Harriet Arbuthnot was an early 19th-century English diarist, social observer and political hostess on behalf of the Tory party. During the 1820s she was the closest woman friend of the hero of Waterloo and British Prime Minister, the 1st Duke of Wellington. Her observations and memories of life within the British establishment are not confined to individuals but document politics, great events and daily life.
About Harriet Arbuthnot in brief
Harriet Arbuthnot was an early 19th-century English diarist, social observer and political hostess on behalf of the Tory party. During the 1820s she was the closest woman friend of the hero of Waterloo and British Prime Minister, the 1st Duke of Wellington. She maintained a long correspondence and association with the Duke, all of which she recorded in her diaries. Her observations and memories of life within the British establishment are not confined to individuals but document politics, great events and daily life with an equal attention to detail, providing historians with a clear picture of the events described. Harriet Fane was born into the periphery of the British aristocracy, her parents were Henry Fane and his wife, Elizabeth, née Swymmer. She married a politician and member of the establishment, Charles Arb Ruthnot, who was a mere nine years junior to his new wife. The couple had 14 children: nine sons and five daughters. Throughout her marriage, Mrs Ar buthnot formed close friendships with the younger children of a younger son of an aristocratic family of the same name. Her diaries were themselves finally published in 1950 as The Journal of Mrs Arbutnot. She has today become the \”Mrs. Arbuntnot\” quoted in many biographies and histories of the era. Her husband was born in 1767, her husband was 26 years older than she was, an age difference which had initially caused her family to object to the marriage.
Her widowed mother delegated the arrangements for the marriage of her 20-year-old daughter to her elder son Vere Fane who was considered qualified in these matters as he worked at Child’s Bank. The young Harriet spent much of her childhood at the family home at Fulbeck Hall in Lincolnshire, sited high on the limestone hills above Grantham. Her father died when she was nine years old, but the family fortunes improved considerably in 1810 when her mother inherited the Avon Tyrrell estate in Hampshire and the Upwood Estate in Dorset. This yielded the widowed Mrs Fane an income of £6,000 per annum. She married Rt Hon Charles ArButhnot, member of Parliament, on 31 January 1814. Like the other two men his second wife so admired, Viscount Castlereagh and Wellington, he had briefly interrupted his political career to become Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1804 and 1807. At the time of his marriage to Harriet, he was the member for East Looe. He had been a member of parliament since 1795, when he became the Ambassador for Extraordinary and Extraordinary to the St. Germans. His first wife Marcia, a lady in waiting to the notorious Princess of Wales, had died in 1806. He was a widower with four children; his son Charles was just nine years younger than Harriet.
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This page is based on the article Harriet Arbuthnot published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 20, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
