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‘Poor squinny dwarfish little Lord Milton is desperately in love with Lady Mary, daughter of Lady Ormonde, who won’t have him,’ Lady Frederick Cavendish noted in her diary shortly before Christmas 1866.
Lady Frederick was staying with the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. Twenty miles from Wentworth, Chatsworth was within visiting distance, a three-hour journey by horse and carriage, or a little over an hour’s gallop across the lowlands of the Pennines. The Fitzwilliams and the Devonshires were part of the same social milieu: the Dukes of Dorset and Omnium as they really existed – two of twenty-nine prodigiously wealthy families, with incomes ranging from £75,000 to £290,000 a year.* With the exception of Barons Leconfield and Overstone and Viscounts Boyne and Portman, the twenty-nine super-rich were Dukes, Marquesses or Earls. They hunted together, shot together, danced together; most important of all, they married one another.
This was the world to which Milton returned from the wilds of North America.
Life during the winter months in the grand country houses, particularly for women, as Lady Frederick records in her diary, followed a strict, if at times dull, routine. In the course of her four-week stay at Chatsworth, while the ‘gentlemen went shooting’, the women stayed at home, occasionally playing ‘furious games of tennis-battledore in the banqueting room’. Between the endless round of meals, there was little else to do except gossip. Problems with servants was one of the favourite topics. ‘I am worried by my new maid turning out huffy with the Duke’s household, and unmanageable when I tell her to show my gowns to other people,’ grumbled Lady Frederick in her diary. ‘This is the 4th I have had that has behaved ill in her rapports with some fellow-servant or other, and they have not a notion that they can be in the least to blame, though by their own showing (certainly in this one’s case) all grows out of the pettiest jealousy and pride.’ Hierarchy and precedence were preoccupations of the servants as much as they were of those they served.
Marriage was another constant theme in the daily round of gossip. Hours were spent discussing potential candidates and possible matches. In the mid-nineteenth century, the sons and daughters of the aristocracy were obliged to marry well. A ‘good’ match was never a romantic one; social rank and fortune were the priorities – love came last.
Milton’s new celebrity status clearly cut no ice with Lady Frederick; the inference in her diary entry is that ‘poor squinny dwarfish little Lord Milton’ was the runt of the Fitzwilliam litter. But as Lady Frederick well knew, many were the congenitally defective – but immensely rich – Earls that had made good marriages. What intrigued her, and the reason for the gossip being worthy of note, was that Mary Butler had turned Milton down. Dark-haired and rather simple-looking, with a weak chin, Mary was no beauty. She was unlikely to receive an offer that would come close to matching his.
‘It is no light thing to refuse such love and gives such pain,’ Mary wrote to Milton’s elder sister Fanny in the spring of 1867. ‘I really think I was doing what I believe to be right and it won’t let him hope anymore. Why should I be the disappointment of his life? Don’t write to me dearest Fanny till you quite like to do so. I do not expect an answer to this – what is there to say?’
Since the summer of 1866, Milton had pursued Mary relentlessly, hoping to win her over. She was twenty years old – seven years younger than him – when they first met. The eldest daughter of the Marquess of Ormonde, she had grown up at the family’s seat, the beautiful Kilkenny Castle in Tipperary in Ireland, where her father owned great tracts of land. Socially, she was as good a match for him as he was for her. His parents ought to have been thrilled. But despite Milton’s love for Mary, for the second time in his life, Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam intervened in an attempt to wreck his chance of marriage.
Mary was warned off in the same way as Dorcas Chichester had been: she was told that Milton was mentally ill. Her initial reaction was not as his parents had intended: to begin with, it almost had the opposite effect. ‘When I knew he was ill I so often thought whether I had any possible right to make a fellow creature so miserable,’ Mary confided to Milton’s sister Fanny, ‘and it was very hard to see my way. Thank God that I believe that as it is, it is best, and if we wait He will show us how. I know that it has been good for me, you don’t know the good it has done me, painful as it has been. I would not now even wish it had not been, as far that is as I myself am concerned by it. For him I would have given anything it might have been spared him.’
It is evident from Mary’s letters to Fanny that she did not love Milton as he loved her. But in the 1860s, the absence of love was not a bar to marriage. On the contrary, daughters of the aristocracy who refused a good offer on romantic grounds risked incurring the wrath of their parents and the extreme displeasure of the family of the man they had spurned. In such cases it was usual for social relations to be broken off. Yet, after Milton had been jilted by Mary, the Ormondes and the Fitzwilliams remained on the best of terms.
Mary appears to have been ignorant of the Fitzwilliams’ motives – and of the fact the family were secretly delighted by her refusal to marry Milton. ‘It was very kind of you writing to me again,’ she told Fanny. ‘It was so very kind – you always seem to think of my trouble in this matter, instead of the arrogance and pain I have caused you and yours and I am so grateful to you.’ The impression from reading Mary’s letters is that she could not quite believe her luck at having escaped censure and social exile. ‘Will you thank dear Lady Fitzwilliam for her more than kind letter to me, it was the greatest comfort to me,’ and in a letter sent several weeks later, she looked forward to the prospect of seeing Fanny, and her sister Mary. ‘You may be certain that if we are in London I shall not miss such a great pleasure as seeing you and dear Mary, as you say you will come! Please give her my very best love and to Lady Fitzwilliam and if it is not impertinent will you thank her from me for the kind way she spoke of me in her letter to Mama.’
Mary spent eighteen months agonizing over whether she should marry Milton; she finally turned him down in the spring of 1867. No words of his survive to demonstrate the heartbreak he must have suffered at being rejected by the woman he loved. But his anger at the way his family had behaved, and his determination to marry regardless of his parents, became clear in the events that transpired within weeks of the end of the affair.
In early July, Lady Fitzwilliam sent her eldest daughter a peevish note. ‘Dearest Fanny, I have written to William [Milton] and to Laura – in short I have written till I am stupid – I hope your father will come back here tomorrow and that we may return to London on Monday Please God. Is the Guards Hall put off – find out and let me know.’
Without telling his parents, a month earlier, Milton had secretly proposed to Laura Beauclerk, the eighteen-year-old niece of the Duke of St Albans. Though Lady Fitzwilliam knew her son was about to get married, she had no idea where, or more crucially when. She had not met her future daughter-in-law; when she first heard the rumour of an engagement, she was not even sure of her name.
Little is known of Laura, beyond a photograph that survives, and the testimony of her granddaughter, Lady Elfrida. ‘I never knew her,’ she said, ‘but they say she could charm the birds off the trees.’ Both Laura’s parents were dead. Her father had been tragically drowned six years earlier trying to rescue a lifeboat crew off the coast of Scarborough, and her mother had died when she was ten years old. Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam had no one with whom to connive, or on whom to put pressure to abandon the wedding.
The couple were married on 10 August 1867 in London at St George’s, Hanover Square. Laura’s ring was crafted from a piece of gold Milton had sieved from the Fraser River at Cariboo in British Columbia.
Admitting defeat, Lady Fitzwilliam confided in Fanny: ‘May God grant that she poor little darling find a haven in our family,’ she wrote to her daughter after the wedding.
Laura Beauclerk did not find a haven in the Fitzwilliam family; instead, for much of her marr
ied life, she and Milton sought refuge thousands of miles away in an isolated forest on the eastern slopes of the Allegheny Mountains in Virginia. Here, at Milton Hall, the house they built together, they could lead their own lives, free from the stigma the family attached to Milton’s illness and free from the guilt – on both sides – that came with it.
Implicit in Milton’s self-imposed exile was a condemnation of his family and the rigid conventions of his class. In April 1872 he left England for good. Laura was six months pregnant. En route to their new home in America, he arranged for the birth of their third child to take place in Pointe de Meuron, a dangerous and isolated spot in the heart of the Indian territories, north-west of Fort William in Canada.
The child was Billy.
Of all the episodes in Milton’s life, this premeditated and inexplicable detour into the wilderness for the birth of his son and heir is the most mysterious.
In February 1872, Hannah Boyce, the midwife who delivered Billy, had been invited to attend an interview at 4 Grosvenor Square, the Fitzwilliams’ house in London. ‘The late Lady Milton asked me if I would go with her to Canada to attend her in her confinement which she expected in the following July,’ Boyce said in her statement sworn before a Commissioner of Oaths in 1901. ‘I agreed to go and we sailed from Liverpool on the 20th April 1872 in the steamship Scotia. It was quite evident that Lady Milton was then in the family way.’
The couple were barely in a fit state to travel. In the five years since their marriage Milton’s health had deteriorated rapidly. His fits were occurring with greater frequency. Previously, as William Cheadle had noted in his diary during their travels through Canada, warning symptoms had appeared before an attack, enabling Milton to remove himself from prying eyes. But towards the end of the 1860s, they began to come without warning, forcing him to withdraw for longer periods from public life. Soon after returning from Canada, he had been elected MP for a constituency in the West Riding of Yorkshire. With increasing regularity, the newspapers carried announcements apologizing for the state of his health. His epilepsy was never mentioned, an elaborate excuse was invented instead. ‘Lord Milton, MP,’ reported The Times in 1869, ‘has been obliged to withdraw temporarily from Parliamentary life in consequence of a severe attack of inflammation in the eyes, which required him to confine himself to a darkened room.’ His illness prevented him from spending his last Christmas at Wentworth, where his position as the eldest son and heir required him to attend traditional events, such as the Boxing Day hunt. ‘On Tuesday there was a really excellent hunt,’ Lady Fitzwilliam wrote to her daughter in Ireland. ‘Thousands out – 17 of the family on horseback, some more in a carriage – a grand day. Had a nice run round and killed in Cortworth on the side of the hill in view of a multitude, everybody seeming very happy. Your brothers were very grand – helping Father in every way to give pleasure to the poor people and seeming to enjoy their tasks. They certainly were rewarded by the enjoyment of a vast number of people. Dear William [Milton] is better but we dare not rely too much on his improvement yet …’
Laura’s health was little better than Milton’s. In the five years since their marriage, though she had borne Milton two daughters, she suffered from arthritis and a chronic kidney disease, and seems to have been ill as regularly as her husband. Frequently, according to announcements in the papers, they were unable to keep appointments because Lady Milton was ‘not in a sufficiently strong state to travel’.
Yet, extraordinarily, given how fragile Laura was, Milton insisted on risking his wife’s health on a transatlantic crossing when she was six months pregnant. After his own experiences on the SS Anglo-Saxon nine years earlier, he knew exactly how punishing, if not perilous, the crossing could be.
As it proved, Milton’s health was hardly up to the journey either. Writing to his parents midway across the Atlantic, he told them,
The voyage so far has been pleasant and prosperous. Laura is pretty well, and so are the children, especially Daisy. Mabel has not been well but is better. As for myself I hardly know what to say – I feel very ill, and utterly unable to manage anything for myself and can only trust in God and leave everything to Dr Millar and to Laura to decide and most thankful I am to have such a man as Millar to go with us.
As a safeguard against poor health and the dangers of childbirth – and to help look after their two young daughters, aged two and three – Milton had asked the family physician, Dr Millar, to accompany them. Hannah Boyce, the midwife, and a nursemaid called Matilda (Tilly) Kingdon were also travelling in the party.
Laura’s baby was due in July. After crossing the Atlantic, the Miltons had plenty of time to get to Callaghan, a small town on the eastern slope of the Allegheny Mountains, where they planned to settle. But rather than heading directly to Virginia, after arriving in New York on 30 April, they made their way to Fort William at Thunder Bay, on the Canadian side of Lake Superior. In the course of a journey spread over twenty-three days, they changed trains four times and caught six boats. Their final destination, Pointe de Meuron, nine miles upstream from Fort William on the Kaministiquia River, was so remote that the last leg of their journey was by canoe.
In her diary Tilly Kingdon recorded their arrival at the small Indian settlement:
25th May went to our woodland home. We were rowed up this delightful river by some half-breeds, and whilst on this delightful river the shades of night gathered around us and we were truly rowing on the river on a moonlight night. I saw (but happily not felt) for the first time in my life a mosquito, but by no means the last, as they were much too familiar during our stay here, we arrived at 10 p.m., and were received by one man, a half-breed, who only spoke very broken English. Babtiste by name, he was busy outside the front-door making a fire on the ground, in the centre of three projecting pieces of wood, on which hung suspended by string a large iron pot, with water in. Our domicile was void of furniture, we made the dear children some beds on the floor, with their waterproofs and other wraps, and they were soon asleep. We had brought eggs with us, so that we had boiled eggs and tea, we did not undress, but made ourselves as comfortable as possible, and slept pretty well, the half-breeds laid on the kitchen floor.
Milton had chosen a small farmhouse for the birth of his child. Built of slatted timber, it was situated on its own, on a sharp bend in the river, surrounded by dense forests and steep cliffs. Aside from the large families of Indians that lived in wigwams clustered around an old Hudson Bay fur-trading post a mile or so downriver, there were no other people for miles around.
It was surely not the sort of place to bring a heavily pregnant wife and two small children. Certainly, Pointe de Meuron frightened Laura. Tilly Kingdon’s journal shows that after a fight among the half-breeds, she was so upset that she became ill:
… the half-breeds came from the Fort very intoxicated, and fought, and used very abusive language to each other in their own tongue, which frightened her Ladyship very much. She was very ill indeed for 2 days and nights, but gradually recovered, as she gained her strength, she found her left leg was quite stiff, and she was unable to use it. Lord Milton got her two rude sticks from out of the woods to help her along a little …
The lengths to which Milton went in order to get his family to Pointe de Meuron, and the primitive conditions he exposed them to, indicate that he had a strong reason to be there. He wanted his child to be born in British territory, but why choose such a remote and hostile spot? Why not Toronto, or some other relatively civilized place instead? There is nothing to indicate that Milton had been to Pointe de Meuron before; in both his and Cheadle’s account of their 1863 expedition, their route took them nowhere near it.
Could it have been because the small Indian settlement offered Milton the seclusion to execute his plan to swap his wife’s newborn child for Billy, if the baby was a girl? Re-reading Dr Millar’s statement, he said, ‘Excepting a Catholic priest and the household of the fort, there were no white people for many miles around, consequently no white w
omen or children ever visited us, our only visitors were Indians – for the most part patients of mine – black flies and mosquitoes and plenty of them.’ But in the town of Fort William, nine miles downriver from Pointe de Meuron, there were plenty of white women. Dr Millar was Milton’s trusted physician: ‘My intercourse with Lord and Lady Milton extended over a course of four or five years during which time, with few intermissions they were under my daily observation,’ he told Billy’s lawyers. Had Dr Millar conspired with Milton to introduce a substitute baby? Might he have had the connections in Fort William to obtain one?
Implausible, but not impossible. Back home in England, at Wentworth, Milton’s family were suspicious from the outset. Flouting tradition, they refused to acknowledge Billy’s birth, let alone celebrate it.
Yet there is a danger of reading too much into their silence. The Earl had done all he could to prevent his eldest son producing an heir; it may simply have been an expression of a fervently held wish – that his grandson Billy, the product in his mind of a corrupted bloodline, had never been born.
It is impossible to know whether, in 1902, Lady Alice had a genuine case against her nephew; whether she could have proved that he had been swapped at birth. The loss and destruction of Billy’s opponents’ papers, documents that could have told the other side of the story, that might have revealed the evidence against him – if it ever existed – means that it is not possible to say.
Ultimately, the conspiracy against Billy failed. Ironically, its failure had nothing to do with documents – the minutiae of sworn witness statements, the supporting evidence of either side. It turned instead, like so many of the dramatic moments in the Fitzwilliams’ twentieth-century history, on sentiment.
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 6