Harriet Sarah, Lady Mordaunt (née Moncreiffe; 7 February 1848 – 9 May 1906), 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 she spent the remaining 36 years of her life out of sight in a series of privately rented houses, and then in various private lunatic asylums, finally ending her days in Sutton, Surrey.
Early life and family Lady Mordaunt was born Harriet Moncreiffe. Some writers have referred to her as "Lady Harriet Mordaunt", but that style would only be correct if she had been the daughter of an earl, marquess, or duke. Her parents were Sir Thomas Moncreiffe of that Ilk, 7th Baronet (1822–1879) of Moncreiffe House, Perthshire, Scotland, and his wife, Lady Louisa Hay-Drummond (died 1898), eldest daughter of the Earl of Kinnoull. They had sixteen children, including eight "beautiful" daughters, most of whom were in due course "extremely well married".Report of the Mordaunt case, Pall Mall Gazette, 11 March 1875; reprinted in The New York Times, 24 March 1875. Lady Mordaunt was their fourth child and fourth daughter. Her sister Georgina, the Moncreiffes' third daughter, known to the family as "Georgy", became Georgina, Countess of Dudley, her husband having been dubbed "frizzle wig" by Lady Mordaunt. In 1920, Margot Asquith recalled that "groups of beauties like the Moncrieffes ... were to be seen in the salons of the 'eighties. There is nothing at all like this in London today".The Autobiography of Margot Asquith, Volume I (1920). Beginning with the Moncreiffes, Mrs. Asquith named several other beautiful groups and individuals, including the Conynghams, Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston, and Lady de Grey, later Marchioness of Ripon. While observing that London society was "neither better nor worse" in 1920 than forty years earlier, she was unable to think "where all the beauty has gone to!"
Sir Thomas Moncreiffe served in the Grenadier Guards and become a captain in the Atholl Highlanders. He was captain of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews.
The atmosphere at Moncreiffe has been described as "free and easy". During her childhood, Harriet Moncreiffe was acquainted with Albert Edward, Prince of WalesDeborah Fisher (2005) Princesses of Wales and, after his marriage to Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, attended informal parties, including dances at Abergeldie Castle,Georgina Battiscombe (1969) Queen Alexandra near Balmoral, which the Prince used as his Highland home.E. F. Benson (1930) As We Were: A Victorian Peepshow In November 1865, she was invited to Sandringham, the Waleses' house in Norfolk, and subsequently joined the Prince and Princess on various occasions in London. Lady Mordaunt grew up to be pretty and flirtatious,Obituary of Sir Richard Hamilton, Daily Telegraph, 3 October 2001 but also headstrong and, ultimately, rather unbalanced.Christopher Hibbert (2000) Queen Victoria: A Personal History
Marriage
On 6 December 1866, at the age of 18, Harriet Moncreiffe married Sir Charles Mordaunt, 10th baronet (1836–1897) at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Perth. Sir Charles was a Conservative M.P. for the two-member constituency of South Warwickshire from 1859 to 1868. Through his brother, John Murray Mordaunt (1837–1923), who played cricket for Warwickshire and I Zingari, he was the uncle of three other cricketing Mordaunts, H.J. (Sir Henry Mordaunt, 12th baronet), E.C. and G.J., who all appeared at county level.Benny Green (comp., 1986) The Wisden Book of Obituaries; Sir Pelham Warner (1946) Lord's 1787–1945. H.J. was notable also for throwing a goal in the Eton Wall Game of 1885 (Wisden, loc.cit.) and was a member of the shooting party on which Viscount Drumlanrig, son of the Marquess of Queensberry, supposedly committed suicide in 1894 (a verdict doubted by Mordaunt as technically impossible) (Leo McKinstry (2005) Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil).
The couple lived at Walton Hall, Warwickshire, which, to mark his coming-of-age, Sir Charles had commissioned in the fashionable Gothic Revival style from the architect George Gilbert Scott,Daily Telegraph, 3 October 2001 who later designed St Pancras railway station in London.John Betjeman (1972) London's Historic Railway Stations A descendant of Sir Charles once counted 72 bedrooms at Walton.Roger Wilkes, "House of fun: Walton Hall, Warwickshire", Daily Telegraph, 16 January 2002 They also had a residence in Belgrave Square, London.
The Mordaunts remained 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.
Extramarital 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, which was then part of the United Kingdoms of Sweden and 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's 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. E-book
Parliament rose on 28 July 1868, and in November Sir Charles did not stand for re-election. The Liberal Party swept to power at the first general election since Disraeli's Reform Act 1867.Roy Jenkins (1995) Gladstone By then, Lady Mordaunt was five months pregnant. On 28 February 1869 she gave birth prematurely to a daughter, Violet Caroline.The Daily Telegraph, 3 October 2001 & 16 January 2002. The timing was significant, in view of Sir Charles's absence on a 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 a hereditary sexually transmitted disease.Michael Havers, Edward Grayson & Peter Shankland (1977, revised 1988) The Royal Baccarat Scandal (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 declared to her husband, "Charlie, I have deceived you; the child is not yours; it’s Lord Cole’s". She further claimed to have committed adultery with "Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, the Prince of Wales and others, often and in open day".Keith Middlemas (1975) Edward VII 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.James Brough (1975) The Prince and the Lily. However, their content (though very similar to the sort of things he wrote some years later to his mistress, Alice Keppel) was, reportedly, innocuous.Sarah Bradford (1982) Disraeli When published later in provincial newspapers and The 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 premises, he had shot in her presence.For example, Edward VII: Prince of Pleasure (BBC2 TV, 2 April 2011); Jane Ridley (2012) Bertie: A Life of Edward VII p. 123 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, of which full details were given 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 Moncreiffe, 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 entry for 6 August, Princess Alexandra noted that "a commission has been ordered to investigate and report if Harriet Mordaunt is truly mad".Quoted in Battiscombe, op.cit.
Mordaunt v. Mordaunt, Cole & Johnstone (1870)
The resulting caseSee An Official Report of the Cause Célèbre: Mordaunt v. Mordaunt, Cole & Johnstone (Evans, Oliver & Co., 1870) came up for trial before Lord Penzance in the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes on 23 February 1870. Having been summoned to appear as a witness, the Prince of Wales was examined for seven minutes by Lady Mordaunt's counsel, the first time that a Prince of Wales had given evidence in open court. While admitting visits to Lady Mordaunt while her husband was away,Jane Ridley ( 2012) Bertie: A Life of Edward VII pp 125–127 he flatly denied any "improper familiarity" or "criminal act" with her – "Never!" – and was not cross-examined by Sir Charles's counsel, William Ballantine. 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".Quoted in Souhami, op. cit. Dominic Sandbrook, writing in 2012 shortly after revelations about Prince Harry of Wales's involvement in a game of "strip billiards" in Las Vegas, observed of the Prince of Wales's denial of impropriety with Lady Mordaunt that "nobody, of course, believed him" and that, by comparison, "Prince Harry looks a model of chastity" (Sunday Times, loc. cit.)
After a trial lasting seven days, and including evidence from the psychiatrist Dr Thomas Harrington Tuke, 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's petition for divorce was dismissed, while Lady Mordaunt was committed to an asylum.
A conspiracy?