Born in October 1757, Seymour Dorothy Fleming was the fourth of five children of Irish career soldier, Sir John Fleming and his wife, Jane Colman, granddaughter of the Duke of Somerset. Seymour was the surname of the Somerset dynasty and she was named to reflect this familial connection.  By the time she was twelve, she had lost her father, brother and two sisters, and found herself heiress, along with her elder sister Jane, to her father’s fortune. Her mother remarried to the wealthy MP Edward Lascelles, whose family had made a fortune through sugar and slavery in Barbados, and she spent her teenage years in his household. By the time, she was of marriageable age, she was personally entitled to a massive £52,000, a figure inflated to £70,000 in the gossip columns that monitored the doings of the British aristocracy. As wealthy women, Seymour and Jane were prized items on the marriage market. Jane was pretty and intelligent, keen to learn, and later developed a reputation for ‘virtue’. Seymour was conventionally attractive, but more headstrong and less inclined to read or attend to her schoolwork. With good familial connections and outstanding personal wealth, both sisters should have married well. As daughters of a baronet, this should have meant capturing an Earl or maybe even Duke. And in this Jane was successful, marrying Charles Stanhope, 3^rd Earl of Harrington.

Seymour first met Sir Richard Worsley, baronet of Appuldurcombe House, Isle of Wight, when he came to court her elder sister, Jane. Attracted by their wealth and of similar social standing, Richard was looking to consolidate his social position in London society. The young Seymour flirted with the man who had come to court her sister, but at fourteen was deemed still too young for marriage. She met him again three years later at the York Races, after which they were inseparable. For Seymour at least, this was likely to have been a love match.  Even her marriage contract benefited Richard more than might have been expected given her wealth, leaving herself only £400 a year pin money and tying up her property until after his death.

A career politician, Richard was establishing himself as stalwart Tory. He would later hold a variety of governmental and diplomatic roles that added to his estate income of between £2000 and £3000 a year, through pay and bribes. He was also an avid collector of ancient art, spending parts of his life travelling through Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey and beyond. Spending considerable time in London, despite Richard’s politics, Seymour became a part of the ‘Devonshire set’. While not in the inner cadre of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s friendship group, she regularly attended her parties, renowned for their gambling, drinking, high fashion, and sexual libertinism. The Worsley’s had one son, Robert Edwin. In August 1781, Seymour had a daughter, Jane, who Richard claimed as his own.

In November 1781, Seymour eloped with George Maurice Bissett, a Captain in the South Hampshire Militia, next door neighbour and close friend of the family. Richard was furious. While discreet sexual liaisons were a common part of their social circle, eloping with a lover opened up the couple’s marriage to public scrutiny, ruining Seymour’s reputation as a respectable woman, and shaming Richard, by challenging his presentation as a strong patriarch with control over his household. Why the couple eloped is an open question. Richard had already accepted Jane as his own daughter, clearly willing to accept his wife’s affair. Perhaps the couple hoped that Richard would similarly offer little resistance, providing his wife with her desired divorce. Or perhaps, her marriage was so miserable that she was willing to take the risk of scandal.

Richard, however, was not willing to concede to this public humiliation. Instead, he sued George for Criminal Conversation with his wife. This lawsuit was a way of receiving financial compensation for the seduction of your wife, and was a fairly standard prelude to divorce proceedings. But, rather than asking for standard damages, that would have allowed Richard to restore his reputation but not overly hurt George, Richard demanded £20,000 in damages. If Richard was awarded the full amount, George would have been bankrupted. Moreover, instead of suing for divorce, Richard asked only for a legal separation. This meant that his wife would never be free to remarry until Richard died.

The trial that followed, however, was wilder that anyone imagined. In order to ensure that George did not have to pay full damages, Seymour decided to open up her marriage to the scrutiny of the world. What emerged scandalised eighteenth-century society. Perhaps unsurprisingly given her social circle, George had not been Seymour’s first lover. In what was an almost unheard of defence, five of Seymour’s previous lovers testified of their relationships on George’s behalf, noting that Richard was often complicit through not questioning what his wife was doing. Her doctor also testified that he had treated her for a sexually transmitted disease. The press, in turn, heightened this scandal linking her with a total of 27 men, often basing their claims
on little more than relative proximity.

But there was more. Richard not only overlooked what his wife was doing, but actively encouraged it. One lover noted that as he was leaving after a night of love-making, he found Richard in her dressing room, but went unchallenged. Another told of how Richard allowed him to watch through a window as his wife dressed, in what appeared to have been an arranged ‘show’. And, George himself had watched Seymour dress through the window of the public baths, sitting on Richard’s shoulders. The threesome had walked away laughing together after the event. Richard’s complicity in his wife’s affairs shocked the jury, who brought back a verdict of one shilling damages.

Tune in next week to find out what happened next.

Further Reading

Hallie Rubenhold, Lady Worsley’s Whim; An Eighteenth Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and Divorce (Chatto & Windus, 2008).

Katie Barclay is amazed at Seymour’s bravery in choosing to destroy her reputation and risk everything for her lover. She is a historian at the University of Adelaide.

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Women (With rather insincere apologies to Mr. Rudyard Kipling.)

I went to ask my government
if they would set me free,
They gave a pardoned crook a vote,
but hadn’t one for me;

The men about me laughed and frowned
and said: “Go home, because
We really can’t be bothered
when we’re busy making laws.”

Oh, it’s women this, and women that and women have no sense,
But it’s pay your taxes promptly when it comes to the expense,
It comes to the expense, my dears, it comes to the expense,
It’s pay your taxes promptly when it comes to the expense.

I went into a factory
to earn my daily bread:
Men said: “The home is woman’s sphere.”
“I have no home,” I said.

But when the men all marched to war,
they cried to wife and maid,
“Oh, never mind about the home,
but save the export trade.”

For it’s women this and women that, and home’s the place for you,
But it’s patriotic angels when there’s outside work to do,
There’s outside work to do, my dears, there’s outside work to do,
It’s patriotic angels when there’s outside work to do.

We are not really senseless,
and we are not angels, too,
But very human beings,
human just as much as you.

It’s hard upon occasions
to be forceful and sublime
When you’re treated as incompetents
three-quarters of the time.

But it’s women this and women that, and woman’s like a hen,
But it’s do the country’s work alone, when war takes off the men,

And it’s women this and women that and everything you please,
But woman is observant, and be sure that woman sees.

Home and Where It Is (An Indiana judge has recently ruled: As to the right of the husband to decide the location of the home that “home is where the husband is.”)

Home is where the husband is,
Be it near or be it far,
Office, theatre, Pullman car,
Poolroom, polls, or corner bar—
All good wives remember this—
Home is where the husband is.

Woman’s place is home, I wis.
Leave your family bacon frying,
Leave your wash and dishes drying,
Leave your little children crying;
Join your husband, near or far,
At the club or corner bar,
For the court has taught us this:
“Home is where the husband is.”

Representation (“My wife is against suffrage, and that settles me.”—Vice-President Marshall.)

I

My wife dislikes the income tax,
And so I cannot pay it;
She thinks that golf all interest lacks,
So now I never play it;

She is opposed to tolls repeal
(Though why I cannot say),
But woman’s duty is to feel,
And man’s is to obey.

II

I’m in a hard position
for a perfect gentleman,
I want to please the ladies,
but I don’t see how I can,

My present wife’s a suffragist,
and counts on my support,
But my mother is an anti,
of a rather biting sort;

One grandmother is on the fence,
the other much opposed,
And my sister lives in Oregon,
and thinks the question’s closed;

Each one is counting on my vote
to represent her view.
Now what should you think proper
for a gentleman to do?

This is the poetry of the suffragist, Alice Duer Miller, first printed in the New York Tribune and compiled in 1915 in the book Are Women People? In 1917, she published a second collection: Women are People.

Want to Read More

The Hairpin offers you a selection of her poetry, while you can read the original at Project Gutenberg.

These poems kept Katie Barclay entertained on a sunny afternoon. She is a historian at the University of Adelaide.

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At particular moments in history, women have thought to be more emotional than men. The Victorians thought women were more emotionally unstable and inclined to hysteria. As late as 1912, one prominent doctor in the UK was arguing that women were hypersensitive, unreasonable and that it was the destiny of the entire sex to eventually go insane (and thus they should be confined to the domestic sphere)! But, how we understand, express and even experience emotion is not unchanging over time.

The history of emotions is a growing field that explores how people expressed and (as best as we can figure out) experienced emotions in past societies. It is an interdisciplinary field drawing on traditional historical sources, but also using theory from psychology, biology, neuroscience, physiology, and methodologies from art history, musicology, and literary and cultural theory.

How emotions work is a matter of debate and different fields have different ideas on the subject. Some theories, notably in psychology, argue that some emotions, like fear and motherly love, are inherited and instinctual, traces of our evolutionary past, whilst others are cultural – learned in childhood and specific to particular societies. But more recently, some theorists have gone further to suggest that all emotions are learned and that the biological response is a taught reaction. This does not mean that the physical reaction is not real, but rather there is increasing awareness of the malleability of the physical body. Such understandings tend to draw on the neuroscience of child development, which shows the way that the way the brain works is not set in stone, but created in the first few years of life and can differ between people and across cultures. We have come to understand that the body is not a ‘universal’, identical across time and space, but a product of cultures. So, we know that much of our physical shape (height, proportional difference between waist, hips and chest, average weight, etc) are a product of our diets and the types of physical activity we do, as well as our genetics. Similarly, the brain is trained to work in particular ways that are manifested in its physical workings. In both cases, the early years of life are crucial to our future selves, as the body becomes less malleable as we age.

These same theories can then be applied to our understandings of emotions, so that we can see that emotions are not the inevitable products of biology, but we are given an emotional education which in turn trains our body to react in particular ways to particular stimuli. As a result, emotions become historically and geographically dependent, shaped by the cultures people are born and raised within. And this, of course, makes it an exciting field of study, as we can no longer assume that our ancestors felt similarly to us.

As importantly, it also has significant implications for how we understand ourselves. One of the reasons why history is important more generally is that it reminds us that the way we do things today is not the way things have always been done. This in turn allows us to realise that we do not need to do things similarly in the future, encouraging us to think more imaginatively and more dynamically about our life choices and the way we want to live as individuals and a society. The history of emotions reinforces these creative potentialities by destabilising those most ‘natural’ and ‘unchanging’ of things: our bodies and our feelings.

Katie Barclay is working on a history of how our emotional reactions shaped law and governance in the eighteenth century. She is a historian in the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions at Adelaide.

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“If I had a daughter or a sister, I should teach her adaptability, and that learned I should have no further anxiety for her future,” observed Lily, Duchess of Marlborough, in 1890. “Let her please, not men alone, but people, and the race is hers.”

Lily Warren Price, born into comfortable circumstances in Troy, New York, in 1854, lived by this precept. In a period during which “the narrative of women’s lives remains a marriage plot,” noted American scholar Linda Wagner-Martin, Lily surmounted a conventional upbringing to broaden her horizons through marriage. She chose a trio of disparate but, alas, short-lived husbands, and proved herself unusual as a wife in applying herself to mastering skills at which her husbands excelled and then using them to promote her own interests. In doing so, she not only acquired an extraordinary education, but also flattered the men with whom she shared her life and kept them interested.

Lily’s first husband, wealthy New Yorker Louis C. Hamersley, left his wife the lifetime use of his real estate fortune after three years of marriage, a loving gesture that gave rise to an ugly, protracted, but ultimately futile attempt on the part of his extended family to break his will. From him, Lily learned how to handle money, and her reputation as a clever businesswoman accompanied her throughout her career.

Her second husband, the eighth Duke of Marlborough and the head of the illustrious Churchill family, was a divorcé in an era in which divorce was rare and frowned upon, a known womanizer, and an outcast in aristocratic society. He was also considered by some to be one of the most capable men of his generation. In marrying him, Lily was perhaps the only one of the numerous American women who traded wealth for a European title in the late nineteenth century to do so without the encouragement of an ambitious family and against her parents’ wishes. Her intractable decision to marry the duke and seek new opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean led to an estrangement from her closest relatives that was never resolved.

Naysayers expected the Marlboroughs to be nothing but unhappy together, but their marriage proved a surprising success. In opposition to all custom, Lily settled no money directly on the duke, but maintained control of her fortune and was her husband’s equal partner when it came to making decisions about how their income should be spent. From him, she acquired knowledge about the intricacies of running a large estate like Blenheim, the Churchill family seat and the grandest home in Britain. She became skilled, too, at overseeing the kind of viable farming operation maintained by her husband. Within weeks of his sudden death, this city-raised woman showed her practical bent by hiring away the Blenheim estate agent and then leasing an important but neglected estate in Dorking, Surrey, that she would run as a stately home to support her aristocratic title, and as a commercial farm on the “scientific” Blenheim model. Her agricultural operation specialized in dairy cows, sheep, pigs, and poultry, and produced some 650 quarts of milk and up to 75 pounds of butter a week for market, as well as 16,000 eggs a year.

Lily had only been a member of the Churchill family for four years when the duke passed away, but she remained close to his relatives after his death. Her intimate friendship with her nephew Winston Churchill offered mutual advantages that both of them knew how to exploit, and her kindness to her stepson after his succession to the ducal title made her many friends and secured for her the social position that had eluded her as Marlborough’s duchess. 

Lily’s third marriage, which lasted for more than five years, was her most light-hearted match. Lord William de la Poer Beresford was an ebullient personality with impeccable social credentials and a passion for horseracing. A bachelor recently returned from government service in India when Lily met him through a Churchill sister-in-law, he was an aristocratic favorite of the English man-on-the-street and attracted the kind of public attention that film stars do today. Lily married him shortly after they met, and with him had her first and only child at the age of forty-two. Lord William had no money and no head for it, and while Lily provided him with an annual allowance, it was understood that Lily would make all financial decisions during this marriage and that her residential properties would be run solely according to her wishes. Under Beresford’s infectious guidance, she pursued interests that would never have appealed to her in earlier years. She became a “well-known racing woman,” was rumored to buy racehorses in silent partnership with her husband, and sued unsuccessfully to retain the leased rights to a promising horse after her husband’s unexpected death in 1900. Horseracing was not, however, a lasting hobby, and, once widowed, Lily lost interest in the sport.

Wives of her generation were expected to be submissive in marriage, but Lily was never subservient, was always sure of herself, and proved herself remarkably resilient. Her zeal and aptitude for learning directly, for absorbing indirectly, and for applying her accumulated knowledge and skills creatively were tributes to her intelligence and capability. She deserves respect for the way in which she took charge of her own destiny and orchestrated a life so different from the one expected for her. She propelled herself under her own power a long way from her roots, and proved herself an admirable woman in a fascinating age. 

Further Reading

Sally Svenson, Lily, Duchess of Marlborough (1854—1909): A Portrait with Husbands (Dog Ear Publishing, 2011).

Sally E. Svenson is a New York City-based writer whose articles about aspects of nineteenth century social life have appeared in various journals. Her book on nineteenth century vernacular architecture, Adirondack Churches: A History of Design and Building, was published in 2006.

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Bringing in the New Year in Germany

There is plenty of dancing going on in Germany. Glee-wine, a sort of negus and puneh, is brought in after supper and just before twelve o’clock. Every one is on the watch to win the New Year from the others – that is, to announce the New Year first. Accordingly, the instant the city bell is heard to commence tolling, ‘Prosst Neu Jahr!’ starts from every one’s lips; and happy is he who is acknowledged to have made the exclamation first, and to have won from all the others the New Year. In every house at that moment, all over the country is shouted ‘Prosst Neu Jahr!’ prose being no German word, but a contraction of the Latin prosit. On one occasion, having retired to rest, our servants assembled at our room door and woke us in order to cry ‘Prosst Neu Jahr!’ On the following morning, every one that meets you salutes you with the same exclamation. With the glee-wine are brought in, on a waiter, the New Year wishes of the family and its friends. These are written in verse, generally on very ornamented gilt notepaper and sealed up. When the Prosst Neu Jahr has passed and all have drunk to one another a happy New Year, with a general touching of glasses, these are opened and read. For the most part they are without signatures and occasion much guessing and joking. Under cover of these anonymous epistles, good hints and advice are often administered by parents and friends. Numbers of people who never on any other occasion write a verse, now try their hands at one; and those who do not find themselves sufficiently inspired, present those ornamental cards of which I have spoken under Christmas, and which have all kinds of wishes, to suit all kinds of taste and circumstances. These are to be purchases of all qualities and prices; and those sent by friends and lovers generally appear on New Year’s Day, and are signed or not, as suits the purpose of the sender. William Howitt’s Rural and Domestic Life of Germany.

Printed in The Chamber’s Journal, vol 11-12, 1849, p. 64.

Katie Barclay wishes everyone a Happy New Year and best wishes for 2012. She is a historian at the University of Adelaide.

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A glorious sun rose on Christmas-day, and the moments were melting ones. The weather had been very wet through June, July and August; September, October, and November had been almost perfect. The bright beautiful green clothing the valleys and hills, the bracing clear atmosphere, just warm enough, but not too warm, the summer evenings, the moonlight nights – all had been nearly perfect; but now hot weather was setting in, and had been for the last fortnight, with the likelihood of continuing for the next three months. [...]

The boys dressed themselves in their holiday suits, after having attended to the business of the morning, and sister Jane’s various little errands; and, the great pudding being ready, and the goose, and the beef, and Mr. Ramsey, they sat down, a merry happy family, to the table.

“Where is your young bear,” said Harry, very mischievously to Edward, “that Mr. Ramsey was to taste when stewed?”.

“It’s where sister Jane’s pudding is,” said the boy, “not on the table.”

Jane sat down on a Christmas-day in a thin white muslin dress and pink ribbons, with the doors and windows open to allow what little air there was to blow through.

Jane was one of those who have the knack of doing everything without seeming to do it. True, she had cooked the dinner with her own little hands; but with the speed of lightening, while it was waiting for five minutes on the table, she had arranged her toilet and looked quite nice in her summer attire. And then whilst the boys removed goosy and beef, she slipped away and with Edward’s help, assisted the pudding so cleverly out of its hot bath, that she was back again before any once missed her (except Mr. Ramsey). Two of her brothers, with a great deal of ceremony and fuss, placed the huge mass of currants, raisins, suet, eggs, flour, brandy, sugar, and lemon-peel on the table, and declared that was an Australian Christmas plum-pudding, and that three cheers were to be given to sister Jane for making it, with another three for their buying it; but that the stewed bear was nowhere to be found, and they feared must have been eaten by the cat.

Jane said, as the rooms were so small, she would prefer the cheers to be reserved for out of doors after dinner. The pudding was investigated and thoroughly approved, and Edward asked Mr. Ramsay, in a very loud whisper, whether he didn’t wish he had the chance of having a sister to make such a pudding as that. [...]

After the merry Christmas dinner, the Seymours betook themselves to the shade of some noble gum-trees, the day being far too hot to admit of any pleasure in walking.

“Janey,” said Harry, “here am I spoiling my handsome pocket-handkerchief by the attention I have to pay to my hot face in these melting moments; and there are my cousins in England dreaming away their night in fancying the snowballs, and skating, and sliding on Christmas-day; but for all that, I don’t envy them, only I cannot understand it.”

“Nor I should think could any one else,” said little Edward. “Why, our noses are red with heat instead of cold, and I was too hot to eat half the pudding I wanted to.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Ramsay, “it was owing to the knowledge of your voracity that your sister had to make so large a pudding; and I think she ought to pray for the hot winds to come generally, and then there would be less demand upon her time and attention in the feeding department.”

Towards evening a cool breeze sprung up, and in half an hour Jane was glad to and change her light robes for a much less sylvan-looking one, and the boys buttoned up their coats, and Daddy put on an extra one.

In the cooler districts, the change in the weather generally comes on very suddenly, often there is the difference of a blanket in the course of an hour. As a rule, the change in the weather, sudden as it is, does not seem to affect the health and the cold nights prepare for enduring the warmth of the next day.

Jane proposed that as Christmas-day had passed without their being able to attend any divine service, that they should sing some of their favourite Christmas hymns. And, having good voices, they sounded very sweetly, and bore away the last echo on the evening breeze. Having ended the day as usual with family devotions, the family retired happily and peacefully to rest in their Australian home.

Taken from Life’s Work as It is, Or, The Emigrant’s Home in Australia, written by A Colonist, and published in 1867. It tells the story of an emigrant family who settle in Willunga, in what is now the famous winery valley of McLaren Vale, south of Adelaide in South Australia.

Katie Barclay is today enjoying her first South Australian Christmas in 30+ degree heat with a BBQ and pool party. She wishes everyone a Merry Christmas.

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After her husband’s death and a widow probably before she was twenty, Susan settled into Castle Lyon. Like other women of her status, she had access to significant wealth and property, and indeed, spent part of the 1730s in legal disputes with the Dukes of Hamilton, aiming to clarify her inheritance from her father. Not much is known about her life at this time, until she was forced into the limelight in the late 1740s, when her estate manager George Forbes took her to court to prove their marriage.

Forbes argued that in April 1745, they were married in her bedroom in Castle Lyon, by a person that she described as clergyman, and that afterwards they cohabited as man and wife. He claimed that they kept the marriage a secret due to the scandal that would have resulted from her marrying so far beneath her social rank. Forbes went on to describe subsequent events, noting that the Countess found that she was pregnant in the October following the marriage and the couple decided to go to Holland so she could give birth privately. They arrived in Rotterdam in November where they lived throughout her pregnancy, apart from short trips when they were bored. At this time, she was accompanied by her companion Miss Emelia Murray.

Susan gave birth to a daughter in Rotterdam in the following May, in front of several witnesses, including Miss Murray, Mrs Dunlop (who had arranged accommodation for them in Rotterdam), the landlady of the house they lived in, and a midwife. Afterwards the child was baptised and named for her mother. The child was then put out to nurse with a woman in the neighbourhood of Rotterdam. After recovering from the birth, Susan returned to Scotland, but left Forbes behind as the Jacobite Rebellion had made Scotland politically dangerous for known Jacobites, and Forbes had previously worked as Master of the Horse for ‘the Pretender’s Son’. On her leaving, she arranged for Forbes to have £1000 credit to support himself. Their daughter was left in the care of Miss Emelia Murray, who remained with the wetnurse in Rotterdam. Yet, as Forbes lamented, once Susan returned to Scotland, she denied the marriage and would have no more to do with Forbes.

Susan’s response to Forbes’ claims was to deny that any marriage took place, arguing that these were specious claims made by her ‘menial servant’. Indeed, a considerable amount of the court case was taken up with arguing over Forbe’s social status. She claimed that he was of lowly status, the child of a grieve (in charge of farmworkers) to the Duke of Perth, who had never had more ambition than to be a livery servant, and these claims were just an attempt to exhort money from her. He claimed that his father was a gentleman fallen on hard times, and that he had worked as Master of the Horse to Bonnie Prince Charlie, a role only given to gentleman. In the post-1745 Rebellion climate, this latter claim brought him under some criticism, with Susan’s lawyer’s remarking that it was ‘unbecoming the outward profession of Gratitude to his Majestie, whose Title he cannot Recognise if he still looks upon himself as honoured or his Blood purified by the Office he now Boasts of’ and ‘It is well known that the Highland Army was an Assylum for persons of all Ranks’. Susan’s strategy was to deny Forbes’ claims, but as Forbes himself complained, she never addressed the issue of giving birth to the child in her denials.

Whatever the truth of the situation, the case dragged out for several years during which Susan moved to Paris, perhaps to avoid the scandal. The case was still ongoing when she died on the 28th June 1754. Yet, this was not the end of the story. As heirs to an unmarried Susan, the Duke of Hamilton (husband of her deceased sister Anne) and Catherine Cochrane, wife to the Earl of Galloway, fought the case on her behalf. They were ultimately unsuccessful and in July 1756 the court found that Susan and George were married and that Susan Janet Emilia Forbes was their lawful daughter.

According to the nineteenth-century writer Thornton Hall, in his imaginative and romantic retelling of Susan’s life, this was not the last legal suit on this matter. He suggests that George then sued Susan’s family for her inheritance, finally proving her will in 1766. In the meantime, their daughter was raised in a convent in Rouen, France, but in 1761, her father brought her home to live with him (now working as a livery servant in Edinburgh) and his new wife. She was said to be cruelly treated by her stepmother and ran away from home, where she lived wild in the countryside for years, before going to work on a farm. Susan, jnr, was ultimately said to have married the farmer’s son and had many children, before finally being granted a £100 annuity by the Hamiltons and Galloways in her old age. Where he got his information, however, is unclear.

Susan was not the only Strathmore to cause legal dramas due to illicit affairs with the servants; one of her family’s descendants married his maid to legitimise their son of his deathbed! Katie Barclay is a historian at the University of Adelaide.

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Susan Cochrane was the second daughter of the 4th Earl of Dundonald and Lady Anne Murray. Her parents married in April 1706 and her mother died in November 1710; she was one of four siblings. Susan was the second daughter, but it is not clear if she was the second or third child. Her eldest sister Anne was born in February 1707, and she also had a brother, William, and a younger sister Catherine. We don’t know much about her childhood, but she was born into one of the wealthiest families in Scotland, and when her father died in 1715, she inherited at least £30,000 Scots – a massive sum for the period.

On the 25th July 1725, when Susan was around 16, she married Charles Lyon, 6th Earl of Strathmore. It was a stressful time for her family. Her brother, William, now the Earl of Dundonald, had been ill for a number of years and finally died in January 1725. This created a crisis of inheritance as it was disputed whether a woman could succeed to the Dundonald estates. Her elder sister, Anne, had married her second cousin, the Duke of Hamilton, in 1723 and died in childbirth in 1724, at age 17. The Hamiltons claimed the estate for Anne’s son, James, but they eventually went to a distant Dundonald cousin, Thomas. So, it was in a context of death and property disputes that Susan was married to the 26 year old Earl. Her marriage and person were described in detail by Ann Stuart, niece to the Earl of Moray in 1725, highlighting the fineries allowed by her wealth:

Lest you have not got a particular account of my Lord Strathmore’s marriage, I will give you the best I can. He was the fondest lover ever I saw, and I believe as fond a husband. He has got a very fine woman, I am persuaded, and I think extream handsome; she has a mighty prity face, but indeed the siklyest pale one that can be; she is tall, well shaped, and has a graceful easie genteel air. In my opinion, take her altogether, she is not inferiour to her sister, Lady Katherine, the famous beauty; but the men are not of that mind, but many of the ladys are and they are certainly nicer judges. My Lady Strathmore had a blue and silver rich stuff gown and petecoat; a blue silk, trimmed to the pocket-holes with silver net; and a pale yellow, trimmed with two rows of open silver lace, about three nails deep each; a green satin, trimmed with close and open silver lace, which she had before her marriage. She was married in white; her fine Brussels lace she got from London, and she bought a great deal of lace at Edinburgh. She made no appearance after her marriage, except seeing the archers, for their coach was not come down from London, and they staid but a few days in town. Her necklace is a very fine one as I have seen this great while, but her earring and other jewels were not come from London at this time.

Their marriage is said to have been happy and one writer has attributed her to saying of this period in her life that “”I never thought that life could be so sweet. The days are all too short to crowd my happiness into.” On her marriage, she became mistress to the beautiful Glamis Castle, which had undergone major modernisation in the decades before her arrival. Yet, her marriage was short-lived.

Her husband Charles died in May 1728, after only 3 years. On the day of his death, he attended the funeral of a family friend and afterwards the all-male funeral party went to a public house to drink. Later that day, Charles left the pub with his friends and distant relatives, Mr Lyon of Brigton and James Carnegie of Finhaven and went to visit Finhaven’s sister. During the visit, Lyon and Carnegie started to quarrel, so Charles helped them out of the house. Once they were outside, Lyon pushed Carnegie into a ditch; Carnegie, now angered, felt this was an insult to his honour and drew his sword to seek revenge. As Carnegie lunged forward, Charles stepped into the brawl and was stabbed in the stomach. He died a few days later with his wife at his side. Carnegie was devastated by the death of his friend and later tried for his murder. The trial was one of the most famous in Scottish legal history, as the jury introduced the verdict of ‘not guilty’, rather than proven or not proven which were previously in use, to indicate that while the death could be proven, he was ‘not guilty’ in law.

As the couple had no children, Charles was succeeded by his brother James, who also died without heir in 1735. He was succeeded by another brother Thomas, who died in 1753. As Susan was now the dowager countess, she was no longer expected to live in the main family home, and moved to Castle Lyon (now HMP Castle Huntly), just west of Dundee, the family’s dowager house. Perhaps foretelling her own future, the Castle was said to be haunted by a White Lady, the daughter of an earlier Lyon ancestor, who was banished to a tower in the Castle after falling in love with one of the servants. After learning of her beloved’s death, she is said to have jumped to her death from the window, but continued to haunt it for succeeding generations.

For Part Two, tune in next week.

Katie Barclay is fascinated by this ill-fated family, who spent several generations in court working out the details of their complex sexual and marital relationships. She is a historian at the University of Adelaide.

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I would like to announce the publication of my new book, Embroidering History: An Englishwoman?s Experience as a Humanitarian Aid Volunteer in Post-War Poland, 1924-1925. The book provides a glimpse inside the inner workings of an early humanitarian aid project through the lively letters of a middle class English woman who steps out of her depth into rural village life in post-war Poland of 1925. Margaret Tregear left teaching to volunteer with a Quaker project providing income generating work for refugee peasant women. The project involved importing English embroidery cotton into Poland, buying local linen, and then paying peasant women and girls to embroider items which were sold in England and America. The English and American project staff worked with middle-class Polish women to reach out to the Belarusian peasants. The “Women’s Industries” project was managed and run by women in the field, and overseen by a committee of men and women in London. Along the way, Treager encountered recalcitrant Belarusian peasants, manipulative local government officials, excitable bourgeois Poles, and altruistic American Quakers. And few of them really meet her British expectations of how things ought to be done. In one letter she lets out her frustration about a field visit from the London office representatives:

 ….on Friday the great trio arrived …. They came partly to look into the housing situation; Jane had urged it on them so that they should be convinced of the necessity of advancing money in London to build a house. In reality that question has been settled already in London, but the letter that had been written had been misleading. So what really happened was that they spent the whole day trotting round, inspecting premises, and after great deliberation feeling prepared to recommend to the Committee that we should take a little house on the green for our loom room instead of the two we now have, – a conclusion which would be obvious to almost anyone! I am afraid I spent the day being either thoroughly aggressive or flippant. In some ways they so utterly fail to grasp the realities of this work and these people.

After six month working on the project Margaret questions the economics of the industry. She can see the weakness of an aid project that purports to take advantage of a peasant women’s ‘spare time’ and she questions whether the project can generate enough income for the peasant women through a home-based craft industry. And she is frustrated that the project doesn’t generate enough money to cover the costs of the overworked local staff either.

… Edmund Harvey, their spokesman is that terrible kind of person who gushes in a soapy manner over everything, and simply oozes brother love, without considering in the least the personality of the persons round him; we had a few furious arguments, – one when he suggested housing in a house on the green and suggesting that two workers could perfectly well share a room at the back, – a room which would give them a space of about eight square feet with a big corner eaten out by the stove; he seemed to think that because he roughed it once while doing emergency work in France that workers here should be glad to put up with any corner that is found for them.

He seems to have not the slightest feeling that this is a new thing being built up, where it is possible for us to set at least a decent standard of living for the workers. It’s true there is no money for it … and that we have possibly over produced this year, but … if the Industry were not going to support the workers in decent conditions, and moreover soon be capable of paying bigger wages to the peasants, it would in my opinion be better to chuck it altogether. …

We argued this point too; – but E. H. thinks that we are conferring a benefit on the dear peasants simply by giving them something to do, – so nice for them to enjoy a little gossip the day they come to the distribution, – a sort of holiday for them, – yes waiting for hours huddled together in the snow or cold or the rain, – or lying about on the ground dozing when the weather is finer!! wasting a whole day to get about four and six [shillings] for a week’s work!

Margaret Tregear’s prose remains crisp and immediate, and her frank letters take the reader into a world where her frustrations are balanced with an intense curiosity, and a desire to explain her experiences to her friends across Europe. A carefully researched introduction places the project in the wider context of humanitarian aid provision in the aftermath of WWI, and explores how the different motives and expectations of the men and women involved – international staff, local staff, project beneficiaries, and local power brokers – shape the projects outcomes, and reveal conflicts rooted in culture and power that will resonate with anyone interested in the history of humanitarian aid, and women’s role in it as both donors and beneficiaries.

Further reading

Jane Cooper, Embroidering History: An Englishwoman’s Experience as an International Aid Volunteer in Post-war Poland, 1924-25 (Kindle, 2011).

Jane Cooper is a free lance researcher who lives in rural eastern Ontario. Having worked in international development on and off for 25 years, she is interested in how the history of humanitarian aid can help explain what happens in the field today.

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26 November 1883 Sojourner Truth (born as Isabella Hardenbergh), speaker and preacher, charismatic religious and political leader, died on this day at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, USA. The day of her death is known but the day of her birth is not. It was some time between 1797 and 1800 (as near, she said, as she could calculate). She was born a slave, and of her ten or twelve older siblings there was only one she knew personally: all the others were sold away from the family before she was old enough to remember them. The brother she remembered was called Peter, and she gave the same name to one of her children (whom by a combination of paying money and going to court she managed to get back after he had been illegally sold as a slave to Alabama).

This action shows the strength of her personality. After living her early years without religion, she had a classic conversion experience, and became an Evangelical Christian of a somewhat idiosyncratic, personal brand which may have owed something to traditional African religions. Before she was thirty, when her current “owner” reneged on a promise to free her, she decided that God would endorse her taking the law into her own hands, and she fled into freedom in New York, taking her baby with her and leaving her husband and elder children behind. She joined a millenarian sect, and took quite a long time to leave it again although it was clearly misogynist. Her motives and intentions in all this are not understood, which means her inner self is still a mystery to her many admirers.

But once she had broken away not only from slavery but from the support of a community, she chose herself (with God’s direction) a new name, and took to the road as a wandering preacher. From the beginning she preached Christ’s second coming and later she preached two causes dear to her heart: emancipation and women’s rights. She was tireless, turning her back on retirement when the American Civil War produced a new level of need, and moving straight from work for the end of slavery to work on behalf of newly emancipated slaves. According to Lucretia Mott, her philosophy was the “finite nature of evil and the everlasting quality of good.”

For this illiterate woman words were her chosen weapon in the fight for good, the fight to advance other people who shared her race or her gender. Her autobiography, the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, is only the tip of an iceberg. It is, of course, a work dictated to somebody else, and it uses (in the third person, not the first), the standard, educated, “white” American English of the time. Sojourner Truth also composed songs, like this for a black Michigan regiment of the Northern army (to the tune of “John Brown’s body”):

Above all she composed speeches, and the most famous is the one she gave at a historic occasion, the Women’s Rights Convention at Akron, Ohio, on 29 May 1851. Here she protested about the lack of attention paid to black women by white suffragists, in a question which has become a catch-phrase or slogan: “Ar’n't I a Woman?” This phrase echoes through her speech like a refrain: “I have borne thirteen chilern and seen ‘em mos’ all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard—and ar’n't I a woman?”

That sentence comes from the longer form of her speech which was printed in the New York Independent twelve years after it was given – for a speech given without notes exists in a number of differing versions. This one, which was ushered belated into print by Frances Dana Gage, organizer of the original conference, uses a stereotyped southern black diction which was probably not how Sojourner Truth spoke at all, given that she grew up Dutch-speaking before she learned English. Gage has had some stick recently for the form that she gave to Truth’s words – but it was she who recorded the most complete version of the speech to survive, and she believed that that speech had saved the convention, converting it from a failure into a success.  Sojourner Truth, wrote Gage, “had taken us up in her strong arms and carried us safely over the slough of difficulty, turning the whole tide in our favour.”

This information is provided by Dr Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta, and comes from Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, by subscription: see http://orlando.cambridge.org.

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