Sale of historic letters in archive fetches 850,000 pounds: Marianne Macdonald reports on the break-up of an important correspondence collection

ONE of Britain's most important private archives, containing royal letters detailing the madness of George III, Lord Byron's account of his pursuit by Lady Caroline Lamb, and a grovelling note of thanks from George Washington, was broken up yesterday.

The collection, from Bowood House in Wiltshire, was sold by the Earl of Shelburne to help pay for the upkeep of the house. The sale raised pounds 853,230 - more than pounds 150,000 above the guide price suggested by Christie's, the London auctioneers.

The sale of the letters, sent to four previous generations of the earls of Shelburne and the marquises of Lansdowne, included correspondence from many important figures of the 18th and 19th centuries - George III, John Wesley, Sir Stamford Raffles, Jeremy Bentham, Napoleon and Nelson.

The most important were 140 letters from George III to his prime minister, the second Earl of Shelburne, which detail the events that established the US's independence from Britain.

The archive included the private papers of Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, whose daughter married into the family. She received letters from, among others, Lord Byron - ungallantly relating his attempts to avoid Lady Caroline Lamb after their affair - and from a miserable Lady Caroline herself, who scandalised society by trying to elope with the poet and attempting to stab herself in public after a quarrel with him.

One letter from Byron in August 1812, which sold for pounds 4,830, wryly comments on an invitation from Lady Caroline's sister-in- law, apparently issued in an attempt to separate the two. 'I am well aware that it is not the exquisite pleasure of seeing me, but of preventing me from seeing that induces her kind request,' he notes.

In another from April 1816, sold for the same amount, Byron implies in tongue-tied prose that he is keen on Miss Elphinstone. 'A more useless friend you could not have - but still a very sincere and by no means a new one - although from circumstances you never knew - (nor would it have pleased you to know) - how much,' the poet confides.

Earlier letters from Lady Caroline in 1813 were full of misery about Lord Byron. 'I have suffered as much as it is possible for a human Being to suffer - & I hope by this means in part atoned for my faults,' Lady Caroline writes.

Miss Elphinstone also corresponded with Princess Charlotte, only child of George IV, during the first six years of the Regency. The series of 575 letters sold for pounds 20,700. In one, dated June 1811, she observes of her mad grandfather: 'The dear little King is treated very kindly,' but panics 10 days later: 'For Heaven's sake dont (sic) say I have written anything about the King as they would not like it to be known, & I overheard it.'

The papers that went under the hammer ranged from discussion of unhappy love affairs to household receipts and papers relating to affairs of state.

A letter from Adam Smith, the philosopher who undertook the care of the first Earl of Shelburne's younger son Thomas at Glasgow College, sold for pounds 5,750. 'Mr Fitzmaurice had the night before last a very slight attack of his fever which he was relieved from by a gentle sweat; & last night he had a bleeding at the nose which Dr Black regards as a perfect crisis,' he told the anxious father in March 1760.

In a different vein, Lord Henry Petty, later third Marquis of Lansdowne, received a playful note from Matthew Gregory Lewis, author of the gothic novel The Monk, demanding a tax on works of the imagination so that bad writers would be priced out of the market: 'The cause of real Literature would gain by the suppression of so much fanciful trash.' The novelist also had a peculiar dislike of Kidderminster, according to his two letters, which sold for pounds 2,070: 'I do warn you Lord Henry Petty, in order that you may warn all other Lord Henry Petties even unto the fiftieth generation, not to suffer any human considerations, neither interest, flattery, nor force, to entree you into the limbo of Kidderminster . . .'

In contrast, George Washington, the first President of the United States, was respectful to the point of grovelling when he wrote in November 1791 to the second Earl of Shelburne, who was partly responsible for the recognition of American independence: 'I pray your Lordship to be assured of the great respect and consideration with which I have the honour to be Your Lordship's most obedient and most humble servant,' he begged, in a letter that was bought for pounds 34,500.

Nine years earlier, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, expressed sentiments to the same earl which will find many sympathisers today: '(If the militia are allowed to train on Sundays) the Churches will be emptier than they are already,' he lamented.

(Photograph omitted)