ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

William, the  first Earl Craven,  was a loyal supporter of the Stuarts during the English Civil War, and  after  it  in 1663 King Charles II rewarded him in many ways, among other things making him one of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, a position he could pass on to his  successors. William Craven 1st Earl of Craven of the 1st creation In 1663, King Charles II granted the land that became South and North Carolina to eight English noblemen: the Earl of Clarendon, the Duke of Albemarle, the Earl of Craven, the Earl of Shaftesbury,  Sir George Carteret, Sir John Colleton,  Baron Berkeley of Stratton, and his brother Sir William Berkeley.   (These Berkeleys were not the ancestors of Elizabeth Craven but a different branch of the family, distantly related.) Carolina itself was of course named after King Charles II, and the king or his officials appointed North Carolina's governor and had the right to approve (or disapprove) its l...

Henrietta Vernon, Lady Grosvenor, by Thomas Gainsborough    When a Georgian woman got divorced, she was supposed to disappear into a twilight of disgrace and social disapproval. At the end of Mansfield Park , this happens to Maria Bertram, who elopes with Henry Crawford, is divorced by her husband Mr Rushworth, and ends up banished from England to live somewhere abroad "remote and private".    But did she really have such a terrible fate? I sometimes imagine that Maria Rushworth had a whale of a time in Paris or Brussels, far away from Mansfield Park. The life of Henrietta, Lady Grosvenor, suggests that divorce was not always such a disaster. There was in fact a flourishing Alternative Society in Georgian England, within which such women lived with impunity and they were very much in the public eye. Miss Caroline Vernon c.1780 by  François-Xavier Vispré from National Tr ust  collection, Attingham Park, Shropshire, the home of her sister Anna. ...