Hon. Anne (Baston) Fane

British, 1758 - 1838

BiographyAnne Batson was born in 1758, only surviving child and heir of Mary (Michel) and Edward Buckley Batson (d.1810), partner in a London banking house in Lombard Street. On January 12, 1778, she married thirty-nine-year-old Henry Fane (1739-1802) of Fulbeck, Lincolnshire, second son of Elizabeth and Thomas Fane (d.1771), eighth Earl of Westmorland. He was a member of parliament for Lyme Regis (1772-1802) and had served since 1772 as "keeper of the king's private roads, gates and bridges, and conductor or guide of the king's person in all royal progresses." The first of Anne Fane's children was born ten months after her marriage, and thirteen followed over the next seventeen years. Together with maintenance of a large family, the enlarging and refurnishing of Fulbeck Hall (which the Fanes occupied from 1784) imposed a steady drain on their finances. Her husband's death on June 4, 1802 left Anne Fane in possession of Fulbeck and other properties, and her father's death in 1810 provided her with additional estates and the capital to carry out further improvements at Fulbeck. Correspondence with her children reveals her as a sensible, but scrupulously unobtrusive adviser and a staunch ally. These strengths were tested during several family crises, among them the courtship and marriage of her twenty-year-old daughter Harriet and the widowed and penniless politician Charles Arbuthnot (1767-1850); as Mrs. Arbuthnot, Harriet later achieved fame as a diarist and intimate friend of the Duke of Wellington. Fulbeck was the site of lively family parties during the thirty-six years of Anne Fane's widowhood. She also made frequent trips to London, various English spa towns, and the homes of her children, most of whom she survived. She died at the age of eighty at Fulbeck Hall on January 19, 1838.

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