To make a figure in the world: Identity and material literacy in the 1770s coach consumption of British ambassador, Lord Grantham

Using archival research on the correspondence of diplomat Thomas Robinson, 2nd Baron Grantham, this article examines how Grantham used his material knowledge of carriage design to negotiate the often‐conflicting pushes and pulls on elite office‐holding men's identities and material cultures. Grantham's anxieties and frustrations surrounding ‘making a figure’ showcase the importance of material culture and material literacy in the construction and negotiation of a professional (specifically diplomatic), social and gendered identity in the late‐eighteenth century and suggests an alternative vision of the ‘anxious masculinity’ paradigm.

history of eighteenth-century elite masculinity and consumption -how men's material knowledge and possessions enabled them to 'make a figure' -and the history of diplomacy -how diplomats used material literacy to perform a diplomatic identity 'in the world'.The article begins with an overview of the literature on gendered consumerism and material culture, on social and professional identities in eighteenthcentury England and finally on diplomatic material culture.I then explore the idiom of 'making a figure' and its diverse usage in eighteenth-century culture before examining Grantham's anxieties about making one through his ambassadorial coach and coach-commissions for the Spanish court in the 1770s.
Since the 1980s historians have considered what, how and why early modern people acquired material goods. 2 Whilst late twentieth-century consumer studies often focused on women as consumers, historians have eagerly responded to Margot Finn's 2000 call to explore men's possessions and excavate their considerable consumer skills and rich material worlds. 3Since 2010, historians of gendered consumption and material goods have turned their attention to the material knowledge and literacy consumers deployed to acquire and use these possessions. 4Now, the history of men's material culture is a rich and growing field.Recent work on eighteenth-century men's material culture has considered men's keen interest in clothing, wine, silver, armorial porcelain, boots and punchbowls, to name a few, and this project adds to this recent scholarship's object-study methodology with its study of coaches. 5In these studies, men's engagement with the world of goods enabled them to enact various masculine social identities from husbands and fathers to soldiers and landowners -historians' investigation of these identities has revealed the mutual reciprocity between men's private identities and public personas, a discussion I add to here.
Despite these studies, historians of both eighteenth-century consumption and masculinity have been much more concerned with the influence that social position had on experience and practices rather than professional identity.Of course, the two were inextricably linked -not simply what trade or profession you had but whether you had one at all were the very material conditions of the early modern period's hierarchal social organisation.Early quantitative inventory studies considered the professions' shared and differing consumer behaviours and their material possessions, but lacked the qualitative analysis that this study aims to produce. 6Building on Alexandra Shepard's 'anxious patriarchs' paradigm, Tawny Paul has detailed eighteenth-century middling men's anxieties over their credit, financial insecurity and social and commercial position which highlights the fragility of social and economic identities informed by social credit and personal reputation in early modern England. 7Accordingly, middling and elite people alike understood that commercial, professional and social advancement was forged through personal connections and relationships. 8As Finn's work on Anglo-Indian colonial gifting demonstrates, family gift exchange could reap significant economic, political and professional advantages. 9Examining diplomatic culture through masculinity and materiality allows this work to explore how Grantham navigated the flimsy distinction between the personas he inhabited of the 'private gentleman' and the 'national representative' -a key dynamic of ancien régime office holding. 10rantham understood this composite identity of nobleman-diplomat and in his portrait by George Romney on his return to England in 1780, the Spanish royal palace at Aranjuez is depicted behind Grantham reclining in nonchalant repose (Figure 1).Grantham must have acutely felt the pressures of his first ambassadorial posting in 1771.His father, Robinson, 1st Baron Grantham, was ennobled in 1761 due to his successful ambassadorship to the Habsburg court in Vienna from 1730 to 1748 -a peerage Grantham junior inherited at his father's death in 1770, a few months before his posting.Dynastic lineage and personal -and professional -succession must have placed additional pressure on Grantham to make an ambassadorial figure and live up to elite expectations.
This article uses material literacy to investigate how men navigated and performed competing identities, arguing that men were not always anxious to 'make a figure' but were frustrated by the expectation to do so.'Material literacy' has diverse meanings in studies of the eighteenth-century material world.Chloe Wigston Smith and Serena Dyer's recent edited collection on material literacy focuses on three categories of material literacy: the knowledge of the active producer, the collaborative partnerships of professional or amateur makers and the consumer's knowledge of making and production. 11This work builds on the final category concerning consumers' knowledge and, throughout, the phrase 'material knowledge' is used to denote the understanding of the material world formed through possessors' understanding of objects' physical properties or qualities, construction, design features or aesthetics. 12Building on this, I use 'material literacy' to mean the successful deployment of those material knowledges in social practice.In doing so, this work thinks less about what material knowledge men had, but rather how they used it to navigate the formation and performance of identities in the period, especially considering gendered, professional, diplomatic identities in the eighteenth century. 13Elite men, not typically the producers or makers of material goods, although often the designers, utilised their material knowledge to negotiate conflicting pulls on, and tensions within, social identities.Grantham's material knowledge, his own expertise of the 'correct' designs, upholstery, ornamentals and carriage type helped to fulfil his professional identity.After all, it was, as Helen Jacobsen has successfully shown, a professional requirement for European diplomats to consume splendidly.
My work builds most on Jacobsen's 2011 exploration of Stuart diplomats' material worlds.By the early eighteenth century, Jacobsen argues, the diplomat's material culture was increasingly important to diplomacy and the cultural importance of the ambassador's clothes, coaches and jewels extended to their residences and wider consumer activities.While Jacobsen's late seventeenth-century diplomats were keen to procure material goods that helped them assimilate into local and court elites, ambassadors did not just emulate or conspicuously consume native fashions.They crafted an identity of the 'Crown Representative' through material distinction with their ambassadorial peers both at home and abroad. 14This work provides an explicit discussion of masculinity, and material knowledge and literacy, in the construction of an ambassadorial identity.Grantham, unlike his Stuart predecessors, purchased most of his ambassadorial possessions, including his coach, from his own purse.By the 1770s, there was a growing gulf between the ambassadorial fashions of splendid magnificence that Grantham was expected to fork out for and his own material tastes that were informed by the more modest expressions of elite masculinity in late eighteenth-century England.Here, I stress role of materiality in men's, often fraught, identity formation and performance in the later part of the eighteenth century.The phrase 'making a figure' is concerned with a sort of self-conscious identity construction, but, as I explore here, it had a particularly material dynamic.In doing so, it builds on Linzy Brekke-Alosie's exploration of the idiom 'making a figure'.Brekke-Alosie argues that Colonial and Revolutionary American elites used clothing to construct both a revolutionary, and, post-war, a national, masculine material selfhood and identity.In her study, suits of Manchester velvet caused men like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington considerable anxiety in materially demonstrating a newfound masculine American identity -just as Grantham worries over his shabby English coach at the Spanish court. 15In this work, the phrase is concerned less with the anxieties and more with the frustrations of the material dynamics of self-presentation of contingent, pluralistic and, at times, competing identities.
Recent discussions of the material culture of the eighteenth-century professions have centred on those connected to imperial expansion. 16Similarly, the recent studies of all-male professional subgroups like the army and navy have used material objects to better understand the tenets of a professional masculine identity but, methodologically, focus more on objects as sources rather than men's interactions with things. 17s the work on diplomatic material culture in the last decade has shown, global material objects were essential to the soft power of diplomats. 18By focusing on both the external pressures of 'making a figure' and the diplomat's emotions, this work centres the materiality of the diplomat's lived experience.In these moments of clash between personal and professional social identities, Grantham's material literacy was most useful to him and his successful negotiation and performance of ambassadorship.As such this work is a discussion of material literacy and elite masculine identity formation and performance, as well as the role of material literacy in diplomatic cultures.
This article examines men's identities and material literacy by analysing Grantham's coach consumption as discussed in his correspondence during his time as ambassador to Madrid from 1771 to 1779 when the Spanish joined the American Revolutionary War against the British.He was born in Vienna in November 1738 and was the eldest son of Robinson, 1st Lord Grantham, ambassador to the Habsburg court in Vienna, and his wife Frances Worsley.Grantham junior had a successful political career first as MP for Christchurch from 1760 to 1770, and, after inheriting his father's peerage, he entered the House of Lords in November 1770.The majority of the correspondence examined in this piece was written during Grantham's time in Madrid and at the Spanish court.He returned to England after the declaration of war with Spain in 1779 and married, after much courting, Lady Mary Yorke in 1780.They had three sons, two (Thomas and Frederick) surviving beyond infancy.Grantham resided between the family seat (Sir Christopher Wren's Newby Hall near Ripon, Yorkshire), Grantham House in Whitehall Yard, and Grantham House on Putney Heath, where he died on 20 July 1786, aged just forty-eight years. 19The eighteenth-century correspondence of the Robinson family, held in the Wrest Park Collection at Bedfordshire Archives and Records Services, is a rich and often overlooked repository of elite correspondence and details Grantham's wide political and social network of the eighteenthcentury lesser nobility.
Men's life-writing, especially diaries, has formed a substantial source base for histories of both gender identity and gendered consumerism as it helps, in Sara Pennell's words, 'to put the consumer back into consumerism'; ego-documents have added nuance and detail to the quantitative inventory studies that so characterise late-twentieth century consumer historiography on eighteenth-century consumption. 20Grantham's correspondence with his siblings reveals his intimate anxieties and frustrations caused by his position as an ambassador -it is hardly surprising that these concerns appear in Grantham's familial rather than professional correspondence. 21Grantham's letters were sent overseas to his brother Frederick and sister Anne from Spain and he and they placed a significant amount of emotional importance onto their correspondence to maintain their relationship during his eight-year posting.Frederick also acted as an agent for Grantham -procuring diplomatic gifts in London for the Spanish Court.The brothers' correspondence to Anne detailed their time in Spain, the court's activities and movements, as well as enquiries about the health and wellbeing of the Robinsons' large network of family and friends.The brothers also engage in a significant amount of discussion on goods, their material qualities, design, use and acquisition in their correspondence.Examining the emotional language surrounding material objects and 'making a figure' in Grantham's letters allows us to investigate the life of a nobleman but also a diplomat and therefore the impact social position and professional identity had on men's material culture and their material attitudes and practices.
Using this case study, the article details Grantham's anxieties about 'making a figure in the world' through his material possessions, particularly concerning his ambassadorial coach.But this is not a history of masculine anxiety as a gendered emotion, as Henry French and Mark Rothery's recent work on younger gentry sons has persuasively detailed, but rather an exploration of the anxieties caused by societal expectations. 22Historians of emotions have demonstrated the utility of thinking about feelings and things, feelings through things and feeling things (emotional, sensory and haptic interactions between objects and people and the emotional response produced) to enrich historical understandings of often elusive emotional subjects and historical experiences. 23Indeed, foundational work on gendered material demands and elite anxieties surrounding correct material display by Linda Peck and Evelyn Welch reminds us that anxious material show was not limited to the eighteenth century. 24But this work demonstrates that men were often more than simply anxious about their social, professional and gendered identities and were often frustrated and irritated at having to perform the demands of elite and professional status.More than a history of the causes of masculine anxieties, this article also examines the changing emotional language men used when discussing the pressures to 'make a figure' and the goods, skills and knowledges required to do so successfully.

Making a figure in eighteenth-century culture
Before delving into Grantham's coach consumption, I want to detail what was at stake when Grantham said he had 'no ambition to make a Figure'; while 'keeping up appearances' is a social performance that many of us today engage in through, for example, buying new cars, redecorating our homes or even mowing the lawn, to 'make a figure' is no longer a common phrase.The phrase was a common form of both social description and evaluation and had several uses across the eighteenth century.In the Spectator, 'making a figure' was an alternative expression of 'putting in an appearance' or 'showing your face' whether that was at the assembly rooms or at the coffeehouse. 25Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his natural son in the 1740s, pre-modified 'making a figure' with qualifiers such as 'handsome', 'graceful' and 'magnificent' and 'very bad', 'slovenly' and 'ridiculous'. 26It was often used to denote, what we would now call, making a name for yourself or forging a successful path in your chosen profession. 27n a 1753 letter to his friend, the Hampshire naturalist Gilbert White, clergyman John Mulso congratulated White on his brother's curacy stating that he was glad White's brother had 'quit every youthfull Folly which would misbecome the Order & [has] Learning enough to make a very good Figure in the Church'. 28Making a figure' also denoted the form and movement of the physical body -common to our own modern usage of the term 'figure'.29 For the breeding of a gentleman, John Locke advocated how important 'a strong Constitution to endure Hardships and Fatigue, is to one that will make any Figure in the World'.30 To 'figure' at a dance or ball was to make an impressive show on the floor.31 Sarah Goldsmith's recent work on masculine danger and the Grand Tour highlights how the European rite of passage was meant to prepare and expose elite young men's bodies to danger and physical exercise.32 The proper deportment and manners of a gentleman was embodied in elite men's balance of gentlemanly poise and manly power, as Joanne Begiato has shown.33 Each of these definitions is preoccupied with ideas of performance; to 'make a figure' in the eighteenth-century world was to ascribe to, and perform, a certain set of expectations and characteristics in a heteronormative and patriarchal society.'Making a figure' was done on specific, prescribed terms, but this is not to suggest that all men wished to live up to the expectation of their position and many did ignore the wishes of families and society in their choices of lifestyle.Indeed, as my case study shows, even those elite men who conformed to behavioural expectations found such a task difficult and often frustrating.
The aspect of 'making a figure' focused on here reflects the most common usage of the term in the eighteenth century: social ambitions and material aspirations.Eighteenth-century people, enmeshed in cultures of credit, commerce and consumerism, acutely understood that it was through personal investment that social and professional advancement was achievable.Joseph Addison contrasted the self-restraint of men able to successfully 'make a figure' commensurate to their income and position with those men who ruined themselves in the pursuit of wealth.In a Spectator issue from November 1711, which explored how tradesmen and landed gentlemen were ruined by the lotteries, he wrote: 'We live up to our Expectations, not to our Possessions, and make a Figure proportionable to what we may be, not what we are'. 34Decades later in 1778, moral essayist Vicesimus Knox wrote that a happy man 'lived within the limits of reason, duty, and his fortune, … He might not indeed have made a figure on the turf; he might not have the honor of leading the fashion; but would probably have had health, wealth, fame, and peace'. 35Both Knox and Addison considered it right to live up to, but within your fortune and rank.Historians have well documented these growing socially conservative anxieties in an emergent consumer society in which new forms of wealth acquisition and new spending patterns were coupled with the arrival and proliferation of 'novel' goods made with new pioneering technologies and global raw materials.In an emerging world of capital, credit and global commerce, mushrooming fortunes could be quickly made and just as quickly lost, and this phenomenon blurred distinctions of rank that the possession of discerning taste in material objects was thought to showcase and often police. 36Indeed, moralists' anxieties were not without foundation.In 1734, the highwayman Thomas Travenor was described in the Ordinary of Newgate's account as having 'an Inclination to make a Figure in the World (as he call'd it) so he was endeavouring to find out ways to enable him to appear above his Equals … and he could think of no readier Expedient than that of the Highway'. 37Men begged, borrowed, and stole to 'make a figure in the world'.Historians of masculinity have also been preoccupied with cultural commentators' concerns over luxury, effeminacy and the social order.They have detailed the anxieties surrounding men's social ruin and immoral behaviour in the pursuit of luxury and the impact that had on the strength and character of the nation, economy and social hierarchy at moments of national crisis. 38ector of St. Boldoph's Bishopsgate, Zacheus Isham's sermon to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London in 1700 preached the need to balance prudence and magnificence.Chastising men who frittered away money on earthly pleasures, Isham considered the responsibility of men of 'honour and generosity' to materialise for themselves a suitably impressive figure expressed through the design of their houses and gardens, the furnishing of their rooms, and the maintenance of their coach house and stable yard.'It will be pleaded', Isham preached, 'that the Man's Dignity, and Station, requir'd his making of such a splendid Figure ; and 'tis a Reproach to a Man, not to live up to the height of his Fortune'. 39For Isham, men who made claims to honour and generosity were expected to live and consume decorously, furnishing themselves and their households in the appropriate and requisite goods.Eighteenthcentury commentators were certainly conservative in their prescriptions concerning 'making a figure' in the right way and this can be understood as a reaction to commerce and luxury's perceived dismantling of older, early modern patriarchal social structures and hierarchies.
It is well-trodden historiographical ground that despite early theories that the middling sorts had social ambitions matched with material aspirations and pent-up consumer desire, middling consumers were not all eager to aspire to and acquire a material culture beyond their means and social position.By refocusing the discussion about how socially aspirant middling men made a figure onto elite masculine culture, we see alternative vision of identity-motivated consumption in the period.Grantham's usage of 'making a figure' is concerned less with aspiration and more with expectation and with the requirement for elite men to live up to the social and familial expectation to 'make a figure'. 40After all, Grantham wished to 'keep up appearances', not to put on a show.This is not a study of men making a name for themselves -it is about how men lived up to the name they already had, and the duties, responsibilities and pressures associated with that dynastic principle as both noblemen and diplomats.
Just as commentators thought middling men should not exceed their income or aspire beyond their allotted position, so too should elite men not fall victim to the enticing perils of material luxury.This vision of emulative conspicuous consumption has dominant histories of gendered consumerism for decades. 41While the growth of middling luxurious consumption was perceived to blur the distinctions of the early modern social order, the extravagance of the elite was chided as the effeminacy of foreign, exotic and, importantly, unmanly luxury.For elite men to maintain their position at the apex of the social and gender hierarchy, they too had to carefully craft their image. 42Upon detailing his conditions on his natural son's allowance, Lord Chesterfield allowed him 'a handsome snuff-box and sword but then no more pretty or very useless things.… I mean to allow you whatever is necessary, not only for the figure, but for the pleasures of a gentleman, and not to supply the profusion of a rake'. 43For Chesterfield, 'making a figure' had a slightly different meaning to ambition and aspiration.In this passage, the 'figure' of a gentleman is in fact the bare minimum; it was a set of objects that forms the essential components of an elite masculine figure or a sort of material jigsaw of manly gentility.Chesterfield's concerns that his generous allowance was funding his illegitimate son's rakish lifestyle were bound to a belief that adroit material discernment and refined gentlemanly behaviour were inextricably linked.For Chesterfield, certain men's goods expressed an appropriately gentlemanly figure and others quite the opposite.The objects Chesterfield associates with a rake are small superfluities, often called 'baubles', but in other letters, he was happy to provide the 'rational pleasures' of quality lodgings, coaches, clothing, and servants. 44f 'making a figure' could be expressed in binary terms, material literacy helped men make the right or 'correct' figure.By studying men's material literacy, we uncover men's often fraught experiences with dealing with expectation and practicing prescription.Here, I present an alternative vision of people's relationship with their possessions.The case study that follows centres on Grantham's frustrations surrounding the commissioning in London of his ambassadorial coach and its subsequent arrival and use at the Spanish Court in Madrid.Certainly, Grantham's correspondence is a highly specific and highly localised case study, but it is perhaps in Grantham's encounters with foreign tastes, styles and material customs that his own attitudes towards material show are their most explicit.Indeed, here too is where we see the tensions between personal and professional identities of the ancien régime diplomat at play.Examining Grantham's acquisition and maintenance of his coaches is particularly useful in revealing the relationship between men's objects as a form of self-fashioning as coaches were one of, if not the, most conspicuous public displays that men had, and could maintain, a befittingly illustrious 'figure' in eighteenth-century society.

The diplomat and his ambassadorial coach
Carriages are useful objects to both think through the materiality the diplomat's identity and to see how elite men negotiated conflicting identities.The coach was, unquestionably, an essential commodity for an elite lifestyle.The material splendour and magnificence of a coach was a uniquely powerful marker of wealth, privilege and taste. 45In diplomatic contexts, the coach was the jewel of the eighteenth-century diplomat's material assemblage.While Stuart diplomats could expect the Crown to foot the bill for the ambassadorial equipage, that increasingly became part of the Ambassador's own expense as the eighteenth century progressed.At home, private coach ownership was the preserve of a wealthy few who avoided the perceived indignity and dangers of public transport, such as mail coaches and hackney carriages that were the preserve of many middling travellers.But within the elite, merely owning a carriage was not necessarily a marker of social distinction and economic privilege.The purchasing and maintaining of a suitably glamorous collection of carriages for town and country roads, for domestic and continental travel, and for promenading and pleasuredriving formed a significant component of elite men's domestic expenditure. 46Annual costs of repairs, maintenance, coachmen, grooms, liveries, horses, feed, farriers, stabling, harnesses and tackle were almost always more expensive than the coaches themselves. 47Truly only comparable to homes and dress, carriages were a unique and overt display of elite status.A shabby coach, a clumsily painted crest, badly groomed horses or poorly dressed grooms could all undermine elite families' claims to prestige and discernment, and even wealthy noblemen racked up considerable debts in the upkeep of their coach house. 48oaches had a particularly masculine appeal because they combined important material preferences of elite men; coaches' magnificence and splendour was matched only by the complexity of their technological construction and the quality of the craftsmanship.Grantham's letters reveal the comprehensive material knowledge he garnered from frequent and lengthy correspondence with both his coachmakers and his peers on fashions, technological components, and construction.But, as Amanda Vickery writes, men's almost fetishistic engagement with coaches could be couched as a concern with 'practical transport'. 49The coach was the pinnacle of men's consumer expertise and material knowledge, but without the potential pollution of effeminate luxury.Men were engaged consumers and active students of carriage construction.Coaches, importantly, also spoke to elite men's mobility and independence.Due to their size and expense, coaches were considered husbands' property and married women's coach ownership was limited under English common law coverture. 50It would have required significant financial independence and wherewithal for a frugal spinster or even a wealthy widow to own and maintain a carriage. 51This often meant that women's coach ownership and use was dependent on their male kin -Grantham himself bought a coach for his unwed sister Anne in 1777. 52he same representational and associational power of the coach for 'private gentleman' was at work with the ambassadorial coach.In 1701, John Churchill, then the Earl of Marlborough, was sent to The Hague by William III to act as chief negotiator in forming an alliance between England, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch Republic against the French -a treaty that led to England's involvement in the War of Spanish Succession (1701−14).Before setting sail, Marlborough wasted no time in ordering structural and decorative alterations to his 'Great Coach' and had his coachbuilder add over 14 earl's coronets to the carriage. 53Clearly Marlborough's personal, noble identity was important to his material presentation as skilled diplomat and negotiator.The formal coach procession of the diplomat at the beginning of his posting materialised national tastes, expertise and skill.
Upon his arrival at the Spanish court in 1771, Grantham wasted no time in renovating and furnishing his ambassadorial residence in Madrid and his early letters describe the financial and emotional investment in preparing the residence for entertaining dignitaries and courtiers. 54Grantham also commissioned a gala coach from London coachmaker John Wright for the annual Court procession into the El Padro Palace.The gala coach cost £365 to build, not including the upholstery or transportation.In 1771, that amount is equivalent to 10 years' annual salary for a skilled tradesman and in today's money is approximately £51,000. 55Even for a wealthy nobleman like Grantham, this was a significant financial outlay.It would have been a highly iconographical, symbolic conveyance much more akin to the state coaches of George III and the Lord Mayors of London's and Dublin's coaches than any kind of private carriage (see Figure 2). 56They were elaborate, magnificent and cumbersome vehicles used in highly ritualised and ceremonial events and this function heightened Grantham's anxieties and frustrations about being a diplomat.
Upon their arrival, adjusting to Spanish tastes was obviously difficult for Grantham and his brother Frederick.Writing to Anne, Frederick wrote that the gala coach 'will be much too beautifule [sic] for this country as I believe you would think, were you see the clumsy unwieldy tabernacles, which the Grandees are dragged about in here'. 57rantham echoed Frederick's thoughts, telling Anne that Despite their protestations at the gaudy Spanish coaches and inelegant mules, the brothers were both anxious about the delayed arrival of the coach in Spain.Frederick complained to Anne at the end of September 1771 that their coachmaker 'has been very dilatory about it, if it is not here by the 9 th of December it will not be wanted till that day twelvemonths'. 59Grantham grew more anxious about the delay and wrote that 'I shall, when once I know it is at Sea, be very content to hear of its being at land again, & I shall long to see it'. 60 By November, the brothers had reconciled themselves to the fact the coach would not be ready in time.Frederick wrote to Anne about their anxiety for 'the safe arrival of our next cargo from England which I doubt will not be before the end of January, we are not a little impatient to see the Plate [and] the Coach'. 61However, the muchawaited coach had been damaged during the crossing from England to Spain.In July 1772, Grantham's consternation peaked as he dashed off a letter to Anne that he was 'keeping a very small table … to make up for the Expenses" and the coach was "a most useless piece of finery & the only thing I repent on having bought'. 62This must have been all the more worrying as Sir Alexander Munro, the Consul General in Spain, had 'four horses and a Phaeton coming, in order to make a figure at [the Court in] Aranjeuz'. 63Grantham's own plan for a phaeton had fallen through and, much to his and Frederick's disappointment, he decided to spend the money on mules instead. 64t is worth pointing out here that Munro occupied a very different position as consul general of the embassy than Grantham as ambassador in the diplomatic hierarchy; his less important position meant that Munro arguably had more autonomy to 'make a figure' more attuned his own tastes than Grantham did.Phaetons -four-wheeled, open-top carriages that were owner-driven rather than driven by a coachman -emerged, in England, in the 1760s and were the height of elite fashion and luxury.Coaches and phaetons were two very different types of carriage, designed and driven for different purposes.Despite phaetons' exclusivity, they were part of a growing culture of men's material simplicity in the later part of the eighteenth century in which elite men's ostentatious material show gave way to more informal, modest dress that was typically more associated with middling men. 65From the 1770s carriages, and especially phaetons, had simpler ornamentation -perhaps why the Spanish 'wieldy tabernacles' appeared so gauche to Grantham and Frederick's plainer and, perhaps in their eyes manlier, British taste.To drive oneself in a plainly decorated carriage without the trappings of a full equipage was a delicately balanced display of elite manly condescension and lack of pretention while at the same time expressing and parading wealth and privilege.The gala coach was designed for pomp, parades and circumstance, with the phaeton built for the elite pastime of pleasuring driving, often for younger men: compare the ostentation of the Lord Mayor's Coach in Figure 2 to the rural elegance of the phaeton in George Stubbs' A Gentleman Driving a Lady in a Phaeton (Figure 3).On Grantham's return to England in the 1780s and establishment of a family at Newby Hall, his correspondence describes how his days were filled by visiting local gentry neighbours in his long-wished for phaeton. 66Personal material tastes had to give way to the demands of making a magnificent ambassadorial figure .By December 1772, just in time to process into the El Prado Palace, the gala coach had been altered and repaired.Two days before the gala, Grantham expressed his relief and delight at the renovated coach to Anne, writing that my Gala Coach is finished, most of the body is new gilt & it is all new Varnished, it [is] more showy than I hoped for, & exceptionally beautiful.The box is much too high; which does not however much signify, because as long as it is mine, it will be used for one hour only. 67e coach enabled Grantham to assimilate into Spanish court life and its ritualised ceremonies, whilst demonstrating the supremacy of English taste and craftsmanship.While the delay and damage of the coach could jeopardise their attempt to make a magnificent figure at the Spanish court, the Gala coach was also a demonstration to the Spanish of Grantham's connection to the fashionable and political elite.It embodied his ability to 'make a figure' through his own resources, taste, and material discernment.Grantham and Frederick's barbed comments to Anne of the Spanish's poor taste in coaches were also part of them setting out their own material distinctions and discernment as superior to the Spanish.Grantham's discussions of other courtiers' coaches speaks to a highly specific, ambassadorial peer-group among whom Grantham was attempting to 'make a figure' and this highly pressured environment heightened his anxieties and frustration.
Grantham was also keen for his family and acquaintances back home to see the coach being made.Frederick wrote to Anne that he and Grantham were glad that she would see the coach in London before it left for the continent, and Grantham wrote to her to ask if his brother-in-law John Parker liked his new coach. 68Grantham's friend George Selwyn jokingly wrote to him of a Lady's society dinner where there was 'no talk of any change in administration [but] there has been a great deal about your Magnificent Coach'. 69The coach was therefore as much a marker of Grantham's success at acquiring the ambassadorship back in England as it was a way to make a figure in Spain.The spectacle of the complex assembly of the coach in London provided an opportunity for those back home to see how their nation was being represented abroad through Grantham's wealth and taste.
In this example, good taste and successful material show were not just dependent on social position, as historians have shown, but also intensely attached to the location of the production and use of the goods in question.Grantham's coach was the preferred model, design and finish for the Spanish court, but was totally antithetical to his own tastes back home.This tension is demonstrated by his reactions to the muledrawn coaches.As Grantham himself considered mules to be more acceptable in the Spanish countryside than in the city, he had an awareness of the suitability of specific carriage components in certain spaces as well as of 'metropolitan' fashions.Mules, in Grantham's mind, were much more suitable to the pasture than the parade.One possible interpretation for Grantham's considerable correspondence on the gala coach is an attempt to try and distance himself from the gaudy and 'showy' carriage back home.Perhaps Grantham intensely disliked the gala coach's design because his role as diplomat required him to adhere to a national 'taste' that stood in for personal taste; Grantham experiences this uncomfortable disconnect between the coach's meaning and its function because of the inherent tensions between personal and professional material identities.Rather than a personal object, this was a 'coach of state', whose design, decoration, gilding, dimensions and requisite horsepower embodied something impersonal, or at least distinct from the personality of its purchaser.
Despite the gala coach's cost and the efforts to procure it, Grantham never took to the coach.In the closing months of his posting, the coach became a materialisation of how Grantham understood and communicated his changing status as British diplomat in a hostile court.The conspicuous discussion of court and diplomatic sociability in his early 1770s letters to Anne suggest a man well-suited to, and enjoying, diplomatic life: British Grand Tourists at the Spanish court in the 1770s described him as affable, generous and agreeable. 70By the spring of 1778, relations with the French and Spanish were deteriorating -for Grantham, these diplomatic tensions were exacerbated by Frederick's to England due to ill health.His letters to Frederick are full of longing for their reunion and Grantham's return to England, and the correspondence became, in his own words, a journal for Grantham. 71He often wrote he was in low spirits, anxious and felt 'alone' at court, withdrawing early from many events to dine at home. 72In April 1778, he desired to leave Spain as soon as feasible and with 'as much credit as possible'. 73By November, he was making substantial efforts to quit the Embassy in Spain by selling his possessions and settling his debts; Frederick was receiving daily instructions for fitting up Grantham's Whitehall and Yorkshire homes for his return. 74Personal issues were also at stake.On turning 40 in November 1778, Grantham wrote to Frederick that 'indeed it is a very serious thing to be forty years old, far from home, single and unsettled'. 75Professional obligations had prevented him fulfilling his personal duties as head of the family.During these final months of his posting, his correspondence became increasingly anxious and frustrated, and he was seriously concerned about his letters being intercepted -he created a cypher to convey particularly sensitive diplomatic material to Frederick.Accordingly, Grantham's personal letters do not reveal much about his own perceptions of his diplomatic character.Indeed, the need for such epistolary discretion makes Grantham's references to material things all the more revealing about the importance of goods for both him to understand and communicate the state of diplomat affairs.
In the final years of his posting, the coach's initial expense and the need to maintain such a magnificent vehicle that was only used once a year continued to worry, and also increasingly irk, Grantham. 76He wrote to Frederick in March 1779 that 'my Coach & Buff Harness are shabby to a degree & I determine whether I can do anything to be merely decent at Aranjuez.You may think that I have no ambition to make a figure, at the same Time I must keep up appearances'. 77Grantham acknowledged to Frederick his personal taste for modest simplicity was at odds with his duty to demonstrate the magnificence of Britain and the use of the conditional 'may think' suggests that Grantham has previously expressed disinterest in curating the required magnificent material show.
This was especially true in March 1779 when the relationship between Britain and Spain was growing increasingly tense and by June the Spanish had joined the American Revolutionary War against the British.Grantham quickly set about finding an alternative to his shabby coach and a week later wrote to Frederick that he had managed to borrow the Portuguese Ambassador's English coach, equipage, and liveries and, in return, Grantham would commission him a new English coach.For Grantham, this material exchange was a sign of his success during his posting as he wrote that it was a sign of the 'footing I am on here'. 78While a loaned coach could be a symbol to Grantham, and others, of his professional standing, Grantham wished to process in his own coach and two weeks later he wrote to Frederick that 'I have my new Coachwheels -looks very well, & the harness too are well brushed up, the liveries are smart, so that I shall not look shabby'. 79n his correspondence, Grantham used a conventional hierarchy of descriptions to describe his 'figure'.To appear shabby was unthinkable, and he would rather borrow a coach from a rival than appear so.To be 'merely decent' was still unpalatable to Grantham, yet he did not want to make a 'showy' or 'magnificent' figure but was required to do so professionally.There is a similarity between Grantham's concerns at appearing 'decent' and Chesterfield's distinction between the 'figure' and 'pleasures' of a gentleman.Both figures, each incidentally connected to cultures of diplomacy, consider the material adornment of a gentleman essential to live up to one's position in life, but thought of it more of an expectation or duty to fulfil rather than something to necessarily enjoy.Grantham's shabby coaches illustrate how essential not just the purchasing of a coach was, but also the maintenance of its magnificent condition.
Whilst the continental demand for quintessentially English coaches was high, Grantham was desperate to sell his gala coach when quitting Spain at the outbreak of war in 1779.Grantham procured and/or commissioned a range of goods from Staffordshireware to weaponry for the Spanish court, but the coaches he bespoke are conspicuously discussed in his correspondence with his contacts in England and with the Spanish court itself.Despite the success in forging friendly alliances through material objects during his posting, he wrote to Frederick of his frustration at being unable to sell his gala coach. 80Frederick suggested that Grantham 'get a convenient Chaise at Madrid tolerably cheap, it will not be a bad scheme, as it will save your Coach, which will certainly sell for very little in England, it being to [o] old & heavy for common use'. 81Frederick consoled his brother with news of a 'plain and fashionable' post chaise commissioned for Grantham's return to England. 82In describing a plain and fashionable carriage, Frederick was deliberately appealing to Grantham's personal tastes to sooth his frustrations.Frederick's practical response outlined the unsuitability and undesirability of a coach designed for Spanish roads and tastes in England; however, he glosses over the harsher reality that ownership of a Spanish coach in England, or an English coach in Spain, could be seen as a conspicuously unpatriotic endorsement of the enemy -reinforcing coaches as representative displays of national identity.
The three carriages under discussion in Grantham's correspondence -the phaeton, the post-chaise and the gala coach -reveal the complexity of personal and professional material identification, but also point to the kind of identities Grantham was choosing between.In his correspondence, Grantham sought to distance himself from the Gala Coach's opulence and craved the 'plain and fashionable' post-chaise or the ownerdriven phaeton.His personal tastes reflected many elite men in the later part of the eighteenth century.As manly material modesty became the dominant elite masculine ideal in the late eighteenth century, and Baroque and Rococo ostentatious magnificence waned into the simplicity of Neoclassicism, Grantham was negotiating between new competing models of elite masculine material expression.Striking the balance between personal economy and professional splendour was no mean feat.Jacobsen's Stuart diplomats had an ambassadorial material culture that was relatively analogous with their personal tastes and Court dress; by the later part of the eighteenth century, court fashions were typically more archaic and static than the styles beyond the walls of European palaces -with perhaps the exception of France. 83

Ambassadorial coach commissions
Although Grantham's material frustrations signal a chronological departure from Jacobsen's earlier servants of the Crown, examining Grantham's procurement of English coaches for the Spanish court and diplomatic corps reveals a continued material demand placed on the early modern diplomat. 84Despite Grantham's regret at ever buying the 'useless piece of finery', the gala coach inspired a long succession of commissions at the Spanish court. 85English coach design was, even by the early part of the eighteenth century thought superior to continental models. 86At the time Grantham was in Madrid, London's coachmakers were busy constructing coaches for European and South-Asian royalty. 87In 1773, he commissioned his English coachmaker to build a coach for Prince Lobkowitz, the Holy Rome Emperor's imperial ambassador to Spain. 88The mission was clearly a success as, upon the coach's arrival at Madrid in 1774, Lobkowitz held a dinner to 'open the carriage' and later, after quitting Spain, he wrote to Grantham that the carriages are 'absolutely delightful, the smoothness of the motion being far from their only merit, I would cross swords with anyone who would contest their solidity … After all, my Lord in great things as in small you do not know how to do things by half'. 89Clearly others wished to emulate Grantham's own magnificent ambassadorial figure.
He also commissioned a coach for the Portuguese ambassador, who wrote in thanks to Grantham for the 'very beautiful and well finished' carriage. 90Although this coach was also damaged in transit and Grantham entrusted subsequent coach commissions for dignitaries -including the Neapolitan, Portuguese, and Swedish ambassadors, The Holy See's Nuncio to Spain, the wedding coach of the Spanish courtiers the Duke and Duchess of Arcos, and a phaeton for the Sardinian ambassador -to his brother Frederick and chaplain to oversee back in London. 91The Arcos marital coach was quintessentially 'English' both in terms of its style of a 'good, strong, neat, easy post coach without a box' and its decorative flourishes of green Manchester velvet. 92rantham also gave specific directions for the Arcos' coach's design and dimension in follow up letters and his Chaplain responded by sending patterns and samples for Grantham to select and inquired about the suitability of details down to the trim on the coachbox and the door decoration.93 In a letter to Frederick concerning a phaeton for Masin in June 1779, Grantham used his knowledge of both the Spanish court and exemplary carriage design to commission the perfect phaeton for the Sardinian ambassador.He wrote to Frederick that Masin hoped for a second-hand phaeton in good order, nothing to be done to it, as he means to alter it here, by painting it, perhaps himself on the outside.He seems not to care how high it is, but I think it should not be one of the high ones but like [Consul General, Sir Alexander] Munro's, very light.94 Grantham's material knowledge of carriage design and his material literacy of different phaeton designs -and how they expressed different masculinities -is evident here.Much to his annoyance the plan fell through as the ambassador took Munro's phaeton.95 Calling Munro a 'fish', Grantham saw this failed commission as a slight upon him.At this point in the rapidly deteriorating diplomatic relations with Spain, these British commissions were all the more important in maintaining some kind of political sway at court.
To make, and maintain, a magnificent ambassadorial figure in the Spanish court, Grantham had to consume ostentatiously for himself while engaging in the custom of diplomatic 'gifting'.However, these commissions do not fit into the conventional narrative of diplomatic gift exchange.For Giorgio Riello, Anne Gerritsen and Zoltán Biedermann, diplomatic gifts were exchanged without pecuniary payment but expected some reciprocity as 'part of a wider economic logic pervading all social relations'. 96ut Grantham's commissions present an alternative to this characterisation, as they were less ritualised forms of exchange.They were, in essence, a business transaction in which Grantham acted as the middleman between the British maker and continental consumer.Grantham certainly perceived it as such as, after his death in 1786, Frederick wrote to the Portuguese Ambassador's son to settle the money owed for his carriage commissioned by Grantham in 1779. 97In one sense, this was perhaps a more personal, albeit economic, social transaction than the ceremonial diplomatic exchange of gifts of respective nations.Grantham acted as a sort of broker and his special brand of diplomacy was very beneficial to English manufacturers back home.Grantham's gift to the Spanish Court was his own personal connections to, and knowledge of, British, elite, masculine material culture -it was, after all, his coachbuilder who manufactured the coaches.Rather than coaches creating or exacerbating the tension between masculine selfhood and diplomatic identity, and between private expenditure and public use, Grantham delightedly exploited his personal knowledges and connections for professional gain -he understood requests for coach commissions as a sign of 'footing I am on here'. 98Grantham's material literacy greased the wheels of diplomatic relationships and networks in Spain, and indeed the very 'Britishness' of the coaches he commissioned and procured for the Spanish court were a form of 'soft-power' promoting the supremacy of British trade and manufacturing in an increasingly hostile Spanish court -in one sense Grantham was working to anglicise Spanish material tastes.His clients' delights confirm that skilfully deployed material literacy was a key skill of a successful diplomat.

Conclusion
By 'keeping up appearances' Grantham was living up to the expectation that an ambassador 'makes a figure' and, at times, had to set aside personal tastes and preferences to do so successfully.For Grantham, carriages articulated his own social position, professional success and refined tastes and so contributed to making his ambassadorial figure.Grantham's correspondence reveals the material literacy required for him to successfully 'make a figure' and shows how he navigated the choices of different paint colours, textiles for trims and model design.Both in his commissions for his gala coach and for his ambassadorial network, Grantham's taste in coaches was an expression of, and tool in fashioning, a professional identity.Rather than an expression of his personal tastes and material preferences -which were becoming increasingly at odds with ideals of men's material simplicity -Grantham's consumption was much more determined by professional pressures than personal preferences.Unquestionably, the nature of his profession as a diplomat intensified the pressure Grantham felt to succeed and heightened anxieties over the arrival and reception of his possessions and commissions at the Spanish court.
Making a gentlemanly figure might have been prerequisite to making an ambassadorial one, but the two were often in conflict.This article has challenged the teleological way historians of gender and consumerism tend to think about the interaction between men and their possessions.Material expressions of the self and material constructions of an identity are two different things.Consumers did not always uncomplicatedly associate and identify themselves with the 'identity' that goods projected.Despite the fact that men like Grantham used goods to communicate quite coherent material messages this was often a means to fulfil and perform a role rather than express their material selfhood.My case study has shown that men's consumption did not always fill some kind of latent, personal desire for goods, but was often obligated as part of fulfilling a role and that duty could cause significant emotional distress.Trying to reconcile personal preferences with societal or professional expectations could be difficult and expensive, and these anxieties and frustrations were openly discussed with close family members.Despite commentary that elite consumers had a greater degree of autonomy in consumption, due to both spending power and social prestige, even elite men in positions of authority could not simply do what they thought was tasteful: they had to abide by the demands of their public office -a timely concern.Grantham's material possessions could simultaneously function as 'correct' displays of material discernment and authority while also greatly burdening and irking the owner or individual who commissioned them.Grantham was a confident and literate consumer who used commodities to fashion and project successful statements about his wealth, status and identity.
Coaches are almost unique in eighteenth-century material culture as they required continual upkeep.Grantham's frustrations were piqued precisely because the coach required so much maintenance to avoid appearing shabby yet was used for only 'an hour' a year -his professional requirements conflicted with the personal and domestic economy that he, as a 'private gentleman', was expected to adhere to.For all the recent discussion on masculine anxieties and 'anxious masculinity', the emotional language of Grantham's coach commissions changed over the course of his posting; Grantham's initial anxiety to impress gave way to irritation at having to conform and maintain a Spanish figure.Grantham, and to a lesser degree Frederick, showed frustration and contempt for these societal demands.
This article has sought out the tensions between the personal and the professional to show how the two were connected: public office informed Grantham's power and prestige as nobleman and politician back in England and thus contributed to his individual, personal identity and his personal knowledges and connections informed and supported his diplomatic career.This exposes the plurality and instability of masculine identity and material identification, albeit in a very specialised and specific context, as the private purchase of a 'public-facing commodity' had to project an institutional identity and national prestige.The distinctions between public representative and private gentleman were blurred and thus had to be negotiated; Grantham's personal material literacy enabled him to perform his 'official' role despite the complex relationship between possessor and possessions.

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: George Stubbs, A Gentleman Driving a Lady in a Phaeton, 1787.Oil on Canvas, 83 × 102 cm.© The National Gallery, Public Domain via Wikimedia [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]