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LONDON — A planned meeting between the British and Greek prime ministers this week was an apparent casualty of one of the world’s longest-running disputes: what to do with the 2,500-year-old Parthenon sculptures — “the Elgin marbles” — showcased at the British Museum.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a late Monday statement he was dismayed the British side had canceled “just hours before” the scheduled meeting. “Anyone who believes in the correctness and justice of their positions is never hesitant to engage in constructive argumentation and debate,” he said.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did not offer a public explanation why the meeting was scrapped. But the change in plan came after Mitsotakis spoke about the sculptures on the BBC, reiterating the view that they “belong to Greece” and “were essentially stolen.” The Greek premier suggested that when Lord Elgin, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, took a portion of the architectural decoration from the Parthenon in Athens in the early 19th century, it was “as if I told you that you would cut the Mona Lisa in half.”
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In the history books, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, gets most of the ink, condemned as vandal or praised as preservationist. His wife, who had the money in the family, gets far less attention. That is too bad. Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin, is a character for the ages.
She brought a smallpox vaccine to the Middle East, negotiated with Napoleon and helped her husband make off with the marbles of ancient Athens — only to see herself dragged through one of the most scandalous divorces of her age. All this and more in scholar Susan Nagel’s 2004 biography “Mistress of the Elgin Marbles,” which is a grand tour into her extraordinary life and times.
Her biographer argues that it was not only Mary’s fabulous wealth that helped her husband acquire the contested sculptures but her acrimonious divorce that forced him to sell them to the British Museum, which has kept them safe for 200 years. If that is so, was it Mary who both “stole” and “saved” them?
A vivacious, adventuresome, pampered heiress to vast estates in Scotland, Mary was 21 when she married the ambitious but already indebted Thomas Bruce in 1799.
All began well. Though opposites, and he 12 years her senior, the lord and lady made a love match. She called him Eggy. He called her Poll. The newlyweds were quickly off to Constantinople, where he would serve as Ambassador Extraordinaire to the Ottoman Empire.
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Historian William St Clair, author of “Lord Elgin and the Marbles,” judges Mary as “a rather silly girl,” based on her letters. But her correspondence and diaries provide the best dish.
It is through Mary’s eyes we learn that this couple knew how to travel. They brought along a retinue of servants, advisers and secretaries, as well as their own pianos. Plural. They hosted lots of parties and, befitting their diplomatic roles, gave lavish gifts to the Turks: gold watches, English pistols, musical clocks and yards of satin, brocade, velvet and damask.
In her letters home, Mary describes the couple being carried on golden chairs upon their arrival in Constantinople, the Istanbul of today, and fed 26-course meals. She recalls the day they were led into the sultan’s inner sanctum — through halls lined with eunuchs — into the audience chamber, where sat the ruler on his bed-slash-throne, an ink well and a pile of diamonds at his elbow. Mary called him “the Monster.”
During their time in the east, Lord Elgin dispatched teams of artists to Athens, to draw, measure and make molds of what remained of the classical sculpture atop the Acropolis, especially the Parthenon, a temple built by the Greeks for the goddess Athena in the fifth century BC.
By the time Elgin’s men arrived, the Parthenon had been occupied, desecrated and burned. Over the centuries, it was looted by conquering Roman generals, seized by Alaric the Goth and blown up by the Venetians in 1687. It had been transformed from pagan temple to church, then mosque, then military garrison and munitions dump. A final assault saw the elegant ruins beset by European gentlemen hunting souvenirs — against the threat of imminent invasion by the French.
As it turned out, Elgin’s crew did far more the sketch. They hauled away. From 1800 to 1803, they stripped the Parthenon of remaining friezes and sculpture, doing grave damage.
Lord Byron, who toured the Parthenon at the time, was appalled and so composed a poem, “The Curse of Minerva,” to condemn Elgin’s vandalism.
Throughout, Mary was an enthusiastic partner to her husband’s rapacious collecting, convincing sea captains to fill their cargo holds with crates to take back to England.
“How I have faged to get all this done, do you love me better for it, Elgin?” she wrote her husband, adding, “I am now satisfied of that I always thought: which is how much more Women can do if they set about it than Men.”
The costs were enormous. It took years to get the marbles to Britain. Bruce Clark, author of “Athens: City of Wisdom,” argues in the pages of the Smithsonian magazine that Elgin was not alone in antiquarian mania, but “surrounded by people whose zeal for the removal of Greek antiquities outpaced his own. These included his ultrawealthy parents-in-law, whose money ultimately made the operation possible.”
On their way home to Britain, the couple traveled through France just as war broke out (again), forcing Ambassador Elgin to serve a lengthy gentleman’s sentence of luxurious house arrest.
While in Paris, the couple’s fourth child died while Mary was pregnant with their fifth. The couple persuaded Napoleon to allow Mary to return to London in October 1805. Elgin finally came home in June 1806.
Mary’s biographer relates how the birth of her last child was a deeply traumatic experience for the countess, requiring her physician to dose her, postpartum, with brandy, opium and toast soaked in white wine.
Mary had had enough. While her husband was awaiting parole in France, she informed him that she needed a very long rest from the marital bed.
Either Elgin “would practice birth control from then on or there would be no sex at all,” Nagel says, quoting from Mary’s correspondence. The countess begs her Eggy to hear her prayer: “I am worn out and would rather shut myself up in a nunnery for life.”
Elgin himself was in poor health. Perhaps this is the appropriate paragraph to mention he suffered from asthma and syphilis, and had lost most of his nose to the disease and crank cures, leaving him, as St Clair describes it, “monstrously disfigured.”
While the couple were separated, a close family friend, Robert Ferguson, began to woo Mary. He wrote passionate letters. She returned his affection. And the clincher? Ferguson promised “devotion, fidelity, and no more children,” Nagel says.
Upon his return home, Lord Elgin discovered their secret. “Overcome with rage and jealousy, Elgin determined that if she would have no more children with him and would allow another man to love her, he would divorce,” Nagel recounts.
In the early 1800s in Britain, in such an exalted marriage, Elgin chose the nuclear option. A separation could be handled quietly, with money, which Mary tried. But Elgin sought divorce in London, which required an Act of Parliament, and in Edinburgh, with all its attendant scandal, with the salacious testimony provided by servants — the who, where and what stain on the sofa? — covered in the tabloids of the age with all-cap headlines like: “WERE HER LADYSHIP’S PETTICOATS UP?”
Elgin won, but he lost access to his ex-wife’s money.
Mary lost rights to her four children, who were estranged from their mother for decades.
Nagel argues that had Elgin not divorced his wife, “there is no doubt” that the marbles would have remained in private hands in his family. “Without Mary’s fortune, which increased spectacularly in the nineteenth century, Elgin was unable to sustain the mounting costs of excavating, shipping, sorting and paying duties … In dire financial straits, he was forced in 1816 to sell the collection to the British Museum.”
So much for Lord Elgin. What happened to Mary? She married Robert Ferguson and couple lived happily into deep old age. The scandal receded. Mary kept up an active social life. True to her promise, she had no more children, but was eventually reunited with those lost to divorce.
So in her own way, Nagel says, the young pampered countess — who helped her first husband strip the Parthenon — evolved into an “early champion of women’s property and reproductive rights.”