Edward Hughes Ball Hughes

In 1823 he suddenly married Maria Mercandotti, a 16-year-old Spanish dancer, who left a theatre full of patrons waiting in vain to see her.

In 1824 Hughes purchased Oatlands Palace from the Duke of York (although the sale was not final until 1827 due to problems with the deed).

The later sale of the grounds for housing lots (creating the modern community of Oatlands) was a profitable venture for Hughes.

Hughes lost enormous sums through extravagant living and gambling; a pamphlet published in 1824 warned him by name about gamblers who would take his money.

[5] He was forced to move to France in 1829 to avoid his creditors, and his affairs were left in the hands of his solicitors, Freere and Forster, who sent him an allowance to live on.

[15] Hughes' older sister Catherine Ball was a socialite, journalist, and novelist who eventually styled herself the "Baroness de Calabrella" after acquiring property in Italy.

Edward Seymour died in 1867 in Dieppe after his horse fell on him;[21] d'Orsay had made a portrait of him as a young man.

[23] In 1871 Sydney and a companion, Julien Garnuchot, were convicted of defrauding creditors, including an elderly field marshal named Baron Schwarz-Wieler, and sentenced to prison and labour.

[26] A color plate of Hughes, Mercandotti, her former patron the Earl of Fife, and others appears in Bernard Blackmantle's The English Spy (1825/6).