A keynote lecture was recently delivered by Professor Elaine Chalus for the 'Adventurous Wives' conference.
The lecture looks at the experiences of four adventurous wives across the long 18th century: Charlotte, Lady Lovelace (wife of John, Lord Lovelace, governor of New York, 1708–09); Winnifred, Lady Nithsdale (wife of the Jacobite peer, William, 5th Lord Nithsdale); Frederika, Baroness de Riedesel (wife of General Friedrich Riedesel of Brunswick, leader of the Brunswick troops under General Burgoyne during the Saratoga campaign); and Priscilla, Lady Burghersh, a niece of the duke of Wellington and wife of John Fane, Lord Burgersh, later 11th Earl of Westmorland.
Excerpt from the lecture
‘I am obliged to remember and think of everything’, wrote twenty-year-old Priscilla, Lady Burghersh, to her mother from Gothenburg, Sweden, on 13 October 1813.
Her husband of two years had recently been appointed Commissioner to the headquarters of the Austrian army in Germany, where the King of Prussia and the Emperors of Russia and Austria were leading their armies in what would become the final push against Napoleon’s retreating French army.
Burghersh wanted his wife to accompany him to Germany — and she wanted to go. By the time that Napoleon surrendered and Lady Burghersh joined her husband in Paris to celebrate the victory in 1814, she would have crossed western Europe as the only elite British woman embedded with the allied forces.