She held wealth, power and prestige: so why did this Georgian aristocrat fake her daughter’s death?

It was spring of 1796 when Elizabeth Vassall, a young English aristocrat of immense fortune travelling in Italy, shared grim news. She had lost her daughter Harriet to a sudden illness, and a small makeshift coffin was discreetly delivered to the British consul for burial. The grieving mother continued her journey.

Except Harriet wasn’t dead. Elizabeth had painted red spots on her daughter’s skin with watercolours to mimic infection, then said her daughter had died. Harriet was then smuggled the child out of Italy disguised as a boy.

It was one of the most audacious deceptions of the Georgian era. But it wasn’t just an eccentric prank. Elizabeth’s desperate act was the direct result of the legal and social realities of Georgian England: a society of glittering aristocratic wealth and entrenched inequality, where even the richest women were hemmed in by patriarchal laws that stripped them of rights over their own children.

Elizabeth Vassall’s unhappy marriage

Incredibly, Elizabeth Vassell really did fake her daughter’s death.

“We’ve got a handwritten account of it by her, and she talks about it in her diaries,” explains historian Miranda Kaufmann, author of Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

Born in 1771 as Elizabeth Vassall, she was heiress to vast Jamaican plantations worked by enslaved Africans. That wealth made her a highly desirable match for English aristocrats seeking both money and connections.

She married Sir Godfrey Webster, an older baronet, but their union quickly soured. “She calls him her ‘tormentor’, and they have this awful relationship,” says Kaufmann.

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But Sir Godfrey still tolerated her appetite for travel, facilitating – and mostly joining – her trips abroad. It was while she was on one of those trips, in Italy, that she encountered Henry Fox, Lord Holland, who would become a prominent Whig politician.

They fell in love, and Elizabeth became pregnant by him. But Sir Godfrey had returned to England more a year earlier, meaning it was impossible that he might be the father of Elizabeth’s future child – who would be born in November 1796.

So divorce from Sir Godfrey – though expensive and scandalous – was now unavoidable; and it would mean that Elizabeth would lose Harriet.

Custody as property

In Georgian Britain, the greatest danger Elizabeth faced wasn’t social disgrace but the law of custody.

“A shocking thing that we don’t always realise is that in this period, after a divorce, the father automatically got custody of the children,” Kaufmann explains. “After all, they were his property.”

Although Harriet wasn’t Sir Godfrey’s biological daughter (she was the product of another affair) she was recognised as his daughter, and he treated her as such. And, under English law, children belonged to the father in the same way that wives’ property was absorbed into their husband’s estate. Mothers had no legal rights over custody or even access.

For Elizabeth, this meant Harriet, the child she most cherished, would automatically be taken by Sir Godfrey upon their inevitable divorce.

It was this legal reality that drove her to extremes. To keep her daughter, she had to erase her: at least in the eyes of the world.

Painting illness and staging death

Elizabeth’s plan was carefully crafted. “She gets out her watercolour paints and paints red spots on Harriet’s arms and legs, tells everybody that she must have some sort of infectious disease, and sends the servants away,” says Kaufmann.

Fear of disease was ever-present in the 18th century. Smallpox was a constant killer, and rumours of infection prompted immediate flight. Her claim that Harriet had died of a contagious illness was perfectly conceivable and went unchallenged.

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“Then, she gets out her guitar case, which was oblong shaped, and fills it full of stones, clothing and a wax mask, and sends it to the British consul to be buried because she’s pretending it contains the body of her dead daughter,” Kaufmann continues.

It was an audacious act of deception, and she pulled it off. Harriet was listed as buried, and Elizabeth, now ‘bereaved’, was free to carry her real child away, knowing that Sir Godfrey wouldn’t be able to claim her.

Smuggling Harriet home

The next step was to spirit Harriet out of Italy. “Then, she smuggles Harriet via Hamburg, dressed as a boy, back to England,” Kaufmann explains.

But this was far from a victimless act. Elizabeth and her husband’s relationship might have been a loveless one, but Sir Godfrey was distraught by the news of the death of his daughter. “She manages this deception, and her husband Sir Godfrey is left miserable. He has many flaws, but does seem to genuinely love his daughter and mourned her for a long time.”

Elizabeth’s act had preserved her relationship with Harriet, but only by subjecting both father and child to an extraordinary act of subterfuge.

Scandal and confession

For a time, Elizabeth’s plan succeeded.

As predicted, she divorced Sir Godfrey upon her return to England and the reveal of her pregnancy, married Lord Holland, and established herself as Lady Holland, presiding over one of London’s most fashionable Whig salons. But the secrecy couldn’t last forever.

“When Elizabeth is Lady Holland and her new husband goes into politics, she realised she has to come clean because this would ruin his political career if it comes out inadvertently,” says Kaufmann.

“She had to come clean, and give Harriet back to Sir Godfrey. And she was distraught.”

The revelation caused predictable uproar. Gossip, the lifeblood of Georgian high society, spread like wildfire – carried in letters and repeated in newspapers and pamphlets.

Lord Holland himself was tainted by association, with many assuming he must have colluded in the deception.

Wealth, slavery and patriarchy

Elizabeth’s story is one that neatly exposes the social complexities and contradictions of Georgian England.

On the one hand, she was a woman of immense privilege: her fortune, derived from Caribbean slavery, made her one of the richest heiresses of her generation. She commanded social attention, travelled freely across the continent and later became an influential political hostess.

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But on the other hand, she was hemmed in by a legal system that denied her agency over her own life. She struggled to control her property within marriage; and she couldn’t claim custody over her daughter.

Even the wealth generated from enslaved labour – which fuelled the consumer culture of Georgian Britain, from sugar to fine clothes – couldn’t shield her from the patriarchal foundations of English law. In Georgian society, female power was always conditional, and even the richest women could be reduced to desperation when the law refused to recognise them as full guardians of their families.

Miranda Kaufmann was speaking to Ellie Cawthorne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.