2
Lovers’ Meeting
DESPITE the difficulties caused by the war with France, Henry’s European travels had not been so different from those of any young nobleman on the Grand Tour in previous years. No doubt, as with other young Englishmen on the loose, they included a number of amorous episodes. The Grand Tour, among other things, was meant to be a journey of initiation. But we hear no echoes of that side of his life in his letters from his uncle, nor of the absorbing love affair that began when he arrived in Florence in January 1794. He was travelling with a friend, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, the two of them having come from Spain. Lord Granville was brilliantly good-looking, a social star who had taken Paris by storm in the days before the Revolution. Henry, black-browed and heavy-featured, was ‘not in the least handsome’1 and moreover known to share his uncle’s unfashionably pro-French views. But he radiated such gaiety and good humour, his manners were so open and unassuming, that he was soon as much a favourite as his friend in the little circle of English aristocrats who were living there.
They were a fluctuating group, whose leading figures, apart from the English minister Lord Hervey, were Sir Godfrey and Lady Webster, the latter a tall, voluptuous beauty of 23, with dark eyes and a restlessly enquiring mind. The two were unhappily married. Elizabeth Webster, paired off at 15 with a husband of 49, had rapidly grown discontented with her lot, drowning her unhappiness in travelling and the adoration of numerous admirers. She was now pregnant with her third child, whose father may have been Sir Godfrey’s political patron, Thomas Pelham, or Sir Godfrey himself, both men fondly believing themselves responsible. When she and Sir Godfrey left Florence for Naples in February, Henry and Lord Granville followed them. They found themselves in a society which included the Duchess of Devonshire’s sister Lady Bessborough and her husband, her mother Lady Spencer and a cheerful band of young Englishmen, whose chief occupations, according to Elizabeth, were gambling and gallantry. The consul was Sir William Hamilton, with the famous Emma as his hostess: ‘Of all the most vulgar, vain and disagreeable women I ever saw,’ wrote Henry, ‘the fair Ambassadress is the most so.’2
Because of her pregnancy Elizabeth Webster did not go out much in Naples, preferring to see friends at home in her apartments, where Henry and Lord Granville were soon constant visitors. It was Lord Granville who first took Elizabeth’s fancy, but it soon became clear that he had fallen for the riper charms of Lady Bessborough (she was 12 years his senior), with whom he would embark on a long-lived affair. Henry, however, was a delightful substitute, his high spirits so infectious that she and Lady Bessborough christened him ‘Sal Volatile’. Above all he shared Elizabeth’s intellectual interests. In her years of travel she had done much to make up for a neglected education, reading widely, assiduously visiting galleries and monuments, learning French and Italian, and taking courses in chemistry, biology and mineralogy. The two spent happy hours sightseeing or discussing poetry, Henry introducing her to the works of William Cowper, Elizabeth sharing her enthusiasm for Ariosto and the Italian poets of the sixteenth century. Sir Godfrey, bored by literary discussions, was usually out on his wife’s evenings at home. The quarrels of the Websters were becoming common knowledge. ‘They do not agree together,’ wrote Lord Granville when he first met them, ‘and their jarrings might as well not be made a matter of public observation.’3
After six or seven weeks in Naples, the Webster party moved to Rome, where they took a villa on the Pincian Hill. They were followed by most of their Naples set, including Henry and the Bessboroughs, though Lord Granville and two others had returned to England – ‘where nothing short of compulsion shall ever drag me’,4 wrote Elizabeth firmly. They lingered there visiting chapels and churches, and saw the Pope (Pius VI) give his blessing to the multitude. ‘He is an excellent actor,’ noted Elizabeth. ‘Garrick himself could not have represented the part with more theatrical effect.’5
It was now nearly time for Elizabeth’s baby to be born; at the end of May she returned to Florence, bidding a fond farewell to Lady Bessborough, who was returning to England – perhaps to follow Lord Granville. On 12 June 1794, Elizabeth gave birth to a little girl, Harriet, her first daughter. Henry turned up for the christening, and remained in Florence on and off for the rest of the year, celebrating his 21st birthday there with a great ball in November. Elizabeth was 24 the following March, and Henry composed a graceful ode for the occasion. It was a custom he would continue for the rest of his life.
By now it was obvious that Henry was deeply in love with Elizabeth. He was not the first to be so, but hitherto she had always kept a cool head in the midst of her affairs. This time, reading between the lines in her diary, with its frequent references to Henry, it is clear that she was beginning to return his feelings. Sir Godfrey, jealous and bad-tempered, resentful at his wife’s neglect, was no match for Henry’s ardent wooing.
Elizabeth was a considerable heiress, an only child, with family money coming from the West Indies; Sir Godfrey had married her as much for her prospects as her beauty. In February 1795 her father, Richard Vassall, died leaving her in possession of a fortune. ‘Detestable gold,’ she wrote on receiving the news. ‘What a lure for a vil[l]ain and too dearly have I become the victim to him.’6 Sir Godfrey was now eager that she should leave with him for England, where he was planning to stand as a parliamentary candidate for his home constituency of Battle. It would have been natural for his wife to accompany him, if only to see her widowed mother and look after her affairs. Elizabeth, however, pleaded ill health; she was in the first stages of pregnancy and unfit, she said, to travel. ‘To say the truth,’ she confided to her journal, ‘I made as much as I could of that pretext… as I enjoyed myself too much here to risk the change of scene.’7 Despairing of persuading her to follow him, Sir Godfrey left for England in May 1795.
Elizabeth spent the next year in Italy, with Henry almost always in her entourage. She had taken a house in Florence, a ‘delicious residence’ in the midst of the Mattonaia gardens, where she entertained three times a week, attracting the leading artists and intellectuals of the town to her salon: the template for the Holland House gatherings was already there. On their evenings alone, Henry read aloud to her; in the daytime they would go on sightseeing expeditions in the surrounding countryside, or travel further afield to visit the galleries and churches of other cities. In Turin, for instance, they visited the chapel of the monastery of St Agnes, with its painting of the saint’s martyrdom by Domenichino. ‘Lord Holland read a passage to me out of a letter from Charles Fox, from which it appears that he reckons the picture almost the best in Italy,’8 wrote Elizabeth in her journal.
The autumn of 1795 was darkened by the death of her newborn baby in October – ‘a lovely boy… never again shall I become mother to such a child,’ she mourned. But Henry’s company helped distract her from her sadness, and by the spring of 1796 she was pregnant once again. The child she had lost might well have been Sir Godfrey’s; this time she was carrying Henry’s. It was clear that the situation had to be resolved. On 11 April, Elizabeth bade farewell to Florence, ‘that lovely spot where I enjoyed a degree of happiness that for a whole year was too exquisite to be permanent’,9 and set out towards England with her lover and three children. She had not seen her husband for a year.
Eighteenth-century aristocratic morality, especially Whig morality, was easy-going where liaisons outside marriage were concerned. The Duke of Devonshire had lived for years in a ménage à trois with his wife and Lady Elizabeth Foster; Granville Leveson-Gower would be Lady Bessborough’s lover for over 15 years. Children were sometimes born, ‘children of the mist’ as someone called them, and brought up either as distant relations or conveniently, during the confusion of the French Revolution, as the orphaned children of French aristocrats. But the marriage bond was usually preserved. Elizabeth and Henry wanted more than a discreet liaison; they wanted to live together openly, if possible to marry.
For Elizabeth this would mean great sacrifices. Not only would she face social ruin if she separated from her husband, but under the laws of the day she would also lose her three children. Godfrey, or ‘Webby’, the eldest, was seven, Henry, the second, three, and Harriet, the youngest, still a baby. It was bad enough to lose the boys, but to part with her daughter at such a tender age was more than she could bear. She had always had a reckless streak, and with or without her lover’s knowledge she now devised a desperate scheme. On the first stage of their journey home, she and Henry separated outside Florence, arranging that they would meet in Padua. She had already sent most of her servants ahead there, taking a slower route via Modena, accompanied by her three children, a nursery maid and her Italian maid who had a small child of her own. A few miles outside Bologna, she pretended that Harriet had been taken dangerously ill with measles and must stay behind with her, while the nursery maid and the two boys went on to Modena. The next step was to fake Harriet’s death. Having filled a guitar case, which could pass for a small coffin, with stones and a pillow dressed with clothes, she told her footman to take it to the British consul in Leghorn with instructions to arrange for its burial in the British cemetery. Meanwhile she had disguised her daughter as a boy, and arranged for the Italian maid to take her and her own child to a rendezvous in Hamburg, using a false passport which she had previously obtained in Florence. As Harriet was said to have died from measles, no one would wonder that Elizabeth had left her maid behind to nurse her own child, supposedly also suffering from the illness.
On reaching Modena Elizabeth broke the news of Harriet’s death to her entourage, before continuing to Padua where her lover joined her from Florence. They then travelled on through Austria and Germany, and eventually reached Hamburg, where Elizabeth met up with her Italian maid (and Harriet) before crossing to Yarmouth from Cuxhaven. They arrived there in mid June. Harriet, still disguised as boy, was presumably left in lodgings with the maid, while Elizabeth and her lover proceeded to London.
Rumour of course had gone before them. Henry’s sister Caroline, six years older than her brother, had heard the news of his attachment the year before and had written to warn him gently of the scandal it was causing. Henry would have none of it: ‘Do not imagine, my dearest little sister,’ he told her,
that I am or ever can be the least angry with you, but I confess I am very unhappy at hearing you abuse a person I love so much… I may be like Antony – & beg the privilege of saying,
But on your life
No word of Cleopatra, she deserves
Caroline, who adored her brother, had quickly changed her tune, and now on the lovers’ return to London she was the first to offer her support. But Henry had no illusions about the social difficulties that lay ahead. His chief concern was to mitigate their consequences for Elizabeth, who would inevitably bear the greatest share of blame. ‘As to what I have done,’ he told his sister,
it was in some respects contrary to the advice of my friends, but as her situation rendered an éclat sooner or later almost certain & any management for her character quite desperate… my only object was to live with her in the way most comfortable & to her feelings most creditable… I would not have taken such a step as this without feeling that I never could be happy were I not to live with her upon the only terms that would make her some compensation for it.11
It might have helped to quieten scandal if, as some of their friends suggested, Elizabeth had concealed her pregnancy, and discreetly farmed out the baby afterwards. But Elizabeth, who was already losing her sons, and could only see Harriet in secret, was determined not to part with her child. Henry agreed. Its situation would be difficult, he told Caroline, ‘yet surely even that is better than if any concealment had taken place & it had been condemned for years never to have known its mother.’12 Both he and his sister, motherless children themselves, knew what a deprivation that could be.
On arriving in London the lovers set up house in Brompton Row. Holland House, which had been let during Henry’s minority, had recently become available, but Elizabeth felt it might be thought ‘a kind of effrontery’13 if she moved there before their marriage. Even this was still uncertain; if her divorce did not go through, it would be socially impossible to stay in England and they would be forced to live abroad. Everything now rested with Sir Godfrey. Within days of Elizabeth’s return to England he had announced that he was instituting divorce proceedings against her. In fact he vacillated for many months, at one point tearfully promising to help her by speeding up proceedings, at another flatly refusing to divorce her on the grounds that it would injure his sons’ prospects. It was only after much hard bargaining – ‘every paltry chicane that could extort money from us was had recourse to,’14 wrote Elizabeth – that he finally agreed to go ahead.
In the meantime the lovers had to come to terms with their relations. Elizabeth’s mother, widowed 17 months earlier, had found a new husband; in July 1796 she married a Suffolk baronet, Sir Gilbert Affleck. Unwilling to jeopardize her new position, she flatly refused to see Elizabeth till she was married. On Henry’s side, things were slightly better. He could count on the support of Caroline, and though Lord Upper Ossory made no immediate signal, his mother’s other brother, General Fitzpatrick, was kindly and encouraging, and invited them to stay. So too did the Duke of Bedford, another friendly kinsman on his mother’s side. Fox, however, remained strangely silent. He disapproved of his nephew’s choice, though it can hardly have been on moral grounds. He had been living with a former courtesan, Mrs Armistead, for the last ten years.
For Elizabeth, hitherto always fêted and admired, these were terrible humiliations. She was miserably conscious of coming between Henry and his family, and her own mother’s disapproval must have been a further blow. But Henry’s devotion never wavered, and the birth of their baby in October was a chance to build a bridge with Fox. The child was christened Charles after his great uncle, with Caroline as his godmother.
Under the laws of the day a marriage could only be dissolved by an act of Parliament, preceded by a case in the civil court. The proceedings began in February 1797, Sir Godfrey making it a condition of the divorce that his wife should give up the bulk of her yearly income of £7,000 to him, retaining only £800 for herself; he also claimed damages of £10,000 (later reduced to £6,000) from Henry. These terms were denounced as ‘iniquitous’ by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Loughborough, when the bill to dissolve the marriage came up before the House of Lords in June. But Sir Godfrey threatened to drop the case if his conditions were not met, and rather than risk his withdrawal, Henry, together with the Duke of Bedford, his friend Charles Ellis and his future father-in-law Sir Gilbert Affleck, signed a bond guaranteeing that they would be responsible if Lady Webster did not hand over her estate within two days of her divorce. Meanwhile Fox, belatedly coming to the rescue, persuaded Loughborough not to upset things by insisting on Lady Webster’s rights.
On 4 July, at long last, Elizabeth’s ‘wretched marriage’ was annulled by Parliament. The next day she signed over her whole fortune, with the exception of £800 a year, to Sir Godfrey. On 6 July, she married Henry in Rickmansworth Church. Fox did not attend, but her new stepfather, Sir Gilbert Affleck, gave her away, and Henry’s old tutor, the Reverend William Morris, officiated. ‘I have been supping with Lady Holland,’ wrote Lady Bessborough to Lord Granville that evening.
They were married at eight this morning, and I never saw creatures so happy. He flew down to meet me, kiss’d me several times, ne vous déplaise, and can do nothing but repeat her name. Such perfect happiness as theirs scarcely ever was instanc’d before[.]