Effie Gray and Scottish Independence

Over the past weeks I’ve been trying to work out how Effie and her family would vote in the Scottish referendum.  Of course, the very idea of voting on a national issue would be alien to her – Effie died two decades before women won the right to vote for their Westminster MP.  But I’m sure she and her parents, and brothers, and daughters, would have debated the question over the dinner table.  Their letters show that the Grays were a vocal clan, and willing to squabble and then resolve their disagreements.  They didn’t bear grudges.  They kept talking through their differences even when they were cross with each other. 

George Gray, Effie’s father, c. 1865

So, what would Effie think about Scotland as an independent country?  She was staunchly loyal to the place of her birth.  And she returned home to Bowerswell, her family house just outside Perth, when she knew she was dying.  She always relaxed in the Scottish hills.  The Trossachs held special associations for her.  It was at Brig o’Turk that she came to realise that her first marriage, to John Ruskin, was over.  Ruskin ‘had no intention of making her his Wife’. Here she began to wrestle with the possibilities for her future. The young pre-Raphaelite, John Everett Millais, fell in love with Effie on this Scottish holiday.  He drew her obsessively in the cramped cottage he shared with Effie and Ruskin throughout the wet summer months.
 

  

 John Everett Millais, Highland Shelter, 25^th July 1853

After Effie left her husband, she went straight home to Perthshire.  Back in Scotland, she swam, and strode out along the coast, regaining her strength and pondering.  Eventually, in July 1855, she quietly married again.  She and her second husband, Millais, spent their honeymoon on Arran, where Effie admitted, ‘they were very comfortable’, waking each morning to clear skies and rowing out into the bay in the cool of the evening.  In August 1855 Effie and Millais settled in Bowerswell, safe from the wagging tongues of the London art world.  Millais grew to love Scotland.  His most sensitive paintings, including ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘The Vale of Rest’ were set against the Scottish sunset, with Bowerswell as a backdrop and local girls as models.

 

John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1855-6

Effie was sure of her Scottishness even when she moved back to South Kensington in the autumn of 1861.  She kept in touch constantly with her parents, and went home as often as she could.  Her father had shares in the Dundee-London steamer service, so Effie and her children made the journey several times a year.  And every summer Millais joined them, decamping to the Highlands to fish and shoot.  Effie’s young family wrote longingly about holidays with their grandparents, when the perpetual hum of London traffic was replaced by the hum of bees.  The children associated these visits with the taste of fresh cream and honey on porridge, with music and parties, with bicycle outings, with family. 

So Scotland was a place of personal refuge.  But Effie was also well aware of its political and judicial differences from England.  She was married (twice) in her father’s house.  As a Scottish wife, she understood that her legal status was a little better than a woman married in England.  She was entitled, for instance, to defend herself against accusations of infidelity. And she could demand financial support from her husband.  Unlike English brides, she retained some of her own property after marriage – at least her clothes and ‘paraphenalia’ remained hers and not her husband’s.

Effie came from a family of lawyers and bankers.  She recognised and applauded the autonomy of the Scottish legal system.  She also benefited from the self-reliance that characterised her family.  Her father, George, was an entrepreneur.  Sometimes he made the wrong call.  His investments in French railway stock at a time of political turmoil on the continent brought the Grays to the brink of financial disaster in the Spring of 1848. But he recovered, and by the 1860s was a pillar of the banking establishment in Perth.    

And here, in a nutshell, lie the answers to Effie’s reaction to Scottish independence: self-reliance, and the Establishment.  Effie and her family were conservatives.  They wanted to be accepted by their neighbours and their colleagues.  George Gray worried about the gossip in the golf-club when his girls got themselves into romantic scrapes. His reputation mattered. He made himself indispensable as manager of the Perth branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland for many years.  He founded the Standard Life Assurance Company in the town, and threw parties for the directors of the Gas Light Company, with ‘as much champagne as they could drink’.  After a few shaky speculations in the 1840s, George Gray was a substantial figure by the time Effie married her second husband.  This security, this sense of having arrived financially and socially, was underpinned by a strong political conservatism.

Effie shared her father’s aspirational attitude, and his conservative political outlook.  She was a social-climber, unashamedly marrying money.  She only had one possible career path, and that was a good marriage.  John Ruskin offered her security, family connections and the chance to make a splash in Society.  She could provide the social skills he lacked, and smooth his path through London soirées.  Effie expected to be presented at Court as Mrs Ruskin.  When she made her debut on 20^th June 1850, she was admired for her dress and her poise as she curtseyed and kissed Victoria’s hand.  As Mrs Millais, she was barred from the Queen’s presence – because she had 2 husbands still alive. This did not stop her becoming good friends with Constance, Duchess of Westminster, and later, Princess Louise, the sculptor-daughter of Queen Victoria.  These friendships mattered.  They signified that the scandalous failure of her first marriage had not blighted her life.  But Effie could not afford to be politically radical. Her reputation was too fragile. Yes, she and Millais enjoyed the company of Louise Jopling, the dazzling artist, Suffragist and teacher.  But Effie did not agree with Louise’s forthright campaigning for ‘Votes for Women’. 

 

John Everett Millais, Louise Jopling, 1879

In fact, Effie’s only overtly political act was to join the Primrose League.  This organisation had been established in 1883 in memory of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli.  When Effie enrolled as a Dame of the League in July 1885, she vowed to ‘uphold and support God, Queen and Country, and the Conservative cause’.  Effie was a staunch Tory.  By the summer of 1885, she was also a Lady herself, since Millais had just been made Baronet. 

In these circumstances, it seems unlikely that Effie would countenance the break-up of the Union.  Disraeli and his Tory party were staunchly Unionist when it came to the question of Ireland.  They would never have dreamt that Scotland might seek independence.  Effie was a Scot who came to London to seek her fortune.  And she was successful.  Scotland was home, but London was where she shone. 

And so finally we come to the element of self-reliance.  Effie Gray was prepared to stand up for herself when her marriage became intolerable.  She learnt to thrive and think independently as a teenager – she kept house when her mother was confined by childbirth.  Her brothers and cousins, and sons and nephews all demonstrated that they could flourish in adversity.  They were flung across the Empire, to farm and fend for themselves.  Their letters home, from Melbourne or Dunedin told how they ‘were getting the wool off the sheep’s backs to send to London to convert into coin.’  Effie’s daughter Mary made the crossing from England, to Cape Town, to New Zealand and then on to Australia in 1885-6, visiting family as she went.  Mary linked the scattered outposts of the Gray clan together.  Her correspondence and her photographs show how Effie’s family embodied the idea of Empire.  They took the opportunities that were given by a Greater Britain, and they prospered. 

Walter Crane, Imperial Federation Map, 1886

It is this idea of a Greater Britain that made sense to Effie and her daughters.  They saw the virtues of thinking big.  They loved their Scottishness, but they were not limited by it.  I think Effie would vote for the Union.