ON 2 FEBRUARY 1851, Portsmouth sat down at his desk to write a letter. Writing was a skill that had always come easily to him, and, now that he was spending much of his time within his mansion at Hurstbourne, sending a letter was a way to communicate with those outside the park gates. What his letters lacked in punctuation (it seems that no teacher had taught him the importance of a comma or full stop), they more than made up for in their confident and clear hand.
For a man like Portsmouth, letter writing was an ideal form of communication. He could choose whom he addressed, and when it suited him. While he might have expected a reply, the decision to initiate or end a correspondence rested with him. He could take his time composing a letter and that gave him more control. Writing from a distance presented him with none of the problems of social awkwardness that meeting someone in person might present. And now that he had been declared a lunatic he could say what he liked: how could he cause offence?
The recipient of this letter was Catherine Fellowes, the second wife of his brother, Newton. Portsmouth seems to have developed a fondness for Catherine, and, while his relationship with Newton would always now be conducted in the shadow of the Lunacy Commission, she carried none of that family baggage. Catherine was remembered by others as the ‘deaf and dumb lady from Castle Hill’, but, as one descendant recorded, she was ‘quite deaf but she was by no means dumb’. For she had been taught by a Frenchman to ‘speak and to read the motions of the throat and lips’. She had a ‘curious, deep voice’, and her children ‘spoke to her on their fingers, which her husband never learnt to do’. Her deafness ‘cut her off very much’ from her family’s lives and in her silent world she absorbed herself in needlework, gardening, and decorating the new house at Eggesford.
Perhaps Portsmouth felt an affinity for this woman whose disability distanced her from society and confined her to the home. He initially viewed letters to her as a way to prompt his brother to action, as in 1827 when he wrote to her to request that she press on Newton the importance of paying the bills owed for his marriage annulment case. But Portsmouth’s subsequent letters showed more of a personal interest in her concerns. He wrote condolence letters to Catherine when her sister-in-law and brother-in-law died. Visits by Catherine and Newton to Hurstbourne strengthened their relationship. Theirs was not a regular correspondence (only seven letters written by Portsmouth to Catherine survive, and none from her), but it was reciprocated. The tone of Portsmouth’s letters was relaxed, and there was none of the anger found in letters to his brother. Writing in August 1834, for example, Portsmouth explained to Catherine that he had been prompted to send a letter after he had heard from his sister, Henrietta Dorothea, that Newton was gravely ill. Enquiring about Newton’s condition, Portsmouth told Catherine to ‘keep up your spirits as much as possible’. He then quickly moved on to describe how his summer had been ‘quite pleasant’, and how many of the younger members of the Fellowes family were currently at Weymouth ‘for the benefit of the sea air’, while he remained at Hurstbourne with ‘old Harry Fellowes’. He finished the letter with a flourish of affection:
I shall be very happy to hear from you as it will give me pleasure to hear from one who loves me as yourself has always professed to do so when you used to be here which I shall never forget it.
I am my Dear Catherine
yours et al
Portsmouth
With our best Love and regards to Newton and your Family wishing him better health
Newton made a full recovery, but what Catherine thought of this letter, or any of the others she received from her brother-in-law we do not know. Portsmouth seized upon her kindness to him and remembered it, but whether she wanted to be reminded of this when her husband was ill seems unlikely. Her priority at this worrying time was Newton, not his emotionally needy older brother.
One thing we can be sure of is that Portsmouth’s letters were never regarded by their family recipients as private correspondence. Just like the letters written by his insane aunt and cousins in former times, Portsmouth’s letters were passed around the family breakfast table, perhaps even read out aloud and scrutinized for evidence of his mental state. They were carefully kept, in a way that Catherine’s letters were not, because they were the words of a man who had been declared insane. Letters could contain the early warning signs of trouble ahead. Any letter Portsmouth wrote to Catherine was passed straight over to Newton.
The letter Portsmouth wrote to Catherine on 2 February 1851 opened with such an explosive blast of news that it must have rocked the Fellowes household to its very core:
My Dearest Catherine
I beg leave to inform you of our intention of being married to Miss C. Norton a niece of mine a sister of Lord Grantley she is coming down here tomorrow morning for the occasion …
Portsmouth was eighty-three years old. ‘Miss C. Norton’ was probably Caroline Elizabeth, at fifty-three years old, the unmarried sister of Fletcher, 3rd Lord Grantley, and the niece of Portsmouth’s first wife, Grace. Having announced their marriage, in the same breathless sentence Portsmouth continued:
…and on Tuesday next there will be a grand review to take place by all the regiments given to me by the Duke of Wellington which will be a grand thing to take place here in this park on Tuesday next of the Surrey Militia regiment of both horse and foot soldiers under command of me and the rest of the officers in Hants and Surrey … which will be a grand sight here of my own given to me by Lord Grantley … and Hampshire and Surrey yeomanry regiments … and from all parts of the country of Guildford and Lymington and Andover yeomanry … if the weather should be fine it will be a grand sight in memory of this happy day which I hope will take place tomorrow to this very nice and affectionate young Lady Miss Norton a very nice young Lady she is certainly and very agreeable one I must say she is
Portsmouth was brimming with excitement. This was the most glorious fantasy. The King of Hampshire was to be restored to his rightful place, commanding his troops who would parade over the land that he ruled. It was a scene that he had been dreaming about ever since he told doctors that he wanted the county militia to be present when he tried the Hansons and Alder some thirty years earlier. The Duke of Wellington, who had been hunting in Hurstbourne Park at least once in previous years, and was lord lieutenant of the county, was imagined to have bestowed this honour upon Portsmouth. The occasion was to be grand (repeated twice) because Portsmouth was to be important once more. The forgotten Lord Portsmouth would be remembered. Everyone would take note.
Characteristically, his letter devoted more attention to the details of the celebration that would follow his wedding than to his bride-to-be. Miss Norton might have appeared youthful to the octogenarian Portsmouth but what was more important to him was that she was ‘nice’, ‘agreeable’, and ‘affectionate’. Perhaps she reminded him of Grace, who had those qualities in bucket-loads. Probably unaware of Portsmouth’s intentions, Miss Norton is unlikely to have found the prospect of marriage to Portsmouth attractive, even if she was a spinster of similar age to her aunt when she had married the earl.
In Portsmouth’s mind, the marriage was a done deal: poor weather might hamper the military display, but the wedding was going ahead the very next day. His two previous marriages had been arranged for him. Now he was going to make an independent decision about his life, and enjoy doing so. Nearly thirty years after the Commission of Lunacy, Portsmouth was testing his family’s resolve. Having been declared a lunatic, Portsmouth could not marry. But what was a legal technicality to a man like Portsmouth? If he could get hold of a willing bride and an ignorant clergyman, then getting married was just the kind of impulsive act of which he was capable. History should have taught Newton that.
But Newton was growing old himself. In February 1851, he was seventy-eight and he had suffered from painful attacks of gout for at least his early forties. Years of travelling to and from Devon to London and Hurstbourne had begun to take their toll. Most significantly, the person whom he had made responsible for taking care of Portsmouth, his oldest son and heir, Henry Arthur, had died in London on 15 February 1847.
Newspapers reported that Henry’s death came ‘after a long and lingering illness’. His body was transported to be buried at Eggesford. Having remained a bachelor, he had spent his adult life caring for Portsmouth at Hurstbourne. But his father could not bring himself to acknowledge his son’s greatest achievement. A handwritten obituary, possibly composed by Newton and read at his funeral, gave an account of Henry’s life. It began in standard enough form, describing his education at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and travel abroad. He had been MP for the ‘family borough of Andover’. But this role had been cut short:
Impaired health however and a preference for the … studies of literature and an attachment to the fine arts induced him to withdraw from public life and for many years he has made his residence at Eggesford which he varied by occasional tours on the continent.
For ‘occasional tours on the continent’ read ‘long stretches of time at Hurstbourne’. Disagreements with Henry over funding Portsmouth’s care, coupled with a desire that at least in Devon society reminders that this family had connections with a publicly declared lunatic should be minimized, meant that Henry’s years of service to his family had no mention. Henry might have inherited a delicate constitution from his sickly mother, but his obituary represented him as a man without distinction. The cover-up about Portsmouth had begun, and Henry was its first victim.
After Henry’s death, other arrangements for Portsmouth must have been made, and a new ‘committee’ appointed by Chancery, although no name has been recorded. It is clear that other members of the Fellowes family visited and stayed at Hurstbourne. But their stays were fleeting, and there was no individual who took overall control. That was Newton’s mistake.
So, when Portsmouth’s letter to Catherine arrived at the start of February 1851, Newton had to act fast. The Fellowes family scrambled to respond. Since it was received after the date when the wedding was to have taken place (a fact that Portsmouth must have known), Newton first had to establish that there had been no nuptials. Much to their relief, this fact was proved. In the meantime, Isaac Newton, Newton’s oldest son by Catherine, and his heir since the death of Henry, was dispatched to Hurstbourne.
Isaac was still there at the end of March. Portsmouth was deluded: he remained convinced that his wedding was going ahead. He wrote a long and rambling letter to Catherine, beginning with the statement that ‘I am very much obliged to you for allowing your Son to come up from Eggesford on my wedding which I hope will be soon’. He told Catherine that for the present he was confined to bed with a cold, which had been brought on by the bad weather. His head was ‘aching very bad’ and he worried about the effect of the weather on the sowing of crops. Many phrases, not just words, were repeated, and his prose became disjointed and difficult to follow. He seemed out of sorts, in both mind and body.
He might have been sent as a rescue party to sort things out, but Isaac had no intention of following in his stepbrother’s footsteps and remaining at Hurstbourne indefinitely. Yet at some point that year he seriously offended Portsmouth in a way that the sensitive Henry never did. At the start of November, Portsmouth wrote a letter direct to Newton:
Dear Brother
I shall never part with this house and premises as long as I live [nor?] for not letting your son Newton come to it at all ever again and I cannot spare it at all as long as I live I will never let your son have it at all to come to it nor will I be at the expense of the repairs he has occasioned to defray the expenses at his own expense I will not send him any money at all to do it it was done unknown to me quite so
Isaac had crossed a line that never should have been breached with Portsmouth. Portsmouth was Hurstbourne Park. He was King there. To threaten his future there was tantamount to treason. To undertake improvements and then not pay for them was to question the legitimacy of his rule. Hurstbourne Park was all that there was left for Portsmouth. Everything else had been taken away. The young man who had been sent to prevent his marriage now seemed to be effecting a coup, a take-over well before his time. And Isaac had done this while he had been a guest at Hurstbourne, right under Portsmouth’s nose. But this was a gross misjudgement, which Portsmouth saw as a direct challenge to his power and legitimacy. Portsmouth still had his title, and he would be Lord of Hurstbourne for ‘as long as I live’.
Fuming, Portsmouth repeated his refusal to pay for the repairs that he had not ordered, and then turned the page. At that moment, he seems to have calmed down, and began writing about something quite different. He told Newton that he had heard from their sister, Henrietta Dorothea, and that she sent word that one of their cousins was to be married. This ‘I hope will be a good match for her,’ Portsmouth wrote. Writing about the marriage helped to defuse Portsmouth’s anger, but there was still a message about how Portsmouth saw himself. ‘I shall have no objection to it at all,’ he wrote. Portsmouth believed he was still head of the family. He thought Henrietta Dorothea was writing to seek his permission for the match, not to inform him of it. Even if he was calmer when he was writing this, Portsmouth intended it as a reminder to Newton that his older brother was in charge. Portsmouth might need protection. He had to be prevented from enacting the wildest of his fantasies, but this did not render him a weak character, far from it. Portsmouth showed his strength when he felt most vulnerable, and that strength rested on defending his home: ‘I shall never part with this house and premises as long as I live.’
Portsmouth remained at Hurstbourne, and it seems unlikely that while his uncle was alive Isaac ever dared to cross its threshold again. Three more letters were written by Portsmouth to Eggesford, but each was addressed to Catherine, not Newton. The ties between the brothers were now permanently severed, with Portsmouth’s angry letter the last time he communicated directly with Newton. Portsmouth remembered Newton’s birthday, writing to Catherine on 27 June 1852:
I must most sincerely congratulate Newton on his Birthday which took place on yesterday in his 80 year of his age. I hope he will continue and enjoy the day for many years to come and yourself.
But he still had the pleasure of reaching this age first. Portsmouth thanked Catherine for her long letter, and described in his remaining letters the weather and how it was affecting the productivity of his farm. This was his world now, and Catherine was the only one whom he privileged with an insight into it.1
More than thirty years after the marriage between Portsmouth and Mary Ann had been annulled, the last thing anyone in the Eggesford household expected was a letter from his former wife. By 1859, the family thought they had put the nightmare of the Hansons well behind them. Even if the name of Hanson was never uttered aloud again, there was probably some knowledge about what happened to Mary Ann and her father once Sir John Nicholl had declared his sentence. The Hansons had got their just deserts.
John Hanson’s career was in trouble even before his daughter’s marriage ended. He was forever falling out with his professional colleagues; two fellow lawyers told the court of Arches that they had ceased contact with Hanson following personal disputes. At some point, he lost his job as solicitor to the Board of Stamps, and there were immediately rumours that he had been dismissed for neglect of duty. Worse followed when government officials tracked a paper trail of missing money back to Hanson. In 1835, the Treasury took Hanson to court to recover £674, with a further sum of £710 judged to be in default.
Most damaging of all was the loss of support from Hanson’s most famous client, Lord Byron. This had nothing to do with his daughter’s marriage: Byron was never so judgemental (nor hypocritical). For so long the Hanson family had been important to Byron. In April 1816, as he waited in Dover for the ship that took him from England’s shores forever, it was to John Hanson that Byron wrote to say a final goodbye. ‘I wish you for yourself and family every possible good – and beg remembrances to all – particularly Lady P and Charles.’ If the Hansons were his old family, Byron also remembered his new one, adding an emotional ‘P.S. Send me some news of my child – every now and then.’
But Byron became disillusioned by Hanson. He had already experienced the effects of Hanson’s family concerns when his marriage arrangements to Annabella Milbanke had been put on hold while Hanson fought the first call for a Lunacy Commission. Once abroad, his patience wore thin as Hanson continued to charge huge fees (his bill for selling Byron’s Newstead estate came to a staggering twelve thousand pounds), and still took an age to get anything done. Byron lost all respect for Hanson: he started to refer to him as ‘Spooney’, a slang term for a ‘foolish, pretending fellow’. He thought it laughable when he heard that Hanson was trying to become a peer, and he increasingly turned to another solicitor, Douglas Kinnaird, to get his business done. Byron’s frustration was palpable. Writing to Kinnaird from Venice in July 1818, Byron wrote that ‘Spooney’ was:
a damned tortoise in all his proceeds – I should suspect foul play – in this delay of the man and papers … for God his sake – row the man of law – spur him – kick him on the Crickle, – do something – anything – you are my power of Attorney – and I thereby empower you to use it and abuse Hanson – till the fellow says or does something as a gentleman should do.
Two days later, in another letter to Kinnaird, Hanson was ‘that knave or blockhead’. Even a visit to Byron in person by John and Newton Hanson, who travelled to Venice in November of that year, did nothing to salvage the relationship. Writing to his former wife in February 1820 about their legal affairs, he pleaded, ‘do let us concur for once’, but ‘above all – expediate that eternal dawdle Hanson – who has sent me in such a bill!’ Byron was done with John Hanson.
When Byron died in Greece on 19 April 1824, his body was brought back to England. After lying in state for two days, Byron’s hearse was accompanied by a cortège of forty-seven carriages back to the family vault near Newstead. John Hanson proudly sat in a mourning coach near the front, and, along with Byron’s long-time friend Hobhouse, became an executor of Byron’s will. For the rest of his life, Hanson was involved with negotiations about the future of Byron’s estate. A lengthy and often fraught correspondence was conducted between Hanson and the publisher John Murray.
There seems little doubt that John Hanson dined off his connections with Byron, and relished the attention this gave him. But anyone who knew him would not employ him professionally, and in a business world that relied on personal recommendations this spelled ruin. Hanson had used up all the goodwill of his legal colleagues fighting his daughter’s case, and now that she had lost he faced their bills. He stubbornly refused to give the editor Thomas Moore access to Byron’s personal papers, arguing that they contained details of people still living, but probably because he had an eye for the profits that could be made if he sold them. Hanson intended to publish a book entitled ‘Lord Byron in his Minority’, but never got round to it. His son, Newton, wrote a narrative about Byron’s life, and joining with his brother Charles entered into negotiations with Murray about its publication. To tempt him, Newton claimed that the Hanson family had a portrait of Byron’s mother, and many original documents and personal items belonging to Byron. Murray either didn’t believe Newton or refused to offer the price that was being demanded, for Newton’s account remained in manuscript form.
The fact was that John Hanson was a ‘has been’. Neither he nor his sons could make a living from stories of their past. There could be no turning back. In a bitter twist of fate, their former home in Earl’s Court, where Byron had been brought as a boy, and Portsmouth had first met Byron, was turned into a private lunatic asylum. Hanson was reduced to writing a series of letters to Hobhouse asking for money. ‘I have no hesitation in telling you that from many unforeseen family causes my circumstances are very different to what they were and I have a huge family upon me,’ he wrote on 16 November 1835. Hobhouse probably shared with others the view that only Hanson could have not foreseen the disaster he was inviting when he tried to defraud a wealthy family like the Portsmouths. By February 1838, Hanson was asking Hobhouse for a loan of four thousand pounds, saying he was ‘rigorously pressed’ and ‘threatened with destruction’. He wrote again in March 1840 pleading for money to allow him ‘to sustain my position in that station of life I have maintained for upwards of fifty years’. But Hobhouse wasn’t listening.
Hanson, the man who had worn a pompous hat to his son’s school speech day, courted wealthy clients, fancied himself as a country squire, and had made his daughter a countess, was a broken man. Ill health now beset him. Hanson wrote to ask Murray to visit him at his home, 52 Upper Norton Street, in London, as ‘I have not been across the Threshold of my Door for the greatest part of a year’, sardonically adding, ‘tho’ the symbols of the sanity of my mental and bodily health, which you allude to, are certainly strong’. He was the one confined now: ‘I am yet a Prisoner and you will be sure to find me at any Time,’ he wrote in a further letter. He died in September 1841.2
The impact of first the Lunacy Commission and then the marriage annulment case upon John’s relationship with his oldest daughter, Mary Ann, were hard to bear. Initially, in November 1822, as each side gathered their evidence for the Commission, John was confident of his daughter’s case. He wrote a letter to the editor of the Salisbury and Winchester Journal, arrogantly dismissing the attention that other newspapers had given to the scandalously short week-long courtship between his daughter and Portsmouth before their marriage on 7 March 1814. He was certain that once members of the public heard his daughter’s version of events they would understand that the Commission was ‘one of the most extraordinary conspiracies that ever was contrived against a virtuous, innocent, and helpless woman’.
Even when the Commission found that Portsmouth was a lunatic, the Hanson family continued to protest Mary Ann’s innocence. Newton Hanson wrote a lengthy letter to The Times in response to ‘the foulest and most malignant aspersions’ that had been cast upon his sister’s ‘conduct and reputation’. She had been left a ‘heart-broken lady’ by the Commission, he said. But while her family continued to support her, and do what they could to salvage her reputation, by the time the case for her marriage annulment was brought to the church courts, it served Mary Ann better to distance herself from her father and brothers. Dr Jenner, the lawyer appointed by Mary Ann to oppose the annulment, represented her as ‘the victim of the wicked designs of her own family’. She was the ‘unfortunate and devoted girl’ who had been reluctantly ‘dragged on by her own family’ to a marriage of ‘fraudulent and cruel iniquity’. By the close of the case, when accounts of her abusing and tormenting her husband had been told, nobody saw Mary Ann in this light. By then she was a social outcast, a figure of public disgust, and an adulteress with a bastard in her arms. Mary Ann wanted nothing more to do with her family, but they felt likewise. It was her wilfulness that had meant she had continued her affair with Alder despite her father’s disapproval. Sooner or later one of her pregnancies would go full term, and then it was inevitable that Portsmouth’s family would act. If only Mary Ann had not taken a lover, then she would have remained a countess, and the Hansons’ gateway into a family fortune would have been secured.
Mary Ann never played by the rules, but she did remain faithful to Alder. In February 1825, she was rumoured to be pregnant again, and, on 10 October 1828, five months to the day since Judge Nicholl had ended her marriage to Portsmouth, she married Alder. Their marriage was announced in the papers, but whether anyone realized that she was the former Lady Portsmouth is unknown. Their wedding took place in Clifton, and it was in Bristol that she gave birth to a third child, a boy, in July 1829. Rumour had it that one of her children was called Byron.3
There was a vain and audacious attempt in April 1833 by John Hanson to make the financial terms of his daughter’s 1814 marriage settlement stick, even after the relationship had been annulled. Alder made an appearance in Chancery as a witness to the deed. The record of Alder and Mary Ann then falls silent. As Mary Ann rebuilt her life with Alder, her former husband settled into a life of seclusion within Hurstbourne Park. They never contacted each other again. But on 6 October 1859 Mary Ann, now in her sixties, wrote a letter that was directed to Eggesford. Like a ghost from the past, the spectre of Mary Ann Hanson was alive again.
The letter had come all the way from Canada. Just how Mary Ann had ended up on the other side of the Atlantic, nobody could be sure. But the opening lines of the letter gave some clues. Mary Ann would have preferred to have written to Portsmouth’s cousin, William Barton Wallop or his son, she said. It seems that Mary Ann had ingratiated herself with this side of her former husband’s family. William had served as a Captain in the Nova Scotia Fencibles, and his wife was from New Brunswick. He had probably first served in Canada during the 1812 war. At some point, Mary Ann had joined the couple and their young family in the small town of Chatham-Kent, in the south-west of Ontario. There she claimed to have looked after William’s son during his holidays, and his sister had ‘resided with us some years’. As expats living in a foreign land, this branch of the Wallop family might have been glad to have had Mary Ann to lend a helping hand. They may even have pitied the aunt who had become the black sheep of the family.
‘I can almost fancy that I see him a Child now,’ Mary Ann wrote, remembering her time looking after the little boy, ‘but time changes all things and it may be that the thoughts of the Man are far different to those of the free headed and generous boy.’ Somewhere along the line Mary Ann had lost touch with the family, and she claimed to not know how to contact them now.
It was almost certainly widowhood and poverty that had prompted Mary Ann to emigrate. Alder had died on 7 February 1847, heavily in debt. He had had to give up his home at Horncliffe, and move his family to the tiny village of Spittal, at the mouth of the River Tweed in Northumberland. The only child mentioned in his will was his youngest son, William Baillie Graham. Mary Ann was probably still being chased for repayment of legal costs so going abroad was one way to escape her debts. Ships regularly sailed to Canada from nearby Berwick. Mary Ann was first recorded as residing in Chatham-Kent in the 1851 census, but there were no other members of the Wallop or Hanson family present. By the 1861 census, two years after Mary Ann wrote her letter, she had been joined in the town by her son, Graham Alder, his wife, M. Alder (born in England), and their four children, aged between ten and one (all born in Canada). Graham gave ‘farmer’ as his occupation, and was listed in an 1864 business directory for the town. But by the time of the next census in 1871, neither Mary Ann nor any other member of the Alder family resided in Ontario.
Chatham-Kent could not be further removed from the social world of London and Hampshire that Mary Ann had experienced as Lady Portsmouth. Beginning as a naval dockyard in the 1790s, and centred upon the Thames River, Chatham-Kent was surrounded by rich farming land. Known from the 1830s as ‘the coloured man’s Paris’, African-Americans escaped the horrors of slavery and flocked on routes called the Underground Railroad that led to Chatham-Kent. While Mary Ann may also have seen the town as ‘a place of refuge’, the sight of black faces would have been unfamiliar to her. There is little to suggest that she was able to benefit from the town’s sudden wealth when oil was discovered in Bothwell during the 1850s.
Mary Ann’s letter was a begging one. She asked for a pitiful ‘£10 or £20’. She claimed to be ‘really and truly in the greatest want of many even common comforts that become necessaries to a person of my years’. In her old age she was now:
stranded on the shore of adversity without a hope of better days, such is the way with me once the Lady of Hurstbourne Park, now with not sufficient to buy my daily bread for the short remaining time that I may need it.
Hopeful of support, Mary Ann added a postscript to her letter, directing that any bank note should be sent in two halves, and not sent on the same day, ‘for safety’.
Her letter sent shivers down the spine at Eggesford, but it is unlikely to have met with any response. Resentment at the cost and suffering she had brought to the Portsmouth family could not be so easily forgotten or forgiven. That she dared to write now was an affront to all decency. She was said to have left the country with a full set of the family’s silver that she subsequently sold. Even today, items are being recovered from North America.
In Chatham-Kent, all Mary Ann had left were her memories of being ‘once the Lady of Hurstbourne Park’. She lived as a recluse in a rather rundown wooden-frame house on the north-east corner of Adelaide and Murray streets. One neighbour who died in 1943 remembered as a child being scared of the old lady ‘who was often seen hobbling about in a crimson velvet cloak trimmed with ermine’. Locals knew her as Lady Alder, and she never tired of telling them that she was once the countess of Portsmouth. She told them a mix of lies (the Prince Regent, later George IV, was at her wedding), as well as truths (so was Byron). After her death in May 1870, she entered the stuff of local myth and legend. ‘Spirit walks’ in the town still stop by the site of her home to record ‘how the Countess of Portsmouth came to Chatham’. She died far from home and alone. She was the misfit now.4