A Monkey Among Crocodiles: The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of Mrs Georgina Weldon – a disastrous Victorian [Text only]

Morgan Thomas and his heavily pregnant wife Louisa rode round London in their carriage that balmy May day, soaking up the atmosphere. Far from being at the centre of things, they had no part to play and were not invited indoors to any great house: they were faces in the crowd. True, Morgan had a stare that could shatter glass and a coat in the old fashioned colour described as ‘King’s blue’. His wife wore a bonnet in which a plume danced as proudly as any other lady’s, but their carriage would have given them away. There was a useful phrase in vogue to describe the aristocratic predominance: men and women of rank spoke of themselves as The Upper Ten Thousand. Morgan and his wife liked to believe they too were in that number – not angling to be admitted but already there and secure in their tenure. It was the deepest and most cherished of their fantasies. As evening approached, they crossed the river and rattled home to rural Clapham, where Georgina was born at a quarter to ten in the last of the summer light. For a few days and weeks there was anxiety in the nursery, for the Thomases already had a child, the sickly infant Cordelia. She died thirteen weeks later and was buried in Clapham Parish.

Georgina was destined to bear three surnames, but the first of these, Thomas, under which she was registered, is tied to a childhood that resolutely failed to budge from its anchorage in less progressive times. Her father was a William IV man, a Tory of the old stripe. At the time of Georgina’s birth, Morgan Thomas was thirty-five years old and as reactionary as any man in England. His wife was a hapless woman who liked to protest that she was not made for children and the family hearth. They were a strange couple, she by temperament as indecisive as her husband was truculent and hotheaded. Morgan’s position in society was a commonplace of the times: he was a lawyer never intending to practise law. His gentlemanly status had been expressed to his own satisfaction in a book published in 1834 by a writer called Medwin. ‘Judges of the Exchequer were designated thus: one as a gentleman and a lawyer; another as a lawyer and no gentleman.’ Morgan was always ready to insist he was of the first kind. He had found and married his rather plain wife in Naples three years earlier, and if the venue was romantic, the circumstances were not. Both bride and groom were in their thirties and whatever hand life had dealt them it did not include friends and confidants. One unhappy and solitary human being was joined with another. Much later, at the time of his death, Morgan’s younger brother George wrote an enigmatic letter to Louisa.

I ignore for the moment that I have treated you and yours with the greatest kindness, without mentioning the way I plugged the gap when you got married, without which it would not have taken place. I have always come to your aid when the means permitted and it was only after Morgan’s gross and insulting letters that I broke off relations, necessarily.

The help that was given the newlyweds was almost certainly financial, but may have included moral support for an unwelcome or overhasty union. These Thomases were turbulent and aggressive opportunists when it came to marriage and Morgan may have been thought to have chosen his wife unwisely. It was a family fiction that he had courted her for ten long years – it seems more likely that he met her in Italy by chance. Louisa was once described by Count D’Orsay, the supreme arbiter of London taste and fashion, as ‘the offspring of Punch and Venus’. The poor woman interpreted this as a compliment. To marry so late and in such a venue as the British Embassy, where otherwise only naval officers spliced the knot, might indicate to the sharp-witted or malicious observer a sudden inheritance on the part of the parentless bride. In this at least Morgan was his father’s child. The marriage was much more favourable to him than to the luckless Louisa, and she was to pay a very heavy price.

The belief that he was a person of importance went very deep with this strutting, vexatious man. It was a matter of pride that his family had some mention in Burke’s Landed Gentry, the second edition of which was brought out in the same year of 1837, for he was descended from those ancient Thomases who owned considerable land near Llanelli. The Lletymawr estates had been in the possession of his family since an honoured forebear Sir Hugh Trehearn followed the Black Prince to Poitiers. Morgan liked to emphasise this glorious ancestry. Perhaps, as the five hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Poitiers approached, he was inclined to make too much of it, yet it was easy to see why. For the first and last time in history, a French king had been taken in battle; more to the point, the entire chivalry of France had either been slain or surrendered. It was a huge payday for the Prince’s army. The lowliest archer had three or four prisoners to ransom and Sir Hugh and his little contingent went back to Wales far richer men than when they left. And there they languished.

Morgan’s great-grandfather gave the family its English connection. In 1745 he married an heiress of the Goring family of Frodley in Staffordshire. Through the female line, the Gorings traced their ancestry back to Edward III, bringing Morgan to the point where he could assure his impressionable daughter that her family ‘would become entitled to the throne of England if anything should happen to the ruling family.’ She believed him. The more recent past was much less romantic. At the turn of the century, Morgan’s father, Rees Goring Thomas, married Sarah Hovel of Cambridge. This was almost certainly an undergraduate romance, spiked with a hard-headed opportunism, the like of which Georgina was one day to demonstrate herself. Hovel was a name well known in Cambridge, but not for its aristocratic connections. Thomas Hovel was a haberdasher and his brother John a saddler. These two had by diligence and hard work acquired property in the market area of town, as well as a parcel of fenland on the road to London on which the Leys School now stands. Rees Goring Thomas, of the illustrious Welsh ancestry, made himself comfortably secure by marrying the haberdasher’s daughter – the last parcel of Cambridge land he acquired through marriage was sold out of the family in 1878. Rees took his bride out of Cambridge and into Surrey, where the family had bought the title to a small manor called Tooting Graveney, in the middle of which was erected a property called Tooting Lodge. It was in this house that Georgina was born.

There was just one small problem: the property did not belong to Morgan. He lived there as his elder brother’s house guest. To be a gentleman under these circumstances was a difficult part to carry off. There was already a nephew bounding about Tooting Lodge, a thirteen-year-old called Rees destined one day to return the family to Wales. Worse yet: only a few months after the birth of Georgina, Morgan’s brother, late in life, was given another boy. This finally slammed the door in the face of any hope he himself might have had of the Lletymawr properties and their rents. It was true he did not have to work but neither was he rich in the way his heart desired. Riches were not quite the central issue – what he longed for was pre-eminence. He was a man who could not bear to be in another’s shadow. This was a feeling he gifted in full to his daughter.

Georgina’s mother had an equally illustrious family history. She was born Louisa Frances Dalrymple, of Mayfield in Sussex. The Dalrymples were an ancient family and claimed descent from the Earls of Stair. Her grandfather was General Sir Hew Whitefoord Dalrymple, the soldier who had signed the Convention of Cintra in 1808, which provided for his enemy the French to evacuate Portugal in British ships with all their impedimenta and a mountain of loot besides. The terms of the Convention were considered so scandalous that Sir Hew never again commanded in the field. He was instead made a baronet and died in 1830. Of his two sons, the elder, who was also a soldier, sat in Parliament for Brighton. The younger was John Apsley Dalrymple, Colonel of the 15th Hussars and Lord of the Manors of Cortesly and Hamerdon near Ticehurst in Sussex. He died in 1833. This man was Louisa’s father. There were problems with this lofty background too.

Insecurity and disappointment made both Georgina’s parents tremendous snobs. The careful and faintly comical allusions to an ancestry not half as grand as they pretended was second nature to these two, and was a form of vanity that ran – increasingly as the Early Victorian period developed – against the tide. Georgina grew up in a meritocratic age. This same Victoria, who seemed so light and biddable when she became Queen, came to preside over the greatest shift in social structure the country had ever experienced, calling for the wholesale redefinition of words like art, and culture, industry and progress and, most significantly of all, family. This change in style and substance had no effect whatever on Georgina’s parents. In 1837, Mr Pickwick’s friend Sam Weller had a characteristically sardonic way of expressing the essence of the old order: ‘Wotever is, is right, as the young nobleman sweetly remarked wen they put him down in the pension list ’cos his mother’s uncle’s wife’s grandfather vunce lit the King’s pipe with a portable tinderbox.’

This was also Morgan’s view of the world. He never mastered the new epoch. You had to look quite a long way down the descending orders of rank to arrive at his actual position in society – though of course his contemporaries could place him after only a few idle questions. This was a second son, educated at Cheam, entered under Mr Wilding at Trinity College, Cambridge, with men who would far outshine him. He was hardly highborn: his great-uncle’s saddlery overlooked the college gates. Later on, in supplying biographical details to year books and the like, he lightly removed his mother from a haberdashery in Cambridge and described the Hovels and all his numerous cousins as ‘of Norfolk’. In the same vein, he once claimed to have been presented at all the Courts in Europe, which was – to put it mildly – stretching the point. This mania for improving the bare facts – and in him it became an actual mania – was passed on to Georgina. There was something very wrong with Morgan Thomas and it seems to have been a wilful attempt to make time stand still or even run backwards. In this he was not alone and there was in his generation a writer only too likely to understand him and his kind.

Thackeray went to Trinity at about the same time as Morgan; and, like him, read law at the Inner Temple. In 1837, he came back from a three-year sojourn in Paris and in that year he too was presented with a daughter, born in London a fortnight after Georgina in much less auspicious circumstances. What distinguished Thackeray from Morgan Thomas and his kind was his energy and, above all, his talent. It was enough for Morgan to be a gentleman of independent means, however shaky those means were. But Thackeray had nothing on which he could fall back: what little he did inherit, he lost at cards in a disastrous evening or two when a student at the Inner Temple. Necessity sharpened his wits. In satirising the likes of Morgan and his foolish wife, he showed himself a man very much in the spirit of the times. The world was moving forward and the gifted man looked outwards and opened his mind and his senses to the new.

Part of the hack work Thackeray did for Frazer’s Magazine was to write the highly popular ‘Christmas Books’, the last of which was published in 1850. He was by now famous through having written Vanity Fair, which some of his contemporaries placed higher than anything by Dickens. At the end of the book the plot is triumphantly resolved when the major surviving characters find themselves thrown together at a Rhineland spa. In the Christmas Book of 1850 Thackeray returns us to the Rhine in the company of a fatuous family called Kicklebury. His satirical portrait of them drew a reproof from The Times. The review, which was written to order by a friend of Thackeray’s called Charles Lamb Kenney, greatly amused its target, enough for him to reprint it in the second edition of the work, with commentary. The one unanswerable point Thackeray had to make about the savaging of the Kickleburys was that the work had sold out. Kenny had written:

From the moment his eye lights on a luckless family group embarked on the same steamer with himself, the sight of his accustomed quarry – vulgarity, imbecility and affectation – reanimates his relaxed sinews, and, playfully fastening his satiric fangs upon the familiar prey, he dallies with it in mimic ferocity like a satiated mouser.

Yes, Thackeray rejoins: and the public loves it. Something is moving, something is in the air: there is no pity for vulgarity, imbecility and affectation. The Times, he indicates with an unruffled assurance, has missed the joke.

Georgina’s arrival did nothing to settle her parents’ position. In the short term, it greatly worsened it. The Thomas family had always found Morgan’s violent temper hard to stomach. Clearly he could not expect to go on living at Tooting Lodge for ever and the question had already been broached more than once as to when he would shift for himself. Georgina’s birth made an issue of it. As soon as it was clear she would not follow her sister into an infant grave, Morgan and Louisa came under pressure to leave. There may have been a second impetus. The family banked with their neighbour William Esdaile, who lay dying in Clapham. For two years Esdaile, who was a very old man but nevertheless the presiding genius of the bank he had built up, had done no business following malarial fever contracted in Italy. At the beginning of 1837 the bank failed. Whether or not the Thomas fortunes went down with it, Morgan was left with just enough unearned income to continue as a gentleman: the challenge was to find a house and a style that would reflect his high opinion of himself. Putting it another way, in the long gallery of snobs, what kind of a snob was he going to be?

Late in life, when the mood of retribution was upon her, Georgina published a letter from her brother Dalrymple. It read in part: ‘If you think to alarm me by threatening to unveil the fact that our grandfather Thomas was a drunken and dissolute lawyer and that Mother was a bastard you enormously mistake yourself.’

Dal was by then a Colonel of Militia straight from the pages of a Thackeray novel. His exasperation was well merited. No one more than his sister had cultivated the legend of glorious Welsh and Scottish ancestry. But he also knew there was truth in at least the second allegation. John Apsley Dalrymple died unmarried. This clashes painfully with the entry in the cherished family copy of Burke’s Landed Gentry, where Louisa is shown as wife to Morgan and ‘only child of John Apsley Dalrymple, Esq., of Gate House in the parish of Mayfield, Sussex.’ The discrepancy is only interesting to us because for Georgina to have learned about it must have been as a consequence of some bitter family accusations. We do not have to look very far for the major culprit. All the cruel candour in the family came from Morgan. As she grew up, it was a style very much to his daughter’s taste. Both parents made her lofty, but she learned her recklessness from him. In her Mémoires, which were a settling of all the scores, Georgina went out of her way to explain to the world how her fearsome and aloof father ended his days in Dr Blandford’s asylum in Long Ditton, restrained night and day by four burly attendants. Without her testimony, this was a secret that might have followed the poor man into the grave. All in all, when the parents gazed down into the crib that first May evening, they were looking unknowingly at a wild child.

Imagine her hand lax and pink against the linen of the crib. Who she is, what she will be is written there in that moist palm as plainly as in any book. Many years later, one sultry afternoon in Paris, the palm reader and psychic Desbarolles, who said so many interesting things to her, was the first to interpret a very pronounced line which ran from her lifeline and ended in a fork or trident under the little finger. ‘Madame,’ the palmist explained, ‘you will write the most celebrated memoirs of the century: and at the same time, useful.’ He repeated this word to her several times, an instance, if any were needed, of his amazing powers. For had she not already begun these memoirs? The word useful rang like a gong in the stuffy room. It was exactly the adjective she herself would have chosen. The nineteenth century had done her wrong, not because she was a ninny, but because she was a woman of genius in a man’s world. There was a vital subtext. The very people who ought to have championed her, her parents, the aristocracy to which she believed she belonged, had cast her aside. Her class had betrayed her. Another palmist, Madame de Thèbes, had also studied the curious branchings and forkings and came up with a different reading, but one which brought the story nearer to home. It was clear to her, she said, before giving Georgina back her mitten, that what the hand indicated was that she would most assuredly be divested of her £27,000 inheritance – if that had not already happened. The glorious thing about palmistry was that both statements were true, one not less than the other.

Until Georgina came along, Morgan was a man who cherished political ambitions. After leaving Cambridge he had gone on a journey through Persia with a friend and this at least showed some enterprise (or was an example of his famous bloody-mindedness) since that country was then at war with Russia. In 1830, with this slight claim to fame and sponsored by his uncle, he stood as a Whig at the Cambridge parliamentary election, where he made an utter fool of himself and was soundly trounced at the hustings. Two years later he went up to Coventry with his mind a little clearer to stand as a Tory in elections to the first Reformed Parliament. His campaign throws great light on his character and helps explain the man he was to his children.

The task before him was a daunting one. Coventry was an uncommonly prosperous borough returning two Members. One of these had enjoyed the confidence of the town for many years. Edward Ellice was a fifty-one-year-old politician of great distinction who had held office under the outgoing Grey administration and was a Whig whip. His son – also of Trinity – was a rising young star in the diplomatic service. Ellice’s running mate was Henry Lytton Bulwer (briefly of Trinity), a man the same age as Morgan, but already infinitely more experienced. Bulwer had that maddening aristocratic languor his opponent so much envied. As a twenty-three-year-old idler, he had been entrusted with £80,000 in gold by the Greek Committee, which he carried across Europe to the insurgents. As a special agent of the Foreign Office in Belgium in the Revolution of 1830, he had an amusing story to tell of how the doorman of the hotel he was staying in was shot dead at his side by a stray bullet while he, Bulwer, was politely enquiring directions. He was hugely rich, apparently completely indolent, and already a very highly regarded diplomat.

Morgan arrived in Coventry on 8 December and made his way to the King’s Head. The Tory favours were light blue and as he peered over the balcony at the mob he could see at a glance they were greatly outnumbered by the dark blue and yellow ribbons of the Whigs. He and his fellow Tory had hired some balladeers who sang, hopefully:

Morgan Thomas and Fyler are two honest men

They are not like Ellice and that East India grappler:

I hope Ellice and Bulwer may ne’er sit again,

But let’s return Fyler and young Morgan Rattler.

Unfortunately, the Rattler was no great speechmaker and his manifesto made dull reading. It began: ‘I shall strenuously support the most rigid Economy and Retrenchment, the Reformation of every Abuse in Church and State, and all such Measures as may tend to promote the Happiness and alleviate the Burdens of the People.’ His one piece of acumen was to declare himself for the retention of tariffs on foreign imports. This was an important and popular point to make in Coventry for the town was getting rich on the manufacture of ribbons and watches, and free trade would flood the market with French goods. Overall, however, it was a lacklustre candidature. Then, quite suddenly, he was illuminated by the sort of forked lightning his daughter was one day to draw down.

Making his way from the King’s Head to the hustings, he was attacked by the mob. This wasn’t an unexpected turn of events; in fact it was the norm. A contemporary Coventry innkeeper with experience of these matters has left his unfailing recipe for election days: ‘To thirty-six gallons of ale and four gallons of gin, add two ounces of ginger and three grated nutmegs. Boil the liquid warm in a copper; place in tubs or buckets and serve in half-pints; with a large cigar for each voter.’ The army pensioners recruited by the magistrates to keep order were soon swept aside, or were perhaps themselves victims of this nutmeg surprise. However, Morgan was not quite so green as he looked. On his way to Coventry he had noticed 600 Irish navvies digging the Oxford Canal near Brinklow, and these he now recruited to his cause. To give some generalship to his forces, he sent to Birmingham for half a dozen prize fighters. The Whigs responded by alerting their own local pugilist, a man called Bob Randall who ran a pub in Well Street. Randall massed his forces. His orders were perfectly simple. He was not to murder anyone, but leave as many as possible hardly alive.

Inflamed by drink and religious bigotry, the riots Morgan Thomas managed to incite were remembered in Coventry for fifty years. His Irishmen suffered a terrible defeat. The local paper reported:

Many, thoroughly stripped, were knocked down like sheep, or escaped into the King’s Head for their lives, in a wretchedly maimed condition, and the yard of the hotel presented the appearance of a great slaughter house, but the gates were closed and the place secured, whilst doctors were sent for to attend those injured.

When the dust settled and the vote was finally taken, in a booth festooned with his supporters’ trousers, the Rattler found himself bottom of the poll, bested even by his running mate Fyler.

Then as now, there was no disgrace in failing at your first attempts to enter Parliament. What marked out the Coventry election of 1832 was not just the scale of the rioting, but its aftermath. To the disgust of the Whig Ministry and the outrage of the battered townsfolk, Morgan at once petitioned the House of Commons, contesting the result on the grounds that the electors had been intimidated. This was particularly rich coming from him. In the following year, after the case had been thrown out in Committee, Halcomb, the member for Dover and a fellow lawyer of the Inner Temple, raised the issue on the floor of the House. When they found they could not silence him, the Ministry departed en masse to watch the Boat Race. As he left the Chamber, Ellice was heard to remark of Morgan with awful prescience: ‘That man will never represent Coventry as long as I draw breath.’

The Rattler’s humiliation was complete, but the victors had failed to identify something it would be his daughter’s misfortune to emulate. No shame was too great for a man possessed of manic powers. Morgan Thomas contested Coventry another four times in his life, finally being elected in 1863. His stubbornness was comical, but it was also touching. The Tory interest in Coventry took early pity on him, and he made a second attempt at the seat in the year of Georgina’s birth. Perhaps this time there was slightly more urgent reason to do well and in one sense he was to be admired for putting his head in the lion’s mouth. The Whigs were waiting for him. One of the broadsheets read: ‘And they went to the man Morgan, who is commonly called Tommy the Truckler, because he weareth two faces – one for Cambridge which looketh blue, and one for Coventry which is an orange yellow …’

Again he came bottom of the poll. His supporters softened the blow by presenting him with a Warwickshire watch. He wore it like a campaign medal. Just before the opening of the new Parliament in 1838, Peel invited more than 300 jubilant new Tory members to his London house. Some of them had been Morgan’s contemporaries at Trinity, some he had met through the Inner Temple. Counselled by Peel in small meetings, cajoled, flattered, cosseted and inspired, the new Members were in no doubt they were the breaking wave of an almighty sea change. Three hundred of them fresh from the hustings, shoulder to shoulder in Peel’s house at Whitehall Gardens and surely soon to be the government of the country! Morgan was left on the outside looking in.