by Paula Byrne
Pierce Egan, The Mistress of Royalty, 1814
The Morning Post, Monday, 29 December 1800:
The literary world have to regret the loss of Mrs Robinson, who died on Friday morning at eight o’clock, at her cottage on Englefield Green. She had been for several months in a declining state of health, which worldly troubles greatly aggravated. In her last moments, however, she was consoled by the tender attentions of her daughter and of many friends, who deeply lament that a woman of so much genius, of such an elegant taste, of so rich an imagination in poetry, should be cut off at a period when the mental faculties are in their prime. As the authoress of several popular novels and poetical pieces, many of them under the signature of LAURA MARIA, she was well known to the public, who would have been still further indebted to her pen, if she had been blessed with life and health.
The idea that she would eventually receive such an obituary would have been unimaginable back in 1786 when the Morning Post had erroneously reported that ‘Mrs Robinson, the once famous Perdita, died a few days ago at Paris.’ The transformation from royal mistress to one of the most admired authors of the age has never been achieved before or since.
In 1801, soon after Mary’s death, the Prince confirmed that he would continue paying the annuity – at the reduced level of £200 – to her daughter. There was some correspondence between Maria Elizabeth and the palace with regard to arrears on the annual payments to her mother. Maria Elizabeth also kept in touch with Godwin. She wrote to thank him for attending her mother’s funeral: ‘If any mortal transaction, could soothe her dear spirit, it would be the knowledge of having been attended to her “long and lasting” repose, by so much worth, and genius, as yours.’1 Maria Elizabeth also asked Godwin to return ‘any letters from my darling Mother – to you – which you think would do her credit’.2 This request was probably made in connection with her work completing her mother’s Memoirs, but it is not impossible that she was considering writing a more ambitious ‘life and letters’. In 1804, Maria Elizabeth was in possession of her mother’s ‘original MSS’,3 but all these papers have disappeared. To judge from the handful that have survived by chance, a collection of Mary’s letters – not to mention those she received from her friends, lovers, and publishers – would have made fascinating reading.
In some circles, Mary’s name remained tarnished. Jane Porter did not publish her memoir of her fellow novelist because she was warned that if her friendship with Mrs Robinson became public knowledge ‘all the world would cut me’; another novelist, Mrs Crespigny, told her that ‘she must drop me and that I should be shunned by all decent people’.4
Mary’s life-story certainly remained in the public consciousness for some years. During the Regency crisis of 1808 the Prince was satirized by means of ‘historical’ novels that enacted the ‘Florizel and Perdita’ affair in medieval settings. The anonymous The Royal Legend included such readily recognizable characters as ‘Colonel Carleton’ and ‘Lupo’ (Fox). Its version of Mary was based on close acquaintance with the Memoirs and was not wholly unflattering:
The youthful Perdita, which was the name of the female, gave early proofs of a sensibility of disposition very uncommon at her tender years: the gloomy ruins of the cloisters were her constant haunt during the day; and in their solitudes her mind received those intellectual rays which beamed so brightly in her more advanced years.5
Another similar novel, The Private History of the Court of England, introduced the pleasing fantasy that Perdita was especially attractive on stage when cross-dressed as Hamlet.
Public interest in the Prince ensured that Mary’s name was kept alive throughout the Regency years. In 1814, the journalist Pierce Egan published The Mistress of Royalty; or, the Loves of Florizel and Perdita, portrayed in the Amatory Epistles, between an Illustrious Personage, and a Distinguished Female. This curiously hybrid book began by reprinting the 1784 Effusions of Love, without apparently realizing that its letters were fabrications, then proceeded to an extraordinary paean to Mrs Robinson’s qualities: she was so beautiful that likenesses of her adorned the finest courts of Europe, as far away as Russia; she was always affable and courteous; she had the ‘most refined and elegant conversation’, together with a ‘pregnant wit’; she showed enormous serenity of mind in her difficult last years; her novels ‘abound with the most accurate delineations of human nature’; her pamphlet on Marie Antoinette was the product of a ‘capacious, intelligent mind’; all in all, she had ‘SUPERLATIVE TALENTS’ and lacked only one thing – chastity.6 The Prince finally became King George IV in 1820. Six years later, Mary’s last publisher, Sir Richard Phillips, tried to sell back to the royal family the lock of the Prince’s hair that she had kept all her life.
Phillips published the Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson, Written by Herself in 1801, in a four-volume set that also included some ‘posthumous pieces’, an elegy on her death by ‘Peter Pindar’, a full list of her published books, a list of the newspaper poems written in the last twelve months of her life, the ‘Sylphid’ essays, the fragmentary novel Jasper, ‘The Savage of Aveyron’, ‘The Progress of Liberty’, and ‘The Haunted Beach’. There were also tributary poems and correspondence by Pindar, Pratt, Taylor, Merry, Boaden, Coleridge, Robert Ker Porter, Reynolds, and many more. Five years later, Phillips brought into print the long delayed three volumes of Mary’s Poetical Works, prepared for the press by Maria Elizabeth.
After the Memoirs but before the Poetical Works, a brief selection of Mary’s poems, together with others by a range of writers in her circle of acquaintance, was edited by Maria Elizabeth under the title The Wild Wreath. Publishing some of her mother’s poems in this company was a way of honouring Mary’s desire to be among ‘a small but brilliant circle’ of literary men and women. Maria Elizabeth includes some of her own poems in the anthology, but had no success in her attempts to publish another collection that consisted solely of her own work. Tarleton’s wife Susan contributed some elegant engravings: she must have become friendly with her husband’s ex-lover’s daughter. Some of the poems in the volume, including one called ‘To a False Friend’, are by ‘Susan’: could it be that Tarleton had resumed his life of philandering and that his wife now found herself in the position Mary had endured for so long? If so, there was a reconciliation: the couple remained married, seemingly very happily in their later years, until Tarleton’s death in January 1833. Susan lived on, an eccentric widow, well into her eighties.
Maria Elizabeth’s request to Coleridge for a poem for The Wild Wreath elicited a long and tortuous reply. First he said that he had given up writing poetry and then he mingled his affectionate memories of Mary with a fit of moralizing:
Your dear Mother is more present to my eyes, than the paper on which I am writing – which indeed swims before my sight – for I can not think of your Mother without Tears. Let not what I say offend you, – I conjure you, in the name of your dear Mother! let it not do so. Others flattered her – I admired her indeed, as deeply as others – but I likewise esteemed her much, and yearned from my inmost soul to esteem her altogether. Flowers, they say, smell sweetest at eve; it was my Hope, my heart-felt wish, my Prayer, my Faith, that the latter age of your Mother would be illustrious and redemptory – that to the Genius and generous Virtues of her youth she would add Judgement, and Thought – whatever was correct and dignified as a Poetess, and all that was matronly as Woman. Such, you best know, were her own aspirations – One of her poems written in sickness breathes them so well and so affectingly, that I never read it without a strange mixture of anguish and consolation. – In this Feeling I cultivated your Mother’s acquaintance, thrice happy if I could have soothed her sorrows, or if the feeble Lamp of my friendship could have yielded her one ray of Hope and Guidance. Your Mother had indeed a good, a very good, heart – and in my eyes, and in my belief, was in her latter life a blameless Woman. – Her memoirs I have not seen – I understood that an excessively silly copy of Verses, which I had absolutely forgotten the very writ
ing of, disgraced me and the volumes – this publication of a private Letter (an act so wholly unjustifiable, and in it’s nature subversive of all social confidence) I attributed altogether to the Man, at whose Shop the Volumes were published –. I was sorry, no doubt, that so very silly a Poem had been published – for your mother’s sake still more than for my own – yet I was not displeased to see my Name joined to your Mother’s – I have said every where and aloud, that I thought highly both of her Talents and of her Heart, and that I hoped still more highly of both. I was not grieved at an occasion, which compelled me often to stand forth, as her Defender, Apologist, and Encomiast.7
The extraordinary mix of feelings expressed here reveals how difficult it was for a man such as Coleridge to reconcile the intensely fond emotions inspired by Mary’s charm with the troubling associations of her reputation.
It transpired that Coleridge’s real concern was the message that would be sent out by the appearance of his work between the same covers as authors such as the Gothic novelist ‘Monk’ Lewis, who had promised a poem. ‘As to Peter Pindar,’ he continued, ‘By all the Love and Honor, I bear to your dear Parent’s memory, by the anguish and the indignation at my inmost heart, I swear to you that my flesh creeps at his name!!’ Did not Maria Elizabeth remember that Pindar had published a poem that described ‘an infamous and mercenary Strumpet’ as ‘the Mrs Robinson of Greece’?8 How could she associate her mother’s memory with such a man? In the end, though, Coleridge relented and his Gothic poem ‘The Mad Monk’ duly appeared in The Wild Wreath.
Nothing is known of Maria Elizabeth’s later years. She lived to a similar age as her mother, dying in 1818. At her own request, she was buried in Mary’s tomb. According to local legend, her sad ghost walks the Old Windsor graveyard at dawn and dusk.9 In her will she left everything to Elizabeth Weale, ‘now residing with me’.10 As has been seen, Miss Weale was nurse to Mary and companion to Maria Elizabeth at Englefield Cottage. It can only be presumed that the two unmarried women continued to live together there for the rest of Maria Elizabeth’s life. Whether her mother’s troubled history with men, together with the broken engagement to Mr H—, led Maria Elizabeth actively to prefer the companionship of a woman is not known.
The Prince’s own marriage proved a disaster, reaching its low point when his consort arrived uninvited at his coronation in Westminster Abbey. Fox found great happiness with Elizabeth Armistead, though tucked away in some private papers there is a letter he wrote to a confidante admitting that Mrs Robinson was the true love of his life.11 As for Lord Malden, he had a string of mistresses and an illegitimate daughter to whom he was devoted.12 At the age of 81 he married his last mistress, a woman half his age, Catherine Stephens, who was admired during the Regency as the most beautiful actress on the London stage (she was especially renowned for her vocal skills in operatic roles such as Susanna in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro). He died a year after marrying her, but she lived on for another forty years as Countess of Essex. In raising an actress to the aristocracy was he finally atoning for his behaviour towards Mary? Perhaps he was haunted all through his later years by the letter she had written him a few months before her death in 1800.
The longevity of Wordsworth, coupled with the potent myths inspired by the premature deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, meant that in the Victorian era Mary Robinson’s poetry was forgotten, along with that of her talented female contemporaries such as Charlotte Smith. Gothic and sentimental fiction went out of fashion, so her novels also ceased to be read. Only in the 1990s, with the academic revival of interest in female authors (especially in America), did scholars begin to take her work seriously and to perceive her importance in the literary world of the 1790s.
The story of her affair with the Prince was sometimes retold in the twentieth century, in the purple prose of popular historical fiction. Jean Plaidy’s Perdita’s Prince (1969) is the best example: ‘The Prince of Wales stalked up and down his apartments in the Dower Lodge on Kew Green and aired his grievances to his brother, Prince Frederick. “I tell you this, Fred,” he declared, “I have had enough.”’ Or, as the blurb to G. P. Putnam’s American edition put it: ‘Their passionate affair was as star-crossed and amorous as any in the history of the English throne. Perdita’s Prince is the haunting story of a sweeping love that threatened to divide politics and become a national scandal.’
The Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Romney portraits of her still turn heads in the Wallace Collection. The Hoppner portrait now hangs in the hall of Chawton House in Hampshire, the home of Jane Austen’s wealthy relations, which has become a centre for the study of early women writers. It is the painting in the collection that visitors always ask about. Mary Robinson’s time has come again in the early twenty-first century: she fashioned her own image, she knew how to manage the media, she lived in the world of celebrity, but she was also an acute and often comic analyst of that world.
The cottage at Englefield Green no longer exists. Close to where it probably stood there is now an exclusive residential community, its pastiche neo-classical architecture and decorative fountains enclosed behind high-security wrought-iron gates – a far cry from Mary’s desire to gather a small but brilliant literary circle. She would, however, have been delighted that a few hundred yards down the road stands the huge Victorian Gothic edifice of Royal Holloway College, one of the first institutions in Britain to have fulfilled her demand that women should be allowed a university education.
Mary’s grave is in the churchyard at Old Windsor. The ravages of time and weather have largely effaced the words on the original memorial stone, but it is still possible to read the poems on either side of the tomb. One is a sonnet by her friend Samuel Jackson Pratt:
Of Beauty’s Isle, her daughters must declare,
She who sleeps here was fairest of the fair.
But ah! while Nature on her favourite smil’d,
And Genius claim’d his share in Beauty’s child;
Ev’n as they wove a garland for her brow,
Sorrow prepar’d a willowy wreath of woe;
Mix’d luried nightshade with the buds of May,
And twin’d her darkest cypress with the bay:
In mildew tears steep’d every opening flow’r,
Prey’d on the sweets, and gave the canker pow’r:
Yet, O may Pity’s angel, from the grave
This early victim of misfortune save!
And as she springs to everlasting morn,
May Glory’s fadeless crown her soul adorn!
The other is an epitaph that Mary composed herself for inclusion in her best novel, Walsingham. Its last two stanzas read:
No wealth had she, nor power to sway;
Yet rich in worth, and learning’s store:
She wept her summer hours away,
She heard the wintry storm no more.
Yet o’er this low and silent spot,
Full many a bud of Spring shall wave,
While she, by all, save ONE forgot,
SHALL SNATCH A WREATH BEYOND THE GRAVE!13
I visited the grave on a sunny spring day. After walking away from it, I returned for one last look. Kneeling down at one end, I could just make out Mary’s name and dates. I traced over them with my finger and then to my surprise discovered another name engraved just below: ‘Perdita’. After all Mary’s efforts to remake herself as Mrs Robinson the author, rather than Perdita the royal mistress, could her daughter really have allowed the infamous name to appear for posterity?
She probably did not: I subsequently learned from a local bookseller that the grave was restored in 1952 by Mary’s great-great-niece, a descendant of her brother George Darby. It was probably she who added the name ‘Perdita’, but we cannot know for sure that she did not order the re-engraving of what was already there. Sadly, the grave is not the ‘silent spot’ of Mary’s own epitaph. Old Windsor churchyard is only a few miles from Heathrow, directly below the flight path. Every few seconds a plane thunders low over he
r grave and almost shakes the ground with its noise.
APPENDIX:
The Mystery of Mrs Robinson’s Age
Mary Robinson’s gravestone and the published text of her Memoirs give her date of birth as 27 November 1758. All biographical and reference works in which she finds a place duly give the lifespan of Mary Robinson, née Darby, as 1758 to 1800. But the original parish register of the church of St Augustine the Less records that she was baptized on 19 July 1758. How could a child have been baptized in July and born the following November?
Was Mary exercising the traditional prerogative of the actress to lie about her age? Maybe it suited her self-image to pretend that she was younger than she was. Later in the Memoirs she represented herself as an innocent and, in particular, a child-bride: ‘only three months before I became a wife,’ she wrote, ‘I had dressed a doll’.1 Her friend Jane Porter said that Mary married ‘at almost an infantine age’.2 Furthermore, most of her readers would have known that she had a very public affair with the Prince of Wales in 1780, when he was just 17. Could it be that by giving her birth date as 1758 Mary made out that she was the 21-year-old lover of the teenage prince, when she was really a year or two older? Was she trying to represent herself as a mere ingénue being swept off her feet by the glamour of royalty when she was really more of a seductive ‘older woman’? And here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, one is tempted to add.
But there is another twist to the story. Tucked away in the library of one of the most closely guarded houses in England is a stout volume containing the original manuscript of the ‘Memoirs of Mary Robinson written by Herself’. Halfway down its fourth page is the statement ‘During a tempestuous night on the twenty seventh day of november, I first opened my eyes to this world of duplicity and sorrow.’3 Mary did not mention the year of her birth. She never made the false claim that she was born in 1758. The date was added when the manuscript was printed after her death. If the misinformation was deliberate, the culprit was her daughter, who saw the Memoirs through the press. It is more likely that Maria Elizabeth Robinson, who was also responsible for the wording on the gravestone, misremembered or never knew the precise year of her mother’s birth.