Harriette’s life changed dramatically in December 1831. Rochfort fell in love with the wife of Mr Thomas Wyatt of the Bengal Civil Service and the couple began living together, thus scuppering Rochfort’s hopes for improved relations with his mother. Mrs Wyatt was ‘destitute’ following the demise of her marriage and she and Rochfort were penniless.1 The following year, he at last found a vocation: Dom Pedro of Brazil was trying to oust his brother, Dom Miguel, from the throne of Portugal, and Rochfort went out as commander of an artillery brigade to help Dom Pedro’s cause. When he returned to London, having now attained the colonelcy it had been presumed for the last ten years he already had, it was Mrs Wyatt’s arms and not Harriette’s into which Rochfort fell.

Writing to Ponsonby in March 1832, Harriette complained that as ‘Mr Rochfort was abroad’ she was, in her ‘difficulties alone in your mercy’,2 and in a letter to Bulwer that November, she referred to Rochfort’s trip to ‘Dom Pedro’ and called herself a ‘grass widow’.3 Did Harriette not want it known that the man whom she had boasted to Bulwer would never be ‘wooed into the arms of another woman’ had done precisely that? Or did she continue to describe Rochfort as her husband because it was still useful to pass herself off, as she had done for the previous nine years, as a respectable married woman? Either way, she never mentioned Rochfort
again – Harriette tended to erase those episodes which wounded her – and the following year she reverted to her original name of Dubouchet.

The year 1832 was bad for Harriette, and her unhappiness cannot have been unrelated to Rochfort’s departure. Theirs had been a relationship of financial convenience but Rochfort had also been her friend and defender and it was their closeness and his support she was missing. Harriette was now living near the Thames in Pimlico, at 69 Vauxhall Bridge Road. That she was more than ever locked in the past suggests her present life was empty and she had nothing to hope for in the future. She wrote passionate letters to Ponsonby on a regular basis, probably after quite a bit of gin, probably at night when she could not sleep. Harriette had shone in her blackmail campaign; the sharp focus of her mission made all else fall away and she emerged from her letters crystal with precision. There is no such pleasure or precision in the following letter to Ponsonby; she feigns a toughness and a purpose that she lacks, and the rage that had previously given her polish is now the cause of her disintegration. She describes the hurt caused by Ponsonby’s leaving her for Sophia as if she had not even begun to recover from it. The loss of Rochfort, who always reminded her of his Ponsonby cousin, had opened Harriette’s old wounds, piling grief on grief, making it no longer clear who or what it was being mourned. Her letter lashes out in all directions and so misses its target; she knows that she is striking the wrong note, that she is unrecognizable as the ‘little fellow’ Ponsonby once teased or the ‘angelick Harriette’ he adored, but she is beyond control. In wanting him to return the money she had refused to accept twenty-five years before, Harriette is asking for a sign that Ponsonby had at least once cared for her, that the past has some significance for him, and that she has something of her old appeal. His refusal to meet her demands does more than undermine Harriette’s version of their history; it undermines her version of herself and strips her life story of its meaning. If she was a good person it was because Ponsonby had thought so, if she was lovable it was because he had loved her. Ponsonby was Harriette’s turning point and the yardstick against which all her other relationships, before and after, were measured and found wanting. And Harriette’s life was the sum of her relationships. It became a matter of principle to her that Ponsonby acknowledge her present financial need just as she had once acknowledged his, ‘I don’t see how you, with your high pride can refuse me the sum you received from me after you had bestow’d it on me – particularly as you know my generous motive for not accepting it at the time –’ Her letter ends with a threat, but now that the King was dead there was no remaining interest in an affair between the old royal mistress and another man that took place over thirty years before. Besides, Harriette is not writing to blackmail Ponsonby; she wants him to give her the money willingly, because he understands her. She wants the understanding between the two of them to return.

I was vilely brought up, my nature was disguised; from under the mark of profligacy, false pride, shyness, and bad habits – you never read my heart – you thought me what false childish pride – error in judgement and taste made me affect to be – could you have understood what in truth was noble in my character – had you known what really was the case – that H. Wilson’s attachment for you would have been equal to the sacrifice of her life a thousand times over, that neither age or poverty or any wretchedness of yours, or future temptation falling in my way, could have made me waver in my faith, supposing you had but told me you wished me to be yours only – or that my constancy could make you happy – perhaps (so I reflected) if this man had known the stirling natural steadiness of my affections he would have felt some friendship for me. If your conduct was profligate and heartless as regards Sophia, if it was somewhat unfeeling as regarded the pecuniary difficulties you left me to struggle with – while my health and spirits were subdued by your desertion – still it may be said in extenuation that my high spirit and false pride were all exerted to blind you and conceal from me my distress both of mind and pocket. You never understood me – let me hope that if you had known me well and truly, I should not have had course to think so ill of you –

… It was hardly fair to leave even a common acquaintance of years without a guinea – and I have never received one from you since I returned your last donation – I leave it now to your good feelings, assuring you in truth that much as I have enjoyed abusing you myself I never can endure to hear of the German’s [sic] doing it, considering myself the only privileged person in that particular.4

Three months later, on 26 June 1832, just after he had seen his Reform Bill approved by Parliament, Brougham received a long and desperate letter from Harriette. It is the last he preserved from her. She was irritated that he had sent Lord Tankerville to negotiate with her in the hope that she would ‘annoy’ him no further. She was ill with gout, the bailiffs had removed much of her furniture and she had been forced to sell other possessions in order to pay the rent. Brougham had sent her money but Harriette wanted confirmation that he was acting not out of fear but from genuine affection and concern. As with Ponsonby, Harriette brings up their past relationship of which she has vivid and bitter memories, reminding Brougham of how he ill-treated her and cut her when he married, chastizing him for having never ‘understood’ her. ‘You were attentive to my wishes when I had no great affection for you in Paris … instead of treating me as a clever ignorant friend who would have liked to have grown wise by your knowledge and reasons, you thought it necessary de faire l’aimable and talk small talk to me as if you had made a fool of the soft sex to please …’ She resumes her blackmail threats; she will have to publish her anecdotes if this is the only way to make a living, and she takes him to task for his self-serving ‘support’ of her in the Conyngham affair. ‘If I must show you up my preface shall contain a copy of this and one or two other of my letters to you lately in which I declare I mean “that the poverty you subject me to, and not my will consents”.’ Finally, she wants his payments to her dramatically increased, from £40 a year to £40 a quarter.5

Lord Berwick died in Naples inthe autumn of 1832. From Paris, Harriette sent her consolations to his brother and heir, William Noel Hill. She also took the opportunity to ask the new Lord Berwick for money. ‘I am desperately ill,’ she told Bulwer later that month, back now in Pimlico, ‘and the mind wears out with body, but I fear you will be so unhappy if you don’t hear from me now and then before I die.’ Writing to Bulwer, Harriette was again sharp, shrewd and amusing. She continued to praise his novels, teasing him that Pelham was ‘but a bad edition of H. Wilson’s Memoirs after all’, before hitting on some home truths. ‘Don’t be such a pedant,’ she joked, drawing on his priggishness towards her. ‘Condescend to exert your playfulness and humour if you have any, in order that we may digest your dry solids. Be agreeable as well as wise and musty. Goodbye.’6 Bulwer most probably feared Harriette’s mockery and this was one reason he resisted a meeting; she had, after all, made fun to him of her ‘short fat man with the snub nose’ and it had not taken her long to pick up on Bulwer’s own less attractive qualities: his stuffiness, pride and pedantry.

In the postscript to her letter, Harriette, as usual, shifts gear. Having got the better of Bulwer with her intellect and wit, she now loses her poise, ridicules herself, hands him all the power and puts him in a position to reject her. ‘When shall we swear eternal love?’ she suddenly asks. ‘Still, up to the date hereof, my passion is quite a fervour grown. It attracts elderly ladies … I suppose, when the lover is hot blooded and yet cold in imagination. We … don’t know what the duce to make of him, he charms and puzzles us with his calm head and sensitive passions, till he drives us mad!’7 Harriette was hell-bent on sabotaging herself.

William Lamb, now Lord Melbourne, took over Lord Grey’s Whig ministry in 1834. In the same year he began an affair with Caroline Norton, the daughter of Tom Sheridan, which became a national scandal. Harriette Wilson, who was rumoured to have been Melbourne’s mistress, had been protected by his brother, Frederic, and Grey’s brother-in-law, Ponsonby. She had also been the courtesan of two of the previous Tory prime ministers, Wellington and Canning, and Palmerston’s ministry was yet to come. The lives of Harriette’s old friends were increasingly gaining the definition that hers had lost. Even Rochfort’s life was more purposeful than her own; he had been recommended by Brougham for a secret mission to Brussels, the object of which was a ‘tortuous domestic affair of inheritance, adultery and lunacy’ in the Wellesley family,8 most probably concerning the Duke of Wellington’s dissolute nephew, ‘Wicked William’ Long Wellesley, whose public and private behaviour was rarely out of the papers. By the end of the year, Wellesley and Rochfort were at one another’s throats. In September, Wellesley wrote to Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, calling Rochfort ‘a man of infamous refute’. Rochfort demanded a public apology, which Wellesley refused to give. Captain Close, a friend of Rochfort’s, then asked for a meeting with a friend of Wellesley’s. Wellesley was denounced as a ‘coward’ by another party, leading Rochfort to refuse to fight with him; Rochfort was called a ‘delinquent’ by Wellesley, who refused a meeting on those grounds. Rochfort wrote to Wellesley saying that he was determined to communicate with him, but only ‘through the medium of an ash plant or a double thronged Crowther horse-whip’.9 Rochfort later recalled with pride his role in the secret mission, reminding Brougham in years to come (at the same time as asking to be recommended for an office in Ireland under the newly appointed Secretary, Sir William Somerville) of ‘the long standing acquaintance subsisting between us’ and of the professionalism with which he had dealt with the Brussels trip.10 The mission ‘did not terminate successfully’, Rochfort conceded, but it ‘failed from no fault or remissness on my part as both Lord Devon and I think the Duke of Wellington will admit’.11 Both Devon and Wellington, Rochfort again reminded Brougham in 1846, ‘say how faithfully I discharged their trust, and at a recent trial in the Court of Chancery in London, Lord Wellesley … has bourne out faithfully everything forecast by me …’12

Harriette, meanwhile, who had begun calling herself Mrs Du Bouchet, was following the career path of a retired prostitute by procuring young women for gentlemen of the ‘first nobility’. In August 1834, she wrote to Ponsonby from her present address at 2 Park Row, Knightsbridge, reminding him again of the annuity she had turned down and suggesting that his refusal to return the money was because she had once suggested that he was not handsome enough. At this point in the letter she sounds drunk, and while she recovers some dignity later there is no sign of her old spark. She was, Harriette told him, ‘still cheerful, thank God, though slowly but surely dying, and too weak to walk half a mile; looking so fair and delicate that I am quite a different person to the H. Wilson you knew me – some say the fairness became me – I certainly do not look so ugly as might be expected which signifies but little to one who leads the life of a hermit’. The purpose of her letter, Harriette continued, was to inform him of a young lady, Miss Buchan, ‘in love with my [Harriette’s] mind and memories’, who had applied to her to be ‘set up in trade’ as a ‘fashionable whore’. Would Ponsonby, as a man of ‘honour’, ‘good taste’, ‘morals’ and ‘manners’, be interested in an introduction? If so, he could save the child from ‘the Dogs’.13

Had Ponsonby read Harriette’s letter (he kept it unopened and it was found in this state in 1984), he would have seen how little its content differed from the previous letters she had sent him. Harriette’s subject was still the past; what, if anything, it had meant to him, how they could return there. Ponsonby would have seen that the ‘handsome’ dark-haired girl described, with the ‘delicate white skin’, who wore only white and was quite ‘mad’, represented to Harriette her younger self. By asking him to ‘save this person’ whose life was in the balance, Harriette was asking if he had once been willing to save her, if he blamed himself for her demise, if he at all remembered Harriette’s own charms. The analogies between Harriette and Miss Buchan continue; this is a girl, she told Ponsonby, whose ‘bad taste’ a ‘man of real good taste could entirely change’, who could be induced ‘to read and improve’, who had ‘vow’d [to] never marry’ and to ‘lead a public not a private life’, who insisted she was ‘shy’ and that men ‘ought to understand’ her, who was ‘obstinate’ as ‘the wind’ and wanted to ‘enjoy life for a few years now instead of being buried alive with her mother’.14 Her life could go either way, and her fate was up to Ponsonby. Harriette’s charge for the introduction would be £100. She might have continued writing to him, but there are no other letters from Harriette in the Ponsonby archive.

Sometime after 1834, Harriette moved to 2 North Cottages, Princes’s Street, south of the Brompton Road. Her house looked out over fourteen acres of land owned by the Smith Charity Estate and a large market garden called the Quail Field. Beyond that could be seen the Chelsea Pavilion. In thirty years’ time, Harriette’s cottage would be razed to make way for the expansion of Chelsea; the barley fields, hawthorne hedges, shrubs and clover would be paved over by Lennox Square, and Princes’s Street would become Rawlings Street. By the end of the decade, the young Queen Victoria would be installed less than a mile away in Buckingham Palace. By the end of the century the Metropolitan and District underground line would run beneath the site where Harriette’s cottage had been.

Many years before, Harriette had fantasized about her old age. She relished the idea of settling into her eccentricities and describes herself in a letter to Byron as a benign witch, toothless and unrecognizable, full of nostalgia and without regret. ‘I … hope that we shall one day (some twenty years hence) take a pinch of snuff together before we die; and as you watch me, in my little pointed cap, spectacles, bony ankles and thread stockings, stirring up and tasting my pot au feu, you’ll imagine Ponsonby’s Worcester’s and Argyle’s Angelick Harriette.’15 According to the one account there is of Harriette Wilson during her years in Chelsea, her vision was not far from the truth. She and Byron were never to share their pinch of snuff, but her famous features had taken on the almost preternatural gleam of the sorceress. George Sala, son of the once famous operatic singer, Madame Sala, remembered Harriette in her fifties as ‘a wonderful old hag, who lived on lucifer matches and gin in a little hovel at Chelsea, but with a bright eye and a skin as white as milk’.16

Berkeley Craven shot himself in 1836 after losing at the races, and the Duke of Argyll died in 1839. Amy’s husband, Bochsa, created another scandal that year when he eloped with the soprano Anna Bishop. It is not known if he was still married to Amy at the time; nor do we know how long Amy lived or what became of either her or her children. In 1841, Frederic Lamb at last married, taking as his bride Alexandrina, Countess von Mahltzahn, the daughter of the Prussian Envoy to the Court of Vienna. She was thirty-six years his junior and their relationship had caused quite a stir. For many people, Harriette was still a heroine; she had proved what they suspected to be true about the moribund morality of the landed aristocracy. In 1838, an anonymous novel appeared called Eliza Grimwood, A Domestic Legend of Waterloo Road, which fictionalized the much discussed case of the murder of a prostitute at Wellington Terrace, Lambeth. Popular rumour had it that she was killed by one of her aristocratic clients – supposed by the majority to be the Duke of Cumberland – who feared that Eliza might ‘do’ a Harriette Wilson and expose him. In the novel, Eliza falls into prostitution when a libertine lord plots to deprive her of her fortune. It is in her new life that she first reads The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson:

The great Brummell died in a madhouse in Caen in 1840, aged sixty-one. He had lost first his style and then his mind; elegance and reason had always been inseparable in his philosophy. ‘Like the orator, the great actor, the conversationalist,’ wrote Barbey d’Aurevilly, ‘Brummell left nothing but a name mysteriously sparkling in all the Memoirs of his time.’

Mrs Wyatt’s poverty made it necessary that she and Rochfort live abroad and, in January 1841, Rochfort wrote to Brougham from Ostende. Four years earlier, Mrs Wyatt’s husband had brought an action against Rochfort and was awarded damages of £230, following which Wyatt began proceedings against his wife and a divorce was pronounced on 27 June 1839. The divorce case was to be brought before the House of Lords and Rochfort was anxious that his mistress would see nothing of her husband’s income, the details of which he painstakingly documented to Brougham. Rochfort’s letter reads more like an order than a request for help; he lists the points to which Brougham is to pay particular attention, he covers every possible angle of the case. So desperate was Rochfort for Brougham to ‘stand forward in the House as defender of the lady’s interests’ and to use his influence to ‘obtain for her the best provision from her husband’, that he uncharacteristically – Rochfort saw himself as a gentleman – reminded the lawyer of how, ‘upon your slightest bidding in former days I was always attentive to and mindful of your every request and wish, as long as ever any power existed with me to influence or control the actions of another person who shall now be nameless …’18

A few minutes away from Harriette’s home, on Cadogan Street, was the Chelsea Catholic Chapel (now St Mary’s), founded in 1811 by Abbé Voyaux de Franous for the use of soldiers and veterans from the Chelsea Hospital. It had always been thought of as principally a French chapel and here, at around 1840, Harriette was received into the Catholic Church, confirmed with the name of Mary Magdalen. The doggerel published ten years before by Bell’s Life in London was correct in all but the finer details.

It seems you’re grown moral at last,

Though still you wear patches and paint;

And you’ll die, like the rest of your cast,

A mortified Methodist Saint.

Renouncing her ways, Harriette did the one conventional – or rather clichéd – action of her life. But in becoming a Catholic she was neither acting out of character nor trying to step back over from the far side of the sword. She was getting older and wanted to ensure eternity in the next life, but she was also bent on amusing herself for her remaining years in this one. Catholicism was Harriette’s final project. She had always thrown herself into whatever she happened to be pursuing, and the study required for her conversion satisfied her enquiring mind and love of learning. The Catholic Church was her new world; she liked cultures that were strange to her – she had, after all, mixed for years in male aristocratic society – and she liked the challenge of studying new codes and customs. And she enjoyed love affairs; Harriette’s engagement with her new religion took the place of the passionate relationships to which she had otherwise been addicted. It enabled her to return to what she was made for. ‘I can do nothing and love nothing coldly,’ she explained. ‘I was created for love, and now […] all the love which my heart is capable of has turned towards God.’19

In the last of her surviving letters, which is undated, Harriette told Edward Bulwer Lytton about her conversion. She had not been in touch with the writer for years but continued to hope they might one day meet, although her commitment to God meant that she was not available for ‘love’ should he think this her intention. She was clearly happier than she had been for a long time; she still had the dash and go that had defined her in her youth and she employed the same good-humoured, impetuous and impudent voice she reserved for those to whom she was still hoping to be introduced. Catholicism entertained her and she enjoyed her present role of reformed sinner, which she adopted without in any way repenting of her youth. Harriette’s life seems back on track again; her flirtations with the priests recall her behaviour as a wayward child in the French convent, and her account of studying the various Church denominations recalls her sojourn at Salt Hill over thirty years before, where she spent ten days wading through the speeches of the Whigs and Tories, wondering where her own sympathies lay. It is easy to see Harriette enjoying her Catholic companions; she always loved being with people she regarded as ‘good’, those like Fanny, Ponsonby and her mother, and presenting herself as bad by comparison. She had always enjoyed being shocking, and now she had a new audience to regale with stories of her wicked past. Her reform would be a continual topic for discussion in the Church and make her the focus of admiration and attention. Catholicism gave her a stage that allowed her to be her best self once more. ‘When I was a sinner, and a good looking one’, she wrote to Bulwer,

I thought you were right to refuse me the honour of your acquaintance; but I have been ‘born again’, as the Methodists say, and am now a Saint!!! What’s more, I am very sick, very old and shall soon die. I was duly received into the Catholic Church by baptism, confessions with confirmation, etc, nearly a year ago, after six months’ hard study. I did not think I could have read so hard or so many books of controversy, Protestant or Catholic. So intense was my curiosity that I neither slept nor dined for many months without a pile of Catholic books on one side of me and one of Protestant, larger still, on my left. Once or twice a week a most amiable Catholic Priest and preacher came to hear and answer all my objections by the hour together with the patience of a true Saint. Our interviews lasted three or four hours. To conclude, I am now a strict Catholic on conviction …

I think you are too clever to be a genuine Protestant, but if you are I should like to know why. Will you let me have the honour of a little chat with you with your lady’s consent? You will find me intelligent and lively, though quite old and sick. I would run no risk of sin, but I was always firm and I know that there is no risk of my ever being unchaste again even by the encouragement of thoughts. This you will say is being too bold, but when was I unfaithful to my love? and I never loved any of you as I love God. I will not believe that any can wilfully offend what they perfectly love …

But you’ll say you’ve no time; well, it is very shabby of you, for you may appoint any hour on any day after twelve, and I will wait your leisure. I have no object but the gratification I know I should feel in talking to a person who could understand me, and as to regard, if we are both honest and single-hearted we must command the goodwill and respect of each other; but as to love!! if I felt a spark stealing over me for any man alive I would avoid him from that hour. Nothing shall induce me to go into temptation again …20

And ever the imperious queen of the demi-monde, Harriette added that she never saw ‘anyone without an appointment’.

Her final address was 3 Draycott Place, on the other side of the Chelsea Catholic Chapel. Draycott Place is now one of London’s bijou enclaves, home to an exclusive row of red-bricked Victorian mansion blocks, but as Harriette lay there dying it was the back of beyond, a far cry from the Mayfair of her childhood, where Mr Blore rubbed shoulders with Beau Brummell, and stockings and squabbles filled the house in Queen Street; where her father stormed over his sums and the straw was laid out each year for the birth of another sibling; where her sisters sat at the window making eyes at Berkeley Craven and Tom Sheridan, and from where, at the dawn of the century, Harriette had stolen away with Berkeley’s elder brother.

On 10 March 1845, two weeks after her fifty-ninth birthday, the spangled curtain came down on the life of Harriette Wilson, the last of the great English courtesans. It had snowed all week and on her final day the sky was hidden behind a thick blanket of cloud. She was consistent to the end; she asked the Duke of Leinster and Frederic Lamb to pay her medical expenses and she left behind a note for Brougham, requesting that he, Leinster, and Worcester, now Duke of Beaufort, pay for her burial. She had added up the cost of a plain and straightforward funeral.

On 8 April, from his desk at the House of Lords, Brougham wrote a few lines to Beaufort.

Four days later Brougham wrote to Beaufort again, saying that in addition to the burial there were ‘some pounds due for care and medicine’, so Harriette’s death would cost her former acquaintance more than they had expected. ‘What I have done’, he explained, ‘is to give £3 and £5 – and if you will send me either £5 or £7 – as you please – it will be quite enough and very handsome and I will mention to Mr D[ubouchet], the brother, who is a respectable man in poor circumstances – a tuner of pianofortes …’22 Brougham appears moved by Harriette’s death, and alone of her lovers may have mourned her. In his evident respect for the Dubouchet family and concern to have Harriette’s final wishes realized it is possible to see his still lingering affection for the smart saucy girl who, thirty years before, burst into his life all guns blazing and kept him on his toes ever since.

Harriette’s funeral was almost certainly held at the Chelsea Catholic Chapel with, we can imagine, the remaining members of her family in attendance. Lady Berwick, now a charitable Victorian widow, journeys down from her Shropshire estate, preparing to forgive her repentant sister her infamous ways. The respectable spinsters, Jane and Charlotte, walk to the Chapel from their modest home in Church Street, Paddington. Mary and her husband, Mr Boroughs, appear with a bevy of their grandchildren, along with Rose Dubouchet and the brother who tuned pianofortes. And if Amy is still alive, she may emerge from the shadows to kiss those once fine eyes goodnight.

The chapel was too small for a cemetery. It is not known where Harriotte Du Bochet, as she is called on her death certificate, a ‘woman of independent means’, lies buried, but no doubt the earth above her has been troubled and stirred during London’s never-ending metamorphosis. She has vanished into the bowels of her restless city leaving behind a book and a bundle of letters, without which it might almost be thought that Harriette Wilson was no more than a figment of the Regency imagination.

Notes

1 Brougham: 21,513.

2 Ponsonby: GRE/E/673/3.

3 Bulwer Lytton: D/EK C1/21.

4 Ponsonby: GRE/E/673/3.

5 Brougham: 14,537.

6 Bulwer Lytton: D/EK C1/21.

7 Ibid.

8 Kenneth Bourne, The Blackmailing of the Chancellor: Some intimate and hitherto unpublished letters from Harriette Wilson to her friend, Henry Brougham, London: Lemon Tree Press, 1975, p. 82.

9 The dispute was given full coverage in Galignani’s Messenger at the end of December 1834, and summarized in The Times on 5 January 1835.

10 Brougham: 21,513.

11 Ibid.

12 Brougham: 21,800.

13 Ponsonby: GRE/E/673/6.

14 Ibid.

15 ‘To Lord Byron’, p. 154.

16 Letter from G. A. Sala to Percy Fitzgerald, Memoirs of an Author, London: 1894, vol. 1, p. 109.

17 Anon., Eliza Grimwood: A Domestic Legend of Waterloo Road, London: B. D. Cousins, c.1845, p. 246.

18 Brougham: 21,513.

19 Bulwer Lytton: D/EK C1/19.

20 Ibid. Only the marriage and baptism records of the Chelsea Catholic Chapel now exist, making it impossible to ascertain the date of Harriette’s confirmation.

21 Badminton: 3/3/23.

22 Ibid.