With Guy Fawkes night almost upon us, we can expect to see and hear fireworks going off all across the country. A previous blog showed how throughout the late 17th century, fireworks and bonfires were used to mark the momentous events of the Glorious Revolution and William III’s wars with France. [Making ‘night like day’] As Dr Charles Littleton shows, that tradition continued into the 18th century, whose many long wars provided numerous victories and peace treaties to be celebrated with large public fireworks displays.
Perhaps the most famous display was held in Green Park on 27 April 1749 to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. It remains most celebrated for the music composed by Handel to precede the spectacle, the ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’. [Parliament, patriotism and the Last Night of the Proms] Its organizer, Charles Frederick, was ambitious and hoped to end the display with ‘so many hundred thousand crackers all set to music, that all the men killed in the war are to be wakened with the crash’. [Walpole Correspondence, xxxvii. 297]. The London Evening Post for 15-17 April enumerated at least 162,000 separate pieces of at least 13 different types of pyrotechnical device that were to be set alight.
The display, however, did not go quite according to plan and, according to Horace Walpole, ‘by no means answered the expense, the length of preparation, and the expectation which had been raised’. He admitted that the rockets ‘succeeded mighty well’, but thought the fire wheels ‘pitiful’. [Walpole Correspondence, xx. 47-8] Worse still, the right pavilion of the large wooden structure from which the fireworks were launched caught fire, and a number of people were killed or injured by stray fireworks or the press of the crowd.
There is, however, a positive coda to this tale of near incendiary disaster. The unused fireworks were purchased by Charles Lennox, 2nd duke of Richmond. [‘Kind patron of the mirthful fray’: the English aristocracy and cricket in the 18th century] His London townhouse, Richmond House, was sited in the Privy Garden of the old Whitehall Palace and fronted the riverside. On 15 May 1749 he staged his own fireworks celebration, clearly visible to all from the river. This attempt was more successful, and even Walpole admitted ‘I really never passed a more agreeable evening: everything succeeded, all the wheels played in time’ [Walpole Correspondence, ix. 80-81]. Walpole saw the event as ‘a codicil to the peace’ celebrations of the previous month and continued with an elaborate description:
The garden lies with a slope down to the Thames, on which were lighters, from whence were thrown up, after a concert of water music, a great number of rockets. Then from boats on every side were discharged water rockets and fires of that kind; and then the wheels which were ranged along the rails of the terrace were played off; and the whole concluded with the illumination of a pavilion on the top of the slope, of two pyramids on each side, and of the whole length of the balustrade to the water. You can’t conceive a prettier sight; the garden filled with everybody of fashion…. the river was covered with boats and the shores and adjacent houses with crowds’.
Walpole Correspondence, xx. 56
The newspapers reported that at Richmond’s entertainment ‘there were upwards of 400 persons of distinction, and the fireworks consisted of 200 water mines, 200 air balloons, 200 fire trees, 5000 water rockets, 5000 sky rockets, 100 fire showers, 20 suns, 100 stars, and the whole concluded with a grand illumination which lasted till two o’clock’. [Old England, 20 May 1749]
The ostensible reason for Richmond’s festivities was his hosting a visit of the duke of Modena. Richmond, though, had other reasons to feel in a celebratory mood at this time. His second daughter Emily and her husband James Fitzgerald, 20th earl of Kildare (later duke of Leinster), were over from Ireland with their newborn son, Richmond’s grandson.
The duke was also joined by his eldest daughter Caroline, who in May 1744 had eloped with Henry Fox. Richmond and the duchess had disapproved of this match and banished the couple from their presence for several years. Fox, however, was a rapidly rising politician, a lord of the Treasury and an effective speaker in the Commons. He attained an important cabinet position when he was made secretary-at-war in 1746, during the War of the Austrian Succession.
Richmond, closely tied to the Whig ministry, could not shun such an important ministerial colleague for long, and Fox steadily rose in his estimation. Gradually Richmond was convinced that ‘by his merits and talents he is bound to make a name for himself in this country’.
In March 1748 Richmond sent a letter to his daughter and son-in-law seeking to reconcile with them and reintegrate them in the family. Caroline, Henry and their infant sons Stephen and Charles James now joined the Lennox clan as it gathered together to watch the fireworks from Richmond House.
That triumphal night, hosting foreign dukes and dignitaries, British royalty and peers at Richmond House, and exulting in his own united and growing family, was Richmond’s swansong. A little more than a year later he was dead, on 8 August 1750, aged only 49, followed a year later by the duchess. His successor, another Charles, took after him in his adherence to the Whigs and his displays of social extravagance. Thus Richmond House under the 3rd duke was the scene on 6 June 1763 of yet another ‘magnificent entertainment’, which caused Walpole to enthuse in much the same terms as he had done 14 years previously:
The ground rooms lighted… the houses covered and filled with people, the bridge, the garden full of masks, Whitehall crowded with spectators to see the dresses pass, and the multitude of heads on the river, who came to light by the splendour of the fire-wheels, composed the gayest, richest scene imaginable.
Walpole Correspondence, xxii. 148-9
CGDL
Additional reading:
Stella Tilyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832 (1994), esp. pp. 7-75
The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, esp. vols. 20, 22 (letters to Horace Mann)
Earl of March, A Duke and his Friends: The Life and Letters of the Second Duke of Richmond (1911), vol. 2
