Written by Alexis Haslam, community archaeologist at Fulham Palace.
Here we are again. Valentine’s Day, and if you read my last blog about it, not a date I’m particularly fond of. Still, our marketing and communications team has asked that I write another piece, so I thought I’d try and go for something a little less tragic this time.
Whilst there is sometimes a tendency to focus on the Bishops at the Palace, examining their extended families as well as their domestic servants has often proved both fruitful and interesting and the Taits are no exception. Archibald Campbell Tait (Bishop of London 1857-1868) married Catherine Spooner on 22 June 1843 in Elmdon, Warwickshire. Together they would go on to have nine children, although tragedy would strike after Archibald was made Bishop of Carlisle in 1849.
The Tait’s seventh child, Lucy Sydney Murray Tait, was born on 11 February 1856, just three days shy of Valentine’s Day itself. But the joy her birth brought her parents was brief. Between 6 March and 8 April that year, five of the Tait’s children; Catherine, Mary, Charlotte, Frances and Susan, aged between just 10 and 1 years old, were to die from scarlet fever. Somehow, both Lucy and her six-year-old brother, Craufurd, survived.
Very shortly afterwards, on 22 November 1856, Archibald Campbell Tait was made Bishop of London and the presumably devastated family moved into Fulham Palace. Perhaps it was a relief to get away from Carlisle, but leaving the graves of five recently buried children behind at the other end of the country cannot have been an easy decision. Whilst Craufurd and Lucy were the sole surviving children prior to the move to London, two further additions to the family followed, with Edith born in 1859 and Agnes in 1860.
Archibald Campbell Tait was translated to the See of Canterbury in 1868, and after this we know little about Lucy’s life. Her relationship with a woman named Mary Benson (née Sidgwick) has however been much discussed and is covered in depth in Rodney Bolt’s book As good as God, as clever as the Devil: The Impossible Life of Mary Benson.
Mary was born in Skipton, Yorkshire in 1841 and was known in her younger years as ‘Minnie’. Her second cousin, Edward White Benson, took quite a shine to her and suggested that they should marry when Mary was old enough. At the time of the proposal Mary was just 12 years old whilst Edward was 24. Still, marry they did, with the wedding taking place in Rugby, Warwickshire on 23 June 1859. Notably the ceremony was conducted by Frederick Temple, who became Bishop of London in 1885 and later Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896 (funnily enough replacing Edward Benson).
Mary’s life then followed that of a married woman at the time, accompanying Edward as his career path moved the family across the country. When they married Edward was a schoolmaster at Rugby, moving on to become first Master of Wellington College in 1859, Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral in in 1872 and Bishop of Truro in 1877. As Bishop of Truro he was consecrated by none other than Archibald Campbell Tait. In total the couple would have six children, with their son Edward noted for his Mapp and Lucia novels and Arthur for writing the lyrics to Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory.
Yet Edward was somewhat of a disciplinarian, which was not particularly appreciated by either his wife or his children. His bouts of depression were also troubling, and a somewhat staid married life cannot have been satisfying for an individual described by the Prime Minister William Gladstone as ‘the cleverest woman in Europe’. With Mary having married so young she was never truly sure that she loved Edward and began to realise that her heart perhaps lay elsewhere, with many of her emotions laid bare in her diaries. Whilst at Wellington Mary became romantically involved with a woman named Emily Edwardes, yet this was not her first crush and she listed Emily as number 39 in her diary.
Mary first met Lucy in 1882 as Archbishop Tait was ailing and Edward White Benson was being lined up as his successor. Benson replaced Tait after his death in 1883. It was clear that Mary and Lucy liked one another, but it would take another tragedy to bring them closer together. Mary’s daughter Nellie passed away from diphtheria in 1890 at the age of just 27, an illness she may have contracted whilst working within local schools. This left the Benson family in a distraught state, with Edward feeling that the gap left by Nellie’s death needed filling.
He was keen on Lucy Tait, particularly in regards of her charitable work, and invited her to live with the family at Lambeth Palace, hoping that she would provide support for Mary and guidance for their younger daughter Maggie. The Palace had previously been Lucy’s home and she quickly settled in and behaved as a member of the Benson family. So, it passed that Lucy and Mary were drawn to one another and started a romantic relationship that would last for nearly 30 years. This caused Mary to suffer from pangs of guilt and a sense that she was committing sin, and she wrote in her diary in Autumn 1896:
‘Once more with shame O Lord grant that all carnal affections may die in me, and that all things belonging to the spirit may live and grow in me – Lord, look down on Lucy and me, and bring to pass the union we have both so ??? and so blindly, each in our own region of mistake, continuously desired’.
Lucy certainly didn’t feel any sense of shame or guilt in the relationship and wrote to Mary: ‘it’s no earthly good you and me having anything together except just the very thing we have always wanted from the beginning, and no other relationship is the slightest good’.
Whilst Mary had suggested some form of compromise involving abstinence and reward, Lucy dismissed this as ‘a Sunday school prize giving arrangement’ and stated ‘I claim, to have you yourself and every bit of you’.
Lucy was certainly in the more advantageous position here as she was neither married nor a mother, and it is easy to see how Mary felt both compromised and vulnerable. In despair she resorted to binge eating. But things were to take yet another turn. On 11 October 1896 Edward White Benson died during the confession at St Deniol’s Church Hawarden whilst he and Mary were paying a visit to the former Prime Minister, William Gladstone.
Mary was now a widow and technically homeless, however she described her husband’s death as providing her with her first sense of genuine freedom: ‘I have never had time to be responsible for my own life. In a way I feel more grown up now than I ever have before – strange when for the first time in my 55 years I am answerable to nobody. No-one has the right to censure my actions and I can do what I like. What a tremendous choice!’
Mary certainly embraced her latter years. She shared a bed with Lucy and they kept a property at 5 Benson Place as a London bolt hole. In the spring of 1899, they moved to Tremans, a rural property in Horsted Keynes, West Sussex, where Mary would live out the rest of her days with Lucy. The family dynamics were not always easy, and Arthur Benson was to write: ‘she (lucy) has been everything to Mama, and I am everlastingly grateful to her – but I think she has really rather broken us up as a family’.
But with Lucy Tait, Mary Benson finally seemed able to live her life as she wished without fear of criticism, guilt or sin. She passed away on 15 June 1918. Lucy initially moved into a smaller house in the neighbourhood before moving in with her younger sister Edith who was married to Randall Thomas Davidson. Keeping the links to Canterbury, Davidson had succeeded Frederick Temple to the Archbishopric in 1903. Lucy died on 5 December 1938 and left everything in her will to her only nephew, Craufurd Tait Ellison, the son of her sister Agnes. Sadly, Agnes had passed away shortly after Craufurd’s birth.
Despite the various tragedies that occurred to both the Tait and Benson families, the partnership between Lucy and Mary appears to have been a happy one in a period where same sex relationships were largely frowned upon. Hopefully that puts more of a positive spin on the Valentine’s Day theme! Both Lucy and Mary are buried at St Mary the Blessed Virgin in Addington.