Amelia Lydia
Dare (1851-1944) was the wife of Sir Thomas Jackson (1841-1915). Parts of
this post will be included in my upcoming book, The Silver Bowl: The Surprisingly Irish Roots of HSBC. In this
post, I am thinking out loud – sharing conjectures in the
hopes of learning more.
UPDATE: Thanks to the research skills and work of Mark Sherbrooke, a number of errors (made by me) have been fixed, and new material added. July 28, 2015. |
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| Elizabeth Murray (1626-1698) aka Countess Dysart, wife of Sir Lionel Tollemache (1624-1669) - thought to be an ancestor of Amelia Lydia Dare. |
In most family histories, the stories of women get
overshadowed by those of their husbands. Not so with Amelia Lydia Dare’s 5th
great-grandmother. Elizabeth Murray. She was a legend in her own time, and
continues to fascinate. Anita Seymour’s novel, Royalist
Rebel, told from Elizabeth’s perspective, opens with a delicious quote
from Bishop Burnet:
She was a woman of great beauty, but of far greater parts. She had a
wonderful quickness of apprehension, and an amazing vivacity in conversation.
She had studied not only divinity and history, but mathematics and philosophy.
She was vehement in everything she set about, a violent friend, but a much more
violent enemy. She had a restless ambition, lived at vast expence, and was
ravenously covetous; and would have stuck at nothing by which she might compass
her ends.
As a royalist, active throughout the Cromwellian years, Elizabeth
Murray even went so far as to meet socially with Oliver Cromwell, initially to camouflage
her subversive activities, but later as an act of genuine friendship. The rumours
of the day (since discounted) had Cromwell suspected of being the father of
some of her children.
Throughout the political Interregnum, Elizabeth was a key
player in the Sealed Knot,
a secret association, which was plotting for the return of the monarchy. She frequently hid
secret documents in her girdle in order to ensure that they got to their
intended readers in Scotland and France. As an amateur chemist, she concocted
secret inks, and shared codes which were then used to transmit messages vital
to the quest of overthrowing the Roundheads.
As a creature of her time and class, the needs of those
beneath her in status were not on her radar. Her main concerns lay with reclaiming
her lost privileges, and access to wealth and power. Both of her parents,
William Murray and Catherine Bruce, had also been significant players in the
behind-the-scenes schemes to restore the previous royal order. To the Murray
family, active resistance was the only hope that they had of safeguarding their
properties, as well as the only hope they had of being able to reclaim at least some
of what had been lost in the mid-1600s political upheaval. She came out of it
all better than most, not only holding on to Ham House, her family
home, but also receiving the benefit of a pension of £800 a year after King
Charles II was back on the throne.
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| Ham House. |
One of Amelia Lydia Dare’s daughters, Amy Oliver Jackson,
transcribed some of the correspondence relating to Amelia's attempts
to prove her own ancestral links to Countess Dysart. Some of the letters were from Amelia's cousins, several of whom had grown up in South Africa. Their grandparents
had settled in Cape Town in the early 1800s shortly after financial setbacks in
England. William Tollemache Parke (1790-1851) and Elizabeth Bushe (1790-1880),
were entrepreneurs whose family had a range of business interests in Essex. William's brother Joseph Parke was a coach maker in
Ipswich, while another brother, Samuel Fenning Park, was a Liquor Merchant, Dealer and Chapman [aka a peddlar]who had declared bankruptcy in
1808.
Amelia’s grandmother, Sarah Shrieve Parke, first arrived at the Cape with her family about 1833 when she was about fifteen years old. One of their enterprises
was the popular Parke’s Hotel, where
the family later resided:
… [in the] Heerengracht of the
1840s. William Parke, a confectioner who also ran buses to Wynberg, decided to
enter the hotel trade. He had been running Papenboom, the old brewery in
Newlands Avenue, as a boarding-house; now he opened Parke's Hotel at the corner
of Heerengracht & Strand Street (later to change to the Grand Hotel
site)...'Warm & cold baths are available at any hour of the day', Parkes
announced - a novelty at that period. History
of Hotels in Cape Town
By 1848, Parke’s
Hotel was the number one place to stay in Cape Town, succeeding Mrs. Van
Schoor’s boarding house, famed for having hosted (decades earlier) both Clive
of India and Prince Frederick Hendrick of Holland. It was also there – or else at
their boarding house at Papenboom -where Amelia’s parents met each other in
1839. George Julius Dare, then a captain in the Royal Navy, had stayed with her
family while laid up with a bout of dysentery and unable to set sail. In 1894, Parke’s
Hotel was replaced by the Grand Hotel. Fittingly, given the ups and downs of the
fortunes of Amelia’s family, a facsimile of the Victorian version of the Grand Hotel (out in the suburbs and not on the original site) fronts a destination casino.
Another researcher working on Amelia’s family history in
the early 1900s was Rev. William Ball Wright (1844-1912). He was not only
related to Amelia as a cousin of the husband of Amelia’s Aunt Elizabeth Legge
Parke (1824-1909), but he had also served as a missionary in Japan during the
1870s, when her family was living in Yokohama. A photograph
of him, taken by Samuel A. Walker, shows him looking more like a gunslinger
than a missionary. At the time of his correspondence with Amelia in 1907, he was
the vicar of Osbaldwick in Yorkshire. A sketch from that time has him looking
more like a vicar and less like a cowboy.
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| William Ball Wright - the other photograph of him is more interesting, but copyrighted - so you need to follow the link to see it. |
Wright’s conclusions about Amelia’s connection to
Countess Dysart were based on what he could find that fit with the Parke family
tale of a secret marriage between the Countess’s youngest and wayward son,
William Tollemache (1662-1691), and a woman named Elizabeth. Such a marriage is not unlikely. Court records that show that William was an impulsive young man, who
had killed at least two opponents in duels, and saddled his family with costly
court cases as a result. One version of his alleged secret marriage is included
in a 1907 letter from Amelia’s cousin Lizzie Arbuthnot:
My sister Jessie is in England
and tells me this story as she heard it was William lived in hiding on his
brothers estate and could not marry in his own class, and secretly married a
farmer's daughter -- his brother was very fond of his children and looked after
them and promised to see them righted, but could do nothing as long as William
lived -- died first -- this is nearly what I heard.
William could easily have been hiding out at his brother’s
house at Helmingham throughout
December 1681 and January 1682. After all, on the evening of November 23rd,
1681, he had killed his drinking partner of the night, William Carnegie, 2nd
son of the 3rd Earl of Southesk in a duel in Paris, and had to flee.
He was nineteen years old. Two years earlier, his mother had dispatched him to
Paris with his tutor for the purposes of advancing his education. By February
1682, still under threat of capital punishment, he had returned to Paris to
fight his case. In the two months that he was a fugitive from the law, there
would have been plenty of time for an ongoing affair at Ham House. Another
opportunity for such a liaison could have occurred when he was home in 1683
after serving a second stint as a soldier in Tangiers. During this latter stay, he had
worn out his welcome by running up bills which infuriated his older
brother Lionel, the only responsible son of the family.
William’s father had died when William was only seven
years old, so even though he could have had no say in his son’s marriage, it is
most unlikely that the Countess would ever have condoned William marrying before
he had reached the age of majority. Such a marriage would most likely have come
about because of a loss of his partner’s virginity, or even more dramatically,
a pregnancy. None of the family histories have ever touched on this aspect, but
it is hard to avoid considering, especially since a grandson named Nicholas gets
no mention in his grandmother’s will. Although
Amy Lloyd doesn’t touch on the question of legitimacy, she does add a little
bit more to Lizzie Arbuthnot’s version:
A well supported and interesting tradition is handed down in certain
families in South Africa, England and Manitoba, that they are descended from a
son of his named NICHOLAS by a secret marriage of William Tollemache of
Coddenham, to Suzan Bloomfield of Coddenham on 25th March 1686. The secret
marriage took place while he was outlawed and his elder brother looked- after
his wife and children.
The father (or grandfather) of Sarah Parke -George Dare had obtained all proofs of the legitimacy of the secret marriage, and all other descendants, and was on his way to London to put it in the hands of a lawyer with every chance of being given his lawful inheritance of both property and money. When on the way back by coach, he and his wife were taken ill with smallpox at Saffron Walden, and both died. The Landlord of the inn, fearing infection, had all their luggage burnt, and with it all the unreplaceable legal documents.
The couple taken ill with smallpox would most likely have
been Amy’s 3rd great-grandfather John Tollemache (son of Nicholas)
and his wife Mary Pettit. Both of them died in 1777. Mary died at Saffron Walden
sometime in April (in Amy's version - which does not agree with her gravemarker), and John on May 19th at their home at "New Place" also known as Gippeswyk
Hall, in Ipswich. If they did both have smallpox, then it seems that John survived the illness, only to die about three months later (going by the death date of Mary on her gravestone - February 25th). Gippeswyk
Hall is now a listed
property, and is about ten miles south of the ancestral Tollemache home of Helmingham Hall. The
distance between the Saffron Walden and Ipswich is about 50 miles. This was not
the most direct route between London and Ipswich, but it was where some of John
and Mary’s grandchildren were born, and the story of the confiscation of their
luggage is a good fit with the known facts.
Assuming that there was a secret marriage, or even just an
illegitimate son, Lionel Tollemache is the most likely of the two brothers to
have housed him. Thomas
Tollemache (1651-1694), their middle brother, was a career soldier, and
rarely home. When William died of yellow fever in the West Indies in 1691 at
age twenty-nine, it is unlikely that Nicholas was more than ten years old. Even
though Countess Dysart lived until 1698 I can find no mention of Nicholas
living with her at Ham House. This leaves us with Lionel and his wife Grace
Wilbraham as possible caretakers. They had at least five children, and lived a
stable life at the Tollemache ancestral home at Helmingham Hall. If the
mother of Nicholas was still living, there also would have been places on their
estate to house them both out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
In the end, Amy, and presumably her mother, would have
known that the proof of this secret marriage was wobbly, but they decided to
accept it. After all, Wright was a published author of at least a dozen
genealogical studies, and he had said:
There is I think, no doubt of
your mother being descended from Hon. William Tollmash, though I fear there
will never be the complete proof of his marriage that would be necessary to
claim property.
After nine days in the British Museum, and succeeding in unearthing a
manuscript of William Tallmarsh of Coddinham, Wright felt confident enough to
pronounce that he had no doubt of your mother being descended from
Hon. William Tollmash. Or was he really this sure? Could this merely be the
response of man who had to deliver a conclusive result in order to be paid for
his research on behalf of a client who was interested in claiming lost lands? In
the same letter, he added:
The remainder of the
searches must be made in Suffolk, when I already had a gentleman employed on
that business, but he came to a standstill, and it is only by my discoveries,
that I can now set him going again.
This kind of language smacks of someone noting his
billable hours. Unfortunately, five years after this letter was sent, Wright
took off his coat and watch, left them on the banks of the River Ouze on
October 26th, 1912, and was never seen again. In the probate of his
will, he left his widow, Emma, £29 2s 6d, not much for a man of his station.
This would be a fit – albeit not conclusive - with a researcher tidying up the
evidence to meet his own personal need to be paid.
There is one last wrinkle to this tale. Amelia’s 1st
cousin, Lizzie Arbuthnot née Ball (1846-1942), wrote to Amelia, suggesting that
the secret wife was not Elizabeth Bloomfield, the daughter of a local farmer, but
rather Elizabeth Bacon, daughter of Sir Nicholas Bacon. Perhaps Lizzie’s theory
is not so far-fetched. Elizabeth Bacon and William were cousins, there had been
other Bacon-Tollemache marriages in previous generations, and the son was named
Nicholas. Also, Elizabeth Bacon’s father had died when she was a toddler, so perhaps
Elizabeth suffered less supervision than women of her class tended to endure.
Still, it would have been a challenge to keep such a marriage a secret.
This is far as we can take this line of inquiry right
now. Did Capt. William Tollemache really have a son, legitimate or not? Did
he really have secret wife named either Elizabeth Bacon or Elizabeth Bloomfield? Well,
Amelia Lydia Dare seemed to believe that he did, and maybe accepting this is what matters most
when it comes to understanding her personal sense of her own ancestral family.
Links on my Silver
Bowl website relating to this research:
Other links:
· Fruitful Endeavours: The 16th-Century Household Secrets of
Catherine Tollemache at Helmingham Hall. Moira
Coleman. Phillimore & Co. 2012.
Ham house, its history and art treasures 1904 by
· Ham House and
Garden. The National Trust
- Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. 2002. Elaine Denby. P 178 reference to Parke Hotel.
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