ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

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 tell...

One thing that always annoys me is how many letters written by women or appertaining to women are not catalogued under that woman's name in archives, but are shoved in with the papers of a male relative or recipient. The British Library does not list this item in its collection under Elizabeth Craven. It is left hidden in the miscellaneous  correspondence of her son Keppel. Yet this letter is of great interest being written to Prince Louis Stanislas Xavier de Bourbon, known as Count of Provence until in later life he became  King Louis XVIII of France. He was the younger brother of Louis XVI who had been sent to the guillotine in 1792. The letter is dated  in 1814,  just before his accession to the throne after the fall of Napoleon. It indicates what friendly terms  Elizabeth Craven  was on with him during his exile in England, and was sent as a cover-note with a gift of a manuscript by a French author, apparently dedicated to her late husband the Margrav...