by Wendy Moore
Men, it seemed, could be every bit as fickle as women.
SEVEN
ELIZABETH
Sutton Coldfield, spring 1771
Although it was just eight miles from Lichfield, Sutton Coldfield might as well have been on the other side of the world. Banished to boarding school in early 1771, Sabrina had exchanged her friends for strangers, her progressive and intimate tutorials for traditional rote learning in a classroom full of girls and the vibrant social life of Lichfield for dreary seclusion. For although it stood just two miles from the busy coaching road between London and Chester, the quiet little town could only be reached by a narrow, winding and lonely track across barren wilderness.
Named Sutton (Old English for South Settlement) because it was the town directly south of its bigger neighbor, Lichfield, and Coldfield for the bleak and inhospitable heath that lay between the two, Sutton Coldfield had acquired a reputation for hard drinking and lawlessness. The expanse of open common that bordered the town was notorious for robberies; travelers who did not meet a highwayman on horseback demanding their money were as likely to meet a dead one hanging from a gibbet. Those who dared to cross the moors on foot ran the risk of disappearing forever into a bog or into an inn. One traveler, a woman peddler laden with jewelry, paused for refreshment at a remote tavern and never reemerged; her bones were discovered years later beneath an enclosed wooden bench. So while many of the local people worked hard in the district’s mills, producing knives, ax blades and gun barrels for the traders of Birmingham, others made less honest use of those products to earn their living.
It was little wonder that the townsfolk kept mainly within town boundaries. Certainly Sutton Coldfield itself boasted a number of fine houses, a handsome church, a reputable boys’grammar school and even a book club. But the dearth of other diversions—there were no concerts, plays or assemblies—left the inhabitants with little sport beyond drinking. One resident, writing to The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1762, boasted that the town’s citizens were such “strangers to gaming and whoring” that there had been only “one kept mistress in the place these forty years.” But he was quickly contradicted by another inhabitant who replied that far from there being a lack of kept mistresses, “I hardly ever knew the town without one.” The controversy was plainly the most exciting occurrence there for decades for the dialogue was published as a pamphlet with a title page containing the wry motto: “Here Dullness, Universal Dullness Reigns, / O’er brainless Heads and desolated Plains.”
For the town’s newest resident, unpacking her clothes in her boarding school, the next three years promised little variation. Since she was sleeping in a dormitory once again, and in all likelihood sharing a bed, with her few possessions stored inside a box, her days would be little different from her former life in the Foundling Hospital. Except that now the routine of lessons, meals and visits to church was not even alleviated by singing or dancing.
Edgeworth described Sabrina’s school as “very reputable.” No doubt her fellow scholars were daughters of the local gentry sent to perfect their skills in writing, arithmetic, needlework, music and dancing. There was a wide choice of such schools, usually run by a schoolmistress and a few assistants, devoted chiefly to preparing young girls for a suitable marriage. They offered precisely the kind of female education that Day professed to despise.
With few opportunities for pleasure, and the specter of the town’s workhouse to remind her of her fate if she did not succeed, Sabrina had little alternative but to work hard at her studies. The monotony of her humdrum days would be enlivened only by letters and visits from Day on the rare occasions when he broke his journeys between Lichfield and Birmingham or London to cross the forbidding heath and check on the progress of his pupil. Since he paid her school fees and promised her advancement if she progressed, he remained the most significant force in her life. Spending her weekends and holidays incarcerated inside the school, watching out of a window for a glimpse of a tall, stoop-shouldered, lank-haired visitor, she must have felt herself all but forgotten.
Meanwhile, life in Lichfield was anything but dull. Once Day had placed Sabrina out of sight in Sutton Coldfield, he found no trouble in simultaneously putting her out of mind. His trust in the power of education had “faltered,” according to Anna Seward. His trials had all proved “fruitless.” But if he could not fashion an ideal wife through careful tutoring, then he would simply have to fall back on finding one ready-made. As luck would have it, his friend Edgeworth had already found the supreme candidate: Honora Sneyd.
As with all Day’s romantic interests, the relationship began badly. Despite visiting the palace almost daily for the best part of a year, Day had proved impervious to Honora’s fabled beauty and lauded talents. When Anna Seward had eulogized her pupil’s aptitude for learning and graceful elegance, Day had yawned politely. When Edgeworth had poured out his longings for the clever, beautiful woman of his dreams, Day had pompously reminded him of his domestic duties. But after months of listening to Seward and Edgeworth lavishly praising Honora’s accomplishments, Day finally began to perceive her attributes for himself.
For all her slender and bronzed arms, her disconcerting skill at dancing, her troubling pleasure in fashionable clothes and her polished manners, Day now grudgingly admitted that nineteen-year-old Honora might just possess the necessary qualifications to become his preferred partner—provided she underwent a rigorous retraining in the Rousseau manner and subject to passing the usual trials. It was, the lovesick Edgeworth observed, the strangest romance. Utterly confounded by his friend’s indifference to his loved one’s charms, Edgeworth wrote, “few courtships ever began between such young people with so little appearance of romance.”
Edgeworth’s exasperation was understandable. Coming from a family of renowned good looks and substantial means, Honora had already won a string of admirers. A powerful dynasty, the Sneyd family had been established in Staffordshire since medieval times. Honora’s father, Edward Sneyd, was the third son of one branch of the family that owned an estate at Bishton, a village in Staffordshire, near the border with Wales. Since he was unlikely to inherit the family fortune, he had enlisted in the Royal Horse Guards, married the daughter of an Essex vicar, Susanna Cooke, and set up home in Lichfield. Over the next twelve years Mrs. Sneyd gave birth to ten daughters who arrived in unvaried succession followed, finally, by two sons—the rather belated heir and a spare—named Edward and William. Four of the girls died in infancy, but their six sisters—Anne, Lucy, Mary, Honora, Elizabeth and Charlotte—all thrived. Mrs. Sneyd did not. Shortly after William’s birth, in 1757, she died—exhausted—leaving her husband beside himself with grief and surrounded by eight motherless children under the age of eleven.
Just as Honora had been welcomed into the Seward family, her siblings were parceled out among family and friends in the manner of foundling babies being dispersed to foster mothers—albeit into rather more comfortable circumstances. Growing up in their scattered families, the Sneyd sisters attracted widespread sympathy and uniform admiration. Three of the girls—Lucy, Honora and Elizabeth—were acclaimed as “celebrated beauties.” Some—not least Anna Seward—considered Honora to be the most beautiful of them all.
Initially, Honora had basked in Seward’s possessive affection, sharing her love of reading and her ideas on life with slavish enthusiasm. Over time, Honora struggled to escape this suffocating adoration and developed her own ideas of how she wanted to live her life—and with whom. Although she would always maintain a calm and demure exterior, Honora could be just as determined in her quiet, cool manner to get whatever she wanted as Anna with her fiery declamations. Just as Day had discovered with Sabrina, when the beautifully crafted woman came to life on her pedestal, she began to view the world with her own eyes.
Courted by a succession of admirers, Honora had been pursued by a young clerk, John André, a few months her junior, during a summer trip to Buxton in 1769. André charmed Honora and—more importantly—won
the approval of Anna, her ever-present chaperone. The couple became engaged. On his return to London, André struck up a regular correspondence with the palace. In accordance with the usual protocol, his impassioned letters were addressed to Anna, and it was she who replied, rather than his modest fiancée who occasionally scribbled a hurried postscript. As André and Seward competed to extol the virtues of their darling Honora—fashioning together a perfect romance—the object of their enthusiasm barely noticed. Having filled page after page with devoted praises, André lamented that “very short indeed, Honora, was thy last postscript!” Indeed, when Edgeworth returned to Lichfield at the end of 1770 and met André at a palace party, he thought André was paying court to Anna. Obviously Edgeworth and Honora only had eyes for each other. It was plainly a relief—to Honora at least—when the couple’s lackluster engagement was summarily ended by Mrs. André and Mrs. Seward at the beginning of 1771.
Poor André would never recover; in desolation, he enlisted in the army. Given charge of British secret services during the American war of independence, he would in 1780 be hanged as a spy, on George Washington’s orders. Equally devastated by the end of this perfect romance, Seward would publish a dramatic elegy, Monody on Major André, in 1781, which celebrated his doomed love and heroic death and incorporated the love letters exchanged between André and herself on behalf of Honora in 1769. The poem would make André a national hero and Seward a household name.
Shedding no tears over her broken engagement, Honora was freed to concentrate on a more compelling romance. During his Christmas break with Day, Edgeworth had spent every possible moment in Honora’s company and found that “the more I saw, the more I admired her.” His unhappy domestic circumstances only made his anguish worse. “I had long suffered from the want of that cheerfulness in a wife, without which marriage could not be agreeable to a man of such a temper as mine,” he wrote. “I had borne this evil, I believe, with patience; but my not being happy at home exposed me to the danger of being too happy elsewhere.”
Determined, nonetheless, to stay faithful to his wife, Edgeworth forced himself to stifle his desires. Although he was a man of impulse who lived in the moment, he would always stick solidly to his honorable principles; he was a rare blend in Georgian times. And so once he had persuaded Day to relinquish Sabrina to her boarding school and noticed his friend’s halfhearted interest in Honora, Edgeworth backed discreetly out of the scene. Leaving behind a pining Honora, Edgeworth returned reluctantly to his melancholy wife and young family at Hare Hatch in early 1771.
Now that the field was clear, with both Sabrina and Edgeworth safely out of the way, Seward seized the moment. Although she would later note that “marriage is often the grave of love,” she could never resist an opportunity for matchmaking. Inviting Day more and more often to the palace, Seward took every opportunity to bring together her favorite philosopher and her adored pupil. In a letter to a friend, Seward divulged her scheme. Day, she proclaimed, was “the only man I ever saw, except one, who I think quite worthy my Honora.”
Describing him as her version of the ideal male, she enthused: “Mr Day’s character rises ev’ry hour—he puts on Virtue & it clothes him, his goodness is more than a robe or a diadem. I must take a quire of paper was I to set about enumerating particular instances of his active benevolence. With a fortune of which a Dunce wd be proud—talents which wd make a beggar look down upon the world & dispise it—with ev’ry virtue under Heaven—he knows not what pride is, & values nothing less than Titles or Dress or Figure.” Granted Day had his “singularities” for which “the Envious, ridicule & dislike him.” Yet Seward was sure that these eccentricities made him all the more suited to Honora since she too, in Seward’s view, detested ambition, vanity and luxury and “would be happier in stooping to the lowest duty of humanity than to glitter in a ball room with all the splendor & elegance of dress & equipage.”
But did the pair like each other? Seward was convinced that Day was enamored of Honora even if he showed scant evidence of this interest. “He admires, he esteems, he praises her. I think he feels passion for her & if he does I think it will be mutual,” she wrote, then allowing her imagination to run on she added, “& if it shd [be] they will marry—to be sure it is an event which promises me much happiness.” The truth was that Seward believed that a match between Honora and Day would be perfect chiefly because it would mean that she would not altogether lose her beloved girl. Since many of Day’s friends lived in Lichfield and there-abouts, the couple would more than likely live nearby. She admitted as much to her friend Po: “Remember dear Po that all I have said upon this subject arises only from my own wishes & dont imagine that they are Lovers for they are yet only friends.”
Slowly, haltingly, as the spring flowers opened along the banks of Stowe Pool, the friendship between Day and Honora blossomed belatedly into romance—with much careful nurturing on the part of their chaperone Anna. Tramping the path to the palace with increasing regularity, Day escorted Honora to plays and concerts in his usual aloof manner and monopolized her with didactic monologues explaining his worldview at assemblies and soirées. In protracted conversations on chaperoned walks, he outlined his plans to live apart from society in rural isolation with neither comforts nor diversions and described the exact requirements of the woman with whom he wished to share this domestic idyll.
Since Honora was already acquainted with Sabrina and aware of Day’s experimental efforts, she could have been in no doubt as to the spartan existence he had in mind or the stoical qualities he expected in a wife. It went without saying that the candidate for this privileged position would also need to undergo stringent training of the type he had already imposed on Sabrina. How could she resist? Seward held her breath in eager anticipation as she egged each of them on to acknowledge the other’s virtues in her favorite position at the apex of the love triangle.
Finally, Day wrote to Edgeworth to confess his new love interest and ask his friend whether he could subdue his own feelings for Honora sufficiently to brook the prospect of her marrying Day. It was “one of the most eloquent letters” Edgeworth had ever received. It would need to be. Insisting that he did not want to harm their friendship, Day helpfully pointed out the folly of Edgeworth pursuing a “hopeless passion” and asked: “Tell me, have you sufficient strength of mind, totally to subdue love, that cannot be indulged compatibly with peace, or honour, or virtue.” Edgeworth could hardly disagree with his friend’s assessment. And so to test his forbearance in seeing his darling Honora on the arm of his best friend, he gamely undertook to move his family to Lichfield.
In late spring of 1771, therefore, Edgeworth brought his wife, Anna Maria, and three children to live in Stowe House with Day. Quite how Edgeworth explained this sudden uprooting to Anna Maria can only be guessed at. While Dick, now seven, ran amok in the grounds of the house, closely followed by his devoted sister Maria, who was three, poor Mrs. Edgeworth tended baby Emmeline. Determined to test his resilience to “the dangerous object” to the limits, Edgeworth took over the lease on the house while Day stayed on as a guest—and tested the resilience of Mrs. Edgeworth, who disliked Day as much as ever.
Introducing the sorrowful Anna Maria into the Lichfield social circle for the first time, Edgeworth forced himself to smile benignly as Day courted Honora. Everywhere they went, Edgeworth saw Day and Honora together, and when the pair were apart, Day bent his ear by describing his feelings in exacting detail. “I saw him continually in company with Honora Sneyd,” wrote Edgeworth, adding wearily: “I was the depositary of every thought, that passed in the mind of Mr. Day.” With Edgeworth’s patience stretched to breaking point, Day blathering about the daily ups and downs of his courtship and Mrs. Edgeworth growing increasingly exasperated by the whole scenario—while Dick tore around the house barefoot—the tensions must have been palpable in the tranquil-looking villa.
Finally steeling himself for the event that he now viewed as inevitable, the wretched Edgeworth assured Day that
he not only approved of his marriage to Honora but firmly believed he would feel pleasure in the couple’s happiness. Nothing now stood between Day and marital bliss but “a declaration on his part, and compliance on the part of the lady,” observed Edgeworth ruefully. Yet with the engagement expected daily, Day still dithered.
A few days later, while strolling under the flowering limes in The Close one evening in early summer with a party of friends, Edgeworth managed to sneak a few private words with Honora. One of the group had airily referred to the long-expected engagement between Honora and Day as a foregone conclusion, but Honora then made a comment that cast doubt upon the plan. Assuming that she must be referring to some perceived uncertainty in Day’s mind, Edgeworth warmly assured her that his friend was indeed eager to marry. Honora simply shook her head.
The very next morning Edgeworth left his family in Stowe House and trod the well-worn path to the Bishop’s Palace bearing a parcel of papers that contained a proposal of marriage. Sadly, for poor Edgeworth, the proposal was not from himself but from Day. Having finally taken the plunge to ask Honora to marry him, Day had drawn up a long and detailed summary of his precise expectations of marriage, his particular requirements in a wife and his proposed mode of living according to the outline he had already discussed at length with Honora. Written out laboriously over several sheets of paper, the parcel contained “the sum of many conversations that have passed between us,” Day informed Edgeworth. “I am satisfied, that, if the plan of life I have here laid down meets her approbation, we shall be perfectly happy,” he added. Day told a skeptical Edgeworth that he felt sure that “if once she resolves to live a calm, secluded life she will never wish to return to more gay or splendid scenes.” And then, like a true romantic, he had asked the tormented Edgeworth to deliver his bizarre proposal to the palace. Solemnly accepting the parcel Honora promised to respond by the following morning, and Edgeworth trudged glumly back to his wife and family for a miserable twenty-four-hour wait. The following day Edgeworth retraced his steps and accepted Honora’s written reply, which he dutifully presented to Day.