In Bed with the Georgians

by Rendell, Mike;

  The Earl never really recovered, retiring from public office two years later. He brought up the children of his union with Martha, and died in 1792.

  EARL FERRERS – murderer.

  The story of the unlovely Laurence Shirley, who was to become Earl Ferrers, is one of arrogance, cruelty, dissolute living and ultimately murder.

  His grandfather, the First Earl, had sired no fewer than fifteen sons and twelve daughters (by two wives) and looking after that lot rather diminished the fortunes of the earldom. Nevertheless the title included family estates in Leicester, Derbyshire and Northamptonshire. Laurence’s father was the tenth son, and Laurence inherited the title in 1745. It is worth mentioning that there appears to have been a strain of madness in the family.

  At the age of 20 he had turned his back on a University education (Oxford) and had gone to Paris where he displayed a talent for every excess, especially drinking, gambling, fighting and whoring. He returned to England and initially set up home with a Mrs Clifford, by whom he had four daughters. Requiring a son once he succeeded to the earldom, he married a 16-year-old girl called Mary Meredith in 1752, but without giving up his mistress. For the young bride it must have been horrific. Her husband was twice her age and was violent when drunk (which was often). She must have been humiliated by his womanising. It was a time when the rich (particularly the males, and especially the nobility) could do more-or-less what they wanted. As it turned out, the one thing they could not do was ‘get away with murder’.

  All the more amazing that in 1758, Mary succeeded in petitioning Parliament for a formal separation from the Earl, on the basis of his cruelty. Horace Walpole noted in a letter that year to his friend Sir Horace Mann:

  The most particular thing I know is what happened the other day: a frantic Earl of Ferrers has for this twelve-month supplied conversation by attempting to murder his wife, a pretty, harmless young woman, and everybody that took her part; having broken the peace, to which the House of Lords tied him last year, the cause was trying again there on Friday last.

  Parliament not only took the unusual step of awarding a formal separation, which must have cost Mary’s family a fortune in legal fees, but also declared that the Earl’s assets should be controlled by trustees and that the trustees should pay Mary rents and profits from the family estates. Laurence must have been furious at having to watch as he lost control of his affairs. Initially he had been keen to recommend his steward John Johnson as rent collector to the Trustees – John had worked for him loyally for some years and was good at book-keeping. Maybe he thought he could lean on John to ‘cook the books.’ However, it appears that over time the Earl grew to distrust the steward. Perhaps this was inevitable, given John’s role as go-between, serving the Earl but paying his rents to the Earl´s estranged wife.

  On Sunday 13 January 1760, Earl Ferrers went to his home at Stanton, about two miles from Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, and ordered the unfortunate Mr Johnson to come to him on the Friday following, at three o’clock in the afternoon. The steward arrived as requested and waited to be summonsed to the Earl’s quarters. The Earl was still eating his lunch. After the meal he sent Mrs Clifford and her young daughters for a long walk and arranged for all five of the male servants to depart on sundry errands. This left only the three housemaids, an old man and a young boy in the house. He then called Mr Johnson into his study, locked the door and, according to The Newgate Calendar:

  … being thus together, the Earl … ordered him to kneel down. The unfortunate man went down on one knee; upon which the Earl, in a tone of voice loud enough to be heard by the maid-servants without, cried: “Down on your other knee! Declare that you have acted against Lord Ferrers. Your time is come — you must die.” Then, suddenly drawing a loaded pistol from his pocket, he presented it and immediately fired. The ball entered the body of the unfortunate man, but he rose up, and entreated that no further violence might be done him; and the female servants at that time coming to the door, being alarmed by the report, his lordship quitted the room.

  The Earl agreed that a doctor could be sent for, and went off for a drink or two in his private quarters, emerging worse for wear some hours later. He refused to let the doctor take the dying man away to his own house. The doctor patiently waited until the earl retired to bed, and rigged up an easy chair with poles so that the dying man could be carried away in a makeshift sedan. He died the following morning at nine o’clock.

  Come the morning and the Earl declined to give himself up – half-dressed he rode off on his horse, but a few hours later was confronted by an angry crowd and despite being armed with a blunderbuss, a brace of pistols and a dagger, was disarmed and taken before the magistrates.

  The Earl was entitled to insist that his trial should take place before his peers in the House of Lords – not for him the humiliation of being tried as a common criminal. He was permitted to drive in his landau, pulled by six horses, to London where his trial started in Westminster Hall in April. The Earl was not permitted to have a defence counsel when he appeared before his peers and was required to conduct his own case. His chosen defence required him to prove that he was insane, but unfortunately for the Earl, the more lucid and eloquently he conducted his defence, the more he proved that he was perfectly sane. He was found guilty – and at that stage he indicated a regret at having pleaded insanity, saying that he intended to kill his victim, and showing no remorse. Murder carried an automatic death penalty. The avid readership of the trial reports loved the idea of a peer of the realm getting his just rewards, and ensured that when sentence was carried out, it was witnessed by tens of thousands of onlookers.

  In vain the Earl pleaded to be dispatched in the manner of a nobleman, that is to say by being beheaded by a swordsman. But that penalty only applied to treason, and the Earl was forced to accept that he would end up in the hangman’s noose, just like any other common felon. He was however entitled to travel from his place of imprisonment (the Tower) to Tyburn in his own landau, accompanied by a guard of lancers. A huge crowd was in attendance on 5 May 1760 to see the hanging and the journey to Tyburn took nearly three hours. The Earl was attired in his best white suit, richly embroidered with silver, (the one he wore at his wedding) saying ‘This is the suit in which I was married, and in which I will die.’ A specially made set of gallows had been put up, furnished with black silk cushions for his Lordship’s comfort.

  He was the last member of the House of Lords to be hanged. It was considered to be his duty as a nobleman to die in a proper and dignified manner – he did his duty, but probably only for the first and last time in his life.

  JOHN DAMER – suicidal debts.

  From the Bath Chronicle:

  The death of John Damer at the Bedford Arms, Covent Garden on 15 August 1776 provides an interesting insight into Georgian attitudes to many things – fashion, debt, gambling, marriage and prostitution. At the date of his demise he had lost £70,000 pursuing his gambling addiction – the equivalent of well over five and half million pounds in modern money. He was also a most devoted follower of fashion, reportedly changing his outfit three times a day. His tailor’s bills alone must have been ruinous. When he died, his wardrobe of clothes were reportedly worth £15,000.

  The German traveller and writer von Archenholz describes the man’s departure from this world as follows:

  The conduct of the Hon Mr Damer, only son to Lord Milton was … extraordinary, and gave rise to a thousand melancholy reflections. Young, handsome, tenderly beloved by his father, nearly adored by the ladies, and with all the honours and dignities of the state within his reach he conceived a sudden disgust to life.

  Having repaired to a bagnio he commanded twelve of the most handsome women of the town to be brought to him, and gave orders that they should be supplied with all manner of delicacies. Having afterwards bolted the door he made them undress one another and, when naked, requested them to amuse him with the most voluptuous attitudes. About an hour afterwards he dismissed them, lo
aded with presents, and then, drawing a pistol from his pocket immediately put an end to his existence.

  Well, his departure from this world clearly showed a certain flair. Others give different versions of the sad death – Boswell’s ‘Johnson’ has him eating three buttered muffins, immediately before committing suicide and knowing that he would not be around to suffer the indigestion which would inevitably follow. The Gentleman’s Magazine for that month rather lamely gave the cause of death as ’lunacy’.

  The one thing which was certain is that John Damer could not face the financial burden of his gambling debts – nor the unhappy marriage which he had entered into with Anne Conway seven years earlier. She, poor woman, was saddled with his debts, because her father-in-law insisted that she should accept personal responsibility for them. She did however go on to become a fine sculptress. She was taken under the wing of Horace Walpole, who was a great admirer of her works. And indeed when he died he left her his extraordinary stately pile at Strawberry Hill at Twickenham.

  Anne exhibited her works at the Royal Academy on no fewer than thirty-two occasions, sculpting the great and the good ranging from His Majesty the King, to Horatio Nelson. Her representation of the god Apollo, as a 10ft high statue, was to be seen in the foyer of the Drury Lane Theatre.

  Caricaturists delighted in showing her sculpting the godly nether regions – they knew that the public would be scandalised at the idea of a female getting so ‘up close and personal’ with the male form. It was however considered entirely acceptable for a man to be painting or sculpting a female nude – a reminder of the misogynistic attitudes prevailing in the Georgian era. But Anne also enjoyed a reputation as a bit of a cross-dresser – she was frequently seen wearing male clothing – and she set tongues wagging because of her fondness for female company, especially with the actresses Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Farren, and with the writer Mary Berry. Rumours circulated of her ‘Sapphic’ tendencies, with the diarist Hester Thrale dismissing Anne contemptuously with the comment that she was ‘a Lady much suspected for liking her own Sex in a criminal Way.’ In print, A Sapphick Epistle appeared in 1771, portraying her as a lesbian. She died in 1828, at her house in Grosvenor Square and was buried in the Kent village of Sundridge, along with her apron and her array of sculptor’s chisels and mallets, and the ashes of her beloved dog.

  *‘Yard’ it must be remembered, was slang for an erect penis.

  Chapter Nine

  Rakes, Roués and Romantics

  Rake:

  Noun: a fashionable or wealthy man of immoral or promiscuous habits.

  Synonyms: playboy, libertine, profligate; degenerate, roué, debauchee, dissolute man, loose-liver; lecher, seducer, ladies’ man, womaniser, philanderer, adulterer.

  Informal: lady-killer;

  Dated: gay dog, rip, blood;

  Archaic: rakehell

  JAMES BOSWELL, 1740–1795

  On the basis of the opening definition, even James Boswell, biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, deserves the title of rake. He had been born in Edinburgh in 1740. His father, a Scottish judge, wanted him to be a lawyer, whereas young James felt drawn to the world of journalism and the stage. In 1762 he came down to London and kept a journal of his stay – and as you might expect from a 22-year-old set loose in a city awash with lewdness and depravity, he revelled in his sexual encounters, and faithfully recorded many of them in his Journal. It is not the bragging which make the incidents endearing – it is the underlying male hypocrisy in his attitude towards prostitutes and prostitution, venereal disease and the use of condoms.

  After a mere week in London, on 25 November 1772 he wrote:

  I had now been sometime in town without female sport. I determined to have nothing to do with Whores as my health was of great consequence to me. I went to a Girl, with whom I had an intrigue at Edinburgh but my affection cooling, I had left her. I knew she was come up [to London]. I waited on her and tried to obtain my former favours; but in vain. She would by no means listen. I was really unhappy for want of women. I thought it hard to be in such a place without them. I picked up a girl in the Strand and went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour [i.e. wearing a condom]. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said “If I ever took a Girl’s Maidenhead, I would make her squeak.” I gave her a shilling; and had command enough of myself to go without touching her. I afterwards trembled at the danger I had escaped. I resolved to wait cheerfully, till I got some safe girl or was liked by some woman of fashion.

  An encounter with a London prostitute the year before had left Boswell with a venereal disease, hence his determination not to catch anything again. But the condoms, which he variously described as ‘machines’ and ‘armour’ had the disadvantage of needing to be moistened with water before use. A further fortnight passed, his passions unassuaged. He writes:

  … I am surrounded with numbers of free-spirited Ladies of all kinds; from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the civil nymph with white thread stockings, who tramps along the strand, and will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling.

  In practice he had no need to resort to either, because he had met a girl who he called Louisa. She was ‘a handsom [sic] Actress of Covent-Garden Theatre’ and having described meeting her on 14 December he then spends the next month recounting how he tried to get her into bed. His seduction techniques appear to have worked and, on 12 January, he describes arranging for them to take a Hackney Carriage to an Inn where they checked in as ‘Mr and Mrs Digges’. That night he proudly records that he rose to the occasion at what he describes as ‘a most luscious feast’; declaring ‘Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture.’ But James omitted to use a condom, believing the girl to be clean – oblivious of the fact that he was as likely to infect her as the other way round. However, she was not as clean as she made out, and James describes a number of painful encounters with the medical profession before he was ready to re-enter the market-place. Louisa was replaced entirely by one-night stands. On 25 March he writes:

  As I was coming home this night I felt carnal inclinations raging thro’ my frame. I determined to gratify them. I went to St. James’s Park and … picked up a Whore. For the first time did I engage in Armour which I found but a dull satisfaction. She who submitted to my lusty embraces was a young Shropshire Girl only seventeen, very welllooked, her name Elizabeth Parker. Poor being. She has a sad time of it!

  The following week, on 31 March, he wrote:

  At night I strolled into the Park and took the first Whore I met, whom I without many words copulated with free from danger, being safely sheeth’d. She was ugly and lean and her breath smelt of spirits. I never asked her name. When it was done she slunk off. I had a low opinion of this gross practice and resolved to do it no more.

  Two weeks later he broke that resolve, recording on 9 April that he ‘then came to the Park and in armorial guise performed concubinage with a strong plump goodhumoured girl, called Nanny Baker.’

  Four days later he recalled another incident:

  I should have mentioned last night that I met with a monstrous big Whore in the Strand, whom I had a great curiosity to lubricate as the saying is. I went into a tavern with her, where she displayed to me all the parts of her enormous carcase; but I found that her Avarice was a large as her A- – - ; for she would by no means take what I offered her. I therefore, with all coolness pulled the bell and discharged the reckoning, to her no small surprise and mortification, who would fain have provoked me to talk harshly to her, and so make a disturbance. I was so much in lewd humour, that I felt myself restless, and took a little girl into a Court; but wanted vigour: So I went home resolved against low, street debauchery.

  By 10 May his vigour had been restored sufficiently for him to record:

  At the bottom of the Hay-market I picked up a strong jolly young damsel, and taking her under the Arm I conducted her to Westminster-Bridge, and then in armour compleat did
I engage her upon this noble Edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us amused me much. Yet after the brutish appetite was sated I could not but despise myself for being so closely united with such a low Wretch.

  Exactly one week later:

  I sallied the Streets and just at the bottom of our own, I picked up a fresh agreeable young Girl called Alice Gibbs. We went down a lane to a snug place; and I took out my armour, but she begged that I might not put it on, as the sport was much pleasanter without it; and as she was quite safe. I was so rash as to trust her, and had a very agreeable congress.

  The week later saw London celebrating the King’s birthday. ‘It was the King’s Birthnight and I resolved to be a Blackguard and to see all that was to be seen.’ writes the randy diarist, and, dressing himself as a lower-class of person, he went out on the town:

  4 June, 1763 I went to the park, picked up a low Brimstone, called myself a Barber, and agreed with her for Sixpence, went to the bottom of the park, arm in arm, and dipped my machine in the Canal, and performed most manfully. In the Strand, I picked up a profligate wretch and gave her sixpence. She allowed me entrance. But the miscreant refused me performance. I was much stronger than her; and volens nolens [in other words whether she wanted or not] pushed her up against the Wall. She however gave a sudden spring from me; and screaming out, a parcel of more Whores and Soldiers came to her relief. “Brother Soldiers” (said I) “should not a half-pay Officer r-g-r for sixpence? And here has she used me so and so.” I got them on my side and abused her in blackguard stile, and then left them. At Whitehall I picked up another girl to whom I called myself a highwayman, and told her I had no Money; and begged she would trust me. But she would not.