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

by Mary S. Lovell

  The party set off on 7 November and after an uneventful journey arrived safely on the 11th. Jane’s description is laconic, but the starry-eyed Emily Beaufort described each hour, each view, each discomfort and novelty vividly in her diary. It is her character portraits that are most interesting – for example, the following account of Medjuel:

  our friend Sheikh Miguel (pronounced Midgewell) is, like all true Bedouins, a small man … slightly made, but erect, very graceful in all his movements and with a light easy step. His face is really beautiful – of a perfect oval – a long aquiline nose, delicately formed mouth, small regular teeth of dazzling whiteness, and large black eyes that could be soft and sweet as any woman’s, or flash with a fierce, wild, eagle glance that really made one start. He wore a short black beard, and long crisp ringlets under his kefiyeh which was of the finest and brightest Damascus silk …

  As to his manners the ‘best bred’ polished Englishman is not more polished than he … From the time we left Damascus and became his ‘charge’ until we re-entered the city his kindness and thoughtfulness never ceased – morning, noon and night, travelling or stationary, whatever we might be doing, alone or surrounded by Arabs, he had an eye and an ear always ready for any want of ours.12

  Jane’s diary reveals the disappointment that greeted them in Palmyra: ‘Alas, Mohammed and Manah went three days before. Poor Medjuel was disappointed not to see them and so was I … We encamped in a garden with a pleasant running stream for a bath.’ Since Jane had made the trip upwards of a dozen times and spent many months at Palmyra, her diary contained no long descriptions. Miss Beaufort fleshes out the skeleton considerably as the party came, at long last, in sight of Tadmor:

  Suddenly there dashed up … towards us some seven or eight men, armed to the teeth, brandishing their long lances, shrieking and yelling and shouting to welcome our good Sheikh Miguel … we dismounted to rest … in the shade … while the Sheikh heard all the news … It was very bad news indeed for him and a grievous disappointment for us all: the famine was so great in the land in consequence of the drought, that the [tribe] knowing nothing of their beloved Sheikh’s approach had broken up their encampment and departed only three days before …

  So there was goodbye to all our promised plans, and our hopes of living among the Bedouins … feasting on camel’s meat and milk, seeing all sorts of Bedouin mares and sports; and our Sheikh’s new tent, too, which he had promised for our special use had been carried off to be ‘seasoned’…

  So we went on … till … we reached a small terrace, secluded and quiet, from whence a very low, ancient stone door, still turning on its original stone hinges admitted us into a delicious garden of olives, plums and pomegranates … Here we had the graceful branches of a palm tree waving above us and we slept well, night after night, in the warm, soft, delicious air.

  Around the fire at night the two sisters listened, as entranced as the Arabs, to the storyteller’s tales:

  Some hostile Arabs came down one night last winter and stole all the cattle of the Tudmor townspeople. Sheikh Miguel was staying there at the time, en passant …but of course the affair was no concern of his, nor do the Bedouin like interfering in each other’s quarrels. So he sat in his tent smoking, not thinking to be mixed up in it, when Sheikh Fares and some of the townspeople came and petitioned his help.

  He could not resist the appeal for he is a most generous and kindhearted man, and in a few moments he rose and mounted his mare. Then turning round quietly to the Sheikh of Tudmor [Fares]… a great blusterer and little doer … he said ‘You can stay in the valley; I will go up the mountain and bring back the cattle.’ He galloped off and before long caught sight of the cattle collected together and guarded by seven or eight men. Though alone he rode straight up to them and demanded in a loud voice, ‘How dare you take these cattle when I am here!’ and fired off his revolver among them. In a moment the whole set of men ran off, and the Sheikh quietly drove back all the cattle himself.13

  Emily Beaufort’s minutely detailed observations not only corroborate Jane’s diaries but enhance her often spare narrative. During their time in Tadmor, Carl Haag, a brilliant watercolour artist, painted several views of the ruins which are arguably the finest archaeological representations in existence. He also painted two full-length portraits: one of Jane wearing one of her bedouin ‘fantasia’ outfits, the other of Medjuel. This was the only image of Jane after she moved to Syria and, with the exception of a watercolour sketch by Emily Beaufort which obscures his features and a few working sketches by Jane, the only known portrait of Medjuel. Jane never actually saw them, but she obtained a photograph of Haag’s portrait of Medjuel and this was displayed at the house in Damascus for many years until she reluctantly gave it to a royal visitor as a parting gift.

  Haag was a Bavarian, born in 1820 at Erlangen (where Charles Venningen had a home). He had studied in Munich and indeed had spent the previous winter there, so he and Jane undoubtedly had much to talk about on their desert trek. He moved to England in 1848 to study at the Royal Academy and was already a naturalised subject before Queen Victoria commissioned him for a series of portraits of herself, the Prince Consort and their children. The Queen also commissioned several landscapes of the highlands of Scotland by Haag, and with his reputation well established he decided to travel to the Levant to find exotic subjects.

  The result of his two trips to Egypt and Palestine were to bring him to the pinnacle of his fame, especially his paintings of Palmyra and the desert encampments during the journey there and back. He added colour to his exhibition by describing his acquaintance with the beautiful former Lady Ellenborough and her princely sheikh.14

  Jane enjoyed the company of the two intelligent Beaufort sisters. Their mother had died when they were children, and they had been raised by their father, an admiral, a point not lost on Jane. When he died suddenly in 1859 the two girls mourned him deeply and decided, as a distraction, to tour the Holy Land. A year later Jane would receive a copy of Emily’s two-volume book about the trip, Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines. She especially appreciated the author’s ‘delicacy of feeling’, for, though Medjuel and the other travellers on the Palmyra journey were all included, Jane was never mentioned by name. The Misses Beaufort left Damascus to be in Jerusalem by Christmas.

  As the year drew to an end Jane found her household constantly split by disagreements, including quarrels with Eugénie, who was still acting as housekeeper despite almost daily threats of leaving. Jane wrote to Kenelm regarding ‘the impending loss of Eugénie after 18 years service … I have some thoughts of taking the English Consul’s wife’s maid, a Mrs Tappenden, whom I call turpentine for she looks rather peppery.’15 The dreary winter was enlivened when Colonel Charles Churchill and his wife came to live in Damascus for a while. The colonel had lived in Syria on and off since 1842, initially as a staff officer with the British expedition to Syria. An acknowledged expert on the uneasy struggle between the Druses and Maronite Christians and their Ottoman rulers, he had produced two books on the subject. He called on Jane in December 1859 to persuade her to introduce him to her friend, the Emir Abd el Khader, and Jane readily obliged. While the two men talked, she and Mrs Churchill called upon the emir’s harem.

  The lives led by these women was ever a subject of morbid fascination to Jane. She was alternately sad for their ignorance and shocked at the uselessness of ‘their pretty, painted’ lives. The senior wife, el Khader’s first and eldest spouse, was the wife of his youth, a native of Algeria. Massively fat and physically ugly, she impressed with her stately dignity as she presided calmly over the harem. El Khader valued her opinion highly and never made a move without consulting her. It was said el Khader took a new wife each year, mostly Circassian girls no older than fifteen to sixteen. However, Jane talked of the emir’s five wives, so unless he divorced a few the rumour seems exaggerated.

  Abd el Khader is a man of middle height and of muscular frame. A broad brow with marked straight eyebrows, larg
e dark brown eyes, bright and piercing but full of softness and intelligence,… and a lively warm brown … complexion, combine to make a handsome face. He has a Grecian nose, a delicately carved but firm mouth, a broad chin … his hands and his whole personal appearance show blood, and his dignified bearing and cool self-possession are characteristic of his life.

  He dresses purely in white and is enveloped in the usual snowy [Algerian] burnous … if you see him on horseback without knowing him to be Abd el Khader you would single him out from a million and ask who that distinguished looking chief might be. He has the seat of a gentleman and a soldier. His mind is as beautiful as his face; he is every inch a Sultan.16

  Within the year Jane’s name would be linked for ever with the Emir Abd el Khader, in a way that neither could have anticipated.

  18

  The Massacre

  1860–1861

  The year 1860 began ordinarily enough. Jane obtained from the consul, not without a great deal of effort, a certificate recording her marriage, which she sent at once to Steely to be lodged with a copy of her will. This gave her peace of mind, for she had sometimes wondered if the marriage was legal.

  Eugénie had relapsed into poor health, and developed a form of paranoia that everyone hated her, provoking almost continuous disharmony in the household. Finally, a week of bickering culminated in a scene. Eugénie had stormed into Jane’s boudoir after listening at the door while one of the other servants was being interviewed by Jane. She had been drinking heavily, ‘and she was so abusive and violent in her language that I was obliged to positively turn her out of the room and decline her further services. And so ends the maid who has been with me through thick and thin for 18 years!!!’ Jane wrote:

  Monday 20th. Mrs Tappenden came as Femme de Chambre and now all is over between Eugénie and me. She is no longer belonging to me. She had a dreadful attack, the longest and the worst.

  Friday March 9th. Today we set off for Beyrout with Eugénie, I and the Sheikh and D’jebran.

  When Eugénie sailed from Beirut for Athens, it marked the end of an eighteen-year partnership, but Jane ‘could not regret her as she is now, her temper is grown so bad … may she be happy in her new life.’ It was Medjuel’s first visit to Beirut; he was fascinated with the seventy-mile stretch of tarmacadam road leading to the city, and even more so with the sea, which he had never seen. Before they left, Jane sold Soultan; he had never suited her. She received a good price but she was sad to part with him, for Medjuel had given him to her during their honeymoon.

  In May, Jane travelled as an emissary of the tribe to the desert fortress of Sheikh Feisal at Mezarib in the Hauran, sixty miles south of Damascus, where there was a huge assembly of bedouin sheikhs. These assemblies were held periodically for the purpose of agreeing arrangements such as the amount of tribute money payable between the sheikhs and the village chiefs, who ‘troop in from all directions’.1

  Medjuel rode with her and her entourage to the outskirts of Damascus. It was Mrs Tappenden’s first desert trip, a test of her suitability, for Jane always appreciated the touches of civilisation that a good maid brought to the wildest environment. Originally Jane was to have accompanied Medjuel, but his eyes were ‘very bad with ophthalmia’ and he was suffering from bad headaches, so she went to represent him. Jane had made friends with Feisal some time earlier and was received as an honoured guest, although it seems unlikely that she would have been allowed to join the sheikhs in council on the twin counts of being a woman and a Christian. Jane’s diary is irritatingly silent on the content of the mission and instead deplores the intense heat and her annoyance at being bothered by ‘the multitudes’. Medjuel’s Ferengi wife was a desert legend and everyone, it seemed, wanted to see her, touch her and speak to her.

  A pencil sketch, hardly more than working notes for a composition, shows a huge encampment of thousands of black tents on a plain beside a lake. Above the encampment on a hill towers the bastioned fortress constructed of black basalt by the Ottoman conqueror of Suria, Sultan Salim, in 1518. Jane had long wished to see the massive doors, said by the Arabs to have been made by giants, carved from a single piece of dressed stone with a pintle at top and bottom that fitted into carved sockets in floor and lintel. Though they weighed several tons, the doors were so beautifully made and balanced that they could be swung to and fro with ease.2

  At the gathering of sheikhs were two of the most formidable men in the desert, Sheikh Faris el Meziad of the Hessienne and Sheikh Mohammed ebn Dukhi of the Wuld Ali. Bloodthirsty and avaricious, they had turned the entire desert into a field of war several years earlier. Ebn Dukhi received an annual sum of 200,000 piastres from the Turkish government, nominally to supply 650 camels and men to carry the barley for the hadj, but in reality to allow the hadj to pass through the Hauran in peace. Citizens of Damascus called this ‘Sultan’s blackmail’.3

  Jane had met ebn Dukhi and Meziad previously. They did not improve with greater familiarity and were ‘odious in every way’, she wrote in her journal, ‘perfectly ignorant brutes’. But there were other sheikhs whom Medjuel knew and trusted and in this mixed company Jane spent six days. When the conference ended the tents were packed and the massed tribes departed.

  Sheikh Feisal, whom she considered her ‘ideal of a Bedouin Sheikh’, impressed Jane greatly, ‘so noble, reserved and dignified in his demeanour, so truly the grand seigneur in his manner and address. I wish dear Medjuel had a little more of his hauteur – at least in manner, and a little more height to command respect.’4 This is the only time that Jane voiced even a breath of criticism of Medjuel, and the entry was written in code. On 19 May, she recorded, ‘At last we set off today on our return, I happy in the thought of seeing dear Medjuel. We left Sheikh Feisal and ebn Dukhi on the point of coming to blows.’

  On her arrival in Damascus, Jane found to her disappointment that Medjuel had taken some French princes to Tadmor and would be away for ten days. The next day Schebibb, who was staying at the Damascus house, came to tell Jane that his mother, Mascha, had died. ‘Her death’, Jane wrote with mixed feelings of guilt and relief, ‘does not mitigate my sin in having been the prime cause of Medjuel putting away the wife of his youth. Plain accusing words.’ But almost at once news came that took her mind off personal considerations.

  Monday June 5th.…poor Sheikh Feisal has been killed, and his son! The Druses and [the] Christians are fighting dreadfully and the whole country is said to be in a state of excitement … the fights [threaten] to break out in Damascus.

  The Druse, an ancient Muslim sect, normally lived in the mountainous area of the Hauran. Recently they had spread into traditional bedouin territory. The road along the hadj route had become notoriously dangerous for travellers and there were frequent reports of murder and robbery. But the latest fighting was more than a simple eruption between the bedouin and Druse people over territorial rights. A deep-seated resentment of the spread of Christianity in the Islamic countries had led to isolated incidents where a Christian had been beaten or killed, and shortly afterwards a Druse was killed in retaliation. In the spring of 1859 the balance had tipped between limited, though bitter, attrition and open conflict.

  Fighting and killing erupted like a flash fire throughout the country. The Christians were outnumbered three to one, and it became genocide. The harvest had failed and the spectre of a possible famine added fuel to the fire. Initially the Turkish government turned a blind eye to the fighting, having a great deal to gain by adopting a laissez-faire attitude. This policy allowed the sparks of intolerance, fear and hatred to fan into conflagration.

  The fighting raced towards Damascus; reports ran ahead of the deaths of hundreds of Christians, whole families and villages wiped out. Jane was greatly relieved when Medjuel came racing back early from the desert after hearing of the troubles. He sent his royal clients to the safety of Aleppo and they gave him a gold pocket-watch as a parting gift, which he presented to Jane.

  Medjuel at once began to make siege prep
arations in Damascus, where there was a large community of Christians. Jane was not overtly religious; however, since the Christian missionaries in the city formed the major part of the small European community, they were all known to Jane. For this reason, as well as a promise to Kenelm during her visit to England, she had taken to occasionally attending church. Medjuel had never interfered with Jane’s observance of Christianity, just as she had never interfered with his faithful adherence to Islam. But he was painfully aware that Jane was a potential target.

  He considered the house safer than the open road for the time being, but he instructed Jane to pack and be prepared to flee to the desert at a moment’s notice.5 Despite the danger, Jane felt she owed a show of allegiance to the alarmed English and French missionaries. Medjuel and his men loyally escorted her to the convent to see if there was anything that might be done to make the inhabitants safer. A large party, including Jane’s friends, Dr Robson and his wife, left the city for Beirut, which Medjuel thought foolish, for they were vulnerable on the roads. One of the party, the missionary Mr Graham, had been ready to leave, but changed his mind at the last moment and stayed to help those left in the city, especially the nuns of the Little Sisters of Charity.

  It was on Monday 9 July 1860 that the massacre began. Christians had been reviled, menaced and insulted in the bazaars for some days previously, and went in fear as reports came in of the slaughter of entire Christian communities elsewhere. An appeal to the governor, Achmed Pasha, to assume control of the situation was a wasted effort. He claimed he was unaware of any crisis, and that he had insufficient resources to declare martial law in the city. A similar reaction occurred when the Christian citizens of other cities – Homs, Beirut and Hamah – complained to their governors. Yet it was known that the Turkish government were supplying the Druses with weapons and ammunition; indeed, the cannons of the fort in Damascus were pointed at the Christian quarter.6