A goddaughter had her first child on St. Stephen’s Day, known in the UK as Boxing Day, this year. Mother and daughter are both well and the chosen names are Meredith Grace Albinia.
At first I thought this was a typo for Albania and then I found that it is the name of a small town in Tuscany. Albinia has been a family name on her mother’s side for some generations, possibly since one of them went on honeymoon to Tuscany.
Further digging yielded this information about another Albinia. I cannot improve on what the Ashmolean Museum website says, so forgive me for wielding my electronic scissors:
“Lady Albinia Hobart (1737/8-1816) was a fun-loving and wealthy heiress. The daughter of Lord Vere Bertie, she married George Hobart at the age of nineteen, eventually inheriting the title of Countess of Buckingham in 1793. In the meantime, while her husband chased failed careers in diplomacy, politics, opera management and the army, as well as various mistresses, Albinia had babies – five sons and four daughters – and chased celebrity.
At her rococo house in Richmond (based on the king of Prussia’s summer palace), she hosted legendary parties for crowds of fashionable London society. Her guests were entertained by theatrical and musical performances starring Albinia and her daughters in costume. Her fame grew as she showed off expensive clothes at public assemblies, private parties, and in flattering portraits. Even her vices were fashionable. As a mania for high-stakes gambling spread across England in the 1780s and 1790s, Albinia became notorious for betting huge sums on card games – a hobby she had in common with other rich notables such as Charles James Fox and Georgiana Cavendish. Since she was excluded from the all-male clubs where the really big-money games usually took place, she began running her own illegal high-stakes card table in her home. Despite being fined, threatened with the pillory, and attacked by a popular press scandalised by what they saw as her brazen law-breaking, lack of propriety, and greed, Albinia seems to have been entirely unrepentant. Nevertheless, the only things she ever managed to gain from these activities were enormous debts.
Although not terribly interested in politics for its own sake, Albinia had friends and relations in high places, including her in-law Lord North, the former prime minister. When in 1784 her relative Sir Cecil Wray stood for election in Westminster (one of the few in the country which actually required candidates to win popular votes as well as bribe and bully the electors), she publicly campaigned for him, against the majority of her friends who were vocal supporters of the opposition candidate, Fox. The newspapers loved the scandalous idea of aristocratic ladies taking part in the grubby chaos of a parliamentary election, and especially made the most of Albinia’s supposed rivalry with the younger Cavendish, Fox’s star cheerleader.
For puritanical commentators like James Gillray, Albinia was a symbol of everything wrong with modern Britain – self-indulgent, extravagant and badly behaved. Most horrifying of all, she was a middle-aged woman (she had reached the advanced age of 47 by the time of the Westminster election) who refused to surrender the limelight to her daughters. As she got older and fatter, and continued to wear the latest and most eye-catching outfits, Gillray seems to have found her physical appearance increasingly caricatureable. In pictures like ‘A Sphere, Projecting Against a Plane’, he simply makes fun of her distinctive round body and its contrast to the ultra-thin “Plane” of William Pitt. Indeed, Gillray portrayed her so often and so nastily that today she is remembered almost entirely as a victim – though perhaps a gloriously unabashed one – of his satires.”
The new Albinia looks nothing like her 17th century namesake and is certainly not as large – 7.12 lbs; a good size for a baby and a grilse. I am so happy for her parents and their families and look forward to being introduced to the latest Albinia.
