Mrs. Piozzi herself was born 16th January 1740 (Old Style), or 27th January 1741 (New Style), at Bodvel, near Pwllheli, and was christened Hester Lynch, the names being derived from her mother, Hester Maria Cotton (granddaughter of Hester Salusbury, the last of the elder line), and from her maternal grandmother, Philadelphia, daughter of Sir Thomas Lynch. Her father, John Salusbury of Bach-y-graig, left an orphan at four years old, was high-spirited and attractive, but careless and extravagant, and even before his marriage had succeeded in heavily encumbering his property. His wife's fortune of £10,000 barely sufficed to pay his debts and to provide a modest cottage in which to start housekeeping. Before long she and her only child found a more comfortable abode at Llewenny Hall with her eldest brother, Sir Robert Salusbury Cotton, who took a great liking for little Hester, and being himself childless, promised to provide for her; but his sudden death before he had carried out his intention left them in great straits. John Salusbury had been sent out by Lord Halifax to assist in re-settling the colony of Nova Scotia, but it was not a lucrative employment, and his wife sought a home for her child first at East Hyde, Beds., with her own mother, Philadelphia, then the widow of Captain King, and afterwards at Offley Hall, Herts., the seat of her brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Salusbury, Judge of the Admiralty Court.

SIR RICHARD CLOUGH

By Basire after M. Griffith

So far Hester's education had been of a very desultory kind, though she had been well grounded in French by her parents from a very early age. At East Hyde she learnt to love and manage horses, startling, and somewhat shocking her grandmother, by driving two of the "ramping warhorses" who drew the family coach round the courtyard. But her first systematic instruction she received at Offley, where she learnt Italian and Spanish, apparently from her uncle's wife, Anna, daughter of Sir Henry Penrice, and "Latin, Logic, Rhetoric, &c." from a Doctor Collier, for whom she had a warm regard, and who did more, she considered, to form her mind than anyone with whom she afterwards came in contact, Johnson not excepted. Greek she did not learn from him, for she laments her ignorance of it some years later, when, in the course of her Italian tour, she was unable to read an inscription in that language which was shown to her. So Mangin was no doubt unconsciously exaggerating when he wrote that she had "for more than sixty years ... studied the Scriptures ... in the original languages." But it seems fairly certain that she acquired some knowledge of Greek, and possibly also of Hebrew, in later life, though she makes no parade of her acquirements. The stray words in these languages which are found in her letters are not conclusive evidence, as they may have been merely copied from some work which she had been reading. But in her Commonplace Book, now in the possession of Mr. A. M. Broadley, and written only for her own amusement, occur several Greek phrases, and an epigram of some length, with a translation, apparently her own. And it is noteworthy that the Greek is written with the breathings and accents, in the clear, firm hand of one well used to the script, very unlike the tentative efforts of a beginner.

By this time suitors for the hand of the prospective heiress began to arrive, among whom was Henry Thrale, proprietor of a lucrative brewery in Southwark, who commended himself to the uncle as being a "thorough sportsman," and to the mother by his assiduous attentions to herself. But he does not appear to have taken the trouble to be more than barely civil to the bride elect, who naturally resented his attitude, and heartily disliked the idea of a marriage with him. She appealed to her father, who had now returned from America, having no aptitude or liking for a colonial career, and who sympathised with her feelings, but his sudden death in 1762 put an end to any hope of intervention on his part. Her mother and uncle pressed on what they considered a desirable match, and she was married to Thrale, 11th October 1763.

At this period, at any rate, Henry Thrale was by no means the dull, heavy, self-indulgent being that some accounts of him in later life might seem to suggest. His father, Ralph Thrale, a shrewd, self-made man, used the fortune he had amassed at the Old Anchor Brewery to give his son the best education the period could afford. Much of his boyhood he spent at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, where his associates belonged to a group of great county families; for Ralph Thrale's cousin, Ann Halsey, had married Sir Richard Temple of Stowe, created Viscount Cobham, whose sisters had married into the families of Grenville and Lyttelton. As some of them were indebted to the father, motives of policy may have had something to do with their friendship for the son. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Oxford, which he left without taking a degree, though he was afterwards created a D.C.L. Then he was sent on the grand tour, on an allowance of £1000 a year, with William Henry Lyttelton, afterwards Lord Westcote and Lyttelton, whose expenses were also paid by the elder Thrale, and at the time of his marriage he was a finished "man about town." His artistic and literary tastes are indicated by the gallery of portraits by Reynolds which he formed at Streatham Park, and by the literary society he loved to entertain there, from Johnson downwards. The latter spoke of him as "a real scholar," and said that "if he would talk more, his manner would be very completely that of a perfect gentleman"; and he had, what Johnson entirely lacked, a keen appreciation of natural scenery. His religious and moral principles might be expected to be those of his associates, who at the time of his marriage, with the exception of one Romanist, all seemed to his wife to be professed infidels. But his outward conduct was at least decorous, and she remarks that his conversation was wholly free from all oaths, ribaldry, and profaneness. In 1779 she wrote in Thraliana (her private diary): "Few people live in such a state of preparation for eternity, I think, as my dear Master has done since I have been connected with him: regular in his public and private devotions, constant at the Sacrament, temperate in his appetites, moderate in his passions,—he has less to apprehend from a sudden summons than any man I have known who was young and gay, and high in health and fortune."

Their usual residence was a pleasant country house known as Streatham Park, standing in grounds of about a hundred acres, but in winter she was expected to live at his business premises in Deadman's Lane, Southwark, a stipulation which had put an end to several of Thrale's previous matrimonial negotiations. Her acceptance of it she believed to have been the determining factor in his final choice of a wife. He possessed also a hunting-box near Croydon, where he kept a pack of hounds, and a house in West Street, Brighton. But with all the comfort, and even luxury of her surroundings, she enjoyed no confidence and little sympathy from her husband. He required a wife to do the honours of his table and to bear his children; other forms of activity were frowned upon or banned. Riding to hounds was too masculine to be tolerated; she was not permitted to have any voice in the management of her household, and she did not even know what there was for dinner till it appeared on the table. She was not allowed to know anything of his business affairs till a serious crisis occurred, when she saved the situation by her promptitude in raising some £20,000 from relatives and friends to meet pressing demands. This, and her energetic canvassing of Southwark when Thrale was standing for Parliament, seems to have convinced her husband of her capabilities, and to have generated in him a certain amount of respect, if not of affection.

The sphere of her activities being thus restricted, and having no taste for gay society, she was driven to occupy herself with her books and her children, of whom she had twelve, though only four survived their childhood. While still in her teens she had contributed verses anonymously to the St. James' Chronicle, but at this period she probably had little opportunity and no encouragement to practise composition. Thrale, however, was interested in men of letters, and the introduction of Johnson to Streatham Park in 1764 helped to make it a meeting-place for many literary and artistic celebrities, such as Murphy, Reynolds, the Burneys, the Sewards, and others. Johnson himself came to be looked upon as one of the family, having a room reserved for him at Streatham and Southwark, and accompanying them as a matter of course on their visits to Bath and Brighton, and on longer expeditions to Wales in 1774 and to Paris the following year.

Thrale retired from Parliament in 1780, and died 4th April 1781, of apoplexy, largely the result of over-indulgence at table, to which in his later years he had become addicted. Both his sons had predeceased him, Henry, the elder, in 1766, and Ralph in 1775; and his widow was left with five daughters, all under age. Harriet, the youngest of these, died at school in 1783, shortly before Mrs. Thrale's second marriage; the four survivors were as follows.