Whether or not the author of the warning letter to Lady Donegall gave a fair report of Andrew’s character, he was well informed about Andrew’s finances. Dennis’s will had implied greater wealth than he really possessed, and his estate turned out to be insufficient to pay his debts and legacies. To compensate, Andrew borrowed money, took out mortgages, and rented properties. But the late eighteenth century was not a good time to stretch your finances. There was revolution in France, followed by European war, and soon everyone was feeling the pinch. From 1787, the year of Dennis’s death, to 1800, Philip and Andrew advertised regularly in the Racing Calendar that all the thirty-plus mares at Cannons, with their foals, were up for sale. Many of the foals found buyers; but, in those straitened times, no one wanted to pay the high prices that the O’Kellys were asking for the mares.135 Meanwhile, the value of the O’Kelly stallions was falling. By the turn of the century, Dungannon and Volunteer were covering mares at a modest ten guineas each – fees suggesting that there was not a great deal of confidence in their ability to get outstanding racers.
Charlotte Hayes was another encumbrance on Andrew. She was as scattily profligate as ever, and in 1798 she got herself committed again to the Fleet debtors’ prison.136 Andrew’s subventions to her at this time included the hefty sum of £728 to satisfy a debt to one Thomas Pilton, a Piccadilly upholsterer, and £105 to buy her the right to the Fleet day rules, allowing her to live outside the prison walls. The next spring, when Charlotte was released, she satisfied further debts, to Thomas and Mary Potts (£48 15s), and to John Thomas (£235 14s). She and Dennis’s brother Philip had already agreed that, in the light of the money that Andrew had raised following Dennis’s death, Andrew should be granted sole right to property worth that sum. Now Charlotte signed, in her scratchy hand, a document releasing to Andrew all her portion of the estate, with the exception of her £400 annuity. The good news for her was that she would no longer be responsible for the upkeep of the horses – though no doubt she had never assumed that responsibility anyway.
The only transfer that had taken place before this was of ‘a very extraordinary and rare bird called Parrot gifted with extraordinary powers of speech and song’. But Polley was to live for only another few years. In October 1802, Philip O’Kelly had sombre news to give to his son, in a letter (original spelling preserved) hinting that Charlotte was a constant worry: ‘Polley was taking ill on Saturday night last with a purging and bloody flox and all things that was fit for her was got. She died on Sunday morning. Dr Kennedy go her to have her stuffd so she is no more. Charlett is in the same state as ever. ’The death, which sounds unpleasant, was a traumatic family event. A family servant, signing herself E.Wilson, wrote to Andrew: ‘My trouble was so great at the death of the bird and I did not know what I was doing, the loss of my children never afflicted me more. I am truly sorry and surprised to hear you attribute to my neglect or want of care her death, as it was impossible if my life was at stake to be more attentive than I was. I could not keep her alive no more than I can my good self when it shall please God to call me.’
Polley got the tribute, surely rare for a bird, of an obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, which reminded readers of her skills: ‘Died, at the house of Colonel O’Kelly, in Half-moon-Street, Piccadilly, his wonderful parrot, who had been in his family 30 years, having been purchased at Bristol out of a West-India ship. It sang, with the greatest clearness and precision, the 114th Psalm, “The Banks of the Deeâ€, “God Save the King!†and other favourite songs; and, if it blundered in any one, instantly began again, till it had the tune complete. One hundred guineas had been refused for it in London. ’The magazine made the double mistake of announcing that Polley would be interred alongside Eclipse at Cannons. In fact, as Philip wrote, she was stuffed, and continued to reside at Half Moon Street; and Eclipse’s skeleton at this time was at a small, private museum in Mayfair.
Charlotte appears to have been willing to give up the annuity bequeathed to her by Dennis as well. Lawyers raised objections, however. One told Andrew, who was hoping to sell Cannons, that any deal should be subject to the £400 yearly charge, ‘as [Charlotte] has very much encumbered it and may create some difficulties in the title’. A man called Brockbank held the same view, to Charlotte’s dismay – which she expressed to Andrew in one sprawling, minimally punctuated (and, again, idiosyncratically spelled) sentence constituting the only letter of hers we have.
February, 1801
My dear Colonel, I am very sorry to find that Mr Brockbank makes any objection to my giving you the releace for my annuiteis and the acknowledgement of the other sums mentioned in it that you and your father have paid and secured to be paid for me but I am not surprised at aney thing that such a man as Mr Brockbank should say or do after the manner he has conducted himself towards me and you – unjust advantage he is attempting to take of you against my wishes or concent – if you or any other person has the smallest doubtes of the justness of what is contained in the releace I shall be ready at any time to com forward and make an affidavit of those circumstances which Mr Brockbank must be perfectly well acquainted with as I have at different times stated to him monies that you have paid for me and I have give him money to keep the transactions of my selling my annuities from your knowledg and am my dear colonel yours sincerely C. O’Kelly.
The annuity was still attached to Cannons when Andrew at last sold the estate, to Sir Thomas Plumer, in 1811. Charlotte is described in one document as a ‘spinster’ (another hint that she never married, although the term may be applied loosely) ‘who is now advanced in years’; in another, she is living on the Cannons estate (though not in the mansion house) and ‘aged about 85years’. Plumer, who was the solicitor general, indemnified himself against paying her any money. Cannons cost him £55, 000.
It is not certain how many further payments Charlotte claimed. E. J. Burford stated that she died in 1813, though on unclear evidence. She does not appear in the Middlesex burial records that contain Dennis O’Kelly, Philip (who died in 1806) and Andrew; and I could not find her in the Westminster archives either. Her death is as obscure as her birth. But this is not the obscurity of poverty and disease that a huge majority of her fellow prostitutes suffered. Surviving into at least her mid-eighties, and doing so, in spite of her various setbacks, in comfort, Charlotte Hayes achieved an impressive transcendence of her background – thanks to her business flair, and thanks as well to Dennis O’Kelly and Eclipse.
Andrew Dennis O’Kelly died, suddenly, in 1820. He left a mystery surrounding his personal life: did he ever marry? In notes about the family left in the O’Kelly archive, Mary O’Kelly Harvey stated that he did, while Theodore Cook, author of Eclipse and O’Kelly, disagreed. Cook found references to a son, Charles, and to a daughter, Eliza, and he quoted a letter from Charles to Andrew dealing with the usual O’Kelly themes of bust-ups over rents and mortgages. (‘Mr Michell went down to Grosvenor Place and discovered that Walton the broker was in the act of taking away all the furniture and yours with the rest …W Stacpoole says he will bring an action against you and he has no doubt but that he will be able to saddle you with all the taxes and rent of the house since Mr Stacpoole left England.’) But Cook did not spot any references to this family in Andrew’s will (dated 1820), and assumed that they had all died.
It seems that Eliza had. However, Cook disregarded a bequest to one Charles Andrews, a student in Aberdeen to whom Andrew gave an annuity of £200, with the provision that he must pursue his studies satisfactorily and observe morality in hisconduct. In the National Archives, there is a will dated 1826 by one Charles Andrew O’Kelly. The brief document states that the author was described as Charles Andrews ‘in the will of my late father Lt Colonel Andrew Dennis O’Kelly’, and lea
ves everything to Charles’s mother, named Susanna and with an illegible surname, about which one can be sure only that it is not O’Kelly.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this will and from Andrew’s, which makes no mention of Charles’s status as a member of the family, is that Andrew was unmarried, and that Charles was illegitimate. Andrew’s will contains no reference, either, to a wife.
One of Andrew’s principal legatees was his cousin, Philip Whitfield Harvey. The two were close: they had been in the Middlesex Militia together, and Andrew introduced Philip to the Prince of Wales and his circle. What is not clear is whether Andrew and Philip were involved in more clandestine activities. Philip’s wife, Frances, inherited an Irish newspaper called the Freeman’s Journal from a man called Francis Higgins, who had risen to newspaper proprietorship from an unpromising early career doing odd jobs for a felon in Newgate prison. In his will, Higgins also left Andrew £300, declaring that ‘if I did not know that he, my friend, was in great affluence, I would have freely bequeathed him any property I might be possessed of’. Andrew’s connection with Higgins, alleged W. J. Fitzpatrick in Secret Service Under Pitt (1892), was shady, and Andrew’s role was as a conduit between the British government and various secret agents, among them Higgins (the ‘Sham Squire’), who used his position at the Freeman’s Journal to undermine the cause of Catholic emancipation.137 If that was the case, Andrew may have approached Philip on behalf of the government too. In the family papers, Mary O’Kelly Harvey – daughter of Philip and Frances – is at pains to emphasize her father’s distance from the government, and says that he turned down money to write anti-Catholic propaganda, suffering discrimination as a result.138
Andrew certainly did make himself politically useful. In 1813, we find him investigating the conduct of the Prince’s – now the Prince Regent’s – estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick. George Augustus had married Caroline, his cousin, under pressure from his father. His first meeting with her, just a few days before the wedding in 1795, was a shock: he found her revolting, and later described her as ‘the vilest wretch this world was ever cursed with’. The Prince, seriously overweight, was far from gorgeous himself; but the unfailing willingness of glamorous women to become his mistresses may have blinded him to that realization. He sought refuge in alcohol on the happy day, and by the evening was so drunk that he collapsed into the fireplace of the bridal chamber, remaining there insensible until the morning. Nevertheless, the union was at some point consummated, and a daughter produced, before the couple separated. The Prince conducted further affairs. Caroline, it was rumoured, took lovers too – a treasonable offence, and one, if proved, that would have given a convenient justification for dispatching her and any descendants to outer darkness. As part of what was known as the ‘delicate investigation’, Andrew went to Caroline’s house and interviewed her servants, but found no incriminating evidence. In 1821, when George Augustus succeeded to the throne, Caroline arrived at Westminster Abbey for the coronation, but was turned away at the doors.
Andrew was also an ally of the Prince in his racing interests. In that role, he got involved in the Escape Affair.
A target for caricaturists when he was Prince of Wales, George IV is portrayed more respectfully here, in an Ascot scene by John Doyle.
131 The son of Dennis and Philip’s sister, Mary O’Kelly, from her marriage to Whitfield Harvey.
132 Which, just over thirty years earlier, Dennis O’Kelly had also enjoyed.
133 I.e., he was uncontrollable.
134 Donegall remained deep in the red until his death in 1844.
135 There is no record of what happened to the horses in the end. Perhaps Donegall bought them – and never paid for them.
136 She had been in the Fleet from 1758 to 1761, and in the Marshalsea in 1776.
137 Though as Fitzpatrick thought that Andrew and ‘Count’ O’Kelly (Dennis) were the same person, he may not be the most reliable guide.
138 The Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland came into effect in 1801.
17
The Decline of the Jontleman
GEORGE AUGUSTUS FREDERICK, the Prince of Wales, was clever and – before he expanded to seventeen and a half stone in weight – handsome. He was also vain, extravagant and self-indulgent. His secret marriage to the Catholic widow Mrs Fitzherbert, his numerous affairs, his Whig sympathies, and his girth all made him a target for satirists. ‘Let us enquire who are the chosen companions and confidential intimates of the Prince of Wales. They are the very lees of society: creatures, with whom a person of morality, or even common decency could not associate, ’ wrote Charles Pigott in his widely circulated lampoon The Jockey Club: Or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age.139 ‘[George Augustus] was, however, genuinely fond of racing, ’ says the Biographical Encyclopaedia of British Flat Racing, as if pointing out the one trait that excuses everything.140 One might point also in mitigation to the architectural splendours – among them the streets, terraces and other buildings of John Nash141– that are the legacy of the Prince’s extravagant patronage.
George Augustus (‘Prinny’) had his first runners on the racecourse – the jockeys wearing the royal colours of purple jacket with gold lace, scarlet sleeves and black cap – in 1784. By 1785, he already had eighteen horses in training, the winners including Eclipse’s son (and former Derby winner) Saltram, Rockingham (later to be a rival to Dennis O’Kelly’s Dungannon), and Rosaletta, who in one race finished second to Dennis’s Soldier. The two owners – from absolutely contrasting backgrounds, but each frowned upon by certain sections of the establishment – were social acquaintances, and Dennis, had he still been alive when Pigott wrote The Jockey Club, would no doubt have got a mention alongside other representatives of the ‘lees of society’. Prinny was a regular among the guests at Clay Hill when Dennis entertained during the Epsom spring meeting, and they appear together among the crowd of gesticulating and shouting gamblers in Rowlandson’s caricature The Betting Post.142
By 1786, Prinny had twenty-six horses in training. Naturally, he also had huge debts, and because he got no help in clearing them from his father, he was forced to offload the entire stable. Not going to market from a position of strength, he could not command premium prices. The stud, reported the St James’s Chronicle, ‘was not sold but given away’, to purchasers who in some cases sold on their horses immediately, for double what they had paid. Two of the fillies, Annette and Augusta, were to finish first and second in the 1787 Oaks – Augusta in the ownership of Dennis O’Kelly. Another lot, a Highflyer yearling, went to a Mr Franco. Later, the yearling kicked out in his box and got his foot stuck between the wooden boards, until the grooms managed to free him uninjured. He got the name Escape.
A year later, Parliament cleared Prinny’s debts. Immediately, he splashed out on racehorses again, buying back some of those he had sold, Escape among them. As the disapproving Charles Pigott wrote, ‘No sooner had parliament voted this money, than decency was set at defiance, public opinion scorned, the turf establishment revived in a more ruinous style than ever, the wide field of dissipation and extravagance enlarged, fresh debts contracted to an enormous amount, which it is neither in his own, or the nation’s power to discharge, and strong doubts entertained that the money voted by parliament was not applied to the purpose for which it was granted.’
In 1788, Prinny became the first royal winner of the Derby, with his colt Sir Thomas. He had thirty-five horses in training in 1789, and the following year he hired the leading jockey of the day, Sam Chifney, famous for the ‘Chifney rush’: a perfectly timed finishing burst after a quiet ride at the back of the field.
A portrait of Chifney gives him the roughened fe
atures of a minor member of Britain’s gangland. But he was a dandy. His jockey’s attire featured ruffs and frills, and he cultivated ‘love locks’ that hung down below his jockey’s cap. He was also conceited. In his autobiography, to which he gave the frank title Genius Genuine, he claimed that ‘In 1773 [when he was 18], I could ride horses in a better manner in a race to beat others, than any person I ever knew in my time; and in 1775, I could train horses for running better than any person I yet saw.’ He was, in short, an upstart. Riding grooms then were merely promoted stable lads, and were considered to be, essentially, servants. Here was one assuming the trappings of celebrity. Moreover, Chifney did not appear to be honest. Those waiting tactics: were they not a ploy to lose races that he should be winning? Chifney was the kind of person that authorities are only too delighted to punish.
Eclipse Page 20