February 21, 2022 • 36 mins
The 8th Earl of Bridgewater’s life is a hodgepodge of privileged eccentricity. From deeply spoiled pets to shoes used as a diary to a whole lot of writing about his relatives, it seems that Egerton was always guided by whim.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Back when
we did our episode recently on Peter Roche, I mentioned
that The Eighth Earl of Bridgewater was an episode I
(00:24):
would absolutely like to do, and here we are, and
I was right. I really enjoyed it. Uh. And this
one also, I did not realize at the time accidentally
dovetails in a nice way on the Great Stork Derby
and Charles Millars Will, because it too features a will
that could be described as uncommon and capricious in its provisions. However,
(00:49):
unlike millars Will, which led to people putting their lives
and their livelihoods in jeopardy, this one is just the
silly stuff and no one has to compete um and
it it becomes an interesting story about a life of
privilege but also a person who is allowed to just
(01:10):
let their eccentricities go unchecked and it's quite funny. It
does have just the briefest mention of hunting for sports,
so heads up there, but it also features some very
spoiled animals, so get ready dog lovers because some of
this might delight you. Yeah, they they are some incredibly
spoiled dogs. Francis Henry Edgerton was born November eleventh, seventeen
(01:35):
fifty six in London. His father was the Right Reverend
John Edgerton, who was Bishop of Bangor in the year
that his son Francis was born. His mother was Lady
Anne Sophia Gray, the daughter of the Duke of Kent,
Henry Gray, and baby Francis was baptized a little more
than a month after he was born on December fourteenth
(01:56):
at St George's Church, and as a boy, Francis attended
eat College. Eaton had been founded in fourteen forty by
King Henry the sixth as a free education system intended
to offer poor boys in London an opportunity to receive
a quality education. It began as King's College of Our
Lady of Eaton, beside Windsor, and while the education was
(02:18):
free for all for anyone who wanted to go, boys
who were sent to the school who were not from
poor families had to pay for boarding. All students were
and still are expected to live at the school full time.
It has obviously had some policy changes over the year,
but Francis would have been one of the students who
absolutely paid to be at Eaton. When it came time
(02:39):
for secondary education, Francis Edgerton enrolled at christ Church, Oxford University.
That was on March seventeen seventy three, so he was
attending university as the tensions between the colonies in North
America and the British monarchy were really escalating. He graduated
in seventeen seventy six, having earned a Bachelor of Arts degree,
(03:02):
and then went on to earn a Master of Arts
degree in seventeen eighty and that was also at christ Church. Yeah,
his life seems fairly untouched by what was going on
in North America. Two other things happened in Edgerton's life.
In seventeen eighty one, he was elected as a fellow
at All Souls College, and he also became a prebendary
(03:22):
of Durham. Let's talk for him a second about the
prebendary situation and Francis Edgerton often being referred to as
a clergyman. He was a clergyman with the Church of England.
Technically he never gave a sermon. He was not particularly
hands on in any of the churches that were listed
under his care. Those include, in addition to that position
(03:44):
at Durham, being named rector at Middle Shropshire in seventeen
eighty one, after which he had to resign that prebendary,
and in seventeen eighty seven becoming rector at Whitchurch, Shropshire.
These positions were really kind of largely honorary and they
with a stipend, but the actual job of doing the
work was performed by a proxy. So the title of
(04:07):
reverend is applicable. But he was definitely not someone who
had dedicated his life to the church. So you may
be thinking, if that's the case, how did he land
those appointments, And that was good old fashioned nepotism. His
father had appointed him a prebendary of Durham. His father's cousin,
Francis Edgerton, third Duke of Bridgewater, had given him two rectories,
(04:31):
and that Bridgewater was incidentally the one who built Bridgewater.
Can now we'll be talking more about that in just
a moment. Yeah, So also just to level set, there
are at this point to Francis Edgerton's in the story.
One is the one that we're talking about primarily his
father's cousin, also Francis Edgerton, is the third Duke of Bridgewater.
(04:53):
We will often refer to him just as the Duke,
so you know that he is an older gentleman relative
in the family. Edgerton became a Fellow of the Royal
Society a year after becoming a Fellow of All Souls,
so that was seventeen eighty one. In seventeen ninety one
he was named as a Fellow in the Society of Antiquaries.
He was in a position of being fortunate enough to
(05:14):
be a lifelong academic without having to worry about income
at this point, and he particularly enjoyed studying natural theology,
that was the effort to establish religious truth through rational argument.
Francis was also a Freemason, and thanks to his family
money and ability to promote the organization and society, he
(05:34):
was a highly placed member and a letter dated February six,
seventeen eighty six, Major Charles Sheriff, who at that time
was working to re establish Freemasonry and Shropshire, wrote a
letter to the Grand Secretary of the organization which read, quote,
my senior Warden, the Reverend Mr Edgerton, son of the
(05:55):
Bishop of Durham's and our rector here left us on
the third and for the conversation that passed between us
respecting the fraternity, although he knows but very little of it. Yet,
as he will be advised by me and appoint me
his deputy grand Master, I have advised him, as he
is known to Lord Effingham, to get appointed for the county,
(06:17):
he being a man of family and fortune. It will
be the means of promoting the craft in this county,
And wherein that is concerned, I always yield, and especially
so when the person who tills the chair is ready
to receive advice. In this case it is of little
moment who is in it. Further, on my own part,
I have never filled any chair yet as a mason
(06:39):
that I found anyone could talk to me, but his
answer was ready for him. So in that slightly awkwardly
worded letter that I've just made poor Tracy read, what
it really sums up to you is that it seems
that Major Sheriiff was describing a situation almost exactly like
the other appointments in Edgerton's life, where he would hold
(07:02):
a position of high rank, but other people were absolutely
going to do the actual work, and in fact, according
to Alexander Graham's eighteen ninety two book A History of
Freemasonry in the Province of Shropshire and of the Selopian
Lodge number two sixty two, Francis Edgerton was quote duly
appointed Provincial grand Master for Shropshire shortly afterwards, and was
(07:23):
installed by sheriff in August. In seventeen ninety two, Francis
moved in with his father's cousin, the other Francis Edgerton,
third Duke of Bridgewater, and that is where he stayed
for quite a while, in an apartment at Bridgewater House,
which was located in Cleveland Court in London. He also
traveled with the Duke out to the Duke's manor in Worsley.
(07:45):
The Bridgewater Canal was opened in seventeen sixty one, and
it was built so the Duke could transport coal from
his minds in Worsley into Manchester. So when the younger
Edgerton was there, he saw its workings and his real
to his management of it. Because the Duke of Bridgewater
was wealthy and influential, this also meant that his young
(08:07):
relative was meeting lots of other wealthy and influential people
as he lived with him, and this eventually led Francis
Henry Edgerton to write about the Duke's work. In eighteen hundred,
he presented a paper to the Society of Arts about
the design of the underground canals that have been developed
by the Duke, and that one Francis Edgerton, third Duke
(08:27):
of Bridgewater, a gold medal for his invention. The younger
Francis Edgerton did not win a medal, but his paper
describing the inclined plane that was fundamental to the canals
design was published in multiple journals, and it was also
translated into other languages, so he got a good bit
of clout out of the whole situation. Edgerton's life carries
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a sort of duality with regard to his behavior and personality.
On the one hand, he really was a fairly serious,
dedicated and accomplished academic, and on the other he was
extremely eccentric in ways that have certainly raised some eyebrows
in regards to his mental condition. Yeah, there are times
(09:09):
where you'll read write ups about him where they're talking
about his work and they're like, but he also did
things that made him seem like he was perhaps not
in his right mind. Um, we'll talk a little bit
more about his his academic work, but I promise for
getting to some fun stuff. We did mention earlier his
interest in natural theology, but he never actually wrote a
(09:32):
book about that, although he did write twenty books in
his lifetime. He did, however, include a mention of natural
theology in an addenda that he published to his most
well known publicly published work. He privately published a lot
of it. That well known work was Hippolytus of Euripides,
and that book was first published in sevent six by
Clarendon Press, and the notes that he published, which talked
(09:55):
about natural theology among other things, did not come out
until twenty five years later. John Campbell, first Baron Campbell,
offered a critique of some of Edgerton's work writing family biographies,
calling one of them the quote worst piece of biography
that he had ever seen. This particular piece of writing
had been about Thomas Edgerton, first Viscount Brackley, who had
(10:19):
been Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor for Queen Elizabeth the First.
Francis was proud of his family heritage and his ancestry.
Even though he was apparently very critical of a lot
of the members of his family. He wrote numerous books
about men of the family and their genealogy, and Campbell's
harsh critique either didn't bother him or it bothered him
(10:41):
a whole lot, because he kept reprinting this Thomas Edgerton
biography over and over, expanding on it every time. Yes,
one write of about this whole thing I read said,
he just started to add really extraneous and nation that
was not really important to augmenting that biographical work at all. Uh.
(11:05):
We are going to talk about what happened when Francis
Henry Edgerton's wealthy and famous cousin died after we take
a quick sponsor break. As for the relative who had
been so much a part of Edgerton's life, the Duke
(11:28):
of Bridgewater, had ultimately disappointed his cousin's son. When the
Duke died in eighteen oh three, Francis had expected that
he was going to inherit a significant part of the estate,
as he had been living alongside the Duke for more
than a decade and they had been very very close,
and he did receive a significant inheritance. According to the
(11:49):
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Duke left him forty
thousand pounds. That's a lot of money. But he thought
that he was going to inherit the estates, and he
was really unhappy that he did not. Prior to the
Duke's passing, Francis had publicly stated to a lot of
people of prominence that he intended to write a biography
(12:10):
of his relative. But several years after the Duke died, Edgerton,
still apparently smarting from what he felt like was a snub,
wrote an announcement that he would not be memorializing the
third Duke of Bridgewater in writing. This inheritance, playing out
the way it did, probably stung more than it normally
would have due to some unfortunate timing. In eighteen o two,
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which was the year before the Duke died, France and
the United Kingdom had signed the Treaty of Amien, and
that had ended the War of the Second Coalition, and
so Francis, who was in his late forties, had traveled
to France for an extended visit. He was still there
when the treaty was broken in eighteen o three, and
things once again became hostile between the two countries. As
(12:56):
a brit he found himself under house arrested. He was
trapped in a country he claimed not to like all
that much to begin with, and that happened just a
few weeks after he received word that the Duke had died.
Edgerton was trapped in Paris for three more years. Uh
whether you think that is a hardship. He was finally
(13:20):
only able to return to England in eighteen o six.
That had just taken considerable work and finagling on the
part of his friend, the scientist Sir Joseph Banks. In
January eighteen o eight, Francis Edgerton's position among the titled
families of England was elevated. Although he was not the
son of an earl, he was granted the title and
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precedence of an earl's son, and this was really just
in recognition of his family's impressive lineage, and it was
no doubt helped along by all of that writing he
had been doing about the family line, and at this
point his brother had been the Earl of Bridgewater, having
taken the title after their father cousin died for five years.
(14:02):
In the time between that honor and the end of
the first decade of the nineteenth century. Edgerton wrote a
pamphlet under the pseudonym John Bull that framed the events
of his lifetime as prophetic of the second Coming of Christ.
He wrote that the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars
were clear signs of what was to come. This was
(14:23):
a millinary in text. Edgerton was writing about the belief
that there would be a thousand years at the end
of the world that would be a time of peace
and righteousness, and all things would change during that time.
This was and is a controversial belief, and that's certainly
why he wrote this under a pseudonym. And it was
not long after he published this pamphlet that Francis Edgerton
(14:46):
moved back to Paris, this time for good. Left some
head scratching going on because his friends all knew. All
he did was complained about how much he hated Paris.
But before leaving England he had asked for and received
a leave of absence from his clerical duties, even though
they were really still performed almost entirely by proxy. Anyway,
(15:06):
he probably just could have strolled without making any paperwork
about it. Um. His request indicated that his health was bad,
but he didn't exactly sit still in Paris, and in
fact he traveled a great deal and was pretty active.
So there has been some debate about what exactly was
or was not going on with his health, and there
have been rumors over the decades that he was feigning
(15:27):
illness to be able to leave England for good, as
he had fathered one or more children there and he
was trying to run from that situation. That is a
rumor that pops up throughout any discussion of him historically,
but there is of course no evidence one way or
the other. All this traveling that Edgerton was doing was
in pursuit of his studies. He was buying manuscripts from
(15:50):
dealers all over Europe. Through those endeavors, he had expanded
the network of intellectuals that he had started getting to
know when he was still living with the Duke. In
eighteen fourteen, Francis purchased a home in the Rue Saint
Honore that was the Hotel de Noi. He called this
the Hotel Edgerton, and it became a destination for all
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the friends that he had made throughout the years. This
was quite a spectacular place with a large garden in
the back. It would have been great for entertaining. But
even so he's rarely described as a particularly social person.
Talk some more about that in a bit. And while
he was living in Paris, Edgerton and his brother, John,
the seventh Earl of Bridgewater started engaging in a good
(16:35):
bit of very public bickering, and it was always over money,
how each of them was spending it, and how each
brother disapproved of or resented the other's decisions. Up until
eighteen twenty three, Francis Edgerton lived the life of a
second son, meaning his older brother had inherited the family titles.
That brother, John William Edgerton, had been this sort of
(16:58):
first son in the family that you might expect. John
was three years older than Francis. He had risen through
the ranks of the military in his career, and he
had served as a member of parliament. John had married
Charlotte Catherine Anne Haynes in seventeen eighty three, but the
two of them had never had children. So when John
died in October of eight, Francis Edgerton inherited all of
(17:22):
his titles. Those included becoming the ninth Baron of Ellesmere County, Shropshire,
the ninth Viscount Brackley, and most famously the eighth Earl
of Bridgewater. That meant that Francis Henry Edgerton, who was
already living a pretty fabulous life thanks to his inheritance
from the Duke, now had an income of forty thousand
(17:43):
pounds per year, and he spent it in ways that
we're both extravagant and unconventional. We promised some eccentricity and
here we go. Worth remembering as we talk about some
of these accounts is that he was living in a hotel,
had lots of room. Yeah, that becomes completely germane. On
(18:06):
this first one, he was not living in a hotel room.
It was his hotel. That was his house, which uh,
I can't even um. We're going to start with an
aspect of his foibles that I will confess I honestly love,
even though it's completely impractical. He wore a new pair
of shoes or boots every single day. He had a
(18:30):
bootmaker essentially on retainer with a standing order to just
keep that foot. We're coming. But he never disposed of
any of these pairs of boots. He kept every single pair,
and as he removed them, his valet was to add
them to the arranged collection, which was kept in meticulous order.
Francis Edgerton used this space gobbling method of shoe management
(18:53):
as a diary of sorts. He insisted that any of
his shoes not be cleaned before they were placed in
their spot, so that if he wanted to recall what
the weather was like on any given day or where
he had been, he would examine the shoes that he
wore and see what sorts of dirt they had walked through,
or if they showed any signs of water stains, etcetera.
The bootmaker also had another standing order, and this one
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is really quite something. Edgerton had an unknown number of pets,
but it was a lot, and he had cats and
dogs who lived in the hotel, and for each one
of his dogs there was a full pair of boots
that was custom made for each of their paws. Those
paws are measured, lasts were made for each of their feet.
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Can you imagine being the bootmaker who is like, I
have the best slash worst deal in the world, Like
the money keeps coming in, but I also have to
get dogs to stand still while I do their It's
so much more fabulous than that, because the dogs did
not only wear shoes, they were full ensembles cut in
(20:00):
the latest styles. We mentioned that Francis was not exactly
known for socializing, but he definitely had very lavish dinner parties,
but these were almost always just for himself and his dogs.
The pooches, fully dressed, were seated at the table. Each
dog had their own footman to dress them and to
thailand and napkins at their necks, and basically just stood
(20:22):
behind their chairs and waited if they needed anything. The
chef who cooked for the Earl and his dogs was
the rival to previous podcast subject Marie Antoine Karem. His
name was Andre Vard, and he compiled a cooking encyclopedia
titled the Cuisinier Imperial, in which later editions came to
be known as the Cuisinier Royal. He was considered one
(20:46):
of the finest chefs in France, and the delectable meals
that he prepared were served to the dogs on silver dishes,
one course at a time. The sounds extreme, but the
dogs had to hold up there into the deal to
attend these lavish dinners, which is to say that they
were expected to behave with quote decency and decorum. But hello,
(21:09):
these were dogs, so they did not always behave. And
often repeated story is that two of his very favorites,
which were named Biju and Beche that translates to Jewel
and Doe in English, were not behaving properly as he
wished for one meal, and Edgerton became very upset and
yelled quote, the blackguards have deceived me. I have treated
(21:29):
them like gentlemen, and they have behaved like rascals. Take
their measure. They shall wear for eight days the yellow
coats and knee breeches of my valets, and shall stay
in the ante room and be deprived of the honor
of seeing me for a week. That's right. He punished
the dogs by making them dressed like house staff and
living in the staff's rooms for a week when they
(21:51):
were not allowed to see him the master of the house.
One Parisian journal wrote up Edgerton and his dogs and
their dining arrangements, and including what would happen quote if
by any chance one of them should, without due consideration,
obey the natural instinct of his appetite and transgress any
of the rules of good manners. The punishment, according to
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the journal reads quote the day following the offense, the
dog dines, and even dines well, but not at my
lord's table. He eats in sorrow the bread of shame
and picks the bone of mortification, while his place at
the table remains vacant till he has merited a generous pardon.
I wanted to include that just because of the bread
(22:35):
of shame. Yeah. As an aside on these meals that
were served at Hotel Edgerton, apparently, even though he had
one of the finest chefs of the day working in
his kitchen, in the event that he did have a
human guest for dinner, and sometimes he did, the Earl
would have them eat what he thought was just a
(22:56):
fabulous English delicacy, boiled beef potatoes, and this was apparently
not particularly popular with any of said guests. We'll get
the even more of the curious behavior of Francis Edgerton
in a moment, but first we will hear from a
sponsor that keeps stuff he missed in history class. Going
(23:24):
during a particularly hot summer. The story goes that Edgerton
decided to move his entire household to the country for
a spell of several months, and this, of course became
an epic task of organizing and packing and arranging all
of the many things in the earl's life that he
felt he simply could not do without. And it took
nearly a month to prepare and pack up all of
(23:47):
those dogs and their caretaking needs, and all of his
clothes and the dog's clothes, and all of the boots
for the season, again for both him and a mystery
number of dogs. It's usually always discussed as well over
a dozen all of the household goods like silver and linen's, etcetera.
And in the end, the stats for the procession included
the carriages carrying Edgerton and his dogs, sixteen luggage carriages
(24:12):
and thirty household staff, and those staff members rode on horseback.
They did not get to ride in carriages. According to
this story, they made their first stop for lunch. The
details are sparse, but somehow Edgerton found the food and
the service at this establishment were not good enough in
his opinion, so rather than risk going any farther and
(24:35):
possibly encountering even more disappointment, he turned the whole entourage
around and they were back home in Paris before the
end of the day. I really hope that house staff
was a good natured and welcome and well paid. The
dogs were not only catered to by their own staff,
we should mention at home. For their daily exercise, they
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traveled by carriage, lounging against plush pillow those to the
Bois de Boulogne, a large park at the edge of
the sixteenth and they were dressed in all of their
finery for these outings. When they were to arrived at
the park, each dog had walk east with a dedicated attendant,
and if it rained, those attendants carried umbrellas for the
four legged gentlemen of Hotel Edgerton. For his part, the
(25:19):
eighth Earl of Bridgewater was always dressed to the nines.
One brief biography that Holly red said that this was
because he had an underbyte and was self conscious about
his appearance, so all of these lavish clothes and the
dogs were away to draw attention from things that he
didn't want people to look at. That really seems like
it's purely speculative, though, Yeah, there's also the argument to
(25:44):
be made of like he could have just not Ben flamboyant.
If he didn't want people to look at him like
he's still drawing attention, just try trying to divert the eye. Um.
So we don't know that was if you ever read that,
just no, we don't know if that's true or not.
You will often see it reported that Edgerton never learned
to speak French despite living in Paris for years, and
(26:06):
that he insisted that people converse with him in Latin.
And while this does seem to have a grain of truth,
it also appears to be not entirely true. While he
may not have entirely embraced the language, he didn't actually
publish in French, although I saw one review this and
his His translations that he did in French were terrible.
(26:26):
So one of his writings was a pamphlet in which
he strongly suggested the French employer canal system, similar to
the one that his relative, the Duke had designed, and
he also had other works that he thought were important
translated into French, including the works of Milton and his
time as an earl. Edgerton found his thoughts turning to hunting.
(26:46):
This was something he had enjoyed when he was in England,
but since he apparently had no interest in returning to England,
he brought the sport to Paris by having all of
the accoutrement of the sport shipped over. This included a huntsman,
a pack of hounds and a fox, and then he
staged a fox hunt on the hotel grounds. Later, as
(27:09):
he was growing less robust than his health, Edgerton had
pigeons and partridges brought to the hotel ground so he
could shoot at them at close range. This understandably bothered
the neighbors. They did not appreciate the sound of gunshots
ringing around the neighborhood. There are other tales of Francis
Edgerton that sometimes seemed pretty mythic. There is one that
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says that he refused to let Napoleon Bonaparte reroute the
reuscent on Array when he was reorganizing the city, claiming
it would have ruined his access to the streets. The
eighth Earl of Bridgewater died on February eleven eight in
Paris at his hotel. He was seventy two at the time,
and he died a bachelor. Although his initial move to
(27:54):
France had been shrouded in rumors of a possible child
who had been born out of wedlock, and the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography claims he had at least five children,
some of them in France and all of them out
of wedlock. The Earl never had any children on record.
News of his passing, when mentioned, was brief. For example,
(28:14):
in the Aberdeen Journal of Northern Scotland. The notice, which
was in a much larger list of deaths simply read
quote at his hotel in Ruscent Honore, Paris on thet
was in Holy Orders and the senior Prebendary of Durham.
His father, Dr Edgerton was Bishop of Durham. He succeeded
his brother John William in eighteen twenty three, but dying unmarried,
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the title is extinct. He was buried at Little Gadsden,
Hertfordshire on March fourth, in Bridgewater Chapel. Bridgewater's will was
unusual and it reflected his eccentricities. He had made it
out almost exactly four years before his death on February.
It passed through probate court as a proven document in
(28:58):
April of eighteen any nine. We mentioned in our episode
on Peter Rogge that Bridgewater set aside money for the
writing and publication of a series of books on quote, power,
wisdom and goodness of God. As manifested in the creation.
That money was a sum of eight thousand pounds, which
was left to the Royal Society, with the understanding that
(29:19):
the Society President would appoint the appropriate authors to carry
out this task. Eight men were selected to each write
a treatise, Thomas Chalmers, John Kidd, William Wewell, Sir Charles Bell,
Peter Mark Roge, William Buckland, William Kirby, and William Prout.
And while Edgerton undoubtedly hoped that this would be a
(29:39):
significant legacy, and as you recall from that Roge episode,
he thought his would be for sure, the writing of
it was all pretty safe and even outdated in its idea.
We also mentioned this in the Roge episode. And also
this was just an expensive thing. He had left enough
money to print one thousand copies, but there were volumes. Involumes,
(30:00):
they didn't sell very many. Um So, while it was
a significant achievement in some way, certainly in terms of
its impact, not so much. In addition to the provisions
for the Bridgewater Treatises, Francis Edgerton left money to various
churches and learning institutions. He donated his significant collection of
(30:21):
sixty seven manuscripts focused on French and Italian literature and
history to the British Museum, along with about twelve thousand
pounds for the purchase of additional items. Fifteen years after
Francis Edgerton's death, his cousin Charles long Baron Farnborough left
another three thousand pounds to the Bridgewater Fund. The British
(30:42):
Library maintains the Edgerton collection to this day and continues
to add to it. It has acquired nearly four thousand
new pieces with money from that fund. The Earls will
also allocated money to ensure that his home in Paris
could continue to operate just as if he were still
alive for a full two months. He also instructed that
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each member of the staff there, and that was a
considerable number of people, was to receive a new morning suit,
a cocked hat and three pair of the best quality
worsted wool stockings. And the Little Gadsden Church, where Francis
Edgerton is buried, there is a monument to him. You
can see this online at the Little Gadsden Church website.
There are also monuments to other members of his family there,
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but Francis specified the design of his in his will.
It features a woman with her feet appearing to be
in the sand of a seashore, and a dolphin is
at her feet. She's seated with her left elbow resting
atop the ear of an elephant. A crane stands behind her,
with its body turned away from her, but its face
(31:47):
pointing in the same direction as hers, as though they're
looking at the same thing. No one knows why he
wanted any of these things on his monument. It's very specific.
No not ledge of elephants being significant to him. No, no,
just perhaps he just thought it would be hilarious to
(32:08):
make someone carve a thing with a bunch of different
animals on it. Uh, Or maybe he just liked those animals.
We don't know. You might find it curious that we
did not mention any dogs on that monument, considering how
he lavished love and gave a very extraordinary life to
the animals that he adopted, And in fact, interestingly enough,
(32:29):
the dogs are excluded entirely from his will, with no
mention whatsoever of them or arrangements for their care. So
we don't know what happened to the pups. My hope,
although this is a very made up in my head, hope,
is that they stayed with the people who had been
their minders, that those were good relationships. But I don't
(32:50):
that's just my fairy tale version of happening. Do you
have some listener mail? I do. I have a listener
mail from our listener, Stephanie, who writes us about our
eponymous food recent episode where we talked about Feduccini Alfredo, writing,
I adored your recent eponymous food episode. As a culinary
(33:13):
school grad and former food writer, I love all your
uponymous food episodes, but the origins of fetuccini Alfredo hit
me much harder than the others. After the birth of
both of my sons, I experienced a side effect of
postpartum anxiety separate from postpartum depression but less talked about,
in which I completely lost my sense of taste and
also my appetite. Anxiety can do this to some people
(33:36):
in the sense that it messes with your neurology and
causes you to experience and hadonia loss of pleasure in things,
and it's awful. I know some people have anxiety reactions
that make them eat more in order to get some pleasure.
But that is not the case with me my second son.
My anxiety was so profound that it did become depression.
And even scarier was that I ended up losing a
(33:56):
dangerous amount of weight just because of my extreme disinterest
in food and everything else. Luckily, I did get help,
and when I stopped breastfeeding and weaned my son, everything improved.
I don't have a problem talking about this, mostly because
I don't think we have enough conversations about the realities
of postpartum health and how it's not just depression. Now
I recognize that Alfredo's wife might not actually have been
(34:18):
suffering from postpartum anxiety or depression, but the lack of
appetite following the birth of their child in a time
where we really didn't talk about postpartum health really resonated
with me. Therefore, I completely love the idea that maybe
this amazing dish was created as a caring husband's cure
for postpartum issues. Thank you again for all you do.
Not only do I look forward to your episodes, but
(34:38):
so do my history obsessed twelve year old and his
younger brother cheers and best wishes, Stephanie. Stephanie, thank you
for this because I agree it's one of those things
we I know so little about it. I have not
had a child. I certainly have lots of friends and
relatives who have, but I do feel like postpartum issues
are one of those things that are like not discussed,
and for some people it's just because it's of it
(35:00):
and they don't want to relive it by discussing it.
But I also think it's important that people just know
that sometimes you can have anxiety. It can manifest in
lots of different ways. In my dreams, fed a Cheni
Alfredo cures every possible not problem. Um, that would be
my excuse for all those gallons, I said. I. But
I'm so glad that things turn around and that your
(35:22):
kids sound like they are happy and healthy, and that
you all listen. Um, it's wonderful. Thank you for sharing
this with us. If you would like to write to
us and share your stories, UM, maybe you too hire
a very expensive chef to feed your dogs. That would
be great. If you have that story, please you can
do that at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
(35:44):
You can also find us on social media at Missed
in History and you can subscribe on the I heart
Radio app or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(36:06):
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Back when
we did our episode recently on Peter Roche, I mentioned
that The Eighth Earl of Bridgewater was an episode I
(00:24):
would absolutely like to do, and here we are, and
I was right. I really enjoyed it. Uh. And this
one also, I did not realize at the time accidentally
dovetails in a nice way on the Great Stork Derby
and Charles Millars Will, because it too features a will
that could be described as uncommon and capricious in its provisions. However,
(00:49):
unlike millars Will, which led to people putting their lives
and their livelihoods in jeopardy, this one is just the
silly stuff and no one has to compete um and
it it becomes an interesting story about a life of
privilege but also a person who is allowed to just
(01:10):
let their eccentricities go unchecked and it's quite funny. It
does have just the briefest mention of hunting for sports,
so heads up there, but it also features some very
spoiled animals, so get ready dog lovers because some of
this might delight you. Yeah, they they are some incredibly
spoiled dogs. Francis Henry Edgerton was born November eleventh, seventeen
(01:35):
fifty six in London. His father was the Right Reverend
John Edgerton, who was Bishop of Bangor in the year
that his son Francis was born. His mother was Lady
Anne Sophia Gray, the daughter of the Duke of Kent,
Henry Gray, and baby Francis was baptized a little more
than a month after he was born on December fourteenth
(01:56):
at St George's Church, and as a boy, Francis attended
eat College. Eaton had been founded in fourteen forty by
King Henry the sixth as a free education system intended
to offer poor boys in London an opportunity to receive
a quality education. It began as King's College of Our
Lady of Eaton, beside Windsor, and while the education was
(02:18):
free for all for anyone who wanted to go, boys
who were sent to the school who were not from
poor families had to pay for boarding. All students were
and still are expected to live at the school full time.
It has obviously had some policy changes over the year,
but Francis would have been one of the students who
absolutely paid to be at Eaton. When it came time
(02:39):
for secondary education, Francis Edgerton enrolled at christ Church, Oxford University.
That was on March seventeen seventy three, so he was
attending university as the tensions between the colonies in North
America and the British monarchy were really escalating. He graduated
in seventeen seventy six, having earned a Bachelor of Arts degree,
(03:02):
and then went on to earn a Master of Arts
degree in seventeen eighty and that was also at christ Church. Yeah,
his life seems fairly untouched by what was going on
in North America. Two other things happened in Edgerton's life.
In seventeen eighty one, he was elected as a fellow
at All Souls College, and he also became a prebendary
(03:22):
of Durham. Let's talk for him a second about the
prebendary situation and Francis Edgerton often being referred to as
a clergyman. He was a clergyman with the Church of England.
Technically he never gave a sermon. He was not particularly
hands on in any of the churches that were listed
under his care. Those include, in addition to that position
(03:44):
at Durham, being named rector at Middle Shropshire in seventeen
eighty one, after which he had to resign that prebendary,
and in seventeen eighty seven becoming rector at Whitchurch, Shropshire.
These positions were really kind of largely honorary and they
with a stipend, but the actual job of doing the
work was performed by a proxy. So the title of
(04:07):
reverend is applicable. But he was definitely not someone who
had dedicated his life to the church. So you may
be thinking, if that's the case, how did he land
those appointments, And that was good old fashioned nepotism. His
father had appointed him a prebendary of Durham. His father's cousin,
Francis Edgerton, third Duke of Bridgewater, had given him two rectories,
(04:31):
and that Bridgewater was incidentally the one who built Bridgewater.
Can now we'll be talking more about that in just
a moment. Yeah, So also just to level set, there
are at this point to Francis Edgerton's in the story.
One is the one that we're talking about primarily his
father's cousin, also Francis Edgerton, is the third Duke of Bridgewater.
(04:53):
We will often refer to him just as the Duke,
so you know that he is an older gentleman relative
in the family. Edgerton became a Fellow of the Royal
Society a year after becoming a Fellow of All Souls,
so that was seventeen eighty one. In seventeen ninety one
he was named as a Fellow in the Society of Antiquaries.
He was in a position of being fortunate enough to
(05:14):
be a lifelong academic without having to worry about income
at this point, and he particularly enjoyed studying natural theology,
that was the effort to establish religious truth through rational argument.
Francis was also a Freemason, and thanks to his family
money and ability to promote the organization and society, he
(05:34):
was a highly placed member and a letter dated February six,
seventeen eighty six, Major Charles Sheriff, who at that time
was working to re establish Freemasonry and Shropshire, wrote a
letter to the Grand Secretary of the organization which read, quote,
my senior Warden, the Reverend Mr Edgerton, son of the
(05:55):
Bishop of Durham's and our rector here left us on
the third and for the conversation that passed between us
respecting the fraternity, although he knows but very little of it. Yet,
as he will be advised by me and appoint me
his deputy grand Master, I have advised him, as he
is known to Lord Effingham, to get appointed for the county,
(06:17):
he being a man of family and fortune. It will
be the means of promoting the craft in this county,
And wherein that is concerned, I always yield, and especially
so when the person who tills the chair is ready
to receive advice. In this case it is of little
moment who is in it. Further, on my own part,
I have never filled any chair yet as a mason
(06:39):
that I found anyone could talk to me, but his
answer was ready for him. So in that slightly awkwardly
worded letter that I've just made poor Tracy read, what
it really sums up to you is that it seems
that Major Sheriiff was describing a situation almost exactly like
the other appointments in Edgerton's life, where he would hold
(07:02):
a position of high rank, but other people were absolutely
going to do the actual work, and in fact, according
to Alexander Graham's eighteen ninety two book A History of
Freemasonry in the Province of Shropshire and of the Selopian
Lodge number two sixty two, Francis Edgerton was quote duly
appointed Provincial grand Master for Shropshire shortly afterwards, and was
(07:23):
installed by sheriff in August. In seventeen ninety two, Francis
moved in with his father's cousin, the other Francis Edgerton,
third Duke of Bridgewater, and that is where he stayed
for quite a while, in an apartment at Bridgewater House,
which was located in Cleveland Court in London. He also
traveled with the Duke out to the Duke's manor in Worsley.
(07:45):
The Bridgewater Canal was opened in seventeen sixty one, and
it was built so the Duke could transport coal from
his minds in Worsley into Manchester. So when the younger
Edgerton was there, he saw its workings and his real
to his management of it. Because the Duke of Bridgewater
was wealthy and influential, this also meant that his young
(08:07):
relative was meeting lots of other wealthy and influential people
as he lived with him, and this eventually led Francis
Henry Edgerton to write about the Duke's work. In eighteen hundred,
he presented a paper to the Society of Arts about
the design of the underground canals that have been developed
by the Duke, and that one Francis Edgerton, third Duke
(08:27):
of Bridgewater, a gold medal for his invention. The younger
Francis Edgerton did not win a medal, but his paper
describing the inclined plane that was fundamental to the canals
design was published in multiple journals, and it was also
translated into other languages, so he got a good bit
of clout out of the whole situation. Edgerton's life carries
(08:49):
a sort of duality with regard to his behavior and personality.
On the one hand, he really was a fairly serious,
dedicated and accomplished academic, and on the other he was
extremely eccentric in ways that have certainly raised some eyebrows
in regards to his mental condition. Yeah, there are times
(09:09):
where you'll read write ups about him where they're talking
about his work and they're like, but he also did
things that made him seem like he was perhaps not
in his right mind. Um, we'll talk a little bit
more about his his academic work, but I promise for
getting to some fun stuff. We did mention earlier his
interest in natural theology, but he never actually wrote a
(09:32):
book about that, although he did write twenty books in
his lifetime. He did, however, include a mention of natural
theology in an addenda that he published to his most
well known publicly published work. He privately published a lot
of it. That well known work was Hippolytus of Euripides,
and that book was first published in sevent six by
Clarendon Press, and the notes that he published, which talked
(09:55):
about natural theology among other things, did not come out
until twenty five years later. John Campbell, first Baron Campbell,
offered a critique of some of Edgerton's work writing family biographies,
calling one of them the quote worst piece of biography
that he had ever seen. This particular piece of writing
had been about Thomas Edgerton, first Viscount Brackley, who had
(10:19):
been Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor for Queen Elizabeth the First.
Francis was proud of his family heritage and his ancestry.
Even though he was apparently very critical of a lot
of the members of his family. He wrote numerous books
about men of the family and their genealogy, and Campbell's
harsh critique either didn't bother him or it bothered him
(10:41):
a whole lot, because he kept reprinting this Thomas Edgerton
biography over and over, expanding on it every time. Yes,
one write of about this whole thing I read said,
he just started to add really extraneous and nation that
was not really important to augmenting that biographical work at all. Uh.
(11:05):
We are going to talk about what happened when Francis
Henry Edgerton's wealthy and famous cousin died after we take
a quick sponsor break. As for the relative who had
been so much a part of Edgerton's life, the Duke
(11:28):
of Bridgewater, had ultimately disappointed his cousin's son. When the
Duke died in eighteen oh three, Francis had expected that
he was going to inherit a significant part of the estate,
as he had been living alongside the Duke for more
than a decade and they had been very very close,
and he did receive a significant inheritance. According to the
(11:49):
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Duke left him forty
thousand pounds. That's a lot of money. But he thought
that he was going to inherit the estates, and he
was really unhappy that he did not. Prior to the
Duke's passing, Francis had publicly stated to a lot of
people of prominence that he intended to write a biography
(12:10):
of his relative. But several years after the Duke died, Edgerton,
still apparently smarting from what he felt like was a snub,
wrote an announcement that he would not be memorializing the
third Duke of Bridgewater in writing. This inheritance, playing out
the way it did, probably stung more than it normally
would have due to some unfortunate timing. In eighteen o two,
(12:33):
which was the year before the Duke died, France and
the United Kingdom had signed the Treaty of Amien, and
that had ended the War of the Second Coalition, and
so Francis, who was in his late forties, had traveled
to France for an extended visit. He was still there
when the treaty was broken in eighteen o three, and
things once again became hostile between the two countries. As
(12:56):
a brit he found himself under house arrested. He was
trapped in a country he claimed not to like all
that much to begin with, and that happened just a
few weeks after he received word that the Duke had died.
Edgerton was trapped in Paris for three more years. Uh
whether you think that is a hardship. He was finally
(13:20):
only able to return to England in eighteen o six.
That had just taken considerable work and finagling on the
part of his friend, the scientist Sir Joseph Banks. In
January eighteen o eight, Francis Edgerton's position among the titled
families of England was elevated. Although he was not the
son of an earl, he was granted the title and
(13:41):
precedence of an earl's son, and this was really just
in recognition of his family's impressive lineage, and it was
no doubt helped along by all of that writing he
had been doing about the family line, and at this
point his brother had been the Earl of Bridgewater, having
taken the title after their father cousin died for five years.
(14:02):
In the time between that honor and the end of
the first decade of the nineteenth century. Edgerton wrote a
pamphlet under the pseudonym John Bull that framed the events
of his lifetime as prophetic of the second Coming of Christ.
He wrote that the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars
were clear signs of what was to come. This was
(14:23):
a millinary in text. Edgerton was writing about the belief
that there would be a thousand years at the end
of the world that would be a time of peace
and righteousness, and all things would change during that time.
This was and is a controversial belief, and that's certainly
why he wrote this under a pseudonym. And it was
not long after he published this pamphlet that Francis Edgerton
(14:46):
moved back to Paris, this time for good. Left some
head scratching going on because his friends all knew. All
he did was complained about how much he hated Paris.
But before leaving England he had asked for and received
a leave of absence from his clerical duties, even though
they were really still performed almost entirely by proxy. Anyway,
(15:06):
he probably just could have strolled without making any paperwork
about it. Um. His request indicated that his health was bad,
but he didn't exactly sit still in Paris, and in
fact he traveled a great deal and was pretty active.
So there has been some debate about what exactly was
or was not going on with his health, and there
have been rumors over the decades that he was feigning
(15:27):
illness to be able to leave England for good, as
he had fathered one or more children there and he
was trying to run from that situation. That is a
rumor that pops up throughout any discussion of him historically,
but there is of course no evidence one way or
the other. All this traveling that Edgerton was doing was
in pursuit of his studies. He was buying manuscripts from
(15:50):
dealers all over Europe. Through those endeavors, he had expanded
the network of intellectuals that he had started getting to
know when he was still living with the Duke. In
eighteen fourteen, Francis purchased a home in the Rue Saint
Honore that was the Hotel de Noi. He called this
the Hotel Edgerton, and it became a destination for all
(16:11):
the friends that he had made throughout the years. This
was quite a spectacular place with a large garden in
the back. It would have been great for entertaining. But
even so he's rarely described as a particularly social person.
Talk some more about that in a bit. And while
he was living in Paris, Edgerton and his brother, John,
the seventh Earl of Bridgewater started engaging in a good
(16:35):
bit of very public bickering, and it was always over money,
how each of them was spending it, and how each
brother disapproved of or resented the other's decisions. Up until
eighteen twenty three, Francis Edgerton lived the life of a
second son, meaning his older brother had inherited the family titles.
That brother, John William Edgerton, had been this sort of
(16:58):
first son in the family that you might expect. John
was three years older than Francis. He had risen through
the ranks of the military in his career, and he
had served as a member of parliament. John had married
Charlotte Catherine Anne Haynes in seventeen eighty three, but the
two of them had never had children. So when John
died in October of eight, Francis Edgerton inherited all of
(17:22):
his titles. Those included becoming the ninth Baron of Ellesmere County, Shropshire,
the ninth Viscount Brackley, and most famously the eighth Earl
of Bridgewater. That meant that Francis Henry Edgerton, who was
already living a pretty fabulous life thanks to his inheritance
from the Duke, now had an income of forty thousand
(17:43):
pounds per year, and he spent it in ways that
we're both extravagant and unconventional. We promised some eccentricity and
here we go. Worth remembering as we talk about some
of these accounts is that he was living in a hotel,
had lots of room. Yeah, that becomes completely germane. On
(18:06):
this first one, he was not living in a hotel room.
It was his hotel. That was his house, which uh,
I can't even um. We're going to start with an
aspect of his foibles that I will confess I honestly love,
even though it's completely impractical. He wore a new pair
of shoes or boots every single day. He had a
(18:30):
bootmaker essentially on retainer with a standing order to just
keep that foot. We're coming. But he never disposed of
any of these pairs of boots. He kept every single pair,
and as he removed them, his valet was to add
them to the arranged collection, which was kept in meticulous order.
Francis Edgerton used this space gobbling method of shoe management
(18:53):
as a diary of sorts. He insisted that any of
his shoes not be cleaned before they were placed in
their spot, so that if he wanted to recall what
the weather was like on any given day or where
he had been, he would examine the shoes that he
wore and see what sorts of dirt they had walked through,
or if they showed any signs of water stains, etcetera.
The bootmaker also had another standing order, and this one
(19:17):
is really quite something. Edgerton had an unknown number of pets,
but it was a lot, and he had cats and
dogs who lived in the hotel, and for each one
of his dogs there was a full pair of boots
that was custom made for each of their paws. Those
paws are measured, lasts were made for each of their feet.
(19:39):
Can you imagine being the bootmaker who is like, I
have the best slash worst deal in the world, Like
the money keeps coming in, but I also have to
get dogs to stand still while I do their It's
so much more fabulous than that, because the dogs did
not only wear shoes, they were full ensembles cut in
(20:00):
the latest styles. We mentioned that Francis was not exactly
known for socializing, but he definitely had very lavish dinner parties,
but these were almost always just for himself and his dogs.
The pooches, fully dressed, were seated at the table. Each
dog had their own footman to dress them and to
thailand and napkins at their necks, and basically just stood
(20:22):
behind their chairs and waited if they needed anything. The
chef who cooked for the Earl and his dogs was
the rival to previous podcast subject Marie Antoine Karem. His
name was Andre Vard, and he compiled a cooking encyclopedia
titled the Cuisinier Imperial, in which later editions came to
be known as the Cuisinier Royal. He was considered one
(20:46):
of the finest chefs in France, and the delectable meals
that he prepared were served to the dogs on silver dishes,
one course at a time. The sounds extreme, but the
dogs had to hold up there into the deal to
attend these lavish dinners, which is to say that they
were expected to behave with quote decency and decorum. But hello,
(21:09):
these were dogs, so they did not always behave. And
often repeated story is that two of his very favorites,
which were named Biju and Beche that translates to Jewel
and Doe in English, were not behaving properly as he
wished for one meal, and Edgerton became very upset and
yelled quote, the blackguards have deceived me. I have treated
(21:29):
them like gentlemen, and they have behaved like rascals. Take
their measure. They shall wear for eight days the yellow
coats and knee breeches of my valets, and shall stay
in the ante room and be deprived of the honor
of seeing me for a week. That's right. He punished
the dogs by making them dressed like house staff and
living in the staff's rooms for a week when they
(21:51):
were not allowed to see him the master of the house.
One Parisian journal wrote up Edgerton and his dogs and
their dining arrangements, and including what would happen quote if
by any chance one of them should, without due consideration,
obey the natural instinct of his appetite and transgress any
of the rules of good manners. The punishment, according to
(22:14):
the journal reads quote the day following the offense, the
dog dines, and even dines well, but not at my
lord's table. He eats in sorrow the bread of shame
and picks the bone of mortification, while his place at
the table remains vacant till he has merited a generous pardon.
I wanted to include that just because of the bread
(22:35):
of shame. Yeah. As an aside on these meals that
were served at Hotel Edgerton, apparently, even though he had
one of the finest chefs of the day working in
his kitchen, in the event that he did have a
human guest for dinner, and sometimes he did, the Earl
would have them eat what he thought was just a
(22:56):
fabulous English delicacy, boiled beef potatoes, and this was apparently
not particularly popular with any of said guests. We'll get
the even more of the curious behavior of Francis Edgerton
in a moment, but first we will hear from a
sponsor that keeps stuff he missed in history class. Going
(23:24):
during a particularly hot summer. The story goes that Edgerton
decided to move his entire household to the country for
a spell of several months, and this, of course became
an epic task of organizing and packing and arranging all
of the many things in the earl's life that he
felt he simply could not do without. And it took
nearly a month to prepare and pack up all of
(23:47):
those dogs and their caretaking needs, and all of his
clothes and the dog's clothes, and all of the boots
for the season, again for both him and a mystery
number of dogs. It's usually always discussed as well over
a dozen all of the household goods like silver and linen's, etcetera.
And in the end, the stats for the procession included
the carriages carrying Edgerton and his dogs, sixteen luggage carriages
(24:12):
and thirty household staff, and those staff members rode on horseback.
They did not get to ride in carriages. According to
this story, they made their first stop for lunch. The
details are sparse, but somehow Edgerton found the food and
the service at this establishment were not good enough in
his opinion, so rather than risk going any farther and
(24:35):
possibly encountering even more disappointment, he turned the whole entourage
around and they were back home in Paris before the
end of the day. I really hope that house staff
was a good natured and welcome and well paid. The
dogs were not only catered to by their own staff,
we should mention at home. For their daily exercise, they
(24:56):
traveled by carriage, lounging against plush pillow those to the
Bois de Boulogne, a large park at the edge of
the sixteenth and they were dressed in all of their
finery for these outings. When they were to arrived at
the park, each dog had walk east with a dedicated attendant,
and if it rained, those attendants carried umbrellas for the
four legged gentlemen of Hotel Edgerton. For his part, the
(25:19):
eighth Earl of Bridgewater was always dressed to the nines.
One brief biography that Holly red said that this was
because he had an underbyte and was self conscious about
his appearance, so all of these lavish clothes and the
dogs were away to draw attention from things that he
didn't want people to look at. That really seems like
it's purely speculative, though, Yeah, there's also the argument to
(25:44):
be made of like he could have just not Ben flamboyant.
If he didn't want people to look at him like
he's still drawing attention, just try trying to divert the eye. Um.
So we don't know that was if you ever read that,
just no, we don't know if that's true or not.
You will often see it reported that Edgerton never learned
to speak French despite living in Paris for years, and
(26:06):
that he insisted that people converse with him in Latin.
And while this does seem to have a grain of truth,
it also appears to be not entirely true. While he
may not have entirely embraced the language, he didn't actually
publish in French, although I saw one review this and
his His translations that he did in French were terrible.
(26:26):
So one of his writings was a pamphlet in which
he strongly suggested the French employer canal system, similar to
the one that his relative, the Duke had designed, and
he also had other works that he thought were important
translated into French, including the works of Milton and his
time as an earl. Edgerton found his thoughts turning to hunting.
(26:46):
This was something he had enjoyed when he was in England,
but since he apparently had no interest in returning to England,
he brought the sport to Paris by having all of
the accoutrement of the sport shipped over. This included a huntsman,
a pack of hounds and a fox, and then he
staged a fox hunt on the hotel grounds. Later, as
(27:09):
he was growing less robust than his health, Edgerton had
pigeons and partridges brought to the hotel ground so he
could shoot at them at close range. This understandably bothered
the neighbors. They did not appreciate the sound of gunshots
ringing around the neighborhood. There are other tales of Francis
Edgerton that sometimes seemed pretty mythic. There is one that
(27:31):
says that he refused to let Napoleon Bonaparte reroute the
reuscent on Array when he was reorganizing the city, claiming
it would have ruined his access to the streets. The
eighth Earl of Bridgewater died on February eleven eight in
Paris at his hotel. He was seventy two at the time,
and he died a bachelor. Although his initial move to
(27:54):
France had been shrouded in rumors of a possible child
who had been born out of wedlock, and the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography claims he had at least five children,
some of them in France and all of them out
of wedlock. The Earl never had any children on record.
News of his passing, when mentioned, was brief. For example,
(28:14):
in the Aberdeen Journal of Northern Scotland. The notice, which
was in a much larger list of deaths simply read
quote at his hotel in Ruscent Honore, Paris on thet
was in Holy Orders and the senior Prebendary of Durham.
His father, Dr Edgerton was Bishop of Durham. He succeeded
his brother John William in eighteen twenty three, but dying unmarried,
(28:36):
the title is extinct. He was buried at Little Gadsden,
Hertfordshire on March fourth, in Bridgewater Chapel. Bridgewater's will was
unusual and it reflected his eccentricities. He had made it
out almost exactly four years before his death on February.
It passed through probate court as a proven document in
(28:58):
April of eighteen any nine. We mentioned in our episode
on Peter Rogge that Bridgewater set aside money for the
writing and publication of a series of books on quote, power,
wisdom and goodness of God. As manifested in the creation.
That money was a sum of eight thousand pounds, which
was left to the Royal Society, with the understanding that
(29:19):
the Society President would appoint the appropriate authors to carry
out this task. Eight men were selected to each write
a treatise, Thomas Chalmers, John Kidd, William Wewell, Sir Charles Bell,
Peter Mark Roge, William Buckland, William Kirby, and William Prout.
And while Edgerton undoubtedly hoped that this would be a
(29:39):
significant legacy, and as you recall from that Roge episode,
he thought his would be for sure, the writing of
it was all pretty safe and even outdated in its idea.
We also mentioned this in the Roge episode. And also
this was just an expensive thing. He had left enough
money to print one thousand copies, but there were volumes. Involumes,
(30:00):
they didn't sell very many. Um So, while it was
a significant achievement in some way, certainly in terms of
its impact, not so much. In addition to the provisions
for the Bridgewater Treatises, Francis Edgerton left money to various
churches and learning institutions. He donated his significant collection of
(30:21):
sixty seven manuscripts focused on French and Italian literature and
history to the British Museum, along with about twelve thousand
pounds for the purchase of additional items. Fifteen years after
Francis Edgerton's death, his cousin Charles long Baron Farnborough left
another three thousand pounds to the Bridgewater Fund. The British
(30:42):
Library maintains the Edgerton collection to this day and continues
to add to it. It has acquired nearly four thousand
new pieces with money from that fund. The Earls will
also allocated money to ensure that his home in Paris
could continue to operate just as if he were still
alive for a full two months. He also instructed that
(31:03):
each member of the staff there, and that was a
considerable number of people, was to receive a new morning suit,
a cocked hat and three pair of the best quality
worsted wool stockings. And the Little Gadsden Church, where Francis
Edgerton is buried, there is a monument to him. You
can see this online at the Little Gadsden Church website.
There are also monuments to other members of his family there,
(31:26):
but Francis specified the design of his in his will.
It features a woman with her feet appearing to be
in the sand of a seashore, and a dolphin is
at her feet. She's seated with her left elbow resting
atop the ear of an elephant. A crane stands behind her,
with its body turned away from her, but its face
(31:47):
pointing in the same direction as hers, as though they're
looking at the same thing. No one knows why he
wanted any of these things on his monument. It's very specific.
No not ledge of elephants being significant to him. No, no,
just perhaps he just thought it would be hilarious to
(32:08):
make someone carve a thing with a bunch of different
animals on it. Uh, Or maybe he just liked those animals.
We don't know. You might find it curious that we
did not mention any dogs on that monument, considering how
he lavished love and gave a very extraordinary life to
the animals that he adopted, And in fact, interestingly enough,
(32:29):
the dogs are excluded entirely from his will, with no
mention whatsoever of them or arrangements for their care. So
we don't know what happened to the pups. My hope,
although this is a very made up in my head, hope,
is that they stayed with the people who had been
their minders, that those were good relationships. But I don't
(32:50):
that's just my fairy tale version of happening. Do you
have some listener mail? I do. I have a listener
mail from our listener, Stephanie, who writes us about our
eponymous food recent episode where we talked about Feduccini Alfredo, writing,
I adored your recent eponymous food episode. As a culinary
(33:13):
school grad and former food writer, I love all your
uponymous food episodes, but the origins of fetuccini Alfredo hit
me much harder than the others. After the birth of
both of my sons, I experienced a side effect of
postpartum anxiety separate from postpartum depression but less talked about,
in which I completely lost my sense of taste and
also my appetite. Anxiety can do this to some people
(33:36):
in the sense that it messes with your neurology and
causes you to experience and hadonia loss of pleasure in things,
and it's awful. I know some people have anxiety reactions
that make them eat more in order to get some pleasure.
But that is not the case with me my second son.
My anxiety was so profound that it did become depression.
And even scarier was that I ended up losing a
(33:56):
dangerous amount of weight just because of my extreme disinterest
in food and everything else. Luckily, I did get help,
and when I stopped breastfeeding and weaned my son, everything improved.
I don't have a problem talking about this, mostly because
I don't think we have enough conversations about the realities
of postpartum health and how it's not just depression. Now
I recognize that Alfredo's wife might not actually have been
(34:18):
suffering from postpartum anxiety or depression, but the lack of
appetite following the birth of their child in a time
where we really didn't talk about postpartum health really resonated
with me. Therefore, I completely love the idea that maybe
this amazing dish was created as a caring husband's cure
for postpartum issues. Thank you again for all you do.
Not only do I look forward to your episodes, but
(34:38):
so do my history obsessed twelve year old and his
younger brother cheers and best wishes, Stephanie. Stephanie, thank you
for this because I agree it's one of those things
we I know so little about it. I have not
had a child. I certainly have lots of friends and
relatives who have, but I do feel like postpartum issues
are one of those things that are like not discussed,
and for some people it's just because it's of it
(35:00):
and they don't want to relive it by discussing it.
But I also think it's important that people just know
that sometimes you can have anxiety. It can manifest in
lots of different ways. In my dreams, fed a Cheni
Alfredo cures every possible not problem. Um, that would be
my excuse for all those gallons, I said. I. But
I'm so glad that things turn around and that your
(35:22):
kids sound like they are happy and healthy, and that
you all listen. Um, it's wonderful. Thank you for sharing
this with us. If you would like to write to
us and share your stories, UM, maybe you too hire
a very expensive chef to feed your dogs. That would
be great. If you have that story, please you can
do that at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
(35:44):
You can also find us on social media at Missed
in History and you can subscribe on the I heart
Radio app or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(36:06):
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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