Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira in the Peerage of Ireland (23 March 1731 – 11 April 1808) was a political hostess, literary patron and antiquarian. She was born at Donington Park, Leicestershire, England and died at Moira, County Down, Ireland. While declaring herself a "firm aristocrat", in Ireland she included in her circle men and women committed to the republican cause of the United Irishmen.
Born as Elizabeth Hastings, she was the daughter of Theophilus Hastings, 9th Earl of Huntingdon and Selina Shirley, founder of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion religious denomination. Elizabeth was 16th Baroness Botreaux and 15th Baroness Hungerford, inheriting the titles on the death of her brother Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon.
She was the third wife of John Rawdon, 1st Earl of Moira, in Dublin an opposition peer in the Ascendancy Parliament, and on his County Down estate an "improving landlord". In 1798, following the Battle of Ballynahinch, fought largely on the Moira demesne, the government suspected her of assisting rebels and their sympathisers escape summary justice.
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In 1752, Elizabeth married John Rawdon, who was Baron Rawdon of Moira in the Irish peerage, and gained the title Baroness Rowdon as his wife. In 1762 her husband was elevated to Earl of Moira, and she became Countess of Moira. In 1788, upon the death of her brother Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, she inherited several English baronies suo jure, becoming 16th Baroness Botreaux, 15th Baroness Hungerford, 13th Baroness de Moleyns, and 13th Baroness Hastings. (The earldom of Huntingdon went in the male line, to a distant cousin.)
Political hostess in Ireland
On her husband's County Down estate (Monalto in the parish of Moira) she professed to feeling herself "exiled": "I hate the North, I detest Ballynahinch" (the nearest market town). She preferred Moira House in Dublin, the Irish capital, where, having established her liberal credentials as a critic of the American War, she hosted the Whig opposition and the literary avant garde. Among her guests were Henry Grattan, leader of the Patriot party in the Irish Commons; Charles James Fox, his English counterpart; the radical MP William Todd Jones for whom voters had defied their landlord, the Moiras’ county neighbour, the Marquess of Hertford; and John Philpot Curran, star counsel in the cause of reform and Catholic emancipation. Writers included the young lyricist Thomas Moore, the Irish-language scholar and bardic antiquarian, Joseph Cooper Walker, and the English philosopher and novelist William Godwin.
A bluestocking set was her salon’s most distinctive feature. It included Charlotte Brooke whose pioneering collection of Irish-language poetry acknowledged Lady Moira's assistance, and the novelists Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). Particularly intimate were Margaret King (Lady Mount Cashell) and the poet and satirist Henrietta Battier. To these she proclaimed "I cannot submit to being controlled in my Way of Thinking".
In 1797, both King and Battier subscribed to the United Irish test. Their patroness, however, had been clear as to enlightenment limits of her politics. In a dinner invitation to Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell both, in 1792, fresh from their role in establishing the Belfast and Dublin societies of United Irishmen, Lady Moira wrote:As for making a democrat of me that, you must be persuaded, is a fruitless hope: for, to keep my Manche and Clarence arms, it is more probable I should turn Amazon and, having the blood of Hugh Capet in my veins, am, from nature, a firm aristocrat ... I am not a convertible, but a rational being. (Tone considered himself a friend of the family. Lady Moira's son Francis was godfather to Tone's fourth child, named in his honour Francis Rawdon Tone).
In the years before the French Revolution gave new currency to ideas of citizenship and universal rights, she had been content to pursue less contentious interests. In 1782 she investigated the remains of a bog body discovered on the husband's land and published her findings in 1785 in the periodical Archaeologia. It was the first documented scientific investigation of a such a find. She also sought to experiment in the cause of practical reform. She devised and demonstrated a method of weaving a cloth from mildewed flax which she hoped might clothe the poor at a cost well below that of imported English cottons.
Son and heir
After her death in 1808, Francis inherited his mother's baronies, taking the family name, in according with the will of a maternal uncle, of Rawdon-Hastings. His creation in 1783 as Baron Rawdon of Rawdon had already secured him a Westminster peerage. After attempting in the wake of Spencer Perceval's assassination in 1812 to a form ministry in favour of Catholic emancipation, he was appointed Governor-General of Bengal. In the tradition of his mother, from Calcutta he contributed generously to the leading Irish cultural association in Belfast, the Harp Society. He also continued her patronage of Thomas Moore.