Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  The young Sheridans started their married life in a gently Bohemian way, sharing a Soho lodging with the musicians Stephen and Nancy Storace, who were on the point of departing abroad to Italy to continue their music studies, then to Vienna, where they worked with Mozart. When you consider the Sheridans and their story, it is most often a Mozart comic opera that comes to mind, with its bright promising surface, the jokes, the fancy dress, the breaking of class barriers, the sentimental protestations; and then the cruel underside of jealousy, the games of power and adultery – on which the Sheridans too embarked. Long before Dora knew them their life had lost its simplicity and become a sophisticated, almost feverish progress, unsettled and extravagant. Elizabeth attempted to keep some order and calm, but he always had too many ambitions, too many desires, too much to do. He could not be punctual; he failed to answer letters, and became famous for not bothering even to open them. For a while whatever he did added to his fame; he became one of the most famous men in England, but he could not settle his bills or pay his employees what they were owed. He simply never had any money.

  They were always on the move, from one half-furnished rented house to another, never anywhere but in smart streets or attractive suburbs. Dora’s early patron, the Duke of Norfolk, lent them a house in Surrey; and they visited the Whig families in their London and country mansions. Elizabeth’s sprightliness and unaffected sweetness of character made her as much admired as her husband. They enjoyed being so popular, but they both remained vulnerable to the caprices and arrogance of the great people who became their playmates: it is hard to see them as true friends.

  The Sheridans were asked everywhere. Elizabeth would sing at private parties, and he would make everyone laugh. They went to the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire’s – after her initial hesitation about whether you could possibly invite a player’s son – and to her clever and still more ravishing sister, Lady Duncannon (later Countess of Bessborough). At Devonshire House Sheridan first met the Prince of Wales. The Prince was eleven years his junior, and clever enough to appreciate Sheridan’s abilities as well as his wit; soon he was the Prince’s confidant and adviser.

  How the world gaped. The Prince enjoyed singing with Mrs Sheridan. The Sheridans were invited to still more great houses, and to the villas and mansions of other beauties, Mrs Crewe, and Mrs Bouverie, well read and clever, though short of occupation. With several of the ladies he flirted sentimentally, and sometimes he was more dangerously involved. Elizabeth suffered from his absences and infidelities. Reading the couple’s letters – few that survive – and the comments of their contemporaries, one sees how they were admired, and how they were used, in the careless way of the rich. Sheridan was a snob; he loved these people, and he knew he had the capacity to be something more than any of them. He was quicker, cleverer, wittier, more charming. And finally he was not accepted as an equal. They thought him delightful and amusing as long as he did not try to pursue his own ideas or desires too far. He was a toy, a favourite, a flattering jester.

  No one could organize a party, or a picnic, or write a love letter, or devise an impromptu set of verses, or a practical joke, as Sheridan could. Staying with grand friends in the country, he once persuaded a whole house party to act out a Civil War battle in the open air, using cows and donkeys strategically entrenched in ditches; everyone joined in and, better still, everyone enjoyed it. He would prepare a dish of his own al fresco; Irish stew was his speciality, a small joke against himself. People passed round Sheridan stories: after being wounded in one of the duels over Elizabeth, they said, he had asked for the newspaper next morning ‘to see whether I am dead or alive’. One day in London, finding he could not pay off a hackney cab he had already kept waiting for hours, he ordered it to drive about until he saw a friend; he hailed his friend and invited him to join him, then skilfully picked a political quarrel, swore he could not stay in such company and leapt out – leaving his friend to settle the huge bill with the driver.

  People remembered these tricks with pleasure; and also how he looked – his peculiarly lustrous eyes, his thin arms and delicate hands, his brightly coloured clothes, a red waistcoat and a cocked hat, a blue coat with metal buttons – and how he talked, mimicking, joking, bringing tears to everyone’s eyes in his speeches, arguing over the dinner table until drink made him inarticulate. He was ‘tall, and very upright, and his appearance and address are at once manly and fashionable, without the smallest tincture of foppery or modish graces’, wrote Fanny Burney, surprised to find herself liking him so much.4 There was a Shakespearean turn to his head, declared John Kemble. His charm won him invitations, affection, love: the Prince of Wales was sincerely attached to him, almost as far as he was capable of real attachment to anyone but himself. ‘The upper part of his face was that of a god, while below he showed the satyr,’ wrote Byron later; both the god and the satyr had their appeal in the great world.

  In Parliament Sheridan was sometimes teased for being a theatre manager, just as he had been teased at Harrow for being a player’s son. There was a celebrated exchange with Pitt, who taunted him with his ‘dramatic turns’, adding that ‘if they were reserved for the proper stage they would no doubt receive the plaudits of the audience’; to which Sheridan responded with a stinging reference to Pitt’s youth, comparing him to ‘the Angry Boy’, a character in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. The ability to score points in debate was highly prized, and exchanges of this kind in the House of Commons were reported throughout the clubs and drawing rooms of London society, so that there was a sense in which the House doubled with the stage as a place of entertainment, and those who triumphed in the House were regarded as star performers. On the other hand, the reproach of the theatre connection was used against him again and again, not only by Pitt in the House, but also in private, and in the press. He was attacked for his origins, and for moving away from them: ‘that a young man, the son of a player, should refuse though in very distressed circumstances to let his wife sing at a royal concert because it would degrade his character as a gentleman’, was found deplorable enough. That he ‘should desert the comic muse for politics’ was still worse.

  Sheridan was stung by these gibes, but his own behaviour sometimes played into the hands of his attackers. When, at the peak of his political career, he led the prosecution in the Warren Hastings trial of 1788, the proceedings at Westminster Hall were as thoroughly stage-managed as any celebrity concert. Tickets were sold at inflated prices up to £50, people sat up all night to get in, and the crush in Palace Yard on the day he was due to start speaking was such that ladies lost their bonnets and shoes. Everyone wanted to be there, including the royal family. Many hardened politicians cried ‘heartily and copiously’ with emotion; so did Mrs Siddons; and at one point Elizabeth Sheridan, sitting next to her, fainted. Her husband spoke on four separate days, and it was generally agreed, even by his political opponents, that he gave a superb account of himself; but it was seen as a performance. The historian Gibbon, who was there for the last speech, could not resist a touch of malice in his account: ‘Sheridan at the close of his speech sank into Burke’s arms; – a good actor; but I called this morning, he is perfectly well.’5

  If Sheridan had been happy in the theatre, as Garrick was, such teasing and attacks would hardly have hurt him; sadly, he felt himself demeaned by his theatrical connection – more demeaned than by his services to the Prince of Wales. Dora must have been struck by the oddity of a man who ran a theatre while disliking so much about it; for she never in her life felt ashamed of the theatre.

  Sheridan was especially distracted throughout her first weeks at Drury Lane because the affairs of the Prince were in acute crisis. In fact it was on the very evening before she signed her new contract that the Prince did something especially unfortunate, and from some points of view disastrous: he got married, secretly and in defiance of the law of the land. It was secret, because he was forbidden, by the Royal Marriages Act, to marry without the consent of his father, the King; an
d had he sought his consent, it would not have been given. It was dangerous as well as illegal, because the woman he married was a Roman Catholic, and if it were known that the heir to the throne had married a Catholic there would be trouble throughout the country – and possibly not just trouble but the threat of civil war, for it was less than a hundred years since the Stuarts had been driven from the throne for their suspected Catholicism.

  The Prince had bullied his bride into the marriage with every sort of false and outrageous statement and action. He had been hysterical for months. There had been difficulties with previous mistresses, including the Drury Lane actress, Mary Robinson, and others had come and gone, but this time everything was different. His present love, Maria Fitzherbert, a young woman of good family, twice widowed, was sensibly resistant to his pleas and promises, and held out against his wooing for two years. In July 1785, when he was twenty-two, the Prince attempted suicide. He was bandaged up, and then threatened to tear off the bandages unless Maria came to him at St James’s and promised to marry him. She prudently insisted on being accompanied by the young Duchess of Devonshire, a friend to both parties and regarded as a ‘sister’ by the Prince. Under his repeated threats, Maria accepted a ring – he had none of his own and had to borrow one from the Duchess – and signed a paper saying she would marry him. The two women left, and the Duchess at once wrote a deposition to the effect that Mrs Fitzherbert knew that a written promise extracted under such threats was invalid. Maria went abroad the next day and remained there for four months while the Prince raged and plotted, unable to follow her without his father’s permission.

  During this period he ‘cried by the hour… rolling on the floor, striking his forehead, tearing his hair, falling into hysterics, and swearing that he would abandon the country, forgo the Crown, sell his jewels and plate, and scrape together a competence to fly with the object of his affections to America’.6 As we know, he also relieved his feelings by visits to the theatre, and perhaps felt a special affinity with the unhappy lovers in Twelfth Night. The Prince turned to words too, and composed a letter of over forty pages that he sent by express messenger to his Maria in Paris, swearing lifelong fidelity, calling himself a liar and a scoundrel should he ever fail her, reminding her of her promise, telling her the King believed him to be married already and had accepted it – a lie – and urging her to return.

  Mrs Fitzherbert, who seems to have been in love with the Prince, unwisely believed his words, softened, and came back to England. It is possible that Sheridan was one of those who helped to set up the wedding: he certainly knew about it. The ceremony took place behind locked doors, and was conducted by a clergyman brought out of the Fleet prison for the purpose, and grossly bribed: his debts were settled, and he was promised a bishopric.7 So although the marriage was illegal, it was valid in the eyes of the church, which meant that any children would be illegitimate by English law, but legitimate by canon law. The Prince and his wife, or not wife, went to Ormeley Lodge on Ham Common to enjoy their honeymoon.

  Having got his way, the Prince denied the marriage in public, because he thought it might cost him the succession to the throne, and he was not prepared to sacrifice the prospect of becoming king. When the matter was raised in Parliament the following year, Fox stated categorically on the Prince’s behalf that no marriage had taken place. Maria wept and protested at this insulting lie, and Sheridan was required by the Prince to make a further statement to the House, intended to soothe her feelings and at the same time to save him from any danger of losing the income that Parliament had to approve for the heir to the throne. Sheridan’s performance did the trick. No wonder the Prince loved and depended on him; but it is a shoddy story.

  George, Prince of Wales, was clever and remarkably handsome, but morally he was damaged goods. He had been petted and paraded in public from infancy, and in private reared by courtiers, mostly away from his busy parents, and subject to a strictly regimented routine – a walk at the same time every day, for instance, regardless of the weather. Queen Charlotte always insisted on the rigid observance of etiquette, possibly as her way of confronting the fact that she was used, year after year, as a breeding machine; the King wanted as large a family as possible, and she was still enduring regular pregnancies when her eldest son was conducting his first love affairs. Court life as conducted by his father and mother was of no interest to him, but he hardly knew how to occupy himself. For several years now he had been lurching from one callow and callously conducted affair to another, running up spectacular debts the while, and falling out with both his parents. He had his own households, at Carlton House and Windsor (and later at Brighton), and took pleasure in horses and paintings, clothes, furniture, food and drink, as well as women. When he began to think of politics, he chose his friends from the opposition; as long as his father believed in the sober, careful, Tory Pitt, George allied himself with Fox and the Whigs. The King, never having been much tempted by luxury or women himself, settled into a baffled and chilly disapproval, and was inclined to blame the Prince’s friends, rather than the royal method of upbringing, for his son’s behaviour; but while it is true that Sheridan and Fox also drank too much, ran after women and got into debt, the Prince needed no corrupting, and Sheridan was no Mephistopheles.

  The King undoubtedly brought many of his troubles on himself. Having accepted the necessity of making an arranged marriage himself, he became determined to control the marriages of his children, and introduced the Royal Marriages Act, a piece of legislation that made it impossible for any member of his family to marry without his approval before the age of twenty-five, and difficult thereafter.* The King saw it as a way of protecting the dignity of the royal family, but the results were almost precisely the reverse of what he had intended, as one after another of his sons found himself unable to marry the woman he cared for, or went through dubious ceremonies, or simply lived a profligate life; while the Princesses pined for husbands into their thirties. The spectacle became deplorable.

  To Dora the behaviour of the royal family was of no great concern in 1785 except when one of them came to the theatre to see her perform; professionally, she hoped to please these powerful and glamorous figures, and was satisfied when she did. There must have been plenty of gossip and speculation in the theatre about the proprietor’s dealings with the Prince of Wales, but she had other things to occupy her, principally the hard labour of taking on leading parts in twelve different productions through the winter and spring. Later, things would change: London society was small, and the number of royal Princes launching themselves into it disproportionately large. Nine sons were born to the King and Queen, of whom seven survived into manhood: after George came Frederick, then William, Edward, Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus. Busy as Dora’s working life kept her, she found herself drawn into circles in which the Princes would appear, not as remote, emblematic figures, but as human creatures, flesh and blood like herself.

  5

  Admirers: 1786–1787

  Among the new pictures on display at the Royal Academy in May 1786, was a very large, elaborate, allegorical painting with a large, elaborate, allegorical title to match: ‘Mrs Jordan as the Comic Muse supported by Euphrosyne, who represses the advances of a Satyr’. It was seen by everyone who counted for anything in London society, and greatly admired; and it was the work of John Hoppner, a young artist who had just carried out a royal commission to paint portraits of the three youngest Princesses, Sophia, Mary and Amelia. Hoppner was a clever artist and a witty and ambitious man. He knew all the gossip, what was in and what was out, and he and his American wife, also an artist, went in for entertaining the fashionable world in their house off St James’s Square. This is where Dora went for sittings; and where Hoppner, in the many drawings and paintings he made of her, helped to make her into an icon of that world. One of his first studies of her was sent round as a gift to Lady Duncannon, friend of Sheridan and the Prince of Wales. It showed Dora pensive, with powdered hair, modestly frilled collar
and stiff black belt round her narrow waist, a small hat piled with flowers on her pretty head: a delectable pastel, full of sexual allure. Hoppner had the measure of the society he served. To further his career, he encouraged a rumour that he was the illegitimate son of King George III. The truth was less glamorous, and more to the credit of the King: Hoppner’s modest German parents had made him a chorister in the royal chapel, where the King had taken a fancy to him and paid for his training as an artist.

  For the Academy show Hoppner decided to give Dora a grand and formal treatment, and to paint her on the same large scale as Reynolds’s portrait of Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse. The result is original and striking – and also odd. The meticulously painted canvas is full of movement and colour. Dora appears, full length, in the centre, her body twisting dramatically as she flies from the satyr lurking in the bushes behind her into the sheltering arms of Euphrosyne. Euphrosyne – one of the three Graces, given a fine Grecian profile and auburn hair – is a commanding figure, holding out an arm to banish the satyr. The satyr was Hoppner’s bold stroke: who was he meant to represent? The obvious answer must surely be the male theatre-goer, who regarded actresses as sexual prey; and since this was a characteristic commonly found among the artist’s patrons, Hoppner was either deliberately teasing or he must have reckoned that a little classical distancing would go a long way to remove any offence. The satyr is ugly, and he is leering evilly at the Comic Muse in her filmy green muslin dress, embroidered with stars; but she is smiling too sweetly and serenely to suggest she feels in any real danger, as though she knows she is safe because this is only an allegory. The mask of comedy is in her hand, there are gold sandals on her feet, and her heart-shaped face is framed in loose dark curls.