Crowning glory

Matthew Dennison explores the life of the Dancing Marquess of Anglesey, whose penchant for sparkle led to him owning one of the most magnificent tiaras of all time

- Matthew Dennison

AN Aubrey Beardsley illustration come to life’ was how architect Clough Williams-Ellis remembered Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey: ‘A sort of apparition —a tall, elegant and bejewelled creature.’ Unlike Beardsley’s illustrations, in sinuous black and white, the short-lived Lord Anglesey was a Technicolor vision. To a journalist from the Daily Mail, in October 1904, he apologised ‘for not appearing before you in peacock-blue plush wearing a diamond and sapphire tiara, a turquoise dog-collar, ropes of pearls and slippers studded with Burma rubies’. Six months later, the 29-year-old aristocrat was dead, a victim of pneumonia brought on by tuberculosis in exile in Monte Carlo, bankrupt and disgraced, a glamorous pariah in Edwardian high society, ‘that frilled and painted decadent’, as the Nuneaton Observer described him, witheringly.

Today, little remains of Lord Anglesey’s sunburst existence. To his successors, the man who, in 1898, inherited the equivalent of £60 million and an annual income estimated at £12 million, plus 30,000 acres in Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Dorset and Anglesey, bequeathed mountainous debts and a fragrant reputation. His contemporaries called him ‘the Dancing Marquess’. Censorious obituaries labelled his, uncompromisingly, a wasted life.