In Bed with the Georgians

by Rendell, Mike;

  WILLIAM DOUGLAS, aka ‘Old Q’ 1724–180l

  William Douglas was a man of various names and titles. As a 7-year-old he inherited an earldom when his father the Second Earl of March died. In 1786 he became Fourth Duke of Queensberry on the death of his cousin, and as an old man was always known as ‘Old Q’. He became a somewhat revolting roué with a penchant for young girls, and spent his entire adult life gambling ferociously and whoring relentlessly. Famously, he spent most of his money on prostitutes and champagne. Image 69 shows him with his quizzing glass in hand, inspecting a young filly – not necessarily equine.

  At the age of 28, Earl March developed such a passion for a Miss Frances Pelham that he deliberately bought a house next door to where she lived in Arlington Street, and had a bow-window constructed so that he could spy on her as she came and went. She was the daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Her brother, the Hon Henry Pelham, disliked March intensely and opposed any form of contact between his sister and the Earl. By the time her brother died, and she was free to marry whom she pleased, Frances discovered that the Earl had transferred his attentions elsewhere. Mortified, she turned to the faro tables and lost both her fortune and her reputation.

  March had a particular penchant for Italian lovers – mostly opera singers and dancers – and had affairs with Teresina Tondino, the Contessa de la Rena, La Zampirini and the Marquesa Fagniani.

  When he was in his mid-sixties he proposed marriage to the young daughter of his next door neighbour in Piccadilly, a Miss Gertrude Vanneck. Her father, Sir Joshua Vanneck, refused to consent to the union, even though the Duke was immensely wealthy and proposed three times. At other occasions he managed to seduce Lady Jane Stuart, the diarist Lady Mary Coke, Lady Henrietta Stanhope, and Lady Anne Conway. In his old age, Queensberry always wore dark green when he appeared in public, in winter carrying a large muff. Seated behind him in his carriage there would always be two servants, while his groom, Jack Radford, would follow on horseback ready to take notes and to deliver messages to any desirable young girls who took the old duke’s fancy. Old Q took to recruiting young girls through the offices of procuresses such as the notorious Mother Windsor, and then re-enacting The Judgement of Paris. In the original classical Greek myth the goddesses each took it in turns to bestow a different ‘gift’ to tempt Paris. Old Q altered the script somewhat, so that the goddesswhores had to tempt him with a variety of carnal delights – a temptation to which he always succumbed. He also took to bathing in milk, believing that the restorative powers would enable him to perform more effectively in bed. The story went around that no-one would buy milk in Piccadilly in case it had already been used by Old Q.

  He is believed to have fathered at least one child, a daughter Maria (known as Mie Mie) who was born in 1771; her mother was his mistress the Marchesa Maria Fagniani. Mie Mie certainly went on to have an odd upbringing. As an infant she was brought up by George Selwyn, one of the weirdest men of the age. In his public life, he served as a member of parliament for forty-four years without once troubling to make a single speech in the House. In his private life, he was a member of the notorious Hellfire Club, and would appear at public executions dressed as a woman. He had an obsessive interest in death in general, and in corpses in particular, allegedly bordering on necrophilia. Nevertheless he managed to persuade the girl’s mother to allow him to foster the child, to whom he became inordinately devoted. Selwyn left Mie Mie an inheritance of £20,000 when he died. The girl was also left a vast inheritance (£100,000) by Old Q , and as a 21-year-old she married Lord Yarmouth, eventually becoming the Marchioness of Hertford.

  SIR JOHN LADE, 1759–1838

  Sir John was one of the inner circle of friends of the Prince of Wales, and was his riding instructor. The man was a superb horseman, but one who gambled and lost heavily. His escapades on and off the race track made him a legend, and when he was not riding horses he was pursuing loose women. He is mentioned in Chapter Four as the rescuer of Gertrude Mahon, with whom he conducted an affair in the late 1770s. Oddly, when he came to choose a wife he selected a girl who was not a high class courtesan, but someone who had risen from the stews. His bride was Letitia, and she was rumoured to have been a cook in one of London’s brothels. By all accounts she did rather more than just cook for the punters, one of them being the Duke of York. Her sexual appetite was legendary, with contemporary reports speaking of her being able to ‘withstand the fiercest assault and renew the charge with renovated ardour, even when her victim sinks drooping and crestfallen before her.’ By reputation she never ‘turned her back against the most vigourous assailant.’ She also swore like a trooper – so much so that the phrase ‘swears like Letty Lade’ entered the vocabulary.

  Letty was a brilliant horsewoman, much like Sir John. Together they would attend sporting fixtures such as race meetings and boxing tournaments. She herself raced at Newmarket, and, like John, was regularly to be seen striding around wearing jockey’s colours and carrying her riding whip. What made her a source of scandal in polite society was her carnal reputation, and her earlier association with the notorious highway robber called Jack Rann. Known to all as ‘Sixteen string Jack’ because of the coloured ribbons he wore from the top of his stockings, he was another fine horseman who regularly attended the same race meetings as Sir John. Letty had been rumoured to have been Jack’s mistress (before she met Sir John). Jack met his fate at the gallows in 1774, and her name was always tarnished by her association with him.

  Sir John conducted a lengthy affair with Letty before ‘making an honest woman of her’ in 1787. They seem to have been a perfect match for each other, and held riotous dinners with their rakish friends at their homes at Cant’s Hill and Brighton. Their portraits were painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the Prince of Wales commissioned George Stubbs to paint a picture of her to hang in his private quarters. The picture is impressive, and shows Letty riding side-saddle while her horse rears onto its hind legs en levade – a difficult manoeuvre requiring great skill and balance.

  Gambling losses eventually took their toll and the couple faded from public scrutiny. Sir John spent time in the debtor’s prison before the Prince Regent came to his rescue with a pension of £500 a year. The royal pension was still being paid, by Queen Victoria, up until his death in 1838. By then he had out-lived Letitia by thirteen years.

  CASANOVA, 1725–1798

  Casanova, who also went under the title of the ‘Chevalier de Seingalt’ visited Britain in 1763 and had some interesting things to say about the country, its customs, and its women. There was rather more to him than just being a randy old rake – he was a polymath, an intellectual, a man who invented a lottery system for the French, was a writer of mathematical works, an astrologer and a spy. He also translated The Iliad into his native Venetian dialect and wrote a science fiction novel. And in between all that, he seduced a large number of apparently very willing and happy ladies.

  Towards the end of his life, when he was employed as a librarian in a remote castle in Bohemia he wrote his autobiography covering the first forty-nine years of his life, entitled The Story of my life by Jacques Casanova de Seingalt. Of the English he says: ‘the people have a special character, common to the whole nation, which makes them think they are superior to everyone else. It is a belief shared by all nations, each thinking itself the best. And they are all right.’

  Arriving in London he quickly found lodgings (‘Thus in less than two hours I was comfortably settled in a town which is sometimes described as a chaos, especially for a stranger. But in London everything is easy to him who has money and is not afraid of spending it’).

  Of English life he wrote:

  there is no playing cards or singing on Sundays. The town abounds in spies, and if they have reason to suppose that there is any gaming or music going on, they watch for their opportunity, slip into the house, and arrest all the bad Christians, who are diverting themselves in a manner which is thought innocent enough in any other country. But to m
ake up for this severity the Englishman may go in perfect liberty to the tavern or the brothel, and sanctify the Sabbath as he pleases.

  When he came to London the problem was that he did not speak English – and the whores did not speak Italian or French. He got a friend to translate a notice which he put up in his window, advertising the availability of rooms to let in the house he had rented, to a young lady. The actual wording was:

  The landlord of the second and third floors probably occupies the first floor himself. He must be a man of the world and of good taste, for he wants a young and pretty lodger; and as he forbids her to receive visits, he will have to keep her company himself.

  The Press got wind of the notice and guessed the reason behind the proviso against having any visitors – he intended to monopolize the young lady himself, and it was not so much a ‘room to let’ as an offer of employment. Casanova was amazed that the Press should write so freely and so openly: ‘Such matters as these’ [i.e. gossiping about the notice he had put up offering accommodation and speculating as to his intentions] ‘give their chief interest to the English newspapers. They are allowed to gossip about everything, and the writers have the knack of making the merest trifles seem amusing. Happy is the nation where anything may be written and anything said!’

  The advertisement worked – a girl he called ‘Mistress Pauline’ responded, was interviewed, and ‘got the job’. True to form, they became lovers, but never on an exclusive basis.

  Casanova was to write:

  I also visited the bagnios where a rich man can sup, bathe, and sleep with a fashionable courtezan, of which species there are many in London. It makes a magnificent debauch and only costs six guineas. The expense may be reduced to a hundred francs, but economy in pleasure is not to my taste.

  On another occasion he describes an unsatisfying and expensive encounter with a prostitute:

  It was one evening when I was at Vauxhall, and I offered her twenty guineas if she would come and take a little walk with me in a dark alley. She said she would come if I gave her the money in advance, which I was fool enough to do. She went with me, but as soon as we were alone she ran away, and I could not catch her again, though I looked for her all the evening.

  He does not appear to have been a great admirer of English food and drink, writing:

  One day I was invited by a younger son of the Duke of Bedford to eat oysters and drink a bottle of champagne. I accepted the invitation, and he ordered the oysters and the champagne, but we drank two bottles, and he made me pay half the price of the second bottle. Such are manners on the other side of the Channel. People laughed in my face when I said that I did not care to dine at a tavern as I could not get any soup. “Are you ill?” they said, “soup is only fit for invalids”.

  The Englishman is entirely carnivorous. He eats very little bread, and calls himself economical because he spares himself the expense of soup and dessert, which circumstance made me remark that an English dinner is like eternity: it has no beginning and no end. Soup is considered very extravagant, as the very servants refuse to eat the meat from which it has been made. They say it is only fit to give to dogs. The salt beef which they use is certainly excellent. I cannot say the same for their beer, which was so bitter that I could not drink it.

  Time and a dissolute lifestyle was beginning to take its toll on the middle-aged libertine. At the age of 38 he met and fell for the charms of a lovely 17-year-old London courtesan named Marie Anne Genevieve Augspurgher, known as La Charpillon. She toyed with him for some weeks and then rejected him. (He later wrote in his Memoirs: “It was on that fatal day…that I began to die.”) Other rejections followed. Worse, he caught a dose of the clap and left Britain to resume his European travels, feeling decidedly under the weather and much poorer than when he arrived. His memoirs remain one of the great autobiographies of all time. As Casanova put it: ‘Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.’

  THE BARRY FAMILY – Hellgate, Cripplegate, Newgate and Billingsgate

  Two centuries before ‘Watergate’, the Barry family were having a monopoly of ‘-gates’. Four poor little rich kids – daughter Caroline, born 1768; Richard born in 1769; Henry born in 1770; and Augustus in 1773. Their father was the Sixth Earl of Barrymore but unfortunately he died when Richard was just 3 years old, passing the title to him. Their mother Emily (the daughter of the Earl of Harrington) died eight years later. So these four wealthy and well-connected orphans were left in the occasional care of their grandmother. Granny, aka the Countess Harrington, packed Richard off to Eton, reputedly with the sum of £1,000 in his pocket for spending money, but then, somewhat inconveniently, she too died. Caroline and her feral brothers seemed to have been left to grow through adolescence and into maturity without close adult guidance – apart from the poor Reverend Tickell of the Berkshire village of Wargrave. He was nominally in charge of the Barry brood, but he appears to have had an uphill struggle to keep in control. As a trio of debauchers, rakes, profligates, gamblers and foul-mouthed ill-tempered brattish aristocrats these boys really took the biscuit.

  Richard, the Seventh Earl, went on to become a close friend of the Prince of Wales, earning himself the name of ‘Hellgate’. His younger brother Henry was born with a club-foot and, in the days before political correctness, was known by all as ‘Cripplegate’. That left Augustus, who somehow or other grew up to become a Reverend, but was the most profligate gambler of them all, and he was given the moniker ‘Newgate’ because, supposedly, that was the only one of the debtors prisons he had not been sent to. And Caroline? Well, she used such foul language that the Prince of Wales gave her the nick name of ‘Billingsgate’ – because she swore like a fishwife!

  By the age of 16 Hellgate had already won a wager of £1,000 at Newmarket. He loved racing, frequently riding his own horses to victory, and he developed a passion for boxing. When he returned to Wargrave in the school holidays he and his mates would terrify the villagers by taking over the reins from the carriage drivers and racing through the village, smashing windows with their whips. By the age of 18 he was developing his own racing stud, keeping a hunting pack in his own kennels, and building a reputation as a hell-raiser. Rumour had it that he had spent or lost £300,000 by the time he hit 21. But he stayed just on the right side of being a pain in the neck to the Wargrave residents by entertaining them all lavishly, providing food and drink at numerous sporting activities in the village. He loved dramatic performances and built a theatre in Wargrave, at a cost of some £60,000, so that plays could be put on. The Seventh Earl and his friends were naturally given key parts to perform.

  As a prankster he had no equal, setting up a blistering pace by forming clubs for every occasion: there was the ‘Two o’clock Club’, which met at that hour of the early morning to hold court and impose ludicrous punishments on any member committing a perceived misdemeanour. There was the Bothering Club, the Je ne sais quoi Club, the Warble Club and so on. The latter had the very sensible rule ‘that if any member has more sense than another, he be kicked out of the club’.

  By now he was gambling heavily – sometimes winning as much as £25,000 on a single boxing match, sometimes losing a fortune on horse races. He liked odd challenges – such as a man-against-horse over thirty yards, with a turn round a tree at the midway point, but he consumed his assets with relentless impetuosity and was in danger of being adjudged bankrupt. Rather to everyone’s amazement he married – but not for money. In 1792 he eloped with the 17-year-old Charlotte Goulding, the daughter of a sedan chair man. Like her husband, she too was a bare-knuckle boxer.

  He stood for parliament – probably as a way of thwarting his creditors – and joined the army, being appointed Captain in the Royal Berkshire Militia. War with France and the threat of invasion meant that he was required to keep his musket loaded at all times – and when he was in his carriage escorting three French prisoners-of-war into custody the musket went off accidentally. The ball lodged in his eye and, at the age of 23, H
ellgate drew his last breath. The date: 6 March 1793.

  His title was taken over by Cripplegate – another person who saw it as his duty to ensure that the Prince of Wales maintained his life of debauchery, scandal and intrigue. The Eighth Earl reportedly had a fine singing voice, but became better known for his pranks – kidnapping young women, then leaving a coffin standing upright outside their front door before knocking loudly – just to see the horror in the face of the servant coming to answer the call.

  He was forever quarrelling and challenging others to duels – and then enlivened proceedings by always conducting the duel while totally naked. In 1795 he decided to get married, but like his elder brother chose as his bride a girl without means, called Anne Coghlan – she was in fact the beautiful daughter of a local tavern-keeper. His debts continued to mount and he died in France at the age of 56 in 1823, probably of a stroke. He was penniless as well as childless, so the Earls of Barrymore died out (younger brother Newgate had already perished). That just left ‘Billingsgate’, who called herself Baroness de Barry, after her marriage to Louis Pierre Francis Malcolm Drummond, Comte de Melfort. Needless to say, such a family provided an easy target for satirists such as James Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank, and they were rarely out of the news.