Family

Wickham stayed in Dublin until his successor had been identified, finally departing for London on 20 February 1804. He and Eleonore travelled very slowly through an ‘unfrequented part of Wales … in the hope that the newness of the scene and its variety … would give a new turn to my ideas, which had been so gloomy for some time past’. In London Wickham put himself under the care of Pere Elisé, a fashionable émigré surgeon from Grenoble who later became King's Surgeon when Louis XVIII ascended the French throne. His treatment involved

His progress was very slow, hindered by a fall down the stairs at home, and it was not until October 1805 that Wickham felt confident of ‘ultimate recovery’.

Wickham was still a comparatively young man, being in his forty-third year when he resigned from his position in Ireland, and had growing responsibilities. The death of his spendthrift father in 1804 placed him formally at the head of a family that faced the threat of slipping down the social scale and requiring, as his sister Harriet feared, ‘easy street oeconomy [sic] necessary to maintain the character of gentlewomen’. Wickham had long accepted his fate (perhaps too pessimistically): ‘I can never become a rich man by honest means’, he once told Portland, ‘and therefore it will be necessary … to live and die poor’. The family home at Cottingley had to be sold and Wickham, as executor, subsequently became involved in an ‘unpleasant’ Chancellery suit. His wife's fortune, such as it was, was either lost or untouchable in French funds. When Louis Bertrand died in 1812, Eleonore was unable, owing to the war, ‘to pay the last duties to her beloved father’.