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

by Jenifer Roberts

  Two months later, they left England to spend the spring and summer in Paris. In the autumn, they stayed in the Bedford Hotel in Brighton, enjoying the sea air for six weeks before returning to Lower Grove House for the winter. They repeated this pattern the following year, but plans for an extended stay in Paris in 1848 were foiled by the revolution in February that year.

  A reform movement had developed in France to expand the franchise, just as the Reform Act had expanded the franchise in Britain, but Louis-Philippe turned a deaf ear to the discontent. He abdicated two days after the uprising began, travelling in disguise to Dieppe where he boarded ship for England. The new republican government introduced liberal reforms, but Paris remained in a revolutionary frame of mind and there were further insurrections in May and June. In September, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew and heir of Napoleon I, returned from exile. His illustrious name gave him great popularity, particularly with the army, and in December – helped in great measure by stirring editorials written by Louis Véron in Le Constitutionnel – he was elected president of the republic.

  Yolande had lived through the July Revolution in 1830 when she was a ballet pupil in Paris. She remembered the barricades in the streets and the sounds and smells of gunfire. Now, living in luxury in Lower Grove House, she followed the news from her home city with concern. At the same time, her husband was paying attention to his ageing father who lived just a short distance away.

  Charles was eighty-four years old. The days of his grand dinners were over. When a cousin was shown around Grove House by the butler, she saw the long table in the dining-room laid with a single place setting.

  ‘Oh! What a melancholy sight,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, Madam, it is,’ replied the butler.2

  Towards the end of 1850, Stephens and Yolande moved into Grove House to keep him company. Father and son amalgamated their households and, when the 1851 census was taken on the night of 30 March, there were seventeen servants in Grove House: butler and under-butler, cook, housekeeper, valet, lady’s maid, two footmen, five housemaids, three kitchen maids and a gamekeeper. The coachman and groom lived in the stables, and a cottage on the estate housed two gardeners.

  In early May 1851, Stephens spent several days in London visiting the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. During his absence, his father died of ‘exhaustion from old age’ with only his butler, George Fisher, at his bedside. Although interments were no longer permitted in London churches, exceptions were made for those with private vaults. On 15 May, the funeral cortège made its way from Roehampton to St Marylebone, where Charles was interred beneath his old parish church alongside his wife and four daughters.

  Stephens was so grieved at the death of the father who had loved him and indulged him, so distressed that he had not been with him when he died, that Yolande took him away to the Bedford Hotel in Brighton. They left Roehampton three days after the funeral and stayed by the seafront for two weeks.

  Ten days after returning to Grove House, Stephens proved his father’s will in London. Written in his own handwriting, and signed on 14 November 1842, Charles had left £50,000 (£6.5 million) in trust for the granddaughter he had not seen since his son-in-law stormed out of Chicksands Priory in October 1835. He left legacies and annuities to a large number of his Lyne relatives, a year’s wages to his household servants, and £1000 to ‘my old, faithful, and very excellent servant, George Fisher’.

  Finally, he left the residue of his estate ‘to my very dear and much beloved and most excellent son, Stephens Lyne Stephens, who is my only son and the only child of mine now living’. Having come to the conclusion that Stephens might never marry, he had added a proviso:

  The property I leave to him will be his absolutely and he, of course, may do with it whatever he may think proper, but should he die unmarried, it is my wish and most earnest desire that he should leave the bulk of the property to his and my near relations, the Lynes, that is to say to such of them as he may think proper and in such proportions as he may think proper.

  The Royal Cornwall Gazette reported that Charles ‘was a man of great benevolence to whomsoever he found needing his assistance’. According to his niece, Mary Chudleigh, ‘he distributed his wealth by thousands every year, to relatives, friends and depressed merchants’. Stephens continued his generosity, ‘spreading his money by thousands, literally so. He was one of the noblest-minded and kindest of men.’3

  He helped many members of the Lyne family, paying for the education of some, giving money to others. He gave generously to charity and, because marriage to Yolande had mellowed the anti-Catholic opinions of an ultra-Tory, he also gave to Catholic institutions. ‘On looking over our annals and reports, we find many notes referring to the goodness of this worthy gentleman,’ wrote the mother superior of a convent in Hammersmith:

  He gave £500 towards the building of Nazareth House and on many occasions when driving by, he would stop the carriage and hand the sister who opened the door a five or ten pound note for coal or something else needful for the aged poor or orphan children, always with the injunction, ‘Mind, you are not to say anything of this to Mrs Lyne Stephens. She has her charities, I have mine’. Twice or three times a week, he would leave at the door bouquets of the choicest flowers from the hot-house, with the request that they be put on the altar for him.

  On one occasion, when two sisters were returning from Roehampton laden with cans of milk, Mr Lyne Stephens overtook them, stopped the carriage, and insisted on the sisters getting in with their cans, much to their discomfiture for the milk spilled over the carriage. Mr Lyne Stephens possessed that rare quality which makes the giving of charity so pleasing to those who give as well as those who receive, he never had to be asked.4

  Stephens had now inherited the entire Lyne Stephens fortune. With an annual income of £52,000 a year (£6.5 million), he set out to become a man of culture. He had already bought a few paintings from salerooms in Paris: a Claude Lorrain in December 1840; a coastal scene by Backhuysen three months later. Now he would acquire one of the most celebrated art collections in Europe. He and Yolande attended auction houses and sales of great European collections and bid successfully for old master paintings, French and Italian sculpture, Gobelins tapestries, French antique furniture, Sèvres porcelain, and a wide range of objets d’art, including Chinese dragons from the Summer Palace in Peking.

  He also set out to become a man of property. In the summer of 1851, he employed the architect William Burn to design alterations to the back of Grove House, remodelling the elevation and adding a new wing and an Italian-style terrace which he adorned with statuary and an intricately carved Viennese well-head.

  Three years later, he made improvements to the estate, employing the architect William Wardell to design a new lodge and gardener’s cottage. Wardell sailed for Australia soon after completing the work, taking with him a reference from Stephens. This is the only letter written by him to have survived the years:

  I was entirely satisfied and much pleased with your services as an architect in erecting some buildings here. You evinced talent, judgement and taste, combined with a conscientious and diligent discharge of your duties in superintending the works in progress. I consider you to be a finished architect possessed of much talent, having sedulously studied your art, and that you are thoroughly acquainted with it theoretically and practically.

  I am fully convinced that you are a man of scrupulous integrity and untiring industry. I much regret that you are leaving the country, because we cannot afford to lose men of talent and probity, and with a feeling for a conception of high art. I wish you success in the country to which you are proceeding. I think it cannot fail to attend you, and I only desire for you that it may be commensurate with your merit.

  On 10 May 1856, Stephens bought the Hôtel Molé, a hôtel particulier in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. ‘One of the historic mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré has just been sold,’ wrote the French journal L’Entr’acte five days later:
<
br />   It conjures up memories of Comte Molé, minister of King Louis-Philippe, but the new owner will be a celebrity of quite a different sort. She made her début as a dancer at the Opéra in 1831. She had an adorable figure, slim, supple, elegant, magnificent eyes and perfect legs. The ballet was called La Tentation. Into a witch’s cauldron diamonds, flowers and pearls were thrown, while the ballet danced around it to diabolical music. Out of it arose the beautiful Miranda.

  Albéric Second wrote a letter published in the same journal:

  The Hôtel Molé has recently been sold to an Englishman who has an income of two millions. His wife … created the role of Miranda in La Tentation as a remarkably beautiful dancer who was also very witty, something not so usual in the Paris Opéra. This dancer’s story is a legend and the Alexandre Dumas of the future will write long novels in many volumes about it.

  The Hôtel Molé occupied a corner plot between the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the Avenue Matignon and the Rue Rabelais. It was originally built for the Marquis de La Vaupalière in 1769 and was described as ‘the most delightful house in Paris’. In 1844, it was acquired by Comte Molé, who had served as minister under several administrations from Napoleon I to Louis-Philippe. He occupied the property from 1844 until his death in November 1855 and he was, according to Benjamin Disraeli, ‘a rich and cultivated man, a grand seigneur of the highest breeding’.5

  By the time Stephens acquired the Hôtel Molé, the Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had been underway for almost five years. Having taken power in a coup d’état in December 1851, Louis-Napoleon was no longer president of the republic. He was Emperor Napoleon III. His ambition was to restore the grandeur of France, to make his Second Empire as magnificent and powerful as the First Empire of his uncle Napoleon I.

  The style of decoration in the Second Empire was hugely ornate and grandiose. Yolande and Stephens redecorated the Hôtel Molé with painted ceilings, richly-carved and gilded woodwork, and heavy velvet furnishings. The decoration of one of the rooms on the ground floor was inspired by the Oeil-de-boeuf salon in the palace of Versailles, the royal ‘double-L’ on the cornice transformed into the letters ‘LS’.

  Every year, Yolande and her husband spent the spring and early summer in the Hôtel Molé, enjoying the glamour and the opulence of Second Empire Paris. ‘The salon or drawing room of a lady of fortune,’ wrote an Englishman who visited the city at about this time:

  exceeds everything in splendour that one can venture to imagine, the furniture being of the richest kind, the walls covered with mahogany relieved with gold borders, and now and then with glass, and in various parts of the drawing room are figures of exquisite workmanship, with couches covered with red velvet, ornamented on each side with artificial flowers.6

  In the autumn and winter, they led a very different life in the British countryside as Stephens hosted shooting parties in East Anglia and the Highlands of Scotland. In 1850, he rented the Glevering Hall estate in Suffolk from a fellow member of the Garrick Club. The property included an eighteenth-century mansion, a shooting lodge and 330 acres of land. He planned to turn his hand to farming and animal husbandry, and employed a farm manager to raise cattle and pigs.

  Two years later, he took the lease of Pitmain, a sporting estate near Kingussie in upper Strathspey in Scotland. The estate included a stretch of the River Spey, a loch stocked with trout, a grand hunting lodge adorned with stags’ heads and antlers, and 12,000 acres of grouse moor and farmland, together with a farmhouse and several cottages. Stephens enjoyed the shooting in Kingussie and Yolande was popular in the village. According to the Inverness Courier on 29 September 1853:

  Stephens Lyne Stephens and his Lady left Kingussie for the south on the 21st inst. This is their second season in this part of the Highlands. The charities of Mrs Lyne Stephens have been on the same liberal scale as last year, and she has not spared trouble or expense in supplying the wants of the needy in both clothing and in money.

  Stephens held the Pitmain estate for four years until he acquired a shooting estate of his own. About the time he bought Hôtel Molé, his lawyer, Meaburn Tatham, told him about an estate in the Breckland of Norfolk which his legal firm was handling and which was due to be auctioned in the summer.

  The Lynford Hall estate was one of the finest sporting estates in East Anglia, ‘a very valuable and important freehold estate … presenting an opportunity of investment rarely to be met with’. The eighteenth-century mansion was surrounded by ‘a beautiful park through which flows a branch of the River Wissey, intersecting the pleasure grounds and plantations and terminating in an extensive lake’. The estate included:

  ornamental pleasure grounds, shrubberies and fishponds, ice-house, stabling, kennels, carpenter’s dwelling, yard and workshops … ten substantial farmsteads, with all convenient agricultural buildings, nine game-keepers lodges, eighty houses, tenements, shops and cottages, a well-accustomed inn, and a corn windmill … upwards of 7700 acres of arable, meadow, pasture and woodland in a ring fence, comprising the entire parish of Lynford, and nearly the whole of the parishes of West Tofts, Mundford and Cranwich. The estate is abundantly stocked with game and wildfowl.7

  The auction was held on 2 July 1856 at Garraway’s Coffee House in Cornhill. Stephens had instructed Meaburn Tatham to bid on his behalf and Tatham bought the estate for £133,500 (£13 million).

  The existing house was not sufficiently grand for his purposes, so Stephens planned to demolish it and build a larger, more opulent mansion on slightly higher ground on the far side of the river. He re-employed William Burn and asked him to study Hatfield House in Hertfordshire before working on his plans. He had passed this Jacobean mansion many times on his journeys to and from Melton Mowbray and was impressed by its domes and towers and magnificent windows.

  William Burn had the largest country-house practice in Britain and the new Lynford Hall would be one of his biggest houses. The plans included a grand entrance hall and staircase, six large reception rooms, several smaller rooms for family use, and a total of fifty bedrooms and dressing rooms. The house would be plumbed with running water and lit by gas from a private gasworks. The ancillary accommodation included a servants’ wing, an extensive stable block and three entrance lodges.

  In the winter of 1856, Stephens and Yolande moved into the existing Lynford Hall where they planned to live during the shooting season until William Burn’s new house was ready for occupation. Work on the new house began the following autumn. It took five years to complete and cost £60,000 (£6.5 million). The project was so large that, in 1861, it swelled the census figures for the area by an additional 500 men, all employed on the building works at Lynford.

  In February 1858, because of the money he was spending in the county, Stephens was appointed high sheriff of Norfolk. The term of office lasted for one year and the role was largely ceremonial. Duties involved formal occasions and official dinners at which he appeared in the livery of his office, ‘olive green with scarlet braid and facings’, and arrived at functions in a ‘carriage drawn by four horses with two outriders’.

  At a dinner in his honour, he ‘expressed the deep interest he would henceforth take in the county from the hearty welcome with which he, a comparative stranger, had been received by gentlemen of all ranks’. To celebrate his appointment, he commissioned a life-size portrait of himself, an unflattering likeness for he was now grossly overweight and had chosen to be depicted with a wad of banknotes in his hand, a symbol of his status as the richest commoner in England, an unofficial title he had inherited after the recent death of a merchant banker.

  Stephens was not only overweight, he was also in very poor health. He smoked constantly, drank too much, enjoyed the rich food prepared by his French chef, and took little exercise. He began to feel unwell in the summer of 1859, suffering from faintness, sickness and headaches. His symptoms worsened in November during a shooting party in Lynford and, when he and Yolande returned to Roehampton in January, he retired to bed, no longe
r able to lift his heavy body on to his feet. Unaware of the danger, he was astonished when the doctor told him that he had only a short time to live.

  ‘Are you not surprised?’ Stephens asked him.

  ‘No,’ replied the doctor, ‘but I am very sorry.’8

  Stephens died on 28 February 1860. He was fifty-eight years old and may have suffered from a variety of conditions: diabetes, heart failure, high blood pressure. The doctor certified that he had died of albuminuria (protein in the urine) and ‘cerebral effusion’, fluid in the intracranial cavity which had caused most of his symptoms.

  The funeral service was held on 6 March in the Anglican church in Roehampton, after which a long cortège made its way across London to the cemetery in Kensal Green. Following the custom, Yolande remained at home during the funeral, the blinds of Grove House drawn against the winter light.

  She had grown fond of Stephens. He was the only person who had ever been kind to her. Her mother had controlled her, Louis Véron had used her to fill his theatre, Félix de La Valette had lived off her earnings. Stephens had bought her favours for his own reasons, forcing her to leave the stage, but since then they had shared a comfortable companionship for almost twenty-three years.

  She ordered elaborate mourning dresses of rich, jet-black silk, and during the next three weeks, the servants watched her small black-clad figure as she took slow, solitary walks around the lake at the back of the house. Now Stephens was gone, she was alone in a society which had little respect for her, which looked down upon her, not only as a woman with a sexual history, but also as a Frenchwoman and a Catholic.