She was born on 12 March 1802, near Abergavenny, the youngest daughter of Benjamin Waddington of Ty Uchaf, Llanover and his wife, Georgina Port.

Benjamin Hall was for some years Member of Parliament for Monmouth, but transferred to a London seat just prior to the Newport Rising, which brought with it a turbulent time in Monmouthshire.

Her eldest sister and co-heiress, Frances, had married the diplomat Baron Bunsen, (later German ambassador to Great Britain) in 1817, following the Waddington family's visit to Rome in the winter of 1816.

Although she was keen to see the women of Wales dressed in home-spun Welsh wool rather than the light cheap cottons which were becoming popular by the 1830s, there is very little evidence to show that she had any influence on the wearing of Welsh costume other than by her servants, family and friends, and there is no firm evidence to suggest that she influenced what was later adopted as the national costume of Wales.

Closely associated with her temperance work was religion in the form of militant Protestantism and she endowed two Calvinistic Methodist churches in the Abercarn area, with services conducted in the Welsh language, but a liturgy based on the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

Only one of their daughters survived to adulthood; Augusta, who in 1846 married Arthur Jones (1818–1895) of Llanarth, of an old Roman Catholic family.

Their eldest son, Ivor Herbert, 1st Baron Treowen, became a Liberal MP and a Major-General during the First World War.