Because of this, he urged they be married secretly in the Greek church in Balaclava. She said her beloved told her he was suffering financial problems and was dependent upon an uncle who did not wish him to marry.
The Major was there as well, and, she stated, was known to everyone there as her fiancé. The Major, on the other hand, stated that he only called on the lady at her request, the meeting was brief, but “in consequences of the advances made by the pursuer, great familiarities ensued.”Īfter hostilities ceased, Longworth visited a friend in the Crimea. The lady claimed he begged for her immediate hand, but she insisted the marriage be postponed until the end of the war. The pair would later give conflicting stories about this reunion. They met again in Constantinople, the Major as a military man, Longworth as a nurse. It took the Crimean War to reunite Carissimo and Tooi-tooi. Their mode of addressing each other soon went from “My dear Miss Longworth,” and “Ever your sincere friend,” to ”Carissimo Carlo mio,” and “Cara Theresa mia,” finally culminating in the unforgettable (or unforgivable) “Tooi-tooi carissima.” In the meantime, they kept up a correspondence-volumes and volumes of correspondence that would eventually become exhausting reading for lawyers scattered all over the British Isles.
Longworth went to Italy, and Yelverton to his station in Malta. During the crossing, he was very attentive to her, (just how attentive he was would be a matter for later public debate,) and after landing the next day, he paid her a call.Īfter this, they went their separate ways for more than three years. During this voyage, she made the acquaintance of the twenty-eight-year-old Yelverton. One summer evening, Miss Longworth, an attractive 19-year-old orphan, took a steamboat from Boulogne to London. The moral, if there is one, could be this: If you are a young, pretty, and romantic young woman, avoid moonlight at sea at all costs. It took six years, numerous courts in three different countries, and Lord knows how many impassioned newspaper stories to sort out their relationship, and even then the results remained unsatisfactorily inconclusive. However, few, if any, ended as publicly and as spectacularly as the enigmatic entanglement of Major William Charles Yelverton (later Viscount Avonmore) and Maria Theresa Longworth.
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