1781–1783
The proposal to elope was subtly couched. As Wentworth explained it, he needed to get away from London – to escape the cronies who had all but gambled away his fortune, and a sister who constantly meddled in his affairs. The idea was that Anne should come with him to Rochester, where his uncle was dean. The hint was that marriage lay at the end of the road. The fact was that to get there they would have to stay at inns along the way, which in the circumstances meant only one thing. Wentworth explained the plan with his usual ‘profusion of tenderness, hesitation and agitation’.1
Margaret joked that a bawdy adventure might be no bad thing, and Anne could get Wentworth to marry by private licence on the road to Rochester. Her own response was that she would go, ‘but not in a manner to degrade him or myself by its indelicacy’.2 There was a coded message here: bachelors like Wentworth might satisfy their desires with mistresses, but they married virgins and Anne insisted that any union must be conducted respectably. The reply amounted to a no.
Wentworth’s younger sister Sophia kept their family informed as his courtship intensified towards the end of 1781. ‘All the town says he & Ly Anne are certainly to be married. He goes everywhere she does – to operas, plays, routs, private partys.’3
All the while another man waited with patient devotion in the background. Anne had known Richard Atkinson for ten years – as a family friend, the rock who had supported Margaret through Fordyce’s disgrace – and, though slow to declare himself, he had made his feelings plain. He once asked for a lock of Anne’s hair which she declined, so it is fair to conclude she had not encouraged him. Eleven years her senior, Atkinson had none of Wentworth’s physical attraction, cutting by his own admission a rough, clumsy figure; but whereas the lord was a foolish boy who had dissipated his entire inheritance, Atkinson had transformed himself into one of the more notable financial figures of the day.
When Anne met him Atkinson was a rising merchant, like Fordyce from an artisan family and self-made but with none of the other man’s braggadocio; and unlike Fordyce he had gone from strength to strength, culminating in the immense fortune he made as the army’s principal contractor during the war in America when he supplied everything from uniforms and horses to rum and provisions. Personal connections as well as his logistical brilliance gained the onetime junior partner in Mures & Atkinson influence in Lord North’s administration. Along with vast amounts of capital and authority, he had estates in Jamaica and fingers in the East India Company pie – all of which suggest a certain ruthlessness. In the labyrinthine intrigues of the Company it was the cunning who prospered and Atkinson was London agent for the corrupt Madras nabob Paul Benfield. As for Jamaica, cultivation was synonymous with slavery. But then trade of any sort was rough while empire was on the march, and when it came to the Lindsay sisters Atkinson was a positive philanthropist.
Anne’s slender means stirred Atkinson’s fatherly interest. He suggested that he might be able to make her small inheritance grow. Surely the amount was scarcely worth his trouble, she replied. ‘We must teach it then to become bigger,’ he insisted. By using some of his own funds and the same kind of insider knowledge of an impending peace that had profited Fordyce, he turned her £300 into £3,475. Anne did not question what she saw as the benefit of friendship and good luck, but was thrilled by the annuity of £200 it produced. ‘This is to be mine?’ she exclaimed. ‘And without robbing you!’4 She felt positively rich.
It would appear to have been gossip about an imminent match between Anne and Wentworth that stirred Atkinson finally to declare his love in a long and oblique letter – it is undated, headed only ‘Sunday 7 o’clock’ but is believed to be from September 1781 – seeking advice on how he might approach the unnamed object of his affection. As he explained it (over many pages and almost 4,000 words) the horrors of the financial crash had demonstrated this lady’s virtues and since then his sole concern had been her welfare. He had known financial tribulations himself but now, with a secure fortune, he wondered whether the friendship between a beautiful young woman and a man of forty-two and in poor health might contain the seeds of mutual affection. He would know ‘by one look of kindness at our first interview’ whether she was about to
extend to me the Golden Sceptre and tranquillise my spirits by that assurance that there is no insurmountable bar to my happiness . . . How many blessings does my heart wish to pour on her!5
Anne’s response to what she called this heart-breaking letter was fundamentally honest: the offer of immense wealth from a man both kind and sickly would have tempted many women, especially one past thirty; but the years had not altered her creed; she did not love Atkinson, so could not accept him. With her usual dread of causing pain, however, her reply was as circuitous as the manoeuvres on a ballroom floor. She alluded to a lover – Wentworth was not mentioned by name – who had professed his devotion and how, despite many obstacles, he still intended to marry her. After pages of agonising, she told Atkinson: ‘I seek in vain for words to please myself, gentle to your feelings, yet conveying no illusion. Explicit, yet consoling.’6 She may have conveyed her meaning, but explicit she never was.
As she often did in reflecting years later on her treatment of the man to whom ‘I owe everything’, Anne combined honesty and guilt with a certain disingenuousness. ‘To have confessed that my sentiments for [Atkinson] were not of a nature to make me happy in marriage would have desolated his honest heart,’ she wrote. Unable to say as much, she had mentioned the possibility of marrying another to discourage ‘a fruitless perseverance’.7 But ultimately Wentworth remained unnamed because ‘he was a man I should have been a little ashamed of confessing I loved to Atkinson’.8
Atkinson, fortunately, was too shrewd not to have seen to the heart of the matter. He replied with pithy insight into her character, notably her aversion to painful truths. ‘You, my friend, turn over the leaf and try to expel the remembrance of what is distressing by an attention to new objects. I never could do this . . . Be the misery what it will, I cannot leave the enemy behind me, but must give battle to my thoughts in the open field . . . My hopes are dead.’9
Rejection also inspired dignity:
I have attempted to show you my whole soul in the most naked sincerity and am incapable of a desire to deceive you . . . I feel I can rejoice in your happiness with another & when the proper time arrives can cordially court his friendship . . . I wish to watch over your welfare as far as my knowledge extends with a kind brother’s care!10
Anne did feel remorse, confiding in a note to herself: ‘To Wentworth I owe nothing but sorrow and disgrace, and yet to him I am attached while Atkinson only wrings my heart.’11 Within weeks she had cause to reflect on this crossroads, amid the scandal that followed.
At Christmas Anne and Margaret were invited to the great Buckinghamshire country house of Lord and Lady Hampden for one of the gatherings beloved of the English nobility – weeks spent in the supposedly harmless pleasures of idling, dining, singing, drinking, bantering and generally entertaining one another. Wentworth was among the guests and a point had been reached when marriage seemed inevitable. His sister Sophia had recently written as much, while citing further evidence of Anne’s habitual hesitation: ‘My Brother wrote to me . . . He is certainly to marry Ly Ann, tho she still denys it to some particulars.’12
A few weeks later, after the party had broken up and returned to London, Sophia had a breathless update for the family. Her account of events on a night in January is confusing, but as she related it, Lord Hampden was going around town telling ‘such a story about my brother and Ly Anne that it is quite shocking’.
It would take up a sheet of paper to tell you the whole of it, but the short of the story is that one day after dinner Ly Anne contrived to stay in the room with my Brother & Mr Hampden after the other ladies had left it. At last it came to their being both on the ground & Mr Hampden roll’d them up in the Carpet, put out the Candles & sat by the fire drinking his wine & in half an hour he heard Ly A say, For shame my Lord, how dare you do so! Upon which Mr Hampden undid the Carpet & they both retired to put their dress to rights.
The next morning my Brother was closeted with Ly Margaret & it is imagined he made some promise.13
The details may have been confusing, the implications were clear, and whatever the version Thomas Hampden himself related, to the mirth of his bibulous friends, it was doubtless far earthier.* He and his wife Catherine combined a love of scandal with mischief-making, and it may be assumed that she – having recently written to Anne, ‘I hope I find you going on in your usual raking way’ – was not silent either about the antics on the carpet.14
All Anne’s anxieties about the power of gossip over reputation returned, and this time there was no refuge. Notoriety had pursued her from Edinburgh to London, and now she had reason to be ashamed. For once she did not leave her own version of the Hampden affair. Keen to set the record straight on so many things, she passed entirely over whether or not – as talk now had it – her virginity had been lost on a drawing-room floor.
Crucially, however, she did not seize the chance, implicit in Wentworth’s pledge to Margaret, of binding him in marriage. This could be put down to her usual wavering, which to some extent it was; but her previous doubts would, in any conventional woman of her time, have been surrendered for respectability. Instead, she explained to a friend in weary tones how she found herself at an impasse with ‘a partiality which might very probably never come to anything, to a person I did not much approve of, but that it barricaded my heart against other impressions.’15
Belatedly, she recognised, too, that she had loved Wentworth not as a man but as a cause – mesmerised by hope in much the same way he and his fellow gamblers were in thrall to the card table. Her need being for approval, she had wanted to prove her goodness could prevail over his weakness. As it was, Wentworth continued to wager nights away with the last vestiges of his fortune.
A few months later he told his family he and Anne had agreed that ‘our marrying would be next door to madness’. But of the two, he had actually become the less doubtful. He said as much to one who least wished to hear it, his sister Judith:
This I must tell you, that I heartily repent I did not know my own mind sometime ago, for I am convinced that we should have been happy together & that her attachment to me was & has always been real & disinterested . . . Was it not for the conviction that misery to both must be the consequence, it would now not be my fault if I did not make her your Sister.16
In one regard Judith could take satisfaction. Events at Hampden showed that she had been right all along about Anne, whom she now referred to as ‘the devil in scarlet’.17
More troubles awaited at Wimpole Street. In the spring of 1782 Fordyce was becoming more boisterous about business and more bullying towards Margaret. Constraint came between the sisters. Anne, living under their roof, was unable to speak candidly, while Margaret, dreading another trauma, was trying desperately to believe in the husband who assured her one more deal would make them rich again. Atkinson warned Anne: ‘Our friend has too many irons in the fire.’
Imminent disaster became apparent, as it had before, one harrowing night when Fordyce denounced Atkinson for refusing to invest with him. His former ally was an enemy. Margaret too had betrayed him, by being too proud to ask friends for money. Next Fordyce turned on Anne, shouting that she must use her connections to raise investment. ‘I must have it or everything must go to Hell,’ he ranted. ‘By God, I won’t suffer it! By God, I won’t!’
A few days later Fordyce returned home ‘looking like a man who had been cut down from the gallows, with a grin of convulsion and assumed bravery’.18 The bailiffs were about to arrive and this time he really was ruined.
Again Atkinson proved the sisters’ rock. With Fordyce on the verge of bankruptcy, it was necessary for Margaret to keep her distance, to get away from Wimpole Street. Though Anne had resources of her own, Atkinson stepped in as their guardian and chaperone, renting a house for them at the seaside resort of Brighthelmstone, as Brighton was then known, or ‘the nasty fishing town to which nobody goes but the Prince of Wales’.19
Anne, as if rising to ‘the devil in scarlet’ within, turned quite wild and careless, consorting with the renowned lecher George Cholmondeley, who sang Jolly Bacchus in her ear, and Tom Onslow, a chum of the Prince of Wales who hurtled around in his phaeton as if it were a horse-drawn sports car. Of a ball at which Anne enjoyed the attentions of a Captain Kaye of the Dragoons, Fanny Burney wrote: ‘Lady Anne dances remarkably well and was in every way a suitable partner’ for this ‘handsome, very tall baronet’s son’.20 When there were no men, she would dance with Margaret, a novel practice seen as rather improper. Judith Milbanke noted with satisfaction: ‘Her character being entirely gone, she is spoken of amongst men as slightly as any woman can.’21
Anne had come to the point of a dilemma perhaps more familiar to modern women: How old was too old for marriage? What happened to a woman who decided not to marry? When did waiting for someone better to present himself become unrealistic? How she answered these questions is not revealed in her writings. What does emerge is a failure to accept responsibility for the course she had adopted. When she castigated herself it would be for ‘foolishness’ or some other frivolous (and necessarily feminine) failing, which implied simple innocence. She had become prone to self-pity. One passage in a letter to Atkinson strikes a particularly miserable note:
The life which a young woman with gaiety, tolerable good looks, a feeling heart but without a fortune passes in this town is more likely to be a mortified than a happy one. If she chances to please . . . [she is placed] in the situation of a female Tantalus, with every good held up to her view, & every temptation offered her heart, only to be baulked with disappointment.22
Atkinson could not have done more to support Anne over the next two years had they been husband and wife. He demonstrated a gentle devotion she received from no other man. She was content to be a dependant, while aware that he still yearned for more. Years later, when the extent of Atkinson’s love became a matter of public interest, The Times reported that he had likened himself to the eponymous husband in ‘Auld Robin Grey’: ‘Mr Atkinson used to say that if Lady Anne would take him as a Robin Grey, she might seek out for a Jamie when he was gone.’23 Atkinson appears to have known his frailty held the seeds of an early death and that the best he could do was to provide for her: ‘You can have no objection, till you are under the protection of another,’ he wrote, ‘to letting me take care of your fortune.’24 As London’s shrewdest investor, he gave Anne the means to comfort and independence.
Margaret also benefited from his generosity. Atkinson used his connections during the final days of the North administration to obtain her an annual pension of £150, granted to ‘indigent young women of quality’; and because Fordyce – now subject to bankruptcy proceedings – could lay claim to her money, he urged Margaret to keep this fact to herself. He also secured a pension for the third Lindsay sister, Elizabeth.†
After a season in Brighton and Bath, Anne was back in town where ‘gaieties were going on . . . the clubs filling . . . pockets emptying’. Her own spirits lifted, she being ‘ever ready to dance over the moon when I was not thrown flat to the ground by a hailstorm’.25 Anne ‘the Blithe’ and Margaret ‘the Blue’, as they saw their respective temperaments, were spending more time apart and though neither would have seen this as a rift, a cycle of mutual dependency had ended. They were guests in different households and while still living together sporadically would go on to have their own homes.
Anne moved to Portman Square (brother Alexander had withdrawn to Balcarres) and, with an income that for the first time allowed her to keep a carriage and servants, including a maid, Betty, might almost have been seen as a lady of fashion, but for her quirky outfits. On her arrival at a ball, Sheridan’s wife, the actress Elizabeth Linley, observed: ‘She was so bedevilled by dress that I should not have known her – a thick muslin rondo cap covering her hair, a gypsy hat of black and white chip circles, a black and white spotted petticoat, and over it a black cloth greatcoat and thick muslin handkerchief.’26
The Lindsays’ status was a little improved by the marriage in the summer of 1782 of Elizabeth, the youngest sister, to Philip Yorke, a politician and heir to his uncle, the Earl of Hardwicke. Aged eighteen, Elizabeth was never fully part of her sisters’ union, and the only one to marry a titled, affluent and entirely respectable man. The marriage gave rise to jests that Anne would have to dance in green stockings, a ritual for spinsters seeking husbands, but few took that prospect seriously any more. She had begun a new chapter, seemingly reconciled at thirty-one to her state and relieved that Atkinson was content to act as companion and financial adviser. Although Wentworth resumed visits on his return from the country, she had unshackled herself and was hoping simply to keep him from the tables, in ‘a last attempt to save the remnant of his fortune and the wreck of his mind’.27
Failure confronted her soon enough. Wentworth arrived late one night, drunk and on his way to the club, then fell asleep, leaving her to reflect ‘what an unlovely object is a man in such a circumstance’. He became more unlovely still when he awoke and started vomiting. After she had fetched him a basin, he burbled an apology and went off to sleep again. Her reflection on this episode, that ‘a snorer was never to my taste’, raises the question whether she had further experience of male snorers, and when it had been acquired.28
In January 1783 she received a blackmail letter:
Unless you send a sum of fifty pounds within eight days to the place hereafter mentioned, all your letters, verses &&& to Lord Wentworth will be published in the course of next month. Even all your artful billet doux shall be exposed . . . The world shall then see the villainous art that you practised against her who now sleeps in peace that you might triumph as Lady W . . . I hope your Ladyship will be at no payns to find out who I am as you never will know. I see you very often and yet I am persuaded I am the last person in the world you would suspect.29
Anne went straight to her port in a storm. A letter in Atkinson’s hand was sent to the address in the blackmailer’s letter, Seagoes Coffee House in Holborn.
Your Threatening Letter has been laid before counsel and it appears that by Act of Parlt the punishment for sending it is DEATH . . . You are already in part traced and to push the Enquiry to your complete detection and punishment is far from difficult. The smallest public impertinence will at once fix that purpose.30
The culprit’s identity was never established, but it is conceivable that Wentworth himself – by now desperate for money – was directly or indirectly involved. As he had returned her original letters, any papers in the blackmailer’s possession must have been copies, perhaps made by Vanloo before her death. Anne’s reliance on Atkinson is seen in another episode when Wentworth, facing action by creditors, appealed to her for funds to provide for his two illegitimate children. She in turn went to her benefactor, whose contempt for the young lord is evident from his note. ‘I saw our friend yesterday with whom nothing in the least degree interesting passed. I paid him £3,000.’31
A further revelation in this cycle of devotion came in December 1782. Atkinson had learnt he was dangerously ill, possibly with consumption, and two days before Christmas signed a will naming Lady Anne Lindsay as the principal beneficiary. He sent her a copy, explaining that her fortune would come in the form of estates and holdings, because ‘a large and staring legacy in money might excite surprise and foolish talk’.32
‘Kind, good, unlucky Atkinson,’ she would write in penitence, ‘to have placed your affections on one so unworthy of them as myself . . .’33
Just how much Anne profited by Richard Atkinson’s love became, as we shall see, an extremely complicated question. His legacy to her aside, however, it appears that by 1783 his investments had transformed her initial inheritance of £300 into the enormous sum of £20,000 in capital, along with annuities of £200 and £150. Crucially, though, only £9,000 of the capital was banked in her name, the rest being held by his partnership.34 The reason was to keep her wealth secret from Fordyce and because of what had become her horror of gossip – or, as she put it, ‘the misconstruction of those who would perhaps have blamed me for accepting of any advantage from the hands of a rejected lover!’35 She was none the less happy for ‘my zealous friend to act, to decide for me on every point’. And he was, as ever, touched by her apparent unworldliness. ‘You are so unlike anyone I ever met with,’ he mused, ‘so confiding, so incautious.’36 As a relationship based on trust between financier and investor it worked for the time being; but it was to store up a wealth of woe for the future.
* Hampden seems to have felt remorse over his scandal-mongering. When Anne wrote a reconciliatory note after a silence of more than thirty years between them, he replied: ‘I am so gratified for a letter with your signature on it . . . I am delighted moreover at the tone of yr note as it is so characteristic of the Lady Anne Lindsay I was so happy to have lived in the most friendly intimacy and shall always be proud to renew the lease.’ (27/4/97)
† Thanks to his profits in America, Atkinson’s influence in Lord North’s government was notorious in so far as the opposition was concerned and attracted attention in the press when he used it on behalf of the Lindsay sisters. The process of obtaining their pensions was complicated, involving Atkinson in buying out an individual, James Macpherson, to whom the government was indebted, but does not seem to have been very improper.