Seduction in Mind

[1] My heroine, Alex, is a combination of various women from history, but one of them was Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), the granddaughter of Thomas Courts (1735-1822), who brought the banking house of Courts and Co. to prominence and fortune in London. Thomas Courts was married for almost forty years to Elizabeth Starkey, who bore him three daughters. But when Mrs. Courts died in 1815, Thomas married the popular actress Harriet Mellon and left her the whole of his immense fortune and the directorship of his bank when he died in 1822. Harriet Mellon married in turn the Ninth Duke of St. Albans in 1827 and died ten years later. Harriet left the duke a modest fortune, but the bulk of her vast wealth and property went to Thomas Courts's granddaughter, Angela Burdett, who then assumed the additional name and arms of Courts.

Angela gave away immense sums of money to charities ranging from the endowment of colonial bishoprics to prizes for costermongers' donkeys; from the construction of model dwellings in the East End of London to the provision of drinking fountains for dogs. She was particularly concerned with the welfare of women and girls and established and maintained schools for them, as well as providing improved facilities for the training of girls in the national schools. For her wide-ranging philanthropies, she was created a baroness in her own right.

[2] Princess Louise, the only one of Queen Victoria's daughters to be considered anything near a beauty, first met Joseph Edgar Boehm, a Hungarian born in Vienna who had been living in London for six years, when she started classes at the National Art Training School. Fourteen years older than Princess Louise, married with a young family, the blue-eyed, curly-haired, tall, slim, and wiry-like "a battered soldier," sculptor-in-ordinary to the queen, had achieved fame in English court circles with his statue of Queen Victoria, unveiled at Windsor Castle in 1869.

Princess Louise was already involved with Boehm at this time, and their relationship was of such concern to the queen that she deliberately sought out an appropriate husband for her daughter. Eventually, the Marquess of Lome, son of the Duke of Argyll, was chosen, because Louise very much wanted to live in Britain, she said, and the fact that Lome was homosexual may have been an asset. Louise spent very little time with Lome before they were married on March 21, 1871, at Windsor. Evidence from Louise's writings suggests that the couple did engage in physical marital relations, although according to some sources the physical relationship ended soon after the honeymoon.

Two years after their marriage, Princess Louise and the Marquess of Lome moved into an apartment in Kensington Palace, which happened to be close to both Boehm's studio and his home. Princess Louise continued to practice sculpture, working in Boehm's studio. In 1878, shortly after her old teacher Mary Thornycroft moved to Melbury Road, Louise had a studio built on the grounds of Kensington Palace. Godwin was her architect, and he explained the task to his architectural students: "I built the studio 17 feet high and put over it a kind of Mansard roof, with windows looking into the garden. The walls are of red brick, there are green slates on the roof to match the old house… and all the light is reflected so as to reduce the horizontal ceiling as much as possible. This studio seems perfectly satisfactory to the Princess, to Mr. Boehm, the sculptor (for it is a sculptor's studio) and also to myself."

The princess's relationship with Boehm continued throughout the 1880s, and the circumstances of Boehm's death in his studio in the company of Princess Louise on December 12, 1890, provided the press with much speculation. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's version from his diaries is generally believed:

It was during one of these visits [of the princess to Boehm's studio] that while he was making love to her Boehm broke a blood-vessel and died actually in the Princess's arms. There was nobody else in the studio or anywhere about… and the Princess had the courage to take the key of the studio out of the dead man's pocket, and covered with blood as she was and locking the door behind her, got a cab and drove to Laking's [the Queen's physician], whom she found at home and took back with her to the studio. Boehm was dead and they made up a story between them to the effect that it had been while lifting or trying to lift one of the Statues that the accident occurred.

The sculptor Alfred Gilbert, who occupied a studio in the same premises, became an accomplice to their concocted story by taking responsibility for finding the body. Princess Louise championed him for the rest of his life, provided him with accommodations at Kensington Palace in later years, and saw that his ashes were buried at St. Paul's Cathedral when he died.

[3] I'm always interested when I run across another mention of Queen Victoria's personal servant, John Brown. I mentioned him in the notes for Brazen, and when I was reading about the queen's daughter, Princess Louise, his name emerged once again because Louise's lover, Edgar Boehm, was sculpting a bust of John Brown for the queen. (A movie of the relationship between this Scotsman and Queen Victoria, titled Mrs. Brown, starring Judi Dench, was made several years ago.)

According to Queen Victoria's journal (parts of which were copied by her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, before the original was destroyed-not an unusual circumstance in Victorian times, when appearances counted more than the truth), John Brown in October 1850 was "a good looking, tall lad of twenty-three with fair curly hair, so very good humoured and willing,-always ready to do whatever is asked, and always with a smile on his face." An indiscreet comment, of course, immediately comes to mind.

John Brown was a gillie at Balmoral from 1849 and in charge of the ponies there from 1855. Three years later the queen appointed him her personal servant in Scotland, to wait upon her at all times. At the end of 1864 (Prince Albert had died in 1861) Brown went south to be on duty at Osborne, too, and in February 1865 he was appointed her personal servant wherever she was, not only in Scotland. She described him to her eldest daughter as "so quiet, has such an excellent head and memory, and is besides so devoted, and attached and clever and so wonderfully able to interpret one's wishes."

When Queen Victoria made him her personal servant outside Scotland in 1865, he was thirty-seven and she thirty-nine.

The queen and Prince Albert had a small hut at Balmoral, where they could escape from the formality of life. At her husband's death, this property went to the Prince of Wales. Now Victoria needed once more "some little Spot" to go occasionally for a night or two of quiet and seclusion. In 1866 she began planning additions to a small lodge at Glasallt Shiel, and on October 1, 1868, she slept there for the first time. Sir Henry Ponsonby felt that she always returned "much the better and livelier" for her visits to the shiel, although he wouldn't himself have chosen so lonely a spot. On March 29, 1883, John Brown died, leaving the house the queen was building for him at Baile-na-Coille incomplete. The Glasallt became, according to her journal, "now most terrible for her to visit-it is like death, far more than the peaceful Kirkyard… The Queen can never live at the Glasallt again. The whole thing was planned and arranged by him. He meant everything there. That bright Chapter in her saddened life is closed forever!"

In 1865, Victoria had published a small number of copies of Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. It was so well received, she was encouraged to publish another edition that would reach a broader audience and this "people's" edition sold thirty thousand copies. In 1884, a further volume was published, More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands, which continued the story from the death of the prince consort to 1882. It was dedicated, not as the Leaves had been to the memory of her husband ("him who made the life of the writer bright and happy"), but to her "Loyal Highlanders" and especially to "my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend John Brown," who had recently died. A tribute to him concludes the book. Wise advisers prevented the queen from publishing a memoir of Brown, which would have surely been misconstrued, they suggested. No doubt.

[4] During the second half of the nineteenth century, the most desirable locations in London for artists' colonies were St. John's Wood, Hampstead, Chelsea, and Kensington; the most prestigious address was Holland Park, home to the celebrated artists George Frederic Watts and Frederic Leighton, and to lesser lights such as Marcus Stone, Colin Hunter, Hamo Thorny croft, and Luke Fildes. The royal family were patrons of these artists, as were some members of the aristocracy, but their main supporters were the newly rich middle classes. Large fortunes were being made in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, and London, and these industrialists wanted the "genuine article and fresh paint" rather than a spurious "Old Master." And they were willing to pay well for what they wanted.

During a period when the average annual income was about one hundred pounds, many artists were earning in excess of five thousand pounds (roughly half a million pounds today). In the year Leighton commissioned his house in Holland Park, his receipts from sales of paintings and investments exceeded twenty-one thousand pounds. Leighton was the model for Disraeli's Mr. Phoebus in Lothair and Henry James's Lord Mellifont in The Private Life, and nowhere was his personal success more apparent than in the palace he created in Holland Park Road.

The houses commissioned by the artists in Holland Park now sell for several million pounds-a one-bedroom apartment carved out of Marcus Stone's large studio house sold in 1999 for over one million pounds.

The mid-quarter of the nineteenth century was the zenith of the artists and millionaire-princes in their palaces of art. The collapse in the value of Victorian art was well under way before the end of the century and the individual wealth and social status achieved by the artist in the Holland Park Circle was sustained only during their lifetimes. Only recently are Watts, Leighton, and Albert Moore regaining some of their former status.

[5] Regardless of the origins of golf, it was the Scots who gave the game its unique character. It was already known as a national pastime before King James IPs abortive efforts to ban it by Act of Parliament in 1457. By 1552, January 15 precisely, the citizens of the town of St. Andrews were given, by charter right, the use of the links for "golf, futball, shuteing at all times with all other manners of pastime." The game of golf as we know it today didn't emerge from its crude beginnings on the east coast of Scotland until it began to become organized about the middle of the eighteenth century. The first golf club for which there is definite proof of origin is the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith, instituted in 1744.

There have been claims from other clubs that they are older than the Leith club, for example the Royal Burgess in Edinburgh and the Royal Blackheath in England, but no evidence to substantiate their claims has been found.

Among those instrumental in drawing up the first set of rules was John Rattray, an Edinburgh surgeon who won the first Silver Club in 1744. His golf was interrupted when he was called from his bed to act as surgeon to Bonnie Prince Charlie's troops at the Battle of Prestonpans.

He followed the prince, some say reluctantly, on his march to Derby and thereafter to the defeat at Culloden, where he was taken prisoner. It was only the intervention of his fellow Leith member, Duncan Forbes, that saved him from the gallows and allowed him to resume his duties as captain of the club in 1747.

The game witnessed some early movement out of Scotland to other golfing outposts. It was taken by royalty to England as far back as 1608, by Scottish merchants to India, where the Royal Calcutta Golf Club dates back to 1829, and by the armed forces to South Carolina, where golf was played long before the Apple Tree Gang founded the first American golf club at Yonkers in 1888.

However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, professional golf was still very much in its infancy. Money matches became the forerunners of the tournaments of the present day, and it was as a result of these matches that professional players came into being. The oldest championship in the world is the Open, first played at Prestwick, Scotland, in 1860. For the first thirty years of the Open, none but a Scot took the title. Not until the great English amateur John Ball from Hoylake won the Open in 1890 did the Scottish stranglehold on the famous claret jug loosen.

The rise of the gentleman amateur and the golf boom of the 1880s was a result of the same emerging, wealthy middle class that was so drastically altering the fabric of society. More people had more money and leisure time, and a measure of the demand for new courses is indicated by the number built in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In 1864 there were about thirty golf clubs in Scotland, while England had only three. By 1880 it is estimated that there were sixty clubs in Britain. The British Amateur Championship was inaugurated at Hoylake in 1885 by the Royal Liverpool Golf Club and the number of golf clubs continued to increase. By 1890 there were 387 and by 1900, Britain had 2,330 golf clubs.

Perhaps the biggest appeal about golf is that when brought right down to its basics, it's between you and your golf ball. Courses have changed over the centuries, as have innovations in equipment, but the skill of the player still matters most. The story of the devout Catholic golfer who crossed himself before he putted and holed his putts every time is a case in point. His opponent asked him, "Does it help?" and the Catholic replied, "No. Not if you can't putt."

[6] Five thousand pounds is equal to approximately five hundred thousand pounds today, or $785,000.

[7] In the early Victorian era, Punch magazine humorously discussed the meaning of the aspersion "mushroom" that denoted someone newly arrived:

A sister of Mrs [Spangle] Lacquer's married a gentleman of property, and resides in the country. Her name is Mrs Champignon Stiffback… In company with their London relatives [they]… partake largely of the nature of mushrooms, in as much as they have not only sprung up with great rapidity… but have also risen from a mould of questionable delicacy…

Society looked askance at the nouveaux riches or arrivistes, although in the end, new money talked. When H. G. Well's fictional uncle, Edward Ponderevo, exchanged his chemist's shop for a lordship, he found the local vicar a useful bridge into country society.

The vicar… was an Oxford man… with… a general air of accommodation to the new order of things. These Oxford men are the Greeks of our plutocratic empire. He was a Tory in spirit, and what one may call an adapted Tory by stress of circumstances, that is to say he was no longer a legitimist, he was prepared for the substitution of new lords for old. We were pill vendors, he knew, and no doubt horribly vulgar in soul… but we were English and neither Dissenters nor Socialists, and he was cheerfully prepared to do what he could to make gentlemen of us.

[8] By the late Victorian period, the process of assimilation-the marriage of land and capital, gentry and haute bourgeoisie-was clear for all to see and new money was calling the shots. "Nowadays," observed the Countess of Cardigan, "money shouts and birth and breeding whisper!"

But of the three props that supported the ruling elite-money, land, and title-it was the possession of a hereditary peerage that was the clearest determinant of class and the most obvious focus of ambition. In the mid-Victorian period, the House of Lords remained a difficult hurdle for new money. Not until the 1880s did both Liberal and Tory governments surrender their patronage to the market. By 1890 the proportion of business and commercial families achieving peerages was twenty-five percent and rising. Between 1886 and 1914 about two hundred new peers were created, at least half from nonlanded backgrounds.

This rise of the bourgeoisie to titled status did not occur without resistance. Many of those in power were offended by "the rustle of banknotes," and native English gentry took affront that social control of London "is now divided between the Semite and the Yankee." Anti-Semitism ran high, as did mockery of the "trans-Atlantic Midases," referred to as peltry or pork kings. But by 1899, the peerage included fifty American ladies; by 1914 seventeen percent of the peerage and twelve percent of the baronetcy had an American connection, frequently through marriage to an heiress. "Failing the dowries of Israel and the plums of the United States," noted Escott with realism, "the British peerage would go to pieces tomorrow."

I became aware of the disdain directed toward American heiresses not only in the memoirs of numerous heiresses who had been treated abominably by their husbands' families, but in particular while touring the Duke of Roxburghe's family seat in Kelso, Scotland, when I was researching Outlaw. In 1902, May Goelet of New York, co-heir to a twenty-five-million-dollar fortune, noted that Captain George Holford had hopes of marrying her: "Dorchester House, of course, would be delightful and I believe he has two charming places [Westonbirt and Lasborough, Gloucestershire]. Unfortunately, the dear man has no title…" She settled for the Duke of Roxburghe. And apparently he settled for her as well, because in the Roxburghe palatial home in Kelso, as we walked through room after room adorned with priceless antiques, exquisite furniture, carpets, and beautiful paintings, we eventually came to a kitchen hallway, where a collection of fishing gear was displayed on the walls-along with the full-length portrait of the American duchess. Her rating in the hierarchy of the Roxburghe family was eminently clear.