Margaret Rolle entered the world on January 17, 1709, as the only surviving daughter and sole heiress of Samuel Rolle, a member of Parliament, of Heanton Satchville in the parish of Petrockstowe, Devon. Her father was a representative of a wealthy cadet branch of the Rolles of Stevenstone, one of Devon's most substantial landowning families, descended from a George Rolle who had acquired estates during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. Through her paternal grandmother, Lady Arabella Clinton, wife of Robert Rolle and aunt of Edward Clinton, the fifth Earl of Lincoln, Margaret carried an ancient blood connection to one of England's oldest baronies, a fact that would eventually be turned to her considerable legal advantage.
The Clinton barony was among those venerable titles that had fallen into abeyance — a condition under English peerage law in which a title expires when its holder dies leaving multiple heirs of equal standing, none of whom can be identified as the sole successor. Such a title could be revived if the House of Lords Privileges Committee was persuaded that one claimant stood above the rest as the senior co-heir. When Margaret's cousin Hugh Fortescue, the first Earl Clinton, died in 1751 without leaving a clear successor, the ancient barony of Clinton became dormant. In 1760 the Privileges Committee called the title out of abeyance in Margaret's favor, making her the fifteenth Baroness Clinton in her own right — a recognition of her superior claim through the Arabella Clinton line.
Her inheritance was substantial by any measure. She had received from her father numerous lucrative manors across Devon and Cornwall, including the pocket borough of Callington in Cornwall, which gave her the practical ability to nominate members of Parliament. The manor of Ashburton in Devon came to her through her mother, having passed from Roger Tuckfield to his sister and then to Margaret herself. In 1761 she used her influence over the Callington seat to nominate Richard Stevens, her Devon agent and brother-in-law of a distant cousin, Henry, first Baron Rolle, as its member of Parliament.
In 1724, when she was fifteen and already known as a notable heiress, Margaret was married to twenty-three-year-old Robert Walpole, the first Baron Walpole and future second Earl of Orford. He was the eldest son of Sir Robert Walpole, the dominant political figure of the age and widely regarded as the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. The match was a union of aristocratic convenience rather than affection, and the marriage deteriorated rapidly. After the birth of their son George — who would become the third Earl of Orford and sixteenth Baron Clinton, and who died insane without legitimate heirs — Margaret made it clear in the most pointed terms that the conjugal dimension of the marriage was over. According to her brother-in-law Horace Walpole, she eventually stipulated that her husband might share her bed no more than twice a week, and she later obtained a formal legal separation. The quarrels she sustained with the entire Walpole family were notorious.
Her second marriage, contracted in 1751 following the death of her first husband, was to the Honorable Sewallis Shirley, the fourteenth son of Robert Shirley, first Earl Ferrers, and a member of Parliament. The relationship had begun before the wedding: she had already been Shirley's mistress for some time. She sponsored his election as MP for Callington in 1754, demonstrating the practical political utility of her pocket borough. This marriage, like the first, ended in separation, and by 1755 Margaret had departed for Florence, where she pursued a relationship with the Count of Richecourt. She also conducted what Horace Walpole described with characteristic acidulousness as a variety of other liaisons, including one with Samuel Sturgis, a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Walpole's letters return to his sister-in-law with a mixture of contempt and fascinated disapproval that tells as much about him as about her. Sir Horace Mann, the British resident at Florence, offered a rather more nuanced view, suggesting that the Count's attentions to Margaret were genuine and that she received them without embarrassment.
Sewallis Shirley's career continued independently of the marriage. He eventually became Comptroller of Queen Charlotte's Household, a respectable office that suggests his separation from the forceful Margaret Rolle had done him no lasting harm in courtly circles. As for Margaret's son George, the third Earl of Orford, he became known as a celebrated falconer but suffered increasingly from mental instability and died in 1791 without legitimate children, ending the Walpole line of the barony. Margaret herself survived until January 13, 1781, dying at the age of seventy-one. She had lived a life of extraordinary independence for a woman of her era — managing vast estates, exercising political patronage, accumulating and recovering from legal entanglements, and maintaining a personal life conducted largely on her own terms. She was in many respects an anomaly in the eighteenth-century English aristocracy: a woman whose wealth and legal standing gave her freedoms that most of her contemporaries could not have imagined.
