Perdita

THE LIFE OF MARY ROBINSON

PAULA BYRNE

DEDICATION

In memory of my grandmother,another Mary Robinson

EPIGRAPH

I was delighted at the Play last Night, and was extremely moved by two scenes in it, especially as I was particularly interested in the appearance of the most beautiful Woman, that ever I beheld, who acted with such delicacy that she drew tears from my eyes.

(George, Prince of Wales)

There is not a woman in England so much talked of and so little known as Mrs Robinson.

(Morning Herald, 23 April 1784)

I was well acquainted with the late ingenious Mary Robinson, once the beautiful Perdita … the most interesting woman of her age.

(Sir Richard Phillips, publisher)

She is a woman of undoubted Genius … I never knew a human Being with so full a mind – bad, good, and indifferent, I grant you, but full, and overflowing.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

I am allowed the power of changing my form, as suits the observation of the moment.

(Mary Robinson, writing as ‘The Sylphid’)

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

PROLOGUE

PART ONE: ACTRESS

1. ‘During a Tempestuous Night’

2. A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World

3. Wales

4. Infidelity

5. Debtors’ Prison

6. Drury Lane

7. A Woman in Demand

PART TWO: CELEBRITY

8. Florizel and Perdita

9. A Very Public Affair

10. The Rivals

11. Blackmail

12. Perdita and Marie Antoinette

13. A Meeting in the Studio

14. The Priestess of Taste

15. The Ride to Dover

16. Politics

PART THREE: WOMAN OF LETTERS

17. Exile

18. Laura Maria

19. Opium

20. Author

21. Nobody

22. Radical

23. Feminist

24. Lyrical Tales

25. ‘A Small but Brilliant Circle’

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Q AND A WITH PAULA BYRNE

LIFE AT A GLANCE

TOP TEN BOOKS

ABOUT THE BOOK

CELEBRITY

READ ON

HAVE YOU READ?

IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE …

FIND OUT MORE

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX: THE MYSTERY OF MRS ROBINSON’S AGE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

PRAISE

OTHER WORKS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

In the middle of a summer night in 1783 a young woman set off from London along the Dover road in pursuit of her lover. She had waited for him all evening in her private box at the Opera House. When he failed to appear, she sent her footman to his favourite haunts: the notorious gaming clubs Brooks’s and Weltje’s; the homes of his friends, the Prince of Wales, Charles James Fox, and Lord Malden. At 2 a.m. she heard the news that he had left for the Continent to escape his debtors. In a moment of panic and desperation, she hired a post chaise and ordered it to be driven to Dover. This decision was to have the most profound consequences for the woman famous and infamous in London society as ‘Perdita’.

In the course of the carriage ride she suffered a medical misadventure.* And she did not meet her lover at Dover: he had sailed from Southampton. Her life would never be the same again.

Born Mary Darby, she had been a teenage bride. As a young mother she was forced to live in debtors’ prison. But then, under her married name of Mary Robinson, she had been taken up by David Garrick, the greatest actor of the age, and had herself become a celebrated actress at Drury Lane. Many regarded her as the most beautiful woman in England. The young Prince of Wales – who would later become Prince Regent and then King George IV – had seen her in the part of Perdita and started sending her love letters signed ‘Florizel’. She held the dubious honour of being the first of his many mistresses.

In an age when most women were confined to the domestic sphere, Mary was a public face. She was gazed at on the stage and she gazed back from the walls of the Royal Academy and the studios of the men who painted her, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was to painting what Garrick was to theatre. The royal love affair also brought her image to the eighteenth-century equivalent of the television screen: the caricatures displayed in print-shop windows. Her notoriety increased when she became a prominent political campaigner. In quick succession, she was the mistress of Charles James Fox, the most charismatic politician of the age, and Colonel Banastre Tarleton, known as ‘Butcher’ Tarleton because of his exploits in the American War of Independence. The prince, the politician, the action hero: it is no wonder that she was the embodiment of – the word was much used at the time, not least by Mary herself – ‘celebrity’.

Her body was her greatest asset. When she came back from Paris with a new style of dress, everyone in the fashionable world wanted one like it. When she went shopping, she caused a traffic jam. What was she to do when that body was no longer admired and desired?

Fortunately, she had another asset: her voice. Whilst still a teenager, she had become a published poet. Because of her stage career, she had an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare’s language – and the ability to speak it. So, as her health gradually improved, she remade herself as a professional author. Having transformed herself from actress to author, she went on to experiment with a huge range of written voices, as is apparent from the variety of pseudonyms under which she wrote: Horace Juvenal, Tabitha Bramble, Laura Maria, Sappho, Anne Frances Randall. She completed seven novels (the first of them a runaway bestseller), two political tracts, several essays, two plays and literally hundreds of poems.¹

Actress, entertainer, author, provoker of scandal, fashion icon, sex object, darling of the gossip columns, self-promoter: one can see why she has been described as the Madonna of the eighteenth century.² But celebrity has its flipside: oblivion. Mary Robinson had the unique distinction of being painted in a single season by the four great society artists of the age – Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, John Hoppner, and George Romney – and yet within a few years of her death the Gainsborough portrait was being catalogued under the anonymous title Portrait of a Lady with a Dog. In the twentieth century, despite the resurgence of the art of life-writing and the enormous interest in female authors, there was not a single biography of Robinson. Before the Second World War, she was considered suitable only for fictionalized treatments, historical romances and bodice-rippers with titles such as The Exquisite Perdita and The Lost One. In the 1950s her life was subordinated to that of the lover she thought she was pursuing to France.* A book on George IV and the women in his life did not even mention Mary’s name, despite the fact that she was his first love and he remained in touch with her for the rest of her life.³ Finally in the 1990s, feminist scholars began a serious reassessment of Robinson’s literary career. However, their work was aimed at a specialized audience of scholars and students of the Romantic period in literature.⁴

When Mary Robinson began writing her autobiography, near the end of her life, there were two conflicting impulses at work. On the one hand, she needed to revisit her own youthful notoriety. She had been the most wronged woman in England and she wanted to put on record her side of the story of her relationship with the Prince of Wales. But at the same time, she wanted to be remembered as a completely different character: the woman of letters. As she wrote, she had in her possession letters from some of the finest minds of her generation – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft – assuring her that she was, in Coleridge’s words, ‘a woman of genius’. Royal sex scandal and the literary life do not usually cohabit between the same printed sheets, but in a biography of the woman who went from ‘Mrs Robinson of Drury Lane’ to ‘the famous Perdita’ to ‘Mary Robinson, author’, they must.

The research for this book took me from the minuscule type of the gossip columns of the Morning Herald in the newspaper division of the British Library at Colindale in north London to the Gothic cloister of Bristol Minster, where Mary Robinson was born. I stood below the incomparable portraits of her in the Wallace Collection tucked away off busy Oxford Street and in stately homes both vast (Waddesdon Manor) and intimate (Chawton House). In the Print Room of the British Museum I pored over graphic and sometimes obscene caricatures of her; via the worldwide web I downloaded long-forgotten political pamphlets in which she figured prominently; in the New York Public Library, within earshot of the traffic on Fifth Avenue, I pieced together the letters in which Mary revealed her state of mind in the final months of her life, as she continued to write prolifically even as she struggled against illness and disability.

I found hitherto neglected letters and manuscripts scattered in the most unlikely places: in a private home in Surrey, I opened a cardboard folder and found the Prince of Wales’s account of the night he saw ‘Perdita’ at Drury Lane, written the very next day, in the first flush of his infatuation with her; in the Garrick Club, among the portraits of the great men of the theatre who launched Mary’s career, I discovered a letter in which she laid out her plan to rival the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and in one of the most securely guarded private houses in England – which I am prohibited from naming – I found the original manuscript of her Memoirs, which is subtly different from the published text. I became intimate with the perfectly proportioned face and the lively written voice of this remarkable woman. Yet as I was researching the book, people from many walks of life asked me who I was writing about: hardly any of them had heard of the eighteenth-century Mary Robinson. So I have sought to recreate her life, her world and her work, and to explain how it was that one of her contemporaries called her ‘the most interesting woman of her age’.⁵

*As with many incidents in her life, the circumstances are not absolutely clear, as will be seen in chapter 15.

*Robert Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (New York, 1957) – as the title reveals, the main emphasis is on Tarleton’s military career. Though Bass undertook valuable archival research, his transcriptions were riddled with errors, he misdated key incidents, and he failed to notice many fascinating newspaper reports, references in memoirs, and other sources. It is no exaggeration to say that his inaccuracies outnumber his accuracies: if Bass says that an article appeared one November in the Morning Post, one may rest assured that it is to be found in December in the Morning Herald.

PART ONE Actress

CHAPTER 1 ‘During a Tempestuous Night’

The very finest powers of intellect, and the proudest specimens of mental labour, have frequently appeared in the more contracted circles of provincial society. Bristol and Bath have each sent forth their sons and daughters of genius.

Mary Robinson, ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, etc.

etc. of the Metropolis of England’

Horace Walpole described the city of Bristol as ‘the dirtiest great shop I ever saw’. Second only to London in size, it was renowned for the industry and commercial prowess of its people. ‘The Bristolians,’ it was said, ‘seem to live only to get and save money.’¹ The streets and marketplaces were alive with crowds, prosperous gentlemen and ladies perambulated under the lime trees on College Green outside the minster, and seagulls circled in the air. A river cut through the centre, carrying the ships that made the city one of the world’s leading centres of trade. Sugar was the chief import, but it was not unusual to find articles in the Bristol Journal announcing the arrival of slave ships en route from Africa to the New World. Sometimes slaves would be kept for domestic service: in the parish register of the church of St Augustine the Less one finds the baptism of a negro named ‘Bristol’. Over the page is another entry: Polly – a variant of Mary – daughter of Nicholas and Hester Darby, baptized 19 July 1758.²

Nicholas Darby was a prominent member of the Society of Merchant Venturers, based at the Merchants’ Hall in King Street, an association of overseas traders that was at the heart of Bristol’s commercial life. The merchant community supported a vibrant culture: a major theatre, concerts, assembly rooms, coffee houses, bookshops, and publishers. Bristol’s most famous literary son was born just five years before Mary. Thomas Chatterton, the ‘marvellous boy’, was the wunderkind of English poetry. His verse became a posthumous sensation in the years following his suicide (or accidental self-poisoning) at the age of 17. For Keats and Shelley, he was a hero; Mary Robinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both wrote odes in his memory.

Coleridge himself also developed Bristol connections. His friend and fellow poet Robert Southey, the son of a failed linen merchant, came from the city. The two young poets married the Bristolian Fricker sisters and it was on College Green, a stone’s throw from the house where Mary was born, that they hatched their ‘pantisocratic’ plan to establish a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River.

Mary described her place of birth at the beginning of her Memoirs. She conjured up a hillside in Bristol, where a monastery belonging to the order of St Augustine had once stood beside the minster:

On this spot was built a private house, partly of simple and partly of modern architecture. The front faced a small garden, the gates of which opened to the Minster-Green (now called the College-Green): the west side was bounded by the Cathedral, and the back was supported by the antient cloisters of St Augustine’s monastery. A spot more calculated to inspire the soul with mournful meditation can scarcely be found amidst the monuments of antiquity.

She was born in a room that had been part of the original monastery. It was immediately over the cloisters, dark and Gothic with ‘casement windows that shed a dim mid-day gloom’. The chamber was reached ‘by a narrow winding staircase, at the foot of which an iron-spiked door led to the long gloomy path of cloistered solitude’. What better origin could there have been for a woman who grew up to write best-selling Gothic novels? If the Memoirs is to be believed, even the weather contributed to the atmosphere of foreboding on the night of her birth. ‘I have often heard my mother say that a more stormy hour she never remembered. The wind whistled round the dark pinnacles of the minster tower, and the rain beat in torrents against the casements of her chamber.’ ‘Through life,’ Mary continued, ‘the tempest has followed my footsteps.’³

The Minster House was destroyed when the nave of Bristol Minster was enlarged in the Victorian era, but it is still possible to stand in the courtyard in front of the Minster School and see the cloister that supported the house in which Mary was born. And next door, in what is now the public library, one can look at an old engraving which reveals that the house was indeed tucked beneath the great Gothic windows and the mighty tower of the cathedral itself.

The family had Irish roots. Mary’s great-grandfather changed his name from MacDermott to Darby in order to inherit an Irish estate. Nicholas Darby was born in America and claimed kinship with Benjamin Franklin.⁴ As a young man he was engaged in the Newfoundland fishing trade in St John’s. His daughter described him as having a ‘strong mind, high spirit, and great personal intrepidity’, traits that could equally apply to herself.⁵

Mary was always touchy about issues of rank and gentility. In her Memoirs she took pains to emphasize the respectability of the merchant classes. Her father had some success in cultivating the acquaintance of the aristocracy: in an unpublished handwritten note, Mary remarked with pride that ‘Lord Northington the Chancellor was my Godfather’ and that at her christening ‘the Hon Bertie Henley stood for him as proxy’.⁶

Mary’s mother, Hester, née Vanacott, made a romantic match with Nicholas Darby when she married him on 4 July 1749 in the small Somerset village of Donyatt. Hester was a descendant of a well-to-do family, the Seys of Boverton Castle in Glamorganshire, and a distant relation (by marriage) of the philosopher John Locke. Vivacious and popular, she had many suitors and her parents would have expected her to marry into a landed family. They did not approve of her union with Darby.

In 1752, three years after their marriage, Nicholas and Hester had a son, whom they named John.⁷ A daughter called Elizabeth followed in January 1755. She died of smallpox before she was 2 and was buried in October 1756. It was a great comfort to Nicholas and Hester when Mary was born just over a year later, on 27 November 1757.*

In the days before vaccination, smallpox was a lethal threat to children. The disease took not only the infant Elizabeth, but probably also a younger brother, William, when he was 6. Another younger brother for Mary, named George, fared better: he and John both grew up to become ‘respectable’ merchants, trading at Leghorn (Livorno) in Italy.

Hester soon found that she had entered into an unhappy union. Nicholas spent much of his time in Newfoundland on business. By 1758, he was putting down roots there, joining with other merchants in an enterprise to build a new church. He returned to Bristol for the winter months, but he can only have been a shadowy presence in his daughter’s early life.

The Darby boys were extremely handsome, with auburn hair and blue eyes. Mary took after her father; she described her own childhood looks as ‘swarthy’, with enormous eyes set in a small, delicate face. She was a dreamy, melancholy, and pensive child who revelled in the gloominess of her surroundings in the minster. The children’s nursery was so close to the great aisle that the peal of the organ could be heard at morning and evening service. Mary would creep out of her nursery on her own and perch on the winding staircase to listen to the music: ‘I can at this moment recall to memory the sensations I then experienced, the tones that seemed to thrill through my heart, the longing which I felt to unite my feeble voice to the full anthem, and the awful though sublime impression which the church service never failed to make upon my feelings.’ Rather than playing on College Green with her brothers she would creep into the minster to sit beneath the lectern in the form of a great eagle that held up the huge Bible. The only person who could keep her away from her self-imposed exile there was the stern sexton and bell-ringer she named Black John, ‘from the colour of his beard and complexion’.⁸

As soon as she learnt to read, she recited the epitaphs and inscriptions on the tombstones and monuments. Before she was 7 years old, she had memorized several elegiac poems that were typical of the verse of the eighteenth century. Her taste in music was as mournful as her taste in poetry.

Mary confessed that the events of her life had been ‘more or less marked by the progressive evils of a too acute sensibility’. One thinks here of Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, with its satirical portrait of the ultra-sensitive Marianne Dashwood: she bears more than a passing resemblance to the melancholy young Mary Darby, quoting morbid poetry and thoroughly enjoying the misery of playing sombre music and being left in solitary contemplation. As a writer, Mary was always acutely aware of her audience: her image of herself in the Memoirs as a child of sensibility was designed to appeal to the numerous readers of Gothic novels and sentimental fiction. At the same time, her self-image appealed to the romantic myth of the writer as a natural genius who begins as a precociously talented but lonely child escaping into the world of imagination.

Though Mary presented herself as a ‘natural’ genius, she was the beneficiary of improvements in education and the growth of printed literature aimed at a young audience. This was a period when private schools for girls of middling rank sprang up all over England. Bristol was the home of Hannah More, playwright, novelist, Evangelical reformer, and political writer. Though Hannah became famous for rectitude and Mary for scandal, their lives were curiously parallel: born and bred in Bristol, each of them had a theatrical career that began under the patronage of David Garrick and each then turned to the art of the novel. In the 1790s they both became associated with contentious debates about women’s education.

Mary attended a school run by Hannah More and her sisters. An upmarket ladies’ academy, it had opened in 1758 in Trinity Street, behind the minster, just a few hundred yards from Mary’s birthplace. The curriculum concentrated on ‘French, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Needlework’. A recruitment advertisement added that ‘A Dancing Master will properly attend.’⁹ The school was immensely popular and four years later moved to 43 Park Street, halfway up the hill towards the genteel district of Clifton. When Mary Darby attended, the enrolment had risen to sixty pupils. Each of the More sisters took responsibility for a different ‘department’ of the curriculum, with – in Mary’s words – ‘zeal, good sense and ability’. The earnest and erudite Hannah ‘divided her hours between the arduous task “of teaching the young ideas how to shoot,” and exemplifying by works of taste and fancy the powers of a mind already so cultivated’.¹⁰

In the summer of 1764 Bristol was in the grip of theatre mania. The famous London star William Powell played King Lear with a force said to rival that of the great Garrick himself. Within two years Powell was combining management with performance at a new building in the city centre. The first theatre in England to be built with a semicircular auditorium, it had nine dress boxes and eight upper side boxes, all inscribed with the names of renowned dramatists and literary figures.

The highlight of the first season in this new Theatre Royal was another King Lear, with Powell in the lead once again and his wife Elizabeth playing Cordelia. Powell had become very friendly with Hannah More, and she wrote an uplifting prologue for the performance. The whole school turned out for the play. It was the 8-year-old Mary Darby’s first visit to the theatre. She vividly remembered the ‘great actor’ of whom Chatterton said ‘No single part is thine, thou’rt all in all.’¹¹ She was less taken by the performance of his wife who played Cordelia without ‘sufficient éclat to render the profession an object for her future exertions’.¹² Among Mary’s school friends were Powell’s two daughters and the future actress Priscilla Hopkins, who would later become the wife of John Kemble and sister-in-law of Sarah Siddons, the most famous actress in Britain. The girls developed a passion for theatre together.

Hannah More continued to be fascinated by the theatre. She wrote a pastoral verse comedy called The Search after Happiness, which was acted by the schoolgirls. It advocates a doctrine of female modesty and submission that would be echoed in the anti-feminist tracts she wrote in later life. One of the characters is an ambitious girl who longs to ‘burst those female bonds, which held my sex in awe’ in order to pursue fame and fortune: ‘I sigh’d for fame, I languished for renown, / I would be prais’d, caress’d, admir’d, and known.’ It is tempting to see the young Mary Darby playing this part, and hearing her aspirations rebuked by another character: ‘Would she the privilege of Man invade? …/ For Woman shines but in her proper sphere.’¹³

By the end of the century Hannah More had turned herself into one of the most formidable conservative propagandists of the age. She deeply resented her connection with her old pupil, the infamous Perdita. That one of the most reviled women of the era was taught by one of the most revered was an irony not lost on the bluestocking Mrs Thrale: ‘Of all Biographical Anecdotes none ever struck me more forcibly than the one saying how Hannah More la Dévote was the person who educated fair Perdita la Pécheresse.’¹⁴ Mary, in turn, made it abundantly clear that her literary gifts owed little debt to Hannah and her sisters. She stressed that the education she received from the school was merely in feminine accomplishments of the sort that were required for the marriage market. Women were expected to be ornaments to society and, once married, to be modest and retiring creatures confined to the domestic sphere rather than competing with men in the public domain.

As the daughter of a prosperous merchant, Mary benefited from the privileges that could be bought by new money. The distinguished musician Edmund Broderip taught her music on an expensive Kirkman harpsichord bought by her father. The family moved to a larger, more elegant house as Nicholas Darby, keen to show off the fruits of his upward mobility, insisted upon living like a gentleman, buying expensive plate, sumptuous silk furniture, foreign wine, and luxurious food, displaying ‘that warm hospitality which is often the characteristic of a British merchant’.¹⁵ He ensured that his daughter lived in the best style. Her bed was of the richest crimson damask; her dresses, ordered from London, were of the finest cambric. The family spent the summer months on gentrified Clifton Hill in order to benefit from the clearer air. Darby’s appetite for ‘the good things of the world’ would be inherited by his daughter.

Mrs Darby, meanwhile, provided emotional security. Unlike many of the other girls at the More sisters’ school, Mary never boarded: she did not ‘pass a night of separation from the fondest of mothers’. In retrospect, she considered herself overindulged, suggesting that her mother’s only fault was ‘a too tender care’, a tendency to spoil and flatter her children: ‘the darlings of her bosom were dressed, waited on, watched, and indulged with a degree of fondness bordering on folly’.¹⁶ Given that Nicholas Darby was absent abroad for much of the time, it is not surprising that Hester threw so much into her children. Mary implies that an absent father and an indulgent mother proved a dangerous combination for a headstrong girl like herself.

The Memoirs paints a picture of Mary’s early childhood as a fairy-tale existence, a paradise lost. Her life changed for ever, she says, when she was in her ninth year. Nicholas Darby had a lifelong history of travelling, fishing, and trading in the far north of Newfoundland. In the early 1760s he was acting as spokesman for the Society of Merchant Venturers, advising the Government on the defence of Newfoundland, which was a key strategic outpost fought over by the British and French during the Seven Years War. Then in 1765 he became obsessed with what Mary describes as an ‘eccentric’ plan, a scheme ‘as wild and romantic as it was perilous to hazard, which was no less than that of establishing a whale fishery on the coast of Labrador; and of civilizing the Esquimaux Indians, in order to employ them in the extensive undertaking’.¹⁷

This was dangerous territory. Not only was the weather extremely inclement, but the area in question – the Strait of Belle Isle – had only been held in British hands for a couple of years. But Darby had some powerful backers: Mary records that his scheme was given approval by the Governor of Newfoundland, Lord Chatham (William Pitt the Elder) and ‘several equally distinguished personages’. The venture seemed ‘full of promise’. Darby dreamed that the day might come when, thanks to him, British America could rival the whale industry of Greenland.

Having got permission from the Government, he told his family that the scheme would require his full-time residence in America for a minimum of two years. Hester was appalled by the idea. The northern wastes were no place for children, so accompanying her husband would have meant leaving her beloved sons and daughter to complete their education at boarding schools in England. She also had a phobia of the ocean. The decision to stay with her children would cost Hester her marriage. Nicholas duly sailed for America. The eldest boy John was placed in a mercantile house at Leghorn, whilst Mary, William, and George stayed with Hester in Bristol.

At first, Nicholas wrote regularly and affectionately. But his letters gradually became less frequent, and when they did arrive they began to seem dutiful and perfunctory. Then there was a long period of silence. And finally ‘the dreadful secret was unfolded’: Darby had acquired a mistress, Elenor, who, as Mary wryly testified, was only too happy to ‘brave the stormy ocean’ alongside him. She ‘consented to remain two years with him in the frozen wilds of America’.¹⁸

Darby had sailed from England to Chateau Bay with 150 men. He was then given headquarters on Cape Charles, where he constructed lodgings, a workshop, and a landing stage. Fishing began well, but then the local Inuit burned his boats and destroyed his crucial supply of salt. His men fought with each other and refused to winter on the coast. He made a second attempt a year later, in partnership with a fellow merchant, returning with new men and more sophisticated equipment. But more fighting ensued and in the summer of 1767 ten men were arrested on murder charges. Then in November, around the time of Mary’s tenth birthday, the Labrador project came to a violent end: another band of Inuit attacked a crew preparing for winter sealing, killed three men, burned Darby’s settlement, and set his boats adrift. Thousands of pounds’ worth of ships and equipment were destroyed. ‘The island of promise’ had turned into a ‘scene of barbarous desolation’ – though Mary’s account characteristically exaggerates the slaughter, turning the three casualties into the murder of ‘many of his people’.¹⁹ Darby’s patrons refused to honour their promise of financial protection and, with more losses incurred, he dissolved his partnership and set in train the sale of the family home.

Back in Bristol, Hester Darby faced a series of calamities: the shame that came with the news that her husband was residing in America with his mistress, the financial losses that would cost her everything, and the death – from smallpox or possibly measles – of Mary’s 6-year-old brother William. On his return to London, Nicholas lived with his mistress Elenor, but the manuscript of Mary’s Memoirs has an intriguing memorandum, excluded from the published text: ‘Esquemaux Indians brought over by my father, a woman and a boy.’²⁰ Could this have been another mistress? And could it then be that Mary had an illegitimate half-Inuit half-brother?

Mary always felt torn between pride in her father’s achievements and resentment at his abandonment of the family. Her ambivalence can be seen in the way that she emphasizes his dual nationality. When she speaks of his bold and restless spirit, and his love of sea life, she ascribes this to his status as an American seafarer, yet at other times he is that stalwart of the community, a ‘British merchant’. Mary blamed her father’s mistress for bewitching his senses at a time when he was isolated in America, away from his wife and family. She herself learnt a valuable lesson at a particularly vulnerable age: loss of fortune and position swiftly loses friends. Dropped by the people who had been happy to take advantage of their former prosperity, the family were left bereft.

A year later, Hester, Mary, and the surviving younger son, George, were summoned to London to their father’s lodgings in fashionable Spring Gardens, near the famous Vauxhall pleasure gardens. Hester was unsure as to whether to expect ‘the freezing scorn, or the contrite glances, of either an estranged or repentant husband’.²¹ His ‘coldly civil’ letter had ‘requested particularly’ that she should bring the children with her: this ought to have been enough to make her realize that the meeting would be a farewell, not a reunion.

When they met, her father was in tears and could barely speak. The embrace he gave his wife was ‘cold’ – and it was the last she was to receive from him. Once the initial recriminations had blown over, Nicholas set out his plans. The children were to be placed at schools in London, while his wife was to board with a respectable clergyman’s family. He would be returning across the Atlantic. And, indeed, the following year he launched a new and much more successful venture in Labrador, this time employing experienced Canadian fishermen.

The next stage of Mary’s education was to be crucial to her vocation as a writer. She was sent to a school in Chelsea and came under the tuition of a brilliant and accomplished woman, Meribah Lorrington. Lorrington was highly unconventional in that she had been given a masculine education by her schoolteacher father, and was as well versed in the classics as she was in the modern languages, arithmetic, and astronomy. She was the living embodiment of a character type that Mary would fictionalize in several of her novels, the female who benefits from the education usually reserved for boys.

Mary worshipped her teacher, elevating her influence far above that of the More sisters: ‘All that I ever learned I acquired from this extraordinary woman.’²² The classical education she was given in Chelsea meant that in the long term her writings would demand a respect that was not often granted to female authors. There is an especially striking breadth of classical allusion in her feminist treatise A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination.

Pupil and teacher became close companions, even sharing the same bedroom. Mary dates her love for books from this relationship: ‘I applied rigidly to study, and acquired a taste for books, which has never, from that time, deserted me.’²³ The women read to one another and Mary began composing verses, some of which were included in her first collection of poems, which she was to publish from debtors’ prison. In Mary’s narrative of her own life, her intellect first blossoms in an all-female community, with Meribah and half a dozen fellow pupils (among whom Mary is clearly singled out as the favourite). Far from aligning herself with the highly respectable Hannah More, she chooses to identify Lorrington as her mentor – and then goes on to reveal that she was an incorrigible drunkard.

Mary often complained of the contemptuous treatment that she received from her own sex, but she paid the utmost respect to the women who inspired and supported her, especially in her writing career. As Meribah Lorrington was credited for encouraging her juvenile writing, so Mary’s first literary patron was another woman of dubious reputation, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. Mary adored both women, though Meribah was a hopeless alcoholic and Georgiana an equally addicted gambler.

Mary accepted the explanation that Meribah gave for her addiction to drink: she was grief-stricken by the death of her husband and was the victim of a bullying, disciplinarian father, a stern-speaking silver-bearded Anabaptist who wandered round the girls’ schoolroom wearing nothing but a loose flowing robe which made him look like a necromancer. Mary noticed that the presence of the father always made the daughter reach for the bottle.

Meribah Lorrington’s ‘state of confirmed intoxication’ even during teaching hours led to the demise of the Chelsea school. Some time later, Mary discovered a drunken beggar woman at dusk in the street. She gave her money, then, to her surprise, the woman said, ‘Sweet girl, you are still the angel I ever knew you.’ Their eyes met and Mary was horrified to discover that it was her old teacher. She took her home, gave her fresh clothes, and asked her where she lived. Meribah refused to say, but promised she would call again in a few days. She never did. Years later, Mary learned that her brilliant but flawed mentor had died a drunk in the Chelsea workhouse.

Mary describes herself in her Memoirs as well developed for her age, tall and slender. At the age of 10, she says, she looked 13. During her fourteen-month period boarding at the Lorrington Academy, she visited her mother every Sunday. One afternoon over tea she had a marriage proposal from a friend of her father’s. Hester was a little surprised; she asked her visitor how old he thought her daughter was. ‘About sixteen,’ he replied. Hester informed him that Mary was still only 12. He found this hard to believe, given that she was such a well-developed girl both physically and intellectually, but he was prepared to wait – he was a captain in the Navy, just off on a two-year voyage. He had great prospects for the future and hoped that Mary might still be unattached on his return. Just a few months later he perished at sea.

In this version of Mary’s first encounter with male desire, she is the innocent: a child, albeit with the body of a woman. The first ‘biography’ of her, published at the height of her public fame in 1784, tells a very different story. The Memoirs of Perdita is a source that must be treated with great caution, since – as will be seen – it was written with both a political and a pornographic agenda. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the book’s anonymous author had a very well-informed source. The ‘editor’ claimed in his introduction that ‘the circumstances of her life were communicated by one who has for several years been her confidant, and to whose pen she has been indebted for much news paper panegyric’ – a description that very much suggests Henry Bate of the Morning Herald, a key figure in Mary’s story. According to the ‘editor’ of The Memoirs of Perdita, ‘the following history may with propriety be said to be dictated by herself: many of the mere private transactions were indisputably furnished by her; nor could they possibly originate from any other source’.²⁴ In some instances this is true: The Memoirs of Perdita published personal information about Mary’s life that was not previously in the public domain. In other instances, however, these supposed memoirs can safely be assumed to offer nothing more than malicious fantasy.

According to The Memoirs of Perdita, Mary’s first love affair occurred soon after the Darbys moved to London. Her father supposedly brought home a handsome young midshipman called Henry, who was allowed ‘private interviews’ and ‘little rambles’ with Mary. They went boating together on the Thames. On one occasion, they stopped for refreshments at Richmond. The only room the landlord had available in which to serve them with a glass of wine and a biscuit happened to be a bedchamber – which had crimson curtains that matched the ‘natural blush’ to which Mary was excited by the sight of the bed. The young midshipman duly took her hand and sat her with him on the white counterpane. ‘Perdita’s blushes returned – and Henry kissed them away – She fell into his arms – then sunk down together on the bed. – The irresistible impulse of nature, in a moment carried them into those regions of ecstatic bliss, where sense and thought lie dissolved in the rapture of mutual enjoyment.’²⁵

The affair supposedly lasted for some time, until the ‘jovial tar’ was summoned back to his ship, never to be seen again. In all probability, ‘Henry’ is pure invention, perhaps spun at second hand from some passing remark about the sailor’s proposal. After all, given that Nicholas Darby was estranged from his family, he was not there to introduce a midshipman into the household. But it would be unwise to dismiss out of hand the possibility that the young Mary – steeped as she was in poetry and romance – might have had some kind of sexual awakening in her early teens.

Mary was moved to a more orthodox boarding school in Battersea, run by a less colourful but nevertheless ‘lively, sensible and accomplished woman’ named Mrs Leigh.²⁶ Nicholas Darby then stopped sending money for his children’s education. The resolute Hester took matters into her own hands and set up her own dame school in Little Chelsea. The teenage Mary became a teacher of English language, responsible for prose and verse compositions during the week and the reading of ‘sacred and moral lessons, on saints’-days and Sunday evenings’.²⁷ Readers of her Memoirs would have been at best amused at the idea of one of the most notorious women of the age presenting herself as a teacher of morals and religion. Mary also had responsibility for supervising the pupils’ wardrobes, and making sure that they were properly dressed and undressed by the servants.

In 1770, Nicholas Darby ran into more problems. Just as he had a thousand pounds’ worth of seal skins ready for market, a British military officer arrived at his Labrador fishery and confiscated all his produce and tackle on the grounds that he was illegally employing Frenchmen and using French rather than British equipment. He was left marooned. He eventually made it back to London and asked the Board of Trade for compensation, claiming that he did not know that his Canadian crew were actually French subjects. The Board of Trade passed the buck, saying it had no jurisdiction in the case. Nicholas had a moral victory when the Court of King’s Bench awarded him £650 damages against the Lieutenant who had seized the goods, but the money was uncollectible. In the circumstances, one might have expected him to be grateful for his estranged wife’s initiative in establishing a school. But he was a proud man: ‘he considered his name as disgraced, his conjugal reputation tarnished, by the public mode which his wife had adopted for revealing to the world her unprotected situation’.²⁸ He lived openly with his mistress, but could not abide seeing his wife publicly revealed as someone akin to an impoverished widow or spinster. He demanded that the school be closed immediately. It had lasted for less than a year.

Hester and her children moved to Marylebone. Like Chelsea, this was an expanding village on the edge of London, but it had a less rural feel and was fast being recognized as an integral part of the metropolis. Mary reverted from teacher to pupil, finishing her education at Oxford House, situated near the top of Marylebone High Street, bordering on Marylebone Gardens. Nicholas Darby and his mistress Elenor settled in the more fashionable and gentrified Green Street, off Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, a district that was becoming increasingly popular with merchants and rich shopkeepers as well as the gentry.

Mary must have been acutely conscious of the differences in lifestyle between her mother and her father. She sometimes accompanied her father on walks in the fields nearby, where he confessed that he rather regretted his ‘fatal attachment’ to his mistress – they had now been together so long and been through so much that it was impossible to dissolve the relationship. On one of their walks, they called on the Earl of Northington, a handsome young rake and politician, whose father had been one of the sponsors of Darby’s Labrador schemes. They were very well received, with Mary being presented as the goddaughter of the older Northington (now deceased). In later years, she did not deny rumours that she might have been the old Lord’s illegitimate daughter. The young Lord, meanwhile, treated her with ‘the most flattering and gratifying civility’.²⁹

When Nicholas returned to America, Hester moved her children to Southampton Buildings in Chancery Lane. This was lawyers’ territory, backing onto Lincoln’s Inn. She had placed herself under the protection of Samuel Cox, a lawyer. Perhaps she had applied to him for legal help after the separation from Nicholas became final. Being ‘under the protection’ of a man was usually code for sexual involvement, so it may have been more than a professional relationship.

It was during her time at Oxford House that Mary was drawn towards the stage. The governess, Mrs Hervey, spotted her talent for ‘dramatic exhibitions’, and persuaded Hester to let her daughter try for the stage, despite the fact that it was not considered to be a respectable career. Hester was persuaded that there were actresses who ‘preserved an unspotted fame’. Nicholas obviously had his doubts. Upon setting off on his new overseas adventure, he left his wife with a chilling injunction to ‘Take care that no dishonour falls upon my daughter. If she is not safe at my return I will annihilate you.’³⁰

The school’s dancing master was also ballet master at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden. Through him, Mary was introduced to an actor called Thomas Hull, who was impressed by her recitation of lines from Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy Jane Shore of 1714. But nothing came of the audition. Mary did not despair and she was rewarded with a much greater opportunity. Her mother’s protector Samuel Cox knew Dr Samuel Johnson and that was enough to open the door of Johnson’s old pupil and friend, David Garrick.

What was Mary Darby like at the time that she met Garrick? Though she may have been a plain child with dark swarthy looks, she had become a very beautiful teenager. She had curly, dark auburn hair and soft blue eyes that were to enchant men from the Prince of Wales to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She had dimples in her cheeks. But there was always an elusive quality to her beauty. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s pupil, James Northcote, remarked that even his master’s portraits of her were failures because ‘the extreme beauty’ of her was ‘quite beyond his power’.³¹

*See Appendix for the uncertainty over the year of Mary’s birth.

CHAPTER 2 A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World

As London is the great emporium of commerce, it is also the centre of attraction for the full exercise of talents, and the liberal display of all that can embellish the arts and sciences.

Mary Robinson, ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, etc.

etc. of the Metropolis of England’

London was like nowhere else in the world. Bigger than any other city in Europe, with a population more than ten times that of Bristol, it was a place of extremes. Riches and squalor, grandeur and wretchedness, appeared cheek-by-jowl. This was an era of unprecedented consumerism: for companionship and entertainment there were coffee houses, taverns, brothels, parks, pleasure gardens, and theatres. Above all there were shops. Napoleon had good reason to dismiss the English as a nation of shopkeepers. By the time of Mary’s arrival in the metropolis, London had one for every thirty residents. Oxford Street alone boasted over a hundred and fifty. Everything was on display, from plate laden in silversmiths’ shops to fruits and spices piled high on street-barrows. Tea, coffee, sugar, pepper, tobacco, chocolate, and textiles – the ‘fruits of empire’ – were sold in vast quantities.¹ There were print shops, book shops, milliners, linen drapers, silk mercers, jewellery shops, shoe shops, toy shops, confectioners. London was the epicentre of fashion, a place to gaze and be gazed at. It was an urban stage, and few understood this as well as Mary.

For the young poet William Wordsworth, London’s inherent theatricality was disturbing. His section on ‘Residence in London’ in his autobiographical poem The Prelude describes with unease ‘the moving pageant’, the ‘shifting pantomimic scenes’, the ‘great stage’, and the ‘public shows’. For Wordsworth, the gaudy display and excessive showiness of the city signalled a lack of inner authenticity; ‘the quick dance of colours, lights and forms’ was an alarming ‘Babel din’.² Mary Robinson also captured the cacophony of urban life in her poem ‘London’s Summer Morning’, but she relished what Wordsworth abhorred:

Who has not wak’d to list the busy sounds

Of summer’s morning, in the sultry smoke

Of noisy London? On the pavement hot

The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face

And tatter’d covering, shrilly bawls his trade,

Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door

The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell

Proclaims the dustman’s office, while the street

Is lost in clouds impervious. Now begins

The din of hackney-coaches, wagons, carts;

While tinmen’s shops, and noisy trunk-makers,

Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters,

Fruit-barrows, and the hunger-giving cries

Of vegetable vendors, fill the air.

Now ev’ry shop displays its varied trade,

And the fresh-sprinkled pavement cools the feet

Of early walkers.³

She finds poetry in everything from the dustman to the ‘neat girl, / Tripping with bandbox lightly’ to the street vendor of second-hand clothes.

Mary was to experience London in its entirety, from debtors’ prison to parties given in her honour as the Prince’s consort at St James’s Palace. She became notorious for her self-promotion and her skill in anticipating the next new thing, be that in fashion or poetry. But she also grasped the very essence of urban culture in the late eighteenth century in a way that eluded Wordsworth. She knew that in order to survive and thrive in the new consumer society, she had to work to sell her wares. The literary marketplace was as crowded as the London streets and it took guts, brashness, and ostentation to make your voice heard – especially if you were a woman.

She must have felt some trepidation at meeting Garrick: ‘King’ David, the man who had single-handedly transformed the theatre world, acting on stage with unprecedented naturalism, producing behind the scenes with prodigious energy, and above all conferring on his profession a respectability it had never had before.

The 14-year-old girl was summoned to the actor’s elegant and grand new house in Adelphi Terrace, designed by the fashionable Adam brothers and overlooking the Thames. The Garricks had recently moved there and had furnished it lavishly. Mary would have entered through the large hall, with its imposing pillars, and then been shown into the magnificent first-floor drawing room, with its elaborate plaster ceiling crowned by a central circular panel of Venus surrounded by nine medallion paintings of the Graces. Garrick would have soon put her at ease with his good humour and liveliness. His wife, Eva Maria Veigel, a former dancer, was usually at his side and was especially considerate to young girls, as the future dramatist and novelist Fanny Burney testified when she visited the Garricks at their new house the same year: ‘Mrs Garrick received us with a politeness and sweetness of manners, inseparable from her.’⁴

Garrick, always susceptible to beauty, was captivated by Mary’s loveliness. Her voice reminded him of Susannah Cibber, an actress and singer he had favoured in his youth. An added attraction came in the form of Mary’s long, shapely legs, ideal for the highly popular ‘breeches roles’ that were required of actresses on the Georgian stage. In an age when women wore full-length dresses all the time, the actress who cross-dressed in boys’ clothing – as Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Viola, and in dozens of similar roles in eighteenth-century comedies – provided a unique spectacle: the public exhibition of the shape of a female leg.

Garrick’s personal interest was in no sense salacious. His faith in this young unknown was typical of his unfailing support for women in the theatre. His patronage of female actresses and female playwrights was highly unusual in a society that discouraged women from the stage and still regarded actresses as little better than prostitutes. Garrick ‘discovered’ many a young actress and gave playwrights such as Hannah More and Hannah Cowley their first break. In return these young women adored him and his wife.

He offered to train Mary for the part of Cordelia to his own King Lear in the version of Shakespeare’s tragedy that he had reworked from Nahum Tate’s Restoration era adaptation, in which Cordelia is happily married off to Edgar instead of being hanged. Garrick was now in his fifties, beginning to suffer from gout and gallstones. He was conserving his energy, limiting the number of his appearances on stage. Lear, which he had been playing since he was 25, was not only one of his most celebrated but also one of his most demanding roles. This late in his career, it was an extraordinary gamble to entrust Cordelia to a complete unknown. He and Mary spent hours preparing for her debut in the role.

But it was not all work: in the Memoirs, she draws a charming picture of them dancing minuets (Garrick was an excellent dancer) and singing the favourite ballads of the day. Her memory remained vivid: ‘Never shall I forget the enchanting hours which I passed in Mr Garrick’s society: he appeared to me as one who possessed more power, both to awe and to attract, than any man I ever met with.’⁵ She also noticed his dark side: ‘His smile was fascinating; but he had at times a restless peevishness of tone which excessively affected his hearer; at least it affected me so that I never shall forget it.’ His temper was renowned. Fanny Burney reported in her diary that Dr Johnson attributed Garrick’s faults to ‘the fire and hastiness of his temper’. Burney loved Garrick and was mesmerized by the lustre of his ‘brilliant, piercing eyes’, but she also noted that ‘he is almost perpetually giving offence to some of his friends’.⁶ Others could feel irritated by his attention-seeking behaviour. As his friend Oliver Goldsmith put it, he was always natural, simple and unaffected on stage – ‘’Twas only when he was off, he was acting.’⁷

Garrick had a genius for self-publicity and was astonishingly energetic: in the light of Mary’s subsequent career, one might say that he was her perfect role model. Mary adored him and took his advice seriously. He advised her to frequent Drury Lane and familiarize herself with its practices before she made her debut. She quickly became known as Garrick’s new protégée and drew a swarm of admirers. This was Mary’s first taste of celebrity and she loved the ‘buzz’ (her term). While Hester fretted about her daughter’s reputation, Mary was confident that she could tread the thin line between fame and infamy: ‘my ardent fancy was busied in contemplating a thousand triumphs, in which my vanity would be publicly gratified, without the smallest sacrifice of my private character’.⁸

Hester worried that her daughter was making too much of a stir amongst the young rakes who frequented the theatre just to flirt with the latest ingénue. She kept her eye on one man in particular. In her Memoirs Mary described him as a graceful and handsome officer – a Captain – who was very well connected, though she declined to name him. After a brief courtship, and offers of marriage, Hester discovered that he was already married. Mary was informed of the deception, but brushed it off: ‘I felt little regret in the loss of a husband, when I reflected that a matrimonial alliance would have compelled me to relinquish my theatrical profession.’ Another rich suitor came forward at this time, but, to Mary’s horror, he was old enough to be her grandfather. She had set her heart on being an actress: ‘the drama, the delightful drama, seemed the very criterion of all human happiness’.⁹

She was naturally flirtatious and her beauty attracted a stream of admirers. One of her most persistent suitors was a young solicitor’s clerk, who lived across the way from her lodgings. He would sit in the window staring at the fresh-faced Mary. He was languorous and sickly looking, which would have appealed to a girl of strong ‘sensibility’. Mrs Darby’s response to the flirtation was to keep the lower shutters of the windows permanently closed. Fancying ‘every man a seducer, and every hour an hour of accumulating peril’, she sighed for the day when her daughter would be ‘well married’.¹⁰

The articled clerk was named Thomas Robinson. He was training with the firm of Vernon and Elderton in the buildings opposite. He persuaded a friend (a junior colleague of Samuel Cox) to invite Mary and her mother to a dinner party out in Greenwich, without disclosing that Robinson himself would be present. Mother and daughter opened the door of their carriage only to find him ready to hand them down. Hester was duly horrified while Mary professed herself only ‘confused’. Fortunately, though, she had dressed very carefully for dinner, sensing that a conquest was afoot: ‘it was then the fashion to wear silks. I remember that I wore a nightgown of pale blue lustring, with a chip hat, trimmed with ribbands of the same colour.’¹¹ The English nightgown was a simple, flowing shift dress that had been popular for many seasons. It was modest in comparison to the revolutionary ‘Perdita’ chemise that Mary herself would popularize in the 1780s. Lustring was a plain woven silk with a glossy finish that was very popular for summer wear, while the fashionable chip hat, made of finely shaved willow or poplar, was to be worn at a jaunty angle.

Mary’s obsession with her outfits might be considered as shallow and frivolous, but this is to misunderstand the power of fashion: she was very attuned to the ways in which clothing could transform her image. Fashion was central to the consumer society of the late eighteenth century. A plethora of shops offered ready-to-wear collections, while there were second-hand clothes stalls for the less well off. Silks, linens, and cottons were more widely available than ever before. Journalism and fashion went hand in hand: new monthly publications such as the Lady’s Magazine included plates and detailed descriptions of the latest styles. Ladies could even hand-colour the black and white engravings and send them off to a mantua-maker with instructions for making up.

Mary loved to remember the tiniest details of the clothes she was wearing on a particular occasion. On the day that she met her future husband in Greenwich she felt that she had never dressed so perfectly to her own satisfaction. Thomas Robinson spent most of the evening simply staring at her. The party dined early and then returned to London, where Robinson’s friend expatiated upon the many good qualities of Mary’s new suitor, speaking of ‘his future expectations from a rich old uncle; of his probable advancement in his profession; and, more than all, of his enthusiastic admiration of me’.¹² Robinson was apparently the heir of a rich tailor called Thomas Harris, who had a large estate in Wales. Hester Darby sensed that the secure marriage she needed for her daughter was within grasp.

As the date set for Mary’s stage debut approached, Robinson was assiduous in his courtship. He knew that it was crucial to win her mother’s approval and did so by his constant attentions and a flow of presents calculated to impress. Hester was especially fond of ‘graveyard’ literature, and she was delighted when Robinson brought her an elegantly bound copy of James Hervey’s lugubrious Meditations among the Tombs of 1746. She was ‘beguiled’ by these attentions and Robinson accordingly ‘became so great a favourite, that he seemed to her the most perfect of existing beings’. He gained more credit when smallpox again threatened the family. This time it was George, Hester’s favourite son, who was dangerously ill. Mary postponed her stage appearance and Robinson was ‘indefatigable in his attentions’ to the sick boy and his anxious mother. Robinson’s conduct convinced Hester that he was ‘“the kindest, the best of mortals!”, the least addicted to worldly follies – and the man, of all others, who she should adore as a son-in-law’.¹³

Robinson might have convinced the mother, but he still had some way to go with the daughter. Luck was on his side. When George recovered from the smallpox, Mary fell sick herself. This was a test that would reveal the extent of the suitor’s devotion: would he persist in his courtship despite the threat of death or at the very least disfigurement of her lovely features? He did not waver and duly exerted ‘all his assiduity’ to win Mary’s affections, proving the ‘disinterested’ quality of his fondness. For Mary, the relationship was more fraternal than romantic: ‘he attended with the zeal of a brother; and that zeal made an impression of gratitude upon my heart, which was the source of all my succeeding sorrows’.¹⁴

The combined forces of mother and lover were irresistible. Every kind of persuasion and emotional blackmail was employed to press the suit. Hester urged Mary to promise that if she survived the disease she would marry Robinson. She reiterated the threat made by Mary’s father and even intimated that her daughter’s refusal was proof that she retained affection for the ‘libertine Captain’. Mary was cajoled and bullied, ‘repeatedly urged and hourly reminded’ of her father’s vow. Hester’s only hesitation was the thought of the inevitable separation between mother and daughter that marriage would bring. But the resolute lover overcame this obstacle with his promise of the ultimate sacrifice: he insisted that the bride’s mother should live with them, overseeing the domestic duties. Could Mary really refuse him when he offered her abandoned mother a home?

This was how Mary recollected the courtship when she came to write her memoirs. By making her mother an accomplice in Robinson’s scheme to force her hand, she gave the impression that it was not a marriage of affection on her part. But Hester’s culpability is debatable. Her worries were genuine. Her daughter was headstrong, and Hester was doubtful about a stage career. She was worried about Nicholas and the threat he had issued. Robinson’s motives seemed genuine enough. His was hardly a mercenary choice, as Mary brought no money or prospects. Few men would cherish the idea of living with their mother-in-law during the first years of marriage. It would appear that Robinson was genuinely in love with Mary. Neither was his devotion skin deep. He could well have withdrawn his suit when the ravages of smallpox threatened her beauty. At its worst, this horrific disease rendered its surviving victims disfigured and scarred beyond all recognition. Robinson risked his own health to nurse George and attend Mary. Considered in this light, his commitment could not be doubted.

Mary’s timid acquiescence in the match seems uncharacteristic. She had inherited her father’s intrepidity and her mother’s determination. Every action of her eventful life suggests strength of will and force of personality that little could dampen. But she was weak and vulnerable with illness when she finally agreed to Robinson’s proposal. While she lay on her sickbed, the banns were published during three successive Sunday morning services at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, in what is now Trafalgar Square.

An unflattering biographical account of the Robinsons, published in 1781, in which the writer claimed that he knew a great deal about the couple’s affairs, claimed that, despite his humble position as a lawyer’s clerk, Thomas presented himself to Mary and Hester as a gentleman of £30,000, sole heir to a Mr Harris of Carmarthenshire, who gave him an allowance of £500 per year and far greater expectations for the future. According to this early biographer, both Mary and her mother jumped at the match.¹⁵

Doubts may have crept in when Robinson urged mother and daughter to keep the engagement secret. He gave two reasons. One was that he still had three months’ training to serve as an articled clerk and the second that there was another young lady who wished to marry him as soon as he came into independence. Mary had found a small window of opportunity for delay and urged him to postpone the marriage until he came of age. Robinson absolutely refused. Now that she had recovered, with no loss to her looks, Mary still harboured hopes of a stage career. Garrick, wholly unaware that he was in danger of losing his protégée, was agitating for a performance date. Robinson, appealing shrewdly to Hester’s insecurities, invoked strong arguments against the theatre. Nicholas Darby would be horrified by the prospect. Mary’s health would suffer from the ‘fatigues and exertions of the profession’. He also voiced the anti-theatrical prejudice of the age’s moralists when he suggested that Mary would become an object of male desire whose reputation would be irrevocably damaged ‘on a public stage, where all the attractions of the mimic scene would combine to render [her] a fascinating object’.¹⁶

Time was running out for Mary. She now had to decide whether to risk the social embarrassment of pulling out of the marriage even though the banns had been posted or to abandon her hopes of a stage career. With increasing pressure from all angles to choose between the professions of respectable marriage or disreputable acting, she relented: ‘It was now that Mr Robinson and my mother united in persuading me to relinquish my project; and so perpetually, during three days, was I tormented on the subject – so ridiculed for having permitted the bans to be published, and afterwards hesitating to fulfil my contract, that I consented – and was married.’¹⁷

In the original manuscript of her Memoirs, Mary proceeded in the next paragraph to describe her feelings as she knelt at the altar on her wedding day. But she later returned to the manuscript and inserted an additional paragraph that creates a compelling picture of herself as little more than a schoolgirl, coerced into marriage out of gratitude and filial obedience. Up until her marriage, she claims, she dressed like a child (though this does not square with the description of her attire on the day she met Robinson for the first time). She insists that she looked ‘so juvenile’ in her appearance that even two years after her wedding shopkeepers would address her as Miss, assuming she was a daughter and not a wife. She even adds that she still retained the manners of a child, playing with her dolls only three months before she became a wife. One senses a certain overegging of the pudding here. The image of the child with her dolls does not equate with that of the young lady being trained by Garrick for the stage and pursued by the ‘libertine Captain’, who was still writing to Mary and following her around in public despite her discovery of the fact that he was already married.

The vicar officiating at the church, Dr Erasmus Saunders, remarked that he had never ‘before performed the office for so young a bride’. The wedding took place on 12 April 1773: Mary Darby became Mary Robinson when she was just under 15¹/₂. In the Memoirs she presents herself as sexually innocent: ‘the only circumstance which induced me to marry was that of being still permitted to reside with my mother, and to live separate, at least for some time, from my husband’.¹⁸ She chose for her wedding attire the habit of a Quaker – ‘a society to which, in early youth, I was particularly partial’.¹⁹ But when the bride left the church for the wedding breakfast at a friend’s house, she changed her plain dress for something altogether more glamorous. Her gown was muslin, with a matching white sarsenet scarf-cloak; she wore a chip hat with silk ribbons and satin slippers embroidered with silver thread. The change of costume is symbolic of Mary’s struggle to reconcile the contrasting aspects of her character. On the one hand she wanted to be seen as a prudish Quaker, a sexual innocent almost forced into an arranged marriage, but on the other she wanted to be viewed as a beautiful and fashionable bride, decked out in white and silver.

Mary always insisted that her marriage was not a love match. She was deeply romantic and cherished hopes of a soul mate. Robinson was not the man. Of her feelings for her future husband, she wrote, ‘I knew not the sensation of any sentiment beyond that of esteem; love was still a stranger to my bosom.’²⁰ But according to the Memoirs, it was not another, more dashing suitor that she thought of as she spoke her marriage vows kneeling at the altar of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Her thoughts wandered instead to the theatrical career that she was sacrificing, to the glimmer of fame, and the lost opportunity of an independent livelihood.

CHAPTER 3 Wales

There is nothing in life so difficult as to acquire the art of making time pass tolerably in the country.

Mary Robinson, The Widow

The wedding party of four set out in a phaeton and a post chaise. They stopped for the night at an inn near Maldenhead. Robinson was accompanied by an old school friend, Hanway Balack, who kept the groom in good cheer whilst the young bride Mary walked in the gardens with her mother, weeping and describing herself as ‘the most wretched of mortals’. She confessed to Hester that although she esteemed Mr Robinson she did not feel for him that ‘warm and powerful union of soul’ which she felt was indispensable for marriage.¹

Mary was already beginning to regret the clandestine quality of the marriage. During the onward journey to Henley-on-Thames the following day, Hanway had quoted facetiously from Isaac Bickerstaff’s comic opera The Padlock of 1768, then in ‘high celebrity’, which depicted the insecurities of an aged bachelor called Don Diego. His teasing made her painfully aware of the precariousness of her position: Robinson had not told even the friend who was accompanying them on the honeymoon that they were married. Ironically, though, Hanway was to remain a close and loyal friend to Mary throughout her life, long after Robinson had disappeared from it.*

The honeymoon by the river at Henley lasted for ten days. Mary had the painful task of sending Garrick the news that she was married and was therefore relinquishing her stage career. When the couple returned to London, it was to separate residences. Robinson returned to his job in Chancery Lane, while Mary and her mother hired an elegant house in Great Queen Street in fashionable Lincoln’s Inn Fields, backing onto Chancery Lane. Robinson stuck to his insistence that the marriage should be kept secret until he had come of age and finished his articles. Whilst he was busy in chambers, Mary grew bored and found herself a young female companion, who shared her romantic disposition. The girls spent hours wandering in Westminster Abbey, peering at its Gothic windows and listening to the echoes of their footsteps vibrating along the aisles. Mary felt transported back to her childhood in Bristol Minster.

Hester became anxious about her new son-in-law’s continued desire for secrecy. She began to regret the part she had played in promoting the marriage. Then she learnt to her dismay that Robinson had been spinning a web of lies from the very start. He had claimed that his inheritance would fall due when he came of age, but in fact he was already 21. And he had much further to go in his training than he had pretended. Worst of all, Hester discovered the true story of Robinson’s origins. He was not the legitimate heir of his uncle, Thomas Harris, and heir presumptive to a ‘handsome fortune and an estate in South Wales’. He was actually Harris’s illegitimate son – according to one source, the result of a fling with a laundress. Furthermore, with an industrious and ambitious older brother in the picture (whom Robinson had conveniently forgotten to mention), his financial prospects were dim. It was extremely unlikely that he would inherit anything at all from his father. He also owed a lot of money.

Mary, meanwhile, unexpectedly met Garrick walking in a London street. This was the first time she had seen him since informing him by letter of her marriage. She was highly sensible that he had not yielded any return on his protégée and that she had not told him of her defection face to face. After all, she had been trained by the greatest actor of the age and he was not accustomed to having his time wasted by fickle would-be-actresses who changed course at the final hurdle. To his infinite credit and to her utmost relief, he greeted her warmly and congratulated her on her marriage. Mary’s charm and beauty had won him over again. She does not record what she said to him at this meeting. Perhaps she intimated to him, as she did in her Memoirs, that she had been persuaded to marry against her will, and that she deeply regretted the sacrifice of her career. However she managed it – and David Garrick was not the easiest person in the world to sweet-talk – he continued to be a friend and supporter. Mary had a unique talent for maintaining loyal, protective friends, most of whom fell headlong in love with her wit and charm.

Garrick’s knowledge of Mary’s marriage put increasing pressure on Robinson to make the union public. Every day that passed with a disavowal from him put Hester under increasing strain, and Mary’s reputation at greater risk. She could fall pregnant at any time, a plight that Garrick and George Colman the Elder had exploited in their popular comedy of 1766 The Clandestine Marriage. In this play, the lovely young heroine Fanny Sterling is persuaded by her new husband, against her better judgement, to keep her clandestine marriage secret, even though she is heavily pregnant. Despite her condition, she is pursued by many suitors, especially the lecherous aristocrat Lord Ogleby. Mary hints at a similar dilemma in her Memoirs, though it was her mother who was furious with Thomas: ‘The reputation of a darling child, she alleged, was at stake; and though during a few weeks the world might have been kept in ignorance of my marriage, some circumstances that had transpired now rendered an immediate disclosure absolutely necessary.’² There is, however, no evidence that Mary was indeed pregnant at this time. Her daughter was born a full year later.

Perhaps this was an example of Mary’s penchant in her Memoirs for conflating fact and fiction, drawing upon a literary cliché of secret unions and swollen stomachs. She was writing with the memory of having drawn attention from the press for playing the part of the pregnant Fanny Sterling in The Clandestine Marriage whilst she herself was heavily pregnant with her second child. Another possibility is, of course, that Mary and her mother used a feigned pregnancy as a final card to force Thomas’s hand and frighten him into submission. If that was the trick, it seems to have worked: Hester confronted her son-in-law and demanded that he make the marriage public before Mary’s reputation was irrevocably damaged.

Finding Hester inexorable, Robinson resolved to leave for South Wales to avow his marriage and present his young bride to his ‘uncle’ – he still stubbornly disputed the fact of his illegitimacy, though his secret was now out. Hester insisted on travelling with the couple as far as Bristol, ostensibly in order to visit her old friends in the city, but no doubt also to keep an eye on developments. In the absence of her husband, she was determined to protect her daughter’s honour. The journey to Bristol was enlivened by a stopover in which they visited the Oxford colleges and took a guided tour of Blenheim Palace – ‘with the hope of soothing my mother’s resentment, and exhilarating my spirits, which were now perpetually dejected’.³

Robinson went on alone from Bristol to the family seat in Tregunter, Wales. He assured his wife that he would be smoothing the way for her eventual cordial reception at Tregunter House, but, in truth, neither was at all confident that Thomas Harris would sanction the union. On the surface, it seemed a very peculiar marriage. Thomas and Mary had now been married for six months without living together under the same roof. Now Mary was being left again so that Robinson could persuade his father, from whom he had been estranged for some time, to give his blessing to a marriage without prospects or money. It was an inauspicious start to domestic life. Still, they both wanted money and status, and wanted to live well. Mary was prepared to let him go to do his best to win round his father. She insists that although she did not feel overwhelmed with love, she was nevertheless attached ‘to the interest as well as to the person of my husband’.⁴ Though she later came to despise him, she was aware of his qualities, his easy-going temperament and affability.

Nor was she willing to sit and mope whilst their future hung in the balance. She was gratified by the homecoming she received at Bristol. News had spread that Mary Darby had made a good marriage ‘to a young man of considerable expectations’ and she was once again ‘received as the daughter of Mr Darby’. Given her father’s marital infidelity and her husband’s true circumstances, she saw the irony in the way that she was deriving respectability from her status as a wife and a daughter. She was struck by the numerous invitations she now received, in stark contrast to the time when she and her mother had left Bristol in humiliation: ‘I found that fortune was, to common minds, a never-failing passport.’⁵ She was in a sense returning in triumph, restoring her mother and herself to the respectability that had been lost when Nicholas Darby walked out. Friends who now greeted Hester and Mary warmly had turned their backs when they had most needed friendship. They could turn again. Mary rarely forgot a social slight, and felt it keenly if someone wronged her – a reaction which perhaps stemmed from those Bristol years when the family had endured social ostracism.

Her return to the place of her birth affected her deeply. She took a solitary walk back to the scenes of her childhood: the schoolhouse, the green, the tombs of her ancestors. In the minster she once more crept under the wings of the huge brass eagle in the middle aisle, just as she had done as a child. ‘Language cannot describe the sort of sensation’ which she felt when she suddenly heard the peal of the organ ringing out as it had in her youth. But now the family home was a ruin: ‘The nursery windows were dim, and shattered; the house was sinking to decay.’ She remembered how she had walked in the cloisters that linked her old home to the minster: ‘“Here,” said I, “did my infant feet pace to and fro” … On those dark and winding steps, did I sit and listen to the full-toned organ, the loud anthem, and the bell, which called the parishioners to prayer.’⁶ As she re-entered the cathedral, she read and reread the monumental inscriptions, finding the grave of the actor William Powell, whose Lear had been her first experience of theatre. And she dropped a tear on the stone tablet that commemorated an old family friend. As so often in the Memoirs, this account is embellished with many a literary flourish, but there is no reason to doubt that when Mary returned to Bristol as Mrs Robinson she must have felt that her childhood was well and truly over, her innocence lost.

Her melancholy was no doubt exacerbated by the uncertainty over her future. Everything depended upon Thomas Harris’s generosity. Perhaps she even feared that her husband would abscond. Hope returned when Robinson sent a letter from Tregunter relating that his ‘uncle seemed disposed to act handsomely’. Mary learned that at first Robinson was too frightened to tell his father that he was already married, but upon revealing the truth, Harris expressed the hope that she was neither too young nor too beautiful, since ‘beauty, without money, is but a dangerous sort of portion’. Still, Harris had grudgingly accepted the inevitable: ‘If the thing is done, it cannot be undone.’⁷ He agreed to a visit. Robinson duly wrote with the news, instructing Mary to obtain funds for the journey by requesting a loan from one of his friends back in London – a man she had sometimes seen in his company.

‘One or two letters passed on this subject,’ she writes in the Memoirs. And then her husband returned in order to escort her to Wales. The man to whom she had written was the notorious John King, generally known as ‘Jew’ King, a young and ambitious money-broker. In the Memoirs Mary claims disingenuously that she was ‘an entire stranger to the transaction which rendered him the temporary source of my husband’s finances’.⁸ She represents herself as the very picture of innocence and passivity. The emphasis on her melancholy mood and her recollections of childhood as she waited in Bristol draws the reader away from any thought of her possible implication in her new husband’s messy financial affairs.

That phrase ‘one or two letters’ is, however, economical with the truth. To a greater extent than at any other point in the Memoirs, Mary was whitewashing her own past. The real story of her involvement with ‘Jew’ King reveals that she was by no means the naive newlywed she would have her readers believe in.

At the height of her fame, Mary was notorious not only for the love letters sent to her from the Prince of Wales under the signature ‘Florizel’, but also for a much sleazier correspondence with King. In 1781, as part of a concerted press campaign to blacken her name, there appeared a slim quarto volume, published at two shillings, which purported to contain copies of real letters that passed between Mrs Robinson and a ‘certain Israelite’ between 21 September and 30 November 1773. Her letters were all dated from Bristol and addressed to King in London. In one of them, dated 9 November, she says that on the previous Tuesday Mr Robinson had set out for Carmarthenshire, where he intended to stay a week, and that he would then send for her to join him. The circumstances fit precisely with the account in the Memoirs of how Mary waited at Bristol with her mother while Robinson went forward to pave the way for her reception in Wales. Many details in the published letters are so specific that it is impossible to suppose that the volume was merely a malicious fabrication. What is more, as will be seen in a later chapter, Mary and her then lover, Lord Malden, made strenuous efforts to recover the original letters. This attempt strongly suggests that in reality more than ‘one or two letters’ passed between Mary Robinson and John King in the first year of her marriage. Though in all probability King spiced up the text for the purposes of publication, Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite, and his Answers to them gives us the very voice of the young Mary with an immediacy that is altogether lacking in the carefully self-censored retrospective narrative of the Memoirs.⁹

The letters reveal an intimacy that would never have been guessed from the casual passing reference to King in the Memoirs. The first of them reads as follows:

Bristol, 21st Sept. 1773

Sir,

I never deemed myself happier, than I found myself those few Days you accompanied us upon the Road; indeed your Company, from the first Moment of our Acquaintance, has been so agreeable, that I scarcely know how to spare you. Shall we expect you at Bristol? Write me soon; write the Style you know I like; let it be plaintive; sooth the Wanderings of my pensive Breast.

Your humble Servant, M. R—

Just as the Robinsons were accompanied at the beginning of their honeymoon not only by Hester Darby but also by Hanway Balack, so they set off for Bristol with King as well as Mary’s mother. The information that Mary has found King’s company highly agreeable ever since their first acquaintance reveals that she must have spent considerable time in his company in the five months since her marriage. What is more, the preface explaining the circumstances of the correspondence includes the information that – on the basis of Thomas Robinson’s prospects of inheriting an estate – King had already lent the couple a substantial sum of money.

The extent of their involvement is further exposed in Mary’s second letter, in which we discover that King was with the Robinsons when they stopped for their sightseeing in Oxford:

Bristol, 29th Sept. 1773

With Pleasure I take this Opportunity of answering my worthy Friend’s obliging Epistle. R—is not yet gone to Wales, but as he will go soon, it makes me uneasy; you know how I love him, therefore will excuse my mentioning him. The Weather is extremely fine, and nothing but your Company is wanted to enliven the Place. We hope by this Time you have seen dear little George, and that he is well. You cannot conceive with what Regret we parted with you at Oxford; the Three last Days were not spent half so agreeable as the first. I am quite ashamed of this intolerable Scroll, but I hope you will pardon it, for I am fatigued almost to Death. Mrs Darby begs her respects.

Your Friend.

King, then, not only travelled with Thomas, Mary, and Hester as far as Oxford: he was also asked to keep an eye on George, Mary’s younger brother left behind in London. King’s response to this letter was flirtatious and literary. Mary wrote again a week later. She, too, flirts in one sentence and moralizes in the next. She was missing him and missing the buzz of London still more:

I wish you were sincere in what you say, I do not think you are, but still I believe myself happy in your good Opinion; you treat me so much in a Style of Compliment, that I really do not know in what Manner to return it; you express so much Friendship, that the hardest Task, I ever undertook in my whole Life, is how to return Thanks suitable to the Favours I have received from you … I long to be in Town. Do not forget our intended Party to Drury-Lane Theatre; you know I am passionately fond of Plays, and I was going to say, I envy you, but Envy I detest.

But then she comes to the main point:

not that I think Generosity consists in throwing Money away at Random, without Distinction or Judgment, but in bestowing it in proportion to the Merit and Condition of those who stand in need of our Assistance. I agree with my favourite Author, who says, in Trust, Intimacy and Confidence, be as particular as you can; in Humanity, Charity and Benevolence, universal. I shall depend on your Promise this Week for I am really distressed.

A plea for funds is dressed up as a moral duty and spiced with literary allusion. King’s response begins in a similar high-minded tone: ‘Morality is that great fundamental Tie that forms and preserves the Peace and Welfare of Society.’ But it quickly turns to an admonition that Mary’s ‘immoderate’ desire for material wellbeing is in danger of leading her to ‘Indiscretion’ and exposing her to ‘the destructive Stratagems of some libidinous Profligate’. Having warned her against the seductions of fashionable society, King then lets his own emotions speak:

That fair youthful Frame is such an Invitation to Love, as no moral or platonic Tenets can restrain. How I pant to be at Bristol, to accompany you through the verdant Meads to the Side of some Silver Stream, slow wandering its Meanders down the Glade, or to the cool Recess of a shady Grove, where every Gale whispers Pleasure, Contentment and Love! Your Breath will add new Fragrance to the Amaranth; the Rose will receive a deeper Hue from the Reflection of those florid Tincts that adorn thy blooming Cheeks, while you melt my Soul to all the soft Attainments of Love.

The expression of such sentiments was King’s price for the payoff signalled by the end of the letter: ‘Adieu! Be ever happy as you are good. Inclosed £50.’

The next letter purportedly from Mary would severely damage her reputation when King published the correspondence eight years later:

I wish you would not write, for while you endeavour to inculcate such good Doctrine, you know I am charmed by your Letters to a Sin. How call I love that stupid Thing R—! yet I am his, Fortune has made it so; but I cannot think I am bound to abide strictly by an Engagement that I was trepanned into, for you know he deceived me. Shall I ever write as well as you do? I am fond of Poetry, and you shall correct some Attempts in that Way, when I come to London. My Friend, you know I esteem you: is it a Crime to say I love you? I feel an Inclination to love Somebody; and how can I love him who is too stupid to return it? Why then, I will love you. Write again, write every Evening, or I shall be melancholy.

Despite his sordid profession as a moneylender, King had a reputation as a man of culture. John Taylor, an oculist who moved in the very best circles and who was himself a poet and a friend of Mary Robinson, recorded in his memoirs that he had known King for forty years and always found him honourable, hospitable, and attentive, and that he especially liked having men and women of talent at his table.¹⁰

Mary’s letter accords with this image: King is presented as a companion for theatregoing and literary talk, associated with poetry and the language of sensibility. The reference to her own efforts at poetry suggests that, with her stage debut forestalled by her marriage, she is already thinking of a literary career. Robinson, meanwhile, is anything but a sensitive literary man: he is a ‘stupid Thing’ and Mary effectively admits that she only married him because of his supposed financial prospects. Because of his deception on this front, he has forfeited any right to strict conjugal loyalty.

For King, this was sufficient encouragement. His reply brings him to a pitch of excitement:

I will not think you sincere, when you say you love; yet if you are not in earnest, you have given too serious a Testimony of it for one only in Joke; but it is almost Blasphemy to suspect one of such heavenly Form, so beautiful, such Symmetry of Features, such delicate welformed [sic] Limbs, such panting snowy Breasts, such – Oh! What Raptures ineffable seize my delighted Imagination, when I recollect the delirious Transports that throbbed to my very Soul, when that beauteous Form stood confessed in all the resistless Power of – Nakedness. I must stop till my enraptured Fancy returns from the ecstatick Thought.

Is this a ripe fantasy or had he really caught a glimpse of a naked Mary in Oxford or on some other occasion?

With the flirtation getting this far out of hand, Mary cooled the temperature in her following letter – though she still needed to keep King sweet, because she was, as she put it in a postscript, ‘rather short’. The correspondence had by now lasted for a month. On 1 November, King wrote with further references to ‘the mystick Meaning of thy wanton Love’ and his ‘melting Senses’ drowning in ‘delicious Transports’, while at the same time delivering a rebuke: ‘You little Prodigal, you have spent £200 in Six Weeks: I will not answer your Drafts.’ King’s refusal to forward any more funds, despite a further request, brought the correspondence to an abrupt end in the final week of November. Mary’s last letter is in a very different tone from the preceding ones:

I Find you have not yet answered my Draft. I do not wish an Acquaintance with any Man who professes so much Love, but who gives so little Proof of it. I wish I could recall those imprudent Moments when I suffered your deluding Promises, and seductive Tongue, to betray me into Sin; but unless you give me the Token of your Sincerity that I ask for, I will take care how I trust you again. I am astonished that you should scruple to lend me such a Sum as £100 when it was the last I should borrow, and should have repaid it faithfully. Now you have an Opportunity of shewing your Love, or I shall see that you have all along deceived me.

King responded with a long and vitriolic letter on the evils of ambition and avarice, and the correspondence ended. His failure to recover either his original loan or his subsequent advances, together with a not unjustifiable sense of having been taken for a ride by Mary’s flirtatious manner, accounts for his action in publishing the letters in 1781. There is no evidence that King himself had any further dealings with Mary thereafter, though by a curious twist his daughter became a passionate fan of her poetry.*

Late in November, Robinson returned to Bristol to fetch his wife. They left Hester and headed across to Wales. They endured a hazardous crossing at Chepstow in an open boat in the midst of a fierce storm. In the Memoirs, Mary novelistically interprets this as an ill omen, akin to the storm that coincided with her birth. Throughout the journey Robinson tried to prepare his refined young wife for her first meeting with his family. Still denying that Harris was his father, he asked Mary to ‘overlook anything harsh that might appear in the manners of his uncle’. But she was busy absorbing the beauties of the landscape as they drove into the remote Welsh countryside: ‘We passed through a thick wood, the mountains at every brake meeting our eyes covered with thin clouds, and rising in a sublime altitude above the valley. A more romantic space of scenery never met the human eye!’¹¹

With a shift of tone typical of Mary’s mercurial nature, the narrative of her visit to the in-laws then turns from romantic novel to comedy of high and low life, with the sophisticated townies meeting the country bumpkins. Mary was fabulously dressed, as usual, in a dark claret riding habit and a white beaver hat trimmed with feathers. She looked askance at the odd couple that waited to greet her, her father-in-law, Thomas Harris, and his daughter, Elizabeth. Harris, evidently pleased with the elegant Mrs Robinson, kissed her ‘with excessive cordiality’, while his daughter led her into the house ‘with cold formality’. ‘She could not have taken my hand with a more frigid demeanour,’ Mary adds, clearly relishing the memory.¹²

The young women sized one another up. Elizabeth was not a great beauty and must have felt threatened by her brother’s fashionable wife. She was cold and haughty and took an instant dislike to her new sister-in-law. To Mary’s sharp eyes, she looked a fright. Elizabeth seemed older than her twenty years, moved stiffly, without grace or elegance, and was short and clumsy looking. She had a rustic face with a snub, upturned nose, and cheeks ‘somewhat more ruddy than was consistent with even good health’.¹³ Her countenance, Mary thought, was ‘peculiarly formed for the expression of sarcastic vulgarity’. The elegantly dressed Mrs Robinson was equally appalled by Elizabeth’s vulgar attire; she wore a cheap gaudy chintz gown and a ‘thrice-bordered cap’ decked with a profusion of ribbons. Her initial impression of retired tailor Thomas Harris was just as dismaying: he wore an unfashionable brown fustian coat, a scarlet waistcoat trimmed with gold, a gold-laced hat, and – instead of the silk stockings that befitted a gentleman – a hideous pair of woollen ‘spatter-dashes’. He cuts an engagingly comic figure, his manners coarse and boorish, but kind of heart – the very embodiment of Squire Western in Fielding’s Tom Jones or Goldsmith’s Mr Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer.

Harris was, in fact, an influential figure in Glamorganshire. He was the squire of two large estates, Tregunter and Trevecca, and was a Justice of the Peace. One of his brothers was Howel Harris, a well-known Methodist reformer. Possibly through his brother’s influence, the religious reformer Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, had established a seminary at Trevecca House for the training of ministers. Elizabeth Robinson was a convert to Lady Huntingdon’s ‘sect’, and sometimes took Mary with her to Trevecca. Squire Harris preferred the local church where he could throw his weight around and fine the rustics for swearing, even though ‘every third sentence he uttered was attended by an oath that made his hearers shudder’.¹⁴ Harris spent most of the days on his estate, riding his small Welsh pony, only appearing at meal times.

Mary was thoroughly bored by her husband’s family. She quickly discovered that the real ruler of the household was Molly Edwards, the housekeeper. She heartily disliked her: ‘a more overbearing, vindictive spirit never inhabited the heart of mortal than that which pervaded the soul of the ill-natured Mrs Molly’.¹⁵ Miss Betsy and Mrs Molly were jealous of Mary, who supped ale with the squire and soon became his favourite: ‘They observed me with jealous eyes; they considered me as an interloper, whose manners attracted Mr Harris’s esteem, and who was likely to diminish their divided influence in the family.’¹⁶

Mary often alienated other young women, who were left feeling dowdy and dull in her presence. She was naturally flirtatious and men were captivated by her charm, but she was perhaps less keen to cultivate the friendship of other women, if she did not think it worth her time. She noticed the ‘side-long glances’ of Miss Betsy and Mrs Molly when she entertained visitors who praised her ‘good looks, or taste in the choice of my dresses’. The women taunted her for acting like a duchess with her fine clothes and her accomplishments – ‘a good housewife had no occasion for harpsichords and books’.¹⁷ They reminded her that she had no money to support her fancy ways. But Mary did not care. She had her beauty and her elegance and her humour to protect her. When she went riding with Miss Betsy, she laughed at her odd appearance: ‘Miss Robinson rode on horseback in a camlet safe-guard, with a high-crowned bonnet. I wore a fashionable habit, and looked like something human.’¹⁸

More disturbingly, Harris seemed to have fallen in love with her even though in his sixties he was old enough to be her grandfather. When he declared that he should ‘have liked me for a wife, had I not married Tom’, she decided it would be prudent to leave. She feared that ‘through the machinations of Miss Betsy and Mrs Molly I should lose the share I had gained in his affections’. Betsy and Molly were duly furious when the squire insisted upon accompanying Mary to Bristol: ‘he swore that he would see me safe across the Channel, whatever might be the consequences of his journey’.¹⁹

In Bristol, meeting the charming Hester and getting a taste of her active social life, Harris decided to stay a while. Hester introduced him to her friends and he was invited to several dinner parties. Mary danced with him and, after he had supped his evening draught, she would sing to him. He was flattered by the attention and dropped hints to the effect that Tom would inherit the estate. He asked for advice on refurbishments for Tregunter House, and together they picked out smart marble chimney-pieces: ‘Choose them as you like them, Mrs Robinson, for they are all for you and Tom when I am no more.’²⁰

*He later changed his name to Hanway Hanway. He was related to philanthropist Jonas Hanway, who campaigned against boy chimney sweeps and was one of the first men to carry an umbrella.

*He later changed his name to Hanway Hanway. He was related to philanthropist Jonas Hanway, who campaigned against boy chimney sweeps and was one of the first men to carry an umbrella.

CHAPTER 4 Infidelity

The town still full of alluring scenes, faro tables, assemblies, to say nothing of Ranelagh, the opening beauties of Kensington, and the morning lounge of St James’s street.

Mary Robinson, The Widow

We are taught to cherish deceit, indifference, vanity, contempt, and scorn; we cannot bear neglect, because it awakens our self-love; we think not of the natural fickleness of man; but we tremble, lest the world should suppose, that a husband’s infidelity proceeds from our own want of attractions to hold him faithful.

Mary Robinson, The False Friend

As soon as Harris had left Bristol, the Robinsons set out for London. According to Mary, they adopted young George Darby and brought him up as their own, until he was old enough to be sent abroad to a merchant house, like his elder brother, John. Elated by the great expectations that Harris had held out for them, the Robinsons threw themselves into London life. The first step they took was to move to a newly built house in Hatton Garden, a location in the ‘city’ at the east end of London as opposed to the more fashionable ‘town’ (or ton) in the west end. Close to Smithfield Market and St Paul’s, the Hatton Garden district was home to newly prosperous merchants and Jewish moneylenders, jewellers, and lawyers – it was conveniently placed for the Inns of Court.

The Robinsons furnished their new property lavishly and bought a phaeton, the modish open-top carriage that was the same kind of status symbol as a modern convertible. Thomas Robinson also got to know the local jewellers and silversmiths. He bought his wife an expensive watch, enamelled with musical trophies.

From where did they get the money? In her Memoirs Mary claimed ignorance about her husband’s financial affairs and debts (which she always described as his debts rather than hers), but according to King she devised a scheme – played out by Robinson and a group of fellow swindlers – that involved raising ‘immense Quantities of Goods on the Credit of foreign Letters, which they had transmitted them for the Purpose, from Holland, Ostend and France’.¹ Whatever the truth of this allegation, the handsome house in Hatton Garden would have been enough to persuade traders and lenders that the Robinsons’ credit was good.

With a smart address, a flashy phaeton, and Mary’s dazzling good looks, they burst upon the social scene, determined to get themselves noticed. Mary knew how to use her sex appeal: ‘A new face, a young person dressed with peculiar but simple elegance, was sure to attract attention at places of public entertainment.’² She describes her entrance into society as making her debut ‘in the broad hemisphere of fashionable folly’. She might have lost her chance to perform at Drury Lane, but she saw the metropolis as a great urban stage where she could still be a star.

Her first stop was the pleasure gardens at Ranelagh. Pleasure gardens ranked high in London’s recreational activities, but the two most popular were those of Ranelagh in Chelsea and Vauxhall in Lambeth. Here, in the open air, people gathered to stroll, chat, and listen to music. By day they could walk amongst the grottoes, groves, and waterfalls, and by night look at the brilliant lights strewn in the trees, attend concerts, balls and masquerades, and see the fireworks. Ranelagh was the classier venue: at two shillings and sixpence, its entrance fee was more than twice that of raucous Vauxhall. It had Chinese buildings, temples, statues, a canal, and a bridge. It also boasted the rotunda, an enormous circular hall for concerts, ringed with fifty-two boxes. An orchestra played whilst the ladies and gentlemen strolled around the main floor. Regular concerts were held in the summer; the 8-year-old Mozart performed there in 1764. After the concert, one would sit and eat a light supper. It was a place to be noticed and to join the smart set. The royal princes were known to frequent the pleasure gardens with their aristocratic friends. Women of fashion promenaded the main walks to show off their latest gowns and hats, and to make a stir. Prostitutes, dressed in their finery, plied their trade in the wooded groves. In Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina, the innocent heroine mistakes the Ranelagh prostitutes for ladies of fashion and is herself mistaken for a whore when she wanders onto a wrong path.

Mary chose her outfit carefully. She wore a simple Quaker-style, light brown silk dress, with close cuffs. Breaking with the convention of powdering her hair, she perched a plain round cap and a white chip hat on her tumbling auburn locks. She wore no other accessories – no jewellery and no ornaments. She was simplicity itself. Never one to follow fashion slavishly, she had confidence in her individual style and panache. Needless to say, she cut a figure: all eyes were fixed upon her.

The Robinsons’ next outing was to the indoor equivalent of Ranelagh, the Pantheon in Oxford Street. It had only opened a couple of years before, when it was described by Charles Burney as the ‘most elegant structure in Europe, if not on the globe’.³ In the main it was a musical venue, housing concerts, balls, masquerades, and dances. It also had a central rotunda where visitors could play cards or take supper on ordinary evenings. Tickets for masquerades were expensive and exclusive: by subscription only, at two guineas (the equivalent of about a hundred pounds in today’s money). Mary described it as ‘the most fashionable assemblage of the gay and the distinguished’. As though at court, visitors dressed formally in large hoops and towering headdresses. The women’s hair was raised high with padding and false hair, and then greased with pomade before being powdered. Mary spent hours preparing herself, wearing an exquisite gown of pink satin trimmed with sable, and arranging her suit of ‘rich and valuable point lace’, which was given by her mother. By this time, though, she really was pregnant: ‘my shape at that period required some arrangements, owing to the visible increase of my domestic solicitudes’.⁴

Mary was overwhelmed by the Pantheon rotunda: ‘I never shall forget the impression which my mind received: the splendour of the scene, the dome illuminated with variegated lamps, the music, and the beauty of the women, seemed to present a circle of enchantment.’⁵ It was the women who made the strongest impact upon the impressionable young girl, four of them in particular: the celebrated beauty Lady Almeria Carpenter (‘the admiration of the men, and the envy of the women’⁶), the actress and singer Sophia Baddeley, Frances Manners the first Countess of Tyrconnel, and Anne Montgomery Marchioness Townshend. Mary was thrilled to be so close to the rich and famous. With a boldness that belies her self-image as a wide-eyed innocent, she took a seat opposite Anne Montgomery, who was flanked by two fashionable admirers. They looked at Mary and one turned to the other and asked ‘Who is she?’

‘Their fixed stare disconcerted me,’ wrote Mary in her Memoirs. ‘I rose, and, leaning on my husband’s arm, again mingled in the brilliant circle.’ One cannot help thinking that this little promenade also had the effect of showing off her frock to its best advantage. The gentlemen set off in pursuit, despite the presence of her husband. As she mingled in the crowd, they asked, ‘Who is that young lady in the pink dress trimmed with sable?’ ‘My manner and confusion plainly evinced that I was not accustomed to the gaze of impertinent high breeding,’ Mary says in the Memoirs, with due propriety, but even in this account written so long after the event – and after the accident that crippled her – one can still sense her pleasure in the power of her looks.⁷

She noticed that the men were joined by a third party, whom she recognized as Robert Henley, the son of her godfather, the politician Lord Northington. The latter had died in 1772, so Henley now had the title Lord Northington himself. He approached her, ‘Miss Darby, or I am mistaken?’⁸ She informed him of her change in status and introduced him to her husband, and together they strolled round the rotunda and chatted. Northington asked after her father, and complimented her on her appearance, asking that he be permitted to call on her. A notorious rake and womanizer, he must have been surprised by the transformation of his late father’s lowly godchild Miss Darby into the lovely Mrs Robinson.

Feeling faint with the heat of the rotunda, and fatigued with the promenading, Mary requested tea, but there was not a single seat available in the tearoom. She finally found a sofa near the door, but her husband refused to leave her for a moment, even to bring refreshments. Henley brought her a cup of tea and introduced his two friends, the gentlemen who had been flirting with the Marchioness Townshend before pursuing Mary around the room. They were cousins: Captain George Ayscough and Lord Lyttelton. Both had highly respected fathers: Ayscough senior had been Dean of Bristol Minster during the 1760s when Mary was growing up, while the elder Lyttelton was a distinguished politician and one of Mary’s favourite poets. The sons were not so virtuous: they, like young Northington, were notorious rakes. Lyttelton junior was known as ‘the wicked’ Lord, in contrast to his father, ‘the good’. Mary described him as ‘perhaps the most accomplished libertine that any age or country has produced’.⁹

Robinson set off to find the carriage, giving Lyttelton another opportunity to ingratiate himself with Mary by offering the use of his own vehicle. She declined and returned home with her husband. The next morning, the three men called on Mary, whilst she was home alone (it was conventional once an introduction had been made at an evening party to call the next day to enquire after the lady’s health).

Lyttelton was by far the most persistent of the three. In Mary’s version of events, she was entirely the victim of his unwanted attentions: ‘Lord Lyttelton was uniformly my aversion. His manners were overbearingly insolent, his language licentious, and his person slovenly even to a degree that was disgusting.’¹⁰ But her abhorrence did not prevent her from being drawn into his lordship’s circle. Lyttelton cultivated her husband’s friendship in order to gain access to her. He gave her presents, which she accepted – contrary to the advice of the conduct books on such matters. Among the gifts was the latest volume of poetry by the ‘bluestocking’ Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Lyttelton knew how to flatter Mary’s intellect as well as her beauty.

Mary was beginning to write poetry herself at this time. Barbauld’s poems fired a spirit of emulation: ‘I read them with rapture; I thought them the most beautiful Poems I had ever seen, and considered the woman who could invent such poetry, as the most to be envied of human creatures.’ She added to her praise a wonderfully derogatory and deflating codicil: ‘Lord Lyttelton had some taste for poetical compositions, and wrote verses with considerable facility.’¹¹

Lyttelton introduced the couple to his wide acquaintance, cultivating Tom Robinson as a friend and companion. The Robinsons were beginning to rub shoulders with aristocrats, politicians, and actors. Mary met and was dazzled by the intelligent and cultivated Imperial Ambassador the Count de Belgeioso, but was less impressed by the rake Lord Valentia (who later eloped with a courtesan). One of the most controversial figures Mary met during this heady time was George Fitzgerald, an Irish libertine and duellist, known as ‘Fighting Fitzgerald’. Other new acquaintances included an Irish gamester called Captain O’Byrne and the actor William Brereton. The latter would subsequently share the stage with Perdita and marry her childhood friend Priscilla Hopkins.

Lord Northington continued to call and some female friendships were also established – with Lady Julia Yea, a prominent figure in West Country society, and the talented and witty writer Catherine Parry. At a party hosted by Mrs Parry, Mary met the actress Fanny Abington and was captivated by her charm, beauty and exquisite dress sense. Mary began again to harbour dreams of acting.

In the midst of all this socializing, Lyttelton was always at the couple’s side: Mary describes him as her cavaliere servante, a fashionable male companion, a sort of ‘mere Platonic cicisbeo – what every London wife is entitled to’, as Sheridan mockingly wrote in The School for Scandal. But Lyttelton wanted to be more than Mary’s friend and companion. He expected a payoff for the investment he had made in the Robinsons. When he realized that flattery was not the way to her bed, he tried a more perverse route: he insulted her in public and ‘affected great indifference’ in a vain attempt to excite her interest. He mocked her for being young and insipid and when she lost her temper he would apologize for making the ‘pretty child angry’. He would repeatedly call her ‘the child’ in public to humiliate her. He mocked her literary endeavours and her thwarted plans to play Cordelia at Drury Lane. His final resort was to get to her through her weak husband. He embarked upon a strategy of ruination and bankruptcy for Robinson, taking him to gaming houses and brothels, ‘the haunts of profligate debasement’.¹² They were seen often at the races, at Ascot and Epsom.

Whilst Robinson led a riotous life, gambling, drinking, and womanizing with his aristocratic friends, his pregnant wife was left neglected and alone. She missed the counsel of her mother, who had repaired to Bristol with young George to help him recuperate from illness. Mary blamed Lyttelton for the change in her husband’s behaviour. In her Memoirs she said that she reacted by devoting her time to poetry, but this picture of her confined existence devoted to literary pursuits is contradicted by her own claim that ‘Dress, parties, adulation, occupied all my hours.’¹³

As her pregnancy advanced in the summer of 1774 she felt resentful that she was being left alone without protection or companionship. One of the most pernicious effects of her husband’s neglect was the temptation opened up by her countless admirers. The ‘most dangerous’ rake was George Fitzgerald, whose ‘manners towards women were interesting and attentive’. He sympathized with her plight of being left without her husband, then proclaimed his devotion. Though ‘surrounded by temptation, and mortified by neglect’, Mary did not waver.¹⁴

It was not long before the couple plunged into debt. For all her claims that she knew little about their financial affairs, Mary was quite aware that they were living beyond their means – though when she did make enquiries about their financial position, her husband assured her that they were well provided for. Lyttelton promised to procure advancement for his young friend, though Thomas was sceptical that he would do anything for them.

Lyttelton tried one last desperate attempt to win Mary away from her husband. With her usual aplomb for setting a scene, she describes the day when Lyttelton called upon her for a meeting, pleading important business. He told Mary that he had a secret to reveal about Robinson. Lyttelton then confessed to his part in alienating her husband’s ‘conjugal affections’, revealing that Thomas Robinson had a mistress, ‘a woman of abandoned character’ who lived in Princes Street, Soho. He told Mary that Robinson spent money on his mistress, money that they should have been saving for the birth of the baby. He even named the other woman: she was called Harriet Wilmot. Robinson visited her every day.

Lyttelton made Mary promise not to tell her husband who was the source of the revelation. If she did, there would have to be a duel. Having reduced her to tears of sorrow and mortification, Lyttelton suggested that Mary should take revenge on her husband by placing herself under his protection: ‘You cannot be a stranger to my motives for thus cultivating the friendship of your husband; my fortune is at your disposal. Robinson is a ruined man; his debts are considerable, and nothing but destruction can await you. Leave him! Command my powers to serve you.’¹⁵

Mary was mortified at the proposal, but she was also angry and determined enough to face her rival. Perhaps she was spurred by the memory that her mother had had to endure a similar revelation. The encounter in Soho is described in the Memoirs in the style of sentimental fiction. Needless to say, the virtuous young wife vanquishes the profligate mistress. With her novelist’s eye for detail, Mary recalled the dirty servant girl who let her into Miss Wilmot’s apartment, the incriminating new white silk underwear spread out on the bed, her beating heart as she heard Miss Wilmot’s footsteps approach the room.

Mary’s rival was a handsome older woman who was visibly distressed by the presence of her lover’s pregnant young wife. Her lips were ‘as pale as ashes’. She did not deny the charges levelled against her, and as she drew off her gloves to cover her eyes, presumably from shame, Mary noticed Tom’s ring on her finger. Harriet tried to return the ring, to no avail. Mary refused to take it. Harriet said, ‘Had I known that Mr Robinson was the husband of such a woman—’ As Mary rose to leave, Harriet spoke, ‘I never will see him more – unworthy man – I never will again receive him.’ Mary swept out of the room without a further word. As usual, Mary remembered her costume for the occasion, as though she were an actress playing her part: she wore a morning dress of white muslin, with a white lawn cloak and a straw bonnet. Her rival was dressed in a printed Irish muslin and wore a black gauze cloak and a chip hat trimmed with lilac ribbons.¹⁶

Devastated by the encounter as Mary claimed to be, she accompanied her husband to Drury Lane that evening with Lord Lyttelton. She concealed her true feelings and participated in the fun with her usual gusto. It was only in the morning that she confronted Robinson. He did not deny the charge. Mary learned that he had had another mistress at the time of their marriage, and that his infidelities were public knowledge. The extent of his debts also became clear to her. Robinson had got himself caught in the invidious position of borrowing money from loan sharks to pay off his creditors. He was deeply involved with King the moneylender. Indeed, ‘the parlour of our house was almost as much frequented by Jews as though it had been their synagogue’.¹⁷ Mary’s protestations that she was a ‘total stranger’ to the business transactions were, of course, untrue – John King had the proof of that.

Despite Robinson’s infidelity, he is not depicted in Mary’s narrative as the outright villain of the piece. She presents her husband as weak and impressionable, rather than vicious. It was Lord Lyttelton she blamed. She despised him for the way he treated women, in particular for his contemptuous behaviour towards his estranged wife and his mistress, a Miss Dawson. The press suggested that Mary and Lyttelton were having an affair, a claim that she vehemently denied: ‘he was the very last man in the world for whom I ever could have entertained the smallest partiality; he was to me the most hateful of existing beings’.¹⁸

Handsome George Fitzgerald was quite another matter: ‘his manners towards women were beautifully interesting’. He tried to seduce Mary on a warm summer’s evening at Vauxhall. The Robinsons stayed until the early hours of the morning and then while they were waiting for their carriage to take them home, Fitzgerald made his move. A late night quarrel broke out between two men and Robinson and Fitzgerald took off to view the commotion. Mary tried to follow but was soon lost in the throng of people. Later, only Fitzgerald returned. He took Mary towards the exit to wait for her husband. To her alarm, Fitzgerald’s carriage appeared as if out of nowhere and he tried to bundle Mary in. As the door swung open, she noticed a pistol in the pocket of the door. His servants, who were clearly in on the attempted abduction, kept at a discreet distance, while Fitzgerald grabbed Mary around the waist. She struggled free and ran back towards the entrance to the pleasure gardens, where she found her husband. Fitzgerald acted as though nothing had happened: ‘Here he comes!’ he exclaimed with an easy nonchalance, ‘we had found the wrong carriage, Mr Robinson, we have been looking after you, and Mrs Robinson is alarmed beyond expression.’ ‘I am indeed!’ replied Mary.¹⁹

She decided to say nothing to Robinson for fear of repercussions: an advanced state of pregnancy was no time to lose one’s husband in a duel. ‘Fighting Fitzgerald’ was a brilliant shot. He killed eighteen men in the course of his duelling career, before being hanged. From that point on, Mary avoided Fitzgerald’s company despite – or because of – his charisma: ‘he was too daring, and too fascinating a being to be allowed the smallest marks of confidence’.

As on so many occasions in the Memoirs, the veracity of this story cannot be taken for granted: the abduction and rape of young women at public places had been a standard twist in the romantic novel ever since the attempted abduction of Harriet Byron in Samuel Richardson’s hugely influential Sir Charles Grandison. We cannot be sure that Mary was not indulging here in a novelist’s licence with the truth.

As with the trip to Bristol and Wales, there is another version of the story of these months – which the Memoirs may indeed have been consciously attempting to erase. Again, it was the Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite that made the case for the prosecution. According to John King, Mary was no innocent that first night at the Pantheon. He claimed that she made a play for the three fashionable aristocrats:

At every fashionable Place of Resort, [the Robinsons] appeared as brilliant as any in the Circle; the Extravagance of the Diversions was no Check to their Vanity. At a Masquerade one evening, she was noticed by Lord Lyttelton, Lord Valencia, and Lord Northington; her Pride was highly gratified to be distinguished by Three such fashionable Noblemen; and that an Acquaintance so fortunately begun should not be lost, she wrote the following Note to each Gentleman the next day. ‘My Lord, a Lady in the Character of an Orange Girl that had the Honour of being distinguished by your Lordship last Night at the Masquerade, was a Mrs R—, of Hatton-Garden, who will esteem herself further honoured if your Lordship should condescend to favour her with a Visit.’ – On this singular Invitation, the Gentlemen came, and paid their respective Addresses to her; but it was the intrepid persevering Lord Lyttelton that most succeeded, it was the Splendor of his Equipage that seduced her vain Heart, till at length his Familiarity with her became the Topic of the whole Town. They were continually together at every Place of Amusement; and the Husband trudged after them, as stupid and as tranquil as any Brute of the cornuted Creation.²⁰

King left his readers in no doubt that Mary and Lyttelton had a full-scale affair. He told of how they would engage in amorous dalliance in a closed carriage, with Robinson riding ‘a Mile or Two behind on Horseback’. Far from taking umbrage at the intimacy, the husband ‘continually boasted among his Acquaintance, the Superiority of his Connections, and his Wife’s Ascendancy over every fashionable Gallant’.²¹ This was the kind of story that gave Robinson a reputation as little better than his wife’s pimp.

A garbled and exaggerated version of this story about Mary making love in a moving coach with the full complaisance of her husband also found its way into the muckraking Memoirs of Perdita published in 1784. Here, though, her high-speed dalliance is with a well-endowed sailor who gives her ‘a pleasure she never could experience in the arms of debilitated peers and nobles’. He takes her four times, with Thomas Robinson riding not on a horse somewhere behind, but on the roof of the very carriage.²²

King also claimed that Lyttelton intervened to save Robinson from prosecution when his fraudulent financial dealings were on the point of being exposed. According to this account, Lord Lyttelton dropped Mary on discovering that she and her husband were mere swindlers out to fleece him for all they could get. The truth of the matter is probably somewhere in the middle between Mary’s picture of aristocratic villainy and King’s far from disinterested portrayal of sexual misconduct for financial ends. There can be no doubt that the Robinsons lived way beyond their means: was it only the Jewish moneylenders who gave them the capacity to do so? Or did Lyttelton dig deep into his pocket? And if he did, was it in expectation of sexual favours or as payment for delights already delivered?

Whatever the precise means, Mary’s beauty, wit, and connections were taking her well on the way to the achievement of her ambition of fame: ‘I was now known, by name, at every public place in and near the metropolis.’²³ At the same time, the Robinsons were becoming notorious for their debts. In the autumn of 1774, in the final weeks of her pregnancy, their creditors foreclosed on them and an execution was brought on Robinson. The couple were forced to flee Hatton Garden for a friend’s house in Finchley, which was then a village on the outskirts of London. They were deserted by all of their staff with the exception of a single faithful black servant. Mary barely saw her husband, who spent most of his time in town.

In the meantime, Hester returned from Bristol with George and helped her daughter to prepare for her confinement. They sewed baby clothes, and Mary continued to read and write. Robinson acquired the habit of taking George with him on his ‘business trips’ to London, but George, who adored his sister, confessed that they called upon disreputable women. He also told her that her valuable watch, which Mary presumed had been taken by the bailiffs, had actually been given to one of Robinson’s mistresses. When confronted, he did not bother to deny the infidelity.

Despite Robinson’s indifference, which was particularly insensitive so close to the birth of his first child, Mary continued to blame others more than her husband for their predicament. Perhaps she felt guilty for contributing to his debts by her expensive taste. She blamed Lyttelton, their creditors and even Robinson’s father: ‘had Mr Harris generously assisted his son, I am fully and confidently persuaded that he would have pursued a discreet and regular line of conduct’.²⁴

It was to Harris that Robinson turned in desperation. He decided to leave London and head for Tregunter, where he could plead for his father’s help. Robinson insisted that Mary accompany him, despite the discomfort and danger of travelling all those miles in her condition. He no doubt anticipated that the presence of his favoured young wife heavy with a future grandchild would help to soften up old Harris. Mary, for her part, did not want to leave her mother when she needed her during the trials of labour. Childbirth was traumatic at the best of times for women in the eighteenth century: it was common for mothers to write their unborn children farewell letters to be read in the event of their death during labour or its aftermath. Mary feared that she might die in Wales and the baby be left amongst strangers. With her youthful pride, she also dreaded the sneers she would have to face from Elizabeth Robinson and Mrs Molly upon returning to Tregunter in debt and disgrace.

CHAPTER 5 Debtors’ Prison

‘Tis not the whip, the dungeon, or the chain that constitutes the slave; freedom lives in the mind, warms the intellectual soul, lifts it above the reach of human power, and renders it triumphant over sublunary evil.

Mary Robinson, Angelina

News had reached Tregunter of Robinson’s imminent arrest. Harris was away from home when they arrived, but on his return he lost no time in making his position clear: ‘Well! So you have escaped from a prison, and now you are come here to do penance for your follies?’¹ Over the following days, he taunted the couple, though he did at least offer them refuge.

When Mary tried to amuse herself by playing an old spinet in one of the parlours, Harris mocked her for giving herself airs and graces: ‘Tom had better married a good tradesman’s daughter than the child of a ruined merchant who was not capable of earning a living.’ She may have smarted from the insults, but her husband, knowing her temper, pleaded with her to ignore Harris’s behaviour. She was furious, though, when he openly insulted her at a dinner party. A guest, remarking on her swollen stomach, expressed his pleasure that she was come to give Tregunter ‘a little stranger’ and joked (as Harris was renovating his house) that they should build a new nursery for the baby. ‘No, no,’ replied Mr Harris, laughing, ‘they came here because prison doors were open to receive them.’²

The renovation of Tregunter meant that Mary could not be housed for her confinement – at least that was the excuse given by Harris. Only two weeks away from giving birth, Mary was told that she must go to Trevecca House, which was just under two miles away, at the foot of a mountain called Sugar Loaf. Away from Harris and his female cronies, she relaxed and communed with nature:

Here I enjoyed the sweet repose of solitude: here I wandered about woods entangled by the wild luxuriance of nature, or roved upon the mountain’s side, while the blue vapours floated round its summit. O, God of Nature! Sovereign of the universe of wonders! in those interesting moments how fervently did I adore thee!³

The sentiments are typical of the age of sensibility. If she really wandered thus so late in her pregnancy, she must have been unusually healthy and energetic.

Though Mary writes here of the ‘sweet repose of solitude’, Trevecca House was actually more crowded than Tregunter. One part housed the Huntingdon seminary and another part of the building was converted into a flannel manufactory. Nevertheless, she was no longer forced to endure the jibes of her husband’s vulgar family, for they seldom visited her. According to the Memoirs, she was indifferent to their ill-treatment of her. Her spiritual communion with the mountains made her all the more conscious that she had ‘formed an union with a family who had neither sentiment nor sensibility’.

The child, named Maria Elizabeth Robinson,* was born on 18 October 1774, just a few weeks before Mary’s seventeenth birthday. Delighted with her beautiful daughter, the young mother allowed her nurse to show Maria Elizabeth to the factory workers who clamoured to see the ‘little heiress to Tregunter’. Mary was at first alarmed at the prospect of exposing the baby to the cold October air, but the nurse soothed her fears and cautioned her that the local people would consider Mary ‘proud’ if she refused to show the ‘young squire’s’ baby. It was a happy day for Mary, as the crowd heaped blessings on the baby, and the nurse, Mrs Jones, passed on every detail of their praises to the exhausted mother.

There is no mention of Robinson in the narrative, but later that evening Harris paid a visit. After asking after Mary’s health he demanded to know what she was going to do with the child. When she made no answer he honoured her with his own recommendation: ‘“I will tell you,” added he; “Tie it to your back and work for it.’” For good measure he added, ‘Prison doors are open … Tom will die in a gaol; and what is to become of you?’ Mary was all the more humiliated by the impropriety of these taunts being spoken in front of the nurse. Maybe Harris would have been kinder if the baby had been a boy, but one senses that his own infatuation with Mary had now worn off and that he considered her expensive lifestyle to have been a major factor in Tom’s improvidence. When his daughter Elizabeth made her visit, she suggested that it would be a mercy for the infant ‘if it pleased God to take it’.⁴

Three weeks later, Robinson’s creditors caught up with him. They had discovered that he had fled to Wales, and in order to avoid the spectacle of being arrested at Harris’s house – which would have been the final nail in the coffin of his hoped-for inheritance – he left immediately. They were on the run once more. Though still weak from the delivery of her child, Mary refused to stay at Trevecca without her husband. She travelled against the advice of the capable Mrs Jones. They set off for Monmouth, where Mary’s grandmother lived. Mrs Jones travelled in the post chaise as far as Abergavenny, cradling the baby on a pillow on her lap. The local people were sorry to see them go, but ‘Neither Mr Harris nor the enlightened females of Tregunter expressed the smallest regret, or solicitude on the occasion.’⁵

Mary was worried about taking care of her baby after the departure of Mrs Jones. Her education had not prepared her for ‘domestic occupations’. She was still only 17, and without her mother. But she trusted her maternal instincts and did the best she could. Lacking a wet nurse, she breastfed her own baby, which was still perceived as an unusual step for a woman of her class – though it was something that would be advocated by the feminist writers of the 1790s.

The next day they arrived at Monmouth, where Mary’s grandmother Elizabeth lived. They received a warm welcome, though how much her grandmother knew about their state of affairs is not clear. Seventy-year-old Elizabeth, who had been a beauty in her day, was still an attractive woman; she dressed in neat, simple gowns of brown or black silk. She was a pious, well-respected figure, and mild of temper: Mary envied her grandmother’s tranquillity and her fervent religious faith.

Here at Monmouth they received ‘unfeigned hospitality’. There was a lively social scene. Once more Mary’s contradictory nature is revealed. Her favourite amusements were wandering by the River Wye and exploring the castle ruins: thus the woman of sensibility who would become one of the most successful Gothic novelists of the age. But she also loved company and attended local balls and dances: thus the lady of fashion who would become a fixture on the London social scene.

Determined not to let breastfeeding interfere with the chance to dance at a local ball, she once took Maria Elizabeth with her, so that she could feed her at intervals. After a particularly strenuous bout of dancing, she fed her in an antechamber. But something went wrong and by the time they arrived home the baby was in convulsions. Mary was hysterical, with the result that her milk would not then come at all, which left the baby parched and continuing to fit. Mary was convinced that her vigorous dancing and the excessive heat of the ballroom had affected her milk and brought on the fit. She stayed awake with Maria Elizabeth all night. In the morning, friends and well-wishers called to enquire after the infant. One such man was the local clergyman, who was moved to see the frantic young mother in such despair. Mary refused to let the baby be taken from her lap, but the clergyman begged her to let him try a home remedy that had been successful with one of his own children suffering the same way. Mixing aniseed with spermaceti, he gave the medicine to the baby and almost instantaneously the convulsions abated and she fell peacefully asleep.

Shortly after this episode, Tom Robinson once more heard that his creditors were about to catch up with him. Yet again, they prepared to travel before Robinson was arrested. But this time they were too late. An execution for a ‘considerable sum’ was served on him and the local sheriff of Monmouth arrived to arrest him. In the event, the sheriff, who knew Mary’s grandmother, took pity on them and offered to accompany the Robinsons back to London.

On returning to the metropolis, Mary hastened to her mother, who was now living in York Buildings just off the Strand. Hester was, of course, thrilled to see her new granddaughter. Robinson, in the meantime, discovered that the person responsible for alerting the sheriff was none other than his best friend Hanway. The latter’s excuse was that the debt in question was relatively small and he had assumed that Robinson’s father would have paid it. They came to an arrangement and patched up their friendship. The Robinsons then took lodgings in Berners Street, just north of Oxford Street.

Mary began to make arrangements to fulfil a secret ambition that she had been harbouring for many years. She now had ready for publication her first book of poems: she had been working on them even before her marriage. In her Memoirs, she spoke disparagingly of her first literary efforts as ‘trifles’; she expressed the hope that no copies survived, except for the treasured one that her mother had preserved. Regardless of the quality, her determination in preparing the volume in such difficult circumstances is impressive. She was also unusual among upwardly mobile women in undertaking the everyday care of her own baby. She insisted on dressing and undressing her daughter. The baby was breastfed and always slept in her presence, by day in a basket, by night in her own bed. Mary had heard horror stories about the neglect of servants towards children who were too young to tell tales, and she resolved only to let herself and Hester tend to the child.

Her devotion as a mother and her plans to become a published poet did not stop her from socializing, and she began visiting her old haunts such as Ranelagh with her female friends, while Tom kept a low profile. Mary had renewed confidence in her personal appearance and her deportment. She had grown taller in the last year and felt more worldly and sophisticated than when she had first broken upon the social scene two years earlier. She felt confident, serene, and was a little harder edged. The special occasion of her reappearance in London society is marked in her Memoirs by a description of a new dress. This one was of lilac silk with a wreath of white flowers for a headdress. ‘I was complimented on my looks by the whole party,’ she recalled, before stressing that her first concern was to be a good mother: ‘with little relish for public amusements, and a heart throbbing with domestic solicitude, I accompanied the party to Ranelagh’.⁶

As she entered the rotunda the first person she encountered was her old ‘seducer’ George Fitzgerald. He was startled to see her, but lost no time in greeting her, welcoming her re-entry into ‘the world’ and observing that she was without Robinson. He followed her for the remainder of the evening, and as she left she observed his carriage drawing up alongside hers. The next morning he arrived at the house to pay his respects, as she sat correcting proofs of her poetry, with her daughter sleeping in a basket at her feet. She was annoyed at the intrusion and her vanity was piqued by the fact that she was dressed in a matronly morning dress rather than ‘elegant and tasteful dishabille’. Papers were strewn over the table, making the room look like a cross between ‘a study and a nursery’.

She received him frostily. Undeterred, Fitzgerald complimented her on her youth and her child on her beauty. The attention to Maria Elizabeth led to a thaw. Fitzgerald then took a proof sheet from the table and read one of the pastoral lyrics, praising her efforts. ‘I smile while I recollect how far the effrontery of flattery has power to belie the judgment,’ Mary wryly notes in her Memoirs.⁷ She asked him how he had discovered her place of residence and Fitzgerald confessed that he had followed her carriage from Ranelagh the previous evening.

The next evening he returned and took tea with the Robinsons, inviting them to a dinner party at Richmond. Mary declined, but she and Tom tentatively began to socialize with their old friends. Returning to Ranelagh a few days later they reacquainted themselves with Lord Northington, Captain O’Byrne, Captain Ayscough, and the wicked Lord Lyttelton, who had not changed one bit and was – as only to be expected – ‘particularly importunate’.

For a few weeks it looked as if the Robinsons were embarking on their old life again, but then Tom was arrested on a debt of £1,200, consisting principally of ‘the arrears of annuities, and other demands from Jew creditors’. Mary insisted that the debts were all his own: ‘he did not at that time, or at any period since, owe fifty pounds for me, or to any tradesman on my account whatever’.⁸ Robinson stayed in custody in the sheriff’s office for three weeks. He felt too depressed even to go through the motions of trying to raise the money from his father or his friends. Prison was inevitable and he was duly committed to the Fleet on 3 May 1775. He would spend the next fifteen months there.

The Fleet housed about three hundred prisoners and their families. It was a profit-making enterprise: prisoners had to pay for food and lodging, pay the turnkey to let their families in and out, and even pay not to be kept shackled in irons. There were opportunities for work, though some inmates were reduced to begging from passers-by – a grille was built into the prison wall along Farringdon Street for this purpose.

It was not a requirement, but was nevertheless common, for wives to accompany their husbands to debtors’ prisons such as the Fleet, the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench. Mary did so – as her fellow novelist and poet Charlotte Smith would when her husband was confined a few years later. Often wives would come and go, bringing in for their confined husband. Young children were, however, usually left with relatives. It is a mark of Mary’s deep devotion to her baby that she took the 6-month-old Maria Elizabeth to prison with her rather than leaving her in the care of Hester. For that matter, she could presumably have stayed with Hester herself. Her loyalty to Tom Robinson is striking, especially in the light of his infidelities.

They were given quarters on the third floor of the towering prison block, overlooking the racquet ground, which the inmates were at leisure to use for exercise. Robinson – an ‘expert in all exercises of strength’ – played racquets daily while Mary tried her best to make a home in the squalid surroundings, and took care of her baby. She barely ventured outdoors during daylight hours for a period of nine months, though she did at least have a nurse to help her with the baby. The cells were small, dark, and sparsely furnished, but at least they were given a pair of rooms and not just one. This meant, however, that they paid extra for lodging, which meant that it would take longer to put aside the money to pay off the debt.

According to the memoirs of Laetitia Hawkins, a neighbour of Mary’s during her years of fame, Robinson was sent a guinea a week subsistence money by his father. He was also offered some employment ‘in writing’ – probably the copying of legal documents, an activity for which he was well trained – but he refused to do anything. Mary, by contrast, not only attended to her child but also ‘did all the work of their apartments, she even scoured the stairs, and accepted the writing and the pay which he had refused’.⁹

Less welcome offers of assistance came from the rakish lords, Northington, Lyttelton, and Fitzgerald. She knew, though, from the ‘language of gallantry’ and ‘profusions of love’ in their letters what the offers really meant. It was above all her maternal devotion that kept her from exchanging a life of poverty for the temporary comforts afforded to a courtesan.

At night, she would walk on the racquet court. One beautiful moonlit evening, she went out with her baby and the nursemaid. Mary would later remember it as the night when her daughter ‘first blessed my ears with the articulation of words’. They danced the child up and down, her eyes fixed on the moon, ‘to which she pointed with her small fore-finger’, whereupon a cloud suddenly passed over it and it disappeared. Little Maria Elizabeth dropped her hand slowly and, with what her mother perceived as a sigh, cried out ‘all gone’. These were her first words – a repetition of the phrase used by her nurse when she wanted to withhold something from the baby. In retrospect, it seemed like the one joyful moment in the long months of captivity. They walked until midnight, watching the moon play hide and seek with the clouds as the ‘little prattler repeated her observation’.¹⁰

Twenty years later, Mary’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge would make one of his loveliest poems out of a similar experience. Coleridge writes of how his infant son Hartley could recognize the song of the nightingale before he could talk:

My dear babe,

Who, capable of no articulate sound,

Mars all things with his imitative lisp,

How he would place his hand beside his ear,

His little hand, the small forefinger up,

And bid us listen!

He then tells of how one night when baby Hartley awoke ‘in most distressful mood’, he scooped him up and hurried out into the orchard

And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once,

Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently,

While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,

Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam.¹¹

Coleridge’s poem was written in April 1798, two years before Mary drafted this section of her Memoirs. It was published in Lyrical Ballads, a book she knew well (it would inspire the title of her final volume of poetry, Lyrical Tales). What is more, Coleridge visited her on several occasions in the early months of 1800, when she was writing the Memoirs. They subsequently wrote poems inspired by each other’s work. There can, then, be little doubt that the phrasing of her memory of Maria Elizabeth by moonlight – the idea of ‘articulation’, the baby’s raised forefinger, the dancing yellow light – was shaped by a memory of Coleridge’s poem for Hartley. Later in 1800, she paid a further compliment in the form of a lovely poem for Coleridge’s third son, Derwent.

It was only as a result of the literary revolution of the 1790s, in which Coleridge and Robinson each played an important part, that intimate memories of this kind became the stuff of poetry and autobiography. Mary’s early verse, published while she was in the Fleet, was stilted and artificial in comparison. Poems by Mrs Robinson, an octavo volume of 134 pages, was published in the summer of 1775, with a frontispiece engraved by Angelo Albanesi, a fellow prisoner who had been befriended by Tom. The volume garnered a mediocre notice in the Monthly Review: ‘Though Mrs Robinson is by no means an Aiken or a More, she sometimes expresses herself decently enough on her subject’ (Anna Aikin and Hannah More were the most admired ‘bluestocking’ poets of the age).¹²

The volume includes thirty-two ballads, odes, elegies, and epistles. For the most part, they consist of pastorals (‘Ye Shepherds who sport on the plain, / Drop a tear at my sorrowful tale’) and moral effusions (pious outbursts addressed to Wisdom, Charity, Virtue, and so forth) that are typical of later eighteenth-century poetry at its most routine. But a handful of the poems show signs of future promise: there are, for instance, some brief character sketches in which one may see the seeds of the future novelist’s voice.

Several of the poems were modelled on the work of Anna Aikin (later Barbauld): ‘The Linnet’s Petition’, for example, was an imitation of her ‘The Mouse’s Petition’. Women’s poetry of the period was often written in the form of verse letters. Mary’s ‘Epistle to a Friend’ is written with a lightness of touch and warmth of feeling:

Permit me dearest girl to send

The warmest wishes of a friend

Who scorns deceit, or art,

Who dedicates her verse to you,

And every praise so much your due,

Flows genuine from her heart.¹³

One is left wondering about the identity of the friend, especially as the following poem is an elegy ‘On the Death of a Friend’, which ends ‘May you be number’d with the pure and blest, / And Emma’s spirit be Maria’s guard.’ We know hardly anything about Mary’s female companionship of these early years, beyond a passing reference in the Memoirs to her close friendship with a talented, witty, and literary-minded woman called Catherine Parry. In Mary’s last years, by contrast, she was sustained by a large circle of intellectually accomplished women. The only one of these early poems with a clearly identifiable biographical subject is an elegy on the death of the ‘generous’ Lord Lyttelton, whose poems were among the first that Mary loved. Needless to say, it makes no mention of the younger Lord Lyttelton.

The one poem in the collection that has real merit, and that deserves to be anthologized, is a ‘Letter to a Friend on leaving Town’. The virtue of a simple country life as against the vice of indulgence in the city was a common poetic theme in the period, but here there is a real sense of Mary writing from experience:

Gladly I leave the town, and all its care,

For sweet retirement, and fresh wholsome air,

Leave op’ra, park, the masquerade, and play,

In solitary groves to pass the day.

Adieu, gay throng, luxurious vain parade,

Sweet peace invites me to the rural shade,

No more the Mall, can captivate my heart,

No more can Ranelagh, one joy impart.

Without regret I leave the splendid ball,

And the inchanting shades of gay Vauxhall,

Far from the giddy circle now I fly,

Such joys no more, can please my sicken’d eye.

Although Mary adopts the conventional pose of condemning fashionable London life, all her poetic energy belongs to that life – her heart is still captivated by Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Yet she also has the maturity to see their dangers. At the centre of the poem is a telling portrait of the society belle who loses her looks, and thus the interest of the gentlemen of fashion, but remains addicted to the treadmill of the social calendar:

Beaux without number, daily round her swarm,

And each with fulsome flatt’ry try’s to charm.

Till, like the rose, which blooms but for an hour,

Her face grown common, loses all its power.

Each idle coxcomb leaves the wretched fair,

Alone to languish, and alone despair,

To cards, and dice, the slighted maiden flies,

And every fashionable vice apply’s,

Scandal and coffee, pass the morn away,

At night a rout, an opera, or a play;

Thus glide their life, partly through inclination,

Yet more, because it is the reigning fashion.

Thus giddy pleasures they alone pursue,

Merely because, they’ve nothing else to do;

Whatever can afford their hearts delight,

No matter if the thing be wrong, or right;

They will pursue it, tho’ they be undone,

They see their ruin, – yet still they venture on.¹⁴

This poem – an accomplished piece of work for a 17-year-old girl – was almost certainly written when Mary was moving in the fashionable circles of London society. It is at one level an anxious imagining of her own future fate. But seeing it in print, she must have wished she was back gliding her life away in the world of ‘scandal and coffee’ rather than languishing in the Fleet surrounded by women whose good looks had been worn down by penury.

Mary knew that her own beauty was fragile. She wrote in the Memoirs of how during her ‘captivity’ in prison her health was ‘considerably impaired’. She declined, however, to ‘enter into a tedious detail of vulgar sorrows, of vulgar scenes’.¹⁵ At this point in the original manuscript of the Memoirs several lines are heavily crossed out. It is impossible to decipher the words beneath the inking over, but there just might be a reference to pregnancy. It is therefore striking that the malicious but well-informed John King wrote in his Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite: ‘the Husband took refuge in the Fleet, immured within whose gloomy Walls they pined out Fifteen Months in Abstemiousness and Contrition, where her constrained Constancy gave birth to a Female Babe, distorted and crippled from the tight contracted fantastic Dress of her conceited Mother’.¹⁶ Since ‘Fifteen Months’ is an exactly correct detail, we cannot immediately dismiss King’s other piece of information about this period: his startling claim that Mary had a baby while in prison. ‘Distorted and crippled’ is certainly not a description of the lovely little Maria Elizabeth. Could it then be that the deleted passage in the Memoirs referred to a miscarriage or an infant death?

Imprisonment for debt was known as ‘captivity’, and this gave Mary the title for a new poem, much her longest work to date. Written in an overblown style, it is a plea on behalf of the wives and children of imprisoned debtors:

The greedy Creditor, whose flinty breast

The iron hand of Avarice hath press’d,

Who never own’d Humanity’s soft claim,

Self-interest and Revenge his only aim,

Unmov’d, can hear the Parent’s heart-felt sigh,

Unmov’d, can hear the helpless Infant’s cry.

Nor age, nor sex, his rigid breast can melt,

Unfeeling for the pangs, he never felt.¹⁷

‘Captivity’ was published in the autumn of 1777, just over a year after the Robinsons’ release from the Fleet. It was accompanied by a poetic tale of marital infidelity called ‘Celadon and Lydia’, into which Mary presumably poured some of her anger over Robinson’s philandering. This second volume of poetry was more handsomely produced than the first. Albanesi provided an elegantly engraved title page and the book bore a dedication guaranteed to grab attention: it was inscribed ‘by Permission, to her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire’. The dedication described the Duchess as ‘the friendly Patroness of the Unhappy’ author and ended by ‘repeating my Thanks to you, for the unmerited favors your Grace has bestowed upon, Madam, Your Grace’s most obliged and most devoted servant, MARIA ROBINSON’.

Georgiana Spencer was Mary’s exact contemporary in age, but came from a very different background: born into one of England’s most illustrious aristocratic families in 1757, she became Duchess of Devonshire and mistress of Chatsworth – one of the greatest houses in England – in the summer of 1774, just before the Robinsons went on the run from their creditors. She was already cutting a spectacular figure in London society. Someone mentioned to Mary that Georgiana was an ‘admirer and patroness of literature’. Mary arranged for her little brother George, an extremely handsome boy, to deliver to the Duchess a neatly bound copy of her first collection of poems. She also enclosed a note ‘apologizing for their defects, and pleading my age as the only excuse for their inaccuracy’.¹⁸ Georgiana admitted George and asked particulars about the author, as Mary no doubt expected. Georgiana was touched by the plight of the young mother sharing her husband’s captivity. She invited Mary to Devonshire House, her magnificent town residence in Piccadilly, the very next day. Robinson urged her to accept the invitation and she duly went, dressed modestly in a plain brown satin gown.

Mary was mesmerized by the Duchess’s look and manner: ‘mildness and sensibility beamed in her eyes, and irradiated her countenance’. Georgiana listened to her story and expressed surprise at seeing such a young person experiencing ‘such vicissitude of fortune’. With ‘a tear of gentle sympathy’, she gave her some money. She asked Mary to visit again, and to bring her daughter with her. Mary made many visits to her new friend – the two women both beautiful and cultivated, but in such contrasting circumstances. Mary described the Duchess as ‘the best of women’, ‘my admired patroness, my liberal and affectionate friend’.¹⁹ They would continue to be closely acquainted for many years. Georgiana loved to hear the particulars of Mary’s sorrows: her father’s desertion, her poverty, her unfaithful husband, her troubles as a young mother, her captivity. She shed tears of pity as she heard the story. Inspired by the Duchess’s patronage, Mary finished the poem that put her reflections on prison life into heroic couplets.

Mary remained unwaveringly loyal to those who helped her. She loved the Duchess and years later paid tribute in verse to her great qualities. She was particularly gratified by her friendship at a time when numerous female companions of happier days had deserted her. It was with the latter in mind that she wrote in her Memoirs of how ‘From that hour I have never felt the affection for my own sex which perhaps some women feel.’ She added with uncharacteristic bitterness: ‘Indeed I have almost uniformly found my own sex my most inveterate enemies … my bosom has often ached with the pang inflicted by their envy, slander, and malevolence.’²⁰ This outburst is, however, belied by the female friendships that she forged and sustained throughout her life.

As spouse of a debtor, she was free to come and go, but the visits to Georgiana were the only time she ever left the Fleet. While she was away from the prison being entertained in the splendour of Devonshire House, Robinson took the opportunity to do some entertaining of his own: Albanesi procured prostitutes for him and brought them into the prison. If the Memoirs are to be believed, after a while Mary was humiliated even further when her husband took to sleeping with prostitutes while she and little Maria Elizabeth were in the very next room. When she confronted him, he brazenly denied the charges.

Despite Albanesi’s supposed responsibility for Tom’s infidelities, the Italian engraver and his glamorous Roman wife became the Robinsons’ closest friends among their fellow detainees. The wife, Angelina, was formerly mistress to a prince and subsequently the lover of the Imperial Ambassador, Count de Belgeioso. Unlike Mary, she chose not to share her husband’s captivity, but she paid frequent visits, dressed to the nines and comporting herself like a duchess. She was a fascinating older woman, in her thirties, a ‘striking sample of beauty and of profligacy’ who gave Mary an insight into the life of a courtesan. She always insisted on visiting Mary when she came to see Albanesi, and she would ridicule the teenage bride for her ‘romantic domestic attachment’. She told Mary that she was wasting her beauty and her youth; she ‘pictured, in all the glow of fanciful scenery, the splendid life into which I might enter, if I would but know my own power, and break the fetters of matrimonial restriction’.²¹ She suggested that Mary should place herself under the protection of rake and celebrated horseman, Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke – she had already told him about Mary and his lordship was ready to offer his services.

Mary blamed Angelina for trying to persuade her into a life of dishonour. Both the Albanesis filled her young head with tales of ‘the world of gallantry’. Despite the disapproval of the couple expressed years later in the Memoirs, Mary was obviously enthralled by the way in which they offered a window into another world – a world that she had briefly tasted and must have longed to return to. Albanesi sang and played various musical instruments with easy accomplishment. And he told good jokes: Mary would herself become a notable wit.

On 3 August 1776, Robinson was discharged from the Fleet. He had managed to set aside some of his debts and give fresh bonds and securities for others. Mary wrote to her ‘lovely patroness’ with the news – she was at Chatsworth – and received a congratulatory letter in return. At the first possible opportunity, Mary headed for Vauxhall: ‘I had frequently found occasion to observe a mournful contrast when I had quitted the elegant apartment of Devonshire-house to enter the dark galleries of a prison; but the sensation which I felt on hearing the music and beholding the gay throng, during this first visit in public, after so long a seclusion, was indescribable.’²²

*Sometimes called Mary and sometimes Maria (both by her mother and herself) – I will call her Maria Elizabeth throughout, to distinguish her from her mother.

CHAPTER 6 Drury Lane

The invitation to meet the new actresses was whispered as though they were meditating to exhibit something monstrous and extraordinary … She had engaged in a profession which vulgar minds, though they are amused by its labours, frequently condemn with unpitying asperity. She was engaging, discreet, sensible, and accomplished: but she was an actress, and therefore deemed an unfit associate for the wives and daughters of the proud, the opulent, and the unenlightened.

Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter

Though Mary was thrilled to be back on the social scene at Vauxhall, the Robinsons had no means of sustaining their expensive lifestyle. Tom was still up to his ears in debt; he had failed to complete his legal apprenticeship and his father refused to aid him. Mary’s poems were not going to make her serious money, so once again she turned her mind to the theatre. This time she was not going to let her husband or her mother stop her. Now that he needed the money, Tom’s scruples about the profession swiftly evaporated.

The Robinsons took lodgings with a confectioner in Old Bond Street, near to London’s main shopping thoroughfare. Walking one day in St James’s Park with her husband, Mary met the actor William Brereton, who was soon to marry her school friend, the actress Priscilla Hopkins.* He joined them for dinner. He had seen Mary’s rehearsals with Garrick and was enthusiastic when she told him that she was thinking of reactivating her stage career. Some time later, when the Robinsons had moved to ‘a more quiet situation’ in the form of ‘a very neat and comfortable suite of apartments in Newman-street’,¹ Brereton appeared unexpectedly one morning with his friend, the playwright and theatre manager of Drury Lane, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Sheridan had been a schoolfellow with Tom Robinson at Harrow, but Tom encountered a very different man from the shy and shabby boy he had once known. Sheridan had taken over from Garrick on the great man’s retirement in 1776 and looked set to shine even brighter. He had all the right credentials: a playwright, the son of an actor-manager and a writer, the son-in-law of a renowned musician; his wife was a musician of rare gifts, the beautiful Elizabeth Linley. Sheridan had caused a scandal when he had eloped with Miss Linley and fought two duels in her honour. Drawing on his celebrity, in 1775 he rocked London with a play based on his amorous adventures, The Rivals. Though not conventionally handsome, with his florid complexion and rugged features, he was clever and charming, renowned for his wit and talent.

When Sheridan called on Mary at her home, he was just months into his new role as manager of the most famous theatre in London and was scouting for talent. Mary found Sheridan’s demeanour ‘strikingly and bewitchingly attractive’. He in turn was entranced by her beauty and asked her to read for him. Looking back, she remembered that she was not dressed properly, a state in which she always felt insecure. She was several months into a further pregnancy and her health was poor – she attributed this to the combined influence of the pregnancy and her continuance in breastfeeding Maria Elizabeth even though the girl was nearly 2. But she agreed to read some passages from Shakespeare. Mary was gratified that the celebrated Sheridan proved so gentle and encouraging. They were to become great friends. He asked her to prepare for a public trial, and read with her himself.

Then Sheridan got Garrick on board. With extraordinary loyalty to the girl who had let him down three years before, he agreed – despite ill health – to come out of retirement and tutor her once again. Garrick and Sheridan decided on Juliet for her debut role, in Garrick’s own adaptation of the play. Brereton would be Romeo. Mary ran through Juliet’s lines for the first time in the green room at Drury Lane. Garrick was ‘indefatigable at the rehearsals; frequently going through the whole character of Romeo himself, until he was completely exhausted with the fatigue of recitation’.² Mary never forgot Garrick’s kindness and his willingness to give her a second chance. When he died three years later, she wrote an elegy in his memory:

Who can forget thy penetrating eye,

The sweet bewitching smile, th’ empassion’d look!

The clear deep whisper, the persuasive sigh,

The feeling tear that Nature’s language spoke?³

Mary’s stage debut was set for 10 December 1776. It was announced to the press some time in advance. Managers often paid newspapers to ‘puff’ their actors. Sheridan and Garrick both had reputations for their publicity skills: Sheridan had planted an article in the Morning Chronicle puffing The Rivals after its initial failure. Garrick owned shares in various newspapers and his friendship with the journalist Henry Bate ensured favourable reviews and publicity for his plays. So it was that a great deal was made of Mary’s educated background and ‘superior understanding’. Sheridan and Garrick’s choice of role was astute: they knew that the press would be very forgiving towards a beautiful young woman playing Juliet for the first time. Mary, meanwhile, took the prudent step of writing to Chatsworth to inform Georgiana of her intentions. It was vital to get the patronage of the ladies, as many theatrical prologues of the period testify. The Duchess gave her approval to her young protégée and with ‘zeal bordering on delight’ Mary readied herself for her debut.⁴

What was the theatre like when Mary Robinson first stepped onto the boards of Drury Lane? The Licensing Act of 1737, which had been introduced in order to keep a check on plays satirizing the Government, confined legitimate theatrical performances to two patent playhouses in London, the Theatres Royal Drury Lane and Covent Garden. During the summer season when the two licensed theatres were closed, the ‘Little Theatre’ in the Haymarket had a summer patent. Drury Lane, London’s oldest theatre, had at this time a seating capacity of about two thousand. In the late Georgian period theatre was an essential part of fashionable life. A vibrant cross-section of the London community came to sit in box, pit, and gallery. Liveried servants were sent to reserve seats when the doors opened at five o’clock in the afternoon. Critics and raffish young men paid three shillings each to squash onto a bench in the pit; the well-to-do sat in private boxes for five shillings; honest citizens and visitors to town crammed into two-shilling places in the first gallery; servants and the hoi polloi sat in the upper gallery for one shilling. An evening entertainment ran to about four hours. First there was an overture played by the orchestra, then the main play (a drama, musical, or opera), then an interlude (music or a dance), and then a shorter afterpiece, usually of a farcical kind. It was generally said that the main pieces were for the ‘quality’ and the afterpiece for the commoners. Certainly the upper galleries filled up halfway through the main performance, when punters could gain admission for half price at the end of the third act of a five-act play.

Garrick had transformed the theatrical profession. In 1762 he had banned the audience from sitting on the stage – previously drunken patrons occupying the stage seats had been known to molest actresses (on one infamous occasion a near rape took place in full view of the audience). He had also made major modernizations in lighting and scenery: he removed the great chandeliers from their traditional place above the stage and substituted them with oil lamps in the wings, which had tin reflectors attached and could be directed towards or away from the stage, giving a greater control over illumination. The waxing or waning of light at dusk or dawn could now be indicated. Garrick also employed the ingenious scene designer Philip de Loutherbourg, who specialized in stage illusions. He charmed his audiences by changing the tints of the scenery, throwing light through coloured silk screens that turned on pivots in the flies and wings. De Loutherbourg was thus able to conjure up moonlight, cloud and fire effects. House lights were not turned down, as the audience came to the theatre to look at each other as much as to look at the players.

When Mary made her debut, she was acting in the newly renovated theatre, recently remodelled by the celebrated Adam brothers. The ceiling had been raised 12 feet, improving the acoustic and giving a sense of space; it was designed in a sumptuous pattern of octagonal panels that rose from an exterior circular frame, diminishing towards the centre, giving the effect of a dome. The side boxes had also been heightened, with an improved view of the stage; they were decorated along the front with variegated borders inlaid with plaster festoons of flowers and medallions. The old square heavy pillars had been removed from each side of the stage and replaced with elegant slim pillars, inlaid with green and crimson plate glass, which supported the upper boxes and galleries. The boxes were lined with crimson spotted paper. New gilt branches with two candles each replaced the old chandeliers. The boxes in the upper tier – known as the ‘green boxes’, where prostitutes solicited rich patrons – were adorned with gilt busts, painted embellishments and gilt borders. There was crimson drapery edged with gold fringing over the stage.

The theatre was not, of course, decorated in any such way in the backstage space where Mary spent most of her time. This was a vast area – larger than the entire front of house – with a maze of stairs and passages, some of them sloped to take wheels and animals. There were twenty dressing rooms, with a dresser allocated to each room, though principal players usually had their own personal dressers. It was later rumoured that Elizabeth Armistead – actress, courtesan, and rival to Perdita – began her career as Mary’s dresser. The dressing rooms, unlike the auditorium, had stoves to keep the actors warm. Some even had water closets. Other water closets were in the corridor adjacent to the stage area. The ladies’ dressing rooms had a candle and a mirror for each actress, their space demarcated by chalk marks across the floor. A hairdresser would have prepared Mary’s coiffure, but actresses put on their own make-up, a powder compounded with a liquid medium, which was often harmful to the skin and sometimes extremely dangerous, especially if white lead was used in its composition. White skin and rouged cheeks was the favoured image. In the green room, immediately to the side of the stage, actors, singers, and their invited friends mingled before the performance began.

The theatre was crowded on 10 December, the audience anxious to see Garrick’s protégée who was now also Sheridan’s new discovery. She had been advertised on the playbill as ‘A Young Lady (1st appearance upon any stage)’. For Mary herself it was a frightening experience. She was exceedingly nervous, mindful of the critics in the pit and Garrick sitting there with his shrewd, intense stare. The fate of a play (and an actor) was sealed on the opening night even before the curtain fell on the concluding act.

Theatre audiences did not sit in darkness and silence as they do today. The atmosphere was boisterous, voluble and interactive; the lighted auditorium helped to establish a rapport between spectators and actors. Applause or hisses rang out throughout the performance, and it was the audience rather than the critics who determined whether there was to be a long run or a speedy closure. The audience in the lobby and auditorium put on a display of its own: the young men in the pit, who were probably the most attentive spectators, offered criticism and comment; cheers and jeers could be expected from the gods (the one-shilling galleries), accompanied by songs, laughter, and flying fruit. It was not only rotten fruit that was hurled at bad performers – broken glass tumblers, metal, and wood could also rain down onto the stage. Despite having a reputation for drunken and unruly behaviour, those in the cheap seats usually paid attention once the play had begun and they were satisfied all was well. Less attentive were the aristocracy and gentry in the boxes, where fashionable society peered at itself as if in a mirror. As Mr Lovel, the fop in Fanny Burney’s contemporaneous novel Evelina, says, ‘I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do in looking at one’s acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage.’⁵

At last the huge curtain opened and Mary walked onto the stage clutching the arm of the nurse, almost fainting with anxiety.* Before she had even spoken a line, she was greeted with rapturous applause. The audience, who could be vicious and recalcitrant if they felt cheated or disappointed, could also be encouraging and kind. It helped that she was beautifully dressed: ‘My dress was a pale pink satin, trimmed with crape, richly spangled with silver; my head was ornamented with white feathers.’ In the final scene, when Juliet is in her tomb, she wore a white satin dress that was ‘completely plain, excepting that I wore a veil of the most transparent gauze, which fell quite to my feet from the back of my head, and a string of beads round my waist, to which was suspended a cross appropriately fashioned’.⁶ White satin was the customary dress for a tragic or mad scene.

Playbills often advertised ‘new dresses’ – clothing was as important as scenery in making the theatre a place of spectacle. Fine robes and court dresses belonging to the aristocracy were sold to the theatres or given to favourite actresses, some of whom wore them irrespective of the role they were playing. There was much debate about consistency and historical accuracy of costumes in plays that mixed together ‘Old English’ style and contemporary dress. Newspapers often complained that the performers dressed according to their own whim and without the least regard for the consistency of the whole – a character might wear Turkish slippers together with a Grecian turban. Leading players could choose their own costumes, either from the stage wardrobe or made up by their own dressmakers. In the case of comedy, which was usually produced in contemporary dress, the female costumes were particularly elaborate, with hoops and high headdresses of plumed feathers. While performing, actresses prided themselves on dressing fashionably, regardless of the specific part they played. A chambermaid could look like a lady. The actress Sophia Baddeley, when encouraged to cut down her wardrobe expenses, reputedly answered, ‘One may as well be dead as not in the fashion.’⁷

‘The thundering applause that greeted me nearly overpowered all my faculties,’ Mary remembered. ‘I stood mute and bending with alarm, which did not subside till I had feebly articulated the few sentences of the first short scene, during the whole of which I never once ventured to look at the audience.’ Her next scene was the masquerade. By now she had had time to collect herself. Being in an onstage crowd, she felt less self-conscious and dared to look out on the pit: ‘I beheld a gradual ascent of heads: all eyes were fixed upon me; and the sensation they conveyed was awfully impressive: but the keen, the penetrating eyes of Mr Garrick, darting their lustre from the centre of the Orchestra, were, beyond all others, the objects most conspicuous.’ The rest of the performance passed in a daze and ended with ‘clamorous approbation’ and compliments on all sides.⁸

Sheridan was pleased with her and paid her well. After only two performances as Juliet, she was given a much-needed £20.⁹ Ten pounds per appearance was the top rate for an actress. But what she most desired was the approbation of Garrick. His praise sparked in her an intensity of feeling greater than she had ever known. She had gained the respect of ‘one of the most fascinating men and most distinguished geniuses of the age’; she felt ‘that emulation which the soul delights to encourage, where the attainment of fame will be pleasing to an esteemed object’.¹⁰

Mary’s performance was well received. The prompter William Hopkins, who had seen all the greats and all the failures, was not an easy man to impress. ‘Juliet by Mrs Robinson – a genteel Figure – a very tolerable first Appearance, and may do in time,’ he noted laconically.¹¹ The writer of ‘Theatrical Intelligence’ in the leading newspaper, the Morning Post, saw considerable potential:

A Lady, whose name is Robinson, made her first appearance last night at this theatre, in the character of Juliet; her person is genteel, her voice harmonious, and admitting of various modulations; and her features, when properly animated are striking, and expressive—

At present she discovers a theatrical genius in the rough; which, however, in elocution, as well as action, seems to require considerable polishing, before it can be brought to perfection. In the scene with the Nurse, where she mistakes Tibalt’s murder, for that of her lover, Romeo, she gave an earnest of stage-abilities, which, if properly attended to, may prove a credit to herself and the Theatre. – We shall be able to speak of her powers at large when we find her become a little more familiar with the stage.¹²

A gentleman signing himself ‘Fly Flap’, writing in the same paper, found her ‘love-inspired Juliet’ most ‘truly and naturally depicted’. Two days later, following a repeat performance, the Morning Post confirmed its favourable first impression: Mrs Robinson ‘has a considerable share of untutored genius, and may, under proper instructions, become an acquisition to the stage’.¹³

A rival paper, the General Advertiser (where Garrick had good contacts), went much further: ‘There has not been a lady on this, or any other stage, for some seasons, who promises to make so capital an actress … she has eloquence and beauty: the grace of her arms is singular … we may venture to pronounce her an acquisition and an ornament.’ The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser said, ‘the young lady who performed the part of Juliet last night was received with uncommon and universal applause’. The Morning Chronicle was also impressed, though it did sometimes think she ‘substituted rant for passion, and dealt in whispers where she evidently meant to be pathetic’. ‘Mrs Robinson,’ the reporter added, had a ‘genteel figure, with a handsome face, and a fine masking eye. She appeared to feel the character; and although there wanted a polish in her manner of speaking and more ease in her actions and attitudes, she gave the audience a better impression of her than we can remember them to have received from any new actress for some time past.’¹⁴

Mary played Juliet several more times over the following months. Her second role, in which she appeared on Monday, 17 February 1777, was as the exotic Statira in a tragedy called Alexander the Great by the verbose Restoration dramatist Nathaniel Lee. In the Memoirs she recollects her costume in great detail: ‘My dress was white and blue, made after the Persian costume, and though it was then singular on the stage, I wore neither a hoop nor powder; my feet were bound by sandals richly ornamented; and the whole dress was picturesque and characteristic.’¹⁵ Her willingness to defy the fashion of hoops and powder for the sake of dramatic verisimilitude, even though this was only her second role on the stage, was impressive. She also knew that her abandonment of contemporary attire for traditional costume would draw extra publicity.

A week after playing Statira she was Amanda in Sheridan’s adaptation of Sir John Vanbrugh’s venerable Restoration comedy The Relapse. The play was announced as a new piece under the title A Trip to Scarborough. The audience were furious when they realized that they had been duped and began hissing (ladies usually hissed through their fans). The leading actress, Mary Ann Yates, swept off the stage, leaving Mary to ‘encounter the critical tempest’ alone. The terrified Mary was rooted to the spot, but Sheridan – from the side wing – bade her to stay on the stage.

Then there was an intervention from the most prominent member of the audience. The King’s younger brother, the Duke of Cumberland, was the black sheep of the royal family. He was a libertine, socialite, and avid theatregoer; his union to divorcée Anne Horton had been one of the causes of the Royal Marriage Act of 1772, which restricted the young royals’ freedom to marry. He called out to Mary from his side box: ‘It is not you, but the play, they hiss.’ She curtsied in response and ‘that curtsy seemed to electrify the whole house’. There was a thundering peal of applause and the play was allowed to continue. It ran for ten nights and remained a staple of the Drury Lane repertoire for many years to come. As one contemporary noted, the great attraction of A Trip to Scarborough was that ‘it gave an opportunity for producing, in one night, three most remarkable actresses, Mrs Abington, Miss Farren, and Mrs Robinson – the first at the very top of her profession for comic humour – the second of surpassing loveliness and elegance – and the third, one of the most beautiful women in London’.¹⁶

Mary’s aplomb in response to the Duke of Cumberland had saved Sheridan’s new show. The following morning’s Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser would have added to her delight: ‘Mrs Robinson’s acting had certainly a just claim to the encouragement of the audience … We will venture to affirm, that success cannot fail to attend her theatrical abilities.’¹⁷

Mary was at last gaining the financial independence that she had always wanted. In April she was given her first benefit. The benefit was the key to an actor’s earnings. It was a special performance from which the financial proceeds, after deduction of expenses, were given to a member of the company, who was allowed to choose the play for the evening. Being nearly eight months pregnant by this time, Mary chose the role of the pregnant Fanny in The Clandestine Marriage, an exceptionally popular comedy of which Garrick was co-author. It was a brilliant choice, which at once fitted her figure, flattered Garrick and guaranteed a good box office return. The playbill announced that she was selling advance tickets herself, from 19 Southampton Street, Covent Garden. Receipts for the night amounted to a very satisfactory £189 (about £8,000 in today’s terms). But her increasing size as she entered the final stages of pregnancy forced her to turn down Sheridan’s offer of a role in his new play, The School for Scandal. It went to her school friend Priscilla Hopkins, who was also in the company. The play opened on 8 May and was an instant hit.

The Robinsons’ new home in Southampton Street – where Garrick had lived for many years – was a stone’s throw from Drury Lane. The area was full of actors and actresses. It was a hub of activity, with the Covent Garden Piazza, a cluster of market stalls in the centre, hotels, coffee houses, and shops, bathhouses, and taverns. The shops stayed open from seven in the morning till ten in the evening, lit by elegant double-branched street lamps. Unusually for eighteenth-century London, the streets were paved and clean. Nearby on the Strand the huge government office building Somerset House was in the early stages of construction. To the west, new streets were being laid out – Bedford and Portman Squares and Portland Place, opening onto the fields of Marylebone. Money and the confidence of money were in the air. In Hyde Park the rich and elegant paraded on horseback or drove about in the latest carriages.

Mrs Robinson began to enjoy the fruits of her talent and popularity. She played light romantic roles, ingénues and virtuous wives – all parts that made the most of her beauty and fine figure. Sheridan lavished attention upon her, she received a handsome salary, the theatre boxes were full of people of rank and fashion. In her Memoirs she records the complete turnabout of her life: ‘I looked forward with delight both to celebrity and to fortune.’¹⁸

She gave birth to another daughter, who was baptized Sophia on 24 May 1777. At the age of 6 weeks, the baby started having convulsions, as Maria Elizabeth had once done in Wales. This time the child did not survive. She died in her mother’s arms. Sheridan called on Mary that very day. She would never forget his face as he entered the room and saw the dying baby on her lap. ‘Beautiful little creature,’ he said with ‘a degree of sympathetic sorrow’ that pierced Mary’s heart. His sympathy was a harsh reminder of Robinson’s lack of sensibility: ‘Had I ever heard such a sigh from a husband’s bosom?’¹⁹ Throughout this period, Tom continued with his infidelities, but all she cared about now was that he could not even be discreet. With a disarming candour, she admits that her husband did not love her: ‘I never was beloved by him … I do not condemn Mr Robinson; I but too well know that we cannot command our affections.’

Meanwhile, her friendship with Sheridan flourished. He gave Mary time and attention, despite all the demands of running Drury Lane – a company of 48 male actors, 37 actresses, 18 adult dancers, 2 child dancers, 30 dressers, and a whole panoply of box-keepers, porters, messengers, fruit-sellers, sweepers, carpenters, prompters, set-builders, and musicians. He was plagued with the business of the choice and casting of plays, but also more mundane matters such as the failure of performers to buy their own white silk stockings, dressers pinching leftover candles from the dressing rooms, late return of gloves and hats to wardrobe. Mr Sheridan and Mrs Robinson were kindred spirits, with their Irish blood, strong passions, high ambitions, and sharp sense of humour. They were both chameleons, players one moment and politicians the next. Perhaps they shared their thoughts on female education: Sheridan had written an essay sympathizing with the plight of impoverished gentlewomen and proposing the foundation of a new female university – just as Mary would do in her polemical Letter to the Women of England at the climax of her literary career twenty years later.

Sheridan’s unremitting attentions initiated a whispering campaign. Up until now the press had been supportive, but the rumour mill was beginning to turn – though Mary always insisted that the relationship was merely a good friendship. When she was too weak and distressed to finish the season after the death of Sophia, Sheridan suggested convalescence in Bath. From there, she returned to nearby Bristol for the summer. In the autumn, she went back to London, to new lodgings in Leicester Square. Her second book of poetry – the volume dedicated to Georgiana, containing ‘Captivity’ and ‘Celadon and Lydia’ – was published at this time. The reviewers were kind. According to the Monthly Review, ‘Two reasons preclude criticism here: the poems are the production of a lady, and that lady is unhappy.’²⁰

For her second season, 1777–8, Mary opened in Hamlet at the end of September, taking the role of Ophelia, the commoner who is wooed and then rejected by a prince. According to one newspaper, ‘Mrs Robinson looked Ophelia very beautifully, and for so young a theatrical adventurer, played it very pleasingly.’²¹ A week later she played Lady Anne in Richard III, the widow wooed over the body of her father-in-law by the man who has killed her husband. Despite these successes in tragedy, Sheridan was keen that she try her hand at comedy. Her roles over the following weeks included Araminta in Congreve’s popular Restoration comedy The Old Bachelor – the part is of a wealthy, witty, independent woman who runs rings round at least three male characters – and Emily, the ingénue in The Runaway, the first play of a woman dramatist who was beginning to make a name for herself, Hannah Cowley. She also took several roles of virtuous young women who refuse to give in to sexual temptation: the Lady in a version of Milton’s Comus, Fanny in a dramatization of Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews, and Octavia in All for Love, Dryden’s reworking of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Her abilities might have been better suited to the part of Cleopatra herself.

On Thursday, 30 April 1778, she played Lady Macbeth for her benefit (having originally been advertised as Cordelia). The afterpiece was a new musical farce called The Lucky Escape. Mary did not appear in it – but she was its author. It seems to have impressed the audience more than her performance as Shakespeare’s ‘fiend-like queen’. The Morning Post recorded that the operetta ‘was well got up, and all the players acquitted themselves with credit. There is a prettiness and sentiment in the language strongly characteristic of the author.’ The Morning Chronicle was more cynical: ‘The Lucky Escape is evidently one of those hasty escapes from the brain, which are from time to time served up at each theatre, during the course of the benefit season, with a view to engage the attention of the publick, on the score of novelty, but which, for want of solid merit, are rarely, if ever, heard of again.’²² But even this churlish reviewer praised the music.

A few days later, there appeared on the London bookstalls (‘printed for the author’) The Songs, Chorusses, etc. in The Lucky Escape, a Comic Opera as Performed at the Theatre-Royal, in Drury-Lane. Mary was proving her versatility, moving with fleetness of foot from comic heroine to tragedy queen to composer of a musical. Her salary had risen to £2. 10s. a week, with the takings from the benefit night on top. She rounded off the season with a reprise of her Juliet.

It would be foolish to seek for biographical revelation in a light musical confection such as The Lucky Escape, but one cannot help wondering whether there is any significance in the fact that the heroine is called Maria (the name under which Mary had signed the dedication to her recent volume of poems). The heroine’s father is called Steadfast – which is something that Nicholas Darby was not. Another character is Venture, ‘a Sharper’, who sings that the attractions of a ‘comely lass of gay fifteen’ (Mary’s age when she married Tom Robinson) quickly pall in comparison to the allure of money:

The comely lass of gay fifteen,

May make a silly lover languish,

But the pain that lurks unseen,

Often fills the heart with anguish.

Beauty once the heart possessing,

Charms the sense and drowns our reason;

Gold the spring of every blessing,

Finds a friend in every season.²³

Robinson answers rather well to Dr Johnson’s dictionary definition of a ‘Sharper’ as ‘a tricking fellow’ or ‘a rascal’: in creating the character of Venture, Mary may well have smiled to herself and thought of her husband.

Mary’s commitment to continue her writing career was of a piece with her decision not to follow the usual actor’s pattern of undertaking a gruelling tour in the provinces when the major theatres were closed for the summer. She was determined to cut a figure in London rather than wear herself out in provincial obscurity. She accordingly remained in her London lodgings in the summer of 1778. Early in August, Sheridan called on her to relay the sad news of the death of his brother-in-law Thomas Linley, 21 years old and the most promising composer in the land, in a freak boating accident.

Around the same time, Sheridan called again with a proposal that she should accept an engagement to play the short summer season at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. She agreed, on condition that she should have control over her casting. She wanted to maximize her impact by only playing a few choice roles. Top of her list was the part of Miss Nancy Lovel in a comedy called The Suicide by Garrick’s friend George Colman. This was a cross-dressed ‘breeches role’, a daring opportunity for an actress to show off her legs. Mary received her copy of the part and waited for rehearsals to begin. But then she was startled to see a playbill advertising Miss Farren for the part. Elizabeth Farren was the beautiful low-born actress who would later marry into the aristocracy, becoming the Duchess of Derby. Mary wrote to the manager of the Haymarket demanding an explanation and was told that he had already promised the role to Farren and would not risk offending her. Mary responded that she must either be given the part as originally agreed or released from her contract. The manager refused to sign her off the books, she refused to play another role, and so an impasse was reached: ‘the summer passed without my once performing, though my salary was paid weekly and regularly’.²⁴ It was a highly unusual occurrence for a player to be paid for not acting. Mrs Robinson was proving herself a determined manager of her own career.

She added several new roles to her repertoire during the following season at Drury Lane. Some were histrionic tragic performances dripping with sensibility. In Mahomet (an English version of a tragedy by Voltaire), reported the Morning Post, ‘Mrs Robinson performed Palmira with spirit, and discovered stage powers that should be more frequently called forth by the managers.’²⁵ Others were lighter, among them Lady Plume in The Camp, a musical entertainment put together by Sheridan, and Miss Richly in The Discovery, a comedy by Sheridan’s mother Frances, in which Mary engaged in a coquettish double act with Elizabeth Farren. For her benefit in April 1779 she was Cordelia in Lear – tickets were available from her new residence in the Great Piazza on the corner of Russell Street, Covent Garden. Receipts were £210, of which she received half, following the deduction of the theatre’s ‘charges’ for expenses. By now she and Tom were leading separate lives, although he took her money. He was supporting two women in one house at Malden Lane, which was also in Covent Garden. One was a figure dancer from the Drury Lane company, the other ‘a woman of professed libertinism’. The bond creditors, meanwhile, ‘became so clamorous’ that the whole of Mary’s benefit was ‘appropriated to their demands’.²⁶

On 10 May 1779, Sheridan presented Mary as Jacintha in The Suspicious Husband by Benjamin Hoadly, a comedy that had been premiered by Garrick thirty years before. It involved many exits and entrances through windows at night, and some risqué small talk. More to the point, it was her first cross-dressed role. ‘Last Night,’ the Morning Post informed its readers, ‘Mrs Robinson wore the breeches for the first time (on the stage at least) in the character of Jacintha in the Suspicious Husband, and was allowed to make a prettier fellow than any of her female competitors.’²⁷ ‘On the stage at least’ seems to imply that Mary might have appeared in breeches off the stage some time before. That is certainly what she did two weeks later, when she attracted great attention by wearing Jacintha’s breeches at a masquerade in Covent Garden. This created a stir in the fashionable world, though at considerable risk to her reputation. To appear cross-dressed on stage was one thing; to do so in society quite another.

Five days after playing Jacintha for the first time, Mary took on another breeches role, Fidelia in Isaac Bickerstaffe’s reworking of William Wycherley’s comedy The Plain Dealer – the part is in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Viola, in which a young woman follows her beloved to sea dressed in man’s clothes. But it is a darker play than Twelfth Night: in Wycherley’s original Fidelia is almost raped on stage.²⁸ From this point on in Mary’s career both on stage and in society, it is hard to avoid the subject of sex. Breeches roles were tremendously popular – they afforded male audiences their only public glimpse of the shape of a woman’s leg – but they reinforced the old prejudice that women who disported themselves on stage were little better than prostitutes. Actresses were required to lead exemplary lives if they stood a chance of earning respectability, and very few did, exposed as they were to the temptations of the rich patrons who frequented the theatres looking for mistresses. One commentator compared the stage to the window of a toyshop through which actresses could be seen and purchased.²⁹ Actresses in the 1780s were seen as no different in kind, but only in degree, from the more obviously sexually available performers of the brothel. ‘Drury Lane Ague’ was slang for syphilis, ‘Drury Lane Vestal’ for a whore, ‘Covent Garden Abbess’ for a madam. Drury Lane and Covent Garden were in close physical proximity to bagnios and brothels; prostitutes sold their services in and around the theatre buildings.

Actresses were thrilling to look at, glamorous and mysterious. Because they were on public display, they broke all the conduct-book rules about feminine modesty. Periodically there were outcries against the immorality of the stage, and it was the actresses who usually bore the brunt of the the press’s opprobrium. In private, too, even those who were closely connected to the theatre had their doubts. Sheridan forbade his wife to perform in public once they were married, earning the approbation of Dr Johnson. When his wife’s sister Mary Linley was offered a contract by Garrick, he wrote a letter to her brother that positively bursts with invective: were she to accept Garrick’s offer, she would become ‘the unblushing Object of a Licentious gaping croud’, the ‘Creature of a mercenary Manager, The Servant of the Town, and a licens’d Mark for Libertinism … a Topick for illiberal News-Paper Criticism and Scandal’. ‘It would be needless to add the circumstance of a Girl’s making a Shew of herself in Breeches.’³⁰ He argued that no decent man ever married an actress and that nine out of every ten actresses ended up bitterly regretting going on the stage. He would rather see his sister-in-law dead than become an actress.

Furthermore, there was anxiety about actresses emulating aristocratic women so successfully that they could play the fine lady offstage as well as on it. Well-to-do women often sold their second-hand clothes to actresses. Actresses used their freedom in selecting their own apparel to associate themselves further with women of quality. By dressing fashionably both onstage and off, they reinforced the idea that there was little to separate them from their most established and wealthy patrons. Mary was careful to emphasize the continued patronage of the Duchess of Devonshire and the esteem in which she was held by several other ‘respectable and distinguished females’. The prominence of ladies of quality in the theatre world was another bane of anti-theatrical pamphleteers. Actresses would often speak Prologues and Epilogues that appealed to the generosity of ‘The Ladies’ for applause and approval. Actresses increasingly aligned themselves with aristocratic women to defend themselves against the less flattering comparisons suggested in scurrilous biographies and the ever more scandalous paragraphs in the newspapers and periodicals. As Mary insisted, ‘I had still the consolation of an unsullied name. I had the highest female patronage, a circle of the most respectable and partial friends.’³¹

Such patronage could not, however, shield her from family disapproval. When Mary’s elder brother John visited England from Tuscany, where he had become a respectable merchant, he was horrified by his sister’s choice of profession. She managed to persuade him to see her perform, but the moment he saw her entering the stage he ‘started from his seat in the stage-box, and instantly quitted the theatre’. Hester, meanwhile, heartily disliked the idea of her daughter being on stage and, although she would go to the theatre to see her perform, she did not hesitate to show ‘painful regret’.³² Mary claims that fortunately her father remained abroad all this time, so never saw her act. But actually he came in and out of the country during these years. In 1779 he opened a subscription at the London Coffee House ‘for fitting out a stout privateer’. So it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that one night Nicholas Darby may have slipped into Drury Lane and seen his daughter under the lights.

In Mary’s 1796 novel, Angelina, the heroine’s despotic father (who is a merchant like Nicholas Darby) condemns female stage players: ‘my daughter an actress! why, I’d cut her legs off, if I thought she wished to disgrace herself by such an idea’. He would rather ‘see her dead, than making such a moppet of herself, as to run about like a vagrant, playacting’. Mary’s own attitude comes across when one of her female characters voices an impassioned defence of the profession as a serious and respectable art:

We have many females on the stage, who are ornaments to society, and in every respect worthy of imitation! For my part, I adore the Theatre, and think there is more morality to be found in one good tragedy, than in all the sermons that ever were printed. With regard to acting; it is an act which demands no small portion of intellectual acquirements! It polishes the manners; enlightens the understanding, gives a finish to external grace, and calls forth all the powers of mental superiority!³³

*Brereton died in 1787 after a year’s confinement in the Hoxton lunatic asylum. Later the same year Priscilla married another famous actor, John Philip Kemble (brother of Sarah Siddons).

*When first published, Mary’s Memoirs filled two volumes: in a suitably dramatic touch, the first volume ends at this point in her story, as ‘with trembling limbs, and fearful apprehension, I approached the audience’.

CHAPTER 7 A Woman in Demand

It has ever been a decided opinion in my mind, that the man who first seduces a woman from the paths of chastity is accessory to all the ills that may await her during the remaining hours of her existence.

Mary Robinson, Walsingham

Mary’s marriage had become a sham. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1779 she accompanied Tom to Tregunter once again. In all probability, he was seeking breathing space from his creditors and wanted to make another attempt to get money out of Harris.

Her reception at Tregunter House was much better than it had been the time when prison loomed: ‘Mrs Robinson, the promising young actress, was a very different personage from Mrs Robinson who had been overwhelmed with sorrows, and came to ask an asylum under the roof of vulgar ostentation.’ Elizabeth Robinson expressed her disapproval of Mary’s profession, but the ‘supposed immorality was … tolerated’ as the labour was ‘deemed profitable’.¹ The visit appeared to go well. Harris arranged parties and dinners to show her off. The well-to-do women of the locality treated her as ‘the very oracle of fashion’. After two weeks in Wales, she returned to London to prepare for the new season. On the way home, a pause at Bath exposed her to the solicitations of the dangerous duellist, George Brereton, prominent amongst her husband’s creditors. Tom had met him in the racing town of Newmarket some time before.

Mary’s re-enactment of the story is one of the best scenes in the Memoirs. It reads like a true novel of sensibility. Brereton had married his cousin, the daughter of the Master of Ceremonies at Bath. Despite the Robinsons’ financial difficulties, they stayed at the Three Tuns, one of the city’s best inns. Brereton was initially friendly, but then his attentions turned to ardour: he made ‘a violent and fervent declaration of love’, which ‘astonished and perplexed’ Mary. She thought the best course of action was to leave town and go to Bristol. They checked into an inn there, in Temple Street. The next morning, just as they were going out to make a visit in Clifton, Tom was arrested at the suit of Brereton on the basis of a promissory note ‘in magnitude beyond his power to pay’. A few minutes later, Mary was informed that a lady wished to see her in an upstairs room. Assuming it was one of her old acquaintances, she followed a waiter into another room, while her husband was detained by the sheriff. Brereton was waiting for her: he had got wind of their movements and followed them to Bristol. ‘Well, Madam,’ he said with a sarcastic smile, ‘you have involved your husband in a pretty embarrassment! Had you not been severe towards me, not only this paltry debt would have been cancelled, but any sum that I could command would have been at his service. He has now either to pay me, to fight me, or to go to a prison; and all because you treat me with such unexampled rigour.’²

When she begged for mercy, he asked her to promise that she would return to Bath and ‘behave more kindly’ to him. She realized what he was asking and burst into tears. She accused him of inhumanity. He replied that she was the one being inhuman – for not giving in to him and for making him follow her to Bristol at a time when his own wife lay dangerously ill in Bath. He rang the bell and ordered the waiter to look for his carriage. Mary lost control of herself and screamed that she would expose him as a seducer and villain. Brereton changed colour and tried to calm her down, fearing an embarrassing incident in a public place. He tried to reason with her, asking why she chose to stay with a husband who treated her so badly. It would be an act of kindness to estrange her from such a man. His neglect of her would justify any action she took. Was it not ‘a matter of universal astonishment’ in society that a woman renowned for her ‘becoming spirit’ should ‘tamely continue to bear such infidelities from a husband’? This hit a nerve with Mary, for Brereton was echoing the view taken not only by the gossips in the theatre world but also by her closest circle of friends. At the same time, it was a line that libertines had tried on her before.

Brereton continued to taunt her as she paced the room in anguish. ‘How little does such a husband deserve such a wife,’ he said:

‘How tasteless must he be, to leave such a woman for the very lowest and most degraded of the sex! Quit him, and fly with me. I am ready to make any sacrifice you demand. Shall I propose to Mr Robinson to let you go? Shall I offer him his liberty on condition that he allows you to separate yourself from him? By his conduct he proves that he does not love you; why then labour to support him?’³

Mary was almost frantic. ‘Here, Madam,’ continued Brereton, after pausing four or five minutes, ‘here is your husband’s release.’ So saying, he threw a written paper on the table. ‘Now,’ he added, ‘I rely on your generosity.’ She trembled, unable to speak. Brereton told her to compose herself and to conceal her distress from the staff and guests at the inn. ‘I will return to Bath,’ he said, ‘I shall there expect to see you.’ He stormed out of the room, got into his chaise and drove away from the inn door. Mary hurried to show her husband the discharge. All the expenses of the arrest were settled shortly afterwards. They returned to Bath. Robinson did not ask too many questions. Mary warned him against placing his freedom in the hands of a gamester and his wife’s virtue in the power of a libertine, but she knew he would not listen.

Back in Bath, they moved to a different inn, the White Lion. The next afternoon, a Sunday, Mary was astonished to look out of the window and see Brereton parading down the road ‘with his wife and her no less lovely sister’ – the story of the wife’s dangerous illness was a lie. When the Robinsons sat down to dinner, Brereton was announced by the waiter. He ‘coldly bowed’ to Mary and then apologized to Tom, producing a story about how he had only taken action because he was himself being menaced for the money, that he had come to Bristol to prevent rather than to enforce the arrest, and that he had now paid off the demand. Perhaps he would have the honour of seeing the Robinsons later that evening? They did not wait around for him: immediately after dinner they set off for London. Mary dramatizes this story – like that of her meeting with her husband’s first mistress, Harriet Wilmot – so as to emphasize that she was a wronged woman long before any scandalous liaison of her own, but the vivid details have the ring of truth.

Back in London, the Robinsons rented a spacious and elegant house from the actress Isabella Mattocks, in the heart of Covent Garden, near Drury Lane Theatre. They entertained with abandon: ‘My house was thronged with visitors, and my morning levees were crowded so that I could scarcely find a quiet hour for study.’⁴ Robinson had a lucky streak with the cards and they spent the money on horses, ponies and a new carriage.

Once again the gossip sheets whispered that the rising star Mary and the dashing theatre manager Sheridan were more than friends. A letter to the Morning Post signed ‘Squib’ said ‘Mrs Robinson is to the full, as beautiful as Mrs Cuyler [another actress]; and Mrs Robinson has not been overlooked; the manager of Drury-Lane has pushed her forward.’ Mary responded: ‘Mrs Robinson presents her compliments to Squib, and desires that the next time he wishes to exercise his wit, it may not be at her expense. Conscious of the rectitude of her conduct, both in public and private, Mrs Robinson does not feel herself the least hurt, at the ill-natured sarcasms of an anonymous detractor.’⁵ She was learning to play the press, an art for which she had good masters in Sheridan and Garrick.

Sheridan continued to pay her marked attention, but she claimed that – in contrast to the behaviour of the libertines – his attitude was always courteous and respectful. He was too good a friend and a man of too much honour to take advantage of her miserable marriage. ‘The happiest moments I then knew, were passed in the society of this distinguished being. He saw me ill-bestowed on a man who neither loved nor valued me; he lamented my destiny, but with such delicate propriety, that it consoled while it revealed to me the unhappiness of my situation.’ And yet she also writes more defensively: ‘Situated as I was at this time, the effort was difficult to avoid the society of Mr Sheridan. He was manager of the theatre. I could not avoid seeing and conversing with him at rehearsals and behind the scenes, and his conversation was always such as to fascinate and charm me.’⁶ Is there a hint of some impropriety here? In the original manuscript of the Memoirs a long paragraph immediately preceding this remark is heavily deleted – could Mary have confessed something and then thought better of it? On the other hand, it is striking that the author of the anonymous Memoirs of Perdita, who was for the most part eager to accuse her of having affairs with almost every important man she met, restrained himself in the case of Sheridan: ‘Of the nature of their intimacy, though the tattle of the day may have spoke freely, no particulars have transpired; nor should tattle always be regarded.’⁷

At this time, Mary was increasingly subjected to the ‘alluring temptations’ of noblemen who wished to take her under their protection. Charles Manners, the fourth Duke of Rutland, offered her £600 a year for the privilege. She turned him down. She wanted the patronage of the theatregoing and poetry-reading public, not that of an aristocrat seeking a courtesan. In her Memoirs, Mary refused to name all the men who propositioned her, so as not to ‘create some reproaches in many families of the fashionable world’.⁸ But she let it be known that advances were made by a royal Duke, a lofty Marquis, and a city merchant of ‘considerable fortune’. Many of these men conveyed their proposals via Mary’s milliners and dressmakers. The scurrilous Memoirs of Perdita, published in 1784 for the purpose of discrediting her, gives graphic details of her purported sexual adventures with both the conceited dandy Lord Cholmondeley and an unnamed heavy-drinking importer of vintage wines. Though not to be trusted, this source provides incidental confirmation of the impression that men from both the established aristocracy and the world of new city money had designs on her.

One of the men who paid her most attention was Sir John Lade, the wealthy heir to a brewery fortune and former ward of Henry Thrale, friend of Dr Johnson. Soon after coming of age, Lade concentrated all his energies on the Robinson household in the Great Piazza. He gambled with Tom and paid court to Mary. Gossip columnists were soon sniffing round the ménage:

A certain young Baronet, well known on the Turf, and famous for his high phaeton, had long laid siege to a pretty actress (a married woman) at one of our theatres; he sent her a number of letters, which after she had read (and perhaps did not like, as they might not speak to the purpose) she sent him back again; a kind of Bo-peep Play was kept up between them in the theatres, and from the Bedford Arms Tavern and her window. The Baronet is shame-faced, and could not address her in person, but by means of some good friend they were brought together, and on Sunday se’en-night set out in grand cavalcade for Epsom, to celebrate the very joyful occasion of their being acquainted. The Baronet went first, attended by a male friend, in his phaeton, and the lady with her husband in a post coach and four, with a footman behind it; the day was spent with the greatest jollity, and the night also, if we may believe report. Since that time they are seen together in public at the theatres and elsewhere, the husband always making one of the party, between whom and the Baronet there is always the greatest friendship.⁹

Lade, who later managed the Prince’s racing stables, affected to dress and speak like a groom. He eventually married a girl called Letty, who had been a servant in a brothel. Lady Letty Lade went on to have affairs with both the Duke of York and a highwayman known as ‘Sixteen-string Jack’.

As rumour spread that Lade had won the affections of the actress, every rake in London began seeking the acquaintance of the beautiful Mrs Robinson. Sheridan was worried that his star would be tempted away by one of the men who were paying court to her. He warned Mary about her expensive lifestyle and the company she kept. The image of her younger self that she presents in the Memoirs is, to say the least, wide-eyed: ‘I had been then seen and known at all public places from the age of fifteen; yet I knew as little of the world’s deceptions as though I had been educated in the deserts of Siberia. I believed every woman friendly, every man sincere, till I discovered proofs that their characters were deceptive.’¹⁰ Given all that she had seen in both high society and low, she could not really have been that naive.

Despite the fact that she was treated as public property by the men who pursued her, Mary evoked this time as a golden age of theatre. Sheridan was at the peak of his reputation as a playwright and manager, following the success of his School for Scandal. He was beginning to turn his mind towards a political career and had recently met the young radical politician Charles James Fox. The green room was frequented by the nobility and ‘men of genius’ such as Fox and Lord Derby, who was to marry Elizabeth Farren: ‘the stage was now enlightened by the very best critics, and embellished by the very highest talents’. Mary also remarked that one of the reasons for Drury Lane’s popularity during this season of 1779–80 was that nearly all the principal women were under the age of twenty (a slight exaggeration). As well as herself and Farren, the lovely Charlotte Walpole and Priscilla Hopkins were on the payroll.

The public’s appetite for news, gossip, and scandal about the stage was insatiable. One of the consequences of the system of stock companies was that the audience became familiar with a small group of actors, seeing them in a variety of different roles and plays of all types, coming to know not only their styles of acting, but the details of their private lives. The proliferation of stage-related literature meant that readers were able to discover the intimate details of actors’ lives. A successful player could only have a public private life. Actors’ journals and memoirs, biographies of playwrights and managers, histories and annals of the theatre, periodicals and magazines rolled off the press. Prints and caricatures of actresses could be bought cheaply. Theatre gossip could be picked up from the newspapers, together with instant accounts of the latest performances – this was the age when professional theatre reviewing grew to maturity.

Sheridan launched his new season on 18 September 1779 with Mary as Ophelia. ‘Natural and affecting,’ said the Morning Chronicle. ‘Ophelia found a more than decent representative in Mrs Robinson,’ judged the Morning Post, ‘except in her singing, which was rather too discordant even for madness itself!’ It also noted that ‘the house, though not a very brilliant [i.e. aristocratic], was a crowded one, and both play and entertainment [the musical Comus] went off with considerable éclat’.¹¹ Mary was Lady Anne in Richard III a week later.

Next, she reprised her Fidelia in The Plain Dealer. Her costume drew attention, though the critic in the Morning Post tried to give the impression that he was only looking at it from the point of view of dramatic verisimilitude, not that of the shapely leg to which it clung:

Fidelia was performed with great ease and feeling by Mrs Robinson, and is by far the best character she has hitherto attempted; but as propriety of stage dress should always be strictly attended to, particularly in the professional characters, it may not be improper to inform Mrs Robinson, that Fidelia as a Volunteer cannot wear a Lieutenant’s uniform, without a violation of all dramatic consistency.¹²

She played fifty-five nights that season, adding to her repertoire Viola in Twelfth Night, Nancy in The Camp, Rosalind in As You Like It, Oriana in George Farquhar’s The Inconstant, Widow Brady (‘with an Epilogue Song’) in Garrick’s The Irish Widow, and Eliza Camply in The Miniature Picture by Lady Elizabeth Craven. As Oriana, she had to win over a reluctant lover by engaging in various schemes including dressing as a nun, feigning madness, and disguising herself as a page-boy. As the Irish Widow, she had to mimic a strong brogue, put down an assortment of men, talk about her clothes, claim that she despised money, and cross-dress as a sword-bearing officer called Lieutenant O’Neale. But it was the Shakespearean breeches roles of Viola and Rosalind that were her greatest triumph. She revealed a gift for both the expression of Shakespeare’s language and the characters’ emotional range – from pathos through wit to fortitude and command.

Admirers began to address her through the medium of the daily press. The Morning Post printed a long and not a little voyeuristic letter to her. ‘Madam,’ it began,

Criticism is a cold exercise of the mind: but as I feel an inexpressive glow, while my imagination takes your fair hand in mine, I think I may venture to court your acceptance of two or three remarks, which are conveyed in a temperament of blood somewhat differing from the chill, and the acid of the critique. I am the veriest bigot to old Shakespeare. – The Genius himself could not have gazed upon you with more delight; nor have forerun your motion, action, and utterance, with more tremulous solicitude for your excellence in Viola, than I did. Shakespeare’s principal substantives should never be sunk, nor kept back, as it were, from the attention, by an emphatic tone upon his epithets.

In the manner of speaking the ‘green and yellow melancholy,’ I would, sweet woman, that the yellow tinge appeared no more than equal to the green; and, that the melancholy so coloured should have a principal share of your voice to mark the subject.

I have seen you too in Fidelia, and am apt to think, that the tone, force, and manner of tragedy make a kind of apparel, both too magnificent, and too solemn, for the sentimental part of comedy.

BO-PEEP¹³

The author sounds as if he would very much like to pay a private visit to her dressing room in order to advise her upon her Shakespearean epithets.

She also played the female lead in Florizel and Perdita. This was Garrick’s 1756 version of the final two acts of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It was revived by Sheridan, after fourteen years’ absence from the repertoire, on Saturday, 20 November 1779, in memory of Garrick, who had died earlier that year. It centred on the young lovers, Prince Florizel and Perdita, who is supposed to be a shepherd’s daughter but is really a princess. It included a sheepshearing song, sung by Perdita, and a dance of shepherds and shepherdesses. Mary’s performance was a success, though the Morning Post complained ‘Mrs Robinson’s Perdita would have been very decent, but for that strange kind of niddle to noddle, that she now throws into every character, comic, as well as tragic.’¹⁴

At the second presentation, the following Tuesday, she was honoured by the presence of such leaders of London society as the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Lord and Lady Melbourne, Lord and Lady Spencer, Lord and Lady Cranbourne, and Lord and Lady Onslow. After this performance the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser published a long criticism. It said that the piece ‘is in general well cast and ably performed’, but reservations were expressed about the costumes:

The dresses on which much of the effect depends, were liable to very glaring objections. Shakespeare has been particularly attentive to the dress of Florizel and Perdita:

Your high self you have obscur’d

With a swain’s wearing, and me poor lowly maid,

Most goddess-like, prank’d up—

To correspond with this description Florizel and Perdita have hitherto appeared in beautiful dresses, covered with flowers of both the same pattern, and she wore an ornamented sheep hook, instead of which Mrs Robinson appears in a common jacket, and wears the usual red ribbons of an ordinary milk-maid, and in this dress she also appears with the King to view the supposed statue of Hermione, after she is acknowledged his daughter.¹⁵

For most of the audience, though, the figure-hugging jacket and milkmaid’s ribbons were exactly what they wanted to see. Takings were excellent and the show played again on the next Friday night and the Monday and Wednesday after that. Mary gained further public exposure when the Morning Post printed her poem ‘Celadon and Lydia’.¹⁶ Then on Friday, 3 December 1779 there was a royal command performance. A full house was assured. Mrs Robinson was about to become ‘the famous Perdita’.

PART TWO Celebrity

CHAPTER 8 Florizel and Perdita

Her name is Robinson, on or off the stage for I have seen her both, she is I believe almost the greatest and most perfect beauty of her sex.

George, Prince of Wales

King George and Queen Charlotte were ardent lovers of the stage, commanding over three hundred performances between 1776 and 1800. The King preferred modern comedies, calling Shakespeare ‘sad stuff’. He also preferred the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden to its rival. Especially after Sheridan took over Drury Lane, and became more and more closely identified politically with the radical Whig faction of Charles James Fox, the two theatres – situated within a few hundred yards of each other – were seen as reflections of the political divisions within Parliament. Drury Lane was regarded as the Opposition’s theatre, Covent Garden as the Government’s. So the appearance of the royal family at Drury Lane on 3 December 1779 was a very special occasion.

They arrived at a door situated near the stage door. The royal box was next to the proscenium on the audience’s left-hand side and always especially fitted up at command performances. The royals were met by one of the proprietors of the theatre. Equipped with a candelabrum, and walking backwards to face the King, he led them through a private corridor that gave direct access to the box. The King would pay £10 on every night that it was occupied. The royal party was presented with special playbills printed on satin. As the King came within sight of the audience, everybody stood up and applauded. The greeting was returned with a bow. The family would have had a very close view of the stage, and would even have been able to see the actors waiting in the wings.

Accompanying the King and Queen that night was 17-year-old George, soon to become Prince of Wales and eventually King George IV. He was dressed in blue velvet trimmed with gold and wore diamond buckles on his shoes. He would have sat in the Prince’s box, which was adorned with his motif of three feathers and situated directly opposite the King’s – and equally close to the stage.

The Prince at the age of 17 was not the fat, lecherous, dissipated hedonist of later years, depicted in so many satirical cartoons. When Mary first met him he was handsome, cultivated, and good-tempered. He was known as a man of enormous charm, intelligence, and taste. Mary was not exaggerating when she described him as ‘the most admired and most accomplished Prince in Europe’.¹ He fenced and boxed, but also played the cello, drew and had a deep appreciation of painting. One of the members of the royal household, Mrs Papendiek, wrote in her journal, ‘he was not so handsome as his brother, but his countenance was of a sweetness and intelligence quite irresistible. He had an elegant person, engaging and distinguished manners, added to an affectionate disposition and the cheerfulness of youth.’² In a letter to his first love, Mary Hamilton, written when he was 16, he described himself as follows:

Your brother is now approaching the bloom of youth. He is rather above normal size, his limbs well proportioned, and upon the whole is well made, though he has rather too great a penchant to grow fat. The features of his countenance are strong and manly, though they carry too much of an air of hauteur. His forehead is well shaped, his eyes, though none of the best, and although grey are passable … His sentiments and thoughts are open and generous. He is above doing anything that is mean (too susceptible, even to believing people his friends, and placing too much confidence in them, from not yet having obtained a sufficient knowledge of the world or of its practices), grateful and friendly to an excess where he finds a real friend. His heart is good and tender if it is allowed to show its emotions … Now for his vices, rather let us call them weaknesses. He is too subject to give vent to his passions of every kind, too subject to be in a passion, but he never bears malice or rancour in his heart. As for swearing, he has nearly cured himself of that vile habit. He is rather too fond of Wine and Women, to both which young men are apt to deliver themselves too much, but which he endeavours to check to the utmost of his power. But upon the whole, his Character is open, free and generous.³

His fondness for wine and women, even at such a young age, was a reaction against the restraint and rigid application to duty in which he had grown up. When he misbehaved as a child, he was beaten by the King in person. The royal household was based in secluded quarters at Kew and Windsor. The Prince and his brother, Frederick Duke of York, had their own apartments, where they were maintained under the watchful eye of an austere governor, the Earl of Holdernesse. Inevitably, the Prince sought more interesting company and developed a tendency to fall in with the wrong people. When he was 15, one of his tutors, a bishop, was asked his opinion of his pupil. ‘I can hardly tell,’ he replied. ‘He will be either the most polished gentleman or the most accomplished blackguard in Europe, possibly an admixture of both.’⁴

Garrick’s adaptation of The Winter’s Tale omitted the first three acts of Shakespeare’s original and began the action with a penitent Leontes washed up on the coast of Bohemia in company with his courtiers. Whereas Hermione is the most important female part in the original, the adaptation – which was published under the title Florizel and Perdita – concentrates more on the young lovers: the prince Florizel and the shepherdess who is really a princess. The name Perdita means ‘the lost one’, but, of course, she is found in the end and the Prince and the Princess are married. The outcome of the royal command performance that December night was, it might be said, the original ‘scandal in Bohemia’.

By her own account, Mary was teased by the other players before the show began. William ‘Gentleman’ Smith, so called for his skill in playing genteel roles on the stage and for his manners and intelligence off it, was to be Leontes. ‘By Jove, Mrs Robinson,’ he said, ‘you will make a conquest of the Prince; for to-night you look handsomer than ever.’⁵

Before she was due to go on, Mary chatted in the wings to Richard Ford (son of one of the proprietors of Drury Lane), who introduced her to his friend, George Capel, Viscount Malden, who was a politician and also a boon companion to the young Prince of Wales. Malden was 22, the same age as Mary. Known as a dandy, he was attired in his usual flamboyant dress – pink satin with silver trim and pink heels to match his coat. The Prince watched them from his box, as he conversed with his companions. He was of medium height, stocky with a rather florid complexion and powdered hair. Mary always remembered the especially clear view of him that she had as she waited in the wings.

Mary hurried through her first scene and as she stood directly below the Prince’s box, she heard him making flattering remarks. She was conscious that he was staring at her so much that it drew everyone’s attention. For Mary, there must have been a special frisson in speaking some of Perdita’s lines in front of the real Prince:

I am all shame

And ignorance itself, how to put on

This novel garment of gentility …

… I shall learn,

I trust I shall with meekness, and an heart

Unalter’d to my Prince, my Florizel. [leans on Florizel’s bosom]⁶

On the final curtsy, the royal family returned a bow to the performers. Mary’s eyes met the Prince’s: ‘with a look that I never shall forget, he gently inclined his head a second time; I felt the compliment, and blushed my gratitude’.⁷

Any doubt that he had been charmed by the lovely shepherdess in her simple dress and milkmaid’s red ribbons was dispelled as Mary was leaving the theatre: she met the royal family crossing the stage and ‘I was again honoured with a very marked and low bow from the Prince of Wales.’ One cannot help wondering whether she timed her departure from the green room in order to give herself the chance of bumping into the Prince. Since she was not appearing in that night’s afterpiece, Sheridan’s The Critic, she could have left the theatre much earlier. Instead, she waited backstage, chatting to her charming and well-connected new acquaintance Lord Malden: ‘He remarked the particular applause which the Prince had bestowed on my performance; said a thousand civil things; and detained me in conversation till the evening’s performance was concluded.’⁸ At home after the show, she threw a lavish supper party for her friends. It lasted far into the night and the handsome young Prince was the only topic of conversation.

During the previous six months, the Prince had regularly poured out his heart to Mary Hamilton, the sub-governess of his sisters the royal princesses. She was 23 to his 16 (he would always prefer older women). His letters to her, in which he called her Miranda and signed himself Palemon, survive in a private collection. Like a young man in a novel of sensibility, he threatened that he would commit suicide if she rejected him. She in turn threatened to resign her post if he did not stop pestering her, so he promised to address her ‘by the endearing names of friend and Sister, and no longer with the impetuous passion of a Lover urging his Suit’.⁹ But he still sent her gifts, such as a ‘Ring set with Brilliants’, which she returned on the very day of the command performance of The Winter’s Tale. He immediately penned a response in his favoured language of extreme sensibility: ‘I am astonished, I am surprised I am enchanted I am enchanted thou ever ever ever dearest, dearest, dearest cruel Creature, Oh believe me my Miranda that if ever I could love you more than I do this has done it. I am & ever shall be unto my last health Thy Palemon toujours de même.’ He also told her that he was looking forward to going to the theatre: ‘how happy should I be to see you there and agreeably entertained with me’.¹⁰ So the Prince went to the theatre that night full of thoughts of Mary Hamilton. By the end of the evening, he was ‘head in heels in love’ with Mary Robinson.

The unpublished letters to Miss Hamilton written by the Prince in the following few days tell the extraordinary story of the beginning of the relationship between the Prince and the actress from his point of view. It is a very different account from that in the Memoirs.

It must have come as something of a shock to Mary Hamilton at ten o’clock on Sunday morning to receive a letter in which, twenty-four hours after professing his undying passion for her, ‘Palemon’ announced that he had fallen in love with someone else:

I was delighted at the Play last Night, and was extremely moved by two scenes in it, especially as I was particularly interested in the appearance of the most beautiful Woman, that ever I beheld, who acted with such delicacy that she drew tears from my eyes, she perceived how much of my attention was taken up with her, not only during her acting but when she was behind the Scenes, and contrived every little innocent art to captivate a heart but too susceptible of receiving every impression she attempted to give it, and Alas my Miranda my friend, she did but too well succeed, consider what is almost impossible, and allow whate’r next to impossibility for the lively and strong and lively passions of a Young Man glowing with the utmost Warmth of desire, and yet feeling himself incapable of gratifying his darling. Her name is Robinson, on or off the stage for I have seen her both, she is I believe almost the greatest and most perfect beauty of her sex.¹¹

Whereas Mary’s account, written twenty years later, emphasizes the Prince’s gaze upon her, George’s, written the very next day, suggests that she was acting for him alone, both onstage and off, contriving ‘every little innocent art to captivate’ his heart. This letter also reveals the emotional power of her performance as Perdita: she was able to draw tears from the eyes of the young Prince.

The real surprise in this letter is the phrase ‘on or off the stage for I have seen her both’. In Mary’s account and in the subsequent myth of ‘Florizel and Perdita’, the command performance on 3 December 1779 was the first time the couple saw one another. But the Prince reveals here that he had seen her before, not only on the stage but also in society. Indeed, in the very next sentence he explains that ‘this passion has laid dormant in my bosom for some time, but last night has kindled it again to such a degree (for what can be more moving interesting, or aimiable [sic] than exquisite beauty in distress) that Heaven knows when it will be extinguished’. He had fallen for Mary Robinson some time before, but put her out of his mind until he saw her play the part of Perdita, the lost one, the ‘exquisite beauty in distress’. Already accustomed to projecting himself into dramatic roles (‘Palemon to Miranda’), George cannot help imagining himself as Prince Florizel.

‘Pardon me, pity me, comfort me,’ he writes to Miss Hamilton, ‘my heart is already something easier by having imparted to you my friend what I have not another friend I can strictly call so to whom I could with implicit confidence impart it.’ He knows that all his secrets will lie as secure in her bosom ‘as in the silent grave’, so she will ‘hear every thing relating to this affair’. He implores her not to reveal anything to the King and Queen. The letter ends with a postscript: ‘a[dieu] a[dieu] a[dieu] toujours chère. Oh! Mrs Robinson.’

Upon receiving this astonishing letter, Miss Hamilton sat down immediately to reply. Acknowledging that the subject embarrassed her, she endeavoured to express her sentiments:

Now my dear friend with respect to the present object of your passion and fancy – I know not what to say – let me however take the liberty of pointing out that a female in that line has too much trick and art not to be a very dangerous object – I do not reprove you for having fix’d your affections – for you tell me – beauty is amiable as well as interesting – how was it possible then for my young friend to steel his heart against the united forces of Beauty and innocence – when under (even of mock) appearance of distress – and likewise when that beauty and innocence could for his sake and to attract his regard, condescend to use the common little arts of her sex and profession to captivate a heart so much worth her while to conquer.¹²

This Mary has no illusions about what the other Mary is up to: for her, an actress is synonymous with ‘trick and art’. In response to the Prince’s request for ‘comfort’, she says that he will not need it, since it will be a ‘pleasing certainty that the lady returns your love’. As for his statement that Heaven knows when his passion will be extinguished, she remarks that Heaven has nothing to do with the affair.

On the Tuesday morning, the Prince wrote again, signing himself, ‘Your unfortunate brother Palemon’: ‘I am in tolerably good health, tho’ over head in ears in love, and so much so that I do not know to what lengths it will carry me.’ The next day, he announced a plan of action:

My dearest friend does not seem to apprehend that the passion I have formed is for an Actress so that I scarcely dare flatter myself that she feels the same love for me that I do for her, I am convinced that she understood the language of my eyes and of my actions, from her manner and the tender and bewitching glances she gave me and her eyes said more than words can express. Heavens, was you but to see her, even if the most envious of her sex was to see her, they must confess that she is almost the most perfect beauty that ever was seen. However no more of these enthusiastic confessions or else you will take me to be mad, I know her to be very galant, and yet I can not help adoring her, however in a day or two I will inform you what opinion she has conceived of my person and how she is content with it, for I have an excellent person to employ who is well acquainted with her, who will inform me of these particulars and you may depend on my informing you immediately.¹³

He had obviously been asking around on the subject of Mrs Robinson: ‘galant’ is code for her dubious reputation, but this has not put him off. He had established that she ‘lives totally separated from her husband’, which had the advantage that an affair would not disrupt ‘family peace’. He is, of course, aware that it would disturb the peace of the royal family, but he professed himself ‘blinded by passion’.

In response, Miss Hamilton warned him that it was already rumoured that he thought Mrs Robinson ‘a Divinity’ and that he should be wary of trusting anyone who would take on so infamous a role as that of a pander. Though the Prince did not reveal his go-between’s identity to Miss Hamilton, it was Lord Malden who paid Mrs Robinson a morning visit on his behalf.

On arriving in her drawing room, Malden seemed embarrassed and uncomfortable, even agitated. By Mary’s account, he ‘attempted to speak – paused, hesitated, apologized’. He was, he said, in a peculiarly delicate situation; he had something to deliver that he hoped she would not mention to anyone else. Finally, he produced a letter addressed to Perdita. She smiled a little sarcastically and opened it, finding it was a love letter. It contained only a few words, but ‘those expressive of more than common civility’. The signature was FLORIZEL. Mary continues the story in her favoured form of dramatic dialogue:

‘Well, my Lord, and what does this mean?’ said I, half angry.

‘Can you not guess the writer?’ said Lord Malden.

‘Perhaps yourself, my Lord,’ cried I, gravely.

‘Upon my honour, no,’ said the Viscount. ‘I should not have dared so to address you on so short an acquaintance.’

I pressed him to tell me from whom the letter came. – He again hesitated; he seemed confused, and sorry that he had undertaken to deliver it. ‘I hope that I shall not forfeit your good opinion,’ said he, ‘but—’

‘But what, my Lord?’

‘I could not refuse, – for the letter is from the Prince of Wales.’¹⁴

Astonished, agitated, and sceptical, Mary ‘returned a formal and a doubtful answer’. Lord Malden then took his leave.

She read over the ‘short but expressive letter’ a thousand times. Malden returned the next evening to Mary’s house, where she was entertaining a card party of six or seven. He praised in extravagant terms the mind, manners, and temper of the Prince, while Mary’s ‘heart beat with conscious pride’ as she thought of ‘the partial but delicately respectful letter’ she had received the day before.

The Prince, meanwhile, was still keeping Miss Hamilton informed of developments. He told her that he was going to the theatre again, but this time to Covent Garden rather than Drury Lane – ‘Oh Mrs Robinson, Mrs Robinson, Mrs Robinson,’ he wailed.¹⁵ During the performance at Covent Garden, George appeared tired. A wag remarked that he would not have seemed so had he been at Drury Lane.

In his next letter he shared the news, which would hardly have been a surprise to Miss Hamilton, that there was every sign that his passion was reciprocated:

Know then my friend, that I am more than ever in love, and that the dear object of my passion, corresponds with my flame, and that our love is mutual, she was attacked the other [night] in the house for addressing every tender speech she ought to have addressed to Prince Florizel to me, you may see of what texture they are by reading them in Shakespeare.¹⁶

Mary has, it seems, had to endure the embarrassment of heckling audience members accusing her of addressing her lines to the real Prince in the side box instead of the player prince, William Brereton, in the role of Florizel. (It is also worth remembering that Miss Hamilton would not have found all the lines in question in her Shakespeare, since some of Perdita’s ‘tender speeches’ had actually been written by Garrick.)

The Prince’s infatuation was the talk of the town. One night a friend of his sat next to Sir John Lade at Covent Garden. The Prince knew that Lade had ‘had an intimate connection avec mon aimable et chère séductrice’. Lade said that he had heard a great deal of the Prince’s attachment to Mrs Robinson and that he could give an assurance that she was as much pleased with him as he could be with her. The friend asked whether, in view of his own intimacy with Mrs Robinson, Lade felt ‘not undermined by this gallant young rival’. To which he replied, ‘By God I should be very glad of it for both their sakes as they seem so perfectly attached to each other.’ Having reported this to Miss Hamilton, the Prince signs off by regaling his long-suffering correspondent with a description of his ecstatic ‘metamorphosis’ from despondent victim of unrequited love to ‘gay galent Lothario’. ‘Love, passion, and the most ardent flame,’ he writes, are ‘boiling altogether in my bosom’.

‘For the love of Heaven, Stop, O stop my friend! and do not thus headlong plunge yourself into vice,’ Miss Hamilton responded. ‘Your last note and the preceding one made every nerve of me thrill with apprehension … You listen not to the voice of reason … I conjure you, strive to conquer this unhappy infatuation.’¹⁷ The letter continues for several pages in this vein, imploring the Prince not to become one of the ‘votaries of vice’. A fragmentary draft chides him for comparing himself to the archetypal rake – ‘Ah! boast not the title of a Lothario lest you should end with his fate’ – and also reveals that she has been doing her own research on Mrs Robinson:

My friend, you have been deceived, Mrs Robinson lives with her Husband and they have never been separated, – the young Baronet [i.e. Lade] if, he did boast, – boasted falsely. Her husband is young, Idle, and extravagant; and they have experienced distress, but her present occupation, as an actress, enables them to live perfectly to their taste, and at their ease – They have a little Girl about 4 or 5 years old – I know their whole History, which I got at by mere chance, and from what I think, the most undoubted authority – You have been abused by some designing person – take care that you are not drawn into some snare.

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