When Lady Anne Barnard first set eyes on Table Mountain in May 1797, she was — like generations of travellers after her — instantly transfixed. “What do I see,” she wrote in her journal. “Is it a vision of a poet’s fancy … or a painter’s dream?”
Lady Anne Lindsay (her maiden name) was born in 1750, the eldest child of a Scottish earl. She grew up to be a beautiful, talented (one of her ballads was set to music by Joseph Haydn) and fiercely independent woman. Her family, who had plenty of titles but not much cash, thought they could marry her off to swell the coffers. But despite the attention of numerous suitors, she said no every time.
Less than a month later she resolved to hike to the top, to go “where no white woman had ever been”. At 6am she set off, accompanied by a party of European men and a few slaves. Wearing her husband Andrew’s trousers rolled up to her ankles, and with rope tied over her shoes for traction, she trudged up “this immense mass of stone rising perpendicular on poor Mother Earth”.
Even today, with modern equipment and Ubers to the trailhead, the hike up Platteklip gorge is no doddle. But Barnard was not one to focus on the negatives: “To feel the pure air raising up … gave me a sort of unembodied feeling such as I conceive the Soul to have,” she wrote.
At the top, after painting a few (very accomplished) watercolours and collecting some plant specimens, she ate a hot supper of “at least a dozen snipes”. She also insisted on trying the fish curry the slaves were eating — something she vowed never to repeat due to its “unaccountable singularity”. Later that night, in a tent pitched at the summit, she and her husband “found a good bed on which two hearts reposed themselves which were truly grateful for all the blessings conferred on them”.
Disgruntled by Scotland’s insular social scene, she moved to London, where she got involved with high society, who loved her for being the life and soul of any party. She took numerous prominent lovers before falling heavily for William Windham, “a real bad egg who treated her terribly”, says Stephen Taylor, author of Defiance: The Life and Choices of Lady Anne Barnard.
In 1791, at the height of the revolution, she went to France to see what all the fuss was about (as you do!), before returning to London and continuing to turn down marriage proposals. By the time she finally married Andrew Barnard, an obscure soldier 12 years her junior, she was 43. Tired of being the centre of scandal in London, she used her influence to find a position for Andrew in far-off Cape Town.
Though she spent less than five years at the Cape, there’s little doubt it was the happiest time of her life. She and Andrew were deeply in love (that they had no children was “not for want of sex”, says Taylor) and she thrived in the simple setting of Cape Town where, then even more than now, nature was ever present.
In the early years, the Barnards spent a lot of time at Paradise, “a little government cottage at the bottom of the mountain [in Newlands] which Lord Macartney has given us to be rural in”. This was typical Lady Anne, says Taylor: “She loved throwing parties, but she also liked getting away from it all.”
In 1798 the Barnards embarked on a voyage into the interior, a 700-mile trip undertaken on ox wagons, that convinced her of the Cape’s amazing potential as a breadbasket — something which the powers that be would not see for decades.
On the trip she wrote and painted furiously, marvelling at the hospitality of the Dutch farmers and at the sincerity of a church service at the simple mission station in Genadendal: “I doubt much whether I should have entered St Peters at Rome … with a more awed impression of the deity and his presence than I did this little Church of a few feet Square, where the simple disciples of Christianity dressed in the skins of animals knew no purple or fine linen, no pride … no hypocrisy.”
She also ate flamingo, near Saldanha Bay, but Andrew dissuaded her from taking a living one as a pet.
In 1800 the Barnards built The Vineyard, the first English country house in South Africa and now a hotel in what were then the rural farmlands of Newlands. The Vineyard was — and is — gorgeous but, writes Taylor, it “would never take the place of Paradise. Returning to the rundown site of her bliss, Anne wandered the old garden, looking up to Table Mountain and digging up her bulbs, as if in hope that by transplanting them she might take her happiness with her.”
1800 was also the year in which Sir George Yonge arrived as governor of the Cape Colony. Yonge represented the worst of British aristocracy: he wasn’t just incompetent and gloriously entitled — he also had zero regard for human life or liberty.
Back then, it was a given that men of his ilk would get away with their crimes for decades, but Yonge had the misfortune of coinciding at the Cape with Lady Anne. She played a pivotal role in getting a man she nicknamed “The Lofty Twaddler” fired. She did this by writing to ex-boyfriends in high places who passed on her messages to the king.
When Yonge arrived and started doing up his official residence, Tuynhuys, at vast public expense, she wrote to Lord Dundas, a leading political figure in Britain: “Dare I say it? — our new Governor, I fear, is a very, very weak old soul … Sir George Yonge is for having every supposed improvement done at once, and I fear does not begin with the things most necessary, but with those most connected with his own domestic conveniency.”
And when Yonge built a wall around the Company’s Garden (in the process emptying the colony’s coffers) to create a private park, she was incandescent: “Had he torn the Magna Carta of the Cape into a thousand tatters he could not have put the Dutch into such an alarm. For 150 years they had enjoyed the privilege of walking under the shade of those oaks … and all ranks of people, the women particularly, were furious.”
He cemented his reputation among the Cape’s residents by levying a charge of £10 a year on every public billiard table, requiring citizens to pay £1 a year for the right to hunt and, perhaps most heinously, doubling the government tax on brandy. You don’t need to know much about Cape farmers to know how these measures were received.
The Lofty Twaddler’s involvement in a slave-smuggling syndicate was the final straw for Lady Anne. She wrote to Marquess Wellesley, the governor-general of India, to “lament the discreditable shade which some events have lately thrown over Sir George Yonge’s administration … What has been here loudly whispered … is that in some late transactions the hands of Government have not been so clean as they ought to have been.”
In describing the “smuggling transaction”, she said it was “generally believed that a douceur [sweetener] of no small magnitude” had been paid to Yonge. She put the figure at about R30m in today’s terms.
After Wellesley wrote to the king to say that “the imbecility and ignorance of Sir George Yonge entirely disqualify him for his situation”, the Lofty Twaddler was recalled — barely a year after he had taken up the post. He died in 1812, both morally and financially bankrupt.
When the Dutch retook the Cape in 1802, the Barnards were forced to return to the UK. The second stint of Dutch rule lasted less than five years, and in 1807 Andrew Barnard returned to the Cape for a temporary posting. A few months after reaching the Cape he died — aged only 47 and before Lady Anne could join him.
She was devastated, describing his death as a sorrow “not to be soon got the better of”. When she discovered that Andrew had had an illegitimate child by an enslaved woman, she did the unthinkable and transported the child, whose name was Christina, to London to raise as her own. Before her own death in 1825, Lady Anne secured Christina a good dowry that enabled her to marry into a prominent farming family in Wiltshire.
“What Anne Barnard did with Christina was most extraordinary for the time and very brave,” says Taylor. “But that was who she was. She was a woman for our time, a one-off … an aristocrat and a rebel, who wanted to live independently. Her values were so against the current of the day … I became, I have to confess, somewhat infatuated by her.”
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