A Right Royal Scandal by Joanne Major

Author:Joanne Major
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2016-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Love amid the Dreaming Spires

On 1 June 1837, Charley Cavendish Bentinck entered Merton College at Oxford University. The handsome youth who, as a boy, had played with the great Duke of Wellington in the drawing room of the pretty Brompton cottage in which Lord and Lady Charles Bentinck had taken refuge following the scandal of their affair, and who was the grandson of one and the nephew of a successive Duke of Portland, had the promise of a successful career laid out before him. He was aged just 19 and preparing to study for a degree that would enable him to take holy orders, renting a room overlooking the Front Quad for the duration of his studies. Years later the gossip surrounding Charley’s time at Oxford was still being told:1

Not a few Oxford men, of nine or ten years’ standing, could tell a tale of frantic passion for a Gipsy girl entertained by two young men at one time, one of them with ducal blood in his veins, who ultimately wooed and wedded his Gipsy love. So that it is no way impossible (the heirs to the dukedom being all unmarried, and unlikely to marry) that the ducal coronet of ____ may come to be worn by the son of a Gipsy mother.2

Sinnetta Lambourne, handsome, dark and lithe as her mother had been before her, captured the attention of Charley and his rival (whose name has been lost to the mists of time) and she aroused and entranced them in equal measure. The two young men strolled into the Cumnor hills to escape their studies and to gaze down upon Oxford (the view later described by the poet Matthew Arnold in Thyrsis as ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires’), and on to Summertown where they met the artless gypsy girl. John Badcock, the Lambournes’ next door neighbour in Summertown, on the main road to Oxford, recalled how he watched numerous carriages rattling along and members of the university strolling in conversation outside his windows. Charley and his friend were two of those and they stopped to talk to the sprightly and beautiful young girl, captivated by her dark brunette hair and exotic features. Just like his Wellesley grandfather had done over half a century before, Charley fell head over heels in love with a woman of whom his family would most certainly not approve.

The story was no doubt still fresh in the mind of Matthew Arnold when, in 1853, he penned The Scholar-Gipsy. Arnold had attended Balliol College at Oxford as a freshman in 1841 when the gossip about the scion of a ducal family and the gypsy girl would have been at its height (and Arnold’s great friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough was at Balliol at the same time Charley was at Merton and no doubt related the tale). Arnold’s poem was based on an old seventeenth-century tale in The Vanity of Dogmatizing by Joseph Glanvill about a poor student at Oxford who left his

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