1. “masquerade”: Terry Castle provides a description of the typical masquerade and a survey of contemporary attitudes toward them in Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), chap. 1. Johann Jakob Heidegger (1666–1749), an opera impresario, is frequently credited with promoting the lavish entertainments, which featured music, dancing, food and drink, and “absolute Freedom of Speech, without the least Offence given thereby” (Weekly Journal, 15 February 1718, qtd. in Castle, 25). The last known advertisement for a Heidegger-promoted masquerade was February 1743 (ODNB; see chap. 88, n. 228).
2. “reckoned without his host”: This idiom is defined as “to come to conclusions without taking into consideration some important circumstance of the case,” and the first instance in print is listed as c. 1489 (OED).
3. “partie”: See chap. 70, n. 22.
4. “billet”: “A short informal letter, a ‘note’” (OED).
5. “Hay-market”: See chap. 81, n. 1.
6. “Pantaloon . . . Columbine”: Stock, well-known, and usually masked characters, originally from Italian commedia, adapted for the English harlequinade. Pantaloon, the father or guardian of Columbine, seeks to keep her from marrying Harlequin. Pantaloon is frequently portrayed as old and foolish, wearing spectacles, pantaloons, and slippers. Columbine, a servant girl in the Italian commedia, is a young and pretty girl in the English harlequinade.
7. “œconomy of the place”: See chap. 41, n. 4.
8. “country-dances”: See chap. 27, n. 1.
9. “pullet”: A young hen (OED).
10. “streets near Temple-bar . . . cut-throats”: For Temple Bar, see chap. 77, n. 9. The Gentleman’s Magazine takes note of danger of robbery in its issue for November 1749: “Robberies in and about this metropolis were about this time so frequent, that several parishes made voluntary subscriptions for maintaining extraordinary guards for the roads, and publish’d rewards for taking robbers and housebreakers” (19 [1749]: 522). J. M. Beattie notes that London saw a crime wave in 1751. Criminal gangs operated “north of the river in several heavily populated districts” (255). For a full account of how these gangs operated, see Beattie’s Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 252–63. Henry Fielding’s pamphlet An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers, a contemporary response to this crime wave, appeared some four weeks before Peregrine Pickle.
11. “hackney-chair”: A sedan chair for hire. See chap. 48, n. 18.
12. “Bedlamite”: See chap. 35, n. 4.
13. “bagnio”: Literally, bathhouse, it came to signify a brothel or other such house of ill repute (OED).
1. “ticket-porter”: “A member of a body of porters in the City of London who were licensed by the Corporation” (OED). The “ticket” referred to the badge that identified the porter as a member of the corporation. See also Ferdinand Count Fathom, 180.
2. “conned . . . harangue”: Memorized a speech.
3. “postern”: See chap. 19, n. 4.
4. “Temple-bar”: See chap. 77, n. 9. Peregrine insults the members of the mercantile class who lived and worked within Temple Bar for their lack of manners and good breeding.
5. “complaisantly”: “Civilly; with a desire to please; ceremoniously” (Johnson).
1. “Amanda”: See chap. 57, n. 7.
2. “woundy”: “Excessive. A low bad word” (Johnson). See chap. 2, n. 3.
3. “oddsheartikins”: “A minced oath (= God’s heart).” The OED cites this passage as an example of its usage.
4. “thof”: See chap. 2, n. 20.
5. “rush-candle”: “A small blinking taper, made by stripping a rush, except one small stripe of the bark, which holds the pith together, and dipping it in tallow” (Johnson).
6. “blunderbuss”: “A gun that is charged with many bullets, so that, without any exact aim, there is a chance of hitting the mark” (Johnson).
7. “Gorgon’s head”: See chap. 51, n. 10.
1. “bridegroom”: Hatchway, as “a new married man” (Johnson).
2. “broach’d to”: Veered suddenly so as to turn the ship broadside to the sea and wind, causing it to founder (OED).
3. “weight of metal”: The OED cites this example as the first instance of the usage meaning “the guns or firepower of a warship.”
4. “Strike in his turn”: See chap. 33, n. 6.
1. “Diabetes”: “The name of a distemper, in which any liquor, soon after it is drank, is immoderately evacuated by urine, without undergoing almost any change, and under the appearance of water” (John Barrow, Dictionarium Medicum Universale: or, A New Medicinal Dictionary [London, 1749], s.v. “diabetes”).
2. “Odds plague!”: An oath. See chap. 84, n. 3.
3. “E. O.”: “A game of chance, in which the appropriation of the stakes is determined by the falling of a ball into one of several niches marked E or O respectively” (OED). Also called Even-Odd, it was played upon a circular gaming table, generally about four feet in diameter, with an outer ring for the placing of bets and a revolving inner ring that contained the niches and ball. See Henry G. Bohn, ed., The Hand-Book of Games (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850), 351.
4. “I would a durst”: “I wish that he had dared.”
5. “good action”: Good grounds for bringing a private suit at law.
6. “bunting-songs”: Perhaps lullabies and ballads; compare “bunting-time,” “when the Grass is high enough to hide the young Men and Maids” (Partridge).
7. “at sixes and sevens”: “Originally denoting the hazard of one’s whole fortune, or carelessness as to the consequences of one’s actions” (OED). The first usage noted is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troylus. The OED also quotes Grose: “In confusion, commonly said . . . of a business left unsettled.”
8. “book-debt”: Debt owed a tradesman and recorded in his ledger (OED).
9. “fate of Orpheus”: Killed and dismembered by the maenads, the frenzied female followers of Bacchus. See Ovid Metamorphoses 11.1–60.
1. “hermaphroditical animals”: In this instance, meaning neither man nor woman and thus calling into question the figure’s virility, especially in light of what follows. Alexander Pope drew on the revulsion generated by such figures in his venomous portrait of Lord Hervey, satirized as Sporus in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735): “Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss” (line 324), an “Amphibious Thing! . . . Fop at the Toilet, Flatt’rer at the Board,/Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord” (lines 326–29). Chambers reports that hermaphrodites were regarded as monsters in Athens and Rome.
2. “squeeze out the worms”: In Jonathan Swift’s poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), Strephon finds in Celia’s room a magnifying glass that
can to sight disclose
The smallest worm in Celia’s nose,
And faithfully direct her nail
To squeeze it out from head to tail. (lines 63–66)
3. “Mrs. Betty”: Conventional name of a lady’s maid.
4. “freedom of the corporation”: “The right of participating in the privileges attached to citizenship of a town or city (in later use chiefly as an honour conferred upon an eminent or distinguished person)” (OED).
5. “virtuoso”: A connoisseur, or one with an interest in the fine arts, antiquities, or the sciences; often used pejoratively, especially by the Augustan satirists, to denote a dilettante.
6. “infirmary . . . subscriber”: By 1750 there were six major hospitals in London: St. Bartholomew’s, just outside the City; St. Thomas’s, in Southwark; Westminster, in Chapel Street; Guy’s Hospital, also in Southwark; St. George’s, near Hyde Park; and London, originally in Goodman Fields. The Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1748 lists two smaller ones, “Bethlem” and Bridewel. That same article reports that 32,552 patients had been treated at these eight London hospitals in the previous year (198). The hospitals were built and run with support from charitable subscribers, and all patients were charity cases. George Rudé notes that in addition to caring for the bodies of their patients, the hospitals sought to reform their morals and reminded them of their indebtedness to their benefactors (Hanoverian London, 84–86).
7. “Foundling-hospital”: A “hospital for exposed and deserted children,” chartered in 1739 by the king under the leadership of Capt. Thomas Coram (1668–1751), shipbuilder, merchant, colonial entrepreneur, and philanthropist. The hospital opened its doors on 25 March 1741 in temporary quarters in Hatton Garden. Permanent buildings in Guildford Street were opened on 1 October 1745. The Foundling Hospital had many eminent governors and benefactors, including Handel and Hogarth (Wheatley, 2:72–73). Coram died on 29 March 1751, shortly after the publication of Peregrine Pickle (ODNB).
8. “from St. James’s to Drury-lane”: The area extending from St. James’s Palace and the adjoining St. James’s Park, home to the court and resort of the elite and fashionable, to Drury Lane, an area known for prostitution. The point of the passage, then, is that the widow might begin her search for a new husband in the area around St. James’s Palace, but that search would be merely the starting point of a “progress” that would lead inevitably to the hundreds of Drury, where she would at last become a common prostitute. See Hugh Phillips, Mid-Georgian London (London: Collins, 1963), 65–69.
9. “crown”: Worth five shillings.
10. “though humorous . . . charity”: From 2 Henry IV, spoken of Prince Hal by his father, King Henry IV:
For he is gracious if he be observ’d,
He hath a tear for pity, and a hand
Open as day for [meting] charity;
Yet notwithstanding, being incens’d, he is flint,
As humourous as winter, and as sudden
As flaws congealed in the spring of day. (4.4.31–35)
The word in brackets has been supplied by the editors of the Riverside Shakespeare. Melting is the reading in the First Folio.
11. “truckle-bed”: See chap. 50, n. 5.
12. “the celebrated lady ——”: Frances, Lady Vane (c. 1715–88), daughter of Francis Hawes (d. 1764) and his wife, Susanna. An account of her early life, two marriages, and many gallantries is the subject of the following chapter. See chap. 88, n. 1.
1. “lady of quality”: Frances, Lady Vane (c. 1715–88). For a discussion of the problem of attribution of this scandalous memoir, see O M Brack, Jr., “Smollett and the Authorship of ‘The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,’” in Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s First Novelist: New Essays in Memory of Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 35–73.
2. “because I loved, and was a woman”: A line from Nicholas Rowe’s (1674–1718) popular domestic tragedy, The Fair Penitent (1703), uttered by the heroine Calista in act 5. Having been seduced by Lothario and then forced by her father to marry Altamont, Calista explains her frailty to her father before the body of Lothario, whom her husband has killed. Just as Lothario was to become the type of the rake (upon whom Samuel Richardson modeled Lovelace), for the eighteenth century Calista became the model of the passionate woman who is undone by a faithless man. Samuel Johnson called Rowe’s play “one of the most pleasing tragedies on the stage, where it still keeps its turns of appearing, and probably will long keep them, for there is scarcely any work of any poet at once so interesting by the fable, and so delightful by the language” (“Nicholas Rowe,” in Lives of the Poets, 4 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006], 2:200).
3. “man of good fortune”: Francis Hawes (d. 1764), father of Frances, Lady Vane, appointed a director of the South Sea Company in 1715. Previous to this appointment, he had served as a clerk to the treasurer of the navy and a stockbroker. His fortune enabled him to purchase an estate at Purley Hall near Reading and a town house on Winchester Street in London, where his daughter Frances was born and where he also amassed a considerable collection of art. In 1721 his assets amounted to £165,587. After the collapse of the bubble and the subsequent parliamentary investigations, his fortune was confiscated. Thereafter he and his family suffered from financial difficulties (ODNB, s.v. “Vane, Frances Anne”; John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1960], 279).
4. “disinterested”: “Superior to regard of private advantage; not influenced by private profit” (Johnson).
5. “Henry the fifth, as described by Shakespear”: Picking up on the word liberal, Clifford directs the reader to Henry V, act 4, the Chorus, where the following description of the king appears: “A largess universal, like the sun,/His liberal eye doth give to every one” (43–44). Lady Vane’s self-conception is more fully captured by the passage from 2 Henry IV, describing the future Henry V, used in the preceding chapter to characterize Peregrine. See chap. 87, n. 10.
6. “Bath”: See chap. 73, n. 1.
7. “two . . . of my favour”: Although no reliable identification of these two men has been made, there is mention of the young Lady Vane’s admirers in two pamphlets that appeared around the time of the publication of Peregrine Pickle. The first, John Hill’s The History of a Woman of Quality: or, the Adventures of Lady Frail (London, 1751), published a few weeks before Peregrine Pickle, is a thinly fictionalized and highly sensationalized account of Lady Vane’s life. Part 1 of the narrative finds Lady Frail in Bath, where she has been brought willingly by her father in order to land a husband. She becomes acquainted with a Captain O ***, an older man for whom she has no real feelings. Captain O *** becomes infatuated with her, but Lady Frail’s attention is soon drawn away from the captain by Mr. Loveill, who in one night meets her, pays her gaming debts, and seduces her. The captain discovers his intended’s infidelity and wounds Mr. Loveill in a duel. Although the besotted captain still wishes to marry Lady Frail despite her clear preference for his rival, she repulses him as the marriage ceremony is about to begin, and her father takes her to London, closing the Bath episode (2–24). The author of An Apology for the Conduct of a Lady of Quality, Lately Traduc’d under the Name of Lady Frail (London, 1751), which was published in July 1751, defends the young Lady Vane’s conduct in Bath and denies that anyone “triumphed over her Virginity” before she was married. The same author admits, however, that she had two admirers during her first season at Bath, though the names are slightly altered from those in Lady Frail: “It is certain, that on this Lady’s first Appearance at Bath, she had a Multitude of Admirers, who paid their Addresses to her; and among the rest were this Mr. Loveit, and Col. O——: The latter of which her Father would fain have persuaded her to have married, but his Person was not sufficiently agreeable to her Taste” (16). For a discussion of the authorship of the Apology and the relation of both texts to “The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” see G. S. Rousseau, “Controversy or Collusion? The ‘Lady Vane’ Tracts,” Notes & Queries, n.s., 19 (1972): 375–78.
8. “princess Amelia”: Amelia Sophia Eleonora (1711–86), second daughter of George II (1683–1760) and Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1683–1737).
9. “red ribbon”: Insignia for the Order of the Bath. See chap. 105, n. 26.
10. “sponsors”: Godparents; those who answer for an infant at baptism (OED).
11. “the queen’s birth-day”: Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1683–1737), queen of Great Britain and Ireland, was born on 1 March 1683 in Ansbach. In September 1705 she married George Augustus, electoral prince of Hanover, grandson to the Electress Sophia, heir to the British throne. Shortly after the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Caroline followed her husband to England, where she became queen consort at the accession of her husband, George II, in 1727. She was considered a powerful political figure in her time.
12. “second son of duke ——”: Lord William Hamilton (c. 1707–34), second son of James, 4th Duke of Hamilton and 1st Duke of Brandon (1658–1712). On 9 January 1733 Lady Irwin wrote to Lord Carlisle that Lord William was in London “in pursuit of a great fortune, a lady of his own name; she’s very plain, and at her own disposal; he very assiduous, and handsome; [so] that ’tis very likely the conclusion of the affair will be matrimony, and the end of it misery.” Lady Irwin’s surmise proved wrong, for in four months Lord William had eloped with Frances Hawes (Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of the Earl of Carlisle Preserved at Castle Howard [London, 1897], 95). In 1734 Lord William became member of Parliament for Lanark. Little else is known of his life besides what Lady Vane reports in her memoir.
13. “princess royal”: Anne (1709–59), second child of George II and Caroline. An important figure at court, she married William IV, prince of Orange-Nassau (1711–51), on 14 March 1734. See chap. 69, n. 22.
14. “idea”: “The mental image or picture of something previously seen or known and recalled by the memory” (OED).
15. “lord P——”: Identified by Herbert as Charles Colyear, 2nd Earl of Portmore (1700–1785), in his youth called “Beau Colyear.” He was known for his equipages and dress, and he was a patron of horse racing (ODNB). In 1732 he married Juliana, widow of Peregrine Osborne, 3rd Duke of Leeds and close friend of Lady Vane. See n. 36, below.
16. “night-cloaths”: “Négligée or informal dress worn in the evening.” The passage is cited in the OED as an illustration of this usage.
17. “Ridotto”: “An entertainment, or social assembly, consisting of music and dancing. Introduced into England in the year 1722 at the Opera House in the Haymarket, and a marked feature of London social life during the eighteenth century” (OED). By 1732 a ridotto al fresco was held at Vauxhall. See William B. Boulton, The Amusements of Old London, 2 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1901), 2:15–16.
18. “lord S——k”: Charles Hamilton (later Douglas; 1663–1739), Earl of Selkirk. He was Lord William’s uncle, brother to his father, James, the 4th Duke of Hamilton. A supporter of the Revolution and William III, he was lord of the bedchamber to George I and II from 1714 until his death. He died unmarried (Complete Peerage, 9:616–17).
19. “Turnham green”: Located in the northern part of the parish of Chiswick, six miles west of Hyde Park, this green was the site of a decisive encounter between Charles I and parliamentary forces in 1642, though there was very little fighting. Charles I’s progress toward London was halted here, and he returned to Oxford. In the seventeenth century, it was known as a favorite haunt of highwaymen.
20. “Brentford”: Western suburb of London on the river Thames, about three miles from Turn-ham Green.
21. “my father’s country-house”: Purley Hall, near Reading, Berkshire, a seventeenth-century mansion described in Nicolas Pevsner’s Berkshire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 195; and (with an illustration) in The Victoria History of the County of Berkshire, ed. William Page and P. H. Ditchfield, 4 vols. (1923; repr., Folkestone: Dawsons, 1970), 3:417–21. The latter work states that the house was “bought by Charles Hall in 1722, but this appears to have been a creditor’s settlement, as the Hawes remained in possession till 1753, when the property was in Chancery. It was heavily mortgaged and was finally bought from the creditors of the Hawes family . . . in 1773” (3:421).
22. “lord H——B——, son to the duke of S. A——”: Henry Beauclerk (1701–61), fourth son of Charles, 1st Duke of St. Albans, and a grandson of Charles II. He distinguished himself at the siege of Gibraltar in 1727. On 25 June 1739 he married Martha, daughter of John, 4th Baron Lovelace. He later served as a Whig member of Parliament and colonel of the Thirty-First Regiment of Foot Guards. When Lord Henry quit his regiment, he lost the king’s favor, never to regain it. The first edition of 1751 has an erratum: “For Lord H. B. read Lord S. B.” The correction was omitted from later editions, all of which retain “lord H——B——.” H——B——is retained here, and the erratum is noted in the historical collation.
23. “lord H——”: Lord Henry Beauclerk. See n. 22, above.
24. “Abigail”: See chap. 80, n. 7.
25. “dimity”: “A stout cotton fabric, woven with raised stripes or fancy figures; usually employed undyed for beds and bedroom hangings, and sometimes for garments” (OED).
26. “stripped”: “To rob or gut a House, to unrig any Body; or to bite them of their Money” (A New Canting Dictionary [London, 1725]).
27. “we went to church and were married”: According to The Scots Peerage, the marriage took place on 30 April 1733 (9 vols. [Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1904–14], 4:384). It was reported in the Gentleman’s Magazine: “Ld William Hamilton, married to Miss Haws, Daughter of Francis Haws, Esq; a South Sea Director in 1720. [sic] able to give her 40,000l” (3 [1733]: 268). The report of the size of the dowry is at odds with other information about the couple’s financial situation. Queen Caroline called the couple “her pretty beggars” (p. 379); Col. Charles Howard (d. 1765) remarks on their poverty in his report of Hamilton’s elopement in a letter to his father, Lord Carlisle, on 3 May 1733: “I forgot to tell my sister Mary, last post, Lord William Hamilton had run away with Miss Hawes; they were married without their relations knowing anything of it. She is a pretty woman, but without a shilling; and what’s worse, her father has not much in his power to give her, if he is reconciled” (Manuscripts of the Earl of Carlisle, 114).
28. “Blackheath”: Six miles southeast from London in the county of Kent and the parishes of Greenwich and Lewisham. At various times, the rebels Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, and the Cornish rebels who opposed Henry VII gathered here. Crossed by Watling Street, which continued on to Dover and Canterbury, it was also a resort for highwaymen.
29. “lord W——m’s youngest sister”: Lady Susan Hamilton (1706–55), appointed a lady of the bedchamber to Princess Caroline in 1731 (Gentleman’s Magazine 1 [1731]: 267). She married Anthony Tracy Keck on 3 August 1736 and took an active role in politics in 1750.
30. “my lord’s younger brother”: Lord Anne Hamilton (1709–48), third son of James Hamilton, named after his godmother, Queen Anne. He was painted with his reputed wife, Mary Edwards, by Hogarth in 1733. They quarreled and separated sometime in 1734. Lord Anne later married Anna Charlotta Maria Powell, at Bath, in October 1742.
31. “rich heiress of masculine memory”: Mary Edwards (1705?–43), only child of Francis Edwards and Anna Margaretta Vernatti of Welham Grove, Leicester, and called “of masculine memory” because she died in 1743 at age thirty-eight without having attempted to remarry and gave her immense fortune to her son by Lord Anne, Gerard Anne Edwards (ODNB). She and Lord Anne were apparently married in 1731 (see Gentleman’s Magazine 1 [1731]: 311, 501), but she declared herself to be a single woman in 1734. See Horace Walpole to Mann, 26 May 1742 OS (Walpole, 17:439).
32. “his mother the duchess of H——”: Elizabeth Gerard, Duchess of Hamilton (c. 1682–1744), the only child of Digby, 5th Baron Gerard, married James, 4th Duke of Hamilton, and became his second wife on 17 July 1698.
33. “woman . . . infirmity”: Jonathan Swift reported to Stella (Esther Johnson) that Lady Hamilton “talks too much, is a plaguy detractor” (26 January 1711–12). Later that same year, in the immediate aftermath of the death of her husband, killed in a duel with Lord Mohun (see n. 35, below), Swift writes of her somewhat less critically, again to Stella: “She has abundance of witt and Spirit; about 33 year old, handsom, and airy, and seldom spared any body that gave her the least Provocation; by which she had many Envyers and few Friends” (15 November 1712). See Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 2:474, 573–74.
34. “an uncle”: Possibly Thomas Hawes, brother of Lady Vane’s father, mentioned by Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, 258.
35. “the duke of H——”: James, 5th Duke of Hamilton (1702/3–43), succeeded his father, James, the 4th Duke, who was killed in a sensational duel with Charles Mohun (1675?–1712), 4th Baron Mohun of Okehampton, Devon, on 15 November 1712. Mohun also died of his wounds from the duel. For Swift’s account of the duel, see his letter to Stella, 15 November 1712, in Journal to Stella, 2:571–73. Hamilton Palace, the family estate, was in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, not far from Glasgow.
36. “The duchess of ——”: Juliana (d. 1794), dowager Duchess of Leeds, third wife and widow of Peregrine Hyde (Osborne), 3rd Duke of Leeds (1691–1731). She had married Charles, 2nd Earl of Portmore, on 7 October 1732.
37. “mistress to the prime minister”: Maria Skerrett (1702–38), who may have been introduced to Sir Robert Walpole by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the summer of 1724 while Skerrett was staying with Lady Mary at Twickenham and Walpole was often nearby at Hampton Court. See J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 2:113. Walpole married her privately in March 1738. She died after a miscarriage on 4 June 1738 (Gentleman’s Magazine 8 [1738]: 324).
38. “Vauxhall”: Public gardens in Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames and a favorite resort of the fashionable London world. Taking their name from a manor (Falkes Hall) built by Falkes de Bréauté (d. 1226), the gardens were laid out around 1661 and were at first called the New Spring Gardens. (The Old Spring Gardens were found at Charing Cross.) In 1732 their grand reopening was attended by Frederick, Prince of Wales. In 1749 twelve thousand people attended a rehearsal of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, written to celebrate the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and the end of the War of the Austrian Succession (Wheatley, 3:426–28). One guide gives the following description of the gardens in the year of Peregrine Pickle’s publication: “They are frequented, in the 3 summer months, by most of the nobility and gentry, then in and near London; and are often honoured with some of the royal family, who are here entertained with the sweet song of numbers of nightingales, in concert with the best band of musick in England. Here are fine pavilions, shady groves, and most delightful walks, illuminated by above 1000 lamps, so disposed, that they all take fire together, almost as quick as lightning, and dart such a sudden blaze, as is perfectly surprizing” (England’s Gazetteer, 3 vols. [London, 1751], vol. 1, s.v. “Foxhall”).
39. “Marblehall”: Located on the Thames, where the southern abutment of Vauxhall Bridge now stands. A “long room” for dancing in spring and summer was improved and opened in 1740. See Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (1896; repr., Hamden: Archon, 1979), 281.
40. “Sir W——Y——”: Sir William Yonge (c. 1693–1755), 4th Baronet of Colyton, Whig politician, first elected to Parliament in 1715. He served in several ministerial capacities under Sir Robert Walpole, including secretary of war from 1735 to 1746. Yonge had an unsavory reputation. Lord Hervey reported that George II referred to him as “Stinking Yonge”; and, though doubtful that he deserved his reputation, Hervey wrote that “his name was proverbially used to express everything pitiful, corrupt, and contemptible” (Some Materials Towards Memoirs, 1:36). Horace Walpole thought him a “very fine speaker, but otherwise a man of very trifling character” (Walpole, 17:233 n. 22). Chesterfield wrote the following assessment to his son in a letter dated 15 February 1754: “Sir William Yonge, with not a quarter of your parts, and not a thousandth part of your knowledge, has, by a glibness of tongue singly, raised himself successively to the best employments of the kingdom . . . and all this, with a most sullied, not to say blasted character” (Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 5:2084).
41. “H——n . . . splendor”: Hamilton Palace, on the border of the town of Hamilton, about a half-mile to the west of the confluence of the rivers Avon and Clyde. John Macky describes it as “built of the whitest Free-Stone that I ever saw; it looks like Marble. The Royal Apartments in this Palace, consisting of a Dining-Room, Drawing-Room, Bedchamber, Dressing-Room, and Closet, are extreamly well finished, with Marble Chimney-Pieces, and Carv’d-work.” When he visited in 1723, it was still under construction (A Journey Through Scotland [London, 1723], 283–84).
42. “eldest sister”: Charlotte Hamilton (1704–77), third but oldest surviving daughter of James, 4th Duke of Hamilton.
43. “humourist”: A capricious individual given to indulging whims and being governed by fanciful inclinations (OED).
44. “interesting situation”: Pregnant. Smollett had used the same phrase to describe Narcissa’s pregnancy at the conclusion to Roderick Random (368). The OED cites that occurrence as the first example of this usage.
45. “my father’s house”: Purley Hall (see n. 21, above).
46. “lying-in”: “The confinement of a woman to bed for the birth of a child” (OED, s.v. “accouchement”); “to be in childbed” (Johnson).
47. “My month was hardly up”: The usual period between childbirth and a woman’s reappearance in society, sometimes signaled by the practice of “churching,” or “The Thanksgiving of Women after Child-Birth,” found in the Book of Common Prayer. In “Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England,” David Cressy calls this period “the privileged month that women normally enjoyed after childbirth” (Past and Present 141 [1993]: 110).
48. “flambeaus”: Torches.
49. “that fatal morning”: 11 July 1734.
50. “duchess of L——”: Leeds. See n. 36, above.
51. “my sister-in-law”: Lady Susan Hamilton. See n. 29, above.
52. “weeds”: Mourning dress. Years later, Horace Walpole regaled Mann with the following account of Lady Vane’s behavior after her husband’s death: “Lady Townshend told me that when her first husband Lord William Hamilton died, she said that she had no comfort but in the Blessed Sacrament—though at the same time she lay with an hundred other men. I said, that was not extraordinary, it was what she meant by the Sacrament, the receiving the body and blood” (Horace Walpole to Mann, 23 November 1741 OS, in Walpole, 17:209–10).
53. “a certain young nobleman”: William Holles Vane (1714–89), 2nd Viscount Vane, maternal grand-nephew of Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle (1693–1768). He was the third and youngest surviving son of William Vane (c. 1680–1734), who had been created Viscount Vane in September 1720. He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, on 12 October 1730 (Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886, 4 vols. [Oxford: Parker, 1891–92], 4:1463). William succeeded to the title when his father died suddenly on 20 May 1734. As Viscount Vane he owned an estate, inherited from his father, called Fairlawn, near Shipbourne (Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 2nd ed., 12 vols. [Canterbury, 1797–1801], 5:50–51). Upon the death of his mother, Lucy Jolliffe Vane, in March 1742, he inherited Caverswall Castle in Staffordshire, originally built in 1275 and described as “a large and uncommonly strong stone castle” (John A. Langford, Staffordshire and Warwickshire, Past and Present, 2 vols. [London: W. Mackenzie, n.d.], 1:285–86). This property was sold in 1759 to pay debts. He died without issue in London at his Downing Street residence on 5 April 1789, about a year following the death of his wife, Frances. Upon his death his title became extinct, and his property was inherited by David Papillon, a relation.
54. “frize”: Frieze, a “kind of coarse woolen cloth, with a nap, usually on one side only” (OED).
55. “shag”: “A cloth having a velvet nap on one side, usually of worsted, but sometimes of silk” (OED).
56. “solitaire”: See chap. 40, n. 10.
57. “bag”: See chap. 46, n. 6.
58. “jack-boots”: “A large strong boot the top of which came above the knee, serving as defensive armour for the leg, worn by cavalry soldiers in the 17th and 18th centuries” (OED).
59. “Ox——chapel … the bishop of W——”: According to the London Evening Post, the marriage took place around nine in the morning on 19 May 1735 at Oxford Chapel, Benjamin Hoadly (1676–1761), bishop of Winchester, presiding. After the wedding, the couple “set out with a very grand Retinue for her Father’s Seat at Perley-Hall in Berks” (London Evening Post, no. 1170 [17–20 May 1735]). Daniel Lysons notes that the marriage is recorded in the register of Oxford Chapel, a private chapel in Marylebone Parish (The Environs of London, 3 vols. [London, 1795], 3:255, 270). The General Evening Post reported that the wedding took place at Grosvenor Square Chapel, near Hyde Park (255 [17–20 May 1735]). The wedding was also announced in the Gentleman’s Magazine 5 [1735]: 275.
60. “his mother”: Lucy (c. 1676–1742), daughter of William Jolliffe and Mary Hastings of Staffordshire. She married William Vane, 1st Viscount Vane, on 15 November 1703 (Complete Peerage, 12.2:214).
61. “he was not wanting … liberality”: Lord Vane’s settlement provided £400 per annum as “pin-money” and £1,500 as jointure (Vane v. Vane, 27 Eng. Rep. 585 [1740]). See n. 74, below.
62. “earl C——”: Herbert speculates that this is George, 3rd Earl of Cholmondeley (1702/3–70), the eldest surviving son of George, 2nd Earl of Cholmondeley (350). On 14 September 1723 he married Mary Walpole, daughter of Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, by his first wife, Catherine. Mary died in late 1731, and Cholmondeley never remarried. Although he had held many lucrative public offices, he fell steadily into debt. By late 1746 Horace Walpole had reported to Mann that Cholmondeley was “totally undone and all he has seized for debt” (Walpole, 19:340).
63. “Mr. S——, brother to lord F——”: Honorable Sewallis Shirley (1709–65), son of Robert Shirley, 1st Earl Ferrers, and his second wife, Selina Finch. Much of what is known of Shirley is taken from Lady Vane’s memoir. Walpole reports to Mann that his sister-in-law, the Countess of Orford, “has picked up a Mr. Shirley, no great genius…. The Swain has so little pretensions to any kind of genius, that two years ago being to act in the Duke of Bedford’s company, he kept back the play three weeks, because he could not get his part by heart, though it consisted but of seventeen lines and a half” (15 September 1746 OS, in Walpole, 19:309). In a letter to Lady Bute dated 23 July 1751, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called Shirley “the most creditable of any [lover] that she [Countess of Orford] ever had. His Birth and sense will induce him to behave to her with Decency” (The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vols., ed. Robert Halsband [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–67], 2:487–88).
64. “He was … gallantry”: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had a different opinion of Sewallis Shirley’s “qualifications.” In a letter to her daughter, Lady Bute, Lady Mary made the following observations: “He appear’d to me gentile, well bred, well shap’d and sensible, but the charms of his Face and Eyes, which Lady V[ane] describes with so much warmth, were, I confess, allwaies invisible to me, and the artifical part of his character very glareing, which I think her story shows in a strong light” (16 February 1752, in Halsband, Complete Letters, 3:3–4). In his edition of Peregrine Pickle, Clifford noted Horace Walpole’s wry estimation of Shirley’s talents, given in a letter to Horace Mann, written after Shirley separated from his wife, Margaret Rolle, Lady Orford, whom he married in 1751: “The testimonials which Mr. Shirley had received in print from that living academy of love-lore, my Lady Vane, added to this excessive tenderness of one, little less a novice, convinced everybody that he was a perfect hero” (5 July 1754, in Walpole, 20:439). See Herbert, 351; and Clifford, 795.
65. “lord C——H——”: Herbert speculates that this is “probably” Lord Charles Hay of Lin-plum (831). Hay (c. 1700–1760) was the third son of Charles Hay, 3rd Marquess of Tweeddale, and his wife, Susan, daughter of William Douglas and Anne Hamilton, Duke and Duchess of Hamilton, and thus aunt to Lord William Hamilton, Lady Vane’s first husband. He began a career in the army in 1722 and was active in several Continental campaigns, including the battle of Fontenoy (11 May 1745), where he was wounded and afterward commended for valor. In 1746 Hay was confined because of insanity. He recovered, and by 1757 he was promoted to major general and was sent to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was arrested for criticizing a superior and imprisoned pending a court-martial, but he died before a verdict was reached. While in prison, Hay was introduced to Samuel Johnson (ODNB). Upon learning of Hay’s death, Johnson remarked: “He was a mighty pleasing man in conversation, and a reading man” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 vols., ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934], 3:9).
66. “this amour was interrupted … Ireland”: In November 1736 as colonel of a regiment of dragoons (Gentleman’s Magazine 6 [1736]: 685).
67. “This new favourite’s mother”: Selina Finch (1681–1762), daughter of a London merchant, George Finch. Selina gave birth to five sons and five daughters (Debrett’s Peerage of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland, 2 vols. [London, 1825], 1:164).
68. “all for love, or the world well lost”: The title of the play by John Dryden, All for Love, or the World Well Lost. A Tragedy (1678), which features a conflict between love and duty dramatized through the story of the lovers Antony and Cleopatra.
69. “my royal patroness”: Queen Caroline, who had promised Lady Vane, then Lady William Hamilton, that “she would provide for her pretty beggars.” See nn. 11 and 27, above.
70. “the p——of W——”: Frederick Lewis (1707–51), Prince of Wales (1727–51). He came to England in December 1728. His relations with his parents, the king and queen, quickly became strained. He married Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha on 27 April 1736. Soon thereafter, he was in open opposition to his parents and the Walpole ministry. On 12 September 1737, at the order of the king, he left St. James’s Palace, a fact that helps date this part of Lady Vane’s memoir. When Queen Caroline was on her deathbed a few months later, she refused to see her son (ODNB).
71. “the immensity … gratification”: Rumors of Lord Vane’s impotence apparently circulated widely. Clifford found a mention of it by Horace Walpole in an unpublished manuscript in the form of annotations to “Sunday or the Presence Chamber. A Town Eclogue” (Clifford, 798). The poem is written to Lord Berkeley, who mourns the absence of Lady Vane, who appears as Liquorissa in the poem. Walpole’s note reads: “Lord Vane was said to be Impotent, yet at any time woud give his wife great Sums to return to Him, which as soon as she had got, she always ran away again. Tis of this Lord Pope says ‘The Fool, whose wife elopes some twice a quarter,/For Matrimonial Solace dies a Martyr!’” (Lewis Walpole Library, Folio 49 2616 II Ms). According to a note in the manuscript, the poem was written in Florence in 1741, but the Walpole Library manuscript must be much later, because another annotation to the same poem mentions Peregrine Pickle. See n. 148, below. Pope’s couplet is from the First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated (1738), lines 150–51. The charge of impotence became a point of contention in the pamphlets that followed the publication of the memoirs: A Letter to the Right Honourable the Lady V——ss V——. Occasioned by the Publication of her Memoirs in the Adventures of “Peregrine Pickle” (London, 1751), published about two weeks after Peregrine Pickle, takes Lord Vane’s side: “Now, I fancy if we were to ask L——V——’s Opinion on this Matter, he would tell us, that the Power of your Charms, and the Greatness of his Passion, occasioned this terrible Disorder, unstrung his Nerves, and hindred him from performing their Duty, … and provided he could have obtained a fair Trial, the second Night would have surmounted all his Difficulties, and given you full Satisfaction; which I think in Conscience you ought to have done, as these Accidents have frequently happened to the most renowned Wrestlers in the Academy of Venus” (9–10). An Apology for the Conduct of a Lady of Quality, Lately Traduc’d under the Name of Lady Frail (London, 1751), published the following July, defended Lady Vane, who, on her wedding night, allegedly discovered that “she had married a meer nominal Husband; an insignificant Non-entity, utterly deficient in all Points of Manhood, and quite incapable of gratifying his own Passion, or allaying those Desires in her, that were excited by his tantalizing Efforts, and shadowy, unsubstantial, vexatious Behaviour in the Nuptial Bed” (6–7). Soon, apparently, the rumor became the subject of jest. In The Tell-Tale appears the following anecdote, also noted by Clifford (795). Having found Lady Vane asleep with Peregrine Pickle in her lap, Lord Vane replaces Smollett’s novel with The Practice of Piety. Upon waking, Lady Vane discovers the trick. When Lord Vane congratulates her on her reformation, she replies: “Nay, nay, … let our reformation go hand in hand, I beseech you: when you, my Lord, practice the whole duty of man, then I’ll read the Practice of Piety” (The Tell-Tale; or Anecdotes Expressive of the Characters of Persons Eminent for Rank, Learning, Wit, or Humour, 2 vols. [London, 1756], 1:158).
72. “Drury-lane”: The locale had acquired its association with prostitution and unsavory reputation by the end of the seventeenth century (Wheatley, 1:524).
73. “duke H——”: See n. 35, above.
74. “produced a quarrel … pin-money”: Pin money is “a (usually annual) sum allotted to a woman for clothing and other personal expenses; esp. such an allowance provided for a wife’s private expenditure” (OED). The quarrel over pin money is recorded in the English Reports:
In 1735 Lord Vane married with his Lady; and on that Occasion, in Consideration of a Fortune of £6000, Lord Vane made a Settlement upon her of a Rent-charge of £1500 per Ann. by way of Jointure, and of a Rent-charge of £400 per Ann. for her separate Use during the Coverture. Soon after the Marriage was had Misunderstandings arose between them, and she left him; but in March in that same Year they came to an Agreement together, that in Consideration that she would relinquish her Right to a House in Grosvenor-square, her Rent-charge of £400 per Ann. should be increased to £700. And thereupon she lived with him again. After this they went into France. (27 Eng. Rep. 585 [1557–1865]
Since Lady Vane married Lord Vane in May 1735, the report most likely refers to the following March, which under the Julian calendar would have been 1735 until the twenty-fifth day.
75. “Case-horton”: Carshalton, a village located about eleven miles south of Westminster Bridge. Carshalton House had passed into the possession of Sir John Fellowes, like Vane’s father, a director of the South Sea Company. Although the house was confiscated in 1721, he continued to live there (“Parishes: Carshalton,” in A History of the County of Surrey [1912], 4:178–88, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=43049). Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, purchased the house sometime in the 1730s. See n. 98, below.
76. “Chantilly”: See chap. 42, n. 3.
77. “Prince of Condé”: Louis-Henri (1692–1740), duc de Bourbon, prince de Condé, had been chief of the regency council for Louis XV and afterward that king’s prime or first minister from December 1723 until June 1726, when he was exiled from the court, having lost a power struggle to Cardinal Fleury. In his exile he resided at Chantilly.
78. “his sisters”: The prince had six sisters: Marie-Anne-Gabrielle-Eleonor, abbesse de Saint-Antoine-lès-Paris (1690–1760); Louise-Elizabeth (1693–1775), princess of Conti; Louise-Anne (1695–1758), Mlle de Charolais; Marie-Anne (1697–1741), Mlle de Clermont; Henriette-Louise (1703–72), abbesse de Beaumont; Elizabeth Alexandrine (1705–65), Mlle de Sens.
79. “Thuilleries”: See chap. 45, n. 8.
80. “French lady”: Marie-Thérèse de Fontaine de La Touche (1712–65), illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV’s banker, Samuel Bernard. She married Nicolas Vallet, seigneur de La Touche, in 1729 and had borne three children by 1736, when she left France with the Duke of Kingston (see n. 81, below). Hervey mentions the elopement and La Touche’s residence in London in a letter to Henry Fox dated 25 November 1736. He elaborates on the scandal that the elopement caused in another letter, to Stephen Fox, dated 4 December 1736: “It is incredible the bustle Madame de la Touche’s adventure makes at Paris. One should have imagined the Duke of Kingston, by the manner the French people speak of this affair, had seduced a Vestal from her sacred Fire, rather than only suffered a forsaken mistress of the Duc de la Trémouille’s to follow him to England” (Earl of Ilchester, Lord Hervey and His Friends, 1726–38 [London: John Murray, 1950], 256, 258). She is described by one of the duke’s servants as a “fine comely woman, of a brown complexion, and black hair. The Duke fell in love with her at Paris, in his younger days. She was the wife of some person of consequence; an elopement soon took place” (Thomas Whitehead, Original Anecdotes of the Late Duke of Kingston and Miss Chudleigh [London, 1792], 45, 47).
81. “duke of K——”: Evelyn Pierrepont, 2nd Duke of Kingston (1712–73), nephew to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. After succeeding his grandfather to the dukedom in 1726, he went on a grand tour that lasted ten years, acquiring over time a scandalous reputation and significant debts. He returned from Paris in autumn 1736 with his mistress, Marie-Thérèse de Fontaine de La Touche. She remained his mistress until about 1752, when she was replaced by Elizabeth Chudleigh, whom he married in 1769, despite her marriage to Augustus John Hervey, afterward 3rd Earl of Bristol (ODNB).
82. “her mother and an agreeable sister”: Marie-Anne-Armande Fontaine (1684–1745), also known as Manon de Dancourt, Mme Guillaume, or de Guillaume de Fontaine. Having come from a theatrical family, she was briefly a member of the Comédie Française until she married Jean-Louise Guillaume in 1702, a wealthy man thirty years her senior. From 1739 until her death in 1745, she lived in a town house on the rue de la Gaillon in Paris. Her daughter, Marie-Louise (1710–65), married Antoine Alexis Pineau seigneur d’Arty but left him to become mistress to the prince of Conti. In a letter to Horace Walpole dated 18 December 1764, Lady Hertford writes the following about Mme d’Arty: “Madame de Boufflers is in retirement because her husband is lately dead, but the report of Paris is, that she will come out soon Princess de Conti. She and the Prince both are at Madame D’Arthy’s (a sister of Madame de la Touches) and the first mistress the prince of Conti ever had; in any other country but this, this circumstance would prevent these ladies living together, but here it makes not the least difference, and Madame D’Arthy I am told has a great friendship for the other” (Walpole, 38:480 and n. 4).
83. “prince of C——”: Louis-François de Bourbon, prince of Conti (1717–76). He had an early distinguished military career and the support of Louis XV for acceding to the throne of Poland (he was unsuccessful), and he was a patron of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
84. “Madam De la T——”: See n. 80, above.
85. “Bois de Boulogne”: Park just beyond the western boundary of the city of Paris. Later in the century, one writer describes it as “a royal forest, full of game, and divided with avenues for the conveniences of pursuing it” (Harry Peckham, The Tour of Holland, Dutch Brabant, the Austrian Netherlands, and Part of France [London, 1780], 193–94). François I built a spectacular palace here called the Château de Madrid, which was destroyed during the Revolution.
86. “calash”: “A kind of light carriage with low wheels, having a removable folding hood or top” (OED).
87. “cradle-walk”: “A garden walk over-arched with clipped yew or the like” (OED).
88. “palace of the prince of C——”: The Hôtel de Conti, built in the 1660s. This building was sold to the princess of Conti in 1670 by Henri de Guénégaud. In 1771–75 it was rebuilt as the Hôtel de La Monnaie, which stands at the same spot today.
89. “he regulated … Sweden”: Charles XII (1682–1718), king of Sweden (1697–1718), a brilliant general and conqueror whose portrait was one of the exempla in Samuel Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). Of Charles XII, Johnson writes:
A frame of adamant, a soul of fire
No dangers fright him, and no labors tire;
O’er love, o’er fear, extends his wide domain,
Unconquered lord of pleasure and of pain. (lines 193–96)
90. “British embassador”: James, 1st Earl Waldegrave (1684–1741), grandson of James II by his eldest illegitimate daughter, Lady Henrietta Fitzjames. Waldegrave renounced his Jacobite leanings, converted to Protestantism, and swore oaths of allegiance to the Crown in 1722. His diplomatic career began in 1727 with an appointment to the court of the emperor in Vienna. His mission there was temporarily suspended at the death of George I, but Waldegrave remained in Paris, where he acquired the reputation of being a man of pleasure and counted among his close friends the famous French political philosopher Montesquieu (1689–1755). In April 1730 he was appointed ambassador to France, a post he held until his deteriorating health led him to ask to be allowed to return to England in October 1740. He died on 11 April 1741 (ODNB).
91. “the laws of France … legal punishment”: Lady Vane may be thinking of the penalty for abduction, which was made a capital crime in 1576 by the Ordinance of Blois. The purpose of the ordinance was to prevent clandestine marriages. See Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598–1789, trans. Brian Pearce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 60–61.
92. “Hotel de Flandre”: In the Place Royale, near the Royal Park. See John Roby, Seven Weeks in Belgium, Switzerland, Lombardy, Piedmont, Savoy, etc., 2 vols. (London, 1838), 1:113–15.
93. “Liegeoise”: A native of the Belgian city of Liège.
94. “setting out for Ostend … passage”: In the second edition, Lady Vane confesses that she had made a plan with Shirley before leaving Paris. See the historical collation, 3.393.4. Clifford notes Patrick Guthrie’s account of Lady Vane’s travels to his friend James Gibbs on 10 August 1736 from Boulogne-sur-Mer:
Lord Vane rid several times post through this town. I did not see him. I hear he is gone from Calais to London. He was in search of his wife, and had forty or fifty people riding over France in quest of her. I hear she run from him at Paris with one of the Shirleys, who carried her to Brussels; he came post here as a courier, hired a ship, one Mirlton master, for Dover, but went to Ostend, where he landed, from thence went to Brussels and brought my Lady Vane to Ostend, and thence carried her to London in Mirlton’s ship. I pity that poor unhappy Lord; if he lives a few years he will be a beggar. (Clifford, 796; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, 10 vols. [London, 1901], 6:63)
95. “lady O——”: Margaret Rolle, dowager Countess of Orford and Baroness Clinton (1709–81), wife of Sir Robert Walpole, 2nd Earl of Orford, who died 31 March 1751. She married Shirley on 25 May 1751 in Keith’s Chapel, Mayfair, where so-called Fleet, or unlicensed, marriages were performed (Wheatley, 2:516–17). See also nn. 63–64, above.
96. “Poland-street”: Near Oxford Street. Charles Burney and his family moved here in 1760 (Wheatley, 3:100).
97. “commenced a suit for separation”: The legal wrangling between Lady Vane and her husband had begun before her trip to France. See n. 74, above. According to the notice in the English Reports, Lady Vane sued her husband because Lord Vane, while in France, “beat her in a violent Manner, and upon this she returned into England, and swore the Peace against him. She likewise instituted a Suit against him in the Ecclesiastical Court to have a Divorce from him Causa sævitiæ” (27 Eng. Rep. 585). Lady Vane brought suit in an ecclesiastical court in 1737 (104 Eng. Rep. 334 [1378–1865]).
98. “lord-chief-justice”: Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke (1690–1764), member of Parliament from 1719, solicitor general, attorney general, lord chief justice of the King’s Bench from October 1733 until February 1737, when he was appointed lord chancellor, a post he held until October 1756. Clifford notes that there are two letters in the British Library from Lady Vane to Hardwicke, “perhaps written about this time (Add. MS. 35597, ff 364, 368)” (796).
99. “a strange … folly”: In a letter to Alexander Carlyle, Smollett used similar words to characterize John Rich of Covent Garden, who rejected Smollett’s play The Regicide: “I sent my Masque [Alceste] to Rich, that it may be put into Rehearsal immediately; but he is Such a Compound of Indolence, Worthlessness and Folly, that I cannot depend upon anything he undertakes” (1 October 1749, in Letters, 12).
100. “Camberwell”: Camberwell was a parish in Surrey, two miles from Southwark, now part of Greater London. As Lady Vane describes a few lines later, at this time it was still a place of “solitary retirement.”
101. “took water from the Bridge”: “To take a boat on the Thames” (OED). The bridge referred to here is London Bridge, until 1750 the only connection between the northern and southern parts of the city.
102. “speaking-trumpet”: “A stentorophonick instrument; a trumpet by which the voice may be propagated to a great distance” (Johnson).
103. “Southampton-street”: Between the Strand and Covent Garden, home to several theatrical personages during the eighteenth century, including David Garrick, who resided at No. 27 from 1749 to 1772 (Wheatley, 3:284).
104. “prince of W——”: Wales. See n. 70, above.
105. “myrmidons”: See chap. 9, n. 16.
106. “drawers”: Those who draw liquor at a tavern; a tapster.
107. “advertised me … our retirement”: In the Daily Journal appeared the following notice:
Whereas Frances, wife of the Right Hon. The Lord Viscount VANE, has for some Months past absented herself from her Husband, and the rest of her Friends, I do hereby promise to any Person or Persons, who shall discover, where the said Lady VANE is concealed, to me or to FRANCIS HAWES, Esq; her Father, so that either of us may come to the Speech of her, the Sum of 100 l. as a Reward…. Any Person concealing or lodging her after this Advertisement will be prosecuted with the utmost Rigour. Or if her Ladyship will return to me she may depend upon being kindly received. She is about 22 Years of Age, tall, well-shaped, has light brown Hair, is fair complexioned, and has her upper Teeth placed in an irregular manner. She had on when she absented a red Damask French Sack, and was attended by a French Woman who speaks very bad English. (24 January 1737)
The same advertisement appeared in the Grub-Street Journal from 27 January to 24 February 1737. In the Grub Street Journal advertisement, however, no mention is made of Lady Vane’s father. The advertisement attracted the attention of the 1st Earl of Egmont, who noted the following in his diary on 27 January 1737:
I read this day in the newspapers my Lord Vane’s advertisement offering 100l. reward to him that should discover his lady, who for some time has eloped from him. One would think he had lost some favourite spaniel bitch, for he describes her person very particularly, even to the clothes she wears…. Lord Vane married her in March last. It was not long before she commenced an intrigue with Mr. Shirley, brother to the Lord Ferrers, and this producing family differences, she thought fit, after running Lord Vane into debt, to desert him. But the advertisement makes sport to the town. He is a very silly young man, half mad, half fool. (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont. Diary of Viscount Percival, Afterwards the First Earl of Egmont, 3 vols. [London, 1920–23], 2:335–36)
Egmont is mistaken with respect to the date of the marriage. The Vanes married in May 1735, approximately twenty months before the date of the letter.
108. “duke of K——… with that lady”: Kingston and Mme de La Touche. See nn. 80–81, above.
109. “duke’s country-seat”: Thoresby Hall in Sherwood, Nottinghamshire, built about 1671. Thomas Whitehead calls the estate “one of the most beautiful inland spots in all England; the park is fifteen measured miles round” (Original Anecdotes, 99). According to the Earl of Egmont, Lady Vane had arrived there by 31 March 1737, as noted in his diary: “I learned this day that Lady Vane, who has so long eloped from my lord her husband, is in the country with the Duke of Kingston, who has still in keeping the French mistress he stole out of France” (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, 2:381). On 4 April 1745 Thoresby burned, and the duke lost many of his possessions, though his papers were preserved (Gentleman’s Magazine 15 [1745]: 218). The house was rebuilt between 1767 and 1771 (ODNB).
110. “an agreement was patched up … separate maintenance”: According to the English Reports, the following agreement was reached: “‘That in Consideration of her staying Proceedings against him in that Suit [see n. 97, above], and that she would cohabit with him in the same Manner as by that Deed was declared, the Rent-charge of £700 per Ann. should be waved, and in the Room of it she should have one of £500 per Ann.’ But in this Deed there was a Proviso, That if Lady Vane shall signify her Desire in Writing, to John Aderly her Trustee, to live separately from her Husband, then and in such Case she shall have free Liberty to do so” (27 Eng. Rep. 585).
111. “pin-money”: See n. 74, above.
112. “full power of alienation”: The power to sell or otherwise transfer ownership of anything to another.
113. “This dispute produced a quarrel”: The quarrel is recorded in the English Reports (see n. 110, above), but they are silent with regard to the cause: “By this Deed there was a Day fixed upon for their Meeting in order to cohabit together again; and they took Lodgings for that Purpose. But on that same Day, after they had been a few Hours together, a Quarrel arose between them, and he took a hot Poker out of the Fire, run it at her, and burnt her Clothes; upon this she instantly went out of the House and left him again, refusing to cohabit with him for ever after” (27 Eng. Rep. 585).
114. “formal separation”: Although Lady Vane is said to have “instituted a Suit against [Lord Vane] in the Ecclesiastical Court to have a Divorce from him Causa sævitiæ” (see n. 97, above), “formal separation” in this instance signifies what Lawrence Stone calls “private separation,” or an agreement between husband and wife to live separately. Such “deeds of separation” usually provided the wife with separate maintenance in return for which the husband was indemnified against any debts that she might contract during the separation. The agreements also usually granted the wife economic and personal freedoms that she would not normally enjoy while she lived with her husband. Lady Vane’s comment that “at that time I thought [the formal separation] binding and immutable” reflects the improvisational origins of this form of private separation, which, again according to Stone, appears to have emerged when the ecclesiastical courts were abolished during the Interregnum (Road to Divorce, 149, 153–54). In the Chancery case cited in nn. 74 and 97, above, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke expressed doubt about past precedents where the court had “given Countenance to Agreements for separate Maintenances. And he did not know, whether in that Matter they had not gone too far.” As a result of his reservations, his ruling in the case in 1740 was not entirely favorable to Lady Vane. Even though Lord Vane had attacked her with a hot poker, the lord chancellor found a clause in the agreement of 1737 that allowed Lady Vane to cohabit with anyone she pleased without interference from her husband “shameful … and a manifest Imposition upon the Husband” (27 Eng. Rep. 585). Private separation is different from “judicial separation,” which was obtained in the ecclesiastical courts.
115. “Salisbury plain”: See chap. 16, n. 3.
116. “Mount-street”: Near Grosvenor Square, Mount Street begins at Hyde Park and extends to Davies Street. The name of the street was derived from Oliver’s Mount, a fortification erected in 1643 (Wheatley, 2:565).
117. “Mr. V——… to D——n”: Thomas Villiers (1709–86), created Baron Hyde of Hindon in 1756 and 1st Earl of Clarendon in 1776. He was the second son of William, 2nd Earl of Jersey, and he served as envoy-extraordinary to the court of Augustus III, elector of Saxony and king of Poland. Villiers lived in Dresden and Warsaw from 1738 to 1742. After 1748 he took an active role in domestic politics (ODNB; Herbert, 359).
118. “a very great man”: Herbert’s speculation that this man is “to be regarded as a member of the royal family” is supported by the man’s subsequent mention of the queen and Lady Vane’s declaration that she would not sell herself to a prince (Herbert, 359).
119. “lord C——”: Lord Cholmondeley. See n. 62, above. He is referred to interchangeably as Lord C——and Lord C——y in these memoirs.
120. “éclat”: “Brilliancy, radiance, dazzling effect” (OED).
121. “Mr. K——”: Robert Knight (1675–1744), as a founder of the South Sea Company, would have known Lady Vane’s father. While being questioned by the House of Commons after the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, Knight fled to the Continent, ultimately to take up residence in Paris, where he resumed his occupation of banker and lived in exile until 1743. He returned to England in May of that year and died in November of the following year (Herbert, 360; Clifford, 797; ODNB).
122. “a certain peer”: Augustus, 4th Earl of Berkeley (1716–55), only son and heir to James, the 3rd Earl, who was a close friend of Bolingbroke, and Lady Louisa Lennox. Writing from Naples on 21 June 1737, William Bristow reports on Berkeley’s reputation to the Countess of Denbigh: “L’on me dit que Lord Berkeley fait á merveilles, estimé des hommes et aimé des femmes” [They say that Lord Berkeley has worked wonders: he is admired by the men and adored by the women]. By 16 December of that same year, James Stanhope had written to Lady Denbigh from Paris to report: “Lord Berkeley is here, and infinite numbers of English of both sexes, and great numbers winter here” (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Denbigh, pt. 5 [London, 1911], 218, 226).
123. “house of Mrs. P——”: Unidentified.
124. “lord C——y”: Cholmondeley. See nn. 62, 119, above.
125. “prince of C——”: Prince of Conti. See n. 83, above.
126. “Miss W——of Kent”: Clifford speculates that this could be the woman referred to by Lady Lucy Wentworth in a letter to her father dated 29 December 1737: “Lord Vane keeps a Lady in the country, so he’s now easy without my Lady, but she’s comeing to town from the Bath, and says she’s sure she can behave in a manner that will make her be esteem’d as well as ever” (797; The Wentworth Papers, 1705–1739, ed. James J. Cartwright [London: Wyman, 1883], 534).
127. “public advertisement”: Unlocated.
128. “earl B——’s love”: Berkeley. See n. 122, above.
129. “lord B——k’s house”: The second edition of Peregrine Pickle changes this to “Lord B——y’s house” (see the historical collation, 3.404.20), which explains why Herbert has filled in the blank in his edition thus: “Lord B(erkeley)’s house.” Clifford uses the reading from the first edition and provides a note identifying Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and his house in Chanteloup, Touraine. Given that Lady Vane avers that it was mistaken pride that caused her to live at B——’s house rather than be “maintained at his expence in any other place,” the second edition’s emendation must surely be correct and Clifford’s note mistaken, since there is no reason to believe that Bolingbroke would have offered to maintain Lady Vane. That Berkeley had a house in Paris is confirmed by a letter to Lady Denbigh from Lady Bolingbroke, who writes: “Le petit conte de Berkeley … a pris une maison a Paris pour un an, et qu’il va a Aubigny chasser” [The little Count Berkeley … has taken a house in Paris for a year, and he goes hunting at Aubigny] (8 October 1736, in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Denbigh, 117). Furthermore, if Lady Vane were indeed staying at Lord Bolingbroke’s house in Paris, it is unlikely that she would mention that she visited him at his house “at a distance of a few leagues from Paris.” Lady Bolingbroke had inherited a house in the rue Saint-Dominique, Faubourg Saint-Germain, at the death of her first husband, the marquis de Villette, in 1707. She and Bolingbroke had entertained there in 1723, but in 1728 she was staying with Robert Knight (see n. 121, above) while her husband was in England (M. R. Hopkinson, Married to Mercury: A Sketch of Lord Bolingbroke and His Wives [London: Constable, 1936], 138, 161, 182). Finally, in the ODNB entry on Bolingbroke, H. T. Dickinson notes that Bolingbroke arrived at Chanteloup in June 1735 but resided there for less than a year before he moved to “Argeville, near Fontainebleau, where he lived until his final return to England in 1744.” Dickinson’s chronology is in accord with other accounts. Lady Bolingbroke writes to Lady Denbigh from Argeville in October 1736 (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Denbigh, 117), and Walter Sichel puts Bolingbroke at Argeville in 1736 (Bolingbroke and His Times: The Sequel [London: Nisbet, 1902], 352–53). It is likely, then, that Lady Vane visited Lord Bolingbroke not at Chanteloup (which is much farther than a few leagues from Paris) but at Argeville and that she was “kept” at Lord Berkeley’s house, not Lord Bolingbroke’s house, in Paris.
130. “lady B——k”: Marie Claire de Marcilly (1675–1750), widow of the marquis de Villette. Bolingbroke married her privately in 1719 and publicly in a Protestant ceremony at Aixla-Chapelle in 1722 (Hopkinson, Married to Mercury, 158). Sichel calls her “a woman of high accomplishments and distinguished charm, … brilliant and unassuming,” who counted Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope among her admirers (Bolingbroke and His Times, 69). Even Horace Walpole, who was generally hostile to Bolingbroke, wrote to Mann that he had “heard her wit and parts excessively commended” (2 April 1750 OS, in Walpole, 20:136). She was reported to have displeased George I by talking too much at court (Complete Peerage, 2:207).
131. “North Briton”: John Christie of Baberton (c. 1709–89). The following notice appears in the section on deaths in the Monthly Register in the Edinburgh Magazine for May 1789: “At his seat of Baberton, John Christie of Baberton, Esq; aged about 80. This gentleman was many years in the Foot Guards, but quitted the army on obtaining a Lottery prize of L.10,000;—the ticket was the gift of his Colonel, the Earl of Berkeley, with whom he was very intimate, and he attended his Lordship in his travels in Europe. The amours of that Nobleman with the late Lady Vane are well known, from the third volume of Peregrine Pickle, in which some mention is made of Mr. C——, the gentleman now deceased.” He died on 30 May 1789 (9 [Edinburgh and London, 1789]: 84). Herbert “copied this [notice] from a cutting from a paper of the date given” but was unable to discover the source. He gives the date of Christie’s death as 30 April 1789 (361).
132. “country-seat”: Cranford House in Middlesex, purchased by Elizabeth, widow of Sir Thomas Berkeley, in 1618. The manor remained in the Berkeley family until 1932 (Susan Reynolds, ed., A History of the County of Middlesex, 10 vols. [London: Oxford University Press, 1962], 3:180). Lady Vane’s arrival was noticed by her distant cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in a letter to Lady Pomfret in January 1739: “Lady Vane is returned hither in company with Lord Berkeley, and went with him in publick to Cranford, where they remain as happy as love and youth can make them. I am told that though she does not pique herself upon fidelity to any one man (which is but a narrow way of thinking), she boasts that she has always been true to her nation, and, notwithstanding foreign attacks, has always reserved her charms for the use of her own countrymen” (Halsband, Complete Letters, 2:133–34).
133. “Mr. H——B——”: Henry Berkeley (d. 1745), son of Henry Berkeley, third son of Charles, 2nd Earl of Berkeley, and cousin of Augustus, 3rd Earl of Berkeley. He was made a captain in Colonel Howard’s Regiment of Foot in Ireland in June 1732. See Gentleman’s Magazine 2 (1732): 828. He died at the battle of Fontenoy on 11 May 1745 (Arthur Collins, The Peerage of England, 5th ed., 8 vols. [London, 1779], 4:27).
134. “Mr. R——”: Identified by Aucher Warner as Capt. Benjamin Rudyard of West Woodhay, Berkshire, aide-de-camp at Dettingen to John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of Stair (Sir Thomas Warner: Pioneer of the West Indies [London: West India Committee, 1933], 125).
135. “law-suit”: According to the English Reports, Lord Vane covenanted that “lady Vane was to have Liberty of leaving her Husband when she should think proper, and no Action was to be brought on any Account whatsoever against the Person with whom she should cohabit.” This covenant was entered into in 1737. In his ruling of 30 July 1740, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke ruled that “this Covenant in the Deed was a Fraud apparent upon the Face of it. By this Covenant the Wife has not only her Liberty to live separately from her Husband, but her whole Conduct is without Remedy” (Vane v. Vane, 27 Eng. Rep. 585 [1740]). Lord Vane brought the case to Chancery in order to be relieved of responsibility for Lady Vane’s debts.
136. “criminal conversation”: An action of trespass at common law, first emerging in the late seventeenth century, whereby a husband sued his wife’s lover for damages on the principle that the wife was the property of the husband, against whom the lover had committed the trespass. See William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (London, 1765–69), 3:139. Monetary awards in these cases could be quite large. See Stone, Road to Divorce, 231–300.
137. “Dr. S——”: Four doctors have been suggested as candidates for the role of physician to Lady Vane: Peter Shaw (1694–1763), John Shebbeare (1709–88), William Smellie (1697–1763), and Smollett himself. Smollett was never seriously entertained as a candidate because he did not arrive in London until June 1739. Less than a year later, on 3 April 1740, he sailed aboard the Chichester, and he did not return to England until 21 September 1741 (Knapp, 31–35). Buck argued that Shebbeare was the doctor, but his case rested on eliminating Smollett from consideration and on Shebbeare’s being a “scurrilous and unprincipled hack-writer” rather than on any evidence that Shebbeare could actually have attended Lady Vane in her illness (43–44). James R. Forster accepts Buck’s suggestion without adding any new evidence (“Smollett’s Pamphleteering Foe Shebbeare,” PMLA 57 [1942]: 1057–58). O M Brack dismisses any possibility that Shebbeare could be the doctor by noting that between 1739 and 1743, the period in the “Memoirs” when the doctor appears, Shebbeare was known to be in Bristol in partnership with a chemist. Brack also notes that Shebbeare did not enjoy a reputation for a tender disposition. In “Three Doctors and Smollett’s Lady of Quality,” Judd Kline proposes Dr. Peter Shaw. Kline argues that Shaw enjoyed both prominence as a physician and the opportunity to be called to attend on both the Vanes and the Berkeleys at the time of Lady Vane’s first illness (1739) (Philological Quarterly 27 [1948]: 219–28). Knapp, who does not refer to Kline, follows the lead of David Herbert, who identifies the doctor as Smellie. Herbert bases his identification on Lady Vane’s remark that the doctor had “acquired a great share of reputation” by the time that she wrote her memoirs (361). Herbert’s identification is repeated by John Glaister in Dr. William Smellie without, however, offering any additional proof for the identification ([Glasgow: Maclehose & Sons, 1894], 12). Knapp notes that Smellie moved to London in 1739 and could have known Lady Vane from 1734, when he practiced near the Hamilton estate, where Lady Vane lived for a time (140 n. 25). Kline does not discuss Smellie at all.
138. “Mr. S——”: Shirley. See n. 63, above.
139. “hunting-seat”: George Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne (1685–1753), states that the Earl of Berkeley had a hunting seat in Wiltshire, a county adjacent to Gloucestershire, site of the family seat (Life and Letters of George Berkeley, D.D., ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871], 313).
140. “B——Castle”: Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, dating from the eleventh century. In 1327 at this baronial castle and seat King Edward II was murdered.
141. “rhodomontade”: See chap. 23, n. 2.
142. “Voyez moi plus souvent, & ne me donnez rien”: “See me more often, and give me nothing” (Racine, Bérenice [1670], 2.4).
143. “one man”: Following a conjecture by Herbert (363), Clifford positively identified this man as Sir Thomas Aston (c. 1705–44), 4th Baronet of Aston (797). Sir Thomas matriculated at Corpus Christi College at Oxford on 1 March 1722, became the 4th Baronet on the death of his father on 16 January 1725, and was elected member of Parliament for Liverpool (1729–34) and St. Albans (1734–41). He married Rebecca Shishe in March 1736, but she died in May 1737. Sir Thomas died in France. The title passed to his eldest sister, Catharine (G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Baronetage, 5 vols. [Exeter: William Pollard, 1900–1906], 2:48–49). Another of Aston’s sisters, called Molly Aston, was a friend of Samuel Johnson. See Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1:83 n. 3. In a letter dated 22 November 1739 to the Countess of Huntingdon, Charles, 9th Viscount Fairfax, writes: “Lady Vane they say has changed [her man] for Sir Thomas Aston” (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, Esq., 4 vols. [London, 1928–47], 3:25).
144. “H——d——n”: Henry Holdman (dates unknown), identified in An Apology for the Conduct of a Lady of Quality (1751) as “L——d V——’s late Steward” (17–18). The anonymous author of a Letter to the Right Honourable the Lady V——ss V——(1751) writes: “I am a near Relation and intimate Friend of the late Mr. Holdman, and have Materials by me which will convince every Body, that you have not acted with Sincerity in your Apology, but have palliated some Things, misrepresented others, and left out the worst Part of your Actions. As the Case stands thus betwixt us, you must not be surprized that I endeavour to vindicate the Character of my deceased Friend from your malicious Aspersions” (5–6).
145. “Red-lion-square”: On the north side of Holborn and east of Bloomsbury Square. In 1731 Philip York, Earl Hardwicke, resided there, and the square was said to be in poor condition. An attempt was made to improve it by building an obelisk in the center of the square, with iron railings around it, and stone watch houses at the four corners (Wheatley, 3:156–57).
146. “earl of A——, his lordship’s uncle”: William Anne van Keppel (1702–54), 2nd Earl of Albemarle. See chap. 44, n. 10. Albemarle was Lord Berkeley’s maternal uncle by marriage, having married Lady Anne Lennox, sister to Louisa Lennox, mother to Lord Berkeley.
147. “Sir T——A——”: Sir Thomas Aston. See n. 143, above.
148. “accompany him into Italy”: Lady Vane never went, but Clifford discovered news of her expected arrival at Florence in an annotation to Horace Walpole’s manuscript poem “Sunday or the Presence Chamber. A Town Eclogue” (see n. 71, above). The annotation reads as follows: “This Eclogue was wrote at Florence, as a Sequel to Lady Mary Wortley’s Six. She was then there, & Lady Vane was expected there with Sir Thomas Aston, for whom She had quitted Earl Berkeley.” Lady Mary was in Florence at a residence rented by Lord and Lady Pomfret from 22 August 1740 to 16 October 1740 (Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 415 n. 2). In Walpole’s poem, various figures visit Berkeley to console him for the loss of Vane, including Colley Cibber, who utters these lines: “Zounds! Are you mad, my Lord? Your Liquorissa/In other Countries follows other Blissa.”
149. “Clermont”: Small town on the road from Calais to Paris, approximately forty miles north of the capital.
150. “rode post”: That is, by a relay of horses rather than in a coach; the phrase derives from the manner of travel by a courier or bearer of letters (OED).
151. “Scotchman”: John Christie. See n. 131, above.
152. “Mr. C——”: Christie, just mentioned.
153. “doctor Cantwell”: Andrew Cantwell (d. 1764), born in Tipperary, Ireland. He earned a degree in medicine from Montpellier University, France, in 1729. By 1735 Cantwell had moved to Paris, where he continued his medical studies, eventually becoming a doctor of the Paris faculty in 1742. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1738. Later, he became well known for his opposition to the practice of inoculation against smallpox, publishing in 1755 Dissertation sur l’inoculation (ODNB).
154. “sister of madam la T——”: Mme d’Arty, sister of Marie-Thérèse de Fontaine de La Touche. See nn. 80 and 82, above.
155. “prince of C——”: Conti. See n. 83, above.
156. “lord ——…receive them”: Horace Walpole reports to Horace Mann of Lord Vane’s recent fortune and an encounter on 21 November 1741 at a performance of Baldassare Galuppi’s (1706–85) Alexander in Persia in the Opera House in the Haymarket:
You can’t imagine what an entertaining fourth act of the opera we had t’other night—Lord Vane in the middle of the pit, making love to my Lady! The Duke of Newcastle has lately given him three-score thousand pounds to consent to cut off the entail of the Newcastle estate; the fool immediately wrote to his wife to beg she would return to him from Lord Berkeley, that he had got so much money, and now they might live comfortably: but she will not live comfortably: she is at Lord Berkeley’s house; whither go divers after her. (23 November 1741 OS, in Walpole, 17:209–10; Clifford, 798)
157. “Mr. B——”: Henry Berkeley. See n. 133, above.
158. “Dr. S——”: Presumably the same doctor who treated Lady Vane. See n. 137, above. Herbert names Smellie (365).
159. “lord F——”: Identified by Herbert as Hugh Fortescue (1696–1751), 14th Baron Clinton (377). In 1721 he was named lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum (or principal justice of the peace and keeper of the rolls) of Devonshire and a lord of the king’s bedchamber. In 1725 he was elected a knight of the Order of the Bath, and in 1746 he was created Earl of Clinton and Baron Fortescue. Fortescue died on 3 May 1751 (Biographia Britannica, 7 vols. [London, 1747–66], 3:2000).
160. “unison”: “The agreement or consonance of the sounds of two or more bodies vibrating at equal rates” (OED).
161. “terrors of expectation”: In the 1758 edition, the text offered reasons for her terrors at this point in her narrative without deleting a similar explanation that appears at the end of the memoirs in the voice of “one of the gentlemen present” at her recitation of her life (see p. 450). Brack sees this redundancy in the second edition as evidence that both Smollett and Lady Vane had a hand in the revisions for that edition. He argues that each made respective changes in different copies of the first edition, and these copies were then sent to the printer without having been collated. See Brack, “Smollett and the Authorship,” 60–61; and the historical collation, 3.413.17.
162. “the duke of L——”: Identified by Herbert (366) and accepted by Clifford (799) as Thomas Osborne (1713–89), 4th Duke of Leeds, only son of Peregrine Hyde Osborne, 3rd Duke of Leeds, and stepson of Juliana, Duchess of Leeds, who had presented Lady Vane at court (see nn. 36 and 50, above). He succeeded as 4th Duke upon the death of his father in May 1731; married Mary, daughter of Francis Earl Godolphin, on 26 June 1740; and held several royal offices in addition to being a fellow of the Royal Society (Egerton Brydges, Collins’s Peerage of England, 9 vols. [London, 1812], 1:260).
163. “Mr. H——V——”: Clifford accepts Herbert’s guess of Henry Vane (c. 1705–58), later 1st Earl of Darlington, Lord Vane’s paternal first cousin (Herbert, 366; Clifford, 799). Vane’s wife, Anne, was first cousin to William Pulteney (see n. 284, below), and Vane himself became a member of the Whig opposition to Sir Robert Walpole associated with Pulteney. Horace Walpole calls him a “toad-eater and spy to all parties” (to Mann, 23 March 1749 OS, in Walpole, 20:39). A toad-eater is a sycophant. Along with Lord Vane, Henry Vane received money from the Duke of Newcastle to renounce his right to the duke’s estate (ODNB). See n. 156, above.
164. “Ranelagh”: Pleasure gardens by the Thames in Chelsea and chief rival to Vauxhall Gardens (see n. 38, above). Built on the site of gardens that had belonged to the Earl of Ranelagh (d. 1711), the gardens opened to the public in April 1742. Ranelagh’s chief attraction was the Rotunda, where concerts were held. Horace Walpole wrote to Mann about the gardens upon their opening, which would have been about the time that Lady Vane visited them: “Two nights ago Ranelagh Gardens were opened at Chelsea…. There is a vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted and illuminated, into which everybody that loves eating, drinking, staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence. The building and disposition of the gardens cost £16,000. Twice a week there are to be ridottos at guinea tickets, for which you are to have a supper and music” (26 May 1742 OS, in Walpole, 17:434). Samuel Johnson was similarly impressed upon his first visit, though his reflections were predictably more complex than Walpole’s, as he later told James Boswell: “When I first entered Ranelagh, it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind, such as I never experienced any where else. But … it went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle, that was not afraid to go home and think” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 3:199). Ranelagh was closed in 1803 and the Rotunda demolished in 1805.
165. “Flanders … the whole army”: Henry Berkeley. See n. 133, above. On 17 June 1742 Walpole wrote to Mann about Lady Vane’s presence in Flanders: “The troops continue going to Flanders…. Lady Vane has taken a trip thither after a cousin of Lord Berkeley, who is as simple about her as her own husband is, and has written to Mr. Knight at Paris to furnish her with what money she wants. He says, she is vastly to blame, for he was trying to get her a divorce from Lord Vane, and then would have married her himself. Her adventures are worthy to be bound up with those of my good sister-in-law, the German Princess [Mary Moders], and Moll Flanders” (Walpole, 17:459). See also n. 169, below.
166. “a damp”: “A check, discouragement” (OED).
167. “Kill-joy”: The earliest citation provided in the OED for this still-current phrase is from Charles Burney, A General History of Music, 4 vols. (London, 1776–89), 1:466.
168. “new modelling”: This verb seems to have been derived from the reorganization of the English parliamentary army during the Civil War (OED).
169. “arrived in Ghent”: Her arrival in Ghent was reported by Lt. Col. Charles Russell in a letter to his wife, Mary, dated 9 June 1742: “The greatest beauty we have here has followed us from England, which is Lady Vane, who arrived here last Monday night, and in reality has followed the brigade of Guards, which, as soon as she is tired with, intends to proceed to Brussels. She has no woman with her, and walks about each evening with an officer of [sic] each side of her” (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley [London, 1900], 215; Clifford, 799).
170. “lord R——B——, the duke of A——’s youngest brother”: Lord Robert Bertie (c. 1721–82), fifth son of Robert Bertie, 1st Duke of Ancaster, but third son by his second wife, Albinia Farrington (dates unknown). Bertie had a long military career, and he was wounded at the battle of Fontenoy. As Herbert and Clifford both point out, he was not the youngest brother of Peregrine, Duke of Ancaster (who died in January 1742), but the second youngest. His heir and successor to the dukedom, who would have been nephew to Robert, was also named Peregrine.
171. “Mr. B——”: Henry Berkeley. See n. 133, above.
172. “Madam la comtesse de C——”: Either Anna Sophie Calemberg (1719–82) or Christiane Sophie Calemberg (1703–75), both countesses. Lady Vane gives this and the following two names in full in her discussion of her subsequent trip to Brussels (p. 421).
173. “princess C——”: Gabrielle-Françoise de Beauvau-Craon (1708–58), princess of Chimay by marriage.
174. “countess W——, lady of the bed-chamber … Hungary”: Unidentified.
175. “Monsieur D’H——”: Harrach. See n. 204, below.
176. “the Scotch earl of ——”: Based on Herbert’s identification of “lord R——M——” as Lord Robert Manners (see following note), Clifford speculates that the “Scotch earl” is William Henry Ker (d. 1775), 4th Marquess of Lothian, sometimes called the Earl of Ancram, who along with Capt. George Waldegrave (see n. 178, below), was a messmate of Manners during the campaign in Flanders (Clifford, 799–800; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley, 214, 236).
177. “lord R——M——”: Lord Robert Manners (1717?–82), third son of John Manners, 2nd Duke of Rutland by his second wife, Lucy Sherrard. Manners later became a member of Parliament for Kingston-upon-Hull and had a house in Grosvenor Square, where he died on 31 May 1782 (Brydges, Collins’s Peerage, 1:484).
178. “(Mr. W——by name)”: Capt. George Waldegrave (see n. 176, above).
179. “carte blanche”: “Full discretionary power granted” (OED).
180. “gaietè de cœur”: “Light-heartedness; playfulness” (OED).
181. “governor of the place”: Leonard-Mathias van der Noot (1676–1753), baron de Kiesegem, governor of Ghent from 1736 to 1753.
182. “commanding officer of the English troops”: During the autumn of 1742, John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl Stair, resided in Ghent as commander in chief of the allied forces. Since Lady Vane refers again to him later in a more familiar way, it is possible that he is meant here. George II recalled all officers who were members of Parliament late in November 1742. By the new year, Lord Stair was with the allied troops, marching into Germany (John Murray Graham, Annals and Correspondence of the Viscount and the First and Second Earls of Stair, 2 vols. [Edinburgh and London, 1875], 2:288–89; and see n. 206, below).
183. “Pall-mall”: See chap. 80, n. 4.
184. “jubilee at Preston”: Town in Lancashire in northwestern England on the Ribble River, approximately 210 miles from London. One observer notes the following about the jubilee: “The most extraordinary circumstance relating to [Preston’s] charter, is its being held upon condition of having a grand jubilee every twentieth year; which commences in the end of August, and continues a month; during which time persons of all ranks and from all quarters resort thither, and amusements of various kinds are kept up with great spirit” (Gleanings of a wanderer, in various parts of England, Scotland, & North Wales. Made during an excursion in the year 1804 [London, 1805], 144). The Encyclopedia Britannica notes: “In the 18th century Preston had a high reputation as a centre of fashionable society, and earned the epithet still familiarly associated with it, ‘proud’” (11th ed., 29 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911], 22:308).
185. “keep measures with the world”: To govern oneself by prevailing opinion.
186. “d——of A——”: Peregrine Bertie (1714–78), 3rd Duke of Ancaster, whose seat was at Grimsthorpe, in Lincoln (Herbert, 369).
187. “Maddox-street”: Built in 1721, it extends between Regent and New Bond Streets in the vicinity of Grosvenor Square (Wheatley, 2:454).
188. “Mr. L——V——”: Identified by Herbert as Lionel Vane, a relation of Lord Vane (Herbert, 369).
189. “my lord’s lodgings in Gloucester-street”: In Bloomsbury near Queen Square. According to Lady Vane’s 1743 suit (described below, n. 216), “about Christmas, 1742, she was seized by five of my lord’s servants, and by force carried to his house, and there confined for 11 days” (cited in The King v. Doherty, 104 Eng. Rep. 334).
190. “Mr. H——”: Holdman. See n. 144, above.
191. “Newgate”: See chap. 77, n. 5.
192. “the duke of L——”: Leeds. See n. 162, above.
193. “lumber”: “Disused articles of furniture and the like, which take up room inconveniently, or are removed to be out of the way; useless odds and ends” (OED).
194. “oil-shop”: “A shop where oils and pickles are sold” (Johnson).
195. “St. James’s gate”: By St. James’s Palace, London residence of the king, and adjacent to St. James’s Park.
196. “brought to the question”: Suggesting “torture as part of a judicial examination” (OED).
197. “myrmidons”: See chap. 9, n. 16.
198. “hundreds of Essex”: Subdivisions of the county, Essex.
199. “in two days … two o’clock in the afternoon”: Lady Vane would have covered a distance of about 180 miles in two days.
200. “I went to Brussels … lodgings”: According to Lt. Col. Charles Russell, she had arrived by 26 February 1743. Russell told his wife that he was staying at the Hôtel de Flandre, keeping company with the “family ladies of this house.” He continued: “And who should be amongst ’em ever since we have been here but Lady Vane, who keeps Lent with the family, has a lodging near and is well received in this town, but whilst we’ve been here is chiefly with us. Berkeley shuns her much and assured me he would never be with her but in my company. She behaves extremely modest and very agreeable” (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley, 224; Clifford, 800).
201. “queen of Hungary’s protection”: Maria Theresa (1717–80), archduchess of Austria, queen of Hungary and Bohemia. She ascended the throne in 1740.
202. “countess of Calemberg”: See n. 172, above.
203. “princess of Chemay”: See n. 173, above.
204. “Madam D’Harrach”: Eleonora (1703–57), wife of Friedrich August Gervas Harrach (1696–1749), Austrian diplomat who served as chief tutor to the Archduchess Elisabeth, governess of the Austrian Netherlands. Following her death in 1741, he became interim-governor of the provinces (Neue deutsche Biographie [Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 1953–], 7:700). See n. 175, above.
205. “duke of N——’s name”: Thomas Pelham-Holles (1693–1768), Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and 1st Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyme who was also the maternal grand-uncle of Lord Vane. Newcastle was an enormously influential politician throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century. At this time, he was the leading architect of Britain’s foreign policy as it entered the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). He would serve as prime minister from 1754 to 1756 (ODNB). See n. 156, above.
206. “my lord Stair”: John Dalrymple (1673–1747), 2nd Earl of Stair, appointed on 18 March 1742, in his seventieth year, field marshal and commander in chief of the allied forces in the War of the Austrian Succession. Clifford discovered two unpublished letters from Lady Vane to Stair written in 1743 and imploring his help in defeating Lord Vane’s attempts to capture her and bring her back to England. Clifford’s note reads as follows:
In the first from Brussels, 14 Aug., she writes of her continued misfortunes caused by her husband’s persecution. “But as he is Endeavouring by all methods at Viena to procure a Grant from the Queen to Empower him to take me. What I have to beg of your Lordship is your interest with the King, to prevent Mr. Robinson’s Soliciting in behalf of Lord Vane, in his Majesty’s name; Mr. Robinson as I am inform’d refused Ld Vane His Services when my Lord first applied to him; but Upon receiving a Letter afterwards from the Duke of Newcastle to desire it of him, he now acts for Ld Vane tho as yet with Little Success; nor do I fear any thing Unless his Majesty was to interfere….” All she desires, she insists, is “to remain in Safety of my Life.” In the second letter, from Paris, two weeks later, on 28 Aug., she refers again to her “Unhappy Situation; Which is render’d much more so, by Lord Vane’s having Obtain’d Permission to take me at Brusselles, by Mr Robinson’s Soliciting for him (in the Kings name as I am told)….” She begs Lord Stair’s help in securing from the King permission for her to live quietly at Brussels “Whilst I can finnish my law Suits in England because till such time they can be decided, I am not Secure from Lord Vane’s Insults…. All I desire is to be heard, before the Judges of England; and to be safe from Lord Vane till I am heard; after Which I shall readily Submit.” (800)
Thomas Robinson (1695–1770) was minister plenipotentiary to Vienna, court of Maria Theresa, queen of Hungary. Lady Vane’s letters were written shortly after the battle of Dettingen, 27 June 1743, where the allied forces, under Stair’s command but led by George II and the Duke of Cumberland, defeated the French. Feeling that his advice to pursue the French had been ignored by the king immediately after the battle, Stair wrote a letter to the king resigning his commission on 4 September 1743 (Graham, Annals, 2:454). Though Lady Vane could not have known it at the time, Lord Stair was evidently not in a position or frame of mind to petition the king on her behalf.
207. “bumpers”: See chap. 4, n. 4.
208. “lord D——”: Unidentified.
209. “the duchess D’Aremberg”: Maria Francisca Pignatelli (1696–1766), wife of the Austrian general Leopold Phillip Karl Joseph (1690–1754), duke of Arenberg, who played a significant role in several battles of the War of the Austrian Succession. His house was frequented by Voltaire and Rousseau (Neue deutsche Biographie, 1:343).
210. “lord G——”: According to Herbert (370) and accepted by Clifford (800), probably John Carteret, Earl of Granville (1690–1763), who was abroad with George II as his secretary of state. At the time that the events transpired, however, Granville was still Lord Carteret, not acquiring the Granville title until October 1744, at the death of his mother. Carteret, who served as lord lieutenant of Ireland from 1724 to 1730, became a friend of Jonathan Swift, who wrote A Vindication of His Excellence John, Lord Carteret in 1730, praising Carteret for, among other gifts, having “carried away more Greek, Latin, and philosophy, than properly became a person of his rank” from his time at Christ Church College, Oxford. Carteret was a major figure in English political life of the mid-eighteenth century, though his influence declined after he resigned his place as secretary of state in 1744. In 1751 he was appointed lord president of the council, a post he held until his death in 1763 (ODNB).
211. “go to service”: To work as a servant.
212. “Valenciennes”: Town in northern France 57 miles from Brussels and about 130 from Paris, according to Nugent, who also notes that the journey to Paris by stagecoach took five days in summer and five and a half in winter (1:235, 240–41).
213. “intendants”: See chap. 44, n. 3.
214. “Lisle”: See chap. 45, n. 14.
215. “Sangrado”: A quack physician in Le Sage’s Gil Blas, described as “a tall, meager, pale man, who had kept the shears of Clotho employed forty years at least.” When called in to treat Gil Blas’s master, Sangrado orders “frequent and copious evacuations” of blood (66–67).
216. “commenced … separation”: Reported in Gentleman’s Magazine 13 as occurring on Monday, 28 November 1743: “The Lady V——exhibited in the King’s Bench, Articles of the Peace against her Husband for ill Usage” (612); and in 104 Eng. Rep. 334: “Lady Vane exhibited articles of the peace against her husband the Lord Vane propter sævitiam…. These articles were exhibited in Court the last day of Michaelmas term, 1743.” This was not technically a new suit for separation but rather an appeal to the court to enforce an agreement reached between Lord and Lady Vane in 1737.
217. “my suit had been successful”: The English Reports state that Lord Vane came to court during Hilary term, which ran from 23 January to 12 February, to have the suit dismissed. The court found the following: “That Lord and Lady Vane were under an agreement to live separate; that he seized her by force, and confined her 11 days; that he had threatened to seize her again, and ordered her to be brought home dead or alive; it doth appear upon the whole that she had a reasonable foundation to require sureties of the peace against him.” Lord Vane’s bond was £1,000 (104 Eng. Rep. 335). See n. 97, above.
218. “Kensington”: At this time, a semirural suburb of London, site of Kensington Gardens and Palace, the latter established by William III and enlarged by subsequent monarchs. Because of its natural chalybeate spring in the Gravel Pits and its clean air, Kensington became a resort for the court and many others seeking to escape London’s rather more smoky and unhealthful conditions. See John Bowack, The Antiquities of Middlesex (London, 1705), 20.
219. “Abigail”: See chap. 80, n. 7.
220. “duke of L——”: Leeds. See n. 162, above.
221. “H——n, who was his chief counsellor and back”: Holdman, see n. 144, above. Back is here an obsolete usage with the meaning of a “following; a body of followers or supporters; support, backing” (OED).
222. “country-house”: Fairlawn in Shipborne, Kent. See the following note.
223. “the very house … space of time”: Sometime during 1739, “one wing of the mansion” burned; construction was started on a replacement for the destroyed wing, but it was destroyed by fire before completion sometime in 1742. The wing was ultimately rebuilt by Lord Vane (Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 12 vols. [Canterbury, 1797–1801], 5:24).
224. “Mr. Bal——”: Unidentified.
225. “Dr. S——and his lady”: If Judd Kline is correct that Lady Vane’s doctor was Peter Shaw (see n. 137, above), then his wife was “Frances, the daughter of John Hyde, esq., of Quorndon, co. Leicester” (William Munk, Roll of the Royal College of Physicians, 2nd ed., 3 vols. [London: The College, 1878], 2:191).
226. “Tunbridge”: See chap. 73, n. 2.
227. “Bond-street”: A fashionable street running between Piccadilly and Oxford Street. In the early eighteenth century, Old Bond Street was home to the 1st Duke of St. Albans (d. 1726) and the Countess of Macclesfield (d. 1753). Both streets together became known as the “resort of the fashionable lounger” (Wheatley, 1:218–19).
228. “Heydigger”: See chap. 82, n. 1. The well-known Swiss impresario, credited with the introduction of Italian opera starting around 1707 and the promotion of masquerades in London from about 1715 to 1743. His ugliness was proverbial. Pope mentions him in The Dunciad when he describes Dulness’s bird as “a monster of a fowl,/Something betwixt a Heideggre and owl” (1.289–90); Henry Fielding portrayed him as Count Ugly in The Author’s Farce (1734); and Mary Granville called him “the most ugly man that ever was formed” (The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, ed. Lady Llanover, 3 vols. [London: Richard Bentley, 1861], 1:6).
229. “I still hesitated between staying and going”: Fanny Russell (1700–1775) wrote to her brother Lt. Col. Charles Russell on 27 August 1744: “Lord and Lady Vane keep mighty well still, but ’tis not supposed she will stay long with him” (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley, 338; Clifford, 801).
230. “Sackville-street”: Between Piccadilly and Vigo Lane, it was “said to be the longest street in London of any consequence without a turning out of it on either side” (Wheatley, 3:197).
231. “Brook-street”: Upper Brook Street and Lower Brook Street extend from Hyde Park to Hanover Square. Among its inhabitants were George Frideric Handel and Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany (Wheatley, 1:283).
232. “new steward”: Unidentified. See n. 236, below.
233. “all imaginable tenderness and care”: Lady Vane’s description of her husband’s treatment is also mentioned in the English Reports for 1747: “They cohabited again in 1744, and he behaved very tenderly and went to Bath with her” (The King v. Lord Vane, 96 Eng. Rep. 9).
234. “death of Mr. B——”: Henry Berkeley was killed at the battle of Fontenoy on 11 May 1745. See Gentleman’s Magazine 15 (May 1745): 276; Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 11 May 1745 OS, in Walpole, 19:43; and n. 133, above.
235. “cancelling a deed … I was intitled”: Although the details given by Lady Vane are not entirely clear, she appears to refer to a settlement that was reached with Lord Vane in 1737 as a result of her suing him for separation in the ecclesiastical court on grounds of cruelty. See n. 110, above.
236. “Mr. G——”: Unidentified, but the context suggests Lord Vane’s new steward. See n. 232, above.
237. “saluted”: Kissed.
238. “Park-street”: Between Hyde Park and Grosvenor Square, running from Oxford Street to South Street (Wheatley, 3:35).
239. “chariot”: See chap. 29, n. 5.
240. “house in Essex”: The English Reports specifies the location, but it puts Lady Vane there at the end of 1744: “In December [1744] she eloped again, grew very expensive, and kept bad company in Fernhall at Essex” (The King v. Lord Vane, 96 Eng. Rep. 9). If the date in the report is accurate, Lady Vane may have been moving between Essex and London during the next two years without noting it in her memoirs.
241. “in the morning appeared … several domesticks armed”: Once again, the English Reports provides the date and corroborating details: “In August 1746, he came there [Essex] with two persons, armed only as travellers; got into the house, and endeavoured to persuade her to return to him, but to no purpose. She got away by stratagem, and locked him in” (96 Eng. Rep. 9). Since Lady Vane reports that her removal to the country occurred in “summer,” the August date in the English Reports would appear to be accurate.
242. “I was apprized … approach”: “In September, he came and took forcible possession of the house. She moved for an information for this breach of the peace, contrary to the articles of 1737” (96 Eng. Rep. 9). Information is defined in the OED as follows: “A complaint or charge against a person lodged with or presented to a court or magistrate, in order to the institution of criminal proceedings without formal indictment.” The report suggests that the information or suit happened after this event, but Lady Vane’s account—“waiting with resignation for the issue of my law-suit”—suggests that it happened prior to it.
243. “my very good friend Mr. G——”: Unidentified, but not to be confused with Lord Vane’s “new steward,” who is also referred to as Mr. G——. See nn. 232 and 236, above.
244. “moveables”: Personal property (capable of being moved) as opposed to real property or an estate.
245. “bodkin”: A pinlike instrument, often used by women to put up their hair. Both the bodkin and the tinder-box are appropriate “domestic” weapons for dealing with Lady Vane’s “little gentleman.”
246. “Mrs. C——”: Unidentified.
247. “Bagshot”: A heath in the county of Surrey known for its sandy soil and described by J. M. Beattie as “especially notorious as a favourite haunt of highwaymen” because of the “long, lonely stretch of road that ran over that sandy and virtually deserted corner of the county” (Crime and the Courts, 156).
248. “foot-pad”: “A highwayman that robs on foot, not on horseback” (Johnson).
249. “Mrs. S——r”: Unidentified.
250. “lord D——, a nobleman who is now dead”: Unidentified.
251. “issue of my suit”: Lady Vane’s “information” against her husband, for breach of the peace in invading and occupying her household in Essex, if indeed this is the suit that she refers to here, was denied during Easter term, 1747. The court refused to rule on the validity of the clause in the 1737 settlement, which gave Lady Vane permission “to go where, and when, and live with whom she pleased,” calling it “strange” and refusing to “determine its validity.” The court also found that “if the articles are valid, there is proper remedy by civil action” (96 Eng. Rep. 9).
252. “Suffolk-street”: Parallel to Haymarket and perpendicular to Pall Mall, known as a residence for foreigners during this period (Wheatley, 3:331).
253. “Conduit-street”: Between Bond and Swallow (now Regent) Streets, it “was completed in 1713, and so called from a conduit of sweet water in Conduit Mead,” a nearby field (Wheat-ley, 1:450).
254. “lord ——”: Identified by Herbert as Fortescue (377). See n. 159, above.
255. “like Falstaff in the play”: In recounting to Prince Hal and Poins how he has come to lose money he has stolen, Falstaff inflates the number of thieves he has fought off, not knowing that Prince Hal and Poins were those very thieves in disguise. See 1 Henry IV, 2.4.156–283.
256. “duke of N——”: Newcastle. See n. 205, above.
257. “Windsor”: In Berkshire, approximately twenty-one miles west of modern-day London, and home to the ancient royal castle, primary residence of the British monarchy since the time of William the Conqueror.
258. “Chelsea”: Now a district of London on the north bank of the Thames. In the eighteenth century it was home to Ranelagh, Don Saltero’s Coffee House, and Smollett himself, who lived with his family at Monmouth House on Lawrence Street. The Swedish botanist and traveler Pehr (Peter) Kalm visited Chelsea in spring 1748, around the time of these events in the “Memoirs.” Kalm called Chelsea “a little suburb or village…. The place resembles a town, has a church, beautiful streets, well-built and handsome houses all of brick, three or four stories high” (Kalm’s Account of His Visit to England, trans. Joseph Lucas [London: Macmillan, 1892], 96).
259. “the war”: The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), an eight-year conflict involving most of western Europe. Prussia, France, and Spain were pitted against Austria, Britain, and the Low Countries. The war ended with the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.
260. “L——”: Perhaps Leeds (see n. 162, above), though Lady Vane has previously always referred to him as the duke of L——. Neither Herbert nor Clifford supplies an identification.
261. “lord B——”: Berkeley. See n. 122, above.
262. “King of P——’s minister”: Unidentified. The king mentioned could be Frederick of Prussia or Augustus III of Poland. Neither Herbert nor Clifford supplies an identification.
263. “Antwerp”: See chap. 64, n. 1.
264. “Mechlin”: See chap. 67, n. 1.
265. “hoops”: From the sixteenth century, women extended and shaped their petticoats with whalebone stays. The Connoisseur for 3 October 1754 notes, somewhat archly, that the hoop “at present … is nearly of an oval form, and scarce measures from end to end above twice the length of the wearer” (3; also quoted in the OED).
266. “a droll”: “A funny or waggish fellow; a merry-andrew, buffoon, jester, humorist” (OED).
267. “un vieux debauché”: An old rake.
268. “trumpet”: Trumpeter, sent as a messenger.
269. “public Voiture”: Here, the public stagecoach; but the word, from the French, was a generic term for any form of conveyance (OED).
270. “post-chaise”: See chap. 37, n. 2.
271. “I never had any taste for foreigners”: Apparently a well-known boast of Lady Vane’s. See Lady Mary’s comments to Lady Pomfret in 1739, n. 132, above.
272. “neat sum”: An “exact, precise” amount (OED).
273. “my benefactor lord ——”: Fortescue, according to Herbert (389). See n. 159, above.
274. “a young Englishman of immense fortune”: Unidentified.
275. “being interested in my love”: That is, with a mercenary motive as the source of her feelings for this young Englishman.
276. “incog”: Incognito.
277. “collier”: “A ship engaged in the carriage of coal” (OED).
278. “Hay-market”: See chap. 81, n. 1.
279. “Dresden ruffles”: “A strip of lace or other fine material, gathered on one edge and used as an ornamental frill on a garment, esp. at the wrist” (OED). By the middle of the eighteenth century, Dresden lace was much in demand. See Bury Palliser, A History of Lace (London: Sampson Low, 1865), 239–40.
280. “This declaration … injustice to me”: Clifford has noted that “Leaf L12 in vol. 3 of the first edition was a cancel. Instead of [this sentence] the original ran: ‘This declaration was a mystery at that time, but is now explained; for I have been credibly informed, and think his conduct since that time has plainly demonstrated, that he was inadvertently drawn into a promise of marriage, from which his honour would not allow him to recede. Upon that supposition, I heartily acquit him of all injustice to me’” (801). See the historical collation, 3.446.11–13.
281. “corresponded with other women”: Conveying the meaning, now obsolete, of having sexual intercourse (OED).
282. “Leicester-Fields”: Built c. 1635 and later known as Leicester Square. It was considered a handsome place with fine large houses and was known as a favorite habitation of artists, among whom was William Hogarth, who moved to a house on the east side of the square in 1733 and was still resident there when Peregrine Pickle was published (Wheatley, 2:382–83).
283. “lord B——”: Berkeley. See n. 122, above.
284. “earls of B——and C——, and Mr. H——V——”: Herbert speculates that these persons are William Pulteney (1684–1764), Earl of Bath; Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694–1773), 4th Earl of Chesterfield; and Henry Vane (1705?–58), who became Earl of Darlington in 1754 (Herbert, 384; see n. 163, above). The three men were part of the political opposition to Walpole’s government in the 1730s and early 1740s.
285. “duke of D——’s”: Clifford accepts Herbert’s speculation that this is Lionel Cranfield Sack-ville (1688–1765), 1st Duke of Dorset and lord lieutenant of Ireland from 1730 to 1737 and 1750 to 1755 (Herbert, 384; Clifford, 801).
286. “Kentish smugglers”: Organized gangs of smugglers were common in southeast England by midcentury. There is some evidence that smuggling gangs, led by local Tory or Roman Catholic landowning families, were active in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Land-smuggling gangs, who operated with French recruiters for the Pretender’s cause, collaborated with the smugglers who plied the coastal trade. The smugglers transported people and letters back and forth across the channel. See Paul Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise: Smuggling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in Southeast England, 1690–1760,” Journal of British Studies 30, no. 2 (1991): 152–54, 167–68.
287. “that act of parliament … his debts”: Corroborated in Journals of the House of Lords (1746–52), 26 May 1749, “An Act for raising Money upon the settled Estate of William Lord Viscount Vane for the Payment of his Debts” (27:351).
288. “annuity, which she had sold”: The maid had sold the rights to the annual payment for a lump sum, in ready cash, which she subsequently exhausted.
289. “lord R——B——”: Robert Bertie. See n. 170, above.
290. “’Tis true, no meaning puzzles more than wit.’” Paraphrasing Pope’s Epistle to a Lady (1735): “For true No-meaning puzzles more than wit” (line 114).