For the price of one penny, No. 8, Vol. 13 of the Princess ‘Complete Story’ Novelettes (1886) tells the story of Kitty, a demure country girl who goes into service as a maid, falls in love with her mistress’s son and ends up as Countess of Masborough. ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ such as this were written for young maids in cold attic bedrooms; girls with no more chance of walking down the aisle with the lord of the manor than being given a morning lie-in. Things like this didn’t happen in real life.
But at Uppark, back in 1825, they did. When Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, 2nd Baronet, tired of gambling and gallivanting (and when society tired of him–‘the greatest goose that ever existed’, thought one), he turned his attentions to home, and to marriage. He was a red-nosed, haw-hawing old Etonian of 71. She was an illiterate, 20-year-old local girl, and she worked in the cool, tiled dairies of Uppark in West Sussex. Sir Harry took to sitting outside the dairy entrance in Sir Humphry Repton’s inspired little shelter–a curved white roof over four slender white pillars–resting his gout-ridden hulk on a white slatted seat while indulging in a Devonshire cream tea from the home farm. Before him was the far ridge of the South Downs; behind, the dairy’s showroom for visiting ladies, with decorative pitchers and earthenware bowls laid out on shelves. The working dairy was one door further in: worn paving slabs, the slap of butter pats, a sour smell in the air and the chatter of female voices.
One voice stood out for Sir Harry. Mary Ann Bullock was proposed to by His Lordship while standing at the door of the dairy, her skirts hitched up into her apron. ‘Taken aback, like,’ was her reaction, according to a workmate. ‘Don’t answer me now,’ said Sir Harry, ‘but if you will have me, cut a slice out of the leg of mutton that is coming up for my dinner today.’ Miss Bullock was no fool. When the mutton arrived, the slice had been cut.
The upper-class rumour mill ground into life–and as with any good rumour, they got the gist but were hazy on detail. ‘Sir Harry Fetherston, 76, has married his kitchen maid, aged 18’, wrote Mrs Arbuthnot in her racy journal (the political hostess went on to note several other ‘quite curious’ marriages between ‘old men’ and younger women that year).3 The Sussex County set snubbed Sir Harry’s new wife, while Uppark’s servants sniggered behind her back. A footman was dismissed on the spot by Sir Harry for laughing at the new Lady Fetherstonhaugh as she alighted from her carriage. It was so hard to take her seriously.
Mary Ann was sent to Paris to have her manners gentrified. She learnt to read. She learnt to write a good hand. She was also taught to embroider very precisely in wool, and once back at Uppark busied herself decorating fire screens and footstools. ‘I’ve made a fool of myself, Legge,’ Sir Harry reportedly told his old gamekeeper–but the goose was cooked. He hit back at unkind snobbery with his own brand of snobbery, negotiating with the College of Arms for the registration of the ‘Arms of Bullock’ so that he could have them ‘impaled’ with his own (‘Gules on a Chevron between Three Ostrich feathers Argent a Black roundel, with an escutcheon of Ulster’).
Casting around for companions for his isolated bride, Sir Harry brought into the house Mary Ann’s younger sister, Fanny Bullock, a pert country girl in want of refinement, aged around eight. He also brought in his protégée (and illegitimate daughter, reportedly), 20-year-old Ann Sutherland, to educate young Fanny. The unlikely new family was complete–and stayed this way for the next twenty-one years. No heir was born to Sir Harry. He died aged 92 in 1846, an enormous man of reduced fortunes, confined to a large Bath chair, surrounded by women and beautiful objects.