Tom Hughes has published A Shattered Idol: The Lord Chief Justice and his Troublesome Women (Marble Hill Publishers):
Sir Paul Coleridge, KC, provides a foreword.After the death of his first wife, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge’s unmarried daughter Mildred was expected to serve as housekeeper, hostess and companion to her father, one of the best known figures in Victorian England. But Mildred wanted to marry Charles Warren Adams, the irascible secretary of the Victoria Street Society for which Mildred worked. After disputed accounts of an incident “in a darkened room,” Lord Coleridge forbade the two to meet. And so began a scandal of the rich peer’s daughter and the fortune-hunting journalist that intrigued London society.
Worse was to follow - the threat of a breach-of-promise action as Lord Coleridge tried to end his attachment to a much younger divorcée with whom he had had an affair on a liner returning from America, a libel suit that revealed every squalid detail of his tyranny over his daughter, and public humiliation as he was questioned in his own court by his would-be son-in-law.
Tom Hughes has written the first full-length account of a scandal that enthralled Britain for more than a decade. This is a thrilling and wonderfully told story of “a family which has gone to ruin itself.”
–Dan Ernst
