Read Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women Online

Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (9 page)

BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
10.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 
Jane Digby
 
1807-1881
 
Being loved is to me as the air that I breathe.
—JANE DIGBY, WRITING TO KING LUDWIG OF BAVARIA
 
 
Jane Digby was born into an aristocratic family with every conceivable advantage—beauty, money, and privilege—yet she shocked her upper-class world by collecting husbands and lovers like a nineteenth-century Angelina Jolie before ending up in the arms of a desert prince. She had uncanny powers of fascination, luring men with her wit and charm. In her lifetime, no fewer than eight novels were written about her, most of them unflattering portraits. Cutting free from tight-laced English society in exchange for the life of a passionate nomad, she spent her life searching for that one perfect love.
 
Born in 1807, Jane was much loved and spoiled by her parents and relatives, who hated to discipline their golden-haired little darling. From childhood, Jane showed the reckless courage, independence, and taste for adventure that marked her ancestors, once wandering off with a band of gypsies because she liked their lifestyle. Jane’s delicate beauty of blond ringlets, violet eyes, and creamy complexion was noticed at a very early age, as well as her power to attract the attention of men. It was her beauty that convinced her mother that it was prudent to get her married off as soon as possible.
At her coming-out ball, Jane met Edward Law, Baron Ellenborough. He was seventeen years her senior and a widower. On paper, it seemed a brilliant match. Ellenborough was a rising politician, handsome, and rich, and his maturity would curb her childish impulses. Flattered by the attentions of an older, experienced man, Jane accepted his proposal. She had visions of the grand life she would lead, the London house, the balls and parties, taking her place as a leading political hostess. On his part, Ellenborough was looking for two things: a decorative partner and an heir. After a short courtship, they were married by special license.
The old adage “Marry in haste, repent at leisure” could have been written about Jane’s first marriage. No sooner had they shaken the rice out of their shoes than Jane realized why her husband had been called “Horrid” Law at school. Ellenborough was ambitious and totally devoted to his career. He thought nothing of spending long hours at the House of Commons late into the night, writing speeches, and hanging out with his political cronies. Instead of attention and affection, he gave her jewelry, cold diamonds that wouldn’t keep her warm at night. Not only did Jane have to contend with the memory of his late wife, she soon discovered he had a mistress tucked away in Brighton.
Jane was not a woman who could live without love and passion in her life. If her husband was not willing to give it to her, she would look elsewhere. Dressed in décolleté gowns, Jane fell in with the glittering and sophisticated international society set led by Princess Esterházy. She soon found her cousin George more than willing to console her. When Jane found herself pregnant, she passed the baby off as her husband’s. When her cousin finally dumped her rather than risk his career, Jane moved on to her grandfather’s librarian. He later wrote that she had “blue eyes that would move a saint, and lips that would tempt one to forswear heaven to touch them.”
It was at one of Almack’s famous Wednesday night balls in late May 1828 that Jane, newly turned twenty-one, met the darkly handsome and courtly Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, an Austrian diplomat who had just been posted to London. The prince was instantly smitten and laid siege to her heart with flowers, poems, and presents until she succumbed to his ardor. It was more than a physical attraction for Jane. The prince had an air of mystery; he literally oozed adventure with his talk of the faraway places he had seen. Jane fell madly, ecstatically in love with him and didn’t care who knew it, practically shouting it from the rooftops. Jane would visit him at his flat on Harley Street, wearing a veil to hide her identity, but before long they became reckless. She was seen by a neighbor in Schwarzenberg’s embrace, the prince lacing up her stays. Soon the gossip about them was so flagrant that Schwarzenberg was sent packing back to the continent before his career was totally ruined.
When Jane realized she was pregnant, she decided to risk everything by joining her lover on the continent. Her parents pleaded with her to at least attempt to repair her relationship with her husband. Her father, in particular, tried to impress upon her what she was giving up by leaving him to go abroad. If she stayed in England, and they formally separated, she could still take her place in society after a suitable amount of time. But Jane was not to be denied. As far as she was concerned, her life and her fate lay with the prince. He was the only man she wanted to be married to.
When Ellenborough found out about the affair, he decided that the only hope he had of maintaining his career and saving his honor was to divorce her. The divorce case was so sensational that for the first time, the
Times
of London featured the story on its front page instead of among the classified advertisements that were a mainstay of the paper until the 1960s. Despite the fact that he was the “innocent party,” Ellenborough was chastised for allowing his wife to associate with “undesirable persons.” In exchange for Jane not introducing evidence of his own indiscretion in court, Lord Ellenborough settled a generous sum on her for the rest of her life.
While the divorce proceeded in England, Jane gave birth to Schwarzenberg’s daughter. The prince soon proved to have feet of clay. Schwarzenberg’s family was adamant that he break up with her. The family was Catholic and marriage to a now notorious divorcée would be ruinous. Realizing that he was out of his depth and fearing for his career, Schwarzenberg left her for good.
On the rebound, Jane fled to Munich and into the arms of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who was captivated like many men before him by her beauty and intelligence. Her portrait joined the pantheon of other beautiful women in his “Gallery of Beauties.” She also caught the attention of Baron Karl von Venningen-Üllner, who worshipped her and pursued her relentlessly while she pined for Felix. After months of rebuffing him in the hopes that Felix would return to her, she finally succumbed to his attentions and promptly became pregnant. Although she didn’t love Karl, Jane succumbed to pressure from her parents, the baron, and the king to get married, but not before giving her daughter by Schwarzenberg to his sister, where she grew up with no memory or knowledge of her beautiful mother.
For a time she was content, but her husband wanted to turn her into a German hausfrau in the country, while Jane was lively and intelligent and loved parties. Even a second baby couldn’t tie Jane down. At a ball, during Oktoberfest, Jane met a young Greek count named Spiridon Theotoky, who awakened her sleeping passion. He was young and carefree, the antithesis of her sober and conservative husband. When the lovers tried to elope, her husband followed them and challenged the count to a duel. Although Theotoky was wounded, he managed to survive. Despite his hurt and humiliation Karl generously agreed to release Jane from their marriage. He received custody of their children, and he and Jane stayed friends for the rest of her life.
Jane moved to Greece and married her count, converting to the Greek Orthodox faith. They had a child, Leonidas, who became Jane’s favorite, the only one of her five children that she felt any affection for. It seemed as if Jane had finally met her soul mate, until the family moved to Athens and Spiridon began drinking and spending his nights out. After fifteen years together, she discovered that not only was he unfaithful, but he was also stealing from her accounts, so she left him. No sooner had she settled into a new home, when she suffered the devastating loss of her six-year-old, Leonidas, who died falling from a balcony when he tried to slide down the railing to greet her.
Jane, beside herself with grief, believed it was a punishment for her actions. Leaving Greece, she wandered disconsolately around the Mediterranean. For a time she became the mistress of an Albanian general and was thrilled to share his rough outdoor life as queen of his brigand army, living in caves, riding fiery Arab horses, and hunting game in the mountains for food—until she found that he, too, was unfaithful, with her maid, no less, and left him on the spot.
Now middle-aged but still stunningly beautiful, and vowing to renounce men, she headed for Syria, to see Damascus. Speaking Turkish, dressed in a green satin riding habit, she hired a Bedouin nobleman, Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab, who was twenty years her junior, to escort her. Smitten by her courage and zest for life, Medjuel proposed but Jane wasn’t interested. On her second trip to Damascus, she began to see him in a different light. When he proposed again, she asked for only two things: that he divorce his wife and that he remain faithful to her. Despite the advice of the British consul and her family, she threw caution to the wind. At the age of forty-six, she had finally found the great love of her life. Medjuel gave her the love and devotion that she had been longing for, and an adventurous life among the Bedouin.
Jane made one last visit to England in 1856. She found English society rigid and straitlaced under the reign of Victoria and Albert. They found her shocking; not only had she married an Arab but she also had three ex-husbands who were still living! Jane realized just how far she had moved away, not just physically but mentally. Victorian England was no place for her. After six months, she kissed her family good-bye and returned to Medjuel and the desert.
During the remainder of her life she adopted for six months of each year the exotic but uniquely harsh existence of a desert nomad living in the famous black goat-hair tents of Arabia; the remaining months she spent in the splendid palace she built for herself and Medjuel in Damascus. Accepting Arab customs, although she never converted to Islam, she dressed in traditional robes, her blond hair dyed black. As wife to the sheikh and mother to his tribe she found genuine fulfillment. She learned to milk camels, she hunted, she rode into battle at Medjuel’s side during the frequent intertribal skirmishes, and she raised Thoroughbred horses. Diplomats and scholars came to visit her, regarding her as an authority in the area. Middle Eastern expert and adventurer Sir Richard Burton called her the cleverest woman he’d ever met.
With her husband by her side, she passed away at the age of seventy-four. Obeying her final wishes, he had her buried in the Protestant cemetery in Damascus. Then her grief-stricken widower rode out into the desert and sacrificed one of his finest camels in her memory.
Jane Digby’s worst sins were an overwhelming hunger for love and adventure, and an astonishing naiveté about men. Despite her romantic disappointments, she never allowed herself to become bitter or jaded. She always believed that the perfect lover was out there, one who would fulfill her body and soul. Some historians and biographers have regarded Jane as promiscuous or a nymphomaniac. But Jane was a serial monogamist. In every relationship, she gave her full heart; each time she was sure that she had found “the one.” She could never be content with maintaining the discreet appearance of respectability. Jane also had a healthy sexual appetite in an era when women weren’t supposed to enjoy sex. If she had been a man, she would have been admired and patted on the back.
Jane lived a remarkable life but she paid a high price for the choices she made, ostracized by most of her relatives and polite society and alienated from her children. She saw her name become a byword for scandal. Despite all this, Jane was able to look back on her life with no regrets. She had lived fully and loved.
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
10.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Kaya Stormchild by Lael Whitehead
Grave Mercy by Robin Lafevers
Tomorrow War by Maloney, Mack
The Merman by Carl-Johan Vallgren
A Highland Duchess by Karen Ranney
The Price Of Spring by Daniel Abraham
Bachelor’s Return by Clarissa Yip
Darnell Rock Reporting by Walter Dean Myers