by Susan Nagel
In Britain at the time, although there were close to seventeen million people, only around four hundred thousand could vote. Voting was not done in secret, and people were often paid to cast their ballot for a particular candidate. Mary, although she controlled huge amounts of land, as a woman, could not vote. The new middle class based in the industrial cities had disproportionate representation, as the distribution of seats in Parliament was based on property and not on population. Robert Ferguson, ever the people’s champion, could no longer resist his true calling. He went back into public life. It had been twenty-six years since the Whigs had controlled Parliament and twenty-four since he had been forced to resign his seat amid the scandal of the love affair. As Mary’s family dwindled—her father and dear uncles the General and “Georgie” had died—an entire way of life was disappearing in the country. Railroads had begun to transport people and things around Great Britain, fashionable people were eating at hotels and in restaurants, and the mood of reform was in the air. In 1830, another revolution in France stirred reform in England, and with the promise of revised voting laws, the Whigs returned to power.
On May 23, 1831, while his wife remained in London—quietly away from election commotion—Robert Ferguson was elected Member of Parliament for Kirkcaldy. Robert timed his reentry into politics at the precise moment when he thought his ideas would not be blunted by the opposing party, and in 1832, a dream would be realized when he would participate in passing the Reform Act, legislation that set a new path for the future of elections in Britain. As the middle class and laborers considered the kind of revolution known in France, voting reform became essential. Large landowners like Mary who constituted the aristocracy were for the most part despised by the common man; this was certainly no different elsewhere. After the Reform Act was passed, corruption was still possible, but the gesture toward the populace served as a temporary stay from possible revolt. Mary’s former husband, who despite a brief early flirtation with an independent point of view, remained a strong Tory, and when he received a lifetime peerage in 1820, he voted consistently against the Whigs. Lord Elgin was as vehemently against the new, more liberal voting laws as Robert Ferguson was a proponent of them.
Mary remained in London for the summer of 1831, when she saw her husband enter the House of Commons. On June 21, King William IV went to the House of Lords, and on Monday, August 1, she saw the king open the new London Bridge. She and Robert attended the opera, the theater at Drury Lane, the ballet La Bayadère, and dined with the Berrys, Belhavens, Mannerses, and the Henry Fergusons. It was an exciting time, and in the fall they returned to their constituency, together very much in the public eye, appearing at the Haddington, Whittingham, and Gilmerton balls. Ferguson went to Edinburgh to attend the Caledonian Hunt. They were clearly a political couple enjoying the local scene. The following spring, after spending the winter between Raith, Archerfield, and Biel, they returned to London for the parliamentary session. Mary went to the theater, where she saw the renowned Fanny Kemble, and once again her vivacious charm drew the world to her door. That year, they entertained important politicians like the chancellor. Robert expanded his influence, gaining an additional power base when on December 18 he was elected MP for Haddington, a town in East Lothian, where his wife was the largest property owner. That was a testament to his skills and good reputation as well as to her popularity. In 1833, the couple was acknowledged with the greatest honor that could befall a politician: the prime minister, Earl Grey, came to dinner at their London home.
Although by nineteenth-century standards all of Mary’s “old guard”—her grandmother Lady Robert Manners; her aunts Mary and Bluey—had lived to a very old age, by 1834 Mrs. Nisbet was in fragile health. Mary made a concerted effort to take good care of her elderly mother. She and Robert changed their London routine, staying at Portman Square instead of Nottingham Place; they visited Mrs. Nisbet more frequently to dine or simply to take her out for a drive. Mary often brought along fun company to keep her mother’s spirits up, like Jane Ferguson, Henry Ferguson, and Fanny. Mary was a dutiful daughter who never forgot the toll her own actions had taken on her mother’s peace of mind; her infinite respect and love for her mother never waned. All through Mary’s most difficult moments, even when Mrs. Nisbet may have lost patience with her daughter, she had always been her closest ally, and when Mrs. Nisbet died on Mary’s fifty-sixth birthday, Mary was filled with unspeakable sadness. When Aunt Bluey died the following year, on February 14,1835, an era had truly ended for Mary.
She poured her heart into the plans for remodeling the Dirleton church while Robert became the first county member for East Lothian. She enjoyed dinners with the Dukes of Sussex and Norfolk and spent time with Jean and the Berry sisters, but for Mary her mother and Aunt Bluey were irreplaceable. Suddenly, her life took a surprising turn: for the first time in nearly thirty years, Mary saw her own daughters.
So indoctrinated with the notion that their mother’s scandal would spoil their chances of making good marriages, they had not even invited her to their weddings. That fear was misplaced, since all of the girls married men from very fine Scottish families. Mary Bruce married Robert Dundas, the great-nephew of Lord Melville; they would have one daughter, Mary Georgina Constance, known as Constance, or “Connie,” to those closest to her. Matilda would at nearly forty marry Sir John Maxwell of Pollock, and they would remain childless. Lucy, the child who was only one and a half years old when she was forcibly removed from her mother, married John Grant of Kilgraston, and they had thirteen children. One of their daughters, Anne, married Captain John Brooke, eldest son of Sir James Brooke, the fabled White Rajah of Sarawak. In 1841, Brooke, an English soldier, was named ruler of Sarawak by the sultan of Borneo as a reward for his military exploits. Sadly, Anne died very young in Sarawak, and her husband predeceased his own father, leaving the title to his brother, Charles.
In 1835, the girls extended the olive branch toward their estranged mother—after all, there was a fortune involved. Mr. Dundas, married to the eldest of the girls, Mary, would even change his name eventually to receive the inheritance. If the girls were worried about how their mother would respond to their years of indifference, neglect, and even ill treatment, they need not have done so. Once the door opened, Mary flung it open wide. She had always embraced strangers and these strangers were her beloved babies. As she had reclaimed Bruce as “my own” in 1821, when they had reconciled fourteen years earlier, she did the same with her girls. On Thursday, January 29, 1835, she entered in her diary that “My Matilda dined with me at Douglas’s Hotel” in Edinburgh; on March 7, she “went to my own Mary in Eaton Square” in London; on August 31, Mr. Grant of Kilgraston, Lucy’s husband, came to Archerfield; and on September 3, “Matilda, Mr. Grant & Lucy and me came to Biel.” The following spring, on March 5, she noted, “My Matilda and Lucy came to London.”
Surrounded by the next generation, Mary and Robert looked toward the future. She was nearing her sixtieth birthday, and although political reform benefited the masses and not the large landowners, she and Robert continued to work together for what they perceived to be positive change. In 1837, Robert became the Lord Lieutenant of Fifeshire, a position long coveted but never achieved by Mary’s former husband, Lord Elgin. With her usual verve, Mary hosted Ronald Ferguson’s entire Seventy-ninth Highlander regiment at Biel, a truly colorful experience, and she continued her busy life, traveling to London, Edinburgh, and home, often in the company of Henry or Jane; she attended the theater, went to dinner parties, and in 1838, she saw Stonehenge and visited Ireland.
Mary Nisbet of Dirleton had been born when George III was king. She had lived through the birth of American independence, the French Revolution, and had known firsthand tyrants like Selim III and Napoleon Bonaparte. She had witnessed the exotic world of the fading Ottoman Empire and the waning world of the eighteenth-century aristocracy; now, in 1837, with the accession of Queen Victoria, she became part of the new age that was coming fast upon the British
Empire. The telegraph, the railroad, the photograph, were making the world a smaller place; the young girl from Dirleton who had mounted a horse, an ass, and a gold chaise boarded her first railroad car on July 13, 1839, and traveled from London to Birmingham, from Birmingham to Manchester, and home to Scotland.
That same year, the Custody of Infants Act was passed in Parliament, allowing a woman who chose to live separately from her husband the right to apply for custody of her own children under the age of seven. All three of Mary’s daughters had been under the age of seven at the time they were removed from her custody. Over the years, while her former husband grew deeper and deeper in debt and lived abroad to evade a growing army of creditors, Mary proved herself to be a fiscally responsible woman with a social conscience as well as a kindhearted stepmother. To her credit, Elgin’s second wife, Elizabeth, was very good to Mary’s children and worked hard to meld the two families; extraordinarily, shy as she was, she personally arranged for a number of successful commercial ventures that would benefit Broomhall and offer some relief to her family’s downward-spiraling finances.
On January 10, 1840, Mary saw a dramatic version of the recently published Dickens novel Nicholas Nickleby in Edinburgh. The Fergusons remained at Archerfield until the end of January, but at the beginning of February they left for their home on Portman Square in London; it wasn’t every day that the queen of England was to marry her consort, and they wanted to witness history. On February 10, Queen Victoria married her prince, and the festivities included a grand ball. London was the most exciting place to be that year, and although Robert was turning seventy-one and Mary sixty-two, they were two of the most vital and energetic people in town. They remained in London for the year which, sadly, did not end as happily. “I lost my poor Bruce about 6 o’clock Tuesday Evening 1st Dec.,” she wrote in her diary, and that tragedy was followed two days later when on Thursday, December 3, Mary added, “I lost my beloved Ferguson at half past 2 in the morning.” Robert’s funeral was on December 9, and Mary stayed in town to receive various Fergusons and politicians who mourned her husband. He was so beloved by the people of Haddington that they erected a statue of him in his honor. The figure of Ferguson stands on a column perched on a base bearing symbols representing justice, geology, and art; the inscription reads: “to a kind landlord, a liberal dispenser of wealth, a generous patron of literature, science and art.”
Robert Ferguson was buried at the Kensal Green Cemetery, which at the time was on the quiet outskirts of London. In the 1820s, the population of London had increased by some 20 percent, resulting in overcrowded churchyards. By the 1830s, there was a growing trend to bury the dead away from the city. Kensal Green Cemetery, based on the design of la Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris, was authorized by an Act of Parliament in 1832. Three years after Robert’s interment, Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex, the sixth son of King George III, was also laid to rest there; his sister the Princess Sophia followed in 1848. This cemetery, in fact, became the Père-Lachaise of London, containing the graves of such diverse celebrities as Anthony Trollope, William Thackeray, Fanny Kemble, and Freddie Mercury.
Lord Bruce predeceased his father by less than one year; Elgin died in Paris on November 14, 1841, leaving his family £120,000 in debt. His and Elizabeth’s son, James, who, coincidentally had been born on Elgin’s own birthday in 1811, inherited the titles and Broomhall. Another parallel occurred when James’s first wife bore him only daughters and his second wife provided him with sons and heirs. James distinguished himself in diplomacy like his father; he became governor of Jamaica, governor general of Canada, and the first English viceroy of India, and was widely known as an incomparable negotiator, having successfully brought about the Reciprocity Treaty between Canada and the United States and several trade agreements with China and Japan. Elgin County, Port Elgin, and the village of Elgin all in Ontario, Canada, were named for him, and his name is carved in the Canadian Parliament among Canada’s founding fathers. James Bruce, the 8th Earl of Elgin and 12th Earl of Kincardine, died in India and was buried in the Himalayas. He was said to be Queen Victoria’s personal favorite ambassador and certainly carried on the dynasty as his father had wished. Sadly, Mary’s son, Bruce, never achieved any kind of professional success, as he was ill most of his adult life. Mary never even acknowledged the death of her onetime husband in her diary, and although their dynasty may have been evanescent, their marriage, certainly meteoric, left a lasting legacy.
Chapter 25
STARBOARD HOME
Mary, now a widow, nonetheless maintained an exhausting social calendar. Henry, Fanny, their children, Jane, the Berry sisters, and all the Fergusons formed a tight circle around Mary, as did Robert’s political allies. One frequent visitor was Sir Benjamin Hall, commissioner of works and public buildings. Hall, known for his corpulence, was unofficially honored as the namesake for the new bell that chimed the hour and became known as Big Ben. He liked to dine at Mary’s. Although her life was as always full, she found it important to visit Robert’s grave and did so in March before she left for Europe.
Traveling with Henry, Fanny, and their children, Mary went to Waterloo, Brussels, and Antwerp, returning to London via Calais. Raith was no longer her home, as it had passed to Ronald, so she spent the summer traveling between Archerfield and Biel. Mary took other trips abroad in the 1840s, traveling as a dowager without a husband. She returned to Italy in 1845 and spent Good Friday and Easter Sunday at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, enjoying the pageantry as the king and queen of Naples appeared before the pope and throngs of worshippers. She went exploring old villas around Florence and visited the Pitti Palace and the Palazzo Vecchio; she also attended local horse races. She continued on to Pisa and Genoa and then to Switzerland, where she saw Zurich, Lucerne, Interlaken, Berne, and Lausanne, viewed Lake Geneva, and noted in her diary that she “crossed the Rhine.” Over the Alps into France, she went through Evian and Chamonix and then set out for Paris, where she stayed at the Hotel Bristol. She had been traveling for almost the whole year when in November Henry joined her in Paris. Together they visited the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the Louvre, and the Church of the Madeleine.
Mary returned home to London just in time to see her longtime friend Lord John Russell become prime minister. Mary’s daughter Mary, and her husband, Robert, now going by the surname Christopher after receiving Bloxholm Hall, visited her, as did Henry and Fanny. Sir Benjamin Hall continued to come for dinner quite frequently, and Mary helped Miss Berry celebrate her eighty-fourth birthday. For the first half of 1847, Mary’s stay in London included evenings at the opera, the theater, and visits to Dulwich College, Covent Garden, Westminster, and the Royal Academy, but in August, she went back to East Lothian with a purpose. Henry Ferguson-Davie was running for his father’s seat in Parliament, which with Mary’s help he won. On August 29, Henry became MP for Haddington; Mary’s daughter Matilda, her husband, Sir John, and Benjamin Hall were all on hand for the victory.
In 1848, as she turned seventy, Mary lived as audaciously as ever. She continued, for the next few years, to be at interesting and important events in London and Edinburgh, and influential people continued to come to her homes. On November 4,1849, the Lord Advocate came to Biel. That same year, on January thirteenth, Lucy’s thirteenth and youngest child was born in Edinburgh. Once the beautiful, young, glamorous Countess of Elgin, Mary was now a grande dame and the formidable matriarch of a growingly powerful and political family. Her own extended dynasty included son-in-law Robert Christopher, who had entered Parliament for Bloxholm and would become a member of the Privy Council, and Henry, who would prove a formidable representative for his constituency. On December 8, 1851, Anne’s father-in-law, the great Rajah of Sarawak, visited Mary. She became used to greeting and saying farewell to Fergusons, Brookes, and Grants as they departed and returned from military posts all over the globe.
Some fifty years earlier, when Mary had lived in Constantinople, her letters took months
to arrive in England and months to reach her with news. She had known firsthand the agony of uncertainty that accompanied long spells without information, and she had witnessed the fact that a lag in communication could change history. How many blunders and fiascos had occurred while people had waited for instructions or had news to impart that would contradict existing orders? Tens of thousands of people had been killed and regimes had been destroyed because of the inability to deliver timely messages; and now, the telegraph enabled people to cross divides in minutes. As she and her children traveled the globe, by sea or rail, cable wires were being laid at a frantic pace. While she stayed at her house on Portman Square in London in 1851, the whole world had its eyes on the Great Exhibition, held in the spectacular Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, which heralded the inventions to come.
