Discouraged by law, custom and the disapproval of their peers from playing a meaningful role in the formal world of the mind, some aristocratic women sought other ways to satisfy their intellectual appetites. As the historian Clarissa Campbell Orr has shown, they attempted to bypass the public realm altogether, turning their grand houses into informal centres of learning, bringing into their homes the discursive enquiry and scholarly enterprise with which they could not engage in wider society. They used their wealth to fund not just their own academic interests, but also to support the work of scholars, for whom they found posts in their households as tutors, archivists or cataloguers. Around them, they attracted like-minded men and women of their own rank, amongst whom they shared books, artefacts and natural curiosities. In these informal salons, men and women met together to discuss the broadest possible range of subjects. They owed something to Rousseau in their self-contained desire to retreat from the world, but within the safe domestic world thus created, there was none of the intellectual separation of the sexes upon which the author of Emile so inflexibly insisted. In these aristocratic bolt-holes – a mansion of one’s own – armed with the resources to fund their ambition, a few privileged women achieved a genuine degree of stimulating, scholarly independence.
Perhaps the most influential of these was Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. She was an heiress to great fortunes from both her parents; but she was also far luckier in her father than poor, persecuted Louisa Stuart. The Earl of Oxford was a noted bibliophile and patron of the arts, and encouraged his intelligent, inquisitive daughter to follow her developing passions as a collector. She began by acquiring shells; by the time she was married, her natural history collection had expanded to encompass examples of almost every species, drawn from all over the world. Soon it was the largest and most comprehensive in Britain. The duchess was no hands-off dilettante; she was a conscientious cataloguer of her specimens, and employed a brigade of specialists to assist her in the task of identifying and recording her finds. Beyond her core natural history collection, she also acquired more conventional objects – fine art, historical artefacts (the famous Portland Vase belonged to her), fossils, medals, maps and drawings. All the objects were open to the inspection of visitors, and her house at Bulstrode Park in Buckinghamshire became a magnet for the philosophically inclined. She was also an eager collector of people, supporting needy scholars with grants from her private income, and taking those she found particularly sympathetic into her household. She was especially generous to women, recognising perhaps how few other opportunities were open to them; it was her assistance that allowed the intellectual Elizabeth Montagu to continue writing.50 Mary Delany – the diarist and botanical artist whose delicate flower pictures made from cut paper were regarded as models of exquisitely accurate precision – lived for long periods at Bulstrode after her husband died, leaving her an elderly and impecunious widow.
For the king and queen, Bulstrode was an entrancing vision of the good life enjoyed as they would have chosen to live it: cultivated and private, retired and purposeful, where intellectual enquiry was in perfect harmony with the principles of received religion (the duchess, an observant Christian, was as interested in theology as in natural science). George and Charlotte, who rarely called on anyone, made an exception in the duchess’s case. They took their two eldest sons and three daughters with them when they paid a grand visit to Bulstrode on the Prince of Wales’s birthday in 1778. First they viewed the duchess’s pictures, before moving on to the natural history collections, ‘and with wondering and enquiring eyes, admired all her magnificent curiosities’. They ‘admired all they saw, the young ones full of observations and proper questions, some skipping, some whistling, and delighted above measure’. Mrs Delany, who was present, had not expected to be noticed: ‘I was below stairs in my own apartment, not dressed, and uncertain I should be thought of.’ But Charlotte wanted to meet the famous botanical illustrator, and she was duly presented. Her latest book of flowers was placed on a table for the queen to examine. ‘I kept my distance till the queen called me to answer some question about a flower, when I came, and the king brought a chair, and graciously took me by the hand and seated me in it, an honour I could not receive without some confusion and hesitation. “Sit down, sit down,” said His Majesty, “it is not everybody has a chair brought them by a king.”’51
Bulstrode brought out the best in both George and Charlotte. In its spacious rooms they were relaxed and charming, completely at ease in its atmosphere of calm domestic scholarship. They admired everything they found there, especially Mrs Delany, who was asked to visit the royal family at Windsor, and soon became a regular guest at royal evening parties and concerts. Charlotte particularly enjoyed her company, discussing with her every possible topic of joint interest, from chenille work to botany. In Mrs Delany – indeed, in Bulstrode and its expansively generous patroness – Charlotte saw not just a reflection of her own inquisitive mind, but also a vision of how female intellectual appetites might be satisfied in ways that did not threaten ‘that tyrant, custom’. It was little wonder she spent so much time there.
As she entered her thirties, Charlotte’s intelligence, always formidable, began to emerge from beneath the mask of discretion, where it had been judiciously concealed for so many years; gradually, it developed into one of the defining traits of her personality. Lady Elizabeth Harcourt, who later became the queen’s closest friend, had no doubt that she was an extremely clever woman. ‘Her understanding was of the first class; it was equally quick and solid.’ She was ferociously well read, ‘well acquainted with the best authors in the English, French and German languages; and her memory was so retentive, that she never forgot what she once knew’.52 In the course of a single conversation with Fanny Burney, Charlotte referred confidently to the works of Milton, Wycliffe, Cranmer and Goethe, citing along the way a number of books in German which Burney did not recognise. She was, whilst the novelist knew her, never without a book in her hand, some of them acquired from very unexpected sources. Fanny was astonished to be told by Charlotte, as they discussed a recently acquired work, that ‘she had picked it up on a stall’. The queen explained that she employed a servant who hunted down elusive titles for her among the second-hand volumes piled up on barrows in the streets of London. ‘Oh, it is amazing what good books there are on stalls!’53
As Lady Harcourt observed, the queen loved to talk almost as much as she loved to read, although her enthusiasm was always tempered by a cautious self-censorship. ‘She relished wit in others, but checked it in herself, from being aware that, dangerous as it was in all situations, it would be particularly so in hers.’ Despite this, ‘in the talent of conversing, she had few equals; whether the subject was serious or lively, she treated it in a manner that those must have been stupid indeed that did not listen to her with pleasure; no one narrated better than she did, and anecdotes that had little merit in themselves were made amusing by the way she told them’.54
It was a frequently expressed regret of Charlotte’s that she could never get enough of the lively, interesting talk she loved; deference made everyone mute in her presence, the clammy hand of etiquette putting an end to the prospect of genuinely entertaining discourse. ‘The queen often complains to me of the difficulty with which she can get any conversation,’ Mrs Delany explained to her friend Fanny Burney, when Fanny was about to meet Charlotte for the first time, ‘as she not only always has to start the subjects, but commonly, entirely to support them.’ She begged Fanny to speak up: ‘Now I really do entreat you not to draw back from her, nor to stop conversation with only answering Yes and No.’ It was all to no avail; as the queen approached, the writer was overwhelmed by shyness, and simply ran away and hid.55
Charlotte’s appetite for knowledge expanded beyond the polite arts into science. She continued to nurture the passion for botany that had been a lifelong fascination for her, and was such a recurring feature of Hanoverian queenship. She followed her predec
essors Caroline and Augusta in developing the gardens at Kew, as well as patronising scholarly studies in the same field. The great naturalist Linnaeus later dedicated one of his magisterial works of plant categorisation to her, as did Lord Bute, when he completed his Botanical Tables, the fruits of decades spent in the political wilderness after his ill-starred resignation from the premiership. She explored some of the newer thinking in geology, although she preferred works that did not contradict too forcefully the biblical version of the origins of Earth. In later years, she attended the lectures on science she had arranged for the instruction of her daughters, which included elements of physics and chemistry. Fanny Burney once watched her sitting with the princesses whilst Mr Bolton taught them geography: ‘She was studying with him herself, as he stood before her, with a book in her hand.’ The only teacher from whom the queen did not occasionally receive instruction was the dancing master, noted Fanny, ‘so indefatigable and humble is her love of knowledge’.56
In other circumstances, Charlotte would probably have chosen to satisfy her intellectual needs rather as the Duchess of Portland had done at Bulstrode. However, she knew she could not retire from public duties as completely as had the duchess and her husband, who turned their backs on conventional expectations to pursue the pleasures of private scholarship. Charlotte did all she could, however, to adapt some elements of the Bulstrode model to her life at court. As she grew older, and exerted more control over the appointments made in her household, she chose to place around herself men and women who could be relied upon to deliver the kind of intellectual stimulation she so craved. Jean Andre Du Luc, for example, who was given the post of Reader to the Queen, was a geologist of European repute whose task was to keep his employer fully abreast of new developments in science, whilst deepening her existing knowledge of various scientific disciplines. Elizabeth de la Fite, another of the queen’s readers, specialised in German literature, whilst the Reverend Charles de Guiffardière fulfilled the same role for works written in French.
The little salon which the queen created around herself from the late 1770s onwards was never intended to attract plaudits from other intellectuals. Its low-key tone was partly a reflection of the prevailing suspicion of female ‘philosophers’ and also a product of Charlotte’s cautious, self-effacing character. Her ingrained sense of her own shortcomings meant that the queen had no great opinion of her own capacities. She insisted to Lady Harcourt that she was ‘very sensible of my deficiencies in everything’, and her correspondence is littered with references to ‘my poor powers’.57 This may say more about Charlotte’s low self-esteem than it does about her real abilities, but her insistence on the modesty of her ambitions meant that she attracted very little of the opprobrium directed at more intellectually confident and assertive women. On the contrary, the range and seriousness of her interests were often regarded as highly desirable alternatives to the idle, empty obsessions assumed to preoccupy so many of her sex. The Ladies’ Poetical Magazine urged its readers to regard their bookish queen as a role model:
Happy for England, were each female mind,
To science more, and less to pomp inclined,
If parents, by example, prudence taught,
And from their QUEEN the flame of virtue taught,
Skilled in each art that serves to polish life,
Behold in her a SCIENTIFICK wife!58
On only one occasion did an expression escape Charlotte which suggested she may privately have harboured rather more radical views about the uses and abuses of female intellect. In 1779, she boldly assured her brother Charles that in her ‘opinion, if women had the same opportunities as men, they could do just as well’.59 This was not a view she was ever heard to repeat. It remained, as did so many other unsayable truths in Charlotte’s life, repressed and unexpressed, a casualty of her iron self-control. For, despite all her commitment to learning, the queen usually valued female education not as a catalyst to transform women’s traditional destiny, but as a way of making it more bearable. She loved knowledge for its own sake, and probably would have pursued it to the best of her abilities, whatever her circumstances.
No one appreciated more than Charlotte the secondary benefits delivered to women by a cultivated mind, the opportunities it offered to sustain and enrich the lives of those for whom independent choices were few and unavoidable obligations many. It was this resource – which alone made her own existence bearable – that she hoped to pass on to her daughters. ‘The plan of this exemplary royal mother,’ noted one perceptive observer, ‘on which she was often heard to decant, was, in the education of her royal offspring to open as many resources to them as possible, in a variety of studies and pursuits; out of which they might subsequently make their own choice, and thus be independent of circumstance for occupation and amusement.’60
The queen hoped to achieve this in two ways. She was fully alive to the power of example. Her daughters, she hoped, would come to appreciate the value of a cultivated mind by being brought up in the company of clever people. They would see what learning looked like at first hand, through conversation, reading and discussion. They would also understand that education was not a single stage in life, to be abandoned on leaving the classroom, but a perpetually invigorating process, through which the intellect was constantly and fulfillingly refreshed. But before this could happen, they needed to be equipped with a solid foundation of useful knowledge. This could not begin too early; and every trouble should be taken to ensure that it was carried out by people of the very highest quality.
Charlotte laid out many of the principles on which she based the education of her daughters in a long letter that she wrote to her brother Charles after the death of his wife, offering him advice on how to raise his motherless girls. She began in her accustomed tone of self-deprecation – ‘I have always more to learn than examples to give, in so important a matter as this’ – but soon warmed to her task, laying out her ideas with an eager, confident assurance. Charles should not send the girls away to be educated, but should keep them ‘under your eyes, and your protection, which I regard as the most important consideration’. He should appoint a governess, the best he can find, and ensure she reports only to him. Her responsibilities will go far beyond the academic: ‘She will answer for the conduct of the princesses, will take care of their habits and arrange for their amusements when they are not with their teachers.’ Charlotte laid great stress on the necessity of finding useful ways to fill all otherwise vacant hours. ‘These moments of recreation are the foundation of laziness; where children do nothing, or worse than nothing, they get up to mischief.’ Organised activities provided one answer to this problem; however, as Charlotte knew only too well from her own life, the best insurance against boredom came from within. ‘The young people must also learn how to amuse themselves, for on nothing so depends the happiness of others than knowing how to use their time.’ This was as true for grown women as for young girls, Charlotte insisted, declaring that ‘I am almost certain that many fall into gallantry because they lack resources within themselves. It is thus that their laziness becomes the mother of all ills.’ Charlotte added to the letter the ‘plan of instruction which I followed with my own girls, which I believe has seen good effects’ (though, sadly, this has not survived). Her final instruction directs the bereaved duke to further useful reading: ‘I recommend to you most strongly the works of Mme de Genlis on education, as giving birth to a multitude of useful ideas.’61
Mme de Genlis was governor (she insisted on the more authoritative male title) to the children of the Duke of Orléans, and earlier that year had published her most influential work. Adèle et Théodore combined the thinking of Rousseau and Mme Beaumont with the practical experience of a mother, and her book proved immensely popular. Many of its recommendations would have been very familiar to George and Charlotte’s sons, advocating as it did a simple diet, lots of exercise and physical labour in the open air. De Genlis added elements which would have been particularly attracti
ve to the queen. Religious instruction, vetoed by Rousseau, was positively encouraged, and a more equal course of study for boys and girls was central to her thinking. So impressed was Charlotte with her ideas that she granted her an almost unheard-of private interview when she visited England. De Genlis’s reputation had been much damaged by rumours that she had been the duke’s mistress as well as his employee, but Charlotte was prepared, initially at least, to turn a blind eye to any such failings: ‘She has, like everyone else, two characters. I neither do accuse her nor excuse her, but I own myself a great admirer of her works.’62 Eventually, the queen’s sense of rectitude triumphed over her intellectual curiosity, and she refused requests for another meeting. But long after she had despaired of Mme de Genlis’s morals, she continued to remain interested in her educational theories.
The Strangest Family Page 34