A scandal of such allure that the House of Lords, the judicial system, the British press and London society ignored a turning point in the American War of Independence, possibly the last moment peace might have broken out: this was the trial for bigamy of Elizabeth Chudleigh in April 1776. The prolific gossip, Horace Walpole, nicknamed her the ‘Duchess-Countess’ because she had unfortunately found herself married to a duke and an earl at the same time. Over five days, 4,000 people, including James Boswell, the Queen (Charlotte – due to give birth in less than a fortnight), three future monarchs and most of the government of the day, crammed themselves into Westminster Hall to witness the humiliation of a 55-year-old widow (she admitted to 50). Dressed theatrically in black, looking much like Mary, Queen of Scots going to her execution, Elizabeth Chudleigh’s court appearance itself triggered a newspaper war for and against her: was she persecuted, or perjurer? Victim or heartless liar?
If a prevailing culture takes some of its social cues from the flavour of its monarchy, then the successively dysfunctional Hanoverian sovereigns are at least partly responsible for the moral confusion and hypocrisy that permeated the Georgian age. German speaking George I had arrived, with two mistresses, to take over from heirless Queen Anne in 1715; by then, his wife Sophia Dorothea of Celle had been incarcerated for infidelity for 20 years. His son George II fared better in marriage to the clever Caroline of Ansbach, but he was serially unfaithful and they were poisonous parents to their eldest son, Frederick, Prince of Wales. Frederick was more uxorious, although his mistress and illegitimate child had to be banished to Bath before his future wife Augusta of Saxe-Gotha arrived in England.
Elizabeth Chudleigh
In this banishment lay Elizabeth Chudleigh’s opportunity. Rebel Whig grandee, William Pulteney, had smoothed over the removal of the offended mistress, the Hon. Anne Vane, with a pension; Vane was being put up to writing furious letters about her disappearance by another lover. In the act of salvaging Frederick’s marriage plans and reputation, Pulteney sealed his status as ally to the Prince of Wales: he was in part repaid when he suggested Chudleigh – whose father had died when she was five and who came from the precarious gentry – for the position of maid of honour. By now the proliferating coffee houses, newspapers (since the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, effectively the end of press regulation), and rising literacy rates meant that ‘everyone’ wanted to know what was happening at court. They read the pamphlets about Anne Vane, who herself had been a maid of honour to Queen Caroline; they read about the new maids of honour. These maids – the only unmarried society women at court, for the role, though paid, required an aristocratic or at least well-connected background – were the object of fascination. Their dresses, jokes and potential husbands were all scrutinised. Of these, Elizabeth Chudleigh, whose beauty Joshua Reynolds, who painted her, was still talking about decades later, became the most written about of all.
This was as much to do with personality as looks. It was the century of rival courts: every Hanoverian generation had a staid, unglamorous circle, that of the king, and a colourful, animated one, that of the prince and princess of Wales. George II’s set-up was monotonous because he hated male rivalry and drove the wits and thinkers away, so his son Frederick, Prince of Wales, happily received them all at Leicester House. Elizabeth, through her considerable powers of courtiership, which made her something of a female Machiavelli, was about the only person who managed to stay in favour with both. This alone might have made her name if circumstance had not intervened with more peculiar twists than the most implausible novel (Thackeray, for one, based Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond partly on Elizabeth).
Elizabeth Chudleigh posing as Iphigenia, 1749
The main aim of being a maid of honour was of course to find a suitable husband. Elizabeth nearly became engaged to the young, orphaned Duke of Hamilton, but other Hamiltons at court (there were many) regarded this possible match as a scandal in itself, as Elizabeth was dowryless. The omnipresent Horace Walpole described Hamilton as ‘hot, debauched, extravagant’ and the young duke was sent off on a rampaging Grand Tour; she would later admit he ‘would never have made me happy.’
Staying with her cousin in the country, Elizabeth met a naval officer at the Winchester races. Though only 20, Augustus Hervey was confident and articulate, already a practised seducer, full of sea stories and swagger. The Earl of Bristol’s grandson, Hervey would become known for good reason as the ‘English Casanova’ and after a brief romance in the August heat, they were married in the middle of the night in a country chapel. This was an episode that they both began to regret. Immediately they decided to lie as they could not afford tell the truth: Elizabeth’s salary as maid of honour depended on single status, and Hervey relied on handouts from his grandfather who would almost certainly not have approved of his underage grandson marrying a dowryless maid of honour (that grandfather, the 1st Earl of Bristol, had carefully wed two heiresses himself).
They agreed to pretend it had never happened, they fell out, and (without recounting the whole story) there was a scene at a masquerade in which Elizabeth wore a costume so revealing it was still being reproduced in penny prints a century later; finally, after some legal machinations, she remarried. Becoming the Duchess of Kingston was the triumph in which her downfall was written; she was presented to King George III in great splendour, but she fell prey to the Duke’s relations’ fury at their loss of inheritance. When Kingston died and left her everything, his family wanted ‘their’ money back and so pursued her through the legal system with a vigour that took her all the way to trial for bigamy at Westminster Hall. By then, she had become one of the three most talked about women in Europe, alongside Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great.
And yet, those who judged her most harshly were an assortment of rakes and reprobates themselves, most of whom should have been concerning themselves with the American question. As Lord Mansfield (alone, it seems, on the judges’ bench) could see, the case at its heart was not about morality at all (although many enjoyed opining on her sins): it was about money. The Georgian peerage were incensed by bigamy – and female, but not male infidelity – because it had the potential to create chaos in the bloodlines of the British oligarchy. So, once Elizabeth’s marital duplicity was revealed, everything – the early fame, the masquerade, the first and second wedding, the decades of press which she had often encouraged – came back on to her with patriarchal force; not that, as readers will discover, she was one to shrink away in humiliation. Her characteristically spirited reaction only made her more famous, and in her way, more modern: if she was going to be the subject of such drama, she wanted to determine the plot.
Catherine Ostler is an author, editor, historian and journalist. The Duchess Countess: The Woman who Scandalized a Nation, is her first book.
Aspects of History Issue 6 is out now. Elizabeth Chudleigh
