It may be that you are, as I am, doing your tax return.
So here is a story about how money doesn’t bring happiness.
It is the tale of Mary Davies, born in London in 1665, married at the age of twelve to a Cheshire landowner named Sir Thomas Grosvenor, who had bought her for £9000. He was the highest bidder in an auction that had been staged over the past five years by Mary’s mother, a Mrs Tregonwell, who had paraded her to the quality in Hyde Park in a coach-and-six and who - as I wrote in my book Heiresses - ‘viewed her daughter with the cold obsessional passion of a gambler waiting to play an ace of trumps’ .
Why? Because Mary owned land. By a series of almost incredible coincidences, premature deaths and will changes she had become heiress to a 1000-acre chunk of London, bought by her great-great-uncle, who had been a money-lender to both sides in the Civil War.
The Manor of Ebury, as it was called, was mere marshland at the time. If, however, I sketch out its rough borders, it will become apparent that the sum of £9000 - which bought both Mary Davies and her acres, because in those days a husband owned his wife and all that she owned - was both a vast sum and one of history’s great bargains, being the original down payment on what is now the immense fortune of the Dukes of Westminster.
The land was bordered to the north by what is now Bayswater Road and Oxford Street, and to the south by the River Thames. Its western edge was formed by the Westbourne: one of London’s several lost rivers, which now runs beneath Knightsbridge, through a pipe above the tracks of Sloane Square Underground. The eastern edge was another river, the Tybourne, whose main course— which then flowed under a bridge across Piccadilly - traces Bond Street, across Green Park and through Victoria.
From my book again:
In other words the twelve-year-old Mary Davies was heiress to what would become some of the most valuable land in the world. She was the winner in the real-life game of Monopoly. In 1723, seven years before she died, Grosvenor Square would be laid out on her acres, and a hundred years later Thomas Cubitt would raise upon them the ice-white glories of Belgravia: the squares and crescents that would become home to prime ministers, aristocrats, embassies, and oligarchs. Although Buckingham Palace itself is built within what was once James I’s “Mulberry Garden,” Mary owned the surrounding fields. Hyde Park had been annexed by Henry VIII, but the rest— save a few plots here and there— was hers.
On Mary’s land the great traders’ city was extended into a residential paradise. Order and money were created by speculators, developers, the kind of bold people who extend London still today. The marshes were drained, the rivers Tybourne and Westbourne were buried beneath the streets, the constant sound of water was silenced; the thieves were driven from their colonies on what is now Belgrave Square, and the highwaymen from their lurking pitch at the Knight’s Bridge on Hyde Park Corner; and the houses, first in dots upon the fields, then in irrefutable rows and squares, began to shape the modern city.
From Mary’s inheritance, the well-to-do Grosvenor family became the supremely grand Westminsters, whose mansion on Park Lane (on the site of what is now the Grosvenor House hotel) stood at the heart of their empire. “It is customary to give place to the lady,” wrote the reviewer of a 1921 book entitled Mary Davies and the Manor of Ebury, “but on this occasion all must feel that precedence is due to the land.”
That last sentence, so formal and so deadly, says everything. Mary was what she owned. She was her external worth; the intrinsic was submerged, unidentifiable and irrelevant. This is the heiress’s burden: think Anne de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. Think Catherine Sloper in Washington Square, the piercing little fable that contains the essence of the rich girl’s dilemma - how is she ever to know her own value? How can she ever know if she is being valued for herself, the great gift that can be bestowed upon a girl without means, like Elizabeth Bennet?
By the 20th century the heiress’s burden would became an existential one, as exemplified by the multiple marriages and questing addictions of the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. But this was a luxury misery (aptly) when compared with the life of the heiress before a series of legal shifts, culminating in the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, gave wives a separate identity in law and the right to retain what they owned and earned. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when women had almost no protection whatsoever, the misery could be very real indeed; not merely something to obsess over between lines of coke and fittings at Dior for wedding dress number 5. It was quite commonplace for heiresses to be seized, kidnapped, impregnated and forcibly married (there was a roaring trade in what were known as ‘clandestine’ ceremonies, often carried out in the Fleet debtors’ prison, by clergymen who were already in jail thus had nothing to lose). A man could be hanged, and sometimes was, for these crimes, but in a gambler’s society the risk was deemed to be worth it. He knew that if he could get a girl married, and preferably pregnant, he would be safe. And the money would be his. It happened, quite a lot.
As will be seen from Act II in the sad, strange life of Mary Davies, uber-heiress.
Act I - life at Eaton Hall in Cheshire with the perfectly pleasant Sir Thomas Grosvenor MP, nine years her senior and rather handsome, by whom she would have eight children - was really not so bad. It was not her choice, but choice was not on offer. And, for all her apparent passivity, she seems to have powerfully resented this. After twenty years of marriage (she had moved to Cheshire aged fifteen) she tried to strike out and do what she wanted for a change.
As I put it in Heiresses: ‘Having lived up to that point within a succession of luxury cages, it was her misguided quest for autonomy that eventually led her back inside one.’
In 1700, when the country had set itself upon a firmly Protestant course (with the 1688 settlement designed to end forty years of extreme tumult), Mary converted to Roman Catholicism. It was a flagrant act of rebellion. ‘Popery’ was regarded as akin to devil-worship, it implied support of the Jacobite cause and it was deeply damaging to her husband; motivated by who knows what? An obscure desire for revenge over that £9000? Genuine Jacobite sympathies? Sincere faith? Anyway it did Sir Thomas Grosvenor no good at all. He fell out of favour with the new King William III, the local gentry muttered about the metaphorical scent of incense at Eaton Hall and, at the age of 44, he died ‘of a feavour’.
At which point the story changes: becomes one that might have been written by Samuel Richardson, even by Bram Stoker.
The day before her husband was buried - interesting timing - Mary introduced into her home a Benedictine monk, the Jacobite Father Lodowick Fenwick, with whom she planned to travel to Europe.
Meanwhile control of her inheritance had already begun to be seized by trustees - among them her terrible mother - who also sought to obtain guardianship of her children. Then came the first, tentative suggestions that she might be confined to an asylum, for her own good don’t you know, what with her erratic whims and odd behaviour… Of course this was all about getting hands on that lovely marshland, just waiting to be drained and built upon. The sad truth, however, is that Mary, high on the desire for freedom, was not capable of handling it - how could she be? - and the appalling fate that would soon befall her merely vindicated those she sought her confinement.
In Paris, Mary met her Lovelace figure: Father Fenwick’s brother Edward.
I describe what happened next in Heiresses.
The events of early 1701 were sinister in the extreme, and for all their crude-coloured melodrama have an uneasy contemporary resonance
Soon after moving to the Hotel Castile in Paris with her entourage, Mary fell ill and was confined to her room. What took place inside that room would later be argued over, obsessively, in a London court case that lasted two years (with an intermission for war with France). The original illness was probably genuine. But there is little doubt that the Fenwicks— helped by a compliant doctor— used it as a highly convenient means to their own ends. Confined to her bed, pallid and powerless, Mary became the very embodiment of the victim-heiress: her vulnerability was absolute. The doctor administered emetics— suitable “for a horse,” according to a witness— and repeatedly bled her with leeches. Then she was drugged with laudanum, which had been sprinkled into a dish of strawberries, and blacked out as if from an efficient dose of Rohypnol; this was date rape with a vengeance, and with one hell of a punch line. When at last she awoke from her semi-coma, Mary was told— or “reminded”— that a ceremony of marriage had been conducted by Father Fenwick, and that she was now Edward’s wife.
Mary would later suggest that the Fenwicks’ ultimate plan was murder, which seems entirely possible. Had she expected love from her handsome Jacobite? Perhaps, although his avowal that she was deeply attracted to him—that in effect she “started it”— naturally cannot be trusted. He, meanwhile, was far easier to understand. He was born into a time and class that snatched women as casually as highwaymen did jewels, then for good measure dismissed them as mentally deficient when they flickered with protest.
Edward Fenwick, bold as brass and with the his-word-against-hers marriage as ‘proof’ of his legitimacy, began to make claims upon Mary’s inheritance; and in 1703 a deeply stupid jury found in his favour. Yet he never acted upon his many threats. Perhaps he knew that the judgment would be overturned - as it was the following year - while the so-called marriage was annulled, on the grounds that Mary had been mentally incapacitated at the time of making it (certainly one way of putting it).
… how beautifully this played into the hands of those who had sought to have her put away four years earlier, who now could say that they had been right all along, that it was a kindness to confine this poor creature, and save her from the troubles that she would otherwise bring upon herself.
Mrs. Tregonwell, that supremely non- maternal woman, tried to regain the custody of the daughter whom she had ceded— or sold off— when Mary was twelve. The Grosvenor sons stepped in to prevent this, however, and gave their mother over to the care of their father’s relations. “Dame Mary Grosvenor, Lunatick” lived with these perfectly nice people until her death, shielded within the somnolent calm of their Cheshire home, as the foundations of Grosvenor Square were laid out, brick by stately brick, upon her fields.
"Good God!"is my first reaction. If one removes rose colour glasses from the quaint old times, this and many other such cases turn up. Are we better off today? Is this hard to imagine? Well... Maybe, hopefully in the age of dot. com people this couldn't happen. Then again, there's a lot of money at stake and human nature being what it is... If death is the tax one pays for living, what is the cost of being alive?
What a read this is, and makes me wonder if we have really moved on that much at all but I hope so. The mind absolutely boggles at such a travesty. Thank you.