Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  14

  The Serpent Enters Paradise

  The happiness of life at Bushy, lasting like a long high summer for nearly ten years, could not entirely be proof against the world outside: against war, or death, or disapproval. The war in France came to a pause in 1802, but broke out again the following year; the Duke’s Volunteers were called against an invasion scare, when Napoleon’s troops massed on the channel coast, and this particular threat did not end until the autumn of 1805. At this time the Duke visited his old naval friend Nelson, his hero and now the whole nation’s, who had achieved everything Clarence would have liked to have done. Dora was also invited by Nelson’s mistress, Lady Hamilton, and drove to their house in Surrey, taking Lucy, Sophy and Henry with her.1 Soon after these visits Nelson left. He was killed in battle at Trafalgar in October. The Duke was overcome with grief; he also decided to express his feelings in a piece of characteristic building work. At his request, part of the mast of Nelson’s flagship, the Victory, was brought to Bushy, a mound was raised in the garden and a small round, classical temple built on the top to house the relic.2 He also began to brood about going to sea again himself.

  Nelson’s state funeral in January 1806 marked the start of an altogether uneasy year. Pitt died, worn out, in January. Fox and Sheridan were in power for a few months, then Fox too died in September. The Duchess of Devonshire, not yet fifty, died, watched over by her adoring sister through the agonizing last days; so did Richard Ford, also in his forties, leaving a young family as well as his two daughters by Dora. Although he seems to have long since lost contact with them, still a father is a father, and they – and Dora – must have felt a pang and a sense of loss. Another loss – the departure of her brother George for America – was more of a blessing, although he left a tangle of debts for her to deal with, and she wrote irritably of ‘the trouble, expence and vexation I have suffered on the account of my brother and sister since I was fourteen years old’; he too died within a year.3

  John Bannister sent her some plays to read to lure her back to the stage, and she wrote back affectionately, saying her ‘theatrical health’ was on the decline; she did not take on the parts he suggested. ‘The three tragedies you sent me I have read this day; and notwithstanding there’s much pretty writing in the part you mention, I do not think I could do myself or the author any service by undertaking it. I think Mrs Siddons would do great justice to it,’ she added magnanimously, adding, ‘I find laughing agree with me better than crying.’4

  So she sat out the spring and summer at Bushy. Fanny gave a ‘rural fête’ at Gifford Lodge in July, and in August the Duke was recovered enough from mourning Nelson to celebrate his own forty-first birthday with a large party. He prepared for it by installing a new dining room and redecorating the hall with clouds on the ceiling – a fashionable effect of the time – bronze pilasters and brilliant lamps suspended from an eagle. Two of his brothers, the Dukes of York and Kent, sent over bands to play on the lawn, and the pleasure grounds were open to the public. The music was worth listening to; one of the bands was a wind group that played parts of Haydn’s The Creation, specially arranged. At five o’clock the Prince of Wales and four of the royal brothers – York, Kent, Sussex and Cambridge – arrived, with the Lord Chancellor, the Attorney-General, the Earl and Countess of Athlone and other aristocrats and dignitaries; everyone amused themselves in the grounds until seven, when the Prince of Wales took Mrs Jordan by the hand and led her to the top of the table in the new dining room; the Duke of Clarence was at the other end. Later, the children were brought in, down to the youngest, Tuss, whose beautiful fair hair was much admired; there were toasts to the King and Queen, and a cannon was fired on the lawn.

  From one point of view, this was a happy family party, a group of loving brothers and uncles gathered to celebrate on a summer evening. It also looked like Dora’s social apotheosis; and as such there was something sham about it. There was nothing sham about Dora herself, but about the royal playacting around her there was; and the whole occasion led to disaster. There were press reports. They attracted the attention of the most brilliant radical journalist of the day, William Cobbett; and Cobbett devoted a long attacking article to the Bushy party in his magazine, the Political Register.

  First he claimed to believe that the report of the occasion must be untrue, since the royal family was known for its piety and morality, whereas the playing of music from The Creation made a blasphemous connection between God’s creative work and the Duke of Clarence’s creation of a large illegitimate family. After this ponderous piece of irony, Cobbett continued.

  We all know that the Duke of Clarence is not married, and that therefore if he had children, those children must be bastards, and that the father must be guilty of a crime in the eye of the law, as well as of religion, – and that he would exhibit a striking example of that vice and immorality which his Royal father’s proclamation, so regularly read to us by our pastors, commands us to shun and abhor, and enjoins upon the magistrates to mark out and to punish whenever they shall find them existing among us.

  The proclamation Cobbett referred to was a moral manifesto put out by King George at the beginning of his reign, ‘For the encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for preventing and punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality’. It was read out four times a year in every church and chapel in the country, at the King’s wish, as a reminder of his insistence that moral standards should be upheld, although it was unfortunately obvious that those closest to the crown were not much impressed by its urgings. Cobbett went on to say the unmarried Duke would be insulting the laws, manners and morals of the whole country if he really had a family at Bushy; and that ‘Mother Jordan’ (‘who, the last time I saw her, cost me eighteen pence in her character of Nell Jobson’) could not possibly be involved. He begged the royal family to deny the whole thing, for fear such reports should damage the throne, and make Parliament unwilling to vote taxes to maintain it.5

  Cobbett’s article was well founded as an attack on the royal Princes – rightly seen as the great drones of the nation – and the Duke must have been shaken. Whether it was fair also to go for Dora is another matter. He chose to insult her both as an actress and as a mother, without justification in either case, except that she was unmarried. She had surely earned her own keep more than any other woman in the land. Dora was wounded and frightened, and felt damaged in the eyes of the public.

  Then came a private tragedy. In March 1807 the news reached them that William, the Duke’s eldest son, was dead. He had been drowned at the beginning of February, when his ship, the Blenheim, disappeared off Madagascar in a cyclone; the wreck was never found. Dora loved the boy; he had been the playmate of all the other children, and his death, alone and far away, cast a chill over the whole family. Ten-year-old Henry in particular had a feeling for William, perhaps because he already knew he was to follow him into the navy; when a letter came from William to his father, Henry, recognizing the hand, had simply opened it and read it.

  William’s death made the question of her own sons’ future suddenly much more ominous. Their father declared that the army and the navy offered not only the best, but the only possible professions for them all. ‘I shall make five sons of mine fight for their King and Country,’ he told a friend. To him, it was as though he were making a personal offering to the nation; he may even have seen it as an answer to Cobbett.6 His sons were to be his justification and his war effort. He believed Britain needed every man – and boy – to fight off the threat of Bonaparte, and also that the services offered them their best chance in life, and a more honest and honourable one than the only possible alternatives of politics, the church or the law. By 1807 the Duke had already allocated the boys between the two services. George and Frederick were for the army, Henry and Adolphus for the navy; soon two-year-old Tuss was promised to the navy too.

  The boys, brought up to believe that the army and navy offered the best of excitement and glory, and sent away to school with
other lads destined for the same future, were not likely to protest. George returned to the military college at Marlow at the beginning of February and was immediately given a commission in the Prince of Wales’s 10th Hussars, as a cornet, the junior officer who carries the colours in a cavalry regiment. His imagination was fired; he was a clever as well as a high-spirited boy, but he began to neglect his studies. All he could think of now was the prospect of joining his regiment and seeing action.

  Before George had his wish, Henry started his working life at the age of eleven, as a midshipman. No doubt he went enthusiastically, aware that he was following in his father’s footsteps, and reared on tales of Nelson and glory. He was sent to the Baltic to serve under the Duke’s (and Nelson’s) friend Admiral Keats, aboard the Superb. Keats had the reputation of caring for the boys aboard his ship more like a father than a master, but it was still a tough initiation: that winter they were frozen into the ice, and Henry did not return home for fourteen months. To Dora (and to us) he was still a child: ‘Two years is a long time to lose the society of so dear a child as Henry,’ she wrote before he went away a second time, ‘but we must give up our children to the World, for our own sakes, and I will reconcile myself to the separation as well as I can.’7 Henry was small for his age and he had a quick brain, for languages especially, and enjoyed reading; one of the things he asked his mother for was a copy of Tristram Shandy.

  When the news of William’s death came she was awaiting the birth of yet another baby. Bushy was, as usual, in the hands of the builders, and the Duke was away a good deal, leaving her to cope; she wrote to him expressing the hope the alterations to her bedroom would be finished by the middle of March (‘which is the time I shall want it’) and complaining mildly that ‘I really don’t know how to manage the bricklayers.’8 In the event all went well. He returned, her room was ready, Nixon performed efficiently, and a fifth daughter for the Duke made her appearance on 21 March. She was named Amelia, after the Duke’s youngest sister; but she was usually called Mely.

  Dora was forty-five. We know this was her last child, and feel it as a relief. Naturally she did not share our knowledge, although she may have thought she had had enough: ten for the Duke, three for Ford, one for Daly. Lying with the little girl in her arms, she could go back in her mind over twenty-four years, to Fanny’s birth in Hull, Dora’s in Edinburgh, Lucy’s in Gower Street; George and Sophy in Somerset Street; Henry at Petersham; Mary, Freddles, Eliza, Lolly, Ta and Stump all here at Bushy. To modern ears such a roll-call has a comic sound, and we have to remind ourselves that to her they were never an undifferentiated troop. Her heart’s blood was in each of them, and each was entirely individual and precious, as is made abundantly clear in her letters. She had not handed them over as most great ladies did, to be brought up apart from her; she had fed them herself, nursed them through their illnesses, stayed up all night at their bedsides and put off her work when necessary, taken them with her into the theatre and entered into their pleasures and amusements. When she was parted from them, she dreamt of them, worried about them and wrote to them; and she took an intense pride in each of them.

  Now, while she nursed Mely, she was busy arranging Fanny’s marriage settlement. Fanny was going to marry Thomas Alsop, a young man who worked in the ordnance office, which dealt with military supplies. He was only a clerk, but a very presentable one. The ordnance office was full of young men like him, with the manners of gentlemen, but short of the income to support a gentleman’s life-style. Dora thought he was ‘a clever and honourably minded young man, but poor and proud, two sad things when united’.9 He made himself agreeable, however, and was approved by the Duke as well as his future mother-in-law. Fanny was twenty-four, and had not received any suitable offers until now, perhaps because of her anomalous position. Alsop may well have been attracted to her; he also saw his chance. Her promised dowry of £ 10,000 was a huge fortune, and her connections could give his career the push it badly needed.

  With the prospect of the money that would come with Fanny, Alsop took an expensive house in Park Place, Mayfair, and suggested that her sisters might like to share it with them after the marriage. Then he introduced Dodee to a charming colleague from the ordnance office, Frederick March, who, exactly like Alsop, was ambitious to escape from lowly clerking and aspired to a grander way of life. March had a good reason: he knew himself to be the son of Lord Henry Fitzgerald and the grandson of the Duke of Leinster; Lord Edward Fitzgerald was his uncle, Charles James Fox his cousin. The only drawback was that he was illegitimate. The Fitzgeralds acknowledged March and made something of a favourite of him; but that did not alter his material situation. No doubt March asked himself why he should not enjoy the same pleasures and privileges as his father, his cousins and his grandfather; when he saw his opportunity, like Alsop, he was not going to miss it. There was something else at work in his mind. Dodee and Fanny both came, like him, from the ranks of the illegitimates. However privileged they might be, they were also despised; the difference between them and him was that their mother had the power and the wish to make them rich. In the summer of 1808, when Fanny’s wedding took place, he called at Bushy with his father, Lord Henry, and made himself extremely agreeable to Mrs Jordan and the children. Dodee was welcomed by the Fitzgeralds, and everyone at Bushy found March engaging. They married early in 1809. Both the Alsops and the Marches began at once to live beyond their means.

  It was not too surprising. They found themselves in a society that offered expensive pleasures – horses, gambling, clubs, fine clothes and furniture, drink and drugs – and the temptation of easy credit. Debt was the condition of the age. Tradesmen were always ready to meet the demands of today against the promise of future payment; the flagrant example of so many members of the royal and aristocratic families availing themselves of tradesmen’s willingness was naturally followed by anyone else who could get away with it. Thomas Alsop and Frederick March had the spectacle of the lavish life-style of Bushy before them, maintained – as far as they could see – by the royal purse. To them it must have seemed bottomless: why should they not have their share? Alsop and March saw their mother-in-law as a supplier of money, and not just what she had promised her daughters; they asked her charmingly for more when they needed it, and when March wanted to raise still more, he used her name without asking. With them, as with the Duke, she forgot to be cautious or businesslike.

  She realized that it was necessary for her to earn more money; and when Mely was six months old she persuaded the Duke to let her return to Drury Lane. The theatre was in increasing difficulties under Sheridan’s distracted management; she was older, and she accepted a drop in her fees to £30 a week. Sheridan had brought in his son Tom, also newly married and needing a job, to help to run his theatre; he himself was in ever worsening personal financial trouble. When he entertained in London, his guests noticed that some of the ‘servants’ were theatre employees; others were even said to be debt collectors persuaded to put on livery for the evening: he could still charm even the most unlikely people. But he was on poor terms with Hecca, who had tired of his drinking and his unreliability, and they lived mostly apart. In moments of fantasy he was prepared to bet that he could restore the glories of the past: £500 that he would write and produce another play of his own. In harsh reality he was desperately seeking a new manager to put some money into Drury Lane and restore its fortunes.

  The return of Mrs Jordan was a good augury, and he invited her to open the season, which she did. ‘I am just return’d from the opening of Drury Lane! Mrs Jordan was received with boundless applause; she is terribly Large, but her voice and acting still delightful,’ wrote Harriet Bessborough to an absent lover.10 Dora’s largeness became the subject of comment from this time on. For some it spoiled their pleasure when she played youthful parts; others found her size less than they had been led to believe and, since her powers as an actress were undiminished, thought nothing of it. But she herself mentions ‘growing large’ in some of her let
ters to the Duke, and jokes about people thinking she was pregnant when she was not; so perhaps she was a little sensitive on the subject.

  She was in London working through the autumn and right up to Christmas 1807. Most of the children were with her, in a new house she had taken in Mortimer Street. In October the Duke was in Norfolk, and caused considerable surprise to the local post master, who spread it about ‘that the Duke writes to Mrs Jordan every day’.11 Sometimes she ‘ran down to Bushy’ in his absence, although the children obviously enjoyed being in London: ‘I do not play next week and have used all my eloquence to persuade the children to go to Bushy and even tempted them with no Book, but I could not succeed – we all stay at home this evening, but they insist on being amused tomorrow – Lloyd is in town and I must contrive it.’12 Frederick, Lolly and Tuss went with Lloyd to Greenwich for a day, and to the Tower for another. Mely had to be inoculated, but not until the weather was cold enough. Later George and Sophy were at Bushy with their father, and she took the younger ones to the pantomime in town, the ‘worst I think ever exhibited and nearly caused a riot’. There are no letters covering Christmas, which must have been spent at Bushy all together.