Fortune Hunter , livre ebook

Title Page

THE FORTUNE HUNTER



A German Prince in Regency England


By
P eter J ames B owman




Publisher Information

First published in 2010 by
Signal Books Limited
36 Minster Road
Oxford OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk

Digital edition converted and distributed in 2011 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

© Peter James Bowman, 2010
The right of Peter James Bowman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved.The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.

Design & Production: Devdan Sen
Cover Design: Devdan Sen
Cover Image: ‘An Election Ball’. Caricature by William Heath, 1827 or 1828; in the author’s possession.




Quote









‘In the past of one’s country one is a foreigner, and it is naturally with other foreigners that one identifies.’

J.W. Burrow, The Times , 20 June 1970




Dedication














FOR MY PARENTS




Acknowledgements

In telling the previously untold story of Prince Pückler’s matrimonial tour of England, I have adhered to the documentary evidence and avoided imaginative reconstruction. This policy was made easier by the richness of the sources in the Archive of the Pückler Foundation in Branitz. In using these sources I was assisted by the Archive’s staff, initially Volkmar Herold and subsequently Christian Friedrich and Anne Schäfer, for whose hospitality, patience and manifold generosity it is a pleasure to express my gratitude here.The Archive is housed in the pretty neo-Gothic former estate forge, and my workroom there, with its view of the park and the mansion house where Pückler spent his last twenty-six years, will always be a happy memory. I also benefited from Englandsouvenirs , the companion volume to an exhibition on Pückler’s stay in England held at Muskau and Branitz in 2005, particularly from the essays therein by Nicole and Michael Brey.
To Dr Nikolaus Gatter, director of the Varnhagen Society in Cologne, I am deeply obliged for photocopies of Pückler-related newspaper and periodical articles in the Society’s collection and for many other acts of kindness. Also in Germany, Ulf Jacob provided information and references and brought my research to the attention of his fellow Pückler scholars.
The bulk of my work with British newspapers, journals and books was done at the Cambridge University Library, facilitated by the unfailing efficiency of its staff.Were it not for the magnanimous policy of allowing graduates of the University lifelong membership of the Library, this book would have taken far longer to write.
I have also been helped by the staffs of the British Library, the British Library Newspapers (Colindale), the Guildhall Library, the Family Records Centre, the National Archives (Kew), the London Metropolitan Archives, and several Public Record Offices and other institutions in the UK as well as the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow, Poland.
For welcoming me into their homes and giving me access to family papers I extend my warmest thanks to Sir John and Lady Hervey-Bathurst, Somborne Park; Captain and Mrs Bell, Llangedwyn Hall; and Mr and Mrs Somerset, Castle Goring.
Those who provided information in response to written enquiries are too numerous to list, but I must at least mention Robin Elliott, Berkshire Record Office; Nigel Everett, Hafod Press; Kate Fielden, Bowood Estate Office; Sheena Jones, Windsor Reference Library; Sheila Markham,The Travellers Club; Malcolm Underwood, St John’s College, Cambridge; John Wardroper, Shelfmark Books; and Emma Whinton, National Monuments Record. Bia von Doetinchem answered my questions about Wilhelm von Biel and sent me a copy of her privately printed book about his family.
I am very grateful to those who read some or all of the manuscript at various stages for their comments: Richard Aronowitz, Lizzie Collingham, Carmel Curtis, Marion Piening, Reehana Raza,Thomas Seidel, Deb Truscott and my parents John and Silvia Bowman. My greatest debt in this regard is to Richard T. Kelly, whose eight pages of remarks on an early draft prompted me to rewrite several chapters. I further profited from the editorial input of James Ferguson of Signal Books, who did everything possible to make the journey into print speedy and smooth. As well as being the first to read the full manuscript, Claude Piening gave me invaluable help and encouragement from the inception of this project. John Cornwell placed his long experience as a writer at my disposal in various ways.
About a third of the illustrations are taken from Pückler’s travel albums, and their reproduction here is by gracious permission of the Pückler Foundation in Branitz (vol. I) and Count Hermann von Pückler (vols II & III). Erika Ingham of the Archive and Library of the National Portrait Gallery tracked down several portraits for me, Sotheby’s and Christie’s sent on blind letters to current owners, and private individuals and curators of collections kindly furnished me with images of items in their possession or care. Further acknowledgements are made in the list of illustrations.

Note: Following common practice, I use the term ‘Regency’ to describe the first three decades of the nineteenth century, not just the years from 1811 to 1820 when the Prince of Wales acted as Regent for his father George III.



Prologue

‘A set of foreign adventurers, who come here to seek their fortunes’

Late in the evening of 28 September 1826 the steam packet from Rotterdam finally dropped anchor near London Bridge. Rather than the usual twenty hours the crossing had taken forty, six of them spent beached on a sandbank in the Thames Estuary.The conditions were so stormy, the motion of the boat so unsettling and the stench from the engines so foul that all the passengers were violently ill. On arrival they were told they must not remove their luggage until the Custom House in Lower Thames Street opened at ten o’clock the next day. Some slept alongside their possessions, but Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau passed the night in a sailors’ tavern next to the moored boat. As he lay in his dingy room, unchanged and unwashed, he must have wondered why he could not be at home, enjoying the comforts of a well-run chateau with his beloved Lucie. But England was his only hope; if he could not repair his fortunes here he faced bankruptcy and the loss of his life’s work. In the morning he went back on board for the inspection of his effects and succeeded in bribing the customs men to ignore the pairs of French gloves he had packed as gifts for ladies. Then he drove to the Clarendon Hotel in Bond Street. He could not afford to stay there for long, but it would be a good base from which to begin his campaign.
A decade earlier he had married Lucie von Pappenheim, a moderately wealthy divorcee. Both were passionately attached to Muskau, his large estate in the eastern German region of Lusatia, which, with her help, he would turn into a magnificent park. But before the work was complete they had poured all their money into the soil and were deep in debt.To avoid the dire necessity of selling the estate the couple devised a bizarre, but to their minds perfectly sensible, scheme: they would divorce so that Pückler could marry an heiress who would finance his continued landscaping and, after a decent interval, be persuaded to let Lucie carry on living at Muskau with them.
The likeliest place to find a suitably dowered bride was England, Europe’s richest country, and as soon as the divorce came through he sailed for London. In his favour he had a grand title, a handsome appearance and a charming personality; against him was the fact that England was already full of titled, handsome and charming Continental noblemen with exactly the same intentions.
Moreover, their presence was causing considerable alarm.A letter printed in the Morning Post just three weeks after Pückler’s arrival makes this clear: ‘As the commencement of the fashionable season now approaches, and families are returning fast to town, may it not be proper to warn the British Fair as to the place being now, as is really the case, swarming with aliens of the description of mere fortune hunters, who have come over for the sole purpose of inveigling women of property.’ A few months earlier the diarist Clarissa Trant, on hearing that her cousin had bestowed her hand and £20,000 on a Count Orsini of Turin, voiced the widespread view that ‘Italian Counts and German Barons are a suspicious, or at best a suspected race.’ As were Frenchmen, and the Court Journal of 1829 went as far as to claim that while many London heiresses had been taken as wives by Parisians, no portionless Englishwoman had ever had a suitor from the rival metropolis. Not all aspirants were even real aristocrats, chimed in Fraser’s Magazine in 1832, but fraudsters who boasted of their pedigrees, feudal castles and rent-rolls so as to ‘kidnap some artless girl’s affections’. 1
The problem was not new. As early as 1740 a published sermon cautioned young English ladies against Irish adventurers, who were coming over in large numbers ‘to make a P