THE MERRY DUCHESS
When Elizabeth Chudleigh first opened her eyes on the world, nearly two
centuries ago, at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, of which her father was
Deputy-Governor, we may be sure that her parents little anticipated the
romantic and adventurous _rôle_ Fate had assigned to her on the stage of
life. A member of an ancient family, whose women had ever been
distinguished for their virtue as its men for their valour, the Chelsea
infant was destined to shock Society by the laxity of her morals as she
dazzled it by her beauty and charm, and to make herself conspicuous, in
an age none too strait-laced, as an adventuress of rare skill and
daring, and as a profligate in petticoats.
As a child she amused all who knew her by the airs she assumed. Before
she was long out of the nursery she vowed that "she would be a Duchess,"
and a Duchess she was before she died. She was quick to learn the power
of beauty and of a clever tongue; and before she was emancipated from
short frocks she was a finished coquette.
Such was Elizabeth Chudleigh when, at fifteen, she blossomed into
precocious womanhood. Her father, the Colonel, had long been dead, and
his widow had made her home in the neighbourhood of Leicester House,
where the Prince and Princess of Wales held their Court. Here she made
the acquaintance of Mr Pulteney, later Earl of Bath, a great favourite
of the weak and dissolute Prince; and through his interest, Elizabeth,
now a radiantly lovely and supremely fascinating young woman, was
appointed a maid-of-honour to the Princess.
In the environment of a Court, surrounded by gallants, and with women
almost as lovely as herself to pit her charms against, Colonel
Chudleigh's daughter, eager to drink the cup of pleasure and of
conquest, was in her element. She was the merriest madcap in a Court
where licence was unrestrained; and she soon had high-placed lovers at
her dainty feet, including, so they say, none other than Frederick
himself. Coronets galore dazzled her eyes with their rival allurements;
but while, with tantalising coquetry, she kept them all dangling, one
alone tempted her--that which was laid at her feet by the Duke of
Hamilton, a gallant whose high rank was rivalled by his handsome face
and figure, and his many courtly accomplishments.
When the Duke asked her to be his wife she graciously consented, and her
Duchess's coronet seemed assured thus early, with a prospect of
happiness that does not always accompany it; for in this case she seems
to have given her heart where she gave her hand. For a time the course
of true love ran smoothly, and the maid-of-honour became a model of
decorum as the affianced wife of the man she loved.
But her dream of happiness was destined to be short-lived. An intriguing
aunt, Mrs Hanmer, who had no love for the Hamiltons, set to work to dash
the cup of happiness from her niece's lips. She intercepted the Duke's
letters, poured into Elizabeth's ears poisonous stories of his
infidelities and entanglements to account for his silence, and, when the
poison began to show signs of working, whisked her niece away on a visit
to the country-house of her cousin, Mr Merrill, at Lainston, where among
her fellow-guests was a dashing young naval lieutenant, the Hon.
Augustus Hervey, who was second heir to his father's Earldom of Bristol.
The lieutenant, as was inevitable, perhaps, fell promptly under the
spell of the maid-of-honour's charms, and made violent love to her,
with, of course, Mrs Hanmer's whole-hearted connivance. The girl,
blazing with resentment of the Duke's coldness, and his apparent
indifference to her beauty and his vows, lent a willing ear to his
pleadings, and within a few days had promised to be wife to a man whom,
as she confessed later, she "almost hated."
The wedding was, by mutual consent, to be secret, partly on account of
the bridegroom's lack of means to support a wife, and partly from fear
of giving offence to his family. In the dead of an August night, in
1744, the bridal party stole out of Mr Merrill's house, and made its
way to the neighbouring church, where the ceremony was performed by the
light of a taper concealed in the best man's hat. Thus, romantically and
mysteriously, Elizabeth Chudleigh took her first matrimonial step, which
was to lead to such dramatic developments.
Forty-eight hours later the bridegroom had joined his ship at
Portsmouth; and his bride's greatest joy, as she confessed, was when he
had departed. Such a marriage, the fruit of pique and anger, boded ill
for happiness. Frankly, the union was one long misery, broken by the
intervals when the husband was away at sea, and accentuated during his,
happily brief, visits to her. Two children were born to this
ill-assorted pair, but both died young; and Elizabeth Hervey had
abundant opportunity to follow her natural bent, by seeking
forgetfulness in dissipation.
In the full glow of her beauty, a wife who was no wife, she resumed her
broken career of conquest. She made a tour of Europe, leaving a train of
broken-hearted and languishing lovers behind her. At Berlin she brought
Frederick the Great to his knees, and made an abject slave of him; she
shocked the ladies of the Dresden Court by her laxity and the prodigal
display of her charms, and by the same arts bewitched the men. She led,
we are told, a life of shameless dissipation, which only her beauty and
intellectual gifts redeemed from vulgar depravity. She had lovers in
every capital she visited, and discarded them as lightly as so many
playthings.
On her return to England, so anxious was she to obliterate that fatal
episode in the dark church, she made a journey with certain friends to
Lainston, and, while the vicar's back was turned, tore the fatal page
out of the marriage register.
Meanwhile, the naval lieutenant had blossomed into an Earl, on his
father's death; and when the new Earl, her husband, showed signs of
failing health, and there was an early prospect of graduating as a
wealthy dowager Countess, she saw the wisdom of making another journey
to Lainston to replace the record of her marriage. Alas, for her
scheming; the moribund Earl took a new lease of life, and the gilded
dowagerhood became nebulous and remote again.
But Elizabeth Chudleigh was not to be long baulked in her ambitious
designs. Though her charms had grown too opulent and were faded--for she
was now near her fiftieth birthday--she was able to count among her
slaves the aged Duke of Kingston, an amiable and weak old gentleman of
enormous wealth, and with one accommodating foot already "in the grave."
Wife, or no wife, she now made up her mind to be a Duchess at last. She
appealed to Lord Bristol, the husband from whom she had so long been
estranged, to divorce her, even going so far as to offer to qualify for
the divorce by an open and flagrant act of infidelity; but his lordship
only shrugged a scornful shoulder. Still, not to be thwarted, she
brought a suit of jactitation of marriage, and, by a lavish use of
bribes and cajolery, got a sentence from the Ecclesiastical Court which
at last set her free. Within a month she had blossomed into "the most
high and _puissante_ Princess, the Duchess of Kingston," thus realising
her childish ambition.
For four and a half years the Duchess was a dignified pattern of all the
virtues. The passions of youth had lost their fires; the scenes of
revelry and coarse dissipation to which they had given birth were only a
memory. She would yet die in the odour of sanctity, however tardy. But
storms were brewing, and the Duke's death, in 1746, precipitated them,
though not before she had had another fling with the riches he left to
her.
Throwing aside her widow's weeds, she flung herself again--old, obese,
and faded as she was--into a round of dissipation which shocked and
disgusted even London, accustomed as it was to the vagaries of the
"quality," until she was glad to escape from the storm of censure she
had brought on her head.
She bought a magnificent yacht and sailed away to Rome, where Pope and
Cardinal alike conspired to do her honour; and was only saved from
eloping with a titled swindler by his arrest and later suicide in
prison. It was while in Rome that news came to her that her late
husband's heirs were planning a charge of bigamy against her, with a
view to setting aside his will in her favour.
Her exchequer was empty for the time; but, presenting herself before her
banker, pistol in hand, she compelled him to provide her with funds to
enable her to return to London--to find all arrangements already made
for her trial in Westminster Hall on a charge of bigamy. Public opinion
was arrayed against her; she was received with abuse, jeers, and
lampoons. Foote made her the object of universal ridicule by a comedy
entitled, "A Trip to Calais." But the Duchess metaphorically snapped her
fingers at them all. She was no woman to bow before the storm of
ridicule and censure. She openly defied it to do its worst. Her splendid
equipage was to be seen everywhere, with the autocratic Duchess, serene,
smiling, contemptuous.
It was of this period of her life that the following story is told. One
day when driving in London her gorgeous carriage was brought to a halt
by a coal-cart which was being unloaded in a narrow street. The Duchess
was furious at the delay, and protruding her head and shoulders from the
carriage and leaning her arms on the door, she cried out to the
offending carter: "How dare you, sirrah, to stop a woman of quality in
the street?" "Woman of quality!" sneered the man. "Yes, fellow,"
rejoined her Grace, "don't you see my arms upon my carriage?" "Indeed I
do," he answered, "and a pair of d---- coarse arms they are, too!"
Seldom has a trial excited such widespread excitement and interest.
"Everybody," Horace Walpole wrote to his friend Sir
Horace Mann, "is on the quest for tickets for her Grace
of Kingston's trial. I am persuaded that her impudence
will operate in some singular manner; probably she will
appear in weeds, with a train to reach across Westminster
Hall, with mourning maids-of-honour to support her when
she swoons at the dear Duke's name, and in a black veil
to conceal her blushing or not blushing. To this farce,
novel and curious as it will be, I shall not go. I think
cripples have no business in crowds, but at the Pool of
Bethesda; and, to be sure, this is no angel that troubles
the waters."
But if Walpole resisted the temptation to witness a scene so piquant and
remarkable, hundreds of the highest in the land, including Queen
Charlotte herself, the Prince of Wales and many another Royal personage,
ambassadors and statesmen, flocked to Westminster to see the notorious
Duchess on her trial on the charge of bigamy. And the vast Hall was
packed with a curious and expectant crowd when her Grace made her
stately entry with a retinue of _femmes de chambre_, her doctor,
apothecary, and secretary, and proceeded to her seat, in front of her
six bewigged Counsel, with the dignified step and haughty mien of an
Empress.
Hannah More, who was present at the trial, says that hardly a trace of
her once enchanting beauty was visible; and that, had it not been for
her white face, "she might easily have been taken for a bundle of
bombasin."
The trial lasted several days, during the whole of which the Duchess
conducted herself with remarkable dignity and composure, in face of the
damning array of evidence that was brought against her--the evidence of
a maid who had witnessed her midnight marriage in Lainston Church; of
the widow of the parson who officiated at the nuptials; and of Serjeant
Hawkins, who authenticated the birth of her first child by Augustus
Hervey.
"The scene opened on Wednesday with all its pomp," wrote
Walpole, who although not present seems to have followed
the trial with the keenest interest, "and the
doubly-noble prisoner went through her part with
universal admiration. Instead of her usual ostentatious
folly and clumsy pretensions to cunning, all her conduct
was decent, and even seemed natural. Her dress was
entirely black and plain; her attendants not too
numerous; her dismay at first perfectly unaffected. A few
tears balanced cheerfulness enough, and her presence of
mind and attention never deserted her. This rational
behaviour and the pleadings of her Counsel, who contended
for the finality of her Ecclesiastical Court's sentence
against a second trial, carried her triumphantly through
the first day, and turned the stream much in her favour."
The following day proved a much more severe test to her Grace's
composure; and no sooner had the Court risen than "she had to be
blooded, and fell into a great passion of tears." And each succeeding
day added to the tension and anxieties which she struggled so bravely to
conceal.
On the third day of the trial Walpole says:
"The plot thickens, or rather opens. Yesterday the judges
were called on for their opinions, and _una voce_
dismantled the Ecclesiastical Court. The
Attorney-General, Thurlow, then detailed the 'Life and
Adventures of Elizabeth Chudleigh, _alias_ Hervey,
_alias_ the most high and _puissante_ Princess, the
Duchess of Kingston.' Her Grace bore the narration with a
front worthy of her exalted rank. Then was produced the
first capital witness, the ancient damsel who was present
at her first marriage. To this witness her Grace was
benign, but had a transitory swoon at the mention of her
dear Duke's name; and at intervals has been blooded
enough to have supplied her execution if necessary. Two
babes were likewise proved to have blessed her first
nuptials, one of whom, for aught that appears, may exist
and become Earl of Bristol."
Three days later Horace Walpole concludes his narrative of the trial,
which we are afraid his antipathy to the adventurous Duchess has
coloured a little too vividly:
"The wisdom of the land," he writes, "has been exerted
for five days in turning a Duchess into a Countess, and
yet does not think it a punishable crime for a Countess
to convert herself into a Duchess. After a pretty
defence, and a speech of fifty pages (which she herself
had written and pronounced very well), the sages, in
spite of the Attorney-General (who brandished a hot iron)
dismissed her with the single injunction of paying the
fees, all voting her guilty; but the Duke of Newcastle,
her neighbour in the country, softening his vote by
adding 'erroneously, not intentionally.' So ends the
solemn farce. The Earl of Bristol, they say, does not
intend to leave her that title.... I am glad to have done
with her."
A few days later, in spite of a writ, _ne exeat regno_, which had been
issued against her, she was back in France, travelling in state as
"Madame la Duchesse de Kingston." From Calais she made her magnificent
progress to Rome, where Pope and Cardinals vied in doing honour to so
exalted and charming a lady, and entertained her as regally as if she
had been a Queen. Returning to Calais she installed herself in a
palatial house where she dispensed a lavish hospitality, and flung her
gold about with prodigal hands.
But Calais soon palled on her exacting taste. It was too dull, too
cabined for her activities. So away she sailed in a splendid yacht to St
Petersburg where Catherine received her as a sister-Empress, and gave
balls, banquets, and receptions in her honour. From St Petersburg she
continued her journey to Poland, and made a conquest of Prince
Radzivill, who exhausted his purse and ingenuity in devising
entertainments for her, including the excitement of a bear-hunt by
torchlight.
Back again in France, flushed with her triumphs, she purchased a Palace
in Paris, and the château of Sainte Assize in the country, at which
alternately she held her Court, and moved among her courtiers an obese
Queen, alternately charming them with her graciousness and shocking them
by her profanity and indelicacies. Here she made her will, leaving most
of her jewels to her "dear friend," the Russian Empress; a large diamond
to her equally good friend the Pope; and an extremely valuable pearl
necklace and earrings to my Lady Salisbury, for no other reason than
that they had been originally worn some centuries earlier by a lady who
bore the same title.
But the career of the profligate and eccentric Duchess was nearing its
close, and she died as she had lived, game and defiant. While she was
sitting at dinner news came that a lawsuit had been decided against her.
She broke out in a violent passion and burst a blood-vessel. But, even
dying as she was, she refused to remain in bed. "At your peril, disobey
me!" she said to her protesting attendants. "I _will_ get up!" She got
up, dressed, and walked about the room. Then, calling for wine, she
drained glass after glass of Madeira. "I will lie down on the couch,"
she then said. "I can sleep, and after that I shall be quite well
again."
From that sleep she never awoke. The maidservants who held her hands
felt them grow gradually cold. The Duchess was dead. After life's fitful
fever, she had found rest. Thus died, in the sixty-ninth year of her
life Elizabeth, Duchess of Kingston, who had drunk deep of life's cup of
pleasure; who had alternately shocked and dazzled the world; and who had
found that the greatest triumphs of her beauty and the most prodigal
indulgence of her appetites were "all vanity."