Selina Trimmer

THE gardens at Chatsworth which contained so many strange exotic plants brought by the great gardener Paxton from foreign lands could boast, too, of one modest daisy whose surname was Trimmer and whose Christian name was Selina. She was a governess of course, and when we think what it meant to Charlotte Bronte and to Miss Weeton to be a governess in a middle-class family, the life of Selina Trimmer redounds more to the credit of the Cavendishes than all the splendours of Chatsworth, Devonshire House, and Hardwick Hall. She was a governess; yet her pupil Lady Harriet wrote to her when she became engaged. “I send you the enclosed bracelet. .... I often think of all your past conduct to me with affection and gratitude not to be expressed. God bless you, my dearest friend.”

Selina sheds light upon the Cavendishes, but outside that radiance little is known of her. She had a brother who Lived at Brentford. From Brentford then, about 1790, came Selina, to be governess to the little Cavendishes at Devonshire House.

But were they all Cavendishes — the six romping, high-spirited children she found there? Three it appeared had no right to any surname at all. And who was the Lady Elizabeth Foster who lived on such intimate terms with the disagreeable Duke, and on such friendly terms with the lovely Duchess? Soon it must have dawned upon Trimmer as she sat over her Quaker discourse when her pupils were in bed that she had taken up her lodging in the abode of vice. Downstairs there was drinking and gambling; upstairs then were bastards and mistresses. According to Brentford standards she should have drawn her skirts about her and flounced out of the polluted place at once, Yet she stayed on.

Far from being vicious, the Devonshire House family was Healthy and in its own way virtuous. No more devoted family existed. The children adored their mother. They were on the best ot terms with one another. If the Duke was an indifferent father, his daughters were as dutiful as the daughters of any country parson. One person, it is true, all the children hated, and that was Lady Lk. But they hated her not because she was their father’s mistress, but because she was corrupt; whining and cooing, false and spiteful. Could it be possible, then, that an absence of conventional morality brings into being a real morality? Were not the little girls, Georgiana and Hary-o,¹ who knew from childhood all the lads that are concealed from female Trimmers till they were married women, far less sentimental, less prudish and silly, infinitely more honest, sensible, and downright than the middle-class girls whose virtue was so carefully shielded at Brentford?

These were questions that Trimmer must have pondered as she walked with her dubious brood in Hyde Park or escorted them to parties. They were asked everywhere. The courtyard at Devonshire House was full of coaches by day and by night. Nobody looked askance at them. So, while she taught the little Cavendishes their sums and their pothooks, they taught her; they enlarged her mind. They laughed at her and teased her and vowed that she was carrying on a love affair with Bob Adair. But for all that they treated her as if she were a woman of flesh and blood. There was only one class for the Cavendish children, and that was their own. Whatever their faults, and Hary-o always overslept, the Cavendishes were the least snobbish of people. They treated her as an equal; they accepted her as part of their pagan and classless society. When the girls began to go out into the world they wrote as frankly and freely to their “dearest Selina” about their parties and their partners as they wrote to each other.

By the time they were going out into the great world, Trimmer was well aware of its dangers. She could take comfort in the fact that Georgiana and Hary-o were spared at least one temptation — they had not their mother’s beauty. “ I am delighted to be reckoned like mama,” Hary-o wrote. “’A very bad edition though,’ as an honest man said of me at Mrs. Somebody’s party.” They were short, fat, and rather heavy featured. But by way of compensation they had excellent brains. Their little eyes were extremely shrewd; in mind they were precocious and caustic. Hary-o could dash off a description of her fox-hunting cousin Althorp with a vivacity that any novelist might have envied, and with a worldly wisdom that would have done credit to a dowager: —

Shocked, puzzled yet charmed, Selina stayed on. But she preserved her own standards. In that intimate society where every lord and lady had a nickname, Trimmer had hers. She was called Raison Sévère, Triste Raison, Vent de Bise. Lady Bessborough lamented “. . . rigidly right, she forgets that one may do right without making oneself disagreeable to everyone around.” And Bess, Lady Elizabeth Foster, shivered in her presence. “Bess . . . says she always affects her like a North-East wind.”

Trimmer was no sycophant. By degrees she assumed the part that is so often played by the humble retainer; from governess she became confidante. In that wild whirling life of incessant lovemaking and intrigue she represented reason, morality— something that Hary-o as she grew up missed in her mother and needed. Mama, she owned to her sister when Duncannon pestered her, was not prudent"; mama did not mind putting her daughter into a “most awkward situation.” But Selina, on the other hand, “gave me a most furious lecture that my coquetry was dreadful, and that, without caring for my cousin, I had made him fall in love with me.” It was “merely to enjoy the triumph of supplanting Lady E.,” Trimmer said. Lady Harriet was angry at Trimmer’s plain speaking, but she respected her for it nevertheless.

More and more, as Hary-o grew older, the extraordinary complications of Devonshire House morality involved her in tortures of doubt — what was her duty to her father, what, after her mother’s death, to his mistress, and what did she owe to society? Ought she to allow Lady Liz to drag her into the company of the abandoned Mrs. Fitzherbert? “And yet I have no right to be nice about the company I go into; or rather no power, for I think no blame can be attached to me for that I so reluctantly live in.” Strangely, it was not to the Bessboroughs or to the Melbournes that Hary-o turned in her dilemma; it was to Trimmer. Though companion now to old Lady Spencer, Trimmer came back to bear Harriet company at Devonshire House when Lady Liz was queening it there, saying “we” and “us” all the time, and fondling the Duke’s spotted and speckled puppies in her shawl. Trimmer alone had the courage to show that the dogs bored her. Trimmer compelled the Duke and George Lamb to talk about “the Quaker persuasion and Mr. Boreham’s scruples about giving the oath. In those tortured days Trimmer, “arch advocate of reason,” was the greatest blessing to her distracted pupil.

And it was finally to Trimmer that Harriet turned when the crucial question of her life had to be decided. Was she to marry her aunt’s lover, Lord Granville? He had two children by Lady Bessborough. They had always been in league against her. She had hated him; yet there had come over her the spell of his wonderful almond-shaped eyes, and it would mean escape — from Lady Liz, from the ignominies and insults that her father’s mistress put upon her. What was she to do?

What she did was to marry Granville — “Adored Granville, who would make a barren desert smile.” And it proved, on the face of it, an ideal union. Lord Granville became a model of the domestic virtues. Harriet developed into the most respectable of Victorian matrons, wearing a large black bonnet, illuminating book markers with texts, and attending church assiduously. She survived till 1862.

But did Trimmer suffer a Victorian change? Or did Trimmer remain immutably herself? There was something hardy and perennial about Trimmer. One can imagine her grown very old and very gaunt, dwindling out her declining years in discreet obscurity. But what tales she could have told had she liked — about the lovely Duchess and the foolish Caro Ponsonby, and the Melbournes and the Bessboroughs — all vanished, all changed.

The only relic of that wild world that remained was the bracelet on her wrist. It recalled much that had better be forgotten, and yet, as Trimmer looked at it, how happy she had been in Devonshire House with Hary-o, her dearest friend.