Agnes Willoughby, part two
A week later she bought every last possession of William’s, and he was declared bankrupt that May.
This is the second part of the story of Agnes Willoughby, a “pretty horsebreaker” courtesan of the 1850s-1860s. You can read the first part in the archive. Agnes came from a working class background and lived well but precariously on money extracted from “protectors” until she married a wealthy young heir called William Windham, who would shortly inherit properties including Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk. As soon as the marriage was finalised, Agnes and her associates began to strip every asset William had, from money to the very trees in the grounds of Felbrigg. Then she took off with an Italian tenor. Read on…
Agnes Willoughby
Part two: “No sane person could act as he has done.”
William sent out detectives to trace his wife, but back in Norfolk letters were circulating between the rest of the Windham family and their own solicitors – even if William thought he had no relations on earth for whom he cared, the Windham family cared very much indeed about his money and the trees. Led by his uncle, Charles Ash Windham, a general of dubious battlefield distinction in the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny, the family launched a bid to have William declared insane by one of the “Masters in Lunacy,” Samuel Warren, at the Court of Exchequer in London. A Commission de Lunatico would strip William of all his property and place him into his family’s care entirely, and, coincidentally, hand his fortune to General Windham. In copperplate letters that flew between the General, William’s maternal uncle, the Marquis of Bristol, and others, the tone was solicitous: “I think the course you are taking is the only one that can save our unfortunate nephew … from absolute ruin, and it is thus as humane as it is wise.” “Judging by his deeds I say that no sane person could act as he has done.”
The commission that followed in December 1861 was a sordid salmagundi in which every rank of Victorian society was shaken up, laid out on a platter and exposed to the eyes of a prurient public both in the court and in the newspapers, which published full accounts of everything said. It lasted 34 days and called on over 140 witnesses from England, Ireland, Scotland and even Russia: tutors, vicars, doctors, maids, laundresses, railway staff, foresters, timber brokers, wine merchants, a marquis, a widow who gambled at Spa, policemen, printers, jewelers, blacksmiths, field laborers and French waiters. In the pursuit of a verdict they raked through William’s foibles, his wallet, his childhood, his wardrobe, his laundry, and even the condition of his crotch.
William had been born with a cleft lip or palate that required him to wear an ivory prosthetic and, when he was older, grow a moustache to cover what was seen as a defect. The family’s lawyers made much of him slavering and drooling. They said he barked and howled like an animal, masturbated, soiled his sheets, threatened women with knives and attacked strangers. He was stupid, “incapable of application” and disruptive. He had also, they claimed, allowed his wife not only to spend the night before their marriage with James Roberts, but also to lock herself into a railway carriage with him en route to Felbrigg, blinds drawn down. The Windhams said William liked to pretend to be a servant or an engine driver, and sometimes the maids carried him upstairs to bed, or he helped them wash crockery. A Dr Gwyn was summoned to tell the court that William had oral syphilis which he had given Agnes before trying to console her with the second gift of diamonds.
His own lawyers hit back with witnesses who rebutted these claims: he did not drool; the howling was his impersonation of a minstrel show; he had merely pulled the moustache of the stranger; he had suffered from food poisoning (Agnes gave him pickled cabbage); Whidborne swore the venereal disease was a rash caused by chafing; William was considered quite bright if unfocused by other tutors, and never drew a knife. The servants of Felbrigg were his greatest champions, defending their master against his rapacious family.
As William’s lawyers turned the tables, another picture emerged, of an only child whose volatile parents handed him over to often heavy-handed tutors. A child who not surprisingly preferred the company of his servants, who became not mad but perhaps foolish, for, as one witness pointed out, “Young men do strange things in love.” Most fatefully for the Windham family, William’s lawyers pointed out that General Windham had not been much concerned about his nephew’s mental capacities when he had tried to extract money from him for another piece of the Windham family’s property that autumn. Had William obeyed his uncle, he would have also signed over the estate to the General’s heirs rather than his own. General Windham refused to be cross-examined during the commission, and the reputation of this “Hero of the Redan” unraveled as it became clear that he had a long acquaintance with William’s London landlords, the Lewellins, and had bribed them to testify against his nephew. Mr Lewellin had been overcharging William for wine, while his wife rode about in a carriage with the young man’s tutor, whom she called “my baby.” When her sister and others testified that they had been offered money or positions to lie about William, the case collapsed.
Agnes’ barrister gave a florid and ingratiating speech in her defense, opining that “A beautiful girl gives herself to an old earl or an old marquis for the sake of position; and why, may I ask, is that which is honourable, pure, and right in Lady Mary or Lady Susan to be characterised as abominable, mercenary baseness in Agnes Willoughby?” The upper classes had been exposed as grasping hypocrites, and the handsome horsebreaker and her humble husband were victorious. To raucous cheers, the weary Master in Lunacy declared William sane.
If Agnes’s story ended here, perhaps she would linger as the heroine of popular ballads, dodgy “autobiographies” from salacious minor presses and photographers’ window displays. But it was at this point that Agnes began to strike harder with her pitons, and break through rock into flesh. During the trial, she returned to William but would leave suddenly, or tell him she must travel for her health, and later be seen touring Europe or in London with the tenor Giuglini before returning to ask for forgiveness and promise nothing. Now she began to filet young Windham with a cold-blooded skill that could, if we choose, look a lot like personal revenge (that rash...).
William was in debt to the tune of £30,000 when the hearing began. When it ended, he owed £20,000 more, and in April 1862 he was refused costs. He began to borrow more money. Agnes traded her £800 annuity for £20,000 cash from James Roberts and Dr Whidborne. Whidborne and Roberts were gambling that the twenty-two-year-old Windham would live till 11 October 1869, inherit all his estates and boost the annuity to £1,500 – making the purchase worth it. Agnes then set about furnishing her house (paid for by herself, not William, though she was still sending bills to him) in Westbourne Terrace in London for £3,000, then tried to pay using the annuity she’d sold, ending up in the courts.
Despite these financial shenanigans, she was munificent enough to forgive a maid who stole £10 and some stockings from her. Munificent enough, too, to let William live with her in London, although when one of his friends returned from a night out and poured water into William’s ear as he drunkenly slept on the sofa, William threatened to cut her throat. After that court case, William apologized and retreated in shame to Norfolk, apparently leaving Agnes to Giuglini.
It took till that autumn for William to publicly withdraw his condonation of her adultery, because she was still having bills made out to him and he could no longer pay them. On 5 December, a year after the Commission de Lunatico began, Felbrigg was sold, and William set up a coaching firm that ran between Norwich and Cromer on the coast beyond Felbrigg. On Christmas Day, a hearing for divorce on grounds of adultery was announced for the following February, with Agnes opposing it on grounds of condonation, cruelty and adultery. William hired detectives to find evidence of Agnes’ adultery. Agnes hired men to spy on William and coopted one of his main witnesses. The following spring, she changed tactic.
Now Agnes sent a photograph of herself to William via one of her army officers, promising that she would renounce Giuglini and once more be William’s wife if they could meet. William arrived at the rendez-vous with a 100lb cake and a buttonhole, and all Norwich saw them leave in his carriage together with a horse dealer who was rumored to be another of Agnes’ beaux. Two months later the divorce was cancelled, and William had repurchased the £800 annuity for Agnes and signed up to cover her debts. By December, Agnes had married her sister Thirza to a Signor La Fuente of Madrid. To seal the renewal of her own marriage, the new heir to the Windham family was born in Westbourne Terrace, London, on 19 April 1864: Frederick Lindsey Bacon Windham. Agnes ordered a pint of beer for every one of the 587 men working at Paddington Station nearby (this bill was still unpaid three years later). There is a photograph of Agnes triumphant in her respectability with the baby, whose blond hair gleams from under his elaborate bonnet.
A week later she bought every last possession of William’s, and he was declared bankrupt that May. Early in 1865, Agnes bought his life interest in the other Windham family property, Hanworth, and, magnificently, bestowed £200 a year on her husband, promising it would increase to £1,000 in 1869 but end if he were declared bankrupt. She sent him £10 for Christmas. The soiled dove was now the mistress, in quite another sense, of the son of the landed gentry, but Agnes wasn’t done with William yet.
William, however, had had enough, although he was increasingly erratic. He was drinking heavily and had assaulted a woman; the syphilis, untreatable then, was perhaps running its course. He taunted an army officer till he was “given the shilling” and then had to pay a guinea to get out of the obligation to enlist. Turning at last to his family, he begged the General’s help to secure a divorce from Agnes and swore in the Court of Chancery that Frederick was not his son. Agnes was in Paris, perhaps with one or other of the army officers or horse dealers who always seemed to be in her orbit; she did not return to Giuglini, who had lost his mind not long after she left him and died later that year (although the tenor was always “eccentric,” his rapid decline raises the specter of syphilis once more). Instead, she returned for William one last time.
When she arrived in Norwich in her finery, she wanted his signature for a piece of paper in her pocket declaring the legitimacy of their son and dealing with a small matter of £5,000. She was worried, she told staff at the Norfolk Hotel, that her husband was ill and needed nursing. Could she have a barouche, good horses, and a large steak? She had meager tips for the ostlers, who took their time with the horses, knowing that two friends of William’s were now racing from Norwich to his side in a dog cart, hoping to warn the young man about her approach. By the time her barouche reached Cromer, William was hiding, and the servants once more came to his defense. Agnes got into his empty room, read his letters, and sank three glasses of brandy, tried to get the old ladies on her side with gifts of tea and sugar and then left once more for London, then Paris, with her companion and the agent of Hanworth, a Mr George Walker.
William died suddenly in February 1866, aged 25. Agnes did not attend his funeral. She had taken out five life insurance policies on her husband. She pocketed £12,000.
Extravagant as ever, she ordered a 50 stone bullock that took eight men to carry to the table, 120 partridges and pheasants, 40 gallons of soup and “game pies in a species of titanic profusion.”
The Agnes who presided over a feast for the men and women of the Hanworth Hall estate three years later in 1869 also wore diamonds. Extravagant as ever, she ordered a 50 stone bullock that took eight men to carry to the table, 120 partridges and pheasants, 40 gallons of soup and “game pies in a species of titanic profusion.” Her five-year-old son began the carving, and after everyone had had three servings there were (surely indigestive) games involving greasy poles and sack races. She was now married to Mr George Walker and a shade under thirty, but she was a new Agnes, who, more in keeping with Victorian than Regency morals, regretted her rapacious past and publicly sought penitence. If money, marriage, and a son had not earned her respectability, a Reverend Veitch was there to vouch for her, having brought her into the church to be confirmed by the Lord Bishop of London himself.
“From the moment that he planted the sign of the Cross on the forehead of my child and asked the blessing of God on his behalf I have been under his ministration,” she told the villagers. “… no endeavour shall be wanting on my part to educate [Frederick] in a manner that he may be worthy of the name he bears, and prove in after life a good landlord and a Christian gentleman.” She appears frequently in local newspapers as the Lady Bountiful to the poor of Hanworth parish during this period, and the estate was run well enough to pay off the mortgage long before Frederick came of age. Her social ascent appeared complete. She had summitted.
But in reality, she was struggling not to fall. George Walker was neither a Christian husband nor a good man. He beat Agnes, and, just weeks after their wedding, told her he only married her to get his hands on her fortune. The marriage limped along till 1878, when Walker sold her furniture and jewelry, and tried to raise money on her property. He then disappeared to Australia, leaving thousands of pounds of debts behind. Agnes went to court once more and got an order of protection for what was left.
General Windham and the family went on trying to reclaim their inheritance or at least guardianship over little Frederick, who remained in his mother’s care though watched over by an official from the Court of Chancery. Ten years after the Hanworth feast, an order was issued restraining a Mr Rowland Hughes from associating with Frederick, and this mysterious man was jailed four years later for breaking the order. Hughes was clearly a companion of Agnes – he was living with her and her son in France against the wishes of Frederick’s Windham guardians – and apparently encouraging him to spend money renting a shooting estate in Dorset. The Chancery guardian believed that “contact with Mr Hughes was decidedly not beneficial,” citing that in Agnes and Hughes’ ménage “wine was taken at breakfast.” But Rowland Hughes duly became Agnes’ third husband, proving perhaps that her reform as a genteel Christian lady was not complete. He was with her when she died in the French seaside resort of Malo Les Bains in 1896, in her fifties. Her cause of death is unclear.
She left an estate worth £5,602 to be divided chiefly among her husband, sisters and two nieces. Her son, Frederick, a neighbor said, was “tall and good-looking, impulsive, excitable, a fine horseman and shot.” The son of a horsebreaker, he had lived exclusively in the heady altitudes of Eton and Cambridge before inheriting his own country estate and marrying into a respectable county family. He died just months after Agnes, probably of complications from congenital syphilis.
Agnes was a contradiction: the woman whose husband said she was “a great deal too kind” to her maid, presenting her with a gold watch, was also the woman who gambled on that husband’s life – and won. She did not seek to explode the system but she blew the Windhams out of the water, leaving a general and an aristocrat to pay £13,000 out of pocket, the family mansion sold to “a retired grocer”, and the heir driving a stagecoach. She wore diamonds in a pub, and, even when she had her chance at respectability, could not resist the demi-monde and men who drank wine at breakfast. She set out to provide for her sisters and succeeded, but was abused and threatened by her husbands, spent thousands carelessly, and contracted a brutal disease that destroyed her only son and her lovers. Agnes was the most audacious, ruthless social mountaineer who grubbed her way up to the summit of lady of the manor, then clung a while to get her breath.