He was a Scot, a Royal favourite, and a handsome man who was lampooned for his vanity, and was constantly the butt of biting political satire, scandal, and gossip.

[1] Stuart's mother, the Countess of Bute, was herself the daughter of the famous writer and traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762).

[2] With her mother, the young Lady Louisa Stuart attended the balls, routs and soirées of London society, but she also followed the literature of the day and corresponded with friends.

[1] Burney writes of mother and daughter on one occasion:[3] ... both in such high spirits themselves that they kept up all the conversation between them, with a vivacity, an acuteness, an archness, and an observation on men and manners so clear and sagacious.

On another occasion, in 1786, Burney found both Stuart and her mother at the house of Mary Delany after a return from the spa town of Bath and writes that they were:[3] ... full fraught with anecdote and character, which they dealt out to their hearers with so much point and humour that we attended to them like a gratified audience of a public place.Louisa's own brothers included John Stuart, 1st Marquess of Bute (1744–1814), a Tory Member of Parliament from 1766 to 1776, later a Privy Councillor and a Fellow of the Royal Society; The Hon.

[1] Lady Louisa was bitterly disappointed with her father's decision, writing glowingly of her cousin:[5] He seems to have that independent spirit which fortune cannot depress or exalt.

He is really a character unlike anything but himself, au reste, the most agreeable man I ever met with, and one of the most humorous.Later the same year, Medows married another lady, Frances Augusta Hammerton, and went on to become a Lieutenant-General, a Knight of the Bath, and Governor-General of Madras.

[1] For fear of losing caste as a lady of quality, Stuart had no wish to see anything she had written published under her name, and it was not until 1895, more than forty years after her death, that this happened.

[2] In a letter to his publisher Robert Cadell, Scott writes "I trust you have received the printed sheets of Lady Louisa Stuart, but for your life mention [not] her name.

"[13] Much of Stuart's writing is still in the form of unpublished memoirs and letters, mostly addressed to women,[2] but interest in her as an observer of her times began to increase towards the end of the nineteenth century.

[17] Conscious of Walter Scott's, Alexander Pope's and Samuel Johnson's poetry, Stuart wrote verses of her own, including fables and a ballad about cannibal brothers and what happens to an unfortunate woman who has married for money.

She had a great lady's fine scorn for Elizabeth Montagu's habit of welcoming into society those born outside its pale, and she ridiculed "college geniuses with nothing but a book in their pockets".

[18] Jill Rubenstein describes Stuart as "Tory to the bone, never having forgiven the pain inflicted on her father by the scurrilous personal attacks of Wilkes and others" and compares her politics to those of Sir Walter Scott, "a principled and consistent conservatism".

[19] Professor Karl Miller, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, praises Stuart's "magnificent pieces of writing".

Lady Louisa herself was a charming letter writer, and her correspondence with Sir Walter Scott – which we hope to see published in our own time – will, it is said, fully sustain the Wortley reputation for wit and beauty of style, while it will exhibit a poet in a very different character from that in which another poet figures in his celebrated correspondence with her grandmother, Lady Mary.

– AthenaeumBy mistake, a shorter version of this notice appeared again in The Gentleman's Magazine Obituary pages for December 1851, preceded by the date "Oct.

[2] An oil sketch of Stuart in 1851 by George Hayter[2] was used to illustrate the chapter on her in Harry Graham's A Group of Scottish Women (1908), and was then in the collection of a Lieutenant-Colonel Clinton.