The Damnation of John Donellan (7 page)

Sadly, but perhaps predictably, Edward and Anne's marriage did not last long. Anne Boughton neé Brydges died and was buried at Newbold church on 15 January 1750. She was sixty-seven, and Edward was thirty-one. Whether Anne had been truly loved as a wife, or rather more pragmatically as a surrogate mother, Edward's reaction to her death is clear from his notebooks: they descend into an illegible scrawl, and then lie empty. His life was, literally, a blank: a telling testimony to his loss.

By 1750, Catherine Shukburgh, who had been such a huge influence on the Boughtons, was also dead. Her son Shukburgh, the darling boy, had married Mary Greville in 1735 and they had already produced a large family, including four sons, of whom the eldest would take the Boughton baronetcy if Edward did not have children of his own. They lived at Poston Hall in Herefordshire, their progeny growing by the year, their eyes fixed on Warwickshire and Edward's alluring wealth and title. So, unless Edward now produced offspring of his own, Catherine Shukburgh's ambition to have her own son inherit the baronetcy would be fulfilled from beyond the grave.

By 1752, Edward Boughton started looking for a second bride.

‘Men are what their mothers made them.'

Ralph Waldo Emerson

EDWARD BOUGHTON
, born in 1719, was a countryman to his core. In the year in which he married Anne Brydges, 1738, his personal account books reveal his interests: he bought ‘a great dog' for 10s. 6d.; a ‘rule and compass' for 3s.; he repaired his carriage for 17s.; and he paid the blacksmith £2 2s.
¹
A few repairs to the house by the carpenter cost him 3s. 10d.; he had a window box made for 10s., and he bought a brazier for £2 0s. 6d. The only concessions to his having married Anne seem to be, later in the year, ‘A box of soaps' bought for £1 3s. 6d. (which must have galled him, as it was more than he paid the butcher) and sixpence for ‘a fiddler'. It is to be hoped that Anne retained some income of her own, because Edward was not exactly generous with his cash. She must have been underwhelmed by the lack of jewellery, clothes or furnishings. For a supposedly ‘Conniving woman', a box of soap is not much of a prize.

Even two years later, Edward's parsimony towards Anne does not seem to have improved. In May alone, he spent a vast amount on wine and cider – £16 9s. (£1,460 in today's money) – and £11 6s.
(the equivalent of £945) on himself; but the only feminine buy was ‘a petticoat' for 9s. 6d. (£40), and even then it could have been for a servant.

There is a curious little anomaly, however, to this seemingly austere lifestyle. Someone at Lawford liked big gestures. Sometime between 1729 and 1739, two large paintings were commissioned from the Italian painter Jacopo Amigoni. Their subjects, Venus and Adonis and Flora and Zephyr, were depicted in an unashamedly romantic and sensual way, as barely draped figures locked in loving embraces beneath suspiciously English-looking oak trees. Did the otherwise undemonstrative Edward commission them for Anne; or did she commission them for him? Or were they ordered by that grande dame of the family, Abigail Shukburgh, who had looked after Edward as a child?
²

Whoever commissioned them, the paintings were hanging at Lawford by the time Edward married his second wife Anna Maria in 1754. Perhaps they inspired him to be a little more outgoing. Whether from passion or just a desire to impress, he appears to have been more extravagant in his spending habits. The year shows a flurry of expensive buys: £13 8s. for ‘a Turkey carpet;' £10 5s. for ‘2 mahogany chests;' £4 18s. for ‘a screen'. In these accounts there are none of the scrawled, ink-blotted or even empty pages that followed Anne's death in 1750; rather, they are neatly written. In May, the month of his marriage, Edward dutifully notes payments to bell ringers and hired coaches, handkerchiefs, stewards at the church, ducks and chickens and fish for the wedding feast, together with a generous milliner's bill for £3 (over £270 today).

But most impressive of all was his purchase in March 1754 of the most luxurious item recorded in his account books: a diamond buckle costing £40 (£3,400 in today's money), presumably a gift for Anna Maria. This one item far exceeded his household bills for the month; the coachman, the housekeeper and the huntsman all earned less than £5 each in the first six months of the year.

In 1760, Edward prefaced his account book with a proud note of ‘My Estate'.
³
It reads:

In fact, Edward had entered the estates brought to him by marriage twice. He made a correction, and totalled his 1760 income as £1,349 4s. 10d. This would be just over £100,000 in today's money – not poor by any standards, but comfortably off rather than very wealthy. His income had been reduced by his having to pay a land tax on Brownsover of over £71 a year, and it appears that he had also borrowed some money, as he had to pay a Mr Lamb a massive £560 (£48,000) in interest in 1744.

Nevertheless, the Boughtons seemed to live well. Their household bills covered the purchase of rabbits, lobster, salmon, fish, chickens, pigeons, eggs and a beehive; they paid washerwomen, labourers, coachmen, a weeding woman and a boy to deliver letters. They attended race meetings and balls; they gave 5s. regularly to the church collection plate; and they made a point of giving to the poor. ‘Gave a poor man 6d.,' reads one entry on 28 July 1755, and ‘Gave a poor man 3d.,' writes Anna Maria a few weeks later.

But by far the most expensive household bill was for alcohol. In April 1755 alone Edward paid 15s. for ten pints of brandy. Comparing 1741 to 1755, Edward seems to have routinely spent over £1,300 in today's money at regular intervals for wine or spirits. However, this was not unusual; liquor was relatively cheap then and Georgian men had a rich diet and drank heavily – hence the preponderance of gout. Alcohol was a domestic and social given: in neighbouring Northampton, for instance, in 1750 there were sixty inns and ale-houses for a population of 5,000.

Anna Maria's life was less concerned with the household bills; her entries list dressmakers, fabric, needles, ribbon – and 5d. for a pair of scarlet garters. In the year that her second son was born, she gave the nursemaid £1 4s. (‘her second month's pay') and 2s. to the apothecary (‘vials at Mr Powel's') who would figure so dramatically in years to come.

The overall expenses for the year 1761 were £1,475 7s. 2d. – over £110,300 in today's money. Expenses were exceeding income by over £100 a year.

The purpose of Edward's remarriage was to provide an heir, and the couple set about this task immediately. For 250 years, the name of the son and heir to the Boughton fortune had been either William or Edward – but it was a tradition that Anna Maria Beauchamp was not prepared to follow.

Anna Maria, described universally as ‘an heiress', had been born on 22 October 1728, the eldest daughter of John Beauchamp and Elizabeth Shipton of Northampton.
⁴
The Beauchamps' second daughter, Elizabeth, named for her mother, was born in August 1729. Both girls were fit and healthy; but unfortunately the sisters that followed were not. Theodosia was born in September 1731 and died five months later. The following year, another child was born, in August; she too was baptised Theodosia, but her life was even shorter. She was buried in December of the same year. It seems that these deaths had a great impact on Anna Maria; when her own children were born she named them either Theodosius or Theodosia. Her influence on Edward must have been quite strong to overturn centuries of tradition in this way. Sadly, however, the pattern of early death was due to repeat itself.

Edward and Anna Maria's first-born little girl, Theodosia Beauchamp Boughton, was baptised at Newbold on 6 July 1757. The next child was another daughter, and she too was christened Theodosia: Theodosia Anna Maria Ramsay Boughton. Baptised on 2 September 1758, this second daughter tragically only lived three months. Two years passed, then, in August 1760, Theodosius Edward Allesley Boughton was born; a year later a brother arrived. Sadly Theodosius Willington Boughton, like his sister before him, lived only twelve weeks and was buried at Newbold on 2 December 1761.

Edward drew up his will, and did not alter it again.
⁵
To ‘my dear wife Dame Anna Maria Boughton I leave all and every lands and common in Long Lawford … that my wife may enjoy the premises free and discharged.' On the event of his son Theodosius reaching
the age of twenty-one, or being married before he was twenty-one, Anna Maria was to receive Brownsover Hall, ‘with the gardens, orchard, grounds and meadows, and the Close and the Cottage Pasture'. This was to ensure that Anna Maria had a property of her own once Theodosius inherited. To his son, Edward left ‘all my Real Estate' but, if he died, then it went to his daughter Theodosia – making Theodosia a potential heiress.

The unusual legacy of Edward's estate to Theodosia in the event of her brother's death was to seal the fate of John Donellan twenty-one years later.

However, no matter how ‘dear' Anna Maria was to Edward, he was not the best of husbands to her in later years. While some of his time was respectably occupied as a JP for Warwick, the remainder was taken up with less admirable pursuits. Edward was fifty-one years old and had been married to Anna Maria for sixteen years when Abraham Turner, a tenant at Brownsover Hall, wrote to Shukburgh Boughton's wife, Mary Greville, in January 1770 about Edward's behaviour.
⁶
The emphasis by underlining is his:

…
I have parted with all my land at Brownsover except for 70s. a year and will get rid of that as soon as your
Good Nephew
gives me leave. I am informed his Lady lately catched him shut up with one of the maids which brought on a Violent Quarrel. Her Ladyship took an opportunity when
His Honor
was out to pack the maid off. Upon his return home and finding the maid gone, he went to bed in a great hurry by himself and would eat no supper. A great deal more is said but I believe what I have before say'd may be depended upon.

The situation had not improved six months later. In fact, it had become markedly worse. Abraham Turner continued his correspondence with Lady Boughton with a piece of sad gossip:‘your nephew Sir Edward keeps a mistress publickly and breaks his wife's heart.'
⁷

Edward did not, then, set the best example to his son Theodosius, who was now ten years old and at Rugby School. Rugby
was only four miles from Lawford Hall, so whether at home or at school, the public parading of his father's mistress, and the consequent misery of his mother, could not have escaped the boy.

Looking back to the First Baronet, Sir William, who was born in 1600, and through to his great-great-grandson Edward, the male Boughtons, with just one exception, all died at roughly the same age: William at fifty-six, Edward in his fifties, William again at fifty-two, and son William at fifty-three. One of the First Baronet's sons, Henry, had died in his thirties, but it was not until the Fifth Baronet, Edward, that we see an exceptionally early demise, at thirty-three. And so Sir Edward Boughton, Sixth Baronet, was following a family precedent when he, like his grandfather, died at fifty-three.

On 3 March 1772, two years after Abraham Turner's reports of his philandering, Edward had taken supper with the Reverend Hall – the same Reverend Hall who had officiated at the unusual exorcism of One-Handed Boughton just a couple of years previously. After they had eaten, the two men had decided to take a walk in the grounds of Lawford Hall. A local newspaper, the
Northampton Mercury
, reported on 16 March: ‘They took a walk in Sir Edward's yard when Mr Hall perceived some signs of Uneasiness which led him to ask, what was the Matter? But, before any Answer could be given, Sir Edward dropped down dead.'

The
Coventry Mercury
reported five days later: ‘Died suddenly at Lawford Hall Sir Edward Boughton, Bart. One of his Majesty's Justices of the Peace for the county of Warwick.'

However, the newspapers may not have been quite accurate in their reports. Many years later, the prosecution brief against John Donellan noted a potential witness called William Marriott: ‘Marriott says that he was with Theodosius's father when he died and that he was a short-necked, full-blooded man and died as he was returning home from a Justice's meeting in a fit without any struggles or convulsions whatever.'

Whether it was Marriott or Hall who witnessed his demise, however, it is indisputable that Edward Boughton died very suddenly. Theodosia was fifteen and Theodosius was twelve. Their
mother, who, until Theodosius came of age, was mistress of her own fortune again, as well as that of her deceased husband, was a widow at forty-four.

Lawford Hall entered a period of seemingly slow decline. On her husband's death, Anna Maria found that, although they owned extensive lands, much of the property was mortgaged. Alone and with two children to provide for, her financial situation clearly preoccupied her. Her son-in-law would later call her ‘covetous', obsessed with money, and slow to pay. She appears to have employed a relatively small number of household servants for a titled estate: one coachman, one footman, one cook, one gardener and a few maidservants are all that are mentioned at the subsequent trial (although there may well have been more – normally it would have taken more than one coachman to run the livery for a country estate, for instance). When medical care was needed, Anna Maria turned to a local apothecary, Powell, rather than have a surgeon or doctor as her first recourse.