Mary Lovell - A Scandalous Life - The Biography of Jane Digby

Jane wrote to Felix to try to heal the breach. His reply, from his father’s castle in Austria, was frigid. She may have forgotten the events of that last fortnight in Paris, he said, but he could remember all too well. First, he said, ‘there were my suspicions, which would soon have been laid aside had you not made such lame excuses for the unaccustomed hours you kept.’ As a result he had had her watched until he knew all her movements, and there was no room left for doubt that the stories he had been told about her were correct. His old suspicions of her untruthfulness had returned, and now there was no possibility of ‘the happy union to which I had looked forward’ and by which he might have reinstated Jane ‘in the position which you had lost’. 7

To anyone but the besotted Jane, his reliance on this trumped-up case as an excuse to end their relationship would have said everything there was to say. But she had not been unfaithful, she knew there was no truth in the accusations, and therefore believed that if she could just see him and explain matters all would be as before. After talking it over with her mother and Steely, Jane, again rejecting their advice, decided to go to Felix to deny what his cousin had told him and to defend her behaviour immediately prior to their quarrel. She was still passionately in love with Felix, and she had a naïve belief that love, and the truth, would triumph in the end.

Lady Andover and Steely became agitated at this plan, believing that Felix was a thoroughly self-centred man whose personal ambitions were more important to him than Jane. His treatment of her to date was clear proof that this was the case, Steely said. She would never change her opinion of the man she saw as a complete bounder. 8 But Jane would have none of it, still believing that she and Felix could return to the heady early days of their love affair. In late July she left England for Europe, arriving during August in Munich, where she evidently expected to meet Felix.

In fact Felix was lying low at his family home in Bohemia. According to his biographer he was ‘in low spirits and poor health because of the Ellenborough affair and the perpetual whirl of activity and excitement in Paris’ which had ‘left their mark.’ 9 We must assume Felix believed that Jane had been unfaithful to him, which might have justified his anger had he been entirely faithful himself. But the fact remains that when he met her she was a respected and well-established member of the highest society in England, living in the utmost comfort and security; he had avidly pursued and seduced her, eventually enticing her away from her husband and family. He had fathered two children by her, one of whom (Didi) still lived, and yet because of rumours which could not truly be substantiated (though evidently he was satisfied of their veracity) he was content, apparently, to abandon her to the uncertain fate of an unprotected woman with a ruined reputation trailing around Europe with their illegitimate child. Although Schwarzenberg’s supporters in England described him as ‘very honourable and right, and ready to make every reparation in his power’, 10 it is not surprising that his nickname ‘Cad’ became synonymous with ignoble behaviour.

One wonders why Jane chose to go specifically to Munich at this point. Of course, she had to go somewhere other than England, where her notoriety was such that she could never have been received in society. She was still not yet twenty-five, and beautiful. She had a comfortable income and a zest for life; she could not hide away in a rented cottage for the rest of her days. In Paris there was nothing for her as an unprotected woman with a reputation, and besides she now hated the city where her hopes had turned sour. 11 A previous biographer suggests that she chose Munich because the British Ambassador there was Lord Erskine, a good friend of Jane’s grandfather. 12 Jane had grown up with the large family of Erskine sons and daughters who might be depended upon not to bar her from their home nor be too critical of the scandal surrounding her name. 13 There may have been more than one reason, however.

Diplomats are not normally at liberty to leave a situation merely because of a disagreement with a mistress (if such were the case, diplomatic legations could hardly continue to function). Since Felix had been openly keeping Jane as his mistress in Paris for over a year, it is doubtful that he was whisked away by his superiors to avoid another ‘incident’, as he had been in London. Clearly the disagreement between Jane and Felix coincided with the end of the prince’s time at the Paris legation anyway; it had only been a temporary assignment for the sake of expediency. He was almost certainly aware that his next posting would be to Germany, and Munich was the most likely base.

Formerly a stolid provincial town, Munich was at that time enjoying a renaissance. Under the personal direction of the latest scion of the House of Wittelsbach, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, a new era of neo-classicism was in vogue. Determined to break the French stranglehold on German culture, and in a bid to achieve his dream of creating the perfect city, Ludwig ensured that German Gothic and rococo design gave way to Grecian friezes and clean rows of Ionic columns. Narrow tree-lined streets opened into broad thoroughfares and plazas with triumphal Roman arches; quiet squares were crowned with obelisks and monuments. Churches and basilicas, palaces and rotundas, museums, art galleries and libraries, public gardens and theatres sprang up around the city. As a result of this feverish activity Munich increasingly came to be regarded as an important centre for the arts; art galleries and libraries have to be filled.

However, after a period of seclusion at Krumlov, during which time he wrote his famous treatise on the 1830 Revolution, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg was appointed Legation Counsellor and posted, not to Munich, but to Berlin. But Jane had already rented a house in Munich. She wrote again to Felix begging him to meet her, anywhere, confident that if they could only meet she could convince him of the truth. There was no reason why she should not hope for this, since in his letters Felix insisted that he still loved her and their child, Didi. Presumably her relationship with the Erskine family meant that she was not friendless upon her arrival in the city, and her beauty and personality immediately ensured a number of eager escorts. However, she could not go into what she called ‘society’ – that is, the society of those she regarded as her peers.

For some weeks she was occupied in furnishing and decorating her new home and designing the garden; these were newly acquired interests that would remain with her for the rest of her life. Munich was exciting, and promised, once the many building projects were completed, to rival any city in Europe for architectural interest. Yet it was Munich’s proximity to Felix’s home, less than 200 miles away, that was its chief attraction for Jane. One of her first purchases must have been a good horse, for the first mention of her at this time is of her beauty and horsemanship.

Within a remarkably short time of Jane’s arrival in the town, word of her reached the ears of the King. Ludwig was a man who worshipped beauty all his life: beautiful objects, beautiful buildings and beautiful women. 14 Either by design or by coincidence a meeting occurred between the two in early October 1832 at an Oktoberfest ball and so began for Jane a wonderful relationship with the man whom as friend, and in her personal estimation, she regarded as second only to the great love of her life, and the latter was as yet many years in the future.

Born in Strasbourg in 1786, King Ludwig I, a godson of King Louis XVI of France and Marie-Antoinette, and a somewhat unwilling protégé of Napoleon and Josephine, had ascended the Bavarian throne seven years earlier at the age of thirty-five. 15 The House of Wittelsbach had ruled Bavaria for almost a thousand years, and its latest head was the same age as Lord Ellenborough. He was an amiable and intelligent man, kind to a fault, and a workaholic.