Mistress of the Elgin Marbles Read online

  These remarkable women defied the social convention of the time by forming an impenetrable coterie: they had ironclad wills and very good lawyers. For all their success in safeguarding Mary’s money, however, they could not preserve her family. She lost custody of her children. The Elgin divorce ignited a new and highly emotional debate on the rights of women. Mary and Elgin were each pitied and despised, depending upon whose side you took. The sad truth was that both Mary and Elgin lost their purpose, for Mary’s favorite job was mothering, and Elgin’s career was over.

  Should Elgin have known that his choice would be self-destructive? Eight years after their divorce, Lord Elgin was back before the English Parliament, embroiled in another controversy: Should the British government buy the marbles from him? If so, how much should be paid? Were they, in fact, priceless treasures or just broken blocks of stones, as some declared them to be? Throughout these proceedings, Mary remained silent. She had put her nine years as Lady Elgin behind her and had gone on to live the next chapter in her extraordinary life with a very distinguished man who happened to be her husband’s dear friend.

  There’s an old adage—”There are three sides to every story—his side, her side, and the truth.” The love triangle, of course, dispels this. The “love triangle” is really a square: her side, his side, his side, and the truth. And now, all sides of the story: the truth about Mary Nisbet, onetime countess of Elgin.

  Chapter 1

  LAUNCHED FROM A SAFE HARBOR

  In 1707, during the reign of Queen Anne, England and Scotland formally ratified an agreement officially creating the United Kingdom. This uneasy truce, which hoped to end centuries of violence between the two countries, was really established for the economic enrichment of both parties. Before 1707, Scotland’s ancient royal, military, and commercial alliance with France, stemming from the 1295 Auld Alliance and various royal unions between the Scottish Stuarts and the French Bourbons, antagonized the English. The frequent insurrections by the Scots—an ongoing attempt to secure a Stuart on the throne of a united kingdom—and the belief by English noblemen that Scotland was an inferior stepsibling provided little reason for Englishmen to allocate their resources to Scottish businesses and alliances. With the new establishment of a legally protected partnership, the tide would now turn, making it more attractive for Scotland and England to settle their differences. England could now take advantage of Scotland’s cheaper labor force and considerable supply of natural raw materials; from the Scottish point of view, once aligned with England, the expanding English colonial empire would provide tariff-free consumers.

  In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of the deposed Stuart and Catholic king James II, led one final insurgence to place, once again, a bona fide Scot on the English throne. Although some Highland factions, known as “Jacobites” for their loyalty to King James, supported the young pretender to the throne, Prince Charlie was defeated, causing the collapse of the Stuart schism. Despite the fact that the prince’s five-month adventure, after he escaped and was supposedly hiding in the hills with the help of a lass named Flora Macdonald, made for a very romantic legend, his failure unintentionally furthered the stabilization of English-Scottish relations for a very practical reason: the British Empire was expanding, and the Scots did not wish to be left behind.1 In 1754, England cemented its holdings and control over India, leading the way to immeasurable riches; and in 1763, victory over France as a result of the Seven Years War netted the United Kingdom vast territorial gains in America, and yet again additional wealth.

  Empire empowerment brought another dividend: creativity at home. Inventions by James Watt (the steam engine), Josiah Wedgwood (division of labor in factories), Joseph Priestley (early studies of electricity), energized a new class of commerce on the scale of mass production.

  The city of Edinburgh, a stunning and dramatic town built high on volcanic rock, bordered at one end by a gigantic seventh-century castle and at the other by the Crown’s Holyrood Palace, became in the eighteenth century a stimulating center of modern achievement and progressive thought. Success was evident at the bottom of High Street, the Cannongate section of town, beside the newer Holyrood. Cannongate became the fashionable hub for prosperous merchants, Scottish baronets, architects like the Adams family firm, and philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith. America’s preeminent colonial doctor, Benjamin Rush, attended the University of Edinburgh’s medical school to study the newest ideas and treatments. Perhaps by accident, Edinburgh had become an international city and its inhabitants quite cosmopolitan. Those prosperous Scots who journeyed frequently to London also made the Grand Tour, and some even traveled to the far-flung outposts of Great Britain’s burgeoning empire. In the 1790s, the future French kings Louis XVIII and Charles X both resided at Holyrood Palace for a time after their brother and his family were guillotined.

  New thought included debate on the God-given rights of man. The movement against tyranny resulted in campaigns such as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the rebellion of the American colonies, which helped stir the Whig Party into action against the monarchy in England.

  Barely six months after the ink had dried on the American Declaration of Independence a quiet but significant merger took place. On January 31, 1777, an illustrious daughter of England, Mary Manners, the twenty-year-old granddaughter of the 2nd Duke of Rutland,2 married William Nisbet of Dirleton, a Scottish landowner. As the niece of the 3rd Duke of Rutland, who, in August 1762, was among less than a handful of people asked to witness the birth of the Prince of Wales, and first cousin to the then current 4th Duke of Rutland, Mary Manners Nisbet traveled in the most rarefied of British aristocratic circles. William Nisbet possessed the distinction of belonging to the small but enviable group of people who controlled the majority of land in Scotland. As the smallest percentage of people to control the largest amount of land in all of Europe, these Scots were richer than most European princes. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and some would argue it still exists today—this group of landowners formed its own close-knit aristocracy. One year and three months after the Manners-Nisbet wedding, Mary and William Nisbet had a daughter, Mary Hamilton Nisbet, born on April 18, 1778. Upon her birth, tiny Mary was immediately, though unofficially, crowned the royal princess of this landed association as one of the richest heiresses in the new United Kingdom of Great Britain. What was unusual about Mary’s inheritance was that it would be passed to her, not to a male heir (under Scottish law, a brotherless daughter such as Mary inherited); and most of it would come to her via a matriarchal chain of ancestors.

  Mary grew up in the fairy-tale, bucolic village of Dirleton, approximately thirty-six square miles of the country’s most arable land, situated eighteen miles east of Edinburgh in the corner of Scotland known as East Lothian. Her home, called Archerfield, sat in what was once a sylvan, medieval, Benedictine sanctuary a few acres from the centuries-old ruins of Dirleton Castle, a reminder of Scotland’s violent, bloody history, which was also part of the Nisbet estate. The name Dirleton meant “ton” (or “town”) of “Dirl,” or “trembling.” The original battle site had evolved into so tranquil a place that its name took on a new meaning. Local people insisted that “Dirleton,” or the place of “trembling,” now referred to the stones that supposedly shook if a carriage rode through and dared disturb the peace of the twelve hundred inhabitants who quietly farmed, tended sheep, and fished.

  Mary’s father, William Hamilton Nisbet, chose not to reconstruct Dirleton’s Scottish warring past and opted instead, emulating many English noblemen, to hire the much sought after Scottish architect Robert Adams. Adams, who had spent many years abroad studying classical architecture, was commissioned to create a home fit for a princess. It was here, where gently rolling links tumbled into the beaches of Aberlady Bay and flower-covered cottages dot the tiny town, that Mary Nisbet presided over all that she could see. She could look north toward Fidra Island, the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Tr
easure Island (Stevenson’s own father was, at one point, the island’s light keeper, and its topography matches Stevenson’s fictional creation), and see, in the distance, the steeper terrains on the far side of the Firth of Forth. North of Edinburgh, where towns like Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline wind upward in the mountains in the county of Fife, the great estates of Raith and Broomhall loomed romantically, eerily foreshadowing her future. The Firth of Forth teemed with shellfish, whitefish, and mineral-rich seaweed used for fertilizer, and its mighty flow carried ships laden with coal, lime, linen, and wool out to sea and off to northern Europe and Scandinavia. A ferry regularly crossed the Firth from its southern side at Gullane, the nearest point to the Fife coast. Gullane was also Mary’s property.

  Little Mary had chestnut-colored curly hair, sparkling hazel eyes, and an irresistible smile. She grew up amid simple, rural pleasures and abandon; Rousseau’s glorification of innocent childhood (and noble savage) was not lost on the Nisbets. She played with her dogs, rode horses, and was tossed in laundry baskets by indulgent servants. On the other hand, there was also discipline. She lived a cosseted and cloistered life where neither dancing nor playing cards was acceptable on Sundays. Her still surviving pocket-size papier à cuvé–bound pamphlets reveal that her education was rigorous, equal to any boy’s. She was eleven years old when she studied—in its original French—geography and history from the ten-volume Ancient History series written by University of Paris professor Charles Rollins. She learned about the exploits of Darius, the Persian invader of ancient Greece, and Pericles’ rebuilding of the decimated city of Athens and his creation of the Parthenon.

  In the early 1790s, her diaries reveal, on the left-side pages, a very busy social life, and, on the right, carefully kept financial records reporting expenditures—donations to the poor, purchases of flowers, and pennies given to “dancing dogs.” She noted with enthusiasm the days when she was able to take “a charming ride” on a “poney” or a dip in the sea, or play a game of “foot Ball,” which was apparently a favorite pastime in the early 1790s, and she “plaed” at “Lord Portmors.”

  A dutiful student, she was quite precise in recording the natural world around her: astronomical phenomena—”The Eclips of the Mone I saw it”—the weather patterns, and farm life. She was an excellent biologist and observed all the tiniest details about the behavior of her “dear cow,” the care of her horses, and whether or not her canaries and nightingales were thriving—”another bird was hatched,” “my dear little canary bird laid another Ege on Christmas Day, she has laid 29 Eges this Year,” one “laid one ege,” “I had one rotten ege.” When any of her birds died, she buried her own. She was quite active and rarely ill but described, quite clinically, the time when she was in her early teens and “measles declared … bled me for the first time in my life,” a horrific experience that left her bedridden and on chicken broth for days—a cure far worse than the illness. Lessons aside, as she became a teenager, Mary lived the life of an older, very social, and very popular lady of great status, and her usual stamina was daunting.

  When Mr. Nisbet was in Parliament, they traveled to London and maintained a home in Portman Square, within walking distance of the home of Mrs. Nisbet’s parents. Family was all-important, and Mary made daily visits to see her grandmother, Lady Robert Manners, at Grosvenor Square (she called it “GS”), where she attended formal dinner parties in the company of government and social luminaries. Grosvenor Square was known to be the most opulent location in London, where staggeringly expensive town houses belonging to aristocrats came alive for merely a few weeks a year, “the season,” when the truly rich and titled came to town to see and be seen. In London, Mary socialized daily with the Manners family, which included the Dukes and Duchesses of Montrose and Montague, the Duchess of Buccleugh (nee Elizabeth Montague), and the Pelham family of prime ministers. Friends such as the Duke of Dorset, General Nisbet Balfour, Lady Rothe, wife of the Earl of Rothe, chief of the clan Leslie, Mr. Churchill, Lord Beaulieu, Lady Elgin, Lady Charlotte Bruce, and others would also come to Lady Robert’s during Mary’s teenage years in the mid-1790s.

  At an early age, Mary displayed a keen interest in what the eighteenth century called “society”—that is, people—and she had a natural, friendly, and easy way with people of all classes. She followed and recorded the marriages of girls she knew and the deaths—by natural causes or accident—of people significant to her family. She had keen intuition and, in fact, claimed to experience “presentiments”—her term for a mild power of premonition. An only and beloved child, she was very adult for one so young and often joined her doting parents at wedding parties and other grown-up gatherings. At fifteen, she stayed out dancing until three in the morning. She spent evenings at the new Pantheon Opera House in Haymarket as well as at the famed Sadler’s Wells Theatre. She danced the minuet at Mr. “Pichinie’s” (sometimes spelled “Puccini”) Academy, played “dummy whist,” “Casino,” and attended the races. She also saw Hertel’s comedic and charming new ballet La Fille Mal Gardée. (The story—a young woman, betrothed to an eminent man, succumbs to the charms of a neighbor and betrays her fiancé when she is left unchaperoned—delighted Mary at the time, but it was a chilling foreshadowing of her own similar predicament, which was far less amusing.)

  Long before she made her debut, the usual moment when girls appeared on the scene entering society, Mary was already a very visible presence. She attended important balls at Gloucester House—home of the Duke of Gloucester, son of King George III—and at the home of the Tory hostess (and Robert Burns patroness) Jane, Duchess of Gordon, and soirees at Lady Cadogan’s and the Duchess of Buccleugh’s. She had been to Court, to Frogmore House, Queen Charlotte’s—and later, Queen Victoria’s—favorite country retreat on the grounds of Windsor Castle, and to Windsor Castle itself.

  Mary was no stranger to protocol and the highest echelons of London aristocracy and was at ease in the most formal surroundings. She was on intimate terms with the British Empire’s dukes and duchesses and military heroes because they were family, and she also possessed an innate fluidity, gracefully adapting to country customs: from an early age, she was comme il faut wherever she went. In London, she went to “church”—sometimes with her parents and sometimes with family friends, like the Duke of Athol. In East Lothian, she joined the local citizenry at “kirk.” In London, she attended balls, and in East Lothian, she enjoyed “country dances.”

  In Scotland, she also enjoyed a whirlwind life, where there was a constant stream of the Scottish landed gentry. Houseguests frequently included Lady Maitland, the Tweedales, and family members like the Hamiltons of Pencaitland and the Campbells of Shawfield. Mary hosted dances and dinners for Lord Ainslie, the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton, Lady Haddington, the Dalrymples, Durhams, Grants, Fraziers, Oswalds, Dundases, and Kinlochs. She, in turn, visited their great country estates, including the world-famous castles belonging to Lord Lauderdale, the Duchess of Hamilton, and the Nisbets of Berwick. Some of London’s elite would visit her in Scotland, and Mary delighted in showing them the sights. The Duchess of Montrose spent a day drawing Dirleton Castle and its gardens. The ebb and flow of company was constant.

  Her world was a safe, protected harbor of people who enjoyed her company and genuinely cared about her. She sailed, skirts rustling and billowing, from castle to castle, from town mansion to city palace, the center of attention of adoring parents and an extended family that cherished her. On the “finance” side of her diary, she noted that on March 27, 1794, when she was not quite sixteen, “’WG’ Manners [her Uncle William] gave me the Diamond and red stoned ring” at Grosvenor Square. The men in her family indulged and pampered her, and she suffered through it good-naturedly.

  From the day she was born, however, she had a network of women whose advice she sought and whose confidences she shared in person and through letters. The women on whom she would depend included her mother, the elegant Mary Manners Nisbet; her favorite aunt, Lucy Manners; her grandmother L
ady Robert Manners; her paternal aunt, Mary Campbell; and her dear cousin and friend, Caro—Lady Caroline Montague. They remained her stalwart and lifelong allies.

  Aunt Mary addressed her as “my sweet Mary” and “my beloved Mary,” and complimented her for her “sensibility.” Her great-aunt, the elderly Countess of Leven, wrote that her letter was a “Love Token, from your Old affectionate Great, Great, Grand Aunt,” and contained additional expressions of affection from cousins Lord Leven and Lady Ruthven.

  She returned their affection, often inventing funny, tender—and mildly satirical—nicknames for those closest to her. Mr. Nisbet, the man who had created Mary’s idyllic world at Archerfield and who was an elected politician, a member of the elite and dashing Grenadiers, a musician, a fabulous shot, and a man of great intellect who loved a good joke, became “Sir Philip O’Kettle.” Aunt Lucy was always referred to as “Aunt Bluey,” and Lady Sutton as “Suttie.” Mary displayed a dry wit from early on and knew how to entertain her audience. In a letter written to Mr. Nisbet while he was in London, she playfully lamented, “Oh, Mary, Mary, where will my Willie be now,” and amused him with a story of her mother walking the dogs around the property while the dogs “stake[d] out” their favorite trees. Mr. Nisbet replied, “Sweet little Pussy your funny scrole I have gott.”

  Her travel entries offer a unique glimpse into the eighteenth-century English party circuit, when the fastest way to travel was by sea. The aristocracy viewed travel not only as the time to experience and appraise others’ hospitality but also as an opportunity to see historic sites and enjoy the beauties of their great country. As Mary and her family traveled leisurely by land, usually in a phaeton, for example, from Archerfield to Edinburgh, their servants went ahead, traveling by sea on the Firth of Forth to prepare for the Nisbets’ arrival. She visited Durham Cathedral, “Blenham House” in Oxford, Broadway, Portsmouth, Glasgow, and other towns that were either en route or just a pleasant diversion. Again, with scientific precision, she kept records of how many miles a day they covered on their journeys and where they “staied,” dined, or “drunk tea.”