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Love Romances of the Aristocracy

<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2> <h4>THE MERRY DUCHESS</h4> 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. <div class="blockquot">"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." </div> 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. <div class="blockquot">"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." </div> 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: <div class="blockquot">"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." </div> 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: <div class="blockquot">"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." </div> 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." <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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