by Susan Nagel
Robert Ferguson was less controversial a character than Mary’s first husband, but he shared the collector’s mania. In his passion—that of collecting minerals—however, he made no enemies and, in fact, was also honored by groups of scientists and his constituents. During the summer of 1812, he and Mary took young Henry to row on Loch Lomond of the famed “bonnie banks” in the well-known Scottish tune. They also visited the tiny island of Staffa in the Hebrides and rowed into Fingal’s Cave, immortalized in Felix Mendelssohn’s music. In the cave there was an impressive quantity of an unnamed mineral that would later be named “fergusonite” by Wilhelm Haidinger in his article “Description of Fergusonite, a New Mineral Species.” In the 1825 article, Haidinger stated that he was calling this dark mineral consisting of yttrium, erbium, and cerium “fergusonite,” “in honor of a gentleman too well known to the mineralogical world.” In 1820, Jameson dedicated his book System of Mineralogy to Ferguson “in testimony of his distinguished talents as a mineralogist, by his faithful and sincere friend the author.” The mineral fergusonite is found from China to Colorado. It was used by Madame Curie in her Nobel Prize–winning discovery of radium and by the chemist Sir William Ramsay—whose family hailed from Haddington, Robert’s eventual political seat—in his work on inert gases, which also earned him a Nobel Prize (1904). Over the years, Robert had amassed one of the finest and most rare collections of minerals on earth. He brought his son and his bride to places where they could observe rock formations and learn to share his interest.
In 1812, Napoleon destroyed Moscow and Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated by a madman who appeared at the House of Commons. It was a time to stay close to home. Mary and Robert lived among three of Scotland’s most fabulous homes: Raith, Biel, and Archerfield. Robert’s brother, General Ronald Ferguson, on the other hand, was away a good deal of the time traveling to locations in Africa, Portugal, and India, where he distinguished himself in battle. For much of the time that Ronald was abroad, Mary and Robert looked after Ronald’s wife, Jean, who went with them from Raith to Archerfield to Biel and back. Jean was the daughter of another famous general—Hector Munro—who had wrested Pondicherry from the French, and she endured Ronald’s absences with the understanding of a military daughter. Jean’s two brothers, who had bravely followed their father into far-flung military posts, died famously grizzly deaths—one killed by a shark and one mauled to death by a tiger.
Mary adored Jean, and they became inseparable, and she also loved having Jean’s son, Robert, around to liven the party. Young Robert was born in 1802, making him only two years younger than Mary’s own Bruce. As her nephew, Robert, and her stepson, Henry, grew older, she often invited them and their school friends to dine with her in restaurants, to accompany her to her grandmother’s house in London, and to attend the theater in Kirkcaldy, Edinburgh, and London. Henry’s closest friends were John Davie and John Glennie; when the boys came home with him for the holidays, they all knew they were in for a treat. In 1811, she invited Henry and his friends, an entire group of thirteen-year-old boys to see the play Blue Beard about the infamous pirate. Mary indulged these boys as she simply could not her own children, and all of the boys remained attentive to her throughout her life. As she journeyed from her thirties into middle age, they continued to gather around her, introducing her to their brides, their children, asking for her advice on careers, and spending time with her—not just because she was rich, not out of pity because she had lost her own children, but because she never lost her sense of fun, and she remained charming, sensitive to people, and perennially young at heart. Even in her own country, she was always a tourist, enthusiastically learning every day. In 1816, she saw Melrose Abbey, Chatsworth—home of the Dukes of Devonshire—and in London, with great fascination, went to visit “The Jews Synagogue” twice. In 1817, when Henry turned twenty, he embarked on the Grand Tour of Europe, which was now, finally, at peace. After his trip, he returned directly to Biel to see Mary and share every detail of his travels.
The Fergusons lived an enviable life of material ease, as neither Mary nor Robert had any financial constraints. She commissioned furniture by Bullock, the well-known furniture craftsman from Liverpool, and she purchased pieces by Chippendale and Hepplewhite, paintings by Canaletto, Van Dyke, and Caravaggio, and a clock once owned by Marie Antoinette. True to his word, Robert Ferguson offered Mary unwavering devotion and a life free of the constant criticism and correction she had found so unbearable and corrosive; and by 1813, it seemed that society was also ready to treat Mary kindly. It may have been her charisma, but more likely it was the house, proving true the maxim “Living well is the best revenge.” The highest echelon of society flocked to Biel, which had become one of the most talked about showplaces in Europe; and in 1814, when Mary’s paternal grandmother died, Belhaven and Pencaitland widened the Nisbets’ East Lothian holdings. Mary was the principal landlord in the region, set to inherit about two-thirds of all of East Lothian.
Gossips were busy on a new subject in the teens, and they now focused their attention instead on the extravagant and questionable behavior of the regent, the future King George IV. The regent and his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, were unable to get along, and they lived completely separate lives. Despite the royal couple’s well-known infidelities and their own status as a separated couple, not surprisingly, hypocrisy ruled the day, and divorced women were still not permitted at Court. In 1817, the couple’s only child, the beautiful young Princess Charlotte, long neglected by her selfish parents, tragically and suddenly died. Princess Charlotte’s only source of childhood affection, except for her grandfather, King George III (and he went mad while she was quite young), was the Dowager Lady Elgin, her “Eggy.” Charlotte was, to many people, a sad figure, the poor little rich girl. She was the lone innocent symbol of the Regency, and her death stunned even the most jaded courtiers.
At a very early age, perhaps prematurely, Mary had been thrust into the same aristocratic, international circles, which undoubtedly prepared her to be completely at ease, even a bit blasé, in any royal court. Although that was a welcome asset for a woman in public life, in private many in her set suffered from ennui—but not Mary. She was intrinsically a Scottish lass, a country girl—albeit a very rich one. As a girl, she had taken pride in her chickens’ eggs and had delighted in watching birds swoop overhead. She had laughed as she danced in the wind on the shores of Aberlady Bay and had grown giddy with abandonment riding her ponies, hiding in her very own castle ruins, and playing pranks on her parents. Everywhere that Mary went, her innate sense of fun, her ever present curiosity, her dry sense of humor, her exuberance and verve were sure to go. In fact, these qualities constituted the essence of Mary Hamilton Nisbet Bruce Ferguson, and they would serve as her port in every storm.
When Robert Ferguson first met the Countess of Elgin who, through no fault of her own, was stuck in a political mire in France, the mineralogist believed that he had discovered his most precious gem. Like a diamond, she gallantly maintained her toughness and sparkle in a situation that would have made others crumble. Later, she stood her ground against her husband; and once again, while other people were raising her children, Mary appeared radiant and strong. Robert, however, knew the sacrifice that Mary had made and the toll it took on her heart. In Robert, Mary found a shelter, a safe and welcoming harbor. This once daring and vital woman had developed a real terror, a phobia of any further pregnancies. She wanted no more pregnancies, and though the Fergusons would have no children, they enjoyed an ardent and amorous relationship nonetheless.
Chapter 24
A BEACON
In 1816, Mary’s beloved Aunt Mary Campbell of Shawfield died. Mr. Berry, Robert’s uncle, died the following year. Mary’s father was in frail health, and it would not be long before she would be solely in charge of her vast estates. To comprehend the extent of her fortune, it must be measured and compared: at that time, there were 12 pence (“d”) to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pou
nd (£) sterling. A typical loaf of bread might cost 6d in 1793 and 8d in the early nineteenth century. A person would be considered a gentleman if he had an income of £150 a year; a middle-class family with an income of £250 a year could employ a maidservant who might receive about £10 a year. Mary’s estate was heading toward the annual income it would arrive at by the 1850s, a staggering £400,000, which today would equal an annual income of approximately £256,010,854, or 400 million U.S. dollars.
If there was one positive aspect to the devastation caused by Napoleon, it was the growing prosperity in Scotland that resulted from the need for clothing, food, coal, lime, and tobacco for the troops and for European countries that imported these goods. Although the national debt for England had ballooned from £228 million in 1793 to £876 million in 1815, the Lowlands, where both Mary’s and Robert’s properties and holdings were, had only increased in value. Because wages in Scotland remained lower than in England, manufacturers often favored locating businesses there. Edinburgh had become a city with a very large professional class, and those lawyers, doctors, and bankers liked to spend their money; the Bank of England had forced other English banks out of business, but Scottish banks were publicly owned, and they too were examples of success. The textile mills hummed, the coal mines thrived, and the farms, employing many women and children owing to the absence of men recruited to the militia, had become models of efficiency.
Conversely, the end of the war brought a serious economic downturn. When men returned from the war, they found that jobs were in short supply. Wages tumbled, and a couple of bad years for crops also sent prices out of range for the average working family. Wealthy landowners campaigned for and got relief from Corn Laws protecting the prices of homegrown crops from foreign competition; poor families suffered, and there was a growing resentment of the powerful. Landowners openly worried that what had happened in France could happen in England: the peasants would storm the castle doors and lop off the heads of the aristocracy.
Mary, ever the public relations tactician, realized that her own visibility was important. Her tenants needed to see her; she became, once again, a public figure, taking part in local, colorful events with the peasantry. These people farmed her land, tended her sheep, bred racehorses, and milled her grains in the magical countryside of East Lothian in places like Dirleton, a Brigadoon-like village in the shadow of its castle; Gullane, where witches were rumored to congregate in the Middle Ages; and Haddington, in the shadow of Traprain Law, a dome-shaped hill hiding buried treasure, silver, and lots of it, hidden by early Roman invaders. In 1818, Mary was very likely to be seen by the townspeople at the Bartholomew Fair, at church, presiding over the Auld Handsel Monday curling contest on Gullane Pond—a tradition for the handloom weavers of Dirleton since 1650—or hosting the annual “silver club” golf contest on her property. The Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, the world’s oldest golf association, founded in 1744 in Leith, enjoyed playing in Gullane and in fact bought some of Mary’s property, known as Muirfield, meaning marshy, open land.
Once she established her presence as the future landlord, and not just the little girl they had known, Mary and Robert decided that it was time to return together to the place where they had met. It had been fifteen years since they had been in Paris, and now that their former jailor, Napoleon, was himself imprisoned on an island, they determined it was safe to return to France. They departed on Friday, June 18, 1819, and this time they toured as husband and wife. They went to the Cathedral at Amiens and visited the grand stables at Chantilly. In Paris, they attended the theater and the opera. General Sébastiani warmly welcomed Mary and Robert to his home, as did their longtime friend the comte de Bournon. The comtesse de la Rochefoucauld, one of Paris’s leading hostesses, gave a dinner in their honor. Together they watched the beautiful fireworks at the Fête de Saint-Louis on August 25. They reminisced in the Tuileries Gardens and at Saint-Cloud and Fontainebleau. It was a romantic five months, and then they left. On the way back to Scotland, they stopped in London for a few days to see family.
Mary’s children had been living in France with their father and stepmother; she had been legally precluded from having contact with them, and not one of them had contacted her until 1821, when one of her children expressed the wish to see her. It was the child who remembered her best. On the thirtieth of January, Mary left Biel and had dinner with her cousins at Berwick. She traveled slowly: Browbridge, Ferrybridge, Sheffield, Derby, Lichfield, Birmingham, Tewkesbury, Rockborough, and on to Bath where on February 5, 1821, she reunited with “my own Bruce.” It had been fourteen years since she had seen her little boy. Bruce, who had been her obstreperous, robust, witty little boy, was now a very ill young man. He stood before her frail and epileptic, a victim of mercury poisoning. She was thrilled and devastated at once. They spent a month together, and during that time she realized what Lord Elgin and his second wife, Elizabeth, already knew. The line of Elgin would not descend from Mary; Bruce was simply too ill to bear children, and it was highly likely that he would not survive his own father. It was sadly obvious to all that the dream of a dynasty merging the Nisbets’ estates and the Elgin title was improbable.
Mary left her son taking the cure in Bath after the month they spent together. She traveled home to Scotland slowly, as if every inch away from him was once again tearing them apart. She stopped at Lichfield for a week, at Wetherby, Durham, and again at Berwick before she arrived at Biel. In May, she turned around and headed right back to Bath to be with him again. He had to remain there for his health, and she spent another month with him before she left for London to witness the coronation of King George IV on July 19. In London, she tried to amuse herself with lighthearted activities. She went to see Sheridan’s classic comedy The School for Scandal and Tom Thumb at the Haymarket.
Although her daughters were also coming of age, none had contacted her, so angry were they at their mother. She did, however, hear from her former husband upon the death of her father in 1822, on behalf of Lucy, their youngest daughter, the child Elgin had falsely claimed was not his own. It was not a condolence call. Now that William Hamilton Nisbet had died and Mary had inherited his fortune outright, Lord Elgin, once again, attempted to get his hands on Mary’s money. He claimed that as their daughter, Lucy, was still a minor, he was suing her mother as the child’s guardian. Elgin asserted in his papers that according to old inheritance laws of entail, it was Lucy, not Mary, who should be Mr. Nisbet’s heir and that Lucy should not only receive the properties but substantial sums of rent money that had been collected over the years. He asked the court, once again, to give him control of Mary’s inheritance, and once again, Mary hired lawyers to tangle with him. Mary’s lawyers explained that she had only inherited her property recently, that Lord Elgin had divorced her fifteen years earlier, and that she was married to another man, who might assert his own legal right to her money. The court ruled that Elgin’s petition was extraordinarily irregular and improper; the judge declared it “one of the most singular cases I have ever seen since I was a member of this Court” and dismissed the case.
In August 1822, King George IV came to Edinburgh, making him the first British monarch since Charles II in 1651 to do so. For two weeks, King George was honored with great pageantry and fanfare, a program designed by Sir Walter Scott. Scott, who understood that the king wanted to be entertained, encouraged the Scots to wear their clan tartans, long forbidden to them as a punishment for their Jacobite rebellions. As a symbolic and conciliatory gesture, King George IV donned a complete tartan costume, which delighted the Scots. The climax of the two-week celebration was the procession from Holyrood Palace to Edinburgh Castle when the crown, scepter, and sword of state, carried in solemn ceremony by a member of the once outlawed Gregor clan, were offered to the king. The king’s fashion statement created an immediate craze that spread around the globe and continues to this day: the penchant for wearing tartan plaid.
Mary’s status as the largest landowner in East Lot
hian gave her considerable political clout, as only landowners could vote; but, of course, women could not. As Robert pursued reform, encouraging politicians to change voting laws, property laws, and the like, Mary did what she could within her rights as the country’s largest landowning nonvoter. She started with the parish churches. The churches had, for hundreds of years in Scotland, been in control of administering money to the poor. Mary endowed both the Dirleton and Stenton churches with new buildings, schools, and generous funds to help those who had been hurt by the downturn in the economy. Her dear father was buried in the Stenton churchyard, and on the wall of the Dirleton church, a small plaque thanks Mary for her good work and discloses that she built a properly completed tower, “a vestry added for the minister and a new imposing Manse…. The castle wall, the Inn, the characteristic gables of the cottages are evidence of her good taste and interest in the village.” In other words, if Mary Hamilton Nisbet could live with style and beauty, why not her neighbors? She was certainly a pioneer in the tradition of beautification for the public good. It was no secret that Robert harbored an unswerving political vision, and he brought his wife to the homes of leading Whigs—Lords Holland, Balfour, and Walpole. Both Robert and Mary felt a duty to improve life for the people who lived on their properties and for the citizenry in general; the Fergusons well understood that laws created unfairness and needed to be reformed. King George IV is reputed to have asked the stalwart Whig, “Have you ever heard a speech that has changed your opinion?” to which Ferguson replied, “My opinion often, sir, my vote, never.”
In 1823, Henry Ferguson married John Davie’s sister, Frances, called “Frannie.” He and Frannie traveled from southern England—as Frannie’s home, Creedy Park, was in Devonshire—to Archerfield in July. Mary received them warmly, and all of her homes became the center for all-important family occasions. In August, Mary hosted a twenty-first birthday party for Frannie, whom she called “Fanny,” and the following August, a christening party for their firstborn child, Harriet Ann. Fanny and Henry filled the house with their children, born two and three years apart. Harriet Ann Ferguson was followed by brothers Henry, John—named for Fanny’s brother and Henry’s best friend—William, and Charles Robert, named for Henry’s older brother, the German baron. After Fanny’s brother John died in 1846, Henry merged the family name to “Ferguson-Davie,” and he became the first baronet of Creedy Park. Although some genealogical directories, including the 1895 Ferguson Clan book, list Henry’s parents to be “John Ferguson and Jean Arnot,” they were not; Henry Ferguson-Davie, 1st Baronet of Creedy Park, was the illegitimate offspring of the forbidden love affair between Robert Ferguson of Raith and his married German baroness, and although Robert loved him, Henry would never inherit Raith. Robert’s brother, Ronald, would. Henry would, however, inherit a legacy of political life and experience the abundant joy of many grandchildren.