Morgan came to Florence for a very good reason. It was far from the scenes of his electoral nightmares, but much more to the point the city was one of the cheapest places to live in Europe. A man with a high sense of his own importance but no money could hardly have chosen better. We can get some idea of the attractions from the affairs of another expatriate in much the same boat, Captain Fleetwood Wilson of the 8th Hussars. He happened to be there on a year-long honeymoon when news reached him that he had been utterly ruined by his older brother, to whom he had lent all his money. The Wilsons were in a fix: they already had one child and another was on the way. Abused, betrayed, the gallant Captain (considered by his generation to be one of the greatest horsemen in England) was at his wits’ end. These straitened circumstances, however, did not prevent him from renting the Villa Strozzino. Built by a Strozzi 300 years earlier, the villa, with its elaborate arcaded front and two floors above, sat on a hill overlooking the city. Fine trees decorated its lawns and gardens and cypresses swayed ecstatically in the background. The internal arrangements were such that fifty years later Victoria herself occupied it on her visit to Florence. As Captain Wilson swiftly discovered, penury in Tuscany was a relative affair.
Morgan Thomas, the secretive and unclubbable newcomer, likewise chose his accommodation well. He rented the Villa Capponi, a short carriage drive from the city on its southern side. At one stroke, he entered into the kind of life so emphatically denied him in England. Like Strozzi, Capponi was a famous name in the history of the Republic. Indeed, when Morgan rode into the city through the Porta S. Giorgio, he could see the proud boast set up by Niccolo Capponi above the portals of the Town Hall in 1528: JESVS CHRISTVS REX FLORENTINI POPULI SP DECRETO ELECTVS. Christ might have been the only king the Florentines could accept – the inscription had been a jibe at the departing Charles V – but things were somewhat different now. The Austrians were in occupation, and the greatest man in Florence was not a Medici but the Russian millionaire Demidov, who maintained his new bride, Bonaparte’s niece, in the sumptuously appointed San Donato palace. The nominal ruler of the city and all the lands round about was the Grand Duke of Tuscany, cheerfully dismissed by his subjects as The Grand Ass. At the lower levels of society, the city was festering with every kind of adventurer and charlatan to be found in Europe. Morgan had been put in the unusual position – for him – of being monarch of all he surveyed, but what he saw he did not like very much.
The youthful Lady Dorothy Orford, a member of the Walpole family which had deep roots in Florence, had recently made a much more dashing entrance into the expatriate community, having ridden the son of the 1835 Derby winner, a seventeen-hand horse called Testina, all the way from Antwerp. This was more to the taste of the locals. She later commented. ‘At that time, society in Florence was somewhat mixed: indeed, there were a great many people of shady character, in addition to others of none at all – so much so was this the case that the town had come to be designated “le paradis des femmes galantes”.’
A paradise for whores was superimposed on and undoubtedly drew some of its custom from the well-established British colony. Many before Morgan had the same idea as he, some of them much more romantically motivated. Dante made the city a place of literary pilgrimage and the Brownings were by no means alone in wishing to live and write there. There were many painters and sculptors in residence and a long tradition of amateur theatricals. All the same, the atmosphere inclined to the raffish. Thomas Trollope, brother to Anthony, settled in Florence in 1843 and has left a snapshot of how the Grand Duke’s hospitality was abused at the Pitti Palace. At balls the English would ‘seize the plates of bonbons and empty the contents bodily into their coat pockets. The ladies would do the same with their pocket handkerchiefs.’ The Italian guests went further, wrapping up hams, chickens and portions of fish in newspapers. Trollope saw an Italian countess smuggle a jelly into her purse.
Behind the walls of the Villa Capponi, where he could direct a household with more servants in it than he had ever dreamed possible, Morgan Thomas played out his fantasies of being a rich and indolent aristocrat. He was living in rooms with high ceilings. The trouble was elsewhere. When he looked further abroad – when he looked outside his gates in fact – it was Florence itself that he reprehended – not any bit of it, but all of it. Though the British colony was various, it contained more scribblers and painters than he was accustomed to meeting and was headed by a man he quickly learned to fear and detest.
Her Majesty’s Minister Plenipotentiary for Tuscany was Henry Edward Fox, soon to be fourth Baron Holland. Fox’s wife was the attractive and flirtatious Augusta – ‘decidedly under three feet’, the diarist Creevey once reported, ‘and the very nicest little doll or plaything I ever saw’. It would be difficult to invent two people less likely to entrance the prickly and suspicious Thomas, who knew very well that Fox had learned of him and his political disasters through Ellice.
The author and socialite Lady Blessington drew a brief sketch of Fox as he was in those days. ‘Mr Henry Fox possesses the talent for society in an eminent degree. He is intelligent, lively, and très spirituel; seizes the point of ridicule in all whom he encounters at a glance and draws them out with a tact that is very amusing to the lookers-on.’
At any such meeting, Morgan was much more likely to be the butt of the conversation than an amused onlooker. Though he wore his hair in a dandified centre parting and clung loyally to the blue and yellow favoured by the Regency period, he was too short, too pugnacious and far too provincial to be of any interest to such great men as Fox. Lady Blessington, who was really rather a good journalist, had noticed some years earlier the fascination the British had for the Florentine portrait sculptor, Bartolini.
Every Lord and Commoner who has passed through Florence during the last few years has left here a memorial of his visit; and every lady who has ever heard that she had a good profile (and Heaven knows how seldom the assertion was true) has left a model of it on the dusty shelves of Bartolini … Elderly gentlemen with double chins resembling the breast of the pelican, requiring a double portion of marble in their representation … portly matrons too are ranged in rows with busts as exuberant as those that Rubens loved to lavish on his canvas … young ladies with compressed waists and drooping ringlets, looking all like sisters … and young gentlemen with formal faces and straight hair confront one at every step.
Bartolini stored these effigies on shelves in his studios and they were inspected in much the same way as the work of Michelangelo. They were on the tourist list. Mr Thomas and his wife belonged much more to that world of nameless and dusty nonentities than anything suggested by the glamour of the great Palaces. Georgina later wrote of the Florence years:
My father disliked Society – he loved his home; my mother on the contrary liked Society. My father did not like women to wear low necked dresses; my mother on the contrary wished to be like other people. My father’s opinion was that eleven o’clock at night was a respectable hour for leaving parties; this was the hour at which parties began. He obliged my mother to come home just at the time when she was beginning to amuse herself. My father would not call on this lady or that lady, or visit Madame A because she had a lover, or Madame B because she received Madame A. He would not even set foot at the English Embassy while Lord Holland was Ambassador, because gossip was afloat concerning Lady Holland. He seemed possessed with a passion for virtue, and he had been nicknamed at Florence ‘the policeman of Society’.
This is as good a portrait of Morgan as can be found, but Georgina added another very telling sentence: ‘I had inherited to the full his mania