Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  Lolly served in the navy for thirty-nine years, but when he had his portrait painted, it was not as a naval officer but as a Byronic corsair, resplendent in plumed and jewelled hat, with pistol, cutlass, striped collar and buckled belt: a very handsome young man in fancy dress, with black flashing eyes and curly hair like his mother’s. He was another devoted theatre-goer, and was said to ‘cling to the minutest recollection of his gifted mother’.19 He went out of his way to assist Madame Vestris when she set up as manager of the Olympic Theatre, getting the King to allow her stage designers to study the rooms at Hampton Court; and he was also involved in the founding of the Garrick Club, intended as a meeting place where those two distinct groups, gentlemen and theatrical people, might be able to meet.

  Frederick remained in the army all his life, without ever seeing active service. He married a daughter of the Earl of Glasgow, and was generally liked for his ‘frank and generous disposition’.20 It was to him that Queen Adelaide gave the hundreds of letters written by his mother that she found at Bushy after the death of his father. In 1852 Frederick was sent to India to command the forces in Bombay, and there he died within two years. The letters were presumably left in England, which helps to explain how they became scattered; his only daughter did not marry.21 Lolly remained a bachelor, and preserved all his mother’s letters most carefully. Tuss, at the age of forty, married the sixteen-year-old Lady Sarah Gordon and took her to Mapledurham. He named their first child Dorothea after his mother, fathered several more, then died suddenly of blood poisoning in 1854, greatly mourned in the village.22

  And George, the infant Hercules, darling of both his parents? He embittered his father’s life and his own by quarrels and demands that were never satisfied, and could not be satisfied: what he was asking for was a replay of his life, with different circumstances. I believe George kept alive a hope that somehow he would after all find himself on the throne of Great Britain: he so clearly had the physique, the intelligence, the courage, the will; he was the right sex, and he was the son of the King. When he saw his cousin, little Princess Victoria, ascend in his place, he may have told himself that she could easily go the way of his other cousin, Princess Charlotte. There was another cousin now, young George Cambridge, but who could tell what might yet happen? George had sons of his own; but Princess Victoria married; she had a daughter; then, in November 1841 she gave birth to a son, Edward, the first male heir born to a reigning monarch in living memory. In December he was created Prince of Wales, amid national rejoicing. George Munster was abroad, settling his two elder sons in a military college. In late November he had written from Paris to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, asking if he might be found public employment of some kind in Europe, in order to earn money for his sons, who could expect almost nothing. The letter referred to ‘my very peculiar Position’, said the Queen was fully aware of it and had ‘expressed herself, with relation to its improvement, in the most gracious and feeling manner, through Lord Melbourne’; and it went on to say Peel should simply refuse his request if it caused him the least embarrassment, and that George would call on him on his return to London.23

  Evidently Peel did nothing for him. George returned to London and, four months later, on 20 March 1842, as he sat alone in his library late on a Sunday night, he killed himself. The footman told the inquest that he heard a shot, went to see what had happened, and found his master with his right hand blown to bits; Lord Munster said he had had an accident, and as the footman went for help there was a second shot. This time George put the gun in his mouth, with his left hand, and blew out his brains. The gun was one given him by his uncle, George IV.24 Two days later Peel wrote to Adolphus, expressing his regret, explaining that ‘The Queen has this day put into my hands a Letter connected with that sad Event – which I believe was delivered by you at the Palace for Her Majesty’ and adding, ‘I will communicate personally with you upon the subject of it.’25*

  Lord Melbourne told the Queen that George had always been ‘an unhappy and discontented man, and there is something in that unfortunate condition of illegitimacy which seems to distort the mind and feelings and render them incapable of justice and contentment’.27 On the face of it, he was right. The jury returned a verdict that the ‘deceased destroyed himself by his own hands whilst labouring under temporary mental derangement’. The funeral left his house in Belgrave Square at eight o’clock in the morning, followed by carriages bearing kind Queen Adelaide and members of George’s family. It proceeded through Knightsbridge, through Fulham, through Wimbledon and Kingston; and at last, at eleven thirty, it arrived at the parish church at Hampton, where George had attended with his father and mother and all his brothers, sisters and half-sisters on Sunday mornings, riding or driving across Bushy park to get there. He was laid beneath the nave of the church, in a vault under a plain slab; whether he chose his burial place himself or left it to his family, it seemed the right spot.28

  When his closest sister, Sophy, had died in childbirth early in 1837, George wrote to his father, using a striking phrase: ‘Death has already commenced his havoc amongst us.’29 He was a man who thought about death, and also thought much of his family. Some time in the 1820s he had himself painted by George Hayter with all his brothers and sisters, gathered together in a room in Bushy. He called it ‘the great family picture’, and it is very curious.30 They form a group around a bust of their father, set on a high plinth above them in the middle; on the wall, still higher, but far away to one side, is the Romney portrait of their mother (inexplicably reversed); and behind the bust is another painting, showing a boy with his dogs: it is plainly Henry, who could not be missed out. When George asked his father for titles, land and money, it was not so much simple acquisitiveness as compensation, a desire to fix something that eluded him, that he felt was denied him – a solidity, a sense of belonging.

  In the aftermath of his death, his sister Mary went to Saint-Cloud to visit their mother’s grave; it is tempting to think George had made the same pilgrimage while he was in Paris. The FitzClarences remained close to one another; George’s two elder sons both married first cousins, one Ta’s daughter Wilhelmina, the other Sophy’s daughter Adelaide. But they were not a long-lived family. Frederick died in India in the same year as Tuss at Mapledurham; Lolly and Eliza – Lord Adolphus and the Countess of Errol – two years later, in 1856. The only ones to reach sixty, Mary and Augusta, followed them in 1864 and 1865: the last relics of an age and a scandal no one then wished to remember.31 When The Life and Times of William IV was published in two volumes in 1884, Dora Jordan’s name had disappeared, her twenty-year presence and ten children reduced to half a sentence: the King had ‘formed a connection with a well-known actress… there is no need to do more than to chronicle the fact, as the subject is a distasteful one’.32

  22

  The Statue’s Story: 1830–1980

  This is not quite the end of the story. Chantrey’s statue of Mrs Jordan, commissioned by King William and intended for Westminster Abbey, was still in the artist’s studio, unclaimed by either the royal family or Dora’s children, at the artist’s death in 1841. Then at last a home was found for it, rather more modest than had been intended, but at least a welcoming one. The Revd Lord Augustus FitzClarence – Tuss – had his mother’s statue crated and carried – probably by boat – to his parish of Mapledurham, and placed in his church there. St Margaret’s is a tiny building, divided into two sections, one Roman Catholic and one Anglican, so there was not much space for a life-size monument. We do not know whether he attempted to explain its presence to his flock. If an inscription had ever been cut, it was removed, leaving it without a name – it has none now – and perhaps the parishioners took it for a representation of Mary with St John and the infant Jesus on her lap. There it stood, and there or thereabouts it seems to have remained for another sixty years, many decades after Tuss himself had gone to his rest in the churchyard outside, and his widow and children had departed to Ireland.1

  Whet
her it stayed in the church, or more likely was removed into a shed or outbuilding, nobody claimed the statue or took any interest in it.2 Dora’s story was not wholly forgotten, but the virtues she embodied – independence of spirit, devotion to her profession – were troubling to the Victorian age, and her private behaviour still more so. Her frankness looked like flagrance, defying a society dedicated to moral improvement, or at any rate moral cosmetics; where Mrs Fitzherbert and the Whig ladies had at least allowed their men to get off unscathed and paid their tribute to public morality by concealing the existence of any inconvenient children, Dora was remembered for parading her pregnancies on the stage, carrying her babies round London with her and showing pride in these many inconvenient sons and daughters. The Chantrey statue revived this flagrance, which was perhaps the main reason for its rejection.

  It remained unclaimed until the early years of the twentieth century. Then the fourth Earl, Aubrey – Dora’s great-grandson – a quiet bachelor with a court appointment who succeeded to the title in 1902, discovered where it was, sent for it and had it installed in his London house; and again nothing was heard of it until the 1950s, when it appeared in another private house, or rather on the veranda of the fifth Earl’s country place, Sandhills, in Surrey.3

  Yet although it was lost to the public for which it was intended by the penitent King, there was another way in which it could, in theory at any rate, be seen. The statue had a twin sister in the plaster cast prepared by Chantrey as a preliminary to sculpting the marble. He preserved all his casts in his studio, to show to visitors; and after his death his widow decided to present them to the newly founded Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Here they were set up in a gallery in 1843; and the Keeper, Joseph Fisher, recorded them in 1847 in a small book of etchings, one of which shows Mrs Jordan and her children.4 As the years went by, however, and Chantrey fell out of fashion, the casts were demoted, first to a ‘sunk court’ and then to a storeroom in the basement. Successive curators grew less and less interested in conserving them; one even noted, with evident satisfaction, that the whole collection was deteriorating. So it continued for nearly a century. No one wanted to see them, it seemed, and very few people knew of their existence.

  The outbreak of the Second World War gave an especially zealous curator the chance to provide a solution to the ‘problem’. Claiming that the basements of the Ashmolean might be needed as air-raid shelters, he made this the excuse for smashing up the whole collection. A grisly scene followed, in which the casts were broken, one after another, like so many aristocrats of the ancien régime meeting their fate. The parallel became even closer when the curator, struck with a sudden doubt, ordered that a few of the casts should after all have their heads sawn off and preserved. Dora Jordan was one of those selected for the process; and this is why the Ashmolean possesses a plaster cast of her severed head.5

  Happily, the marble twin survived in one piece. Tastes changed; the fifth Earl was proud enough of her to think she should be seen. So she made her first public appearance, more than a hundred and twenty years after she was sculpted, in 1956. At this time not a single likeness of her was on public display anywhere in the country; but now at least the statue was shown at the Royal Academy in an exhibition of British Portraits. Afterwards the fifth Earl had a garden house or temple specially built for her at Sandhills, an architectural echo of the Duke’s temple to Nelson at Bushy. She was protected by a green blind in winter and open to the birds in summer; one art historian who went to see the statue there found the surface marked and rather rough, and she needed cleaning before her second public showing, again at the Royal Academy, in the Neo-classical exhibition of 1972.6

  Three years later the fifth Earl of Munster died.7 He was childless, and had decided to bequeath the statue to the Queen, perhaps with the idea that this would be the best way of ensuring its safety and good preservation. Her Majesty was pleased to accept the bequest, and in May 1980 Mrs Jordan was brought to Buckingham Palace and given a royal welcome. There she now sits in splendour, with two of her sons, among the tall portraits of the kings and queens: Queen Charlotte, King George III, King George IV, King William IV, Queen Adelaide, Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert. Two exquisite chairs made for the Prince Regent, in pink silk and gilt, and with snakes wound about their legs, stand beside her in the corner of the Picture Gallery; above her is a wall hanging showing the Annunciation, and on a staircase not far away hangs Hoppner’s allegorical portrait of her as the Comic Muse fleeing from the satyr.

  As an actress, Dora Jordan knew all there was to know about reversals of fortune and transformations of appearance and personality. She might have seen the story of her own statue as a comic drama in its own right, starting from the King’s sentimental but noble arrière-pensée, in which he at last made exactly the right gesture by offering her back to the nation that had loved her work. She would have smiled at the power of the church and the establishment to kill the gesture, shrugged, and said it was only to be expected. She would have understood and forgiven poor George for being embarrassed by her statue and not wanting anything to do with it; and she would have blessed dear Tuss, who was able to show his love and give her a home. After that, the sheer awkwardness of there being no appropriate place for her in the whole of Victorian England, and her statue’s total disappearance for many decades, provided a long interval in the comedy. The sub-plot of the twin or double, deteriorating and then decapitated, contributed a few scenes of black farce; and the Surrey garden temple added a fine touch of the pastoral-historical-elegiacal. The fifth Earl was Dora’s direct descendant; he had grown up in South Africa, come to England as a young man, married a wealthy wife and become Lord Lieutenant of Surrey and a pillar of the establishment. His decision to introduce the statue of his great-great-grandmother and great-grandfather to the legitimate royal line was the climax or apotheosis of her long history. Mrs Jordan came to rest at last in the heart of the very building into which the living Dora was never, and never could have been, invited to set foot. The smile on the face of the statue appears at last entirely appropriate.

  This drawing by Henry Edridge, signed and dated 1808, shows Henry FitzClarence at the age of eleven, wearing his brand-new midshipman’s uniform. It is the only known portrait of him, and must have been commissioned by his parents shortly before he went to sea. (Drawing in private possession.)

  Afterword

  Mrs Jordan’s Welsh Family

  Little has been known of the family of Mrs Jordan’s mother, Grace Phillips, beyond the fact that she was connected with Trelethyn in Wales, was the daughter of a clergyman, and one of three sisters. The researches of local historians Peter Davies and David James have revealed a good deal more. They have studied wills, baptismal registers and the archives held in the National Library in Aberystwyth, the Haverfordwest Record Office, the Cathedral Library of St David’s and the Reference Library at Haverfordwest, from which all the following information is derived.

  Trelethyn is a Pembrokeshire hamlet (known today as Treleddyn) close to St David’s and not far from Haverfordwest. Grace Phillips was the youngest of the three sisters, born in 1736 and baptized at Haverfordwest, her two elder sisters being Anne, born 1734, and Margaret (who used the name Mary or Maria later and especially in her stage career), born in 1735. Their father was the Revd George Phillips, rector of St Thomas’s, Haverfordwest, from 1735 to 1743, their mother Margaret, about whom nothing is known. George Phillips died in 1743, leaving his three daughters aged seven, eight and nine.

  The little girls had an older cousin Blanch, who took an interest in them. She was the daughter of their father’s elder brother, Thomas Phillips of Trelethyn, and she too had lost her father early; he died in 1728, when Blanch was only eight. In 1758 (aged thirty-eight) she married a local gentleman, Thomas Williams, and in 1760 she inherited money and property from her elder sister Mary. Blanch had no children of her own. She seems to have been a strong-minded and generous woman, establishing something of a matriarcha
l pattern in the family. Both Blanch and her cousin Grace lost their fathers early; then when Grace and her children were abandoned by their father (Francis Bland) Blanch gave support to the family. It was at her home that Grace’s invalid daughter Lucy Bland died, aged fourteen, in 1778. Dora’s recollections of her childhood days in Wales also presumably relate to periods spent with Aunt Blanch. And when Blanch died in 1788, she left her property at Trelethyn to two of Grace’s children, Dora’s brother Nathaniel Bland and her sister Hester (‘Ester’) Bland. (Grace herself died a year later.)

  Nathaniel Phillips Bland was an Oxford graduate. He settled at Trelethyn and married in 1812 Phebe James, daughter of a prosperous local family. When Dora sent her three eldest daughters to Wales from 1803 to 1804, it seems likely it was to be near Nathaniel and Phebe, who were childless; they are said to have lived in Cloister Hall in the Close in St David’s. Certainly when Fanny was proving difficult in 1814 Dora wrote of sending her ‘to her uncle in Wales’. Nathaniel, highly respected in the community, died in 1830. Hester Bland, who settled near him in due course, also died there in 1848. Another brother, Francis Bland, is also said to have lived for some time in the Chancellor’s House in the Close.

  Blanch Williams and Lucy Bland are buried in the same grave. The inscriptions read as follows:

  In memory of Lucy Bland of Trelethin, who departed this life the 4th of May, 1778, in the 14th year of her age. Not lost but gone before.

  For here I am free from sickness, free from pain,

  But with my God in endless pleasure reign.

  This life is past, therefore rejoice

  That I am now in Paradise.