The Lost World of James Smithson

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The Lost World of James Smithson Page 4

by Heather Ewing


  Bath was a regular stop for the Northumberlands on their junket of the seasons in the early 1760s—down from Dublin Castle in Ireland, where he was Lord-Lieutenant, off to the races at Newmarket, in London for sessions of Parliament, some summer time at Alnwick. In the autumn, they often spent several weeks and sometimes even a month in Bath. Both Lord and Lady Northumberland suffered prodigiously from gout; recourse to the waters was a popular solution, but Bath was equally a place to continue the business of politics in a freer and more playful environment. It was also here most likely that the affair between Mrs. Macie and Northumberland began. Despite the strictures that the Master of Ceremonies Beau Nash had imposed, Bath exhaled an air of transgression. "Is there, or is there not any other large town," one writer asked, "where young women indiscriminately run, either alone or in groups, from one end to the other, without any servant or steady friend to accompany them; talking and laughing at the corners of streets, and walking sometimes with young men only? I do not happen to know of any similar instance: in London certainly these matters are differently regulated."30

  Despite the entourage that surrounded the Northumberlands, it would not have been difficult for Elizabeth Macie and Lord Northumberland to see one another. Lord and Lady Northumberland lived fairly independent lives, often traveling apart; both engaged in numerous dalliances. Northumberland fathered two other illegimate children by a different mistress, as well as conducting a couple of other known affairs during these years. His wife at one point caught him kissing Lady Lauderdale, when that woman and her husband were visiting Alnwick. Lady Northumberland, for her part, believed that "There are women who have never had an Intrigue, scarce any who have had but one." She carried on her own flings and flirtations, coyly chronicling her escapades with her lovers, using numbers in her diary to mask their identities: "Had a very agreeable private party in the evening [including] 500 & 9. … 9 not so prudent as usual had like to have betray'd himself more than once …" She rode out with them, traipsed through Ranelagh Gardens with them, gambled, supped and enjoyed their company over breakfast. She was caught out with 500 "on the stairs" while on one of their rides, by Princess Augusta and her two brothers.31 Nevertheless, the Northumberlands' marriage by all accounts was a strong and loving one. In Parliament in 1763, presumably around the height of his dalliance with Elizabeth Macie, Lord Northumberland inserted into one of his speeches a passionate tribute to his wife, a subject which "inspired him with a vast Ardour." Lady Northumberland, happily recording the event in her diary, reported that "Ld. Drogheda said he [the Earl of Northumberland] was the first Man yt [that] ever brought a Declaration of Love into a speech in Parliament." She comforted herself with the knowledge of his love, and with the maxims: "We forgive as long as we love," and "Men find it more difficult to overlook the least infidelity to themselves than the greatest to others."32

  In December 1761, in perhaps the early days of the affair between Lord Northumberland and Elizabeth Macie, the Northumberlands passed a month in Bath, taking in the theatre and the balls, games of three-card love or quadrille at the Assembly Rooms, and a private conceit by the Italian singer Passini. At the end Lord Northumberland found reason to stay on at Bath a further four days after his wife. She, in the closest thing to an admission of abandonment in a diary otherwise free of self-pity and open declarations of pain, confided: "Left Bath quite alone shocking Day …" In the autumn of 1762 Lord Northumberland made a two-week visit to Bath without his wife, a trip he repeated in February 1763.33

  Northumberland's correspondence has been culled of nearly all personal letters—presumably by a subsequent generation concerned with tidying up the family reputation. There is no trace of any of his dalliances, nor even hardly anything of his relationship with his wife or children. What survives provides a vivid illustration of the barrage of requests a lord in a position of power received in the mid-late eighteenth century. Most of the pleas the duke declined or punted to others he felt could better afford to deliver. On the outer leaf of many of the letters he has scrawled, in his confidently lean, looping hand, "Answered. Impossible." A rare few he felt beholden to satisfy. One such favor was the job he arranged for Elizabeth Macie's brother in May 1763—and which he worked the system assiduously to maintain in subsequent years. It is an indication, most likely, that the affair that led to James Smithson was by then already flourishing.

  Northumberland was once more alone in Bath for two weeks in September 1764, and it was perhaps not long thereafter that Elizabeth Macie found herself pregnant. The news must have come as quite a shock. While it was relatively common, according to the Countess of Sutherland, for English women to present their children as legitimate when in fact they were not, Elizabeth Macie was a widow, about thirty-six years old, and clearly unattached. For eleven years she had been married to John Macie, without ever having had a child, though they had fervently hoped for one. Now she was with child, and in this situation—"when in scrapes," as the Duchess of Devonshire called it—she did as countless other well-born women did, before and after. She headed for the Continent to have the child in secret.34

  No record appears to survive documenting James Smithson's birth, which happened in 1764 or 1765, though the petition for naturalization lodged on his behalf in 1773 makes clear that he was born in Paris. The French birth certificates, even in the unlikely event one was recorded for Smithson, were mostly lost in the torching of Paris' city hall during the Commune of 1871; and he does not seem to have been baptized in a church in England upon his return. Smithson's birthday remains unknown. The few pieces of evidence uncovered are contradictory and as yet irreconcilable. In any event, even before the catastrophic loss of his papers and belongings in the Smithsonian fire of 1865, James Smithson's story was shrouded in mystery.35

  Almost nothing is known of Smithson's childhood prior to the petition of naturalization of 1773. Since he was already nearly ten when applying for British citizenship, it has been assumed that "Jacques Louis" largely spent his formative years being kept discreetly in France. In the late 1830s one friend of Smithson's recalled that "Mrs. Macie lived much abroad and her Son was much with her."36 There are indications, however, that Smithson may sometimes have been left behind by his mother for long stints, and this reminiscence—by someone who did not know Smithson before university—may be a gloss on the real nature of Smithson's childhood.

  Furthermore, it seems likely that he was raised in England, not France. Before Smithson was even a year or so old, he and his mother were almost certainly back home, on account of a family crisis. On March 26, 1766, Elizabeth's brother Lumley died, aged thirty-one, leaving no wife or children. His only survivors were his sisters, the widowed Elizabeth Macie and the still unmarried Henrietta Maria Keate. Critically, Lumley had written no will, and the fate of the Hungerford estates lay in the balance.

  For a couple of years Lumley had been locked in a court battle with a Mrs. Hungerford, the second wife of his father's cousin George, over several estates, including Studley House, a handsome property that sat adjacent to the Earl of Shelburne's seat of Bowood House in north Wiltshire. Studley House had been the seat of the last great scion of Elizabeth's branch of the Hungerford family, Sir Walter Hungerford. When Sir Walter died childless in 1754, his will was a subject of fascination, its abundant clauses elaborating a "fee tail male" chain through the family across the path of his nephews—ensuring that the properties would stay in the family via the male descendants. Elizabeth's father had come into possession of Great Durnford Manor, and he and his heirs seemed primed to come into all the other Hungerford lands as well after the death of his older cousin George, who was also childless; George, however, had married a second time late in life, and his widow was now doing her best to thwart any claims on the properties.37

  In November 1766, when James Smithson was presumably about eighteen months old, Elizabeth Macie and her sister Henrietta Maria, both then resident in Bath, took up the suit themselves.38 In it they called themselves the co-heiresse
s of Studley—an epithet Smithson would ostentatiously use to define his mother some sixty years later in his will. Over the next few years the suit wound its way through Chancery Court, an expensive drain on the sisters' resources. At New Year 1769 there was still no resolution in sight. Henrietta Maria passed a heartbroken "Holydays within sight of the house [Studley], at Lord Shelborne's [sic], it was a place I once dearly loved."39

  Elizabeth Macie, though equally vested in the stakes tied to gaining the ancestral homeland, seems to have been content to entrust her sister with the battle for ownership. In search of attention and affection, she left everything behind and headed for the Continent. In early 1768 she seems to have put Smithson in a school in Hammersmith, a leafy village west of London. By April she was in Amsterdam.40 She was gone, in the end, for more than a year, and when she finally returned she brought back with her incalculable misery—a calamitous entanglement that greatly complicated the lives and fortunes of her entire family.

  At the resort town of Spa in the late summer of 1768 she took up with a young Englishman named John Marshe Dickinson, the roguish son of a former Lord Mayor, whom she had met in Amsterdam.41 Their flirtation rapidly somersaulted into a torrid affair. Within a month the two were married at Paris, in a hastily arranged ceremony in the state room of the Dutch ambassador—the English ambassador and his chaplain being out of town. Some of Dickinson's big-spending Paris friends were invited as witnesses, including Sir John Irwin, a well-mannered major general known for lavish entertaining, the foppish Clotworthy Skeffington, the second Earl of Massereene, still in his twenties and recognized already as "the most superlative coxcomb that Ireland ever bred," and Isaac Panchaud, an English banker resident at Paris.42

  The cracks in this precipitous liaison quickly revealed themselves. Dickinson had a roving eye and recommenced his romancing soon after their marriage. Not long after the wedding he set off on a solo trip to England, intent on securing his rights to Elizabeth's wealth. He renewed the suit at the King's Bench for the claim to the Hungerford estates, making the case now in his name.43 Dickinson had learned the family history well; he knew already the intricacies of the tangled web of Hungerford cousinage and the potential reward that it could bring to him.

  His departure left a desperate Elizabeth alone in Paris, pregnant with the child that had evidently precipitated the hasty wedding. She wasted away, a roiling bundle of emotions, confined to her bed. At one moment she was madly in love with her new husband, fearing for his safety as the winter months whipped up the Channel waters. In the next, she felt despondent, humiliated over his betrayals and resentful of his lack of attention. The doctor came and ordered her blood let. His ministrations, which left her weak and feverish, were futile. She wrote an extraordinary letter to Dickinson in London, to tell him of the loss of the baby:

  With the utmost difficulty am I supported in my Bed, exactly in the same spot you left me to tell you that I am alive but ill indeed! And the little creature w[hic]h I hoped w[oul]d have been the means of bringing you to love, &c me, for all y[ou]r further follies is now in spirits at the apothecary shop. I pity and forgive you any fault you may have had herein, Nay love you still enough to be in agonies from the weather. Do not cross I conjure you till it is safe & then you may be sure I ever stand in need of you.

  I am entirely y[ou]rs

  Eliza: Dickinson44

  One child was lost, pickled in ajar in the apothecary shop, presumably awaiting burial, but one remained. Three-year-old James was still in London. She seems to have charged Dickinson with paying the boy a visit and even bringing him back to France. She waited for word from Dickinson, word that he had made the journey to Dover safely, gossip of life in London, and news especially of this precious child of hers. She sent more letters to him, "full of sighs, complaints, & murmurs." In her last letter, sent to Calais in an attempt to intercept Dickinson on his return, she included a message especially for her son:

  I cannot conclude without a little word to y[ou]r young companion if w.th you & was you indeed to bestow a little kiss upon him I will repay you most faithfully when we meet. Pray heav'n it may be soon.45

  No further mention, however oblique, was made of young James Smithson in the material that survives. It is not possible to know whether the callow Dickinson brought him to Paris. Soon after Dickinson's return Elizabeth again became pregnant. But their relationship, fragile from the start, deteriorated tremendously over the winter of 1768-9. Both were drawn to the glittering nightlife of Paris. They frequented the Monday night parties hosted by the debauched Prince de Conti in his sumptuous Salon des Quatres Glaces at the Temple, long evenings of music and food and gambling popular with the English aristocracy and certain radicals in the French court.46 One habitué of these soirées, the Due de Lauzun, captured the tenor of this society in his indiscreet and entertaining memoirs. Though he lost his head during the Revolution, his book found its way to publication in the 1820s, scandalizing French society. Smithson owned one of the precious copies (the book was suppressed by the government soon after publication), aware perhaps, maybe even proud and titillated, that his mother had been a peripheral part of this circle.47

  Elizabeth steeled herself against the disappointments of her alliance with Dickinson. Where she had once signed her letters to him, "I am my dear Dickinson tenderly and affectionately yours," she now closed, "I am, to my misfortune, Eliza: Dickinson." She tried to maintain some sort of moral high ground, rebuking him, "Let your treatment of me be what it will I shall always carry towards you as it becomes your Wife to do." She did, however, have much to rue. The man she had married was grossly in debt. His estate at Gloucester was mortgaged for much more than its worth, compounding the burden of maintaining his main house at Dunstable. She had rashly promised him £20,000 from her estate in the early days of their relationship, and from the moment the marriage had been enacted he had pressured her to advance him some of this money.48

  By March 1769 the situation was dire indeed. Elizabeth decided she had to return to England; Dickinson fought her, believing she should not travel till after she had been delivered of the baby. Meanwhile he carried on his affairs out on the town, forcing her to send a note out after him:

  If you are wise Dickinson return to me this Evening without going to the Temple [to the Prince de Conti's party] for perhaps on your conduct this Evening depends the future peace of both our lifes & the life its-self of an Infant you acknowledge to believe your own!49

  As much as she painted herself the wronged wife, Elizabeth too knew how to play the game. The letter's stormy conclusion—"an Infant you acknowledge to believe your own!"—suggests that perhaps he accused her, too, of infidelity. The night before their departure—which could conceivably be the same tumultuous day that she sent this letter—Elizabeth went herself to the public supper at the Prince de Conti's and, ignoring her pregnancy, stayed on for the dancing and gambling late into the night. According to Dickinson, she "did not return home till long after [he] was Retired to rest." The journey from Paris to London, a passage typically lasting from three to five days depending on the wind and weather, took the pair more than a month. Whether the loss of the baby was caused by the "Extreem fury of her Temper" and her reckless partying (as he alleged) or his "cruelty" and violent behavior (as she testified), by the time the couple finally arrived back in London Elizabeth Dickinson was, for the second time since her marriage six months earlier, no longer pregnant.

  They returned to a house at Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square), a tiny island of desirability in an area that had lost much of its aristocratic sheen. The year that followed was one of absolute chaos, an unending series of highly damaging, terrifying events. If Smithson was present for much or even any of it, he would have been witness to scenes of violence, thunderous rage, threats, and the rapid, ugly disintegration of his mother's economic and emotional wellbeing.

  Upon her return to England Smithson's mother was in "a low and languishing state," shattered physically and mentall
y by the second miscarriage. Dr. Hunter, physician to the fashionable and accoucheur to the Queen, was briefly brought in to consult. She should "repose all day on a Couch," he instructed, confined to one floor of the house. It was a prescription that suited John Marshe Dickinson very well. With his wife's movements curbed, Dickinson immediately set upon her once more to sign over her property to him. His oily solicitor came to add further pressure, in the guise of a confidant, aware that she suffered Dickinson's infidelities: "The way to make John Marshe Dickinson a Good Husband," he assured her, "was by laying him under a real Obligation." In the meantime, Dickinson took what steps he could on his own, taking possession of the Macie house at Queen Square in Bath, which was soon on the rate books under his name rather than hers.50

  Elizabeth defiantly announced she would make no deal without the counsel of her own family lawyer. The declaration incensed her husband. He became, in her words, "so outragious [sic] and violent that [Elizabeth] considered her Life to be in the utmost Danger." She fled the house, aided by a sympathetic servant, and she hid successfully for over a month before Dickinson located her. He arrived finally late one evening at the house where she was staying, armed with his solicitor and a posse of men he had hired to help him take possession once more of his intractable wife. Refused entry to the room where she was hiding, Dickinson banged and thundered, breaking down the door while a crowd of neighbors and passersby gathered, drawn by the commotion and its promise of explosive familial theatre. The hired men faltered in the face of such a censorious audience, and Dickinson was driven away. It was 3.00 a.m. When his carriage rolled off into the darkness, without Elizabeth (or James) inside it.

 

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