Of personal influences, her mother’s, until marriage, was the strongest.  There are only two long breaks in the diary she kept, when she had no heart to write down her thoughts; one occurs during the year of Lady Minto’s long and serious illness at Berlin, which began in 1832, and the other after Lord John Russell’s death in 1878.

Lady Minto was not strong; bringing many sons and daughters into the world had tried her; and her delicacy seems to have drawn her children closer round her.  Lady Fanny’s references to her mother are full of an anxious, protective devotion, as though she were always watching to see if any shadow of physical or mental trouble were threatening her.  So in imagining the merry, active life of this large family, the presence of a mother most tenderly loved, from whom praise seemed something almost too good to be true, must not be forgotten.

In November, 1830 (the year Lady Fanny’s diaries begin), the Duke of Wellington resigned, having emphatically declared that the system of representation ought to possess, and did possess, the entire confidence of the country.  He had gone so far as to say that the wit of man could not have devised a better representative system than that which Lord John Russell, in the previous session, had attempted to alter by proposing to enfranchise Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham.  But the election which followed the death of George iv on June 26th had not borne out the Duke’s assertion; it had gone heavily against him.  Lord Grey, forming his Ministry out of the old Whigs and the followers of Canning and Grenville, at once made Reform a Cabinet measure.  During the stormy elections of July the news came from Paris that Charles X had been deposed, and unlike the news of the French Revolution, it acted as a stimulus, not as a check, to the reforming party in England.

The next entry quoted from Lady Fanny’s diary, begun at the age of fourteen, is dated November 22, 1830; the family were travelling towards Paris, matters having almost quieted down there.  Louis Philippe had been recognized by England as King of the French the month before, and the only side of the revolution which came under her young eyes was the somewhat vamped up enthusiasm for the Citizen King which followed his acceptance of the crown and tricolor.  It is said that any small boy in those days could exhibit the King to curious sightseers by raising a cheer outside the Tuileries windows, when His Majesty, to whom any manifestation of enthusiasm was extremely precious, would appear automatically upon the balcony and bow.  But there were traces of agitation still to be felt up and down the country, and over Paris hung that deceptive, stolid air of indifference which is so puzzling a characteristic of crises in France.

The Mintos travelled in several carriages with a considerable retinue, with a doctor and servants, but not with a train which, in those days, would have been thought remarkable for an English peer.