Burdett-Coutts, Angela (1814–1906)

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Burdett-Coutts, Angela (1814–1906)

English heiress who spent a large part of her fortune on various charitable causes, especially to help the very poor. Name variations: Baroness Burdett-Coutts of Highgate and Brookfield; took the name Coutts by royal license, 1837; surname sometimes unhyphenated; created baroness in 1871. Pronunciation: Coots. Born Angela Georgina Burdett on April 21, 1814, in London, England; died in London on December 30, 1906; daughter of Sir Francis (a politician) and Sophia

(Coutts) Burdett; educated by private tutors; married William Ashmead-Bartlett, 1881; no children.

Awards:

raised to the peerage (1871); Freedom of the City of London (1872); Freedom of the City of Edinburgh (1874); Order of Medjidie, conferred by the sultan of the Ottoman Empire (1878); Lady of Grace of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem (1888).

Selected publications:

A Summary Account of Prizes for Common Things offered and awarded by Miss Burdett Coutts at the Whitlands Training Institution (Hatchard, 1856); (editor) Women's Mission: a series of congress papers on the philanthropic works of women (Sampson Low, 1893).

On Wednesday August 9, 1837, two days after her death, the relatives of Harriot Mellon , duchess of St. Albans, gathered to hear the reading of her last will and testament. To the astonishment of those present, the greater part of her fortune, including the profits from half the shares in the banking house of Coutts, went to her stepgranddaughter, a tall, thin young woman, hardly pretty, although possessing a lively intelligence and much physical energy. Thus Angela Burdett was immediately transformed into the richest and, it was said, the most eligible heiress in England. Almost as immediately, numerous suitors appeared. "No young man of good family," according to the Dictionary of National Biography, "abstained from a proposal," but "she declined all advances and devoted herself exclusively to social entertainment and philanthropy, both of which she practiced at her sole discretion on a comprehensive scale and on the highest and most disinterested principles."

The birth of Angela Burdett was a result of the fusion between an older, aristocratic landed order and a newer, commercial elite. Her father, Sir Francis Burdett (1770–1844), though born into a family that could be traced back over many generations, was a vigorous critic of the existing political order. His radicalism, at a time when the government was facing popular unrest at home and the turmoil of the French Revolutionary wars abroad, led to his arrest and a brief period of imprisonment. At the time of Angela's birth, he was the Member of Parliament for Westminster, the constituency at the center of London. The family of the woman he married in 1793, Sophia Coutts , had reluctantly agreed to the match, although the father of Sir Francis also had reservations about the suitability of the nouveau riche Coutts family. Sophia's father Thomas Coutts came from a Scottish family that had moved from trade into banking with so much success that King George III was a client. Sophia's mother had been a domestic servant in the Coutts' household, another reason for the disapproval of the Burdett family. What were widely regarded as irregular marriages twice more affected the course of Angela's life.

Sir Francis and Sophia Burdett had six children, one son and five daughters; Angela was the youngest. She received the education deemed appropriate to her social position: personal tutors and travel abroad (between the ages of 12 and 15, she mainly toured Europe with her mother and became fluent in French, German and Italian). Her father's London house was a center of literary and political debate, into which, as she became older, Angela was drawn.

Mellon, Harriot (c. 1777–1837)

English actress and duchess of St. Albans. Born around 1777 in London, England; died in 1837; married Thomas Coutts (a banker), 1815 (d. 1822); stepgrandmother of Angela Burdett-Coutts ; married William Aubrey de Vere, 9th duke of St. Albans, 1827.

Harriot Mellon made her acting debut in 1787, and from 1795 to 1815 appeared at Drury Lane. In 1815, she married her elderly protector Thomas Coutts, a banker and sole partner of the banking firm, Coutts & Co., who left his entire estate to her when he died in 1822. In 1827, she married William Aubrey de Vere, the ninth duke of St. Albans.

In 1815, the wife of Thomas Coutts died. A few days later, and at the age of 80, he remarried. His second wife Harriot Mellon, a 38-year-old actress, inherited his entire fortune when he died in 1822. These events were the cause of much gossip, and further opportunity for disapproving comment arose in 1827 when Harriot married the much younger duke of St. Albans. At this time, Angela, still in her early teens, was on her European tour, but in later years she got on well with her stepgrandmother. The duchess was financially generous with her Coutts relations, who received a large part of her income. It is possible that these payments were made to forestall a legal challenge of the will left by Thomas Coutts, and Harriot might have undertaken to restore the family's inheritance in her own will. However, she did retain the freedom to decide which branch of the family would benefit. At one stage, she favored a cousin of Angela's, but he ruled himself out when he married one of Lucien Bonaparte's daughters—bigamously, as he later discovered, though Harriot's objection then was to a disreputably connected foreigner. She then decided that of her various relations Angela should be entrusted with her fortune, confident that she had the necessary qualities for the responsibilities that great wealth would bring. Her will did, however, limit the part that Angela could take in the running of Coutt's Bank and contained a provision to keep the family fortune from falling into the hands of a foreigner—this stipulation was, over 40 years later, to have its repercussions.

Angela entered into her inheritance at the age of 23 in 1837 when Harriot died (the duke of St. Albans was allowed the use of some family property during his lifetime; when he died in 1849 her wealth was further increased). Adding Coutts to her own name, Angela Burdett-Coutts moved from her father's house in St. James's Place to the substantial property adjoining Piccadilly that Harriot had occupied, 1 Stratton Place, where she lived for the remainder of her life. Burdett-Coutts was accompanied by her former governess Hannah Meredith , who until her death in 1878 assisted Angela's charitable work and was her closest friend.

During the 70 years following her inheritance, Burdett-Coutts supported a great range of charitable and other causes. In doing so, she to some extent reflected the conventional views of the time, and in retrospect some of her benevolence might seem misplaced. She advocated, for example, emigration as a solution to destitution but also as a means of extending the settlement of English stock in Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Her enthusiasm for colonization found an outlet in the financing of colonial bishoprics. In 1847, she endowed two bishoprics, in Cape Town and Adelaide, both of which were structured on the practices of the Church of England. A similar endowment was created in 1857 to provide British Columbia with a bishop; on this occasion, she made £50,000 available, a sum equivalent to several million pounds at present-day values.

In spite of her wealth, she lived in a relatively unostentatious style (although her collection of jewelry was worth a fortune). For some months of each year, she lived in Torquay, where the weather was milder. She also had a home in north London, Holly Lodge, the grounds of which were used for charitable garden parties. Much of her social entertaining was undertaken in connection with either her charitable efforts or to further other interests. Among the latter were the encouragement of scientific investigation; for example, she endowed the University of Oxford with two scholarships in 1861 for the study of geology and presented the university with a collection of fossils. Kew Gardens, a leading botanical establishment, benefitted from her gifts of plant collections. Though progressive in such respects, her views on women's rights were not advanced. On the issue of women entering the medical profession, which was much discussed in the 1860s and 1870s, she told one correspondent that she feared it would lead to the breakdown of the "barriers of common decency."

She set a standard; her charity was given with style, without condescension and with kindness.
—Edna Healey

For many years, she collaborated closely with Charles Dickens, then equally prominent in the public eye as an author. He dedicated Martin Chuzzlewit to her and based one of the novel's most vivid characters, the old-fashioned nurse Sarah Gamp, on a woman she had hired to look after Hannah Meredith during an illness. Dickens encouraged Angela to give money to the Ragged Schools, which provided a basic education for London's poorest and most neglected children. They also worked together to establish a home in which prostitutes might be redeemed. This initiative led to the opening in 1847 of Urania Cottage. Women rescued from the streets were encouraged to learn respectable skills and were found situations (often, appropriate to her imperialist views, in the colonies). Her philanthropy operated whenever possible on the principle of "work, not alms." She encouraged schools that would provide practical training, in part by awarding prizes. Some of the educational provision was at a school attached to St. Stephen's Church, Westminster, a Gothic building endowed by her at a cost of more than £90,000 and opened in 1850, which commemorated her father, who was for many years Westminster's Member of Parliament. She assisted in the building of churches in poor areas in order that there should be not only the provision of spiritual values and the distribution of alms but also the coming into being of clubs and societies dedicated to self-improvement and mutual assistance through which the clergy could encourage their parishioners to better themselves in all respects.

Other efforts to help the poor included the erection of model dwellings. In 1862, four blocks of tenements, with accommodation for over 1,000 people, were opened in the Bethnal Green area of London, one of the poorest in the city. Angela Burdett-Coutts made a number of attempts to break the vested interests that controlled the capital's wholesale food markets in a way that caused higher prices. She paid over £200,000 for the construction of Columbia Market, a vast building, again in the Gothic style she and many Victorians favored, in the East End. It failed to serve the purpose for which it was designed and was one of her few unsuccessful projects.

On a more modest scale, she helped to initiate a Flower Girls' Brigade. This was intended to help the numerous girls, mostly in their early teens, who eked out a meager living by selling flowers in the better parts of London. In Clerken-well, she set up a small workshop in which crippled girls were taught how to make artificial flowers as a means of supporting themselves. She tried to help unemployed weavers in the East End by training them for other forms of employment or by assisting them to emigrate. Though she realized that the enormous volume of hardship that existed would not be greatly reduced by these and by many other of her initiatives, the poor of London in particular held her in great regard.

Angela Burdett-Coutts' charity extended to animals. She was prominent in the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, both at the committee level and more publicly as a letter writer and speaker. She paid for drinking-troughs for the use of horses and, touched like many others by the story of Edinburgh's "Greyfriars Bobby," the dog that kept vigil over his master's grave, she erected in 1872 a fountain as a memorial. The costermongers of London were helped by the provision of stables for their donkeys. She encouraged the breeding of goats for the benefit of poor cottagers and became president of the British Goat Society; the milk from her own goats she sent to hospitals.

Though celebrated for her charitable work in the capital, she generously supported good causes in all parts of the United Kingdom, especially Ireland, where she believed fisheries would reduce poverty and accordingly helped with the purchase of boats. She admired Florence Nightingale 's medical work in the Crimean War and, with the help of Dickens, had a machine for drying clothes constructed and sent out to the Crimea. Some 20 years later, when the Russo-Turkish war was in progress, she helped to set up the Turkish Compassionate Fund, to which she contributed £2,000 for the aid of those peasants displaced by the advancing Russian army. At the end of the war, the sultan decorated her with the diamond star of the order of Medjidie and the grand cross and cordon of the Chafakar.

Convinced, as were many Victorians, of the civilizing influence of the British Empire, she supported various schemes for its extension. In the belief that the spread of missionary work would help to end the slave trade, she helped to finance the expeditions of David Livingstone, who became a friend, in East Africa. Her wealth and social position enabled her to befriend many politicians and builders of the British Empire. She encouraged Sir James Brooke, who had founded the kingdom of Sarawak, in Borneo, in 1842; she bought him a gunboat and put money into a model farm. In the late 1840s, she was so friendly with the old war hero and diplomat Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of Wellington, that there were rumors of marriage, but he discouraged her overtures, pointing out the disparity in their ages. General Charles George Gordon was another friend, and she was one of those who pressed William Gladstone's government to mount an expedition to rescue Gordon from Khartoum. He died in 1885 at the hands of the Mahdi's forces before the grudgingly despatched help arrived, though she remained on cordial terms with Gladstone.

Queen Victoria had in 1871 conferred a unique honor, that of making Angela Burdett-Coutts a baroness: the raising of a woman to the peerage in recognition of her services had never happened before. Ten years later, however, the queen was far from pleased by an event that caused an immense stir in the upper reaches of English society. On February 12, 1881, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, approaching her 67th birthday, married a man 27 years her junior, William Ashmead-Bartlett. He was American by birth, though he had lived most of his life in England and for some years had assisted the baroness in her good works. In particular, he had traveled on her behalf as an administrator of the fund to aid Turkish refugees and had caused her great anxiety with his falling ill. Many assumed Ashmead-Bartlett was merely a fortune hunter. Others dwelt on the motives of a woman who, having refused many offers of marriage in her youth, entered matrimony so late in life. Queen Victoria recorded in her journal on May 3, 1881, after the couple had been presented at court: "That poor foolish old woman Lady Burdett-Coutts was presented on her marriage with Mr Bartlett 40 years younger than herself. She looked like his grandmother and was all decked out with jewels—not edifying!" Elaborating on her theme, the queen wrote of the "mad marriage" as "a most lamentable act of self-abasement." Lady Burdett-Coutts seemingly ignored or was oblivious to such remarks. Perhaps, having grown up in the socially more relaxed atmosphere of pre-Victorian England, she underestimated the rigid proprieties that required those in the public sphere to have conventional private lives. If her husband, who took her surname, was embarrassed, her wealth ensured that he could live in an aristocratic style, of which he took full advantage. He was able to gain election in 1885 to the House of Commons, as MP for the Westminster constituency that he represented for many years.

After marriage there was some falling off in the amount of work undertaken by the baroness, though she still supported a great range of good causes. By marrying an alien she had, under the terms of her stepgrandmother's will, forfeited some of her income from Coutts' Bank. Nevertheless, among the ordinary people, she was regarded still with great respect and affection. Her example of charity work influenced others to take up similar causes. She always took a close interest in the schemes she supported and the good works she espoused. They involved a huge correspondence, innumerable visits and attendance at various meetings of committees or with groups of supporters. Many of the schemes she had initiated operated successfully for long periods. When organizers of the World Fair held in Chicago in 1893 required information on the philanthropic work of women, they turned to her, and she helped compile Women's Mission, which detailed the activities of some 300 individuals and organizations, an indication of the many-sided world of Victorian philanthropy.

In the longer term, many of the causes with which she was identified disappeared. As absolute poverty lessened, flower girls and others like them grew fewer; costermongers, and their donkeys, ceased to be a feature of metropolitan life; goats' milk was no longer of vital importance to cottage-dwelling peasants. The colorful exploits of Rajah Brooke and General Gordon, men once regarded as heroes of the British Empire, faded with the eclipse of that empire. In the 1950s, her model dwellings were pronounced unfit for human habitation and demolished. The Columbia Market building suffered the same fate in 1960, just a few years before legislation to preserve historic buildings that would probably have saved it. Historians with no particular respect for social status and those who believe in the insights offered by psychology have been less impressed than were the Victorians by private charity. From the age of 23, Angela's wealth tended to isolate her and led to a somewhat artificial style of life. Her enormous fondness for animals (she kept several pets as well as campaigning on behalf of animal charities) can be interpreted as a substitute for human affection and her controversial marriage, within three years of the death of her former governess and lifelong companion, gives further reason for regarding her as a "poor rich girl."

After Angela Burdett-Coutts died, of acute bronchitis on December 30, 1906, her private house in Stratton Street was opened to allow mourners to pass by her coffin. The decision that she should lie in state was unusual, yet over a period of two days tens of thousands paid their respects to a woman whose death was almost as much the end of an era as that of Queen Victoria a few years earlier. Her remains were interred in Westminster Abbey on January 5, 1907. William Ashmead-Bartlett, her widower, died in 1921.