Henry Philip Ducarel de la Pasture, E M Delafield’s father, was born in Italy in 1841, probably at the end of May, and after the death of his father in Lyons in December 1840. It’s not clear why his widowed mother Ellen had gone on to Italy to have her baby; perhaps that was always the end point of their journey. Ellen did not remarry. There are legal papers relating to the trusteeship of Philip Ducarel, her husband’s uncle, in the Gloucestershire Archives, and in 1854 she made an application to the Court of Chancery regarding the appointment of a guardian. There is no sign of Ellen and her family in the 1851 census, so possibly they were abroad at that time, but they appear in the press during the 1850s living in and around Cheltenham, where her older sons were educated. Ellen is also absent from the 1861 census, but so are her sons Gerard and Henry; by this time, they had left for New Zealand. In April 1861 Henry had completed the long journey from London and was on his way to Wellington.
What were Gerard and Henry doing in New Zealand? Principally, farming. In the New Zealand newspapers of the 1860s, there are repeated mentions of Crown Grants of large tracts of land being awarded to one or other brother. The land they farmed was in the South Island, in the Amuri district, quite close to Christchurch. Amuri is on the edge of the Southern Alps, mountainous countryside that must have only been useful for sheep farming. Gerard and Henry were relatively early colonists; the colony of New Zealand had been established by the Treaty of Waitanga in 1840. Throughout the de la Pasture brothers’ time in New Zealand, Maori resistance to colonisation meant that a series of wars were fought over land ownership and sovereignty. These were mostly confined to the North Island, however, and the press accounts of the brothers’ progress as farmers and members of the British colony give no indication that there was any local opposition; perhaps it was not in their interests to report it. As well as farming, Gerard and perhaps also Henry were involved in civic society; Gerard acted as a magistrate and coroner on occasion. In 1864 Gerard married Léontine Standish back in England, and the newlyweds arrived in New Zealand in 1865. Sadly (and like so many other women in the history of EMD’s forbears) Léontine would die in childbirth in 1869, leaving behind her daughter Monica Lily. Gerard remained in New Zealand, marrying a second time in 1874 to Georgina Mary Loughnan; by 1880 they had had a daughter who died in infancy, and had moved to England. Ellen de la Pasture died in October 1874, but it’s not clear if either Gerard or Henry returned to England then; however, a Mr H. de la Pasture was at a ball at Burghley House near Stamford, Lincolnshire in January 1873, so it’s possible he was in the country for the last months of his mother’s life. Henry was definitely in New Zealand in 1877, when he was fined £25 for driving a large flock of scab-infected sheep. Gerard seems to have retained some land holdings in New Zealand, but it’s not clear whether Henry also did so; there is nothing in his will to indicate that did.
After his permanent return to England, Henry starts to appear in press accounts of upper-class society. He had his portrait painted by Charles Edward Hallé in 1878, and later that year went to a grand garden party on the Isle of Wight given by the Count and Countess of Batthyany, and attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales. Having his portrait painted and attending society parties might be the signs of a man on the look-out for a wife. By the 1881 census Henry was living, with Gerard and his growing family, and eight domestic servants including a French governess, in Caley Hall, Pool-in-Wharfdale, Yorkshire. This house was near Otley, where their sister Elizabeth and her husband Thomas Constable were living in the Manor House, which perhaps explains the choice of location. On the census their occupation is given as “Capitalist (No Occ)” so they were living on their own means. From 1879 to 1882 Henry also paid the rent on a property in London at 6 Ormond Yard. This is a back street between Jermyn Street and St James’s Square, a smart area but not a smart address; in the 1882 Post Office London Directory it is home to the Duke of York pub, a vet and a cabinet maker. Possibly this was a pied-à-terre. In 1884, Henry is in the press as one of the mourners in attendance at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, along with a Mme de la Pasture who was presumably Gerard’s wife Georgina; their attendance is probably because of the military career of Henry’s father, Henri Pierre de la Pasture. He must have met his future wife Betty Bonham in the mid to late 1880s, as they were married on 29 October 1887, at Our Lady of Victories in Kensington. In September 1887, a month before his wedding, he (assuming no other H de la Pastures were in circulation at this time) performed at a concert on the Isle of Wight, singing the duet ‘Sul Campo della Gloria’ from Donizetti’s Belisario with the Hon Lincoln. E. Stanhope, son of the 7th Earl of Harrington. Henry was mixing in fairly grand circles, and connected to the Catholic aristocracy through his sister Elizabeth, but his chosen wife was a Catholic convert from a middle-class background. Betty must have had something about her.
This account of Henry as a colonist, a farmer, and a performing singer give the impression of a rather dynamic man with both a professional and a cultural hinterland. This is at odds with his representation in EMD’s biographies: McCullen describes him as “shut off in England from the normal careers suitable for a titled gentleman; he was never seen to work at anything” [McCullen p. 1]. He does, however, note that Henry was “handsome, charming and talented” and that EMD “adored” him. Violet Powell suggests that he “seems to have made little mark on the world beyond the circle of Catholic families to which he was connected by birth and marriage” [Powell p. 3]. The image of him that emerges from the press before his marriage contradicts this sense of a passive, rather parisitic aristocrat; instead, we have a man who was willing to travel to the other side of the world to launch himself in business in his early twenties, enjoyed a party, and was a confident enough singer to perform opera. We start to see what - apart from his charm and good looks - might have made him seem like a good choice of husband to Betty.
It’s true, though, that after his marriage he did not work again. There might well have been some income from his time in New Zealand, and some inheritance from his mother, but I suspect that what kept the family going was Betty’s income from her writing. Instead, Henry lived the life of a Victorian and Edwardian gentleman; he maintained country and London homes, he participated in amateur theatricals with his wife - his performances in the annual plays at Ugbrooke Park were repeatedly praised in the press - and he was a magistrate in Devon and Wales. He played bridge and drove a four-in-hand coach in Hyde Park in London. In March 1907 he and Betty attended a reception at Buckingham Palace [Powell p. 6], just before EMD’s social debut in London. But by October 1908 Henry was dead. He is reported as being frail in 1908, when EMD’s future sister-in-law Monica Dashwood saw Henry walking in Chester Square, supported by his two teenage daughters [Powell p. 7]. His obituaries were few but heartfelt, stressing how much he would be missed and how respected he had been in his various communities. He left his estate to Betty, who inherited Llandogo Priory and around two and a half thousand pounds in cash. Living to 67, Henry lasted far longer than the father he never knew, who died at 43, and his grandfather who died at 30, but he left behind a young widow - Betty was only 42 - and two teenage daughters, who were in the middle of being launched into society in the hope that they would find husbands.
The only photo of Henry I have found is in Violet Powell’s biography, and was taken in the mid-1890s. He’s wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a white shirt, with wavy white hair under his hat, a white moustache and probably also a beard. He is handsome, with deep-set eyes under straight brows; his straight nose and mouth, and firm jaw, are very like EMD’s. The cover image for this post is a photo by James Petts of some luggage at the North Norfolk railway, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license via Wikimedia. It seemed appropriate for a man who spent much of his life on the move.