Fact, factoids and the fabulous lives of the 5th Marquess of Anglesey
9 Jun 2025
We have been very lucky to have benefitted from Performance Historian Viv Gardner's interest in (obsession with?) Henry Cyril Paget and spent a fascinating hour chatting to her about the contradictions and complexities that made up the legend of Henry Cyril.
Welcome to the blog Viv - Henry Cyril is certainly a unique individual...
There aren’t many historical aristocrats that in 2025 feature in both a list of ‘Hot Victorians’ and as a variety of peach tree. Or whose purple striped silk underpants are on display in the National Museum of Scotland. But that says quite a lot about the present fascination with – even need for – Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey. Including mine – Professor Emerita, best known for her deeply serious work on first- wave feminism, the New Woman, the New Man, and performance.
When did you first become intrigued by the 5th Marquess of Anglesey?
My interest goes back a long way. I was first drawn into the 5th Marquess’s worldsometime in the 1990s on a rainy-day family visit to Plas Newydd – or Anglesey Castle as the 5th Marquess called his veryuncastle-like mansion on Anglesey– with my two sons. They relished the 1st Marquess (hero of Waterloo)’s wooden legs but not much else.After some fairly dutiful interest (and the promise of fudge),we came to the corridor by the kitchens and there on the wall were five or six pictures of this extraordinary individual, very theatrical, certainly not military...
They weren’t like any other theatrical or studio portraits from the 1900s I knew – and this was my area of expertise. Bold, self-defining, posed, playful in every sense. ‘The Dancing Marquess’ and the information on the label almost as unhelpful. I was interested – but it took another 10 years for interest to become obsession!
Almost accidentally I have now found myself writing the book (almost finished!) on his life and times – and the afterlives– trying to unpick the facts from the factoids (unprovable statements which achieve unquestioning acceptance by frequent repetition!). I am as interested in the stories he generated in his lifetime – and now – as the ‘truth’,a form of truth. I blame Marc Rees, the performance artist who invited me to ‘advise’ on his dance creation of the Marquess’s life, Gloria Daysin 2007 – which involved me having a great time in Berlin, imitating various butterfly dance movements for proper dancers, and feeding them bizarre titbits from the Marquess’s life. The result was exquisite, melancholic and told atruthI hadn’t seen before.
When did you first get involved with this production?
It was Marc who introduced me to Seiriol, Matthew and Dylan when they were working on the second version of How ToWin Against History. I became their ‘stalker’, following the production around, observing rehearsals and performances – feeding them info when they wanted it (which they rarely did). Seiriol dubbed me ‘the great thing-knower’, but I was really interested in the story they were telling, its truth.
How much of Henry’s story is fact or fantastical fiction? Do we know for sure?
I keep going back to that word truth. They didn’t need my ‘facts’, they needed my stories. I needed their factoids, not facts. There is much that is correct in How To Win Against History – he did lose his mother when he was two years old, probably (they do not add because they do not know) to suicide. But he had a loving surrogate mother in his maternal aunt, Edith, and grandparents whose world in Paris included many theatricals. His father was described by one newspaper as "a huntin’,shootin’and sailin’ bastard who lived in Paris but spoke no French". Eventually, his thug of a father took him away from that Paris family and deposited him on Anglesey aged eight, with only a nurse and a variety of tutors for company.
Sometimes, with great delight, the company and I would find that fact and factoid coincided. Accidental truths.
In How To Win Against History there is a scene where two 'ghosts from the future', of ‘prophesy’, who fail to predict anything, appear. What the company didn’t know was that in 1900 Henry Cyril HAD consulted a soothsayer – ‘Kismet, the Court Palmist Royal’ – in Llandudno. Not once, but twice, inviting his friends to have their future told too at his expense.
Did he go to Eton? Only for a couple of terms. Was he a cross-dresser? Effeminate yes, but no stories emerge in his lifetime about dresses, none were sold at the Great Anglesey Sales that followed his spectacular insolvency.
Every group that becomes fascinated with Henry Cyril generates their own stories – and repeats them until they enter his history. One recent one I heard was that he didn’t die in 1905, his body was not brought back from France and buried in Llanedwen churchyard with his father, but the death was a scam, a pauper’s body substituted for his, so he could escape paying off his massive debts. Madness, but I bet I’ll hear it again.
How was Henry treated by the people who knew him? Was society kind?
This is such a complicated question! It depended where you were. Society with a big S –ignored him. On the evidence of the newspapers, London and the provinces were fascinated but generally disapproving – whether of his ‘not being as other men are’, his extravagance, his ‘foreignness’, or his theatricality, is not clear. All were cited. America and the English-speaking world filled spare column inches in the newspapers with stories about his spectacular eccentricity, as far away and as unconnected as Idaho. Industrial towns like Burton-on-Trent wrote ‘socialist’ diatribes about his extravagances and neglect of the workers who generated most of his income by their labour. The actors in his company seem to have been pragmatic – it was a job, albeit an extraordinary one.
The locals in North Wales seemed to regard him with genuine affection,despite the fact that he destroyed so many lives with his wild spending and complete disregard for anyone else’s interests. He brought ‘many a gleam of brightness and sunshine’ to those whose lives ‘are a weary round of daily toil, with very little to cheer them on their way’ with his free performances, fancy dress cycle races and other ‘innocent amusements’.After his death the family shut down any discussion, re-established the old forelock-tugging order, and eradicated effectively all traces of him for nearly 100 years. His was a ‘wasted life’, but then so had his father’s been,and so many other aristocrats. It’s just his was more spectacular and therefore more shameful.
It's Pride month – what do you think Henry would think about his story being Bristol Old Vic’s major production – particularly this month?
He would have loved being centre stage in a theatre. That was where he was, it seems, most himself. Performing, then disappearing. It’s impossible to know what he would have made of Pride. He was never, as far as we know, centre of any ‘Pride’ equivalents in his own time, the queer circles of his time – unlike his step-mother, his estranged cousin-wife and cousin (who married Oscar Wilde’s lover, Bosie Douglas),who were part of a queer aesthetic group in Versailles. Nor can we be certain about his sexuality. (We are talking, however, about the decade around Wilde’s prosecution and imprisonment). Homosexual, asexual, bisexual? He was probably ‘+’. Certainly ‘queer’ in every sense. He would have lurved, just lurved, the outrageous popularity of How To Win Against History, the colour, the extravagance, the music…the celebration of HIM.
If there is one rule Henry lived by – what would you say it was?
Henry Cyril was no philosopher, but I go with How To Win Against History’s ‘be yourself’, the real you. Or Dorian Gray’s: ‘To realise one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for’. For a very brief time, on stage in his theatre on Anglesey, with his close friends, maybe in France, he was.
We have to allow that he might also have been an only average actor and dancer, a thick, selfish, dog-loving, chocolate-addicted, speed-maniac fantasist! He had the money to be all of those things until it ran out. Maybe him ‘being himself’ allows us to ‘be ourselves’. That’s why we find him so fascinating 120 years after his death.
P.S. I find I have slightly embellished a number of these accounts, for the sake of ‘a good story’.
