CHAPTER TWO
A V
ERY
F
INE
C
HILD
(1792–1810)
From 1792 on, Judith Milbanke’s letters to her family and friends dwelt upon a single theme: the wonder that was her daughter, Annabella. Never in the history of mankind had a mother been blessed with such a flawless little creature! Happy someday would be the winner of such a bride! Visiting grand neighbours with Sophy and Annabella (when Miss Milbanke was still only fifteen months old), Judith took less interest in a park newly landscaped by Humphry Repton than in the fact that the Earl and Countess of Fitzwilliam’s son ‘quite doated [sic] on Annabella’. Lord Milton, aged just seven, seemed a most eligible candidate for her hand. Having seen ‘Miss naked,’ Judith raunchily joked to her broadminded aunt, Mary Noel, ‘therefore he can tell whether he will like her or no.’
Travelling on to stay with other old friends from earlier, Yorkshire days, before the Milbankes moved east to Seaham, Judith complacently reported how the county folk flocked in to see their Annabella ‘as if she had been something miraculous’. On 20 April 1794, as little Miss neared her second birthday, the proud mother was happy to credit her offspring as ‘Governess in Chief of Papa, Mama & the whole Family’.
The word was out. Pleasing Judith Milbanke depended upon how many bouquets a friend was willing to throw in the direction of her daughter. Judith, while priding herself on her forgiving nature, was better known for her hot temper. Annabella, therefore, was warmly praised: ‘one of the finest girls of her age I ever beheld,’ Mrs Baker of Elemore gushed in a tactful postscript to one of Judith’s letters from Seaham to Mary Noel.
Admirers were rewarded with more information than they might have wished to receive. Aged two, Annabella could already identify twenty flowers (and weeds) by name. Annabella always performed her ‘Do Do’ as soon as she got up. Annabella had bathed in the sea and, rising from the waves, looked ‘like a little Venus’. The princesses (George III’s daughters) had personally requested news of Annabella, having heard report – the words were seldom off the lips of a besotted mother – that ‘she was a very fine Child’.
Few dared suggest the likely result of all this adulation. In 1794, Sophy Curzon masked her own anxiety behind a neighbour’s comment. Apparently, Lady Liddell of Ravensworth Castle thought Judith far too indulgent: ‘she does not ever deny that if it is possible to spoil a very fine Girl, Annabella’s Mama is determined to do it.’ The words were Lady Liddell’s; the emphatic underlining was Sophy’s own.
Warnings – rarely offered – were a waste of breath. Events conspired to strengthen Judith’s belief that Miss Milbanke was destined for great things. Her brother, Viscount Wentworth of Kirkby Mallory, had always made it clear that the handsome estate over which he presided in the Midlands would not be passed down to his own illegitimate son. Thomas Noel, following his marriage to Kitty Smith in 1796, was understandably disgruntled about receiving only a modest sum of money and the living of the church at Kirkby Mallory (to which he became a notoriously absentee rector, employing a curate as his substitute). The following year, Lord Wentworth made arrangements to leave his considerable property, together with his title, to his sister Judith, and after her, to his niece. A conscientious brother, he now began the task of setting his affairs in order by paying off a substantial number of gambling debts. (Both Wentworth and Mary Ligonier, the wealthy little wife he married after the death of his live-in mistress, Catherine Vanloo, were addicted to the tables; Judith and Ralph preferred betting on horses.)
In January 1798, Ralph Milbanke’s father died. It was years since either Judith or her husband had visited Halnaby Hall, the north country mansion at which the long-widowed baronet had consoled himself with various lady-friends. Now, Halnaby and the annual rents from a second grand house (Moulton Hall) passed into the new baronet’s hands, together with an agreement that the 5-year-old Annabella, when she married, would receive a dowry of £16,000 (worth approximately £800,000 nowadays). In due course, the whole of this estate would pass down to her as well.
The new Lady Milbanke had no difficulty in adjusting to her improved circumstances. In London, a splendid new house on Lower Berkeley Street, near Manchester Square, was rented at £300 per year. Plans were swiftly made to entertain the Wentworths at Halnaby; Annabella, now grown too grand for a mere nurse, was allotted a personal maid of her own.
Mary Anne Clermont had arrived nine years earlier to help care for the orphaned Sophy Curzon. Self-taught and possessed of modest independent means, this timid, plain but capable young woman had already established her worth as a housekeeper and tactful smoother of Judith’s volatile temper when she was promoted to the role of Annabella’s admiring attendant.
Judith felt a twinge of apprehension about her brother’s first visit to Halnaby. The house, elegantly furnished in the French style, was sure to impress, but what opinion would Thomas and his fashionable wife form of their nieces? Sophy, at nineteen, was going through a plain phase (‘very journalière’) and Annabella, while an undeniably appealing child with her deep blue eyes, flushed cheeks and high pale forehead, was a law unto herself. ‘She is excessively talkative and entertaining if she likes people & very coaxing to her favourites’ Judith confided to Aunt Mary Noel, ‘but she will judge for herself & cannot be made to like any body.’
Annabella’s thoughts about her uncle are unknown, but she did not take long to reach an opinion of Halnaby. Certainly, the big red-brick house (supposedly designed by Inigo Jones) was very splendid, symmetrical and ornate; certainly, it was pleasant to march along stone terraces as broad as a small town square, or to dash through high, quiet rooms that unfolded each
