There was, however, nothing calculated in Jane’s affair with her cousin, no deliberate attempt at retribution. She believed that the frothy romance with Edward was true love. A degree of ingenuousness would explain an incident which occurred the following spring, when Jane visited Holkham to see the latest addition to her grandfather’s growing new family.33
As usual Holkham was full of guests during March and April, including Jane’s parents, her maternal aunts – Anne, Lady Anson and Eliza Spencer-Stanhope – as well as sundry other family members who came and went, an archdeacon, a Captain Greville, various neighbours who called in casually and the diarist Thomas Creevey. There was also a man described by Creevey as ‘a young British Museum Artist who is classing manuscripts’.
He was Frederick Madden, aged twenty-six, an academic who specialised in and spoke Norman-French and Anglo-Saxon, and who was also a noted scholar in ancient manuscripts. In the spring of 1827 Madden was working in a freelance capacity with Mr William Roscoe of the British Museum, cataloguing Mr Coke’s manuscripts and hoping it might lead to a permanent position. Paid employment would enable him to marry his fiancée Mary, about whom Madden wrote each day, longingly, in his diary. Mary lived in Brighton with her widowed mother, who disapproved of Madden, having no wish to see her daughter married to an impecunious man, no matter how scholarly he might be.
It is Madden’s diary, rather than the more famous one of Creevey, that provides the clearest surviving description of Jane at that period, and also of the daily routine at Holkham. Frederick Madden was a conscientious man, and, as he meticulously recorded, he spent each day, from 10 a.m. until 4 or 5 p.m., working hard in the library. This was his second visit to Holkham; like the first, it would last a month or so. Everything went on as usual until Wednesday, 14 March, when something occurred to change his routine:
Wednesday 14th. In library from ten until five and went over some of the Greek Fathers which will, as before, prove the most tedious.
Lady Ellenborough, daughter of Lady Andover, arrived to dinner and will stay a fortnight. She is not yet twenty and one of the most lovely women I ever saw, quite fair, blue eyes that would move a saint, and lips that would tempt one to forswear heaven to touch them.34
One look and the sober scholar was smitten. It was completely normal for someone on meeting Jane to note before anything else her beautiful appearance; this started when she was in the cradle and would continue until she was over seventy. But Madden was infatuated. He found it impossible to concentrate on his work, and within two days he was finding excuses to finish work at noon to spend time with his host’s granddaughter. ‘Lady Ellenborough is such a charm that I find the library become a bore, and am delighted to be with her, and hear her play and sing, which she is kind enough to do.’ A day later he recorded: ‘From four till half past five with Lady Ellenborough in the saloon; she sings to me the most bewitching Italian airs, the words of which are enough to inflame one, did not the sight of so lovely a creature sufficiently do so.’35
Poor Madden. ‘Dearest Mary’ appears to have been forgotten and instead his diary is filled each day with Lady Ellenborough: tête-à-tête walks around the mile-long lake with her; sitting in the salon while she plays the guitar and sings to him; strolling in the garden with her past the bronze lions that guard the house’s entrance, to the extravagant fountain depicting Perseus and the Medusa; rides to the nearby fishing village of Wells-next-the-Sea, and back along the sweeping sandy beaches in her company; heads bent together over her sketchbooks; playing écarté in the drawing-room with her each evening. Madden was furious when a visitor, Captain Greville, called and robbed him of an opportunity to be alone with her.36
Ten days after her arrival Madden’s diary entry has degenerated into a hurried scrawl:
Saturday 24th. In library till 4 o/c. Then out. In the evening drew pictures for Lady Anne Coke and Miss Anson. Also played whist and won. Lady E. lingered behind the rest of the party and at midnight I escorted her to her room——Fool that I was!——I will not add what passed. Gracious God! Was there ever such good fortune?
Sunday 25th. Chapel in the morning. In the afternoon, walked out with Lady E. She pretended to be very angry at what had passed last night, but I am satisfied that, she——!
Satisfied that she what? Satisfied that she was at least as much to blame as he? Satisfied that she was as eager as he? Satisfied that she intended it to happen? We shall never know. Madden’s irritating slashes across the page convey only that he was emotionally overwrought.
Jane cold-shouldered him for a couple of days, advising her family that she intended to leave as planned in three days’ time. The day before her departure she relented her cool behaviour to the bewildered scholar:
Wednesday 28th. In library till 2 o/c then went with Lady E. tête-à-tête around the lake, and remained in one of the hermitages with her until 5 o/c. We have completely made it up. She is a most fascinating woman! Whist in evening. Won. Afterwards drew pictures in Lady E’s album, cupid on a lion.
Thursday 29th. To my infinite regret Lady E. left Holkham this morning. Since I parted with dear M[ary] I never felt more melancholy or vexed. Whist in the evening. Won.
Madden stayed on for a further fortnight, but, as quickly as he could decently escape, he returned (as he had come) by Mr Coke’s gig to Fakenham, then an uncomfortable seventeen-hour stage-coach journey to the Golden Cross Inn at Charing Cross and a hackney coach to his modest lodgings near the British Museum.37 He was, it is obvious, still upset and bewildered, though whether he was suffering from Jane’s absence or a severe attack of guilt he failed to say. Madden was a hardworking young man, but he often felt life was unfair to him and spent a lot of time justifyng himself. When he failed to obtain hoped-for positions of employment, for instance, he would justify the selection of a candidate he believed inferior to himself as being due to his own lack of important connections. On the subject of his short relationship with Jane, though, he is surprisingly silent. There is no suggestion that he was seduced; no hint of self-justification for his betrayal to Mary.
When he posted down to Brighton a few weeks later to visit ‘dearest Mary’, Madden booked into the newly opened Albion Hotel. He walked disconsolately on the pier for an hour, and ascertained that Lady Ellenborough was not in town. Nor was Lady Anson, from whom he thought he might obtain news of Jane. His hopes dashed, he returned his heart to Mary. His diary entries become happier and, as the days pass, linger once more on his fiancée: ‘In a new white satin bonnet … she looked lovely … How very kind has fortune been to me … her I love more than all the world.’38
Madden and Jane never met again, and it is difficult to place the incident in context. It is unlikely that Jane set out deliberately to seduce him. Perhaps she was simply dejected and, enjoying the young man’s obvious admiration,