The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England

by Jenifer Roberts

  Princess Victoria was in the royal box on 22 December. The ballet was not to her taste:

  It is a stupid subject … long, heavy and tiresome, nay would not be bearable were it not for the charms of the delightful Mademoiselle Duvernay, who looked lovely, and danced … and acted beautifully. She certainly is the best after the inimitable Taglioni, as she dances quite in the same quiet, graceful, light style. Duvernay … has a beautiful figure … and is so lady-like … She is very much improved since I last saw her two years and a half ago.

  Her two Spanish dresses are beautiful, particularly the one in the second act in which she dances the Cachucha, a very singular Spanish dance, all alone, with castanets, which she does beautifully, quite, so gracefully and with so much spirit. Her last dress, though not perhaps very lady-like, is very becoming; it is that of a Spanish officer of former times, and she looks so handsome.13

  Four days later, the Christmas pantomime opened in the Theatre Royal. This included an ‘obscene caricature’ of Yolande’s Cachucha, performed by a Mr Matthews, a parody received with ‘roars of laughter and applause’. A weekly newspaper was not amused:

  The best approved thing in the pantomime was a dance, or rather a series of disgusting postures called in the play-bills ‘the popular cashew-nut dance’, which was done by the Clown in a dress something like the one worn by Duvernay in the Spanish dance in the ballet recently produced at this theatre … We cannot tell what are the feelings of Duvernay, but were we a performer of her distinction, and if so gross a parody of anything – universally accounted great – that we had done were given in the theatre that we assisted to support, we would certainly never enter its doors again.14

  At the end of the article, the newspaper added a comment: ‘Since the above was written, we have learnt that Miss Ballin appeared in the Devil on Two Sticks on Thursday night, as the substitute for Duvernay, who is reported indisposed.’

  Yolande remained in a huff for almost two weeks. As the Theatrical Observer reported on 2 January:

  On Saturday evening Miss Ballin was again the substitute for Duvernay who continues indisposed … When Miss Ballin consented to undertake the part, her husband applied to Mr Bunn to know what was to be done about the dresses, as it was not to be expected that his wife could hire them; the lessee replied that she should have Duvernay’s. On sending to the sick danseuse for them, she returned for an answer that if Miss Ballin wore any part of her dresses, she would never enter Drury Lane Theatre again.

  Bunn was dismayed that Yolande had taken such exception to the parody. She was contracted to appear at the Theatre Royal until the end of January so he did his best to mollify her. When she finally returned to the stage on the 7th, she was ‘received with great enthusiasm’. On the 24th, she gave her benefit performance and was ‘overpowered by plaudits; overwhelmed by garlands and bouquets; at one time she was affected even to tears by the enthusiastic applause’.15

  The additional six weeks at the Theatre Royal had ended but Yolande’s popularity was still so great that Laporte, manager of the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, was now in negotiation with Duponchel to keep her in London for a further two months. At first Duponchel refused but, after Laporte offered to pay £200 and Yolande agreed to add a further two months to the length of her contract in Paris, he agreed that she could stay in London.

  She opened in the King’s Theatre on 25 February in a new ballet, Le Brigand de Terracina, which included a pas seul danced in a nightgown before a mirror. Her performance received glowing reviews. The Times wrote that ‘the dancing was very good, particularly the pas seul of Duvernay in her nightdress before the looking-glass; her expression of perfect simplicity is exceedingly clever’. The Morning Herald considered the pas seul to be ‘one of the most charming pieces of acting ever exhibited on any stage’. The critic of The Satirist was quite overcome:

  The bedroom scene is rendered by her quite as warm – to say nothing further – as the frequenters even of the stalls can desire. The fashion in which she reclines on the bed we must not attempt to describe, but it inspired the bald-pated part of the audience (those whose brains are too ardent for the continued existence of hair above the ears) with intense delight.

  On 16 March, the King’s Theatre revived the ballet Beniowsky, which now included the famous Cachucha. Princess Victoria watched a performance on 1 April and wrote in her diary that Yolande performed a pas de deux ‘delightfully and looked very pretty’ and danced the Cachucha ‘with great grace, spirit and character; she dances it delightfully. I am very fond of this dance, for it is so characteristic, peculiar and so truly Spanish; the actions are certainly somewhat bold, but Duvernay dances it in great perfection. She was compelled to repeat it.’16

  Twelve days later, on 13 April, Yolande gave her benefit performance in the King’s Theatre, dancing the Cachucha and the pas seul before the mirror. The occasion was ‘a tremendous hit’, according to the critic of The Times:

  The house seemed as full as it could be … a brilliant as well as a crowded one, a larger number of the subscribers than usual retaining their boxes for this occasion … Mademoiselle Duvernay’s rise in general estimation has been rapidly accelerated in this and the past season, yet it rests evidently on the most secure basis – that of pleasing unaffected manners, in addition to real merit.

  As Yolande acknowledged the applause from the audience, she may have seen, sitting alone in a private box close to the stage, a small man of unremarkable appearance leaning forward in his seat and gazing intently in her direction. He was the curiously named Stephens Lyne Stephens. He was thirty-five years old and heir to one of the largest non-aristocratic fortunes in the country.

  4

  A PRINCELY FORTUNE

  Mr Stephens might make a vast deal more money by the factory than he does. He is already one of the richest men in Portugal and there is not, I suppose, a better man in any country.

  Antony Gibbs, 10 December 1798

  While Yolande remains on stage at her benefit performance, acknowledging the applause from the audience, this story goes back in time to the origins of the Lyne Stephens fortune and the circumstances which led the unassuming young man in the opera box to make the biggest decision of his life.

  The story of the fortune began in 1778 when the young man’s father, Charles Lyne, moved to Lisbon at the age of fourteen, invited there by his father’s cousins, the Stephens brothers, who had made their home in Portugal. Charles worked as a merchant in Lisbon for twenty-five years and became rich in his own right from the lucrative business of Anglo-Portuguese trade.

  English merchants in Portugal were laden with privileges. Under several treaties, they were exempt from domestic taxes, from the jurisdiction of Portuguese courts, and from most commercial regulations. Through their activities, the country had become reliant on imports, unable to feed or clothe its people from its own resources. It depended on imports of textiles, wheat, fish and other foodstuffs, which it paid for in gold and diamonds from the mines of Brazil – and because of the advantages conferred by treaty, it was the British merchants who handled the bulk of this highly profitable trade.

  Nine years before Charles arrived in Portugal, his eldest cousin, William Stephens, had been given ownership of the royal glass factory in the village of Marinha Grande, ninety miles north of Lisbon. He was also granted a number of important privileges: exemption from all domestic taxes; a monopoly of glass supply in Portugal and its colonies; freedom to set his own prices; and free use of fuel from the royal pine forest, a valuable benefit because of the energy-intensive nature of glass production.

  These privileges allowed William to build up an enormous fortune. They also allowed him to create a welfare state in Marinha Grande, decades ahead of similar developments in Britain. He paid good wages; opened a school where his apprentices received an education; provided a first-aid post where sick or injured workers were treated free of charge; organised a relief fund for illness; and set up a generous pension scheme. He emp
loyed teachers of music and dance, and built a theatre to one side of his private garden. Every Sunday, his glassworkers acted in theatrical productions, including plays translated from Shakespeare and Voltaire.

  William’s estates in the area totalled 15,000 acres of scrub and heath, which he used to extract sand for use in the factory. Having seen the poor harvests obtained by local farmers, and the backward methods used to cultivate the soil, he reclaimed some of his land and used it to teach more up-to-date methods of cultivation. He introduced the rotation of crops and imported mechanical seed drills and iron ploughs from England. He planted vegetable gardens and orchards, with fruit trees grown from imported seed.

  The factory became so well known that it was visited twice by the reigning queen of Portugal, Maria I, together with the royal family and the entire court. The second visit, in July 1788, lasted for three days; Maria slept in William’s private house and attended two performances in the factory theatre. As his sister Philadelphia wrote to a cousin in London:

  The performers acquitted themselves with honour and received universal applause, not only from the Royal Family but from all the audience who thought it impossible that a rude country place like this could have produced such good actors. Their surprise was greatly increased on finding that the greatest part of them had never been more than two or three leagues from this parish, and that they all worked in the Fabrick …

  My brother has attained what nobody else in the Kingdom can boast of, which is the honour of entertaining the Royal Family and all the Court for two days, and given universal satisfaction to everybody from the Queen down to the scullions and stable boys. The first time of Her Majesty’s coming here was not so surprising, as curiosity to see the Glass Fabrick was supposed to be the motive, but that she should come a second time and sleep two nights in the house of a private person, an Englishman and a Protestant, is a thing that never entered the idea of the Portuguese and has struck all people with amazement.1

  ‘I never saw so excellent an establishment,’ wrote the merchant Antony Gibbs when he visited the factory ten years later, ‘where such strict discipline is observed to the hours of attendance or more diligence appears through the work of the day … Mr Stephens might make a vast deal more money by the factory than he does. He is already one of the richest men in Portugal and there is not, I suppose, a better man in any country.’2

  William Stephens died in 1803, leaving the factory and his fortune to his younger brother, John James. Twenty-three years later, John James left the factory to the Portuguese state, legacies totalling £64,000, and his entire residuary estate to his ‘much loved and respected cousin Charles Lyne’. This consisted of John James’s financial assets in Portugal, described by the British consul in Lisbon as ‘a princely fortune of above £700,000’, together with considerable financial securities in London.

  Charles had left Portugal in 1803 to become leading partner in the merchant house of Lyne, Hathorn and Roberts in the City of London. He gained a reputation as a shrewd and able businessman, and in the spring of 1810 he was called to give evidence before the select committee investigating the high price of bullion. Against his advice, the committee concluded that over-issue of banknotes had led to the depreciation of paper money against the price of gold and recommended a return to the gold standard no less than two years in the future.3

  A few months later, after the politician William Huskisson had written a pamphlet endorsing the committee’s conclusion, Charles published a pamphlet of his own. Exasperated by what he perceived as ignorance, he explained that Huskisson’s opinions were ‘erroneous and dangerous in the extreme. Never was a doctrine more pregnant with evil nor, thank God, one founded upon more fallacious principles.’4

  He then gave a complicated description of exchange rates between countries and shipments of bullion from one country to another to explain the high price of gold against paper money. ‘Mr Lyne lays considerable stress upon the state of exchanges between the different countries of Europe,’ wrote another merchant after reading his pamphlet, ‘which I am persuaded hardly any man in this country can comprehend.’5

  Parliament rejected the committee’s recommendation. The price of gold continued to rise and, in need of bullion to cover the increasing costs of Wellington’s campaigns in the Peninsular War, the government asked the Bank of England to buy gold to the value of £2 million. Impressed by Charles’s trading experience with South America, the Bank employed Lyne, Hathorn and Roberts to import half this amount from Brazil.

  After writing detailed instructions about the types of gold to be purchased, weighing and measuring techniques, insurance and shipping matters, Charles urged his agent in Brazil to strict secrecy:

  An operation of this nature may be viewed with no small degree of jealousy. It is therefore our most particular desire that you exert your utmost skill to do the transaction in that circumspect, careful, quiet manner, so that no person but yourself shall ever know the extent to which you are to carry out your operations. Nothing further should be known, even to your confidential clerks and assistants, than what may be absolutely necessary. The management and execution of the operation must be confined to as few of your clerks as possible and the greatest secrecy be enjoined, not only to them, but also to the captains and officers of the ships which take off the gold.6

  Lyne, Hathorn and Roberts received a commission of 6 per cent on the transaction, of which a third was passed to the agent in Brazil. The bank covered all transport and insurance costs, so the profit on the deal was £40,000 (£3 million).

  Charles had retired from business when he inherited John James’s fortune in November 1826. ‘In grateful and affectionate regard for the memory of his kinsman from whom he derives considerable property’, he applied for royal licence to take the name Lyne Stephens. To his own assets of half a million pounds, he had added the Stephens wealth of more than a million, a total fortune estimated at over £150 million in today’s values.

  The heir to all this wealth was his only son, the unassuming young man in the opera box. Given a plural name in honour of both his cousins in Portugal, Stephens Lyne was born on 4 October 1801. The only son in a family of four daughters, he was brought up by nurses and maidservants in a narrow terraced house in Devonshire Place in London and was unaccustomed to the rough and tumble of normal boyhood.

  During his childhood, his father spent long hours in his counting-house in the City and had firm opinions on how young men should conduct themselves in business. William Gibbs, twenty-one years old, received a taste of these when he visited Devonshire Place on 20 April 1812. As he wrote to his brother that night:

  It struck me that, having been ill and having no one to pour out his advice upon for some time, he thought it a good opportunity of relieving himself of it and giving it all to me. First I was to remove to his part of the town … and ride into the City every morning with merchants of the first eminence who lived in the same neighbourhood and with whom I was instructed how to get acquainted.

  Then I was never to [attend] a gambling club, even though I had no intention to play – no, no, it must never be said that Mr William Gibbs was even seen at such a place. It was a bad custom too, which many young men had, of continually lounging away their evenings at playhouses, but there was a place at which I should now and then appear, as being a gentlemanlike and proper place, and that was the opera. It is well that I should be seen there now and then …

  I dine there on Friday when I suppose I shall have an improved edition of my conversation with him this morning. He is certainly a very clever, sharp man, and though he carries his line of dictating to others to a disagreeable length, yet I believe he means well and a good deal of very useful information may be gained from him.7

  On Friday evening, he was regaled with another ‘interesting and instructive’ lecture, during which Charles’s wife fell asleep on the sofa. ‘It is astonishing what a deal of information one gets out of the little man,’ he wrote the following morning. Some of
Charles’s advice may have proved useful: in years to come, William Gibbs would make a fortune from the importation of guano from South America and he built Tyntesfield, the Gothic Revival house in Somerset now owned by the National Trust.

  At the time of William’s visit to Devonshire Place, Stephens had spent two years as a boarding pupil at Fulham Park House, a ‘respectable school’ in Parson’s Green run by the Reverend Joshua Ruddock and a widow, Mrs Bowen, ‘a comely plump matron in a stone-coloured silk gown’. One of his near-contemporaries was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who arrived at the school in 1812. In his memoirs, Bulwer-Lytton described his first day at what he called ‘that horrible institution’, an ordeal which Stephens had undergone two years earlier:

  Mrs Bowen [who] had more especial charge of the younger children … good-naturedly sent two boys, not much older than myself, to spend the evening with me in the parlour, and explain the nature of the place. These boys seemed to me like fiends … their language was filthily obscene and my ignorance of its meaning excited their contempt, which they vented in vague threats and mocking jeers …

  Once in my little crib, I thought I was safe; but scarcely had I cried myself into an unquiet doze, when I was suddenly seized, dragged from bed, and carried away in the dark, gagged and bound … I was borne into the open air, on a cold winter’s night; and, two of my tormentors laying hold of my arms, and two of my legs, I was swung against the trunk of a tree in the playground, to undergo an operation termed bumping.8

  After leaving the school, Stephens was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took four and a half years to complete what was normally a three-year course of study. ‘Cambridge is but a short distance from that place of sporting notoriety, Newmarket,’ explained a writer of the time, ‘so it is next to impossible but that a youth of an inspiring mind should be up to all the manoeuvres of a racecourse.’9