Jane and the Barque of Frailty

Editor’s Afterword

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY WAS FIRST ADVERTISED BY ITS publisher on October 31, 1811, and similar advertisements appeared for several weeks following. It was a modest success that was capped by general admiration and clamor for Pride and Prejudice, when that novel appeared in 1813; and although Jane Austen was not then revealed as the author, subsequent novels were promoted as having been “by the author of Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice.” Jane’s career and reputation were in a fair way to being made — and have endured for all time.

Readers of this detective amusement may be interested to learn the fates of some of its characters. Emmanuel, Comte d’Entraigues, and his wife, Anne de St.-Huberti, were murdered at their home in Barnes, Surrey, on July 22, 1812. They were discovered in bed with their throats slit; and a household servant was charged with the crime. When the news of this horror reached Jane, she must have experienced a certain sense of what we would call closure. D’Entraigues’s biographer suggests that during his lifetime he was employed as a spy against England by several governments, Russia and France being among them; but he was also certainly employed by George Canning, to provide intelligence to England of those nations’ intentions. The confusion of motives, policy, and fact that Lord Harold Trowbridge described in his 1808 journal, while analyzing the turf battles between Castlereagh and Canning, probably resulted from the deliberate design of Canning’s chief spy — Comte d’Entraigues. Which of the governments and patrons d’Entraigues regarded as meriting his true allegiance — if he was capable of any — is difficult to know; but he certainly promoted distrust between Russia and Great Britain. Those who wish to know more of his life may consult Léonce Pingaud, Un agent secret sous la Révolution et l’Empire: Le Comte d’Antraigues (sic) (Paris, 1894).

Julien, Comte d’Entraigues, lived out his life in London in a home in Montague Place, Russell Square, dying in 1861.

Spencer Perceval, who led the government during Jane’s visit to London, was assassinated in Parliament May 11, 1812. The Regent asked the Tory Lord Liverpool to form a new cabinet, and Lord Castlereagh to serve as foreign secretary — a post he held until his death. George Canning, who had wished to be named to that portfolio, was given nothing in 1812; Lord Moira was named governor-general of Bengal, where he lived for nine years. In 1817 he was made Marquis of Hastings.

Lord Castlereagh’s later career was not untouched by scandal. In 1822, having acceded to his father’s estates and title as Marquis of Londonderry, he began to receive blackmailing letters accusing him of homosexuality. Apparently, as Castlereagh told the story, he had been seen entering a brothel with a prostitute he later learned was a transvestite male. Whatever the truth of the situation, by mid-August of that year, Castlereagh was subject to a severe mental collapse and depression; he confessed his “crimes” to both the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington — two of his closest friends — and despite being under the watchful guard of his medical doctor, slit his throat with a razor.

The chief biographer of both Canning and Castlereagh is Wendy Hinde, whose workmanlike studies of the celebrated Regency statesmen, George Canning (London: William Collins Sons, 1973) and Castlereagh (London: William Collins Sons, 1981) are well worth reading.

Stephanie Barron

Golden, Colorado

September 2005