Dude, Where Did You Get Your Threads? Or The Sad Life Of Henry Cyril Paget

Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey (1875-1905), nicknamed “Toppy”, was a British Peer who was notable during his short life for squandering his inheritance on a lavish social life and accumulating massive debts. 

Regarded as the “black sheep” of the family, he was dubbed “the dancing marquess” for his habit of performing “sinuous, sexy, snake-like dances” 

“The Complete Peerage says that he “seems only to have existed for the purpose of giving a melancholy and unneeded illustration of the truth that a man with the finest prospects, may, by the wildest folly and extravagance, as Sir Thomas Browne says, ‘foully miscarry in the advantage of humanity, play away an uniterable life, and have lived in vain.’”

Paget was the eldest son of the 4th Marquess by his father’s second wife, Blanche Mary Boyd. However, rumors persisted that his biological father was the French actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin, a rumour that gained some currency when, according to some sources, after the death of his mother in 1877, when he was two years old, Paget reportedly was raised by Coquelin’s sister-in-law in Paris until he was eight. That story seems to have been a confusion of facts. The sister-in-law, née Edith Marion Boyd was the fourth marquess’s aunt, one of his mother’s sisters, and she did not wed Coquelin’s brother Gustave until 1891. His stepmother, from 1880, was an American, Mary “Minna” Livingston King, the widow of the Hon Henry Wodehouse.

He attended Eton College, later receiving private tuition, and was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the 2nd Volunteer Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers; on 20 January 1898 he married his cousin Lilian Florence Maud Chetwynd (1876—1962). Upon the death of his father on 13 October 1898, he inherited his title and the family estates with about 30,000 acres (120 km²) in Staffordshire, Dorset, Anglesey and Derbyshire, providing an annual income of £110,000.

Lifestyle 

Paget swiftly acquired a reputation for a lavish and spendthrift manner of living. He used his money to buy jewelry and furs, and to throw extravagant parties and flamboyant theatrical performances. He converted the chapel at the family’s country seat of Plas Newydd, Anglesey, into a 150-seat theatre, named the Gaiety Theatre. Here he took the lead role, opulently costumed, in productions ranging from pantomime and comedy to performances of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband and Shakespeare’s Henry V. For three years he took his company on tour around Britain and Europe. His wife disapproved of his lifestyle and obtained a decree nisi of divorce on 7 November 1900; it was later annulled due to nonconsummation, according to Lady Anglesey’s grandson by her second marriage, the historian Christopher Simon Sykes. The breakdown of his marriage effectively gave Paget more freedom to enjoy his self-indulgent lifestyle. By this stage he had already begun to mortgage his estates to raise money.

Theft 

On 10 September 1901, Paget’s French valet Julian Gault took the opportunity of his employer’s absence at the theatre to steal jewellery to the value of £50,000. At the time, Paget was living in the Walsingham House Hotel in London. Gault, who was later arrested at Dover, testified in court that he had been instructed to steal the jewels by a French woman of his acquaintance called Mathilde (who had taken the jewels to France and was never found). Although Gault’s testimony was believed to be true, he pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey on 22 October and was sentenced to five years imprisonment.

Sexuality

Paget’s outrageous and flamboyant lifestyle, his taste for cross-dressing, and the breakdown of his marriage, have led many to assume that he was gay. Writing in 1970, for example, the homosexual reformer H. Montgomery Hyde characterised him as “the most notorious aristocratic homosexual at this period”. There is no evidence of any lovers of either sex, however, and he probably died a virgin – performance historian Viv Gardner believes that he was “a classic narcissist: the only person he could love and make love to was himself, because, for whatever reason, he was ‘unlovable.’” However, the destruction of all of his papers by his family make that open to question.

Financial trouble and death 

By 1904, despite his inheritance and income, Paget had accumulated debts of £544,000 and on 11 June was declared bankrupt. His lavish wardrobe, particularly his dressing gowns from Charvet, and jewels were sold to pay creditors, the jewels alone realizing £80,000.

In 1905, Paget died in Monte Carlo following a long illness, with his ex-wife by his side, and his remains were returned to St Edwen’s Church, Llanedwen, for burial. The Times reported that despite all that was known of him, he remained much liked by the people of Bangor who regretted to hear of his death. Lilian, Marchioness of Anglesey, married, in 1909, John Francis Grey Gilliat, a banker, by whom she had three children.

The title passed to his cousin Charles Henry Alexander Paget, who destroyed all the papers of the 5th Marquess and converted the Gaiety Theatre back into a chapel. It was at least in part owing to the debts left by the 5th Marquess that the family’s principal English estate at Beaudesert, Staffordshire, had to be broken up and sold in the 1930s.