1750–1768
‘The wife for you is Lady Anne Lindsay,’ Hester Thrale informed a wealthy member of her literary and intellectual circle in Streatham in 1779. ‘She has birth, wit and beauty, she has no fortune and she’d readily accept you; and she has such a spirit that she’d animate you, I warrant you!’ Dr Johnson’s friend was not the first to see Lady Anne’s marriageable qualities, nor the first to note her aptitude for handling spendthrifts. ‘O, she would trim you well!’ Mrs Thrale told William Seward. ‘She’d take all the care of the money affairs, and allow you out of them eighteen pence a week. That’s the wife for you!’
Attempts to match Anne – witnessed in this instance by the novelist Fanny Burney – reached a new pitch that year and crossed the spectrum of London society.1 Similar confidence was being expressed by relatives of the dissolute Viscount Wentworth who had identified her as his saviour. Meanwhile a wild set of aristocratic mistresses offered other candidates for her hand in the belief that she had ‘kept her virginity rather too long’.2 What they shared, both prim bluestockings and racy courtesans, was a conviction that this clever and spirited woman would make an excellent wife. She was, to top it all, brilliant in company.
Anne Lindsay may have been born for companionship. She certainly had it thrust upon her. As the eldest child fathered by an earl in his sixtieth year, she began life at the dark old hall of Balcarres on the coast of eastern Fife in virtual solitude. The house soon turned into a nursery of mayhem; Anne was followed by ten more children, born at home within fourteen years of one another into an intensely socialised form of isolation – almost, as she observed, like castaways. Balcarres was distant enough from any other world to require a household of governesses, scholars, servants and hangers-on; and raised high above the Firth of Forth, it was surrounded on one side by trees and presented on the other with the sea. ‘If we had supposed ourselves to be islanders we should not have been much mistaken,’ Anne wrote. ‘We were completely secluded.’ There was, however, more than a hint of ambivalence in her memories of the place. ‘Though our prison was a cheerful one, yet still it was a prison.’3
She could recall, as if it were an idyll, gambols with siblings and barking dogs across Balcarres. Field ran down to coast in what was, in part, an Eden. Among the landscapes of Scotland, the wildernesses and turbulence of highlands and glens, this low green aspect of Fife has a pure loveliness and cultivable soil that had attracted a branch of one of the country’s oldest clans. John Lindsay, Lord Menmuir, acquired some 800 acres here in the 1580s and ‘built a house to the skies’. More than 150 years on, his descendants – these young inhabitants – were still paddling in muddy pools, rambling across the estate and looking out to Bass Rock, which Anne saw rising from the sea ‘like a great whale’.4
Yet this same gentle pastoral had a more forbidding aspect. The house resembled a bastion, standing high on the estate and rising over four levels in austere, castle-like tiers to towers like turrets with croaking rooks. Balcarres had been at the heart of a century of conflict. Alexander Lindsay, the First Earl of Balcarres, served as a royalist officer during the Civil War and died in exile. Colin Lindsay, the Third Earl, was imprisoned for his Jacobite sympathies before joining the 1715 rebellion against the Hanoverian monarchy; placed under house arrest, he died at Balcarres in 1721.
Insurrection cost the family dear. Scottish aristocrats had always been less affluent than the English among their Palladian mansions, sculpted lawns, artificial lakes, mazes and follies. Balcarres was an austere seat to start with and by the time Anne’s father, James Lindsay, became the fifth of his line, the estate had been reduced to a state of self-sufficiency, its riches the food on his table. The house was bleak, a statue of Venus in a pond an isolated symbol of wealth.
James was a bookish, kindly former army officer who had failed to reach senior rank because of his Stuart sympathies.5 These remained passionate, but at the defining moment of the second Jacobite rebellion in 1745, which broadly divided Scots between the Gaelic-speaking Highland clans and the landed and professional classes of the south, he prudently kept to his library, even after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s forces entered Edinburgh. A solitary man, he seemed likely to end his days a bachelor among the books which, Anne recalled, ‘had made chemists and philosophers of all the moths in the castle’.6 Away from the army, James was content: ‘I dine alone and find the sentiments of the dead much more instructive and entertaining than the fellowship of the living.’7 The Stuarts had been extinguished at Culloden and he was fifty-nine when he visited the spa town of Moffat and met Anne Dalrymple, aged twenty-one. Naturally she refused his proposal, for the Dalrymples were a distinguished family, her father a knight, and even in those times a marriage between a man and a woman separated by almost forty years was a curiosity. Just such a ceremony nevertheless took place a few months later at Balcarres; for when Miss Dalrymple’s father had died soon after their meeting and the earl offered to settle half his estate on her, she was pressed by her brothers to accept. The young bride came to Balcarres burdened with resentment.8
On the new Lady Balcarres falling pregnant expectations were raised of a first-born male heir who, according to prophetic oracles, would help to restore the Stuarts, so the birth of Anne Lindsay two weeks before Christmas in 1750 came as a profound disappointment. Lady Balcarres was with child again within four months, this time a boy, Alexander. A second daughter, Margaret, followed a year later. Nothing loath, the earl continued to father offspring on an almost annual basis. By the time the last was born, he was seventy-three and he had a complement of eleven: eight boys and three girls.
Their isolation was relative. As the crow flies, the city of Edinburgh lay little more than 20 miles across the Firth of Forth, although it was almost twice that by road and ferry and the obstacles of high winds and contrary tides ensured journeys were occasional. Arising from this seclusion, however, and enforcing it, was what Anne called ‘a sort of creed in our family . . . that it was impossible anyone at Balcarres could wish to be anywhere else’.9
Her own feelings about home were always more ambivalent. This had nothing to do with the frugality of their existence, for while the children of English lords rode horses on their family estates, Anne Lindsay would laugh at the memory of how she used to dig up turnips and jog about on the back of a pig. These rustic early years were typical enough among landowning Scottish families and it was combined at Balcarres with an easy familiarity towards common folk, such as the shepherd Robin Grey. On Sunday they would all, family and servants, walk two miles to church ‘and listen with reverence to all we understood, and with smiles to the horrid discords with which a Presbyterian congregation assails the ears’.10
Yet although Anne grew up without the usual affectations of class, she bore another burden. This arose partly from being the eldest, a girl among a rabble of boys, a thoughtful, sensitive child and, being clumsy too, conspicuous in any hunt for wrongdoers. In an ordinary home this would have mattered less. But with the austerity of Balcarres came a disciplinary regime that was nothing short of severe.
‘Had my mother been married to a man of her own time of life . . . I am convinced she would not only have been a more complying wife but a tenderer mother,’ Anne recalled. As it was, harnessed to the sixty-year-old earl when their first child was born, and sustained in an almost constant state of pregnancy, Lady Balcarres vented her discontent as much on her growing brood as on her husband. This was a subject which Anne wrote about with some guilt, consoling herself with excuses for her mother’s coldness and emphasising her rectitude and honesty. The fact remained that Lady Balcarres ‘was not naturally fond of children – they annoyed her’. She slapped them freely and frequently in order, so she said, ‘to fit us for the hardships of life’, but in reality, Anne believed, out of bitterness.11
Adding to the Gothic aspect of Balcarres was her mother’s entourage. While the earl lived among his books, his wife surrounded herself with female companions who competed for her favour, including her cousins, the Miss Keiths, a trio of sour spinsters who visited often. The dark, central figure in a gallery of curiosities, however, was Henrietta Cumming, small, eccentric and hysterical, with a fondness for laudanum.
Henrietta came to Balcarres in her mid-twenties as governess to the Lindsay girls, having passed herself off as an ill-fated gentlewoman descended from a Highland chief and cited by Edinburgh society as a creature of exalted mind. In reality she was modestly educated but bountifully endowed with cunning. She refused quarters below stairs by staging a hunger strike, then settled in the heart of the family where she nestled like a viper.
Fantastic in her dress, and naïve in her manners, her countenance was pretty, her shape neat and nice; but in that casket was lodged more than Pandora’s Box contained – of sorrows and of ills to demolish mankind.12
Henrietta’s rival for Lady Balcarres’s favour and the girls’ affection was another member of the household, Sophy Johnston, the natural child of a debauched local laird. Sophy, as Anne observed, was a woman of Amazonian stature. ‘Nature seemed to have hesitated to the last whether to make her a boy or a girl . . . She worked well in iron, could shoe a horse quicker than the smith, made excellent trunks, played well on the fiddle, sung a man’s song in a bass voice, and was by many people suspected of being one.’13
The tensions within this bizarre circle were felt particularly by Anne, aged about ten when Henrietta was appointed to cultivate the sisters’ manners, morals and accomplishments. Henrietta noted early on that if Lady Balcarres showed any indulgence it was for Margaret; and because she regarded Sophy as an enemy, and saw she had a partiality for Anne, she turned against the older girl with an ‘aversion which met me in every turn of my progress thro’ the early stages of life’.14
It became Anne’s way to make light of her childhood. She could write amusingly of Balcarres as:
A little Bastille, in every closet of which was to be found a culprit. Some were sobbing and repeating verbs, others eating their bread and water, some preparing themselves to be whipped, and here and there a fat little Cupid who having been flogged was enjoying a most enviable nap.15
But there was real darkness too. With ‘everything done by authority and by correction’ the displeasure was constant, the spankings were severe.16 Anne was often left confused and frightened. Why could her mother not be kind like Sophy? As the eldest, she felt exposed. Once Henrietta’s malice was brought to bear she became even more vulnerable as, for reasons that defied her understanding, the governess set out to turn others against her. Having established what Anne perceived as ‘an ascendancy over the mind of Lady Balcarres’, Henrietta became increasingly hostile until it became not so much common ill will but ‘the malediction of an evil genius’.17
Rarely did Anne abandon the wit and irony of the memoirs written late in her life, so it is evident the scars from Henrietta’s spitefulness and the lack of love from her mother ran deep. Reflecting then with horror on the damage done by severity to children ‘for their good’ and the depressing effect this could have in adulthood, she became an advocate for the French writer and educationalist whose pioneering ideas on gentler child-raising had won approval in Britain: ‘Long live Madame de Genlis if she can make youth happier and better without the birch!’18 Almost the first lesson Anne drew from her own childhood was a ‘great dislike of making others unhappy’ which, as she said, was a negative virtue. But it went deeper than that. Behind what became a constant desire to please lay a real dread of disapproval, of being misunderstood. The girl with the brightest smile was always on a quest for affection. Balcarres she called, only half in jest, ‘the Black Broth of Sparta, seclusion and correction’.19
Like many an unhappy child, she took refuge in books. And here at least the dark broth contained light, for the library at Balcarres was a treasure trove: the basis for what became the Bibliotheca Lindesiana, one of Britain’s great literary collections, was started by the Lindsay family in the seventeenth century and contained poetry and philosophy, Classics and history, along with theological works.20 Words became the wisdom, the comfort, of Anne’s lifetime; and it may be concluded, too, that in these early years they fed her with ideas, strong beliefs and even notions of romantic love.
There was no formal education system for the earl’s vast brood. In theory the pupils were formed in two age divisions, the first composed of Anne, Alexander, Margaret, Robert and Colin, the second – arising from a two-year gap when the countess failed to produce a single child – consisting of James, William, Charles, John, Elizabeth and Hugh. In reality the boys had an occasional male tutor, Mr Small, while the girls were given a haphazard blend of lessons from Henrietta and Sophy. As one of the family recalled, young women were taught no language besides English, and in addition to that only a little arithmetic and cookery.
But Lady Anne and Lady Margaret were not to be so satisfied; they studied and read together, working out instructions for themselves; and their example was followed in time by the third sister. This struggle of the intellect against difficulties drew forth the energies of the three sisters.21
Anne’s first surviving literary effort, from her twelfth year, a poem entitled and dedicated To My Pocket Book, is revealing of the private, confessional world of words which became her retreat.
Of all the friends that can be named,
For Secrecy and Prudence famed,
I hear thou art the very best,
For in thy Breast can secrets rest,
Thy chattering tongue will neer reveal,
What we require thee to conceal.22
The black broth had other warming elements too, notably the old earl himself who provided some of the affection lacking in his wife. When he thought her treatment of the children too severe, the former army officer would remonstrate: ‘Odsfish, Madam! You will break the spirits of my young troops. I will not have it so.’23
Along with fondness came the intelligence of an exceptionally well-read man. Anne especially enjoyed his company in the library where he would reach down a favourite volume, declaring: ‘You must have books.’ James Lindsay’s learning – and his collection of rarities – brought guests of real eminence to Balcarres, including a giant of Scottish letters, the philosopher and historian David Hume, and Alison Cockburn, writer, literary hostess and Edinburgh’s ‘romantic old lady of genius’.24 Anne’s early reading often consisted of verse. In time she moved on to Plutarch’s Lives and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and thanks to Rollin’s multivolume Ancient History ‘became acquainted with the exact height of the pyramids and how to make a mummy’. The earl encouraged a love of music too and as Anne and Margaret were taught the keyboard and singing by Sophy, he would ask them to perform for him, savouring the ‘soft sownds from a pair of fine lips, the sweetest of all musick’.25 As she told her beloved nephew James many years later, if a single source can be identified for fostering the liberal, questing mind of the woman who became Lady Anne Lindsay, it was her elderly father.
On a more pragmatic level, he exerted political influence – guiding his ‘troops’ away from the Jacobite sympathies that had deranged the clan’s fortunes, and urging reconciliation in the light of the prosperity that Scots in the Lowlands, mainly the urbanised Edinburgh–Glasgow region, were starting to enjoy under a new king, George III. ‘You my children are born after the Union,’ the earl declared. ‘Scotland is no more, and likely never to revive.’26
But the principal comfort of Anne’s childhood, the companion with whom she shared a bedroom at the top of a dark, spiralling stone staircase, who would grow into the soulmate of her adult years until family and society alike saw them as virtually indivisible, was her sister Margaret.
In a house teeming with male siblings it was natural that two girls should have formed a particular bond. Margaret, roughly two years her junior, was the prettier and more favoured by her family. In later years Anne was so overwhelmed by recollection of their shared lives she could scarcely comprehend how this tragic figure could have loved her so deeply, ‘with a tenderness which no arts of Henrietta could undermine, or partiality of Sophy destroy, so foreign was discord or jealousy to our united hearts’.27 Margaret she declared to be her superior in almost every way, from beauty to enlightenment. So deep was the love between them that Anne felt compelled to admit the strains, the quarrels and the guilt that went with it.
Anne was the principal target for feminine vindictiveness at Balcarres; Margaret was the favourite. Yet Margaret had ‘a tendency to self-distrust’, and deferred instinctively to her elder sister whom she secretly envied.28 Anne believed it was ‘as if she left me, whom she loved, to think feel and act for her’.
Nature had given her a sensibility so acute to ridicule or blame that it was difficult to find words so tender as not to hurt her feelings or alarm her pride – she needed my cheerful careless view of things, the hope and hilarity of my self-content to reassure her respecting herself.29
The need, in fact, was mutual. Insecurities vanished when they were with one another. They shared gaiety and what Anne attributed to Margaret as ‘the brilliancy of harmless wit’. During the day they sang, painted and read together, and when they retreated to their bedroom at night they performed together. ‘By the embers of a fire we sat talking, imagining and laughing, till we could laugh no more. How often have we not made a theatre of our apartment . . . There we acted plays, farces and harlequin entertainments till we almost brought down the old house about our ears.’30
Affection for their swarm of brothers was naturally diffused. Alexander, reserved and seemingly burdened by his birthright, became a distant figure quite early on. Anne was closest to the next two boys, of whom she recalled:
Robert bought a knife for sixpence, used it for three months and sold it to Colin for a shilling. Colin discovered this and complained in terms so judicious that the whole family pronounced Robert must be a merchant and Colin my Lord Chancellor. Robert was forthwith destined to go to India as a writer and Colin was bred to the bar.31
In fact, the Lindsay brothers might have served as standard-bearers for that generation of Scots who carried the Union flag across the globe and, for good and bad, shaped Britain’s empire. The saga of the laird’s sons, forced by primogeniture to leave the land and make their way through opportunities created abroad by English mercantile interests, is intrinsic to Scottish history and it could have been written with the Lindsays in mind.32 Of the eight boys, only the eldest could inherit the title and estate. Four would enter the army, two went to sea and one joined the East India Company. Just one entered the Church. Among the earl’s last productions was a third daughter, Elizabeth, thirteen years Anne’s junior – too young to have fully joined her sisters’ indivisible circle.
Their first insights into a world beyond Balcarres began with visits to Edinburgh. Anne had just entered her teens when she and Margaret spent six months with their maternal grandmother, Lady Dalrymple, a kinder soul than her daughter, who provided a beacon of warmth. ‘She loved me,’ Anne recalled. ‘I was her god-daughter and her sworn friend.’ Moreover, the old lady held court in the quiet, antique corner of Hyndford’s Close, described by Sir Walter Scott as a retreat where ‘worth and talent and elegance were often nestled’. Along with receiving dancing lessons, the girls were taught the forte-piano and harmony by an Italian exile named Pignatelli, reputed to have murdered a Venetian noble who had seduced his wife.
By the time of their next visit Anne was a sparkling fifteen-year-old and starting to engage with the kind of circle that would become her natural milieu. Intellectuals gathered at Lady Dalrymple’s table for what were called ‘Dinners of the Eaterati’ by one of their number who promptly collapsed at his own wit. David Hume was counted among the guests here too. Less renowned but a great favourite for his enquiring intelligence and bonhomie was Sir Augustus Oughton. Anne thrived in this good humoured environment, to which she and Margaret were encouraged to contribute.
On one occasion Hume, recalling previous meetings at Balcarres and Edinburgh, reminded Anne of a particular conversation.
‘Do you remember all this, my little woman?’
‘I was too young to think of it at the time.’
‘How’s this? Have not you and I grown up together?’
I looked surprised. ‘Yes,’ added he, ‘you have grown tall and I have grown broad.’33
Behind such inconsequential banter lay a significant fact. Anne spent her formative years in one of the cleverest places in the world. The intellectual blossoming of Scotland’s Enlightenment produced philosophers, economists, writers, scientists and lawyers of a brilliance out of all proportion to the size of the population. Men like Hume and Lord Monboddo, a jurist and philosopher in whose company she also learned to sharpen her wits, were leading figures in a movement which had far greater impact on the immediate environment than its equivalent elsewhere in Britain; Adam Smith, the moral philosopher and economist, seems to have been one of the few she did not meet until she was in her twenties, after publication of his landmark study, The Wealth of Nations. The stimulating effect such men had on this teenage girl is hard to exaggerate, especially as they had encouraged her to express herself. The Scottish Enlightenment was advanced in other ways, ascribing to women a progressive role as agents of social change; the literary hostess, Alison Cockburn, another familiar from Balcarres, persuaded Hume to offer Jean-Jacques Rousseau a refuge from his European persecutors and would be an early admirer of Anne’s talents. (The young Walter Scott was among Mrs Cockburn’s later protégés.34) That is not to say early feminism was in any way general; Anne would suffer deeply from conventional opinion in Edinburgh.
One man on the fringe of this intellectual circle had a more sinister aspect, and pernicious influence. William ‘Sheriff’ Cross, as he was known by the family who regarded him as an old friend, was a poet and traveller, and – although in his fifties with an ill-fitting bushy wig – a roué. Cross insinuated himself with the Lindsay girls and became infatuated with Anne. ‘Though not an absolute Beauty, you are very handsome,’ he wrote, ‘and you know well how to give that handsomeness all its effect.’35 Her literary interest provided the necessary connection: he bombarded her with letters and Classical allusions, to Horace and Euclid, and she was flattered.
But she was also repelled. There were ‘the unholy glances that his wanton little eye shot from under the shade of his wig’ which ‘too much resembled the Anacreon of antient [sic] times; they inspired me even then with a Frisson I could not account for.’36 From her confusion, and aspects of their correspondence, it is evident that in their early teens both girls were molested by Cross. Anne came close to spelling it out in her memoirs:
He delighted in Margaret’s company and in mine, and always took care to pay his visits when our Grandmother was from home . . . He got acquainted with the extent of our abilities and the force of our arms from romping and reasoning with us.37
Conflict between the pleasure of his intellectual attention and revulsion at its physical aspect added to her ambivalence. ‘I loved Sheriff Cross when he was absent, but I hated him when he was present.’ Influential as he was within the family, there would have been no question of challenging him openly, and in an age when teenage girls were married off to older men as a matter of course, his ‘romping’ would have attracted less revulsion than it does in ours.
That Cross had a significant influence on Anne’s development is clear. Many years after his death she prefaced her memoirs with a series of admonitions, citing Cross as the author. The first, spelling out what she had clearly come to recognise as her own greatest weakness, went: ‘To the Young: Beware of Indecision . . . It neutralises every virtue.’
Another was a virtual confession by Cross of his own sin. ‘To the Mature: Beware of retaining for the education of youth persons of eccentric character . . . They are unsafe. The world is full of coal-pits and wastes into which the young colts and fillies tumble and are lost.’38
Anne continued to correspond with Cross until his death, mostly without rancour but also with a forthrightness rare in her – as if knowledge of his flaws dispelled her usual need to please – and in one instance with venom; her letter to him does not survive but his reply makes this clear: ‘You say you hate me sometimes, and I can partly guess at the reason but I defy you to hate me, and I laugh at the menace for I love you.’39
The effect on Anne of what must appear in today’s light as sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend is a matter of speculation. She did, however, show certain symptoms: the blend of reverence and resentment towards Cross, and a confusion over how to respond to men. The wariness that she would demonstrate during many courtships, to the point of appearing incapable of commitment, was sustained by a belief in true love and a spirit of independence. But it appears to have had two catalysts. Observing her mother’s bitterness at being married off to a titled old man was one. Damage from Cross’s twisted love may have been another.
*
Soon after receiving what Lady Balcarres called ‘the Finishing Stroke’ of their Edinburgh education, both girls came down with measles – so seriously in Anne’s case that her life hung in the balance for a week. Even then it appeared that the results might leave her face disfigured. Looking at herself in a mirror she thought: ‘As on Belshazzar’s wall, so a finger on my cheek proclaimed “Anne thou shall’t never be married” and that no man of delicacy or pride would have me.’40
That was a fate Lady Balcarres had resolved should not befall her girls. As the earl grew frail, keeping to his library in a gown and slippers – with holes slashed in the toes to relieve his gout – the financial infirmity of his estate became equally apparent, and whatever his wife lacked in warmth she was handsomely endowed with flinty resolve. Her sons were being prepared for military careers. Her daughters, at least the two eldest, had to deploy their rank and beauty to save Balcarres by marrying fortunes.
The first attempt at matchmaking occurred in Anne’s seventeenth year with the proposal from a retired merchant by the name of Alexander, relayed from Edinburgh by Anne’s old bête noire Henrietta Cumming. Although almost fifty and ugly with it, Alexander had a fabulous income of around £4,000 a year.
‘You must be sensible that you are not very young,’ Lady Balcarres said in relating his offer.
You are past 16 and, everyone must allow, a woman to all intents and purposes. You also have to consider very calmly whether you would be contented to find yourself at 50 an old maid like Sophy Johnston, your old friends dead, on a scanty income, which would scarcely afford you a bone of mutton and potatoes.41
Marrying Mr Alexander, on the other hand, would leave her comfortable and respected – and provide ‘the support of your brothers and sisters in case of your father’s death’.
Anne’s response was clear and direct. She would not accept Mr Alexander, she said, having heard that he was ‘frequently deranged in his intellects’. At this point Lady Balcarres volunteered that she had heard similar reports. Rather more to her credit, she accepted Anne’s decision and pressed the matter no further.42 Henrietta’s acid comment was that it required a mind of a certain kind to appreciate Mr Alexander’s true worth, and she could not resist expressing a hope that Anne would not end up doing worse.
A time of change was at hand. The eldest Lindsay boy, Alexander, had just left for Europe, having entered the army as an ensign. Robert and Colin were sent away to school. The winter of 1767 was approaching when Lady Balcarres, who ‘seemed to grow more bitter and displeased with all we said or did’, announced that Anne and Margaret must prepare themselves for a return to Edinburgh to be presented to society. While staying at Hyndford’s Close, they would rejoin their grandmother’s circle for introduction to potential suitors.
Almost the first young man Anne met appeared an ideal match. Lord Deskford, son of the Earl of Findlater, was tall, stiff and ‘resembled a young Van Dyke lord with a Roman nose’.43 They went to a ball followed by a concert, a breakfast, a dance, a walk and a play, at which point Anne and Lady Balcarres were taken to meet his parents. ‘We want no fortune with Deskford’s wife,’ his father said. ‘Youth and good connections are all we require.’44
Thus were matters neatly poised when a letter arrived from Balcarres, addressed to Anne but meant for both sisters. It was from their father and it had the tone of a valedictory:
My Anne, your father is now no more but the ruin of an old building that never had much beauty in it . . . Men love companions as can help to make them gay and easie. For this end fair Nymphs should provide chains, as well as nets to secure Captives. You must have the Muses as well as the Graces to aid and assist Nature, which has been very good to you.45
There was an exhortation to continue their learning: poetry was cheering; history showed man at his best and his worst; and philosophy would bring consolation should they be condemned to life as old maids. Finally, as if holding up the example of his wife as a warning, he urged that if they did marry they should be amiable to their husbands: ‘It’s the best instrument to have power, as he will have more pleasure in pleasing yow than even himself.’
They hastened back to Balcarres, to find him on his deathbed. ‘Have my girls left any lovers behind them?’ he asked weakly.
Lady Balcarres accepted his end in February 1768 with fortitude. The troops were assembled. ‘We shall all do perfectly well,’ she declared, ‘by making up our minds to what we have to do.’46
The little sea of faces confronted Anne in stark terms with her responsibilities. Six of her siblings had not yet reached the age of ten: her youngest sister Elizabeth was four and Hugh just three. Barely seventeen herself, she would feel a natural fondness towards them all; but her primary role as the eldest child now must be as a provider.