The Infamous Sophie Dawes: New Light on the Queen of Chantilly

By Adrian Searle

A biography of the British woman who left behind life in a brothel to become a baroness in a French chateau, and perhaps a killer.

She was the daughter of an alcoholic Isle of Wight smuggler. Much of her childhood was spent in the island’s workhouse. Yet Sophie Dawes threw off the shackles of her downbeat formative years to become one of the most talked-about personalities in post-revolutionary France.

It was the ultimate rags to riches story that would see her become the mistress of the fabulously wealthy French aristocrat Louis Henri de Bourbon, destined to be the last Prince of Condé. Her total subjugation of the aging prince, her obsessive desire for a position among the highest echelon of French royalist society following the Bourbon restoration, and her designs upon a hefty chunk of Louis Henri’s vast fortune would lead to scandal, sensation, and then infamy.

The Infamous Sophie Dawes examines her island background before tracing her extraordinary rise from obscurity to becoming a baroness who ruled the prince’s château at Chantilly as its unofficial queen and intrigued with the King of the French to get what she wanted.

But how far did she go? The book examines the mysterious death of Louis Henri in 1830 and uses newly discovered evidence in a bid to determine the part Sophie may have played in his demise.

“Mouthwatering scandal, dangerous affairs, this story has the lot!” —Books Monthly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526717504

Adrian Searle

Adrian Searle is a journalist and author who writes on a range of historical topics, unearthing previously hidden aspects of history in a search for the truth. Born and bred on the Isle of Wight, he returned there in 1984 to edit a local newspaper and has worked in a freelance capacity since 1989. Previous titles for Pen and Sword were The Quintinshill Conspiracy, a collaboration with Jack Richards (2013) examining Britain’s worst rail disaster, and Churchill’s Last Wartime Secret (2016), revealing a hushed-up German raid on an Isle of Wight.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Fall and Rise:

The Smuggler’s Daughter

The formative years of the Englishwoman whose rags to riches story would so spectacularly stamp an indelible mark on the history of post-revolutionary France held little in the way of promise. Indeed, there was nothing at all to suggest, at best, anything other than a life of drudgery and servitude; one devoid of recognition beyond the narrow confines of a humble existence amid the relative obscurity and rural remoteness of her birthplace on the Isle of Wight.

Any biographical account should, of course, begin with the date of the subject’s birth. Yet all attempts to establish with certainty the year, let alone the precise date, of Sophie Dawes’ low-key start to a life which would prove to be anything but modest or restrained have been frustrated by the absence of a baptismal record in infancy – the usual source for determining the age of a child born in England before the introduction of birth registration in 1837 – and a subsequent catalogue of conflicting documentary evidence. We are left with the vague conclusion that she was born sometime between 1789 and 1793. The commemorative plaque which today adorns the front wall of her village home in Upper Green Road, St Helen’s¹ proclaims that the future ‘Queen of Chantilly’ was born there ‘around 1792’. It seems a safe bet.

Name styling, too, is something of a problem when recounting Sophie’s story. Neither her given name nor the family name corresponds precisely to how she is remembered today. Called Sophia at birth – the adaptation to Sophie, the Gallic form of the name, was a much later consequence of her time in France – she was the eighth of the ten children born to fisherman Richard Daw, popularly known and always recalled as Dicky, and his wife, the former Jane Callaway. Despite early biographical insistence that theirs was a union never blessed with the sanctity of a wedding ceremony, the couple had been married at the village church in 1775. Again, the longer expression of the surname as Dawes, subsequently adopted by most of her family and generations since, came in Sophia’s adulthood.² Not untypically for the period, she was one of only four offspring of Dicky and Jane to reach maturity, each of the remaining six children succumbing to a tragically early death as an infant or young child.

The first of the Daw children was James Richard, believed to have been born at St Helen’s in August 1777, although if his birth was sanctified by baptism there are no surviving records to confirm this. James would emerge safely from childhood. Not so fortunate were William, whose birth in July 1779 was followed almost exactly two years later by his death, and Richard, a Christmas Day arrival in 1780 who survived only until his thirteenth month in 1782. By December of the following year Jane had given birth once more, this time to a girl, Mary-Ann, the second child destined for a full life. Sadly, this was in stark contrast to Sarah, born in 1785, who lived for just nineteen months, dying three days after Christmas in 1786, five months after the birth of a second Richard, who seems to have lived only long enough to acquire a name. More heartbreak was to follow for Jane Daw following the birth in July 1788 of another daughter, Charlotte. By the start of November 1791 Charlotte was dead, aged 3.

So, if we opt for the likelihood that Sophia was born as the eighth child ‘around 1792,’ her only surviving siblings would have been James and Mary-Ann. However, in February 1793 she acquired a younger brother, the second to be called William, and in November 1795 Jane Daw gave birth to her tenth and final child, a second sister for Sophia, baptised as Charlotte Mary. The St Helen’s household thus contained five children (if we extend that definition to include the 18-year-old James) as the century neared its conclusion. However, the twin terrors of financial hardship and ill-health, sadly common in that period among the lower reaches of English society, would soon combine to hold the family of Dicky Daw in a vice-like grip.

For these reasons we must first examine the known character of the father and that of the village environment which provided the setting to this part of Sophia’s story. Dicky Daw may have been an established fisherman, along with many others in the locality at that time, but the bulk of his income came undoubtedly from a second, entirely illicit, profession. As was the case elsewhere around the island’s coastline, and at English coastal areas in general, smuggling contraband was energetically pursued in a village a short distance uphill from the Solent shoreline in the north-eastern corner of the Isle of Wight, close to the banks of the town of Brading’s inland tidal haven, which would not finally be reclaimed from the sea until 1881.

On the opposite side of the haven lay Bembridge, most easterly of the island’s coastal settlements. Together, the waterside neighbourhoods in Wight’s northeast constituted a smuggling hub. The small boats of their free-trading mariners made frequent trips southwards across the seventy-odd miles to Cherbourg, Harfleur and other ports in Normandy to replenish their vessels with the ill-gotten cargoes of spirits, tobacco and other highly-desired consumables before, heavily laden, setting off on their return journey to the island’s distant shores.

Within their own communities these men were not seen as social outcasts or despised as criminals. For centuries smuggling foreign imports which would otherwise have attracted a high levy of customs duty had been regarded in coastal areas as something of a right, the benefits of which extended to, and were seized without demur by, an established chain of local residents, embracing all sections of a community’s social stratum. Smuggling had long claimed a degree of morality, fired by deep resentment at the high rate of taxation imposed by successive governments seeking ever greater sums of money to finance foreign wars.

This shared interest would have sheltered Dicky Daw and his free-trading colleagues from the law – that and the general inadequacy (and in some cases, complicit dishonesty) of the official forces that were put in place to thwart the illegal trafficking. There can be little doubt that the latter had a particular problem with Dicky, who seems to have more than made his mark as a mariner, as devious as he was skilled, hugely capable of outrunning and outwitting the revenue men. So renowned was his seamanship, the core of his smuggling capabilities, that the narrow channel he used to navigate through the treacherous rocky outcrop of Bembridge Ledge on reaching home waters became enshrined on Admiralty charts as Dicky Daw’s Gut – a name that, while initially bestowed out of grudging respect, has stuck ever since!

Of the many colourful tales that used to be told of the smugglers’ nefarious antics in St Helen’s, perhaps the most memorable, and ghoulish, was centred on the remains of the old church on the shoreline, a battered reminder of a rich ecclesiastical heritage dating back to the late arrival in the eighth century of Christianity on the island. The church, replacing a wooden Saxon predecessor, had occupied a small peninsula on the Duver (an Isle of Wight dialect word for a sandy coastal strip, usually with dunes) at the mercy of the sea, which had eventually ripped it apart. By the eighteenth century the only remnants of the stone-built church on dry land were the tower, still intact today as a sea mark, and the former churchyard which held the graves of several generations of villagers. It was a spooky place at the best of times.

In their highly readable 1977 parish history, Twelve Hundred Years in St Helen’s, co-authors David Low and Sheila White described how the free-traders made good use of this forbidding place: ‘Some of the tops of the tombs in the churchyard were loose and, after the attentions of the smugglers, became looser still and would move fairly easily to allow kegs of brandy and other smuggled goods to be hastily stuffed inside to await collection when the coast was clear.’

Another ruse was particularly useful if there were any simple village folk around. The smugglers would disguise a man in a white sheet and seat him on a tombstone playing a drum. This gave rise to the legends of dead drummers in churchyards, which in turn gave local people a horror of passing such places at night and thereby witnessing the clandestine antics!

Added the village historians:

Smugglers were up to all kinds of tricks and one of the most ingenious was to use long poles with horse-shoes nailed on the ends. These were stamped into the sand in the opposite direction to that in which [the smugglers] were going, in order to mislead the Excise Men. Equally clever ways of bringing in the brandy were devised: a great deal of it was towed through the harbour entrance in ten-gallon tubs lashed together and weighted.

Such was the dark underbelly of village society at that time, but what of St Helen’s itself? Named as a consequence of the old Duver church’s rebuilding in the Norman period and its subsequent dedication to the fourth-century Roman Empress, Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine the Great, the Daw family’s home village in 1795 contained around forty small houses. These were built primarily from the stone abundant in the neighbouring quarries, roofed with thatch and clustered around an expansive area of rural greens, known previously as Eddington before St Helen’s inland retreat away from the land around the old church. Today, the spacious verdant heart of the village constitutes one of the largest village greens in England.³ Back in 1795 the population was recorded as 210, a figure that would grow significantly during the lifetime of the girl destined for celebrity status as far removed as possible from the lives of the remaining 209 residents recorded in that eighteenth-century survey.⁴

The cottage in which she and her family jostled for living space was among those lining the sloping village green’s higher (northern) perimeter. The earliest surviving photographs of the building, although considerably post-dating the period of the Daw family’s occupancy, provide a clearer idea of its likely appearance in the late eighteenth century than a glance at the property today allows. There are descriptive references to it as ‘nought more than a fisherman’s hut’ back in the 1790s. Judged on the photographic evidence, these seem ridiculously dismissive of its true dimensions, but those early images do indicate a home with a markedly shorter front elevation than exists on the charming house that survives today in Upper Green Road. It is known as Freefolk, a name which may or may not offer a nod to its free-trading past.

The present owners believe the original house may account for only the right-hand portion of Freefolk when viewed from the road. This seems likely. Certainly the brick-faced upper floor, adorned with the commemorative plaque, is a more recent addition, replacing the rooms whose windows protruded from the steeply sloping roof which would have provided cover for the Daws’ home. So the front of the property has changed substantially since Sophia’s childhood. But step inside and the curious visitor is transported immediately back to the period of her upbringing alongside the cart track which would later evolve into Upper Green Road.

Commendably conscious of the building’s historical tradition, owners Mark and Rosy Hickman have peeled back the centuries, combining careful restoration with sensitive substitution to reveal as far as possible the distinctive flooring, both stone-flagged and wooden-planked, the timber beams and the inglenook fireplaces which would have been familiar features of the smuggler’s home as his family struggled to make ends meet in turn-of-the-century St Helen’s. The house exudes an air of comfort, cosiness and charm today. Would Sophia have felt those sustaining qualities of family life back in the days of her infancy?

Along with her siblings, she would have spent some of her childhood propping up her father’s legitimate trade by picking shellfish from the shore. Probably she took for granted – or was otherwise preoccupied in the company of the competing young pickers from neighbouring families – the idyllic coastal vista which formed the backdrop to her child labour. It was largely unchanged a half-century or so later when the writer W. H. Davenport Adams, in his History, Topography and Antiquities of the Isle of Wight, published in 1856, drew attention to ‘the many beautiful views – the English Channel sweeping away to the eastward, Bembridge and its elm trees on the opposite point, the surrounding Downs, the Haven, and the old town of Brading.’ Did Sophia scan that vista in search of her father’s boat?

How she would have reacted to a first siting of Dicky Daw’s homecoming vessel, heavily laden with his catch of the day, legitimate or otherwise, is open to question. All the evidence, and the folklore too, points to one conclusion: the home he was returning to was not a happy one.

In terms of social standing and family responsibilities, the problem with Dicky was not the way he set out to earn his income, which potentially would have been considerable; it was the way he chose or, as time wore on, probably became compelled by addiction, to fritter it away. Again, like many of his cohorts – though local legend suggests he was especially prone to this – he seems to have consumed a considerable amount of the spirits he smuggled and thereby most of the profits. It was easy for Dicky to satisfy his ever increasing need for alcohol. Sadly for his wife and children, who should have fared better than most in St Helen’s from Dicky’s lucrative earnings, it was just as easy for them to suffer the inevitable consequences of his chronic dependency. One preserved account of their collective slide into poverty and heavy reliance on institutional help for the destitute tells a tragically depressing story.

It comes from the pages of record books compiled at the Isle of Wight House of Industry, the island’s workhouse. Noted for being among the first centralised rural workhouses in England, taking as its model the Samford House of Industry in East Suffolk which had opened in 1763, this huge edifice, its façade as gaunt as it was imposing, dominated an isolated eighty-acre site on what until then had been unutilised land adjacent to the eastern limits of Parkhurst Forest (though the workhouse survives today as the oldest part of the St Mary’s Hospital complex).⁵

With the land acquired on a 999-year lease, Forest House, as it became known, was conveniently located a short distance north of Newport, the island’s capital. It had been planned as the physical embodiment of a bold statement of intent by the island’s ruling class to revolutionise the provision of relief for the destitute, a responsibility hitherto invested in, and jealously guarded by, each of the island’s parishes. The workhouse was the key element of the Isle of Wight Incorporation for the Poor Act, which, despite opposition from several of the parishes, desperate to retain the benefits of income and cheap labour from local management of their poor, was granted Parliamentary approval in May 1771. The island’s largest public building at the time of its construction, the House of Industry, although still incomplete, opened its doors for the first time in August 1774. In the years to come, many of the island’s poorest would feel the cold embrace of an institution colloquially decried as the Grubber.

While there was, just about, a regular supply of food for inmates at Forest House, the term ‘grubber’, used progressively until it acquired the status of common parlance in the Victorian era, had no association with grub of the edible kind. It was used instead as a derogatory label for someone who routinely scavenged in drains to scratch out a pitiful living. In its early years the workhouse for some of these poor wretches possibly represented something of a sanctuary, but for most inmates, down on their luck, fallen from grace, innocent victims of others’ misdeeds, ill-treatment or basic lack of adequate familial care, admission to the House of Industry marked a last desperate retreat from starvation, a final clutching of survival’s straws.

On paper, at least, the aims of Forest House’s founders, its governing body of guardians, were honourable, well-intentioned and neatly summarised by Jack and Johanna Jones in their authoritative work, The Isle of Wight: An Illustrated History, published by the Dovecote Press in 1987. Workhouse objectives, they wrote, were ‘to care for the aged and infirm, to give employment to the able-bodied, to correct the profligate and idle, and to educate children in religion and industry’. But the care was basic, the environment anything but homely. Although the majority of inmates had been driven by their desperate state to seek admission, and while they were not prisoners in the accepted sense, neither were they treated as guests, free to come and go as they pleased. The gates to the Parkhurst workhouse were locked each night.

Forest House did offer succour for the poor but this did not extend to any appreciable degree of home comfort. The workhouse had not been planned as an easy option for the destitute. ‘Support yourself in your own home or you’ll end up in here’ was effectively the forbidding ethos.

For child admissions in particular, the workhouse must have stirred up a whirlwind of emotions. Uprooted from their home and everything they knew, herded unceremoniously off to Parkhurst in a farm cart, cut off entirely from their family and forced to sleep in draughty dormitories – which, until reform in 1813, meant sharing the thin mattress of an iron bed with others – their regimented daily routine of working, feeding and sleeping was punctuated by the monotonous clanging of bells to denote the start or end of one or other of these precisely set procedures, every day the same. But maybe, hopefully, in time they grew to appreciate that they were almost certainly better off in the care of the workhouse than they had been at home.

All things, of course, are relative. The practically never-changing mealtime menu covering seven days at Forest House was probably markedly more nourishing than the scraps provided irregularly in the cottages of the island’s poor, but it makes particularly unappetising reading today. This menu sheet from the early years of the nineteenth century serves as a good example:

Over the course of nine years, three of Dicky Daw’s children would be served this frugal fare, but the family’s involvement with the House of Industry actually began on 1 April 1797. By then Dicky’s mental health had clearly deteriorated to such an extent – the assumption being, as a result of his alcoholism – he appears to have been no longer capable of earning any sort of living, legal or otherwise, to support either himself or his dependants. On that day he was admitted to the Parkhurst workhouse. The surviving records provide a one-word comment about his desperate condition on arrival at Forest House. It was something of a catch-all phrase at the end of the eighteenth century for people with mental instability. Richard Daw, the former expert mariner and renowned artful smuggler, was now described simply as ‘insane.’

There is nothing in the records to indicate the source of this diagnostic conclusion or whether any real attempt at determining the cause of Dicky’s troubled state was actually made. We know only that five weeks later, on 6 May, he was discharged from the workhouse, the reason for this left unexplained. Whether or not Dicky then returned to his St Helen’s home – and there is now no way of knowing this – he was clearly still incapable of supporting his family. On 10 June the keeper of records at the House of Industry noted that two of the Daw children had that day entered the workhouse on the stipulation that their troubled father each weekend should pay 2 pence (0.83p in today’s decimal currency), at a time when a labourer’s average weekly income was around 17 shillings (85p today), towards their keep. The register of inmates identifies the two children admitted to the workhouse as Sophia, whose age is given as 6 – indicating a birth date in 1791 – and her 4-year-old brother, William.

They were still there a year later, now aged 7 and 5, respectively, according to the preserved records. Despite having no longer to provide for them at home, back in St Helen’s Jane Daw continued to struggle against the odds. We can only conjecture about the precise nature of the revised domestic arrangements in which she found herself in 1798. The workhouse records do at least provide the basis for an educated guess, beginning with the assumption that, wherever he was actually living at the time, the dysfunctional Dicky, in his forty-seventh year, had by now wholly abrogated the protective twin roles of husband and father.

For some years Jane’s eldest son, James, now in his early twenties, would have been old enough to make his own decisions and had probably assumed the role as de facto head of the family. In April 1798 he had married local girl Mary Crann in the village church. It is likely that he brought his new bride to live in the rapidly emptying family home. It is also probable that Mary-Ann, Jane Daw’s second eldest child, just short of her sixteenth birthday, was by then working in some form of domestic servitude, although it is impossible to be precise about this. But that would still have left Jane to fulfil, with virtually no discernible income, the role of mother to her infant daughter Charlotte Mary, who had yet to reach the age of 3.

The sad reality of Jane’s plight is borne out by the next reference to the Daw family in the House of Industry record books. On 21 September 1799 it was noted that 3-year-old Charlotte had been taken from her St Helen’s home to become the third child of Dicky Daw admitted to the workhouse. However, three became two on 21 December when Sophia was discharged from the House, the appended note in the relevant book making clear this was at the ‘request of her brother’. The reasons behind James Daw’s move to secure his young sister’s release from the workhouse were not explained. One of his principal motives may have been to provide some help for their mother who had endured so much suffering and heartache over a prolonged period. Jane and Sophia were destined to share a great deal of the dramatic events which dominated the latter’s extraordinary story but the reunion – if reunion there was – between mother and daughter in December 1799 unhappily would prove to be short-lived as the Daw family’s declining fortunes plunged further into the realms of abject misery.

The workhouse records for 1800 note the continued existence there of William Daw, now 7, and his 4-year-old sister, Charlotte. A year on, their names were recorded again on the register of inmates, but in October 1801 tragedy reduced the family presence at the House to a single representative. Four months short of his ninth birthday, William had passed away. It was not at that time uncommon for children to die in a workhouse or, indeed, anywhere else, so it comes as no surprise to find no other details of his passing other than the one word, ‘died’.

Not for the first time a single stark word had been used by a scribe at the workhouse to denote the collapse of a life in the Daw family. ‘Insane’ … ‘died’. In a sense it comes as something of a relief to find no similarly severe references alongside Charlotte’s name as her continuing residence at the House was noted in both 1802 and 1803, by which time she had reached the age of 7. The records are vague about her presence there in 1804, though the absence of any discharge note makes this a distinct probability. One thing is certain – on 24 March of that year the workhouse had renewed its acquaintance with Charlotte’s sister, Sophia.

Evidently, the circumstances which had allowed her discharge a little more than four years earlier had been unsustainable and Sophia was once more an inmate of the House of Industry. It was at this point in the workhouse record-keeping that the seeds were sown for the confusion, which has persisted ever since, over the year of her birth. In December 1799 she had left the workhouse as a child whose age had been recorded earlier that year as 8. Now, in March 1804, four years and three months later, when we would expect her age to have risen to 12 or possibly 13, she is described on re-admittance as a 15-year-old!

There is nothing to explain the anomaly. Was this a correction in order to redress an earlier error? Or was the error made on readmission? Did Sophia, or a family representative, lie about her true age on readmission in the hope that this would improve her chances of more speedily escaping the grim realities of workhouse life, given that girls and boys were treated as adults in Forest House beyond the age of 13? There is no way of knowing which of these possibilities, or perhaps some other explanation, provides the most likely answer to the riddle. However, in a period far less obsessed with age than our own, such inconsistencies were common.

What is certain is that Sophia’s second period of residency at the House of Industry lasted less than nineteen months. On 11 October 1805 – aged 16 or 17 if we adhere to the workhouse’s re-admittance details from March 1804 – she left the House to take up an apprenticeship at an Isle of Wight farm. Since farms were a common