Henrietta, Lady Luxborough

The St John ladies of Lydiard Park certainly had a penchant for gardening.  From Johanna, famous for her herbal remedies, to Diana, artist wife of Frederick ‘Bully’ Bolingbroke, who sought solace in the walled garden, the Lydiard ladies left their mark on the estate. And for Johanna’s granddaughter Henrietta, her love of gardening would sustain her through exile and isolation.

In ‘My Darling Heriott’ her biographer Jane Brown describes Henrietta as a ‘hands on and muddily booted’ gardener from early childhood.

The only surviving daughter of Henry, 1st Viscount St John and his French, second wife Angelica Pelissary, Henrietta spent her childhood summers in the old fashioned formal gardens at Lydiard Park.  It was her brother John who remodelled the mansion house and swept away his grandmother’s gardens as he had the grounds landscaped in the style of  Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.

Henrietta was born on July 15, 1699 in the midst of the squabbling St John family.  Her father Henry had proved a huge disappointment to his Puritan parents Sir Walter and Lady Johanna St John.  A dissolute libertine, Henry had murdered Sir William Estcourt in a pub brawl and it was only the intercession of his cousin Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine, Charles II’s mistress, that saved his neck.

Henrietta’s half brother, the mercurial statesman Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke and Queen Anne’s Secretary at War, despised his father and rebelled against the grandparents into whose protection he had been placed when Henry senior had been forced to flee the country.

In the middle of this quarrelsome household Henrietta and her much elder half brother Henry formed the closest of bonds.  In fact there was a scurrilous rumour that little Henrietta might actually be ‘brother’ Henry’s own daughter by his stepmother Angelica.

Henrietta, with her mass of unfashionable black hair and tall frame, was beautiful in an unconventional way.  She was intelligent, amusing and gregarious with a romantic inclination, qualities that, unfairly but ultimately proved her downfall.

It was brother Henry who introduced her to banker Robert Knight, the son of the Chief Cashier of the South Sea Company who was instrumental in the bubble bursting scandal.

Following a short engagement the couple were married at St George’s, Hanover Square on June 10, 1727.  Robert and Henrietta set up home in Paris with Henrietta’s in laws where they lived for a little over a year.  Their son Harry was born at Henry Bolingbroke’s Dawley home.  A daughter Madelaine Henrietta was born in 1729 at the family’s London home.  When the baby was just five months old the Knight in laws demanded that Henrietta return to Paris to act as a hostess for their establishment.  When not required to be in attendance upon her in laws, Henrietta would return to England, staying with her childhood friend Frances, Lady Hertford.

It was on one such visit to the Hertford’s home in Marlborough during the winter of 1735/36 that Henrietta met the handsome young poet John Dalton, tutor to the Hertford’s son Viscount Beauchamp.

There was never any hard proof as to the nature of Henrietta’s relationship with Dalton, ten years her junior.  Incriminating poems and a letter Henrietta claimed to be a copy or translation of another were all that emerged as she insisted theirs had been but a light hearted, platonic flirtation. But Knight was having none of it.

Gossip abounded. Henrietta supposedly gave birth to a third child late in 1736, the product of this affair, about whom there is scant evidence. And the Earl of Egremont recorded in his diary dated August 11, 1736 “that Mr Knight had separated from his wife (daur of my Lord St John) finding her a bed with Dr Peters, her physician, but allows her 500l a year out of respect to her family.”

Robert Knight, hardly Mr Squeaky Clean himself, was indignant, as was Henrietta’s pot calling half brother Henry.

Robert issued his wife with two alternatives.  She could either live in his house, confined to one floor, deprived of the means to keep in touch with friends and banned from seeing her children. Or she could retire to the Knight family home at Barrell’s Hall in Warwickshire on an income of £500.

Henrietta tried living in her husband’s London home before opting for the Barrell alternative.  Despite the restrictions on her movements – she was forbidden to go within 20 miles of London – and the dilapidated state of Barrell’s Hall – Henrietta made the best of a bad lot, even adopting the title Lady Luxborough when her estranged husband was raised to the peerage.

She surrounded herself with literary companions, developing her garden at Barrell’s in consultation with the poet William Shenstone.

She soon got to work on the neglected 56 acre estate, writing to her friend Lady Hertford in 1742 ...”I have made a garden which I am filling with all the flowering shrubs I can get.  I have also made an aviary, and filled it with a variety of singing birds, and am now making a fountain in the middle of it, and a grotto to sit and hear them sing, contiguous to it.  This, as it is seen from every window of the house, affords me some amusement. And in a coppice a little farther I have made a very lovely cave shaded by trees.”

Henrietta planted snowdrops, primroses, polyanthus and violets, which she described as ‘the beauties of childhood’ – perhaps a reference to Lydiard where the snowdrops flourish today.

During 1749/50 she planted a lane of white poplars, a lime avenue and built a ha-ha and a summer house.

Until the end of her life Henrietta worked hard in her garden writing in November 1749 that she had “stood from Eleven to Five each day, in the lower part of my Long Walk, planting and displanting, opening views, etc.”

She left the house and gardens in a far better condition than she had found them.  Towards the end of her life people of so called taste visited Barrell’s and upon her death her estranged husband couldn’t wait to get his hands on it.

Henrietta died on March 26, 1756 aged 56. She had been reunited with her daughter but never enjoyed a close relationship with her son.  She is buried at St Peter’s Church, Wootton Wawen, Warwickshire.