Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  The Duke now began to make his strongest bid yet to return to a command at sea. Alsop, in spite of his newly married condition, declared himself ‘raving mad’ (in Dora’s phrase) to accompany him as his private secretary. Neither fulfilled his ambition; instead George was brought home in disgrace from the military college. He had been neglecting his studies; his father, who went to fetch him, said it was because he was so anxious to join in some fighting; and he promised to mend his ways on being told he might sail with his regiment to Portugal later in the year. It is possible that George’s bad behaviour was aggravated because he was now old enough to be aware of his own anomalous position in the world, to be teased by other boys, and to worry about it. A poem published this year hailed the Duke of Clarence flatteringly as a second Rodney and likened his sons to the princely sons of Edward III:

  While in his lovely progeny I trace,

  The dauntless rivals of great Edward’s race;

  Still crown’d with laurels on the embattled plain;

  Triumphant ever on the boundless main.13

  But George and his friends knew he was not a prince, let alone crowned with laurels. On the one hand his father was a duke and he was the grandson of the King; on the other, there was something mysterious and shameful about his parentage. For a boy of fourteen, anxiety about such things would be enough to make him behave badly, stop working and decide he had to prove himself by heroic deeds.

  Sophy also became difficult. Her mother was understanding, telling the Duke that his eldest daughter had headaches, that ‘her constitution will shortly undergo a change’ – she was thirteen – and that ‘it is with the greatest difficulty that I can get her to stir out of her bedroom or hit on anything to amuse her’.14 Sophy was upset by the departure of the two brothers who were her closest friends, and still more upset when she heard of the possibility of her father also going to sea. She too was old enough to understand that the idyllic life of Bushy was built on something the world disapproved. In a letter George wrote after her death about his ‘oldest playmate’, he made it clear that she had suffered: ‘no one but myself knows the painfulness and difficulty of her early life’, he wrote.15 Her mother might give her love and attention, but she could not remove the difficulty for which she was responsible in the first place.

  The serpent had entered paradise, at any rate for the older children, and they went willingly out of its gates. The Duke took George to Portsmouth, where he was to embark for Portugal; and told a party of naval officers that he devoted his son to the service of his country, having so far volunteered in vain himself. George sailed towards Corunna on a fair wind, in high health and spirits. ‘The distress of Mrs Jordan is not to be described… however, like what she is, one of the best and one of the ablest of women, she sees the propriety of his going,’ wrote the Duke to the Prince of Wales.16 Dora sent her fourteen-year-old off with her blessing, assuring him he was a fortunate boy, and offering him one of the most unusual pieces of advice ever offered to an officer: ‘as you are now a Lieutenant and employed on actual service it would be more appropriate if in future when you mention the Duke, that you should say my father, or the Duke: it may prevent any little ridicule that might be excited by your saying Papa’.

  15

  London and Dublin Disasters: 1809

  Still in Portsmouth, the Duke sat down and wrote to Dora in London, where she was back at work. The letter, one of the very few from him to her to survive, shows him at his best. He sounds careful, affectionate and responsible. He enclosed a letter from George, described his last cheerful wave from the deck to his father below in a yacht, and said he himself was going to Windsor to press the King once more for a naval appointment. After that he and Dora would meet for dinner at ‘dear Bushy’. Then he explained carefully, as though to forestall her distress, that if he should get a command in the navy, even though it meant ‘separating from every domestic comfort possible’, he would be earning something for the children. The letter went on,

  Thro’ your excellence and kindness in private life I am the happiest man possible and look forward only to a temporary separation to make that happiness more compleat from having provided for our dear children. My love and best and tenderest wishes attend you all at Bushy… Adieu till we meet and ever believe me, dearest Dora, Yours most affectionately…1

  The sweetness is meant to soothe, but the warmth is real.

  The King was not able to help him; his mental health was increasingly precarious, he was taking little part in such decisions, and would not override his advisers. The Duke complained bitterly of not being considered trustworthy either in the Cabinet or in the field. Dora sympathized, then returned to her season at Drury Lane. Time hung more heavily for him, with two sons gone. To give himself something to do he started on yet another programme of changes to the house and garden. Here at least he could direct and control matters exactly as he wished, blocking and opening windows, putting in extra servants’ quarters, installing bathrooms, redesigning and reallotting the function of rooms. Almost as soon as one improvement was finished, another was begun. Dora suggested tactfully that ‘Bushy will be so thoroughly comfortable when the new room is finished that I do not think you will feel any wish to make any further alterations.’ She was quite wrong: work on more new rooms and improvements to the grounds continued as long as she lived there. At St James’s too there was much redecorating and furnishing. No connection between the enormous bills run up in this way and his anxiety about providing for his children seems to have occurred to him.

  Did he cherish any hopes that the children might be more formally acknowledged and incorporated into the royal family than they were? He is reported as saying, ‘Do you think that I and my brothers will ever suffer that girl to wear the Crown?’, meaning the Prince of Wales’s daughter, Princess Charlotte.2 The report is only gossip, and sounds like drunken talk, but it is quite possible he said it, and that he sometimes compared Charlotte in his mind with his son George, her cousin and the grandson of the King. Even the Prince of Wales himself sometimes appeared to find George more interesting than his own daughter.

  George FitzClarence arrived in Portugal to join Sir John Moore’s army as it retreated before the French to Corunna. His first experience of action was consequently short and harsh, but he managed to distinguish himself. Late one evening the Prince of Wales burst in on Dora in Mortimer Street, full of news of her son’s exploits, and delighted by the letter he had just had from him; he told her George had a horse shot under him, and was ‘running in the road’ until Colonel Hawker found him another. Although it was after midnight, the Prince insisted on Dora getting nine-year-old Frederick out of bed so that he could tell him about his brother’s exploits; no uncle could have been prouder, more friendly, less formal.3 As the Prince left, he asked Dora to pass on his love and congratulations to the Duke: for once, through his son, he had done well. And when George arrived back in England in January 1809 he spent most of his time at Brighton, where his regiment was based, greatly in favour with Mrs Fitzherbert as well as the Prince. He came to London for a few nights with his mother, and then returned to Portugal in April, where he continued to win golden reports for his ‘great quickness, Intelligence and Activity’.4

  This time he was serving under Arthur Wellesley – the future Duke of Wellington – and experienced the horrors of a famously bloody and cruel campaign. He wrote his own vivid account of it later, based on the journal he kept. It started with the Portuguese ladies showering the young British officers with sugar plums and roses; soon the same young officers were being ordered, for the first time in their lives, to charge with bayonets. He describes how the French hanged the peasants and cut their ripe wheat and olive trees to make huts for themselves; how the Spaniards murdered the wounded; how everyone merrily looted the dead and dying. It is a remarkable impression of a war fought in an alien land by quarrelling and treacherous allies and guerrilla forces for whom the rules of honour no longer operated.5 After reading George’
s narrative it is a shock to find Dora sending Lucy out to buy him wooden soldiers; but she insisted that he would still enjoy childish amusements, and she was right.

  In July he was wounded at the battle of Talavera; the English were victorious, but at the cost of almost a third of their force. The Duke was in Brighton when the news came, and set off at five in the morning to ride to Bushy to reassure Dora that George’s wound, though in the leg, was a slight one, and that he would be brought home to recover. Henry reappeared at last in July too, after fourteen months in the Baltic, a hardened twelve-year-old. George arrived in Eng-land suffering from dysentery. Soon Henry volunteered for another expedition, this time to Holland. The war ground on, Napoleon defeating the Austrians and threatening Holland, which he proceeded to take; Henry was lucky to get away alive.

  Newspaper reports praised the FitzClarence boys in glowing terms for their courage and pointed out their extreme youth: ‘It has seldom fallen to the lot of youths of their early age to have seen so much and severe service.’6 Dora said George’s reputation should be ‘a fine soft pillow for his head, for many years to come’: the turn of phrase is charming, but she also told a friend, ‘I have five boys, and must look forward to a life of constant anxiety and suspense.’7

  Now she worried about her child-warrior sons constantly, as her letters make plain; and above this ground of anxiety, other problems appeared. Three disasters struck in 1809. In January fire broke out at St James’s Palace, destroying a great part of it, though not the Duke of Clarence’s apartments, where she and the children had rooms; but it made her uneasy at what other members of the royal family, displaced by the fire, might feel. So she proposed to the Duke that he should buy a house in town for the children. It could be put in trust to Coutts or Adam, she suggested, and it was ‘a measure that must be pleasing to every individual in your own Family’, as well as saving her from mortification. ‘There is nothing that can ever reconcile me to be at St James’s… Do take this into consideration, and by purchasing a House at once, give your children a home, that every author may not feel it in his power to dispute their right.’8 Depending professionally on public good-will as she did, she worried about the possibility of more press attacks on herself, and on the children too. Her suggestion of a house was sensible and tactful on all counts, but the Duke did not follow it. He may have felt he could not afford to; he also saw no need to move his own children out of St James’s, whatever Dora thought.

  The second disaster of 1809 was the Duke of York’s involvement in a scandal. He was the commander-in-chief of the army, and married to a virtuous wife; and he was revealed as having a married mistress who traded in commissions, and who, on top of that, made his love letters public. This set the press off in full cry against all the royal brothers. Gossip was passed round, some harmless, some vicious. It was said that the Duke of Clarence had seduced one of Dora’s daughters. Further, that one of the Miss Fords was pregnant by him. Another report put about that the King was insisting on Mrs Jordan being removed from Bushy.9 None of this was true; all of it was hurtful, some of it almost too much to bear just when Dodee Ford was about to be married. Dora wrote to Boaden complaining of the ‘cruel and infamous reports’ in circulation, and insisting that the Duke was ‘an example for half the fathers and husbands in the world’.10 The wedding went ahead at the beginning of March, and Dora and the Duke spent the rest of the month together at Bushy: ‘Your mother… is reading by me,’ he wrote calmly to George. Then the three grown-up daughters joined them at Easter, bringing Alsop and March with them. The gossip quietened down.

  The third horror produced the worst and most lasting effects on Dora’s life. Late in the evening of 24 February the ‘new’ Drury Lane – it had opened in the year of George’s birth – caught fire. The huge building went up in a blaze, brightening the whole night sky of London. There was no hope of saving it. This was the occasion of Sheridan’s greatest show of nonchalance; he refused to hurry from the House of Commons, and sat in the Piazza Coffee House answering his friends’ urgings to action with, ‘May not a man be allowed to drink a glass of wine by his own fireside?’ A few of the staff and actors did, however, risk their lives bringing out the theatre’s charter and some other pieces, the writing desk from Dora’s dressing room among them; all her costumes were destroyed. Garrick’s clock was lost, and the harpsichord belonging to Elizabeth Sheridan. No insurance could make up for these, but in any case the theatre was insured far below its value.

  A joke was Sheridan’s way of defying disaster; but it was undoubtedly an absolute disaster for him and for the many others whose livelihoods depended on his theatre – the ‘extensive company’ Dora immediately thought of and invoked in the warmly sympathetic and supportive letter she sent him. She offered to do anything she could to help, naming herself ‘one who has the happiness of being ranked amongst your friends’. She also reminded him firmly of his past literary triumphs, and urged him to think that he at least had the power to recoup his losses, which lesser members of the company had not.11 If she hoped he would be inspired to write more plays, she was being optimistic; he had lost the knack. For the moment the company was able to use its patent in other theatres, playing again at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket and at the Lyceum. Dora appeared with them, and took part in benefits for the stage-hands who had lost their jobs. Then the Duke again asked her to withdraw from the London stage entirely. At the same time Sheridan, who at first believed he could remain in charge and rebuild his theatre again, found that no one would back him; when a committee was formed to put up a new theatre royal, he was excluded from it.

  Dora and Sheridan had been colleagues for twenty-three years. They had wrangled about parts and benefits, quarrelled over contracts and money; she had suffered from his deep-seated suspicion of actresses, he had been frightened by the tenacity with which she extracted her salary; but they had been part of the same team and the same world, one that extended from the Devonshire House ladies in their boxes to the lowliest scene-shifters and painters. She had known Elizabeth, he had known her lovers, and they had shared many triumphs. The end of their Drury Lane careers meant they were both left without a professional base at ages – he approaching sixty, she in her late forties – when they most needed one. Not only did they never work together again; each of them became vulnerable, as creatures who have lost their supporting environment are vulnerable.

  From now on the Duke opposed every invitation to appear in London received by Dora. No reasons are discussed in her letters; sometimes she asked his permission again, then obediently complied with his ban, even though she clearly wanted to accept, for instance, young Tom Sheridan’s proposal that she should play at the Lyceum later that year. The Duke did not wish it, and that was that. His dignity took precedence over her convenience and career; very possibly he was thinking of the dignity of the children also. If Dora could be made less conspicuous, the children might seem less like her children and more like his; rather than there being any question of their moving out of St James’s Palace, they might more easily take their place within the royal family. Dora, looking on the bright side, wrote of touring for four months of the year and spending the other eight months ‘quietly settled with my dear family’; but it did not work out as she imagined.12

  There was another darkening shadow of worry for her this year: money. Two hundred years later, her accounts are impossible to sort out; they were not much easier then. For decades she had earned more than she had ever hoped or expected to; she had spent as she needed, given generously, and saved for her three eldest daughters. In her letters she mentions debts, life insurance policies, tax problems and the setting aside of money for the children: she often sent cash to her sons, and this year she began to save for Sophy’s future as she had done for her half-sisters. She was also known for spontaneous charitable gestures. Since she was almost always paid in cash, and often gave large sums to the Duke, estimating her tax must have been a nightmare. ‘I do not think there is any oc
casion to fill up the Tax paper whatever I will write a line to Dalrymple and he and Barton can make the deductions together,’ she told the Duke in April.13 Colonel Dalrymple was a neighbour at Bushy as well as an adviser to the Duke; he and his daughter often dined with Dora, and she regarded him as a good friend. John Barton, another adviser, was not so friendly; and soon he would become a formidable enemy.

  The letter about her tax was written from Bath. The effect of her anxiety about money, and the Duke’s ban on London, was to make her agree to appear in the provinces. Instead of settling down quietly at Bushy, with the odd appearance at Richmond or Margate, she started on a series of strenuous tours. April was spent in Bath; in June she went, much against her inclination, to Dublin for six weeks; and in September she set off again for Leicester, Liverpool and Chester. Lucy, her third daughter, went with her on all these tours, and gave her loyal and loving support, sometimes in difficult circumstances. She was a good companion; her character shines out of Dora’s letters as steadfast, sensible and intelligent. They made jokes together, simple family ones, ones to cheer themselves up when they felt low. About their poor lodgings, ‘Lucy says we are like a couple of Pigs put up in a small place to fatten.’ On hearing of the Duke having a new wig, ‘Lucy is a TORY, and likes you best in your own hair, and I think if it was put to the vote there would be more Tories than Wigs.’ She amused her mother with her clever vocabulary, saying they were ‘two poor Itinerants’ – Dora preferred ‘pilgrims’ – and amused herself by going out to see the sights, and sometimes drawing what she saw; the walls of Chester, with their double view over town and country, offered ‘the most delightful walk she ever took’. She would go out in search of books from second-hand stalls, accompany Dora to church or to the Methodist services they found more entertaining, shop with her for presents for the younger children, write letters for her, sign and seal tickets for her benefits, and generally keep her in good heart.