The Recluses of Llangollen
Many years ago, there lived together, in romantic seclusion, in the Vale of Llangollen, in Denbighshire, two ladies, remarkable not only for the singularity of their habits and dispositions, but as the daughters of ancient and most distinguished families in the Irish peerage.
Lady Eleanor Butler was the youngest sister of John, sixteenth Earl of Ormonde, and aunt of Walter, seventeenth Earl, who died in 1820. Miss Mary Ponsonby was the daughter of Chambre Ponsonby, Esq., and half-sister to Mrs. Lowther, of Bath.
These two ladies retired at an early age, about the year 1729, from the society of the world to the Vale of Llangollen. Lady Butler had already rejected several offers of marriage, and as her affection for Miss Ponsonby was supposed to have formed the bar to any matrimonial alliance, their friends, in the hope of breaking off so disadvantageous a companionship, proceeded so far as to place the former in close confinement. The youthful friends, however, found means to elope together, but being speedily overtaken, were brought back to their respective relations. Many attempts were renewed to entice Lady Butler into wedlock; but on her solemnly and repeatedly declaring that nothing should induce her to alter her purpose of perpetual maidenhood, her friends desisted from further importuning her.
Not many months after this a second elopement was planned. Each lady taking with her a small sum of money, and having confided the place of their retreat to a confidential servant of the Ormonde family, who was sworn to inviolable secrecy, they deputed her to announce their safety at home, and to request that the trifling annuities allowed them might not be discontinued. The message was received with kindness, and their incomes were even considerably increased.
When Miss Seward visited the spot, our heroines had resided in their romantic retirement about seventeen years; yet they were only known to the neighbouring villagers as the Ladies of the Vale. The verses which Miss Seward dedicated to the Recluses, and wherein she celebrated “gay Eleanor’s smile,” and “Zara’s look serene,” conclude with this morceau of sentimental affectation:—
May one kind ice-bolt from the mortal stores
Arrest each vital current as it flows,
That no sad course of desolated hours
Here vainly nurse their unsubsiding woes.
While all who honour virtue gently mourn
Llangollen’s vanish’d pair, and wreathe their sacred urn.
But they did not vanish for many a long year: they neither married nor died till they were grown too old for the world to care whether they did either or both. On one occasion, indeed, a party of tourists, male and female, unable to procure accommodation at the village inn, requested and obtained admittance at “the cottage,” when they proved to be near relatives of Miss Ponsonby. No entreaties, however, could allure their fair cousin from her seclusion.
Lady Eleanor is described as tall, of lively manners, and masculine. She usually wore a riding-habit, and donned her hat with the air of a finished sportsman. Her companion, on the contrary, was fair, pensive, gentle, and effeminate. Their abode was a neat cottage, with about two acres of pleasure-ground. Avoiding every appearance of dissipation or gaiety, they led a life as retired as the situation. Two female servants waited on them, and while Miss Ponsonby superintended the house, my Lady amused herself with the garden. The name of the retreat is Plas Newydd, about a quarter of a mile from Llangollen, hidden among the trees on ascending the Vale behind the church. By some the ladies are said not to have led here a life of absolute seclusion, but to have visited their neighbours and received friends. The cottage was built purposely for them. They died after a life full of good deeds, within eighteen months of each other—Lady Eleanor, June 2nd, 1829, at the patriarchal age of ninety; Miss Ponsonby, December 9th, 1830. Their monument, in Llangollen churchyard, in which they were buried, has three sides, each bearing a touching epitaph; the third to the memory of Mary Carrol, a faithful Irish servant.