Ewing (in reality, Theodore Sturgeon), after broadcaster Jean Shepherd’s radio hoax on the bestseller lists. *It became a real novel, I, Libertine, by the imaginary author Frederick R. Elizabeth was the manifestation of women’s humiliating, claustrophobic lack of autonomy and their lack of independence. If the Kingston case served to expose anything, it was the trap in which eighteenth-century women were placed. Women of all classes looked to men for support. Downward social mobility was easy-the Duchess-Countess was no stranger to the pawnshop. Most particularly, women, who could so easily (like some associates of Elizabeth’s) become destitute. Those with no prospects were left hopelessly insecure. In the 18th-century oligarchy, the lack of social mobility, the reliance on inheritance, and the status that came with it snared those hoping for legacies into endless legal quests. Elizabeth Chudleigh shamelessly disregarded both the role and its constraints. Women were dollhouse figures, expected to lead small, decorative, confined lives traipsing in a carriage between town and country, drawing room and ballroom. For women of Elizabeth’s ilk, born into gentry but not well-off, the only respectable salvation, bar a convent or becoming a governess-and Elizabeth was palpably unsuited to both-was marriage. She tried to remove the obstacles in a woman’s way: the lack of income, the lack of male relatives, the entrapment of an unwise marriage. Petersburg to Rome.Įlizabeth used her beauty, wit, and connections to further her own position.
Her story was read in coffee shops and drawing rooms from St. But she toyed with publications herself like any controlling celebrity today, paying numerous publicists, lawyers, and editors to defend her. Annual sales of British newspapers had risen from 2.5 million in 1713 to 12.6 million in 1775,5 the year before her trial, and as a fashionable woman connected to royalty, accused of a crime, she could not have been a better subject. Through a contemporary lens, many of the issues that surround Elizabeth would be well understood: a struggle with mental health, for female empowerment, for civilized divorce laws, the cost of fame-seeking. Petersburg still possesses the paintings and the giant but delicate musical chandelier she took there to persuade the court to embrace her, taking advantage of the vibrant Anglomania that gripped Imperial Russia at the time. She became one of the three most talked-about women in Europe, alongside Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great.
Petersburg, befriending popes, princes, and tsarinas. She was convicted of bigamy and then pursued across the world by her second husband’s relations, the newspapers, and the ill-wishes of her enemies.Īfter her court humiliation, rather than choosing to live out the rest of her days in hermetic retirement or atonement, she went on a floating odyssey from Rome to St. Elizabeth Chudleigh, Elizabeth Hervey, Duchess of Kingston, Countess of Bristol-by the time she went on trial, no one knew what to call her-started her life in the public sphere as a maid of honour to the Princess of Wales at the Georgian court, married one man in secret and denied it, only to wed another. But the story of the Duchess-Countess casts other, more human, shafts of light onto this period of history, in which the seeds of so much of our culture were sown: the struggle of a forward-thinking woman in a society undergoing the birth pangs of modernity the rise of journalism, an incipient always-on form of social media, and its occasionally willing collaborator, the celebrity the way in which Elizabeth used soft power and the art of public relations, before either had those names. Now we see it more clearly: the distracted incompetence of a tired colonial power engaged in the displacement activity of persecuting an errant, aristocratic woman.
The woman accused was christened Elizabeth Chudleigh, but when she was talked about in the coffeehouses, written about in the penny papers, gossiped about by diarists, and sketched by cartoonists, they more often nicknamed her the Duchess-Countess. Half of the Cabinet was there, the secretary of war a witness.
CHARACTER PORTRAIT MALE SOCIALITE TRIAL
The trial saw the queen, two future kings, Queen Victoria’s father, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, James Boswell, Horace Walpole, and most of the bishops, peers, and peeresses in the land in Westminster Hall, either as jury or spectator.
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