Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  The episode reads like a London version of Cosi fan tutte, and makes Europe seem small for a moment; Cosi was written in 1789 and first played in Vienna in 1790.* Something of the bright intensity, the sheen of the opera, which promises pure laughter only to give us a glimpse of darkness and cruelty beneath the surface of its silly lovers’ games, finds an equivalent in the London society in which Dora and the Sheridans and the royal princes met. There was pleasure, there was luxury, and most of the players were capable of putting on magnificent virtuoso performances; but there were victims, and prices to be paid in due course, as Elizabeth already saw clearly enough. She sent Prince William packing. In any case he already had his eye fixed on someone else. He had seen her in the theatre: her name was Dora Jordan.

  8

  A Royal Education: Prince William

  The admirer of Mrs Sheridan and Mrs Jordan was the same boisterous Prince William whose pranks Fanny Burney had been warned against in Cheltenham. William had not enjoyed a sheltered upbringing. In Chapter 1 we saw him born to the very young Queen at Buckingham House, on 21 August 1765, the third child and third son, and almost at once life was hard for him. As was normal for royal children, he was put in the charge of a wet nurse; he was also weaned at four months, perhaps because his wet nurse, Mrs Sarah Tuting, was found unsuitable by the Queen. Although highly recommended by one of her court ladies, the Duchess of Ancaster, Mrs Tuting turned out to be the mistress of the Duchess’s father, who also ran the royal stud at Newmarket; her departure must have been a bad moment for baby William.

  His earliest cheerful memories were probably of Richmond Lodge, the house on the Thames, just south of Kew, used by his parents in summer; he always liked living close to the river. There he tumbled about on the grass, and ran and shouted with his brothers and sisters – Charlotte, Edward and Augusta arrived in 1766, 1767 and 1768 – and the royal nurses, who could be cuddled one minute and bullied the next. The children followed a healthy routine, were bathed once a fortnight and vaccinated in batches. In the early days their father sometimes got down on the floor to play with them, but their mother’s strict etiquette meant they were not usually allowed even to sit down in her presence, and sometimes they fell asleep on their feet. There were toys, among them twenty-one small brass guns on travelling carriages for George on his fifth birthday, and a specially made ‘Chamber Horse to Carry four Children at once’ for the nurseries. There was also much music and dancing, fireworks on their father’s birthday, and presents on New Year’s Day. In public the children were shown off in Roman togas and other fancy dress; and William, still in petticoats, played ‘Mademoiselle’ to Frederick’s Harlequin in a little entertainment.

  So far so good; but when he was seven, William saw his two elder brothers, aged ten and nine, formally installed as Knights of the Garter at Windsor Castle, and after this their familiar world was broken up. George and Frederick were given an establishment in London, and William was put into a separate household of his own on Kew Green, shared only with five-year-old Edward, whom he did not much like. He was allotted tutors, middle-aged clergymen and retired army officers; he copied out pages of copperplate improving sentiments, and studied Latin, French and German, mathematics, riding and fencing. More to his taste, he was allowed to help with the running of a model farm set up for the royal children. It was a curious life for a boy. He saw that he was special and set apart, and he lacked equal companionship and love.

  He continued to idolize his handsome and clever eldest brother at a distance. George charmed most people, although by the age of twelve he was incurring parental disapproval for his lack of application and ‘bad habit of not speaking the truth’, and at sixteen he was embarked on a way of life entirely disapproved by his father.1 Frederick was destined for the army; and when William reached thirteen, the King decided to put him into the navy. It was a wholly original plan, and not William’s idea, but he does not seem to have raised any objection. Other boys went into the navy as early as eleven, leaving everything familiar behind them; he was treated more gently in that he was nearly fourteen when he joined his first ship as a midshipman, and he went accompanied by a tutor. He took his meals at the admiral’s table, was allowed to go home for Christmas, and was shielded from the grosser discomforts and cruelties midshipmen could expect to encounter. He was small for his age, with straight fair hair, pouting lips and an oddly elongated head; he was also bold and sociable.

  The first year in the navy was by far his best. It brought him approval from his parents, and made him briefly famous and popular with the general public. He was with Rodney’s fleet when it captured a Spanish flagship, immediately renamed the Prince William in his honour; a full-scale battle followed and William, who behaved courageously throughout, became a national hero.2 This was in January 1780; on his next leave he was taken to Drury Lane for a celebratory evening, and his presence threw the audience into such excitement that there was almost a disaster: pressing forward to see the Prince, people were half crushed and had to be hauled out of the pit on to the stage.3 Verses were written in his honour and a glorious future was predicted for him as a naval leader.

  Nothing so good happened again. He went to sea and learnt his profession, but there were no more battles. He began to feel neglected and unloved by his parents. They wrote rarely, and when they did their letters were admonitory, and dull. As time went by they made it clear that the navy was not acting on his character as they had hoped: they were surprised and displeased to find he picked up the sailor’s amusements of swearing, drinking and worse, and lost whatever princely polish he had once possessed. He resented his parents’ disappointment and disapproval, the more so since no one else dared to criticize him, because flattery was the routine approach to all members of the royal family. As he grew up, William received it from almost everyone but his parents and siblings. Even naval discipline was oiled and diluted with it. When fellow midshipmen or senior officers disapproved of his actions, their criticisms were not made to his face. If they disliked him, they concealed it, avoided him or were kept out of his way. The sternest admirals used unctuous phrases when they wrote to him: he might, after all, be king one day. The effect was baffling and isolating; he could not learn how to get on with people because he rarely saw their true faces.

  He also remained powerless to order his own life. When he was seventeen his father decided to take him out of the navy and send him to the court of Hanover; the idea was that he should pick up some manners from his German cousins. It was another plunge into a wholly strange environment, and William hated it from the start. He preferred the middle-class families of Hanover, but when he tried to make friends with them he met with disapproval. He fell in love, first with a princess, then with a bourgeois girl, but was not allowed to court either. Bad reports went back to his father. In his loneliness the young man took to the brothels, and to writing crude and angry letters to the Prince of Wales. He complained of his boredom at being forced to remain in Hanover, ‘this damnable country, smoaking, playing at twopenny whist and wearing great thick boots. Oh, for England and the pretty girls of Westminster; at least to such as would not clap or pox me every time I fucked.’4 He was also increasingly bitter about his parents: ‘Yesterday morning I received a set down from the two persons that were concerned in begetting me. The female was more severe than the male. I do not mention names for fear the letter should be opened.’5 After two unprofitable years in Germany he was allowed back into the navy and promoted to lieutenant; but he still complained that his parents ‘keep me under like a slave’.6

  During the next years, as he sailed the Atlantic, he got into scrapes of various kinds. He ran up debts, a failing shared with his mother and brothers, but still disapproved by his father. When he became a captain, he overdid the discipline aboard his ship to a ludicrous degree, inventing unnecessary rules and punishing minor infractions with disproportionate severity. He got into every sort of trouble with women. His one artistic talent lay in designing uniforms for
his midshipmen, but they were more theatrical than practical: the breeches split when the boys climbed the rigging. Above all he still failed to develop a sense of how to get on with his fellow officers. He made friends with the young Horatio Nelson in the West Indies; but although Nelson, a fervent monarchist, said he grew fond of Prince William, and did his best to keep up in his round of dancing and feasting in the islands, even he could not support him in all his professional behaviour. Gradually William lost favour with the sea lords as well as with his father. Early in 1786 he wrote to his brother saying he was not sure whether he wanted to remain in the navy, but ‘what is to become of a young man of one & twenty years old, who has neither a profession nor money? A pretty situation indeed: add to all this a King’s son. What shall I do?’7 It was a reasonable question. In September 1787 he threatened to resign.8 To the admiralty lords, it was obvious that the King’s plan for his son had failed. He would never have made an outstanding officer, and the upbringing he received went a long way towards obliterating the good qualities he had.

  On hearing of his father’s illness, he hurried back from his station in the West Indies, dispensing with the necessary formality of seeking permission from his commanding officer. Instead he simply wrote to his elder brother, under the impression that he was already Regent, asking to be recalled. He sent no letter of sympathy to his mother, telling his brother he lacked words, and it is true that he found language awkward to handle. ‘The poor Queen: what a situation for her… Permit me to express myself strongly. I follow the dictates of my heart. Sincerely do I love this good and worthy man and long may he yet with his usual firmness reign over us.’ Admirable sentiments, though he also assured the supposed Regent, ‘I am attached to you of all other of the family in the strongest manner.’9 William hoped his brother would either appoint him to the Admiralty or make sure he was given a high command.

  When he arrived in England at the end of April 1789 it was to find his brother with no more power than before, and the Admiralty strongly opposed to his continuing in the navy at all. The King passed on this verdict, and grumbled about his unauthorized return; but he saw that something had to be done for William. The immediate answer was a peerage. He was made a duke and an earl too, for good measure: Duke of Clarence and of St Andrews, and Earl of Munster in the Irish peerage. From now on he ceased to be known as Prince William and became the Duke of Clarence, the first since the unfortunate Clarence who was drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower, under orders from his brother, Richard III.

  The new Clarence got £12,000 a year and a set of rooms in St James’s Palace. It was about as bad an arrangement as could have been made, for none of this gave him an occupation. He had not lived at home for ten years, hardly recognized his own sisters, and found his parents cold towards him; they made it clear that his manners, mostly acquired at sea, were not up to scratch. He had been systematically forbidden to marry any of the young women he had fallen in love with, and, without moral or social guidance, had resorted to loose women on a scale even his naval companions found spectacular. He wanted to be liked – this is clear – and he wanted to belong, but he did not know where he belonged. He was already half sickened by his years of debauchery, and his boisterousness was partly the defence of a lonely boy.10

  The best descriptions of him at this time come from Burney’s careful pen. In May she heard he was back, and of his parents’ disapproval, and then on the same day, as she sat with a group of courtiers at Windsor, found herself face to face with him as he burst suddenly into the room. He greeted everyone civilly and ‘began to discourse, with the most unbounded openness and careless ease, of everything that occurred to him’. He was, she thought, ‘handsome, as are all the Royal Family, though he is not of a height to be called a good figure’ – which means he was short, something that does not appear in his portraits. What won her over was his knowing that she had a brother in the navy. ‘“I am very happy, ma’am,” he cried, “to see you here; it gives me great pleasure the Queen should appoint the sister of a sea-officer to so eligible a situation. As long as she has a brother in the service… I look upon her as one of us. O, faith I do! I do indeed! she is one of the corps.”’ And he stayed for an hour, chatting about what a reformed character he had become, and about his sisters, and how Princess Augusta interested him particularly because ‘she looks as if she knew more than she would say; and I like that character’.11 Miss Burney was to see more of him, when he came to the play readings she gave at court the next spring, and on other occasions when he appeared among the courtiers, teasing them by insisting they drink his father’s health in champagne, boasting about his fine new carriage, and altogether ‘gay, and full of sport and mischief, yet clever withal as well as comical’.12 Although he was not at all the sort of young man she admired or approved, she clearly found something likeable in William.

  He must have noticed Dora properly for the first time in May or June 1789. Bannister, playing Ben in Congreve’s Love for Love, has a story about Clarence coming backstage to offer his naval expertise over the way to wear a sailor’s handkerchief; Dora was his Miss Prue. So the Duke saw her at Drury Lane, and at Richmond Theatre too, where she was acting during the early summer that year. He may also have seen her out and about in Richmond, with her children and her handsome ‘husband’, because he took a house there himself. The Fords’ house was outside Richmond in the meadows, while the Duke’s house, Ivy Lodge, was in the centre of the town, in a terrace close to the Thames, with what Horace Walpole described as only a little green apron of land between it and the water.

  Walpole, who kept his sharp eye on everything from the other side of the river, and was usually ready with a gibe, dismissed Ivy Lodge as a house fit for an old gentlewoman interested in nothing more than playing cards. William quickly showed he did not meet this description. He brought down a handsome young woman to keep him company, who was obviously not going to be invited to any card parties in Richmond. She was known as Polly Finch, and she usually plied her trade in London.

  While Richmond and Twickenham gossiped about the Duke’s affairs, the Fords were away in the north. They were still away when he celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday in August, appearing on the balcony of the Castle Tavern to survey a regatta. Polly Finch was soon back in London; it was put about that she was bored by the Duke’s reading aloud from the Lives of the Admirals, which sounds, like much good gossip, too funny to be true. He was quickly forgiven his faux pas. Walpole decided to praise his sobriety, his regular domestic habits – he locked his servants in at night – and, most surprisingly, his punctual settlement of bills with the Richmond tradesmen, all departures from princely habits. He began to take an interest in local life. Early in October he organized a command performance at the Richmond Theatre, asking for two farces, Chapter of Accidents and Animal Magnetism. The theatre had been one of his few pleasures in Hanover, and he had been an actor himself, in amateur shipboard productions, and in Shakespeare too; he had been Prince Hal on one occasion, and Mistress Page on another when, to add to the verisimilitude, he had arranged for his Falstaff to fall into some real pitch.13

  The Sheridans, on the move as always, also had a house in Richmond at this time. William was delighted to find such congenial neighbours. ‘The Duke of Clarence lives within a hundred yards of me and he generally pays me a visit most mornings,’ wrote Elizabeth to a friend.14 The Fords too arrived back in September, but Dora was mourning her mother, and awaiting the birth of Lucy, and is less likely to have taken part in any social life.

  In November (1789) the Duke returned to St James’s. Dora stayed at home with her baby and was not seen at the theatre until February; but once back at work she picked up her usual momentum very fast.15 In March she was in a new farce called The Spoiled Child, playing a mischievous boy, Little Pickle. The plot is extremely simple; Pickle’s tricks run to tying people’s clothes together, and substituting a pet parrot for the chicken being prepared for dinner. This type of humour, entirely devo
id of sexual innuendo, and interspersed with songs, appealed strongly to the Duke. The general public shared his taste, Little Pickle was the rage, and every seat at Drury Lane was filled whenever it was on. Audiences who came expecting to see Dora as Pickle rioted and asked for their money back if she failed to appear; and provincial actresses were soon reproducing her performance all over the country.16 The rumour went about that she had written it herself; it is certainly the work of someone who knew exactly what they were about technically in constructing a farce. Ford’s name was also suggested; he seems an unlikely author. Dora might have put it together when she was at home with the baby during the winter, to amuse herself, and as a vehicle for a range of stage effects she knew she could bring off; but she never claimed to be the author, and the attribution remains uncertain.*

  One of the things the Duke particularly enjoyed in The Spoiled Child was a song about the navy (‘What girl but loves the merry Tar’), delivered of course by Dora. He was often seen at Drury Lane; but so was the rest of his family. One of the Queen’s ladies who was also a childhood playmate of William, Charlotte Papendiek, described this period in the aftermath of the King’s recovery, when ‘Miss Farren, Mrs Siddons and Mrs Jordan filled the house every night to overflow… the stage was in its zenith… Their Majesties gave every encouragement to it, by appearing every week at one or the other house.’17

  Dora had another success, with Kemble and Bannister, in Aphra Behn’s The Rover (renamed Love in Many Masks – it was another Peg Woffington role), which had not been revived for thirty years. Just about every part she touched turned to gold, and everyone at Drury Lane appreciated the fact. In April Elizabeth Sheridan wrote to her husband, ‘I am very glad The Rivals is to be got up at Drury Lane. I dare say it will bring very good houses especially if you alter Lydia Languish for Mrs Jordan. Is that to be done or how? [sic]’ Whether Sheridan wrote alterations to suit Dora or not – if he did, they have not survived – she duly appeared as Lydia Languish, with Miss Farren as Julia.18 And she managed to put in an appearance at the rival house, Covent Garden, too, doing The Country Girl in a benefit performance for widows and orphans.