Odd this day
The Duke of Bourbon is found dead in his bedroom. The signs are that he took his own life, but public opinion knows better. THAT ENGLISH GOLD-DIGGER MISTRESS OF HIS WHO’S NO BETTER THAN SHE OUGHT TO BE DONE HIM IN!
Yes, this is largely not the story of the unfortunate Duke (who wasn’t that unfortunate, being born into wealth and getting to 74 before he karked it), but of Sophie Dawes, who made her way from being one of ten children of an allegedly alcoholic fisherman on the Isle of Wight, and spending much of her childhood in the workhouse, to becoming Baroness de Feuchères, and worth several hundred thousand pounds when she popped off ten years later.
Sophie (some sources call her Sophia, and some have her surname as Daw, but the most recent Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry says Sophie Dawes, so that’s what we’re going with) was born in around 1790, and was one of only four of the ten children to survive. After some years in the workhouse, she went into service for a local farmer, and may also have been a chambermaid in a Portsmouth hotel. Soon, though, she went to London, that den of iniquity, and fell into the inevitable life of vice. Or, as ODNB puts it:
she became a milliner’s assistant, but was dismissed when she became involved with a water carrier. Like Nell Gwyn, she sold oranges at Covent Garden and is reputed to have appeared briefly on the boards there.
Whether she acted or not, she certainly became the mistress of an army officer, “who set her up in a house in Turnham Green, giving her an income of £50 a year when the liaison ended”. (Remarkably decent for a chap of the time.) Sophie, though, wasn’t content simply to live on this. She was going to invest in her future. She sold the annuity and bought herself an education (either, as the early 20th century Dictionary of National Biography puts it, “from love of study or ambition for a higher station”).
This, however, did not prevent her from falling into (or at least towards) poverty again, and she became “a servant at a house of ill-repute in Piccadilly” (according to the 21st century ODNB. It was “a house in Piccadilly frequented by rich profligates” according to the earlier DNB.) There, her luck changed. She was spotted by Louis Henri Joseph, duke of Bourbon, who proceeded to ‘win’ her in a card game (against the earl of Winchilsea and the duke of Kent, apparently).
One biographer, Violette Montagu, says of her at this point that “her face had already lost the first bloom of youth and innocence”, but Victor MacClure, author of the restrained and purely factual “accounts of the lives and deeds of notorious women”, She Stands Accused, says “her intelligence was above the average, and she had a good share of wit”. Whatever it was that attracted him, the duke took a house for her — much as the army officer had done, but this one was in Bloomsbury — and paid for more education.
One account of her, in an 1885 work entitled Men of the Reign; a biographical dictionary of eminent persons of British and colonial birth who have died during the reign of Queen Victoria, suggests that she “obtained the most extraordinary ascendancy” over the duke. None that I’ve read, though, have suggested that he, at least 34 years her senior, was a dirty old bollocks, so I think we can see that she was being judged by… standards which are not universally applied, let’s say. Anyway, Sophie was on her way up.
The duke took her to Paris, and arranged in 1818 for her to marry Baron Adrien Victor de Feuchères, so she could be presented at court. The baron was unaware of Sophie’s true relationship with the duke, and it seems she even told her husband that the duke was her father (and that she was illegitimate). By 1822, though, he had discovered the shenanigans going on under his very nose, separated from his wife, and told Louis XVIII, who barred her from court.
She and Bourbon kept seeing each other, despite, in the words of ODNB again:
her lowly origins and bullying nature, both parties being said to be ‘mediocre in everything’ and Sophie being reputed to take coarse lovers of her own original social standing.
Sophie tried to ingratiate herself with the king’s relatives and get back into society, with little success, but she did ‘persuade’ the now “old and weak” Bourbon to sign a will which left her two million francs and five of his estates. Then Charles X succeeded his brother on the French throne and she was back at court, known as Queen of Chantilly and dining with posh types like the diplomat Talleyrand. Talleyrand’s nephew, the Marquis of Chabannes, married Sophie’s niece, Matilda, and Sophie’s nephew, James, was made Baron de Flassons. Bourbon, though, according to ODNB:
was unhappy, and said he was sure that once Sophie and others had obtained from him all that they wanted his life could be at risk.
…and the 1830 revolution in France made him want to leave for Switzerland, and there was also talk of him revoking his will.
On 26 August Bourbon was at St Leu and passed a pleasant evening playing whist, asking his servant to call him at eight the next day. In the morning he was found dead in his room attached to the handle of the French window by two handkerchiefs.
The duke, it was said, was by this time
so feeble that he could not tie his own shoelaces let alone hang himself.
She Stands Accused says there was a ‘secret’ staircase near his apartments leading down to Sophie’s, and her maid and other spies of her lived directly below him,
and it is recorded that the floor was so thin that they could hear not only the old man’s every movement, but anything he said.
Bourbon’s aide had rooms next door to the duke’s, but was also (apparently) a lover of Sophie’s. The first people to examine the body
found that the dead man’s ankles were greatly bruised and his legs scratched. On the left side of the throat, at a point too low for it to have been done by the handkerchief, there was some stripping of the skin. A large red bruise was found between [his] shoulders.
The DNB says that
but for express injunctions from the king, she would have been placed under arrest.
The following year, the judges decided she had no case to answer. The duke’s will was contested, but she won that case, too (later leaving £2,000 to a servant who had testified in her favour…). More suspicion attached itself to her when her nephew James died suddenly, and eventually she moved back to England, dividing her time between an estate in Hampshire and no.5 Hyde Park Square. She sold off her French estates, “became dropsical and died of that illness on 15 December 1840 at 18 Great Cumberland Street”. The humble cottage she was born in now bears a blue plaque.
In 1843, ODNB says, the Times described her as being
of an inflexible character, seeking only social and financial success, though astute; she was pretty but not beautiful, with flashing dark eyes, tall, and squarely built, with arms and legs which ‘could have served as models for a statue of Hercules’.
She Stands Accused adds to this that
Her muscular force was extraordinary. Her lips were rather thin, and she had an ugly habit of contracting them when she was angry.
…none of which does much to suggest that she wasn’t then and isn’t still now being judged for being a 19th century woman with — gasp! — ambition. The author of She Stands Accused, though, does concede that
There must have been a fighting quality about Sophie to take her so far from such a bad start. Violent as she was of temper, greedy, unscrupulous, she seems yet to have had some instincts of kindness. The stories of her good deeds are rather swamped by those of her bad ones. She did try to do some good with the Prince’s money round about Chantilly, took a definite and lasting interest in the alms-houses built there
…and left money to Paris hospitals. So, perhaps she was a ‘murderess’, or an ‘adventuress’, but whatever the truth is, I think we have to conclude that she had strength of character, to put it mildly, and that she achieved remarkable things from humble beginnings. If nothing else, her life does seem to show us that rags to riches stories are seldom straightforward.
