Henry Cyril Paget: The Dancing Marquess of Anglesey and the True Story Behind Madfabulous
Updated: 6 hours ago
In 1898, a 23-year-old with a taste for diamonds, perfume and amateur dramatics inherited one of the biggest fortunes in Britain. Six years later he was bankrupt, his dressing gowns were being auctioned off in a tent on his own lawn, and within months he was dead at 29.
That's the short version of Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, better known as the Dancing Marquess. His family was so embarrassed by him that they destroyed his papers after he died. It didn't work. More than a century on he's had an award-winning musical, a National Trust exhibition and, in 2026, a feature film called Madfabulous. Here's what actually happened.
Quick Answers
Who was the Dancing Marquess? Henry Cyril Paget (1875 to 1905), 5th Marquess of Anglesey. He got the name from his Butterfly Dance, performed in white silk under coloured lights.
How much money did he lose? He inherited an income of about £110,000 a year in 1898 and was bankrupt by June 1904 with debts of more than £544,000, roughly £60 million today.
How did he die? In Monte Carlo on 14 March 1905, aged 29, of pneumonia following tuberculosis.
Where is he buried? At St Edwen's Church, Llanedwen, on Anglesey, close to Plas Newydd.
Is Madfabulous a true story? Only loosely. The 2026 film is a fictionalised take on his life.
Who was the Dancing Marquess?
Henry Cyril Paget was born on 16 June 1875, the only son of the 4th Marquess of Anglesey and his second wife, Blanche Mary Boyd. Even his birthplace is argued over. The National Trust says London, while other accounts say Paris.
His mother died when he was two, and he spent his early years in France with an aunt. He didn't set foot on Anglesey until he was eight.
That French childhood produced the juiciest bit of gossip about him. For years people whispered that his real father was the famous French actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin. There's no proof, and the story looks like a muddle. The aunt who raised him did marry Coquelin's brother, but not until 1891, long after Henry had left.
Family and friends called him "Toppy". He went to Eton, had private tutors, and picked up a commission as a lieutenant in a volunteer battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Nothing on that CV hinted at what was coming.
A 23-year-old with £110,000 a year
On 20 January 1898 Henry married his cousin, Lilian Florence Maud Chetwynd. That October his father died at Plas Newydd, the family seat on the Menai Strait, and Henry became the 5th Marquess of Anglesey.
With the title came about 30,000 acres across Staffordshire, Dorset, Anglesey and Derbyshire, plus an income of roughly £110,000 a year. Depending on how you do the sums, that's somewhere between £12 million and £18 million a year in today's money. Around two thirds of it came from industry in and around Burton upon Trent, a town he's said to have visited just twice.
His father had loved hunting and horse racing. Henry loved jewels, furs, perfume, photography, motor cars and, above everything else, the stage. He renamed Plas Newydd "Anglesey Castle" and got to work.
The Gaiety Theatre at Anglesey Castle
The first thing to go was the family chapel. Henry turned it into a 150-seat theatre decorated in blue with a sunflower theme and called it the Gaiety, after Sarah Bernhardt's theatre in Paris. He fitted it with electric stage lighting, which was still a novelty.
At first he performed with friends, servants and locals. Then in 1901 he brought in a professional theatre manager and a full company, and was later sued for poaching them. The shows were free. The audience was made up of neighbours, tradesmen, servants, students and holidaymakers, and when the company played other local venues the box office went to charity. Henry sometimes handed out postcards of himself in costume on the way out.
The repertoire was proudly lowbrow. There were two pantomimes, Aladdin and Red Riding Hood, plus musical comedies and four short melodramas he adapted himself, in which the richest man on the island played drunks, convicts and killers. His last big role was Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband, at a time when most theatres wouldn't touch Oscar Wilde after his conviction in 1895.
He took the company on tour around Britain and Europe too. In December 1899 he even danced at the Central Theater in Dresden, billing himself as "San Toi".
The Butterfly Dance, the diamonds and the perfume
The nickname came from his party piece. Borrowing from the American dancer Loie Fuller, Henry would sweep around the stage in a huge robe of white silk while coloured lights played across it, so the fabric looked like wings. He called it the Butterfly Dance, and the newspapers called him the Dancing Marquess.
He wore a different costume most nights, and the jewels were real. One 1902 reviewer described him in a suit of sequinned mail with a headdress of pearls and diamonds hung wherever a diamond could be hung. Newspapers claimed he had a quarter of a million pounds' worth of stones on him in Aladdin.
The architect Clough Williams-Ellis, who later built Portmeirion, remembered him as a tall, bejewelled apparition who looked like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing that had come to life.
Then there's the famous story that he had his car exhaust modified to puff out perfume. It's a great detail, but treat it with a pinch of salt. Historian Viv Gardner traces it to American newspapers, and it only spread to Britain afterwards. What does seem solid is that he scented his theatre programmes with patchouli, heavily enough that one reviewer joked the audience might suffocate.
A marriage that lasted six weeks
Lilian left him after about six weeks. Her grandson, the writer Christopher Simon Sykes, later said the marriage was never consummated, and that the closest it came was Henry asking her to pose naked, covered from head to toe in his jewels.
In November 1900 a court granted her a decree on the grounds of non-consummation. What happened next depends on who you read. Some accounts say the marriage was annulled. The National Trust says the couple chose not to go through with it and agreed in 1901 to stay married but live apart. Either way, Lilian didn't vanish from his life. She was at his bedside when he died.
The valet, the stolen jewels and Sherlock Holmes
On 10 September 1901 Henry went to the Lyceum Theatre in London for the opening night of the Sherlock Holmes play. While he was out, his French valet, Julian Gault, helped himself to jewellery worth about £50,000 from his rooms at the Walsingham House Hotel.
A distraught Henry reportedly asked Arthur Conan Doyle himself for help. Gault was arrested at Dover and told the court a Frenchwoman called Mathilde had put him up to it and taken the jewels to France. She was never found. He pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey on 22 October and got five years.
Was the Dancing Marquess gay?
It's the question everyone asks, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. In 1970 the writer H. Montgomery Hyde called him "the most notorious aristocratic homosexual at this period". But the National Trust, which has studied what survives, says there's no evidence he ever had a same-sex relationship. There's no evidence of a relationship with a woman either.
Part of the problem is that his family destroyed the papers that might have settled it. Viv Gardner, who has spent years researching him, thinks he was a classic narcissist whose one great love was himself. Norena Shopland, in her book Forbidden Lives, argues he belongs in the history of gender identity whatever his sexuality was.
One thing that often gets lost is that he rarely played women on stage. What he liked to do was take a part written for a woman and play it as a man, which unsettled Edwardian audiences in a different way.
Loved on Anglesey, laughed at in London
High society kept its distance. Aristocrats didn't come to his balls or his shows, and he didn't go to theirs. The London press treated him as a joke.
On Anglesey it was a different story. He kicked off football matches, handed out prizes and once ran a stall at a school bazaar in Bangor selling pictures of himself. At the 1902 National Eisteddfod in Bangor he turned up in specially made bardic robes and was given an honorary bardic degree. Between 1899 and 1903 he threw fancy-dress balls that were open to locals and visitors, including one where every costume had to be made of paper.
His spending, his entourage and his 40-odd performers also kept a lot of local businesses afloat. When the money ran out, the postmistress at Llanfair told a Manchester newspaper that "if half the London people who sneer at him did half as much good" in their own neighbourhoods, London would be better for it.
Bankruptcy and the Great Anglesey Sales
It couldn't last. By 1904 Henry had run up debts of more than £544,000, which is around £60 million today, and on 11 June he was declared bankrupt.
Auctioneers William Dew and Son moved into Anglesey Castle, and the Great Anglesey Sales began on 29 July 1904. Between 17,000 and 18,000 lots went under the hammer. Everything went, from his five cars and his pet toy dogs to the pots, pans, mop heads and buckets.
His wardrobe alone made up 806 lots and took three days to sell. A marquee went up with raised plank walkways, and an auctioneer's assistant called Jerry modelled the Marquess's silk pyjamas, smoking jackets and fur-lined dressing gowns for a laughing crowd. There were about 247 embroidered waistcoats. The music hall star Vesta Tilley bought dozens of them and wore one on stage in New York. The jewels fetched £80,000.
It wasn't all mockery. Servants who had lost their homes along with their jobs came to buy back things from their own rooms. Some of his creditors even turned up and bid on items to support him.
Scotch tweed in Dinard: his final months
Henry left before the sales began and never saw Plas Newydd again. His creditors allowed him £3,000 a year to live on, and he headed for France with a manservant.
In October 1904 the Daily Mail tracked him down in the Breton resort of Dinard. He opened by apologising for not appearing in peacock-blue plush, a tiara and ruby-studded slippers, and insisted he'd always preferred "Scotch tweed". The reporter was surprised at how ordinary he seemed, with his pince-nez and brown boots, but noted that he looked very delicate.
He was. Henry moved on to Monte Carlo, and on 14 March 1905 he died there of pneumonia after a long struggle with tuberculosis. He was 29. His body was brought home and buried at St Edwen's Church, Llanedwen, on the edge of the estate.
The obituaries were brutal. One magazine called his life one of the best arguments against the hereditary system anyone could wish for. Even so, his critics admitted that estate workers and locals had adored him, and The Times reported that people in Bangor were sorry to hear he'd gone.
How his family tried to erase him
The title passed to his cousin Charles, the 6th Marquess, who set about tidying up. He destroyed Henry's papers, turned the Gaiety Theatre back into a chapel, and dropped the Anglesey Castle name. The debts lingered for decades. They were part of the reason the family gave up Beaudesert, their grand house in Staffordshire, which was broken up and sold in the 1930s.
Plas Newydd went to the National Trust in 1976. Very little of Henry is left there beyond a handful of photographs and theatre leaflets, though Bangor University holds a collection of his programmes, invoices and postcards. In 2018 a batch of previously unseen photos turned up showing him at one of his fancy-dress balls in the garden. And in 2020 a diamond tiara he's thought to have worn on stage, held back from the sales, was offered for sale by the family at an art fair in Maastricht.
Madfabulous: the Dancing Marquess on screen
The comeback started in 2017 with How to Win Against History, a musical by Anglesey-born writer and performer Seiriol Davies that went from the Edinburgh Fringe to a national tour. The fashion designer Harris Reed has also named Henry as an inspiration.
Then came the film. Madfabulous stars Callum Scott Howells as Henry, with Ruby Stokes as his cousin Lily and Rupert Everett as his butler, Gelert. It was directed by Celyn Jones and written by Lisa Baker, both of whom grew up on Anglesey. It premiered at BFI Flare in March 2026, reached UK cinemas on 5 June and came out on Blu-ray, DVD and digital on 20 July.
Scenes were shot at Plas Newydd itself in September 2024, with nearby Penrhyn Castle standing in for Beaudesert.
Is Madfabulous a true story?
Only loosely. The National Trust describes it as a fantastical reimagining, built on real themes and moments but happy to reshape events. For example, the film brings Henry together with Lord Penrhyn, the slate baron across the water. In reality there's no evidence the two men ever met.
If you want to see how the film compares with the real thing, five of the film's costumes are on display at Plas Newydd until the end of 2027, including a recreation of the Butterfly Dance outfit.
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Sources
Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, National Portrait Gallery
The life of history's most eccentric aristocrat, Daily Post, 2017
Madfabulous costumes go on display at north Wales home of Dancing Marquess, Nation.Cymru, 2026
Callum Scott Howells on why playing Henry Paget in Madfabulous changed his life, Attitude, 2026
Madfabulous on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital 20th July, From Page 2 Screen, 2026
