The Dancing Marquess & the Gaiety Theatre

The Dancing Marquess: Anglesey's Butterfly in Diamonds

Come up the Menai Strait to Plas Newydd and you are standing where Britain's most flamboyant aristocrat blazed a path of burning torches to light his guests up to his private theatre. This is the house of Henry Cyril Paget — "Toppy" to the few who loved him, the "Dancing Marquess" to the press, and "the black sheep" to a family that spent decades pretending he had never existed.

He was born in Paris in 1875, amid whispers — recorded by his own biographers — that his true father was the French actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin rather than the 4th Marquess. Fostered in France until he was eight, he arrived on Anglesey a solitary, theatrical boy in a house of hunting men. When his father died in November 1898, the 23-year-old inherited the marquessate, some 30,000 acres, and an annual income of roughly £110,000 — a river of money he would drain in six extraordinary years.

Paget renamed the ancestral seat "Anglesey Castle" and did the thing his descendants could never forgive: he took the family chapel and turned it into the Gaiety Theatre, a 150-seat auditorium fitted, by 1901, with electric stage lighting. Here, opulently costumed, he took the lead in everything from pantomime to Shakespeare's Henry V to Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband — a pointed choice, since Wilde had been jailed for "gross indecency" only in 1897. He hired professional actors down from Llandudno, and staged free performances for servants, tradesmen, students and neighbours.

His signature turn made his name. Borrowing from the American dancer Loïe Fuller, he performed what the press dubbed the Butterfly Dance: swathed in a voluminous robe of transparent white silk, waved under coloured electric light like wings. Contemporaries described "sinuous, sexy, snake-like dances." Between the acts he handed out photographic postcards of himself in costume.

Then there were the jewels. Paget bought them by the fistful, sewing real diamonds onto stage costumes, keeping a Pekingese in pink ribbons, and — most gloriously — modifying his car's exhaust to spray perfume in its wake. His marriage, in January 1898, to his cousin Lilian Florence Maud Chetwynd, was later annulled — on the grounds of non-consummation. One persistent story, repeated in the costume he supposedly draped his cousin in nightly with jewels before returning them to the vault, points to a marriage that was pageant rather than partnership.

The reckoning came fast. On 11 June 1904 he was declared bankrupt, with debts of £544,000 — jewellers heading the creditor list — a sum variously reckoned at £50–70 million today. The "Great Anglesey Sale" dispersed his treasures; it was said he even sold his housekeeper's parrot, reputedly able to swear in several languages. He died in Monte Carlo on 14 March 1905, just short of thirty, his ex-wife at his side. One obituary judged: "From boyhood to death no one had ever loved him."

What his cousin did next is the second scandal. Succeeding as 6th Marquess, Charles Henry Alexander Paget destroyed all the 5th Marquess's papers and reconverted the Gaiety Theatre back into a chapel. Queer history, as the modern stage biographer Seiriol Davies puts it, is erased. The Paget debts helped force the sale of the family's English seat at Beaudesert in the 1930s.

Why did the family try to erase the Dancing Marquess?

Because he embodied everything Edwardian aristocracy feared: extravagance, effeminacy, theatricality and possible queerness. His successor burned his records and dismantled his theatre; artefacts were sold or lost in the 1904 sale. Only recently have the National Trust, exhibitions at Plas Newydd, the musical How to Win Against History and the 2024 film Madfabulous restored him.

Was the Dancing Marquess gay?

He is claimed today as an icon of queer and gender-nonconforming heritage — the National Portrait Gallery, PinkNews and the Historic queer-places project all treat him so. The documented facts are his cross-dressing performances, his jewellery and furs, and his annulled, unconsummated marriage. Beyond that, direct evidence was largely destroyed by his family, so his precise private life remains, honestly, undocumented.

What survives at Plas Newydd today?

The house and gardens are National Trust and open to the public. The chapel-turned-theatre-turned-chapel survives within the house; the Trust displays photographs of the 5th Marquess in costume and, since 2018, a dedicated room with a reproduction costume and a mock-up of the Gaiety. The lower terraces and Gothic Hall doors feature in Madfabulous.

• Who: Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey (1875–1905)
• Where: Plas Newydd, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Anglesey (National Trust)
• Claim to fame: the Gaiety Theatre; the Butterfly Dance; £544,000 bankruptcy (11 June 1904)
• Buried: St Edwen's Church, Llanedwen
• Access: NT house & garden, seasonal opening; check winter closures

PHOTOGRAPHY NOTE: Plas Newydd is National Trust — photography permitted in grounds; interior photography rules vary, ask on arrival. Strongest visual subjects: the Menai Strait terraces (used in Madfabulous), the Gothic Hall doors, and the displayed costume/theatre mock-up. Seasonal opening (typically reduced in winter); book ahead. Free-licence period portraits of the Marquess are scarce — the NPG holds the best images but they are rights-restricted.

---