Bundling children between Bushy and London was never easy, and required a good deal of support, but her enjoyment in combining her work with their visits to the theatre is obvious:
We have got safe to town but too late for rehearsal… the children Mr Lloyd and Mrs Sinclair went to Covent Garden Eliza and all but Adolphus [Eliza was now three, Lolly two] – I joined them after the Country Girl, and never saw anything like the delight and attention of Eliza she kept awake to the very end of the whole – they go to Sadlers Wells tonight but I think it will be better for Mary Frederick and Eliza to stay at home as it was very late last night…24
Sometimes they were taken to see their mother perform in the Richmond Theatre by Bushy neighbours. One evening when she was giving a charity show for poor families in the district, ‘two Temporary Boxes were erected on the Stage; in one of them sat the Earl of Athlone and his daughter, Lady Christiana Regina Ginkell, and the two Masters and the two Misses FitzClarence’.25 This was in 1802, when George was eight, Sophy seven, Henry five and Mary three. Their father and mother also took them to Christmas pantomimes at Covent Garden and Drury Lane: The Forty Thieves, Robinson Crusoe, Blue Beard.
During her first autumn at Bushy, Dora made a short working visit to Margate, where there was a very good theatre; it is still standing today, although it is hard to believe that Margate once rivalled Brighton as a fashionable resort, where duchesses and admirals went for the bathing and the sea air blowing over the cliffs, and were glad to be entertained in the evening. The Duchess of Cumberland, widow of the King’s brother, sent for twenty tickets for one of Dora’s appearances, and the Devonshires and the Bessboroughs were Margate visitors, and were especially appreciative and civil to her.26 She was such a success on her first visit that she returned many times, either in August or September, sometimes going on to Canterbury, Deal and once to Brighton.
The Duke did not accompany her on these visits; indeed, there is no evidence of them either taking a holiday or travelling together again after their stay in Dover in the summer of 1797. He would go to Brighton alone in August for the Prince of Wales’s birthday; when she went on from Margate to Brighton in September 1801, it was strictly as a working woman. She noted that the Prince of Wales lent his box to the Duchess of Marlborough, who wrote her a polite note, but when she was invited to a ball ‘by desire of several Ladies who will make a point of shewing her every attention’, she declined. She may have felt uneasy about appearing professionally in the Prince’s own territory, and being lionized there; and although she was warmly pressed to return to Brighton by the theatre manager, she declined.27 The Duke sometimes took some of their sons to Brighton without her; Harriet Bessborough saw him there with ‘three beautiful boys’ in October 1805.28 While they were enjoying the sea bathing, Dora was in London with Sophy and Mary, who were attending dancing lessons, and having their health checked by a court physician. Dora’s letters also speak of their having their ears pierced – Eliza frightened Mary by telling her the man would bore through her lobes with a red-hot needle – and their teeth looked at. About such matters, and indeed about everything to do with the children’s health and education, she was an extremely careful and conscientious mother.
She took none of the children to Margate; understandably perhaps, when you consider the difficulty of combining seaside holidays with her work schedule. There was also the fact that she was the object of so much attention she was sometimes forced to leave her lodgings by the back door to escape the crowd hanging about for a glimpse of her at the front. The person who did accompany her on the Margate visits, as well as her maid and manservant, was usually Lloyd. A clergyman may seem a curious companion for an actress, but he was eager to go; perhaps even a little stage-struck. His excuse was that his health required sea air, and he made himself useful and companionable. She gives a faintly satirical description of him, paddling on the beach by day and admiring the actresses backstage in the evening, but she liked him well enough. On one occasion he was with her in the coach, travelling late and after dark, near Sittingbourne, when they were threatened by two black-coated highwaymen; although they knocked Dora’s manservant off his horse, they lost their nerve and were driven off. She was grateful for Lloyd’s support on this occasion. Telling the Duke about it, she said she would not travel after dark again; but she only mentioned the incident to him for fear ‘you might have heard it with additions’. She meant through press reports; and she added, rather peremptorily, ‘Be so good as to write to the girls for the same reason, who may be alarmed.’29 ‘The girls’ were her three eldest daughters; and no doubt the Duke complied.
It was on the Margate stage too that she was nearly burnt when her costume caught fire, in August 1802, as she was playing The Country Girl. ‘I find by the papers of today that they have mentioned the accident that happened to me last Friday & which I was in hopes would not have taken wind,’ she wrote coolly to the Duke a few days later; ‘but as it is over, I may now tell you that I was near being burnt to death, my gown being in flames up to the waist so that I concluded my last scene in my petticoat. Notwithstanding all these disasters I shall come home safe to you & the dear children.’30 At least she was not pregnant when it happened; even so, she was formidable in her refusal to show fear or fuss. A few weeks later she was in Liverpool, still accompanied by Lloyd, and being pressed to go on to Preston and Ireland; she refused the latter, but agreed to stop at Preston on her way home. ‘I never saw so pleasant an audience,’ she wrote from Liverpool, adding, ‘Notwithstanding all this I feel quite forlorn.’ And a few days later, ‘On Saturday… I set out for dear dear Bushy. If the people of Liverpool knew how I long & pray for this day, they would think me very ungrateful… You have not yet mentioned the £100 I sent. Do, if you can, think of it in your next.’31
In Margate she sometimes had her sister Hester with her, and her brother Francis is mentioned also; it may have been easier to see them there than at Bushy, where they risked disturbing the Duke. According to The Times, a paper that displayed consistent hostility towards Dora, she first went there to earn money to pay off her brother George’s debts; and it implied there was something discreditable about this. She may well have been foolish not to resist his demands, but it is hard to see anything dishonourable about meeting them by her own exertions. If The Times felt she was a blot on the royal family, and her scrounging relations still more so, the facts of the matter were not as they imagined. She must have realized early in her relations with the Duke that, from a financial point of view, he was not much of a ‘protector’ – probably not as good as Richard Ford – but it made no difference to her affection for him. She was businesslike with theatre managers, but she was not at all businesslike, let alone mercenary, where he was concerned. He – or rather the King – provided her with a home, and he – or rather the taxpayer -– gave her an allowance; but she was always sending and lending the Duke money, in small and large amounts, and he often depended on her earnings to keep up the way of life to which he felt he had a right, and to stave off disaster. In May 1803, for instance, he found himself unable to settle the £2,000 he owed his upholsterer, and his bank in Bond Street was refusing any payments; he managed to scrape up some, and Dora, ‘whose benefit is on Monday, offered to give me the remainder, four hundred and fifty five’.32
Apart from money, everything flourished at Bushy: the Duke’s constant building works, the gardens, the dairy, the greenhouse, the farm – above all, the children. There was always a fat new baby in the nursery, and often one – or two – in her bed: two-year-old Lolly ‘having nearly escaped falling out of my bed twice on Wednesday night – I was obliged to put him in his own bed last night’,33 – she had a younger baby of one, and was just pregnant again. The top floor thundered with small feet running up and down the corridors; in the Family Room there were card games and billiards. There were peaceful evenings when they were all reading their books, or the girls singing and playing; Fanny helped Dora with their music lessons. There was
another tutor, partly to replace Lloyd during his absence, a Monsieur Champeaux – surely a French émigré – and later Mr Daniell, to whom the children became strongly attached. The Duke also appointed a second chaplain, with a still stronger theatrical bent than Lloyd, being the son of the playwright O’Keefe, well known to Dora. But John Tottenham O’Keefe had a short career. He came to Bushy from Oxford, and the Duke then presented him with a rich living in Jamaica; he sailed out in 1803, only to die of a tropical fever on arrival.34
Summer and winter, the children lived much of their time outside in the park with their animals. There were dogs, and they all had ponies, and then horses, as they grew. They might help Robin the farmer bring in the hay, or enjoy Dora’s tame pigeons with her. The boys went coursing for hares, and got covered in mud; no one thought of scrubbing them, she grumbled, until she came home. They also went to the races at Molesey and Ham. They fished, and later they learnt to hunt. Playing with them, Dora fell off ‘a Jack Ass’ one day; the donkeys were kept not only to work but also for their milk, prescribed by the royal doctors after the two great epidemics she nursed the children through: measles in 1805, whooping cough in 1807, with much rubbing in of embrocations, counting of ‘boils’, and many sleepless nights. George was at school in Maidenhead when the whooping cough struck, and Dora decided to take all the others over to visit him, and to spend the day at a nearby inn. The whole thing was a mistake: ‘It is not the most agreeable thing in the world to be shut up on a rainy day in a small Inn, with 8 children in the Hooping cough, I do believe the people would give up all the profits of our visit, to get us out of the house – I hardly know what I am doing for the variety of noises.’35
The children got better, and life at Bushy continued as pleasantly as ever. Grapes, flowers and peaches came from the greenhouse, and many oysters were consumed, as well as turkey, venison, partridges, pheasants, the occasional turtle and vegetable broth for the invalids. There was cricket in the park in summer; sometimes the curate at Hampton Church brought over a team of local boys to play. Dora arranged entertainments for everybody: ‘We are to have a conjuror here tomorrow evening from the fair at Kingston, he is to exhibit in the Hall, at 7 o’clock… I mean it as a treat for all the servants.’36 When Polly the Parrot flew away, they spent the day coaxing him out of a tree. On another summer’s day the colonel of a regiment stationed in the neighbourhood sent a message offering to send over his musicians to play for the family. It was accepted with delight. All the children ‘danced to the Band and were very happy’, she wrote to their absent father. ‘I did not get to bed till past one – Jemmet and myself seeing everything safe and quiet.’ Jemmet was a favourite, trusted old servant, and the image of the two of them going round the house together, the children sweetly sleeping in their beds upstairs after their day of sunshine, is one I like to think of as a high point of the family life.
‘I did not go to London,’ she added. Understandably, for she had spent the morning of the day of the dance with the builders working on the front of the house, and on the Duke’s new library. It was all business he was pleased to have her supervise on his behalf. On one occasion she presided over the laying of eight thousand turfs in the garden; on another, over the rehanging of all the pictures in the house.37
As well as supervising the accounts and building works in the Duke’s absences, she also intervened to preserve good relations with their neighbours. One of his many building projects on the outskirts of the park upset Mrs Garrick, who was still living on the small riverside estate her husband had laid out for his retirement; it was next to Bushy, and she felt threatened by the Duke’s plans. Dora put all her persuasive powers into urging him to give them up:
I have just had a visit from Mrs Garrick in the greatest distress about a building you are erecting opposite a principle [sic] Bow window of hers she says she is certain you do not know the detriment it will be to the Estate which cost her Husband so much money and pains to render beautiful or you with your goodness and condescension would not do it – if it can be done away I am sure you will do it and it will be a popular act to discontinue it, I wish you would let me say something handsome from you to the old woman who really seemed greatly agitated… if you continue the building you will have all the old cats at Hampton Court on your back… it would give me some pleasure, to be able to set the old soul’s heart at ease about it.38
Dora’s letter gives a precise impression of one aspect of life at Bushy, in which she had to juggle the Duke’s wishes with the need to be friendly with their neighbours; she manages to be placatory and firm with him at the same time, and to show her affection for old Mrs Garrick.
In this case her wise counsels prevailed. There is another letter telling him about Mrs Garrick inviting her and the children over to see her house and gardens with the Shakespeare temple and grotto, and to ‘stay as long as we pleased – this kindness you may be sure we availed ourselves of’. After this good relations flourished, because later she and Mrs Garrick took to going to the theatre together.39
Dora also intervened kindly in the matter of the Duke’s son William. It was she who took him off to school in 1802, and cheered him up the following year when he cried as she was about to leave, and said he would rather live with her: ‘However, I left him in very good spirits at last.’ A year later she again expressed sorrow at the thought of not seeing him for a long time, and asked if he might spend the day with George and Henry at Bushy before leaving: this time he was not going to school, but to follow in his father’s footsteps as a midshipman.40 From his ship, young William sent her ‘kind and affectionate letters’, and asked her to intercede for him with his father about his leave; she told the Duke, ‘I think Baptist [a Bushy gardener] might very easily send him grapes and peaches. You will of course let him come home when the ship is docked; he seems very anxious about it.’41 There can be no doubt that she replied to William’s letters with as much kindness and affection as he showed her.
Every summer the Duke had an attack of asthma. It varied in severity, sometimes responding to Nixon’s ministrations, sometimes needing more important doctors, but during the first ten years at Bushy it was never very bad. There were other things to plague him. In 1803 he was put in charge of the Teddington volunteers, the Home Guard of the Napoleonic wars, and found them very troublesome. Dora wrote to him from London, ‘I am sorry to hear that you are so plagued with the Volunteers I am afraid they are scarcely worth your trouble’; and then, ‘if you cannot make them serviceable for God’s sake let them go to the devil they are beneath your notice and example, neither the King nor his Ministers deserve it of you, and be assured you will make yourself unpopular in the neighbourhood when everybody was inclined to love you as you deserve.’42 At Drury Lane Dora would sing the most patriotic songs and speak lines urging the women of Britain to their duties – ‘Should British women from the contest swerve? We’ll form a female army of reserve,’ but she was too protective of the Duke, and too realistic, to want him to play at soldiers if it made him unhappy.43
In the summer of 1805 a young painter, George Harlow, a pupil of Lawrence and just making his reputation, came to paint the children. It seems likely he was commissioned to do them all in different groups, but the only one known to survive shows Frederick, Eliza and three-year-old Lolly. Eliza sat wearing a straw bonnet and a high-waisted dress with puff sleeves, and holding a posy; both her brothers wore wide frilled collars, and trousers under their knee-length jackets. Lolly has a mass of uncropped golden ringlets, and all of the children look as charming as any of those painted by Reynolds. Harlow showed them out of doors, Fred leaning on a large dog, Lolly holding a crimson banner with the royal arms of his grandfather the King blazoned on it.44 About the same time Beechey came to paint Dora again, not this time as a theatrical character but as the châtelaine of a great estate. It is a full-length portrait set against a rural landscape; she is plainly dressed, a fine shawl draped around her high-waisted dress, a serious and dignified expressi
on on her face, and neatly arranged hair.45 In fact it is the nearest thing to a royal pose she ever adopted, and the two pictures prompt the question whether the Duke had serious thoughts of legitimizing their union. In 1805 he was forty, and could be presumed to be settled in his ways. They had lived happily together for thirteen years; when the Prince of Wales suggested in 1799 that Clarence might marry a daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel in order to reduce the family debts, he had simply refused, ‘being satisfied with Mrs Jordan’; and nothing had changed since 1799 except that she had given him five more children.46
Boaden, who had known her and the Duke since 1799, said that ‘Whoever has had the happiness of seeing them together at Bushy, saw them surrounded by a family rarely equalled for personal and mental grace; they saw their happy mother an honoured wife, in every thing but the legal title, and uniformly spoke of the establishment at Bushy as one of the most enviable that had ever presented itself to their scrutiny.’ He added his admiration for the way in which she ‘devoted herself to [the Duke’s] interests and his habits, his taste and domestic pleasures’.47
The Duke’s career – or lack of it – apart, there seemed to be only one rift in his contentment, and that was her frequent working absences from Bushy. The loss of her company was not unbearable – he was often away himself – and he may have minded more that their children, and the household, and the whole royal family too, were so frequently reminded of her professional life and status. She might look like a duchess; she might be in most respects treated as his wife; she might behave in all respects as though she were his wife, as long as she was at Bushy; but at Drury Lane, or in Margate, she was unavoidably someone quite other. To many people – to Sheridan, no doubt, and to Coleridge and the young critics, to other managers, to all audiences – she was also someone greater than she could ever be at Bushy. If the Duke wanted her to approach more nearly to the status of wife, this may help to explain why, at the end of 1805, he decided she should devote herself entirely to their family life. He asked her to give up the stage. Other actresses – Elizabeth Farren, for instance – had done so unhesitatingly. It was the standard thing to do on acquiring a husband, and remained so throughout the next century; but where Dora was concerned, it was an extraordinary request. Nevertheless, for the next year and a half, she did as he desired, and became nothing more than the mistress of Bushy and the mother of his children.
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