When Charlotte encountered him, Dennis had already succumbed to the sale of most of his clothing and the ‘few little moveables’ that he had on his person. According to her recollections, ‘wretched tatters scarce covered his nakedness’ and ‘famine stared him in the face’. Remarkably, however, O’Kelly’s spirit remained wholly intact. For most of his life, Dennis had been noted for possessing ‘the ease, the agremens, the manners of a gentleman’, as well as ‘the attractive quaintness of a humourist’, and it was these qualities, in addition to his ruggedly handsome features, that captured Charlotte’s confidence. With his formidable build, O’Kelly would have made an ideal protector, while his good humour, sharp wit and resourcefulness would have assisted in fortifying her emotionally. With Dennis at her side, Charlotte might now begin to win back some control over her position within the prison. After feeding and clothing Dennis, she was able to secure him a job within the Fleet as ‘attendant in the Tap’, a measure that then allowed him ‘to live by carrying out porter to his fellow prisoners’. Now the tables were turned, and Dennis could exact fees for the privilege of drink, just as they had been coerced from him. Unlike others, however, he was ‘distinguished for his jolly song’ rather than for abusing his newly acquired position. Consequently, the downcast inmates lodging on the Master’s side welcomed the singing, jocular Irishman into their fold with open smiles. ‘His reputation extended to the private apartments’ and, not surprisingly, ‘his company was frequently solicited among convivial circles’. Among the downtrodden population on both sides of the prison, O’Kelly became so popular that a fellow inmate, known affectionately as ‘the King’, bestowed on him the honorary title of ‘Count’.
While collecting Fleet honorariums was an amusing way of passing one’s sentence, Charlotte harboured much more substantial ideas of how she and Dennis might improve their lot. Throughout their lives, the couple were noted for their ability to scent promising opportunities. Although Charlotte had attempted to establish a brothel on Berwick Street shortly before her incarceration, her absence meant that the untended enterprise had withered and died by the time of her release in 1760. Now, contained by the perimeters of the prison, Charlotte’s hopes for surviving in the Fleet and building the foundation for a life beyond it were pinned on Dennis. Dennis, in turn, placed his hopes on the gaming tables. Their objective was then to get him to them.
While the Fleet did not prevent prisoners from gambling, anyone hoping to make a profit from the proceeds of card games would not seriously consider wasting his or her time matching hands with the insolvents in a debtor’s prison. Fortunately, as those pursuing legitimate work and seeking counsel from their legal representatives were allowed to traverse the boundaries of the prison, gaining access to the world outside was not an impossibility. The implications of the Fleet’s ‘day rules’ meant that debtors had to remain within a short distance of the prison walls and return at nightfall. This final stipulation was what would prove to be problematic. In Georgian London, dedicated gamesters could find any excuse to lay bets or sit at a card table, whether it was mid-afternoon or in the diminishing hours of darkness. Dennis required a bit of flexibility in order to perform his card tricks, and could hardly abandon a healthy rubber midway through simply because the sun had begun to set. The scheme therefore required the assistance of Charlotte’s expert diversion tactics. Outside the prison walls, O’Kelly ‘… was now as constantly seen in all public places as if he had not owed a shilling. These day and night rules frequently continued for weeks,’ wrote the author of The Exploits of Count Kelly, explaining that ‘as his judgement was now matured by experience, he seldom failed to make these excursions very advantageous’. Meanwhile, back at the Fleet, the prison’s grubby guards failed to notice the Count’s absence while Charlotte Hayes, ‘that well known priestess of the Cyprian Diety, that love and mirth admiring votress to pleasing sensuality … did not forget to perform her midnight orgies or sacrifice to the powers of love and wine’.
Such a plan could not have been carried to fruition without the cunning of both parties. Of all the accounts written about their relationship, not one differs in opinion about the bond that existed between them. This was love, in the truest, most devoted sense. Although the relationship may have begun as one of mutual convenience, forged through the shared experience of hardship, it evolved into something much more substantial. The ‘friendly assistance’ that Charlotte was said to have received from Dennis at this period became ‘the basis of her future attachment to him’, while he in return ‘now devoted the whole of his time to Charlotte’ and concentrated on securing her happiness. It is perhaps slightly over-romantic to believe that from the period of their meeting, ‘time passed without care’, as O’Kelly’s Memoirs suggest. No one’s sentence in a prison could slip away unnoticed, but there is much to substantiate the claim that their ‘attachment became so strong, that no circumstance in future life, could ever dissolve or shake the union.’ Dennis O’Kelly was Charlotte Hayes’s perfect match. He countered every quality she possessed. He was as well-endowed with physical and personal charms as she, and maintained the knowledge necessary to deploy his gifts to their greatest effect. Like Charlotte, Dennis had ‘a great ingenuity and a constant eye to temporary resources’. Both were instinctive emotional manipulators and observers of human behaviour. Both were intellectually astute, Charlotte particularly so with money: in the modern era she would have made a formidable business rival. Her survival skills, especially after a stint in prison, would have been honed to a vicious sharpness. However, ‘notwithstanding the varieties she has seen in life’, Sam Derrick wrote, Charlotte retained the ability to love. She had a weak side to which Dennis alone was privy.
Like many couples, Dennis and Charlotte passed away the hours together contemplating their future. If or when they were able to secure their release, if Dennis was able to earn enough by his gaming to satisfy their creditors, if they could then raise enough money upon which to live, they resolved to throw their lots into a business venture that was certain to make them rich. While residing in the Fleet, she and Dennis had begun to lay ‘the plan of an elegant brothel, under the title of a nunnery’. It was an idea over which she had mused for some time, since first encountering the concept at her rival Mrs Goadby’s establishment. Jane Goadby had taken credit for bringing to England this fashionable new style of brothel, in imitation of the sérails found in Paris. For a number of years, she had been regaled with stories of lavish brothels in palatial hôtels de villes by young men who had whiled away their grand tours exploring the insides of such places. According to the Nocturnal Revels, the enterprising Jane Goadby was so taken with these stories that she mounted an investigative campaign to France’s capital city to see these seraglios for herself. What she found was a complete novelty to the British bawd. The French serails were ordered and operated impeccably by ‘two veteran procuresses’. ‘Under each of their roofs were assembled about a score of the handsomest prostitutes in the purlieus of Paris …’ – but this alone was not the attraction. Mrs Goadby found that her French counterparts were offering more than just sex; rather, they provided an entire evening’s worth of genteel entertainment, where women relaxed with their customers by passing ‘their hours after dinner till the evening in a large saloon; some playing upon the guitar, whilst vocal performers were accompanying them; others were employed with needle or tambour work.’ Drunken behaviour, and anything other than the ‘strictest decorum’, was not tolerated among the nymphs or their guests. Such a concept flew in the face of London’s seedy bagnios and insalubrious taverns, where riff-raff, aristocrat, bunter and courtesan mixed indiscriminately over smashed glasses, foul language and punch-ups. Even the damask-lined drawing rooms of Mrs Douglas’s abode had nothing on the grandness of such places. Mrs Goadby was certain that the French ‘system of brothels’ would earn her riches in England, and upon her return to London ‘she immediately began to refine her amorous amusements and regulate them according to the Parisian
system.’ This included fitting up ‘a house in an elegant stile’, engaging ‘some of the first rate fille de joye in London’ to work for her, and employing a surgeon to vouchsafe for their health. Additionally, the enterprising procuress ‘brought over a large quantity of French silks and laces,’ which enabled her ‘to equip her Thaises in the highest gusto; and for which she took care to make a sufficient charge’. Most importantly, though, ‘Mrs. Goadby’s serail was not a seraglio for les bourgeois; she aimed at accommodating only people of rank and men of fortune …’ – and by such means secured her own.
After hearing about the success of her competitor, Charlotte was determined to create a sérail even bigger and more splendid. Dennis, it was decided, would assist her by ‘furnishing the money’ while Charlotte, with her considerable experience, would ‘furnish the nuns’.
On 24 June 1760, the pair was given their chance. It was reported in the Gentleman’s Magazine for that month that ‘Upwards of three hundred prisoners from Ludgate, the two Compters and the Fleet were discharged at Guildhall by the Lord Mayor’. By the grace of the Insolvency Act, any prisoner who could produce the small sum necessary to secure their release was absolved of their debts and free to begin their lives afresh. This, however, did not prevent creditors with grudges from coming after the newly liberated, waving unpaid bills. Immediately after their release, Charlotte and Dennis temporarily went their separate ways in order to re-establish themselves in their respective professions. Charlotte, it seems, was still hiding from those to whom she owed money. She took unassuming lodgings in Scotland Yard and asked her former lover, Sam Derrick, to write her an entry for the 1761 edition of the Harris’s List. As Derrick tactfully relays, three years of the Fleet, even on the Master’s side, had noticeably taken its toll: ‘Time was’, he reminds the reader, ‘when this lady was a reigning toast;… She has been, however, a good while in eclipse …’. He then ever-so-gently comments: ‘Were we to enter into an exact description of this celebrated Thais; that is, were we to describe each limb and feature a part, they would not appear so well as taken altogether’.
Before Elizabeth Ward had launched her daughter into the demimonde she would have warned Charlotte to make the most of her beauty while it remained in flower. There could be no more cruel fate for a courtesan then to observe how deeply time and misfortune had worn away the face that earned her a living. Now in her mid-thirties and without the support of the annuity she had expected from Tracy, Charlotte’s future security was questionable. In order to survive financially, her only hope was to build a successful business where younger women provided pleasures that she could no longer demand high prices for bestowing. Now, more than ever, she required the assistance of someone like Dennis. His successes were required to compensate for her inability to lure the town’s most fashionable bucks into her bed. Dennis instead had to lure them to the gaming tables.
To contemporary sensibilities, the arrangement that existed between Dennis and Charlotte appears weird in the extreme, but to O’Kelly and his inamorata, this was simply the nature of their situation. In the eyes of the eighteenth century, a whore would always be a whore, and any man who loved a whore must first be resigned to what her profession entailed. Dennis never questioned what Charlotte was, or the method by which she derived her only means of income, and like Sam Derrick, who could not provide for her comfortably, he had no choice but to consent to share her, at least temporarily. As the author of the Nocturnal Revels explains, ‘policy induced her to see them [her clients] with complaicency’, regardless of the fact that ‘Her affections were still centred in her hero’. Ambition for a better life meant that Dennis and Charlotte had to use the means available to them in order to raise the capital that would ensure their future comfort. Both worked for their mutual benefit: he shared his profits with her, and ‘on him were all the pecuniary favours, which she received from others, bestowed with unbounded liberality’.
By contrast to Charlotte’s experience, after his release, Dennis appears to have hit the ground running. When he set out to do it, O’Kelly had an almost miraculous ability to find money and put it to use. To many, it seemed as though the Count had never been in prison at all; they had become so accustomed to seeing him at all of the usual places. According to one source, he ‘was not released from prison many days before he appeared at the Tennis Court and some of the polite coffee houses in the west end of the Town’, dressed in finery, with a sword strapped to his hilt. He also had managed to procure himself fashionable lodgings in St James’s, ‘and absolutely wore gold buckles on his shoes’. Once fitted out convincingly as a gentleman and carrying a few guineas worth of winnings in his pocket, O’Kelly proceeded to work his way into the best circles of sportsmen. ‘He became’, as his Memoirs state, ‘intimately acquainted with a class of beings commonly known by the denomination of black legs, that is those equestrian heroes who are invariably seen at every capital horse race in England’. Not surprisingly, once ‘among those, he acquired and irresistiable taste for the same avocation’. Providence had led Dennis to horse racing, the one occupation that was destined to make him more money than all of his card-counting tricks and deceptions put together.
Through pooling their resources, Charlotte and Dennis were prepared to launch a small brothel by 1761, roughly a year after they had seen the last of the Fleet. They had taken a house together on Great Marlborough Street, in Soho, then a mixed bag of an area, one that played home not only to upstanding members of the gentry and the secure middle classes, but to tradespeople, small merchants and artists. Even during the mid-eighteenth century, Soho was beginning to acquire what might be called a bohemian reputation: not everything that occurred there nor everyone who lived there was considered to be on the right side of respectability. Soho had been built comparatively recently as part of the westward sprawl that filled out London’s edges. Its orderly, grid-based streets were lined with single- and double-fronted brick terraced houses, whose insides were illuminated by fanlights and generous sash windows. With front and back parlours, such abodes offered ample entertaining space for small, merry parties. This was a first step on the ladder for Charlotte and Dennis. Based on Great Marlborough Street, they were only a few doors down from Mrs Goadby’s famous sérail, and in the appropriate neck of the woods to catch the interest of those seeking that sort of entertainment. It is likely that in the first instance the couple shared their home with two or three hand-selected nymphs and operated on a modest scale. At this early stage, Dennis’s involvement in the business of promoting their new enterprise as well as in the duties of brothel management would have been crucial. His gaming companions, those dissolute black legs (called so for the tall black riding boots in which they tramped about the turf and the town), were just the sort of cash-laden clientele that Charlotte was seeking. He, as much as Charlotte, would have been responsible for steering them into her drawing room. The Count’s other role was equally important. Without the presence of a male figure, female-run establishments were never truly secure from unpredictable behaviour. Whether it was the brutality of drunken culls or the exploitative tendencies of the night watch, it was always useful to have a ‘bully’ lurking somewhere within shouting distance. Thus, in this manner O’Kelly not only assisted Charlotte ‘in the double capacity of lover’, but also as ‘a flash-man, which was nothing more than a generous protector from the violence of modern buckism’.
Even in the infant days of her operation, Charlotte had her eye on far wider horizons. Soho, by comparison with the elegant neighbourhood of St James’s, simply did not exude the same cultivated ambiance. Having spent her childhood at her mother’s establishment near the Haymarket, she would have remembered what advantages were to be wrought from trading so close to the royal court, a place where bored aristocrats longed for fleshy distractions. By the mid-1760s, the entire pull of pleasure-seeking gravity had shifted westward. Many of the Covent Garden faithful had begun to abandon the upstairs rooms and illicit gambling offered at the Shakes
pear and the Bedford for the exclusive gaming tables and assembly rooms of Almack’s. St James’s had become the centre of fashionable entertainment, enticing the bon ton to the new theatre on the Haymarket and to private parties held in stone-faced townhouses along the recently laid out squares. Charlotte’s vision of a grand Parisian-style sérial, or nunnery, as it would later be called, was not suited to her current middle-class surroundings. In order to exceed Goadby’s establishment in grandeur, an appropriate setting at the heart of the haute world would be a necessity.
13
Harrison’s RETURN
IN 1761, IT was John Harrison’s turn to emerge from prison into the blazing light of day. What his intentions might have been upon his release from captivity it is impossible to say; what is known about how he chose to conduct the remainder of his life does not indicate that he was moved by the spirit of character reformation. Harrison did however choose to live more carefully and more surreptitiously. He had been born into the world of the tavern, and that trade and everything it entailed comprised the extent of his skills. Therefore, not surprisingly, he returned to Covent Garden to pick up his life from the point at which it had been unfortunately interrupted.
The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List Page 21