Britain’s most eccentric aristocrat lives again
The remarkable story of the Fifth Marquess of Anglesey is being told in a musical comedy. Tristram Fane Saunders reports
Most people haven’t heard of Henry Cyril Paget, which is hardly surprising; his descendants did all they could to scrub him from history. The Fifth Marquess of Anglesey, “Toppy” to his friends, was considered a blot on the family name.
He enjoyed dressing up as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, performed sultry dances in German music halls, and (as one contemporary newspaper put it) “he bought diamonds as an ordinary man buys cigarettes”.
When his wife Lilian made an admiring comment about a piece of jewellery in a shop window, he bought the whole shop. Rather than making love, he preferred merely to cover her naked body in gemstones. She left him after just six weeks, mid-honeymoon.
He has been dead since 1905, but this month Toppy is back treading the boards in a new show at London’s Young Vic theatre. “Regrettably,” he sings, “my family annihilated every record of my existence, and burnt every trace of me: every photograph and document and letter…”
And yet there he stands, resurrected by actor-composer Seiriol Davies in his wickedly funny three-hander How to Win Against History – a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016 and 2017 and soon to open in London.
“A lot of what survives about him is rumour, speculation, myth,” says Davies. “You can pour whatever you want into the vessel of this character. And that’s a gift.” It clearly is: Davies summons real pathos from this story, while squeezing in a punchline every six seconds. Even the current Marquess (the Eighth) is a fan.
Davies retells the Marquess’s story using the very thing that caused his downfall: musical comedy. A keen amateur performer, Lord Anglesey wanted to share his talent with the world. So he bought himself a theatre troupe. He paid Julia Kent and Alex Keith, two prominent actors of the time, well above the odds to drop everything and move to his remote manor in Wales.
There, he gutted the family chapel and rebranded it the Gaiety Theatre. For its opening show, Aladdin, he lit a three-mile path of flaming torches all the way to the main square in the nearest village, the snappily named Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
This lavish Christmas pantomime ran until June. The jewels on the costumes alone were worth (at today’s value) around £43million. He had no plans to recoup the cost through sales: tickets were free to anyone who wanted them.
Emboldened by Aladdin’s modest success, Lord Anglesey decided to mount a tour of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, with a company of 50 (orchestra included). Even Wilde himself would have found their travelling arrangements a touch decadent. Their cars were redecorated outside to look like the carriages of the Orient Express. The exhaust fumes of the Marquess’s own vehicle were scented with perfume and rose petals.
“He was a genuine oddball,” says Professor Viv Gardner, a performance historian at Manchester University, who is writing a biography of the Marquess. “From quite early on, he was thought of as beyond the pale.”
High society shunned him, but in Anglesey he became a kind of local mascot. “He developed a relationship with the local community through his shows,” Gardner adds. “In 21st-century eyes, it’s very strange. But he created a sort of utopia. At the same time as all this was going on, there was Lord Penrhyn, over the straits, only five miles away, behaving abominably, like the arch-capitalist out of a melodrama, locking out the starving slate workers. Yet on this island utopia you’ve got an eccentric aristocrat being invited to kick off local football matches.”
His quixotic fantasies ruined him. Once one of the richest men in the world, Henry Paget died bankrupt in Monte Carlo at just 29, of a broken heart. “Actually, it was probably a form of tuberculosis which brought on a heart failure,” Gardner corrects me.
In its obituary, The Welsh Coast Pioneer praised him for his many anonymous acts of charity, but papers beyond Wales either mocked or pitied him. According to the Daily Dispatch, he had “a strange and repellent spirit opaquely incomprehensible and pathetically alone”.
This suggestion of loneliness rings true. Toppy’s mother died when he was two years old, and his father, the Fourth Marquess, was by many accounts a nasty bit of work. There’s a revealing, apocryphal story about him. His butler once asked him what to do with a few spare fire extinguishers. The Marquess replied, “Put them in my coffin. I shall need them.”
He may have been neglected by Pagets before and after, but in Davies, the Dancing Marquess has found a passionate defender.
The 33-year-old playwright grew up in Anglesey, making regular visits to the Paget estate, Plas Newydd. Generations of stiff-upper-lipped aristocrats have monuments there; there’s a column to rival Nelson’s for the First Marquess, who famously had his leg shot off at Waterloo. “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!” he is said to have cried, prompting the Duke of Wellington’s laconic reply: “By God, sir, so you have.”
And how did the estate commemorate poor Toppy? “Just a few photocopied photographs, grudgingly laminated, on the wall directly above the doormat.” But the photos were extraordinary. “He looks like Freddie Mercury drove through a branch of the jewellers Elizabeth Duke’s covered in Sellotape, and everything stuck on.”
For Davies, Toppy’s saving grace was his sincerity. A few surviving descriptions suggest he had a naive vulnerability that set him apart from other “eccentrics” of the day. One friend called him “a shrinking, nervous young man”. Gardner says it is “probable” he was homosexual, but – like Davies – is reluctant to reduce this unique figure to a label.
History has started to turn in Toppy’s favour. Gardner, who helps the National Trust with their work on Plas Newydd, tells me they are “very interested” in revisiting his story.
“I wanted to ask what can we glean from the fragments of history, how we might even change the world about us,” says Davies. “Also, I wanted to get onstage in a dress.”
The Marquess would certainly approve.