by Philippa Tudor, Archives Volunteer
There is little evidence of the several hundred letters which Rev. William Beauvoir wrote to his wife between 1715 and 1722 having been read for many decades. Now Lambeth Palace Library (LPL) MS 1555-1558, the letters, many of which are written in French, are a rich and unusual historical resource. Here are some reasons why.
The Rev. William Beauvoir (1669-1724) was a naval, military and Embassy chaplain who was appointed Rector of St Saviour’s in his native Guernsey in 1692, although he spent decades without visiting his parish. The extensive correspondence starts on 6 January 1715, when William addresses his wife as “Mrs Elizabeth Brown”. He was writing from Kent, waiting to sail to Calais to begin his new role as Chaplain to the Earl of Stair, the British Ambassador in Paris. Although William’s letters are affectionate in the extreme, and signed as her husband, he repeatedly asked Elizabeth not to hurry the public declaration of their marriage until his return to London, which he optimistically hoped would be in four or five months’ time.
Elizabeth was as keen to have her marital status made public as her new husband was not. If the above document in LPL MS 1552 is to be believed, they had married by licence at an unspecified location in London on 6 April 1714, so would have been keeping their relationship secret for many months. Moreover, at the start of the correspondence she was still a minor and by convention her husband should have asked her guardian’s permission for the marriage, as she appears to have been an orphan. The guardian in question was Hans Sloane (from 1716 Sir Hans), one of the most influential people in London. Seeking his permission would have been prudent as Sloane was the executor of the will of Sir Godfrey Copley MP, which as well as making substantial provision for Copley’s widow and daughter included a payment of £500 to Elizabeth as soon as she was 21. That was in addition to the annuity of £20 per annum which Copley had bought to support her and after her decease any of her heirs, and £20 a year “for her maintenance yearly during her life”, to be paid at six-monthly intervals. Copley had made his last will in 1704, when Elizabeth was an infant under ten years of age, and following his death Hans Sloane held the purse strings.
This was a substantial bequest, and as a chaplain William’s own means were slender. His annual salary for the Guernsey parish was only £15, all of which went to support his sister who lived there (British Library [BL] Sloane MS 4036, f. 204v). There is no other similarly large provision in Copley’s will – the next provision in the will, which is also the next largest, was £100 bequeathed to Hans Sloane and a colleague for use by the Royal Society and which now provides funds for its prestigious Copley Medal. Hans Sloane was, however, already looking after a young girl on Copley’s behalf in October 1696. The child was very ill and Copley wrote to Sloane asking him to make arrangements for her to be moved to the country if that would benefit her, and if the worst came to the worst, “that she may be very privately and decently be interred without trouble to those who have had care of her during her sicknesse” (BL Sloane MS 4036, f. 268).
Although it is not known whether Elizabeth was the young girl who was the subject of Copley’s concern in 1696, one thing was abundantly clear in January 1715: she was heavily pregnant. On the advice of Copley’s daughter and her husband, Mr and Mrs Moyle, she moved to stay with a midwife near the Two Green Canisters in Covent Garden, not a salubrious address. Letters William sent in February recounted that he had confided in a French minister and his wife that he was married, and another advised her on how to deal with unpleasant gossip. Fortunately, when baby Billy was born he was initially strong and healthy, and was baptised at St Paul’s Church Covent Garden on 19 February. William, who until meeting Elizabeth had had a profound aversion for marriage (LPL MS 1555, ff. 30-31) addressed her as “Mrs Brown” even in his letter rejoicing at the news of Billy’s safe delivery, although in April he finally called her “Mrs Beauvoir” (LPL MS 1555, ff. 48-49, 62-63).
In the meantime, on 19 January 1715 William, by now arrived in Calais, finally plucked up the courage to share the secret of their marriage, though not the pregnancy, with Sloane. “I try’d many times, but had not the Power to do it, to acquaint You, that Yr Pupill is marry’d”. He protested that he did not have “any other View in the Match, but to have a Wife, whom he values more than himself, who will make it his study by honest Methods to better his Circumstances to maintain her comfortably; & who most humbly begs You will be so good as to forgive his marrying her without Your Consent”. He asked Sloane “to continue Your kind Care & Guardianship of her, & to keep her Marriage secret till his Return, because the disclosing of it now would undoubtedly be prejudicial”. Fortunately Sloane was understanding (BL Sloane MS 4044, ff. 11-12 and 18-19, LPL MS 1555, ff. 40-41).
The payments for Elizabeth were slow to arrive and the little family’s money worries worsened. They had no permanent home, and being mostly based in Paris William was able to visit Elizabeth only very occasionally. From summer 1715 onwards William’s letters to Elizabeth were addressed to her at the school at Clapham, and in April 1718 this changed to the house of Mr John Cheere, a wheelwright in Clapham. Clapham is only four miles from the centre of London, but its air was thought to be healthier and Cheere – the father of the celebrated sculptor Sir Henry Cheere – was an active member of the local Anglican church, and thought to be of Huguenot descent. In January 1718 the Beauvoirs’ second son, Dicky, was born. They had still not received the £500 due to Elizabeth on her 21st birthday (BL Sloane MS 4045, f. 47). William was concerned that Elizabeth’s inability to discover the identity of her mother (MS 1556, ff. 84-85v, 96-97, 104-105, 108-109v, 114-115) and their lack of evidence of Elizabeth’s age (MS 1556, ff. 160-161) could create difficulties. He had earlier urged her to discover about her own baptism so that nothing would prevent them from receiving her inheritance (MS 1555, f. 157-158).
The keen appreciation of William’s work in Paris by William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury from January 1716, gave hope of material reward. A long-lobbied-for lucrative living finally emerged in summer 1719. William went to view the rectory attached to the parish of Bocking in Essex on 31 July. Unlike Elizabeth he was fully bilingual and usually wrote mostly in French, but he broke excitedly into English to report that it had “16 sash Windows in the Front”. He was able to visit Elizabeth in Clapham before returning to Paris, but sadly the resultant pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in February 1720. William bewailed “the loss of that precious Embrio” (LPL MS 1558, ff. 86, 114, 116-117). It was left to Elizabeth, at last with a home to call her own, to sort things out at the substantial Bocking property, with William trying his best to supply her requests for furnishing materials, and instructing her frequently from afar on planting seeds in the rectory garden – lettuce for her and potatoes for him, with William planning to learn to like lettuce (still not very common in England) so as to be able to eat it at future suppers with Elizabeth in their new home.
Archbishop Wake had done his best for William. The Deanery of Bocking was one of his personal appointments, with a living of £300 a year. William planned to invest their funds in South Sea Stocks, although as early as February 1720 he was warning Elizabeth that their income would decrease due to the troubles of that company (LPL MS 1558, f. 112-113). He clearly did not anticipate the full impact of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble between September and December 1720. The birth of their third son, Osmond, in late 1721 was a cause of rejoicing, although William was once again abroad and he and Elizabeth therefore agreed by correspondence the arrangements for his baptism, William adding gloomily that a private baptism would be a wise precaution in case their new baby died.
William’s visits to Paris, and thus his letters to Elizabeth, ended in 1722, when they and their three beloved sons were finally able to live together at Bocking. But his days were numbered. Already suffering from various ailments whilst in France, in the winter of 1723-24 his health weakened further. Sloane, the most eminent doctor in England, prescribed several medicines, but William proved a stubborn patient and in January his recovery seemed impossible (BL Sloane MS 4047, f. 120-121). He died on 10 February 1724. Sloane wrote to Elizabeth two months later:
“I am very sorry for the death of the Dean your late husband on many accounts & principally on that of you & your family. You may be sure of any service I can do you upon any occasion both upon your own & his account & therefore you may at any time command” (LPL MS 1554, f. 90).
Elizabeth took Sloane at his word, and he helped her sell some prints, with an estimated value of £42, and offered to have the medals in her possession valued (LPL MS 1554, ff. 92 and 94). She needed the money, as after all the time and effort taken in obtaining the money left to her by Sir Godfrey Copley, the investor handling it – like so many following the South Sea crash – was declared bankrupt. In June 1728 she wrote again to Sloane, cataloguing the various steps she had taken to try to obtain enough to live on and educate her three young children, mostly unsuccessfully. She enclosed a petition for assistance endorsed by Archbishop Wake and the Bishop of London Edmund Gibson, which she hoped Sloane would present to Prime Minister Robert Walpole (BL Sloane MS 4049, ff. 176-177 (petition) and ff. 174-175 (letter).)
Elizabeth’s “sad & deplorable condition” was resolved by her remarriage, but within about 20 years she and her two elder sons had also died (LPL MS 1552, f. 145). We know these scanty details thanks to a note drafted in French and English by her youngest son Osmond Beauvoir. He had a distinguished clerical and scholarly career, including 32 years as Headmaster of King’s School Canterbury, and lived until 1 July 1789. Twenty years after the death of his first wife, Anne Boys, he married Bluestocking Mary Sharpe (born 1753), who was attracted to his kindness despite his lack of youth or fortune (John Rylands Library Manchester HAM/1/22/43). Reporting the marriage on 30 October 1782, the Kentish Gazette thought fit to comment on his age (60) and her estimated fortune (£200,000). Although the marriage damaged irreparably Mary’s close friendship with fellow Bluestocking Elizabeth Carter, Mary, who like Osmond’s father William had previously resolved never to marry, subsequently remarried.
It is thanks to Osmond, who was an active fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, that his father’s correspondence with his mother has survived. Unlike William’s correspondence with Archbishop Wake, it has attracted little attention. In 1956, when the six (now seven due to rebinding) volumes of William’s manuscript papers were acquired by Lambeth Palace Library, the main interest was in an ultimately unsuccessful project for the union of the Anglican and Gallican churches, with the political content also noted.
The four volumes of letters from William to Elizabeth went largely unnoticed. Setting aside William’s effusive protestations of love, punctuated with regular despairing reprimands when her letters to him were held up in the post, these private letters expose the vulnerabilities of both parties, from the steps William deemed necessary for Elizabeth to conceal their unusual marriage to his own existence at the beck and call of his employers. Whilst William recounted some of the same news to Archbishop Wake and to Elizabeth, particularly the services he held in French and English for Protestants in Paris at a time of considerable persecution, Elizabeth got the gossip too, ranging from what he had eaten and drunk to speculations as to the nature of someone’s sickness following “a turn in Hide Park with a Damsel”, to lamenting the high number of miscarriages suffered by others. The letters provide insight into the daily life of a Church of England chaplain based in Paris at a time of religious and political upheaval, and of a young woman who had uncertain social status despite her connections with such powerful people as Sir Hans Sloane and Sir Godfrey Copley. They reveal much about the hopes and fears, and kindnesses and prejudices, experienced by Elizabeth Brown and William Beauvoir. The heart goes out to them both.
New catalogue entries for MS 1555-1558 can be found on our Archives catalogue by entering the reference, e.g. ‘MS 1555’, in the Order Number field: LPL: Advanced Search .
A Monument of Fame 