by Wendy Moore
In fact, in line with typical parenting practices among the landed classes in eighteenth-century Britain, Mary probably spent more time and enjoyed a more physical relationship with her pets than with her children, especially her sons. From birth, her children would have been nursed, petted, dressed and groomed by all manner of different hands except those of their parents. Like Mary herself, her babies were undoubtedly handed to a wet-nurse to be breastfed from the moment they were born. Although wet-nursing had been criticised by a few enlightened voices, it was still routine among upper- and middle-class families in the 1770s. A decade later, when Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, would defiantly breastfeed her daughter, the decision was still so remarkable that the Rambler’s Magazine commented: ‘Her grace deserves commendation for this, but it is rather a reflection on the sex, that females in high life, should generally be such strangers to the duty of a mother, as to render one instance to the contrary so singular a phenomenon.’43 Having lost the opportunity to bond with her babies during feeding, there would be little chance for Mary to grow close to them later on. As they grew up, the children would be cared for by nursemaids and a battalion of other servants - little Maria had her own footman by the age of three - and taught by governesses and private tutors. The children had their own nurseries at Gibside, Grosvenor Square and - after further renovations began in 1773 - at Glamis, where the wet-nurses and nursery maids slept alongside their charges. From the age of seven the boys would be sent to private boarding school and the girls would follow soon after. It was little wonder, therefore, that many parents felt remote from their children and that some actively disliked their offspring. Indeed, both George II and George III, along with Queen Charlotte, expressed extreme distaste for their eldest sons.
Yet despite such obstacles, many Georgian parents still enjoyed fond relationships with their children. Indeed Mary would later sincerely repent her aversion to her son John, describing it as the first of her ‘crimes’.44 And there may well have been other reasons for her difficulties. It is possible that, in favouring her daughters, Mary was attempting to compensate for their second-class status in Georgian society just as her own father had done. For all that Lord Strathmore had urged that children should ‘rank equally’ with their parents, there is no doubt that his sons - the natural heirs - were held in higher esteem than his daughters. When Georgiana gave birth to her first daughter, the Morning Herald reflected contemporary reactions by reporting that the ‘happy occasion’ was ‘perhaps a little impaired by the sex of the infant’.45 Celebrations to mark the birth of Lord Glamis, the heir, included extravagant revels at Glamis - when nineteen bottles of port, eight bottles of rum and copious other beverages were consumed and several ‘Brocken Glasses’ ensued - as well as a poem commissioned by Uncle Thomas.46 Nothing comparable had marked the birth of the first-born Maria. To make matters worse, Mary was ill soon after her second or third pregnancy - later she could not remember which - with what she described as ‘convulsions’. These attacks, which she would suffer all her life, may have been epileptic fits although - given the inexact science of contemporary medical diagnosis - they could equally have been any number of complaints. It is quite conceivable too that she suffered from postnatal depression. She was, after all, just twenty-four by the time she had had five children, having been pregnant almost continually since she was eighteen.
Spending little time with her infants, Mary threw herself into her twin passions of writing and botany, despite her husband’s disparagement. Lord Strathmore would later criticise her ‘extreme rage for litrary fame’ in the hope of convincing her of the ‘futility of the pursuit’.47 Soon after her marriage, the scholarly earl forbade her from attending Elizabeth Montagu’s blue-stocking gatherings, making her break with her friend in what Mary described as ‘a very rude and abrupt manner’.48 Although Mrs Montagu’s company was plainly good enough for Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole and David Garrick, the earl branded her ‘a wild, light, silly woman, of bad character’ who was ‘not fit’ for his wife’s acquaintance. ‘Sadly against my inclination,’ she said, ‘I was forced to comply, and give her up, with many others’.
Compelled to abandon her literary mentor, Mary refused to abandon her literary ambitions and in 1771, while pregnant with George, she put the finishing touches to a five-act poetical drama entitled The Siege of Jerusalem.49 Having been started in 1769, only two years after her wedding, its subject was unlikely to have proved popular with her husband. A tragedy in blank verse, it laments its heroine’s unrequited love and arranged marriage. The drama is set at the time of the actual siege of Jerusalem in 1187 when the Muslim warrior Saladin captured the city and triggered the third Crusade. Mary’s poem tells the fictional story of a Muslim princess, Erminia, who is betrothed to Saladin but loves the Crusader Tancred, who in turn is in love with an Amazon-like warrior princess called Clorinda. Disguised as a soldier in armour Clorinda is killed by Tancred, who then dies in a duel with Erminia’s brother, Argantes, whereupon Erminia converts to Christianity and consigns herself to a nunnery. At one point bemoaning her noble birth and the ‘detested nuptials’ set to go ahead, the heroine longs for a simple pastoral life where true love is allowed free rein.
Would we have been some neighbouring shepherd’s babes,
Together bred in equal humble state:-
We then had frequent met at rural sports,
In sweeter converse oft beguil’d the day,
’Till love insensibly had crept into our hearts,
And our glad parents had with rustic joy
Join’d willing hands and heard our nuptial vows.
Although not a literary masterpiece, the narrative is moving and the poetry accomplished. It certainly drew enthusiasm from friends who later persuaded her to publish it privately. Hearing that Mary had completed the work in May 1771, her former governess Elizabeth Planta, now living with Mrs Bowes in Hertfordshire, wrote to congratulate her. The following month, having read the drama, she wrote to praise her efforts and suggest a few amendments, declaring the first speech by Saladin ‘very fine’ but the words of Argantes to his sister ‘too warm for a brother’. Locked in her own loveless marriage, Mary would continue to write poetry - in tragic, comic and satirical veins - throughout her life although no more would be published.
If Lord Strathmore took no interest in his wife’s literary talents, Elizabeth Planta and her clever family continued to encourage Mary’s intellectual pursuits. Andreas Planta, Elizabeth’s father, still corresponded with his former pupil in French and Italian. Having been elected to the Royal Society in 1770, he wrote the following year asking Mary to use her influence to help further his prospects at the British Museum, where he had been assistant librarian since 1758. Elizabeth, who also wrote to Mary in Italian and French - not least to conceal their gossip from Mrs Bowes’s prying eyes - was approached in 1771 to become English teacher to the royal princesses. Well aware that her financial interests were better served by remaining with Mary, for whom she hoped to become the children’s governess, Elizabeth diplomatically declined. The royal family had to settle for her sister Frederica, reportedly fluent in seven languages, who was recruited to teach the little princesses at a salary - scornfully dismissed by Elizabeth as ‘mediocre’ - of £100 a year (£13,000 today). Meanwhile Elizabeth and Mary exchanged news about Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, who had just returned from their three-year expedition to the southern hemisphere with James Cook laden with new flora and fauna.
Inspired by the exquisite surroundings of Gibside where she had cultivated her own garden since the age of twelve, and encouraged by Elizabeth Planta, who tended her plants at St Paul’s Walden Bury, Mary had become a serious student of botany. Naturally, Lord Strathmore had nothing but disdain for this enlightened spirit of enquiry. Yet since he was increasingly absorbed by his own consuming interests of drinking, gambling, cock-fighting and horse-racing, the earl appeared willing to tolerate his wife’s botanical fascination.
Botany had
developed a wide and enthusiastic following in Britain in the mid-1700s, especially among intelligent, educated and wealthy women. George III’s mother, Princess Augusta, had established Kew Gardens in 1759 and his wife, Queen Charlotte, had continued her patronage. Several aristocratic women devoted their spare time and riches to amassing impressive stocks of plants - most notably the Duchess of Portland who established a collection to rival Kew at her seat of Bulstrode Park. The introduction into Britain in the 1760s of the binomial classification of species, created by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, helped popularise botanical studies. Consequently, increasing numbers of women collected and studied, cultivated and painted domestic and exotic flora - despite concerns in some quarters over the sexual connotations of the Linnaean system based, as it was, on the male and female reproductive organs. Charles Alston, professor of medicine and botany in Edinburgh, for example, thought Linnaean classifications ‘too smutty for British ears’ while even towards the end of the century the Cornish poet, Richard Polwhele, would voice alarm at the prospect of ‘girls and boys botanizing together’. But although women were excluded from formal scientific study - banned from universities and all-male organisations such as the Royal Society - botany became regarded as a socially acceptable and largely harmless female pastime.
Like the Duchess of Portland, Mary plunged her surplus funds into buying rare seeds and plants to be cultivated at Gibside and St Paul’s Walden Bury. In 1772, she commissioned workmen to begin building a magnificent greenhouse in the grounds of Gibside, with seven spectacular arched windows divided by stone columns, to provide a suitable habitat for the exotic specimens she was accumulating. Carefully positioned and designed to provide optimum light and warmth for the collection, the greenhouse may have been the work of James Paine who had completed so many of her father’s architectural projects. As with her father’s works, materials for the building were obtained from within or near the estate and the craftsmanship was provided by local labour. Work quarrying stone began in July 1772, slates were laid on the roof that winter and the great tall windows glazed the following summer. In 1774, eight ornamental urns were carved to top the façade and at the end of the year seven tubs for orange trees were placed in front of each window. Two lobbies at either end kept draughts out, a furnace beneath the floor provided a steady temperature and a wooden ‘stage’ elevated the plants to maximise the light. A hothouse, to nurture seeds and seedlings, was built nearby. Mary stocked her greenhouse with botanical rarities from specialist nurseries, like the world-famous Vineyard Nursery run by James Lee in Hammersmith, and employed a gardener to tend her specimens. The greenhouse would provide her with some of her most fulfilling moments - as well as furnishing the setting for one of her infamous court-case scenes.
Unlike other female botanists, content to cultivate and catalogue their growing collections, Mary wanted to go further. As explorers and adventurers penetrated previously unknown parts of the globe, they brought back to Europe botanical discoveries to the delight of amateur naturalists. Banks and Solander had returned from Australasia in 1771 with more than a thousand new plant species. Calling briefly at Cape Town on the way home, Banks had found to his wonder and frustration a veritable botanical paradise waiting to be explored. The following year he persuaded George III to finance an expedition to the Cape expressly to harvest new plants for Kew. Francis Masson, a Scottish gardener at Kew, arrived in Cape Town in October 1772 and promptly began sending home a bounty of exotic flora, including the vibrant bird of paradise, named Strelitzia regina after Kew’s royal patron, Queen Charlotte.
Mixing in predominantly male scientific circles, who were attracted to her London home by the abundance of her knowledge and her wealth, Mary aspired to become a scientific patron in her own right and perhaps even to have her own name ascribed to a new botanical marvel. Probably through her links to the British Museum, she became friendly with the affable and portly Solander, a favourite pupil of Linnaeus, who had settled in London and was busy cataloguing the museum’s natural history specimens. She was friendly too with James Lee, the Vineyard Nursery owner, who had first translated the Linnaean system into English in 1760. Once, admiring some of the ‘scarce and valuable plants’ at his nursery, Mary said, ‘Mr Lee told me, if I would allow him the honour to salute a Countess, he would give me the most curious; which I did, and had the plant.’50 Although now in his fifties, Lee could obviously still be persuaded to part with a rare flower in return for a kiss from an attractive and wealthy customer. And in 1774 or 1775, when he treated her for another of her unexplained fits, Mary came to know John Hunter, the maverick surgeon and anatomist who was busy accumulating one of the biggest natural history collections in the country.51 Fraternising with these glittering stars of the Royal Society, all central figures in the Enlightenment, the seeds were sown for Mary to contemplate funding an ambitious expedition of her own.
There were other male admirers too, interested in more than a chaste peck on the cheek in a hothouse. For in 1772, five years after her wedding and not long after the birth of George, Mary met James Graham, the younger brother of David and Robert Graham, twelfth Laird of Fintry. The Grahams stemmed from an ancient Scottish family with a history as chequered as that of the Strathmores and owned a house and lands just fourteen miles south of Glamis.52 Like Lord Strathmore, the twelfth Laird had lost his father when young - at the age of seven - and had had to assume responsibility for his large family, of two brothers and five sisters, early on and under straitened circumstances. Unlike the earl, Robert Graham had remained close to his Scottish roots, going to school in Edinburgh then enrolling at St Andrew’s University, where he had studied the classics and - it being St Andrew’s - learned golf. He would later become a patron and friend of Robert Burns. Exactly the same age as Mary Eleanor, the laird had been appointed ‘gamekeeper’ or factor to Lord Strathmore’s hunting grounds in 1771 and the two families had forged close ties. All three Graham brothers developed an infatuation for the lively, young countess who occasionally graced Glamis with a visit but it was the youngest, James, who inflamed an enduring passion in Mary. She would describe their relationship as the first of ‘my imprudencies’.53
From the moment she saw James, visiting his mother in 1772, Mary was captivated by the youth - who was as many as seven years her junior - saying ‘he was quite a boy, but a very extraordinary one, and I must confess, much too forward for his years’. Two more years passed before she saw him again, in which time the laird himself had pressed his attentions on Mary. All too easily flattered by male attention, Mary had flirted freely with Robert so that when she finally rebuffed his obvious intentions, he was so furious - according to Mary - that he immediately proposed to a cousin, Margaret Mylne. Whether Robert was quite as mortified as Mary suggested is open to conjecture; after marrying in 1773 he and Margaret went on to have sixteen children.
James, however, was a different matter. Having frequently begged his elder brother to take him to Glamis for a second glimpse of its mistress, he finally persuaded one of his sisters to let him escort her there in 1774, where he contrived to stay for a fortnight. It was probably late summer, when the family stayed through August and September, with Thomas Lyon - just married - in tow as usual. What began as childish horseplay and innocent friendship between Mary and James quickly developed into an intense and heady mutual desire. While Lord Strathmore and his brother were occupied in planning the continuing renovations to the castle and its grounds, 25-year-old Mary wandered the rooms and gardens with 18-year-old James - and his sister - constantly at her side. One morning, with nothing better to do, the three walked round and round the perimeter of the Great Hall marking each turn with a pencil. When they stopped, James pocketed the pencil and pledged to guard it with his life. Whispering in the gloomy corridors, giggling in the lofty rooms, James and Mary exchanged deeper and deeper expressions of affection - despite their supposedly watchful chaperone. Looking back, Mary would admit that she gave James ‘very improper encoura
gement’ and won from him ‘many improper declarations, not only without anger, but even with satisfaction’. By the end of the fortnight, when he pressed her for a response she admitted he had won her heart.
With her marriage increasingly rocky, Mary was a willing victim. Although she was still, she insisted, scrupulously faithful to her husband, relations with the earl and his family had soured significantly. Staying in Edinburgh for two weeks that August, along with Thomas and his new wife, Mary claimed that Thomas insulted her in public, although she failed to specify precisely how. Perhaps aware of Mary’s flirtation, Thomas ‘behaved in such a manner, as scandalized the whole town of Edinburgh; who, at that time, hated him as much as they liked and pitied me’.54 Although she complained of his conduct to the earl, Lord Strathmore refused to concede any fault since ‘it was an unfortunate and most prejudiced rule with him, that Mr Lyon could not err’. With antipathy between Mary and her brother-in-law an open secret, and her husband unsympathetic or indifferent, Mary fell back on the tenacious interest of her young admirer. Once Mary returned to London, the pair exchanged letters which were apparently so incriminating that Mary not only burnt them but drank the diluted ashes. Anxious to keep their love a secret - not only from the earl but also from the jealous laird - they proceeded by swapping coded messages in letters sent between Mary and James’s obliging sister. In the goldfish bowl of aristocratic Georgian life - never allowed a private moment without servants watching every move - Mary confided her passion to Elizabeth Planta, now governess to the children, and a footman who conveyed the letters. When James enlisted as an ensign with the army, Mary met him one last time in London before he sailed for Minorca in early 1775. Although Mary was bereft at his departure, she found her lover suddenly ‘much altered towards me’ and so forced herself to ‘treat him with the indifference I ought, though it almost broke my heart’. Although James, still only nineteen, had evidently decided to forget his boyish fantasies and direct his attentions elsewhere, Mary continued to beg his sister for news. For the next year she pined for him, despite receiving only two messages from the young soldier, until finally she wrote a fuming letter to his sister with the message that James could ‘go hang himself’.