In May 1806 in Sloane Street Harriette saw a stranger riding on horseback with a Newfoundland dog by his side and she fell violently in love. ‘I have never enjoyed one hour’s health since,’ she wrote in her Memoirs. ‘Now, however, I look on all my past bitter suffering caused by this same love, which many treat as a plaything and a child, and which I believe to be one of the most arbitrary ungovernable passions in nature, as a wild dream, remembered by me merely as I recollect three days of delirium …’1 The stranger was ‘a very god!’, Harriette told Amy; he was her ‘fate’, she told Fanny. ‘Though he treated me ill and for ever destroyed my heart’s affection,’ she wrote twenty years later, ‘I would compare him with no mortal.’2 He was ‘not the sort of man … that generally strikes the fancy of a very young female; – for he was neither young nor at all gaily dressed. No doubt he was very handsome; but it was that pale expressive beauty, which oftener steals upon us, by degrees, after having become acquainted, than strikes at first sight.’ Harriette thought about her hero constantly, comparing him favourably with every other man she knew or met. ‘If I could but touch with my hand, the horse he rode, or the dog he seems so fond of, I should be half wild with joy!’ she believed.3

In the hope of seeing the stranger again, Harriette started to walk more often in the neighbouring parks. He always appeared after six o’clock; he was sometimes throwing stones in the water to coax his dog to swim, he was sometimes riding, but ‘he always turned his head back, after he had passed me … whether he admired, or had, indeed, observed me, or whether he only looked back after his large dog, was what puzzled and tormented me. Better to have been merely observed by that fine noble-looking being, than adored by all the men on earth … thought I.’4 One evening, sitting down to dinner with Fanny and Amy, Harriette ‘felt a kind of presentiment come over’ her, ‘that if I went into Hyde Park at that moment, I should meet this stranger’. Off she went in her bonnet and shawl, accompanied for some of the way by a mocking Lord Alvanley. The park was empty, and after walking up and down for nearly an hour, she gave up hope and began home, meeting on the way an impoverished old woman. Wanting to give her some money but having none about her, Harriette ran after a gentleman she slightly knew and borrowed from him half a crown. Turning back to give the coin to the pauper, Harriette ‘came immediately in contact with the stranger, whose person had been concealed by two large elms, and who might have been observing me for some time. I scarcely dared encourage the flattering idea.’5 The horseman rode by, and Harriette thought she saw him blush.

It was Julia who identified him. One night he was at the opera, sitting in a nearby box. ‘I have met him in society when I was a girl,’ Julia said, ‘but I was intimate with a girl to whom, when young, he proposed. Her wedding clothes were made; she used to sleep in my room, with his picture round her neck. She adored him beyond all that could be imagined of love and devotion, and, within a few days of their proposed marriage, he declared off. His excuse was that his father refused his consent. For many years … my friend’s sufferings were severe; her parents trembled for her reason. No one was permitted to name her former lover in her presence. She is now Lady Conyngham.’ The stranger, Julia confirmed, had since married ‘the loveliest creature on earth’. He was Lord Ponsonby, ‘the handsomest man in England’.6

The ‘sly, voluptuous and most luxurious’ John Ponsonby was the eldest son of William Brabazon, First Baron Ponsonby, and Louisa Molesworth, daughter of Viscount Molesworth.7 He succeeded his father in 1806, the year in which he also succeeded with Harriette Wilson. His grandparents were John Ponsonby, second son of the First Earl of Bessborough, and Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, of the great Devonshire family. He was the cousin of Lady Caroline Lamb and therefore related by marriage to Frederic Lamb as well as to the Duke of Argyll. The Ponsonbys were a great sprawling clan who had virtually ruled Ireland since Cromwell gave Sir John Ponsonby an estate near Kilkenny; as staunch Whigs they kept the State provided with a steady flow of politicians, churchman and soldiers. Of John Ponsonby’s four brothers, Richard was Bishop of Derry, and William was the celebrated major general who led the charge of the Union brigade on d’Erlon’s corps at Waterloo and was killed by French lancers. His sister Mary married Charles, Second Earl Grey, future Whig Prime Minister.

Ponsonby’s beauty, of which he was vain, was legendary. It was rumoured that as a young man he travelled through France at the height of the Revolution and was seized by the mob, strung up by his neck, and left hanging from a lantern. Seeing him there, a crowd of women protested that he was too handsome to die, whereupon he was cut down and carried home to be nursed back to health.

He was born at the family estate of Bishopscourt in County Kildare, in 1771. His father intended for him a political career, in keeping with family tradition, and he duly stood as MP for Tallaght in 1793 and for Dungarvan, in the Irish House of Commons, in 1798. Ponsonby’s reserve and dislike of public speaking made parliament an unsuitable place for him: ‘It is all I can do’, he once said, ‘to find nerve for “yes” or “no” when there is a question in the House, and that is in a whisper.’8 He could relax only when slightly drunk and several descriptions suggest that under the influence of alcohol his character changed from taciturnity to easy charm. In 1826, the year after Harriette’s Memoirs were published, Ponsonby became a diplomat.

Ponsonby’s letters reveal him to be stubborn and opinionated and he was considered by his peers to be too indolent to take on a profession. The few memories of Ponsonby to survive present him as being something of a maverick. Harriette said that ‘his humour exactly suited mine’9 and he seems to have been the type to enjoy her irreverence. In 1826, en route to Argentina as Ambassador, he caused havoc by wearing only his underwear on deck. In Constantinople six years later, he was asked to give a speech to the Sultan which was to be translated into Turkish by the Chief Dragoman. A great number of dignitaries were present, standing in rows and holding banners and flags; with gravity and dignity Ponsonby unrolled his prepared script, and began to read, slowly counting ‘one, two, three, four, five, six …’ until he had reached ‘fifty’, ‘occasionally modulating his voice as if he desired to make an impression upon the minds of his hearers, putting emphasis upon some numbers and smiling with satisfaction and pleasure when he reached the higher numbers of twenty to fifty. Of course, his excellency knew that the Sultan, his ministers, and the officials of the Court were not acquainted with the English language. On concluding, he turned to the interpreter and motioned him to speak.’ After the Sultan had expressed his thanks, Ponsonby ‘commenced to count from sixty upwards, pausing now and then on particular numbers, which by his voice and gesture, it would appear he desired especially to impress on His Imperial Majesty’s mind’.10 This same Sultan, ensuring that he was greeted with respect, had a low arch built at the entrance of his reception room which required visitors to enter on their hands and knees. Ponsonby did what was expected of him, but parted his coat tails and crawled backwards, presenting His Imperial Majesty with the ambassadorial behind.

Harriette’s version of meeting Lord Ponsonby has about it the same self-conscious air of romance as the tale of her initial encounter with Julia Johnstone. Harriette liked to picture herself as the wanderer alone in nature, spying a kindred spirit and making a connection so immediate and so deep that few words were necessary to consolidate the bond. Her relationship with Ponsonby takes up more space in her Memoirs than any other affair related so far, and it strikes an entirely different note. Through love of Ponsonby, she sanctifies herself; with Ponsonby she became ‘angelick Harriette’. Her love for him was doomed, eternal, as good as fiction. She equates her love for Ponsonby with her feelings for Fanny; the only person she loved more was her mother.11 For the first time in her life, Harriette began to regret the ‘unfortunate situation she had fallen into’, fearing that her profession might make Lord Ponsonby think less of her. She lost interest in society and started to reflect on various sacrifices she might make or virtuous deeds she could perform in the hope of Ponsonby respecting her memory after her death. Ponsonby was sanctified too; Harriette presented nothing hypocritical or cruel in his treatment of her. At least, her portrait of him revealed little of what she really felt about his behaviour. Lord Ponsonby was to go down in posterity as her perfect man and their affair would be recorded as one perfect love: this was Harriette’s revenge. She punished Ponsonby’s treatment of her by painting him as the love-sick consort of the most notorious siren of the age. Her description of him was limp and lifeless enough to render him impotent.

Meanwhile, sitting in her opera box with Julia, Harriette found her heart was sinking fast. It had never occurred to her that the stranger might be married; he always looked so alone and unloved, so unbearably sad (a melancholic appearance, she later realized, that was due to the slow demise of his father). ‘I resolved now to make no kind of advances to become acquainted with Lord Ponsonby; but on the very next evening, I indulged myself in passing his house at least fifty times. I saw and examined the countenances of his footmen, and the colour of his window curtains: even the knocker on his door escaped not my veneration.’12 His wife, Fanny, was the youngest daughter of the formidable Lady Jersey, mistress to the Prince of Wales during his marriage to Princess Caroline. Lady Ponsonby was therefore the sister of the Lorne’s mistress, Lady Charlotte. Fanny, ‘beautiful beyond all description … an engaging, affectionate, gentle person’ was treated by Ponsonby with ‘affected contempt and brutality’.13 Married at fifteen, Lady Ponsonby was deaf from scarlet fever. She spent her days playing with a mouse who lived in the wainscot. When her husband met Harriette Wilson, Fanny had just trained the mouse to eat from her hand.

Ponsonby and his wife left town for the summer and shut up house. Although ‘half the fine young men in town were trying to please’ her, Harriette went into mourning, and hung around outside Ponsonby’s door in Curzon Street, hoping for signs of renewed life. One day, several months later, a letter arrived:

I have long been very desirous to make your acquaintance: will you let me? A friend of mine has told me something about you, but I am afraid you were then only laughing at me … I hope, at all events, that you will write me one line, so say you forgive me, and direct it to my house in town.14

Putting aside all anguished thoughts of poor Lady Ponsonby, Harriette answered:

Ponsonby’s reply enclosed an exquisite watch. Their correspondence continued, and the happiness Harriette felt during this time was ‘the purest, the most exalted, and the least allied to sensuality, of any I have ever experienced in my life’. Eventually the couple met: ‘I heard the knock, and his footsteps on the stairs, and then that most godlike head uncovered, that countenance so pale, so still, so expressive, the mouth of such perfect loveliness, the fine, clear, transparent dark skin.’16 She wept; he comforted her; they talked all night, her head on his breast. He told her he had first seen her two years ago when she lived at Somerstown, and that he was there when she first came out at the opera. She was spoken of by everyone, and being shy he feared her notoriety. When he saw her again, however, walking in the park, she looked so natural and unaffected and wild that he forgot that side of her life; and when he saw her give money to the old lady what he said was too flattering for Harriette to repeat. She longed to kiss him but he refused. ‘No, not tonight! I could not bear your kiss tonight. We will dream about it till tomorrow.’17

As ever with Harriette, the stylistic monotony of the Ponsonby episode is occasionally relieved by a whiff of familiar cynicism – ‘I am sure my readers are growing as tired of this dismal love story as I am’18 – and a characteristic wink. ‘Heavy work, ma’am, all this love and stuff, says my fair reader of sixty, taking off her spectacles … and my young reader does not like playing second fiddle, which is my own reason for hating novels.’19 Left to her own devices, she would have preferred to leave out ‘this love of mine, altogether’, but her editor insisted on it. ‘Nevertheless I will make shorter of our second night.’20 True to her word, the second night is passed over swiftly. ‘And then! – yes, and then, as Sterne says, – and then, – and then, – and then, – and then, – and then we parted.’21 The nuts and bolts of the rest of their affair are hardly described. During their time together, ‘my life produced very few anecdotes which I can recollect worth relating; for I had neither eyes, nor ears, nor thoughts, but for Ponsonby’.22

Harriette and Ponsonby ‘seldom contrived to separate before five or six o’clock in the morning, and Ponsonby generally came to me as soon as it was dark. Nor did we always wait for the evening to see each other, though respect for Lady Ponsonby made us ever, by mutual consent, avoid all risk of wounding her feelings; therefore, almost every day after dinner, we met in the park, by appointment, not to speak, but only to look at one another.’23 She could feel Ponsonby’s arrival in his wife’s opera box without having to look up; the air, Harriette said, ‘suddenly became purer’.24 Often, at the end of an evening together, ‘finding it so difficult to separate’, Harriette would drive to the House of Lords with him and wait in his coach half the night just for the pleasure of one last kiss, and accompany him back to his venerated front door. One night Ponsonby came late to Harriette’s rooms and rather than wake her, he slipped a pearl ring on her finger and left a note under her pillow reading, ‘Dors, cher enfant, je t’aime trop tendrement pour t’éveiller.’ Harriette began to think herself ‘in the land of fairies!’25 She shone, as lovers do, in his company, recalling that ‘though I have never been called agreeable in all my life, I am convinced that I was never half so pleasant or so witty as in Ponsonby’s society’.26

In order to make herself ‘rather more worthy’ of her protector and to ‘improve [her] powers of consol[ation] and charming away all his cares’,27 Harriette used the time they were apart to continue the educational process begun by Frederic Lamb. When Ponsonby was away one time, she set off with her maid to the Castle Inn at Salt Hill, on the Bath road. Here she proposed to study: ‘The word study sounded very well, I thought, as I pronounced it.’ Unpacking her trunk of books, Harriette

sat down to consider which of them I should begin with, in order to become clever and learned at the shortest notice. Let me see! What knowledge will be likely to make me most agreeable to him? O! politics. What a pity that he does not like something less dry, and more lively! But no matter! And I turned over the leaves of my History of England, for George the Second and George the Third, and I began reading the Debates in Parliament. Let me consider! continued I, pausing. I am determined to stick firm to the opposition side, all my life; because Ponsonby must know best; and yet it goes against the grain of my late aristocratical prejudices, which, by-the-bye, only furnish a proof how wrong-headed young girls often are.28

She tried to make a ‘little Whig’ of herself and read a speech of Charles James Fox. ‘This man, thought I, when I had finished his speech, appears to have much reason on his side; but then all great orators seem right, till they are contradicted by better reasoners.’ But finding that all her instincts were Tory (‘Opposition is such a losing game! And then I have a sneaking kindness for my king’), Harriette decided that ‘out of respect for Lord Ponsonby’ she would ‘stand neuter in regard to politics’.29 Shakespeare, who she would love reading all her life, was too beautiful to be considered study, so she settled down to a history lesson. ‘The Greeks employed me for two whole days, and the Romans six more: I took down notes of what I thought most striking. I then read Charles the Twelfth, by Voltaire, and liked it less than most people do; and then, Rousseau’s Confessions, then, Racine’s Tragedies, and afterwards, Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I allowed myself only ten minutes for my dinner.’ Her work was interrupted by the arrival of the Pitcher family, who, ‘having once taken a fancy to my society, I had no chance but returning to town as fast as possible’.30

Back in London the pattern of Harriette’s days otherwise continued much the same, but she remained faithful to her lord. On one occasion, Lamb appeared at her house at ten o’clock in the evening. Being told by Harriette’s servant that it was too late to visit, he none the less admitted himself. He talked to her first of his feelings and then ‘grew desperate, and proceeded to very rough, I may say brutal, violence, to gratify his desires against my fixed determination’. In self-defence, Harriette pulled his hair until it came out by the roots; in retaliation, Lamb put his hand on her throat, ‘saying, while he nearly stopped my breath and occasioned me almost the pangs of suffocation, that I should not hurt him another instant. He spoke this in a smothered voice and I did in truth believe that my last moments had arrived. Another moment would have decided the business; but he, thank God, relinquished his grasp at my throat. He is, however, mistaken if he believes I have ever forgotten the agony of that moment.’31

Harriette refers again to this event in one of her few surviving letters, reminding Ponsonby in years to come that she was ‘nearly choaked’ by Lamb ‘pour vos beaux yeux rather than be unfaithful to you’.32 Panicking about his reputation after his attack, Lamb quickly spread around Harriette’s friends a breezy version of her forceful rejection of his ardent passion. Harriette was so in love with Lord Ponsonby, he joked, that she had eyes for no one else. Harriette was therefore silenced and the first time she described the experience was in her Memoirs. But even here, in her harrowing account of Lamb’s behaviour, she draws again on his stinginess, as though this fault were somehow comparable with his physical violence: ‘I am sure Mr Frederic Lamb cannot assert that, on the day I believed he meant to have been my last, he had ever given me one single guinea, or the value of a guinea.’33 For Harriette, Lamb’s fault lay in breaking the rules, one of which was gentlemanlike behaviour and the other, more important, was respect for her professionalism. By not paying her, or by not paying her enough, he cheapened her. And Harriette was never in any doubt about her value and the privileged position of those on whom she bestowed her favours.

Out riding with Fanny in Hyde Park, they would find their carriage quickly surrounded by admirers. But because ‘that adored, sly, beautiful face of Ponsonby’s was fixed on me à la distance’, Harriette encouraged all the ‘trotting beaux’ to Fanny’s side. Once, walking in the park with her brother George, they happened across Ponsonby riding with his sister Lady Howick, who commented on the handsome pair. ‘Ponsonby always described this as one of the very happiest moments of his life, nor could all his dread of notoriety, his constitutional reserve, and his sense of what was due, both to his wife and sister, prevent his acknowledging … that we had loved each other for more than a year.’34 ‘Good-natured’ Lady Howick tuttutted and then suggested that young George might like to go to sea as a midshipman, which thrilled the boy but devastated his mother. However much Ponsonby persevered with the idea, George stayed at home in Queen Street.35

One evening, about three years into their relationship, Harriette accompanied Ponsonby to the House of Lords and waited in the carriage until daylight for his return. When he appeared he seemed careworn and distressed. ‘You are much fatigued, dear Ponsonby, said I, – I only wish to heaven I might stay with you, and take care of you for ever.’ But it was not to be: Ponsonby produced from his pocket a letter that Harriette rightly guessed was to secure her the lifetime’s ‘provision’ of which he had often spoken. He offered her £200 a year, which sum Harriette refused, knowing he could ill afford it. ‘He will provide his purse with me, thought I. While he lives and loves me, – and I will never look forward, nor provide for one hour after Ponsonby shall be lost to me.’ Harriette tore the letter into pieces and threw it out of the window.36 The generosity of her gesture would be hard for her to forget. ‘It is very hard upon us’, Ponsonby then said, ‘that we may not pass the whole of our lives together; but then be assured of this truth; and I hope that it may afford you consolation, happen what will, my affection for you, to whom I certainly owe some of the happiest hours I have ever known, will last while I exist.’ As the carriage reached his door, he gave Harriette one last kiss, ‘as long and as ardent as our first’. Harriette, unable to speak, ‘kissed his hand eagerly and fervently, as he was hurrying out of the coach’. She never saw Ponsonby again.37

Ponsonby left her, Harriette told Byron, ‘because Mrs Fanny would have it so’,38 but soon afterwards he began an involvement with Harriette’s younger sister, Sophia, aged fourteen and just launched as a courtesan. Harriette is silent on this liaison in her Memoirs, perhaps because she found it too humiliating an incident to reveal to a readership she was bent on amusing. Ponsonby was not acting with unusual indifference; the traffic of lovers between the sisters and Julia seems to have been fairly constant. Like Lorne, who had traded Harriette for Amy, and like other lovers of the Dubouchet girls, Ponsonby saw them as interchangeable. Sir Henry Mildmay, currently Julia’s protector, left her for an affair with Harriette; James Napier, a rich landowner who first pursued Fanny, was donated by her to Julia, who needed the money. But Ponsonby’s relationship with Sophia made Harriette ill with grief and jealousy. ‘Lord,’ she wrote to Byron in 1823, ‘if you could only suffer for one single day the agony of mind I endured for more than two years after Ponsonby left me … you would bless your stars and your good fortune, blind, deaf and lame at eighty-two, so that you could sleep an hour in forgetfulness or eat a little bit of batter pudding. Heavens! How I have prayed for death, nights and days and months together, merely as a rest from suffering …’39 In the sentimental version of her illness, Harriette turned to charitable works, visiting Lord Craven’s old housekeeper, imprisoned for debt in Newgate. ‘“I wish I could pay your debt,” said I, panting for breath, as usual, and speaking with pain and difficulty.”’40 She took home with her a sick girl she found sitting outside Ponsonby’s house in the rain; Harriette then took to sitting outside his house in the rain herself. In the rendition of her collapse she related in the letter to Ponsonby of 1832, Harriette was more philosophical:

Her Memoirs ‘quote’ the following letter, written to Ponsonby from Harriette’s sickbed when she was strong enough to wield a pen once more:

Scarcely a month has elapsed since I possessed, or believed I possessed, with health, reputed beauty, and such natural spirits ‘as were wont to set the table in a roar’, all my highest flights of imagination had ever conceived or dreamed of perfect happiness on earth … Alas! I had not considered how unreal and fleeting must ever be the glories of this life, and I was, as a child, unprepared for the heavy affliction which has fallen on my heart like a thunder-bolt, withering all healthful verdue, and crushing its hopes for ever.

In encouraging so deep an attachment for a married man, I have indeed been very hardened; but, till now, I call my God to witness, I have never, in my life, reflected seriously on any subject …

Oh! I have known such moments of deep anguish, as I could never describe to you, Ponsonby, my dear Ponsonby! I throw myself on my knees before you; I raise the eyes you have so often professed to love and admire, now disfigured and half closed by constant weeping, towards heaven …42

Whatever Harriette wrote, Ponsonby remained unmoved. He asked her to return all his letters, and she duly complied. He had also given her letters he had received from his previous lover Lady Conyngham, and this act of blind trust would later result in a governmental crisis.

What are we to make of ‘all this love and stuff’? How can we interpret the unnerving shift of gear in Harriette’s Memoirs from comedy to tragedy, from mocking her lovers to abject adoration of them? She lards her woeful tale in order to satisfy the demands of her publisher, but this does not totally account for what is going on here. It is interesting that in a long career of feigning devotion, the only man Harriette was genuinely to fall for was already married. She recognized from the start the hopelessness of her feelings but nurtured them none the less. Because Ponsonby was unavailable, Harriette, who loathed being trapped, could afford to open the floodgates. But is this how she experienced love, as a sentimental fiction? Whenever she writes of her love for Ponsonby, the untutored natural style that characterizes the voice of her Memoirs becomes self-consciously ‘literary’, artificial, clichéd, and Harriette employs the stock images of the novels she claimed to despise. Not being able to write well about love, on the other hand, is hardly new; many an original voice has resorted to the mimicry of popular fiction in order to dramatize his or her most violent and vulnerable feelings. To see one’s life in terms of a story we are writing, or in terms of stories we have read, is just one way of organizing chaotic experience and need not detract from the reality of the feelings involved. Harriette Wilson was always drawn to stories and she used them for various purposes; in this instance, adopting the language of a melodrama enabled her to describe an experience for which she might otherwise not have been able to find words: she had no natural voice for weakness and despair.

Harriette was twenty-three when Ponsonby deserted her. ‘Never in the pathetics for long’ and hating to be thought a maudlin figure, she was hurt, humiliated and defeated. ‘My mind was now a complete blank. My imagination was exhausted, my castle had fallen to the ground, and I never expected to rebuild it, for even my cool judgement told me that Ponsonbys were not often to be met with.’43 This was the first time that she had made the error of mistaking a business arrangement for a love affair. She would never again refuse money from a protector or allow her feelings to get the better of her, but she would continue to make the mistake of believing that she was appreciated beyond her sexual celebrity, that those she was closest to valued her as a friend as well as a courtesan.

Just as Harriette was at her lowest ebb, the Mary Anne Clarke scandal broke.

Notes

1 Memoirs, p. 61.

2 Memoirs 1831, vol. 7, p. 138.

3 Memoirs, p. 61.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 64.

6 Ibid., p. 72.

7 Ibid., p. 198.

8 Sir John Ponsonby, KCB, The Ponsonby Family, 1771–1855, London: The Medici Society, 1929, p. 75.

9 Memoirs, p. 96.

10 Ponsonby, op. cit., pp. 78–9.

11 Memoirs, p. 639.

12 Ibid., p. 73.

13 The Hon. F. Leveson-Gower (ed.), Letters of Harriette, Lady Granville, 1810–1845, London and New York: Longman, 1894, vol. 1, p. 43.

14 Memoirs, p. 80.

15 Ibid., p. 81.

16 Ibid., p. 89.

17 Ibid., p. 83.

18 Ibid., p. 164.

19 Ibid., p. 84.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 90.

22 Ibid., p. 121.

23 Ibid., p. 96.

24 Ibid., p. 120.

25 Ibid., p. 98.

26 Ibid., p. 96.

27 Ibid., p. 106.

28 Ibid., p. 107.

29 Ibid., p. 108.

30 Ibid., p. 110.

31 Ibid., p. 126.

32 Ponsonby: GRE/E/673/3.

33 Memoirs, p. 126.

34 Ibid., p. 221.

35 Julia Johnstone’s version of Harriette’s affair with Ponsonby differs in every detail. According to Julia, ‘Harriette was never connected with Lord Ponsonby, and never spoke to him above twenty times in her life.’ It is possible that Julia knew very little about their relationship; it is equally possible that she knew all about it and was envious. Ponsonby first saw Harriette, she says, when the two women were living together in Bloomsbury and he came to the house drunk one evening, in the company of Argyll and some others. ‘He selected Harriette for his friend and till twelve at night talked her into the belief that he was really smitten with her charms.’ Any contact Ponsonby continued to have with Harriette was charitable rather than amatory; he had offered to help her brother George, who was in financial trouble. Ponsonby helped to get him bound on a ship for the West Indies. This is where Harriette’s and Ponsonby’s relationship began and ended. Problems in credibility arise from George Dubouchet’s being born in 1796, which would have made him ten years old at the time of his bankruptcy. There are no Dubouchets named in any of the army lists, which puts paid also to Julia’s account of Harriette’s other brother, ‘the Major’, who she describes as being ‘manly, open hearted, and free, much readier to censure his sister for her faults than throw away money to pamper her frivolous disposition’. And of course any remaining doubts can be assuaged by reading Harriette’s surviving letters to Ponsonby.

36 Ponsonby appears to have left Harriette in 1809, but a letter from Lady Granville to Lady Morpeth, written on 12 December 1812, says that he and his wife had come to ‘an understanding’ whereby ‘he is to give up Miss Wilson and all that sort of thing …’Leveson-Gower, op. cit., p. 43. The most plausible interpretation of the discrepancy in dates is that ‘Miss Wilson’ had become a byword for courtesans.

37 Memoirs, p. 106.

38 Harriette Wilson to Lord Byron, in George Paston and Peter Quennell (eds), ‘To Lord Byron’: Feminine Profiles, based upon unpublished letters 1807–1824, London: John Murray, 1939, pp. 160–61. Hereafter cited as ‘To Lord Byron’.

39 Ibid.

40 Memoirs, p. 254.

41 Ponsonby: GRE/E/673/3.

42 Memoirs, p. 151.

43 Ibid., p. 182.