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cahnBackground: The kids' school has a topic for "Unit" every trimester that a lot of their work (reading, writing, some math) revolves around. These topics range from time/geographic periods ('Colonial America') to geography ('Asia') to science ('Space') to social science ('Business and Economics'). (I have some issues with this way of doing things, but that's a whole separate post.) Anyway, for Reasons, they have had to come up with a new topic this year, and E's 7/8 class is doing "World Fairs" as their new topic.
Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*
Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*
Lady Grange: Her story
Date: 2024-01-07 04:46 pm (UTC)So remember Lord "Bobbing John" Mar, Jacobite leader and apparently shitty husband to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's sister Frances? Lord Mar's younger brother, Lord Grange, managed to be an even shittier husband!
He married Rachel Chiesley, a headstrong woman. Think Marguerite Louise. Rumor had it Lady and Lord Grange had a shotgun wedding, in that she held a pistol to his head. Biographer Macaulay doesn't think this is true, but let's just say that Lady Grange's later behavior made her contemporaries inclined to believe it.
The Granges lived in Edinburgh. Lord Grange was often away on business in London, and Lady Grange was left as "factor" (like regent but when you don't have a kingdom) of all his affairs in his absence. This was really, really important to her: she liked running things.
Things went fine for a short while, but she started noticing her husband was having affairs and was probably a Jacobite. She threatened to come to London, confront him and his mistress, and expose his treason to the authorities if he didn't come home and resume being a faithful husband.
He retaliated by demoting her from factor, locking his study away from her, etc. Matters escalated. Her son "was awakened by shrieks and cries, which at first he thought came from the nearby Cowgate. But it was his mother, crying 'Murder, murder', threatening to run naked out into the street or to kill herself by throwing herself out the window.'"
Her husband plays himself off as the victim and shows all his friends and acquaintances a razor he says she keeps under her pillow.
He pushes for a separation. She keeps trying to reconcile with him: "Come home, abandon the mistress, reinstate me as factor, and abandon the treasonous Jacobite activities, and it'll be fine!"
Lord Grange: Make me.
Lady Grange: Watch me.
Lady Grange is further accused of accosting her husband in the street and attempting to disturb him in church when the minister was in the pulpit. On one occasion, when Grange emerged with one of the children she pursued them through the crowd which had gathered, 'raising so great a clamour that they were compelled to take refuge in a tavern in the Writers' Court where she imprisoned them for more than two hours, by waiting for their reappearance at the head of the close. [A close in Edinburgh is an alleyway.]
Macaulay says these accounts may be exaggerated, but her temper was clearly providing ammunition for her husband and his allies.
Armed with this ammunition, what does Lord Grange do?
He activates his network of old boys' club friends and fellow Jacobites, and has his wife kidnapped from her home in 1732 and taken north to the Monach Isles in the Hebrides.
Lady Grange spent the rest of her life trying to communicate her plight to the outside world, to no avail. During the trip through the Highlands, her captors were careful to make sure to stay only in places where their hosts spoke no English, only Gaelic. Oral legend has it that her captors took her to visit a pool where the local saint was supposed to cure madness, in order to convey to the locals that this desperate-to-escape woman was not a kidnap victim but a poor madwoman who was being carted away for her own good.
Furthermore, Lord Grange kept his wife in the territory of Scottish clan chiefs who were on his side. In particular, Lord Lovat, though he indignantly denied it, is widely suspected of having helped out his "worthy friend":
They said ten times worse of me when that damn’d Woman went from Edinburgh than they can say now; for they said it was all my contrivance, and that it was my servants that took her away; but I defy’d them then, as I do now, and do declare to you, upon honour, that I do not know what is become of that Woman, where she is, or who takes care of her; but if I had contrived, and assisted, and saved my Lord Grange from that devil who threatened every day to murder him and his children, I would not think shame of it before God, or man, and where she is, I wish and hope that she may never be seen again, to torment my worthy Friend.
In 1734, Lady Grange was moved to the most remote spot anyone could think of: St. Kilda, because the Monach Isles just weren't remote enough.
St. Kilda is a tiny rock in the Atlantic, currently uninhabited, and home to just 42 people in 1728, 70 in 1739. The poverty and living conditions were unbelievable, the weather cold, wet, and dreary. Even today, the sea is so stormy that it's difficult to land a ship there. Quoting Wikipedia:
When Martin Martin visited the islands in 1697, the only means of making the journey was by open longboat, which could take several days and nights of rowing and sailing across the open ocean and was next to impossible in autumn and winter. In all seasons, waves up to 12 metres (40 ft) high lash the beach of Village Bay, and even on calmer days landing on the slippery rocks can be hazardous. Cut off by distance and weather, the natives knew little of the rest of the world.
St. Kilda would be Lady Grange's prison until 1741. Her house would have looked something like this storage hut:
In the same year as his wife arrived on the barren rock of St. Kilda, Lord Grange, living the good life in London, succeeded in getting elected to Parliament.
In Edinburgh, none of Lady Grange's friends or family seem at all concerned by her disappearance. Her adult children were sick of her antics, and everyone was apparently willing to believe she was a madwoman. And the network of Lady Grange's husband's friends was sufficient for a long time to keep her from getting any word of her plight out.
A glimmer of hope dawned in 1739. A Presbyterian minister assigned to St. Kilda had sympathized with her, and when he returned to Edinburgh, he carried two letters from her and tried to launch an investigation. But Lord Grange's friends and allies promptly countered with a successful smear campaign against the minister to undermine his credibility.
A ship named the Arabella was sent to St. Kilda to look for Lady Grange, but her husband had already activated his network to have her removed to a different island. She died on Skye, unrescued, in 1745, aged 66.
Her husband outlived her by almost a decade, and faced no consequences whatsoever for his actions. Apparently his political downfall was caused only by his firm belief in witchcraft and passionate desire for legislation to seek out and punish witches, which made him an embarrassment to everyone in the mid 1700s.
Lord Grange did not, as far as I know, ever accuse his wife of being a witch, but, you know. The misogyny is strong with this one.
On a historiographical note, Macaulay points out that we have no unbiased contemporary takes on Lady Grange, the accounts being almost entirely 1) her own, and 2) her husband's and his allies'. She had every incentive to paint the worst possible picture of her treatment and the best possible picture of her own behavior; he and his allies had every incentive to paint the worst possible picture of her behavior. So who actually did what is not really clear.
But lest you think all descriptions of her hysteria were made up after the fact by her husband, it was her son who wrote a letter to his father going, "Mom kept threatening to run around naked in the street or throw herself out a window last night, and we had to put her to bed. If she had threatened a fourth time, I would have let her do it." (Yes, this is one of the children who won't protest her abduction or question why they haven't seen her in 13 years. And yes, one of the non-protesters was a daughter.)
And lest you think Lady Grange is an utterly reliable witness, she denied having signed the paperwork for a legal separation between her and her husband, but we have the paper and it looks like her signature in other places.
So while we know enough to sympathize with Lady Grange and blame Lord Grange, when it comes to reconstructing the details of events, we have to add a bunch of caveats.
*
Addendum on Lady Mary's sister, to the surprise of NO ONE, Lord Grange is siding with his brother. In fact, one of the reasons he's worried that his wife may be able to turn his enemies in London against him is that he's caught up in this scandal:
The main problem there is the situation of his sister-in-law, Frances Pierrepoint, Lady Mar, the second wife of his exiled brother, who has been declared ‘lunatick’ and is in London in the care of her sister, the redoubtable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. There is little love lost between Lord Grange and Lady Mary. Grange expands at great length on the difficulties he has with Lady Mary. Lady Mar is now quite well, he informs Thomas. She should no longer be detained as a lunatic, but is obstinately averse to appearing in chancery to have the detention order removed. Grange suspects this is the work of Lady Mary who would lose not only the custody of her sister but also the £500 which she gets yearly from the Mar estates, if the order were to be lifted.
Re: Lady Grange: Her story
Date: 2024-01-07 06:02 pm (UTC)Apparently his political downfall was caused only by his firm belief in witchcraft and passionate desire for legislation to seek out and punish witches, which made him an embarrassment to everyone in the mid 1700s.
Good grief. It would be. Also, to the utter disbelief of many, the last witch on German territory was executed in the 18th century, so I hope Grange didn't get a poor woman killed for real.
Anyway, the whole thing reminds me that one reason why Wilkie Collins' novel The Woman in White resonated so much with readers was that it was even in the 19th century so damn easy get a woman institutionalized as mad. :( :( :(
Re: Lady Grange: Her story
Date: 2024-01-07 06:18 pm (UTC)Yep, Germany, and Switzerland I think, were amazingly late. Yeah, Wikipedia has Anna Göldi being executed in 1782 in Switzerland. I am reminded of Swiss women not getting full voting rights until 1971.
so I hope Grange didn't get a poor woman killed for real.
To my own surprise, I correctly remembered off the top of my head the year of the last witch execution in Britain: 1727. In 1735, the Witchcraft Act made it "a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft." That was the law Lord Grange embarrassed himself and his supporters by vehemently opposing.
I don't *think* he had the power to cause executions in or before 1727, so I think the poor women were safe in that respect...but still. This guy.
even in the 19th century so damn easy get a woman institutionalized as mad. :( :( :(
Yep, was thinking the same thing. :(
Re: Lady Grange: Her story
Date: 2024-01-07 11:02 pm (UTC)(Thank you for telling us about it, complete with maps and pic. But still awful!)
Re: Lady Grange: Her story
Date: 2024-01-07 11:23 pm (UTC)Re: Lady Grange: Her story
Date: 2024-01-09 05:58 pm (UTC)Lord Lovat! Why am I not surprised that he was involved in this.
Re: Lady Grange: Her story
Date: 2024-01-12 04:48 pm (UTC)But probably if you had a bunch of Jacobite clan chiefs as your friends, St. Kilda was easier. :P
Lord Lovat! Why am I not surprised that he was involved in this.
I had the same reaction! Like, I don't even know if he *was*, but I immediately believe that he was, all the more as he's denying it (but siding with Lord Grange). :P
For those of you who may not remember what we've said about Lord Lovat in salon, I'll just say that he's the kind of the person you wouldn't give the benefit of the doubt on anything. Diana Gabaldon summarized him as having "a character that would enable him to hide conveniently behind a spiral staircase."