After lean, long-nosed, dark-browed John Stuart married Mary Wortley Montagu (daughter of Alexander Pope’s rival, the poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), they spent almost the first decade of their life together on the craggy Isle of Bute, about seventy-five miles east of Glasgow, Scotland, where he carried on his study of green existences, botany beneath the gray skies and among the gray stones. Part of his personality preferred nothing to collecting plants, but another part of him, his political ambitions, brought him to London in the 1740s. There his looks and tamped-down, strict demeanor made him a friend of fun-loving, botanically minded Prince Frederick and severe, suspicious, botanically minded Princess Augusta. Frederick named him a Lord of the Bedchamber, and in 1749 Bute advised the Prince on his horticultural enterprise at Kew.
After the Prince died suddenly in 1751, leaving Augusta five months pregnant, along with eight children and her husband’s gambling debts, she reduced her number of residences, withdrew from the court, and finagled Bute to be tutor to her sleepy, tall, sandy-haired oldest son, the future King George III. Bute’s relationship with the teenage Prince of Wales was intense. At last the boy had found a teacher, a taskmaster, a role model. George resolved to turn his indolence around and get cracking. He strove for Bute, and Bute, in turn, along with his mother, stirred up his love of plants and plant collecting. (Later on, after George III made the mistake of appointing Bute prime minister, they fell out and the King repudiated him.)
Part of Bute’s problem was that he was rumored by his enemies to be having an affair with Princess Augusta. Augusta, wary of courtiers and anti-extravagant, was at home with plants, happy with green life, and she took all her children with her to Kew for the summertime. There she continued her late husband’s horticultural project, and Bute assisted her. In 1759 the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew were born.
Four years later Bute was so out of power that he had to retire to the country. This was when, with his wife’s inheritance, he purchased Luton Hoo. There he created botanic gardens, hiring the genius of eighteenth-century pleasure grounds, Lancelot “Capability” Brown, as landscaper. By the time Mrs. Delany came to stay in 1777, George, now King, was embroiled in a North American war, while Bute was busy being a patron of intellectuals and writers like Samuel Johnson and working on his Botanical Tables Containing the Families of British Plants, which he wrote to edify ladies about botany24 and would publish in 1785. Classification, establishing a plant’s bloodlines, as both botanists and aristocrats loved to do, literally created a plant’s family tree. It nailed things down. All the wobbling uncertainties of life, of being in or out of favor, might be ignored, and perhaps eased, if one could pin things down, just as his guest Mrs. Delany was gluing fragments down on paper.
When Mrs. D. accomplished the miracle of the Passiflora laurifolia, she was at the height of her powers. Three months later, in October 1777, she would be cutting out mosaicks at the rate of one per day! If ever there was an occasion for an exclamation mark, it’s this. Her median rate of production for the mosaicks is roughly one every four days over ten years, though the production waxed and waned: more in the summer months, when specimens were available and, of course, daylight lasted longer. All of her years had trained her eyes and muscles – and her inspiration. She also by this time understood how an assemblage of fragments would best emulate a botanical specimen. As a nascent scientist, she worked with deliberation, and as an artist five years into her project, she worked with joy and speed.
Yet in her early forties, after Anne’s marriage, Mary pieced her life together with little joy or speed. In April 1743 she dined at Carteret House and learned that there was absolutely no court appointment for her.
But on the very day she suffered through that dinner, someone was traveling toward her from Dunstable, about thirty miles north of London, and doing so with dispatch. Patrick Delany, now a widower, had a mission. He stopped at the house of Sir Clement Cottrell Dormer, Master of Ceremonies to George II, where he was invited to stay, and wrote to Mary Pendarves a simple, direct letter. Little in her past ten years had been either simple or direct. “I have long been persuaded that perfect friendship is nowhere to be found but in marriage.… I know that it is late in life to think of engaging anew in that state, in the beginning of my 59th year. I am old, and I appear older than I am; but thank God I am still in health …”25
A damp, verdant scent comes off the words. Rain-soaked.
“However the vigour of life may be over,” Patrick Delany wrote, “and with that the vigour of vanity, and the flutter of passion, I find myself not less fitted for all that is solid happiness in the wedded state – the tenderness of affection, and the faith of friendship.” Solid happiness the man was offering her, she who had been so fragmented.
The woman whose “debt is large already,” and who that very year would pay fifty pounds for a hat (“Is that not extravagant?” she asked her country sister),26 was hearing from the man after whom she inquired in all her letters to Mr. Swift, the kind man, the generous Delany. “I have a good clear income for my life,” he wrote, “a good house (as houses go in our part of the world), moderately furnished, a good many books, a pleasant garden (better I believe than when you saw it).”27 Into the brick and stone and wrought iron, into the gilt and carriage traffic and gossip, into the larded hair, into the tweezing, the teasing, the pleasing of London came the scent of growth, of black soil, damp air, and the burgeoning of a garden outside Dublin. His was not a marriage offer as a financial contract, although Reverend Delany addressed money in the second paragraph, and it was certainly not a marriage offer for a political alliance or a line of inheritance. It was a proposal of friendship. “Would to God,” he wrote, “I might have leave to lay them all at your feet.”
Then he delivered the sentence she may have read over and over – for this is a letter that she herself, not her sister, must have saved, containing the words of another who recognized who she was and what she had experienced. “As you have seen the vanities of the world to satiety,” he quietly wrote, acknowledging her worldly position, “I allowed myself to indulge a hope that a retirement at this time of life, with … a man who knows your worth, and honours you as much as he is capable of honouring any thing that is mortal.”
She did not respond. Didn’t the letter go straight to her solar plexus?
Patrick Delany waited ten days, and on May 3 he tried again, sensing the reason for the stonewall of her reticence: she was a Granville and he was a social zero, the son of a servant to a judge,28 a mere cleric, and Irish at that.
“Permit me, madam, to beg to know my fate as far as it depends upon your friends in Gloucester …” he wrote in a short note.29
She did not answer.
But it was not her mother in Gloucester who was standing in her way.
On May 6, nearly two weeks after he wrote his first letter, Reverend Delany beseeched her, “I can scarcely hold a pen in my hand.”30 Now he was in London. He had come determined to break the logjam that he had guessed was being caused by her older brother Bernard. Lady Llanover, Mrs. Delany’s great-great-niece, ventured to say that Bernard was “well known to have been violently opposed to his sister’s marrying a man who had no claim of ancestry to bring forward, or anything to offer in excuse for what Mr. Granville doubtless considered unparalleled presumption.”31 Reverend Delany, a bit portly, his face round above his cleric’s collar, went straight to Bernard Granville’s house to accost him directly. Apparently Bernard slipped out the back door to avoid the confrontation. Patrick found the coward “in the street” and had, as he wildly understates, “a moment’s conversation.”32
What had happened to Mary Pendarves in these two weeks? Clearly she had gone to her family for permission, not only to her mother but to the head of the family, Bernard, and likely to Sir John Stanley. The very fact that she even sought permission, that she didn’t reject the offer as she had rejected others entirely on her own, implies that the letter arrived at a propitious, a rescuing time, a
nd that she wanted their blessing for a leap she was about to make. A leap into the life of a man whose house, whose food, whose laughter and hospitality, and, perhaps most importantly, whose garden she had visited a decade before. In midlife we fall in love with a person’s circumstances as much as the person, for even if the lover is entangled in the web of social and political exigencies that created him, that lover has also had choices available to make, and this man had elected to blow his money on a garden and to speak his mind in sermons and to entertain his literary friends and let them shine. He had also selected her. She, in turn, could choose his house, his garden, his tastes, his friends, and the country he lived in, far from feuding kings and princes. At the age of almost forty-three, she could grab his hand and run away. But as she made clear with Robert Twyford long before, she did not want to sacrifice her ties to her family. She was the first to recognize how this constituted her identity. She cared deeply about her position in society, and she did not want to ruin it in seizing this chance for herself. We can only imagine the flurry of communiqués among Bernard, their mother, their sister, and their uncle Sir John Stanley.
But as far as her suitor was concerned, Mary Pendarves was stalling.
The week before her forty-third birthday, he simply and directly put it to her: “I might venture to pronounce that even a parent has no right to control you, at this time of life, and under your circumstances, in opposition to these; and a brother has no shadow of right.”33 Wasn’t it about time she made her own decisions? Earlier in the letter he paid her a compliment: “God has blessed you with noble sentiments, a good understanding and a generous heart.” Not the gauzy tribute one might get from a lover, but bedrock reassurance from a man intending to be a husband. He trusted that she would listen to him, and he spoke clearly and openly about her brother: “leave me not to [his] caprice … let not the decision depend upon the fickle, the uncertain, and the selfish.” He enclosed a letter of formal request to her mother. Then he asked to see Mary face to face.
She did not permit him.
Reverend Delany’s next letter is dated six days later, “May 12, 6 in the evening.” At this point he has insomnia. “They say you sleep better, that is the condition of a heart at ease, – would to God mine were so!” he exclaimed. Her mother had responded to him, owning that her grown daughter should decide for herself. He calls her letter “not unfriendly ; it leaves my happiness where I wish … – at your feet.”34
Mary Granville Pendarves celebrated her forty-third birthday on May 14.
And by the night of this anniversary of her birth, when the sun came into the alignment it held near the day she was born, we can conclude that they had communicated and agreed on a plan to assuage her family. The Reverend had sent a message to “the Dragon,” Countess Granville, with a “friend” of the family, and this may have been Lord Carteret, her son, who “undertook it with a zeal.”35 Now they really were acting together, strategizing to preserve all ties, and it must have been the future Mrs. Delany who engineered this, and who may have engineered other negotiations all along. However, it was Reverend Delany who craved her on her birthday evening. “Are you alone?” he wrote to her in a brief note. “[May I] hope to be happy with you one moment?”
Let’s hope she opened the door for him.
Anyone who has ever read a seventeenth-century metaphysical poet knows that the sacred and the sexual are never very far apart. Nor are the botanical and the anatomical: the leaves of the Passion Flower are “petiolate, serrate, and very finely pubescent”; their undersides are hairier than their upper sides. The leaf blades have “extra-floral nectaries.”36 The Passion Flower is the flower of possibilities. To this day it has the Christian overtones assigned it by its first discoverers, Spanish Jesuit priests in South America. The priests viewed the flower as the Passion of Jesus Christ. They played an entrancing numbers game: five petals plus five sepals equals ten disciples (minus Peter and Judas). Three pistils? The three nails of the cross. The purple filament-like petals around the center? It’s the crown of thorns. The flower’s ovary is the goblet of the Lord.
The flower was viewed as a Christian ceremony, and Patrick Delany, devout cleric and passionate gardener, was proposing a Christian ceremony to Mary Granville Pendarves. She married him on June 9, 1743. In the letters we have, she does not record what she wore, or who was there. It had to have been a small, private ceremony. Then her new husband quietly moved into her house on Clarges Street, just as if she had moved her rump over a little to make room for him on a garden bench. Just like that. Not young, not inexperienced, past the height of her sexuality, she entered into a full-blown engagement with what she thought was her old age, but what turned out to be her middle period.
This second, entirely adult marriage took place in what likely would have been the best month in the garden at Delville in Ireland, though they did not see it then. In fact, the new Dr. and Mrs. D. did not rush for the boat to Ireland at all. They spent nearly a year in England. There was still the matter of Patrick’s social status. Could she manage for him what she hadn’t been able to manage for herself: secure him a better appointment in the church? Use the relentless hierarchy of the court and her family to help her new husband and, incidentally but crucially for status-conscious Mary, erase some of the disparity of rank?
A year later, in May 1744, just before her forty-fourth birthday and the month before her first wedding anniversary, her cousin Lord Carteret, in his coat and waistcoat, stockings and buckled shoes, appeared at her door in Clarges Street. She and Patrick were just sitting down to dinner, but Carteret told her to dismiss her servants. When they had scuttled from the parlor, Carteret announced that he had just come from the Duke of Devonshire to offer Delany “the Deanery of Down.”37
She’d done it. At last Carteret had obtained her a favor.
She’d worked to show the world the merit she found in her husband. Now he would have the title of “Dean” to display this value and lend him power, and a yearly income, too. She could be secure. (Not as secure as she would have liked. Carteret also promised a small bishopric when a position came up, should Delany want to remove himself from Down, and Mary remembered this pledge and attempted to have it fulfilled for years. It was not.)
During their year-long honeymoon in England they spent a good deal of time visiting friends and relatives, venturing to Wellesbourne to introduce Patrick to her sister and brother-in-law, whom she came to like and respect, visiting her mother, who was gracious about her daughter’s new connection, and staying at Bulstrode, embraced by the Duke and Duchess of Portland and their children. Mary was not cut off from society for her decision to marry Patrick. Her sister, the Duchess, her tumultuous friend Donnellan, and much of her intimate female acquaintance understood her position – and remembered how she’d described the anger and horror of her first marriage. Her friends also knew the joy she had experienced when she’d first set foot in Ireland.
But the men in her family would not truly forgive her. Sir John Stanley would die and leave her only a few household objects; Sir Anthony Westcombe, of her mother’s family, would ignore her in his will. Her brother Bernard would demand that she woo him with sisterly supplication, which she would do, though it would take years before he would half-forgive her, and even in the illnesses of his old age he refused her at his bedside. Their rapprochement never fully bridged the rift.
At the end of that honeymoon year, in June of 1744, the freshly appointed Dean and his profoundly refreshed wife boarded the ship to Ireland. There, on deck, she was inspired to draw. “I sat on deck the whole day and eat a very good dinner and an egg for my supper, and worked and drew two or three sketches; nothing could be more pleasant.”38 Their windy boat journey recalls that the root of inspiration is breath. When she married Patrick, the newly named Mrs. Delany at last could breathe. She entered into that full knowledge of the self that is possible inside the understanding of another. Then, that night on the rough Irish Sea, the yearling husband, aged s
ixty-one, and the yearling wife, aged forty-four, in the full intimacy of a mid-life marriage near its first anniversary, got seasick together, puking into buckets in their tiny stateroom.
In marrying another man who was the probable age of the man she had married at seventeen, she was able to ameliorate the trauma of her life. Instead of reading to him with her teeth chattering or being subsumed into his jealousies, she sat on the deck of the boat and drew, leaving everything behind her and touching the world in front of her, as she grasped the graphite in one hand and with the other held the paper down against the salty air currents of the Irish Sea near the summer solstice.
Patrick Delany (illustration credit 8.2)
{ FLOWER, BRIGHT }
One day in February 2003, in the heart of the happiness of mid-life, I found myself waiting for my husband, my derrière parked on a hard bench near the coatroom of the British Museum. By now we had been married for eleven years. He was hunched in a telephone booth yammering away to a colleague, his eyebrows bobbing, his hand waving, his body alive with arrangements and academic gossip. We’d just left St. John’s College at Oxford University, where Mike had given a lecture and I had given a poetry reading, ending up in London before we flew back to North America. There was just enough time to peek into the museum’s atrium and be enthralled by the winter light. Unusually, that day it had snowed. His phone call seemed to be taking ages. Restless, I looked around and spied the museum shop. Carved into the stone lintel was its name: The Granville Shop. Needless to say, I didn’t connect it with Mary Granville Pendarves Delany when I ventured in.
The Paper Garden Page 16