Although we will never know what Lady Winchilsea thought and felt when she arrived in Constantinople in 1661, remarkably, many accounts of the lives and experiences of diplomatic women have survived. Until well into the first half of this century many of them wrote letters home; these letters are often the sole record we have of them. A handful are already well-known names – Mary Wortley Montagu, Vita Sackville-West, Isabel Burton. The vast majority are not. Who was Mrs Vigor, gossiping from St Petersburg in the 1730s about the scandals and intrigues of the imperial court? Or Miss Tully, incarcerated for over a year in the consulate in plague- and famine-torn Tripoli on the eve of the French Revolution? We know almost no personal details about them (not even their Christian names). Nor do we know who their correspondents were, only that their letters were precious enough to someone, as my mother’s were to me, to have been safely kept. A great number of the sources I have used – collections of letters, private journals, or memoirs largely based on them – were never intended for public consumption at all: only a hundred or so copies were sometimes published through private subscription for family and friends. Why did they write these letters? No doubt they longed for news from home; but perhaps they also felt compelled to describe the circumstances of their lives abroad – so exhilarating, so strange, so inexplicable – to their family and friends. In Moscow in 1826 Anne Disbrowe enjoys the festivities which took place at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas I; in Peking, some fifty years later, at the heart of the Forbidden City itself, Mary Fraser takes tea with the legendary Chinese Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi; while at the turn of this century, during her seventeen long years in Chinese Turkistan, Catherine Macartney witnesses not one, but two full eclipses of the sun.
Others have more perilous tales to tell, of famines, plagues, tempests, earthquakes, wars, kidnappings, assassination attempts, and of the illnesses and deaths of their children. Even today – perhaps especially today – the world remains a hostile place for many diplomats. Their families, my own included, have often felt that the real substance of their lives is greatly, and at times almost wilfully, misunderstood. As one wife recently wrote in the BDSA (British Diplomatic Spouses Association) Magazine: ‘All Britons KNOW that diplomatic life is one long whirl of gaiety (they have seen the films and read the books)…’ Although this may be true for a few, most of the women represented here have very different stories to tell. ‘I shall never forget the utter despair into which the sight of my new home plunged me,’ wrote Jane Ewart-Biggs of her arrival as a young wife at her first posting in Algiers. From the outside their house – the central block of the old British hospital – seemed solid enough, but the interior was in a state of total disrepair, the paint flaking from the walls and doors hanging on single hinges. In the entrance hall a huge hole gaped through the ceiling ‘through which pipes and wires hung like intestines’. By the time her husband Christopher came home she was in tears. He, by contrast, was buoyed up by the fascinating day he had spent learning all about his new job. ‘It was then that I realised that the major problems arising from our nomadic life were going to affect me rather than him,’ Jane wrote, ‘and that the same circumstances creating political interest for him would make my life especially difficult.’1
Whatever the external circumstances, for the most part these are personal stories told from within. Their sphere is essentially domestic. Whether they are writing from Persia or St Petersburg, these women (mostly wives, but some daughters and sisters, too) describe the concerns of any ordinary Englishwoman: children, dogs, gardens, houses, servants, clothes, food. Politics, except on the occasions when they came into direct conflict with their lives, are only incidentally discussed. What they engage with instead is daily life. For the contemporary reader the women’s subjectivity has a peculiar veritas which is frequently absent from their husbands’ more distanced and perhaps more scholarly approach. What they do, brilliantly, is to describe what life was really like. It is this, more than anything else, which is their particular genius.
Who, today, would want to read Colonel Sheil’s ponderous ethnographic dissertation on Persia in the mid-nineteenth century?* The memoir of his wife Mary, however, contained in the same volume, while politically almost entirely uninformative, has a freshness and drama which remains undimmed by time. Mary vividly describes her agonizing 1,000-mile journey with three small children and an invalid husband through the Caucasus Mountains from Tehran to Trebizond on the Black Sea (from whence they were able to sail to England). She recorded with simple stoicism how they waded up to their knees through the freezing snow, eating only dry crusts and sleeping in stables: ‘I learned on this journey that neither children nor invalids know how much fatigue and privation they can endure until they are under compulsion.’2
In writing Daughters of Britannia I have drawn on the experiences of more than 100 diplomatic women. Their lives span nearly 350 years of history, and encompass almost every imaginable geographical and cultural variation, from the glittering social whirl enjoyed by Countess Granville in Paris after the Napoleonic Wars, to the privations suffered at the turn of this century by that redoubtable Scotswoman, Catherine Macartney, who in her seventeen years in Kashgar, in Chinese Turkistan, saw only three other European women.
Many of these women lived unique lives. Some saw sights which no other English person, man or woman, had ever seen. And yet, despite their vast differences – in character and taste as much as circumstances – a bond of shared experience unites them; a diplomatic ‘culture’ which was both official and intensely personal. Even though they are separated by nearly 200 years, when the anguished Countess of Elgin writes about her longing for news from home, it could be my own mother writing.
Dearest Mother,
Do not expect this to be an agreeable letter. I am too much disappointed in never hearing from home; the 17th July is the last from you, almost six months!… I can’t imagine why you took it into your heads that we were going home; for I am sure I wrote constantly to tell you that we were at Constantinople, and why you would not believe me I know not. If you knew what I felt when the posts arrive and no letters for me, I am sure you would pity me. I shall write to nobody but you, for I feel I am too cross.3
In the Elgins’ day the journey from England to Constantinople was not only long and arduous, it was also hazardous. Messengers were frequently attacked and robbed, and every single precious letter either destroyed or lost. Amazingly, even in the late twentieth century the non-arrival of the bag has been the cause of as much disappointment and pain. Here is my mother to my brother on 23 May 1978: ‘Darling Matthew, Boo hoo! The bag has let us down, and there is gnashing of teeth here, and blood is boiling.’ And to myself, on the same day: ‘Darling Katie, The bloody bag has let us down yet again and we have no letters from any of you. We are so mad we could spit …’
What qualities were needed in a diplomat’s wife? In Mary Elgin’s day nobody would have thought it necessary to enumerate them. Of course, plenty was written on the qualities required in a man. In the sixteenth century, when the idea of sending a resident ambassador abroad was still fairly new, these were frequently listed in treaties and manuals. A man (in Sir Henry Wotton’s famously ambiguous phrase) ‘sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’ was required to have an almost impossibly long list of attributes. He should be not only tall, handsome, well-born and blessed with ‘a sweet voice’ and ‘a well-sounding name’,4 but also well read in literature, in civil and canon law and all branches of secular knowledge, in mathematics, music geometry and astronomy. He should be able to converse elegantly in the Latin tongue and be a good orator. He should also be of fine and upstanding morals: loyal, brave, temperate, prudent and honest.
An important ambassador’s entourage could include secretaries and ‘intelligencers’, a chaplain, musicians, liverymen, a surgeon, trumpeters, gentlemen of the horse, ‘gentlemen of quality who attended for their own pleasure’, young nephews ‘wanting that polish that comes