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Phoebe Simson Maria Roberts was born at 30 West Square, Southwark on 29 August 1849, the eldest daughter of James Mackenzie and Phoebe Roberts, as announced in the Essex Standard of 7 September 1849.
She rarely used the Simson middle name it seems and, to avoid confusion with her mother, was known by her second middle name, Maria: ‘dear Maria’, as it says on her gravestone.
She was Aunt Maria to my grandmother’s generation, although whether my grandmother herself had much contact with her is doubtful. She is not mentioned in my grandmother’s birthday book (nor are any of her siblings).
Maria grew up at the family home, Heath Cottage, at Dedham, Essex, but after the death of her father in 1890 she moved to London, where she worked as a school governess.
By the Edwardian period, James Mackenzie’s two daughters and youngest son were very much a London branch of the family and I am not sure how much contact they had with the family back in Essex.
In 1891 Maria was lodging with or visiting her brother, the veterinary surgeon Arthur Mason Roberts at Belsize Road, off Abbey Road, St John’s Wood.
In 1901 Maria was living on private means in a single room at number 9 Holtham Road (now demolished). She was a fifty-one-year-old spinster and ‘daily governess, of private means’ – in other words, she worked for herself, resided at one place and travelled to another place to teach.
Maria never married and died on 16 September 1903, at Holtham Road. She was just fifty-four. Her grave is in Hampstead Cemetery.
Probate was finalised in October 1903: her unmarried sister Mary inherited the modest savings of £328 14s.
The Mason Portraits
Dorothy Roberts, Maria’s niece and my grandmother’s cousin, comments in her notes on the family written in the 1940s or 50s that:
Father’s full names were Arthur Mason [Roberts]. His mother’s name was Mason and Aunt Maria had two portraits painted by Sir Peter Lely of Judge Mason and his wife. The judge was painted in his scarlet robes of office.
I assume the pictures Dorothy remembered seeing at her aunt’s house in Holtham Road (which was a stone’s throw from where Dorothy grew up) were framed prints or engravings of some kind– and in colour, given the comment about scarlet robes (colour prints in the nineteenth century were not unusual).
Perhaps they hung at Heath Cottage in the nineteenth century and had been inherited by Maria on the death of her father, my great-great grandfather James Mackenzie Roberts, who died in 1890? They are not mentioned in James’s will, although Maria was the primary beneficiary. The pictures must have been significant enough for Dorothy to mention though.
I wonder if they were the portraits of Sir Richard Mason, MP and his wife Anne Margaret Long, Lady Mason which hung (and still hang) in Belton House, Lincolnshire? These are by Jacob Huysmans, but were seemingly once attributed to the seventeenth-century court painter Peter Lely.
The one of Sir Richard does not quite match Dorothy’s description however – although his wife’s dress is red, his robes are more brown than scarlet. And I don’t think he was a judge.
But Dorothy may not be correct in her recollection – she was nineteen when Maria died and so probably hadn’t seen the pictures for over forty years when she was writing her notes on the family. Also, assuming they were prints or copies, the colour could have been reproduced inaccurately.
There is no connection between my great-great grandmother’s family and Sir Richard Mason or with Belton House, as far as I know, so if these are indeed the portraits in question, the relevance of them to the family is not clear.
And what became of them is also unclear. If they eventually passed to Maria’s sister Mary, where did they go after her death in 1918?
Jacob Huysmans (originally attributed to Peter Lely), portraits of Sir Richard Mason (1619–1685) and his wife Anne, Lady Mason (c.1637–1711). Acquired by the National Trust in 1984 from Lord Brownlow with Belton House (artuk.org)
© National Trust
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