Biography of Pulteney, Henrietta Laura (1766-1808)

Henrietta Laura (1766-1808), known as ‘the richest spinster in Europe’, inherited the vast Pulteney estates from her mother in 1782. With her father William Johnstone, she created the elegant new town at Bathwick, extending from the Pulteney Bridge through Laura Place to Sydney Gardens, where the Holburne Museum stands. Although a major Bath landowner, Laura’s main home was Bath House in Piccadilly. Laura was educated at home by a cousin and later in a Paris convent and on the Grand Tour. According to the European Magazine, she was educated ‘after the manner of Jean Jacques Rousseau’. Her obituary in the Bath Herald blamed her ‘many peculiarities and eccentricities’ on her education and relatively sheltered childhood, and she was notoriously shy and awkward.