A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby
- -
- 100%
- +
As we hinted yesterday, such a result was all but inevitable; seeing in the first place that the chief opponent of the bill proceeded on the absurd ground that adultery was not proved, and secondly that nobody had the courage to take the true ground – the alleged conduct of Lord Ellenborough with respect to other women.9
There was a beneficiary of the publicity surrounding the Ellenborough divorce case. Advertised in The Times, as often as not alongside the daily reports of the hearings, was ‘A Satirical Novel of Fashionable Life’, entitled The Exclusives. The publisher’s blurb proclaimed: ‘This extraordinary production continues to be the leading topic of conversation among the higher circles. The astonishment felt at the details connected with a certain system of London Society is indescribable.’10 Although appearing under the shelter of anonymity this book was written by a lady-in-waiting to Queen Adelaide, and the leading character was unmistakably Lady Ellenborough. Just to ensure that her readers were not left wondering, the author boldly plagiarised the name ‘Lady Glenmore’, the same name as that used for the character based on Jane in Almack’s. The Exclusives ran to three editions in a month while the hearings lasted, and the publishers could not keep it in print. Covering the period 1827–8 the story told how Lord Glenmore, a Minister of the Crown, was cuckolded by a man bearing a remarkable resemblance to Colonel George Anson. It was the second of eight novels that would be written, during Jane’s lifetime, using her character or story.
Given the weight of evidence against Jane – publicly self-admitted, one might say, through Miss Steele – one might have expected some sympathy for Ellenborough. After all, he was the proven injured party and had recently been bereaved of his only son and heir. However, virtually no one believed that he had not behaved badly himself on the two counts of adulterous behaviour and neglect of Jane.
There is no doubt from the surviving evidence that an agreement was reached between Admiral Digby and Lord Ellenborough, which appears to be that, in return for Jane’s matrimonial freedom and a financial settlement, no defence evidence would be offered. However, if blame must be apportioned for what happened to the Ellenborough marriage, and despite the decision of Parliament, it was clearly not one-sided. Jane was guilty of adultery, on two previous occasions as well as her affair with Schwarzenberg, but it was well known in their circles that Ellenborough was as guilty as Jane of marital infidelity. At that time, however, it was not possible for a woman to divorce a man on the grounds of his adultery.
Ellenborough’s relationship with the Countess St Antonio terminated abruptly, and the Princesses Lieven and Esterhazy’s activities were sharply curtailed by their respective husbands after The Times hinted broadly that they were the undesirable persons to whom Margaret Steele had alluded. Lady Holland, at whose home all those most involved had often met, openly stated that Jane had been corrupted by the Esterhazys. Count Apponyi claims that Prince Esterhazy locked his wife in her bedchamber for a week11 and, according to Lord Clare, he ‘threatened her with divorce if she did not mend her ways’. In the same letter, Clare touched on the current widespread rumour that Ellenborough was to marry Clare’s sister Isabella. This ‘absurd story’ was swiftly denied: ‘You who know her will acquit her of the indelicacy of forming an engagement with a married man. But in truth the [two] parties, which by the way have not met for more than a year, have not and never have had any thought of being mated.’12
In fact, Ellenborough was never to marry again. After a brilliant career during which he became a highly successful Governor-General of India, he died without a legitimate son to inherit his title, which then passed to another branch of his family. He was never socially ostracised as Jane was, but, though his career was never affected by the divorce, few decent families were prepared to risk a daughter to the dubious protection of a man over whose reputation so many questions hung. Instead, as the years passed, Edward lived with several mistresses (not of his own class), by whom he had a number of children, one of whom is said to have been Madame Hamilton, the ‘petite Mouche Blanche’ of King Victor Emmanuel of Italy.13
Although Lord Ellenborough subsequently had two natural sons, he left a large part of his fortune to his two natural daughters, apparently much loved, who lived with him at his Gloucestershire estate, called Elm Grove, like his house at Roehampton. His daughters were raised and educated as ladies.14 At the chapel on the estate he erected a beautiful monument to his first wife Octavia. A brief note in his will acknowledges: ‘Jane Elizabeth Digby and her assigns may receive yearly [the sum of] £360 clear of tax or duty … in satisfaction of a bond executed by me to the said Jane Elizabeth Digby … during her lifetime … on the first of April and eighth of October in every year … as shall happen after my death if the said Jane Elizabeth Digby shall by then be living.’15 Apart from this, it was as though Jane had never existed.
Stories that Ellenborough had settled a large capital sum upon Jane, and that he had forced Schwarzenberg to contribute the sum of £25,000 to a trust account for Jane’s future security, were widely circulated, even finding their way into respected reference books such as The Complete Peerage. It has not been possible to substantiate these rumours; however, it has been possible to confirm that, in the years that followed, Jane received monies far in advance of the annual £360 allowed by Ellenborough’s bond, and the various legacies subsequently bequeathed by her parents and grandfather. These surpluses did not emanate from future partners, for in the main they were supported by Jane. A substantial sum (which will be discussed later) was undoubtedly settled upon Jane at the time of the divorce, providing the wherewithal for her lifestyle and adventures.
During the spring and summer of 1830, when Jane’s shocked relatives were busy trying to live down her notoriety, Admiral Digby and Lord Londonderry (an emissary of Lord Ellenborough and a lifelong friend of Jane)16 made separate abortive attempts to persuade Felix Schwarzenberg that he had an obligation to marry her. They entreated Jane to recognise ‘the necessity of steady conduct and patient forbearance’ towards the prince. This seemed especially appropriate when Jane discovered that she was again pregnant by him.
By the time she regained her marital freedom, Jane, still calling herself Madame Einberg, had found a larger apartment near the Palais-Royal in Paris.17 Here she held her famous ‘salons’ which were, as Apponyi put it, ‘much frequented’. Her first function, referred to by Apponyi as ‘Lady Ellenborough’s Ball’, was well attended, though Apponyi stated that he was unable to dance since it was the season of Lent.18 Despite her pseudonym it was clearly well known that she was the former Lady Ellenborough, and, glittering and entertaining as Jane’s functions were, they were noticeably not attended by the English contingent in Paris. Instead of her former connections, Jane found herself hostess to Felix’s unmarried friends, minor European royalty, and the slightly louche members of Paris’s artistic and literary society.
One wonders what Jane had expected when she gave up her husband, name and position to run into Felix’s arms. She may well have assumed (despite her father’s warning) that Felix would marry her, and it is doubtful that she suspected the reality which ultimately faced her. To have had a love affair with a dashing foreign prince when she had few responsibilities, and to conduct it while under the nominal protection of an aristocratic husband, with no doors closed to her, was one thing. It was quite another to live almost as a demimondaine, a woman disgraced and regarded as not quite acceptable in circles which had once clamoured to receive her. Jane held her head up and pretended to ignore slights, but she was deeply hurt.
She had plenty of invitations until her pregnancy began to show, but it was never possible for her to accompany Felix to state banquets and formal diplomatic functions. She was not received at court, and many houses were closed to her. Her days were spent visiting acquaintances, attending salons, riding in the Bois de Boulogne; notoriety hung around her and she knew that those who stopped to stare at her now were not merely admiring her beauty as in the past but identifying her as the disgraced divorcee.
As the heat of the summer settled upon Paris, revolution seethed, forcing the abdication of King Charles X in favour of the Ducd’ Orléans. Felix became involved to an extent that later enabled him to produce a treatise called The Revolution of 1830 which earned him praise in Austria for his analysis of the control of mobs. It was a way back to favour after the adverse publicity of the previous spring. His love for Jane was not strong enough for him to risk his brilliant career for it, let alone his security and reputation.
The relationship for which Jane had risked everything had already started to go wrong by the autumn of 1830, according to a letter written by Felix, which refers to frequent disagreements between them.19 This friction almost certainly stemmed from the prince’s refusal to agree to a marriage under French law as suggested by Jane’s father, which would bypass the restrictions of his own country. At one point Felix had appeared to be giving the possibility serious consideration, though he was always aware that the illegality of such a move in his native Austria would affect his career. The story that Jane and Felix were to marry imminently was so widely accepted in Paris salons that it was reported in The Times and Jane received several congratulatory letters.20 However, under pressure from his family and possibly Metternich, Felix finally rejected this solution to the problem.
In October, Jane received news from home about George Anson. Her ‘first love’ was to be married to Isabella, daughter of Lord Forrester – a noted beauty who had been in love with George for years. Their betrothal had been delayed, undoubtedly because of the possibility of George being implicated in the Ellenborough divorce. Other news was not so happy: George’s younger brother William, serving in His Majesty’s Navy, had been killed aboard his ship; two of the young Anson boys who had shared Jane’s lessons at Holkham were now dead.
Her teenage affair with George, and the misery it had caused her, now seemed as though it had happened to someone else. But the uncertainty in her relationship with Felix began to affect her health. In this unhappy state, shortly before Christmas, Jane gave birth to a son, whom she called Felix after his father. The child died ten days later.
Jane had hoped that a son might induce Felix to marry her, and for that reason she had welcomed his birth. Her poetry makes it clear that the death of her baby put an end to her ‘bright vision’ of marriage to his father. In an agony of guilt, loss and self-reproach she wrote of her worship of the prince and her sentiments that perhaps it was best the child had not lived ‘to share [my] destiny of shame’.21
Two days later Felix sent her a note of consolation for her loss, regretting the many dissensions they had had during the past year.22 It was not very consoling to Jane. Felix was hardly ever with her. She had begun to fear that there was little hope of ever becoming his wife and that even the likelihood of remaining his beloved mistress was far from assured.
7 Jane and the King 1831–1833
During the period of Jane’s third confinement, and especially after the death of their baby, one might have expected that Prince Schwarz-enberg – in common decency – would spend more time with the woman who had given up so much for him and who, lacking any family support, was otherwise alone. However, on the good authority of the wife of the British Ambassador in Paris, we know that his thoughts were not with Jane. ‘Poor Lady Ellenborough is just going to be confined’, Lady Granville had written to the Duke of Carlisle, ‘and Schwarzenberg is going about flirting with Madame d’Ouden-arde.’1 Nor did his behaviour improve after the death of Jane’s baby, according to Schwarzenberg’s friend and colleague, Count Apponyi, who noted that ‘Felix Schwarzenberg is paying court to Mme Hatzfeld, they are inseparable in the salons. Mme d’Oudenarde, to whom our attaché paid his first homage, is very jealous and cannot believe he would drop her for a red-haired German.’2
The defence offered by Schwarzenberg for his behaviour was his suspicion that Jane was having an affair with a Monsieur Labuteau, who until 1830 had been an officer in the élite royal Guarde du Corps of the erstwhile Charles X, and was a scion of one of the great French families.3 That this young man was an admirer of Jane’s may have been true. Apparently he acted as an escort on several occasions; even in Paris a woman could go nowhere alone, and during the late stages of her pregnancy she had been glad of his arm. But that Jane had betrayed Felix with him was untrue, and she indignantly denied the charge;
If to gaze upon thee waking with love never ceasing
And fondly hang o’er thee in slumber when laid,
Each tender dear moment my passion increasing,
If this is betraying, thou hast been betrayed.
… if thy comforts by every fond art to enhance
Thy sorrows to lighten, thy pleasures to aid,
To guess every wish and obey every glance,
If this be betraying, thou hast been betrayed!
J.
Paris 18314
At the bottom of the rumours concerning Jane’s fidelity was the prince’s handsome sister, Princess Mathilde, whose ambition for her much loved younger brother was boundless. She saw nothing but disaster in his relationship with Jane and feared that if the couple married in France, as suggested, his career was finished. Mathilde enlisted the aid of a Schwarzenberg cousin (there were several Prince Schwarzenbergs in Paris) to ensure that Felix heard of Jane’s friendship with Monsieur Labuteau in an unfavourable light.5 The seeds of suspicion were well sown and provided Felix with self-justification for his own shameless behaviour.
Jane was well aware that the Schwarzenberg family were ranged against her and were almost certainly responsible for Felix’s rescinding his earlier semi-agreements to marry her. But an interest in Monsieur Labuteau was never even mentioned by Jane; not in her poetry, nor in subsequent letters to close friends, in which she denied the allegation, nor in her surviving diaries. She was accustomed to having a court of admirers, and the young man clearly meant nothing to her beyond a convenient and pleasant escort.
Immediately after Jane’s confinement, Felix too appeared to believe that there was nothing in the story he had been told. In a note to Jane he confirmed that he had now ‘entire faith in her’, though for a time, he wrote, he had believed her ‘incapable of speaking a word of truth’.6 However, only a few months later, in May 1831, the couple had a further violent disagreement on the same subject and they left Paris, separately. Felix went home to Austria, Jane took little Mathilde and fled to Calais. Shortly afterwards she travelled to Dover, where she was met by Lady Andover and Margaret Steele; the three women and Didi lived there for a while in a cottage rented by Jane, using the name Mrs Eltham.
Jane wrote to Felix to try to heal the breach. His reply, from his father’s castle in Austria, was frigid. She may have forgotten the events of that last fortnight in Paris, he said, but he could remember all too well. First, he said, ‘there were my suspicions, which would soon have been laid aside had you not made such lame excuses for the unaccustomed hours you kept.’ As a result he had had her watched until he knew all her movements, and there was no room left for doubt that the stories he had been told about her were correct. His old suspicions of her untruthfulness had returned, and now there was no possibility of ‘the happy union to which I had looked forward’ and by which he might have reinstated Jane ‘in the position which you had lost’.7
To anyone but the besotted Jane, his reliance on this trumped-up case as an excuse to end their relationship would have said everything there was to say. But she had not been unfaithful, she knew there was no truth in the accusations, and therefore believed that if she could just see him and explain matters all would be as before. After talking it over with her mother and Steely, Jane, again rejecting their advice, decided to go to Felix to deny what his cousin had told him and to defend her behaviour immediately prior to their quarrel. She was still passionately in love with Felix, and she had a naïve belief that love, and the truth, would triumph in the end.
Lady Andover and Steely became agitated at this plan, believing that Felix was a thoroughly self-centred man whose personal ambitions were more important to him than Jane. His treatment of her to date was clear proof that this was the case, Steely said. She would never change her opinion of the man she saw as a complete bounder.8 But Jane would have none of it, still believing that she and Felix could return to the heady early days of their love affair. In late July she left England for Europe, arriving during August in Munich, where she evidently expected to meet Felix.
In fact Felix was lying low at his family home in Bohemia. According to his biographer he was ‘in low spirits and poor health because of the Ellenborough affair and the perpetual whirl of activity and excitement in Paris’ which had ‘left their mark.’9 We must assume Felix believed that Jane had been unfaithful to him, which might have justified his anger had he been entirely faithful himself. But the fact remains that when he met her she was a respected and well-established member of the highest society in England, living in the utmost comfort and security; he had avidly pursued and seduced her, eventually enticing her away from her husband and family. He had fathered two children by her, one of whom (Didi) still lived, and yet because of rumours which could not truly be substantiated (though evidently he was satisfied of their veracity) he was content, apparently, to abandon her to the uncertain fate of an unprotected woman with a ruined reputation trailing around Europe with their illegitimate child. Although Schwarzenberg’s supporters in England described him as ‘very honourable and right, and ready to make every reparation in his power’,10 it is not surprising that his nickname ‘Cad’ became synonymous with ignoble behaviour.
One wonders why Jane chose to go specifically to Munich at this point. Of course, she had to go somewhere other than England, where her notoriety was such that she could never have been received in society. She was still not yet twenty-five, and beautiful. She had a comfortable income and a zest for life; she could not hide away in a rented cottage for the rest of her days. In Paris there was nothing for her as an unprotected woman with a reputation, and besides she now hated the city where her hopes had turned sour.11 A previous biographer suggests that she chose Munich because the British Ambassador there was Lord Erskine, a good friend of Jane’s grandfather.12 Jane had grown up with the large family of Erskine sons and daughters who might be depended upon not to bar her from their home nor be too critical of the scandal surrounding her name.13 There may have been more than one reason, however.
Diplomats are not normally at liberty to leave a situation merely because of a disagreement with a mistress (if such were the case, diplomatic legations could hardly continue to function). Since Felix had been openly keeping Jane as his mistress in Paris for over a year, it is doubtful that he was whisked away by his superiors to avoid another ‘incident’, as he had been in London. Clearly the disagreement between Jane and Felix coincided with the end of the prince’s time at the Paris legation anyway; it had only been a temporary assignment for the sake of expediency. He was almost certainly aware that his next posting would be to Germany, and Munich was the most likely base.
Formerly a stolid provincial town, Munich was at that time enjoying a renaissance. Under the personal direction of the latest scion of the House of Wittelsbach, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, a new era of neo-classicism was in vogue. Determined to break the French stranglehold on German culture, and in a bid to achieve his dream of creating the perfect city, Ludwig ensured that German Gothic and rococo design gave way to Grecian friezes and clean rows of Ionic columns. Narrow tree-lined streets opened into broad thoroughfares and plazas with triumphal Roman arches; quiet squares were crowned with obelisks and monuments. Churches and basilicas, palaces and rotundas, museums, art galleries and libraries, public gardens and theatres sprang up around the city. As a result of this feverish activity Munich increasingly came to be regarded as an important centre for the arts; art galleries and libraries have to be filled.
However, after a period of seclusion at Krumlov, during which time he wrote his famous treatise on the 1830 Revolution, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg was appointed Legation Counsellor and posted, not to Munich, but to Berlin. But Jane had already rented a house in Munich. She wrote again to Felix begging him to meet her, anywhere, confident that if they could only meet she could convince him of the truth. There was no reason why she should not hope for this, since in his letters Felix insisted that he still loved her and their child, Didi. Presumably her relationship with the Erskine family meant that she was not friendless upon her arrival in the city, and her beauty and personality immediately ensured a number of eager escorts. However, she could not go into what she called ‘society’ – that is, the society of those she regarded as her peers.
For some weeks she was occupied in furnishing and decorating her new home and designing the garden; these were newly acquired interests that would remain with her for the rest of her life. Munich was exciting, and promised, once the many building projects were completed, to rival any city in Europe for architectural interest. Yet it was Munich’s proximity to Felix’s home, less than 200 miles away, that was its chief attraction for Jane. One of her first purchases must have been a good horse, for the first mention of her at this time is of her beauty and horsemanship.
Within a remarkably short time of Jane’s arrival in the town, word of her reached the ears of the King. Ludwig was a man who worshipped beauty all his life: beautiful objects, beautiful buildings and beautiful women.14 Either by design or by coincidence a meeting occurred between the two in early October 1832 at an Oktoberfest ball and so began for Jane a wonderful relationship with the man whom as friend, and in her personal estimation, she regarded as second only to the great love of her life, and the latter was as yet many years in the future.
Born in Strasbourg in 1786, King Ludwig I, a godson of King Louis XVI of France and Marie-Antoinette, and a somewhat unwilling protégé of Napoleon and Josephine, had ascended the Bavarian throne seven years earlier at the age of thirty-five.15 The House of Wittelsbach had ruled Bavaria for almost a thousand years, and its latest head was the same age as Lord Ellenborough. He was an amiable and intelligent man, kind to a fault, and a workaholic.
At the age of eighteen Ludwig went to Italy. It is said that he saw the Colosseum by moonlight and fell deeply in love. In Venice he was further enthralled. And as he roamed the sun-baked Tuscan hill towns he gave his heart completely to southern lands. It was the one love in his life that was never to fade. As a result of the years he spent in Italy and his later travels in Greece, Ludwig formed a deep interest in ancient civilisations and subsequently became an acknowledged expert on the subject during a period of almost twenty years’ study. His taste in art was, in fact, remarkably similar to that of Jane’s grandfather. The decorations at Holkham and those in Ludwig’s palaces might have been planned by the same person.