Ambassadress Extraordinaire

Every time I pass the blue wrought-iron gates, now on the Piccadilly side of Green Park but formerly at Chiswick House, they serve to remind me of Lady Granville, who died there. Harriet Granville came out of the topmost drawer of the tallboy housing the various ranks of later Georgian society and made full use of this elevated position and its rarefied atmosphere to gain a particularly clearsighted view of her world, with all its rules of conduct and its pretensions. Her keen intelligence and sense of the ridiculous were combined with amiability, but she also had strong feelings, was virtuous, was good. When she praised Lady Harrowby, one of her sisters-in-law, as ‘honourable, sincere, open, vérédique’, she was describing qualities she herself possessed.

Hary-O, as she was called, was born in 1785 to the beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and incurable gambler, and the 5th Duke, who seems to have passed his life largely disengaged from his surroundings. With her elder sister Georgiana, who became Lady Morpeth then eventually Countess of Carlisle, and younger brother William, always known as Hart, the bachelor 6th Duke, she formed an unrivalled mutual admiration society. Whenever they were apart, they were the most assiduous of correspondents, which means that we can enjoy Hary-O’s mordant wit and shrewd commentary through her letters to them. She once strikingly invoked Georgiana: ‘O sister of my own sort, liver of the chicken to which I am gizzard.’ Perhaps fortunately, Hary-O did not inherit her mother’s looks. While at Ramsgate in 1802 she reported that her beauty was ‘alas! Much in the same state . . . I fear (though Sir Walter [the family doctor] and Mama are very sanguine) that I shall never be rode or bathed into a beauty.’ But at Bath the following year, as well as Boswell’s Johnson and a history of England, she immersed herself in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, which one suspects gave her a far greater stimulus than the sea. They made up for the likes of a Mrs Pennington met there, ‘a bergère of about 50 . . . she talked Mama and I into a sort of stupor . . . Imagine [her] under a flaxen wig, gipsy hat, miminey voice and, as she expresses it, a frame all of nerve, delicately alive to every call of sensibility.’ Peel, the great Tory, said ‘Damn the Whigs, they’re all cousins’, and indeed there were efforts to marry her off to two such, first to her aunt Lady Bessborough’s son and then to her uncle Lord Spencer’s, neither of whom she would take at all seriously. Rather it was her aunt’s lover, Lord Granville, whom she eventually married in 1809, after he had spent time as ambassador in St Petersburg, had had an affair with Lady Hester Stanhope, and had pursued two of the richest heiresses on the marriage market. When his devastating good looks and charm are factored in, it all sounds like a recipe for marital disaster, but Granville was tactful, kind, far from stupid, and wanted to settle down – he was twelve years older than she. One gets the impression that during the early years of the marriage, while Hary-O was producing their five children, her husband was underemployed. He was still an MP for Staffordshire but, as a staunch supporter of George Canning, not in line for plum jobs. (He had a close shave in 1812 when the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was, it seems, assassinated by mistake for him, by one  Bellingham, a bankrupt businessman who had been dealing in Russian timber and blamed his failure on the ex-ambassador.) Much of their time was taken up with long country-house visits. The greatest pleasure of these for Hary-O was conversation – ‘Men so little understand the comfort of talking a great deal about nothing at all’ – but there were other delights too: ‘Blazing fires of Staffordshire coal, two new reviews [the Quarterly and the Edinburgh?], early hours, wholesome dinners, a comfortable bed and Granville, adored Granville, who would make a barren desert smile.’ In 1814, after his earlier entanglement with her cousin Lady Caroline Lamb, Hary-O was forthright about Lord Byron’s engagement to Annabella Milbanke: ‘How wonderful of that sensible, cautious prig of a girl to venture on such a heap of poems, crimes and rivals.’ In 1815 the Granvilles wasted no time in going to Paris after Napoleon’s final defeat and there went to the opera.

The house was full and brilliant beyond measure . . . scarcely a reputable woman besides myself. Boxes for every King and Emperor of the known world. But what do you think they shout at, applaud . . . ? They dance the battle of Waterloo in all its details. The Imperial guard wounded form dejected groups . . . a smart English officer makes most brilliant entrées. This héros de la pièce ends the ballet with presenting a French officer whom he has taken prisoner to his mistress, who had imagined him lost . . . Metternich sat by me at supper at Lady Castlereagh’s, and we agreed that it was worth coming any distance to see this proof of national character . . .

In July 1819 the Granvilles were in London for the Season and went for a walk in Kensington Gardens. ‘The Miss Fitzclarences [William IV’s daughters by Mrs Jordan] all but astride upon the wall with all the young practitioners [eligibles] at their feet; wretched girls pacing after their chaperones and the dandies on horseback, gazing at us; I don’t know why, but follies are more glaring by daylight.’ She gave a ball three days later to bring out Granville’s and her aunt Lady Bessborough’s illegitimate daughter, whom she had welcomed into her family some years earlier. ‘Two large rooms below were filled with little round supper tables, and all the flirtations went down together, to back their sentiment with soupe and entrées.’ Her correspondence is littered with inimitable thumbnails: ‘Miss Parkins, very short and very smart, with a pot of rouge on each cheek’ and ‘Mrs Pigot, who I am convinced if she settled upon one would sting’. Then there is Lord Clanwilliam whose ‘zest in society consists in perpetually going too near the wind, and the satisfaction that people in general find in winning the race is found by him in running out of the course’, Lady William Bentinck, ‘a good-natured, kindhearted, potato-headed woman always in a bother, every second word a blunder’, Mr Edgcumbe, ‘very inoffensive. He is not handsome, he is not clever, he is not useful, but there is nothing below mediocre’. Talleyrand ‘crawled past me last night like a lizard along a wall’, while Rossini at the Brighton Pavilion, ‘being fat and lazy, and consequently averse to standing, took a chair and sat by the King, who, however, gave him the kindest reception and, less petit than his suite, understood the man and treated him as his enthusiasm for music disposed him to do’. In 1822 the death of Castlereagh at last brought Canning in as Foreign Secretary and he was soon able to re-employ Granville as an ambassador, first in Holland and then in Paris. Princess Lieven, Russian ambassadress, friend of Hary-O, fiercely intelligent and addicted to political intrigue, wrote to her lover Metternich in 1824 with her opinion of how Hary-O would cope. At the same time she gave a snapshot of her in action on her home territory.

She will make an extremely odd ambassadress. She cannot bear any kind of constraint; and her sole pleasure in society is to get into the most obscure corner of a drawing room, equipped with her lorgnettes, so that she can see how ridiculous all the surrounding faces are, and accompanied by someone she can laugh with. She has never learned to be polite. I have often seen the King of England call her to sit by him – and two minutes later she would leave him because she did not find him amusing.

The princess turned out to be quite wrong: Hary-O became an outstanding ambassadress and in that role knew full well that she could ‘not let myself go to any likes or dislikes [but must] shine on all alike . . . To avoid intimacy of communication and create none, all this will rub my back up the wrong way but I think over my part so much that I must end by learning it.’ She realized too ‘the impervious necessity’ of dressing well, ‘and am learning it as a trade’. To begin with in Paris she found the ‘exquisite set’ insufferable: ‘There is a fond of ill breeding, insolence, conceit, and pretension . . . Their conversation is all upon dress, the Opera. There is not as much mind as would fill a pea shell.’ But soon she was reporting herself ‘absolutely baked into civility and perseverance’, helped by the thought that ‘I have not to work up the ladder to make myself une grande dame and I have a fond of English society of the crack kind.’ A French duchess came up to her and told her she was a truly remarkable woman since she led with perfect grace the sort of life which she hated more than anything. ‘They have twigged me, Lady Morpeth, but little they’ll heed if they see me drum on . . . They are like children, clever, lively, troublesome children . . . If kept in order, gay and animated, easily pleased and rarely offended.’ She entertained remorselessly, knowing that ‘A country may do what it pleases if its ambassador has des violons chez lui.’ By December 1825 she was able to say, ‘As I go on I like some of them much better and in my calmer moments I allow for them . . . They are not to be measured by the same rule as any other people on earth. Their impressions are all uncommonly vivid. Their expressions of affection, admiration, delight proportionately strong. You deceive yourself, if you reckon upon this, but it is your own fault.’ In 1828 the Ultra Tories came to power after the death of Canning, and Granville resigned. It meant Hary-O could now enjoy an English garden again. ‘I rushed to the potager – you know my weakness – and walked up and down between spinach and dahlias in ecstasy . . . I feel as if alone in the world . . . but then comes the enormous satisfaction of always finding a man dressing a hedge or a woman in a gingham and a black bonnet on her knees picking up weeds.’ By 1831 the Whigs were in, led by her mother’s lover, Lord Grey, who was greatly helped over his Reform Bill by her brother Hart’s management of William IV. The Granvilles were reappointed to Paris where the new king, Louis Philippe, was much more to their taste than Charles X, last of the Bourbons. Her quizzing of the French and other peoples continued. The Russian ambassador, Fyodor Pahlen, was ‘a very handsome fine-looking man . . . Picks his teeth with his knife, scorns sugar tongs, a grand specimen of a Russian soldier.’ In 1833 one of her sons died aged only 17 and from this point on much of the zest seems to vanish from her correspondence, to be replaced by a growing piety, which eventually overwhelmed her after the death of her husband in 1846. But there are thirty years or more of letters before that, peppered with her pyrotechnics. It is hard to think of any before or after her time that are their equal.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Roger Hudson 2015