Mrs Jordan's Profession

by Claire Tomalin

  They remained unpaid for the next three years, when the municipality of Saint-Cloud announced publicly that sixty francs (£2.12s.6d) were still due. Boaden says there was a plan to move her remains to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and put up a marble monument, but that what he calls ‘mistaken ideas of delicacy’ prevented this; and he bursts out into indignation that she was not taken home to ‘the noblest cemetery of the world’, to lie alongside other great actresses in Westminster Abbey. His suggestion may have stirred something in the Duke’s mind later.

  What happened was that a memorial stone was ordered for the grave by an English couple, a Mr and Mrs Henry Woodgate of Dedham in Essex, who are supposed to have visited Dora shortly before her death. Their respect for her memory was such that, on returning to England, they asked the theatre historian, John Genest, to write an epitaph, which he did. Cypresses were planted around the grave, and in 1818 Genest’s dignified tribute was engraved on a large, plain stone and placed over the tomb, despite the unpaid funeral dues. In twenty-three lines of Latin he praised her outstanding skill as an actress, her wit and sweetness of voice, her ability to play men as well as women, and her goodness and generosity of heart. The epitaph ended with the words ‘Mementote Lugete’: remember her, and weep.12

  Dora’s death, like Sheridan’s, still has the power to shock us today. His was made more terrible by his debts, and she was driven abroad by debts incurred in her name; but it is not the question of money that makes them so painful. The Duke defended himself later, half-heartedly, by insisting that her allowance was always paid. So it was; but how little that signifies. It is the failure of love, friendship, imagination and simple decency that appals. A woman who should have been honoured and supported, surrounded by her family, comforted in her illness, was instead first driven out of her home, then separated from the sons who were her natural protectors, and divided from her young daughters, who were encouraged to forget about her while she lived. No one took up the case against her swindling son-in-law; no one lifted a finger to help her in practical matters; no one spoke for her in her isolation and illness. The most loving of her adult daughters, Lucy Hawker, was tied down by three babies and another pregnancy; in any case she depended on her husband’s permission to do anything, and the General, though well intentioned, was also interested in retaining royal favour. Both Sheridan and Dora died from physical causes that would in all likelihood have killed them wherever they were and however they were treated; but the misery of the conditions in which they found themselves – Dora especially, in a foreign country with no real friend even to understand what she said – made their last months infinitely more cruel. No one dies of a broken heart, perhaps; but they were both of them broken-hearted when they died.

  21

  The Children: ‘with the King they die’

  As for Dora’s children, their stories make up as broad and striking a map of human experience as you would expect to find in some great panoramic novel of the nineteenth century: from a suicide in Greenwich Street, New York, to a glittering life as viscountess and wife of a governor of Bombay; from a remote village vicar, building a school for his parish children, to a distinguished oriental scholar. One daughter became mistress of Penshurst Place; one son helped to found the Garrick Club. Several have descendants in the House of Lords today, and Rupert Hart-Davis is one of Dora’s most brilliant sprigs. Others faded into obscurity, like the Marches, who went to ground in Wales. Their aunt Hester – Dora’s little-loved sister – outlived several of them, dying in 1848 at the age of eighty-eight, pensioned by Queen Victoria to the end.

  On the day of Dora’s funeral – 13 July 1816 – the Duke wrote to Henry from Bushy as though nothing had happened.

  I have had my annual attack lightly… Frederick and Tus are both at home… It looks like war in India and so much the better for you… All your sisters unite with me in every sincere and good wish for your health and welfare; I hope you mind the climate and do not expose to the sun… Do not spend more money than is requisite; we are a large family and must take care of ourselves.1

  Henry must have received his father’s letter round about Christmas 1816, along with the one from Barton informing him of his mother’s death. We don’t know what he thought. He was well liked in Madras, and gave ‘unceasing satisfaction’ to his commanding officer, as did George in Calcutta, but neither had anyone to share their grief with them.2 In September the Duke wrote again from Bushy,

  Frederick is quite well at Cambray; I am anxious to hear of Adolphus and the fleet under Lord Exmouth; Augustus is very kindly noticed by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and I dined with the dear boy there last week… I hope to enclose letters from your sisters… our weather is lamentable… tho’ not so bad as on the Continent… I think having nothing in fact to say I have written a pretty good letter.3

  With this sort of thing his sons had to be content. Only in November of the following year (1817) did the Duke make any allusion to their mother, in a letter to George. ‘Barton has written the particulars attending your mother’s misfortunes and death: the infamy and rascality of March and Mrs Alsop and the extreme folly of Hawker permitting himself to be made a Cat’s paw by them will prevent my future intercourse with them. I pity Mrs March and Mrs Hawker.’ He went on, ‘Henry is or has been with you and I shall expect home about this time twelvemonth.’4

  Henry was being sent home because of his health. Of all the children, he had led the toughest life physically – locked into the Baltic ice at eleven, serving with the ill-fated Walcheren expedition at twelve, with the Mediterranean fleet at thirteen, the German legion at fourteen, the Peninsular War at fifteen, and to India before he was eighteen. He never grew very tall; he was brave and passionate in temper, a good linguist but not much of a letter-writer, and always overshadowed in the family by the favourite eldest son, George; it had taken him years, and his mother’s persistent championing, to get out of the navy after he came to detest it. He hated the idea of going to India, and was furious at his father’s treatment of his mother. There was not much joy in Henry’s life. After the news of his mother’s death reached him, his health began to give cause for alarm; and before he was due to start the long journey home from Madras, before he could even visit George, he became ill. For four days the fever raged in him; and after four days he died.

  This was at the beginning of September 1817. His father did not get the news until the following February; by then George was on his way home. Perhaps Lord Moira feared a second tragedy; George was sent bearing dispatches, by an overland route, setting off in December. He had been away for nearly three years, and in the course of them he had lost both his mother and his closest brother.

  Fanny is supposed to have learnt of her mother’s death through Barton’s summary stopping of the payment of her allowance. He may have had the law on his side, but Dora had surely earned every penny of the allowance for her awkward daughter. Fanny went, grieving and fuming, to Englefield Green to collect what she could of her mother’s possessions; she came away with a portrait, a mirror that had once belonged to Garrick, a half-knotted rug started by Dora, a few letters. Because her mother had died intestate and was declared illegitimate, the King’s solicitor collected her effects, which were estimated at less than £300; a few years later, in 1823, the Treasury announced that her creditors would receive five shillings in the pound.

  There was vengeance in Fanny’s heart, and she was almost certainly involved in a publishing project announced in June 1817 to bring out the Authentic Memoirs of Mrs Jordan ‘in one Vol. octavo, with original letters’.5 The book did not appear, doubtless stopped by royal intervention: Fanny’s threats against the Duke were mostly futile gestures, but she remained a thorn in his side. For a while she pursued her stage career; in 1817 she was again seen in London, acting at Drury Lane at the same time as Kean.6 Then, in 1820, the Duke paid her passage to America, where she had offers of work and was billed as ‘the Grand-Daughter of the late King of Britain’
. Whether she took her child with her is not known. Nine months later, in June 1821, she swallowed an overdose of laudanum in her Greenwich Street lodgings. The register of deaths makes her thirty-one; really she was thirty-nine. What became of the child? We don’t know. The cause of death is bleakly given as ‘suicide’. Little Fan, adored, cherished and misunderstood by her mother, had outlived her by only five years.

  As for Lucy Hester Hawker – good, sensible Lucy – she settled into a busy life as wife of a general and mother of a large family. She gave her husband ten children, the youngest born when he was in his seventies. The Hawkers were the backbone of England, sending their strong and healthy sons into the army and the navy. One of Lucy’s boys – Adolphus Octavus – died in 1921, in his ninety-first year. Lucy became Lady Hawker, and must have lived many years as a widow. In 1847, when she was nearly sixty, and free, she travelled to Saint-Cloud to visit her mother’s grave. By then she could have taken the train for part of the journey at least; she may even have passed the hours reading the popular newly published books of the year, Vanity Fair or Jane Eyre, with their warnings against bold, adventurous women; or she may simply have sat and thought of her mother and the rapidly fading past. Whatever sadness she felt as she climbed the hill to the cemetery above the Seine, whatever memories came crowding back, she kept them all to herself.7

  For the Bushy girls, the death of their mother allowed them to be drawn more closely into royal circles. This was a relief to Sophy, who suffered most acutely from her ambiguous status. In October 1816 Princess Augusta wrote to her, conveying the Queen’s thanks for her letter, and after this there was a steady correspondence between her and the Princesses. They sent presents to all the girls: garnet and malachite earrings, gold chains and lockets for Sophy, Mary and Eliza, muslin dresses for Augusta and Amelia.8 The Duke was often with his mother; he was at her side in Bath when Princess Charlotte died in childbirth at the end of 1817, and the whole pattern of the succession changed. The old King could not live much longer; now only the Prince Regent and the Duke of York stood between the Duke of Clarence and the throne. Parliament voted some money to repair Bushy House, and £1,000 for each of the girls, and he set about looking for a wife once again. In 1818 he was finally found an acceptable and willing German princess, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. She was not much older than his daughters. The Duke himself, showing more imagination than was usual with him, was somewhat appalled at the idea of her fate: ‘She is doomed, poor, dear, innocent young creature to be my wife. I cannot, I will not, I must not ill use her,’ he wrote to George, newly returned from India.9

  The Duke shared a wedding with his brother Kent, each marrying a German princess in July 1818. Now Queen Charlotte could, and did, go to her grave in peace, secure in the knowledge that some of her sons had at last settled into a correct way of life. Six months later the Kents produced a healthy daughter, and named her Victoria. Adelaide too bore two daughters, both of whom died. She found consolation in becoming a model stepmother, good-hearted and generous, and won the hearts of all the FitzClarence girls by her kindness. At her insistence the portraits of their mother remained in place at Bushy.* She made no attempt to keep either sons or daughters away from their father. He adored all his daughters, and he and Adelaide took groups of them on several foreign holidays. In 1826 Ta and Mely went with them to visit the Queen of Würtemberg – George III’s eldest daughter – who declared they were pleasing, sensible and modest as well as handsome, and added that their brother Colonel George FitzClarence was so nice that she regretted he was not legitimate.

  One by one, the girls found aristocratic husbands. Eliza was the first; she became Countess of Errol at St George’s, Hanover Square, in December 1820. ‘What a handsome, spanking creature Lady Errol is, and how like her mother. She looks as if she was quite uncomfortable in her fine cloaths and wanted to have them off,’ wrote Thomas Creevey in his sneering way.11 After Elizabeth’s marriage the four remaining girls lived together in Audley Square, chaperoned by a Mrs Harpur, ‘a respectable Lady, who accompanies the elder daughters when they go into company,’ observed Farington in his diary, adding, ‘The Duke of Clarence shews great attention to them. They dine with the Duke and Duchess every day when there is no particular engagement.’12 Charles Fox, the illegitimate eldest son of Lord and Lady Holland (and great-nephew of Charles James Fox), had been in love with Eliza, but when she jilted him he turned to Mary, and they married in 1824: Mary had grown into ‘a fine looking, brown girl with a pleasant countenance and manners’, and remained considerate and charming. The next year Sophy married Sir Philip Sidney of Penshurst Place in Kent; ten years later her father made him Baron De L’Isle and Dudley. Augusta took the son of the Marquess of Ailsa, who died of tuberculosis after only four years; from a second husband, Lord John Frederick Gordon Hallyburton, she also had children. Lastly Mely married Byron’s godson, Viscount Falkland; she went with him to Bombay when he was appointed governor-general; and she wrote and published a lively account of her travels in India, Egypt and Palestine, which show her as adventurous and unconventional, full of curiosity, always ready to meet and mix with the people among whom she found herself, and to go exploring wherever she pleased, sketch-book in hand.13

  So the FitzClarence girls, charming, clever and pretty, were assimilated by the establishment, bad blood or no, their matrimonial chances aided, no doubt, by the prospect of their father becoming king, as he did in 1830. For their brothers things were more difficult. All of them felt their anomalous position; they were jeered at and humiliated in the press, verbally roughed up as ‘the Fitzjordans’ and ‘the Bastards’, and treated with contempt by many of the nobility as well as by journalists. In 1832 a book called The Great Illegitimates offered the public a spicy account of their origins. Princess Victoria’s mother established a firm line early in their father’s reign: ‘I never did, neither will I now associate Victoria in any way with the illegitimate members of the Royal family. – With the King they die; did I not keep this line how would it be possible to teach Victoria the difference between Vice and Virtue?’14 How indeed?

  George FitzClarence arrived back from India in March 1818, having travelled through the deserts of Egypt, explored the pyramids and descended the Nile. He was promoted to brevet lieutenant-colonel; and at the same time he prepared an account of his travels, with his own drawings as illustrations, which he published as Journal of a Route across India, through Egypt to England, in the latter end of the year 1817 and the beginning of 1818. It does not have quite the immediacy of his journal of the Peninsular campaign, but was a considerable achievement for a young man trained to fight rather than to choose his words; and after this he went to work in the field of oriental studies. He collected a mass of material for a projected History of the Art of War among Eastern Nations; he worked with a scholarly secretary, and promoted the translation of oriental texts. He became a member of the Royal Society and other learned bodies, and helped found the Royal Asiatic Society, all suggesting an inclination for study. Had he been able to concentrate entirely on the quiet life of a scholar, he might have been a happier man than he was. Instead he was made miserable by a sense of grievance. It was not due to domestic unhappiness, for he married, shortly after his father, the sister of one of his army friends, the daughter of Lord Egremont, and they had a large family.

  All the FitzClarence brothers were stirred into action when their father became king in 1830. While William was still at Bushy he seemed disposed to give George some official tasks – he was sent, for instance, to make the arrangements for the visit to London of the King of Würtemberg, husband of his approving aunt Charlotte; and he was clearly believed to have influence with his father, since the following year the editor of the Morning Post wrote to him asking him to intervene in the matter of Coleridge’s pension.15 George asked to carry the crown at the coronation: ‘Who is more fit than your own flesh and blood?’ It is even said that he asked his father to make him Prince of Wales; the King refused, saying th
at if he encouraged George’s pretensions, he would lower himself in the estimation of the country and injure the interests of the monarchy.16 More reasonably, all four sons petitioned their father together, complaining of ‘the cruel position in which we are placed as natural children… in the eyes of the Law we are at present nameless and devoid of many rights and advantages of our Fellow Subjects’.17 They were asking for titles and pensions; they were also surely expressing their rage against the system that had destroyed their mother and set them in limbo. The King was angry. George foolishly threatened suicide, and Frederick more effectively proposed to stand for Parliament. After several months of wrangling, in which they all left their father’s house and resigned their appointments, the King gave way and conferred on George two of his own subsidiary titles, Earl of Munster and Baron Tewkesbury; the rest of his children were granted the rank of children of a marquis – i.e., they could call themselves Lords and Ladies. The sons continued to ask for money. George was accused of meddling in politics where he had no right to, and of giving bad advice to the King over the Reform Bill.

  Tuss, who had pleaded his way out of the navy faster than the others, and been sent to Oxford and Cambridge, was installed as Vicar of Mapledurham. He became an unusually devoted and enthusiastic clergyman, and built a village school, very probably inspired by the girls’ school established at the Bushy gates in his mother’s time; he provided uniforms and meals for the children, and was much loved by his parishioners. His other interest was the theatre. When not at Mapledurham he spent a good deal of time standing in the wings at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, sometimes waving his gloves about in sympathetic dumb show when, for instance, Fanny Kemble played Juliet; later he danced with her at a ball, where he spoke of his father, uttering ‘an expression of his filial disrespect for the highest personage in the realm, of such a robust significance as fairly took away my breath’, she noted.18