Jane Digby
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jane Elizabeth Digby (April 3, 1807 – August 11, 1881) was an English aristocrat who lived a life of wild adventure.
Contents |
[edit] Family
Jane Digby was born in Dorset, daughter of Admiral Henry Digby and Lady Jane Elizabeth née Coke. Her father seized the Spanish treasure ship Santa Brigada in 1799 and his cut established the family fortune. As captain of HMS Africa he participated under Admiral Nelson's command in the Battle of Trafalgar. His estate, Minterne Magna, was inherited. Jane's maternal grandfather was Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester. Pamela Churchill Harriman was the great-great-niece of Jane Digby.
[edit] Marriages, scandal, and affairs
Notoriously promiscuous through much of her lifetime, she was first married to Edward Law, 2nd Baron Ellenborough (later Earl of Ellenborough) on October 15, 1824 who became Viceroy of India. They had one son, Arthur Dudley, who died in infancy. After affairs with her cousin, George Anson, and Felix Schwarzenberg, an Austrian statesman, she was divorced from Lord Ellenborough in 1830 by an act of Parliament. This caused considerable scandal at the time. Jane had two children with Felix before he left her in Paris.
She then moved on to Munich and became the lover of Ludwig I of Bavaria, but had a child by the Bavarian Baron Venningen, whom she married in a relationship based on convenience in 1832.
Soon she found a new lover in the Greek count Spyridon Theotoky. Venningen found out and challenged Theotoky in a duel. He wounded him but generously released her from the marriage, took care of her children, and remained her friend. Jane married Theotoky and they moved to Greece. Greece's King Otto became her lover. The marriage to Theotoky ended in divorce after the fatal fall of their 6 year old son.
Next came an affair with an Albanian general, acting as 'queen' of his brigand army, living in caves, riding horses and hunting in the mountains. She walked out on him when he was unfaithful.
[edit] Life in Syria
At age forty-six, Jane travelled to the Middle East, and fell in love with Sheikh Abdul Midjuel el Mezrab (also known as Shaikh Mijwal). Midjuel was the sheikh of the Mazrab section of the Sba'a, a well-known sub-tribe of the great 'Anizah tribe of Syria. Although he was seventeen years her junior, the two were married under Muslim law and she took the name Jane Elizabeth Digby el Mezrab, living with him for quite some time in the Bedouin style and adopting Arabic dress. Half of each year was spent in the nomadic style, living in goat-hair tents, while the rest was spent in the palace she built at Medjuel in Damascus.
In her later years Jane became friends with Richard and Isabel Burton while he was the British consul at Damascus, as well as Abd al-Kader al-Jazairi, a prominent leader of the Algerian revolution living in exile in Damascus at the time. She died of a heart attack in Damascus on August 11, 1881. After her death a young H. R. P. Dickson and his family moved in to her house.
Her bible was inscribed: "Judge not, that ye be not judged."
[edit] References
- Lovell, Mary S. (1998). A Scandalous Life: A Biography of Jane Digby. Fourth Estate.
- Ure, John (2004). In Search of Nomads. Constable and Robinson. ISBN 1-84529-082-8.
- Bedell Smith, Sally (1996). Reflected Glory. The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80950-8.
