There were four other children to be considered: Dora’s Fanny, now fourteen; Dodee and Lucy, nine and seven; and the Duke’s eldest son, William, aged about seven. The girls were still not to be permanently lodged under the Duke’s roof, and Hester remained with them, but Dora wanted them as close as possible; she found Gifford Lodge – once the home of Mrs Fitzherbert – on Twickenham Green, close to Bushy, and installed them there. As for William, the Duke took responsibility for his education, and Dora was kind and motherly to him. He is rarely mentioned except by her, and whether he lived in Bushy House itself, or was lodged in a cottage in the park, or perhaps only came as an occasional visitor, remains uncertain; but he certainly grew attached to her, to the place and to the other children. To all of this loose family group, Bushy came to be regarded as the nearest thing to home. One more boy who sometimes came to stay, and was loved and comforted by Dora, was FitzErnest, the Duke’s nephew, and another illegitimate grandson of the King and Queen: his father, the Duke of Cumberland, took very little interest in him, and he seems to have been farmed out rather casually here and there, and to have envied his Clarence cousins their good fortune.
In January and February 1797, while the plans for Bushy were being made, and despite her advanced pregnancy, Dora was busy in the theatre. A new play, Frederic Reynolds’s The Will, opened; it was somewhat creaking of plot and dialogue, but the public went to see her as Albina, a spirited girl obliged to disguise herself as a midshipman. She was applauded for herself, and no doubt the allusion to her lover’s naval past provided an extra thrill for the audience. A perfectly fastidious Dora might have refused to go along with this, but she did not care enough to protest or withdraw. Perhaps she reasoned that it was harmless fun; it may even have made her, and the Duke, laugh. Secure in his affection as well as the public’s she could brazen out such things.
She enjoyed her successes, but she remained modest, and able to laugh at herself. When another Reynolds play again put her into breeches to represent a boy of fifteen, she expressed her doubts about it during a rehearsal: breeches and advanced pregnancy must have been especially difficult to reconcile. At this the company manager accused her of growing proud and attacked her with the obvious tease: ‘Quite the Duchess,’ he said. She could have stood on her dignity or thrown a fit of temper; instead, she giggled and told him a joke against herself, of how she had sacked her Irish cook that very morning for impertinence, and how the angry cook had banged a shilling on the table and said: ‘Arrah, now, honey, with this thirteener, won’t I sit in the gallery, and won’t your Royal Grace give me a courtesy, and won’t I give your Royal Highness a howl, and a hiss into the bargain!’10 You can see why she was so much liked by most of her theatrical colleagues: she could no more resist capturing the lilt and vigour of her cook’s speech than she could, as it turned out, refuse to play the part of the fifteen-year-old boy.
In February she had to retreat from Drury Lane. This time she chose to go to Petersham for her confinement, and there she gave birth to another boy. Henry Edward was born at eleven at night on 8 March, as his father carefully noted. The Times duly reported the birth of a son to ‘Little Pickle’; and Little Pickle, or her Royal Grace, was back on stage again within weeks, and keeping Drury Lane full whenever she appeared.
In April, Gillray put out a ‘Sketch from Life’ called ‘La Promenade en Famille’, showing the Duke pulling a large perambulator decorated with a coronet over a chamber-pot, on the path from Richmond to Bushy; he is represented as a foolish-looking, thick-lipped creature, though – rather endearingly – he has a child’s doll hanging out of his pocket. In the pram George is flourishing a toy whip at his father, Sophy has a large pet dog sitting in her lap and is half disappearing under an elaborate hat; Henry is, as he was, a featureless infant. The most striking thing about the print is the figure of Dora, who is walking apart, very trim, very severely dressed in a riding habit with a high-necked blouse and plain hat; she is taking no notice of either the Duke or her children, but is studying a play-script. Gillray really did this drawing from life, as the ad vivam fecit in the bottom left-hand corner indicates; and the feminine vivam also shows who was the most important figure in the picture in his view.
Gillray, in this instance at any rate, shows some respect for Mrs Jordan and her professional status; and the whole picture can be read as a sly topical comment on the rights and duties of the sexes. Its appearance coincided with two much discussed marriages that took place in London that April. One was between Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher William Godwin: Wollstonecraft, like Dora, had claimed the right to bear children without being married, for she too had a child by an earlier lover, and was already pregnant by Godwin. The other marriage was between Dora’s colleague, the beautiful actress Elizabeth Farren who, this same April, gave up the stage to marry her admirer, the Earl of Derby. She was approaching forty, and had guarded her virtue resolutely for nearly twenty years while they waited for the death of the Earl’s invalid wife; the marriage took place within weeks of the first Countess’s funeral. Miss Farren had been the poorest of child actresses, beating the drum from village to village for her travelling company, and had risen entirely by her own merits; she excelled in playing fine, well-bred and elegant ladies. On leaving the stage of Drury Lane for the last time, she wept; but once she had become a countess she suffered no one to allude to her previous existence, and lived out a life of refined and blameless inactivity. Her behaviour won the warm approval of Queen Charlotte.
Before the end of the season Dora played several benefits, one for a fellow actor at Covent Garden, another for the widows and orphans of the sailors killed at the battle of Cape St Vincent in February. The Duke’s friendship with Nelson, the hero of the battle in which he defeated the Spanish fleet, made this cause particularly appealing. William’s pride in his association with the navy remained strong, despite being persistently passed over and excluded from naval matters. His rank of vice-admiral, his age and experience should have entitled him to a command, and his eagerness to find a real naval role of some kind broke out regularly. The year 1797 was particularly difficult for him. After Cape St Vincent came the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore; he wrote to Nelson expressing his horror at the ‘state of democracy’ into which the Fleet was falling.11 The mutinies subsided and were brutally punished, to the Duke’s approval; then came the news that Napoleon was appointed commander of forces for the invasion of England, and again William expressed his urgent wish to ‘attack and distress the Gallic foe’.12 Still no command was forthcoming; nor would his father make him Marine Minister, another ambition in which he persisted. The Duke might believe the country needed him, but those who made the decisions disagreed. Even his affectionate sister, Princess Augusta, had doubts about his capacities. She thought her brother ‘had very good parts… but was so indolent that he never did them justice… If he has something of high importance to do… he will exert himself to the utmost, & do it really well; but otherwise, he is so fond of his ease, he lets everything take its course.’13 Dora, struggling to combine her own successful and demanding career with almost permanent pregnancy, might well have hoped he would be given a short spell at sea.
So he found himself unmanned professionally while her career prospered: just as Gillray had suggested. Both in public acclaim and in earning power, she was the man of the family. In the summer of 1797 she lent him £2,400 – a very large sum indeed – prompting him to a charming understatement in his correspondence with Coutts: ‘Mrs Jordan has never been to me the least cause of expense.’14 The fact that on stage too she was so often the man – or a woman disguised as a man, and more astute than her lover – may sometimes have struck her; she was certainly too good-natured and loving to make anything of it, and if he noticed, he was too easy-going, or too thick-skinned, to mind. Often, he stayed at home with the children while she went into town to work. Perhaps he cheered himself by considering that in the most private realm at least her masculine role was very re
gularly put aside, and his most thoroughly asserted.
Nor did she ever adopt an assertive tone with him in her letters. Like Fanny D’Arblay, though from a very different perspective, she could not formally allow that the King’s son could be less than perfect in his conduct and character. Even when she offered him advice, as she did – not to get tipsy with his brothers, not to say indiscreet things, not to mind too much when he was passed over for the naval appointments he craved – she never forgot to defer to him. She asked his permission for trivial as well as important matters – whether she might stay in town overnight because of a changed rehearsal schedule, whether she might take one of the children with her, whether to accept or turn down offers of work – and she regarded herself as bound by his opinions and wishes. The law gave him entire rights over their children, though no legal rights over her; but in her eyes the fact of his princely status was probably more important than any legal consideration.
In the summer, as the work progressed at Bushy, William took himself off to a rented house at Dover, away from debts and builders, where he could at least look at the sea, even if he had no fleet to command. Dora joined him after Drury Lane closed in June, but did not stay for long; by July Bushy was habitable, and she installed herself there with the children, to prepare things for his arrival. She reported that her sister Hester was with her, and that Dodee and Lucy were comfortably lodged ‘within a quarter of a mile’.15 For the little girls, their mother being settled at Bushy must have meant a significant improvement in their lives; all the pleasures of the park and the farm could be shared with their half-brothers and sister. Haymaking and harvest, directed by young farmer Robin, and the activities surrounding horses, sheep, dairy and poultry were all entrancing for them. So the first summer at Bushy gathered together children of at least two mothers and three fathers, and the bonds between the groups became warm and close. Soon the Duke arrived and the pattern of their life began to be established. He was affectionate as always to the Gifford Lodge girls as well as his own brood; he was good-tempered and kindly, with what Dora called ‘equal spirits’, especially reassuring to stepchildren. He also entered enthusiastically into the estate activities, which from now on were a frequent subject of Dora’s letters; harvest and lambing became important features of the year.
In September the Drury Lane season started again, and the coroneted carriage bearing her in and out of London for rehearsals and performances became a familiar sight along the Kingston Road. Blessedly, she was not yet pregnant again. That season she played Miranda in The Tempest and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing for the first time, calling Beatrice ‘a very easy, quiet part’, which may explain why it was never among her most popular.16 In any case, Shakespeare took second place this season to the craze for the Gothic: ghosts and other horrors, statues spouting blood and ruined abbeys were what the public wanted, and Drury Lane obliged to the best of its ability. First they revived a play called The Count of Narbonne, a tale of divorce and incest partly inspired by Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. There was no sharp comment on Dora’s performance from Twickenham: Walpole, full of years and waspishness, had died in March.17 She had played it twelve years before in Dublin, opposite John Kemble; now they repeated their performances, supported by Mrs Siddons and another Kemble brother, Stephen. Audiences loved it and asked for more Gothic business, which was provided by a young writer, Matthew or ‘Monk’ Lewis, who produced an entertainment called The Castle Spectre. Sheridan turned up his nose at a play which was no more than a series of tableaux with thrills, but that did not prevent it from running for forty-seven performances. Dora had the not very taxing part of Angela, her great scene a collapse in the moonlight when she is visited by the ghost of her mother; she shared Sheridan’s view of its merits. ‘The rage for the Castle Spectre is astonishing,’ she wrote to the Duke from town, in a letter in which she expressed the hope that he might come to join her; whether he would or not, she assured him that she would ‘contrive to see the dear children before the end of the week’. She went on, ‘The House overflowed last night from every part, and there is the same prospect for the next performance of it.’18
She was also rehearsing Knave or Not?, a new comedy by Thomas Holcroft. He was a writer with advanced ideas about the organization of society and in particular the relations between the sexes; and a close friend of Wollstonecraft, who died in childbirth during the summer of 1797, leaving among her papers a half-finished comedy; in that small world, it seems a pity her widower did not get it submitted to Mrs Jordan, given her championing of plays by women. Wollstonecraft and Jordan were poles apart in many ways – the one political and intellectual, the other a performer and pragmatist – but they had important things in common too: personal experience of poverty that made them concerned to help their fellow women, and strength of character that allowed them to flout convention.
To some, Dora did embody social change. An article appeared at this time that presented her in this light, describing the domestic arrangements at Bushy as peculiarly admirable, and asserting that her children were likely to ‘grow up cheerful, independent and happy’. It mentioned that she herself paid the Duke’s chaplain, Lloyd, to instruct them, and that
the noble sentiments flowing from a liberal education, will teach them to reverence the mother, without sprinkling the tender nomination with any unworthy reflections on the father. And the base ungenerous tongue that ignorantly reflects upon their own birth, that education will teach them to despise; whilst if necessary, it will also teach them to resent and chastise. The sense ingrafted in their youthful minds by the liberal and Christian principles of a Lloyd, will likewise teach them that one Being is the Great and Universal Parent of Mankind, and that Being will instruct them that next to him, they owe all their love and homage to a fond, a tender, and ever anxious mother.19
If not quite the voice of the Enlightenment, this is at least an attempt at an enlightened statement, with its rational and humane insistence that illegitimate children need not be ashamed of themselves or their parents. In practice Lloyd seems to have been an amiable man, who trod the delicate path between the church’s dictates and the Duke’s and Mrs Jordan’s actual family situation with tact. The children were baptized; daily prayers were part of the routine at Bushy, and the whole family often attended divine service on Sundays at Hampton Church. ‘The Great and Universal Parent of Mankind’ did indeed appear to be watching over the little world of Bushy in a kindly way.
13
The Long Idyll: 1797–1806
Bushy gave Dora a place of comfort, beauty and continuity such as she had never known, an idyllic world within the busy outer world, an enclosed and self-sufficient rural paradise. Whatever the demands made on her by her profession and whatever the Duke’s frustrations in attempting to pursue his, their domestic happiness, increased by their new home, was deeply felt. It brought out the best in both of them. Neither had enjoyed an easy childhood, both set out – at first at any rate – to ensure that their children’s experience should be different. For a man of his class and generation, he gave his young children an unusual amount of fatherly love and attention.
There was no lack of scope. Judged by their productivity alone, they were remarkable parents, and made a striking contrast with the rest of William’s generation of the royal family. The combined effects of the Royal Marriages Act and the King’s reluctance to let his daughters have husbands meant that, having fathered fifteen children, he found himself with only one legitimate grandchild, Princess Charlotte, offspring of the Prince of Wales’s official marriage; she was born in 1796 to already estranged parents. There were a few other miscellaneous and unblessed royal grandchildren; but William was the only one among his brothers and sisters to come anywhere near matching his parents’ breeding performance. In thirteen years he and Dora produced ten children together; all survived, and all were healthy and good-looking, so that they presented a radiant spectacle of exactly the sort of gemütlich family life the King most approv
ed – but for the drawback of their mother’s status, history and profession.
There was no official royal acknowledgement of Dora’s children; but a very slight unbending or softening towards them began to show itself from the time they settled at Bushy. A letter from Dora, written to William at Windsor, early in these years, shows there was some kind of gesture at least: ‘A thousand thanks dear love for your kind letter… I am proud of their Majesties notice of the dear children,’ she wrote; and later she mentions a proposal, emanating from the royal household, to do something unspecified, requiring the King’s approval, which would be to the advantage of the boys – exactly what is not made plain.1 The Princesses too, cloistered and childless in what one of them called the nunnery, were aware of the existence of these delightful nephews and nieces, and ready to take an interest in them; and as the years went by, it is clear that there were occasional meetings between some of the official and some of the unofficial members of the tribe. Charlotte rode in the park with her cousins, Princess Amelia sent messages to them and was visited by the older ones when she was ill. For the Duke’s brothers, there was always less of a problem, and all showed friendliness; they called at Bushy and sometimes asked the children back to their homes; the Duke of Kent even invited Dora over to see his house at Ealing.2 As William’s best biographer has said, ‘to the Prince of Wales and Duke of York, Mrs Jordan was to be treated as much like their brother’s wife as the Royal Marriages Act would allow’.3
Mrs Jordan's Profession Page 18
