When Elizabeth Chudleigh first opened her eyes on the world, nearly two centuries ago, at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, of which her father was Deputy-Governor, we may be sure that her parents little anticipated the romantic and adventurous rôle Fate had assigned to her on the stage of life. A member of an ancient family, whose women had ever been distinguished for their virtue as its men for their valour, the Chelsea infant was destined to shock Society by the laxity of her morals as she dazzled it by her beauty and charm, and to make herself conspicuous, in an age none too strait-laced, as an adventuress of rare skill and daring, and as a profligate in petticoats.
As a child she amused all who knew her by the airs she assumed. Before she was long out of the nursery she vowed that "she would be a Duchess," and a Duchess she was before she died. She was quick to learn the power of beauty and of a clever tongue; and before she was emancipated from short frocks she was a finished coquette.
Such was Elizabeth Chudleigh when, at fifteen, she blossomed into precocious womanhood. Her father, the Colonel, had long been dead, and his widow had made her home in the neighbourhood of Leicester House, where the Prince and Princess of Wales held their Court. Here she made the acquaintance of Mr Pulteney, later Earl of Bath, a great favourite of the weak and dissolute Prince; and through his interest, Elizabeth, now a radiantly lovely and supremely fascinating young woman, was appointed a maid-of-honour to the Princess.
In the environment of a Court, surrounded by gallants, and with women almost as lovely as herself to pit her charms against, Colonel Chudleigh's daughter, eager to drink the cup of pleasure and of conquest, was in her element. She was the merriest madcap in a Court where licence was unrestrained; and she soon had high-placed lovers at her dainty feet, including, so they say, none other than Frederick himself. Coronets galore dazzled her eyes with their rival allurements; but while, with tantalising coquetry, she kept them all dangling, one alone tempted her—that which was laid at her feet by the Duke of Hamilton, a gallant whose high rank was rivalled by his handsome face and figure, and his many courtly accomplishments.
When the Duke asked her to be his wife she graciously consented, and her Duchess's coronet seemed assured thus early, with a prospect of happiness that does not always accompany it; for in this case she seems to have given her heart where she gave her hand. For a time the course of true love ran smoothly, and the maid-of-honour became a model of decorum as the affianced wife of the man she loved.
But her dream of happiness was destined to be short-lived. An intriguing aunt, Mrs Hanmer, who had no love for the Hamiltons, set to work to dash the cup of happiness from her niece's lips. She intercepted the Duke's letters, poured into Elizabeth's ears poisonous stories of his infidelities and entanglements to account for his silence, and, when the poison began to show signs of working, whisked her niece away on a visit to the country-house of her cousin, Mr Merrill, at Lainston, where among her fellow-guests was a dashing young naval lieutenant, the Hon. Augustus Hervey, who was second heir to his father's Earldom of Bristol.
The lieutenant, as was inevitable, perhaps, fell promptly under the spell of the maid-of-honour's charms, and made violent love to her, with, of course, Mrs Hanmer's whole-hearted connivance. The girl, blazing with resentment of the Duke's coldness, and his apparent indifference to her beauty and his vows, lent a willing ear to his pleadings, and within a few days had promised to be wife to a man whom, as she confessed later, she "almost hated."
The wedding was, by mutual consent, to be secret, partly on account of the bridegroom's lack of means to support a wife, and partly from fear of giving offence to his family. In the dead of an August night, in 1744, the bridal party stole out of Mr Merrill's house, and made its way to the neighbouring church, where the ceremony was performed by the light of a taper concealed in the best man's hat. Thus, romantically and mysteriously, Elizabeth Chudleigh took her first matrimonial step, which was to lead to such dramatic developments.
Forty-eight hours later the bridegroom had joined his ship at Portsmouth; and his bride's greatest joy, as she confessed, was when he had departed. Such a marriage, the fruit of pique and anger, boded ill for happiness. Frankly, the union was one long misery, broken by the intervals when the husband was away at sea, and accentuated during his, happily brief, visits to her. Two children were born to this ill-assorted pair, but both died young; and Elizabeth Hervey had abundant opportunity to follow her natural bent, by seeking forgetfulness in dissipation.
In the full glow of her beauty, a wife who was no wife, she resumed her broken career of conquest. She made a tour of Europe, leaving a train of broken-hearted and languishing lovers behind her. At Berlin she brought Frederick the Great to his knees, and made an abject slave of him; she shocked the ladies of the Dresden Court by her laxity and the prodigal display of her charms, and by the same arts bewitched the men. She led, we are told, a life of shameless dissipation, which only her beauty and intellectual gifts redeemed from vulgar depravity. She had lovers in every capital she visited, and discarded them as lightly as so many playthings.