Black Diamonds (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increasingly, as the Earl’s hopes for a cure for his son faded, he realized that his illness placed the family in jeopardy. The stigma of lunacy threatened the Fitzwilliams’ fortune and position – their potential for alliances through marriage with other great noble houses. It also threatened their social omnipotence. Endemic to epilepsy was the risk of public humiliation – an eventuality of which members of the aristocracy were particularly fearful. Even Lord Shaftesbury, the great Whig reformer and philanthropist, expressed horror at the thought of being humiliated in front of his tenants and employees when his son suffered a fit in public: ‘
Maurice fell
yesterday in the Park. I trembled lest a vast crowd should be gathered. Sent away the children and sat by his side as though we were lying on the grass, and by degrees he recovered and walked home.’

In the early 1860s, new research determined that what had previously been a minority view among doctors had become medical fact: mental illness, including epilepsy, was hereditary, sending shivers through the aristocracy for whom pedigree was everything. Milton’s illness had corrupted the Fitzwilliams’ blood.

That the Earl had reached this view became evident on 27 July 1860, Milton’s twenty-first birthday.

At Wentworth, the coming of age of the eldest son had traditionally been celebrated on a lavish scale. In 1807, when Milton’s grandfather, the 5th Earl Fitzwilliam, came of age, the family gave a party for 10,000 guests.
The Iris
, a Sheffield newspaper, carried a report:

May 5th 1807

Yesterday being the 21st anniversary of the birthday of Lord Milton, the only son and heir of Earl Fitzwilliam, the day was most munificently celebrated at Wentworth House. Two oxen weighing together 240 stone were roasted whole on the lawn, in sheds erected for the purpose; these had been feeding for upwards of three years past, and are supposed to have been the finest and fattest beasts ever grazed in this county. Twenty sheep had also been previously roasted in quarters, which with the beef, bread, etc and more than 10,000 gallons of strong ale, principally brewed several years ago for this festival, were distributed among the multitudes who assembled in the park, and whose numbers, notwithstanding the wetness of the day, have been estimated at 10,000.

During the forenoon and in the evening the roads on every side of Wentworth were darkened with crowds of people on foot, on horseback, in gigs, in chaises, coaches, carts and wagons. Yet rainy and unfavourable as the day was, none who travelled to Wentworth had occasion to complain of the fare – except those who by their gluttonous and drunken indiscretion made beasts of themselves and converted the bounty of Lord Fitzwilliam and his son at once in the means and the punishment of sinning. About a thousand of the tenants and others were entertained most sumptuously in the House itself.

The household accounts show precisely what the crowds consumed:

3 roasted oxen
, 336 stone in weight

2 Scotch bullocks, 130 stone

26 roasted sheep, 177 stone 6 pounds

3 lambs

3 calves

10 hams

54 fowls

240 bushels of wheat

555 eggs

75 hogsheads of ale

6 hogsheads of small beer

473 bottles of good wine

23 gallons of rum

18 gallons of brandy

13 gallons of rum shrub [
sic
]

Viscount Milton’s party, half a century later, was a very different affair. He was not even there. Nor was his family. Instead, it was quietly celebrated by 180 tenants, who drank toasts to the young Lord with specially brewed ale, while the house masons and carpenters played cricket on the lawn.

It was a crushing snub to Milton, proof that his father refused to recognize him for who he was – the heir to his title and fortune. Yet again, it seems he had been sent away. Only one member of his family appears to have given the occasion any thought: his younger brother, William Henry, the Earl’s second son. ‘
I have been thinking
as William is just 21 that we ought to give him a birthday present; there is plenty of time to think of it before he comes home’, Henry, as he was known in the family, wrote to his older sister, Frances. ‘I should like to give him something really worth having, and if all of us brothers and sisters were to subscribe together we might get something very good, and if you can not spare much now, I am quite sure Mama will forward you some money. I know he often thinks that we do not care for him and he would very much like to have something from us all. I will give five pound but I do not mean that I want you to give the same, for I know you have more things to buy than I have. If we could get up between us £10 or £15 it would be very nice. He will never be 21 again you know.’

William Henry was Milton’s favourite brother; he was also his father’s favourite son. De facto, the Earl regarded Henry as his heir. Yet problematically, primogeniture dictated that Milton would succeed to the title and estates. Disinheriting an eldest son was a complex and all too public procedure; in light of the low life expectancy of epileptics in mid-nineteenth century England, the Earl decided to ride the matter out. As long as Milton died before he did, Henry, his second son, would succeed.