Adeline, Countess of Cardigan and Lancastre
How’s this for a name? Adeline Louisa Maria de Horsey, Countess of Cardigan and Lancastre. As this ludicrous (and technically-illegal merging of titles by the woman herself) suggests, Adeline (1824-1915) did not do things by halves. Throwing caution to the wind, Adeline first came to the attentions of publicly-moralistic Victorian England when she became involved in a scandal. On several occasions in 1857 she was seen riding with the married 7th Earl of Cardigan without a chaperone. They were married a year later when Cardigan’s poor wife died. Polite society shunned Adeline despite the solemnization of their union.
The Earl died in 1868, and as a wealthy widow with a life-interest in the estates, Adeline was not short of suitors. One of these was the former Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, whom she rejected because of his bad breath. She instead met and married Don António Manuel de Saldanha e Lancastre, Conde de Lancastre, in 1873. She styled herself Countess of Lancastre, which was Anglicised to ‘Lancaster’, a probably-deliberate taunt to Queen Victoria, who used ‘Countess of Lancaster’ as her traveling pseudonym. Victoria had never forgiven Adeline for the Cardigan scandal, which seems to have delighted the Countess.
As she grew older, Adeline became markedly more eccentric. As a young woman she had been a famous sportswoman, and in old age continued to attend hunting meets across the country. Her cunning trick was to step out of her carriage, glance around, and then curse her groom for taking her horse to the wrong event. She could then watch the hunt with the rest of the spectators, in full hunting pinks. She also continued to shock polite society by smoking in public and wearing a leopard skin cape and tight red military trousers to cycle around London.
The parties she gave at the Cardigan estate at Deene, Northumberland, also sounded a hoot. As hostess, the septuagenarian Adeline delighted in dressing in mantilla and multiple layered skirts and playing the castinets. She would warn guests that Deene was haunted by a ghostly nun, disappear on a flimsy pretext, and then appear in a nun’s habit, drifting through the candlelit reception rooms. Polite guests would indulge Adeline by fainting and screaming in terror. As she neared the end of her life, Adeline kept a coffin in the Deene Ballroom, and staged rehearsals of her burial by climbing in.