Francis Hare-Naylor, the Duchess of Devonshire's Protégé

An outline of the life of the early nineteenth-century figure Francis Hare-Naylor resembles the plot of a Romance novel. A handsome boy, heir to an astonishing fortune and England’s best-preserved fifteenth-century castle, Herstmonceux, he loses his beautiful mother, Sarah Selman, when she dies after becoming overheated at a ball. His father, Robert Hare, soon after marries Henrietta Henckell. The proverbial wicked stepmother, Henrietta burns Sarah’s portrait, sells family properties to pay for extravagances, pulls down the storied castle, builds a new pile, Herstmonceux Place, and then, by settling it on her own children, disinherits Francis and his brother. Francis flees to London, lives meagerly on a small annuity from his mother’s estate, and runs up debts.

Now enter a Whig society patron, the famous Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire (pictured below), whose colourful life is portrayed in the 2008 film, The Duchess.

A good Miss Havisham, she introduces Francis to her lovely young cousin Georgiana Shipley, a member of the ‘Craven street club’, bright young things who doted on the colonial genius Benjamin Franklin during his time in London. The flirtatious Georgiana Shipley is an accomplished painter, a pupil of the great Joshua Reynolds. Francis courts her, they fall in love, and she takes him home to meet her father, Jonathan Shipley, the Bishop of St Asaph. The day after his arrival at the bishop’s palace, Francis is arrested for debt while out riding with the bishop! The bishop secures his release but sends him away. Determined to be with Georgiana, Francis sneaks back to the palace disguised as a beggar.

The Duchess of Devonshire helps the lovers elope and grants them an annuity of £200, a sizable sum (today about $14,000). In Nov. 1784 they marry and retreat to Europe where they live in exile for the next thirteen years. Upon the death of Francis's father, in 1797 an astonishing development makes it possible for Francis and Georgiana to return to England and claim possession of Herstmonceux: his stepmother having erected her building on entailed land now has no right to it. She is forced to leave with her many possessions.

The lovers, though, are star crossed; their story does not end happily. A few years after they take over the estate, Georgiana becomes blind. Income from the much-reduced family properties is insufficient to provide upkeep for the castle. In 1804 they return to the continent; within two years Georgiana dies at Lausanne.

Hare-Naylor’s story takes a final interesting turn when he falls in love with and in 1807 marries his sister-in-law Anna Marie.* The widow of a notable 'orientalist', Sir William Jones, Anna Marie had adopted one of Francis and Georgiana’s children, Augustus William. In the same year he marries Anna Marie, Francis sells Herstmonceux and moves with his new wife to Matson House, near Gloucester.
Also in that year, to support his family Francis begins to write for pay. A novel, some plays and a history are, if at all, only moderately successful.

It was in these straightened circumstances that Francis Hare-Naylor became a writer for the Quarterly Review, an unusual development given the Quarterly's reputation as a conservative journal. It came about because in 1814 one of Georgiana’s old friends, Phoebe Hoppner, the widow of the portrait painter John Hoppner, introduced Francis to the journal's editor, William Gifford. Though John Hoppner had been one of Gifford's closest friends, and though he was the Hoppner family's patron, he must still have thought twice about admitting Francis into the roster of his contributors. Gifford would have known about Georgiana’s shenanigans with Benjamin Franklin, that via French agents she had smuggled letters to Franklin during the American war, that her father was pro-American. He would have known, too, that from republican motives Francis had refused a baronetcy, that he had been a member of the Whig politician Charles James Fox’s circle, and that the Duchess of Devonshire had been his sponsor.

On the other side of the balance sheet, decisively so, were Francis’s connections with the Hoppners and the Hebers, families close to Gifford whose wishes the editor could not overlook. Besides her friendship with Phoebe Hoppner, as a painter Georgiana had been respected by John Hoppner. She was also related by marriage to Reginald Heber; Heber’s wife, Amelia Shipley, was Georgiana’s niece. Perhaps there was as well a conservative side to Hare-Naylor: we find him in 1805 a £1, 1s. subscriber to the evangelical-dominated Society for Bettering the Condition and Improving the Comforts of the Poor. (‘Miss Louisa Shipley, Upper Grosvenor-street’, too, was a subscriber.)

In Sept. 1815, Francis again left for the continent; he died the next month. For the benefit of Francis’s family, John Murray (the 'Prince of Booksellers') swiftly brought out what became Hare-Naylor’s best-known work, Civil and Military History of Germany (1816).

Francis’s will bears some plaintive notes. He implores his brother to care for his and Georgiana’s sons: ‘I firmly rely upon his supporting them during the life of Mrs. Henrietta Hare’. To his ‘beloved wife Anna Maria’ he apologizes ‘that it is not in [his] power to give … a more substantial proof of [his] tender affection’.

Two of Francis and Georgiana Hare-Naylor’s children became notable clergymen, Augustus William Hare (pictured above with his mother) and Julius Charles Hare. Both were members of the liberal Broad Church and, as such, intellectual progeny of the Quarterly reviewer Edward Copleston. The Bishop of Chester, William Otter, who was related by marriage to the Quarterly reviewer George D’Oyly, was Julius Hare’s ecclesiastical patron.

*The marriage to Anna Marie has not before been noticed. The relationship is stated in Francis Hare-Naylor's will.

Sources: John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland. Will of Francis Hare-Naylor, PRO PROB 11/1573. Will of Henrietta Hare, PRO PROB 11/1719 || Alexander Du Toit, ‘Naylor, Francis Hare- (1753–1815)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography www.oxforddnb.com (identifies Hare-Naylor’s second wife as ‘a relative of his first wife’). || Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition … of the Poor 4 (1805), p. 184. Georgiana: Extracts from the Correspondence of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, ed. Earl of Bessborough (1955). A. Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1998).

(c) Jonathan Cutmore, 2010. All rights reserved. Re-publication prohibited.

jonathan.cutmore@utoronto.ca