Waiting for Posterity

In 1786 Richard Wynne decided to sell his estate at Folkingham in Lincolnshire and go to live on the Continent with his wife and five daughters. The sale realized £90,000 and he had investments too; his wealth, eight figures in today’s terms, meant he could lead as elaborate an existence as he wanted, and the hope was that his wife’s health would be improved by living abroad. Moreover she was French, while his mother had been Italian and he had spent part of his youth in Venice, so perhaps it wasn’t as radical a step as all that. Then his fifth daughter had been born in 1786, so he might have resigned himself to never having a male heir to inherit Folkingham.

For us the important thing is the obvious determination of the Wynnes that their daughters should be equipped with all the ladylike accomplishments, so the household included music, dancing and drawing masters as well as governesses and tutors. Among the good habits inculcated was diary-keeping and we find them beginning with this in August 1789, in Alsace, a little to the south of Strasbourg, ominously a month after the start of the French Revolution, when Betsey is 10 and Eugenia 9; Harriet’s began later – she was then only 5. Their diaries record much dressing up and cross-dressing, card-playing, blind man’s buff and frog-in-the-middle, visiting the neighbours, music-making and dancing (with and without music), this often involving servants and peasants ‘who stank terribly and were all a trifle tipsy’, putting nettles down their father’s secretary’s bed, but also learning how to darn stockings and mend clothes. Their father meanwhile buys horses and goes shooting. They move to Venice, where their eldest sister Mary has married an Italian, on the way enduring the bad roads and inns, broken axle trees, verminous beds and drunken postilions even wealthy travellers cannot avoid. In Venice the French ambassador, the Marquis de Bombelles, has been forced to resign rather than serve his new revolutionary masters and the two families agree to share a castle on the banks of Lake Constance in easternmost Switzerland. Here amateur dramatics and reading aloud from Molière, Racine or Robinson Crusoe, and learning German from Schiller’s Don Carlos are added to the educational mix. A passing bassoonist is hired for Lent, and the girls sing at high mass but are allowed to skip the German sermon and have breakfast instead. Betsey dislikes the numbers of French émigrés arriving and the increasingly tiresome de Bombelles, who seems to hold her father in thrall: ‘I would rather live in a cottage in England than among these proud Frenchmen.’ The massacre of the Swiss Guards in Paris in August 1792 makes all the French, whatever their politics, very unpopular with the local peasantry, who take the Wynnes to be French too. By early 1793, when Louis XVI is guillotined, Betsey records how she ‘danced with the afflicted French this afternoon. Is there such another drôle nation?’ In 1794 the Wynnes learn of the torture of their mother’s parents by the sans-culottes at their home near Lyons. Later that year fear of the advancing revolutionary armies persuades Mr Wynne to go further east, alas with the de Bombelles in tow. They move to Ratisbon (Regensburg), then still an enclave of the Holy Roman Empire and seat of its ‘Perpetual Diet’, within Bavaria on the Danube, essentially Protestant but with three Catholic bishops and three abbeys as well, all under the benign guidance of the Princess of Thurn and Taxis. Betsey is soon recruited by her to play at performances of the first act of The Magic Flute and the finale of Don Giovanni put on at her court. It is now, at the great age of 16, that Betsey expresses some shame and an accompanying very adult feeling of responsibility: ‘It is very humiliating to see that all the women of Papa’s family should have lost their character and that makes us more than anyone else be scrupulous for the least thing and keep up an irreproachable conduct.’ She is referring here to her father’s mother, Anna Gazzini from the Ionian island of Lefkas, procured for her Wynne grandfather by his gondolier according to the catty Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (see SF no.57) and only married by him some time after the birth of their first child, Giustiniana, who then acquired considerable notoriety for the number of her lovers, including Casanova. Giustiniana had married the Count von Rosenberg in 1761 but he had died in 1791 and now Betsey’s aunt’s last lover is one Benincasa, an ex-Jesuit. Finally there is her sister Mary, who seems to have fallen for her brother-in-law very shortly after her marriage. Now, ‘She behaves herself every day worse. She has left Conegliano [her home] and has gone [off with] an archiprête, a man of bad reputation.’ At the end of 1795 de Bombelles’ valet de chambre insults Mr Wynne’s, who then knocks him down. According to Betsey the former is de Bombelles’ ‘darling, confidant and friend’ and the only person who can ‘arrange’ his dozen false teeth. His master over-reacts, threatening to abuse Mr Wynne and so provoke a duel. When Wynne offers to give him satisfaction, he denies that he had wanted to fight. At last the Frenchman’s hold over her father is ended and by March Betsey can rejoice that her family is on its way to Florence over the Brenner Pass. But soon they are fleeing from the French forces progressing rapidly down Italy, in the nick of time making it to Leghorn where Captain Thomas Fremantle of the frigate Inconstant takes them on board. Thomas (b. 1765) has been in the Mediterranean for two years, often in the company of his good friend Nelson, distinguishing himself in March 1795 with his attack on the far larger French 84-gun Ça Ira during a major encounter with the French fleet, before Nelson then delivers the coup de grâce. From a sketchy diary he keeps it is plain that both he and Nelson, a married man, have a succession of ‘dollies’ as he calls them, or mistresses. In July 1795, when dining with Nelson on his ship, he remarks that ‘He makes himself ridiculous with that woman’, meaning Nelson’s current mistress. Later he refers to one of his own, ‘a Venetian dolly – ravenous bitch’. The day the Wynnes first come on board in June 1796 he notes that another called Adelaide comes off the Inconstant that very evening. In spite of this, Thomas and Betsey feel drawn to each other from the start and by 12 July Betsey is recording how he acknowledged to her mother ‘that he is partial to me, and as his fortune at present was not sufficient enough for him to maintain a family he said he should not keep us any longer with him’. The family are transferred to another ship while he sails off. When he sees them again in October the pace quickens once more, with Mrs Wynne offering him a marriage settlement of £5,000 with the promise of £10,000 on her husband’s death. But by 30 December he is still dithering: ‘Don’t like the idea of parting with Madlle [his current dolly]. Get serious fits. [December 31] Amazingly attached to Betsey . . . I can’t say I have on the whole behaved very well.’ Only on 10 January are matters finally settled, as Eugenia bluntly records: ‘Papa behaved very handsomely in granting him my sister and £8,000.’ Two days later they are married, the event orchestrated by the glamorous ambassadress at Naples, Emma Hamilton, with George III’s son Prince Augustus giving Betsey away and Queen Maria Carolina of Naples smoothing out any difficulties with the Catholic authorities. Betsey sails off with her husband and harpsichord, immune it seems to seasickness, while he pursues prizes, including one laden with Joseph Bonaparte’s furniture. There is also ‘much flogging this morning which made Fremantle ill and broke my heart’. In July Nelson and he are involved in hand-to-hand fighting in small boats off Cadiz, of which Betsey does not approve: ‘sacrificing men for nothing’. Later that month, in hopes of capturing Spanish treasure ships, a foolhardy night landing at Tenerife is attempted, in which Nelson loses his right arm and Fremantle has two musket balls through his. A pregnant Betsey nurses them as they sail back to England on Fremantle’s ship. His wound forces Fremantle to give up his command, Betsey has the first of her ten children, and they set up house in Buckinghamshire where he had been brought up. He takes up wood-turning and shoots his first partridge. They are at pains to maintain their friendship with the family of the Marquess of Buckingham, by far the grandest and richest of their neighbours. (In the 1800s the biggest of his sinecures, the Tellership of the Exchequer which he has held since he was 11, is making him between £20,000 and £25,000 a year.) He, a member of the great Grenville political dynasty, is the source of the patronage vital for advancing the career of an officer like Fremantle; luckily Fremantle’s younger brother has for some time acted as a valuable political fixer for the Marquess, while the Marchioness and her daughter are Catholic like Betsey and her sisters. Eugenia and Betsey have a regular immersion in the social swim each year during the London season, their musical skills much in demand. At home they have to make do with the Kettering Ball: ‘a collection of tall, stout, immense women and not one good dancer. Few beaux and all parsons.’ But things are very different each Christmas, spent at the Buckinghams’ palatial Stowe, playing the new piano before the French royal family in exile or mixing with the Prince of Wales and Charles James Fox, attending the dinner given for 500 of the local poor or the feast for their children where they receive a shilling apiece and a baked potato. Early in 1801 Betsey is forthright about Lady Nelson’s separation and the emergence of what might be called England’s first Celebrity Couple: ‘I have no patience with her husband, at his age and such a cripple to play the fool with Lady Hamilton.’ But soon Nelson is telling Fremantle, back at sea in command of the Ganges, that she must be next in line to his own ship in the desperate battle which is to be fought at Copenhagen. From this point on there are frequent extracts from Fremantle’s letters to Betsey, telling her for instance about the tedium of being part of a blockading squadron, ‘bile and ennui: I do nothing but take snuff and read Shakespeare when I am off the quarterdeck’. She in return tells him how two of their children have been introduced to Queen Charlotte by her daughter Princess Sophia. Come October 1805 and Freemantle must put aside his pug dog, cat and monkey as Trafalgar looms: Nelson ‘told me I should have my old place in the line of battle, which is his second’. There Fremantle’s ship, the three-decker Neptune, takes the surrender of the four-decker Santissima Trinidad single-handed. It is another year before he is back in England, where he is suddenly the beneficiary of major patronage, appointed a Lord of the Admiralty in Buckingham’s brother Lord Grenville’s Ministry. But by March 1807 it has fallen, and three years go by before he is on the upward path again, promoted to Admiral and serving once more in the Mediterranean. By the time the war finally ends he has been off Toulon, at Minorca, Tunis, Vis off the Croatian coast and Trieste, freeing the entire Adriatic of the French, and has been made a Knight of the Bath. By his death at Naples in 1819 he is Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean and a Baron of the Austrian Empire. Betsey lives until 1857, and by then there are more than sixty volumes of her and Eugenia’s diaries waiting for posterity.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Roger Hudson 2023