The Mary Hamilton Papers : Letter from Francis Napier, 8th Lord Napier, to Mary Hamilton

Napier, Francis Scott, 8th Lord

The Mary Hamilton Papers

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Letter from Francis Napier, 8th Lord Napier, to Mary Hamilton, containing news of family and friends including the Duchess of Rutland. Now that Hamilton has married, Napier writes to her not as a ‘Miss about St James's’ but as the ‘far more respectable’ country housewife. Napier writes that he had not heard of Mr Glover's death until Hamilton's letter and notes that ‘whatever airs I may have given myself relative to his writings, be assured I respected him from knowing his disinterested attachment to you’. Napier writes of illnesses in his own family. His daughter Mary has smallpox and whilst he was in Ireland on business relating to his ‘vexatious legacy’ he received a letter from his wife informing him that she had scarlet fever. He returned home immediately and found her out of danger from the fever but dangerously ill from a bowel complaint.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>He writes of an inaccurate newspaper account concerning his wife and the Duchess of Rutland. It is true that Maria dined with the Duchess privately on a number of occasions but she had not sufficiently recovered from the birth of her daughter to ‘be able to exhibit herself in public. The Duchess had no companion with her, consequently was reduced to the necessity of feeling herself obliged to Maria for being with her at all’. He describes the Duchess as a ‘silly woman, not comfortable in her matrimonial connection and of course more an object of pity, than Envy’.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dated at Cork [Ireland].</p>