Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  My soul with Angels sweetly sings;

  ‘Hosanna to the King of Kings.’

  and

  In memory of Blanch Scudamor, the Wife of Thos. Williams of Trelethin, Esq. who departed this life on the 6th day of January, 1788, aged 68 years.

  Nathaniel Bland’s gravestone reads:

  In memory of Nathaniel Philips Bland, of Trelethin, in this parish, Esq. who departed this life May 31st, 1830, in the 63rd year of his age. He was a man, possessed of rare endowments of mind, dignified manners, inflexible integrity, unfeigned benevolence, with every social and amiable virtue. Having lived respected and beloved he died sincerely lamented by all who knew him. ‘Manet post funera virtus’.

  With the additions, ‘Also of Hester Bland of Trelethin his sister, who died March 4th, 1848, aged 88’ and ‘Also of Phoebe, his widow, who died June 23rd, 1852, aged 77’.

  Local legend has it that the Duke of Clarence stayed at the Castle Hotel in Haverfordwest, but there is no documentation for this. It is also said that Mrs Jordan visited Trelethyn from time to time during the years of her fame, which seems perfectly possible, although not recorded in any currently known letters of hers. A Major Harries of Travaccoon is supposed to have sent his carriage for her personal use when she did.

  ‘Treleddyn’ is the modern spelling for what was known variously as ‘Trelethyn’ (as I give it), ‘Treleddin’, ‘Trefflethin’ and ‘Treffleddin’. It is close to the sea, with St David’s Head to the north-west, and consists of two houses, Upper Treleddyn, the solid Georgian farmhouse associated by tradition with Mrs Jordan, and Lower Treleddyn, also a farm.

  The house at Upper Trelethyn, where Dora Jordan and her brothers and sisters sometimes stayed as children. It passed to her brother Nathaniel and sister Hester. (Photograph courtesy of Peter Davies.)

  Although Dora Jordan herself never contradicted Tate Wilkinson’s account of how he suggested her stage name (p. 27), it may also have had a Welsh family origin. In her mother Grace’s native Pembrokeshire there were many Jordans, and among them several Dorotheas, Dorothys or Doras scattered through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One Dorothy Jordan married in 1642; another died unmarried in 1714. Yet another was born about 1775, her mother being a Phillips; she married a Joseph Clare of Haverfordwest and lived until 1858. It is possible that Grace and Maria Phillips’s mother was born a Jordan, or connected with the Jordans, and that the name suggested itself for that reason.

  THE FITZCLARENCE-DANIELL LETTERS

  After the original publication of this book, I was kindly offered the chance of examining a collection of about 150 letters written by the FitzClarence children, or connected with them, between 1813 and 1854. The letters were addressed to their one-time tutor, James William Daniell (1773–c. 1855). As well as tutoring the boys, Mr Daniell served as librarian to their father and later as his steward at Bushy at least until 1826. Daniell preserved his letters from the FitzClarences carefully and they have been handed down through the family to his great-great-great-niece, Diana Daniell, who showed them to me.

  They include George’s instructions to his old tutor about preparing the Upper Lodge at Bushy for himself and his bride on returning from their wedding tour in 1820, and letters from Frederick, Eliza, Adolphus, Augusta and Amelia, some giving family news of deaths – Amelia wrote of that of Sophia – and marriages, Augusta announcing her own first wedding; but the bulk of them are from Augustus, the youngest son.

  As a clergyman, Tus had the pleasant privilege of conducting his former tutor’s wedding ceremony in December 1829. The Daniells lived in London, and most of Tus’s letters were written from his vicarage at Mapledurham, although, as the years went by and he acquired a family of his own, some came from seaside lodgings at Weston-super-Mare, Torquay and Broadstairs. He gave family news, complained of a chronic shortage of money and asked Mr Daniell to perform small chores for him. In 1835, while his father was on the throne, he wrote from 85 Eaton Square, saying that most of his brothers and sisters were in Brighton, but George was in Paris and ‘great friends with Louis Philip’ (sic). But after the death of King William things changed. There is no mention of George’s suicide in 1841. In 1844 he described a visit to Windsor and expressed annoyance at having to write down his name before being allowed entrance. He visited the room where his father died and observed that the Queen was ‘in the family way’.

  He announced his own marriage in Kensington Church the following January (1845) and thereafter the births of his children. His eldest daughter, Dora, became a source of great pride; at the age of thirteen her achievements in reading the Bible and doing arithmetic were far beyond his at the same age, he reported. He saw this as evidence of the ‘March of intellect’, like a true Victorian. His politics were proclaimed in a letter of March 1847 when he wrote, ‘Where is the promise of the poor man’s better days? Not in this world – you may depend upon it: we give them a pull at the whistle every 100 years & make them pay well for it.’ In the same year he adorned a letter with a disrespectful sketch of Queen Victoria.

  Money was always a problem. He took to selling off possessions, among them his fine dinner services and, in 1847, dismantling his conservatory. Describing this, he wrote, ‘The figure is removed – and the Conservatory will soon be down’ – perhaps a reference to the Chantrey statue, and if so a tantalizing one which offers no clue as to where he put it next. The following year, when Frederick was offered a highly paid place in India, he in turn offered Augustus £1,800 a year to go with him as his secretary, but Augustus, in spite of his difficulties, refused it unhesitatingly. He preferred to stay at Mapledurham with his young family, choosing England on a lower income rather than India on a higher one: ‘this dear old country with a few hundreds – bright days – cool nights and a good pump of clear water – and I will never give her up’. It is perhaps worth noting that, despite his money problems and constant talk of retrenchment, the 1851 census records eleven servants at Mapledurham vicarage.

  Also in 1851 Augustus mentioned a visit from his half-sister Lucy, Lady Hawker, now a widow: no doubt they had much to recall together about Bushy and their mother. In the same year, on 11 October, Frederick wrote to Daniell to say he was going to Madeira for his daughter’s health (she died young of tuberculosis) and asked him to ‘write to Tus, & say I take all the papers to sort when at Madeira, except one box with my mother’s letters to my Father which Adolphus has sealed with my seal and his’. An added note reads, ‘Should anything happen to me, I wish Tus to have my rights in them and that anything disparaging be in them about my Father (which there is) I wish them to be burnt.’ This was presumably done; but the fate of the letters after the deaths of Augustus and Frederick in 1854, and Adolphus two years later, remains obscure until they reached the sale rooms early in the next century.

  Mr Daniell received a final letter from Mapledurham in 1854, announcing the death of Lord Augustus. Later in the year Frederick also died in India, and his widow sent him a lock of his ‘dear hair’. The very last letter seems to be from the youngest FitzClarence daughter, Amelia, Viscountess Falkland: she wrote asking if he could trace the record of her baptism, wanted by her husband’s lawyer. No record of it had been found at either Teddington or Hampton, and it appears that Mr Daniell was unable to help the anxious Viscountess, doubly stigmatized by illegitimacy and no evidence of baptism. Probably she had been baptized privately at Bushy in 1807, and no proper record made.

  James Daniell was clearly held in affection by the FitzClarence children, even though George took a rather high-handed tone with him. I have noted that there are no references to George’s suicide, either because it was too upsetting to mention, or because the letters were destroyed later. Henry’s death is not mentioned either, but I have seen a letter from Henry to Daniell in the De L’Isle Archive written from Portsmouth just before his embarkation for India in January 1815: perhaps Daniell gave it to Sophia as a memento of her brother. Another link with the Bushy days appears in a le
tter from Jane Lloyd, daughter of the Duke’s chaplain, the Revd Thomas Lloyd, who was good friend to Mrs Jordan from the early 1790s on. Jane wrote to Daniell from Richmond Park, where she was with Lord and Lady Errol (formerly Eliza FitzClarence); this letter does not give the year but has an 1834 watermark, so evidently the family connection remained for several decades.

  The earliest letter of all is from Colonel Butler at the Royal Military College, dated 30 June 1813, asking for news by return of the Duke’s health, of which he has read bad accounts in the newspapers: Frederick was his pupil at the time. Daniell was at Bushy then with the girls but no boys, for in the summer of 1813 George and Henry were fighting in the Peninsular War, Adolphus had started his naval career, and Augustus was away at school. Mrs Jordan had left Bushy eighteen months earlier and was based in Cadogan Street. She had just given a benefit with Mrs Siddons at Drury Lane which raised £983 for their Theatrical Fund. The Duke was in dire financial difficulties, threatening to close Bushy and move his family to St James’s.

  Although Daniell could not help with baptismal certificates, he kept two copies of the Duke’s list of the place and date of birth of each of the ten children Mrs Jordan bore to him. And finally, there is some correspondence in the 1840s in which Daniell asked both Frederick and Adolphus to assist his nephew, who was seeking a clerkship at the Home Office. Both seem to have done what they could, but without success; evidently their power of patronage was very limited.

  The place held by their tutor in the hearts of the FitzClarence children – girls as well as boys – is clearly demonstrated in these letters. It suggests he was a stable figure for them in what was otherwise a bumpy and unpredictable world.

  In 1996 Captain Hugh Owen RN published his research into the Duke of Clarence’s son William in The Mariner’s Mirror. He found from the muster book of the Blenheim that his full name was William Henry Courtney and that he was sent to sea in July 1803. The identity of his mother remains unknown, and the pitiful pay due to him after his drowning was returned to the Crown because he was intestate and ‘a Bastard’.

  An ambrotype of a watercolour miniature showing Mrs Jordan’s daughter Lucy, Lady Hawker. The resemblance to her father, Richard Ford, is striking, but the spectacles – an unusual feature in a portrait of a woman – suggest she inherited her mother’s short sight. It seems likely from her mourning clothes that the original was painted some time after 1838, when her husband, General Sir Samuel Hawker, died. She was then fifty. Lucy was much loved by her half-brothers and sisters, and family bonds remained close despite the behaviour of the Duke of Clarence and tragic death of their mother. According to family records the Duke stood as godfather to her son Henry, who was born in the year of Mrs Jordan’s death. The boy followed family tradition by starting his naval career at the age of twelve under Lord Adolphus FitzClarence, who gave him daily lessons and ‘was quite a father to him’.

  Lucy’s portrait, the only one known to exist, came to light recently among the family papers of a direct descendant, Mr Claude Swain.

  Note that both her age and the date of her death are given wrongly. This inscription is now illegible and is covered by a bronze plaque (see p. 383).

  Appendix: Mrs Jordan’s Roles

  Although various lists have been compiled of the parts played by Mrs Jordan, it would be hard, if not impossible, to produce a complete one. The theatre historian John Genest lists her first appearances in each role at Drury Lane, the Haymarket and Covent Garden; but during her early years in Ireland and Yorkshire she covered a wide repertoire and took many supporting roles. Among them are Lady Anne to Kemble’s Duke of Gloucester in Richard III (in Dublin early in 1782), Emilia in Othello and Octavia in Dryden’s All for Love with Tate Wilkinson’s company; and there were of course many more. There are no complete records of these years or of her many later provincial tours that took her to all but the most remote parts of the country: Liverpool, Dublin, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, Birmingham, Coventry, Canterbury, Margate, Carlisle, Hull, York, Leeds, Manchester, Portsmouth, Salisbury, etc.

  The three roles in which she was most admired were, first, Rosalind in As You Like It, which she played in London from 1787 to 1814 – a remarkable span of twenty-seven years. Second, Hippolita, the spirited Spanish heroine who appears dressed as an army officer throughout all five acts of Colley Cibber’s comedy of 1702, She Would and She Would Not. Hippolita is the pivot and controller of the plot, winning her lover by a series of tricks, among them a wedding ceremony with the heiress he is supposed to marry. Her maid is also disguised as a boy, leading to the exchange,

  Is this gentleman your friend, sir?

  This friend, madam, is my gentlewoman.

  Gentlewoman! What, are we all going into breeches, then?

  When Genest was introduced to her in 1814 and complimented her on her playing of Hippolita, she answered him, ‘Aye, that was one of the parts on which I used to pique myself.’1

  The third role with which she was always associated was that of the Country Girl in Garrick’s mid-century adaptation of Wycherley’s Country Wife (1675): Garrick cleaned up the jokes and watered down the humour in the process, but Mrs Jordan’s performance as an innocent nineteen-year-old (her opening line is ‘Pray, sister, where are the best fields and woods to walk in in London?’) whose jealous guardian dresses her as a boy for a walk in St James’s Park became and remained a hit. Jane Austen used the notion of the ‘Country Girl’ as a point of reference in a letter to her sister in 1799; Mrs Jordan played her for fifteen seasons at Drury Lane, from 1785 to 1800, and continued to play occasionally elsewhere up to 1814; even when she was too old and large to be convincing as a young girl, people still wanted to see her in the role.

  After Rosalind, her most famous Shakespearean role was Viola in Twelfth Night, the first she played at Drury Lane (in 1785). Her Imogen in Cymbeline was not a success, but her Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well was singled out for praise by Charles Lamb. She played Mrs Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor by royal request at Cheltenham in 1788. She was Ophelia in Hamlet during the 1790s, both at Richmond and in London; in a letter written after a performance to the Duke at the end of the decade she says she ‘never got so much applause as last night – but the particular friend of Mr Kemble will not allow me any merit in Ophelia’: the particular friend was almost certainly his sister, Mrs Siddons, who often played Gertrude in the same production.

  Mrs Jordan played Juliet for a few performances in 1796. Her Beatrice in Much Ado was popular, and she was still playing the part in 1804, at Margate; she was also briefly Miranda in The Tempest in 1797. She seems never to have played Cleopatra, either Shakespeare’s or Dryden’s version. For its single performance she acted Flavia in Vortigern, the famous Shakespeare forgery, her part especially conceived by young Samuel Ireland to suit her, with boy’s costume and a song.

  From Shakespeare’s contemporaries Beaumont and Fletcher she acted Bellario, the page’s part in Philaster (1609) and Second Constantia in The Chances (adapted by Garrick); and the high-spirited Estifania in their Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (1624) was one of her standard roles. The Restoration dramatists gave her many of her best parts. She was Miss Prue in Congreve’s Love for Love, and in five of Farquhar’s plays: as Bizarre in The Inconstant, Sir Harry Wildair in The Constant Couple, Silvia in The Recruiting Officer, Mrs Sullen in The Beaux’ Stratagem and Fidelia in The Plain Dealer. She was Corinna in Vanbrugh’s The Confederacy, and Miss Hoyden in Sheridan’s adaptation of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse – another watered-down version. As Boaden wrote, complaining of the failure of contemporary writers to provide her with decent parts, ‘Wycherley, and Congreve, and Cibber, had conceived something, perfectly in nature, which she appropriated to herself.’ And he called Drury Lane ‘this political and bankrupt theatre’ for not providing her with a comedy as good as any of Congreve’s.2 Horace Walpole took a similar line when he contrasted the excellence of her performance with the poor material in which she so of
ten had to work, in a letter written on 1 July 1789, from Strawberry Hill:

  Nothing has happened within my beat, but the arrival of Mrs Jordan at the theatre at Richmond, which has raised its character exceedingly: our Jews and Gentiles throng it. I have not been there, for though I think her perfect in her walk, I cannot sit through a whole play ill performed to see her play however excellently in such wretched farces as The Romp in which I have seen her.3

  In spite of Walpole’s scorn, the operatic farce called The Romp, in which she played Priscilla Tomboy, was continuously popular with the general public; she played it in York for Wilkinson, and then at Drury Lane in her first season, at which she introduced her own business, boxing Watty Cockney right off the stage. It was based on Isaac Bickerstaffe’s play Love in the City (1778). Bickerstaffe was a prolific writer of farces, who started his career as page to Lord Chesterfield during his Lord Lieutenantship of Ireland, and ended it like Oscar Wilde, fleeing to the continent from English intolerance of his homosexuality. The Sultan was another enormously popular farce of his, in which Mrs Jordan played Roxalana, an English girl who puts down the harem system single-handed by a combination of courage and outrageous cheek.

  Garrick’s farce The Irish Widow gave her a good part as Mrs Brady; according to Genest she had an Irish brogue when she started acting in York, which she lost, but no doubt recovered as needed: there were many ‘Irish’ farces. She was Helena in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, again not in its original version, but reworked by John Kemble, and renamed Love in Many Masks. Another woman playwright, Susannah Centlivre, provided her with a triumphant role as Donna Violante in The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714); it seems to have been the last play in which she appeared, at Margate in 1815. Violante is the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman; she falls in love with Don Felix, whose sister takes refuge with her to escape a hateful marriage; and Violante risks losing Felix by keeping the other woman’s secret even when her own reputation is at stake.