Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  Like Dora Jordan, Fanny Burney had a career of her own. She had published a novel, Evelina, when she was twenty-six, which brought her immediate fame, and followed it up with a second, Cecilia, four years later, no less successful; she had been the darling of Dr Johnson and the friend of Garrick. She had plans to write more novels, as well as plays – for years Sheridan had been pressing her for a comedy – but at present her writing career was stalled. All her energies were going into her work for the Queen.2 Her family – and especially her father – had encouraged the court appointment because it brought the likelihood of a pension, for she was not now expected to marry: too clever, too shy and, in her mid-thirties, too old. She was indeed quiet and delicate; and she found her work at court, which meant almost constant attendance on her mistress and the almost constant company of other courtiers, not all of them congenial, exhausting. She pined for freedom, and to be able to return to her chosen profession; but although her diary makes it clear how desperately she suffered from the confinement, boredom and brutal hard work at court, she allowed herself not a breath of criticism of her employers. Sometimes she let slip a sad phrase about the effect of life at court on her spirits – ‘dreary vacuity of heart and of pleasure’ is one – but she prided herself on her submission to what was deemed necessary. When regrets arose or criticisms occurred to her, she repressed them; it may have made her fiercer over the things she did feel free to criticize. She had been at court for two years when the Cheltenham visit took place.

  The Queen, her early enthusiasm for the theatre as great as ever, must have intended to be kind when she sent Miss Burney off to the playhouse, and was quite unaware of her disapproval because a few days later she gave her some more tickets. The second visit was still less to her taste than the first.

  In the afternoon I went again to the play… It was ‘Sir Harry Wildair’ and Mrs Jordan performed it extremely well, but very little to my satisfaction. It is a very disagreeable play, and wholly abounding in all that can do violence to innocence and morality… It was for the benefit of Mrs Jordan; and all our household had taken tickets.3

  Fanny Burney’s disapproval was not generally shared. In fact Dora was almost as great an attraction in Cheltenham as the royal party. ‘Mrs Jordan’s popularity has been so great at Cheltenham that next to the eagerness of the people to see the Royal Family has been their expectation of this comic heroine,’ reported the local newspaper, and went on, ‘Her success has not fallen in consequence of this highly raised desire, for she has performed to crowded houses, and her fame has even increased since her theatrical appearance.’4 Cheltenham may have considered itself particularly lucky to see her in the role of Sir Harry Wildair, because she had just played it for the first time at Drury Lane, where she carried it off with such style and conviction, ‘charmingly dressed and provokingly at ease’, that shouts of applause had followed her when she left the stage in London.5 The part was not written for a woman, and the plot turns on the joke that Wildair, a rakish but good-hearted young man about town, mistakes the respectable heiress he is meant to be courting with a view to marriage for a high-class prostitute. You can see why Burney was shocked. The joke is broad – the play is by Farquhar and dates from the Restoration – but it is not just coarse; there is a redeeming wit and good humour to it. Before Dora, Peg Woffington, the greatest actress of her day, had chosen to play Wildair, and made it one of her popular roles; and according to Elizabeth Inchbald, Dora was ‘no less admired and no less attractive’ in it than Woffington.

  Miss Burney’s distaste was not conveyed to her royal employers, and they were all very keen to see Dora. The local paper announced that ‘their Majesties do not honour the playhouse till Mrs Jordan makes her appearance’. They saw her on the 28th of July in play and farce, as Hippolita and the Romp, and the King sent his Colonel Digby round with a gift to her benefit (‘all, all, and much more, she deserves’ proclaimed a local enthusiast).6 Theatre fever was increased when the King’s second – and favourite – son, Frederick, Duke of York, arrived on a flying visit to his parents with his equerry, Henry Bunbury, already a champion of Dora. Bunbury announced himself ‘languishing to see the play’, the Duke seconded him, and another royal box was at once arranged. At the same time the King insisted on having a wooden house moved out from the centre of Cheltenham to accommodate his son as close to him as possible during his brief stay. It was a gesture the locals may have taken as typically royal, although in truth it was more likely another sign of his impending mental collapse.

  Dora appeared in a further command performance on 9 August; it was O’Keefe’s The Poor Soldier, and out of respect for royal decorum she gave up her usual part as the Soldier and appeared as the heroine, in a skirt. She then went off to the Worcester Theatre for a few days, returning to play Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor before the King and Queen on the last night of their visit. They declared themselves delighted yet again, and before they set off the next morning the King gave permission for the playhouse to be known as the Theatre Royal.

  Fanny Burney also saw Dora as Mistress Ford, and on this occasion did not express any disapproval; in any case her earlier distaste was for the plays, not the player. Burney was fastidious, but also far too conscious of the barriers set up in the paths of all clever women not to rally to the defence of a sister worker. She spoke up as a staunch supporter of Mrs Jordan’s powers as an actress, defending her skilfully when a gentleman of the court said he did not care for hoydens and suspected Jordan of being in life what she played on stage. Burney answered that although she too had begun to feel disgust when she first saw her as the Romp, she changed her view as the performance proceeded, because ‘afterwards she displayed such uncommon humour that it brought me to pardon her assumed vulgarity, in favour of a representation of nature, which, in its particular class, seemed to me quite perfect’.7 The tribute is so intelligent that one groans at the thought of Burney having to waste her time among such dim, supercilious courtiers. Provoked, she was able to speak honestly and even boldly; she knew that to express admiration for tragedy, and Mrs Siddons, was always safer ground than to praise comedians, but this time she said what she really felt. Another time she confessed to laughing so much at a farce that she was ‘almost ashamed’, an avowal read with some relief, coming from someone so rigidly self-controlled.

  Fanny Burney and Dora Jordan stand about as far apart in their experience of life as two women could: the one carefully protected – intention at least – and docile and decorous in all things, reluctant to question the attitudes imposed on her by family and court; the other unprotected, self-motivated and willed, forced to fend for herself and her family. Yet Burney was too wise and clear-headed not to recognize and respect in Jordan what she shared with her – her professional skill.

  And Mrs Jordan too, robust as she was, would have preferred not to shock Burney. Dora liked a joke, but she did not set out to challenge the moral order, and her attitude towards the court and the royal family was as reverential as that of the people who came out to line the streets to express their loyalty. She took royal patronage and approval seriously: with a twinkle in her eye for the young Duke and Mr Bunbury, perhaps, but a very thorough and proper respect and gratitude towards King George.

  There is another curious entry in Fanny Burney’s Cheltenham diary. It contains her first reference to the King’s third son, Prince William, absent at sea during the Cheltenham jaunt – he was serving in the navy – but soon to reappear. A few days after Burney’s second visit to the theatre, she was sitting with another of the Queen’s ladies, Miss Planta, and a court clergyman called Fairly, when he suddenly asked her how she managed to cope with the boisterousness of the royal Princes; because as far as he was concerned ‘there was something in the violence of their animal spirits that would make him accept no post and no pay to live with them. Their very voices, he said, had a loudness and force that wore him.’8 Burney was so embarrassed by this sudden and unprovoked criticism of members of t
he royal family that she could hardly speak, but just managed to explain that she scarcely knew the Princes, for the good reason that they were almost never at court. Mr Fairly congratulated her on this. If they had been, he said, ‘they would have come to you, I promise you; and what could you have done – what would have become of you? – with Prince William in particular? Do you not think, Miss Planta, the Prince of Wales and Prince William would have been quite enough for Miss Burney?’ Miss Burney answered again, still more faintly, that she would have avoided them.

  ‘Impossible! They would have come to your tea-room.’ ‘I would have given up tea.’ ‘Then they would have followed you – called for you – sent for you – the Prince of Wales would have called about him, “Here! Where’s Miss Burney?”’ ‘O, no, no, no!’ cried I; ‘I would have kept wholly out of the way, and they would never have thought about me.’ ‘O, ho!’ cried he, laughing, ‘never think of seeing Miss Burney! Prince William, too! what say you to that, Miss Planta?’

  Miss Planta agreed there was no probability of such an escape; and Miss Burney’s July diary ends with an expression of relief that her time at court had not coincided with that of the Princes. Mr Fairly was then summoned by a page to play backgammon with His Majesty, putting an end to the torment. Fairly was usually a kindly man, yet he obviously enjoyed teasing Burney for her primness on this occasion; perhaps the idea of her being confronted by the boisterous, rakish Princes came into his head after seeing her shocked reaction to Sir Harry Wildair, just such a rakish youth as one of them. And as it happens, his warning was timely, for within a few months she did find herself face to face with Prince William at Windsor, and was able to discover for herself whether Mr Fairly’s account was exaggerated, or whether he was indeed another Wildair.

  If Miss Burney noticed that Mrs Jordan was with child at Cheltenham, she was far too well bred to mention such a thing in her diary. The pregnancy was not very far advanced, but it may have been partly responsible for Dora’s decision to give up her male role in The Poor Soldier, a very unusual concession for her. She was billed as Mrs Jordan, of course, but was often now called Mrs Ford; the coincidence of the name when she played Mistress Ford must have been one of the jokes of Cheltenham that season. Richard Ford accompanied her on some of her out-of-town engagements, so he may have been with her for some of her stay at least. Her brother George was certainly there, because he was acting alongside her; and very likely the two little girls were also taken along for the country air, with Mrs Bland and Hester, all packed into a comfortable lodging, near the theatre but also close to the fields and hills surrounding the smart little spa town.

  The success of this summer season was very important to the owner of Cheltenham’s theatre, an Irishman of many talents called Boles Watson: he had been its builder and was now its manager too. As things turned out, he was so grateful to Dora that when she left in September he presented her with a locket of blue enamel, set with pearls and brilliants, with a picture of the Comic Muse ‘after Reynolds’ inside and an inscription, ‘Presented to Mrs Jordan, Thalia’s Sweetest Child’, in gold letters: a charming tribute, although the picture, rather tactlessly, was not of Dora. She had not yet sat for Sir Joshua, as the Comic Muse or anything else. On the other hand he may have planned to paint her, because his ‘Sitter Book’ shows that she visited him early the following year. He also expressed his admiration for her in unusually warm terms, saying ‘she vastly exceeded everything that he had seen, and really was what others only affected to be’.9 He was especially struck by the fact that she could play both fashionable men like Wildair and women who pass as men, ‘the tender and exquisite Viola of Shakespeare, where she combines feeling with sportive effect, and does as much by the music of her melancholy as the music of her laugh’.10 Sadly, his tribute was made only in words, and neither her melancholy Viola nor her elegant Wildair was put on canvas by Reynolds to stand alongside the Mrs Siddons he painted that year.

  Cheltenham took up Dora’s summer. She had been almost continually busy at Drury Lane until mid-June, and was immediately back again in September, playing the Shakespeare heroines she had already made her own, and more of the Restoration dramatists whose women’s parts seemed to have been written especially for her: Congreve’s Miss Prue, Corinna in Vanbrugh’s The Confederacy, Miss Hoyden in A Trip to Scarborough (which was Sheridan’s toned-down version of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse). In all these plays she appeared with her neighbour John Bannister as her leading man, and they could do no wrong in the eyes of the audience when they appeared together, clowning or sentimental as lovers, fast and funny as a pair of rakes.

  Yet when John Kemble took over the management of Drury Lane this autumn he and Dora quarrelled like cat and dog, sometimes over her salary, sometimes over her occasional refusals to appear. He fully understood her value to the theatre, but she maddened him. ‘Mrs Jordan again fancied herself ill. I spent above Two Hours in coaxing her to act… she was as well as ever she was in her life, and stayed when she had done her part to see the whole Pantomime,’ he wrote angrily on one particularly trying occasion.11 She would never give ground when she was fighting for a pay increase or an extra benefit. This shocked and embarrassed both Kemble and Sheridan, because it was so unlike the behaviour expected of a lady; and it was precisely her strength that she was prepared to embarrass them. People noticed that Sheridan was sometimes ‘as afraid as a Mouse of a Cat’ when faced with Dora in one of her fierce moods.12 She knew she had to be as tough as the toughest of the men she was dealing with, and she used whatever weapons came to hand to achieve what she believed to be her due.

  Some of her pleas of illness may have been put on to make a point, but others were certainly genuine; Kemble, childless himself, was not likely to take much account of pregnancies or of the demands made by sick children on their mothers’ attention. After a year of almost unceasing work, Dora gave birth to her third child during the autumn of 1788. This was the first to be born in London, and her first boy, but there was no rejoicing. He may have arrived prematurely; he did not live long enough to be given a name. A son and heir might have tipped Ford towards legitimizing his domestic situation; the disappointment did not encourage him. But whatever gloom fell upon Gower Street, Dora quickly gathered her energies and was back on stage in late November.

  7

  Carnival: 1789–1791

  The waters of Cheltenham did not save the King’s health. In the autumn of 1788 he fell ill with a fever; the fever turned to madness. Sometimes he wept, sometimes he talked on and on until he was raving uncontrollably; sometimes, it was said, he even barked like a dog. The Queen was naturally distraught, many doctors were called in, and the most intimate details of the royal illness were publicly discussed. The Prince of Wales expected to be made Regent, which modified whatever distress he felt. Charles James Fox, getting the news in Italy, came back at all speed. Parliament was thrown into more severe conflict than usual, the Whigs supporting the Prince, Pitt and his followers seeking ways of limiting the power he might have to be granted. One clause of the Regency Bill made it impossible for him to create peerages or to appoint his friends to offices for a period of twelve months; Pitt was pinning his faith on the recovery of the King. Another clause would deprive the Prince of all authority if – it was carefully phrased – he should marry a Catholic.

  Sheridan, summoned at all hours to Carlton House to administer advice and comfort to the Prince, and often kept there half the night, did his best for his cause both in and out of the House. He asked Members of Parliament not to inquire into the matter of Mrs Fitzherbert; the Prince did his bit gallantly by putting it about that he was tired of her. Sheridan was also able to get a handbill relating to their marriage suppressed; and he took on Pitt fiercely, accusing him of insolence in his dealings with the Prince. The Prince said to his friends at Devonshire House that ‘he must crush Pitt or Pitt him’.1

  Devonshire House in Piccadilly was one of the places where the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Duncannon
regularly entertained, gossiped, gambled, flirted and presided over the Prince’s party. Sheridan was there as often as he was at Carlton House. Both Whigs and Pittites gathered at Drury Lane in the evening. Sheridan’s appearances were more likely to be in the front of the house with his political cronies than backstage, while Kemble was allowed to get on with the running of the theatre. When Sheridan was at home he was often too distracted to talk to his family. In November his sister Betsy wrote from his house in Bruton Street, ‘Dick with us but so engaged in thought he hardly seemed to hear or see us, and so we went to the play, – Confederacy and Sultan, Mrs Jordan delightful in both. The usual intimates came home to eat oysters.’2

  Mrs Jordan could have been among the oyster eaters, but she is more likely to have gone home to Gower Street after her strenuous double bill. She was pregnant again, not so many weeks after losing the baby boy; not that she let it curtail her appearances. In December, for her benefit, she played Rosalind in As You Like It and Nell in the farce The Devil to Pay, ‘exquisitely well – nothing could be better’ wrote the clergyman critic, John Genest.

  In February the King began to show signs of recovery. Fanny Burney, meeting him unexpectedly in the gardens of Kew Palace, was frightened and tried to run away, but then found him gentle and sensible; he took hold of her and kissed her. Something about the gesture, which suggested his need for affection and reassurance after his ordeal, touched her heart. Soon the news went out and the country as a whole rejoiced with her. The Queen presented Miss Burney with a fan ornamented with the words ‘Health restored to one, and happiness to millions’. The claim was scarcely exaggerated; the King had never been so popular as his illness made him. The town of Windsor subscribed forty guineas for fireworks to greet his return to his castle, and clergymen sent up thanks to God; one country parson gave his two servants a bottle of gin between them to celebrate.3