Biography

Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall

Wraxall, Sir Nathaniel William, first baronet (1751–1831), traveller and memoirist, was born on 8 April 1751 in Queen's Square, Bristol, the only son (there were four daughters) of Nathaniel Wraxall (1725–1781), a merchant of that city, and Anne (d. 1800), daughter of William Thornhill and great-niece of Sir , the painter. He claimed descent from an ancient family of Wraxall, a village 6 miles west of Bristol, but there is no proof of this connection.

After receiving some sort of education in Bristol, he was sent to Bombay in 1769 with the , and was appointed judge-advocate and paymaster of the forces in the Gujarat expedition, and that against Baroche in 1771. For reasons that remain unclear, he abandoned this career in 1772 and returned to , and seems to have decided to become a professional travel writer. During 1774–5 he travelled extensively in Europe, especially Portugal and Scandinavia, moving (at what must have been some considerable expense) in diplomatic and royal circles, garnering numerous anecdotes which later found their way into his published travelogues and the Historical Memoirs (published in 1815). During 1774 he became involved with those of the Danish nobility who were campaigning for the return from exile in Germany of Queen Caroline Matilda, sister of George III. Wraxall had an interview with Caroline Matilda in her Hanoverian retreat at Celle in September 1774 and became devoted to her cause, carrying messages between her and George III. He gave some £500 of his own money towards reinstating her on the Danish throne; unfortunately, Caroline Matilda died on 11 May 1775. Thereafter Wraxall wrote several times to George III, asking to be reimbursed: these requests remained unanswered for five years, until Wraxall became an MP in 1780, at which point he received 1000 guineas from Lord North, no doubt to ensure his loyalty in the House of Commons.

In 1775 Wraxall published Cursory Remarks Made in a Tour through some of the Northern Parts of Europe, dedicated to Viscount Clare in gratitude for his patronage. Wraxall's travelogue is elegantly written, and its Scandinavian and Russian itinerary was novel and therefore of great interest to the reading public (it rapidly went through four editions); although the Gentleman's Magazine (1st ser., January 1776, 24) wished that he could ‘be prevailed on to strike out all mention of every woman that he would have us believe reigned the sovereign of his affections for an hour’. The narrative is self-consciously chivalric and testifies to Wraxall's lifelong interest in tales of intrigue and distress, although Queen Caroline Matilda's

predicament does not figure in the text, presumably in the interests of diplomacy. He presents himself as a citizen of the world, observing that ‘I have always found the great and good to be of no country’ (Wraxall, Cursory Remarks, 32), and boasts that ‘danger and fatigue have no terrors for me, when knowledge is the reward of my endeavors’ (ibid., 268). Samuel Johnson wrote to Hester Thrale (22 May 1775) that ‘Wraxal is too fond of words, but you may read him’ (Letters of Samuel Johnson, 2.209–10).

Wraxall continued to travel around Europe during the late 1770s, visiting Germany and Italy in 1778–9. In 1780 he returned to England and became member of parliament for Hindon (Wiltshire), through the influence of Lord George Germain, a lifelong ally. His maiden speech, on 25 January 1781 in the midst of the rupture with Holland, urged the ministry to cultivate the emperor Joseph as a European ally. In the same year Horace Walpole complained that Wraxall was ‘popping into every spot where he can make himself talked of, by talking of himself; but I hear he will come to an untimely beginning in the House of Commons’ (Walpole, 29.104). In fact Wraxall sat in the House of Commons for fourteen years, representing Ludgershall in 1784 and Wallingford (Berkshire) in 1790. In 1794 he resigned his seat at the request of Francis Sykes, the proprietor of the borough of Wallingford, and accepted the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds. Although he does not seem to have played a significant parliamentary role, Wraxall's pretentious rhetorical style in the house was satirized in the ninth of the ‘Probationary odes for the laureateship’ in The Rolliad (1795), which also makes fun of his boastful, adventuring spirit:

I burn! I burn! I glow! I glow! With antique and with modern lore! I rush from Bosphorus to Po— To Nilus from the Nore (p. 315)

Nevertheless the government seems to have taken advantage of his experience, appointing him to a secret committee to inquire into the causes of the war in the Carnatic in 1781, during which the territories of England's ally, the nabob of Arcot, were devastated by Haidar Ali. Subsequently, in conjunction with John Macpherson, later governor-general of Bengal, and his relative James ‘Ossian’

Macpherson, Wraxall acted as an agent (or vakeel) for the nabob of Arcot, who was petitioning to have his debts wiped out by the British government. He also took it upon himself to send news overland to India of the 1783 peace, which arrived six weeks in advance of the tardy official communication.

On 30 March 1789 Wraxall married Jane Lascelles, daughter of Peter Lascelles of Knights in Hertfordshire. They had two sons, William Lascelles (b. 5 Sept 1791) and Charles Edward (b. 9 Aug 1792). Between the late 1770s and 1815 Wraxall published several more works of travel narrative and historical anecdote, including Memoirs of the kings of France of the race of Valois: interspersed with interesting anecdotes, to which is added, A tour through the western, southern, and interior provinces of France (2 vols., 1777), which was translated into French in 1784, and saw several English editions; Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, and Vienna (2 vols., 1779); and an uncompleted History of France, from the Accession of Henry III to the Death of Louis XIV (3 vols., 1795; 6 vols., 1814). In 1787 he published (anonymously, although his authorship was widely known) a polemical pamphlet entitled A Short Review of the Political State of Great-Britain, which celebrates the continuing popularity of George III despite ‘the abyss of ruin into which a long train of unfortunate councils has plunged the empire’ (p. 4), laments the misdirected brilliance of Fox and the ‘departed greatness’ (p. 43) of Lord North, defends Warren Hastings, and calls upon the prince of Wales to cast off his train of ‘obscure and unprincipled individuals’, not to mention his Roman Catholic mistress, in the national interest. The pamphlet provoked several responses, both hostile and supportive, and the prince of Wales himself is said to have threatened the publisher, Debrett, with a prosecution for libel.

These works may be seen as rehearsals for the publication which was to bring Wraxall great fame and notoriety in 1815: the Historical Memoirs of my Own Time, from 1772 to 1784 (2 vols.). The first part of the narrative is a collection of anecdotes gathered during his European travels, including some grisly tales of aristocratic murder allegedly told to Wraxall by Lady Hamilton; but it was the second and more substantial section which generated public interest and critical outrage. Here Wraxall describes in fascinating, often scurrilous detail the political world and the London social scene, commenting on everything from hairstyles and costume to the conduct of the American war. He was a supporter until 1783 of Lord North; but he relates how Fox's India Bill of that year prompted him to

abandon the coalition party (even though North had promised him a seat at the board of greencloth) and throw his weight behind Pitt, to whom he remained generally loyal, and who arranged for his election as member for Ludgershall in 1784. However, with the exception of George III, neither friend nor foe of Wraxall's escaped having their character and physiognomy delineated for the amusement of his readers.

The Historical Memoirs were a great popular success: the first edition of 1000 copies (at 26s. per copy) sold out in five weeks. However, printing of a second was interrupted when Wraxall found himself accused of libel by the former Russian ambassador in London, Count Vorontsov, for suggesting in the Memoirs that the count had related how Catherine the Great had been responsible for the death of the German princess of Württemburg. Wraxall was found guilty, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment and a fine of £500.

The count's diplomatic character having been cleared by the verdict, he kindly campaigned for the reduction of Wraxall's punishment, so that he only served three months in the king's bench, in ‘two airy, spacious apartments’ where he was shown ‘every possible indulgence and attention’ by the marshal (N. Wraxall, Posthumous Memoirs of his Own Time, 3 vols., 1836, 1.ix). Once released, Wraxall quickly expunged the offending passages and brought out a second edition, in June 1816, of the Historical Memoirs, which sold out by August.

A third edition in 1818 contained various additions, and refutations of his critics. During the later years of his life he continued to write his frank and often malicious memoirs, but was careful this time to ensure that they would be published only posthumously; he had been ‘instructed by experience in the legal dangers and penalties that attend the premature disclosure of historical truth’ (ibid., 1.v). For all his high-minded rhetoric Wraxall seems to have enjoyed the furore wrought by the earlier Memoirs, recalling that: ‘Never, I believe, did any literary work procure for its authour a more numerous list of powerful and inveterate enemies’ (ibid., 1.ix).

One notable exception was Sir George Osborn, former equerry to George III, who wrote to Wraxall in 1816: ‘I personally know nine parts out of ten of your anecdotes to be perfectly correct’ (ibid., 1.xi). And Hester Thrale found them so interesting that she made numerous marginal annotations. However, the literary

journals of the day were unanimous in their disapproval, the Quarterly Review denouncing the Historical Memoirs as ‘pompous gossip and inflated trash’ (April 1815, 213), the British Critic attacking their ‘outrageous and unnecessary indecency’ (July 1815, 24), and the Edinburgh Review condemning their ‘union of nastiness and obscenity’ (June 1815, 190) while nevertheless printing lengthy excerpts. It was in the Edinburgh Review that an epigram probably penned by George Colman the younger, and subsequently much misquoted, was first printed:

Men, measures, seasons, scenes, and facts all Misquoting, misstating, Misplacing, misdating, Here lies Sir Nathaniel Wraxall!

By the time of Posthumous Memoirs, and no doubt partly because Wraxall was dead and therefore now incorrigible, the reviews had come to acknowledge that his anecdotes contain much that is true and interesting: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine compared him to Boswell, and commended his ‘dexterous mind’ and grasp of ‘the important idea’ (July 1836, 63); and the Gentleman's Magazine declared that the Posthumous Memoirs ‘will not be considered as one of the ephemeral productions of the day, but … will be consulted by those who wish to obtain information relative to one of the most eventful and interesting periods of English history’ (GM, 2nd ser., 5, 1836, 123).

The London and Westminster Review described Wraxall's last work as a ‘parliamentary epic’ (January 1837, 495), and indeed both sets of his memoirs may be viewed as such, presenting vivid and intimate accounts of the American crisis, the illness of George III, the trial of Warren Hastings, debates in the House of Commons, Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, and the colourful careers and characters of Fox, Pitt, Sheridan, and Burke, of whom Wraxall writes:

He always reminded me of the image which Nebuchadnezzar sees in his dream, recorded by the prophet Daniel; ‘whose brightness was excellent,’ and whose ‘head was of fine gold;’ but whose ‘feet were part of iron and part of clay’. (Posthumous Memoirs, 2.89)

In both sets of memoirs there are also amusing recollections of London literary celebrities, to whom Wraxall frequently pays backhanded compliments: of Hester Chapone, for instance, he recalls that ‘a most repulsive exterior concealed very superior attainments’ (Historical Memoirs, 1.111). He seems also to have dabbled in literary editorial work, planning in 1802 to publish some of the Dorset papers, which were erroneously suspected to contain some letters by Shakespeare, and going through the papers of in 1805 (albeit primarily as a source for his own memoirs). In 1799 the prince regent, clearly unaware that it was Wraxall who had written the 1787 pamphlet attack on himself, appointed him his ‘future historiographer’; and in 1813 he was created a baronet at the regent's request. Little is known of his later years. He died on 7 November 1831 at Dover, on his way to Naples, and was buried in St James's Church at Dover.

Katherine Turner