Sheik Who Took Bride From Britain

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 51, 23 May 1927, Page 12

Sheik Who Took Bride From Britain

“Aurora —The Light of Day ” A WOMAN OF TITLE To marry a sheik and live in the desert is said to be the frequent dream of romantic modern maidens. Perhaps the heroines of fiction reach the romantic goal more often than the heroines of real life: but it was once attained by an Englishwoman of very high social rank —the divorced wife of Lord Ellenborough, some time Viceroy of India, writes Bruce Vaile in "T.P.’s and Cassell's Weekly.” She was the Honourable Jane Digby. a grand-d/v ghter of Coke of Norfolk. She was so beautiful and so brilliantly accomplished that she was nicknamed “Aurora, the Light of Day.” Lord Ellenborough, then aged 40. fell in love with her at her coming-out ball. He was very rich, having a large income derived from his estates, supplemented by sinecure appointments which brought him in £IO,OOO a year. A Command Portrait But the marriage was a failure: and much sympathy *aus felt with Lady Ellenborough, though she was technically the guilty party. A private Act of Parliament divorced her in 1830, the co-respondent being Prince Schwarzenberg. A settlement was subsequently made whereby she was allowed to keep her pin money on condition that she left England at once and never returned. She did return once, secretly, to visit her mother: but practically the whole of the rest of her life was spent abroad. Prince Schwarzenberg soon deserted her: and her career became adventurous, Louis XVIII. of Bavaria fell in love with her. Her portrait, painted by his command, hung in his private apartments, and may now been seen in a public gallery at Munich. He found her a husband —one Baron Venningen—for the advantage of her social status: | but that marriage also ended in divorce. Subsequently, she is said to have married and divorced six Italian and two ; Greek husbands, though that period of her career is wrapped in the mists of obscurity. A Bagdad Romance Then, inspired by the example of Lady Hester Stanhope, she went to the East, landed at Beyrout, proceeded to Damascus, and sought an escort from the Mezrab Arabs for a journey to , Bagdad. That was how she came to meet her sheik. His name was Medjuel el Mezrad. He was the younger brother of the head of the tribe, just half Lady Ellenborough’s age, a brilliant Arabic scholar and a chivalrous gentleman. She, though fifty, “was,” Lady Burton tells us, “far more attractive than most young girls. So the sheik fell in love with her, and she fell in love with him, and they married. Every endeavour was made to prevent her from concluding this marriage, which was destined to turn out so well. The British Consul refused to perform the ceremony. He even threatened to lock the bride up as a lunatic; and he warned her that, in the East, a -wife is a slave whose husband has an absolute right, at any time, to divorce her, or even to put her to death. But she took the risk, and never regretted it. The sheik promised her that he would divorce all his other wives, who were fairly numerous, and take no new ones; and he kept that promise faithfully; he kept it for many years. Queen-like at Sixty-one The name by which she was known after her strange marriage was “the Honourable Jane Digby el Mezrab.” The Burtons —Sir Richard Burton being then British Consul at Damascus —knew her well; and there is a vivid account of her in Lady Burton’s Life of her husband: “She was a most beautiful woman, though at the time I write of she was sixty-one, tall, commanding, and queen-like. . . . She spoke nine languages perfectly and could read and write in them. She painted, sculptured, was musical. “She lived half the year in a romantic house she had built for herself in Damascus; the other half she and her husband lived in his Bedawin tents, she like any other Bedawin woman, but honoured and respected as the queen of her tribe, wearing one blue garment, her beautiful hair in two long plaits down to the ground. milking the camels, serving her husband, preparing his food, giving him water to wash his hands and face, sitting on the floor and washing his feet, giving him his coffee, his sherbet, his nargilehs, and while he ate, she stood and waited on him and gloried in it.” Arab Superstition

Lord Redesdale, whom the Burtons took to see her, reports that “she had been a fair beauty, but in deference to the Arab superstitious fear of the evil eye, her hair and eyebrows were dyed black.” It may be added that she devoted her talents to managing the business of blackmailing desert travellers on her sheik’s behalf, that she died of dysentery at the age of 73. and that her grave in the Damascus cemetery adjoins that of Buckle, the historian of civilisation. It was found, after her death, that she had written on the fly leaf of the Bible she had kept with her all her days, the text: “Judge not that ye be not judged.”