Catharine Macaulay “just returned from a Journey to Paris”

Today, after a gap of more than four months, I’m picking up the story of the British author Catharine Macaulay.

To catch us up, I’ll quote Macaulay’s own letter to the Earl of Buchan dated 23 Feb 1778:

The favor of your Lordship’s letter found me just returned from a Journey to Paris where I resided a few weeks for the recovery of my health after a long and dangerous illness.

Macaulay had gained the strength to undertake that journey only after Dr. James Graham had provided her with “a judicious mixture of the Bark” to treat her “Billious intermitting Autumnal fever,” as I quoted here. The doctor’s sister Elizabeth Arnold was Macaulay’s traveling companion.

Both Macaulay and Lord Buchan supported the American cause. France had just become a formal ally of the U.S. of A., and Macaulay wrote:

I have the pleasure to inform your Lordship that sentiments of liberty which are as you observe lost in these united Kingdoms never flourished in a larger extent or with more vigorous animating force than they do at present in France.

That reflected the Enlightenment circles that Macaulay visited since France was, after all, still a less democratic regime than Britain.

The author also told the earl: “I have this month published a vol of the history of England from the revolution to the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole.” That was the first volume of a never-completed set titled The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend. It was less formal than Macaulay’s earlier histories.

The “Friend” was the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson—Macaulay’s patron, host, and unrequited suitor in Bath. A portrait of Wilson with Macaulay’s daughter set me off on the author’s story last May. That daughter, Catherine Sophia, was “at a Boarding School at Chelsea” when her mother wrote to Lord Buchan; she would turn thirteen the next day. 

TOMORROW: The Wilkesite view.

“No beings in human shape could resemble each other less”

And still speaking of Horace Walpole, Lady Louisa Stuart, daughter of the Earl of Bute, had more to say about him.

In 1837, Lady Louisa wrote in the introduction to a volume of her grandmother Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters and works:

In a word, Horace Walpole himself was generally supposed to be the son of Carr Lord Hervey, and Sir Robert not to be ignorant of it. One striking circumstance was visible to the naked eye; no beings in human shape could resemble each other less than the two passing for father and son; and while their reverse of personal likeness provoked a malicious whisper. Sir Robert’s marked neglect of Horace in his infancy tended to confirm it.

All that would have happened well before Lady Louisa was born in 1757, so she was recording previous generations’ gossip.

The story starts with the rise of a couple of politicians in the last decades of the Stuart dynasty. John Hervey (1665–1751) followed his father into Parliament, then became Baron Hervey in 1703 and Earl of Bristol in 1714. By his first wife he had a son named Carr Hervey in 1691, and by his second a son named John Hervey in 1696.

After Hervey became Earl of Bristol, his eldest son and heir received the courtesy title of Lord Hervey based on the father’s lesser peerage. That meant Carr Hervey was called Lord Hervey from 1714 until his death in 1723. At that point the younger John Hervey became his father’s eldest son and thus also Lord Hervey until his own death in 1743. In fact, through a special law John Lord Hervey got to be Baron Hervey in the House of Lords all on his own in 1733. But he never inherited his long-lived father’s earldom; instead, the second Earl of Bristol was his son.

John Lord Hervey was a major figure during Walpole’s years in power, as a Member of Parliament, a political writer, and a close friend and then enemy of Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III. Thus, when people remembered “Lord Hervey,” they usually meant him. Carr Lord Hervey didn’t leave such a big mark.

Meanwhile, Robert Walpole (1676–1745) was climbing the political ranks as a Whig. He joined Parliament in 1701, served as chancellor of the exchequer 1715–1717, and then dominated Britain as prime minister from 1721 to 1742. He was knighted in 1725. As part of his exit deal, Walpole was kicked up into the House of Lords as the first Earl of Orford.

Robert Walpole married Catherine Shorter in 1700. They had four children soon after marriage, then none for eleven years until Horace appeared in 1717. By the late 1720s Sir Robert was living openly with his mistress, Maria Skerritt, and their affair probably began earlier. In 1737 Catherine Walpole died. Sir Robert then married Maria, but she died in 1739. Their daughter was retroactively made legitimate and became Lady Mary Walpole.

According to the rumor that Lady Louisa Stuart set down, Catherine Walpole had given up on her marriage because of her husband’s infidelities and took her own lover in Carr Lord Hervey. Horace Walpole was supposedly the result of that affair.

It’s true that Sir Robert Walpole and Horace Walpole didn’t look much alike. Sir Robert had a square chin while Horace always had a long, lean face. However, the one surviving portrait of Carr Lord Hervey (shown above) depicts him as a youth with a completely round face, even less like Horace’s.

When people talked about how Horace Walpole resembled Lord Hervey, they usually end up pointing to the younger and more famous John Lord Hervey, not the paternity candidate. In particular, authors have pointed out two major similarities.

First, both Baron Hervey and Horace Walpole wrote gossipy, iconoclastic memoirs about the politics of their day. Hervey’s memoirs were so juicy that the family suppressed their publication until 1848. Therefore, unless he got a secret peek at that manuscript (and, even more improbably, managed to leave no record of that peek), Horace Walpole couldn’t have used the Hervey memoir as a model for his own.

The second similarity, which authors found different ways to express, is that both John Lord Hervey and Horace Walpole were queer.

For Hervey, this took the form of sex with both men and women. He had eight children with his wife; affairs with Anne Vane and perhaps Princess Caroline; infatuations or affairs with Henry Fox, Stephen Fox, Count Francesco Algarotti, and perhaps Prince Frederick. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, another likely lover, declared, “this world consisted of men, women, and Herveys.”

Horace Walpole appears to have been attracted only to men, and it’s unclear whether he had any happy sexual relationships. He did have close friendships with many women, but they were all either married or uninterested in men. People saw Walpole as effeminate. The novelist Laetitia Matilda Hawkins recalled:

His entrance into a room was in that style of affected delicacy, which fashion had made almost natural, chapeau bras between his hands as if he wished to compress it, or under his arm; knees bent, and feet on tip-toe, as if afraid of a wet floor.

Thus, when Horace Walpole scholar Peter Cunningham wrote in 1861, “he was unlike a Walpole, and in every respect, figure and formation of mind, very like a Hervey,” he meant mostly that neither Horace Walpole nor John Lord Hervey were straight.

But how significant was that supposed similarity to the question of Horace’s paternity? Baron Hervey was the putative father’s half-brother. There was only a thin genetic connection between him and Horace Walpole, so their resemblances were likely no more than coincidence.

On the other hand, Horace Walpole was such a gossip that it’s only fair to have this sort of discussion about him.

Horace Walpole at Ten Years Old

Speaking of Horace Walpole, last week I received a packet of postcards from Strawberry Hill, that gentleman’s British estate, in thanks for supporting a fundraising initiative.

The Antiques Trade Gazette told the story:

The Strawberry Hill Trust appealed for help to buy the painting by William Hogarth (1697-1784). Walpole – the 4th Earl of Orford (1717-97) – lived at the Twickenham house and the portrait was on loan there from a private collection.

The trust had an opportunity to buy the painting from the private collection as it has been offered to the nation in lieu of death duties.

However, the painting had been valued at more than the tax due which meant there was a £230,000 funding gap.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund donated £115,000 and the Art Fund has given £90,000. The remaining £25,000 was raised via the Art Fund’s crowdfunding platform, Art Happens. . . .

The trust said the picture was of “exceptional interest” as it is the earliest surviving oil portrait of Walpole; a rare and significant example of Hogarth’s early mature pictorial work; the earliest-known commissioned picture of an identifiable sitter by Hogarth and his first-known portrait of a child. The painting was commissioned by Horace’s father, Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745), the first British prime minister, when his youngest son was aged 10 and a pupil at Eton.

The portrait can now be viewed at Strawberry Hill. One day I’ll go there and feel pride in contributing to that display.

At Museum Crush, Richard Moss wrote on article on “Decoding the Hogarth portrait of the young Horace Walpole.” The boy points to a sundial indicating the number ten, his age. One of the many spaniels he loved over his lifetime runs below. And he looks fabulous in his embroidered blue waistcoat.

But that article doesn’t note what might be the most significant aspect of this portrait: it signaled that his father was actually interested in him at last. As Horace was growing up, his parents were estranged. Horace lived with his mother while, from 1723 on, his father kept house with Maria Skerritt, eventually his second wife. According to Lady Louisa Stuart (1757–1851), a daughter of the Earl of Bute, “Sir Robert Walpole took scarcely any notice of him, till his proficiency at Eton school, when a lad of some standing, drew his attention…” And that’s when the portrait was made.

Campaigns for Two Portraits in the U.K.

A couple of news stories about British art caught my eye recently.

In 1727 Sir Robert Walpole, then defining the post of prime minister, commissioned the thirty-year-old engraver William Hogarth to paint a portrait of his youngest son, Horace.

The result is “the earliest-known commissioned picture of an identifiable sitter by Hogarth and his first-known portrait of a child.” The painting’s creator, subject, and commissioner were three of the century’s most notable Britons.

Horace Walpole grew up to design and commission his Strawberry Hill mansion, a pioneering Gothic Revival structure. He also pioneered the Gothic in fiction with The Castle of Otranto.

Horace Walpole’s childhood portrait is still in private hands, and Strawberry Hill House & Garden, now a museum, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to buy it. The trust that runs the museum says:

The National Heritage Memorial Fund has generously awarded the Trust £115k and Art Fund has kindly offered £90k, but we now need to raise the final £25k by 14 April 2022, to meet the total cost of £230k.

For a look at the portrait and the fundraising campaign, go to this page.

In 1774, a young man called Omai (Mai to his compatriots) from Raiatea, one of the Society Islands, arrived in London. He had traveled on H.M.S. Adventure, commanded by Capt. James Cook, and was introduced to London society by the naturalist Joseph Banks.

Several leading British artists made portraits of Omai. In 1776 Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a full-length picture of the young man in robes and turban (shown above). In 1777 Omai returned to the South Pacific, and he reportedly died two years later.

In 2001 the Earl of Carlisle sold the Reynolds portrait of Omai to an Irish horse-racing magnate, John Magnier, for £10.3 million ($15 million). A few years later the British government sought to buy the painting for £12.5 million for the Tate Museum, but Magnier declined. He was able to have the picture displayed in Ireland from 2005 to 2011. Since then it has been in a “secure art storage facility” in London.

According to ArtNews, it’s unclear if Magnier still owns the painting, but last year the owner applied to export the picture from Britain again. The U.K. government temporarily barred its removal, designating Raynolds’s portrait as of “outstanding significance in the study of 18th-century art, in particular portraiture,” and “a signal work in the study of colonialism and empire, scientific exploration and the history of the Pacific.”

The latest estimate of the painting’s market value is £50 million ($65 million). Under British law, if any of Britain’s public museums commits by 10 July to try to raise that money, the painting will stay in the U.K. until next March to allow time for that campaign. But the Art Newspaper says, “it is unlikely any cash-strapped national museum can afford the hefty price tag.”

Some Podcast Episodes to Sample

I’m sure everyone reading this has sampled several early American history podcasts. There really is a plethora of them, from both individuals and institutions.

Here are a few recommendations of individual podcast episodes that I recently found interesting. They may have slipped by because they appeared in the series unaccountably not devoted to the history of the early America or Boston.

History Extra’s Matt Elton spoke with Jeremy Black about Sir Robert Walpole, who served as prime minister of Great Britain from 1721 to 1742. Prof. Black presented the case that Walpole, the first man to hold that power (even before the term “prime minister” became codified) is still the greatest. Other historians will speak up for other prime ministers, but since this series is linked to the 300th anniversary of Walpole coming to power, he does seem to have a head start.

On the BBC’s In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg conversed with Kathleen Burk of University College London, Frank Cogliano of the University of Edinburgh, and Michael Rapport at the University of Glasgow about the Franco-American Alliance of 1778, what led up to it and what results it produced for all the parties involved. The end of that treaty of amity in the 1790s raised the question of whether the young republic had made an agreement with the nation of France or simply its monarchy. For pragmatic and perhaps temperamental reasons, Washington chose to interpret the situation in the second way.

On Mainely History, host Ian Saxine and Prof. Andrew Wehrman discussed the controversies of smallpox inoculation, not just in Maine but also not neglecting that district. Wehrman notes that by the late 1700s colonial Americans understood the benefits of inoculation, but they also recognized that it carried risks both to individuals an to surrounding communities, so they were ready to protest inoculation efforts that seems risky or inequitable.

The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Talking in the Library series shared a 2020 talk by Prof. Sally Hadden about two rising young attorneys in federal Boston—Harrison Gray Otis and Christopher Gore. Both represented Loyalists trying to regain the rights to their property, and they used that business to build their own wealth before going into politics.

All of these podcasts are available through multiple platforms and apps, so you should be able to find them by search. But I’ve included direct links in each description for people who prefer that route.