It is not quite true that when Edward Hughes married his blue-eyed, pale-skinned girl,4 nobody knew what Parys Mountain contained. There had been ancient workings here. In the early 1760s, Bayly had opened various ‘ventures’ on the hill. The poisoned streams and the very barrenness of the earth pointed towards the possibility that the hill might contain something worth having. But none of the workings seemed that productive5 and all were on the point of being abandoned when, on 2 March 1768, the world changed. A local miner, Roland Puw, stumbled on an unimaginably vast mass of ore coming to the surface at a spot on the barren hill called ‘The Golden Venture’.6 Quite suddenly, all parties realized that Parys Mountain was their future. Puw was given a bottle of brandy and rent-free accommodation for the rest of his life. The two families that owned the hill could gaze into the future with equanimity.
A long, angry and complex court case followed in which Sir Nicholas Bayly struggled with the Hugheses to establish their respective rights to what the hill contained, but by 1775 they had reached a conclusion.7 Bayly had wanted to keep all the ores that were raised himself but Hughes, no retiring vicar, required ‘assurance that he would get half the ores, not half the proceeds of the sale, for he intended to erect his own smelting works, and his profit would be reduced if he did not receive the ores themselves’.8 There was no question of exaggeratedly gentlemanly behaviour on either side: instead, a straightforward, bullet-nosed and appallingly expensive legal battle for an enormous fortune.
Within three years, according to commercial imperatives, all differences had been buried. Edward Hughes had gone into partnership with a brilliant and entrepreneurial Anglesey lawyer, Thomas Williams, who had been acting for him in the case, and with a London banker, John Dawes. Together they formed the Parys Mine Company and in 1778, Sir Nicholas Bayly leased his half of the hill to the company. From then on, under Thomas Williams’s guidance, the company would work the whole of the hill, paying a royalty to both the lucky families who owned it.
This was no small-scale enterprise. Even in the 1770s, 3,000 tons of lead ore and 4,500 tons of copper ore were being raised in a year, the ore worth £27,000 at the quayside, with annual expenses of some £4,500, giving a profit even in these early days of £22,500 a year.9
About 220 people were working in the mine at the time but the business soon exploded into life. The hulls of the Royal Navy, policing the seaways of the Atlantic and the route to India, were exposed as never before to the teredo shipworms which could destroy the oak in a matter of years. Sheathing the hulls in copper plates (fixed with copper nails) could not only save an expensive hull; the copper itself was a form of antifouling which kept the underwater profiles of the ships clean and fast, a critical element in victory at sea. This huge new market for copper (in which all European navies soon joined), combined with Thomas Williams’s comprehensive manipulation of the market and the setting up of large smelting works at Swansea, at Ravenhill in Lancashire and at Temple Mills in Buckinghamshire, meant that the Parys Mine Company soon straddled the world copper business.
Within a dozen years the company was dominant. Some of the rock was 40 per cent pure metal10 and by 1784 a hole had been opened in the hill 40 yards wide, 100 long and almost 80 feet deep. Further workings drove deep into the hill, ‘supported by vast pillars and magnificent arches, all metallic; and these caverns meander far underground’,11 as the excited Thomas Pennant wrote in 1783.
The mine was the talk of the kingdom and romantic tourists dropped by. The Reverend Edward Bingley stood aghast in the summer of 1798:
The shagged arches and overhanging rocks, which seemed to threaten annhilation to any one daring enough to approach them, when super-added to the sulphureous smell arising from the kilns in which the ore is roasted, made it seem to me like the vestibule to Tartarus.12
Thomas Pennant witnessed a saturnine and diabolical world:
Suffocating fumes of the burning heaps of copper arise in all parts and extend their baleful influence for miles around. In the adjacent parts vegetation is nearly destroyed; even the mosses and the lichens of the rocks have perished: and nothing seems capable of resisting the fumes but the purple Melic grass, which flourishes in abundance.13
By the 1780s 1,500 people were working in and around the mine, the men underground, or with gunpowder in the open pits, blowing up the walls of the ever-enlarging chasm and then nibbling away at the loosened rock with picks. Boulders were lifted in baskets to the old ground surface, where women sat with hammers, all year, all their lives, breaking the boulders of ore into pebbles which could be more easily smelted. The fires that burned in the kilns used peat from the hill. In the blocks of peat, chemical reactions had sometimes occurred between the buried plant material and the copper-thick water, so that mysteriously perfect branches, plant stems, leaves and nuts of pure copper could be picked out of the dirt.
The number employed at the mountain went up by a factor of six or seven and the production with it, bringing an annual profit for the Hugheses in the very best years of the 1790s of more than £150,000 a year.14 Sir Nicholas Bayly’s son, by now the Earl of Uxbridge and the father of Lady Caroline Capel, enjoyed the same kind of revenues.
As the Hugheses grew rich, those working for them were living in penury: the masons building the giant docksides and the bins for the ‘roasted ore’ were paid 1s. and 3d. a day; miners 1s. and 4d.; the carriers of the ore from the mine to the docks, a single shilling; the carters of the turf for the kilns 3d. a cartload.15 These were the mathematics of ownership and dispossession: £150,000 a year for the Reverend Edward Hughes; £19 11s. a year for one of his miners – a multiplier of 7,692:1.
From the early 1780s onwards, and for the next twenty-seven years, the Reverend Edward Hughes started to pour his mineral money into land, first buying Greenfield Hall, on the North Wales coast near Flint, where the Parys Mine Company had a works making rolled copper sheets for naval hulls. Then in 1786, he bought the Kinmel estate, for £42,000, a beautiful slab of country lying across the borders of Denbighshire and Flintshire, on a range of limestone hills overlooking the coastal flats, conveniently halfway between Greenfield and Anglesey.
Large tracts of Anglesey itself were bought for £113,000, further pieces around Kinmel and in 1813 as the culmination of the whole story, the Lleweni and Cotton Hall estate, just outside Denbigh, for £209,000. By 1815, when he died, Edward Hughes had spent a total of £496,000 on land in North Wales and had bought something approaching 85,000 acres.16
The Hughes land holding was a province of money made flesh. At Kinmel Hughes built an elegant neo-classical villa, with Samuel Wyatt as the architect, on a beautiful shelf of land looking east towards the Clwyd Hills, the wide vale of north Denbighshire and Flintshire laid out below it and the sea in the distance stretching away to the Lancashire coast.17 By the time he died in 1815, Hughes must have thought, and with some justification, that he had established a dynasty. His youngest son had become a colonel in the 18th Hussars, his second son a partner in the Chester and North Wales Bank, which the family had founded in 1792, and his eldest son, William, was pushing his way into politics. The constituency of Wallingford in Oxfordshire had been acquired for William in 1802. After his father’s death, he remained a liberal and entirely undistinguished Whig Member of Parliament for twenty-nine years until, at the coronation honours in 1831, he was raised to the peerage as Lord Dinorben, a title derived from an ancient hillfort just above Kinmel.18
This may look like an accelerated form of the life stories in this book – a happy sequence of luck, enterprise, money, politics, grandeur and establishment – but all was not well. By his first marriage, Dinorben had two sons and eight daughters; but only four daughters and a single son survived, and that son an ‘Epileptic idiot’,19 ‘incapacitated, by imbecility of mind, from the exercise of the privileges of his rank’.20 Everybody understood that he could never be Dinorben’s heir. Two of the surviving daughters were weak and, although married successfully to a baronet and a pee
r, also looked unlikely to survive. Lord Dinorben was faced with the prospect of his nephew, Hugh Robert Hughes, born in 1827, inheriting everything he had.
Dinorben didn’t like him. They were opposed politically, the older man more liberal, favouring the abolition of the slave trade, the emancipation of Catholics, Jews and dissenters, the abolition of the Corn Laws and parliamentary reform.21 The nephew, who would come to revel in his initials HRH, was by instinct a deep Tory, increasingly interested in genealogy and heraldry, three generations away from the raw money-making phase at Parys Mountain and coming to conceive of himself as a member of an ancient family of high standing. The vast estates were strictly entailed: only the male heir to the Hughes line could inherit them but to the end of his life, despite a sequence of disasters, Dinorben manfully struggled to keep Kinmel out of HRH’s hands.
Dinorben’s first wife had died in 1835 but five years later, in February 1840, when he was seventy-two, he married again, a young Irishwoman, forty years younger than him, whose connections, vim and breedability looked promising: her sister Penelope had run off with Carlo Ferdinando di Borbone-Due Sicilie, Principe di Capua, married him at Gretna Green and soon given birth to the spankingly healthy half-Irish, half-Neapolitan Francesco and Vittoria.
This was clearly suitable stock for a man in Dinorben’s position, the mild air of scandal was acceptable in the circumstances and he now fathered two more children on Gertrude, the Princess’s sister. The first, a girl, died in infancy. The second, born in 1845 when Dinorben was seventy-eight, was no good either: another girl. It looked as if HRH would come into his inheritance.
This was not a good end to a life. Dinorben’s precious eldest daughter had died in 1829; the Irish mother of his putative heirs had failed to deliver; his elegant Wyatt house at Kinmel had burnt down in 1841 after a fire had started in her dressing-room;22 nothing was insured and the cost was estimated at £35,000.23 The house was rebuilt as ‘a Grecian villa’, with Thomas Hopper as the architect, but by the time it was completed, another disaster had struck. Dinorben’s fourth daughter, Frances, Lady Gardner, had died in December 1847 and the old man was sunk into an embittered gloom.
At precisely this moment, the young HRH, aged twenty-one and beginning to spread his wings, poked his head up into the Kinmel air. In January 1848, a month after his cousin Lady Gardner had died, he went to stay with Dinorben’s neighbours, Sir John Hay Williams and his young family, who lived at Bodelwyddan Castle, a neo-Gothic fantasia even then under construction. It is about a mile away from Kinmel across the park and when staying there, the young HRH committed two cardinal sins: he did not leave his card at Kinmel, announcing his presence to his uncle and implicitly asking if he might come to visit him; and he went dancing at the Denbigh Ball, the annual winter gathering of the North Wales gentry.
Dinorben was disgusted. ‘His conduct towards myself has been anything but respectful,’ he wrote to Philip Humberston, a Chester solicitor who was HRH’s brother-in-law.
There was no reason why in his first visit to Boddelwyddan he should not at ye least have offer’d his card at Kinmel and none then on my part why he should not have been kindly received. But his conduct on a recent occasion, the indecency of which drew general observations, has greatly offended me & I must forget the unfeeling act of disrespect, the going to a public ball in my immediate neighbourhood ere the remains of my dearest child was cold in the grave, before I can consent to see him.24
This is how old people behave when exhausted by grief and disappointment, when the succession of a family-in-a-place looks insecure, but the resentment did not disappear. The following January, 1849, Humberston wrote to Dinorben. HRH (‘Hugh’) was going to stay at Bodelwyddan again over ‘a few days for some gaieties’ – surely the wrong word in the circumstances –
that are going on in the Neighbourhood. And as he will be so near to Kinmell we are Wishful if it would be quite agreable to your Lordship that he should call at Kinmell during his Visit at Boddelwyddan and make himself known to your Lordship.25
The language was symptomatically and painfully status aware: Humberston could not allow himself any form of assertion. He could not even ‘wish’ but merely ‘be Wishful’. He never said ‘you’ to Dinorben, always only ‘Your Lordship’, as if unable to look the greatness of the man in the eye.
Dinorben replied coldly, explaining how HRH’s behaviour the previous year had been so grievous to him, and Humberston was forced to make the excuses. This mid-Victorian thickening of the arteries is a sad decline. Property, status difference, the corset of financial expectation, the loathing of an heir, particularly a brother’s son, the implicit bullying of moneyed power: material things had taken over from human relations. It is certainly possible to see in this Victorian tableau a descendant of all the human relationships this book has described; but mid-and late nineteenth-century Kinmel feels like a bleak place to arrive at.
On 13 January, Sir John Hay Williams, HRH’s cheerful host at Bodelwyddan, wrote to Humberston:
My dear Sir,
I am sorry to say that no relenting has taken place in Lord Dinorben & consequently we have not called, but Lady Sarah [his wife] has had a communication from Lady Dinorben, & she is very kind in the matter & her advice is that Mr Hughes should write a kind letter to his uncle when he gets to Chester, and that he should express how grieved he is that his uncle is somehow alienated from him, who never intentionally gave him any cause of pain.26
Back in Chester, HRH duly wrote the crawling letter, of which an anxious, much doodled-on, pencil draft survives:
Chester Monday
My dr Uncle,
On my return to Chester on Sat. evening I read with much concern your letter to my Brother-in-law and am grieved to find that my going to the Denbigh Ball last year should have occasioned you so much pain and displeasure. Had there been the ordinary intercourse of relationship between my poor Cousin and myself I should have known at once what course to pursue, but I was in fact personally a stranger to her, wh. I will hope may exonerate me from the charge of want of feeling toward her memory. And that you will attribute my inconsiderateness on that occasion to youth & inexperience, rather than to any desire to show disrespect or to give you any pain to yr Lordship which I may truly say has ever been far from my intention – With regard to the calumnious reports about me which I know have reached you from time to time, I am confident you will find them either entirely fabulous or gross exaggerations –
Trusting that this explanation may in some degree remove the unfavourable opinion your Lordship has you have formed of me, I hope you will allow myself to subscribe myself
Yr affect. nephew27
The letter had no effect and on 10 February 1852, Dinorben died without mending the breach. Five days later, the Kinmel steward, Thomas Williams, wrote to Humberston in Chester:
My dear Sir
I received a note from Mr. H R Hughes this morning stating that he intended coming here on Tuesday and I was requested to inform him that the House would be quite full on Tuesday & that it would not be convenient to receive him. Lest he may leave London without receiving my note I shall be obliged by your communicating the substance of it to him as he states he shall be in Chester tomorrow.28
The young Dowager Lady Dinorben relented from this angry exclusion and both HRH and Philip Humberston were in the end invited to the funeral. Old Dinorben was interred in the churchyard at St George just outside the park gates and next to his first wife in the stone mausoleum he had built for her, a squat, crocketed, gothic chapel decorated with the Dinorben arms supported by a Welsh dragon and a half-naked Ancient Briton.29 On each side, there is an elaborate traceried window, stone filled, glassless and blind.
The unmarried idiot son was dead within eight months. The title died with him but his death meant that in 1852 HRH came into his material inheritance. The anger still comes reeking out of the papers. He immediately began a prosecution of the Dowager Lady Dinorben, for £12,000, the residue of a �
�20,000 mortgage which her dead husband had taken out against the Kinmel estate after the fire in 1841. It is a measure of HRH’s bitterness that he did not allow her to keep a penny of it. She had been left lands at Llysdulas by her husband, but Kinmel was entailed to a male heir and the law stipulated that it should come to HRH whole. That is what he insisted on, even though the lands he now owned had an annual income of £27,000 and Dinorben’s personal estate was valued at £300,000.30 It is one of the mysteries of upper gentry life that vast wealth generates meanness.
The story of the following sixty years at Kinmel is of a man relentlessly denying the memory of an uncle who had wanted to exclude him; of a vastly rich Victorian squire who spent the bulk of his life enraged; and of a desire to expunge the memory of having once been the grasping nephew and the anxious inheritor. He had money but he wanted dignity.
In August 1853, less than a year after coming into his inheritance, HRH married Florentia Liddell, the daughter of the vastly coal-rich Lord Ravensworth, and brought her back to Kinmel for what was, in effect, a coronation. Thousands ‘of people, comprising large numbers of the élite of the county’, came to welcome them at the house, before proceeding ‘to the refreshment booths erected in the park’.31 The newly married couple received gilded tributes from the 306 farm tenants of the estate and their families, a medieval-level gathering of what would have been called ‘the affinity’.
The Gentry Page 32