Daughters of Britannia by Katie Hickman

Author:Katie Hickman [Katie Hickman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007390410
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1999-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Every detail of public life was strictly regulated for diplomatic wives, from the number of diamonds they wore to their presentation, to the depth of their plongeon and the length of the court mourning observed. They had to work hard to fulfil the duties expected of them at court and some, like Harriet Granville, complained bitterly of the essential uselessness of it all. ‘It is frivolous, eternally frivolous, and at fifty I shall at best be no wiser and better than I am now,’ she wrote, adding drily, ‘At my age the head is not turned by incessant dissipation; but the time is filled, the result much the same.’ Most wives, however, lacking her essential social austerity, were content to see the public face of diplomatic life for what it was.

As silent but privileged witnesses in society, these women found much to enjoy. ‘In spite of fatigue, I found constant amusement in watching the ways of this new world,’ wrote Mary Fraser of her time at the Viennese court. The vivid descriptions that are their legacy portray a world of luxury and courtly pleasure now gone forever. In 1826 Anne Disbrowe did the honours at the great ball given by the Duke of Devonshire, the Ambassador Extraordinary sent to the Tsar’s coronation. The entire marble-white ballroom was decorated with pink roses; an immense circle of wax lights supported on a wreath of roses dangled from the ceiling on such fine wires that the whole seemed held in place by magic. (The candles were lit by a man suspended from the ceiling by a rope.)

Nearly a hundred years earlier Mrs Vigor described the Tsarina Anna Ivanovna’s birthday celebrations at ‘the new hall that is just finished’ in St Petersburg.* It was winter, and the hall was even bigger than St George’s Hall in Windsor, but the room was kept warm by ornamental heated stoves. Orange trees and myrtles in full bloom were arranged into two rows, or walks, on either side of the hall, leaving a good space for dancing in the middle. Mrs Vigor was especially glad of these walks, she said, because they made it possible for the company to sit down and rest, unobserved by the sovereigns. Amongst the ladies of the court ‘stiffened bodied gowns of white gauze with silver flowers’ were the fashion, with quilted petticoats of different colours. The monstrous headpieces of a few decades earlier were no longer worn; instead ‘on their heads was only their own hair, cut short, and curls in large natural curls and chaplets of flowers’.

The beauty, fragrance and warmth of this new formed grove, when you saw nothing but ice and snow through the windows looked like an enchantment, and inspired my mind with pleasing reveries [she wrote in a letter to her English confidante]. In the rooms adjoining were coffee, tea and other refreshments for the company, and when we returned into the hall, the music and dancing in one part, and the walks and trees filled with

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