Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  … abomination! The full moon came thundering down from Heaven, like a Cannon Ball; & seeing that nothing could be done went quietly back again! Dreamt these words before daylight, May Morning, 1804. Put ’em into a Mrs Jordan’s mouth, ridiculing some pompous moral or political Declaimer.– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Serious Reviewer, interrupting: But, my good sir, suppose some of your female readers should take it into their heads to be Mrs Jordan?

  Author: Oh, my good sir, don’t be alarmed. My female readers are not persons to be so much afraid for, as you seem to think yours are. The stage itself has taught them large measures both of charity and discernment.– Leigh Hunt, in his Autobiography, published 1850

  Prologue: ‘Beside the monuments of the Queens’

  At six o’clock in the morning of 26 June 1830, an elderly gentleman of no great distinction, sleeping peacefully in his country house in Middlesex, was woken by his manservant and told that two doctors were waiting to see him. The old man got up, put on his dressing-gown, and went downstairs. The doctors were bringing him some good news. His elder brother George had died in the night, and they had ridden over from Windsor to Bushy in the early morning sunshine to tell him so, and to be the first to salute him as the new King of England. He was sixty-four years old, had spent a large part of his life unemployed and made a hash of the jobs he had been given: now he found himself King William IV.

  William was the third son of King George III and his Queen Charlotte, and had not been expected to succeed to the throne, or educated with it in mind. He had been sent to serve in the navy as a boy, with the idea that it should become his profession; when that proved a mistake, he was given a dukedom, an income and an estate, and left largely to his own devices. He had married, at the age of fifty-three, a German princess, Adelaide; she was less than half his age, but they had no living children.

  The new King was not known as a patron of the arts, but one of the first acts of his reign was to send for the sculptor Francis Chantrey and commission a work. Chantrey was the leading sculptor of the day and an established favourite of the royal family. He had made busts of George III and Queen Charlotte as well as of most of the distinguished figures of his generation: Wellington, Pitt, Walter Scott, Wordsworth, James Watt and many more. George IV, a notable patron, had also commissioned a bust of himself, and paid three hundred guineas for it. But the new King was not on this occasion asking for a bust of himself or his Queen Adelaide. What he wanted was a life-size representation of an actress. King William wept as he explained to Chantrey exactly what he had in mind.1

  The subject of the statue had been dead for fifteen years, but Chantrey agreed to attempt the work and began by producing a small terracotta model, showing her, as the King had asked, with two of her children. The model is faceless, and all three figures are bare and rudimentary – to a modern eye they look like little figures by Henry Moore – but evidently the King approved it. For the features Chantrey had to work from portraits, of which there were fortunately many. He felt confident enough to ask a fee of two thousand guineas. The King agreed to these terms, and there was a formal commission early in 1831. It can still be read in Chantrey’s ledger, under the heading ‘Mrs Jordans Monument’: ‘Recd an order from His Majesty William IV to create a Monumental Groupe in memory of Mrs Jordan to be erected in Westminster Abbey…’ The line of writing continues, crossed through in ink, but deciphered quite easily through the deletion: ‘… beside the monuments of the Queens’. So the King’s intention was clearly to have the statue not only in the Abbey, but also in a place of special honour.2

  It took Chantrey several years to produce first a plaster cast and then the marble monument itself; in the summer of 1834 it was finally finished. It is a magnificent and touching work. The subject is shown life-size and, as the King wished, with two of her children, one a curly-headed small boy, the other a fat baby, also a boy. She is seated on a plain block, knees apart and ankles crossed, looking down at the infant on her lap, and draped in the simplest and lightest of classical gowns, held on her right shoulder by a single large button and edged with an embroidered band. Her left shoulder is uncovered, and her hair falls forward in loose curls. The mask of comedy and a set of musical pipes representing music and poetry lie beside her bare and beautiful feet, but her pose, in its simplicity and tenderness, makes one think less of an actress or a muse than of a Renaissance madonna.3

  The King was pleased. He made a personal friend of Chantrey, conferred a knighthood on him a few years later, and even offered him a baronetcy, which the sculptor modestly refused.

  But there were problems. The Dean of Westminster at this time was John Ireland, an ailing scholar in his seventies. His own bust had been made by Chantrey, and he had held the crown at the coronations of both George IV and William IV.4 Ireland was not prepared to allow Chantrey’s monumental statue into the Abbey, either among the queens of England or indeed anywhere else. If he even troubled to look at the statue, the Dean may well have thought it too secular and celebratory of its subject’s beauty for a religious setting; but fundamentally his refusal must have been on moral grounds, because Dorothy or, as she preferred it, Dora Jordan, had a double stain on her character. She had lived with the King when he was Duke of Clarence, and borne him ten children over a period of twenty years. At the same time she had never given up her professional career in the theatre. She was the best-loved and most admired comic actress of her time, hailed by fellow actors, critics and public alike as a uniquely gifted performer, fully the equal in comedy to Mrs Siddons in tragedy: for several decades they were generally referred to as the Muses of Comedy and Tragedy. George III, Joshua Reynolds, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Byron, Mrs Inchbald, John Kemble, Fanny Burney, Madame de Staël, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Benjamin Haydon and William Macready were all among her admirers. Lamb, looking at her portrait some years after her death, described her simply as ‘Shakespeare’s woman’, the highest praise he could accord.5

  Whatever stain the church might perceive on her character, it was a lesser stain than marked the King himself, or the previous King, his brother George, known to be a bigamist and adulterer, or indeed a significant number of men in public life honoured in the Abbey. Other actresses, virtuous and otherwise, were buried or commemorated there: from the seventeenth century Mary Saunderson, from the eighteenth Anne Bracegirdle, who had been Congreve’s mistress, Susanna Cibber, who had been divorced, the rackety, much married Ann Barry, the blameless Hannah Pritchard and Anne Oldfield, interred without a monument, on account of her two illegitimate sons. David Garrick and Samuel Foote were also buried there, and Sarah Siddons’s statue appeared in the following decade.6 But, despite the King’s wishes, Mrs Jordan was not allowed into Westminster Abbey.

  When the Dean of St Paul’s was approached, he reacted in the same way. Other suggestions seem to have been made, and rejected as unsuitable, by the eldest son of the King and Mrs Jordan, the little boy represented in the statue, now Earl of Munster. So the nation was deprived of an outstandingly beautiful monument, and the rejected group remained in Chantrey’s Pimlico studio. It was still there in 1839, two years after King William’s death, and had become something of an embarrassment.7 The young Queen Victoria, who had a passion for the theatre, was curious about Mrs Jordan, whose children were after all her own first cousins. Her diary records several conversations with the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, in which she asked about her.

  At the end of December 1838:

  Lord M talked of Mrs Jordan; I thought he couldn’t remember her, but he said he did perfectly, and remembers going to see her act in ’13 with Madame de Stael, who was delighted with her; she had a beautiful voice, and sang all those songs without music delightfully; exceedingly lively, and seemed always in the highest spirits on the stage; Lord M continued, that her real forte was in such characters as a ‘Chamber Maid’, though she acted latterly Lady Teazle and even Juliet, but it wasn’t the same thing… Her singing ‘used to produce an electrical eff
ect’…

  Lord M [also said] it was a very curious thing, her acquaintance with the late King, which he thinks began as early as ’82, for that he was not very fond of the Theatre, though he always used to be there when she acted; and Peak, the Treasurer of either Drury Lane or Covent Garden, told Lord M, that the King used always to come himself to receive her salary – which was paid regularly to him; Mrs Jordan was very good natured, Lord M said, and George IV liked her, and used to go and dine with them.8

  In January 1839 the Queen had two more conversations about Mrs Jordan with Lord Melbourne. She noted that he

  had seen all Chantrey’s works in his studio; and he said, ‘I saw Mrs Jordan’s statue’; the late King, Lord M told me (Chantrey told him) sent for Chantrey about 4 or 5 days after he came to the Throne, and desired him to make this statue, which he had always intended to have done when he had the means for it; [WIV] wished to place it in Henry VII’ s Chapel, which Lord M said is Crown property, over which the Dean has no power, so that no one could refuse or prevent its being put there; but Munster (why, he don’t know) would not let the King do it, and thwarted the King amazingly about it; and the King’s Executors tell Chantrey it belongs to Munster, but Lord M said Munster doesn’t know what to do with it; it’s too large for a house. Said I thought it was rather odd to put it in Henry VII’s Chapel; ‘I think it’s rather odd,’ said Lord M, ‘as she wasn’t even buried there.’9 Then Lord M said, they didn’t know what to write under it, so they called it, ‘Sacred to the memory of an affectionate Mother, Dorah Bland.’10 But I asked Lord M, why shouldn’t it be Dorah Jordan? Bland was her maiden name; Lord M said he had no idea who Mr Jordan was, or if she was married to him.11

  The Queen continued to be curious. Her questions may have arisen as much from a desire to understand the marital and extramarital histories of her uncles and her father as from an enthusiasm for cultural history, although this is what Lord Melbourne mostly offered her. Later, her diary reads:

  Talked again of Mrs Jordan… ‘She was beautifully formed,’ Lord M said, ‘her legs and feet were beautifully formed, as this statue is’; and she used to be fond of acting in men’s clothes; she used to act Hippolyta in She Would and She Would Not, and Rosalind in As You Like It; ‘a lovely play,’ said Lord M, ‘the prettiest play in the world; and her acting in that was quite beautiful.’ ‘She had a beautiful enunciation,’ he added. She was an Irish girl.12

  Interested as she was, and enthusiastic about the theatre, Queen Victoria did not want the statue herself. Nor did its rightful owner, Lord Munster, who suffered cruelly from taunts in the press about his shameful birth, which may be why he wanted nothing to do with the commemorative piece. It remained in Chantrey’s studio, ‘never having been settled during the King’s life’, and it looks as though it was still there at Chantrey’s death in the autumn of 1841.13

  The subject of Chantrey’s statue, Dora Jordan, and her tangled and tormented relations with the royal family with whom she became so closely allied, make the subject of this book. Her life was one of extremes: extremes of poverty and misfortune, extremes of success and riches. For over twenty-five years she was probably the most popular actress in Britain, based at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, under the management of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, with whom she was closely connected both professionally and personally. Her fame was immense and sometimes scandalous, and she was one of the first women to fight back against the power of the press and make it serve her purpose instead of accepting that she must always be its victim. She was intensely serious about her work, and revered by several generations of her fellow professionals. She also bore thirteen children who lived to adult life, and involved herself deeply and lovingly in their care and upbringing while continuing her acting career. As an unmarried working mother, she crossed every social barrier, going from penniless provincial to royal intimacy in a few years, without ever growing affected or pretentious. Although she never married, five of her daughters entered the British aristocracy through marriage; her sons, all of whom went into the services, had more curious and in some cases much sadder fates.

  If she moved through her early years like the passionate heroine of a picaresque novel – Fielding’s Tom Jones, say – in which morality is developed through experience, trial and error, she lived to see her children enter the more circumscribed world of Jane Austen, with its backdrop of army, navy and colonies, its insistence on prudent and advantageous marriage and its tight, confident social structure that simply obliterated those who, for one reason or another, failed to fit or conform. Her name and reputation were partly suppressed and yet covertly fascinating to the nineteenth century. To those who knew her story she became a symbol of the strength a stage career could confer on a woman, and a warning of its dangers: independence, yes, and professional satisfaction, but also the risk of degradation, and of crashing from the brilliant pinnacle of fame to poverty and humiliation.

  She was painted by some of the best artists of her time, and caricatured by the cruellest; the range of images is startling, and a rich source of information. The first three decades of her life can be traced only through outside evidence. There is no shortage of this, because she was born with the knack of attracting attention; but from the age of thirty we have her own voice in her letters. Against the odds, many hundreds have been preserved. Very few of them are formal, or carefully composed. Almost all were written in haste and without a thought of posterity, dashed off in the dressing rooms of provincial theatres, or in nurseries, or in lodging houses and inns, in her various town houses, in St James’s Palace, and in the home in which she passed her happiest years, Bushy House. Most were addressed to her royal partner, the future King.

  If Dora’s letters give a voice to her statue, the most curious thing about the statue itself is that the King was memorializing his own victim. Like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, William first honoured and then destroyed the woman he loved; and hoped to make amends to a statue for the wrong done to a living woman. Only Dora’s statue could not come back to life as Hermione’s did; and it suffered the further indignity of being treated by the nation as she had been treated by William: rejected and consigned to oblivion. This book seeks to tell the story of both the statue and the woman, and to do what it can to distinguish between image and truth. ‘On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.’

  1

  The Sins of the Fathers: 1761–1782

  In retrospect King William and Dora Jordan make a very unlikely couple. In prospect they would have seemed even more improbable. He was born to legitimate splendour and riches in 1765, she four years earlier to a marked lack of any such advantages. They shared a birthplace, London; beyond that there was nothing to link their fates. All the royal circumstances of William’s birth are recorded, down to the length of the Queen’s labour (an easy four hours), the midwife’s meals and the yards of stuff purchased for the wet nurse’s nightgowns; but doubts and uncertainties cloud Dora’s birth and early history.

  Although Lord Melbourne said she was an Irish girl, her mother was Welsh and her father came from a Protestant Yorkshire family settled in Ireland for less than a century; and although they usually lived in Dublin, she was born somewhere in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, Covent Garden and the Strand. What were her parents doing in London in 1761? They may have been looking for work, judging it a hopeful time as the capital prepared itself for the festivities surrounding the coronation and wedding of the new King, George III; or they may have been simply visiting friends or family. What we know for certain is that Francis and Grace Bland registered the birth of their daughter Dorothy as having taken place on 22 November 1761, and that she was baptized at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields on 5 December.

  The baptismal register is clear enough; but her parents’ marriage was not legally valid; Grace Phillips was not really entitled to be set down as Mrs Bland, and Dorothy should perhaps have been given Phillips as her family name. Against this, Franc
is and Grace both considered themselves as good as married, and Dorothy was not their first child. They may have gone through some sort of ceremony somewhere; less than perfectly legal marriages were not hard to arrange in the middle of the eighteenth century. The problem was that Francis had not asked for his father’s consent. He had not asked because he knew he would not get it; he had been under twenty-one at the time of the ‘marriage’, and Grace was not the heiress his father hoped for, but a working actress. She was nothing like the sort of actress Boswell picked up outside Drury Lane, with a murky history of false marriages and lovers, but a respectable and well brought up young woman, the daughter of a clergyman; and she put her whole trust in young Bland as a gentleman, in spite of his father’s feelings.

  The Bland family had done very well out of their adoptive country. Francis’s father Nathaniel became a doctor of divinity, a vicar-general and a judge of the Prerogative Court in Dublin; and he acquired a castle at Derriquin in County Kerry for good measure. Judge Bland expected his sons to build on these achievements, and his disapproval of Francis’s marriage, or half-marriage, was implacable. He had already disinherited his eldest son John for becoming an actor and marrying an actress: what was it about these young men that made them involve themselves with the stage? After Grace had borne two children to Francis, Judge Bland had their marriage declared void on the grounds that his son had been a minor at the time. It was one of the old man’s last acts; he died in 1760, before the birth of his granddaughter Dorothy.

  The young couple continued to pass as Mr and Mrs Bland in Dublin and London and also, it seems, with Grace Phillips’s family. Her father, George, one-time rector of St Thomas’s, Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, had died when she was only seven, but her spirited cousin Blanch Williams – married but childless, and sixteen years older than Grace – kept a welcoming home at Upper Trelethyn, her farmhouse set high up above St David’s Head. There were other branches of the family in Bristol, where Grace spent some of her girlhood, and where she acquired the polished manners of a city girl, and the ambition to make something of herself. Bristol was the second city of the kingdom, and supported a particularly successful theatre. There was hardly a town in the land that did not welcome strolling groups of players at this time – apart from church-going it was the chief entertainment – but the Bristol theatre was a fine, formal building, regularly visited by leading London players.1 Grace and her sisters were stage-struck, and, with remarkable strength of character, she and her elder sister Maria set off together for Dublin in the mid-1750s determined to become actresses. The Irish players may have been familiar – they came touring in the west of England in summer – and the Phillips sisters were greeted in Dublin as ‘two young ladies lately arrived from England (sisters) to perform at the Theatre Royal who have never yet appeared on any stage. As they have all the requisites to make a figure in that sphere, added to a polite education and a knowledge of the Beau Monde, it is hoped they will prove shining ornaments to the Theatre.’2 And they did shine, brightly enough at least to be accepted as fellow professionals by the thriving theatre community of Dublin.