GREAT BRITAIN: Two Minuses Equal Plus

In the Victorian Gothic corridors of London’s Royal Courts of Justice last week, the well-dressed crowd pushed, shoved, and asked attendants: “Which way to the duchess? Which way to the countess?” Of two aristocratic divorce cases being heard at the same time, many of the crowd were most interested in the 46-year-old Countess of Shrewsbury, whose husband the earl had sued her—and who in turn had sued her husband—for divorce on grounds of adultery. The scandal had fed the tabloids for weeks, but the real jolt in the case turned out to be the decision.

John George Charles Henry Alton Alexander Chetwynd Chetwynd-Talbot, 45, Premier Earl of England and Bearer of the White Wand at the coronations of George VI and Elizabeth II, charged that in 1955, while he was recovering in an iron lung from an attack of polio, his dark-haired wife had had an affair with their children’s tutor, a young man (23), fresh down from Cambridge, named Gerald Anthony (“Tonykins”) Lowther. For 17 days the court listened to excerpts from letters describing “nights of passion and ecstasy,” heard two butlers, a secretary, a nanny and a governess tell of warm embraces on the Blue Landing of the great staircase of Ingestre Hall and meetings in the White Room and the Bird Room. Last week, after one of the most costly ($56,000) divorce cases in British history, Justice Sir Charles Collingwood ruled that the countess had indeed been unfaithful—but that she and the earl would have to remain man and wife, though their courtroom behavior exhibited a deep-seated dislike of each other.

The reason was that the earl himself had admitted in court to having kept a mistress ($2,300 a year plus a $17,000 house), whom he wanted to marry after his divorce. British law stipulates that a marriage may be dissolved only when one party is egregiously at fault. “If ever the inadequacy, feebleness and immorality of our present laws on marriage and divorce have been exposed,” said the Yorkshire Post, “it has been in this pitiful and protracted case.” Added the Evening Standard: “In legal mathematics two minuses add up to a plus, and double adultery can come to mean preservation of a marriage which has become meaningless.”

The Earl of Shrewsbury, dining afterward with his well-gowned mistress Aileen Mortlock, declared: “I am definitely not going back to my wife, but I’m afraid she will never divorce me.” The countess, dining at a big table with a place set for the earl’s return (as it has been ever since he walked out of Ingestre Hall last September), said: “As a Christian, I believe I am pledged to him for life.”