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ELLEN MANNERS SUTTON: SCANDAL AT THE SPEAKER’S HOUSE
On 6 December 1828 the Rt Hon. Charles Manners Sutton, great-grandson of the third Duke of Rutland, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Speaker of the House of Commons, married beautiful and vivacious Irish widow Mrs Ellen Home Purves at St George’s Church, Hanover Square:
In vain his daughters … threw themselves at their parent’s feet and implored him not to disgrace himself; tears and supplications were in vain. The Speaker would have his way, would give his casting vote and Mrs Purves is at length nestled within the precincts of St Stephen’s Chapel.
Or so speculated William Beckford, embittered social outcast, expressing horror that Manners Sutton, ‘theex-officio as it were of public morals’, was now bound to ‘that errant lady’.1 The contrast with Ellen’s predecessor, respectable Elizabeth Abbot, could not have been greater.
Other contemporaries agreed. Although Ellen Manners Sutton was soon established in high society, her past – reputedly as a kept woman and the mother of several illegitimate children – was always to be held against her by those professing more traditional values. So too was the fact that she was the younger sister of Lady Blessington, a high-profile author and literary hostess, much reviled for her own racy life.
But the Speaker’s new spouse soon became one of the ‘fashionables’, a prominent society hostess and a powerful, dominating and dramatic presence in the Palace of Westminster. The press reported her activities with relish, and she evoked a mixture of repulsion, envy and admiration. The story of her rise reveals the extent to which an attractive, unconventional, determined and ruthless woman was able to carve out political and social influence at Westminster, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of her lifestyle to the full. However, her later decline into financial hardship and ill health shows how fragile and transitory such a gilded existence could be.
ELLEN’S FORMATIVE YEARS
Born in 1791, at Knockbrit near Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ellen hailed from an old Irish Catholic gentry family. Her father, Edmund Power, a magistrate and businessman, was unstable, violent and periodically insolvent. Ellen first comes into public view in her early teens, attending society assemblies in Clonmel. Here, she and her older sister Margaret, both well educated, were said to have impressed the people of the town with their precocious cultivation and charm, although Ellen, already very comely, ‘seemed conscious of being entitled to admiration’.2 At this time, there was nothing to suggest that these two sisters would go on to lead lives which – even discounting jealous gossip and vitriol – would enthral any modern soap-opera audience and which would take them to the heart of the British establishment.
In 1804, as soon as she reached 15, the legal minimum age for marriage, Margaret was forced by her parents into wedlock with an apparently prosperous army captain, Maurice St Leger Farmer. Farmer soon proved violent and abusive towards Margaret and was disgraced after making a brutal attack on his commanding officer. He was rapidly banished to serve in India, but Margaret’s refusal to accompany him there left her a social outca
