Ann Ford - 4. in marriage

A marriage made in heaven and spiced by hell

In 1761, Ann's friend, Lady Elizabeth Thicknesse, became pregnant, and Ann broke off from performing in concerts in London to travel to Landguard Fort (near Ipswich). Her intention was just to be company for her during Lady Betty's confinement, and to help with their children.

On 28 March 1762, Lady Elizabeth died in childbirth. To help her widower, Philip Thicknesse, Ann aged to stay on as the children's governess.

On 27 September 1762, almost exactly six months later, Philip Thicknesse (at the age 43) and Ann Ford (who was by then 25) were married.

A miniature by Nathaniel Hone, believed to be Philip Thicknesse in 1757 - five years before he married Ann Ford

It's the sort of ending that Jane Austen would have been proud of.

As a wedding present, Thomas Gainsborough gave them his portrait of Ann Ford She’d be on public display no more.

It was treasured by her descendants, several of whom live in the US, and is now in the Cincinnati Art Museum. https://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/art/explore-the-collection?id=20842622

What happened after the Jane Austen ending?

Philip Thicknesse can’t have been an easy man to live with. He had a temper and could be consumed by righteous indignation that led him to behave erratically. Shortly after their marriage, he had to serve three months imprisonment in the King’s Bench prison after a quarrel got out of hand, and Ann moved into prison with him.

Thicknesse by Thomas Gainsborough in 1756 (sold by Christies for $132,000 in 2006.)

Later in life, he wrote his memoirs and two guides to Bath, which is how we know so much about him. Much of what he wrote reflects badly on him and today, his writings are important historical documents. They’re refreshing because they obviously haven’t been edited - the first draft is the last draft. They're full of rambling digressions, and are all the more revealing for that because, in those days before psychology was understood, Thicknesse unselfconsciously set down his perceptions and prejudices, often digressing into some tirade against someone who slighted him in some way. You can ride on his stream of thought.

What becomes evident is that Thicknesse was a self-confessed blackmailer, liar and cheat. He intrigued me so much that I wrote a novel loosely based on events in his memoirs: some of After Taking the Waters is in Thicknesses's own words.

He was the first owner of a house in the Royal Crescent (no. 28) and then a cottage on the hillside above the Crescent, which he called St Catherine’s Hermitage, named after a hermit in Montsarrat in northern Spain, whom he boasted that he’d bullied. Philip and Ann Thicknesse lived in Bathampton for a while, and even that was not without incident: he managed to provoke a riot. In fact, his life was a series of quarrels all of which he documents, and one of his victims was his old friend, Thomas Gainsborough, whom he claims he drove from Bath in 1774.

Even Thicknesse’s death was unconventional. This was in November 1792, with the French Revolution in full swing, and they had hardly left England for Italy before he was seized by a fit and died in their carriage. Ann Thicknesse was immediately arrested and, after being allowed to have him buried in the Protestant cemetery in Boulogne, she was confined in a convent. She ended up being imprisoned there for 18 months. Yet on the monument that she later had erected on his grave, she inscribed these telling words:

“Philip Thicknesse was a man of strict honour and integrity; few men had less failings, but fewer still possessed his eminent virtues…. No man ever was his enemy whose friendship was worth coveting. His literary talents were universally admired [except for] those who were stung by the severe but just censure of his poignant pen.” But she ends with “her gratitude and unbounded love to the memory of a man with whom she lived for thirty years in perfect felicity.”

So maybe their marriage was the epitome of a Jane Austen ending after all.