Webster, Elizabeth (Vassall), Lady
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- Webster, Elizabeth (Vassall), Lady
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(1771 - 1840), dau. of Richard Vassall of Jamaica; m. 1 1786 Sir Godfrey Webster (see above), 2 1797 2nd B. Holland.
1791 - 3 [dep. England Jun. 1791] Turin (11 May - 10 Jun. 1792), Milan (13 - 22 Jun.), Mantua (23 Jun.) [Dresden, Vienna] Venice (29 Sep. - 6 Oct.), Mantua, Parma, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples (Oct. 1792 - 23 May 1793), Rome (25 May - 14 Jun.), Perugia, Cortona, Florence (20 Jun. - 2 Jul.), Milan (5 Jul.) [England 1 Sep.]
1794 - 6 [dep. England 2 Dec. 1793] Florence (8 Jan. - 15 Feb. 1794), Rome (20 - 22 Feb.), Naples (26 Feb. - Apr.), Rome (Apr./May), Florence (by 12 Jun. - Aug.), Lucca (Sep.), Pisa, Florence (Oct. 1794 - Apr. 1795), Rome (Apr.), Florence (May), Lucca (Jun.), Pisa, Leghorn, Genoa (Jul.), Lucca, Florence (Aug. - 22 Nov.), Bologna (22 Nov.), Florence (Dec. 1795 - 9 Feb. 1796), Rome (18 Feb. - 1 Mar.), Naples (Mar.), Rome (Apr.), Florence ( - 11 Apr.), Ferrara (18 Apr.), Padua (20 - 24 Apr.) [England Jun.]
The Websters were an ill-matched pair. Sir Godfrey had married at the age of thirty-eight a bride of fifteen; he was headstrong and profligate (known as 'Sir Wedfrey Gobster'), while she was already intelligent and ambitious. They had set out for the Continent in the spring of 1791 with their two infant sons, and their travels are recorded in Lady Webster's rather erudite journal1 (whose occasional asides confirm that her marriage was not an easy one). They spent some time in Paris and in Switzerland before arriving in Turin on 11 May 1792. Lady Webster at once applied herself to chemical lectures at Bonvoisin's, and they met Lady Duncannon, the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Malmesbury. After a month they went to Milan, Lady Webster paying a visit to Spallanzani, director of the musum at Pavia. There followed a visit to Dresden and Vienna, but they were back in Venice in September,2 whence they proceeded to Naples. There on 10 February 1793 their son Henry was born.
There was much society in Naples, Lady Webster particularly liking the Palmerstons and Lady Plymouth, and she befriended Italinski, the Russian secretary. In March she joined an expedition to Paestum with the Palmerstons; she found the temples unattractive, 'the Doric, to my taste, is too uneven. The columns are squat and clumsy'. Her twenty-second birthday (25 March 'so old and yet so silly', she confessed) was spent at Pompeii. On 1 April she went to Benevento with Lady Plymouth, Thomas Pelham (later 2nd Earl of Chichester) and the younger Henry Swinburne; there were excursions to Pozzuoli and Baiae in May, and, with the Duchess of Devonshire, she dined with the King. It must have been at this time that she sat to Robert Fagan for the three-quarter length portrait with a view of Vesuvius in the background which Italinski owned (now priv. coll.). She left Naples on 23 May with regret: 'what can please or cheer one who has no hope of happiness in life', for whom 'home is the abyss of misery[?]'. The Websters went back to Rome through Capua, 'the antidote to all pleasure at present from its filth and dulness'. On 26 May Lady Webster began her course on Roman antiquities under 'old Morrison' [Colin Morison]; her notes fill several pages of her journal. They left Rome on 14 June 1793 for Florence, travelling slowly by vetturini through Perugia and Cortona. [Thomas?] Hodges went with them. They arrived on 20 June and in the evening Lady Webster went with Lady Elizabeth Foster, Lady Hervey and John, Lord Hervey, to the opera; the following day she was in the Uffizi with 'my friend [Thomas, c.1751 - 1814] Brand'. She met Prince Augustus and Felix Fontana, the Grand Duke's director of museums and she evidently enjoyed the company of the Countess of Albany and her companion, the poet Count Alfieri. On 2 July, having left the children with Dr John Stewart and an Italian physician, Gianetti, the Websters set off home. They were in England on 1 September.
They set sail again in December and on 8 January 1794 found the children well in Florence. John, Lord Hervey, attended Lady Webster, finally making a passionate declaration to her on 14 February. 'Oh! what vile animals men are, with headstrong passions', she wrote. But she had already met Henry, 3rd Baron Holland, who had arrived in Florence on 29 January, and their growing relationship afforded her increasing solace. On 15 February the Websters left for Naples (spending just two days in Rome en route), where they spent 'six or seven weeks'. Lady Webster was then heavily pregnant and passed her time 'in lounging and talking'. Back in Rome they made an excursion to Tivoli with the Bessboroughs, the 2nd Earl Grandison 'and the young men'. She described her customary companions as being 'Lady Bessborough, Lord Holland, [the Rev. Matthew] Marsh, Brand etc.'. She described Pius VI giving his benediction 'to a kneeling and believing multitude. The sight was imposing. He is an excellent actor; Garrick could not have represented the part with more theatrical effect'.
Meanwhile her 'little friend' Mrs William Wyndham, wife of the new British envoy in Florence, had arrived and Lady Webster went there to meet her, and it was in Florence on 12 June 1794 that her daughter Harriet was born. She then set off on her own through Lucca and Pisa and visited Vallambrosa. She returned to Florence, while her husband went to Milan and Turin 'for some months' (he returned at Christmas); his portrait, dated 1796, i.e. after he had left Italy, was painted by Gauffier (untraced).3 Lady Webster met William Pitt Amherst and George Cornewall, went to balls and was very gay. On her father's death that winter, she inherited 'great wealth, upwards of ten thousand per annum. Detestable Gold! What a lure for a villain, and too dearly have I become the victim to him', she wrote. Her health suffered and she went to consult Dr Thompson in Rome in April 1795. Then in May her husband returned on his own to England, passing through Venice on 7 - 9 May.4
There followed a period of constant travel, mostly with Lord Holland. She took the children to the Lucca baths, where Mrs Wyndham joined her, with Lords Wycombe and Holland and [Thomas] Hodges. She visited Leghorn, lodging with John Udny, the consul. She went to Genoa in July with Hodges and Lord Holland, and returned to Florence late in August. In November she accompanied Mrs Wyndham to Bologna; she met the 4th Earl of Bristol, 'a clever, bad man', who asked for a copy of her portrait by Fagan. Her portrait had also been painted by Gauffier in 1795 (Christie's, 13 Dec. 1996) and Deare had been carving her bust in July that year in Rome.
The winter was spent in Florence, consorting with the Italian intelligentsia: Fontana, Fabroni (sub-director of the Grand Duke's museums), the mathematician Fossombroni, Delfico (a Sicilian lawyer), the Countess of Albany and Alfieri. In October 1795 she gave birth to a boy who died soon after; this was probably the 'petit enfant, fils de Mylady Webster' painted by Guy Head by December 1795.5 In February she went to Rome with Lord Holland; she again met Lady Plymouth and Amherst, and together they saw the great Antinous recently excavated by Gavin Hamilton. Sposini was restoring it, the sculptor who had undertaken the 'lasting monument of Ld. Bristol's bad taste' (Hercules and the Hydra). With Lady Plymouth and Amherst she spent two days at Tivoli. In March she went to Naples to see Italinski, who reluctantly sent Fagan's portrait of her to Lord Bristol, then ill in Naples; he set it on an easel, lit candles round it and failed to return it. With Lord Holland she returned to Rome and went straight on to Florence. On 11 April they left: 'I bid adieu to that lovely spot, where I enjoyed a degree of happiness for a whole year that was too exquisite to be permanent'. On 18 April she reached Ferrara where she saw the tomb of Ariosto ('the architecture of it is bad, and the bust but moderately executed'). Lord Holland rejoined her at Padua (where she had arrived on 20 April6); they left together on the 24th, going on to Trieste; they were in London in June.
Just before leaving Italy Lady Webster told her husband that little Harriet had died in Modena, but in fact the child was left with a nurse and smuggled back to England, the subterfuge preventing her husband from taking the child after the inevitable divorce action.7 In November 1796 she bore Lord Holland's child, and in July 1797, following her divorce, they were married. Her first husband took his own life in 1800.
1. Holland Jnl., 1:6 - 65, 112 - 47. 2. ASV is 765. 3. Illus. Burl.Mag., 136[1994]:442. 4. ASV is 774. 5. Holland Jnl., 1:xiii. Montaiglon, 16:405. 6. ASV is 783. 7. Fitzgerald, 260.