NEWTON FELLOWES KNEW nothing about his brother’s marriage to Mary Ann Hanson until it was too late. When he heard the news, he was staying with his wife and three children at Hurstbourne. They often stopped at the family seat on route to Eggesford. ‘He and all his family were going to quit Hurstbourne Park pack and package,’ he said to a neighbour, for he had heard that Portsmouth and his new wife were ‘coming down and should want the house’.
Newton had become ‘heir apparent’ to the Portsmouth title and fortune by the terms of the 1790 deed, a position that was confirmed nine years later when he became one of the four trustees entrusted to protect the estate. But his future inheritance was only assured if his older brother had no children. By marrying a much younger wife, and a woman who was from a ‘known breeding family’ (she had seven brothers and sisters, after all), for the first time Portsmouth was in a position that seriously threatened his brother’s future. Leaving Hurstbourne, Newton felt that he was being forcefully evicted, from both title and home.1
Newton was less than five years younger than Portsmouth, but his life had followed a very different path from his older brother. From an early age, Urania had pinned all her hopes upon him. He crossed the hurdles of aristocratic education without a problem, progressing from Odiham to the tutorage of Dr Kyte in Hammersmith, and on to Eton. He had a spell as a student in the Middle Temple, and then finished at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Reverend Garnett was a Fellow.
Newton’s future looked bright after he inherited a fortune and the mansion at Eggesford following his uncle’s death in January 1792. The will was disputed, and even in the 1820s Newton was still receiving letters from his solicitor, Henry Karslake, about this inheritance. But the sums made the trouble worthwhile. ‘I came into ten thousand a year and £200,000 ready money,’ Newton boasted to a relative, ‘and didn’t I make it fly!’
Like Portsmouth, Newton loved spending time outside, and took an active interest in farming his estates. He also liked his coach and four, and had a favourite coach, ‘of original design’ that he insisted on driving himself from Eggesford to London. He certainly enjoyed the good life, suffering from gout for much of his adulthood as a consequence. But his greatest pleasure was hunting. Family legend had it that he was out hunting for such long days that, when he returned, ravenously hungry, he could not wait for the cooks at Eggesford to prepare a meal, but set to boiling eggs over the open fire in the dining room. He could eat six eggs in succession.
If eccentricity was a family trait, then so too was rebelliousness. Much to his mother’s annoyance, Newton did not always conform. As an idealistic young man, he was not always willing to tow the family line in political affairs. On 29 May 1797, Urania wrote to Newton, thanking him for his condolence letter following his father’s death on 16 May (Newton does not seem to have attended the funeral), and telling him that she had ordered a mourning ring for him to wear. Moving swiftly on from matters relating to her husband’s death, Urania then wrote that she had been really upset by what she had read in the newspapers about Newton’s conduct at the Hampshire County Meeting the previous month. The meeting had overwhelming support from gentlemen for a petition to be presented to the King calling him to dismiss his corrupt ministers, and for an end to ‘the present improvident and unfortunate war’ against France. Newton’s uncle, Robert Fellowes, gave his support for a similar petition at a County Meeting that was held in Norfolk. But in Hampshire, Newton seconded an amendment to the petition and spoke to defend the government and its actions in the war with France. Urania had already written to Newton on this issue, but he had not replied. ‘You have adopted a line of public conduct so diametrically opposite to that of your great Benefactor [presumably Urania’s brother, Henry Arthur],’ she angrily wrote, ‘and every Principle entertain’d by your Ancestors, on both sides.’ While Urania was willing to pay lip-service to her son’s independence of thought and actions: ‘you retain your opinions,’ she wrote grudgingly, but such ‘non-compliance with my sentiments’ meant that he lost her support. Visiting Newton at Eggesford was out of the question: she had once spent three happy weeks there, but now, she told him, it would only increase her sorrow to be in his company.
Newton was equally wilful over matters of the heart. Two years earlier, in January 1795, and at the tender age of twenty-two, Newton had married the woman of his choosing, Frances Sherard. ‘This marriage his mother strongly disapproved,’ remembered a relative. No wonder. Frances was the youngest daughter of a Huntingdon clergyman, and decidedly middle class. Perhaps the couple had met when Newton visited his uncle at Ramsey Abbey. It was certainly not a marriage that had been arranged by Urania or her husband, who no doubt had a far grander and wealthier bride in mind for their second son. With the inheritance from his uncle, and legal arrangements in place for the day he would assume his older brother’s title and position, Newton could have felt that he had his destiny set out for him by his parents. His marriage was the one big decision in life that he wanted to make for himself.2
Newton had a freedom of choice in marriage that he never thought his older brother should exercise. He had grown up with Portsmouth, spent time with him in the playground, and had begun taking responsibility for him from an early age. As he quickly out-performed his older brother academically, he also became aware of his parents’ wider concerns about Portsmouth’s development. For years, he was the recipient of the many letters written by his mother in which she agonized about how best to manage Portsmouth. He was the family representative who was sent to Yarmouth to seize his brother from the clutches of Seilaz. He knew Portsmouth was trouble and that he needed to be managed with care, and there seems little doubt that he approved of his marriage to Grace, and may even have played some role in arranging it. After her death, Newton was instrumental in organizing Coombe’s return to keep a watch over Portsmouth. But whether he had plans to marry Portsmouth to another older woman, as Hanson told Byron, is unclear. There is no evidence to prove it, and he certainly would have expected Portsmouth to spend a longer period in mourning before another marriage was arranged. Everyone recognized that Grace was an exceptional woman, and finding her replacement was not something that could be done easily or in haste.
Newton knew his brother’s weaknesses and limitations. When he heard about Portsmouth’s marriage to Mary Ann Hanson, he never considered it a love match. This was a sham of a wedding, and his brother had been tricked or forced into it. The exchange of vows tied his brother to a lifetime’s commitment, and potentially overturned the plans for the Portsmouth estates that had been set in place nearly a quarter of a century earlier.
The person who lay behind this marriage was John Hanson. This is what hurt Newton most. Portsmouth had not been abducted by an opportunist to be married against his will to a stranger. There were a scattering of marriages like this to the insane or weak-minded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provoking law cases and inspiration for sensational novels. Instead, this was personal. The marriage of Portsmouth was arranged by the family solicitor, trustee, and friend, and the bride was his own daughter. Hanson took advantage of his position, and his knowledge of the Portsmouth family’s situation. Newton was left feeling slighted and utterly betrayed. News that Hanson, the new countess, and Portsmouth ‘came in triumph and made a cavalcade’ with colours to mark their arrival at Hurstbourne was a further bitter blow.
Newton inherited his mother’s spirit of determination, and there was no way that he was going to abandon the Portsmouth name and fortune as easily as he had left Hurstbourne Park. He was in for the fight. Portsmouth had married Mary Ann, but Newton remained one of his trustees. What followed was a battle of legal wills, as Newton sought to prove that John Hanson still had to obtain the consent of the three other trustees before making any decisions about the Portsmouth estate. Newton acted quickly, and by August had filed a Bill in Chancery charging Portsmouth with ‘committing waste’ by cutting down ornamental trees at Hurstbourne with no prior warning to the trustees. So began a legal process about trees that was to last at least another five years. An injunction was issued to stop further felling, but this was breached and challenged a number of times. Business at Chancery was notoriously slow, and this case dragged on as lawyers argued about the definition of an ornamental tree, and whether a gamekeeper needed to have a clear view of the estate from his cottage. Even the Chancellor (perhaps with lunch on his mind) started discussing the merits of different types of trees: ‘old trees are like old cheese, often the best of their kind’.
While the case could descend into farce, the intent was deadly serious. This was about who was in charge: of Portsmouth as a person, and of the Portsmouth family estate. Of course, Newton’s opponent was a lawyer, and Hanson knew the best people in his profession to come to his aid. When Newton later tried to obtain a Lunacy Commission, it was tricky to maintain that he thought his brother a lunatic when earlier that same year he had thought him mentally capable of being sued at Chancery, and swearing his oath before giving answers to a Bill. Newton raised the issue of the 1799 deed, but Hanson responded by arguing that this document, signed the day before Portsmouth’s marriage to Grace, was simply a marriage settlement. As a result, the deed and its terms had ceased upon her death.
In September 1814, the feud between Portsmouth, Hanson, and Newton moved from the dusty offices of Chancery to the very gates of Hurstbourne Park. In a provocative step, Newton stationed himself in nearby Whitchurch, and on a daily basis entered the Hurstbourne estate to kill game, ‘sending it away every night in large baskets’. This ‘was meant as an insult to Lord Portsmouth,’ Hanson argued to Chancery, and was ‘a mode of exercising Mr Fellowes’ authority as a Trustee’. Portsmouth, no doubt directed by Hanson, retaliated by printing trespass notices that the farmers at Hurstbourne were to issue on sight of Newton. Newton had no right to do sport at Hurstbourne; he had become a trespasser on the lands that belonged to his ancestral home.
Hearing that the leases of many of the tenants at Hurstbourne had come to an end, and that Hanson intended to raise the rents, Newton began his own paper campaign. He distributed handbills stating that Hanson was only one of four trustees, and that he had no power to let the farms or raise the rents at Hurstbourne without the agreement of the other trustees. Newton visited many of the tenants in person, telling them not to quit, and to continue to pay their rents at the old rate. A number followed his instruction.
For the Hurstbourne tenants, utter confusion about who had control followed when Portsmouth issued another set of handbills later in the month. These read as follows:
Notice: Mr Fellowes having taken upon himself to assume a power over my property and circulated hand bills pretending to be one of my Trustees, I give this Public Notice that Mr Fellowes is no longer one of my Trustees and has no right to interfere in any manner whatever in my property or concerns, the Trust in which he was originally named a Trustee and that only nominally having ceased with my former marriage.
The words meant nothing in law: Chancery never revoked the 1799 deed, and the trustees remained in place despite Hanson’s best efforts and the many years of legal argument that were to follow.
But the exchanges in September 1814 showed Newton what Hanson was about. Newton had been summarily dismissed as a trustee, and treated as a trespasser on his family’s lands. Hanson had no intention of allowing him any control over the Portsmouth estates, not even to decide whether a tree should stand or fall. As the fight between the two men became a confrontation on the very land that was at stake, each had shown their hand and the battle lines had been firmly drawn.3
On 22 November, Newton issued a petition to the Chancellor to call a Commission of Lunacy for his brother. If the Chancellor agreed, and the Commission declared Portsmouth a lunatic, all his property would be handed over to a committee. Of greater importance to Newton, given that the 1790 and 1799 deeds protecting the Portsmouth estate were still in place, was that a verdict of lunacy would ensure that the validity of his brother’s marriage to Mary Ann became questionable. If Portsmouth was insane on 7 March, then his marriage vows and his signature on the marriage contract and register meant nothing.
Portsmouth’s ability to manage his property had already been seriously curtailed, but a Lunacy Commission could take away the most fundamental right to enter into personal relationships. Retrospectively and in the future, if declared a lunatic, Portsmouth would lose the liberty to form any kind of legitimate relationship with a woman. He could not love, or be loved, as a husband or a father. His mind would separate him from the rest of society, and condemn him to isolation.
The legal process that could lead to this damning verdict of lunacy was designed to be rigorous, thorough, and fair. No Chancellor was expected to make the decision alone. Instead, he would hear arguments from both sides, for the petition (Newton), and against it (Portsmouth and Hanson). The Chancellor, Lord Eldon, did his job well, hearing statements from over 130 witnesses, and arguments from the lawyers for both parties.
It is the statements lawyers made in 1814–15 that survive today. They show how quickly the case became a bitter family feud. Newton was accused of wanting to make his brother a ‘mere nonentity’, and it was said that he was only petitioning for a Commission because he wanted to protect his own interests. Concern for the Portsmouth estate was secondary to Newton’s selfish desire to ‘set aside’ his brother’s marriage to Mary Ann, and to ‘bastardize’ any children that might follow. For years, Newton had been content to let John Hanson take the lion’s share of managing the Portsmouth estates, and he had only started to take note and exercise his authority as a trustee when he felt threatened by his brother’s marriage. Portsmouth had not told his brother of his forthcoming marriage to Mary Ann because he was sick of his interference in his life. Now jealousy and greed were prompting his brother to pursue the cruellest of legal actions.
Counsel for Newton presented a very different picture of their client, of course. Newton was a reluctant petitioner, who was only pursuing this legal remedy because he had been provoked by the actions of John Hanson. For a long time, Portsmouth had been a proper subject for a Commission, but Newton had held back, ‘from motives of delicacy’. All families desired ‘to avoid such a proceeding if possible, not only with respect to the individual but with respect to the feelings of those who are connected in family relation’. Seeking a Lunacy Commission was always going to be a last resort. It would have been insensitive to the feelings of Grace and her family to have sought such a Commission in her lifetime, and Newton’s own family circumstances ‘made it inconvenient if not highly revolting to their feelings to apply’ before now. What family wanted to expose themselves to the scrutiny of others, especially when lunacy was the issue, without good cause? Hanson, with the marriage of his daughter to Portsmouth, was a veritable traitor who had committed ‘fraud’ on a grand scale, and forced Newton to act. Hanson had acted immorally, and Newton had to right that wrong. Only a Commission could protect Portsmouth from the designs of such a man.
Knowing a bit more about Newton at this time helps to put his decision into perspective. He and his wife Frances had their share of personal tragedy. They had lost two of their children within their first year of life, and as grieving, ‘afflicted parents’ they erected a monument to the first, Newton John Alexander, in St Peter’s Church, Over Wallop. They chose the words ‘Sacred to departed innocence’ as its heading, continuing that it had ‘pleased the Almighty to translate’ Newton ‘from a sinful world to an Heavenly one at the early, but immaculate age of five months’.
The death of two babies in 1801 and 1803 was undeniably painful, but accepting God’s will was even harder when it deprived them of the life of their oldest daughter. Fanny Jane Urania was seventeen years old when she died on 23 August 1814. Newton was in the midst of his legal struggle with Hanson, and, in what might have been seen as an ill omen, Fanny was said to have hit her head when she fell jumping from her father’s coach on to the front steps of Hurstbourne house. She appeared fine immediately after her fall, but shortly after the family’s return to Eggesford became seriously ill, and died within four days of ‘water on the brain’. The devastation felt by her immediate family was visible. Newton’s only surviving daughter, Henrietta Caroline, just turned sixteen years old, had rested her head in the hands of her dying sister, ‘stunned by the suddenness of the shock’. It was said that the hair pressed by Fanny’s fingers ‘was perfectly white’ ever after. Frances, Newton’s wife, who had always suffered from poor health, became seriously unwell. Henrietta remembered her mother being paralysed and bed-ridden for a number of years thereafter.
Newton had his own cross to bear in 1814. With the death of his daughter and the illness of his wife, he could scarce afford the time for his brother’s affairs. But Newton had been instilled with a strong sense of family duty. From his school days, he had been taught the importance of his family’s name and property. This had shaped his upbringing, his mother admitting that she had toughened him by letting him cope with the ‘bustle’ of the world while he was still young. When Portsmouth married Mary Ann, he had acted in a way that put him beyond brotherly sympathy from Newton. For Portsmouth had put himself before family interest; his marriage, unlike Newton’s to Frances, could alter the course of the family line. Now Newton had to put his own family sadness to one side, and act decisively to save and then secure the Portsmouth legacy. He owed that much to the memory of his father and mother. As a lawyer later put it, as the ‘heir apparent to this Noble family’, Newton could ‘not lose sight of his duty’ to protect ‘those honours and great estates’. ‘Whenever that inheritance is in danger of annihilation’, as it surely was by Portsmouth’s marriage to Mary Ann, ‘it is his duty to stand forward and protect it not only for himself but for his noble brother.’
Newton may have believed that petitioning for a Lunacy Commission was the only course of action available to him, but his decision was presented by John Hanson as deeply hurtful to Portsmouth. Hanson kept a letter that he claimed was written by Portsmouth to him in January 1815 in which Portsmouth referred to Newton’s ‘unbrotherly manner’ and his ‘cruel application’. Robert Bird, a Winchester solicitor employed by Hanson to oppose the Commission, remembered how Portsmouth ‘seemed to feel the indignity’ of the case. ‘He bore it very patiently and in a manner dignified,’ Bird recalled, and ‘he was by no means insensible to its effects’. Portsmouth was not such a fool or a madman to be unaware of what was happening, or the meaning of his brother’s actions. He did have feelings and sensitivity, even if his naturally shy manner meant that ‘he subdued his feelings,’ Bird thought.
Actions can speak louder than words, and Bird witnessed a scene of tenderness between Portsmouth and Mary Ann that he thought showed where Portsmouth’s true feelings lay. At dinner a few days after Newton had first petitioned the Chancellor, Mary Ann was ‘much depressed’. Portsmouth ‘in a very kind manner bid her raise her spirits, and invited her to take a glass of Madeira with him’. When Mary Ann struggled to carve the turkey, Portsmouth said she should be relieved of this task, and, ‘referring to Lady Portsmouth’s depression’, asked Bird to take over. Feeling the strain of what lay before them, it was Portsmouth who was in control of his emotions and could help his wife to overcome hers.4
No doubt Portsmouth felt less assured a few months later when he had to face the Chancellor in his chambers on 24 January 1815. Ill with a cold, a hot water stove was brought to warm Portsmouth’s feet. What Eldon asked Portsmouth was not recorded, and at the ‘earnest request of the parties concerned’ the press were asked not even to report that the examination had taken place. Not all abided by this call for secrecy, but the press had to be content with reporting Portsmouth’s cold symptoms, rather than the detail of his examination. But that was enough. Word was out: the sanity of Lord Portsmouth was being questioned.
In the autumn and winter of 1814–15, if Portsmouth felt betrayed, it was by his brother, not John Hanson. He had ‘harassed’ him on his estates and now humiliated him by requiring him to be examined in front of the Lord Chancellor. All his life Portsmouth had been taught the importance of keeping his mental weaknesses in check and hidden from public view. Now Newton had exposed him for all to see.
As the legal arguments continued, the decision that Eldon was likely to take was far from predictable. Both sides made convincing arguments for and against a Commission, and Portsmouth’s personal appearance seemed to have done nothing to bring a speedy resolution to the issue. For everyone involved, the wait seemed interminable. Finally, on 22 April, Eldon reached his decision. He would not call a Commission. The arguments that Portsmouth was insane were not convincing. A Commission was not warranted. ‘This is the most painful business that I have ever been concerned in in the course of my judicial life,’ Eldon commented. Eldon, who had been called to the bar nearly forty years earlier, and whose support for and close relationship with George III during his periods of insanity had earned him the nickname ‘keeper of the King’s conscience’, knew what he was talking about.
The relief of Portsmouth and the Hansons was tremendous. John Hanson threw a celebration dinner party in London for Portsmouth and his daughter, attended by Lord Grantley (Grace’s brother), Lord Bolton, and a number of other distinguished guests. A toast was made to Portsmouth to mark the Chancellor’s decision. In Hampshire, John Hanson’s brother-in-law, who owed his position as rector of Farleigh to Hanson’s connections with Portsmouth, set about organizing a triumphant return of Portsmouth and Mary Ann to Hurstbourne. All of the estate’s tenants and workers gathered to meet Lord and Lady Portsmouth on their journey back from London. They assembled in the tiny village of Mapple Durnell, just outside Basingstoke, and accompanied Portsmouth ‘by way of congratulation’ on the road back to Hurstbourne Park. Once the crowd arrived at Hurstbourne, a dinner was provided in a number of rooms for as many as could be accommodated. There had been almost an entire change of staff over the previous few months as Hanson had dismissed anybody who had dared to speak in favour of the Commission, so there was much confusion as loyal members of the household showed newer members where to find such basic items as knives and forks for the many guests. But it was a happy occasion, when Portsmouth moved from room to room, talking to everyone. Around twenty-five Hampshire gentlemen joined the party. After dinner, Portsmouth invited everyone into the dining room, where guests squeezed for space and strained to get a view of their host. Portsmouth gave a speech ‘saying how happy they had made him, and that he was only sorry that the short notice he had, prevented showing them greater hospitality’. ‘He did not say much, but what he did say was to the purpose,’ recalled John Twynam, Portsmouth’s gentry neighbour. Locksmith and mender of bells Robert Long, who had been on the welcoming procession from Mapple Durnell, remembered events far more warmly: ‘Everyone present was quite delighted at what Lord Portsmouth said on the occasion.’ With free food and booze, and a Lord and master so obviously pleased to be back home, what reason was there to feel otherwise?5
With two triumphant arrivals to Hurstbourne in less than a year, the Hanson family had symbolically laid claim to the Portsmouth estate. Now that the Chancellor had rejected Newton’s call for a Commission, Mary Ann was also confirmed in her title and place as Lady Portsmouth. Newton never recorded his response to the Chancellor’s decision. Shattered and exhausted he may well have been. He had revealed doubts about his brother’s mental health, fuelled society’s gossips, and lost forever the affection of his brother, yet to no good end. He never thought he would dare to risk an attempt to get a Commission again.