Inheritance, p.1
Inheritance, page 1
Praise for Leo Hollis
‘This wonderful book has many layers: the entwined stories of the men who stamped their names on the streets of London and, in their midst, one woman for whom a rich inheritance became an impossible cage. Leo Hollis knows the expanding city like the back of his hand, and brings a forensic eye and a deep empathy to the mystery at the heart of Mary Davies’s tragic life. Combining biography and detective story with urban panorama and a thought-provoking exploration of the nature of property, Inheritance is a consistently enthralling read.’
Helen Castor, author of Joan of Arc
‘A fascinating insight into a tragic backwater of London’s history, yet from which one of its most magnificent estates emerged…’
Simon Jenkins, author of A Short History of London
‘Hollis expertly weaves together the human tragedy and high politics behind the explosion of one of the world’s greatest cities. His scholarship and storytelling makes the seventeenth century seem so familiar.’
Dan Snow, author of Death or Victory:
The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire
‘Leo Hollis combines meticulous research with his trademark style once again in this perceptive and humane book on one of modern London’s most significant origin stories.’
Lucy Inglis, author of Georgian London: Into the Streets
‘Identifying an authentic seventeenth-century mystery, Leo Hollis uses the form of the classic detective story to deliver a fast-moving and forensic account of the birth and development of the London property market. Here is a valuable addition to the literature of the city in another period of cancerous growth.’
Iain Sinclair, author of The Last London
‘Wonderfully rich and informative… To present deep scholarship so accessibly and with such fluency is a rare achievement.’
Tom Holland, author of Dominion, on The Phoenix
‘A tour de force of biography, history, politics, philosophy and experimental science… With huge skill, Mr Hollis weaves his characters through this thickly detailed scene.’
The Economist on The Phoenix
‘A fascinating picture of the rebirth of London after the Fire… combining the history of ideas, architecture and the life of the city in a riveting narrative.’
Jenny Uglow on The Phoenix
‘What makes this book so fascinating, though, is not just the rich detail, but also its explanations of the emergence of the new thinking that so profoundly shaped the spirit of the age.’
Independent on The Phoenix
‘Leo Hollis’s book is as impressive a construction as St Paul’s itself… Hollis makes us see St Paul’s as if for the first time, a remarkable achievement.’
Jonathan Glancey, author of
The Story of Architecture, on The Phoenix
‘This is a superlative book. Leo Hollis has that rare gift of making the incomprehensible, such as the nature of light and the complexity of national finance, comprehensible to the most lay of readers.’
Liza Picard, author of Victorian London:
The Life of a City 1840–1870, on The Phoenix
‘From Westminster Abbey to an unremarkable house in Spitalfields, this ingenious study unearths the architectural history of 12 buildings to produce engrossing insights into London’s transformations.’
Sunday Telegraph on The Stones of London
‘From Mumbai to Shanghai, Hollis is the perfect guide to the art, science and even maths of what makes cities so great.’
Marcus du Sautoy on Cities Are Good for You
‘Extremely timely… Fascinating and thoroughly researched.’
Financial Times on Cities Are Good for You
‘Many men make no scruple to marry a woman they don’t love, for the sake of her money; it may therefore be supposed, that women of fortune, are more liable to injuries of that kind than any other part of the sex.’
Sarah Chapone, The Hardship of the English Lawes in Relation to Wives, 1735
To Mum
Contents
Introduction
1 ‘The Way to be Rich’
2 ‘Lord, Have Mercy on Our Souls’
3 The Preparation of the Bride
4 ‘All the Trouble in the World’
5 ‘To Such a Mad Intemperance Was the Age Come’
6 ‘A Woman of Great Estate’
7 ‘Let Him Prove the Marriage’
8 ‘One Degree of Madness to Marry a Man Not Worth a Groat’
9 ‘For the Good of Her Family’
10 ‘An Amazing Scene of New Foundations’
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Introduction
THE CARRIAGE ARRIVED at the Hôtel Castile, on Rue Saint-Dominique, deep in the night of Sunday, 12 June 1701. There was great activity as soon as the horses came to a halt, and as the party of English travellers uneasily stepped down to the street. This troupe included Lodowick Fenwick, a Benedictine monk. As a Catholic persecuted for his faith in Britain he often wore secular clothes in order to dissemble his true vocation. Beside him, looking frail and in distress, came Dame Mary Grosvenor, who was rushed into the house and her rooms on the first floor, with a view to the garden beyond. She was followed by a flurry of servants, who had accompanied her on the arduous journey. The owners of the hotel, Madame Dufief and her husband, had already prepared rooms and now busied themselves in settling the guests in.
Dame Mary, exhausted by the journey, took to her bed immediately. She had been ill when they had departed Rome a few weeks before and her condition had not improved despite a break in the itinerary for rest in Lyon. This respite included a succession of doctors’ visits, and a regime of bleeding and dosing. There had been reports of her behaving strangely in Italy, of talking in agitation during a concert, and other unexpected conduct encouraging gossip and concern. Perhaps she was still in the depths of mourning, following the death of her husband eleven months before. Others interpreted her eruptions as something more disturbing: a mental instability manifesting itself in public. From the scenes that night and over the coming week, it appeared the days in a cramped carriage, exposed to the elements, had dramatically worsened her condition.
The exact location of the Hôtel Castile is unknown. It is not identified on the detailed Turgot map drawn thirty years later, illustrating each house, garden and churchyard in the city. On this plan, Rue Saint-Dominique sweeps into the city from the south-west, following the bend of the Seine, and emptying out into the bustling St Germain. Until the 1630s the route was known as the Rue des Vaches, a cattle path into the city markets. However, the establishment of the Dominican monastery and the elegantly baroque Église Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin demanded a more tempting identity for the emerging bourgeois neighbourhood.
It was a suitable location for respectable British travellers to find a resting place in the city. Fine stone buildings, in the latest modern styles, lined both sides of the street, making it a desirable enclave. More importantly, this was close to the exiled English community that clustered around the eclipsed star of the banished former monarch James II, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. This court-in-exile attracted all sorts of Catholics, chancers and spies, which fixed an additional layer of intrigue to Dame Mary’s story.
The rooms in the hotel had been arranged days before by Dame Mary’s Paris banker, Mr Arthur, and Fr Fenwick’s brother, Edward. Dame Mary had been in touch with Mr Arthur often to ensure her affairs were in order, and to share some gossip. On the other hand, Edward had met Dame Mary only twice before. During the previous summer, they had been introduced at the Fenwick family home in Essex, where the two seemingly made a connection; and then again a few weeks later in London, just before the group had set out on their travels. The brief encounters had made an impression on both.
That same summer, Michael Dahl, a fashionable portraitist amongst conservative grandees, painted Dame Mary in his studio on Leicester Square. Mary is in her widow’s clothes, a simple black shawl and dress, a white lace collar and sleeves offering contrast. There is no background scenery, nor any object of contemplation in her hands. No rings on her fingers. It is as if she is looking into the future with nothing to guide her. She wears a white veil that frames her face; it appears like a Spanish mantilla with an intricate fringe. Her face is plain, without expression. Her eyes are heavily lidded. The portrait seems intended to display rather than record the person.
Michael Dahl’s portrait of Mary Davies, 1700
Here was a woman who now faced the world alone. She was only thirty-five years old, a mother of four children – three boys and a seven-month-old daughter. As the child heir of an extensive plot of land to the west of the city, she had been marked out as an heiress of considerable fortune. As a child she had been a prize in the marriage market, the subject of negotiations with aristocrats and grandees. And finally a wife, married before her thirteenth birthday and, possibly, a mother still in her teens. As a widow, this inheritance was now hers once again, held on behalf of her children and future generations. She was already taking control of the management of the estate and, while in London, had signed a contract concerning a lease. This was the first legal agreement that she had signed in her own name. For reasons we will see, it turned out to be her last.
Something about those two short meetings in Essex and London had encouraged Edward Fenwick to follow on to Paris some months later. His cousin, Francis Radcliffe, had encouraged him to ‘pursue his courtship’, yet Edward had arrived in Paris three days after his brother and Dame Mary had left for Rome and he was forced to linger there for their return. In the meantime, he had taken a position as a tutor to a young aristocrat. However, once Dame Mary had arrived back in the city, Edward’s attentions again turned to the ailing widow.
Over the next week Dame Mary kept to her rooms at the Hôtel Castile. Edward and other visitors were allowed to visit on Tuesday. There were solicitations after her health, as well as opinions sought and discussions on who were the best doctors amongst the English community in Paris. On the following day, Dr Ayres, recommended by Mr Arthur, was called for and Dame Mary was given an emetic to purge her malady. Despite the unpleasant vomiting, which weakened her body, the antimony did not seem to have had the desired effect. And on Thursday the doctor prescribed opium pills. By Friday, the symptoms had not altered and the doctor returned to bleed the patient as she lay in her bed. She was also dosed with opium. The bleeding was intended to release a surfeit of blood that caused the hot fever, but this only weakened her further.
On the following morning, Saturday 18th, gossip started to thread through the English community in Paris. Her name began to circulate with the news that Mary had woken up that morning with Mr Fenwick in her bed, and the widow had taken the sacred oath of marriage. There seemed to be no other witnesses than the couple, Fr Fenwick, who conducted the service, and two servants. Could it be true?
Immediately, whispers of foul play swirled. Mr Lewis, secretary to the British ambassador, noted that he had heard ‘particularly in the chocolate and coffee houses, that Dame Mary Grosvenor had lately received ill-usage from Lodowick Fenwick, and persons about her’.1 The ambassador himself contacted London in order to get word to Mary’s family. He feared that she was being trapped, and that they might lose her estate through this misadventure.
Nearly three weeks later, Mary found her way back to London, and to her mother’s house at Millbank, overlooking the Thames. Here, still in an anxious mania, she denied her marriage to Fenwick, swearing that it never happened. At the same time she wrote: ‘I positively deny it, and so will swear, and shall never own any such thing, it being absolutely false; for I never saw book, nor heard marriage words, nor said any.’2
The close family were fearful that Fenwick might soon follow on from Paris to claim his property; and so he did. The supposed-husband arrived in the capital three weeks later and immediately started to behave like the rightful owner of Dame Mary’s birthright. He began contacting the tenants who leased lands from her estate, demanding rents to be paid directly to him, while threatening eviction to others.
He then made his way to Millbank. When the widow’s mother, his apparent mother-in-law, refused to receive him, he demanded that the servants show him to his wife. Instead, he was handed a note stating that Mary was not there and, furthermore, she was not betrothed. Forced to leave empty-handed, he was nevertheless not dissuaded from his course. And so on 12 August his representatives returned to Millbank and served Dame Mary with a legal demand from the Spiritual Court of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster that questioned why Edward Fenwick should not have ‘the benefit of his conjugal rights’.3 On the following day, 13 August, in fear that Fenwick now had the legal means to take control of his new wife, the family decided to send her away to the Grosvenor family estate in Cheshire.
These disputes culminated, over two years later, in a legal case in front of the highest court in the land in Westminster Hall. The building, over six hundred years old, had been the theatre for political drama, revels and regicides, and home to the court of the Queen’s Bench. Above the hubbub, the elegant vaulted ceilings gave a sense of serene, structured order. Along the walls, fifteen statues of English monarchs stood in niches looking down upon the milling crowd below. A visitor or a petitioner might think that here, upon the flagstones, was the forum of the nation: where the law met power, and the business of the city. Within the throng, everything had its price, including justice. One side of the room, according to one contemporary observer, was ‘occupied by the stalls of seamstresses, milliners, law stationers, and secondhand booksellers, and even publishers’,4 while in the west corner of the room sat the Queen’s Bench, where Dame Mary’s fate was to be decided.
This came to a head in the early hours of the morning of 4 February 1703, when, after fourteen hours of deliberations, pleas and cross-examinations, Lord Chief Justice Holt, the leading judge in the country, turned to the jury of twelve men and asked them to adjudicate upon a legal case that had scandalised London for the last two years. Witnesses had been called from across the Channel to bear testimony to what actually happened in that hotel on Rue Saint-Dominique on 18 June. Over the previous day and night of questions and witness statements, many disturbing tales were revealed in public about what had gone on. There were accounts of how the husband’s family had laced glasses of wine with laudanum, and sprinkled strawberries with ‘black grains’ of salt prunello. Alternatively, the jury was informed that Dame Mary had fallen in love too fast, and then had had regrets. That she was turned against her new husband by her family who cared not for her heart, but only about her fortune.
Whatever the reasons, there was more at stake than the desires of a woman who had been treated as a commodity all her life. One can only imagine the gossip bubbling through the public gallery. What was a recently widowed woman doing, leaving her children behind for a reckless trip to Europe? Why was she alone with these men on that Saturday night? Was she drugged, and failed to remember what happened in that hotel room? Was the marriage legitimate, albeit unwilling? Or too hasty, and swiftly regretted?
Such hearsay and legal wrangling came to determine not only the lives of Dame Mary and her supposed husband, Edward Fenwick, but her whole family: her mother, Mrs Tregonwell, and her own brood from her first marriage. And, in time, their family, for many generations to come. Furthermore, it is fair to say that the future of London itself was also in the balance as the judge made his ruling on the legitimacy of the wedding:
Gentlemen of the jury, it is supposed and admitted on all hands to be the estates of the Lady Grosvenor Mr Edward Fenwick does endeavour to make out his title to … On this account, that he was married to her (as he says), and that, Gentlemen, is the only question you are to try. If so be Mr Fenwick be [sic] the husband of Mary Grosvenor, then he hath a good title to the estate; if he is not married to her, that he hath not.5
The jury took only half an hour to make their decision.
* * *
I had not started out writing with this story in mind. I had begun with a completely different question: who owns London today? Researching the housing crisis, I soon came to recognise how often the question of land is overlooked. When we think about the modern city we look at the buildings and the infrastructural flows of the urban environment: stones, bricks, stairs, windows and kerbs. It is often assumed that when we consider the current housing crisis the debate is concerned only with the supply and distribution of houses. We should build more; open more space; construct taller; increase density. But this is not the solution in itself.
The question of land is indelibly linked to the question of the form and functions of the city. As radical geographer Brett Christophers notes, in London nearly eighty per cent of the price of a property is actually for the purchase of the land rather than the bricks and mortar that sit on top of it.6 This has convinced me of the obvious, but ambiguous, fact that whoever owns the land has a disproportionate say in how the city is shaped and functions.
Having written one history of the seventeenth-century capital,7 I realised that this period – so volatile, dangerous, transformative – was the crucible of the modern city. During the span of a single life, London went from a dilapidated backwater to the largest city in the world. It faced revolution, plague, fire, was the theatre for political ruptures and economic storms. Here, one finds the forcing ground of banking, empire, the Enlightenment. It changed the idea of what a city can be – in form, and as an idea. And in particular, what it was to be modern. This involves not just changes in technology and architectural style, but also a rupture in the economic system, a revolution in the understanding of value, time, work, and even a sense of self within an increasingly complex world.
