‘Marquess of Anglesey’ porcelains are much sought after. What makes our Coalport example so unusual is that the pattern – a frieze of brightly coloured garden flowers on a sold gilt ground – is painted inside the cup. The only others we know that have with this feature belong to the Coalport Museum at Ironbridge.

The name derives from a hero of the Napoleonic Wars. The Earl of Uxbridge (Henry Paget) led a courageous charge of heavy cavalry at the Battle of Waterloo in1815, where he later lost a leg. The Prince Regent made him the 1st Marquess of Anglesey five days after the decisive victory over Napoleon.

Paget had served with distinction as a cavalry officer during the Peninsula War against Napoleon under the command of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, but scandalised society by conducting an affair with Wellesley’s sister-in-law. At the time, Lady Charlotte Wellesley, daughter of the Earl Cadogan and Mary Churchill, was mother of four children. Paget was also married. In 1809 the couple eloped, and to restore the family honour, Charlotte’s brother Henry Cadogan challenged Paget to a duel. It took place on Wimbledon Common, on the southern border of London. Pistols were discharged, but both parties missed their target and left the field uninjured.

The following year, Henry Wellesley had his marriage to Charlotte dissolved by private act of Parliament on grounds of her adultery. It was much harder for Paget to divorce his wife Caroline, who by that time was in love with the Duke of Argyll. Under English law, a wife could only divorce her husband if his adultery was compounded by “life-threatening cruelty.” Scottish law was more lenient, although it barred Charlotte from marrying Paget if she were to be identified with him in flagrante delicto. Charlotte was said to have kept her face shrouded by a black veil when chambermaids witnessed her in bed with Paget at hotels in Edinburgh and Perthshire.

Paget’s divorce was granted in Scotland, and he married Charlotte in Edinburgh on 15 November 1810. Caroline then duly married the Duke of Argyll. Adding more sauce to the scandal, one of Paget’s brothers also ran off with a married woman whom he wedded after her divorce. “What can be expected from a Paget, born & brought up in the centre of conjugal Infidelity & Divorces?” an exasperated Jane Austen wrote in a letter to her niece.

Paget inherited the tile Earl of Uxbridge when his father died in 1812. Arthur Wellesley was made Duke of Wellington in 1814.

During the Hundred Days, the high command in London made Uxbridge commander of cavalry and Wellington’s second-in-command. At the Battle of Waterloo, Uxbridge led a spectacular cavalry charge which checked the advance of the Grande Armée.
With fighting almost over, Uxbridge and Wellington were surveying the battlefield when an iron ball from a French canister shot (a type of anti-personnel artillery munition) passed between their horses and shattered one of Uxbridge’s knees. Wellington helped him dismount, and he was taken to a house in the village of Waterloo that was being used as a field hospital. A surgeon amputated the leg at mid-thigh without anaesthetic or antiseptic.

The owner of the house, one Hyacinthe Joseph-Marie Paris, asked if he might bury the severed leg in his garden, and Uxbridge consented.

Made 1st Marquess of Anglesey on 4th July 1815, he returned to his homeland a national hero. A 27-metre-high column, topped with a statue of the marquess, was erected in 1817 near the family retreat at Plas Newydd in North Wales, overlooking the island of Anglesey and the Menai Strait.

A revolutionary prosthetic leg, carefully carved from fruitwood, was hinged at the knee and ankle, preventing the toes froim catching on the cobbked streets, and allowing him to dance and ride a horse.The patented ‘Anglesey leg’ continued to be advertised until 1914.

The Marquess of Anglesey pattern first adorned soft-paste porcelains made in South Wales at the Nantgarw (pronounced nant-garu) factory near Cardiff, and at the Cambrian Pottery in Swansea, between 1813 and 1820. The creative genius behind both factories was William Billingsley, a porcelain painter by training. Financial losses eventually drove Billingsley and his partner Samuel Walker into the clutches of John Rose, founding owner of the rival Coalport works, where Marquess of Anglesey bone china was soon produced.

The hero’s severed leg proved a tourist money-spinner for the Paris family. Wealthy visitors, including the King of Prussia and Prince of Orange, paid to see the blood-stained chair where the amputation was performed, before being escorted to view an elaborately inscribed tombstone beside a willow tree where the leg had been interred.

In 1878, a son of the marquess visited the house in Waterloo and was aghast to find the leg bones on open display. To calm the resulting furore, the Belgian ambassador to London began an investigation and found the bones had been exposed during a storm that uprooted the willow. He demanded that the Paris family repatriate the relics, but they refused, and instead offered to sell them to the Pagets for an extortionate sum. The Belgian minister of justice then intervened and ordered the bones reburied, but this was not carried out. In 1934, the widow of the last male descendent of Hyacinthe Joseph-Marie Paris found the bones in her late husband’s study in Brussels and incinerated them in a central heating furnace.

‘The Dancing Marquess’

The 5th Marquess of Anglesey, Henry Cyril Paget (1875-1905), is remembered for his unbridled extravagance, love of drama and cross-dressing.

He was born in Paris to the second wife of the 4th marquess. His real father was rumoured to have been the famous French actor Benoit-Constant Coquelin, and between the ages of two and eight, he was brought up by Coquelin’s sister in Paris. Following his father’s third marriage to an American heiress, he was taken to live at Plas Newydd, where his chief companions were an elderly Scots nanny and a multitude of dogs. After schooling at Eton, and a stint as a commissioned lieutenant in the Royal Welsh Fusilers, Paget inherited the title and 30,000 acres (120 sq. km.) of family estates in Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Dorset and Anglesey, yielding an annual income of £110,000, a sum worth more than £11 million today.

In January 1898, nine months before his father’s death, he married his cousin, Lillian Florence Maud Cherwynd. During the honeymoon, he bought the entire front window display of a Parisian jewellers for his new bride. The marriage was never consummated and after two years was annulled. Although Lady Anglesey later requested the annulment be withdrawn, they would remain estranged. According to historian Christopher Sykes, their closest form of physical intimacy had been to ‘make her pose naked covered top to bottom in jewels’ which she also had to wear in bed.

Freed from marital constraints, Paget pursued his passion for the stage with reckless abandon. The family chapel at Plas Newydd, which he renamed Anglesey Castle, was gutted and replaced by a 150-seat theatre modelled on one in Dresden. A troupe of professional actors, who happened to be performing in nearby Llandudno, were hired on inflated salaries for the ‘Gaiety,’ as Paget called his theatre. For the first production, Aladdin, he lit a three-mile path from the nearest village with blazing torches. All the pantomimes and plays he staged were free to see.

For the next three years, the marquess and his company toured Britain and Europe, together with their own orchestra. The marquess travelled in a Pullman motor car with five attendants; the baggage and scenery required five lorries. Paget had a role in every performance, and his costumes were specially designed and made to order. One diamond-encrusted costume for a part in Aladdin was reportedly worth at least £100,000, or more than £1 million today. Stolen from a dressing room, he had another one ordered. During intermissions, he would sometimes perform a tableau vivant which he called his butterfly dance. Lord Berners, who was equally eccentric, recalled the marquess ‘clad in a white silk tunic, a huge diamond tiara on his head, glittering with necklaces, brooches, bracelets and rings. He stood there for a few moments motionless, without any mannequin gestures of display’. He would also hand out postcard photographs of himself in various poses, such as draped on a chaise longue.

On 10 September 1901, Paget attended a stage adaptation of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle at the Lyceum Theatre in London while staying at the Walsingham House Hotel. His French valet, Julian Gault, took advantage of his absence to steal valuable jewels from his hotel room, and Paget enlisted the help of Conan Doyle to try and get them back. Gault was arrested at Dover and sentenced to five years in prison. He testified that he had acted on the instructions of a French woman who took the jewels to France and was never found. A year later, a British detective disguised as Paget arrested a gang in a Parisian café who were trying to sell the jewels, including a pear-shaped pearl valued today at £1.2 million.

His extravagance extended to a gold tea service studded with diamonds, turquoise and garnets, and bejewelled collars for his poodles. His wardrobe contained 721 ties and scarves and hundreds of pairs of shoes. A jacket for playing table tennis was encrusted with emeralds. His annual bill for underwear alone cost £3,000. “I had braces woven of threads of gold instead of the usual elastic webbing that other men rely upon to support their trousers,” he later told a French journalist. There were also umbrellas and walking sticks set with rubies, diamonds, pearls, emeralds and amethysts. One of his five cars was equipped to emit rose-scented perfume from its exhaust.

Six years of inheriting his vast estate, the marquess was declared bankrupt on 11 June 1904, with debts of about £560,000, or almost £60 million today. His collections were auctioned off over a period of 40 days. Silk-lined suits and fur coats took up 900 lots. The jewels alone raised £80,000.

The disgraced marquess departed for a new life in France on a sizeable annual allowance granted by his creditors. He died of tuberculosis nine months later at Monte Carlo’s Hotel Royale, with Lily and his French ‘aunt’ at his side. He was only 29.

No family members greeted his coffin on arrival in England, or at the railway station on Anglesey for burial. The title passed to Paget’s cousin, Charles Henry Alexander Paget, who destroyed all the papers of the fifth marquess and turned the Gaiety Theatre back into a chapel. Today, the house and gardens at Plas Newydd are in the hands of the National Trust and open to the public.