A Scandalous Life. Mary S. Lovell

disturbed, or even if she has no dinner at all. She had better not drink anything but water.

      She must run the instant she is called whatever she is about. Morning, noon and night she must not mind going without sleep if her mistress requires her attendance. She must not require high wages nor expect profit from old clothes but be ready to turn and clean them … for her mistress, and be satisfied with two old gowns for herself. She must be a first-rate vermin catcher.

      She must be clean and sweet … let her not venture to make a complaint or difficulty of any kind. If so, she had better go at once.²²

      Few of Jane’s papers from this period survive and her journal is not among them. We know, however, that her parents were delighted with the match, and that Steely approved also. But there were some dissensions, notably among Ellenborough’s political opponents. One could not accuse the Duke of Wellington’s chère amie, Harriet Arbuthnot, of political bias, however, when she wrote that ‘Ellenborough having flirted and made himself ridiculous with all the girls in London now marries Miss Digby … she is very fair, very young and very pretty.’²³ The diarist Thomas Creevey, who was a close friend of Jane’s aunt Lady Anson and knew Ellenborough well, wrote:

      Lady Anson goes to town next week to be present at the wedding of her niece, the pretty ‘Aurora; Light of Day’ Miss Digby … who is going to be married to Lord Ellenborough. It was Miss Russell who refused Ld Ellenborough, as many others besides are said to have done. Lady Anson will have it that he was a very good husband to his first wife, but all my impressions are that he is a dammed fellow.²⁴

      Lady Holland wrote to her son that Ellenborough ‘has at last succeeded in getting a young wife, a poor girl who has not seen anything of the world. He could only snap up such a one … she is granddaughter of Mr Coke who has another son!’²⁵ Thus she broke the news that Jane’s grandfather had the felicity of a spare for his cherished heir. However, Lady Holland’s views on Lord Ellenborough were politically jaundiced; she disliked him intensely and openly held the opinion that he was impotent.²⁶

      In August, Ellenborough noted in his diary that he had ‘dined with Janet at the Duke’s’. The Duke of Wellington’s London home was Apsley House, near Hyde Park. It was a huge formal dinner with many notables present, all much older than Jane. Ellenborough was clearly pleased at the manner in which Jane conducted herself in such august company.²⁷

      The day designated for the marriage was 15 September 1824, some five months after their meeting in London. The venue was not, as might be supposed, the chapel at Holkham; with a new son only three weeks old, Jane’s step-grandmother could not accommodate a wedding party. Jane was married to Edward at her parents’ London house, as an entry in the register of the Parish of St Marylebone shows:

      The Right Honourable Edward Lord Ellenborough, a Widower, and Jane Elizabeth Digby, Spinster, a minor, were married by Special Licence at 78 Harley Street by and with the consent of Henry Digby Esquire, Rear Admiral in His Majesty’s Navy, the natural and lawful father of the said minor, this fifteenth day of September.²⁸

      It was not unusual for a society marriage to be conducted in a private home. Slightly more unusual, perhaps, was that it was performed in a secular venue by a bishop, Edward’s uncle, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The court pages reveal that the happy couple sped off to Brighton for the honeymoon where, as Jane recalled many years later, a wholly satisfactory wedding night followed.²⁹

       3 Lady Ellenborough 1825–1827

      The honeymoon in Brighton lasted a mere three weeks and Lord Ellenborough was back at work in October. During the following period, though busy with affairs of great moment, he still found time to write poetry to his bride. The epithet ‘Juliet’ was only used in the first months of their marriage, probably as an allusion to Jane’s youth. Jane had a pet name for her husband – ‘Oussey’ – but in all surviving correspondence between the two she signed herself ‘Janet’, except in the following exchange:

      Oh Juliet, if to have no fear

      But that of deserving thee,

      To know no peace when thou art near

      No joy thou can’st not share with me

      If still to feel a lover’s fire

      And love thee more the more prospect,

      To have on earth but one desire

      Of making thee completely blest!

      If this be passion, thou alone

      Canst make my heart such passion know.

      Love me but still, as thou hast done,

      And I will ever love thee so.

      Ellenborough, 12 November 1824

      To which his bride of two months readily replied within twenty-four hours:

      ‘To love thee still as I have done’

      Say, is it all thou ask of me?

      Thou has it then, for thou alone

      Reign in the soul that breathes for thee.

      Edward, for thee alone I sigh

      And feel a love unknown before

      What bliss is mine when thou art nigh

      Oh loved one still, I ask no more

      As thou art now, oh ever be

      To her whose fate in thine is bound

      Whose greatest joy is loving thee

      Whose bliss in thee alone is found.

      And she will ever thee adore

      From day to day with ardour new

      Both now and to life’s latest hour

      With passion, felt alas! … by few.

      Juliet, 13 November 1824

      Those words ‘whose greatest joy is loving thee’ hardly reinforce the image of a girl coerced into an unwanted marriage, nor charges that the marriage was a failure from the day of the wedding, and these facts are important in view of what was to follow. Visitors to Elm Grove found the couple happy together and living in terms of open affection.¹ They rode out together most mornings when Edward was at Roehampton, often across Richmond Park.² Joseph Jekyll, who visited the Ellenboroughs just before Christmas, wrote: ‘I dined and slept … at Roehampton to be presented by Lord Ellenborough to his bride. Very pretty, but quite a girl, twenty years younger than himself³ … The general subject was his lordship’s lamentation at being called away so frequently from his beautiful wife by debates and politics.’⁴

      The poetry and literary love-making during Ellenborough’s absences continued for months, whenever Ellenborough was away from Jane, and some, such as the following extract from a poem written on New Year’s Day 1825 while he was staying at Boldrewood in Hampshire with Lord Lyndhurst, the Attorney-General and a close friend, is illuminating:

      My bride! For thou art still a bride to me

      And loved with all the passion of a soul

      Which gave itself at once, nor would be free …

      Yet I have had a roving eye, till now,

      And gazed around on every lovely face

      And still would, all enthralled to beauty, bow

      But ne’er in fairest features could I trace

      The sympathetic smile, and winning grace

      Which beam aloft on thy illumined brow

      And every thought of others is effaced

      In dreams of bliss which heaven’s behests allow

      So wedded truth alone, and love’s unbroken vow,