Read the book: «A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby»

3 Lady Ellenborough 1825–1827

The honeymoon in Brighton lasted a mere three weeks and Lord Ellenborough was back at work in October. During the following period, though busy with affairs of great moment, he still found time to write poetry to his bride. The epithet ‘Juliet’ was only used in the first months of their marriage, probably as an allusion to Jane’s youth. Jane had a pet name for her husband – ‘Oussey’ – but in all surviving correspondence between the two she signed herself ‘Janet’, except in the following exchange:

Oh Juliet, if to have no fear

But that of deserving thee,

To know no peace when thou art near

No joy thou can’st not share with me

If still to feel a lover’s fire

And love thee more the more prospect,

To have on earth but one desire

Of making thee completely blest!

If this be passion, thou alone

Canst make my heart such passion know.

Love me but still, as thou hast done,

And I will ever love thee so.

Ellenborough, 12 November 1824

To which his bride of two months readily replied within twenty-four hours:

‘To love thee still as I have done’

Say, is it all thou ask of me?

Thou has it then, for thou alone

Reign in the soul that breathes for thee.

Edward, for thee alone I sigh

And feel a love unknown before

What bliss is mine when thou art nigh

Oh loved one still, I ask no more

As thou art now, oh ever be

To her whose fate in thine is bound

Whose greatest joy is loving thee

Whose bliss in thee alone is found.

And she will ever thee adore

From day to day with ardour new

Both now and to life’s latest hour

With passion, felt alas! … by few.

Juliet, 13 November 1824

Those words ‘whose greatest joy is loving thee’ hardly reinforce the image of a girl coerced into an unwanted marriage, nor charges that the marriage was a failure from the day of the wedding, and these facts are important in view of what was to follow. Visitors to Elm Grove found the couple happy together and living in terms of open affection.¹ They rode out together most mornings when Edward was at Roehampton, often across Richmond Park.² Joseph Jekyll, who visited the Ellenboroughs just before Christmas, wrote: ‘I dined and slept … at Roehampton to be presented by Lord Ellenborough to his bride. Very pretty, but quite a girl, twenty years younger than himself³ … The general subject was his lordship’s lamentation at being called away so frequently from his beautiful wife by debates and politics.’⁴

The poetry and literary love-making during Ellenborough’s absences continued for months, whenever Ellenborough was away from Jane, and some, such as the following extract from a poem written on New Year’s Day 1825 while he was staying at Boldrewood in Hampshire with Lord Lyndhurst, the Attorney-General and a close friend, is illuminating:

My bride! For thou art still a bride to me

And loved with all the passion of a soul

Which gave itself at once, nor would be free …

Yet I have had a roving eye, till now,

And gazed around on every lovely face

And still would, all enthralled to beauty, bow

But ne’er in fairest features could I trace

The sympathetic smile, and winning grace

Which beam aloft on thy illumined brow

And every thought of others is effaced

In dreams of bliss which heaven’s behests allow

So wedded truth alone, and love’s unbroken vow,

Ellenborough

Unless this poem came as a shock to her it seems that Jane was aware of Ellenborough’s reputation as a womaniser; he freely admits that he is still a potential rover were he not in love with his wife and her sympathetic smile and winning grace.

During her husband’s many absences Jane was initially content to get to know her new homes and learn the ordering of them. Steely was a visitor to Roehampton several times, as were Lady Andover and Lady Anson. Nor was Roehampton far from London, should Jane have felt the want of company. Once the 1825 season started, though, Jane removed to town and immediately her name featured regularly in the court page of the Morning Post as guest of socially prominent hostesses, often – but not always – accompanied by her husband, and also as the hostess herself of several formal dinners and a ball.

As the year wore on, however, hairline cracks began to appear in the fabric of the marriage. Lady Londonderry had earlier commended her former son-in-law for the five years of happiness he had given her late daughter, and Ellenborough’s biographers claim that the first Lady Ellenborough, Octavia, was the love of his life. Ellenborough is on record as saying that in his opinion whatever good he had done in his life was due to his first wife.⁵ Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Jane, feeling rejected by her husband’s frequent absences and hurt by his apparent coolness, attributed the neglect not to his work but to his love for the dead Octavia.

In a poem to him, written about the time of the first anniversary of their wedding, answering Edward’s comment on her ‘lack of gaiety’, she asked his forgiveness for her jealous fears that Octavia ‘thy love of former years still reigns, while every thought and wish of mine is breathed for thee alone’. Beyond doubt she believed herself in love with her husband when she asked plaintively, ‘did her passion equal mine? Her joy the same when thou art near? And if not present did she pine?’

And here I am the fond, the young,

The blest in all that earth can give,

By men beloved, by lovers sung,

Yet silent, loveworn do I grieve.⁶

Why did this marriage, which had begun so well, run into trouble so quickly? On the face of it Jane had everything most women of her world could have wished: love, wealth and social position. At least Edward’s poetry proclaimed love, and whatever his faults he was always generous. Jane had a ‘pin-money’ allowance that her female relatives regarded with envy,⁷ and on their marriage he presented her with a green leather box of family jewels. Even a year after their marriage he habitually returned from short absences with a costly gift of jewellery such as the emeralds for which Lady Ellenborough became envied. However, it becomes clear from her diary in later years that these gifts were not appreciated by Jane as much as would have been a display of warmth from her husband.⁸

During the London season it was inconceivable that she would not attract the attention of admiring young men prepared to offer a solace her husband could not or would not give. Ellenborough might have smiled at the stir his wife created whenever she appeared in company, indeed basked in the thought that he possessed what other men so desired. Or he may have been so preoccupied and immersed in his work that he did not notice that the only time his bored young wife came to life was when she was the adored centrepiece of a crowd of young men.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Jane began to move away from her husband, in fantasy if not in deed. The next poem is almost certainly about George Anson, and was written after the visit of a horseman whom, at first sight from a distance, Jane mistook for her cousin. She recalled his winning look and had to ‘quell each rebel sigh’ at the thought of him. But then loyalty to Edward overtook her fantasy:

I may not think, I will not pause

One look behind my faith to shake.

Henceforth must buried be the past

Nor in my heart shall e’er awake

Its echo, for dear Edward’s sake.⁹

So far as one can take this surviving written work as evidence of the pattern of their marriage, it is possible to conclude that Jane felt neglected by her husband and believed he no longer loved her. Given Ellenborough’s age and disposition, and Jane’s lively but romantically inclined personality, such a situation was always probable. Had she confided in her mother or Steely, she would undoubtedly have been advised to accept that Edward must be about his business. It would be wrong, however, not to produce another piece of the jigsaw at this stage. Edward had a mistress, and within six months of the marriage Jane apparently discovered a portrait of this woman in their home.¹⁰

At this point, although the couple clearly had problems, the marriage survived a potential crisis. The Ellenboroughs spent some weeks in Paris during the autumn of 1825,¹¹ and, at least to observers who would later testify to the fact, all seemed perfectly normal. In the following April, when seen by a member of the family at an early season ball, she was ‘on the arm of her Lord looking devastatingly handsome in black velvet and diamonds’.¹² Two nights later she was noted by Mrs Arbuthnot at a Spanish ball held at the Opera House, where the company ‘Polonaised all around … Lady Ellenborough looked quite beautiful … it was altogether as magnificent a fete as I ever saw.’¹³ No event of any note, it seems, was held without the presence of this lovely young woman. And she was never without her crowd of male admirers. At the end of the season the couple spent several weeks in Brighton, staying at the Norfolk Hotel in a suite which they habitually engaged for regular visits to the seaside town.

The appearance of serenity was, however, a front. The eighteen-year-old Jane, still more child than woman, left more and more in her own company, was inexorably sucked into the glittering and sophisticated world of the European diplomatic set, to whom she had first been proudly introduced as Ellenborough’s fiancée. They were Edward’s friends and now they were hers too. She was intelligent enough to see that their rules on behaviour were not those of her own family, but it seemed to her that if these highly regarded people behaved in such a manner then she too could play by their rules. Her husband’s infidelity may have caused the new note of defiance in her conduct.

Jane’s activities were remarked by friends of the family, who were concerned that the young woman should be given a hint in order to correct any danger of being thought ‘fast’. Predictably, when her parents remonstrated with her, Jane defended herself vigorously, provoking an estrangement with her father which lasted some months.¹⁴ Steely spoke to her and, receiving no satisfactory response, took the matter up with Lady Anson. This conversation caused George Anson to be charged with keeping an eye on his young cousin, escorting Jane about town and guarding her reputation. It was an unfortunate commission. That summer, only two years after her marriage, Jane embarked upon a romantic liaison that had been waiting in the wings, so to speak, for several years.

George Anson was ten years older than Jane, yet they had known each other for ever. Perhaps he had not recognised the hero-worship of his pretty cousin that had begun when he returned as a handsome eighteen-year-old subaltern from the battlefield of Waterloo. Three years later, when Jane was still only twelve, Anson had just been elected to Parliament as the Member for South Staffordshire.¹⁵ He quickly became acknowledged by men of character as a likeable sprig and ‘a top sawyer’, despite a well-earned reputation for womanising.¹⁶ ‘George Anson is to have all the married women of good character in London this year,’ wrote one to another good-naturedly. ‘And so he ought, for he is the best looking man I know.’¹⁷

In fact, in his first years in town George was in one scrape after another, tipping a boatload of cronies into the Thames near Kingston, getting drunk, behaving outrageously with older women.¹⁸ He was believed to be the organiser of the famous quadrille at Almack’s in which both George and the lady he would later marry danced together all evening, to the irritation of many matrons:

I went two nights ago to a costume ball at Almack’s. It was all very brilliant and there was a quadrille that was beautiful. All the prettiest girls in London were in it … the men were in Regimentals and each wore a bouquet. The quadrille, however, gave great offence for they danced together all night and took the upper end of the room which was considered a great impertinence.¹⁹

But Anson’s pranks were conducted with such innocent good humour and unselfconscious charm that he was instantly forgiven, particularly by women, who fell at his feet in droves. He was a cracking horseman and could drive a carriage ‘to an inch’; he was also one of the best shots in England.²⁰

Jane had been a pretty schoolgirl with a schoolgirl crush on him, but, as they both grew older, on two counts – her being a virgin and a member of his own family – she was strictly forbidden territory to George. He was used to tougher meat, his name being linked by both Creevey and Mrs Arbuthnot with the fastest women in town: in particular, the young Duchess of Rutland and Mrs Fox Lane, who, though the latter was considerably older than he, were both said to be his lovers.²¹

In the summer of 1926 it was a different matter. Jane was a married woman and therefore a ‘safe’ target by the code of the day. She was among the most desirable women in London, her virginal sweetness having given way to a slim voluptuousness guaranteed to turn men’s heads. It was perfectly acceptable for George to escort his first cousin Jane to functions in the absence of her busy husband. George, as well as serving in several political posts, was now a colonel in the Guards, and Jane was delighted to have such a handsome and personable chaperon.

They were seen together often, at Almack’s, at the races, at a fireworks party. Almost certainly the affair began perfectly innocently with the touch of hands or a snatched kiss; but at some point it became something else. Two handsome young people, both with a healthy libido – ‘Oh it is heaven to love thee,’ she wrote, and ‘rapture to be near thee.’ If he only felt half the joy she experienced, then, ‘what ecstasy is thine!’ He swore undying love; she countered that he might – at some time in the future, when her beauty had gone – be seduced by others. Still, she claimed, she would be true to him, for ‘though all righteous heaven above, / Forbids this rebel heart to love, / To love is still its fate.’²²

Gone now was all her resolution of quelling her ‘rebel sighs, for Edward’s sake’. She flung herself into the affair with passionate involvement. Such a remarkable couple could not escape attention; indeed, they were frequently mentioned in contemporary correspondence, and featured on the same guest lists of court pages, but at this stage there were no raised eyebrows and no gossip, because the pair were reasonably discreet. At Roehampton there was a side-door to the house from the garden which was little used and consequently kept locked. Jane gave the key to George so that he could come and go at night during Edward’s absences, without the servants seeing him.²³

At the same time, in a more public manner, and to the sustained disapproval not only of her parents but also of Steely (who visited Roehampton every two months or so as a friend of the family), Jane infiltrated deeper into the set of cynical, worldly men and women who, while considered by many to constitute the haul ton, the people of high fashion, were not at all suitable companions for a girl of nineteen. They included at least a brace of Almack’s Patronesses – Princess Esterhazy, the wife of the Austrian Ambassador, and Princess de Lieven, the haughty and imperious wife of the Russian Ambassador – as well as other leading members of the diplomatic set who were also the intimates of the King in the so-called ‘Cottage Clique’.²⁴ All were regular dinner guests at Lord Ellenborough’s London house and at Roehampton, and their reciprocated hospitality was accepted by both Edward and Jane.

The Digbys’ distress at Jane’s behaviour was increased on the publication of a novel which, under the title Almack’s, could hardly fail to be a bestseller. It was a roman-à-clef in which the anonymous author provided only paper-thin guises for the real-life characters that populated its pages. The beautiful Lady Glenmore was widely identified as Lady Ellenborough. Jane was amused, not recognising the damage it would inflict upon her reputation. It was no comfort to her family that the book, in fact written by a member of the family (Eliza Spencer-Stanhope’s sister-in-law Marianne), presented as fiction several true incidents in Jane’s life.

During one of her visits to Roehampton, having been primed by Lady Andover, Steely delivered a stern lecture on the importance of a woman’s reputation. Jane appeared to listen, but several days later, in a letter to her former governess, she brushed Steely’s concerns aside on the grounds that the persons to whom she and her parents objected were Edward’s friends and must therefore be perfectly acceptable.²⁵ By now Steely was so concerned about Jane that she overrode any personal sensibilities and went to see Lord Ellenborough. Her case was that Jane was mixing too freely with associates who, she insisted, were ‘gay and profligate’. Significantly she did not include George Anson in her list.²⁶ Ellenborough clearly did not know whether to be angry or amused at such an approach from a woman who, though undeniably gently bred, was, when all was said and done, a former employee of his wife’s family. In the end his sense of humour got the better of him; he laughed and told Steely that he thought she was being ‘too scrupulous’, stating that he had ‘unlimited confidence in Lady Ellenborough’.²⁷

It is surprising that Ellenborough did not connect Steely’s warnings with what was happening at home, for when he wrote to Jane in September from Stratfield Saye (the Duke of Wellington’s country seat in Hampshire) he spoke of her recent ‘coldness and indifference’ towards him. ‘But all is now forgotten,’ he continued.²⁸ Her ‘want of gaiety’ had certainly disappeared as she went about town on her cousin’s arm. Indeed, Edward misread all the signs that would have been obvious to a more concerned husband. Even Jane’s style of dressing should have alerted him. She set off to perfection the high velvet bonnets with huge upstanding pokes that framed her little heart-shaped face, and on Jane the modish high-waisted narrow gowns, worn with a short, demurely fastened spencer for walking out, looked exceptionally elegant. But the deep décolletage of her evening dress, though fashionable in that the edges of her nipples could be plainly seen, was thought unseemly by a visitor from Paris, who reported himself entranced with Lady Ellenborough but ‘sickened by her dress’.²⁹

But among the smart set it was considered neither stylish nor particularly commendable to be faithful to one’s spouse. Despite Steely’s stern moral teaching Jane was impressionable and looking for justification that her behaviour with Edward was acceptable. She had only to look at her peers to conclude that it was. The women with whom she was most often seen were the subject of open gossip. One gentleman wrote: ‘My whole time for the past week has been devoted to the Belgrave’s Chester committee. I am very thankful for a violent cold which came to my assistance on Saturday and has prevented my further attendance. There can be nothing in life so disagreeable, not even sleeping with Mme Lieven.’³⁰ While Princess Esterhazy had been the subject of scurrilous gossip for years, ‘said Esterhazy has been in Cheltenham for three weeks, where the people, being a moral race, were shocked at her having a fresh lover for every week. The order ran thus: 1st week Castlereagh; 2nd Viner; 3rd Valerfrie.’³¹ So Jane’s liaison with the handsome and universally popular George Anson undoubtedly did her no discredit in their eyes. Her other intimates were George’s former lovers, the Duchess of Rutland and the notorious Mrs Fox Lane. If the approbation of these high-flyers should be insufficient, her husband’s affair with the pretty daughter of a confectioner in Brighton was common knowledge and provided justification enough.³²

There was, however, nothing calculated in Jane’s affair with her cousin, no deliberate attempt at retribution. She believed that the frothy romance with Edward was true love. A degree of ingenuousness would explain an incident which occurred the following spring, when Jane visited Holkham to see the latest addition to her grandfather’s growing new family.³³

As usual Holkham was full of guests during March and April, including Jane’s parents, her maternal aunts – Anne, Lady Anson and Eliza Spencer-Stanhope – as well as sundry other family members who came and went, an archdeacon, a Captain Greville, various neighbours who called in casually and the diarist Thomas Creevey. There was also a man described by Creevey as ‘a young British Museum Artist who is classing manuscripts’.

He was Frederick Madden, aged twenty-six, an academic who specialised in and spoke Norman-French and Anglo-Saxon, and who was also a noted scholar in ancient manuscripts. In the spring of 1827 Madden was working in a freelance capacity with Mr William Roscoe of the British Museum, cataloguing Mr Coke’s manuscripts and hoping it might lead to a permanent position. Paid employment would enable him to marry his fiancée Mary, about whom Madden wrote each day, longingly, in his diary. Mary lived in Brighton with her widowed mother, who disapproved of Madden, having no wish to see her daughter married to an impecunious man, no matter how scholarly he might be.

It is Madden’s diary, rather than the more famous one of Creevey, that provides the clearest surviving description of Jane at that period, and also of the daily routine at Holkham. Frederick Madden was a conscientious man, and, as he meticulously recorded, he spent each day, from 10 a.m. until 4 or 5 p.m., working hard in the library. This was his second visit to Holkham; like the first, it would last a month or so. Everything went on as usual until Wednesday, 14 March, when something occurred to change his routine:

Wednesday 14th. In library from ten until five and went over some of the Greek Fathers which will, as before, prove the most tedious.

Lady Ellenborough, daughter of Lady Andover, arrived to dinner and will stay a fortnight. She is not yet twenty and one of the most lovely women I ever saw, quite fair, blue eyes that would move a saint, and lips that would tempt one to forswear heaven to touch them.³⁴

One look and the sober scholar was smitten. It was completely normal for someone on meeting Jane to note before anything else her beautiful appearance; this started when she was in the cradle and would continue until she was over seventy. But Madden was infatuated. He found it impossible to concentrate on his work, and within two days he was finding excuses to finish work at noon to spend time with his host’s granddaughter. ‘Lady Ellenborough is such a charm that I find the library become a bore, and am delighted to be with her, and hear her play and sing, which she is kind enough to do.’ A day later he recorded: ‘From four till half past five with Lady Ellenborough in the saloon; she sings to me the most bewitching Italian airs, the words of which are enough to inflame one, did not the sight of so lovely a creature sufficiently do so.’³⁵

Poor Madden. ‘Dearest Mary’ appears to have been forgotten and instead his diary is filled each day with Lady Ellenborough: tête-à-tête walks around the mile-long lake with her; sitting in the salon while she plays the guitar and sings to him; strolling in the garden with her past the bronze lions that guard the house’s entrance, to the extravagant fountain depicting Perseus and the Medusa; rides to the nearby fishing village of Wells-next-the-Sea, and back along the sweeping sandy beaches in her company; heads bent together over her sketchbooks; playing écarté in the drawing-room with her each evening. Madden was furious when a visitor, Captain Greville, called and robbed him of an opportunity to be alone with her.³⁶

Ten days after her arrival Madden’s diary entry has degenerated into a hurried scrawl:

Saturday 24th. In library till 4 o/c. Then out. In the evening drew pictures for Lady Anne Coke and Miss Anson. Also played whist and won. Lady E. lingered behind the rest of the party and at midnight I escorted her to her room——Fool that I was!——I will not add what passed. Gracious God! Was there ever such good fortune?

Sunday 25th. Chapel in the morning. In the afternoon, walked out with Lady E. She pretended to be very angry at what had passed last night, but I am satisfied that, she——!

Satisfied that she what? Satisfied that she was at least as much to blame as he? Satisfied that she was as eager as he? Satisfied that she intended it to happen? We shall never know. Madden’s irritating slashes across the page convey only that he was emotionally overwrought.

Jane cold-shouldered him for a couple of days, advising her family that she intended to leave as planned in three days’ time. The day before her departure she relented her cool behaviour to the bewildered scholar:

Wednesday 28th. In library till 2 o/c then went with Lady E. tête-à-tête around the lake, and remained in one of the hermitages with her until 5 o/c. We have completely made it up. She is a most fascinating woman! Whist in evening. Won. Afterwards drew pictures in Lady E’s album, cupid on a lion.

Thursday 29th. To my infinite regret Lady E. left Holkham this morning. Since I parted with dear M[ary] I never felt more melancholy or vexed. Whist in the evening. Won.

Madden stayed on for a further fortnight, but, as quickly as he could decently escape, he returned (as he had come) by Mr Coke’s gig to Fakenham, then an uncomfortable seventeen-hour stage-coach journey to the Golden Cross Inn at Charing Cross and a hackney coach to his modest lodgings near the British Museum.³⁷ He was, it is obvious, still upset and bewildered, though whether he was suffering from Jane’s absence or a severe attack of guilt he failed to say. Madden was a hardworking young man, but he often felt life was unfair to him and spent a lot of time justifyng himself. When he failed to obtain hoped-for positions of employment, for instance, he would justify the selection of a candidate he believed inferior to himself as being due to his own lack of important connections. On the subject of his short relationship with Jane, though, he is surprisingly silent. There is no suggestion that he was seduced; no hint of self-justification for his betrayal to Mary.

When he posted down to Brighton a few weeks later to visit ‘dearest Mary’, Madden booked into the newly opened Albion Hotel. He walked disconsolately on the pier for an hour, and ascertained that Lady Ellenborough was not in town. Nor was Lady Anson, from whom he thought he might obtain news of Jane. His hopes dashed, he returned his heart to Mary. His diary entries become happier and, as the days pass, linger once more on his fiancée: ‘In a new white satin bonnet … she looked lovely … How very kind has fortune been to me … her I love more than all the world.’³⁸

Madden and Jane never met again, and it is difficult to place the incident in context. It is unlikely that Jane set out deliberately to seduce him. Perhaps she was simply dejected and, enjoying the young man’s obvious admiration, allowed a simple flirtation to get out of hand. Or maybe she was miserable and hurt and, having been inexplicably rejected by both her husband and her lover, needed reassurance that she was still desirable.

For her affair with George Anson was in trouble. Indeed, there was no possibility that it would prosper in the long term, even supposing George had wished such a thing. Marriage to Jane was out of the question. The average divorce-rate was two a year at that date, and the publicity and expense surrounding such a course was usually sufficient to ruin the applicants and their families, socially as well as economically. A divorce would have finished George’s career in the army, and both cousins would have been aware that the closely linked Anson, Coke and Digby families would never countenance their union.

There is no evidence, however, that George ever regarded the affair as anything more than a light-hearted romance with his pretty cousin. It was Jane who elevated it to a more serious level. Her poetry implies no thought of divorce, nor indeed what might come of such a relationship, but in her romantic and impractical way she expected things to continue, and George to be faithful to her. Too late Colonel Anson recognised that this affair was not like his others and that Jane was not an experienced woman-about-town who could insouciantly treat a liaison for what it was, but a still-naive girl who was bound to be emotionally hurt. His way of handling the problem was to stay away from Jane, trusting she would recognise the implication of his actions. There is a strong possibility, too, that a senior officer or member of the family warned George that his behaviour would not do. Whatever the reason, there came a time when George was forced to tell her that their affair must end.

So when Jane made her visit to Holkham in March 1827 she was desperately unhappy. Unseasoned in the art of sophisticated dalliance, she had believed George when he had sworn to love her no matter what. She had never been refused anything, and could not believe the hurt occasioned by George’s rejection. Reared in the age of Byron, when strong emotions were often channelled into verse, she wrote a series of poems to George, attempting to convey her feelings. The following was written when she retired to her room on 19 March. According to Madden’s diary, she had spent that evening playing the guitar and singing Italian love songs.

… is passion’s dream then o’er

Is tenderness with love then fled?

So soon cast off, beloved no more.

Yes! Nought of all I’ve done for thee

Will e’er awake a pitying sigh

Or should my name, remembered be