IN 1775, WHEN he was seven years old, Lymington was sent to Odiham Grammar School, some twenty-five miles from Hurstbourne Park. He boarded there for the next seven or eight years, coming home for the school holidays, and was in due course joined at this school by his younger brothers, Newton and Coulson. Odiham was a quiet country place, later described by William Cobbett in his iconic Rural Rides as a ‘nice little plain market-town’. The school there had opened in 1694, following the instructions contained in the will of Robert May, a local mercer. Some boys had their education paid for by May’s benefaction, and were then apprenticed. A surviving list of pupils shows that forty-one boys received their schooling in this way between 1763 and 1787. Other boys, including Lymington and his brothers, were fee-paying, and by 1788 the charge was twenty guineas per year.
Odiham offered the typical grammar school education of the time, and, if required, the first step before public school and university. Advertisements in 1788 and 1789 declared that, at the school, ‘young gentlemen are genteely boarded and tenderly treated’, and ‘taught the Classics, English, Writing and Accompts [maths] in all their Branches, the Use of Globes, etc etc.’ By 1788, the headmaster was Reverend Jeston, but in Lymington’s time the school was run by Reverend Benjamin Webb.1
Judging from the occupations of some of Lymington’s school fellows, who went on to be tradesmen, surgeons, and barristers, those who needed an education so that they could earn a living when they grew older were well served by their time at Odiham. Whether Lymington was ‘tenderly treated’ by Reverend Webb we do not know, but the reminiscences of his fellow pupils show that the conduct of other boys was far from kind.
This was Lymington’s first exposure to the world outside the narrow confines of Hurstbourne Park and the homes of Austen and Angier. He needed to show that he could stand on his own two feet, and in the schoolroom and playground defend himself when put to the test by boys who cared little for his title or status. But Lymington’s failure to fit in made such an impression that, nearly fifty years later, other pupils at Odiham still remembered how he had behaved and been regarded.
Richard Bishop, for example, who later counted Lymington as one of his customers in the drapery shop he set up in Whitchurch, recalled first getting to know Lymington when they were both pupils at Odiham some forty-seven years earlier. Lymington was ‘a big boy’, about four years older than Bishop, who was in his final years of education at Odiham when Bishop joined the school. Bishop thought of Lymington, as all the other boys did, as ‘a boy nearly void of all understanding’. ‘He was the laughing stock of the school,’ said Bishop, ‘by reason of his singularly foolish silly ways and antics: the boys jeered him and ridiculed him as being a fool.’ In the competitive environment of a boys’ school, Lymington was an easy target. Even a boy who was struggling to learn could take comfort from the fact that he could do better than Lymington. Lymington might have been taught Latin, ‘and used to stand up in a class with other boys’ to recite their lessons, but, according to Bishop, this ‘was only a matter of form’, for Lymington ‘certainly did not and could not learn as other boys did’. His ‘very dull understanding’ made this an impossibility, argued another former pupil. His stupidity was such that Latin verses were given to him ‘which were full of nonsense’, a fact that ‘he himself was not able to discover’.2
To be a poor scholar was one matter, and in a boys’ school this might have been forgotten and even forgiven if Lymington had shown himself to be physically strong and courageous. But he was a ‘great coward’. ‘Any small boy by holding his little fist’ up at Lymington ‘would frighten him and make him cry as though he was going to be half killed.’ He was a cry baby who was ‘the object of ridicule and the butt of the school’, remembered John Bishop (possibly Richard’s older brother). Night times afforded Lymington no escape from this mockery. He had ‘so little sense of propriety that it was a common practice with him to dirty, not only wet but foul, his bed and clothes’. Here was a boy who had no control over his bodily functions, and locked into habits that most children outgrew. He was a ‘big boy’ to Richard Bishop, but he was still a baby in every other way. Perhaps his misery was shown by his persistent bed-wetting, but his fouling of himself was seen as beyond the pale. It showed a lack of ‘propriety’, or sense of acceptable behaviour. It could neither be hidden nor excused.
Who would want to be a friend to such a boy? Most children of Lymington’s age longed to belong, to be accepted as part of a group, and even to be admired. Peer recognition was as important then as it is now. But there was no hope of this for Lymington. ‘He seldom associated with any of the other boys or joined in their sports,’ recalled John Bishop. No doubt he was the boy left on his own in the playground, shunned by the others. ‘He was very timid,’ said William Lovett, who was at school with Lymington for about three years.3
Timid here might well mean shy. There was little chance of Lymington developing his confidence or social skills in these circumstances. Of the half-a-dozen or so witnesses who later gave testimony about Lymington’s school days, none said that they had been his friend. He had already become an outsider. Rejected by his school fellows, he sought other companionship. He ‘had a propensity to low company,’ remembered one former pupil. For instance, he ‘was in the habit of going to a low hovel to eat bacon and greens with a carrier of the name of Tom Boddy’. Off the school premises, perhaps Lymington found that he could relax and be himself, but he could not escape the censure of his fellow pupils. Did they follow him there one day, or did gossip about his meetings reach the school gates? Teasing him for meeting Boddy, the boys ‘used to laugh at him to shame his Lordship out of it’. Mixing with the local ‘low-life’ was out of the question for most aspiring young boys.4
Yet for all Lymington’s difficulties and peculiarities, none of his school fellows was prepared to declare that he exhibited the mind or behaviour of an ‘idiot’. An idiot was a person who had so little reason, and whose mind was so underdeveloped that no amount of schooling would make a difference to their understanding. As a doctor who later examined Lymington explained, ‘idiots cannot be acted upon by any impressions at all, still less is there the power of will, memory, and judgement’. Neither this doctor nor Lymington’s school fellows thought he fitted this category. As John Bishop declared, although he thought Lymington’s mind was ‘uncommonly weak’, he was ‘not an idiot for he kept himself out of the way of harm and acquired some little education’. ‘He was bordering upon idiotism,’ thought former pupil Mr Vernon, but his common sense and ability to learn (albeit limited) prevented his acquaintances from being absolutely certain about how to label him.5
Lymington was already proving himself an enigma. While he fell far behind his peers in most subjects, he was uncommonly able at arithmetic. Giles King Lyford, a Winchester surgeon who would count Jane Austen as one of his patients, was at Odiham School for two years with Lymington. He remembered Lymington ‘was considered to be a very good Arithmetician’. He ‘well recollects’ how Lymington ‘was held up as an example by the Writing and Cyphering Master to the rest of the boys on account of his Lordship’s quickness at figures’. Cyphering, or number work, was to prove a strength of Lymington’s for the rest of his life. Lyford said Lymington was ‘as sharp as any boy at a bargain, and could not be easily prevailed upon to part with his money’. Once his pocket money days were over, it was noted that he could spot errors on his estate accounts, complain about the high cost of a hotel bill as he settled it, and drive a hard bargain over the purchase of horses.6
His ability at figures could throw any attempt to prove him an idiot or insane off course. In July 1821, when Lymington (then Lord Portsmouth) was fifty-three years old, and facing a legal test of his sanity in the Chancery court, it was represented to the Lord Chancellor that he ‘could not add five figures, by five’. In a comical, yet humiliating repetition of his school days, Portsmouth ‘was obliged to go through’ his sums in front of the Chancellor. It turned out that Portsmouth ‘happened to be a better arithmetician than the Chancellor, for he did it very well, and I did it very ill’, admitted Lord Eldon. Indeed, one witness to the occasion claimed that Eldon slipped up, and made a mistake, which Portsmouth corrected. The Lord Chancellor suitably humbled, was left wondering what else was ‘not true’ about what he had been told concerning Portsmouth’s ‘state of mind’?7
With this kind of ability, surely Lymington could not be called a fool? Mental arithmetic was not his only skill. According to Richard Bishop, at school Lymington ‘learned to write, and made more proficiency in writing than in anything else’.8 As an adult, writing letters would enable Lymington to manage the estate he would eventually inherit from his father, and give him a form of self-expression in the personal correspondence he sent to other family members. Surviving letters written by him show a clear and steady hand, and consistent spelling.
More remarkable than his writing, however, was his memory. When Dr Lyford met Lymington twenty years after they had been at school together, he recognized him by his unusual-looking eye, but Lymington went one better, and remembered Lyford’s name. His good memory also meant that Lymington, then Lord Portsmouth, always asked after his acquaintances’ children by their names. To doctors specializing in madness, this was proof that Portsmouth was not an idiot. ‘Imbecility, idiotcy, has no memory,’ Dr Warburton declared. But ‘memory may consist with lunacy … a lunatic may recollect’. As astonishing as Portsmouth’s memory might be, what he remembered, and how he remembered, could still leave his mind open to question. Portsmouth had a memory for ‘trifles’ such as people’s names, but not for ‘great and considerable circumstances’. He had a ‘sort of instinctive memory,’ thought Reverend McCarthy, which absorbed information without processing it. As one lawyer put it, ‘His lordship remembered no material or worthy impressions, but those things only which good sound memories contrived to lose and throw out.’ In other words, he could not distinguish between types of knowledge, and had no judgement about what was important. A good memory was no proof of soundness of mind, even if it meant idiocy was unlikely.9
There was enough about Lymington in his school days to mean that former pupils were divided over whether this period revealed anything about the man he was to become. William Lovett, who became a barrister, perhaps came closest of all Lymington’s acquaintances to becoming a friend after they left school. Lovett and his father paid social visits to Hurstbourne Park, often met Lymington at county events, and ‘friendly recognitions took place between them and they sometimes walked about together’ when they met. For Lovett, there was nothing extraordinary about Lymington’s time at school. He ‘went thro’ the routine of education much in the same way as other boys’, he said. Similarly, although Lymington was ‘not considered a clever boy, but rather weak’, Lyford thought that at school Lymington ‘was as capable as any boy there, of conducting himself in the ordinary occurrences of life’. ‘I don’t remember that his Lordship was laughed at by the other boys,’ he claimed on another occasion.10
Could Lyford have been so detached and unaware of all the teasing and taunting that others described? Or did the legal and media attention on Portsmouth encourage those who knew him as Lymington to think differently about the boy they had known? Did they attach significance to events and habits that at the time were brushed aside? The later legal trials in which they acted as witnesses were opportunities for men like the Bishops to take the stage and show how they had taken a part in Portsmouth’s extraordinary life. Would a bit of exaggeration and embellishment be surprising in these circumstances? Whose account of Portsmouth’s school days was the closest to the truth?
By May 1782, Lymington and his brother Newton had both left Odiham School and were being privately tutored by a Reverend Dr Kyte at his home in Hammersmith. Lymington was fourteen, and Newton a month short of ten years old. Away from the school environment, we do not have the memories of other pupils to tell us about Lymington’s experiences. But there are the beautifully written letters from Newton to his parents.
The earliest surviving letter from Newton dates from June 1780, when he was at Odiham, and was formally addressed to his father, ‘Dear and Hond Sir’. All subsequent letters were sent to his ‘Dear Mama’. Each page had pencil lines to ensure that the carefully written script remained well presented, and it is clear that early letters from Newton were as much exercises in handwriting as means of communication. Given Newton’s eagerness to give his father and mother ‘satisfaction by the attention I have paid to the several Branches of my Learning since I last saw you’, it is possible that these letters from Odiham were checked over, or even dictated, by Reverend Webb.
By the time Newton and Lymington moved to Hammersmith, the content of his letters became less closely supervised, and glimpses of life in the Kyte household emerge. ‘Lymington and myself have both had little Coughs but we are very well now,’ reported Newton on 1 June 1782. A few weeks later, he thanked his mother for sending him some ‘very neat, and pretty’ waistcoats. Soon afterwards, a tailor came to measure Lymington and Newton for some clothes. An uncle and aunt (possibly William and Lavinia Fellowes, their mother’s brother and sister-in-law) visited them. There was a Mrs Kyte (Newton always concluded his letters by saying that ‘Dr and Mrs Kyte send compliments’), who had a baby girl in January 1785, and possibly other children with whom to play. According to Newton, both he and Lymington looked forward to their summer holidays at Hurstbourne, and wanted to know how their sisters did at home.11
Kyte clearly had a good reputation for he tutored the son of another aristocratic family, John Parker, who became 2nd Baron Boringdon and 1st earl of Morley, at the same time as Newton and Lymington. John Parker’s boyhood letters also survive, although unfortunately he does not mention Newton or Lymington in his correspondence. John told his Uncle Fritz, ‘I do like school very well.’ Kyte knew how to nurture his pupils’ imaginations and enthusiasm for learning. Each year he took his pupils to see the play from Terence or Plautus performed by boys from Westminster School. Newton and John Parker both eagerly anticipated the occasion. On 16 October 1784, Kyte allowed Newton to attend the balloon flight by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Sheldon from Chelsea’s military academy. ‘I am just returned from little Chelsea,’ wrote Newton to his mother, with breathless excitement, ‘where I saw Mr Blanchard and Mr Sheldon ascend into the air, with which I was very much pleased.’12
When Newton wrote this letter, Lymington was being tutored elsewhere. Newton wanted to know in December 1784 when his brother broke up for the holidays, and hoped his mother had heard news from him. As Newton reported that he was studying Virgil and that his class had ‘finished our Greek Part Book’ in March 1785, he expressed hope that ‘Lymington was very well when you heard from him last’. Lymington was now seventeen years old, and Newton twelve. Why Lymington had been moved from Dr Kyte, and where he was now living, we do not know. We can be sure from Newton’s letters that he was with Kyte at Hammersmith in July 1783, but his whereabouts by the autumn of the following year is a mystery.
We can be certain that he was not at Eton, the destination of both his younger brothers, Newton and Coulson. Eton was the finishing school for many aristocratic boys of this period, and the artist Richard Livesay was given the commission of a leaving picture for both boys. Livesay was living in neighbouring Windsor, and made a handsome living painting portraits of Etonians, some of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy. Livesay’s portraits of the young Newton and Coulson show them serenely confident of their attainment and wealth. Newton with his dark locks and Coulson with his fair hair look improbably tidy and well ordered for young men, yet ready to take on the world.
With no Eton we have no portrait of Lymington at this age. The unusual appearance of his eyes, which was already visible to his school fellows at Odiham, perhaps gave his parents a ready excuse not to have his portrait commissioned. But facial features could be disguised, and it is more likely that the real reason why no artist was asked to paint Lymington was because he gave his mother and father no cause to celebrate. He gave them nothing to boast about.
There are no surviving schoolboy letters written by Lymington either. This could, of course, be accidental. A fire tore through Hurstbourne Park on 1 January 1891, destroying many of the family’s papers, and it may be that Newton’s letters were a chance survival from a larger collection of letters home. We know that Lymington could write letters, and, when he went ahead of Newton to Dr Kyte’s in the autumn of 1781, he wrote at least one ‘short letter’ to his brother who was still at Odiham. We also have evidence that Lady Portsmouth wrote letters to Lymington when he was at Hammersmith. But in March 1782 he was willing to delegate the responsibility of a response to his brother, Newton. ‘Lymington desires his Duty and thanks for your letter,’ Newton wrote to their mother. There are no surviving letters from Lymington’s youngest brother, Coulson, either. Newton’s letters suggest that he became the spokesperson, and letter writer, for both brothers. ‘Lymington and Coulson are both well and join me in Duty to Papa,’ Newton wrote to his mother from Odiham in November 1780, for example. From a young age, Newton was assuming a special role in his family, and one that might usually be taken by the oldest son. Perhaps Lymington was thought too unreliable a witness and Coulson too young to report back to their parents. We do not know how far Newton was aware that his eldest brother was causing his parents to worry, but they were giving him a significant degree of responsibility as a result.
There is, of course, another explanation for the absence of letters from Lymington and his youngest brother; their mother destroyed them. Letters from Newton were treasured and kept safely. They had an emotional value for Lady Portsmouth because he became her favourite son. Not that Lady Portsmouth let her high standards slip because of her attachment to Newton: she had clearly scolded him in 1782, when aged nine Newton had displeased her with one of his letters home. ‘I hope you will approve of this Letter,’ he wrote plaintively. ‘I will take care for the future to conclude my Letters as you would wish,’ he promised.
Newton grew into a man who earned his mother’s approval. She was so proud of his good looks that she had another portrait commissioned of him, this time by George Romney, another well-known painter of Etonians.13 Her other boys, Lymington and Coulson, caused her much disappointment. As a schoolboy, Coulson, named after Lady Portsmouth’s father, still had a bright future ahead of him. As he left Eton, his portrait revealed nothing of the trouble he would later cause. Lymington, on the other hand, was already having a different upbringing from his brothers, and not because he was the oldest son and heir. Lord and Lady Portsmouth were forced to prolong Lymington’s education because he did not seem to be developing as he should. He spent more years at his first school and with tutors than was usual, and never progressed to a public school such as Eton. Urania, countess of Portsmouth, wanted no memory, written or pictorial of her oldest child from these years. But she knew that Lymington could not continue indefinitely to be instructed by others. As he entered his late teenage years, and approached his legal majority of twenty-one, Lady Portsmouth knew she had to take a more active role in preparing Lymington for his future.