ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse (1720-1804) fled from France to England in 1756 to avoid the Bastille for writing a book denouncing the tyranny of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. The French government did everything it could to get her arrested and her book suppressed but did not succeed. Known as "Madame de Vaucluse" she was a poet, novelist, political satirist, author of philosophical tales, fierce feminist and animal rights advocate,  whose life was improbable, unconventional and complicated. Her lovers included Charles Edward Stuart the Young Pretender, an ambassador and an Italian opera-singer.  In England she became a friend of John Cleland, Elizabeth Craven and William Beckford, many of whose letters to her survive. She was welcomed among the Bluestockings as a learned lady, though it might have raised eyebrows if they had known about her previous disreputable existence as a seditious ex-nun, friend of spies and clandestine intellectuals, a person who had seen the ins...

  Maria Johnstone was the niece of William, 6th Baron Craven, Elizabeth Craven's husband, so she was the writer's niece by marriage. Several watercolour paintings by her of Coombe Abbey and its surroundings are preserved in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry.  They give a vivid picture of the house as it was in 1797, before the ambitious alterations of later generations. Seen at this distance and from this angle, it merges into one harmonious whole, with the Georgian wings on the left and the Tudor  and Stuart buildings visible on the right, unified by being in stone of the same colour. A few sheep graze peacefully in the foreground.  Coombe Abbey was by this time owned by Elizabeth Craven's son, the next Lord Craven, who was too busy on active service during the war to spend much time there.  Maria Johnstone was aged twenty when she did these paintings. Her father, the Rev. Robert Augustus Johnstone, had married Anna Rebecca Craven in 1773, and M...

Lydiard Park in Wiltshire is a handsome Palladian house built for the St. John family, Viscounts Bolingbroke, in the early eighteenth century. It has a little-known connection with Elizabeth Craven, because her youngest daughter, Arabella, married into the St. John family and is buried in St Mary's Church on the estate. There is a portrait in one of the bedrooms of the house of General Frederick St. John who was Elizabeth Craven's son-in-law. He married Arabella Craven in 1793 and they had at least ten children, of whom not all survived. She must have often have visited Lydiard Park which was the property of her husband's elder brother George, Lord Bolingbroke.  The library at Lydiard House. The 1st Viscount Bolingbroke was a writer, politician and  Jacobite supporter, for which he went into exile. He doggedly opposed the government of King George I and Robert Walpole. His successors were  somewhat notorious for their flamboyant lifestyles. The dining-room walls are hung...