Secret Comment: the diaries
of Gertrude Savile, 1721-1757
One of the best documented lives of a member of Nottinghamshire’s
County familes in the early 18th century is that of Gertrude Savile (1697-1758).
Both her diaries and her personal financial accounts survive amongst the
Savile family archives deposited in Nottinghamshire Archives. Selections
from the accounts, 1736-58, were edited by Marjorie Penn and published
in the Society’s Record Series, vol. 24 (1965), and selections from
the diaries have now appeared as vol. 41 (1997) of the same Series. Published
in collaboration with the Kingsbridge History Society in Devon it is entitled
Secret Comment: the Diaries of Gertrude Savile, 1721-1757 and
is edited by Alan Saville, assisted by Marjorie Penn and based on a transcript
by the late Dorothy Hooper.
Gertrude was the late-born unwelcome third child of the Rev. John Savile, a kinsman of the great statesman, Lord Halifax, and spent all her life as an unhappy spinster. Her father died when she was only three and in the same year her brother George unexpectedly inherited the title of 7th Baronet Savile of Rufford Abbey. She was brought up by her mother at Rufford under the guardianship of her brother eighteen years her senior. She describes her situation in her diary:
I... was born out of my time, came into the world three yeares before my father went out of it, who was fond of me... I was born when my mother was an old woman... before I grew up pas the inclination or fitness to introduce me or put me forward into the world; when my brother was a young man; spent my infancy in, (if ever) the gay, sosiable, agreable part of his life, and grew a young woman just as he grew an old man. I suppose ‘twas from her, [her mother] that my brother kept me as he has done; I found myself when I came to years of reason in his family, and in circumstances that were not very easy to me... so uncertainly to depend upon him, without any set allowance, or anything settled upon me for the future; to need to go to him... for every pin and needle; to be subject to affronts from his servants; to be treated like a hanger-on upon the family
Gertrude seems to have found later life with her mother and sister at the London house in Golden Square equally unsatisfactory; there shared servants and housekeeping expenses were sources of friction. However, she gradually obtained emancipation and financial independence, and was completely her own mistress by the time she reached her forties, with an income sufficient for her needs and station. She leased a house in Farnsfield in 1737 and lived there, though returning to London for the season each year, until her brother’s death in 1743, when she returned to the capital permanently.
Her diaries contain commentaries on national events. As a junior member of a compact social ascendency, the sister of an affluent M.P., she witnessed and comments upon a State funeral, a coronation, public alarms, the Hogarthian 1722 election, the South Sea Bubble, the vogue of the Beggar’s Opera, the consternation of the 45 rebellion and the progress of those 18th century wars. The minutiae of her daily entries illuminate on every page the privileged conventions and the crudity of life in her times, but her personality is what predominates. Uniquely she seems to have taken to writing as a therapy, but it was very private, with lengthy intimate passages of tormented outpourings in a crude code, but it is these revelations that bring her to life.
This new edition also contains selections from her correspondence, a literary bibliography of all the books and plays etc. mentioned by her, and an index. Non-members of the Record Series may obtain copies from the Kingsbridge History Society, Hatch Arundell, Loddiswell, near Kingsbridge, Devon, TQ7 4AJ, price £15.95 (plus postage).