Wedlock (15 page)

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.’
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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 encouragement’ 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’.
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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’.

For all her apparent fury, and although the relationship never evolved beyond smuggled letters and fervent declarations, he would always remain the true love of Mary’s life. She would later concede that had he persevered, James might have seduced her but insisted that ‘violent as my passion was for him, I do still sincerely think it was pure’. Secret passions notwithstanding, she could not resist noting that the middle brother, David, who was ‘still handsomer’ than his brothers, was likewise ‘a great admirer of mine’ and that even the go-between sister professed such a ‘violent’ friendship that ‘had she been a man . . . I should have called it love’.

By the summer of 1775, with her love for James Graham spurned, her eight-year marriage nothing but a facade and her husband showing signs of serious illness, Mary was growing emotionally vulnerable and increasingly reckless. Lord Strathmore had already suffered a repeat of the chest complaint of his youth - now undeniably tuberculosis - at the end of 1774 when he was so ill that Horace Walpole had prematurely reported his death.
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After visiting Bath in the vain hope that the waters might cure his condition, the earl joined Mary and his young family at St Paul’s Walden Bury in August 1775. While his mother-in-law confidently hoped that the wholesome country air would restore him ‘to perfect health’, there was little doubt that the illness was terminal. Certainly the earl was continuing to run up debts - for horses, fighting cocks, new coaches, building works and the inevitable shipments of wine from abroad - as if there was no tomorrow. Even as builders demolished the west wing of Glamis that summer, the earl’s financial agent in London was attempting to keep his creditors at bay.
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Sufficiently recovered to visit William Palgrave, a former university chum, at his rectory in Suffolk, the earl left Mary in London to follow her own pursuits. With time on her hands for her literary and botanic interests, Mary was attracting an ever larger circle of visitors to her Grosvenor Square home. While some were honest and straightforward fellow enthusiasts, keen to direct Mary’s patronage to worthy ends, others had more self-interested reasons for their constant attention and flattery. In the latter group was George Gray, an unscrupulous entrepreneur who had returned from India with an enviable fortune, largely accrued through bribes.
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A friend of James Boswell and the playwright Samuel Foote, whose 1772 comedy
The Nabob
is thought to have been informed by their friendship, Gray shared Mary’s literary zeal. Born in Calcutta in 1737, where his Scottish father worked as a surgeon for the East India Company, Gray had been sent at the age of seven to boarding school in Edinburgh where he had met Boswell. At seventeen, he had returned to India as a clerk for the rapidly expanding trading company, stationed in Bengal, while his father retired to Scotland, where he spent much of his time lamenting his son’s neglect. Clever and well-read, Gray ingratiated himself with his fellow officers and the local nawabs or nabobs, the puppet rulers of the region, and prospered in the lax regime. ‘I can now converse familiarly with a parcel of ragged squalid weavers,’ he proudly informed a friend soon after arriving, ‘who tho’ they make clothes to be worn by the Kings of the earth, have scarce a rag to cover their own nakedness’.
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Keen to exploit his chances further, he almost succeeded in marrying a wealthy widow before he was beaten to the altar by an army captain. Undeterred, Gray secured a seat on the company’s Bengal Council in 1765 and soon after pocketed a ‘gift’ from the new nawab sufficient, he assured his father, to provide him with an ‘independent fortune’. When Lord Clive arrived from England a few months later in a belated effort to clean up the mounting disorder and corruption, Gray resigned in apparent - or contrived - protest at Clive’s autocratic manner. Gathering up his ill-gotten rupees, and leaving behind some mischievous verses about Clive, he departed briskly for London where he arrived in 1766.

At what point ‘Nabob Gray’ - as Boswell dubbed him - met Mary is unknown. It is possible that they became acquainted in the early 1770s through Gray’s Scottish relatives - his mother was related to the Grahams of Fintry and his niece was the Margaret Mylne who married Robert Graham. Certainly he had become a feature of her life, and a regular visitor to Grosvenor Square, by 1775. Gray smuggled some verses declaring his ardour to Mary just before she left for Hertfordshire that summer and they exchanged letters until her return. Never a good judge of character, or indeed of her own true feelings, Mary encouraged Gray’s attentions despite feeling ‘nothing for Mr G, that exceeded friendship’.
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When Lord Strathmore set off for Suffolk, Gray made his move, propositioning Mary in a letter delivered to Grosvenor Square one evening. Fortuitously, for Gray if not for Mary, the proposal arrived at the same time as a letter from James Graham’s sister, bringing news of his interest in a woman in Minorca, and a brusque refusal from Thomas Lyon to send her a small sum of money which she had requested on the orders of the earl. Believing she was revenging herself on others - though she later conceded she only hurt herself - she began meeting Gray in secret using her footman, George Walker, as go-between.