Unlikely maid of honour
Hugh Massinqberd
ELIZABETH: THE SCANDALOUS LIFE OF THE DUCHESS OF KINGSTON by Claire Gervat Century', £17.99. pp. 306. ISBN 0712614516 `1( iss me, Chudleigh,' quipped
Auberon Waugh, as he lay badly wounded in Cyprus, to his bemused corporal of horse, who treated Waugh with some caution thereafter. The corporal of horse's 18th-century namesake, Elizabeth Chudleigh, who had a reputation for being (to employ the old journalistic euphemism) `fun-loving', would surely have responded in kind.
'Miss Chudleigh' (as she continued to be known after her `private' marriage to Augustus Hervey, later 3rd Earl of Bristol) is the sort of historical personage who makes an amusing footnote in The Complete Peerage. Indeed she is featured there as the notorious 'Duchess of Kingston', who subsequently 'went through a form of marriage' with Evelyn Pierrepont, 2nd Duke of Kingston, and was eventually tried for bigamy before the House of Lords. Horace Walpole is duly wheeled on to observe that 'Miss Chudleigh had a most beautiful face, her person was ill made, clumsy and ungraceful'. The sniffy footnote ends with the assertion that 'she concentrated her rhetoric into swearing, and dressed in a style next door to nakedness'.
I confess that I had my doubts as to whether Elizabeth, traditionally caricatured as 'a coarse strumpet' (a phrase, which I see to my shame that I trotted out in print myself), was really worth a fulldress biography. Yet I am glad to report that Claire Gervat has proved me quite wrong. She writes with sympathy and much good sense, backed up by sound scholarship, about a real-life woman in the round. While not neglecting her subject's faults, which included vulgarity, vanity, pride and self-delusion. Gervat makes a convincing case for her qualities, such as her witty conversation, generosity, loyalty as a friend, forgiving nature and her `courage and resilience in dealing with difficult situations, even if the difficulties were frequently of her own making'. As a travel writer herself, Gervat is especially assured on `the Wandering Duchess's' experiences of travelling widely in Europe — far more widely, as she says. 'than many men of her generation, let alone the women'.
Like the great 20th-century adventuress Pamela Harriman (nee Digby), Elizabeth Chudleigh came from a West Country family. Her grandfather was a baronet; her father, who was lieutenant-governor of Chelsea Hospital, lost money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720, shortly before Elizabeth's birth. Yet the vivacious girl with the sparkling eyes portrayed by the then unknown Joshua Reynolds was determined to make her mark and in 1743, thanks to the influence of William Pulteney. Earl of Bath, she became a maid of honour to the Princess of Wales.
At a masquerade, dressed, or rather undressed, as lphigenia, she caught the eye of George II. The story goes that the King asked if he might touch Miss Chudleigh's breast. 'Your Majesty,' Elizabeth apparently replied, 'I can put it to a far softer place.' She then guided the royal mitt to his own head.
Elizabeth's trial for bigamy in the House of Lords is a tremendous set-piece, reminiscent of the scene in Kind Hearts and Coronets when the Duke of Chalfont is tried by his peers. It was the hottest ticket in town and, in the scramble for a better view, one woman fell through a gap in the floor of a gallery ending up, as the Morning Chronicle noted, with `her bare bum squatted on a gentleman's head'. Elizabeth was exempted (through 'benefit of peerage', as at least she was still a countess) from being branded on the thumb — to the apparent disappointment of a former lover, Lord Camden, who gallantly would have 'recommended a cold iron'.
Long before her death in Paris, in 1788, I had warmed to the gamy old girl. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of her greed. At dinner she would overeat to such an extent that she would have to retire to an adjoining room 'leaving the door open, where after violently cascading in the hear
ing of all, a glass of Madeira was sent as a bracer'. On hot days she would rise from the table and fan herself 'by taking hold of her petticoats, and well shaking them'. The resulting smell would be blamed on the dogs.
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