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 Frances Douglas, Lady
Douglas (1750–1817), friend of Sir Walter Scott and Lady
Louisa Stuart, was born on 26 July 1750, the sixth and posthumous
child of Francis Scott, earl of Dalkeith (1721–1750), eldest son of the
duke of Buccleuch, and Lady Caroline Campbell (1717–1794), eldest daughter
of John Campbell, duke of Argyll. She was brought up in the family's
residence at Grosvenor Square, London, where she experienced a difficult
childhood: her mother showed her little affection and was, according to
her aunt, the redoubtable Lady Mary Coke, ‘insensible to her merits’ (Letters
and Journals, vol. 1). The saving grace of her early years was her
mother's second marriage in 1755 to the mercurial politician Charles
Townshend (1725–1767). Recognizing her many qualities, he was the most
important influence on her early education and development. Alexander
Carlyle, minister at Inveresk, later a great friend and correspondent, met
her at Dalkeith in 1767 and noted her good taste, knowledge of
belles-lettres, and ready wit. He also saw how the stepfather, her
‘enlightened instructor’, protected her from the tyranny of her mother (Autobiography,
ed. Burton, 515). The growing intimacy between Townshend and the highly
strung adolescent could have developed into something more dangerous had
not Lady Frances used the occasion of her brother's marriage in 1767 to
escape to Scotland. Townshend's death some months later removed her
protector, but Lady Frances blossomed in the literary society at Dalkeith
Palace. In 1779 the death of her aunt Lady Jane Scott afforded her
financial independence as well as a house at Petersham, Surrey.
In
1782 Lady Frances visited Dublin with her brother as the guests of Lady
Carlow, sister of Lady Louisa Stuart, but also to sort out the finances of
her stepsister Anne Townshend, who had married disastrously. For someone
who in her youth had claimed to prefer the armchair to society, her stay
in Ireland was the making of her. In a series of lively letters to her
sister-in-law, the duchess of Buccleuch, she describes herself as ‘recherchée
and fetée’, a success Lady Carlow ascribed to her having been so much
‘mortified and neglected at home’ (Stuart, Gleanings,
1.185). She stayed on to introduce her friend Lady Portland, the wife of
the new lord lieutenant, into society, returning to England via Wales,
where she visited the ladies of Llangollen, later petitioning successfully
for royal pensions for Sarah Ponsonby. Her Irish letters, subsequently
annotated by Lady Louisa, her literary executor, were, following the
conventions of her circle, never published. Like the verse journals of her
tour in Scotland in 1780, and of another to the Lake District in 1781
(written at the request of Queen Charlotte), they were copied or
circulated among friends and family, and greatly admired.
On 13 May
1783 Lady Frances married
Archibald James Edward
Douglas, first Baron Douglas of Douglas (1748–1827), at her brother's
London residence in Grosvenor Square. The marriage to a ‘safe … and
comfortable man’ seems to have been, if not a love match, one of
convenience and mutual affection. Douglas's first marriage to her friend
Lady Lucy Graham, who died in 1780, had produced four children. Lady
Lucy's attachment to her friend and Lady Frances's affection for her
children played no small part in the union, which was itself to produce a
further eight offspring. She parodied her role as ‘wicked stepmother’ in a
prose and verse version of Cinderella written in 1801. At Bothwell Castle
with its ruined medieval castle and ‘romantick solitudes’ she created an
‘air of ease, comfort and gaiety’ (Stuart, Memoire,
96), where the Douglases welcomed authors and poets, including Mary Berry
and M. G. Lewis, and the French émigré aristocracy. It was there, in 1799,
that she introduced Sir Walter Scott to her great friend and confidante
Lady Louisa Stuart, who became one of his most valued critics and one of
the few to share the secret of the authorship of his novels. Through their
auspices Scott also met the classical scholar J. B. S. Morritt of Rokeby.
She and Lady Louisa had formed a close bond through their family
connections, and a shared passion for poetry and literature. Lady
Douglas's early life is related in Lady Louisa's frank
Memoire of Frances, Lady Douglas, written some
years after her death for her daughter the novelist
Lady Caroline Scott. There she encapsulated the character of this charming
woman whom Jane, duchess of Gordon, described as ‘a most uncommon sort of
young lady’ (NA Scot., GD1/479/15/2). Lady Louisa asked Sir Walter Scott
to memorialize Frances Douglas in one of his novels, and believed he had
done so in the character of Jeanie Deans in The Heart
of Midlothian (1818).
Lady Douglas was small and
undistinguished in appearance—even the favourably inclined Carlyle
described her as ‘far from handsome’—but surviving portraits of her
scarcely seem to justify Sir Walter Scott's description of her as ‘quite
the ugly old woman of a fairy tale’, though, he adds, ‘still [with] the
air d'une grande dame’. Although she characterized herself as a ‘weak,
unsteady creature’, her strength and generosity of mind, modesty, loyalty,
and wit nevertheless made her greatly admired; her only fault, mentioned
by all, was her laziness. Lady Douglas was prone to nervous exhaustion;
her many pregnancies took their toll on her health, and in middle age she
lost the sight of one eye. But her sudden death in May 1817 at Bothwell
Castle, Lanarkshire, came as a shock to her friends and family. She was
buried in the Douglas aisle in Douglas parish church, Lanarkshire.
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