Increasingly, as the Earl’s hopes for a cure for his son faded, he realized that his illness placed the family in jeopardy. The stigma of lunacy threatened the Fitzwilliams’ fortune and position – their potential for alliances through marriage with other great noble houses. It also threatened their social omnipotence. Endemic to epilepsy was the risk of public humiliation – an eventuality of which members of the aristocracy were particularly fearful. Even Lord Shaftesbury, the great Whig reformer and philanthropist, expressed horror at the thought of being humiliated in front of his tenants and employees when his son suffered a fit in public: ‘Maurice fell yesterday in the Park. I trembled lest a vast crowd should be gathered. Sent away the children and sat by his side as though we were lying on the grass, and by degrees he recovered and walked home.’
In the early 1860s, new research determined that what had previously been a minority view among doctors had become medical fact: mental illness, including epilepsy, was hereditary, sending shivers through the aristocracy for whom pedigree was everything. Milton’s illness had corrupted the Fitzwilliams’ blood.
That the Earl had reached this view became evident on 27 July 1860, Milton’s twenty-first birthday.
At Wentworth, the coming of age of the eldest son had traditionally been celebrated on a lavish scale. In 1807, when Milton’s grandfather, the 5th Earl Fitzwilliam, came of age, the family gave a party for 10,000 guests. The Iris, a Sheffield newspaper, carried a report:
May 5th 1807
Yesterday being the 21st anniversary of the birthday of Lord Milton, the only son and heir of Earl Fitzwilliam, the day was most munificently celebrated at Wentworth House. Two oxen weighing together 240 stone were roasted whole on the lawn, in sheds erected for the purpose; these had been feeding for upwards of three years past, and are supposed to have been the finest and fattest beasts ever grazed in this county. Twenty sheep had also been previously roasted in quarters, which with the beef, bread, etc and more than 10,000 gallons of strong ale, principally brewed several years ago for this festival, were distributed among the multitudes who assembled in the park, and whose numbers, notwithstanding the wetness of the day, have been estimated at 10,000.
During the forenoon and in the evening the roads on every side of Wentworth were darkened with crowds of people on foot, on horseback, in gigs, in chaises, coaches, carts and wagons. Yet rainy and unfavourable as the day was, none who travelled to Wentworth had occasion to complain of the fare – except those who by their gluttonous and drunken indiscretion made beasts of themselves and converted the bounty of Lord Fitzwilliam and his son at once in the means and the punishment of sinning. About a thousand of the tenants and others were entertained most sumptuously in the House itself.
The household accounts show precisely what the crowds consumed:
3 roasted oxen, 336 stone in weight
2 Scotch bullocks, 130 stone
26 roasted sheep, 177 stone 6 pounds
3 lambs
3 calves
10 hams
54 fowls
240 bushels of wheat
555 eggs
75 hogsheads of ale
6 hogsheads of small beer
473 bottles of good wine
23 gallons of rum
18 gallons of brandy
13 gallons of rum shrub [sic]
Viscount Milton’s party, half a century later, was a very different affair. He was not even there. Nor was his family. Instead, it was quietly celebrated by 180 tenants, who drank toasts to the young Lord with specially brewed ale, while the house masons and carpenters played cricket on the lawn.
It was a crushing snub to Milton, proof that his father refused to recognize him for who he was – the heir to his title and fortune. Yet again, it seems he had been sent away. Only one member of his family appears to have given the occasion any thought: his younger brother, William Henry, the Earl’s second son. ‘I have been thinking as William is just 21 that we ought to give him a birthday present; there is plenty of time to think of it before he comes home’, Henry, as he was known in the family, wrote to his older sister, Frances. ‘I should like to give him something really worth having, and if all of us brothers and sisters were to subscribe together we might get something very good, and if you can not spare much now, I am quite sure Mama will forward you some money. I know he often thinks that we do not care for him and he would very much like to have something from us all. I will give five pound but I do not mean that I want you to give the same, for I know you have more things to buy than I have. If we could get up between us £10 or £15 it would be very nice. He will never be 21 again you know.’
William Henry was Milton’s favourite brother; he was also his father’s favourite son. De facto, the Earl regarded Henry as his heir. Yet problematically, primogeniture dictated that Milton would succeed to the title and estates. Disinheriting an eldest son was a complex and all too public procedure; in light of the low life expectancy of epileptics in mid-nineteenth century England, the Earl decided to ride the matter out. As long as Milton died before he did, Henry, his second son, would succeed.
Some months after his twenty-first birthday, in April 1861, Milton blew his father’s strategy apart; without consulting him, he announced his engagement to Miss Dorcas Chichester, the daughter of Lord Chichester, and the niece of the Marquess of Donegal. On hearing the news the Earl took to his bed, unable to cope with the strain of the whole affair. What horrified him above all else was the thought that his eldest son might now produce an heir. If he were to do so, Milton’s bad blood would feed into the direct Fitzwilliam line.
In the days after the announcement, letters flew back and forth from Wentworth, as Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam connived with close family members to stop the marriage from going ahead. ‘There appears some reason to fear an immediate marriage,’ Milton’s mother wrote to his Uncle George. ‘My head is so weary I cannot judge of anything or write clearly either I fear.’
The situation came to a head when the Earl received a threatening letter from Lord Chichester, Dorcas’s father. Sharply reminding the Earl that both his daughter and Milton were of age and therefore did not need the Earl’s permission to marry, Chichester accused him of slighting his family by objecting to the marriage.
Behind Milton’s back, the Earl replied to Lord Chichester’s letter, knowing that what he had to tell him would bring the engagement to an end:
My son’s conduct has been so unsteady and his health so bad that I do not feel justified in consenting to his taking upon himself the serious responsibility of a married life. I feel sure you will think with me that I should not be doing right in withholding from you these facts, a knowledge of which will probably drastically alter your judgement as to your daughter’s prospects of happiness. My son suffers from fits which cause at times great mental excitement sometimes followed by considerable depression of spirits.
Three days later the engagement was called off.
The Earl had not consulted his son before sending the letter; nor was he prepared to discuss it after it had been sent. Lady Fitzwilliam, writing on behalf of her husband, sent Milton’s Uncle George a copy of the letter to Lord Chichester, with the following instructions. ‘He wishes you to read the enclosed letter and consider when it should be given to William or if it should be withheld.’
No letters survive to reveal Milton’s feelings for Dorcas Chichester, or what he felt about the way his father had behaved. Within a few months, relations between them were destined to get worse. In the spring of 1862, the Earl’s patience finally snapped.
5
On the morning of 26 May 1862, Milton stood in the dock at the Police Courts in Bow Street in London, as the magistrate delivered his verdict. He had been charged with fraudulently obtaining a pair of diamond earrings from a pawnbroker:
With respect to the charge before me, I can assure you, Lord Milton, if I had come to the conclusion that Your Lordship had any guilty intention with reference to the possession of the
earrings, I should have sent you at once for trial, but my belief is there was no guilty intention. You are young and inexperienced, and evidently require good guidance, and I wish to remind you that considering your station, you are pre-eminently bound to obey the law, as your station will not protect you from the consequences of violating the law. The earrings will of course be given up to the pawnbroker. The act was the act of a foolish person, and therefore you, Lord Milton, are discharged.
In the weeks following his broken engagement, Milton, in deliberate defiance of his father, had been mixing with bad company in gaming houses and brothels in London’s West End. The diamond earrings had been deposited at a pawnbroker’s in Bond Street by Madame Rachel, a second-rate courtesan, who, according to police reports, traded as an ‘enameller of women’s faces’. She had won the earrings, which belonged to a ‘ladyfriend’ of Milton’s, at a game of cards. Milton, wanting to please his ‘ladyfriend’ by returning the earrings to her, went to the pawnbroker’s shop to redeem them. He offered the broker a cheque for £200, which he declined, saying ‘it was too much; the earrings were only worth £65’. At which point, Milton put them into his pocket and walked out of the shop.
In his defence, Milton argued that he had simply intended to take care of the earrings until their legal title was established. His lawyers, pleading that he suffered from ‘ill health’, said that he had been acting under the influence of a ‘woman much older than himself’.
His acquittal did not assuage his father. Angered by the negative publicity and the embarrassment to the family, the Earl ordered Milton out of England. Rather than send his frail son to a spa resort in Europe, he chose to banish him to the wilds of Canada. Making only the smallest of concessions to Milton’s fragile health, he paid for a young doctor, twenty-nine-year-old William Cheadle, to accompany him into exile.
Cheadle recorded their departure on 19 June 1862 from Liver-pool Docks on the steamship Anglo-Saxon, bound for Quebec.
Sailed at 5, only 25 Cabin passengers as yet. Weather very drizzling on leaving in the tender but soon became fine though cloudy. Had the temerity to smoke two pipes immediately on the ship’s getting under way. About 6 o’clock 3 little devils found stowed away amongst the coals, hauled out, ship brought to, and the boat from a pilot vessel signalled to come alongside, when they were quickly sent over the side with a bag of biscuits from the Captain. They did not appear at all disconcerted at being discovered, but went away grinning, one waving a biscuit in farewell.
As Milton watched the vanishing wake of the pilot vessel returning the stowaways to shore, he must have longed to go with them. Yet again, as he had experienced throughout his childhood, he was being sent away against his will. Only one member of his family – his brother Henry – had waved him off from the quayside. ‘I am sorry I did not look up at the last moment I saw you,’ wrote Milton later that evening, ‘but I could not manage it I felt so unhappy at going away. Please give my love to all the little ones and remember me to all other people at home, with best love your affectionate brother, Milton.’
The weather, during what became a horrendous crossing, can only have heightened Milton’s despair. Two days off the coast of Ireland the ship ran into a violent storm. ‘Weather blowing stormy very,’ Cheadle noted in his journal.
A gale of wind and sea during the night and still continuing. Turned out to breakfast. Lord Milton wisely taking his repast in his berth. I got through a little breakfast but had to bolt downstairs, was sick and expected to have to endure frightful tortures, but recovered in a few minutes. Hardly anyone at table. Felt seedy and spent most of the day in my berth.
The following day, the storm continued, a day Cheadle describes as ‘certainly one of the longest days I ever passed’. And the next day:
Turned out towards 11, and shortly after Lord Milton put in his first appearance for two days. Both felt very uncertain. No catastrophe however occurred. Still very rough wind dead ahead, the vessel pitching tremendously, being very lightly laden – cargo tea. Everyone appears to have suffered and several passengers who have crossed the Atlantic several times agree that they never suffered so much before. Take the precaution however of having our meals in the passage, or on deck.
At night, phosphorescence made the heavy seas look angrier still; the crest of each wave ‘breaking in light’ and the wake of the ship ‘a path of brilliant scintillation’. And on the fifth day when the storm began to subside, eerily, at intervals through the morning, they saw joists of timber swirling past the boat. Later in the day, the source of the wreckage became evident.
About 1 o’clock, the Captain whilst talking with us on deck suddenly exclaimed: ‘By Jove, there’s the wreck of a vessel.’ After some little time we discovered a small object on the horizon, which by the help of glasses we made out to be the hull of a ship, dismasted and no one on board and almost directly in our course. We altered our course a little N. so as to pass under her stern which was towards us, and at about 2 yards distance read her name ‘Ruby’. She was completely waterlogged, the waves which were not very high washing over her. The masts (2, a schooner) had evidently been cut away, and her sides down to the level of the deck were broken up so that only the skeleton beams were left. The bowsprit was carried away, and the boats had either been the refuge of the crew, or washed away and the men drowned. They had evidently made a good struggle for life, but from the dreadfully battered state of the hull it would seem doubtful whether the boats could live in such a sea as there must have been.
On the eighth day, a thick fog descended. The ship slowed to half speed, its whistle blowing in short bursts.
Very cold and raw. Now in the region of ice about 100 miles from Cape Race. Great caution used. 2 lookouts in the bows, two officers on the bridge. The Captain had the ‘Canadian’ when she was lost, struck on a piece of ice which was under water and not seen. Shock so light that he standing on the bridge did not perceive it. Keel torn out so that she filled rapidly about 40 lost. Stop the engines every few hours to sound.
As the steamship crept through the dense fog, it was a grim foreshadowing of Milton and Cheadle’s next journey into the unknown. Determined to prove himself to his father, Milton refused to allow his health to encumber their plans. The two men had mapped an ambitious expedition across Canada: to find the most direct route through British territory to the gold regions of Cariboo and from there to explore the little-known country on the western flank of the Rocky Mountains.
It was wild and dangerous country, populated largely by tribes of Indians. Writing in the 1850s, Robert Ballantyne, a Hudson Bay Trader, had warned,
When starving, the Indians will not hesitate to appease the cravings of hunger by resorting to cannibalism; and there were some old dames with whom I was myself acquainted, who had at different periods eaten several of their children. Indeed, some of them, it was said, had also eaten their husbands.
Prejudice led many Europeans to exaggerate, but in the 1860s, in the remote fur-trading regions north of the Great Lakes, cannibalism was still prevalent among the tribes, and Indians were continuing to claim the scalps of white settlers.
While Cheadle, a Cambridge graduate and an accomplished oarsman, was stockily built and physically strong, Milton was weak and of slight physique, and frequently debilitated by epileptic attacks. His health posed a considerable handicap over the terrain they planned to cross. Yet, over distances of hundreds of miles, much of it on foot or on horseback, sleeping in tents in the open at night, Milton would endure some of the most hostile country in the world.
Their journey took them along precipitous mountain trails, often in driving blizzards of snow; across barely navigable rivers that had claimed many lives; through dense, unmapped forests, where paths had to be hacked with axes and many a traveller had been lost. And always, in these remote and wild regions, there was the danger of starvation, the travellers’ only source of food coming from whatever they could shoot or carry. There were other dangers too: from diseases such as
smallpox, which had ripped through some of the small communities along their route, from wild bears and wolves, and from the hostile indigenous tribes.
It would be nearly two years before Milton saw his family again; for nine months of that time, he had no contact at all with them. Yet despite his unhappiness at the outset, the expedition to Canada was the making of him. In the rugged and inhospitable landscape he found peace and tranquillity, a ballast against, and refuge from, the pressures and prejudice at home. He was fascinated by the people he met, developing a particular affinity with the Indians and becoming fluent in Cree. His empathy with the tribesmen is apparent in his book, The North-West Passage by Land, where he describes his first sighting of an Indian:
He was leaning against a tree, smoking his pipe with great dignity, not deigning to move or betray the slightest interest as the train went past him … We could well imagine the disgust of these sons of silence and stealth at the noisy trains which rush through the forests, and the steamers which dart along lakes and rivers, once the favourite haunt of game, now driven far away. How bitterly in their hearts they must curse that steady, unfaltering, inevitable advance of the great army of whites, recruited from every corner of the earth, spreading over the land like locusts – too strong to resist, too cruel and unscrupulous to mingle with them in peace and friendship.
Milton and Cheadle’s expedition achieved its goal; they succeeded in mapping a route across Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific. On 7 March 1864, Milton returned to England; he was received like a conquering hero, fêted by everyone from the Royal Geographical Society to Fleet Street. ‘So long as in the cause of science the nobility showed such skill, enterprise and perseverance, as that of Viscount Milton,’ claimed Sir John Richardson, the famous Arctic explorer, ‘England might be proud of her aristocracy.’
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 5