A Scandalous Life. Mary S. Lovell

though it is difficult to see what he could have done given their situation. Even then she could not accept that George could apparently forget her so finally and transfer his affections so quickly. At length she came to realise that their youthful love had been perhaps no more than ‘the bright creation of a heated brain’, and that her ‘idolisation’ of him had been misplaced. ‘Now’, she wrote, ‘another love inflames my lonely heart’, and this new love promised ‘far, far higher ecstasy’. At last, she wrote, there was ‘sun in a breast which else were cold’.²⁴

      Prince Felix courted Jane hotly throughout the summer. In the early part of their relationship it was he who set the pace, he who fretted when she could not meet him or went away with her husband. At the end of July, when society decamped to the country, Jane was due to leave town for a short stay at Roehampton before a visit to Cowes in early August. The diplomat diarist, Count Rodolphe Apponyi, wrote of dining with Felix at the Esterhazys’ and finding the prince very preoccupied because Jane was due to leave town within a few days. ‘This did not suit him and consequently he was in a very bad humour.’²⁵

      But the prince was to see Jane several times before she left, once in the park, where they rode their horses together, and again on the evening of the same day at a masked ball given by Lady Londonderry, Ellenborough’s former mother-in-law.²⁶ The Londonderrys’ town-house was very grand and had formerly belonged to the late Queen Caroline. It was here, among a vast glittering throng, that Count Apponyi was to meet for the first time the lady whose imminent departure was causing his old friend Felix Schwarzenberg such dejection. Guests were dressed magnificently in historical costume. As they were announced, each had to curtsy or bow to their hostess, who, in the guise of Queen Elizabeth I, graciously inclined her head in greeting. To some the hostess showed individual favour and, since she had met Apponyi in Paris, Lady Londonderry went to some pains to introduce the count to as many people of influence as she could:

      among all these people, one lady in particular attracted my attention. It was Lady Ellenborough, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Nineteen years of age [sic], with fair hair, a magnificent complexion, large blue eyes and the figure of a nymph, she is everything that is desirable. It is she whom Schwarzenberg adores, and I lost no time being introduced. I was not overawed by her intellect, it is true, but one cannot have everything. The expression on her face is sweet, as is her voice, and her whole personality exudes an indefinable air of modesty and decorum which I found ravishing.

      The coldness and formality of first acquaintances did not last long between us. She spoke to me very freely about her husband, whom she accuses of being jealous, and of not understanding her. This is what she likes to say, but in reality I think that Lord Ellenborough, preoccupied with the duties of his position, has no time to give good advice to his young wife.

      … I had already danced with Lady Ellenborough when Schwarzenberg arrived. Madame did not reveal that she had danced with me and instructed him to engage me with her for the first waltz which I accepted with great pleasure. I was so preoccupied with dancing and with my partner that I had to endure reproaches from all the ladies I know whom I had not yet approached.²⁷

      It is strange that Jane complained to Apponyi of Edward being ‘jealous’ when his coolness towards Jane was so marked that it was noticed by a number of writers, contemporary and later, with the added explanation that he was totally dedicated to his work. But despite Apponyi’s excuses for Jane’s husband it would be fair to say that Ellenborough too had his share of extramarital diversions. He had at this time two mistresses that are known about and contemporary gossip speaks of another. One was the Countess St Antonio, an aristocratic member of the set to which Jane’s parents so objected. The other, ‘a very pretty girl’, according to Joseph Jekyll, was ‘the pastry-cook’s daughter at Brighton who Ellenborough preferred to his bride’; she was also referred to in The Times as a ‘confectioner’s daughter’.

      The latter allegedly had a child by him and, being cast off in disgrace by her family, might have starved had not Lord Ellenborough finally been shamed into providing support for the mother and child under threat of exposure – or so said the equivalent of today’s tabloid press.²⁸ Since Jekyll’s gossip was written in 1829 after the birth of Jane’s child, it is probable that the term ‘bride’ was being used figuratively rather than literally. Whoever she was, the ‘pastry-cook’s daughter’ was the on dit in London that winter and there is even evidence that Jane may have met this young woman. In her notebook Jane wrote the first line of a poem, ‘Ah! Wert thou, love, but all thou seemed …’ She got no further than the first line but she scribbled underneath, in the ‘secret code’ she had used since her childhood, the explanation that she had written it ‘on meeting the poor woman who called on my lord’.²⁹

      The Ellenboroughs officially ‘quit town’ at the end of the season, but Edward continued to use the town-house as a base when he was detained in London for reasons of work. Jane, in summer residence at Roehampton, was therefore free to meet Felix by prior arrangement. Each morning she rode out with her young groom, William Carpenter. Sometimes she rode as far as Wimbledon Common, and there, at the old windmill, she met Felix. One wet and windy day when the prince could not keep his appointment he sent his groom, who handed Jane a letter. The two grooms watched from a distance as Jane read the letter and placed it back in the envelope with a red rose which she had brought with her. She handed the envelope to the prince’s groom and told him to return it to his master.³⁰

      Given Jane’s immature romanticism and her self-confessed rebellious nature, these illicit trysts, so eagerly sought by the inflamed Prince Schwarzenberg, must have in themselves been a major attraction to her. Thwarted lovers, a handsome prince and a beautiful girl, meeting in secret, with all the sweet sadness the frequent partings inevitably brought about, was the stuff of the romantic novels that Steely loved. Sometimes when they met and rode together they stopped at inns and hotels, such as the Castle at Richmond.³¹ Jane had the utmost confidence in her youthful groom, for he was always present to see to her horse. By the time summer slid into autumn she had ceased to think of the relationship as a flirtation; she was deeply, passionately in love, and this time she had the delight of knowing that her chosen partner loved her equally. Jane had fought the feeling at first, not because of Edward – she had already released her hold on that relationship – but fearing to let go of her girlish adoration of George Anson. But it dawned on her that the glow she felt whenever the prince was near was love. Gradually her affair with George became as a candle to the sun of the emotions she began to experience. When she was with Felix she felt whole and alive; at other times she looked for him everywhere she went, and thought only of him and the next time they would be together. Gone was any thought of the discretion she had employed in her affair with Anson; she spoke openly of her love to anyone who cared to listen. According to one acquaintance,

      Lady Ellenborough … tells everybody she meets the whole history, and it is a long one, of her and Schwarzenberg. Any indifferent person by whom she sits at dinner is sure to get up intimately acquainted with every circumstance related to their intercourse. How she drives to Schwarzenberg’s lodgings, and how Dietrichstein, who lodges with him, sees her. What they do together, how often they have been in Schwarzenberg’s cabriolet to the White House in Soho Square etc. How she meets Ellenborough, as she walks the streets, who intent on high matters does not know her.

      And then she concludes with most amiable naïveté by exciting indignation against George Anson who is so ‘uncivil and unkind. Do you know he is gone out of town without giving me up the key to the secret door at Roehampton though I asked him so often for it.’³²

      What Jane related to her cronies was that on most weekday afternoons when she was in town she called at 73 Harley Street in her carriage. If Dietrichstein was at home he quickly made his excuses and left. The lovers would spend an hour or two together. Several times she rode there accompanied by her groom, who returned her horse to the stables off Portman Square; when Jane and Felix subsequently left his house they drove off together in his cabriolet.

      Sometimes they called on friends such as Princess Esterhazy upon whose discretion they believed they could rely. On at least one occasion they drove together to the house of Felix’s colleague, the Count St Antonio,