A Scandalous Life
The Biography of Jane Digby
MARY S. LOVELL

Dedication

This book is dedicated to

Joan Williams

to whom I owe a great deal;

she knows why.

And also to my aunt

Winifred Wooley

who is a great lady.

Epigraph

‘How could this Lady Ellenborough, whose scandalous life is known to all the world, have deceived you, Your Majesty?’

Letter to King Ludwig I from his mistress’s maid

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

1 Golden Childhood 1807–1823

2 The Débutante 1824

3 Lady Ellenborough 1825–1827

4 A Dangerous Attraction 1827–1829

5 Assignation in Brighton 1829–1830

6 A Fatal Notoriety 1830–1831

7 Jane and the King 1831–1833

8 Ianthe’s Secret 1833–1835

9 A Duel for the Baroness 1836–1840

10 False Colours 1840–1846

11 The Queen’s Rival 1846–1852

12 The Road to Damascus 1853

13 Arabian Nights 1853–1854

14 Honeymoon in Palmyra 1854–1855

15 Wife to the Sheikh 1855–1856

16 Return to England 1856–1858

17 Alone in Palmyra 1858–1859

18 The Massacre 1860–1861

19 Visitors from England 1862–1863

20 The Sitt el Mezrab 1863–1867

21 Challenge by Ouadjid 1867–1869

22 The Burtons 1870–1871

23 Untimely Obituary 1871–1878

24 Sunset Years 1878–1881

25 Funeral in Damascus 1881

Appendix: Last Will and Testament of the Hon. Jane Digby

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Author’s Notes

Notes

Praise

By Mary S. Lovell

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

Friends often ask me how I choose my subjects. The answer is that my subjects usually choose me, and so it was with Jane Digby.

This book began at a cocktail party at the RAF Club in London in the spring of 1992 when Jane Digby’s name and her story came up in conversation. I had never heard of her, so I made a mental note to do some research and rapidly found myself in the early stages of an obsession that was to last several years. Who was Jane Digby, and why should she cast such an appeal?

Born into the English aristocracy with every conceivable advantage in physical beauty, social position and wealth, Jane spent the final years of her life married to a desert prince. The Palladian mansions and gilded Mayfair salons of her youth made way for low black goat-hair tents and rugs spread upon wind-washed sands. Even now, with jet travel and motorised transport, the Syrian desert is one of the few lonely places left on earth. What unlikely circumstance, I wondered, had led Jane Digby there a century and a half ago?

Barely out of the schoolroom, already regarded as one of the most beautiful women of her day, Jane had married an ambitious politician, Lord Ellenborough, who was twice her age. In achieving his desire for a Cabinet post, Ellenborough neglected his bride and she soon sought consolation elsewhere. Before she was twenty-one Jane’s love affair with an Austrian prince precipitated her into one of the most scandalous divorce cases of the nineteenth century. In April 1830, to the astonishment of its readers, The Times cleared its traditional front page of classified advertisements to carry a sensational news story – a verbatim report of the Ellenborough divorce hearing in Parliament which included intimate details about the beautiful peeress and her prince.

Jane did not dispute the charges. Head over heels in love, she had already run off to Europe. But her story did not end there. Subsequently, for over twenty years Jane was to have a number of love affairs with members of the European aristocracy including a German baron, a Greek count and the King of Bavaria, as well as an Albanian general from the mountains. During this time she also married twice and travelled from the royal courts of Europe to the wilder regions of Turkey and the Orient. After a succession of scandals and betrayals, she made a journey to Syria. By then she was almost fifty and feared her life was over. Astonishingly, the most exciting part of her story still lay ahead of her.

The Arab nobleman who had been engaged to escort her caravan to the ruined city of Palmyra fell in love with her. He was young enough to be her son, was of a different culture and already had a spouse; indeed, he had recently divorced a second wife but he asked Jane to marry him. Although she was doubtful at first, she was soon deeply in love and, ignoring the entreaties of British officials, placed herself willingly in the power of a man who could divorce his partners on a whim. Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab was the love of her life, and he brought her all the romance and adventure she had ever dreamed of.

Inevitably, because of the years she spent in Arabia, Jane’s story invites comparisons with that of Lady Hester Stanhope, the niece and confidante of William Pitt who became the self-styled ‘Queen of the Desert’ a generation before Jane. But Hester Stanhope ended her life in Syria in abject poverty as an eccentric recluse, robbed, abused and eventually deserted by her Arab servants. Jane Digby lived as a respected, working leader of her adopted tribe, spending months at a time in the Baghdad desert, sharing the spare existence of the bedouin.

So astonishing was Jane Digby’s career to her contemporaries that no fewer than eight novels based on her character and various elements of her story were written during her lifetime – one for every decade of her life. From 1830 until her death in Damascus in 1881 her name was rarely out of the newspapers as she featured in one outrageous tale after another.

Was it possible, I wondered when I embarked upon this project, to discover the rationale of such a person who even as a young woman married to an eminent Cabinet Minister refused to concede to convention by hiding her illicit love affair? Who a century ahead of her time was completely free of any form of racial or cultural prejudice? Who saw travel to exotic destinations as a raison d’être second only to sharing her life with a great all-encompassing love (though she showed remarkably little regard for the immense difficulties involved in both)? Who had, even prior to her desert expeditions, carelessly abandoned the comfortable life of a royal mistress to live with an Albanian chieftain who was virtually a legitimised brigand?

Over a hundred years had elapsed since her death, but I knew that, in common with many contemporaries, Jane kept diaries all her life. Her first biographer, E. M. Oddie, who wrote A Portrait of Ianthe in 1935, had access to some of them; but several subsequent biographers (such as Lesley Blanch and Margaret Schmidt) declared that the diaries were lost. Since E. M. Oddie had quoted from the diaries hardly at all, this seemed especially tragic. So I set out to discover what had happened to them in order to learn about Jane through her own voice. I also decided to try to locate the diaries and correspondence of people who met or were friends with Jane, not only to see what more could be learned about her, but to give a three-dimensional perspective to her story.

I contacted Lord Digby, a direct descendant of Jane’s brother, Edward, and in April 1993 at his invitation I drove down to Minterne House in Dorset one morning to see his collection of Jane’s watercolours. Over lunch I told him about my work and, after a pause, he looked at me, seemed to come to a decision, and said, ‘Um, we do have Jane’s diaries here. But we’ve never shown them to anyone.’

Within a short time I was seated at a writing table with objects that had once been Jane’s; her notebooks and sketchbooks, and her diaries which covered more than three decades, principally those years she spent in the desert. All would need to be transcribed and indexed to be easily accessible. Some sections written in pencil were badly faded; many entries were written in code and there were passages written in French and Arabic. I realised too that the code, once broken, might translate into any of the many languages that Jane spoke; it would be a mammoth task. Five days later I was due to leave for Syria to research Jane’s life there. I asked to be allowed to return to Minterne at some date in the future for a very long time.

Somewhere there must be a patron saint of biographers, to whom I owe much. On my second visit Lord Digby showed me a small portrait of Jane which hangs in the great hall at Minterne. ‘We believe from portraits that she had the same colouring as my sister Pamela … we’ve always thought they were probably quite alike.’ The Hon. Pamela Digby, later Mrs Randolph Churchill and now US Ambassador Mrs Averell Harriman, shares a great deal with Jane: intelligence and charm, an unselfconscious sexuality, a disregard of the mores that accept (even admire) polygamy in men but deprecate similar behaviour in women. Mrs Harriman is widely regarded as a nonpareil among US Ambassadors to France and her ability to attract and fascinate is as legendary as that of her ancestor. Several portraits of Jane bear a remarkable likeness to Pamela Digby Harriman.

One memorable day I received a package from a descendant of Jane’s brother Kenelm, a branch of whose family moved to New Zealand some decades ago. It contained letters written by Jane to her family and others over a thirty-year period. Together with her diaries and other papers, they provide a unique insight into a remarkable life.

During my trip to Syria I encountered the seductive spell of the desert that so bewitched Jane. With the enthusiastic help of my guide and interpreter Hussein Hinnawi, I was able to locate the remaining traces of her residence in Damascus; her home with its celebrated octagonal drawing-room and the high cupola ceiling, its curved alcoves for books and china, and its treasury of gilded woodcarving; her grave and – not least – Jane’s lingering legend. Even after I left Syria, Hussein continued to research the story, purely out of interest, and his contribution to this book has been invaluable.

Had I simply copied all the information amassed during research, including relevant excerpts from over 200 books and scores of newspapers, parliamentary records, Jane’s own diaries, letters and sundry papers, and those of her many friends such as Lady Anne Blunt, Isabel Burton and Emily Beaufort, the result would have been many thousands of pages of text. However, the job of a biographer is not merely to unearth and assemble facts; one must also dissect, compare, confirm and analyse; then hone the result in order to present to the reader a historically accurate, digestible and, I hope, enjoyable account of the subject.

Here, then, is my portrait of Jane Elizabeth Digby.

I Golden Childhood 1807–1823

When Jane Elizabeth Digby was born at Forston House in Dorset on 3 April 1807 her parents had hoped for a son. However, she was such a beautiful child that her family were soon besotted with her. After all, there was time for sons and, as Jane’s aunt wrote, ‘providing the little girl is well and promising we must not hold her sex against her’.¹

Later, with her large violet-blue eyes and pink-and-white complexion, little Janet (as her family called her then) was a pretty sight. Her waist-length golden hair, curling free from the prescribed banded and ringleted style, glistened halo-like in the sunshine. Her cheeks glowed: ‘a picture of health,’ local villagers said. As curious and agile as a kitten, as intelligent and eager as a puppy, she seemed to want to take the world by the coat-tails, and there was about her, even then, an irresistible charm.

This alert vitality captivated her grandfather, who was called ‘Coke of Norfolk’ throughout the country and ‘King Coke’ by everyone in Norfolk. Widely regarded as the most important and powerful commoner in England, Thomas Coke might have had a peerage for the asking; indeed, King George III was eager enough to bestow one. Yet this would have meant Coke giving up his independence and his seat in the House of Commons where he represented the county of Norfolk. He saw no merit in doing so.

Thomas Coke had three daughters, Jane, Anne and Elizabeth. They were all acknowledged beauties and all well educated; his late wife had seen to that when it became obvious there would be no male heir.² In addition to these advantages, Mr Coke had dowered his girls generously so that their eligibility in the marriage market was assured, though, in the event, all three married for love.³ Since their sex prevented them from inheriting a title from their father, he therefore resisted ennoblement – once to the extent of openly rebuffing the King – spoke his mind freely and often bluntly, and owed allegiance to no man he felt had not earned his respect.

Coke’s home in Norfolk was Holkham Hall, a Palladian mansion more like a palace than the home of a country squire. Here, in the great house where her mother had grown up, Jane spent much of her childhood.

Jane’s mother, Thomas Coke’s eldest daughter Jane, was known as Lady Andover, a form of address she used for the remainder of her life. The title was retained from a previous (childless) marriage which had ended in tragedy when she was twenty-one. Her husband Lord Andover had been killed as the result of a shooting accident that she had accurately foreseen in a dream. She had rushed out to him upon hearing the news, and almost his last words to her were: ‘My dear, your dream has come true!’⁴ It was not her only successful prediction and, curiously, her second husband had a similar ability, claiming that he owed his first success to a voice in a dream which told him to change the direction in which his ship was headed and even the course to steer.⁵

Captain Henry Digby, Jane’s father, was a fair, handsome and much decorated naval hero. Prior to his marriage to Lady Andover he had distinguished himself at Trafalgar as commander of HMS Africa. In a letter to his uncle, the Hon. R. Digby (later Lord Digby), at Minterne he wrote of his part in the battle:

HMS Africa at sea off the Straits November 1, 1805

My dear Uncle,

I write merely to say I am well, after having been closely engaged for 6 hours on 21st October. For details, being busy to the greatest degree, I have lost all my masts in consequence of the action and my ship is otherwise cut to pieces but sound in the bottom. My killed and wounded number 63, and many of the latter I shall lose if I do not get into port …

After passing through the line in which position I brought down the fore masts of Santisima Trinidad mounting 140 guns, after which I engaged with pistol shot L’Intrépide 74 guns, which afterwards was struck and burnt, Orion and Conqueror coming up. A little boy that stayed with me is safe. Twice on the poop I was left alone, all about me being killed or wounded. I am very deaf.⁶

Before Trafalgar he had been posted aboard the frigate Aurora and in less than two years had captured six French privateers (thanks to the voice in his dream) and one corvette, L’Egalité, making a total of 144 guns and 744 men, besides 48 merchant ships taken or sunk. In command of the Leviathan he assisted in the capture of the island of Minorca. Later he captured two French men-of-war, Le Dépit and La Courage; and in 1799 two Spanish frigates Thetis and Brigide, which carried between them 3 million dollars in gold. Fifty military wagons were needed to convey the spoils from Plymouth Dock to the Citadel. By the time he was thirty, Captain Digby had earned himself over £57,000 in prize money alone, and another £7,000 over the next five years.⁷

At the time of Jane’s birth Captain Digby owned Forston House, a pleasant country property in Dorset. It overlooked the famous Cerne Abbas giant and was close to his uncle’s estate, Minterne. It was because of her father’s frequent absences at sea, and her mother’s natural wish to spend time ‘at home’ at Holkham while he was away, that Jane and her two younger brothers, Edward and Kenelm, were often at their grandfather’s house and, like their mother, came to regard Holkham as a second home. Here the eleven children of Lady Andover’s sister Anne and her husband, Lord Anson, were also educated in the capacious schoolroom. Jane was particularly close to her Anson cousins Henry and Fanny who were nearest to her in age.

Those first decades of the nineteenth century were a golden era for the rich. Vast country houses surrounded by shaved lawns and pleasure gardens, with artificial lakes, follies and deer parks, stables full of hunters, hacks and work-horses, and coach-houses full of elegant equipages, provided work and livings for hundreds of servants indoors and out. Holkham was no exception.

Tom Coke could not be described as extravagant; he spent shrewdly enough, but no visitor ever walked through the deliberately unpretentious front entrance of Holkham Hall without being stunned at what lay within. The massive entrance hall, modelled on a Roman temple of justice, is an extravaganza of marble, alabaster and carved stone. Fluted Ionic columns support the domed Inigo Jones roof, a gilded crown for this masterpiece of light and space. Around the walls are bas-relief and marble sculptures, and the classical theme continues throughout the house. Holkham was – and remains – richly endowed with Greek and Roman statuary, but it is also famous for its art collection, its rich and rare furnishings and sumptuous Genoese velvet hangings, and its incomparable library. It is still regarded, along with Chatsworth, Blenheim, Badminton and Burghley, as one of the truly great houses of England.

Such grandeur, however, was not the brainchild of Jane’s grandfather. The property was bought in 1610 by Edward Coke, the famous jurist, who became Lord Chief Justice. The first Earl of Leicester built the present house in 1734 and, when the direct line failed, the estate, but not the title, passed to Thomas William Coke. If Thomas Coke ever was inclined towards prodigality, the money was spent on his lands rather than his house. Politically he was a staunch Whig, but first and foremost he was a dedicated agricultural reformer, who spent a fortune⁸ transforming a rugged wasteland ‘where two rabbits fought over a single blade of grass’ into a fertile, productive, ‘scientifically controlled’ region famous for its barley soil.⁹ He convinced men of substance to invest in long-leases of farms and to ‘induce their sons, after [reading] Greek and Latin in public schools, to put themselves under the tuition of well-informed practical farmers to be competent for management.’¹⁰ It is no exaggeration to say that this far-sighted man was the architect of modern farming methods throughout the world.

His livestock, particularly sheep, were selectively bred for meat, breeding stock and wool. His annual sheep-shearing, known as Coke’s Clippings, became a sort of four-day county fair which attracted thousands of sightseers from all over the country, and overseas. Exhibitions of every aspect of rural industry, from animal husbandry to flax weaving and the building of agricultural cottages, were presented. Conferences were held during which papers were given on agricultural matters such as crop rotation and stock-breeding, and these were a magnet for the guests assembled at Holkham for the Clippings, almost all of them titled.¹¹ The autumn and winter shooting parties at Holkham included royalty and top political figures of the Whig Party, as well as sporting squires, and Mr Coke’s hospitality was legendary.

Despite his leaning towards outdoor pursuits, Thomas Coke did not neglect the arts. Educated at Eton (where on one occasion, to avoid being caught poaching on the neighbouring royal estates, he swam the River Thames with a hare in his mouth),¹² he spoke both Greek and Latin. He inherited the vast library of classical literature and manuscripts at Holkham, considered to be a national treasure (when he took over Holkham he found hundreds of rare books from Italy still unpacked in their crates), but he continued throughout his life to purchase rare books, and works of art by such contemporary geniuses as Gainsborough, to add to those by Titian, Van Dyck, Holbein, Rubens and Leonardo da Vinci.

It was in this atmosphere that Jane spent much of her youth. She was encouraged by her grandfather to ride, to take an interest in the active management of horses and small farm animals, to read the classics and to be aware of the ancient civilisations represented at Holkham, as well as modern politics. She lived the privileged life of a cosseted only daughter, surrounded on all sides by love and admiration, and the constant companionship of her two brothers and numerous cousins. In turn she worshipped her hero father, adored her lovely mother, who was called by all three children ‘La Madre’, and loved and revered her aunts.

We have mere glimpses of Jane in those days. A family friend who peered round the door of an upper-floor room saw through the dust motes of an early summer morning that ‘the schoolroom was nearly full … there was Miss Digby – so beautiful – and the two Ansons, such dear and pretty children’.¹³ Another noted Jane’s vitality and grace of movement, but judged that ‘her chief glory was her hair, which fell, a rippling golden cascade, down to her knees.’¹⁴ An aunt recollected that as a child Jane used to refer to annoying incidents with the impatient phrase, ‘it is most provocative and bothersome.’¹⁵ In later years, Jane’s own diary recalls the wonderful, rumbustious, ‘old-fashioned’ Christmases at Holkham, with all the traditions of feasting and mummers and laughter and games, and the annual servants’ party. We also know from the diaries of her relatives, and visitors to Holkham, of the gargantuan dinners of dozens of courses for scores of appreciative diners from the Prince of Wales (a frequent visitor before he became Regent) to scholars, to which the children were sometimes invited. Again, we learn from her own diary that Jane’s chief delight was to beat her brothers in their frequent mock horse-races.¹⁶ She had no time for dolls and girlish toys but preferred riding and playing with dogs and the numerous family pets.¹⁷ Totally fearless, she could ride anything in the Holkham stables, and was as at home looking after a sick beast as riding one – which must have especially endeared her to her grandfather.

That she was frequently wilful is enshrined in family legend, as is the further characteristic that she was so prettily mannered and always so abjectly apologetic at having offended that she was instantly forgiven. It was a happy childhood, but her natural high spirits led her into many ‘scrapes’, as she called them, and a picture emerges of a highly intelligent, active, perhaps somewhat spoiled little girl who instinctively threw up her head at any attempt to check her. She was not unfeeling in her pranks, however; her anxious cajolery shines through the tear-stained and ink-blotted note of apology that she wrote to her mother at the age of about eight:

Dearest Mama,

I am very sorry for what I have done and I will try, if you will forgive me, not to do it again. I wont contradict you no more. I’ve not had one lesson turned back today. If you and Papa will forgive me send me an answer by the bearer – pray do forgive me.

You may send away my rabbits, my quails, my donkey, my monkey, etc., but do forgive me.

I am, yours ever,

JED

P. S. Send me an answer please by the bearer. I will eat my bread at dinner, always.¹⁸

It was perhaps hardly surprising that Jane was a beauty. Her looks were inherited from her maternal grandmother – a woman of almost fabled loveliness and charm. Jane’s mother was herself described by the Prince Regent as ‘without doubt, the handsomest woman in England’.¹⁹ However, it was unusual that Jane was given the same education as her brothers and male cousins, so that in addition to the practical basic education which naturally included French, a little German and Italian and a knowledge of the arts, she also had a thorough grounding in classical languages and acquired a love of history both ancient and modern. Nevertheless she managed to emerge from the schoolroom at the age of sixteen reasonably unspoiled and without undue vanity. Credit for this must go in large part to Miss Margaret Steele, the sober, fair-minded and determinedly moral governess recruited when Jane was ten years old.

The daughter of a scholarly but impoverished clergyman, Margaret Steele had been discreetly educated as a lady. She never married and when, on the death of her father, it became necessary to find a way of supplementing the meagre income bequeathed by her late parent the role of governess was one of the few acceptable occupations open to her. Her family was well known to Lady Andover and Lady Anson, and Lady Andover had no hesitation in offering Margaret Steele the position of governess to her daughter; not as a £40-a-year drudge at the mercy of the household but as a social equal who commanded the respect of the pupil’s family and whose opinions were heard.

Miss Steele took very seriously her duty to impart the behaviour and skills that Jane would require for her adult role in the highest ranks of society. These skills included a thorough training in music, needlework, the Bible, social deportment and other accomplishments not normally dealt with by the male tutor who had been engaged at Holkham for the young men of the family, who would later be shipped off to public school at the age of eleven or twelve to finish their education.

The governess had an apt pupil in Jane when Jane wished to attend. She quickly displayed, in common with her mother and aunts, a remarkable talent for painting. Margaret Steele – already irreverently called ‘Steely’ by her young charge – was not artistically gifted; however, Margaret’s elder sister Jane, who painted watercolours of a professional standard, gladly consented to tutor Jane Digby in this subject. Between them the two sisters had a great influence on Jane’s upbringing, and a deep affection developed between mentors and child which would last into the old age of all three. Steely’s nickname was apt: she was uncompromising in her steadfast obligation to duty and industry. She had a firm belief in Christianity and adhered strictly to the tenets of the Church of England, striving always for self-improvement. In the louche era of the Regency she was almost a portent of the Victorian ideal to come; in an earlier age she might have been a Puritan. However, Steely’s forbidding nature was offset by the presence of her gentler sister, who was soft and kind, and forgiving of the sins of others. Moreover, Steely had one failing of her own, a slightly guilty enjoyment of popular literature of a ‘non-improving’ variety such as the novels of Mrs Radcliffe, which the sisters used to read aloud to each other.

Jane’s lifelong delight in travel was fostered early. Her father rose quickly to the rank of rear-admiral and was often absent for long periods of duty with the fleet. In 1820, when it was necessary for him to visit Italy, Lady Andover accompanied him on the overland journey, and Jane and the Misses Steele went also, attended by Admiral Digby’s valet and Lady Andover’s French maid. They travelled in a convoy of carriages and luggage coaches, calling at Paris and Geneva. While they were in Italy thirteen-year-old Jane, obviously totally confident of her father’s love for her, engagingly requested an advance on her allowance. Her coquettish use of punctuation and heavy underscoring, sometimes teasing, sometimes firm, reflects their close relationship:

Rear Admiral Digby

Casa Brunavini

Florence, Italy

Florence, Thursday

Dearest Papa,

I write because I have a favour to ask which I am afraid you will think too great to grant; but as you at Geneva trusted me with [a] littler sum I am not ashamed, after you have heard from Steely my character, to ask a second time.

It is to … to … to advance me my pocket money, two pounds a week for 20 weeks counting from next Monday and I’ll tell you what for! If you approve I’ll do it but if not I’ll give it up!!!

Remember at Geneva after you advanced me 12 weeks, I never teased you for money until the time was expired. I promise to do the same here. Do not tell anyone but give me the answer. I will not ask for half a cracie until the time is expired. Think well of it and remember it is 20 ! ! ! weeks; I ask 40 pounds ! ! ! ! Not a farthing more or less. 40 pounds.

Goodbye and put the answer at the bottom of this [note]. I have long been trying to hoard the sum but I find that I want it directly and then I should not have it till we were gone. If you repulse me I will not grumble and if you grant it me ‘je vous remercie bien’. Pensez y and goodbye, mon bon petit père, I remain your very affectionate daughter.

Jane Elizabeth Digby²⁰

Unfortunately the surviving note lacks Admiral Digby’s response, and it is impossible to guess at the childhood desire that prompted such a request, or whether it was granted.

At the age of fifteen Jane was sent off to a Seminary for Young Ladies near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, for finishing. Here, in the traditions of English public school life, Jane fagged for an older girl, Caroline ‘Carry’ Boyle, during her first year.²¹ She missed her family but not unusually so, and to compensate she became a frequent correspondent, especially with her brothers, of whom she was very fond. Their notes to each other were partly written in the ‘secret’ code which she would use freely in her diary throughout her life.²²

There was a good deal to write about. Their grandfather Coke, only a year short of seventy, decided to remarry in February 1822. His bride, Lady Anne Keppel, was an eighteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a family friend, Lady Albemarle (who had died at Holkham in childbirth some years earlier), and god-daughter to Mr Coke. Furthermore, since Lady Anne’s father married a young niece of Mr Coke’s at the same time, there was a good deal of speculation that Lady Anne had married merely to escape from home.

Soon afterwards, Coke’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth (Eliza), who had reigned at Holkham as chatelaine while her father was a widower, married John Spencer-Stanhope and finally left the family home.

When Jane Digby left school at Christmas 1823, she was – as the French writer Edmond About wrote – ‘like all unmarried girls, a book bound in muslin and filled with blank white pages waiting to be written upon’.²³ She was also a lively, self-confident young woman who adored her parents and was not above teasing her papa with humorous affection when she came upon a ‘quaint’ tract on his desk entitled ‘Hooks and Eyes to keep up Falling Breeches’.²⁴

It had already been decided by ‘dearest Madre’ that Jane would make her début in the following February when the season started, rather than wait a further year. There is an unsubstantiated story that Jane was romantically attracted to a Holkham groom,²⁵ and that an attempted elopement precipitated her early entry into society; however, according to her poems, Jane had thoughts and eyes for no one during these months but her handsome eldest cousin George Anson. It is doubtful that George, one of the most popular men about town, gave Jane more than a passing thought, for he was busy sowing his wild oats with married women; the hero-worship directed at him by his cousin was totally unrequited. Besides, there was a family precedent for early entry into society. Jane’s Aunt Anne was betrothed at fifteen, and made her début a year later.

Though no longer required in the role of governess, Steely remained as Jane’s duenna, to chaperon her during her forthcoming season when Lady Andover was engaged elsewhere. Miss Jane Steele continued to provide drawing lessons.

Had they been told that Jane would hardly be out of her teens before she would appear in one of the most sensational legal dramas of the nineteenth century, making it impossible for her ever again to live in England; that she would be so disgraced that her doting maternal grandfather Coke would cut her out of his life, and her uncle Lord Digby would cut her brother Edward (heir to the title Lord Digby) out of his will; that she would capture the hearts of foreign kings and princes, but would abandon them to live in a cave as the mistress of an Albanian bandit chieftain; that in middle age she would fall in love and marry an Arab sheikh young enough to be her son, and live out the remainder of her life as a desert princess, the Misses Steele could not possibly have believed it. Yet all those things, and much more, lay in the future for Jane Digby.

2 The Débutante 1824

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Jane was not a stranger to London. Her parents owned a house on the corner of Harley Street ‘at the fashionable end’,¹ so she would not have arrived wide-eyed at the bustle and noise noted by so many débutantes. However, as a girl who had not yet been brought out into society, the time she had previously spent there would have been very tame.

When not in the schoolroom Jane would spend her days shopping with her mother in the morning, if the weather permitted walking. In the afternoon she might walk in Hyde Park, chaperoned by Steely, and paint in watercolours or practise her music at other times. Jane and her brothers would have eaten informal meals with their parents, but for dinners and parties they would have been banished to the nursery – a far cry from Holkham, where the children often mingled with the adults. In town it was not possible for Jane to walk round to the stables and order her horse to be saddled for an invigorating gallop. It was necessary to appoint a given time for the horse to be brought round to the house, and it would be a solecism if a girl not yet out in society or even one in her first season went for a gallop in the park.

But all this changed when she took London by storm. The change to her life was an intoxicating experience. Now she breakfasted late with her parents and, while she might still shop with her mother in the mornings, it was for clothes and fashionable fripperies for her town wardrobe: new silk gloves or satin dancing slippers, an embroidered reticule for walking out, a domino for a masked rout, white ostrich feathers for her presentation, some ells of white sprigged muslin. Now she attended lessons in the cotillion and the waltz, given by a dancing master under Steely’s watchful eye. Now she rode her neat cover-hack in the park at the fashionable hour of 5 p.m., or rode with her mother in the chaise in Rotten Row, nodding to acquaintances, stopping for a chat with friends. Now the florist’s cart was never away from the door with small floral tributes from admirers.

The years of instruction by Steely at last bore fruit. Jane’s natural ear for languages enabled her not only to infiltrate foreign phrases into her conversation and correspondence – the outward sign of a well-rounded education – but also to converse in Italian, French and German with foreign visitors. All those music lessons that Jane had found a dreary bore were now justified, for after a dinner party she might be called upon to perform for her fellow guests. She was a good pianist, and played the guitar and lute; she also had a sweet singing voice. She acquired a wide repertoire of foreign love songs, which generally delighted her listeners. She was not slow to recognise when she captivated her hearers, and was feminine enough to enjoy doing so.²

At sixteen, however, Jane was younger than the average débutante and had little experience of life. But she realised quite quickly that what was acceptable behaviour in the country was not so in London. A young lady might never venture abroad alone, on foot without a footman, or on horseback or in a carriage without a groom in attendance. She might, by 1824, have shopped with a girlfriend in Bond Street without raising eyebrows, just; but no lady would be seen in the St James’s area where the gentlemen’s clubs were situated. A young unmarried woman could never be alone with a gentleman unless he was closely related, and, while she might drive with a gentleman approved by her mama in an open carriage in the park, it must be a safe gig or perch phaeton and not the more dashing high-perch phaeton affected by members of the four-horse club, nor the newest Tilbury driven tandem. Either of the latter would have branded a girl as ‘fast’, even with a groom acting as stand-in for a chaperone. At a ball she must not on any account stand up to dance with the same man more than twice. The merest breath of criticism against a girl or her family was enough to prevent her obtaining a voucher from one of the Lady Patronesses of Almack’s.³

Despite the high standards they set for patrons of Almack’s it would be fair to say that the private lives of most of the Patronesses would not stand close examination, for with one exception they all had famous affaires with highly ranked partners ranging from the Prince Regent himself to several Prime Ministers; however, they maintained a discreet appearance of respectability – a pivot, as it were, between the open licentiousness of the Regency and the rapidly approaching hypocrisy of Victorian morality.

Not to be seen at Almack’s branded one as ‘outside the haul ton’, so that, in effect, the Patronesses constituted a matriarchal oligarchy to whom everyone bowed, including the revered Duke of Wellington, who was turned away one evening for not wearing correct evening dress. Captain Gronow, the contemporary social observer, wrote: ‘One can hardly conceive the importance which was attached to getting admission to Almack’s, the seventh heaven of the fashionable world. Of the three hundred officers of the Foot-Guards, not more than half a dozen [Captain Gronow was one of those] were honoured by vouchers.’ Almack’s was a hotbed of gossip, rumour and scandal, and the country dances were dull. Matters improved somewhat after Princess Lieven and Lord Palmerston made the waltz respectable, though it was still regarded by many parents as ‘voluptuous, sensational … and an excuse for hugging and squeezing’.⁴ Alcoholic drinks were forbidden, and refreshments consisted of lemonade, tea and cakes, and bread and butter.

Why entrance to so prosy a venue should excite such passion, when the London season offered dozens of more exciting and enjoyable occupations every evening, can be explained by the fact that Almack’s was the most exigent marriage market in the Western world,⁵ and marriage was what the whole thing was about. It was desirable for a young man of decent background and respectable expectations to attract favourable connections through marriage, and if the wife had a good dowry so much the better. But it was essential for a young woman to contract an eligible match with a man who could provide all the social and financial advantages that she had been reared to take for granted. The lot of an unmarried woman past her youth in that milieu was unenviable – thrown, as it were, on to the charity and tolerance of her relatives. Jane Austen’s heroines exemplify, with a touching contemporary immediacy, the importance of a woman ‘taking’ duringdeher début.

Vast wardrobes of morning dresses, afternoon dresses, walking-out dresses, ballgowns, riding habits and gowns suitable for every conceivable occupation were necessary. But cloaks and gowns were only the start. Accessories, such as collections of hats ranging from the simple chipstraw to high-crowned velvet bonnets, were indispensable. Gloves of silk, lace, satin and kid for every occupation that might be fitted in between rising and retiring, from walking to riding to dining and dancing, were essential. Sandals, reticules, shawls, tippets, fans, chemises, camisoles and undergarments such as stays were obligatory. All of this, with luck, would form the basis of a girl’s trousseau in due course. Further expenditure included the cost of a good horse for riding in Hyde Park (a prime shopwindow in the marriage market) and the use of a carriage, since it was no use expecting a girl to travel everywhere by sedan chair. If the parents had no town-house of their own, and no relative with whom to stay, they must also bear the cost of hiring a house for the season as well as organising several smart dinner parties and soirées, and at least one ball. It was a huge investment, and this can only have served to heighten the pressure on the girl to fix the interest of a suitable man.

Jane made her début at a royal ‘Drawing Room’ in March 1824, when Lady Andover introduced her daughter to King George IV and the fashionable world. Henceforward Jane was an adult, free to attend adult parties and dances. With her background, connections and appearance, it was inevitable that she would be an immediate success. Her aunt, Eliza Spencer-Stanhope, wrote to the family that her sister, Lady Andover, was ‘graciously’ anticipating imminent conquests.⁶

Vouchers for Almack’s were, of course, forthcoming for Lady Andover and her fledgeling, and Jane was subsequently to be seen at every ball, soirée, rout and dinner party of note. Young admirers wrote poems to her eyes, her shoulders, her guinea-golden curls; and she replied by telling ‘her wooers not to be “so absurd”’.⁷ No new entry truly made an impression unless a nickname attached itself to her; ‘the Dasher’, ‘the White Doe’ and ‘the Incomparable’ were typical. Jane became known as ‘Light of Day’.

The pencil and watercolour sketch made of Jane in 1824 shows her hair springing prettily from her high forehead, curling naturally into small ringlets around her face and coiled into a coronet. Large eyes fringed by thick dark lashes gaze serenely at the viewer and the sweet expression which might otherwise be serious is lifted by curved full lips. What the sketch does not convey is Jane’s colouring; oil portraits show that her hair was a rich tawny gold, her eyes dark violet-blue, and her fine clear skin a delicate pink. The sketch does not portray her figure (described by many diarists as ‘perfect … instinctive with vitality and an incomparable grace of movement)’,⁸ nor that when her pink lips parted her teeth were like ‘flawless pearls’.⁹ She had a roguish smile, a soft light voice and a pleasing modesty which gave way to lively animation once initial shyness had been overcome.

George IV was no longer the handsome Prince Regent of yesteryear but a tired and corpulent old man who walked with a stick. Nevertheless Jane must have enjoyed the thrill of the occasion. She wore the uniform white silk gown of simple cut, high-waisted with tiny puff sleeves, a sweeping train falling from her slim shoulders, long white gloves, and the de rigueur headdress of three white curled ostrich feathers. Small wonder that within days of her daughter’s presentation Lady Andover was so certain of a conquest that it was being noted in family correspondence. Small wonder that within a matter of weeks the youthful admirers who shoaled around Jane were scattered by a shark attracted into Jane’s pool of suitors.

Edward Law, Lord Ellenborough, was no stranger to Jane. She had met him at least once some four years earlier when he had sided with Thomas Coke in opposing the King’s wish to divorce. As a consequence Ellenborough had visited Holkham, though at that time Jane was a mere twelve-year-old occupant of the schoolroom. Now, creditably launched into society, although very young she was considered by many to be one of the catches of the season.

Ellenborough was thirty-four, a widower, childless, and by any standards eligible in the marriage market. He was rich and pleasant-looking, with a polished address, having been educated at Eton (where he was known as ‘Horrid Law’, and generally regarded as ‘prodigious clever’),¹⁰ and Cambridge. He had wanted a military career but his father, a former Lord Chief Justice in the famous post-Pitt ‘All the Talents’ coalition government, forbade it, so he entered the world of politics. By 1824 Edward, who succeeded to the title in 1819, had every anticipation of a Cabinet position. His late wife Octavia had been sister to Lord Castlereagh – Ellenborough’s political mentor – and The Times report of her funeral reflects their status:

At an early hour yesterday, the remains of Lady Ellenborough were removed from his Lordship’s house in Hertford Street, Mayfair. The cavalcade moved at half-past 6, and consisted of four mutes on horseback, six horsemen in black cloaks etc.

The hearse, containing the body enclosed in a coffin covered with superb crimson velvet, elegantly ornamented with silver gilt nails, coronets etc. and with a plate bearing the inscription; ‘Octavia, Lady Ellenborough, daughter of Robert Stewart, Marquis of Londonderry died the 5th of March 1819, aged 27’; was followed by five mourning coaches and four, with several carriages of the nobility etc.¹¹

Five years had passed since Lady Octavia’s untimely death. Meanwhile her brother had become the most hated politician of the day, and ended his life in 1822 by slitting his throat with a penknife. Probably England’s forty years of peace after Napoleon’s downfall owed much to Castlereagh’s period as Foreign Secretary,¹² yet he was so despised that his coffin was greeted with shouts of exultation as he was borne to his grave in Westminster Abbey. Some of that odium still clung to Lord Ellenborough. Further, Ellenborough’s championship in 1820 of the former Queen Caroline’s cause, and a major speech in 1823 during a debate on the King’s Property Bill seeking to reduce George IV’s powers to dispose of Crown property, had permanently alienated his sovereign and made him persona non grata at court. Nevertheless Lord Ellenborough was a rising power in the land, despite whispered hints and rumours that he had some murky secrets in his private life and that he had been refused by several respectable young women.

Jane and Lord Ellenborough met in early April around the time of Jane’s seventeenth birthday, possibly at Almack’s. Less than eight weeks later Ellenborough sought permission from Admiral Digby to address Miss Digby (he always called her Janet) and a week later, on 4 June, Coke’s friend Lord Clare was writing to a mutual acquaintance, ‘I hear Ellenborough is going to be married to Lady Andover’s daughter.’¹³

They were a handsome couple and each had much to offer a partner, but there was an obvious disparity in age and experience. Ellenborough was twice as old as Jane and a friend of her father, though at thirty-four he was hardly the raddled ancient roué that some Digby biographers have implied.¹⁴ The difference in years is anyway of questionable importance when within Jane’s own family there was ample evidence that April could successfully marry December. However, Ellenborough was an ambitious and mature politician who had little time to spare for social obligations unless they might further his work or career, and even less to cherish and instruct – let alone amuse – a child bride. Here was a man who, when obliged to entertain, would inevitably fill his table and his guest rooms with minor members of the royal family, ambassadors and senior politicians.

Jane was a young girl who only a few weeks earlier would have needed her governess’s permission even to ride her horse. This marriage would place her at a stroke in charge of an elevated domestic establishment, hostess to the country’s leaders and responsible for dozens of servants. Jane’s family connections were considerable, but Ellenborough had no need of them to further his career. Perhaps he fell in love with the enchanting girl, or at least was so charmed with her that he was willing to overlook her lack of experience. He desperately wanted an heir and her family had a record of healthy fecundity. It was said that he ‘courted her with the impatience and persistence of an adolescent boy’.¹⁵

That Jane chose to marry Lord Ellenborough when, to judge from her family’s correspondence, she might have chosen a bridegroom nearer her own age is equally surprising. Previous biographers have speculated that Jane was compelled to marry Ellenborough by her parents, but there is no evidence to substantiate this. Jane could twist her father – whom she called ‘darling Babou’ – round the proverbial little finger, as surviving letters show, and it would have been out of character for either of her doting parents to coerce Jane into an unwanted marriage. Furthermore, Jane was so young that, even had she not found a match she liked in her first season, she could have returned again – as many girls did – for a second shot, still not having reached her eighteenth birthday. It seems far more likely that she was flattered by the attentions of an older, experienced man and that she romantically concluded that she was in love with him. This is borne out by poems that the couple sent each other, and by subsequent entries in Jane’s diaries. One of Lord Ellenborough’s poems tells of Jane’s love for him:

O fairest of the many fair

Who ruled, or seemed to rule my heart

The first I have enthroned there

Without a wish my bonds to part.

The thought that I am loved again

And loved by one I can adore,

That I have passed through years of pain

And found the bliss I knew before.

O ’twould have ta’en away my mind

But thy sweet smile a charm has given

And love’s wild ecstasy combined

With deepest gratitude to heaven.¹⁶

His Lordship’s other poems spoke of ‘joy in the present day’ because of her and the bliss of knowing that ‘the next will be yet happier than this … Oh! this is youth and these the dreams of youth … And heaven itself is realised on earth.’¹⁷

During their whirlwind courtship society found a synonym for Jane’s sobriquet ‘Light of Day. ‘Aurora’ was a name with which Jane could not have found fault in view of the fact that her father had once captained a ship of the same name, and it had a pretty sound. However, it was almost certainly intended to be less flattering to her suitor, Jane being cast in the role of Lord Byron’s sixteen-year-old heroine Aurora Raby, with Lord Ellenborough as the debauched, ageing, eponymous subject of the best-selling Don Juan:

there was indeed a certain fair and fairy one

Of the best class and better than her class,

Aurora Raby, a young star who shone

O’er life, too sweet an image for such glass.

A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded,

A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.¹⁸

It was not to be supposed because of the speed of the courtship that the marriage could be held with similar haste. During June the engaged couple enjoyed the last days of the season with its military reviews, balloon ascents, race meets and ridottos. As his fiancée Jane could ride publicly in Lord Ellenborough’s glossy phaeton, with his groom in attendance. She must be introduced to her prospective in-laws, Edward’s sister Elizabeth and his brothers, Charles and Henry. There were also the Londonderrys, his former in-laws, a valuable relationship he wished to maintain. When Lady Andover received a letter from Lady Londonderry congratulating her upon Jane’s betrothal and eulogising Lord Ellenborough,¹⁹ it must have been comforting to know that her cherished daughter was to marry such a paragon.

At the end of July, Edward visited Holkham, where he met the Cokes, Digbys, Ansons and Spencer-Stanhopes.²⁰ It was not his first visit, but Jane must have derived immense pleasure from showing him some of the treasures of the great house, and riding with him in the parkland bordering the beaches. However, Edward and Mr Coke, having once been allies, had now moved apart politically; consequently his future visits to Holkham, and eventually Jane’s own, were few.

Shopping and fittings for the bridal clothes were time-consuming, and Jane must be taken over her future homes – an elegant pillared and porticoed town-house in Connaught Place, whose rear windows today overlook Marble Arch, and Elm Grove, Lord Ellenborough’s country house at Roehampton near Richmond.²¹ Yet somehow, during this time, Jane must have been instructed in her duties as chatelaine, for, although she would have had domestic instruction as she grew up, she would have had little reason to put such knowledge to practical use. Her mother wrote a treatise, which subsequently served as a model for other brides-to-be within the Coke family, upon the qualities requisite for ‘members of the household’, including that most valuable servant, the Lady’s maid:

Essentials for a Lady’s maid

She must not have a will of her own in anything, & always be good-humoured and approve of everything her mistress likes. She must not have an appetite … or care when or how she dines, how often disturbed, or even if she has no dinner at all. She had better not drink anything but water.

She must run the instant she is called whatever she is about. Morning, noon and night she must not mind going without sleep if her mistress requires her attendance. She must not require high wages nor expect profit from old clothes but be ready to turn and clean them … for her mistress, and be satisfied with two old gowns for herself. She must be a first-rate vermin catcher.

She must be clean and sweet … let her not venture to make a complaint or difficulty of any kind. If so, she had better go at once.²²

Few of Jane’s papers from this period survive and her journal is not among them. We know, however, that her parents were delighted with the match, and that Steely approved also. But there were some dissensions, notably among Ellenborough’s political opponents. One could not accuse the Duke of Wellington’s chère amie, Harriet Arbuthnot, of political bias, however, when she wrote that ‘Ellenborough having flirted and made himself ridiculous with all the girls in London now marries Miss Digby … she is very fair, very young and very pretty.’²³ The diarist Thomas Creevey, who was a close friend of Jane’s aunt Lady Anson and knew Ellenborough well, wrote:

Lady Anson goes to town next week to be present at the wedding of her niece, the pretty ‘Aurora; Light of Day’ Miss Digby … who is going to be married to Lord Ellenborough. It was Miss Russell who refused Ld Ellenborough, as many others besides are said to have done. Lady Anson will have it that he was a very good husband to his first wife, but all my impressions are that he is a dammed fellow.²⁴

Lady Holland wrote to her son that Ellenborough ‘has at last succeeded in getting a young wife, a poor girl who has not seen anything of the world. He could only snap up such a one … she is granddaughter of Mr Coke who has another son!’²⁵ Thus she broke the news that Jane’s grandfather had the felicity of a spare for his cherished heir. However, Lady Holland’s views on Lord Ellenborough were politically jaundiced; she disliked him intensely and openly held the opinion that he was impotent.²⁶

In August, Ellenborough noted in his diary that he had ‘dined with Janet at the Duke’s’. The Duke of Wellington’s London home was Apsley House, near Hyde Park. It was a huge formal dinner with many notables present, all much older than Jane. Ellenborough was clearly pleased at the manner in which Jane conducted herself in such august company.²⁷

The day designated for the marriage was 15 September 1824, some five months after their meeting in London. The venue was not, as might be supposed, the chapel at Holkham; with a new son only three weeks old, Jane’s step-grandmother could not accommodate a wedding party. Jane was married to Edward at her parents’ London house, as an entry in the register of the Parish of St Marylebone shows:

The Right Honourable Edward Lord Ellenborough, a Widower, and Jane Elizabeth Digby, Spinster, a minor, were married by Special Licence at 78 Harley Street by and with the consent of Henry Digby Esquire, Rear Admiral in His Majesty’s Navy, the natural and lawful father of the said minor, this fifteenth day of September.²⁸

It was not unusual for a society marriage to be conducted in a private home. Slightly more unusual, perhaps, was that it was performed in a secular venue by a bishop, Edward’s uncle, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The court pages reveal that the happy couple sped off to Brighton for the honeymoon where, as Jane recalled many years later, a wholly satisfactory wedding night followed.²⁹

3 Lady Ellenborough 1825–1827

The honeymoon in Brighton lasted a mere three weeks and Lord Ellenborough was back at work in October. During the following period, though busy with affairs of great moment, he still found time to write poetry to his bride. The epithet ‘Juliet’ was only used in the first months of their marriage, probably as an allusion to Jane’s youth. Jane had a pet name for her husband – ‘Oussey’ – but in all surviving correspondence between the two she signed herself ‘Janet’, except in the following exchange:

Oh Juliet, if to have no fear

But that of deserving thee,

To know no peace when thou art near

No joy thou can’st not share with me

If still to feel a lover’s fire

And love thee more the more prospect,

To have on earth but one desire

Of making thee completely blest!

If this be passion, thou alone

Canst make my heart such passion know.

Love me but still, as thou hast done,

And I will ever love thee so.

Ellenborough, 12 November 1824

To which his bride of two months readily replied within twenty-four hours:

‘To love thee still as I have done’

Say, is it all thou ask of me?

Thou has it then, for thou alone

Reign in the soul that breathes for thee.

Edward, for thee alone I sigh

And feel a love unknown before

What bliss is mine when thou art nigh

Oh loved one still, I ask no more

As thou art now, oh ever be

To her whose fate in thine is bound

Whose greatest joy is loving thee

Whose bliss in thee alone is found.

And she will ever thee adore

From day to day with ardour new

Both now and to life’s latest hour

With passion, felt alas! … by few.

Juliet, 13 November 1824

Those words ‘whose greatest joy is loving thee’ hardly reinforce the image of a girl coerced into an unwanted marriage, nor charges that the marriage was a failure from the day of the wedding, and these facts are important in view of what was to follow. Visitors to Elm Grove found the couple happy together and living in terms of open affection.¹ They rode out together most mornings when Edward was at Roehampton, often across Richmond Park.² Joseph Jekyll, who visited the Ellenboroughs just before Christmas, wrote: ‘I dined and slept … at Roehampton to be presented by Lord Ellenborough to his bride. Very pretty, but quite a girl, twenty years younger than himself³ … The general subject was his lordship’s lamentation at being called away so frequently from his beautiful wife by debates and politics.’⁴

The poetry and literary love-making during Ellenborough’s absences continued for months, whenever Ellenborough was away from Jane, and some, such as the following extract from a poem written on New Year’s Day 1825 while he was staying at Boldrewood in Hampshire with Lord Lyndhurst, the Attorney-General and a close friend, is illuminating:

My bride! For thou art still a bride to me

And loved with all the passion of a soul

Which gave itself at once, nor would be free …

Yet I have had a roving eye, till now,

And gazed around on every lovely face

And still would, all enthralled to beauty, bow

But ne’er in fairest features could I trace

The sympathetic smile, and winning grace

Which beam aloft on thy illumined brow

And every thought of others is effaced

In dreams of bliss which heaven’s behests allow

So wedded truth alone, and love’s unbroken vow,

Ellenborough

Unless this poem came as a shock to her it seems that Jane was aware of Ellenborough’s reputation as a womaniser; he freely admits that he is still a potential rover were he not in love with his wife and her sympathetic smile and winning grace.

During her husband’s many absences Jane was initially content to get to know her new homes and learn the ordering of them. Steely was a visitor to Roehampton several times, as were Lady Andover and Lady Anson. Nor was Roehampton far from London, should Jane have felt the want of company. Once the 1825 season started, though, Jane removed to town and immediately her name featured regularly in the court page of the Morning Post as guest of socially prominent hostesses, often – but not always – accompanied by her husband, and also as the hostess herself of several formal dinners and a ball.

As the year wore on, however, hairline cracks began to appear in the fabric of the marriage. Lady Londonderry had earlier commended her former son-in-law for the five years of happiness he had given her late daughter, and Ellenborough’s biographers claim that the first Lady Ellenborough, Octavia, was the love of his life. Ellenborough is on record as saying that in his opinion whatever good he had done in his life was due to his first wife.⁵ Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Jane, feeling rejected by her husband’s frequent absences and hurt by his apparent coolness, attributed the neglect not to his work but to his love for the dead Octavia.

In a poem to him, written about the time of the first anniversary of their wedding, answering Edward’s comment on her ‘lack of gaiety’, she asked his forgiveness for her jealous fears that Octavia ‘thy love of former years still reigns, while every thought and wish of mine is breathed for thee alone’. Beyond doubt she believed herself in love with her husband when she asked plaintively, ‘did her passion equal mine? Her joy the same when thou art near? And if not present did she pine?’

And here I am the fond, the young,

The blest in all that earth can give,

By men beloved, by lovers sung,

Yet silent, loveworn do I grieve.⁶

Why did this marriage, which had begun so well, run into trouble so quickly? On the face of it Jane had everything most women of her world could have wished: love, wealth and social position. At least Edward’s poetry proclaimed love, and whatever his faults he was always generous. Jane had a ‘pin-money’ allowance that her female relatives regarded with envy,⁷ and on their marriage he presented her with a green leather box of family jewels. Even a year after their marriage he habitually returned from short absences with a costly gift of jewellery such as the emeralds for which Lady Ellenborough became envied. However, it becomes clear from her diary in later years that these gifts were not appreciated by Jane as much as would have been a display of warmth from her husband.⁸

During the London season it was inconceivable that she would not attract the attention of admiring young men prepared to offer a solace her husband could not or would not give. Ellenborough might have smiled at the stir his wife created whenever she appeared in company, indeed basked in the thought that he possessed what other men so desired. Or he may have been so preoccupied and immersed in his work that he did not notice that the only time his bored young wife came to life was when she was the adored centrepiece of a crowd of young men.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Jane began to move away from her husband, in fantasy if not in deed. The next poem is almost certainly about George Anson, and was written after the visit of a horseman whom, at first sight from a distance, Jane mistook for her cousin. She recalled his winning look and had to ‘quell each rebel sigh’ at the thought of him. But then loyalty to Edward overtook her fantasy:

I may not think, I will not pause

One look behind my faith to shake.

Henceforth must buried be the past

Nor in my heart shall e’er awake

Its echo, for dear Edward’s sake.⁹

So far as one can take this surviving written work as evidence of the pattern of their marriage, it is possible to conclude that Jane felt neglected by her husband and believed he no longer loved her. Given Ellenborough’s age and disposition, and Jane’s lively but romantically inclined personality, such a situation was always probable. Had she confided in her mother or Steely, she would undoubtedly have been advised to accept that Edward must be about his business. It would be wrong, however, not to produce another piece of the jigsaw at this stage. Edward had a mistress, and within six months of the marriage Jane apparently discovered a portrait of this woman in their home.¹⁰

At this point, although the couple clearly had problems, the marriage survived a potential crisis. The Ellenboroughs spent some weeks in Paris during the autumn of 1825,¹¹ and, at least to observers who would later testify to the fact, all seemed perfectly normal. In the following April, when seen by a member of the family at an early season ball, she was ‘on the arm of her Lord looking devastatingly handsome in black velvet and diamonds’.¹² Two nights later she was noted by Mrs Arbuthnot at a Spanish ball held at the Opera House, where the company ‘Polonaised all around … Lady Ellenborough looked quite beautiful … it was altogether as magnificent a fete as I ever saw.’¹³ No event of any note, it seems, was held without the presence of this lovely young woman. And she was never without her crowd of male admirers. At the end of the season the couple spent several weeks in Brighton, staying at the Norfolk Hotel in a suite which they habitually engaged for regular visits to the seaside town.

The appearance of serenity was, however, a front. The eighteen-year-old Jane, still more child than woman, left more and more in her own company, was inexorably sucked into the glittering and sophisticated world of the European diplomatic set, to whom she had first been proudly introduced as Ellenborough’s fiancée. They were Edward’s friends and now they were hers too. She was intelligent enough to see that their rules on behaviour were not those of her own family, but it seemed to her that if these highly regarded people behaved in such a manner then she too could play by their rules. Her husband’s infidelity may have caused the new note of defiance in her conduct.

Jane’s activities were remarked by friends of the family, who were concerned that the young woman should be given a hint in order to correct any danger of being thought ‘fast’. Predictably, when her parents remonstrated with her, Jane defended herself vigorously, provoking an estrangement with her father which lasted some months.¹⁴ Steely spoke to her and, receiving no satisfactory response, took the matter up with Lady Anson. This conversation caused George Anson to be charged with keeping an eye on his young cousin, escorting Jane about town and guarding her reputation. It was an unfortunate commission. That summer, only two years after her marriage, Jane embarked upon a romantic liaison that had been waiting in the wings, so to speak, for several years.

George Anson was ten years older than Jane, yet they had known each other for ever. Perhaps he had not recognised the hero-worship of his pretty cousin that had begun when he returned as a handsome eighteen-year-old subaltern from the battlefield of Waterloo. Three years later, when Jane was still only twelve, Anson had just been elected to Parliament as the Member for South Staffordshire.¹⁵ He quickly became acknowledged by men of character as a likeable sprig and ‘a top sawyer’, despite a well-earned reputation for womanising.¹⁶ ‘George Anson is to have all the married women of good character in London this year,’ wrote one to another good-naturedly. ‘And so he ought, for he is the best looking man I know.’¹⁷

In fact, in his first years in town George was in one scrape after another, tipping a boatload of cronies into the Thames near Kingston, getting drunk, behaving outrageously with older women.¹⁸ He was believed to be the organiser of the famous quadrille at Almack’s in which both George and the lady he would later marry danced together all evening, to the irritation of many matrons:

I went two nights ago to a costume ball at Almack’s. It was all very brilliant and there was a quadrille that was beautiful. All the prettiest girls in London were in it … the men were in Regimentals and each wore a bouquet. The quadrille, however, gave great offence for they danced together all night and took the upper end of the room which was considered a great impertinence.¹⁹

But Anson’s pranks were conducted with such innocent good humour and unselfconscious charm that he was instantly forgiven, particularly by women, who fell at his feet in droves. He was a cracking horseman and could drive a carriage ‘to an inch’; he was also one of the best shots in England.²⁰

Jane had been a pretty schoolgirl with a schoolgirl crush on him, but, as they both grew older, on two counts – her being a virgin and a member of his own family – she was strictly forbidden territory to George. He was used to tougher meat, his name being linked by both Creevey and Mrs Arbuthnot with the fastest women in town: in particular, the young Duchess of Rutland and Mrs Fox Lane, who, though the latter was considerably older than he, were both said to be his lovers.²¹

In the summer of 1926 it was a different matter. Jane was a married woman and therefore a ‘safe’ target by the code of the day. She was among the most desirable women in London, her virginal sweetness having given way to a slim voluptuousness guaranteed to turn men’s heads. It was perfectly acceptable for George to escort his first cousin Jane to functions in the absence of her busy husband. George, as well as serving in several political posts, was now a colonel in the Guards, and Jane was delighted to have such a handsome and personable chaperon.

They were seen together often, at Almack’s, at the races, at a fireworks party. Almost certainly the affair began perfectly innocently with the touch of hands or a snatched kiss; but at some point it became something else. Two handsome young people, both with a healthy libido – ‘Oh it is heaven to love thee,’ she wrote, and ‘rapture to be near thee.’ If he only felt half the joy she experienced, then, ‘what ecstasy is thine!’ He swore undying love; she countered that he might – at some time in the future, when her beauty had gone – be seduced by others. Still, she claimed, she would be true to him, for ‘though all righteous heaven above, / Forbids this rebel heart to love, / To love is still its fate.’²²

Gone now was all her resolution of quelling her ‘rebel sighs, for Edward’s sake’. She flung herself into the affair with passionate involvement. Such a remarkable couple could not escape attention; indeed, they were frequently mentioned in contemporary correspondence, and featured on the same guest lists of court pages, but at this stage there were no raised eyebrows and no gossip, because the pair were reasonably discreet. At Roehampton there was a side-door to the house from the garden which was little used and consequently kept locked. Jane gave the key to George so that he could come and go at night during Edward’s absences, without the servants seeing him.²³

At the same time, in a more public manner, and to the sustained disapproval not only of her parents but also of Steely (who visited Roehampton every two months or so as a friend of the family), Jane infiltrated deeper into the set of cynical, worldly men and women who, while considered by many to constitute the haul ton, the people of high fashion, were not at all suitable companions for a girl of nineteen. They included at least a brace of Almack’s Patronesses – Princess Esterhazy, the wife of the Austrian Ambassador, and Princess de Lieven, the haughty and imperious wife of the Russian Ambassador – as well as other leading members of the diplomatic set who were also the intimates of the King in the so-called ‘Cottage Clique’.²⁴ All were regular dinner guests at Lord Ellenborough’s London house and at Roehampton, and their reciprocated hospitality was accepted by both Edward and Jane.

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

The Ellenboroughs’ close friendship with the Russian and Austrian ambassadors and their wives meant that Jane was a frequent guest at embassy balls. It was at one such ball at the Austrian embassy, in May 1828, shortly after her twenty-first birthday, that Jane’s life was changed for ever. Her son’s godmother, Princess Esterhazy, introduced her on a warm early-summer evening, when the lilac trees in London squares were drenched in rain and heady scent, to Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, the newly arrived, darkly handsome attaché and secretary to Prince Esterhazy.

Prince Felix Ludvig Johann Friedrich zu Schwarzenberg was a member of one of the great aristocratic families of Europe. Born the fourth child and second son of a happy marriage, he grew up at Schloss Krumlov, one of the most beautiful and romantic castles in Bohemia, situated amid dense forests on rocks overlooking the River Vltava. His father’s holdings of land amounted to half a million acres over which the family ruled in an almost feudal manner.¹²

The name Schwarzenberg was already familiar in London and Paris for the exploits of Felix’s uncle, Field Marshal Karl Philipp Schwarzenberg, Commander-in-Chief of the Austrian forces ranged against Napoleon at Leipzig; and no less for the tragic story of Felix’s mother Princess Pauline who died at a state banquet given in Paris to honour Napoleon and Marie-Louise in 1810. When the building caught fire everyone was successfully ushered to safety, but a false report that her daughters were trapped in their bedchambers sent Princess Pauline flying back inside to rescue them. When they found her body next day, crushed by a fallen roof beam, all that was recognisable in the charred remains was her diamond necklace.¹³

By the age of twenty-one, Felix had attained the rank of captain in a cavalry regiment bearing his family name (the Schwarzenberg Uhlans). After catching the eye of the self-appointed kingmaker, Prince Metternich, Felix joined the Austrian Diplomatic Corps. His first assignment was to the legation at St Petersburg where the Tsar was a friend of his father.¹⁴ Unfortunately, he became innocently involved in the Dekabrist revolt of army officers attempting to overthrow the Tsar’s government – a minor embarrassment which made it politically expedient to transfer him to another post. He was sent to Portugal to prepare for the arrival of Dom Miguel, Metternich’s choice for King. Dom Miguel was not the choice of the people, however, and Prince Felix subsequently found himself very unpopular, on one occasion being stoned by a mob from which he was lucky to escape without serious injury. He stuck to his post, regardless of unpopularity and, once Dom Miguel was safely installed in 1826, Felix was sent via Paris to London, where he took a ship for Rio de Janeiro on a special mission.¹⁵ He was subsequently appointed as attaché to London in May 1828.

At the time he met Lady Ellenborough, Prince Felix was twenty-seven years old, handsome, dashing and accomplished. Highly intelligent, he was an excellent linguist, speaking fluent German, Czech, French, English, Latin and Spanish. He studied anatomy and, to judge from remarks by his biographer, it is probable that he was a natural healer.¹⁶ Felix was a music lover with a good voice, who wrote musical comedies to entertain his friends.¹⁷ ‘He was’, wrote one contemporary, ‘artless … and kind and friendly,’¹⁸ and according to his friend Count Rodolphe Apponyi, the Hungarian-Austrian diplomat and diarist, he was witty and amusing to be with.¹⁹ On that night at the Russian embassy ball Jane knew only that the prince smiled down into her eyes with uncomplicated admiration, waltzed as only someone who had learned to waltz in Vienna could, and held her attention to an extent that made her forget, for a while, her wretchedness over George Anson.

Even Schwarzenberg’s biographer, who had no good word for Jane, admitted grudgingly that, as soon as the prince laid eyes on Jane, ‘it was love at first sight in the Byron style.’²⁰ Jane was attracted but not smitten. It was the prince who laid siege to Jane with flowers, poems and notes. Wherever Jane went, the prince managed to be, and soon she was seen in his company, as she had previously been seen in George’s, riding with him in Rotten Row, in his cabriolet at the races, waltzing at Almack’s, in his box at the opera, walking round the Zoological Park on his arm.²¹ To find herself so courted and so desired after her lover’s seemingly callous desertion and her husband’s indifference was balm to Jane’s wounded spirit. Despite initial discretion it was quickly apparent to interested members of society that Lady Ellenborough had exchanged her regular escort, Colonel Anson, for the handsome foreign prince. It suited Jane’s hurt pride that society assumed the change was by her own choice, but her poetry confirms that she was not yet in love with the prince.

The 1828 Derby, held shortly after Jane met Felix, was narrowly won by the Duke of Rutland’s Cadland, with the King’s horse, The Colonel, which started favourite, finishing in second place. It seemed excruciatingly amusing when Felix suddenly acquired the nickname ‘Cadland’, because, as the fashionable world tittered, ‘he had beat the Colonel’ out of Jane’s affections. Later Cadland was shortened to ‘Cad’. In that form it has been passed down to the present day as a synonym for ungentlemanly behaviour – not surprisingly, given the prince’s subsequent conduct.

In June, several Harley Street residents noted a striking girl visiting number 73, a house that had been taken by Prince Schwarzenberg and Count Moritz Dietrichstein,²² two young attachés from the Austrian embassy. There was no reason why Jane should not be seen walking in Harley Street. Her parents’ home at number 86 was a mere hundred yards away at the opposite end of the block. The Ellenborough town-house at Connaught Place was a fifteen-minute stroll along Oxford Street, or a five-minute drive by horse and carriage. Jane’s carriage was an elegant small green phaeton, drawn by two long-tailed black horses which, being an able whip, she habitually drove herself. She was always accompanied by a groom, a fifteen-year-old boy dressed in Lord Ellenborough’s livery of drab olive with blue-lined facings and a top hat with a band of silver lace. This boy often stood about in the afternoon, holding the horses while he waited for his mistress, who visited a house a few steps away on the corner of Queen Anne Street and Harley Street.

One resident who lived opposite saw the young woman several times through the window of the first-floor drawing-room. As the summer wore on, her visits became more frequent, often three or four times a week, and the neighbours noticed with heightened interest that sometimes she came on foot, and started wearing a veil. Her phaeton was spotted in adjacent streets, sometimes Wimpole Street, sometimes Portland Place. Several times she left her carriage in Cavendish Square and walked past her parents’ house to number 73, and on a few occasions she came by hackney coach.²³

But it was not until many months later that Jane would be able to write of recovery from the depression over what she called George’s ‘betrayal’, though it is difficult to see what he could have done given their situation. Even then she could not accept that George could apparently forget her so finally and transfer his affections so quickly. At length she came to realise that their youthful love had been perhaps no more than ‘the bright creation of a heated brain’, and that her ‘idolisation’ of him had been misplaced. ‘Now’, she wrote, ‘another love inflames my lonely heart’, and this new love promised ‘far, far higher ecstasy’. At last, she wrote, there was ‘sun in a breast which else were cold’.²⁴

Prince Felix courted Jane hotly throughout the summer. In the early part of their relationship it was he who set the pace, he who fretted when she could not meet him or went away with her husband. At the end of July, when society decamped to the country, Jane was due to leave town for a short stay at Roehampton before a visit to Cowes in early August. The diplomat diarist, Count Rodolphe Apponyi, wrote of dining with Felix at the Esterhazys’ and finding the prince very preoccupied because Jane was due to leave town within a few days. ‘This did not suit him and consequently he was in a very bad humour.’²⁵

But the prince was to see Jane several times before she left, once in the park, where they rode their horses together, and again on the evening of the same day at a masked ball given by Lady Londonderry, Ellenborough’s former mother-in-law.²⁶ The Londonderrys’ town-house was very grand and had formerly belonged to the late Queen Caroline. It was here, among a vast glittering throng, that Count Apponyi was to meet for the first time the lady whose imminent departure was causing his old friend Felix Schwarzenberg such dejection. Guests were dressed magnificently in historical costume. As they were announced, each had to curtsy or bow to their hostess, who, in the guise of Queen Elizabeth I, graciously inclined her head in greeting. To some the hostess showed individual favour and, since she had met Apponyi in Paris, Lady Londonderry went to some pains to introduce the count to as many people of influence as she could:

among all these people, one lady in particular attracted my attention. It was Lady Ellenborough, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Nineteen years of age [sic], with fair hair, a magnificent complexion, large blue eyes and the figure of a nymph, she is everything that is desirable. It is she whom Schwarzenberg adores, and I lost no time being introduced. I was not overawed by her intellect, it is true, but one cannot have everything. The expression on her face is sweet, as is her voice, and her whole personality exudes an indefinable air of modesty and decorum which I found ravishing.

The coldness and formality of first acquaintances did not last long between us. She spoke to me very freely about her husband, whom she accuses of being jealous, and of not understanding her. This is what she likes to say, but in reality I think that Lord Ellenborough, preoccupied with the duties of his position, has no time to give good advice to his young wife.

… I had already danced with Lady Ellenborough when Schwarzenberg arrived. Madame did not reveal that she had danced with me and instructed him to engage me with her for the first waltz which I accepted with great pleasure. I was so preoccupied with dancing and with my partner that I had to endure reproaches from all the ladies I know whom I had not yet approached.²⁷

It is strange that Jane complained to Apponyi of Edward being ‘jealous’ when his coolness towards Jane was so marked that it was noticed by a number of writers, contemporary and later, with the added explanation that he was totally dedicated to his work. But despite Apponyi’s excuses for Jane’s husband it would be fair to say that Ellenborough too had his share of extramarital diversions. He had at this time two mistresses that are known about and contemporary gossip speaks of another. One was the Countess St Antonio, an aristocratic member of the set to which Jane’s parents so objected. The other, ‘a very pretty girl’, according to Joseph Jekyll, was ‘the pastry-cook’s daughter at Brighton who Ellenborough preferred to his bride’; she was also referred to in The Times as a ‘confectioner’s daughter’.

The latter allegedly had a child by him and, being cast off in disgrace by her family, might have starved had not Lord Ellenborough finally been shamed into providing support for the mother and child under threat of exposure – or so said the equivalent of today’s tabloid press.²⁸ Since Jekyll’s gossip was written in 1829 after the birth of Jane’s child, it is probable that the term ‘bride’ was being used figuratively rather than literally. Whoever she was, the ‘pastry-cook’s daughter’ was the on dit in London that winter and there is even evidence that Jane may have met this young woman. In her notebook Jane wrote the first line of a poem, ‘Ah! Wert thou, love, but all thou seemed …’ She got no further than the first line but she scribbled underneath, in the ‘secret code’ she had used since her childhood, the explanation that she had written it ‘on meeting the poor woman who called on my lord’.²⁹

The Ellenboroughs officially ‘quit town’ at the end of the season, but Edward continued to use the town-house as a base when he was detained in London for reasons of work. Jane, in summer residence at Roehampton, was therefore free to meet Felix by prior arrangement. Each morning she rode out with her young groom, William Carpenter. Sometimes she rode as far as Wimbledon Common, and there, at the old windmill, she met Felix. One wet and windy day when the prince could not keep his appointment he sent his groom, who handed Jane a letter. The two grooms watched from a distance as Jane read the letter and placed it back in the envelope with a red rose which she had brought with her. She handed the envelope to the prince’s groom and told him to return it to his master.³⁰

Given Jane’s immature romanticism and her self-confessed rebellious nature, these illicit trysts, so eagerly sought by the inflamed Prince Schwarzenberg, must have in themselves been a major attraction to her. Thwarted lovers, a handsome prince and a beautiful girl, meeting in secret, with all the sweet sadness the frequent partings inevitably brought about, was the stuff of the romantic novels that Steely loved. Sometimes when they met and rode together they stopped at inns and hotels, such as the Castle at Richmond.³¹ Jane had the utmost confidence in her youthful groom, for he was always present to see to her horse. By the time summer slid into autumn she had ceased to think of the relationship as a flirtation; she was deeply, passionately in love, and this time she had the delight of knowing that her chosen partner loved her equally. Jane had fought the feeling at first, not because of Edward – she had already released her hold on that relationship – but fearing to let go of her girlish adoration of George Anson. But it dawned on her that the glow she felt whenever the prince was near was love. Gradually her affair with George became as a candle to the sun of the emotions she began to experience. When she was with Felix she felt whole and alive; at other times she looked for him everywhere she went, and thought only of him and the next time they would be together. Gone was any thought of the discretion she had employed in her affair with Anson; she spoke openly of her love to anyone who cared to listen. According to one acquaintance,

Lady Ellenborough … tells everybody she meets the whole history, and it is a long one, of her and Schwarzenberg. Any indifferent person by whom she sits at dinner is sure to get up intimately acquainted with every circumstance related to their intercourse. How she drives to Schwarzenberg’s lodgings, and how Dietrichstein, who lodges with him, sees her. What they do together, how often they have been in Schwarzenberg’s cabriolet to the White House in Soho Square etc. How she meets Ellenborough, as she walks the streets, who intent on high matters does not know her.

And then she concludes with most amiable naïveté by exciting indignation against George Anson who is so ‘uncivil and unkind. Do you know he is gone out of town without giving me up the key to the secret door at Roehampton though I asked him so often for it.’³²

What Jane related to her cronies was that on most weekday afternoons when she was in town she called at 73 Harley Street in her carriage. If Dietrichstein was at home he quickly made his excuses and left. The lovers would spend an hour or two together. Several times she rode there accompanied by her groom, who returned her horse to the stables off Portman Square; when Jane and Felix subsequently left his house they drove off together in his cabriolet.

Sometimes they called on friends such as Princess Esterhazy upon whose discretion they believed they could rely. On at least one occasion they drove together to the house of Felix’s colleague, the Count St Antonio, whose wife was widely rumoured to be Lord Ellenborough’s mistress. Jane’s carriage had been ordered to meet her fifty yards from the countess’s gate, where she transferred to it and drove up the drive to the entrance. Felix ‘arrived’ five minutes afterwards. When they left at ten o’clock that night Felix drove out and waited for her carriage to catch up. Jane then joined him in his closed chaise and they travelled to within a short distance of Elm Grove, where he handed her out and she returned home in her own carriage, while he continued on to London.

But mostly, unless they met in public, their meetings were confined to 73 Harley Street, when always, whether clothed in a walking dress or riding habit, she wore a light veil over her face. This was not regarded as unusual; many fashionable women lowered veils to protect their complexions. Indeed, a lady’s magazine of the day warned its readers that the complexion could be discoloured by moonlight as well as sunlight.

Towards the end of 1828, an observant neighbour glanced across the street into the house opposite and saw the veiled visitor in Prince Schwarzenberg’s arms. A door behind them had been left open, letting in light behind them. How long the neighbour stayed glancing across the street he did not say, but it was long enough to notice that the prince was dressing himself, and subsequently laced up the lady’s stays.³³

It would be easy to write off Jane’s behaviour as that of a promiscuous woman deceiving her busy husband. But to sit in judgement one must also take into consideration that her conduct was no better or worse than that of her husband and their closest friends of both sexes. Jane regarded the attachment as more than a casual love affair, which was, for her, sufficient justification. That she did not choose to conceal her relationship with Felix, indeed that she broadcast her feelings so openly that it was almost guaranteed to get back to her husband, was certainly a departure from the norm. But Jane went even further. Her love for Felix had now made sexual intercourse with Edward abhorrent. So, giving as her reason the fact that she did not care to have another child, she told Edward that in future she wished to sleep alone.³⁴

Her poems to ‘F.S.’ passionately denied that her feelings for him were a passing fancy, as he had suggested to her; ‘Oh say not that my love will pass … my love is not the love of one who feels a passion for a day.’³⁵ Felix had already been warned by his ambassador to be more discreet. Prince Esterhazy was visiting Dietrichstein one day when Jane called at 73 Harley Street and, seeing her husband’s friend in the hall, chatted to him ‘without a shade of embarrassment’ before going up to Felix’s rooms.³⁶ After an informal admonishment Felix moved from the house in Harley Street to a similar one in nearby Holles Street, and the meetings between the lovers went on as before.

By this time everyone, except – apparently – Edward, was talking about ‘Ellenboriana’.³⁷ Joseph Jekyll, who took a puckish delight in reporting scandalous gossip to his sister-in-law Lady Sloane Stanley, was a little behind with the news when he wrote, ‘Torrents of scandal afloat! They call Schwarzenberg “Cadlands” because he beat the Colonel out of Lady Ellenborough’s good graces. It is added that she talks openly of her loves.’³⁸ From their correspondence, on the other hand, it seems certain that the Digbys, Cokes and Ansons found the situation between Jane and the prince not amusing at all.³⁹

However, at this point another family matter removed Jane from centre-stage. Earlier that year George Anson’s younger brother Henry, accompanied by his friend John Fox Strangways, had set out on an extended Grand Tour of Europe, the Holy Land and the Near-Middle East. With only three years separating them, Henry was the cousin to whom Jane had been closest in the years growing up at Holkham. She was as anguished as anyone in the family when news came that the two men had perished of the plague in Syria.

In fact Fox Strangways survived. The two young men had entered a mosque in Aleppo disguised as Muslims, but foolishly neglected to remove their shoes. They were set upon and beaten by a mob who deeply resented the intrusion by Christians into their sacred place. The two Englishmen were then flung into a prison, where they languished in appalling conditions before diplomatic persuasion was able to effect their release. Their incarceration in a cell below ground with only a pinprick of light was at least cool during the worst of the day’s heat, but the prisoners were given the barest of rations, and water whose source was dubious. Sanitary arrangements were non-existent, and many of the inmates were ill.

Their eventual release came too late for Henry Anson, who having contracted the plague was already a dying man. Strangways assisted him from the prison and they walked as far as a field on the outskirts of Aleppo, where Anson lay down, unable to move further. Strangways did what he could for his stricken friend, but Anson died before medical aid arrived. The manner of his death was rendered more horrible to all the family by virtue of its being in such a far-off place. Syria might have been on a different planet, so far removed from their lives was that alien country. More than a quarter of a century later Jane would stand at the site of Henry’s death, recalling her childhood friend.

The tragic news at least effected a reunion between Jane and George when she went to pay a duty call on her Aunt Anson, who was staying at Holkham. The cousins had seen little of each other during the past months, for Felix was jealous of George.⁴⁰ He had no cause for jealousy, as Jane’s final poem to George Anson shows; it was written while she and her parents stayed at Holkham over Christmas, and he at his parents’ home in the neighbouring county.

I’ll meet thee at sunset, but not by the bower

Where with thee I’ve gathered love’s gory, torn flower,

Since that would be only recalling to mind

Bright visions of pleasures now left far behind.

What tho’ the cold stoic proclaim it as mystery

The feelings of youth are as lasting as history

And the rays with which love has once lit up the heart

May fade for a while but they cannot depart.

Then come, but come not with the accent of love,

I would not its echo reply from the groves

Oh! Come as if all, save old friendships, were o’er

And, – I’ll meet thee at sunset once more.⁴¹

They were bound to each other now more by grief for Henry than by their child. For Arthur was undoubtedly George’s son and not Edward’s. Jane openly said so, as a friend wrote to a correspondent in the country:

The other day Belfast was riding with Lady Ellenborough and said to her ‘Do you see much of your child?’ ‘No,’ was her answer. ‘It would grieve Felix if I was to see much of George’s child …!!! ‘⁴²

Nine-month-old Arthur had been poorly with a respiratory complaint. In November he had been sent off to Brighton with his nursemaid and nanny for three months’ convalescence. His parents visited him in January and a month later, having been advised that her son was doing well, Jane decided to drive down and spend a night there before bringing the little boy home to Roehampton.

She reserved a suite at the Norfolk Hotel, where she and Edward always stayed when in Brighton. Felix also reserved a room there. The opportunity to spend a night together was irresistible. The date was carefully chosen; Ellenborough’s day was fully committed to a parliamentary debate, and furthermore he had a dinner engagement that evening.

On 6 February 1829, Jane travelled down to Brighton in a closed chaise, accompanied by her maid Anna Gove; Felix was only a short distance behind. The going was heavy on the unmade-up road because of the seasonal heavy rains, so it took longer than usual. By prior arrangement, the horses were changed at the halfway point and left at a livery stable for collection on the return journey.⁴³ Every mile of that journey took Jane inexorably closer to ultimate disaster.

5 Assignation in Brighton 1829–1830

Jane arrived at the Norfolk Hotel just as the winter light was fading at about five o’clock. She was shown to the suite of apartments in the east wing which she and her husband often used. Entrance from the main part of the hotel was by a private staircase which led nowhere else other than to some staff quarters. Arthur was brought to her and, as babies will, having not seen his mother for some weeks threw a tantrum. A little later Jane dashed off a quick note to Ellenborough at Roehampton:

Brighton, Friday night

[postmarked 7 February 1829]

To Lord Ellenborough

Connaught Place, London

Dearest Oussey,

I am just arrived, and will only write you one line as I am tired to death with my journey, the roads were so very heavy. I found Arthur looking really pretty – you may believe it if I say so – and appears to me much improved in strength, but he greeted me with such a howl!! We shall improve upon acquaintance.

If you go to Mrs Hope’s tonight, have the thought to make my ’scuses to save me the trouble of writing them.

The post is ringing –

Good night, dearest

Janet¹

Felix arrived at the hotel between six and seven o’clock in a hired yellow-bodied chariot driven by a post-boy. He alighted from the coach carrying his cloak and a carpet-bag which bore his coat of arms and initials, and was shown to a room in the west wing. This room was approached by the centre stairway from the main hall of the hotel. Having settled in and had his luggage unpacked by a member of the hotel staff, he took dinner in his private sitting-room and as the waiter was clearing away he asked casually who else was staying in the hotel at this unseasonal time of year. He was told that Lady Ellenborough was in residence. ‘Is that the dowager Lady Ellenborough?’ the prince enquired. ‘No,’ was the answer. ‘It is the young Lady Ellenborough.’² The prince asked the waiter to take his card to the lady with his compliments.

Within a short time the waiter returned to the prince with the message that the lady would be delighted if, after the prince had dined, he would take tea with her in her room. The waiter personally served tea to Lady Ellenborough and her guest and noted that they remained together until half-past ten, when the prince left to return to his sitting-room. Requesting the waiter to fetch a bedroom candle and light it, Felix said goodnight and went up to his bedroom.

At about midnight the hall porter, Robert Hepple, who was sitting in his pantry awaiting the late return of a family who had gone out for the evening, heard someone coming down the main stairs. He walked across the hall foyer, which was illuminated by gas lighting, and saw the prince descending the stairs. As soon as the prince saw the porter, he retreated back up the stairs.

Hepple was ‘anxious to know what a person at that time of night was wishing to do … and kept out of sight’ for a while. To ensure that he was not seen, he put out the light in his pantry. His vigil was not long. Within ten or fifteen minutes the prince, still wearing the ‘frock coat, trowsers and boots’ in which he had dined, softly descended the stairs, crossed the hall and went along the passage leading to the east wing’s private stairway. Mr Hepple followed him and watched as the prince entered Lady Ellenborough’s bedroom without knocking. The door was closed and the key turned in the lock. After peering through the keyhole and listening for some fifteen minutes at the door, Mr Hepple formed his own opinion of what was happening within. He returned to his pantry. When he retired at 3 a.m., the prince had not yet reappeared. Next morning Hepple was summoned to the prince’s room and asked to press some clothes.

At about 9.30 a.m. the prince descended to the hotel sitting-room, where he joined Lady Ellenborough for breakfast. Although it is not possible to say for certain what Jane and Felix spoke of over breakfast, it is possible to guess that one subject under discussion was an unpleasant incident which had occurred in Jane’s bedroom earlier that morning. Mr William Walton, the proprietor’s brother, who was responsible for waiting on the suite of rooms in the east wing, took it upon himself to tell her ladyship that his colleague, Mr Robert Hepple, had confided in him what he had seen and heard the previous night. Mr Hepple felt that the information ought to be communicated to Lord Ellenborough, a frequent guest in the hotel.

Jane was taken by surprise but did not panic, relying upon her ability to charm the opposite sex. She admitted ‘that what she had done was wrong’ and said she did not wish anyone to learn about what had transpired. Begging Walton not to repeat what he had told her to anyone, especially not to her maid, she then gave him ‘a present’ of £20. Not surprisingly, Walton promised his silence in response to such generosity. It was not often that he received a tip that equalled half a year’s wages, even though he subsequently gave Hepple £5 of it.

The prince watched Jane depart at eleven o’clock with her small retinue before he also left at about noon in the hired chariot to post back to London.

Within weeks Jane discovered she was pregnant. There was no doubting the paternity of her second child, since, although she had a bed in the marital bedchamber, she and Edward had not enjoyed sexual relations for some months at her own request. A miniature, painted by James Holmes at this time, shows Jane reclining in gipsy-style déshabillé on a couch draped with an Eastern rug. She has lost the wide-eyed innocence of earlier portraits and despite the slimness of her hips appears voluptuous. The diarist Thomas Creevey met her in the same month at a party held by Lady Sefton. Present were ‘Mrs Fox Lane, Princess Esterhazy, Lady Cowper … Lady Ellenborough and the Pole, or Prussian or Austrian or whatever he is … anything as imprudent as she or as barefaced as the whole affair I never beheld … in short by far the most notorious and profligate women in London.’³

Meanwhile, reports of Jane’s flagrant behaviour had finally begun to make an impression on Edward, especially when his brother Henry related gossip which reflected unfavourably upon her. Too late, Ellenborough accepted the sense of Margaret Steele’s warnings and the letter he had received from Lady Anson strongly urging he spend more time with his young wife. At first his concern showed itself in requests for Jane not to visit those very people to whom he had introduced her.⁴ At length he received a letter from one Robert Hepple, a former employee of the Norfolk Hotel in Brighton. Unfortunately £5 had not seemed sufficient reason for Mr Hepple to keep his lordship uninformed about Lady Ellenborough’s delinquency; he felt his knowledge might be worth more to her husband. The letter contained information which, though he was reluctant to believe it, Lord Ellenborough could not ignore.

When Ellenborough confronted his wife with the contents of the letter Jane confessed, but only partially. She admitted her attachment to Felix, though not the full extent of it, and she denied the act of adultery at Brighton. This was foolishness taken to an absurd degree, for she could not have hoped to hide her condition indefinitely; and at the date of this discussion she must at least have suspected her pregnancy. Probably because of Ellenborough’s political commitments the matter was left hanging bitterly between them.

Jane’s first thought was to rush to Felix and lay her problems upon his broad shoulders; but she got little comfort from him. Apparently realising for the first time the predicament in which he was now placed, the prince was appalled. He saw clearly that the matter could cause a major diplomatic incident and the end of his promising career. He immediately reported the matter to his ambassador and was given forty-eight hours to put his affairs in order, pack and leave for home, pending an imminent transfer to the Paris embassy. Ambassador Esterhazy knew that here was a man marked out by destiny for greater things than a life spent as secretary to the Ambassador at the Court of King James; the great Metternich himself took a keen interest in Schwarzenberg’s progress. Esterhazy decided to place the young man out of harm’s way and ride out any resulting unpleasantness.

On 11 May 1829 Felix left for Europe, telling Jane he had no alternative but to accept his new posting and suggesting that, since she could not confess her pregnancy, she should attempt to obtain Ellenborough’s permission to go abroad to be confined in secret.⁵ He would, of course, do all in his power to assist her in this delicate matter. His suggestion was not made coldly; he was, according to his letters, still very much in love with Jane. Yet, whatever protestations of love Felix made to her, the fact remains that he rode off leaving his pregnant young mistress to face public condemnation and the wrath of her husband, for the sake of his career. Jane blamed the Esterhazys for transferring Felix and quarrelled with them, and also with Princess Lieven, who was furious that Jane had endangered the prince’s career.

With no alternative, Jane did as Felix suggested, choosing the evening of 22 May to make her request to Edward. But Edward refused to allow her to go abroad to ‘reflect on her feelings’ for Schwarzenberg. The entire matter seems to have culminated in a quarrel in which Jane said she could not live without Felix. The outcome was that Edward proposed a formal separation in which they would each go their separate ways, but leaving little Arthur in his custody. Edward would, he said, make adequate provision for Jane’s future needs, and before leaving for an important dinner party with Lord Hill to discuss a military matter he arranged for her departure for Roehampton with her personal servants. The following morning, before attending a Cabinet meeting, he found time to write to his mother-in-law, Lady Andover, suggesting she join her daughter immediately at Roehampton.

All her life Jane hated to quarrel with anyone, and the fracas with Edward unnerved her. However, the thing was done. Naively, she thought the worst was now behind her, and her sole ambition was to leave immediately and join Felix. The explanatory note she wrote to her Aunt Anson must have come as a relief to Lady Anson, for Jane’s former relationship with George remained the subject of gossip. Since Jane made no mention of her pregnancy, Lady Anson was inclined at first to think the matter was a storm in a teacup, an affair that, with careful management of Ellenborough’s natural anger, might be smoothed over and the couple brought together again. She called on Ellenborough later that day as a peacemaker and later wrote to her niece, no doubt pointing out the impossibility of her travelling abroad without her husband’s permission. The following letter from Jane was the result:

Lord Ellenborough,

Connaught Place

Roehampton,

Saturday night

Dearest Edward,

Forgive me if I do wrong in writing to you, a note just received from Lady Anson seems to imply that you have expected it. I had begun a letter to you this morning, thanking you from the bottom of my soul for your unbounded kindness in act and manner – it was far more than I deserved, and I am deeply grateful.

I again renew all the assurances I gave you last night, that in act I am innocent. I hardly know what or how to write to you; I daren’t use the language of affection, you would think it hypocrisy, but though my family naturally wish all should be again as it once was between us, those feelings of honour which I still retain towards you, make me still acquiesce in your decision. I continue to think it just and right

I have not been able to speak to them on the subject I confessed to you last night; I have spoken little today but have never for an instant swerved from my own original opinion. I write this to YOU, if it is possible for you to keep what I have said from them, do, as they would only set it down as another proof of unkindness on my part.

Could you write me a line through Henry; were it only to tell me your opinion, be assured I should think it right. But Oh! Edward, dear Edward! ought not time, solitude, and change of scene to be tried by me, to conquer or obliterate sentiments so inimical to our mutual peace? Pray write to me, tell me all you think upon the subject, all you wish me to do. I shall now answer you candidly, and without a shade of deception.

God bless you, dearest Edward,

Janet

If my Aunt has misunderstood any expression and you did not expect or wish to hear from me personally, forgive me, for although I longed to tell you how gratefully I feel towards you yet I confess I should never have ventured to write. Ever Yours. J.

Were it not for two short declarations, ‘that in act I am innocent’ and ‘my family … would only set it down as another proof of unkindness on my part’, this would be a straightforward letter. Yet she could hardly profess to be innocent in act without lying. And surely the act of infidelity merited a word stronger than merely ‘unkind’? Not that it made a scrap of difference; the extent of her relationship with Schwarzenberg could not be concealed for much longer.

On Sunday, 24 May, Miss Margaret Steele received a hand-delivered message from Lady Anson. It asked her to go immediately to Elm Grove, where Lady Andover and Lady Ellenborough were in need of support. Steely was living with her sister and a friend in Stanhope Terrace in London’s Regent’s Park, so it took her only a few hours to arrange a chaise and travel to the Ellenboroughs’ house at Roehampton. There, in place of the normally relaxed household presided over by Jane, she found a strained atmosphere.⁶ In residence, as well as Jane and her mother, was Henry Law – Edward’s brother – whom Jane disliked at the best of times and who now wore a face of self-righteous gloom.

It took only a short time for Steely to discover the reason her presence had been requested and the news came as a thunderclap to her, for despite her reservations about Jane’s companions she was under the impression, as she was shortly to state under oath, that the Ellenboroughs had always lived together ‘most happily’. Jane was tearful but obstinately determined, ultimately, to join Schwarzenberg. Lady Andover was distraught but equally determined that her daughter should not leave the country. For a week the unhappy quartet shared Elm Grove, during which time arrangements were made for Steely to take Jane to the West Country. There they were to join Jane’s brother Edward, by now a twenty-year-old subaltern in a cavalry regiment, in a rented cottage at Ilfracombe. Jane’s parents must have hoped that a holiday in rural surroundings, miles from any social diversions, would bring Jane to her senses. At the very least it might stay the gossip which was already on everyone’s lips, and faithfully recorded within forty-eight hours by Mrs Arbuthnot, close companion of the Duke of Wellington and a frequent guest of the Ellenboroughs:

There has been an explosion at last in the house of Lord Ellenborough. He has found out all or at least a part of the improprieties of her conduct. Her lover, Prince Schwarzenberg, is gone back to Austria &, at just the same time, Lord Ellenborough took her to her father & refused to live with her any longer. She has been boasting of her own infamy & ridiculing Lord Ellenborough’s blindness; but now she protests that, however foolish and indiscreet she may have been, she is not a criminal. I understand she has gone down to Roehampton where he has allowed her to be for the present. What will be the end of it I do not know.⁷

Jane and her companions remained at Ilfracombe for a month during which Miss Steele wrote at Jane’s request to Lord Ellenborough, asking once again for permission to take Jane abroad for a period of reflection. He replied in a kindly manner but refused. During this entire period Jane was somehow receiving letters from Felix at the rate of two a week and she was presumably responding.⁸ On 1 July the two women left Ilfracombe and travelled to Minterne, where Admiral Digby and Lady Andover arrived for a prearranged visit with Lord Digby.

Jane was then five months pregnant. Two days after arriving at Minterne her condition became apparent to the straitlaced Steely and, ‘much agitated’, she broached the subject. By then Jane was relieved to be able to discuss the matter that had been at the forefront of her mind for so long. Admitting her condition, she broke down and sobbed, ‘God knows what will become of me, for the child is not Lord Ellenborough’s but Prince Schwarzenberg’s.’ She then confessed the entire circumstances of her adulterous relationship, including the overnight stay in Brighton. When questioned about how she could be sure the child was not her husband’s, Jane admitted that they had not slept together for some time prior to her becoming pregnant.⁹ Only a few weeks earlier, Steely had remarked to Jane that her sleep was troubled and that she spoke in her sleep. On that occasion Jane had answered lightly that Edward said the same thing to her. From this Steely had supposed that they slept together, but Jane subsequently explained that they had two beds in the same room.

Miss Steele was not only a spinster but, according to Jane, a ‘gloomily severe’ Christian. Nothing could have prepared for her such news from her former pupil. She had hardly started to gather her thoughts together before Jane, who had recovered her composure and did not wish her plans to be thwarted, was beseeching her not to divulge what she had been told to Lord Ellenborough, her parents or her aunts. Steely reluctantly agreed not to do so without Jane’s permission. However, before the month was out Jane consented to share the appalling secret with Lady Anson.

Meanwhile Edward, acting on the strong recommendation of his brothers and cousin, had contacted a solicitor and produced certain papers alleging infidelity by his wife, including the letter from Hepple. The solicitor felt initially that, though damaging, there was insufficient evidence to warrant an investigation. Who would take the word of a hotel waiter against that of a peeress? However, some weeks later in early July, Ellenborough’s cousin again contacted the solicitor and suggested that he begin private investigations into Lady Ellenborough’s behaviour during the past twelve months, starting at number 11 Holles Street where Prince Schwarzenberg had most recently lived until his precipitate departure for Europe.

Within a short time all was discovered. A routine call at the Holles Street address led the detective inevitably to the prince’s former address in Harley Street and the many eye-witnesses to Jane’s indiscreet conduct. Next he visited Robert Hepple and William Walton, both of whom had been dismissed from the Norfolk Hotel for their part in the affair. Their testimony, however, led first to the post-boy who had driven the prince to Brighton, and then to the hirer of the yellow chariot. In attempting to make Jane’s groom betray his employer, the solicitor hit his first difficulty. The boy was as uncooperative as could be without telling any untruths, and gave evidence as near to ‘no comment’ as he could manage. There was no mistaking where his sympathies lay.

It made no difference, of course. Ellenborough ‘appeared to be amazed’ at the evidence, according to his legal advisers. Surprisingly – or perhaps not so, bearing in mind his behaviour towards his wife – Ellenborough’s diary entries at this date betray no personal emotions, minutely detailing instead the daily meetings and committees and conversations at formal dinners that he attended. His manner was not one of outrage: indeed he made it clear to his legal advisers and Jane’s family that his wife was always to be treated with all the courtesies to which her rank entitled her. He arranged for a generous allowance to be paid to her, and, though he asked for the return of heirloom items, he insisted that she keep the magnificent jewellery which he had given her during their marriage. His generosity prompted Jane to write dispiritedly:

My dearest Edward,

I hope you will believe me when I say that I feel myself utterly unequal to writing to you today. I cannot thank you enough for your kindness but entreat you will not think of making me such an allowance. Indeed it is more than I can possibly want. I will send back the green box tomorrow.

Ever, ever yours,

Janet¹⁰

In a letter written from his father’s palace, Frauenhof, near Vienna, Felix advised Jane to leave England as quickly as possible for the address in Basle which he had indicated in a previous letter, where she would be cared for during her confinement. He instructed her not to come to him, as he suspected (incorrectly) that all his movements were being watched by agents of Lord Ellenborough. He bitterly regretted the position she had lost because of their affair, and the more so, he said, because it would be impossible for the sake of his future, as well as hers, that they should ever marry. Nevertheless, he swore, he loved her, and his life would be devoted to her happiness and that of their child.¹¹

Soon after receiving this letter Jane left England in the face of all entreaties from her distraught mother to remain. She could not bear to be separated from Felix and believed that he would find some way of joining her if she went, as he advised, to Basle. Her father told her that if she went ahead with this plan Ellenborough would have no option but to divorce her. Her reputation, he said, though damaged, might yet be partly restored if she were to remain in England and lead an exemplary life. Furthermore, it was not impossible that Ellenborough might be persuaded to reconsider; no man in his position would wish to be involved in a divorce. Gossip about the affair was confined to her own class and, after a time, would be overlooked if not forgotten. But the inevitable consequences, if she ran away now, were that she would never be permitted to resume her place in society. Nor could she depend upon marriage to the prince; his Catholic faith precluded it. What she was contemplating was lifelong exile from her country and her family, and total disgrace.

For anyone but Jane, with her entire family pleading for her to give Felix up and remain in England under their protection, there would surely have been some wavering of resolve at this point. She adored her parents and her brothers, and the feeling was reciprocated, as letters and diaries would show. But her love for Felix was transcendent. His frequent letters to her, swearing eternal devotion if not promising marriage, bolstered her insistence that there was no future happiness for her without him. She must join him whatever the cost.

Edward Digby accompanied Jane and Steely to the east coast, where they took the packet ferry to the Continent. Steely travelled as far as Brussels and then returned home. Jane continued on with her maid to Basle, where she assumed the name of Madame Einberg at the accommodation arranged by Felix. By then she was six months pregnant.

Rumours had already started to swirl in London, and the ripples quickly spread outward to Jane’s greater family in Norfolk.¹² With the open intelligence that Jane had fled to Europe to have Schwarzenberg’s child, Ellenborough’s original plan of a formal separation was dropped in favour of his seeking a legal divorce. This was the man who had once alienated the King by expressing disapproval when George IV attempted to divorce Caroline of Brunswick. He was also, and remained long afterwards, a friend of Jane’s father. The two men met and reached an amicable agreement; obviously they decided to make the best of a bad business.

News of Ellenborough’s intention to seek a divorce spread like a bushfire. Some tried to excuse Jane – ‘but think of being very pretty and very young and just finding oneself married to such a monster of odiousness as Lord Ellenborough, and then discovering that he wanted the only quality for which women ever forgive monsters’.¹³ These allusions to Ellenborough’s lack of sexual ability, or alternatively his extreme licentiousness, were common, and summed up by one correspondent: ‘Ellenborough’s divorce is going on – so we shall soon know, I hope, whether he is as Lady Holland says, impotent, or as others say given to bad women and blessed with a family of natural children.’¹⁴

Meanwhile, Jane was quite alone in Basle apart from her servants. Contrary to legend, her family did not abandon her but stayed in constant touch by letter. There is a report that her husband visited her, and indeed Ellenborough made a visit of several weeks to the Continent in early September 1829.¹⁵ There is no way of verifying this rumour, for such a visit would have been the subject of greatest secrecy to avoid any accusations of collusion between the divorcing parties. However, in view of what followed it is more than likely that Ellenborough visited Jane to ensure that she fully realised how the mechanism of divorce worked.

By now Admiral Digby had realised that there was no hope of a reconciliation. Jane wanted the divorce as much as Ellenborough; she could not bear the thought of being married to any man but Felix. Therefore she agreed not to offer any defence. A few weeks later she received another visitor, a Mr Wigram, who presented her with a ‘Copy of a Bill for the Divorce to be Heard in the House of Lords’. She instructed him to refer the matter to her solicitor in England.

As the last stages of her pregnancy, coupled with the winter weather, confined her to her apartment, Jane felt increasingly lonely, bored and desperate. If only Felix would come to her, everything would be well. But her only relief from the continuous misery lay in the regular letters from Austria, promising that he would try to be with her in time for the birth of the child. It was not until 10 November, more than two months after her arrival in Basle, that Felix managed to visit Jane en route to his new appointment at the Austrian embassy in Paris. She had longed for this moment for months, but she was soon to suspect that his former feelings had undergone a subtle change, doubtless influenced by his family.

Their daughter was born two days later – nine months and one week after the fateful night spent in the Brighton hotel.¹⁶ They called the baby Mathilde (after Felix’s favourite sister), which was shortened to ‘Didi’. Seeing Jane’s distress when the time came for him to leave five days later, Felix promised to visit again within weeks and this time kept his promise, for he spent a further few days in December with Jane and his daughter. During this visit he promised to make arrangements for her to join him in Paris as soon as she and the child were well enough to travel.

Four weeks later tragedy struck the house of Ellenborough. Little Arthur Dudley Law, just a month short of his second birthday, had again been ill with a childish infection, and Ellenborough had sent him in the care of his nurse, Mrs Mowcock, to the seaside in the belief that the fresh air would help alleviate the symptoms. All seemed to be under control on 27 January:

My Lord,

Master Arthur is in very good spirits but his tonsils have been very [troublesome]… Mr March has been to see him today and says it is his teeth and he will bleed him tomorrow to correct it. He will be all the better for it but is much fawling [sic] away. The weather is so very wet so he could not go out today.¹⁷

The next letter, from Mr March himself, only two days later, must therefore have come as a shocking blow. Ellenborough noted on the envelope that he received it as he returned home from a Cabinet meeting:

Worthing 29th January 1830

My dear Lord,

I am distressed beyond description to be compelled to relate the melancholy fact that your dear infant has ceased to exist. He was attacked this morning by a convulsive fit which caused his extinction in a few minutes. Everything was done judiciously by the nursery assistant who was on the spot instantly but so violent was the attack that all was over before I could get to him.

He passed a tolerably quiet night till about 5… up to the time of the fit which seems to have been immediately caused by some accidental noises, there was no reason to consider the child in the slightest danger as everything was going well.¹⁸

It was distressing news for all concerned, the Digby grandparents as well as the father. The black-edged mourning letters expressing shock and grief, as well as concern for Ellenborough, carefully folded back into their original envelopes, still exist in a pathetic stack neatly tied with deep-purple ribbon among Lord Ellenborough’s papers.¹⁹

It might be assumed, because of the history of the marriage and the fact that the child had spent a lot of his time away from his parents, that his death was of no great moment to them. But Ellenborough, whose ambitions for his son now lay in ruins, mourned him with genuine grief. Like Jane he found consolation in writing poetry throughout his life, and on this occasion wrote:

Poor child! Thy mother never smiled on thee

Nor stayed to soothe thee in thy suffering day!

But thou wert all the world to me,

The solace of my solitary way.

Despite any bitterness he might have felt towards Jane, Ellenborough wrote to her, as always in a kindly manner, to break the news and thoughtfully enclose a lock of Arthur’s soft, fair hair. A messenger delivered the letter to her personally, under Ellenborough’s seal. She kept it with her, through all her travels, until her death.

A week later Jane set out for Paris with her baby daughter. It is clear, from a poem written in December 1830, when fresh tragedy struck, that she was distressed about Arthur’s death. She was also depressed after the birth of Mathilde, and worried about her future. Just as her father had warned, Felix had confirmed that his religion would not allow him to marry her and, further, her reputation could damage his career. Jane optimistically believed that once she joined Felix their former love would reassert itself and he might find a way. Meanwhile, at least they would be together.

In England, Ellenborough too was concerned for the future. The forthcoming divorce hearings would, he knew, be extremely unpleasant. Jane would not – could not – contest the charge of adultery. However, it was important that his own behaviour did not come under close scrutiny, for under the prevailing laws a divorce could not be granted if both he and Jane were found equally guilty to adultery. Yet with the death of his son and heir it was even more important, now, for him to obtain a divorce in order to remarry.

Jane decided to keep the name of Madame Einberg when she arrived in Paris. Felix had rented an apartment for her in the fashionable quarter of the Fauberg Saint-Germain,²⁰ and she lived there for some weeks while she searched for something more suitable for herself and her child. Primarily, though, simply being with Felix was all she asked. It was perhaps just as well that she chose to live quietly under an assumed name. Within weeks she was to become the most notorious woman in England.

6 A Fatal Notoriety 1830–1831

Until comparatively recent years The Times newspaper was renowned for its front page which consisted of classified advertisements. In May 1966, when the front page was changed to a news format, there was an outcry of protest. However, there was a precedent: 136 years earlier, in April 1830, the editor broke with tradition and placed the Ellenborough divorce case on the front pages.

On 1 April the entire right-hand column of the first page and two-thirds of the second page were given over to the story. It was a sell-out. On 2 April virtually the entire front page and part of page 2 were given over to a complete transcript of the Ellenborough divorce hearing. For weeks the name of Lady Ellenborough was in every newspaper and Jane’s misdemeanours became the breakfast-table tittle-tattle of the entire country, causing her name to become a byword for scandalous behaviour for generations. Indeed, for decades small news items continued to appear (they were often incorrect) about her adventures, always referring to her as Lady Ellenborough, though after 1834 she never again used this name.

The preliminary hearing by the Consistory Court, held in relative privacy on 22 February, readily established from the assembled evidence that Jane was guilty of adultery. That was the easy part. But Ellenborough’s application for his marriage to be dissolved then had to be examined, under law, by both Houses of Parliament, in public. Divorce was a difficult and highly complicated legal matter. As a lawyer Ellenborough knew that only too well. The social ignominy and sheer cost of obtaining a divorce meant that few were applied for.

On 9 March 1830, in the House of Lords, the Clerk read out the Order of the Day:

being the Second Reading of the Bill entitled, ‘An Act to dissolve the marriage of the Right Honourable Edward Baron Ellenborough with the Right Honourable Jane Elizabeth Baroness Ellenborough his now Wife, and to enable him to marry again; and for other purposes therein mentioned’, and for hearing Counsel for and against the same, and for the Lords to be summoned.¹

The witnesses were called, gave their evidence and were cross-questioned at length by Lord Ellenborough’s counsel and subsequently by any member of the House who wished to query the facts. Jane was not represented and offered no defence; no attempt was made to mitigate her actions. Ellenborough’s counsel, Mr Wigram, began calling staff from the Norfolk Hotel, who detailed the couple’s movements during their overnight stay in Brighton. Robert Hepple, the night porter on the evening of 7 February 1828, was questioned minutely about what he had heard after watching the prince go into Lady Ellenborough’s room at midnight:

Q: Did he lock the door after him?

A: He did.

Q: Did you still watch him?

A: I waited a short time at the door … a quarter of an hour the first time: then I went again … and remained there, I daresay, nearly an hour …

Q: How near to the door?

A: Quite close … I heard two persons talking, a man and a woman in the room … the language was foreign to me, it was not a language I understood at all.

Q: Did you hear anything more?

A: I heard him get into bed … and I heard them kissing.

The entire performance was repeated again in early April in the House of Commons, where radical members were not inclined to allow an easy passage of the reading to accommodate Lord Ellenborough. Not surprisingly, Jane’s grandfather did not take his seat for the hearing. On this occasion Robert Hepple was constrained to take his answer at the same point in the proceedings a step further:

Q: What did you hear then?

A: I could hear them kissing, and a noise that convinced me that the act of cohabitation was taking place.

A word-for-word transcript of the Commons hearing was reproduced in The Times. Thus respectable ladies might sit in their own drawing-rooms or boudoirs and learn the shocking nature of Lady Ellenborough’s guilt from Mr John Ward, the prince’s neighbour in Harley Street. Mr Ward testified that Jane was a frequent visitor to the house opposite, disguised with a white veil. Sometimes he saw her in the upper-floor room which faced this drawing-room:

Q: Have you ever observed anything in particular passing between them?

A: On one occasion I saw Prince Schwarzenberg assisting in dressing the lady.

Q: In what state was the lady at this time?

A: The Prince was lacing her stays.

Jane’s groom, William Carpenter, was as economical with his answers as could possibly be while remaining truthful under oath. For his loyalty to his mistress he was told that he was the most difficult and unwilling witness it had ever been counsel’s misfortune to examine. Yet even young William had to admit that he had accompanied Lady Ellenborough when she went to the Castle Hotel, Richmond, one afternoon with the prince. Yes, he had put the horses up there, and yes, he had lied to the head groom about where he had been that afternoon. Was there another similar occasion at Highgate? Yes. And yes, he had ridden out with his mistress on many other occasions when she met the prince. Yes, he had looked after her horse on many occasions while she visited a house in Harley Street. No, he did not know which house; he presumed it was her father’s house. Why should she ask him to wait so far from her father’s door? He did not know the reason why. Yes, she had left him in charge of her carriage after they left the Countess St Antonio’s house; Lady Ellenborough travelled with the prince in his closed chaise until they were within sight of Elm Grove at Roehampton where she transferred back to her own carriage again.

As William Carpenter stood down, a Member of the House intervened in the hearing. Mr Joseph Hume, Member for Montrose, bravely objected per se to the entire case on the grounds that

in this country a woman is punished severely for faults which in the husband are overlooked. For a single slip she is banished from society. And yet if justice is to be done to Lady Ellenborough, can anyone overlook the gross neglect on Lord Ellenborough’s part that has led to the unhappy events of the past couple of years? Ought not the charge to be read as one of criminality against Lord Ellenborough, who had permitted and even encouraged his wife’s association with the persons responsible for her downfall, rather than one of marital infidelity against an unfortunate lady whose youth and immaturity ought to have been safeguarded by her natural protector? What is a young lady to do who is neglected by her husband? Is she to stop at home all day long?

Touching upon the present line of questioning, in which the prosecution were clearly suggesting that while in the closed chaise together Lady Ellenborough and the prince indulged in a sexual encounter, Mr Hume asked seriously: ‘would anyone believe that a lady dressed to go out to dinner could be guilty of anything improper?’ Indeed, with the stays and panniers, wigs and feathers of a decade earlier, impropriety might have been difficult. However, fashions had changed in recent times, and the ribald laughter and sallies which greeted the Honourable Member’s final remarks left no one in any doubt that a number of members of the House had experienced little difficulty in misbehaving under similar circumstances.

Next the prince’s maid provided evidence that on the frequent occasions when Jane had called on her master the couple had usually spent the afternoon in bed together. How could she tell, asked the prosecutor? By the rumpled and marked bedlinen, replied the maid.

Miss Margaret Steele’s evidence served to damn Jane completely. She gave her answers quietly, so quietly that The Times journalist in the gallery missed some of her answers and complained about it indignantly in his column. She acknowledged that she was a personal friend of Lady Andover and Lady Anson and that for six years she had taken responsibility for the upbringing of Lady Ellenborough prior to her marriage. She told how she had been summoned to Roehampton on the occasion of the couple’s separation, how she accompanied Jane to the West Country, of her discovery that Jane was pregnant and of Jane’s confession that she had spent the night with the prince at the Norfolk Hotel:

Q: Did you ask Lady Ellenborough any questions as to why she supposed the child was not Lord Ellenborough’s?

A: When she first disclosed the circumstances of her guilt to me, I was told to keep it a secret. I think I made no further inquiry, and seeing me much agitated, and being very much agitated herself, she merely said to me, as I have stated, ‘God knows what I shall do, for the child is not Lord Ellenborough’s but Prince Schwarzenberg’s.’ That is to the best of my recollection. At that time I asked her no further questions. She was always very modest in her manner to me.

Miss Steele explained that Jane had asked her husband if she might sleep alone, having told him that she did not wish for another child. Questioned on the state of the marriage generally, Steely said she thought the couple had always appeared very happy together. ‘You do not recollect seeing Lord Ellenborough ever treat her with harshness, either in word or manner?’ On the contrary, replied the witness, ‘he was always remarkably kind and attentive to her.’ Indeed, she said, she had found Lord Ellenborough to be an unfailingly kind and considerate husband in every way. Indulgent? Very much so, indeed! She had been astonished when the separation occurred.

Her memory failed her only when it came to the conversation she had had with Lord Ellenborough a year earlier on the subject of his wife’s behaviour. She recalled that Lady Ellenborough had been ‘indiscreet, giddy and very regardless of consequences’. She could not recall exactly in what manner, nor from whom she had heard the report. Her answers were weak, and she knew it, and so did her interlocutor:

Q: What particular acts were indiscreet?

A: I heard of her riding a good deal.

Q: Was there anything indiscreet in a lady riding?

A: I think in her riding alone there was.

Q: Did she ever ride without a servant?

A: No, with a servant. I thought it very indiscreet.

Q: Is that all the acts of indiscretion you ever heard of?

A: … I cannot recollect.

She did, however, recollect that she had advised Lord Ellenborough about some of the friends to whom he had introduced his wife before their marriage, and who were frequent guests of the Ellenboroughs. Making it clear that she placed the full blame for Jane’s behaviour on the example set by these unnamed persons, she nevertheless hedged and weaved for what must have been some twenty minutes of questioning. When asked directly for names she murmured a short reply which was drowned in loud cries of ‘No! No!’ by angry members.

Q: Were these associates men or women?

A: Both … I thought them very bad companions … I cannot mention names, it might implicate many persons.

Q: Were they persons universally accepted at respectable houses in London?

A: At houses called respectable. (Laughter.)

Q: In the best society in England?

A: In fashionable society. (Laughter.)

Q: Can you recollect what answer Lord Ellenborough made to your warning?

A: He laughed.

Several times during the long interrogation Miss Steele asked to be allowed to sit down and sip at a glass of water. Later the men and women she alluded to were identified by the broadest of hints in the newspaper leaders, and they would complain loudly that their behaviour had been judged by a person they thought their social inferior.

It was undoubtedly an ordeal for Steely. This modest and moral woman elected to stand up before several hundred men and discuss the sexual behaviour of her former pupil, knowing that it would be widely reported in the newspapers. No one would have forced her to do so, but Lady Andover had begged it as a favour and Steely complied, knowing that her evidence would clinch Lord Ellenborough’s case. She must have known that this would ensure a decision that would provide the freedom Jane wanted, but only at the cost of Jane’s reputation.

The last of the twenty-one witnesses (many were called twice or three times during the Commons’ exhaustive hearing, the rest consisting of prying neighbours and hotel staff, post-boys and coachmen, maids, grooms and lawyers’ clerks) was Thomas Kane, the Ellenboroughs’ butler. He testified that as far as he and the other servants could see their master and mistress lived in happiness and affection, they generally called each other Edward and Janet, and had until two years ago frequently gone out together in the evening, less often after that. Prince Schwarzenberg had never been a guest at either house. All the servants (there were many) knew that the Ellenboroughs latterly slept in separate beds. Yes, it had been discussed in the servants’ hall but no one had taken it to mean that the couple were estranged.

After Kane stood down, the Honourable Members debated the matter. The arguments raged back and forth. Jane had many champions who said that Ellenborough ought to have been more vigilant, that an experienced and worldy man ought not to have left his young wife so alone and unprotected that she had opportunity to behave so badly. Besides, said several, she had behaved no better nor worse than her peers, people who were also personal friends of her husband. And how had this husband reacted when warned by those closest to his wife that she was in moral danger? He had laughed. When one speaker asked what arrangements had been made to secure Lady Ellenborough’s future he was advised by Ellenborough’s barrister that Lord Ellenborough had made arrangements which ensured ‘she should not want for any of the comforts and conveniences which her rank in life required’. The barrister then produced what he described as a letter written by Lady Andover to Lord Ellenborough absolving him of responsibility for the break-up of the marriage, but the members of the House refused to allow it to be admissible.

Those who supported Ellenborough argued that a husband could not possibly watch over his wife every minute of the day. There was no man in the House, said one Member, whose wife and daughters did not go out during the fashionable hours of the afternoon. Where did they go? Did the Honourable Members know every move of their womenfolk? Of course not. Were they then to suspect them of being false?

The newspapers had their say too. The Times stated that there was little doubt about Jane’s adultery. However, it pointed out that there were other facts to be proven before a divorce might be granted. The editor hoped that there was no ‘collusion or connivance with the wife, [or] gross negligence of her morals or comforts … or gross profligacy on his part which might prevent the divorce going through’² – especially, said the editorial suspiciously, in view of the fact that Lady Ellenborough had made no attempt to contest the divorce, nor offer any defence for her behaviour.

Denying the rumour that Prince Schwarzenberg had offered marriage to Lady Ellenborough if she obtained a divorce, the editor pointed out that in Austria, a Catholic country, such a thing was impossible. However,

as there has been no opposition by Lady Ellenborough or her family to this bill, we must conclude that neither she nor they have any objection to let the divorce be completed

Now this is a state of things which naturally begets the idea of collusion between the parties … the party seeking relief must come into court with clean hands. An adulteress cannot lawfully divorce her profligate husband. Nor can an adulterer his adulterous wife.

… it seems to us, from reports that are current that an enquiry might be advantageously directed to what might be called ‘the Brighton affair’.³

The open reference to the ‘Brighton affair’ – widespread reports of Ellenborough’s affair with the daughter of a confectioner from Brighton – was astonishing unless there was some evidence to back up the accusations. Yet it was mentioned in several papers, including The Times, and the word ‘collusion’ was raised a great deal by many in the debate.⁴ At one point it looked as though George Anson’s name might be brought into the proceedings, but to the relief of the family this dangerous ground was skated over.⁵

The cheaper papers were less circumspect than The Times. The Age, having questioned a former servant, claimed that Jane had found a portrait of Ellenborough’s current mistress ‘within six months of their marriage’ which ‘insulted the delicate sensibility of an affectionate wife’. Openly accusing Ellenborough of neglecting Jane not because of his work, but because of other women, the editor asked his lordship to answer publicly certain statements being made by many people, namely:

you have been an adulterer yourself, you have seduced and intrigued with females, more than one or two in humble life, one of whom has a child of which you are the father, and whom you refused to aid in her poverty and misery until fear of exposure tempted you to grant her a pittance …

The Times says boldly that there was an affair with a confectioner’s daughter at Brighton. Now this is downright slander or downright truth. Lord Ellenborough is bound, in justice to the public, to deny in toto the verity of such a charge.⁶

The same paper continued the attack a week later, referring also to an alleged relationship with another young woman, which led to a ‘recontre in Portland Place and even to a personal conflict’ between Ellenborough and a young doctor.⁷

Ellenborough loftily ignored the press, and so apparently did his peers, for after a third reading in the week of Jane’s twenty-third birthday, on 7 April, the bill was passed. Royal Assent was duly granted and the Clerk of the House gravely announced, in time-honoured fashion, ‘Soit fait comme il est désiré.’⁸ The Times, seeing the end of its best lead story since the King’s attempt to brand Queen Caroline an adulteress in order to divorce her, contented itself with a huffy statement:

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.

He married the former Princess Theresa of Saxe-Hildburghausen, ‘the best-looking princess in Europe’ according to Ludwig’s biographer. Their wedding celebrations in October 1810 were so well received that the people of Munich repeated them again on the couple’s anniversary; and the celebrations are still being held each year as Munich’s famous Oktoberfest. Ludwig himself was then ‘a fair young man … with soft features, a flushed face, a proud full mouth and wide blue eyes. Allowing for the flattery expected by princes, he still must have been amazingly good-looking.’¹⁶ The royal couple had seven children and the marriage was, despite Ludwig’s many love affairs, an affectionate one.

When he ascended the throne of Bavaria, Ludwig used his classical knowledge and his philhellenism in the design of his new capital. He set in motion, at huge cost, many civic projects designed to turn Munich into the most beautiful city in Europe, a second Athens, a city to rival Florence and Paris. Excavations were commissioned in Italy and Greece to recover ‘lost’ works of art, the cities of Europe were combed to purchase classical treasures originally plundered by Napoleon’s armies. One of his first actions as King was to commission a great art gallery (the Pinakothek) to house the royal art collection and make it available to the public. No expense was to be spared to achieve his objective, even though it reduced the members of his household to petty economies and Ludwig himself wandered around his many building sites dressed like a penniless artist.

The year that Ludwig met Jane was a landmark for him in that his eighteen-year-old second son, Otto, had been elected King of Greece by a self-selected mini-League of Nations headed by Metternich. Short of being made King of Greece himself, nothing could have pleased Ludwig more than that his son should become ruler of the country which had evolved what he considered to be the ideal culture. Coincidentally, Lord Ellenborough had been involved in the early discussions on a suitable candidate to fill this role,¹⁷ and Jane knew something of the political background to the choice of Prince Otto. Although she was never interested in politics Jane still maintained a correspondence with, among others, the Princesses Lieven and Esterhazy and Lord Londonderry, so that she could not help but pick up news which undoubtedly made her an interesting conversationalist. She was an animated talker with a good sense of humour, and this shows in the surviving letters of her later years. From her upbringing at Holkham, Jane retained a basic knowledge of classical art, and she had travelled in Italy – which enabled her to talk on the subjects that most interested Ludwig. Had she been merely a pretty face, she would no doubt have gone the way of most of Ludwig’s numerous beautiful mistresses in a very short time.

As it was, the two quickly forged a close friendship based on shared confidences, punctuated by a correspondence that would last for six years. In her letters and billets-doux she addressed him as ‘My Dearest Friend’ or ‘Dearest Lewis’, an anglicised version of his given name, Louis, used by his intimates.¹⁸ In her diaries and between themselves, however, Jane and the King used names from the ancient world. She was ‘Ianthe’ (the Greek equivalent of the name Jane) while he was ‘Basily’ (from the Greek basileus meaning king).

Initially, Jane regarded the King as a friend and comforter. Within days of their meeting he had written a poem to her and she was writing to him on intimate terms. At the same time she confessed that she trembled to use his Christian name so freely, despite his insistence that she dispense with all formalities, and hesitated to give him her complete trust ‘lest at some future date you will receive it as another did!’¹⁹

Ludwig was intensely attracted to this charming young woman, who seemed to him at times little more than a hurt child. She was recovering from a mild eye infection when he first met her and seemed fragile and forlorn.²⁰ The King found it difficult to resist the romantic story of Jane’s ultimate sacrifice for love, of her continuing devotion to Felix and her determination to be reconciled to him. Undoubtedly he felt protective towards her. Jane was happy to have such a sympathetic and uncritical ear for her problems, and the King made daily visits to her home to listen and advise. She happily shared Felix’s letters with him, already secure in the knowledge that Basily was her champion.

Meanwhile Jane was besieged by other admirers, and within several weeks of her arrival in Munich had already received several proposals of marriage, none of which she took seriously.²¹ She now knew how to handle flirtations with charming expertise, refusing suitors in a manner which left them feeling complimented rather than rejected. Hence she received a diet of admiration which bolstered her spirits and kept about her a court of suitors which did her no disservice in the eyes of Ludwig. He became completely immersed in the romantic story of Jane and her prince, with its haunting Tristan and Isolde theme. The thought of this extraordinarily lovely child-woman, whose passions were apparently as strongly felt as his own, who was desired by so many yet rejected all to remain faithful to her one true love, enchanted him. He swore to do all in his power to help her achieve a reunion with Felix, and meanwhile was happy to dispense advice and offer warm affection.²²

Their daily meetings were augmented by frequent notes, sometimes two or three times a day, hand-delivered by their servants.²³ Each evening the King called at Jane’s home, and most days she called on him at the vast Residenz Palace. They exchanged gifts. He gave her an inscribed prayer book, and often sent her posies of violets which she told him were her favourite flowers; she embroidered a cap for him and sent him sketches she made of the countryside around Munich. From the beginning he warned her to be careful of the content of her letters to him, for his position made him vulnerable. His fears were prophetic, for he would ultimately lose his crown through the indiscretion of a mistress. Throughout their correspondence Jane was careful, sometimes advising him she was being so, for his sake.

One of the proposals of marriage rejected by Jane came from a more than usually attentive and eligible source. Baron Carl Theodore Venningen, whom Jane met one morning while riding in the Hofgarten, fell instantly in love with her, just as Felix Schwarzenberg had done. But in the baron’s case Jane would remain his ideal while there was breath in his body. Unlike Jane’s other suitors, Carl – or Charles as Jane called him – refused to be rebuffed and became too attentive for Ludwig’s liking. This may have been because Ludwig was jealous on his own account, or because it spoiled his dream of a romantic reunion between Felix and Jane, the thought of which the King found irresistible.

However, it is obvious that Jane could not be singularly dependent upon her royal friend for friendship. She was not received at court, and the time the King could devote to her was, of necessity, limited. So Charles, who pursued her as tirelessly as Felix had once done, was Jane’s diversion from loneliness. He was tall, red-haired and good-looking, an aristocrat of obvious Germanic stock who wore the dashing uniform of a cavalry officer of the King’s Regiment.²⁴ He rode well, and wrote exquisite French in a small, neat hand. He spoke English and indeed had English connections too, for he was first cousin to Lady Granville, the wife of the British Ambassador in Paris during the time that Jane was living there with Felix Schwarzenberg. Left to himself, Charles was inclined to perceive life as a serious business; Jane was like a beautiful butterfly that had fluttered within his grasp. He was utterly fascinated.

At first she regarded him merely as an amusing and pleasant companion; his constantly repeated proposals became almost a joke between them, prettily parried by Jane. Indeed, Charles’s devotion and frequently professed wish to marry her must have counterbalanced to some extent the pain of rejection by Felix. Yet she loved Felix so utterly that no man could even begin to be a substitute. She explained her feelings to Charles as she had explained them to the King, but Charles continued to press his suit. After all, he must have thought, he was here in Munich; Felix was not.

Felix continued to write to Jane, however, and though he resisted a meeting his constant declarations of love gave her reason to hope that their relationship could be resuscitated. In an attempt to assist in their reunion, Ludwig suggested that the couple might meet secretly at Schloss Berg, a Wittelsbach hunting lodge on Lake Starnberg, some forty miles south-west of Munich. There in romantic isolation they could discuss their differences and perhaps achieve a rapprochement without inviting further gossip. At the end of October 1831 Jane wrote to Felix telling him of the meeting proposed by the King. She begged him to join her and set out for Schloss Berg.

Full of anticipation, though Felix had not yet actually agreed to meet her, Jane waited for him. The poem she wrote upon her arrival wondered anxiously whether he would look at her ‘as of old’ or whether she must expect ‘a change I never thought to see’. Convinced that he merely had to see her to know that she loved only him, regardless of what others told him and the deceitful ‘breath of shrilling slander’, she refused to believe he could receive her coldly after all they had meant to each other.

Her confidence in her ability to win Felix back was undoubtedly due to her experience that where men were concerned one look was all it usually took. Felix possibly knew this too; hence his attitude regarding a meeting. It must not be forgotten, either, that Felix was an unusual man with unique qualities. His official court biographer in Vienna insisted he had mystical powers: ‘The excessive life-force of the Prince is illustrated by the fact that he had a magnetic influence over women – not in the romantic and figurative way, but actually and medically. His sister was supposed to come especially to visit him and touch his hand to acquire more strength.’²⁵ Perhaps this explains, in part, Jane’s obsession.

Jane remained at Berg for several weeks in October and November 1831, wandering in the glorious woodlands alone, on horseback or on foot, willing her prince to come to her. One day her hopes soared when a visitor arrived, but it was not Felix. The persistent Charles Venningen had pursued her to her secret hideaway. Fearful that his presence might be misinterpreted by both the King and Felix, Jane insisted Charles return to Munich immediately and to ensure he did so made him the bearer of one of her frequent letters to the King. ‘I am so glad, dearest Lewis, to have had this opportunity of sending you these lines by Monsieur de Venningen who came here today. By this means you will receive them sooner … as he returns this evening’ – not, however, before he had made some ardent advances.

After ten days Felix wrote to advise that he could not meet Jane because of his commitments. As consolation the same post brought two letters from the King, a bouquet of violets and a book of his own poems preceded by the handwritten inscription:

These poems show you, show you my innermost feelings

You who became a victim of love, you will understand me

As I understand you, dearest, whom the world has exiled.

I will never judge you harshly, even if all the world does!

I cannot condemn you, because I understand it all.

Jane replied: ‘Do you really long for my return? Your wish shall be gratified … My first care shall be to sit for your picture. You are very impatient to have it finished, and that wish is sufficient for your Ianthe.’²⁶ She returned to Munich having written her own dispirited poem of disappointment: ‘He comes not, ’twas but fancy’s dream which mocked my hopes with visions bright.’²⁷

It is difficult to explain Schwarzenberg’s behaviour. If he did not wish the relationship to continue, why the constantly repeated avowals which kept Jane dancing to his tune? Had he simply told Jane that he no longer loved her it would have set her free, though painfully. The King sought to console his lovely young friend, and during the course of their conversation queried Baron Venningen’s frequent attendance at Jane’s home. When Jane confessed that his advances were becoming pressing, the King was alarmed. He begged her to discourage Charles and to be true to their shared ideal of love in its purest form.

One of Ludwig’s minor self-indulgences had been to commission the Schönheits-Galerie (Gallery of Beauty) for the Festsaalbau (or assembly rooms) at the Residenz. Similar in concept to the Lely series of Charles II’s ‘Ladies of the Bedchamber’, it consisted of a series of paintings by the court artist, Josef Stieler, of beautiful women. They were mainly members of Ludwig’s court (some were his mistresses), but Ludwig’s appreciation of pulchritude was catholic and women of every social rank were included, from the beautiful daughter of a Munich shoemaker to the wife of the British Minister, Lord Milbanke. In this gallery the royal connoisseur liked to wander each morning to contemplate in an inspirational communion of beauty. Ludwig asked Jane to sit for Stieler as an example of her type of beauty, and was present for most of the sittings.

It was a pretty compliment, but, just as Lely did before him, Stieler, though undoubtedly an artist of great talent, reduced some of his subjects to a contemporaneous ideal. Technically speaking, his portrait of Jane set against a typically classical background captures perfectly the sumptuousness of her clothes, the richness of her colouring, the transparency of her skin, the symmetry of her features. But the quicksilver quality which was Jane’s real beauty eluded Stieler. At the time of this portrait Jane was in her mid-twenties and just coming into her full magnificence, and Stieler himself wrote that, of all the women in the Schönheits-Galerie, Jane was the only one who could rival in beauty the exquisite Marchesa Marianna Florenzi.²⁸ Jane herself some time later nevertheless made the comment that it was not ‘very like’. A white marble bust of Jane that Ludwig commissioned Josef Bandel to sculpt a month later confirms the slender voluptuousness hinted at in Stieler’s portrait.

Arguably, her intelligent vivacity as much as her physical beauty attracted Ludwig, and also brought Charles Venningen back to her time and again. But it was her own physical needs that broke her sexual fast in November. It is not entirely clear whether this was with Ludwig or with Charles, but the reawakened desire provoked by the encounter created difficulties, as she told Ludwig in a letter:

Forgive me, dearest Lewis, if our last night’s conversation pained you, but your openness, affection and sincerity encourage mine.

It is not to be denied that rapture, untasted for six months, has [now] reawakened passions I flattered myself were nearly if not quite extinguished. Still, dearest, I repeat my intentions remain unchanged … My word of honour I regard as a sacred vow and I dare not, dare not, give it lightly.

What would [you]… think if after all my promises to the contrary I fell a victim? Do not be thus unhappy. I vow not to deceive you, I never will.²⁹

In her latest letter to Felix she had begged him to allow her to come and live near him in Berlin. If he would not agree, she wrote, she would go into a convent and take Didi with her.³⁰

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