Priscilla Anne Fane

Artist Info

Priscilla Anne Fane1793 - 1879, London

Fane [née Wellesley-Pole], Priscilla Anne, countess of Westmorland (1793–1879), diplomatic service wife and artist, was born on 13 March 1793. Her father was William Wellesley-Pole (1763–1845), brother of the duke of Wellington and Lord Wellesley; he was himself created Baron Maryborough in 1821, and succeeded his brother as third earl of Mornington in 1842. Her mother was Katharine Elizabeth (d. 1851), eldest daughter of Admiral John Forbes. She was the youngest of the three daughters and one son. Her father being constantly in political office, she was brought up to move in those circles; her daughter wrote that, at eighteen, ‘she already had the habit of society, a perfect knowledge of French and Italian, and a good idea of the leading questions of the day’ (Correspondence ... Westmorland, vi).

On 26 June 1811 Priscilla married John Fane, Lord Burghersh (1784–1859), the eldest son of John Fane, tenth earl of Westmorland. He was at that time serving in the army under Wellington, and his new wife accompanied him on the campaigns of 1813–14. Then in 1814 Burghersh transferred to the diplomatic service, where he made the remainder of his career. He was appointed minister in Florence, and lived in Italy for the next sixteen years. Lady Burghersh's diplomatic salon was frequented by the usual array of travellers, aristocrats, royalties, and politicians, British and European; although the Italian courts were not among the major diplomatic postings, Lady Burghersh's status was enhanced by the widely held knowledge that she was the favourite niece and correspondent of the victor of Europe, Wellington. Here she laid the foundations of a large circle of friends and correspondents; such circles were an important means of gathering information from abroad in the era before speedy communications and mass media, and by their means women often contributed significantly, if informally, to the development of foreign policy. Lady Burghersh's activities as a hostess were necessarily somewhat curtailed in this period by the birth of eight children. The eldest, a son, lived only for six months in 1816, and the second was stillborn in 1817, but they were followed by four more sons and two daughters. Only one son and one daughter survived their mother.

In 1830, on the change of ministry, the Burghershes returned to England. Without a diplomatic salary the family was very short of money, and they lived quietly in London, where Priscilla's close relationship with the duke of Wellington was revived. She and her children spent much time with him at Walmer Castle, and she became one of his circle of female confidantes: Lady Cowper observed in 1836 that ‘Lady Burghersh enjoys his confidence more than anyone else, although Lady Salisbury likes to think that she is the favourite’ (Lieven–Palmerston Correspondence, 117). Lady Cowper was perhaps in a position to know that Wellington sometimes used his niece as a confidential intermediary between himself and the whig prime minister (Lady Cowper's brother), Lord Melbourne. But in general her time passed unobtrusively with her children and in pursuing the hobby of painting which she had taken up in 1829. Though it is not known by whom Lady Burghersh was taught to paint, Joseph Farington recorded in his diary her visit, with her sisters, during a sitting by her mother in 1814, to the studio of the fashionable portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (who painted a celebrated portrait of the duke of Wellington the following year). Together with the knowledge that Lady Burghersh herself sat to Lawrence in Florence in 1820, these associations suggest that he was instrumental in arranging tuition for her, as he had for other female artists, for example, the miniature painters Charlotte Jones and Mrs Mee. The subjects of her known paintings indicate that, before the duties of a diplomatic service wife took her elsewhere, Lady Burghersh held serious aspirations as a painter. Lord Burghersh was a talented amateur musician and moved in bohemian circles, and so was less disconcerted than most aristocratic husbands would have been when his wife exhibited six figure pieces in the Suffolk Street exhibition between 1833 and 1841. In 1842 and 1857 she sent two religious paintings to the British Institution. She also painted a picture of her grandmother, Anne, Countess of Mornington, Surrounded by the Effigies of her Sons (1839; Apsley House, London), Wellington, Wellesley, and Lord Cowley, which was engraved in mezzotint the same year by T. Hodgett (repro. in R. Walker, Regency Portraits, 1985, 2, pl. 836) and became quite well known. Lady Burghersh also painted Wellington Writing the Waterloo Dispatch, now known from T. Hodgett's mezzotint of 1840 (impression in BM).

In 1841 the Burghershes' fortunes changed. With the change of ministry, Burghersh was appointed minister at Berlin. The minister he was replacing, Lord William Russell, was disgruntled, and put the appointment down to Lady Burghersh lobbying Wellington; his wife, more generously, was ‘glad the Burghershes get something—they have a large family—larger than ours; & the same income & habits of expence & luxury. So I don't grudge them their diplomatic treadmill’ (Blakiston, 453–4). Burghersh's father died in December 1841, so it was as Lord and Lady Westmorland that they went to Berlin in August 1842. They remained there (with annual visits to London) for nine years, resuming their social and diplomatic entertaining, the company of royalties and diplomatists being leavened by that of musicians such as Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn and scientists and men of letters, including Alexander Humboldt. Their lifestyle was interrupted briefly by the revolution of 1848, when their house was fired on. A confirmed tory, Lady Westmorland was appalled by the events, accusing the Prussian government of ‘truckling to the abominable and unjust tyranny of the mob’ (Correspondence ... Westmorland, 121). In like vein, the British Chartists were ‘horrible people’ (ibid., 130). In 1851 the Westmorlands were transferred to Vienna. It was a promotion, but they found the society there less congenial, while the political and diplomatic manoeuvrings around the Crimean War (in which one of their two surviving sons served) made the posting an uncomfortable one. The death of Wellington in 1852 was a huge personal loss. Towards the end of 1855 Westmorland retired to Apethorpe, in Northamptonshire, the family estate that had come to him in 1841. Although concurring in the decision, Lady Westmorland confided in one of her friends that

it costs me a good deal to definitely give up Germany to settle in England. I have never liked living in this country ... I have always felt that to be comfortable here you needed health of iron, and a much larger fortune than ours. (ibid., 273)

Finally settled in England, Lady Westmorland kept up her interest in European affairs through her wide circle of correspondents, and also through her youngest son, Julian Fane, who had followed his father into the diplomatic service. Westmorland died in 1859, and thereafter his widow lived mostly in London and at Wimbledon, with her youngest child, Lady Rose Weigall, with occasional visits to the continent. Her own health was declining—she was in a bath chair by 1863—and although she continued to be interested in the affairs of the world, in 1865 she confessed that ‘As for political opinions, I trouble little about them. Everything is so changed since our time, that I am not sure that the so-called Conservatives are not more destructive than others’ (Correspondence ... Westmorland, 466). Her mind and memory also began to give way, perhaps hastened by the death of her beloved youngest son in 1870, and she eventually died at her London home, 29 Portman Square, on 18 February 1879, and was buried on 25 February at Apethorpe.

K. D. Reynolds

Sources

Burke, Peerage (1901) · The correspondence of Priscilla, countess of Westmorland, ed. R. Weigall (1909) · Correspondence of Lady Burghersh with the duke of Wellington, ed. R. Weigall (1903) · Letters of Lady Burghersh (1893) · The Lieven–Palmerston correspondence, 1828–1856, ed. and trans. Lord Sudley [A. P. J. C. J. Gore] (1943) · A great lady's friendships: letters to Mary, marchioness of Salisbury, countess of Derby, 1862–1876, ed. W. A. Gardner, Baroness Burghclere (1933) · G. Blakiston, Lord William Russell and his wife, 1815–1846 (1972) · J. S. Lewis, In the family way (1986) · K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic women and political society in Victorian Britain (1998) · E. Longford [E. H. Pakenham, countess of Longford], Wellington, 2: Pillar of state (1972) · DNB · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1879) · K. Garlick, ed., Sir Thomas Lawrence: a complete catalogue of the oil paintings (1989) · R. Walker, National Portrait Gallery: Regency portraits, 2 vols. (1985) · Farington, Diary, 13.4561