georgian coloured engraving

‘Miss Foot-it, in the King’s Bench Battery!! Peppering a Haineous Nincompoop’Etching with hand colouring 1824. This is basically the Georgian version of the Daily Mail’s side bar of shame and Miss Coote’s life reads like the racy novel Jane Austen never wrote!Maria Stanhope (neé Foote), later Countess of Harrington during her career as a noted actor, was made a promise of marriage by Joseph ‘Pea Green’ Hayne, which was not kept. Although she accepted the offer, it was retracted, and after a ‘breach of promise’ action in the courts, she was awarded £3,000 damages. These proceedings gave rise to pamphlet warfare, through which Miss Foote retained a measure of public sympathy. Notwithstanding her legal success, Maria Foote’s predicament as a single woman was profoundly precarious: she had a secret liaison with Colonel William Fitzhardinge Berkeley (a notorious rake), eldest son of the Earl of Berkeley, by whom she had two children, and who eventually refused to marry her. Luckily, in early 1823, while pregnant with her second child, she made the acquaintance of a young man about town, Joseph Hayne, who had seen her on stage and had been overcome with passion for her. When Hayne made a firm offer of marriage, Colonel Berkeley took it upon himself to tell Hayne about the two children. On this, Maria wrote to Hayne releasing him from his obligations; but when they later met, they renewed their relationship, and subsequently a written offer of marriage was made, together with a promise of a £40,000 settlement, which Hayne then retracted! She sued for breach of promise in the court of King’s Bench; during the trial she was accused of being little different to a prostitute, practised in the arts of seduction, Hayne’s barrister also referring to her ‘witchery’. On retiring for 15 minutes, the jury awarded her damages of £3,000. Hurrah!

The work has been professionally conserved.

AU$695