SOMETIME ON THE evening of 13 November 1813, Portsmouth entered his wife’s bedroom in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to go to bed. Grace was kneeling by the bed, as if in prayer. But as he approached her and saw her face he realized that she was dead. She was sixty-one years old, and her death was attributed to an apoplectic fit, or what we might today call a stroke. She died alone.
Grace had been complaining for some time of ‘a giddiness in the head’. Portsmouth said that he had advised her to see Dr Matthew Baillie, one of the leading physicians of the day. But in 1813 Baillie was occupied with his most famous patient, George III, as he suffered from another of his episodes of insanity. Over the course of the regency, which had begun two years earlier, Baillie visited the King at Windsor several hundred times. Never able to resist the opportunity to take on a new fee-paying patient (it was said Baillie was so much in demand that he regularly worked sixteen-hour days), Baillie sent a note to Portsmouth appointing a time when he would see Grace. Grace resigned to wait and ‘see whether she in a few days might not get better’.
In the end, the doctor never arrived because Grace died before her appointment. Portsmouth had demonstrated his concern for his wife’s health; Baillie did not come cheap. The irony that Portsmouth had recommended Baillie to examine his wife’s head could not have been lost to the Commission of Lunacy years later. At the Commission, Baillie was one of a number of physicians to declare Portsmouth insane. But when his wife had been sick, who better than a man with head problems of his own to know that Baillie was the doctor his wife should see?
In the days immediately following his wife’s death, Portsmouth withdrew from society, and returned to Hurstbourne. Edward Phillips, an Andover physician who had become friendly with Portsmouth while playing cards with him, came to give his condolences. Initially, Phillips was told that Portsmouth was not seeing anyone, but, after Phillips presented his card, Portsmouth warmly invited him in.
Portsmouth was eager to talk to Phillips and to get his medical opinion about his wife’s death. He told Phillips how Grace had died, and that he had tried to get Baillie to see her. As he spoke, Phillips considered that Portsmouth’s ‘manner was collected’. Like any person who had lost someone who was close to them, Portsmouth wanted to know if he could have done anything to prevent his wife’s death. In particular, Portsmouth asked if that cure for all ills, and his own peculiar obsession, bleeding, would have made any difference, and prevented the fit. Phillips answered all his friend’s questions, and then ‘endeavoured to divert his Lordship’s mind, as he seemed much affected’. Phillips was confident from his experience treating patients with disordered minds that Portsmouth had a weak but sound mind, and this conversation confirmed his opinion that Portsmouth was not insane. He spoke ‘with a tenderness and intelligence equal to a person of the strongest mind’, and his conduct was ‘uniformly correct and proper’.1
Death had taken away the three people who had the closest interest in Portsmouth’s welfare in less than two years. On 29 January 1812, Portsmouth’s mother, Urania, had died at her home in Harley Street, aged sixty-nine. Buried in the family vault of the church within the lands belonging to Farleigh House, she was laid beside her husband, and three of their children who had died before her. Fourteen months later, in March 1813, Reverend Garnett, close family friend and one of Portsmouth’s trustees, also died. Portsmouth attended his funeral, and oversaw the erection of a memorial in the Farleigh Wallop church.
Now Grace was also dead, and for the first time in his life, aged forty-six, Portsmouth was without anyone to tell him what to do or how to act. While Dr Phillips was impressed by Portsmouth’s conduct, there were others who were appalled by his response to his wife’s death. Once again, it was the servants who saw his other side.
To date, Portsmouth’s interest in funerals had been confined to those of working people who were unrelated to him. But Grace’s death gave him a chance to organize and participate in a funeral of an altogether different kind. By now an expert on undertakers and hearse drivers, a day or two after Grace’s death, Portsmouth visited Webb in the stables. It had been decided that Grace’s body should be returned to her family home at Wonersh, to be interned in the church where she had got married. ‘His mind was full of it,’ remembered Webb. He came ‘in great glee’, ‘joking and laughing and enjoying it very much’. Daily visits to the stables followed, as Portsmouth tried to guess which ‘black-job coachmen’ would drive the hearse. He was sure ‘old Joe’ would be one of them. Portsmouth told Webb that if he was right, then Webb was to give the drivers ‘a flogging all round; and when they got to Lord Grantley’s to give them a ducking in the horse pond’. Discovering that Webb had never driven a coach in a funeral before, Portsmouth said Webb should pay him five shillings.
As the day of the funeral dawned, Webb and the other coachmen who knew Portsmouth wondered just what would happen. If they were expecting a funeral with a difference, they were not disappointed. Mr Page, a London undertaker, had been instructed to take charge of the funeral. He already knew Portsmouth, as he had been employed by him to bury ‘a poor woman’ who had died in St Martin’s workhouse. On this earlier occasion, he did not think Portsmouth’s interest peculiar, as he believed that the woman had some connection with a servant in the Portsmouth household. This was ‘not foolishness but an act of charity’, he later declared.
The funeral for Grace was one fit for a countess. Her coffin was laid in a funeral carriage, with her coronet on a cushion before her. The cortège consisted of a large number of coaches that made its slow procession to Wonersh. This was intended to be a solemn and dignified occasion, reflecting the high social position of the deceased, her husband, and their family. But when Portsmouth first saw the hearse, he immediately asked Page, ‘How much will that come to Sammy?’ and also enquired about the cost of his wife’s coffin. Such matters, especially to a wealthy man like Portsmouth, should have been far from his mind. The funeral was in November, but the following May Portsmouth was still disputing its cost with Page, and saying that he had been overcharged.
On the day of her funeral, Portsmouth was delighted to find that two of the coachmen he had predicted would drive the hearse were present. One was ‘old Joe’. As they went along the road, Portsmouth looked out of his coach window several times at Webb, and ‘laughed, pointing with his fingers towards old Joe’. About twenty miles into their slow journey, Webb, driving another coach, ‘accidently came close to the mourning coach’ in which Portsmouth was sat. Portsmouth ‘made signs’ to Webb to ‘flog the coachman’ who was driving Grace’s carriage. When the procession stopped at Guildford, a short distance from Wonersh, Portsmouth came up to Webb, ‘knocked him on the elbow’, and said, ‘Charles, go and … give a good one’, meaning that Webb should now carry out the flogging.
Of course, Webb did no such thing, but Portsmouth was persistent. The day after the funeral, Portsmouth visited Webb in the stables and asked him if he had flogged the coachmen. He demanded the five-shilling fine from Webb, and would not give up on it. Webb eventually paid Portsmouth half a crown three weeks later.
Summarizing his account of Grace’s funeral, Webb said, ‘his Lordship did not appear … to grieve at all after his Ladyship, or show any reasonable or proper feeling on the occasion of her death’. Gatekeeper William London agreed. As he sat by his fire in the Lodge at Hurstbourne a few days later, Portsmouth chatted to London about who had driven the hearse, and complained that he could not get Webb to pay the five shillings. ‘Who do you think carried her?’ Portsmouth asked London, commenting, ‘She was damned heavy.’ ‘His Lordship could not have showed less sorrow than he did on that occasion’, remembered London, than ‘if he had been talking of any poor person in Hurstbourne parish of whom he had known nothing.’
Portsmouth’s words and behaviour were so shocking that those who heard or witnessed them struggled for explanations. Why would a man who had been so well treated by his wife be so apparently lacking in sorrow at her death? ‘The late Lady Portsmouth expressed the utmost tenderness for his Lordship,’ said Webb, ‘notwithstanding which, he mentioned her death with great glee.’
Those who had observed Portsmouth with his wife pointed to his inconsistency of affection when she was alive. ‘At times Lord Portsmouth appeared to be very fond of her Ladyship,’ a bailiff remembered. ‘He would hang over her and kiss her and call her his dear and his love’, but after a few minutes ‘he would be altogether as cross with her’. ‘He would change like the wind’, and he showed no more certainty of affection than a ‘baby in arms’. So it followed that, after his wife’s death, Portsmouth could not maintain any display of grief. He told a butler that ‘he had lost his best friend when he lost his late wife’, and his bailiff ‘that he had lost his poor wife’. ‘He whimpered a little’, recalled the bailiff, ‘making a sort of mock cry for a few moments’, but he then took the man’s ear and pinched it, ‘in his usual way, laughing all the while just as he had used to do’. Grace’s death appeared to have so little affected Portsmouth that he behaved just as normal. Most witnesses agreed that Portsmouth was fond of Grace, and that he had ‘some sort of regard for her’. But there was such shallowness to that regard that it evaporated as soon as Grace was dead and buried. As park keeper Godden put it, ‘he is convinced that his Lordship would have lost all feeling for her in the pleasure of tolling the bell for her and attending her funeral if she had died at any time’.
Many people had been astonished at Portsmouth’s lack of sensitivity towards the feelings of others, especially when he had disrupted the funerals of people he did not know. But after Grace’s death it was Portsmouth’s own emotions that came under scrutiny. His response to the death of other family members had been a foretaste of what might happen. After the death of his father he had a ‘serious conversation’ with a clergyman in which ‘he expressed deep regret at his father’s decease’, but also sought advice about how he should live his life now that he had inherited a ‘great estate and fortune’. While he maintained a level of formal composure on this occasion, some twelve years later, when he joined in some manual work drawing gravel on his estate and suddenly started crying, he surprised his co-worker by saying that he was thinking about his father. Another time, Portsmouth was seen crying when he heard that his brother Coulson had died abroad. But William London said that ‘the next minute it was all over and he was in good spirits again’. As a result, London did not believe Portsmouth ‘felt anything at losing his brother’.
No love was lost between Portsmouth and his mother, so perhaps it was not surprising that nothing was recorded of his reaction when Urania died. But Grace’s death should have mattered to him. If this man did not show emotion about the death of a woman who had been his wife for fourteen years, then could he ever develop an emotional attachment? Did he lack the emotional maturity for an adult relationship? Some were ruthless in their assessment. Godden did not believe that Portsmouth was ‘capable of any proper feeling of affection’, for example. To local doctor Daniel Ludlow, Portsmouth ‘was attached’ to Grace ‘much in the way that an animal is attached to one who is kind to it, no exercise of reason being necessary to the existence of such attachment’. Portsmouth’s regard for Grace was mindless in Ludlow’s opinion. It was an instinctive response to her kindness, but there was nothing more. There was an expectation that at this level of society, where arranged marriages were common, relationships between husbands and wives would be forged and developed after the knot had been tied. But with Portsmouth’s limitations this was impossible. He had no love to give.
This trial of a man’s mind was becoming a test of his feelings. But what was the relationship between the head and the heart? Was it fair or ‘proper’ that Portsmouth’s mind was being judged by his emotional reactions, or lack of them? People responded to death, for example, in infinitely varied, and often surprising and unpredictable, ways. Feelings, especially if they were deeply held, could make anybody act in an irrational way. Truthful, honest feelings were tricky to measure. Outward behaviour, especially when it came to a complex emotion like grief, might not be an indicator of inner feelings. Just as Dr Phillips was impressed by the measure of control that Portsmouth demonstrated when talking about the death of his wife, so also Dr Ainslie, who knew Portsmouth socially as well as a patient, was ready to defend Portsmouth’s reluctance to talk about his grief in an emotional way. When Ainslie saw Portsmouth a few weeks after Grace’s death, ‘after the usual exchange of civilities, the Earl shaking his head’ said to him, ‘in a serious manner’, ‘You know I have lost Gracey?’ Portsmouth ‘conducted himself in a perfectly rational and sensible manner,’ Ainslie argued. Indeed, in a period when some people were condemned for indulging in grief, and grieving to such excess that they lost their reason (this was listed as a frequent ‘cause’ of insanity for those admitted to public asylums), Portsmouth could be praised for his measured response to his wife’s death. If he was not overly emotional about his wife during her lifetime, it would be hypocritical of him now to display feelings for her. Ainslie thought Portsmouth was a classic case of a man who found it difficult to show his feelings. He believed Portsmouth:
felt much more than he outwardly appeared to do: the Earl was not a polished man, but he showed as much feeling on that occasion as his general habits permitted him to do: it was evident that he regretted the loss of his … Wife, and that he was aware of the loss he suffered by her death.
There was nothing sophisticated about how Portsmouth expressed himself, but his name for his wife, ‘Gracey’, was evidence of his affection for her. He did feel love, even if he struggled to show it. ‘He certainly was as fond of her as he could be of anyone,’ concluded gatekeeper London.2
Even if Portsmouth’s behaviour following his wife’s death could be explained, or excused, as being exhibited during special circumstances when any man would be put under strain, it alerted the Commission jury to his emotional difficulties. This was a man whose slow mental development seemed to have affected his ability to feel and demonstrate affection. Although they never complained, the experience for both his mother and Grace of caring for someone who could give so little in return must have been devastating. For Portsmouth himself, his apparent inability to feel, and the death of both his real mother and his substitute one, left him in the future vulnerable and exposed to the abuse of others.
We do not know who was present from Portsmouth’s side of the family at Grace’s funeral in November 1813, but we can be sure that word quickly travelled about his alarming behaviour. Grace’s brother, Lord Grantley, was one of Portsmouth’s trustees, and he, along with the three others, Newton Fellowes, Justice Best (who had taken over from Reverend Garnett after his death), and John Hanson, met in London at the end of the month. They had seen just how badly things could go wrong if Portsmouth was left unsupervised. It was decided that Portsmouth should stay at Hurstbourne, and that Coombe would be invited back to take care of him. Coombe was installed by the end of December, and Henrietta Dorothea, Portsmouth’s sister, who was still unmarried at this stage, took position as a useful female presence with responsibility for domestic concerns.3 Portsmouth’s first taste of freedom was curtailed, or so his trustees thought.