Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, possessed everything a woman of her time could want: beauty, wealth, and a place at the heart of Britain’s elite. But she carried a secret dark enough to destroy it all. When her husband’s suspicions got the better of him, he broke into a locked room in their Mayfair home and discovered something that shook him to the core. What he found ignited one of the most notorious scandals in British history—a scandal that followed Margaret to her grave and beyond.
The woman who would one day become the Duchess of Argyll was born Ethel Margaret Whigham on December 1, 1912, in Newton Mearns, a small town in Renfrewshire, western Scotland. Her father, George Hay Whigham, was a successful businessman who for many years served as chairman of Celanese, an Anglo-American company specializing in the production of synthetic materials from substances like cellulose. The family enjoyed extensive connections and considerable wealth as a result, though they were not supremely rich by the standards of the time. Margaret’s mother was Helen Mann Hannay.
During her upbringing, Margaret attended a series of private and boarding schools in New York and Scotland, reflecting the family’s commercial interests on both sides of the Atlantic. This included some fourteen years at the elite Spence School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The family traveled widely, enjoying holidays in France and places like the Isle of Wight. It was a cosmopolitan upbringing, though not a happy one.
Her parents’ marriage was strained by George’s numerous affairs, and Margaret’s mother often used her daughter to mediate their marital disputes. The chaos of her parents’ marriage left a mark on Margaret that shaped the rest of her life. Years later, biographers would draw a direct line between her fractured childhood and the scandals that made her infamous. Margaret’s slide into controversy did not begin when she became a duchess.
It began in her teenage years with a forbidden romance and a secret she kept fiercely. Even before her debutante years, Margaret’s beauty and charm attracted a succession of wealthy and influential admirers. But behind the glamour was a growing appetite for risk, and one teenage love affair would change her life forever. In 1928, during a family holiday on the Isle of Wight, she began a relationship with David Niven, who would later become a famous Oscar-winning actor for his role in the 1958 film *Separate Tables*.
At the time, Niven was eighteen and Margaret fifteen. But what began as a summer romance quickly became a crisis when Margaret fell pregnant. When her parents learned of the pregnancy, they were deeply shocked. One maid later recalled that all hell broke loose in the house.
For a wealthy upper-class family in 1928, an unmarried teenage daughter expecting a child meant not just shame but social ruin. Her parents acted quickly, determined to avoid scandal at any cost. Margaret was taken to London and underwent a secret abortion at a time when the procedure was still illegal in Britain. At just fifteen years old, she found herself trapped in a nightmare that had to remain hidden from the world.
The experience was undoubtedly traumatic, buried so deep that Margaret completely omitted it from her later memoirs. Remarkably, however, she never lost her affection for David Niven, remaining on good terms with him for decades, even attending his funeral in 1983, fifty-five years after a fleeting fling on the Isle of Wight. If her family hoped this painful episode would teach Margaret caution, they were mistaken. Greater scandals and far more dangerous relationships lay ahead.
In 1930, at the age of eighteen, Margaret made her debut at the royal court in London and was named Debutante of the Year. Thereafter, she became one of the most talked-about socialites of the 1930s, cleverly manipulating the tabloid press and exploiting her beauty. She appeared regularly in magazines, with frequent commentary on her dress sense and hairstyle. As her fame grew, so did the number of wealthy and influential men competing for her attention.
Among them was Charles Greville, the 7th Earl of Warwick, who became so infatuated that he proposed marriage. Margaret accepted, and for a time it seemed she was destined to become the Countess of Warwick. But when the moment came, she abruptly called off the wedding, infuriating society gossip columns. It was an early sign that Margaret had little intention of following convention.
At the same time, she was romantically linked to Prince George, Duke of Kent, the youngest son of King George V and one of the most eligible bachelors in the country. Margaret was not one to remain unattached for long. The collapse of her engagement to Warwick did nothing to slow her rise in high society; if anything, it increased her allure. Just one year after parting with Warwick, Margaret married for the first time.
Her husband was Charles Sweeny, an amateur golfer and stockbroker from a very wealthy Irish-American family. The Sweenys had made their fortune in mining during the Gilded Age of late nineteenth-century America. Margaret even converted to Catholicism to facilitate the marriage, and the ceremony became one of the most talked-about social events of 1933. The wedding literally brought traffic to a standstill in the streets around the Brompton Oratory in Kensington, London, where the service took place.
Particular attention focused on Margaret herself. Her wedding dress, designed by Norman Hartnell—the couturier who made dresses for the British royal family—was widely admired and remains on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to this day. It marked the beginning of her enduring association with elegance and high fashion. To outside observers, the marriage seemed to have every ingredient for success: wealth, status, and refinement.
Behind closed doors, however, the relationship was steadily falling apart. The marriage lasted more than fourteen years, but according to Margaret’s account, it was deeply unhappy. “All Charlie wanted in a wife was a beautiful, brainless doll,” she later complained. Both were unfaithful and engaged in numerous affairs.
Then in 1943, Margaret came terrifyingly close to death. In an incident that briefly captured the newspapers’ attention, she fell forty feet—twelve meters—down an elevator shaft. The fall was so violent that she miraculously survived. Recalling the ordeal years later, she said: “The only thing that saved my life was the elevator cable, which broke my fall.
I must have clung to it, for afterwards all my fingernails were found to have been torn out. I seem to have fallen on my knees and hit the back of my head against the wall. ” Though it appeared to be nothing more than a freak accident, Margaret was fortunate to survive. The marriage finally ended in divorce in 1947.
It was not without complications, as she and Charles had three children by then. Their first, born in 1933, was stillborn. A daughter named Frances Helen followed in 1937 and a son named Brian Charles in 1940, both of whom lived long lives. Margaret’s reproductive history was complex; she suffered repeated miscarriages and a stillbirth before Frances was born, possibly as a result of the manner in which her teenage abortion had been performed.
After her marriage to Sweeny collapsed, Margaret quickly became engaged to Joseph Thomas, a bond banker from Texas working at Lehman Brothers. The relationship did not last. Before they could marry, Thomas fell in love with another woman and the engagement was broken off. Margaret then had a brief relationship with Theodore Rousseau, who was curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Shortly after, she met Ian Douglas Campbell, the 11th Duke of Argyll, one of Scotland’s leading noblemen, on a train journey. An affair soon began, quickly turning into her second marriage on March 22, 1951. She was thirty-eight. He was forty-seven.
On the surface, Margaret’s marriage to Argyll and her elevation as Duchess of Argyll seemed a step up the social ladder. The glamorous society figure of the 1930s had finally found happiness after her failed first marriage. But as events would soon prove, her second marriage was far more turbulent. While Campbell represented a very distinguished aristocratic family with extensive lands around Inveraray Castle in western Scotland, the duke was in fact in severe financial distress.
The British government had decided to impose punitive taxes on the aristocracy after the Second World War as part of its efforts to rebuild Britain. This, combined with Argyll’s addictions to alcohol, gambling, and prescription drugs, created significant financial difficulties. While Margaret was theoretically marrying into a higher social class, it was Whigham family money that saved Argyll from having to sell his ancestral castle. Sadly, marital happiness was not in store for Margaret.
As the years passed, the marriage rapidly descended into bitterness and hostility. Argyll was also physically and psychologically abusive, something his two previous wives later confirmed. Then, during their vicious marital war, he made a discovery that would explode into one of the most sensational scandals in modern British history and destroy Margaret’s reputation forever. By the early 1960s, Margaret’s marriage was a sham in all but name, and both were considering divorce.
Convinced the duchess had been unfaithful, Argyll took matters into his own hands. While Margaret was in New York, he hired a locksmith to force open a locked cupboard in their Mayfair home. Once inside, he discovered a collection of photographs that shocked him and confirmed everything he had feared about his wife. He then proceeded to file for divorce on the grounds of her adultery, hoping also to obtain a financial settlement as part of the proceedings.
When the case came to trial in 1963, it attracted intense media attention. How could it not, involving one of Scotland’s leading noblemen and his wife, one of England’s most prominent society figures for decades? However sensational the case already was, the real explosion came when Argyll revealed the photographs he had obtained. Overnight, what had been a high-profile aristocratic divorce turned into a national obsession.
Among the photographs were Polaroid shots showing the duchess naked except for her trademark three-strand pearl necklace, in the company of an unidentified man. Another photograph showed her engaged in a sexual act with an unidentified lover. In an era when divorce itself was controversial enough, this was highly explosive. The case then became something of a media circus, with every sordid detail of the Argylls’ troubled marriage displayed before the public.
Then the allegations grew even wilder. The duke accused Margaret of having affairs with no fewer than eighty-eight alleged lovers. The number was certainly exaggerated, but that did not matter to a press already intoxicated by the scandal. Rumors spread of an astonishing list of alleged lovers, including members of the British royal family, senior aristocrats, and government ministers.
Among the names bandied about was Duncan Sandys, the Minister of Defence and son-in-law of Sir Winston Churchill. Each new allegation stoked the fire, and Margaret was soon dubbed the “Dirty Duchess. ” When the case finally ended on May 8, 1963, the verdict was devastating for Margaret. In granting the divorce, the judge declared that the evidence showed the duchess to be “a completely immoral woman” whose sexual appetites could only be satisfied with a number of men, condemning her attitude towards marriage as wholly immoral.
These remarks received extensive coverage, ensuring the scandal would follow her long after the courtroom doors closed. After months of relentless publicity and public humiliation, the end of the divorce proceedings must have come as a great relief. Margaret fled into seclusion, retreating for a time to a remote village on the English-Scottish border. Perhaps the worst aspect of the divorce and scandal was the rift it caused between Margaret and her daughter Frances.
In 1958, Frances had married Charles Manners, the 10th Duke of Rutland. Margaret had already damaged her relationship with her daughter years earlier by insisting Frances raise her children as Catholics, and this rift widened during the divorce. They did not speak for more than two decades, in a sad situation where mother and daughter often attended the same social events in London and refused even to acknowledge each other. Margaret’s life was severely damaged by press attention and the scandal surrounding her divorce.
She attempted to bring several libel suits against newspapers and other media for how they covered and portrayed the case. These attempts failed and only further harmed her financial position in the long run. Her other attempts to rehabilitate her image included writing a memoir titled *Forget Not* and even a book on the art of hosting, but neither achieved much success. Her name remained tainted by the events of 1963.
By the late 1970s, Margaret faced serious financial difficulties. In a desperate attempt to maintain her luxurious lifestyle, she opened her famous Mayfair home at 48 Upper Grosvenor Street to visitors for a fee, but the income was not enough. Years of lavish spending and unwise investments had gradually eroded her fortune, and in 1978 she was forced to sell the house that had been her home for over four decades. She then moved to a luxury hotel and lived there for many years, but could not pay her mounting bills and was eventually evicted.
In 1991, shortly before her death, Margaret finally reconciled with her daughter Frances after a decades-long estrangement. Only two years later, in 1993, she suffered a terrible fall and died shortly after on July 25 at the age of eighty. She was bankrupt at the time and living in a care home, her reputation never having recovered from the blow it received thirty years earlier during her infamous divorce. Interestingly, she was buried in Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey, beside her first husband, Charles Sweeny, who had died just four months before her.
The duchess’s story did not end with the newspaper articles and media coverage of her time, and that notoriety continued to provoke discussion and treatment of her life in the years after 1963. Retrospectives on the trial appeared in newspapers and magazines for years to come, and in 1995 a chamber opera dealing with the trial and other events of the duchess’s life was performed at the Cheltenham Music Festival. The most famous version of her story, however, is the 2021 historical drama series *A Very British Scandal*, which received reasonable critical acclaim and starred Claire Foy as the duchess. Thus, Margaret’s story continues to fascinate audiences more than six decades after her scandalous divorce.
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On February 21, 1782, one of Britain’s most scandalous trials began in Westminster Hall. An angry aristocrat, Sir Richard Worsley, accused his close friend Captain George Bisset of “criminal conversation” with his wife and demanded £20,000 in damages. For years, his wife and his close friend had been lovers in secret, and this—along with other shocking revelations—would make Lady Worsley the most scandalous figure in Georgian Britain. But what exactly was criminal conversation?
And who was the woman at the center of a scandal all Britain could not stop talking about? The woman who became known as Lady Worsley was born on October 5, 1758, in Middlesex, England. Oddly, she was christened with a male name, Seymour Dorothy Fleming, but there was a good reason for this. She was the daughter of Sir John Fleming, a landowner of Irish descent who had moved to Brompton Park in Middlesex, in what is now South Kensington in London.
Seymour’s mother was Jane Conway, a wealthy heiress. John and Jane’s unusual choice of name was a tribute to Seymour’s maternal grandmother, who came from the influential Seymour family—the same family that produced Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII in the 1530s. Seymour and her older sister Jane were raised largely by their mother alone. A few weeks after Seymour turned five in 1763, her father died tragically at around thirty-three years of age.
After seven years of mourning, her mother Jane was finally ready to remarry, and in 1770 she wed Edwin Lascelles, the 1st Baron Harewood, a wealthy man whose family owned a sugar plantation in the Caribbean. In the 1760s, Edwin had been building Harewood House near Leeds, one of the greatest country houses of the age. A famous portrait of Lady Worsley by Joshua Reynolds still hangs there today. After her mother’s marriage, Seymour and Jane moved with her to Harewood.
They had several other siblings, but all died in infancy. As she grew into her teens, it became clear that Seymour was a strong-willed young woman with a fondness for riding, card games, and dancing—in contrast to her sister Jane, described as more reserved. As one of only two surviving daughters of her deceased father, Seymour would carry a substantial dowry into any potential marriage. It amounted to tens of thousands of pounds—millions in today’s currency—and wealthy, powerful men soon began lining up for her hand.
Seymour’s entire life would be shaped by her marriage at an early age and the unhappiness of that relationship. Her future husband was Sir Richard Worsley. He was seven years her senior, born in 1751 on the Isle of Wight, where the Worsley family had been major landowners since the Middle Ages. Sir Richard inherited his baronetcy when he was seventeen.
He later became a Member of Parliament and a comptroller in the royal household of King George III. The Worsleys, like the Flemings and Lascelles, were a wealthy family in an era when money flowed into England with the rise of the British Empire as the world’s dominant power. Interestingly, Worsley had originally courted Seymour’s older sister Jane, but she rejected him in 1772, preferring to marry the Earl of Harrington. He then turned his attention to Seymour after meeting her at the York races in the summer of 1775.
In a whirlwind romance that shocked high society, he proposed in less than a week, and by September 20, 1775, the couple were married. Seymour was seventeen; Sir Richard was twenty-four. Unfortunately for Seymour, the marriage settlement was heavily weighted in her husband’s favor. While a vast fortune was handed over to Worsley, she received only an annual allowance of £400, effectively giving him control of the wealth she brought to the marriage.
At first, the marriage seemed fairly conventional. Lady Worsley became pregnant within months of the wedding and gave birth to their first child in August 1776, a son named Robert. He would be their only legitimate child. Behind the grand façade of aristocratic marriage, tensions were already rising.
Seymour later described her husband as cold, stiff, and painfully dull, while she was vivacious, flirtatious, and strongly drawn to the glamorous inner circle of Georgiana Cavendish. It was not long before whispers spread through high society: the Worsleys’ marriage was heading toward scandal. Before long, accusations of adultery emerged within the Worsley marriage. Many sources indicate that Sir Richard was remarkably indifferent to his wife’s affairs.
On one famous occasion, he was said to have discovered one of Lady Worsley’s lovers inside the house at midnight. Instead of confronting him, however, he simply let the man go, fueling rumors that their marriage concealed darker secrets than anyone realized. Newspapers later claimed Seymour had dozens of lovers, although the evidence suggests fewer. Of all the men Lady Worsley was linked to, none was more scandalous than Maurice George Bisset.
He came from a noble family with lands on the Isle of Wight. Though the Bisset clan was of Scottish origin, his seat on the Isle of Wight was only four miles from the Worsley home, and Bisset was no stranger—he was one of Sir Richard’s closest friends. What followed was not merely an affair but a humiliating betrayal that turned friendship into treachery and sent shockwaves through Georgian high society. The affair might never have been discovered had it not been for the outbreak of the American War of Independence.
After France entered the war on the side of the rebels in North America, Lord Worsley became responsible for training militias in southern England in anticipation of a French attack on the coastal region. Bisset took part in these military exercises, and when Worsley rented a house in Maidstone, Kent, while overseeing these drills, he invited Bisset to stay there. During that period, the relationship between Lady Worsley and Captain Bisset became common knowledge. In August 1781, Seymour gave birth to a daughter named Jane, but whispers immediately circulated that the child was not Sir Richard’s at all.
In a desperate attempt to avoid a greater public scandal, he acknowledged the child as his own despite widespread rumors that the true father was Bisset. What is clear is that Sir Richard was not entirely upset by his wife’s infidelity at the time. One famous story that emerged shortly after is that in September 1781, he had joked about the relationship between Bisset and his wife while the three were visiting a public bath in Maidstone. But while Sir Richard seemed willing to tolerate the insult of his wife’s infidelity in public, Seymour had grown thoroughly tired of the marriage.
In November 1781, she took the scandal to an entirely new level, eloping with Bisset from Kent to London, where they brazenly checked into the Royal Hotel together as lovers. Seymour then wrote to her maid, Mary Southby, ordering her to send the infant Jane to her in the capital along with extra clothes. Seymour apparently believed her dramatic flight would finally force her husband to agree to a divorce, paving the way for her to marry Bisset. But while Sir Richard had long tolerated her affairs, he had no intention of giving up the wealth and status attached to their marriage.
What followed was a bitter separation, a sensational legal battle, and a scandal that gripped all of Britain. Lord Worsley now moved to sue Bisset for what was called “criminal conversation”—a specific charge brought when a man accused a close friend of seducing his wife. Crucially, the charge prevented the wife from testifying because she was not a party to the suit. Instead, in this case, Sir Richard was suing Bisset, not Lady Worsley.
Richard demanded £20,000 in damages, an amount that would have bankrupted Bisset if Lord Worsley won the case. To put this in context, that sum is equivalent to roughly £3 million today. The case was heard in Westminster in February 1782. Rather than denying the affair, Bisset’s legal team argued that Lady Worsley had had many lovers before him, meaning he had not corrupted her honor in the first place.
Moreover, they also claimed that Sir Richard had been fully aware of his wife’s infidelity and in some cases seemed to have encouraged it. Several of her former lovers were then called to testify under oath. Viscount Deerhurst, clearly embarrassed by the proceedings, admitted that Sir Richard had once known that he and his wife had spent three days together in London and Southampton and had done nothing to stop them. As the trial continued, the scandal grew, and Lady Worsley’s reputation began to deteriorate rapidly.
For example, one of her physicians, William Osbourne, appeared to testify that he had treated her for venereal disease possibly contracted from the Marquess of Graham. It was unheard of for such medical matters to be discussed publicly in court in the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, newspapers, cartoons, and pamphlets detailing the trial’s sensational revelations were published throughout London. In the end, the court ruled in favor of Sir Richard.
There was no doubt that Lady Worsley and Bisset had had an affair, yet the court awarded Sir Richard just one shilling in damages—the smallest amount possible. It was a devastating public humiliation. The verdict effectively declared that while his wife had been unfaithful, Sir Richard himself had publicly tolerated and even encouraged her affairs. As the scandal continued to spread across Britain, the lives of all three were never the same.
The trial of 1782 was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Sir Richard’s political career never recovered. The full transcript of the trial was put on sale in London a few days after it ended and became a bestseller—even George Washington owned a copy across the Atlantic. This meant Lady Worsley’s reputation was also destroyed by the trial, and soon bawdy pamphlets were also circulating with titles like *The Genuine and Amorous Adventures of Sir Richard Easy and Lady Wagtail*.
Moreover, the trial’s outcome did not mean the Worsleys could divorce so Seymour and Bisset could live happily ever after. In fact, Sir Richard refused to agree to a divorce, as he would have lost financially by doing so, and Seymour would have gained control of the dowry she brought to the marriage. In a dramatic turn of events, Bisset then left Lady Worsley. She ended up in the worst possible circumstances.
Her reputation was completely destroyed. Her lover and the father of her daughter had abandoned her, and her husband refused to grant her a divorce, meaning she was left destitute—especially since her wider family had also disowned her. Not only that, she was also pregnant with another child by Bisset. After giving birth in 1783, she became a mistress to survive, dependent on the money and patronage of the wealthy.
In the period that followed, Seymour became a member of the new “Female Coterie,” a group of women who met at a brothel run by Sarah Prendergast. It was essentially a kind of support network for women of the noble class whose reputations had been destroyed in some way and who were living in precarious circumstances. Among its members were Lady Anne Cork and Lady Derby, while the founder of the group, Caroline Stanhope, was the mother-in-law of Seymour’s sister Jane. Caroline, like Seymour, had become notorious years earlier for her adultery.
As part of this group in the mid-1780s, Lady Worsley had several more lovers. But again, her life was about to take a darker turn. However much she tried to support herself, Lady Worsley’s debts began to mount in the years after her separation, and she eventually moved to Paris, where there was more tolerance for women publicly accused of extramarital affairs. She became a permanent figure at the French court at Versailles and gave birth to another daughter named Charlotte, who was sent to be raised by another family.
One of her lovers there was Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a composer and champion fencer of mixed-race origins. However, the timing of her decision to join the French court was not ideal, for in 1789 the French Revolution began. The revolutionary years were not easy for her. The revolutionary government arrested her during the Reign of Terror in 1793 because of her noble status and connections to the royal court.
This led eventually to her imprisonment, and during this dark period of her life, her son by Worsley also died. Finally, in 1797, she escaped back to England. By this point, she had reconciled with her family and began living quietly at her childhood home, Brompton Park, now in her fourth decade. While his wife moved about, Sir Richard continued his faltering career.
In the period before the French Revolution, he lived on the Isle of Wight with his mistress, Sarah Smith. During the French Revolutionary Wars, he was appointed British envoy to the Republic of Venice. He died returning to Britain in 1805 at around fifty-four years of age, leaving behind an estate burdened with enormous debts—a very common feature of British aristocratic life in an age marked by extravagance in drinking, gambling, and squandering fortunes on grand houses. Despite the financial incompetence of her estranged husband, Seymour was finally able, after his death, to regain control of the £70,000 she had brought into the marriage.
For more than two decades, this fortune had been tied up in legal disputes. Suddenly restored to her vast wealth, she was able to leave behind the years of unstable living she had endured in England and France. The former Lady Worsley was also finally able to marry again. On September 12, 1805, a little over a month after her husband’s death, she married Jean-Louis Couchet, a musician of twenty-six.
She resumed her family name Fleming, which Couchet also adopted in an unusual move for the time. Her second marriage, shortly before her forty-seventh birthday, was much quieter. Most accounts agree it was a happy relationship, and they lived a peaceful life compared to the upheaval of her first marriage. After the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars ended in 1814 and 1815, the couple moved to Paris and lived in the French capital for the rest of Seymour’s life.
She died there on September 9, 1818, at age fifty-nine, of an unspecified illness. The woman who had once been the talk of the British public was buried in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where she lies today among the graves of figures such as Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Édith Piaf, and Frédéric Chopin. A fitting end to a life full of scandal. —
Known to history as Julie d’Aubigny, she was born around 1673 in Paris.
Julie came from a middle-class background; her father, Gaston d’Aubigny, served as secretary to one of France’s most important men, Louis de Lorraine-Guise, the Comte d’Armagnac, and the Grand Squire of France to King Louis XIV. Information about her mother remains entirely unknown, leading many to speculate she likely died shortly after Julie’s birth. Apart from his work, Gaston, Julie’s father, was known for his skill at sword fighting and for being a womanizer. His personality—and the fact that Julie grew up without a mother—had a tremendous influence on her early life and on the woman she became.
Thanks to her father’s work, which involved training the king’s servants, young Julie received a much better education than most, as the majority of the population was illiterate. She was fortunate to be educated by several tutors in various fields, from painting and dancing to writing and literature. From an early age, her father also made sure she learned to use a sword. During the seventeenth century, fencing was a very common practice in France.
In the 1630s, Cardinal Richelieu had complained that duels had become so common in France that the streets had turned into battlefields. Because of this, the practice was banned. However, Gaston realized that to properly prepare Julie for life, she would need to defend herself. Over time, Julie became an excellent fencer, thanks to constant training, good teachers, and her quick movements and agility.
It should also be said that Julie, as a girl, considered her male counterparts her equals—something unheard of at the time. All of this prepared Julie for her turbulent and dangerous adventures. Julie was described as having grown into a very attractive young woman with soft facial features and a slender figure. Her father’s employer, the Comte d’Armagnac, noticed how she had developed into a beautiful young woman.
When Julie was about fifteen, she became his mistress. The relationship lasted about two years. Gaston’s view of this is unknown. In any case, intervening in the affair could have cost him his job, so all he could do was remain silent.
Unfortunately, Gaston died around that time. However, he seems to have persuaded the Comte d’Armagnac before his death, because he soon arranged for Julie to marry Monsieur de Maupin to protect her reputation. The marriage was merely a front, however: shortly after—or according to some accounts, the day after the wedding—Monsieur de Maupin was sent to work in Toulouse in the tax administration. Meanwhile, Julie, now known as Madame de Maupin or La Maupin, remained with her older and more influential lover, the Comte d’Armagnac.
Whether the count was happy to have her stay with him in Paris is unknown, as her strong and reckless personality was something difficult for an elderly man to handle. Her husband was far away, and she soon fell deeply in love with a fencing instructor’s assistant named Henri Sérance. Shortly after, the couple made their way toward Marseille. There are many accounts explaining why they left Paris.
The most common story is that Sérance became involved in an illegal duel that ended with the death of his opponent. The Lieutenant General of Police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, learned of it and began tracking Sérance with police forces. Sérance was forced to flee to avoid execution. During their journey south, the couple gave fencing exhibitions and sang in local taverns to earn their living.
It was around this time that Julie began dressing in men’s clothing and openly declared her bisexuality. It should be noted, however, that many women wore men’s clothing while traveling because it was safer and simpler. Julie wore men’s clothing in these impromptu performances with Sérance, but she made no attempt to hide the fact that she was a woman. One story tells of a man who refused to believe that any woman could fight as skillfully as Julie.
He shouted that she must be a man. In response, Julie tore open her shirt and exposed her breasts, silencing the man completely. Julie’s success in the small performances made her dream of a career in opera. She thought she could achieve this in Marseille, where the Marseille Academy of Music had been founded a few years earlier by Pierre Gaultier.
Although she had never received singing training, Julie possessed a wonderful mezzo-soprano voice. When she auditioned for the academy, she passed easily. Admission at the time was not overly difficult. As a man, Sérance was also hired.
In Marseille, she performed under the name Mademoiselle d’Aubigny and achieved immediate success thanks to her beauty, acting abilities, and powerful voice. However, her time in Marseille was drawing to a close after she found true love. Julie’s stardom in the city attracted the attention of many admirers, and since she was disguised as a man, many of them were young women. Eventually, she fell madly in love with one of her fans, believed to be named Cécile Portugale.
The two young women were not discreet at all, and it wasn’t long before Cécile’s parents discovered their relationship. In response, they sent her to a convent to protect the family’s reputation. The family thought that was the end of it, but they underestimated young Julie’s determination. Without hesitation, she packed her bags and traveled alone to the convent in Avignon, where her beloved Cécile was waiting.
Upon arrival, she pretended to want to become a nun and was immediately accepted. Julie was finally reunited with her love, but of course, they had to be careful in a convent. The two waited for a good opportunity to escape, which finally came after the death of an elderly nun. The two secretly removed the corpse and placed it in Cécile’s bed.
Then they set the room on fire, and as planned, the flames threw the convent into chaos. The resulting confusion provided the perfect cover for their escape, and the burned bed and corpse led everyone to believe Cécile had perished in the fire. Unfortunately for Julie, subsequent investigations pointed to her as the culprit. Julie was summoned to court, and when she did not appear, she was tried in absentia.
Evidence was presented to prove her guilt, and she was sentenced to death by burning at the stake. It is worth noting that during the proceedings, she was tried as a man to avoid further shame to the Portugale family. Within a few months, the once-passionate relationship faded. Cécile returned home.
Meanwhile, Julie traveled north to Paris. To support herself, she stopped at taverns along the way, singing, dancing, and enjoying life. Her journey home was not without danger, however. While at a tavern outside the city of Tours, three drunk men challenged her to a duel.
Julie defeated them with ease, finally stabbing one directly in the shoulder and ending the fight. The man she stabbed turned out to be a prominent aristocrat, Louis-Joseph d’Albert, the future Duc de Luynes. Julie learned who he was, and in turn, the future duke discovered that the person he had dueled was in fact a woman. Afterward, the two made contact, and Julie visited him at the inn where he was staying.
They must have become quite close, as Julie remained by his side until he recovered. Some stories say they fell deeply in love, but this ended when the duke was sent to the army. In any case, they became lifelong friends. Julie eventually arrived at the Paris Opera but was not initially accepted.
She did not give up, however, and with the help of some acquaintances, she was admitted to the company in 1690. While moving about Paris, she had to be careful, as there was an arrest warrant out for her due to the events in Avignon. Julie had no choice but to seek a pardon. Fortunately, she was still on good terms with the Comte d’Armagnac, and she used her charm to persuade him to do everything possible to obtain a royal pardon from King Louis XIV.
Luckily for Julie, the king was amused by her wild adventures, meaning she was now free to do as she pleased. Julie decided to continue in opera, making her debut in December 1690 under the stage name Mademoiselle Maupin. Singing at the opera was a challenge even for seasoned singers; audiences were known for misbehaving, from interrupting and talking during performances to singing along with the artist and drowning out their voice. Despite these obstacles, Julie was a great success in Paris.
The Marquis de Dangeau later wrote in his memoirs that she had the most beautiful voice in the world. During this time, she played many roles and had love affairs with both men and women. However, she only truly earned the respect of her colleagues after making a fool of one of the company’s most famous singers. The singer—the golden-voiced tenor, likely named Dumény—was arrogant and haughty.
Julie did not like his attitude, so when he tried to court her, she immediately rejected him, and he responded by calling her an offensive name. It seemed a fight was about to break out at that moment, but the company intervened and prevented any violence. Later that evening, Julie, disguised as a man, waited patiently outside the Place des Victoires. As soon as she saw him, she approached him with a threatening manner, drew her cane, and began beating him with it.
The man begged for mercy, but Julie was not the merciful type. When she had done enough, she took his snuff box and his watch and left. The next day, Dumény told the entire company how he had been beaten and robbed by three men but had managed to defend himself. Julie heard this, called his story a lie, and produced the watch and snuff box.
Their colleagues laughed, and the man left in shame. After this incident, he treated everyone with greater respect. Julie remained at the opera for more than five years until she got into trouble again one night because of her bold and fearsome nature. In February 1696, Julie attended a masked ball hosted by the Duc d’Orléans.
At the ball, dressed as a man, she caught the eye of a very beautiful young marquise. Julie began courting the young woman, but her three suitors did not take kindly to this and demanded she leave. In her usual fashion, Julie asked the men if they would like to settle the matter outside. At midnight, the four went to a garden on the Seine.
Each of them fought their own duel with her, and all lost, suffering serious wounds. Julie returned to the ball and told the duke that the men needed medical attention. Although this could have led to severe punishment, the king seems to have been impressed by Julie’s audacity and entertaining behavior, and no charges were brought against her. She had escaped justice again, but she decided to head to Brussels in case the king changed his mind.
While in Brussels, she entered into a relationship with the Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian II. The affair lasted a few months, but Maximilian, known for his many affairs, soon sought better company. He ended the relationship and gave her 40,000 francs as a farewell gift. Julie responded by taking the purse and throwing it at his testicles.
Nevertheless, she ended up with a pension of 2,000 francs and allegedly headed to Spain. Although there is no evidence to support this story, it seems she ran out of money in Spain and had no choice but to work. She found a job as a maid to the Countess Merlino, but they did not get along at all. One night, Julie helped the countess prepare for a ball, and since she had saved enough money to leave, she decided to take revenge on the unpleasant countess.
Julie managed to slip some small radishes into the countess’s hair without her noticing. However, the radishes were perfectly visible to everyone else. At the ball, crowds laughed and mocked the countess. Eventually, someone told her about the radishes in her hair.
The countess rushed home angrily to scold Julie—but Julie had already left for Paris. In November 1698, Julie was performing again at the Paris Opera. Over the next seven years, she appeared at many events, including operas, concerts, and even performances at the Palace of Versailles. These were the peak years of her fame as a singer.
Yet despite her success, her disruptive behavior continued. Throughout those years, Julie was reported to have attacked her landlord, threatened to shoot a duchess, and continued her duels and quarrels with actors when disagreements arose. In 1703, Julie fell madly in love with the most beautiful woman in France, the Marquise de Florensac. Accounts indicate they lived happily for two years, the longest relationship of Julie’s life.
She seemed to have finally found lasting true love. However, in 1705, Florensac tragically died of a fever. Grief-stricken by her death, Julie retired from the opera in 1705 and retreated to a convent. She remained there for the rest of her life and died only two years later at the age of thirty-three.
In 1835, Théophile Gautier published a novel based on her life titled *Mademoiselle de Maupin*. Many characters in the novel were named after her real-life acquaintances. —
Amy Lyon was born the daughter of a blacksmith at Swan Cottage in Cheshire, England, in the spring of 1765. She later took the name Emma Hart, married Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the court of Naples in southern Italy, and later became the mistress of Horatio Nelson, Britain’s most prominent naval commander during the Napoleonic Wars—a relationship that scandalized British society in the early nineteenth century.
The woman who would become one of the most famous beauties of the Romantic era in Britain and Europe was born at Swan Cottage near Neston, in Cheshire, England, on April 26, 1765. Her father was Henry Lyon, a blacksmith who tragically died just seven weeks after Emma’s birth. Because of her relatively poor background—a situation worsened by her father’s early death—Emma had no choice but to enter the workforce while still young. This happened in her early teens, a very common situation in Britain during the early industrial age before universal primary education.
By age twelve, she was working as a maid, and shortly after, she moved to London. A variety of jobs followed in subsequent years. During her teenage years, she changed her name to Emma Hart and began a relationship with Charles Greville, a British antiquarian and Member of Parliament between 1774 and 1790. Their relationship lasted four years, during which Emma allegedly also worked for the quack doctor and fraudster James Graham.
In 1785, Greville ended the long relationship by sending Emma to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, who was then serving as British commissioner at the court of Naples, where she arrived in 1786. Emma later married Hamilton in 1791, and as a woman in her mid-twenties at the Neapolitan court, she became a prominent society lady. She met many of Europe’s leading literary figures there and also became the subject of numerous paintings, including works by famous painters of the time such as Gavin Hamilton, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Angelica Kauffman. These paintings depicted Emma in a classical and mythological style, often portraying characters like Medea, Ariadne, and Cleopatra, which began to establish her fame throughout Europe.
In particular, James Gillray’s depiction of Emma became widely known. However, beyond merely modeling for artworks, Emma managed to exploit her talent for imitation and the prevailing gender concepts of the era to her advantage. She was, for example, a skilled hostess capable of charming influential men. This played a role in her later relationship with Horatio Nelson.
Emma’s life at the Neapolitan court between the mid-1780s and late 1790s unfolded against a backdrop of significant political changes in Europe. In 1789, a revolution in France overthrew the royal government of King Louis XVI. In the years that followed, these events escalated and led to Louis’s execution by the French revolutionary government in 1793. Consequently, the French Republic became the political enemy of almost all European great powers, which were deeply concerned that the revolutionary principles adopted in France might destabilize their own political systems.
Thus, shortly after the French Revolution began in 1789, France found itself in constant warfare with countries such as Austria, Prussia, Russia, and above all Britain. This was the context in which Horatio Nelson arrived at the Bourbon court in Naples in 1793. Nelson was by then a distinguished admiral in the British Royal Navy, having held several senior command positions in the Mediterranean. His career had taken a heavy toll: he had lost the sight in one eye during an engagement near Corsica shortly before arriving in Naples.
As a skilled commander in these waters, Nelson’s mission in the autumn of 1793 was to rally reinforcements for the renewed conflict between France and the European powers. This was only an early moment in what became the broader Mediterranean campaign between 1793 and 1796—a long series of naval clashes between the British Royal Navy based in Italian ports and the French revolutionary fleet in Toulon, southern France. The prize in this lengthy naval operation was control over the Italian peninsula. The mission also led to Nelson meeting Lady Emma Hamilton.
Emma was first introduced to Nelson very shortly after his arrival in southern Italy. She was presented as the wife of the British envoy to the Neapolitan court, Sir William—or Lord—Hamilton. Emma was not only married, but Nelson was married too, having wed Fanny Nisbet in 1787. Fanny was a loyal wife, and while Lord Hamilton soon accepted Lady Emma’s and Nelson’s relationship, the admiral’s wife never did.
The attraction between Lady Hamilton and Admiral Nelson became apparent quickly. The Hamiltons invited Nelson to stay at their official residence while he was in Naples rallying support for British efforts in the Mediterranean. When he departed after several days, it was clear he had left an indelible impression on the other. It could have ended there, but five years later, Nelson returned to Naples.
By that time, the French were growing stronger across continental Europe, led by a brilliant general named Napoleon Bonaparte, the man who would later crown himself Emperor of France. However, while Bonaparte dominated on land, Nelson was the greatest naval commander of the age—a fact cemented by his great victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. On his way back across the Mediterranean, he stopped at Naples in late September 1798. Lady Hamilton may have been shocked by the change in Nelson’s appearance.
He had lost his right arm since his first visit and looked older than his years due to his time at sea. The Hamiltons hosted him in Naples, and soon a full-blown affair developed between the thirty-three-year-old Emma and the forty-year-old admiral. Lord Hamilton decided, for reasons perhaps not entirely clear, to turn a blind eye to his wife’s infidelity with their guest. It is likely that Hamilton was infertile, and perhaps his guilt at being unable to give Emma children contributed to his willingness to allow his wife to engage in this relationship.
By November 1798, news of Nelson’s affair in Italy reached the British newspapers. From then on, Lady Emma and her already-famous lover were under the microscope of the English media. Some of their actions aroused passing interest, but most of British high society was disapproving. This obsession with the pair only grew in subsequent years as they and Lord Hamilton returned to England.
In 1799, a popular revolution broke out in Naples, eventually leading Napoleon to install a new French royal family there. As these events unfolded, many members of the British embassy and the British community that had grown up there during the intermittent wars with France in the 1790s began returning to Britain. When they arrived in London in November 1800, immediate tensions arose between Nelson, his mistress, and Lord Hamilton on one side, and Nelson’s wife and family on the other. Everyone had known about the affair before their return to Britain, but the actual presence of the trio in England created tensions that could no longer be easily ignored.
Matters worsened when Fanny, Nelson’s wife, quickly realized that Lady Emma was pregnant with Nelson’s child. Unlike Emma’s husband, Lord Hamilton, she was never willing to accept the relationship. In an attempt to keep the peace, Nelson stayed with his wife and their family, while the Hamiltons lived separately at several addresses in London. However, when Fanny issued an ultimatum demanding Nelson choose between her and Lady Emma, it forced his decision.
Shortly before returning to active naval service in 1801, he began formal separation proceedings from Fanny—unusual in the early nineteenth century compared to the modern era. Moreover, in late January 1801, Nelson’s and Emma’s daughter was born. They named her Horatia. By that time, while Nelson was away at sea on a naval mission, Emma began courting English high society to win public opinion for her and Nelson’s cause.
Remarkably, this may have increased the rumors in London: the Prince of Wales—the future King George IV—admired Lady Emma at one of her social events, although his attempts to get close to her came to nothing. That autumn, on Emma’s advice, Nelson arranged the purchase of Merton Place, a house in Wimbledon, where they lived together openly—Lady Emma, Lord Hamilton, and Admiral Nelson. His return to England followed when the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802 briefly ended the war between Britain and France. Lord Hamilton died in April 1803, finally easing some of the criticism that London society had continued to direct at the trio’s living arrangement.
But Lady Emma and Admiral Nelson were not able to enjoy a conventional relationship, as Lord Nelson outlived Hamilton by barely two years. Nelson, a man who had suffered numerous injuries during his naval career, finally succumbed to one in 1805. The peace between Britain and France lasted only one year after the Treaty of Amiens. In May 1803, what is commonly known as the War of the Third Coalition broke out, with Britain, Russia, Sweden, and Austria allied against France and its client states in Europe, including Italy and Spain.
One of Napoleon’s main strategies in this renewed conflict was an attempt to invade Britain. To achieve this, he had to bring the French fleet, mostly based in the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar north to the English Channel. When this was attempted in 1805, Nelson was tasked with preventing the operation. On October 21, the British Royal Navy under Nelson defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, off the southwestern coast of Spain.
No French invasion force could ever cross from France to Britain again. But Nelson’s most glorious victory was his last. He was seriously wounded during the battle and died just three hours later. Emma was utterly devastated when the news reached England.
She took to her bed for several weeks in grief. But in the longer term, there was the matter of Nelson’s will to be dealt with. The British state was determined to exclude Lady Emma as much as possible from dividing the admiral’s estate, and Nelson’s wishes that his lands and wealth be divided fairly and equally between Emma and his legitimate family were ignored. Emma received a payment of £2,000, Merton Place, and an annual income of £500.
But with the cost of maintaining Merton far exceeding that income, she soon fell into financial distress. Additionally, the £500 annuity became the subject of another legal dispute with Nelson’s family. As a result, by 1808 she owed more than £15,000, and attempts to sell Merton failed. The story reached its lowest point in 1812, when Lady Hamilton was briefly imprisoned for failing to pay her substantial debts.
A series of health problems followed in subsequent years. Eventually, friends raised some money, allowing Lady Emma and her daughter Horatia to escape to Calais in France. However, Emma died there just one year later, at age forty-nine, having increasingly succumbed to alcoholism and obesity in her later years. A tragic end for a woman once famous across Europe through paintings depicting her beauty.
Yet her memory endures to this day, as she has been the subject of numerous books, songs, and films during the twentieth century—most notably the 1973 film *The Nelson Affair*, starring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch, and Susan Sontag’s 1992 novel *The Volcano Lover: A Romance*.
