by Paula Byrne
The articled clerk was named Thomas Robinson. He was training with the firm of Vernon and Elderton in the buildings opposite. He persuaded a friend (a junior colleague of Samuel Cox) to invite Mary and her mother to a dinner party out in Greenwich, without disclosing that Robinson himself would be present. Mother and daughter opened the door of their carriage only to find him ready to hand them down. Hester was duly horrified while Mary professed herself only ‘confused’. Fortunately, though, she had dressed very carefully for dinner, sensing that a conquest was afoot: ‘it was then the fashion to wear silks. I remember that I wore a nightgown of pale blue lustring, with a chip hat, trimmed with ribbands of the same colour.’11 The English nightgown was a simple, flowing shift dress that had been popular for many seasons. It was modest in comparison to the revolutionary ‘Perdita’ chemise that Mary herself would popularize in the 1780s. Lustring was a plain woven silk with a glossy finish that was very popular for summer wear, while the fashionable chip hat, made of finely shaved willow or poplar, was to be worn at a jaunty angle.
Mary’s obsession with her outfits might be considered as shallow and frivolous, but this is to misunderstand the power of fashion: she was very attuned to the ways in which clothing could transform her image. Fashion was central to the consumer society of the late eighteenth century. A plethora of shops offered ready-to-wear collections, while there were second-hand clothes stalls for the less well off. Silks, linens, and cottons were more widely available than ever before. Journalism and fashion went hand in hand: new monthly publications such as the Lady’s Magazine included plates and detailed descriptions of the latest styles. Ladies could even hand-colour the black and white engravings and send them off to a mantua-maker with instructions for making up.
Mary loved to remember the tiniest details of the clothes she was wearing on a particular occasion. On the day that she met her future husband in Greenwich she felt that she had never dressed so perfectly to her own satisfaction. Thomas Robinson spent most of the evening simply staring at her. The party dined early and then returned to London, where Robinson’s friend expatiated upon the many good qualities of Mary’s new suitor, speaking of ‘his future expectations from a rich old uncle; of his probable advancement in his profession; and, more than all, of his enthusiastic admiration of me’.12 Robinson was apparently the heir of a rich tailor called Thomas Harris, who had a large estate in Wales. Hester Darby sensed that the secure marriage she needed for her daughter was within grasp.
As the date set for Mary’s stage debut approached, Robinson was assiduous in his courtship. He knew that it was crucial to win her mother’s approval and did so by his constant attentions and a flow of presents calculated to impress. Hester was especially fond of ‘graveyard’ literature, and she was delighted when Robinson brought her an elegantly bound copy of James Hervey’s lugubrious Meditations among the Tombs of 1746. She was ‘beguiled’ by these attentions and Robinson accordingly ‘became so great a favourite, that he seemed to her the most perfect of existing beings’. He gained more credit when smallpox again threatened the family. This time it was George, Hester’s favourite son, who was dangerously ill. Mary postponed her stage appearance and Robinson was ‘indefatigable in his attentions’ to the sick boy and his anxious mother. Robinson’s conduct convinced Hester that he was ‘“the kindest, the best of mortals!”, the least addicted to worldly follies – and the man, of all others, who she should adore as a son-in-law’.13
Robinson might have convinced the mother, but he still had some way to go with the daughter. Luck was on his side. When George recovered from the smallpox, Mary fell sick herself. This was a test that would reveal the extent of the suitor’s devotion: would he persist in his courtship despite the threat of death or at the very least disfigurement of her lovely features? He did not waver and duly exerted ‘all his assiduity’ to win Mary’s affections, proving the ‘disinterested’ quality of his fondness. For Mary, the relationship was more fraternal than romantic: ‘he attended with the zeal of a brother; and that zeal made an impression of gratitude upon my heart, which was the source of all my succeeding sorrows’.14
The combined forces of mother and lover were irresistible. Every kind of persuasion and emotional blackmail was employed to press the suit. Hester urged Mary to promise that if she survived the disease she would marry Robinson. She reiterated the threat made by Mary’s father and even intimated that her daughter’s refusal was proof that she retained affection for the ‘libertine Captain’. Mary was cajoled and bullied, ‘repeatedly urged and hourly reminded’ of her father’s vow. Hester’s only hesitation was the thought of the inevitable separation between mother and daughter that marriage would bring. But the resolute lover overcame this obstacle with his promise of the ultimate sacrifice: he insisted that the bride’s mother should live with them, overseeing the domestic duties. Could Mary really refuse him when he offered her abandoned mother a home?
This was how Mary recollected the courtship when she came to write her memoirs. By making her mother an accomplice in Robinson’s scheme to force her hand, she gave the impression that it was not a marriage of affection on her part. But Hester’s culpability is debatable. Her worries were genuine. Her daughter was headstrong, and Hester was doubtful about a stage career. She was worried about Nicholas and the threat he had issued. Robinson’s motives seemed genuine enough. His was hardly a mercenary choice, as Mary brought no money or prospects. Few men would cherish the idea of living with their mother-in-law during the first years of marriage. It would appear that Robinson was genuinely in love with Mary. Neither was his devotion skin deep. He could well have withdrawn his suit when the ravages of smallpox threatened her beauty. At its worst, this horrific disease rendered its surviving victims disfigured and scarred beyond all recognition. Robinson risked his own health to nurse George and attend Mary. Considered in this light, his commitment could not be doubted.
Mary’s timid acquiescence in the match seems uncharacteristic. She had inherited her father’s intrepidity and her mother’s determination. Every action of her eventful life suggests strength of will and force of personality that little could dampen. But she was weak and vulnerable with illness when she finally agreed to Robinson’s proposal. While she lay on her sickbed, the banns were published during three successive Sunday morning services at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, in what is now Trafalgar Square.
An unflattering biographical account of the Robinsons, published in 1781, in which the writer claimed that he knew a great deal about the couple’s affairs, claimed that, despite his humble position as a lawyer’s clerk, Thomas presented himself to Mary and Hester as a gentleman of £30,000, sole heir to a Mr Harris of Carmarthenshire, who gave him an allowance of £500 per year and far greater expectations for the future. According to this early biographer, both Mary and her mother jumped at the match.15
Doubts may have crept in when Robinson urged mother and daughter to keep the engagement secret. He gave two reasons. One was that he still had three months’ training to serve as an articled clerk and the second that there was another young lady who wished to marry him as soon as he came into independence. Mary had found a small window of opportunity for delay and urged him to postpone the marriage until he came of age. Robinson absolutely refused. Now that she had recovered, with no loss to her looks, Mary still harboured hopes of a stage career. Garrick, wholly unaware that he was in danger of losing his protégée, was agitating for a performance date. Robinson, appealing shrewdly to Hester’s insecurities, invoked strong arguments against the theatre. Nicholas Darby would be horrified by the prospect. Mary’s health would suffer from the ‘fatigues and exertions of the profession’. He also voiced the anti-theatrical prejudice of the age’s moralists when he suggested that Mary would become an object of male desire whose reputation would be irrevocably damaged ‘on a public stage, where all the attractions of the mimic scene would combine to render [her] a fascinating object’.16
Time was running out for M
ary. She now had to decide whether to risk the social embarrassment of pulling out of the marriage even though the banns had been posted or to abandon her hopes of a stage career. With increasing pressure from all angles to choose between the professions of respectable marriage or disreputable acting, she relented: ‘It was now that Mr Robinson and my mother united in persuading me to relinquish my project; and so perpetually, during three days, was I tormented on the subject – so ridiculed for having permitted the bans to be published, and afterwards hesitating to fulfil my contract, that I consented – and was married.’17
In the original manuscript of her Memoirs, Mary proceeded in the next paragraph to describe her feelings as she knelt at the altar on her wedding day. But she later returned to the manuscript and inserted an additional paragraph that creates a compelling picture of herself as little more than a schoolgirl, coerced into marriage out of gratitude and filial obedience. Up until her marriage, she claims, she dressed like a child (though this does not square with the description of her attire on the day she met Robinson for the first time). She insists that she looked ‘so juvenile’ in her appearance that even two years after her wedding shopkeepers would address her as Miss, assuming she was a daughter and not a wife. She even adds that she still retained the manners of a child, playing with her dolls only three months before she became a wife. One senses a certain overegging of the pudding here. The image of the child with her dolls does not equate with that of the young lady being trained by Garrick for the stage and pursued by the ‘libertine Captain’, who was still writing to Mary and following her around in public despite her discovery of the fact that he was already married.
The vicar officiating at the church, Dr Erasmus Saunders, remarked that he had never ‘before performed the office for so young a bride’. The wedding took place on 12 April 1773: Mary Darby became Mary Robinson when she was just under 151/2. In the Memoirs she presents herself as sexually innocent: ‘the only circumstance which induced me to marry was that of being still permitted to reside with my mother, and to live separate, at least for some time, from my husband’.18 She chose for her wedding attire the habit of a Quaker – ‘a society to which, in early youth, I was particularly partial’.19 But when the bride left the church for the wedding breakfast at a friend’s house, she changed her plain dress for something altogether more glamorous. Her gown was muslin, with a matching white sarsenet scarf-cloak; she wore a chip hat with silk ribbons and satin slippers embroidered with silver thread. The change of costume is symbolic of Mary’s struggle to reconcile the contrasting aspects of her character. On the one hand she wanted to be seen as a prudish Quaker, a sexual innocent almost forced into an arranged marriage, but on the other she wanted to be viewed as a beautiful and fashionable bride, decked out in white and silver.
Mary always insisted that her marriage was not a love match. She was deeply romantic and cherished hopes of a soul mate. Robinson was not the man. Of her feelings for her future husband, she wrote, ‘I knew not the sensation of any sentiment beyond that of esteem; love was still a stranger to my bosom.’20 But according to the Memoirs, it was not another, more dashing suitor that she thought of as she spoke her marriage vows kneeling at the altar of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Her thoughts wandered instead to the theatrical career that she was sacrificing, to the glimmer of fame, and the lost opportunity of an independent livelihood.
CHAPTER 3
Wales
There is nothing in life so difficult as to acquire the art of making time pass tolerably in the country.
Mary Robinson, The Widow
The wedding party of four set out in a phaeton and a post chaise. They stopped for the night at an inn near Maldenhead. Robinson was accompanied by an old school friend, Hanway Balack, who kept the groom in good cheer whilst the young bride Mary walked in the gardens with her mother, weeping and describing herself as ‘the most wretched of mortals’. She confessed to Hester that although she esteemed Mr Robinson she did not feel for him that ‘warm and powerful union of soul’ which she felt was indispensable for marriage.1
Mary was already beginning to regret the clandestine quality of the marriage. During the onward journey to Henley-on-Thames the following day, Hanway had quoted facetiously from Isaac Bickerstaff’s comic opera The Padlock of 1768, then in ‘high celebrity’, which depicted the insecurities of an aged bachelor called Don Diego. His teasing made her painfully aware of the precariousness of her position: Robinson had not told even the friend who was accompanying them on the honeymoon that they were married. Ironically, though, Hanway was to remain a close and loyal friend to Mary throughout her life, long after Robinson had disappeared from it.*
The honeymoon by the river at Henley lasted for ten days. Mary had the painful task of sending Garrick the news that she was married and was therefore relinquishing her stage career. When the couple returned to London, it was to separate residences. Robinson returned to his job in Chancery Lane, while Mary and her mother hired an elegant house in Great Queen Street in fashionable Lincoln’s Inn Fields, backing onto Chancery Lane. Robinson stuck to his insistence that the marriage should be kept secret until he had come of age and finished his articles. Whilst he was busy in chambers, Mary grew bored and found herself a young female companion, who shared her romantic disposition. The girls spent hours wandering in Westminster Abbey, peering at its Gothic windows and listening to the echoes of their footsteps vibrating along the aisles. Mary felt transported back to her childhood in Bristol Minster.
Hester became anxious about her new son-in-law’s continued desire for secrecy. She began to regret the part she had played in promoting the marriage. Then she learnt to her dismay that Robinson had been spinning a web of lies from the very start. He had claimed that his inheritance would fall due when he came of age, but in fact he was already 21. And he had much further to go in his training than he had pretended. Worst of all, Hester discovered the true story of Robinson’s origins. He was not the legitimate heir of his uncle, Thomas Harris, and heir presumptive to a ‘handsome fortune and an estate in South Wales’. He was actually Harris’s illegitimate son – according to one source, the result of a fling with a laundress. Furthermore, with an industrious and ambitious older brother in the picture (whom Robinson had conveniently forgotten to mention), his financial prospects were dim. It was extremely unlikely that he would inherit anything at all from his father. He also owed a lot of money.
Mary, meanwhile, unexpectedly met Garrick walking in a London street. This was the first time she had seen him since informing him by letter of her marriage. She was highly sensible that he had not yielded any return on his protégée and that she had not told him of her defection face to face. After all, she had been trained by the greatest actor of the age and he was not accustomed to having his time wasted by fickle would-be-actresses who changed course at the final hurdle. To his infinite credit and to her utmost relief, he greeted her warmly and congratulated her on her marriage. Mary’s charm and beauty had won him over again. She does not record what she said to him at this meeting. Perhaps she intimated to him, as she did in her Memoirs, that she had been persuaded to marry against her will, and that she deeply regretted the sacrifice of her career. However she managed it – and David Garrick was not the easiest person in the world to sweet-talk – he continued to be a friend and supporter. Mary had a unique talent for maintaining loyal, protective friends, most of whom fell headlong in love with her wit and charm.
Garrick’s knowledge of Mary’s marriage put increasing pressure on Robinson to make the union public. Every day that passed with a disavowal from him put Hester under increasing strain, and Mary’s reputation at greater risk. She could fall pregnant at any time, a plight that Garrick and George Colman the Elder had exploited in their popular comedy of 1766 The Clandestine Marriage. In this play, the lovely young heroine Fanny Sterling is persuaded by her new husband, against her better judgement, to keep her clandestine marriage secret, even though she is heavily pregnant. Des
pite her condition, she is pursued by many suitors, especially the lecherous aristocrat Lord Ogleby. Mary hints at a similar dilemma in her Memoirs, though it was her mother who was furious with Thomas: ‘The reputation of a darling child, she alleged, was at stake; and though during a few weeks the world might have been kept in ignorance of my marriage, some circumstances that had transpired now rendered an immediate disclosure absolutely necessary.’2 There is, however, no evidence that Mary was indeed pregnant at this time. Her daughter was born a full year later.
Perhaps this was an example of Mary’s penchant in her Memoirs for conflating fact and fiction, drawing upon a literary cliché of secret unions and swollen stomachs. She was writing with the memory of having drawn attention from the press for playing the part of the pregnant Fanny Sterling in The Clandestine Marriage whilst she herself was heavily pregnant with her second child. Another possibility is, of course, that Mary and her mother used a feigned pregnancy as a final card to force Thomas’s hand and frighten him into submission. If that was the trick, it seems to have worked: Hester confronted her son-in-law and demanded that he make the marriage public before Mary’s reputation was irrevocably damaged.
Finding Hester inexorable, Robinson resolved to leave for South Wales to avow his marriage and present his young bride to his ‘uncle’ – he still stubbornly disputed the fact of his illegitimacy, though his secret was now out. Hester insisted on travelling with the couple as far as Bristol, ostensibly in order to visit her old friends in the city, but no doubt also to keep an eye on developments. In the absence of her husband, she was determined to protect her daughter’s honour. The journey to Bristol was enlivened by a stopover in which they visited the Oxford colleges and took a guided tour of Blenheim Palace – ‘with the hope of soothing my mother’s resentment, and exhilarating my spirits, which were now perpetually dejected’.3