Although the Irish Huguenot writer Melesina Trench has been memorialised on a marble plaque on the south wall of Winchester Cathedral’s North Transept for nearly two hundred years, she only recently returned to popular notice when a new female peregrine arrived by the transept’s rose window in early spring this year. The bird was named “Mel” after her and so the focus has turned to this largely forgotten writer.
Both the peregrine and the author have shown their talons, with Melissa Trench, also known as Melissa Chevenix St George Trench, showing them in a scathing literary form about the great naval hero Horatio Nelson and his lover Emma Hamilton.
She was born in Dublin on 22 March 1768, as the only child of the Rev Philip and Mary Chenevix. Her wealthy parents were both dead by her fourth birthday and she was then raised by family. From the age of thirteen onwards, Melissa was an independent heiress and able to live life on her own terms. Always a bright and good-looking young woman, she was married at eighteen to Colonel Richard St George, an Irish officer, in October 1786.
Two children were born to the marriage, but Richard St George died of consumption in 1790 which left Melesina a widow at the age of twenty-one. Although one writer claimed she was “alone in the world”, her striking good looks were recorded in portraits by George Romney, Hugh Douglas Hamilton and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The best-known image of her is a later engraving of Romney’s 1792 portrait which shows a fashionably dressed young woman, “with beautiful black eyes and … [a] fascinating smile”.
For the next decade, she travelled extensively. It was her travels in Germany starting in 1799 which brought her in contact with many famous and powerful people that turned her into a writer and diarist for which she is best known, although her Journal Kept During A Visit to Germany in 1799, 1800 was not published until 1861.
The section of the diary in which she exhibits her peregrine-like literary talons is a very uncharitable description of Lady Emma Hamilton and a drunken Lord Horatio Nelson whom she met in Dresden. Referring to Lady Hamilton’s attempts to befriend her, Melesina commented that “she does not gain upon me. I think her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped with manners of her first situation [as a courtesan]”. Nelson who is a “little man, without any dignity” has a vanity “so undisguised that it wears the form of frankness”. The great admiral, she wrote, was in the possession of Lady Hamilton “and he is a willing captive, the most submissive and devoted I have seen”.
Having dined with the couple, Melesina found they were besotted with each other and added that Emma Hamilton was “bold, forward, coarse, assuming, and vain”. Adding brutally that “her figure is colossal, but, excepting her feet, which are hideous, well shaped. Her bones are large and she is exceedingly embonpoint …”
This critique of Emma Hamilton has not met with universal praise over time. One of Emma’s biographers, Mollie Hardwick, has described Melesina Trench as “a prig of the first degree” for what some consider to be “bitingly malicious” descriptions. Ironically portraits of both Melesina Trench and Emma Hamilton were painted by the same artist George Romney.
In 1803, she married again, this time in Paris to Richard Trench, a younger lawyer. Trench was classically good-looking and was said to have resembled the Apollo Belvedere”. (The Apollo Belvedere is a famous Roman marble statue of a naked god Apollo which is now at the Vatican in Rome). After being interned in France for several years during the Napoleonic wars, the Trenches returned to England and Ireland before setting up home at Bursledon, Hampshire in a house which they renamed Elm Lodge.
Among their guests in 1815 was the Duke of Wellington, the recent victor at Waterloo, which demonstrated the Trench’s elevated position in society. Melesina was not, however, as enthusiastic about her local church which caused her discomfort. It was a damp building, she wrote, full of people with unbrushed hair and “not a drop of eau de Cologne to sweeten the atmosphere”.
While in France, she had lost two children, Frederick and an unnamed daughter. To cope with her grief, she resumed her diary writing and created The Mourning Journal which records her responses to the children’s early deaths and her progress through depression to consolation. The unpublished diary was a departure from the way a child’s death was treated in the late Georgian period, which was that the mother should suffer in silence. She gave full voice to her grief and refocused her life on motherhood, including early home education of her surviving children.
Another daughter died in 1816 but three surviving sons, Francis, Richard and Philip, were educated at Twyford and Harrow. Richard and Francis entered the church, where they had long careers, with Richard becoming the Dean of Westminster Abbey and, later, Archbishop of Dublin. Richard Trench’s early church career was in the Diocese of Winchester in the south Hampshire villages of Curdridge and Alverstoke.
During her remaining years in England, Melesina Trench campaigned for the welfare of chimney-sweeps and the itinerant poor in England and Ireland. One of her initiatives resulted in the establishment of soup kitchens for the homeless, first in Southampton and later in London. In 1816, she also wrote Laura’s Dream or, The Moonlanders, an epic poem in a science fiction style which preceded Mary Shelley’s much better-known Frankenstein by two years.
During the 1820s, her health declined and she died on 27 May 1827 at Malvern where she had gone to take the waters. Melesina Trench was buried in the Cathedral’s Guardian Chapel and the commemorative marble plaque was placed in the North Transept. Its Latin text can be translated as “To the best, most accomplished, and most beloved wife and mother, Melesina Trench.”
After her death, her writing about parenting, Thoughts of a Parent on Education, was published in 1837. At its core was her view that mothers should trust their own observations about their children and not to follow “the guidance of any general system.”
It was not until 1860 when Richard Trench died, that his wife’s papers were passed to their son, the Rev Richard Chenevix Trench, who was then Dean of Westminster. He prepared an edition of his mother’s Journal Kept During a Visit to Germany in 1799, 1800, extensive excerpts of which, including her biting comments on Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson, were published with fanfare in the Times during October 1861.
In the following year, a collection of her writings, The Remains of Mrs. Richard Trench, was widely reviewed and sold out on its first printing. Her diary writing about Nelson, says American academic Katharine Kittredge, made her “a celebrity thirty-five years after her death”, but the fame was not lasting and she quickly faded from literary notice.
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Sources
Sheila Gray, “Mrs Melesina Trench 1768-1827”, Winchester Cathedral Record 68 (1999), p. 21.
Katharine Kittredge, “Melesina Chenevix St. George Trench (1768-1827)”, Chawton House Library, p. 2. https://chawtonhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Melesina-Chenevix-St.-George-Trench.pdf
Melesina Chenevix St George Trench, Journal Kept During a Visit to Germany in 1799, 1800, edited by Richard Chenevix Trench (London: Savill & Edwards printers, 1861).
Illustrations
Engraving by William Holl the Younger, dated 1862, after portrait by George Romney.
Source: The Remains of the Late Mrs Richard Trench being Selections from her Journals, Letters and Other Papers, 1862. (Public Domain).
Memorial Tablet for Melesina Trench, south wall of North Transept, Winchester Cathedral (© Tom Watson).
Earlier versions of this article were published in the June 2024 edition of Record Extra, the journal of the Friends of Winchester Cathedral (www.wincathrecord.org), and in the Hampshire Chronicle, June 20, 2024.
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