The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  The very next day she went straight to Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chancellor, to charge Dickinson with disturbance of the peace, the beginning of an escalating series of court battles between the couple. Cut off from her sources of income, Elizabeth was without most of her clothes or even any belongings. Dickinson, after she had fled, had taken possession of her plate, her linens, her clothing, and most especially, her jewelry—most of which, she learned later, he had immediately hocked to pay his mounting debts. He had raided Weston and the town house in Bath and carted off the furniture, silver, and other goods she had inherited from John Macie, removing them to his house at Dunstable. She in turn began once more to call herself Elizabeth Macie, widow, as if the marriage had never taken place. She launched a suit of jactitation in the Consistory Court of the Bishops of London; jactitation, from the Latin jactitare or "to boast," is an archaic legal term meaning to prohibit someone from publicly claiming to be your spouse; Elizabeth's suit was one of the last such cases ever pursued in England. She also launched a separate suit at the King's Bench to reassert the Hungerford suits in her own name.51

  Pursuing multiple cases in multiple courts, Elizabeth Macie stood in danger of being isolated as a radical, fallen woman. Even the Wiltshire chattering classes were against her. General Irwin, a frequenter of the Bath social scene, testified against her, siding with her erstwhile husband. Mrs. Harris, the wife of the author "Hermes" Harris and Elizabeth's tenant at Great Durnford Manor, wrote of the news to her son (later Lord Malmesbury): "I hear there has been a Tryal at the Salisbury Assizes between Mrs. Macie as she calls herself and Mr. Dickenson, whom she married at Paris; and now she disowns the match; but, as I am informed, General Irwine [sic] swore in the Court he saw them married at Paris, so a verdict was given for Dickenson."52 The acid tone of the aside—"Mrs Macie, as she calls herself"—suggests Elizabeth had made a spectacle of herself in the very place where she would most have hoped for support.

  Elizabeth Macie's indignant, self-righteous outrage at those who crossed her drew her into staggering number of lawsuits for a woman of her time. Smithson's childhood was dominated by these suits, which lasted years and involved countless testimonials from relatives, tenants, and others. The spins and eddies of these legal challenges—the elation of small triumphs, the dark cloud of setbacks, the tense wait for appeal or reversal—must have underscored the idea that family heritage was everything: money, security, identity. His mother and aunt did finally win some important battles over the Hungerford properties, and through arbitration they managed between them an equitable split of the estates, Elizabeth Macie ending up with Great Durnford Manor, Henrietta Maria with Studley House.53

  But James Smithson was a keen observer, and his apprenticeship in life began at the knee of a high-strung, tempestuous woman, a mother unlikely to have sheltered her son from her rage at a system she believed was unfairly slanted against her. Her disillusionment as often turned to petulance, and she had a fearsome temper. According to Dickinson, "any Contradiction or Disappointment threw her … into very violent Agitations."54 All the lawsuits entered against Elizabeth Macie over several decades accuse her of making threats. She allegedly terrorized her first husband's cousins, the Leirs, over the Weston estate, threatening to destroy their inheritance by scorching the land and selling off all the timber. Dickinson she threatened to run into debt and ruin. These accusations seem vivid, credible reports of the outbursts of a shrill and unstable woman.

  Smithson's mother, though, was not simply a harridan or an ogre. She was sparkling and witty enough to have captivated the Duke of Northumberland as well as others, and she seems to have lavished a fierce love on those she protected. Her capacity for devotion is evident in her early letters to Dickinson. Smithson was her firstborn, and he was probably much in her thrall, a faithful companion to her in the trenches. In a portrait that possibly depicts the two of them, painted around 1770, a little boy sits upon his mother's lap. He wraps his arm around her neck in a gesture at once possessive and protective. But he is the one who seems already world-weary; she stares out at the viewer in her sumptuous dress, proud, defiant, and vulnerable. The two of them in the end seem very much alone.55

  In these early years Smithson suffered a series of dramatic childhood illnesses, episodes severe enough to have registered as growth-arrest lines on his teeth. The precarious state of his health plagued him for the rest of his life. As an adult Smithson projected an aura of vulnerability and weakness, and he regularly made reference to his feeble constitution. He was almost invariably described as "delicate" by those who met him. When he was nineteen, on an expedition to Scotland, his companions attempted to leave him behind at one point, advising him to wait for their return, "as he was delicate." And when Smithson was in his early thirties, one dinner-party guest refrained from teasing him, deciding that it "would have been cruel, considering the delicate state of his health & penury of Vital power."56

  Today it is impossible to diagnose exactly the nature of Smithson's illnesses. He complained of spitting up blood at one point, a near-complete loss of hearing at another, and "a terrible cold which has made me fearful of going out" in yet another instance. Forensic investigation of his bones in 1973 revealed no syphilis or other infectious disease, and virtually no arthritis. The conclusions drawn from this posthumous analysis, in fact, indicated that Smithson was, at the time of his death, around the age of sixty-four, a relatively strong and vigorous man—despite terrible teeth problems, like most of his contemporaries. The one other independent perspective on Smithson's constitution, from 1805, yields a similar portrait, depicting the forty-year-old Smithson as fairly well built ("assez fortement constitue"). Neither of these assessors was privy to Smithson's chronic complaints about his health. Their conclusions suggest that Smithson may have been something of a hypochondriac, or at least vigilant and voluble about the slightest sign of frailty; Sir Charles Blagden, for one, who saw Smithson at a dinner party in Paris in 1814, noted in his diary: "Smithson pleaded his bad health: is capricious, does not know when to go."57

  Smithson lived in an age that placed a high value on the persona of the consumptive, a figure who lived a life of intense feeling and who through suffering had developed a refined and sensitive spirit; he may well have enjoyed the exclusivity of that Romantic disposition and sought to cultivate it.58 It is also more than likely that from childhood, with a narcissistic mother prone to abandoning him for months at a time, Smithson learned early on that being sick was a very good way of gaining attention.

  Mysteriously, towards the end of 1770, in the midst of these lawsuits, Smithson's mother at the age of forty-two again found herself pregnant. The child when it was born in August 1771 was called Henry Louis Dickenson, and it was clearly intended that the child be perceived as a son of John Marshe Dickinson; Elizabeth Macie seems to have opted for a slight alteration in the spelling of the name, perhaps to distance herself and her child in some small way from the odious Dickinson. And yet in the very weeks when this child must have been conceived, Elizabeth Macie (as she insisted on calling herself) and John Marshe Dickinson were hurling accusations at one another in several different courts. Dickinson had also rewritten his will to exclude any mention of her whatsoever.59 Relations between them could hardly have been more antagonistic. They had not been living under the same roof since the summer of 1769, and Elizabeth Macie claimed in court not even to know the whereabouts of Dickinson. She suggested that he had "fled the Kingdom" and accused him of laying claim to her as his wife and yet leaving her destitute and without support. All in all, it was hardly a promising premise for even an irrational moment of reunion.

  The Dickenson name appears to have been used as a cover. A month before the birth of this unanticipated child in the summer of 1771, John Marshe Dickinson conveniently died. Out of the way, he could not contest the naming of the boy. Henry Dickenson was in all likelihood a full brother to James Smithson. Elizabeth Macie, it seems, had either kept or renewed her relationship with the
Duke of Northumberland. Neither of these boys was ever publicly acknowledged by the duke; they lived their lives as bystanders to his gilded story and hankered after any association with him. Smithson and Dickenson both collected memorabilia with the ducal arms as well as other tokens of their father: a silver medal from 1766 commemorating the restoration of Alnwick Castle, with the duke's portrait on the reverse; silver plate with the family crest; and an engraving of the duke.60

  But although Smithson and Dickenson were not publicly recognized, they may well have enjoyed a measure of secret, silent support from their famous father. Their mother was assertive and determined enough that it is possible to imagine her engineering some kind of encounter or audience for her sons with the duke. And her solicitors, Edward Woodcock and his son Elborough, may have served as a quiet go-between. There were several large deposits made into Woodcock's account by the duke, in the 1770s, at a time when it is not clear that Woodcock had any official relationship as solicitor to Northumberland. And Woodcock likewise paid out significant sums to Elizabeth Macie, who at the time owed large amounts to Woodcock on account of the multiple lawsuits in which she was involved.61

  An engraving of the first Duke of Northumberland that was owned by Smithson or his brother Henry Louis Dickenson.

  The duke did support the two other illegitimate children that he fathered—two girls, born of another widow, Margaret Marriott, a demure-looking woman with large eyes and light colored hair, some fourteen years younger than Elizabeth Macie. These girls, unlike the children the duke had fathered with Elizabeth Macie, were called Percy and given the treasured first names of Dorothy and Philadelphia—respectively the names of a sister of the duke who had died quite young, and of the duke's mother. Mrs. Marriott, who was born on an indigo plantation in South Carolina, probably traveled in similar circles as Smithson's mother. Her daughters grew up very close to Smithson, and she too was an important figure in his life—though whether as surrogate mother, or lover, or simply "a most particular and intimate friend of mine," as Smithson himself described her, is unclear.62

  Smithson's back-story—a noble, famous father, a wild, theatrical seductress of a mother, an illegitimate secret birth, disputed ancestral lands, and untold family lawsuits and countersuits, lasting years—eventually acquired the status of legend. Years later his Oxford friend Davies Giddy disdainfully recounted a very convoluted version of it in his diary:

  Macie afterwards Smithson was a Gent. Com. [a Gentleman Commoner, a high social rank of student] when I entered at Pembroke College. His Mother's Husband was a country gentleman to whose estate he has succeeded; but the first Duke of Northumberland was allowed on all sides to be his Father. At the time of his matriculation I have heard that a Blank was left for his surname, Mr Macie having at that period instituted suit to annul his marriage which the wife defended. The Duchess of N. Then died, when Mrs Macie wished the marriage dissolved with the hope of marrying the Duke of N. But this the Husband from spite opposed. I have heard that a suit was actually instituted in which the parties switched sides.63

  Giddy was mistaken about a number of basic facts. Smithson never succeeded to John Macie's estate, though he did presumably enjoy some of Macie's money simply by virtue of his mother's legacy to him. And it was not, of course, the Macie marriage that was the subject of spiteful suits of annulment. But Elizabeth Macie's actions—her long involvement with the duke, her tormented relationship with Dickinson, and her vengeful pursuit of her property rights—colored Smithson with a kind of notoriety.

  When Smithson was about eight years old, around the time he would have begun formal schooling, he appears to have been left once more by his mother, deposited in London as the ward of one of the family solicitors. His guardian was Joseph Gape, a docile, avuncular bachelor from a prominent St. Albans family, who enjoyed the high-ranking post of treasurer at the Middle Temple and had also long served as a legal adviser to the family.64

  Since Smithson had been born in Paris, it remained first of all to make him English. An act of naturalization, however, did not confer full rights of citizenship. Inserted at the end of all bills of naturalization were the restrictions that tolled for Smithson: "that the said Jacques otherwise James Louis shall not be hereby Enabled to be of the Privy Council or a Member of either House of Parliament or to take any Office or place of Trust either Civil or Military or to have any Grant of Lands, Tenements or Hereditaments any inheritable property from the Crown to him or to any Person or Persons In trust for him Any thing herein contained to the Contrary Notwithstanding."65 Since the time of Edward III, when plague and war had sent many English subjects abroad, the government had attended to the rights foreign-born subjects should enjoy back at home, but a succession of kings with foreign allegiances had curbed these privileges; the restrictions cited in Smithson's case had been established in the time of William and Mary, as protection against claims by his Dutch followers, and been reenacted under George I, targeted likewise against his Hanoverian followers.66 For Smithson then, here already, before even the age of ten, was laid the groundwork for a lifelong sense of disenfranchisement. The ceiling on the heights he could attain as an English gentleman was entirely due to the circumstances of his birth. Had his mother not felt compelled to hide her pregnancy, it is unlikely he would have been born abroad. The stain of illegitimacy had been compounded by the privations of limited citizenship.

  It was Gape, not Smithson's mother, who presented the petition to the House of Lords for his naturalization in June 1773. And it was probably Gape who took charge of the boy's schooling. It is not known where, if anywhere, Smithson attended.67 He might have been tutored privately. It is also quite possible that he attended Charterhouse, the school occupying the site of an ancient Carthusian monastery in the heart of the City of London. Smithson's brother Henry Louis Dickenson attended in the early 1780s, lodging in the boarding house on Charterhouse Square run by Master Henry Berdmore. And Charterhouse, through its Holford scholarships, had a long-standing relationship with Pembroke College, Oxford, where Smithson matriculated in 1782.68

  Wherever Smithson gained his early education, he does in any case seem to have been raised in the tradition of the Whig aristocracy, with a great love for all things French, a penchant for travel, and a belief in progress. He gained a thorough knowledge of history, a love of logic, a fluency in French, as well as Latin and presumably ancient Greek. He must have mastered the polite acquirements of riding, fencing, music and dancing. To the polish of a gentleman Smithson married the rigor and questioning of a scientist. An utter perfectionist, he corrected any error that he came across in his books, even grammatical ones. He remained hungrily acquisitive of knowledge all his life, gathering information and observations into myriad notebooks and journals. True to his times, he organized the disparate knowledge that he collected, encyclopedia-like, under themed headings; it covered a vast discursive palette—"history, the arts, language, rural pursuits, gardening, the construction of buildings, and kindred topics."69

  If Smithson did attend Charterhouse it was probably there that his friendship with the future chemist William Hyde Wollaston, a fellow Charterhouse pupil one year younger than Smithson, who went on to Cambridge, was kindled.70 No tradition of natural philosophy is known to have been taught at Charterhouse at this time; neither was it especially common at other schools—though the itinerant lecturer Adam Walker did teach astronomy at Eton and Christ's Hospital, where among his eager listeners was one Percy Bysshe Shelley.71 But based on the expert knowledge Smithson displayed at Oxford, it is likely that, by the time he headed to Pembroke, he was already awake to the mounting excitement surrounding the investigation of the natural world. It was the arena that would become the dominant focus of his energies, that to which he would dedicate his life, and, eventually, his fortune.

  TWO

  Oxford: The Lure of Novelty, 1782-1784

  Macie I sincerely esteem—& as a Gent[leman]. of fortune, who dedicates his whole time to Mineralogy, in a ratio
nal manner, I think him a valuable character in this country. He is very young.

  —William Thomson to Joseph Black, 1784

  WHEN SMITHSON ENTERED Oxford, in early May 1782, Britain was reeling from its humiliating surrender of the American colonies, a defeat that had forced the resignation of Lord North, the prime minister, and was to drive the King to consider abdication. North happened also to be the chancellor of the university, and the Tory stronghold of Oxford bore the gloom and shock that pervaded the government particularly heavily. Smithson, however, likely saw things in a different light. His family friend, Lord Shelburne, whose neighboring estate of Bowood had served throughout Smithson's childhood as a great salon for scientific and political radicals like Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, and Jeremy Bentham, had all of a sudden become the only member of the opposition with whom the King would negotiate. Shelburne was elevated to a key position in the new ministry; as secretary of state for home affairs, he was in charge of negotiating the peace with the United States. Smithson's aunt Henrietta Maria wasted no time in sending a letter of congratulations and recommending her husband George Walker as one who could "speak to America."1

  Smithson at seventeen, his hair powdered and his slight frame clad in the latest fashions, had connections to the very pinnacle of power. Shelburne was not popular, however, and though he was made prime minister a few months later in the summer of 1782 following the death of Lord Rockingham, his ministry was short-lived. Shelburne's precarious position mirrored Smithson's own fragile equilibrium at university. Oxford, as one of only two universities in England, was a rarefied rite of passage for the elite of the land. It was above all an experience shared between fathers and sons, and this was a bond that eluded Smithson entirely. Most boys were accompanied by their fathers on their momentous entrance to this honey-colored kingdom of domes and spires and pinnacled towers. "When my Father & myself came in site [sic] of Oxford from the Hill on the Burford Road," Smithson's friend Davies Giddy recalled, "I was curious to inquire about the several buildings. My Father pointed out every one of them, excepting two which he could not make out. These were the Observatory & the Hospital. The Observatory had been built since my Father's time."2 Smithson, though no stranger to the privileges of the place—his mother's husband John Macie, his uncle Lumley, and his own father the Duke of Northumberland had all attended (at Queen's, St. Edmund Hall, and Christ Church, respectively)—was without a father at this important moment, an absence underscored by the age-old rituals of that first day.