Harriet Mordaunt

Harriet Sarah, Lady Mordaunt (7 February 1848-9 May 1906), formerly Harriet Moncrieffe, was the Scottish wife of an English baronet and Member of Parliament, Sir Charles Mordaunt. She was the respondent in a sensational divorce case in which the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) was embroiled and, after a counter-petition led to a finding of mental disorder, spent the remaining thirty-six years of her life in a lunatic asylum.

Background and marriage

Lady Mordaunt (as she is referred to throughout this article) was born Harriet Sarah Moncrieffe. Her parents were Sir Thomas Moncrieffe, 7th baronet (1822-1879) of Moncrieffe House, Perthshire, Scotland and his wife, Lady Louisa Hay-Drummond (died 1898), eldest daughter of the 11th Earl of Kinnoull. They had sixteen children, including eight "beautiful" daughters who were, in due course, mostly "extremely well married". Lady Mordaunt was their fourth child (and fourth daughter). Their third daughter, Georgina, became Countess of Dudley.

Sir Thomas served in the Grenadier Guards and become a captain in the Atholl Highlanders. He was captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St. Andrews.

During her childhood Lady Mordaunt was acquainted with the Prince of Wales and, after his marriage to Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, was invited to informal parties, including dances at Abergeldie Castle, near Balmoral, which the Prince used as his Highland home. Lady Mordaunt grew up to be pretty and flirtatious, but also rather unbalanced.

Marriage to Sir Charles Mordaunt

On 6 December 1866, at the age of 18, Lady Mordaunt married Sir Charles Mordaunt, 10th baronet (1836-1897) at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Perth. Sir Charles was Conservative MP for South Warwickshire, a two-member constituency, from 1859 to 1868. The couple lived at Walton Hall, Warwickshire, which, to mark his coming-of-age, Sir Charles had commissioned in the fashionable Gothic style from the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, who later designed St. Pancras station in London. A descendant of Sir Charles once counted 72 bedrooms at Walton. The Mordaunts also had a residence in Belgrave Square, London.

The Mordaunts became part of the so-called "Marlborough House set" who were associated socially with the Prince and Princess of Wales. According to later legal reports, Sir Charles made a “handsome” settlement on his wife at the time of their marriage and initially they appeared to live “most happily together”. However, it became clear subsequently that Lady Mordaunt was in the habit of entertaining male guests alone while her husband was absent on Parliamentary business or engaged in his various sporting pursuits.

Lady Mordaunt’s extra-marital activities and birth of a daughter

The Mordaunts had toured Switzerland together early in their marriage, but when, in June 1868, Sir Charles prepared for an annual fishing trip to Norway, Lady Mordaunt encouraged him to go on his own. Arrangements were made for her to remain at Walton Hall in the company of a sister and another lady. However, when Sir Charles returned early from Norway, he found his wife alone. One of her maids later testified that, during Sir Charles’ absence, Lady Mordaunt had been visited in London by Viscount Cole (later 4th Earl of Enniskillen), who, after dinner, had “remained alone with her until a very late hour”; on another occasion, he had travelled with her by train from Paddington station to Reading, where he alighted from a carriage of which they had been the only occupants. Other servants, who seem to have resented Lady Mordaunt's behaviour, added their own accounts of Lord Cole’s visits.

In February 1869 Lady Mordaunt gave birth prematurely to a daughter, Violet Caroline. The timing was significant in view of Sir Charles’ absence on his fishing trip the previous year. Doctors initially feared that the child might be blind, causing Lady Mordaunt to become hysterical, imagining that this had been brought about by an hereditary sexually transmitted disease. (At the time, gossip surrounding Freddy Johnstone, a close friend of the Prince of Wales, whom Lady Mordaunt shortly afterwards claimed to have been one of her lovers, was that he suffered from such a disease.) Violet’s eye infection was successfully treated and no venereal infection was found in either mother or child. However, following this episode, Lady Mordaunt not only declared to her husband, "Charlie, I have deceived you; the child is not yours; it’s Lord Cole’s", but claimed to have committed adultery with “Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, the Prince of Wales and others, often and in open day” As one of Princess Alexandra’s biographers put it, “the ensuing scandal was immense”.

Involvement of the Prince of Wales

Sir Charles forced the drawer of Lady Mordaunt's writing desk and found a number of letters to her from the Prince of Wales. It was plainly unwise for the Prince to have written these and, throughout his life, he seems to have had trouble resisting such communication with women he admired. However, their content (though very similar to the sort of things he wrote some years later to his mistress, Alice Keppel) was not incriminating as such. When published later in provincial newspapers and the London Times, they were judged to be "simple, gossipy, everyday letters"; a biographer of the actress Lily Langtry, another of the Prince's mistresses, observed that "typical lines to Harriet might have come from a benevolent uncle".

There is a widely recounted story of Sir Charles' returning to Walton Hall to find his wife in the company of the Prince and two white ponies, which, following the Prince’s expulsion from the premesis, he had shot in her presence. However, although Sir Charles acted very bitterly towards the Prince, he did not cite him in any legal action and so formal contemporaneous accounts of Lady Mordaunt’s activities tend to skirt around such episodes.

Legal proceedings

Sir Charles commenced proceedings for divorce on 20 April 1869. In view of her nervous and erratic behaviour after Violet’s birth, to which the details were given full rein by her servants, Lady Mordaunt’s family claimed that she was insane and unfit to plead. A counter-affidavit on behalf of Sir Charles maintained that she was feigning a mental disorder. On 30 July 1869 Sir Thomas Moncrieffe, acting as his daughter’s guardian ad litem, formally alleged that, at the time the summons was served on her, she was "not of sound mind". In her diary on 6 August, Princess Alexandra noted that "a commission has been ordered to investigate and report if Harriet Mordaunt is truly mad".

Mordaunt v. Mordaunt (1870)

The resulting case came up for trial before Lord Penzance on 23 February 1870. Having been summoned to appear as a witness, the Prince of Wales was examined for seven minutes by Sir Charles’ counsel, the first time that a Prince of Wales had given evidence in open court. He flatly denied any “improper familiarity” or “criminal act” with Lady Mordaunt – “Never!” – and was not cross-examined. The Prince had sought advice about whether to accept the subpoena from, among others, the Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, Sir Alexander Cockburn, who in advising him to do so, described Lady Mordaunt as “a lady of such apparently fragile virtue” and referred to the notion that “one to whom a woman has given herself up is bound, even at the cost of committing perjury, to protect her honour”.

After a trail lasting seven days, the jury determined that Lady Mordaunt was suffering from “puerperal mania” at the time the summons was served on her and that she was unable to instruct a lawyer in her defence. Accordingly, Sir Charles’ petition for divorce was dismissed, while Lady Mordaunt was committed to an asylum.

A conspiracy?

The convenient finding of insanity inevitably gave rise to suspicions that there was a conspiracy to silence Lady Mordaunt. Reynold’s News, for example, asked why the Prince (“a young married man”) should have been “so eager to pay weekly visits to a young married woman when her husband was absent, if it was all so innocent?”

There is some evidence that the “Establishment” closed ranks at a time when republican sympathies in Britain had been aroused by Queen Victoria’s virtual withdrawal from public life It seems that, in advance of the trail, the Prince's Household received private assurances that his position would be protected as far as possible, and, some years later, his private secretary, Francis Knollys, recalled that the Prime Minister William Gladstone was involved indirectly "and successfully" behind the scenes.

The Queen strongly disapproved of her son’s (and daughter-in-law's) lifestyle, writing to her eldest daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, on 2 March 1870 that "they lead far too frivolous a life and are far too intimate with people - with a small set of not the best and wisest people who consider being fast the right thing". She seemed especially concerned (with, as Lord Hattersley has put it, "admirable understanding of the moral inferiority of the lower orders of society") that the affair could damage the Prince's reputation in the eyes of "the middle and lower classes".. However, Victoria remained staunch in her son's defence, as did Alexandra, who referred to him as “my naughty little man”, but was nonetheless deeply hurt by the affair. For his part, Gladstone observed rather despairingly to his Colonial Secretary, Lord Granville, that "in rude and general terms, the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected".

Attitudes to Lady Mordaunt's mental condition

Historians have taken differing stances on the extent of Lady Mordaunt’s mental illness. Diana Souhami (1996) reflected on Cockburn’s pre-trial observations that neither her “fragile virtue” nor “honour” were protected; that her “punishment” was to be declared insane; and that “it proved expedient to call her mad and bad”. However, Michael Havers, a future Lord Chancellor who published in 1977 an account of the Prince’s involvement in the Tranby Croft baccarat scandal of 1890, commented that, by the time the Mordaunt case came up, Lady Mordaunt was “quite obviously insane” and that her physical condition had also deteriorated.

In the 1960s, the historical biographer, Elizabeth Hamilton, whose husband, Sir Richard Hamilton, 9th baronet (1911-2001) inherited Walton Hall in 1961, found a vast consignment of papers there that she used as the basis of a book about the scandal. She took the view that Lady Mordaunt probably did fake her madness at first, but added that “if you feign insanity, it can become a habit, and you can genuinely go mad”.

After the trial

Asylum at Chiswick

The census of 1871 revealed that Lady Mordaunt was living at an asylum in Chiswick, on the western outskirts of London, whose clinical director was Dr. Thomas Harrington Tuke. Tuke was, at the time, one of the most respected practitioners in lunacy and played a prominent role in the Mordaunt case; his previous patients included the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor, the painter Sir Edwin Landseer and Sophy Gray, sister-in-law and muse of the painter John Everett Millais. Tuke had a humane reputation and the régime at Chiswick was, by the standards of the day, very enlightened, with high staffing ratios and reasonable levels of freedom accorded to its patients.

Divorce

There is little, if any, publicly available information about Lady Mordaunt’s life between 1871 and her death in 1906. After various legal appeals, including to the House of Lords (in its former judicial capacity), Sir Charles Mordaunt’s petition for divorce was remitted to the original court on the basis that Lady Mordaunt’s insanity was not, as a matter of law, a bar to proceedings. Eventually, in 1875, Sir Charles was granted a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery with Lord Cole, who did not contest the action. In 1878 Sir Charles, by then in his forties, married Mary Louisa Cholmondeley, the 16 year old daughter of a parson.

Violet Mordaunt

In 1890 Lady Mordaunt’s daughter Violet married Viscount Weymouth, later 5th Marquess of Bath. She died in 1928. Her son Henry, the 6th Marquess, was famous for developing a safari park on the family's estate at Longleat. She was the grandmother of the present 7th Marquess.