Biography of Caroline Fitzroy Countess Harrington 1722-1784

Letters of Horace Walpole. 23rd June 1752. Arlington Street. To The Hon H S Conway (age 31).

By a letter that I received from my Lady Ailesbury (age 31) two days ago, I flatter myself I shall not have occasion to write to you any more; yet I shall certainly see you with less pleasure than ever, as our meeting is to be attended with a resignation of my little charge (age 3).³¹⁶ She is vastly well, and I think you will find her grown fat. I am husband enough to mind her beauty no longer, and perhaps you will say husband enough too, in pretending that my love is converted into friendship; but I shall tell you some stories at Park-place of her understanding that will please you, I trust, as much as they have done me.

My Lady Ailesbury says I must send her news, and the whole history of Mr. Seymour (age 22) and Lady Di. Egerton (age 21), and their quarrel, and all that is said on both sides. I can easily tell her all that is said on one side, Mr. Seymour's, who says, the only answer he has ever been able to get from the Duchess or Mr. Lyttelton was, that Di. has her caprices. The reasons she gives, and gave him, were, the badness of his temper and imperiousness of his letters; that he scolded her for the overfondness of her epistles, and was even so unsentimental as to talk of desiring to make her happy, instead of being made so by her. He is gone abroad, in despair, and with an additional circumstance, which would be very uncomfortable to any thing but a true lover; his father refuses to resettle the estate on him, the entail of which was cut off by mutual consent, to make way for the settlements on the marriage.

The Speaker told me t'other day, that he had received a letter from Lord Hyde, which confirms what Mr. Churchill writes me, the distress and poverty of France and the greatness of their divisions. Yet the King's expenses are incredible; Madame de Pompadour (age 30) is continually busied in finding out new journeys and diversions to keep him from falling into the hands of the clergy. The last party of pleasure she made for him, was a stag-hunting; the stag was a man in a skin and horns, worried by twelve men dressed like bloodhounds! I have read of Basilowitz, a Czar of Muscovy, who improved on such a hunt, and had a man in a bearskin worried by real dogs; a more kingly entertainment!

I shall make out a sad Journal of other news; yet I will be like any gazette, and scrape together all the births, deaths, and marriages in the parish. Lady Hartington (age 32) and Lady Rachel Walpole (age 25) are brought to bed of sons; Lord Burlington (age 58) and Lord Gower (age 57) have had new attacks of palsies: Lord Falkland (age 45) is to marry the Southwark Lady Suffolk;³¹⁷ and Mr. Watson (age 23), Miss Grace Pelham (age 17). Lady Coventry (age 19) has miscarried of one or two children, and is going on with one or two more, and is gone to France to-day. Lady Townshend (age 44) and Lady Caroline Petersham (age 30) have had their anniversary quarrel, and the Duchess of Devonshire (age 53) has had her secular assembly, which she keeps once in fifty years: she was more delightfully vulgar at it than you can imagine; complained of the wet night, and how the men would dirty the rooms with their shoes; called out at supper to the Duke (age 53), "Good God! my lord, don't cut the ham, nobody will eat any!" and relating her private menage to Mr. Obnir, she said, "When there's only my lord and I, besides a pudding we have always a dish of Yeast!" I am ashamed to send you such nonsense, or to tell you how the good women at Hampton Court are scandalized at Princess Emily's (age 41) coming to chapel last Sunday in riding-clothes with a dog under her arm; but I am bid to send news: what can we do -,it such a dead time of year? I must conclude, as my Lady Gower did very well t'other day in a letter into the country, "Since the two Misses³¹⁸ were hanged, and the two Misses³¹⁹ were married, there is nothing at all talked of." Adieu! My best compliments and my wife's to your two ladies.

Note 315. Now first published.

Note 316. Their daughter, Ann Seymour Conway.

Note 317. Sarah, Duchess-dowager of Suffolk, daughter of Thomas Unwen, Esq. of Southwark.-E.

Note 318. Miss Blandy and Miss Jefferies.

Note 319. The Gunnings. [Maria Gunning Countess Coventry and Elizabeth Gunning Duchess Hamilton and Argyll (age 18)]

Letters of Horace Walpole. 27th July 1752. Our beauties are travelling Paris-ward: Lady Caroline Petersham (age 30) and Lady Coventry (age 19) are just gone thither. It will scarce be possible for the latter to make as much noise there as she and her sister (age 18) have in England. It is literally true that a shoemaker in Worcester got two guineas and a half by showing a shoo that he was making for the Countess, at a penny a piece. I can't say her genius is equal to her beauty: she every day says some new sproposito [Note. blunder]. She has taken a turn of vast fondness for her lord (age 30): Lord Downe (age 25) met them at Calais, and offered her a tent-bed, for fear of bugs in the inns. "Oh!" said she, "I had rather be bit to death, than lie one night from my dear Cov.!" I can conceive my Lady Caroline making a good deal of noise even at Paris; her beauty is set off by a genius for the extraordinary, and for strokes that will make a figure in any country. Mr. Churchill (age 38) and my sister (age 29) [Note. Half-sister] are just arrived from France; you know my passion for the writing of the younger Crebillon (age 45)³²⁴ you shall hear how I have been mortified by the discovery of the greatest meanness in him; and you will judge how much one must be humbled to have one's favourite author convicted of mere mercenariness! I had desired Lady Mary to lay out thirty guineas for me with Liotard (age 49), and wished, if I could, to have the portraits of Crebillon and Marivaux (age 64)³²⁵ for my cabinet. Mr. Churchill wrote me word that Liotard's³²⁶ price was sixteen guineas; that Marivaux was intimate with him, and would certainly sit, and that he believed he could get Crebillon to sit too. The latter, who is retired into the provinces with an English wife (age 40)³²⁷, was just then at Paris for a month: Mr. Churchill went to him, told him that a gentleman in England, who was making a collection of portraits of famous people, would be happy to have his, etc. Crebillon was humble, "unworthy," obliged; and sat: the picture was just finished, when, behold! he sent Mr. Churchill word, that he expected to have a copy of the picture given him-neither more nor less than asking sixteen guineas for sitting! Mr. Churchill answered that he could not tell what he should do, were it his own case, but that this was a limited commission, and he could not possibly lay out double; and was now so near his return, that he could not have time to write to England and receive an answer. Crebillon said, then he would keep the picture himself-it was excessively like. I am still sentimental enough to flatter myself, that a man who could beg sixteen gineas will not give them, and so I may still have the picture.

Note 324. Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon, son of the tragic poet of that name, and author of many licentious novels, which are now but little read. He was born in 1707, and died in 1777.-D. ["The taste for his writings," says the Edinburgh Reviewers, "passed away very rapidly and completely in France; and long before his death, the author of the Sopha, and Les Egaremens du Coeur et de l'Esprit, had the mortification to be utterly forgotten by the public." Vol. xxi. p. 284.]

Note 325. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, the author of numerous plays and novels, some of which possess considerable merit. The peculiar affectation of his style occasioned the invention of the word marivaudage, to express the way of writing of him and his imitators. He was born in 1688, and died in 1763.-D.

Note 326. Walpole, in his Anecdotes of Painting, states Liotard to have been an admirable miniature and enamel painter. At Rome he was taken notice of by the Earl of Sandwich, and by Lord Besborough, then Lord Duncannon. See Museum Florentinum, vol. x.; where the name of the last mentioned nobleman is spelled Milord D'un Canon.-E.

Note 327. She was a Miss Strafford. The perusal of Crebillon's works inspired her with such a passion for the author, that she ran away from her friends, went to Paris, married him, and nursed and attended him with exemplary tenderness and affection to his dying day. In reference to this marriage, Lord Byron, in his Observations on Bowles's Strictures upon Pope, makes the following remark:-"For my own part, I am of the opinion of Pausanias, that success in love depends upon fortune. Grimm has an observation of the same kind, on the different destinies of the younger Crebillon and Rousseau. The former writes a licentious novel, and a young English girl of some fortune runs away, and crosses the sea to marry him; while Rousseau, the most tender and passionate of lovers, is obliged to espouse his chambermaid."-E.