Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

It was against this background of domestic harmony that the Blanckleys’ most important work was carried out. While they survived the worst excesses of the Dey’s regime, some of their countrymen were not so fortunate. One of Mr Blanckley’s main duties in this ‘very nucleus of piracy’ was to claim any British national taken into slavery by the Algerians. He was able to do this under the terms of a treaty agreed with the Turkish Sultan in 1761, known as the Ottoman Capitulations, which also gave European consuls wide-reaching powers of jurisdiction over their countrymen in both civil and criminal cases, liberty of movement around the Dey’s dominions, freedom from restrictions in commerce and religion, and (in theory at least) inviolability of domicile.

After these captured Britons had been identified and set free, it was to Mrs Blanckley that the care of these unfortunates most frequently fell. Sometimes they were English sailors, or a handful of travellers on board a foreign passenger ship which had fallen into the hands of Algerian pirates. Sometimes they were the crew of an English merchant vessel captured on the high seas with its cargo of cotton, opium or oil. If the captain of one of these ships (who was often accompanied by his wife and family) was not properly insured his capture would spell certain ruin. At least he would have been allowed to keep a change of clothing; the rest of the crew on board such vessels were routinely stripped of everything they possessed, right down to their underclothes. Mrs Blanckley grew adept at making up not only extra beds, but also new shirts with which to clothe her destitute countrymen.

On one occasion fifteen Englishmen were shipwrecked on the Barbary Coast, at a place called Gigery. The Blanckleys first received knowledge of their capture when a small piece of bluish-white paper was delivered to their house, much creased and soiled, on which a few scarcely legible lines had been scratched with charcoal and water. It told a distressing but all too familiar tale. The ship belonging to these English mariners, laden with a cargo of pigs of lead and barrels of gunpowder, had been on its way to one of the Mediterranean ports, when a storm had driven it onto the rocks. The ‘inhospitable savages’ who inhabited this remote piece of coast had overpowered the exhausted men and diverted them of everything, including all their clothes. Freezing with cold and half-starved, the fifteen men watched helplessly from the shore as, in their haste take possession of the ship’s cargo, several of their captors tied pigs of lead to their waists, instantly sinking to their deaths as they attempted to swim back to shore. Another group later blew themselves up when they built a fire too close to one of the barrels of gunpowder. Perhaps anxious to be rid of these unlucky Christian devils, they were now demanding a large ransom.

It was only with difficulty that the outraged Mr Blanckley could be made ‘to comprehend the truth of the Dey’s reply, which was, that he had not the least command or influence with the men of Gigery … that they had ever continued a wild and completely savage people; and that had any Algerine subjects fallen into their hands, he, the Dey, would equally have been obliged to pay a ransom for their liberation.’ The compassionate Blanckleys paid the ransom from their own pocket, and a few days later the thirteen mariners – ‘two having sunk under their misery’ – arrived in Algiers.

The men had scarcely a rag upon them, but Mrs Blanckley was well prepared and already had beds and clothing waiting for them. She tended their wounds and fed them, although her greatest anxiety over the following weeks was that ‘they might be injured by taking too great a quantity of food, after their long state of almost starvation; and she used great caution in having nourishment distributed to them.’ ‘In this, and in every other instance,’ Elizabeth wrote, ‘did my excellent parents act a part worthy of the good Samaritan; their house, their purse, and even their wardrobe, being opened and freely bestowed according to the wants of their unfortunate fellow-creatures.’1

In no other profession has a wife been so intimately involved with her husband’s work. While not everyone had the extraordinary task of sewing shirts for starving shipwreck survivors, it was a partnership which, in one form or another, had been taking shape from the very earliest days of diplomacy.

The Earl of Stair, ambassador to Paris in 1715, was noted for keeping ‘the most splendid house in Paris next to that of the King, and having with him his Countess and her daughter, both ladies of the greatest honour and politeness’. Here the ambassador would entertain the principal lords and ladies of France ‘with all possible elegance’, but after about ten o’clock at night his custom was to ‘pretend business, and leave the company to the care of his lady, withdraw to his Room, undress himself, and repair to the coffee-houses incognito; and, by a dexterous Method of Conversation, find out the secrets of the Day’.2 In the 1730s Mrs Vigor, whose husband was consul-general in St Petersburg, liked to do her embroidery at the Countess of Biron’s, where the Tsar was a constant visitor. This was in no way for her own amusement, she claimed, but for the advantage these contacts might bring her husband ‘in the station he is in’.3

Marriage to a diplomat was a commitment not just to an individual but to an entire way of life. ‘CONSIDER SMALL MEANS AND FOREIGN LIFE,’ Lady Fane, herself the child of diplomats, telegraphed frantically to her own daughter when she announced her engagement to a young Foreign Service subaltern.4 The vagaries of diplomatic life, its insecurities and discomforts as well as its privileges, meant that husbands often demanded far more of their wives than most women might legitimately expect.

The twenty-one-year-old Catherine Borland might have thought twice if she had had someone like Lady Fane to advise her when in 1898 she became engaged to George Macartney, the first and perhaps most famous British consul to Kashgar. Assuming that her fiancé was still safely en poste, Catherine was in her kitchen in Edinburgh, innocently baking a cake one Saturday morning, when the maid announced that George had arrived. Although they had been engaged for nearly two years, to her astonishment he calmly announced that they must be married within the week, ‘for he had only got three months’ leave from Kashgar, and already five weeks of it had gone’. Just one week later they set off on their ‘great adventure’. ‘To me it was a great adventure indeed,’ Catherine later recalled, ‘for I was the most timid, unenterprising girl in the world. I had hardly been beyond the limits of my own sheltered home, and big family of brothers and sisters, had never had any desire whatever to see the world, and certainly had no qualifications for a pioneer’s life, beyond being able to make a cake.’

In the seventeen years that Catherine Macartney spent in Chinese Turkistan she had to master a far greater range of accomplishments. Fortunately, she seems to have been one of those women who was quite simply born to the pioneering life, and learnt to adapt both to a new husband and to a new life with extraordinary speed.

A journey of that sort is a pretty good test to one’s temper [she wrote of her first arduous six-week journey to Kashgar] for one’s nerves get strained, at times almost to breaking point. Everything seems to go wrong when one is utterly tired out, and sometimes very hungry. If two people can go through the test of such a journey without quarrelling seriously, they can get through under any circumstances. We just survived it, and it promised well for the long journey through life.5

There were others, however, who were not so lucky; others from whom, however devoted they may have been as wives, diplomatic life required sacrifices they found terribly hard to bear. ‘You cannot imagine how sorry I am at giving up our snug country Darby and Joan life for all the plagues and tinsel of diplomacy,’ wrote Anne Disbrowe in a letter from St Petersburg, where her husband was posted in the 1820s. The glitter of Alexander I’s court was a far cry from the braying donkeys and dust storms of Kashgar, but for Anne it was just as hard: ‘I once thought I was ambitious, but either I was mistaken in the conjecture or the quality is worn out, and perhaps having attained my wishes I want nothing more.’6 Having been told that they would only be gone a month or so, she had left her two little girls behind in England. In the event it was three years before she finally returned to England and was able to see her daughters again.

Whether or not they wanted to, diplomatic wives almost always led a far more active role than that of a mere camp-follower and housekeeper to their husbands. But as the example of Mrs Blanckley shows, their role often extended into many areas beyond the conventional social ones. Although it was not until 1946 that women were able to enter the Foreign Office in their own right,* in the past, when diplomats were often obliged to work with very little formal backup, they frequently used their wives as unofficial secretaries, and occasionally even as their deputies when they were occupied elsewhere. Many women, such as Mary Fraser in Japan and Isabel Burton in Brazil and later in Damascus, frequently acted as a private assistant, copying reports and even getting to grips with complicated systems of codes and ciphers. When Elizabeth McNeill married her husband John, the British agent in Persia in 1823, she took over the management of all his expenses. She was so discreet ‘that he could entirely trust her with all his diplomatic difficulties’, and was soon involved in making copies of all her husband’s letters. Their years in Persia were crucial ones as the country was an important buffer between an increasingly expansionist Russia and British India at that time. Although John McNeill was frequently away for months on end travelling the country, no one doubted that Mrs McNeill was more than capable of undertaking the more sedentary parts of his job. ‘I am more than delighted with the promptitude and ability manifested by Mrs McNeill,’ Colonel Macdonald, the envoy, wrote just a few years later in 1828; ‘we have no need of an Agent at the capital so long as she is there.’7

Even earlier, in the eighteenth century, diplomatic wives showed themselves to be equally as capable. In 1789 Torrington, the British minister in Brussels, described his wife in a letter to the Secretary of State as ‘the soul of my office’. When he came back to England he left her behind to supervise the work of his young (and of course male) chargé d’affaires. Although it was then unthinkable, for all her capabilities, that Mrs Torrington should herself have been appointed chargé, it was not unknown for women to be recommended for the less politically important post of consul. In 1752 Mr Titley, from Copenhagen, recommended the appointment, on the death of her husband, of ‘a very notable woman’, Mrs Elizabeth Fenwick, as consul in Denmark, so long as she should remain unmarried. In the event one of her sons was appointed instead, but some ten years later, in Tripoli, a Mrs White did indeed act as her husband’s unofficial successor (and was paid by the Treasury) for two years until an official, male replacement was appointed.8

In particularly remote or dangerous postings, an even closer involvement was often necessary. Felicity Wakefield was posted to Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956, when President Nasser nationalized the previously neutral canal zone. Although no one in the embassy, not even the ambassador himself, knew of the Israeli and Anglo-French plans to invade Egypt at that point, there was no doubt that the situation was serious – ‘We had a house out on the pyramids road and I remember convoys of Egyptian army vehicles going past.’ Given tank recognition charts by the secret service, she was asked to identify and count the tanks going past her house – ‘Which I did,’ she recalls with satisfaction. ‘I hid behind the curtain so that my servants didn’t know what I was doing and I drew the tanks and I counted them. I suppose they could have accused me of spying – which is just what I was doing.’

Spying was one of the very few things that Ann Fanshawe did not do for her husband, but no doubt she would have, had it been necessary – and relished it too. The marriage of Ann and Richard Fanshawe represented not only one of diplomacy’s greatest partnerships, but one of its greatest love stories. They were married in 1644, during the Civil War. Richard was thirty-five, and the Secretary of the Council of War to the Prince of Wales (the future Charles II), then a boy of fourteen. Ann herself was just nineteen. A portrait of her in later life by Sir Peter Lely shows an exquisite oval face with a long nose and soft chin. Her small mouth is slightly pursed; her dark eyes, beneath the fashionable ringlets of the day, have a faintly resigned look about them. Thick ropes of pearls are strung at her wrists and looped around her neck and shoulders over magnificent lace cuffs and collar. By not so much as a flicker of a sloe-shaped eyelid is it possible to guess at the extraordinary swashbuckling life which lay behind the exterior of this placid, conventionally fashionable matron.

Ann was the eldest daughter of Sir John Harrison of Hertfordshire. Although she was brought up with ‘all the advantages that time afforded’, learning to sew, to speak French, to sing and dance and play the lute, she was, by her own admission, ‘what we graver people call a hoyting girl’.* She learned her lessons well, ‘yet was I wild to that degree, that the hours of my beloved recreation took up too much of my time.’ Best of all she liked riding and running, ‘and all active pastimes … But to be just to myself, I never did mischief to myself or other people, nor one immodest action or would in my life, but skipping and activity was my delight.’

From a boisterous, skipping girl Ann grew up into a deeply sensual, ambitious and capable woman. From the day of her marriage at Wolver-cote church until Richard’s death in 1666, she was passionately in love with her husband. ‘I thought myself a Queen,’ she wrote, ‘and my husband so glorious a crown, that I more valued myself to be called by his name than born a princess; for I knew him very wise and very good, and his soul doted on me.’

It was only after the Restoration in 1660 that Dick Fanshawe became an officially credited diplomat, but for many years both during and after the Civil War, he acted as an envoy for the King in exile. He was very much a man of his times – highly educated, a great lover of both history and poetry, and something of a poet himself. As well as a writer of his own verses he was a translator of Horace, and of Camoëns’s The Lusiads from the Portuguese. In the memoir written for her son, also called Richard, so that he would know what manner of man his father had been, Ann describes him tenderly: ‘He was of the highest size of men, strong, and of the best proportion, his complexion sanguine, his skin exceeding fair, his hair dark brown and very curling, but not very long, his eyes grey and penetrating, his nose high, his countenance gracious and wise, his motion good, his speech clear and distinct.’ Both his ‘masters’, Charles I and Charles II, loved him greatly, ‘both for his great parts and honesty, and for his conversation, in which they took great delight’. Even after his death, Ann never stopped loving him. Throughout their life together he was her ‘North Star, that only had the power to fix me’.

Richard Fanshawe loved his wife as much as he was beloved by her. The first time they were parted after their marriage, when Richard went to Bristol on the King’s business, he was ‘extremely afflicted even to tears, though passion was against his nature’. From the very beginning he had complete trust in Ann, involving her unhesitatingly in many of his affairs. Not long after their marriage he entrusted her with his store of gold, saying to her, ‘I know that thou that keeps my heart so well will keep my fortune, which from this time I will ever put into thy hands as God shall bless me with increase.’

His trust was well-placed. During the dangerous and uncertain years of the Civil War Ann undertook a number of missions on her husband’s behalf. Alone, and almost continually pregnant (typically for those days, she bore Richard fourteen children), she travelled frequently on his business affairs: in November 1648 ‘my husband went to Paris on his master’s business, and sent for me from London. I carried him three hundred pounds of his money.’ In France she was received at the Palais Royal, and there her little daughter played with ‘the lady Henrietta’, younger sister to Charles II. This respite did not last long. Soon Richard ‘thought it convenient to send me into England again, there to try what sums I could raise, both for his subsistence abroad, and mine at home’.

But these missions were only a small taste of what was to come. After the Battle of Worcester in 1651, which finally ended the cause of Charles II in England, Richard was taken prisoner and for ten weeks kept in solitary confinement at Whitehall. ‘Cease weeping,’ Richard told her when they met, ‘no other thing upon earth can move me.’ But Ann had good reason to weep. The conditions in prison were so bad that Richard contracted scurvy, and the effects nearly killed him. In order just to catch a glimpse of him, she would go ‘when the clock struck four in the morning, with a dark lantern in my hand, all alone and on foot, from my lodging in Chancery Lane … to Whitehall … There I would go under his window and softly call him … Thus we talked together; and sometimes I was so wet with rain that it went in at my neck and out at my heels.’

Ann petitioned Cromwell in person to secure Richard’s release, and in November that year he was finally let out on bail, although it was not until 1658, seven years later, that he was able to escape to France again. To her consternation, Ann was refused a pass to travel out to join him. At Whitehall she was told that her husband had gained his liberty through trickery; ‘but for me and his children upon no conditions we should not stir’. Ann did not waste time arguing. She went to the pass office at Wallingford House, and obtained papers under her maiden name, Ann Harrison, for herself, ‘a man, a maid, and her three children’. She then shamelessly proceeded to forge the pass, changing the capital ‘H’ to two ‘f’s,* the two ‘r’s to an ‘n’ and the ‘i’ to an ‘s’, and the ‘s’ to an ‘h’, the ‘o’ to an ‘a’, and the ‘n’ to a ‘w’, ‘so completely that none could find the change’. She then hired a barge to take her family to Gravesend, and from thence a coach to Dover. Then, laughing merrily at the thought of their great escape, she and her family crossed the Channel, to Richard and freedom.

The Fanshawes’ greatest adventure of all, however, had taken place in 1650, ten years earlier, when Richard was sent on a vital diplomatic mission to Spain: he carried letters from the future Charles II to the king of Spain, Philip IV, petitioning urgent funds to help the royalist cause. Ann, as always, was by his side.

The Fanshawes set out from Galway, which was then in the throes of the plague. Not wishing to enter the town itself, they were led ‘all on the back side of town under the walls, over which people during the plague (which was not yet quite stopped) had flung out all their dung, dirt and rags, and we walked up to the middle of our legs in them’. By now covered in flea bites, they found the ship, a Dutch merchant vessel, which was to carry them as far as Málaga.

The boat was owned by ‘a most tempestuous master, a Dutchman (which is enough to say), but truly, I think the greatest beast I ever saw of his kind’. All was well until they came to the Straits of Gibraltar, where they suddenly saw a well-manned Turkish galley in full sail coming towards them. The Dutchman’s ship was so loaded with goods that his guns, all sixty of them, were useless. ‘We believed we should all be carried away as slaves,’ Ann wrote. But the ‘beast captain’ was not about to give up so easily. He called for brandy, of which he drank a good deal, called for his arms, called for his men, and cleared the decks of everyone else, ‘resolving to fight rather than to lose his ship that was worth £30,000’.

‘This was sad for us passengers,’ Ann went on, ‘but my husband bid us be sure to keep in the cabin, and no women appear, which would make the Turks think we were a man-of-war; but if they saw women they would take us for merchants and board us.’ Leaving Ann down below, Richard took up his gun, his bandoliers and his sword, and went up to the top decks, where he stood waiting with the rest of the ship’s company for the Turkish man-of-war to approach them. Ann, who despite being expressly forbidden to show herself, was merely waiting for her chance to join him, had not reckoned on the ploys of the ‘beast captain’. When she tried the door, she found she had been locked in:

I knocked and called to no purpose, until at length a cabin boy came and opened the door. I all in tears desired him to be so good as to give me his blue thrum-cap he wore, and his tarred coat, which he did, and I gave him half a crown; and putting them on, and flinging away my night’s clothes, I crept up softly and stood upon the deck by my husband’s side as free from sickness and fear as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the effect of that passion which I could never master.

The Turks were satisfied with a parley, and eventually turned and sailed away. ‘But when your father saw it convenient to retreat, looking upon me he blessed himself, and snatched me up in his arms, saying “Good God, that love can make this change!”, and though he seemingly chid me, he would laugh at it as often as he remembered that voyage.’

The most dangerous voyage of all, however, was undertaken very soon after this one on their return from Spain to France. In the Bay of Biscay their boat sailed into a storm which lasted for two days and two nights ‘in a most violent manner’. The winds were so strong that they ‘drew the vessel up from the water’, and so destroyed the boat that by the end it had neither sail nor mast left. The crew consisted of six men and a boy: ‘Whilst they had hopes of life they ran about swearing like devils, but when that failed them they ran into holes, and let the ship drive as it would,’ Ann wrote. The final blow to their chances of reaching land came when even the ship’s compass was lost, causing

such horrible lamentation as was as dismal to us as the storm past. Thus between hope and fear we past the night, they protesting to us that they knew not where they were. And truly we believed them; for with fear and drink I think they were bereft of sense. So soon as it was day, about six of the clock, the master cried out, ‘The land! The land!’ But we did not receive that news with the joy belonging to it, but sighing said, ‘God’s will be done’.

Eventually their ship ran aground and that night they all sat up

and made good cheer, for beds we had none, and we were so transported that we thought we had no need of any. But we had very good fires and Nantes white wine, and butter and milk, and walnuts and eggs, and some very bad cheese. And was this not enough, with the escape of shipwreck, to be thought better than a feast? I am sure until that hour I never knew such pleasure in eating, between which we a thousand times repeated what we had spoken when every word seemed our last.

Nothing was ever to equal the exquisite exhilaration of these two great adventures. After the Restoration the Fanshawes’ diplomatic career reverted to a distinguished but far more conventional round of appointments. Richard was officially accredited ambassador, first to the court of Portugal in 1662, and then three years later to Spain. In between the births, and deaths, of her prodigious family, Ann slipped effortlessly into the role of the ambassador’s lady, admiring Richard in all his finery as he presented his credentials, giving and receiving visits, and attending court functions; listing, with distinctly beady eye, all their silver, and plate, and fine brocades. But she would doubtless have given it all up, and endured a thousand more dangers, to be at Richard’s side.

When he died in 1666, while still serving as Charles II’s ambassador to Spain, Ann’s heart was broken. ‘O all powerful Lord God,’ she wrote in a frenzy of grief, ‘look down from heaven upon me the most distressed wretch upon earth. See me with my soul divided, my glory and my guide taken from me, and in him all my comfort in this life. See me staggering in my path. Have pity on me, O Lord, and speak peace to my disquieted soul now sinking under this great weight …’