Bell, Laura Eliza Jane Seymour (1829?–1894), celebrated beauty, was daughter of Robert Bell of Bellbrook, near Glenavy, Co. Antrim, bailiff for the Hertford estate, and locally prominent. In later life she claimed that her mother was Laura Jane Seymour, an illegitimate daughter of Francis Seymour (qv), 3rd marquess of Hertford, who had been rescued from a Spanish convent to become Robert Bell's second wife. The connection seems to have been acknowledged by the Seymour family. Laura's birth is variously given as 18 October 1831 in Glenavy, and c.1829 in Newry, Co. Down, while in the 1881 census she gave her age as 44 and her birthplace as Dublin. In her early teens she worked in a draper's shop in Belfast, and unsuccessfully tried acting there and later in Dublin and London; prostitution was a much more lucrative sideline. When she moved to London she became one of the hetaerae whose careers were the obverse of Victorian ideals of decorous femininity, but Bell, said to have been the most beautiful woman of her day, was also a sparkling and intelligent companion, who modelled for artists and whose likeness as ‘The nun’ sold thousands of photographs. She may have been the mistress of Edwin Landseer, and possibly of Sir William Wilde (qv) and other wealthy men; even Prince Louis Napoleon, the future emperor, may have been briefly involved with her, perhaps when she had been abandoned in Paris in 1850 by the Nepalese ambassador to London, who had spent thousands of pounds on her. On 21 January 1852, in St George's, Hanover Square, London, she married Augustus Frederick Thistlethwayte (Thistlethwaite) who was only 21 years old. Six months later she ran off with his younger brother, Arthur Henry Thistlethwayte, an army officer, who fought at the battle of the Alma (1854) in the Crimea and died at Scutari. Realising that her legal husband, a serious and religious man, had inherited the family's wealth, she experienced a sudden conversion and was presently received back by him. The couple lived unhappily in Grosvenor Square, London; her husband announced on several occasions that he would not be responsible for her debts, but in 1878 and 1879 the Thistlethwaytes were unsuccessfully sued for payment of dress bills of over £1,000. Thistlethwayte is said to have been moody and irascible, often firing a pistol to summon servants.
Laura, despite her past reputation, was accepted for a time by a clique of society evangelicals based in Welbeck St. They eventually found her out in many untruths. Undaunted, she took up public preaching in Dingwall, Edinburgh, Scotland, and in London at the Polytechnic (1865), where she created quite a stir and was able to maintain her reputation for evangelical witness and philanthropy. In the 1870s and 1880s her ‘dinners to statesmen’ were very fashionable, attended by the Russian ambassador and other notable people, including Lord Rosebery, Lord Torrington, and W. E. Gladstone. Gladstone was fascinated by the version she gave of her life story and by her company; he visited her often in London and at her country house, and there was some contemporary comment about their relationship, which lasted from about 1864 until her death. After October 1869 Gladstone began his letters to her ‘Dear Spirit’, and a ring that she gave him can be seen on his right-hand in many of his later portraits and photographs. On 7 August 1887 Laura Thistlethwayte found her husband in his bedroom, killed by a pistol shot; it is unclear whether as a result of an accident or suicide. In somewhat reduced circumstances (though her husband did leave her all his property), she gave up the house in Grosvenor Square, which had had a household of eighteen servants, and moved to a rented property in Hampstead, which was still large enough to support pet deer. She died, childless, at Woodbine Cottage, Hampstead, on 30 May 1894, leaving instructions that her coffin should bear her name as Laura Eliza Seymour. After her death Gladstone's solicitors retrieved his letters to her, and Gladstone himself burned her letters to him, for fear of their being misunderstood. A portrait of her by Girard in the Wallace collection, London (a collection formed by her Seymour relatives), is reproduced, together with a photograph, in the Gladstone diaries, vi.