ON TUESDAY, 19 November 1799, John Charles, 3rd earl of Portsmouth, was married to Grace Norton in the parish church of St John the Baptist, Wonersh, Surrey. Portsmouth was one month short of being thirty-two years old; his bride was forty-seven.
The woman who had married the 3rd earl of Portsmouth, and so became the new Lady Portsmouth, came from a respected and wealthy family in neighbouring Surrey, the Grantleys. Grace’s father, Fletcher Norton, had been Attorney General for two years from 1763, and had served as Speaker of the House of Commons for a decade from 1770. ‘Remarkable alike for the clearness of his arguments and the inaccuracy of his statements’, he was a man with a tempestuous disposition, and an attraction to controversy. Awarded the title first Baron Grantley, he also earned the nickname Sir Bull-Face Double Fee.
The 1st Lord Grantley set about making improvements to his wife’s family home in the small village of Wonersh, just a few miles south of Guildford, where he had been an MP. Wonersh Park was a large red-brick mansion, set in wooded grounds and a ‘tastefully arranged’ pleasure garden. It was where Grace and her four brothers who survived infancy grew up. Their father increased the Wonersh estate by buying more land in and around Guildford, and made Surrey his family home rather than Grantley, near Ripon, Yorkshire, where he had been born. Proud of the family’s new aristocratic title, the Grantleys put their stamp on the place that they had made their home. When the parish church, which could be reached through a gate in the wall that surrounded the Park, was rebuilt, Grace’s eldest brother, William, constructed a family mausoleum in the south chapel. By the time Grace married, her father had been dead for ten years, and William was the 2nd Baron Grantley, but her mother was still alive. With Reverend Garnett officiating, the couple exchanged their marriage vows within sight of the mausoleum, and then led the wedding party through to the bride’s family home.1
Grace had become a Countess, but before her marriage we know very little of her life. Like her new husband, there was no portrait of her, or at least no surviving one. Nobody remarked on her looks, so perhaps they were unexceptional. At forty-seven years old she had probably given up all hope of marriage. Yet she did not have to take whoever made an offer. There was strong disapproval of forced marriages, and she held the power of veto. As a family friend described the marriage, Grace was ‘at the time of life which made her able to judge for herself’.2
What Grace was thinking as she was led down the aisle, we will never know. If she had been worried about rumours that had begun to circulate about him, then it is possible that the earl’s good manners and polite behaviour allayed her fears. Portsmouth’s mother had certainly prepared him for such meetings, and, if Grace was reassured by his conduct, she would not be the first or last person to be taken in by his civility.
Even if Grace had no illusions about her husband’s mental abilities, she cannot have thought him mad. The church, which governed the law on marriage, deemed that no person who was insane could enter a contract of marriage. For a marriage to be valid, each person had to be able to give their consent, and without understanding this was impossible. At least at the point when they exchanged their vows on 19 November 1799, Grace thought that Lord Portsmouth was sane. But perhaps that showed how little she knew him.
Grace’s oldest brother, William, 2nd Lord Grantley, was pleased with the marriage. It took his unmarried sister off his hands, and her title increased the family’s prestige. But one of her brothers (either Fletcher or Chapple Norton – reports differed) disapproved. Their friend, Justice Best, who also expressed his ‘disapprobation’ at the match, remembered that the family had heard Lord Portsmouth was ‘a person of very weak intellect’.3 Rather than acting as a boost to the family’s honour, this brother thought that Grace’s marriage to such a man would reflect badly on their family, and would perhaps encourage people to think that their father’s money-grabbing tendencies had not died with him. Following this line of thinking, their sister’s personal happiness was being sacrificed for family fortune and title.
This was a marriage of convenience for both sides. Once it had been decided in 1790 that after Portsmouth the next heir should be his younger brother, Newton, a young wife was deemed unsuitable for Portsmouth. If there was any concept that Portsmouth’s condition could be inherited, then there was another reason why an older wife would be sought. Nobody wanted to risk another baby being born like John Charles. An older woman would not have any expectation of becoming a mother, and would perhaps make a less demanding partner in the marital bed. Grace’s maturity, in understanding, patience, and ability to manage a difficult husband, would be her asset. Being ‘a pleasant and agreeable lady, but of an age which did not promise prolific consequences’ was Grace’s key attraction.4 Whether Portsmouth saw his bride, as she approached the altar on 19 November 1799, in anything like these terms was not recorded. Aside from exchanging their vows, both groom and bride were resolutely silent about the occasion.
The legal settlement that was agreed the day before the wedding was a sign that this was going to be no ordinary marriage. Lawyers always got to work before marriages at this level of society because they involved the transfer and protection of so much property. But the document signed on 18 November 1799 was an exceptional one, which would have repercussions for Portsmouth long into the future.
By this deed, Lord Portsmouth handed over all his estate to four trustees: Grace’s brother, Lord Grantley; Portsmouth’s brother, Newton Fellowes; Reverend Garnett; and John Hanson, the solicitor who had drawn up the settlement. By the terms of the settlement, Portsmouth could not enter into a lease or any other legal arrangement concerning his property without the signature of all four trustees. He could not draw a draft without it being countersigned by his wife. In exchange for a promised marriage portion of twelve thousand pounds from Grace, the trustees were empowered to raise a jointure of one thousand pounds a year for her should she be left a widow. Grace was also promised three hundred pounds per year as ‘pin money’, to spend as she wished. Several valuable household items, including Isaac Newton’s manuscripts, were given to the trustees for their safe-keeping. As Dr Garnett and Mr Hanson were expected to do most of the work as trustees, and they were not family members, it was agreed that they should each be paid £150 per year out of Portsmouth’s estates.
Why would Portsmouth have agreed to the terms of this settlement? As Best said, ‘No one in his senses would have signed it.’5 He was ‘dispossessed of all control over his real and personal property’, and was proof of his insanity, argued lawyers in the 1823 Commission of Lunacy, ‘because he placed himself in such a situation that he could not possess himself of a £20 note’.6 To draw up such a deed was evidence, thought the Chancellor in 1821, that the trustees saw Portsmouth as a man unable to act ‘in respect to almost any transactions of human life, as far as related to his estate and property’. Incredibly, Portsmouth had chosen ‘to put himself under fetters very similar to those which belong to a Commission of Lunacy’.7 He was left with his hands tied; a man born into enormous wealth, but now without the power to spend it. He was beholden to his four trustees and on a day-to-day basis to his wife. Like a child, he was left financially dependent. ‘Is it possible then to believe that a man of competent understanding … could induce himself to give up his property in such a way as to be left with only that sort of pocket money which would be given to a school boy?’ argued another lawyer.8
The marriage settlement brought rock-solid guarantees for the families of both Grace and Portsmouth. It gave Grace financial security for the rest of her life. At her age, there was no risk of Grace bearing a child who as Portsmouth’s heir would deprive Newton of inheriting the estates that had been set apart as his by the earlier 1790 deed. But only the 1799 deed would ensure that during his lifetime Portsmouth could not sign away the family’s fortune at a whim. In November, the painful memories of the summer when Seilaz had attempted to defraud the entire family were still fresh. Newton’s lawyers later argued that the 1799 settlement was intended to protect the Portsmouth estate ‘from imposition’. The family recognized that Portsmouth was ‘a person of a weak and imperfect mind and of an extremely rash and irritable temper’, and had a ‘disposition liable to be imposed upon’, and so was ‘unfit’ to be left ‘in the uncontrolled management’ of his estate.9
However, in time, the 1799 settlement, and the marriage the following day, became a thorn in Newton’s side. To argue that in 1799 he and Grace’s family thought Portsmouth was simply incapable rather than insane was extremely tricky when the deed meant such a wholesale transfer of power over property. Furthermore, Newton’s lawyers became embroiled in complex legal manoeuvres as they attempted to prove that, while his older brother was ‘weak-minded’ in 1799, he had become insane by 1815. It was only by this later date, it was argued, that Portsmouth required a Commission of Lunacy.
Newton’s self-interest in the 1799 deed was evident to everyone. Was it Portsmouth’s state of mind that had changed or, given that by 1815 Portsmouth was married for a second time, his personal circumstances? Newton was left being asked by his solicitor to find evidence that would show that the marriage to Grace ‘was a match of convenience’ because this first marriage was ‘the principal stumbling block’ to proving that his second marriage was invalid.
Perhaps Portsmouth had always been insane, and in 1815 Newton just had to find new ways of protecting his inheritance. But if Portsmouth was insane in 1799, then ‘it is the most scandalous deed that was ever executed’, declared the Chancellor in 1815.10 An insane man was not capable of signing such a deed, or entering into a marriage. The document would then become evidence that Newton had deliberately deprived his brother of his legal rights, and that Portsmouth’s marriage to Grace was invalid from the outset.
To try to show that Portsmouth knew what he was doing when he signed the 1799 deed, and therefore was not insane, lawyers pointed to the fact that he made a number of changes to the document. He amended the papers by hand, and his changes were incorporated in the final document. Portsmouth increased Grace’s pin money from two to three hundred pounds per year. Then in careful hand he wrote that ‘Hurstbourne Park, House and Premises to remain for my occupation’.11 The man who was to pass everything to four trustees on the eve of his wedding wanted the reassurance that his home, and the three hundred acres of land that immediately surrounded it, were to stay his own. This was his.
The marriage between Portsmouth and Grace was an arranged one, between two individuals who barely knew each other. It was a match based on comparable wealth and collective benefit, not personal compatibility. But once the legal documents had been signed, and the formalities of the wedding service were over, there was a limit to how far their families could intervene. Grace had been chosen for Portsmouth because it was thought she could take on a very particular (and, many would argue, peculiar) role as his wife. Now she had to perform.
And perform she did, with some aplomb. In public, the new couple led a busy life full of society engagements. Spending the winter months at her father’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the summer at Hurstbourne, Grace and Portsmouth mixed with fellow aristocrats in town and country. There were balls and parties aplenty, and many social functions that provided the excuse for Grace to go shopping for a new gown. These were the pleasures of marriage to a peer, and the grand occasions that remained long in her family’s memory. When Grace’s mother died at Wonersh in 1803, at the advanced old age of ninety-five, she left her ‘dear Daughter Grace now Countess of Portsmouth’, the ‘silver and gold gown and coat’ that she wore at a ball held at Hurstbourne. With an endearing, yet poignant optimism, she also left her only daughter her ‘childbed linen’ and baby clothes, for her to use ‘if she has one’.12
On a day-to-day basis, Grace assumed many of the responsibilities usually left to a husband in marriage. She managed all the household expenses, and tradesmen, estate workers, and servants knew that she was the one who would settle their bills. Servants were instructed to receive their orders from her, not Portsmouth. Grace ‘always appeared to be on the watch lest his Lordship should commit some error of judgement’, commented one of Portsmouth’s former school fellows. She told servants and estate labourers to take care of her husband, to prevent him from coming to harm. A Hurstbourne gatekeeper was instructed by Grace to ‘humour’ Portsmouth ‘in everything as far as he could’.13
Keeping Portsmouth in good humour was the principle that governed Grace’s relationship with her husband. His bad and frequently changing moods were notorious, but being the daughter of ‘Sir Bullface’ had taught Grace a thing or two about how to live with irascible men. She could be visibly affected by her husband’s anger. On one occasion, convinced that some poachers caught on his land should have been sentenced to transportation rather than imprisonment, Portsmouth became ‘quite raving’ with fury, and Grace was seen shaking with fear.14 But most of the time Grace was able to control her emotions and focus on improving her husband’s. Reverend McCarthy, who frequently visited the couple when they were at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was full of praise for how Grace managed her husband. She was ‘eminently careful of him. She took care to have him soothed,’ he remarked. If Portsmouth ‘evinced a strong inclination to break out’, she would pacify him, and encourage him ‘to go to bed’.15 Another trick was to try distraction. The wife of a Hurstbourne labourer recalled hearing Grace responding to Portsmouth’s ill humour by cheerfully announcing, ‘do now Lord Portsmouth come and look at this pretty baby’. Her best efforts were met on this occasion with Portsmouth deliberately turning his head away.16
Described after her death as a ‘very pious’ lady, Grace was the epitome of a virtuous wife.17 At a time when moralists were busy constructing new ideals of femininity and domesticity, Grace embodied the qualities that would eventually be described in Coventry Patmore’s Angel in The House (1854). This upper-class woman was a model of angelic patience, self-sacrifice, duty, and devotion to her husband. What she thought of her life as a married woman remains a mystery. Virtually nothing remains that was personal to Grace. Just two brief letters, one barely more than a rushed undated note to Newton Fellowes, enquiring whether he and his family will be joining her at Hurstbourne, survive in her hand.18 Nearly everything we know about Grace comes from the reports and memories of others, and these were recorded after her death. In her lifetime, she was the invisible woman, subsumed by her husband’s needs.
Grace seems too good to be true, but for some of those who knew her, it was her kindness to Portsmouth that was her main fault. She was just too kind. Her efforts to please her husband, to keep him in a good mood and make him happy made them both behave in ways that were inappropriate. Grace indulged her husband and allowed him to pursue some of his eccentric habits. The second surviving letter written by Grace was sent in August 1813 to Charlotte Maria, 8th countess of Banbury, and is friendlier and less functional in tone than the note to her brother-in-law. Grace began by describing attending a confirmation celebration for the daughter of a local family in Whitchurch, and the visit of her brother, Lord Grantley. But, since ‘the weather has been very fine for the Harvest’, Grace’s main activity had been ‘Dining out of Doors’ with her husband. She breezily writes of sitting in the hay fields in ‘some very pritty situations’ as if that was an entirely normal thing for an aristocratic couple to do.19
But of course it wasn’t, and nor was this couple’s conduct when they dined indoors. Husbands and wives at this level of society usually sat at either end of the table, or opposite each other when they entertained. Grace, however, sat next to her husband. Several witnesses remarked on this as a ‘peculiarity’.20 It allowed Grace to control how much wine Portsmouth could drink, and perhaps ensure that conversation ran smoothly. But it also led to exchanges between the couple that fellow diners found astonishing. David Williams was a surgeon in Hurstbourne Priors who frequently dined with the Portsmouths when he visited London. ‘A great many times’, Williams witnessed Portsmouth stop eating, turn to his wife sitting next to him, ‘and lay his head on her neck and fondle her and cry and make a great piece of work in a very ridiculous manner: she coaxed him as if she were humouring a fractious and spoilt child; and in a few minutes he began eating again very heartily.’21
The discomfort that Williams felt as he described this scene is palpable. There was a familiarity and display of dependence in this relationship that was altogether unnatural. Even if Grace knew what was required of her as a wife, Portsmouth appeared entirely ignorant of his role as a husband. He should have been at the head of the table, performing the ‘honours of the table’ to his guests, not fawning over his wife. He was her master, she his subordinate. But in this marriage, the roles had been reversed. As another frequent visitor remarked of the couple, ‘her whole treatment of him was quite unlike the behaviour of a Wife to a Husband who was of sound Mind’.22
It was Grace’s goodness that prevented her from taking advantage of her husband’s dependence upon her. Many people who saw Grace together with Portsmouth would have agreed with his former school fellow’s observation, that ‘she was more like a Mother to him than a Wife’.23 A bailiff at Hurstbourne believed that Portsmouth ‘looked up to’ Grace, ‘somewhat as a little child does to a Mother or a Nurse’, while a former servant said that ‘his Lordship used to complain to her Ladyship as a Child would to its Mother’.24 Being a mother figure meant Grace could exercise some kind of discipline over her husband. A footman observed that Portsmouth ‘was plainly under some restraint in her presence but she was kind to him’. Grace ‘spoke with authority to his Lordship, but mildly: she seemed to have the sort of command and direction of him that a mother has of a child’.25
But of course Portsmouth already had a mother. The fact that Urania pursued a very different kind of mother role from the one assumed by Grace inevitably brought the two women into conflict. The contrast between their different ways of managing Portsmouth could not be greater. Urania was the strict disciplinarian; Grace the indulgent carer. Urania knew her son needed a wife, but that did not mean that she had to like her daughter-in-law. She saw Grace as a figure with a function to fulfil, not a person whom she needed to get to know. This wasn’t so much a case of rivals for affection (Urania may have been content to let Grace monopolize any feelings Portsmouth may have had), but a battle of wills over who had the greatest power over Portsmouth.
As early as the spring following her son’s marriage, Urania was expressing her disapproval of Grace in her letters to her favourite son, Newton. ‘I believe the Grandees of H.P. go on but strangely!’ Urania wrote from London in April 1800. ‘She holds a very Lofty Head, and this is the first time she has been here, and I paid my first visit Saturday.’ Grace and Portsmouth’s visit had to be postponed after Urania received a note from Grace to say, ‘my P. was rather Fatigued’, and so could not come. Married he might have been, but Portsmouth was still Urania’s: he was ‘my P’.26
Resentful that her daughter-in-law now determined when she could see her son, Urania was also critical of how Grace ran her household. Hurstbourne had become ‘such a Pickle’, Urania complained in January 1802. It was in disorder that was ‘worse than a Stable. Nay many stables are in a more fit state for Human creatures to reside in!’ Grace and Portsmouth were also neglecting the wellbeing of their servants, Urania believed. Newton, far away in Eggesford, Devon, was praised by his mother for sending relief to one sick Hurstbourne servant and his wife. In turn, Urania told Newton how she had intervened to organize medical assistance for a Hurstbourne coachman when he had caught a cold on a journey from London. ‘The Want of Christian Feeling, to the Menial Servant who is known to have no resource, and should look up to, and be Protected by Master and Mistress’ was shocking to Urania and a ‘Disgrace’ to Lord and Lady Portsmouth.27 Although they had ample opportunity in the later legal trials that examined Portsmouth’s life, not a single servant or other witness made the same critical comments about Hurstbourne under Grace and Portsmouth’s management. This was Urania’s particular bugbear.
Having controlled every detail of her son’s life, Urania disliked being kept at arm’s length when he married. Writing to Newton from London in August 1810 she said she did not ‘know anything what is doing at H. Park. I had last week, a chip-in-porridge letter from her Ladyship: that told nothing on the subject!’28 ‘Chip-in-porridge’ was a nineteenth-century phrase, meaning insubstantial. Such a lack of news was immensely frustrating. Urania had been a dowager countess since her husband died in May 1797, but it was only since Grace had become her son’s wife in November 1799 that she had been made to feel like one.
Usurped she may have been, but Urania was ready to step in if the occasion arose. In January 1811, Urania wrote to Newton saying that ‘owing to its being Wedn your Bro Breakfasted here’: mother and son had got into some kind of London routine in which Portsmouth visited Urania once a week at her house in Harley Street. There he asked his mother to attend a social function with him, as Grace lay sick at their house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and could not go. Initially, Urania seemed reluctant, saying that she might not recognize the company and that she disliked going out in the cold weather. But then, she explained to Newton, she realized that ‘a Time might come, when a more serious want of a Deputy to Gracy might happen,’ and ‘if I now complyed, I might then be resorted too in such a Need’. ‘In such a future Case, I should rejoice in being applyed too for assistance’: so she agreed to go.29
Imagining a time when Urania might be able to resume her position of control over her son was not so difficult when we realize that Grace was a few months older than Portsmouth’s mother. Grace was forty-seven when she married Portsmouth in November 1799; the age that Urania reached in January 1800. Comparisons between women of such similar ages were inevitable. John Godden, whose employment as a park keeper at Hurstbourne began during the lifetime of the 2nd earl, thought that, after the 3rd earl’s marriage to Grace, Portsmouth ‘had more liberty then than he had been allowed before’. Richard Poore, a wheelwright and carpenter at Hurstbourne, agreed, as he saw more of Portsmouth after his marriage than when his mother was in charge.30
But how wise was it for Grace to allow Portsmouth this greater freedom? Godden believed that Portsmouth, unaccustomed to living without the restraint imposed by his mother, grasped the opportunity that Grace offered him, and ‘indulged in extravagancies of conduct, and showed more violence of temper’. Grace was always kind to Portsmouth, ‘too much by half at times’, thought Godden. Another employee, John Baverstock, believed that Grace’s approach meant that ‘his Lordship showed what he was after his marriage more than he did before, more publicly too’.31 Grace’s treatment of Portsmouth exposed his condition to a greater number of people. It made him vulnerable, and stored up trouble for the future. The insinuation was that Grace was just too kind for Portsmouth’s good.
Being Grace, the wife of the earl of Portsmouth, cannot have been easy. Her husband’s hands were tied by the terms of their marriage settlement, and her control over the Portsmouth’s estates was limited. There was a suggestion in later years that the 1799 deed was in part drawn up to satisfy Urania, who was anxious to preserve the house and grounds that she had planned and completed, and who wanted to prevent Grace introducing any major changes.32 Marriage to a man whose behaviour was unpredictable, interests and conversation limited, and needs for attention many, was demanding and exhausting, even at the best of times. All that patient endurance was bad enough without having to tolerate an overly critical mother-in-law. Perhaps it is not surprising that Grace ended up mothering Portsmouth. It was her way of coping with a difficult husband, and for Portsmouth it was the type of relationship that he was used to having with a woman of her age. For if Grace was Portsmouth’s new, and possibly favoured, mother then that meant that her husband, who was in his thirties, continued to be treated as a child. Portsmouth was the child whom Grace would never have. The marriage between Grace and Portsmouth had been arranged, but their relationship was something that could not be managed. What nobody counted on was feelings. How Grace felt about her husband she never recorded. Portsmouth’s feelings towards Grace were only examined when tragedy struck. Perhaps Grace found it impossible to set down her mixed emotions in words. But while she found a way of living with her husband that to the closest observer sometimes caused attention, the public image that Grace presented of the marriage of Lady and Lord Portsmouth was entirely without fault.