by Paula Byrne
Some readers were disgusted by the amount of space that the papers devoted to the doings of Mary and other ‘demireps’. Thus a letter signed ‘Lover of Virtue’:
In what a degree of low scandal is a certain morning paper now held! Whole columns of it filled with Mrs Robinson’s green carriage. It is of little consequence to the public whether an impure, as they are fashionably denominated, drives four ponies or two coach-horses; whether she paints her neck or her cheeks; whether she sports a phaeton or rides in a dung-cart; whether she is accompanied by a peer or a pimp; by a commoner or a bully … it sickens a modest woman, and creates belief that girls of the town are the whole entertainers of the polite circles in the metropolis. The papers have found out fine names for those prostitutes: they are called the Cyprian Corps, the frail sisterhood, the nuns, the vestals, the impures, and twenty other pretty names … meant as so many umbrellas to shade the infamy of their real appellation – the hired prostitution of the day.24
Within a few months of abandoning the aristocrat for the war hero, Mary also became involved with the most prominent and controversial politician in the land. Charles James Fox, the son of a politician, was eight years older than Mary. A drinker, a gambler, and a Member of Parliament since the age of 19, he had made a name for himself by opposing the Royal Marriage Bill and supporting the repeal of the tea duty that was so hated in the colonies across the Atlantic. His support for the American rebels provoked the King to write to the Prime Minister, Lord North, in 1774, ‘That young man has so thoroughly cast off every principle of common honour and honesty, that he must become as contemptible as he is odious.’25
Over the next few years Fox became widely recognized as the leading figure on the more radical wing of the Whig party (the term ‘party’ denoted a broad alliance of interests, internally divided by different factions, rather than anything so strictly defined as a modern political party). He earned the title ‘the man of the people’ and became involved in prolonged infighting with Lord Shelburne, leader of the more moderate Whigs. In terms of public perception, Fox was regarded as the leader of the parliamentary opposition to Lord North’s Tory administration. The King thoroughly approved of North, which inevitably threw the Prince into the arms of Fox. They became regular gaming companions at Brooks’s Club in St James’s. The politician became a kind of anti-father figure to the Prince: dozens of caricatures alluded to the relationship in the terms of Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth, representing Fox as Falstaff to the Prince’s Hal. Though unshaven and slovenly, with grease spots on his coat, a paunch, a double chin, and beetling eyebrows, Fox was a figure of great charisma, principally because he was a brilliant orator and great wit. He had a reputation for taking a new mistress more frequently than he took a bath.
The loss of the American war precipitated the fall of North’s Government in the spring of 1782. An uneasy alliance of Whigs took office, with the old rivals Fox and Shelburne as joint secretaries of state in charge of foreign affairs with responsibility for negotiating peace with America (Shelburne) and France (Fox). They quarrelled about priorities, could not agree, and in July Fox resigned in pique from the Government. He returned to the gaming tables and the company of the Prince of Wales and the Devonshire House set. He began an affair with Mary in July and persuaded her to drop Tarleton. The Colonel seems to have viewed this turn of events with equanimity, to judge from a letter to his brother Thomas (in which he also reveals that he and another of his brothers, John, had previously quarrelled over his relationship with Perdita): ‘The seceded Secretary is now my rival with the Lady in whose cause and in defence of whose disinterested conduct John first took umbrage against me. The Fox will not be so fortunate in his association as I am fortunate in separation. I shall ever applaud the Perdita as the most generous woman on earth.’26 That last sentence could be read in several different ways.
As only to be expected, the press made much of the affair. In the conservative Morning Post Fox was criticized for wasting his time and talents ‘on the turf, in gaming houses, and sacrifices to the Cyprian Goddess’ while the rising Tory star William Pitt the Younger was studiously employed in qualifying himself for future ministerial greatness.27 The more gossipy Morning Herald preferred to record sightings of Fox and Mary driving around together and to suggest that ‘The present intimacy subsisting between the ex-minister and the Perdita is said to be perfectly political on the part of the lady’ – she was supposedly anticipating the day when he would return to high office.28 Fox reportedly claimed that the reason he was so often seen at Mrs Robinson’s house in Berkeley Square was that it commanded a view of Lansdowne House, the residence of his rival Shelburne: ‘You know, Sir, I have pledged myself to the public to have a strict eye on Lord S—’s motions; this is my sole motive for residing in Berkeley-square, and that you may tell my friends is the reason they have not seen me at Brookes’s.’29
On 20 August a new caricature appeared in the window of Elizabeth D’Achery’s print shop in St James’s Street, a few doors from Brooks’s Club and a few streets from both the home of Mary Robinson and the lodgings of Banastre Tarleton. Entitled ‘The Thunderer’, it was one of the earliest works of James Gillray, who would become the most brilliant and scabrous caricaturist in English history. The Thunderer is Tarleton: the caricature is a parody of Reynolds’s portrait of him, with both posture and dress closely replicated. His crotch, however, is greatly enlarged, in order to suggest that he was physically much better endowed than the Prince.
The Colonel’s facial expression has been changed from the alertness and ardour suggested by Reynolds into a contemptuous sneer. He is transposed from the American battlefield to a London tavern. The sign above the door, inscribed ‘THE WHIRLIGIG Alamode Beef, hot every Night’, takes the form of Mary Robinson impaled on a long pole, with legs spread wide apart and completely exposed breasts. A face on the bracket that holds the pole grins lasciviously at the sight of the exposed thighs above her stocking-tops and the delights above. From her mouth comes a speech-bubble saying ‘This is the Lad’ll kiss most Sweet / Who’d not love a Soldier?’ The ‘whirligig’ was a large cage suspended on a pivot, in which army prostitutes were hoisted for punishment.
Gillray’s satirical art relied on a combination of visual and verbal allusion. The posture of Tarleton is that of the Reynolds portrait, while the lines he speaks belong to the worthless adventurer Bobadill in Ben Jonson’s popular comedy Every Man in his Humour, who brags about his fictitious exploits in foreign wars and especially about his skill in swordplay. The thundering Tarleton/Bobadill stands beside the vain country gull Stephen, who represents the Prince of Wales, identifiable by the ostrich feathers (his insignia) that replace his head. ‘Often in a mere frolic I have challeng’d Twenty of them, kill’d them,’ says the Thunderer, ‘Challeng’d Twenty more, kill’d them; – Twenty more, kill’d them too; and thus in a day have I kill’d Twenty Score; twenty score, that’s two hundred, two hundred a day, five days a thousand; that’s – a – Zounds, I can’t number them half.’ Tarleton was a notorious braggart. Horace Walpole said that he boasted of having butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the Army. To which Sheridan acidly replied, ‘“Lain with” – what a weak expression! he should have said ravished. Rapes are the relaxation of murderers!’30
Gillray paid attention to minute details in his caricatures. Although modern scholars have not noticed the fact, the figure of the sexually impaled Mary reveals a clear allusion to the Romney portrait: the tilt of the head, the slightly hooked nose, the half-smile, the dimple beneath the lower lip, the strawberry blonde hair and the giveaway Quaker cap are all exact copies. As Reynolds’s heroic Tarleton is subverted by the allusion to Bobadill, so Romney’s chaste image of Perdita is transformed into a vicious representation of her as a prostitute selling her wares.
Even the Morning Post, which was usually unfavourably disposed towards Mary, felt that Gillray had gone too far. Just over a week after the publication of this caricat
ure, it published a profile entitled ‘Hasty Sketch of Perdita By a Gentleman over Head and Ears in Love’. This was a very flattering portrait, describing her as a woman who embellished the ton naturally but instinctively shunned the bright lights of the fashionable world, seeing through its hollowness. An opening reference to her disdain for ‘the whirl of life’ may be intended specifically as a riposte to Gillray’s ‘whirligig’:
Formed by the hand of nature for almost every opposite pursuit to that in which the whirl of life has engaged her, Perdita but half enjoys her present situation; yet she gives to it every grace and embellishment of which it is susceptible … her soul turns unsatisfied away from whatever princes can bestow! Were her talents mean, her fancy less elevated, her heart less animated, her passions less vivid, she would derive a more constant pleasure from the gaieties which are now her occasional consolation. Her temper is by nature quick, impatient, excursive, and romantic; and makes her equal to every thing which is uncommon, adventurous, and unpremeditated. There is nothing enthusiastically great of which she is not capable, when she obeys the unresisted impulse of the moment: and love or generosity would carry her from pole to pole.
These traits – her passionate nature and quick temper, her generosity and impulsiveness – were all stressed by those who knew her, and were acknowledged in her own self-portraits. The author proceeds to represent her as a heroine of sensibility, sensitive to poetry and prone to melancholy like a character out of a novel in the tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
Her love is the child of nature, nurs’d by the heart … She has taste and feeling which fit her for the retreats of life. Simplicity has charms for her. Attached to her, by nature, are the soft dejections of a pathetic spirit, a tender friendship with the Muse, and a soul that aches for the softness of unstraying love … it is to be deplored that she is not the happiest, because she has a heart to be the best; yet to her should be adjudged the highest praise, who in a difficult situation shows, by her sensibility, that she deserves a better.31
Gillray’s caricature was, of course, rather behind the times. When it was published, Mary was Fox’s lover rather than Tarleton’s. The ex-minister and the ex-actress were to be seen driving around in her carriage, the ultimate symbol of luxury and conspicuous consumption:
Now Charles Fox being dismissed from the Secretaryship of State returned again to Gaming and Dissipation. And he resumed his Pharoah Bank at Brooke’s and sojourned with Mrs Rob—s—n, the Harlot of the Day, and he drived her about in a Phaeton. The rattling of the wheels filled the air of the streets, and the neighing, and trampling of the horses was heard afar off.
And the people turned, and gazed upon him, and said, He driveth like Jehu, though not to the confusion of Jezabel!32
Fox’s aunt, Lady Sarah Napier (one of the famous Lennox sisters, herself once beloved of George III), remarked in a letter dated 11 September:
I hear Charles saunters about the streets and brags that he has not taken a pen in hand since he was out of place. Pour se desennuyer [to relieve his boredom], he lives with Mrs Robinson, goes to Sadler’s Wells with her, and is all day figuring away with her. I long to tell him he does it all to show that he is superior to Alcibiades, for his courtesan forsook him when he was unfortunate, and Mrs Robinson takes him up.33
Several commentators considered that it was Fox who was acting the part of a kept man. Perdita was the one in the driving seat: ‘In the late Phaetonic expedition of Perdita and the eloquent patriot it is to be distinguished that the lady gives the gentleman the airing, and not, as usual, the gentleman, the lady.’34
A caricature soon appeared with the title ‘Perdito and Perdita – or – the Man and Woman of the People’. This alludes to a joke that was going the rounds in London society. Horace Walpole reported it in a letter: ‘Charles Fox is languishing at the feet of Mrs Robinson. George Selwyn says, who should the man of the people live with, but the woman of the people?’35 The latter phrase meant a prostitute, though when it was applied to both Mary Robinson and the Duchess of Devonshire during the Westminster election campaign a year and a half later it took on political connotations.
In the cartoon a resplendent Mary dressed in a strikingly tight masculine riding jacket and high-crowned feathered hat (resembling that in Reynolds’s portrait) is driving Fox past the gateway of St James’s Palace in her carriage, firmly holding the reins. Her famous cipher of roses entwined around her initials in the shape of a coronet is highly prominent. The fact that she is in the driving seat, flourishing a whip high above her head, is intended to show that she is keeping Fox, who looks characteristically shabby and unkempt with his unshaven face. He is clutching his stomach and looks disconsolate. On the upper margin of the print is engraved: ‘I have now not fifty ducats in the World and yet I am in love.’
Again, though, the caricaturist had failed to keep up with the rapidity of events in Mary’s love life. By the time this print was published, she had left Fox and was back with Tarleton. Like the Prince of Wales before him, Fox turned for consolation to Elizabeth Armistead – though, very much unlike the Prince, he would fall deeply in love with her, remain faithful to her, and eventually marry her.
There was talk of Mary attempting to win back the Prince, but struggling as a result of her recent amours: ‘The Perdita has pitched upon the place where she is to erect her batteries next winter at the Opera-house; it is, as usual, pointed against the quarter of Florizel; but it is thought that her artillery is so weakened by constant use that it will not be able to do any great execution.’36 A few days later, the military metaphor was replaced with a nautical one. In a paragraph of sustained and very obscene double entendre the Perdita’s sexual exploits are described in the language of privateering on the high seas:
Yesterday, a messenger arrived in town, with the very interesting and pleasing intelligence of the Tarleton armed ship having, after a chace of some months, captured the Perdita frigate, and brought her safe into Egham port. The Perdita is a prodigious fine clean bottomed vessel, and has taken many prizes during her cruize, particularly the Florizel, a most valuable ship belonging to the Crown, but which was immediately released after taking out the cargo. The Perdita was captured some time ago by the Fox, but was afterwards retaken by the Malden, and had a complete suit of new rigging when she fell in with the Tarleton. Her manoevering to escape was admirable: but the Tarleton fully determined to take her or perish, would not give up the chace; and at length, coming along side of the Perdita, fully determined to board her sword in hand, she instantly surrendered at discretion.37
The ‘Tarleton armed ship’ and the ‘prodigious fine clean bottomed vessel’ Perdita were soon seen together in the environs of Windsor, Mary’s favourite spot for amorous sojourns. They were said to have converted an inn called the Bush at Staines into ‘the temple of the Cyprian Goddess’.38 Fox appeared back in London, parading with a fashionable beauty on each arm, but lamenting that ‘the bird in the bush’ was ‘worth two in the hand’.39
Rumour had it that Mary intended to remain in Windsor through the winter, but by mid-October she and the Colonel were back in town. She supposedly engaged in a lengthy wrangle with Dally the Tall for the best box at the opera from which to aim ocular artillery at the Prince. There were rumours that Mary was back in his favour and that he had named his favourite racehorse after her. A perusal of the racing news over the next few years reveals that ‘Perdita’ developed an excellent track record.
Whatever the success of the horse, as far as Henry Bate’s Morning Herald was concerned, Dally offered no contest in the female stakes. Mrs Robinson was the queen of the side boxes, the undisputed beauty of the age:
Whenever the beautiful Perdita puts in her claim for admiration, every heart must bestow its suffrage. Her late appearance at Covent-garden theatre justifies this remark, and shows that tho’ other Beauties may dazzle for a time, yet like the mock suns of Greenland, they are totally lost and expire, whenever a superior Splendour approaches!40
The Priestess of Taste
Delighted with the prospect of celebrity which opened to her view, she resolved seriously to invoke the supreme goddess, Fame!
Mary Robinson, Walsingham
To-day she was a paysanne, with her straw hat tied at the back of her head, looking as if too new to what she passed, to know what she looked at. Yesterday she, perhaps, had been the dressed belle of Hyde Park, trimmed, powdered, patched, painted to the utmost power of rouge and white lead; tomorrow she would be the cravatted Amazon of the riding house, but be she what she might, the hats of the fashionable promenaders swept the ground as she passed.
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, Memoirs
On 30 October 1782 the Morning Herald reported that ‘The Perdita has received a dress from Paris, which was introduced this Autumn by the Queen of France, and has caused no small anxiety in the fashionable circles. It is totally calculated for the Opera, where it is expected to make its first appearance.’ The dress was a sensation and would revolutionize female fashion in England.
It was a simple white flowing shift that dispensed with bodice and hoops, panniers and trains. The resemblance to a nightgown or undergarment meant that the style became known as deshabille (undressed). The dress was a copy of one first worn by Marie Antoinette, who had caused controversy by her adoption of a style of cool white muslin dress imported from the West Indies, where it was worn by Creole women. Unlike traditional dresses, which ladies stepped into, the chemise de la Reine was placed over the head and held with a drawstring at the neck or at the side. It was then tied at the waist by a silk sash, usually pale blue or striped, and often worn with a straw hat. Marie Antoinette’s adoption of the style was immortalized in 1783 by the brush of her favourite painter, Madame Vigée-Lebrun. Thanks to the Queen of France at Versailles and Mrs Robinson in London, it became, in the words of the Lady’s Magazine, ‘the universal rage’.1