif des peintres versaillais,’whose number

267 See Kenneth Bendiner, Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), p. 135; Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), p. 114. 268 Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting 1600 – 1750 (Dulwich: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1996), p. 14; Meijer, Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Paintings, p. 32. See also Donna Barnes and Peter Rose, Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life, exh cat. (Albany, NY: Albany Institute of History & Art, 2002), p. 116, and Sam Segal, A Flowery Past – A Survey of Dutch and Flemish Flower Painting from 1600 until the Present (Amsterdam: Gallery P. de Boer, & the Noordbrabants Museum, 1982). 269 For Francophilia among the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Dutch still life painters, see Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 221. 270 Alain Tapié, Symbolique et Botanique: Le Sense Caché des Fleurs dans la Peinture au XViie Siecle, ed. by Caroline Joubert (Caen: Museé des Beaux-Arts de Caen, 1987), p. 30. 271 See Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 75.

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included Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer and Jean-Baptiste Belin de Fontenoy.272 Monnoyer capitalized on the new (aristocratic) style of placing flower pieces ‘above doors and mantelpieces, on ceilings and between pilasters’ and it is tempting to conceive of Lady Hervey envisioning the eloquent, dignified speaker of the house as possessing the same stylish, elevated qualities as the

Dutch and French still life painting she was familiar with.

Verelst, the Monnoyers, and Van Huysum

A brief survey of the specific artists Lady Hervey may have had in mind when thinking of a

‘flower piece’ raises an intriguing historiographical point: the critical reception of these

Francophile flower painters by later art historians. On 26 November 1698 the Earl of Bristol,

Lady Hervey’s father-in-law, recorded the purchase of ‘two fruit pieces and a fframe’ [sic], five pounds, five shillings’ but did not trouble to write down the name of the artist, while a ‘Peter

Verelst’ was paid twenty-seven pounds and eighteen shillings in 1703 for a large consignment of artwork.273 The Verelst family of painters was well established in London by the early eighteenth century, but Pieter Harmenzoon Verelst, the portrait painter, had died in Holland many years previously. This reference must therefore alludes to the ‘God of Flowers’, Pieter’s son Simon, a flower painter recognized by the diarist as one of the best artists in

Stuart London. Velerest unfortunately succumbed to mental illness in the late , and his

272 Ibid, p. 38. See also Christopher Wright, Masterpieces of Reality: French Seventeenth-Century Painting (New Walk, Leicester: Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery, exh. cat., 1986), p. 85; Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 115; and Peter Mitchell, Great Flower Painters: Four Centuries of Floral Art (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1973), pp. 43, 45. 273 John Hervey, 1st Earl of Bristol, The Diary of John Hervey, 1st Earl of Bristol. With Extracts from his book of Expenses, 1688-1742, ed. by S.H.A.H. Hervey (Wells: Ernest Jackson, 1894), p. 150.

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delusions of madness and grandeur were accompanied by increasing personal disarray.274 His work would have been on display at Ickworth when Lady Hervey wrote her letter.

Simon Verelst was still painting flower pieces – one record has him ‘chained to the galley’ at an art dealer’s house in the Strand - as late as 1709, so the 1703 record of sale is an important historical document, in that it records Verelst’s continuing patronage by the

Hervey family in this period.275 The record of Figure 4.1. Simon Verelst, Still-Life of Flowers in a Glass Vase, c. 1680, oil on canvas, 762 x 635 mm, Philip Mould Historical Paintings, London. him ‘chained to the galley’ in the Strand, still painting gargantuan images of vividly-coloured blooms, is a poignant reminder of the lack of respect and care afforded to the mentally ill in this period. Simon Verelst’s Still Life of Flowers in a Glass Vase (Fig. 4.1) thus exemplifies the kinds of still-life painting that would have been familiar to Lady Hervey and her friends. Crammed with large, drooping blooms, Verelst’s vase is dwarfed by the asymmetrical composition, which leans heavily off-centre, giving the impression of an exploding cascade of pink and red petals, all ‘simulated with magnificent

274 Philip Mould, Still Life of Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1680s, [accessed 11 June 2010]. See Samuel Pepys, ‘Sunday, 11 April 1669’, http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1669/04/11/index.php. [accessed 13 August 2012] 275 J. C. Weyerman, De Levens-Beschryvingen der Nederlandsche Konst-Schilders en Konst-Schilderessen, 4 vols. (, 1729 – 69), III, p. 250, in Paul Taylor, ‘Verelst, Simon Pieterszoon (bap. 1644, d. 1710x17)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/28222, [accessed 10 June 2008]. See also George Aitken, The Tatler, ed. by Alexander Chalmers, 4 vols (repr. London: F.C. and J. Rivington et al., 1822), no. 175, III, p. 375.

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virtuosity’.276 Verelst’s flower pieces, produced in London for an English clientele, illustrate the cultural hybridity of the London art world in the early eighteenth century, deftly mixing earlier

Dutch Calvinist allegory with the lightness and informality of bright-hued, sensual Francophile composition.277 Other art historians, however, such as Verelst’s biographer Peter Taylor, curator of photography at the Warburg, have found his late work ‘depressingly inept’, highlighting the artist’s sufferings under mental instability and pointing to the technical flaws in pigmentation resulting from the low-quality pigments available in London at the time.278

If Verelst’s paintings were not the prototype for Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘flower piece’, another good example is work by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer himself. Monnoyer came to England in 1690 at the behest of one of the court’s leading Francophile patrons, the Duke of Montagu, and died in 1699.279 Besides Montagu House and Boughton, the town and country seats of the

Duke, he also worked at Burlington House, Kensington Palace, and Hampton Court.280 No records of payments to Monnoyer from the Hervey family are on record, but Lady Hervey was almost certainly present at Burlington House over the course of her long life, as Lady Burlington was one of Queen Caroline’s longest-serving Ladies-in-Waiting.281 Burlington House was notable for a large flower piece (signed 1699) by Monnoyer, created specifically as an overdoor

276 Philip Mould, Still Life of Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1680s, [accessed 19 June 2008] 277 For the Francophile look of Verelst’s flowers, see Frederick Peter Seguier, A Critical and Commercial Dictionary of the Works of Painters… (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1870), p. 221. 278 Taylor, ‘Verelst, Simon Pieterszoon’. Meijer is similarly dismissive of Verelst’s portraits, writing that they are ‘not very successfully’ received by today’s art historians, Dutch and French Still-Life Painting, p. 29. 279 ‘Jean Baptiste Monnoyer’, The Illustrated Magazine of Art, 2: 12 (1853), 353 – 356 (p. 354). 280 For Monnoyer and his English career, see Charissa Bremer-David, French Tapestries & Textiles in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997), p. 75; James Parker et al., ‘French Decorative Arts during the Reign of Louis XIV 1654-1715’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 46: 4 (Spring, 1989), 10 – 64 (p. 28). 281 Dorothy (Savile) Boyle was a Lady of the Bedchamber from 1727 – 1737, and was a talented amateur artist, caricaturist and copyist in her own right. See Judy Egerton, ‘Boyle , Dorothy, countess of Burlington (1699–1758)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/66564. [accessed 28 Aug 2012]

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decoration in the Versaillais mode.282 Although Monnoyer was a generation older than Lady

Hervey and was dead by the time she wrote the imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, Monnoyer’s son, Antoine, who followed his trade of flower painting, was still very much alive, and lived in

London until 1734.

Antoine Monnoyer is another example of a little-known itinerant artist whose life and career in many ways parallels that of Philippe Mercier; he is on record as working briefly in

Amsterdam, Rome, Copenhagen and possibly Stockholm, while Vertue claims he was also present for a time in Portugal, Austria and Poland. As for the merit of his art, The Dictionary of

National Biography’s brief entry for Monnoyer tersely says that ‘art historians tend to attribute to him poor imitations of his father’s work’.283 Just as Verelst’s unsettling personal habits and cultural Francophilia colour modern-day perceptions of his work, the pan-European quality of

Antoine Monnoyer’s flower pieces defies traditional conceptions of a nationalist school, and both artists suffer historiographically from a dismissive attitude to their cultural production. For example, in a 1996 exhibition catalogue from the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Paul Taylor points out that still life as a genre almost died out in Holland in the years following 1700. ‘Rococo interiors,’ he writes, ‘do not exactly chime with paintings of dead fish, and pies or hunks of meat do better in tiled and whitewashed rooms than in chintzy boudoirs. Only flower and fruit paintings survived the general massacre.’284 While his words are problematically tied to the notion of aesthetic essentialism, dismissing the ornate dressing-rooms and music parlours of the early Rococo, Taylor does also discuss another, more contemporary flower painter, Jan van

Huysum.

282 See George Knox, ‘Sebastiano Ricci at Burlington House: A Venetian Decoration “Alla Romana” ’, The Burlington Magazine, 127: 990 (Sep., 1985), 600 – 609 (p. 602). The Monnoyer overdoor is now at Chiswick. 283 Paul Taylor, Ibid.¸p. 1. 284 Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, p. 14.

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By the 1720s, Van Huysum, the most famous living Dutch flower painter, was working in a quintessentially Francophile manner. Even his portrait by Arnold Boonen, with its sensual hints of informality and pastel palette, looks like work by the French painters Nicolas de

Largillière or Hyacinth Rigaud.285 Many of van Huysum’s works found their way into English private collections, notably those of the Levenson-Gower and Greville families, with whom Lady

Hervey and Henrietta Howard were undoubtedly familiar.286 As Taylor notes, ‘a word one often encounters in writings on van Huysum is superficial’, and he suspects that ‘the resistance to van

Huysum is a [similar] instance of that nationalism which objects to Jan Mabuse, on the grounds that he sold out to the and jettisoned early Netherlandish painting’, while van Huysum is similarly ‘cast as a Francophile prettifier’. These biases in art historical scholarship continue, despite the fact that van Huysum’s delicately-coloured still life paintings were much in demand in his day, and still command large prices at auction in our own.287

Simon Verelst, Antoine Monnoyer (junior) and Jan van Huysum are each examples of artists whose work was once rejected or disparaged by art history, largely due to their cultural hybridity, their nomadic lives, and the very genre in which they worked. While recent critical reappraisals of flower pieces have found much of value in the genre, in the academic world of the eighteenth century, flower pieces, while sought after, were not thought to function on the same level as other, more intellectually rarified types of art, such as history painting, which

285 Portrait sold, lot 59, AM 1057 by Sotheby’s in Amsterdam on 11 November 2008, for 72, 750 euros. See the e- catalogue online, at Sotheby’s, ‘Old Master Paintings, Amsterdam, November 11, 2008’,m http://www.sothebys.com/en/catalogues/ecatalogue.html/2008/old-master-paintings- am1057#/r=/en/ecat.fhtml.AM1057.html+r.m=/en/ecat.lot.AM1057.html/59/+r.o=/en/ecat.notes.AM1057.html/59/, [accessed 15 September 2011] 286 The round of ‘visits’ that were central to elite women’s social lives in early eighteenth-century England meant acquaintances were kept up by a whirl of visits to each other’s town houses: Lady Hervey and Henrietta Howard would certainly have ‘visited’ Lady Burlington at Burlington House or Chiswick, while the Grevile and Leveson- Gower families were closely connected to the court and played leading roles in elite society. 287 Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, p. 16.

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dominated the ‘hierarchy of genres’ upheld by the French Academy. Arthur Onslow, ‘ye speaker’, would however surely have delighted in Lady Hervey’s canny allegory of his personality as ‘a flower piece’, as it speaks to the elocutionary abilities of a great politician, and to the precise attention to detail necessitated by a difficult and demanding parliamentary position.

The next entry in Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ similarly juxtaposes artwork with the political career of George II’s most significant administrator, Sir Robert Walpole, only in this instance, she foregrounds her satire not in genre painting but in an exemplary history- piece tapestry design or ‘cartoon’ by Raphael.

‘A Miraculous Draught of Fishes by Sir R W’

This pointed reference to Sir Robert Walpole is a complex, resonating witness to the the propaganda abilities of elite women of early eighteenth-century English cultural life, as Lady

Hervey here combines religious, political and personal meaning in her text. ‘A Miraculous

Draught of Fishes’ refers to the cycle of Raphael cartoons, originally produced in 1515 – 1516 for the Medici Pope Leo X, which had been the possession of the British crown since 1623.288 In the late 1690s, William III had the cartoons permanently reassembled by the painter Henry

Cooke and surveyor Parry Walton. Part of a larger process of ongoing expansion at Hampton

Court, the restoration of the cartoons was the beginning of a grand scheme of public display. As part of Sir ’s remodeling of the King’s Gallery, they were reassembled onto

288 The Raphael cartoons’ ostensible purpose was for the creation of tapestries to decorate the lower sections of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The cartoons had been acquired in 1623 for Charles I, then Prince of Wales, presumably through the auspices of Francis Crane, manager of the royal tapestry works. After the execution of Charles I in 1649, the cartoons remained at the Banqueting House in Whitehall, still in the strips that resulted from the textile-transfer process. They were among the few works of art from Charles I’s collection that were reserved from sale by Cromwell’s protectorate, while Charles II, despite showing little interest in the paintings and even pawning them to an independent broker in 1680, valued them at the large sum of three thousand pounds. Sharon Fermor, The Raphael Tapestry Cartoons: Narrative, Decoration and Design (London: Scala Books in Association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996), p. 20.

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canvas and kept on permanent display in a specially-designed, heated and lit exhibition space, called the cartoon gallery.289 Physically huge, and sumptuously colored, the cartoons were and are sensual and evocative images, guaranteeing their status as one of the great artistic treasures of the English court. Cathleen Hoeniger, in her work on the object biographies or ‘afterlife’ of

Raphael’s paintings, has pointed out how much the restoration and reassembly of the cartoons at this time contributed to Raphael’s supreme position in English art history, connoisseurship and collecting habits of the time. ‘Seen in a new light, they would have been made more available to a much larger audience than before’, and indeed Lady Hervey’s juxtaposition between Walpole and a central narrative in the cartoon cycle affirms the success of the restoration work commissioned by William III, which repositioned the cartoons’ ‘central place in English art history.’290

289Ibid., p. 20. 290 Cathleen Sara Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael’s Paintings (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 1 6. There proliferation of prints made after Raphael’s cartoons made them influential for English history painters: see Stephanie Dickey, ‘The Passions and Raphael’s Cartoons in Eighteenth-Century British Art’, Marsyas, 22 (1986), 33 – 46.

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In 1725, four years before Lady Hervey wrote this letter, Jonathan Richardson asserted that the Raphael cartoons were ‘generally allowed by foreigners, and those of our own nation who are most bigoted to Italy, or

France, to be the best of that master, as he is incontestably the best of all those whose works remain in the world.’291

Undoubtedly, the vocal championing of the Raphael cartoons was a way for disparate and competing schools of cultural theory in England to find Figure 4.2. Simon Gribelin, The Cartoon Gallery at Hampton Court: common ground by stressing their detail, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 1720, engraving, full piece 187 x 220 mm, The British Museum, London. shared love for a beloved national treasure. Independently framed as autonomous works of art in their own right, and set in wooden paneling high above eye level, the cartoons occupied a very visible, symbolic space at Hampton

Court. Hoeniger comments on the proximity of the cartoon gallery to the wing of the palace where the King and Queen actually lived.292 A long corridor measuring 117 x 23 ½ feet, with four windows opening onto the palace’s square fountain court, the cartoon gallery backed onto four small rooms that were the private apartments of the King, and was similarly physically proximate to the Queen’s bedchamber, ‘ground zero’ for Caroline’s staff.

291 Jonathan Richardson, ‘A Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur,’ in Jonathan Richardson, The Works of Jonathan Richardson, ed. by Horace Walpole (repr. London and Twickenham: B. White and Son and Strawberry Hill, 1792). 292 Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael’s Paintings, p. 152.

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Lady Hervey was, even by 1725, widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading

Francophiles, at least in all matters cultural. Her letters are peppered with references to French literature, theatre and design.293 An early engraving of the cartoon gallery by the French émigré artist Simon Gribelin, done in 1707 and used as the frontispiece to his 1720 edition of engravings of the cartoons, shows the Miraculous Draught of Fishes as the central panel of the cycle (Fig.

4.2). While undoubtedly familiar with the physical space of the cartoon gallery, Lady Hervey and Henrietta Howard were also likely familiar with either these engravings or those by Nicolas

Dorigny, another popular émigré engraver.294 A lavishly colored view of the cartoon gallery from W.H. Pyne’s History of Royal Residences, of 1816 – 1819, shows the sequential narrative of the seven main cartoons somewhat altered from Gribelin’s time, but the central position of the

Miraculous Draught of Fishes remains unchanged.295 Lady Hervey thus uses the Miraculous

Draught of Fishes to symbolize the entire cartoon gallery, and this symbolization is particularly appropriate, given that the Privy Council, which Walpole headed, was in the habit of meeting in the cartoon gallery during the times that the King was resident at Hampton Court.296

293 See, for example, letters dated 1744 and 1753 in Mary Hervey, Letters of Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey, ed. by John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1821), pp. 48, 59. Croker points out that ‘Lady Hervey used to be laughed at by her acquaintance for her fondness for things French’. See n. p. 49, where she writes of ‘my friends the French’. See also Katherine Thomson and Philip Wharton, The Queens of Society (London: Harper and Bros., 1860), p. 300. 294 Fermor, The Raphael Tapestry Cartoons, p. 23. George Vertue wrote that ‘in London about 1700, the state of Print Engraving on Copper was at a low ebb… til about 1707. Mr Griblins cartons in print from the pictures of Raphael were well received, and vast numbers of them [sold]’, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, ‘Summary’, in The Seven Famous Cartons [sic] of Raphael Urbin; Raphael Cartoons, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O239656/the-seven-famous-cartons-sic-print-gribelin-simon-ii/ [accessed 11 November 2011]. The Cartoons were engraved again by Nicholas Dorigny in 1719. 295 W. H. Pyne et. al, The History Of The Royal Residences Of Windsor Castle, St. James's Palace, Carlton House, Kensington Palace, Hampton Court, Buckingham House, And Frogmore...( London: W.H. Pyne, 1816-19), hand- coloured aquatint view of the Picture Gallery at Hampton Court (1819). As Jeremy Wood points out, the cartoons, as represented in Gribelin’s 1720 engraving, were ‘arranged (out of narrative sequence)’. See ‘Raphael Copies and Exemplary Picture Galleries in Mid Eighteenth-Century London’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte , 62: 3 (1999), 394 – 417 (p. 397). 296 Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael’s Paintings, p. 153.

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Figure 4.3. Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Raphael), The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, c. 1515 – 1516, Bodycolour over charcoal on many sheets of paper, mounted on canvas, on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 3190 x 3990 cm, London, since 1865 (formerly Hampton Court).

Walpole’s Attribution: Iconographic Meaning

In this context, it seems almost certain that Sir Robert Walpole, the deus ex machina of the

Georgian court and, indeed, of the political career of Lady Hervey’s husband, is the individual satirized. The subject of the work is the miracle described in Luke 5: 3 – 10, and also described in John 21: 1 – 14, narrating the conversion of St. Peter and other fishermen. Jesus’ miraculous provision of a supernatural catch of fish, caught within sight of a large audience onshore, persuades the Galilean fishermen to join his cause. Raphael’s scene (Fig. 4. ) shows some of the new disciples straining to haul the cargo onto the boat, while two others beseech Christ in

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attitudes of wonder and gratitude.297 I suggest that Lady Hervey’s letter, written as it certainly was for circulation at Lady Suffolk’s residence and beyond, thus contains an instant association:

Walpole as the miracle worker, able to ‘pull off’ situations or challenges that were seemingly beyond the range of common mortals, perhaps including the disposition of only a few court places, with which he fed a ‘multitude’ of political dependents.298

Nearly all of the noblewomen and men associated with the court, even those who were not particularly known for wit or learning, could easily put together the identification, culled from the image’s physical place within the semi-public, if aristocratic space of Hampton Court, the senior administrative role of Sir Robert Walpole. Everything about Walpole’s extraordinary career of three decades of service in the public service lends credence to this identification, but there are other hints of tertiary, iconologic or ‘intrinsic’ meanings expressed by Lady Hervey that are not easily accessible at the time without further thought, knowledge, education or meditation.

These are the meanings that help construct an exclusive circle of connoisseurs and intellectuals, and I argue Lady Hervey’s letter is trying, like all social media, to construct a circle of communal knowledge, where in-jokes and hidden or veiled meanings define group solidarity and cohesion .

For example, in the conventional iconography of Renaissance painting, due to the species’ observed monogamy, the cranes in the foreground of the drawing allude to vigilance and constancy, compared to the seagulls in the background, which are contrasting emblems of sin,

297 For a compositional analyses of this work, stressing how landscape structure emphasizes the main figure, see John White and John Shearman, ‘Raphael's Tapestries and Their Cartoons’, The Art Bulletin, 40: 3 (Sep., 1958), 193 – 221 (pp. 205 – 206). 298 Just as Jesus fed the apostles (but not, seemingly, the crowd). See John 1: 1 : ‘Jesus then came and took the bread and gave it to them, and likewise the fish’.

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and apostasy.299 Given the semi-public context of this letter, the painting’s allusion could indicate Lady Hervey is couching her family’s political benefactor, and hence the Whig party as a whole, as defenders of the Protestant faith against an apostate and venal Catholicism, or

Walpole as the crane-like semper fidelis of the court, versus the apostate propaganda of

Bolingbroke’s ‘gulls’. The biblical episode represented in The Miraculous Draught of Fishes takes place under the gaze ‘of the multitudes on shore’, which itself seems to be a kind of metaphor of the privileged nature of the Whig oligarchy. The Whigs, and court party to which both women belonged, are thus constructed as the recipients of divine providence, part of the miracle-working process through their labour. More than this, the poses of the figures and foreshortenings involved in the Miraculous Draught of Fishes are the most complex of the entire cycle, enhanced by a particularly striking, difficult and complicated colour arrangement, and vividly demonstrated by the shimmering reflections of the apostles in the water beneath the cracking boats.300 Lady Hervey could be taking note of Walpole’s character as an ambitious, complicated and particularly successful man. For example, six years after Lady Hervey’s letter, copies of the entire series were purchased from Sir James Thornhill’s estate by the young John,

4th Duke of Bedford to decorate the ballroom of his imposing mansion in Bloomsbury Square.301

299 James F. Wittenberger and Ronald L. Tilson, ‘The Evolution of Monogamy: Hypotheses and Evidence’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 11 (1980), 197 – 232 (p. 208); Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 66 – 67; Fermor, The Raphael Tapestry Cartoons, p. 23. In British myth, the seagull is an emblem for the souls of the drowned, and of the absent life-presence of a sailor: see Boria Sax, The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Animals in World Myth, Legend, and Literature (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2001), p. 217. 300 Sharon Fermor and Alan Derbyshire, ‘The Raphael Tapestry Cartoons Re-Examined’, The Burlington Magazine , 140: 1141 (Apr., 1998), 236 – 250 (pp. 246 – 249). See also Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons, Illuminating Luke: The Public Ministry of Christ in Italian Renaissance and (Edinburgh: T & T Publishing, 2005), which, pp. 49 – 82 (esp. pp. 64, 65, 71, 72 for the underdrawings and technical sophistication of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes) gives a very sound overview of the cartoon in both religious and art-historical literature. See also John White and John Shearman, ‘Raphael’s Tapestries and Their Cartoons, II: The Frescoes in the Stanze and the Problem of Composition in the Tapestries and Cartoons’, The Art Bulletin, 40:4 (Dec., 1958), 299 – 323. 301 Jeremy Wood, ‘Raphael Copies’, p. 97.

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The episode does show how Peter, the ‘lowly and sinful fisherman’ is chosen by Jesus

Christ to be a ‘fisher of men’ and to take over the helm of the boat, representing the spiritual community chosen by Jesus to lead his earthly organization after his ascension to heaven.302

While Walpole’s Norfolk family was well-established, he was known as a notoriously ‘sinful’ man in his private life, due to his long-standing relationship with his mistress Maria Skerret, who he eventually married. In this way, a Catholic artistic emblem originally designed to further a

Medici Pope’s political ambitions has been transformed, through the satirical writing of a former

Lady-in-Waiting, into an expression of political and religious cohesion around a prominent

Protestant national figure. Despite being recognizably sinful, Walpole is imbued with a kind of religious legitimacy in his role as a man divinely appointed to head the English administration.303

I assert, therefore, that Lady Hervey alludes to much more than simply the ‘extraordinary majorities in Parliament; or to the great number of places he had obtained for himself and his family’ suggested by Croker. By associating Walpole with this highly prized, sumptuously coloured and iconographically rich image, Lady Hervey, whatever her private feelings about

Walpole’s leadership abilities may have been, demonstrates a public show of support for the court’s leading administrator. Given her husband’s dismissive account of her political capabilities, and the reasons he offers, in his memoirs, for her political opposition to Walpole

(discussed in a later chapter), this entry challenges long-established notions about her antipathy

302 Hornik and Parsons, Illuminating Luke, pp. 71, 72. 303 Walpole’s notoriously cynical rejection of any kind of political morality is a leitmotif in histories of his career. See Philip Woodfine, ‘Tempters or Tempted? The Rhetoric and Practice of Corruption in Walpolean Politics’, in Corrupt Histories, ed. by Emmanuel Kreike and William Chester Jordan (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), pp. 167 – 196; Simon Targett, ‘Government and Ideology during the Age of Whig Supremacy: The Political Argument of Sir Robert Walpole's Newspaper Propagandists’, The Historical Journal, 37: 2 (Jun., 1994), 289- 17 (pp. 05, 07); Thomas Horne, ‘Politics in a Corrupt Society: William Arnall’s Defense of Robert Walpole’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 41: 4 (Oct. – Dec., 1980), 601 – 614 (esp. pp. 603, 607).

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to Walpole’s continued dominance of the government.304 It similarly reminds modern audiences of the public context of this entry, which would have been circulated among other courtiers, and was hardly an appropriate place to express naked criticism of the King and Queen’s chosen minister. The entry does, however, express a veiled, if humorous comment about Walpole’s integrity, in that he ‘feeds’ his supporters with court positions and places conjured from nothing, just as Jesus fed his apostles fish that had been miraculously conjured into existence. There is a delicate balance between satire and praise in this entry, and Lady Hervey pushes the limit of acceptable criticism in her ambiguous juxtaposition of Walpole with one of the British court’s most famous history paintings. Raphael was undoubtedly viewed at the time as the ‘best’ painter in the highest of all genres, history painting, but the specific work Lady Hervey chooses to

‘picture’ Walpole’s character is one that holds potentially subversive meaning.

Conclusion

Despite the misogynistic and patriarchal social practices of the time, both Lady Hervey and

Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk, through their creative agency and independence, participated in the creation of a sophisticated and cultivated world for intellectual men and women. Early Rococo flower painting, affiliated at the time with femininity and later developed in England to an outright assertion of feminine space, is deployed in Lady Hervey’s text as a political tool.305 The gentle satire offered by Onslow’s characterization as an imaginary ‘flower

304 See John Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, From His Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline, ed. by John Wilson Croker, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1848), I, p. 128. 305 See Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700 – 1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), pp. 184 – 187; see also Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 62, for the explicit association between femininity and flower painting. In the later eighteenth century, Queen Charlotte commissioned a female founding member of the Royal Academy, Mary Moser, to decorate her favourite room at Frogmore with flower murals, while her daughter Princess Elizabeth was a lifelong artist who specialized in the genre. See Jane Roberts, George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste (London: Royal Collection, 2004), p. 146,

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Piece’ thus directly commemorates the political nature of the lives of Ladies-in-Waiting, their intimate acquaintance with leading government officials, their constant presence in the lives of such figures – indeed, their active participation in the political machinery of the nation. Lady

Hervey’s pairing of Walpole with the famous Raphael cartoon at Hampton Court likewise shows both women’s thorough familiarity with the spaces of power and pleasure – country houses, elite town residences, and above all the royal palaces – that structured political life under the early eighteenth-century monarchy.306

In contrast with the way Francophile flower painting has been disparaged by art history,

Raphael’s work continues to inspire fervent admiration within the discipline, and as Hoeniger notes, ‘what actually happened to the paintings is as important for an understanding of the reception of Raphael as what was written about his art’. Lady Hervey’s recognition of the primacy of Raphael in English art connoisseurship thus bridges these two concerns. An analysis of her text builds on Hoeniger’s idea of the ‘afterlife’ of Raphael by stressing how Wren’s cartoon gallery, and the successful restoration of the tapestry cartoons, showcased Raphael within the royal collections in early eighteenth-century Britain, and this little-known text helps recuperate the private, ‘interior aesthetic experience’ of Ladies-in-Waiting, their engagement with what could be called ‘Raphael Redux’.

Other entries in the letter are as equally rich in iconographic and satiric political potential as the two case studies of Arthur Onslow and Sir Robert Walpole that I have analyzed. For example, among the entries I do not discuss, that of , 2nd Viscount

and especially Catherine Horwood, Women and their Gardens: A History from the Elizabethan Era to Today (Chicago: Ball Publishing, 2012), p. 182, for the rejection of Moser by most of the masculine art establishment. 306 For the social spaces of politics, and elite women’s involvement with political life, heavily informed by the writing of Elaine Chalus, see Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 11.

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Townshend (1674 – 1738), Secretary of State and cabinet minister to George I and II, expresses

Lady Hervey’s disdain for his leadership abilities as ‘A head Unfinish’d’. Henry St. John, 1st

Viscount Bolingbroke’s similarly visceral castigation as ‘A Judas’ reflects on her low opinion of his integrity, probably by alluding to a famous drawing at Windsor by of the apostate disciple. Flowers, foodstuffs and plants also feature as political allegories in this text.

Just as Sir John Rushout is mocked as being as poisonous as ‘nightshade’, so George Bubb

Dodington is laughed at for being ‘a still life’, corresponding to the rich, sumptuous scenes of flowers, fruit and game, much of it of Dutch inspiration, that surrounded both women in their professional and personal lives.. The next chapter continues to explore Lady Hervey’s imaginary

‘collection of pictures’ by examining the intersection between literary allegory, politics and art in other entries.

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Chapter Five: ‘Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back’: Literary Allusion, Elite Feminine Education, and the salonnière Tradition

Ladies-in-Waiting like Mary Cowper, Charlotte Clayton, Mary Hervey, or Henrietta Howard were all intellectually formidable women. Letters from each individual and from their friend and correspondent Lady Mary Wortley Montagu continually reference their shared love of literature, of hunting avidly for the latest books out of London and Paris, and of a communal sense of intellectualism, which they used to delineate themselves from others at court.307 Wortley

Montagu frankly admitted her love of books, writing ‘I yet retain and carefully cherish my taste for reading. If relays of eyes were to be hired like posthorses, I would never admit any but silent companions.’308 In a character sketched by Jonathan Swift in 1727, Henrietta Howard is mentioned as being ‘neither an enemy nor a stranger to books which maintain the opinions of freethinkers’.309

Charlotte Clayton was similarly intellectual: in one letter she received from Queen

Caroline’s chaplain Dr. Alured Clarke, the learned man sent her his opinions of Conyers

Middleton’s latest controversial religious book and of Bernard Mandeville’s Book of Honour, where Mandeville deconstructs the idealization of honour as a philosophical concept. Clarke has every expectation of Clayton having already read these books, but wants to discuss them with her.310 Lady Hervey was similarly well-read and scholarly engaged. In a letter dated 8 February

307 For Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s well-known love of books, see The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Mrs. Hale (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876), esp. letters of Feb. 12, 1717 and Aug. 20, 1752 (pp. 135, 248 – 250)., I give the above examples in such detail to demonstrate the intellectual sophistication of both Hervey and Howard’s cultural milieu, and to show the plausibility of the complex literary allusions that I argue are present in her list. 308 Ibid., p. 263. 309 see Henrietta Howard, Letters to and from Henrietta, countess of Suffolk, and her second husband the Hon. George Berkeley, from 1712 to 1767, ed. by John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1824), p. xlii. 310 see Charlotte Clayton, Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon: Mistress of the Robes to Queen Caroline, ed. by Katherine Thomson, 2 vols (London: Colbourn, 1847), II, pp. 108 – 112.

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1748, she asks her sons’ tutor to clarify ‘who, exactly, were the ancients?’311 She cites Basil

Kennett’s Romae antiquae notitia, or, The Antiquities of Rome (1696), Sir William Temple’s

Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning (1690), and Gabriel Naudé’s entry in ‘Chanter’s

Dictionary’ where, to her surprise, Naudé ‘reckons those only moderns, who have lived since

Boetius’.312 Lady Hervey concludes her request by writing ‘I have searched several other books, both French and English, that I thought might possibly have cleared this up’.313 Lady Hervey’s scholarly and literate tastes exemplify the intellectual fortitude of Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting, as they do the primacy of French literature as a cultural alternative to both traditional (Greco-

Roman) and modern domestic English systems of knowledge.

Like many educated court women Hervey had to conceal her classical learning – for example, her knowledge of Latin – from public knowledge. Lord Chesterfield remarked of her that ‘she has all the reading that a woman should have; and more than any woman need have, for she understands Latin perfectly well, though she wisely conceals it’. 314 This statement by one of

Lady Hervey’s closest friends and fellow cultural demonstrates the limits of educational tolerance allowed to elite women, even of the highest rank, by the patriarchal order at the time. This is not to say Hervey as well as Howard, Clayton and Cowper did not enjoy and engage with the canonical Greco-Roman texts: they undoubtedly did, but women were excluded from public excellence in those fields by norms of class behaviour.315 However much the Queen

311 See Mary Hervey, Letters of Mary Lepel [sic] Lady Hervey. With a memoir and illustrative notes, ed. by John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1821), p. 120. 312 Ibid., 120. I have not been able to specify the allusion to ‘Chanter’s Dictionary’, but the reference makes clear it quoted from Naudé, probably his Apologie Pour Tous les Grands Personages Faussement Soupçonnez de Magie (1625, reissued 1712), in which Naudé cites from Boethius. See Peter Samuel Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 179. 313 Ibid., 120. 314 See Philip Dormer Stanhope, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, 4 vols, ed. by Lord Mahun (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), II, pp. 40, 41. 315 See Caroline Winterer, ‘Why did American Women read the Aeneid?’, in A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and its Tradition, ed. by Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 366 – 375 (p.

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and her Ladies-in-Waiting may have enjoyed the classics in private, they were not encouraged by many, if any male contemporaries to publish critical opinions on these works.316 Instead, Lady

Hervey developed an interest in rational religion, read and wrote French, corresponded with and entertained Voltaire, and was a vibrant, even integral part of the society of learned aristocratic women who surrounded Queen Caroline. For these reasons, in the following analysis of Lady

Hervey’s literary allusions, I discuss texts that were well known to the court at the time, including the work of Évrard Titon du Tillet (1677 – 1762), Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599), and

Robert Southwell (d. 1595).

As salonnière specialist Dena Goodwin points out, the kinds of socially-interactive, spontaneous literary activities popular at the salons were more than just mere ‘games’. Spaces like Howard’s country house of Marble Hill, so proximate to the literary world of London, were what Goodwin calls ‘working spaces… the salonnières were not simply ladies of leisure killing time. On the contrary, Enlightenment salonnières were precisely those women who fought the general malaise of the period by taking up their métier.’317 For London society, Lady Hervey would later in life fulfill a comparable role to the French salonnière, holding intellectual

74), and Idem, ‘The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America’, in Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic world, 1500 –1800, ed. by Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 105 – 12 (esp. p. 107). Winterer’s comments about eighteenth-century American life also hold true for British models. See also Roger Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’, in Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, ed. by Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. xxi – xlvii (p. xxiv); Jane Stevenson, ‘Women and Classical Education in the Early Modern Period’, in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, ed. by Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 83 – 109 (pp. 83, 84); Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 199 ), p. 6; Susan Whyman, ‘The Correspondence of Esther Masham and : A Study in Epistolary Silences’, Huntington Library Quarterly , 66:3/4 (2003), 275 – 305 (p. 277). 316 See The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, 17 (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1822), pp. 101 – 107 (p. 102), and The British Critic, 17 (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1822), pp. 42 – 51 (p. 46). 317 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 74. For a contrasting view, see Janet M. Burke and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘French Feemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship’, The Journal of Modern History, 68: 3 (1996), 513-529, pp. 14 – 515).

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gatherings in what Horace Walpole called her ‘house built to the French taste’. 318 Victorian reviews of Lady Hervey’s letters amply demonstrate this point: one critic writes derisively that

‘she affects Latin quotations, and takes upon her too much of a political character. For an

Englishwoman she has an undue liking for the literature and manners of France. She wants too, that sense of religion, without which, the female character is always glaringly and offensively imperfect’, while another reviewer huffs that ‘her letters are immeasurably dull...we cannot but feel that there are some points too sacred in their nature to be submitted to the sport and play of gladiatorial conversation,’ referring to her philosophical discussions with a deist and an Abbé.

The ‘play and sport of conversation’ advocated by Lady Hervey in her ‘house built to the French taste’ was likely directly modelled on the encouragement of intellectual conversation through communal games and literary exercises inaugurated by the salon hostesses. Certainly in this letter to Henrietta Howard, she assumes Howard fulfills a similar position at Marble Hill as hostess to visitors from court: ‘I pray everybody to add something as they read them’.319

In what follows I assert that her association of The Three Graces with ‘Horace’ in the imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ refers to the English ambassador to France at the time, Horatio

Walpole, and I explore some of the images of The Three Graces that were in circulation at the time. Several of these images – especially Titon du Tillet’s Le Parnasse Français – have overtly feminist meanings. By selecting two works of visual art to illustrate the contextual associations of The Three Graces at the early-eighteenth century British Court, I explore how Francophilia intersected with feminine education, and how French modes of visual and literary representation impacted British elite social life.

318 See Horace Walpole Correspondence, XXXI, p. 417. 319 Katherine Thomson rightly remarks that the letters of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century women, especially those affiliated with the political world through the court, wrote with an eye to the greater public who would read them. See Katherine Thomson and Philip Wharton, The Queens of Society (London: Harper and Bros., 1860), p. 300.

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I similarly argue that Lady Hervey’s discussion of ‘Peter knocking at the door’ in her imaginary collection refers to the philosopher John Locke, and to noblewoman Damaris

Masham’s protection of Locke in the final years of his life. Lady Hervey’s evocation of an imaginary ‘Peter Knocking at the Door’ shows originality and innovation, due to the rareness of the narrative subject in western painting. Because of the feminist connotations of this scripture, she might well be asking the valid question as to why, exactly, the powerful role allotted to both mistress and maidservant in this biblical passage was not more frequently represented by artists.

A third entry from Lady Hervey’s imaginary collection of pictures that might best be described as feminist is the ‘Nine Muses’, juxtaposed with a mysterious ‘W. P’. The most famous visual precedent for the theme of the Nine Muses at the early eighteenth-century court was a highly visible, familiar work of art in the Royal Collection – Tintoretto’s Muses at

Hampton Court – but a commemorative volume with the same title, written exclusively by women in honour of , was also popular at this time. The social context of how the authors of the honourary Nine Muses’ came to write this unique literary tribute shows how

French literary precedents helped to shape their work, and a further indication of the interconnectivity between elite eighteenth-century women and Francophile culture in Britain.

These various strands show a world where British court women were redefining their own norms of sexual and political behaviour in response to a combination of political idealism and cultural stimuli coming from outside the nation, especially the celebrated achievements of aristocratic literary hostesses in France. Whiggish principles were oriented towards the enjoyment of great personal religious and political liberty, where the right of the oligarchy to choose their monarch – to limit the succession to a certain Protestant branch of the Royal Family

– was mirrored by a concomitant interest in sexual freedom and rational religion. Locke’s

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ground-breaking work on autonomous subjectivity created a discourse advocating for experiential knowledge, a key intellectual component of the enlightenment. Locke was leveling the educational field for gender equality. In response, Hervey embraced more democratic versions of religion, where women play a more central role; and Francophilia provided these

‘protofeminists’ at the early Georgian court with a subversive and empowered voice within the

British imperial project.

‘The Graces by Horace’

The ‘Horace’ who was most visible on the English political stage in 1729 was not the famous

Horace Walpole, but his uncle Horatio, who filled a succession of important and lucrative court appointments.320 Horatio Walpole’s biographer Philip Woodfine notes that his ‘avarice was a frequent subject of contemporary comment, linked to his mean hospitality, and the slovenly dress on which he prided himself’.321 Lady Hervey’s husband wrote much later that the Queen found him difficult to work with, ‘his silly laugh hurting her ears and his dirty sweaty body offending her nose’, while the Ambassador and his wife were described by his nephew as ‘Horace and his dirty wife… a French staymaker’s daughter’.322 Certainly on 9 November 1734 Horatio wrote to his brother that ‘I am extreamly sorry to find that the dress of my letters to the Q---n are not liked altho’ the matter is approved, I solemnly protest to you, I doe not affect that free stile but I can

320 In 1729, Horace Walpole, junior, was only have been twelve years old. 321 Philip Woodfine, ‘Walpole, Horatio , first of Wolterton (1678–1757)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/28595 [accessed 25 May 2011] 322 Hervey, in his best manner, castigates her as having ‘a form scarce human, as offensive to the nose and the ears as to the eye, and one to whom he was kind not from any principle of gratitude, but from the bestiality of his inclination’, John Hervey, Some Materials towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. by Romney Sedgewick, I, p. 284, and also Horace Walpole junior, Robert Walpole Miscellany, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, p. 1 1, 1 2, both in Woodfine, ‘Walpole, Horatio’.

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no more write otherwise than I can tell how to dress my person better than I doe’.323 By comparing the three mythical personifications of beauty, charm and joy with one of the most notoriously slovenly and ill-mannered politicians of the era, Lady Hervey’s sarcasm would have been immediately acknowledged by Henrietta Howard, the other Ladies-in-Waiting, and their courtly circle at Marble Hill.

During the time Lady Hervey wrote this letter (the summer of 1729), Horatio Walpole had a particularly visible public role in national affairs. Walpole was the senior English representative at the Versailles embassy, and was directly responsible for any of the English elite who travelled to Paris for pleasure or business.324 Part of Walpole’s job as ambassador also involved the monitoring and extradition of Jacobite loyalists. Hervey would have been well aware of Walpole’s persecution of the exiled Jacobites at Saint-Germain, and of the unflattering representation of the English national character he presented to the sophisticated, fastidious aristocrats at the French court. Her sarcasm therefore is political. She is highly critical of Horatio

Walpole’s performance of masculinity and of his class attributes. Through her sarcasm, she constructs an identity for him – an imaginary ‘picture’ – that lacks the essential attributes of an aristocratic courtier.325 As a representative of the British nation at Versailles, he would be expected to be a man ‘graced’ with charm, style and manners, and yet of course he failed miserably to live up to these courtly expectations in France.

323 Ibid., p. 2. 324 Priscilla Cady, ‘Horatio Walpole and the Making of the Treaty of Seville, 1728 – 17 0’(unpublished Ph D Thesis, Ohio State University, 1976), qtd. in P. J. Kulisheck, The Duke of Newcastle, 1693 – 1768, and Henry Pelham, 1694 – 1754: A Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 84. 325 There is some evidence to suggest Lady Hervey herself harboured Jacobite sympathies, although these appear to have been manifested more in symbolic gestures of interest in the exiled Stuarts, rather than in any serious wish to see the Hanoverian dynasty displaced. See the c. 1754 perfume vase from the royal porcelain factory at Capodimonte, near , now in the collection of the , Cambridge, decorated with a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlies and with Lady Hervey’s arms and motto, ‘Je n’oublerai jamais’, discussed @ http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/collections/recentacquisitions/article.html?845&sf_function=print [accessed 11 August 2012].

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The Three Graces: Martin Maingaud’s Princesses

In Greco-Roman mythology, the Three Graces, Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia, were the favoured daughters of Zeus and the fish-tailed goddess Eurynome. Companions of Venus, they are normally represented nude, dancing together in a circle. One of the earliest statues of the

Graces known is the Roman group preserved in the Piccolomini library in Siena.326 The

Piccolomini statue provided the model on which subsequent depictions of The Three Graces were based in the Renaissance and beyond.327 Lady Hervey alluded to Raphael in her list’s entry for Horatio’s brother Robert, and could be using the same artist to refer to Horatio himself:

Raphael’s The Three Graces, of 1503 – 1505 was displayed by the Princes of Bourbon-Condé at

Chantilly.328 Lady Hervey was on very friendly terms with this branch of minor royalty at

Versailles, and could easily have heard of Raphael’s Graces from her French correspondents. In a letter written from Paris to the Rev. Edmund Morris, formerly tutor to her sons, she mentions

‘going about five leagues out of town, to a very fine place, with a very agreeable set of people’, which Croker believed was L’ Isle Adam, chateau of the Prince de Conti.329 Specific works that may have influenced Lady Hervey directly, if engravings of any of those mentioned above did not, must include works on The Three Graces in the Royal Collection. Two drawings of the

Farnesina Graces are currently at Windsor, although their date of entry into the collection is

326 Jane Francis, ‘The Three Graces: Composition and Meaning in a Roman Context’, Greece & Rome, 49: 2 (October, 2002), 180 – 198. 327 One of the most popular visual depictions of the subject of The Three Graces in painting today is Botticelli’s entrancing Primavera of 1482, but although a slim possibility exists the Georgian court was aware of his work – Primavera, for example, hung in the Villa of the Medici at Castello, which was visited by both French and British courtiers undertaking the Grand Tour – it seems most unlikely that this painting was an inspiration, as Botticelli not well-known outside Italy in the eighteenth-century. 328 Another version, by Raphael’s assistants, is a 1517 fresco at the Villa Farnesina. 329 Mary Hervey, Letters of Mary Lepel, p. 187 (Letter dated 30 July 1751). She also had apartments reserved for her in the various chateaux of Mlle Charolais, sister of the Duc de Bourbon (Prince of Condé), with whom she lived for several years. She almost certainly saw this Raphael in person during her sojourn there: one is tempted to wonder if she recalled this letter when she did.

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unrecorded. The earliest mention of one, a delicate red chalk study attributed to Raphael, is from

1810.330

Figure 5.1. Martin Maingaud, Princesses Anne (1709 – 59), Amelia (1711 – 1786) and Caroline (1713 – 57), 1721, oil on canvas, 673 x 793 mm, Royal Collection (Kensington?).

I advance that the most important painted precedent for the motif at the early Georgian court is Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline (Fig. 5.1), a 1721 portrait by the French artist

Martin Maingaud (c. 1692 – 1725). The three eldest daughters of George and Caroline are shown in an informal, close-to-the-canvas mode that would have looked startling to Mary Cowper, who complained about the ‘most horribly done, and unfortunately alike’ work by Constantyn,

330 Royal Collection, ‘The Three Graces,’ catalogue entry adapted from Martin Clayton, The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque (London: Royal Collection Publications, 2007), http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/912754/the-three-graces [accessed 2 July 2012]

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discussed in chapter two of this thesis. Maingaud, like Constantyn and Mercier, was another of the Francophone peripatetic court artists, working first in Bavaria and then in England where his modish style, inspired by French fête galante painting, won him royal approval.331 As the Royal

Collection’s curators remark, Maingaud’s portrait of the princesses utilizes the body language of

The Three Graces, reproducing in the girls’ posture the usual attributes of the Graces and emphasizing their close connection through the way they interact. Instead of the idealized facial homogeneity that is present in the older, Knellerian tradition of court portraiture, and in some later conversation piece paintings, the individual features – the ‘likeness’ – of each of the girls is here stressed by Maingaud, to a degree almost exaggerated to caricature.332 Limbs intertwined, bedecked with flowers, velvet and jewels, and painted in a serpentine compositional line that heightens a sense of group cohesion, the adolescent princesses are revealed as active, self- assured and fashionable.333

Maingaud here anticipates later conversation-piece portraiture, and his work’s prescient quality must be regarded, like Mercier’s Music Party on a Terrace, as a key indicator of the

Hanoverian court’s cultural influence on British artistic activity. Unlike the quintessentially

331 Royal Collection, ‘Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline’, par. 3. 332 For the homogeneity of Kneller’s portraits, see Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: the Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth- Century England (Los Angeles: Getty Publishing, 2008), p. 17. Specifically of Kneller’s portraits of court women at Hampton Court, William and Robert Chambers write that ‘Kneller has here depicted several lovely countenances, although a sameness runs through the whole, and none are so striking as to leave an impression’. See Chambers Edinburgh Journal, 78 (27 July 18 ), 201, 202; see also Laurence Binyon, ‘Some Drawings of Englishwomen from van Dyck to Kneller’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 10: 44 (Nov., 1906), 70 – 81 (p. 70); see also E. H. Gombrich, Julian E. Hochbers, and Max Black, Art, Perception and Reality (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 14. For a specific example of the facial homogeneity of women in later conversation-piece portraiture, see Gawen Hamilton’s 17 2 Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford and Family, in the National Gallery of Canada, where Wentworth’s three daughters are portrayed as almost identical. 333 To some extent the princesses replicate the posture, (although not, of course, the nudity) of The Three Graces engraved in Bernard de Montfaucon’s popular illustrated guidebook, L’Antiquité Expliquée et Représentée en figures, of 1719 – 1724, trans. by David Humphreys and issued as Antiquity Explained and Represented in Diagrams (London: 1722, 1725). See Malcolm Warner, ‘The Sources and Meaning of Reynolds’s “Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces” ’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 15: 1 (1989), 6 – 19+82 (pp. 8 – 10). See also above, n. 1, where Lady Hervey discusses her interest in both French and English guidebooks of classicism.

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Baroque attributes of the works by Kneller and Worsdale of Mary Cowper and Charlotte

Clayton, discussed in Chapters Two and Three, the Maingaud royal portraits show an avant- garde, continental aesthetic sensibility, traceable to Caroline of Ansbach. Following a violent quarrel between her husband and his father, Caroline’s daughters were seized by the King, who kept them very much separate from their parents. Then Princess of Wales, Caroline was likely spurred to commission these portraits because of her restricted access to her children during this time and her sense of estrangement and dispossession from her daughters.334

While Maingaud’s career is virtually unknown in British art history, his image of the three princesses performs several important functions. Compositionally it alludes to the motif of

The Three Graces by using an informal, interlocking series of gestures that highlight the cohesive sense of group identity presented by Anne, Amelia and Caroline. Stylistically

Maingaud’s work uses the conventions of fête galante painting in Europe to introduce Rococo aesthetics to court portraiture: heads rendered slightly over lifesize, bright and, in Hyde’s language, ‘pretty’ colouring, and subject matter culled from the fantasy spaces of aristocratic

French representation (Maingaud’s group of four royal portraits is discussed in more detail below).335 Perhaps most importantly, it also highlights the autonomy of the three girls as individuals. Instead of falling back on the old tradition of idealized homogeneity, Maingaud draws attention to their distinct likenesses and characters. Caroline bitterly resented the separation from her daughters enforced by George I, and as her husband is well known for his lack of interest in artistic matters, the ‘radical’ appearance of the Maingaud portraits is, I assert, a result of her need for affective images of the children she missed so strongly. By commissioning

334 The children were viewed as the property of the British crown. George and Caroline tried to use a court to force George I to relinquish control of their education, but were denied. See Ragnhild Hatton, George I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 208. 335 See Hyde, Making Up the Rococo, p. 11.

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innovative, Francophile portraits of her daughters and eldest son, Caroline reminded the English court of their humanity, of the fact that her children were more than just state property, and that their own wishes and desires

(in this case, their desire to have closer access to their mother) should be respected.

Three groups of the eldest four children of George and Caroline were painted by

Maingaud at this time. The Royal Collection’s entry notes their collective ‘fanciful Figure 5.2. Martin Maingaud, Prince Frederick(1707 – 1751) and Princess Amelia(1711 – 1786), c. 1720, character’, as each work is very similar to oil on canvas, 1527 x 1200 mm, Royal Collection (Kensington?). French Rococo art, from the informal groupings of interacting subjects to the delicate inflections of fawn, rose and cerulean background light.336 Allusions to French courtly precedent are particularly noticeable in one of the companion pieces, Prince Frederick and Princess Amelia (Fig. 5.2). In both portraits a flower wreath winds between siblings, formally linking them together. Fête galante-like in its use of pastel colouring, idealized setting, and emblematic devices, such as the insect-winged wind cherub, also found in Watteau’s Pilgrimmage to Cythera, Maingaud’s portrait of Frederick and Amelia makes startling use of royal male bare skin. Shown bare-chested, enveloped in a swirling pink robe, with powdered curls tangled in the wind, Prince Frederick’s Arcadian

336 Royal Collection, ‘Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline’, par. 1.

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appearance is a direct nod to the mythological world of early Rococo painting.337 It also mimics the dynastic pride shown by the Bourbons in Jean Nocret’s 1670 group portrait of the French royal family dressed as Olympian gods.338 Maingaud even goes further than Nocret, showing the

Prince and his sister as lovers by representing them as Cupid and Psyche, a conceit not much repeated in subsequent British royal portraiture.

Nocret represented Louis XIV and his brother similarly bare-chested, within an Olympian setting, advertising their sexual vigour as potent marks of reproductive potential. Dynastic failures had plagued the Protestant branch of the Stuart dynasty, and the tragic death of Queen

Mary, as well as that of the , Queen Anne’s only surviving child, had plunged the British nation into crisis. The Hanoverian electoral family offered the English dynastic continuity. Maingaud’s depiction of Prince Frederick, so similar in look to the portraits of French nobles by Nicolas de Largilliere, similarly advertises a sexually desirable, healthy and active young male royal as a potential successor to the throne, guaranteeing continued Protestant control of the nation-state. In Marcia Pointon’s hypothesis of the bodily reflection of dynastic tension, such a calculated exercise of dynastic power produces, not the kind of idealized body shown by Maingaud, but a grotesque body that fatally projects back on the brittle social construction from which it came, engendering conflict and suspicion. 339 Frederick’s later much- publicized hatred for his mother, father and sisters is a strident example of how such modes of dynastic power were exploited by feuding factions of the English elite. Pointon theorizes that

337 For the long-established association between Rococo and the colours sky blue and rose pink, see Martin Scheider, ’Between Grâce and Volupté: Boucher and Religious Painting’, in Rethinking Boucher, ed. by Melissa Hyde and Mark Ledbury (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 61 - 91 (p. 62, 63). 338 For the association between dynastic pride and the unclothed royal body, see James D. Herbert, Our distance from God : studies of the divine and the mundane in western art and music (Berkeley : University of California press, 2008), p. 1, where he writes of Louis XIV that divinity ‘seemed to sink into his body itself, so that his partially nude physique in Jean Nocret’s group portrait of 1670 of the royal family as the Gods of Olympus could inspire genuine veneration’. 339 Pointon, ‘Material Manoeuvres’, p. 507.

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‘the calculated exercise of dynastic power transmutes into formalities’, creating ‘grotesque bodies that project back upon that social construct of the individual and their family, a construct that was… impossible to regulate and subject to frequent breakdown’.340 This could, for example, help explain the extravagant, ‘grotesque’ fashions in late-seventeenth century

Versailles, where women’s towering headgear received much adverse comment, even from

Louis XIV.341

Pointon’s comment refers to Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough and interprets the bitterness between the Duchess and her daughters in the context of dynastic breakdown. Maingaud’s portraits were created in exactly such a time of dynastic tension, during the ‘breakdown’ of personal relations between George I and his son, a personality conflict exacerbated by political struggle between different factions of the British elite. In some senses the British Whig oligarchy used the foreign Hanoverian family as dynastic pawns to further their own collective interests, after religious and reproductive failures caused the collapse of the indigenous line. The bodies of young royals, both female and male, were therefore highly charged sites of political, sexual and dynastic power, and their representation in painting similarly electric.

Maingaud was working at court during Lady Hervey’s last months as a Maid of Honour to Caroline, after she had secretly married. She continued to attend court regularly throughout the

1720s, especially during the times her mother-in-law Elizabeth, Countess of Bristol was in residence (Lady Bristol had been appointed a Lady of the Bedchamber in 1718). Hervey and

Howard must have had ample opportunity to become very familiar with the Maingaud portraits

340 Ibid., p. 507. 341 Louis Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Mémoires de Saint-Simon, 20 vols (Paris: Chéruel ,1885), X, chapter 14, par. 6.

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during that time and in the years that followed.342 Due to Caroline’s enforced absence from her children, and her continued concern for their welfare, the Maingaud portraits were likely exhibited in Caroline’s quarters as affective images that synthesized personal with political meaning. Their unusual appearance, especially in contrast to more ‘official’ images Maingaud created of Prince Frederick, may in fact suggest they were kept in her ‘private’ apartments, which were less public (but still accessible to the Ladies-in-Waiting) than other, more formal suites of rooms.343

Figure 5.3. James Stephanoff, The Queen’s Drawing Room at Kensington Palace, 1817, watercolour over pencil, 19.9 x 25.1 cm, Royal Collection.

342 Royal Collection, ‘The Judgement of Paris’, catalogue entry adapted from Kate Heard and Lucy Whitaker, The Northern Renaissance. Dürer to Holbein, (London: Royal Collection Publications, 2011), http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/egallery/object.asp?object=405757&row=1244&detail=about., [accessed 28 November 2011]. Maingaud’s Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline is first documented in the Queen’s Apartments at Kensington Palace, favourite urban residence of George and Caroline, in 1818, but they were probably taken to or Leicester House during the schism. Caroline continued to try and regain control over her eldest daughters during the years 1718 – 1721. 343 See the entry for the c. 1719 portrait of Prince Frederick in Royal Collection, ‘Prince Frederick of Wales’, http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/404987/frederick-prince-of-wales-1707-1751. [accessed August 2012]

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I assert that Princesses Anne, Amelia and Caroline would have been seen on a regular basis by Lady Hervey, Henrietta Howard and all of the court women in Caroline’s employ. The painting is visible over the door leading into the Queen’s Drawing Room at Kensington Palace in a watercolour by James Stephanoff of 1817 (Fig. 5.3). The decoration of the room was unaltered since the death of George II in 1760, and so the position of the painting in Stephanoff’s view of the Queen’s Apartments is almost certainly how it was in Queen Caroline’s day, as George II locked up half the apartments and took no interest in the decoration of the palace in the years after her death. Stephanoff’s record of how visual art was arranged in this room is of great interest, as Caroline, not content with remodelling the gardens, was responsible for the decorative programme of the Palace’s interior design. It was the Royal Family’s main London residence after 1727, and the Queen’s Apartments at Kensington Palace were spaces habituated by Caroline’s attendants and their families. The decoration of the Queen’s Drawing Room included seventeenth-century Italian ‘Old Master’ painting, at least one large floral still-life, contemporary English portraits of high-ranking naval officers, furniture made in the French style by Huguenot artists, and large pieces of Chinese export porcelain.344 In its eclectic blend of genres and themes, Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ is similar to the programme of picture hanging in the Drawing Room, and reflects the stylistic hybridity of early eighteenth- century British court aesthetics. Contemporary parallels of Mercier’s early conversation pieces, these portrait groups have received almost no critical attention by art historians (curators at the

Royal Collection call Maingaud ‘an imitator’ of Mercier).345 Maingaud is very little-known or discussed today, despite the fact that his groups of portraits of the royal children are so prescient,

344 Royal Collection, ‘Kensington Palace: Queen Mary's Drawing Room (The Admirals' Gallery), 1817’, online @ http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/eGallery/object.asp?feature=true&object=922152&row=26&detail=about., [accessed 17 October 2012]. 345 Ibid., ‘Prince Frederick and Princess Amelia’, par. 2.

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and are such cosmopolitan, stylistically hybrid works of art, combining developments in contemporary continental art with the Augustan tradition of elite portraiture in a unique synthesis.

Le Parnasse Français: salonnière culture and elite feminine education in England

The narrative subject of The Three Graces was of great interest, not only to painters, but also to sculptors. One of the most plausible connections between Lady Hervey’s mention of The Three

Graces and a specific work of art is the engraving after the giant bronze sculpture by Louis

Garnier, Le Parnasse Français, a two-meter high modello of a more ambitious, but never- completed project, commissioned in France by the popular society dilettante Évrard Titon du

Tillet (1677 – 1762).346 The subject apotheosized the French arts through a pyramidical composition with Louis XIV as Apollo near the top and various personifications of the muses cascading downwards, including authors and musicians like Molière, Jean Racine and Pierre

Corneille. Titon du Tillet, whose family was partly of Scottish descent, tried for fifty years to get funding for the statue to be reproduced in truly monumental form, and did in fact create a garden by the Seine in which the monument was to be displayed. Funding costs, however, escalated out of control, and the project eventually had to be abandoned, but in 1727 Titon du Tillet published

Description du Parnasse François, in which he included illustrated anecdotal biographical fragments of the authors and musicians under discussion.347

346 See Judith Colton, The Parnasse Francois: Titon du Tillet and the Origins of the Monument to Genius (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979); Colin Bailey, Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in pre- revolutionary Paris (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2002), p. 253, n. 163; Matthew Craske and Richard Wrigley, Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), p. 142, n. 6; Julie Anne Sadie, Companion to Baroque Music (Berkeley, Calif : University of California Press, 2002), p. 143. 347 Michael D. Garval, A Dream of Stone: Fame, Vision and Monumentality in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (University of Delaware Press, 2004), p. 23.

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Figure 5.4. Jean Audran after Nicolas Poilly the elder, Description du Parnasse François: detail of ‘The Three Graces’, Antoinette Deshoulières (1637 – 1694), Henriette de la Suze (1618 – 1673), and Madeleine de Scudéry (1607 – 1701), 1760 repr. after 1723 original, Pazzo Books, West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

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Included in the Description was an engraving of Garnier’s modello. Early in 1723, Titon du Tillet had commissioned a painting en grisaille of the modello by Nicolas de Poilly the elder, which was engraved by Jean Audran in the same year.348 The modello, painting and one of

Audran’s prints were all presented to Louis XV when he came of age, but to Titon du Tillet’s discomfiture, only the print and the painting were accepted, as the young King was more interested in proclaiming a new era, rather than looking backwards to the old. The Three Graces were personified in the Parnasse François (Fig. 5.4) as three of France’s most famous female poets, Antoinette Deshoulières (1637 – 1694), Henriette de la Suze (1618 – 1673), and

Madeleine de Scudéry (1607 – 1701).349 All three women represented the best of salonnière culture, and Deshoulières’ writing even mentions the subject of The Three Graces in an exchange purportedly from her cat, Grisette, to Cochon, the beloved dog of the Maréchal de

Vivonne.350

Given the prominence of these poets, the appeal of French literature to Lady Hervey, and her own keen sense of the intellectual viability of women, which was a leitmotif throughout her life (her own daughters were educated to very high standards, causing complaints from her

348 See Julie Anne Sadie, ‘Parnassus Revisited: The Musical Vantage Point of Titon du Tillet’, in Jean-Baptiste Lully and the music of the French Baroque: Essays in honor of James R. Anthony, ed. by John Hajdu Heyer, pp. 131 – 158 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 134. The Audran print is reproduced p. 135. 349 For Scudéry and Le Parnasse François, see Helen Osterman Borowitz, The Impact of Art on French Literature: From de Scudéry to Proust (Newark : University of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 43. 350Deshoulières work was issued repeatedly throughout the eighteenth century. A version Lady Hervey may have been familiar with is the 1709 Amsterdam edition, issued from a French publisher living there. The full reference is as follows: ecris moi seulement quelque lettre galante car tes vers à mon gré brillent de si beaux traits Que tous esprits ils enlevement, Il paroît bien, quand Phebus les a fait que le trois graces les achevent voilà te loüer assez bien et ce ne sont pas-là des loüanges de chien…, p. 161. There are many other references to the graces in the same volume. Antoinette Du Ligier de La Garde Deshoulières, Poésies de Madame et de Mademoiselle Deshoulières (repr. Amsterdam: Henri Desbordes, 1709). See also Katharine M. Rogers, The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 86.

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mother-in-law), I argue that Lady Hervey could well be invoking a quiet sense of feminist pride in this entry. 351 The Le Parnasse Français was generating considerable cultural discussion in that contemporary moment.352 The cultural work, legacy and reputation of salonnière women like Deshoulières was certainly of interest to literary-minded Maids of Honour at the British court, with an earlier Maid of Honour, Anne Finch (later known as Lady Winchilsea) expressing considerable interest in Deshoulières’s innovative mode of writing. In one poem, entitled To the

Right Honble Lord Viscount Hatton by way of excuse for my not having replied to his last copy of verses in which he gives the name Corydon not approved by me who in this Poem offer at an imitation of Madame Deshouliers in her way of Badinage, Finch not only adopts Deshoulières’ poetic style but also concludes with a direct reference to de Scudéry.353 Finch’s poetry shows how much Deshoulières and Scudéry’s work was cultural currency in the early eighteenth- century British courtly world, and is a further indication of how likely it is Lady Hervey,

Henrietta Howard and their circle were familiar with their writing.

One further example demonstrates the close association between early eighteenth-century elite British women’s education and the French authors represented as ‘The Three Graces’ in

Titon du Tillet’s Le Parnasse Français. Three months after Lady Hervey included this imaginary

‘collection of pictures’ in her letter to Henrietta Howard, a satirical letter to the editor appeared in Henry Baker’s Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal. Written by ‘Clarissa’, the letter reiterates the informal, erratic character of elite women’s access to classical education, as well as the prejudices against which literary-minded adolescent girls suffered. Elsewhere in the letter

351 Carola Hicks, Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of an earlier Lady Diana Spencer (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002). 352 Titon de Tillet published, in 1730, a second revised edition of his description, in which the lives and accomplishments of France’s most famous poets were updated and enlarged, and he did so because there was demand for his work in 1728 and 1729. 353 Anne Finch, The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems: A Critical Edition, ed. by Barbara McGovern and Charles H. Hinnant (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998), p. 184.

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Clarissa bemoans the obstacles put in the way of her reading by her own father and mother: the mother insists embroidery is a more suitable occupation for adolescent girls, while her father catches her reading a Latin grammar book and bans her from the library, observing that ‘if I aim’d at chopping Logick, he’d chop my legs off’ and that ‘if I wou’d read for my improvement, he wou’d recommend to me the Court Cookery, and the Compleat Housewife’. 354 Despite these strictures Clarissa does receive some encouragement in her studies, as her three brothers, before they are placed in positions at court and in the Law, were ‘pleased with my Thirst for books, and would often help me to some’.355

Before his early death, Clarissa’s grandfather was the most instrumental figure in her education. Described as a ‘man of Letters, fond of a sedentary contemplative life; the greater part of which he spent in his study’, he taught his adolescent granddaughter to read in Latin and

Greek ‘at my earnest solicitation’, encouraged her writing, and created an informal curriculum by selecting books designed to improve her mind.356 Significantly, the French salonnière writers were key figures in this process of informal education for British noblewomen. ‘He used to call me his little Scudery, his little Dacier’, wrote Clarissa, ‘…and by giving me the character of those inimitable women, add oil to the fire, and raise in me a generous emulation of excelling, or at least of equalling, their Learning’.357 While ‘Clarissa’ may well have been an imaginary figure created by Baker and his colleague and father-in-law Daniel Defoe for literary effect, it is clear that in 1729, the names of French salonnière authors like de Scudéry were bywords that signified feminist education, and were easily intelligible as such to the wider newspaper-reading public in

354 Henry Baker and Daniel Defoe as Henry Stonecastle, Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, 54 (London Saturday 18 October 1729), p. 1. 355 Ibid., p. 1 356 Ibid., p.1. 357 Ibid., p.1. Anne Dacier translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into French at the turn of the century, and her spirited defense of Homer was carried out in a playful literary vein at the salons of the day.

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Britain. Clarissa’s letter in Baker’s Universal Spectator and Anne Finch’s poem in homage of

Deshoulières both help to contextualize how popular French literary hostesses were in the public imagination, and how much their memory was associated with elite women’s interest in classical texts at the early eighteenth-century British court. Clarissa makes perfectly clear her family’s court connections: the last half of her account fervently criticizes aristocratic male court fashion as effeminate, following a visit from a newly-fashionable brother, and advocates for feminine education as a measure against the enervating effects of decadence and luxury.358

Maingaud’s portrait of George II’s three eldest daughters and Jean Audran’s engraving of

Le Parnasse Français are thus two works of art that were contextually associated with the motif of The Three Graces in Lady Hervey’s cultural milieu. These two works of art demonstrate the cultural hybridity that was part of the visual, material and cultural world of British Ladies-in-

Waiting during the 1720s, when artistic and literary innovations developed in France were imported to the English aesthetic sphere. These two works also help interrogate the circumstances of young court women’s education. Maingaud’s portrait shows how the classicizing motif of the Three Graces was translated by an émigré painter to suit the needs of a particularly powerful female patron – likely Queen Caroline herself – as a form of protest against her loss of control over her own daughters. By using French courtly innovations of informal portraiture, Maingaud was able to express the distinctive physical characteristics, and intellectual autonomy of the three princesses, thereby publicly commemorating their individuality. The

Queen’s public display of this painting in the favourite London residence of the royal family,

Kensington Palace, underscored its importance as a propaganda object. When viewed on a regular basis by her staff, the Queen’s family portraits served as a reminder of the circumstances

358 Ibid, p. 1.

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of George I’s seizure of his three eldest granddaughters, his control over their education in opposition to the wishes of their parents, and the role of young elite women from royal or aristocratic families as sexual, reproductive and biological assets of the pater familias.

Audran concomitantly used The Three Graces motif in his engraving of Titon du Tillet’s

Le Parnasse Français to include feminist representation within a program of cultural celebration, picturing the Graces as three of the most influential French salonnière author-hostesses in recent memory. Two of these writers, Deshoulières and de Scudéry, were known to reference the Three

Graces in their own literary work, which was of great interest to literary-minded British Ladies- in-Waiting like Anne Finch, and as ‘Clarissa’s account tells us, was still being publicly held up as an exemplar to elite female education in popular British newspapers in 1729, the year Lady

Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection pictures’ was written. Audran and Maingaud’s visual representations of the Three Graces thus illustrate the benefits of being a Francophile for literary- minded Ladies-in-Waiting of Queen Caroline’s circle. Aristocratic French salon hostesses, who wrote court poetry and literary satires in word ‘games’ that used light, playful banter or raillery

(badinage), combined excellence in scholarship with excellence in the more traditionally reiterated elite female role of hospitality. As ‘Clarissa’s’ letter so poignantly suggests, under these circumstances, authors like Deshoulières and de Scudéry were probably the most visible, most famous and most celebrated examples of female excellence in classical scholarship for young British women. The courtly world of the French salon evoked in the salonnières’ satirical poems and imaginary epistolary exercises was one of the rare spaces where elite female education was encouraged in anything like a formal, public arena. The literary games of

Deshoulières and de Scudéry, dripping with references to Latin authors, Arcadian metaphors and classical pseudonyms maximized for witty effect, showed young British noblewomen a world of

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highly refined and educated women who made significant contributions to literature, and whose merits as authors and scholars were celebrated by their contemporaries, even – as Titon du Tillet desired – on a monumental scale. Contrast this example with the brutal prejudices displayed by

‘Clarissa’s’ father, or Lord Chesterfield’s canny recognition of the reasons for Lady Hervey’s own concealment of her knowledge of Latin, and the appeal of the salonnières for young, educated noblewomen certainly seems very strong.

An additional incentive for Lady Hervey, Henrietta Howard and other court women’s interest in the salon was provided by the exemplar set by their contemporaries in France, where elite women were very much part of an active and thriving salon culture. Throughout the 1720s, a wide range of women of backgrounds ranging from royal to bourgeois emulated the precedents that had been set by ‘les précieuses’, the mid seventeenth-century aristocratic hostesses associated with the circle of Deshoulières, de Scudéry, and their mentor Catherine de Vivonne,

Marquise de Rambouillet. As Clarissa’s account in a popular London newspaper of 1729 suggests, the achievements of this older generation of salon hostesses continued to be an active influence over an ongoing reconceptualization of the desired social role of elite women in

Britain. As such, their cultural memory and literary legacy was, I argue, perhaps of more vital, immediate importance in 1720s Britain than the achievements of Frenchwomen living in the period itself, whose own cultural work was ongoing, and had not yet been codified and canonized into an easily assimilated set of intellectual tools.

However, there can be no doubt that Hervey, Howard and the other learned women of the court were intimately well-aware of the activities of the salon hostesses of their own day. As has been mentioned in this thesis’ Introduction, Queen Caroline and her grandmother-in-law Sophia of Hanover were keen imitators of the salon tradition, while Lady Hervey herself later

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corresponded with influential hostesses in France and, in her widowhood, staged small-scale salons at her house ‘built to the French taste’. Through their proximity to Queen Caroline and their active, day-to-day participation in the court, the Ladies-in-Waiting were well-placed to hear and read about the achievements of the living salonnières in France. In 1729, at the time of the writing of Lady Hervey’s ‘collection of pictures’, four aristocratic women stood out as leading political and literary hostesses in France itself. Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles,

Marquise de Lambert (1647 – 1783), Claudine Guérin de Tencin (1682 – 1749), Marie de Vichy-

Chamrond, known as Madame du Deffand (1697 – 1780), and Louise Bénédicte du Bourbon-

Condé, Duchesse du Maine (1676 - 1753) were all active as highly-visible salon hostesses throughout the late 1720s and early 1730s.

These four women were known for hosting informal gatherings where literary conversation was stressed above and beyond the more usual feminine social prerogatives of fashion, gossip and gambling. This is not to say fashion and gossip were not ever discussed by habitués of these three women’s salons, because they undoubtedly were, but like the gatherings of the précieuses hostesses before them, Madame de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, Madame du

Deffand and the Duchesse de Maine encouraged intellectual stimulation through impromptu theatrical or literary performances. French salon hostesses chose their guests and the potential conversation with great care, taste and acumen, thus paving the way for educational opportunities for women denied them in a more formal setting. 359 With her call for Howard’s

359 Denise im, ‘Le gout de la nation: The Influence of Women in Forming French and Foreign Taste’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 44: 3 (2007), 221 – 2 7. See also Steven D. Kale, ‘Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons’, French Historical Studies, 25: 1 (2002), 115 – 148, Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), and Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), Duncan McColl Chesney, ‘The history of the history of the Salon’, Ninteenth-Century French Studies, 36: 1/2 (Fall, Winter 2007), 94 – 108; Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, trans. by Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), James Van Horne Melton, The Rise of the Public in

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guests at Marble Hill to spontaneously add to the list of imaginary portraits, Lady Hervey certainly follows in these celebrated hostesses’ insistence on spontaneity, fun and intellectual play.

Madame de Tencin, a former nun, was the lowest-ranking of these four case studies of notable French salon hostesses active in the second decade of the eighteenth century. A younger daughter who was consigned against her will to a convent by the family’s tradition, she managed to revoke her vows to the church, and soon after bore an illegitimate child – the mathematician

Jean le Rond d’ Alembert – to Louis-Camus Destouches, an artillery officer. Although their child was sent out for adoption, both Tencin and Destouches retained a sustained (if distant) interest in the child’s welfare and education.360 Madame de Tencin was known for her amorous and political intrigues, especially after she moved to Paris and took up residence with her sister,

Madame de Ferriol.361 With her sister’s assistance, she self-consciously performed the role of a salonniere, hosting elegant and informal parties attended, not only by leading French aristocrats and writers, but also English nobles passing through Paris on diplomatic business, notably Henry

St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, and Matthew Pryor.362 While literature was its ostensible focus,

Madame de Tencin’s house was known for its frank discussion of sexuality, its sexual intrigue, and its connection to church patronage through her brother’s ambitious political career.363

Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 205 – 212, Mary Sherriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), pp. 87 – 105. 360 Nancy K. Miller, ‘The Gender of the Memoir-Novel’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. by Dennis Holler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 55, 446 – 432. 361 Pierre-Maurice Masson, Une Vie de Femme aux VIIIe Siècle: Madame de Tencin (1682 - 1749) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), pp. 48, 61 – 63, 77. 362 Jean Serail, Les Tencin: Histoire d'une Famille au Dix-Hutième Siècle d'après de Nombreux Documents Inédits (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1969), pp. 215 – 229. 363 See René Vaillot, Qui étaient Madame de Tencin... et le Cardinal? (Paris: Le Pavillon Roger Maria Editeur, 1974).

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In 1726, after a lover committed suicide outside of her house and left incriminating notes suggesting she was involved in John Law’s ‘Mississippi Bubble’ scheme of 1720, Madame de

Tencin deliberately began to model her gatherings on that of another society hostess, Madame de

Lambert, who gave two philosophical gatherings a week where political discussion was strictly prohibited. On Tuesdays, Madame de Lambert entertained writers and intellectuals, and on

Wednesdays, she invited members of the nobility to her home, although the boundary between these two groups of people was kept consciously fluid. Madame de Lambert was also unique in including in her group members of the stage, such as Adrienne Lecouvreur. After Madame de

Lambert’s death in 1733, Madame de Tencin would replicate her formal allocation of specific days to specific classes of people, and yet the formal division was kept by both women as inducement to allow cross-pollination between groups, and to stage appropriate environments, away from the court, where the nobility and the literati could mingle. Visitors could and did attend both days if they had risen to sufficient level of intimacy with their hostess.364

Just as Madame de Tencin and her sister followed the social example of Madame de

Lambert (who was herself of course mimicking the achievements of les précieuses), a subsequent generation of salonnière hostesses were indebted to Madame de Tencin’s notions of hospitable entertainment as an inducement to intellectual activity. Madame Geoffrin, whose famous salons reached their heyday much later in the eighteenth century, was thirty years old in

1729, and while her avid interest in Enlightenment ideals of rational religion, scientific empiricism and feminine education had already sparked conflict with her much older husband, her social ambitions were still very much in their infancy.365 Geoffrin frequented the salon of

364 Renée Winegarten, ‘Women and Politics: Madame de Tencin’, The New Criterion (Oct., 1997), 26 - 32. 365 Emma Barker, ‘Mme Geoffrin, Painting and Galanterie: Carle Van Loo's Coversation Espangnole and Lecture Espangnole’, Eighteenth Century Studies 40: 4 (2007), 587 - 614.

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Madame de Tencin in this period, seeking out the company of writers and scientists. She would later become known as a hostess who preferred serious conversation to frivolity, and by her own daughter’s admission she was averse to the life of the sparkling aristocrat who chased ephemeral bodily and mental pleasures in an unending round of social engagements.366

Ephemeral sensuality, visual pleasure and light-hearted wit were attributes encouraged and even promoted by Geoffrin’s future rival Madame du Deffand, who by 1729 had for many years formed a lively and integral part of the debauched circle that had formerly surrounded the

Regent of France, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans. While in her youth it was widely rumoured that

Deffand and the Regent were sexually involved, the Duc d’Orléans had died in 1723, and the second decade of the eighteenth century saw Madame du Deffand take a growing interest in promoting intellectual discussion at her parties.367 She also began a voluminous correspondence with a wide range of scientific and literary figures. These interests brought her, not only into the orbit of Madame de Tencin, but also that of the Duchesse de Maine, who presided over a brilliant, if hedonistic court at her residence at the Chateau de Sceaux.368 Tencin and the

Duchesse du Maine were two opposing, yet complementary models for the role of the famous

French literary hostess.

In 1729, the year Lady Hervey wrote her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ to Henrietta

Howard, both Madame Geoffrin and Madame du Deffand were therefore only beginning their informal apprenticeship as salonnières. Madame Geoffrin leaned heavily on the example of

366 Dena Goodman, ‘Filial Rebellion in the Salon: Madame Geoffrin and Her Daughter’, French Historical Studies 16: 1 (1989), 28 – 47. See also Pierre de Ségur, La Royaume de la Rue Saint-Honoré: Madame Geoffrin et sa Fille (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 10th ed., 1927). 367 See Madame du Deffand, The Letters of the Marquise Du Deffand to the Hon. Horace Walpole, ed. by Horace Walpole (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1810), p. xxxiii. See also Carol Lloyd, ‘Marie de Vichy- Chamrond, Marquise de Deffand, 1697 – 1780’ in French Women Writers, ed. by Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 134 – 142. 368 Nina Lewallen, ‘Architecture & Performance at the Hôtel du Maine in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 17: 1 (Fall - Winter, 2009/2010), 2 – 32.

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Madame de Tencin and Madame de Lambert, and was just beginning to be known for the seriousness of the tenor of her mind. In contrast, Madame du Deffand empathized with the ideals of sexual freedom circulating at the house of Madame de Tencin, a somewhat scandalous woman linked closely to the world of political and church intrigue, and also sought entry to the glamorous world at Sceaux, where the great nobles, friends and relations of the captivating

Duchesse du Maine mixed freely with the writers, painters and actors they found indispensable for their amusement.369

As an illustration of the cultural hybridity of the vibrant intellectual climate of the salon,

Madame du Deffand and the future Madame de Pompadour were also unofficial members of the male-dominated Club d’Entresol (The Mezzanine Club), an association of aristocrats who met in a salon-like atmosphere deliberately modeled after English Whig ideals of liberty and free speech. Hosted by Charles-Jean-François Hénault, a politician and historian, and founded at least in part by the exiled English politician Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, these gatherings were frequented by men bound by their common opposition to the administrative policies of

Cardinal Fleury, chief minister of the young Louis XV.370 Most of the club’s members were also familiar guests of Madame de Tencin, and thus the Club’s formalized and informalized meetings were social spaces where the political and social prominence of influential literary hostesses was celebrated. The connection between literary gatherings and political intrigue was taken as necessarily overt in eighteenth-century France. Literary hostesses were by definition political figures, despite the best efforts of Madame de Lambert to separate those roles. The Duchesse de

Bourbon, for example, meddled so much in French dynastic politics that the Duc d’Orléans felt

369 Florica Dulmet, ‘L’Amour, la Politique, l’Esprit: Tiercé d’une Femme Libre, Madame de Tencin’, Écrits, 415 (Juillet-Août 1981), p. 97 – 104. 370 Jürgen Habermas (trans. Thomas Burger), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Camb., Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), p. 263, n. 27.

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forced to order her exile and confinement to house arrest. Her eventual rehabilitation in 1720 gave the Duchesse more opportunity to concentrate on her social role, and her salon at Sceaux was certainly a much-admired prototype for gatherings of a similar, if less opulent nature throughout Europe, including those hosted by Henrietta Howard at Marble Hill.371

While numerous visual examples of the subject of the Three Graces were extant in Lady

Hervey’s courtly milieu, and were common themes espoused by specific literary hostesses in

France (both of an earlier generation and contemporary to Lady Hervey herself), literary precedents of the Three Graces in English literature highlight the complexity and political depth of her allegorical caricature. Milton was popular and widely-read at the time, admired by leading

French intellectuals whom she befriended, including Voltaire, who wrote a 1727 treatise in praise of the author.372 Voltaire’s famous poem ‘Hy would you know the passion/you have kindled in my breast’ is thought by some scholars to refer to her, and some to refer to her husband. The question is not irrelevant: Horace Walpole refers to an epigram by Voltaire, where he saw both Lord and Lady

Hervey in bed together, and an anonymous poem of 17 4 refers to this by claiming ‘Well might that Bard his ign’rance plead/when charmed with both as laid in bed/ yet dubious which was girl or boy/to be secure, would both enjoy’.373 Milton’s poem L’Allegro of 1645 evokes the pleasures of life and

371 Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Marc Favreau, ‘L’Inventaire àpres décès de Duchesse du Maine: Etudes et Commentaires, in La Duchesse du Maine: Une Mécène à la Croisée des Arts et des Siècles, ed. by Catherine Cessac (Brussells: University of Brussells, 2003), pp. 51 - 64. 372 There is some suggestion that Lady Hervey and possibly even Lord Hervey were sexually involved with Voltaire during his visit to England 1725 – 1728; certainly the three were extremely close, as is proven in extant correspondences preserved, among other places, in the Hervey correspondences at the Suffolk Record Office in Bury St. Edmunds; see Robin Simon, Hogarth, France and British Art (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2009). 373 Both Lord and Lady Hervey are known to have been fervently, if not passionately, admired by Voltaire. See Horace Walpole, Correspondence, XXXI, p. 417, n. 25., and David Wootton, ‘Unhappy Voltaire, or ‘I shall never get over it’ as long as I live’, History Workshop Journal, 50 (2000), 137 – 155 (p. 142). Voltaire’s poem in full is as follows: Hy would you know the passion You have kindled in my breast Trifling is the inclination That Can Be expre’d by words.

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alludes to The Three Graces. The motif’s most direct English literary precedent occurs in Book 6 of Spenser’s The Faery Queene, where the hero’s vision of The Three Graces dancing in a circle around a fourth, supreme Grace provides the symbolic center for the episode.374 As Spenser scholar Lila Geller points out, ‘the symbolically weighted episode provides the justification for

Calidone’s dereliction of duty as he idles his time in pastoral seclusion, while the object of his quest, the Blatant Beast, disconcordant antithesis of all that is courteous, rages unimpeded

[italics mine]’.375 The overt similarities between the Spenserian precedent and Lady Hervey’s own position, secluded away in the pastoral haven of Ickworth while the slovenly, ill-dressed and blunt-mannered Horatio Walpole grossly trampled through the courtly French society she loved and craved, seem too strong to be mere coincidence. As further example of the contextual associations between these motifs, The Faery Queene was thought to be an appropriate subject for visual art by some of the most famous connoisseurs from the period. In 1731 Richard

Temple, Lord Cobham commissioned the Venetian painter Francesco Sleter to decorate the interior of the Temple of Venus at Stowe with murals based on the epic poem.376 While Lady

Hervey’s evocation of The Graces drew on poetry and feminine pride to satirize Horatio

Walpole, other entries in her letter are concerned with more weighty biblical, scientific and philosophical issues.

In my silence, see the lover, True love is Known by silent; In my eyes you'll best discover All the power of your own. See Nicholas Cronk, ‘Voltaire, Lord Hervey et le paradoxe du modèle anglais’, Revue française, Numéro special: Numéro élèctronique, http://revuefrancaise.free.fr/Cronk.htm [accessed 6 June 2011]. 374 Edmund Spenser, The Faery Queene, Canto 10, Book Six, (repr. New York: D. Appleton, 1857). ‘These were the graces, daughters of delight/ Handmaids of Venus, which are want to haunt/ upon this hill, and daunce there day and night’, p. 744. 375 See Lila Geller, ‘The Acidalian Vision: Spenser’s Graces in Book VI of the Faerie Queene’, The Review of English Studies, 23: 91 (August, 1972), 267 – 277 (p. 268). 376 Catherine Whistler, ‘Venetian painters in Britain (act. 1708 – c.1750)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004); http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/66558 [accessed 6 July 2012].

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‘Peter knocking at the door by M. Lock’

M. Lock, I argue, refers to the early enlightenment philosopher and intellectual hero of the Whig party, John Locke (1632 – 1704), who died unmarried at Oates, the home of his long-time friends Sir Francis and Lady Damaris Masham.377 Locke was one of the earliest British writers to advocate for religious toleration, for the separation of church and state, and for the understanding of a unified theory of mind and of human understanding, which he believed to be much like a tabula rasa, or blank page on which personal character was formed through experiential knowledge.378 He was also a friend and compatriot of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st

Earl of Shaftesbury, and through his association with emerging Whig principles, was marked out as a person for arrest in the turbulent final years of Charles II. Locke avoided arrest by fleeing to

Holland, only returning (on the same ship as the future Queen Mary) following the Glorious

Revolution of 1688/9.379 Locke thus had a close association with the English court and with the

Whig political interest. Locke’s writings, most notably the Essay Concerning Human

Understanding of 1690, had a huge influence on later thinkers, including Voltaire who called him ‘le sage Locke’.380 Locke’s theories were seen as ‘having given a plain unmetaphysical account of the workings of the human mind that could serve as a complement to Newton’s

377 Matthias Lock, d. 1765, although one of the great furniture designers of the Rococo during the second half of the eighteenth century, does not appear to have made much of an impact in the London art world until the mid 1740s, long after the penning of this letter. ‘M’ could, in this case, serve as a title, Mr., as ‘Ld’ stands for Lord in many other of the entries in the letter. For Locke’s connection with the Masham family, see Whyman, ‘Epistolary Silences’, p. 275. 378 See Erling Eng, ‘Locke’s Tabula Rasa and Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad” ’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 41: 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1980), 133 – 140 (p. 133); Neal Wood, ‘Tabula Rasa, Social Environmentalism, and the “English Paradigm” ’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53: 4 (Oct. – Dec., 1992), 647 – 668 (p. 662); Walter M. Simon, ‘John Locke: Philosophy and Political Theory’, The American Political Science Review, 45: 2 (Jun., 1951), 386 – 399 (p. 391). 379 See J. R. Milton, ‘Locke, John (16 2–1704)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/16885 [accessed 7 March 2012]. The ship landed 12 February 1689. 380 Ruth Hagengruber, Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton: The Transformation of Metaphysics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), p. 8, n. 38.

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account of the physical universe’,381 and generated considerable controversy at the time.

Dominant ideas of human development were heavily invested in Christian theological principles, including the idea of man as naturally prone to wickedness and sin.382 While Locke was no atheist, and confined his numerous acts of charity to persons who conscientiously observed the

Sabbath and refrained from lewdness or heavy drinking, his ideas were seen as radical at the time, and he spent much of his adult life refuting attacks on his work by highly-placed conservative clergy.383

Remarkably, Lady Hervey draws on an episode in St. Peter’s life (Acts 12: 16) that was lacking much, if any pictorial representation in major Renaissance or Enlightenment painting.

The narrative concludes the much more commonly depicted Liberation of St. Peter, a subject that is very well represented in European painting. Raphael’s 1514 fresco of the subject, located in the Vatican’s Stanza di Oliodoro, was particularly famous as were depictions of this subject by the Dutch caravaggisti artist Gerard van Honthorst, who issued two separate canvases on this theme.384 The context of the episode shows Peter at the mercy of early Christian women. In c. 44

C.E., Peter was imprisoned on threat of death by King Herod Agrippa I. Fearful of the worst, prominent Christians in Jerusalem gathered at the house of a wealthy woman, Mary of

381 Milton, ‘Locke, John’, par. 1. 382 See Sorrana Corneanu, Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition (Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 76; Warren L. McFerran, The Principles of Constitutional Government: Political Sovereignty (Greta, LA: Pelican, 2009), p. 24; Helmut Richard Niebuhr, Theology, History, and Culture: Major Unpublished Writings, ed. by William Stacey Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 184. 383 See Roger Woolhouse, John Locke: A Biography (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 98 and 99 for Cambridge University’s support of pro-clerical attacks on Locke in the press. 384 For The Liberation of St. Peter by Raphael, see David Alan Brown and Jane Van Nimmen, Raphael and the Beautiful Banker: the Story of the Bindo Altoviti Portrait (New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 2005), p. 20; Claudio M. Strinati, Raphael (Florence: Giunti, 1998), p. 36; Frederick A. de Armas, Cervantes, Raphael and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 45; Michael Schwartz, ‘Raphael’s Authorship in the Expulsion of Heliodorus’, The Art Bulletin, 79: 3 (Sep., 1997), 466 – 492 (p. 468, n. 11). For the Dutch examples, See Jay Richard Judson, Gerrit van Honthorst: A Discussion of his Position in Dutch Art (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 38, 88, 89.

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Jerusalem, mother of Mark the Evangelist. They spent the night in prayer, beseeching God for

Peter’s release. The conclusion of this episode sees Peter fleeing prison and seeking refuge at the house of Mary of Jerusalem.

And as Peter knocked at the gate, a damsel came to hearken, named Rhoda. And when she knew Peter’s voice, she opened not the gate for gladness, but ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate. And they said unto her, Thou art mad. But she constantly affirmed that it was even so. Then said they, It is his angel. But Peter continued knocking: and when they had opened and saw him, they were astonished. But he, beckoning unto them with the hand to hold their peace, declared unto them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. And he said, Go shew these things unto James, and to the brethren. And he departed, and went into another place.385

The motif of Peter knocking at the door is thus contained within this larger biblical episode that does take feminine roles in early Christianity seriously and which is underrepresented in the Christian art tradition. Rhoda’s narrative has a collective, playful character, associated with the relief of seeing a cherished figure alive, and parallels the amazement of the disciples after the resurrection of Christ. Mary of Jerusalem, however, shows that even crucially founding members of the early Christian church sought the protection of wealthy influential women in Judeo-Roman society. Henrietta Howard’s guests at Marble Hill would have been a mixture of literary figures associated with the Richmond-Twickenham environs of her house or highly-educated courtiers who had great familiarity with these kinds of

New Testament narratives. Both circles would have known these contextual associations and been able to place the episode of ‘Peter knocking at the door’ in its proper biblical context.

In theory, the role of Rhoda, the servant girl, who mediates between the greater community and the apostle, could be said to function as an allegory for the women at the

Georgian court who advocated for the reception of the new ideas. The French salonnieres, much

385 Acts 12: 12 – 18. For all biblical quotes, I use the official online version of the King James Bible, from the 1769 version, http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/ [accessed 11 March 2012]

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like Lady Hervey herself, stressed the discussion of innovative, intellectual ideas in social setting, as opposed to the more usual pursuits of card-playing, tea-drinking and gossip, thought to be prerogatives of feminine behavior.386 Rhoda’s and Mary of Jerusalem’s roles subtly highlight the role of elite women’s hospitality, and other courtiers who read Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ and saw the name ‘Lock’ associated with this episode would of course have been guests of Howard at Marble Hill, and would have had elite female hospitality very much in mind. Just as Lady Damaris Masham hosted Locke in his final years at her family’s residence at Oates, so Mary of Jerusalem gave shelter to the early Christian movement, including

St. Peter, the very founder of the church.387 The biblical episode is one that situates a major intellectual figure enjoying elite female hospitality, and hence the instant combination between

‘Lock’ and ‘St. Peter knocking’ may have suggested Damaris Masham to Howard and her guests.

A final aspect of Lady Hervey’s juxtaposition of Locke and Peter comes from relational literature applied to the literary motif of ‘knocking at the door’. Revelation :20, for example, reads ‘Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me’, a passage that has proved enduringly popular in its evocation of a popularized and democratic version of religion.388 This is a motif that appears again and again in English devotional poetry, especially in that of Robert Southwell,

386 See Dena Goodman, ‘Seriousness of Purpose: Salonnières, Philosophes, and the Shaping of the. Eighteenth- Century Salon’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 15 (1988), 111 – 118; Steven D. Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 18 – 23; Jolanta T. Pekacz, ‘The Salonnières and the Philosophes in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60: 2 (Apr., 1999), 277 – 297 (p. 283). 387 See Elizabeth McNamer and Bargil Pixner, Jesus and First-Century Christianity in Jerusalem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulis Press, 2008), p. 30. 388 See David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 140.

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the English Jesuit martyred in 1595, whose Saint Peter’s Complaint contains a reference to St.

Peter knocking on sorrow’s door, and announcing himself as ‘one, unworthy to be knowne’; the link between this and a human soul knocking at St. Peter’s gates in Heaven is fairly explicit.389

St. Peter’s Complaint was published immediately following Southwell’s execution, and was reprinted thirteen times in the next forty years, editions that Lady Hervey, Henrietta Howard and their courtly circle would have undoubtedly been familiar with through their experience of country house libraries or the royal collections. 390 The poetry of George Herbert (1593 – 1633) also contains veiled references to Peter knocking at the door, particularly the opening lines of his poem Love where he writes ‘Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back/ Guilty of Sin and

Dust’, concluding with ‘ ou must sit Down’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat’, drawing on Southwell and the apostle John.391

Lady Hervey’s discussion of ‘Peter knocking at the door’ is a remarkable synthesis of

Whig political theory with religious imagery and devotional poetry, and deserves further consideration. These contextual associations between political theory, biblical citation and a kind of proto-feminist questioning of canonical narrative episodes presented by the Christian artistic tradition points to Lady Hervey’s own position as an educated woman, where access to female education, belief in the ‘rational religion’ of Enlightenment scholars and a commitment to learning were life-long interests. Artistic precedents possibly associated with the motif of Peter

389 Robert Southwell, ‘St. Peter’s Complaint’, qtd. in Helen Vendler, ‘The Re-Invented Poem: George Herbert’s Alternatives’, in Literary Criticism: Idea and Act , ed. by W.K. Wimsatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 362 – 382 (p. 380). 390 For the various editions of Southwell printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see William Thomas Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, Part 9 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1863), pp. 2461 – 2462. The ‘thresher poet’ , plucked from working as a labourer, was eventually promoted to Keeper of the Queen’s Library at Richmond: see David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth- Century Working Class Autobiography (London ; New York : Methuen, 1981), pp. 29 – 34 (esp. p. 30). 391 Julia Carolyn Guernsey, The Pulse of Praise: Form As a Second Self in the Poetry of George Herbert (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), p. 158.

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knocking on the door in the minds of George and Caroline’s courtiers include the 1722

Liberation of St. Peter by Sebastiano Ricci, installed in the Presbytery of the Venetian Church of

San Stae, where it and other works by Piazzetta, Pittoni and Tiepolo quickly became must-see pieces for Britons undertaking the grand tour.392 To what extent Lady Hervey is influenced by these developments in Italy, and whether she was aware of any pre-existing visual sources of

Rhoda and Peter, remain unknown at present. A subsequent entry in her letter, however, refers explicitly to ‘the nine muses’.

Figure 5.5. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Muses, 1578, oil on canvas, 2067 x 3098 mm, The Royal Collection (Hampton Court).

392 The paintings were commissioned by the agents of Andrea Stazio, acting on instructions in his will, and Tiepolo’s biographer Michael Levey notes that Ricci, then aged 6 , created a picture that had only ‘the faintest suggestion of a prison and imprisoned saint, but decorated by an attractively coloured, air-borne angel, stylistically descended not from heaven but from Luca Giordino, in some tinted, misty space’, Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 12.

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‘the nine muses by Ld W P’

A critical reading of this entry in Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ can be enhanced through a reference to two cultural documents, one visual and the other literary, that are contextually associated with the trope of ‘the Nine Muses’. The first is Jacopo Tintoretto’s

Muses of c. 1578 (Fig. 5.5), which had entered the Royal Collection in the time of Charles I.

Tintoretto’s huge, lavishly-coloured view of the nine daughters of Jupiter and the goddess

Memory shows the demigoddesses as companions to Apollo, who is here represented as a bright sun instead of taking anthropomorphic, incarnate form. The muses tune a variety of musical instruments, as if before a performance.393 Calliope, the chief Muse, normally associated with epic poetry, the highest form of literature among eighteenth-century as well as Greco-Roman cognoscenti, may be the Muse represented at the harpsichord in the center of the composition.

Clio, holding a book, may be the figure beneath the sun-Apollo, while sources that may have inspired Tintoretto include Cartari’s 1556 guide to mythology, published in as Le imagini con la spositione de i dei de gli antichi.394 I assert that the painting’s courtly associations with the Mantua court of the Gonzaga family combined with Tintoretto’s sensual depiction of the female form to make this painting memorable at Hampton Court. On display in the King’s

Drawing Room, where George I, and then George and Caroline received visitors and held parties, Tintoretto’s mid seventeenth-century Venetian canvas is a strong candidate for an image

393 See Paola Besutti, ‘Spaces for Music in late Renaissance Mantua’, in The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, ed. by John Whenham and Richard Wistreich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 76 – 94 (p. 81). 394 Clark Hulse, ‘The Significance of Titian’s “Pastoral Scene” ’, The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, 17 (1989), 29 – 38 (p. 32).

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Lady Hervey, Henrietta Howard and her circle may have had in mind when thinking about the theme of The Nine Muses.395

The Nine Muses, besides being a famous Venetian painting in the Royal collection, may have also recalled another cultural document to Henrietta Howard and her guests at Marble Hill.

The Nine Muses, or Poems written by Nine Several Ladies upon the Death of the late famous

John Dryden had appeared in the autumn of 1700.396 As literature scholar Anthony Lee points out, ‘the nine ladies were actually six’, all of whom had strong ties to the theatre. Intriguingly, the biographical details of each of the female authors of the The Nine Muses provide case studies of how cultural Francophilia operated on the female-associated stage set. Knowledge of French, and of French literature, was key in the cultural lives of each of these women, including Susanna

Centlivre (1677 – 1723), whose contribution as Polumnia was her first published endeavor, playwright Delarivier Manley, who organized and edited the volume, and Mary Pix, whose publisher, Richard Bennett, had previously issued six of Pix’s poems, and who now issued The

Nine Muses in a rush stimulated by Dryden’s death.397 As Lee points out, all of the six women were ‘around 0 – 40 years Dryden’s junior, born between 1670 – 1679 (except for Mary Pix, born 1666).’398 Centlivre was an autodidact who taught herself to read French, and then relied heavily upon the plots and themes of French novels for her own work. Manley learned French in

395 See H. Colin Slim, ‘Tintoretto’s “Music-Making Women” in Dresden’, Imago Musicae, 4 (1987), 45 – 78 (p. 66). 396 As an example of the misogynist frame of historiography erected over this writing by nineteenth-century critics (completely abandoned by modern feminist scholars, who see much of value and interest in the volume), is the comment by Edward Malone, whose introduction to the collection of Dryden works he had edited included a lengthy biography. In this introduction, Malone states of The Nine Muses that ‘in this collection, of which I have never seen a copy…. There isn’t a single line worth quoting, nor one circumstance concerning Dryden worth repeating’, p. 89, An Account of the Life and Writings of John Dryden (London: H. Baldwin and Son, 1800). 397 See Margaret Maison, ‘Pope and Two Learned Nymphs’, The Review of English Studies, 29: 116 (Nov., 1978), 405 – 414 (407); Chantel M. Lavoie, Collecting Women: Poetry and Lives, 1700 –1780 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2009), p. 55; Lonsdale, ‘Eighteenth-Century Women Poets’, p. 74. 398 Anne Cotterill, ‘ “Manly Strength with Modern Softness”: Dryden and the Mentoring of Women Writers’, in Mentoring in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. by Anthony Lee (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2010), p. 27.

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the house of a Huguenot clergyman in France who shared his quarters with her brother. She had been banished to France by her family after an importunate romance with an actor-turned- soldier.399

The importance of the literary The Nine Muses is in its rarity, prompting Ruth Salvaggio to ask ‘What other poet in English has been so recognized?’400 Anne Cotterill sees in Dryden’s work an inherently liminal quality that was attractive to late Stuart feminism. Although his work has come under critical barrage by twentieth-century feminists opposed to Dryden’s swaggering,

‘macho’ characters, Dryden’s literary output ‘goes beyond sex and the conventions of gender, at home with mutability, free to move between masculine and feminine’, which are qualities possessed by the authors of The Nine Muses.401 Susanna Centlivre, for example, is described as encountering ‘a company of stroling Players came to Stamford [near Holbeach] where she joined them with a little persuasion … having a greater inclination to wear the Britches, than the

Petticoat, she stuck unto the Men’s Parts’.402 Like Dryden’s play with gendered norms of human sexuality, Centlive’s performances of gender, in a theatrical context, adopted masculine norms to give her greater agency, freedom and adaptability. As Cotterill points out, ‘many of the chief women writers of the time, judging by the verses and their efforts to produce this ‘rare’ volume, saw Dryden as a heroic devotee of the muses and a friend to women.’403

399 See Rachel Carnell, A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley (London ; Brookfield, Vt. : Pickering & Chatto, 2008), pp. 56, 61, 252 n. 55; Delarivier Manley, The Adventures of Rivella, ed. by Katherine Zelinksy (repr. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999 [1714]), p. 58. 400 Ruth Salvaggio, ‘Verses on the Death of Mr. Dryden’, Journal of Popular Culture, 21 (1987), 75 – 91. 401Cotterill, ‘Manly Strength’, p. 27. 402 J. Milling, ‘Centlivre , Susanna (bap. 1669?, d. 172 )’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/4994 [accessed 25 February 2012] 403 Cotterill, ‘Manly Strength’, p. 27.

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Long after the volume was produced, the authors of The Nine Muses continued to court notoriety and fame, increasing the likelihood both Lady Hervey and Henrietta Howard were aware of their reputation. Delariviere Manley, for example, had in her youth been taken under the protection of Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, and thereby rescued from an involvement with a man who bigamously married her (ignoring the claims of his first wife, who was still living). She was, however, ignominiously ejected after six months, apparently due to a flirtation with one of the Duchess’ sons. After this period, Manley made a name for herself through the publication of scandalous fiction meant to titillate the reader’s voyeurism and jog her or his memory of contemporary political events.

Manley mostly used the framework of Italian and French novels, which she could presumably read and translate, over which she added individual details of world news, society gossip and racy sexual tension.

One novel, entitled the New Atlantis, garnered not only the author but her publisher and printer a stint in jail, as Manley was interred between 29 October and 5 November 1709.404 Even without a working hypothesis of who ‘W.P.’ is, his identification as an imaginary painting entitled ‘Nine Muses’ illustrates how the theme of the muses was associated at the time, not only with a very visible real work of visual art, but also with the clandestine sexualities of Francophile women’s education in the period.

Conclusion

Written as a socially interactive form of epistolary literature, Lady Hervey’s list expresses her abilities as a soi-disant salonnière, exhorting Henrietta Howard and the other courtiers at Marble

Hill to play along, to continue her entertaining exercise in art writing, and to thus engage in activities similar to those carried out by the précieux hostess-poets of an earlier generation. Lady

Hervey’s list builds on the tradition of the ‘court journal’ written by Howard for the amusement

404 Ros Ballaster, ‘Manley, Delarivier (c.1670 – 1724)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/17939 [accessed 17 October 2012]

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of her friends, using the interactive quality of the exercise to demonstrate her literary abilities. In her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, the motif of ‘The Three Graces’ figures as a way to satirize a corrupt politician who had famously had no social graces, and she criticizes a leading figure of the regime by her mockery. Iconographical use of ‘the Three Graces’ in two images from the time suggest some of the political and gendered meanings that can be teased out of

Lady Hervey’s satire. Titon du Tillet’s Le Parnasse Français for example uses the motif to represent three famous female literary hostesses, and the work of these hostesses was a byword for elite feminine education in early eighteenth-century. Queen Caroline was personally concerned with the issue. Through her public exhibition of a series of works by Martin

Maingaud, a Francophone émigré artist, Caroline stressed the autonomy of her daughters and their rights as individuals. These early Rococo portraits of the royal children were created at a time of dynastic stress, and paralleled larger developments in female education.

Literary allusions in the associations Lady Hervey draws between her imaginary

‘collection of pictures’ and her satirical targets are not limited to face-value references. Spenser’s

The Faery Queene may also be linked to this entry on Horatio Walpole, for example. Feminist pride is evoked by Lady Hervey in her reference to John Locke and ‘Peter Knocking at the

Door’, a biblical narrative that inspired the Jesuit poets Southwell and Herbert’s moving writing.

Lady Hervey expects the cultural knowledge of this narrative of her audience, and by stressing this particular episode in Peter’s life history – his taking refuge at Mary of Jerusalem’s house, and remaining dependent on the slave girl Rhoda – Lady Hervey creates an imaginary painting that has little established visual precedent, thus drawing attention to how certain narrative scenes in the Bible are left out of the western artistic tradition. If she is referring to Locke and his

Whiggish insistence on individual liberty, the juxtaposition between Locke and imaginary ‘Peter

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knocking at the Door’ could potentially highlight the role of elite women in providing hospitality to influential philosophers. By referring to the ‘Nine Muses’ by ‘Ld W P’, Lady Hervey draws an explicit link between her imaginary painting and the large, sumptuous Nine Muses by Tintoretto, prominently displayed in the King’s Drawing Room at Hampton Court. The Nine was also a volume of poetry written exclusively by women, many of whom were, like Hervey and Howard, cultural Francophiles whose sexuality alternatively fascinated and disturbed their contemporaries. This issue is explored in the next chapter.

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Chapter Six: ‘Some Few I don’t Understand’: Sex, Vision and Violence

For the Ladies-in-Waiting who surrounded Queen Caroline, preoccupations with sex and sexual behaviour were strong, and indeed this particular court was known for its frank discussion of sexuality. Lady Hervey’s satirical list of imaginary ‘pictures’ shows just how blatant these references could be, which is somewhat surprising, given the public reticence towards sexuality displayed by most elite women in early eighteenth-century Britain. For aristocratic women confronted with an unacceptably public mention of sexuality, the most common defence mechanism was simply to pretend not to understand what was happening, and to display a total lack of interest in pursuing the subject, especially by physically removing from the room. One previously unpublished example is from Lord Hervey’s correspondence with Charles, 2nd Duke of Richmond. Speaking of his wife, who was with the Duke and Duchess, Lord Hervey writes of a particularly notable incident at Court:

she will not tell you of an etourderie of Lady Charlotte de Roussie’s, who the other day at the Duke of Dorset’s table, giving the account of the Descendants of Oliver Cromwell, named my Lady Falconbridge among the rest, she repeated her name several times, My Lady Fuck in Breech, & so plain that every Body at the table but herself took the joke, and laughed so violently that half the women were forced to rise & go up out of the room.405

405 John Hervey to Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, dated St. James, November 11, 1732. Hervey MSS 941/47/4, 941/47/2, f. 2 9. Suffolk Record Office, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, U.K. The word ‘etourderie’ means a careless or thoughtless mistake, and is related to the verb étourdir, to stun, daze or deafen.

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This telling incident encapsulates many of the major themes of this thesis. Charlotte de Roye de

Roussy (d. 1742), for example, was a member of a French Protestant noble family who had been

living in England since 1688. De Roussy’s mother had been a Lady-in-Waiting to James II’s

second wife, , and she herself was

employed as a favourite court attendant of George

and Caroline, who kept her in close attendance.406

The incident, hinging as it does on de Roussy’s

accent, highlights the transnational character of the

early Georgian court, while the physical state of the

letter itself speaks to the suppression of records of

sexuality by later historians: where Lord Hervey’s

secretary has written the word ‘Fuck’, a later curator

has stamped over the phrase in red wax, partially

407 Figure 6.1. Letter showing red wax censorship of obscuring the document (Fig. 6.1). The letter also contents, Lord John Hervey to Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, dated St. James’, 11 draws attention to the reaction of the courtiers and to November 1732. Hervey MSS 941/47/4, 941/47/2, f. 239. Suffolk Record Office, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, U.K. the incident by Lady Hervey herself – ‘she will not tell you’. Pretending not to understand, and withdrawing from the situation, was one way for

elite women to negotiate sexuality on their own terms. Artists and writers found these artifices an

406 She was governess to their younger children, Prince William and Princess Mary, by March 1734. See Charles E. Lart, Huguenot Pedigrees (London: Clearfield, 1924 –2 5), p. 31. Charlotte de Roussy also is mentioned in Swift’s 1727 ‘Pastoral Dialogue’, where Swift constructs a poetic conversation between Marble Hill and Richmond Lodge: ‘While Lady Charlotte, like a stroller/sits mounted on the garden-roller/A goodly sight to see her ride.’ See Jonathan Swift, The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, ed. by Thomas Sheridan, 24 vols (New York: William Durrell and Co, 1812), XI, p. 59. 407 For the Huguenot de Roye de Roussy family and their English career, see Matthew Glozier, War, Religion and Service: Huguenot Soldiering, 1685 – 1713 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 33, 52, 57; Hart, Huguenot Pedigrees, p. 1; Philip Rambaut, ‘Louis Durfort-Duras, Earl of Feversham, 1640 – 1709: A Study of Misplaced Loyalty’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, 25 (1989), 244 – 56 (p. 255).

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irresistible theme for satire. Voltaire famously drove Alexander Pope’s devout Catholic mother from the tea-table by openly discussing child abuse in the church, causing her to flee in horror.408

Much of the disengagement with sex expected of elite women involved a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. Witness the conduct of one exemplary noblewoman in John Nichol’s

1740s painting St. James’ Park and Pall Mall (Royal Collection), depicting a large group of aristocratic people promenading in the park immediately adjacent the palace: these are very much elite men and women representative of court tastes and court morals.409 Confronted with a soldier and milkmaid who (after invading the physical space normally reserved for the elite) are locked in a scandalously public embrace, one richly-dressed woman unfurls her fan and holds it to her face as a shield, literally screening herself off from seeing what happens as she passes by.

The audience – her fashionable peers, middle-class onlookers, and even contemporary viewers – know perfectly well that she does of course recognize the sexuality expressed by the couple’s behaviour. However, by publicly signifying her distaste for public eroticism through gender- performative strategies involving dress accessories, this woman constructs a public reputation of chastity. She pretends the event is simply not happening, using the fan as a psychological defence. Similar tropes are often repeated in early eighteenth-century British visual culture, for example in the final scene of Hogarth’s ‘Rake’s Progress’, where a richly-dressed young woman shields her eyes from the nude body of a mentally ill man incarcerated at Bedlam. In both cases, the liminal space of ‘seen and not-seen’ plays on the voyeuristic and discursive effects of the gesture.

408 David Wootton, ‘Unhappy Voltaire, or ‘I shall never get over it’ as long as I live’, History Workshop Journal, 50 (2000), 137 – 155. 409 The painting is reproduced in Christopher Lloyd, Les Tableux de la Reine: Maîtres Anciens de la Collection Royale (Windsor: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. for Royal Collection Enterprises Ltd., 1995), p. 72.

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Similarly, in her introduction to the imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, Lady Hervey highlights that some entries in her list are very risqué by saying that there are ‘some few I do not understand’. By pretending not to comprehend her own jokes, she suggests they push the boundaries of the pretended sexual misknowledge allowed (at least in public) to elite women in

Georgian Britain. She naturally expects the King’s recognized secondary sexual companion to catch these sexual references, and to enjoy their warm humour. Lady Hervey’s imaginary pictures-as-portraits exercise was, after all, written to a woman who was publicly acknowledged as the mistress of George II. Howard’s residence at Marble Hill was built as a concrete acknowledgement of her semi-official status as a sexual companion.410

Despite all the artifice and pretence surrounding elite women’s public performance of disinterest in dissident sexual behaviour, the letters of early Georgian Ladies-in-Waiting – and this letter containing the imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ especially – suggest that they were no less interested in sexuality, including extramarital sexuality, than their male contemporaries. In the same letter of 24 July 1729 where the satirical list of imaginary ‘paintings-as-portraits’ is found, the text immediately before the list of pictures discusses extramarital sexuality among court women, and is thought to refer to her mother-in-law, Elizabeth, Countess of Bristol. In reverse order of the traditional gender expectations among oligarchical Whigs, Lady Bristol kept up the family profile at court, serving as a Lady of the Bedchamber while her husband tended to their large family in the country. The enforced separation between the elder Hervey couple

410 For Marble Hill, see Jeffery Daniels, ‘English Baroque Sketches at Marble Hill’, The Burlington Magazine, 116: 856 (Jul., 1974), 420 – 422; Marie Draper, Marble Hill House, Twickenham: A Short Account of its History and Architecture (London: Greater London Council, 1982); Tita Chico, Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Lewisburg : Bucknell Univ. Press, 2005), p. 56; John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530 – 1830 (9th edn, Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1993 [1953]), p. 347; Jonathan Swift, ‘A Pastoral Dialogue’, p. 59, where he writes of Marble Hill as ‘my house was built but for a show/ my Lady’s empty pockets know’.

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evidently allowed Lady Bristol a great deal of personal freedom. The passage is here worth quoting in full.

I am apt to believe she depends on the superiority her full-blown charms have over the budding beauties of those three girls; but she does not consider that some men have a green-sickness in their taste, and prefer the green, tasteless, trash of forty, to the ripe, delicious fruit of five and fifty. I wish this may not be the case, and if it is, I know but one thing she can do, which is to resign the son and be contented with the father, who is (by what one may judge by several things she has let fall) fast bound in her chains. Is it not surprising how a young creature of her age can already have so much management as to be one of the first favourites wth the wife, at the same time that she is belov'd by the father and son? Would one not wonder that she shou'd not have been the occasion of some dissentions in that family?411

Lady Hervey was twenty-nine when this letter was written, and Lady Bristol significantly would have been fifty-three or fifty-four in 1729, exactly the ‘ripe, delicious fruit of five and fifty’.

Henrietta Howard, who was notoriously reticent about her age, was about forty-one or forty-two at the time. The point is that this very catalogue of imaginary pictures is part of a letter that takes dissident, alternative or outright flagrantly deviant forms of sexuality as its satirical leitmotif.

Part of the value of Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ is in how it thus illuminates some court women’s attitudes towards sexual morality. The game or exercise of this satirical list is part of a larger, and very frank, discussion of elite women’s sexuality, as Lady

Hervey’s merciless caricature of the extramarital affairs of her mother-in-law vividly demonstrates. From the corpus presented in her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, I have extracted three examples – Thomas Gage, listed as ‘a naked modesty’, Francis Charteris, listed as ‘a piece of devotion’, and the ‘D of B’ as ‘The Siege of Gibraltar’, which I argue refers to

Charles Powlett, Duke of Bolton – as case studies of early Georgian attitudes towards ‘deviant’ heterosexuality, using examples of visual art from the period to interrogate how these entries

411 Correspondence of Mary Lepell Hervey, Baroness Hervey and Henrietta Howard, Baroness Suffolk. The Suffolk Papers, Letter dated Ickworth, 24 July 1729.

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were likely to have been received by Henrietta Howard and her circle of friends at Marble Hill.

Throughout this chapter, I explore how sexuality impacted ways of seeing images in early eighteenth-century Britain, and I use Laura Mulvey and Julia Kristeva’s theories of scopohilic pleasure to tease out the sexualized meanings inherent in Thomas Gage’s association with ‘a naked modesty’, likely associated contextually with antique sculpture of the Venus Pudica type, such as those found in the Capitoline and Uffizi collections.

‘More overt sarcasm is displayed by Lady Hervey in her entries for Charteris and ‘The D of B’. Colonel Francis Charteris’ sexually predatory habits, and his debauched lifestyle, must have been common knowledge among the Ladies-in-Waiting at the British court. Her entry strongly suggests many women knew and talked about his reputation, his exploits, and his sexual violence. George White, William Hogarth and other artists used Charteris’ likeness as an exemplary signifier for the viciously corrupt, class-based sexual exploitation that existed among many male members of the British nobility at the time, while knowledge of Charteris’ complete lack of public religious devotion makes her jest so sharp. Lady Hervey’s reference to devotional imagery does however underscore how Queen Caroline’s female attendants, while far more religiously liberal than many of their contemporaries, were in fact very interested in spirituality.412

The date and timing of Lady Hervey’s letter (the summer of 1729) where the imaginary

‘collection of pictures’ occurs show how she has deftly interwoven contemporary political developments of international import with the ‘on-dit’ scandal of the theatrical world. Tongue

412 Intriguingly, Queen Caroline and Charlotte Clayton were heavily criticized by the Anglican establishment of the time for their conception of a flexible Church of England, and Lady Hervey herself, at least later on in life, is on record as having read deist or even atheist literature. Henrietta Howard’s religious feelings are a little more difficult to uncover, but the King’s mistress would undoubtedly have been familiar with the types of images Lady Hervey was referencing. See Chapter Five, n. 1 of this thesis.

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planted firmly in cheek, she compares the exhaustive and eventually unsuccessful siege of

Gibraltar by the Franco-Spanish alliance in 1727 with Charles Powlett, Duke of Bolton’s determined, very public and ultimately successful ‘siege’ of . The scandal of Lord

Bolton’s public cohabitation with a woman born into poverty and forced onto the stage by an unscrupulous mother was given cultural relevance by Fenton involvement with John Gay’s popular musical The Beggar’s Opera. I show how Gibraltar was the subject of an early automated diorama or ‘moving picture’ known to the early eighteenth-century court, and explore how its ‘theatrical’ associations structured a sexualized, scopophilic mode of reading Lavinia

Fenton and Lady Hervey’s own bodies.

‘A naked modesty, full-length, Ld Gage’

Thomas Gage, 1st Viscount Gage (1702 - 1754), the son of Joseph Gage of Shirbirne Castle,

Oxfordshire, was a connoisseur of some note.413 Lord Hervey, recollecting the Princess Royal’s wedding to the Prince of Orange that took place five years after this letter, writes of Gage that he was a ‘petulant, silly, meddling, profligate fellow’.414 Hervey’s quarrel with Lord Gage occurred over a precedence issue. Hervey was Vice-Chamberlain of the Queen, and had to decide the protocol and pomp of the royal ceremonial, which was difficult to manage in days when the nature of such ceremonies structured a noble’s professional career.415 On this occasion, the Irish

413 For Gage, see The Gentleman’s and London Magazine: or Monthly Chronologer, 1741– 1794 (Dublin: J. Exshaw, 1741), p. 174. Gage was created 1st Viscount Gage in the Irish peerage by George I in 1720, and served as MP of Tewkesbury 1721 - 1754. Viscount Gage’s most famous descendant was his second son, also named Thomas, who served the British army in North America, and was appointed governor of Montreal following the conquest of Quebec in 1760. Thomas junior was also Commander-in-Chief of North America, 1763 – 1773, and was the General whose pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill confirmed his recall to London. See Robert Leckie, George Washington’s War: The Saga of the American Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 85 414 Lord John Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of George II, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1848), I, p. 307. 415 For the symbolic importance of court ceremony, and the degree to which most European courts were influenced by French models, see Samuel John Klingensmith, The Utility of Splendor: Ceremony, Social Life, and Architecture at the Court of Bavaria, 1600 – 1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 119, 180 – 185. See also the sensitive discussion of court ceremonial and its psychological effects on both participants and observers in Henry

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peerage claimed the right to walk in order of rank instead of country, as the Irish peerages ranked below the English and the Scottish in ceremonial precedent. Gage claimed that ‘it was very hard they might not have the same privileges on this occasion that they normally had’ which may account for Lady Hervey’s characterization of Gage as ‘a naked modesty, full-length’ or a vain, hypocritical paradox of a man.416 Whatever his character, Thomas Gage was something of a collector in painting, and amassed a good collection of Italian, French and English masters at

Firle Place, East Sussex, following his second marriage to a woman of fortune.417 Like Lady

Hervey herself, the Viscount was a cultural Francophile, and newspaper reports from the time record his departures and arrivals for Paris.418

Intriguingly, the Gage entry also connects to the entry on Horatio Walpole in the preceding chapter, where I argued that Spenser’s The Faery Queene was a likely influence for

Walpole’s ironic juxtaposition with ‘the Three Graces’. Allegorical models of modesty or chastity are similarly present in The Faery Queene. The debates on chastity in Spenser concern the differing responses of two elite women towards their own sexual desires: while the heroine

Britomart is able to control her sexuality through reason and the dictates of courtly behavior,

‘The Lady of Delight,’ who Britomart encounters, is completely unable to modify her responses to sexual attraction in the same way. The Lady of Delight is ‘given to all fleshly lust, and poured forth in sensual delight, that all regard of shame she had discus’t, and meet respect of honour put to flight.’ 419 Given the sexualized nature of the letter in which these satires are found, and the

Maguire, Byzantine court culture from 829 to 1204 (Washington, DC : Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1997), pp. 218 – 220. 416 Ibid., p. 307. 417 Bruce Arnold and the National Trust, The Art Atlas of Britain and Ireland (London: Viking, 1991), p. 200, 229, 231. 418 The Daily Post, 390 (London: 30 December 1720), unpaginated. 419 See Frederick M. Padelford, ‘The Allegory of Chastity in The Faery Queene’, Studies in Philology, 21: 2 (April, 1924), 367 – 381.

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subject matter of the letter, Spenser’s possible influence on the Gage and the Horatio Walpole entries in Lady Hervey’s list seems entirely plausible.

By referring to Lord Gage as ‘a Naked Modesty’, Lady Hervey likely refers obliquely to one of the many copies of Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite, a classical sculpture from the fourth century BCE. Praxiteles’ original was so popular in antiquity that up to fifty copies, in varying degrees of preservation, have been found in archaeological contexts throughout the former

Greco-Roman world. The general type of the copies is known as the ‘Venus Pudica’, as the nude goddess gracefully covers her breasts and pelvic area with her hands, a gesture known as

‘modest’ in the western artistic tradition.420 While the most famous of these copies in our own day is the Louvre’s Venus de Milo, recovered from Melos by the French in the early nineteenth century, another copy after the Cnidian type, the so-called Venus de Medici displayed in

Florence at the Uffizi, was a must-see highlight of the Grand Tour for many English travelers.

Lady Hervey, Henrietta Howard, and the wider court at large would have known about this statue from three main sources: from reproductions and engravings, from literary descriptions, and from its word-of-mouth reputation among British connoisseurs who had seen it in Italy.

The Venus de Medici was engraved many times throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably in François Perrier, Segmenta nobilia signorum et statuarum que temporis dentem invidium evase (Rome: 1638), a volume that reproduced all the significant statues of antiquity known in Rome (and which dedicated three pages to the Venus), in Jan de

Bisschop, Signorum Veterum Icones (Amsterdam: c. 1670), and Gérard Audran, Les proportions du corps humain mesurées sur les belles figures de l'Antiquité (Paris, 1683), which showed exact

420 Paulson, Art and Politics, p. 105.

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measurements and proportions of the famous statue.421 Besides these three popular and influential works, there were numerous drawings in English collections of the Venus de Medici, such as in the Royal Collection, where it and other famous classical statues are sketched on a seventeenth-century sheet ascribed to the ‘English School’. The statue was also physically reproduced in three dimensions. These reproductions ranged from the excellent - the Duke of

Marlborough had a bronze copy taken from a rare mould-cast – and the mundane, such as statuettes that dispensed with the Venus de Medici’s dolphin support stand. As Penny and

Haskell remark, ‘it was probably the most popular of all the lead copies produced for eighteenth- century English gardens’, and copies of the sculpture, paired with other statues from the Uffizi, were a feature of some early eighteenth-century country houses, such as in the entrance hall at

Towneley, Lancashire.422 English enthusiasm for the Venus de Medici was stimulated by the admiration lavished on the statue in Europe. Louis XIV, for example, had five copies by different sculptors made, and the French king collected other fragmentary copies of the ‘Venus Pudica’ type, such as the so-called Venus of Arles, put on display in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.

Literary and word-of-mouth descriptions of the Venus de Medici were similarly profuse in the early eighteenth-century courtly milieu of Lady Hervey, Henrietta Howard, and her guests at Marble Hill. Joseph Addison wrote of the Venus that ‘the softness of the flesh, the delicacy of the shape, air and posture, and the correctness of the design in this statue are inexpressible’, and further added that he believed ‘it was the most celebrated statue among the ancients, as well as

421 Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles : J. Paul Getty Museum : Getty Research Institute, 2008), p. 144. 422 Nicholas Penny and Francis Haskell, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500 – 1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 305.

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among the moderns’ because of how many copies after the Venus Pudica existed.423 As we have seen in Chapter Five, Lady Hervey is known to have expressed a strong interest in the Ancients vs. Moderns question, and to have consulted English, French and probably Latin books on the subject, as well as asking her sons’ tutor for advice. For the Richardsons, who published An

Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings, and Pictures in Italy in 1722, the Venus de Medici itself outshone its many copies and reproductions. Richardson the younger, who saw the statue ‘in the flesh’ in Florence, wrote that he ‘had some Prejudice against it, from what I had observ’d in the Casts’, but that although the original had flaws, ‘it has too such a Fleshy

Softness, one would think it would yield to the touch’.424 The Duke of Shrewsbury criticized the restored arms of the statue, but subsequent English connoisseurs maintained the statue’s fame well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, in Lady Hervey’s day, the Venus de Medici was the prototype of the iconographical motif of ‘A Naked Modesty’, and the Venus’ visibility within the

Florentine collections, their centrality to the art-educational practices of the Grand Tour, and the extent of sculptural and engraved reproductions of this work made it a highly recognized piece among the British aristocracy.

Feminist art historian Nanette Solomon has pointed out how the Pudica pose – the ‘naked

Modesty’ – is perhaps the most strident example in the western art historical canon of Laura

Mulvey’s concept of the ‘male gaze’, or the spectatorial, voyeuristic way of seeing the feminine body as represented in art.425 Guy Debord’s ‘situationist’ formulation of capitalist society shows

423 Joseph Addison, The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, ed. by Richard Hurd (London: George Bell and Sons, 1885 repr. after 1703 original), p. 472. See also Miranda Marvin, The Language of the Muses: the Dialogue between Roman and Greek Sculpture (Los Angeles : J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), p. 122 424 Jonathan Richardson, An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings, and Pictures in Italy (London: 1722), p. 56. 425 Nanette Solomon, ‘The Venus Pudica: Uncovering art history’s “hidden agendas” and pernicious pedigrees’, in Generations & Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. by Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 69 – 87 (p. 76).

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how the exercise of viewing commodities mediates social relationships through a ritualized

‘spectacle’ of display and aggression. 426 Greco-Roman sculptures of naked women were collectors items very highly valued by the eighteenth-century British aristocracy, and indeed they were ultimately sexual commodities, explicitly linking possession of sculpted bodies with desire and control over real female bodies. Part of their popularity had to do with their situation within the development of Greek visual art. Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite broke new ground in its representation of the naked female form. Solomon justly draws attention to the tradition of gendered sculpture in classical Greece, where the naked male form – the kouroi – was represented nude but female bodies, including those of goddesses, were always shown clothed.

By depicting a naked Venus in the act of surprise and concealment, Praxiteles replaced the customary chiton of the goddess with the unusual substitute of Venus’ own limbs, thus both concealing and revealing her body at the same time. Solomon writes that ‘by covering her pubis,

Praxiteles makes her pubis the most desireable thing to see/have: the unjaded viewer cannot not think about her pubis while standing before her.’427 The direct invitation to sexually ‘conquer’ a reluctant and non-consensual partner through the act of looking explains the adulation given to the Venus de Medici by Addison, the Richardsons, the Duke of Shrewsbury and other connoisseurs.

Solomon describes the pose as the ‘most successful, popular and most often recited fabrication of classicism in Christian art history’, noting how easily the trope was naturalized as the major sign for sexual shame in depictions of Adam and Eve.428 Despite the biblical narrative’s clear record of the first couple sewing fig-leaves together to cover their genitals, the

426 See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Red and Black, 1977), pp. 4, 24, 29. 427 Solomon, ‘The Venus Pudica’, pp. 76 – 78. 428 Ibid., p. 78.

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Pudica pose was so popular within established canons of bodily representation, both in sculpture and in painting, that it was simply transposed onto the bodies of Adam and Eve by early

Christian painters. This tradition was continued by medieval and early Renaissance artists, who stressed the sexual fear, and sexual vulnerability before God, of the original man and woman.

Adam’s special status as the first human lent his fall from Grace an enhanced piquancy, while patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes towards women’s moral and intellectual attributes led later biblical scholars to blame Adam more than his partner for succumbing to the serpent’s temptation. Solomon points out how Adam’s effeminization through the use of the pose was ‘the worst form of humiliation’ artists could think to bestow upon a postlapsarian Adam.429 The

Pudica pose, as developed in antiquity by classical sculptors and replicated in Christian iconography in depictions of Adam and Eve, acted as a sign for the quintessential attributes of canonical femininity. Therein is the sting to Lady Hervey’s jest: she detracts from Gage’s virility by radically effeminizing his reputation. Lady Hervey uses this sexualized interest to satirize a particularly vain, lustful man at court, but by doing so, she draws attention to the ironic tension present within depictions of ‘modestly’ concealed female nudes in the classical tradition. Perhaps she also pokes fun at the enthusiastic adulation of such statues by art connoisseurs who are uncritical of the sexual violence implicit in such depictions, and in later Christian representations of feminized sexual shame. She certainly draws attention to a more overt form of sexual violence, domestic abuse between aristocratic men and their household employees, in her later entry for ‘Coll Chateris’.

‘a piece of devotion - Coll Charteris’

429 Ibid., p. 80.

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Private and public ownership of devotional painting was on the rise in England during Lady

Hervey’s lifetime, as the Grand Tour spurred English appetites for Italian, Spanish, Dutch and

French religious images.430 ‘A piece of devotion’ could well refer to an art object very similar to the Holy Family with Saints Catherine, Francis and John the Baptist, attributed by Horace

Walpole to Raffaellino da Reggio, which hung in the ‘Great Room above stairs’ of Downing

Street. There ‘Sir Robert’s collection found its most splendid expression’.431 Both Hervey and

Howard would have been familiar with such public spaces in Walpole’s apartments, as they served as reception rooms where the Walpole family entertained other courtiers. The Holy

Family is a 16th century Italian painting of unknown attribution, and is currently in the Kuban

Art Museum, Krasnodar, while the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge holds a Reggio drawing with a similar subject. Leaning into the foreground, the Virgin’s pose is accentuated by successively darker washes of grisaille ink, with the light falling on the two infants. 432 A multitude of similar sixteenth and seventeenth-century devotional images are similarly in the

Royal Collection, as they were in country houses across Britain. One of the most famous, Dosso

Dossi’s Holy Family of. c. 1527 (Fig. 6.2), was acquired by Charles I from the Gonzaga court, and is documented at Hampton Court during Hervey and Howard’s lifetimes. Dossi’s is certainly representative of the types of religious imagery readily available to both women through their access to the Royal Collection.433

430 See Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: the Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), pp. 106 – 110. 431 Andrew Moore: Catalogue of Paintings, ‘Sculpture and Works of Art remaining at Houghton’, in A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage, ed. by Larissa Dukelskaya and Andrew Moore (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the State Hermitage Museum and the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, 2002), pp. 303 – 351 (pp. 29, 315). 432 Tatyana Kusodeva in ‘Catalogue of the Paintings Sold to Catherine II’, Ibid., cat. no. 9 , p. 18 . 433 See Peter Humphrey, ‘Holy Family’, in Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara (New York : The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the John Paul Getty Museum, 1998), pp. 200 – 203; Ernest Philip Alphonse Law,

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Devotional images like those of

Reggio and Dossi emphasize the ethereal

purity and holiness of the Christian faith

through the compositional use of light.

They also stress the emotional stability of

intimate family relations, where children,

mother and father are seen as happy,

productive, and replete with the peace,

faith and spiritual hope expected to result

Fig. 6.2, Dosso Dossi, Holy Family with Saints Anne and from the practice of Christianity. Both Joachim, c. 1527, Royal Collection visual and ideological concerns would be a

very jarring contrast to the mental image of the person Lady Hervey names. Croker gives the

attribution as Colonel Francis Charteris, the notorious rake grown rich from gambling (he was

dismissed at least twice from the military – by the Duke of Marlborough for cheating at cards,

and by Parliament for accepting bribes).434 Charteris’ Scottish family was well-connected, while

he had added to his social influence by marrying Helen Swinton, daughter of Alexander, Baron

Mersington. The couple’s own daughter Janet was married, in 1720, to James, 5th Earl of

Wemyss, further enhancing Charteris’ political clout.435 Later in 1729, after Lady Hervey’s letter

was written, Charteris became involved in a notorious sexual scandal. Under an assumed name,

A Historical Catalogue of The Pictures in the Royal collection at Hampton Court (London: George Bell, 1881), p. 33. 434 Emmeline Garnett, John Marsden’s Will: Hornby Castle Dispute, 1780 – 1840 (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), p. 56. 435 Philip Beaufoy Barry, Sinners Down the Centuries (Whitefish, MT : Kessinger Pub., 2004), p. 142.

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he had hired a country serving-woman, Anne

Bond, to work in his house, and he despicably

used his position of authority to try and bully

or bribe her into having sex with him. She

resisted, and on the 10th November, he

attacked and assaulted her. Bond went

immediately to a former employer and, with

her assistance, to the authorities, after which

he was tried for the capital felony of rape.

Lady Hervey’s ironic comment about his

complete lack of religious devotion shows that

even before his subsequent trial for rape in the

Fig. 6.3. George White, after unknown artist, Frances spring of 1730, Charteris was probably known Charteris (c. 1665 – 1732), c. 1731, mezzotint, The National Portrait Gallery, London. by his contemporaries, and by elite women, as an aggressive lecher.436The trial was a media sensation, with numerous accompanying poems, and other printed ephemera, including engravings made of Col. Charteris’ appearance.

One mezzotint by George White (Fig. 6. 3) reiterates Charetis’ elite status through the visual stress on the powdered, pomaded wig, which mediates between the contrasting poles of light and dark in the background, and the starched, crisp laces and linens, which stand out from the rest of the work. The way a defendant looked and what he wore was, in this period, carefully scrutinized. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough wrote that Henry Sacheverell’s ‘clean gloves, good assurance and white handkerchief, carefully-managed, moved the hearts of many at his

436 See Antony E. Simpson, ‘Popular Perceptions of Rape as a Capital Crime in Eighteenth-Century England: The Press and the Trial of Francis Charteris in the Old Bailey, February 17 0’, Law and History Review, 22: 1 (Spring, 2004), 27 – 70.

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appearance’ after seeing him in the dock.437 White uses the disjunction between conventional elite masculine attributes, such as the wig, handkerchief and laces, and the scandal’s brutal facts, outlined in the following poem, to critique the aristocracy’s sexually aggressive practices towards their employees.438

Blood! Must a Colonel with Lord’s Estate Be thus obnoxious to a Scoundrel’s fate? Brought to the Bar, and Sentenced from ye Bench For only Ravishing a Country Wench? Shall Gentlemen Receive no more respect? Shall their Diversions thus by Laws be Checked?439

Charteris’ case had clearly exposed a faultline within English social custom of what was tolerable in dissident or deviant sexualities, and had drawn attention to the non-monogamous, cross-class sexual practices of many (male) aristocrats. Although condemned to death, with his goods and property seized under the writ of attainder, Charteris’ aristocratic family connections did eventually secure his release. His son-in-law, the Earl of Wemyss, travelled down from

Scotland to personally intervene with the King, and even the victim herself was bribed, cajoled or otherwise enticed to campaign for his pardon.440 The other criminals sentenced to death in the same court sessions at Charteris were not so lucky, and were hung at the Tyburn gallows:

437 Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough qtd. in Robert Chambers, ‘December 14’, The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, Including Anecdote, Biography, & History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character (London: W. & R. Chambers Limited, 1832), pp. 696, 697. 438 Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1996), p. 254, n. 68, Kristina Straub, Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 36 – 8; Laurie Edelstein, ‘An Accusation Easily to be Made? Rape and Malicious Prosecution in Eighteenth-Century England’, The American Journal of Legal History, 42: 4 (Oct., 1998), 351 – 390 (p. 372). For a contrasting view that argues eighteenth-century maidservants in London were less likely to suffer physical assault than in previous centuries, see Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Women’s Roles in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Santa Barbara : Greenwood, 2010), p. 33. 439See G. H. Wilson, The Eccentric Mirror, 4 vols (London: J. Cundee, 1807), II, p. 17. 440 See George Augustus Sala, William Hogarth: Painter, Engraver, and Philosopher (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1866) p. 163. F. J. McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 106.

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Charteris after a reconciliation with his wife was however allowed to repossess his property, after the payment of substantial sums to the authorities.441

Even after his release, Charteris remained a near-caricature emblem of lechery and moral decay in the minds of the general public. One modern author calls him ‘the quintessential monster of London’s sex industry’, much as the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting and other court women undoubtedly regarded him.442 The historian Dan Cruikshank records that Charteris, who resided in George Street near the fashionable Hanover Square, had on at least one occasion a siege attempted on his house by the mob, who had learned of a young woman kept virtual prisoner inside of it. Cruikshank suggests Charteris’ Whig neighbours financially supported

Bond and her prosecution to be rid of a neighbour they loathed. At his death in 1732, possibly from medical problems exacerbated by his long stay in , the Edinburgh populace attacked his funeral procession and threw dead cats into his grave. Anne Bond herself was able to retire from serving life with the money she had accrued from her involvement in the trial and married a young server from a nearby tavern. Newspaper reports indicated she was planning on opening a tavern with the profits and advertising it with a painted sign of Col. Charteris’ head, such was the visibility and infamy of his countenance in the period.443 Charteris also appeared in the first installation in Hogarth’s famous six-piece A Harlot’s Progress series, where he lurks in

441 See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth's Harlot: Sacred in Enlightenment England (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 110. 442 Dan Cruikshank, London’s Sinful Secret: The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London’s Georgian Age (London: Macmillan, 2010), pp. 312 – 321 (p. 321). 443 The Journal (26 April 16 1730), qtd. in Antiquary: A Magazine Devoted to the Study of the Past, ed. by Edward Walford, John Charles Cox and George Latimer Apperson, 5 vols (London: Elliot Stock, 1880), II, p. 236.

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the background fondling himself in the company of his pimp, leering at the arrival of the ingénue country girl, Moll Hackabout.444

While Charteris was thus the model in Georgian society for a very dishonourable, violent and exploitative man, Hogarth also commemorated the unusual sexual behaviour of a very different peer, Charles Powlett, rd Duke of Bolton, in two of his paintings of ‘The Beggar’s

Opera’, a sensationally popular smash hit on the London stage. In my third case study on heterosexual deviance in Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, I discuss the ‘D of

B’, arguing it relates to Bolton’s pursuit of and cohabitation with the actress Lavinia Fenton, a major celebrity of the age.

‘the Siege of Gibraltar by the D of B’

Lady Hervey refers to the thirteenth siege of Gibraltar, which had taken place from 11 February

– 12 June 1727 as part of the short-lived Anglo-Spanish war of that year.445 Gibraltar, one of the so-called ‘Pillars of Hercules’ connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, was of course of immense strategic value, and its capture from the Spanish in 1704 under forces led by Admiral

Sir George Rooke was a widely-celebrated victory.446 The fortress was formally handed over to the British in perpetuity by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht (1714), but by late 1726 it became apparent that a coalition of Austrian and Spanish troops was preparing to retake Gibraltar,

444 Page Life, ‘Charteris, Francis (c.1665–17 2)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/5175, [accessed 6 July 2012] See also Ronald Paulson, ‘The Harlot, her Father, and the Parson: Representing and Interpreting Hogarth in the Eighteenth Century’, in Icons - Texts - Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996), pp. 149 – 176 (p. 161); M. G. Benton, ‘From “A Rake’s Progress” to “Rosie’s Walk”: Lessons in Aesthetic Reading’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 29: 1 (Spring, 1995), 33 – 46 (p. 35); Paulson, Hogarth’s Harlot, p. 362, n. 2. 445 Darren Fa and Clive Finlayson, The Fortifications of Gibraltar: 1068 – 1945 (Oxford : Osprey, 2006), p. 10; J. H. Mann, A history of Gibraltar and its sieges (2nd edn: London: Provost & Co., 1873), pp. 240 – 248; Jason R. Musteen, Nelson’s Refuge: Gibraltar in the Age of Napoleon (London: Naval Institute Press, 2011). 446 A Narrative of Sir George Rooke’s Late Voyage to the Mediterranean…With a Description of Gibraltar (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1704).

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although diplomatic maneuvering and bureaucratic recalcitrance combined to delay the actual onset of hostilities until well into the New Year.447

The campaign was a disaster for the attackers. Rainstorms rendered the notorious Spanish roads nearly impassable for the heavy guns that were sent down from Cadiz and Madrid, while the royal treasury of Spain, much dependent on uncertain shipments of precious metals from galleons in Manila and Mexico, had difficulties in raising the money to properly pay, feed and clothe their troops, despite the drafting in of thousands of agricultural labourers from the region.

British diplomacy was also successful in persuading the Austrian Emperor to withdraw effective, concrete support for the siege.448 Many of the Spanish and Austrian noblemen leading the attack were well aware of their limitations and had been uneasy about the venture’s success from the beginning. By June, after a number of sorties by British attackers, they retired from the field and pressed for peace talks, which eventually resulted in a truce of February 1728.449 The final peace, which returned the situation to its antebellum status, was not confirmed until after Lady Hervey’s letter was written, as the Treaty of Seville was not signed until November of 1729.450 The Anglo-

Spanish war was still a topical news item at court during the summer of 1729, and Lady Hervey here refers to events that had gripped the nation: beginning in January 1727, nearly every newspaper in London regularly covered the story and did so for months if not years after, including the London Gazette, The Daily Journal, The Daily Post, Mist’s Weekly Journal, The

Daily Courant, The Evening Post, and The British Journal. The 1727 Siege of Gibraltar also had a much more lasting visual representation.

447Isaac Schomberg, Naval chronology: or, An Historical Summary of Naval & Maritime events, From the Time of the Romans, to the Treaty of Peace, 1802 (London: T. Egerton by C. Roworth, 1815), p. 164. 448 Charles Arnold-Baker, The Companion to British History (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 560, n. 12. 449 See The Westminster Review, 88 (London: July – October, 1862), p. 204. 450 Max Savelle, Empires to Nations: Expansion in America, 1713 – 1824 (St. Paul, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1974), p. 204.

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Many different types of visual images of the event were created to commemorate and celebrate British imperial triumph. Besides the commemorative medals struck to memorialize the conquest of Gibraltar, there were popular engravings of the subject created in Italy, Spain, several of the German states, and in France, where, for example, Andre Coquart engraved a maritime view and a bird’s eye city map of Gibraltar after a map by Nicholas de Fer. 451 The most striking example of a visual representation of ‘the Siege of Gibraltar’ in early eighteenth- century London was, however, not a traditional painting or an engraving, but a very innovative

‘moving picture’ or automated diorama presented by the magician Isaac Fawkes and the clockwork engineer Christopher Pinchbeck.

In 1724 ‘Conjuring Fawkes’, a juggler, tumbler and illusionist well-known on the London fair circuit had the chance to perform before the King, George I, his son and likely his daughter- in-law, and their courtly attendants. The cachet that accrued to his act after the royal performance enabled Fawkes to leave the itinerant life of a fair-worker and set up a theatre-cum-exhibition space at an old tennis court between Haymarket and Whitcomb, at the heart of London’s theatre district. The Pinchbeck family designed and built a variety of mechanically-operated figures, which functioned in the manner of cuckoo-clock instruments, watches and other automata, but their creations were on an unprecedented scale and complexity. Together with Fawkes, they designed, built and exhibited, in his Haymarket theatre, human figures with musical instruments, dogs hunting waterfowl, and other mechanically operated exhibitions. They also cooperated on mechanically-operated pictorial representations of landscapes, which were moving paintings,

451 Oliver Warner, Great Sea Battles (London: Exeter Books, 1981), pp. 80,81. The map is viewable online @ http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/gibraltar/gibraltar/maps/nicolas_de_fer_1727_gibraltar.html., [accessed 6 August 2012]

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drawings and transparencies (shadow-show screens) accompanied by music and even fireworks, smoke, lights, and gunpowder.

Pinchbeck and Fawkes aimed at capturing an elite market: they deliberately designed and executed their show to appeal to the aristocracy, calling their exhibition extravagantly classicized or elegant names such as ‘the Temple of the Muses’ and reiterating the

‘respectability’ of their performances. They chose themes designed to maximize aristocratic attendance. The Siege of Gibraltar, an early creation, was one of two inaugural mechanical landscapes or ‘moving pictures’ that proved enduringly popular. Fawkes toured the piece around

England, exhibiting it at Bartholomew’s Fair and at Bristol Fair: one advertisement for the latter event describes the two landscapes, one of which was a musical group and the other ‘discovering the city and bay of Gibraltar, with a Fleet of ships under sail, troops of soldiers marching and countermarching’.452 Fawkes’ Haymarket theatre was flush with aristocratic audiences during the 1727 – 1730 period. In January 1728, The Daily Post reported of Fawkes that ‘His musical

Siege of Gibraltar has… got a nice prospect of the Palace-yard and the whole procession of the

Coronation, all moving alive by clock-work, and almost as many other knick-knacks as the Old

Tennis Court will hold’.453 The coronation procession and several other automated tableaux were housed together, and were marketed to appeal to ‘lovers of art’.454 These lures to an aristocratic audience paid off for Fawkes and Pinchbeck with another Royal visit in August of

1729, only one month after Lady Hervey wrote her list of imaginary pictures (and indeed, in the

452 The Evening Post, 2804 (11 July 1727), p. 2. 453 The Daily Post, 2597 (January 1728), p. 4. 454 Ibid., 2789 (29 August 1728), p. 1.

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very month leading up to the letter’s creation, Fawkes and his ‘art machines’ were very much in the public view and were talked up in the newspapers).455

On 27 August 1729 the children of George II and Caroline were taken to see ‘Mr.

Pinchbeck’s Grand Theatre of the Muses’ at Bartholomew Fair. The three youngest children went earlier, at 6 pm, and their elder brother and three sisters went, ‘attended by a great number of the nobility’, at 9 pm. The newspaper puff suggests ‘they seemed highly delighted’ with

Pinchbeck and Fawkes’ ‘most noble art’.456 Fawkes had been on the court’s radar since his command performance in 1724, and the Royal Family’s continued patronage of his shows in

1729 ensured the piece’s reputation. The ‘Siege of Gibraltar’ motif in Lady Hervey’s cultural milieu was therefore not only a contemporary news event much-discussed in newspapers, but was also a primitive version of ‘the movies’, the moving pictures, through which automated dioramas, lighting effects and mechanical music similar to a wind-up music box brought to life the distant campaigns at Gibraltar. As Fawkes’ biographer Helen Stoddart writes of Isaac

Fawkes, ‘the fact that he pioneered the harnessing of the ancient and anti-Enlightenment tradition of magic with complex forms of mechanization… clearly anticipated more modern preoccupations with the apparatus of vision’.457 Fawkes used the Pinchbeck family’s skill in mechanical design to legitimize the illusionist tradition, and he used new mechanically-oriented technologies of looking – peep shows, wind-up figures, clockwork, special effects, and shadow- screens – to capitalize on public interest in the 1727 Siege of Gibraltar.

The ‘Siege of Gibraltar’ in the cultural landscape of the late 1720s was, therefore, not just associated with the news event of the actual siege, but was strongly associated with a specific

455 Fog's Weekly Journal (5 July 1729), p. 3. 456 The Daily Post, 3100 (27 August 1729), p. 7. 457 Helen Stoddart, ‘Fawkes, Isaac (d. 17 1)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/64337. [accessed 15 Nov 2012]

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‘moving picture’ widely exhibited throughout London in fairs and at Fawke’s ‘Long Room’ in

Haymarket. By juxtaposing the motif of the ‘Siege of Gibraltar’ with the ‘D of B’, Lady Hervey could well be referring to theatrical sexualities. That the ‘D of B’ in Lady Hervey’s list refers to a specific Duke seems straightforward, and the ‘Duke’ who was most strongly associated with the world of popular entertainment was Charles Powlett, 3rd Duke of Bolton. While not a political heavyweight, Bolton was still an important figure in London’s society world, partly from the influence he enjoyed in Hampshire and Yorkshire.458 In 1713, Bolton had married Anne

Vaughan, daughter and heiress of the 3rd Earl of Carbery, whose wealth amassed as Governor of

Jamaica accrued to her after his death, but the marriage was from the beginning a complete failure. Within a year, the couple were privately living apart.459

Early in 1724, Bolton took the step of introducing a private member’s bill into

Parliament, allowing his wife, contrary to the economic norms of the time, to earn money of her own from a portion of her estates. Property and income belonging to women usually became the legal responsibility of their husbands, except in some rare instances.460 Bolton had a high public profile during the 1720s. He lived in Hanover Square, at that time a nexus locum for aristocratic families (thirteen titled households, out of a total of twenty five, made their residence there,

‘including the Dukes of Roxborough and Montrose, the Earls of Sussex and Pontrefect, and

458 Succeeding to the title in 1722, at the age of thirty-six, he filled several important offices in quick succession, and in 1729 he was serving as Governor of the Isle of Wight, besides having been elected Knight of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry in Great Britain. For the Powlett estates, see Samuel Egerton Brydges, Censura Literaria: Containing Titles, Abstracts and Opinions…, 11 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), VI, p. 111. 459 Matthew Kilburn, ‘Powlett , Charles, third duke of Bolton (1685–1754)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/21615. [accessed 6 July 2012] 460 Amy Lo Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 113, 231, 232. See also Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660 – 1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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Lords Hilsborough and Londonderry’).461 His estranged wife, though she preferred the country, was a good friend of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was certainly well known to Lady

Hervey.462 Bolton and Lady Hervey moved in the same world, and undoubtedly knew each other well.

In mid-1728, John Gay reported to Jonathan Swift that ‘the D of __ has run off with Polly

Peachum’, referring to Lavinia Fenton, the nineteen-year old actress playing the lead role in

Gay’s popular ‘Newgate pastoral’ The Beggar’s Opera.463 The piece, an innovative reworking of the traditional formula of Italian opera into a satire on the genre’s popularity with the English public, was likely inspired by both Gay’s and ’s familiarity and experience with French vaudeville theatre in Paris. A number of the songs and ballads embedded within The Beggar’s

Opera are modeled directly on French tunes and lyrics.464 Partly due to the novelty and immediacy of the subject matter, which was heavily intermixed with political satire aimed at the corruption of Walpole’s administration, The Beggar’s Opera opened to great curiosity and speculation on 29 January 1728. The very high standards of performance exhibited by Fenton and her associates were partially responsible for the work’s success. It immediately became a

461 Lisa Hilton, Mistress Peachum’s Pleasure (London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 78. 462 Lady Hervey damaged her early friendship with Lady Mary by testifying to the sanity of her sister, the Countess of Mar, whose revenues were accruing to Lady Mary under the terms of the custodianship agreement. The two were never fully reconciled, especially as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu spent much of her later adult life in Italy. See Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 291. 463 Jonathan Gay to Jonathan Swift, Letter of 1728, quoted by George Hogarth, ‘Memoirs of the Musical Drama’, in Waldie’s Select Circulating Library, ed. by Adam Waldie (Philadelphia: Adam Waldie, 1839), pp. 185 – 279 (p.237). 464 See Robert D. Hume, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, in Stanley Sadie and Laura Williams Macy, The Grove Book of , 2nd ed. (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 71 – 74 (p.71); William A. McIntosh, ‘Handel, Walpole, and Gay: The Aims of The Beggar's Opera’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 7: 4 (Summer, 1974), pp. 415 – 433 (p. 430); Daniel Heartz, ‘ “The Beggar's Opera” and “opéra-comique en vaudevilles” ’, Early Music, 27: 1 (Feb., 1999), 42 – 5 ; Sybil Goulding, ‘Eighteenth-Century French Taste and “The Beggar’s Opera” ’, The Modern Language Review, 24: 3 (Jul., 1929), 276 – 293.

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sensational smash hit.465 Fenton’s beauty and suitability for the role was universally acknowledged, and she became, briefly, one of the great sex symbols of the age, with her portrait reproduced in many broadsheets and engravings.466

Lady Hervey by this time was herself something of a sex symbol and semi-public figure, although of course the two women’s circumstances were wildly disparate. As so many accounts of the eighteenth-century theatre reiterate, the theatre was above all a place to be seen as well as to see, up to and including the right of the wealthiest, most important customers to be seen on the stage itself, in boxes that were situated on the margins of the stage.467 Lady Hervey would have been keenly familiar with this world: like many if not all of Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting, she had a lifelong, active interest in the performing arts. In the 1720s, after a deterioration of relations between herself and her mother-in-law Lady Bristol had culminated in a public scene,

Lady Hervey took to going to the opera, ‘for the entertainment of the public’, twice a week.

Mary Wortley Montagu said Lady Hervey ‘made the top figure in town’ during this period.468

She had long figured as a noted court beauty in the culture of the time, and this comment proves the theatre audiences took an avid, spectatorial interest in her presence.

By ‘spectatorial’ I mean the sexually commodified ways of seeing prominent women

(especially actresses, but also court ‘beauties’) among the theatre-going audience, where social

465 See The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, ed. by Ian Ousby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 70; Matthew J. Kinservik, Disciplining Satire: the Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth- Century London Stage (Lewisburg, ,PA : Bucknell University Press, 2002), pp. 60 – 63. 466 See Charles E. Pearce, Polly Peachum, The Story of Lavinia Fenton and the Beggar’s Opera (repr. Benjamin Blom, 1968 [1919]), pp. 102, 186; Frederic George Stephens et al., Catalogue of the Prints in the British Museum: Personal and Political Satires, Vol. 2: June 1689 – 1733 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1873), pp. 664 – 672; Cheryl Wanko, Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lubbock : Texas Tech University Press, 2003), pp. 51 – 62, esp. p. 58. 467 See Ian Woodfield, Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: the King’s Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 215; Lisa A. Freeman, Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 236. 468 Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 55.

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modes of looking were combined with sexual tourism.469 Just as classical statues showing the

Venus Pudica type were avidly viewed, displayed and collected by connoisseurs as a sign of the commodification of female bodies, actresses and other well-known women were pursued and

‘traded’ among aristocratic benefactors. They were the most legitimized form of the sex trade that was such a part of urban life in this period, and the close association between the stage and prostitution would be maintained well into the early nineteenth century. In this context, Debord’s thesis suggesting the spectatorial potential of objects is remarkably applicable to the viewing practices of the early eighteenth-century theatre-going aristocracy, recorded in Hogarth’s inclusion of Bolton in The Beggar’s Opera. Walpole mentions Lady Hervey’s status as a sex symbol, mentioning several poems that lauded her beauty and her sexuality, including one from

1725 by Edward oung, ‘And Harvey’s eyes, unmercifully keen/ Have murder’d fops, by whom she ne’er was seen’. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s canny acknowledgement that she did so ‘for the entertainment of the town’ suggests Lady Hervey, and likely Henrietta Howard and other of the Queen’s attendants, were highly aware of these sexualized modes of looking and manipulated them for their own social agendas. 470 Social performance and sexual display were thus relegated and adapted within the rituals of vision used within the theatre, and court women like Lady

Hervey used select participation within this sexually commodified world to negotiate their own autonomous performance of elite femininity.

469 For spectatorship and the ‘spectatorial’ gaze in theatre, see Barbara Freedman, ‘ Frame-Up: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Theatre’, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. by Sue-Ellen Case: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 54 – 76 (esp. p. 54). 470 See ‘Satire III’, in Edward oung, The Poetical Works of Edward Young, vol. 2, ed. by John Mitford (Boston and Cambridge: Brown and Co, 1871), p. 87. For the sexual context of elite women’s theatre-going, see Paul McCallum, ‘Cozening the Pit: Prologues, Epilogues and Poetic Authority in Restoration England’, in Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-Raisers, and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-Century London Stage, ed. by Daniel James Ennis and Judith Bailey Slagle (Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 2010), 33 – 69 (p. 48); John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690 – 1760 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 23.

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Figure 6.4. William Hogarth, A Scene from ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, VI (detail), 1731, oil on canvas, 572 x 762 mm, The Tate Gallery, London.

It is perhaps this circumstance that insinuates most strongly that this entry relates to the

Duke of Bolton and Lavinia Fenton. The forty-five year old Bolton, like so many others, was fascinated by Fenton. If the story of his attending all sixty two performances of the play where

Fenton played Peachum is an exaggeration, there is no doubt he attended enough to make him a recognizable figure in the two final versions (out of five) of The Beggar’s Opera that Rich commissioned from William Hogarth.471 In these versions of the scene (Fig. 6.4), the Duke of

Bolton in a stage box occupies the extreme right of the painting, and he is unquestionably identified by the glittering Star of the Garter prominently displayed on his chest.472 Powlett stares at Fenton, who in her role as Polly Peachum kneels before a magistrate looking not at her accuser, as the scene demands, but at Lord Bolton himself. Lady Hervey’s juxtaposition of the

471 Jeremy Barlow, The Enraged Musician: Hogarth’s Musical Imagery (Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2005), p. 166. See also Marvin A. Carlson, ‘A Fresh Look at Hogarth’s “Beggar’s Opera” ’, Educational Theatre Journal, 27: 1 (Mar., 1975), pp. 30 – 39. 472 See David Bindman, Hogarth and his Times: Serious Comedy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 92; Amal Asfour, ‘Hogarth’s Post-Newtonian Universe’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60: 4 (Oct., 1999), 693 –716 (p. 696); Gillian Wagner, Thomas Coram, Gent., 1668 – 1751 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press), p. 87.

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‘Siege of Gibraltar’ motif with that of the ‘D of B’ in her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ therefore could indicate an overt reference to the theatrical world: just as the world watches

Bolton’s literally on-stage ‘siege’ of a leading actress, the world watched a mechanical tableau of

Gibraltar in one of Fawkes’ popular ‘art machine’ entertainments.

In this contextual association and juxtaposition, the sexualized body of Lavinia Fenton is linked to the mechanical tableau. Just as the British people, through Pinchbeck and Fawkes’ creations, were encouraged to use ‘peep-show’ technologies of vision and illusion to view, and hence to control, the precious overseas colonial possession that had been so successfully defended, they similarly saw and took voyeuristic pleasure in the literally on-stage pursuit of

Fenton by one of the nation’s highest-ranking aristocrats. They also took voyeuristic and spectatorial pleasure in looking at well-known women, including the Queen’s attendants and other members of the court in the audience. Lady Hervey, as a high-ranking courtier, herself probably saw the show from a similar and highly-visible stage box.

Pinchbeck and Fawkes’ boundary-crossing artistic creations, illusionistic technologies and mechanical automata of all kinds deserve further critical attention. Given that the Royal

Family visited Fawkes and Pinchbeck’s ‘Temple of the Muses’ the month after Lady Hervey composed her ‘collection of pictures’, the wider court at large were likely well aware of this piece, as it was well travelled and much-seen. It seems likely that both Howard and Hervey would have been fully cognisant of how Fawkes and Pinchbeck were using emerging technologies of vision to capitalize on popular interest in British military retention of Gibraltar as a strategic colony. Fawkes’ popularity with the aristocratic theatre-going audience was certainly satirized as early as 1723 by William Hogarth, whose print Masquerades and Operas shows a sign that says ‘Faux: Dexterity of Hand’, near the venue where costumed elites jostle to enter a

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masquerade. Both Henrietta Howard and Lady Hervey were, like many elite women of their generation, very fond of masquerade parties, and both women were painted in similar ‘Van

Dyck’ costume earlier in the decade. Presaging the popularity of the tableau vivant, the automated diorama and the ‘Venetian machine’, Faux and Pinchbeck’s Siege of Gibraltar combined elements of all three without specifically belonging to either, and did so with the same delight in illusion that characterized the masquerade.

Conclusion

The political dimension of Lady Hervey’s joke of ‘the D of B’/ ‘The Siege of Gibraltar’ would not be lost on Henrietta Howard: indeed, Howard’s failure to find Gay employment at court was one of the main reasons he reworked the piece into such a biting piece of anti-administration satire.473 In the winter of 1729, only a few months before Lady Hervey sent this letter to

Henrietta Howard, there was a huge scandal at court about the play. Walpole had originally tolerated the satire (he and his mistress, Maria Skerrit, who had been openly living together since about 1724, were easily recognizable, with the Prime Minister in the character of the Macheath). As Lord Hervey recounts in his Memoirs, after Gay added a second part to the Opera that was ‘less pretty, but more abusive, and so little disguised’ as to leave no room for doubt, Walpole finally took steps to ban its performance.474

The Duke of Grafton was then Lord Chamberlain, with authority over the theatres.

Walpole had Grafton ban this second version of the play in every theatre.475 Gay then resolved to print it by subscription, and Catherine, Duchess of Queensbury, whose husband had financially

473 See Chapter One, n. 6 of this thesis. 474 Hervey, Memoirs, I, p. 121. 475 See Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry : 1650 – 1850 (Chicago: The University Chicago Press, 1996), p. 195; William Eben Schultz, Gay’s Beggar’s Opera: Its Content, History and Influence (New York: Russell and Russell, 1923), pp. 212, 213.

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supported Gay’s initial venture, took it upon herself to advertise the subscription in every possible public venue, including the royal court itself. Lord Hervey recounted that ‘to a woman of her quality, proverbially beautiful, and at the top of the polite and fashionable world, people were ashamed to refuse a guinea, though they were afraid to give it’.476 At the Duchess of

Queensbury’s attendance at a drawing-room entertainment given by the Queen, she was noticed by the King actively soliciting his servants for subscription money, and she pointedly mentioned the work to the King himself. After consulting with Queen Caroline, the King took the unusual step of forbidding the Duchess from court the very next day. Her letter in response, found in

Hervey’s memoirs, is a masterly repartee of insouciant defiance, and well shows high-ranking women’s capacity for independent resistance to official, even royal order.477 Lady Hervey pokes fun at the Duke of Bolton’s stubborn pursuit of an early superstar of the theatrical world by recalling Henrietta Howard’s memory, not only of her initial protection of John Gay, but of the scene with the Duchess of Queensbury over The Beggar’s Opera, thus hitting home at a crucial intersection between art, politics, sex and culture.

Hervey’s statement about the Duchess of Queensbury – ‘proverbially beautiful, at the top of the polite and fashionable world’ is an apt description of Lady Hervey herself. Lady Hervey’s twice-weekly attendances at the theatre in the 1720s made her ‘the top figure in town’, due in no small part to her own entirely successful performance of sexually desirable aristocratic

476 Ibid., p. 122. 477 Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Grand Century of the Lady (London : Gordon and Cremonesi, 1976), p. 62. ‘The Duchess of Queensbury is surprised and well-pleased that the King hath given her so agreeable a command as to stay from court, where she never came for diversion, but to pay a great civility to the King and Queen’. See also Alexander Pope, The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. W.C. Armstrong (New York: World Publishing House, 1877), p. 33.

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femininity.478 Like many other court women, she undoubtedly withdrew from any unacceptably public demonstrations of sexuality, as is witnessed by her withdrawal from the crass scene engendered by Charlotte de Roussy’s mispronunciation of a name as ‘Lady Fuck-in-Breech’.

However, by saying ‘there are some few I don’t understand’ about a list of entries she herself compiled and sent to Henrietta Howard for group perusal, she says exactly the opposite: she does understand the sexual connotations of her entries for Gage, Charteris and ‘the D of B’, and of course she expects Howard and their mutual friends to pick up on her risqué juxtapositions.

‘Some few I don’t understand’ is simply a coy way of admitting the sexual subject matter of the letter would be entirely inappropriate in a public context.

When couched in a ‘veil’ of artistic associations, however, her sexual allusions at least provide a formal pretense of disengagement. Like the fan used by the elite woman in John

Nichols’ St. James Park and Pall Mall, iconographical allusions to art and artistic practice were a form of psychological defense against the performance of sexual knowledge. These devices expected a certain amount of suspension of disbelief on the part of the onlooker, but they also preserved the façade of manners that was integral to elite forms of early eighteenth-century gender construction. Through the creation of an imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ as a vehicle for political satire, Lady Hervey was able to articulate sexual knowledge, as well as theatrical and cultural knowledge, to her wider Georgian peer group at court. In the next chapter, I explore the role of ‘legitimate’ marital sexuality in her ‘collection of pictures’.

478 Walpole points out that Lady Hervey’s profile print was ‘done in France, but it gives but a poor idea of her beauty, though she preserved uncommon remains of it till her death at the age of 68’. Walpole, Correspondence, XXXI, p. 417.

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Chapter Seven: Marital Humour and Visual Imagery

While ribald humour couched in the form of artistic allusions refers explicitly to extramarital sex in some entries within Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, other entries in the

‘collection’ concern the more socially reified sexual roles of marriage and . I here select three case studies from the ‘collection’ to examine early Georgian court discourses of marriage – ‘A Mountain in Labour’ by Sir W Lawson, a ‘Maidenhead’ by ‘Ld Harborough’, and

‘A Dutch Marriage’ by ‘William oung’. I examine how artwork contextually associated with these three entries is best studied through an acknowledgement of the iconographical allusions to art and literature present in these entries. By juxtaposing a fable (La Montagne qui Accouche) by popular French court author Jean de La Fontaine with the politician Sir Wilfred Lawson, Lady

Hervey for example describes Lawson’s wearisome, splenetic and overzealous character, and she also displays a cavalier attitude towards the perils of childbirth, which is mocked in the fable’s narrative.479

Certainly the man listed as a ‘Maidenhead’ in the ‘collection’ - Bennett, 1st Earl

Harborough - would have found her sense of humour disturbing, as is witnessed by the sensitive, evocative tomb monument he posthumously commissioned in memory of his young wife Mary.

Lady Harborough’s portrait by Kneller (discussed below), so delicately Francophile in tone, is an example of the kinds of images of elite women that have been devalued in British art history as repetitive, homogenous and ‘uninspired’. While some of Kneller’s portraits are certainly repetitive, the Harborough portrait, when read in dialogue with the circumstances of the sitter’s

479 She would eventually raise eight children to adulthood, and was herself seriously ill following the birth of her first child: see Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), p. 45. See also Adrian Wilson, ‘Childbirth in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 1982), pp. 115 – 122; Deborah Maine and Therese McGinn, ‘Maternal Mortality and Morbidity’ in Women and Health, ed. by Marlene B Goldman and Maureen Hatch (San Diego, CA : Academic Press, 2000), pp. 395 – 404 (p. 400).

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life history, is an expressive and emotionally poignant image, its meaning complemented and paralleled by the Harborough family tomb monument. Lady Hervey’s inclusion of Harborough within this satirical ‘collection of pictures’ therefore highlights the need for sensitive, nuanced readings of Kneller’s portraits of court women and of the real human histories that are commemorated and celebrated in his work.

In early eighteenth-century British society, especially for women, heterosexual marriage was thought to be the only acceptable form for the proper expression of sexual desire. Paradigms of social behavior were however beginning to change, as divorce rates among the elite rose.480

With the pairing of William onge with an imaginary ‘Dutch’ marriage scene, Lady Hervey likely refers to divorce, using onge’s much-reviled public character to satirize his callous and hypocritical attitude towards his first wife. Seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting was avidly admired and collected among the court elite in her day, and she here uses an imaginary

Dutch marriage portrait to recall Henrietta Howard’s memory of the real paintings both women were familiar with. In Lady Hervey’s juxtaposition of ‘Sir W Lawson’ with ‘A Mountain in

Labour’, as she refers explicitly to a specific poem, she similarly expects Howards and their mutual friends to be familiar with the French court fable,

‘A Mountain in Labour by Sir W Lawson’

Une Montagne en mal d’enfant Jetait une clameur si haute, Que chacun, au bruit accourant, Crut qu'elle accoucherait, sans faute, D'une cité plus grosse que Paris ;

480 See Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530 – 1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 40 – 41; Paul-Gabriel Boucé, Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 125; Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, ‘Marriage, Widowhood and Divorce’, in The History of the European Family. Vol.1: Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500 – 1789, ed. by David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 221 – 256 (p. 254).

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Elle accoucha d'une souris. Quand je songe à cette fable, Dont le récit est menteur Et le sens est véritable, Je me figure un auteur Qui dit : Je chanterai la guerre Que firent les Titans au Maître du tonnerre. C’est promettre beaucoup : mais qu’en sort-il souvent ? Du vent.481

Sir Wilfrid Lawson (1697 – 1737), 3rd Baronet of Isell, of an old Yorkshire family (‘one of the

Lawson baronet’) was MP for Cockermouth and Groom of the Bedchamber to George I, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society.482 Lawson was an important political figure in the early years of the Hanoverian regime, and entered politics in 1717, as MP for Cockermouth. 483 His family connections stood him in good stead in the Georgian court hierarchy, as his wife, Elizabeth Lucy

Mordaunt, was niece to the Earl of Peterborough. 484 Like many of Lady Hervey’s satirical

481 Maya Slater, The Craft of La Fontaine (London: the Athlone Press, 2000). The English translation is:

A Mountain in Labour Raised such a noisy clamour That whoever heard her cries Thought that she would give birth To a city bigger than Paris; She gave birth to a mouse. When I hear this fable, The meaning of which is true, I think of an author, Who says, ‘I will sing of the war, Of the Titans and the Lord of Thunder’. They promised much, but what came of it? The wind. 482 See John Burke, A General and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the British Empire, 2 vols (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1833), II, p. 64; John Maurice Beattie, The English Court in the Reign of George I (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 162. 483 See Robert Wright, The Life of Major-General James Wolfe, founded on Original Documents and Illustrated by His Correspondence (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864), p. 113. 484 Richard Saul Ferguson, Cumberland and Westmoreland MPS from the Restoration to the Reform Bill of 1867 (London: Bell and Daldy, 1871), pp. 394, 397.

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targets in this ‘collection of pictures’, Lawson was an important man within Parliament and was a prominent member of the coalition opposed to Walpole. 485

What the nineteenth-century critic Croker failed to realize in his exposition on the

‘collection of pictures’ is that the motif of a ‘Mountain in Labour’ refers to a specific literary work, a fable by the seventeenth-century French poet Jean de La Fontaine, who was read avidly by many eighteenth-century courtiers in England (especially, it seems, by women).486 In La

Fontaine’s La Montagne qui Accouche (5:10), a mountain is giving birth, and during labour makes a great commotion, but eventually brings forth nothing but a mouse. Lawson, despite being a prominent politician in his own day, is rarely discussed in Georgian court history, and his social role has been largely lost. Considering how little we know about him, critically reading

Lady Hervey’s entry on Lawson is a way to reclaim something of his individuality and identity.

The fable specifically points to people who promise much, and then produce nothing but the wind. These are fairly pointed references to the failure of personal and political integrity attributed to a prominent politician of the time.487 By drawing a link between Lawson and this fable by La Fontaine, Lady Hervey insinuates that Lawson is characterized by fussy, overdramatic ways. She expects cultural knowledge – that of the French court fable – of her audience and the crux of the joke relies on Howard and her friends’ ability to immediately recall the narrative told by La Fontaine. This is a doubling or even tripling of iconographic meanings,

485 Ibid., p. 396. 486 For the international popularity of La Fontaine in the early eighteenth century, See Rosamund G. Eland, ‘Problems of the Middle Style: La Fontaine in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Modern Language Review, 66: 4 (Oct., 1971), 731 – 737 (p. 731); for his popularity among elite women, see Charles H. Hinnant, The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay in Interpretation (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1994), p. 167; Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, ‘Invading the “Transparent Laberynth”: Anne Finch and the Poetics of Translation’, in Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, ed. by Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 166 – 186 (p. 169). 487 See Randolph Runyon, In La Fontaine’s Labyrinth : a thread through the Fables (Charlottesville : Rookwood Press, 2000), p. 68.

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as the La Fontaine’s final stanzas in the fable make specific reference to Ovid, in

Book One, passages 130 – 156, where the Giants, seeking to conquer Heaven, heaped mountains on each other until they were destroyed by Zeus.488

Lady Hervey’s juxtaposition of La Fontaine’s fable with Lawson reiterates how much that the French courtly fable was a homogenizing social device for disparate elites.489

Obviously, the fable would be immediately recognizable to Howard and her guests, and hence, through one brief allusion, Lady Hervey evokes the whole poem. This entry in Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ is therefore yet another sign of French cultural influence, of the cultural dialogue between the French and British courts, and the popularity of allegorical stories, games and exercises in the articulation of political and personal satire. Anne Finch, the earlier British Maid of Honour who wrote poetry imitating salonnière ways of writing or

‘badinage’, was for example very fond of La Fontaine, and wrote fables engaged with his work, while the whole ‘fable’ or ‘fairy-tale’ literary tradition at this time was heavily influenced by the memory of the French literary hostesses.490 Lady Hervey’s expectation of this knowledge by

Howard and her circle at Marble Hill reiterates the linkages between Caroline’s Ladies-in- waiting and the salonnière literary tradition.

488 Association pour le Musée Jean de La Fontaine, ‘La Montagne qui Accouche,’ http://www.la-fontaine-ch- thierry.net/montacouch.htm [accessed 13 July 2010]. 489 Slater, The Craft of La Fontaine, p. 68. See Anne E. Duggan, Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (Newark, DE : University of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 54 – 57; Dani Cavallaro, The World of Angela Carter: A Critical Investigation (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2011), pp. 104, 105; Bettina Liebowitz Knapp, French Fairy Tales: A Jungian Approach (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 63. 490 Hinnat, The Poetry of Anne Finch, p. 167.

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Figure 7.1. François Chauveau, ‘La Montagne qui Accouche’, in Jean de La Fontaine, Illustrations des Fables Choisies Mises en Vers (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1668), engraving, p. 219.

At least one image of the fable was widely circulated in aristocratic libraries at the time, both in France and in England. In the 1668 edition of Illustrations des Fables choisies mises en

Vers, by Claude Barbin, illustrated by François Chauveau (1613 – 1676) to texts by La Fontaine, the title page for the fable is accompanied by an explanatory engraving (Fig. 7.1). A copy is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.491 The engraving of La Montagne qui Accouche in

Chaveau’s edition shows a crowd of gesticulating people in the right foreground, some of whom are pointing at a large mountain in the center background: a large cave or crevice is visible in the mountain’s face. Literary scholar Rudolph Runyon points out how the deep crevices of the earth alluded to in the poems immediately before and after La Montagne qui Accouche refer to chthonic capriciousness, where the earth can bring forth or destroy things of value in an

491 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b22000789/f89.item.hl [accessed 14 May 2012]. For Chauveau’s role, see Gervais E. Reed, Claude Barbin, Libraire de Paris sous le Règne de Louis IV (Geneva and Paris : Droz, 1974), p. 70.

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instant.492 Ségolène Le Men, in an article on illustrated fairy tales, draws attention to the primacy of Chauveau’s format in subsequent volumes of fables and fairy-tales, pointing out how his small engravings act as emblems when inserted between title and text.

For Le Men, emblematic images like Chauveau’s ‘appeal to the senses and emphasize the concreteness of the text… this format is indicative of how involved illustrations are in the reading and re-reading process’.493 Lady Hervey’s similarly emblematic mental images are evoked in the entry through the shared experience of reading La Fontaine. Illustrated copies of

La Fontaine’s fables were popular reading material long after their initial edition, and I believe both Lady Hervey and Henrietta Howard would both have had access to this book in the royal library, if not directly in the libraries of Ickworth or Marble Hill.494 This ‘emblem’ image of La

Montagne qui Accouche, with its chthonic depictions of caverns, of vast trembling crevices that go into labour, bringing forth creation in the process of childbirth, visually constructs an association between the natural world and female reproductive body. It is a bodily image, contextually linked through the trope of childbirth to sexual, generative understandings of that landscape. As an emblem image and part of a volume known for this distinctive illustrative format, it was part of a process of emblem image-making that informed the organizational design of later collections of fables and fairy-tales.

492 Runyon, In La Fontaine’s labyrinth, p. 68. 493 Ségolène Le Men, ‘Mother Goose Illustrated: From Perrault to Doré’, Poetics Today, 13: 1 (Spring, 1992), 17 – 39 (p. 21). 494 For an example of how nationalist discourse colours the memory of La Fontaine, as it does the historical legacy of Ladies-in-Waiting and of the émigré painters in England, see John Hollander, ‘Introduction’, where he writes ‘walking through La Fontaine’s world of fable is not the least like going through one of the Sun King’s labyrinths, but more like a walk through an English, or natural garden’, despite the fact that Jean de La Fontaine’s experience of gardens was shaped most decisively by the formal grounds of his noble salonnière patrons, such as Marie Anne Mancini, Duchesse de Bouillon. See Jean de La Fontaine, The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, ed. by Norman Schapiro (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. xxiii – xxxviii (p. xxxii).

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There are other probable iconographic allusions in this entry on Lawson, specifically between the chthonic generativity of La Fontaine’s enlaboured Mountain and the physical body of another famous woman, Mary Tofts, the ‘Rabbit-Woman of Godalming’. The case of the

‘rabbit-woman’, a notorious fraud who publicly ‘gave birth’ to a succession of animal parts over a period of several months in the autumn of 1726, is well known in eighteenth century social and art history. Toft herself was reported to have made a great performance of ‘bearing’ the animal parts that had been inserted into her reproductive tract. The ‘clamour’ she raised during these performances of ‘rabbit-breeding’ was part of the mythology she constructed about herself, and her bodily reactions to her ‘births’ were closely observed and documented by male physicians, some of whom believed she was a scientific example of the long-held notion of maternal impression. The case had attracted the notice of the court – Nathaniel St. Andre, the royal surgeon in England, was fooled, but George I’s personal physician Cyriaceus Ahlers was not – and was much in the ‘cultural radar’ of the early eighteenth-century world. Hogarth’s Walpolean

‘nativity’ Cunicularii: or the Three Wise Men of Godalmin appeared in December of 1726, just after the Toft scandal broke.

At least fifteen songs and pamphlets appeared in the years after the case, newspapers regularly covered the story and Lady Hervey’s close personal friend, Charles, 2nd Duke of

Richmond occasionally ‘exhibited’ Mary Tofts as a curiosity at his residence. By referring to La

Fontaine’s fable of La Montagne qui Accouche, Lady Hervey is therefore almost certainly referring indirectly to Tofts and to orifices that ‘produced a great clamour’ and yet were delivered of ‘monsters’ or animals. Given the very public visibility of the Toft trial and its enduring legacy, which included its formative role over Pope’s creation of the monster-breeding goddess ‘Dulness’ in (1728), there seems little room for doubt on this issue: La

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Fontaine’s fable would not simply be recognizable as such, but would also carry a secondary, associational meaning to the Toft trial.495 Lady Hervey significantly does not reference Toft openly, but by using the fable (and possibly its accompanying emblematic image) as a mnemonic device for the trope of generative orifices that give birth to animals, the association with Toft would almost certainly be made instantaneously by her audience. Through the use of contextual associations, Lady Hervey therefore insinuates, through the courtly allusion of La Fontaine’s fable, that Wilfrid Lawson is as big a fraud as , and that his political posturings against the administration are as false as Toft’s rabbit-children. While this entry implies Lady Hervey expected Henrietta Howard and their mutual courtly friends to be aware both of La Fontaine’s fable and the Toft case, she likewise anticipates extant cultural knowledge in another entry: ‘A

Dutch Marriage’ by ‘William oung.’

‘A Dutch Marriage by William Young’

Sir William Yonge, 4th Baronet (1693 – 1755), was of Colyton, Devon. He had a London residence in Pall Mall, which he occupied up to the end of 17 8, described as a ‘large house at the end of a passageway almost directly opposite … near the fashionable of St. James’, and only a short walk from the gov’t offices in Whitehall’.496 While a frequent speaker in Parliament, onge is described as ‘obnoxious to many, how justly we cannot say, for some steps he made in his private life, and this prepossession affected the opinion of the

495 Lady Hervey, Henrietta Howard and the wider court at large were undoubtedly very well-versed in the Dunciad’s contents: nearly every one of the early Georgian court’s leading figures were viciously satirized by Pope in this poem. Lady Hervey’s husband, for example, was castigated as ‘Sporus’, the castrated slave ‘married’ by the Emperor Nero. 496 H. T. Dickinson, ‘ onge, Sir William, fourth baronet (c.169 –1755)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/30232 [accessed 6 July 2012]

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public in his parliamentary and ministerial character’.497 This obnoxiousness was due to the popular feeling against his very public divorce: hence the irony of the ‘Dutch’ marriage. In July

1716 Yonge had married Mary, the sister of Sir William Heathcote, a rich London merchant.498

No children were born of the marriage, as the couple soon separated. Yonge, despite being well known for his promiscuity, seized the chance offered by his wife’s dalliance with a handsome army officer to sue her family for damages, and divorced her in 1724 by private act of parliament.499 The hypocrisy of the event, which saw one of London’s leading sexual ‘schemers’ callously attacking his estranged wife for infidelity, led Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to compose an imaginary poem from Mary Heathcote to her former husband, railing against the double standard of the time. onge’s second wife, ‘whom he married on 14 April 1729, was Anne, the daughter and coheir of Thomas Howard, sixth Baron Howard of Effingham’.500 Lady Hervey’s letter, written only a few months after Yonge had remarried, thus draws the attention of Henrietta Howard and her guests at Marble Hill back to the very public failure of his first marriage, and possibly the startling prospect of a man remarried while his first wife was still living to a new bride, an uncommon circumstance even among elite circles in England.

‘Dutch’ in early eighteenth-century England was a satirical epithet applied injudiciously to nearly every situation in life.501 Sir William onge’s name was proverbial in political circles as a byword for corruption, both political and personal, and Lady Hervey’s use of the phrase

497 The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Vol. VIII: 1722 – 1733, ed.by William Cobbett and T. C. Hansard (London: T. Hansard, 1811), p. 671. 498 William Heathcote built Hurley House, Herefordshire, between 1721 to 1724. 499. The poem remained unpublished until 1974: see Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 240. 500 Dickinson, ‘ onge, Sir William’, par. 4. 501 See John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley, A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1905), p. 147: a great variety of mostly negative meanings (Dutch uncle, double Dutch, etc.) were applied to the term ‘Dutch’, called ‘an epithet of inferiority’ by the authors. The most relevant entries are ‘Dutch widow’, a prostitute, or Dutch wife, ‘a bolster’, all page 147. See also David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 2007), p. 249.

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‘Dutch Marriage’ implies this, as his reputation was something of a caricature throughout his life. Philip, Earl of Chesterfield wrote of onge’s ‘most sullied, not to say blasted, character’, while Horace Walpole recollected his father saying ‘nothing but onge’s character could keep down his parts, and nothing but his parts support his character’.502 In reality, Walpole and the

Whig faction depended heavily on onge’s undoubted political skill as a speechmaker and publisher, and Lord Hervey, in his memoirs, was uncharacteristically tolerant of onge’s personal attributes, expressing surprise that a man who was ‘nobody’s friend, nobody’s enemy’ should become such a public scapegoat.503 Dickinson claims that ‘it may be that onge’s robust defence of Walpole's political methods, his cynical attitude towards virtue and corruption, and the many lucrative government posts which he held’ contributed to the public’s aversion to him.

George II, who originally forbid ‘stinking onge’ in his presence, mellowed towards him significantly as the years progressed.504

The closest direct reference to a ‘Dutch marriage’ is that a ‘Dutch wife’ was a prostitute, but it seems clear that Lady Hervey is simply referring to an unwilling, unhappy or (more likely) adulterous relationship. The current meaning of Dutch wife applies literally to a sex doll, originating in the leather life-size dolls carried by Dutch East India merchant ships to seventeenth-century Japan, but I think it unlikely she refers explicitly to this. Marriage portraits were quite common in the Dutch visual tradition, as indeed they were in the English. Many noblewomen never had their portrait painted until the occasion of their marriage or the birth of their first child, just as many noblemen waited to commemorate their physical appearance until

502 See Philip Dormer Stanhope, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, ed. by Lord Mahon, 4 vols (London: Bentley, 1847), II, p. 59; Dickinson, ‘ onge, Sir William’, par. 4. 503 John Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, From His Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline, ed. by John Wilson Croker, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1848), I, p. 47. 504 Ibid., p. 48.

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they succeeded to a title, some important government office, or a military commission.505 One possible painted ‘Dutch marriage’ that was familiar to both Hervey and Howard is Abraham

Bloemaert’s Marriage of Cupid and Psyche, from c. 1593, purchased by Charles II for the Royal

Collection in the late seventeenth century.506 While not a genre scene, it is from the hand of a

Dutch painter, and is on the subject of marriage. Many of the Calvinist marriage pieces produced in Holland during the seventeenth century take a composition or ideological structure that creates gendered dichotomies of the ‘active’ husband and ‘passive’ wife.507 As Harry Berger writes of these Dutch marriage portraits, ‘The focus of attention… [is] men’s ultimate authority and domination within a family structure’, and Simon Schama noted that the bodies of women in

Dutch art were fenced about with a range of associations of human frailty and patriarchal dominance.508

As a discursive record on how seventeenth-century Dutch marriage portraits were valued as art objects among a later generation of British elite collectors, and of how one former Lady-in- waiting used the trope for her own satirical purposes, Lawson’s entry in Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ is a poignant reminder of Dutch marriage portraiture’s high

505 See Alison Conway, Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709- 1791 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 83, 84. 506 See Anne W. Lowenthal for the Entwistle Gallery, Netherlandish Mannerism in British Collections (London: L&R Entwistle and Co., 1990), p. 23; Peter C. Sutton and John Loughman for the Thyssen-Bornemisza, The Golden Age of Dutch Painting (Madrid: Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, 1994), p. 114. 507 Roland E. Fleischer, , Rubens, and the Art of their Time: Recent Perspectives (University Park, PA : Pennsylvania State University, 1997), p. 151; David R. Smith, ‘Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting’, The Art Bulletin, 69: 3 (Sep., 1987), 407 – 430 (pp. 414, 415). 508 See Harry Berger, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief : Rembrandt’s Night watch and other Dutch Group Portraits (New ork : Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 105; Simon Schama, ‘Wives and Wantons: Versions of Womanhood in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 3 (1980), 5 – 13 (p. 7); David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbour, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1982), pp. 28 – 0; Lotte C. van der Pol, ‘The Lure of the Big City: Female Migration to Amsterdam’ in Women of the Golden Age: An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland, England and Italy, ed. by Els Kloek (Hilversum : Verloren, 1994), pp. 73 – 82 (p. 73). See also Wayne E. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in seventeenth-century Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Eddy de Jong, Portretten van Echt and Trouw: Huwelijken gezinde Netherlandse kunst van de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat (Haarlem: Frans Halsmuseum, 1986).

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visibility in the early eighteenth-century cultural world of aristocratic Britain. Another entry, that of a ‘Virgin’ or Maidenhead’ with ‘Ld Harborough’, likewise attests to the emotional resonance of the art object, and to the literally ‘after-life’ or posthumous meanings attached to an individual’s historical memory through commemorative art objects.

‘a maidenhead’ (referred to by Croker as ‘a virgin’) - Lord Harborough’

Croker, puzzlingly, lists this entry as ‘A Virgin’ although in the manuscript MSS in the British

Library, Lady Hervey quite clearly writes ‘Maidenhead’, which was perhaps not thought appropriate to Croker’s Victorian sensibilities. A ‘Maiden’s Head’ alluded to the hymen and to virginity in early eighteenth-century discourse. Pictorial depictions of the subject were rare, and were limited to street signs showing a bust of a young woman: the Maiden’s Head thus linguistically punned on the hymen, and the trope was a popular pun in early eighteenth century urban geographies. A carved stone street sign in Cheapside of ‘the Maiden’s Head’, probably of late seventeenth-century origin, was for example a feature of London urban life, while in the novel A Sentimental Journey, an itinerant sign-painter boasts of turning ‘the Maidenhead into that of her present Majesty Queen Charlotte – and Queen Charlotte’s Head as often into the

Maidenhead’.509 The sexual allusions to the hymen in the pun were blatant to eighteenth-century audiences. The printing of the erotic poem Fifteen Plagues of a Maidenhead (1707), for example, caused ‘England’s first true obscenity prosecution’ when its distributor was arrested.510

509Joseph Moser, ‘Vestiges, LXIV’, in The European Magazine and London Review…, 52 (July – Dec. 1807), pp. 417 – 424 (p. 420). For Sterne, see Lawrence Sterne, ‘A Sentimental Journey’ in The Lady’s Magazine or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, 5 (1774), pp. 455 - 456 510 The poem refers explicitly to the hymen. The line ‘her Husband’s bauble is so short/ That when he Hunts, he never shows her Sport’ is characteristic. See Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Images in Shakespearian and Stuart Literature (London: Athlone, 1994), p. 77; Bernard Stuart Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 63; and Geoffrey R. Stone, ‘The History of Obscenity, the British Novel, and the First Amendment’, in Subversion and

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Bennett Sherard (1675 – 1732), whose family was based at Stapleford Hall, near Melton

Mowbray, Leicestershire, was created 1st Earl of Harborough in 1719. Lord Harborough, whose family had previously only been ennobled in the Irish peerage, was Lord-Lieutenant of Rutland during Queen Anne’s rule until the ministerial crisis of 1712. In 1714, Harborough’s support for the Hanoverians was rewarded by George I by being bumped up into the English peerage, and as

Croker cattily remarks, ‘the title, in failure of issue male, was settled on his cousin, a singular provision in the case of a man not above thirty-seven years of age... The allusions to Lord

Harborough’s gallantry are frequent in the letters of the day’.511 It would be easy to infer from this interpretation, as from any first-hand impression of Lady Hervey’s jest on virginity, that

Harborough showed no public interest in sexuality.

The truth, or at least a nearer approximate hypothesis of the complexities of Lord

Harborough’s life history, differs from Croker’s account. Whatever his later reputation for being uninterested in women might have been – and it is difficult to confirm this assertion in published correspondences – Lord Harborough was married and had at least one child. Mary, Lady

Harborough was daughter and heiress of Sir Henry Calverely of Eylham, Durham. In 1696, after

Mary’s mother sold secondary estates belonging to the Calverleys to raise her dowry, she married Lord Harborough in the Henry VIII chapel at Westminster.512 The marriage brought

Lord Harborough considerable extra income. The new Lady Harborough’s large portrait by Sir

Godfrey Kneller (Fig. 7.4), likely dating to the same year, was owned briefly by Philip Mould, a prominent art dealer in London. Mould believes the painting is a wedding portrait, which was the

Sympathy: Gender, Law and the British Novel, ed. by Martha Nussbaum and Alison Lacroix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 65 – 83 (p. 71). 511 Croker, Letters to and From Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, p. 345. 512 Andrew David Hedderwick Trollope, An Inventory of the Church Plate in Leicestershire, with Some Acount of the Donors (Leicester: Clarke and Hodgson, 1890), p. 141 – 142.

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usual time that young women in her position sat for such large, lavishly-coloured and expensive portraits.513 She was then only eighteen.

Figure 7.4. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Mary Calverley Sherard, Countess of Harborough (d.1702), oil on canvas, 1270 x 1020 cm, Philip Mould Historical Portraits, London.

513 Philip Mould, ‘Portraits by Sir Godfrey Kneller,’ http://www.historicalportraits.com/Gallery.asp?Page=Item&ItemID=1092&Desc=Mary-Calverley-%7C-Sir- Godfrey-Kneller-Bt. [accessed 1 February 2012]

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Lady Harborough’s portrait is an exemplar of the achievements of Kneller’s studio at the end of the seventeenth century. Its appearance shows striking signs of Francophilia, most notably in the choices of the colour palette, which stresses the newly fashionable colour pink through the swirling robes of the sitter. The robes, vivacious and sensual, heighten the pink accents of the landscape in the right background, traces of which are also observable striking the outside of the stone ledge on which Lady Harborough rests one elegant hand, elongated fingers fashionably outstretched. British conventions of portraiture, established under van Dyck and Lely and continued by Kneller in his influential depictions of powerful female figures, like the Duchess of

Marlborough, are of course adhered to in this portrait. It is however the manner in which they are conveyed that shows, unusual in the vast studio-assisted output of Kneller, traces of new innovation and a response to aesthetic developments among French society portraitists.

Kneller, with his allegiances to the Kit-Kat club and the Whig party, was not an avant- garde figure when it came to adoption of new modes of portraiture. French painters associated with the switch from Baroque to Rococo forms, like Nicolas de Largillière, did however visit

England for extended periods of time during Kneller’s working lifetime. Largillière, whose work is associated with exactly the same kind of delicate, pink-hued sensuality as seen in Lady

Harborough’s portrait, was in England from 1679 to 1683 and again during 1685 to 1686.514

Largillière was a rising star at the French Academy in the decade following his return to France, and he made ample use of the French court’s taste for rose-coloured pigments, which peaked in popularity around the early years of the 1720s, declining afterwards, until it was re-popularized by artists like François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Historian Robin Nicholson has

514 For Largillière’s English career, see Dominique Brême, Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot, and Jean-Pierre Babelon, Nicolas de Largillierre: 1656 –1746, exh cat. (Paris: Phileas Fogg for the Musée Jacquemart-André, 200 ), p. 16. Edward T. Corp, A Court in Exile: the Stuarts in France, 1689 – 1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 182; Robin Nicholson, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Making of a Myth: A Study in Portraiture, 1720 – 1892 (Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, 2002), p. 25.

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pointed out how Largillière’s portraiture marked a crucial stylistic transition from Baroque to

Rococo modes of representation, stressing the softness, sensuality and eclecticism of early eighteenth-century . After his return to France, Largillière continued to be patronized by English Catholic gentry visiting Paris.515 Influential art historian Ellis Waterhouse also commented on the popularity of French portraitists for the English elite during this time, noting several of Hyacinth Rigaud’s sitters were also in touch with Kneller. Waterhouse’s account, like much of his work, is very biased: he calls portraiture the work of ‘a mere face-painter’, and fails to understand how Anne and George I’s anti-French political position in no way influenced the

Hanoverian court’s admiration for French art.516

Kneller’s portrait of Mary, Lady Harborough is thus responding to the new mode for vivacious, brightly-coloured portraits that used the pink and rose light of early French Rococo painting. Kneller himself was an émigré artist. In contrast to his art historical memory, which stresses the homogeneity and repetitiveness of his format, the Harborough portrait does show the artist as in touch with developments in the French art market and personally responsive to the inspiration of a particularly engaging client. The quiet charm of the rose palette is appropriate for a springtime portrait, intended to evoke the time of the wedding. Lord and Lady Harborough lived together for six years at Stapleford Hall, near the village of Whissendine, Leceistershire,

515 See Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott, Catholic Gentry in English society: the Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 191. 516 See Ellis K. Waterhouse, ‘English Painting and France in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 15: 3/4 (1952), 122 – 135 (p. 124). Early eighteenth-century French art historiography can hold a similar national biases :see Brême, Nicolas de Largillierre, ‘Ainsi, le peintre français occupait encore assez le mémoire des aristocrates anglais pour que ceux-ci fissent appel à lui peu après l’avénement de Jacques II, en février 1685. Il est vrai que Lely était mort en 1680 et que la jeune génération des portraitistes anglais manquait peut-être un peu de cette élégance qui avait fait son succès. Sir Godrey Kneller (1646 –1723), particuliérement, qui allait devenir premier peintre du roi en 1688 e le demeurer toute sa vie, faisait preuve de moins d'originalité que ses devanciers’, p. 33.

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which descendants of the Sherard family owned until 1867 (the village is described as having a

‘fine blue clay’, which encouraged agriculture). 517

Lady Harborough died in childbirth in 1702, at the age of twenty-four. Her portrait was displayed prominently at Stapleford for another six or seven generations, a period of some 185 years. The object thus preserved her memory and some trace of her identity at the home of later

Lord Harboroughs throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Stapleford was built on the old agglutinative model, where successive wings of the house were attached in a somewhat ramshackle manner to each other, although subsequent owners radically remodeled the house

Lord and Lady Harborough knew.518 The old wing of Stapleford had been built in 1633, and was added to by Harborough’s father, c. 1670, to form an H-Range wing: this is the core structure that would have been familiar to the couple. Written descriptions of the place are glowing, and a typical entry describes Stapleford Hall as ‘a fine ancient mansion, in a beautiful park of 8 0 acres’, situated on top of a hill and enjoying magnificent views over the neighbouring prospect.

519 One of the reports of Harborough at Stapleford stresses the convivial atmosphere found there. John Perceval, visiting the house in 1701, recollected that ‘the entertainment we met with here was singularly good, for the family pique themselves upon eating and drinking well… [Lord

Harborough] is very much a gentleman’.520 Mary, Lady Harborough’s infant son, also called

Bennet, at whose birth in May of 1702 she died, survived her by only a few months, and, significantly for Croker’s input on this entry, her husband never remarried.

517 John Wesley Judd and Robert Etheridge, The Geology of Rutland and the parts of Lincoln, Leicester, Northhampton, Huntingdon, and Cambridge (London: Longmans and Co., 1875), p. 64. 518Anthony Emery, Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300 –1500. Vol. 2:East Anglia, Central England, and Wales (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 305. 519 William White, History, Gazetteer and Directory of Leceistershire (Sheffield: R. Leader, 1846), p. 260. 520 Sir John Perceval, later Viscount Perceval, wrote that ‘old Lord Sherard has been dead about a year, and has left a son who is very much a gentleman’, in A. A. Hanham, ‘Sherard, Bennet,’ The House of Commons: 1690 – 1715, Volume V: Members O – Z (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the History of Parliament Trust, 2002), p. 467.

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Sherard remained attached to the memory of his late wife for the rest of his life. As a single peer of rank and fortune, he was a heady matrimonial target for those calculating a business and political advancement for their family. While Croker’s analysis is lacking sensitivity, he does raise the point that it was unusual for a peer to remain unmarried in early or even late middle age. Lord

Harborough did receive considerable pressure from his colleagues to remarry, and in the summer of 1709, he was ‘expected to marry one of the daughters of Sir John Brownlow, a match urged upon him by his drinking partner, the Earl of Exeter, who had married

Brownlow’s eldest daughter. The marriage never took place, however.’521 At his death in Figure 7.5. Michael Rysbrack, Monument to Bennett Sherard (d.1732), Mary Calverley Sherard (d.1702) and 1732, the Earl provided money to his sister, their infant son (d.1702), 1732, marble, Stapleford, Leicestershire. Lucy, the Duchess of Rutland, to commission a tomb sculpture in the nearby church of St. Mary Magdalene at Stapleford, at a cost of three hundred pounds.522 The resulting monument to Lord and Lady Harborough with their infant son is Michael Rysbrack’s striking tour de force of neoclassical tomb statuary (Fig. 7.5). Rysbrack, like Kneller, clearly found inspiration in the memory of Lady Harborough, even using the

521 Ibid., p. 467. 522 Trollope, An Inventory of the Church Plate in Leicestershire, p. 141 – 142.

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Kneller portrait of 1696 on which to base his likeness.523 As Mould notes, ‘Mary not only looks exactly like Kneller’s Mary, but shares the same facial archetype as the majority of Kneller’s subjects. The sculptor must have used the present picture as his model.’ 524 Lord Harborough himself is in Roman dress, and the whirling draperies of his cloak, like his feet, reach down and over the tomb register to convey a maximum source of plasticity and motion. He reclines against a cushion, reaching out to the figure of his wife in grief. 525

Croker’s easy jokes about Lord Harborough are difficult to understand. His want of gallantry seems easily explained as a widower who, in strong contrast to the behavior of many of his own peers, including his own brother-in-law, was devoted to the memory of his late wife. 526

Emotional trauma is not easy to ascertain without direct written evidence, but it is at least a working hypothesis that Sherard’s rejection of any form of public courtship or sexuality was related to this biographical incident. This context also helps to explain details of his character that have puzzled or eluded other scholars. For example, in a letter dated 25 October 1731,

Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (of Wesleyan Methodist fame), mentioned Harborough in a letter to Lady Stafford. Lady Huntingdon’s biographer Alan Harding points out that ‘she did find

523 Ibid., p. 142. 524 Mould, ‘Portraits by Sir Godfrey Kneller’, par. . 525 For more on tomb monuments for elite English women who died in childbirth, see Judith W. Hurtig, ‘Death in Childbirth: Seventeenth-Century English Tombs and Their Place in Contemporary Thought’, The Art Bulletin, 65: 4 (Dec., 1983), 603 – 615. 526 John Manners, the 2nd Duke of Rutland, who by his second wife Lucy was brother-in-law to Bennett Sherard, had married, as his first wife, Catherine Russell, daughter of Lady Rachel Russell of Woburn Abbey, with whom he had nine children, and who died on October 31, 1711. In a manuscript once held at Woburn Abbey, Lady Rady Russell writes, in August of 1712, to the Earl of Galway, that she has ‘for some weeks, often resolved, and as soon unresolved, if I would or would not engage upon a subject I cannot speak to without some emotion’, and then remarks that she has had some unpleasant questions to answer by women who visited her, all of whom wanted to know ‘Whether or not the D. of R_ had not fixed on a second choice? Perhaps, as proper to call it the first, for when marriages are so very early, ‘tis accepting rather than choosing, on either side.’ In point of fact, the Duke had in fact already proposed to Lucy Sherard, and while Lady Russell is distressed as to the timing – ‘a decency in time was all I expected’ – she gives credit to the Duke for making concrete provisions for his children with her daughter before remarrying the woman he seems to have always wanted in the first place, both the Sherard and Manners families being intimately acquainted through the proximity of their estates and political interests. Lucy Sherard and John Manners were married on the 1st of January, 1712 -3. See Rachel Russell and Thomas Selwood, Letters of Lady Rachel Russell: From the Manuscript at Woburn Abbey (London: E. C. Dilly, 1773), p. 225, 226.

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it necessary to warn her friend’ not to flirt with him, for she writes not to ‘coquete it with Lord

Harborough, for I shall keep him to myself’.527 Given the context of Croker’s joke, and indeed

Lady Hervey’s original jest on virginity, Huntingdon was probably indulging in similar humour, pointing out the unlikeliness of this devoted widower paying her any serious sexual attention.

Conclusion

By using real works of visual art, such as the Chauveau engraving, Kneller’s portrait of Lady

Harborough, and the Dutch marriage portraits, to ‘interrogate’ or criticize three of Lady Hervey’s entries from the imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, early Georgian attitudes towards marriage and socially reified modes of sexual morality are given an enhanced reading. Early eighteenth- century mortuary portraiture in England for example could carry a wide range of cultural traditions. In the Harborough instance, the posthumously commissioned tomb represents the commemorative funerary form of the monument itself, with its Etruscan pedigree and legacy bequeathed by classical Rome, and is also informed by the Francophile British portrait that was probably used as a model, as it is the Flemish legacy of Rubens via the monument’s creator,

Antwerp-born émigré sculptor (John) Michael Rysbrack, who was patronized by English aristocrats like the Harboroughs. No wonder nationalist art historiographers like Walpole, Fry,

Waterhouse, Rothenstein and Einberg were squeamish about early eighteenth century British visual art. England was eagerly commissioning, buying and translating a plethora of continental visual sources, reworking and re-hammering imported styles into a new and unique synthesis of previously disparate cultural repertoires. Kneller’s painted portraits and Rysbrack’s commemorative sculptural portraiture were part of the same continuum, where the uniquely

527 Selina Hastings to Lady Stafford, 25 October 1731, in Alan Harding, The Countess of Huntingdon’s ‘Connexion’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press for Oxford Theological Monographs, 2003), p. 25.

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cosmopolitan milieu of the English setting allowed for this unique synthesis of sources and styles.

Kneller’s ‘homogenous’ or ‘repetitive’ court beauties is often devalued in British art history for their perceived aesthetic flaws, such as the artist’s use of many assistants and copyists in one studio or the stylistic similarity and formal characteristics in that studio’s output of female likenesses. Lady Harborough’s portrait by Kneller is however an emotionally poignant and culturally hybrid art object, one that shows traces of solidarity with the work of French portraitists like Largillière. Long after her death, Lady Harborough’s memory continued to inspire her bereaved husband with devotion that was commemorated on the grand scale through

Rysbrack’s mortuary sculptures, and the Kneller portrait, likely used by Rysbrack as a model, was in some senses ‘reproduced’ or replicated within the resulting tomb monument.

Portrait and monument are thus linked in dialogue with each other, and that dialogue enables Lady Hervey’s dismissive treatment of Harborough to be challenged and interrogated.

Her attitude to Harborough as expressed in her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ certainly seems callous when informed by the circumstances of Lady Harborough’s life history, just as the

Victorian critic’s occlusion of the word ‘Maidenhead’ by use of the word ‘Virgin’ seems prurient when compared with the contemporary interest in sexual expression and the free interchange of sexual knowledge. Something of this callousness towards the business of childbirth, and towards the biological dangers that were inherent in reproduction, is perhaps best explained by the Toft scandal. The credibility of the (male) doctors, their obsessive interest with Toft’s reproductive capabilities and the perceived futility of scientific observation in the fact of human deception were all issues at stake in the Toft trial, and the images, newspaper reports, songs, broadsheets and poems created by her case publicized these wider issues. By expressing a hardened attitude

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towards the rigours of childbirth, Lady Hervey moved away from the difficult reality of early eighteenth century women’s lives. Instead, through referencing La Fontaine’s fable and thus probably the Tofts case, she uses language that constructs a much more flippant attitude towards marriage, childbearing and family life. The entire picture suggested by these three case studies is of a cynical attitude towards marriage and towards the cold medical reality of childbearing where heterosexual marriage was the only socially accepted form of sexual expression, and where lives spent in a constant cycle of were sometimes, such as in Lady Harborough’s case, terminated tragically early.

Harborough’s personal tragedy was by no means rare, but Lady Hervey’s joke on him suggests his reaction was unusual enough to provoke commentary and a somewhat cruel humour.

Lord Harborough’s life-long attachment to the memory of his wife, however it may have prejudiced his relationship on the ‘marriage market’, is the real emotional value that invests both the Kneller portrait and the Rysbrack monument with such depth and breadth of meaning. This emotional depth is matched by an iconographic richness. In the Rysbrack monument, Mary herself sits upright with her infant son on her knee, draped in the stola, or pleated dress worn over a slip, that was the customary clothing for women in ancient Rome. Rysbrack’s treatment of

Mary Sherard and her son is described by Margaret Whinney as ‘inherently Flemish, rather than

Italian, and suggests that Rysbrack, perhaps unconsciously, had Rubens’ treatment of the

Madonna and Child firmly imprinted on his mind’.528 Intersections between biography, gender and art render the circumstances of Bennett Sherard, Lord Harborough’s life history considerably more poignant than either Croker or Lady Hervey’s callous treatment of him warrants.

528 Margaret Whinney, Sculpture in Britain, 1530 – 1830 (London, 2nd edition of 1988: repr. of Pelican Books, 1988), p. 177.

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Chapter Eight: ‘Jupiter and Ganymede’: Homosexuality and Art at the early Georgian Court

While aristocratic women at the early Georgian court were reluctant to speak openly about heterosexual sexualities, references to homosexuality in their letters, diaries and memoirs are even rarer. The subject was not thought appropriate for ‘polite’ conversation. In the pamphlet A

Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel, Intitled Sedition and Defamation Display’d, published

January 1731, William Pulteney attacked Lord Hervey for his alleged homosexuality. I discuss this more fully in the next chapter, but one section of the text exemplifies elite attitudes to the subject.

You seem, pretty Sir, to take the word Corruption in a limited sense and confine it to the corruptor. Give me leave to illustrate this by a parallel case – there is a certain, unnatural, reigning vice (indecent and almost shocking to mention)… It is well known that there must be two parties in this crime, the Pathick and the Agent, both equally guilty. I need not explain these any further.529

‘Indecent and almost shocking to mention’, the sheer existence of male homosexuality seriously troubled early eighteenth-century concepts of sex, morality and ethics. Lady Hervey’s reference to ‘Jupiter and Ganymede, after the Italian manner’ is however an explicit reference to same-sex male eroticism. Mythologies of national character rejected the fact that homosexual behaviour among men sprang from within or that it was part of the natural continuum of human sexual behaviour. Instead, social and sexual discourses in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century

England and France consistently attributed to Italian cultural influence the existence of ‘queer’ sexualities among men. Reluctant even to discuss deviant forms of heterosexuality, such as the rape trial of Francis Charteris (which he says ‘needs no explanation’), the Victorian critic Croker avoids any comment on this entry in his analysis of Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of

529 William Pulteney, A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel, Entitled Sedition and Defamation Display’d (London: Richard Francklin, 20 January 1731), p. 15.

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pictures’. To return to Croker’s text: his silence is telling. By refusing to discuss queer content,

Croker maintains a tradition of deliberately erasing and eradicating same-sex eroticism from the historical record. The textual overtones of Lady Hervey’s mention of homosexuality in this manuscript are therefore of contemporary political relevance and import. Their interpretation necessarily re-inserts, and reclaims, a queer presence back into narratives of cultural history from this period.530

This list of imaginary pictures does not stand alone, self-evident and self-revealing, but was written during the time that Lady Hervey’s husband was on an extended trip to Italy in the company of the younger man many speculated was his lover (the sexual nature of their relationship is hinted at in their surviving correspondences and explicitly stated in opposition political propaganda and satirical poetry from the time).531 Lady Hervey stayed secluded at

Ickworth during this period, craving the stimulating society of the absent court. In that context, the sheer mention of the ‘Jupiter and Ganymede after the Italian manner’ makes this reference one of the most overt, compelling and even blatant references to male homosexuality by an eighteenth-century Lady-in-waiting. In what follows, I use the life history of Charles Talbot, 1st

Duke of Shrewsbury (1660 – 1718) to interrogate the gendered, explicitly queer associations

530 For relevant examples of queer-focused cultural history, see Randolph Trumbach, ‘London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behaviour and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Journal of Social History, 11 (1977), 1 – 13, and also Idem, Sex and the gender revolution. Vol. 1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998); George Haggerty, ‘Literature and Homosexuality in the late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis’, Studies in the Novel, 18: 4 (1986), 167 – 177; Sexual underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York and London: Harrington Park, 1989), John Thomas Rowland, ‘Swords in myrtle dress’d’ : Toward a Rhetoric of Sodom: Gay Readings of Homosexual Politics and Poetics in the Eighteenth Century (Madison : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998); Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700 –1830 (2nd edn, Stroud, Gloucestershire : Chalford Press, 2006); Thomas Alan King, The Gendering of Men, 1600 –1750: Volume 2, Queer Articulations (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). 531 See Eric Weichel, ‘ “Fixed by so much better a fire”: Wigs and Masculinity in early Eighteenth-Century British Miniatures’. Shift: Queen's Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, 1 (Autumn, 2008), 1 – 25.

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drawn at the early eighteenth-century British court between male homosexual behavior and the

‘Italian manner’ in visual art. Shrewsbury is worth examining for many reasons, but among the most important include his family’s sexual history, which serves as an (extreme) example of moral and sexual behavior among the late seventeenth-century British court aristocracy. His wife’s Italian heritage – as well as his own role as an art connoisseur and classical scholar – also suggests an immediate association between Italian painting and ‘Italian’ or queer sexualities.

Shrewsbury was a leading courtier par excellence, and while he had died by the time Lady

Hervey wrote her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, his Bolognese wife Adelaide was a key colleague of both Lady Hervey and Henrietta Howard as one of Caroline’s early Ladies-in- waiting and was also herself only recently deceased (the Duchess of Shrewsbury died in 1726).

Modern scholars of eighteenth century social history have also remarked on Shrewsbury’s reputation as for same-sex eroticism, and outside of Lord Hervey himself, Shrewsbury is the highest-profile example of an early Georgian courtier whose sexual behaviour can be read as queer. By examining Shrewsbury’s upbringing, marriage and performance of gender, and by reading this entry in Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ in tandem with the history of Shrewsbury’s court career, I explore the linkages between homosexuality and visual art in the cultural milieu of Queen Caroline’s Ladies-in-waiting.

‘A Jupiter and Ganymede after the Italian Manner by Lord --- ’

This unpublished reference to male homosexuality is the only known mention of the subject in

Lady Hervey’s correspondence, either preserved physically as primary source documents in an archive collection, such as in this case, or known or inferred second-hand through printed ephemera and biographies. That it exists at all is surprising, given how infrequently the subject is referenced in extant elite female writing from the period and additionally because of her

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husband’s subsequent notoriousness for his relationship with at least two male courtiers. Lord

Hervey and his friends Stephen Fox, later 1st Earl of Ilchester, and Viscount William Bateman were part of a circle or ‘coterie’ of Whig courtiers who were well-known for intensely homosocial relationships, some of which were almost certainly sexualized.532 The Whig aristocrats were committed to the radical espousal of Protestant Christian ethics and norms of behavior, which specifically prohibited homosexual behavior, but their own internal standards of sexual tolerance allowed some individuals, such as Lord Hervey and the Duke of Shrewsbury, room to negotiate queer identities.533 These identities were commemorated and celebrated through the adoption of certain Greco-Roman iconographic tropes, such as that of ‘Jupiter and

Ganymede’.

Charles, 1st Duke of Shrewsbury was a foundational figure in Whig politics. Born into a

Catholic family, the young Shrewsbury had converted to Anglicanism soon after achieving his majority. While loyal to James II during the peasant-backed Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, he soon fell out with the King over controversial pro-Catholic religious policies. Shrewsbury was a major financial backer behind the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9, mortgaging his estates and fleeing to Holland to directly contribute over twelve thousand pounds to the movement, a shrewd, if risky decision.534 Shrewsbury’s early show of loyalty to the Whig cause insured him

532 See Eric Weichel, ‘ “Fixed by so much better a fire”: Wigs and Masculinity in early Eighteenth-Century British Miniatures’, Shift: Queen's Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, 1 (Autumn, 2008), 1 – 25. 533 For an example of Whig tolerance of queer masculine identity on the London stage, see David L. Oris, ‘ “Old Sodom” and “Dear Dad”: Vanbrugh's Celebration of the Sodomitical Subject in The Relapse’, Journal of Homosexuality, 57:1 (December 2009), 140 – 162. 534 Steven C. A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2009), p. 232.

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significant political capital, as during the years that followed, he was showered with high- ranking, lucrative political and court appointments.535

No small part of Shrewsbury’s political career was based on his own performance of aristocratic masculinity, in which a strikingly handsome face and body was linked to a charm of manner conceded even by his political opponents.536 Gentleness, charisma, elegance and gracefulness are recurring motifs in the letters that describe him, even from James II, who was under Shrewsbury’s direct supervision when he was allowed to escape to France from Rochester

House.537 William III, rather unsurprisingly given his homosocial proclivities for handsome young men, such as William Bentinck and Arnold van Keppel, was charmed by the young

Shrewsbury and kept him continually close by. Queen Anne was similarly delighted by

Shrewsbury’s cultivated conversation and polished address, appointing him Lord Chamberlain in

1710.538

By the early eighteenth century, the office of Lord Chamberlain, titular head of the sprawling Royal Household, was no longer merely an administrative position. The job guaranteed day-by-day proximity to the sovereign, meaning the office was effectively a political one, a ministerial position that changed as civil governments rose and fell.539 It also had a

535 Stuart Handley, ‘Talbot, Charles, duke of Shrewsbury (1660–1718)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/26922. [accessed May 2009] 536 See The Hibernian magazine, or, Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge (Dublin: , January 178 ), p. 11. James II recorded that, in contrast to some of his peers (notably Lord Halifax), Talbot was ‘very fair and civil, and agreed to the King’s desire’. See James Stuart, ‘Extracts from the Life of James II, as written by Himself’, in Original Papers, Containing the Secret History of Great Britain, from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hanover, ed. by James Macpherson (London: W. Strahan, 1775), p. 168. 537 Thomas Cecil Nicholson and Arthur Stanley Turberville, Charles Talbot Duke of Shrewsbury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p. 31; Thomas Babington Macaulay, The history of England from the accession of James II (New York: Harper and Bros, 1856), p. 244. 538 See Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 311. 539 For description of the Lord Chamberlain’s office and responsibilities as it evolved over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (much of which applies to the late Stuart period as well), see Geoffrey Hughes, An

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cultural aspect, reflecting on the Lord Chamberlain’s position as executive head of the Office of

Revels, responsible for supplying court entertainments and for the censorship of plays.540 After the accession of George I, Shrewsbury retained this position through to 1715, and after he relinquished it also retained his court appointment of Groom of the Stole, another office that referenced his role as a trusted confidante of the monarch, until his death in 1718.541 Shrewsbury was thus a leading member of the court when Lady Hervey first took up her appointment as a

Maid of Honour (in 1715), and she would have known and worked with him during her first three years in Caroline’s employ.

Shrewsbury’s role as an art patron, connoisseur, collector and cultural arbitrator par excellence has not received much critical attention.542 For all his impeccably anti-French political activities in the national arena, the Duke of Shrewsbury was, like most of the senior courtiers at St. James, a cultural Francophile. In his adolescence, Shrewsbury spent years of prestigious training at the French Academy, where he was taught with the sons of the haute noblesse not only to hunt, ride, shoot and dance but to draw, paint, play music, write, and study

Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharp, 2006), pp. 298 – 300; Pam Wright, ‘A change in direction: the ramifications of a female household, 1558-160 ’, in The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. by David Starkey (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 147 – 172 (pp. 153, 154); Leeds Barroll, ‘Shakespeare, nobile patrons, and “common” playing’, in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. by Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 90 – 124 (pp. 107, 108). 540 John Christopher Sainty, Officials of the Royal Household, 1660 –1837: Department of the Lord Chamberlain and Associated Offices (London: University of London, Institute of Historical Research, 1997), p. xxii. 541 See A History of England in the Lives of Englishmen, vol. 4, ed. by George Godfrey Cunningham (London and Edinburgh: A. Fullarton and Co., 1853), p. 89. 542 See Charles Talbot, Private and Original Correspondence of Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, ed. by William Coxe (London: Longman and Co., 1821); Dorothy H. Somerville, The King of Hearts: Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962); D. Szechi, ‘The duke of Shrewsbury's contacts with the Jacobites in 171 ’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 56 (1983), 229 – 2; Clive Jones, ‘The impeachment of the earl of Oxford and the whig schism of 1717: four new lists’, in Peers, politics and power: the , 1603 –1911, ed. by Clive Jones and D. L. Jones (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), pp. 185 – 206; and J. C. Grayson and Wouter Troost, William III the Stadholder-King: A Political Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 221 – 224, 230, 290.

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the classics.543 MacCauley famously wrote that he spoke French like one of the gentlemen of

Louis XIV’s bedchamber, and indeed part of his success as a career courtier resulted from his ability to project the persona of the consummate gentleman. Shrewsbury was a key player in the complicated honour system that bound the Whig oligarchs together in shared systems of sexual, financial and political trust.544 His early acquaintance with leading representatives of the French nobility would serve him in good stead in several key government positions, including the

Embassy to France that he headed in 1713.545

Shrewsbury’s Family History

Due to their sexual and sexualized activities, the Duke of Shrewsbury and his family were under constant public scrutiny. Shrewsbury’s father died while he was only seven years old, from wounds acquired in a bloody duel with George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, then living openly with Shrewsbury’s mother Anna. The memoirist Grammont called Anna Talbot a woman who men would kill each other over and yet she would ‘hold her head higher’, while popular

London rumour whispered she was present, disguised as a page holding one of Buckingham’s horses, at the duel where her husband was mortally wounded.546 After Shrewsbury’s father’s death, Anna was installed in Buckingham’s London residence, Wallingford House, ousting

Buckingham’s legal wife and shortly thereafter bearing his illegitimate child, which he recognized and respected. The publicity of this adulterous relationship scandalized London society, leading the family of the then-thirteen year old Shrewsbury to take the unusual step of

543 See Stuart Handley, ‘Talbot, Charles’, par. (Pass dated 1 September 1676). 544 Macaulay, The history of England, p. 244. 545 See Cunningham, History of England, p. 90. 546 Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of Count Grammont, ed. by Sir Walter Scott (London: Worthington, 1889 edition), p. 225. The full quote is ‘I would take a wager she might have a man killed for her every day, and she would only hold her head the higher because of it’, in the context of a general discussion of the promiscuity of British court women.

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petitioning the House of Lords to directly intervene, and to make the private affairs of these individuals the moral business of the nation-state. 547 By act of Parliament, Buckingham was forbidden, on pain of a 10 000 pound fine, to ever again cohabit or communicate with

Shrewsbury’s mother.548

Both Anna Talbot and her father, the Earl of Cardigan, found reason to join the young

Shrewsbury in Paris later on that year, where Anna went into nominal retirement at an aristocratic convent. She was soon actively asserting herself to return to the English court;

Shrewsbury had to lobby his elder Talbot relations, who served as his trustees, to withdraw their objections to her return to public life.549 Following her remarriage to an Englishman of some property, and likely responding to the entreaties of the teenaged Earl, the Talbots did eventually let the matter drop.550 Shrewsbury himself rapidly became no stranger to public scrutiny of his sexual morals, as the Anglican divine widely held accountable for his conversion to

Protestantism, James Tillotson, felt obliged to publicly reprove his young and politically valuable protégé’s ‘dissolute lifestyle’ in October of 1679.551

Shrewsbury therefore came out of a background of extreme sexual dissidence to normative behavior of the time, and was himself criticized for similar (although less wildly sensational) sexual extremes throughout his life. During the joint reign of William and Mary, for

547 The infant subsequently died, and was interred, to great public outcry, in the Villiers family vault in . 548 See George Villiers and Christine Phipps, Buckingham, Public and Private Man: The Prose, Poems and Commonplace Book (New York: Garland, 1985). 549 Nicholson and Tuberville, Charles Talbot, p. 10. 550 Charles II himself had to personally intervene before Catherine of Braganza consented to receive such a flagrant femme fatale. See Mary Louisa Boyle, Biographical Catalogue of the Portraits at Longleat in the County of Wiltshire, Seat of the Marquis of Bath (London: Elliot Stock, 1881), pp. 337 – 339; Catherine McLeod and Julia Marciari, Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II (London and New Haven: National Portrait Gallery for the ale Center for British Art, 2001), p. 2 0. ‘Lady Shaftesbury hath bin by the King’s absolute command received by the Queene, who did beg itt of her’, Lady Chasworth to Lord Roos, 19 December 1677, in Nicholson and Tuberville, Charles Talbot, p. 11. 551 Stuart Handley, ‘Talbot, Charles’, par. 4.

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example, the new Queen’s flirtatious relationship was noticed, but was later satirized for providing to both individuals what Dennis Rubini calls ‘frontal homosexual cover’.552 Following

Mary II’s death of in 1692, the exclusively masculinized nature of the court, and King

William’s lavish grants of Irish lands to his male favourites Portland and Keppel, created international attention. Lisolette, Duchess of Orleans, was asked if the court of England had become a ‘chateau de derriere’. The Duchess herself was not squeamish about the matter, considering that her own husband, the younger brother of Louis XIV, was famous for his male lovers and was openly discussed as ‘the best-placed sodomite in Europe’.553 Shrewsbury, a single bachelor long past the normal age at which men married, was one of the most prominent members of William’s masculinized court. Two years before William’s death, Shrewsbury was also directly implicated in a homosexual scandal.

The Rigby Trial

In late 1698, officers from the Society for Reformation of Morals, an informal network of censorious citizens determined to prevent the spread of bawdy houses and profanity, succeeded in entrapping a prominent naval Captain, Edward Rigby, in a homosexual intrigue with a nineteen-year old clergyman’s servant, William Minton.554 Rigby, who had been put in command of the fireship Mermaid in 1693, was at this time an officer of the H.M.S. Dragon, a forty-gun man of war.555 Like many naval officers, Rigby came from a well-to-do family and had

552 Dennis Rubini, ‘Review: Robert Harley, Speaker, Secretary of State and Premier Minister by Brian Hill’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 21: 4 (Winter, 1989), 635 – 639 (p. 637). 553 Jennifer M. Jones, quoting Elisabeth-Charlotte of Palatine, in Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), pp. 57, 58. 554 For the activities of the Society in a ‘straight’ context, see Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘Policing Male Heterosexuality: The Reformation of Manners Societies’ Campaign against the Brothels in Westminster, 1690-1720’, Journal of Social History, 37: 4 (Summer, 2004), 1017 – 1035. 555 See Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 38; William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present (repr.

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added to his personal wealth throughout his career. William Minton was approached by Rigby in

St. James’ Park on Guy Fawkes Night of 1698, and some sort of sexual encounter seems to have taken place between the two young men, after which Minton had a crise de foi and approached his master for guidance.556

Minton’s master was a parishioner of one of the Society for Reformation’s trustees, who used the young man to lure Rigby to a back room in the George tavern, near Pall Mall. Once

Minton had succeeded in stripping an eager Rigby of most of his clothes, he gave a signal to the waiting police secreted in the next room, and Rigby was immediately arrested. He was subsequently sentenced to a year in prison, fined 1000 pounds, and made to stand in the pillories closest to the George (Pall Mall, Charing Cross, and Temple Bar). Rigby, who could very well have been killed by the mob during his sentence in the pillories, fled to France before he could be committed permanently to prison, became a Roman Catholic, and re-embarked on a highly successful naval career in France.557

London: Chatham Press for the Naval Insitute Press, 1996 [1898]), p. 5 1. Clowes mentions, n.2, that Rigby ‘had been convicted of a detestable crime’. See also John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and ‘Early Enlightenment’ Europe (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 460, 461. 556 See Rictor Norton, ‘The Trial of Capt. Edward Rigby, 1698’, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook (15 June 2005), http://www.rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/rigby.htm [accessed 29 May 2011]. See also Cook et al., A Gay History of Britain, pp. 72 – 74; Patricia U. Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America (Chapel Hill : Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 137. 557 Rigby, in a rare case of compassion, seems not to have been molested by the mob: see Waltraud M. Jacob, Lay People and Religion in the early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 133. For pillory violence against queer men, see John Bartlett, ‘Sodomites in the Pillory in Eighteenth Century London’, Social and Legal Studies 6: 4 (1997), 553 – 572; Emma Griffin, ‘The “urban renaissance” and the mob: Rethinking Civic Improvement over the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, ed. by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 54 – 73 (p. 67). Rigby was captured again during a later British-French naval conflict, but escaped, for the second time, at Port Mohun. See Rictor Norton, ‘The Gay Subculture in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, The Gay Subculture in Georgian England. Updated 15 June 2008 , http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/molly2.htm [accessed12 November 2011]

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Shrewsbury seems to have either known Rigby or been implicated in the circle of homosexually active men Rigby frequented. While there is some confusion over dating, several letters of James Vernon to Shrewsbury in December 1698 specifically mention the trial and humiliation of a military officer, almost certainly Rigby, which resulted in Shrewsbury’s resigning the seals of Secretary of State the next day. Rubini believes that ‘sodomy was probably not the key factor in Shrewsbury’s decision, but at the very least it appears to have been the last straw’.558 Rigby’s comparatively high social standing had raised the profile of same-sex eroticism in elite circles, and drawn public attention to the existence of a thriving underground queer community. In response, the government arrested dozens of men suspected of homosexual activity, most of them of lower-class social status. The newspapers at the time were full of the

‘Buggery’ trials of 10 – 1 December of that year, and Shrewsbury’s resignation coincided with the publicity of the trials.559 The seething feedback loop of prejudices, ignorance and hatred known today as ‘homosexual panic’, fueled by the early workings of a nascent popular press, may have meant it was no longer safe or wise for Shrewsbury to continue in his post.560 Other men were not so lucky: The Flying Post and The Post-Boy of 20 December 1698 both carry reports of a servant who ‘putting himself in women’s apparel, went up again to his bed, and laid himself athwart it, and cut his own throat’, showing something of the stresses faced by queer

British men at that particular moment in history.561 In his review of a biography of the statesman

558 See Rubini, ‘Review: Robert Harley’, p. 6 7. 559 See Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 134. 560 For the concept of ‘homosexual panic’, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, ‘The Beast in the Closet: James and the writing of homosexual panic’, in Speaking of Gender, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 243 – 268; Maeve M. McMahon, The Persistant Prison: Rethinking Decarceration and Penal Reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), esp. pp. 159 – 163; Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market (Athens, OH : Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 6; David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: the Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 56, 98, 106, 216 – 219. 561 See also The Flying Post (20 December 1698), in Rictor Norton, ‘The Trial of Edward Rigby’, par. 1 .

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Robert Harley, Dennis Rubini, building on Randolph Trumbach’s model of transitional masculine queer sexualities, where the earlier elite societal tolerance of bisexuality gave way to a panic about exclusively homosexual individuals, hypothesizes that queer people ‘served as scapegoats during times of political conflict or national misfortune. Were a number of Harley’s associates, if not Harley himself, caught in this period of transitional sex roles?’562 Unlike the men accused of buggery who committed suicide in prison before their trial, or the manservant found dead in women’s clothing, aristocratic men like Shrewsbury were to some extent shielded from direct and overt violence.

Shrewsbury’s aristocratic heritage, foundational role within Whig politics and close personal friendship with William III meant he was sacrosanct from official persecution. After the ‘Buggery’ scandal had died down, he was reinstalled as William III’s Lord

Chamberlain as early as October of 1699, while he was Robert

Harley’s successful candidate for the same post again under Queen

Anne in 1710.563

Figure 8.1. unknown artist (Jan Italian art and Italian sexuality Swart van Groningen?) after Michelangelo Buonarotti, The Rape of Ganymede, c. 1570 – Lady Hervey’s use of the trope ‘Ganymede and Jupiter’ is an 1630, oil on panel, 2207 x 1415 cm, The Royal Collection. obvious and potent sign of intergenerational male homosexual relationships.564 Example of specific works of art with this theme that Lady Hervey and

Henrietta Howard were exposed to include a 16th-century copy after a lost work by

562 See Rubini, ‘Review: Robert Harley’, p. 6 8. 563 See Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy, and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 259. See also Gerard and Hekma, The Pursuit of Sodomy, pp. 359, 376, n. 45. 564 For critical discussions of the trope of Ganymede as a ‘sign’ for homosexuality in Greco-Roman culture, and concomitantly in the Renaissance and Englightenment societies of western Europe, see John Boswell, Christianity,

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Michelangelo Buonarotti, which hung first in the ‘Common Parlour’ and then ‘the Gallery’ at

Houghton, and a similar work after Michelangelo at Hampton Court. 565 The Royal Collection’s

Jupiter and Ganymede (Fig. 8.1) is very close to a version recently sold by Sotheby’s, who attribute the image to Jan Swart van Groningen, noting that there are only three painted versions of this particular Ganymede known, and that the composition is heavily indebted to a 1542 engraving by a French artist,

Nicholas Beatrizet. The engraving stripped away from the scene

Michelangelo’s original depiction of a bundle of clothes, a shepherd’s crook, and a second dog.566 Ham

House, near Richmond, a favourite neighbourhood of Lady Hervey’s Figure 8.2. Antonio Verrio, Ganymede and the Eagle, ceiling fresco: oil on plaster, late seventeenth century, Ham House, Richmond. and one in close proximity to

Henrietta Howard’s house Marble Hill (the two houses literally face each other across the river), also has a late seventeenth-century Jupiter and Ganymede by Antonio Verrio, another émigré painter responsible for the decoration of several prominent country houses. Verrio’s Ganymede

Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 250 – 265; Joseph Cady, ‘The “Masculine Love” of the “Princes of Sodom”: “Practicing the Art of Ganymede” at Henri III’s court’, in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. by Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 123 – 154; James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Leonard Barkin, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1991); Stephen Orgel, ‘Ganymede Agonistes’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10: 3 (2004), 458 – 501. 565 Tatyana Kusodeva, ‘The Houghton Paintings sold to Catherine II: Italian School’, in A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage, ed. by Larissa Dukelskaya and Andrew Moore (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the State Hermitage Museum and the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, 2002), p. 147. 566 See Sotheby’s, ‘Lot 1 ’, Important Old Master Paintings and European Works of Art (25 January 2007, no. 8282), www.sothebys.com/en/ecat.notes.N08282.html/13., accessed August 2012.

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(Fig. 8.2) features prominently in the décor of the most important feminine space in the house, the Queen’s Closet, built in hopes of a royal visit from Catherine of Braganza.567 Michelangelo’s composition was a famous one, and many copies such as these are extant. The piece was so well- known that it came to signify as the quintessential ‘sign’ for same-sex eroticism between men in the dominant visual culture of the time, most notably in Hogarth’s series Marriage-a-la-Mode.568

In The Countess's Morning Levee, a print of the

Jupiter and Ganymede after Michelangelo is shown on the wall behind a caricature-like depiction of the castrato singer Senesino, alluding to his liminally-gendered identity.569

By creating an imaginary ‘Jupiter and

Ganymede’ that was ‘after the Italian manner’,

Lady Hervey’s entry refers to the memory of Figure 8.3. Louis Laguerre, The Creation of Pandora: detail, Ganymede, oil on plaster, 1718 – these well-known works at Houghton, Hampton 1720, Petworth House, East Sussex (The National Trust). Court, Ham House and others. Petworth, for

567 I visited Ham House in July 2011. See Ralph Edwards, Ham House: A Guide (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office for the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1959), p. 54; Jane Davidson Reid and Chris Rohmann, The Oxford guide to classical mythology in the arts, 1300 –1990s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 453, 455. 568 For the uses of the Ganymede motif to signify queer masculine identity in British eighteenth-century visual culture , see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England (Baltimore, Md. ; London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 242 – 245; King, The Gendering of Men, pp. 36, 76, 364; Richard Meyer, ‘ “Nature Revers’d”: Satire and Homosexual Difference in Hogarth’s London’, in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, ed. by Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 162 – 175; Robert L. S. Cowley, Marriage a-la-mode: A Re-View of Hogarth’s Narrative Art (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 115 – 116; David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English art (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 77; Peter Jan de Voogd, and William Hogarth : the Correspondences of the Arts (Amsterdam: Costerus, 1981), p. 91; James Saslow, Pictures and Passions: a History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts (London: Viking, 1999), p. 157; James Laver, The Age of Illusion: Manners and Morals 1750 – 1848 (New York: D. McKay Co., 1972), p. 80; Claude J. Summers, The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts (San Francisco : Cleis Press, 2004), p. 118. 569 (Francesco Bernardi, 1686 – 1758).

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example, home of the ‘Proud’ Duke, Charles, 6th Duke of Somerset, displays a huge ceiling mural of The Creation of Pandora, painted by the émigré artist Louis Laguerre in 1720.

Ganymede, in Laguerre’s very courtly, Francophile image, is displayed as a blond adolescent male of about eighteen (Fig. 8.3). Unlike the other major male deities, who each are associated with whirling robes, he is represented completely naked. While Zeus’ marital role with Hera is emphasized by the way that the patriarch of the gods leans close to his wife, his sexual connection with Ganymede is reinforced not only by the nudity of the young man, but

Ganymede’s position at his feet, thigh and leg resting comfortably, even intimately against his red draperies. Below Zeus and Ganymede, Dionysos raises a cup that the young male favourite has just filled: Ganymede is in action as a cupbearer and attendant to gods. This type of

Ganymede would be familiar to Henrietta Howard, and many of Lady Hervey’s courtier friends.

Lady Hervey’s entry thus conjures an imaginary Ganymede image, likely diffused with golden

Italianate light and littered with capricci ruins, peasants and russet-hued cattle, just like the renditions of ‘Jupiter and Ganymede’ hanging in saloons or frozen in fresco murals in the country houses across Britain. She therefore deliberately creates an imaginary object that caters to the aristocratic fantasies of otherness, in which Italian art, Italian bodies, and Italian sexuality are inextricably linked.

This imaginary painting of Jupiter and Ganymede may serve as a veiled defense of her own identity, marriage and social position. In other words, above all the other entries in her imaginary catalogue of paintings-as-portraits, this is the most enigmatic, the most ambivalent, and the most deeply personal. She seems to have been at least aware of her husband’s homosexual behaviour. Later on in life, she discreetly lent another of Lord Hervey’s lover’s, the

Italian scientist and philosopher Francesco Algarotti, the money to leave England, thereby

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placing him out of reach of her husband’s orbit. With Stephen Fox, she formed a close and lifelong friendship. By referring to the subject of male homosexuality in this particular way in her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, she points not only to homosexuality’s existence within socially reified forms of elite knowledge (Greco-Roman myth and culture) but also reminds her reader of its existence at the British court. This constructs a narrative that culturally legitimizes male homosexuality within a discourse of aristocratic connoisseurship, a doubled sign or allusion that uses foreign identities and sexual and ethnic ‘otherness’ to appeal.

Verrio, like Laguerre, was continually denigrated by critics both during his lifetime and long after. In his satire on the Duke of Chandos, called ‘Timon’, Alexander Pope wrote ‘On painted ceilings you devoutly stare/ Where sprawl the saints of Verrio or Laguerre/ On gilded clouds in fair expansion lie/ and bring all paradise before the eye’.570 In Art in England, Dutton

Cook writes, after a series of comments criticizing both artists’ taste, ‘for their art, there was not enough in it to endow it with any vitality’.571 Despite these criticisms, Verrio, Laguerre and the other émigré muralists contributed much to English decoration and design history. The two painters worked on some of the best-known interiors in Britain, including Blenheim Palace,

Burleigh House, Petworth, Devonshire House, Windsor Castle and . Their work deserves new critical attention. The presence of homosexual motifs, couched within the

Greco-Roman mythological context, in early eighteenth-century country house mural painting by these two artists reflects the reality of human experience in the period.

Laguerre’s Ganymede at Petworth, Verrio’s Ganymede at Ham House and the copy after

Michelangelo at Hampton Court are therefore images that are in dialogue with Lady Hervey’s

570 Alexander Prope, ‘Epistle IV: To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington’, in The works of Alexander Pope, Vol. 3, ed. by John Wilson Croker (London: John Murrary, 1881), p. 182 571 Dutton Cook, Art in England (London, S. Low, Son, and Marston, 1869), pp. 15 – 27 (p. 27)

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juxtaposition of ‘A Jupiter and Ganymede after the Italian manner’. Each of these three works were status images on display in prominent elite spaces: Hampton Court’s Ganymede would, of course, have been intimately familiar to the British court women, while Ham House was only just across the river from Henrietta Howard at Marble Hill, and no doubt both Hervey and

Howard were familiar with its interior decoration. Petworth, too, was a high-profile exemplar of the country house tradition, and the Duchess of Somerset was Queen Anne’s favourite Lady-in- waiting at her death in 1714: she was on intimate terms with Caroline’s Ladies-in-waiting until her own death in 1722. Both Lady Hervey and Henrietta Howard may have visited her there.

‘After the Italian manner’ was a slang and obvious way of saying ‘queer’ in seventeenth and eighteenth-century elite social life. Both in Britain and in France, male same-sex eroticism was consistently attributed to Italian cultural influence. Homosexuality was literally known as the ‘ultramontane’ (literally, beyond-the-mountains) vice among the decadent princes of the blood at Versailles, at least three of which are on record in court memoirs as engaging in queer behavior.572 England was no different, and as Rictor Norton has pointed out, English printed ephemera did not hesitate to draw ethno-nationalist conclusions about male homosexuality. One printed lottery advertisement of the time, tongue planted firmly in cheek, gossips that ‘A Dutch

Merchant of the Italian humour, known by name of the Queen of Sheba, frightened over to

Germany upon Capt. Rigby’s fate, put in Forty shillings just before his departure, and what

Benefits arise are to be spent in drinking his Health, amongst all the handsome Prentices that frequent Paul's on a Sunday Afternoon’.573 This lottery advertisement shows how ‘the Italian

572 Louis-Francois de Bouchet and Gabriel-Jules, Comte de Cosnac, in Memoirs sur le Regne de Louis XIV, vol. 1, pp. 110 – 113, in Merrick and Ragan, Homosexuality in Early Modern France, pp. 118, 240, n. 65. See also Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 362, n. 90. 573 ‘Characters of Gentleman’ (London: about 1700), in Neil Bartlett, Who was that Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1989), p. 90.

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humour’ was linked to Rigby’s name and reputation, as it does the culture of fear among London queer communities in the wake of his trial. It also shows a sense of humour and warmth by describing behaviour paralleled in the Ganymede myth, and commemorated visually at the early eighteenth-century British court by artists like Verrio and Laguerre. The satirical ‘Dutch merchant’s ‘Italian humour’ or homosexuality leads him to sexually pursue lower-class younger men, such as the good-looking apprentices gathered at a particular -shop.

After the Italian humour or manner is similarly described in a satirical street-song of the time aimed at King William.

For the Case, Sir, is such, the people think much, That your love is Italian, your government Dutch, Though who could have thought, that a Low-Country Stallion, And a Protestant Prince, should prove an Italian.574

These satirical barbs are aimed at William’s well-known insistence on keeping his male favourites, William, and Kepple, created , in successive physical proximity to his person and physical seclusion from the rest of the court.575 The open rivalry to which these male favourites came, and the King’s refusal to publicly refute such insinuations, did nothing to dispel the rumours. In another letter dated 29 December 1699,

Humphrey Prideaux, Dean of Norwich, describes a neighbour in similar terms.

A young gentleman of a very considerable estate in this country, but, having an Italian education, is all over Italiz’d, that is, an Italian as to religion, I mean a downright atheist; an Italian in politics, that is, a Commonwealth man; and an Italian I doubt in his morals, for he cannot be perswaded to marry.576

574 Anonymous Jacobite poet of c. 1691, quoted in Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 32. Rose similarly quotes another Jacobite poet from 1697, who writes, referring to King William, that ‘Keppel and he are Ganymede and Jove’, cited in Ibid., p. 2. 575 See Troost, William III, pp. 24 – 26; Paul Hammond; ‘Titus Oates and “Sodomy”’, in Culture and Society in Britain, 1600 – 1800, ed. by Jeremy Black (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 85 – 101 (p. 97); George Sebastian Rousseau, Perilous Enlightenment: Pre- And Post-Modern Discourses : Sexual, Historical (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 24 – 26. 576 Quoted in Andrew Moore, Norfolk and the Grand Tour (Norwich: Norfolk Museums Trust, 1985), p. 19; Prideaux seems to be referring to Sir Andrew Fountaine (1676 – 1753), who in fact went on to make two extended

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In 1730, the anonymous author of Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy likewise claimed

‘how infamous Italy has been in all Ages, and still continues, in the odious practice of Sodomy, needs no explanation’, and went to assert that ‘it is there esteemed so modish a sin, that not a cardinal or churchman of note but has his Ganymede’, and that ‘no sooner does a stranger of condition set his foot in Rome’ but Italian ‘panders’ would harass the newcomer with offers of prostitutes both female and male. In this entry in her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, Lady

Hervey thus underscores the homosexual jest in this entry through a doubling of signs, the one taken from visual depictions of a common Greco-Roman motif, and the other lifted from the regularly-expressed cultural biases against Italy circulating at the time.577

The Italian Duchess of Shrewsbury

Shrewsbury left England in 1700 and undertook an extended trip abroad, ostensibly on behalf of his health, which was never good. He spent over three and half years living in Rome. He also lived in Venice, and only left it for Augsburg, where he was joined by and married his long-time friend and acquaintance Adelaide (Paleotti) Roffeni. Roffeni, a widow, was the daughter of a

Bolognese noble family. Her mother, Cristina di Nortumbria, made the most of a tenuous

English connection with the disgraced Elizabethan courtier-in-exile Sir Robert Dudley.578

tours of Italy, 1701 – 1707 and again in 1714 – 1716: his gifts as a scholar had been incubated at Eton and Oxford. See also James M. Rosenheim, The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English Landed Society 1650-1750 (London: Longman, 1997), where he writes that the ‘association between Italy – the increasingly likely destination for young men on tour – and male homosexuality was common in the late seventeenth century. The explicit connection made a few decades later between homosexuality and Italian opera, much attended by young aristocratic males, is further suggestion that men – perhaps even groups of men – behaving in some recognizably “homosexual” manner were identifiable in the upper reaches of Augustan society, specifically in London’, p. 2 . 577 Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy (1730), p. 17, qtd. in Rowland, ‘Swords in Myrtle Dress’d’, pp. 76 – 79. 578 Cristina was Dudley’s granddaughter: Adelaide was thus his great-granddaughter. Although Italian-born, Cristina herself was the daughter of a French noblewoman ‘of good family’, and was thus of French, English and Italian ancestry. Like the Duke of Shrewsbury’s mother, Adelaide Roeffini’s mother was a noted Francophile whose sexual morality scandalized the patriarchal order of the time. At the age of fourteen, Cristina had been seduced by one of the noblemen at the court of Savoy, with whom she had an illegitimate daughter, recognized by the father’s family.

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Shrewsbury’s marriage was a brilliant choice, at least as a social and political distraction, since the Italian-born Duchess of Shrewsbury was a court and national celebrity from the moment of their return to England. She was an object of fascination and uneasy speculation for the English elite, not only because of a precipitate conversion to Anglicanism, but because Shrewsbury got a private act of Parliament to secure her naturalization, and hence ensured her suitability to operate in a paid Government position at court as a Lady-in-waiting.

Like her husband, the Duchess of Shrewsbury is one of the most vivid portrayals of dissident gender performance and gestural idiosyncrasy to come out of the early Georgian court.

‘Extremely affected in her carriage, so full of gaiety and motion that it would not be born with in a mademoiselle of eighteen at Paris’, was the judgment of Sir William Simpson,579 while Sarah

Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, informed Mary Cowper with characteristic verve that the new Duchess of Shrewsbury was ‘entertaining everybody aloud, thrusting out her disagreeable breasts with such strange motions’.580 Mary Cowper herself, despite a generally amicable disposition, records a remarkable image of the Duchess, who both fascinated and repelled her.

October 26 and 27 passed without anything remarkable, unless the Duchess of Shrewsbury being named a Lady of the Bedchamber Extraordinary deserves to be thought so. She had solicited the King [George I] for it, who had asked the Princess [Caroline of Ansbach] three times to do it, and since had told her it would be an Obligation to him. The Princess said to me afterwards that the Duchess of Shrewsbury

A husband, the Marchese Andrea Paleotti of Bologna, was rapidly found for her to cover the scandal: this was Adelaide’s father. After he died in 1689, Adelaide’s mother ‘kept open house for virtually all comers. Indeed, she introduced French social ideals into Bologna, where she provided the first conversazione of a general kind; but it was so promiscuous and her house had such a bad name, that people did not like their sons frequenting it.’ See L. Collison-Morley, Italy after the Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1930, repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1972), pp. 201, 205. See also Corrado Ricci, Una Illustre Avventuriera (Cristina di Nortumbria) (Milan: Fratelli Treves, Editori, 1891), p. 271. 579 University of Kansas, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, MS C163, Simpson–Methuen correspondence, 8 Jan 1706, quoted by Stuart Handley, ‘Talbot, Charles’, par. 10. 580 Letter from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough to Mary Cowper dated 25th October 1710, found in the Panshanger MSS and quoted in David Hamilton, The Diary of Sir David Hamilton, 1705 – 1714, ed. by Philip Roberts (Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 87, n. 145.

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was not her own choice, nor can anybody reasonably believe she could be, all the World knowing that her brother had forced the Duke to marry her after an intrigue together… The Duchess of Shrewsbury had some extraordinary talents, and it was impossible to hate her so much as her Lord, though she was engaged in the same ill design. She had a wonderful art at entertaining and diverting people, though she would sometimes exceed the bounds of decency. She had a great memory, and spoke three languages to perfection; but then, with all her prate and noise, she was the most cunning, designing woman alive, obliging to people in prosperity, and a great party-woman, as I may say from experience.581

The Duc de Saint-Simon’s judgement of the Duchess of Shrewsbury is also intriguing, in that it again highlights how both Shrewsbury and his wife were known for being atypical of gendered expectations for the time. The memoirist specifically comments on the Duchess’ performance of gender.

She was a great fat masculine creature, more than past the meridian, who had been beautiful and who affected to be so still; bare bosomed; her hair behind her ears; covered with rouge and patches, and full of finicking ways… All her manners were that of a mad thing, but her play, her taste, her magnificence, even her general familiarity, made her the fashion.582

Could Lord Shrewsbury have known very well what he was doing, in choosing such an entertaining, entrancing, cosmopolitan woman as his wife? It is possible that he did not wish to return from Italy without someone to fulfill the feminine social role of an income-generating post at court. If so, he chose an Italian woman of rank whose socio-sexual morals and distinctive

581 Mary Cowper, Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper; Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales, 1714 - 1720 (London: John Murray, 1865), p. 8. See also Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford and New ork: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 86, footnote 18.The phrase ‘it is impossible to hate her as much as her Lord’ is informative, as Shrewsbury had the reputation for excellent manners, while women were closely associated with a hatred of sodomites in the early eighteenth century. 582 In French, ‘était une grande créature et grosse, hommasse, sur le retour et plus, qui avait été belle et qui prétendait l'être encore; toute décolletée, coiffée derrière l'oreille, pleine de rouge et de mouches, et de petites façons. Dès en arrivant elle ne douta de rien, parla haut et beaucoup en mauvais français, et mangea dans la main à tout le monde. Toutes ses manières étaient d'une folle, mais son jeu, sa table, sa magnificence, jusqu'à sa familiarité générale la mirent à la mode.’ Louis Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Mémoires de Saint-Simon, 20 vols (Paris: Chéruel ,1885), X, chapter 14, par. 6. See also Richard Lassells and Edward Chaney, The grand tour and the Great Rebellion : Richard Lassels and ‘The Voyage of Italy’ in the Seventeenth Century (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985), p. 376.

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performances of elite gender, like his own, were somewhat suspect by more orthodox members of the Protestant nobility.

In her entry for an imaginary ‘Jupiter and Ganymede after the Italian manner’, Lady

Hervey drew a link between herself and her husband and Shrewsbury and his Italian-born duchess, who had just died in 1726. Lady Hervey does this through the juxtaposition of aristocratic male homosexuality and visual culture. Her husband was still in Italy when she wrote this letter. In an earlier letter to Howard, Lady Hervey writes that her husband ‘tells me money is so scarce at Florence that for a little of it one may have very fine things there, if you care to make any use of his virtu, and their poverty, write your commands to him immediately’.583 The present letter, with its exciting imaginary pictures-as-portraits exercise, is the sequel, and she informs

Howard that she is ‘sure if he executes your comision (sic) wth as much success, as he’ll wth pleasure indeavor at it, Marble Hill will receive some considerable addition to its present beauty’.584 The ‘collection of pictures’ follows and is a natural, amusing tag to the conversation between women.

Like Lord Hervey, Shrewsbury was known for his virtu, famous as a cultural arbitrator for the Whig junto, and widely respected as an art connoisseur. Twenty five years earlier, in July of 1704, the wealthy lawyer (and fellow unmarried bachelor) John, 1st Baron Somers wrote to

Shrewsbury about Italian painting, giving an indication of Shrewsbury’s cultural role while abroad.

I give your grace a thousand thanks for the account of the fine pictures. I am not capable of judging of what I do not see, nor, indeed, could I pretend to determine of them, if I saw them. But, if your grace thinks there be any one, or more, among them, or elsewhere, very good, and at reasonable price, I could be extravagant

583 Mary Hervey to Henrietta Howard, Suffolk Papers, Letter dated Ickworth, 24 July 1729. 584 Ibid., Letter dated Ickworth, 24 July 1729.

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enough to lay out about two or three hundred pounds, and should be very proud of having one chosen by you.585 Later that same month, Shrewsbury writes to the Duke of Marlborough, congratulating him on a major military triumph, that ‘in this holy, ignorant city, they have an idea of you as a Tamerlane, and, had I a picture of old Colonel Birch, with his whiskers, I could put it off for yours, and change it for one done by Raphael’.586 After the Italian manner, therefore, stands as a sign in this imagined attribution, not simply for male homosexuality, but also of art connoisseurship, cultural leadership, and virtu in general. After the death of Queen Anne, Lord Shrewsbury wanted to install Sebastiano Ricci, ‘then in great favour with the court of England’, as principal painter, responsible for the decoration of ‘the princess’s apartments’ at Hampton Court. Lord Halifax, then acting as Treasurer, flatly refused, giving the commission instead to an Englishman, Sir

James Thornhill.587

585 Letter of 21 July1704 from Lord Somers to Charles Talbot, found in Private and Original Correspondence of Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, ed. by William Coxe (London: Longman and Co., 1821), p. 643. 586 Letter dated Rome, July 26, 1704 from Charles Talbot to John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, in Ibid., p. 636 587 See The Society for the Difussion [sic] of Useful Knowledge, The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Difussion of Useful Knowledge, vol. 24 (London: Charles Knight, 1842), p. 392; also Charles Saumarez-Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 199 ), p. 59. See also Richard Leppert, ‘Imagery, Musical Confrontation and Cultural Difference in Early 18th- Century London’, Early Music, 14: 3 (Aug., 1986), 323 – 45 (p. 29), for the Duke and Duchess of Shrewsbury’s identification with Italian cultural influence in British arts (Adelaide Roeffeoni, for example, went so far to fetch the opera star Nicolini in her own coach after he had initially refused to sing at a 8 December 1708 rehearsal in Haymarket).

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Chapter Nine: Beauty and Conflagration: Space and Place

Space and place was just as important as literary allusion or references to familiar works of art in this 1729 imaginary ‘collection of pictures’. A common thread throughout this thesis is the role of the ‘afterlife’ of art, or how looking at the shifting meaning of objects over time – at object biographies – leads to enriched analysis of early eighteenth century British visual culture, which as I have reiterated has been consistently disparaged by generations of art historians. In this chapter, I use a similar methodology to examine two country houses and a specific town, and the visual and literary representations that these places inspired in Georgian cultural discourse. By looking at the ‘afterlife’ of these three places, I return to themes about gendered dissidence and cultural ‘otherness’ in the social milieu of British court women. Just as Lady Hervey’s entry on

Sir Robert Walpole draws attention to the Raphael cartoon gallery in Hampton Court, she also uses other entries in her ‘collection’ to invoke specific physical places. Three of these entries –

‘A Town Afire by W Pulteney’, ‘A Distant Prospect by Shippen’, and ‘A night by Mr. Bottle’ - are useful case studies for interrogating how narratives of sex, gender and politics were embedded in early Georgian concepts of place.588

The famous lawyer and self-made new man Sir Thomas Bootle, whose soi-disant pretensions to aristocratic status were well-known in court society, spent much time and energy on Lathom House, his Palladian mansion in Lancashire. While Lathom, like so many other

588 For notions of place as a phenomenological plurality, where concentrations of sensation and memory combine to distinguish certain ‘places’ from mere ‘spaces’, see R. J. Johnston, ‘A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16: 2 (1991), 131 – 147; Timothy Oakes, ‘Place and the Paradox of Modernity’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87: 3 (Sep., 1997), 509 – 531; Lineu Castello, Rethinking the Meaning of Place: Conceiving Place in Architecture-Urbanism (Burlington, VT : Ashgate Pub. Company, 2010), esp. pp. 3, 15.

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houses from the period, has been lost, a small fraction of its magnificent interior escaped destruction, and is preserved in a private residence owned by his descendants. This dialogue between lost architectural history, porcelain collecting and one man’s social reputation shows how architecture and interior design were used as social technologies in elite British society, and how the newly rich might use these technologies.

In another entry concerning early Georgian spaces, William Shippen, as the public face of the Jacobite party, is immediately identified with pining for a‘distant prospect’. As Shippen was well-known at court as a fervent Stuart partisan, the political aspect of that ‘distant prospect’ is overt. I shall argue that this obvious meaning is not, however, the only one that can be applied to Shippen’s juxtaposition with ‘distant prospects’. By describing the situation of Shippen’s family home, Stote’s Hall, and the written description of ‘a distant prospect’ in Stephen

Switzer’s Ichnographica (1715 – 1718), I explore how landscapes were politicized spaces in early Georgian elite life, and how one author’s description of an ideal view correlates word-for- word the landscape around Stote’s Hall. Lost histories of British architecture are hence revealed and given more expressive nuances in this analysis, as are the particular circumstances of Lady

Hervey’s life.

Lady Hervey’s pairing of the Whig dissident William Pulteney with an imaginary image of ‘a town on fire’ doubtless comments on his incendiary political and editorial role, as it does his aggressive personality. I argue that this entry also refers obliquely, or is at least informed by, a recent contemporary urban tragedy, the great Copenhagen fire of 1728, which levelled much of

Denmark’s historic capital. By juxtaposing Pulteney with an image of urban destruction, she acknowledges his fiery temper, a character trait that would subsequently embroil Pulteney in a duel with her husband concerning Lord Hervey’s queer identity. As we have seen in Chapter Six,

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the use of art theory and art satire in this ‘collection’ provided a psychological defense mechanism that allowed for the expression of ‘unspeakable’ sexual matters, including queer identity. In the previous chapter, Jupiter and Gaynmede functioned as an allegory for the British court’s fascination with Italian art and Italian bodies, and here Lady Hervey similarly uses the trope of a fraught and even apocalyptic occurrence – the urban fire – to comment on Pulteney’s personality, character and perhaps his propaganda abilities as well.

‘A Town Afire by W Pulteney’

The first imaginary painting in this series of case studies is ‘A Town Afire by W Pulteney’, referring to William Pulteney, later ennobled as the 1st Earl of Bath: as his promotion did not come until long after 1729, and as Lady Hervey calls him ‘Pulteney’ in her satirical ‘collection of pictures’, I refer to him by the same name. Pulteney came from a well-established upper-class family with strong ties to the aristocracy; his grandfather, an important London landowner, was

MP for the important metropolitan borough of Westminster, while his aunt, Anne Pulteney, was the wife of the 2nd Duke of Cleveland, illegitimate son of Charles II and Barbara Castlemaine.589

Educated with the sons of the nobility at Westminster and Oxford, William Pulteney was a noted classical scholar, a passionate huntsman, and an ambitious political personage, especially following his inheritance of the wealthy Sir Henry Guy’s estates. Guy had been his father’s close friend, and his adoption as the man’s legal heir gave him the financial resources to enter politics.

Pulteney was thus a well-connected man with diverse financial interests and strong social and familial links with the court aristocracy. 590 He was a fervent supporter of the Hanoverian succession, but not of Walpole’s government. Despite his Whiggish politics, Pulteney found

589 For an account of Anne, Duchess of Cleveland, written by a later Duchess of Cleveland, see C.L.W. Powlett, History of Battle Abbey (London: William Clowes, 1877), p. 275. 590 See Thomas Macknight, The Life of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (London: Chapman and Hall, 1863), p. 574.

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himself increasingly passed-over for the (lucrative) major administration positions he expected to receive from the Prime Minister, and by early 1720 he was actively opposing Walpole’s leadership, forming the core of a temporary coalition of Tory and Whig disaffected MPs. 591 He was quick to realize the propaganda benefits of printed ephemera, and he decided to use the press to disseminate his political views.

In late 1726, along with his cousin Daniel and the notorious Henry St. John, 1st Viscount

Bolingbroke, William Pulteney launched The Craftsman, a periodical which attacked Walpole’s ministry in intemperate, satirical language.592 Originally a single-page document solely containing a political essay and issued only once a week, from May of 1727 the periodical was a four-page paper issued twice-weekly, renamed as The Country Journal or the Craftsman. The newly enhanced publication was fronted by a political essay on page one and a discussion of news events on page two and part of page three, with advertisements concluding.593 Estimates of

The Craftsman’s peak circulation (1731) accord the publication a readership of over 13 000 readers, and of course the real number of people who saw and read Pulteney’s magazine is likely much higher.594 1729 thus marks the rise of Pulteney’s importance in formulating home-grown opposition to the pro-Hanover policies of Walpole, and of reaching larger and larger amounts of people through the press media. Lady Hervey’s characterization of Pulteney’s personality as ‘a

591 For Pulteney’s political role as an opposition Whig, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725 –1742 (Oxford : Clarendon Press and New York : Oxford University Press, 1994). T. F. J. Kendrick, ‘Sir Robert Walpole, the old Whigs and the Bishops, 1733-1736: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Parliamentary Politics’, The Historical Journal, 11: 3 (1968), 421 – 445 (p. 433, n. 72). 592 See Alexander Pettit, ‘Propaganda, Public Relations, and the “Remarks on the Craftsman's Vindication of His Two Honble Patrons”, in His Paper of 22 May 17 1’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 57: 1 (Winter, 1994), 45 – 59 (p. 48). 593 See Stanly Morrison, The English Newspaper, 1622 – 1932: An Account of the Physical Development of Journals Printed in London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 111 – 113. 594 SimonVarey, ‘The Craftsman’, Prose Studies, 16.1 (1993), 58 -77; repr. in Telling People What to Think: Early Eighteenth-Century Periodicals from the “Review” to the “Rambler”, ed. by J. A. Downie and Thomas N. Corn (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 58 – 77 (p. 62, 74 n.1); See also Alok adav, ‘The Craftsman (1726-1752) and Gray's- Inn Journal (1753-54)’, Historical Outline of Restoration and 18th-Century British Literature, http://mason.gmu.edu/~ayadav/historical%20outline/craftsman.htm [accessed 3 August 2012].

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town afire’ in her ‘collection’ likely refers in some sense to his attempts to rile the public with

The Craftsman. She was certainly very aware of the publication, as she wrote two years later of her husband that he ‘reads all papers’, meaning copies of most were physically present in her house.595

There are, however, other possible alternative and complementary meanings to her characterization that are not strictly limited to the firebrand language expressed in The

Craftsman. Pulteney was an aggressive and sometimes violent man. His abrasive and quarrelsome temperament had been noted as early as 1709:

the Pulteney which is distinguished as Henry Guy’s heir - he had a quarrel with a gentleman at the Playhouse, and they went outside to decide it, but before he got out of the passage there came two more and drew their swords upon him, but the footmen and chairmen prevented any mischief that night.596 Scandal in Pulteney’s household was not limited to his own reputation, as his wife Anna Maria

Gumley, heiress of a rich glazier and cabinet-maker, was similarly socially notorious. Pulteney’s wife was frequently satirized in the press for being promiscuous, and she ‘appears in one print with her bare backside being used as a desk by a secretary and later on in life, after her husband had been raised to the peerage, she was branded ‘Bath’s enobled doxy’ in another engraving.597

Both were known for their wit and biting sarcasm, and years later Horace Walpole, when writing ironically of Lord Chatham and his wife, said that they ‘are now as quiet, good sort of people, as my Lord and Lady Bath who lived in the vinegar-bottle’. According to W.S. Lewis’ annotated editions of Horace Walpole’s correspondence, this reference, as identified by Mrs. Toynbee,

595 Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 112. 596 Stuart Handley, M. J. Rowe, and W. H. McBryde, ‘Pulteney, William, earl of Bath (1684–1764)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/22889 [accessed 22 November 2011] 597 S.P. B, ‘Satirical Print against Lord Bolingbroke’, in Notes and Queries, 47 (22 November 1862), pp. 401 – 403. See also J. L. Wood, ‘The Craftsman and Miss Gumley’s Bum’, Factotum, 8 (1980), 25 – 27.

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refers to the west country tale of ‘Mr and Mrs Vinegar’ who lived in the Vinegar Bottle. The tale is a cautionary tale about a man who is given the gift of wealth, and who, instead of using it to fix his broken bottle-house with a dairy enterprise, foolishly makes successive purchases, each more devaluing than the last, until he returns to his wife with no money, and she ‘instantly gave him such a sound cudgeling that she almost broke every bone in his skin’. Both Pulteney and his wife were thus known for their temper, and they were both also known to be materialistic and much concerned with money.598

Despite the couple’s reputation for parsimony and avarice, their house, built to designs by

Giocomo Leoni in 1730, was furnished and decorated in an elegant and lavish style. Further scholarship is needed on the Pulteneys’ artistic patronage and cultural legacy.599 Raby Castle, which houses the core of the collection of visual artifacts amassed by the couple and their heirs, for example houses some rare large multi-tiered porcelain pagodas from the Qianlong period, and large Meissen birds originally made for the famous Japanese Palace in Dresden by the

Rococo artists Johann Kaendler and Johann Kirchner. The delicate chinoiserie figurines and tableware of Kaendler and Kirchner were on the cutting edge of the avant-garde Rococo ceramic style in Europe. Meissenware’s popularity was expanded through these two artists’ canny sense of marketing, and their talent in reproducing Chinese motifs found on real Xing export porcelain.600 Kaendler’s birds were purchased for Raby in 18 5 in order to recall the atmosphere of the house as it had been in the Pulteneys’ time, but there are other similar examples traceable to the Pulteneys, such as porcelain services that accurately depict North American butterflies in

598 See http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/eft/eft07.htm [accessed 18 November 2011] 599 David Pearce, The great houses of London (New York : Vendome Press , 1986), p. 211. Bath House was destroyed in 1959. 600 See The French Porcelain Society, Newsletter (Autumn, 200 ), p. 12., see Brian Haughton and Paul Riley, ‘Entry 2 ’, A Passion for Porcelain: Dedicated to the memory of Helga Riley, exh cat. (London: The Haughton Gallery, 2009), p. 32.

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great detail. Putleney was well acquainted with Charles Hanbury Williams, envoy to , who helped popularize the taste for such elegant, Asian-inspired porcelain in Britain.

Lady Hervey is often described as a personal friend of the Pulteneys. From 1720 – 1728, their high-ranking position in London society and Hervey’s increasing political importance to

Walpole certainly brought her much into William Pulteney’s orbit.601 After the writing of this imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, and following her husband’s return to England, the Herveys fell violently out with their former friends in a very public manner.602 The dispute was mainly political, as Hervey’s commitments to Walpole were increased by his appointment as Vice-

Chamberlain to the Queen, while Pulteney’s importance to the ministerial opposition was hardening. At this time, Pulteney made the effort to convert his friend to the opposition side, and in doing so, displayed ‘coarse invective and rambling extravagance’, which is characteristic of

Lord Hervey’s many descriptions of him in his memoirs.603 Lord Hervey’s own account of the breach accuses his wife of joining with Pulteney, the Duchess of Marlborough, and his father

Lord Bristol in a concerted attempt to separate Hervey from Walpole’s interest; he says Walpole formerly made love to Lady Hervey, but unsuccessfully, which had produced the mutual enmity

‘generally consequential on such circumstances.’

Given that Lady Hervey, in the second entry of her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ compares Walpole to Raphael (discussed in chapter four of this thesis), her opinion of the Prime

Minister was not publicly vitriolic. Lord Hervey returned to England on 25 October 1729, possibly suggesting Lady Hervey’s breach with Walpole occurred in early autumn of that year.

601 See Lady Hervey to George Berkeley, 10 August 1726, in Henrietta Howard, Letters to and From Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, and her Second Husband, the Hon. George Berkeley: from 1712 to 1767, ed. by John Wilson Croker, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1824), I, p. 205. 602 See John Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, From His Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline, ed. by John Wilson Croker, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1848), I, pp. 128 - 129. 603 See Halsband, Lord Hervey, p. 87.

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Speaking of himself in the third person, Hervey writes that ‘he had lived in long intimacy and personal friendship’ with Pulteney, and that as Lady Hervey ‘knew her husband’s affection to

Mr. Pulteney, she was certain nothing but the weight of interest could turn the scale in this contest on the side of Sir Robert Walpole’. Hervey, in answer, responded by defending his allegiance to Walpole in a series of pamphlets, including one entitled Sedition and Defamation

Display’d: In a Letter to the Editor of the Craftsman. He only wrote the preface, with the rest being authored by Sir William onge (satirized as ‘A Dutch Marriage’ in Lady Hervey’s

‘collection of pictures’), but the piece’s strong defense of the ministerial position included accusing Pulteney and Bolingbroke of being ‘infamous retailers of lies, scandal, sedition, and treason’ and was enough to provoke Pulteney into a furious rage.604

On 21 January 1731 Parliament opened for the year, and Pulteney moved that the customary Address of Thanks to the King include specific terms indicating the resistance of the

British people towards being involved in any future war in Flanders or along the Rhine. Lord

Hervey was one of the speakers who, along with Robert and Horace Walpole senior, spoke out successfully against Pulteney, defeating the measure.605 Later that same day a pamphlet entitled

A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel, entitled Sedition and Defamation Display’d began to circulate in the streets of London, and in it Pulteney attacked Hervey’s sexuality in the strongest possible terms. According to Pulteney, Sedition and Defamation Display’d was written by one

‘pretty Mr. Fainlove’ who is ‘a Lady himself; or at least such a nice composition of the two sexes, that it is difficult to distinguish which is the most praedominant... such a delicate

604 See William Stebbing, Some Verdicts of History Reviewed (London: John Murray, 1887), p. 225. 605 Halsband, Lord Hervey, p. 109.

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Hermaphrodite, such as pretty, little, Master Miss’.606 After conceding that any physical damage done to ‘Mr. Fainlove’ would anger the ladies, whose company he frequents, Pulteney concludes with the inflammatory accusations with the specific references to homosexuality mentioned in the previous chapter. Pulteney’s words, ‘indecent and almost shocking to mention’, and ‘I need not explain any further’ showcase how ‘unspeakable’ queerness really was in the mainstream of eighteenth-century British society.607

Hervey’s small size, effeminate demeanour and physical beauty made up part of his well- known public and court persona. He and his wife had both been lauded for their appealing looks, while he was short enough in his adolescence to act as a professional jockey, and his preference for women’s company, in most matters, is similarly recognized in Pulteney’s inflammatory pamphlet.608 His relationship with Stephen Fox was also very much in the public eye after the couple’s return from their Grand Tour, as the pair were living together in a house Fox had purchased from Lady Hervey herself: her thoughts on this domestic arrangement went unrecorded.

By expressing the all-too usual heteronormative, homophobic and prejudiced fetishization of anal sex as the only component of mutual eroticism between men, Pulteney strips the emotional bonds possible between two specific individuals down to an obsessive interest in what they possibly might be doing with their bodies.609 For the heterosexual fetishization of the

606 William Pulteney, A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel, entitled Sedition and Defamation Display’d (London: Richard Francklin, 20 January 1731), pp. 1, 2. 607 Ibid, p. 15. 608 Ibid. p. 2; See Halsband, Lord Hervey, p. 13, 14. 609see Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2008), p. 97; Patricia Ticineto Clough and Kate Millett, ‘The Hybrid Criticism of Patriarchy: Rereading Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” ’, The Sociological Quarterly, 35: 3 (Aug., 1994), 473 – 486 (p. 474); David William Foster, ‘Arturo Ripstein's El lugar sin l mites and the Hell of Heteronormativity’, in Violence and the Body, ed. by Arturo J. Aldama (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press), pp. 375 – 387 (p. 382). Queer theorist Thomas Yingling similarly

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queer male body through obsession with anal sex, Sally Munt writes that ‘anality itself is classically related to shame’, and by stressing the role of anal sex in same-sex eroticism between men in A Proper Reply, Pulteney drew direct and explicit links between the corrupt body politic of the nation-state under Walpole and the assumedly corrupt body of Lord Hervey. I use the term

‘assumedly’ because the private sexual acts between individuals are impossible to ever recover with certainty, and nor is an obsession with what and where exactly sexual contact between adults took place anything but a kind of literary scopophilia, a heteronormativity as brazen and blatant as Pulteney’s political homophobia. In Fox and Hervey’s case, the tenor and tone of their voluminous correspondence, the fact that their manuscripts were censored heavily by their descendants, a few fairly explicit references to eroticism that escaped the censors’ notice, and

Hervey’s subsequent attachment to the bisexual Francesco Algarotti later in life are all circumstances that enhance a reading of A Proper Reply’s meaning.

These facts strongly suggest Lord Hervey was well known at the time for an unusual performance of masculinity, and they also situate A Proper Reply’s importance to queer history and to the contemporary queer community. It is one of the very first examples of homosexuality being used, publically, as a political tool to devalue a rival’s position in the press in Britain. At least in terms of having been written by one MP to destroy another, and not the kind of popular, anonymous smut circulated of James I or William III, it is a uniquely foundational document in the Anglo-American world.

The pamphlet’s value today, ironically, is that it points to the historical existence of same-sex eroticism between men in the early Georgian period. Pulteney’s role as its author, and argue that ‘if the Phallus is the fetish, and masculine identity the reified identity it signifies, the single most unthinkable event for the masculine is anal penetration as pleasure’, in Harry M. Benshoff, ‘A Straight Cowboy Movie: Heterosexuality According to Brokeback Mountain’, in Hetero: Queering Representations of Straightness, ed. by Sean Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), pp. 227 – 242 (p. 236).

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Lady Hervey’s role as the wife of his victim (and mother of his children), give this entry a rare insight on the social climate during the years leading up to the pamphlet’s creation and its subsequent sexualized social scandal. A Proper Reply provides material for a historical narrative that positively asserts queer identity, individuality and existence in a specific (pre-industrial) context: the early eighteenth-century British court. Conversely, A Proper Reply also enables us to challenge, question and trouble the existence of contemporary structures of queer and gay identity, in this case by problematizing the notion of an exclusively homosexual identity as necessarily the raison d’etre of the gay community, instead of the more nuanced, complicated structures of eroticism rendered possible to the eighteenth-century elite.610

Erin Mackie, a historian who writes about pirate sexualities in the eighteenth century, advocates for the understanding of numerous historical ‘queer’ sexual categories, such as the pirate, the fop, or the highwayman, that ‘elude relegation to these classifications’ of homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality. Mackie is more interested in class and occupation as defining markers of gender identity and sexual expression than on any perceived correlation with modern ‘homosexual’ identities implied in A Proper Reply and its modern-day successors (Lord Hervey, for example, was not a member of an exclusively homosexual social community of men, and neither were many of his circle, but their tolerance of sexual dissidence

– including sexual acts between men – allows them to be claimed by queer history). For example, Lord and Lady Hervey had eight children together over the course of their marriage,

610 See Steven Seidman, Chet Meeks, and Francie Traschen, ‘Beyond the Closet? The Changing Social Meaning of Homosexuality in the United States’, Sexualities, 2: 1 (February 1999), 9 – 4 (p. 18); J. P. Paul, ‘Bisexuality: Reassessing our Paradigms of Sexuality’, in Bisexuality in the United States: A Social Science Reader, ed. Paula C. Rodr guez Rust (New ork: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 11 – 2 (pp. 15, 16)., see Erin Mackie’s evocative discussion of pirate sexuality in Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 115 – 117.

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including one born exactly nine months after his return to England from the Grand Tour.611

Besides his wife and Stephen Fox, Lord Hervey was also probably sexually involved with at least one other woman – Anne Vane, mistress of Frederick, Prince of Wales – and one other man, the Italian celebrity scientist Francesco Algarotti.612 Court sexualities were fluid. Lady

Hervey’s recognition of their flexible nature was embedded as a leitmotif throughout her entire

‘collection of pictures’, but while her exercise in collective literary-art satire discussed sexuality through a ‘veil’ of allusions, Pulteney’s homophobic and heteronormative political documents had betrayed aristocratic silences in a public medium.

In response to A Proper Reply, Lord Hervey astonished his court society of peers by challenging Pulteney to a duel. Sir John Rushout, yet another satirical target of Lady Hervey in her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, acted as Pulteney’s assistant or ‘second’ and Stephen

Fox’s younger brother Henry acted for Lord Hervey, almost certainly defending his brother’s public honour as much as his friend’s.613 Both men were wounded slightly around the hands and wrists, but were prevented from further damage through the assiduousness of their seconds.614

The court at St. James was so impressed with Hervey’s conduct in defending the ministry from its opponents in such passionate and personal terms that the ‘newspapers carried erroneous reports of his elevation to the house of Lords’, while a variety of broadsheets, ballads, lampoons, caricatures and even engravings exist from 1731 commemorating the duel.615 Engravings of

Hervey and Pulteney’s duel are part of the ‘afterlife’ of Lady Hervey’s ‘collection of pictures’, as

611 See chapter five, n. 34 of this thesis. 612 See Halsband, Lord Hervey, pp. 199, 200. 613 Ibid., pp. 113, 114. 614 Ibid., p. 112. See also Rosemary Baird, Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses 1670 – 1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003), p. 24 – 42. 615 Ibid., p. 118.

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they represent the conclusion or ‘tag’ to her characterization of Pulteney as ‘a town afire’.

Figure 9.1. Anonymous, A Full and True Account of a Sharp and Bloody Duel, 1731, wood-cut engraving, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

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One engraving, printed for

Figg and Sutton and written in

defense of Pulteney, shows an

emblem illustration accompanying a

satirical poem describing the duel,

and the emblem gloss shows what

London society at the time thought an

effete nobleman looked like.

Figure 9.2. Anonymous, Mr. Pulteney’s duel with Lord Pulteney, representative of the ‘new’ Hervey, 1731, mezzotint in sepia, 190 x 260 mm, The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT. order of monied mercantile interest, is shown without his wig and clad in dark, sober clothing, while Lord Hervey is characterized wearing a large wig, light-coloured clothing with lace foaming at his throat and wrists, and holding his right hand up in a fencing gesture (Fig. 9.1). The largest and most elaborate of the engravings of the event repeats this general theme (Fig. 9.2), with Pulteney’s features quite recognizable, Hervey wearing a long pigtail wig and light clothing. Sir Robert Walpole, resplendent in the large star of the Garter, is prominent in the foreground, pointing and leering at

Hervey. Other visual renditions of the incident repeat these general themes, with Walpole especially castigated for being seen to victimize and ridicule his supporter. As trivial and glancing as Lady Hervey’s reference to Pulteney as a ‘town afire’ seems to be, it is, given this very personal and political context, an important record of the build-up to an incident that has great import in the formulation of any kind of public recognition of dissident masculinities, and in their visual representation in the early eighteenth-century media.

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While Hervey and Pulteney’s duel did not take place for a full year and a half after Lady Hervey wrote this letter, there were more immediate visual and written precedents of urban conflagrations that I assert could have shaped Lady Hervey and Henrietta Howard’s understanding of ‘a town afire’. The immediate English visual precedents for depictions of urban fires are the engravings by Wenceslaus Holler of the Great Fire of London. Bilingual prints of the 1666 Great Fire of London were circulating in Europe, written in both Dutch and

French, from as early as 1667, and the general schema in many of them is the same.616 In one

characteristic example of

Hollar’s prints of the Fire

(Fig. 9.3), Southwark is

pictured in the foreground,

and the retreating line of a

house-crowded London

Bridge disappears over the

Thames into a mighty wall

Figure 9.3. Wenceslaus Hollar, The Great Fire of London, 1666, copperplate of flames, with the smoke engraving, 22 x 35 cm, Village Antiques, Switzerland. billowing up many hundreds of meters above the skyline; it is both an awesome and a terrifying sight.617 As Ian Haywood writes, these visual depictions of the London fire by Hollar and his followers offered their viewers ‘a powerful combination of vivid reportage and sublime solemnity’ with the collapse of

616 See Emily Mann, ‘In Defence of the City: The Gates of London and Temple Bar in the Seventeenth Century’, Architectural History, 49 (2006), 75 – 99 (pp. 78, 79, 96 n. 28). 617 These prints are discussed in London and Middlesex: or, An historical, commercial, & descriptive survey of the metropolis of Great-Britain: including sketches of its environs, and a topographical account of the most remarkable places in the above county, ed. by Edward Wedlake Brayley, James Norris Brewer and Joseph Nightingale (London: W. Wilson, for Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, 1810), pp. 698, 699.

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the city’s main architectural landmarks functioning as a collective memento mori in the cultural geographies of late seventeenth-century print culture.618

Lady Hervey, Henrietta Howard and their courtly circle may have come across at least one of these images in a friend or colleague’s print collection, and it is possible, although uncertain, that either courtier may have also seen a painted depiction of the Great Fire. One example is an evocative image of refugees with their possessions by the Tower of London, a work now in the collection of the Museum of

London and which is attributed by them to ‘the Dutch School’ (Fig.

9.4).619 The flickering chiaroscuro

of the painting highlights the Figure 9.4. ‘Dutch School’, The Great Fire of London, c. 1666, oil on canvas, 897 mm x 1516 mm, Museum of London. contrast between a black, lowering sky and the unbroken line of refugees, laden with their meager belongings. As Haywood comments, these types of depictions ‘move the visual point of view much closer to the chaotic scenes of terrorized citizens, while retaining the nocturnal burning skyline as a backdrop’, thus focusing on the emotional, rather than the purely physical, damage wrought by such fires.620 If

618 See Ian Haywood, ‘ ‘A metropolis in flames and a nation in ruins’: the Gordon riots as sublime spectacle’, in The Gordon riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. by Ian Haywood and John Seed (Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 117 – 136. (pp. 129 – 133). 619 See Museum of London, ‘The Great Fire of London’, http://www.museumoflondonprints.com/image.php?id=64964&idx=12&fromsearch=true [accessed 12 November 2011] 620 Haywood, ‘A Metropolis in Flames’, p. 1 1.

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Lady Hervey saw a similar scene, this entry strikingly evokes Pulteney’s capability for emotional aggression.

Newspaper articles from the time, including those of Pulteney’s own Craftsman, continually report incidents of fire and destruction across the country. On 20 May 1727 The

Craftsman recorded a barn in Worcester ‘was set on fire by lightning, which consum’d that, and four or five bays of buildings, together with a stable and a mare in it’621 and a subsequent report on a gunpowder explosion in Waltham-Marsh records how after storage mills ‘took fire by some unknown accident, a man, who attended it, was blown up, and so miserably shattered that no part of him but his feet could be found’.622 Contemporary news reporting in The Craftsman, like most other periodicals with similar sections, carried similar reports many times in their history, and Lady Hervey may well be thinking of Pulteney’s link to the newspaper world of contemporary news with her juxtaposition of his personality with ‘a town afire’.

As alarming as the Worcester barn fire or the Waltham gunpowder blaze were to The

Craftsman’s audience, full-scale urban fires of the kind Lady Hervey might have had in mind were, due to advancements in urban planning, infrastructure, civic organization and government regulation, becoming a rare event.623 Her satire on Pulteney may have been informed by a specific urban conflagration outside of national borders. Over a period of three day,

Copenhagen’s medieval quarter was completely leveled by a great fire in late October of 1728.

Much of modern-day Copenhagen’s city center dates from the mid eighteenth-century and

621 The Craftsman, 46 (London: Saturday, May 20, 1727), p.2 622 Ibid., p. 2 623 See Robin Pearson, ‘The Impact of Fire and Fire Insurance on Eighteenth-Century English Town Buildings and their Population’, in Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment: Europeans, Asians, Settlers and Indigenous Societies, ed. by Carole Shammas (Boston : Brill, 2012), pp. 69 – 93 (pp. 84 – 86). See also E. L. Jones and M. E. Falkus, ‘Urban improvement and the English economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Research in Economic History, 4 (1979), 193 – 2 ; E. L. Jones, ‘The reduction of fire damage in southern England, 1650 – 1850’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 2 (1968), 140 – 9.

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beyond because of the scale of the fire’s devastation, which rivaled that of the more well-known

‘Great Fire’ of London (1666).624 The Craftsman itself reported on the Copenhagen fire several times in its Foreign Affairs section. A typical entry from 21 December 1728 comments on social relief programs inaugurated by the Danish nobility.

Advices from Copenhagen are full of accounts of the extraordinary and truly Royal munificence of his Danish Majesty, the Prince Royal, and the nobility, of both sexes, towards the poor distressed families, which were ruined by the late dreadful conflagration.625

The Great Fire of Copenhagen, in fact, was paid a great deal of attention in the English press in the autumn and winter of 1728. The Daily Journal for 22 October 1728 wrote of news from where ‘this morning came the melancholy news by the Danish post, of a dreadful fire at Copenhagen, which had destroy’d above two thirds of that city, 5 churches, the Hospital for Orphans, the University, all the colleges… together with many palaces belonging to the chief ministers, and the houses of the most eminent merchants. The further particulars could not be expected, by reason of the great consternation the city was in, till the next post’. The magazine published a follow-up article four days later.626 Financial spheres in northwestern Europe were hit heavily by the fire. The Daily Post of 29 October 1728 reports that it was ‘hardly possible to express the consternation of the merchants of this city [Hamburg] when they heard of the bad

624 See Pernille Stensgaard and Anne Prytz Schaldemose, Copenhagen – People and Places (Copenhagen : Gyldendal, 2005), p. 27; Ludvig Holberg, Ludvig Holberg’s Memoirs: An Eighteenth Century Danish Contribution to International Understanding, ed. by Stewart E. Fraser (Leiden: Brill Archive, 1970), pp. 155 – 159; Jens Kvorning, ‘Copenhagen: Formation, Change and Urban Life’, in The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation, ed. by Peter Madsen (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 115 – 135 (p. 118). 625 The Craftsman, 129 (London: Saturday, 21 December 1728), p. 2. 626 The Daily Journal, 2434 (London: Tuesday, 22 October, 1728), p. 1, and Idem, 2435 (London: October 26, 1728), p. 1.

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news of the burning of Copenhagen’ and of course many London merchants and merchant companies would have been similarly affected.627

Copenhagen seems to have experienced a complete breakdown of law and order during the disaster, as The Daily Journal notes that ‘the King of Denmark ordered to arrest all persons who may be suspected of having pilfered during the late dreadful fire at Copenhagen, where about 5000 houses were burnt’,628 The Daily Courant’s article on the subject from Halloween day 1728 records that the Danish King ‘ordered to be published yesterday by beat of the drum, that all such as are willing to remove anywhere into the country, they shall have free wagons allowed them’ and, significantly, none of the military or naval personnel were allowed to remain in the city ‘after the retreat is beaten, on pain of being hanged on the spot’.629 ‘A town afire’ in any early eighteenth-century British informed mind thus might well refer obliquely to the

Copenhagen blaze that had happened so recently. The Copenhagen blaze’s associations with rape, pillage and plunder could be linked, in Lady Hervey’s entry, to Pulteney’s avarice, or the general tenor and tone of his newspaper cronies in the face of political contention. As a further link, Lady Hervey was herself of Danish descent. Her mother was an English courtier, but her father, born in Santau, Germany, was Danish, and only came to England in 1683 as part of the staff of , husband of the future Queen Anne.630 While a specific foreign city was thus contextually associated with the motif of ‘a town afire’ in the year Lady

627 The Daily Post, 2841 (London: Tuesday 29 October,1728), p.1. The Flying Post or the Weekly Medley of October 26th also commented on the fire’s origins, claiming that the fire ‘broke out near the West-Gate on the 20th-instant between 8 and 9 in the evening, and burnt with such violence, that notwithstanding the incredible labour of the inhabitants in lasted three nights and two days’. The Flying Post or the Weekly Medley, 4 (London: Saturday, 26 October 1728), p. 1. 628 The Daily Journal, 2438 (London: 31, October 1728), p. 1. 629 The Daily Courant (London: October 31, 1728), p. 1. 630 Matthew Kilburn, ‘Hervey , Mary, Lady Hervey of Ickworth (1699/1700–1768)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/13118 [accessed 17 Sept 2011]. Visual images of the Copenhagen fire were probably not immediately available to Lady Hervey in the summer of 1729, although further research by Danish-speaking art historians, or by those interested in visual representations of urban fires, may uncover a different story.

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Hervey wrote her satirical ‘collection of pictures’, another of her entries evokes a specific kind of landscape, ‘a distant prospect’.

‘A Distant Prospect by Shippen’

There was only one Shippen in the political landscape of the English court of 1729, and that was

William Shippen (1673 – 1743), prominent Jacobite Parliamentarian and outspoken dissident

MP, voice of the pro-Stuart Tory opposition. On the surface, Lady Hervey’s reference to a

‘distant prospect’ clearly refers to the wishes of the Stuart loyalists for a second Stuart restoration, with Shippen figuring as a kind of emblematic sign for the Jacobite cause as a whole.

‘Honest Shippen’, as he was called, garnered considerable respect among his political contemporaries for the dedication with which he served the Stuart interest, qualities that were entirely lacking in the self-serving, dual-faced tactics of men like Henry, Viscount

Bolingbroke.631 Shippen’s devotion to the Stuarts dates as early as his commitment to the Tower on the 4th of December, 1717.632 His services to the Pretender in opposing any chance of a mixed Tory-Whig ministry of the kind so favoured by William III, Mary II, and Anne, were evidently very great.633 The Jacobites at St. Germain, however, grew disenchanted with his caution, as a negative report suggests that he was very well aware of the risks of any abortive rebellion. ‘Shippen trembles, and infuses his fears into the gentlemen to whom the King [the pretender] writes’, and as a consequence he was discreetly excluded from the official communications from Saint-Germain to the English Jacobites.634 The recorded history of failed

631 John W. Jordan, Colonial and Revolutionary Families of Pennsylvania: Genealogical and Personal Memoirs (repr. Baltimore, MD : Clearfield Co. by Genealogical Pub. Co., 2004 [1911]), p. 97. 632 William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, vol. 11 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1812), p. 1376. 633 Stephen W. Baskerville, ‘Shippen, William (bap. 167 , d. 174 )’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/25419 [accessed 15 February 2010] 634 Letter of 28 March 1740, in Ibid., par. 4.

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Jacobite risings in the north of Britain suggests the Pretender’s inner circle would, in fact, have done better to have listened to Shippen’s counsel and acted with greater caution.

What has not previously been recognized about Lady Hervey’s juxtaposition of ‘A

Distant Prospect’ with the name of William Shippen is the fact that this attribution refers to the site of a specific residence, Jesmond Hall, and does so by utilizing language that had involved the politicization of the landscape in a specific literary work. In 1715, Stephen Switzer (1682 –

1745) wrote a treatise on gardening entitled The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s

Recreation. In contrast to the established taste for closed-in, formal gardens that stressed hierarchy and symmetry through the cutting of trees, shrubbery and flowers into ornamental parterres, Switzer’s work advocated for the opening up the landscape view, and for informality and irregularity to take precedence in landscape design.635 Switzer’s work was so popular among the nobility of the time that three years later, in 1718, it was expanded into a three-volume set called Ichonographica Rustica, which became the gardening treatise de rigeur for many noble households. It seems very likely Lady Hervey, with her wide-ranging intellectual interests, would have been familiar with Switzer’s work (indeed, it seems almost impossible she would not be), and it is Switzer who famously draws a clear and concrete line between the sweeping, expansive and unbounded horizons of an unenclosed garden landscape with British political liberty. In volume three of Ichonographica Rustica, Spitzer criticizes ‘the immuring, or, as it

635 See Christopher Christie, The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 15 ; W. Brogden, ‘Stephen Switzer: “La Grand Manier”, in Furor Hortensis, Essays on the History of English Landscape Garden in Memory of H. F. Clark (Edinburgh: Elysium Press, 1974), pp. 21 – 30, elaborates on how these new developments, later so important to the concept of an ‘English’ landscape, were actually responding to French precedents. See Mavis Batey, ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination: Joseph Addison's Influence on Early Landscape Gardens’, Garden History, 33: 2 (Autumn, 2005), 189 - 209 (p. 197). For a view that problematizes the concept of national attributes as expressed in garden design, and advocates for an understanding of shifts in culture where ‘owners, rather than recognized designers’ shaped the transformation of the garden environment, see David Jacques, ‘Who Knows What a Dutch Garden Is?’, Garden History, 30: 2 (Winter, 2002), 114 – 130.

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were, the imprisoning by walls…too much us’d of late…’, advocating instead that ‘wherever

Liberty will allow, would throw my Garden open to all view to the unbounded Felicities of distant Prospect and the expansive Volumes of Nature herself’.636 While some twentieth-century authors have downplayed the political connotations of this and other passages, other scholars of eighteenth-century English landscape design note that strongly-worded criticism of Bourbon absolutism is written into Switzer’s work.

James Turner, for example, in a 1978 article in Eighteenth-Century Studies, notes that

‘there can be little doubt that, in Switzer’s view, hatred of ‘Arbitrary and Despotick Power’ and zealous assertion of patriotic liberty was inextricably woven with the advancing art of gardening,’ and later he suggests that ‘it is surely unwise to deny the political overtones of that

‘Liberty of Planting’ and design so eloquently propounded by Switzer’.637 Switzer, in other words, makes naturalistic, unenclosed garden design a political question, and it seems likely

Lady Hervey understood that sense at the time. Shippen for all his devotion to the Stuart branch of the dynasty was still a Parliamentarian, and that his efforts for a restoration did not necessarily entail a negation of Parliamentary checks on dynastic absolutism.638

While Lady Hervey’s understanding of a politicized landscape links Shippen fairly directly to Switzer’s Ichonographica, it is less certain exactly what kind of ‘distant prospect’ she had in mind when thinking of him. Switzer’s text may throw some light on this facet of her

636 Stephen Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica:or, the Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation (London: D. Browne, 1718), p. 38. 637 James Turner, ‘Stephen Switzer and the Political Fallacy in Landscape Gardening History’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 11: 4 (Summer, 1998), 469 – 486. 638 Shippen was initially committed to the Tower for suggesting George I would introduce Hanoverian absolutism into England, and cannot be regarded as an uncritical admirer of the Stuarts. See Vincent Carrera, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 11. See also Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy, 1697-1699’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 28: 3 (May, 1965), 187 – 212.

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juxtaposition, as he describes, in some length, the kind of ‘distant prospect’ that would characterize his garden of liberty. Switzer favours keeping large tracts of woodland intact on an estate, for both economic and aesthetic reasons, but one of the only factors that could convince him to take some parts of old forest down is the ‘unbounded felicities’ of a beautiful, far- reaching view. ‘Such is the case,’ he writes, ‘when you have blue hills, a fine valley, or some noble lawn, tower or rising hills, cloth’d with wood at a large distance. These are beauties so noble, that even grown wood ought to be cut down, to admit an open view to it.’639 This description corresponds almost word-for-word with the country house in Northumberland where

Shippen spent most of his summers throughout his entire political career.640

Shippen had married, on 17 July 1712, Frances Stote, daughter of Sir Richard Stote of

Jesmond Hall, Northumberland.641 Sir Richard Stote had been one of the richest men in present- day Newcastle, and in 1658 he had purchased a farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, in the district known as ‘Jesmond Dene’, where he built a manor house of considerable size for the area. Jesmond Hall, known locally as ‘Stote’s Hall’ is thought to have been the very first unfortified manor house built outside Newcastle City walls.642 Only three children, all girls, survived their wealthy father, and each received a share of their father’s considerable estate.

Shippen, in fact, was only able to embark on his extraordinary career as a Stuart parliamentarian because of his wife’s fortune, which was estimated at seventy thousand pounds, and because of her political connections, as her younger sister and co-heir to the Jesmond estate, Dorothy,

639 Stephen Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica: or, the Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation (London: D. Browne, 1718), p.38. 640 It is important to remember that Lady Hervey’s letter was written in the summer, written from one country house (Ickworth) and sent to another (Marble Hill), and hence specific summer residences of important political figures were very much part of the raison d'être of the entire imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ exercise. 641 Baskerville, ‘Shippen, William’, par. 4. 642 Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ‘Jesmond Dene’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 4:26 (1890), 263 – 265.

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married the Hon. Dixie Windsor (d. 1743), younger son of the 1st Earl Plymouth. All three of the

Stote sisters appear to have remained close throughout their life, and Shippen is noted as having

‘frequently spent the summers here, among his wife’s relations’ who continued to share Stote’s

Hall between them. Indeed, none of the Stote sisters had any surviving children, and in the end

Dorothy Windsor outlived both her sisters and their husbands and claimed Jesmond Hall for herself, eventually triggering a lengthy lawsuit between her maternal cousins and the descendants of a younger brother of Sir Richard for control of the manor house.643 Stote’s Hall was rebuilt in the middle of the eighteenth century, after Shippen and his wife’s death, and the subsequent farmhouse-manor that was erected on the site was heavily damaged in World War II,

and was soon after demolished, its lawns

and view swallowed up by an ever-

expanding suburban sprawl of row-

housing emanating from Newcastle. The

site on which it once stood is now bare,

Figure 9.5. Jesmond Hall or ‘Stote’s Hall’, Greater Newcastle, and is roughly situated opposite present- c. 1765, photograph of c. 1910. day Collingwood Terrace. A photograph of the rebuilt Hall, c. 1910 (Fig. 9.5), records the building’s appearance relatively unchanged from that described in a simple woodcut from the early nineteenth century, with three high- ceiling stories flanking a modest entrance, and two great chimneys at either ends of the old house. The height of the house, projecting well above the treeline, may speak to the desire of the builder to better enjoy the view it became famous for, and which Lady Hervey, like most of the inhabitants of Newcastle, very likely knew, enjoyed, and associated with Shippen and his family.

643 Eneas Mackenzie, An historical, topographical, and descriptive view of the county of Northumberland (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Mackenzie and Dent, 1825), p. 475.

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All accounts of the manor are unanimous in their praise of an extraordinarily well- situated structure. ‘The road from Stote’s Hall to West Jesmond commands a view of the most romantic and picturesque scenery’ claimed one early nineteenth-century commentator, while another agreed that it ‘commands a view of the most beautiful and picturesque scenery, and is a favourite walk of the inhabitants of Newcastle’.644 The most complete description of the

‘distant prospect’ enjoyed by Stote’s Hall itemizes the specific attractions of the view, recording that ‘Gateshead-Fell’, a vast stretch of high moorland, ‘is situated in the distance on the right, and the grounds of Sir Matthew White Ridley lie remotely in the center. There are public gardens in Jesmond, for the accommodation and refreshment of the parties that visit the neighbourhood.’645 Gateshead-Fell remained unenclosed and wild, given over to those on the margins of society and the social reformers who targeted them until it was finally enclosed in

1809.646 Work on the famous colliers of Gateshead did not commence until the late eighteenth century, although sporadic work had been done here as in most places of the Tyneside since at least the fourteenth century.647 The point is that the description of the view from Stote’s Hall corresponds almost exactly with the beauties of a ‘distant prospect’ recorded by Switzer: the

‘blue hills’ of the Fell, the ‘fine valley’ of the Tyneside, the ‘noble lawn’ of the White Ridley family visible in between. Far from being a general description of Shippen’s work for the ‘distant prospect’ of a Stuart restoration, Lady Hervey’s association of him with a ‘distant prospect’

644 Ibid., p. 476. 645 Thomas Rose, Durham and Northumberland, their lake and mountain scenery (London: Peter Jackson and the Caxton Press, 1856), p. 43. 646 Gwenda Morgan, Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law: The Problem Of Law Enforcement In North-East England, 1718-1820 (London: UCL Press, 1998), p. 93.

647 For an innovative look at British transformations of European technology, see Christine Macleod, ‘The European origins of British technological pre- dominance’, in Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and its European Rivals, 1688-1815, ed. by Leandro Prados de la Escosura (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 111 – 126 (p. 115). See also Thomas Faulkner and Helen Berry, Northern Landscapes: Representations and Realities of North-East England (Woodbridge : Boydell, 2010), p. 51.

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could show how Georgian conceptions of place were politicized. Stote’s Hall and its view would be redolent of in Lady Hervey’s ‘collection of pictures’, and the physical space inhabited by Stote was marked in her imagination by his work for the Parliamentary restoration of Stuart rule.

The ‘afterlife’ of the building, with its object biography of building and rebuilding, of collective feminine inheritance and legal squabbles over control of its spatial resources, its value to eighteenth-century inhabitants of Newcastle as a scenic place of exercise and conviviality, and its eventual loss before the face of urban sprawl, are all meanings embedded in this ‘lost’ architectural history of Shippen’s ‘place’. These meanings enhance and complement the value of

Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, for this entry refers not only to Shippen’s cultural legacy, but also to the spaces associated with his life and his work, and to an alternative model of political and cultural rule in England that, despite Shippen’s lifelong efforts, was never fully realized. Reclaiming the importance of Stote’s Hall in the cultural geography of Newcastle resituates Shippen’s memory as central to a particular early Georgian residence. In this way, the writings of an early eighteenth-century Lady-in-waiting help to reinsert his legacy back into the historical record and to create a dialogue between lost architectural history and the specificities of an individual human life. In a second case study from the ‘collection of pictures’ dealing with space and place, lost architectural history and the afterlife of Georgian buildings, I discuss Lady

Hervey’s mockery of Sir Thomas Bootle, a nouveaux-riches lawyer who used architectural patronage and porcelain collecting as a way of defining his newly acquired elite status.648

‘------by Mr. Bottle’

648 See Jesmond Network News, ‘Jesmond 1850 – 1950’, online @ http://www.jesmond.uk.net/oldHistory.htm., accessed March 2011.

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Sir Thomas Bootle, of Latham or Lathom Hall, in Lancashire, was a figure of some repute. From the extant record of his activities, Thomas Bootle was a self-made man grown rich from the profits of the practice of law, a notoriously venal profession in an age famous for political corruption.649 In 1724, he purchased the ruins of the old manor house of Latham Hall, which had been destroyed by Cromwell, and commissioned the popular Palladian architect Giacomo Leoni to rebuild it (Fig. 9.6).650 Lathom was destroyed in 1925, and can no longer be studied directly, but later descriptions of the house and its social role indicate its importance on the cultural as well as the physical landscape of Lancashire.

Figure 9.6. Giacomo Leoni and Sir Thomas Bootle, Lathom Hall, 1724 – 1745 (destroyed 1929), Lancashire, photograph of c. 1920.

649 See Robert Robson, The attorney in eighteenth-century England (Cambridge : University Press, 1959), p. 108; Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘The Westminster Impostors: Impersonating Law Enforcement in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38: 3 (Spring, 2005), 461 – 483 (p. 469); William Arthur Speck, Stability and strife : England, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 144; George Catlin, The story of political philosophers (New ork: Tudor, 19 9), p. 60; David Punter, ‘Fictional Representation of the Law in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 16: 1 (Autumn, 1982), 47 – 74 (p. 56). 650 See Thomas Moule, The English Counties Delineated (London: George Virtue, 1838), pp. 359, 360; Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Pseudo-Palladian Elements in English Neo-Classical Architecture’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 6 (1943), 154 – 164 (p. 161).

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In 1773, a Mr. Pennant undertook a journey across the north of England, in which he visited the most prominent country houses in the region, Latham among them. Pennant’s record of his journey is full of anecdotes he gleaned on the trip, including recollections of Sir Thomas

Bootle and his reasons for choosing and rebuilding Lathom as the visual sign for his family’s new prominence. If anecdotes are by definition subject to doubt, they are also indications of the kinds of oral histories that still circulate around country houses, and Pennant’s record of these oral histories provides insight on Bootle’s character, as it does the reasons for his architectural patronage.651 Pennant explains that the estate, built by the Stanley Earls of Derby and formerly the family’s country seat, left the Stanley family as part of a dowry arrangement. The Stanleys relocated to Knowsley Park, a former hunting lodge that had been aggrandized after the

Restoration. Sir Thomas Bootle, looking for a place to settle, heard of a manor near Liverpool that bore his family name of Bootle, and he sought to buy it from its owner, John, 10th Earl

Stanley. Pennant claims the reason was that ‘Sir Thomas was particularly desirous of .. being thought to have been derived from some ancient stock’.652 Lord Stanley, disgusted by the charade, refused to sell the ‘Bootle’ estate, and Thomas Bootle ‘with proper spirit, sent his

Lordship word (Latham being then to be sold) that if he would not let him be Bootle of Bootle, he was resolved to be Bootle of Latham’.653 Bootle bought the old house, flouting the Earl and establishing his family within a landed manor with historic Stanley connections. Part of

Lathom’s magnificence was due, if this record of his character is believed, to Bootle’s desire to outjockey an old feudal family literally from their place. By renovating Lathom to become a

651 For the importance of the anecdote to art history, and how readings of an image are enhanced, enriched and tested by anecdotal history, see David Carrier, ‘Art History’, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 174 – 187 (pp. 176, 177). I disagree with his narrow definition of what historians and art historians do, and argue that the interchange of information from one discipline to the other enhances a reading of early Georgian visual culture. 652 Thomas Pennant, A Tour from Downing to Alston Moor, Journey of 1773, (repr. for E. Harding, London: Wilson and Co., 1801), p. 59. 653 Ibid., p. 59.

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leading architectural jewel of the region, he supplanted the Stanleys and their association with the house, recapitulating their elite social role through the annexation of aristocratic space.

Lathom Hall itself came into the possession of the Wilbraham family through the 1755 marriage of Mary Bootle, Sir Thomas Bootle’s niece and heiress, to Richard Wilbraham.654

Although the west wing at Lathom has survived as refurbished apartments, the house was largely demolished in 1929, the Wilbraham family only being able to keep up their main residence at

Rode Hall, .655 Lathom under the Bootle-Wilbraham family became a node for theatrical performances, a role it continued until the end of Wilbraham ownership in the 1930s. The

Lathom Trust, which today administers the remnants of the park surrounding the house, curates a collection of storyboards, posters, paintings and drawings that record something of the composition, character and style of these performances.656 Pennant’s physical description of the house therefore literally sets the stage for the kinds of activities that took place at Lathom.

Latham is placed on a most barren spot, and commands a view as extensive as it is dull… ground floor, principal, and attic; has a rustic basement, with a double flight of steps to the first story. The front extended a hundred and fifty feet, and has nine windows on each floor; the offices are joined to it, by a corridor supported by pillars of the Ionic order. The hall is nearly a square, 40 feet by 42, its height 36, the saloon 39 x 24. On this floor are thirteen apartments.657 The hall and saloon that overlooked the medieval deer park were the setting for these communal entertainments, which were an essential part in Bootle’s gentrification process, as he could now host the neighbouring aristocratic families in their favourite pursuit of theatre. By the early eighteenth century, amateur aristocratic theatre evolved into an elaborated system of favourite

654 See The Gentleman’s Magazine, 221 (January – June 1853), p. 539. 655 Barry Coward, The Stanleys (Manchester :Manchester University Press, 1983), p. xii. See Catherine Ostler, ‘England’s Lost Downtons: Or how endless homes have ended up as bypasses, office blocks and golf courses’, The Daily Mail (16 February 2012), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2101933/Englands-lost-Downtons-Or- endless-homes-ended-bypasses-office-blocks-golf-courses.html [accessed 15 September 2012] 656 Lathom Trust, ‘Storyboards’, http://www.lathom-park-trust.org.uk/html/history.html# [accessed 15 May 2009] 657 Pennant, A Tour from Downing to Alston Moor, p. 59.

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performers and repertoires, some of which even toured from house to house, attracting the local gentry near each estate as an audience. Richard Leppert’s description of amateur concerts of music in Georgian country houses also stresses the private, intimate, exclusive nature of such events, where the host family’s invitations were avidly sought after as a marker of social status.658

There is one more remainder of Lathom and Sir Thomas Bootle and his social pretensions, a collection of eighteenth-century porcelain, acquired by Mary Bootle Wilbraham and displayed at Rode Hall, which, like Lathom’s neighbour Knowsley Park, is still inhabited by the direct descendants of the family. An heiress to two fortunes, Mary Bootle particularly favoured blue-and-white ‘delftware’ ceramics decorated with blue underglaze patterns heavily reminiscent of horticultural motifs on Asian porcelain. The collection contains pieces from the

Bow, Worcester and Derby factories. It appears her uncle shared her love of porcelain, as the earliest pieces in the nationally-renowned Rode Hall ceramic collection are two Chinese armorial services commissioned by the Bootle family in 1730.659 Armorial services are the rarest and most expensive of all Chinese export porcelain, and involved a lengthy, transnational (indeed, panglobal) process of cultural exchange, in which the coat of arms of the patron was shipped, via the East India Company, to the city of Jingdezhen, ceramics production capital of the Qing empire under the Yongzheng Emperor.660

658 For private theatricals at country houses in the eighteenth century, and their popularity among the aristocracy, see T. H. Vail Motter, ‘Garrick and the Private Theatres: With a List of Amateur Performances in the Eighteenth Century’, ELH, 11: 1 (Mar., 1944), 63 – 75 (pp. 63, 64). See Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio- cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 204, 205. See also Wilhelmina Quirante Ramas, ‘Private theatricals of the upper classes in eighteenth-century England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Fordham University, 1969). 659 See Julie McKeown, English Ceramics: 250 Years of Collecting at Rode (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2007); Rode Hall & Gardens, ‘Porcelain’, http://www.rodehall.co.uk/porcelain., accessed September 2011. 660 Yongzheng, the 3rd Qing Emperor, reigned 1678 – 1735., see Clare Le Corbeiller and Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, ‘Chinese Export Porcelain’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 60 :3 (Winter, 2003), 1 - 60

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Many noble families in England directly commissioned one-of-a-kind porcelain services from China that were specially decorated with their coats of arms. Comparable armorial services from this era include a particularly hybrid, Francophile set that well illustrates the international flavor of Rococo art in this period. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns a 1735

Chinese-made service, decorated with flower designs by the Versaillais flower painter Jean-

Baptiste Monnoyer, whose work was discussed above in Chapter Four. The service, delicately painted in a palette evoking the bronze and gold contrasts of East Asian lacquer, was commissioned by a noble family of French descent living in Scotland. It was at this time that

British ceramics began to replicate the ‘foreign colours’ produced for the export market by

China, most notably in the delicate pinks and golds of the so-called famille rose porcelain inspired by orders from Europe. Complete services including dinner plates, teapots, serving trays and sets of matched vases in fives, called garnitures, were then shipped back to England with the coat of arms embedded in more traditional forms of Chinese floral decoration.661 As for the

Bootle family and their lowly origins, Pennant writes that the family was ‘non arma gerens, those they assumed being the property of Ponsonby, ’, and so just as Bootle’s proudly-displayed armorial porcelains were exhibited in the annexed aristocratic architectural space of Lathom, these relics of a lost history are decorated with an annexed set of symbols.662

The Bootle armorial porcelains are distinctive and transnational items of visual culture, decorated with gilded scrolling and the unusual motif of green parrots in overglaze enamel (Fig.

9.7). As art objects commissioned by an English patron from Chinese artisans, they are

(p. 24); see also Ann T. Bailey and Thomas V. Litzenburg, Chinese export porcelain in the Reeves Center collection at Washington and Lee University (Lingfield : Third Millenium Publishing, 2003), p. 96; David Sanctuary Howard, The choice of the private trader: the private market in Chinese export porcelain illustrated from the Hodroff collection (London: Zwemmer for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1994), pp. 34, 56, 81 – 84. 661 See Jean McClure Mudge, Chinese Export Porcelain in North America (New York: Riverside Book Co., 1986), p. 140; Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilized Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 662 Thomas Pennant, A Tour from Downing to Alston Moor, p. 60.

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quintessentially hybrid objects, belonging wholly to neither England or China, but representative of the cross-cultural interaction between both regions. Through annexing an old feudal manor formerly belonging to an ancient family, and by rebuilding that manor in a fashionable style with an eye to entertaining the neighbouring nobility, Bootle attempted to signal his suitability for aristocratic status, and his ability to compete with more traditionally established families with long lineages. 663

Conclusion

Sir Thomas Bootle, William Shippen and William Pulteney are three case studies from Lady

Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’ that are associated with architecture, space and place.

Their satirical value was aimed at using court understandings of the landscape to mock each individual’s foibles: Bootle’s social pretensions, Shippen’s political fantasies, and Pulteney’s inflammatory temper. The seriousness of her exercise, and the real, concrete political power that could be wielded through satires such as hers, is highlighted by an incident at court that took place after Lord Hervey’s return from Italy to court service. In 1731, Queen Caroline and her attendants – including Lord Hervey - were received at Richmond House by the Prime Minister,

Sir Robert Walpole, who wore the distinctive costume of a Ranger of , with a sash tied across his shoulders. At seeing Walpole in his traditional costume, Hervey, in an episode that encapsulates his personality, made up a song to the tune of a popular French medley of the time, predicting that while Walpole might wear a sash around his shoulders, Pulteney would someday wear a rope around his neck. Halsband comments that ‘first Hervey and the

663 As it did his choice of nightwear, with disastrous results. Bootle made himself ridiculous by appearing downstairs at Cliveden in a ‘night-gown, cap and slippers’ of gold brocade, clearly overstepping aristocratic boundaries in dress and ostentation. See Horace Walpole to Sir Thomas Mann, 1 September 1750, The Yale edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. by W. S. Lewis, 48 vols (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), XX, p. 184.

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Queen sang it together, and then the whole company took up the tune, and often repeated it throughout the day’.664 It is out of this cultural milieu, in a world where satire could and did translate into political and therefore financial gain, that Lady Hervey’s own cultural work must be interpreted. Her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, written as a collective form of social engagement for Henrietta Howard and her friends at Marble Hill, is a similar form of satire to

Lord Hervey’s threatening song. Likely written in emulation of similar jeue d’esprit exercises inaugurated by the salon, her ‘collection of pictures’ thus takes a French cultural model for its inspiration, but Lady Hervey reworks this format for political use at Marble Hill, just as her husband reworked the lyrics of a French song to satirize Pulteney’s political career.

Certain locales – Copenhagen, Lathom, Stote’s Hall – that are alluded to in her entries suggest that British court women like Lady Hervey had a deep appreciation and understanding of the sexually, politically and culturally charged nature of landscape. Knowledge of the potentialities embedded within the landscape, and within architecture, led to a collective and shared knowledge among oligarchical elites. The language Lady Hervey uses to describe

Shippen’s political future– ‘a distant prospect’- was language repeated in landscape guidebooks of the day, especially in the landscape theories of Stephen Switzer, a leading landscape designer popularized by influential courtiers. The political power of place, the geographical influence over the motions and emotions of human individuals, and how landscape design forged an emotional, affective relationship between elite experience of that environment, were all important factors in how British court women thought about place. Their class used it to control people, to seduce, confine or physically shape their lifestyles and life-motions.

664 Halsband, Lord Hervey, p. 121.

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Consumption was one form of resistance and subversion against rigid aristocratic hierarchies. By collecting armorial service porcelain, the most expensive and time-consuming type of East Asian ceramic design, the Bootle family similarly annexed the symbols of traditional nobility and traditional elite ‘place-ness’. They were setting down roots. Many other elite families at this time were likewise interested in having Chinese craftsmen design custom services of porcelain to display at their residences. The Bootles participated in this larger process of cultural exchange, where Asian ceramics were objects of collective desire by British court elites and catered to a ritualized spectacle of consumption, mediating social relationships through reference to a misunderstood but stimulating foreign region.

While Lathom is lost, its afterlife is not, and part of that afterlife – besides its reputation for fostering theatre and the public arts – are these precious pieces of armorial porcelain at Rode

Hall. As art objects, as relics of a by-gone environment loved and regretted, the Rode porcelain interrogates and challenges the loss of Lathom’s contents, which are rumoured to have been fed to the Blagugate collier when the mansion was broken up.665 These pieces are thus rare survivors of a careless or deliberate attempt to erase Lathom’s central position as a regional cultural locus, and with it the concomitant associations with aristocratic political privilege: this is an iconoclausm where industrialization quite literally devours the past, and where the coal furnaces of orkshire consume former sites of cultural excellence in the process of production. Lathom’s afterlife as an exemplar of lost architecture, and a sobering reminder of the necessity and value of cultural heritage preservation strategies on the national level, is therefore what imbues its associational ceramics with such social value. Produced in China and decorated there with a complex European caste-symbol - the assumed coats of arms of a newly-rich English family -

665 Coward, The Stanleys, p. xii.

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they are truly pan-global, stylistically hybrid works of art, and they retain emotional poignancy when enriched by a reading informed by Lathom’s history. When placed in dialogue with records of Sir Thomas Bootle’s character and personality – such as Lady Hervey’s imaginary

‘collection of pictures’, or Pennant’s record of Bootle’s conflict with Lord Stanley – these pieces of porcelain also illustrate their role as social technologies at the early Georgian court. In the next chapter, I conclude this thesis by continuing to explore porcelain’s social role as art objects in the cultural milieu of British Ladies-in-waiting.

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Chapter Ten, Conclusion: ‘Portrait of an Unknown Lady’: Ceramics, Sex and Gender in British Art Historiography

Much of this thesis is dedicated to investigating the intersection between the life histories of

Ladies-in-Waiting at the early Georgian court and the subsequent historiographic elision of the

émigré artists they favoured. By constructed a dialogue between specific works of art, architecture and literature and the letters of Caroline of Ansbach’s early circle of female attendants, I have explored the contextual associations between image and the archive, between issues of sex, family and gender in court women’s life histories, and the sexual and political diversity present in early eighteenth-century British art. By providing examples of their intellectual fortitude, interest in scholarship and familiarity with contemporary news events and politics, I have argued that the Ladies-in-Waiting selected as case studies in this thesis played important roles in processes of cultural change. Caroline’s early attendants were all highly educated, refined and sophisticated individuals. By interrogating their ideas about what constituted value in art, long-held art historical notions about ‘quality’ – both of the visual art itself, and of British court women’s connoisseurial and patronage abilities – are called into question.

For example, at the end of his career, the long-standing Tate Gallery director John

Rothenstein claimed that the rejection of the émigré muralists Louis Laguerre and Antonio

Verrio was a direct result of their ethnic status as foreign-born artists. In this narrative, English national myths of ethnic and stylistic purity are articulated through stressing the achievements of

‘real’ English painters, such as Sir John Thornhill and William Hogarth. Rothenstein asserts that a ‘native painter more than equal to their talents had emerged’, without making any mention of the racial, religious or xenophobic attitudes informing the patronage habits of Whig and Tory

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oligarchs alike.666 One quote in particular is worth quoting in some length, as it is remarkably informative about the tenor and tone of Rothenstein’s conception of the national past.

England had art patrons and connoisseurs before she had artists, and foreigners were well established before a national impulse to express itself in terms of paint came into being. And their art did not spring from the people but was imposed upon them... And English artists, having little to express, were content merely to repeat what… men belonging to older traditions, had already said. In short, they were like children who imitate without fully understanding the sophistication of their elders.

Repetition is key to the criticism here. Instead of child-like imitation, I understand the aesthetic and stylistic homogeneity of much early eighteenth-century art (including Kneller’s portraits of court women) as a cultural politics of repetition, comparable to oral histories, storytelling, or traditional dance. Adolph Adam’s ballet Gisele, for example, was first danced in 1841, but each time her story is retold and re-performed, the production is necessarily receptive to the shifting needs of the now. This holds true for sequential performances given by the same company at the same theatre. Gisele’s story is never told in quite the same way.

In a similar manner, the repetition of older compositional and narrative devices, largely forged at the seventeenth-century Stuart court by successive generations of artists, allowed for the creation of many disparate forms of images linked by the same visual frame. To illustrate,

Kneller’s portraits of Mary Cowper, Charlotte Clayton and other aristocratic women look very similar, but as his portrait of Lady Harborough (discussed in chapter seven) shows us, close examination of Kneller’s work does show personal emotional resonance. The story remains alive and vibrant in the retelling, indicating that in the visual world of Ladies-in-Waiting, there was as much negotiation as repetition, as much innovation as tradition. British historicism and

‘traditional’ aesthetics, as expressed in these homogenous portraits of court women, does in

666 John Rothenstein, An Introduction to British Painting (New York: Norton, 1965 – 67), p. 41.

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some sense defy modernist teleologies and aesthetic-artistic values, which are almost always obsessed with the new, and yet the early eighteenth century was a time of shift and transition.

The death of Queen Anne in 1714 might be said to truly conclude Britain’s ‘seventeenth century’, giving way to an era of comparative socio-economic stability carefully cultivated by the Hanoverian and their Whiggish advisors.

Visual art reflected the social changes that accompanied these political transitions, including a new focus on portraits that were outdoor and informal. Self-aware of the fête galante paintings popularized by Rococo artists in France, émigré artists in early Georgian Britain capitalized on court women’s interest in French modes of education and aesthetics. Porcelain is a key indicator of their interest in cultural difference. In the last chapter, I advocated for an understanding of some porcelain collections – such as the Bootle family’s service of export porcelain, commissioned from China and decorated there with their assumed coat of arms – as

‘relics’ of lost architectural sites that enhance a critical reading of their original owner’s cultural legacy. In this concluding chapter, I discuss the interest shown in Asian ceramics by both French and British court women, briefly explore the continuing elision of sexuality in contemporary

British art history, interrogate some of the curatorial strategies currently employed by museums and galleries regarding early eighteenth-century women’s portraiture, and end by comparing three examples that I argue act as metaphors for the main themes of this thesis.

Ladies-in-Waiting and Asian Art

French court culture was important for Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting because it offered a cultural alternative to the normally misogynist, anti-intellectual attitude towards women’s scholarship. Names like that of de Scudery or Deshouliers stood in Britain as bywords for the

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world of the salon hostess-poets in France, where members of disparate social status were encouraged in literary, philosophic and poetic endeavours by female aristocrats. Fashions in clothing, music and theatre also were first articulated in a French courtly environment and exported throughout the rest of Europe. During the first decades of Hanoverian rule in England, the court spoke French, read French literature and behaved in a way that consciously emulated

French manners. Lady Hervey, the British court’s most famous Francophile, was a leading figure in this process of cultural exchange, and she was likely fostered in these habits by the self- consciously ‘salon-like’ atmosphere cultivated by Queen Caroline. Her imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, with its evocation towards collective participation, and its playful sense of fun overlaid on rapier-sharp political and sexual satire, was an epistolary exercise in social media highly informed by these Francophile traditions. In the patriarchal world of early eighteenth-century

Britain, educated court women looked to the cultural examples set by their French peers to challenge and subvert norms of gendered behaviour, such as their exclusion from excellence in

Greco-Roman classical scholarship, the only ideologically reified secular mode of learning.

Taste and connoisseurship were important among both sexes of the French elite, but while, as in England, women were not usually encouraged to become serious scholars of the

Greco-Roman classics, elite French women showed a strong interest in the decorative repertoires of China and Japan. As Charissa Bremer-David has written, scholarship on Ladies-in-Waiting at

Versailles tends to focus on sexual or political scandal, titles and precedence, or maternal roles rather than on the real aesthetic influence exerted through their cultural patronage. Bremer-David identifies Madame de Montespan and her four surviving legitimized children as the ‘epicentre’ of court fashion and a ‘dynamic force – beyond that of the king or crown – in the creation and dissemination of style in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France’, arguing for the

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reconsideration of Montespan’s importance on the look, feel and tone of material culture at

Versailles.667 Montespan and her children’s importance to French fashion thus has real import in an English context, as it is clear their leading social roles at Versailles allowed the family to profoundly, if indirectly influence how fashion, style and interior design was received and translated outside France’s national boundaries. While Bremer-David’s study focuses on textiles,

Madame de Montespan clearly advertised her social prominence through the display of East

Asian luxury goods, especially porcelain and laquerwork, goods that made up a prominent part of the décor in her residence at Clagny and which are commemorated in her sumptuous portrait by Henri Gascars. After her sexual relationship with the King had ended Madame de Montespan also buttressed her close personal relationship with the Grand Dauphin, Louis XIV’s (legitimate) son and presumed heir, with gifts of blue embroidered tapestry covers for his own porcelain collection.668

British aristocratic women were aware of these tastes at Versailles and at other major aristocratic residences, such as the chateaux of St. Cloud and Chantilly, each with its own design studio, ceramic kilns, and distinctive type of ‘soft-paste’ porcelain decorated with motifs directly copied from Asian originals. In Britain, Mary II’s obsession with porcelain of all kinds also provided a high-profile exemplar to the court women and stimulated their collecting habits. The author Daniel Defoe, in his account (published 1724) of a visit to Hampton Court wrote that the apartments of Mary II were stuffed with ‘a vast stock of fine chinaware, the like whereof was not yet to be seen in England; the long gallery, as above, was filled with this china, and every other

667 Charissa Bremer-David, ‘The Tapestry Patronage of Madame de Montespan and her Family’, in Tapestry in the Baroque: New Aspects of Production and Patronage, ed. by Thomas Campbell and Elizabeth Cleland (New Haven and New York: Yale University Press for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), pp. 316 – 341 (p. 316). 668 Ibid., p. 323.

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place it could be placed with advantage’.669 Later in the same volume, Defoe elaborates on the perceived national connection between Mary Stuart and chinoiserie in England, claiming that the

Queen introduced not only printed Indian calicoes to popular taste, ‘grevious to our trade, and ruining to our manufactures and the poor’, but that she was also personally responsible, through example, for the worst excesses of conspicuous consumption the British had ever seen.

The Queen brought in the custom or humour, I may call it, of furnishing houses with China-ware, which increased to such a strange degree afterwards, piling their china upon the tops of cabinets, scrutores, and every chimney-piece to the tops of the ceilings, and even setting up shelves for their china-ware, where they wanted such places, till it became a grievance in the expense of it, and even injurious to their families and estates.670

Defoe’s description was written thirty years after the death of Queen Mary, but her cultural legacy in interior decoration and design over subsequent generations of British courtiers remained strong. Defoe’s account also suggests that the French Huguenot émigré Daniel Marot

(1661 – 1752), whose extant drawings and engraved designs done for William and Mary show similarly ‘excessive’, Asian-inspired interiors, were influential over the development of aristocratic domestic space. Defoe’s reiteration of the primacy of Mary II as a founding model for the reception of East Asian ceramics in England also points out that the Queen’s memory was an active factor in the conceptualization of ceramics as art objects by the English court.

Conceived as a figure who influenced and modified national taste, and indeed the national economy, the brevity of her time on the throne did not occlude her lasting role as a cultural matriarch within English elite society and especially her inspirational role among her Ladies-in-

Waiting.

669 Daniel Defoe, A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain… (London: G. Strahan et al., 1724), p. 7. 670 Ibid., p. 122.

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While the French courtly model in etiquette, aesthetics and design continued to be a powerful force over late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century elite British women’s tastes in porcelain, largely because of the example set by Versailles, Mary II’s porcelain cabinet was also building on social and cultural precedents established by women in Holland and the Low

Countries. Amalia von Solms (1602 – 1675), the wife of the Dutch stadtholder Frederick Henry of Orange, was well known for her love of imported ceramics. A former Lady-in-Waiting of

Elizabeth of Bohemia, von Solms was a prominent figure in Dutch politics, as she acted as her husband’s political advisor and later regent after he fell ill in 1640, and was again of considerable political importance from 1650 – 1667, during the minority of her grandson

William III. The couple rebuilt and extended several palatial residences, and their homes were filled with the gifts of visiting dignitaries, ‘comme tous les rois’, including large collections of imported paintings, tapestries and porcelain.671

Polychrome ceramics feature prominently in the palace inventories of Frederick Henry and Amalia von Solms as early as 1632, and later in life von Solms would show a marked preference for coromandel screens from India and lavish quantities of polychrome ceramics from

China and Japan.672 A little ‘cabinet’ room laid out for her country residence at Huis ten Bosch was decorated with Chinese lacquer panels cut from screens and chests, while at her death over forty-six pieces of lacquer remained in her possession.673 She was similarly intrigued by porcelain, and both von Solms and her granddaughter, Henriette Amalia of Nassau, were known for their collections of both lacquer and porcelain from Asia. In Imitation and Inspiration:

671 Todd Jerome Magreta, ‘The Development of Orange-Nassau Princely Artistic Activity, 1618 – 16 2’ (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, New York: City University of New York, 2008), p. 32. 672 Linda Rosenfeld Shulsky, ‘Japanese Porcelains in Seventeenth-Century European Inventories’, in Japanese art from the Gerry Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. by Barbara Brennan Ford and Oliver Impey (New York : The Museum, Distributed by H.N. Abrams, 1989), pp. 129 – 130 (p. 129). 673 Stefan van Raay, Imitation and Inspiration: Japanese Influence on Dutch Art (Amsterdam: Art Unlimited Books, 1989), p. 51.

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Japanese Influence on Dutch Art, Stefan van Raay points out that many Asian objects recorded in Dutch palace inventories were ‘to be found in the private apartments of the female members of the Orange-Nassau family’.674 For these sophisticated female patrons and ceramic collectors in

Holland, palace spaces were laid out ‘according to French etiquette’, and French courtly aesthetics were heavily influential over how interior living spaces were used, decorated and displayed.675 Frederick Henry’s mother, Louise de Coligny, and a previous wife of his father’s,

Charlotte of Bourbon-Montpensier, were highly erudite Francophone women whose religious sensibilities had led them to flee France and to marry into the Dutch nobility, and their foundational role over the acquisition and display of Asian ceramics in Dutch elite spaces has not been sufficiently explored in art historical literature. While many different national, cultural and stylistic threads informed the rise in porcelain collecting among elite women in late seventeenth- century Europe, it was a trend that saw early expression in England. The Earl and Countess of

Arundel, for example, had a Dutch banqueting hall furnished with Asian porcelain built at the residence of Tart Hall as early as 1641.676

While porcelain’s popularity among early eighteenth-century court women is well- known, British court women’s use of porcelain as a political tool has not been much discussed in art history. Mary II used ceramics to mediate between England and Holland, to showcase Anglo-

Dutch cooperation and stress their shared resistance to French geopolitical aggression. Her

674 Ibid, p. 64. 675 Reinier Baarsen, Furniture in Holland’s Golden Age (Amsterdam : Rijksmuseum , 2007), pp. 17, 111, 200, 201. 676 John Ayers, Oliver Impey, J.V.G. Mallet, and the Oriental Ceramic Society, Porcelain for palaces : the fashion for Japan in Europe, 1650-1750 (London : P. Wilson Publishers for the Oriental Ceramic Society, 1990), p. 57. For more on van Solms’ collection of porcelain, see also Reinier Baarsen and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum et. al, Courts and Colonies : the William and Mary style in Holland, England, and America (New York, N.Y. and Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1988), p. 203; Ruud Priem et. al; Vermeer, Rembrandt and the golden age of Dutch art : Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, exh. cat (Vancouver : Douglas & McIntyre for the Vancouver Art Gallery, 2009), p. 21; Wolfgang Savelsberg et. al, Infinitely beautiful : The garden realm of Dessau-W rlitz (Berlin : Nicolai, 2005), p. 94.

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exaggerated use of imported East Asian luxury goods in the palace interior physically symbolized and embodied the mutual practicability of rival colonial groups. By literally

‘shelving’ nationalist tension through the excessive, fetishistic use and display of high-status

Asian trade goods, Mary Stuart highlighted the pleasures and profits of Protestant colonialism in the broader global sense, and was able to forge a working partnership between two previously warring ethno-national groups. She also, as surviving records and memoirs make abundantly clear, inspired a new generation of elite British women, some of whom played leading roles at court, to avidly collect, consume and study Chinese and Japanese ceramics, leading to an increased awareness of and interest in East Asia in all spheres of material culture, including textile and furniture design, ceramic production, garden layout, portraiture and even architecture.677

In a letter to her sister likely written in early summer 1729, the same year as Lady

Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, Mary (Pendarves) Delany comments on the contemporary taste for Asian or Asian-inspired ceramics among elite women.

I sent a little box last night to the carrier with a set of china as my mama ordered me: I hope they will come safely, I gave great charge about packing them carefully. China is risen mightily this month. My Aunt Stanley liked them so well for the oddness of them, that she bought a set of cups, saucers, bason, sugar-dish and plate cost fourteen shillings.678

The letter makes clear that ‘Aunt Stanley’ was the key purchaser and connoisseur in all things related to china in the extended family, and also reiterates the high economic value given

677 Cassandra Brydges, Cassandra Brydges (1670 – 1735) Duchess of Chandos: Life and Letters, ed. by Rosemary O’Day (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), p. 1 7. For the Francophile connotations of this display of porcelain, see Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design 1500 – 1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 2001), p. 105. 678 Mary (Granville) Pendarves Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany with Interesting Reminisces of King George III and Queen Charlotte, ed. by Augusta Llanover, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), I, p. 210.

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ceramics at this time. ‘Aunt Stanley’ refers to her father’s eldest sister, Ann Granville Stanley, who earlier in life was employed at court as one of Mary II’s Maids of Honour. 679 Like Lady

Hervey, who entered service as a government employee at fifteen, Ann Granville was probably very young when she was appointed as an attendant to the Queen. The privilege of having one’s unmarried daughters at court, and thence around the children of the most powerful people in the nation, was so appealing as to convince many parents to put their daughters forward as candidates from very early on.680 In a letter dated 3 September 1716, Sarah Duchess of

Marlborough wrote to Mary Cowper of courts that she ‘had seen a good many, and lived in them many Years, but I protest I was never pleased but when I was a Child, and after I had been a

Maid of Honour some time, at Fourteen I wished myself out of the Court as much as I desired to come in it’, showing something of the age at which young noblewomen were plucked from the nursery to play quasi-political roles at the nexus of the social administration.681 Sarah Churchill herself had been placed around Mary and Anne Stuart, the daughters of the Duke of York (the future James II) before she or the princesses were much older than twelve or thirteen. In any case, Ann Granville is likely to have been very young when she joined the court at St. James and

Hampton Court.

Queen Mary’s influence over an impressionable companion is likely to have been great.

The Queen’s collection of imported porcelain, and of Dutch delftware with designs that mimicked East Asian aesthetics, was influential over the collecting practices and display habits of the English nobility, as she made it clear that she valued these precious articles of art very

679 See Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Montagu: the Queen of the Bluestockings. Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, ed. by Emily Climenson (repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1906]), p. 46, n.2. 680 See Frances Harris, ‘ “The Honourable Sisterhood”: Queen Anne’s Maids of Honour’, British Library Journal, 19:2 (1993), 181 – 198 (esp. pp. 187 – 190). 681 Sarah Churchill in Mary Cowper, Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper, Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales: 1714 – 1720, ed. Charles Spencer Cowper (London: John Albemarle, 1865), p. 196.

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highly. One drawing by the Huguenot designer Daniel Marot shows an apartment in the new wings of Hampton Court bristling with china of all types and description. A rolwagon or large vase occupies the central position of glory above a mantle stuffed with imported vases, ranked hierarchically according to size, including a bowl and large jars occupying the fireplace. The room is a curiosity cabinet exploded to become the room itself. Marot may well be catering to the Queen’s delight in fantasy, so that the viewer is encouraged to view her or himself as one of the dolls placed in a china cabinet.682 Most intriguingly, the inlaid panel decoration of the room designed by Marot shows influences lifted almost directly from contemporary French chinoiserie textiles designed for the aristocracy at Versailles. Remarkably similar to the tapestries woven for

Elihu Yale, where pavilions and Orientalizing figures are grouped separately on floating islands that recede into the background, the Yale and Hampton Court decorative motifs mingle styles from China, Japan and India in a manner reminiscent of the Chinese lacquerwork currently reaching Europe via the Coromandel coast of India.683

Domestic interiors in a court setting are heavily politicized spaces, even in rooms designed for the semi-private use of elite women, with the senior royal figure stamping the physical spaces of the new palaces with indications of their own personal style. While Caroline later espoused Rococo modes of portraiture, Mary, highly aware of the tensions brewing over her usurpation of her father’s throne with a Dutch army at her back, and anxious to smooth over tensions that had exploded into open war between the Dutch and English in her uncle Charles

II’s time, was quick to take up porcelain. This almost kitsch-like delight in crowded, eclectic assortments of porcelain is a statement of Dutch cultural and political affiliation made coherent

682 This is, after all, the age and the time that influenced Jonathan Swift to write Gulliver’s Travels: an interest in collapsing the limits of space was circulating in the literary world of the time. 683 Madeleine Jarry, Chinoiserie: Chinese Influence on European Decorative Art of the 17th and 18th Centuries (New York: The Vendome Press, 1987), p. 35, 36.

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through French Huguenot aesthetic design, and hence a potent symbol of her dynastic, personal and economic links with Holland. The triumph of William and Mary in ousting Catholic political influence from England meant that Dutch influences came pouring into Britain, including a taste for imported Chinese porcelain, much of which was bought directly from the Amsterdam warehouses of the Dutch East India Company. Long after her death, ceramics imported from

China via Holland were highly-desired status objects among court women. Lord Chesterfield, during his Ambassadorship to the Netherlands, wrote Henrietta Howard offering his services in this respect: Caroline was however his real target.

I have bought some China here (which was brought by the last East India ships that came in) of a very particular sort; its greatest merit is being entirely new, which in my mind, may be as well as being undoubtedly old; and I have got all there was of it…They are of metal, enameled inside and out with china of all colours. As I know the Queen loves China, I fancy she would like these, but it would not become me to take the liberty of offering them to her majesty; but if you think she would like them, I must beg you would be so good as to take the whole affair upon yourself, and manage it so that I may not seem impertinent. Were they not mere baubles, I could not presume to offer them to her majesty at all, and as they are such, I am ashamed of doing it.684 Howard’s answer, relayed from Queen Caroline, was that she had ‘managed the china-affair with the most consummate wisdom & prudence; and have received her Majesty’s commands to thank you, and tell you she has but one scruple in taking it, which is, that it may look like a bribe for her’.685 Bribery among Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting was endemic. When Charlotte Clayton made a call to Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough wearing a fortune’s worth of diamonds flashing in her ears, the Duchess expressed indignation to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. It was widely rumoured the expensive jewels were a gift from Lord Pomfret in return for her services in securing him a lucrative court appointment. ‘How can that woman have the impudence to go

684 Philip Dormer Stanhope to Henrietta Howard, Letter dated the Hague, 13 August 1728, in Henrietta Howard, Letters to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk…, ed. by John Wilson Croker, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1824), I, p. 305. 685 Letter from Henrietta Howard to Philip Dormer Stanhope, August 1728, in Ibid., p. 311.

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about in that bribe?’ demanded the Duchess. In response, with her characteristic caustic wit,

Wortley Montagu retorted ‘Madam, how would you have people know there is wine to be sold, if there is not a sign hung out?’686 Chesterfield’s interaction with Howard, which attempts to use

East Asian art objects as prestige gifts to curry favour with the Queen, shows that for all his self- effacing gentlemanly tone, he was well aware of how much distinctive ceramics were valued among high-ranking courtiers. From the description, his service is undoubtedly some very early examples of Asian cloisonné, a technique not native to China, but which became popular in the wake of increased stimulus from the global market.687 Chesterfield’s letter to Henrietta Howard suggests that at least one service of cloisonné enamel was known at the English court, and that western interest in rare or unusual examples of East Asian material culture was sparked by elite women’s taste for an emerging and cosmopolitan Rococo visual style.688

While collecting habits in England were stimulated by the Dutch example, they were filtered through a French lens, shown by Charles Hanbury William’s poem about Isabella

Montagu, Dowager Duchess of Manchester.689 Montagu’s fondness for Francophile forms of chinoiserie is highly respected by Hanbury Williams, and she is positioned in the poem as a leading figure in London society, a woman whose tastes and fashions set the tone of the ‘ton’ or

686 Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, letter of 17 Jan. 1742, quoting the author’s father, Sir Robert Walpole. 687 See Beatrice Quette, ‘Introduction,’ p. xiii, and Helene David-Weill, ‘Preface,’ p. xi, in Cloisonné: Chinese Enamels from the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, ed. by Beatrice Quette (New York: Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture in conjunction with Les Arts Decoratifs, Paris, and Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2011). Quette writes ‘compared to Chinese ceramics, bronze, and lacquer… little scholarly attention has been given to cloisonné, despite the remarkable level of quality achieved by Chinese artisans. One reason for this lack of recognition may be that cloisonné is not considered by either Asian or Western scholars as part of the craft heritage of China, since it was a technique first explored elsewhere’, while David –Weill points out that Chinese cloisonné from the imperial period has a fraught history of reception, coming ‘to the attention of the west in the wake of the sack of the Summer Palace in 1860’, after which ‘this unfamiliar aesthetic sparked widespread curiosity and enthusiasm’. 688 See also Charles Hanbury Williams, The Works of the Right Honourable Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, vol. 1, ed. by Horace Walpole and Edward Jeffery (London: Edward Jeffrey, 1822), p. 78, for See also T. Préaud, ‘Sèvres, La Chine et les “Chinoiseries” au XVIII siècle’, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 47 (1989), 35 – 50. 689 Peter van der Ploeg et. al, Princely patrons : the collection of Frederick Henry of Orange and Amalia of Solms in the Hague (The Hague : Mauritshuis, 1997).

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high society. In Hanbury Williams’ poem, the Duchess is positioned as an avid collector when her friend Richard ‘Dicky’ Bateman produces a new English-made teapot. ‘With eager eyes the longing D----s stood,/ and o’er and o’er the shining bauble view’d’. The Dowager Duchess mentions St. Cloud and Chantilly in her adultatory tribute to this new English product – ‘it equals Dresden, and excels St. Cloud:/ All modern China shall now hang its head, And ev’n

Chantilly must give o’er the trade’.690 Her admiration for Staffordshire ware, tinged with nationalism, sees porcelain as inflected through a cultural lens that is two-tinted, certainly via

Asia but also through the French aristocracy’s admiration of Asia.

If the cloisonné purchased by Chesterfield was, as he claimed, ‘entirely new’, the service dates from the Yongzheng reign, a brief but flourishing period for the visual arts in China that saw the expansion of the enamel palette used in the making of cloisonné and of porcelain.

ongzheng’s era (172 – 36) ushers in the widespread use of beautiful translucent pink enamel made from gold hydrochloride, sometimes thought to have been introduced into China by Jesuit missionaries familiar with its discovery by Andreas Cassius in Holland, although Chinese craftsmen were quite likely perfectly capable of making the discovery on their own.691 Given these details, it seems highly likely that the unusual ‘china of all colours’ incorporated elements of gold hydrochloride enamel in its decorative programme, and would have been highly fashionable in the drawing rooms and reception suites of St. James’ palace, where the colour

690 Hanbury Williams, Works, p. 78. 691 For an investigation into the work of Cassius and his father, and an alternative identification of the discovery to Bavarian chemist Johann Rudolph Glaber, see Gold: Science and Applications (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press for Taylor and Francis Group, 2010), p. 2009. For Yongzheng and pink enamels, see Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550 – 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 209; Anthony Du Boulay, Christie’s Pictorial History of Chinese Ceramics (Oxford : Phaidon, 1984), pp. 190, 235 – 238; Yaw Lu, Lee Kong Chian Art Museum: Collection of Chinese Ceramics, Bronze, Archaic Jade, Painting & Calligraphy in the light of Recent Archaeological Discoveries (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1990), p. 37; and Denise P. Leidy, Wai-fong Anita Siu and James C. . Watt, ‘Chinese Decorative Arts’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin , 55: 1 (Summer, 1997), 1 – 71 (p.16).

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pink was much in demand. Techniques of metalworking foreign to China were naturalized and adapted by talented craftsmen there and transformed into an export commodity popularized by elite European women’s tastes in interior decoration, display and consumption. The resulting pan-global aesthetic revolution was inextricably linked to the rhythms of transnational commerce and shipping, dependent on the personal tastes, preferences and choices of an increasingly educated global elite.

Ladies-in-Waiting were highly visible individuals within the national elite, and records of their aesthetic preferences can demonstrate their curiosity about different ways of life, about exoticism and foreign ‘otherness’. Parts of Ann Granville’s material world can be traced in the letters of Celia Fiennes, whose records of her journeys around England on horseback parallel

Defoe and Delany’s descriptions of Granville’s world. Fiennes visited Hampton Court in 1694, the year of the Queen’s death, writing that ‘there was the Water Gallery that opened into a ballcony to ye water, and was decked with China and fine pictures of ye Court Ladyes drawn by

Nellor’, referring to the Water Gallery, a beautiful, gleaming pleasure house over the Thames redecorated for the Queen near the Privy Garden.692 The Water Gallery’s association between an outdoor pleasure pavilion, portraits of famous (sexualized) beauties of the court, and blue-and- white export porcelain is a direct nod to the Trianon de Porcelaine of the 1670s, a short-lived pavilion decorated in exterior delftware tiles. The Trianon de Porcelaine lay at the back of the

Versailles gardens, at the site now occupied by the Grand Trianon. Louis XIV here entertained his mistress in a setting said to be hung with sapphire textiles as a tribute to the Marquise de

692 Celia Fiennes, Through England on a Side Saddle in the time of William and Mary, Being the Diary of Celia Fiennes, ed. by E. W. Griffiths (London: The Leadenhall Press, 1888), p. 47.

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Montespan’s blue eyes.693 The exterior tiles did not successfully weather a succession of cold winters, so Queen Mary’s solution of putting some of her best pieces of china in her famous

Water Gallery, proximate to the gardens, was an innovative reworking of the norms established at Versailles. Ann Granville could very well have been one of the ‘Court Ladyes’ whose portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller was thought by Queen Mary to parallel and complement the export porcelain displayed in the Water Gallery, linking porcelain with painting and their mutual, cooperative role in artistic expression. Most, if not all, of the great seventeenth century and eighteenth century country houses surviving today have similar juxtapositions of Kneller’s work with export porcelain or delftware chinoiserie ceramics, as the juxtaposition of portrait and porcelain remains a defining characteristic of the country house style, found in mansions across the transatlantic British world.

The recorded material culture of one of Mary Delany and her aunt Ann Stanley’s acquaintances, the Calvert family, makes a poignant counterpoint to the records of their purchases of china, as the Calverts’ Maryland colony, by 17 0, was run largely by one of the

Granville family’s closest friends and political allies, Charles, 5th Lord Baltimore. Lord

Baltimore features largely in the young Mary Delany’s writing at this time, as he was one of her main suitors and friends during this period of her first widowhood. A comparison of the pottery shards found in archaeological excavations of his Maryland estates, where his younger brother resided and which he visited in 1732, demonstrates the importance of East Asian products in delineating social status. Anne Yentsch, the author who summarized the findings of the archaeological work in Maryland, suggests that the Calverts had, at their North American base,

693 Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), p. 163. The embroidered textiles Madame de Montespan sent the Grand Dauphin to cover his collection of imported porcelain were also blue: see above.

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‘two dozen [plates] of expensive Chinese porcelain. Only four of the latter made their way into the ca. 1730 archaeological features, but more of these older plates show up in later deposits, suggesting they were carefully curated and cared for by the governor’s household while they were new’.694 entsch notes ‘the Calvert pottery and porcelain are visible marks of a distinctive lifestyle. It is useful to think of them as props in a performance…Fancy ceramics, c. 17 0, were masculine tools for status acquisition. Men carefully compared, selected, ordered and used fine pottery and porcelain… Men sometimes gave full sets of opulent china to their daughters as wedding gifts.’695

Ann Granville Stanley is using the selection of china, specifically ‘for the oddness of it’ and likely referring to export porcelain from China with distinctive motifs (or, possibly, a delftware tin-glazed copy with new Rococo chinoiserie designs), as a way of expressing autonomy. She uses a set of cultural tools normally gendered as masculine, the selection and purchasing of china, rather than the stereotyped curation and display and use of china. Mary

Delaney recognizes her aunt’s individuality as a way of showing her own educated connoisseurship, making use of entirely new, foreign and distinct educational criteria to create a new space of patronage that allows for female choice.696 This runs parallel to the notion that elite women used exoticism to voice dissidence against the classical or biblical paradigms of culture (shown most strikingly in the architectural vocabulary of Pope’s Burlingtonian

Palladianism) and highlights their distinct and specific role within the secular rituals of early capitalism. David Porter, for example, has commented on the explicit association between

694 Anne E. Yentsch, A Chesapeake Family and their Slaves: A Study in Historical Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,) p. 140, 146. 695 Ibid., p. 146. 696 See Beth Kowalski-Wallace, ‘Women, China and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29: 2 (1995/6), p. 153 – 168.

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chinoiserie and the rejection of scientific, classical (and hence patriarchal) modes of order, rationality and control. For Porter, the use of chinoiserie, and of export porcelain, was ‘a bold celebration of disorder and meaninglessness, of artifice and profusion, an exuberant surrender to all that remained unassimilated by rationalist science and classical symmetries.’697 The interest shown by Ladies-in-Waiting in Asian ceramics, and the obsessive delight in their distinctive, anti-classical, different look is therefore a politicized issue of gender, in which Asian art was used to ‘perform’ political difference.

Part of that difference was in an evocation of sensuality, in which the Rococo world was used by court women to advocate for a cultural model more inclusive than the narrow range of domestic, sexual and maternal functions allowed by biblical or classical precedents. ‘The candlelight from the sconces in the Calvert home glistened and reflected from burnished pewter plates, shining silver vessels, rarely seen colours such as famille rose and verte on Chinese bowls and crystal decanters’, writes entsch. Creating this kind of flickering, glittering, fairy-like environment of the early Rococo took poly-cultural objects of decorative art as the very cornerstone of its being, and was driven by the tastes of elite court women for the exotic. Key players at the apex of the Georgian hierarchy, whose purchases and habits defined fashion itself,

Ladies-in-Waiting had enormous reverberations both within Britain and especially without, as the nascent economy of British and French America adapted to a milieu set by the aesthetic standards of court women. In another example, Catherine Shorter, Lady Walpole, a cultured and intellectual woman who was herself a prolific amateur artist, and whose family holdings of visual art were probably the best-known private collection in England (due to Walpole’s public life), was known for her interest in the ‘ancient porcelaine of China’. Like the reliquary role

697 David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 135.

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collections of porcelain can sometimes play in referring to lost residences – for example, how the

Bootle family’s armorial service interacts with the memory of its exhibition at places like

Lathom - porcelain as well as portraiture sometimes bears emotional, affective and mnemonic familial meaning. The early Georgian court recognized these social roles implicit in porcelain.

After Lady Walpole’s death, her collection was purchased by a prominent courtier, the Duke of

Richmond, and later gifted to her son, Horace Walpole, who acknowledged Richmond’s sensitivity in restoring his mother’s cherished objects into his care. These little-known records of British court women’s tastes and purchasing habits, therefore, are important insights onto a little-known and historigraphically elided world.698

Both Lady Hervey and Henrietta Howard faced difficulty in their personal and professional careers, and cultural activities such as porcelain collections or an imaginary

‘collection of pictures’ seem to have offered a welcome respite from the social and sexual pressures of a society that openly espoused double standards of morality for men and women.

Swift’s criticism of Howard to Betty Germaine, in the letter mentioned in this thesis’ introduction, records how unlike in France, where maitresses-en-titre like Madame de

Montrespan or Madame de Pompadour held great financial resources, Howard’s position in

England was much more ambiguous. Marble Hill was certainly built to showcase her relationship with the future King, but George II and Queen Caroline’s close marital relationship, and the

Queen’s politically savvy, farsighted control of her household, meant Howard was left without much overt financial or political clout. Deafness was also a factor, as the increasing loss of

698. See Timothy Wilson, ‘ “Playthings still?”: Horace Walpole as a Collector of Ceramics’, in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. by Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman, exh. cat (London: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and Victoria & Albert Museum, , 2009), pp. 200 – 219 (esp. pp. 215, 217). Historiographic issues still exist in writing as sensitive and evocative as Wilson’s, who praises the eclecticism and diversity of the Strawberry Hill ceramic collection in derogatory comparison with women’s taste in Asian goods, writing Walpole’s ‘collecting was not limited… nor was it dominated (like many ladies’ china closets) by oriental porcelain’, p. 215.

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hearing she suffered as she grew older made the fulfillment of Howard’s social responsibilities at court difficult. After the King’s coldness to her was made publicly apparent, and, following a contentious interview with the Queen, Howard resigned her position in 1734, retiring in relief to

Marble Hill to start a new life with her second husband, George Berkeley.

Letters referencing her role as a connoisseur of imported Asian porcelains, and her activities as a conduit by which patrons like Philip, Earl of Chesterfield forwarded rare or exotic pieces to the Queen, are documents that reiterate the importance of ceramics as art objects in the cultural milieu of the early Georgian court. Howard’s individual role as a patron deserves further scholarly attention, as her choices illuminate how court women used their interest in cultural alternatives, in foreign ‘otherness’ and exotic luxury, for subversive purposes. Like Mary II, the

Dowager Duchess of Montagu, Anne Granville Stanley, Catherine, Lady Walpole and many other court women, Howard acquisitively sought and displayed distinctive types of porcelain.

Her collection grew in size and scope as her life progressed, and she housed it in a special, garishly-painted summerhouse designed by her favourite architect, Roger Morris, and placed close to the river in the grounds of Marble Hill.699 Without Mary II’s example, or the precedents in collecting porcelain established by Dutch and French noblewomen, Howard’s obsession with china would have looked excessive, as her summerhouse bristled with china of all description.

Just as Mary II’s collection was politicized through her ‘shelving’ of Protestant discord through the prominent display of coveted trade objects from Asia, Howard’s collection of ceramics, and more than that her curatorial strategies of exhibition and display, were an outright challenge to the cold, impeccably Greco-Roman formal rigidity of Burlingtonian Palladianism. In 1739, ten years after she had received Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’, Howard wrote to

699 David Beevers, Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain, 1650 – 1930 (Brighton, East Sussex: Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery, and Museums, 2008), p. 49.

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her friend Henry Herbert, 9th Earl Pembroke, telling the architect-earl that her ‘Cheyney room will make you stare, if not swear… I must tell you ‘tis the admiration of the vulgar, but my vanity would be entirely gratified if it shou’d meet with your approbation’.700 Herbert was previously responsible for the design for some of the most famous Palladian monuments in

England, such as White Lodge, Richmond Park, the Column of Victory at Blenheim Palace, and the Palladian Bridge at Wilton House.

Herbert had also collaborated with Morris on the design of Marble Hill itself. Howard’s satirical comment therefore shows how likely aristocratic male connoisseurs were to ‘stare’,

‘swear’ and sneer at products and styles that blended the decorative repertoires of China, India and other Asian states. Her summerhouse stuffed with china, with its vivid colours and eclectic assortment of Asian ceramics, was the antithesis to Herbert’s rarefied form of neoclassicism.701

Its warmth, vitality and cheerful ‘vulgar’ clutter was, as Chesterfield’s letter shows, sparked by her intimate familiarity with the unusual items of East Asian art forwarded to her by diplomats and courtiers. The collection in this ‘cheyney room’ reached such vast numbers that it ‘defeated the inventory clerks’ charged with valuing Howard’s estate. After her death in 1767, the clerks, faced with such a daunting assortment of goods, decided to value only the best pieces.702 Ladies- in-Waiting thus challenged their exclusion from masculine spheres of classical scholarship through their interest in cultural difference, in exotic products from lands only partially

700 See Tracy Borman, Henrietta Howard: King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 226. 701 For another example of a summerhouse filled with china (although perhaps not to such an extent as Howard’s), from 1720, see the unpaginated entry for William Chapman, Inventories of the South Sea Directors, Quarto 63 721 P258, Lewis Walpole Library, ale University. Chapman’s summerhouse ‘down in the garden’ was furnished with marble chairs and a parcel of china. 702 Timothy Wilson, ‘Playthings Still?’, p. 207.

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understood, but which provided a real cultural alternative to the Greco-Roman world and its interpretation by their male contemporaries.703

Sexuality

While the assertion of nationalist bias has formally structured the discipline of art history’s approach to early 18th-century British visual and material culture, a continuing elision of sexuality also tinges modern, contemporary discussions of the subject. This is not to say that there have not been many, excellent articles dedicated to the discussion of sex and gender in early British Rococo art; there have been, and this is a continuingly fertile ground for many historians, art historians, sociologists, anthropologists, curators, and museum professionals.704

What has, however, not been acknowledged, is the absolute need to put queer identities, dissident performances of gender, flagrant or overt sexuality, or even pornographic images from the period front and center in any critique of the early eighteenth-century aristocracy and their cultural work, including Ladies-in-Waiting and their architectural and artistic patronage.

Sexuality affects the afterlife of buildings and estates associated with the British court, where a refusal to privilege the restoration of explicit sexual scenes enacts a loss of sexual knowledge. Country houses can and do suffer from a stripped-down historical presentation. In

703 Blue and white china, especially delftware, is sometimes described as vulgar by aristocratic patrons. In his entry for June 25, 1714, the young Robert L’Estrange, on the Grand Tour in France, remarks of the castle of ‘Baugair’ that it ‘has nothing worth notice except a few Orange Trees, here is a Gallery lay’d with Blew & White Dutch tile, wch is much admired by the meaner sort’. L’Estrange unfortunately died in Basle the following year, but his diary was shipped back to his grieving family, and is now in the Norfolk Record Office as Robert L’Estrange, ‘Diary of Travel’, MSS LEST/NF2; the reference to ‘Baugair’, which from its proximity to ‘Chevirny’ (Cheverny) must be the Château de Baugé, is found f52. 704 For three of the most evocative articles, see Karl Toepfer, ‘Orgy Salon: Aristocracy and Pornographic Theatre in Pre-Revolutionary Paris’, Performing Arts Journal, 12: 2/3 (1990), 110 – 1 6; Donald Posner, ‘The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard’, The Art Bulletin, 64: 1 (Mar., 1982), 75 – 88; and Angela Rosenthal, ‘Unfolding Gender: Women and the ‘Secret’ Sign Language of Fans in Hogarth’s work’, in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, ed. by Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 120 – 141.

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one 2002 article, Tim Knox presents an overview of the restoration projects undertaken by the

National Trust at Stowe, the estate created by Lord Cobden as a political and aesthetic alternative to court Whiggism. Stowe’s innovative landscape program, where sweeping vistas of land merge with informal, serpentine stretches of paths, canals and flowerbeds, proved inspirational to later generations of British landscape designers. Knox offers insights into the art conservation practices involved at Stowe, outlining the challenges involved in the curation of a large, site- specific outdoor space populated by small structures in varying degrees of preservation.

When working on the ‘Chinese Pavilion’, an early and influential example of British chinoiserie garden architecture, the conservation team at Stowe used enlarged details of photographs of the pavilion taken in 1949 to recreate other lost ornamental details, such as the upswept wings of the roof. The building reflects the orientalist interest in sexual and ethnic

‘otherness’ articulated by the tastes of the early Ladies-in-Waiting, and shows how their continuing interest in the decorative repertoires of East Asia eventually permeated the work of major architectural patrons. Garden buildings at Stowe were heavily gendered, with some spaces designed for the enjoyment of Lady Cobden and her friends, and others reserved exclusively for men. One of these deliberately homosocial garden pavilions at Stowe has not been reconstructed.

Erotic paintings by Francisco Sleter that once adorned the Temple of Venus, built on the grounds in 17 1, are not yet resurrected. Apparently too scandalous for guidebooks to mention, Sleter’s fresco cycle at the Temple of Venus depicted scenes from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen, but

Knox recounts that ‘with so little information about them we have resisted the temptation to put them back’, a statement which carries a great deal of unconscious baggage about the extent of

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early Georgian sexual practices, possibilities and ideologies.705 No such reluctance was expressed, for example, in Knox’s account of the restoration of two whole sections of the

Chinese Pavilion’s exterior panelling. By his own admission, these panels were completely lost during the ancient structure’s forty-year weathering of the Irish elements in a private collection.

Despite a comparable lack of information to Sleter’s erotic scenes, the exterior panels of the

Chinese house were treated to a complete re-haul during the recent restoration effort. I suggest that this rejection of the erotic continues to permeate the larger discipline of British art history, influencing the ‘afterlife’ of estates like Stowe and how modern-day critics and historians experience Stowe and engage with its cultural legacy. Knox’s account is a particularly interesting one from a historiographic point of view: by selecting some aspects of an estate’s ‘afterlife’ for restoration and recreation, and deliberately ignoring others, eighteenth-century British art is recapitulated to reflect modern discomfort towards explicitly sexual art within prestige settings like Stowe.

As a second example of the elision of dissident sexualities in the work of preeminent specialists in the field, one drawing discussed in Charles Saumaurez-Smith’s book Eighteenth-

Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England brings up the intersecting spheres of sexuality, French influence, émigré artists and material culture in early Georgian

Britain. Of the French influences at work in the early Georgian interior, Saumarez-Smith points to the truly revolutionary attitude towards private space advocated by the French and the

Francophile British nobility, seeing the late seventeenth-century reconceptualization of interior space as a successfully hegemonic social strategy engaged in by the elite. Huguenot craftsmen, in

Saumarez-Smith’s account, are particularly important in the process of cultural diffusion and

705 Tim Knox, ‘Architectural colour at Stowe; recent discoveries by the National Trust’, Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles (February, 2002), 1 – 19 (p. 13).

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translation. Exemplified in Saumarez-Smith's narrative by Daniel Marot, who, with his tangible connection to the decorative programme of Versailles, serves as an appropriate example of cross- channel influences, the Huguenot population in London were vital in the galvanization of forms of artistic expression that were at once fiercely nationalist and inherently cosmopolitan.

However, in his discussion of an important 1706 sketch by Pellegrini of the Huguenot writer and trader Pierre-Antoine Motteux, Saumarez-Smith points out that while this drawing is undoubtedly an ‘early precedent for the later genre of the conversation piece’, he focuses his analysis, not on the life histories of the Motteux family, but on Pellegrini’s treatment of the imported porcelain prominently displayed in the background as marker of Motteux’s profession.706 My problem with the otherwise excellently written, carefully researched record presented by Saumaurez-Smith is the way in which groups of individuals are elided through the

‘and family’ narratives of art that only mention the capitalist production or administrative role of the patriarch in question, refusing to engage with the individuality of other members of a family - people such as Madame Motteux and her children.

Conversation pieces are group portraits, and while the patriarch is the most publicized, overtly politicized subject of the artist’s brush, the thoughts and sensitivities of the rest of the family are largely unexplored. How did these children feel about coming to live in a new, alien country? During the course of research for this chapter, I consulted an article written by David

Hopkins on the subject of Motteux, published in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as I was hoping to further identify Madame Motteux and her children. I became interested once again in Motteux himself, as besides neglecting the identities of his wife and children, Saumarez-

Smith also neglected the manner of the subject’s death, which took place in 1718, in a notorious

706 Charles Saumarez-Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), pp. 54, 55.

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Temple-Bar brothel, as a result of autoerotic asphyxiation (he was strangled by prostitutes who neglected to remove the cords around his neck). Priscilla Motteux, her stepdaughter and the couple’s two surviving sons were unsuccessful in prosecuting the madam of the house, Elizabeth

Simmerton, for murder.707

This case study illuminates a number of historiographic concerns which are evident in a review of even contemporary British writing on art, art history and art historiography. One is the continuing elision of non-patriarchal identities represented in group portraits, and another is the rejection, either as spurious or superficial, of any talk about dissenting sexualities in the lives of represented individuals. But that failure to speak of such things marks a subtle refusal on the point of the British art establishment to document, record and to ‘speak’ of sexual diversity in the historical record.

Part of the value of studying the cultural patronage of early eighteenth-century British court women is therefore in how their art writing illustrates a dialogue between their life histories and that of the objects and buildings they knew and loved. In these cultural afterlives of subject and object, there is a space to ‘say’ queer histories and to talk about the queer body, about sexualized bodies – like Lady Hervey’s own body, admired at the theatre - and responses to sexualized violence, reflected in the brutal treatment of his maidservants by Colonel Charteris.

The attempted censorship with red wax on Lord Hervey’s letter to the Duke of Richmond, reflecting Lady Hervey and other court women’s withdrawal from a sexual joke mistakenly uttered by a Francophone courtier, is a rare reminder of all that has been deliberately lost, unspoken, left unsaid. In the materiality of the letter, its subsequent meaning forever altered by a

707 David Hopkins, ‘Motteux, Peter Anthony (166 –1718)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.queensu.ca/view/article/19423 [accessed 11 June 2009]

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later censor’s attempt to hide text that highlighted just how crass, frank and sexually explicit the court was, the crimson splash of wax exemplifies discourses of repression. This suppression of queer history has a long history, such as in the instances mentioned in this thesis where letters suffered destruction or damage.

Queer bodies provoke violence of all kinds. The violence enacted on a manuscript acknowledges the threat of violence against the queer body itself. Queer bodies also provoke fetishization, seen so prominently in Pulteney’s A Proper Reply, and hence insinuated in broadsheet engravings of the duel that resulted, or the inclusion of Ganymede on the soaring wall murals of émigré artists like Verrio, Laguerre or Cheron. Both responses to the challenge of queer identity result in a deliberate erasure of memory, so that queerness is not preserved, is erased from memory, erased from ‘legitimate’ human sexual activity.708 Lord Hervey’s censored letter is a survivor, but as the importance of historiographic readings of manuscript correspondences remind us, the deliberate destruction of women’s letters, of explicit references to sex and sexuality (especially queer sexualities) and of ephemeral ‘social media’ like Henrietta

Howard’s lost ‘Court Journal’ all contribute to an ongoing silencing of how sex, art and politics are viewed in this period.

Emotion and Image: Portraits of Ladies-in-Waiting

Concomitant with this process of cultural silencing is the rejection of the importance of the foreigner, the stranger and the unsettled, itinerant artist in the development of British art by later art historians. Lady Cowper’s thoughts on the strangeness of work – ‘most horribly done, and yet so unfortunately like’ – by Francophile artists like Rene Constantyn, who like Philippe Mercier

708 Here I take the meaning of ‘queer’ to include homosexuality, bisexuality (including the ménage a trois), and dissident heterosexual practices, such as autoerotic asphyxiation.

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was patronized by the Schutz family and other Hanoverian courtiers, reflects on how French aesthetic influence was naturalized and translated in a British context by foreign artists to create a new national school of painting. Mercier’s use of fête galante conventions at the early

Georgian court forged the conversation piece as a stylistic hybrid, using French court sensuality, the informality of Dutch genre portrait groups and the richness of the British court portrait tradition in his outdoor group portraits of prominent landed families. While the Court’s leading artist, Sir Godfrey Kneller, was a conservative émigré whose portraits of Caroline’s early Ladies- in-Waiting looked back on the older British tradition, Mercier’s work was innovative and stylish, responding to the contemporary interest in French fashion, style and courtly aesthetics. Émigré artists like Mercier and Maingaud, stimulated by Caroline’s direct interest in the arts and their international experience of contemporary art, created new modes of portraiture for the court.

Maingaud’s c. 1720 portraits of George and Caroline’s eldest children, created during a time of family crisis, showcases how these émigré artists were able to use international modes of

Francophile Rococo visual art to adapt to the court’s changing needs, and to articulate shifts in attitudes towards feminine intellectual autonomy and access to education.

The emotional, affective aspect of Maingaud’s portrait of Caroline’s three eldest daughters, portrayed in compositional ways evoking the motif of ‘the Three Graces’, also reminds contemporary art historians of how precious and deeply-cherished court portraits were.

Caroline reserved a prominent spot for the work in her state apartments at her main London residence, Kensington Palace, where her attendants undoubtedly saw it on a regular basis. By doing so, the Queen reminded her audience of the enforced separation from her daughters that she experienced during her father-in-law’s life, and all records consistently indicate the great amount of emotional stress suffered by Caroline during this period. Maingaud’s portrait marks,

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not just a transitional period of style or aesthetics, or even the changing attitudes towards aristocratic women, so often used as dynastic pawns in systems of economic and reproductive exchange by the great landed families of Britain, but a record of the genuine affection and love felt between one particularly prominent mother and her three daughters. The work is a potent echo of familial bonds, rendered all the more precious in Caroline’s own life by her long-running estrangement from her son Frederick, who most observers agreed treated his mother with cruelty.

Maingaud, however, is not much discussed in the scholarly literature, and is held up as an imitator of Mercier, whose reputation, like that of other émigré artists such as Seeman and

Zincke, has suffered from xenophobic, gendered and otherwise dismissive accounts of his work.

In a similar fashion, the letters of John Wainwright, English legal administrator in

Ireland, reflect the emotional importance of the itinerant painter James Worsdale’s portrait of

Charlotte Clayton, favourite Lady-in-Waiting of the Queen. For Wainwright, Worsdale’s portrait of Clayton ‘excited’ his imagination and inspired him to write poetic tributes to its emotional value as a marker of their friendship. Significantly, within Worsdale’s life history, there is considerable room to speak about queer history and queer art. Worsdale’s transvestite roles in theatre, his involvement in the sodomy trial of Edward Walpole, younger son of the Prime

Minister, and his foundational role within the Limerick ‘Hellfigure’ club all argue for the existence of queer identities in early eighteenth-century elite society. Worsdale’s case also pinpoints a critical flaw in art historical analyses of eighteenth-century art. While Wainwright admired the portrait for its expressive qualities, later art historical accounts of Worsdale’s artistic production have been unanimously negative, using quality judgements to denigrate his work and to negate the real emotional power of his portraits, which his patrons noted with appreciation.

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These disdainful attitudes towards Worsdale go hand in hand with the critics’ rejection of

Worsdale’s life, blindly overlooking how his interests bridged the worlds of theatre, literature and painting, and how images like his portrait of one of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting participated in a larger process of visualizing political patronage through emotional bonds. While

Worsdale’s portrait of Clayton was once prominently displayed in Wainwright’s Dublin residence at Mount Merrion, the physical painting itself is now untraceable. Its afterlife lingers in the dialogue between his recorded attitudes in the archives and an extant copy of a similar portrait of the same individual by Kneller, Worsdale’s teacher and mentor. Between text and image is the space for reconstructing the public, political and private emotional value of a lost image. Worsdale’s portrait at Mount Merrion bore witness to the real, concrete political power wielded by some women at the British court, and how some of Caroline’s early Ladies-in-

Waiting, such as Clayton, Howard and Lady Hervey, acted as political agents of the nation-state, facilitating affective relationships between the court and its colonial representatives in Ireland. I have given an eco-critical reading of Clayton’s portrait to heighten the links between nation, environment and individual that were present in many early eighteenth-century images of court women, and to emphasize how contextual associations between an object and an owner help to enrich an understanding of their mutual ‘afterlife’.

Biography: ‘Portrait of an Unknown Lady’

While biography is an important aspect of traditional art history, in that biographical details of an artist’s life have often been used to further the critical analysis of a work of art, extended discussions of elite women’s lives themselves are much rarer. Part of this is to do with methodological problems, such as the paucity of preserved letters for elite women compared to male counterparts, discussed in this thesis’ introduction. Another problematic is in the sheer

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numbers of portraits whose identities have simply been lost, and which are offered on the market, or worse, put on display in a museum, with only the accompanying label ‘portrait of a lady’, or ‘unknown sitter’.709 The large numbers of these objects, unfortunately disassociated from their proper identities, speak volumes about the casual attitudes towards women’s portraiture held in previous eras.

Even when the sitter is known, art historical accounts of eighteenth-century aristocratic women’s portraiture usually skim over the biographical details of the represented individual, often preferring to concentrate on how that particular work illustrates a specific artist’s style, rather than on how the image intersects with the wider life of the sitter. For labels accompanying portraits of early Georgian noblewomen, birth date and place, family, date of marriage and identity of marriage partner is often simply accompanied by a list of children and then, disconcertingly, a date of death, for all but the most famous of sitters. I assert that this process helps keep discussion focused on the artist, adding to the canonization of a (usually) male individual within the discourse of art history. Canon formation remains one of the most tendentious problems in the discipline of art history, with many critics of the traditional

‘western’ canon arguing for a more inclusive view of world art, especially one that takes into consideration women’s cultural roles. A more appropriate balance would involve a greater admixture of biography, explaining the sitter’s history, theories on how she came together with the artist, and how the resulting image marks an important life cycle event. Even the most

709 For just three examples in a North American context, see National Gallery of Canada, ‘Lady with a Dog, 1679?’, Collections: Canadian, http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=4236 [ accessed 11 January 2012]; Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, Robert Lehman Collection http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the- collections/150000648?rpp=20&pg=7&rndkey=20120913&ft=*&deptids=15&pos=131 [accessed 13 September 2012]; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, ‘Portrait de femme jouant du luth’, Michiel Van Musscher, http://www.mbam.qc.ca/collections/- /art/artist/4113?q=%22Musscher%2C%20Michiel%20van%22#http://www.mbam.qc.ca/collections/- /art/details/MIMSY_ID_8700 [accessed 13 September 2012].

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glancing references to an individual’s identity and activity in the diaries, journals and letters of their acquaintances have much of value in retracing their life activities, major acts of cultural patronage, political advancement, and biological and familial development.

Portraits are not just luxury items, but are heritage items, created not merely to decorate the present environment of the commissioner, but to transcend the biological limitations of an individual’s life, and to preserve the memory of the individual far into the future. Portraits are, also, normally created to commemorate the passing of an important life cycle event – marriage, the birth of a child, political preferment, or a trip – and thus represent just the cusp of all the activity, all the thoughts, actions and activities that enabled the achievements of that individual’s life. If a sitter is known, and described only by a condensed packet of biographical detail, a complex understanding of that human life is often frustrated. There is simply so much more to know – where did the sitter live? Who were her closest neighbours? Who were her relatives, and how is she positioned in the incredibly complex, interconnected world of the Georgian nobility, where family and marriage connections created a spider’s web of political and personal

‘interest’? What houses were the portrait displayed in? What did they look like, inside and out – are they still extant, and if not, when were they lost? Is there an inventory catalogue of their contents, and if so, what kinds of books, paintings, porcelain and other cultural artefacts were in them? What of the object biography of the portrait itself – how has it been used in the past as a marker, sometimes the only tangible, material marker of an entire existence? How is it so used today? How has this object been thought about, talked about, and written about in art history – is it viewed as an important art object? Or – as is common - is it denigrated, subliminally or overtly, as a class of artistic production that is somehow less valued than another? These questions are all highly significant to this course of research, precisely because portraits of early

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Georgian Ladies-in-Waiting have been in the past, and indeed still are, subject to historiographic elision. Through examination of surviving archival evidence, we can begin to reclaim these objects for art history, pointing to their importance at the time, and arguing for their critical reappraisal.

For example, besides commenting on the importance of James Worsdale’s portraits in rendering visible a new ethical commitment to judiciary integrity in Ireland, Charlotte Clayton’s correspondence also provides almost the only information we have on her country seat at Sundon

House, near Luton, in Bedfordshire. The mansion itself, known from watercolour paintings, was destroyed in the late 19th century, with the stones of the house used to make a vicarage, now a private home. The church of St. Mary’s alone remains of Sundon, as the parkland has been absorbed by suburbs catering to the industrial part of Luton. In 1882, the physical remains of her body, along with those of her husband, were rediscovered in a neglected section of St. Mary’s, the Lady Chapel, that was then under renovation. Commemorative plates had been installed in the church proper, but the location of the bodies had been forgotten, as the couple had had no children and had passed from living memory. Clayton’s correspondence makes numerous references to the house, its furnishings and the life led by its eighteenth-century inhabitants, and her correspondence helps ‘reclaim’ these aspects of history that have vanished. In a sense, portraits of Clayton ‘stand in’ for the lost architecture at Sundon House, and epistolary reactions in the archive to untraced images like Worsdale’s portrait of Clayton help to underline the importance of the images that do still remain extant. Each ‘portrait of an unknown lady’ mirrors not just a long-dead individual, but the way of life they led, the houses they lived in, and the poignancy and immediacy of their particular life history. These are stories that need to be reiterated in curatorial practice.

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Reflections: Three Examples

I would like to conclude this thesis with three examples, which serve as metaphors for the arguments I have advanced in this thesis, and which illustrate the various strands of sex, politics and visual art embedded in my study of early eighteenth-century British court women’s letters and the references to art and art satire contained therein. My first example is a painting: an

‘Unknown Portrait of a Lady’, which has a casual note in pencil written across the back of it:

710 Figure 10.1. Unknown, Portrait of an Unknown Lady: ‘Lady Hervey’ (Fig. 10.1). This later piece of Possibly Lady Mary Hervey (d. 1768), c. 1730. Oil on canvas, Skinner Art Gallery, New York. handwriting is the single link to a possible

identity for the sitter. The piece has no known

provenance, and there are no known documents

in archival collections that definitively connect

this work to the Hervey family. Disconnected

from its earlier context, the object is denuded of

emotional resonance, and of financial value. It

is valued, more as an antique item of furniture,

than as for its historical context as a document

of one individual human life. It does, however, bear a certain likeness to Lady Hervey’s recorded portraits, and its style, as we would expect, is very different than the stylistic facial homogeneity present in Kneller’s portraits of court women.

Likeness is, as in the Maingaud portraits of the three eldest daughters of Queen Caroline and George II, exaggerated almost to caricature, with the head rendered larger than life-size,

710 Skinner Auctioneers and Appraisers, ‘Sale 2554B Lot 810a’, British School: 18th Century (9 July 2011), https://secure.skinnerinc.com/explore/sales/2554B/lots/810A [accessed July 12 2012]

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betraying the artist’s naivety and technical awkwardness but also the talent of a skillful ‘face- painter’ so denigrated by canonical art critics like Waterhouse, Fry and Rothenstein. Dress is also an indicator of change. Instead of the swirling robes of Kneller’s Cowper, Clayton and Calverley portraits of ten or twenty years previous, this quiet painting depicts the sitter in simple, contemporary dress. Her hair pinned back under the ruffle of a lace cap, with only one saffron flower as ornament, gleaming against the hastily-painted gold brocade and highlighting the modest golden chiffon ruff around the bodice. Such extreme simplicity and informal modes of representation makes the work a restrained, yet sensual image.

By reading the details of Lady Hervey’s life in conjunction with this image, the casual, unproved pencil attribution on the back speaks to the desire of later curators to put some sort of story, some sort of historical narrative, back onto the denuded object, thus re-investing it with emotional significance. The painting becomes one more way to reach out across space and time and ‘recover’ the complexities of a lived human experience, and thus becomes a tool by which to literally illustrate, picture, embody or encapsulate that experience. In a reversal of normal meanings, Lady Hervey’s memory, her acts and life and reputation, illustrate the object, make the object come alive in a different way, and act for the object as the image of Mary Cowper’s portrait does for the Dictionary of National Biography’s entry on Cowper, or the Sotheby’s portrait of Charlotte Clayton does for their record of sale.

In each case, meaning is produced by the combination of visual and printed narratives, but narrative is expected to be produced through proof. Cowper’s portrait (Fig. 2.1) is taken of proof of Mary Cowper’s life by the Dictionary of National Biography, enhancing the scholarly value of their entry: ‘this is truth, this person lived’. I argue it cannot simply be viewed as such portraits usually are – either as a snapshot of one moment in a sitter’s life, or as one example of

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an artist’s (studio-assisted) oeuvre. Rather, works of art like Kneller’s portrait of Mary Cowper are bridges between time and space, connecting the modern audience to the totality of the sitter’s life history, and via it to her interaction with a particular artist. Meaning has accrued to the image in ways that would be wholly unexpected for either Kneller or Cowper herself. For example, the

Dictonary of National Biography’s use of the image to illustrate their article on Cowper’s life creates an emblematic image, a sensory object that appeals to our vision while reinforcing and reiterating the story of a human life narrated by the text. It is in the combination of text and image that the circumstances of Mary Cowper’s life become more real, more believable, and more nuanced. Chauveau’s image of La Montagne qui Accouche, created to accompany a popular illustrated edition of La Fontaine, is similarly emblematic.

Clayton’s image (Fig. 3.1) is likewise used as proof of economic transaction, of value represented, and of Sotheby’s economic influence over the lives of objects: ‘we sold this, this is valued at this cost, this object exists’. 711 In the Skinner portrait, however, this pencil attribution does not prove Lady Hervey existed (archival manuscripts, printed correspondences, and perhaps her genetic and cultural legacy does that), but it is certainly in dialogue with her historical existence. The handwritten identification speaks more of the survival of a particularly influential elite individual’s cultural memory, than it does any definite, concrete association between text and image, between this work of art and a specific human life. And yet the knowledge of the specificities of this one life – Lady Hervey’s – makes the Skinner portrait that much richer, more poignant, and causes the viewer to see it in an entirely different light than if it were simply a

‘Portrait of an Unknown Lady’. Instead of ‘what is this’, or ‘how much does it cost’, the viewer

711 For the kinds of emblematic imagery I am proposing, see Ségolène Le Men, ‘Mother Goose Illustrated: From Perrault to Doré’, Poetics Today, 13: 1 (Spring, 1992), 17 - 39 (p. 21). See also Casie Hermannsson, Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition (Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2009), p. 84.

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is left wondering about the sitter’s education, about her attitude to this new, informal art, whether she thought her head looked too big, or whether rather, perhaps, she was discerning enough to enjoy the Rococo comedy and sensuality underlying its distinctive appearance. The memory of a known Lady-in-Waiting emblematically ‘illustrates’ the object.712 By knowing Lady Hervey’s life history, and her unique attitudes towards sexuality, our reading of this portrait asks questions about our own norms and standards of sexual behaviour and sexual identity.

My second example is from Lady Hervey’s published correspondence. She writes to her son’s former tutor, responding to a letter where he asks for clarification on ‘pantins’. As Lady

Hervey explains, pantins were large paper cut-out figures, sometimes painted, with sayings, songs and poems attached to them: they were originally created by salonnières as political satire.

Each pantin would correspond to some well-known figure at court, and the pantins, no doubt put through their paces in impromptu performances, would entertain, amuse and inspire the company. Taken up by a French court noblewoman, their popularity spread rapidly, including in

England.

Due to their new-found popularity, pantins became divorced from their personal, political context and relegated to the intellectual status of a mere doll. Lady Hervey writes with regret of seeing the former salonnière satirical tool stripped of its serious function. ‘The English’, she writes, ‘who heard of this fashion by the time the French were tired of it, according to their usual custom, took it up without any finesse, and so only have the amusement of twirling about a card scaramouche, as I have seen a thousand children do of three years old’.713 The pantins, like her

712 See Bernard Jackson, ‘Narrative Theories and Legal Discourse’, in Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Stoyrtelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Christopher Nash (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 23 – 52 (p. 46). 713 Letter of 18 June 1748, in Mary Hervey, Letters of Mary Lepel [sic] Lady Hervey: With a memoir and illustrative notes, ed. by John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1821), p. 131. See also Elizabeth Stone, Chronicles of Fashion: From the Time of Elizabeth to the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century (London: Richard Bentley, 1845),

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list of imaginary portraits, only had deeper intellectual meaning when they bridged two purposes

- the promotion of group cohesion through political satire, and the portrait’s ability to stand in for the absent person, and hence to commemorate (even if through ridicule) the life history of the absent subject.714 Maurice Rickards, a historian who specializes in ephemeral objects, points out the pantin ‘was at first a home-made gift, exchanged among the fashionable and the distinguished’; he also points out that purpose-made pantins by artists like Francois Boucher sold for high prices.715

My third and final example is from the archive. In the Dorchester History Center is a letter from Stephen Fox-Strangways, 1st Earl Ilchester, written to Lady Hervey. Undated, it is grouped with material that dates from near the end of their long lives, and is probably from c.

1764. The letter speaks of the depth of emotion Ilchester has for his old friend, and the love that they shared together as life-long acquaintances. Their friendship was certainly unusual by societal standards of then and now. After all, her husband’s close personal (probably sexual) relationship with this man took him away from their family for years on end, provoking printed accusations of homosexuality that resulted in a duel and a public scandal commemorated in engravings. Henry Fox, Stephen’s younger brother, was defending Ilchester’s honour as much as he was his friend’s when he acted as Lord Hervey’s ‘second’.

et Lady Hervey and her ostensible ‘rival’ forged a deep, intimate bond. A few glimpses of them together without her husband show them in a tight circle with the Duke and Duchess of

p. 176, where she describes a poem on the Pantin, and also includes the illustrative comment that its popularity ‘can only be described to the inanity of the pursuits of fashionable people generally’. The political importance of the pantin, like the genre of Francophile portraiture to which it belongs, is here quite overtly written out of history. 714 See Maurice Rickards, Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator and Historian (London: Routldge, 2000), p. 186. See also Mary Ernestine Lewis and Dorothy Dignam, The Marriage of Diamonds and Dolls (New York: H.L. Lindquist publications, 1947), p. 36, where the authors stress the popularity of the pantin among French court women, such as the Duchesse de Chartres. 715 Rickards, Encyclopedia of Ephemera, 186.

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Richmond. In one incident, Fox-Strangways, Lady Hervey, the Duchess and her chaplain were all together in a carriage when they were held up by highwaymen and robbed near the entrance to the Richmond estate at Goodwood.716 Another letter in the Dorchester History Center refers to

Fox-Strangways’ depth of regard for Lord Hervey’s memory, for long after his former lover had died, letters from his estate by Fox’s brother-in-law record extensive renovations that included rehanging and displaying Hervey’s portrait, behind a new glass frame, in a prominent place of the house.717 This document, however, refers to fashion, and the kind of dress and grooming

Lady Hervey expected of the people who loved her.

Burlington Street, Tuesday Evening, Eight o Clock. I enjoy perfect health and if I exist till Thursday propose to give myself the pleasure of dining with you and looking at you most part of the time, as for waiting upon you this evening as I have no periwig except one made by the barber fromWincannton, the man is a pretty good country wigmaker but does not pretend to make wigs fitt to appear before your ladyship…. ours yours yours yours yours yours, Ilchester718

Lady Hervey was older than Fox-Strangways, and would have then been in her early sixties. She still had the power to fascinate, charm and inspire her husband’s former lover, who was careful about his public appearance before he saw her. A friendship the modern world might find unusual is here commemorated, recorded and memorialized through the preserved letter in an archive, referring, like discussion of the cut-out paper pantins, to ephemeral physical objects

(wigs) that no longer exist. The story of the pantin thus illustrates the same private, satirical,

716 Charles Henry Gordon-Lennox, A duke and his friends : the life and letters of the second Duke of Richmond (London : Hutchinson & Co., 1911), p. 272. See also Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), p. 158; Lucy Moore, Amphibious Thing: The Life of Lord Hervey (London: Viking, 2000), p. 151. 717 See Edward Digby to Stephen Fox-Strangways, 12 July 1754, Fox-Strangways MSS D/FSI d124, f240a bundle 1/1 (unpaginated: Dorset History Centre, Dorchester), where he writes ‘the rooms are pretty compleatly furnish'd now except Ld Hervey’s picture wch has no frame yet, we stay’d for the Glass’s being fix’d, I am afraid that wont be done before the 4th of next month there is no frame for the Cabinet. I thought there was to have been one since we went from hence.’ 718 Stephen Fox-Strangways to Mary Hervey, c. 1764 in Idem, f 240b.

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collective nature of Rococo art theory and practice as is demonstrated in Lady Hervey’s imaginary ‘collection of pictures’. Lady Hervey’s recollection of the brief fad, and her understanding of its origin, is a vivid demonstration of the popularity of French court fashion, of how swiftly such fashions were replicated back in England, and how such intrapersonal devices were misunderstood and misappropriated by uninitiated onlookers. Part of the cultural importance of the Queen Caroline’s Ladies-in-Waiting is in how they mediated cross-cultural exchange in British art, including through the patronage of foreign artists, the acquisition of high-status consumer goods like Asian export art ceramics, and especially through their discerning knowledge of French court culture, including art, literature, music, and philosophy.

They expected the people who surrounded them to be aware of these trends, and to dress and groom themselves in ways that were informed by French court fashions, such as stylish wigs that signified the performance of elite gender and intellectual membership within a privileged circle of aristocratic connoisseurs, collectors and arbitrators of taste. Through their love for these things, new and influential ideas would be introduced into popular English thought. They helped drive a new, transnational mode of cultural identity.719

Most importantly, the Skinner portrait with its emblematic if unattributed pencil inscription, and ephemeral art objects like pantins, or sensual, corporeal objects like wigs, are technologies that recognize the social role of aesthetic objects as inherently emotional things that are used to mediate relationships between individuals. When read in juxtaposition with a rich body of archival and epistolary material from the period, art objects from the early eighteenth century record the vastness and richness of intrapersonal human affection, devotion and love.

719 For the political value of pantins, used to criticize the King, the administration and even the Pope in eighteenth- century Paris, see Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 89, 201 n. 16.

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The sexual and cultural diversity present in early eighteenth-century British society is reflected in the art of its émigré painters, and in the patronage, art theory and art satire enacted and recorded by women of the court. Their writing certainly records the dynamic shifts in style and content that were transforming the visual vocabulary of art at the time. They also record something much more important and precious: the unexpected ‘weirdness’ of history, and of the strange and diverse sets of associations that bind people together in systems of sexual, emotional and social closeness. Real worth, in these terms, is not about how beautiful an object is, or how much potential cash it can raise at auction: this is merely the object’s ‘spectatorial’ role noted by

Debord, Freedman and other theorists interested in the commodified ‘spectacle’ of display.

Instead, the four Ladies-in-Waiting selected as case studies in this thesis thought and wrote about visual art in ways that stressed its sexual, political and emotional power. Existing on a temporal trajectory that has such communicative and connective potential that the art object continues to accrue emotional meaning long after an artist, patron or sitter’s death, the objects discussed in this thesis evoke the sensory world of the past in a way that complements how historians read archival manuscripts. In the dialogue between art object and archival manuscript, the memory of these Ladies-in-Waiting helps to mediate between past and present, raising the possibility of sexual and political behaviours that challenge contemporary norms, and reiterating their unique contributions to visual and material culture in early eighteenth-century Britain.

Epilogue:

Lady Hervey died, after much ill health, in 1768, in her London house. Fox-Strangways himself, after being appointed to a much sought-after seat on the Privy council in 1763, died in

September of 1776, at the age of seventy-two. Both were universally regretted by their many

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friends and family members: Horace Walpole’s dedication to the memory of Lady Hervey found expression in his purchase of her portrait at the Bateman sale in July of 1775. His record of that purchase evokes the poignant afterlife of portraits of British court women.

‘I went to Old Windsor to see poor Mr. Bateman's auction. It was a melancholy sight to me in more lights than one. I have passed many pleasing days there with him and Lady Hervey, and felt additional pain by reflection on my child, Strawberry. All pulled to pieces, and sold by the person he loved and left it to. So was poor Lady Hervey treated! I bought her picture there, left for sale. Indeed Lord Bateman made amends, for he left his own and his house's portraits there too for sale, with a lot of shalots, four acres of beans, and a parcel of human bones.’ 720

720 See Horace Walpole to Anne, Countess Ossory, Sunday July 23 1775, in Horace Walpole, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. by W.S. Lewis and the Lewis Walpole Library (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1937), XXXII, p. 241.

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Figure 9.7. Chinese famille rose porcelain mug from the Bootle armorial service, c. 1730, Rode Hall, UK

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Appendix One

Lady Hervey’s ‘Imaginary Collection of Pictures’

A flower piece by ye speaker

A Miraculous Draught of Fishes by Sir R W

The Graces by Horace

A Distant Prospect by Shippen

A Town Afire by W Pulteney

The Four Seasons, by Mr. Winnington

A night shade by Rushout, and colouring by Mr. Sandys

A still life by Mr. Dodington

402

------by Mr. Bottle

A Dutch Marriage by William Young

A Mountain in Labour by Sir W Lawson a Judas ------Ld Bolingbroke

A naked modesty, full-length, Ld Gage

A Jupiter and Ganymede after the Italian Manner by Lord -- a neat piece of needlework in a gilt frame – Ld Carlisle

A sea piece - Lord Malpas a piece of devotion - Coll Chandos

Rejoycing of the Beets at the exclusion of the throne by several hands belonging to the adm.

A sea fight by Ad. Cavendish

Peter knocking at the door by M. Lock a Gentleman Three-Quarters by Mr Hope a maidenhead - Lord Har a fall after the manner of ------by Mr. corkes a head unfinished by Ld Townshend the nine muses by Ld W P the Siege of Gibraltar by the D of B

Several Ruins by Sir Peter Waters

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