The story starts at the edge of the void; at the moment when the official history of Wentworth House stops.
PART I
1
In the crush of mourners, one man walked alone behind the glass hearse.
William Charles de Meuron Wentworth-Fitzwilliam – ‘Billy Fitzbilly’, as the miners called him, or Lord Milton, as his courtesy title styled him – was William, Earl Fitzwilliam’s grandson and heir. In addition to the main family seat and estate at Wentworth, his £2.8 million inheritance included a 100-room mansion and 90,000 acres at Coollattin in Ireland; a fifty-room house in the heart of London’s Mayfair; eighty racehorses; a further 5,000 acres of land dotted around Yorkshire; a priceless collection of paintings and books and a massive portfolio of shares. The income from his coal holdings alone would bring in more than £87,700 a year.*
‘Milton looked very tall and good-looking,’ Lord Halifax, a neighbour of the Fitzwilliams who went to the Earl’s funeral, told his sister enviously. Aged thirty in 1902, wearing the dress uniform of an officer in the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, Billy cut a dashing figure. He was classically good-looking, according to the benchmarks of the Edwardian era. Even-featured, with warm, smiling eyes, he had thick dark brown hair and a sprucely clipped moustache. His face still bore the colour of the African sun: he had recently returned from the Transvaal where he had won a DSO fighting in the Boer War.
A brilliant huntsman and polo player, Billy, the heir to one of the richest aristocrats of the twentieth century, was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1895 – when he was twenty-three – until he became the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, he sat as MP for Wakefield. Prior to that, in his late teens, he had served as ADC to the Viceroy of India. These are matters of record: the scant details that can be firmly established about him at this stage of his life. Little else is known. ‘He had a perfect horror of publicity of any sort or kind,’ his sister, Lady Mabel Smith, recalled. ‘It ran all through his life from when he was quite a boy. It was one of his chief characteristics.’
In a vaulted cellar beneath a large house in Southern England there are sixteen trunks containing Billy’s personal effects: the things he regarded as precious. There is a pair of black and tan hunting boots that still bear the worn creases of the chase; a set of tiger’s teeth; a miner’s lamp and helmet and a battered leather cigar case: inside it, the disintegrated flakes of a Monte Cristo that he never smoked. There are boxes of wax seals and rolls of parchment bearing grants of title. The things Billy was proud of are also there: the DSO awarded during the Boer War; the plumed hat and ceremonial robes he wore for his inauguration as Mayor of Sheffield in 1909, and a handwritten letter from King George V, dated July 1912. At the bottom of one trunk there are hundreds of silver buttons stamped with the Fitzwilliam crest – a winged griffin and two coronets. Some are as small as a 5-pence piece, others the size of an old half crown: the spare buttons for Billy’s shooting and hunting jackets, they were also the tokens of livery, worn by his servants on the breasts and sleeves of their tailcoats.
Things, not words, are all that remain. The trunks contain few papers. There are no letters written by Billy, or copies of letters that he received, although, tantalizingly, the paraphernalia of writing has been kept. One trunk, stamped with a coronet and Billy’s initials, contains monogrammed letter folders and notepaper holders, and the large blotting pad that once lay on his desk. Framed in dark green leather, it is stained with use. The imprint of hundreds of back-to-front words, hieroglyphs impossible to decipher, are scattered across it.
The true identity of Billy Fitzwilliam is the first of the Went-worth mysteries. If his spiteful, meddlesome aunts are to be believed, we cannot be absolutely sure who he really was.
On the eve of his grandfather’s funeral, the scandal and controversy that were to dog his succession had ignited behind the walls of Wentworth House.
2
It had been raining for days; torrents of water, blackened by coal dust, cascaded from the roof gutters. Squalls of wind, blowing straight off the moors, whipped across the Park, driving the rain horizontally against the thousand windows, as if tiny fragments from the gravel drive around the house were being hurled from outside. The clock in the North Tower at the furthest end of the East Front struck three, the signal on a dark winter afternoon for the lampmen to begin their evening round.
Upstairs, in the ‘Duchess of Kent’, the state bedroom reserved for royalty and other important guests, the body of the dead Earl lay in a four-poster bed that was crowned by a cornice of gold. A pistachio-coloured silk valance ran beneath it, trailing luxurious hangings and thick braided tassels. Gold and green were the primary colours of the state bedroom; the principal items of furniture – the intricately carved mahogany Louis Quinze bed and a pair of Sheraton cabinets, eight feet tall – were formal and austere. The hand-painted wallpaper, a heavy yew-green, embossed with tiny clusters of silk flowers, added to the room’s sombre tone.
The body had been there for five days. Even in death, the retinues of staff at Wentworth continued to serve the Earl. His servants had washed and dressed his corpse, and a plain oak coffin, made by the Estate carpenters from one of the oaks in the Park, chosen by the Earl some years before he died, stood ready for the following morning’s burial.
The temperature in the room was as cold as the dead Earl; deliberately so, the chill necessary to slow the process of decomposition. A ring of white and gold oval-backed chairs formed a crescent around the bed, carefully positioned by footmen for the succession of visitors – members of the family, senior servants and the local nobility – who had come to pay their last respects.
It was a world away from the pit villages nearby, where the Earl’s miners stood up their family corpses in the corner of their front parlour rooms to make way for the crush of mourners, and where, in the overcrowded cottages, dead relatives frequently shared the family’s beds. As late as the 1920s, a boy from Greasbrough, one of the Fitzwilliams’ villages, told his teacher, ‘Please, Miss, they’re goin’ ter bury our Ernest tomorrow, he’s in t’ big bed in t’room now. Our Jimmy wouldn’t sleep wi’ him last night – ’e wor frightened – but I worn’t, ’e carn’t hurt ya, ’e’s dead and wrapped in a sheet, so I sleep next ’im and our Alice next to me, an’ our Joe at t’ bottom.’
The Fitzwilliam household accounts for February 1902 show that eighty-five servants were on duty to serve the twenty house guests staying at Wentworth for the funeral.
Aside from the senior servants – the house steward, the butler, the groom of chambers, the chef, the housekeeper, and Lord Fitzwilliam’s personal valet – there were four kitchenmaids, four still-room maids, eight charwomen, one steward’s room boy, two confectioners, six under-chefs, two brewers, six housemen, two lampmen, seven footmen, three scullery maids, nine housemaids, two under-butlers and one clockman.
Almost all the house guests were members of the Fitzwilliam family; the Earl’s children and grandchildren, and his cousins, nephews and nieces. They brought their own valets and ladies’ maids, adding a further twenty-two servants to the total.
By comparison to the outdoor staff at Wentworth, the number of indoor servants was small. More than 300 workers were required for the upkeep of the grounds, stables and Home Farm. There were gardeners and groundsmen, park keepers, gamekeepers, deer keepers, a bear keeper, forestry workers, mole catchers, millers, grooms, coachmen, stable lads, farm hands, huntsmen, kennel men, carpenters, slaughtermen and mechanics. The Fitzwilliams’ annual wage bill for the Estate and household staff at Wentworth came to more than £1 million in today’s money. It did not include the wages of the thousands who worked at their collieries and chemical factory, and on the family’s other estates in Yorkshire and Ireland.
Yet living conditions at Wentworth were medieval. The 6th Earl had made few concessions to the modern world; the servants of the great feudal overlords would have slotted easily into its daily routine.
The house had five miles of corridors: coa
l, wood, water, food and light all had to be carried great distances by hand.
Elfrida, Countess of Wharncliffe, Billy’s eldest daughter, who was five when the 6th Earl, her great-grandfather, died, described the house as it was at the time of his death. ‘There was no electric light, no gas, no central heating. In our living rooms we had glorious raging fires, so the bedrooms and day nurseries were warm, but otherwise the entire mansion was like an icehouse. In the hard winters that we used to have then, going downstairs to be with my mother after tea was a very chilly affair, we could never go along the passages without heavy shawls and spencers.’
‘Spencers’, short, close-fitting woollen jackets, woven in the Fitzwilliam tweed, were also issued to servants and guests to wear when moving from room to room.
There was no hot or cold running water at Wentworth. One water pump – hand-pumped and cold water only – served each of the four floors. Hot water was heated in vast cauldrons on the stoves in the kitchen in the basement. There were no toilets or bathrooms. ‘Baths – carried into the bedrooms by footmen – were tin baths,’ recalled Lady Elfrida. ‘The hot water was brought up from the kitchen two floors below. Depending on the location of the bedroom it was sometimes over a furlong away. The servants carried the water in large brown metal cans. The baths were filled by the footmen and emptied by the housemaids. A cotton cover hung over the side of the bath. You only used the cloth if you wanted a soak. The footman would come in and pour fresh hot water under the edge of it before inquiring, “Is there anything more, Sir?”, regardless of the sex of the bather.’
Even human waste had to be carried by hand. The 6th Earl had installed one flushing toilet for his personal use; aside from this, there were no other toilets, flushing or otherwise, in the guest and family apartments at Wentworth. Close-stools were used; a detachable porcelain bowl mounted in a wooden box. To empty the bowls, the servants covered them with a cloth and carried them through the corridors down to the basement where they were washed out before being returned to the rooms.
The lighting at Wentworth in 1902 was equally arcane. Two men, Moses and his assistant – known as Aaron by the family – were employed seven days a week to light the house. Their day began before dawn. Oil lamps, with large glass funnels, and candles were the only source of artificial light. Every morning, Moses and Aaron walked the length of the house blowing out and replacing the candles they had lit in the chandeliers and wall sconces, and collecting the oil lamps they had put out the evening before. The lamps required a great deal of maintenance; Moses and Aaron had their own room, the lamproom, located in the basement. The wicks had to be trimmed and the lamps filled, cleaned and polished, before being put back in place around the house. ‘They did nothing else except lamps,’ recalled Lady Elfrida, ‘never had a day off, never wanted one. When my father succeeded, he insisted that Moses and Aaron should each have a Sunday off and a day off in the week. Moses couldn’t understand this and went in tears to the head steward and said, “What have I done wrong, I’ve always worked on a Sunday, now I’ve got to do nothing, what have I done?”’
On the afternoon of the 6th Earl’s funeral, Moses and Aaron began their round earlier than usual. With twenty members of the Fitzwilliam family staying, together with their personal valets and ladies’ maids, the two men had further to travel – to the bedrooms in the outer reaches of the East and West fronts.
Beginning shortly after lunch, it took the lampmen as long to light the house as it did for the sky outside to turn from day to night. Although at Wentworth the night was never black, it was red; a reflection of the glow from the after-burn from the hundreds of chimneys that ringed the Park.
Moving slowly through the house, on reaching the Duchess of Kent room, Moses and Aaron were required to place a lamp on the ebony and gilt pedestal by the dead Earl’s bed, and to light the candle branches of the cheval mirror on the wall next to it – in preparation, so they assumed, for the family’s last farewell.
Yet, contrary to late Victorian custom, there was to be no final gathering of the clan at the Earl’s bedside that night. The House Steward’s Book for 24 February 1902 records that most of the family took supper on trays in their rooms; the few letters that survive in the Fitzwilliam archives reveal that they were not only avoiding one another, they were barely speaking. When they did communicate, it was in the heat of blazing rows, or via hurriedly scrawled and acrimonious notes.
The tension at Wentworth, as reported by friends and neighbours of the Fitzwilliams who visited the house in the days before and after the 6th Earl’s funeral, was unbearable. The Halifax family, who lived a few miles away at Hickelton Hall, were frequent callers. ‘Agnes and I were over at Wentworth again yesterday where we saw most of them,’ wrote Lord Halifax to his sister Emily. ‘They one and all looked greater wrecks than you can conceive. I feel sure Lady Mary has really been odious to poor Lady Alice, really tormenting her and making herself, and stirring up others to be, thoroughly disagreeable.’ Lady Mary Sutton, Lord Halifax’s daughter, writing to her brother, said, ‘Affairs at Wentworth seem in a most wretched state – none of the aunts speak to Billy – one of the trustees, Mr Doyne, is ill with scarlet fever, and the other, Lord Zetland, being Maud’s father won’t act alone so nothing can be done – and it is said that Lady Alice is trying to appropriate everything she can.’ Ten days after the funeral, Lord Halifax, who was due to meet his sister in London, and reluctant to commit the latest news to paper, sent her a cryptic note, ‘Agnes tells me the rows at Wentworth are portentous and of this more on the day.’
The rows were between Billy Fitzwilliam and his uncles and aunts. Billy was the only son of Viscount Milton, the late Earl’s eldest son, who had died twenty-five years earlier in 1877. The Earl had produced fourteen children: eight boys and six girls. Five had died in his lifetime: those who survived him, gathered at Wentworth for the funeral, were in their late fifties and sixties.
With the exception of two of them, there was little love lost between the aunts and uncles and their nephew. Billy had been estranged from them for many years, leaving them to hold sway over the elderly and fragile Earl, and to dictate the running of the house and the Estate. Billy had been at Coollattin, the family’s seat in Ireland, when he heard the news of his grandfather’s death. Some indication of the deep divisions within the family can be found in a letter written by his favourite cousin, Kathleen Doyne, to another family member. ‘I think in my yesterday’s note I told you we had just had a wire from Billy to say that poor old Grandpapa had passed away. It seems that the dear old man had bronchitis and had been ill for a week or more but no one until just the last let Billy know.’ The ‘reptiles’, as Kathleen refers to the aunts and uncles, had deliberately denied Billy the chance to see his grandfather before he died. ‘As to the funeral,’ she wrote, ‘Billy was dreading the ordeal more than he could say, and no wonder.’
A clue to the tensions at Wentworth lay within the fabric of the house itself.
There was one wing that Moses and Aaron did not visit on their lamp round: the nursery wing, an important part of any great country house. Staffed by posses of nursery maids and governesses, this was where the blood line was raised; the sons who would carry on the title, the daughters who might bring wealth and prestige to the family by marrying well.
In 1896, when he was twenty-four years old, Billy had married Maud Dundas, the eldest daughter of the Marquess of Zetland. They had three young daughters and were hoping for a son and heir. Yet, as Elfrida, Countess of Wharncliffe, remembered, the nursery wing at Wentworth in 1902 was all but derelict. No instructions had been given by the 6th Earl to renovate it; the wing had not been touched for nearly fifty years. ‘They’d done nothing for Billy Fitzwilliam’s family to come into – nothing! You wouldn’t believe it, the nurseries that we were put into with the peacock paper – it was falling down on to the floor. Damp! It was in the most desperate state. The windows were falling out of the frames, there was glass out of the window frames th
emselves. They’d done nothing to it, nothing, not a bit.’
It was as if Billy and his family did not exist.
Early that evening, the tense atmosphere in the house escalated with the arrival of Lady Alice. She had travelled by train from London, where she had been ill for some days with an attack of flu, carried on a day bed, accompanied by a doctor and two nurses.
Of all the Earl’s children, Alice had been closest to her father. A dominant character, she had run her father’s affairs for more than three decades. She was a shrewish-looking spinster in her late fifties, with mouse-brown hair and a pale pinched face. Wentworth had been her home since birth. In the last ten years of the Earl’s life, aside from a few old family retainers, ancient wet nurses and governesses, Alice, her unmarried sister, Charlotte, and their elderly father were the only occupants of the house.
Billy loathed his Aunt Alice – as his daughter, Elfrida, remembered, ‘She made the milk go sour just by looking at it’ – and he loathed her for good reason. Lady Alice was the chief conspirator in a plot hatched by Billy’s uncles and aunts to oust him. They believed their nephew was an impostor, a fraudulent claimant to their father’s fortune and to the Fitzwilliam title.
Elfrida put it bluntly: ‘They wanted to kick him out.’
A century on, much of what lay behind the impostor allegation is obscure; perhaps deliberately obscured. The trail is almost cold: the fire that burnt for three weeks at Wentworth in 1972, consuming sixteen tons of the Fitzwilliams’ correspondence, had been preceded by others. The private papers of all but two of the conspirators have been destroyed; a systematic destruction that extended across collateral branches of the family, as well as along the main line.
Earl Fitzwilliam’s letters, Billy’s and Maud’s, and the correspondence of eight out of ten of the aunts and uncles who conspired against Billy, or who were privy to the conspiracy, have not survived.
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 2
