Harriet: The Duchess who could have been Prime Minister

Walk into the dining room at Dunrobin Castle and you will find Harriet, the second Duchess of Sutherland, looking down from the full-length portrait on the far wall. She appears friendly yet formidable, although with little in the room to explain who she was, visitors could easily give her a passing glance and continue towards the next display of aristocratic possessions. I think that is a shame, because the woman in the painting belonged to the inner circle of Queen Victoria and exercised a degree of political influence that makes her considerably more interesting than her quiet place on the dining-room wall might suggest.

Harriet’s appointment as Mistress of the Robes placed her at the head of Victoria’s female household, where she became a trusted friend of the young Queen as well as a senior member of her court. To appreciate how much that relationship mattered, consider the difficulty Sir Robert Peel encountered while trying to form a government in 1839. His proposed changes to the Queen’s Whig-connected household met with Victoria’s refusal, helping bring his attempt to an end in what became known as the Bedchamber Crisis. Women who could neither vote nor sit in Parliament were nevertheless close enough to the monarch for their presence to become a matter upon which the formation of a government depended.

Beyond the palace, Harriet could draw politicians, writers and reformers into Stafford House, the family’s enormous London residence, using her position to support causes ranging from Italian nationalism to the abolition of slavery. She corresponded extensively with William Gladstone and helped organise the Stafford House Address, through which more than half a million British women appealed to American women to oppose slavery. Yet speaking about suffering overseas left her open to questions about the Sutherland estates, where displacement and poverty had accompanied the Highland Clearances. That uncomfortable comparison belongs within her story, because recognising the influence she exercised does not require us to overlook the circumstances from which her family’s wealth and authority came.

At Dunrobin, that wealth helped Harriet and her husband transform an ancient fortified residence into the castle we recognise today, leaving us surrounded by the scale of their ambitions even if we know little about the people behind them. Victoria’s friendship with Harriet endured, and after the Duchess’s death the Queen personally laid the foundation stone of her memorial within the estate. Both the monument and the portrait deserve more attention than they generally receive, particularly if we want to understand Dunrobin as something beyond an impressive collection of rooms. Before leaving the dining room, pause to consider a woman who helped shape political debate through the avenues available to her, and how formidable she might have been had she been able to pursue political leadership in her own right.

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