Newsletter of the Elizabeth Craven Society 2022

Rockley Manor.

   

    The highlight of the year was the talk given in February 2022 by author Nicola Cornick to the Friends of Lydiard Park, entitled "A Georgian Love Story" about the marriage of General the Hon. Frederick St. John and Arabella Craven, the youngest daughter of Elizabeth Craven. Many interesting details emerged about their eventful lives, including the fact that when they went to India they took their three sons with them, and nearly lost all three when the ship caught fire. On their return to England they lived at Rockley Manor in Wiltshire, halfway between Lydiard Park and Ashdown House. The house survives (above). Ms Cornick has used the manuscripts in the Lydiard Archives as her source, and we look forward to many more fascinating discoveries about the Cravens and St. Johns, two closely connected families with estates in the neighbouring counties of Berkshire and Wiltshire. 

    Elizabeth Craven is named in Dale Townshend's Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination 1780-1840 (Oxford University Press, 2019, 94). "When, as late as November 1786, Lady Elizabeth Craven presented him with a watercolour of the south-west view of the Castle of Otranto in Italy, a 271-by-511-mm painting that had been rendered on site by Willey Reveley in 1785, a delighted but also partly embarrassed Walpole acknowledged the gift with a startling disclosure, "I did not even know that there was a Castle of Otranto"..."  Townshend tells us that the original picture is preserved in the British Museum and it is reproduced above, from the website of the BM.

    Elizabeth Craven is the topic of Suzanne Schmid's essay "Elizabeth Craven, Private Theatricals, and Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers" in British Sociability in the European Enlightenment: Cultural Practices and Personal Encounters...edited by Sebastian Domsch and Mascha Hansen (Springer Nature, 19 Jan 2021). One interesting detail comes to light, a press report that provides initials for Elizabeth Craven's nieces,  otherwise named only as the "Miss Berkeleys". Here they are named as "Mdlle E Berkeley" and "Mdlle G. Berkeley" and recorded as taking part in the performance of a French comedy "Le Retour Impreuve" [surely a misprint for Imprévu].

    Jürgen Osterhammel's Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia (Princeton University Press, 2019) says that journey through the Crimea, Craven was used by Prince Potemkin as a "guinea-pig" to try out the "Potemkin villages"... "elaborate deceptions he had created to conceal the devastation of war from the eyes of Empress Catherine who was planning to visit the area."  He calls her "the gullible tourist in the Crimea" but unfortunately does not provide enough textual support or background detail to explain this (pp 317, 449).