Chapter 5: Fashionable heyday

As for Fagg’s tenants, first we must deal with a tantalising episode dating from 1822, when Exmouth Cottage was brand new. In September 2020, Dr Nicole Willson of the University of Central Lancashire visited Hastings, having discovered a letter showing that Marie-Louise Christophe, the exiled Queen of Haiti, stayed at Exmouth Cottage in 1822, a fact that was subsequently commemorated by a blue plaque erected in 2022. I showed her the pages of the third edition of Powell’s Hastings Guide, illustrating that Exmouth Cottage was for rent at that point and that it had two sitting rooms and five beds, and she in return showed me the actual letter, which turns out not to be from the queen but from her daughter, Athénaire, and was written to Mrs Clarkson, wife of the anti-slavery campaigner, Thomas Clarkson.34 It is indeed addressed from ‘Exmouth Cottage, West Hill, Hastings’, and is dated 26 October 1822, by which time the party had evidently been staying there for some time, during which her mother’s health had greatly improved. Hastings, she writes, ‘is just now the rival of Spa’.

Athénaire also refers to ‘les demoiselles Thornton’ as staying for several weeks and how she and her mother and sister ‘have been enjoying the pleasure of their company’. It immediately occurred to me that these Thornton sisters (of whom there could have been anything up to six) might have been staying at Exmouth House, which would have been big enough for a larger party (as we have seen, Exmouth House is described in the guidebooks as having eight beds; Exmouth Cottage, which had only five, would have been almost filled by the queen, Athénaire and her sister, Améthisse, and their devoted maid servant, Zephyrine, who had come with them from Haiti). The Thornton sisters are well known because the eldest, Marianne, was the subject of a biography by E.M. Forster, who also writes about Sir Robert Inglis, who adopted the Thornton children when they were orphaned. Nicole Willson subsequently put me onto a touching interview with the queen in Pisa (where she was by then living) recorded by Sir Robert in his diary in 1840, which recalls the queen’s time in Hastings; by then, Athénaire had died.35 The Thorntons are very much the kind of smart people who would have rented Exmouth House and it would make sense for Matthew Fagg to rent out the two properties together. But that may be wishful thinking!

34 Printed (with slight inaccuracies) in E.L. Griggs and C.H. Prator (eds), Henry Christophe & Thomas Clarkson: A Correspondence (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1952), p. 247.

35 E.M. Forster, Marianne Thornton 1797-1887. A Domestic Biography (London, 1956); Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Journal of Sir R.H. Inglis, 1840, CCA-U210/4/10, 6 volumes (transcript kindly provided by Nicole Willson).