Elizabeth Armtistead

Elizabeth Bridget Armistead or Armitstead (11 July 1750 – 8 July 1842) was a courtesan and, later, the wife of statesman and politician Charles James Fox. Her relationship with and marriage to Fox was one of the most famous and controversial of their age. Early life Elizabeth Armistead was born Elizabeth Bridget Cane on 11 July 1750. Later items in The Public Advertiser and Town and Country Magazine reported her place of birth as Greenwich, London, and her parentage as variously a market porter and an herb-vendor or a shoemaker turned Methodist lay preacher, but biographer I. M. Davis gives such accounts little credence. Samuel Rogers believed she had once been a waiting woman to actress Fanny Abington. The reasons for her changing her maiden name to Armistead or Armitstead are unknown. She began her career in an exclusive, high-class brothel in London, though which one is uncertain. An entry in Sir Joshua Reynolds's appointment books for 1771 includes a marginal annotation, "Mrs Armistead at Mrs Mitchell's, Upper John Street, Soho Square". Together with Charlotte Hayes and Jane Goadby, Elizabeth Mitchell was one of the most infamous brothel-keepers of the time. (See Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, a description of prostitutes of that era, for context.) It was perhaps at one such establishment that Armistead met her first documented patron, Frederick St John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke. Many years later, George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, recalled how he and a group of young friends, including Charles James Fox, had taken a visiting French nobleman to a bawdy-house. On learning that their friend Bolingbroke was being entertained by one of the women, Egremont, Fox and the others kicked the door open. The woman was Elizabeth Armistead.