Margaret Cavendish Bentinck

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Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, by Christian Friedrich Zincke , 1738

Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland , b. Harley (born February 11, 1715 in London , † July 17, 1785 in Bulstrode , Buckinghamshire ) was a British botanist and naturalist .

She was the richest woman in Great Britain during her lifetime and used considerable parts of her fortune for her art and natural history collection in Bulstrode. Their collection, known as the Portland Museum , was the largest natural history collection in Great Britain in the 18th century and probably also in Europe. It surpassed the now much more famous Sir Hans Sloane collection in the British Museum . It took 38 days to sell her collection after her death and eventually resulted in the Duchess and her collection being forgotten. She was a member of the feminist blue stocking society .

Life

Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley was born on February 11, 1715 as the only surviving child of Edward Harley , later 2nd Earl of Oxford (1689–1741) and his wife Henrietta Cavendish Holles, then the richest woman in England (1694–1755). Her mother brought a lot of money into the two years earlier marriage and her mother's Cavendish estate, which Margaret would later inherit and bring into her own marriage.

Margaret, called "Peggy" by her parents , was soon the darling of her parents' literary circle . When she was five years old, the poet Matthew Prior wrote a poem for her. It is often referred to as the most beautiful poem addressed to a child in English.

Margaret with her mother Henrietta Harley, 1717 by Bernard Lens

My noble, lovely, little Peggy,
Let this my First Epistle beg ye,
At dawn of morn, and close of even,
To lift your heart and hands to Heaven.
In double duty say your prayer:
Our Father first, then Notre Pere.

And, dearest child, along the day,
In every thing you do and say,
Obey and please my lord and lady,
So God shall love and angels aid ye.

If to these precepts you attend,
No second letter need I send,
And so I rest your constant friend.

As a child she showed a keen interest in nature. She collected animals and natural history objects, especially mussels, and was encouraged in this by her father and grandfather Robert Harley . In adulthood, her passion for collecting developed into a scientific interest in nature that also included botany . As a child, she also received art lessons from the painter Bernard Lens III.

On June 11, 1734, 20-year-old Margaret Harley married William Bentinck, 2nd Duke of Portland (1709–1762). Her parents had chosen Bentinck from a large number of contenders for her hand because, in their opinion, he was least inclined to gambling and other contemporary vices. Indeed, unlike Margaret's father and her two sons, William Bentinck managed to avoid ruinous expenses. Margaret brought in £ 20,000 dowry, half the value of his property. The newlyweds settled in Bulstrode , near Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire , and had six children together. From 1739 until their death, the Duchess hired the scholar and feminist Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) to educate her children .

After her husband's death in 1762, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck did not marry a second time, but devoted herself entirely to studying natural history and expanding her immense collection at the Portland Museum . In addition to the Portland Museum, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck also owned a garden, aviary, and menagerie full of native and exotic animals, and raised bees and rabbits. It surrounded itself with a circle of scientists and intellectuals and supported many of them financially, e.g. B. Mary Delaney and her chaplain and curator of her collection, John Lightfoot , who became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1781 and was a founding member of the Linnean Society of London . Together with him she created a herbarium in Kew .

The Duchess was also part of a network of botanists, including Queen Charlotte and a member of the Blue Stocking Society , a group of aristocratic women who endeavored to establish intellectual freedom for women in a socially acceptable form. The Bluestocks acted as patrons and promoters of education and learning, and held meetings in their London salons and country houses. She had been friends with the feminist Elizabeth Montagu , known as the "Queen of the Blues", since she was seventeen .

Lady Margaret died at the age of 70 on July 17, 1785 in Bulstrode after a brief illness.

Working as a botanist and naturalist

The great work of the Duchess was her garden and her immense natural history collection, the care and expansion of which she devoted a good fifty years of her life. It was their declared aim to collect and describe all the species that existed in the world. However, the death of its curator Daniel Solander and her own two years later prevented this goal from being achieved. Despite her privileged status and wealth, the Duchess was by no means a dilettante . Her knowledge and network of academic scholars was impressive, and many of her contemporaries emphasized her erudition. Even if she did not leave an autobiography, the records she received testify to her expertise.

She also developed a passion for botany and was friends with Philip Miller , the chief gardener of the Chelsea Physick Garden , and botanical illustrator Georg Dionysius Ehret . The latter made drawings of British plants for her. Through her friendship with Peter Collinson , she also got drawings of shells by the American William Bartram . She was also in contact with Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander , whom she visited after their trip on the Endeavor with Captain Cook .

She was in correspondence with the botanist Jean-Jacques Rousseau for 10 years and exchanged plants, seeds and books with him. In September 1766 he accompanied her on an expedition to search for wild plants in the Peak District . Despite his otherwise negative views of women in science, he admired her erudition, recognized her knowledge as superior to his and referred to her as only one of two representatives of her gender among the "few true botanists". He was also impressed by the physical stamina that the then over 50-year-old showed on the expedition.

Aftermath

Although her collection was the largest and best known of its kind in the UK, the Portland Museum and the Duchess were quickly forgotten even after her death. The main reason for this was the liquidation of the Portland Museum by their heirs. The sale of the collection in 1786 took a total of 38 days and comprised 4,000 auction items. Only eight days of the auction did not deal with shells, ores, fossils, bird eggs and natural history. The sale was intended to rejuvenate the troubled family finances suffered by the expensive canvassing of their older son William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (later Prime Minister) and the dissolute lifestyle of their younger son. If Margaret Cavendish Bentinck's collection had remained intact, her fame as a great collector, on par with Hans Sloane, would have been assured. Only the so-called Portland vase , the showpiece of her collection, and a tea service designed by herself were later bought back by William Cavendish Bentinck.

In 1977 the current Duchess of Portland founded the Harley Foundation in honor of Margaret Bentinck . On the ducal estate Welbeck, which has been in the possession of the Cavendish-Bentinck family since the 17th century, the exhibition The Duchess of Curiosities was organized by the Foundation from 2006 to 2008 . The first exhibition to explore the forgotten life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Portland, one of the eighteenth century's greatest collectors .

Marriage and offspring

Margaret Harley married William Bentinck, 2nd Duke of Portland in 1734 , with whom they had six children. Four of them reached adulthood.

literature

  • Pat Rogers: Bentinck, Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Portland (1715–1785). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press 2004, online edition 2006.
  • Katherine Harriet Porter: Margaret, Duchess of Portland. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1930.
  • Alexandra Cook: Botanical exchanges: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Duchess of Portland. In: History of European Ideas 33 (2007), pp. 142–156 (correspondence between Rousseau and Margaret Bentinck).

Web links

Commons : Margaret Cavendish Bentinck  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Pat Rogers: Bentinck, Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Portland (1715–1785). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press 2004, online edition 2006
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Alexandra Cook: Botanical exchanges: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Duchess of Portland. In: History of European Ideas 33 (2007).
  3. ^ Matthew Prior: A Letter to Lady Margaret Cavendish Holles-Harley, when a Child. Daypoems.net (English).
personal data
SURNAME Bentinck, Margaret Cavendish
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Harley, Margaret Cavendish
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British art collector
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1715
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH July 17, 1785
Place of death Bulstrode