The Dancing Marquess
He spent the family fortune, mortgaged the mansions and ended up with debts of around £60 million pounds in today’s money. Why do we not know more about his life?
I stumbled across Henry Paget, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey, last week when I was trawling through Youtube documentaries about Edwardian Britain. He was only mentioned briefly, a vignette between stuffy interviews with the Dukes and Earls of early 90s Britain. The stories I’ve been able to find about him since mainly focus on his wealth and his debts. So let us start there…
Henry Paget was known as the “dancing marquess”. He became enormously wealthy when his father died. His estates brought in an annual income of £12 million in today’s money.
He quickly started spending it. He bought jewellery and furs. He converted the chapel at the family estate in Wales into a theatre and danced what became known as the “butterfly dance” on stage. He founded a theatre company and took it on tour around Europe.
"He bought a car that converted the exhaust fumes into rose-scented perfume, he had a fleet of poodles. He made a ping-pong jacket and wanted it to be green - so he made it out of real emeralds”, actor and writer Seiriol Davies, who wrote and performed a musical show based on Paget’s life tells the BBC.
During the five years that followed his father’s death he spent his whole inheritance and ended up deeply in debt. A couple of years later, at the young age of 29, he died of tuberculosis in Monte Carlo.
And that’s it. That’s all I’ve been able to find. His extended family burned his private papers, letters and diaries. His life deserves a book. I want to know what he was thinking, feeling, what drove him. Seiriol Davies says:
"It's not just a story about a whacky man who splashed money up the wall - it's also about a man who was erased from history."
– Facts from the BBC and Wikipedia. Picture from Wikipedia as well.