The Damnation of John Donellan (13 page)

If Donellan was condemned later as a conniving money-grabbing scoundrel and seducer, he certainly did not behave like one now. He acted like a man in love.

How was it possible for Donellan to marry a minor without her family's consent?

Two legal options would have been open to John and Theodosia: marriage in church after banns had been published, or marriage by special licence (the preferred option for the aristocracy). The Clandestine Marriage Act of 1753 established whose consent was needed: firstly, the minor's father (in Theodosia's case, no longer living), or a guardian specifically appointed by the father (which had been done for her brother, but not Theodosia). Only if neither father nor guardian existed would consent be the mother's responsibility, and then only if she had not remarried. (Control over her children might have been one of the very logical reasons that Anna Maria had not chosen another husband.)

However, the consent issue could be bypassed. The Act said that if the couple had had their banns read in church, the marriage could go ahead only if there were no objections; positive consent was not needed as it was with a licence – only a lack of opposition. Nor could the marriage be invalidated if the couple did not live in the parish where the marriage had taken place, or where the banns had been called: the direction was only for guidance, not mandatory. So, the marriage could be legal even without positive parental consent. However, this would mean that John and Theodosia would have to escape somewhere distant, somewhere they would not be recognised or their names were not known, and to live there for a month without being found out.

The quicker alternative was marriage by licence. Before the Act of 1753, those who married by licence had to swear under canon law either that they were both over twenty-one, or that they had parental consent, and two witnesses were needed to swear that the parents did indeed approve. However, this was canon law, which could be – and regularly was – circumvented, not least by obliging Anglican ministers who for the right fee were prepared to risk being suspended for three years.

Half of all those women who married by licence were daughters of gentlemen or wealthy farmers; only 5 per cent of those who were married by the calling of banns in church were in the same class. And so the expectation would have been that, rather than waiting a month to take the lower-class option, John and Theodosia would have married by licence.

There was a problem with that option, though. Although John and Theodosia could have been legally married by banns without Anna Maria's consent, they needed her approval to marry by licence. However, the Act stated that such positive parental consent could be sought ‘even retrospectively'.

So, even though they could marry without Anna Maria's consent at the time, they would need it eventually.

Anna Maria could have opposed the marriage by going to court, but there were hurdles there for her. In order for litigation to proceed, certain circumstances had to be in place. Firstly, the
marriage had to contravene the clauses of a will (which it did not). Secondly, consent had to be refused (it was). Thirdly, the marriage had to have gone ahead without consent (it had). But lastly Anna Maria had to have enough money to contest the case (she did not).

Once Anna Maria found out that Theodosia was married, what could she do? She did not approve, but there was no word in Theodosia's father's will setting out conditions for her marriage. The cost of a court case was frightening: a lot of the Boughton estate was already mortgaged, and court cases had been known to cost upwards of £1,000 (£64,000). On top of this would have been the public disgrace, the picking-over of family problems in public. While Anna Maria hesitated, John Donellan attempted to win her round.

The 1781
Nottinghamshire Gazette
piece reported that John's attitude towards his wife was always respectful and that ‘he used every means to facilitate esteem'. Presumably he wrote to Anna Maria pleading his cause, and possibly also to Sir William Wheler and Sir Francis Skipwith, Theodosius's legal guardians. He may well have told them what he told the court in his own trial later, that he had seen a lawyer before he married Theodosia and had drawn up a will showing that he was not interested in her money. On 7 May 1781, the
Northampton Mercury
said that John Donellan made a will in August 1777 ‘by which he disposes of his property to Sir Theodosius after the death of Mrs Donellan in case she should die without issue from him'. This will was, apparently, drawn up by a Mr White of Castle Yard, Holborn, and was supposedly concrete proof of Donellan's lack of financial motive.

However, this is not quite as selfless as it sounds: what John Donellan was actually saying was that if both he and Theodosia died before Theodosius, and they did not have any children, Theodosius would get all John Donellan's money. Which was not actually much of a promise: Donellan had very little money to leave, and the will presupposed that either he or Theodosia were infertile, or that their children all died, and that Theodosia died, and that
he
died before Theodosius. Not exactly probable, and so not a hugely generous gesture.

Whatever John pleaded or promised, it did not seem to affect
Anna Maria's resolve, at least not at first. But a change was on the way. The
Nottinghamshire Gazette
went on: ‘during a visit to a sea coast a reconciliation took place between the parties.'

What caused this change of heart?

The most probable reason was that Theodosia was pregnant (at the time of her brother's death three years later, she already had two children). After several months of separation, either an accidental or an arranged meeting would have presented Anna Maria with visible evidence that she was going to be a grandmother. Living alone at Lawford Hall, worried by her son's behaviour, she may well have decided to welcome her daughter back into the fold. If she had not done so, and given her consent to the marriage, it would have remained technically illegal until Theodosia reached the age of twenty-one.

The couple were not quite ready to return to Lawford yet, though. It is known that they were living in Bath in 1777, and the likeliest contender for the ‘sea coast' where the reconciliation took place is Brighton.

Although Weymouth, which was closer to Bath, would become the favourite seaside resort of the ailing king in 1777, Brighton was still the resort of choice for the rakish Prince of Wales and the fast young set. The Prince of Wales was only sixteen, but he was already famous for a wild lifestyle that at various points of his life was to make him ill (he was treated for venereal disease as well as many other complaints). From 1750, when the physician Richard Russell moved to Brighton, he had upheld the town and its sea bathing as a cure-all. Brighton therefore fulfilled a dual purpose for the Prince: he could indulge himself well out of sight of his ailing father and the interfering House of Commons (who had an annoying habit of trying to make him accountable for his spending), and he could give himself a rest cure when his exhausting life took its inevitable toll.

In 1760, Russell published ‘A Dissertation on the Use of Sea Water', quoting Euripides, in which he claimed that ‘sea water washes away the evils of mankind'. His claims for the efficacy of Brighton water in particular were responsible for its transformation
from a modest little town with a population of 3,600 in 1786 to a thriving metropolis of 40,000 by 1830. Russell's book claimed cures and treatments for all kinds of ailments, from ‘scrofulous tumours of the ear' and ‘scirrhus of the liver' to ‘dry leprosy' and ‘obstructions of the rectum'. Some of the claims for sea water were pure fantasy – in one case, Russell declared that ‘two girls who could not speak and every time they drew in their breath they made a noise not unlike the crowing of a cock' were perfectly restored by sea bathing, an unusual remedy for what sounds like whooping cough.

His prescriptions for some other poor benighted patients were equally challenging: ‘An old woman had been afflicted with a violent Itch for some four or five years,' he wrote. ‘She was sent to drink the sea water and likewise bathed in it. The sea water made her stomach very uneasy … she returned home quite free of the disease.' And more unpleasantly still: ‘A man of illustrious family had his body and all his joints covered with white leprous scabs. The disease was hereditary and he had taken mercury, antimony, Viper's Flesh in vain. After he began to bathe in sea water the disease would give way and the scales fall off … ' Russell also claimed that those who had been bitten by a mad dog should be ‘dipt' as soon as possible, but added helpfully that this would be of no use if the patient had already been ‘affected by the Dread of Water'.

Bathers climbed into a sea-bathing machine which was rolled out into the waves. Steps were lowered into the water and the patients – nude in the case of men, and usually dressed in a modest linen or woollen costume in the case of women – climbed down the steps and into the arms of the ‘dippers', who helped them submerge in the water or swim.

In this sporting and lively atmosphere, in a town favoured by the Prince of Wales, Anna Maria decided to reconcile herself to John and Theodosia's marriage. The union was apparently strong, and Theodosia was undoubtedly pregnant. Pragmatism took the place of outrage, and John Donellan was welcomed into the family fold.

It was June 1778 when John and Theodosia came to live at Lawford at Anna Maria's invitation.

A letter from Edward Allesley Boughton Ward-Boughton-Leigh to Sir Charles Rouse-Boughton of 1882 discusses at length the couple and their relationship with Theodosius. ‘Sir Theodosius had been staying at Bath with Mr & Mrs Donellan for five or six months,' he wrote, ‘and I have Lady Boughton's diary which shows that she paid Donellan a considerable sum for the keep of Sir Theodosius and his house and probably a servant.'

This has a significant bearing on later events. Anna Maria trusted Donellan to look after her son, enough that, when Theodosius left Eton, she sent him to live with the newly married couple. This would indicate the rift was securely healed, and Anna Maria evidently felt that Donellan was a man who could advise Theodosius and steer him away from ‘particular complaints'. in this Donellan was not successful – Theodosius's range of treatments testify that the boy could not keep his hands off prostitutes – but Anna Maria's actions show that in her mind it was preferable for Theodosius to stay with the Donellans than at either Eton or, indeed, Lawford Hall. During these months, Edward Allesley Boughton Ward-Boughton-Leigh claims that Theodosius even put his name down for Magdalen College, Oxford, a family tradition which not all the Boughton men had taken up.

When the Donellans moved to Lawford Hall in June 1778, Theodosius went to Rugby to be privately tutored – probably to cram for Oxford entry.

John and Theodosia's daughter Maria Boughton Beauchamp Donellan was born that year, but her birth is not registered at Newbold, so presumably she was born before June. Another girl was born the following year, but sadly Theodocia King Donellan (registrar's spelling) was buried on 9 December 1779 at Newbold. John Boughton Beauchamp Donellan, their son, was born in July 1780 and was therefore just a babe in arms when Theodosia visited Donellan in Warwick Gaol in the autumn of 1780.
²

When Theodosius returned from Rugby to live at Lawford Hall in November 1778 it was a changed place. When he had gone up
to Eton, he had left behind a widowed mother and his 18-year-old sister; now, just four years later, his sister was a married woman with a child and John Donellan was the man of the household. Donellan, by every account, was very much in charge, and Anna Maria deferred to him on most household matters, a fact which reputedly annoyed Theodosius intensely – so much so that at one point he rallied his drunken friends to try and have Donellan thrown out at the point of a sword. The attempt inevitably failed and frayed tempers were subsequently smoothed over.

Evidence is scant as to what was going on in the family at this time, but Anna Maria did draw up a new will dated 28 September 1778, just three months after John and Theodosia took up residence.
³
In it, she gives ‘the whole moiety of my estate … to Esquire William Beauchamp Rye of Bath and Doctor in Physick and his son Robert'. What Anna Maria was effectively doing here was returning to her own family – her brother and her nephew – the estates worth £1,400 (£89,000 today) which she had inherited from her sister Elizabeth Shipton.

However, the next clause is more perplexing. In this Anna Maria states that if Theodosius were to die or ‘forfeited' the estate, the whole was to be divided between Sir William Wheler and her brother William and nephew Robert. It is doubtful that this had legal credence, as Theodosius's father had left the estate to his son, and thereafter to Theodosia, so technically it was not Anna Maria's to bestow. Perhaps she saw the impossibility of this, because she later voided the will. But why, three months after her daughter and new son-in-law came to live with her, did she try to exclude Theodosia from her inheritance if Theodosius died? And what did she mean by Theodosius ‘forfeiting' his inheritance?

The answer as regards her daughter may be simply that Theodosia had come of age the year before, and was now married. Anna Maria may have thought – wrongly – that she could overrule her own husband's will now that Theodosia was an independent person. But it is Anna Maria's change towards Theodosius which is more interesting. The wording of the will indicates that she had reservations about either her son's physical or mental health. The
estate could only be ‘forfeited' if he were declared insane or so desperately ill that he had no control or understanding over his affairs. Perhaps the incident of the rowdy teenagers trying to drag Donellan out of the house had preyed on her mind; perhaps Theodosius's bar-room brawls were becoming notorious. Perhaps she was simply a mother at her wits' end. Whatever the reason, Anna Maria in late 1778 was making plans to hand over the estate to Sir William Wheler and her own family members. Moreover, she was trying to overturn her husband's will by keeping the inheritance from her daughter – and, thereby, her son-in-law.