Dan Snow's History Hit - A Scandalous Duchess

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston was a duchess who attracted scandal, a duchess who divided opinion, a duchess who refused to give up agency or accept her place in 18th century society and she was loathed and loved in equal measure. Maid of honour to Augusta, Princess of Wales, for over 20 years and an important figure in Hanoverian court and her exploits delighted and scandalised the press and the people. A first clandestine marriage to an Earl was followed by a second a second bigamous marriage to a duke almost bought her downfall. After a humiliating trial in Westminster Hall, she embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe, being welcomed by the Pope and Catherine the Great along the way. Author and journalist Catherine Ostler joins Dan to discuss one of the most intriguing, flawed and complex women of the 18th century.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today we're talking about a duchess. A duchess who attracted scandal. A duchess who divided opinion. A duchess who was unwilling to accept the female status of underdog or hand over all her power. She refused to give up agency as she split society down the middle. She was loathed and loved in equal measure. I am, of course, talking about Elizabeth Chudley, the Duchess of Kingston in the late 18th century. She had a clandestine marriage to an absolute lunatic, the brilliant Augustus Harvey, a swashbuckling sailor, one of the inspirations for Captain Aubrey in the wonderful Patrick O'Brien series of novels about the late 18th, early 19th century navies. She was a maid of honour to Augusta, the Princess

of Wales. She then slightly awkwardly married the Duke of Kingston and went on trial in Westminster Hall, the largest medieval hall in Europe, for bigamy in 1776. And at the time, that attracted more attention than the start of the American War of Independence. A reminder, if we need a reminder, that sometimes popular interest and involvement in a subject is not correlated to the event's importance over the broad sweep of history. I don't know who needs to hear that, but it's true. In this podcast, I ask Catherine Osler all about the brilliant Elizabeth. She's a very well-known journalist, edited and written for all sorts of famous publications, and now she's turned her attention, of which I'm very grateful, to Elizabeth Chudley, the Duchess of Kingston. You're going to love this, everyone. You're going to love it. If you want to listen to more of these wonderful

podcasts without the ads, without the ads, or if you want to subscribe to the world's best history channel, historyhit.tv is your answer. It's a digital history channel. You go there, you're all the podcast stretching back five years, they're available without ads. You have got hundreds of hours of documentaries, more being added all the time. My goodness, we've got some treats for you in the pipeline head over to historyhit.tv and enjoy in the meantime everybody here's Catherine Osler talking about the scandalous duchess Catherine thank you very much for coming on the podcast oh pleasure so you have written about this fantastic character it's a bit complicated because is she a duchess or is she a countess? What is she?

Well, it's a very good question. Legally, she was a countess. In her mind, she was a duchess. Hey, she and me both. I mean, I'm a duchess in my own head as well, I'll tell you. Yeah, that was her truth. She was sort of both, really. Tell me about her upbringing.

Elizabeth, how do we pronounce this? One of those English names, Chudley. Ch of both, really. Tell me about her upbringing. Elizabeth, how do we pronounce this? It's one of those English names, Chudley. Chudley, yes. Okay, it's not like spelt Chudley, but actually pronounced chum or something. Okay, so tell me about her upbringing. Well, her upbringing, it was a classic Jane Austen, gentry, aspirations without cash. So her father was a sort of minor military hero, really, fought under the Duke of Marlborough and became Lieutenant Governor of the Royal Hospital at

Chelsea. So she had this rather wonderful childhood by the river in Chelsea. And her mother came from a family of courtiers, so they were very attached to the hanovers but her father was a younger son so there wasn't much money but there was sort of expectation that's a dangerous place to be isn't it so she grows up around some of the grandest people in the land but actually can't necessarily guarantee she's going to maintain access into that world. Exactly. So how did she go about doing so? Well, so what happened was then her father died when she was very young. She was only five and the mother moved to a rented house in Mayfair.

But through connections, she got what was really the only job available to a woman like that. The legal profession, politics, everything being closed off to women. The only thing you could get was a role at court. And so she became a maid of honour to the Princess of Wales through a family friend who was a friend of her uncle's and the Prince of Wales owed him a favour. He'd actually got one of his mistresses out of the way so that he could marry. So he wrote him a letter and said, I know this dear girl, she's wonderful. And she had all the accoutrements you needed to be a maid of honour. She was good looking, she could dance, she had a wonderful voice. She was witty, she could speak French and German. And she was sort of the same age as Augusta,

who was a young German girl who'd arrived at 16 in England, speaking no English. And so that was her sort of moment when she arrived on the public stage, was when she went to be her maid of honour. How did she live? Do you just live at court and everything's paid for? I mean, she's one paycheck away from destitution, right? Yes, it's a kind of very good gig while it lasts. So she got a salary. She got £200 a year. It's very hard to do equivalents now. But basically, that was a pretty good salary if you lived modestly, which she didn't. which she didn't but the royal family led a life of incredible excess so the food and everything at Leicester house where she was which she could have was rather wonderful and the art and the music Handel came round and gave music lessons to the children and the food was sensational and all the finest artists came so she got used to a, very expensive life without having to pay for it herself.

But as you say, she was one cheque away from destitution. If you lost that role for some reason, then she had nothing to fall back on, which was very unusual, actually, because most of the maids of honour were from families, had a big dowry and they were just there to meet a husband and they didn't really need the money that was sort of pin money for them but not for her although speaking of meeting husbands presumably that was a way in which she could transform her privileged access and proximity to monarchy into material safety you know security by marrying someone. Yes. That was the big idea. And that was the aim if you were a maid of honour. That was the hope. And indeed, it was the only hope. There was no other route to security.

It's a sort of obvious point, but it has this rather sort of heart-rending touch of sort of desperation to it. So in that period, you see, even up to sort of Jane Austen, well, and beyond, you have this sense of women focusing on marriage. But it's very easy to forget there weren't any alternatives at all. So marriage equals survival, progress. The stakes are very high. It can be glittering or it can be nothing.

And she ends up choosing slightly curiously, doesn't she? Because I love the career of Augustus Harvey. I've come across him as a Royal Navy officer. But he was, I'd call him unreliable, to be honest. I'm not sure he's a guy I'd choose if I had the pick of all the men at court. I know, I agree. I mean, he's a rather wonderful figure, as you know. I can sort of see why she fell for him. He was incredibly brave and articulate and confident. He was actually four years younger than her when they met. He was only 20, so technically he was underage. But he was so worldly wise already, but hopeless, younger son, extremely unreliable, already a compulsive womaniser. As he carried on, he becomes known as the English Casanova.

His diaries that he wrote, which luckily survive, are really still quite shocking. In modern parlance, I think we call him a sex addict. Right. Well, that was her Hanoverian court for you. Yeah. And so she marries Augustus Harvey. He will later become the Earl of Bristol, but he had no particular prospects at the time. Is that right?

Well, he was a naval officer. He was a naval officer. He was a naval officer and he was young and he was brave, but he was a junior naval officer. He wasn't even captain of his own ship. But he was very persuasive and seductive. And he wasn't in line for the earldom. He had an elder brother who was a diplomat. But the diplomat, it looked like he would never marry,

which he didn't. So for years and years, there was this prospect that maybe Augustus Harvey would become the Earl and maybe he wouldn't. And this is the sort of thing that the Georgian court speculated about. But she remained at court and he went back to his ship. Did they ever live together properly as man and wife? Did they ever establish themselves man and wife? No, they didn't really. So they decided to keep it a secret because he was terrified of his grandfather, the first Earl of Bristol, who controlled all the money and disapproved of him anyway. He thought he was a

bit rebellious and not academic and all of those things that were true. And so he didn't dare tell him what he'd done. And she didn't want to lose her salary. So if you're a maid of honour, you had to be single. So if it was discovered she was married, she would not have a job anymore. They had nowhere to leave. And they had no money. And he almost immediately went on his ship to the West Indies. So they decided to keep it a secret. And then when he came back, he sort of thought maybe they would get together. But it was a real sort of, I mean, they weren't teenage, but it was a teenage mistake. I always think of it like one of those sort of celebrity Las Vegas weddings where everyone's drunk too much whiskey and there's an Elvis impersonator. It was just a sort of hasty, romantic, regrettable thing.

And then he went away for two years and they both wish they hadn't done it. By the time he came back, they sort of got back together because they were young and they were both attracted to each other. But they began to realise they couldn't really sustain a marriage at all. They have nothing and nowhere to live and no permission. So did they just sort of pretend it hadn't happened? Well, it was a bit more unfortunate than that because they sort of did get back together in a kind of half-hearted way.

And she had lots of other admirers at court and she sort of encouraged them because she was pretending to be single. And then other men, very eligible men, kept opposing her and she kept turning them down, which made them all the keener. And everybody was speculating, why is she turning all these men down? And they came back and they did get

together to the extent that they had a child in secret. And then before it was born, they fell out again and he went off on his ship. Neither of them were particularly good relationships, it has to be said. So he went off and then the baby died. And then that was it, really. They never spoke to each other again. And they sort of agreed to carry on keeping it a secret. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about a scandalous Duchess. More after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict.

We've got the classics. Understandably, when we see it from hindsight, the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending.

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where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. But how did everything come to a head? Why did this become one of the most celebrated scandals in Georgian England? Well, it all unraveled because it's a sort of complicated story. But basically what happened was they agreed to keep it a secret.

And then too many people knew he couldn't really keep a secret. So he told a few friends of his and the people on his ship found out and his brother found out. And eventually he asked her for a divorce because he didn't want his younger brother to inherit. He asked her for a divorce because he didn't want his younger brother to inherit. Her lawyers came up with a way of getting out of this marriage without divorcing so that her name wouldn't be disgraced. So she did remarry to a guy called the Duke of Kingston. But when he died, she inherited all his money and then his family decided to prove that it wasn't a legal marriage so it's basically an inheritance battle ah that'll do it yes that'll do it okay so she almost got away with it were it not for the ungrateful step kids exactly step nephews but same thing yeah even worse even worse no business of theirs. Their uncle can do what he likes.

So it's interesting, though, this issue of widowhood. I often think when I read history about the 18th century that the absolute dream ticket for these women was to marry some dreadful old boy with a load of money and then he dies. And then you actually do get some personhood and legal ability to control your own faith at that point, don't you? Yeah. Oh, I agree.

Had it not been for the inconvenient nephews, it would have been fine because she would have had the title and the houses and all the money. Widows could have a wonderful time. They went travelling. They had autonomy at last. The property that had always been their husband's could be left to them. But the idea that that would be her

annoyed these grown-up nephews so much, one of them in particular, who'd spent his whole adult life borrowing money against the idea that he was going to inherit. That was his role. He just presented himself as the heir to the Duke of Kingston, even though he was the son of a sister. as the heir to the Duke of Kingston, even though he was the son of a sister. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We've talked a lot about her choice around marriage, but she was building a reputation just as a sort of dazzling figure at court by this stage,

or during this time as well, wasn't she? Yes, well, she was a very good courtier. The 18th century, as you know, is the century of the rival courts. So you've always got the King and the Prince of Wales, and you've always got two courts who always hate each other always hate each other and it's sort of set in stone that the king's court is always the sort of dull boring one and the prince of wales is always having a fantastic time with lots of charismatic people and everybody hates everybody and all the movers and shakers have got to decide who they want to get into bed with.

Are they going to suck up to the current king or are they going to think, well, he's about to drop off his perch anyway, so we'll set our stall up over here. But she was a sort of professional courtier. She was almost like a female Machiavelli type. She was the only person, as she claimed, but she was right, who stayed in good favour with both the court of George II and the court of Frederick Prince of Wales. She could charm anybody. She was very good company, full of stories and fun. So although her marital life was a bit of a disaster, she could put on a good show.

So when the obnoxious step-nephews come after her, it all goes public. There's a trial, there's a scandal. Yes, there's an enormous trial in Westminster Hall. So it's the sort of spectacle of the late 18th century. 4,000 people come and watch her being humiliated over five days. And because she is married to Augustus Harvey, she's entitled to trial by peer. So basically the House of Lords line up and each one of them gets a say in whether she's guilty or not. And it becomes a fantastic event. All the journalists go, all the socialites, people dress up, they meet for coffee beforehand. Each peer is given seven tickets, but they start

changing hands for ever increasing amounts of money. Carriages are rattling across Europe for people to try and come, foreign royalty. The Queen, Charlotte, who was two weeks off giving birth, came with five of her children, including three future monarchs. Tiny children, everybody crammed in there to watch her. But try as she might, there was too much evidence against her. So you had some very elderly servants stepping forward in this hall and giving their evidence, which was very damning, actually. She was obviously guilty, but she escaped punishment other than the fact she couldn't use her title. She could no longer call herself the Duchess of Kingston. And she wasn't having any of this. So she decided to go abroad. She wanted to go anywhere she could use her title. Did she keep her money?

Yes. She kept her money, more or less. Basically, her money came in the form of estate rents. And technically, she kept it. But then the executors in England started blocking it. So towards the end, she had a few difficulties, partly because she had a terrible spending habit by then. She got the money for her lifetime, but I think her plan was, I will spend it all and there will be nothing left for these ghastly nephews

because she became a compulsive, not only a traveller, but an estate builder. She kept buying property all over Europe and building farms. And she tried to build an English garden on the coast in Estonia. And she bought a chateau outside Paris a few months before she died. I mean, crazy spend, spend, spend behaviour. Jewels, paintings. Yeah, I mean, she cut a spend, spend behaviour. Jewels, paintings. Yeah, I mean, she cut a swathe across Europe.

She did. She did. And she was quite clever because the idea of her disgrace had got out. So she decided to use other means to ingratiate herself at court. So when she wanted to become friends with Catherine the Great, she sent some paintings ahead to Catherine's friend, who was called Admiral Chernochev. And he was so struck by her generosity that he ensured that she was received by Catherine the Great and Potemkin, even though the British ambassador in Russia was determined to block her. Wow. And so she's friends with the Russian royal family. She meets the Pope. I mean, what's she up to? I mean, she's building this big estate across Europe and she's just traveling and

being fabulous, is she? She's traveling and being fabulous, but what she's really, I think she'd been a maid of honor for so long. And it got slightly humiliating, this sort of maid of honor thing, which was meant to be a temporary thing until you got married. But because she was already married and she hadn't told anyone, she ended up being a maid of honour for over 20 years. So she was like the longest serving. And I don't think she knew what else to do other than be at a court. A court to her was like a surrogate family. So it was a sort of quest for security and protection. It was if I'm under the patronage of this amazingly powerful person, whoever it was, then these ghastly nephews and my own history, my legal humiliation, and the fact that England

feels so unfriendly to me, it won't bother me because I'll be safe. But the problem was it never really worked, which is why she kept moving from one to another. The lawsuits always followed her. The story followed her. So that's why she starts moving around so much. I'm not safe in Russia. I'm not safe in Rome. Is there an element of her femininity here? the fact that it was Catherine the Great in Russia there's other powerful women in their own right around Europe who seem to give her a safe harbour is that important I do that's a very interesting point and I do think it's important I think they were intrigued by her because there were lots of people who just plain disapproved of her. They thought this woman is a convicted bigamist, which she was, who's taken all this money from this grand English family, which she had. But these women like Catherine the Great and her

other great friend, who's the Electress of Saxony, they could see she was also very courageous. Women then didn't travel across Europe on their own. They didn't stand up and try and defend themselves in Westminster Hall in front of 4,000 people. And they felt sorry for her. They could see she'd made a youthful mistake, that she'd tried to inelegantly escape. And they saw courage and spirit where others saw criminality.

It's very funny you say that because one of my favourite books is Vanity Fair and Becky Sharp, who is thought to be partly based on Elizabeth Chudley, perhaps. And my grandma and I used to disagree. Like, I find her very courageous. And my grandma's like, no, she's just a nasty little criminal. You know, so we used to have those debates about Becky Sharp. Yeah. And I can see how Elizabeth Chudley would bring that out in people some sympathetic others critical yes she was very

divisive and becky sharp you know thackeray obviously work of genius he created somebody who behaves badly but we know why if we remember what's at stake for her, which is survival. And Becky Sharp goes on the rampage throughout Europe. And she is selfish, but we think self-preservation is the first law of nature. So what would we all have done in that situation? You're quite right.

Let's finish up by telling me about this famous dress. It was the liz hurley safety pin dress of the 18th century every time i hear about it tell me all about it well it was rather interesting so she went to a masquerade ball to celebrate the peace treaty in 1749 and she just split up with augustus harvey they were never going to speak to each other again and i think it's quite hard to say why she did it. I think it was just blatant attention seeking. I need some other form of protection. There was a vogue for dressing up as Greek Roman characters and abstract nouns and

things like that. And she decided to dress as a Phidgenia from the myth who is sacrificed by her father before the Trojan War. But if you see paintings of this, it's normally somebody in a sort of drape, but her interpretation was a very see-through costume. So from a distance, she looked completely naked and everybody became obsessed with this. It was such a shock in a world where everybody's sort of wandering around in manchures and dresses 10 feet wide. So it became a moment in the press and penny prints got drawn of her and sold and reselled. People wrote poems about her. It was probably the most famous fancy dress costume of the Georgian period. Amazing. Well, thank you so much.

Tell us, what is the book called? It's called The Duchess Countess, The Woman Who Scandalised a Nation. The Duchess Countess. I'm going to call her a duchess, man. I'm in. I'm not holding it big at me. I think she's the Dowager Duchess of Kingston, always will be. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Catherine.

Our pleasure. Thank you so much. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great

podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things,

and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.