Abstract
After the Duke of Kingston’s death in 1773, three years before his widow’s trial, Elizabeth Pierrepont, dowager Duchess of Kingston, found that her exalted rank did not guarantee her friends, or even respect. Although she had been a duchess for only four years, she acted as if she had been born into the aristocracy and had a naive faith that her exalted rank would guarantee her the polite respect of her peers. She would soon learn that class solidarity was a fleeting thing among the British aristocracy and that wealth and celebrity were double-edged swords.
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Chapter 1
Mary Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany, ed. Chauncey Woolsey, 2 vols. (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1880), 1: 554.
Quoted in Claire Gervat, Elizabeth: The Scandalous Life of the Duchess of Kingston (London: Century, 2003), 44.
For this anecdote and for an overview of Mansfield’s character and professional reputation, see James Oldham, English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), chap. 1.
Lord Hailsham, A Sparrow’s Flight (London: Collins, 1990), 397;
Diana Woodhouse, The Office of the Lord Chancellor (Oxford and Portland: Hart Publishing, 2001), 5.
Horace Walpole, The Correspondence of Horace Walpole, ed. W. S. Lewis, 47 vols., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 17 December 1775, 24: 151.
Lawrence Stone calls divorce proceedings the “soft-core pornography of the late eighteenth century” in Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 44. See also David M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex, and Civility in England, 1660–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 6; and
Peter Wagner, “The Pornographer in the Courtroom: Trial Reports about Cases of Sexual Crimes and Delinquencies as a Genre of Eighteenth-Century Erotica” in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul Gabriel Bouce (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 120–140.
Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, George III, A Personal History (London: Viking, 1998), 171.
Richard Arthur Roberts, ed., Calendar of Home Office Papers of the Reign of George III, 1773–1775 (London: 1881), 498.
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© 2007 Matthew J. Kinservik
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Kinservik, M.J. (2007). Disgracing Her Grace. In: Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604803_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604803_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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