Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  you may safely congratulate me on my success: everything is arranged: they never were married: I have all proofs requisite and even legal ones. I have as quiet, full and ample possession of the house in Somerset Street as if I had been an inhabitant for ten years. No letter could possibly contain the particulars: suspend then judgment till we meet. In your way to Windsor come here Sunday… I am sure I am too well acquainted with your friendship to doubt for a moment you will, my dear brother, behave kindly to a woman who possesses so deservedly my heart and confidence, and who has given me so many unequivocal and steady proofs of the most uncommon steady attachment.39

  9

  Scandal: 1791

  Dora was accustomed to public attention, but the storm of abuse that broke about her when she was known to have accepted the Duke’s advances was unlike anything she had experienced before. It seems obvious that neither an actress nor a prince could hope to conduct their affairs in private, and that journalists and cartoonists, offered such an opportunity, should seize on it for all it was worth; even so, the savagery and ribald fervour with which they went for her shocks. The ferocity of their attacks could of course be justified in the name of public morality, on the grounds that it was the duty of the royal princes to set an example to the nation in their private lives, and that Mrs Jordan’s behaviour now associated her with their vices. The indignation may even have been genuine in part; but there is another strong whiff arising from the whole affair – the whiff of the satirists’ glee at getting hold of such a perfect story.

  The Duke was not a delicate man, and Dora was used to standing up before an audience and delivering broad jokes, but she winced and he protested when they saw themselves savaged in the windows of the print-shops, and mocked with the special relish that greets revelations of delinquency in the famous and privileged. Some of Gillray’s and Cruikshank’s drawings can still make you wince today. She had been teased in the press because of the question marks over her past and her private life, although usually with affection; but the love affair with a prince changed the perception of her disastrously for the worse. She was suspected of using her professional success to rise socially, and even with a view to leaving the stage. Some thought she was selling herself cynically; others were driven to particular spite because she and the Duke seemed to be enjoying themselves too much. Day after day, they were held up to the nation’s contempt.

  Dora made as splendid a leading lady for the satirists’ purposes as she did on stage; and their fun could be much more outrageous than hers. She was irresistible, and the Duke was quite as good a subject, not least because he lacked any notion of discretion. The spectacle of a second of the King’s sons blatantly following in the footsteps of the Prince of Wales, and with a woman he had stolen from another man, provided them with one glorious opportunity after another. Cruikshank drew ‘The Pot Calling the Kettle Black’, setting Dora alongside a Mrs Fitzherbert who strives to look superior. Venereal disease and drunkenness, both rightly thought to be attributes of the royal brothers, could be invoked in a cartoon showing the Prince of Wales sitting in a box, watching Dora on stage, and saying, ‘I’ll clap her’ while his brother administers gin from a large, leaky bottle.

  Gillray drew Dora and William together in a tumbled bed, he in post-coital slumber, she sitting up proudly and reflecting on her success. In one cartoon they were made to represent ‘Debauchery’. In another, captioned ‘A Burning shame and Adulterous disgrace’, Dora was shown with her breasts bared. A third set her on horseback, leading the princes to ruin, William riding behind with a chamber-pot on his head.

  ‘Jordan’ was a common term for a chamber-pot, so her name came in very handily. Just as the words ‘Little Pickle’ were understood by everyone to refer to her, the chamber-pot became an instantly recognizable visual symbol. Sometimes it was put over the head of the Duke; sometimes he was shown standing in it, with her prettily draped round the edge, naked and mermaid-like. In other drawings the pot reverted to its domestic function under the bed; the words ‘Public jordan open to all parties’ were written round one of these. The most effective and cruellest was Gillray’s simple picture showing Dora as a giant chamber-pot, cracked and with a vagina-shaped hole into which the figure of William is disappearing, giving a nautical shout of pleasure as he does so. His braided coat is hanging on a peg to one side, and her ankles and feet in dainty slippers appear below the pot. The caption reads ‘The Lubber’s Hole, alias The Crack’d Jordan’. It was bad luck for Dora that Gillray was a genius, and that he struck off here a brilliant surreal image that imprints itself on the eye at once, and stays. It must have haunted her: an image to make its victim reluctant to face friends, enemies, family – Fanny was old enough to be aware of written words and pictures – colleagues, servants, or even strangers in the street; that could wake her at two in the morning in a cold sweat of humiliation.

  There were political as well as moralistic elements in these attacks. With the French reforming their society across the channel, a significant number of the English were sympathetic to egalitarian ideas and efforts, and the spectacle of a brood of idle princes living extravagantly at the expense of the nation evoked strong disapproval. When it was rumoured that William was making a financial settlement on Dora, she could be presented as yet another drain on the nation’s purse. Since actresses were routinely accused of being mercenary, and of using their public appearances to get rich lovers, some suggested she had set out to entrap the Duke. Others mocked their financial arrangements from the opposite end. One paper reported that Little Pickle’s ‘new FRIEND… actually received her week’s salary from the Treasurer, on Saturday last’ at the theatre.1 This story was so good that it was taken up by the comic versifier Peter Pindar:

  As Jordan’s high and mighty squire

  Her playhouse profits deigns to skim;

  Some folks audaciously inquire

  If he keeps her or she keeps him.

  This version remained in the mythology. Those who thought she was the one who had been fooled warned her of the risks she was taking; the usual attention span of the princes did not inspire confident predictions for her future. Her mistake in thinking she might become a duchess was mocked in a cartoon showing her gazing into the mirror in her dressing room, which gives a false reflection in which she is wearing a coronet.

  There was sympathy for Ford, who had seen his mistress and the mother of his children pinched by a rival with advantages that owed more to social position than merit. In mid-December a newspaper reported that a ‘Naval Officer’ (i.e., the Duke) was infesting the Haymarket Theatre to the annoyance of everyone working there, and that he had asked ‘Mr S’ (i.e., Sheridan) to forbid Mr Ford from going backstage. ‘Mr S very properly told the naval officer, that Mr Ford’s behaviour, as a gentleman, precluded such a prohibition; and that in point of right, Mr F had as much pretention as (Mr S) himself.’2

  The Duke busied himself trying to stop attacks that were sometimes precipitated by his own behaviour. He even applied to Sheridan for advice about how to silence the press, not stopping to think that there might be something awkward about going to the husband of a woman he had quite recently attempted to seduce. Sheridan, understandably enough, passed him on to the Controller General of the Post Office, John Palmer, who was a former theatre manager, and knew Dora; and the Duke’s lawyer urged Palmer to try to silence the Morning Herald, which had been particularly vicious in its attacks. Whether this had any effect or not is impossible to tell; the Duke went on agitating, and urged his lawyer to prosecute the publishers of a scandalous book that revived the Daly story. But more books and pamphlets followed, with titles like Little Pickle or the Pretty Plotter.3

  She continued at the Haymarket while the punishment went on until, at the end of November 1791, she became so distressed that she refused to appear. This precipitated further mockery and abuse, and she was accused of faking illness. The Duke called in the royal physicians, who said she must remain at Petersham for at least two we
eks.

  Dora suffered, but not in silence for long. When she was attacked for abandoning her children – ‘To be mistress of the King’s son Little Pickle thinks respectable, and so away go all tender ties to children’ wrote Bon Ton magazine4 – she reasonably enough asked Ford to write a letter stating that she had not done so. He obliged with a statement declaring that

  her conduct has… been as laudable, generous, and as like a fond mother as in her present situation it was possible to be. She has indeed given up for their use every sixpence she has been able to save from her theatrical profits. She has also engaged to allow them £550 per an. and at the same time settled £50 a year upon her sister. ’Tis but bare justice for me to assert this as the father of those children.

  He wrote a further note, again at her request:

  In gratitude for the care Mrs Jordan has ever bestowed upon my children, it is my consent and wish that she should, whenever she pleases, see and be with them, provided her visits are not attended by any circumstances which may be improper to them or unpleasant to me.5

  Now, in order to silence the attacks on her in relation to the children, Dora gave Ford’s statements to the press. This made him so angry that he wrote in turn to the Morning Post to say he had not authorized their publication; though one wonders what he thought the purpose of the letters was if they remained private. He then took himself across the channel to recover; his father was still in France, keeping clear of the financial tangles of Drury Lane in which he still feared involvement. According to Sheridan, this was ‘a meer matter of unnecessary caution’, but Dr Ford preferred to stay safely away. Father and son, feeling themselves to be fellow victims of the conduct of their one-time theatrical idols, licked their wounds ruefully together in Rouen.6

  Dora also used the press at the end of November when she was attacked for failing to appear at the Haymarket. She wrote a letter from the theatre that she sent to several newspapers, including The Times, making the point that the public had no right to concern itself with anything outside her professional life.

  I have submitted in silence to the unprovoked and unmanly abuse which, for some time past, has been directed against me; because it has related to subjects about which the public could not be interested; but to an attack upon my conduct in my profession… I think it my duty to reply.

  Nothing can be more cruel and unfounded than the insinuation, that I absented myself from the theatre, on Saturday last, from any other cause than real inability, from illness, to sustain my part in the entertainment… I would not obtrude upon the public an allusion to anything that does not relate to my profession, in which alone I may, without presumption, say, I am accountable to them; but thus called on, in the present instance, there can be no impropriety in my answering those who have so ungenerously attacked me, that if they could drive me from that profession, they would take from me the only income I have, or mean to possess, the whole earnings of which, upon the past, and one-half for the future, I have already settled upon my children.

  She went on to say she had been ‘injustly and cruelly traduced’ in the matter of her children; otherwise, she did not attempt to defend herself.

  It is a good letter, clear and businesslike. Boaden says it was greeted with sneers, and certainly The Times first failed to print it and then commented rudely, ‘she declares that if driven from the stage, she shall be deprived of the only income she has, or means to possess. If this be the case, we cannot help saying there are certainly more fools than one in the world.’7 The insulting implication was that her career was of no account and could easily be given up; and that she should as a matter of course rely on the Duke to support her and her children in future.

  She did accept a financial settlement from the Duke on 4 November, but she had no intention of giving up her career. The settlement was made through lawyers, and by its terms she received £840 a year from the Duke, paid as a quarterly allowance; his income, it will be remembered, was £12,000 a year. At the same time she transferred her entire savings, invested in government stock, to her sister and Richard Ford, for the future provision of their daughters, and promised to give them an annual allowance of £600. She also continued to be responsible for Fanny, and for her house in Somerset Street. So it is not surprising that she felt indignant at the accusations levelled against her. The difference between her arrangement with the Duke and the settlements made when the daughters of the rich married was that theirs were made by their fathers or brothers; whereas Dora had to make her own terms for herself and her children.

  She was back on stage earlier than the doctors permitted, on 10 December. The audience was hostile. There were shouts, boos and hisses. Instead of leaving or showing she was angry, she came forward and spoke to the house. She was unsmiling and straightforward. She said she had never absented herself for one minute from the duties of her profession except when she was ill; and that as a result she considered herself ‘under the public protection’. Only when she saw she had won the audience over did she allow a smile to appear. The effect was perfect. Boaden, who was present, said nothing in the play that night was quite so good as that moment. In the theatre at least she was victorious over her enemies. Even Kemble wrote in his diary, ‘Mrs Jordan made an Apology this Night, and all is well again.’8 But it was not an apology: it was a claim upon the loyalty of the audience and their solidarity with her. She worked for them, and – contrary to the view taken by The Times – she took her work seriously; and she expected them to be on her side.

  10

  ‘The only rival you can ever have’

  Was the blundering Duke worth the commotion? Uncouth, uncultivated and prone to take up bad causes – he was a keen supporter of slavery, for example – he looks all too much of a royal Bottom to Dora’s Titania. But she found him lovable; and although we can see, with hindsight, that it would have been better if she had never met him, she was drawn into the carnival, found herself at the whirling centre, and could not stop to consider or get away. Her first letters to him are sometimes tremulous, as though she felt she were indeed living through a fairy story, and he might sprout wings or carry her off in a magic pumpkin. How was it possible for a hardened Drury Lane actress who had seen the Prince of Wales at work on her colleagues to react like this? The answer is, as easily as for Elizabeth Sheridan, or Fanny Burney, or Mary Robinson, or almost anyone else. Royal blood confers charm, wit and even profundity on its lucky possessors. Even historians are sometimes vulnerable to it – Roger Fulford claimed that ‘all the sons of George III had abilities far above the average’ – so it is not too surprising that Dora Jordan found an irresistible glamour in being loved and courted by a real prince of the blood.1

  The magic of royalty was not the only thing: for all his faults and deficiencies, he was a warm, outgoing creature, and she had been living with a man who had turned chilly. The Duke was energetic, passionately in love with her, and burning to display his love. He wanted to protect her; he called the best doctors when she was ill; he did his utmost to silence the press when it snarled and growled. He was kind and jolly with her daughters. He showed an interest in her working life and was proud of her professional reputation. He had an easy-going temper. He was not clever, or smart, like the Prince of Wales, but much more of an innocent, as much in need of a mother as a mistress. At twenty-six he longed for affection, and for the warmth of domestic life. Dora could give him both; and may have been encouraged by knowing she could supply what was needed.

  And her effect on him was tonic. Not only was her dedication to her work exemplary, she also provided a centre and order to his life. She gave him good advice. Under her tactful guidance he largely gave up drinking – the exception being when he visited the Prince of Wales, which meant being on what Dora called ‘hard duty’ in that department. She teased him and even quarrelled with him, but she was loyal and constant. As one satirist wrote, congratulating him on his good fortune,

  She’s in truth the best feather you have in your cap.r />
  How you got her, to me, I must own, is a wonder!

  When I think of your natural aptness to blunder.2

  There was no question of marriage. All the Princes were under the constraint of the Royal Marriages Act, which they dealt with according to their temperaments. The Prince of Wales pursued his own duplicitous course. Frederick, Duke of York, obediently married the German princess selected for him and then lived mostly apart from her and had no children. The fourth son, Edward (later Duke of Kent), invited a young Frenchwoman, Julie de Saint Laurent, to live with him and settled down to decades of complete domestic happiness; whether they were married, and whether they had children, remains uncertain. Prince Ernest (later Duke of Cumberland) lived a generally profligate life, and had one known illegitimate son, FitzErnest; he was also suspected of making incestuous advances to one of his sisters. Prince Augustus made an illegal marriage in Rome, and fathered two children of uncertain status. The Princesses pined for husbands into their thirties and forties, or in vain.

  Dora was disqualified as a possible royal bride, not only by being illegitimate, and an actress, and the mother of three children, but because she had not the right type of blood flowing in her veins: royals were supposed to marry other royals. The Duke’s letters have not survived, and hers to him make no mention of the subject of her status, so there is no way of knowing how he explained his position to her; and perhaps no explanation was necessary, seeing what promises of marriage had done for her and her mother. But Dora was not a Mrs Crouch or an Emma Hamilton, ready to have a fling and then forget it, or to be passed from one admirer to another; and there was nothing casual about the setting up of the terms on which she and William were going to live together. There could be no church blessing, but there was a settlement, in its way a serious thing that acknowledged her dignity. In the eyes of the world the Duke became her ‘protector’, a word wonderfully unsuitable, but understood by everyone.