1802–1806
Spring in 1802 refreshed England with hope as well as scent and bloom. Anne landed at Gravesend on 11 April after a three-month voyage to learn of the peace treaty ratified at Amiens two weeks earlier and found London in a state of rejoicing. With her Berkeley Square house being rented by the Ottoman ambassador, she took lodgings at Mollards Hotel where to start with a tremendous fuss was made of her.
‘Friends have poured their civilities on me,’ she wrote to Barnard. ‘My levees exceed those of the minister and my invitations to dinner run at four a day. No man or woman of my former acquaintance has found himself or herself too great to have sat an hour with me.’1 Callers included the Prince of Wales and a host of political figures, Pitt, Dundas, Windham, Fitzroy, Abercorn and various Yorkes, all coming to praise the good she had done at the Cape. Then, pricking the bubble of her own vanity, she went on: ‘This makes me ask the question of Fag in the Chapter of Accidents “Am I so wery delightful?” ’*
Dundas’s attention was especially reassuring. As she reported it, he explained in private what he had been unable to say in writing, and the chill arising from the dispute with his nephew was set aside. Everyone else she met sympathised, asking: ‘How goes on that madman General Dundas?’ In the first flush of excitement there appeared a keen interest in all matters to do with the Cape, and when she showed Dundas her panorama from the Castle he, rather than an artistic work, saw a strategic diagram for another invasion. ‘Guard it like the apple of your eye,’ he said. ‘We may not always be without the Cape.’2 All in all, the omens could hardly have been better. ‘I really think my best beloved,’ she told Barnard, ‘your chance of future employment is good.’
Her African creatures were spared life in the metropolis. The antelope and lourie had expired at sea and it was not long before the collection of wild fowl came to royal attention.
The Queen, who had heard of them, was graciously pleased to send one of the Ladies of her Bedchamber to congratulate me on my safe return, and to beg that whatever birds or animals I had brought that were curious, might be sent to her villa in Frogmore, when she should be happy to shew me them in good health. The Royal Mandate was obeyed, the geese were sent, but the Goose never had the invitation renewed to her.3
Feminine fashion, she reported to Barnard, had taken a daring turn in their absence:
Lady Hertford would take no denial to my appearing at her assembly t’other night and sent Lady Clive to fetch me. I was glad I went. The women are all Sir Peter Lely’s beauties. The gowns are cut down behind to show bare shoulders, and before to show other bare things, and the drapery round the form is so very light that Pygmalion might chisel after nature in all her lines.4
Margaret’s failure to join her after their five-year separation hastened the passing of euphoria. She was in Dublin with their sister Elizabeth whose husband, Lord Hardwicke, was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and would not travel to a reunion, ‘the journey to London being so very long’.5 Margaret’s susceptibility to ‘the blews’ grew and there are signs of resentment towards Anne, who did not want to leave London because Barnard might sail home at short notice. ‘Oh, no Margaret,’ she wrote, ‘be not vexed my best of creatures, but wait a little longer and we will come together.’6 The Atkinson bequest was a further source of strain. With a relatively small annuity, Margaret had been hoping to see a resolution of the case that Anne did her best to ignore. That was easy at the Cape, but she still showed no willingness to grapple with lawyers and Margaret’s rebuke that ‘your hatred of dispute will keep you from engaging’ had an edge, as well as being true.7
Anne’s novelty value as an informant on Africa was short-lived – indeed, indifference to the Cape now it was about to be handed back, and her efforts to remedy society’s ignorance on the subject may have jarred on both sides. Unknown as she was to Henry Addington’s ministers, she found the new generation of public men had ‘little time for female dinners’.8 Close male friends, on the other hand, were no longer at the centre of national affairs. She lured an increasingly gouty Macartney from Antrim to London and found him a villa in Chiswick where she visited to administer care and humour. Dundas continued to fulminate against the peace until retreating to his estate at Dunira with the title of Viscount Melville – but not before telling her of his madness in marrying Jane Hope.
In Margaret’s absence Anne made a new friend, the wife of her brother John and a fellow eccentric. Charlotte North was a sister of Frederick North, the governor of Ceylon with whom Anne formed a witty rapport when he called at the Cape. The Norths were a family of ramshackle originals. Charlotte’s sister had urged Anne to ‘leave your Hottentots & fly over in a balloon’ to be at the wedding.9 Charlotte herself was a treasure.
She was not only without beauty but she might have been called very plain by anyone who could find it in their heart to say so . . . but no one could refrain from loving her. Careless of censure from the extreme innocence of her heart, she said and did what she pleased and never was blamed and never deserved to be so.10
Artless Charlotte was the long-suffering wife of a tormented soul. John Lindsay never recovered from his years of imprisonment in India and pursued a wild career of gaming and speculation that ruined him and made regular demands on family members for help, among whom Anne was the most indulgent.
Another friend was enjoying a spell of tranquillity in her turbulent marriage to the Prince of Wales. Maria Fitzherbert had turned to Anne as peacemaker before her departure for the Cape and lamented her absence while rejoicing that ‘every letter that comes to England is full of your praises’.11† After the prince’s affair with Lady Jersey and official wedding to Princess Caroline of Brunswick, Fitz likened herself to a galley slave, telling Anne she was finished with him and wanted a financial settlement. Instead, she accepted him back at her Tilney Street house and despite his lapses into dissolution they had five years – by her own account – as merry as crickets, though she denied him her bed. ‘We live like brother and sister,’ she told Anne. ‘I did not consent to . . . live with him as his wife or his mistress.’12 ‘Both friends I love,’ Anne recalled, ‘both I have been obliged at times to condemn. Neither has been quite right, nor either so wrong as they have been called.’13
A renewal with William Windham was always going to be more awkward. He had written to her at the Cape that he was to wed an early love, and Anne was unimpressed, perhaps a little offended, by his choice of, ‘the worthy but undistinguished Miss Forrest’. Cecilia Forrest had once been besotted with Windham’s friend, Cholmondeley, and she had reached the age of forty-eight before Windham took the decisive step. Anne initially described Cecilia as ‘a sick-nurse whom he could depend upon’ and the match as typical of one who ‘spent his life in regretting and being too late in everything’.14 But she warmed to Mrs Windham, while her husband ‘had become so little to me that to be in his company ceased to give any pain’.15
Hopes of a lasting peace faded as Bonaparte demonstrated that his real desire was for time to prepare for further conflict. Anne’s paramount concern, however, was how delays in implementing the treaty were keeping Barnard at the Cape. Three months after her return, no Dutch officials had sailed to take over the administration and, as she told Macartney that summer, her husband could not possibly be home before the end of winter.
Andrew was not managing well without her. His letters, addressed to ‘My Ever Dearest Nanny’, were loving, plaintive and almost as long as hers.16 Both dwelt on their lost happiness at the Cape and, as months went by, Anne suggested she might actually sail back to him, ‘which from such a coward is saying a great deal’.17 This set off whimsical flights of fancy as they renewed ideas for further adventure, sailing on to the Pacific or Mediterranean. As Andrew pointed out, they could be free.
I have great comfort My Love in what at a former time I rather wished otherwise – that we have no children. You and I can make ourselves happy anywhere – in Africa, Wales, Russia. Had we children in the present position of the times our hearts would bleed for them. I feel now for you only. I can face any ill with you.18
She agreed: ‘There is not one part of the world makes any difference except you are in it . . . How comfortable we shall be when we have our nice roast leg of mutton, potatoes and an apple pie, with a bit of fish on Sundays!’19
Comfortable they could be. Yet while Anne positively wished to live ‘careless of the pomps and vanities of this wicked world’, Andrew had a desperate desire to work, partly for the self-respect of providing for his wife, and partly because he was not good at living within their means.20 Despite a handsome salary of £3,500 his purse had been constantly stretched by what Anne saw as ‘his pleasure of bestowing it on others’.21 Meanwhile, her hopes of finding him another post had clearly been too sanguine. Quite simply, time had moved on and old friends were no longer in positions of influence. As Andrew would soon be without income, she decided to raise capital by realising some assets.
Anne’s property portfolio is a confusing subject and – like her activity as a landlady – one that raised eyebrows. Her first house in Manchester Square had been followed by a second in Berkeley Square; a third was built on the same site, and a fourth purchased in Hanover Square. Returns were not high to judge from the £180 per annum she received for one, and the ravages of tenants such as the Ottoman ambassador could be severe, as she discovered on returning to find ‘the seven plagues of Egypt were nothing to the 700 plagues of Elphi Bey’.22 Intending to redecorate and sell, she rented another house a short walk away in Dover Street, from where she could oversee progress. Months later two of her properties went under the hammer, only for the sales to fall through. Money remained short.
They had been a year apart when Andrew wrote a last letter before sailing:
I meet with mortification & vexation every day. Gracious God, what a twelve month I have passed since you left me Dearest. If I was to possess the wealth of Bengal I would not undergo such another . . . But home, Dearest, after all these fiery trials will be the sweeter. Let me only find my love in good health when I get there and I shall forget them all.
Your Own Slave, AB23
Andrew was still homeward bound when Bonaparte’s aggression left even the peace-loving Addington with no option but to confront him. On 18 May 1803, three weeks after Andrew landed from the Jupiter, Britain and France were at war again.
Over the next three years the Barnards persevered against prevailing winds. They adopted the modest premise that Andrew’s experience should lead to a paid position of some sort, somewhere in Britain. That they failed and were separated again was down largely to unkind fate and William Windham; but it is still apparent that Andrew did not attract favour. Reputation was a powerful, often terrible, thing in Georgian society, and he never quite lost the taint Anne once alluded to: Barnard had been labelled an opportunist, a blackguard even.
On reaching London he was received by the prime minister in a manner Anne insisted was markedly civil.24 That was all very well, but Addington’s civility did not amount to employment. Next Henry Dundas, now Lord Melville, visited London when it was suggested he might join the government as First Lord of the Admiralty, and assured Anne of his willingness to help. But within weeks he was on his way back to Scotland after negotiations over a coalition involving Pitt collapsed.
Only now did the Barnards set off on a journey of family reunion, another year having passed since the five-year separation of the Cape, and though Anne would never have said as much, the summer they spent among relatives in Scotland and Ireland exposed how distant she had become from the mainstream of family life. Detachment began with her native land. For some time, she had perceived in Scotland an ‘illiberality of thinking on every trivial point, such as to render the society quite odious to me’. (James Boswell, a fellow Scot, also developed what one biographer has called ‘a repugnance for what he saw as Scottish insularity and crudeness of expression’.25) It was, she admitted, ‘not amiable to feel disgust to the country in which one was born, but I can’t help it’.26 The gap went further. Her mother had been softened by age and infirmity to a condition of dependence and, as Anne saw it, ‘seems to rely on her children with perfect confidence for their affections and care’. She herself had no part in bearing this burden, so there may have been guilt too.
More painful was being distanced from her once-inseparable sister. Margaret had experienced further misery with an unknown lover and ‘a deep resentment corroded her heart’ until she found comfort in religious faith.27 She had also been provided with a refuge by the Hardwickes and, even before the Barnards joined them in Ireland, that side of the family had signalled disapproval of Anne’s unconventional ways. Her brother-in-law was the epitome of propriety and Elizabeth had become quite prim. Together they urged Anne to beware the company she kept: Lady Wellesley should not be visited; as for Mrs Fitzherbert and the prince, they were to be avoided – she entirely. ‘You owe it to yourself to keep clear of the liaison,’ Elizabeth wrote. ‘I think of you only, of your character and your interests. Both will suffer if you are not on your guard.’28 Margaret, for her part, was now closer to their youngest sister’s way of thinking. ‘Lady Hardwicke tells me she has written to you to caution you about Fitz . . . I believe [she] is right – prudence is necessary.’29
The antics of Anne’s father-in-law did not help. While the Barnards were in Ireland, it became clear the seventy-six-year-old Bishop of Limerick was infatuated with twenty-two-year-old Jane Ross-Lewin, a woman of innocent demeanour and deep designs, and because the old bon viveur was ‘still animated by the promethean fire of fancy, ready to be kindled into a blaze and explode on opposition’, there was nothing his son could do to restrain him.30‡
Back on the mainland, they started north to Haigh Hall, the new seat of the Earl of Balcarres.§ Debts on the family estate had obliged Alexander to sell Balcarres to Robert on his return in true nabob style from India, and move to his wife’s home in Lancashire.31 The Barnards went on to Balcarres and Dunira, sharing Melville’s contentment with his rugged landscape, and would have stayed longer but finding there was only one room with a double bed and it was to host another guest after five nights, they moved on. They remained, in Andrew’s words, ‘unfashionable enough to sleep in the same bed’.32
The campaign to find Andrew a position resumed on the Barnards’ return to London in the spring of 1804 and continued without success to the end of 1806. Andrew had no vaulting ambition – had, indeed, been happy with the promise of a role with Hardwicke in Ireland on a salary of a mere £600 a year. The political ground, however, was shifting constantly and when Addington’s government fell, the post went with it. At first that appeared to Barnard’s advantage because Pitt returned to power and Melville with him. Both men lived in Wimbledon, a country retreat favoured by statesmen, so naturally when a house became available, Anne took it. ‘It was an old Gothic house full of ghosts and goblins,’ she recalled, ‘with no garden to rear a cabbage in.’33 But it was only a hundred yards from Melville’s. The likes of Fox, Wilberforce and Grenville also lived near by and Andrew’s optimism returned. ‘Chance may promote my wishes without my saying anything,’ he said cheerfully.34
In the event, moving to Wimbledon served no purpose other than for Andrew to ride out on the common. When Anne managed to get Pitt round, he ‘came and went without even an allusion [to] our having been six years at the Cape’.35 The prime minister’s carriage would clatter by on its way to the next house, and the cry ‘Drive on to Melville’s’ became a joke between the Barnards. She persuaded Andrew to write to Pitt, reminding him that he was the only official from the Cape left without a post.36 Nothing came of it.
Late in 1804 Andrew returned to Ireland when his father’s affairs descended into farce. The bishop – once cited by Dr Johnson as evidence for his theory that a man could improve in later life because improvement would be so easy in his case – had married the twenty-two-year-old object of his infatuation, on whom he lavished the small remains of his estate. Matters became mysterious and fraught. Jane was mortally ill, according to the bishop. In fact, she had fallen pregnant by a young lover. The bishop’s eccentricity turned to dottiness. He railed against ‘my ungrateful son’, but when accounts revealed he was bankrupt had no option but to return with him to England. Andrew wrote to Anne: ‘I will endeavour to dream of you, which will do me good.’37
Money remained a serious concern. Further attempts to sell property failed after a fall in prices. To make his own ends meet, Andrew was reduced to sending Anne silver because it fetched more in London than Ireland. For little comforts, he would ask for bottles of Harveys Fish Sauce, sold by a shop in Wigmore Street.38
It was not until the end of 1805 that the bishop’s affairs were settled and he could be brought back to spend his last weeks at Wimbledon. Anne had had one success – obtaining a cadetship for the second of Andrew’s sons. She still took a maternal interest in his boys and, with Lord Hardwicke’s influence, both had been set on the path to military careers.39 But almost four years after her return from Africa, she had failed to secure so much as an offer for Andrew and her own declining status was inescapable.
If ambition, the pride of birth or love of pre-eminence have ever led me to wish for a certain portion of superiority, my walk in life – both in fortune and rank – denys it to me now.40
The fact was, she had to admit, ‘I am married to an amiable good man, but he is neither a nabob or a peer.’
The start of a fateful year found them back at Berkeley Square when British troops landed at the Cape of Good Hope again. The Barnards had just attended Nelson’s burial at St Paul’s and the struggle for world power was once more in the balance: Trafalgar may have secured British control of the seas, but Bonaparte’s victory at Austerlitz had made the French masters of Europe.
Two weeks later a stunned Andrew came home to announce, ‘Pitt is no more.’ The death at the age of forty-six of Britain’s war leader was accompanied by the political demise of his closest associate. Melville’s enemies, most notably Windham, had forced his resignation over allegations of malfeasance and impeachment proceedings were in hand. Lives seemed to be shrivelling everywhere. Macartney died on 31 March, a day after the Duchess of Devonshire. Anne had seen them at Chiswick after Pitt’s death and been shocked by Georgiana’s appearance, her right eye sightless and swollen, but ‘with rays of beauty still, and beams of goodness gleaming from the poor eye that had lost its partner, over which there descended a lock of hair to conceal the misfortune’.41
Melville’s trial on charges of embezzling £27,000 from navy funds began four weeks later in an incongruous blaze of Westminster pageantry. Anne did not attend, hoping to spare her friend embarrassment and clear in the belief that ‘a man careless of money, high in honour’ had been the victim of a political conspiracy. The vast majority of his parliamentary peers agreed. After being acquitted in June, he wrote to her that ‘my triumph is certainly a complete one’, and inviting the Barnards to a family celebration.42 Within days he was on his way to Scotland, leaving power behind him once and for all.
Though Anne’s old suitor had been falsely accused by his foes, it was an inescapable fact that these same individuals were now in power – among them Windham, Secretary for War and the Colonies in the coalition put together after Pitt’s death. Somehow, despite all that had passed between them, Anne persuaded herself that Windham, rather than seizing an opportunity to humiliate her further, would recognise his obligation. Once more she would petition a former lover on her husband’s behalf, discomforting though it was.
To take up my pen in solicitation to you seems so strange to it that if it wanders and blots do not impute it to a want of respect for the Secretary of State . . .
She wanted, she said, ‘your patronage in general’ to find Barnard a post, up to and including the governorship of the Cape. Something at home would be preferable but, she added, in a strained version of the metaphor she had once used with Dundas, ‘I am ready to lay my bones down at the foot of Table Mountain if my duty calls me there, as governor’s wife or secretary’s wife . . . the whole study of his life is to make me happy.’43
Barnard as a colonial governor was inconceivable and when the post was awarded to the Earl of Caledon, even the secretaryship seemed beyond his reach because the young lord wanted his cousin, a Mr Alexander, in the post.44 Anne took the case up with the Prince of Wales who spoke to his friend Fox and word came back that the foreign secretary liked Barnard and would help. ‘Poor Fox,’ remarked Andrew, ‘something will happen to him. It has been the case with every man ready to befriend me.’45 If Anne’s account is accurate, Fox lived just long enough to intercede with Windham, dying on 13 September. Andrew was appointed secretary, the same post he had relinquished three years earlier.
Barely had her objective been achieved than Anne began to have second thoughts. She was almost fifty-six, Andrew forty-three, and they might have no more than a dozen ‘comfortable years together’. She expected to die first, but his health had been poor, with a recurrence of the stomach ailment that ended his army career. Along with risk, a return to the Cape would involve all the upheaval of transporting their way of life across the world again. A position at home, however lowly, became suddenly far preferable to a highly paid one abroad.
Anne’s version of what passed was coloured by the guilt and bitterness she carried to the end of her days; but subjective though her account is, the principal strands are clear. Andrew was at Wimbledon, making arrangements for his father’s memorial plaque at Westminster Abbey, when he wrote suggesting how to approach the individual who held their fate in his hands:
Perhaps you may be able to see Windham and talk the matter over confidentially with him remembering always that you have a politician to deal with. But you may say that on your account I would greatly prefer a situation of less emolument at home but in case that cannot be settled I am ready to go. I know you will act better than I can write.46
Anne’s account of calling on Windham as he prepared for a court levee is couched in her most dramatic style but the essentials are substantiated by other papers.47
He was in his robe de chambre. He received me with a chivalric manner of obsequious gallantry, when my heart was beating with agitation and anxiety.
I told him my errand. I urged my earnest but humble petition that instead of the salary of £3,500 he had given Barnard, that he would arrange some exchange to give him a third or fourth of the sum with business at home as I thought Barnard’s health was too subject to bilious attacks to venture a second trip to Africa . . .
‘Ah,’ cried he, smiling and seeming to fly, ‘I know these blandishments, these powers of persuasion, but I must fortify myself against them . . . I have said what I will do, but more I think ought not to be asked. I must not bend to the powers of an enchantress who waves the wand she so well knows how to use over my head!’
Silent tears were the only reply to this irony of Coquetry mixed with Resentment. He saw them fall unmoved. He rang for my carriage unbidden and called out ‘Lady Anne’s servants’ before the door was opened.48
In desperation Anne wrote to Lord Wellesley, whom she saw as her last friend of influence, asking him to intervene with Lord Grenville, the prime minister. ‘Neither my own health nor the health of my excellent bilious husband is stout enough to flatter myself with the hope of our returning alive and merry some years hence.’49 Whether or not Wellesley tried to help is not clear, but his star, too, was on the wane.
The one individual to emerge with dignity intact was the subject of these negotiations. Barnard made clear that money was not his concern by declining a private offer of £1,000 a year to stand aside in favour of the governor’s cousin.50 Reasoning that he must serve at the Cape if he was to be offered another post in future, he told Anne it would be best if he went alone: he could then make it understood that if her health did not permit her to join him, he would seek leave of absence and return after a year; in the meantime she would be best placed in London to pursue other openings.
Amid tearful preparations Anne commissioned a portrait. The great Reynolds was no more, so she turned to Sir Thomas Lawrence, the artist she thought his nearest equivalent, and over three days before Christmas at a cost of fifty guineas he produced a work typical of his talent, combining likeness with a tasteful element of flattery. As she told herself, Andrew’s portrait would be a gently smiling presence at Berkeley Square until his return.
* Anne seems to have been confusing a character in Sheridan’s The Rivals with the play by Sophia Lee.
† Before departing Anne had continued to urge her friend against outbursts with the prince. ‘Dearest Fitz be not too violent for your own sake.’ After hearing the prince complaining of his misery, Anne wrote again: ‘I never heard a man express himself with more attachment to a woman than he did when talking of you and the complaints he made of you . . . (small ones they were) were the complaints of tenderness only.’ See also Maria Fitzherbert – The Secret Wife of George IV by James Munson.
‡ Another form of Irish volatility erupted during the Barnards’ visit, in the short-lived uprising led by Robert Emmet. Of the public execution of this ‘young and singularly handsome young man of noble air’, Anne wished to know nothing – ‘the subject demolishes me’ – but Andrew attended and was impressed by Emmet’s ‘manly and undaunted deportment’. (Memoirs, vol. 5, pp. 86–8)
§ Haigh Hall, then a comparatively simple manor house, was rebuilt at vast expense by Alexander’s son James from 1827. Ultimately, the Haigh estate provided the coal wealth that revived the Lindsays’ fortunes. James successfully reclaimed the title of Earl of Crawford for the family in 1843. The seat of the Earls of Crawford and Balcarres returned to Balcarres in 1947.