Wedlock (12 page)

Mary could hardly claim she had not been warned. Her mother had advised against the match - not least on account of the large and needy Strathmore family - while her governess, Elizabeth Planta, had similarly pressed her not to go ahead. During the protracted marriage negotiations, Mary had gradually realised that she and the earl, twelve years her senior, had little in common. She found, she would later say, ‘our tempers, dispositions, and turns different’.
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The earl’s cool, reserved demeanour, which had at first seemed so alluring, had soon spread a chill over Mary’s flirtatious, capricious ways, while his scholarly interest in literary works did not extend to encouraging his young fiancée’s talents in the same direction. But although she had desperately wished to call off the engagement, her pride had prevented her either from voicing her doubts to her intended spouse or from confiding in her mother. Keeping her anxieties to herself, she had therefore gone ahead with vows from which she knew there was probably no escape. Since divorce was both unattainable and unconscionable for the vast majority of married couples in the eighteenth century, matrimony truly was for better or worse, till death do us part. In her own home, free to pursue her literary interests and her botanical studies, she could perhaps have convinced herself that the marriage might work. Certainly many couples brought together in arranged marriages later found mutual affection and even love. But now that she was leaving her familiar surroundings, her social calendar and leisure pursuits dictated by her husband, encircled by his tight-knit family, the prospects for a happy, harmonious partnership seemed remote. Finally she had to concede: ‘I was imprudent in marrying Lord Strathmore, against my mother’s advice.’
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For although John Lyon had been forced to change his name to Bowes by a private bill through the House of Lords, in compliance with George Bowes’s will, he had no intention of letting Bowes’s daughter change him.
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Born and brought up in County Durham, educated by tutors at his mother’s Durham estate before entering Cambridge, John Lyon had seen little of Scotland or his crumbling Scottish seat of Glamis for most of his youth. He probably even spoke with an English accent. Yet with his family’s fortunes long entwined with the turbulent history of Scotland, his ancestors as bound to the Scottish throne as the Bowes forefathers had been to the English, there was little doubt that - in the words of his guardian and relative Lord Chesterfield - he had been ‘born a Jacobite’.
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Descended from Celtic or Norman origins, the Lyon family had first gained prominence in Scotland in the fourteenth century when an earlier John Lyon was created Thane of Glamis by Robert II and soon after married the king’s daughter Joanna.
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The stronghold at Glamis, or Glammis as it was often called, in the marshy land north of Dundee, had originally been built as a royal hunting lodge. King Malcolm II had died there, after being fatally wounded in battle nearby in 1034; six years later his grandson Duncan had been slain by his cousin Macbeth, who seized the crown only to be killed himself some years later by Duncan’s son Malcolm. Although Duncan’s death most probably happened in combat rather than in cold blood, egged on by a majority of Scottish lords rather than committed in self-serving treachery, and took place at Elgin, nearly seventy miles from Glamis, the name of Macbeth would forever be associated with Glamis Castle through Shakespeare’s flight of imagination. Indeed, so ingrained would the myth become that an eighteenth-century architect indicated ‘The Room where King Duncan was murdered by McBeath’ on his plans for the castle, while another room is still named ‘Duncan’s Hall’ as the legendary site of the regicide.

If the tale of Macbeth was fanciful, there was every bit as much tragedy in the bloodshed that dogged the Lyon family in the ensuing centuries. Caught up in the factional struggles that split the Scottish nobility in the sixteenth century, the seventh Lord Glamis was sentenced as a small boy by James V to be executed as soon as he attained his majority, while his mother, Janet Douglas, was burnt at the stake on trumped-up charges of witchcraft. Finally released five years later, the young lord reclaimed his forfeited castle, where his son, the eighth lord, later entertained Mary Queen of Scots. Judiciously switching allegiances, the ninth Lord Glamis accompanied James VI to England when he succeeded to the crown in 1603, and was created First Earl of Kinghorne for his troubles. The family’s influence and affluence were reflected at the time in the extensive rebuilding of Glamis with its imposing fairy-tale towers and tapering turrets. In another deft transfer of loyalty, the third earl - who formally took the title of the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne by royal charter in 1677 - belatedly pledged allegiance to William of Orange.

With the family’s political clout firmly on the wane as the eighteenth century dawned, its support for the doomed Stuart cause would continue - along with the bloodshed. The fourth earl, John Lyon’s grandfather, managed to father the next four holders of the title, who followed him in swift succession. John Lyon’s uncles, the fifth, sixth and seventh earls respectively, all died young - before he was even born - and the first two in particularly gory circumstances. Uncle John, the fifth earl, was killed supporting the first Jacobite rebellion at the Battle of Sheriffmuir in 1715, while Uncle Charles, the sixth earl, died an innocent bystander in a street brawl at the age of twenty-eight. Uncle James, the seventh earl, likewise died young, so that Thomas Lyon, actually the sixth son, unexpectedly found himself installed as the eighth earl in 1735. Shrewdly marrying a County Durham heiress, Jean Nicholson, to shore up the family’s ever-depleted funds, the eighth earl spent much of his married life quietly avoiding trouble on his wife’s estate, leaving Glamis to descend once more into neglect. It was at Hetton-le-Hole, the Nicholson family seat north-east of Durham and just eleven miles south of Gibside, therefore, that their first son, John Lyon, was ‘born a Jacobite’ on 17 July 1737.

Eager to avoid another of the violent ends which his forefathers had met, the eighth earl established his young family at Hetton-le-Hole, with rare forays to Glamis, and fraternised chiefly with the coal-owning gentry of the north-east, including George Bowes. When Newcastle defended its medieval walls against the second Jacobite uprising in 1745, the eighth earl kept his head down and his family out of harm’s way in their County Durham home. As the local supporters of the rebel army were rounded up and hanged the following winter, his fiercely capable wife spent Christmas in Bath where she sent for nine-year-old John, the little Lord Glamis, to join her. And when the earl died in January 1753, before John had reached his sixteenth birthday, the formidable dowager countess was determined to keep her eldest son firmly within her orbit and her influence.

Although she now had to compete for dominance against fourteen other guardians or ‘curators’ named by the late earl - including the Earls of Chesterfield, Panmure and Aboyne - the dowager countess was a fair match. Travelling to Glamis with her son in tow to discuss the young earl’s future education in 1754, she listened politely as ‘all the Curators declared in the strongest terms, that it was their opinion, that my Lord should go to an university in Scotland’.
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Apart from the desire to keep the ninth earl close to his Scottish seat - and, of course, to his Scottish guardians - the curators voiced their concerns at the steep costs an English university would impose on the family’s limited resources. Indeed, not only were tuition fees higher at Oxford or Cambridge, the curators persisted, but since the earl was likely to mix there with English aristocrats possessing considerably larger riches ‘he might thereby acquire a habit of living at an expense which his fortune was not able to bear’. But Lady Strathmore plainly did not wish to send her son out of her dominion, no matter that the Scottish universities far outperformed their English counterparts academically. Squared up against the united ranks at Glamis, she insisted that as the young earl had expressed his preference for an English university - which concurred happily with her own opinion - ‘she could not think of not giving him his own choice’.

After borrowing an impressive stack of books from the castle library - in English, French, Latin and Greek - Lord Strathmore enrolled on 3 March 1755, at the relatively advanced age of seventeen, at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
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His brothers James, a year his junior, and Thomas, four years younger, would follow. But if the dowager countess seriously believed that she could keep a close check on her son’s activities and expenditure once he left her side, she was sadly mistaken. For no sooner had the earl escaped his mother’s iron rule than he began to flex his muscles, quickly acquiring the extravagant English tastes his guardians had feared.

With Pembroke having languished moribund for years, unable to attract students or funds and riven by discord, the fellows eagerly looked forward to the arrival of the ‘beautiful Lord Strathmore’ and his admission fees. Entered as a ‘nobleman’, these were almost double the usual rates. ‘Pray is the Thane of Glamis come?’ enquired William Mason, the former don, of his friend the poet Thomas Gray, at the beginning of March. Gray, who was on the point of moving from Peterhouse to Pembroke, having earned acclaim for works such as his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, announced the earl’s arrival with a flourish a few days later. Writing to his close friend, and former Pembroke fellow, Thomas Wharton, he declared: ‘Ld S: is come, & makes a tall genteel figure in our eyes. His Tutors & He appear to like one another mighty well.’
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Indeed, the earl and his tutors got along famously - maybe even a little too well. Lord Strathmore forged strong bonds with his personal tutors Henry Tuthill and the Reverend James Brown, later Master of Pembroke, as well as with the affable Gray. His cosy college connections almost embroiled the earl in scandal, however. In early 1757, college authorities abruptly dismissed Tuthill and stripped him of his fellowship amid sensational but mysterious charges of misconduct. Originally a friend of Gray’s from Eton, and possibly Gray’s lover at some point, Tuthill is thought to have been sacked over allegations of homosexuality, perhaps with Gray, but conceivably with Lord Strathmore or his brother James, who had been admitted to Pembroke the previous year.
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The college register for February records enigmatically that: ‘Since Mr Tuthill’s absence fame has laid him under violent suspicion of having been guilty of great enormities, to clear himself of which he has not made his appearance and there is good reason to believe he never will.’ Letters between Gray and his friends at the time are thought to have been destroyed or censored to hush up details of the incident. Lord Strathmore’s bills include fees to Tuthill for private tuition until December 1756 but the earl and his brother James left Pembroke at the beginning of January - about the time Tuthill made himself absent - and only returned on 10 February. Gray expressed obvious relief at their return, which had plainly been in doubt, writing to Wharton: ‘Ld S: & his brother are come back, & in some measure rid me of my apprehensions for the College.’
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Whatever happened that January in Cambridge was taken to a watery grave: Tuthill drowned himself shortly after.

No whiff of the scandal appeared to reach Durham, however, where the dowager countess continued to worry about her three sons’ hefty college expenses as well as her eldest son’s health, prone as he was to recurrent chest complaints. While Lord Strathmore dismissed her concerns with characteristic disdain, it was Gray who overcame the countess’s objections and persuaded her to allow the earl to visit Europe as part of a diplomatic mission to Portugal with Thomas Pitt, a fellow Cambridge student and nephew of the former prime minister, William Pitt the Elder. Relating news of the young pair’s plans to his friend Wharton in early 1760, Gray urged that the details should remain secret ‘for fear my Lady should be frighted at so much Sea’.
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A grand tour of Europe was an obligatory requirement in the curriculum vitae of all self-respecting aristocrats and gentlemen in the eighteenth century. Embarking by sea at the height of the Seven Years’ War may not have seemed the most sensible plan, especially to an anxious mother, but Lord Strathmore assured her that the Mediterranean climate would prove ‘a sovereign Remedy’ for ‘any lurking Complaint in my Breast from Colds’. Before leaving he also wrote to George Bowes, expressing concern for Bowes’s declining health and sending respects to ten-year-old ‘Miss Bowes’.
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Having peremptorily discharged his guardians immediately he had come of age in 1758, the 22-year-old earl was now firmly in charge of his own finances. Making up for lost time under his mother’s parsimonious regime, over the next three years he would leave a trail of bills across southern Europe, drawn on the Scottish peer Lord Gray’s account with Coutts in London, in a frantic spending spree of epic proportions. Faithfully recording their impressions in a travel journal, ‘Observations in a Tour to Portugal & Spain 1760’, the two friends meandered across the Iberian peninsula denigrating the food, transport, fashions and women in the manner of typical British tourists.
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Buffeted across the Bay of Biscay, the pair arrived in Lisbon in March. First impressions set the tenor for the expedition. Very few of the Portuguese women had ‘any pretensions to Beauty’ the earl wrote to younger brother Tom, now nineteen and at Cambridge, so that ‘you may assure my Country women I shall bring home my Heart safe & sound’.
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Embarking on a sightseeing tour by mule-drawn cart, the travellers were disappointed in the food - ‘garlic, saffron & bad oil’; the transport - ‘a miserable calash’; the roads - ‘very poor and barren’; and the accommodation - ‘full of fleas and vermin’; although the architecture passed muster. Spain offered little reprieve. Only Barcelona won grudging approval and then chiefly for its bullfighting which drew the praise: ‘The spectacle is certainly one of the finest in the world.’