Necessary Women (eBook)

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ELLEN MANNERS SUTTON: SCANDAL AT THE SPEAKER’S HOUSE

On 6 December 1828 the Rt Hon. Charles Manners Sutton, great-grandson of the third Duke of Rutland, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Speaker of the House of Commons, married beautiful and vivacious Irish widow Mrs Ellen Home Purves at St George’s Church, Hanover Square:

Or so speculated William Beckford, embittered social outcast, expressing horror that Manners Sutton, ‘the ex-officio as it were of public morals’, was now bound to ‘that errant lady’.1 The contrast with Ellen’s predecessor, respectable Elizabeth Abbot, could not have been greater.

Other contemporaries agreed. Although Ellen Manners Sutton was soon established in high society, her past – reputedly as a kept woman and the mother of several illegitimate children – was always to be held against her by those professing more traditional values. So too was the fact that she was the younger sister of Lady Blessington, a high-profile author and literary hostess, much reviled for her own racy life.

But the Speaker’s new spouse soon became one of the ‘fashionables’, a prominent society hostess and a powerful, dominating and dramatic presence in the Palace of Westminster. The press reported her activities with relish, and she evoked a mixture of repulsion, envy and admiration. The story of her rise reveals the extent to which an attractive, unconventional, determined and ruthless woman was able to carve out political and social influence at Westminster, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of her lifestyle to the full. However, her later decline into financial hardship and ill health shows how fragile and transitory such a gilded existence could be.

ELLEN’S FORMATIVE YEARS

Born in 1791, at Knockbrit near Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ellen hailed from an old Irish Catholic gentry family. Her father, Edmund Power, a magistrate and businessman, was unstable, violent and periodically insolvent. Ellen first comes into public view in her early teens, attending society assemblies in Clonmel. Here, she and her older sister Margaret, both well educated, were said to have impressed the people of the town with their precocious cultivation and charm, although Ellen, already very comely, ‘seemed conscious of being entitled to admiration’.2 At this time, there was nothing to suggest that these two sisters would go on to lead lives which – even discounting jealous gossip and vitriol – would enthral any modern soap-opera audience and which would take them to the heart of the British establishment.

In 1804, as soon as she reached 15, the legal minimum age for marriage, Margaret was forced by her parents into wedlock with an apparently prosperous army captain, Maurice St Leger Farmer. Farmer soon proved violent and abusive towards Margaret and was disgraced after making a brutal attack on his commanding officer. He was rapidly banished to serve in India, but Margaret’s refusal to accompany him there left her a social outcast. Ellen’s name was, meanwhile, linked with polished and cultured William Stewart of Killymoon, later a lieutenant colonel and Westminster MP, and a pillar of Irish society. One of her many detractors later alleged that she produced three daughters with him out of wedlock, who would subsequently be brought up by her first husband.3 This oft-repeated canard is not supported by any other evidence.

In about 1809, Captain Thomas Jenkins, a family friend, became Margaret’s protector. He spirited her away to England, installing her in his house in Hampshire with his mother and sisters. This liaison would change Ellen’s life as well. For when in 1810 – beautiful, vivacious and penniless – she went to stay with Margaret and the Jenkins family, she met John Home (soon styled as Home Purves), of Purves Hall, Berwickshire. A gentleman of independent means, he was a good marriage prospect. In September 1810, Ellen, aged 19, duly wed John at the Anglican parish church of St George, Hanover Square, London, with her sister Margaret Farmer as a witness. The couple settled down into a respectable union, producing a son and heir, John, born in 1815, and four daughters who survived into adulthood. The eldest was Louisa, born in 1811 – well after the end of any liaison that Ellen might have had with William Stewart – and the youngest was Ellen, born between 1820 and 1823. By that time, though, the relationship between Mr and Mrs Home Purves was coming to an end.

In 1816, Ellen’s sister Margaret had found a new protector in the person of a very wealthy and hedonistic Irish peer, Charles John Gardiner, Viscount Mountjoy, who installed her in style in his house in Manchester Square, London. The fortuitous death of Margaret’s husband in 1817 – from injuries sustained during a drinking spree at the King’s Bench prison – enabled her to marry Mountjoy, by now Earl of Blessington, in 1818. To be known henceforth as Marguerite, Lady Blessington, and an exquisite and accomplished woman, she reinvented herself as a society hostess and author, residing mainly on the Continent, in France and Italy.

A ‘KEPT WOMAN’

On 30 September 1823, on one of his journeys across the Alps, Lord Blessington was both delighted and very surprised to encounter Ellen Home Purves, his sister-in-law, in the company of Charles Manners Sutton, Speaker of the House of Commons. They were staying together at a fashionable inn just outside Geneva, along with all their respective children, nannies and governesses. After travelling convivially with them for a month, Lord Blessington offered Ellen the use of his grand house in St James’s Square, Piccadilly, on her return to London. This became Ellen’s official residence for the next few years, where she entertained the Speaker in private. She was also to be seen in company with Manners Sutton at dinners and events, and in 1824 travelled with him to Paris to see the sights.4 But she was a social outcast in much of polite society, which regarded her as a kept woman.

What had become of John Home Purves, the husband whom Ellen had left for the Speaker? As a contemporary euphemistically put it, ‘circumstances led to him separating himself from his country and his family’.5 In April 1824, having obtained a posting as the British Consul for Florida, he set off for Pensacola, a strategically significant and far-flung port recently acquired by the United States from Spain. But this appointment, although dutifully discharged, did not bring him contentment. Pensacola was an expensive place to live and his consular salary of £500 (approximately £28,000 today) was ‘barely sufficient to live on with any degree of respectability, or importance, that the situation otherwise authorises me to keep up’.6 In September 1826, Purves died aged 43, one of the many victims of Pensacola’s notoriously unhealthy climate. Ellen was now free to marry her paramour.

As already noted, Charles Manners Sutton had been Speaker since 1817. Tall and gentlemanly in demeanour, with a sonorous voice and a commanding presence, he soon gained the respect of the House despite retaining his strong Tory views in private. Charming, witty and congenial, although not a heavyweight intellectual, he was noted for his facility in managing debates. Moving with him into the Speaker’s House were the servants needed to sustain his daily life and the pomp of his office, along with his much-cherished two young sons and one daughter from his marriage to Lucy Denison, who had died in 1815, leaving him a widower.

Manners Sutton continued his predecessor’s custom of holding grand political banquets and receptions, and in July 1821 he hosted the new king, George IV, at the Speaker’s House on the eve of his coronation. But behind its glittering gothic revival surfaces all was not well with the structure. In 1824, some substantial and costly alterations were suddenly set in train and in 1826 the Speaker’s kitchens were cleared out of the central cloister court and relocated as the smoke from their chimneys was annoying the residents.7 It is tempting to see Ellen’s hand in all this, not least as some contemporaries were of the view that she was living there.

THE SPEAKER’S WIFE

When Ellen married Charles Manners Sutton in December 1828 at St George’s, Hanover Square, he was 48 years old and she was 39, and ‘still very beautiful’ according to an admiring guest (Figure 1).8 She was now at last officially resident at the Speaker’s House, and an old friend, the Irish poet Thomas Moore, visiting her in February 1829, was ‘not a little amused to see her enshrined in her magnificent establishment’. On a further visit in May, he was beguiled by the beauty of the house and garden and again ‘amused to see her, in all her state, the same hearty, lively Irish-woman still’.9

A crucial part of the duties of the Speaker’s wife was acting as her husband’s hostess for his frequent soirées and private dinners at his Westminster residence and accompanying him on official engagements. Ellen shone in this role, famously enlivening her husband’s entertainments both formal and informal with vivacity and...