GEORGE, THIRD EARL COWPER.
Red dress. Light-coloured cap.
BORN 1738, DIED 1789.
By Raphael Mengs (?).
ELDEST son of the second Earl Cowper by Lady Henrietta, youngest daughter and co-heir of Henry d’Auverquerque, Earl of Grantham. King George II., the Duke of Grafton, and Princess Amelia stood in person as sponsors at his baptism. In 1754 he came into a large fortune on the death of the aforesaid Earl of Grantham, and in 1759 was elected M.P. for the town of Hertford. While his father was yet alive, Lord Fordwich (as he then was) went on his travels, and, arriving at Florence, fell in love with that beautiful city, and with one of its beautiful citizens, the Princess Corsi. The lady was married, or the young lord would doubtless have carried her to England as his wife, and thus escaped the blame, cast upon him by Horace Walpole, of disobeying the summons of his dying father in 1764. So delighted was George, Lord Cowper, with his sojourn in Florence, which he had originally visited with the intention of passing a short time there, that he remained within its charmed walls for upwards of thirty years. He outlived his infatuation for the fair Florentine, and married, in 1775, Anna, daughter of Charles Gore, a gentleman at that time residing in Florence with his family, who was said to have been the original of Goethe’s travelled Englishman in Wilhelm Meister. Lord Cowper was most desirous of obtaining permission to add the royal surname of Nassau to his own patronymic, on the plea that he was one of the representatives of the Earl of Grantham (an extinct title); but there were many difficulties in the way, and while the matter was pending he received a high mark of distinction from the Emperor of Austria, through the instrumentality of his Imperial Majesty’s brother, Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, at whose Court Lord and Lady Cowper (but especially the latter) stood in high favour. This was the grant of a patent to Lord Cowper, which bestowed on him the rank of a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. That arch-gossip, but most amusing letter-writer, Horace Walpole, in his correspondence with his friend Sir Horace Mann, British Envoy at Florence, takes a most unaccountable interest in the private concerns and aspirations of Lord Cowper, and thus animadverts on the subject of his foreign names and titles: ‘There is another hitch in the great Nassau question. The objection is now started, that he must not bear that name with the title of Prince. The Emperor thought he had hit on a clever compromise for his protégé, by giving up the name of Nassau, and substituting that of Auverquerque. But my Lord’s cousins object to that also, so now he is reduced to plain Prince Cowper, for which honour he has to pay £500.’
Again: ‘I do not think either the Emperor or Lord Cowper knows what he is about. Surely an English peer, with substantial dignity in his own country, is more dignified than a man residing in another country, and endowed with a nominal principality in a third!’
Again: ‘I believe both Emperor and Prince begin to regret the step. The Imperial diploma dubs him Highness, but he himself will not allow any one to address him in any other way than Lord Cowper.’
It was not very long after their marriage that Horace Walpole glances at the report of a possible separation between Lord and Lady Cowper, but without assigning any reason. There can be little doubt that the union was not a happy one, for, whatever other ground of complaint the husband might have had, Lady Cowper was of a quarrelsome and unconciliatory disposition, and her sister, who lived with the family at Florence, seems, by all accounts, to have been far the more amiable of the two. Miss Berry alludes to a visit she paid her compatriots at Lord Cowper’s house in Florence, ‘where you have the best of society, both native and foreign, and where all the English (in particular) are desirous of obtaining an introduction.’ She goes on to describe the house as ‘fitted up in a peculiar manner: one room as a museum, another as a laboratory, a third a workshop; in fact, too many to enumerate.’ He was evidently a man of very versatile tastes, and one who had many irons in the fire at the same moment. In 1781 Horace Walpole, alluding to the fact that the three Cowper boys had been sent over to England for their education, says, ‘It is astonishing that neither parent nor child can bring your principal Earl from that specific spot,—but we are a lunatic nation.’ Another letter speaks of a vacant green ribbon, and the possibility it might be given to Lord Cowper, if he were on the spot; ‘but he won’t come. I do allow him a place in the Tribune at Florence. An English earl, who has never seen his earldom, and takes root and has fruit at Florence, and is proud of his pinchbeck principality in a third country, is as great a curiosity as any in the Tuscan Collection.’
Lord Cowper did go to England at last, and Walpole owns to his going to a concert at Mrs. Cosway’s—‘out of curiosity, not to hear an Italian singer sing one song, at the extravagant sum of £10—the same whom I have heard half a dozen times at the opera-house for as many shillings—but to see an English earl, who had passed thirty years at Florence, and thought so much of his silly title, and his order from Würtemberg! You know, he really imagined he was to take precedence of all the English dukes, and now he has tumbled down into a tinsel titularity. I only meant to amuse my eyes, but Mr. Durens brought the personage up, and presented us to each other. He answered very well, to my idea, for I should have taken his Highness for a Doge of Genoa. He has the awkward dignity of a temporary representative of a nominal power. I wonder his Highness does not desire the Pope to make one of his sons a bishop in partibus infidelium, and that Miss Anne Pitt does not request his Holiness to create her Principessa Fossani.’