The Jamaican heiress who faked her own daughter’s death

Lady Elizabeth Webster nee Vassall by Robert Fagan, Naples, 1793

Not long now till my new book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery, hits the shelves on 4 September, so I'm beginning to share some of the most intriguing stories from the book... beginning with this one about the strange case of a Jamaican heiress driven to fake her own daughter's death in Italy!


     Have you heard what a lady in Italy did,
     When to spite a cross husband she buried a kid?
                                                     Lord Byron

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Henry, Lord Holland by François-Xavier Fabre, 1795.

 In the Spring of 1796, Lady Elizabeth Webster was pregnant by her lover, Henry, Lord Holland. Her husband Sir Godfrey had returned to England a year ago, leaving her abroad in Italy. With this obvious evidence of adultery, divorce was inevitable. 

While it would be a relief to be parted from her despised, and much older, husband, ‘the certainty of losing all my children was agonising’. Until 1839, the law dictated that fathers gained sole custody of children after a divorce. 

In desperation, Elizabeth developed a ‘visionary scheme’ to keep her favourite child. In the village of Paullo on the way to Modena from Bologna, she daubed red spots on her daughter Harriet’s arms with her watercolours to convince everyone she had measles. Then she dismissed the servants, sent Harriet to England via Hamburg, dressed as a boy, and put together a ‘rude coffin’, filling her oblong guitar case with stones, a pillow dressed in children’s clothes and a wax mask. She sent this strange item to the British Consul in Livorno for burial, then travelled on to Modena to break the news of her daughter’s death.

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Sir Godfrey Webster by Louis Gauffier, Florence, 1794

Sir Godfrey, who also ‘doted’ on Harriet, was ‘wretched’ on hearing the news and ‘wept his lost child for some time’. 

Three years later, Elizabeth, now Lady Holland, had to come clean. Her new husband’s political career was taking off, and no politician can afford to have embarrassing skeletons in their closet.  In June 1799, she revealed the truth, sending Harriet back to Sir Godfrey, who ‘immediately recollected and acknowledged her’. 

​Elizabeth lamented:

    I have renounced a darling child, and my heart aches afresh when I
    think of the separation. She is so captivating… with my others I feel
    gratified to see them healthy and intelligent, but her winning manners
    convert the duty of maternal attention into a positive enjoyment. I delight
    in being with her… Would to God I were allowed to bring her up! 

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Gossips delighted in the story, which was embellished with rumours that the fake coffin had also contained a dead baby goat. This caused Lord Byron - supposedly a friend of the Hollands, and certainly a frequent dinner guest, to pen the witticism: 

    Have you heard what a lady in Italy did,
    When to spite a cross husband she buried a kid?

Elizabeth's daughter Harriet Webster, later Lady Pellew, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1817

After Sir Godfrey committed suicide in June 1800, overwhelmed by gambling debts, it was whispered that the shock of Harriet’s return from the dead had unbalanced his mind. Gossips blamed both Elizabeth and Henry. While her ‘diabolical deceit’ had ‘as much murdered – as if she had pulled the trigger which had shot him’, Henry ‘must have been privy to the deed’, and in not stopping her, ‘weakly’ became ‘an accomplice of the crime’. 

I came across this bizarre story while researching Elizabeth’s life for my new book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery. It was Elizabeth’s fortune, as heiress to three estates in Westmoreland, Jamaica, which had attracted the much older, and ill-suited first husband Sir Godfrey, and in that sense led to this whole debacle. As she exclaimed ‘Detestable gold! What a lure for a villain!’ 

To discover more about Elizabeth’s dramatic journey from scandalous divorcee to society hostess and political mover-and-shaker extraordinaire, and the equally intriguing lives of eight other female enslavers, pre-order Heiresses now…

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Pre-order Heiresses Now