The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  6 Elizabeth Macie to John Harris, Lord Malmesbury, September 3, 1777; Hants RO, 9M73/160.

  7 Smithson to Lord Malmesbury, February 28, 1802; Hants RO, 9M73/G2215.

  8 Smithson to Sir Joseph Banks, September 18, 1808; Sutro Library, California. Published in A. Grove Day, "James Smithson in Durance," The Pacific Historical Review 12, no. 4 (1943), pp. 391–4.

  9 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, May 7, 1775; Correspondence of Horace Walpole 24 (1967), p. 99; quoted in H. S. Torrens, "Smithson, James (1764–1829)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

  10 Phillimore and Fry, An Index to Changes of Name, p. 296.

  11 Davies Giddy diary, June 11, 1789 (note added to this day's entry, written c. 1826); DG 14, CRO; reprinted in the Smithsonian's Annual Report of 1884, p. 4.

  12 Smithson knew his family tree well enough to refer to his fellow chemist Smithson Tennant as a "distant relative." The relationship between the two was so obscure it eluded any explanation; and it was only in the 1970s, after Tennant's biographer devoted much of his retirement to the problem, that it was determined the two were related not on the Smithson side, as one might suspect, but instead on the Hungerford side of the tree (and it was necessary to go all the way back to the 1660s to find the connection). A. E. Wales, biography of Smithson Tennant, unpublished. I have not been privileged to see the manuscript, but Wales' son, Dr. John Wales, generously shared the genealogical chart and other Smithson-related materials with me.

  13 My assumption that they were a London-based family comes from three sources: a title deed listing "John Keate of the City of Westminster, Esq.," December 1, 1746; Z1/47/1, Devon Record Office; and the fact that at the time of his Oxford matriculation Lumley Keate hailed from the parish of St. Margaret's, Westminster, as did Elizabeth Keate at the time of her marriage in St. Paul's Cathedral in 1750. J. Foster, Alumni Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1888), p. 780; J. W. Clay, Register of St. Paul's Cathedral (Harleian Society, 1899), p. 163.

  14 Anne Pollen, John Hungerford Pollen, 1820–1902 (London, 1912), p. 3. Thanks to Louis Jebb for this reference.

  15 A. G. Stewart, Tlxe bounds of sodomy: textual relations in early modern England, unpublished Ph.D. (Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1993), pp. 196–8.

  16 Rev. Richard Warner, Excursions from Bath (Bath, 1801), pp. 25–35.

  17 Lumley is referred to as "Hungerford Keate" in a letter from Lord Northumberland to George Grenville, March 17, 1765; BL Add MS 57824, f. 115. Henrietta Maria Keate changed her name from Walker to Hungerford on March 17, 1789; Phillimore and Fry, An Index to Changes of Name, p. 169. That Smithson requested his nephew change his name is noted in John Guillemard to Richard Rush, July 4, 1837; Rush Family Papers, Princeton.

  18 The Proud Duke was the third husband of the famous child heiress Elizabeth Percy, who as the only surviving offspring of Josceline Percy, the eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland, brought with her to the marriage all the titles and estates of the House of Percy.

  19 Northumberland's intimacy with the head of the new government, the Earl of Bute, George Ill's former tutor, was cemented by the marriage of Northumberland's eldest son to one of Bute's daughters in 1764—a disastrous liaison as it turned out, concluded by scandalous divorce proceedings, but a formidable alliance at the time. Gerald Brenan, A History of the House of Percy (London, 1902), vol. 2, p. 446.

  20 Lady Northumberland compiled a list of "persons from whom being descended I ought to have Prints." Alnwick Castle MSS, D20/242.

  21 Henrietta Maria Walker to Earl of Shelburne, June 14, 1782; BL Bowood Papers, B50, ff. 7–12.

  22 Henrietta Maria Walker to Earl of Shelburne, June 14, 1782. For Lumley Keate's perquisite see Northumberland to G. Grenville, May 10, 1763, Morgan Library [Aut. Misc. England], and March 17, 1765, BL Add MS 57824, f. 115.

  23 John Macie died at their Queen Square house "after a tedious Illness," in 1761, aged forty-two. "Universally beloved while living, lamented when dead," he was buried, like all his family, at the church in Weston. Bath Journal, March 30, 1761, p. 4, col. 3; Bath Chronicle, April 2, p. 4, col. 4; April 9, p. 4, col. 4. Elizabeth's description of the worth of the Macie estates is in TNA: PRO C 12/1028/19.

  24 Louis Dutens, Mémoires d'un voyageurquise repose (London, 1807), vol. 3, p. 108; Smithson Library, SIL. Roy Porter gives comparative earnings, showing that the agricultural laborers on Elizabeth Macie's properties, for example, might not earn £800 in a lifetime; Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1982), pp. 63–4.

  25 In 1764 Horace Walpole told a friend, "I have been this evening to Sion, which is becoming another Mount Palatine. [The architect Robert] Adam has displayed great taste, and the Earl matches it with magnificence." Horace Walpole to the Earl of Hertford, August 27, 1764; Peter Cunningham, ed., The Letters of Horace Walpole (London, 1891), vol. 4, pp. 265–6. For a discussion of the work done at all three residences, see Eileen Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam (London and New Haven 2002), pp. 64–103.

  26 Walpole to George Montagu, June 8, 1762; Mrs. Paget Toynbee, ed., The Letters of Horace Walpole (Oxford, 1904), vol. 5, p. 211.

  27 Photographs of Weston House taken prior to its 1970 demolition are at the National Monuments Record, BB74/5778–95. See also Joan Hargood-Ash, Looking Back at Weston (1964); John Collinson, The History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset (Bath, 1791), vol. 1, pp. xxxix, 156–66. The mention of the laundresses is in Pierce Egan, Walks Through Bath (Bath, 1819), p. 186. The Jane Austen letter is quoted in Constance Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends (John Lane Bodley Head, 1901), p. 126.

  28 R. E. Peach, Historic Houses in Bath and their associations (London, 1883), p. 60. Bath Record Office, SRO D/P/Wal. SW 4/1/1.

  29 Alfred Barbeau, Life & Letters at Bath in the XVIIIth Century (London, 1904), pp. 53–62.

  30 Bath: A Glance at its Public Worship, Style of Dress, Cotillons, Masquerades, &. &. (Bath, 1814), p. 6.

  31 Diaries of the Duchess of Northumberland, July 29, 1760 and February 6, 1763; Alnwick Castle MSS. There are also many entries concerning her anonymous lovers "500" and "9" throughout 1763–65, which were all edited out of the published edition of her diaries.

  32 The mention of the declaration of love is quoted in James Grieg, The Diaries of a Duchess: Extracts from the Diaries of the First Duchess of Northumberland (1716–1776) (New York, 1927), p. 58. The maxims are from the Duchess' original manuscript diaries.

  33 Diaries of the Duchess of Northumberland, November 17 and December 19, 1761; the movements of the duke are charted from his correspondence. Alnwick Casde MSS.

  34 Will of John Macie, July 16, 1761; TNA: PRO PROB 11/867. Judith Schneid Lewis, In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760–1860 (Rutgers University Press, 1986), p. 39.

  35 There is a microfilm at the Archives de Paris of those records reconstructed in the late nineteenth century from other sources; it contains no record of Smithson. It would in any case have included Smithson only if his mother had chosen to have him baptized a Catholic; Protestants were not permitted official records of birth, death, or marriage in Paris at this time, and had to worship in private. The naturalization petition expressly states that Smithson was raised in the Protestant faith, despite being born in Paris. There has been some speculation that Smithson might have been born at the Abbaye de Penthemont, one of the most aristocratic convents in Paris and highly fashionable with the English (the grizzled and worldly Abbesse, Madame de Béthisy de Méziéres, had an English mother and grandparents who had held positions in the household of james II). The Duke of Northumberland paid for his illegitimate daughters, Smithson's half-sisters Philadelphia and Dorothy Percy, to be educated there. Thomas Jefferson was another who placed his daughters there, during his stint in the city in the late 1780s; he was quick to explain to relatives back home that the convent had "as many protestants as Catholics, and not a word is spoken to them on the subject of religion." Jefferson to Mary Jefferson Boiling, July
23, 1787. Quoted in William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 221. See also François Rousseau, "Histoire de l'Abbaye de Pentemont, depuis sa translation à Paris jusqu'à la Révolution," Mémoires de la Société de l'Histoire de Paris (1918), pp. 171–227.

  Baptismal records for the Bath region, several areas of London with connections to Elizabeth Macie, and the parishes around Alnwick in Northumberland yield no mention of Smithson's birth. The 1773 naturalization petition, which states Smithson's age as "nine years and four months or thereabouts," would make his birthdate February 1764. This is the source used to justify 1764 as Smithson's birth year in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. This is contradicted, however, by the Oxford record of matriculation, which states that Smithson was seventeen in May 1782. Smithson's tomb, erected by Smithson's nephew, gives no date of birth; it states only that Smithson "died at Genoa the 26th June, 1829, aged 75 years." This would place his birth in about 1754, which is clearly widely off the mark. I think it possible that he was born in the spring of 1765; such a date would make the transfer of land that Smithson's mother made to him on April 10 and 11, 1786, a celebration of his coming of age. Deeds of 9 Friar's Walk, Lewes; Add. MSS, Catalogue X, Ref. AMSX, East Sussex Record Office, Lewes.

  36 John Guillemard to Richard Rush, July 4, 1837; Box 13, Rush Family Papers, Princeton. Not all of Guillemard's recollections are accurate.

  37 Will of Walter Hungerford, June 26, 1754; TNA: PRO PROB 11/809. Keate v. Hungerford, 1764 and 1765; TNA: PRO C 12/1011/39 and C 12/1230/46.

  38 Macie v. Hungerford, November 17, 1766; TNA: PRO C 12/1019/4.

  39 Henrietta Maria Keate to Charles Yorke, January 4, 1769; BL Add MS 35639, ff. 1–4.

  40 The testimony of Mr. William Harris mentioned Elizabeth Macie "putting two children" in the school that his wife ran at Hammersmith; one was probably Smithson, the other unknown. That Macie and Dickinson met in Amsterdam in April 1768 was revealed in the testimony of Dickinson's butler. Joseph Tournon; Macie v. Dickinson, 1769; London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), DL/C/277.

  41 La Liste des Personnes, qui sont venues aux Eaux Minerales de Spa Van 1768 (Spa and Liege, 1751). "Madame Macie, Dame Angloise," was announced on List no. 10, July 12. She appears to have been traveling with a young Mademoiselle Sorenzy from The Hague and an English gentleman named Mr. Pennant. Dickinson arrived August 11, alone. He was staying at the Moulinet d'Or, which does not seem to have been a large or particularly fashionable place to stay. I am extremely grateful to Vyvyan Lyle for all her work retrieving this information.

  42 Madame du Deffand in Paris was staggered at Irwin's "folles depenses." A. I. Dasent, rev. Roger T. Steam, "Irwin, Sir John (1728–88)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Massereene ended up imprisoned for debt in Paris; he remained there for eighteen or nineteen years, escaping only in 1789, shortly before the fall of the Bastille. G.E.C. [Cockayne], The Complete Peerage, revised by the Hon. Vicary Gibbs (London, 1932), vol. 8, pp. 546–47; see also John Goldworth Alger, Englishmen in the French Revolution, (London, 1889), p. 25.

  43 Dickinson v. Blaake, December 6, 1768; TNA: PRO C 12/1230/23.

  44 LMA, DL/C/002/001–007.

  45 LMA, DL/C/002/001–007.

  46 The Temple, later famous as the dungeon that held the royal family prior to their march to the guillotine (and which was as a result demolished by Napoleon, in order to prevent it becoming a pilgrimage site for royalists), was like a small city within Paris, with its own justice system and its own police. It was owned by the Knights of Malta; Conti had gained his apartments there as part of his appointment as grand-prieur de France. The Temple was a sink of dissipation, and Conti set the standard—notoriously exacting a trophy from each of his sexual conquests. Countless locks of hair and four thousand ladies' rings, each with a little label naming its owner, were said to have been found among his possessions after his death. The numbers were exaggerated, but an actual inventory after Conti's decease did reveal 492 rings of precious stones, many engraved, and some thirty of which featured scenes from the legend of Priapus. G. Capon and R. Yve-Plessis, Paris Galant au Dix-Huitiéme Siecle: Vie privée du prince de Conty, Louis-François de Bourbon (1717–1776) (Paris, 1907), pp. 112–14, 290.

  47 Mémoires de M. le due de Lauzun (Paris, 1822), 2 vols. Smithson Library, SIL.

  48 LMA, DL/C/277. TNA: PRO C 12/56/39.

  49 LMA, DL/C/56/002/001–007.

  50 TNA: PRO C 12/1028/19. Rate Books, SRO D/P/Wal. SW 4/1/1, Bath Record Office.

  51 Elizabeth Macie lodged her case of jactitation in the Consistory Court of London on November 25, 1769; LMA, DL/C/176 and DL/C/277. Five days later Dickinson executed an indenture of lease and release and assignment with his bankers Biddulph & Cocks for control of lease, in right of his wife, of the Queen Square house and the rents and profits of the Weston estate, and the undivided moiety of the Hungerford estates; TNA: PRO C 12/1038/11 and 1035/12. On January 10, 1770, Dickinson launched a countersuit in the King's Bench against Macie and her lawyer Woodcock; TNA: PRO C 12/56/39. On July 2, 1770, Elizabeth Macie launched another suit against Dickinson; TNA: PRO C 12/1028/19. John Marshe Dickinson's new will was drawn up on April 18, 1770; TNA: PRO PROB 11/969.

  52 Mrs. Harris, to her son James, then in Madrid, April 12, 1771; Hants RO, 9M73/G1258/18/2.

  53 Description of the two lots were "in closed in Balls of Wax of equal Size as near as might be," and an independent third party picked a ball out of a hat for each sister. TNA: PRO C 12/1261/38.

  54 TNA: PRO C 12/1028/19.

  55 Alex Kidson, George Romney, 1734–1802 (London, 2002), cat. no. 31. See Heather Ewing, "A Possible Identification for Romney's Portrait of a Mother and Child, c. 1770," Transactions of the Romney Society (forthcoming).

  56 J. Lawrence Angel, "The Skeleton of james Smithson (1765–1829)," October 15, 1973; SIA, Smithson reference file. "As he was delicate," from Greville to Hamilton, n.d. [1784]; printed in Hamilton and Nelson Papers (London, 1893–4), pp. 91–2. "Penury of vital power" from William Drew to Lady Webster, n.d. [c. June–5 July, 1797]; BL Add MS 51814, ff. 37–8.

  57 "Spitting up blood" from James Smithson to Sir Joseph Banks, September 18, 1808; Sutro Library, California. "Loss of hearing" from James L. Macie to Charles F. Greville, January 1, 1792; BL Add MS 41199, f. 82. "Terrible cold" from Smithson to Miss Eccles, n.d.; SIA, RU 7000, Box 1. The forensic report from Angel, "The Skeleton of james Smithson," 1973. 1805 report from "No. 9890, Smithson agent anglais sur le Rhin," F7/4641, Archives Nationales, Paris (AN). Blagden Diary, October 2, 1814; Blagden Papers, Royal Society.

  58 David M. Morens, "At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art," Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal, vol. 8, no. 11 (2002).

  59 John Marshe Dickinson's will, April 18, 1770; TNA: PRO PROB 11/969.

  60 In the family genealogy that his relatives, the de la Batuts, supplied the Smithsonian in the late nineteenth century, Henry Louis Dickenson was called a son of the Duke of Northumberland. An example of the Alnwick medal of 1766 is depicted and described in Laurence Brown, British Historical Medals (Seaby, 1980), I, nos 106–7. I am very grateful to Peter Barber for his help on this subject; personal communication with the author, November 2004. The medal is mentioned in a list of items retained by the de la Batut family; its whereabouts today are unknown. See Labatut to the Smithsonian, February 9, 1879; SIA, RU 7000, Box 4. The inventory of Smithson's possessions made following his death included some silver plate engraved with the arms of the duke. A BBC Television Antiques Roadshow episode in November 2005 featured an intriguing rummer (a large drinking glass), with the Northumberland arms on one side and the initials "JS" on the other. Many thanks to Sue Palmer for drawing my attention to this.

  61 The Woodcock payments can be seen in the Hoare's ledgers for the Woodcocks, the Duke of Northumberland. The payments from the duke do not correlate exactly with payouts to Mrs. Macie; as an example, the duke paid Mr. Woodcock £500 on July 5, 1777; Woo
dcock recorded a payment of £700 to Mrs. Macie on July 26, 1777. The Woodcock Partnership Accounts are kept at Dawson's, Lincoln's Inn Fields. They run from 1762 to 1774; Northumberland was not a client during these years. Elizabeth Macie incurred charges of £175 in 1772–3, a sum exceeded by only three other clients that year, out of a total of about 450 clients (including figures like the Earl of Bute, the Duke of Devonshire, and the Duke of Newcastle). She did not pay the firm at all that year or the next.

  62 See Philadelphia and Dorothy Percy's obituary notices in the Gentleman's Magazine (1791), p. 1068, and (1794), pp. 1060–61. Today, all that remains connected to these two girls is a row of brick almshouses in Brighton that their mother raised to their memory in the last years of the eighteenth century; Brighton City Archives. Margaret Marriott was painted by Angelica Kauffmann, who was very close to Smithson's cousin George Keate; see Angela Rosenthal, "Kauffmann and Portraiture," in Wendy Wassyng Roworth, ed., Angelica Kauffmann: A Continental Artist in Georgian England (London, 1992), p. 100. Smithson's description of her is in a letter to Lord Holland, June 20, 1797; BL Add MS 51821, f. 47.

  63 Davies Giddy, note of 1826, in diary entry for June 11, 1786; DG 13, CRO.

  64 Gentleman's Magazine (1801), p. 380; The Times, April 14, 1801, p. 3, col. d. Many thanks to Major David Gape and also to Brian Moody of St. Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archeological Society for their help.

  65 House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers, May 21, 1773.

  66 William A. Shaw, ed., Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland, 1603–1700 (London, 1911), vol. 18 (1911), pp. iii-x.

  67 Generally, attendance records for this period are scanty at best. Unless the child was a scholar—i.e., receiving funds for his education—he was often not recorded. I have checked the records of Westminster, Eton, St. Paul's, Christ's Hospital, Dulwich, Shrewsbury, and Charterhouse to no avail.