Patrck Comerford
I was writing the other day about my visit with Father Jeffry Renos Nawie to the village of Kampung Quop, 20 km from Kuching, and Saint James’s Church, which was built almost 160 years ago, in 1863-1865.
It is one of the oldest church buildings in Sarawak, and was built through the efforts of Father Frederic William Abe, the second SPG missionary priest to live in Quop.
When the church was being built in Quop, the English banking heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906) responded to an appeal from Bishop Francis McDougall of Sarawak and donated the silver and nickel bell that is still in use in Quop to this day.
Angela Burdett-Coutts was one of wealthiest women in 19th century England and a close friend of Sir James Brooke (1803-1868), the first White Rajah of Sarawak. She owned a house in Kampong Quop and land and a plantation in the area. Local historians claim she would wander from Quop deep into the jungle and the rain forest., and that whenever she got lost she relied on the toll of the church bell, ringing for the Angelus at 6 am, 12 noon and 6 pm, to find her way home.
Other accounts, however, claim she never actually set foot on Sarawak.
Angela Burdett-Coutts was one of the three daughters of the wealthy banker Sir Francis Burdett (1770-1844) and his wife Sophia, a daughter of the banker Thomas Coutts. She became one of the wealthiest women in England at the age of 23 in 1837 when she inherited a fortune of around £1.8 million (worth £210 million today) following the death of her step-grandmother, Harriot Beauclerk, Duchess of St Albans.
The banking heiress was a loyal friend and admirer of the White Rajah of Sarawak, James Brooke (1803-1868), funding many of his enterprises.
When Jmes Brooke established his Kingdom in Sarawak, he needed money to develop it, and considered many options, including selling the country to Belgium. During return visits to England, he worked constantly on making connections with powerful people, including Queen Victoria and Angela Burdett-Coutts, who decided to use her great wealth to advance her humanitarian ideas.
As Brooke struggled to strengthen his hold on Sarawak, he was greatly assisted by her generosity, and it has been said that Sarawak was only kept afloat by a loan from the richest woman in England. including the Rainbow and Brooke named the armed steamer the Rainbow after her ‘to honour the beauty of Miss Burdett-Coutts, the goddess of the Dayaks, and the calm following a storm’. He also named a fort in Mukah, Fort Burdett, after her, and she underwrote the cost of running an experimental farm at Matang.
Their correspondence, which continued for almost nine years, was edited by Owen Rutter and published in 1935. In their exchanges, Brooke asked about her health and how she took care of herself, and he created riddles for her to solve.
A portrait of her in the Brooke Museum in Fort Margherita in Kuching shows her with a cockatoo that was believed to have been given to her by the Rajah.
Brooke trusted Burdett-Coutts so much that at one point he willed Sarawak to her. He wrote in his will: ‘I do hereby nominate and appoint her to be my true and lawful successor in the dignity and office of the Rajah of Sarawak now vested in me, to be held by her, the said Angela Burdett-Coutts, as a public trust for the good of the people.’
It is thought she offered him at least one proposal of marriage, but that Brooke politely refused. They never married and Brooke changed his will before he died on 11 June 1868.
Why did Burdett-Coutts and James Brooke never marry?
According to Owen Rutter, who edited and published their correspondence, Brooke was sexually incapacitated. It was said that in storming Burmese stockade in 1825, Brooke received a wound that rendered him incapable of marriage in the physical sense, and so he carefully avoided any approach to the subject.
Of course, many claim this is not true. Among his alleged relationships was one with Badruddin, a Sarawak prince, of whom he wrote, ‘my love for him was deeper than anyone I knew.’ Brooke is also said to have had a relationship with 16 year old Charles TC Grant, grandson of the seventh Earl of Elgin.
Three years after James Brooke died, Queen Victoria recognised Angela’s generous philanthropic work, making her a peer with the title of Baroness Burdett-Coutts.
She was 67 when she shocked polite society and married her 29-year-old secretary, the American-born William Lehman Ashmead Bartlett (1851-1921), on 12 February 1881. Her new husband changed his surname to Burdett-Coutts. But a clause in her step-grandmother’s will forbade her heir to marry a foreign national. This clause was invoked and Burdett-Coutts forfeited three-fifths of her income to her sister, Clara Maria Burdett (1830-1899), who had married a former Vicar of Askeaton, Co Limerick, the Revd James Drummond Money (1805-1875).
James Drummond Money was born in Bombay on 26 April 1805, a son of Sir William Taylor Money (1769-1834), who made his fortune in India and Java as a director of the East India Company and who died of cholera in Venice in 1834.
James was educated at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge, and came to Co Limerick in 1830 and was presented as Vicar of Askeaton by Sir Matthew Blakiston (1783-1862). He was then only 25, newly-ordained and she was a granddaughter of Sir Lucius O’Brien (1731-1795) of Dromoland Castle, Co Clare, and a first cousin of William Smith O’Brien (1803-1864) of Cahermoyle, Co Limerick.
Charlotte died in 1848 and the Revd James Money married Angela Burdett-Coutts’s sister Clara Maria at Chelsea on 28 April 1850. James and Clara were the parents of Francis Burdett Thomas Nevill Money-Coutts (1852-1923), who was born Francis Money in London on 18 September 1852.
Francis Money was educated at Eton and Trinity College Cambridge and was both a barrister and solicitor. But he spent most of his life as a poet, librettist and writer, and was a patron and collaborator of the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz. In 1875, he married Edith Ellen Churchill.
His aunt Angela Burdett-Coutts violated the terms of the will making her the sole heir of the Coutts fortune when she married a foreigner in 1881. Seeing an opportunity on the horizon, Clara and her son had adopted the name Coutts under the terms of the will, so that he became Francis Burdett Thomas Nevill Money-Coutts on 20 September 1880, and mother and son then contested Angela’s claims. A settlement was reached, and Angela received two-fifths of the income until her death in 1906, when Francis then became the sole beneficiary.
At one point, Francis was considered for a partnership in the family bank, but this idea was abandoned, as he was thought too unstable an temperamental. Adopting the pen name of ‘Mountjoy,’ he wrote and published at least 23 works between 1896 and 1923. Many of these were collections of poems. He also worked for the publisher John Lane in London, writing prefaces for, and editing, collections of poems by other authors, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Jeremy Taylor.
In 1912, by a genealogical sleight of hand, he became the 5th Baron Latymer through his mother’s family, when the title was called out of abeyance. The title was thought to have been extinct for 335 since the death in 1577 of John Nevill, stepson of Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII.
He petitioned for the title in 1911, and by resolution of the House of Lords on 15 July 1912 he was declared to be co-heir to the Barony of Latymer. He was summoned to Parliament by writ on 11 February 1913. Now the son of a Vicar of Askeaton and the nephew of the woman who almost married the Rajah of Sarawak had a seat in the House of Lords.
He changed his name again in 1914 to Francis Burdett Thomas Coutts-Nevill. He died in London on 8 June 1923.
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