The Honourable Misses Monckton Milnes
(1852-1902 and 1855-1923)
3 May 1861

Volume 3, page 187, sitting number 3440.

These are the daughters of Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-1885), 1st Baron Houghton. The elder girl is Amicia Henrietta Monckton Milnes, who married Sir Gerald Fitzgerald in 1881. The younger girl is Florence Ellen Hungerford Monckton Milnes, who married Major the Honourable Arthur Henry Henniker in 1882. As Florence Henniker she published a nuber of poems, novels, short stories and one play. She met Thomas Hardy at a party in Dublin in 1893 and the two became close friends for the rest of her life, though their relationship was sometimes complicated. 

Richard Monckton Milnes was an author and a Member of Parliament. He also had an enormous influence on Victorian literary taste, with a reputation as 'the first wit in town and a maker of men.' Among the first to recognize the genius of Keats, in 1848 he published his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. In addition he secured a pension for Tennyson and widely proclaimed Swinburne's talent. His own works include Poems of Many Years (1838) and Palm Leaves (1844). He repeatedly offered his hand in marriage to Florence Nightingale but, although she adored him, she always turned him down. He later acknowledged that she would never have achieved all she did if she had married him. 

An ardent collector of erotica, he was almost certainly the author of an epic poem on flagellation, The Rodiad. It was Milnes who first introduced Swinburne to the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Swinburne later said that he had never laughed so much in his life.