Wedlock (13 page)

Things looked up considerably once they had arrived in Italy, however. By far the most fashionable destination of any grand tourist, Italy - actually an assortment of kingdoms, duchies and republics - played host to travellers including James Boswell, Adam Smith and Robert Adam who came to sample the opera, art and architecture. Having parted company with Pitt in Spain, where Lord Strathmore had fallen ill, the paperchase of bills reveals the earl to have arrived at Genoa by October 1760.
¹⁸
Evidently the warm winter - as well as the uplifting art and architecture - provided a boost to the earl’s health and vigour. Touring the cities on the customary itinerary he reported that the women of Milan were ‘greatly inferior’ to those in Turin, although what the former lacked in beauty they ‘make up in Good Will towards Men’.
¹⁹
But it was Parma, where he arrived in March 1761, that held the greatest fascination, for there he embarked on a passionate affair with the Countess Sanvitale, 25-year-old Costanza Scotti, which would detain him in Italy long beyond his planned return. When the earl briefly escaped to Florence in August, Horace Mann, who looked after British interests in the city, reported that Lord Strathmore had ‘broken the chain that held him so long at Parma’.
²⁰
It was a durable chain, however. For although the earl spent much of the winter in Rome, he was back in the arms of the contessa the following year. His portrait, painted in Rome by the English artist Nathaniel Dance in February 1762, shows a self-assured, elegantly handsome young man with delicate long fingers, a knowing look and a hint of a smile. Although the earl had obtained a passport to travel through France by April, Mann doubted that he would be leaving Parma any time soon. He was right. After escorting the contessa to Florence and Lucca, it would be another year before the earl finally severed the chains that bound him. Mann wrote to his friend Horace Walpole, who was impatiently awaiting letters entrusted to Lord Strathmore a year previously, in May 1763 with the arch comment: ‘I have often told you that your letters were in the hands of Lord Strathmore, and he in the hands of the Countess San Vital.’ Finally, by the end of June, the earl returned to England.

Aristocratic and attractive, cultured and bronzed, at nearly twenty-six the earl was immediately counted among the eligible bachelors on the vibrant London scene. Although Horace Walpole took an instant dislike to the young man who had detained his mail, branding him insipid and rustic - ‘too doucereux and Celadonian’ - Lord Strathmore proved popular enough among the
bon ton
frequenting the clubs and assemblies of the West End.
²¹
‘A sincere friend, a hearty Scotch-man, and a good bottle companion, were parts of his character,’ declared Jessé Foot, even if the earl’s pursuits ‘were not those of science’.
²²
Continuing the hedonistic lifestyle he had tasted on the continent, the earl’s costly hobbies included horse-racing, cock-fighting and collecting fine wines - large quantities of which had been shipped back from France and Portugal during his absence - as well as reckless gambling. The club, Almack’s, which he co-founded as a meeting point for fellow travellers to Italy, became notorious for its eccentric dress code and high betting stakes.

With his debts mounting and Glamis falling into disrepair, the earl was belatedly forced to face up to his family responsibilities when news arrived from India that his brother James had been murdered in a massacre at Patna in October 1763. Having joined the East India Company as an officer in 1760, James was among sixty or so prisoners who were slaughtered on the orders of the Nawab Mir Kasim in retaliation for defeats at the hands of the British. The loss of James in such brutal circumstances brought the earl closer to Thomas, who had just left Cambridge, aged twenty-two, while understandably heightening the anxiety of their mother. The brothers developed an intense, protective relationship in which neither could do any wrong. In one letter, the earl confessed that his worries over Thomas’s health and prospects ‘render me little capable of knowing what I write’.
²³
Quite opposite in character, the financially astute Thomas indulged his elder brother’s flamboyant lifestyle, while the earl defended his younger brother’s stern, stiff demeanour. Finally appraising his draughty castle and its marshy estate in 1763, Lord Strathmore drew up elaborate plans for improvements and renovations. All he needed now was the money to fund them.

Just as Irish fortune hunters sought a ‘worthy little woman’ to provide financial security, so English and Scottish aristocrats would cast about for a wealthy heiress to help finance their expensive estates and further the bloodline. The only difference was that the latter pursuit was deemed entirely respectable. John Lyon did not have to look far before alighting on the obvious candidate, although it is possible that his mother, the shrewd dowager countess, helped direct his gaze. Since the earl had last seen Mary Eleanor, daughter of his old friend George Bowes, she had been transformed from a precocious ten-year-old, reciting poetry at evening soirees, into an accomplished, vivacious and witty sixteen-year-old. Although she had not grown much taller, reaching only five feet two inches, she had certainly grown more curvaceous. With her abundant brown hair and buxom figure she was considered charmingly pretty by some - according to Foot she possessed a ‘very pleasing embonpoint’ - even if the earl’s erstwhile guardian, Lord Chesterfield, thought her ‘the greatest heiress, perhaps, in Europe, and ugly in proportion’.
²⁴
Although she plainly displayed a lively streak of independence, the earl seemed sure that she was young and malleable enough to be tamed, while he also hoped to cure her of her naive literary and scientific ambitions. He lost no time in conveying his interest through a mutual family friend.

By late 1765, the engagement had been agreed. The following summer Lord Strathmore was sufficiently confident of the expected boost to his income to place a colossal order for furniture and furnishings with upholsterers in Edinburgh in a bid to render Glamis habitable again. The eventual bill, for four-poster beds, flock wallpaper, Wilton carpets, mahogany furniture, vast quantities of fabric for curtains and assorted materials for bedding - including feathers weighing thirty-nine stones - would amount to more than £1,000.
²⁵
But there was no longer any concern about payment, since on 24 February 1767, when he placed the ring on Mary Eleanor’s finger, Lord Strathmore took possession of one of the largest fortunes in Europe.

 

If impressionable young Mary was inspired by romantic notions of beauty and a vision, there is little doubt that her 29-year-old beau was spurred to marry by the age-old imperative of hard cash. Certainly Lord Chesterfield had no illusions when he related news of the impending wedding: ‘The men marry for money, and I believe you guess what the women marry for.’
²⁶
The marriage settlement guaranteed Mary an independent annual income of £500 up to the age of twenty-one and £1,000 thereafter for her ‘sole and separate use and benefit’; if she were widowed it ensured a generous ‘jointure’ and there was provision for future children too.
²⁷
But beyond this, all the property, land, collieries and other riches Mary had inherited from her father now belonged exclusively to her husband. Except where specified in a legal contract, married women in Georgian England were barred by law from owning land and property or enjoying a private source of income. Indeed, upon marriage a woman effectively lost her legal status entirely since in law her entity was merged with that of her spouse. William Blackstone, the pre-eminent eighteenth-century law writer, put it succinctly: ‘By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.’
²⁸
It followed, therefore, that ‘whatever personal property belonged to the wife, before marriage, is by marriage absolutely vested in the husband’. Even more pithily, in her unfinished novel
Maria
, Mary Wollstonecraft would lament: ‘But a wife being as much a man’s property as his horse, or his ass, she has nothing she can call her own.’ Indeed, it was in response to this very principle that Dickens’s corrupt beadle Mr Bumble infamously quipped: ‘If the law supposes that . . . the law is an ass.’ Thus stripped of her legal status, deprived of her fortune and disappointed in her spouse, the new Countess of Strathmore headed towards Glamis with understandable trepidation.

Travelling the same route just two years earlier with the earl, Thomas Gray had described the journey with characteristic exuberance. After two days travelling by coach to Edinburgh, Gray had crossed the Firth of Forth in a ‘four-oar’d yawl without a sail’ and confessed that he had been ‘toss’d about rather more than I should wish to hazard again’.
²⁹
Staying overnight at Perth, the party had been ferried next morning across the Tay to reach Glamis by dinner. Gray was enthralled with the scene, lyrically describing the broad Strathmore valley swathed with broom and heather, the extensive farm lands dotted with labourers’ huts and the majestic castle ‘rising proudly out of what seems a great & thick wood of tall trees with a cluster of hanging towers on the top’. Approaching the castle along its mile-long avenue, Gray admired the walled gardens planted by the third earl before entering the courtyard with its statues of the four Stuart kings of the United Kingdom. As enamoured of Glamis as he seemed to be of its thane, Gray enthused, ‘the house from the height of it, the greatness of its mass, the many towers atop, & the spread of its wings, has really a very singular and striking appearance, like nothing I ever saw.’ Although he spent six weeks at the castle, where the Scottish poet James Beattie came to meet him, Gray said nothing of the internal accommodation. Another guest, Thomas Lyttelton - the future ‘wicked Lord Lyttelton’ - took a rather less romantic view when he visited declaring that Glamis was ‘a very old castle, but has not a tolerable apartment, and can never be altered for the better’.
³⁰

Rattling down the tree-lined drive as the forbidding hulk of the pink sandstone castle loomed before her, dwarfed by the effigies of the Jacobite kings as she dismounted in the courtyard, the differences between Mary and her Scottish husband were more apparent than ever. While the earl had gone to commendable lengths to furnish the castle, insulating floors, walls and windows with the best carpets, papers and fabrics, the rooms were still draughty, the paint peeling, the plaster crumbling and the kitchens ill-equipped. Rather like her vision of the beautiful earl, the fairy-tale castle proved cold and inhospitable at closer quarters. With the ghost of Janet Douglas said to haunt the corridors, the spectre of Lady Macbeth wringing her hands in the chambers, and the legend of a secret room known only to the presiding earl, Mary must have found her newly decorated bedroom an eerie refuge. Her in-laws - the over-protective dowager countess, humourless brother Thomas and elderly Aunt Mary who lived at Glamis - did little to make her feel at home. Happy to take advantage of her funds - Thomas had won an expensive election to become MP of Aberdeen Burghs in 1766 in anticipation of his brother’s marital windfall - they were unfriendly and vindictive to her face. Mary described their behaviour as ‘disagreeable’.
³¹

The earl, meanwhile, provided little in the way of compensation. Much of his time was spent supervising the seemingly endless renovations to the castle and improvements to the surrounding land. That summer, the castle teemed with workmen all generating the inevitable mess, noise and upheaval. While carpenters fitted windows, erected library shelves and hung doors, masons were building new hearths and laying stone floors. As painters whitewashed walls and varnished woodwork, upholsterers laid carpets, pasted wallpaper and fitted curtains. So chaotic was the renovation programme that Thomas’s room had to be painted a fourth time because the ‘work folks spold it’.
³²
Beyond the castle walls, the activity was just as intense as labourers built an icehouse, laid roads, dug ditches and drained the swampy grounds. It was only the start of the extensive improvements required, which would eventually include demolition of the west wing and draining of Loch Forfar. When not overseeing the workmen, dealing with estate business or enjoying his brother’s company, the earl was distant and aloof with his wife. For all his concern with his grounds, he disparaged Mary’s passion for gardening; despite his scholarly bent for literature, he derided her writing ambitions. Nevertheless, amid the dust, rubble and grime, Mary performed her expected duty in the earl’s new mahogany four-poster bed. By July, as the family prepared to return south of the border, she was pregnant.

Back at Gibside by August, as the King’s Own regiment was enjoying Newcastle’s summer revels, Mary could almost have seen the path of her marriage foretold in the scenes from Hogarth’s
Marriage A-la-Mode
still hanging in the hall of her childhood home. Locked in a loveless marriage of convenience, just like Hogarth’s ill-matched couple, she and the earl shared neither romantic commitment nor common interests to prevent them from sliding into acrimony and contempt. Just like Hogarth’s Earl Squander, Lord Strathmore would run up ruinous debts through gambling and carousing; and while no evidence points to him being unfaithful, it is likely that he had syphilis too - perhaps contracted in Italy - since medical bills included copious doses of mercury, the traditional remedy.
³³
Similarly, like Hogarth’s countess, Mary would pursue a life of leisure, drifting into half-hearted dalliances and ultimately embarking on an affair. Like many couples marrying in hope, they had simply found themselves to be incompatible.

Preferring the expensive temptations of Durham and London to the simpler life in Scotland, the couple divided their time between Gibside and their London house at 40 Grosvenor Square, whose lease had been passed to Lord Strathmore by Mary’s mother, with occasional excursions to Glamis. Frequently, brother Thomas tagged along; he had his own room at Gibside as well as at Glamis. There would always be three people in this marriage. With the earl incapable of managing his financial affairs, it was Thomas who took charge of the vital mining and farming businesses, approving pocket money for his brother and sister-in-law as he saw fit. Lord Strathmore’s old college chums remained frequent visitors too. Gray came to stay at Gibside in August, informing his old friend William Mason, ‘tomorrow I go
vizzing
to Gibside to see the new-married Countess, whom (bless my eyes!) I have seen here already’.
³⁴
With him he took the Reverend Brown, who had officiated at the wedding and now accompanied the couple to Scotland when they returned in September, crossing the turbulent rivers in the early months of Mary’s pregnancy. The visit was most probably timed to coincide with Lord Strathmore’s election as one of Scotland’s representative peers that October. They were back in Durham before long, since in February 1768 Lord Strathmore had settled sufficiently into his role as master of Gibside to continue George Bowes’s passion for foxhunting. His hounds chased a fox which took refuge - sensibly enough - in a pit shaft within the Gibside grounds. He would continue to run the stud that George Bowes had established at Streatlam as well as pursuing his love of gambling on the horses.