The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Kiss me, Chudleigh!
This duchess inspired Vanity Fair, but her life was more like Elizabeth Taylor’s
THE DUCHESS COUNTESS by Catherine Ostler
466pp, Simon & Schuster, T £25 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £9.99
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Even good biographies read like bad novels. Catherine Ostler refers to one of her characters “gazing into the middle distance with a faint, enigmatic smile”. There are people in a garden, “observed only by the fluttering moths around the flowerbeds”. Elizabeth Chudleigh, this book’s heroine, was “talked about in coffee-houses, written about in the penny papers, gossiped about by diarists”, and no doubt by sweeps, muffin men, oyster merchants and tallow chandlers besides.
Admittedly, Hanoverian and Regency England does rather encourage a fan-fluttering style – the pleasure parks and picturesque (always “Hogarthian”) slums; costume balls, concerts, plays and dinners, where guests ate gum-friendly “jellies, syllabubs and crayfish”; the mermaids and unicorns shown at fairs; the parties for stutterers, who came to blows “as each thought the others were mocking them”; the way dentists extracted teeth by wrapping a string around the tooth, the other end around a bullet in a pistol, which was then fired.
Ostler is very good at conjuring up the 18th century “in all its elegance and acidity”. Yet though Chudleigh “was the greatest antiheroine of the Georgian era”, whose life allegedly inspired Thackeray to create Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp, what struck me is how, because of her diamonds, real estate, menagerie of dogs and monkeys and her fancy possessions, the person she actually resembled is Elizabeth Taylor. Even the clothes she went in for, fashioned from flesh-coloured silk, which were deemed “an overt display of her sexuality”, sound exactly like Taylor’s costumes in A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Chudleigh was born in 1721, the daughter of the lieutenant general of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. Renowned for her “expressive blue eyes, fair wavy hair and peachy, plump cheeks”, she became a maid of honour to the Princess of Wales. These paid companions were expected to be “vivacious, moraleraising, polite and entertaining”. They were not allowed to cross their arms or sit without permission, nor speak unless spoken to. As for Cleopatra’s attendants, it was a decorous, insufferable existence of compulsory whispering, joking, tittle-tattling, playing cards, sewing and drinking tea, the pinkie cocked.
The court ladies were inevitably groped and leered at by ghastly drunken aristocrats, intent on gambling away their inheritance. One such “proud buccaneer” was Augustus Hervey, heir to the earldom of Bristol. He was a Royal Navy officer, who had “captured a Spanish ship full of cocoa in the West Indies”. Ostler assures us he was a “crafty, articulate young man, as well as a serial seducer”. He was 19.
It’s not clear why Chudleigh wanted to ally herself with him, apart from the fact that he stood to inherit 30,000 acres of East Anglia. Ostler ascribes their affair to “the naivety of youth”, and their midnight wedding in a deserted mausoleum at Lainston, Hampshire, in 1744, seems make-believe and makeshift, like Elizabeth Taylor’s first silly teenage marriage to Nicky Hilton, which was over before the end of the honeymoon.
Chudleigh “married Hervey on an impulse because she did not want him to abandon her”, argues Ostler. Nevertheless, Hervey immediately returned to his ship and served in Jamaica for the next two years. When he did come back to England, he and his bride made no effort to see each other, not for months. When they were reacquainted, they squabbled. Chudleigh took an overdose of laudanum, Hervey “contracted painful rheumatic pleurisy”. A baby born in due course quickly died. Hervey then set sail for the Mediterranean, where he “flirted with nuns” and had an “anonymous liaison” with a Spanish princess who had “fallen for him on sight” at a bullfight.
“Neither Elizabeth nor Augustus had any desire to remain properly married to the other,” we are told. As divorce in those days entailed an Act of Parliament, Chudleigh instead went to the Consistory [Ecclesiastical] Court, arguing that the marriage was not legal in the first place – the ceremony had been performed outside canonical hours, no banns were read, Hervey was underage, and parental consent had not been sought, and there were no reliable witnesses, only servants.
The ecclesiastical lawyers agreed. Like when Elizabeth Taylor got rid of Michael Wilding in Mexico so she could be with Mike Todd, Chudleigh was “declared free from any matrimonial contract”, and thus in 1769 married her old flame the Duke of Kingston, with a special license granted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The couple lived in splendour in the palatial Thoresby Hall, Nottinghamshire. The duke died within four years, ostensibly of palsy, though also “tortured by doctors”.
The family immediately began persecuting Chudleigh over the duke’s will, which had left her all the income from vast estates. If it could be proved the marriage was invalid, the will could surely be set aside and Chudleigh publicly humiliated, as when Elizabeth Taylor was accused by the Vatican of “erotic vagrancy” for being with Richard Burton. “You have declared I should not have any peace while on the face of the earth,” Chudleigh wailed to the litigious Kingston relatives. “You have deprived me of my name and would deprive me of my fortune.”
“All eyes were on a woman in black, charged with bigamy,” says Ostler. The story suddenly becomes g ‘The greatest anti-heroine of the Georgian era’: Oliva Cooke as Becky Sharp in ITV’s
Vanity Fair one of patriarchal power – how the majesty of the law, the ownership of land and acquisition of money, could never go a woman’s way. In any event, as a married woman’s property belonged to her husband, if the Kingston wedding was cancelled and the Hervey one reinstated, Chudleigh’s assets bought for her by the duke in her name, would go to the earl – though that issue, at least, vanished when Hervey died in 1779, having fallen in love with a courtesan “said to have been born in a wheelbarrow”.
The Law Lords threw out the verdict of the Consistory Court, and Chudleigh was indeed branded a bigamist. She moved to the Continent, taking with her “two hundredweight of cheese”, then Russia, where she ran a vodka distillery in Estonia. The rumour in London was that Chudleigh planned to become the next Queen of Poland, like Elizabeth Taylor hoping to be First Lady for senator John Warner.
She died in Paris, on the eve of the Revolution. The Kingston relatives descended and made off with jewellery. The house was looted. Chudleigh’s body was shoved in an anonymous vault in Belleville – presumably it is still there. Her London home was demolished in 1937 for flats. Its doors are in Hearst Castle, San Simeon. Thoresby is now a hotel, threatened with subsidence from mine workings. Chudleigh’s French chateau, requisitioned by the French navy, “who tracked nuclear submarines from the site”, is now abandoned. The Estonian distillery was bombed in the war. Chudleigh’s art collection found its way to the Hermitage.
In an epilogue, Ostler says she has wandered through the galleries there, examining her subject’s former belongings, marvelling at their “excessive scale and secret history”. She would have been better off dropping the trappings and protocols of a historian, and instead giving the duchess countess the full Hilary Mantel treatment.
She was branded a bigamist, then ran off to Russia, where she ran a vodka distillery