LITMIR.BIZ

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Felix was a music lover with a good voice, who wrote musical comedies to entertain his friends.¹⁷ ‘He was’, wrote one contemporary, ‘artless … and kind and friendly,’¹⁸ and according to his friend Count Rodolphe Apponyi, the Hungarian-Austrian diplomat and diarist, he was witty and amusing to be with.¹⁹ On that night at the Russian embassy ball Jane knew only that the prince smiled down into her eyes with uncomplicated admiration, waltzed as only someone who had learned to waltz in Vienna could, and held her attention to an extent that made her forget, for a while, her wretchedness over George Anson.

      Even Schwarzenberg’s biographer, who had no good word for Jane, admitted grudgingly that, as soon as the prince laid eyes on Jane, ‘it was love at first sight in the Byron style.’²⁰ Jane was attracted but not smitten. It was the prince who laid siege to Jane with flowers, poems and notes. Wherever Jane went, the prince managed to be, and soon she was seen in his company, as she had previously been seen in George’s, riding with him in Rotten Row, in his cabriolet at the races, waltzing at Almack’s, in his box at the opera, walking round the Zoological Park on his arm.²¹ To find herself so courted and so desired after her lover’s seemingly callous desertion and her husband’s indifference was balm to Jane’s wounded spirit. Despite initial discretion it was quickly apparent to interested members of society that Lady Ellenborough had exchanged her regular escort, Colonel Anson, for the handsome foreign prince. It suited Jane’s hurt pride that society assumed the change was by her own choice, but her poetry confirms that she was not yet in love with the prince.

      The 1828 Derby, held shortly after Jane met Felix, was narrowly won by the Duke of Rutland’s Cadland, with the King’s horse, The Colonel, which started favourite, finishing in second place. It seemed excruciatingly amusing when Felix suddenly acquired the nickname ‘Cadland’, because, as the fashionable world tittered, ‘he had beat the Colonel’ out of Jane’s affections. Later Cadland was shortened to ‘Cad’. In that form it has been passed down to the present day as a synonym for ungentlemanly behaviour – not surprisingly, given the prince’s subsequent conduct.

      In June, several Harley Street residents noted a striking girl visiting number 73, a house that had been taken by Prince Schwarzenberg and Count Moritz Dietrichstein,²² two young attachés from the Austrian embassy. There was no reason why Jane should not be seen walking in Harley Street. Her parents’ home at number 86 was a mere hundred yards away at the opposite end of the block. The Ellenborough town-house at Connaught Place was a fifteen-minute stroll along Oxford Street, or a five-minute drive by horse and carriage. Jane’s carriage was an elegant small green phaeton, drawn by two long-tailed black horses which, being an able whip, she habitually drove herself. She was always accompanied by a groom, a fifteen-year-old boy dressed in Lord Ellenborough’s livery of drab olive with blue-lined facings and a top hat with a band of silver lace. This boy often stood about in the afternoon, holding the horses while he waited for his mistress, who visited a house a few steps away on the corner of Queen Anne Street and Harley Street.

      One resident who lived opposite saw the young woman several times through the window of the first-floor drawing-room. As the summer wore on, her visits became more frequent, often three or four times a week, and the neighbours noticed with heightened interest that sometimes she came on foot, and started wearing a veil. Her phaeton was spotted in adjacent streets, sometimes Wimpole Street, sometimes Portland Place. Several times she left her carriage in Cavendish Square and walked past her parents’ house to number 73, and on a few occasions she came by hackney coach.²³

      But it was not until many months later that Jane would be able to write of recovery from the depression over what she called George’s ‘betrayal’, though it is difficult to see what he could have done given their situation. Even then she could not accept that George could apparently forget her so finally and transfer his affections so quickly. At length she came to realise that their youthful love had been perhaps no more than ‘the bright creation of a heated brain’, and that her ‘idolisation’ of him had been misplaced. ‘Now’, she wrote, ‘another love inflames my lonely heart’, and this new love promised ‘far, far higher ecstasy’. At last, she wrote, there was ‘sun in a breast which else were cold’.²⁴

      Prince Felix courted Jane hotly throughout the summer. In the early part of their relationship it was he who set the pace, he who fretted when she could not meet him or went away with her husband. At the end of July, when society decamped to the country, Jane was due to leave town for a short stay at Roehampton before a visit to Cowes in early August. The diplomat diarist, Count Rodolphe Apponyi, wrote of dining with Felix at the Esterhazys’ and finding the prince very preoccupied because Jane was due to leave town within a few days. ‘This did not suit him and consequently he was in a very bad humour.’²⁵

      But the prince was to see Jane several times before she left, once in the park, where they rode their horses together, and again on the evening of the same day at a masked ball given by Lady Londonderry, Ellenborough’s former mother-in-law.²⁶ The Londonderrys’ town-house was very grand and had formerly belonged to the late Queen Caroline. It was here, among a vast glittering throng, that Count Apponyi was to meet for the first time the lady whose imminent departure was causing his old friend Felix Schwarzenberg such dejection. Guests were dressed magnificently in historical costume. As they were announced, each had to curtsy or bow to their hostess, who, in the guise of Queen Elizabeth I, graciously inclined her head in greeting. To some the hostess showed individual favour and, since she had met Apponyi in Paris, Lady Londonderry went to some pains to introduce the count to as many people of influence as she could:

      among all these people, one lady in particular attracted my attention. It was Lady Ellenborough, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Nineteen years of age [sic], with fair hair, a magnificent complexion, large blue eyes and the figure of a nymph, she is everything that is desirable. It is she whom Schwarzenberg adores, and I lost no time being introduced. I was not overawed by her intellect, it is true, but one cannot have everything. The expression on her face is sweet, as is her voice, and her whole personality exudes an indefinable air of modesty and decorum which I found ravishing.

      The coldness and formality of first acquaintances did not last long between us. She spoke to me very freely about her husband, whom she accuses of being jealous, and of not understanding her. This is what she likes to say, but in reality I think that Lord Ellenborough, preoccupied with the duties of his position, has no time to give good advice to his young wife.

      … I had already danced with Lady Ellenborough when Schwarzenberg arrived. Madame did not reveal that she had danced with me and instructed him to engage me with her for the first waltz which I accepted with great pleasure. I was so preoccupied with dancing and with my partner that I had to endure reproaches from all the ladies I know whom I had not yet approached.²⁷

      It is strange that Jane complained to Apponyi of Edward being ‘jealous’ when his coolness towards Jane was so marked that it was noticed by a number of writers, contemporary and later, with the added explanation that he was totally dedicated to his work. But despite Apponyi’s excuses for Jane’s husband it would be fair to say that Ellenborough too had his share of extramarital diversions. He had at this time two mistresses that are known about and contemporary gossip speaks of another. One was the Countess St Antonio, an aristocratic member of the set to which Jane’s parents so objected. The other, ‘a very pretty girl’, according to Joseph Jekyll, was ‘the pastry-cook’s daughter at Brighton who Ellenborough preferred to his bride’; she was also referred to in The Times as a ‘confectioner’s daughter’.

      The latter allegedly had a child by him and, being

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