Скачать или смотреть The Tragic Heiress Who Died of a Broken Heart: Catherine Tylney-Long

When you think of tragic romances, Romeo and Juliet have nothing on Catherine Tylney-Long – the teenage heiress whose fortune could have purchased Verona outright with enough left over for a summer palace in Venice.

Newspapers breathlessly tracked "The Wiltshire Heiress" as though reporting on a walking national treasury, which effectively she was.

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The Haunted Heiress Who Loved and Lost: Alice de Janzé --    • The Haunted Heiress Who Loved and Lost: Al...  

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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Introduction
1:20 Chapter 1: Golden Girl, Gilded Cage
5:37 Chapter 2: Fortune’s Foundational Sins
10:04 Chapter 3: Romance’s Ruinous Price
14:24 Chapter 4: Fatal Correspondence

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Catherine's inheritance was a financial supernova that warped the social fabric of Regency England, creating gravitational forces that pulled every debt-riddled aristocrat into her orbit and making her the target of fortune-hunting missiles disguised as gentlemen, all launching themselves toward her with mathematical precision.

At sixteen, Catherine inherited a fortune so staggering it sent dukes swooning, earls salivating, and royalty itself calculating the most expedient path to her boudoir.

Her inheritance sprawled across twenty-five thousand acres in six English counties, encompassing several palatial homes including Wanstead House—dubbed "England's Versailles"—alongside financial investments worth three hundred thousand pounds, approximately thirty million in today's currency.

The annual income from her properties alone—forty thousand pounds—quadrupled what Jane Austen considered fabulously wealthy in Mr. Darcy, allowing Catherine to purchase multiple fictional romantic heroes before breakfast while still affording a diamond tiara for afternoon tea.

Even the Duke of Clarence, future King William the Fourth, joined this matrimonial stampede despite his amphibian features, mountainous gambling debts, and inconvenient collection of ten illegitimate royal offspring already supported at taxpayer expense.

When she finally chose William Wellesley-Pole at twenty-one—the Duke of Wellington's deceptively charming nephew—society momentarily believed in fairy tales, not recognizing that beneath his captivating exterior lurked financial appetites that would humble a fleet of pirate ships.

Their eighteen twelve wedding dazzled London with Catherine adorned in seven-hundred-guinea Brussels lace and diamonds worth five million modern pounds—treasures that would soon vanish as her husband's compulsive spending devoured her wealth with locust-like efficiency.

Behind their mansion doors, William revealed his authentic nature—hosting ruinously expensive parties, redecorating with the restraint of a megalomaniacal peacock, and systematically converting Catherine's inheritance into an impressive collection of creditors.

Within ten years, the world's wealthiest heiress found herself fleeing across the English Channel to escape debtors—her vast fortune transformed into equally vast liabilities through her husband's specialized talent for financial immolation.

By eighteen twenty-two, he had burned through her fortune with such extraordinary efficiency that he engineered an appointment as Gentleman Usher to King George the Fourth specifically to obtain immunity from arrest for debt—essentially gaining diplomatic protection from his own financial crimes.

Against overwhelming social pressure and legal obstacles, Catherine finally summoned remarkable courage to escape her gilded prison—returning to England with her children, initiating legal separation, and securing court protection for her children through actions requiring more genuine bravery in eighteen twenty-five than leading a cavalry charge into enemy fire.

On September twelfth, eighteen twenty-five, Catherine died at eleven o'clock surrounded by sisters and physicians but mercifully not by the husband who had systematically dismantled her fortune, health, and happiness with the efficiency of someone pursuing his life's true purpose.

Contemporary witnesses testified that correspondence from William arriving that morning triggered her final seizure—delivering the ultimate emotional blow to her weakened system and creating history's clearest case of death by poorly timed letter.

Catherine's death catalyzed legal history when Lord Chancellor Eldon ruled William should become England's first father denied custody based on moral character—a decision so revolutionary in patriarchal Georgian society that it effectively created modern family law's foundational precedent.