Mad and Bad

CHAPTER ONE

The Ton

Either You’re In or You’re Out

The first line of Pride and Prejudice—*the* defining novel of the Regency era by Jane Austen—tells us everything we need to know about the focus and priorities of the upper classes.¹ Marriage, and in particular the right marriage, ensured that the wealth concentrated among a few families remained exactly where they wanted it, passed down through the generations, consolidating and consecrating their power. This singular obsession runs through sources from the time both consciously and less obviously so.

The discussion of marriage and what it truly means is put into even more material terms in Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s novel The Sylph, but it’s no less harsh a description of the institution and the way her entire social circle treated it during the time period.

Both Georgiana and Jane highlight the mercantile reality of marriage for the upper classes. Money needs to marry. And during the Regency, these marriages were plotted and encouraged during social events held over a social Season, like the Wednesday-evening ball held weekly at Almack’s Assembly Rooms.

The Assembly Rooms and the “marriage mart” culture they encouraged have been immortalized in the fictional worlds of Jane and Georgiana and their fellow nineteenth-century authors, which in turn captured the imaginations of historical romance novelists, who frequently feature Almack’s and the marriage machinations taking place therein in their Regency-set romances.

Almack’s and the Patronesses who ran the membership lists for the club, deciding who was awarded a voucher for entry and who was denied, have become a beloved and expected part of a Regency romance novel. The Patronesses are often portrayed as middle-aged and meddling (if invariably with a well-hidden streak of kindness), ruling their club with an iron fist and eye to the unwritten set of rules that governed the world of the aristocracy.

In reality the Patronesses were young women themselves, many of them friends or related through marriage, who lived the kind of interesting, exciting lives that Regency romance heroines aspire to.

ALMACK’S: A BRIEF HISTORY

Almack’s Assembly Rooms were founded around 1765 by William Almack, who originally had a coffeehouse and tavern on the premises.² By the height of the Regency his daughter Elizabeth Pitcairn had inherited and was running her father’s establishment. The coffeehouse and tavern had morphed into a much more elegant operation, with a series of large ballrooms connected to one another.

Almack’s was one of the first clubs in London to admit both men and women. Men’s clubs were already very popular with upper-class men as a space for socializing. Almack’s allowed women into this inner sanctum.

Even more uniquely, the list of those admitted was ruled over by a group of aristocratic women, called the Patronesses.

The Patronesses were an integral part of William Almack’s vision for his club. He wanted to ensure an elite reputation for his establishment, and knew that engaging the services of the most aristocratic women he could find would help achieve this goal. In his original advertisement for Almack’s he announced that seven aristocratic women had each opened a subscription book with the intention of giving sixty subscriptions apiece, which would confer the right to the holder to pay ten guineas for admission to the twelve balls a Season.

In doing so he created a uniquely feminine space where aristocratic men and women could meet and continue the conversations that had been occurring in Parliament and elsewhere, with an eye to keeping their social world rigorously regulated through careful, often arranged marriages and courtships. But unlike Parliament, women ruled at Almack’s.

Almack’s and its Patronesses truly capture the many contradictions of Regency society. Even during their lifetime, they were characters of fascination and subjected to satirical representations as well as public gossip about their lives. The Patronesses were never neutral figures. By entering a world of power and setting themselves up as the ones to control it, the Patronesses found themselves in an unusual position. They wielded authority over those who traditionally never gave up power to anyone.

The Regency-era Patronesses of Almack’s are often remembered and associated with a number of incidents that occurred during their tenure, perhaps none more famous than Wellington and his trousers.

Almack’s was governed by a strict set of rules, which included a dress code. In May 1819 the Duke of Wellington arrived at Almack’s with the necessary voucher to attend the ball. However, he was turned away at the door because he was wearing full-length trousers, rather than the required knee-breeches. The Patronesses’ rejection of the new fashion reminds us of their core of conservativeness. Another rumor goes that he was turned away for arriving seven minutes after the doors had closed, necessitating the steward to ask the Patronesses to hold the door for him, a request that was refused.

Wellington was a lionized and beloved figure in the press and with the people for defeating Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo. The Patronesses were painted as ridiculous and petty to deny entrance to such a figure due to a simple fashion error. Rather than being considered fair, they were seen as small, mean, and so obsessed with their own rules that they couldn’t bend them, even for such a great hero.

The sheer uncomfortableness of Regency men with this exceptional display of feminine power can be seen in the contemporary writing about Almack’s, like Henry Luttrell’s Advice to Julia, which features the lines:

Luttrell bemoans the fact that the Patronesses have circumvented traditional power structures, and have specifically rejected the traits that would normally ensure social acceptance. Instead they have created their own “list,” and only they know the secret formula for guaranteeing a name’s inclusion.

Contemporary (and slightly later) chroniclers of the time have been less than kind to the Patronesses, perhaps no one more so than Rees Howell Gronow, known as Captain Gronow.

A Welsh officer in the Welsh Grenadier Guards, Gronow arrived in London in 1813 after serving with his regiment in Spain. He was a popular society figure, attending Almack’s Wednesday-night balls along with his fellow dandies. His military career continued and took him to Paris. He retired and struggled financially, while attempting to mount a political career—which failed. In 1862 he published the first of what would eventually be four volumes of Reminiscences, his true legacy.

Captain Gronow had a lot of opinions, some of them worthy of a great deal of skepticism, and he shared them freely. In 1813 he recorded the Patronesses as: Sarah Villiers, the Countess of Jersey; Emily Clavering-Cowper (later Viscountess Palmerston); Dorothea, Princess Lieven; Clementina Drummond-Burrell; Amelia, Viscountess Castlereagh; Maria, Viscountess Sefton; and Princess Esterhazy.

According to Captain Gronow, Sarah Villiers, Lady Jersey, was a “theatrical tragedy queen” and “inconceivably rude,” in contrast with Emily Clavering-Cowper, later Viscountess Palmerston, whom he names as the most popular of the Patronesses.

To Captain Gronow, Princess Lieven is “haughty and exclusive” and Lady Castlereagh and Mrs. Drummond-Burrell are the “grand dames” of the proceedings. Meanwhile, Lady Sefton is described as “kind and amiable” while Princess Esterhazy is given the nickname of “bon Enfant,” which can mean both “good-natured” and, in a less charitable reading, “simple-minded and naive.”⁴

Gronow’s descriptions might often be unkind, but they hint at the differences among the Patronesses. We often think of this group of women as a unit, but they were individuals with different lives and ambitions. We also see these descriptors pop up again and again in almost any future mention of the Patronesses either together or separately, highlighting the way fact and fiction can become entwined in a historical source.

But what is even more interesting is to examine what the Patronesses thought of one another, and their impressions of each other.

Princess Lieven is a wonderful source for this. A prodigious letter writer separated from her family due to her husband’s ambassadorship in London, Princess Lieven wrote thousands of letters to her family and friends, keeping them abreast of everything happening in Regency England, and Lieven’s opinions on it all.

Princess Lieven describes Princess Esterhazy as “small, round, black, animated, and somewhat spiteful,”⁵ which is oft referenced when discussing the two women. However, Princess Lieven is not only discussing Princess Esterhazy, but also comparing her with another recently arrived ambassador’s wife, and after her description of the pair, she writes, “I get on equally well with both.”⁶

The princesses are often compared to one another as the only two foreign-born Patronesses, with Princess Lieven cast as the jealous older woman worried about losing her position of power to the younger, prettier Princess Esterhazy. But the princess’s letters reveal something far more interesting: two power players jockeying for favor and position in the world they both entered as foreigners.

Princess Lieven mentions her fellow Patronesses regularly in her gossipy letters, sometimes hinting at historical intrigues long forgotten, as in her discussion of her fellow Patroness Clementina Burrell-Drummond, who seems to have been kicked out of the Prince Regent’s inner circle due to her friendship with an out-of-favor mistress, only to be brought back into the fold when he became king.⁷

The Patronesses were larger than life. But in studying the details of those lives we can see that in actuality, the women who held themselves up as moral authorities were often the most scandalous of all, or at the very least intimately connected to the scandalous ones.

Part of the fascination with the Regency seems to come from exactly this touchpoint of the rules of a society and what happened to those who flouted them. The Patronesses were not the only aristocratic women to skirt this line between respectable and scandalous, but they were also the ones in the unique position of casting judgment upon their fellow aristocrats.

Rules are, of course, made to be broken.

THE PATRONESSES

Sarah Sophia Child Villiers, née Fane, Countess of Jersey, is perhaps the most often mentioned and best remembered of the Patronesses, immortalized in her contemporary Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon as Lady Augusta and by later writer Georgette Heyer as “Queen of London’s most exclusive club.”⁸

She was born March 4, 1785, to John Fane, tenth Earl of Westmoreland, and Sarah Anne Child. Her mother, Sarah Anne, was the daughter of Sarah Jodrell and Robert Child, a banker and politician.

John and Sarah Anne eloped to Gretna Green in 1782, against Robert Child’s express wishes. He did not approve of his daughter’s husband and arranged for his fortune to pass to his daughter, and then her children, effectively writing the earl out of his inheritance.

It worked. Sarah Anne’s daughter Sarah inherited the family estate Osterley Park and also became a principal shareholder in the family banking firm, Child & Co. Sarah’s husband, George Villiers, fifth Earl of Jersey, had the surname Child added to his own by royal license, fulfilling a long-held family wish.

Sarah married George in 1804. The marriage, like those of so many of their contemporaries, was not a faithful one. Despite Sarah’s determination to stand in contrast to her notorious mother-in-law, Frances Villiers, who was famously mistress to George IV while he was Prince Regent (the prince had a thing for older women), she was not a faithful wife. One of her most famous supposed lovers was Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, who would go on to marry Sarah’s fellow Patroness, Emily Clavering-Cowper.

Sarah was a complicated figure. She was immortalized in many contemporary pieces of fiction, sometimes in a less-than-flattering light. In fiction Sarah is alternately meddling and severe, but in real life, Regency chronicler E. Beresford Chancellor wrote that “her amiable manners, her interest in politics, her admirable linguistic powers, her kindly, genial nature, all combined to give her a sort of prescriptive right to the exalted sphere in which she moved.”⁹ Sarah’s fellow Patroness Princess Lieven wrote that Sarah was the only other society hostess who threw as elegant a party as she did, and she mentioned Sarah many times in her letters as a friend.

Sarah had seven children, who all went on to make the kind of socially advantageous marriages Almack’s was supposed to facilitate. But perhaps most neatly for us, her daughter Lady Sarah Frederica Caroline Child Villiers married Nicholas Paul, ninth Prince Esterhazy and son of Lady Jersey’s fellow Patroness Princess Esterhazy, uniting the two families.

Sarah is also remembered for introducing the quadrille to Almack’s in 1816. [Figure 1] Up until that point, only country dances had been allowed at the Wednesday-night balls. This, along with the fact that only light refreshments were served, contributed to a stuffy reputation for Almack’s. Quadrilles are performed by four couples, arranged in a square set. In the early nineteenth century they were complicated dances that required the dancers to memorize a series of elaborate sets. While country dances were inclusive and easier for anyone to join, quadrilles could only be danced by those “in the know.” Perfect for members of a social club looking to make themselves even more exclusive!

Sarah Villiers, Countess of Jersey, Queen of the Ton, was the daughter of a banker and an heiress to boot. These are two qualities that fiction has told us would have resulted in her exclusion from the very exalted circles she ran. Instead she ruled over a legendary social scene, turning the tables on the Ton and holding court from her position of power as both a Patroness and a partner at Child & Co. Sarah never relinquished control of the bank to any of the men in her life, retaining the right to hire and fire partners and attending meetings regularly herself.

Sarah’s nickname was, ironically, Silence, due to her supposed penchant for rambling storytelling. But in Sarah we see a woman who refused to be quiet about the things that mattered to her, and instead used her considerable wealth, power, and personal charm to achieve her goals. Henry Greville, third Earl of Warwick, wrote about Sarah in his diary, “Few women have played a more brilliant part in society, or have commanded more homage, than Lady Jersey… It was her great zest and gaiety, rather than her cleverness, which constituted her power of attracting remarkable men, many of whom I have seen listen with the greatest complacency to what they would have considered to be egregious nonsense had it emanated from less charming lips.”¹⁰ And then, attesting to the true legacy Sarah left behind, “She will be a great loss to many, and she is the last, with the exception of Lady Palmerston, of a more brilliant and more refined society than is to be found in our present time.”¹¹

Emily had many names throughout her life. She was born Emily Lamb in 1787, but even her birth surname was in question as her mother, Elizabeth, was famously unfaithful to her husband Peniston Lamb, bringing Emily’s parentage into question. Peniston was made Viscount Melbourne in 1781, honoring the family’s contributions to politics and changing Emily’s title for the first time, as she became the Honorable Emily Lamb.

Emily’s glamorous mother, Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne, can be seen alongside Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Anne Damer in the famous Macbeth witches portrait by Daniel Gardner. [Figure 14] Elizabeth’s many affairs distressed her children, but she remained a fierce advocate for her offspring, working hard to ensure successful marriages for all of them.

In 1805 eighteen-year-old Emily married Peter Clavering-Cowper, fifth Earl of Cowper. The two were wildly different, with the charming, vivacious Emily often outshining her more quiet and reserved husband. The couple had five children, though the paternity of two of them is in question. Their marriage was not a faithful one, but Emily’s most famous affair led to an even rarer thing: a happy second marriage with her former paramour Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston. Palmerston earned the nickname Cupid for his many affairs, including with two of Emily’s fellow Patronesses, Princess Lieven and Lady Jersey.