The Dukes (77 page)

Worse was to follow. Her first husband, the milliner, was a man called Thomas Radford, whom she married in 1633, when she was seventeen. It now appeared that there was no evidence whatever to indicate that he was dead, as she claimed. If this were true, then her marriage to Albemarle was null and void, and her son Christopher, the 2nd Duke, was a bastard. All this affected the Duke of Montagu rather closely, because if Christopher Monck was illegitimate, then his mad duchess wife would not be entitled to the Albermarle fortune, and Montagu's dreadful marriage would have been in vain. None of the questions had been raised until both dukes of Albermarle were safely dead, but eventually the whole matter had to be aired in a noisy trial before Lord Chief Justice Holt on the King's Bench. Several witnesses were brought forward to testify that they had seen Thomas Radford after his alleged death, but as no one could pro­duce him in the flesh the jury decided that "Dirty Bess" had legally become Duchess of Albemarle after all.

The dukedom has been extinct since 1689; there is an earldom ofAlbemarle, dating from 1696, which continues in the Keppel family, descendants of William Ill's friend who supplanted Bentinck.

Anne Clarges was by no means the only working-class girl to become a duchess. We have seen before that many a duke has felt an irresistible attraction towards ladies of what they would call "low birth", sometimes resulting in the most unlikely marriages. Often such wives have been chosen from among the ranks of actresses, such as Harriot Mellon, who became Duchess of St Albans in 1827, May Yohe in 1894, who would have become Duchess of Newcastle but for her divorce, May Etheridge - Duchess of Leinster in 1922 (mar­ried 1913), and Marianne de Malkhazouny - Duchess of Leeds in 1933 and living today. Rarely have these marriages proved successful but a romatic exception is offered by the example of Lavinia Fenton and the Duke of Bolton in the eighteenth century.

The 3rd Duke of Bolton (1685-1754) had been a single-minded turbulent youth even at school, disobedient of authority and eager to follow his own ideas and inclinations in the face of what was expected of him in the way of ducal behaviour. He did his duty in marrying a pleasant and virtuous woman, but he did not happen to like her, and was not about to pretend that he did. "My Lord made her an early confession of his aversion", wrote Lady Mary Montague in 1714. He then embarked on a life as a handsome libertine about town, until one day he went to see
The Beggar's Opera
and fell irre­vocably in love with the leading actress, Lavinia Fenton.

Lavinia was a pretty little Cockney girl, the illegitimate daughter of Mrs Fenton by a man called Beswick, who disappeared from view. Her parents ran a coffee house at Charing Cross, frequented by
habituSs
of the theatre, called "humming beaux", who were charmed by the ease with which Lavinia would entertain them singing songs from the shows they loved. Her beautiful voice and perfect pitch soon brought her to public attention and eventually on to the stage in 1726, in
The Beaux' Stratagem.
She was an immediate success. "She became the talk of the coffee houses, the most celebrated toast in town. Her face, her form, her grace, her voice, her archness, her simplicity, were lauded alike on all hands."
⁷
On 29th January 1728 she created the part of Polly Peachum in
The Beggar's Opera,
and was thereafter the rage. The theatre was crowded every night. Lavinia Fenton was more famous than the opera itself. Admirers guarded her nightly on her walk home from the theatre. Her portrait appeared on ladies' fans. It was not that her voice was particularly well-trained or operatically pure, but her style and charm caught the imagination. Known to her fans as "Pretty Polly"., she played in
The Beggar's Opera
sixty-two times, giving her final performance
on
19th June 1728, after which she retired from the stage, at the age of twenty.

The reason for her sudden decision was no secret. She had been wooed and won by the forty-three-year-old gallant who watched her from his box night after night, the Duke of Bolton. That same year they ran away together, and she spent the next twenty-three years as his mistress, with an annual settlement from him of £400. They had three sons, none of whom could inherit the dukedom, being illegiti­mate, and they never ceased to be happy. Her conversation, wit, and discreet conduct were much admired. Four weeks after his estranged wife died in 1751, he made Lavinia Duchess of Bolton in a ceremony at Aix-de-Provence. He died in 1754, leaving everything to "my dear and well-beloved wife", having made generous settlements on his family during his lifetime. Lavinia died in 1760. The dukedom passed to his brothers and nephew, finally becoming extinct in 1794.

Much less fortunate was the marriage made by the Duke of Kings­ton with Elizabeth Chudleigh in 1796, eventually giving rise to the most notorious aristocratic scandal of the eighteenth century. Eliza­beth Chudleigh started life in misfortune. The poor daughter of Colonel Thomas Chudleigh, Lieutenant-Governor of Chelsea Hos­pital, who died when she was six, she left London with no prospects of improvement. As she grew into adolescence, she became aware that her one capital was her beauty. Her first love affair is said to have occurred when she was fifteen years old. When she was twenty, she was noticed by the Earl of Bath, who took an interest in her and brought her back to London, securing for her an appointment as Maid of Honour to Augusta, Princess of Wales. An early instance of her impudence and wit is afforded by the story of her response to the Princess who saw fit to reproach Elizabeth for her flirting. As the Princess was at the time engaged in a clandestine affair with Lord Bute, Elizabeth Chudleigh was not ready to accept blandishments from that quarter.
"Votre Altesse Royale sait que chacune a son gout,"
she said.

The lustful Duke of Hamilton, then nineteen, fell in love with her on sight, but had to leave almost immediately for the obligatory grand tour of Europe. He wrote to her regularly from the continent, intend­ing to make her his duchess on his return, but his letters were inter­cepted and never delivered to her. Faced with what he thought was deliberate discouragement, his ardour cooled. He afterwards married Elizabeth Gunning.

She, meanwhile, thinking Hamilton had betrayed his word, married someone else in an attack of peevishness. At Winchester races, she had met Augustus Hervey, son of Lord Hervey and grandson of the Earl of Bristol, and on a sudden impulse they married secretly at Lainston chapel on 4th August 1744. The reason for the secrecy was simple: they were both poor, and she could not afford to lose her position as Maid of Honour. The cat was nearly out of the bag when she gave birth to a boy in 1746, baptised in Chelsea as Henry Augustus, son of Augustus Hervey; the child lived only a few weeks. Even this she contrived somehow to keep secret. Later that year, she and Augustus separated once and for all, both conveniently forgetting that they were husband and wife.

At the court of Princess Augusta, "Miss Chudleigh" continued to flaunt convention with lewd speech and frankly enticing behaviour. In a less permissive age she would have been quickly dismissed. She "concentrated her rhetoric into swearing, and dressed in a style next "door to nakedness".
⁸
Not surprisingly, men clustered around her in a heat of aroused libido, to which her vulgar ways acted as a spur of extra spice. The Duke of Ancaster wanted to marry her, even George II made no bones about his love for her; the King made her mother housekeeper at Windsor, and gave her an allowance from his personal funds.

Suddenly, the whole farcical kaleidoscope made a desperate shift when Augustus Hervey came closer to inheriting the earldom of Bristol. Elizabeth thought it would be wise to protect her future by establishing the marriage in the registry at Lainston, without yet making it public knowledge. This she did in 1759, at the same time taking the Duke of Kingston as her lover. It was a notorious liaison, as her behaviour was becoming more and more objectionable, her language richer. She gave splendid balls, and fell down drunk as often as not in their midst. Her life was one of sordid dissipation.

Augustus Hervey was now wanting to marry again. Before he could divorce Elizabeth, however, he had to prove that he was married to her, in which endeavour she was by no means willing to cooperate. She was nevertheless in a quandary. She did not want the scandal of a divorce, but she
did
want to be free of Hervey so that she could marry the Duke of Kingston. The pair of them agreed therefore that she should bring a suit of jactitation against him, to which he would make a merely token defence. This was to say that she; would sue him for having falsely boasted of a marriage in such a way as to make people think that such a marriage had taken place, and thereby bring disrepute upon her. The case was heard before the consistory court, she taking the oath that she was not married, and the court accordingly declared her a spinster on nth February 1769, at the same time imposing silence on Hervey. On 8th March following, Elizabeth Chudleigh became Duchess of Kingston.

Four years later her duke died (on 23rd September 1773) leaving her his real estate for life and his personal possessions in per­petuity, on one condition - that she should remain a widow. This was rendered embarrassingly difficult for her to comply with by virtue of her first marriage, which refused to be swept aside. Hervey wished to reopen the case, and now the Duke of Kingston's family wished to stalk its prey. The Duke's nephew, Mr Evelyn Meadows, charged the Duchess with bigamy, causing a bill of indictment to be drawn up against her. On hearing this she hurred back from Rome (getting some money for the journey at the point of a gun from a terrified bank manager) to prepare her defence. Nothing went right for her. With consummate theatrical timing, the Earl of Bristol then died, and Augustus Hervey succeeded his brother in the title, making Miss Chudleigh a genuine Countess as well as a bogus Duchess. The combination of events drew all eyes upon her, satirists lampooned her, and her trial was awaited with predatory glee by the gossips.

The five-day proceedings began on 15th April 1776, in West­minster Hall before the peers. During the course of a fascinating trial, evidence was given by Anne Craddock, who had for long been in the Duchess's service, by the widow of the Lainston rector who had performed the first marriage service, and various others. Every­thing was laid bare to public scrutiny, the wedding, the birth and death of a child, the registration of marriage to Hervey, and details of character. Elizabeth came out of the ordeal very badly. The case was clearly proven against her, and was duly found guilty of bigamy by a unanimous verdict of the peers; the scene in which the peers rose from their seats, one after the other, monotonously intoning the one word "Guilty", is justly famous. The spurious Duchess would have had the palm of her hand burnt for the offence, had she not pleaded the privilege of her rank. She was allowed to keep her fortune, the fruit of her duplicity.

Augustus Hervey, Earl of Bristol, died in 1779. The dukedom of Kingston had been extinct since 1773. As for Elizabeth, now legally Countess of Bristol, she went to St Petersburg, where she bought a large estate, which she called "Chudleigh", and later to France. Wherever she wandered, scandal followed in her wake. Her manners remained coarse, her habits disgusting, to the end. She died in Paris in 1788, at the age of sixty-eight. She will always have the distinc­tion of having shocked an unshockable age.

Half a century later, in a less tolerant age, a woman risen "from the ranks" as it were, could not expect to slide so easily into the top drawer. Values were different, and not necessarily better. One such woman was Elizabeth Russell, daughter of a market gardener, Robert Russell, of Burmiston, Yorkshire. She has been described as a washer­woman,
⁹
with language and manners to match; slarig was her only means of intelligible communication. After having been the discarded mistress of the Duke of Bedford, and a mistress of Mr Coutts the banker (Harriot Mellon's first husband), she became Duchess of Cleveland on 27th July 1813, at the age of thirty-six. She was the Duke's second wife; he, incidentally, was Duke of Cleveland of a new creation, vested in the Vane family, but he was related to the wicked Barbara Villiers who bore the same title - she was his great- great-aunt. Contemporaries professed to be astonished that he should choose this infamous title, a bastard descent from an unpleasant adultress, rather than his own ancient and distinguished title of Darlington, in which name he already held an earldom. Anyway, the new Duchess of Cleveland, who addressed her husband as "Niffy- Naffy", and in later years was to refer to her son Lord Harry Vane as "My 'arry", was presented to a dubious world just emerging from the licentious age of the Georgians, dusting their morals and read­justing their values.

Creevey called her a "brazen-faced Pop", and thought the marriage "the wickedest thing I ever heard of", though he confessed she was something of a miracle to have pulled it off.
¹⁰
She even managed to retain the allowance from her lover the Duke of Bedford after her wedding. People tolerated her impudence with a stretched smile for the sake of her likeable and generous husband, whose wine-glasses were made without a stem, to oblige you to drink each glass at a throw.