A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby

The Digbys’ distress at Jane’s behaviour was increased on the publication of a novel which, under the title Almack’s, could hardly fail to be a bestseller. It was a roman-à-clef in which the anonymous author provided only paper-thin guises for the real-life characters that populated its pages. The beautiful Lady Glenmore was widely identified as Lady Ellenborough. Jane was amused, not recognising the damage it would inflict upon her reputation. It was no comfort to her family that the book, in fact written by a member of the family (Eliza Spencer-Stanhope’s sister-in-law Marianne), presented as fiction several true incidents in Jane’s life.

During one of her visits to Roehampton, having been primed by Lady Andover, Steely delivered a stern lecture on the importance of a woman’s reputation. Jane appeared to listen, but several days later, in a letter to her former governess, she brushed Steely’s concerns aside on the grounds that the persons to whom she and her parents objected were Edward’s friends and must therefore be perfectly acceptable.25 By now Steely was so concerned about Jane that she overrode any personal sensibilities and went to see Lord Ellenborough. Her case was that Jane was mixing too freely with associates who, she insisted, were ‘gay and profligate’. Significantly she did not include George Anson in her list.26 Ellenborough clearly did not know whether to be angry or amused at such an approach from a woman who, though undeniably gently bred, was, when all was said and done, a former employee of his wife’s family. In the end his sense of humour got the better of him; he laughed and told Steely that he thought she was being ‘too scrupulous’, stating that he had ‘unlimited confidence in Lady Ellenborough’.27

It is surprising that Ellenborough did not connect Steely’s warnings with what was happening at home, for when he wrote to Jane in September from Stratfield Saye (the Duke of Wellington’s country seat in Hampshire) he spoke of her recent ‘coldness and indifference’ towards him. ‘But all is now forgotten,’ he continued.28 Her ‘want of gaiety’ had certainly disappeared as she went about town on her cousin’s arm. Indeed, Edward misread all the signs that would have been obvious to a more concerned husband. Even Jane’s style of dressing should have alerted him. She set off to perfection the high velvet bonnets with huge upstanding pokes that framed her little heart-shaped face, and on Jane the modish high-waisted narrow gowns, worn with a short, demurely fastened spencer for walking out, looked exceptionally elegant. But the deep décolletage of her evening dress, though fashionable in that the edges of her nipples could be plainly seen, was thought unseemly by a visitor from Paris, who reported himself entranced with Lady Ellenborough but ‘sickened by her dress’.29

But among the smart set it was considered neither stylish nor particularly commendable to be faithful to one’s spouse. Despite Steely’s stern moral teaching Jane was impressionable and looking for justification that her behaviour with Edward was acceptable. She had only to look at her peers to conclude that it was. The women with whom she was most often seen were the subject of open gossip. One gentleman wrote: ‘My whole time for the past week has been devoted to the Belgrave’s Chester committee. I am very thankful for a violent cold which came to my assistance on Saturday and has prevented my further attendance. There can be nothing in life so disagreeable, not even sleeping with Mme Lieven.’30 While Princess Esterhazy had been the subject of scurrilous gossip for years, ‘said Esterhazy has been in Cheltenham for three weeks, where the people, being a moral race, were shocked at her having a fresh lover for every week. The order ran thus: 1st week Castlereagh; 2nd Viner; 3rd Valerfrie.’31 So Jane’s liaison with the handsome and universally popular George Anson undoubtedly did her no discredit in their eyes. Her other intimates were George’s former lovers, the Duchess of Rutland and the notorious Mrs Fox Lane. If the approbation of these high-flyers should be insufficient, her husband’s affair with the pretty daughter of a confectioner in Brighton was common knowledge and provided justification enough.32

There was, however, nothing calculated in Jane’s affair with her cousin, no deliberate attempt at retribution. She believed that the frothy romance with Edward was true love. A degree of ingenuousness would explain an incident which occurred the following spring, when Jane visited Holkham to see the latest addition to her grandfather’s growing new family.33

As usual Holkham was full of guests during March and April, including Jane’s parents, her maternal aunts – Anne, Lady Anson and Eliza Spencer-Stanhope – as well as sundry other family members who came and went, an archdeacon, a Captain Greville, various neighbours who called in casually and the diarist Thomas Creevey. There was also a man described by Creevey as ‘a young British Museum Artist who is classing manuscripts’.

He was Frederick Madden, aged twenty-six, an academic who specialised in and spoke Norman-French and Anglo-Saxon, and who was also a noted scholar in ancient manuscripts. In the spring of 1827 Madden was working in a freelance capacity with Mr William Roscoe of the British Museum, cataloguing Mr Coke’s manuscripts and hoping it might lead to a permanent position. Paid employment would enable him to marry his fiancée Mary, about whom Madden wrote each day, longingly, in his diary. Mary lived in Brighton with her widowed mother, who disapproved of Madden, having no wish to see her daughter married to an impecunious man, no matter how scholarly he might be.

It is Madden’s diary, rather than the more famous one of Creevey, that provides the clearest surviving description of Jane at that period, and also of the daily routine at Holkham. Frederick Madden was a conscientious man, and, as he meticulously recorded, he spent each day, from 10 a.m. until 4 or 5 p.m., working hard in the library. This was his second visit to Holkham; like the first, it would last a month or so. Everything went on as usual until Wednesday, 14 March, when something occurred to change his routine:

Wednesday 14th. In library from ten until five and went over some of the Greek Fathers which will, as before, prove the most tedious.

Lady Ellenborough, daughter of Lady Andover, arrived to dinner and will stay a fortnight. She is not yet twenty and one of the most lovely women I ever saw, quite fair, blue eyes that would move a saint, and lips that would tempt one to forswear heaven to touch them.34

One look and the sober scholar was smitten. It was completely normal for someone on meeting Jane to note before anything else her beautiful appearance; this started when she was in the cradle and would continue until she was over seventy. But Madden was infatuated. He found it impossible to concentrate on his work, and within two days he was finding excuses to finish work at noon to spend time with his host’s granddaughter. ‘Lady Ellenborough is such a charm that I find the library become a bore, and am delighted to be with her, and hear her play and sing, which she is kind enough to do.’ A day later he recorded: ‘From four till half past five with Lady Ellenborough in the saloon; she sings to me the most bewitching Italian airs, the words of which are enough to inflame one, did not the sight of so lovely a creature sufficiently do so.’35

Poor Madden. ‘Dearest Mary’ appears to have been forgotten and instead his diary is filled each day with Lady Ellenborough: tête-à-tête walks around the mile-long lake with her; sitting in the salon while she plays the guitar and sings to him; strolling in the garden with her past the bronze lions that guard the house’s entrance, to the extravagant fountain depicting Perseus and the Medusa; rides to the nearby fishing village of Wells-next-the-Sea, and back along the sweeping sandy beaches in her company; heads bent together over her sketchbooks; playing écarté in the drawing-room with her each evening. Madden was furious when a visitor, Captain Greville, called and robbed him of an opportunity to be alone with her.36

Ten days after her arrival Madden’s diary entry has degenerated into a hurried scrawl:

Saturday 24th. In library till 4 o/c. Then out. In the evening drew pictures for Lady Anne Coke and Miss Anson. Also played whist and won. Lady E. lingered behind the rest of the party and at midnight I escorted her to her room——Fool that I was!——I will not add what passed. Gracious God! Was there ever such good fortune?

Sunday 25th. Chapel in the morning. In the afternoon, walked out with Lady E. She pretended to be very angry at what had passed last night, but I am satisfied that, she——!

Satisfied that she what? Satisfied that she was at least as much to blame as he? Satisfied that she was as eager as he? Satisfied that she intended it to happen? We shall never know. Madden’s irritating slashes across the page convey only that he was emotionally overwrought.

Jane cold-shouldered him for a couple of days, advising her family that she intended to leave as planned in three days’ time. The day before her departure she relented her cool behaviour to the bewildered scholar:

Wednesday 28th. In library till 2 o/c then went with Lady E. tête-à-tête around the lake, and remained in one of the hermitages with her until 5 o/c. We have completely made it up. She is a most fascinating woman! Whist in evening. Won. Afterwards drew pictures in Lady E’s album, cupid on a lion.

Thursday 29th. To my infinite regret Lady E. left Holkham this morning. Since I parted with dear M[ary] I never felt more melancholy or vexed. Whist in the evening. Won.

Madden stayed on for a further fortnight, but, as quickly as he could decently escape, he returned (as he had come) by Mr Coke’s gig to Fakenham, then an uncomfortable seventeen-hour stage-coach journey to the Golden Cross Inn at Charing Cross and a hackney coach to his modest lodgings near the British Museum.37 He was, it is obvious, still upset and bewildered, though whether he was suffering from Jane’s absence or a severe attack of guilt he failed to say. Madden was a hardworking young man, but he often felt life was unfair to him and spent a lot of time justifyng himself. When he failed to obtain hoped-for positions of employment, for instance, he would justify the selection of a candidate he believed inferior to himself as being due to his own lack of important connections. On the subject of his short relationship with Jane, though, he is surprisingly silent. There is no suggestion that he was seduced; no hint of self-justification for his betrayal to Mary.

When he posted down to Brighton a few weeks later to visit ‘dearest Mary’, Madden booked into the newly opened Albion Hotel. He walked disconsolately on the pier for an hour, and ascertained that Lady Ellenborough was not in town. Nor was Lady Anson, from whom he thought he might obtain news of Jane. His hopes dashed, he returned his heart to Mary. His diary entries become happier and, as the days pass, linger once more on his fiancée: ‘In a new white satin bonnet … she looked lovely … How very kind has fortune been to me … her I love more than all the world.’38

Madden and Jane never met again, and it is difficult to place the incident in context. It is unlikely that Jane set out deliberately to seduce him. Perhaps she was simply dejected and, enjoying the young man’s obvious admiration, allowed a simple flirtation to get out of hand. Or maybe she was miserable and hurt and, having been inexplicably rejected by both her husband and her lover, needed reassurance that she was still desirable.

For her affair with George Anson was in trouble. Indeed, there was no possibility that it would prosper in the long term, even supposing George had wished such a thing. Marriage to Jane was out of the question. The average divorce-rate was two a year at that date, and the publicity and expense surrounding such a course was usually sufficient to ruin the applicants and their families, socially as well as economically. A divorce would have finished George’s career in the army, and both cousins would have been aware that the closely linked Anson, Coke and Digby families would never countenance their union.

There is no evidence, however, that George ever regarded the affair as anything more than a light-hearted romance with his pretty cousin. It was Jane who elevated it to a more serious level. Her poetry implies no thought of divorce, nor indeed what might come of such a relationship, but in her romantic and impractical way she expected things to continue, and George to be faithful to her. Too late Colonel Anson recognised that this affair was not like his others and that Jane was not an experienced woman-about-town who could insouciantly treat a liaison for what it was, but a still-naive girl who was bound to be emotionally hurt. His way of handling the problem was to stay away from Jane, trusting she would recognise the implication of his actions. There is a strong possibility, too, that a senior officer or member of the family warned George that his behaviour would not do. Whatever the reason, there came a time when George was forced to tell her that their affair must end.

So when Jane made her visit to Holkham in March 1827 she was desperately unhappy. Unseasoned in the art of sophisticated dalliance, she had believed George when he had sworn to love her no matter what. She had never been refused anything, and could not believe the hurt occasioned by George’s rejection. Reared in the age of Byron, when strong emotions were often channelled into verse, she wrote a series of poems to George, attempting to convey her feelings. The following was written when she retired to her room on 19 March. According to Madden’s diary, she had spent that evening playing the guitar and singing Italian love songs.

… is passion’s dream then o’er

Is tenderness with love then fled?

So soon cast off, beloved no more.

Yes! Nought of all I’ve done for thee

Will e’er awake a pitying sigh

Or should my name, remembered be

E’en friendship’s tear thou wilt deny.

Twas then a crime to love too well!

Ah when did man e’er grateful prove

To her whose heart has dared rebel

Against the laws of man and God?39

There are more poems in this vein, written during the weeks that followed. They spoke of ‘love betrayed by a soft voice and sweet accents’; of how easy it had been for her to forget ‘in one wild, thrilling kiss’ that ultimately it would have to end. And now the man she adored ‘though chill neglect has snapped the silver cord … in the heart in which he reigned’.40 With her cousin, Jane found a sexual joy and companionship that was perhaps missing in her relationship with her husband. She had mistakenly believed her first love affair to be the love of her life.

Yet this makes the interlude with Madden all the more surprising. There were a few other occasions in her life when Jane indulged in casual sexual encounters, and it is obvious from diary entries in her middle age that she had a frank enjoyment of sex that was unfashionable in a world where brides-to-be were advised that sex was meant to be not enjoyed but endured. Her attitude has somewhat predictably led two (male) biographers to suggest ‘nymphomania’, but in fact her views on sex were similar to those of most women of the late twentieth century. Under normal circumstances Jane was faithful to the man with whom she was in love because, quite simply, each time she fell in love she believed the man to be the centre of her existence. Each time she thought that this man, this love, was the one she had been seeking. Between partners, however, she experienced no guilt in occasionally seeking ‘rapture’.

Madden made no secret of the admiration he felt from the moment she arrived. Jane was flattered and tempted. Her sexual mores were already established. Had her relationship with George been stable, she would never have looked at Madden, but given the situation that prevailed she accepted his admiration and the solace of his obvious desire. On the following day she recalled Steely’s moralising and was remorseful. The pattern would repeat itself occasionally in the future.

That visit to ‘dear old Holkham’ was to be almost the last. Many years later she would recall it in a letter to her brother Kenelm and explain how ‘Lord Ellenborough’s politics at that time prevented Holkham intimacy, which I always regretted.’41

Jane’s twentieth birthday passed and suddenly, to her joy, George was back in her life for a few weeks, but by 23 May they had parted again, this time – as he made clear – permanently. The danger of discovery by their families and the potential damage to George’s military career were too great. He left London and ignored her notes to him, returning them unanswered. Jane continued to pour out her distress in poetry. She accepted the reasons for which he said they had to part, but his instruction to her at their last meeting to ‘forget him’ she could not obey. She could never forget him, she wrote in anguish – even if they were never to meet again.42

However, it was not to be as simple as that. Although she was not aware of it when she wrote her poem in May 1827, Jane was pregnant. And, as she would later confide to a friend, the father of her child was not her husband but George Anson.43

4 A Dangerous Attraction 1827–1829

Jane’s state of mind as she parted from George Anson and discovered that she was pregnant is not a matter for speculation, for she was still using poetry as a sort of psychiatric couch, much as she used her diaries years later when there was no one in whom she could confide. Her pregnancy and subsequently the safe arrival of her child are mentioned briefly in surviving family correspondence, but from Jane herself there was a series of forlorn compositions written at Cowes, when she and Edward visited the Isle of Wight in August for the annual regatta. George Anson was also at Cowes and had returned to his former wild living. He was rarely seen there without a pretty woman on his arm and, as cartoonists noted, he was involved in a duel. Jane’s verse reveals her misery at the broken relationship and Anson’s present, hurtful, attitude towards her. Tormented by his calculated indifference, she found it hard to accept that he now regarded her as just another of the ‘host’ of pretty women who loved him.1 All her life she had known only unconditional love and approval. George had sworn he loved her but clearly he did not, at least not as she had interpreted his declarations. As her body thickened she felt herself unattractive and deserted.

Of her pregnancy she wrote nothing. She was a married woman enjoying a normal sex-life with her husband; the manner in which her love affair had been conducted had provoked no gossip. There was apparently no reason why Edward, or anyone else, should suspect the child was not his. Indeed, until her confinement confirmed the date of conception she may not have been entirely sure herself whose child she was carrying. Meanwhile her emotions were centred around the hurt she felt. She wrote despairingly of how, like many other women, she had succumbed to George’s ‘specious flatteries, breathed by lips none could resist’. Who could have refused to listen to George’s softly spoken words of love, she asked.

Not I, alas! For I have heard and drank

Delicious poison from those angel lips,

And listening first believed, then tempted, fell

By passion wrought to madness. I can see

No shame in infamy, no hell beyond

The doubts and jealous fears that rack my soul

Lest thou should e’er forget her who has loved

With more than woman’s love, and given thee all

She had to give; a spotless name, and virtue.2

For him and for his love she had risked everything: her marriage, hurting Edward, family honour and public contempt. Out of superstition, rather than penitence, she ceased to attend church as a communicant, lest she should provoke divine vengeance. George had taken her innocence and her unquestioning love and, it now seemed to her, tossed them in her face. She felt utterly betrayed. Her family saw none of this; she was, outwardly at least, the same sweet, smiling, brilliant Janet. Family letters to her are chatty and congratulatory.3

Jane’s first child, a boy, was born on 15 February 1828. Ellenborough, who had longed for a son, was elated. Only a month earlier he had achieved his primary ambition, a Cabinet post; he was made Lord Privy Seal in Wellington’s new government. It was not a universally popular appointment. Lady Holland is said to have ‘nearly killed’ the messenger who brought her the news.4 A fellow member of the Upper House wrote of the new administration:

and indeed, were it not for one blot, there is not a name I object to. The blot is Ellenborough. It is miserable and unworthy to stop his teasing babble by [giving him] one of the great offices of State and his appointment is an indignity to the memory of Canning which I regret was advocated in the House of Lords. He will be nothing; though he might be a worrying opponent and as a member of the cabinet will be unpractical and unmanageable.5

Even Princess Lieven, whom, together with her husband, Ellenborough regarded as a friend, was less than happy, writing to Earl Grey, ‘You will imagine that I am not highly delighted at seeing Lord Ellenborough, a rabid Turk, in the Ministry.’6 And, though there were some who felt that Ellenborough had earned his appointment, clearly the King was not among them. He met the new Lord Privy Seal only once, out of courtesy. He was charming and polite but Ellenborough was never again invited into his presence.

Ellenborough did not allow his monarch’s dislike to worry him. He wrote a triumphant personal note in his political diary:

Janet has brought me a boy. I put this down as a political occurrence because I shall make him, if he lives and I live, a political Character. I shall ask the Duke of Wellington and Lord Dudley to be his Godfathers. Princess Esterhazy is to be his Godmother. A good diplomatic introduction to the world.7

One must assume from this that Ellenborough accepted the child as his. The baby was named Arthur Dudley after his illustrious godparents. Evidently the birth was an uncomplicated one, for the smart christening party was held only a fortnight later, and within two months or, as one biographer cheerfully put it, ‘as soon as she could get her stays fastened again’, Jane was back in circulation apparently in glowing good looks.8 Lord Ellenborough was now more preoccupied than ever with his work of national importance, though Jane accompanied him to several state functions at this time.

She was a poor mother, which is surprising, for she was a warm and caring person by nature. But she was unable to form any maternal bonds with her baby. It was not that she did not love him, but it was as though the child belonged to someone else. This disappointed her, but, as she wrote to her brother, she was as a child ‘never naturally fond of babies, never played with dolls, if you recollect, but was much fonder of animals etc.’9 Her inability to bond may also have been rooted in the fact that her lifestyle did not allow a great deal of contact with her ‘darling boy’.10 It was the established custom of the upper class to have children cared for by servants, thus enabling the mother to regain her place in society quickly. Moreover, London with its winter palls of smog from coal fires, and its summer plagues of typhoid, was considered unhealthy; the mortality of infants was high enough (hence Ellenborough’s remark ‘if he lives’), without exposing a child to additional risks. It was considered almost a duty to have a child professionally cared for in a quiet, healthy place. In little Arthur’s case this care devolved initially on a wetnurse and nursemaid in the country.

Despite her glowing appearance, Jane was deeply unhappy in the weeks and months following her confinement. Edward was tolerant but remote, and her relationship with her child was conducted at arm’s length. She pined, according to her poetry, for the days of love and laughter, and the ‘magic’ she had shared with George.11