TENNANT OF BALFLUIG, Lady Harriot (Lady Harriot PLEYDELL-BOUVERIE) 1935-2024
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She was d of 7th Earl of RADNOR 1895-1968 and Helena Olivia 1902-85 d of Charles Robert Whorwood ADEANE 1863-1943 scion of that gentry family of Babraham and Madeline Pamela Constance Blanche 1869-1941 d of Hon Percy Scawen WYNDHAM 1835-1911 (s of 1st Baron LECONFIELD 1787-1869 and gs of 3rd Earl of EGREMONT 1751-1837, etc) and Madeline Caroline Frances Eden 1835-1920 d of Sir Guy CAMPBELL 1st Bt 1786-1849 and Pamela 1795-1869 d of Lord Edward FITZGERALD 1763-98 (s of 1st Duke of LEINSTER 1722-73, gs of 2nd Duke of RICHMOND 1701-50 who was gs of King CHARLES II, etc etc) and his w and 5th cousin once removed (both desc. from King HENRY IV of France 1553-1610) Stephanie Caroline Anne (Pamela) SIMS ?1776-1831 actually illegt d of Philippe Egalité Duc D’ORLEANS 1747-93 (3xgt gs of King LOUIS XIII of France 1601-43) by (Caroline) Stéphanie Félicité Brulart Comtesse de Genlis (née DU CREST) 1746–1830. She m 1965 Mark Iain TENNANT OF BALFLUIG 1932-2020 s of Major John TENNANT 1899-1967 (gs of Sir Charles Clow TENNANT 1st Bt 1823-1906 who was f of 1st Baron GLENCONNER 1859-1920) and his 1st w Hon Antonia Mary Roby BENSON 1903-77 d of 1st Baron CHARNWOOD 1864-1945 and Dorothea Mary Roby THORPE 1876-1942, and had a son and a dau as above.
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Olivier
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I have the following note about Pamela/Stephanie Syms in my files:
[illegitimate,ex matre Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St.Aubin "Css de Genlis":this is not accepted in Valynseele(1962),vGérard,pp.227 228,n14 >H&G 1986:64,1989:257 258] Stéphanie Syms +1831 x1 1792 Lord Edward Fitzgerald *** x2 c 1810 Joseph Pitcairn; the editors of the Correspondence of Lady Sarah Lennox note that Mme de Genlis herself said that Pamela was dau of a Mr Seymour and of his wife, Mary Sims
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https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Fitzgerald,_Pamela
FITZGERALD, PAMELA (1776?–1831), wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald [q. v.], was described in her marriage contract of 1792 as Anne Stephanie Caroline Sims, daughter of Guillaume de Brixey and Mary Sims, as a native of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, and as about nineteen years of age. Though she has generally been regarded as the daughter of Madame de Genlis by the Duke of Orleans (Égalité), this statement of her Newfoundland birth is confirmed by information now obtained from Fogo. Henry Sims, a respectable planter who died there in 1886, at the age of eighty-two, believed Pamela to have been his cousin. Mr. James Fitzgerald, the present magistrate of Fogo, on arriving in the island in 1834, made the acquaintance of Sims, who informed him that his grandfather, an Englishman living at Fogo in the latter part of last century, had a daughter Mary, that she was delivered of a child at Gander Bay, and in the following summer sailed with her infant for Bristol, in a vessel commanded by a Frenchman named Brixey, and that the Simses heard nothing more of mother or child until they learned from Moore's book that Lord E. Fitzgerald married a Nancy Sims from Fogo. Newfoundland had no parish registers at that date, but Henry Sims's story may be true, though there is the bare possibility of the death of the child in infancy, and of the transfer of her pedigree to a second child placed under Mary's charge. It may be conjectured that when in 1782 she was sent over by Forth, ex-secretary to the British embassy at Paris, to be brought up with the Orleans children, and familiarise them with English, the object was to divert attention from the arrival a little later of a child known as Fortunée Elizabeth Hermine de Compton (afterwards Madame Collard), who died in 1822 at Villers Hélon. Hermine, who, unlike Pamela, was recognised by the Orleans family in after life as a quasi-relative, was in all probability Madame de Genlis's daughter by Égalité, and was perhaps born at Spa in 1776. In a scene between Madame de Genlis and Pamela, witnessed by the latter's daughter, there was moreover a positive disclaimer of maternity (Journal of Mary Frampton, letter of Lady Louisa Howard to Mrs. Mundy,1876). Unveracious, therefore, though the lady was, her story may be credited that Forth casually saw the child at Christchurch, that he sent Orleans 'the handsomest filly and the prettiest little girl in England,' that, enraptured by the girl's beauty and talents, she had her conditionally baptised, conferring on her her own name, Stéphanie, and the pet name, Pamela, and that to guard against extortion by the mother, she paid the latter in 1786 twenty-four guineas for a legal renunciation of all claims. The belief of the Fitzgerald family, in deference to which Moore retracted his original acceptance of the Orleans-Genlis parentage, and Louis-Philippe's opposite conduct to his two old playmates, strengthen this conclusion. Against it must be set Pamela's alleged likeness to the Orleans family ; the rumour of 1785 (see Grimm, Correspondence), that Monsieur de Genlis had acknowledged both Pamela and Hermine as his own children, sent away in infancy to test the difference between children brought up with and without knowledge of their status ; Égalité's settlement on Pamela about 1791 of fifteen hundred francs, increased on her marriage to six thousand francs ; and Madame de Genlis's statement in her memoirs (1825), assigning the paternity to a legendary Seymour of good family, who married a woman of low birth named Sims, took her to Newfoundland, and there died, whereupon widow and child returned to England. Of winning manners, though devoid of application or reflection, Pamela was applauded by the mob on their way to Versailles (Madame de Genlis had sent her out, with grooms in Orleans livery, to ride through the crowd), was the ornament of her adoptive mother's political receptions, and went with her to England in 1791, when Sheridan is said to have offered her marriage, and been accepted, he being struck by her resemblance to his late wife. To that resemblance is also attributed her conquest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who, objecting to 'blue stockings,' had refused to meet the Genlis party in England, but saw Pamela at a Paris theatre, was immediately introduced to her, was invited to dinner next day, joined the party on the road, on their expulsion from Paris as émigrees, accompanied them to Tournai, and there married her, 27 Dec. 1792. The Tournai register, which, like the marriage contract, overstates her age by at least three years, gives her father's name as Guillaume Berkley, and London as her birthplace, but this may be imputed to the carelessness of the officiating priest. The future Louis-Philippe was present at the ceremony. Arrived at Dublin, Pamela indulged her passion for dancing, but failed to win popularity. Meanwhile the Paris revolutionists, misled by a report of her travelling in Switzerland with her adoptive mother, issued a warrant against her. She gave birth to a son in Ireland, and in 1796 her second child, Pamela, was born at Hamburg. Madame de Genlis, then staying there, represents herself as remonstrating against Lord Edward's political vehemence, and Pamela as replying that she avoided discussing politics with him for obvious reasons. Their domestic happiness seems to have been unalloyed. Her third child was born while her husband was in concealment and paying her secret visits. On his arrest she was ordered to quit Ireland, and after his death repaired to Hamburg, whence she had had an invitation from her old companion, Henriette de Sercey, Madame de Genlis' niece. Henriette had married a Hamburg merchant, Mathiesson, and Pamela hoped there to be able to recover the Orleans annuity. Her children seem to have stayed behind. She shortly afterwards married Pitcairn, the American consul at Hamburg, by whom she had a daughter (who was married and living at New York in 1835), but a separation soon ensued. She is next heard of as encountering, about 1812, in a Dover hotel, Casimir, another of Madame de Genlis's adopted children, and as giving her English creditors the slip by accompanying him to Paris. Resuming the name of Fitzgerald, she first lived at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, next lodged with Auber, the composer's father, and then went to Montauban to lodge with the Due de la Force, commandant of Tarn-et-Garonne. There she is said to have had the freak of acting as a shepherdess in the costume of Fontenelle's pastoral heroines. She appears to have paid at least one visit to Paris about 1820, when Madame de Genlis forgave her abrupt departure from Paris and cessation of correspondence. At this period her home was at Toulouse. After the revolution of 1830 she revisited Paris, apparently in the hope of royal favour, but received little notice, and died eleven months after her adoptive mother, in November 1831, in a small hotel in the rue Richepance. Though enjoying a pension of at least ten thousand francs, she is said to have left nothing, so that Louis-Philippe had to be applied to — probably by Talleyrand, who attended it — to provide a proper funeral at Montmartre. In 1880, a legal informality necessitating the removal of her remains, they were interred by her grand-children at Thames Ditton.
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E X T R A C T
Lady Harriot Tennant obituary: charity trustee who declined to be a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth
Unassuming fundraiser who helped to renovate a burnt-out Scottish castle
When Harriot Tennant was appointed lady-in-waiting to Lady Dalhousie, the wife of one of the last governor-generals of Rhodesia, she was informed that as a matter of protocol she would have to curtsy at her every appearance. This she succeeded in doing until one day, when taking a break in the swimming pool at Government House in Salisbury (now Harare), her employer unexpectedly loomed into view over her breaststroke.
Tennant’s father was a friend of the governor-general, the 16th Earl of Dalhousie, but had soon found that even in the early 1960s formalities still had to be rigidly observed. Attempting to obey instructions from Margaret Dalhousie, Harriot merely sank beneath the water. She was to write in her diary that she improved this art: “Getting better at the curtsies though cannot ever remember to offer cigarettes, which is serious as everyone seems to chain-smoke…
… Such a role proved not to be for her: after 11 months’ service and a few weeks spent travelling in Africa she returned to England earlier than she had intended.
Nevertheless, Tennant was sounded out by Buckingham Palace to become a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth when in middle age but turned this down on the basis that it would be disruptive to her family life…
One responsibility she had to contend with at the Royal College of Art was looking after Princess Margaret during an exhibition of the life and work of Prince Albert. There was no cocktail reception featured in the invitation but nonetheless whisky was requested. A bottle was eventually found but not a suitable glass. In desperation Tennant spotted a small vase, emptied the flowers out of sight and filled it with the favourite royal tipple. There was no dissension.
Born Lady Harriot Pleydell-Bouverie in 1935, Tennant was the daughter of the 7th Earl of Radnor, whose seat was Longford Castle in Wiltshire. Her mother, Helena, left her father when she was two years old and she was evacuated with her nanny to Long Island in the United States when she was four [returning] to England [aged 8] in 1943…
… she married in 1965. Her husband, Mark Tennant, had already bought for £2,500 the ruined 16th-century Balfluig Castle in Aberdeenshire, which had been burnt down by the Marquess of Montrose in 1645 during the Civil War. There were distinctly fewer comforts than she was accustomed to at the castle where she had grown up. No one had lived within it for 200 years. The remnants of the great hall had become a roost for chickens, kept there by the local farmer…
…Tennant’s husband, a barrister who became a judge, predeceased her in 2020. She is survived by their children, Sophia, a musician, and Lysander, who is finance director for the energy firm BasePower.
Her name and title occasionally caused some confusion. The trustees of St Martin-in-the-Fields Almshouse were told by their chairman that what they took to be “a lady tenant” was joining their body. The new trustee was too modest to disabuse them of this misconception.
Lady Harriot Tennant MBE, lady-in-waiting, was born on December 18, 1935. She died on January 5, 2024, aged 88
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lady-harriot-tennant-3vxzs7gmz