On Un-Cruella-DeVilling Frances Twysden Villiers

Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) is arguably the person about whom the English version of the phrase “history is written by the victors” was first framed:

"Vanquished — his history written by the victors — Robespierre has left a memory accursed " (Hon. George Sidney Smythe, M.P., Historical Fancies, 1844)

Robespierre, you will recall, is the person we picture cheering loudly at the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and then architecting the "Reign of Terror" immediately after these executions, in which thousands died all over France. But should he personally be held culpable for all of it? It's the kind of question that people love to think about, even hundreds of years later. Here, for example, is a 2017 Quora thread on the topic of: Was Maximilien Robespierre a villain?

The jury is still out, when it comes to Robespierre. And this makes me feel an urgent need to talk about Tim Clarke's 2016 book, The Countess: The Scandalous Life of Frances Villiers, Countess of Jersey.

I have been researching Frances Twysden Villiers on and off since 2011, and it has been rough going, because so little written information is available about her, except for salacious and scurrilous press coverage of her alleged love affair with the Prince of Wales in 1794-1798 or so (she and the Prince disagreed about if and when it was finally over). History has been virtually silent about her since Robert Huish's 1831 biography of George IV, in which she plays an intriguing but short cameo role. To some degree, the silence of history is slightly bizarre—this is the same "Prinny" who would later become the Prince Regent. He’s the one after whom the whole "Regency Period" is named. Lady Jersey participated in an actual scandal with an actual British royal heir, a scandal which took place in Georgette Heyer's world, in the world of yes, Bridgerton, and yet hard facts have been remarkably thin on the ground.

Imagine my delight when Clarke published his book -- over 300 pages with tens of pages of footnotes. I was finally going to get some real information I could use.

Photo credit: Amazon.com

But sadly, no, I was not going to get that, not at all. Clarke was not writing about a life that had scandal in it -- he was writing a thoroughly researched polemic to prove that scandal was what defined her life. Clarke rescued Lady Jersey from obscurity, only to cast her as someone only slightly more three dimensional than a cartoon villain. Fair enough, but I have three bones to pick with Clarke.
First: overstating the Villiers villany

Clarke has my sympathy, he really does. He has researched a woman who lived in the late eighteenth century, and he is hoping to make this debut writing effort of his a major literary event. Amanda Foreman's life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire had just in 2008 been made into a movie starring Kiera Knightly, and in the wake of the film, the Foreman book was marketed under the title, "The Duchess." So when Clarke writes "The Countess," perhaps he is thinking about the movie his book will make.

And for the movie, the Countess needs to have been a serious historical heavy. Clarke more than delivers here. In his final chapter, entitled, "The Verdict of History," Clarke elevates Lady Jersey into a figure who personally, and with only a very small amount of assistance from the principals, managed to threaten the British monarchy itself. Clark gives Lady Jersey quite a lot of credit for George IV's marriage to Caroline of Brunswick in 1795, and indirect credit for all of the bad things that happened after that.

Indeed, twice on account of this marriage and the treatment of Princess Caroline by the Prince and Frances Jersey the Monarchy itself had seemed under threat and its survival uncertain, so violent was the public reaction to their deeds. (p. 299)

He continues:

So King George IV went to his grave disgraced by, and to be remembered in the light of, his many misdeeds, not least his marriage to and treatment of Princess Caroline. And in that Frances Jersey played no mean part. That is her legacy and for that and for what flowed from it she must take the blame. In the space of a handful of years Frances Jersey destroyed an already doubtful reputation and helped blacken that of a future King. (p. 299)

The logic which takes us back from the toppling of the monarchy to all of George IV's missteps, to his marriage with Caroline of Brunswick as the harbinger if not the actual cause of all those missteps, to that marriage itself being unquestionably a huge misstep in itself, and then to Lady Jersey herself as playing "no mean part" is quite tortured, even if one simply stops to ask the question "did George IV have any agency in his life?" Keep in mind that this is a man who stabbed himself to prove to a prior lover, Maria Fitzherbert, that he would literally die if she didn't agree to marry him (illegally). He managed that dramatic scene in 1785 completely without help from Lady Jersey.

Prinny’s decision to marry Caroline of Brunswick is so logical that one wonders by what stretch of the imagination Lady Jersey can be brought into the calculation. By 1794, Prinny was seriously in need of the funds Parliament would give him in return for completing a legal marriage with an eligible person (someone both Protestant and of royal blood), and there were only two for him to choose from at that desperate moment. His mother preferred one, so he chose the other. Prinny’s treatment of his consort once he married her cannot reasonably be blamed on his mistress of the moment, which is what Lady Jersey was, at that moment. In fact, one has to dig deep to think of a way this makes sense. He should have had a different, nicer, mistress, who encouraged him not to be repelled by his wife? What?

If we return to Robespierre for just a moment, we will observe that on his watch, monarchs were actually beheaded. Holding Lady Jersey responsible for almost toppling the British monarchy through the second-hand effects of her influence on George IV's treatment of his wife would be, if considered sympathetically, the equivalent of blaming the French revolution and its aftermath on Robespierre's reputed mistress, Éléonore Duplay. Except Clarke's chain of causation has about six more questionable steps, and his story of threatened monarchial extinction ends with Queen Victoria sitting on the throne for a world record six decades afterwards.

Second: pretending the overstated villainy is a set of exaggerations he is actually trying to rectify

Despite Clarke's unequivocal stance that Villiers must take some serious responsibility for nearly toppling the British throne, he also tries to claim that on balance, the Countess wasn't actually that bad. His pronouncement that Lady Jersey must take responsibility for completely ruining Prinny’s reputation is immediately followed by this somewhat astonishing “aw shucks” moment:

That apart, her conduct was neither exceptional for her time or unconscionable in any other. For 200 years she has been treated as the personification of malevolence, often on the back of falsehoods. She was a remarkable woman. She was not all bad, let alone that bad. History has been harsh to Frances, Countess of Jersey. (p. 300)

This is where we need to come back to the issue of "history is written by the victor." With a deft slight of hand, Clarke attempts to clarify that it isn't he, Tim Clarke, who is blaming Villiers for the tragic under performance of George IV on the British throne. No no--he is correcting 200 years of history. With his unenthusiastic realization that Villiers was "not all bad," he is apparently redeeming what he can of a pretty poor specimen. Which makes him a pretty good guy!

Natalie Hanley-Smith, who reviewed the book positively in the Royal Studies Journal, calling it"a good and interesting read," jumps on this bandwagon as well, marveling that Clarke's ambition is to "rescue [Villiers'] character after two hundred years of vilification."

But hang on a second. What vilification? Who exactly in "history" has been "harsh" to Frances, Countess of Jersey? As previously mentioned, I have been searching hard for any sign of information about Villiers, and as far as I can tell, nothing has been written about her since Robert Huish trashed her in his creatively trashy biography of George IV in 1831, and all of Villiers's papers were burnt upon her death. Clarke quotes a descendant of Lady Jersey who dishes in a letter that nobody wanted to be buried next to her in the family vault, but this is not enough to constitute the full 200 year record we are looking for.

This whole 200 years of vilification thing exists solely in Clarke's imagination, and I think we need to ask what Hanley-Smith is up to, when she enthusiastically embraces his assertion that silence means condemnation. I hope there is something more to this than she approves of a tired narrative about weak men and the strong, sexy women that control them, especially if those men are important and make notoriously bad decisions. The barriers to victory against this excessively limp straw man are completely negligible. It's as though Clarke has reversed the logic: he is the VICTOR, so what he is writing must be HISTORY.

Returning again to Robespierre, the many historians who have debated the many different perspectives on his role, his agency, the morality of the revolution, the inevitability of the violence, and so on, have had each other to argue with. Clarke, on the other hand, sets up a completely imaginary phalanx of opponents, spewing vilification, and it is pretty amazing to imagine that could have said anything worse than what Clarke himself has to offer, because Clarke doesn't hesitate to make ad hominem attacks on Lady Jersey throughout the book.

Third: so what?

Here are some things I am trying to figure out about Frances Twysden Villiers which I would have liked to be able to find out in her one existent 300-page biography:

• What was her childhood like? Clarke devotes the first three (3) pages of the book to her life before marriage to the Earl of Jersey. This information about her childhood would be interesting under any circumstances, in any biography, but add to that:

• Where did she stand on issues of Irish nationalism? What impact did it have on her that on her mother's side, she was the grand-daughter of Thomas Carter, founder of a notorious Irish patriot family? Her father died before she was born. Was she raised in Ireland with her mother's family?

• What was her relationship with her mother, this daughter of Thomas Carter? We don't find out in the biography even basic facts like when her mother died.

• What was going on with Maria Cosway painting her, the Duchess of Devonshire, and other Haut Ton women as enchantresses in the 1780s? What happened to those Cosway paintings of her?

• What was her relationship with Queen Charlotte?

• What does it mean that she was friends with Edward Jerningham, the sole Protestant member of a seriously recusant traditionally Roman Catholic family from northern England?

• What was her relationship to the Dashwoods, near neighbors to the Jersey country house at Middleton Stony.

• In what musical circles did she move? She was apparently a dedicated harp player. Who taught her?

• What exactly was she doing while she was hanging out in Cheltenham at the end of her life? Why Cheltenham? What was it like at that time, at minimum, and why might she have stayed there?

• What does it mean that the Jerseys owned land in Wales?

All of these are potentially interesting angles to pursue, that Clarke didn't pursue, and that's fine, because I hope there will be another biography that is more interested in these other aspects of Lady Jersey's life. But the fact that these questions remain un-investigated suggests more than just a lack of sympathy. It’s as though Clarke has something to gain by veering away, again and again, from details that might speak to Villiers as a genuine and dimensional person.

There are two intimate points about Lady Jersey which Clarke seems to be amazingly wrong about.

First, the child that Lady Jersey bore in 1795 who died in June of 1796. I will say that Clarke provides a lot of good information about the bizarre setup whereby Princess Charlotte and Lady Jersey were both apparently carrying children sired by Prinny at the same time, and the three of them were all rattling around at the Brighton Pavillion together in the summer of 1795. What a situation!

But Clarke falls short when he states that we have no idea what that child's name was. He himself quotes from one of the rare surviving letters written by Lady Jersey about a moment when she is very bored in London, in 1796, serving as Caroline of Brunswick's chief of staff (Head Lady of the Bedchamber). She complains that all she gets to do is hang around and look at the nursery the Prince of Wales and Caroline have provided for Charlotte, the baby who survived. Half brother to her own son:

My life at present is, as you know, intolerable to endure and more than insipid to describe. The P. stayed in town till Friday noon, and returned on Saturday. The time has been passed either in seeing Charlotte's nursery, which brings afresh to my mind my angel Augustus, or in cheating myself into fancied amusement by going to the shops for things I do not want, and cannot afford to buy... (quoted on Clark, p. 191)

Is it a fantastic leap of the imagination to think that her "angel Augustus" might have been the child she had lost in June? I've looked into the burial records and the child's name is not recorded at Middleton Stoney, where he seems to have been interred. The Earls of Jersey do not seem to have recorded the child's existence in Debrett's or the like, but I would have loved to see whether there was more to find here, from one who had access to so much of the correspondence of the Earl of Jersey and others.

But this brings me to the most aggravating thing about Clarke's biography. In his book’s final "Verdict of History" chapter, Clarke opens with a damning family story:

...the little Parish Church of Middleton Stoney, the Church of All Saints...sits within the park of Middleton itself. On one side of the church is a memorial chapel to the Jersey family, built in 1805. In it can be found separate plaques in memory of various members of the family. There is a plaque for the 4th Earl as well one for each of his father and his son, the 5th Earl. There is one, too, in memory of Augustus, who is recorded as being buried in 'Picton', Nova Scotia, and also one for Sally Jersey.

There is none for Frances Jersey.

Such was her reputation. (p. 296)

Great. Except that there is a plaque. I have been to that chapel, and I took a picture.

Photo credit: the author.

I do not understand how Villiers' biographer could have gotten this basic piece of information wrong. (Note that the tombstone accurately shows that Lady Jersey had eight daughters and three sons--not just the two sons that show up on Wikipedia). If Clarke thought her child remained nameless and that her family didn't even provide her a tombstone, and he was wrong about those details of her life, what else might he have missed?

Conclusion

The phrase "history is written by the victor" is excellent to remind us that what we hear will inevitably be colored by who wrote it, and what that person's world view is. The saying implies a certain amount of pity for the poor undocumented underdogs, and I have seen commentary online making fun of this pity. Indeed although the Hon. George Sidney Smythe, M.P., concluded that Robespierre was going to end up as a villain until the end of time, sure enough slews of Marxists emerged to defend him in the early twentieth century, and the debate will certainly continue to rage, maybe because it is fun, among other things.

The continuing debate illustrates a point that all good historians eventually make: history is always going to be written by the victors--of arguments about what the right evidence is to consider, and what the right context is for placing a particular set of events into words. And those conversations will change with time, and with the availability or loss of different kinds of evidence.

So when it comes to Lady Jersey, I have a strong suspicion that she (like Robespierre) was not a very nice person, and that I wouldn't have liked her at all if I had met her, and that she probably would have preferred not to topple the monarchy, but mainly because she would have liked to keep sponging off of the Prince of Wales forever, and buying really great dresses. But I want to see beyond this sketch, and I especially want for people who are newly blackening Lady Jersey’s reputation to take credit for doing it. It’s not just that Tim Clarke fit the evidence he found to a pre-determined conclusion—it’s that he took all his excellent research and absolutely stampeded to that conclusion, guns blazing, and then tried to claim what he had done was rescue her reputation from other people.

By all means, let us consider possible villainy, but let's cast a wider net when we look at all of the different things Frances Twysden Villiars might have been up to.