The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Smithson seems to have grown exceedingly close to Margaret Marriott, whom he called "a most particular and intimate friend of mine."11 While this language was not uncommon in the eighteenth century and does not necessarily connote a physical relationship, Smithson did give Margaret Marriott two portraits of himself, both "painted in Oil Colours one very large and one smaller."12 She is the only person so far identified to have been singled out in such a way. A portrait, a miniature especially, was an intimate memento, to keep one's beloved close during times of separation. As Prince Lee Boo gleefully replied, when Smithson's cousin George Keate asked whether he understood the purpose of a portrait, pointing first to Keate and then to the painting of him: "Lee Boo understand well—that Misser Keate die,—this Misser Keate live!"13

  Margaret Marriott and the Percy girls, probably more than anyone, understood Smithson's anguish over his father. Even as the sisters had enjoyed many advantages that Smithson had not, they had not been accepted into the ducal household; Mrs. Marriott had attempted, following the duke's death, to have the girls raised by the duke's second son Lord Beverley and his wife, but Lady Beverley had apparently refused.14 Dorothy Percy in her last days worked out a way to express the acute sympathy she felt for Smithson. Two weeks before her death, she added a codicil to her will. In it she left "unto my half brother James Macie Esquire natural son to his late Grace Duke of Northumberland the sum of three thousand pounds."15 The money was not to come to Smithson until after the death of Mrs. Marriott, an event which occurred only in 1827. The heft of these words in Dorothy's will, though, was much greater even than the monetary gift. Dorothy's bequest, her legacy to Smithson—the act of a devoted friend, a sister in spirit—was the act of naming. It represented, finally, a public acknowledgment of Smithson's paternity. There in writing, in an official document, was notice of his birth.

  Dorothy's death was probably a strong reminder to Smithson of his disenfranchisement, and the corresponding need he felt to be recognized as a man of quality, a wealthy noble-born gentleman. Most young gentlemen returned from the Grand Tour to settle on to their estates. Smithson had no such realm. His mother had sold Great Durnford Manor in 1791, the estate that had been in the Hungerford family since the fifteenth century. She still retained the Macie property of Weston House in the countryside near Bath, and she was expending astronomical sums bringing it into the latest fashion, but it was not destined to be his. She may also have been renting Elm Grove near Mortlake, a bucolic Thames-side community of villas and pleasure grounds where Smithson passed some time this first summer.16

  Smithson had yet to establish his own domain, but he was a gentleman returned from the Grand Tour, and he intended now to live in a manner reflecting that status, despite the continuing suffering of the country at war. In early 1799 he found a house to rent on Clarges Street off Piccadilly and began to decorate lavishly. Payments flowed out of Hoare's to the cabinet makers Gillow & Co., to Thomas and Richard Chippendale, to the wallpaper manufacturers Jeffrey & Co., and to one of London's leading glass suppliers, John Blades. At a house sale run by the auctioneer Christie's he laid out £70 for a large collection of items, including a mahogany card table, three separate fireplace sets—each with fender, irons, and hearth rug—and a pantheon stove. He prepared for entertaining on a large scale with the acquisition of eighteen oval blue and white china dishes and a vast set of decanters and wine and water glasses. He also took home a handsome "three-foot achromatic telescope by Watkins, on a pillar and claw," as well as quite the most expensive item in the sale, "a magnificent Vauxhall plate of glass," nearly six feet high and four feet wide, cased in an "elegant carved and gilt frame."17 Eager to stock his library shelves, Smithson roamed the booksellers of London, including the French émigré De Boffe's shop in Soho. Among his purchases was Mercier's Mon bonnet de nuit, or "night cap" thoughts, the two-volume pocket-sized French edition published in London in 1798. This luminous meditation on quotidian life in Paris—a kaleidoscopic parade of images: bolts of silk in shop windows, snatches of conversation from the theatre boxes, and the songs of oyster sellers in the market—provided wistful Francophiles something to luxuriate in while they were still prevented from crossing the Channel.

  Smithson immersed himself in the company of the Whig aristocrats he had met on the Grand Tour. "Would you have the kindness to re-tell me the shop where your dinner services were made," he asked Lady Holland, "and if you would grant me the loan of one of them, to guard against the little mistakes to which the petulant genius of English workmen expose them, of taking black for white, blunt for sharp-pointed, &c &c &c it would still add to the favor. You know that by your own calculation you will save me two years of the time required for my getting settled in my house." When he returned the items a few weeks later, he thanked her profusely before joking, in regard to the tripling of wheat prices and the bread riots around the country:" I believe that I should have done more wisely not to [have] bespoken any, as knives, plates, and every other article, in any way, connected with eating, must be very soon, in this country, most perfect inutilities."18

  At Lord and Lady Holland's rambling Jacobean mansion on the outskirts of town, he found a happy simulacrum of his European existence. Their unorthodox courtship and subsequent marriage had stunned London society, and her divorce trial had only compounded the scandal of the liaison. Shunned by many of the court regulars, she and Holland proceeded to set up an alternative court at Holland House, which soon became one of the most important centers of opposition politics and culture in the country. It was the closest thing London had to a European salon—and it was one, like those of Madame de Staël or Madame é, run by an alluring, opinionated woman. At its famous dinner parties the table was crammed with visitors, scientists mingling with poets and politicians. As Holland recalled years later, "geology, chemistry and electricity were the fashionable topics of conversation."19 Lady Holland imperiously presided over all; "Make room," she called down to a guest on one occasion, who replied, "It certainly must be made, for it does not exist."20

  One of the many acquaintances Smithson met at Holland House was the wealthy American William Laughton Smith, a congressman from South Carolina who was on his way to a posting as American minister to Portugal. Smithson turned to Smith for help when Mrs. Marriott ran into trouble with "a very considerable" property in South Carolina that she had inherited from her uncle. Margaret Marriott had been born Margaret Goodwin on the island of St. Helena, near Beaufort, South Carolina.21"A rascally executor," as Smithson explained to Lord Holland, was preventing her from obtaining the property. Smith's brother, Joseph Allen Smith, one of America's first art collectors and philanthropists and a key member of South Carolina's merchant and planter elite, had been "mentioned to her [Mrs. Marriott] by many people as the person in the world most able, and best qualified, to render her service, both from his station and the excellence of his moral character." Smithson was convinced that "if our Mr. Smith [William], his brother, would prevail upon him to undertake the affair they say that the recovery of the property is indubitable."22

  Unfortunately, no details regarding this particular American connection have yet been found in the archives of either England or the United States. For someone like Smithson, though, trafficking in the Establishment culture of England and Europe in the late eighteenth century, America was not a remote and foreign land. Many of Smithson's friends and associates had traveled there, whether to fight—as his half-brother Lord Percy, now the second Duke of Northumberland, had—or to explore, as had Count Paolo Andreani or Lord Wycombe or Sir Charles Blagden or any number of Smithson's acquaintances. Others of his acquaintances drew much of their fortune from property there, as Margaret Marriott probably did; Lady Holland, for example, was the granddaughter of an American loyalist who had left her a life interest in a vast estate in Maine on the Kennebec River.23 And there were lots of Americans abroad. American diplomats formed part of the circles in which Smithson moved; and on the Continent wealthy, sophisticated A
mericans like the smith brothers were frequently to be met on the Grand Tour.

  Smithson had come of age during the extraordinary decade that witnessed the surrender of the British at Yorktown, the formal recognition of an independent United States, and the unprecedented creation of a constitution based on self-government. He had learned of these epochal events and discussed them—in the politicized circle of chemistry devotees at Oxford, amidst the congenial philosophers of Edinburgh, and in the radical coffeehouse culture of London—in communities of men who were profoundly sympathetic to the democratic ideals of this new nation.

  Smithson and his fellow philosophers, the men of the English Enlightenment, were focused on constructing a public sphere, a community that fostered scientific advancement and the happiness of mankind. They understood that liberty was essential to the success of their pursuits. When Joseph Priestley fled to the United States in 1794 seeking protection from the persecution that trailed him in England, the radical United Irishmen published a public letter of sympathy and support; "But be cheerful, dear Sir, you are going to a happier world, the world of Washington and Franklin," they assured him. "The attention of a whole scientific people [here] is bent to multiplying the means and instruments of destruction … but you are going to a country where science is turned to better use."24

  Smithson's Enlightenment aspirations had had in his lifetime their most perfect realization to date in the United States. The architects of the American republic, statesmen like Franklin and Jefferson, were many of them scientists and leaders of scientific societies; the election of 1800, which pitted Jefferson against Adams, was also the contest of the president of the American Philosophical Society against the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. America's leaders regularly praised the pursuit of science, highlighting the role that democratic forms of government could play in the fostering of progress. Jefferson argued that liberty was "the great parent of science and of virtue; and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free."25 And George Washington, in his final address as president, exhorted: "Promote, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."26

  In April 1799 Sir Joseph Banks invited "Louis Macie" to become a proprietor of just such a new establishment, the Royal Institution. The brainchild of the American-born inventor and soldier of fortune Count Rumford, the Royal Institution was to be devoted to "the applications of Science to the common Purposes of Life."27 It was a dramatically new kind of forum for the spread of knowledge, both in its scientific focus and in its intended audience. It was to be dedicated to applied science, to the discoveries that materially improved the human condition—research into the properties of heat and fuel, and the processes of tanning, bleaching, and dyeing—work that Rumford had long championed. By providing laboratory facilities, it would offer the country's first institutionally backed place of research. And with the creation of a lecture hall, teaching became possible. This utilitarian approach, so markedly different from the gentleman-scholar-oriented program of the Royal Society, which lacked both laboratory and lecture hall, was coupled with a brand new target audience: the working man. The Royal Institution in its earliest iteration was an idealistic effort to bring science to the masses. The higher echelons of society were to be entertained with lectures illustrating the beneficial applications of new discoveries to daily life, while artisans, bricklayers, and other tradesmen—"whose deficiency in knowledge proves one of the greatest drawbacks to the progress of fart"—were to be served by a school for mechanics.28

  Smithson was one of about one hundred original subscribers or "Proprietors" solicited within the first two months to provide financial backing; by the end of the first year this number had grown to two hundred and eighty. These men were for the most part not scientists at all, but rather aristocrats and wealthy gentry; at fifty guineas a subscription, only the rich could afford to be listed supporters of the new endeavor. Smithson, hungry for recognition of his gentlemanly status, seems to have been content to become a patron. He found himself in the company of some of the most prominent philanthropists in England: the Earl of Winchilsea, who took an active role as the first president of the Managers, the men picked by the Proprietors actually to run the business of the Institution; the entrepreneurial aristocrat the Duke of Bridgewater, who spearheaded the canal mania that swept the country in the late eighteenth century, and was invited to be president of the Royal Institution but declined; and Thomas Bernard, the treasurer of the Foundling Hospital, who served as the first secretary of the Royal Institution. Many of the backers, Bernard especially, had been involved in the creation of the Society for the Bettering of the Condition of the Poor and had also been active on the Board of Agriculture. They were for the most part improving landowners—enlightened aristocrats riding the latest developments in science to better their agricultural yields and more effectively exploit the natural resources of their properties.

  Chemistry was promptly established as a central preoccupation of the new institution. Humphry Davy, twenty-two years old and fresh from his experiments with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) at Thomas Beddoes' Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, was hired in the first yean of operation as a lecturer. Davy was a brilliant, dynamic speaker, taking his audiences on an exalted tour of the civilizing forces of chemistry. His lectures were filled with references to poetry, metaphysics, and ancient history, and were punctuated by spectacular demonstrations. Electricity could be summoned, for example, with loud explosions and brilliant colored lights, to burn out the letters S-C-I-E-N-C-E on a luminous sheet of gold leaf. Davy's lectures soon became an essential part of fashionable entertainment in the capital, and on evenings when Davy was speaking Albemarle Street became so clogged with carriages rushing well-dressed ladies and gentlemen to the proceedings that it was made into London's first one-way street.29

  Smithson's initial involvement in the Royal Institution signaled his ever-increasing involvement as a gentleman patron and his ascent to roles of leadership in London's scientific community. Over at the Royal Society he was elected to the governing council for the first time at the anniversary meeting of 1800.30 Among those with whom he was to serve were his friends John Hawkins and Charles Greville, as well as Greville's uncle Sir William Hamilton, who was then, together with Emma and Lord Nelson, enjoying a hero's welcome back in London, his posting at Naples finally at an end. Just as Smithson seemed ready to take a more commanding position in the scientific world, however, he dropped out of sight. He failed to attend a single meeting of the Royal Society council following his swearing in in January 1801.

  The start of the new century was an absolutely calamitous period for Smithson, a time filled with the deaths of many in his closest circle, including his mother. His cousin George Keate had died shortly after Smithson's return from the Continent in 1797. Now Keate's wife Jane-Catharine passed a way, forcing the sale of all Keate's extraordinary collections. The sale of the books alone lasted for three days, the coins for two, and the lots that comprised the rest of the museum, when finally sold more than a year later, filled an astonishing eleven days. Smithson, as he witnessed this spectacle, might have wondered about Keate's legacy—and whether it could have been handled in a different manner. Might Keate's name have been better remembered if he had specified in his will that the museum be kept intact? Certainly, this was something on the minds of others. "It is to be lamented," declared The Times, "that the valuable and choice Muséum of the late George Keate, Author of the Pelew Islands, which will begin selling at King's in Covent Garden, on Monday next, was not disposed of altogether, for although it will enrich the cabinets of the first Collectors in Europe, it certainly ought to have become a national purchase."31

  Smithson's old guardian Joseph Gape, the family solicitor who had sponsored his naturalization and who might well have been the neare
st that Smithson had to a father figure during his early childhood, also passed away around the turn of the century. So too did the solicitor Albany Wallis, who took to the grave much of the staggering and mysterious £8,000 that Smithson had loaned him a few years earlier; his death provoked Smithson into filing a lawsuit against Wallis' heir for the recovery of the money, the only time—in contrast to his extraordinarily litigious mother—that Smithson ever went to court.32 Most traumatic of all was the death of his mother.

  To her last days, Smithson's mother had remained the widow Elizabeth Macie. And yet, at the end, she did not come to rest next to her first husband in the Macie ancestral grounds at Weston, near Bath. Neither did she elect to be interred amongst the Hungerfords at Bremhill in Wiltshire, where her brother lay. In 1803 her sister Henrietta Maria would be buried in Salisbury Cathedral, surrounded by those medieval Hungerfords who had once brought fame to the family. Elizabeth Macie instead came to lie in Brighton, a louche watering hole popularized by the King's wayward son (later George IV) on the south coast of England. She had evidently developed some roots there, as she chose to be buried at St. Nicholas' and requested that the parish officers distribute twenty guineas worth of bread to the poor on the day of her burial. Why she settled in Brighton, and who or what kept her there, is a mystery.33

  Smithson immediately threw himself into sorting out the morass of her affairs. Among his many responsibilities was the vacating of the premises at Weston, according to the terms of John Macie's will. There were problems as well at Great Durnford, the Hungerford property Mrs. Macie had sold in 1791. Smithson had a testy exchange over water rights with the new owner, Lord Malmesbury. He extended the offer that his mother had made, "to take back the Estate, and restore to you the price of it." Failing that, Smithson told Malmesbury, they would have to settle the matter in court, though he concluded, "To me, as to you, my Lord, the object is null—the money in dispute is nothing—the amount of it, and more, will be wasted in the struggle." Smithson felt insulted by Malmesbury's accusations, and he believed the honor of his late mother was drawn into question, too, by the dispute. Malmesbury's proposed solution, simply to split the monies in question, Smithson sarcastically called "an ingenious device by which wrong becomes inevitable." He exhorted Malmesbury to come to an amicable agreement. "From the imperfections intrinsically interwoven in human nature, there are no transactions between men in which there are not some flaws on which rigid precision may not fix. But Nature has infused candor in the human heart, my Lord, for the purpose of supplying the defects which she had left in the human head, and checking the jars which, else, would endlessly have perturbed society."34