Witley Court in Worcestershire was setting for some scandalous tales

It features the marital peccadilloes of Lord Ward, the 1st Earl of Dudley, who purchased the Court and estate from Lord Foley in 1838 for a then UK record property price equal to £115 million today. 

Obviously Ward was immensely rich, owning more than 200 mines in the Black Country and scores of iron and chemical works, but his spending was on an even more industrial scale.

The magnificent interior of Witley Court in its heyday

When asked by his solicitor to rein it in a bit, he replied that he couldn’t possibly live on less than £10 million a year. Sheer impossibility, old boy.

Among Ward’s many extravagances was jewellery and he once spent £60,000 (£7.5 million today) in one visit to the Vienna Exhibition. When his famous “Dudley Jewels” were shown at the French Exhibition of 1857, he spent so long admiring them he was eventually “taken into custody for loitering” by an over-zealous sergeant of police.

Witley Court in its prime

To match his taste for things expensive, Ward chose as his first wife Selina Constance de Burgh, who might have been stupendously rich herself and very beautiful, but made an unwilling bride.

Constance, as she was usually known, didn’t want to marry Ward because she was in love with someone else. However, her parents insisted and within a year she was dead.

Although Ward undoubtedly worshipped his young wife’s beauty, he had a strange way of showing it.

A royal shooting party in the deer park of Witley Court in December 1892. The Prince of Wales stands in the centre and to his left are the 2nd Earl of Dudley and his first wife Rachel

Used to owning things, he treated her like a lovely slave he had bought. Which didn’t go down well with the independently minded Constance.

Nevertheless he lavished expensive jewellery on her and when Lady Dudley attended functions with her husband she appeared literally ablaze with diamonds.

But Constance was to confide to a friend that her husband’s behaviour was beginning to scare her.

She said he had taken to making her sit for hours on a black satin couch, stark naked apart from ropes of pearls, while he admired her beauty.

She felt terrified and disgusted and protested to her father, but received little sympathy and was told just get on with it because apart from that Ward was a kind man.

The Countess of Dudley with family and friends at Witley Court in 1875

However Constance took a lover, Lord Dupplin, and became pregnant. Ward had his suspicions, which were confirmed one evening when he returned home early from a ball to see Dupplin exiting via the back stairs.

He immediately went to his wife’s bedroom and confronted her, saying: “Get up madam, my house is no longer yours; arrangements shall be made for your future, but henceforth you are no wife of mine.”

He told Constance to dress and then led her out of the Court past the servants, who had been gathered downstairs, and turned her out into the night.

The frightened young woman managed to reach her parents’ property, but they were as heartless as Ward and refused to take her in. After staying with her music teacher overnight, Constance travelled to Ostend the following day.

A few months later she was to die in childbirth on the Continent, aged only 22. Ward did bring her body home, but complained to friends that his wife had rotten teeth, which he insisted on showing them.

Georgiana Elizabeth Moncreiffe, second wife of the 1st Earl of Dudley who was one of the society beauties of the Victorian age and successor to the unfortunate Selina Constance de Burgh. By Alice Hughes, platinum print, circa 1906

In 1865 Ward, by then the 1st Earl of Dudley, married for a second time, another beautiful young lady called Georgina Moncreiffe. She was 17 and he was 48.