Early Life
Stuart was one of the six daughters of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (1713–1792), who at the time of her birth in 1757 was the closest friend of the future King George III. Her mother was Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute (1718–1794). Lord and Lady Bute also had five sons. Although Bute was Scottish, he spent much of his time at his grand London house in Berkeley Square. In 1762, he bought the estate of Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire.
George III came to the throne in 1760, and in 1762 his friend Bute became prime minister. As a statesman, Bute was massively unpopular with the English, for a variety of reasons. He was a Scot, a Royal favourite, and a handsome man who was lampooned for his vanity, and was constantly the butt of biting political satire, scandal, and gossip. This included frequent allegations of an affair with Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (1719–1772), the widow of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Bute's ministry fell in 1763, when his daughter Louisa was five years old, and Bute retired from public life to Luton Hoo and thereafter devoted himself to botany, horticulture and other country pursuits.
Stuart's mother, the Countess of Bute, was herself the daughter of the famous writer and traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762).
By the time she was ten, Stuart had begun to follow in the footsteps of her writer grandmother. She had begun a French novel and had also started planning a Roman play. She felt threatened by her brothers, who teased her about her learning.
With her mother, the young Lady Louisa Stuart attended the balls, routs and soirées of London society, but she also followed the literature of the day and corresponded with friends. She had great powers of observation from an early age, and a manuscript notebook survives in which she describes her circle.
Fanny Burney often met Lady Bute and her daughter Lady Louisa and described Lady Bute as "forbidding to strangers", but entertaining and lively among friends. Burney writes of mother and daughter on one occasion:
| “ | ...both in such high spirits themselves that they kept up all the conversation between them, with a vivacity, an acuteness, an archness, and an observation on men and manners so clear and sagacious. | ” |
On another occasion, in 1786, Burney found both Stuart and her mother at the house of Mary Delany after a return from the spa town of Bath and writes that they were:
| “ | …full fraught with anecdote and character, which they dealt out to their hearers with so much point and humour that we attended to them like a gratified audience of a public place. | ” |
Read more about this topic: Lady Louisa Stuart
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