The good news is this particular woman, Mary Hamilton, courtier and one-time amour of the Prince Regent, is, hopefully, going to be saved for British history,. The bad news is that her papers could ever have got close to escaping the country.
The ‘sub-governess’ was an accomplished diarist and letter-writer and attempts are now being made to keep her extraordinary, largely unpublished letters and journals in this country.
A month ago David Lammy, the Arts Minister, put a temporary block on private plans to sell the archive abroad and last week the John Rylands university library in Manchester expressed an interest in buying the documents from the owners at the recommended price of £123,500 so that historians could have access to the fascinating picture she painted of court life in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The government decision on the export licence application for the archive will be deferred until 12 January, but this could be extended until early April in the light of a serious attempt to raise the money needed to buy it.
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