Horatio Walpole
Lineage
The
Walpole Relationship to the First British Prime Minister
Robert Walpole, 1 st Earl of Orford, KG, PC (26
August 1676 – 18 March 1745), known between 1725 and 1742 as Sir Robert
Walpole, was a British politician
who is generally regarded as the de facto first Prime
Minister of Great Britain.
On 30 July 1700, Walpole
married Catherine, daughter of John Shorter of Bybrook
in Ashford, Kent. She was described as "a woman of
exquisite beauty and accomplished manners". Her £20,000 dowry was,
according to her brother-in-law Horatio Walpole, spent on the wedding, christenings and
jewels.
Together
they had two daughters and three sons:
·
Robert who
married Margaret Rolle (17 January
1709 – 13 January 1781), later the 15th Baroness Clinton, in 1724. They had one son,
George, who died unmarried.
·
Katherine, who died unmarried and without issue[
·
Mary, who married George Cholmondeley, 3rd Earl of Cholmondeley, on 14 September
1723. They had sons and daughters. She died at Aix-en-Provence in 1731, and was buried at Malpas, Cheshire.
·
Edward who died unmarried but had four illegitimate children
with Dorothy Clement, three of whom
were daughters. Laura, the eldest, married Bishop Frederick Keppel.
·
Horace, who died unmarried and without issue
Edward’s second daughter, Maria Walpole (d. 1807), married, firstly,
James Waldegrave, 2nd
Earl Waldegrave and, secondly,
Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and
Edinburgh, King George III's brother.
His son, Edward,
born in 1737, died in 1771 without issue.
The youngest
daughter, Charlotte, was wife of Lionel Tollemache, 5th
Earl of Dysart.
Walpole's
first wife Catherine died on 20 August 1737 and was buried in Henry VII
Chapel, Westminster
Abbey
Maria Walpole’s great grandsons eventually became the heirs of
Strawberry Hill House.
John James Henry Waldegrave and George Edward Waldegrave both inherited
Strawberry Hill and both married Frances Elizabeth Braham.
After
Walpole's death, Lady
Louisa Stuart, in the
introduction to the letters of her grandmother, Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu (1837),
wrote of rumours that Horace's biological father was not Sir Robert Walpole but
Carr, Lord Hervey (1691-1723), elder half-brother of the more famous John
Hervey. T.H. White writes: "Catherine Shorter, Sir Robert Walpole's
first wife, had five children.
Four of them
were born in a sequence after the marriage; the fifth, Horace, was born eleven
years later, at a time when she was known to be on bad terms with Sir Robert,
and known to be on romantic terms with Carr, Lord Hervey." The lack
of physical resemblance between Horace and Sir Robert,[44] and his close resemblance to members
of the Hervey family, encouraged these rumours. Peter Cunningham, in his introduction to the letters of Horace Walpole (1857),
vol. 1, p. x, wrote:
"[Lady
Louisa Stuart] has related it in print in the Introductory Anecdotes to Lady
Mary's Works ; and there is too much reason to believe that what she tells
is true. Horace was born eleven years after the birth of any other child that
Sir Robert had by his wife; in every respect he was unlike a Walpole, and in
every respect, figure and formation of mind, very like a Hervey. Lady Mary
Wortley divided mankind into men, women, and Herveys, and the division has been
generally accepted. Walpole was certainly of the Hervey class. Lord Hervey's
Memoirs and Horace Walpole's Memoires are most remarkably alike, yet Walpole
never saw them. [Yet] we have no evidence whatever that a suspicion of spurious
parentage ever crossed the mind of Horace Walpole. His writings, from youth to
age, breathe the most affectionate love for his mother, and the most unbounded
filial regard for Sir Robert Walpole."
When Horace
Walpole died in 1797, he left a life interest in Strawberry Hill to Anne. She
had the job of recording the contents of Strawberry Hill for the Berry family,
who had moved into an adjoining property. Anne used Strawberry Hill as her
country house until 1811, which she maintained alongside her central London
home in Upper Brook Street. In 1818, she returned to Twickenham, buying York
House.
After Walpole's death, the house passed first
to his cousin Anne Seymour Damer, then
in 1797 to John Waldegrave,
a grandson of Maria Walpole, the illegitimate
daughter of Walpole's older brother Edward. In the first half of the 19th
century, two successive owners, brothers John and George
Waldegrave, spent most of the family fortune, culminating
in a "Great Sale" lasting twenty-four days held in the grounds in
1842 which left the house stripped of virtually all its contents
From 1818,
Anne Damer lived at York
House, Twickenham. She
continued to sculpt until the end of her life. She died, aged 79, in 1828 at
her London house, No. 27 Upper Brook Street, Grosvenor Square. She was buried in the church
at Sundridge,
Kent.
Lady Anne Seymour-Conway was the daughter of Field Marshall Henry Seymour-Conway
and his wife Lady Carolina Campbell.
Henry was the son of Frances Seymour, 1st Baron of Conway and
his wife Charlotte Shorter.
Charlotte was the sister of Catherine Shorter, who married Robert
Walpole, 1st Earl Orford.
They were the parents of Horatio Walpole.
From the Twickenham Museum
Anne
Seymour Damer, née Conway,
(8 November 1748 – 28 May 1828) was an English sculptor. Once described as a 'female genius' by
Horace Walpole, she was trained in sculpture by Giuseppe Ceracchi and John
Bacon. Influenced by the Enlightenment movement, Anne was an author, traveller,
theatrical producer and actress, as well as an acclaimed sculptress.[2]
She
exhibited regularly at The Royal Academy from 1784 to 1818. She was a close
friend to members of Georgian high society, including Horace Walpole and the
Whig politician Charles James Fox. It is believed that she was a lesbian and
was in a relationship with the actress Elizabeth Farren
Anne Conway
was born in Sevenoaks into an aristocratic Whig family. She was the only daughter
of Field-Marshal Henry
Seymour Conway (1721–1795)
and his wife Caroline Bruce, born Campbell, Lady Ailesbury (1721–1803). Her
father was a nephew of Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister.[ Walpole's son, Horace Walpole was her godfather, and Anne
spent much of her childhood in his home in Strawberry Hill.
Her mother
was the daughter of the Duke of Argyll. She was brought up at the family home
at Park
Place, Remenham, Berkshire. She was highly educated and taught at
home. By the time she was seventeen, she
was introduced into society.
In 1766 at
the age of 17, she was sketched by Angelica Kaufmann in the character of the goddess
Ceres. The work which can be found in St Mary's University Twickenham. In 1800,
an unknown artist (possibly Kauffman) completed a painting with the same
composition as the sketch. The painting preceded her launch into Society and
her entrance onto the marriage market.
In 1767 she
married John Damer, the son of Lord Milton, later
the 1st Earl of Dorchester. The couple received an income of £5,000 from Lord Milton, and
were left large fortunes by Milton and Henry Conway. Damer was described
as a poor businessman, who had a taste for expensive clothing. The marriage was
not a successful one. The couple had no children and separated after seven
years.
In 1775, Anne
was included in a painting titled The Three Witches form Macbeth by
Daniel Gardner (c.1750–1805), which can be found in The National Portrait
Gallery, London. The work shows her next to other ladies of high society:
Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
Anne's
husband committed suicide in 1776, leaving considerable debts. As a widow, Anne
benefitted from a prenuptial agreement whereby her father-in-law was obliged to
pay her £2500 a year. This money allowed her to be financially independent, and
continue her artistic career.[2] Whilst immersing herself in sculpture, she still found
time for a full social life, on a more intellectual plane than that of her
earlier married years.
Anne was a
frequent visitor to Europe. In 1779, she had watched from the deck, a four-hour
running gunfight between a French privateer and the cross Channel packet boat
on which she was travelling. During one voyage she was captured by a privateer, but released unharmed in Jersey. In 1790–91, she travelled alone through Portugal and Spain and
back through revolutionary France. She visited Sir
Horace Mann in Florence, and Sir
William Hamilton in Naples, where she was introduced to Lord Nelson.
In 1801, she
published a novel, Belmour, a book she had written in Lisbon. It
ran in three editions and was translated into French.
In 1802,
while the Treaty of
Amiens was in
effect, she visited Paris with the author Mary Berry and
was granted an audience with Napoleon.
A fluent
French speaker, Anne became friends with Josephine Buonaparte. They
corresponded about gardening and plants, mostly in connection to Josephine's
garden at Malmaison. Anne had also discussed this with Sir Joseph Banks, one of
the founders of the Royal Horticultural Society. A sculptural bust she made of
Banks can be found in The British Museum.
In 1815, she
travelled to Elba, the island where Napoleon had been exiled. She travelled
there despite the ongoing war between France and Britain. The Emperor gifted
her a snuffbox featuring his portrait, which is housed in the British Museum.
When Horace
Walpole died in 1797, he left a life interest in Strawberry Hill to Anne. She
had the job of recording the contents of Strawberry Hill for the Berry family,
who had moved into an adjoining property. Anne used Strawberry Hill as her
country house until 1811, which she maintained alongside her central London
home in Upper Brook Street. In 1818, she returned to Twickenham, buying York
House.
From 1818,
Anne Damer lived at York
House, Twickenham. She
continued to sculpt until the end of her life. She died, aged 79, in 1828 at
her London house, No. 27 Upper Brook Street, Grosvenor Square. She was buried in the church
at Sundridge,
Kent.
According to
Richard Webb, she directed in her will that her correspondence by destroyed and
that she be buried with the bones of her dog and her sculpting tools
