Odd this day
16 June 1875
You’ve probably seen this picture before, but did you know it’s the 150th anniversary of the birth of the man in it — Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, who bankrupted his vastly wealthy family estate in less than six years?
Henry succeeded to his title on 13 October 1898, inheriting considerable property and an annual income of over £110,000 a year (about £10m now), and officially ran out of readies on 11 June 1904.
Mind you, he did dress like this:
…and, indeed, this
He converted the family chapel at the stately pile, Plas Newydd, into the Gaiety Theatre and put on extravagant shows with himself in the lead, and
bought diamonds as an ordinary man buys cigarettes.
He also
paraded through London with a poodle dressed in pink ribbons tucked under his arm; amazed his audiences with his sinuous ‘butterfly dance’; [and] modified his car so that the exhaust pipe sprayed perfume.
His family destroyed all his papers after his death, so we can’t be… certain about his sexuality, but it does seem there might be an obvious explanation for why his wife divorced him on the grounds of nonconsummation
As Seiriol Davies, author of a show about him, said:
He looks like Freddie Mercury drove through a branch of [jewellers] Elizabeth Duke’s covered in Sellotape, and everything stuck on
There’s more about him here:
…and here:
I like him.
