Another quarrel broke out between Sheridan and Kemble when he shut the Haymarket as a gesture of respect on the day the news of the French king’s execution reached London, 24 January 1793. Sheridan complained angrily that the gesture was both unnecessary and expensive: he was having enough trouble funding his new theatre, rising slowly in Drury Lane, without losing receipts. Dora was absorbed in her rehearsals and avoided politics; and the Duke missed the whole thing because he had slipped on a frosty step outside Somerset Street, fallen and broken his arm, and was at once carried off by a protective Prince of Wales to St James’s Palace, to be tended by the royal doctors.
This meant he missed Anna as well – perhaps a relief to Dora – and he was still at the palace when France declared war on England at the beginning of February. As soon as his arm mended he asked to serve his country by being given a command in the Home Fleet; but he immediately lost whatever chance he might have had by announcing in the Lords that he thought the war should be ended. The Prime Minister, Pitt, told the King he could not have a ‘political admiral’; and William remained torn between his desire to serve his country at sea and his anti-war feelings, which developed as the year went by. In November he wrote, ‘If ever, unfortunately for this country, I should by Providence be commanded to wear the Crown, my greatest desire would be to be considered a peaceful Monarch.’3 It is one of his more appealing remarks, because it suggests genuine modesty. It shows too that he sometimes allowed himself to imagine a future in which he occupied the throne; which was a reasonable enough prospect, since neither of his elder brothers had children – or at least avowable children.
When the Duke wrote this letter, Dora was again expecting a child. Did he consider its future when he wrote of becoming king himself? Probably not. As the birth approached, in January 1794, she stayed in London and he was away a good deal visiting his brothers. His money problems were particularly acute, and he thought he might be about to lose the Petersham house. The Prince of Wales, largely responsible for his difficulties, was trying to help by asking the King to get Pitt to agree to ‘purchase the whole of Petersham for the sum of four-and-twenty-thousand pounds’, and to allow William to remain there. ‘I am afraid the Prince will not succeed,’ he wrote to Thomas Coutts. He was right; there was no reason at all why Pitt, who had more serious matters to attend to, should agree to the proposition. Still William remained optimistic. When Pitt turned him down, he asked the King to buy the house; the King also refused. William managed to raise money through another financier; then he assured Coutts that ‘seven thousand pounds will, I am sure, settle difficulties and then by economy I hope to be once more free’.4
While these inglorious negotiations were under way, Dora’s and the Duke’s first child made his appearance at Somerset Street, at seven in the morning of 29 January 1794. The birth was difficult and Dora even thought she might die; but although she was weak and ill for a few days, she soon recovered, and the boy was pronounced ‘a very fine one and in the most perfect health’ by his proud father. He was not baptized until 10 May, when Thomas Lloyd, the same curate of Ewell who had christened Lucy, now Chaplain to the Duke, went to Petersham to perform the office privately. The child was set down as George FitzClarence, ‘son of His Royal Highness The Duke of Clarence and Mrs Dorah Jordan’; at some later date he was given two extra names, Augustus Frederick, for good measure. Little George was adored from the start by both his parents. Dora fed him herself, and he grew into a handsome, high-spirited small boy; he was much indulged, and much loved by his half-sisters.
Engaged in nursing her son, Dora did not appear when the new Drury Lane opened in April, with Mrs Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Miss Farren displaying the glories of the iron fire curtain. Henry Holland had designed a colossal building, with seats for 3,600, but the sight lines were bad and the gallery so high that its occupants found it hard to hear. Sheridan called it his Grand National Theatre, but it was in trouble from the start because he could not manage the finances; actors and staff went unpaid, there were strikes, people left, and the house was never full.
Over the next three years the Duke, despite his disapproval of the war, continued his efforts to get a naval appointment, while England was drawn into one military and naval disaster after another. Three of his brothers were seriously involved, the Duke of York being forced to flee for his life, and the Dukes of Sussex and Cumberland both wounded in battle. The Prussians and the Spaniards made their peace with France; the French crushed the English-backed rising in the Vendée, built up a great revolutionary army, fought off all comers, and became masters of the Dutch coast. Still William was refused any role in the struggle. He was fobbed off with an honorary promotion to vice-admiral; and he was mocked in the prints – unfairly in this instance – which show him holding a baby and saying he’d rather creep into a Jordan than fight the enemy. Cruelly, his naval expertise found its only outlet when Sheridan organized a grand benefit for naval widows at the new Drury Lane in July 1794. The whole thing was written and rehearsed in three days flat – this was very much Sheridan’s hallmark – and, since it involved the representation of two fleets in tanks of water on the stage, the Duke was called in to give technical advice. At least the satirists missed this opportunity for further mockery.
Dora, after nursing George quietly for five months, made her first appearance on the new stage at this benefit. Then she began to talk business with Sheridan and, after long negotiations, signed a fresh contract with him on 1 September, engaging herself to ‘act, sing and perform any and every character for five years at thirty guineas a week’.6 It was a generous arrangement for her, but a demanding one; Sheridan may have thought – or hoped – she had enough children, and could now give herself to her career full time. In fact she was already pregnant again. ‘Mrs Jordan is shortly expecting to produce something, whether a young Admiral or a Pickle Duchess it is impossible yet to tell,’ Bon Ton magazine announced to its readers.7 She did not let this interfere; after a short holiday in Brighton, where she stayed with the Duke and baby George in Mrs Fitzherbert’s house, she was back at Drury Lane to work through the autumn and winter. George was always with her; the Duke was not. She sent him reassuring notes: ‘your dear little Boy is perfectly well’; she was ‘perfectly happy’ with him; or she was delayed at a rehearsal with him. It is obvious that she took him into Drury Lane with her, in the time-honoured fashion, making him into a thoroughgoing theatre baby even if his grandfather was the King.8
Sheridan was now wooing Hecca, half his age and well connected: she was the daughter of the Dean of Winchester and would become his second wife. But he did not neglect Dora, and even thought of her interest in women playwrights. He asked Elizabeth Inchbald, who had a string of successful plays at Covent Garden, to write something especially for Dora; she seized the chance and wrote a farce mocking male vanity, The Wedding Day, in which an elderly widower is on the point of marrying a young girl when his supposedly dead wife returns unexpectedly. Dora’s Lady Contest became another of her regularly repeated successes; and encouraged by this, she made another attempt of her own to help a woman playwright by offering to appear in a satirical comedy about gambling, Nobody, the work of Mary Robinson, loved and abandoned by the Prince of Wales fifteen years earlier. Some of Dora’s colleagues feared that the satire would anger the very ladies on whose patronage the theatre depended – not to mention the Prince – and refused to be involved in the production, so that she found herself championing a play with little support once again; but Bannister at least was loyal. As soon as the curtain went up, ladies in the audience hissed through their fans, while their servants in the gallery were under orders to express themselves as loudly as they could. Dora played on against the interruptions, and was only just able to get through the evening. The Duke was not there to support her, and she sent him a note afterwards, telling him the play had been ‘damned most unfairly… I send these few lines to anticipate the newspapers,’ she added.9 But she was back in the theatre the next
night, and a brave third. The audiences grew rowdier, and Mrs Robinson decided Mrs Jordan had done enough, and withdrew her comedy. Plays were damned for different reasons, and the text has again disappeared; but Dora’s determination to give it a fair trial, her bearing the brunt of the hostile reaction, was an admirable and unusual piece of solidarity with another, less fortunate woman.
After this came a different trial. Twelve-year-old Fanny fell ill, Dora went to nurse her, found she had a high fever, and would not leave her. When the Duke suggested she should at least meet him in the park for a walk, she refused, saying she was too tired to go so far on foot, and would not use the carriage for fear of infecting it with whatever Fanny might have. She called in one of the royal family’s physicians, Dr Turton, who diagnosed putrid or scarlet fever. Dodee caught it too, and both children were seriously ill; Dr Turton said Fanny’s life depended on her being able to keep down the bark he prescribed. Dora was up for three nights, ‘half distracted’, and Turton too was anxious enough to remain with the children all through one of them. He was also watching Dora for signs of illness, and though she showed none, he counselled her to keep entirely away from the Duke and from George. This advice she obeyed. ‘I should never forgive myself if I was the cause of giving you any pain either of body or mind,’ she wrote; ‘Love and kiss my dear little boy and let him (independent of the claim he has on you) have some interest in your heart because he is mine also.’ Whether Dr Turton’s bark or their mother’s nursing was responsible, the girls slowly recovered; first Fanny, then Dodee was declared out of danger, Dora expressed her gratitude to the doctor, and things settled down into a more normal pattern.10
Or at least, she was able to return to Somerset Street for the birth of another child: at two in the morning of 4 March 1795, the Duke’s first daughter was born. He gave her the name of his seventeen-year-old sister, Princess Sophia. A month after this Dora was back at work, though sometimes ‘very much exhausted and languid’; she was feeding the baby, and found the constant travel between their different houses tiring. There was something else to worry her in April. The Prince of Wales, his debts now amounting to over £600,000, had finally agreed to follow his father’s wishes and marry his cousin Caroline of Brunswick. He went through the whole thing reluctantly and in a spirit of total cynicism, simply in order to retrieve his financial situation; although he had long been faithless to Mrs Fitzherbert, he still regarded her as ‘the Wife of my heart and soul’.11 Since Dora was on terms of friendship with her, she could not fail to feel sympathy for her position, and to ponder the royal family’s notion of acceptable behaviour.
The Duke naturally attended his brother’s second and more public wedding; how the marriage was discussed between them is not on record. We do know that the Prince, who separated from the Princess almost as soon as they were married, came to Petersham the following summer to discuss his marriage problems with his brother, and stayed for two weeks, with Dora as his hostess. She also entertained the Prince of Orange to dinner that summer, putting off a performance at Richmond in order to do so. Horace Walpole, still keeping an eye out on the other side of the river, observed that ‘she did the honours at the head of the table’ and added slyly, ‘no, the Princesses were not there’.12 The rules of royal behaviour must have seemed as bizarre as the antics of Greek gods on a painted ceiling. The Prince might smile and scatter his favours, or show a cold face and withdraw them, without being asked for a reason from below; and he could share a house with his brother and Dora, but not bring his sisters; and they could watch her across the theatre, but not speak to her.
There were quarrels between her and the Duke this summer of 1795, perhaps precipitated by the royal wedding. The gossip was that William had flirted with a lady at a ball; Dora was not invited but she had gone into the gallery where the band was playing to observe them. Everything about the story was humiliating for her, the social snub she was subjected to, her jealousy, the fact that it seemed justified; only the Duke’s response salved the hurt, as he simply refused to consider the separation she proposed in her anger. He had no wish at all to give up his pleasant domestic arrangements with her. His account of the quarrel, reported by a later dancing partner, is more endearing than not:
Mrs Jordan is a very good creature, very domestic and careful of the children. To be sure she is absurd sometimes, and has her humours. But there are such things more or less in all families. I daresay you and Mr Sutton have your little disputes. To be sure she made a strange, foolish business last summer… but then she repented and was sorry for it. You heard of it, I daresay.13
The very good creature was also appearing in half a dozen plays in the spring of 1795: one adapted from Madame de Genlis; a revival of Mrs Inchbald’s The Child of Nature; a farce called The Adopted Child, done to music by Mozart (tantalizingly, we do not know which music); other new farces, including The Welch Heiress by Jerningham, a friend of the Prince of Wales and Horace Walpole, which failed after one night; and the success of the season, a very up-to-date play about a girl whose parents die in the French Revolution, First Love, by Richard Cumberland. The sheer number of lines to learn in one season, alongside all her old parts, must have made considerable demands. No modern actor has to carry anything like such a burdened memory; the nearest equivalent is the old provincial repertory system, but even that did not alternate revivals with new plays, or run two plays every night. Most of the farces in which Dora excelled also demanded considerable physical agility; her letters mention falls, bruises and sprains. Then there were songs to learn and deliver; and counterpointed against the rhythm of learning, performing, consolidating and discarding different parts, was the other rhythm of her life, the pregnancies, the babies, the breast-feeding, the miscarriages. She and the Duke proved an almost indecently fertile couple. It became a subject of amusement to others but probably not to her, although she never complained either. In the busy season of 1795, with Sophia only a few months old and unweaned, she was pregnant again; it was not too surprising that she miscarried in July. The same thing happened the following January, in the middle of an equally hard-working winter.
There was a further piece of unpleasantness to deal with in July, when Richard Daly appeared in London. Not the man to lose an opportunity, he asked Dora if he could see his daughter Fanny, at the same time letting her know he would pay her a hundred guineas a night if she would make the trip back to Dublin to perform at his theatre. Dora was neither touched nor flattered by the sudden interest in Fanny or the recognition of her own cash value. It is unlikely she consulted Fanny, and she refused him on both counts.
She kept up her appearances at Richmond Theatre in August and September. Walpole turned an elegant Shakespearean phrase in her honour: ‘Nell of Clarence plays Ophelia tonight at Richmond.’14 Why did he call her Nell? It was one of her best-known parts, as a poor wife magically transported to riches, in The Devil to Pay; but Walpole may also have intended a reference to her famous predecessor as royal theatrical mistress, Nell Gwynne.
After the winter miscarriage she was quickly back at Drury Lane, playing with Kemble in Wycherley’s Plain Dealer. Their feud had burnt itself out for the moment, and they allowed themselves to be friends; and he found her performance as Fidelia to his Manly so irresistible that he quoted his favourite author, Sterne, in her praise: ‘I could have taken her into my arms, and cherished her, though it was in the open street, without blushing.’15 Kemble may have been softened by some troubles of his own. He had been caught on the point of raping Miss De Camp in her dressing room: she screamed for help, and a crowd gathered and rescued her. Kemble was often drunk, and probably so on this occasion, an acceptable excuse to most of his circle. His wife forgave him, and his grand friends laughed it off as ‘more a jest than… an enormity’, but he was obliged all the same to make a public apology in the newspapers, because she was a respectable young woman, who later became his sister-in-law.16
Kemble and Jordan were together again in Vortigern, one of Sherid
an’s most misjudged dramatic ventures. The play, which ran to nearly 3,000 lines, was brought to the attention of the world by a father and son, Samuel and William Ireland, who claimed to have discovered some Shakespeare manuscripts. They were authenticated by many eminent people; Boswell, for instance, fell on his knees at the sight of them. The Prince of Wales and Duke of Clarence both asked to see the manuscript of Vortigern; and according to young Ireland, who showed it to the Duke and Mrs Jordan, they questioned him about its origin, and made several objections, which he was able to answer. Covent Garden and Drury Lane then competed for the honour of putting it on; Sheridan got it for £300, only a hundred more than he paid Mrs Inchbald for her farce, but promising the Irelands half the profits for the first sixty nights. As it turned out, it was not too disastrous a bit of bargaining, because as soon as the play went into rehearsal, everyone began to have doubts about it. Sheridan, never a Shakespeare enthusiast, pronounced it an early work. Mrs Siddons found she was not well enough to appear. Kemble suggested 1 April as an appropriate opening date. The press was divided about its authenticity, but agog, and the theatre was besieged for the first performance, on 2 April. Vortigern was of course a forgery. William Ireland had been inspired by Chatterton; having convinced his own father with the first forgeries he attempted, he found himself carried along on their momentum. He confessed afterwards that he had written the play with parts for particular actors and actresses in mind; Mrs Jordan, for example, had a ‘Shakespearean’ song, was put into male attire, and given the epilogue, because he knew this was what the public liked. As playwriting policies go, it was not a bad one, but it did not go far enough. Dora did her best, and went out of her way to speak kindly to the eighteen-year-old author as he sat backstage, hearing the packed house begin to shout and jeer as the evening proceeded, while Kemble encouraged the audience from the stage by gesturing to show which side he was on. The evening ended with people howling and throwing oranges, and the sixty nights of half profits remained a dream for the Irelands: Vortigern was never played again.
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