The Duchess Countess

Catherine Ostler

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781471172571
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR
A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR
A VOGUE BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A rollicking read... [Ostler] tells Elizabeth's story with admirable style and gusto' Sunday Times
'Terrifically entertaining: if you liked Bridgerton, you'll love this... and her research is impeccable' Evening Standard When the glamorousElizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, Countess of Bristol, went on trial at Westminster Hall forbigamyin April 1776, the story drew more attention in society than theAmerican War of Independence. Aclandestine, candlelit weddingto the young heir to an earldom, a second marriage to a Duke, a lust for diamonds and an electrifying appearance at a masquerade ball in a diaphanous dress: no wonder the trial was a sensation. However, Elizabeth refused to submit to public humiliation and retire quietly. Rather than backing gracefully out of the limelight, she embarked on aGrand Tourof Europe, being welcomed by thePope andCatherine the Greatamong others. As maid of honour to Augusta, Princess of Wales, Elizabeth led her life in the inner circle of the Hanoverian court and her exploits delighted and scandalised the press and the people. She made headlines, and was a constant feature in penny prints and gossip columns.Writers were intrigued by her. Thackeray drew on Elizabeth as inspiration for his calculating, alluring Becky Sharp. But her behaviour, often depicted as attention-seeking and manipulative, hid a more complex tale – that of Elizabeth's fight toovercome personal tragedy and loss. Now, in thisbrilliantly told and evocative biography, Catherine Ostler takes a fresh look at Elizabeth's story and seeks to understand and reappraise a woman who refused to be defined by society's expectations of her.

1 COUNTESS

CHAPTER ONE A TOWN OF PALACES

In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the London metropolis sprawls from the tar-caked wharves of Wapping in the east to the walls of Hyde Park in the west: the greatest, richest, most rapidly expanding trading city in the world.

St Paul’s dominates the skyline in the City, as brick and stone rise from the ashes of the Great Fire. Mayfair is a neoclassical building site – the finest architectural period in England’s history is under way. Terraces of houses, church spires with glinting weather vanes are interspersed with swathes of parkland and open fields along the city’s artery, the salmon-rich silent highway, the Thames, which teems with sailing boats, pleasure boats, merchant ships, barges, small craft and yachts.

A visitor in the summer of 1717 might witness the royal party, the new Hanoverian King George I and his attendants, on their stately barge, followed by an orchestra of fifty on another, playing Handel’s Water Music. They board at Whitechapel, pass marshes and heathland and disembark at Chelsea, two miles upstream. The banks shine with beauty on either side of the river; it compares only to the river ‘Tyber… nothing in the world can imitate it’.¹

Daniel Defoe calls London a ‘Great and Monstrous Thing’,² but Chelsea is a village outside the city, an airy ‘town of palaces’³ where the river breeze shakes the boughs of the fertile gardens, none so spacious as those of the Royal Hospital.⁴ Prosperous townspeople head for Chelsea on Sundays for fresh, clean air. Here there are market gardens supplying fruit and vegetables for the town, alongside the graceful houses of noble families.⁵ At the hospital, the grounds are designed in French formal style, front and back; two L-shaped canals lined with swan houses flow from the river up the sweeping gardens. At the bank of the Thames, there is a terrace, pavilions and steps down to the water. On the south side lies open country – trees, fields, homesteads and windmills, like a scene painted by a Dutch old master. The river can only be crossed by ferry here and sheep are driven through the streets from local farms.

The austere red-brick splendour of Wren’s home for old soldiers contains a gracious three-storey, high-ceilinged apartment in a river-facing wing. In 1726, this forms the light-filled London home of the lieutenant-governor, Colonel Thomas Chudleigh, his wife Harriet, and the two children who have survived infancy: dutiful, seven-year-old Thomas and the angelic-looking, adored five-year-old Elizabeth. The hospital estate is their playground: they run along stone-flagged corridors and through colonnades of Doric columns under the inscription ‘IN SUBSIDIUM ET LEVAMEN, EMERITORUM SENIO, BELLOQUE FRACTORUM’^I towards the chapel and the dining hall, past the gilded statue of founder Charles II cast as a Roman emperor, near-blinding when the sun hits it, and the royal portraits, across lawns lined with limes and chestnut trees, orchards and their family kitchen garden, all the way down to the river.

The Chudleigh children grow up accustomed to a degree of stately grandeur and plenty. They have several playmates, the children of hospital staff – the secretary, the clerk of works, the physician⁶ – and they live alongside the elderly majority, 400 old or wounded soldiers. Chelsea, like its inspiration, Louis XIV’s Hôtel des Invalides, is an architectural celebration of both military courage and a king’s benevolence. It is said that in England, the hospitals resemble palaces, and the palaces resemble prisons.⁷ Although the men sleep in small wooden berths and the stairs have shallow risers to aid their superannuated frames, prayers are said in the chapel beneath a glorious Resurrection by Sebastiano Ricci, and the Great Hall is fit for a medieval king. Governor Charles Churchill and Lt-Governor Chudleigh dine on a high table on a dais and the pensioners eat beneath them at long tables. Flags of battlefield triumph and portraits of princes line the walls, most prominently, Antonio Verrio’s mural of Charles II, crowned by the winged figure of Victory.

Within the institution live a chaplain, a porter, a baker, a brewer, an apothecary, a physician, a wardrobe keeper, linen-women, a sexton, cooks, butlers, gardeners, matrons, housekeepers, an organist, a barber, a treasurer, a canal keeper. The clerk of works oversees the building.⁸ Most senior of all the residents are the paymaster – in 1720, it was Robert Walpole, who became prime minister⁹ the following year – the governor and the lieutenant-governor.

As the children are aware as they weave their way through the faltering steps of the pensioners, with pats and smiles, the hospital is also a garrison, the men subject to military discipline: chapel twice a day, a roll call and gate-closing time at 10 P.M. Some men – they are all men¹⁰ – stand sentinel. A drumbeat calls them to the hall for lunch, between eleven and twelve. Food is served on pewter dishes; tablecloths reach to the floor, to double up as napkins; mugs of beer are poured from leather ‘jacks’ or jugs, and the undercroft below the hall contains a brewery with six weeks’ supply.¹¹ Pensioners wear variations of crimson cloth coat and tricorne hats, depending on rank and regiment. It is such a picturesque scene that tourists such as a young Benjamin Franklin^II come to watch them from the gallery.

It is an idyllic place to grow up. The Chudleigh children’s earliest years are spent among the gracious architecture of this strange palace of military heroes, a compressed version of the strict hierarchy of Georgian society itself, with their father, a man of high status, respected by all.

Constant entertainment is provided by the river, which represents the chaotic world on the edge of the estate, a globe on the fringe of their consciousness. By the hospital stairs^III on the river, numbered, lightweight boats, painted red or green, wait on the water ready to take passengers; ‘oars’ have two boatmen: ‘scullers’ one. When a person approaches, the boatmen, dressed in velvet caps and red or green doublets, run to meet them, calling out ‘lustily “oars, oars!” or “Sculler, sculler!” ’ When the passenger chooses a boat, the others ‘unite in abusive language at the offending boatman’.¹²

The hospital is bookended by plutocrats’ villas, one the house of Lord Ranelagh, the late, corrupt hospital treasurer and army paymaster, to Swift, ‘the vainest old fool I ever saw’.¹³ Now lived in by his widow, its garden is known as the most resplendent in England, a ‘paradise’¹⁴ to Defoe. One day Elizabeth will frequent the same spot when it becomes the Ranelagh pleasure gardens, a lamp-lit land of nocturnal delight.

On the other side is the house of the Walpole family, with its octagonal riverside summerhouse topped with a golden pineapple, its Vanbrugh orangery, and its grotto. The Princess of Wales (the future queen, Caroline) and the court are frequent visitors, along with the ton,¹⁵ the fashionable set, such as the peripatetic writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,¹⁶ of whom we will hear more. Proximity to power is part of the climate.

Politics is discussed constantly in Chelsea. Writer, Whig, Richard Steele (Col. Chudleigh subscribed to his entire Spectator when it was published in 1721) and scientist philosopher Isaac Newton meet at Don Saltero’s, the whimsical coffee house on nearby Cheyne Walk, where the cabinet of curiosities includes attractions such as a nun’s whip, ‘the Pope’s infallible candle’ and a bat with four ears.^IV

The Botanick Gardens nearby with their cedar trees, the first in England, now belong to Saltero’s regular physician and naturalist Hans Sloane, whose collection of rare artefacts will one day become the British Museum.¹⁷

A child in this environment learns the importance of the monarch, military might and courage. Young Elizabeth Chudleigh, with her expressive blue eyes, fair wavy hair and the peachy plump cheeks inherited from her father, is armed with natural beauty and bravado. She has an intrepid, unconquerable spirit worthy of the military herself. She wears a simple bodice-and-skirt dress of pale calico, cap and apron, having graduated out of the padded infant ‘pudding’ hat that protected her while she learned to walk. Her constant companion, her brother Thomas, now in breeches, wants to be a soldier like his father and the old war chroniclers who surround him with their stories. The Chelsea veterans of the Duke of Marlborough’s decisive battles against the French in Flanders and Germany¹⁸ dote on the children and their playmates, Horace Walpole, the prime minister’s son,¹⁹ diarist to be, a delicate child of eight, and Horace Mann, future diplomat in Florence, and his four younger siblings.

The hospital is a place of ritual, celebration and pride. The children munch their way through the Ceremony of the Cheese at Christmas, where donated cheeses are cut and distributed; Restoration Day in May, when all wear oak leaves to commemorate Charles II hiding in the oak tree from Cromwell’s troops; and the Festival dinner for the reigning monarch, George I, when pensioners fire their muskets. They visit the Old Church, whose lonely spire dominates the river view on the north bank, and feast on piping-hot sugary buns from the nearby Chelsea Bun House, ‘a Zephyr in taste! As fragrant as honey’,²⁰ which has royal custom and a cheerful queue.

As an indulged youngest child, Elizabeth is used to being centre of attention and is always at ease, fearless around men, especially, we can assume, military men.

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Fifty years later, at her trial, Elizabeth proudly described the Chudleighs as ‘ancient, not ignoble’; the women, ‘distinguished for their virtue’, the men ‘for their valour’.²¹ Family was always important to Elizabeth, partly because she was a Chudleigh twice over: her parents were first cousins. The name itself was of profound significance to her. By the time she died, she had convinced two monarchs – Louis XVI and Catherine the Great – to let her rename two estates in countries hundreds of miles apart Chudleigh, and attempted to coerce heirs into changing their names to that of her waning tribe.

Some of the brave Chudleighs were as reckless as they were adventurous. Although one naval officer ‘distinguished himself’ against the Spanish Armada, another, John ‘Chidley’, a privateer who had sailed with his Devon kinsman Walter Raleigh in the search for El Dorado,²² sold his estate for an expedition and died in the Strait of Magellan, losing his investors’ money along with his own. Others were sheriffs, lawyers, and men who – a notable family characteristic – made advantageous marriages. In the English Civil War, a George Chudleigh raised the family to a baronetcy when he swapped allegiance from Parliament to king.²³

Less was said of other ancestors, such as Elizabeth’s maternal great-grandfather Sir Richard Strode, an MP from the Devon gentry, ‘a man of unquiet spirit and contentious nature’²⁴ who was incarcerated in Fleet Prison for debt and became mentally unstable. Or of Henry VIII’s wily minister Thomas Cromwell, eventually executed for treason, of whom she was also a direct descendant. Ambition sometimes blighted reason.

Many centuries earlier, marriage had brought into the family her father’s childhood home, a woodland manor house and estate near Higher Ashton, in a river valley ten miles from Exeter. Elizabeth’s grandfather Sir George, 3rd Baronet, was a man of books and a landowner. Yet for all the male forbears, Elizabeth Chudleigh’s most remarkable ancestor was a woman. Her grandmother Lady Mary Chudleigh was an early pioneer of independent female thought, in spite of the fact that she lived an isolated life among the remote rural backwaters of Devon, a week’s carriage ride from the cultural centre of the metropolis. She was a proto-feminist composer of lyrics, verses, essays, tragedies, satires and operas. Sloe-eyed, dark-haired, witty and opinionated, she was a friend of Dryden,²⁵ who asked her opinion on his works. Her best-known poem, ‘The Ladies’ Defence’, is a riposte in rhyming couplets to a sermon on marriage, ‘The Bride-Woman’s Counsellor’,^V in which women, who have ‘weaker capacities to learn than men’ were advised that ‘the love of a husband very much does depend on the obedience of a wife’. Mary wrote in retort: ‘Wife and servant are the same/ But only differ in the name.’

Mary was one of only two published female poets in the first decade of the eighteenth century.²⁶ Her family were Puritan thinkers and she corresponded with a circle – the poet Elizabeth Thomas, ‘the first English feminist’²⁷ Mary Astell, the Rev John Norris – who believed in women’s intellectual autonomy.

She achieved her writerly success in spite of ill health and much bereavement: of her six children, only two, George and Elizabeth’s father, Thomas, survived into adulthood. A devout Anglican and royalist, she dedicated one book to the Electress Sophia of Hanover, the cerebral woman who would have succeeded Queen Anne if she had lived three months longer, and another poem to Anne herself, after the death of her son, the Duke of Gloucester, at the age of eleven. Mary’s ‘Ode to the young Duke of Gloucester’ was written from one heartbroken mother to another:

His Face was Charming, and his Make Divine

As if in him assembl’d did combine

The num’rous Graces of his Royal Line.

Lady Mary was much ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Notes on the Text
• Family Trees
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Part 1: Countess
• Part 2: Duchess
• Part 3: Duchess Countess
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Cast List
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• List of Illustrations
• Copyright