Chevalier d’Eon: Spy, Diplomat, Freemason, Trans-woman [by Simon Strickland-Scott]

A few short metres away from Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave in St. Pancras Churchyard can be found the Burdett-Coutts Memorial Sundial.  Sponsored by the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts of the famous banking family, it was erected in 1879 to commemorate those initially buried in the churchyard whose remains were moved in 1866 to make way for the Midland Railway running into and out of St. Pancras station.  Angela Burdett-Coutts deserves her own article, such were her achievements, but this essay concerns one of the names that appears on her monument, that of Chevalier d’Eon whose life as a spy and adventurer is now being revisited in the light of recent attempts to rediscover LGBT history.

New Unity has a proud history of supporting LGBT rights and most recently that has involved being explicitly inclusive of trans and non-binary people.  The first time the current writer used a gender neutral toilet, it was at New Unity!

So it seems appropriate that one of history’s earliest recorded trans-women should be buried close to New Unity’s most famous alumni.

Chavelier d’Eon was born Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont in France in 1728.

After a good education culminating as a graduate in law, D’Eon started work in administration and as a writer.  They began spying for Louis XV in 1856 having become a member of the clandestine branch of France’s diplomatic corps, the so called Secret du Roi, literally the ‘king’s secret’.

In 1762 d’Eon was part of the French negotiating team which drafted the terms of a complex peace treaty which brought the Seven Years War to an end.  The Seven Years War had been a multi-sided conflict fought in Europe in which d’Eon themselves had participated as a soldier.  For these successful diplomatic efforts d’Eon was knighted, receiving the Order of St. Louis and earning the title Chevalier.

In 1767 Chevalier d’Eon became a freemason.  They were initiated into a lodge called L’immortalite del l’Ordre, a French speaking lodge in London under the auspices of the Grand Lodge of England.  D’Eon rose through the degrees from Entered Apprentice to Fellow Craft and on to Master Mason.  They also passed through various masonic lodge offices eventually becoming a Junior Warden. (Pick and Knight The Freemasons Pocket Reference Book p.113/114) Obviously all this masonic activity was whilst d’Eon was still presenting as a man.  In 2018, in a surprise move, the United Grand Lodge of England passed a resolution allowing female to male transgender people to join as men and, perhaps even more surprisingly, ruled that male to female trans members (i.e. those who had joined as men before transitioning to female) could retain their membership.  The institution remains adamantly opposed to allowing cis women to join however.

From 1763 d’Eon was trapped within French political intrigue and a rivalry with the new French ambassador to Britain.  Amidst allegation and counter-allegation, d’Eon published their memoires in 1774; Lettres, mémoires et négociations particulières du chevalier d’Éon revealing many aspects of their career in espionage much to the delight of their British hosts.  The French government was less pleased and d’Eon became exiled in London.

There are contradictory stories about when and why the Chevalier began presenting as a woman.  According to their own account, published in  Lettres, mémoires et négociations, early on during their career as a spy, d’Eon was dispatched to Russia to make contact with French sympathisers in the Russian court and believing that disguising themselves as a woman the most effective means of infiltration duly presented themselves as such and with much success.  At another time d’Eon claimed to have been born a woman but brought up male in order to satisfy an inheritance requirement.

Another account has it that d’Eon’s sex was always perceived as ambiguous (even when they presented as male) to the extent that large sums of money were bet on it, including on the London Stock Exchange.  Eventually seeking a resolution to the emerging scandal while negotiating an end to d’Eon’s period of exile, the new French king, Louis XVI, allowed d’Eon back into France in 1777 with certain conditions including that they would have to dress as a woman for the rest of their life.  However somewhat in contradiction to this d”Eon retained their knighthood.  Their pension was also restored.  A second memoire was published in 1779 titled La Vie Militaire, politique, et privée de Mademoiselle d’Éon, ghostwritten by La Fortelle and less controversial than the first.

D’Eon returned to England in 1785 and remained for the rest of their life.  The French Revolution ended their pension and their remaining French properties were confiscated by the state.  This left d’Eon in a state of poverty and they spent some time in a debtor’s prison.  On release they eked out a living by entering fencing tournaments and teaching fencing.

D’Eon’s status as a woman received a significant endorsement courtesy of her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft who in a Vindication of the Rights of Woman listed D’Eon as one of several women who serve as models of what women can achieve with the advantage of education (then often denied to girls):

I shall not lay any great stress upon the example of a few women (Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs. Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame d’Eon, etc. These, and many more, may be reckoned exceptions; and, are not all heroes, as well as heroines, exceptions to general rules? I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes; but reasonable creatures.) who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution; (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Chapter 4.) 

Chevalier D’Eon died in 1810, aged 81.  A posthumous medical examination intended to clarify their gender confirmed the presence of both male and female characteristics.  So in modern parlance it would appear that d’Eon was born intersex, assigned male at birth and then transitioned to female.

This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and Simon Strickland-Scott. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.