The de la Pastures, EMD’s father’s family, come from a markedly different background to her mothers’ ancestors the Bonhams, although as we shall see they have points in common. The website geneanet.org shows the de la Pasture family tree stretching back into the fourteenth century, all living around the Pas-de-Calais in northwest France. Violet Powell suggests they were also related to the Netherlandish artist Roger van den Weyden, who is better known by the Flemish translation of the de la Pasture surname (Powell 2). They start off bearing the title ecuyer or squire, before acquiring grander titles like chevalier (knight), marquis and comte (count) of various places around Calais and Bolougne. In the early eighteenth century, they also start to have military titles.
EMD’s great-great-grandfather, Pierre Edmé Antoine François de la Pasture (1st Marquis, 1747-1826) was born and died in Montreuil-sur-Mer, a small fortified town in north-west France. There is scant information about him online, and it is hard to substantiate, but he seems to have had a military career in the Musketeers of the Guard, a military company of members of the nobility who protected the French King; he was presented to Louis XVI in 1788. He married a local girl, Marie Catherine Agathe d’Acary (1742-1826) probably in the late 1760s and they had three children: Pierre Marie François (2nd Marquis, 1770-1800, and EMD’s great-grandfather); Charles Henri (1773-1854) and Marie Charlotte Agathe. Given the family’s social position and their proximity to the royal family, it is unsurprising that most of the family except Marie emigrated in 1791. Marie entered the religious life and as a nun in the French Revolution was imprisoned in the Calais Citadelle in 1793, where she died shortly afterwards. Pierre Edmé Antoine François and Marie Catherine de la Pasture returned to France eventually, however, as they both died in Montreuil.
Pierre Marie François had a court and military career before leaving France. He was a royal page and served as an officer in a cavalry regiment, before joining the Armée des émigrés, the army raised by the nobility to counter the Revolution. By the late 1790s, however, he had moved to England, as he married Elizabeth Ducarel (1771-98, and the granddaughter of Henry and Betty’s common ancestor Adrien Coltée Ducarel) in London in February 1797. Although both families were of French origin, the Ducarels were Protestant Huguenots, the de la Pastures Catholic. The Ducarels had established themselves in England as colonial merchants; Adrien Coltée Ducarel was a director of the South Sea company. His son Gerard Gustavus (known as Gusty, 1745-1800), Elizabeth Ducarel’s father, worked for the East India Company. Why did the rich well-connected Ducarels consider her marriage to a Catholic refugee suitable?
Around 1770, Gusty began cohabiting with the twelve-year-old Sharaf un-Nisa (1758-1822), a girl from an aristocratic Mughal background in Purnea. Interracial relationships of this type were not only tolerated but encouraged by the East India Company. The website https://unstable-archives.github.io/ tells Sharaf un-Nisa’s story in fascinating detail. Elizabeth Ducarel (1771-98) was their first child; the couple would go on to have six children in total, four born in India and two in England. Unstable Archives suggests that there were mutual benefits to the relationship - Sharaf un-Nisa could help her husband with local contacts, and he could help her family acquire posts that would support them financially. Very unusually, Gusty took Sharaf un-Nisa back to England to live; they were married in London in 1787, and the children legitimised. In England, she was also known as Elizabeth Ducarel, and lived in Newlands in Gloucestershire where she seems to have integrated into local society. The Indian writer Mirza Abu Taleb Khan visited the Ducarels in 1899, and described her as thoroughly assimilated.
It doesn’t seem that the younger Elizabeth’s racial background was a barrier to achieving a more suitable marriage. Her brothers and sisters married, and her elder brother Philip became a respected member of the Gloucestershire gentry and a published poet. Even more convincingly, Elizabeth had already been married, in 1793 to Archibald Hamilton Foulkes (who died in 1795), and they had a daughter, called (of course) Elizabeth. The most obvious reason for the Ducarel-de la Pasture match, though, is that their son Henri Pierre de la Pasture (3rd Marquis, 1797-1840) was born about four months after the wedding. Elizabeth was of age, a widow with a young daughter and pregnant, so there were compelling reasons for the marriage to take place. Sadly, the marriage ended with her death only a year later in 1798. Pierre Marie François would also die young in 1800, when his son was only three; he is buried in St Mary’s Churchyard, Bath.
Who raised the orphaned Henri Pierre? His French grandparents both lived until 1826, and may have been in England when he was a small child, although both returned to France at some point. His other grandmother, Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa Ducarel, might also have been a candidate. Henri Pierre was apparently educated at Eton, and served in the British military; he would possibly have been old enough to serve in the later Napoleonic wars or have been part of the Army of Occupation in France from 1815-21. In April 1818 the London Gazette reports that he purchased a commission and had been promoted to Lieutenant of the 15th Light Dragoon. Henri Pierre occasionally appears in the social news in the press, taking tours, attending balls, being presented at a royal reception.
Henri Pierre married Ellen Crawford (sometimes spelled Craufurd online) Hardie (1809-74) in 1830, in Cheltenham. Ellen was the daughter of Captain Thomas Hardie, who had worked in the Indian Civil Service. Henri Pierre and Ellen would have four children: another Elizabeth Ducarel (1832-1919), Gerard Gustavus Ducarel (1838-1916), Charles Edward (1839-1923), and finally EMD’s father, Henry Philip Ducarel (1841-1908), who was born after the death of his own father. There is a clear connection to Cheltenham and Gloucester in the mentions of the couple in the press, which suggests that Henri Pierre was in contact with his Ducarel relatives; in 1834, Ellen’s fancy-dress is particularly mentioned in an account of a Cheltenham ball. The fact that three of his children have Ducarel as a middle name also indicates that he valued these links. However, it’s clear from the locations of the births of their children that Henri Pierre and Ellen continued to travel a lot; Elizabeth and Charles Edward were born in France and Gerard in Italy. Perhaps Henri Pierre wanted his children to be born in France to reflect his heritage, or perhaps he just liked to be on the move. I wonder whether Ellen enjoyed travelling through her pregnancies.
Henri Pierre and Ellen continued to feature in the social columns of the 1830s, often on journeys to or from France, or Scotland In 1838 Henri Pierre gave a ball in Monmouth. Perhaps they were living nearby; it is not far from the Forest of Dean where his uncle Philip Ducarel lived, and is also very close to where his son eventually settled in Llandogo. In October 1840, Henri Pierre is noted as being on his way to France with Ellen, and his death is subsequently reported on 1 December 1840 in Lyons. Henri Pierre was the first of EMD’s ancestors to write a novel, publishing Real Pearls in a False Setting in 1839 (available to read online at Google Books). This is a picaresque comic novel in three volumes, in which Sir Walter Closet undertakes a journey from London to the Forest of Dean and beyond, gets into various scrapes including being imprisoned for manslaughter, and has some romantic entanglements before eventually marrying. There is a lot of slapstick humour and euphemistic vulgarity along the way.
In her novels, Betty de la Pasture frequently evokes her husband’s French ancestry. The de Coursets in The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square (John Murray, 1907) have a family history clearly based on the de la Pastures, as described by Jeanne de Courset:
There were two brothers and a sister; Pierre, Charles and Anne-Marie. Our great-grandfather was Pierre, the Marquis de Courset. He was page to Madame Royale, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. He escaped with his young wife during the Revolution in 1793, and came to England and gave drawing-lessons in Bath to support them both. But he had been an officer in the French cavalry, and couldn’t be happy without soldiering; so he left his wife and joined the campaign of the French princes in Germany, and was killed. But he desired that his son should be brought up an Englishman […] my great grand-uncle Charles was in the French navy […] and served on board the Calipso, at Martinique, a battleship which remained faithful to the royal cause throughout the Revolution. Louise XVIII made him a Chevalier of St Louis, and of the Legion of Honour, and that is all the book says about him. I don’t know if he married and had children. Anyway, he did not emigrate, he stayed in France. […] The little sister, the Comtesse Anne-Marie […] was a Chanoinesse, but we do not know exactly what that means. She is the one we like best. She was the first noble lady to be arrested in the Revolution, and she was imprisoned in the Citadelle of Calais during the Terror, and died there. (pp25-6)
In this novel, there are hints about the upbringing of Henri Pierre: Jeanne’s great-aunt and uncle adopted Jeanne’s father, orphaned by the age of 5. The historical setting is off, as this adoption happens in 1851, but his uncle has the same name as one of Henri Pierre’s Ducarel uncles.
Ellen, widowed and pregnant, travelled on to Italy where her fourth son, EMD’s father Henry, was born in 1841. She did not remarry; there are archive papers that suggest Philip Ducarel, Henri Pierre’s uncle, oversaw the trust fund that supported Ellen and her children. In the 1840s Ellen and her children seem to have been living in Cheltenham, a place she often visited with her husband and close to her family home in Gloucestershire, and to the home of Philip Ducarel; the Cheltenham Looker-On reports on Ellen moving from Columbia Place to 2, Lansdown Crescent in 1848. Two of her sons, Gerard and Charles Edward, are also reported as winning prizes at Cheltenham College in the late 1840s. There is no sign of the de la Pastures in the 1851 census, so perhaps they were abroad, but in the early 1850s they were living at Glen-Wye Villa, near Ross, because the contents of the house were auctioned after Ellen moved out in 1856. After that, there is little trace of her in the press or census until 1871, when she is recorded in the census as staying with friends in Pontypool, Monmouthshire. Ellen died in 1874, in Bryanston Square, London.
Her third child, Charles Edward was an early student at the Catholic University of Ireland from 1855-58, winning several prizes and scholarships; he seems to have been more academic than sporting, judging from the account of a rowing race in 1857. Charles became a schoolteacher at St Francis Xavier School, Liverpool and later a parish priest near Bournemouth. In 1865, Ellen’s daughter Elizabeth Ducarel married Thomas Constable, a Catholic solicitor and magistrate (1805-91). They lived in Otley, in Yorkshire, where Thomas and his sister Mary funded the building of the Catholic church where he and Elizabeth Ducarel (1832-1919) are both buried.
Thomas and Elizabeth Constable’s daughter Mary, EMD’s first cousin (1870-1961) would marry Charles Stourton, 24th Baron Mowbray and 21st Baron Stourton, a member of a long-established aristocratic Catholic family. I will write separately about Gerard Gustavus Ducarel and, of course, Henry Philip Ducarel, EMD’s father.
The cover image shows a drawing of Montreuil in France in 1634 by Christophe Tassin. Public domain, via Wikimedia