For this one we're going back in time. Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848), who was a senior statesman and mentor to Queen Victoria, was also a "cuckolded husband in one of the most scandalous affairs of the nineteenth century". Known as Lord Melbourne, he married Lady Caroline Ponsonby. It was a marriage which was to cause him no small amount of grief. His wife had a public affair with poet Lord Byron. The resulting scandal was the talk of Britain in 1812. Lord Byron and Melbourne's wife began an affair which lasted until 1813, but even after it finished Lady Caroline’s obsession with the poet continued. She published a novel, Glenarvon , in 1816 containing obvious portraits of herself, her husband, Byron and many others. Embarrassed and disgraced, Melbourne decided to part from his wife, though the formal separation did not occur until 1825.
Lady Caroline died in 1828, aged 42, her death hastened by drink and drugs. Lord Melbourne, not yet prime minister, was by her bedside.
The fact that, despite the public humiliation in an era in which adultery (by women) was even less accepted than today, he stayed at her bedside and the fact that an Australian city was named after a cuckold earns Lord Melbourne 9 on the cuckold scale!
In those days in England and the USA, a married woman and her manstress could be killed but in France, for instance, it was a different story. A married woman and her manstress could be tolerated or the husband could file for divorce or even separate. But in the USA these days, married women who philander still get killed and plus they pay higher costs as well, due to getting pregnant by the manstress.
ReplyDeleteHere's a French-American tennis star whose supposedly French or American mom had an affair with her coach and her French dad divorced her.
ReplyDeletehttp://articles.nydailynews.com/2009-09-10/gossip/17930248_1_villiers-melanie-oudin-brian
An American woman cheating on her French husband. Or, is this tennis star's mom French herself? French men are notorious for being cuckolds while French women are notorious for cheating on their husbands or boyfriends.