The Musical Oeuvre of Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon (1740–99)

Abstract

Willoughby Bertie was born in Gainsborough on January 16th 1740. Gainsborough was a family seat on his mother's side. Why his birth should have occurred there, rather than at the paternal family seat at Rycote in Oxfordshire, is not known. In November 1745 a fire destroyed the Great House at Rycote; Willoughby's elder brother James, the heir to the title and the estate, died in the fire and Willoughby became the heir to the earldom. Otherwise very little is known. He attended Westminster School, proceeding to matriculation at Magdalen College Oxford in January 1759, and by the time he had taken his M.A. in January 1761 he had already become the 4th Earl (June 1760). He took his seat in the House of Lords in February 1761. Thereafter biographers have assumed he met up with the infamous radical politician John Wilkes in Geneva, where, in the words of his obituary, ‘he imbibed some of the democratic principles of the unsuccessful part of that republick’. In fact he was for some of the time in Rome, as verified by the Mémoires of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, from whom he commissioned a flute concerto. Willoughby's first known music teacher was the flautist and composer Karl Gaspard Weiß, who befriended Grétry and invited him to join them in Geneva. At about this time the exiled Wilkes also joined them in Geneva, and all three together with Boswell may also have met up at the Carnival in Naples in 1765. Like Grétry, Willoughby and Wilkes visited Voltaire at nearby Ferney, staying en route at the monastery of Grande-Chartreuse. Voltaire made reference to him as follows: ‘Pair d'Angleterre/Qui voyageait tout excédé d'ennui/Uniquement pour sortir de chez lui/Lequel avait pour charmer sa tristesse/Trois chiens courants, du punch, et sa maitresse’ (English peer, bored out of him mind, travelling simply to get away from home. To charm away his sadness he had three hunting dogs, punch, and his mistress). In an autobiographical poem the earl also talks disparagingly of his time in Holland. A letter from England to Wilkes in Paris, talking of his ‘tender engagement’, confirms that Willoughby was back in this country by the end of June 1767. In July 1768 he married the daughter of Admiral Sir Peter Warren, an Irish Member of Parliament and deemed the richest commoner in the country, owning a substantial amount of land on Manhattan Island (NY). In that year the earl also wrote to Grétry, by this time in Paris, terminating an allowance in return for flute compositions, a ‘proposition’ entered on in Rome, on the grounds that he was no longer playing the instrument, though more feasibly because the composer had not fulfilled his part of what was probably a very informal contract.