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Wit and Truth

I first delved into Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s astringent and witty letters about fifteen years ago when compiling a Book of Days for the Folio Society. I had to find extracts for each day of the year, written on that day – so nearly all from diaries and letters. Towards the end of my search I was left with several stubbornly blank dates, and was even thinking I might have to write bogus entries, but she, along with Pepys, as it were saved the days.

Lady Mary (1689–1762) was a creature of the Augustan Age, with an often forthright but above all rational approach to the world, far removed from the sensibility that later swept in. Lytton Strachey identified her ‘outspoken clarity’ – if today’s social media had been around for her to use, one could see her quickly getting into trouble. She is best known for the letters she wrote from Turkey, where her husband was ambassador in 1717–18, but prior to these came the ones to him before they eloped in 1712. In those of the 1720s she told her sister of the excesses and frivolities of London society, while in the 1740s and ’50s she wrote to her daughter from her self-imposed exile on the Continent.

Like Belloc’s Godolphin Horne, Lady Mary was ‘nobly born’; she might not have ‘held the human race in scorn’ but she often regarded it with an unblinking eye. She was the eldest child of Evelyn Pierre-pont, Earl of Kingston, later promoted Marquis and finally Duke. Her mother, a daughter of the Earl of Denbigh, died when she was only 3 and it seems likely this led to her education being ‘one of the worst in the world’ at the hands of a superstitious old governess who had been her mother’s nurse. But she had what she called ‘my natural inclinations to solitude and reading’ as well as the run of her father’s library, and she taught herself Latin and Greek. In the 1750s she was to offer advice about the education of her granddaughter to her daughter, Lady Bute:

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I first delved into Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s astringent and witty letters about fifteen years ago when compiling a Book of Days for the Folio Society. I had to find extracts for each day of the year, written on that day – so nearly all from diaries and letters. Towards the end of my search I was left with several stubbornly blank dates, and was even thinking I might have to write bogus entries, but she, along with Pepys, as it were saved the days.

Lady Mary (1689–1762) was a creature of the Augustan Age, with an often forthright but above all rational approach to the world, far removed from the sensibility that later swept in. Lytton Strachey identified her ‘outspoken clarity’ – if today’s social media had been around for her to use, one could see her quickly getting into trouble. She is best known for the letters she wrote from Turkey, where her husband was ambassador in 1717–18, but prior to these came the ones to him before they eloped in 1712. In those of the 1720s she told her sister of the excesses and frivolities of London society, while in the 1740s and ’50s she wrote to her daughter from her self-imposed exile on the Continent. Like Belloc’s Godolphin Horne, Lady Mary was ‘nobly born’; she might not have ‘held the human race in scorn’ but she often regarded it with an unblinking eye. She was the eldest child of Evelyn Pierre-pont, Earl of Kingston, later promoted Marquis and finally Duke. Her mother, a daughter of the Earl of Denbigh, died when she was only 3 and it seems likely this led to her education being ‘one of the worst in the world’ at the hands of a superstitious old governess who had been her mother’s nurse. But she had what she called ‘my natural inclinations to solitude and reading’ as well as the run of her father’s library, and she taught herself Latin and Greek. In the 1750s she was to offer advice about the education of her granddaughter to her daughter, Lady Bute:
Learning (if she has a taste for it) will not only make her contented but happy in it. No entertainment is so cheap as reading, or any pleasure so lasting. [But] it is most absolutely necessary to conceal whatever learning she attains . . . The parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred of all he and she fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four of all her acquaintance.
From 1710 to 1712 Lady Mary’s letters plot the troubled course of her relations with Edward Wortley Montagu, her eventual husband. Her best friend’s brother and a grandson of ‘Admiral Sandwich’, Pepys’s patron, he was wealthy but not prepared to agree to the marriage settlement proposed by her father, who instead touted the eligibility of an heir to an Irish viscount, worth mentioning if only for his name: Clotworthy Skeffington. But her father’s objection was only part of the problem. She obviously had doubts about her own feelings, early on saying, ‘I can esteem, I can be a friend, but I don’t know whether I can love . . .’ She also questioned Edward’s ardour: ‘You say you are not yet determined. Let me determine for you and save you the trouble of writing again. Adieu for ever.’ A mere two months before they did finally elope she was still unremittingly realistic: ‘I know you too well to propose to myself any satisfaction in marrying you that must not be centred in yourself.’ Lady Mary gave birth to a son in 1713, as well as making some criticisms of a draft of her husband’s friend Addison’s play, Cato, which became one of the century’s most successful. In 1715 Edward entered Parliament, while she caught smallpox (her brother had died of it in 1713) and also attended the new Hanoverian Court. In 1716 they set out for Constantinople, calling at Vienna en route, where she was fascinated to find that
Getting a lover is far from losing, ’tis properly getting reputation . . . It would be a downright affront and publicly resented if you invited a woman of quality to dinner without at the same time inviting her two attendants of lover and husband, between whom she always sits in state with great gravity.
But what was this, compared to the Turkish bath at Sofia? There all the ladies sat,
without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature . . . I excused myself with some difficulty [from undressing]. I was at last forced to open my skirt and show them my stays, which satisfied ’em very well, for I saw they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.
On the other hand,
You may guess how effectually [their veil] disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave, and ’tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street. This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery . . . The great ladies seldom let their gallants know who they are, and ’tis so difficult to find it out that they very seldom can guess . . . Those ladies that are rich have all their money in their own hands, which they take with ’em upon a divorce with an addition which [the husband] is obliged to give ’em.
She dismissed the story that the Sultan threw his handkerchief to indicate whom from his harem he selected or that she had then to ‘creep in at the bed’s foot’, and she marvelled at the Sultana’s apartments and jewels, but for posterity her most important report was of the Turks’ use of inoculation against smallpox. She described the parties they held each autumn for this purpose to which old women came with nutshells ‘full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox’ which was then carefully inserted into children’s veins with a needle. Later they would have a day or two in bed and a few scabs which left no mark. ‘I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England.’ When home she indeed announced that her son had been inoculated in Constantinople and then her daughter in London. Caroline, the Princess of Wales, was persuaded to arrange a trial. Seven condemned prisoners were offered their freedom in return for submitting to inoculation. All survived, as did six orphans who were inoculated after them. In 1722 two of the Princess’s children followed suit, and inoculation became fashionable. It seems that by now Lady Mary’s marriage was less than a bed of roses, her husband interested only in Parliament and in amassing a still larger fortune. She puzzled, ‘But where are people matched! I suppose we shall all come right in Heaven, as in a country dance; though hands are strangely given and taken while we are in motion, at last all meet their partners when the jig is done.’ But she could count Pope, Congreve and Gay among her friends and she took it on herself to try and raise the spirits of her sister Frances, forced into exile abroad because her husband, the Earl of Mar, the leading figure in the 1715 Jacobite rising, had been attainted. She did this with a mix of scurrilous gossip and ironical comment. Lady Bristol, ‘resolved to make up for time misspent, has two lovers at a time . . . Now I think this the greatest compliment in nature to her own lord . . . being forced to take two men in his stead.’ She claimed, ‘There is a Bill cooking up at a hunting seat in Norfolk [Houghton, the Prime Minister Walpole’s house] to have not taken out of the Commandments and clapped into the Creed . . . To speak plainly I am very sorry for the forlorn state of matrimony, which is as much ridiculed by our young ladies as it used to be by young fellows . . . We married women look very silly; we have nothing to excuse ourselves but that ’twas done a great while ago and we were very young when we did it.’ She reported on a man who could only move one arm, in love with a woman who could not move her hands for rheumatism: ‘This amour seems to me as curious as that between two oysters, and as well worthy the serious enquiry of the naturalists.’ It is not known why, but in 1728 Alexander Pope took against Lady Mary, referring in his Dunciad to some supposed financial misdoing of hers during the 1721 South Sea Bubble. His barb of 1733 was much more wounding: ‘From furious Sappho scarce a milder fate, / Poxed by her love, or libell’d by her hate’. This time she gave as good as she got: ‘none thy crabbed numbers can endure; / Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure’. It seems this whetted her appetite, and she next took as her target one of Swift’s notorious ‘excremental’ poems, ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, which relished the disgusting details of what could be found there:
And first a dirty smock appeared Beneath the armpits well besmeared . . . Nor be the handkerchiefs forgot All varnish’d o’er with snuff and snot.
Lady Mary imagined that Dean Swift had been provoked to his attack on womanhood by an unsuccessful encounter with a prostitute:
The rev’rend lover with surprise, Peeps in her bubbies and her eyes, And kisses both and tries – and tries.
When he asks for his money back, the prostitute replies:
What if your verses have not sold, Must therefore I return your gold? Perhaps you have no better luck in The knack of rhyming than of f____n’.
In 1736 the 47-year-old Lady Mary so far forgot herself as to become totally besotted with a young cosmopolitan bisexual poet and writer, Francesco Algarotti, ignoring the fact that her epicene friend Lord Hervey was equally smitten. When she set out on her travels in 1739 it was because she expected to meet him on the Continent, but this did not happen until 1741 and by then he had acquired a new and overwhelmingly powerful patron, Frederick the Great. That brought her infatuation to an end. Luckily she was able to make a new life for herself with a generous allowance from her husband: farming, gardening with advice from her son-in-law Lord Bute, later the creator of Kew, building, reading and criticizing all the latest books and observing the antics of the young English milordi passing through Venice or Rome on their grand tours, she herself being one of the sights to be seen. Her daughter Lady Bute dispatched boxes of novels to her from Kenwood, her Hampstead home, including those of her cousin, Henry Fielding. In 1748 thirty local ladies and gentlemen whom she had never met before called unannounced on her at her house near Brescia in northern Italy, so she gave them a good supper and ‘sent for the fiddles; they were so obliging to dance all night, and even dine with me next day, though none of them had been to bed’. The next month a gaggle of ladies dressed all in white and wearing masks arrived ‘with violins and flambeaux, but did not stay more than one dance, pursuing their way to another castle’. Then the local peasants put on a sophisticated commedia dell’arte production for three nights in her stables. She relished her vineyard, fish from the river, her poultry, fruit, bees and silkworms, found gardening ‘certainly the next amusement to reading’ and played a little whist in the afternoons. She also introduced custards, cheese-cakes, plum puddings and minced pies to her neighbours ‘with universal applause’, as well as the art of butter-making. As she entered her sixties her expectations, always realistic, shaded into resignation: ‘Let us be contented with our chance, and make the best of that very bad bargain of being born in this vile planet, where we may find however (God be thanked!) much to laugh at though little to approve.’ The chase for worldly honours should not make people neglect ‘the innocent gratification of their senses, which is all we can properly call our own’. In her reading, she told Lady Bute, ‘I must be content with what I can find . . . Your youngest son is, perhaps at this very moment riding on a poker with great delight, not at all regretting that it is not a gold one, and much less wishing it an Arabian horse . . . I am reading an idle tale, not expecting wit or truth in it, and am very glad it is not metaphysics to puzzle my judgment or history to mislead my opinion.’ Returning to England at last in January 1762, she died later that year. Wit and truth are just what can be enjoyed in these letters, by a woman whose devotion to reading ought to make her some sort of exemplar for Slightly Foxed.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Roger Hudson 2018


About the contributor

Roger Hudson compiled a series of books for the Folio Society in the 1990s and 2000s.

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