According to Lady Alice, Billy Fitzwilliam was ‘a spurious child’ that had been substituted at birth.

It was an old ruse, one that had been around for centuries. There was even a word for such babies: changelings. In aristocratic and royal circles, precautions to guard against the danger of a substitution had long been in place. The Home Secretary was required to attend all royal births – a practice that continued until 1930, when the late Princess Margaret was born. Aristocrats were equally cautious; at births where the devolution of prestigious titles, great fortunes and vast tracts of land were at stake, interested parties from tangential branches of the family, or their representatives, were in attendance to ensure that a changeling was not introduced.

Convention was broken at Billy’s birth. He was born thousands of miles from Wentworth in the wilds of Canada; there were no other members of the Fitzwilliam family present. Tucked among the bundle of documents Billy kept in his safe is a tattered fragment of newspaper, torn from the pages of The Times, dated 5 September 1872, some six weeks after the event. The circumstances of his birth, as the report reveals, were bizarre:

. . . near Fort William and on the borders of civilization – but it may well be confessed, of an uncouth and uncomfortable civilization, it may be mentioned that a son and heir to the noble house of Fitzwilliam has been born on the banks of the Kaministiquia River, on the north shores of Lake Superior.

The report continued:

An Ontario paper, in mentioning the birth of the infant, remarks that ‘the cries of the young stranger will be echoed by those of Indian papooses, and the tender sympathy of the tawny squaws in their wigwams with the coroneted mother in her tent, will show a touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. Unless the waves of the democratic revolution surge over England, or this last shoot of an ancient tree be untimely cut off, a native Canadian will succeed to one of the noblest titles, most princely estates, most honourable and honoured names in England and England’s history.’

A ‘stranger’ indeed – a cuckoo in their nest, so Lady Alice and her brothers and sisters believed. Lord Milton, their elder brother, they alleged, had been guilty of a fraudulent and criminal act. Moments after giving birth, and on his instructions, Lady Milton, the ‘coroneted mother’, had been knocked unconscious by chloroform, so that Billy, the son of a white settler, could be substituted for the couple’s newborn baby girl.

Billy’s documents reveal the substance of the conspirators’ allegation, but in the process of selecting which were kept, any letters or legal briefs containing details of the evidence his accusers held to corroborate their charge were deliberately destroyed. It is clear, however, that in 1896, the year the aunts and uncles first alleged that he was an impostor, Billy had no means of refuting it. It seems he himself did not know who he really was; all traces of his entry into the world appeared to have been lost.

His parents had been dead for many years; Laura, Viscountess Milton, had died in 1886, and Lord Milton almost ten years before her. Billy’s birth certificate, a key piece of evidence in his defence, had disappeared. If he was to prove that he was not the changeling his aunts and uncles believed him to be, witnesses to his birth, and his birth certificate, had to be found.

Billy knew he would receive no help from the Fitzwilliam family. From the outset, they had refused to credit his existence. Traditionally, the Fitzwilliams had celebrated the arrival of a new heir with lavish parties for tens of thousands of their tenants and employees. When Billy was born, there was silence from Wentworth: no announcement, no acknowledgement even. The British Press limited itself to carrying extracts from Canadian and American newspapers. Clearly the Fitzwilliams’ response had been ‘no comment’; it was as if Billy was being wiped from the family history even as his life began.

In 1896, at the age of twenty-four, Billy, Viscount Milton, was compelled to search for the proof he needed behind his family’s back. He hired a solicitor who also practised as a special investigator – the early-twentieth-century equivalent of a private detective. His name was Thomas Bayliss.

Some years later, Bayliss described his brief. ‘Certain members of the family said the Viscount was not the son of the late Viscount and Viscountess Milton, suggesting that he was a spurious child introduced into the bed of the Viscountess . . . My work as a specialist extended over a period of several years – from 1896 to 1900 inclusive. I was not allowed to make inquiries from members of Viscount Milton’s family, and inquiries had to be made in Canada, the United States and abroad. I wrote many hundreds of letters and consulted very many documents in various parts of the country, with the object of tracing the pedigree of Viscount Milton, and of procuring evidence of his legitimacy.’

Five people, as Bayliss discovered, had been present at Billy’s birth: his parents, Lord and Lady Milton; a midwife called Hannah Boyce; Dr Thomas Millar; and a nursemaid named Tilly Kingdon. In 1900, Bayliss, after a four-year investigation, finally succeeded in tracking down two of them: the doctor and the midwife. Both were asked by Johnson and Long, Billy’s solicitors, to make a statement about the circumstances surrounding his birth.

‘Gentlemen,’ wrote Dr Millar in response to the lawyers, ‘the indisputable facts connected with the birth of Viscount Milton are as follows’:

Sometime in July 1872 – I forget the exact date and have no means of verifying it – the late Viscountess Milton was delivered of a son (the present Viscount Milton), about 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock in the evening at Pointe de Meuron the head of navigation of the Kaministiquia River in a little wooden shanty, 12 miles from Fort William, a Hudson Bay post situated at the mouth of the above-named river in the province or department of Alghany, Canada.

The late Lord Milton, the nurse brought out especially for the purpose of attending her ladyship, and myself as medical attendant, were the only persons present, and no other person except the children’s nurse attended and then only occasionally during the convalescence of her ladyship. As mentioned by you, chloroform was administered, but not to the point of producing complete unconsciousness, only for the mitigation of pain (I add this detail, for I know nothing of the purport or import of your inquiries on this point, so have thought it better to be quite explicit).

The child’s name, date of birth, parentage and other particulars etc were recorded by the Governor of the Fort in the district court, and the birth was also made the subject of an article in the Toronto Globe. My intercourse with Lord and Lady Milton extended over a course of 4 or 5 years during which time, with few intermissions they were under my daily observation. Excepting a Catholic priest and the household of the fort, there were no white people for many miles around, consequently no white women or children ever visited us, our only visitors were Indians – for the most part patients of mine – black flies and mosquitoes and plenty of them.

Hannah Boyce’s statement, sworn before a Commissioner of Oaths in London, concurs with Dr Millar’s:

While we were at Pointe de Meuron Lady Milton on the 25th [sic] of July 1872 gave birth to a son. I delivered her. Just at the last pains Dr Millar came into the room and gave her a little chloroform. I was the first who saw and handled the child and there is absolutely no doubt it was a male child. While we were at Pointe de Meuron there were no other white people there, only Indians.

Both Boyce and Millar categorically refute each of Lady Alice’s allegations: Viscountess Milton had given birth to a boy, not a girl; she had not been chloroformed to the point of unconsciousness at any point during, or after, labour; a ‘changeling’ could never have been substituted because, in an area populated by Indians, there were no other white babies for miles around.

The two testimonies leave no room for doubt. Billy was clearly who he claimed to be: the legitimate heir to the 6th Earl’s title and fortune. His case seems cut and dried.

But was it?

There are some strange anomalies in Billy’s documents.

In January 1901, after Hannah Boyce had made her statement in London, she sent Mr Barker, Billy’s solicitor, a ‘small cutting’ from, as she claimed, ‘an old diary written on the day of Lord Milton’s birth’. The entry, just one sentence, read:

1872 July 26 – the first cry from a lovely boy gave joy to each of our little party in the lonely forest where no other white persons ever live.

How fortuitous that a line written thirty years previously should so succinctly inform the reader of two of the points Billy’s lawyers were so anxious to hear. The handwriting is shaky and spidery, more obviously that of a sixty-eight-year-old than that of the thirty-eight-year-old Boyce would have been in 1872. The diary entry is dated 26 July, yet oddly, and evidently written with the same pen and at the same time, ‘1872’ is scrawled above it. It is curious that the year was recorded six months into the diary: on the original document, someone has put a large cross in pencil beside ‘1872’, as if they too found it odd. Was Hannah Boyce telling the truth or was she perhaps a little too eager to please?

Among Billy’s documents there is a letter from Hannah Boyce to Billy’s solicitor, Mr Barker, which shows that she was paid £5 for her testimony; not personally by Billy, but through Barker. It was a lot of money to a village midwife, as she then was – the equivalent of a year’s wages.

Twelve years later – in 1913 – Billy would pay her again. More than a decade after he had become the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, Hannah, who had fallen on hard times after a street hawker had swindled her of her life savings, sent his wife, Maud, a letter, begging for her help:

Dear Lady Countess Fitzwilliam will you please excuse me being the old nurse of Lady Milton I trust you will pardon the liberty I am taking writing. It is now very many years I well remember being sent to 4 Grosvenor Square to see the Countess Fitzwilliam, she that engaged me to travel to Canada with Lady Milton as her nurse and midwife. Neither shall I ever forget the joy of Lord and Lady Milton at the birth of a son. As you do not know who I am I will remind you of my calling on you at the Castle Ryde. I gave you an advertisement I had cut from a Canadian paper of the birth of the present Lord Fitzwilliam. Mr Raymond Barker seen me several times as I went to London and signed an affidavit for which he gave me five pounds at that time. I never thought I should ever require help I am now over 80 years old I have been ill for several months I am getting better but cannot get strength. I have worked very hard helping the poor mothers in the village over their confinement. Four years ago I lost all our life savings leaving us with only the old age pension to depend on. I can only appeal to your sympathy if you could help me a little just now I should be most grateful. Again apologizing for writing to you it is the first time I ever wrote a letter asking any one to give me help I am very sorry to do so now. I remain your humbl [sic] servant, Hannah Boyce.

Maud showed the letter to Billy; wary of sending money directly to Hannah, he wrote a short note to Mr Barker: ‘Lady Fitzwilliam has received the enclosed from Mrs Boyce, I have not allowed her to send anything as I thought it safe to leave that matter in your hands. Will you send £5 or £10 on my behalf.’

Quite why Billy ‘thought it safe’ to leave the transaction to Mr Barker is unclear. Perhaps it was because he doubted the credibility of her original statement, and did not want to be seen to be paying her, as if she were a bought witness.

One further inference remains to be drawn from Billy’s documents.

On 10 March 1902, Thomas Bayliss, the solicitor and special investigator hired by Billy between 1896 and 1900, appeared before the Lord Chief Justice at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, charged with professional misconduct. Billy, who three weeks earlier had succeeded to his grandfather’s title and fortune, had instigated proceedings to have Bayliss struck off the rolls.

There had been a serious falling-out between the peer and his private detective. On the face of it, the dispute appears to have been about money. Billy accused Bayliss of embezzling £1,500, claiming he had submitted ‘fictitious’ invoices to account for the stolen money. Bayliss argued that the invoices, far from being fabricated, represented his charges for the special investigation into Billy’s legitimacy, conducted over a period of four years.

The judge ruled that Bayliss had submitted a ‘fictitious claim’ for his work. Bayliss lost the case; he was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and struck off the rolls. The assumption, from the published court report, and the verdict in the case, is that Bayliss was corrupt; more crucially, the implication in the judge’s ruling was that the ‘strange allegations as to Earl Fitzwilliam’s identity’, as one newspaper referred to the case, were a figment of Bayliss’s imagination.

Bayliss may have been guilty of some form of embezzlement, but Billy’s documents show that what he said in court was true. He had investigated Billy’s legitimacy, and he had played an important part in procuring the evidence necessary to rebut the impostor charge: moreover, a letter from Johnson and Long shows that in 1900, Bayliss was the lawyer responsible for coordinating Billy’s defence in anticipation of a legal challenge by the Fitzwilliam family. Bayliss had, as he claimed in court, submitted a detailed brief to Billy’s barrister, Mr Butcher. Writing in November 1900, Billy’s solicitor attached a note to the brief: ‘In lieu of the questions submitted by Mr Bayliss’s case, Counsel is requested to advise Lord Milton what steps he should take in order to guard against any attack such as is suggested on the part of certain members of his family.’ Intriguingly, neither Bayliss’s brief nor Mr Butcher’s response has survived among Billy’s collection of documents; they have been pruned. The supposition has to be that both documents contained negative information, possibly details of the evidence on which Lady Alice’s allegation was based.

Oddly, the £1,500 pounds at issue (the equivalent of around £105,000 today) was money that Billy had already made available to Bayliss. It is unlikely that he would have advanced such a large sum had he not been anticipating a costly and difficult investigation, involving inquiries abroad. Though a sizeable figure, it was not a huge amount to a man who had recently inherited £2.8 million, or £3.3 billion at today’s values; so why would Billy want to quibble, and so publicly, over what for him was a relatively small sum?

It seems that Bayliss possessed information that Billy wanted to suppress; a breach of confidence, or the fear of it, was what drove him to bring the case.

The two men had parted company at the end of 1900. Shortly after, Billy served a Writ of Attachment on the solicitor to recover the £1,500 he claimed he owed him. Bayliss responded angrily; an extract from the letter he sent to Billy was read out during his trial:

You cannot be surprised that I intend to hit out hard. By your underhand shuffling I consider you have forfeited all claims to the confidence about your affairs that I scrupulously observed. I have been interviewed by a representative of the Press to whom I have given information of your dealings with me.

The precise nature of Billy’s ‘underhand shuffling’ was not specified in court. Nor did anything ever appear in the Press. What is clear, though, is that Billy, after receiving the solicitor’s threatening letter, wanted to silence him – and for good. If it had been simply a matter of money, he could have pursued the debt recovery action via the Writ of Attachment. Instead, he chose to lodge a complaint with the Law Society, the solicitors’ governing body. To seek to have Bayliss struck off the solicitors’ rolls was a more vitriolic way to proceed; if successful, it ensured censure and humiliation, and an end to Bayliss’s legal career.

Yet Bayliss was nearing seventy: in 1902, his career was almost over. It seems that Billy’s true aim in discrediting his professional integrity was to destroy the credibility of the information his solicitor had threatened to reveal.

Billy’s documents cannot be regarded as conclusive. In offering a resolution to the mystery of his identity, they raise more questions than they answer. That the heir to one of Victorian England’s greatest industrial fortunes was born in a wooden shack in an Indian camp, miles from anywhere, in a region plagued by mosquitoes and black flies is in itself mysterious.

As vouched for by his sister, Lady Mabel Smith, Billy had a ‘perfect horror of publicity’: an obsession with secrecy, as she remembered, had been one of his chief characteristics from childhood. But why, from such an early age, had he been so secretive? Was it because he knew he was not his father’s son? Or was there something else he wanted to hide?

Billy’s documents point to his father, William, Viscount Milton. He, if Lady Alice is to be believed, was the guilty party; a man so desperate to produce a son and heir that he was prepared to abandon his newborn baby daughter and replace her with Billy.

William, Viscount Milton, the eldest son of William, the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam, was born in July 1839. He died just thirty-eight years later. It was beginning to look as if the family was cursed: he was the second of three successive heirs to die before reaching the age of forty.

In William’s case, the Fitzwilliams were doubly cursed. His death, in 1877, came as a relief.

‘One of the hard lessons one has to learn, one which I fear I have been rebellious about, is to trust one’s children cheerfully to God when they suffer,’ wrote his mother, Harriet, Countess Fitzwilliam, on the afternoon he died. ‘I have been a long time learning it – but I hope I know it now. I call to mind so often now the time when my dear William seemed to stand very near to death as a little boy – how I prayed for his life to be spared! And could not say “Thy Will Be Done” and now I remember how much sooner he might perhaps have been with his God had I been more submissive, how much suffering he and others might have been spared and now I do most earnestly hope that his sufferings may not have been in vain and that we may all learn all that God in His mercy designed us to learn from it.’

To the British public, in the course of his short life, William Milton became a hero – one of the most famous and feted of the nineteenth-century explorers. At the age of twenty-four, after an epic and hazardous journey across the Rocky Mountains, he discovered a land route that linked the Atlantic to the Pacific. On his return to England in 1864 he received a rapturous response from the Press. ‘Lord Milton is something better than a Lord; he has proved himself to be a fine, heroic young man, of true English pluck and daring,’ wrote The Ilustrated Times. ‘Lord Milton,’ the panegyric continued, ‘is no shiftless Lord Dundreary, neither is he a mere pleasure-hunter, but a genuine Englishman – a splinter off the old Hartzrock – brave, tough, wise, energetic.’ Milton’s book, The North-West Passage by Land, an account of his journey published in 1865, ran into five editions in eight months and was still in print at the end of the century.

Yet he was no hero to the family. After his death, his name was taboo.

‘My grandfather never spoke about his father,’ recalls Billy’s granddaughter, Lady Barbara Ricardo. ‘We never knew anything about him. Were never told anything. Never knew about the book he wrote of his great adventures in Canada. There wasn’t even a copy of it in the library at Wentworth. There were tens of thousands of books there – not one single copy!’

More than a century after Milton’s death, his great-grandson, Michael Bond, set out to retrace his journey across North America and Canada. ‘I couldn’t believe there was so little to go on. It was like trying to build an ancient invertebrate from its trace fossils. He has all but been blanked from the family records. Remarkably for the heir to an Earldom, even his will has disappeared.’

Bond had touched the edge of the void in the family archives; it is from the mid-nineteenth century, around the time of Milton’s birth, that the destruction of the Fitzwilliam papers begins. ‘I imagined that the family would have been proud of its explorer son,’ Bond wrote. ‘So where were the biographies, the photograph albums, the archived letters, the gilt-framed portraits and the relics of the Wild West?’

Was he an embarrassment, Bond wondered. Had he done something inexcusable? Searching through the family archives, at the bottom of one meagre file containing rough drafts of Milton’s speeches, a few scraps of letters, and some notes from his secretary, Bond made a significant discovery, one that accounts for the mystery surrounding Milton’s life and explains why his name was taboo. ‘I found a small bundle of papers that would transform the way I looked at Milton,’ he wrote. ‘At first they resembled unpaid bills: lists of products and a signature, some numbers, his name at the top. But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.’

The bad blood of a man who appeared to be among the most blessed in mid-Victorian England gives the impostor affair a fresh twist.

*

‘Fits are treated as madness and madness constitutes a right as it were to treat people as vermin,’ Lord Shaftesbury, whose son, Maurice, was an epileptic, remarked in 1851.

In the mid-nineteenth century, epilepsy was tragically misunderstood. Doctors diagnosed it as a form of madness: there was no cure for it, and no understanding of what caused it. Deriving from the Greek word epilepsis, meaning ‘a taking hold of’, a state of being seized by some power of a mysterious nature, even its name supported the belief that it had some supernatural cause.

A terrifying and stigmatizing mythology had formed around the disease, still lodged in the popular consciousness centuries after it had been created. Islamic lore attributed epileptic fits to the blow of a ghost; in the Ottoman Empire, they were said to betray an illicit sexual love affair, brought on by a jealous spirit’s attempt to choke the guilty party. But in mid-Victorian England, to devout Christians like Earl Fitzwilliam, it was the verdict of the Bible that was the most damning. When Christ healed a child suffering convulsions, the episode was represented as the casting out of a demon: ‘a spirit taketh him and he suddenly crieth out; and it teareth him that he foameth again’ (Luke 9:39).

Over the centuries, the treatment for epilepsy had been as barbarous as the views attributed to its cause. In the first century, at the Colosseum in Rome, epileptics waited to drink the blood of mutilated gladiators: ‘They think it most valuable to sip the blood, still warm, still flowing, from the wounded themselves and thus to imbibe the breath of life immediately from the fresh opening,’ Pliny recorded. In later centuries, various body parts were prescribed to treat the disease: the sixteenth-century Parisian physician Jean Fernel recommended a mixture of mistletoe, powdered human skull and peony seeds gathered when the moon was waning. When Milton was growing up, miners in the pit villages around Wentworth used an old folk remedy to treat epileptic fits: a dried calf’s tongue was tied with a piece of string and placed around the afflicted person’s neck.

The ingredients of Milton’s prescriptions and the few letters that survive from his doctors indicate that he was sent to the top medical specialists of the day. From the onset of his illness, his parents spared no expense in the search for a cure for their eldest son and heir. Milton was treated by Sir Alexander Morrison, a prominent Edinburgh physician, and a disciple of a group of French doctors, based at the notorious Paris lunatic asylum, Salpetrière. Though widely regarded as the leading experts of their day, their views were almost as malevolent as the Ancients’, serving only to heighten the stigma and shame attached to the illness. Dr Beau, who conducted a study of sixty-seven epileptics at the Salpetrière asylum in 1833, concluded that his patients’ epilepsy had been caused by sorrow, morbid terror and masturbation. Dr Beau’s findings were replicated in further experiments conducted by other experts during the 1830s and 1840s. Even as late as the 1880s, the British neurologist Sir William Gowers was still attributing epilepsy to excessive masturbation.

Demons, self-abuse, fear; it was hardly surprising the Fitzwilliams themselves took fright.

During much of Milton’s childhood, their solution, which was typical of their class, was to keep him out of sight. Like other wealthy ‘lunatics’, he was exiled from his family from an early age, funnelled into the shadowy network of ‘madhouses’ that offered a cloak of secrecy: the private asylums and single-lodging establishments, both at home and abroad, that had proliferated in the first half of the nineteenth century.

His fits began before he was eleven years old. In 1850, Milton’s father sent a letter to his father, the 5th Earl, from the Fitzwilliams’ estate in Ireland.

William may have to remain here longer than I had anticipated, as his health is not very settled, and he has had many but only slight attacks of unconsciousness. The Edinburgh doctors recommend quiet, and no amusement of an exciting tendency.

Shortly after, Milton was sent to Avignon in France. Writing home to his mother at Wentworth, his anxiety about the long, enforced periods of separation from his family is painfully clear:

Please do let me know as soon as possible when you want me to come home for certain, and when and where we shall all be the next coming and midsummer holidays, if you knew how I long for an answer I am sure you would send one directly. On 15th April I shall have been here 3 months which was the greatest time you said I should stay and as I abominate being away here most thoroughly I really must come home then, and not go away again anywhere for an awfull long time except to Eton.

In their search for a cure, to the consternation of the round of specialists they consulted, the Fitzwilliams tried everything. An undated letter from one doctor mysteriously contains a lock of Milton’s hair: ‘I see no prospect of all this business finishing,’ he wrote. ‘Dr Willis saying that he can cure the thing appears to me very extraordinary.’

Dr Willis was the notorious proprietor of an asylum called Shillingthorpe. In 1847, the Medical Practitioner ran the following advertisement:

This Asylum for the Insane was established by the celebrated Dr Francis Willis, who had the happiness of restoring his Majesty George the Third from the serious malady with which he was afflicted in 1788. It is now conducted by his grandson, Dr Francis Willis, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, in the style of a country gentleman’s residence. It is exclusively adapted for persons moving in the upper ranks of society. The Invalids are separately provided for in their own private apartments, and do not associate with each other, unless they are capable of joining Dr Willis’s family. The numbers are very limited.

Shillingthorpe was one of several ‘aristocratic’ asylums that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century. Modelled on grand country houses, they boasted aviaries and bowling greens, cricket pavilions and pagodas. One establishment, Ticehurst, even had its own hunting pack. Catering exclusively for the sons and daughters of the well-born, the intention was to mimic ‘Society’: dances, billiards, Latin and Greek lessons, cards and concerts were among the many forms of activity on the curriculum.

When Milton was at Shillingthorpe, Dr Willis was known as a strong disciplinarian. His excessive fondness for the use of mechanical restraints – strait-waistcoats, handcuffs, hobbles, leg-locks and the ‘coercion chair’ – was criticized by the Lunacy Commissioner in 1854: ‘It is painful to know that such views are entertained by a few physicians, who are men of education, but apparently proud of adhering to ancient severities.’

Despite Dr Willis’s severity, Shillingthorpe’s royal imprimatur lent it an extra cachet. Yet the luxurious comforts on offer at the aristocrats’ asylums rendered them the more grotesque. They were desperate places. Many of the patients were not insane; like Milton, some were epileptics, others had been incarcerated by their families simply for falling in love beneath their class. At Ticehurst, in April 1847, one patient, Augustus Gawen, was admitted for proposing marriage to a fisherwoman, and another, Henrietta Golding, was confined after ‘she had shewn strong inclinations to form an improper connection with a Person of very inferior grade.’ The psychological scars inflicted on patients like these must have been considerable. The availability of private apartments meant that the patients did not live cheek by jowl, as they did in the paupers’ asylums, but Milton, and men and women like Augustus Gawen and Henrietta Golding, would have had some exposure to the other inmates – patients who were clinically mad. In 1857, lifting the veil of secrecy that shrouded the asylums tailored for ‘persons moving in the upper ranks of society’, William Browne, the Superintendent of Crichton Royal, was keen to stress that high birth did not diminish the ravages of madness. The ‘manic glorying in obscenity and filth’ was by no means confined to the working classes: ‘They are encountered in victims from the refined and polished portions of society, of the purest life, the most exquisite sensibility . . . Females of birth drink their urine . . . outlines of high artistic pretensions have been painted in excrement; poetry has been written in blood, or more revolting media . . . Patients are met with who daub and drench the walls as hideously as their disturbed fancy suggests; who wash or plaster their bodies, fill every crevice in the room, their ears, noses, hair, with ordure; who conceal these precious pigments in their mattresses, gloves, shoes, and will wage battle to defend their property.’

This, then, was the hinterland of Milton’s childhood.

During his teenage years there were times when he appeared to be better; he was well enough to go to Eton and from there to Trinity College, Cambridge, although his attendance was often interrupted by his illness. When he was sixteen his father, writing to his grandfather, told him, ‘I am sorry to say that William has had another attack like those he has had, but it was very much slighter, and there was only one, whereas he has had two on the previous occasions.’ And in another letter, when Milton was eighteen: ‘William, I am happy to say, is much better than when I left here 3 weeks ago, and I believe has had very little tendency towards a reversal of his old attacks and although he had tendencies when he first came here from London still those tendencies appear to be diminishing. He is evidently much stronger, and his face is fatter, and he does with far less medicine.’

Milton’s grandfather replied: ‘I hope the ups tendency to illness in William will go on – in medicine I have no great faith but I have great faith in diet which I hope will be enforced upon him systematically and perseveringly.’

But the ‘ups tendency’ the family longed for did not continue. Milton’s illness, and the profound feelings of guilt and shame that accompanied it, dogged every step of his life. In a letter to his parents, written when he was thirty-two, he begged to be forgiven. ‘Dear Father and Mother will you forgive me for all the pain and trouble I have caused you. When you know what I have suffered I know you will. Pray for me dear Father and Mother. Your loving and repentant son.’

His father was unforgiving. Pride and ignorance led him to treat his son, to use Lord Shaftesbury’s words, ‘like vermin’. William, 6th Earl Fitzwilliam, moulded in the cast of the Victorian patriarch, was a figure who inspired fear and awe among his family and his employees. After his death, one society writer said, ‘It is almost impossible to make a stranger realize the tone and style of the late Earl Fitzwilliam’s method of life at his Yorkshire seat, Wentworth. It must have been the nearest approach to the baronial splendour of the Middle Ages which the modern aristocracy can furnish.’ When his yellow coach, ‘horsed by four prancing chestnuts’, flanked by outriders and running-men dressed in the Fitzwilliam livery, travelled through the pit villages and the streets of Rotherham and Sheffield, women curtseyed, and the men removed their caps and bowed.

The 6th Earl was a man of few words. Evelyn Dundas, who sat next to him at a dinner at Wentworth in the 1890s, described him as the most difficult and ‘silent of hosts’. Throughout the meal she struggled to find conversation. When it reached a standstill, at a loss as to what to say though determined to elicit some response, she asked him ‘which reflection of himself in his spoon he preferred – the convex or concave’. Privately, his reticence translated into relationships with his children and grandchildren that were formal and cold. ‘A good many of them were frightened of him,’ said his granddaughter Lady Mabel Smith. He used his wealth as a weapon of control; letters that survive in the Fitzwilliam archives show that he advanced or withheld money depending on his children’s behaviour and continuously altered the amounts he planned to leave them in his will. Family to the 6th Earl meant duty, power, prestige and position; where these precepts were challenged, love and loyalty did not count.

Increasingly, as the Earl’s hopes for a cure for his son faded, he realized that his illness placed the family in jeopardy. The stigma of lunacy threatened the Fitzwilliams’ fortune and position – their potential for alliances through marriage with other great noble houses. It also threatened their social omnipotence. Endemic to epilepsy was the risk of public humiliation – an eventuality of which members of the aristocracy were particularly fearful. Even Lord Shaftesbury, the great Whig reformer and philanthropist, expressed horror at the thought of being humiliated in front of his tenants and employees when his son suffered a fit in public: ‘Maurice fell yesterday in the Park. I trembled lest a vast crowd should be gathered. Sent away the children and sat by his side as though we were lying on the grass, and by degrees he recovered and walked home.’

In the early 1860s, new research determined that what had previously been a minority view among doctors had become medical fact: mental illness, including epilepsy, was hereditary, sending shivers through the aristocracy for whom pedigree was everything. Milton’s illness had corrupted the Fitzwilliams’ blood.

That the Earl had reached this view became evident on 27 July 1860, Milton’s twenty-first birthday.

At Wentworth, the coming of age of the eldest son had traditionally been celebrated on a lavish scale. In 1807, when Milton’s grandfather, the 5th Earl Fitzwilliam, came of age, the family gave a party for 10,000 guests. The Iris, a Sheffield newspaper, carried a report:

May 5th 1807

Yesterday being the 21st anniversary of the birthday of Lord Milton, the only son and heir of Earl Fitzwilliam, the day was most munificently celebrated at Wentworth House. Two oxen weighing together 240 stone were roasted whole on the lawn, in sheds erected for the purpose; these had been feeding for upwards of three years past, and are supposed to have been the finest and fattest beasts ever grazed in this county. Twenty sheep had also been previously roasted in quarters, which with the beef, bread, etc and more than 10,000 gallons of strong ale, principally brewed several years ago for this festival, were distributed among the multitudes who assembled in the park, and whose numbers, notwithstanding the wetness of the day, have been estimated at 10,000.

During the forenoon and in the evening the roads on every side of Wentworth were darkened with crowds of people on foot, on horseback, in gigs, in chaises, coaches, carts and wagons. Yet rainy and unfavourable as the day was, none who travelled to Wentworth had occasion to complain of the fare – except those who by their gluttonous and drunken indiscretion made beasts of themselves and converted the bounty of Lord Fitzwilliam and his son at once in the means and the punishment of sinning. About a thousand of the tenants and others were entertained most sumptuously in the House itself.

The household accounts show precisely what the crowds consumed:

3 roasted oxen, 336 stone in weight

2 Scotch bullocks, 130 stone

26 roasted sheep, 177 stone 6 pounds

3 lambs

3 calves

10 hams

54 fowls

240 bushels of wheat

555 eggs

75 hogsheads of ale

6 hogsheads of small beer

473 bottles of good wine

23 gallons of rum

18 gallons of brandy

13 gallons of rum shrub [sic]

Viscount Milton’s party, half a century later, was a very different affair. He was not even there. Nor was his family. Instead, it was quietly celebrated by 180 tenants, who drank toasts to the young Lord with specially brewed ale, while the house masons and carpenters played cricket on the lawn.

It was a crushing snub to Milton, proof that his father refused to recognize him for who he was – the heir to his title and fortune. Yet again, it seems he had been sent away. Only one member of his family appears to have given the occasion any thought: his younger brother, William Henry, the Earl’s second son. ‘I have been thinking as William is just 21 that we ought to give him a birthday present; there is plenty of time to think of it before he comes home’, Henry, as he was known in the family, wrote to his older sister, Frances. ‘I should like to give him something really worth having, and if all of us brothers and sisters were to subscribe together we might get something very good, and if you can not spare much now, I am quite sure Mama will forward you some money. I know he often thinks that we do not care for him and he would very much like to have something from us all. I will give five pound but I do not mean that I want you to give the same, for I know you have more things to buy than I have. If we could get up between us £10 or £15 it would be very nice. He will never be 21 again you know.’

William Henry was Milton’s favourite brother; he was also his father’s favourite son. De facto, the Earl regarded Henry as his heir. Yet problematically, primogeniture dictated that Milton would succeed to the title and estates. Disinheriting an eldest son was a complex and all too public procedure; in light of the low life expectancy of epileptics in mid-nineteenth century England, the Earl decided to ride the matter out. As long as Milton died before he did, Henry, his second son, would succeed.

Some months after his twenty-first birthday, in April 1861, Milton blew his father’s strategy apart; without consulting him, he announced his engagement to Miss Dorcas Chichester, the daughter of Lord Chichester, and the niece of the Marquess of Donegal. On hearing the news the Earl took to his bed, unable to cope with the strain of the whole affair. What horrified him above all else was the thought that his eldest son might now produce an heir. If he were to do so, Milton’s bad blood would feed into the direct Fitzwilliam line.

In the days after the announcement, letters flew back and forth from Wentworth, as Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam connived with close family members to stop the marriage from going ahead. ‘There appears some reason to fear an immediate marriage,’ Milton’s mother wrote to his Uncle George. ‘My head is so weary I cannot judge of anything or write clearly either I fear.’

The situation came to a head when the Earl received a threatening letter from Lord Chichester, Dorcas’s father. Sharply reminding the Earl that both his daughter and Milton were of age and therefore did not need the Earl’s permission to marry, Chichester accused him of slighting his family by objecting to the marriage.

Behind Milton’s back, the Earl replied to Lord Chichester’s letter, knowing that what he had to tell him would bring the engagement to an end:

My son’s conduct has been so unsteady and his health so bad that I do not feel justified in consenting to his taking upon himself the serious responsibility of a married life. I feel sure you will think with me that I should not be doing right in withholding from you these facts, a knowledge of which will probably drastically alter your judgement as to your daughter’s prospects of happiness. My son suffers from fits which cause at times great mental excitement sometimes followed by considerable depression of spirits.

Three days later the engagement was called off.

The Earl had not consulted his son before sending the letter; nor was he prepared to discuss it after it had been sent. Lady Fitzwilliam, writing on behalf of her husband, sent Milton’s Uncle George a copy of the letter to Lord Chichester, with the following instructions. ‘He wishes you to read the enclosed letter and consider when it should be given to William or if it should be withheld.’

No letters survive to reveal Milton’s feelings for Dorcas Chichester, or what he felt about the way his father had behaved. Within a few months, relations between them were destined to get worse. In the spring of 1862, the Earl’s patience finally snapped.

On the morning of 26 May 1862, Milton stood in the dock at the Police Courts in Bow Street in London, as the magistrate delivered his verdict. He had been charged with fraudulently obtaining a pair of diamond earrings from a pawnbroker:

With respect to the charge before me, I can assure you, Lord Milton, if I had come to the conclusion that Your Lordship had any guilty intention with reference to the possession of the earrings, I should have sent you at once for trial, but my belief is there was no guilty intention. You are young and inexperienced, and evidently require good guidance, and I wish to remind you that considering your station, you are pre-eminently bound to obey the law, as your station will not protect you from the consequences of violating the law. The earrings will of course be given up to the pawnbroker. The act was the act of a foolish person, and therefore you, Lord Milton, are discharged.

In the weeks following his broken engagement, Milton, in deliberate defiance of his father, had been mixing with bad company in gaming houses and brothels in London’s West End. The diamond earrings had been deposited at a pawnbroker’s in Bond Street by Madame Rachel, a second-rate courtesan, who, according to police reports, traded as an ‘enameller of women’s faces’. She had won the earrings, which belonged to a ‘ladyfriend’ of Milton’s, at a game of cards. Milton, wanting to please his ‘ladyfriend’ by returning the earrings to her, went to the pawnbroker’s shop to redeem them. He offered the broker a cheque for £200, which he declined, saying ‘it was too much; the earrings were only worth £65’. At which point, Milton put them into his pocket and walked out of the shop.

In his defence, Milton argued that he had simply intended to take care of the earrings until their legal title was established. His lawyers, pleading that he suffered from ‘ill health’, said that he had been acting under the influence of a ‘woman much older than himself’.

His acquittal did not assuage his father. Angered by the negative publicity and the embarrassment to the family, the Earl ordered Milton out of England. Rather than send his frail son to a spa resort in Europe, he chose to banish him to the wilds of Canada. Making only the smallest of concessions to Milton’s fragile health, he paid for a young doctor, twenty-nine-year-old William Cheadle, to accompany him into exile.

Cheadle recorded their departure on 19 June 1862 from Liverpool Docks on the steamship Anglo-Saxon, bound for Quebec.

Sailed at 5, only 25 Cabin passengers as yet. Weather very drizzling on leaving in the tender but soon became fine though cloudy. Had the temerity to smoke two pipes immediately on the ship’s getting under way. About 6 o’clock 3 little devils found stowed away amongst the coals, hauled out, ship brought to, and the boat from a pilot vessel signalled to come alongside, when they were quickly sent over the side with a bag of biscuits from the Captain. They did not appear at all disconcerted at being discovered, but went away grinning, one waving a biscuit in farewell.

As Milton watched the vanishing wake of the pilot vessel returning the stowaways to shore, he must have longed to go with them. Yet again, as he had experienced throughout his childhood, he was being sent away against his will. Only one member of his family – his brother Henry – had waved him off from the quayside. ‘I am sorry I did not look up at the last moment I saw you,’ wrote Milton later that evening, ‘but I could not manage it I felt so unhappy at going away. Please give my love to all the little ones and remember me to all other people at home, with best love your affectionate brother, Milton.’

The weather, during what became a horrendous crossing, can only have heightened Milton’s despair. Two days off the coast of Ireland the ship ran into a violent storm. ‘Weather blowing stormy very,’ Cheadle noted in his journal.

A gale of wind and sea during the night and still continuing. Turned out to breakfast. Lord Milton wisely taking his repast in his berth. I got through a little breakfast but had to bolt downstairs, was sick and expected to have to endure frightful tortures, but recovered in a few minutes. Hardly anyone at table. Felt seedy and spent most of the day in my berth.

The following day, the storm continued, a day Cheadle describes as ‘certainly one of the longest days I ever passed’. And the next day:

Turned out towards 11, and shortly after Lord Milton put in his first appearance for two days. Both felt very uncertain. No catastrophe however occurred. Still very rough wind dead ahead, the vessel pitching tremendously, being very lightly laden – cargo tea. Everyone appears to have suffered and several passengers who have crossed the Atlantic several times agree that they never suffered so much before. Take the precaution however of having our meals in the passage, or on deck.

At night, phosphorescence made the heavy seas look angrier still; the crest of each wave ‘breaking in light’ and the wake of the ship ‘a path of brilliant scintillation’. And on the fifth day when the storm began to subside, eerily, at intervals through the morning, they saw joists of timber swirling past the boat. Later in the day, the source of the wreckage became evident.

About 1 o’clock, the Captain whilst talking with us on deck suddenly exclaimed: ‘By Jove, there’s the wreck of a vessel.’ After some little time we discovered a small object on the horizon, which by the help of glasses we made out to be the hull of a ship, dismasted and no one on board and almost directly in our course. We altered our course a little N. so as to pass under her stern which was towards us, and at about 2 yards distance read her name ‘Ruby’. She was completely waterlogged, the waves which were not very high washing over her. The masts (2, a schooner) had evidently been cut away, and her sides down to the level of the deck were broken up so that only the skeleton beams were left. The bowsprit was carried away, and the boats had either been the refuge of the crew, or washed away and the men drowned. They had evidently made a good struggle for life, but from the dreadfully battered state of the hull it would seem doubtful whether the boats could live in such a sea as there must have been.

On the eighth day, a thick fog descended. The ship slowed to half speed, its whistle blowing in short bursts.

Very cold and raw. Now in the region of ice about 100 miles from Cape Race. Great caution used. 2 lookouts in the bows, two officers on the bridge. The Captain had the ‘Canadian’ when she was lost, struck on a piece of ice which was under water and not seen. Shock so light that he standing on the bridge did not perceive it. Keel torn out so that she filled rapidly about 40 lost. Stop the engines every few hours to sound.

As the steamship crept through the dense fog, it was a grim foreshadowing of Milton and Cheadle’s next journey into the unknown. Determined to prove himself to his father, Milton refused to allow his health to encumber their plans. The two men had mapped an ambitious expedition across Canada: to find the most direct route through British territory to the gold regions of Cariboo and from there to explore the little-known country on the western flank of the Rocky Mountains.

It was wild and dangerous country, populated largely by tribes of Indians. Writing in the 1850s, Robert Ballantyne, a Hudson Bay Trader, had warned,

When starving, the Indians will not hesitate to appease the cravings of hunger by resorting to cannibalism; and there were some old dames with whom I was myself acquainted, who had at different periods eaten several of their children. Indeed, some of them, it was said, had also eaten their husbands.

Prejudice led many Europeans to exaggerate, but in the 1860s, in the remote fur-trading regions north of the Great Lakes, cannibalism was still prevalent among the tribes, and Indians were continuing to claim the scalps of white settlers.

While Cheadle, a Cambridge graduate and an accomplished oarsman, was stockily built and physically strong, Milton was weak and of slight physique, and frequently debilitated by epileptic attacks. His health posed a considerable handicap over the terrain they planned to cross. Yet, over distances of hundreds of miles, much of it on foot or on horseback, sleeping in tents in the open at night, Milton would endure some of the most hostile country in the world.

Their journey took them along precipitous mountain trails, often in driving blizzards of snow; across barely navigable rivers that had claimed many lives; through dense, unmapped forests, where paths had to be hacked with axes and many a traveller had been lost. And always, in these remote and wild regions, there was the danger of starvation, the travellers’ only source of food coming from whatever they could shoot or carry. There were other dangers too: from diseases such as smallpox, which had ripped through some of the small communities along their route, from wild bears and wolves, and from the hostile indigenous tribes.

It would be nearly two years before Milton saw his family again; for nine months of that time, he had no contact at all with them. Yet despite his unhappiness at the outset, the expedition to Canada was the making of him. In the rugged and inhospitable landscape he found peace and tranquillity, a ballast against, and refuge from, the pressures and prejudice at home. He was fascinated by the people he met, developing a particular affinity with the Indians and becoming fluent in Cree. His empathy with the tribesmen is apparent in his book, The North-West Passage by Land, where he describes his first sighting of an Indian: