A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby (Text only)

by Mary S. Lovell

  The rumour was one of many about Jane which would circulate over the years, as though her life were not exciting enough without any invention.

  But Jane had put her German marriage out of mind; she was in love with Spiros and the manner in which they lived. For the first time she found real joy in motherhood. E. M. Oddie, who visited the Theotokys’ house in the 1920s when many elderly residents still remembered them, wrote that Jane and Spiros

  kept open house and entertained lavishly. They both loved horses. They rode together round the island, exploring it. Sometimes they rode in a particularly ornate carriage, Spyro [sic], superb in his fustanello, attracting attention by sitting beside the coachman on the box, flag in hand. They lived indeed in the grand eighteenth-century manner …

  There is still a marble-topped table with a bad crack in it which commemorates a gay party at which the guests so enjoyed themselves that they broke not only the glasses from which they drank their very numerous toasts, but smashed the entire dinner service. Had Jane known that the guests would prove so hilarious she might not have used her finest English dinner service for their open air meal. After the dinner, the Count, pleasantly satiated with good food and good drink and good company chose the table top as a couch on which to sleep off the effects.

  For all that it was marble and … solid, it cracked beneath his weight. In England a table that had taken part in so undignified an episode would have been removed from sight but in Corfu they felt differently about things. The story of how the table got its crack was good fun in retrospect and the table still remains in the garden as a pleasant reminder that Uncle Spyro … was once young and gay and human, and lacking the wisdom that comes with years. The fragments of the dinner service are also in existence.11

  In September 1842 a shadow fell across Jane’s golden world when she received a letter from Lady Andover telling of her father’s death three days after he had suffered a stroke. It was undoubtedly a long-term effect of his bad fall eighteen months earlier, for he had suffered headaches and nosebleeds ever since. Edward and the family were with Lady Andover when Sir Henry died. The unhappy widow wrote, ‘he seemed to regain knowledge of those around him and got up in his dressing gown and stood at the window counting rabbits on the lawn.’ After his death she had prayed ‘alone by the body of a husband to whom I was deeply attached and giving a kiss to features that only appeared to be in a deep sleep’. Afterwards Edward and Kenelm had taken her to Theresa, who had cared for her until they all travelled back to Minterne for the funeral. His uncle, Lord Digby, ‘was too unwell to be able to attend’. This was no surprise; Lord Digby had cut all social ties with Sir Henry’s branch of the family after Jane’s divorce from Ellenborough, and, though he could not choose to confer the barony elsewhere, he had otherwise cut Edward out of his will within a few months of the divorce case. The great estate of Sherborne (which was not entailed) and the old Digby fortune were left instead to Lord Digby’s sister.

  In a diary entry in September, Lady Andover describes receiving a ‘most heart-broken letter from Jane from Corfu, enclosing a most affectionate one from the Count’. Jane was so upset at the loss of her father that she had made herself ill with weeping, Spiros wrote, and he therefore intended to take her away to Italy to ‘change the scene’. Jane’s grandfather had died six weeks before her father. Although she had had no contact with Thomas Coke for many years, the news of his death had seemed impossible to accept. Now with her dearest Babou, both her childhood gods had gone; it was the end of an era. Mixed with her grief at the loss of her father was guilt for the anguish she knew she had caused both men.

  Ducades – Corfu

  19th September, 1842

  My dearest Kenelm,

  I received but last night the stunning intelligence of our dear, dear Father’s death. To me the blow came most unexpectedly, nor can I yet bring myself to believe that I am never, never to see him again!!! For this at least you and Edward must be eternally grateful that you were both with him to the last, while I, to whom he was, ever, so kind, so generously forgiving, was thousands of miles away, and perhaps even the very day he was expiring was unconsciously engaged in some party of pleasure! This is such a dreadful thought …

  I can hardly see to write more for head and heart feel as if they would burst. Still, wretched as I am that I did not, could not, see him, I am intensely grateful that the sad event did not occur on the visit to us which he had often talked over and planned. Never should I have fancied all had been done that could be done, in short it would have been a remorse more to add to the many others of my life. I cannot write more …

  Your afflicted Sister

  J. E. T.12

  As expected, the admiral left Minterne House and the bulk of his fortune (which he had made, not inherited) to his son Edward. Kenelm received a capital sum of £10,000. To his daughter ‘Elizabeth Jane, now the wife of the Count Theotoky’, he left a capital sum of £10,000 and a cash legacy of £500 ‘as an undeniable provision for her sole and separate use, benefit and maintenance for her life, independent of the debts of her present or any future husbands … towards her support and that of her children … surviving their majorities … or reputed children of my daughter’.13 From Lady Andover, Jane received soon after this a capital sum of £5,000 – £2,000 of which was added to her capital portfolio and the remainder sent to Baron Venningen for Heribert and Bertha. Jane’s personal annual income from investments, rents and other sources appears at this point to have been well in excess of £4,000 sterling (today worth about £140,000). It was regarded as great wealth in Greece.

  The late summer break in Italy with her husband and son helped to divert Jane from her grief but she did not recover her former high spirits until the end of the year. By then, despite apparent opposition from Queen Amalie, Spiros had been called to serve at King Otto’s court in Athens as aide-de-camp to the King. Jane wrote to her mother that they were to leave Corfu the following morning to sail for Piraeus, from where they would ride to Athens.14

  From the day of her arrival at court Jane was always known by the Greek version of her Christian name, Ianthe. And just as she had charmed King Ludwig, so she charmed his son. Things were not going too well for poor Otto. He was a likeable but inept young man who believed that his daydreams of a classical and philosophical Greek tradition were shared by everyone. One of his first acts as King was to declare Athens – or, rather, the site of ancient Athens – his capital. But Athens in 1837, when he first took the throne, was no more than a village:

  barely two streets were recognisable as streets and even they were still rough with rubble and heaps of stone. Few of the houses were finished. A roof was missing here; a wall there. Very few shops were in existence. There was a market-place [and]… two or three mediocre hotels. Under the shadow of the Acropolis which dwarfed the new Athens as King Otto’s interest in the past dwarfed his interest in the … present, there was a bleak looking barracks.15

  Had his father not sent an ‘army of workmen from Bavaria’ the King would not even had had a palace. Matters had improved a little, but the Theotokys knew what they were facing when they moved to Athens. There were no hotels suitable for residence, though the Hotel Europe served as a short-term pied-à-terre; nor were there any houses to rent.

  As soon as they arrived, Jane purchased land, engaged the architect Kleanthes, who also designed the British embassy in Athens, and set about building a fine mansion in the Hodos Sokratans district which would become the most sought-after area in the city. With her money, drive and impatience, her house was ready for occupation in the autumn when the Theotokys returned from a summer in Italy. When Jane wanted something she threw herself into it in the ‘headlong’ manner described by both Steely and Charles Venningen. She worked with inexhaustible energy and when she was working and fulfilled she was devastating. Her house in Athens was among the most elegant in the city and it was generally agreed that Theotoky was a fortunate man to have as his wife the lovely and wealthy count
ess.

  Each day she exercised her white Arabian horse on the outskirts of the city, jumping neatly over the ditches of building sites. In her superbly cut French riding habits and neat hats she was sometimes mistaken by urchins for the Queen and hailed as such. Such stories, when they reached the ear of Otto’s wife, could hardly be expected to please. Queen Amalie, who prided herself on her skill as an equestrienne, had already marked Jane out with disapproval for overshadowing her in the ballroom. Prior to Jane’s arrival the Queen had been regarded as the best rider and the most graceful dancer at court. Now she had a rival – not that there were many who would have told her to her face. But Amalie was no fool; she saw what she saw. She also knew that Jane had once been Ludwig’s mistress. And when she observed how her husband admired Jane she instantly decided that if Jane had been mistress to one king there was little to stop her being mistress to another.

  Jane fuelled the Queen’s antagonism in many ways: by clothing her own more slender and youthful figure in the fashionable new crinoline styles lately imported from Paris even before the Queen had worn them; by her stable of fine horses including her favourite, the beautiful Arabian, Athos; by the manner in which she and Count Theotoky lived; by her well-stocked and well-managed garden (Amalie was also a keen gardener). Worst of all, knowing how much it annoyed the Queen, Jane wilfully encouraged the King’s admiration of her. She meant nothing by it other than to tease, for she was still in love with Spiros.

  The court at Athens was not a particularly happy place: the thirty-year-old King’s ineptitude and the dour Queen’s attitude to life in general, coupled with her childlessness, set the spirit of their court. It was not a spirit the Greeks admired, and a bloodless revolution in the summer of 1843 eventually forced Otto to sign a document dismissing from his service the hordes of foreigners – mainly Bavarians – who had swamped all the country’s top positions. Spiros was made a colonel in the new army.

  Despite its lack of the civilised amenities found in European cities, Jane nevertheless enjoyed Athens. It was a crossroads between Europe and what was known then as the Orient. In the salons of socialites, returning travellers told of ancient ruined cities in the desert, of nomad tribes whose manner of living had seen no change since biblical times. Outdoor cafés were crowded with men in Turkish baggy ‘trowsers’ smoking the aromatic narghiles and drinking tiny cups of thick Turkish coffee well into the night. Black-robed Muslim women who covered their faces, and colourfully costumed visitors from the Levant and Arabia, mingled in the few streets with Greeks in fustanellas and more soberly clad Europeans in frock-coats and crinolines. There were French and Italian sailors up from the ships in Piraeus harbour, sheep and goat herders, and the proud Palikares – the nomadic men from the mountains. All flocked to the regular Turkish market and jostled with the respectable citizens of Athens going about their daily tasks. Turkey was tantalisingly close and Jane found the lure strong. She meant to go there: to Constantinople; and to Arabia, where her cousin had met such a tragic end.

  During the next two years of Jane’s life, as confidante of the King, she was highly placed in Athenian society. Previous biographers, without access to Jane’s papers and without quoting sources, have speculated that during this time she became Otto’s mistress. Although the pages of the diary of that specific period were among those destroyed by a Digby niece after Jane’s death, part of it survives. From Jane’s subsequent few references to King Otto it appears unlikely that she ever regarded him as a lover. She offered him support and shared confidences; possibly she spoke of his father whom she still revered. But the absence of passion was no consolation to Amalie, whose dislike and distrust of Jane grew daily.

  In 1846, although no evidence of the meeting exists, it seems that Jane met, or at least corresponded with, Prince Felix Schwarzen-berg.16 The prince spent two years as Austrian Ambassador at the court of the King of Naples between 1844 and 1846. The appointment was not generally approved, for though he was popular in his native land he had become imperious and arrogant; and the Italians did not see why they should accept such behaviour. When after two years the Austrian flag was torn down from the embassy building Felix departed hastily. Before that, however, there appears to have been some kind of contact between the former lovers.17

  Certainly Jane and Spiros were in the habit of visiting Italy each summer and in Naples, a major port of steamships from Greece, they had many friends. The prince was ‘with his family’ in Naples, according to his biographers, the family consisting of his sister Mathilde and daughter Didi. Felix was no longer important to Jane and she regarded her relationship with him sadly, not from any sense of loss but because of the manner in which he had treated her youthful sacrifice. She always suffered guilt for the distress she had caused but, she once wrote, Felix had ‘avenged most awfully’ any wrong she had done by his cruel abandonment of her.18 However, Jane almost certainly saw her daughter in 1846, when Didi was about the same age as Jane had been when she married Ellenborough.

  Many years later Didi would recall an evening in Naples when she was sixteen or seventeen. Her father and aunt had gone out, and the servants admitted a lady who stayed chatting to Didi for a brief time without revealing her identity. It was not until shortly before his death that the prince admitted to Didi that he was her natural father; and that the woman who had called that evening in Naples was her mother, who had requested permission to see her daughter. Felix had allowed the visit, applying the condition of anonymity. Later that same year, according to family legend, Jane was allowed to see her daughter again while the girl was out walking. This time more stringent conditions were imposed: Jane was neither to speak nor even to approach the girl.19 This was the last time Jane ever saw her daughter, and by that time Jane’s world had fallen apart again.20

  During the spring of 1846 Jane had suspected that Spiros was being unfaithful to her. Initially she could not bring herself to believe her suspicions, but investigation proved the matter and when she confronted Spiros he did not deny it. Worse, when Jane confided in Eugénie, the maid cautiously ventured the information that she had known all about the affair, and indeed that it was not the first occasion on which the count had strayed. Jane was hurt, humiliated and angry, and the scales fell from her eyes completely when she discovered that without her knowledge Spiros had made many incursions into her finances, for she had always been generous to him.

  There was no agonising this time; Jane was her own woman now. She left Spiros with instructions to pack and move out of their home. Her behaviour suggests that their relationship had not been close for some time, since there was no attempt by either to repair the rift. Taking Leonidas and Eugénie, Jane left Athens for Corfu, and in July went on to Italy, where she was met by her mother and Steely.21 As usual the two women had flown to Jane’s aid as soon as they heard from her. She had taken a house for the summer at the Tuscan spa village of Bagni di Lucca in the foothills of the Apernnines where she had spent holidays in the past with Lady Andover. The large three-storey house is still standing, tall and square ‘with a façade of egg-yolk stucco and dark green shutters’.22 A typically Florentine-style villa of the period, it had a cool, lofty entrance hall and an impressive open stone stairway and polished banister which reached to the top floor some forty feet or so above the front door.

  One of Jane’s first actions on her arrival was to recruit a suitable person into whose care she could entrust Leonidas. He was an enchanting little boy, now aged six, and the remaining joy of Jane’s life. He had outgrown nursemaids and she felt that his enquiring mind needed the stimulation of instruction. Mr Woodcock, a young English chaplain from the nearby town of Livorno, was happy to take on the role of tutor and companion to the boy for a few weeks that summer.

  The exact date of the following incident is not known to the present-day family. Only the details of what happened to Jane on that awful day in 1846 survive.

  Leonidas … had been taken upstairs, presumably to the nursery quarters at the top of
the tall Italian house, while she remained talking to some friends in the large hall. Leonidas, wilful and adventurous as herself, knowing where she was, attempted by climbing the banisters at the top of the house to slide down to her. He overbalanced and was dashed to death on the marble floor at her feet.23

  11

  The Queen’s Rival

  1846–1852

  It was some weeks after the funeral of Leonidas that Lady Andover and Steely left for England. Jane returned to Athens for a short time; presumably she felt she owed it to Spiros to tell him at first hand the details of the frightful accident that had befallen the child they both adored. Jane was said to be ‘beside herself with grief’,1 and it is not difficult to believe this, given the frank admissions in her diary that Leonidas was the only one of her children for whom she felt real maternal love. For the two older women the shock was combined with the need to comfort Jane, and there had been a very tearful leavetaking at Pisa when Jane and her mother parted, uncertain of when they might meet again.

  With the disintegration of six years of happy married life, Jane found no consolation as Spiros did. At thirty-three he was in the prime of his manhood and in love with a much younger woman. Though he had loved his son no less than Jane did, he already had a life beside the one he had formerly shared with Jane. The interview between husband and wife was painful; hardly less bitter than the previous one. They had both wept for Leonidas, but Spiros was now as ardent in his new love as he had once been for Jane. And when Jane recalled how he had pursued her to Heidelberg, and later returned from Greece to woo her afresh, she was well aware of the lengths to which he would go. There was no future for them as man and wife, and clearly they could not both remain in Athens. He must leave, she told him, in return for which she would continue the allowance she had always given him. As a result Spiros resigned his commission and took his mistress to Italy.2