The curse of the Percevals: part 2

Spencer Arthur Perceval was born on 27 June 1832 at the Rectory in the village of East Horsley in Surrey. He was descended from a number of aristocratic families: the barons Arden, the earls of Egmont, the earls of Northampton, the earls of Dartmouth, the barons Bagot (and probably some more if you go far enough back). But the descent was only in the direct male line for the Egmont and Arden titles and, as the younger son of a younger son, Spencer Arthur was not particularly high up in the line of succession. When he was born the title of baron Arden was held by his grandfather and the earldom of Egmont by the fourth earl, a first (half blood) cousin of his father’s. There were nine heirs between Spencer Arthur and the title of earl of Egmont: the fourth earl’s son and grandson; Spencer Arthur’s grandfather (Baron Arden); his uncles George James, Edward and Charles George; his father Arthur Philip and his older brothers Augustus George and Charles John. In the normal course of events at least some of those nine could have been expected to produce sons of their own, edging Spencer Arthur ever further down the line of succession. But, in defiance of the odds, five earls in a row died without a surviving son and the accursed earldom crept inexorably closer to Spencer Arthur. (Legend had it that an Irish woman had laid a curse upon the earls of Egmont after being evicted from her property and this was the reason why they had such difficulty in producing heirs.) As an elderly man, Spencer Arthur found himself second in line to the titles of earl of Egmont and baron Arden.

Spencer Arthur’s father was the Reverend Arthur Philip Perceval, rector of East Horsley and chaplain to three monarchs (George V, William IV and Victoria). He was the sixth son of the second baron Arden. According to the Dictionary of National Biography he published ‘slight theological works’ and had a theory that Ireland was the Patmos of Revelation. I am not sure what ‘slight’ means in this context: were they slim volumes or was the theological thought not too deep? One of these slight volumes, incidentally, was published by the firm of Parker, Furnivall and Parker. The Furnivall in the partnership came from the same family as the man who would be suspected of murdering one of Arthur Philip’s grandchildren in Nebraska, USA.

The Reverend Arthur Philip married Charlotte Anne Legge, who was a grand-daughter of the earl of Dartmouth, and the nursery at East Horsley rectory was soon populated with little Percevals. Between 1826 and 1837 Arthur Philip and Charlotte had ten children, one of whom died shortly after birth. An eleventh baby was born in 1840 later but did not survive infancy. The surviving children were five daughters, Helena, Frances, Louisa, Caroline, and Charlotte, and four sons, Augustus George, Charles John, Spencer Arthur and Henry Legge. Frances was the first to marry, aged eighteen. Her husband was the vicar of neighbouring West Horsley, Henry Cerjat. Frances died a few weeks after the marriage.

As a leading Tractarian the Reverend Arthur Philip Perceval had become involved with the project to establish a colony in New Zealand and had bought 50 acres in the province of Canterbury. Spencer Arthur went out to the colony in 1851, joined the next year by elder brothers Augustus George and Charles John. The youngest brother, Henry Legge joined the Royal Navy. Arthur Philip died in 1853, followed by Charlotte in 1856, and their four surviving daughters appear to have been taken in by their maternal grandmother, who lived in Bramdean, Hampshire. In the 1861 census Charlotte is living with the eighty-five-year-old Honora Legge at Bramdean House, while the other three sisters, Helena, Louisa and Caroline (all described as fund-holders) are living in the Lodge. After her grandmother’s death, Helena seems to have become the head of the family, setting up home at 36 Ecclestone Square, London. Charlotte married the curate of Bramdean (who was called James Percival, but doesn’t seem to have been closely related to the Percevals), while Caroline married the Reverend Henry Landon and lived to the age of 95 on the Isle of Wight, the last survivor of the brothers and sisters.

By the time he reached his majority in 1853, Spencer Arthur had moved considerably closer to the earldom. The fourth earl had been succeeded by his son, the fifth earl, who died young with no surviving children. At this time the earldom devolved onto the descendants of the second earl’s second marriage, who already held the Arden baroncy. The second baron Arden had died in 1840, leaving his oldest surviving son, Admiral George James, to become the third baron Arden and then the sixth earl of Egmont. The sixth earl had no children. His brother Edward had died when he fell from a window in Denham Park Asylum in 1841, so the earl’s heir was the next eldest brother, the Reverend Charles George Perceval, Rector of Calverton, Buckinghamshire. Charles George had one surviving son, leaving the twenty-one year old Spencer Arthur fifth in line of succession, after his two older brothers.

Interesting glimpses of the lives of the three brothers in the province of Canterbury, New Zealand, are provided by cards written by George Ranald Macdonald in the preparation of his Dictionary of Canterbury Biography project. The cards can be seen on the website of the Museum of Canterbury, Christchurch.

The card for Spencer Arthur Perceval reads:

“… He came out in the Fatima, arriving Dec 1851. In 1852 he was engaged Asst. master at X’s Coll [Christchurch College] and advertised that he was willing to take boarders in his private house. Charlotte Godley [the wife of Canterbury founder John Robert Godley] wrote of him: ‘Mr P is not very taking as a stranger: he is very ugly, shy, and stammers very much when he tries to talk, but I dare say he is very good. Though young, he looks much steadier than his … brother… he says he will not go back to Eng.; he is so much delighted with the country and the life here, and finds his brothers, or rather, I believe, his fathers section such a good one. He lives at the house on it which is small and unfinished and works on the land. He, too, came to see us and brought us a bag of French beans and rhubarb from the garden. He is infinitely superior to the elder brother and so far more steady. I can see that he is already very differently though of here… The youngest Mr P is going on very well, and seems very happy here and one of the steadiest that we have, always at church, etc… He seems a very good steady boy or man, and I quite honour him for choosing to make himself useful in such a way;’”

In June 1857 Spencer Arthur married the rector’s daughter Marianne Dunnage. Over the next nine years they had seven children: Arthur Philip; Helena and Caroline, who died as babies; Henry Godfrey; Mary Henrietta; George, who died at one day old; and Louisa. The first five children were born in New Zealand, but by the time of George’s birth they had returned to England. Sometime after the birth of Louisa the couple separated and in 1871 Marianne, having provided her husband with ‘an heir and a spare’, had a son, Edward Leander Perceval, with another man back in New Zealand.

In 1874 the sixth earl, Admiral George James, the uncle of Spencer Arthur, died, one of the last survivors of the battle of Trafalgar. According to the newspapers his estate was worth £350,000. The real estate, along with the titles, went to his nephew Charles George, £40,000 to the children of his late brother Arthur Philip, £20,000 to his brother-in-law Sir William Heathcote; £20,000 to his cousin Spencer H. Walpole, smaller amounts to various other cousins and a year’s wages to his servants.

By this time there were seven surviving brothers and sisters to share the £40,000, Henry Legge having gone down with his ship in 1869. With nearly six thousand apiece, they should have been financially secure for the rest of their lives. Separated from his wife, Spencer Arthur settled in England. On the 1871 census he is staying with his sister Helena at 36 Eccleston Square; in 1881 he is living in Edith Street, and described as a private secretary (a position in the civil service). In 1884 tragedy struck with the murder of his son Harry in Nebraska, USA, along with his daughter-in-law and grand-daughter, as well as a lodger and a neighbour. In 1892 his daughter Louisa died, followed by her brother Arthur Philip (married but childless) in 1893.

In 1899 Spencer Arthur sued for divorce. His cousin the seventh earl had died childless two years previously, his nephews – the eighth earl and the eighth earl’s brother and heir – both had childless marriages. Did Spencer Arthur perhaps see the time coming when his wife’s child, Edward Leander Perceval, who had no Perceval blood in his veins, would inherit the earldom? (In the event Edward Leander Perceval, a ship’s cook, appears to have made no claim to the earldom when the ninth earl died.) Did he divorce for the sake of the earldom? Or perhaps he had a second marriage in mind? (There wasn’t one.) When Spencer Arthur died in 1910, just months before the death of his nephew the eighth earl, he was next-but-one in line for the earldom. He was buried in the churchyard at East Horsley, where he had been born.

Spencer Arthur’s divorce papers note that he had just one surviving child, Mary Henrietta, from his marriage. He may not have produced heirs to the earldom of Egmont but he is the ancestor, via his daughter, of the Heathcote baronets, still going strong. In 1883 twenty-year-old Mary Henrietta married her father’s cousin, the fifty-three-year-old Reverend Gilbert Vyvyan Heathcote. They had two sons, one of whom became the tenth baronet. Gilbert died in 1890 and seven years later Mary Henrietta remarried, again to a man over thirty years her senior, the Scottish engineer and shipbuilder Henry Gourlay.