The Damnation of John Donellan (8 page)

If an anecdote about a Mr Powell quoted in a book about the area at the time, M. H. Bloxam's
Rugby
, regarding the years beginning 1777, relates to
the
Powell in this case, it is revealing. The story, referring to a house used as accommodation for boys at Rugby School, relates: ‘the house belonged to one Powell, a country apothecary, who went about in a drab suit of clothes, cauliflower wig and black-topped boots. Old Mother Powell was a regular skinflint.'
⁸
Thomas Powell and Thomas Clare are the only apothecaries listed in
Simmons' Medical Registers 1779–1783
for Rugby, so it is likely that the shabbily dressed man described here is the same Powell that tended Theodosius Boughton on his mother's instructions. Again, hardly the type of medical man one would associate with a baronet's family, but no doubt cheaper than a physician.

Although her prosecution lawyers later described Anna Maria's wealth as ‘splendour', that was not accurate. She seems to have provided none of the extensive hospitality that Sir William and Catherine had once shown to their neighbours; Anna Maria went to Bath occasionally, and possibly to London for the season – it was necessary to put her daughter on display for the marriage market
– but there is no suggestion of Anna Maria being part of ‘society;' no balls, no entertainments at Lawford are mentioned. Whether Anna Maria even kept up the age-old suppers and fairs for her tenant farmers at harvest time is also questionable. She was respectable, and she doted on her son. That much, at least, was accepted locally.

In 1775, Anna Maria decided to send Theodosius, then fifteen, to Eton. Until now, he had gone to Rugby School, where he had been first admitted in 1767, aged seven. The school had been founded in 1567 by Lawrence Sheriff, to whom Anna Maria's family, the Beauchamps, were distantly related: Anna Maria owned much of the land around Brownsover where Sheriff had been born. After a period of decay in the early 1700s, Rugby School moved to new premises twenty-seven years before Theodosius registered, by which time it had expanded to a roll of about 200 boys from all over England. Although the education that the boys received was well respected, discipline was severe and their living accommodation spartan: the Birching Tower and the old outdoor wash-houses attested to that. An old boy of the school, Albert Pell, was to describe it as ‘cruelly comfortless' in his autobiography.

‘Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality,' wrote Henry Fielding in
Joseph Andrews
(1742). Many titled ladies resolutely refused to put their sons into what they considered to be harm's way: Lady Leicester of Holkham, for instance, insisted that her nephew take the Grand Tour and £500 a year rather than go to a public school that was, as she put it, ‘a school of vice'. Theodosius would have entered Eton as a senior, where he would have expanded upon what Rugby had already taught him: a basic classical education accompanied by harsh discipline.

Eton exercised the law of survival of the fittest. It was physically demanding, not least in its punishments, and flogging by both masters and seniors was routine. The school was well known for its beatings. In the sixteenth century, Friday had been set aside as ‘flogging day;' from 1809 to 1834 the headmaster, John Keate, used the birch unmercifully – on one occasion he is supposed to have publicly flogged eighty boys. In addition to this, the oldest
self-electing society at Eton, ‘Pop', administered private canings, known to be the severest punishment at the school.

At all boys' public schools at the time young boys were expected to ‘fag' for the older ones in a form of humiliating domestic slavery. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained that at his school, Christ's Hospital, ‘the boys tormented me' ; another pupil reported that he was woken regularly by a senior boy stubbing out his cigar on his face. Gambling, drunkenness and violence were commonplace, but occasionally the boorish behaviour overstepped even Eton's boundaries: the militia were called in more than once to keep order. The historian Edward Gibbon commented sourly, ‘the mimic scene of a rebellion displayed in their true colours the ministers and patriots of the rising generation.'
⁹
These were boys from privileged backgrounds who, to keep up appearances and status, created mayhem, running up bills that their parents were expected to pay at the end of each term. Theodosius, however, was kept short of money; in the
Defence
Donellan noted that ‘Lady Boughton allowed her son 18 pence a week when first there and half a crown thereafter … an allowance not suitable to his birth and fortune,' adding that, as a result, Theodosius borrowed money locally, thereby increasing his debts.

But Theodosius's debts were the least of his problems. He ‘sank into debauchery'
¹⁰
and contracted venereal disease in his first year at Eton. In July 1777, the newly married Donellans visited him at school, and, according to an article in the
Northampton Mercury
of 23 April 1781, found him lodging at the house of one Mrs Roberts where he was ‘in a deep salivation from the Venereal Disease whilst under the care of a Mr Pearson, Surgeon'. ‘Salivation' – by which mercury was given in sufficient quantities to produce sweating and large quantities of saliva – was the standard treatment for the disease at the time.

A horrific case of the effects of mercury was reported in the
Hull Packet
newspaper of 1 November 1803. A child of three, Thomas Clayton, had been given Ching's Patent Worm Lozenges containing a white panacea of mercury, despite the travelling salesman who had sold them to his parents insisting that ‘not one particle of
mercury' was in them. The poor child went into a state of high salivation – drooling, flushed and spotted complexion, convulsions – and died in ‘indescribable torments'.

Self-medication was common enough at the time and the newspapers were full of patent remedies, the sale of which was unregulated by a government which none the less levied a duty on every bottle sold. Nor did medical care improve with any noticeable rapidity in Warwickshire in the late eighteenth century. A document now in Warwick Records Office records one doctor's prescriptions to the Ward-Boughton family in 1790: ‘a halfpenny-worth of black treacle applied to each side of the head until the rag drops off' for violent headaches and ‘a fresh ivy leaf applied with fasting spittle each morning' for corns on the feet.

In the
Northampton Mercury
of 7 May 1781, ‘anti-venereal diuretic vegetable drops' were advertised, ‘famous in curing every species of venereal infection in bottles at 10s. 6d., 6 shillings, 4 shillings and two shillings each'. In October of the same year, the newspaper advertised Fothergil's Chymical Nervous Drops, supposedly a cure ‘for those who have polluted themselves with secret Venery', who ‘may have their Constitution Strengthen'd for 10 shillings 6d.'. More chilling is the advertisement for Leake's Pilula Salutaria in December 1773, in which a Mr Marshall of Northampton claimed an absolute cure for venereal disease ‘should the Malignancy be ever so great. Effecting a cure where salivation fails in boxes for 2s. 6d. each.' Mr Marshall, in common with all his colleagues and competitors, did not say what was in his super-strength ‘Pilula Salutaria'.

These are the types of self-medicating ‘cures' which Theodosius would have bought or had prescribed to him, and which Donellan is supposed to have referred to as reported in the
Northampton Mercury
of 23 April 1781: ‘On the Saturday preceding the Death of Sir Theodosius, The Rev. Newsam took Notice to Mr Donellan that Sir Theodosius appeared much worse than usual, which Mr Donellan, by Way of Reply, said he did not wonder at, for that he was continually quacking himself with Mercury.'

In the summer of 1777, when Theodosius was almost seventeen and very soon after the Donellans' visit to Eton, Anna Maria
brought her son home. It was reported in the newspaper that ‘Mr & Mrs Donellan received several letters from Lady Boughton in the first of which she tells them that she had fetched her son from Eton, and had placed him under the care of a Mr Clare, an apothecary at Rugby, plain proof that he was not then well; and in all the rest she complains of her son's irregularities and says that blotches appeared upon his Face, and that he had lost his fine Complexion and that he was taking Things for his Complaint.'

A letter survives which shows that Theodosius also went to stay with the Donellans in Bath for a while.
¹¹
It seems that Theodosius was not interested in education. What he
was
interested in was hunting and fishing, drinking and fighting, brawling over imagined insults and generally running riot in the countryside. In the same article, the newspaper continues that ‘he was engaged in several disputes and quarrels, one or two of which were near to be carried to serious lengths had not Mr Donellan stepp'd in and prevented them.'

Following several requests from Anna Maria, the Donellans left Bath in June 1778 and went to live at Lawford Hall. The
Northampton Mercury
reports that Anna Maria employed a tutor, a ‘Mr Jones, near Northampton', for Theodosius for five months, until November 1778. But when Theodosius returned to Lawford, his health was no better. The newspaper goes on: ‘On Sir Theodosius's return from Mr Jones's, he was so much altered in his Countenance and Person that Mr Donellan suspected he had contracted a fresh Venereal Complaint; and therefore, merely with the View of recommending a skilful Surgeon to him, he took an opportunity of questioning him … At first he seemed unwilling to give any answer, but at length confess'd that when he went to Mr Jones's he was not well in his Old Complaint, and that while he was there he used a great Deal of Mercurial Ointment.' The paper adds the rather poignant detail that Theodosius admitted to using so much that he wore flannel drawers in bed every night ‘in Order to prevent a Discovery upon the Sheets'.

John Donellan, the newspaper concludes, was convinced that Anna Maria would not employ a reputable surgeon to help
Theodosius; instead she bought him a book called
The Family Physician
, from which Theodosius ‘was continually quacking himself' – in other words, dosing himself up with inappropriate ‘cures'. But Theodosius compounded his problem by contracting another infection and, according to Donellan, ‘had nearly destroyed his Constitution' by ‘unfortunate Connections with different Women'.

The ‘unfortunate Connections', quarrels and scrapes continued at Lawford. In his written defence published after his trial, Donellan gave an example of his care for the boy. One afternoon, Theodosius had asked the vicar of Newbold for the key to the church tower, saying that he wanted to climb to the top. Donellan went with him and, when they reached the top, Theodosius decided to try and turn the weathercock. As he climbed up, his foot slipped and he fell; Donellan reached out to catch him, but Theodosius fell backwards on to Donellan, winding the older man severely. On the way home in the coach, Theodosius told his mother what had happened, adding, as Donellan writes, ‘he must have been killed, if his brother had not saved him.'

Theodosius Edward Allesley Boughton was a worrying, obstreperous boy. His royal confidant ancestors were a distant memory; even his great-grandfather's ‘valuable qualitys so effectually recommended to the esteem and favour of the county' – an inscription on the Rysbrack memorial which Theodosius would have seen in church every Sunday at home – rang hollow now. Theodosius was the son of a father who had broken his wife's heart, and the grandson of a man who had dropped dead of alcoholic excess aged thirty-three.

The Boughtons were a family of dramatic opposites, of glorious highs and ignominious lows. Unfortunately, it looked as if Theodosius was set on the latter course.

While Theodosius was at Eton, his sister Theodosia had continued to live at home with her mother. The future for a sister whose brother was due to inherit the estate on which she lived could be a precarious one. Gertrude Savile, for instance, who lived in nearby Nottinghamshire in the early 1700s, complained of ‘the baseness of
the dependence on my brother'. Left penniless when her brother had inherited everything, she had been ‘forced to grovel to Sir George for every gown, pair of gloves, every pin and needle', and complained that ‘If it was possible to get my bread by the meanest and most laborious imployment [
sic
] I would without dispute choose it.'
¹²

Dependent sisters were also a drain on finances. If Theodosius had ever married, Theodosia would have fallen even further down the food chain, behind his wife and their children, an embarrassment and a financial liability. She might have moved out to live with her mother in Brownsover Hall, but even then both women would have looked to Theodosius for money to maintain their family name.

Anna Maria, therefore, was faced with more than one problem. Not only did she have a son whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to keep bad company – which did not bode well for the Boughton fortune – but she also had a daughter whose reputation she must protect. Theodosia, if married, would at least have a husband to look after her; and Anna Maria no doubt gave some thought to the idea that a full-grown man with some sense of the world could give proper guidance to the fatherless Theodosius as well as – most importantly – provide for her daughter.

Theodosia would not have had much of an education, but, bearing in mind her brother's track record at Eton, she was probably better informed than him. Ladies were expected to be proficient in needlework and craftwork (there was a strong fashion at the time for the latter in particular); and they would have been schooled in a little French (but not the classics). Theodosia would have been expected to learn from other society ladies how to deport herself, dance, hold a lively conversation, and to know something of the arts. The aim was to charm general company, keep chaste until marriage (though not necessarily faithful after it) and be well schooled in ‘the graces'.