Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  After this there was another row between Kemble and Dora, when they both wanted to put on Hamlet for their benefits. Kemble invited her to play Ophelia to Mrs Siddons’s Gertrude, and she refused, although it is unlikely she wanted Gertrude for herself. Sheridan, called on to arbitrate, told them neither could have Hamlet, at which Kemble performed his old success, Coriolanus, and then resigned and went off to Ireland. Dora, more boldly, tried something new and played Juliet. It was not one of her triumphs, but went well enough to be repeated several times; and at least she had just managed to fit it in between pregnancies.

  Sheridan was now struggling with the theatre’s finances, growing worse from month to month, and he found Dora’s pregnancies particularly exasperating. He wrote to William Adam – who acted as her lawyer and the Duke’s – in September 1796, when she was once again in this condition, to point out how much time she missed on their account: ‘It is to be observed (tho’ perhaps out of the Spirit of Chivalry) that when Mrs Jordan’s time comes to play according to the Letter of her article she will be unfit to perform anything worth her salary.’17 He need not have grumbled; Dora worked all through the autumn and into December, when she made a very pregnant Ophelia. She and Sheridan wrangled over the arrears of salary due to her, and her refusal to play parts she disliked. Once he went out to Richmond to ‘remove an impediment to Jordan’s playing tomorrow’ only to find ‘she does not return with her Duke till – ten o’clock – being gone to see her children’.18 It was bad luck for Sheridan, left to wander round the fields of Petersham; but we can be pleased to think of Dora and her Duke taking the babies to spend the day with their sisters, not unlike a busy late-twentieth-century career woman trying to fit the various elements of her scattered family together. The new manager of Drury Lane, Richard Wroughton, advised Sheridan to use ‘more soothing Terms’ when he dealt with Mrs Jordan, and bits of her salary were dribbled out to her: she got £20 on one day, £120 on another, then ten guineas on account in December. The winter settled into a cold spell. The weather was too much for Horace Walpole; he fell ill and was taken to London, and failed to return. Twickenham, Petersham and Richmond felt the loss of his watchful eye and witty pen, and so do we.

  Playbill for the only performance of Vortigern, the Shakespeare forgery, at Drury Lane on 2 April 1796. Note the musical entertainment following, with Mozart’s friend, Anna Storace, in the cast.

  Was Nell of Clarence happy? Partly, though she had her bleak times. Sometimes she felt the need to see more friends from her professional world. In such a mood she wrote ‘without ceremony’ (as he put it) to a newspaper editor and aspiring playwright, James Boaden, inviting him to visit her to discuss scripts, and to consider how she might extend her range. They became friends, and he took to calling regularly to talk about the theatre, often while the children played around them. For her it was useful to have a sympathetic journalist on call, and for him it was flattering; and there was genuine warmth on both sides too. The best result of this initiative of hers was one she could not possibly have foreseen, when, forty years later, Boaden became her first biographer.

  Other young men who were to become her champions in later years were coming into the theatre to see her for the first time in the mid-1790s. One was a Cambridge undergraduate and aspiring poet and playwright, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘Have you seen the Siddons this season? Or the Jordan?’ he asked a friend.19 Another was William Hazlitt, a minister’s son preparing for the ministry himself, but on the brink of abandoning his studies for a career as a critic and essayist; he was struck especially by the beauty of her voice, both singing and speaking – ‘like the luscious juice of the ripe grape’, he recalled – and by the impression she gave of enjoying whatever she did on stage, and sharing her enjoyment with the audience. There was never anything contrived, ‘dexterous or knowing’ about her performance, he said; it was all warmth and generosity. Another admirer, a young clerk, fresh out of Christ’s Hospital, was Charles Lamb, who particularly admired her in Shakespeare: as Rosalind, Ophelia and Helena in All’s Well. Hazlitt and Lamb became friends, but each cherished a quite different aspect of Dora’s playing. Lamb believed her plaintive parts outdid her much more popular comic ones; in particular he never forgot her sad Viola, telling her love to Orsino as though each line, each idea, had only just come into her head freshly as she spoke it.20

  When audiences rose to her with appreciation and understanding of this calibre, she became exultant, even ecstatic.21 The natural converse was that when she failed, or had to fight over productions and parts and money with the management, she became wretched. There is a note to the Duke this winter of 1796 from her dressing room after one such row:

  they are distracted about my refusing to play four times this week – Wroughton says it is their intention if I refuse, to leave me out of all new pieces. I said with regard to that they might do as they thought proper – tho’ between ourselves I should be very sorry if they did… I wish I was at home, when I am here I feel like a person deserted by the whole world, and open to all kind of unpleasant situations.22

  Only where was home? Another letter from Somerset Street to the Duke, who was at Windsor, on a dark morning, suggests she was weary of uncertainty on this matter:

  I returned last night at half past ten very much tired as you may suppose after playing in both Play & Farce… George is very well tho’ his cold is rather troublesome. You will let me know tomorrow whether you wish we should go to Richmond on Saturday or not. I could wish for the child’s sake more than for my own that we did not, as I fear he has caught this cold in going backwards & forwards so frequently. I wish you were come home as poor George and I feel quite alone in the world without.

  Dora was subject to sudden attacks of melancholy and panic all her life; they were the down side of the high spirits, the exuberance and energy she put into everything she took on – work, love, quarrels, child-rearing. She continued her letter about George: ‘I don’t know what I should do without him – he wont be a moment away from me – the first thing he did this morning as soon as he was awake was to pull open the curtain and call to me.’ Then, in the abrupt style of her letters, she finished, ‘I could almost wish you stayd at Windsor today, it is so very dark.’

  12

  The Man of the Family: Bushy, 1797

  By the winter of 1796, against all the odds and confounding the gossips, Mrs Jordan and the Duke of Clarence had become a comfortably settled couple, mutually dependent and devoted. Smart society was disappointed: Hoppner, staying with them at Petersham, judged the Duke to be ‘illiterate’ and was appalled to be carried off for ten- or twelve-mile walks daily after dinner; and he complained that ‘Mrs Jordan affords very little entertainment in Company. Her thoughts seem to be engaged abt. something not present’ – which was almost certainly the case.1 Their way of life was sober and decorous; the Duke was a fond and delighted father; and she was pregnant once again. Both Somerset Street and Clarence Lodge began to feel rather cramped. The prospect of children and nursemaids bursting out of every room drove him to action. He sent for John Soane, the architect who had already fitted up his apartments in St James’s Palace, and asked him to prepare plans for a new wing to be added to the lodge. Soane produced drawings with obliging speed; but before things could go any further, in January 1797, William was summoned by his father and offered something that made the enlargement of Clarence Lodge unnecessary.

  It seemed that the King had overcome his disapproval of his third son’s way of life enough to give him a helping hand. He was presenting him – unasked, as William proudly noted – with one of the many royal estates at his disposal: Bushy, a part of the Hampton Court Palace estates. Hampton and Bushy are not far upstream from Richmond and Petersham, on the opposite, Middlesex bank of the Thames, where Garrick’s villa also stood. Bushy House was set back at some distance from the river, and surrounded by more than a thousand acres of parkland, quite flat, but green and wooded. It was only two hours by coach from St James
’s, and not much more from Drury Lane, though it is unlikely the King had Dora’s convenience in mind; it was also easily large enough for their family.

  There was talk about such an unusual display of tolerance from the King towards his son’s domestic arrangements: ‘the Duke of Clarence has managed so well that the King jokes with him about Mrs Jordan’.2 To the ageing monarch almost anything may have seemed preferable to a repetition of the Prince of Wales’s marital behaviour: better one well-established mistress than two unsuitable wives. Even the Queen, who had once written to William that she could not ‘bear the idea of your being only Mediocre’ and urged him to aim at perfection, may have grown more reconciled to his mediocrity as a public personage, and concluded that a quiet life at Bushy would suit him well enough, for the time being at least.3

  William’s behaviour shows how entirely he now felt himself to be a family man; his first thought was to take Dora and the children to inspect Bushy. On 30 January 1797 they were observed looking it over with ‘a boy, like herself but less ugly, and a little girl,’ noted one diarist, sour, but intensely interested.4 George was just three, Sophy not yet two, neither of an age to appreciate the splendours of their future home, but the Duke regarded this as an excursion for them all to enjoy together. Driving into the wintry park through the gates opposite Hampton Court’s Lion Gate, they first passed a large, frozen ornamental pond, presided over by a statue of Diana, then proceeded along the triple avenues of leafless but still splendid chestnuts and limes planted by Christopher Wren, catching glimpses of ponds and a stream, and great patches of bracken in which deer were settled. There were scattered cottages, pheasant coverts, a hare warren and stable buildings. When they had almost reached the gates on the Teddington side of the estate, the house itself appeared. Cold and empty as it was, it must have delighted them.

  Bushy House was – and still is, though it can only be glimpsed from the park today, and has been almost surrounded by ugly modern buildings – a singularly attractive place.5 Once a royal hunting lodge, it was enlarged into a comfortable mansion in the 1660s, and stood, a good square block of red brick, with seven tall windows set across each side at each of its three levels and, beneath, great vaulted basements. The special charm of the plan was in the curving corridors – called quadrants – that sprout from the four corners of the building, each leading to a pavilion. When Dora and William first saw the house, the corridors were open colonnades; even closed in, as they are today, they give it a light-hearted appearance. They suggest summer and easy living. You can imagine parties, and children at play running along them between house and garden with shouts and laughter; as indeed a whole tribe of boys and girls was to run and shout and laugh throughout the fifteen years in which Dora lived there. It was to become her most settled, happiest and best loved home: ‘dear Bushy’ she often called it in her letters, always longing for it when work took her away.

  She had never lived in anything on this scale before. The main entrance, on the east front, was reached by a shallow flight of steps: inside you came into a large classically proportioned hall, marble-floored and pillared. From this opened all the great ground-floor rooms, most of them with tall windows on to the gardens. There were two drawing rooms, a dining room, a parlour, a study and a book closet. At the ends of the colonnades, the two pavilions on the south side of the house served as a ball room and a greenhouse. The northern ones housed the kitchens, offices and servants’ rooms, keeping them away from the house: it meant colder food perhaps, but greater intimacy for the family. The basement was for the storage of beer and wine, and provided more quarters for the large numbers of servants needed to run such a place.

  Through the whole length of the first floor ran a wide central corridor, lit by a south window that filled the house with sunshine; opening off it were a picture room, a magnificent ladies’ dressing room and the master’s and mistress’s bedrooms and dressing rooms. Again, the rooms for valet and maids were away from the house in the north wings. The top floor was obviously the children’s domain: two wide passages intersecting in the middle, and seven airy bedrooms with smaller ones attached for nurses; and two skylit storage and laundry rooms. On the plan drawn up by Soane that February a water closet is shown on each floor; at this date baths were still portable, although Dora and the Duke installed both bath and shower later.* From every upstairs window there were views over the parkland; and the rooms were all well proportioned. Some had ceilings ornamented with plaster work, patterns of garlands, ribbons and flowers, and delicate friezes.6 Dora was to reign over a household and estate as beautiful and grand as that of a true duchess, with dozens of staff and every sort of provision for comfortable living made on the premises and the estate.

  With the house went an official, though hardly taxing, position for the Duke. He was now the Ranger of Bushy Park, a title that meant as much or as little as its possessor chose. He could farm, frivolously or seriously; there were no duties so demanding that they would prevent him from taking up a naval appointment should one ever turn up. Earlier Rangers had included two Earls of Halifax; one had walled the park and attempted – and failed – to abolish a public right of way through it. The Duke’s immediate predecessor was Lady North, wife of the Prime Minister the King had favoured; the Norths had spent their summers at Bushy for over twenty years. Now Lady North was dead, the Duke expressed his sympathy to her daughter, and urged her to stay on in a smaller lodge in the park. She did not avail herself of the offer. Unmarried, she could hardly live on neighbourly terms with an irregular household, however domestic, however royal.

  She was not the only lady to be troubled by Clarence’s occasional tendency to blur the distinction between wife and mistress; Fanny Burney – now Madame D’Arblay – also complained that ‘the Duke had carried Mrs Jordan to Chesington’ and that one of her friends had innocently ‘received her [Mrs J.] as an honour, & accompanied her about the village, &c! -’. The mistake was explained to the unfortunate woman, and shuddered at, later. Madame D’Arblay’s indignation could be expressed only in a private family letter: meeting the Duke at court, in the room of his sister Princess Augusta, she was all respect, and mentally put the blame for the episode on his aide-de-camp.7

  The Duke, like many of his family, became an ambitious builder and decorator, with extremely lavish ideas. He found there was little he enjoyed so much as making alterations and ‘improvements’, ordering walls to be put up and knocked down, windows to be filled in, stairs and doors moved, rooms restructured, gardens redesigned. Bushy was quite habitable as it stood, and he entirely lacked the resources to set about altering it, but he decided at once that the old stables must be rebuilt and a second stable block put up. Some of the exterior steps must also be moved, and the colonnades altered. Soane was accordingly invited to breakfast and asked to transfer his attentions from Petersham to Bushy; his workbook records several visits to the Duke and to Bushy, and the making of drawings by his assistants, during February and March.

  Soane also submitted estimates for this work to the Treasury. The Duke’s grasp of financial matters was loose; he had been brought up to feel almost totally detached from any sense of personal responsibility, the notion that someone would provide always with him. This time his hope was that the work on Bushy would be paid for out of public funds, but he also immediately asked for a loan of £2,000 from his friend Coutts. Once again he declared that he intended from now on to live with ‘the strictest oeconomy’, adding that the money he hoped to borrow from Coutts was to go towards new furniture, and stock for the Bushy farm.8 There was also the matter of the Richmond shopkeepers with whom he had gradually fallen behind and who, on hearing he was going to move from Petersham, very sensibly began to ask for settlement of their accounts. He could not manage that without Coutts’s help; and a new house must have furniture and improvements, debts or no debts.

  The improvements were soon under way. Unfortunately Soane did not continue to supervise the work, and it seems to have progressed in a
haphazard way. Later, called in by the Treasury to look at the bills, Soane put in a report which suggested that neither the Duke nor his advisers knew how to control the operations, and that almost everyone concerned was ready to seize any chance to profit by his, or his steward’s, carelessness or gullibility. Soane provides the most vivid demonstration of just how vulnerable Clarence could be to cheating, and helps to explain how debts piled up for him, and for Dora too. Both were clearly regarded as ripe to be swindled wherever possible. The meticulous Soane found that the builders had often charged twice for both materials and work; he reduced the bill, item by item, by many hundreds of pounds.9 Unfortunately there was no equivalent of Soane watching over their other expenditure. The royal brothers treated money like children at play; a bet made between William and the Prince of Wales this year put a stake of £500 on whether Dora had ever acted in London before 1785. Having thought things over – or perhaps discussed the bet with Dora – the Duke offered to withdraw from it, on the grounds that it was a little too easy for him to win. He may have reflected too that the transfer of £500 from his brother’s debts to his own was in any case hardly more than notional.

  Now that Bushy House was his, who exactly was to live in it? Obviously, William himself and Dora; obviously too, George, Sophy and the next baby, with their train of nurses. The Duke’s chaplain, the Revd Thomas Lloyd, was also installed in an estate house with his young family. Dora’s maid and the Duke’s valet headed the list of servants; there would be a butler and a housekeeper, cooks, kitchen maids, parlour maids, still-room maids, footmen; and all the outside staff for the gardens, the stables, the dairy, the greenhouse. This was straightforward enough. Less so was the question of the extended family.