Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, styled Lord Paget until 1880 and Earl of Uxbridge between 1880 and 1898, and nicknamed “Toppy”, was a British peer who was notable during his short life for squandering his inheritance on a lavish social life and accumulating massive debts. Regarded as the “black sheep” of the family, he was dubbed “the dancing marquess” and for his Butterfly Dancing, taken from Loie Fuller, where a voluminous robe of transparent white silk would be waved like wings. Vicary Gibbs, writing in The Complete Peerage in 1910, commented that he “seems only to have existed for the purpose of giving a melancholy and unneeded illustration of the truth that a man with the finest prospects, may, by the wildest folly and extravagance, as Sir Thomas Browne says, ‘foully miscarry in the advantage of humanity, play away an uniterable life, and have lived in vain.'”
Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey
