Regency Personalities Series

In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Lady Diana Spencer

1734–1808

Diana Spencer

Diana was the daughter of the Honourable Elizabeth Trevor and Charles Spencer, 3rd Duke of Marlborough. Her siblings were George, Charles, and Elizabeth. She was raised at Langley Park, Buckinghamshire, where she was introduced to art at an early age. Joshua Reynolds, an artist, was a family friend.

She married Frederick St John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke in 1757, and from 1762–1768 was Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte. She became widely known as ‘Lady Di’ (as did her namesake in the early 1980s).

Bolingbroke was notoriously unfaithful. In February 1768 he petitioned for divorce on grounds of adultery. Within two days of it being granted by Parliament she married Topham Beauclerk of Old Windsor. They had four children:

Anne (did not survive infancy)

Elisabeth Beauclerk

(Anne) Mary Day Beauclerk, twin of Elisabeth. married 1797 Franz Raugraf Jenison von Walworth

Charles George Beauclerk.

Their circle of friends included Samuel Johnson, Georgiana Cavendish — who maintained a glittering salon — Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Charles Fox, James Boswell and Edmund Burke.

Beauclerk illustrated a number of literary productions, including Horace Walpole’s tragedy The Mysterious Mother, the English translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s Leonora (1796) and The Fables of John Dryden (1797). After 1785 she was one of a circle of women, along with Emma Crewe and Elizabeth Templetown, whose designs for Josiah Wedgwood were made into bas-reliefs on jasper ornaments.

Her husband died in 1780 and, due to restricted finances, she began to lead a more retired life. She died in 1808 and was buried in Richmond.