Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  The London season was a particularly festive one. The revolution rumbled on in France, but still seemed more benign than threatening to many of the English; it did not, for instance, prevent the Duchess of Devonshire from visiting Paris that summer. At Carlton House the Prince of Wales gave a series of levees and balls. A respectable lady complained that, ‘not satisfied with asking all the W—s at this end of town, [he] sent into the City for more Ws’; but then her name had been left off the Prince’s list.19 The round of the young royals’ pleasures was not going to be slowed down by disapproval. In May William was obliged to tear himself away. The navy was on alert; someone at the Admiralty remembered that the Duke was a sailor, and he was summoned to Portsmouth to take command of the Valiant. He busied himself about his ship as best he could, but was only half pleased to be given another command just now. He read enviously in the newspapers of the masquerades, fêtes and balls he was missing, and wrote complaining to his brother that there was ‘not a woman fit to be touched with tongs’ in Portsmouth.20 As the Admiralty officials had rightly judged, being a royal duke and being in command of a frigate were not easily compatible pursuits.

  Dora did not make the journey north or west this year, but kept Fanny, Dodee and baby Lucy with her in Petersham. It was easy and agreeable to go across the meadows to Richmond Theatre, where she did her summer season in June and July. She was also looking for a new house in London; whether Gower Street was too small, or too sad in its associations with her lost mother and her lost baby son, she had decided to move. She found a more central and fashionable house between Portman Square and Oxford Street, in Somerset Street. (It ran from Orchard Street to Duke Street, and has disappeared beneath Selfridges.) Ford naturally moved with her; but it looks as though the choice was hers, and the house belonged to her, either outright or on a lease in her name.

  In mid-September she was back at Drury Lane for the first night of the season, starring both in the Aphra Behn and the farce; in October she was in a new five-act farce by Frederic Reynolds, Better Late than Never, which the grateful author said she saved single-handed from total disaster.21 She was full of energy, with the bonus of not being pregnant for nearly a year. Whether this was chance, care or coolness on Ford’s side or hers, she must have enjoyed her freedom. On her return to the stage after the birth of Lucy the press had, for the first time, commented on what they called her ‘bulk’; Dora was not a particularly vain woman, but nobody likes to be described as bulky.

  November brought her twenty-ninth birthday. It also brought the Duke back to London, very pleased to be dining at Carlton House again rather than in a cabin with the Admiral; in one of his letters he spoke of having been long enough at sea to hate it, and expressed his unwillingness to serve except in war conditions. He also mentioned his desire to be back in ‘the quiet and peaceable regions of Richmond’.22 His two elder brothers welcomed him, not least because they wanted him to join them in a scheme for raising a loan of £300,000 that they saw as a means of paying off their current debts. Anxious to be accepted as one of them, he did as they asked, involving himself in their financial tangle with disastrous long-term results. Trying to be still more helpful, he is supposed to have suggested that he might ‘do something for the family’ by marrying ‘someone very rich’: an offer greeted by the Prince of Wales with one of his special sneers: ‘Who would marry you?’23

  Fantasies of marriage did not prevent William from pursuing ladies he could not hope to honour with the offer of his hand. A son was born to him at about this time, acknowledged by him and called William; we are left wondering who the mother was, and what became of her. Could it have been Polly Finch? It seems unlikely that the Duke would have taken into his own care the child of a woman of her reputation. Since he also claimed never to have debauched an innocent woman, little William’s mother may have been a married woman. Whatever her status, ‘natural’ children were regarded as natural mistakes made by men. Even Jane Austen, a clergyman’s daughter, refers to them without embarrassment. Unmarried mothers often willingly handed over their children if the fathers were rich enough to offer them a better chance in life than they could; and in any case the law denied such mothers any rights over the child after the age of seven. The father might claim them, if he chose to; but he was under no obligation to do so.24

  If we are to believe the Duke’s statement to his brother, he began to court Dora on his return from Portsmouth in November 1790. He wrote to the Prince the following October (1791) saying, ‘Mrs Jordan, through a course of eleven months’ endless difficulty, has behaved like an angel.’25 Perhaps his memory was at fault, because in the winter of 1790 he was, as we have seen, vigorously pursuing Elizabeth Sheridan. Her letters about him date from January 1791, and mention his age as twenty-six, and hers as thirty-seven.26 The fact that she took him seriously and found him attractive is a real – and rather surprising – testimonial to his ability to charm. If, after two decades with the wittiest husband in Britain, she could find herself ‘not indifferent to his [i.e., the Duke’s] devoted Attachment for me’, it certainly suggests he could transform himself into a different person from the man his brother mocked and the great ladies found ‘heavy to have sur les bras’, as Lady Duncannon put it.27 Elizabeth might welcome a blunt man for a change, but she would surely not have liked a boor or a complete fool, even with the dazzle of royalty about him. Another voice in his favour was Horace Walpole’s: he found William lively, cheerful, talkative, manly, well-bred and sensible.28

  He did not take Elizabeth’s dismissal entirely easily. There is mention of his ‘persecutions’ later. They were brought to an end as her delicate image was blotted out by the bolder one of Mrs Jordan.

  It was an image hard to avoid in London in 1790. She was visible in the theatre, in prints, in paintings and engravings: as Rosalind and Viola, her most popular Shakespeare roles, both of which she was playing through that spring; as farcical chambermaids, Romps, Hoydens and Pickles; as the dashing Hippolita, with military sword and feathered hat. Hoppner painted her again in this role, with her spectacles in her hand. A fine silhouette of her dressed as Hippolita in her soldier’s costume was also cut about this time, with the high plume of feathers on her head, carrying a sabre, and showing her legs up to mid-thigh.29

  In February 1791 Dora was visited by her friend Tate Wilkinson. He put up in a hotel in Gray’s Inn Lane, on the other side of town. The weather was terrible, the Thames had risen over its banks, and he had to struggle through rain and flooded streets with his bad leg to Drury Lane; to get him to Twelfth Night and back, his servant had to bribe a private coachman waiting outside Brooks’s, who took the job because he could rely on his master not coming out until four or five in the morning – a point noted by Wilkinson with a mixture of horror and amusement. So the old manager managed to see her in her glory, both as Viola and as Hippolita; and when he had seen her, he persuaded her to promise another visit north in July, and went away well satisfied.

  The Duke’s serious attentions began after Wilkinson’s visit. In March he decided to move from his small place in Richmond and bought Petersham Lodge, a comfortable house set in its own grounds; he renamed it, a trifle self-importantly, Clarence Lodge. It was of course close to the Fords. Both he and Dora were now dividing their time between Petersham and London. He was having his rooms in St James’s Palace redesigned and decorated by the architect John Soane; she was working at full tilt, and more often at Somerset Street. But someone got an inkling of something, and although there were no babies in question – as far as Dora was concerned at least – a curious print appeared in the middle of March called ‘Mrs Pickle’s mistake’, showing a baby held at the window of a house in ‘Sommers St’, with the Duke, Richard Ford and Dr Warren, the Prince of Wales’s doctor, also present. It is inexplicable unless it is an allusion to the Duke’s baby son, by a misinformed cartoonist.30

  Dora said afterwards that she did nothing to encourage the Duke, and that her wish was to remain with Richard Ford
. Her behaviour confirms this, right up to the autumn; but she must have been flattered, and amused. She may have enjoyed people speculating about William’s attentions, and she may even have thought it was good for business. One of her roles was that of a noble girl who spurns a royal seducer in fine words: ‘Feed on the scum of sin?… Dishonour to the noble name that nurs’d thee… There, take your jewels; let ’em give them lustres/That have dark lives and souls; wear them yourself, sir.’31 If he was offering her jewels, she was not accepting them at this point. On the other hand, when she played this part, a modern epilogue was attached for her to speak, which suggests the theatre management was happy enough to stir up speculation about a royal admirer:

  How strange! methinks I hear a critic say,

  What, she the serious heroine of a play!

  The manager his want of sense evinces

  To pitch on Hoydens for the love of Princes!

  To trick out Chambermaids in awkward pomp –

  Horrid! to make a Princess of a Romp.

  The public could read what they liked into this demure declaration.

  On 4 June she was chosen to lead the last performance ever to be given in the Drury Lane built by the Adam brothers. Sheridan had made his ill-starred decision to rebuild the theatre again, on a much larger scale, hoping to increase his revenue; he invited Henry Holland, the architect employed by the Prince of Wales to remodel Carlton House, to undertake the project. Meanwhile the company would have to move to the opera house in the Haymarket, where they remained until 1794.32 On this final night in the familiar theatre Dora was in both The Country Girl and No Song, No Supper, and the house was bursting at the seams, with people packed and squeezed into every one of the two thousand seats.

  On the same day the Duke was at St James’s, celebrating his father’s official birthday; ‘this is the first day I have ever dined with the King at St James’s on his birthday’, he told a group of courtiers. He was in high spirits, boasting of the beauty of his new carriage and saying he had to hurry off to see his tailor, but he ordered champagne and insisted on them all drinking toasts to the King and Queen, and refilling the glasses of the most reluctant. Clearly he was already drunk himself, and his behaviour was not endearing. He was rude to one of the Queen’s faithful old German ladies, calling her ‘potato-jaw’ and then trying to make amends by kissing her hand clumsily. ‘Dat Prince Villiam – oders de Duke de Clarence – bin raelly ver merry – oders vat you call tipsy,’ grumbled another of the ladies.33

  His approaches to Dora must have been more circumspect. In July the press was printing reports of his infatuation, but said it was unrequited: ‘Mrs Jordan has withstood the unbounded offers of a certain personage…’ ‘Little Pickle has been besieged at Richmond by a certain exalted youth, whom at present she has managed to keep at bay…’ There was renewed speculation as to whether she was really married to Ford or not, opinion inclining to her being Mrs Ford; no one could resist punning on the situation: ‘The Ford is too dangerous for him to cross the Jordan.’ She herself did not tell the Duke whether she was married or not at this stage; why should she? The royal princes were not noted for constancy. Lady Lumm advised her strongly to keep him away and to stick to Ford. Hester was also a Ford partisan, regarding him, for all his faults of omission, as a gentleman.

  Even if Dora was half pleased by William’s very public attentions, her first intention was to follow Lady Lumm’s advice. By her own account,

  The declared attachment of the Prince weighed at first no more with her than to take the opportunity of ascertaining, whether Mr Ford was sincere in his devotion to her; in which case she thought herself every way entitled to his hand; and, in fact, even upon a mere worldly estimate of the matter, a desirable match, in possession of a positive, and progressive fortune, the honourable result of superior, indeed unequalled talents.34

  The Duke, that is, was at this stage hardly more than a lever to be used on Richard Ford. The events of the summer bear out this remarkably frank admission. William came to a benefit she gave at the Haymarket on 2 August. The next evening she played at Richmond Theatre to a full house: ‘scarcely a family of any rank or consequence in Richmond, and the adjoining Villages, but paid a tribute to the abilities of this charming Actress’. The Duke then let it be known that he would be giving a splendid fête, to which the charming actress was invited. Perhaps he chose this moment to press his suit with a serious declaration.

  Dora turned down his invitation. The fête was cancelled. Not only that, she escaped altogether, leaving both Richmond and London. Five days later, on 8 August, she and Ford were in York. She had promised Tate Wilkinson; the trip also allowed her to tackle Ford about his intentions, and to test the Duke’s fidelity.

  Wilkinson’s detailed account of the Fords’ visit makes it clear it was an edgy experience for everyone concerned. To begin with, it was not a good moment for the theatre; there had been political riots, with houses burnt down in Birmingham, only a few weeks before, and the whole country was disturbed by the news of massacres in Paris and the imprisonment of the French King and Queen after their attempted flight. There was also a blistering heat wave, punctuated by thunderstorms, which discouraged audiences. The High Sheriff came to see Dora’s Rosalind, but the people of York decided The Country Girl was rude and vulgar. Some of the same tribe who had hissed Dora in Hull eight years before shouted insults when she appeared on stage. Wilkinson says they were about her living openly as Ford’s mistress, but rumours of the Duke’s attentions may have filtered through as well. He himself teased her by calling her a ‘theatrical duchess’. ‘She did not deign to reply, but reddened and looked angry.’35 Then the Wilkinsons gave one of their splendid dinner parties for the Fords, and she recovered her good humour. Michael Kelly and Mrs Crouch were in York too, and John Kemble arrived, and was put up by the Mayor; the city was abuzz with parties and entertainments.

  But Dora was not happy. She resented the position she was in, and she was not used to a hostile reception. One evening, at the end of She Would and She Would Not, she showed what she thought of the lukewarm Yorkshire audience: instead of bowing towards it – she was dressed for Hippolita, and always bowed when she wore male costume – she turned her back and bowed the other way, ‘as much as to say, kiss—’, wrote Wilkinson, somewhat taken aback, but also amused by such fighting spirit.

  Whatever Ford thought of this, the next day he wrote to Wilkinson to say Dora was ill and could not either come to dinner again, as had been arranged, or continue to perform. Kemble went round to see her, but she would not budge, and Ford carried her off on a trip to Castle Howard. If this was meant to give them a breathing space to enjoy each other’s company, it was not a success. Her distress as the mistress of the man who had been living with her and promising marriage for five years had turned to anger. How could he pretend to be looking after her, when he was the very cause of her troubles? Their relations soured from day to day; and now escape from her current situation began to look attractive.

  Wilkinson sent to say she must pay a £30 indemnity. She returned a formal note: ‘I agree with pleasure to your proposal of giving you thirty pounds, rather than ever perform in York. I shall return tomorrow and settle the balance of the account.’ It was signed, firmly, ‘D. Ford’.36 But in her mind D. Ford was occupied with questions that excluded R. Ford altogether. They returned to York together to see Kemble as Othello – not the most tactfully chosen entertainment – in the continuing heat wave, then took themselves off to Newcastle. She expected to act there, but the arrangements, which depended on Kemble’s brother Stephen, fell through. Altogether it was a very bad month for Wilkinson’s ‘truly admired and beloved Mrs Jordan’. It was also the last trip she and Ford made together.

  In Twickenham at least, Walpole was finally convinced that the Fords were married: he wrote to a friend on 16 September, ‘Do you know that Mrs Jordan is acknowledged to be Mrs Ford?’37 But by the time she and Ford arrived back, he had failed his test and she had
understood he was never going to make good his promise of marriage. She told him that, if she had to choose between being his mistress and the Duke’s she might as well opt for the Duke; or, as she put it later to the sympathetic Boaden,

  She at length required of Mr Ford a definitive answer to the proposal of marriage; and, finding that he shrunk from the test, she told him distinctly, that her mind was made up, at least to one point, THAT, if she must choose between offers of protection, she would certainly choose those that promised the fairest; but that, if he could think her worthy of being his wife, no temptations would be strong enough to detach her from him and her duties.38

  Although this is her own version, intended to justify her behaviour, its effect is unfortunate because it suggests she gave up one lover for another on financial grounds, settling for the one who ‘promised the fairest’. She was trying to put the blame on Ford, and to emphasize her own sense of duty; but the effect was to make herself look mercenary. She could simply have said she chose the one who loved her best; and that Ford’s failure to demonstrate his love gradually destroyed her belief in it, until her own feelings changed. The talk about being willing to do her duty as his wife was irrelevant by then, because she knew she never would be. They were on the point of separating.

  Meanwhile, on 22 September, she opened the season at the Haymarket. The following evening both the Duke and the Prince of Wales were there to see her. Nothing was settled yet; but three weeks later, on 13 October, the Duke wrote to his brother from Petersham triumphantly,