LADY-IN-WAITING BY LADY CHARLOTTE BURY BEING THE DIARY ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE TIMES OF GEORGE THE FOURTH INTERSPERSED WITH ORIGINAL LETTERS FROM THE LATE QUEEN CAROLINE AND FROM OTHER DISTINGUISHED PERSONS EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. FRANCIS STEUART WITH EIGHTEEN FULL-PAGE PORTRAITS TWO IN PHOTOGRAVURE : TWO VOLUMES : VOL. I LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY: MCMVIII INTRODUCTION LADY CHARLOTTE SUSAN MARIA CAMPBELL-one of the greatest beauties of her day, whose "Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth" (which we here reprint) made so much stir in the world when it first appeared in 1838-merits a short biographical notice. She was born February 18, 1775,* and was the younger daughter of John, 5th Duke of Argyll, and of his wife, Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton, one of the beautiful Irish Gunnings of whom we learn so much from Horace Walpole. For Elizabeth Gunning, though her fair face was her sole fortune, married in succession two Scottish Dukes. By her mother's two marriages Lady Charlotte was half-sister to the 7th and 8th Dukes of Hamilton and to the unhappy Elizabeth, Countess of Derby, and full sister to George, 6th, and John Douglas, 7th Duke of Argyll and to the handsome Lady Augusta Clavering. She received her name from Queen Charlotte, whom her mother had escorted from Germany when betrothed to her future husband King George III. and to whom she was then Lady-in-waiting, and as a duke's daughter was, from her earliest years, naturally placed in the highest society. Horace Walpole, writing of the Argyll family to Miss Berry in 1791, when Lady Charlotte was only sixteen, says, “Everybody admires the youngest daughter's person and understanding." She was much The Edinburgh Advertiser of February 24, 1775, speaks of the birth occurring "at London on the 18th current." V 1963 abroad in France and Italy during early life, owing to the ill-health of her mother (who died in 1790) and she acquired a very considerable knowledge of art and a real love of literature and music. She was presented to King George III. and Queen Charlotte, when about seventeen, and soon astonished London by her beautiful face and handsome presence, and we find her praises sung in many letters and memoirs of the time. Like many another spoiled beauty, however, she did not make a brilliant match, for on June 21, 1796, she married her kinsman, John Campbell, "handsome Jack Campbell," a goodlooking young man of twenty-four, "a great fellow," and with only a small income, as was most natural, as he was the eldest of the fourteen children of Walter Campbell of Shawfield. At first Lady Charlotte and her husband were a good deal in Edinburgh, where she queened it over the literary set and wrote some poems which were published anonymously 1797, and there in 1798 she, " in pride of rank and beauty's bloom," introduced Walter Scott, of whom she had made a friend, to Matthew Lewis, the then celebrated author of "The Monk," whose "Divinity Divinity" she was. Another of her friends and correspondents was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, the antiquary, whom some called "the Scottish Walpole;" and a more critical one, Miss Susan Ferrier, the novelist, whose father was agent for the Argyll family and who was a frequent visitor at Inverary Castle, where Lady Charlotte often acted as châtelaine. In 1803 she and her husband made Hartwell, in Bucks, their headquarters, but she was still frequently in Scotland, and in Edinburgh in 1809 her husband died, leaving her, at the age of thirty-four, a widow, "in uneasy circumstances," as she had been since her marriage, with nine children but scantily provided for. A year after this, whether compelled by poverty or not, she accepted the position of Lady-in-waiting to H.R.H. |