Margaret Tyndall Bruce (c.1780-1869) of Falkland and India, by Sarah Leith
In March 1828, Susan Elizabeth Low, of Clatto House, near Blebo Craigs, Fife, wrote to her son, Peter Low, with news about a recent marriage in the county:
Our great Fife heiress, Miss Bruce of Falkland, is married to Mr. [Onesiphorus] Tindall, a London attorney – what a change of fortune for him. She has three hundred thousand pounds. […] Her uncle was against the marriage, he wished her to marry a man of business. However, she told him she might marry no man of business, but that he would come to be one as soon as he married her….[1]
Heiress and future donor to the University of St Andrews, ‘Miss Bruce of Falkland’ was a woman in possession of a good fortune in early nineteenth-century Fife. This wealth, however, was partly derived from the East India Company, and it may also be linked with the slave trade through her husband’s Bristolian merchant family.
Born in India c.1780, Margaret Bruce was the daughter of an unknown Bengali mother and an unmarried Scottish father, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hamilton Bruce (1751-1796), who served in the East India Company’s Bengal Artillery. Employed later by Warren Hastings, whom Deborah Cohen has described as ‘the corrupt Governor-General of Bengal’, Robert Bruce grew wealthy in India, benefitting from ‘the emoluments that flowed to all in Hasting’s service’.[2]
In 1786, Robert brought young Margaret to a boarding school in England as ‘Margaret Stewart’, and he kept up a pretence that she was his ward rather than his illegitimate daughter until his return to India two years later. Margaret was then brought to live in the three-story townhouse in Edinburgh’s New Town which Robert had purchased for his mother and his unmarried brother and sister. His brother John had written to Robert revealing that ‘I am as much attached to her [Margaret], as if she were my own. I am sure I see her as such’, and, upon Robert’s death in c.1796, Margaret was adopted by her uncle, being cared for by her paternal grandmother and her aunt, Peggie, at 81 Princes Street.[3]
John Hamilton Bruce (1744-1826) held a variety of posts over his lifetime. When Margaret first came to Scotland, he was Professor of Logic at the University of Edinburgh (from 1778 to 1792). He had the patronage of Henry Dundas, political manager of Scotland (and Chancellor of the University of St Andrews from 1788 to 1811), whose son Robert (later, another Chancellor of St Andrews) he had tutored during the 1780s. In 1793, Henry Dundas was instrumental in securing for Bruce the role of official historiographer for the East India Company. Bruce was entangled within Dundas’ political machinations regarding the East India Company, writing a Historical View of Plans for the Government of British India (1793) which helped to soften public opinion about Dundas becoming the president of the Board of Control for India. He later wrote a 3-volume Annals of the East India Company from 1600 to 1707–8 (1810). Bruce was briefly a member of parliament (1809 to 1814), during which period he worked with his former pupil Robert Dundas, on East India Company matters.[4]
Michael Fry suggests that it was from around 1810, though, that John began to amass significant fortune through his role as king’s printer for Scotland, printing and publishing the Bible here; this sinecure had been in the gift of Henry Dundas. Certainly, by 1820, Bruce (at the age of eighty-six) had become became sufficiently wealthy to purchase the estate at Falkland, including the ruins of the palace.[5] And around this period, an elegant young Margaret was painted by Henry Raeburn.
Margaret already had £20,000 of her own money by age twenty-six; and, upon her uncle’s death in 1826, she inherited his estates of Nuthill, Falkland and Myres in Fife, together with £300,000 in securities.[6]
As reported from Clatto House two years later, Margaret Bruce then married Onesiphorus Tyndall (1790-1855), a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn who added the name of Bruce to his surname in honour of Margaret’s uncle. Onesiphorus was a member of a well-established merchant and banking family based in the slave-trading port of Bristol; the Tyndall family had been heavily involved with the slave trade, and the family’s association with the West Indies may be traced as far back as 1674. However, it is unclear whether Onesiphorus brought any money or financial acumen to the marriage; Cohen highlights that he had expensive taste and a penchant for Spode porcelain.[7] Indeed, a few weeks after her first letter, Susan Elizabeth Low wrote cattily again to her son, claiming that Margaret had ‘paid his [Onesiphorus’s] debts, amounting to fifty thousand pounds, settled very handsomely on him, but kept a good deal in her own power.’[8] Cohen explains that Onesiphorus had ‘pursued Margaret for six years’ and that she accepted his hand ‘on the condition of a pre-marital settlement that protected her property.’ Despite Margaret’s concerns, Cohen suggests they made a ‘well-matched, loving pair.’[9]
Margaret’s charitable nature has been acknowledged by Cohen, though she makes no mention of her donation to the University of St Andrews. In 1865, Margaret donated £5,000 of Bank of Scotland stock to the University of St Andrews in memory of her uncle, to honour both his regard for the university and his interest in the promotion of education in Scotland. The funds were to be used to establish bursaries, scholarships and the Bruce of Grangehill and Falkland Logic Prize. The Bruce Bursaries and Scholarships are now part of a merged fund known as ‘Lapsed Bursaries’; and though the logic prize was still being awarded in the 1990s, it seems to no longer exist.
Upon her death, Margaret’s estate, worth over £300,000, was inherited by her cousins, the Hamiltons, who were obliged to adopt the name Tyndall Bruce, preserving Margaret’s memory.[10] Margaret Tyndall Bruce is notable as a British female philanthropist of Bengali descent, and her life shows that we cannot easily draw a line between Atlantic-world slavery in the eighteenth century and India and the British Empire in the nineteenth century.
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Sarah Leith is associate lecturer in the School of History.
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Sources:
Michael Fry, ‘Bruce, John (1744-1826)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3739
Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day (London, 2013)
Ursula Low (ed), Fifty Years with John Company: From the Letters of General Sir John Low of Clatto, Fife 1822-1858 (London, 1936)
‘[1] Letter from Susan Elizabeth Low to her son, Peter, in Ursula Low (ed), Fifty Years with John Company: From the Letters of General Sir John Low of Clatto, Fife 1822-1858 (London), pp.61-2, at p.62.
[2] Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day (London, 2013), p.6.
[3] Cohen, Family Secrets, pp.3, 6-8, 12.
[4] Fry, ‘Bruce, John (1744-1826)’, ODNB
[5] ODNB
[6] Cohen, Family Secrets, p.12.
[7] Ibid., p.13.
[8] Letter from Susan Elizabeth Low to her son, Peter, in Low (ed), Fifty Years with John Company, p.126.
[9] Cohen, Family Secrets, p.13.
[10] Ibid., p.14.