‘The First Countess of Wessex’ is broadly based on events documented in John Hutchins’s immense four-volume History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, an eighteenth-century work of which Hardy proudly owned a Victorian third edition.1 King’s-Hintock Court is the Wessex name for Melbury House, thirteen kilometres north-west of Dorchester, which was inherited in 1729 by Susannah Strangways, who in 1713 had married Squire Thomas Horner of Mells Park, Somerset, a man below her in his possessions and style of life. These historical originals for the parents of Betty Dornell likewise had one daughter – Elizabeth Strangways-Horner, born in 1723 – who at the age of thirteen, under pressure from her mother, married Stephen Fox, later Lord Ilchester (1741) and then the first Earl of Ilchester (1756); like Betty Dornell, she did not live with her husband until some years after her marriage.2 In 1893, Hardy told an interviewer that his attention was first drawn to these historical personages by ‘the only fact which can be learned from the records’: ‘that the child was married at that age’.3 He presumably then followed the procedure he described in his Preface to A Group of Noble Dames, where ‘The First Countess of Wessex’ was collected in 1891, of ‘raising images’ from genealogies by ‘unconsciously filling into the framework the motives, passions, and personal qualities which would appear to be the single explanation possible of some extraordinary conjunction in times, events, and personages’.4 Hardy freely fabricated some facts, in other words, for his own imaginative purposes. There is no evidence in Hutchins or elsewhere, for example, that Elizabeth Strangways-Horner was attracted to another man after her marriage to Fox, a detail that appears in both the 1889 periodical version of the story and its volume appearance two years later. Neither is there any known basis for two plot elements introduced in 1891: that the daughter was rejected by a lover after contracting smallpox and that the mother, guilt-stricken after her husband’s death, then tried to discourage the daughter from living with her husband.
Hardy’s relationship to the story, however, is not so distant or dispassionate as such a process of historical fantasizing would imply, for he also wrote to Lord Lytton in July 1891 that the stories in A Group of Noble Dames came from ‘the lips of aged people in a remote part of the country, where traditions of the local families linger on, & are remembered by the yeomen & peasantry long after they are forgotten by the families concerned’.5 As Michael Millgate has suggested, one of those aged sources for ‘The First Countess of Wessex’ was ‘almost certainly’ Hardy’s mother, Jemima Hand Hardy (1813–1904). As a young Melbury Osmond woman in destitute circumstances, she had worked as a cook for two relatives of the third Earl of Ilchester, and through her mother, the former Betty Swetman (1778–1847), she descended from a family that had once possessed property near Melbury House. According to Millgate, ‘the Swetmans had been small landowners – or, as Hardy was fond of saying, “yeomen” – for generations, farming land subsequently absorbed into the Melbury House estates of the Earls of Ilchester. The land had been theirs, Hardy once told a friend, at a time “when the Ilchesters were at plow” ’. The implication in this statement that the rise of the Ilchesters coincided with the decline of the Swetmans is roughly consistent with Hardy’s family tradition that his mother’s ancestors were ‘ruined’ at the time of the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion, when the illegitimate son of the beheaded Charles I led an abortive insurrection against James II.6 Hardy reported in the Life that the Swetmans ‘seem to have been involved in the Monmouth rising’ and that one of them ‘was probably transported’, which ‘seems to have helped to becloud the family prospects of the maternal line of Hardy’s ancestry’. Hardy had also been told that two of the Swetman daughters narrowly escaped being raped by victorious loyalist soldiers.7 The ancestors of the Ilchesters were on the opposing side. Indeed, during the Parliamentary Revolution (1649-60), Stephen Fox’s father – of yeoman stock and originally in service at the court of Charles I – had curried the favour of the dead King’s legitimate son, thus building a fortune and ensuring a place for himself as Paymaster of the Forces in the courts of Charles II and James II after the Restoration.8 It is not surprising, then, that the Life pointedly describes the former Swetman house as ‘now in the possession of the Earl of Ilchester’.9 Just a year before he wrote ‘The First Countess of Wessex’, Hardy had made a sketch of that house, noting on the back that this was ‘where G. [Granny] Melbury & her father were born’.10
Nor was Melbury House and its environs the only property in which Hardy invested such emotional and imaginative interest. ‘The First Countess of Wessex’ also features the manor at Corfe Mullen near Wimborne (called Elm-Cranlynch in the story and occupied by Charles Phelipson), which, as Hutchins reports, had dwindled to cottages after it had been lost by the Phelips family.11 And in August of 1888, Hardy visited Woolcombe, once owned by a family to which he thought he was related; he then made this mansion the setting for the honeymoon scenes in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a novel that dwells on the decline of families.12 In the case of ‘The First Countess of Wessex’, the focus on houses extended even to its illustrations, for in December 1888 Hardy requested of James Ripley Osgood, the London agent for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, that the story’s artist have ‘a special skill’ in delineating not only period costume but also ‘old English manor-house architecture, & woodland scenery’. Hardy proposed the name of one artist who was ‘fairly good at architecture’, mentioned a drawing of Melbury House in the British Museum, and offered to entertain the chosen artist for a few days in order to ‘accompany him to the scenes’. A month later, the painter Alfred Parsons did make such a trip,13 and the result was two contrasting sets of pictures. The American illustrator C. S. Reinhart provided four illustrations featuring the story’s human characters, while Parsons furnished the architectural and landscape drawings: a headpiece showing Melbury House seen from a neighbouring hill, plus full-page pictures of Mells Park seen from its avenued approach, of Squire Dornell and Tupcombe driving through a hilly countryside towards Bristol, and of the entrance gate to the Ilchester estate at Melbury Park. Most intriguing is the last of these, which features close to its edge on the right a mustachioed man who does not appear in the narrative and who resembles Hardy himself as he looked in the late 1880s. Significantly, this mysterious figure is leaving the estate, not by the main gate, but by climbing the stile to its side, and he is carrying over his shoulder, tramp-style, a sack tied to a stick; he is not dressed as a rustic, however, but rather wears a respectable suit and hat. It is tempting to think that Hardy gave Parsons instructions for the details of this illustration – perhaps even that he posed for it – and that the presence of the genteel tramp on the stile is linked to his own ambivalent feelings about the lost property and house on the outskirts of Melbury Park.14
In any case, it is indisputable that Hardy felt a hereditary tie with the very property that the fictional Stephen Reynard so deftly makes his own by becoming the husband of the heiress Betty Dornell.15 And while she, in turn, by marrying him, becomes the future ‘First Countess of Wessex’, it is Hardy himself who is slyly implicated in Reynard’s justification for the choice of title. Paraphrasing Reynard in his letter to Betty when he seeks to win her heart, Hardy’s narrator reports that, when mentioning his expected peerage, Reynard tells her he ‘thought the title of Wessex would be eminently suitable, considering the position of much of their property’. This focus on the ‘position’ of the Ilchester property – the word could imply more than location – has a double effect. On the one hand, it draws attention to the wiliness of Reynard, whose marriage with his child-wife has already brought him the ‘enormous estates’ which had made possible his promised peerage. At the same time, however, Reynard’s letter establishes an imaginative identification between Hardy and the house of Ilchester.16 For here the intellectual property of ‘Wessex’ – to which he had begun so prominently to lay claim – gives its name to the titled family that owns the land and house his maternal family had lost many generations before. To tell the story passed down by his ‘yeomen’ ancestors and to make it central to the history of Wessex is thus to reclaim their propertied past: Hardy himself, in the person of Reynard, playfully becomes the first Earl of Wessex and the father of that house’s multiple (fictional) progeny.17
This fanciful tinkering with the history of an eminent family still living at Melbury House was potentially damaging for the Hardy who, as a renowned novelist, had begun to socialize in élite circles, and he eventually learned that the fifth Earl of Ilchester had been angered by the story. What is not known, however, is which version the Earl was responding to. Was it the 1889 Harper’s version, published in the United States with the illustrations of his property, or the 1891 volume version, significantly different from the first and published, without pictures, in England? There is also no evidence indicating when – before or after the decision to offer the changed version of 1891 – Hardy heard of Ilchester’s annoyance. In either case, even the possibility that the Earl might be offended could have provided the reason for Hardy to alter the story for its volume publication, when for the first time it would be reviewed inside England. For although Martin Ray suggests that the plot for Harper’s was probably a bowdlerization, there is no evidence that the journal called for any changes to the original manuscript or that the 1891 version was written first. It is quite possible, then, that the second publication is the bowdlerized one, a response to the known or anticipated sensitivity, not of an editor, but of the Ilchesters.18 For the book version, while it introduces, as Ray points out, an elopement, a kiss, secret meetings and a pregnancy,19 also makes respectable the relationship between the Earl and Countess by removing the strong implication that she was not a virgin when she finally yielded to her husband.
In the periodical, Phelipson dies from a fall because Tupcombe, thinking it is Reynard who has entered Betty’s bedroom, destabilizes the ladder at the window. Phelipson is repeatedly described as the ‘lover’ of Betty, and when, immediately after the fatal fall, her mother finds her lying ‘in a dead swoon’ and wearing only a ‘night-gown’, the narration explicitly suggests the aftermath of a sexual assignation:
Before going near her daughter she quickly pushed the door behind her, put the room in order, and gently closed the window, which was a little open, though this had been unobserved from below. She then wrapped a dressing-gown round Betty, called in the house-steward, and told him that her daughter had seemingly run to the window and fainted at sight of the accident outside.
At a later stage in this first version, the narrator also volunteers that ‘Mrs Dornell had reason to think that the night on which the rash young fellow had lost his life was not the only occasion of his surreptitiously visiting King’s-Hintock Court,’ and Reynard’s cool logic at learning the circumstances of Phelipson’s death is summarized in language that implies a recognition of distinctly sexual misconduct: ‘How would it matter what the old Eve had been, if the new Eve’s mind veered in a direction favourable to him?’20
In accepting what has happened, Reynard makes his most cunning move in the wooing of his young wife. But the implication that Betty (and thus the first Countess of Ilchester) had committed adultery – not to mention that she finally developed an affection for her husband only because of his expected peerage – could well have been part of what provoked anger in the fifth Earl of Ilchester. In any case, the Betty of the later version is given a less ambiguous history. Carried from her room by Phelipson immediately after he has arrived and warned of Reynard’s impending arrival (significantly, she did not know that he was coming, and there is no time for lovemaking), she then feels ‘much misgiving’ after their escape. The introduction of the smallpox incident, which replaces the fatal fall in the periodical version, then exposes Phelipson as a shallow suitor and reveals that Reynard, with his daring kiss, is the one who truly loves Betty. In this version, there are indeed sexual assignations, but they involve the man who is already her legal husband rather than a lover who tries to displace him. The volume publication, in short, removes the potentially scandalous aspects of Betty Dornell’s sexual history, and although it retains the characterization of Reynard as a clever strategist, it none the less establishes him as a chivalrous lover who is prepared to risk his life to prove his devotion to his young wife. Betty may shock her mother with the revelation of her pregnancy, but the child she is carrying is both legitimate and the offspring of the only man she has ever slept with.
Whether or not these changes of 1891 were a direct response to objections by the Earl of Ilchester, Hardy’s reluctance to offend members of the old family is obvious in his revisions for the 1895 Osgood, McIlvaine edition of The Woodlanders, which move Little-Hintock, the village of the seductive Felice Charmond, a respectable distance from Melbury House – a decision that was anticipated, as F. B. Pinion has pointed out, in the 1891 addition to ‘The First Countess of Wessex’ of a reference to Little-Hintock as ‘several miles’ east of King’s-Hintock.21 Though Hardy’s reasons for both these sets of changes were obviously practical, there may also have been an emotional motivation, for he had still another tie to the history of the Ilchesters: Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, the daughter of Stephen Fox and Elizabeth Strangways-Horner, who eloped in 1 with the well-known Irish actor William O’Brien, lived with her husband for many years in Stinsford House, near Hardy’s own home at Bockhampton, and both were buried in a vault built by Hardy’s paternal grandfather. Hardy reported in the Life that this connection ‘lent the occupants of the little vault in the chancel a romantic interest’ in his mind ‘at an early age’, and he described the 1892 destruction of Stinsford House by fire as ‘a bruising of tender memories for me’. He felt especially drawn to the O’Briens, moreover, because Lady Susan ‘caused such scandal in aristocratic circles’ by marrying an artist without title or property. Twice in the Life, Hardy challenges Horace Walpole’s judgement that she had ‘stooped’ in this marriage to a talented actor and dramatist, and he mentions proudly that both his grandmothers had seen O’Brien perform and that his great-grandfather and grandfather ‘had known him well’. He also quotes the reminiscences of a local labourer who had praised Lady Susan for her generosity and concludes the entry with a fond epithet: ‘A kind-hearted woman, Lady Susan.’22 In sum, although Hardy may have seen the marriage of the first Earl of Ilchester as made partly for reasons of convenience, he also viewed the elopement of the Earl’s daughter as a love match, an overcoming of rigid class divisions. What emerges from such tangled associations, then, is a complex and sometimes contradictory response by Hardy to family traditions about the house of Ilchester: filtered through both his mother’s and his father’s sides, these stories of property lost and gained, of arranged and forbidden marriages, fed into his abiding preoccupation with sexual desire across class lines.
It is hardly a coincidence, then, that the literary text most clearly linked to ‘The First Countess of Wessex’ is Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride
of Lammermoor (1819), a work Hardy praised in his 1888 essay, ‘The Profitable Reading of Fiction’.23 For The Bride of Lammermoor also features an ambitious heiress who has married below her own rank and who then forces her young daughter, against the will of the father, to marry a man of her mother’s choosing. In addition to having similar plots, both love stories serve as vehicles for an exploration of political change. In Scott’s novel, the class differences repeat the historical conflict between a declining aristocracy and the aspiring middling classes at the time of the Union. In Hardy’s story, the background to the marriage is the conferral of noble titles on Stephen Fox because he is a ‘favourite at Court’ – one of several indirect allusions to the well-known association of both Stephen and his brother, Henry (father of Whig leader Charles James Fox), with Robert Walpole’s Whig politics. The success of the brothers, moreover, had depended on the previous rise in the Tory Party of their yeoman father (see n. 8). The Fox family, in short, was notorious for its strategies of political expediency, and it is this aspect of the historical Stephen Fox that Hardy foregrounds in his fictional character: Reynard is successful in wooing the young heiress precisely because he is a ‘diplomatist’ who knows that ‘the only permanent attribute of life is change’. His cleverness is presented as tact, his opportunism as patience, and his understanding of Betty’s past infatuation as something that can be changed is simply a domestic application of a political principle that he has always embraced. This wry transformation in ‘The First Countess of Wessex’ of the fox from beast-fable tradition into the fairy-tale prince – especially prominent in the less cynical 1891 version – is accomplished by the story’s comic method and form, which reverses the tragic outcome of Scott’s novel: where Lucy Ashton had escaped her mother’s manipulations only by violently attacking her new bridegroom and then dying, Betty Dornell defies Susannah first by fleeing from Reynard and then by recognizing his authority over her mother’s: ‘ “But, my dearest mamma, you made me marry him!” ’ she exclaims with a logic worthy of her diplomatic husband, ‘ “and of course I’ve to obey him more than you now!” ’ So the story can end happily, with the future Earl triumphant in his property, his wife and the prospect of numerous offspring. And this is Hardy’s whimsical triumph as well: Wessex – the imaginative place whose ownership he had fully claimed in the recent collection of stories entitled Wessex Tales – had acquired its presiding aristocrat, one with intimate ties to Hardy’s own fantasies about his ancestral past.
‘The First Countess of Wessex’ in its two versions can finally be seen, then, as a revealing example of a tendency in Hardy – not unlike that in his character Angel Clare – both to resent and to romanticize aristocratic privilege. This doubleness, which became increasingly apparent during the 1890s as Hardy’s growing fame put him in social contact with people of wealth and title, emerged again in his subsequent relationship with the Ilchester family. When the fifth Earl of Ilchester died in 1905, Hardy wrote in elegiac tones to his friend Florence Henniker that ‘Our county has lately lost a noble lord – its Lr Lieutenant’, and for a few days in November 1915 he was a guest of Lady Ilchester at Melbury House, after which he sent her the manuscript of a poem he had written ‘in Melbury Park years and years ago’.24 That poem, dated 1901 in Time’s Laughingstocks (1909), is ‘Autumn in King’s-Hintock Park’, spoken in the voice of an old woman meditating, as she rakes leaves, on the passage of time. Though she sees ‘Lords’ ladies pass in view’, she is not one of these noble dames (a variant title was ‘Autumn in My Lord’s Park’); rather, she occupies the perspective of Hardy’s mother and grandmother, who knew the Ilchester estate only from the outside. So Hardy – now the famous creator of ‘Wessex’, but also still the son of a woman who cooked for relations of the Ilchesters – could pay tribute to this aristocratic family, now his friends, even as he reminded them of who lived outside their gates. Indeed, more than thirty years after the periodical publication of ‘The First Countess of Wessex’, some of the mischief in the genteel tramp at the entrance to Melbury Park (if one can presume that this figure is meant to be Hardy) may have intruded on a happy social occasion at Max Gate. In February 1919, Florence Hardy wrote to Sydney Cockerell,
T. H. is very well and very cheerful. He had a visit yesterday from Lady Ilchester and her daughter and we were quite a noisy party – shouts of laughter, such as I had not heard here for many months. He insisted upon telling that awful story of the burning of Mary Channing, with all its gruesome details. I tried in vain to stop him, for the daughter turned white – she is only fifteen.25
So Hardy continued to tell stories to the Ilchesters, parts of which they did not want to hear. At the same time, however, by marrying his Wessex to their Dorset, he also had become part of their social set: like the Foxes, Hardy the descendant of yeomen had entered the world of the aristocracy.
1. Biography, 4. Hardy invented the ‘Wessex’ title, although fiction became reality in 1999 when, at the time of his marriage, Prince Edward, Elizabeth II’s youngest son, assumed the title of Earl of Wessex, his bride thereby becoming an actual first Countess of Wessex. One assumes that those responsible for the choice were not sufficiently familiar with Hardy to be aware of the less conventional episodes in the fictional couple’s marital odyssey.
2. See John Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, vol. II (Westminster: J. B. Nicols, 1861; repr. East Ardsley: E. P. Publishing, 1973), pp. 663–79; Giles Stephen Holland Fox-Strangways, sixth Earl of Ilchester, Henry Fox, First Lord Holland, His Family and Relations, vol. I (London: John Murray, 1920), pp. 44–7; Brady, 85–6; and Ray, 79–81.
3. Quoted in Ray, 80.
4. See Personal Writings, 24.
5. Collected Letters, I, 239–40.
6. Biography, 317, 13, 9 and 12.
7. Life, 10–11. John Symonds Udal notes that the Monmouth Rebellion ‘never fails to stir the hearts of West Dorset folk’ (Dorsetshire Folk-Lore, 2nd edn (1922; repr. Guernsey: Toucan Press, 1970), p. 150), and in ‘The Duke’s Reappearance’, his 1896 story featuring the ancestral house, Hardy draws on another Swetman tradition, that the family was visited by ‘one of Monmouth’s defeated officers’ (Life, 11).
8. On the career of Sir Stephen Fox, father of the first Earl of Ilchester, see Ilchester, Henry Fox, pp. 4–6; and The Home of the Hollands, 1605–1820 (London: John Murray, 1937), pp. 32–5.
9. Life, II.
10. Biography, 279.
11. Millgate (Biography, 191) notes that the ‘decline’ of this house is described in Hutchins.
12. Biography, 293.
13. Collected Letters, I, 181–2.
14. Six of the seven Parsons and Reinhart illustrations, plus the headpiece, appeared again in the 1891 publication by Harper & Brothers of A Group of Noble Dames, and the 1896 Osgood, McIlvaine edition featured a frontispiece by Henry Macbeth Raeburn entitled ‘King’s-Hintock Court’ (Ray, 75–6).
15. Squire Dornell described Reynard as ‘poor’, but the historical Fox had considerable property and money. His estates, however, had been purchased by his father, while the Strangways were, according to the sixth Earl of Ilchester, ‘a family of ancient descent’, and their property in southern England dated back to the early fifteenth century (Ilchester, Henry Fox, p. 31).
16. The name ‘Betty’ may be a veiled reference to Betty Swetman; Elizabeth Strangways-Horner is not referred to in the diminutive in Hutchins or other published sources.
17. In his 1890 poem, ‘The Rhyme of the Three Captains’, Rudyard Kipling ironically calls Hardy ‘Lord of the Wessex coast and all the lands thereby’ (quoted in Biography, 308).
18. Hardy had completed the volume version of A Group of Noble Dames, a job that included adding ‘The First Countess of Wessex’ and three other stories to the six that already comprised the periodical printings of ‘A Group of Noble Dames’, in early 1891. By this point, not long after he had spent months bowdlerizing the manuscripts of ‘A Group of Noble Dames’ and of Tess of the D’Urbervilles for their appearances in the Graphic, Hardy had become adept at anticipating what might be objectionable in his fiction and at finding cynical ways of getting around those objections. It is unlikely, before the multiple rejections of Tess at the end of 1889 and the difficult negotiations with the Graphic during 1890, that Hardy would have felt the need to bowdlerize the original version of ‘The First Countess of Wessex’, which he had sent to Harper’s late in 1888.
19. See Ray, 78 and 81.
20. 1891 GND also replaced ‘an offence which he might with some reason have denounced as forgivable’ with the milder ‘an errant passion which he might with some reason have denounced’.
21. Thomas Hardy: His Life and Friends (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 213. Since this detail was added in 1891, it could indicate that Ilchester’s response to ‘First Countess’ prompted the later changes to the novel.
22. Life, 14, 264, 13 and 170.
23. Personal Writings, 121.
24. Collected Letters, III, 190 and V, 134.
25. Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 157.