All through her life, Annabella would be drawn back to the sea, and Seaham Hall, completed in the year of her birth, was the home that she never ceased to love. The hall’s long windows and terraced gardens faced the sea. Sealight glinted off the windowpanes. The smell of salt sharpened the northern air. From the house, a sandy descent led down beyond the garden to the beach, where a wilful Annabella liked to pull off her big cotton bonnet and scamper into the waves. ‘She . . . is sadly tanned, which I know would annoy you,’ Judith told Aunt Mary, ‘. . . I believe it is the bathing makes the sun & air catch her skin so much.’
Ancient tunnels wound down from the hamlet above into the deep caves once used by smugglers; off in the hazy distance, the deceptively named Featherbed Rocks obscured the long line of coast curving south, down to distant Whitby and Scarborough.
The village, although largely rebuilt during the transformation of old Seaham Manor into the smart new hall, remained a feudal community. Eliza Grant, visiting Seaham as a child in 1808, remembered seeing only a dozen or so cottages, all occupied by Milbanke employees. Staying at the village inn with her mother and sisters, Eliza noticed the graceful manners and wistful face of the innkeeper’s daughter. Young Bessy, she learned, had been summoned up to the hall as that summer’s chosen companion for Lady Milbanke’s daughter. Restored to the inn, Bessy hankered after the privileged world into which she had briefly stepped.
Quick-tempered and bossy though Judith Milbanke was, she shared with her husband a warm sense of social duty that was imparted to her daughter. In politics (Sir Ralph was a Whig MP), Judith inclined to the left. A fierce opponent of the hangings that took place after the Gordon Riots, she had expressed outrage in 1797 at the English government’s persecution of ‘the poor oppressed Irish’. Rebuilding Seaham village along with the hall, the Milbankes had replaced a row of ‘miserable Cottages’ with sturdy, habitable homes. It was customary, whenever one of the community fell ill, for Sir Ralph to send in the family’s own Dr Fenwick, while adding the comfort of a bottle or two of his own best claret. Annabella, nostalgically recording these details some forty years later, stressed the fact that – while her father gave the orders concerning his workers’ welfare – it was Judith who enforced them. ‘She did not leave it to Servants. She saw that the execution was as good as the Intention.’
Sentimentality was at play in a middle-aged lady’s recollections of her long-dead parents. Nevertheless, it was these early experiences that helped to make a committed philanthropist of Annabella. Equally enduring was the influence of her parents’ own Unitarian faith in a forgiving God, one who preferred active benevolence to the slavish following of Christian doctrine that Annabella later mocked as ‘Pye-house’. Relations between the owners of Seaham Hall and their rector, Richard Wallis, were cordial, but never so close as with their tenant workforce in the village.
Annabella’s education, like that of most girls of her time, was a haphazard affair. A governess, passed on by the Bakers of Elemore Hall, was dismissed for neglectful behaviour before her charge had reached the age of five. Miss Walker had no successor. Mary Anne Clermont taught Annabella the clear handwriting that caused Lord Wentworth jovially to request his niece to take over the role of family correspondent. (Nobody except his own wife could decipher Sir Ralph’s crabbed penmanship.) A skilled sketcher, Annabella learned her attractive technique when William Mulready was touring great houses of the north as a drawing-master. She left a strong impression upon the young man; many years later, Mulready recalled that Miss Milbanke, while not quite so handsome as her parents thought her, was an exceptionally kind and friendly child: ‘very gentle and good’.
Drawing, together with dancing (for which Annabella evinced both aptitude and relish), formed an essential part of a young Georgian lady’s education. Music, despite the fact that her parents enjoyed duetting on the violin and harpsichord, interested her less than learning to make her own petticoats. Greek was a struggle – demonstrated by the awkwardly shaped letters in the Greek list of friends’ names that Annabella drew up during her teens. (William Mulready was among them.) Reading tastes were dictated by Sir Ralph’s affection for the plays of Dryden, Otway and Shakespeare and by her early and surprised delight in poetry. By the age of fourteen, Annabella was swooning over Edward Young’s fashionably gloomy Night Thoughts. Young, as she started to try her hand at scanning verses, became her model.
Poetry became the private vehicle through which Annabella voiced the passions – a reaction against her mother’s noisy impulsiveness – that she concealed from public view. Letters were her downfall. Aged eleven, anxious to praise her mother for giving (it was most unusual at that time) a political speech in public, Annabella could not manage it without condescension:
You never forgot one word of your speech nor was any fear discernable in your speech, addressing a very numerous & in part a very respectable audience you never once forgot the proper action (for action is a very essential part in a good speaker . . .)
Have I praised or have I flatter’d? let those who heard them judge – as it is I remain an impartial Tory.
AI
Letter-writing was a medium in which Annabella was never at ease. Whether offering advice, making jokes or presenting a criticism, the tone invariably went wrong. It was a failing of which she was
