Martha Wilmot 54
- Born: 1774
- Died: 18 December 1873 aged 99
General Notes:
Found in The Times, December 22, 1873
On the 18th Dec., at the house of her son-in-law, William Brooke, Master in Chancery, Ireland, at an advanced age, Martha Bradford (born Wilmot), widow of the Rev. William Bradford, Rector of Storrington, Sussex.
Found in The Times, November 15, 1935
More Letters From Martha Wilmot: Impressions of Vienna, 1819-1829. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by the Marchioness of Londonderry and H. M. Hyde. (Macmillan. 21s.) Lady Londonderry and Mr. Hyde, who last year gave us "The Russian Journals of Martha and Caroline Wilmot", now present us with the promised sequel. Martha, the younger of the two Anglo-Irish sister, after fives years spent in Russia as the fortunate protégée of Princess Dashkov, returned to England in 1808. Four years later she married the Rev. William Bradford, who held the living of Storrington in Sussex and who, in 1819, was offered the post of chaplain to the British Embassy at Vienna. Save for travels in Italy and Tirol, Martha Bradford remained in Vienna with her husband and their three children for nearly ten years. The present volume consists mainly of the letters she sent to England during this time, of which the greater number are addressed to her unmarried sister Alicia. As readers of her Russian journals will know, Martha's pen dances to as tripping and vivacious a measure as the formality of the occasion allows. She is always inclined to be a little overcome by magnificence, but yet retains an unfailing eye for accidental and unrehearsed effects. Her letters from Vienna are light-hearted to the point of frivolity, full of vivid descriptions and immensely entertaining. The waltzes and the diamonds at Embassy balls; the fashions in "the gauzy, flouncy, frubelow, flybysky place"; the feat of walking backwards down a room 60 feet long "without treading on our tails"; the equipages and the rank and beauty on the Prater - these things she describes in breathless and misspelt words of brilliant choosing. All sorts of scenes spring to vivid life in unexpected phrases and bursts of Irish idiom, particularly when she is writing of the accomplishments, spontaneous and unwilling, of her children. The most notable set description is an account of the famous ball given at the British Embassy at the conclusion of the season of carnival in 1826. Martha is almost reduced to speechlessness in the attempt to reproduce the costume of Harum al Raschid in one "quadrille" and of Queen Elizabeth, "accoutered like a hog in armour", in another. The Ambassador at the time was Sir Henry Wellesley, afterwards Lord Cowley. For the first three years of Martha's residence in Vienna, however, Lord Stewart, Castlereagh's half-brother and later the third Marquess of Londonderry, was still in occupation. Martha's growing hostility to Lord and Lady Stewart, whom eventually she came to regard with venomous indignation, forms a comic little essay in self-revelation. Flattered and pampered as she had been in Russia, Princess Dashkov's favourite could not easily resign herself to comparative obscurity in Vienna; her gorge rose at the Ambassadorial neglect and she raged bitingly at the Stewarts' "regal" airs. Martha died in her ninety-ninth year (Catherine died of consumption in 1824), apparently alert and vital to the last. It is her tremendous vitality which these letters of hers reveal once more. In addition to the letters the volume contains the journal of an Italian tour and a series of drawings of Viennese figures by William Bradford, together with other illustrations.
Martha married Reverend William Bradford, son of Mr. Bradford and Unknown.
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