The Impression of the Moment

In 1916 a book appeared, in two volumes running to more than 1,100 pages, with the not very snappy title of Lord Granville Leveson Gower, Private Correspondence 1781 to 1821. This was misleading, since between two-thirds and three-quarters of the letters included were not by Earl Granville, but to him, from his lover for seventeen years, Harriet, Countess of Bessborough. This ancient scandal is hardly reason enough to go in search of Harriet, but there are many other elements of her story that should encourage us to learn more about her, not least the outstanding quality of her letters.

Her sister was the famous Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whom Harriet adored, whose besetting vice – gambling – she shared, but who was regarded by contemporaries as nothing like as bright as Harriet. One of her legitimate children was the notorious Lady Caroline Lamb; another, Frederick Ponsonby, a true hero of the Peninsular War and Waterloo. She was at the centre of the Grand Whiggery, that group of aristocratic families who saw themselves as guardians of the constitutional settlement that had followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a role which justified their great wealth and allowed them to survive a long period of political failure. Theirs was a caste that must intermarry to maintain its exclusivity and position, hence other nicknames like The Great Grandmotherhood or They’re All Cousins. So divorce was frowned on, but affairs and illegitimates carried no great stigma. Harriet had two, her sister Georgiana one by the politician Charles, Earl Grey, and her husband the Duke of Devonshire two by his lover Lady Elizabeth Foster. Harriet was the daughter of Earl Spencer and her husband was a first cousin of the Duke of Devonshire with a sister married to Earl Fitzwilliam – all impeccably Whig. Where she diverged was in her choice of lover: Granville’s extremely wealthy family were leading Tories, followers of Pitt the Younger. And we must be grateful that this was so because their differences add spice to the letters, allowing her to display her shrewd instinct for and interest in politics. Famously she and her sister the Duchess had canvassed for Charles James Fox in the 1784 election, trading kisses for votes, if the caricatures are to be believed. When the war against Napoleon was going badly in 1806 and Prime Minister Pitt was dead, she re-emphasized her constant wish, natural for one in her situation, that the best men of both parties come together – Granville and his great friend George Canning from the Tories, and Fox and Grey from the Whigs. Harriet’s marriage was arranged in 1780, when she was 19, and her expectations were limited: ‘The inside & not the out is what one ought to look at . . . I have a better chance of being reasonably happy with him than with most people I know. But . . . he is so grave and I am so giddy.’ Her four legitimate children came in quick succession, three boys and a girl, and they spent their first years in the Bessborough town house in Cavendish Square or at their new Palladian country house in the Surrey village of Roehampton, an hour or so away. (The family’s many thousands of acres in Kilkenny, Tipperary and Waterford she did not visit until 1808.) Sometime in the 1780s she also had her first affairs, one with a member of the Wyndham family and another, much more serious, with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, leading playwright and Whig MP. She was to pay a high price for this since his behaviour towards her later started to become increasingly unbalanced and obsessive. But there was normal country life besides: ‘reading, drawing, riding, a little musick, and a great deal of piquet’, and poor Willy catching the chickenpox. At times she became an enthusiastic farmer: ‘Some dung I had set my heart upon sold at 15 shillings a load, and I could get none.’ Then she had to appear before a magistrate for failing to pay Pitt’s new tax on hair powder. A few weeks later she was visiting her school in the village, and reporting she had ‘almost completed my prints for Dryden and got a good many towards my Pope’. She was also planning another school, ‘taking a few (I cannot afford many) of the commonest poor beggar girls who are running ragged and dirty about the streets, and can probably have no prospect but thieving or prostitution’, teaching them to become cooks, house maids or laundrymaids. In 1789 Lord Bessborough found out about her affair with Sheridan, then in 1791 she and her sister’s ‘inclination for play’ resulted in a huge loss for them over share dealing. Harriet suffered some sort of col lapse, a stroke perhaps. Soon after, the Duke of Devonshire discovered that Georgiana was pregnant by Charles Grey and demanded that she go abroad to give birth. A large party of Bessboroughs and Devonshires set out for Italy, using Harriet’s illness as the excuse. Harriet was to spend nearly three years away and in 1793 she met Granville for the first time, twelve years younger than she, in Naples on his Grand Tour. He was nicknamed Antinous for his beauty and Beamer because of his almond-shaped eyes of startling blue. She was smitten. If one has to guess when they became lovers, evidence from her letters points to 1797, when she wrote from Chatsworth: ‘I have been riding, and hated it of all things; it reminded me with so much regret of our two rides. How different the most trifling things appear enjoy’d with those we love.’ Before then she had been firm that friendship was ‘all I have to offer’. Their daughter, it seems, was born in 1800 and their son in 1802. Affairs are as much about separation as companionship. Granville was often on diplomatic missions to France or Prussia or Russia, so letters were of the utmost value to Harriet, though perhaps less so for him. She tried to teach him what for her were the makings of a good correspondence: ‘Whoever thinks beforehand of a letter? I am sure I should not know what to say if I did. Believe me, it is best to trust to chance and write whatever comes uppermost at the moment.’ It was not only his letter-writing she sought to improve. She issued what may well be the first warning against mansplaining: ‘I believe a great many men appear more foolish to women than among themselves. They so often think it necessary to use a sort of jargon, adapted to the level of our capacities, and a little condescending way of talking of trifles and making little compliments, that it quite provokes me.’ When he admitted to gambling heavily, she, speaking from her own ‘sad, sad experience’, was particularly forthright: ‘I am quite certain that you are sincere in your resolution of giving up play now . . . but am I not as certain you were sincere in all the other various times you have made me the same promise?’ Harriet was also ready to lecture him on the importance of ‘reading in detail’, not relying on digests or outlines: ‘Botany and Astronomy will never be learnt upon fans nor History and Chronology on fire screens.’ She knew she was ‘always full of whatever I am reading and quote it without mercy’. In 1811 she asked Granville whether he had read Sense and Sensibility. ‘It is a clever novel. They were full of it at Althorp, and tho’ it ends stupidly I was much amused by it.’ As Granville entered his thirties, Harriet found herself in the bizarre position of encouraging her lover to find a wife. In 1804 he was sent to St Petersburg as ambassador, to help keep Tsar Alexander in the war against Napoleon, and there he fell under the spell of the ‘Barbarian’, Princess Galitzin. Although obviously ‘going in deep’ with her, at the same time he made a moving affirmation of his feelings for Harriet: ‘I am persuaded that if it had been my lot to have been married to you, I should have passed a life of happiness such as is enjoyed by few people . . . I look upon you as far, far superior to any other human being.’ But the Princess’s married state proved insuperable. Susan Beckford, heiress of the fabulously wealthy William Beckford of Fonthill, was then briefly spoken of, at the same time as Harriet was chaperoning her deceased sister’s debutante daughter, Lady Harriet Cavendish – ‘Tho’ I do not think she is handsome, she is not ugly.’ It was she whom Granville finally married at the end of 1809, bringing some sort of circularity, or perhaps continuity. Whatever her looks, her intelligence and perception made her the most apt replacement for her aunt. The only unexpected outcome was the extraordinary behaviour of the Prince of Wales when he called on Harriet after hearing the news: falling to his knees, clasping her, kissing her, then ‘mixing abuse of you and vows of eternal love . . . he would break with Mrs Fitzherbert and Lady Hertford [the two royal mistresses] I should make my own terms. I should be his sole confidant . . . Mr Canning should be Prime minister . . . I must have laughed out at the comicality of . . . that immense, grotesque figure flouncing about.’ Two of Harriet’s legitimate children, Frederick Ponsonby and Caroline Lamb, were particular sources of pride and of anguish to her. Frederick served with much distinction through the Peninsular campaigns at the head of his regiment, the 12th Light Dragoons. He survived the battles of Talavera, Barrosa, Salamanca and Vitoria, only to be left for dead on the field of Waterloo. He had led his men in a charge, which Wellington had called ‘beautiful’, but had been wounded in both arms and knocked off his horse before having a lance thrust into his back; he was then plundered by the French, given brandy by a French officer, ridden over by Prussian cavalry, and plundered by Prussians too. He was only rescued the following day. In late July 1812 he had sent a report home after the battle of Salamanca (‘I have knocked up all my horses; I lamed two on the day of the battle, broke my sword, and lost my pistol . . . I never was better in my life.’) which arrived almost at the same time as the most infamous crisis in his sister Caroline’s life. She was lively, precocious and attractive, but subject to alarming mood swings. She had married William Lamb, the future Lord Melbourne and Whig prime minister, in 1805, when she was 19, a love match. Lord Byron – three years younger than her – had woken up to find himself famous in March 1812, on the publication of Childe Harold, and in April he and Caroline began their affair, which turned them into a public spectacle. She was given to cross-dressing as a page-boy, which no doubt sealed the deal for him. It lasted a few months, until Byron was scared off by the realization of her ‘total want of common conduct’. When Caroline saw where matters were heading, she absconded. That night Byron found her, in a surgeon’s house in Kensington, and took her home. In the very month that Byron and her daughter had become entangled, Harriet wrote herself a note, of what she dared tell nobody: ‘In my 51st year I am courted, follow’d, flatter’d and made love to, entoutes les formes, by four men’, whom she listed. She then went on that since she was 15, for thirty-six years, ‘I have heard or spoke that language, and for 17 years of it lov’d almost to idolatry the only man from whom I could have wished to hear it.’ This hardly sounds like someone whose ‘heart and head were exquisitely balanced’, as the writer Raymond Mortimer claimed. But he was right: she was born and lived at a time of equipoise, when emotion and Enlightenment, feeling and reason, sensibility and sense were balanced, and when Evangelicalism and the reaction to the horrors of the French Revolution were still waiting in the wings. We must be thankful that her idolatry drove her pen so unceasingly, so we can share something of those good years.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Roger Hudson 2026