Weston House, the property outside Bath that she had recently so lavishly renovated, had been left her for her lifetime only, and Smithson was now forced to vacate in favor of a distant cousin. The genealogical relationship was so remote that the cousin left blank the space explaining it in the lawsuit they launched against Mrs. Macie, accusing her of defrauding them of their inheritance. And he was locked in a dispute with Lord Malmesbury, the new owner of Great Durnford Manor, the Hungerford estate that his mother, after years of litigation to establish her right to the property, had sold in 1791. Nevertheless, from the depths of his mourning, Smithson devoted himself to defending his profligate mother's reputation, fighting for her right "to receive, at least a posthumous, possession of her due." It was a role that he had probably taken on at a very early age. As a single woman of property, and one who had once been disastrously seduced by a fortune hunter, Elizabeth Macie had been a defiant and much embattled character. "Womens estates are so neglected & consequently incroached upon," she complained, "that y.e. [the] idea of their being even drove to dispose of them presents its-self to every one."6 She lived her life convinced that everyone was trying to take advantage of her, and she evidently passed on this besieged outlook to her son. Smithson warned Malmesbury, "The man who feels does not sit down easy under the sense of being wronged, and nor my family, or myself, have been inured by habit to the sensation."7
Smithson seems to have felt a fierce loyalty to his beleaguered mother, but her feckless ways also left him greatly conflicted. Nowhere was this fraught and complicated attachment more fully exposed than in Smithson's decision to change his name. His adoption of the name Smithson immediately identified him as a son of the late duke, but it also publicly declared his illegitimacy. And even more problematically, especially for one as image-conscious as Smithson, it presented the appearance of disrespectfully abandoning his mother at the very moment in which her name should be most honored and remembered. He had apparently protected her reputation during her lifetime by tacitly obscuring his real paternity. "Since her death," however, he explained, "I make little mistery [sic] of my being brother to the present Duke of Northumberland."8
To most people in the beau monde, the name Smithson blatantly signaled illegitimacy. Smithson was the name that the Duke of Northumberland had carried when he was a mere baronet from Yorkshire—before he married the well-born Elizabeth Seymour, granddaughter of the sixth Duke of Somerset, and before the two of them, on account of her brother's premature death, fell by happy accident into the earldom of Northumberland and the great fortunes of the Percy family. The Smithsons in the not so distant past had been London haberdashers, and Sir Hugh Smithson before this windfall had been destined for life as a Member of Parliament, holder of some lands and a middling fortune. Through his intellect, good looks and magnetic personality he had carried off a bride much above his station and made himself in the process into one of the most formidable taste-setters of eighteenth-century England.
The Act of Parliament permitting Hugh Smithson to assume the name of Percy in 1750 barred him from passing the Percy name to any children other than those by his wife. This restriction was common knowledge in their circles; Horace Walpole, writing to a friend in 1775, noted: "Another of our number is dying, the Duchess of Northumberland. Her turtle will not be so impatient for a mate, as his patent does not enable him to beget Percys—a Master or Miss Smithson would sound like natural children."9
Smithson seems to have taken elaborate steps to ensure that the name change be made as discreetly as possible. In his plea to the Crown he argued that this change had in fact been his mother's idea: "James Macie of Clarges Street … hath by his petition humbly represented unto us, that his mother … having during her lifetime, expressed her earnest desire that the Petitioner and his issue should take and use the surname of Smithson, instead of that of Macie."10 In this narrative, which has been readily accepted by subsequent generations, Smithson became simply a dutiful and adoring son, intent on fulfilling his mother's deathbed wishes.
Yet there seems reason to question whether in fact Smithson invoked his mother as a means of masking what otherwise might have appeared disrespectful and grasping. His old Oxford friend Davies Giddy confided to his diary, "Macie had the bad taste (not to use any stronger expression) to obtain the Kings Authority for taking the name of Smithson (his putative father) he still continuing to usurp, & wrongfully hold, by his own admission, the property of the Macies."11
The freighted emotions carried in his dynamic with his mother, and the import of his father's place in his life, are encapsulated in a letter he wrote at this time to his friend the political hostess Lady Holland, in which he described his mother's death as that only of "a very near relative." Referring to his mother so obliquely enabled him in the same breath to convey the news he seems really to have wanted to announce—his new name—without any crisis of conscience. He concluded the letter: "Having entirely relinquished the name of Macie to resume that of my Paternal Family I have the honor to subscribe myself, Dear Madam, Yr. very ob. & most humble Serv.t, James Smithson." (He was, it is worth noting, proud to "resume" a name he had never actually owned in the first place.)
The difficult months following his mother's death bring into focus how much Smithson was concerned with the pursuit of legacy—of both name and property—as well as the pursuit of knowledge. Ironically, by 1800 Smithson had already succeeded in finding an arena in which to make a name on his own account, one based on his accomplishments and talents rather than on a troubled bloodline. The science to which he had devoted himself-—chemistry—was the most exciting of all the sciences at the end of the eighteenth century, boding great things for the future prosperity and happiness of man. Smithson had been singled out from an early age for his exceptional promise. He immersed himself in an extraordinary collective of individuals who were bent on unmasking the secrets of nature and harnessing those powers for the benefit of society. Smithson and his friends lived in a universe still full of unexplained mysteries, but they believed that through the careful accumulation of observation and facts they could divine a system of laws that ordered the natural world. For all his investigations into the composition of ancient Egyptian paint colors or the crystalline structure of ice, however, for all his efforts to identify the constituent parts of calamines and zeolites and ulmin, the greatest mystery Smithson faced, the conundrum that possessed his life, was the accident of his birth.
In eighteenth-century British society name meant everything. It signified one's source of wealth and prestige; it provided a palpable link to one's ancestors. Smithson was raised by a woman who kept her pedigree carefully groomed and displayed, and he learned the twists and turns of his family tree out to its most remote branches.12 Smithson's childhood was fueled with stories of his ancestors—the charting of "the best blood of England" that ran through his veins—and his adult life was consumed with efforts to ensure his own name added some luster to the family pantheon.
His mother's family, the Keates, was a fashionable London family. Although they were not heirs to any great fortune, the eighteenth century's cult of ancestry ensured their easy entree to polite society.13 Through the paternal line they could lay claim to the arms and crest of an old family, once very powerful and numerous, but now practically extinct: the Hungerfords. Sir Thomas Hungerford was the first identified Speaker of the House of Commons in 1377, and the brocaded mantle he wore as Speaker became one of the family's most cherished heirlooms, used by subsequent generations as a christening gown.14 Thomas' son Sir Walter brought fame and honor to the Hungerford name on the battlefields of France under three Lancastrian kings, Henry IV, V, and VI. Even the nefarious exploits of Hungerford ancestors carried claims to greatness; another Walter Hungerford in 1540 mounted the gallows after Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister who oversaw the dissolution of the monasteries before he fell from Henry VIIl's favor. Their severed heads leered down together from adjacent spikes on London Bridge. (It was surely omi
tted from the family's boasts of ancestral accomplishments that Hungerford was charged, in addition to his seditious work on Cromwell's behalf, with sodomy and incest and the use of "magic arts.")15
Vast swathes of Wiltshire and Berkshire once sat under the command of the Hungerfords, but before the end of the seventeenth century, the then reigning Sir Walter—later dubbed Spendthrift Hungerford—was forced by his extravagances to sell the principal family seat, the castle of Farleigh Hungerford, and to demolish their great London palace, which ran from the Strand to the River Thames (commemorated today by the Hungerford foot and railway bridges). Farleigh Hungerford was already in ruins by the time Smithson was a teenager, its crumbling, ivy-covered embattlements symbolic of faded grandeur and a family driven to extinction. It was, one guidebook advised, "a place curious to the antiquary, pleasing to the painter, and which might be rendered of great utility to the public at large, since I know of no spot whither we could send, with so much advantage, those unfortunate patients who are under the influence of family pride, or of that inflation which worldly greatness is so apt to inspire."16
For Smithson, as for his mother and the rest of his family, family pride was indeed something of a sickness. The Hungerford name remained all their lives a talisman of status and privilege. Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie and her brother Lumley Hungerford Keate had both been given Hungerford as part of their name; and Lumley eventually even took to calling himself simply Hungerford Keate. Their other sibling, James Smithson's aunt Henrietta Maria Keate, officially adopted Hungerford as her surname in 1789. Smithson himself bankrolled the establishment of a Hungerford Hotel on the rue Caumartin in Paris in the 1820s. And around the same time he also requested that his nephew and heir, Henry James Dickenson, change his name to Hungerford.17 The Hungerford name was the relic that remained to them, their sole link to a history of conquest and feudal power. It gave them a sense of self.
The Hungerford link was also the vehicle by which the family could claim its descent from royalty. Elizabeth's great-grandfather Sir George Hungerford had married Elizabeth Seymour, the daughter of Charles Seymour, second Baron Seymour of Trowbridge, and the half-sister of Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset, the notorious "Proud duke"—so-called on account of his extraordinarily arrogant behavior.18 Traveling higher up the family tree through this Seymour link, the Keate family could reach back to Henry VIII, one of whose wives had been Jane Seymour (sister of Elizabeth Seymour), and through him to additional kings: his son Edward VI, his father Henry VII, and his ancestors Edwards I, II, III, and VI. They could also claim Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England for nine days in 1553, who was the sister of Catherine, wife of Edward Seymour, the first Earl of Hertford, Elizabeth Macie's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
But the fruits of the family tree were not all illustrious long deceased. The most rewarding living connection Elizabeth Macie's genealogical caretaking brought her was the Proud Duke's granddaughter, Elizabeth Percy, Lady Northumberland—and by extension her husband Lord Northumberland. Northumberland was not made a duke until 1766, a year or so after James Smithson's birth, but he was already by the early 1760s a commanding figure in public life—a Knight of the Garter, Chamberlain of the Queen's Household, a member of the Privy Council, and one of "the King's Friends," the secret, intimate circle that met daily to advise the King.19 In an age that celebrated celebrity, Lord Northumberland was one of the most magnificent men of England.
In Lady Northumberland, a prodigious keeper of her own family history, Elizabeth Macie and her sister Henrietta Maria found an amiable companion.20 These women, the Keate sisters and Lady Northumberland, had only to reach back as far as their grandparents' and great-grandparents' generations to find their kinship. When one kept tabs on a web of relations that reached back centuries, to Charlemagne and King Alfred, these nearest generations collapsed as if they were one. Thus could Elizabeth Macie call herself a "niece of the Proud Duke," as James Smithson referred to her in his will, when in fact he was her great-grandmother's half-brother. And so too did Lady Northumberland embrace Elizabeth Macie and Henrietta Maria Keate as blood. "The Dutchess ha[s] done me the honor to call me 'a near Relation by Her Father, '" Henrietta Maria boasted to the Earl of Shelburne, '"one to be made much of having so few.'"21
Elizabeth Macie and her siblings latched onto this connection with all their energies. They lived in a world incumbent on patronage, a world in which everyone knew their place, just as they knew the extent of any financial package vaunted for a marriage arrangement. At balls and assemblies, everyone stood conscious of their position in the firmament of society, and they passed the evenings fixing the ranks of their neighbors and newcomers. In this world, every link to a constellation of greatness represented a possible perquisite in the way of a preferment or annuity. Lord Northumberland sat in the inner circles of power; he represented one of their best hopes for advancement. When Henrietta Maria eventually married a Barbados plantation owner named George Walker, she petitioned Northumberland to help her husband secure a baronetcy. Lumley, through Northumberland's efforts, became Commissioner of the Lottery.22 And Elizabeth, it seems, sought nothing less than Northumberland himself.
When her affair with Northumberland began, Elizabeth Macie was in her early thirties, recently widowed and childless. Her husband John Macie had been a well-liked and upstanding pillar of the community in the countryside outside Bath, a lieutenant in the Sixth Company of the Eastern Battalion of the Somerset Militia, a justice of the peace for the county of Somerset, and High Sheriff for the same in 1753. Elizabeth enjoyed an income of about £800 a year from her late husband's estate, and he had also left her "a very considerable personal Estate consisting principally of Mortgages and other Securities for Money Household Goods and Furniture Plate Linnen [sic] and China," which enabled her to live quite grandly.23 She did not, of course, live in a manner remotely in the league of the Northumberlands, who were spending about £400 a year on candles alone, and whose annual expenditures often topped £50,000. The properties that Lord and Lady Northumberland commanded—in Northumberland, York, Cornwall, Devonshire, and Middlesex—comprised one-hundredth of all England.24
In the 1760s Lord and Lady Northumberland were busily overhauling their seats, bringing them into fashion and creating a platform suitably opulent for their politicking and entertainment. They transformed the outdated Jacobean pile of Syon House into a dazzling suite of neoclassical rooms, a progression of monumental state apartments modeled on ideals of Roman architecture and filled with references to the latest archeological discoveries of antique style. They restored Alnwick Castle in the north as the ancient seat of the Percys, papering the walls with colorful escutcheons and other heraldic ornaments celebrating their family pedigree. And at Northumberland House, their palatial London base at the foot of the Strand, they likewise rebuilt extravagantly, paneling an entire drawing room in costly plate-glass mirrors imported from France.25
The parties they held were legendary, with six hundred, one thousand, even twelve hundred guests in an evening, the courtyard a perpetual scrum of carriages and sedan chairs. The prolific diarist Horace Walpole described one "pompous festino" at Northumberland House, where "not only the whole house, but the garden, was illuminated, and was quite a fairy scene. Arches and pyramids of lights alternately surrounded the enclosure; a diamond necklace of lamps edged the rails and descent, with a spiral obelisk of candles on each hand; and dispersed over the lawn were little bands of kettle-drums, clarionets, fifes &c, and the lovely moon, who came without a card."26
The town of Weston, near Bath, home to generations of the Macie family, 1789.
James Smithson's mother, the widowed Elizabeth Macie, aspired to a stately life of her own. She reigned as the lady of the manor at Weston House, the largest and most elegant house in the humble village of Weston, near Bath, where for generations Macies had been among the principal landholders. Weston's picturesque topography and its romantic Gothic church and graveyard made it an
inviting destination for strollers out from Bath, but there was no local fashionable society. Many of the sturdy stone houses hugging the meandering high street were inhabited by laundresses who took in the clothes of the wealthy of Bath. As Jane Austen playfully told her sister, "We walked to Weston one evening last week and liked it very much. Liked what very much? Weston? No, walking to Weston, I have not expressed myself properly."27
Elizabeth Macie also commanded an impressive house in town on Queen Square, one of the first grand developments of neoclassical Bath, a property she and her late husband had probably taken on to assuage her appetite for society.28 Bath, at mid-century, was England's premiere pleasure resort, a gleaming city of fashion and frivolity half a mile down the road from Weston. In the course of a few decades the city had been transformed from a medieval backwater into the most elegant exemplar of Georgian design, a theatrical stage set inspired by classical Rome. Stately rows of new buff-colored stone houses swept up the hills, curving in ripples of columns around crescents and circles, terraces and squares. Its greatest excitement, though, came with the influx of the wealthy, landed clientele who visited in the season that stretched from September to June. Visitors came under the pretense of taking the waters, which were promoted for all sorts of ailments—gout, fevers, pustules, infertility—but the city was a pleasure ground for the wealthy, where ritualized encounters offered a guise for titillation. Against a backdrop of musical serenades, the fashionable promenaded from one ceremoniously programmed activity to the next. In the morning men and women in brown linen costumes and caps bobbed, sweated and teased one another in the sulphurous waters of the baths before being carried home in their sedan chairs. Others watched and gossiped while quaffing the mineral waters in the Pump Room overlooking the baths. Breakfast, taken at home by the ladies and in the coffeehouses by the men, was followed by daily service at the Abbey. The afternoon was idled away in shopping, calls at people's houses, and gambling. Twice a week in the evenings formal balls drew every level of society to the Assembly Rooms.29
The Lost World of James Smithson Page 3