Queer Places:
29 Eaton Pl, Belgravia, London SW1X 8BP, UK
Alice
Maria Hill, Countess of Bective (November 7, 1842 - February 25, 1928), was
born Lady Alice Maria Hill in London, the daughter of Sir Arthur Wills
Blundell Sandys Trumbull Windsor Hill, 4th Marquess of Downshire, and Hon.
Caroline Frances Stapleton-Cotton. She was the only daughter. In 1860 father
Arthur Wills demolished the old mansion house of Easthampstead Park in
Berkshire and built the present house, which was finished in 1864, a couple of
years later he also provided for the St Micheal’s Parish church, Easthampstead
to be rebuilt.
In 1867 on the 9th October Lady Alice Maria Hill married Thomas Taylour,
Lord Kenlis, son of the Earl of Bective. The couple went on to have two
daughters, the first was Lady Olivia Caroline Amelia Taylour (born 1869).
Their second daughter Lady Evelyn Alice Estelle Taylour (born 1873), sadly
died at age 2. Lady Evelyn was buried in Kirkby Lonsdale. In 1892 Lady Olivia
married Lord Henry Cavendish Bentinck (1863-1931). They had no children.
In 1893 Thomas Taylour, now Earl of Bective, died from a serious attack of
influenza.
Almost as soon as Victor
Beigel and
John Borie
arrived in London, they resumed their close friendship with
Jane Emmet and
Wilfrid de Glehn, whose home
in Chelsea already had become a center for the art colony of painters,
composers, and musicians. Though modestly gifted at the easel, Jane von Glehn
excelled as a hostess, and she organized numerous recitals in their drawing
room when John Singer Sargeant was
present and their close friends Roger Quilter,
Leonard Borwick,
Gervase Elwes,
Percy Grainger, and the singer
Susan Metcalfe all performed. Though
overlooked by most published accounts, Victor Beigel, Dickie Borie, and
Emily Sargent were present,
too, on such occasions, when the lines distinguishing strictly professional
from more intimate personal relations readily were blurred. A gossipy letter
from Jane Emmet back to America helps to clarify the social dynamic of this
close-knit group. "I was carried off to dinner by Lady Bective," she wrote in
June, 1907, "it was great fun. Beigel & Dickie and a young Indian Rajah who is
studying law and art (very handsome) and the writer
Robert Hichens. Beigel
played divinely after dinner & Dickie was too funny. He has the most perfectly
divine combination with Lady Bective who is an old Countess and a great sport.
She sits and stares at Dickie's impertinences and says really he must treat her
with some respect. She's been used to it." Despite, or possibly because of it,
John Borie's irresistible sallies, Alice Maria Bentinck, the Countess of
Bective, hired the architect to redecorate her elaborate London residence at
29 Eaton Place (one of the few later commissions on record for him). This
must have been a very queer evening, indeed: Hichens notoriously had satirized
- and exposed - Oscar Wilde and Lord
Alfred Douglas in his 1894 novel The
Green Carnation (published anonymously), and many of his later works
suggestively would explore the homoerotic subtext of Britain's orientalist
fixations in the far reaches of the Empire. Not surprising, then, to find a
"very handsome" Indian Rajah among the company.
The Countess of Bective passed away on February 25, 1928, aged 85 at her
home, 29 Eaton Place, London.
My published books:
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https://lynnswaffles.com/2015/08/27/the-countess-of-bective-lady-alice-maria-hill/
- Anesko, Michael. Henry James and Queer Filiation . Springer
International Publishing. Edizione del Kindle.