Following the deaths of her mother and her sister, Harriette returned to Paris. It was 1817 and also in Paris, having run away with and then from Mrs George Lamb, was Henry Brougham. Brougham had gone with his mistress to Geneva where the monotony of the landscape – ‘Ennui comes on the third hour, and suicide attacks you before night’1 – cooled his ardour. When Mrs Lamb returned home to her husband, Brougham became acquainted with the Lambs’ old friend, Harriette Wilson. The relationship was to be one of the most enduring and significant of her life.
Brougham’s visit to Geneva coincided with the arrival there of Lord Byron, who had run away from England after his wife, Annabella Milbanke, a cousin of the Lambs, ran away from him. The poet would never return home, and while London salons mourned their most dazzling star they flocked to booksellers to buy Glenarvon, the fantastical novel about herself and Byron written by the wife of William Lamb, Lady Caroline.
During the time of the Byron scandal in 1816, Meyler, or ‘Dick the Dandy-Killer’ as he became known,2 finally broke with Harriette and began the ruin of high society’s other favourite, Beau Brummell. The Beau’s fate, like that of Byron, was all too inevitable; his sun, as Harriette put it, had long been setting. ‘Empires had risen and fallen while he experimented with the crease of a neck-cloth,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in her elegant essay on Brummell, ‘and criticized the cut of a coat. Now the battle of Waterloo had been fought and peace had come. And it was peace that undid him.’3 The armies disbanded, pouring soldiers into London’s gaming houses; Brummell’s game got higher, he lost his lucky coin, he spent his last guinea, he borrowed money and won, he played again and lost. He made an enemy of the Regent, a sure sign that his days were numbered.
Together with his closest friends, Robert and Charles Manners, Brummell had set up various schemes to get capital, and in 1816 he joined Lords Alvanley and Worcester to raise a loan of £30,000 on their joint securities. ‘The weight of the debt’, Harriette recalled, ‘was expected to fall on the Duke of Beaufort, who, after strict enquiry, ascertained that Brummell was deeply involved and without even the most remote prospect of ever possessing a single guinea.’ Meyler, who had lent Brummell £7,000, went in a hot-headed rage to White’s ‘for the sole purpose of saying to every man who entered that Mr Brummell’s late conduct both towards the Marquis of Worcester and himself had been such as rendered him a disgrace to society and most unfit to remain a member of that club’. Panicked, Brummell sent a note to Meyler, ‘begging to be informed if such had really and truly been the expressions made use of’. Meyler, immune to the implied threat, replied that ‘not only had he used the expressions but that he further proposed returning to the club on the following day for the sole purpose of repeating them between the hours of two and four, to anybody who might be present, and if anybody had anything to say to him in return, he would be sure to find him at White’s during that hour’.4
The next day, 16 May, Brummell dined on cold fowl and red wine, paid a last visit to the opera, bid farewell to ‘about a dozen of his former acquaintances’. ‘I now throw myself on your compassion,’ he said in Harriette’s dramatization of the scene, ‘being in a wretched plight.’ When these ‘half and half sort of gentry’ asked what Brummell could offer in exchange for being given large sums of money by them at this precarious stage in his life, the Beau replied, ‘Why, have I not called you Dick, Tom and John, you rogues? And was not that worth all the money to you? But for this, do you fancy or flatter yourselves that you would ever have been seen picking your teeth in Lady Foley’s box, or the Duchess of Rutland’s?’ He slipped out of London, arriving in Dover before dawn. He sailed to Calais where he lived for the rest of his life and was, Harriette said, visited by ‘half the world … as though he had been a lion’.5 In a ‘pair of muchmended trousers’ and ‘a tattered cloak’,6 Brummell continued to entertain and was visited by all the old crowd on their way to and from Paris. Harriette, out of curiosity rather than concern, called and found him, plump and bewigged, at his second toilette of the day, in a room stuffed with watches, snuffboxes, seals and chains, all presents from English ladies of rank. ‘“Play”, he said, “had been the ruin of them all.”’7
Two years after Brummell fled the country, Meyler, aged twenty-six, fell from his horse during a hunt at Melton Mowbray and broke his neck. His body was laid out in great pomp and state at the Three Crows, Leicester, and he was buried in Crawley on 12 March 1818. Richard Meyler was the last of his family line and his will was unfinished; nine years later the administration of his considerable estate was still being fought over by disparate relations.8 Harriette mentions Meyler’s death only in passing and does not say how it affected her.
The party was over. Those of Harriette’s friends who were still standing were sobering up. In June 1817, Lord Ebrington married the daughter of the Countess of Harrowby, whose sister was the Duchess of Beaufort. The wild figures of the Regency were not only disappearing but closing ranks. In their stead emerged heroes of a different kind: grand patriarchs and orators; those who became the great Victorians were the new gods. No poet would again be so desired by his readers as Byron, and no one since Brummell has been again been lionized for the tie of his cravat. In Henry Brougham, Harriette met a man of the next age, someone of a different cut from the playboys she had attracted. Brougham ‘plunged with the energy of a Titan into a thousand projects’.9 Eight years Harriette’s senior, he was one of the most remarkable figures of the nineteenth century; a polymath of extraordinary ability, an intellectual, a social and educational reformer, a debauchee. He published, aged seventeen, a paper in the Transactions of the Royal Society on experiments and observations on light. Fascinated by mathematics and physics, he studied humanity and philosophy at Edinburgh University for four years and then trained as a lawyer before becoming a member of parliament. He gave his name to the light one-horse carriage he designed, and he was also the greatest legal mind of his time. ‘This morning,’ Samuel Rogers said of him, ‘Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Chesterfield, and a great many more went away in one post-chaise.’10 Greville described Brougham in 1828 as ‘certainly one of the most remarkable men I have ever met; to say nothing of what he is in the world, his almost childish gaiety and animal spirits, his humour mixed with sarcasm, but not ill-natured, his wonderful information, and the facility with which he handles every subject, from the most grave and severe to the most trifling, displaying a mind full of varied and extensive information and a memory which has suffered nothing to escape it, I never saw any man whose conversation impressed me with such an idea of his superiority over all others’.11
In 1802 Brougham helped to found the Edinburgh Review, which quickly became the authoritative literary periodical of the next century; Thomas Carlyle described it as ‘a kind of Delphic oracle’. Brougham’s reviews, by which he supported himself, were seering and merciless; his savage denunciation of Byron’s juvenile Hours of Idleness – he counselled him to ‘forthwith abandon poetry’12 – was typical and his future relations with Byron reveal a great deal about Brougham. The poet was only nineteen and still unknown while Brougham was a thirty-year-old lawyer: to attack with such energy so easy a target suggests an insecurity in Brougham, a need to impose himself; he made no concessions to Byron’s youth or fragility and showed no compassion when his blows had been dealt. Nor was he able in later years to laugh off his lack of judgement. Brougham’s animosity towards Byron had ‘almost an obsessive quality’,13 one commentator has noted, and he waited until Byron’s fame had turned to infamy in order to continue his attack. Byron put Brougham’s hatred of him down to something he might have said about Mrs George Lamb when she was Brougham’s mistress, but the lawyer’s animosity was older than that, and deeper. It was the envy of ugliness faced with beauty – Brougham tastelessly attacked Byron for his club foot – of a politician towards a poet, of a self-conscious and self-promoting commoner towards an arrogant, posing milord.
Brougham was a peculiar-looking man, a gangly figure with a nose like a snout. ‘A more complete antidote to the tender passion never walked upon two legs (Broom-sticks I mean) than Henry Brougham’ – the description is Julia Johnstone’s – ‘his features apparently stamped on a toad stool, and his eyes like marbles floating in mortar; his chin and nose like the toes of Grimaldi’s slipper, when dressed for Whang-fong.’14 Meeting him as a young man in 1798, Francis Horner wrote to the Reverend Hewlett, ‘Have you had any conversation with Brougham? He is an uncommon genius of a composite order, if you allow me to use the expression; he unites the greatest ardour for general information in every branch of knowledge, and, what is more remarkable, activity in the business, and interest in the pleasures of the world, with all the powers of a mathematical intellect. Did you notice his physiognomy? I am curious to know your observation on it.’15
Henry Brougham was complex and calculating, born to be a politician. Hugely ambitious, he was strong and able to thrive in an environment where other men were dropping like flies. He lived as hard and fast as the Regency bucks but he kept to the front of the race. His life was so voluminous and tangled that it makes the lives of his contemporaries look like footnotes. While he was Lord Chancellor he was caught in a drunken orgy in a public house, and he once lost the Great Seal in a game of blind man’s bluff at a country weekend; there was an arrogance to Brougham’s carelessness. One of the most revealing things about Brougham is that, while Harriette’s other lovers burned her correspondence, he kept all her letters. This was typical of the man: he thought like a lawyer but lived like a gambler and he held on to the very evidence that could bring him down. The relationship that he kept secret during his lifetime he left to posterity to judge.
The grandson of a principal of Edinburgh University, Brougham was outside the closed circle of titles, Oxbridge and the army. Having no pedigree, it was his sociability, wit and ambition that earned him a central place in London’s Whiggish circles, and when he was elected MP for Winchelsea in July 1815, the Whigs found their most brilliant speaker. Brougham restored energy to the beleaguered party; he was the new hope.
Brougham would also restore hope to another beleaguered party, the hapless Queen Caroline, who had lived abroad since 1814. The Regent was anxious to procure a divorce and when he became King George IV in January 1820 it became a matter of urgency that the Queen did not attend the Coronation as his wife. He brought the matter before Parliament and hoped to gather enough evidence to prove that Caroline had been unfaithful. Brougham, acting as the Queen’s legal adviser since 1815, suggested that she be bought off with an enormous annuity – £50,000 – as an inducement to stay in Italy and he put it to the government that if he were rewarded with the silk gown of King’s Counsel he would do his best to ensure that Queen Caroline lived abroad. Brougham hoped at this stage that he might become prime minister in a new government. The Regent detested Lord Liverpool, the present premier, and getting rid of His Highness’s wife, Brougham reasoned, would do his career no harm at all. Liverpool told Brougham to put the offer to the Queen, which Brougham did in his own time before advising her to reject it. Brougham played a double hand throughout the sordid affair, and was always one step ahead.
While he was not pleased when she returned to England in the summer of 1820 to face ‘trial’, Brougham conducted a brilliant defence. His opening speech, which lasted two days, was ‘one of the most powerful orations that ever proceeded from human lips’, his fellow defendant Denman declared;16 it had Lord Erskine, the former Lord Chancellor, rushing from the chamber in tears. His closing speech, Charles Grenville wrote, was ‘the most magnificent display of argument and oratory that has been heard for years, and they say that the impression it made upon the House was immense; even his most violent opponents were struck with admiration and astonishment’.17 ‘Brougham has just finishing his opening,’ Thomas Creevey wrote to his daughter of the same speech, which had so far lasted for twelve hours, ‘… and I never heard anything like the perfection he has displayed in all ways … In short, if he can prove what he has stated in his speech, I for one believe she is innocent, and the whole case a conspiracy …’18
Anyone would think Brougham himself believed the Queen innocent and the whole case a conspiracy. But he began his defence unconvinced by her proclamations and at best, he later admitted, ‘he had never been very much for the Queen’.19 Brougham defended her not because he felt, along with the rest of the country, that she was an injured wife and a victim of the corruption of the State, but because it suited his interests to do so. He wasted his time on nothing that did not further his career; he was without fixed principles. An eyewitness account of a meeting between the Princess, as she then was, and Brougham in 1813 catches precisely the nature of their relationship: ‘His manner does not please her: they look at each other in a way that is very amusing to a bystander. The one thinks, “she may be useful to me;” and the other, “He is useful to me at present.” It does not require a conjuror to read their thoughts; but they are both too cunning for the other.’20
Brougham was a genius at manipulating public opinion and ‘doing all the world’s business as well as his own’, as Thomas Love Peacock wrote in Crotchet Castle, where Brougham is lampooned as the ‘learned friend’. Brougham’s efforts at what we know now as spin-doctoring paid off. It is largely thanks to him that the national propaganda around the Queen’s case reached the peak of intensity it did. ‘It is impossible to describe the universal, and strong, even violent feelings of the people,’ Brougham himself wrote of the atmosphere during the time of the trial, ‘not only in London but all over the country, upon the subject of the Queen … The crowd collected wherever they knew her to be, and called her to appear at the windows of whatever house she was in. The noise and cheers were excessive and exposed her to great annoyance and fatigue …’21 It was he who organized public meetings and lobbied Whig and Radical MPs to circulate petitions and bombard newspapers with letters about the case. Brougham played magnificently on the public’s sense of the Queen’s dishonour being linked to their own disenfranchisement and the case brought him fame, which he relished. The Queen eventually accepted the offer of an annuity of £50,000 and a house in exchange for the dissolution of her marriage. There was only one real winner to emerge from the Queen Caroline affair, however, and it was neither of the royal couple. ‘The only person who is cheerful and pleased with himself’, Princess Lieven drily commented at the termination of the trial, ‘is the King of Parliament: Brougham.’22
He was not the type of man to attract Harriette, but it was legal advice and not love that she sought from Brougham. She was still bothered by the loss of her annuity from the Duke of Beaufort, and Brougham was sympathetic. Harriette might well have seen him as the champion of wronged women. He had previously defended Mary Anne Clarke, and in the year before he first became acquainted with Harriette he was appointed one of Lady Byron’s team of legal advisers, following her separation from Lord Byron. Brougham used this position to spread malicious gossip and to make impossible any attempt at the couple’s reconciliation. The reason for the separation was, Brougham whispered abroad, ‘too horrid to mention’,23 and his spite against Byron was one of the main causes for the poet’s ostracism by the very people who had idolized him. John Cam Hobhouse, Byron’s friend, realized that some of the worst rumours about Byron ‘were traceable to Lady Byron’s legal advisors themselves’24 and among them was the story started by Brougham that Byron had cheated his landlady, the Duchess of Devonshire, of £500. Information Brougham received about Byron through the channel of George Lamb’s wife, who had heard it from Caroline Lamb, he spun with artful dexterity. It was Brougham who was responsible for the offensive publication of Byron’s ‘Separation’ poems in the journal the Champion, which resulting scandal besmirched what little was left of the poet’s reputation.25 Far from representing Lady Byron’s interests, Brougham surreptiously added whenever he could to her distress.
His relationship with Harriette was, like his relationships with everyone and hers with many people, dependent on mutual usefulness. He gave her advice; she gave him sex. He took her to the theatre, introduced her to gentlemen, and invited her to dinners. ‘One day,’ she wrote, Harriette ‘took the liberty of consulting him on the subject of my annuity from the Duke of Beaufort … Brougham said boldly, and at a public dinner table, that it was a mean, paltry transaction, the object of the Duke being fully obtained by my final separation from his son, to seize hold of such a pretext for depriving me of a bare existence.’26 He advised Harriette to bring the matter to trial and told her she had every chance of winning, as Worcester would never be able to face the shame of bringing the offending letter to court. His offer to defend Harriette was payment for enjoying her body.
The day of the trial arrived, the Duke and Brougham waited in court but there was no sign of Worcester. The Marquis, it seemed, was either defying his parent out of respect for Harriette or had too much pride to reveal to the world his correspondence with a courtesan. The Duke, in a fluster and having no other witness, proposed an out-of-court settlement: he would pay Harriette a lump sum of £1,200, which bond Brougham had just signed when a carriage rattled up and Worcester stepped out, holding Harriette’s letter in his hand.
Harriette accompanied Brougham to Westminster Hall to make an oath that she had ‘set forth a full and true list of all the letters, papers, and writings in her possession, or power, written by the Marquis of Worcester … and that she hath not retained or delivered to any person, any copies, or extracts of them …’27 Harriette then claimed her money; a paltry amount considering that she had hoped for a lifetime’s annuity. It was Beaufort who won the day. She never spoke to any member of the family again, but while she lived in Paris she continued to see Lord Worcester walking in the park with his wife, looking for all the world ‘as if he did not even know me by sight, while I often forget, until he has passed me, where or when I have seen that man before, the face being familiar, and perhaps the name forgotten’.28
By the next year the money from the Duke had disappeared. The extravagance of Harriette’s lifestyle, her rents, debts, cellar, servants, jewels, dresses, dinners, the fact that her entire life was lived in public, in opera boxes and carriages, and that it was expected of her to sparkle with luxury, to outshine every other woman, meant that money never lasted long. She was reduced to writing begging letters to her old friends, including Lord Byron, who always sent her money when she asked him. This she did without losing a jot of dignity; in fact her brilliant letters are worth what he paid for them. She was now thirty-two and more level-headed than before, amused at herself and her life, taking nothing too seriously. She lied about – or simply forgot – her age and lived in the past but seemed relaxed about the future, having no interest, other than financial, in what it might hold for her. She wrote to Byron as one great figure from a lost world to another, and continued to remain unfazed by the curtness of his replies. She is seeped in nostalgia but her freshness and flirtatious appeal are if anything greater now than before:
Pray, dear Lord Byron, think of me a little now and then (I don’t mean as a woman, for I shall never be a woman to you) merely as a good little Fellow who feels a warmer interest in all that happens to you and all that annoys you than anybody else in the world. Forget me when you are happy; but in gloomy moments, chilly miserable weather, bad razors and cold water, perhaps you’ll recollect and write to me …29
Notes
1 Henry Brougham, letter to Thomas Creevey MP, 25 August 1816; quoted in G. T. Garratt, Lord Brougham, London: Macmillan, 1935, p. 115.
2 See Leslie Marchand (ed.), Byron’s Letters and Journals, London: John Murray, 1973, vol. 9, p. 29: ‘When Brummell was obliged (by that affair of poor Meyler – who thence acquired the name of “Dick the Dandy-Killer” – it was about money and debt and all that) to retire to …’ Memoirs also refers to Meyler as ‘Dick the Dandy-Killer’.
3 Virginia Woolf, Beau Brummell, New York: Rimmington and Hooper, 1930, p. 5.
4 Memoirs, pp. 602–4.
5 Ibid., p. 604.
6 Woolf, op. cit., p. 1.
7 Memoirs, p. 609.
8 R. G. Thorne, The Commons 1790–1820, London: Secker and Warburg, 1986, vol. 4, p. 585.
9 Garratt, op. cit., preface, quoting Morley.
10 Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford, The Greville Memoirs, London: Macmillan, 1938, vol. I, p. 120.
11 Ibid.
12 Edinburgh Review, January 1808.
13 Doris Langley Moore, The Late Lord Byron, London: John Murray, 1966, p. 162.
14 Confessions, p. 336.
15 Quoted in Garratt, op. cit., p. 1.
16 Quoted in Flora Fraser, The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, p. 433.
17 Quoted in E. A. Smith, A Queen on Trial: The Affair of Queen Caroline, Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993, p. 118.
18 Ibid., p. 115.
19 Thomas Creevey, quoted in Fraser, op. cit., p. 465.
20 Lady Charlotte Bury, The Diary of a Lady in Waiting, quoted in Garratt, op. cit., p. 70.
21 Brougham’s memoirs, quoted in Smith, op. cit., p. 33.
22 Smith, op. cit., p. 92.
23 Moore, op. cit., p. 125.
24 Quoted in Moore, op. cit., p. 52.
25 The evidence for this comes from the painter Benjamin Haydon’s diary, and is quoted in Moore, op. cit., pp. 162–3.
26 Memoirs, p. 570.
27 Ibid., p. 636.
28 Ibid., p. 440.
29 ‘To Lord Byron’, p. 154.