ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Elizabeth Craven loved music and poetry and occasionally liked to compose music for her favourite poems. This is her setting of Shakespeare's O Mistress Mine, Where Are You Roaming?  The words come from Twelfth Night: O Mistress mine where are you roaming? O stay and hear, your true love's coming,       That can sing both high and low. Trip no further pretty sweeting. Journeys end in lovers' meeting,       Every wise man's son doth know. What is love, 'tis not hereafter, Present mirth, hath present laughter:       What's to come, is still unsure. In delay there lies no plenty, Then come kiss me sweet and twenty:       Youth's a stuff will not endure. The original song has been adapted for two voices by Mr Joseph Major, who was a Professor of Music resident in Bloomsbury. We know that as he subscribed in 1805 to a book called Dr. Watts's Psalms and Hymns, set to new music in three and four parts, edited by Edward Miller. Only about half a dozen copies of

John Horne Tooke, portrait by Thomas Hardy. John Horne Tooke was one of the most controversial and radical MPs of the Georgian era. We know, from her Memoirs, that Elizabeth Craven was friendly with John Wilkes, so it is not altogether surprising to discover that Horne Tooke also turned up from time to time at Brandenburgh House when she lived there with her second husband, the Margrave of Anspach.     Horne Tooke was an indefatigable campaigner for electoral reform, whose support for the independence of the American colonies got him jailed for seditious libel in 1778. Nothing daunted, he went on advocating radical ideas during the period of the French Revolution, something so alarming to those in power that he was tried for treason in 1794. If convicted, he would certainly have been hanged. Luckily, he was acquitted.          Shortly afterwards, he went to one of Craven's theatrical productions at her private theatre in Hammersmith. Samuel Rogers tells us:-          " One nig