Queer Places:
Eton College, Windsor SL4 6DW, Regno Unito
Beaudesert House, Longdon, Rugeley WS15 4LN, Regno Unito
Plas Newydd, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll LL61 6DQ, Regno Unito
St Edwen, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll LL61 6EZ, Regno Unito
Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey
Bt,
(16 June 1875 – 14 March 1905), styled Lord Paget until 1880 and
Earl of Uxbridge between 1880 and 1898, and nicknamed "Toppy", was a
British peer who was notable during his short life for squandering his
inheritance on a lavish social life and accumulating massive debts. Regarded
as the "black sheep" of the family, he was dubbed "the dancing marquess" for
his habit of performing "sinuous, sexy, snake-like dances"[1]
and for his Butterfly Dancing, taken from
Loie
Fuller where a voluminous robe of transparent white silk would be waved
like wings.
[2]
The
Complete Peerage says that he "seems only to have existed for the
purpose of giving a melancholy and unneeded illustration of the truth that a
man with the finest prospects, may, by the wildest folly and extravagance, as
Sir Thomas Browne says, 'foully miscarry in the advantage of humanity,
play away an uniterable life, and have lived in vain.'"
Paget was the eldest son of
the 4th Marquess by his father's second wife, Blanche Mary Boyd. However,
rumours persisted that his biological father was the French actor
Benoît-Constant Coquelin, a rumour that gained some currency when,
according to some sources, after the death of his mother in 1877, when he was
two years old, Paget reportedly was raised by Coquelin's sister-in-law in
Paris until he was eight.[1]
That story seems to have been a confusion of facts. The sister-in-law, née
Edith Marion Boyd, was the fourth marquess's aunt, one of his mother's
sisters, and she did not wed Coquelin's brother Gustave until 1891. His
stepmother from 1880 was an American, Mary "Minna" Livingston King, the widow
of the Hon. Henry Wodehouse.
He attended
Eton
College, later receiving private tuition, and was commissioned as a
Lieutenant in the 2nd Volunteer Battalion of the
Royal Welsh Fusiliers. On 20 January 1898 he married his cousin Lilian
Florence Maud Chetwynd (1876–1962).[3]
Upon the death of his father on 13 October 1898, he inherited his title and
the family estates with about 30,000 acres (120 km²) in
Staffordshire,
Dorset,
Anglesey
and
Derbyshire, providing an annual income of £110,000 (equivalent to
£11 million per year in 2018).[4]
Paget swiftly acquired a reputation for a lavish and spendthrift manner of
living. He used his money to buy jewellery and furs, and to throw extravagant
parties and flamboyant theatrical performances. He renamed the
family's country seat
Plas Newydd as "Anglesey Castle" and converted the chapel there into a
150-seat theatre, named the Gaiety Theatre. Here he took the lead role,
opulently costumed, in productions ranging from
pantomime
and comedy to performances of
Oscar
Wilde's
An Ideal Husband and
Shakespeare's
Henry V. Early performances from around 1899 were mostly variety
performances of song and dance numbers,
sketches and
tableaux vivants in front of an invited audience of notable local
people. In 1901, the Gaiety Theatre was refurbished and fitted out with
electric stage lighting and re-opened as a public entertainment venue.[5]
For three years Paget took his theatre company on tour around Britain and
Europe. His wife disapproved of his lifestyle and obtained a decree nisi
of divorce on 7 November 1900; the marriage was later annulled due to
nonconsummation, according to Lady Anglesey's grandson by her second marriage,
the historian Christopher Simon Sykes.[1]
The breakdown of his marriage effectively gave Paget more freedom to enjoy his
self-indulgent lifestyle. By this stage he had already begun to mortgage his
estates to raise money.
On 10 September 1901, Paget's French valet Julian Gault took the
opportunity of his employer's absence at the theatre to steal jewellery to the
value of £50,000. At the time, Paget was living in the
Walsingham House Hotel in London. Gault, who was later arrested at Dover,
testified in court that he had been instructed to steal the jewels by a French
woman of his acquaintance called Mathilde (who had taken the jewels to France
and was never found). Although Gault's testimony was believed to be true, he
pleaded guilty at the
Old
Bailey on 22 October and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
Paget's outrageous and flamboyant lifestyle, his taste for
cross-dressing, and the breakdown of his marriage, have led many to assume
that he was gay. Writing in 1970, the homosexual reformer
H. Montgomery Hyde characterised him as "[t]he most notorious aristocratic
homosexual at this period".[6]
One journalist wrote, “I am driven to the conclusion from much that I have
seen that there are men who ought to have been born women, and women who ought
to have been born men … Bearing the form of a man, he yet had all the tastes,
something even of the appearance, of not only a woman, but, if the phrase be
permissible, a very effeminate woman.”
[7] There is no evidence for or against his having had any lovers of
either sex: performance historian Viv Gardner believes rather that he was "a
classic
narcissist: the only person he could love and make love to was himself,
because, for whatever reason, he was 'unlovable'".[8]
The deliberate destruction by his family of those of his papers that might
have settled this matter has left any assessment speculative. However, it
would appear that he did not have sexual relations with his wife, who
initially left him after just six weeks: "The closest the marriage ever came
to consummation was that he would make her pose naked covered top to bottom in
jewels and she had to sleep wearing the jewels."[9]
By 1904, despite his inheritance and income, Paget had accumulated debts of
£544,000 (£50 million in 2018)[4]
and on 11 June was declared bankrupt. His lavish wardrobe, particularly his
dressing gowns from
Charvet,[10]
and jewels were sold to pay creditors, the jewels alone realising £80,000.
In 1905, Paget died in
Monte
Carlo following a long illness, with his ex-wife by his side, and his
remains were returned to
St Edwen's Church, Llanedwen, for burial.
The Times
reported that despite all that was known of him, he remained much liked by the
people of
Bangor, who were sorry to hear of his death. Lilian, Marchioness of
Anglesey, married, in 1909, John Francis Grey Gilliat, a banker, by whom she
had three children.
The title passed to his cousin
Charles Henry Alexander Paget, who destroyed all the papers of the 5th
Marquess and converted the Gaiety Theatre back into a chapel. It was at least
in part owing to the debts left by the 5th Marquess that the family's
principal English estate at
Beaudesert, Staffordshire, had to be broken up and sold in the 1930s.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
-
"Eat your heart out Elton, here's the most eccentric English aristocrat
ever".
Daily Mail. London. 2007-10-27.
Retrieved 2009-07-09.
- Shopland, Norena 'The
Butterfly Dancer' from Forbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales
Seren Books (2017)
-
Barnett, Henry Walter ("H. Walter").
"Lilian Florence Maud Paget (née Chetwynd), Marchioness of Anglesey (later
Gilliat)". vintage bromide print, 1902.
National Portrait Gallery, London.
- UK
Retail Price Index inflation figures are based on data from
Clark, Gregory (2017).
"The Annual RPI and Average Earnings for Britain, 1209 to Present (New
Series)". MeasuringWorth.
Retrieved November 6, 2017.
-
Cochrane, Claire (2016).
Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth.
Springer. pp. 69–70.
ISBN 9781137457288.
Retrieved 24 July 2017.
-
Hyde, H. Montgomery (1970). The Other Love:
an historical and contemporary survey of homosexuality in Britain.
London: Heinemann. pp. 153–4.
- Shopland, 2017
-
Gardner, Viv (10 October 2007).
"Would you trust this man with your fortune?". The Guardian.
Retrieved 24 June 2015.
- Christopher Sykes, the
grandson of Lilian Florence Maud Chetwynd , The Aristocracy - Born to
Rule 1875 - 1945, BBC , First broadcast: 29 Jan 1997
-
"The Marquis of Anglesey". Evening Post. 5 November 1904.
Retrieved 2010-01-25.