In 1773, George III’s architect, James Wyatt, was commissioned by Elizabeth, Countess of Home, to build a sophisticated ‘Pavilion’ designed purely for enjoyment and entertainment at No. 20 Portland Square. The Countess, aptly known as ‘The Queen of Hell’, was in her late 60’s, twice widowed, childless and rich.

(Home House, “London’s Iconic Members Club” website)

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In her sixties and seventies, Elizabeth Gibbons, Countess of Home, was one of the most powerful and colorful characters of British high society.  But finding authentic traces of her now— beyond the standing edifice on Portland Square—is tricky.  I had to rummage. Contemporary references mostly bounce off internet repetitions, clones of each other. Original sources are sparse—in fact,  I’m quoting most of them here. Historically, Countess Elizabeth is the “Queen of Hell” because William Beckford, an inconceivably wealthy brat young enough to be her grandson, bestowed the title in one of his many florid letters to his artsy who-alls. Not that he’d miss one of her parties. At least when he wasn’t about to be arrested.

Beckford’s catty nickname for the Countess of Home (royal by calculated marriage) stuck to her like a meme, wafting down to us with little context.  I’m not saying it’s not apt, but Elizabeth’s hellish queendom was not No. 20 Portland Square.  Her hell simmered across the Atlantic, in the brutal slaveholding culture of Jamaica, richly funding the London party house. 

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She was the only daughter and heir of William Gibbons of Vere in the island of Jamaica.  Her first husband was James Lawes, son of the Governor of the island. After his death she married William, 8th Earl of Home on 25th December 1742.  He was a Lt. General in the army and Governor of Gibraltar but he deserted her the year after the marriage.  She had no children and died at Home House in Portland Square, London.

(Westminster Abbey Website; Burial Commemorations)

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Elizabeth was born in 1703, maybe 1704—an only child, which likely means “only surviving child.”  Her mother died in 1711, probably taken by one of the freewheeling diseases that jacked the death rate—for Black and white people alike—twice as high as the birth rate.  Only slightly less probable causes of death: pirates. Maroons. Slave revolt.  So many ways to die young in the Caribbean, even among the unimaginably wealthy and privileged.

Elizabeth’s father William was a cane planter. He owned hundreds of sugar-producing acres stocked with hundreds of enslaved workers.  At sixteen, Elizabeth married James Lawes. James’s father Nicholas, Governor of Jamaica, was even richer; he had a way of marrying (and surviving) widows of other rich men. Governor Lawes owned more land, enslaved more people, and was apparently more interested in distinguishing himself in public affairs than Elizabeth’s father.

Maybe the only plantation family richer than the Gibbonses and Laweses: the neighboring Beckfords.

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Soon after marrying, Elizabeth commissioned a prestigious London sculptor to craft a memorial for her mother.  I have never been there, but by all reports the plaque is still set in Halfway Tree Church near Kingston, in a parish they called Vere:

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Near this place lies intern’d with her parents, &c., the body of Mrs. Deborah Gibbons, wife to Willm. Gibbons, Esq., and daughter of John Favell, Esq., of ye county of York, who departed this life the 20th of July, 1711, in the 29th year of her age.  To summ up her character in brief she was one of the best of women and a most pious Christian.  She left only one daughter, who married the Honble. James Lawes, eldest son of Sir N. S. Lawes, Kt., Governor of this island, who in honour to the memory of so good a parent erected this monument to her.

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Here we see Elizabeth, the “Queen of Hell,” enshrining her mother’s pious Christianity. A trope?  The sweetest phrase: “… one of the best of women …” but what did this mean to the daughter who had lost her too soon to know her?

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When James died, thirteen years after their wedding, Elizabeth imported another memorial—same sculptor, a prestige move—to the same church.  The bust of James is puckish and lifelike.  The inscription is in Latin, which I don’t read, but I’ve seen this translation:

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Nearby are placed the remains of the Honourable James Lawes: he was the first-born son of Sir Nicholas Lawes, the Governor of this Island, by his wife Susannah Temple: He married Elizabeth, the only daughter and heiress of William Gibbons, Esq; then in early manhood, when barely thirty-six years of age, he obtained almost the highest position of distinction among his countrymen, being appointed Lieutenant Governor by Royal warrant; but before he entered on his duties, in the prime of life—alas—he died on 4th January 1733.

 

In him we lose an upright and honoured citizen, a faithful and industrious friend, and most affectionate husband, a man who was just and kind to all, and distinguished by the lustre of genuine religion.  His wife, who survived him, had this monument erected to perpetuate the memory of a beloved husband.

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Alas.

 

James Lawes, in life, was a pain in the butt among all and sundry—the entitled oldest son of one of Jamaica’s prominent planters, the governor’s obnoxious kid (we know his kind). James scooted to London after his father died, cleaned up his act enough to return with the crown’s appointment. Back on the island, however, he was no “upright and honoured citizen.” And by all-accounts-not-Elizabeth’s he was neither just nor kind. Genuine religious lustre: zero.

 

But the last sentence of the epitaph may be accurate: his widowed, childless wife Elizabeth appears to have truly loved him—an obscure signal that she also harbored a trickster heart.

 

Not yet thirty, Elizabeth Gibbons Lawes was now among the very wealthiest human beings in the western hemisphere. Heiress of her father’s Jamaican estates and her husband’s formidable holdings, she was richer—and better-landed—than many English royals.

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James, her dead husband, carried small-time noble blood through his mother’s line, thanks to his common father who had married the “relict” Susannah Temple.  Elizabeth’s ancestry is obscure on both sides—the Gibbonses and Favells likely rose from the merchant/esquire class, or military, peppered with buccaneers.  A New World pattern: upstart creole heirs entrusting vast properties (and the people enslaved on them) to ruthless hired managers.  Raised rugged, isolated, accustomed to violent power and obscenely rich, the second generations believed they warranted royal prestige as they returned to the motherland.  Third, fourth, fifth generations—or second, third, and fourth families—often slid back into rough poverty, inheriting only resentments.

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Elizabeth makes no mark on extant records for nine years after her young husband’s death.  Did she hang around Vere, learning the sugar business and the enterprise of enslavement?  Did she party in Kingston and Spanish Town, attended by human beings she called her property?  Did she, like her Jamaican neighbors the Beckfords, bring Black “servants” to England to pad the shock of return?  She appears in London at age thirtyeight, on record for her second marriage: Christmas day 1742, to the eighth Earl of Home.

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I am no Anglophile.  I had to look this up: an earl is the British equivalent of a count.  The Earl of Home was several years younger than Elizabeth, dissolute, and probably homosexual (which was not nearly as rare as my ancestor-searching Mormon relatives wish to acknowledge.  Not nearly).  Elizabeth bailed her prodigal earl out of some hefty bankruptcies, he abandoned her a year after the marriage, her wealth was barely dented, and now she was a countess.  Deal.

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Aaaand she goes invisible again for thirty years, then blazes up in 1773 to contract James Wyatt, a trendy London architect, to design and build her party house on Portland Square.  Reminder: Elizabeth was sixty-seven.

 

Notoriously drunk, dirty, and sporadic, Wyatt erected the outer structure and a few ornate ceilings before Elizabeth got fed up and fired him, hiring his rival Robert Adam to redesign and finish.  Adam’s takeover-makeover produced one of the most legendary and enduring interiors of the Georgian era; beyond its wide but unostentatious front façade, the entry opens into multiple stories of elaborate and spacious gathering rooms, bound by a central staircase spiraling under a glass dome. Skylight reaches nearly every chamber.  A covered garden extends beyond the rear exit.  Although there were sleeping quarters, the house was—and remains—a social hall, made to be lit, designed for music, drink (rum I guess), fine food, and rich party animals.  For much of the twentieth century, the Home House served as the Courtauld Institute, displaying an offbeat but prestigious art collection.  On my first (and probably last) visit to London, as a young wife married to an artist committed to the high truths of the European Enlightenment, I spent a full day in the Countess’s “Pavilion,” although I had no sense of its history or peculiarity.  Now the building houses a prestigious private club, frequented by descendants of the original royal revelers.

 

The parties were, by all reports, ragers.  Booze.  Drugs.  Orgies.  Costumes.  Birthday suits.  People came off the streets, out of the palaces, highborn and lowlife.  Once, Elizabeth invited a couple of passing Black men in to show the orchestra how to kick up the beat, but they drank themselves to sleep in the kitchen instead.  Parties went on for days, one event indistinguishable from the next.

 

The woman was in her seventies.

 

During Elizabeth’s residence, two life-sized, full-body portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland hung on either side of a grand fireplace.  A ceiling-high mirror enhanced the grandeur.  Thomas Gainsborough was the artist; if you’re not an art history type, orient by recalling that he also painted The Blue Boy and Pinkie.

 

The Cumberland portraits now belong to the Royal Collection Trust and hang in Buckingham Palace—amusing because the couple in their time were notorious for (figuratively at least) farting in the general direction of the king and queen.

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Henry Frederick, the portrait’s Duke of Cumberland, was King George III’s younger brother, bigly royal but outside the line for the throne.  Think Harry, if you must.

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Anne Luttrell Horton, the portrait’s Duchess of Cumberland, was a widowed Jamaican plantation heiress, in fact James Lawes’ half-sister’s daughter, making her Elizabeth’s half-niece by (long-ago Jamaican) marriage.  Elizabeth’s wayback Jamaican sister-in-law had married into the Luttrell family.  The Luttrells were surly Irish nobles (also Jamaican planters) committed to social advancement through shameless seduction and/or election rigging and/or vicious personal violence.  Hence Anne Luttrell, Elizabeth’s Irish/Jamaican creole niece, widow of some dude named Horton, sprang up at the right moment to become the Duchess of Cumberland.  She took to batting her famous eyelashes, flashing her coyest-in-all England green eyes at dumb-as-dirt playboy Henry, the king’s brother.  The Luttrells campaigned (blackmailed) for marriage.  Hard.

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Sure, the old serial groom, Governor Lawes, had labored to give his descendants noble blood, but his granddaughter was out of her league.  By royal reckoning, Duke Henry was succumbing to a rank commoner, a confoundingly rich creole hick.  The creoles won.  King George III was furious, inspiring the newlywed Duke and Duchess to take a long honeymoon on the continent.  But they returned to their fine estate after long enough, mere walking distance from Buckingham Palace.  They played cool uncle and aunt to the Prince of Wales, who liked sneaking over to party like only the Jamaicans could.  After yet another brother married a commoner, King George decreed that no member of the royal family could marry without the monarch’s permission, and certainly could not marry a nonroyal.

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William Beckford (the father of the WB who called Elizabeth the Queen of Hell), possibly the very richest of the Jamaican rich, had also relocated to London, holding various offices—including, over time, Sheriff of London and even Mayor.  Despite the high functions, Daddy Beckford was a colorful guy, leaning with the “radicals” who liked to worry the legitimate gentry.  Little William Thomas Beckford, next generation, sole heir of his father’s mad fortune, was about thirteen when Elizabeth launched her Portland Square project.  This William, a gorgeous, flamboyant Peter Pan (Google his portrait), eventually left England for the continent, hiding out after a scandalous and super kinky (and criminal, even for him) affair with a seriously underaged and even prettier boy.  In comfortable exile, young Beckford wrote a dense proto-romantic novel rife with artsy erotic adventures called Vathek, which no one ought to endure, not because it’s perverse (adorned with sensually compliant dwarves and a sexy “black eunuch” who manages Vathek’s harem of “females,” etc.) but because it’s a ponderous “gothick” fundamentally hostile to the twenty-first-century attention span.  It’s worth grazing though: his depictions of exotic pleasure palaces seem to be inspired by Elizabeth’s Portland joint.  And, possibly, Jamaican fantasies.  Beckford made his own attempts at an architectural legacy with the “help” of the same James Wyatt Elizabeth fired.  All of this may have spiraled down like Elizabeth’s skylit staircase to birth Coleridge’s In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately pleasure dome decree …

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Some sources report that the Cumberlands commissioned Gainsborough to paint the matching portraits, and then gave them as a remarkable (and self-aggrandizing) gift to Elizabeth, prompting her to build a stately pleasure dome to house them.  Other sources say that Elizabeth commissioned the paintings to flatter the Cumberlands, strengthening her ambivalent and ornery link to established prestige.  The portraits are stunning: Gainsborough’s high rococo style, feathery fabric strokes, matching mid-body ferric reds.  The artist overcomes the duke’s buggy eyes and wigged pointy head by sussing Henry’s integral sex-money-titular swagger.  He fingers royal gold hanging from his neck, reminding all that not even the king can deny the facts of true lineage.​

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Gainsborough portrays Anne somewhere between distinguished lady and incorrigible coquette—drooping lashes over vivid eyes, an almost-smile offering and withholding.  The Duchess, like all her family and apparently like the regulars who partied in the court of the Queen of Hell, cursed like a pirate:

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Lady Anne Fordyce is reported as saying that after hearing (the Countess) talk one ought to go home and wash one’s ears; Lady Louisa Stuart called her vulgar, noisy, indelicate, and intrepid but not, she adds, accused of gallantry.

​(Historian Lesley Lewis, 1967)

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It’s appealing, cowgirl American that I believe I am, to root for these appalling white Jamaicans as the feisty underdogs, returned from the rough West to mimic and mock the arrogant royals.  Guess I inherited a New World urge to poke self-important folks in the eye with a sharp stick.​

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However.

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Back when it was legal to assign college students to read words that challenged their worldviews, I spent a week trying to guide my sophomore composition students through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations.  A bright young woman— certainly the finest natural writer of the group—said, “Well, if I had any ancestors who owned slaves, I guess I’d feel kind of responsible.  But I don’t, so don’t see how this is my problem.”

 

I formulated some responses, but, really, she’d just excused the class.  They were done, grateful that she’d stated the obvious.  On the train home I admitted to myself that, for all my righteous attitudes about race and history, I too was happy that I had no slaveholding forbears.  Not literally, anyway.

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My down-home Idaho mother knows little of her own maternal ancestry because her mother died very young, at thirty-three.  My mom is a sincere and unpretentious Latter-Day Saint, and, maybe due to this early loss, she’s always eager for her academic daughters to retrieve genealogical information about “who we are.” 

 

I bailed on my mother’s religion—any religion—long ago, but I like research and I do narrative, so I’m happy to help appease her passion for filling in names and dates on her family group sheets.  I try to dig around, find context, pull up information to enrich the characters for her.  So far, it’s felt reasonably safe.  What even in my straight-from-Europe dirtpoor-immigrant ancestry could foist the brutalities of Jamaican and Barbadian slavery on us?  So, tracking the (heavily obfuscated) generations of her Grandma Gibbons’s family was —I don’t know.  Should it really be such a shock?

 

Gibbonses proliferated on both islands; my theory now is that Elizabeth’s father had a second family on Barbados— possibly half-siblings she never discovered.  But every guess is raw speculation: who even were they?  Any of them?  They’re no good for fiction; I can’t imagine them well enough to fabricate.  Not like I have no evil in me, to help me “relate” to them.  I have plenty. It’s just not a world I can conjure.  My mom isn’t interested in following this family thread any further.  This is not who we are.  Maybe that tells me plenty.  She’s eighty-eight.  It’s not my call to badger her—and, anyway, whatever’s left of those people, they’re already in me as much as they’re in her.  If her religion is as true as she hopes, she’ll have to chat those people up in the next life. I’ll leave it to them.

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But here’s an eighteenth-century Barbadian plantation song, written down (with musical notations) by someone who thought it mattered enough to transcribe as he stood to listen to enslaved people “chanting” in the fields:

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Massa buy me he won’t killa me

Massa buy me he won’t killa me

Oh Massa buy me he won’t killa me

O ‘for he killa me he ship me regulaw

 

For I live with a bad man oh la

for I live with a bad man Obudda bo

For I live with a bad man oh la

‘for I would go to the Riverside Regulaw

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