Nocturnal Revels portrayed Dennis as a general man about the house, and credited him with dreaming up ‘elastic beds’, specially designed for the delight of Charlotte’s customers, who experienced on them ‘the finest movements in the most ecstatic moments’. When Charlotte retired, a bawd called Mrs Weston bought these beds, winning for her house great popularity among ‘peers and peeresses, wanton wives, and more wanton widows’, for whose satisfaction she provided ‘some of the most capital riding masters in the three kingdoms’. Charlotte employed males in various capacities too. A satirical sketch in the London Magazine reported an auction for ‘Cream-coloured Tommy – In plain English, a pimp deep in the science of fornication and intrigue … He will cringe, fawn and flatter like a Parisian. A guinea for him! Well spoke Charlotte! A true whore’s price! Charlotte Hayes has got him, to be chaplain at her nunnery.’
Charlotte’s name appeared in the public prints, in memoirs, and in topical verses – a level of fame that her modern counterparts would prefer to avoid. Cynthia Payne, who held ‘parties’ at her house in Streatham, and Heidi Fleiss, ‘the Hollywood madam’, became celebrities who appeared on chat shows, but they did so after scandals and court cases had ended their sex industry careers. Charlotte was a celebrity when she was in her prime. As would be the case in our own age, her status quelled moral considerations; that she provided titillating copy was the main thing. But, entertaining as her story is, it cannot be dissociated from its basis in exploitation and its association with misery.
Consider Charlotte’s employees. Although well-known molls catered to Doctor Frettext and Sir Harry Flagellum, 76 the chief attractions of Charlotte’s establishment were her own protégées, whose recruitment often involved distressingly underhand methods. One, tried and tested in the business, was to lurk at register offices, dressed modestly and purporting to be in search of a young woman to attend to a lady. On snaring an appropriate candidate, Charlotte would take her to a house that, under a false name, she had rented specially, and wine and dine her. The young woman, perhaps up from the country, would retire to bed, only to find her sleep interrupted by one of Charlotte’s customers. ‘In vain she laments the fraud that has been played upon her, ’ Nocturnal Revels explained, with a mixture of prurience and compassion. ‘Her outcries bring no one to her relief, and probably she yields to her fate, finding it inevitable; and solaces herself in the morning with a few guineas, and the perspective view of having a new gown, a pair of silver buckles, and a black silk cloak. Being once broke in, there is no greater difficulty in persuading her to remove [from] her quarters, and repair to the nunnery in King’s Place, in order to make room for another victim, who is to be sacrificed in the like manner.’
For the privilege of raping this virgin, ‘Lord C-N, Lord B—ke, or Colonel L—e’ would have paid a handsome sum. Deflowerment was a highly prized pleasure, and was the subject of a certain amount of fraud. ‘A Kitty Young or a Nancy Feathers … could easily be passed off for vestals, with a little skilful preparation.’ Charlotte seemed to be happy to convince herself that she was operating with essential honesty, arguing that, ‘As to maidenheads, it was her opinion, that a woman might lose her maidenhead 500 times, and be as good a virgin as ever. Dr O’Patrick had assured her, that a maidenhead was as easily madeas a pudding; that she had tried herself, and though she had lost hers a thousand times, she believed she had as good a one as ever … She had one girl, Miss Shirley, just come from the play with Counsellor Pliant, who had gone through 23 editions of vestality in one week; and being a bookseller’s daughter, she knew the value of repeated and fresh editions.’
Charlotte would also place advertisements in the press, seeking young women to go into service, and would meet the applicants herself at the specially rented house. Sometimes, the nuns would come, or be brought, to her. Betsy Green arrived in the care of a Captain Fox, who clearly thought that he was doing his charge a favour. A sickly girl in her early teens, Betsy had been soliciting on the street when Fox found her, and had been placed by him in the care of his friend Lord Lyttelton. Since Lyttelton was later to earn the title ‘The Wicked Lord Lyttelton’, Fox’s arrangement showed a lack of insight. However, when he learned of Betsy’s mistreatment at Lyttelton’s hands, he rescued her and entrusted her to Charlotte. ‘Under [Charlotte’s] care and tuition her wonderful beauty was brought out, ’ Burford quoted. ‘No age or clime has ever produced such a perfect model of voluptuous beauty.’ Betsy became the mistress of Colonel John Coxe, who doted on her. When Coxe (whose name Betsy assumed) was away, though, she regularly summoned ‘all her most abandoned companions of either sex and converted his house into a temple of debauchery’. Reports of these orgies got back to Coxe, who threw Betsy out. Later, she acted in Drury Lane, and boasted lovers including Lord Falkirk, the Earl of Craven and the Earl of Effingham. But the relationships did not endure, and she eventually returned to brothel life.
Betsy’s decline was the fate of most prostitutes, even when they had the contacts that employment by Charlotte afforded them. Nevertheless, some had the beauty, charm and determination to make good lives for themselves, above all enjoying the luck to find men who did not suddenly abandon them to poverty. Agentleman of means might take one of the ‘nuns’ as his mistress, setting her up (after compensating the madam) in fine apartments, with servants and a carriage. As long as he did not vulgarly flaunt her, as the Duke of Grafton did Nancy Parsons, it was a dashing way to behave. In that respect, Captain Fox had taken Betsy Green to a woman who offered her better prospects of advancement than almost any other employer in London.
A ‘shaggy-tail’d uncomb’d unwash’d filly of 14 … bought from her industrious painstaking mechanick of a father for a song’ blossomed, under Charlotte’s care, to become Kitty Fredericks, ‘the veritable Thais77 amongst the haut ton, the veritable flora of all London’. Harriet Lamb, seduced by an aristocrat and abandoned at Charlotte’s, became another favourite: ‘Kind Charlotte Hayes, ’ wrote the poet Edward Thompson, ‘who entertains the ram / With such delicious, tender, nice house-lamb!’ Though well trained in how to behave in society, these women were usually bereft of education. A possibly apocryphal story about Polly Vernon, who adorned the parties that Captain Richard Vernon (‘Old fox Vernon’) held for his racing chums, told how she reacted to Wicked Lord Lyttelton’s enquiry about whether she knew Jesus Christ: indignantly, she protested that ‘she wondered at his Lordship’s imperence [sic] … she never had no acquaintance with foreigners’.
In the modern era, prominent mistresses such as Antonia de Sancha (who had an affair with the Conservative minister David Mellor) and Bienvenida Buck (whose lover was the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Peter Harding) achieve tabloid celebrity. In the eighteenth century, you could be a courtesan (the paid mistress of a grand figure) and former prostitute, and become a subject for the most prominent artist of the day. Emily Warren was walking the streets with her father, a blind beggar, when she met Charlotte; she was then twelve years old, and illiterate. Charlottedid not correct that deficiency, but taught Emily deportment and manners that ‘attracted universal admiration wherever she appeared abroad’. Emily modelled for the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who portrayed her as Thais and declared that ‘he had never seen so faultless and finely formed a human figure’.78
It was ‘to the great astonishment of all beholders’, Town & Country magazine reported in an archly ironic tribute to the ‘Monastery of Santa Charlotta’, that Charlotte was able to transmute ‘the basest brass into the purest gold, by a process as quick as it is unaccountable’. Charlotte provided her nuns not only with tutoring in ladylike skills, including d
ance and music as well as deportment, but also with fine dresses, luxurious underwear, jewellery and other adornments. She did not do so out of a spirit of lavish charity, however. She was investing in the monastery, as well as ensuring that the women, who were indebted to her for these donations, and for board and lodging too, were chained to the place unless wealthy admirers bought them out. Customers who attempted to persuade nuns to leave Santa Charlotta’s without compensation for the proprietor were committing a grave breach of decorum, while those who offered presents to their favourites were in fact giving them to Charlotte.
Charlotte advertised her pampered charges by strolling with them in parks and pleasure gardens, and by gracing fashionable venues. At the opening in 1772 of the Pantheon, 79 the grand Oxford Street hall devoted to masquerades and concerts, she and several nuns were among the crowd of 1, 500 in spite of an announcement by the Master of Ceremonies that actresses and courtesans would not be admitted. The edict failed, but the MC still tried to bar the dance floor to Betsy Coxe and her then lover, Captain Scott, who observed, ‘If you turn away every woman whois not better than she should be, your company will soon be reduced to a handful!’ Today, if a man took an ‘escort’ to a party, he would probably try to disguise her occupation; his eighteenthcentury counterparts were not so squeamish.
The fashion-consciousness of Charlotte’s profession is apparent in a picture entitled A Nun of the First Class (1773). The nun wears a tight hairdo, ascending to a point bearing a small bonnet, from which descends a row of orbs. She has a choker, a flower in her bodice, and a cheek patch80 – these patches were originally coverings for smallpox scars, but became desirable adornments. In A Saint James’s Beauty (1784) (which appears in this book’s colour section), the nun wears a dress of some rich, heavy material; her hat sports feathers and a bow. She looks out of a window towards the palace – she is expecting a royal visitor. He may be the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), or his brother the Duke of York.81
In addition to royalty and lords, Charlotte’s most favoured customers were Jewish merchants and financiers. The print One of the Tribe of Levi, going to Breakfast with a Young Christian shows an elderly gentleman at a breakfast table in a large reception room. Above him, a painting portrays a scene of seduction. A smiling, liveried black servant boy holds a seat for the nun, who stands richly dressed for the gentleman’s inspection. E. J. Burford speculated that the woman observing them from the sofa – a rather crone-like figure – is Charlotte. Jewish men, he quoted her as saying, ‘always fancy that their amorous abilities never fail’; they were civil, and spoke gently.
One of the Tribe of Levi, going to Breakfast with a Young Christian (1778).A scene from a King’s Place nunnery. E. J. Burford thought that the crone-like figure in the background was ‘probably’ Charlotte Hayes. She was to live for another thirty-five years.
Eighteenth-century men rarely allowed their enthusiasm for sleeping with prostitutes to wilt at thoughts of the risks involved. Gonorrhoea was widespread; worse, you might get syphilis (though the distinction between the diseases was not understood), guaranteeing a terrible decline and death. Charlotte’s good name depended on healthy experiences for her customers. She employed a doctor, Chidwick, to give her nuns weekly check-ups, and she provided ‘Mrs Phillips’ famed new engines’ – condoms, made of dried sheep’s gut and tastefully presented in silk purses, tied with ribbon. Mrs Phillips owned a shop in Covent Garden that offered ‘implements of safety for gentlemen of intrigue’, in three sizes. A woman of advanced marketing skills, she promoted her wares with this advertising jingle:
To guard yourself from shame or fear
Votaries of Venus, hasten here;
None in wares e’er found a flaw
Self-preservation’s nature’s law.82
However, Charlotte’s principles weighed lightly in the scales against commercial opportunities. In this business, you had to be flexible. Nocturnal Revels carried the anecdote of a nobleman who arrived at the nunnery with a plan to win a bet of 1, 000 guineas against a rival, who was cuckolding him. The bet was that the rival would be afflicted with ‘a certain fashionable disorder’ within the next month, and the plan was this: Charlotte would provide an infected woman; the nobleman would sleep with the infected woman; the nobleman would infect his wife; the wife would infect the rival. Charlotte’s first reaction to this scheme was a show of outrage. ‘Heavens, you astonish me!’ she cried. ‘And I think you use me very ill, my Lord, considering the constant care I havealways paid to your Lordship’s health and welfare. I know of no such rotten cattle as you talk of; they never come under my roof, I assure your Lordship.’ In response, his lordship produced a banknote for £30. Charlotte said that she would see what she could do. The next time the nobleman met his rival in public, he demanded payment of his bet; the rival handed over the money.
James Boswell was, despite his careful use of ‘armour complete’, a frequent sufferer from the pox. So was the young William Hickey, who recalled treating himself with mercury (the standard medicine for the ailment) and enduring the unpleasant side-effect – exacerbated by his unwillingness to stop drinking – of ‘salivation’: black saliva flooded his mouth, and his tongue swelled up to prevent his ingesting anything other than fluids. Thus poisoned, he must have had a strong constitution to pull through and survive to the age of eighty.
In his entertaining account of his rackety life, Hickey noted that he was a frequent visitor to the ‘house of celebrity’ kept by ‘that experienced old matron Charlotte Hayes’. However, he has caused confusion by referring also to ‘Mrs Kelly and her bevy of beauties in Arlington Street’. A passage in the Memoirs of William Hickey recalled an episode from 1780. Hickey was in Margate, dining with his brother and two friends, when a sumptuous landau arrived, bearing Mrs Kelly, ‘two nymphs’ and a girl of twelve or thirteen. The girl, Mrs Kelly explained, was her daughter, off to a convent school in Ostend. At dinner, Hickey’s brother got very drunk and made leering advances to the girl, offering such gracious observations as ‘the young one’s bosom had already too much swell for a nun’ and ‘no canting hypocritical friar should have the fingering of those plump globes’. He lunged at her, but fell to the floor, insensible. Mrs Kelly rushed the girl away, and roundly abused the whole company. Hickey, undeflected by the acrimony and farce into which the evening had descended, retired to bed with one of the nymphs.
Charlotte did start to style herself Mrs O’Kelly, and the ‘O’ was often treated as optional. But it is misguided to speculate thatshe and Dennis had a daughter and sent her abroad for a convent education.83 Hickey’s Mrs Kelly is clearly someone else, who is introduced only a few pages after a mention of Charlotte Hayes and her house of celebrity; and Burford wrote about Mrs Kelly of Arlington Street (not King’s Place) – her first name, according to him, was also Charlotte – as a different person. In any event, the young girl in Hickey’s anecdote may not really have been Mrs Kelly’s daughter, but a ward of some sort – though one who got a more sheltered education than did Charlotte’s Betsy Green and Emily Warren.84
Several of the nuns we have met in this chapter did well for themselves, escaping their cloisters to become the mistresses of wealthy men; some, such as Harriet Powell, made good marriages too. But of course they were exceptional. Most prostitutes, including those who spent their careers in the environs of St James’s, endured miserable declines, which would begin before they were thirty years old. And although they were more likely to find grand lovers and husbands in Georgian London than at any other period of the capital’s history, they did not enjoy complete social movement. Stigmas endured. Emily Warren became the mistress of a friend of William Hickey’s, C
aptain Robert Pott, who on being posted to India commissioned Hickey to secure a passage for her to join him. Pott’s father was dismayed. ‘The unthinking boy, ’ he complained to Hickey, ‘has taken that infamous and notoriously abandoned woman, Emily, who has already involved him deeply as to pecuniary matters, with him to India, a step that must not only shut him out of all proper society, but prevent his being employed in any situation of respect or emolument. ’The story ended sadly.The couple made a ‘great impression’ in Madras (Chennai), and set sail for Calcutta (Kolkata); but Emily died on board, mysteriously succumbing to fever shortly after drinking two tumblers of water mixed with milk.85
Charlotte, meanwhile, continued to prosper. In 1771, she opened a second King’s Place brothel, at number 5, entrusting number 2 to a Miss Ellison. She also had an establishment in King Street, for the King’s Place overspill. The German visitor Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz noted that King’s Place was clogged with carriages in the evenings, and observed of the nuns, ‘You may see them superbly clothed at public places; and even those of the most expensive kind. Each of these convents has a carriage and servants in livery; for the ladies never deign to walk anywhere, but in the park.’
Charlotte was in her pomp. Edward Thompson, who had followed her progress, wrote in the 1770 edition of his poem The Meretriciad:
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