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

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  At the height of her renown, the nunnery of the ‘Saintly Charlotte Hayes’ hosted the leading lights of Georgian society in its bedchambers. The Earl of Sandwich, Viscount Falmouth, the Duke of Richmond, and the Earls of Egremont, Uxbridge and Grosvenor were only a handful of the names who regularly bestowed their favours on her establishment. Scores of lesser gentry and wealthy city gentlemen of all religions, including numerous aldermen and Lord Mayors, were known customers. In later years, through Dennis’s racing connections, most of Charlotte’s nuns would have benefited from intimacies with the Prince of Wales and his libertine companions, an accolade that was certain to be one of the Abbess’s crowning glories. There was no one of the beau monde to whose predilections and requirements Charlotte did not cater. In addition to the women she had readily at hand, it was not uncommon to bring in others to appease various tastes. Actresses, singers, fallen ladies of the fashionable set, and other reigning ‘toasts of the town’ made appearances in Charlotte’s salon to entertain and be seen in the highest company. It was their talents in the bedroom as much as the drawing room that were solicited for the night’s events. It was Charlotte’s endeavour to ensure that all of her clients’ needs were addressed, even those with rather unorthodox tastes. Like Harris the pimp, the great Abbess would have kept a record of her patron’s most lewd desires and ensured that the appropriate mistress of that skill was at hand on the night. The Nocturnal Revels records one such occasion that Charlotte had planned with meticulous care. Although the event it documents and the names used have undoubtedly been fabricated for the readers of the Revels, the range of delights on Madam Hayes’s menu would have been an accurate sampling of those available. As the author prefaces, this ‘specimen from Charlotte’s bill of fare’ was intended to ‘give the reader some idea of the manner of her conducting business’.

  On this particular occasion, an average night in January 1769, it was claimed that ‘Alderman Drybones’, with ‘Nell Blossom, a maid … about 19’ whose virginity had recently been restored to her, were ‘crammed into the chintz bed-chamber, which though small is elegant’. For this pleasure the Alderman gladly parted with twenty guineas. Just adjacent, in the ‘high French bed-room’, could be found ‘Lord Spasm’ who had paid five guineas to spend the night with a black prostitute, one ‘of the first rate of St. Clements’. For the mere cost of ten guineas, Sir Harry Flagellum was being seen to by ‘Nell Handy from Bow Street’ with her bunch of birch twigs in the nursery, ‘Bet Flourish from Berners Street’ or ‘Mrs. Birch herself from Chapel Street’ being unavailable. ‘Colonel Tearall’ had requested ‘a modest woman’ for his pleasure, and Charlotte accommodated him by drafting in ‘Mrs. Mitchell’s cook-maid, being just come from the country’. For the price of a banknote, the Colonel was prepared to take ‘his chance in the parlour upon the settee’. ‘Doctor Frettext’, a clergyman getting on in years, came to Charlotte ‘after church was over’ specifically to have his needs gratified by ‘a very white soft hand, pliant and affiable’, belonging to either ‘Poll Nimblewrist’ of Oxford Market ‘or Jenny Speedyhand of Mayfair’. Madam Hayes had this quick piece of work completed in the servants’ quarters, up ‘the three pair of stairs’, for an easy two guineas. ‘In the drawing room and [on] the sopha’ could be found the discreet ‘Lady Loveitt’, who had paid Charlotte fifty guineas to allow her to meet with her lover, ‘Captain O’Thunder’, in secret. Meanwhile, next door in the card-room, ‘Lord Pyebald’ was charged five guineas to innocently ‘play a party at piquet … and the like without coming to any extremity but that of politeness and etiquette’ in the company of ‘Mrs. Tredrille from Chelsea’. ‘His Excellency, Count Alto’, on the other hand, in the adjoining salon, had come for a one-hour dalliance with ‘a woman of fashion’ at the expense of ten guineas.

  The nunneries on King’s Place were known for the lengths their Abbesses would go to in order to accommodate their elite guests. Virtually no request was refused, even by those who were not specifically seeking the services of a prostitute. Charlotte’s residence was frequently offered as a type of safe house for couples pursuing illicit affairs and seeking somewhere to meet for their sexual encounters. The Revels would also have readers believe that Madam Hayes procured well-endowed men to satisfy women who were disappointed in the matrimonial bed. However, perhaps one of the strangest requests that Charlotte received came from ‘a certain young nobleman’ whose wife ‘was having criminal intercourse’ with his friend. Upon learning of his friend’s betrayal and his wife’s infidelity, he bet his rival ‘a thousand guineas that he would once within this month be confined with a certain fashionable disorder.’ He then approached Charlotte and requested that she procure for him a whore from whom he might infect himself with the clap. By passing the disorder onto his spouse, he claimed he could then ‘be completely revenged of my wife for her infidelity, and of my rival for his’. His Lordship, meaning no offence to Charlotte by implying that she kept ‘rotten cattle’ under her roof, ‘took out his pocket book and presented her with a thirty pound bank note’. The plot was then put into motion and the Abbess went to work rooting out a suitably diseased harlot for the job. Within two weeks, upon discovering himself infected with the clap, the young nobleman’s duplicitous friend, ‘in order to avoid a further discussion of the affair’, grudgingly paid out the £1,000 wager he had now lost.

  More frequently, requests were submitted not for hackneyed whores riddled with disease, but for clean virgins whom the best-paying clients might have the pleasure of deflowering. This presented quite a problem. Procuring an untouched girl was extremely difficult. Those Charlotte had rescued from the street, although as young as twelve or thirteen, had in many instances already been the victims of a seduction. Luring girls away from their families, schools or the households where they worked could be not only a lengthy process but a dangerous one as well. If the girl had a sufficiently influential or vocal family behind her, as the procuress Mrs Nelson learned, the law was liable to become involved, and her once tight-lipped neighbours might suddenly ‘propose indicting the house for a disorderly one’. Nevertheless, bawds and pimps were pestered incessantly to procure genuine maidenheads. In part the demand came from those who enjoyed the sexual thrill of intercourse with a young virgin, but also from those who believed that relations with an unspoiled girl would cure them of venereal disease, or would ensure a ‘safe sex’ experience. Rather than waste time searching London for unsullied maidens, it was easier to simply recycle those ‘virgins’ already to hand. Those in the procuring trade stood to make hearty sums of money by passing off a very young recruit ‘for a maidenhead’ several times to unwitting men who might pay fees as high as 100 guineas for the privilege of spending the night with a thirteen-year-old. At a time when the pubescent female (and male) body was highly sexualised, a girl of this age would have been deemed, although extremely youthful, an appealing object of lust. Given such tastes, it should also be added that in the eighteenth century, what passed for the normal sexual predilections of a significant portion of men would today be enough to send most of them to prison.

  In the face of such demand, Charlotte’s establishment was able to forge a name for itself as a purveyor of maidenheads. When questioned by George Selwyn as to how she was able to produce so many, so often, Charlotte replied that ‘As to maidenheads, it was her opinion that a woman might lose hers a hundred times, and be as good a Virgin as ever’, and assured him ‘that a Maidenhead was as easily made as a pudding’. At any time, Charlotte claimed that she had enough ‘maidenheads now in possession, as would serve a whole court of Aldermen, aye and the Common Council in the bargain.’ This was not the idle assertion of an emboldened bawd, but rather a boastful recognition of one of the successful brothel-keeper’s best-kept secrets. Even the least literate bawd would have had on the shelves of her establishment a worn copy of John Armstrong’s Oeconomy of Love. The work, which could loosely be considered a kind of sex manual, contained poetically written advice as well as a rec
ipe for the restoration of virginity. Armstrong had put into writing what had been common knowledge among women and practitioners of medicine for centuries. To tighten the walls of the vagina, a concoction of herbs was needed which included the myrtle’s ‘styptic Berries’, the roots of a caper bush, oak bark stripped ‘bleak and bear’, in addition to ‘Bistort, and Dock and that way-faring Herb, Plantain’. The collection was then to be ‘boil’d in wine’ so that the herbs would ‘yield their astringent force’, in order to produce ‘a Lotion … Thrice powerful to contract the shameful Breach’. If applied several times a day, the desired outcome would be the illusion of an unruptured entry. Bawds added their own particular touches to this deception, some inserting a small ‘bladder’ of animal blood into the vagina to produce the effect of a broken hymen. Others, as suggested by John Cleland’s character Fanny Hill, might use a blood-soaked sponge by ‘squeezing it between the thighs’ so it ‘yielded a great deal more of the red liquid than would save a girl’s honour’. Whatever the precise method employed, it would be Charlotte who gained the last laugh. Even after parting with copious coins and banknotes, clients could never be absolutely certain that the girl who lay underneath them had been a genuine virgin, or if she, like Charlotte’s nun Miss Shelly, had ‘gone through twenty-three editions of vestality in one week’.

  In addition to those who demanded a constant supply of virgin sacrifices, another contingent of well-paying patrons who required special services frequented her establishment. ‘The noted houses … in King’s Place’, wrote the Baron D’Archenholz, included among their useful possessions ‘… every Device to restore old men and debauched youths’ who otherwise experienced difficulties in consummating their earthy desires. It was at this feat that Charlotte truly excelled. ‘She … Makes old dotards believe themselves gay, vigorous young fellows …’, Chase Price boasted, in addition to turning ‘vigorous young fellows into old dotards’. This expertise was achieved through the invention of a device Charlotte called her ‘elastic beds’. According to the Nocturnal Revels, these apparatuses had been ‘invented by that great creative genius Count O’Kelly and constructed by that celebrated mechanic and upholsterer Mr. Gale’. Undoubtedly, Dennis had been inspired by the motions felt while astride one of his galloping horses, and alighted upon the idea of a spring-loaded bed frame which replicated the sensations, thereby minimising the effort involved in the act of copulation. Charlotte, until her attempt to retire in 1778, was the sole owner of these unique contraptions, credited with giving ‘the finest movements and in the most extatic moments, without trouble or the least fatigue to either Agent or Patient … to the amazing gratification and sensation of the Actor and Actress’. The very existence of these beds drew in some of the most lecherous, ageing roués still in circulation – or, as Charlotte regarded them, ‘Peers who depended more upon art than nature’. This set, which included ‘impotent Aldermen and rich Levites, who fancied that their amourous abilities were not in the least decayed’, were considered her best customers and ‘her choicest friends’. Among these infirm rakes, none was so great a supporter as William Douglas, Duke of Queensbury, a man who through his unabated sexual appetite had earned himself the sobriquet of ‘the Old Goat’.

  As the Abbess of one of the most celebrated houses of ill repute in London, Charlotte had earned greater renown and a larger income than in her youthful heyday. However, in spite of her success, she was rapidly wearying of her profession. All bawds at some point dreamed of retirement, a graceful exit which would mark the official end of a long-suffered career. For Charlotte, who had been prudently counting her pennies, that occasion now did not seem so remote. By the beginning of 1769 she and Dennis had managed to save enough to make the much-desired move into the circles of landowning society. They had set their sights on the estate of Clay Hill in Epsom. While the couple had always been eager to demonstrate their wealth, there was something unusually urgent about the nature of this transactio. Something about Charlotte’s physical condition had begun to change.

  15

  ‘THE LITTLE KING OF Bath’

  WITH HIS CREDITORS paid and his freedom secured, in the latter part of 1757 Sam Derrick was at last at liberty to roam the West End streets. The unexpected success of his Harris’s List had replenished his pockets, and such a windfall called for a round of celebrations. In his usual fashion Derrick headed for his tailor, hired smart lodgings and spread his wealth liberally around the Garden, throwing his money at the taverns, bagnios, gaming tables and whores who were usually in receipt of his benevolence. Sam had taken nothing away from his close brush with the horrors of debtor’s prison. Instead of saving the dividends from his portion of the List’s profits, he squandered them with his usual abandon. By the following year, he was writing again to his friend Faulkner in Dublin complaining of his penury. It was obvious that any advantage he might have gained from his efforts had simply slipped through his fingers. In spite of the promise of a reliable source of income editing the Harris’s List, when Boswell encountered him two years later, Sam’s finances were as stretched as they had ever been. Even with the secret success he had enjoyed, little had changed in Derrick’s life. The year 1760 still found him in circulation around the watering holes of Covent Garden, hunting for patrons and free favours from female ‘friends’.

  Although it may not have been obvious to Boswell at the time, Sam’s years of perseverance and prostration before potential sponsors was at last beginning to bear some fruit. The net result of a life passed in coffee houses and taverns had provided him not only with his single literary triumph, but with an impressive array of acquaintances. Although many had turned up their noses at him, there remained a handful who found him charming, recognising at least a spark of talent beyond his roguish demeanour. By the end of the 1750s he could count among his admirers the Duke of Newcastle, as well as the Earls of Chesterfield, Charlemont, Shannon and Cork – the latter, according to George Faulkner, was ‘much yours and speaketh most affectionately and friendly of you’. With Faulkner actively promoting Derrick’s name within aristocratic circles, the gilded doors to some of the most illustrious drawing rooms in England and Ireland were at last unbolted. In the early 1760s, Derrick found himself the guest of the Earl of Chesterfield, who undoubtedly enjoyed his ribald Covent Garden tales. Similarly, invitations to visit his noble patrons across the Irish Sea were also forthcoming, one of which was followed by a commission to compose a history of Ireland. Who precisely his benefactor was on this occasion is not entirely clear, but for some time John Boyle, the 5th Earl of Cork and Lord Thomas Southwell, who was in the habit of praising Sam ‘with raptures and panegyricks’, had been soliciting his company. A substantial advance had been paid and the business of subscription-raising already commenced when Derrick departed for the shores of his homeland in September of 1760. He had been away for nearly ten years.

  Derrick had decided that his long-overdue visit to Ireland would mark the belated making of him. Setting sail from Liverpool and landing in Kinsale, he would then travel over land to Dublin via Killarney, Kilkenny, Carlow and Naas, visiting potential patrons and those who had requested his entertaining company. As he travelled he scribbled furiously, taking notes for what promised to be his magnum opus, detailing the characters he met and the sites of natural beauty he observed. His ultimate destination, where he would arrive two months later, was Dublin. In the decade he had been away, the city, like Derrick, had acquired a veneer of polish. The streets had been widened, a new crossing spanning the Liffey had replaced the old Essex Bridge, while the interiors of Dublin’s public buildings had been embellished with elaborate rococo plasterwork. In his youth, Sam had abandoned Dublin for its lack of promise, but now, with some maturity, he returned to his beloved ‘Eblana’ in the hope that she would yield to him what had once been denied. Derrick had always envisioned his return to the city of his childhood – he would ride into the centre triumphantly, a celebrated bard. He had not quite arrived at that situation upon the occas
ion of this visit. Instead he had hoped to re-establish relations with those who might possibly assist him in achieving his goal. Unfortunately, by virtue of the season, he found many of his former acquaintances unavailable, and claimed disappointedly that ‘Bath, and the vacation of Parliament’ had ‘robbed me of my purposed pleasure’. Nevertheless, Sam amused himself at the theatre, passing the hours with his friend, the actor Thomas Wilkes. He also paid a visit to Mrs Creagh.

  Since the day of Sam’s disinheritance some three years earlier, not so much as a letter had passed between the two. After such an expression of condemnation, it is unlikely that Sam expected his words to adequately sooth away Mrs Creagh’s concerns with regard to his moral character. With some luck and finesse, however, reinstatement in her will might not wholly be out of the question. At any rate, Sam felt that he owed his childhood guardian an excuse or explanation, or at least an opportunity to see him standing before her as a favoured poet of the Irish gentry. In November, he appeared in his aunt’s drawing room with his hat in hand. Whatever words he had chosen to effect a reconciliation had at least partially assisted in healing the wound. As the two remaining members of a dwindling family, emotional ties may have spoken the loudest, surmounting mistrust and disapproval. Derrick later wrote to Faulkner that he had been accepted back into Mrs Creagh’s company. ‘I am extremely glad of the good agreement between you and your Aunt, and wish a continuance of it’, replied his friend. Whether this agreement included some sort of financial reward is unknown. Certainly, if it did, not a hint of it remained at the time of Derrick’s death.