Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  Your affectionate brother

  Henry Edward Fitzclarence30

  Henry’s letter is striking for two reasons. One is its timelessness – it could almost be a child of today writing about his parents’ separation. The other is that it was preserved by George, surviving both Henry’s and his own untimely deaths, and has remained in a bundle of disregarded papers for nearly two hundred years. When I opened the double sheet with its crumbled edges and began to read, the clear, true voice of Henry’s outraged grief brought him to life before me with all the force he put into the writing, and I found I had tears in my eyes as I read.

  Henry also wrote to his sisters’ governess, Miss Sketchley, for information, saying his delicacy would not suffer him to write directly to his mother or sisters. Miss Sketchley, well intentioned though ineffectual, handed the letter to Dora. ‘I answered it in the best manner I could, tho’ I found it a cruel task,’ she told George. ‘I told him to take the opportunity of coming home on Saturday to tell dear Frederick.’31 So the children learnt, one by one; Mary was old enough to be distressed; the younger ones understood little, but missed their father’s presence. Even to Boaden she now wrote that she was ‘heart-sick, and almost worn out with this cruel business’.32

  Dora had been a good fighter – ‘I should make an excellent soldier’ she once told the Duke33 – but in this battle she faced too strong an opponent: not just the power of the royal family and its servants, but also the respectful response of almost everyone else to that power, which in practice exempted the Princes from moral judgement. Pindar and Cruikshank were only jesters; they may have expressed what many people felt, but they could not affect what happened. She was trapped by her own history, by her affections, above all by her children. Any fight she got into was going to be conducted on such unequal terms that she was bound to lose.

  Money was important, although there seemed little doubt that the Duke intended to make an adequate financial settlement. Her worries were as much for the children. What she wanted was to hold the family together, the small children to her and to their father, the older ones to the younger, sons and daughters to one another, the children of the Duke and her daughters by Ford and Daly, and their husbands too. This became her main endeavour over the next years. Her letters show how she kept the flow of information and affection circling round the many scattered members of the family. Most of them – she sometimes wrote as many as twenty a day – are lost. It is particularly sad that none to her daughters has survived; Mary, thirteen at the time of the separation, was a notably regular and affectionate correspondent. But two of her sons were able to preserve theirs, George and, more surprisingly, her fourth son, Lolly. He was a good correspondent even at nine – his age at the time of the separation – and passionately devoted to his mother. The forty letters he kept show that she used an especially fine and legible hand in her early letters to him, to make them easy for a small boy to decipher; and all of them breathe tenderness and a determination to say or show nothing that might upset him. From these letters you would not guess that she was undergoing humiliation and unhappiness. She writes gaily, she sends little presents, cakes, books and newspapers, she jokes about his brothers and sisters. She constantly assures him of her love and interest in what he is doing, and expresses her delight in his many letters to her. You can see what an adorable mother she must have been to a boy at boarding school, and why he not only wrote to her regularly, but also sent her gifts in return. The others may have done as much, but he is the only one of her children known to have taken the trouble.

  Naturally she did not discuss the settlement with Lolly. The deed of separation was drawn up on 23 December, as formally as the settlement of November 1791 that had begun her association with the Duke. Then she had been chiefly concerned with the arrangements for her daughters; now they were again guaranteed £200 a year each from her income. The Duke’s income is given as £12,000 a year (although it is likely to have been more), out of which he was to pay her £4,400.34 This sum is subdivided, to cover house, carriage and horses, as well as the expenses of the four youngest daughters; Sophy would remain with her father. It was agreed that the Duke could take them at thirteen, and that he must have access to them whenever he wished to observe ‘the progress of their Education, habits, behaviour and accomplishments’. The next clause stated that if ‘the said Dora Jordan shall perform or act upon the Stage of any public or private Theatre or shall marry or form any other Engagement or connection which in the opinion of the [Duke] may be unfavourable to the morals manners or habits of the said children’, she would lose that part of the allowance that relates to the children, leaving her with £2,100. This would still have been a very large income if she had chosen to withdraw from the world, to live simply and, more important, refused to go on helping her grown-up children; but it was not in her nature to do any of these things.

  The question as to why her profession should suddenly now, after twenty years, become a reason for regarding her as an unsuitable guardian to her own children can only be answered in terms of the Duke’s total reliance on his advisers. He let them impose the terms and conditions; for instance, he was quite prepared to allow his daughters to remain with Dora until they were sixteen, as he wrote to Sophy, firmly putting her off when she tried to insist that she wished to live with him immediately.35 It was the lawyers and the Prince Regent’s men who insisted the age should be thirteen. Judging from his correspondence over these months, he was absorbed in new activities. Sophy was worrying about what was to happen at Bushy, where inventories of the furniture were being made; and he was in fact considering exchanging Bushy for Oatlands with his brother Frederick. Apart from this, he was enjoying visiting friends, dancing, taking up fox-hunting in the New Forest, scattering proposals of marriage and penning character references for himself as a good-natured man. That he was normally a good-natured man was perhaps why he left the negotiations with Dora to other people who could be relied on to be less so.

  Letter from Mrs Jordan to John McMahon, adviser to the Prince Regent, written before leaving Bushy in January 1812, with which she returned all but four of the Duke’s letters to her.

  On Christmas Eve the Prince Regent gave the Duke what he had always wanted, and appointed him Admiral of the Fleet. Dora had as yet been paid nothing of her promised allowance and was still at Bushy, negotiating the lease of a house in London (‘any cheap and convenient one’ would do, suggested the Duke to Sophy).36 He remained inaccessible to Dora, and the lawyer Wilks, to whom she had been told to apply if she needed anything, failed to answer her letters. Remembering the kind words of the Prince Regent, she now wrote to him for help in getting and furnishing a house; at the same time she sent letters to all the other royal dukes who had been her guests at Bushy over the years. The Prince Regent did not answer her letter. He told Adam he considered her writing at all ‘a very extraordinary proceeding’ and suggested she should be paid some of her allowance in advance, ‘if circumstances will at all admit it’.37 This was not done, and none of the other dukes responded.

  Now a story was put about that she was proposing to publish the Duke’s private letters. Princess Charlotte was told this, and wrote to a friend,

  What can the D. of Clarence expect from a discarded mistress? I own I am not in the least surprised at her procedure, nor should I at all wonder if she put her threat into execution. His children are so much distressed already, that it cannot be well added to, I fancy. Not that I mean to take her part, for if she really should publish his private letters, it will be abominable, but yet there is much to be said for her, & but little for him.38

  The story was wholly untrue. When it reached Dora’s ears, it caused her so much distress that she immediately packed up the Duke’s hundreds of letters, saved over the years as he had saved hers, and sent them to one of the royal advisers (probably McMahon) with a covering note explaining her intention: ‘That the Duke of Clarence nor any of his friends should entertain any idea of my making an im
proper use of his letters, I request you as HRH friend to keep them till you can put them into his own hands – I have kept the last four, because they do him credit for candour and justice.’ A postscript apologized for the brevity and informality of the note: ‘excuse this – for I am so ill that I write from my pillow’.39

  She then wrote once more to the Duke, to say she was content with his arrangements and that she hoped he would never meet with ‘a less sincere or more attached friend than she who now subscribes herself for the last time, Your Royal Highness’s most dutiful servant’. She was ‘on the eve of quitting this place for ever’: she meant Bushy.40 It was January, as it had been when they first drove delightedly into the park together, with George and Sophy, to inspect their beautiful home.

  The Duke had not managed to persuade his brother to swap Oatlands for Bushy, but Dora’s apartments were locked up, and he decided to make his bedroom in what had been the children’s sitting room.

  18

  An Attack by The Times: 1813

  There is no established etiquette for a discarded royal mistress. When Clarence’s brother, the Duke of Kent, was persuaded to give up his Madame de Saint Laurent, with whom he had lived happily for twenty-seven years, he was concerned that she should be provided with at least a proper household and carriage; he was miserable, but she went with dignity, choosing to retire into a convent, and was not heard of again. She had never been an actress; and if there were children, they were never seen in Britain; from the point of view of the royal family, she was easily disposed of. Mrs Jordan was bound to attract more attention. Her fame was an embarrassment to the royals, and her large family made things worse.

  The plan was that she should lose both her home and her career. The Duke seems to have wobbled on the second point and ‘kindly exonerated’ her from the promise of not returning to her profession ‘under the idea of its benefiting my health, and adding to my pleasures and comforts’.1 But when she checked this with Adam, he wrote back firmly, ‘As to the returning to the stage even in a limited way, HRH is very peremptory tho’ very kind in his expressions of refusing it – and says it will be most painful to him, but he should think it his duty to enforce the condition of renouncing the children.’2 And although the Duke spoke of their daughters remaining with Dora until sixteen in a letter to Sophy, the age was later fixed at thirteen. The impression is that the Duke, once the euphoria of his pursuit of Miss Long wore off, had no very definite plans or intentions, and mostly did as he was told by the Regent and his advisers. He was so heavily in debt that he could at first neither settle what he owed Dora nor begin her quarterly allowance, and needed to be bailed out. The first payment to her was not made until mid-February; after that payments were regular, although his financial problems continued to be so bad that within a year he was talking of selling up the contents of Bushy. A year later he was still desperate, begging the Regent to guarantee his credit and staking everything on a projected marriage to the sister of the Tsar – a plan that, like so many of his ventures, failed.

  Dora had been allowed the right to care for her children until they were thirteen, but in practice the boys were sent away to school long before that. Lolly had already gone, and Tuss was to be sent, at seven, in the summer of 1812. The girls would also be divided. Warm-hearted and communicative Mary was thirteen just as the settlement was agreed. ‘Dear Mary writes constantly, and I must shortly give her up,’ her mother sorrowed. She was allowed to come to Dora at first, but would soon have to join Sophy in their father’s care and come under the influence of governesses Dora disliked and mistrusted. Miss Turner in particular she considered ‘an artful woman’; this governess told Sophy, whose religious education she had taken in hand, to reflect on the fact that her ‘father and mother brought her into the world to please themselves’, as though they should have had a higher reason such as duty to the state or fulfilling God’s plan. It was a curious point to make to their unhappy sixteen-year-old daughter.3

  Dora gathered her energies to prepare the house in Cadogan Place for the children. While she was busy with the practical matters of linen and beds, finding furniture and engaging servants, the Barrington boy came to stay, and her married daughters Lucy Hawker and Dodee March also descended on her. Lucy’s husband was now a general and had been sent to Nottingham to crush the Luddite rioters; whatever Lucy thought of that, she was glad to be with her mother again, and especially when her baby daughter became ill. Dora, with grandmotherly authority, took the child, ‘clapped her into a tub of warm water up to the neck and in the course of two hours she began to breathe without much difficulty, and is now out of danger’ and a grateful Lucy was able to rejoin her husband shortly afterwards.4

  Dora’s spirits were kept up by having too much to do. When a lull came, there was no protection against grief and bitterness: or, as she put it briskly, ‘If it was not for the bustle of endeavouring to get the house ready for the dear little ones, I should be found hanging some morning in my garters.’5 Frederick and Lolly came for dinner, on their way back to Bushy and then school. Then George failed to visit her on his eighteenth birthday, and she told him, ‘I do not see a soul from night to morning – and absolutely feel myself quite an outcast.’ She knew she would be better when the children came. She had ‘worked and worried myself into illness to get the house ready for them,’ but now ‘I am almost tired of my life – and if it were not for the sake of the poor little ones I would not remain a week in the Kingdom – so disgusted am I with the whole affair – and time and reflection makes it appear worse every day.’6 There was another very black moment when she proposed a day for their arrival and could get no answer from Bushy. All her unhappiness burst out to George again: ‘I would not for the universe the world should know the cruel neglect I have been treated with. It would hardly be believed… If I had deserved it, it would be cruel, but that not being the case – I dare not give it a name.’7

  And by now the Duke was hardly happier than she was. On 7 February he did deliver the children, Mary, Eliza, Ta, Tuss and Mely, coming to the back door of her house in order to avoid meeting their mother. ‘He suffered greatly in parting with the children – and I am sure will ever prove himself, whether present or absent, an affectionate father,’ she told George.8 For a while she was content with the children, seeing their enjoyment of the new house and staying at home with them: ‘I have not been out of doors these ten days.’9 One evening the Duke, like a modern divorced father, took them to the theatre to see a Harlequin farce. Then she visited the boys at school. Henry went away to serve in the German Legion and was not expected to return for a year at least; Dora was annoyed to hear he did not write to his father. Neither she nor the Duke could quite stop feeling protective towards one another when there was no one else to interfere. She fussed when she heard he was ill or looked thin; and he had started to collect all the portraits of her he could find, to hang on the walls at Bushy.

  She and the Duke were both shocked when the Regent, on assuming full power, turned his political coat and abandoned his old Whig friends. Jilting them, she called it in her frank language; she thought the Duke, who was ‘disappointed and very much hurt’ by his brother’s behaviour, might go into opposition; but he was talked out of it. The Prince wanted to pursue the war vigorously, and he did not care about Catholic Emancipation; and now that he had supreme power at last, the Tories seemed closer to his views than he had ever realized, especially when their leader, Spencer Perceval, steered a bill to increase his income through the House of Commons. Sheridan was another casualty of the Regent’s political about-face; already wounded at being excluded from the new Drury Lane, he now saw all prospect of power disappearing, and skidded from one defeat to another. He even lost his seat in Parliament this year. This meant he was no longer immune from arrest by his creditors, and he began to be a hunted creature.

  The great spending spree of the nineties had to be paid for at last, and debts were the general affliction of the time. Dora’s brother Frank
surfaced again to torment her with his begging, and she had to warn her son George against him. The Alsops were overwhelmed by their unpaid bills, reduced to living in lodgings, and had no one to turn to but her. Fanny’s solution, which was to go on the stage, appalled her, and they had a painful row. Dora could see that she lacked the necessary talent; Fanny believed her mother was standing in her way and made such a scene that Dora felt she would have to stop seeing her: ‘I have met with many cruel things – but this is a climax.’10 As her eldest child, passionately loved and protected for so long, Fanny had a unique capacity to wound her; Dora could not bear – and did not fully understand – her anger against the world.

  The demands on her as mother and grandmother multiplied. The Marches had a second child and came to stay again while their babies were christened. The first instalment of her allowance had been spent on moving and furnishing Cadogan Place; she had to supply the Alsops and keep up payments to her sister Hester, to the Marches and the Hawkers – these were the promised dowries. George made frequent demands, which were never refused, and the younger boys occasionally asked for money too. She may have been unwise in her generosity, but she was also paying £400 a year income tax and putting more than £1,000 a year into life insurance policies, which must have been intended to provide for her children after her death. She may also have been extravagant in ordering a carriage, although again it was for the children that she wanted it; when she thought she might not be able to afford it, she began to think of getting rid of it.

  Servants are quick to smell trouble. In the spring a manservant spoke to her insolently and walked out without giving notice. The coming of summer brought an intensification of her problems. The children, accustomed to the freedom and fresh air of Bushy, were now confined in a small London house; she began to worry about the limited life she could offer them, and still more about their father’s feeling for them. Tuss was soon sent, crying, to boarding school – not the school at Sunbury, but another at Pirbright Bridge, in Surrey. She asked Lolly to comfort him, sent him a cake, and wrote to both boys regularly. The fear that the younger girls, if they were not with their father, would be altogether ‘out of his heart’, grew when she heard that some of his entourage at Bushy were encouraging him to write them off; ‘the less he sees them the less he will care for them’.11 By the time his asthma attack came round in June she resolved it was best after all for them to return to Bushy.