Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  It seems that Bayliss possessed information that Billy wanted to suppress; a breach of confidence, or the fear of it, was what drove him to bring the case.

  The two men had parted company at the end of 1900. Shortly after, Billy served a Writ of Attachment on the solicitor to recover the £1,500 he claimed he owed him. Bayliss responded angrily; an extract from the letter he sent to Billy was read out during his trial:

  You cannot be surprised that I intend to hit out hard. By your underhand shuffling I consider you have forfeited all claims to the confidence about your affairs that I scrupulously observed. I have been interviewed by a representative of the Press to whom I have given information of your dealings with me.

  The precise nature of Billy’s ‘underhand shuffling’ was not specified in court. Nor did anything ever appear in the Press. What is clear, though, is that Billy, after receiving the solicitor’s threatening letter, wanted to silence him – and for good. If it had been simply a matter of money, he could have pursued the debt recovery action via the Writ of Attachment. Instead, he chose to lodge a complaint with the Law Society, the solicitors’ governing body. To seek to have Bayliss struck off the solicitors’ rolls was a more vitriolic way to proceed; if successful, it ensured censure and humiliation, and an end to Bayliss’s legal career.

  Yet Bayliss was nearing seventy: in 1902, his career was almost over. It seems that Billy’s true aim in discrediting his professional integrity was to destroy the credibility of the information his solicitor had threatened to reveal.

  Billy’s documents cannot be regarded as conclusive. In offering a resolution to the mystery of his identity, they raise more questions than they answer. That the heir to one of Victorian England’s greatest industrial fortunes was born in a wooden shack in an Indian camp, miles from anywhere, in a region plagued by mosquitoes and black flies is in itself mysterious.

  As vouched for by his sister, Lady Mabel Smith, Billy had a ‘perfect horror of publicity’: an obsession with secrecy, as she remembered, had been one of his chief characteristics from childhood. But why, from such an early age, had he been so secretive? Was it because he knew he was not his father’s son? Or was there something else he wanted to hide?

  Billy’s documents point to his father, William, Viscount Milton. He, if Lady Alice is to be believed, was the guilty party; a man so desperate to produce a son and heir that he was prepared to abandon his newborn baby daughter and replace her with Billy.

  4

  William, Viscount Milton, the eldest son of William, the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam, was born in July 1839. He died just thirty-eight years later. It was beginning to look as if the family was cursed: he was the second of three successive heirs to die before reaching the age of forty.

  In William’s case, the Fitzwilliams were doubly cursed. His death, in 1877, came as a relief.

  ‘One of the hard lessons one has to learn, one which I fear I have been rebellious about, is to trust one’s children cheerfully to God when they suffer,’ wrote his mother, Harriet, Countess Fitzwilliam, on the afternoon he died. ‘I have been a long time learning it – but I hope I know it now. I call to mind so often now the time when my dear William seemed to stand very near to death as a little boy – how I prayed for his life to be spared! And could not say “Thy Will Be Done” and now I remember how much sooner he might perhaps have been with his God had I been more submissive, how much suffering he and others might have been spared and now I do most earnestly hope that his sufferings may not have been in vain and that we may all learn all that God in His mercy designed us to learn from it.’

  To the British public, in the course of his short life, William Milton became a hero – one of the most famous and fêted of the nineteenth-century explorers. At the age of twenty-four, after an epic and hazardous journey across the Rocky Mountains, he discovered a land route that linked the Atlantic to the Pacific. On his return to England in 1864 he received a rapturous response from the Press. ‘Lord Milton is something better than a Lord; he has proved himself to be a fine, heroic young man, of true English pluck and daring,’ wrote The Ilustrated Times. ‘Lord Milton,’ the panegyric continued, ‘is no shiftless Lord Dundreary, neither is he a mere pleasure-hunter, but a genuine Englishman – a splinter off the old Hartz rock – brave, tough, wise, energetic.’ Milton’s book, The North-West Passage by Land, an account of his journey published in 1865, ran into five editions in eight months and was still in print at the end of the century.

  Yet he was no hero to the family. After his death, his name was taboo.

  ‘My grandfather never spoke about his father,’ recalls Billy’s granddaughter, Lady Barbara Ricardo. ‘We never knew anything about him. Were never told anything. Never knew about the book he wrote of his great adventures in Canada. There wasn’t even a copy of it in the library at Wentworth. There were tens of thousands of books there – not one single copy!’

  More than a century after Milton’s death, his great-grandson, Michael Bond, set out to retrace his journey across North America and Canada. ‘I couldn’t believe there was so little to go on. It was like trying to build an ancient invertebrate from its trace fossils. He has all but been blanked from the family records. Remarkably for the heir to an Earldom, even his will has disappeared.’

  Bond had touched the edge of the void in the family archives; it is from the mid-nineteenth century, around the time of Milton’s birth, that the destruction of the Fitzwilliam papers begins. ‘I imagined that the family would have been proud of its explorer son,’ Bond wrote. ‘So where were the biographies, the photograph albums, the archived letters, the gilt-framed portraits and the relics of the Wild West?’

  Was he an embarrassment, Bond wondered. Had he done something inexcusable? Searching through the family archives, at the bottom of one meagre file containing rough drafts of Milton’s speeches, a few scraps of letters, and some notes from his secretary, Bond made a significant discovery, one that accounts for the mystery surrounding Milton’s life and explains why his name was taboo. ‘I found a small bundle of papers that would transform the way I looked at Milton,’ he wrote. ‘At first they resembled unpaid bills: lists of products and a signature, some numbers, his name at the top. But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.’

  The bad blood of a man who appeared to be among the most blessed in mid-Victorian England gives the impostor affair a fresh twist.

  ‘Fits are treated as madness and madness constitutes a right as it were to treat people as vermin,’ Lord Shaftesbury, whose son, Maurice, was an epileptic, remarked in 1851.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, epilepsy was tragically misunderstood. Doctors diagnosed it as a form of madness: there was no cure for it, and no understanding of what caused it. Deriving from the Greek word epilepsis, meaning ‘a taking hold of’, a state of being seized by some power of a mysterious nature, even its name supported the belief that it had some supernatural cause.

  A terrifying and stigmatizing mythology had formed around the disease, still lodged in the popular consciousness centuries after it had been created. Islamic lore attributed epileptic fits to the blow of a ghost; in the Ottoman Empire, they were said to betray an illicit sexual love affair, brought on by a jealous spirit’s attempt to choke the guilty party. But in mid-Victorian England, to devout Christians like Earl Fitzwilliam, it was the verdict of the Bible that was the most damning. When Christ healed a child suffering convulsions, the episode was represented as the casting out of a demon: ‘a spirit taketh him and he suddenly crieth out; and it teareth him that he foameth again’ (Luke 9:39).

  Over the centuries, the treatment for epilepsy had been as barbarous as the views attributed to its cause. In the first century, at the Colosseum in Rome, epileptics waited to drink the blood of mutilated gladiators: ‘They think it most valuable to sip
the blood, still warm, still flowing, from the wounded themselves and thus to imbibe the breath of life immediately from the fresh opening,’ Pliny recorded. In later centuries, various body parts were prescribed to treat the disease: the sixteenth-century Parisian physician Jean Fernel recommended a mixture of mistletoe, powdered human skull and peony seeds gathered when the moon was waning. When Milton was growing up, miners in the pit villages around Wentworth used an old folk remedy to treat epileptic fits: a dried calf’s tongue was tied with a piece of string and placed around the afflicted person’s neck.

  The ingredients of Milton’s prescriptions and the few letters that survive from his doctors indicate that he was sent to the top medical specialists of the day. From the onset of his illness, his parents spared no expense in the search for a cure for their eldest son and heir. Milton was treated by Sir Alexander Morrison, a prominent Edinburgh physician, and a disciple of a group of French doctors, based at the notorious Paris lunatic asylum, Salpêtrière. Though widely regarded as the leading experts of their day, their views were almost as malevolent as the Ancients’, serving only to heighten the stigma and shame attached to the illness. Dr Beau, who conducted a study of sixty-seven epileptics at the Salpêtrière asylum in 1833, concluded that his patients’ epilepsy had been caused by sorrow, morbid terror and masturbation. Dr Beau’s findings were replicated in further experiments conducted by other experts during the 1830s and 1840s. Even as late as the 1880s, the British neurologist Sir William Gowers was still attributing epilepsy to excessive masturbation.

  Demons, self-abuse, fear; it was hardly surprising the Fitzwilliams themselves took fright.

  During much of Milton’s childhood, their solution, which was typical of their class, was to keep him out of sight. Like other wealthy ‘lunatics’, he was exiled from his family from an early age, funnelled into the shadowy network of ‘madhouses’ that offered a cloak of secrecy: the private asylums and single-lodging establishments, both at home and abroad, that had proliferated in the first half of the nineteenth century.

  His fits began before he was eleven years old. In 1850, Milton’s father sent a letter to his father, the 5th Earl, from the Fitzwilliams’ estate in Ireland.

  William may have to remain here longer than I had anticipated, as his health is not very settled, and he has had many but only slight attacks of unconsciousness. The Edinburgh doctors recommend quiet, and no amusement of an exciting tendency.

  Shortly after, Milton was sent to Avignon in France. Writing home to his mother at Wentworth, his anxiety about the long, enforced periods of separation from his family is painfully clear:

  Please do let me know as soon as possible when you want me to come home for certain, and when and where we shall all be the next coming and midsummer holidays, if you knew how I long for an answer I am sure you would send one directly. On 15th April I shall have been here 3 months which was the greatest time you said I should stay and as I abominate being away here most thoroughly I really must come home then, and not go away again anywhere for an awfull long time except to Eton.

  In their search for a cure, to the consternation of the round of specialists they consulted, the Fitzwilliams tried everything. An undated letter from one doctor mysteriously contains a lock of Milton’s hair: ‘I see no prospect of all this business finishing,’ he wrote. ‘Dr Willis saying that he can cure the thing appears to me very extraordinary.’

  Dr Willis was the notorious proprietor of an asylum called Shillingthorpe. In 1847, the Medical Practitioner ran the following advertisement:

  This Asylum for the Insane was established by the celebrated Dr Francis Willis, who had the happiness of restoring his Majesty George the Third from the serious malady with which he was afflicted in 1788. It is now conducted by his grandson, Dr Francis Willis, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, in the style of a country gentleman’s residence. It is exclusively adapted for persons moving in the upper ranks of society. The Invalids are separately provided for in their own private apartments, and do not associate with each other, unless they are capable of joining Dr Willis’s family. The numbers are very limited.

  Shillingthorpe was one of several ‘aristocratic’ asylums that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century. Modelled on grand country houses, they boasted aviaries and bowling greens, cricket pavilions and pagodas. One establishment, Ticehurst, even had its own hunting pack. Catering exclusively for the sons and daughters of the well-born, the intention was to mimic ‘Society’: dances, billiards, Latin and Greek lessons, cards and concerts were among the many forms of activity on the curriculum.

  When Milton was at Shillingthorpe, Dr Willis was known as a strong disciplinarian. His excessive fondness for the use of mechanical restraints – strait-waistcoats, handcuffs, hobbles, leg-locks and the ‘coercion chair’ – was criticized by the Lunacy Commissioner in 1854: ‘It is painful to know that such views are entertained by a few physicians, who are men of education, but apparently proud of adhering to ancient severities.’

  Despite Dr Willis’s severity, Shillingthorpe’s royal imprimatur lent it an extra cachet. Yet the luxurious comforts on offer at the aristocrats’ asylums rendered them the more grotesque. They were desperate places. Many of the patients were not insane; like Milton, some were epileptics, others had been incarcerated by their families simply for falling in love beneath their class. At Ticehurst, in April 1847, one patient, Augustus Gawen, was admitted for proposing marriage to a fisherwoman, and another, Henrietta Golding, was confined after ‘she had shewn strong inclinations to form an improper connection with a Person of very inferior grade.’ The psychological scars inflicted on patients like these must have been considerable. The availability of private apartments meant that the patients did not live cheek by jowl, as they did in the paupers’ asylums, but Milton, and men and women like Augustus Gawen and Henrietta Golding, would have had some exposure to the other inmates – patients who were clinically mad. In 1857, lifting the veil of secrecy that shrouded the asylums tailored for ‘persons moving in the upper ranks of society’, William Browne, the Superintendent of Crichton Royal, was keen to stress that high birth did not diminish the ravages of madness. The ‘manic glorying in obscenity and filth’ was by no means confined to the working classes: ‘They are encountered in victims from the refined and polished portions of society, of the purest life, the most exquisite sensibility … Females of birth drink their urine … outlines of high artistic pretensions have been painted in excrement; poetry has been written in blood, or more revolting media … Patients are met with who daub and drench the walls as hideously as their disturbed fancy suggests; who wash or plaster their bodies, fill every crevice in the room, their ears, noses, hair, with ordure; who conceal these precious pigments in their mattresses, gloves, shoes, and will wage battle to defend their property.’

  This, then, was the hinterland of Milton’s childhood.

  During his teenage years there were times when he appeared to be better; he was well enough to go to Eton and from there to Trinity College, Cambridge, although his attendance was often interrupted by his illness. When he was sixteen his father, writing to his grandfather, told him, ‘I am sorry to say that William has had another attack like those he has had, but it was very much slighter, and there was only one, whereas he has had two on the previous occasions.’ And in another letter, when Milton was eighteen: ‘William, I am happy to say, is much better than when I left here 3 weeks ago, and I believe has had very little tendency towards a reversal of his old attacks and although he had tendencies when he first came here from London still those tendencies appear to be diminishing. He is evidently much stronger, and his face is fatter, and he does with far less medicine.’

  Milton’s grandfather replied: ‘I hope the ups tendency to illness in William will go on – in medicine I have no great faith but I have great faith in diet which I hope will be enforced upon him systematically and perseveringly.’

  But the ‘ups tendency’ the family longed for did not contin
ue. Milton’s illness, and the profound feelings of guilt and shame that accompanied it, dogged every step of his life. In a letter to his parents, written when he was thirty-two, he begged to be forgiven. ‘Dear Father and Mother will you forgive me for all the pain and trouble I have caused you. When you know what I have suffered I know you will. Pray for me dear Father and Mother. Your loving and repentant son.’

  His father was unforgiving. Pride and ignorance led him to treat his son, to use Lord Shaftesbury’s words, ‘like vermin’. William, 6th Earl Fitzwilliam, moulded in the cast of the Victorian patriarch, was a figure who inspired fear and awe among his family and his employees. After his death, one society writer said, ‘It is almost impossible to make a stranger realize the tone and style of the late Earl Fitzwilliam’s method of life at his Yorkshire seat, Wentworth. It must have been the nearest approach to the baronial splendour of the Middle Ages which the modern aristocracy can furnish.’ When his yellow coach, ‘horsed by four prancing chestnuts’, flanked by outriders and running-men dressed in the Fitzwilliam livery, travelled through the pit villages and the streets of Rotherham and Sheffield, women curtseyed, and the men removed their caps and bowed.

  The 6th Earl was a man of few words. Evelyn Dundas, who sat next to him at a dinner at Wentworth in the 1890s, described him as the most difficult and ‘silent of hosts’. Throughout the meal she struggled to find conversation. When it reached a standstill, at a loss as to what to say though determined to elicit some response, she asked him ‘which reflection of himself in his spoon he preferred – the convex or concave’. Privately, his reticence translated into relationships with his children and grandchildren that were formal and cold. ‘A good many of them were frightened of him,’ said his granddaughter Lady Mabel Smith. He used his wealth as a weapon of control; letters that survive in the Fitzwilliam archives show that he advanced or withheld money depending on his children’s behaviour and continuously altered the amounts he planned to leave them in his will. Family to the 6th Earl meant duty, power, prestige and position; where these precepts were challenged, love and loyalty did not count.