Our local Elizabethan mansion, Hill Hall in Theydon Mount, is currently being redeveloped as luxury apartments, after a splendid exterior refurbishment by English Heritage. It is proving very popular, as over half the apartments are already sold. Its new residents, thinking about the families who have lived there in the past, might imagine four centuries of worthy upper class respectability. This may have been a true picture in some periods, but in others, scandal has rocked Theydon Mount!
Sir William Bowyer-Smyth was born in 1814, the eldest son of the Revd Sir Edward Bowyer-Smyth of Hill Hall. Educated at Eton and Trinity College Cambridge, he was admitted to Middle Temple in 1837 and called to the Bar in November 1840, although there is no record of him ever practising. Perhaps he was too busy practising archery, at which he was an international champion, as well as shooting, fishing, sailing on his schooner and real tennis. He started to borrow money at an early age, thus beginning a long-sustained tradition of debts, loans and mortgaging his inheritance, which was substantial. The Hill Hall estate covered all of Theydon Mount and half of Stapleford Tawney; the family also owned Horham Hall in Thaxted and Attleborough Hall in Norfolk, as well as houses in Camberwell and London. By marrying Marianne Meux, daughter of the “millionaire” Sir Henry Meux of Theobalds Park, in 1839, he added a welcome cash injection to his finances.
During the 1840s, the couple had three children; William became a JP and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. In 1850 his much-respected father died and William inherited the title of 11th Baronet, as well as the income from the estates. At first he was quite keen, making improvements to various farms; he built new barns at Great Tawney Hall, Little Tawney Hall and Woodhatch, enclosed Tawney Common (which was a real common until then) and built ‘New Farm’, now called Mount Farm, on its edge. He became a Deputy Lieutenant and in 1852 he again stood for Parliament, this time becoming Conservative MP for the whole of South Essex. He seems to have made little impact, and was defeated at the next election in 1857.
Once the initial enthusiasm for running the estates wore off, he spent much of his time in London, leaving Hill Hall to caretakers and agents. It was in London in 1855 that he first met a 13-year-old Scots girl, Eliza Malcolm, who was to change his life. Eliza was the only daughter of a relatively modest military family (her grandfather was a regimental captain), but both her parents had died young and she had been brought up by a succession of aunts. Apparently she and William met socially in some way, then met again in Scotland three years later, when she was sixteen and he was 44. In the language of the time, they ‘formed an attachment’. William persuaded the aunt to allow Eliza out with him on an unchaperoned carriage ride. During the drive, he produced a ring and pronounced the words, ‘With this ring, I thee wed’. He then persuaded Eliza, and later her aunt, that under Scottish laws this constituted a legal marriage. (Trust me, I’m a lawyer?) The fact that he was already married, with three children older than Eliza, apparently slipped his memory.
In a court case nearly 60 years later, Eliza claimed that at the time she did not even know he was a baronet - he had told her he was plain Mr William Smith. When she discovered he had children, he said he was a widower. When she finally learned that his wife was still alive, she had too many family responsibilities to end the ‘marriage’. Her opponents claimed that she must have known the true situation almost from the beginning ... but she was, after all, only sixteen and entitled to be naive.
Whatever she knew or didn’t know, William and Eliza settled down to a life of apparently genuine married bliss. They were devoted to each other, and Eliza very soon produced the first of twelve illegitimate children. The family lived for several years in France and then in Cheltenham, Hill Hall being occupied by tenants and the estates run by trustees. No doubt to finance his lifestyle, Horham Hall was sold. In March 1875, Sir William’s first wife died. A few days later, he married Eliza legally, and a few days after that, their thirteenth child arrived. There followed a stillbirth and a miscarriage, then the last child, Adela was born in 1878. Eliza had been through sixteen pregnancies and had 14 children under 20 and was still only 35.
Now legally married, the couple and their enormous brood moved into Hill Hall, where they spent a blissfully happy time, filling the house with life and activity and exploring the grounds and the village. One of the children, Mary, described their childhood in a delightful memoir ‘Our Lives’, transcribed in 1993 by Suzanna Brooks.
After two or three years at Hill Hall, Eliza became restless. She perhaps felt insecure, as William’s eldest legitimate son was entitled to move into Hill Hall if he married. Or maybe they were not quite accepted by the locals, who remembered Sir William’s kindly, upright clergyman father. Whatever the reason, Eliza insisted on moving to Twineham Court in Sussex. In Mary’s words, “As we were all away and no-one to say her ‘Nay’, she did as she liked, as Papa had always let her do” - a remark which casts an interesting light on their relationship. Sir William actually refused at first to leave Hill Hall, and stayed on with his eldest daughter Kitty for a while, but eventually capitulated and joined Eliza in Sussex. Within a few months however, he had died, aged 69. According to Mary, “We all think he never recovered from being torn away from Hill Hall, his old home.” Whether he knew it or not, no Bowyer-Smyths would ever live at Hill Hall again.
Eliza later remarried, but it was not a success and they separated. She lived to be 80, and a photograph taken the year she died shows her as a strong, handsome woman with hardly a line on her face.
Sir William’s eldest son who, interestingly, was on good terms with his half brothers and sisters and gave the girls away when they married, became a career diplomat. (Perhaps he had a lot of practice at diplomacy, with his father’s double life being an open secret, politely not mentioned in respectable Victorian society.) He himself never married and never lived at Hill Hall, which remained empty and overgrown for many years until some colourful new tenants moved in. But that’s another story…