Hello, and welcome to trashy divorces, everybody's favorite good podcast about bad relationships.

My name is Alicia and Stacey. You're taking us to the Emerald Isle today.

Hello, everyone, and yes, today we are hopping on a boat and a time machine.

Hazzah!

To go back to what is possibly Ireland's most scandalous divorce ever, a case from the 1850s known as Talbot v. Talbot.

Skullduggery of the highest order, which is of course what we love most in the world.

Trashy skullduggery for the win.

I already love this story.

Stacey, if we're going to jump into the land of my people, I guess we got to go, go, go.

Alicia, if you want to talk trashy divorces, let me assure you that history always delivers.

In this instance, we're heading back to Ireland in the middle of the 19th century to talk about Talbot v. Talbot,

described in 1856 as, quote, the most remarkable affair of its kind that has ever occurred in this kingdom.

What? There's a lot that's occurred in that kingdom. On its face, it was a simple case of a wife's

adultery with a servant at Mount Talbot House, the ancestral manor house of Marianne Talbot's

husband, John. But in fact, the story was far

more scandalous, violent, and involved the conspiracy that shocked the nation and ultimately cost

Marianne her sanity. Just an enormous miscarriage of justice. There's also a heroic lawyer's

angle to this, and I got to say people don't talk

about heroic lawyers enough. Atticus Finch for the win. There you go. Honestly, I was initially

suspicious that it was even a true story because my early searches only returned one website

telling the story, which had been told to that author by an Irish novelist, so the provenance

seemed potentially fictitious. But that telling mentions that the case ended up in the House

...