A Ride in a Sedan
From a house in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, the beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the other fair and high-born women who canvassed for Charles James Fox, used to watch the humours of the Westminster election. Pitt writes to Wilberforce on the 8th of April, 1784, “Westminster goes on well, in spite of the Duchess of Devonshire, and the other women of the people; but when the poll will close is uncertain.” Hannah More, as appears from the date of her letters, resided at one period in Henrietta Street, and in one of them we find an amusing account of an adventure which she met with during the Westminster election. To one of her sisters she writes:—“I had like to have got into a fine scrape the other night. I was going to pass the other evening at Mrs. Coles’s, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I went in a chair. They carried me through Covent Garden. A number of people, as I went along, desired the man not to go through the garden, as there were an hundred armed men, who suspected every chairman belonged to Brookes’s, and would fall upon us. In spite of my entreaties the men would have persisted, but a stranger, out of humanity, made them set me down, and the shrieks of the wounded, for there was a terrible battle, intimidated the chairmen, who were at last prevailed upon to carry me another way. A vast number of people followed me, crying out, ‘It is Mrs. Fox: none but Mr. Fox’s wife would dare to come into Covent Garden in a chair; she is going to canvass in the dark!’ Though not a little frightened, I laughed heartily at this, but shall stir out no more in a chair for some time.”