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Isabella Caroline Somerset

London, 1851 - 1921, London

BiographySomerset [née Somers-Cocks], Lady Isabella Caroline [Lady Henry Somerset] (1851–1921), temperance activist and campaigner for women's rights, was born in London on 3 August 1851, the eldest of the three daughters of Charles Somers Somers-Cocks (1819–1883), Viscount Eastnor and (from 1852) third Earl Somers, and his wife, Virginia (1829–1910), daughter of James Pattle, an official in the Bengal civil service, and his wife, Adelaide de l'Etang. After a private education and two London seasons Lady Isabella married on 6 February 1872 Lord Henry Richard Charles Somerset (1849–1932), son of Henry Charles Fitzroy Somerset, eighth duke of Beaufort (1824–1899), and his wife, Lady Georgiana Charlotte Curzon (d. 1906). The match seemed ideal, and produced in 1874 a son, Henry Charles Somers Augustus, but soon Lord Henry's homosexual proclivities broke up the marriage. Lady Henry Somerset rejected divorce as contrary to church teaching, and opted for a separation. A custody battle ensued over their only child, which she won in 1878; she thereafter adopted the style of Lady Isabella Somerset. Because of the adverse publicity over the case she retreated from society life and took up charity work in Ledbury, Herefordshire, near her family home. Christian piety, her personal tragedy, and experience of charity work brought her to the cause of temperance after a close friend committed suicide while intoxicated.

Lady Isabella Somerset entered the national stage in 1890, when she was elected president of the British Women's Temperance Association (BWTA). This organization, founded in 1876, affiliated with the newly organized World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1886. Lady Isabella brought to the job eloquence as a speaker and her compelling personality. Yet her major assets were her large reserves of cash and the aristocratic pedigree that gave prestige and financial support to the fledgeling movement. Her father had died in 1883 and she inherited his large estates, including Eastnor (a Norman baronial castle), fashionable properties in London, estates in Surrey and Gloucestershire, and slums in the East End. Equally important to her credentials as a temperance leader, Lady Isabella was baptized an Anglican but worshipped in a Methodist chapel after 1885. This made her views congenial to women temperance advocates who, if not evangelical Anglicans themselves, came mainly from the nonconformist churches.

In 1891 Lady Isabella Somerset visited the United States, where she met—and forged a strong personal friendship with—Frances Willard (1839–1898), president of the World's and the American Woman's Christian Temperance Unions. She spoke at the first World's WCTU convention in Boston in November 1891. There Willard engineered Lady Isabella's election as World's WCTU vice-president. For her part Willard visited Britain for extended periods in the 1890s and lived with her friend.

Back in Britain Lady Isabella Somerset's period in office saw BWTA membership rapidly expand, and its social and political influence grow. She served during this period as the fifth-ranked member of the Women's Liberal Federation, and her politics were always closely linked with the Liberal Party. Lady Isabella forged important alliances with other reformers, including Lord Roberts, former commander of the British army in India and founder of the Army Temperance Association, and with the Salvation Army's William Booth. Her friendship with Church of England Temperance Society leader Canon A. Basil Orme Wilberforce brought her back to the fold of the Anglican church by 1897. Yet her leadership also entailed controversy for the formerly staid BWTA. Opponents felt that American influence was excessive through Somerset's friendship with Willard. More important, they objected to the ‘do-everything policy’ of the American Union, which involved the introduction into the BWTA of a range of activities including purity (anti-prostitution) work, foreign missions, and campaigns for peace, labour reform, and women's suffrage. Frances Willard and Lady Isabella Somerset became Fabian socialists and preached against the gospel of wealth, which they claimed was destroying Anglo-American society. Though Lady Isabella denied that she intended to turn the organization into a suffrage society, she was, along with Willard, a force within the WCTU's worldwide affiliates for the extension of women's ‘emancipation’, as they termed it, in all areas of life. As founder and editor of the BWTA journal, the Woman's Signal, Lady Isabella pursued a broad reform agenda. Disaffected BWTA members split from the organization and formed in 1894 the British Women's Total Abstinence Union, devoted narrowly to the drink question, but this organization never rivalled the BWTA's membership, which continued to grow strongly to 1914.

Feeling vindicated by the healthy increase in membership, Lady Isabella Somerset became more ambitious. She advocated in 1896 a modification in the policy of prohibition which the BWTA supported, and admitted that she served wine at parties for her son. She publicly expressed the idea that licensed prostitution in selected cantonments in India, for the benefit of the British army, was the most practicable means of dealing with the spread of venereal disease. While this view was common in the aristocracy, it was anathema to her organization. Lady Isabella clashed with Josephine Butler over the issue, and was forced in 1898 to recant her views to prevent the WCTU from disintegrating worldwide. Nevertheless, when Frances Willard died the same year Lady Isabella became World's WCTU president, a post she held until 1906. She visited the United States for the last time in 1903 and, still controversial, argued that the WCTU should adopt a system of public management of hotels similar to that introduced in Scandinavia. Only as a result of this final controversy did she give up her leadership of the British temperance movement.

Lady Isabella Somerset left the national scene in 1903, and devoted her remaining years to the Colony for Women Inebriates, Duxhurst, that she had established in Reigate, Surrey. While she sank her own fortunes into the venture, Duxhurst also received support from the BWTA and the World's WCTU. Formally opened by Princess Mary in July 1896, Duxhurst bore the influence of the Booths' idea that the poor of industrial cities should be sent to ‘farm colonies’ to relieve social problems. Lady Isabella believed that ‘working in the open air and among fruit and vegetables would be the best cure for intemperance’ (Bath Herald, 2 June 1896). She saw Duxhurst as a personal refuge and an alternative to her controversial public campaigns for temperance reform; she regarded it as her most lasting and effective work, though even here she could not entirely escape controversy. She faced ridicule at the outset when forced to eject one of the first inmates, a recidivist alcoholic named Jane Cakebread (1827/8–1898), who disrupted the facility and brought its methods into disrepute.

Lady Isabella Somerset died at 4 Gray's Inn Square, London, on 12 March 1921 after a short illness. She was a charismatic leader who brought the temperance movement from the margin of British life to as close to the centre as was possible without full voting rights. Along with Rosalind Howard, countess of Carlisle, who succeeded her as BWTA president, Somerset was one of the two most important woman temperance reformers in British history.

Ian Tyrrell
Sources

K. Fitzpatrick, Lady Henry Somerset (1923) · I. Tyrrell, Woman's World/Woman's Empire: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in international perspective, 1880–1930 (1991) · Woman's Christian Temperance Union Series (1977) [microfilm edn of the Temperance and Prohibition Papers] · R. Bordin, Frances Willard: a biography (1980) · Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Evanston, Illinois, USA, Woman's Christian Temperance Union MSS, scrapbook · Castle Howard, Yorkshire, Rosalind Stanley Howard MSS · B. Strachey, Remarkable relations: the story of the Pearsall Smith family (1980) · Indiana University, Lilly Library, Hannah Whithall Smith MSS · DNB · Woman's Herald (1893) · Woman's Signal (1894–1903) · Annual Report of the British Women's Temperance Association (1890–1904) [United Kingdon Alliance, London] · Women's Library, London, Butler MSS · Burke, Peerage · m. cert.
Archives

Castle Howard, Yorkshire, Rosalind Stanley Howard MSS · Herefs. RO, corresp. relating to the Eastnor estate · Indiana University, Bloomington, Lilly Library, Hannah Whithall Smith MSS · Women's Library, London, Butler MSS · Evanston, Illinois, Woman's Christian Temperance Union MSS

Likenesses

G. F. Watts, double portrait, oils, 1861 (with her sister Adeline), Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire · J. M. Cameron, photograph, 1864 (with her sister Adeline), NPG · G. F. Watts, oils, 1871, Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire · H. S. Mendelssohn, photograph, pubd 1893, NPG [see illus.] · Canavari, drawing, Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire · J. Russell & Sons, photograph, NPG · photograph, repro. in A. A. Gorgon, The beautiful life of Frances Willard (1898) · portraits, repro. in Woman's Herald (1893)
Wealth at death

£2593 15s. 1d.: administration, 3 Dec 1921, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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Ian Tyrrell, ‘Somerset , Lady Isabella Caroline [Lady Henry Somerset] (1851–1921)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2012 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/36188, accessed 23 Oct 2017]

Lady Isabella Caroline Somerset [Lady Henry Somerset] (1851–1921): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36188

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