by Paul Boucher, author of An Absent Life: Elizabeth, the “mad” Duchess of Albemarle, 1654–1734
You may be wondering what a music specialist is doing delving into a story of wealth, piracy, lunacy and imprisonment! Looking up from the precious music manuscripts assembled over 300 years at Boughton House, the “English Versailles,” I realised that there was a hidden, rather compelling family story begging to be told; a woman languishing in the shadows of history, veiled in silence but discreetly present in unopened archives. Mental illness is an uncomfortable subject, which has been with us since the dawn of humanity. Attitudes to it have fluctuated between understanding and support to intolerance, cruelty, and ridicule. Today, medical intervention is the norm, but for Elizabeth Cavendish (1654-1734), misunderstanding, exploitation, and incarceration were the reality.
Born in 1654 into the highest nobility, the innocent, uneducated, and bewildered “Pretty Betty” was married off at 15 to fellow teenager Christopher Monck, becoming the Duchess of Albemarle just days later, on the death of her in-laws. Effectively still strangers, the young couple tried their unsuccessful best to produce an heir to the huge family reputation and fortune; she, trembling and uncomfortable; he, bored and much preferring the excitement of prostitutes.
Despite an outwardly glamorous life as dazzling Restoration courtiers, the choking Albemarle marriage was strained further by a string of miscarriages and stillbirths and by the alcoholic Christopher’s outrageous and unaffordable lifestyle. Elizabeth’s fragile sanity quickly unravelled after the sale of their magnificent London home to pay off debts. The inevitable fall from favour at Court catapulted the couple into a grim, downward spiral only halted by the duke’s recovery of a colossal Spanish treasure on the Caribbean seabed, guaranteeing his fall back into favour with the King.
On the back of this success, the couple – she unstable, unwilling, and nervous; he buoyed up, debauched, and ambitious – are parcelled off to govern the lucrative colony of Jamaica, then a disease-ridden epicentre of slavery and piracy from where sugar cane was feeding the sweet tooth of England. They were lucky to have the brilliant young botanist and physician Hans Sloane as their doctor, who treated her for tropical diseases and mental anguish, and him for a whole list of unpleasant symptoms brought on by alcohol, liver disease, and malaria until his death eighteen months later.
Finally returning to England with her husband’s mummified body and Sloane’s incredible collection of flora and fauna, Elizabeth, now the richest widow in the land, was tricked into marriage by an unscrupulous aristocrat intent on her income. No sooner was she wed than she is locked away at the rear of his London mansion – today the British Museum – and denied all contact with the outside world, while he carries on an ever more extravagant existence just feet away through bolted door. Already fragile, her mental health declines rapidly in this sudden isolation, and upon her husband’s death fifteen years later, she is officially declared insane, widowed again, and bundled away under lock and key to her family’s gloomy mansion on the edge of town, where she slides further into dementia and death 25 years later, aged 80.
There, in a nutshell, you have the story of poor Elizabeth Cavendish, impossible to label or diagnose. Her deranged, “absent” life, though hushed up by the family, is haloed by a rich cast of contemporary characters and events – civil war, plague, fire, restoration, revolution, colonialism, and a whole roll call of monarchs. Away from my music scores, I have had an illuminating journey to bring this fractured being back into some focus, but more importantly, I just think that her unbelievable story deserves acknowledgment and sympathy – even after 350 years.
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