Mrs Delany by Clarissa Campbell Orr

Author:Clarissa Campbell Orr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300161137
Publisher: Yale University Press

THE METROPOLIS AT MID-CENTURY

Although Patrick and Mary were in London because of the lawsuit, it was actually a significant time in its own right, leading towards war that would engage the attention of many in the Delany circle, as combatants or anxious commentators. Tension was building in North America between English and French settlers, aided on both sides by indigenous nations, as the English expanded west over the Appalachian Mountains, and the St Lawrence seaway was contested by French traders. The ‘Patriot’ politicians, now lacking their princely leader, were re-grouping. Some, like George Lyttelton, joined the ministry, and others, like William Pitt the Elder, remained a gadfly outside it, criticising its sympathy with George II’s concern for defending Hanover in the event of a French war overseas. The Delanys still admired the widowed Princess Augusta and in 1754 Patrick had had the satisfaction that she accepted a dedication from him of his Sixteen Discourses upon doctrines and duties, and against the reigning vanities of this age.47 These emphasised the mutual obligations between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, which transcended conventions of social hierarchy.48

Former ‘patriots’ like Lyttleton and his friend and cousin Gilbert West tried to position themselves as patriots of a moral and religious kind, looking to the spiritual welfare of the nation, instead of merely a factional, political kind of patriotism that was partly a strategy to dislodge ministers. For West, ‘the greatest service that the most zealous Patriot can do his country, is to promote the faith, and thereby encourage the practice [of] the truly divine virtues recommended by Christ and His Apostles’. Another spur to seriousness was the earthquake in Lisbon in November 1755, which occasioned much agonised reflection throughout Europe about how a good God might have permitted many innocents to suffer, especially as it occurred the day after the religious festival of All Saints, while many were attending morning mass. It was a severe quake, retrospectively considered to have been .9 on the Richter scale, and was followed by a tsunami wave rolling up the River Tagus into the heart of the business district. Fires then broke out, destroying many more buildings and their valuable business records. Thousands perished.

Mary knew several people who had some connection with Lisbon; Portugal was Britain’s oldest trading partner. The duchess’s cousin Edward Hay, the English consul, had had to jump from the second storey window of his house, after which it had collapsed, while his young wife, who had had a baby ten days earlier, was helped out, wearing only her shift, by a maid. Sally Chapone knew a Mr Gore and a Mr Mellish, who were leaders of the port wine business, and stood to lose financially by at least £30,000. Sally went to the latter’s London house to help his wife pack ‘boxes with all sorts of wearing apparel and necessaries for work, to send to the poor miserable Portuguese’.49 But by the next winter season in London Mary observed, ‘Earthquakes are forgotten,

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