Too dreadfully dreadful
Tom Hughes, the author of A Shattered Idol, which has just been published by the independent publisher, Marble Hill. shines light on a lost Victorian scandal
Aristocratic misbehaviour, to be sure, was regular entertainment for the great Victorian public. “Earls and girls,” you know. Many of the malfeasants were from the bawdy set of peers orbiting the rotund figure of the Prince of Wales. Queen Victoria was never amused. Thus, the Coleridge sensations, detailed in my new book, A Shattered Idol – The Lord Chief Justice & His Troublesome Women, were unique. For most of a decade, the public craved every detail of whatThe World called “one of the most despicable scandals ever enacted in an English household.”
John Duke, the first Baron Coleridge, was Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales from 1880. Such a grandee is impossible to envision today. “In all externals, he was perfect,” according to the Edinburgh Review. He loved his ceremonial “toggery,” he called it, embellishing his robes with sashes and ruffles of his own design. Feared on the bench, Lord Coleridge reveled in deprecation and “polished pungency,” delivered with his customary seraphic smile. He likely inspired the oft-portrayed arrogant judges who plagued poor Rumpole and his cowering ilk. A great nephew of the immortal poet, in private life, Coleridge consorted mostly with divines and sages. He read only The Times, never went to the races, and ignored the theatre. In sum, according to Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal in 1884, the “Pecksniffian aroma” which pervaded Lord Coleridge’s public character explained the “malicious interest taken in the exposure of his private relations with his family.”
In his sixties Coleridge was a widower with three sons; he lived with his unmarried 35-year-old daughter Mildred, who kept his homes in Sussex Square and Devon. Mildred never grumbled. It was the ordained role of the eldest, unmarried daughter. She had her pin money, her beloved pianoforte, and her “expectations.” (£300 a year, worth a quarter-million quid today per measuringworth.com!) Mildred was active in the Victoria Street Society — A-listers of the time who drove the rising antivivisection movement in Britain. There, she came met Charles Warren Adams, editor of The Zoophilist. They were ill-matched. Mildred was tall, like her father, a bit stooped, bespectacled, and was described cruelly as “devoid of personal attraction.” She was, her family believed, “not as others.” Adams, however, was a blustering, peevish fellow, “hairy and bejeweled,” and chronically skint. They worked closely together, daring to publicly use their first names around the office. An undue familiarity at the time, to be sure, but when interrupted in a darkened room, the relationship had to end. Her father and her three brothers were adamant but Mildred sulked.
His lordship had been invited to head a legal delegation to visit Washington and New York in the summer of 1883. Mildred declined to be his escort. This took on greater importance because she missed her father’s eventful return passage. Aboard the White Star Britannic, he put down his planned reading (The Aeneid in the original Latin, of course) and “danced attendance” on a pretty widow, half his age. As we have seen, the family fully supported his lordship’s refusal to sanction any marriage between Mildred and Adams – soon, they were equally aghast to learn of the old gentleman’s late-life romance with a woman unknown among London’s better circles.
The stage was set for years of quarrels. Adams involved his would-be father-in-law in ceaseless litigation. Meanwhile, private negotiations were undertaken to compensate “Miss Lawford” and her redoubtable mother. In America, where they published things only whispered in England, there was talk of a breach-of-promise action. An unnamed “special correspondent” from London informed Ohio readers it was “too dreadfully dreadful.”
Lord Coleridge detested the “Society papers,” as the organs that carried such whispers were called. Edmund Yates, editor of The World, given credit (or responsibility) for the gossip column, took frequent pleasure in twitting the exalted jurist. Given the chance, seizing upon an error in one of Yates’ columns, “the Chief” jailed him for four months, condemning that “portion of the press which exists by gratifying the appetite for scandal and gossip.” It was a curious time for his lordship to poke the bear. Yates would later lead the Fleet Street hounds and write, “Never, certainly in such a social position as that of Lord Coleridge, has the curtain been lifted upon a domestic interior so graceless and so squalid.”
Mildred and her father eventually had their grim little weddings. The last years of Lord Coleridge’s life, with the beautiful 2d Baroness, were happy but lonely. After his death in 1894, the tributes conceded he “never quite survived this unfortunate shock to his prestige.” According to the New York Times, in his will, he “practically took from his children every penny it was possible to take away.” Mildred, banished with the splenetic Adams, went unmentioned. The Coleridge family survives and remains prominent in law and publishing; I appreciate their support and interest in a family story they knew very little about.
A Shattered Idol is the first full-length account of the libels and lawsuits, rewritten wills, and enough marriages to rival Trollope. “Society never had such a peep into the manners of our titled men.” Such intrusions are now common. Lord Coleridge would, no doubt, form an unlikely alliance with the celebrities in like straits today. Prince Harry, no doubt, would understand the Chief Justice’s pain.
After a long career in US radio, Tom Hughes discovered Mildred et al while assembling a vast data base on Victorian sensations. He has written about scandals in the Church of England, most recently — How the Vicar Came and Went. As he notes ‘The cheeky title is actually word for word from a newspaper headline in 1892. Those Victorians!’ Currently, he is reading anything he can find on the Torquay Pearl Mystery circa 1891 — as well as Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.
Tom’s new book can be ordered here.