THE FAMED PROFESSOR James Hamilton was a good choice of doctor for Mary Ann, countess of Portsmouth. Hamilton had been practising midwifery since he was twenty-one years old, working alongside his father, the previous incumbent of the Chair of Midwifery at Edinburgh University, and travelling to study at Leiden and Paris. His expertise in women’s health was well known, and he attracted wealthy patients as well as medical students to Edinburgh University, where he campaigned to make midwifery a compulsory subject. His lectures were legendary, and he achieved the considerable feat of filling the lecture theatres where he spoke to eager listeners, despite the non-compulsory nature of his courses. Along with his father, Hamilton founded and funded Edinburgh’s Lying-In Hospital for the poor, and it was there that he gained valuable experience observing and delivering many hundreds of babies. As a ‘man-midwife’, there was little he didn’t know about how to see a woman and her child safely through labour.
Along with many other physicians of the day, Hamilton was used to conducting medical consultations with his patients by letter. It meant that he could treat patients from a wide geographical area, and dispense advice without necessarily seeing or examining the patient. This was how Mary Ann first became his patient, possibly corresponding with him after she suffered a miscarriage in August 1821. Unfortunately, Hamilton’s correspondence does not survive, but whatever he wrote was so well received that, when Mary Ann found that she was pregnant again in the autumn of that year, she headed straight for Edinburgh.
She was accompanied on this journey by both Portsmouth and Alder. They stopped on their route north at Harrogate for three weeks, perhaps to benefit from the spa waters. Then they continued to Edinburgh, spending at least a night at Alder’s home, Horncliffe Hall in Northumberland, on their way. Initially, suitable lodgings in Edinburgh were difficult to find, and the party stayed in the Union Hotel before and after they rejected a house in North Frederick Street for being too noisy. Finally, they settled upon 32 Great King Street, an elegantly furnished townhouse that had been built recently during the second phase of Edinburgh’s New Town development. This was Edinburgh at its best and most exclusive: the streets were wide, there were splendid squares and gardens where the fashionable could promenade, and all was a vision of space and order. Most importantly for Mary Ann, it seemed to offer the calm atmosphere and the quiet that she craved.
From all that she had heard about him, Mary Ann may well have been taken aback when Hamilton made his first visit to her. From first impressions, he did not look like the great doctor that everyone talked about. He was short in height, had a permanent stoop, and didn’t even appear well, seeming frail and nervous. When he spoke, he did so in a harsh voice and with a heavy Scottish accent that was seen as unsophisticated for his social position. He rarely looked people in the eye. He insisted on being carried around Edinburgh in a sedan chair, and views were mixed about whether this was because he did not have the strength to walk, or reflected his inflated sense of self-importance.
Mary Ann overcame any initial doubts she had about Hamilton, trusting her care to him. When she arrived in Edinburgh in November 1821, she was only a few weeks pregnant, but after all those miscarriages she was understandably anxious. To Hamilton, she was a demanding patient, insisting that he see her nearly every day. Yet, as a countess, Hamilton calculated that she would also be a lucrative source of income. Hamilton’s services did not come cheap. When Mary Ann asked how he would like to be paid (per visit, or after the birth?), he declared that ‘he never talked on these little matters’, cannily allowing her to decide what would be an appropriate payment for a lady of her social status. This was a shrewd move: one interim payment of £150 was made in April, with a much larger sum expected upon the birth of the baby.
Hamilton paid enough visits to 32 Great King Street to get to see the other members of the household. He was never introduced to Alder, and did not know his name, but upon enquiry was told that he was a wealthy gentleman from Berwickshire. Mary Ann was joined in Edinburgh by her sister, Laura, and her brother, Newton, and in the last weeks of her pregnancy, by her father, John Hanson, who travelled up from London to be there for the birth.
But the person whom Hamilton saw most was Portsmouth. Portsmouth ‘always expressed much anxiety about his Lady’s health’, Hamilton recalled. He seemed to display all the worry typical of a father-to-be. Indeed, Portsmouth’s daily questioning about his wife’s condition, and sometimes ‘urgent’ enquiries about when the baby would be born, led Mary Ann to advise Hamilton to try to evade the subject. When Hamilton invited Portsmouth to an evening party at his house, Portsmouth declined the invitation, ‘from the apprehension of disturbing Lady Portsmouth’. This was a husband who was treating his wife with every degree of care that her fragility seemed to demand.
When Portsmouth did leave the house, he appeared happy. While in Edinburgh, he took the opportunity to make several calls to see Grace’s sister-in-law, Caroline Elizabeth, recently widowed from Fletcher Norton. He may have engaged in a spot of sightseeing, and witnessed preparations for George IV’s visit to the city that was scheduled for the summer of 1822. The tone of a letter that he wrote to a friend was relaxed and chatty:
We are so much delighted with this fine town, that had we been here at any other season of the year, we should have made it a point of visiting the Highlands.
There were signs that, free from the confines of Fairlawn and the restrictions of London society, Portsmouth was back to his old self. He ran up quite a bill at a sweet shop, the owner not realizing who he was until Portsmouth gave his name for a home delivery after about a month of frequent visits. He contented himself visiting a repository where horses were sometimes sold, and even bought a horse there himself. The owner of the repository, who over the course of several months had many conversations with Portsmouth, considered him ‘very intelligent in regard to farming, and a particular good judge of horses’. But a few days after Portsmouth had made his purchase, two men visited the repository and told the owner that Portsmouth was ‘not in the way of managing his own affairs’ so the horse had to be returned. Portsmouth was not seen at the repository again.
With the progress of Mary Ann’s pregnancy, her control over Portsmouth lessened, but there were others to remind him of his responsibilities. Hamilton was not a man to cross. He had a reputation for having furious quarrels with his academic colleagues. His longstanding animosity towards the equally fiery Professor James Gregory, for example, eventually resulted in Gregory attacking Hamilton in the street with his walking stick. When Hamilton issued instructions in his patients’ households, he expected them to be followed. So he was sorely irritated on one of his visits when he heard Portsmouth making a great noise in the room below Mary Ann’s bedroom. Hamilton rushed downstairs, as Portsmouth’s ‘screaming out, as if in danger of being hurt’ had ‘alarmed the Countess’. He found Alder in the room with Portsmouth, and was told that Portsmouth had hit Alder as he sat writing a letter. Alder got up ‘to return the compliment’, and it was at this point that Portsmouth started screaming. When Hamilton remonstrated with Portsmouth, Portsmouth declared that the whole exchange ‘was merely a joke, the consequence of which he had not foreseen’. Hamilton had no interest in why the men were quarrelling; his only care was his patient, and she was ‘at that time in such a state, as to require the utmost possible quiet’. Whatever Portsmouth’s situation, it was vital that it did not affect the health of his wife.
This time Mary Ann carried her baby to full term. On 7 August 1822, she went into labour, and Hamilton rushed to her assistance. His skills were needed as the labour was not an easy one. The baby girl ‘was brought into the world by means of instruments’, probably forceps, and ‘above an hour elapsed before it breathed so freely as to give it reason to expect its living’. A clergyman was called to baptize the baby when its life looked in danger. ‘The resemblance of the infant to your Lordship,’ Hamilton told Portsmouth, ‘particularly about the lower part of the face, was so remarkable as to strike at once all the attendants.’ The baby was given her mother’s name, Mary Ann, and her birth in Edinburgh was announced in the standard fashion later that month in the Hampshire papers.
But, while the baby had survived her first few hours of life, her future looked far from certain. For when she was born, the man whom her mother said was her father was hundreds of miles away. Hamilton had to write to tell Portsmouth about her birth because he was not there. His absence immediately raised questions about why Mary Ann had chosen to spend her pregnancy and give birth in Edinburgh. Perhaps Hamilton was the obvious choice not just because he was a great doctor, but because he practised far from the gossiping social circles of Hampshire and London. Mary Ann became a virtual recluse in Edinburgh, and her household went into lockdown, because she wanted to keep her condition private for as long as possible. She yearned for anonymity, seeking no company except that of Alder and her family. Her confinement began long before necessary because anyone who knew her would soon guess that the baby she carried was not Portsmouth’s.
Mary Ann was one patient that Hamilton could have done without. The last thing he wanted was a reputation for being a doctor who delivered illegitimate babies. Portsmouth’s high-profile Lunacy Commission brought him unwelcome publicity. He regretted his letter to Portsmouth in which he stated what all new fathers want to hear, that their baby looked just like them. In an awkward case of backtracking, he later claimed that it was only in the first few fragile hours of life, when the baby was struggling to breathe, ‘that its resemblance to his Lordship appeared so striking’. Twisted and contorted, hardly an attractive image, the baby looked like Portsmouth. ‘He never saw any circumstance which could lead him to suspect improper conduct on the part of Lady Portsmouth,’ he asserted. Hamilton made no mention of the anonymous letters that were sent to him in the weeks before the birth, warning him that the baby was a bastard. Yet Hamilton’s claim that he was ignorant of all that was going on at 32 Great King Street fell apart when accounts were given of Portsmouth’s departure from Edinburgh. It was the events of 2 July that laid bare the truth of this family’s situation.1