Agnes Willoughby, part one

"The lady is a kept mistress and ... she is also very extravagant"

Amazons of Paris is a newsletter researched and written by me, Susanna Forrest, as I work on a book of the same name. The Amazons were circus equestriennes of nineteenth-century Europe, from the famous to the forgotten. You can get a sense of their lives and world from my introductory post, which you also receive if you subscribe.

My hasty sketch on viewing Agnes’ riding habit.

Writing Lives

In 2009 I was working on my first book, If Wishes Were Horses, which was a kind of hybrid social history and memoir about horse-mad women. It became tied to my home county of Norfolk via my own childhood, via Black Beauty's author Anna Sewell, and then a web of linking threads suddenly came into view. I wrote about a local horsewoman said to have been buried with her horse in the eighteenth century (sadly unlikely to be true), and then my mother told me that I should go to the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service because the Costumes and Textiles Study Centre had some old riding habits. I made an appointment.

The archivist had a huge flat cardboard box waiting for me. She opened it, and there it lay in tissue paper: once scarlet velvet and black wool, now faded to ketchup and navy in places, Agnes Willoughby's habit. She had worn it to ride with the Prince of Wales' staghunt in Berkshire – those were the hunt's colours – and it dated from the late 1850s or early 1860s when women still wore bright shades for riding. The sleeves were stuffed with more paper where her wrists had once been. The skirt had black fringing and the original minute hooks and eyes. There was also a note from an earlier archivist: "very village dressmaker". "There's a story behind this lady," the archivist told me. And so there was.

I see from my emails that around 2010 I was thinking about pitching a biography of Agnes, although The Age of the Horse, which helped me run away to Mongolia and China and Portugal and Spain and America and France was a bigger draw. But I did make enquiries about Agnes at a National Trust property where she had lived, and I went to the Norfolk Records Office to go through a file of old documents and letters relating to her. I read all I could from old newspapers, to the point of finding that in one enormous account a single sentence had been removed by one newspaper but not another.

I made some brief efforts to turn the research into a proposal or chapter but found that my heart wasn't in it. I could not get excited about writing a conventional cradle-to-grave biography, and a plan to write about the group of women of which she was part didn’t spark either. The Age of the Horse took over my time, and then in 2014 a writer called Trevor Heaton wrote a book about her and I let go of Agnes till 2018 when I decided to turn the material into an essay. This seemed like the right place to share it.

Agnes Willoughby

Part one: “All my property must go to my wife.”

A carte-de-visite of Agnes Willoughby at the height of her notoriety. This image and its copyright belongs to the Mary Evans Picture Library.

In 1860, Agnes Ann Rogers gave up her license at the Florence Tavern in Islington, London where she used to preside behind the bar with all her diamonds on. She was probably barely twenty and on the up – the pub was no longer a good fit for a girl who drove about town in an expensive brougham carriage and wore silk shirts. Agnes spoke and rode like a lady, and the Master of Her Majesty’s Staghounds was glad to see the flash of her scarlet-and-black-striped habit each autumn in Berkshire. At home in St John’s Wood, she had a butler and a secretary, and she kept her mother and her younger sisters in crinolines. “Agnes Willoughby,” as she styled herself, had an income of £2,000 a year – at least twenty times more than ninety percent of the population – and she had made every penny herself. She was a shoemaker’s daughter, a “social evil,” and a “soiled dove”.

Lately we’ve gotten fond of the history of “badass women” whose spirit looks a lot like contemporary feminism. But Agnes was not a “badass woman.” I want to picture her as a ruthless class avenger in an era when a woman of her birth was expected to stitch shirts till her eyesight failed, or where wealthy male politicians saw no reason that young girls shouldn’t work twenty-hour days in bleach factories. In truth, she was a woman of her time, scrabbling to improve her own lot using the tools available. She was ruthless, but she was a victim too, and no revolutionary. Scaling the sheer cliff face of Victorian society, Agnes drove home her claims to money and respectability like pitons, court case by marriage settlement by life insurance policy and entail, hauling her sisters Emma and Thirza with her as she went.

Men, lawyers, and money were the ropes she used for her ascent, and each carried its own risk – of disease, legal losses, bankruptcy – that could have sent her plummeting to the workhouse. The sums are dizzying translated into modern terms. She came into thousands at a time and yet skipped out on paying tradesmen’s bills – the classic pattern of one whose income is sporadic and tenuous. The only letter I’ve seen from her is a pencil scribble on a visiting card, but much of the minutiae of her life – the itemized bills, the journeys (and in what company), even the things she ate – are chronicled for some periods in considerable, if often conflicting, detail. She first appears in a court in absentia in 1857 over an unpaid bill (a running theme), when her mother boasted to the judge, “She sees gentlemen. I can’t tell you how many. She lives that way and has no other mode of supporting herself.” Did Agnes (whose real name was Caroline) seize this initiative or did her mother, who also claimed to have her own independent income, get her started in a family trade? One source says only that Agnes was sent out of a workhouse at thirteen to work as a maid in Colchester and there “commenced her career of vice.” Though I’ve pored over these texts for years I still cannot tell you if she was canny, spendthrift or foolish – or all three. All that’s clear is that she wanted more for her sisters, and she would do almost anything to ensure that. But the messy, human mundanity and dirty glamor of her life is always missing a center: Agnes’ voice.

 Agnes was one of the “pretty horsebreakers,” an elite squad of mid-century English courtesans who, laced tight and sporting pork-pie hats or toppers, rode blood horses or drove spanking pairs of ponies on Rotten Row

Agnes was one of the “pretty horsebreakers,” an elite category of mid-century English courtesans who, laced tight and sporting pork-pie hats or toppers, rode blood horses or drove spanking pairs of ponies on Rotten Row, the Hyde Park bridle path where aristocracy, royalty and the upper crust of London took their equestrian exercise. Their origins didn’t matter – the most famous of these “demi-reps,” Catharine Walters, was a Liverpool custom official’s daughter nicknamed Skittles after the bowling alley where she excelled as a girl – it was their combination of sex appeal, insouciance and horsewomanship that catapulted them into the orbit of the wealthy and gave them notoriety. Such was their draw, that the matrons of respectable Belgravia let their daughters imitate Skittles’ wardrobe and even her easy style of talking to young men. Men and the money they monopolized were the prizes sought by both the courtesans and the well-brought-up young ladies; as the horsebreakers rode like upper-class women and upper-class women dressed like horsebreakers, the blurring of class codes caused a small moral panic.

“Such things were not done even under the dissolute society of the Regency; they certainly should not be done in the respectable reign of Victoria,” blasted the Morning Post, while the Telegraph complained that the horsebreakers’ “principle preoccupation is to interchange salutes with Lord Dundreary, and to stare modest women out of countenance.”  “A Young Englishman” hit back in a letter to the Times: if the Belgravia matrons weren’t so grasping for their daughters, he claimed, eligible bachelors would not prefer the cozy charms of an easy-going equestrienne in a small house in St John’s Wood. No one seemed interested in discussing why, other than out of avarice or disgrace, the horsebreakers might choose to become “social evils.” Instead of waking at five to scrub floors and carry coal for the gentry, Agnes grasped for silks, pedigree horses and annuities guaranteed for life.

While Skittles kept house for the Marquis of Hartington, Agnes had just extracted some £8,000 from Travers Twiss, a prominent scholar and lawyer, and earned her two-grand a year from a reputedly handsome “Mr J. C.” She was the protégée of a former timber merchant turned Mayfair brothel keeper called James Roberts, known as “Bawdy House Bob.” Roberts also hunted with the same stag-hunting pack, and through the Staghounds Agnes assembled a little team of professional men who would play key roles in her future, including her lawyer James Bowen May and her doctor, George Whidborne. Whether she slept with these two or not is unrecorded (both denied it on oath) but in one of those unfathomable innuendos of the past, we know that in April 1861, Bowen May rode a mare of James Roberts’ called Agnes Willoughby to second place in a private race.

In Ascot Week in June 1861, Agnes was introduced to the man who would shape her life: a new connection of Roberts’ named William Frederick Windham, the twenty-year-old son of a prominent Norfolk family who was less than two months from coming of age and inheriting a country house called Felbrigg Hall. William was boarding with a couple called the Lewellins in St James after an undistinguished turn at Eton and failure to get into the army. His family had packed him off to travel the spas of Europe in the care of various tutors and military men, but, awkward, dim and loud, he had not gained any polish. This obstreperous boy was charmed by golden-haired, blue-eyed “Miss Agnes Willoughby,” the seduced and deceived daughter of a clergyman, and began to drive a giddy, high-wheeled phaeton on Rotten Row in the hope of seeing her. When Skittles warned him about Agnes, he bullied her out of the park. He told his Felbrigg housekeeper, Mrs Martin, that he should sooner marry a “pretty horsebreaker” than a lady. When he proposed a few weeks later, Agnes took him to Bowen May’s office to hammer out a contract.

Bowen May asked William if he realized “that the lady is a kept mistress and that she is also very extravagant?” He asked Agnes if she wanted to give up her two thousand a year. William offered that his income was £3,000 a year but would be £9,000 in a few years when more of his inheritance fell into place. Agnes demanded £1,000 a year. William said he could not yet offer that. Bowen May suggested a compromise of £600 which Agnes rejected. William, desperate, proposed £800 and £1,500 when he came into his property. Agnes refused. The money was not, she said, for her. “I am going to marry for the benefit of my sisters, and I must have it so that I can will it to them, or do as I like with it.” Agnes meant the marriage to lift not just herself but Emma and Thirza to a safe social plateau where her sisters would escape life as demi-reps – or worse. William volunteered that with his father dead, his only relative was his mother, and that she was already provided for, so Agnes’ sisters could have the money. After all, he told the lawyer, “I have no friends or relations on earth that I care for; all my property must go to my wife; why, therefore, should I refuse her £1,500 a-year?”

An agreement was signed with Whidborne and Roberts as trustees at Agnes’ suggestion, for William seemed nonplussed when asked to come up with his own friends. Then Bowen May helped him remove Felbrigg from the line of inheritance in his own family. Another house, Hanworth Hall, was too strictly entailed into the family for William to use as leverage. After this, events moved swiftly.

Fellbrigg Hall.

On the 9th August, William turned twenty-one. He bought Agnes £7,000 of diamond jewelry. On the 30th, William and his bride-to-be woke in separate rooms in Bawdy Bob’s mansion in Piccadilly before going to Agnes’ house in St John’s Wood and preparing for the wedding. Dr Whidborne was summoned to examine a troublesome rash on Willian’s thigh, and then the young couple were married in church. They went to Paris with her sister, and he bought Agnes another £7,000-worth of diamonds. He sent word from France to his staff at Felbrigg to “have the east bedroom and dressing room [ready] for my wife and the thoroughfare room for her maid.” The party arrived by train, accompanied by James Roberts, who promptly drew up a contract to chop down and sell all the trees in the park for timber.

By the end of September, Agnes was seen with a shadowy army officer in a box at the opera in Dublin in white silk, sables on her shoulders, diamonds in her hair, at her neck, wrists, breast and ears, gazing down at the tenor Antonio Giuglini as he sang in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. “She certainly made herself completely at home, and … leaned on the dark velvet cushion, and thus adroitly accomplished the double purpose of displaying the whiteness of her well-turned arm and the varying brilliancy of the valuable gems which adorned it,” noted a correspondent from Belfast. But William was nowhere to be seen.

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