Queer Places:
44 Berkeley Square, London W1J 5AR, UK
Cecilia
Isabella Finch (1700–1771), known as Lady Isabella or Lady Bell, came from an
aristocratic and well-connected family; she was the fourth daughter and one of
the twelve surviving children of Daniel Finch, the second Earl of Nottingham
and seventh Earl of Winchilsea, and his second wife, Anne Hatton. Nottingham
served as Secretary of State under Queen Anne, and on King George I's
accession in 1714 he was appointed Lord President of the Council. In this
capacity, he came into close contact with the Prince and Princess of Wales
(the future George II and Queen Caroline). Lady Isabella greatly admired her
father, who represented an important role model to her throughout her life.
Writing to Newcastle in July 1753 she referred to 'that Honor and Spirit which
I flatter myself I have inherited from the sage Earl of Nottingham' and she
selected the motto 'virtus parentum' as her armorial bookplate. The
Finch family home was the grand country estate of Burley-on-the-Hill, Rutland,
which was built between 1694 and 1702 and appears to have been designed by
Nottingham himself. The staircase hall is a major feature of Burley's
interior, its walls decorated with illusionistic frescos, painted around 1700
by Gerrard Lanscroon, depicting the history of Perseus and Andromeda and it
originally led to a magnificent saloon hung with rich mythological
tapestries. This leads us to speculate that the spatial and decorative
emphasis placed on Burley's staircase and saloon inspired Lady Isabella to
translate these features to her own town house at 44 Berkeley Square where the scale and grandeur of the stairwell and first-floor saloon
dictate its unusual layout.
The female members of the Finch family appear to have been
exceptionally well-educated. Lady Isabella's celebrated great aunt was the
philosopher Anne Conway (née Finch), whose writings on Platonic metaphysics in
the 1670s anticipated the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the prominent
German philosopher and tutor to Princess Caroline. Nottingham also took pains
to ensure that his daughters were well provided for financially; on his death
in 1730, he bequeathed £5000 to each of his three unmarried daughters to be
charged on his estate, thereby granting them a degree of independence. Four of
Lady Isabella's brothers and her brother-in-law, Lord Rockingham, were
included among the trustees of the estate, but they failed to honour the
legacy, prompting Lady Isabella, her mother and one of her sisters to mount a
legal challenge in April 1736. Although the details of the outcome have not
survived, Lady Isabella appears to have been successful in claiming her
inheritance: her correspondence with Rockingham repeatedly refers to his
financial obligation towards her in his role as her trustee. In a later
letter, written on 18 October 1747, she betrayed her persisting resentment
towards her brothers, claiming that her father, 'that great and good man with
prudence and foresight so intailed and tied up his estate that no one
of his sons should be able to do as they pleased with any part of it much less
defraud his daughters whom he left absolute mistresses of their fortunes
thereby showing how much a better opinion he had of them than of his sons.'
Having had to fight for her inheritance, the construction of her own
magnificent town house can perhaps be interpreted as a defiant statement of
her justly claimed personal fortune.
A surviving painting of the Finch family by Charles Philips, c.1731-32,
represents the Family posing before an elaborately staged architectural
backdrop. Lady Isabella is represented on the far right of the
painting, her gaze directed confidently towards the viewer, her brother-in-law
and correspondent, Rockingham, turns towards her whilst gesturing towards his
wife and children. The exact meaning of this complex conversation
piece has been lost, but there is a sense of progression from the noble
antique ruin in shadow on the left to the pristine pedimented structure bathed
in light on the right, emphasising the family's importance as landowners and
architectural patrons who looked to the authority of the classical past.
When the picture was painted, Rockingham, who is thought to have commissioned
the work, was engaged in plans to extend his own palatial property, Wentworth
Woodhouse in South Yorkshire. On the far left of the composition, one of
Lady Isabella's six sisters, Henrietta Finch, gestures proprietorially towards
a portrait bust on a modelling stand. Malcolm Baker has recently argued that
Henrietta was one of the first women of rank to practise as a sculptor,
leading us to speculate that the Finch daughters all benefited from an
artistic education. Lady Isabella's enthusiasm for architecture must also
have been fuelled by her friendship with
Richard Boyle, third Earl of
Burlington and the great exponent of English Palladianism, who married her
half-niece, Dorothy Savile, in 1721. When Burlington resigned from the privy
council in 1733, Lady Isabella lamented, 'nothing since I came to court has I
own vexed me half so much as this affair for I shall upon my own account be
very sorry if I lose my only male friend there'.
Lady Isabella's introduction into the royal household is likely to have
been facilitated by Lady Burlington, who served as a lady of the bedchamber to
Queen Caroline between 1727 and 1737. The exact date of Lady Isabella's
appointment is unrecorded but in a letter to Newcastle, dated 19 February
1761, she claimed to have been 'above 30 years at court' so it seems
reasonable to infer that she entered the royal household around 1730. Her
letters to Lady Burlington, dating from the 1730s, indicate that she was
initially employed to wait on the three eldest princesses, Anne (the Princess
Royal), Amelia and Caroline. She evidently enjoyed her new role since she
wrote: 'I'm mighty happy in my new situation of life and have nothing to wish
but that my Mistresses may like my service as well as I do their place.' The position also enabled her to indulge her love of stag hunting; in the
same letter she described 'a noble chase near 50 miles' in the company of the
Princess Royal who rode 'so well that tis a pleasure to follow her'. Lady
Isabella was to lose one of her royal mistresses in 1734 when the Princess
Royal married William IV of Orange-Nassau, but even greater disruption was
caused by the death of Queen Caroline in November 1737. The following month,
perhaps fearing for her position as a courtier, Lady Isabella applied for the
post of Housekeeper of Windsor Castle. Hoping to enlist the support of
Rockingham, she wrote, 'I think I have merited some mark of favour for my long
constant attendance on the Princesses and great expenses... and that
there are few women would hunt at the rate I have done, which P. Amelia
herself has often said'. Her ambition to gain the position of housekeeper
also suggests a desire to be involved with the running and management of a
royal residence, presaging the relationship she was later to have with her own
house, which she referred to as her 'castle'. George II was ultimately to
deny this application but Lady Isabella continued to serve as a lady of the
bedchamber in the household of Princess Amelia who, following the death of her
mother, became the highest-ranking woman at court.
Lady Isabella therefore entered the royal household several years prior to
Queen Caroline's death and would have been included in the Queen's elite
circle of characterful female courtiers. During this period, she would also
have witnessed the construction of the magnificent new library at St James's
Palace by William Kent, completed just before Queen Caroline's death in 1737. The
library was conceived not only as a repository for books but also as a setting
for intimate intellectual gatherings; it therefore provided a powerful example
of how architectural space could express the status of an enlightened female
patron. For Kent, Queen Caroline was the embodiment of Minerva, the Goddess
of Wisdom and his inclusion of Minerva in the ceiling painting of the Privy
Chamber at Kensington Palace may well have been intended as an early tribute
to her. As a frequent visitor to the Burlington household, Lady Isabella also
came to enjoy a close relationship with Kent, who cohabited with the
Burlingtons for almost thirty years and was affectionately referred to as the
'Signor' by both Lady Burlington and Lady Isabella.
In 1732 Kent constructed a stone grotto in the grounds of Richmond Palace,
known as the Hermitage, which appears to have held a particular significance
for Lady Isabella. Conceived as a miniature pantheon to the nation's great
minds, its interior was furnished with bookcases and adorned with five
portrait busts of celebrated scientists and theologians, carved by Giovanni
Battista Guelfi. The fired-clay models for the sculptures
were acquired by Kent, who later bequeathed four of them, 'Newton, Clark, Lock
and Woolaston', to Lady Isabella, thus alluding to her interest in
philosophical debate and their mutual admiration for Queen Caroline.
Whilst prescriptive sources dating from the eighteenth century sought to
promote an ideal of submissive femininity, Lady Isabella's correspondence
reveals her to have been independent, opinionated and physically active. As
already established, she enjoyed a reputation as a skilled horse-rider, which
is further borne out in her correspondence with Newcastle. In a letter dated 7
September 1738, she recounted the events of a day's hunting with Princess
Amelia, riding 'over bogs, nits, rough and smooth ground, a variety of country
not to be avoided in a long chase'. In the same letter, she playfully
alluded to the envy of Newcastle's 'Bay nag who can't bear to see my horse
before his in ye field', thus betraying her own competitive spirit. During
the thirty years she corresponded with Newcastle, she frequently offered her
opinions on political matters with outspoken frankness: 'As your Grace has
often been deceived in your favourites, I don't wonder you are grown
suspicious of every body and give me leave to say you in some measure
deserve it by Trusting to such a wretch...' She was also an authoritative
figure within her own family: her letters to Rockingham regularly offer
assertive financial advice. On 10 December 1745, she wrote, 'Stock bore so low
a price that indeed I advised Buck to stay a few days before he parted with
yours if the rebels meet (as I hope they will) with a smash, all stocks
will rise again faster than they fell and you'll receive more money by this
Delay.' Beyond the elite world of the royal court, Lady Isabella fashioned
herself as the defendant of talented female writers, acting as the patron of
the novelist Charlotte Lennox and the philosophical writer
Catherine Cockburn,
who defended the writings of both Locke and Clarke.
Charlotte Lennox became a companion to Lady Isabella Finch, whose attention
had been caught by Lennox's writings. Lennox's first volume of poetry, Poems
on Several Occasions, published in 1747, was dedicated to Lady Isabella and
centred partly on themes of female friendship and independence. The semi-autobiographical novel entitled The Life of Harriot Stuart which was published by Lennox in 1751. Lady Isabella acted as literary patroness to the young Lennox when she first carne to London around 1746, but later withdrew
her patronage, prompting the resentnient of her former protégé. In the novel, Harriot (a surrogate for Lennox) pays a visit to the London home of Lady Cecilia (a thinly veiled portrait of Lady Isabella) who is described as
'a woman of great distinction about court, remarkable for the brilliancy of her wit, and
her taste for the belles-Lettres.' What is striking about the novel’s portrayal of Lady Cecilia is
that her house becomes a vehicle for expressing her dominant personalaty; the shrillness of
her voice echoes through the house, she flings the doors open and throws herself into a chair, each verb conveying
her command over the house’s interior space. Meanwhile her young guest is made to wait, first in
the drawing room, then in the dressing room, meaning that she is both confined and controlled by each space. In describing Lady Cecilia's library, Harriot observes that ‘the great number of books of which it was composed gave me a very advantageous idea of a lady who could be at such an expense to furnish herself with intellectual entertainments.’ This appears to be a deliberate jibe at Lady Isabella’s conspicuous self-fashioning as an erudite lady. However, when the novel appeared in print, it prompted an outraged response from Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu who leapt to the defence of her friend, writing: ‘I was rouz’d into great surprise and Indignation by the monstrous abuse of one of the very, very few Women I have a real value for. I mean Lady Bell Finch, who is not only clearly meant by the mention of her Library, she being the only Lady at Court that has one, but her very name at length, she being christen’d Cecelia Isabella,
tho she chuses to he call’d by the Latter. I allwaies thought her conduct in every
light so irreproachable, I did not think she had an Enemy upon Earth.’
Lady Isabella's position as a courtier brought her an annual income of
£400, contributing to her independence and facilitating her role as a hostess to members of Princess Amelia’s inner circle. Her royal entertainments frequently took place after a day’s hunting, as she described to Rockingham in June 1743, ‘We
had a most prodigious chase yesterday which did not hinder the company’s supping at my lodging where after they had indeed all eaten like sportsmen and sportswomen, we sat up till near 3 o’clock at whist.’ When she wrote this letter, the construction of her own town house in Berkeley Square was already under way, and from
1745 until her death in 1771 the house was to provide a sumptuous setting for
numerous select gatherings, consolidating her reputation as one of the great
society hostess of her time.
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