Jane would have appreciated the bedouin guard of honour, ranged behind her coffin and led by her adored sheikh, and the presence of her favourite horse and the gentle mule as her body was lowered into the ground. It was as dramatic as the legend, but perhaps there was greater dignity.
Some time later a tombstone was erected over the grave under the trees. It was organised by Mr Jago in consultation with Medjuel, following correspondence with Edward Digby. It is an unexceptional, formal design that would not be out of place in any English country churchyard, except that the shape is more typical of that given to an old warrior. The slightly raised dais with a flat cross upon it is carved from grey granite. Along the side is written in English ‘Jane Elizabeth Digby, daughter of Admiral Sir Henry Digby GCB. Born April 3rd, 1807. Died August nth 1881.’
Resting across the foot of the gravestone, as a slightly incongruous addition, is a large block of pink desert limestone brought from Palmyra, where Jane had spent the happiest days of her life. It was Medjuel’s parting gift to her. On it he carved her name in his own hand, in bedouin Arabic characters – ‘Madame Digby el Mezrab’.6
Medjuel never remarried.
APPENDIX
Last Will and Testament of the Hon. Jane Digby
I, Jane Elizabeth Digby el Mezrab, of Damascus in Syria declare this to be my Last Will and Testament. I give to my husband, as a token of my respect and regard, my house, stables, garden and premises situated near the Bab Menzel Khassabb in the City of Damascus, together with all furniture, plate, linen, coppers, carpets, saddlery and household goods, my horses, dromedaries and other livestock, my gold watch and chain, large ruby ring, and Arab ornaments, belt and jewellery in gold or silver and my silver gilt headpiece, breast ornament and bridle studded with coral, and my silver gilt ewer basin, together with the sum of one thousand pounds (being a moiety of the legacy of two thousand pounds bequeathed to me by my dear mother).
I bequeath the sum of one thousand pounds (being the other moiety of the said legacy), my diamond necklace and earrings, my emerald and diamond bracelet and my silver gilt dressing box to my son, Heribert, Baron de Venningen, Ulner, and I bequeath my coloured diamond sprig for the head, and ear-rings and my crysolite necklace, together with the portraits of my dear father and mother, and the miniature of my brother Lord Digby, to my said brother, Lord Digby. And I give to my brother Kenelm Henry, in token of my affection my large turquoise ring, my silver and gilt inkstand and my coloured sketches in Switzerland and Palmyra.
I give and bequeath all the residue of my estate and effects whatsoever after payment thereout of my just debts and testamentary expenses, unto my said husband absolutely. And I appoint my said brother Lord Digby Executor of this my Will. In witness whereof, I, the said Jane Elizabeth Digby el Mezrab, the Testatrix, have, to this my last Will and Testament, set my hand, this fifteenth day of June, in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and seventy-one.
Jane Elizabeth Digby el Mezrab
Witnessed by: (Signed): William Wright AB
(Signed): James Orr Scott MA
Corrected and Registered by me: Richard F. Burton – H.M. Consul Damascus
Epilogue
On Sunday 14 August 1881 Lady Anne Blunt was at her country house in Sussex when she received a telegram from Mr Jago which said simply, ‘Mrs Digby died on Thursday.’1 By coincidence Anne Blunt’s guest that day was a friend of Edward Digby’s, who left at once to break the news to the Digby family.
It was a few weeks before the news appeared in the newspapers; perhaps on this occasion they ascertained that Jane was dead before printing. The obituaries were much the same as those which appeared erroneously in 1873, the same old stories with the same errors. ‘Jane’s many, many friends in this country’ were deeply angry, according to Edward Digby,2 who had to call on some of them and persuade them not to write to the press contradicting the ‘base calumnies heaped upon poor Jane in The Times’. Such a thing, he assured them, would be most painful to her family.
Among these were Lady Strangford, the former Miss Emily Beaufort, who regarded Jane as her role model. Emily had been an adventurous girl when she made the trip to Palmyra and had now achieved fame in her own right in the field of nursing. William Wright, a retired missionary whom Jane had befriended in Damascus, had once before written to the press about Jane following Isabel Burton’s ‘defence’ of her and was eager to do so again. An amateur archaeologist with limited funds, with Jane’s help he had been able to visit Tadmor.3 He subsequently produced an authoritative book on Palmyra and Queen Zenobia in which he attributed much of his basic knowledge to Jane, who ‘knew more about the site than any other European’.4
‘He told me’, said Edward after meeting Wright, ‘lots of anecdotes of her great kindness to the poor people … how wisely she dispensed her charity, and was looked up to, beloved and almost worshipped by them all.’5
In the following spring Jane’s will was proved and her English estate valued at some £6,000. Much of the capital upon which Jane drew income during her life had been left in trust and, like the allowance paid by the Ellenborough estate, terminated on her death. This figure did not include the house in Damascus, which she had already sold to Medjuel for a peppercorn sum prior to her death, nor her effects which she had bequeathed directly to him.
After paying Heribert’s legacy of £1,000 (see the Appendix), a sum of just over £5,000 remained. This was sent to Medjuel through Mr Jago, under the consular seal. It was delivered to him in packets of 500 gold sovereigns. Characteristically indifferent to Jane’s money after her death as he was during it, he opened one or two of the packets to buy camels, but it is said that when he died most of the packets were under his pillow, still unopened.6
Medjuel had no use for the house without Jane. He let it for a short time to the Reverend J. Segall and then to the Dickson family, who were attached to the British consulate.7 Mrs Dickson was the mother of a baby boy who, as the family arrived in Damascus, looked to have a slim chance of survival when his mother’s milk failed. Hearing of this through Mr Jago, Medjuel provided one of the nursing women of his tribe as wetnurse for the child, who later wrote: ‘A Bedouin girl was duly produced, and according to my mother’s testimony I drank her milk for several weeks. This in the eyes of the Bedawin entitles me to a “blood affinity” with the Anazeh, for to drink a woman’s milk in the desert is to become a child of the foster-mother.’8 In the following year the Dickson family became Medjuel’s tenants and the boy, H. R. P. Dickson, grew up ‘rambling about the old garden that had once been the pride and happiness of Lady Digby. At an early age I was given my first camel ride by Sheikh Medjuel’s grown up son Sheikh Afet.’ ‘Afet … still clearly remembers the incident,’ Dickson wrote in 1936.9
Consul Jago helped Medjuel to settle Jane’s sundry bequests. With typical generosity he sent many items of jewellery and valuables to her family, in addition to those Jane had formally bequeathed. Perhaps she had asked him verbally to do so. To Edward went all her family portraits, papers and photographs; one of the portraits Edward later sent to Jane’s illegitimate daughter Didi, as a memento of the mother she had never known. Among Jane’s papers were over 200 letters from Felix Schwarzenberg and hundreds more from other correspondents. To Kenelm, Medjuel sent Jane’s paintings, not just those she mentioned in her will but those of Switzerland and Greece, as well as some other items including a silver muff chain which is still used today as a necklace by a descendant in New Zealand.10
All of the remainder of Jane’s jewellery, and there was a great deal, Medjuel gave away to her friends or sold along with furniture and contents when the house was let. Items worth a king’s ransom were said to have been sold for the same price as Jane’s silver bedouin bracelets; Medjuel never learned the English conception of values, but it is fair to say that Jane herself would probably have valued her bridal gift of silver bracelets more highly than any other item in her ample jewel case. Several pieces were bought by Mr Jago on behalf of
Lady Anne Blunt, who requested some remembrance of her friend: a gilded and bejewelled ‘fantasia’ bridle; a silver bedouin necklace, and the gold and turquoise bracelet inset with a miniature of King Ludwig that Jane always referred to in her inventories as ‘the King’s bracelet’. Anne Blunt later gave the latter two items to her daughter Judith, Lady Wentworth, but Judith died childless and the family have now lost track of them.11
Edward, Lord Digby died in 1889, and Kenelm two years later in 1891. Their deaths ended the pained silence maintained by Isabel Burton since the public embarrassment she suffered after her ‘defence’ of Jane in 1873. Shortly before her death in 1896, Isabel, now Lady Burton, dictated her story to W. H. Wilkins, and a two-volume biography of her duly appeared. In it Isabel went further than referring to Jane as a friend. She dug into her own antecedents and found a distant relative married to a distant cousin of Jane’s. On this tenuous relationship she claimed kinship with Jane.
Lady Ellenborough … was the most romantic and picturesque personality … she had married Lord Ellenborough, Governor-General of India, a man much older than herself when she was quite a girl. She was unhappy with him and ran away with Prince Schwarzenberg when she was only nineteen and Lord Ellenborough divorced her. She lived with Prince Schwarzenberg for some years and had two or three children by him, and then he basely deserted her. I am afraid after that she led a life for a year or two over which it is kinder to draw a veil.
She then tired of Europe and conceived the idea of visiting the East … and went to Damascus, where she arranged to go to Bagdad, across the desert. For this journey a Bedouin escort was necessary, and as the Mezrab tribe occupied the ground, the duty of commanding the escort devolved upon Sheikh Medjuel, a younger brother of the chief of this tribe. On the journey the young Sheikh fell in love with this beautiful woman, and she fell in love with him. The romantic picture of becoming a queen of the desert, suited her wild and roving fancy. She married him in spite of all opposition, according to Mohammedan law.
At the time I came to Damascus she was living half the year in a house just outside the city gates; the other half of the year she passed in the desert in the tents of the Bedawin tribe, living absolutely as a Bedawin woman. When I first saw her she was a most beautiful woman, though sixty-one years of age. She wore one blue garment, and her beautiful hair was in two long plaits down to the ground.
When she was in the desert, she used to milk the camels, serve her husband, prepare his food, wash his hands, face and feet, and stood and waited on him while he ate, like any Arab woman, and gloried in doing so. But at Damascus she led a semi-European life. She blacked her eyes with kohl, but otherwise she was not in the least extraordinary. But what was incomprehensible to me was how she had given up all she had in England to live with that dirty little black – or nearly so – husband.
I went to see her one day, and when he opened the door to me I thought at first he was a native servant. I could understand her leaving a coarse, cruel husband, much older than herself who she never loved (every woman has not the strength of mind and the pride to stand by what she has done); I could understand her running away with Schwarzenberg; but the contact with that black skin I could not understand. Her Sheikh was very dark, darker than a Persian, and much darker than an Arab generally is. All the same he was a very intelligent and charming man in any light but as a husband. That made me shudder.
It was curious how she had retained the charming manner, the soft voice and all the graces of her youth. You would have known her at once to be an English lady, well born and bred, and she was delighted to meet in me one of her own order. We became great friends and she dictated to me the whole of her biography, and most romantic and interesting it is. I took a great interest in the poor thing. She was devoted to her Sheikh whereat I marvelled greatly. Gossip said he had other wives, but she assured me that he had not, and that both her brother Lord Digby and the British Consul required a legal and official statement to that effect before they were married. She appeared to be quite foolishly in love with him (and I fully comprehend any amount of sacrifice for the man one loves – the greater the better), though the object of her devotion astonished me.
Her eyes often used to fill with tears when talking of England, her people and old times; and when we became more intimate, she spoke to me of every detail of her erring but romantic career. It was easy to see that Schwarzenberg had been the love of her live, for her eyes would light up with a glory when she mentioned his name with bated breath. It was his defection that wrecked her life. Poor thing! She was far more sinned against than sinning …
… After I left [Syria] a report came home that she was dead. I answered some unpleasant remarks in the press about her, throwing a halo over her memory, in which I stated that I being the possessor of the biography, no one had any right to say anything about her except myself. She appeared again, having only been detained in the desert by fighting of the tribes. Her relatives attacked her for having given me the biography, and she, under pressure denied it in print through one of the missionaries, and then she wrote and asked me to give it back to her; but I replied that she should have it with the greatest pleasure, only ‘having given me the lie’ in print, I was obliged for my own sake to keep it, and she eventually died. I have got it now, but I shall never publish it.12
Elsewhere in the book, to illustrate the ‘massive support’ for her late husband, Isabel published a highly edited version of Jane’s letter to her in November 1870 warning of a plot against Burton. She had no qualms about changing Jane’s greeting from ‘My Dear Mrs Burton’ to ‘My dear Isabel’. And Jane’s letter which actually ended ‘Yours most affectionately’ appeared in Isabel’s book as ‘Your affectionate cousin’.13
Given Burton’s reputation, and the public nature of the accusations and counter-accusations, a biographer must ask, ‘Who is telling the truth?’ It is obvious from at least one entry in Jane’s diaries that she was occasionally given to talking about her past – witness her annoyance over her confidence to Madame Heuguard in November 1862: ‘I was vexed with myself for speaking to them of bye-gone days. Why? I neither did the noble-minded Baron justice, nor the love I bear to the dear Sheikh.’
But the information published by Isabel is riddled with errors of fact. Moreover, except for her own eye-witness experiences, in everything she wrote about Jane (not all reprinted in this book) nothing appeared that was not already available in the public domain or that Isabel could not have observed for herself in Damascus. She offered nothing new to Jane’s history, despite her claims that Jane unburdened herself ‘daily’ to Isabel over a period of many weeks.
Surely an authorised biographer would know the precise number of children Jane had by Schwarzenberg had she been given Jane’s complete and unexpurgated version of the story, as Isabel claims? Short of her eyes filling with tears when she mentioned Schwarzenberg in her later years, Jane wrote of him quite unemotionally in her diary on several occasions after meeting former friends of his who called on her in Damascus. And the meeting with Medjuel, the real love of Jane’s life, occurred not on the trip to Baghdad, which she made with Barak, but during her trip to Palmyra a year earlier.
It clearly suited Isabel’s notions of what was acceptable to promote Felix as Jane’s lifelong love, rather than Medjuel, whose black skin made Isabel ‘shudder’. In her defence of Jane in 1873 Isabel referred to Medjuel divorcing his ‘wives … to marry her’. At the time Medjuel married Jane he had only Mascha as a wife; Jane would never have exaggerated Medjuel’s marital commitment; rather she consistently played it down. As for the supposed insistence on a pre-nuptial document by the British consul and Lord Digby, to verify that Medjuel had no other wives, about which Isabel claims to have been told by Jane, Jane had not corresponded with either of her brothers for some years before she married Medjuel. They were, as she put it, ‘estranged’.
But Isabel went further than mere error; she knowingly stretched facts. Her actual eighteen months in Dama
scus became ‘two years of … daily intimacy’ with Jane. She deliberately altered parts of a letter of Jane’s to substantiate her claim. The original of Jane’s letter, sent to the Foreign Office by Burton as evidence, survives today, to reveal Isabel’s small deceit.
Having read all the material written by Isabel (who in fact was as remarkable and extraordinary as Jane in her way), I prefer to accept Jane’s mild comment (in her letter of 21 May 1873) to her sister-in-law as being the truth of the matter:
I certainly always deprecated every idea of publishing anything relating to myself or my former existence … I never spoke to her at all on the subject except to answer some of her general queries as to what the world of that day knew, positively denying some other histories that people have forged. And as to begging her to remember her promise after my death of justifying me, it is pure error; she knew the horror and aversion I have to this kind of thing.
This does not have the desperate ring of someone caught in an untruth, as Isabel’s statement does. Given the friendship the women shared, it is a pity that the relationship ended as it did. No one ever saw the biographical material in question. Isabel claimed she still had it in 1896 but her co-biographer Mr Wilkins did not mention seeing it – which, given its importance to Isabel, is surprising. An eye-witness would have clinched her case without her having to defend it so vigorously. It was not among Isabel’s surviving papers, though this in itself is not conclusive, for, like her husband’s, many were burned at her own request.
A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby (Text only) Page 42