Friction in the Archive

Last week I took a little jaunt to Lincolnshire to look at the collections of the Gregorys, a wealthy gentry family and one-time residents of Harlaxton Manor. I was on the trail of ‘last letters’ – that is, is incidences of people keeping the ‘last letter’ they received from a friend or family member before their death. These missives were often annotated with notes that trumpeted their ‘last letter’ status, and, in so doing, recipients sought to preserve an item’s sentimental significance – for themselves, and for future generations who may not perceive the emotional power of these often rather ordinary letters. 

There are several ‘last letters’ in the Gregory collection. For example, a letter from Anne Gregory to her son, George De Ligne Gregory, in December 1785, was headed ‘The last letter’. On the back memorandum which read: ‘This was the last letter I ever received from my dear Mother, who was suddenly taken ill on 9^thDecember following, & died on the 20^th of that month’. 

But just intriguing was a series of letters preserved by an earlier member of the family, Susanna Gregory (nee Williams), which had a rather different emotional register. Far from letters kept as affectionate mementos to lost loved ones, these letters were bitter, angry, filled with recrimination and ill will. The series begins with a copy of a letter Susanna received from her son, also (and confusingly) called George, in 1731. In it, he made several accusations against her, lambasting her tyrannical behaviour, negligence, and claiming she was so ‘blinded’ by her desire to die rich that she had overlooked the interests of her family. Susanna was clearly outraged, and, on her copy of the letter, she included a damning postscript:

‘this letter was sent to me inclosed in one to my Husband, the 10^th of Febuary 1730, which letter was dated and sined by my son George Gregory, & that letter was full of falce accusations […] like this, but I having been his fathers wife above thirty years, & in that time he had longe Experience of my frugall carefull Conduct & knew his sons accusations to be falce, & mischevious, & malicious, & ungrattful to his tender affectionate Industrious Mother, so that it only Exposed him selfe, & provoked his Parents to resent his undutiful Base Behavior to them, Susanna Gregory’.

Here, Susanna transformed her son’s letter into a site of self-justification, defending her actions and character from the accusations of a ‘malicious’ son. The next letter in the series is her copy of her reply. This served a similar purpose, justifying her actions and impugning her son for his behaviour. The family archive became a site for negotiating conflict, and papers were preserved with an eye to presenting a particular version of events – in this case, Susanna’s. 

Given that this dispute was between Susanna and her eldest son, who was the eventual heir of the Gregory fortune, I pondered why these letters had survived, without any effort at revision or rebuttal, in the family archive. Did Gregory simply never bother to read them? The answer presented itself when I pursued the pathway the papers took through the family. Though George Gregory, the vengeful son, was the eldest son and Gregory heir, Susanna survived her husband. On her death, she had her own wealth and personal effects to dispose of, including a family Bible that had descended down the Williams line and the Williams family silver. These she left – along with all her other effects, presumably including her papers – not to her eldest son, but to her daughter. This daughter died unmarried, leaving the Williams heirlooms to her nephew. Thus, they skipped over the angry son in question and were preserved by a line of the family who owed their wealth to the Williams legacy. Susanna’s careful bequeathal of her goods, and the loyalty of later family members, ensured that it was her version of events that was preserved in the family papers. Indeed, very few of her son’s papers survive in the collection, and those that do are largely uncontroversial: they certainly make no reference to this bitter family feud. 

The complex case of Susanna Gregory’s letters shows that when considering which items (and emotions) appear in the archives, we need to pay careful attention to the pathways that papers took through families and the stories that their custodians were keen to tell. Family collections often appear to be sites of shared identity and consensus – but they were also places of conflict and friction, where family stories were contested and (re)constructed. And though we might assume that patrilineal descent would ensure the narratives of male heirs generally achieved precedence, in the case above it is the female voice that emerges victorious.