‘Men are what their mothers made them.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson
EDWARD BOUGHTON, born in 1719, was a countryman to his core. In the year in which he married Anne Brydges, 1738, his personal account books reveal his interests: he bought ‘a great dog’ for 10s. 6d.; a ‘rule and compass’ for 3s.; he repaired his carriage for 17s.; and he paid the blacksmith £2 2s.1 A few repairs to the house by the carpenter cost him 3s. 10d.; he had a window box made for 10s., and he bought a brazier for £2 0s. 6d. The only concessions to his having married Anne seem to be, later in the year, ‘A box of soaps’ bought for £1 3s. 6d. (which must have galled him, as it was more than he paid the butcher) and sixpence for ‘a fiddler’. It is to be hoped that Anne retained some income of her own, because Edward was not exactly generous with his cash. She must have been underwhelmed by the lack of jewellery, clothes or furnishings. For a supposedly ‘Conniving woman’, a box of soap is not much of a prize.
Even two years later, Edward’s parsimony towards Anne does not seem to have improved. In May alone, he spent a vast amount on wine and cider – £16 9s. (£1,460 in today’s money) – and £11 6s. (the equivalent of £945) on himself; but the only feminine buy was ‘a petticoat’ for 9s. 6d. (£40), and even then it could have been for a servant.
There is a curious little anomaly, however, to this seemingly austere lifestyle. Someone at Lawford liked big gestures. Sometime between 1729 and 1739, two large paintings were commissioned from the Italian painter Jacopo Amigoni. Their subjects, Venus and Adonis and Flora and Zephyr, were depicted in an unashamedly romantic and sensual way, as barely draped figures locked in loving embraces beneath suspiciously English-looking oak trees. Did the otherwise undemonstrative Edward commission them for Anne; or did she commission them for him? Or were they ordered by that grande dame of the family, Abigail Shukburgh, who had looked after Edward as a child?2
Whoever commissioned them, the paintings were hanging at Lawford by the time Edward married his second wife Anna Maria in 1754. Perhaps they inspired him to be a little more outgoing. Whether from passion or just a desire to impress, he appears to have been more extravagant in his spending habits. The year shows a flurry of expensive buys: £13 8s. for ‘a Turkey carpet;’ £10 5s. for ‘2 mahogany chests;’ £4 18s. for ‘a screen’. In these accounts there are none of the scrawled, ink-blotted or even empty pages that followed Anne’s death in 1750; rather, they are neatly written. In May, the month of his marriage, Edward dutifully notes payments to bell ringers and hired coaches, handkerchiefs, stewards at the church, ducks and chickens and fish for the wedding feast, together with a generous milliner’s bill for £3 (over £270 today).
But most impressive of all was his purchase in March 1754 of the most luxurious item recorded in his account books: a diamond buckle costing £40 (£3,400 in today’s money), presumably a gift for Anna Maria. This one item far exceeded his household bills for the month; the coachman, the housekeeper and the huntsman all earned less than £5 each in the first six months of the year.
In 1760, Edward prefaced his account book with a proud note of ‘My Estate’.3 It reads:
£629 17s. 6d. |
|
Northamptonshire |
£37 8s. 0d. |
Michaelmas rents |
£644 14s. 4d. |
Adson & Potterspury |
£37 8s. 0d. |
In fact, Edward had entered the estates brought to him by marriage twice. He made a correction, and totalled his 1760 income as £1,349 4s. 10d. This would be just over £100,000 in today’s money – not poor by any standards, but comfortably off rather than very wealthy. His income had been reduced by his having to pay a land tax on Brownsover of over £71 a year, and it appears that he had also borrowed some money, as he had to pay a Mr Lamb a massive £560 (£48,000) in interest in 1744.
Nevertheless, the Boughtons seemed to live well. Their household bills covered the purchase of rabbits, lobster, salmon, fish, chickens, pigeons, eggs and a beehive; they paid washerwomen, labourers, coachmen, a weeding woman and a boy to deliver letters. They attended race meetings and balls; they gave 5s. regularly to the church collection plate; and they made a point of giving to the poor. ‘Gave a poor man 6d.,’ reads one entry on 28 July 1755, and ‘Gave a poor man 3d.,’ writes Anna Maria a few weeks later.
But by far the most expensive household bill was for alcohol. In April 1755 alone Edward paid 15s. for ten pints of brandy. Comparing 1741 to 1755, Edward seems to have routinely spent over £1,300 in today’s money at regular intervals for wine or spirits. However, this was not unusual; liquor was relatively cheap then and Georgian men had a rich diet and drank heavily – hence the preponderance of gout. Alcohol was a domestic and social given: in neighbouring Northampton, for instance, in 1750 there were sixty inns and ale-houses for a population of 5,000.
Anna Maria’s life was less concerned with the household bills; her entries list dressmakers, fabric, needles, ribbon – and 5d. for a pair of scarlet garters. In the year that her second son was born, she gave the nursemaid £1 4s. (‘her second month’s pay’) and 2s. to the apothecary (‘vials at Mr Powel’s’) who would figure so dramatically in years to come.
The overall expenses for the year 1761 were £1,475 7s. 2d. – over £110,300 in today’s money. Expenses were exceeding income by over £100 a year.
The purpose of Edward’s remarriage was to provide an heir, and the couple set about this task immediately. For 250 years, the name of the son and heir to the Boughton fortune had been either William or Edward – but it was a tradition that Anna Maria Beauchamp was not prepared to follow.
Anna Maria, described universally as ‘an heiress’, had been born on 22 October 1728, the eldest daughter of John Beauchamp and Elizabeth Shipton of Northampton.4 The Beauchamps’ second daughter, Elizabeth, named for her mother, was born in August 1729. Both girls were fit and healthy; but unfortunately the sisters that followed were not. Theodosia was born in September 1731 and died five months later. The following year, another child was born, in August; she too was baptised Theodosia, but her life was even shorter. She was buried in December of the same year. It seems that these deaths had a great impact on Anna Maria; when her own children were born she named them either Theodosius or Theodosia. Her influence on Edward must have been quite strong to overturn centuries of tradition in this way. Sadly, however, the pattern of early death was due to repeat itself.
Edward and Anna Maria’s first-born little girl, Theodosia Beauchamp Boughton, was baptised at Newbold on 6 July 1757. The next child was another daughter, and she too was christened Theodosia: Theodosia Anna Maria Ramsay Boughton. Baptised on 2 September 1758, this second daughter tragically only lived three months. Two years passed, then, in August 1760, Theodosius Edward Allesley Boughton was born; a year later a brother arrived. Sadly Theodosius Willington Boughton, like his sister before him, lived only twelve weeks and was buried at Newbold on 2 December 1761.
Edward drew up his will, and did not alter it again.5 To ‘my dear wife Dame Anna Maria Boughton I leave all and every lands and common in Long Lawford … that my wife may enjoy the premises free and discharged.’ On the event of his son Theodosius reaching the age of twenty-one, or being married before he was twenty-one, Anna Maria was to receive Brownsover Hall, ‘with the gardens, orchard, grounds and meadows, and the Close and the Cottage Pasture’. This was to ensure that Anna Maria had a property of her own once Theodosius inherited. To his son, Edward left ‘all my Real Estate’ but, if he died, then it went to his daughter Theodosia – making Theodosia a potential heiress.
The unusual legacy of Edward’s estate to Theodosia in the event of her brother’s death was to seal the fate of John Donellan twenty-one years later.
However, no matter how ‘dear’ Anna Maria was to Edward, he was not the best of husbands to her in later years. While some of his time was respectably occupied as a JP for Warwick, the remainder was taken up with less admirable pursuits. Edward was fifty-one years old and had been married to Anna Maria for sixteen years when Abraham Turner, a tenant at Brownsover Hall, wrote to Shukburgh Boughton’s wife, Mary Greville, in January 1770 about Edward’s behaviour.6 The emphasis by underlining is his:
… I have parted with all my land at Brownsover except for 70s. a year and will get rid of that as soon as your Good Nephew gives me leave. I am informed his Lady lately catched him shut up with one of the maids which brought on a Violent Quarrel. Her Ladyship took an opportunity when His Honor was out to pack the maid off. Upon his return home and finding the maid gone, he went to bed in a great hurry by himself and would eat no supper. A great deal more is said but I believe what I have before say’d may be depended upon.
The situation had not improved six months later. In fact, it had become markedly worse. Abraham Turner continued his correspondence with Lady Boughton with a piece of sad gossip:‘your nephew Sir Edward keeps a mistress publickly and breaks his wife’s heart.’7
Edward did not, then, set the best example to his son Theodosius, who was now ten years old and at Rugby School. Rugby was only four miles from Lawford Hall, so whether at home or at school, the public parading of his father’s mistress, and the consequent misery of his mother, could not have escaped the boy.
Looking back to the First Baronet, Sir William, who was born in 1600, and through to his great-great-grandson Edward, the male Boughtons, with just one exception, all died at roughly the same age: William at fifty-six, Edward in his fifties, William again at fifty-two, and son William at fifty-three. One of the First Baronet’s sons, Henry, had died in his thirties, but it was not until the Fifth Baronet, Edward, that we see an exceptionally early demise, at thirty-three. And so Sir Edward Boughton, Sixth Baronet, was following a family precedent when he, like his grandfather, died at fifty-three.
On 3 March 1772, two years after Abraham Turner’s reports of his philandering, Edward had taken supper with the Reverend Hall – the same Reverend Hall who had officiated at the unusual exorcism of One-Handed Boughton just a couple of years previously. After they had eaten, the two men had decided to take a walk in the grounds of Lawford Hall. A local newspaper, the Northampton Mercury, reported on 16 March: ‘They took a walk in Sir Edward’s yard when Mr Hall perceived some signs of Uneasiness which led him to ask, what was the Matter? But, before any Answer could be given, Sir Edward dropped down dead.’
The Coventry Mercury reported five days later: ‘Died suddenly at Lawford Hall Sir Edward Boughton, Bart. One of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the county of Warwick.’
However, the newspapers may not have been quite accurate in their reports. Many years later, the prosecution brief against John Donellan noted a potential witness called William Marriott: ‘Marriott says that he was with Theodosius’s father when he died and that he was a short-necked, full-blooded man and died as he was returning home from a Justice’s meeting in a fit without any struggles or convulsions whatever.’
Whether it was Marriott or Hall who witnessed his demise, however, it is indisputable that Edward Boughton died very suddenly. Theodosia was fifteen and Theodosius was twelve. Their mother, who, until Theodosius came of age, was mistress of her own fortune again, as well as that of her deceased husband, was a widow at forty-four.
Lawford Hall entered a period of seemingly slow decline. On her husband’s death, Anna Maria found that, although they owned extensive lands, much of the property was mortgaged. Alone and with two children to provide for, her financial situation clearly preoccupied her. Her son-in-law would later call her ‘covetous’, obsessed with money, and slow to pay. She appears to have employed a relatively small number of household servants for a titled estate: one coachman, one footman, one cook, one gardener and a few maidservants are all that are mentioned at the subsequent trial (although there may well have been more – normally it would have taken more than one coachman to run the livery for a country estate, for instance). When medical care was needed, Anna Maria turned to a local apothecary, Powell, rather than have a surgeon or doctor as her first recourse.
If an anecdote about a Mr Powell quoted in a book about the area at the time, M. H. Bloxam’s Rugby, regarding the years beginning 1777, relates to the Powell in this case, it is revealing. The story, referring to a house used as accommodation for boys at Rugby School, relates: ‘the house belonged to one Powell, a country apothecary, who went about in a drab suit of clothes, cauliflower wig and black-topped boots. Old Mother Powell was a regular skinflint.’8 Thomas Powell and Thomas Clare are the only apothecaries listed in Simmons’ Medical Registers 1779–1783 for Rugby, so it is likely that the shabbily dressed man described here is the same Powell that tended Theodosius Boughton on his mother’s instructions. Again, hardly the type of medical man one would associate with a baronet’s family, but no doubt cheaper than a physician.
Although her prosecution lawyers later described Anna Maria’s wealth as ‘splendour’, that was not accurate. She seems to have provided none of the extensive hospitality that Sir William and Catherine had once shown to their neighbours; Anna Maria went to Bath occasionally, and possibly to London for the season – it was necessary to put her daughter on display for the marriage market – but there is no suggestion of Anna Maria being part of ‘society;’ no balls, no entertainments at Lawford are mentioned. Whether Anna Maria even kept up the age-old suppers and fairs for her tenant farmers at harvest time is also questionable. She was respectable, and she doted on her son. That much, at least, was accepted locally.
In 1775, Anna Maria decided to send Theodosius, then fifteen, to Eton. Until now, he had gone to Rugby School, where he had been first admitted in 1767, aged seven. The school had been founded in 1567 by Lawrence Sheriff, to whom Anna Maria’s family, the Beauchamps, were distantly related: Anna Maria owned much of the land around Brownsover where Sheriff had been born. After a period of decay in the early 1700s, Rugby School moved to new premises twenty-seven years before Theodosius registered, by which time it had expanded to a roll of about 200 boys from all over England. Although the education that the boys received was well respected, discipline was severe and their living accommodation spartan: the Birching Tower and the old outdoor wash-houses attested to that. An old boy of the school, Albert Pell, was to describe it as ‘cruelly comfortless’ in his autobiography.
‘Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality,’ wrote Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews (1742). Many titled ladies resolutely refused to put their sons into what they considered to be harm’s way: Lady Leicester of Holkham, for instance, insisted that her nephew take the Grand Tour and £500 a year rather than go to a public school that was, as she put it, ‘a school of vice’. Theodosius would have entered Eton as a senior, where he would have expanded upon what Rugby had already taught him: a basic classical education accompanied by harsh discipline.
Eton exercised the law of survival of the fittest. It was physically demanding, not least in its punishments, and flogging by both masters and seniors was routine. The school was well known for its beatings. In the sixteenth century, Friday had been set aside as ‘flogging day;’ from 1809 to 1834 the headmaster, John Keate, used the birch unmercifully – on one occasion he is supposed to have publicly flogged eighty boys. In addition to this, the oldest self-electing society at Eton, ‘Pop’, administered private canings, known to be the severest punishment at the school.
At all boys’ public schools at the time young boys were expected to ‘fag’ for the older ones in a form of humiliating domestic slavery. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained that at his school, Christ’s Hospital, ‘the boys tormented me’ ; another pupil reported that he was woken regularly by a senior boy stubbing out his cigar on his face. Gambling, drunkenness and violence were commonplace, but occasionally the boorish behaviour overstepped even Eton’s boundaries: the militia were called in more than once to keep order. The historian Edward Gibbon commented sourly, ‘the mimic scene of a rebellion displayed in their true colours the ministers and patriots of the rising generation.’9 These were boys from privileged backgrounds who, to keep up appearances and status, created mayhem, running up bills that their parents were expected to pay at the end of each term. Theodosius, however, was kept short of money; in the Defence Donellan noted that ‘Lady Boughton allowed her son 18 pence a week when first there and half a crown thereafter … an allowance not suitable to his birth and fortune,’ adding that, as a result, Theodosius borrowed money locally, thereby increasing his debts.
But Theodosius’s debts were the least of his problems. He ‘sank into debauchery’10 and contracted venereal disease in his first year at Eton. In July 1777, the newly married Donellans visited him at school, and, according to an article in the Northampton Mercury of 23 April 1781, found him lodging at the house of one Mrs Roberts where he was ‘in a deep salivation from the Venereal Disease whilst under the care of a Mr Pearson, Surgeon’. ‘Salivation’ – by which mercury was given in sufficient quantities to produce sweating and large quantities of saliva – was the standard treatment for the disease at the time.
A horrific case of the effects of mercury was reported in the Hull Packet newspaper of 1 November 1803. A child of three, Thomas Clayton, had been given Ching’s Patent Worm Lozenges containing a white panacea of mercury, despite the travelling salesman who had sold them to his parents insisting that ‘not one particle of mercury’ was in them. The poor child went into a state of high salivation – drooling, flushed and spotted complexion, convulsions – and died in ‘indescribable torments’.
Self-medication was common enough at the time and the newspapers were full of patent remedies, the sale of which was unregulated by a government which none the less levied a duty on every bottle sold. Nor did medical care improve with any noticeable rapidity in Warwickshire in the late eighteenth century. A document now in Warwick Records Office records one doctor’s prescriptions to the Ward-Boughton family in 1790: ‘a halfpenny-worth of black treacle applied to each side of the head until the rag drops off’ for violent headaches and ‘a fresh ivy leaf applied with fasting spittle each morning’ for corns on the feet.
In the Northampton Mercury of 7 May 1781, ‘anti-venereal diuretic vegetable drops’ were advertised, ‘famous in curing every species of venereal infection in bottles at 10s. 6d., 6 shillings, 4 shillings and two shillings each’. In October of the same year, the newspaper advertised Fothergil’s Chymical Nervous Drops, supposedly a cure ‘for those who have polluted themselves with secret Venery’, who ‘may have their Constitution Strengthen’d for 10 shillings 6d.’. More chilling is the advertisement for Leake’s Pilula Salutaria in December 1773, in which a Mr Marshall of Northampton claimed an absolute cure for venereal disease ‘should the Malignancy be ever so great. Effecting a cure where salivation fails in boxes for 2s. 6d. each.’ Mr Marshall, in common with all his colleagues and competitors, did not say what was in his super-strength ‘Pilula Salutaria’.
These are the types of self-medicating ‘cures’ which Theodosius would have bought or had prescribed to him, and which Donellan is supposed to have referred to as reported in the Northampton Mercury of 23 April 1781: ‘On the Saturday preceding the Death of Sir Theodosius, The Rev. Newsam took Notice to Mr Donellan that Sir Theodosius appeared much worse than usual, which Mr Donellan, by Way of Reply, said he did not wonder at, for that he was continually quacking himself with Mercury.’
In the summer of 1777, when Theodosius was almost seventeen and very soon after the Donellans’ visit to Eton, Anna Maria brought her son home. It was reported in the newspaper that ‘Mr & Mrs Donellan received several letters from Lady Boughton in the first of which she tells them that she had fetched her son from Eton, and had placed him under the care of a Mr Clare, an apothecary at Rugby, plain proof that he was not then well; and in all the rest she complains of her son’s irregularities and says that blotches appeared upon his Face, and that he had lost his fine Complexion and that he was taking Things for his Complaint.’
A letter survives which shows that Theodosius also went to stay with the Donellans in Bath for a while.11 It seems that Theodosius was not interested in education. What he was interested in was hunting and fishing, drinking and fighting, brawling over imagined insults and generally running riot in the countryside. In the same article, the newspaper continues that ‘he was engaged in several disputes and quarrels, one or two of which were near to be carried to serious lengths had not Mr Donellan stepp’d in and prevented them.’
Following several requests from Anna Maria, the Donellans left Bath in June 1778 and went to live at Lawford Hall. The Northampton Mercury reports that Anna Maria employed a tutor, a ‘Mr Jones, near Northampton’, for Theodosius for five months, until November 1778. But when Theodosius returned to Lawford, his health was no better. The newspaper goes on: ‘On Sir Theodosius’s return from Mr Jones’s, he was so much altered in his Countenance and Person that Mr Donellan suspected he had contracted a fresh Venereal Complaint; and therefore, merely with the View of recommending a skilful Surgeon to him, he took an opportunity of questioning him … At first he seemed unwilling to give any answer, but at length confess’d that when he went to Mr Jones’s he was not well in his Old Complaint, and that while he was there he used a great Deal of Mercurial Ointment.’ The paper adds the rather poignant detail that Theodosius admitted to using so much that he wore flannel drawers in bed every night ‘in Order to prevent a Discovery upon the Sheets’.
John Donellan, the newspaper concludes, was convinced that Anna Maria would not employ a reputable surgeon to help Theodosius; instead she bought him a book called The Family Physician, from which Theodosius ‘was continually quacking himself’ – in other words, dosing himself up with inappropriate ‘cures’. But Theodosius compounded his problem by contracting another infection and, according to Donellan, ‘had nearly destroyed his Constitution’ by ‘unfortunate Connections with different Women’.
The ‘unfortunate Connections’, quarrels and scrapes continued at Lawford. In his written defence published after his trial, Donellan gave an example of his care for the boy. One afternoon, Theodosius had asked the vicar of Newbold for the key to the church tower, saying that he wanted to climb to the top. Donellan went with him and, when they reached the top, Theodosius decided to try and turn the weathercock. As he climbed up, his foot slipped and he fell; Donellan reached out to catch him, but Theodosius fell backwards on to Donellan, winding the older man severely. On the way home in the coach, Theodosius told his mother what had happened, adding, as Donellan writes, ‘he must have been killed, if his brother had not saved him.’
Theodosius Edward Allesley Boughton was a worrying, obstreperous boy. His royal confidant ancestors were a distant memory; even his great-grandfather’s ‘valuable qualitys so effectually recommended to the esteem and favour of the county’ – an inscription on the Rysbrack memorial which Theodosius would have seen in church every Sunday at home – rang hollow now. Theodosius was the son of a father who had broken his wife’s heart, and the grandson of a man who had dropped dead of alcoholic excess aged thirty-three.
The Boughtons were a family of dramatic opposites, of glorious highs and ignominious lows. Unfortunately, it looked as if Theodosius was set on the latter course.
While Theodosius was at Eton, his sister Theodosia had continued to live at home with her mother. The future for a sister whose brother was due to inherit the estate on which she lived could be a precarious one. Gertrude Savile, for instance, who lived in nearby Nottinghamshire in the early 1700s, complained of ‘the baseness of the dependence on my brother’. Left penniless when her brother had inherited everything, she had been ‘forced to grovel to Sir George for every gown, pair of gloves, every pin and needle’, and complained that ‘If it was possible to get my bread by the meanest and most laborious imployment [sic] I would without dispute choose it.’12
Dependent sisters were also a drain on finances. If Theodosius had ever married, Theodosia would have fallen even further down the food chain, behind his wife and their children, an embarrassment and a financial liability. She might have moved out to live with her mother in Brownsover Hall, but even then both women would have looked to Theodosius for money to maintain their family name.
Anna Maria, therefore, was faced with more than one problem. Not only did she have a son whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to keep bad company – which did not bode well for the Boughton fortune – but she also had a daughter whose reputation she must protect. Theodosia, if married, would at least have a husband to look after her; and Anna Maria no doubt gave some thought to the idea that a full-grown man with some sense of the world could give proper guidance to the fatherless Theodosius as well as – most importantly – provide for her daughter.
Theodosia would not have had much of an education, but, bearing in mind her brother’s track record at Eton, she was probably better informed than him. Ladies were expected to be proficient in needlework and craftwork (there was a strong fashion at the time for the latter in particular); and they would have been schooled in a little French (but not the classics). Theodosia would have been expected to learn from other society ladies how to deport herself, dance, hold a lively conversation, and to know something of the arts. The aim was to charm general company, keep chaste until marriage (though not necessarily faithful after it) and be well schooled in ‘the graces’.
As early as 1774, however, the Lady’s Magazine railed against sending a girl away to be ‘educated’ in this way: ‘Nothing can justify such monstrous indifference! What is called a genteel education by some, which is very different from a good one, can only prepare a young person for an early defeat.’ In the same vein, it struck out against vacuous preening, as opposed to skills: ‘She never hears a syllable about her understanding, judgement, or mental endowments.’ Proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft went further: ‘[Girls] are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.’
It was an age of the kind of display of which Wollstonecraft despaired. Lord Chesterfield, writing to his illegitimate son Philip Stanhope, in Letters to His Son: On the Fine Art of becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1749), while insisting that Philip should be of a responsible, serious frame of mind, nevertheless encouraged him to develop a certain artful playfulness, the code by which high society operated. He repeatedly recommended ‘graces’ that a gentleman should refine. Quoting the philosopher John Locke, he advised, ‘You will find the stress that he lays upon The Graces, which he calls good breeding … Study hard; distinguish carefully between the pleasures of a man of fashion, and the vices of a scoundrel; pursue the former and abhor the latter, like a man of sense.’ Theodosius’s behaviour fell very short of that.
Chesterfield’s opinion of women, however, was low. ‘Vanity is their universal, if not their strongest passion,’ he wrote. Money was not to be wasted on educating them or sending them on the Grand Tour; they were only important as introductions into the beau monde and, as such, they had to be flattered and cajoled into acting with sense.
Girls like Theodosia usually ‘came out’ into society aged about fifteen or sixteen, sometimes younger (in Eliza Haywood’s didactic novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) the heroine’s adventures begin when she is fourteen). In the 1720s Daniel Defoe had already sneered at the ‘daughters of the gentry carrying themselves to market’,13 while Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s description of Sir John Vanbrugh’s attempts at finding a wife in 1713 is not flattering: ‘I believe last Monday there were 200 pieces of Woman’s Flesh, both fat and lean.’14 Some writers, like Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1792 pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Women, condemned the flagrant sexual parading of single women and their mothers: ‘What can be more indelicate,’ she asked, ‘than a girl’s coming out in the fashionable world?’
Young women were certainly preyed upon at public gatherings, and a mother had to distinguish between the admiration of a gentleman and the leering advances of an adventurer. Society in Bath was no exception. Tobias Smollett’s character Matthew Bramble complains that it was crowded with ‘Vulgars … a very inconsiderable proportion of genteel people are lost in a mob of impudent plebeians.’
At least Anna Maria had relations in Bath on whom she could rely: her sister and brother-in-law, the Shiptons. And Bath was exciting, compared to Warwickshire. The city was in communication with a wider world: coaches ran daily to all the major areas of population. The place was buzzing with entertainments; beside the regular assemblies, parties and balls the Bath Journal in the 1760s advertised such delights as a ‘Troop of Equestrians in Egyptian Pyramids’, stage plays at the Lower Rooms and the Theatre Royal, a display of ‘Fireworks by Signor Invetto’, ‘Dancing Displays by Master and Miss Michael’, and ‘Miniature Portraits Painted by a certain Mr Lightfoot’ (‘whose performances need no comment’). There were all kinds of things to lavish money on, too: from gold and silver writing pens, harpsichords and Dutch tulips to the more mundane ‘elastic saddles’ and ‘shamoy leather socks for the prevention of chilblains’.
It is quite probable that Anna Maria and Theodosia also visited London; the season began in the New Year and went on until the end of April or so. It was considered that any gentleman of note had a ‘town house’ and a ‘country house’. The Shukburgh side of the family certainly had a place in London; and in later years Theodosia herself would live in Portland Street and her cousins the Rouse-Boughtons in Devonshire Place during the season.
Georgian society was quite different in character from the public restraint and industry of the Victorians, and the hub of it all, London, was a very seductive lure for minor gentry from the provinces, male and female alike. At the head of London society was the Prince of Wales, son of George III; by the time he had reached the age of eighteen in 1780 he had already set the tone for gambling, whoring and drunkenness. By the mid-eighteenth century London society was gripped by gambling fever: fortunes were both made and lost at pharaoh, quinze and piquet – thousands of guineas changing hands every night. The prince also led by example when it came to women: he publicly frequented brothels and early in his life had affairs with other men’s wives, the Duchess of Devonshire and the Countess of Salisbury among them. Following his example, male members of the aristocracy frequented prostitutes as a matter of course.
But Anna Maria would not have taken Theodosia to London just to see and be seen; she would have been looking for a wealthy man for Theodosia to marry. London was the heart of government, and the aristocracy had a stranglehold on public finances and appointments. By 1720, a quarter of the peerage held government or Crown office, and being appointed to public office made the fortunes of men like Marlborough, Cadogan and Sir Robert Walpole. James Brydges made a profit of £600,000 from his time in the post of Payments General of Forces Abroad from 1705 to 1713. Anna Maria may have seen that there might be rich pickings to be had, and she would have leapt on invitations to dine and socialise, if only in the cause of a good marriage for her daughter.
If this was her aim, however, it fell rather short. In the season of 1777, it did not reach the peerage. It fell instead on a lowly commoner, although a glamorous one. Into the Boughtons’ world stepped Captain John Donellan, Master of Ceremonies at the fashionable Pantheon Assembly Rooms in Oxford Street. He was a man of the world who had returned from soldiering in India with a reputation for both bravery and fortune-hunting. He was about to use both attributes to devastating effect.