[BITList] Lady about town

[John Feltham]

I watched "A History of Scotland" last night on Australian TV. Part 1 of %.


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Townshend  [née Harrison],  Etheldreda  [Audrey], Viscountess Townshend  (c.1708-1788), society hostess, was the daughter of Edward Harrison (1674-1732) and his wife, Frances (d. 1758), of Balls Park, Hertfordshire. Her father was governor of Fort St George, Madras, India, from 1711 to 1717, MP for Weymouth and Melcome Regis from 1717 to 1722 and for Hertford from 1722 to 1726, postmaster-general from 1726 until his death, and several times deputy chairman, and in 1729 chairman, of the East India Company. Her mother was the daughter of Reginald Bray, of Great Barrington, Gloucestershire. The deaths of her brother and two sisters in infancy left her an only child. She was presumably named after her paternal grandmother Audrey, nee Villiers, but always used the form Etheldreda.

On 29 May 1723 Etheldreda married Charles Townshend  (1700-1764) [see under Townshend,  Charles, second Viscount Townshend], afterwards third Viscount Townshend. On 24 May he had been summoned to the House of Lords as Baron Townshend of Lynn, and until the death of her father-in-law in 1738 she was known as Lady Lynn. From the outset they had a stormy marriage. Her husband was preoccupied with his mistress, a maidservant on the Raynham estate in Norfolk, and they led separate lives, not even seeing each other at dinner. They did cohabit sufficiently to have children: George Townshend, later first Marquess Townshend  (1724-1807); Charles Townshend  (1725-1767); Roger (d. 1759), who pursued a military career; Edward, who died of smallpox in 1731, as a young boy; and Audrey (d. 1781), who in 1756 eloped with Captain Robert Orme, from Devon.

As Etheldreda lived separately from her husband, she was able to enjoy men's company more than most other ladies in her position. In 1738 John Perceval, first earl of Egmont, wrote that Lady Townshend had 'gained to herself as infamous a character as any lady about town for her gallantries'  (Egmont Diary, 2.510). This was followed by a formal separation about 1740 or 1741, from which time her husband lived at Raynham with his mistress. Following their separation she moved to her own establishment in the Privy Garden near St James's Street, Westminster, where she spent her time hosting leading dignitaries and organizing gorgeous entertainments, which were renowned throughout the country. By 1742 she had taken as her lover the politician Thomas Winnington  (1696-1746), whom she 'used as insolently as if she kept him, not he her'  (Walpole, Corr., 30.46). After Winnington's death on 23 April 1746 she fell in love with the Jacobite William Boyd, fourth earl of Kilmarnock, during his trial for treason in 1746, and amused and embarrassed her friends with a sudden, although short-lived, conversion to Jacobitism. Her later lovers included Frederick Campbell  (1729-1816), whom Walpole reported her as pursuing in 1752, and, a few years later, Henry Fox  (1705-1774), to whom she remained a political confidante for several years. Politically she opposed the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole, and later that of Henry Pelham and his followers, but seems to have been ill-disposed to governments in general.

The chief authorities for Etheldreda's career are her friends Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Both tended to portray her as a woman of the world who paid little attention to what people said about her as long as she could amuse herself in the way she liked best, and continued to be surrounded by plenty of lively men and women. Her exploits are supposed to have been the basis for the portrayal of Lady Bellaston in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and also Lady Tempest in Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little.

Following the death of her mother in 1758 Etheldreda inherited a further sum of £1000 per annum to add to the £2000 already settled on her. On 7 July 1759 her son Roger was killed at the battle of Ticonderoga; she erected a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey in 1762, designed by Robert Adam. She inherited Balls Park from her uncle George Harrison when he died in 1759, but received no legacy from her husband when he died at Raynham on 12 March 1764; he reportedly left £50,000 in trust for his mistress.

Etheldreda continued to lead an eventful life. In 1765, for example, she was arrested in the streets outside the house of a painter whose bill she had refused to pay because it was double the original estimate. She was, however, badly affected in 1767 by the death of her son Charles, and it was several years before her activities were once again a talking point for fashionable London society. In June 1780 Walpole reported her as so 'terrified' by the Gordon riots that she 'talked the language of the Court, instead of Opposition'  (Walpole, Corr., 33.195), breaking a habit of decades. She died suddenly on 5 March 1788 and was buried on 12 March in the family vault at All Saints, Hertford, near her own property of Balls Park, which she left to her grandson Lord John Townshend.

Nineteenth-century writers regarded Lady Townshend as exemplifying the loose morals and absence of restraint they deplored in eighteenth-century society: to Justin McCarthy she was 'a whimsical spiteful sprightly oddity'  (McCarthy, 3.152) who separated from her husband 'to carry her beauty, her insolence, and her wit through an amazed and amused society'. In the early twentieth century her reputation was defended by her great-great-great-grandson Erroll Sherson, who portrayed her as 'one of the most beautiful, fascinating and witty women of a fascinating and witty age, who held her own, brilliantly and audaciously as a lady of quality'  (Sherson, 1), well-bred, ambitious, and accomplished, with a mode of living distinguished by luxury, joviality, and expense. This assessment seems more likely than McCarthy's to be enhanced by further study.

John Martin 

Sources  E. Sherson, The lively Lady Townshend and her friends (1924) + J. H. Jesse, George Selwyn and his contemporaries, 4 vols. (1843) + GEC, Peerage + will, TNA: PRO, PROB 11/1164, sig. 160 + J. McCarthy, A history of the four Georges (and of William IV), 4 vols. (1884-1901) + A. N. Newman, 'Harrison, Edward', HoP, Commons, 1715-54 + Walpole, Corr. + A. N. Newman, 'Harrison, George', HoP, Commons, 1715-54 + R. R. Sedgwick, 'Winnington, Thomas', HoP, Commons, 1715-54 + Manuscripts of the earl of Egmont: diary of Viscount Percival, afterwards first earl of Egmont, 3 vols., HMC, 63 (1920-23) + H. Fox, letters to Lady Townshend, 1742-66, Bodl. Oxf., MS Eng. lett. d. 85
Archives Raynham Hall, Norfolk, MSS
Likenesses  J. B. van Loo, oils, in or before 1742; Sothebys, 8 Nov 1995, lot 40 [see illus.] · Kneller, oils, repro. in Sherson, Lively Lady Townshend, 152 · Zincke, oils, repro. in Sherson, Lively Lady Townshend, frontispiece
Wealth at death  Balls Park property in Hertfordshire: will, TNA: PRO, PROB 11/1164, sig. 160