Was Mother a Virgin?

Under a huge oil painting of King George VI's coronation, nine peers of the realm gathered last week in a paneled committee room of the House of Lords. Ranged around a horseshoe table, the lords listened intently as, one by one, bewigged barristers rose to argue the fine points of one of the oddest cases in British legal history--the sort of legal conundrum that could exist only in a country that still has titles and a nobility. The two opposing claimants in the case sat stone-faced in the chamber, refusing to meet each other: Geoffrey Denis Erskine Russell, 54, a prosperous London theater producer, and John Hugo Trenchard Russell, 25, an accountant who may--or may not--be Geoffrey's half brother.

The case, in fact, hinged upon that relationship. The nine peers, constituting a Committee of Privileges, were to decide whether John or Geoffrey should be honored with the title of fourth Baron Ampthill, a hereditary peerage John is the son of the third Baron Ampthill by his third wife. Geoffrey, who now holds the title, was born during the third baron's marriage to his first wife. The bizarre story behind John's challenge is that Geoffrey's mother was, by her own testimony and expert medical opinion a virgin when Geoffrey was born.

The House of Lords hearing resurrected one of Britain's most publicized scandals of the early 1920s, a story that has since been tagged as "The Case of the Virgin Birth." It involved a tall young aristocrat, John ("Stilts") Russell then heir to the Ampthill title, his vivacious and liberated wife Christabel and her baby Geoffrey, who was born in October 1921. Soon after Geoffrey's birth, John Russell filed for divorce charging that the baby could not possibly be his. He claimed that he and his wife had agreed before the wedding to lead separate lives and leave the marriage unconsummated.

Christabel Russell admitted that she had never had full intercourse with her husband. But she insisted that she had not had sex with any other man either. Her proof: after learning that she was pregnant, she had undergone a medical examination. Doctors testified that she was still technically a virgin; her hymen had been only partly perforated. How then had the baby been conceived? During a night of "Hunnish" behavior ten months before Geoffrey's birth, she testified, when her husband tried to force her to have intercourse, but succeeded only in an incomplete act. He flatly denied any such behavior occurred.

One divorce trial ended without a decision, but a second in 1923 explored the details again. Christabel, her husband charged, had cavorted across the Continent, writing home about "slim, silky Argentines" and "marcel-waved" Italians who courted, wined and dined her. She still insisted that they had not slept with her; medical experts conceded that her story of Geoffrey's conception might be true. A ten-month gestation was not unknown, they said. Impregnation without penetration, though rare, was possible. Still, the jury in the second divorce trial found her guilty of adultery with an unnamed man.

Prior Lover. Christabel Russell appealed the divorce decree to the House of Lords and won. In 1924 a panel of lords, Britain's highest court, ruled that no child born after a marriage could be declared illegitimate merely on the testimony of his mother or father. Two years later, a High Court judge reinforced this decision by issuing a certificate of legitimacy for Geoffrey. Not until after John Russell succeeded to his title as the third Baron Ampthill in 1935 did the redoubtable Christabel finally divorce him. He later married Adeline Hone, a vicar's daughter who bore the young John Russell.

The renewed challenge to Geoffrey's legitimacy has been simmering since the third baron's death in 1973. Geoffrey and John Russell had already agreed on a financial settlement of their claims to his estate. But then, spurred by relatives, John challenged Geoffrey's right to the Ampthill title. Geoffrey fought back, as he told friends, to defend "the honor of my mother."

At week's end, the lords adjourned without reaching a decision. The main argument put forward by Geoffrey's lawyers was that if Christabel had had a lover prior to her marriage, then she could not also have had an intact hymen. John's lawyers offered, unsuccessfully, to introduce results of blood tests of the late third baron's blood as evidence in the complicated paternity issue. Whatever the lords eventually decide, the only person who knew for sure about Geoffrey's parentage will never tell. Serenely confident and "without one backward look that saddens or distresses me," Christabel Lady Ampthill died in Ireland last month at the age of 80.

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