BIGAMOUS DUCHESS WHO ENTICED A KING
The Duchess Countess Catherine Ostler Simon & Schuster €30 ★★★★★
In 1776, Elizabeth Chudleigh, right, former royal lady-in-waiting and dedicated party girl, found herself fighting for her freedom and reputation in front of the House of Lords. She had been summoned to defend herself against the charge of bigamy. Dressed for drama, and modelling her look on that of the tragic Mary Queen of Scots two centuries earlier, ‘the Duchess Countess’ as she was popularly known, played the role of tragic heroine to perfection. .
In the end, Elizabeth was unanimously found guilty and only narrowly escaped being branded. Sensibly she slipped out of the country, headed for Calais and spent the rest of her life in European exile. What an exile, though. She chummed up with Catherine the Great, whom she thought, rightly, might be sympathetic to her as another high-profile, scandalous woman, and spent a fortune building herself a little palace in the Baltic.
Elizabeth Chudleigh’s story is well known, but in this brisk retelling Catherine Ostler does a good job of making us see how this ambitious army officer’s daughter was doing nothing more wicked than making the best of an indifferent hand of cards. After getting a job as lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales when she was only 22, she made sure she was noticed. Fancy dress was all the rage at court, and on one occasion Elizabeth turned up to a party as Iphigenia, a mythic Greek princess. King George II was so excited by her costume, which seems to have been little more than a wisp of see-through chiffon, that he asked permission to touch her naked breast. She sassily replied that she knew of something even softer, and then placed the royal hand on top of the royal head. You probably had to be there.
As a young woman she had conducted a love affair with Augustus Hervey, later Earl of Bristol. His family were against the match, since she was from an obscure family. The couple married in secret, and Elizabeth gave birth to a boy who sadly died. When Augustus made it clear he would not support Elizabeth in the style to which she was accustomed, she pretended their marriage was invalid and went looking for a rich new husband. She soon found one – the Duke of Kingston – and, against all the odds, fell in love with him. As the gossips soon pointed out, she was both a Countess and a Duchess, hence her curious nickname.
For her latest biographer there is something quite admirable about the Duchess Countess, a girl who battled the law of the land, not to mention a good chunk of Britain’s aristocracy, in order to become her own woman.