HORACE WALPOLE'S GREAT-NIECES
The Three Ladles Waldegrave (and their mother). By Violet Biddulph. (Peter Davies. iss.) THE Ladies Laura, Charlotte and Horatia Waldegrave were the great-nieces of Horace Walpole. This is their chief claim to
fame. They are more generally known, perhaps, as the subject of an agreeable and familiar conversation piece, painted when they were young ladies ripe for marriage, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Beyond this there is really very little to be said about them other than what might equally well be said about any lady of title of the period who was born with a silver spoon of moder- ate size in her mouth, was suitably matched, bore children, added a few letters to her family's archives and died ingloriously at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Miss Violet Biddulph has evidently had some difficulty in spinning out the tenuous threads of their lives into a full- length biography, for in order to give substance to it she has had to drag in—though not as incidentally as her title-page suggests—their mother, a very much more interesting woman,
who caused a considerable stir by marrying en secondes notes
George III's brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester. A further disability appears before one has read very far, which is that Miss Biddulph is quite incapable of bringing her characters to life. She records painstakingly the facts ; she sketches in the background both domestic and historical ; she quotes from family papers, some of them unpublished, at Ragley, Euston and elsewhere ; but her imagination fails to fuse these elements into an integrated and animated whole. It would have been wiser, I cannot help feeling, if she had exercised her modest talent in composing a short monograph on each of the three sisters and possibly one on their mother. As it is her biography is shapeless and rambling, lacking a central design, and, from her habit of wandering backwards and forwards in time, diffi- cult to follow. One has to read more than a third of it before the three sisters are introduced, and even then Miss Biddulph does not say very much about them. It is not until the end of her book that a separate chapter is devoted to each of them in turn.
What one learns then about Sir Joshua's three young ladies when marriage and maternity had claimed them—Laura as the wife of her cousin the 4th Lord Waldegrave, Charlotte as Lady Euston and Horatia as Lady Hugh Seymour—cannot compare for interest with what one has already been told about their mother, whose commanding presence fills the bulk of the book.
Good Walpolians know her well—the washerwoman's daughter, Horry's niece and a royal duchess. One curious and I believe unpublished fact which Miss Biddulph has turned up is that
she had to be restrained by the Duke from retailing bawdy stories to his two children—those " elements of dullness," as
Caroline called them, Prince William and Princess Sophia of Gloucester. Whether she inherited this taste from her mother or picked it up on the dreary fringes of the Court circle about which she revolved, proudly but rather uncomfortably, it is impossible to say. But it was certainly a peculiar practice for a woman who was a disciple of Hannah More's.
A novelist could build a complete character out of two contrasting facts of this kind. Miss Biddulph merely records them and passes on to give her readers another slice of. Court gossip, another extract from Walpole's letters, another thin spread of potted history. She is, one may say, a plain cook ; her materials are- of reliable quality ; but the results are uni-
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