The Damnation of John Donellan (32 page)

Edward was an interesting character. As the eldest surviving son of Shukburgh Boughton, he had known all his life that he would inherit the Boughton baronetcy if the line from Mary Ramsey's children failed. (Hence his initial reaction to Theodosius's death – ‘wonderful news'; his grandmother Catherine Shukburgh's hopes had been fulfilled.) As a younger man, he had written to his brother Charles in India warning him not to marry ‘a Nabob' woman and seek one with a fortune at home, but he did not follow his own advice;
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he had a lifelong mistress, Salome (‘Sally') Davis, once the serving maid at his home, Poston Hall in Herefordshire, and subsequently kept comfortably by Edward while she bore him five children. The daughters lived; the sons died as infants; and when Edward died in 1794, aged fifty-three, Theodosius's title passed to brother Charles, who was still smarting from the humiliating blow of being left only £100 in his brother's will.
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Lawford Hall was, temporarily at least, still the residence of Anna Maria, even though it became Edward Boughton's property. But she did not, as it turned out, have to live there entirely alone. Family ledgers in Anna Maria's hand show that she and Theodosia spent several months together there in 1782/3. Instead of a mere list of expenses, as shown in the rest of the accounts, though, Anna Maria includes a lengthy diary entry for 1782, writing that ‘Mrs Donellan' came to visit in July, bringing ‘her child, a man, and a maidservant'. Theodosia evidently stayed for some twelve weeks,
returned again in November and left again in February 1783. It was not the first extended visit between the two. Just before Christmas 1781, Theodosia had her mother to stay with her in Northampton. It had taken Theodosia nearly nine months before she could contemplate the company of her mother after the trial; but she charged Anna Maria for the privilege – £126 0s. 0d. ‘for board of myself and servants and two horses', Anna Maria noted.

Anna Maria's accounts here are rather touching. They are really an extended narrative of the time she and Theodosia spent together, with a slight undercurrent of self-justification, as if she were determined to correct the idea that they might be estranged: ‘March 1783,' she records, ‘I went with her and she and her family set out with me for Bath; her man came a week after and they all stay'd at my house till I returned to Lawford which was Sunday 21 June, and my daughter and man and maidservant came to Lawford and her two children … the Monday after they all came she sent for her other two horses … she took all away on 19th July 1783 … since then I went to Mrs Donellan's house ye 27th August and stayed there …' So it goes on, with no rents apparently charged to Theodosia in Bath ‘at my house' but copious amounts flooding out each time Anna Maria stayed with her daughter – at a rate, in modern terms, of £330 a week. A daughter referred to only by her surname, and never her Christian name – a curious relationship indeed. However close they appeared to be now, it is also interesting that Theodosia maintained her independence, and was not willing to make Lawford her home again. Anna Maria resolutely records that Theodosia's home was in Northampton.

Before he died in 1794, Edward Boughton disposed of Lawford Hall, which had – much to his mother Mary Greville's pleasure – been part of his inheritance from Theodosius.
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It is to be presumed that Anna Maria was spending more time now in Bath, as the family lawyer, Caldecott, was to record. Whether Edward felt that Lawford was an unnecessary financial encumbrance, or whether he agreed with the locals' view that it was ‘cursed', is debatable. The fine house was put up for auction. There is a story that Caldecott attended the auction and bought the house on Anna Maria's
instructions, but when he got back from the sale he told her that he had bought it for himself, not for her – and promptly demolished it.
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The tale may not be accurate, however: a map of 1787 shows it still standing,
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though it was indeed taken down some time later (the most quoted date being 1793, the year before Edward died). Nothing now remains of the once graceful Tudor mansion; all the stones of both the house and its walled garden were taken away, some of them going to repair a local road bridge. A less-than-graceful end to the ‘fine archway',
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the parlour where Donellan argued his case over the bottles, and the hallway where Theodosius's coffin had stood on the great table in the oppressive afternoon heat of August 1780. Only the old stable block remains, and is now a private home; but a few tantalising undulations in the fields both to the east and west of the remaining building may hold the key to the exact location of Lawford Hall itself.

Anna Maria would now be living permanently in the fashionable watering hole of Bath, the home of her brother, the doctor Robert Rye. In 1782, the solicitor Caldecott wrote that she was seen about town flaunting her ‘wealth' and ‘boasting of property'; she had new clothes, he said, a new livery on her carriage, and had been heard to say that she would marry again ‘if the opportunity offers'.
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And we know from her ledgers that she was there again in 1783 with Theodosia. However, the opportunity of marriage did not offer.

Anna Maria died in Bath in 1787 aged fifty-nine. Her past had not been forgotten; the newspaper notices of her death could not resist a hint of notoriety by mentioning that her son Theodosius had died ‘after a medicinal draught given by his mother'.

And what of Theodosia, who by 1787 had not only lost both her brother and her husband but the company of her own mother?

Caldecott reported that, fourteen months after Donellan's death, Theodosia was still living ‘altogether alone' in Northamptonshire but ‘will I believe marry Dr Bree, a young physician, before the year is out'.
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His belief was misplaced. Robert Bree, born in 1759 in Solihill, was three years older than Theodosia and had matriculated from Oxford just seven years before. He was working as a
physician at the General Infirmary in Northampton and in time he would become an authority on asthma, from which he himself suffered. But the romance did not end in marriage, and evidently it was Bree himself who was disappointed in the matter. Anna Maria objected to the amount of money that Theodosia was proposing to settle on Bree, and their relationship foundered.

In March 1783, Theodosia drew up a new will; now possessed of a large fortune, it seems that her primary objective was to protect her two children. Her executor was William King, an alderman of Northampton and probably Theodosia's cousin, the son of Anna Maria's half-brother.
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The closeness of the Kings to Theodosia was evident in both the will and the fact of Theodosia having fled to Northampton before the trial; King now took on the responsibility, should Theodosia die, of managing all her ‘manors, messuages, tenements, hereditaments and real estates' and ensuring that some £6,000 (£377,000) should be raised for Maria when she was twenty-one or on the day of her marriage.

Theodosia's mother was already in Bath, and it seems that Theodosia herself moved there some time before 1785. Whether Anna Maria's health was declining is not known, but Theodosia certainly seems to have taken charge of some of Anna Maria's domestic affairs. ‘Hired a cook maid,' she scribbled in a notebook. ‘She to have a rate of twelve pound a year to clean the rooms. She came to Lady Boughton's place 5 March and I paid her.'
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The year 1787 marked the end of an era with Anna Maria's death. It was six years since John Donellan's trial and execution, and Theodosia's children were now aged nine and seven; but there may have been another family member living in Bath who was in contact with her. A brief reference in family papers in Ireland note that John Donellan's father Nehemiah, who had once been colonel of the 39th Regiment and commander of the garrison at Carrickfergus – and who had gained his son his place in the army – had died in a private madhouse belonging to Sir Joseph de Burgo at Killaloe, having been driven insane both by a private lawsuit and the scandal of the Boughton trial.
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However, there is a will in existence for a Nehemiah Donellan who died in Bath in 1787. It makes
no mention of Theodosia, but is it too much of a coincidence to suppose that John Donellan's only surviving relative was brought to Bath by the woman who was his daughter-in-law?

Theodosia was probably still in Bath sorting out her mother's affairs when she met Egerton Leigh, son of Peter Leigh, former Attorney General of South Carolina. When the family had lost their estates in the American War of Independence of 1775–83, Egerton had returned to England to find that most of their property in England had gone into Chancery and all that remained was Little Harborough Hall in Warwickshire. Theodosia and Egerton therefore both had possessions in the county, and their friendship blossomed into a romance. It is surprising that Theodosia felt secure with a man who, although well connected, by his own admission did not have a wholesome reputation: he admitted freely that he had been ‘deceitful and desperately wicked' in his previous dealings with women.
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Neither did he seem to be a stable character: his journal shows extreme swings of mood and lurid dreams and visions.
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Nevertheless, Egerton felt that his life changed dramatically after he met Theodosia; and this is quite some testament to her own calm and strength of character. Indeed, Egerton converted to the Baptist faith and set up a new church in Rugby in the poorest part of town, where Theodosia laid the foundation stone.

The couple were married in Northampton on 12 May 1788.
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They remained in Bath until 1792, when Theodosia sold her property; from 1792 they seem to have been either at Brownsover Hall or at Cavendish Place in London. Their first child, a little girl called Theodosia Carolina Leigh, died in 1792, and another girl, Theodosia Egerton, died as an infant.
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Ten months after Theodosia Carolina died, another daughter, Theodosia de Malsburg, was born, followed by a son, Egerton, in 1795. Sadly, Egerton died when he was eleven years old, so the sole remaining child of this marriage was Theodosia de Malsburg Leigh.

During this time, little is known of what happened to Maria and John, Donellan's children. At the time of the marriage they were ten and seven respectively, following which their surname changed to Beauchamp (their grandmother's maiden name). Maria, sadly,
becomes clear at only two moments in her life: on the August afternoon in 1780 when Donellan claimed he had spent some time walking with her in the fields near Lawford, and then only again nineteen years later, when she drew up her will. She was then living in Hotwells, near Bristol, briefly famous for its supposedly curative waters. She left everything to her mother and, after Theodosia's death, to her brother John,
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she died just a few months later, probably from tuberculosis.

John had been given the living of Newbold church, and went up to Oxford while he was still in his teens, matriculating shortly before his sister's death. He gained a Bachelor of Honours in 1802, and was ordained the same year, when he went to live in Dallington, near Northampton. On 23 November 1803, he too drew up his will, leaving everything he owned not to his mother and step-father but to Anna and William King – undoubtedly the same Kings who had helped his mother when she fled Lawford Hall in 1780.
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John died just two years later, and was buried in Newbold on 26 August 1805. The cause of his death is a mystery: one lurid Victorian account has him committing suicide as a teenager after a local boy told him ‘Better a tradesman's son than a murderer's son', but that is patently untrue.
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However, it is possible that John's real identity caught up with him once he became a curate in a Northamptonshire church, and the attendant rumours were too much for him. Either that or he was simply a victim of natural causes, like his sister six years before him. Here was the end of John Donellan's line, and the son who – if his father had not been found guilty of poisoning Theodosius – would have inherited the Boughton estates.

In the space of fourteen years, from 1792 to 1806, Theodosia and Egerton endured the deaths of five children, and so it is not very surprising that the couple doted on their remaining child, Theodosia. Their daughter, in contrast to her siblings, was destined to live a long life and found a considerable dynasty, but not before she had driven her father to distraction.

By 1811, the Leighs were living at 72 Portland Street, London, and were enjoying a close friendship with their step-cousins, the Rouse-Boughtons.
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Egerton and Charles seemed to have been
close, and Egerton was soon to need Charles's sangfroid in a family crisis. Theodosia fell in love with a young upstart (according to Egerton) called John Ward and, although Egerton banned him from the house, he had his suspicions that she was seeing him secretly. In March and April of 1811 a flurry of letters from Egerton to Charles begged him to act as an intermediary; it appeared that Theodosia was in Warwickshire with Ward and ‘I fear that we are too late.' He was right. The headstrong Theodosia had run off to Gretna Green in Scotland some three weeks before, and was already married.
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Egerton Leigh was apoplectic. The whole affair reads like a Victorian melodrama, Egerton telling Charles that he felt Ward was after Brownsover Hall: ‘It is a most happy circumstance that the property is in Lady Leigh's power.' Actually, John Ward had a complicated distant connection to the Boughton family.
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Theodosia and John – or perhaps Egerton himself – tried to repair the scandal by posting banns of a forthcoming ‘marriage' in the high-society church of St Marylebone, London, as if Theodosia and John were still single. There is no record of that ‘marriage' actually taking place, however: perhaps the young couple thought it was too much of a farce. By November, Egerton was almost beside himself with fury, and his letter to Charles reveals a man who was having the greatest difficulty in seeing his daughter as a fully grown woman. ‘An infant,' he wrote, ‘is seduced to go away with a stranger … a man thus makes unsatisfactory infancy its prey – No – it cannot be – The son was a material instrument in the seduction – seduction – seduction – My dear Charles, I cannot soften this term.'
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