Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  On October 2, 1811, Dora received a letter from William, asking her to meet her in Maidenhead three days later. Although there is no record of what transpired, William must have told Dora that—after twenty years—it was all over between them. From then on, he endeavored to avoid her, and the negotiations for her extrication from the relationship were conducted by factors. Dora did not even have her own advocate against the vast royal machine.

  The gossip mill churned up the rumors of a royal split, as well as William’s almost immediate, and bumbleheaded, proposal of marriage to Miss Tylney-Long—who summarily rejected him. Everyone wondered what would become of poor Mrs. Jordan. Even the regent’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, expressed her sympathy, endorsing Dora as a “true friend to [the duke] and a most affcte. mother.”

  Dora’s children by William were shocked and wondered about their future. Now fourteen, their second son, Henry, who had been sent to join the navy at the age of eleven, immediately took up the cudgels on his mother’s behalf, writing to his elder brother, George: . . . were he not my father I could and would say more . . . My God!! To think that our father should have done such a thing [proposed to Miss Tylney-Long] . . . if this be true I will never more go home except once to see my Dear Mother whom I consider as a Most Injured Woman . . . I could not believe my eyes when I saw the paper which contained Distressing truth I scarcely know how I write I am nearly mad I think I shall run away home . . .

  No one dared to openly criticize the duke for his callous conduct toward the devoted and faithful woman who loved him dearly, who had never once given him cause for complaint, and who had cared for him and their children with every ounce of her energy and every penny she earned.

  The trusting Dora was misled by the royal machine, which assured her that she would be well provided for after the split, and so she “went quietly,” assuming that their representations were genuine. In fact, she was kicked out of Bushy with no arrangements made for her residence elsewhere. She lost custody of her children once they reached the age of thirteen. For decades Dora Jordan had been living proof that an actress need not be licentious or loose. In fact, William had scarcely objected to her performing career while she was raising their children. However, under the new arrangement, Dora would not be permitted to see them if she continued to pursue a profession that was of dubious moral value. This distasteful restriction would effectively deprive her of her income and her life’s work if she ever wanted to spend time with her beloved children.

  The deed of settlement was formalized on December 23, 1811. Her three daughters by other men were again guaranteed £200 a year as they had been in the 1791 agreement that cemented Dora’s arrangement with the duke. Of William’s £12,000 annual allowance, Dora was to receive £4,400 (a bit more than $451,000), to sustain a home, horse and carriage, and provide for her younger daughters. She would lose half that income if she participated in any activity (including both public and private performances) that the duke might consider “unfavorable to the morals, manners, or habits of the said children.”

  It was a travesty.

  But it got worse. A rumor began to circulate that Dora was planning to publish her private correspondence with William. Dora was so distressed by it that she packed up the hundreds of letters she had sentimentally saved and delivered them to one of William’s factors, saving only four letters “because they do him credit for candor and justice.”

  She moved to Cadogan Place and tried to begin anew. When the duke brought their children for their prearranged visits, he went around to the back-door servants’ entrance to avoid running into their mother.

  Money, or the lack of it, remained a problem. When Dora told William’s adviser, John Barton, that she needed to resume her profession in order to pay the bills, Barton coolly belittled the longtime royal mistress by informing her that far from the duke’s objection to her theatrical career, it was a matter of perfect indifference to His Grace.

  So, taking Barton at his word, Dora returned to the stage. And she pragmatically covered her derrière in case there might be any backlash from William, by telling the newspapers (before William had a chance to react) that the duke had been the embodiment of kindness in allowing her to pursue her profession and thereby provide for herself. Although Dora had been treated abominably by the royal family, she was more regal and dignified than any of them and never spoke a single unkind word against William.

  But the separation had taken its toll on her emotionally. She wrote to her son George, “I begin to feel that acting keeps me alive. In fact, it keeps me from thinking.” Still, close friends like William Boaden noticed a difference in her performances; glimmers of her private despair occasionally intruded on her professionalism. But after a career that spanned nearly four decades, exhausted and disappointed by the dwindling houses, she retired from the stage without fanfare in 1815, giving her final performances in July and August at the seaside resort of Margate.

  At the end of August, Dora discovered that her son-in-law, Frederick March—Dodee’s husband—had bled dry her Coutt’s bank account. All the wind went out of her sails. Dora hadn’t an ounce of fight left. Terrified of being arrested for debt—the same fate that befell her friends Mary Robinson and Emma Hamilton—she decided to flee to the Continent, where her creditors could not legally reach her. She landed at Boulogne, took a little coastal cottage in nearby Marquetra, and sought anonymity by calling herself Mrs. James. Although Dora had relied upon John Barton to handle the arrangements of disposing of her property, Barton never informed the duke of her plight. Nor did anyone take the thieving Mr. March to court on her behalf.

  In the wee hours of the morning on July 5, 1816, at the age of fifty-four, Dora Jordan died in a rooming house in St. Cloud, alone and impoverished in a country not her own. It was only through the energetic intervention of “an English gentleman of some weight” that she was buried in the local cemetery. Being an actress and a Protestant counted as two strikes against Dora in Catholic France. Her headstone was paid for by the Wood-gates, an English couple from Essex, who were said to have visited Dora shortly before her death. Dora’s epitaph, engraved by the theatre historian John Genest, was a lengthy Latin encomium ending with the words “Mementote Lugete” (Read it and Weep).

  Two of her children, Frederick FitzClarence and the devoted Lucy, could have reached her in time, had they known she was ill.

  At the time Dora left England, William himself was so deeply in debt he’d considered giving up Bushy and moving with their half-royal children to St. James’s Palace. We do not know how he felt when he heard of Dora’s death. He was utterly silent, not even referring to it in his letters to their children. Yet years later, surrounded by portraits of her, with tears in his eyes, the duke remarked to others what a good woman she was.

  After trying his luck with a few more marriageable heiresses, in 1818 the duke finally wed Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Coburg and Meiningen, who was “very ugly, with a horrid complexion.” Adelaide gave William five children, none of whom survived infancy. But she was a terrific stepmother to the FitzClarence girls, who admired her very much, in part, perhaps, because she insisted that all the portraits of Dora Jordan remain on the walls at Bushy.

  After Dora’s death, one of her daughters revealed that the duke had never repaid some £30,000 (more than $3.2 million today) that he had borrowed from Dora.

  At six a.m. on June 26, 1830, the sixty-four-year-old duke was awakened with the news that his elder brother, George IV, had died and that he was now King of England.

  The royal bum had hardly warmed the throne when the press took him to task for his callous treatment of his former mistress. Finally, someone dared to mention the immorality in a man’s refusing to do his duty by the mother of his children, rather than the scandal of not being married to her. One paper wrote: The people . . . have witnessed a man who has inundated his country with bastards, and deserted the deserving but helpless mother of his offspring, and finally left her to perish like a
dog in the streets, and to be buried as a pauper at the public charge when she ceased to maintain him by her exertions.

  On the other hand, the Morning Post continued to complain about the indecency of the new king riding about in his carriage accompanied by his illegitimate children.

  Was it Dora’s fault that their children were bastards? No—it was George III’s. His Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which was intended to prevent his wayward sons from engaging in mésalliances , instead had the effect of sending them into the arms of mistresses whom they couldn’t wed. William and Dorothy’s healthy brood of ten children, raised in a loving and stable home, were exactly the ideal family George III had envisioned for his heirs. And yet Dora herself, a loving, hardworking pragmatic soul and devoted mother—was persona non grata because of her lack of birthright.

  Although Dorothy had been dead for fifteen years, one of William’s first acts as king was that of a lover’s repentance toward the woman he had reduced to penury and disgrace. He commissioned a statue of Dora with two of their children from Francis Chantrey, the leading sculptor of the day. The marble tableau—an odd cross between a Madonna and a Greek Muse—features Dora breast-feeding their infant. It was not completed during the king’s lifetime, and languished in the artist’s studio (where an eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria admired it). At the time, because the subject was a notorious fallen woman, the sculpture was deemed too immoral to be displayed in a public place. Since 1980, it has been on view in the Portrait Gallery at Buckingham Palace, where the living Dora would have been denied entry.

  William was considered a relatively decent king, if not a very bright one. His reign was marked by a struggle for parliamentary reform and the attempt to rid the country of the “rotten boroughs”—the sparsely populated districts that had the same voting power as more densely inhabited ones.

  The seventy-one-year-old king was felled by a serious illness in the spring of 1837. He died at Windsor Castle on June 20, and was buried on July 8 in the vault at St. George’s Chapel. William was succeeded on the throne by his niece, Victoria, the daughter of his late younger brother Edward, Duke of Kent.

  In 1884, a two-volume biography titled The Life and Times of William IV was published. It was a perfect example of high Victorian literature and mores, in that there was no mention whatsoever of Dora Jordan and her two-decade love affair with the future king, except in the unsatisfying sentence: The king had formed a connection with a well-known actress . . . there is no need to do more than to chronicle the fact, as the subject is a distasteful one.

  VICTORIA

  1819-1901 RULED 1837-1901 (GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND) EMPRESS OF INDIA 1877-1901

  VICTORIA’S FATHER, THE DUKE OF KENT, DIED WHEN SHE was just a few months old. Her mother, the German-born princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, deliberately shielded her from her “wicked uncles” so that she could never be tainted with even the slightest whiff of the immorality that was the hallmark of the Hanoverian monarchy. Victoria was to represent a fresh start, the future of England, rather than an extension of its dissolute past.

  When she was just eighteen years old, Victoria acceded to the throne on the death of her uncle, William IV. By all accounts the diminutive sovereign possessed remarkable poise for one so young and with such enormous responsibility on her slim shoulders. Her modest yet regal demeanor immediately won her the praise of her ministers as well as her subjects.

  On February 10, 1840, three years after becoming queen, Victoria married her first cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. It was most definitely a love match; the twenty-year-old queen had giddily fallen head over heels for the tall, mustachioed German, and with thumping heart, she had proposed marriage to him. It was one of the last times she took the reins in their relationship. Victoria and Albert had nine children and worked diligently to promote the royal family as the archetype of English domestic bliss, a model for the middle classes to emulate.

  When, after twenty-one years of marriage, Albert died of typhoid fever on December 14, 1861, part of Victoria died with him. Widowed at forty-two, she continued to rule the country through the prism of Albert’s eyes, emphasizing his most keenly held virtues of discretion, decorum, and duty, as well as strict moral rectitude (even to the point of prudery), leading her subjects by example. She went into permanent mourning for Albert, retiring from public life for a number of years, which left her open to severe criticism from her subjects, her ministers, and the press. During these reclusive years, her intimate friendship with a Scottish gillie, John Brown, created a national scandal.

  Victoria was the longest-reigning monarch in British history, lending her name to an era that spanned two-thirds of the nineteenth century. During her sixty-three years, seven months, and two days as queen, the British Empire reached its zenith, covering a quarter of the world. But imperial expansion exacted its price, notably the 1857 Sepoy Massacre in India and the two South African Boer Wars.

  Trade was so extensive, and the available goods so exotic, that the English became an acquisitive population, packing as much bric-a-brac into their gaslit homes as humanly possible. The Industrial Revolution, the steam engine, and the invention of the telegraph changed the way people lived, worked, communicated, and traveled, transforming the English economy.

  Victoria survived six assassination attempts during her reign, but on January 22, 1901, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of eighty-one, marking the end of the House of Hanover. She was interred beside her beloved Albert at Frogmore mausoleum in Windsor Great Park. She was succeeded by her eldest son, who was crowned Edward VII at the age of fifty-nine. One of his first acts as king was to destroy the myriad monuments his mother had erected in memory of her beloved John Brown.

  “MRS. BROWN” QUEEN VICTORIA and John Brown 1826-1883

  From their very first visit to Scotland in 1842, Victoria and Albert had been enchanted by its wild beauty and by the simplicity and genuineness of its people. “All seemed to breathe freedom and peace,” Victoria observed, and the royal family was eager to establish a presence there. Victoria bought the lease to Balmoral, “a pretty little castle in the old Scotch style,” after its owner, Sir Robert Gordon, dropped dead over his morning kippers on October 8, 1847.

  At Balmoral, the rugged John Brown, seven years the royal couple’s junior, was one of their gillies, an attendant on the family’s hunting and fishing excursions. He was one of nine children, born in Craithie, Aberdeenshire, to a tenant farmer, or crofter. Brown had no formal education, but Victoria found him “discreet, careful, intelligent [and] attentive.”

  This stalwart and handsome Highlander, with his russet hair and beard and his thick muttonchop whiskers, soon became an indispensable retainer. The queen’s physicians had prescribed riding as a remedy against her increasing stoutness. Victoria would have no one else lead out her pony, so Brown was promoted to chief gillie. In 1858, Albert handpicked him to be his wife’s personal servant in Scotland.

  After Albert died on December 14, 1861, Victoria was stricken to the point of collapse. She slept with her consort’s coat on top of her, clutching his nightshirt like a lover. Other clothes of Albert’s were strewn about the bed so that his presence and his scent were omnipresent. The Blue Room at Windsor where he spent so much time became a shrine to Albert, his personal effects maintained the way he had left them. In fact, Victoria turned the entire kingdom into a memorial to her late husband. “His wishes—his plans about every thing, his views about every thing are to be my law! And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished.”

  As the 1860s plodded on, the queen became reclusive, refusing to appear in public or attend to the duties of state, such as opening Parliament. People thought she was literally going mad, so excessive was her mourning. All she desired to do was sit and weep. According to Lord Clarendon, “She believes that his eye is now constantly upon her, that he watches over every action of hers and that in fact, she never ceases to be in communication with his spirit.
”

  Feelings were running high against the queen’s selfishness in abandoning her public duties in order to wallow in her misery. Her subjects had sympathized with her at first, but as the years dragged on, they wanted her to snap out of it already! In March of 1864, a large placard was affixed to the gates at Buckingham Palace: “These commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.”

  Enter John Brown.

  Fears for Victoria’s health brought Brown and Her Majesty’s pony Lochnagar from Balmoral to Osborne, her estate on the Isle of Wight. But John Brown was far more than a personal trainer. He was a connection to Albert, someone who had known her husband well in happier times.

  The Queen of England was in a very difficult position. She was friendless. Victoria had no former playmates or schoolfellows to surround herself with, because she had been raised apart from other children. It was inappropriate to confide in her ladies-in-waiting or her younger children; besides, she never had much use for her offspring, preferring Prince Albert over any of them, individually and collectively. Her older children were starting families of their own, often in far-flung countries on the Continent. And Victoria could be surprisingly shy in the presence of the upper classes, often at a loss for conversation. She was far more comfortable among the middle classes, who shared her tastes and values, and most at ease among the hardworking, honest Scots laborers.

  It was Victoria who was the constitutional monarch. Because Albert was just her spouse, her prince consort—not even king consort—he had no official role in the government. Victoria lamented that their marriage reversed the natural order of things: man was supposed to master woman. Victoria’s ministers always acknowledged that there were two sides to her that needed constant massaging: the queen, and the woman. And all through her life, the woman needed to be cherished. Not only that, she seemed to crave a strong man to put her in her place.