Elizabeth Linley at the age of seventeen is England’s most celebrated singer. Her beauty and voice can captivate the King, or send an audience into a state of wild infectious hysteria, but suddenly and mysteriously she disappears during the night of March the 18th 1772. What no one knows, she is escaping the trauma and consequences of a horrific rape at the hands of Thomas Mathews and the stifling controls of her ambitious parents who, in a Britney Spears-like manner, expropriate all her earnings for themselves and try to force her into marriage with a rich sixty-four-year-old bachelor. Six weeks later she is discovered in the company of Richard Brinsley Sheridan in a remote French town and dragged back by her furious father, who keeps her a virtual prisoner.
News reaches her that Sheridan has been seriously wounded in a duel. Still, he manages to survive to confront her father with a blackmail ultimatum, forcing him to permit their marriage. Sheridan, a talented and ambitious writer, destroys his new bride’s happiness on their honeymoon by forbidding her to sing again. To overcome the loss of his wife’s income, the Sheridan’s co-write two hugely successful plays, The Rivals and La Duenna, in which, like Dorothy Wordsworth, Elizabeth’s role is unacknowledged. The proceeds, however, enable Sheridan to buy The Drury Lane Theatre.
On the opening night of his third play, The School for Scandal, Elizabeth discovers her husband has two secret mistresses. She leaves him for Bath. It takes the tragic death of her brother Thomas to reunite them. But when she returns to her husband, she finds him living extravagantly and shockingly in debt.
Against Elizabeth’s better judgment, but supported by his newly found aristocratic friends, Sheridan’s next move is to enter politics, a world in which he shines as a formidable Whig orator in the House of Commons. However, the cost of his election at Stafford drives him even deeper into debt. Obligated to support her husband’s interests, Elizabeth canvasses the 1784 election in support of Charles James Fox’s Westminster seat. But any chance of reconciliation is dashed when it is revealed that Sheridan is having an affair with Lady Harriet Duncannon. They separate again, and Elizabeth goes to live alone at Deepdene in Surrey.
Here, Charles James Fox persuades her to interview an East India Company whistle-blower. Armed with this secret intelligence, Sheridan becomes the champion of the day, leading the Impeachment Trial in Westminster Hall, of Warren Hastings, the corrupt Governor of Bengal.
The following year she is reluctantly reunited with her husband to add her practical support to the Prince of Wales, in his – ultimately unsuccessful – Regency power grab, during the madness of King George III in 1787-8. Sheridan had gambled everything on holding a valuable Political Office under the Regent and now falls prey to his creditors who strip their home bare. Over Christmas the following year at Crewe Hall, any attempt at reconciliation is dashed when Sheridan is found in flagrante delicto with a servant of their hosts and once again the couple separate.
At the Duchess of Devonshire’s Ball Elizabeth becomes reacquainted with Lord Edward FitzGerald, recently returned from his heroic explorations across North America. Forced by lack of money, Elizabeth moves out of London to live close to her lifelong friend Hitty Canning. Here she takes a lease on Athene Cottage, a little home of which she had always dreamed. However, her hopes for a peaceful existence are shattered when she discovers that her nemesis, the rapist, Thomas Mathews, is stalking her. The shock exacerbates an attack of consumption and she flees to Southampton to recover, FitzGerald at her side. They rekindle an initial attraction and become lovers. Expecting his child, they plan a future together in Ireland, to escape their scandalous situation.
However, war with Russia threatens and FitzGerald, an officer in the British Army, is deployed to Prussia, leaving Elizabeth alone. During his absence, she nearly dies giving birth to their daughter, Mary. Filled with remorse, and still fundamentally in love with her, Sheridan tries to atone by taking her to be nursed at Hot Wells near Bristol.
FitzGerald returns from the Russian front desperate to be with Elizabeth and their child, but their attempts to meet are thwarted. They will never meet again.
Thomas Messel is a writer and the author of The Nightingale of Bath: Love, Jealousy, Betrayal and Revolution in Georgian England.
