The Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (15 May 1689 – 21 August 1762) was an English

English people

The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...

 aristocrat and writer. Montagu is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her letters from Turkey, as wife to the British ambassador, which have been described by Billie Melman as “the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient”.

Life

Lady Mary Pierrepont was born in London on May 15, 1689; her baptism

Baptism

In Christianity, baptism is for the majority the rite of admission , almost invariably with the use of water, into the Christian Church generally and also membership of a particular church tradition...

 took place on May 26 at St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden

St Paul's, Covent Garden

St Paul's Church, also commonly known as the Actors' Church, is a church designed by Inigo Jones as part of a commission by Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford in 1631 to create "houses and buildings fitt for the habitacons of Gentlemen and men of ability" in Covent Garden, London, England.As well...

. She was a daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull

Evelyn Pierrepont, 1st Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull

Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl and 1st Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull had been member of parliament for East Retford before his accession to the peerage in 1690. While serving as one of the commissioners for the union with Scotland he was created Marquess of Dorchester in 1706, and took a leading part in...

.

After her mother’s death, she was raised by her father’s mother until she was nine, and then was raised by father. She began her education in her father's home. Family holdings were extensive, including Thoresby Hall

Thoresby Hall

Thoresby Hall is one of the Dukeries, four country houses and estates in north Nottinghamshire all occupied by dukes at one time in their history.-History:...

 and Holme Pierrepont Hall

Holme Pierrepont Hall

Holme Pierrepont Hall is a medieval hall in Holme Pierrepont near Nottingham. It is a Grade I listed building.-History:The Pierrepont family have lived at Holme Pierrepont since around 1280. Originally the area was known only as Holme, but later adopted the family surname as a suffix.The hall was...

 in Nottinghamshire, and a house in West Dean in Wiltshire. She used the library in her father’s mansion, Thoresby Hall in the Dukeries of Nottinghamshire, to “steal” her education, teaching herself Latin. Thoresby Hall had one of the finest private libraries in England, which she loved, but it was lost when the building burned in 1744.

Lady Mary's close friends included Mary Astell

Mary Astell

Mary Astell was an English feminist writer and rhetorician. Her advocacy of equal educational opportunities for women has earned her the title "the first English feminist."-Life and career:...

, a champion of women's rights

Women's rights

Women's rights are entitlements and freedoms claimed for women and girls of all ages in many societies.In some places these rights are institutionalized or supported by law, local custom, and behaviour, whereas in others they may be ignored or suppressed...

, and Anne Wortley Montagu, granddaughter of the 1st Earl of Sandwich

Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of Sandwich

Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of Sandwich, KG was an English Infantry officer who later became a naval officer. He was the only surviving son of Sir Sidney Montagu, and was brought up at Hinchingbrooke House....

. With Anne, she carried on an animated correspondence. Anne's letters, however, were often copied from drafts written by her brother, Edward Wortley Montagu

Sir Edward Wortley Montagu

Sir Edward Wortley Montagu was British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, husband of the writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and father of the writer and traveller Edward Wortley Montagu....

, and after Anne's death in 1709 the correspondence between Edward and Lady Mary continued without an intermediary.

By 1710 Lady Mary had two possible suitors to choose from: Edward Wortley Montagu and Clotworthy Skeffington. Mary's father, now Marquess of Dorchester, rejected Wortley Montagu as a prospect because he refused to entail his estate on a possible heir. Her father pressured her to marry Clotworthy Skeffington, heir to an Irish peerage. While Lady Mary had fallen in love with another unidentified man, in order to avoid marriage to Skeffington, she eloped with Wortley. They were married on August 23, 1712 in Salisbury.

The early years of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's married life were spent in seclusion in the country. She had a son, Edward Wortley Montagu the younger, on May 16, 1713, in London. Her husband became Member of Parliament for Westminster in 1715, and shortly afterwards was made a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury. When Lady Mary joined him in London, her wit and beauty soon made her a prominent figure at court. She was among the society of George I and the Prince of Wales, and friends with Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Abbé Antonio Conti.

In December 1715 Lady Wortley Montagu contracted smallpox. She survived, but while she was ill someone spread rumors of the satirical “court eclogues” she was writing. Unable to return to court, Lady Mary left London in August 1716 to accompany her husband on his embassy to Constantinople.

Early in 1716, Edward Wortley Montagu was appointed Ambassador at Constantinople

Constantinople

Constantinople was the capital of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.-Names:...

. Lady Mary accompanied him to Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, and thence to Adrianople and Constantinople. He was recalled in 1717, but they remained at Constantinople until 1718. She had a daughter, Mary Wortley Montagu, on 19 January 1718 in Constantinople. After an unsuccessful delegation between Austria and Ottoman empires, they returned to England.

The story of this voyage and of her observations of Eastern life is told in the Turkish Embassy Letters, a series of lively letters full of graphic descriptions; Letters is often credited as being an inspiration for subsequent female traveller/writers, as well as for much Orientalist

Orientalism

Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...

 art. Lady Mary returned to the West with knowledge of the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox, known as variolation

Inoculation

Inoculation is the placement of something that will grow or reproduce, and is most commonly used in respect of the introduction of a serum, vaccine, or antigenic substance into the body of a human or animal, especially to produce or boost immunity to a specific disease...

. In the 1790s, Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner

Edward Anthony Jenner was an English scientist who studied his natural surroundings in Berkeley, Gloucestershire...

 developed a safer method, vaccination

Vaccination

Vaccination is the administration of antigenic material to stimulate the immune system of an individual to develop adaptive immunity to a disease. Vaccines can prevent or ameliorate the effects of infection by many pathogens...

.

Before starting for the East she had met Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

, and during her absence he wrote her a series of extravagant letters, which appear to have been chiefly exercises in the art of writing gallant epistles. Very few letters passed between them after Lady Mary's return, and various reasons have been suggested for the subsequent estrangement and violent quarrel. The last of the Constantinople letters to Pope purports to have been written from Dover on November 1, 1718. It contains a parody on Pope's Epitaph on the Lovers Struck by Lightning. The manuscript collection of these letters was passed round a considerable circle, and Pope may have been offended at the circulation of this piece of satire. Jealousy of her friendship with Lord Hervey has also been alleged, but Lady Louisa Stuart

Lady Louisa Stuart

Lady Louisa Stuart was a British writer of the 18th and 19th centuries. Her long life spanned nearly ninety-four years.-Early life:...

 says Pope had made Lady Mary a declaration of love, which she had received with an outburst of laughter. In any case Lady Mary always professed complete innocence of all cause of offence in public. She is alluded to in the Dunciad in a passage to which Pope affixed one of his insulting notes. A Pop upon Pope was generally thought to be her work, and Pope thought she was part author of One Epistle to Mr A. Pope (1730).

Pope attacked her again and again, but with especial virulence in a gross couplet in the Imitation of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, as Sappho

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...

. Verses addressed to an Imitator of Horace by a Lady (1733), a scurrilous reply to these attacks, is generally attributed to the joint efforts of Lady Mary and her sworn ally, Lord Hervey. She had a romantic correspondence with a Frenchman named Rémond, who addressed to her a series of excessively gallant letters before ever seeing her. She invested money for him in South Sea stock at his desire, and as was expressly stated, at his own risk. The value fell to half the price, and he tried to extort the original sum as a debt by a threat of exposing the correspondence to her husband. She seems to have been really alarmed, not at the imputation of gallantry, but lest her husband should discover the extent of her own speculations. This disposes of the second half of Pope's line "Who starves a sister, or forswears a debt" (Epilogue to the Satires, 113), and the first charge is quite devoid of foundation. She did in fact try to rescue her favourite sister, the countess of Mar, who was mentally deranged, from the custody of her brother-in-law, Lord Grange, who had treated his own wife with notorious cruelty, and the slander originated with him.

In 1739 she left her husband and went abroad, and although they continued to write to each other in affectionate and respectful terms, they never met again. Edward worked away from home, leaving Mary to raise their children, and she eventually divorced him. She exchanged many love letters with Francesco Algarottim, Count Algarotti, but never remarried. At Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

 in 1740 she visited Horace Walpole, who cherished a great spite against her, and exaggerated her eccentricities into a revolting slovenliness (see Letters, ed. Cunningham, i. 59). As Lady Mary was then in her sixty-third year, the scandalous interpretation put on the matter by Horace Walpole may safely be discarded. She lived at Avignon

Avignon

Avignon is a French commune in southeastern France in the départment of the Vaucluse bordered by the left bank of the Rhône river. Of the 94,787 inhabitants of the city on 1 January 2010, 12 000 live in the ancient town centre surrounded by its medieval ramparts.Often referred to as the...

, at Brescia

Brescia

Brescia is a city and comune in the region of Lombardy in northern Italy. It is situated at the foot of the Alps, between the Mella and the Naviglio, with a population of around 197,000. It is the second largest city in Lombardy, after the capital, Milan...

, at Gottolengo

Gottolengo

Gottolengo is a town and comune in the province of Brescia, in Lombardy.As of 2007 Gottolengo had an estimated population of 5,397....

 and at Lovere

Lovere

Lovere is a town and comune in the province of Bergamo, in Lombardy, Italy, at the north-west end of Lake Iseo.The houses in the city have overhanging wooden roofs, typical of Switzerland, united with the heavy stone arcades of Italy; it faces a lake and has a semicircle of mountains behind...

 on the Lago d'Iseo

Lake Iseo

Lake Iseo or Lago d'Iseo or Sebino is the fourth largest lake in Lombardy, Italy, fed by the Oglio river.It is in the north of the country in the Val Camonica area, near the cities of Brescia and Bergamo. The lake is almost equally divided between the Provinces of Bergamo and Brescia...

. She was disfigured by a painful skin disease, (smallpox), and her sufferings were so acute that she hints at the possibility of madness. She was struck with a terrible fit of sickness while visiting the countess Palazzo and her son, and perhaps her mental condition made restraint necessary.

Her ex-husband spent his last years in hoarding money, and at his death in 1761 is said to have been a millionaire. His extreme parsimony is satirized in Pope's Imitations of Horace (2nd satire of the 2nd book) in the portrait of Avidieu and his wife.

Lady Montagu had many problems with both her children; her daughter eloped with a suitor Mary disapproved of; her son ran away from school repeatedly and then after his father’s death, he contested a will in Mary’s name without her knowledge.

Her daughter Mary, Countess of Bute

Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute

Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute and 1st Baroness Mount Stuart was the daughter of Edward Wortley-Montagu and Lady Mary Pierrepont ....

, whose husband

John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute

John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute KG, PC , styled Lord Mount Stuart before 1723, was a Scottish nobleman who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain under George III, and was arguably the last important favourite in British politics...

 was now Prime Minister

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and...

, begged her to return to England. She came to London, and died in the year of her return, on 21 August 1762. Her son, Edward

Edward Wortley Montagu

Edward Wortley Montagu was an English author and traveller.He was the son of Edward Wortley Montagu, MP and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose talent and eccentricity he seems to have inherited....

, was also an author and traveller.

Important Works

A number of Lady Mary's poems were printed in her lifetime, either without or with her permission or connivance: in newspapers, in miscellanies, and independently.

Her poetry was included in Anthony Hammond’s “New Miscellany of Original Poems, Translations and Imitations, by the most Eminent Hands” (1720). Verses Address'd to the Imitator of Horace, The Reasons that Induced Dr Swift to Write a Poem call'd the ‘Lady's Dressing Room’, and the Answer to the Foregoing Elegy. London Magazine printed a number of her poems.

She wrote a political periodical called the Nonsense of Common-Sense. She wrote Six Town Eclogues, with some other Poems (1747). She was included in Dodsley's Collection of Poems. She wrote notable letters describing her travels through Europe appeared in three volumes from Becket and De Hondt after her death. During the twentieth century Lady Mary's letters were edited separately from her essays, poems, and play, and from her longer fictions.

She wrote a series of poems about society's unjust treatment of women. She had notable correspondence letters to Anne Wortley and courting letters to her future husband Edward Wortley Montagu. Love letters to Francesco Algarottim Count Algarotti. She wrote berating letters about the vagaries of fashionable people to her sister.

Legacy and Influence

By fourteen Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had written two books filled with poems, a brief epistolary novel, and a prose-and-verse romance modeled after Aphra Behn's Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684).

She had the ambition of a major writer coupled with influence in rank and society.

She was friends with Molly Skerritt, Lady Walpole

Maria, Lady Walpole

Maria, Lady Walpole was the second wife of British politician and Prime Minister Robert Walpole from before 3 March 1738 until her death in childbirth a few months later...

; John, Lord Hervey; Mary Astell

Mary Astell

Mary Astell was an English feminist writer and rhetorician. Her advocacy of equal educational opportunities for women has earned her the title "the first English feminist."-Life and career:...

; and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough

Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough

Sarah Churchill , Duchess of Marlborough rose to be one of the most influential women in British history as a result of her close friendship with Queen Anne of Great Britain.Sarah's friendship and influence with Princess Anne was widely known, and leading public figures...

, Alexander Pope, John Gay

John Gay

John Gay was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera , set to music by Johann Christoph Pepusch...

, and Abbé Antonio Conti.

She was responsible for the introduction of the Turkish inoculation to smallpox into Western medicine.

She was painted and copied many times; by Charles Jervas

Charles Jervas

Charles Jervas [Jarvis] was an Irish portrait painter, translator, and art collector of the early 18th century.-Early life:...

 as a shepherdess in 1710, by Sir Godfrey Kneller in 1715 and in 1722, by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, by Jonathan Richardson, and by Carlo Francesco Rusco.

She defied convention most memorably with her pioneering of a smallpox inoculation, a course of action unparalleled in medical advance up to that point.

Ottoman smallpox inoculation

Lady Mary's own brother had died of smallpox and her own famous beauty had been marred by a bout with the disease in 1715. In 1717, she went to live in Turkey with her husband, the British ambassador to that country, and stayed for two years. In the Ottoman Empire, she visited the women in their segregated zenanas

Zenana

Zenana , refers to the part of a house belonging to a Muslim family in the Middle East and South Asia reserved for the women of the household. The Zenana are the inner apartments of a house in which the women of the family live...

, learning Turkish, making friends and learning about Turkish customs. There she witnessed the practice of inoculation against smallpox

Smallpox

Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning "spotted", or varus, meaning "pimple"...

—variolation—which she called engrafting, and wrote home about it. Variolation used live smallpox virus in the liquid taken from a smallpox blister in a mild case of the disease and carried in a nutshell. Lady Mary was eager to spare her children, and had her son inoculated while in Turkey. On her return to London, she enthusiastically promoted the procedure, but encountered a great deal of resistance from the medical establishment, both because it was an "Oriental" process and because of her sex.

Emanuel Timoni, a Greek physician who also attended the Wortley Montagues, had also described the procedure a few years earlier. Dr. Timoni first described this procedure in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1714. James Pylarini described it again in the Transactions in 1716. They called it variolation (varus is Latin for pimple) or inoculation (inoculare means to graft).

In 1721, after a smallpox epidemic struck England, she had her three-year-old daughter inoculated by Charles Maitland, a physician who had been at the embassy in Turkey, and publicized the event. She persuaded Caroline, Princess of Wales

Caroline of Ansbach

Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach was the queen consort of King George II of Great Britain.Her father, John Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, was the ruler of a small German state...

, to test the treatment. Seven prisoners awaiting execution were offered the chance to undergo variolation instead of execution: they all survived and were released. Then six orphan children were inoculated: they all survived. In 1722 King George I

George I of Great Britain

George I was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1 August 1714 until his death, and ruler of the Duchy and Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the Holy Roman Empire from 1698....

 allowed Maitland to inoculate two of his grandchildren, children of the Princess. The children recovered.

However, in another household, six servants became ill with smallpox after a child was inoculated. Some clergymen then announced that trying to prevent the illness was against God's will. Some physicians warned that inoculation might spread the disease. Nevertheless, inoculation became known as a way to prevent smallpox. In fact, using live virus did carry a risk of infection. About 3% of those inoculated developed smallpox and died. Others spent weeks recovering. However, that was preferable to catching smallpox in the wild, with its mortality rate of 20–40% and survivors left scarred and sometimes blind.

In response to the fear of inoculation, Lady Mary wrote an anonymous article describing inoculation as it was practised in Turkey. Inoculation gained general acceptance. In 1754 she was praised for bringing the practice to Britain.

In later years, Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner

Edward Anthony Jenner was an English scientist who studied his natural surroundings in Berkeley, Gloucestershire...

, who was 13 years old when Lady Mary died, developed the much safer technique of vaccination

Vaccination

Vaccination is the administration of antigenic material to stimulate the immune system of an individual to develop adaptive immunity to a disease. Vaccines can prevent or ameliorate the effects of infection by many pathogens...

 using cowpox.

Literary place

Montagu's poetry circulated widely, in manuscript, among members of her own social circle. She seems to have avoided publication in print in order to avoid the personal attacks that inevitably followed. However, her letters from Turkey were clearly intended for print, she revised them extensively and gave a transcript to the Rev. Benjamin Sowden in Rotterdam in 1761 so that he could publish them.

Montagu's Turkish letters were to prove an inspiration to later generations of European women travellers to the Orient. In particular, Montagu staked a claim to the particular authority of women's writing, due to their ability to access private homes and female-only spaces where men were not permitted. The title of her published letters refers to "Sources that Have Been Inaccessible to Other Travellers". The letters themselves frequently draw attention to the fact that they present a different (and, Montagu asserts, more accurate) description than that provided by previous (male) travellers: "You will perhaps be surpriz'd at an Account so
different from what you have been entertaind with by the common Voyage-writers who are very fond of speaking of what they don't know." Montagu provides an intimate description of the women's bathhouse, in which she derides male descriptions of the bathhouse as a site for unnatural sexual practices, instead insisting that it was “the Women’s coffee house, where all the news of the Town is told, Scandal invented, etc”. However, Montagu's detailed descriptions of nude Oriental beauties provided inspiration for male artists such as Ingres, who restored the explicitly erotic content that Montagu had denied. In general, Montagu consistently derides the quality of European travel literature of the 18th century as nothing more than "trite observations...superficial...[of] boys who only remember the best wine or the prettyest women."

Montagu's Turkish letters were frequently cited by imperial women travellers, more than a century after her journey. Such writers cited Montagu's assertion that women travellers could gain an intimate view of Turkish life that was not available to their male counterparts. However, they also added corrections or elaborations to her observations. Julia Pardoe

Julia Pardoe

Julia Pardoe , was an English poet, novelist, historian and traveller.She was born at Beverley, Yorkshire, and showed an early interest in literature. She became a prolific and versatile writer, producing in addition to her lively andwell-written novels many books on travel, and others dealing...

, in describing her own visit to a bathhouse, wrote "I should be unjust if I did not declare that I saw none of that unnecessary and wanton exposure described by Lady Mary Montagu. Either the fair Ambassadress was present at a peculiar ceremony, or the Turkish ladies have become more delicate and fastidious in the ideas of propriety." Emmeline Lott

Emmeline Lott

Emmeline Lott was the author of "The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople" , an account of her employment as governess to the young son of Isma'il Pasha, Viceroy of Egypt...

, who wrote a book about her experience working as a governess for the son of Ishamel Pasha, claimed that Montagu's aristocratic rank meant that she had seen only the most attractive elements of Oriental life: "...her handsome train, Lady Ambassadress as she was, swept but across the splendid carpeted floors of these noble Saloons of Audience, all of which had been, as is invariably the custom, well “swept and garnished” for her reception."

Her Letters and Works were published in 1837. Montagu's octogenarian granddaughter Lady Louisa Stuart

Lady Louisa Stuart

Lady Louisa Stuart was a British writer of the 18th and 19th centuries. Her long life spanned nearly ninety-four years.-Early life:...

 contributed to this, anonymously, an introductory essay called Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu, from which it was clear that Stuart was troubled by her grandmother's focus on sexual intrigues and did not see Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Account of the Court of George I at his Accession as history. However, Montagu's historical observations, both in the "Anecdotes" and the "Turkish Embassy Letters," prove quite accurate when put in context.

In 1901, her letters were edited and published as The Best Letters of Mary Wortley Montagu by Octave Thanet

Alice French

Alice French , better known as Octave Thanet, was an American novelist.She was born at Andover, Massachusetts, a daughter of George Henry and Frances Wood French. She graduated from Abbot Academy in Andover, in 1868...

.

Paintings

On a recent episode of the British TV show Antiques Roadshow

Antiques Roadshow

Antiques Roadshow is a British television show in which antiques appraisers travel to various regions of the United Kingdom to appraise antiques brought in by local people. It has been running since 1979...

, several paintings attributed to Lady Mary were brought in for valuation. Remarkable for their sensitive portrayals of royal courtiers of the Turkish Empire, the paintings show lively and genuine artistic talent. The colours are still vibrant, and it is interesting to note that she was allowed to paint male members of the royal family. These valuable works are currently in the hands of a private owner, who plans to bequeath them to a museum.

Book reviews

• Prescott, Sarah. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment, Isobel Grundy 1999. Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 51, No. 202 (May, 2000), pp. 300–303

External links

• The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lord Wharncliffe (great-grandson), ed. 2 Vols. Third Edition, with Additions and Corrections Derived from the Original Manuscripts, Illustrative Notes, and a New Memoir By W. Moy Thomas. Henry G. Bohn, London: York Street, Covent Garden, 1861.
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Exhibition at The Graves Art Gallery Sheffield, 10 March until 3 June 2007
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu biography at the Montagu Millennium family history website