Published in Windlesora 17 (1999)
© WLHG
The grave of Esther Sheridan, carved with words of extravagant love by her son, lies in Old Windsor churchyard, a tranquil resting place after a troubled life. The widow of the playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in her final years, set her heart on a quiet cottage in Windsor close to the Scottish doctor on whom she had come to depend. In the end, her wish came true but her time in this ‘flower garden’ in the country was pitifully short.
Esther Jane Ogle was Sheridan’s second wife and it seemed her fate always to be second best. The romance of Sheridan’s first marriage to the beautiful singer Elizabeth Linley – the elopement, the duels – is the one that is remembered. His courtship of the lively but eccentric Esther was less romantic, even his love letters were second-hand, many of them copied from those to his first wife.
Esther seems to have had no particular links with Windsor before her last years, but Sheridan had lived there for two short periods when he was a boy. His father Thomas, an actor, author and failed theatre manager, had left Dublin to seek a new life in England with his young family, and they spent two summers in Windsor in about 1760 and 1761. Sheridan’s sister, Alicia, remembered how the children once managed to enter the castle grounds and ran about enjoying themselves greatly. On another occasion, Alicia horrified her father by coming home with a fawn from the royal enclosure wrapped in her maid’s apron.
R B Sheridan “Girl, do you know you might be hanged for this!” Sheridan roared at the servant, who flew back to return it to the exact spot they had found it.
The Windsor sojourn had less pleasant consequences for Richard. It was here that his father met Robert Sumner, an Eton schoolmaster, who made such an impression on him that he packed the 11-year-old Richard off to Harrow when Sumner was appointed headmaster there. Those school years were among the most miserable of Sheridan’s life.
His return to the Windsor area marked a much happier period. In 1773, when he was 21 and newly married, he and Elizabeth spent their first idyllic months in a cottage in East Burnham where the young Mrs Sheridan was delighted with “her Nightingales, her great Elm tree and her Rooks”. It was in Slough, too, that Elizabeth was staying on the night of 19th January 1775, when Sheridan’s first play The Rivals opened at Covent Garden. Her relief at its failure, which meant she could resume her singing career, was short-lived for Sheridan drastically revised the play and recast it in time for its second triumphant performance ten days later.
On a sadder occasion in 1806, Sheridan attended the funeral of Elizabeth’s sister Jane, in Iver, and bitterly contrasted this quiet country burial with “the gaudy parade and show” of his first wife’s funeral fourteen years before, when crowds of curious spectators mobbed Wells Cathedral.
Sheridan had been a widower for three years when he married Esther, youngest daughter of the Rev. Newton Ogle, Dean of Winchester, and his wife Susannah. There is little doubt that this was a love affair as passionate in its own way as Sheridan’s first marriage, but the couple seemed mismatched from the start, not least the gap of 25 years. Hecca (Sheridan’s nickname, she called him Dan) was tall, ‘gypsy’ dark, green-eyed, and vivacious; she was also extravagant and thoughtless. She was a naive 19-year-old when they married, with a highly romanticised view of ‘everything that was great and good’ including, unfortunately, Sheridan, whose once handsome looks had been dissipated by heavy drinking and loose living.
Before their wedding took place (on 27th April 1795), Dean Ogle, well aware of Sheridan’s reputation, insisted on a proper financial settlement. Somehow the debt-ridden Sheridan managed to raise £12,000 to add to Hecca’s dowry of £8,000. The money was held in trust for her, and some £12,000 was used to buy Polesden Lacey, the estate near Leatherhead. Despite his dire financial troubles, Sheridan refused to touch the interest on the capital until it had doubled, and a small fortune had accrued by the time he died.
The romance did not last for their married life was made miserable by Sheridan’s debts and drinking. Moreover, his life was increasingly devoted to politics and public affairs, while Hecca was more interested in riding spirited horses than the theatre and politics. On at least two occasions Hecca suggested they separate, but he would have none of it. He loved her to the end, and their only child, Charles, born on 23rd January 1796, adored her.
Hecca’s sister Susannah told Sheridan’s biographer Thomas Moore that although her family admired his talents they used “to wish him dead … as they thought she might recover her health if she was rid of him”. She also told Moore that it was sad to compare the letters of the two wives, both starting with such love and devotion, which dwindled away because of his extravagance, his drinking and his infidelities. It is perhaps not surprising that both wives turned to lovers for consolation, Hecca to her cousin Charles Grey.
Another man, however, was assuming great importance in Hecca’s life. By 1812 she was showing the first symptoms of the cancer of the womb which killed her, and for the remaining five years of her life she leaned heavily on the advice and care of Dr Matthew Baillie, a physician born in Lanarkshire in 1761. He made his reputation with The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body, the first English text on pathology, published in 1795.
Short and slight, with a striking simplicity of dress and manners and broad Scottish accent, Dr Baillie was a popular man, renowned for his candour, his kindness to patients, and his clear explanation of their illnesses. He came to the attention of the royal family when he was called in to tend the Duke of Gloucester, and the family was so impressed with him he was recommended to King George III. In 1810 he was commanded by the king to attend on his youngest daughter Princess Amelia, and after her death he was appointed Physician Extraordinary to the king. At first the doctor found his new duties irksome, but he became devoted to the King and attended him until his death in Windsor Castle in January 1820.
As Dr Baillie’s duties at the castle became protracted, it grew obvious he would need a base nearer Windsor. In 1813 he took residence of Beech House, in Sunninghill, where he stayed when his presence was required at court. The doctor’s increasing absences to Windsor to care for the King must have concerned Hecca, and she conceived a plan to acquire a country cottage near Windsor to be near him at all times. In December 1815, Sheridan wrote to his wife: “You describe how eagerly you desire to recover your health, by Heaven no more than I do – my own condition I value as little to it. – But I must make you smile another time at your idea of this cottage and ‘Place’. Such a cottage as I believe never entered into the head of any human being before, and such a cottage as I am sure no human head ever enter’d into yet.”
He pointed out that as Dr Baillie spent little time at his Sunninghill home there was little point to her moving there to be nearer him. “However I will assist in accomplishing your scheme, rely on it, with all my means and all my veins because I see your heart is set on it, and under modification it may be the very best. Baillie and I jump’d together on the same idea – and you may be in truly lovely air, aye in a flower garden in a month – not a 100 yards out of Baillie’s road, and the Bishop passing the door!”
Where this cottage was, we cannot be sure, but at some time during 1816 or 1817 Hecca did acquire a home at Frogmore, on the road between Windsor and Old Windsor. At that time the Old Windsor road, a continuation of Park Street, crossed the Long Walk and wound between Frogmore and the Little Park, which was still surrounded by an old brick wall built in William III’s time. Along this road stood the renowned Hope Inn and several houses, one of which (according to T E Harwood) became Hecca’s country home. When the road to Old Windsor was diverted further south to its present position in 1851, the buildings on the old road, including the Hope Inn and Hecca’s home, were pulled down.
Despite her own ill health, Hecca remained loyal to Sheridan and stood by him devotedly until his death on 7th July 1816. The strain of the final months took its toll and she needed a long period of convalescence. She was not idle though. In October, she wrote to her sister-in-law Alicia LeFanu in Ireland: “Our dear Sheridan has left an incredible quantity of private papers… I have taken a small house in Grosvenor Place … and as soon as I have got through the above mentioned papers, I shall give my whole thoughts to a biographical account and publishing his works, it is a subject on which I am on fire, and I shall have no peace till I see something given to the public whether by the hand of one friend, or many friends, simple, clear, just and eloquent …”
Although she had optimistically told Alicia: “I have now every prospect of a recovery, and … I have been even quite free from every symptom of a distressing or dangerous nature”, she did not have long to live. During 1817, she moved to Frogmore with Charles in constant attendance. Dr Baillie must have been spending more time at Sunninghill that summer. As well as his duties with the King at Windsor, he was one of several doctors caring for Princess Charlotte during her pregnancy, so he was near at hand for Hecca’s last months. She died at home in Frogmore on Monday morning, 27th October, at the age of 41, an event briefly recorded in the Windsor Express but soon forgotten in the outpouring of national grief when the Princess died on 6th November after giving birth to a still-born son. Dr Baillie was among the many mourners at the state funeral held at Windsor five days later.
We do not know if he had attended the more modest funeral of Hecca in Old Windsor on 1st November, but it was here that she was laid to rest by her son in a churchyard renowned for the beauty of its setting, its fine yews and larches. Poor Charles had lost his father, mother and half brother Tom (who had died on 12th September at the Cape of Good Hope where he was Paymaster General) in little more than a year. Sheridan’s second son, his “dear Beastie”, had a tendency to idleness but, according Edward Jesse of Upton Court, he was “one of the most amiable, kind-hearted men I ever knew”, and showed great solicitude and generosity to Tom’s widow and children. After his parents’ death he inherited the Polesden estate and £40,000 which allowed him to live the life of a dilettante. He never married, but spent his time studying and writing about Greek mythology and history and promoting the cause of Greek independence.
Charles died at the age of 47 in November 1843 and was buried near his mother. The inscription on his grave, now obliterated, was recorded as: “In memory of/Charles Brinsley Sheridan second son of the Right Hon/ Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Esther Jane his second wife/born January xxiii mdccxcvi Died Novr mdccexLiii Hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place & when thou hearest forgive.” It is a modest memorial compared to Charles’ lavish tribute to his mother’s “unexampled resignation and heroism”. Hecca’s own assessment of herself was less grandiose: “I am not handsome, I am full of faults and very ignorant. I have a tolerable heart, and not a little mind, and I adore merit in others, and that is all I can say for myself.”
It seems an inadequate epitaph.
The inscription on the grave of Esther Sheridan (dated 1.11.1817) reads:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ESTHER JANE, DAUGHTER OF NEWTON OGLE D. D. DEAN OF WINCHESTER OF KIRKLEY IN NORTHUMBERLAND AND WIDOW OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN, AFTER ENDURING WITH UNEXAMPLED RESIGNATION AND HEROISM AN ILLNESS PROTRACTED DURING FIVE YEARS AND AGGRAVATED BY EVERY SPECIES OF PAIN AND SELF DENIAL SHE WAS RELEASED ON THE 27TH DAY OF OCTOBER 1817 AGD 41 YEARS ADMIRED IN SOCIETY AND ADORED IN DOMESTIC LIFE, IT WAS RESERVED FOR THE MORE TRYING HOURS OF SOLITUDE AND SUFFERING TO CALL FORTH THE ENERGIES OF A MIND IN WHICH THE UTMOST FEMININE SENSIBILITY WAS SUPPORTED BY A MORE THAN MANLY FORTITUDE THIS STONE IS ERECTED AS A FEEBLE TRIBUTE OF REGRET AND GRATITUDE BY AN ONLY SON THE OBJECT OF HER ARDENT AND UNVARYING LOVE, OF UNBOUNDED AND INVALUABLE BENEFITS, AND WHO IN LOSING THE BEST OF PARENTS, THE DEAREST OF FRIENDS,
THE MOST DELIGHTFUL OF COMPANIONS, WAS SUSTAINED BY THE HUMBLE HOPE THAT HER LENGTHENED TRIALS HAD AT LENGTH OBTAINED A LASTING RECOMPENSE
Alison Haymonds
Selected bibliography:
BUTLER, EM Sheridan: a ghost story Constable & Co (1931)
KELLY, LINDA Richard Brinsley Sheridan Sinclair-Stevenson (1997)
PRICE, CECIL (ed.) The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan Oxford University Press (1966)
RAE, W. FRASER Sheridan Richard Bentley (1896)
SICHEL, WALTER Sheridan Constable & Co (1909)
WARDROP, JAMES The Works of Matthew Baillie MD to which is prefixed an account
of his life collected from authentic sources Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green (1825)
HARWOOD, TE Windsor Old and New (1929)
HUGHES, G E A History of Windsor Forest, Sunninghill and the Great Park Ballantyne, Hanson & Co (1890)
JESSE, EDWARD Favourite Haunts and Rural Studies including visits to spots of interest in the vicinity of Windsor and Eton John Murray (1847)
TIGHE, R R and DAVIS, J E Annals of Windsor Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans,
and Roberts (1858)
Windsor Local History Group 