The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  The shedding and altering of names was by no means an unusual practice among women of Charlotte’s profession. Without a direct association with a great lineage or a family of rank, a surname was a negligible, valueless thing. It was far better to call oneself something suitable, a moniker which conveyed a sense of allure, which alluded to an illustrious birth or to one’s special talents. If she was fortunate enough to be placed in keeping, she might also elect to adopt her lover’s surname, a practice which conferred on her the status of a de facto wife while simultaneously outraging respectable society. Why Charlotte alighted on the name of Hayes as a replacement for Ward is unknown. It may perhaps provide us with a clue as to who her first paramour might have been, although any evidence of a Mr, Lord or Captain Hayes has not been recorded in the annals of her history.

  In 1740, at about the time Charlotte Hayes made her appearance, two other girls ‘came upon the town from obscurity’: Lucy Cooper and Nancy Jones, who, along with the courtesan Fanny Murray, would prove to be her greatest rivals. The most business-minded bawds of the day were like horse trainers, constantly in search of young, promising blood from which they might be able to mould a winner. While Mrs Ward poured her resources into preparing her daughter for entry into the stakes, other procuresses cultivated their own favourites. At the time that Charlotte entered her profession, Fanny Murray had already established a name for herself as mistress to Beau Nash, the reigning Master of the Ceremonies at Bath, but it was Lucy Cooper who looked to be her greatest rival. Like Charlotte, she too had been the daughter of a bawd, born straight into the arms of a whorehouse. There were no aspirations for Lucy’s future though. If nature hadn’t blessed her with such overwhelming beauty, it is probable that she would have sunk into obscurity along with the others who lodged under her mother’s second-rate roof. It was only through the insight of Elizabeth Weatherby, one of Covent Garden’s ‘super-bawds’, that Lucy was polished and presented, a finished product ripe for high-class whoring in her early teens. Although lauded as being ‘perfection … amongst the great impures’ and deliciously ‘Lewder than all the whores in Charles’ reign’, Lucy never learned to exude the slow-burning charm that sustained Charlotte’s light. She and Mrs Weatherby, who acted as a kind of manager-cum-mother-figure, rowed bitterly and frequently. Choosing to ignore her procuress’s advice, Lucy eventually exhausted her good fortune, ending her days in debt and destitution at the period when Charlotte’s star was most in its ascendant. Nancy Jones’s fame was also short-lived. After only a few seasons, her handsome features were destroyed by a bout of smallpox. Robbed of the single attribute responsible for her livelihood, she too fell from the front row of leading lights and into the degradation of the back streets. From there, the grasp of syphilis is said to have pulled her into a pauper’s grave before the age of twenty-five. It only required poor judgement, or a stroke of bad luck, to capsize an otherwise profitable career as an exclusive lady of pleasure. Of the three who began the race in that year, only Charlotte managed to sustain her stride and amass a triumph of riches.

  The more often Charlotte’s face appeared in the front boxes of the theatres, the more frequently she was seen on the arms of her fashionable lovers, the more jewels they wrapped around her neck, the more her name was spoken by the raffish ‘in-crowd’ of Covent Garden. Gossip could be a courtesan’s best friend and, if its flames were stoked appropriately, could be used to her advantage. The more she appeared to be the dish du jour, the more desirous gentlemen of means became of making her acquaintance, although unlike Lucy Cooper and Fanny Murray, it was not necessarily Charlotte’s beauty about which her admirers raved. There was something in her person far more bewitching than simply a pleasing arrangement of features.

  Although no one of her contemporaries would have disputed that Charlotte Hayes was attractive, if not very pretty, the words used to praise her appearance are sparing and judiciously applied. She was, according to admirers, ‘buxom’ and ‘fair’. The poet Edward Thompson commemorates her not only for her ability to preserve her youthful features but for her admirable use of very ‘little paint’, while Sam Derrick, always favourable in his appraisals of her, remarks simply on her ‘grey eyes and brown hair’. These attributes were only partially responsible for what the devoted believed to be her true beauty. Charlotte, as one lover wrote, ‘shined’. Her composure, dignity and gentility made her unlike the majority of the foul-mouthed sisterhood. How a woman of such low birth could behave with the honesty and kindness of a virtuous wife was a mystery that gentlemen found both enthralling and sexually thrilling. One observer wrote that:

  She is extremely genteel … all her features [are] elegant, her air is fine, her address polite, and her taste in dress indisputably genteel; she is a woman of good sense, but talks less than most of her sex, except when she is perfectly well acquainted with her company; then few women can be more agreeably entertaining.

  Throughout her life, hardly an unfavourable word was uttered against her. To men like Edward Thompson who fell under her spell, it was Charlotte’s unaffected candour that was most enchanting, making her appear in his eyes at least ‘as honest as a saint’. Sam Derrick was also hooked by this, and praised her for ‘never learning to deceive … not withstanding the varieties she has seen in life’. To him, she would always possess ‘a countenance as open as her heart’.

  But the flattery of lovers and pundits says more about Charlotte Hayes’s impeccable professional skills than it does about her true qualities. She did not become an affluent courtesan or one of London’s most influential brothel-keepers by being either kind or honest. If, by chance, one of Charlotte’s female associates had left some jotted memory, some scrap of her life spent in the shadowed company of such a complicated creature, a truer picture of the woman might be have survived. Where her male patrons may have seen her exterior, a fellow female traveller would have seen the inside, the efforts to slowly extinguish her sense of sympathy, to unplug her emotions and to stuff the empty spaces with false smiles and theatrical tears. Her seemingly effortless deception of men is a testament to her mother’s early teaching, although in the first decades of her career, there were many more lessons still to be learned.

  5

  The Rise OF PIMP GENERAL JACK

  THE SHAKESPEAR’S HEAD Tavern, even in the early 1750s when Harrison arrived there, had been a fixture in Covent Garden for several generations. Reputed to be the first tavern in the Piazza, the Shakespear did a handsome trade and was, along with the Bedford Head Coffee House, one of the most profitable places of resort with which to be connected. This had something to do with its location in the north-eastern corner of the square, within easy stumbling distance of the two major theatres, and also with the availability of upstairs rooms. Private rooms brought gatherings of men (and sometimes women) before the establishment of fee-paying private members’ clubs. The society meetings it hosted were entirely legitimate and trumpeted openly in local papers, the most notable of these being the dinners held by the Beef-steak Society. When the rooms were not let out to society members intent on satiating themselves with beef and beer, individual patrons might be permitted to do the same with any number of Covent Garden’s luminary whores.

  The crowd at the Shakespear was a mixed and boisterous one. A recognised theatrical retreat, the raucous and drunken voices of Ned Shuter, Charles Macklin and Peg Woffington could be heard there above the din following a performance night. Aristocrats and wealthy ‘Cits’, such as William Hickey, were as conspicuous at its tables as the Garden’s least savoury element. The Shakespear was very much a no-holds-barred type of establishment, where no one asked questions and punters did as they pleased. Devoted patrons and local scions of the law, Justice Saunders Welch and the vice-busting Fielding brothers, did little to impede the activities that flourished in the more inconspicuous parts of the taproom. While enjoying their beefsteaks above stairs, they feigned blissful ignorance as to what transpired directly below their feet.

  Alt
hough gambling was officially banned from Covent Garden taverns, the Shakespear hosted a Hazard Club, where large sums of money were lost and won. Some fortunate souls could be seen carrying hats filled with guineas away from its illicit gaming tables. Bucks and bloods loved the Shakespear, Boswell being among them. Taking advantage of one of the empty rooms above stairs, the author escorted two willing ladies of pleasure to the Shakespear and ‘solaced my existence with them, one after the other, according to their seniority’. Those unable to afford or too impatient to wait for a private room could easily ‘solace’ themselves in a quiet corner with one of the ‘drunken and starving Harlots’, who often complained that such ‘wanton embracing’ on the tavern floor ‘soiled their clothes’.

  There were few in Covent Garden who swaggered with an air of wealth more convincing than the Shakespear’s proprietor, Packington Tomkins. His tavern had everything the Covent Garden punter desired and more: drink, women, convivial company, celebrities, gaming, and the unexpected. The Shakespear’s popularity was enormous and Tomkins’s taps never ran dry; he had one of the most extensive cellars in the area, containing ‘never less than a hundred pipes of wine’. Naturally, roaring trade made Tomkins shamefully wealthy. In addition to a house in London, he also maintained a Herefordshire estate and a private coach to shuttle him there and back at his leisure. Although the owner of a disreputable business, he was able to wipe the smudges of moral taint from his person and walk the streets of London as a convincingly respectable family man. By the end of his life he had married his daughter into the Longman family of publishers, and he died with a fortune in excess of £20,000. Unlike the majority of the patrons of his establishment, Tomkins was exactingly shrewd, and sober-headed enough to steer clear of the gaming tables.

  A booming business required an army of assistants, and to keep his ship afloat Tomkins employed seven waiters, including a head-waiter, a cellarman and a pot-boy. He also took on apprentices and ran a kitchen noted for its culinary genius. For staff at the Shakespear, it was unlikely that a better-paid position could be found in all of London. Aware of the reputation he was required to maintain, Packington Tomkins insisted that ‘each waiter was smartly dressed in his ruffles’. New recruits like John Harrison would have been granted a clothing allowance to pay for his attire in the first instance, but soon would have had pockets heavy enough with gold to purchase any number of fine shirts, coats and breeches. The handsome tips proffered at the Shakespear permitted its waiters to smile smugly. As ‘Old Twigg’, a former cook at the Shakespear, recalled, a porter ‘thought it a bad week if he did not make £7’, a sum equivalent to a domestic servant’s entire year’s wages. This, even for the son of a tavern-keeper, was likely to have been an enormous allowance. When coupled with his takings as a pimp, any appetite for wealth that Harrison may have harboured would have been well satisfied.

  Under Packington Tomkins’s roof, John Harrison would have been granted the precious opportunity of starting afresh. As a waiter at a Covent Garden back-street tavern, few but the locals would have known his name and face, but at the Shakespear, in the heart of the excitement, Harrison would become a recognised character in no time at all. The Shakespear’s Head was a destination in itself, a place where men from all corners of London would have gathered for an evening’s entertainment. As a fledgling pimp, Harrison would have recognised to what degree he could expand his fortune were he to make the most of his situation. He also could not fail to see the dangers that success might bring. Although discreet bawds, waiter-pimps and panderers higher up on the rungs of the sex-trade ladder had little to fear from the easily bribed authorities, Harrison was under no illusions as to the legitimacy of his craft. In his line of work, an alias would be a necessity, a kind of cloak of invisibility that could be pulled over the eyes in an instant. So when Tomkins’s patrons bellowed for a waiter to bring them a woman, they didn’t call for John Harrison, instead they requested the watchful, well-dressed figure known simply as ‘Jack Harris’. His father’s name, however esteemed, reviled or inconsequential it may have been, was cast off in favour of an altogether new identity. No longer Harrison the taverner’s son, he was free to become anyone.

  According to the two contemporary ‘authorities’ on Jack Harris, The Remonstrance of Harris and The Memoirs of Miss Fanny Murray, the key to the pimp’s success was his cool, calculating manner, his powers of observation and his rational approach to his trade. Like his employer Tomkins, Harris was a savvy businessman. He came to the Shakespear well acquainted with the role of waiter-pimp and, under Tomkins’s direction, was able to play his part to perfection. Harris had already established his understanding of the several fundamental characteristics required of a good pimp or panderer. The first and foremost of these was a knowledge of how to supplicate, which necessitated an aptitude for ‘insinuating, dissembling, flattering, cringing’ and ‘fawning’. Grovelling to badly behaved young gentlemen did not suit Harris’s personality, but he found that pragmatic self-control made him better able to ‘answer the huffing questions of fiery Blades’ and to ‘deprecate ire’. Although ‘ready to burst out of my head’ with anger, he learned to fix ‘my eyes on the ground … then raise them by degrees, speaking in the winning tone of submission’. This was a difficult pill to swallow, which Harris claimed he could not have managed had he not cultivated a certain strength of character and ‘philosophy enough to bear a kicking’. His only comfort lay in the revenge he was likely to reap at the expense of his wealthy client’s purse.

  Harris also found that in a larger establishment conspicuously larger requirements were made of him by patrons. A wider pool of gentlemen, comprising regulars as well as visitors from other parts of London, required a more diverse body of women to keep them amused. Harris’s knowledge of local prostitutes would have sufficed for only a short period. At a venue as well trafficked as the Shakespear, demand could quite easily outstrip supply if he was to rely solely upon the flesh on offer within the precincts of the Garden, particularly if a number of his reliable ladies might be unfit for performance due to a bout of the pox or a case of the clap. Irrespective of the quandary in which he found himself, and with no obvious solution, ‘the Bucks still rutted and called for coolers to quench their passions’. With hindsight, Harris was able to philosophise about the matter: ‘Man is an animal of passions’, he concluded, and ‘that which is subject to its passions has no steadiness … nor can it like anything for a long time’. The answer to such a problem was obvious: ‘provide a variety of faces’. But from where? And how could he vouch for the integrity of the goods on offer, if he was unfamiliar with the history of their suppliers? To make matters worse, what if these same bucks found ‘the fountains from which they drew their refreshment to be poisoned’? Certainly ‘they would blame those who led them to it, especially if it were done purely for the love of lucre’. Even in the early years of his career, Harris was likely to have been no stranger to physical violence. Jealous lovers, angry husbands and previously healthy clients who contracted the pox were all likely to have sought him out at some point. Of all three, none could be so vicious as the last of these, a gentleman whose entire life might have been cast into the balance as the result of a hasty and lustful encounter. Here might be someone who had unwittingly infected his wife and unborn offspring, who had shortened his own existence and that of his entire lineage due to the poor advice of a pimp. It may have been a picture of this figure standing before him that inspired John Harrison’s change of identity.

  Managing ‘a variety of faces’ required the cultivation of a flawless memory. A successful pimp needed a means by which this range of varied visages could be easily recalled and summoned when requested. In the case of a high-profile pimp at the Shakespear, whose reservoir was expected to be as vast as all of London, this was no easy feat. Similarly, a clever pimp would put himself in good stead with his customers if he could remember them, their preferences and which of the ladies under his care they had already sampled. Recruitment also
posed a problem, and might occupy a good part of a pimp’s energy. He would be constantly on the look-out for further conscripts, bearing in mind the partialities of his better-paying clients, making mental notes of who liked fresh-faced country lasses and who liked buxom older ladies. He might be given specific projects to pursue, orders from a bored peer or rich banker to hunt down a cleaner, younger mistress. On a lesser scale, at a smaller establishment, these tasks might have seemed less daunting, but now that his playing-field had been widened, Jack Harris’s challenge was to come to terms with the demands placed on him. If he were to master them successfully, he would make both his and Packington Tomkins’s fortune.

  When Tomkins took on John Harrison, he may have known something about the Covent Garden local or he may have divined it from the glint in his eye. Harrison had more ambition than most. He was, above all else, exceedingly clever, a man who might have fared equally well as a merchant or a banker, but who by virtue of his birth found himself in a realm far below that. ‘I saw great room for an amendment in the profession of pimping’, Harris claimed and therefore ‘… set about cudgelling my brain, and soon perceived that in the State, so in our business there was wanting a system to proceed methodically’. Pimps, he complained, ‘were men of expedients, devoid of all forecast’, who only managed problems as they arose in the present. After identifying the prevailing impediments, Harris, like any adept engineer, was determined to make some changes.