Beauchamp, the elder son of Lord Yarmouth, the noted society playboy and friend of the prince regent, was probably, in fact, his only child, as a younger brother and a sister were apparently fathered by someone else. Brought up in Paris by his Italian mother, ‘Mie-Mie’, who had separated from Yarmouth, he was a bright but wayward boy, who received little formal education. Yarmouth’s intention had been to take him to England to attend public school, but his wife’s doubts about his health persuaded him to place Beauchamp with a tutor. He did not flourish, however, being incorrigibly idle and irked by English society; he wrote to his mother in 1816, asking her to pity him, ‘for I do bore myself cruelly’.
gives an account of my business, and says I affect to speak bad English, that I wore false favoris and moustaches in Paris, etc., etc., etc. My name in the book is Don Exoticus Wistcoranzov. Exoticus on account of my having lived abroad all my life, and the other name on account of my favoris (my beard).
Eg. 3263, f. 89.
For part of that year, and again during the Oxford vacation in 1819, he was apparently an attaché at the British embassy in Paris. He began a liaison with a woman 11 years his senior, Agnes Jackson, whose origins are obscure, although she was ostensibly the daughter of the self-styled baronet, Sir Thomas Wallace of Craigie Castle, Ayrshire, and the temporarily estranged wife of a City financier, Samuel Bickley. On 21 June 1818 she gave birth to Beauchamp’s son, who was christened Richard Jackson. He was taken to France at the age of six and subsequently brought up by Lady Yarmouth, who was popularly supposed to be his mother.
At Dover in October 1818, Lord Glenbervie† recorded meeting Beauchamp, ‘just landed, looking so pale, so yellow and so jaded!’, who ‘unasked, told me he had just lost all his money at Paris’.
Beauchamp informed his mother of his success, adding that he was
with great truth very sorry for it. I will show you how near I have been to quarrelling with Lord Yarmouth about it by his letters to me, etc. But I can assure you nothing will prevent me living a great deal more than I have abroad with you ... But you have too much good sense to perceive that I must live a great deal in this country especially while Lord Hertford lives, as much depends upon him with regard to me.
He chose to stay in the army that session, when parliamentary attendance would excuse him from his regiment, and to look for a way of leaving it in the autumn.
In early 1823, Hertford noted of his son, who left the army at this time, that he seemed in better health in England: ‘I believe this dull country exhausts him much less than Paris for he soon picks up here’.
the greatest pity that ever was. Such powers of being delightful and captivating, grandes manières, talents of all kinds, finesse d’esprit, all spent in small base coin. He walks amongst us like a fallen angel, higher and lower than all of us put together.
Countess Granville Letters, ii. 121.
From the mid-1830s he resided in Paris, living reclusively at the Bagatelle villa in the Bois de Boulogne, and purchasing a vast collection of especially eighteenth-century art. In March 1842 he succeeded to the titles and estates of his father, by then a decrepit old roué.
a man of great comprehension; not only versed in the sciences, but able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright and active imagination. In a word, if he had lived in London, instead of frittering away his time in Paris, he would no doubt have been prime minister of England.
Gronow Reminiscences, ii. 323-4.
An epicurean figure at the decadent court of Napoleon III and one of the last of the absentee English ‘milords’, Hertford died in Paris in August 1870, shortly before the fall of the Second Empire at the battle of Sedan, and was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery.