In Bed with the Georgians

by Rendell, Mike;

  Her charm and good manners opened doors for her in London. She obtained the patronage of the Duke of Richmond, and was invited to give performances at private parties at his home in Whitehall. There she was to meet her most ardent admirer, the Earl of Derby. As explained, he fell madly in love with her. The newspapers chose to portray her as a gold-digger, with scurrilous prints showing her eyeing up the ducal coronet (see Contemplations on a Coronet in Image 38) or plotting how to make the Earl marry her. In many prints she was shown as tall and scrawny, while the Earl is shown short and somewhat ugly – a rather unfair representation of the couple, but which served to show how their union was viewed by the public – as being completely ludicrous. Nonetheless, she got her ducal coronet when they married on 1 May 1797, following which she had a son and two daughters into the bargain. Her last performance on stage was as Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal, just a month after the death of the Earl’s first wife. Cue many tears as she bade a sad farewell to the stage, before a large and appreciative audience. She died in 1829, aged 70, and was survived by her husband for a further five years.

  CATHERINE TYLNEY-LONG – a quadruple-barrelled surname was never going to work.

  When the immensely wealthy heiress Catherine Tylney-Long married a scion of the famous Anglo-Irish Wellesley family, her husband adopted her surname in addition to his own, becoming known as the Rt Hon William Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley. At 21, Catherine was attractive, lively and petite, but above all, she was loaded. She had inherited a vast fortune at the age of 16, estimated as giving her an income of £40,000 a year – and had spent five years trying to avoid fortune hunters. She then made the biggest mistake of her life, by marrying a man who would turn out to be one of the most profligate and odious men of the century. He was a nephew of the Duke of Wellington, and was reputed to have been turned down on the six previous occasions when he had proposed marriage to her. Unfortunately for her, her resilience failed her and she finally consented at the seventh time of asking. She had other suitors – notably the Duke of Clarence (later to become William IV) and cartoonists revelled in the Duke’s embarrassment at being spurned in favour of the Irish ne’er-do-well.

  The newspapers had a field day when the marriage took place in Piccadilly on 14 March 1812, reporting that after the ceremony:

  …the happy couple retired by the southern gate … where a new and magnificent equipage was waiting to receive them. It was a singularly elegant chariot, painted bright yellow, and highly emblazoned, and drawn by four beautiful Arabian grey horses, attended by two postilions in brown jackets, with superb emblazoned badges in gold, emblematic of the united arms of the Wellesley and Tylney families. The newly married pair drove off, with great speed, for Blackheath, intending to pass the night at the tasteful chateau belonging to the bridegroom’s father, and from thence proceed to Wanstead House, in Essex, on the following day.

  Newspapers then, as now, seemed to concentrate as much on what everything cost as on what the bride wore. The same report advised that:

  The dress … consisted of a robe of real Brussels point lace … placed over white satin. Her head was ornamented with a cottage bonnet of the same material, being Brussels lace with two ostrich feathers. She likewise wore a deep lace veil and a white satin pelisse trimmed with swansdown. The dress cost seven hundred guineas, the bonnet one hundred and fifty, and the veil two hundred, and she wore a necklace which cost £25,000.

  If the day was the happiest of her life, things started to go downhill with ominous speed. No sooner had he had got his hands on his wife’s money than William spent it with extravagant zeal. There were ostentatious parties at the family home at Wanstead which cost a fortune – and from which Catherine was excluded. And then there was the constant and unbelievably reckless gambling, on top of which vast sums were laid out in bribes to get William elected to Parliament. It was also decided to refurbish Wanstead, a magnificent Palladian mansion, at an estimated cost of £360,000. The papers reported that the couple were ‘fitting up Wanstead House in a style of magnificence exceeding even Carlton House.’

  In the course of a decade Catherine had to suffer in silence as her husband spent her entire fortune, forcing the couple to flee abroad to avoid their creditors – humiliating for a woman who had been given the accolade of being the richest woman in the land just ten years earlier. Worse humiliation followed when they reached Italy – William openly conducted an affair with one Helena Bligh, the wife of a captain of the Coldstream Guards. Catherine tried, unsuccessfully, to buy off her rival, but realising the futility of the exercise returned to Britain with her three children, determined to obtain a legal separation from her husband. Meanwhile Wanstead house had been put up for auction – the entire contents were sold but the house failed to attract a buyer and had to be sold ‘one stone at a time.’ The proceeds amounted to a miserable £10,000. William accepted no blame at all for the extravagance which cost his wife her entire fortune, always claiming that it was ‘someone else’s fault.’

  Her health broken, Catherine died at the age of 35, entrusting the care of her children to her two sisters. Her death may well have been attributable to a nasty dose of the clap which her husband gave her, as there were indications that she developed an inflammation of the bowels caused by a venereal disease. A letter to one of her sisters hints at this. Her death triggered off a series of legal battles in which William tried to recover legal custody of his children.

  Astonishingly for the time (when, as the natural father, he would always expect to be supported by the Courts) his case in Chancery failed – over and over again. Each case brought further salacious details of William’s private life into the public domain. In particular he openly lived with Helena, his mistress, and when she came to live in London her husband Thomas Bligh decided that enough was enough, and he brought a suit of crim. con. against William. The public revelled in the gossip, and cheered tumultuously when the court awarded damages of £6,000 to the cuckolded husband. William retaliated by publishing accounts which sought to defend his adulterous behaviour, and heaping accusations of immorality on to the two Long sisters who had been given custody of the children by the Courts.

  In November 1828 William married Helena, who by then had been exposed as a whore in the minds of the general public. It was a disastrous second marriage, and before long she was reduced to claiming Poor Relief from the parish. William eked out the last thirty years of his life in considerable poverty, dying in July 1857 while eating a boiled egg. The Morning Chronicle contained an obituary which described him as ‘A spendthrift, a profligate, and gambler in his youth, he became a debauchée in his manhood … Redeemed by no single virtue, adorned by no single grace, his life has gone out even without a flicker of repentance…’

  It has to be said: the boiled egg did the world a favour.

  LAVINIA FENTON – aka Lavinia Beswick, aka Polly Peachum: the story of the showgirl and the duke, with a fairy-tale ending.

  Sometimes it all worked out for the tart-with-a-heart. Sometimes she did get to meet the aristocrat who would whisk her away from all her boudoir games, and even make an honest woman of her … sometimes, but not often. One of the few was Lavinia – born to a prostitute called Fenton, but who adopted the stage name of Beswick in honour of her natural father, who was believed to have been a captain in the Royal Navy. After treading the familiar route of becoming a child prostitute and then a part-time actress, she got her big break in 1728 when she was cast in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. In an inspired piece of casting, the character in the play who was ‘no better than she oughta’ called Polly Peachum, was played by … the girl who was no better than she oughta. Lavinia was perfect. She was a sensation in the part and she became an overnight celebrity – books were written, ballads were composed, her likeness was bought in innumerable prints. And she came to the notice of the very much married Charles Powlett, Third Duke of Bolton.

  He sat watching every performance, clearly besotted with the young star (she was
twenty-three years his junior). The infatuation became obvious, but still the Duke came for his nightly dose of lust and adoration. Hogarth even painted a picture of the opera being performed, with the Duke watching, rapt, in a box right at the front of the auditorium. In the end, his wooing worked wonders – she set up home with the Duke, but only after he had, in effect, bought her services on an exclusive basis, with a large annuity. John Gay, writing to Jonathan Swift, claimed that the agreement involved her being paid £400 a year while they were together, and £200 a year if they ever parted. The Duke’s wife, whom he had married fifteen years earlier, was childless and no doubt was not amused when the mistress produced three children in quick succession, all of them boys.

  When the first duchess died in 1751 the Duke wasted no time in proposing to Lavinia and they were married before the year was out. Now a duchess, she outlived him by six years, dying in 1760. As far as can be seen, she had been faithful to the old boy during his lifetime but, when he died aged 68, Lavinia fell for the charms of an Irish surgeon called George Kelly, whose services she had sought when illness affected her during her stay at Tunbridge Wells. According to letters of Horace Walpole, she settled most of her money on her children and then made a will appointing the good doctor her sole executor and beneficiary. And with that she departed this world, having achieved far more happiness and success than would have been thought possible after such an inauspicious start.

  AUGUSTUS HENRY FITZROY – a Prime Minister, a whore and two wives.

  In April 1768 Augustus Henry Fitzroy, aka the Third Duke of Grafton, went to the opera – hardly newsworthy, except that he took with him as ‘arm-candy’ someone who was known to everyone in the audience – and it wasn’t his wife. It was Nancy Parsons, one of the leading courtesans of the era, and a woman at the very top of her game. Their scandalous affair was noted in the notorious gossip column of the Town & Country Magazine called Histories of the tête-à-tête annexed where she was given the appellation of Annabella:

  Annabella is now the happiest of her sex, attached to the most amiable man of the age, whose rank and influence raise her, in point of power, beyond many queens of the earth. Caressed by the highest, courted and adulated by all, her merit and shining abilities receive that applause that is justly due to them. She presides constantly at his sumptuous table, and does the honours with an ease and elegance, that the first nobility in the kingdom are compelled to admire.

  And it was not as if the Duke’s wife was dead – she had been chucked out of the ancestral pile some three years earlier when the Duke installed Nancy as chatelaine. Before long, Nancy was hosting dinner parties, and filling the role of social hostess. The papers were agog, especially as the Duke went on to become prime minister. The most vitriolic of his critics was someone writing under the pseudonym ‘Junius’, in the paper called the Public Advertiser (originally known as the London Daily Post and General Advertiser). ‘Junius’ mercilessly poked fun at the Duke’s private life, including a poem under the title of Harry and Nan (published in the Political Register) as well as savaging him for his lack of leadership skills and political acumen, and for his failure to uphold constitutional rights. Indeed so effective were the attacks on Grafton, and on the corruption which marked some of his appointments to high office, that Grafton resigned as Prime Minister in 1770 and gave up politics altogether. He also abandoned the Church of England and to the great embarrassment of his friends, became a staunch Unitarian (deeply unfashionable and not acceptable to the Establishment).

  The fact is, the Duke was not really cut out for active politics – his passion was the Turf. He kept his own pack of hounds and liked to hunt. He was an avid race-goer, in particular for the races on Newmarket Heath, and he bet heavily. What he wanted was a woman who shared his passions – but his wife, for all her looks, intelligence and charm, certainly did not.

  She was born Anne Liddell, the only child of Sir Henry Liddell, later Baron Ravensworth. He had made a packet out of coal and owned extensive lands in and around Durham. She had brought money to her marriage to the Duke in 1756 and in time did her marital duty by producing the obligatory ‘heir and a spare’ as well as a daughter called Georgiana. But her passion was gambling at cards, and holding lavish parties, neither of which held any interest for her husband. They drifted apart as her gambling debts increased. Anne objected to the mistresses he brought to the house – by 1764 Nancy Parsons was in residence – and when she informed the Duke that she hated him, she was told to pack her bags and leave. She did so, and the couple were legally separated in January 1765. She kept her jewels and an allowance of £3,000 a year, along with custody of Georgiana. The two boys were excluded from the arrangement. As was normal in the eighteenth century, their upbringing remained under the control of their father the Duke. Anne went off to the arms (and bed) of a succession of lovers including the Third Duke of Portland. Their affair was public knowledge and it was assumed that they would marry when circumstances permitted, but to Anne’s humiliation and distress, Portland went off and got engaged to Lady Dorothy Cavendish. He had omitted to inform the Duchess.

  Anne had begun a correspondence with Horace Walpole and he introduced her to his friend the Earl of Upper Ossory. Within a short time they were lovers, and in 1768 news reached the ears of the Duke of Grafton that his estranged wife was pregnant. That was too much to bear, and he immediately set about divorcing her. Three days after that marriage came to an end, she and the Earl were married. Any hopes of taking up a public life were diminished when her ex-husband re-married – not to the ever-charming Nancy Parsons, who was to go on to become Viscountess Maynard, but to Elizabeth Wrottesley, who was Lord Ossory’s cousin. Anne, understandably, preferred not to allow their paths to cross, choosing respectable rural retirement over anything which the Ton could offer. As Countess of Upper Ossory she kept out of the public limelight, dying in 1804 after being something of a muse for Horace Walpole over a period of some twenty-eight years. He wrote her more than 450 letters during this time, offering a wonderful snapshot of his views about the period in which he lived.

  The Duke of Grafton’s new wife was described as being ‘not handsome, but quiet and reasonable, and having a very amiable character.’ Elizabeth was just as keen a follower of equine matters as the Duke, and also bore him twelve children, of whom eight reached adulthood. Elizabeth died in 1822, having survived the Duke by eleven years.

  In all, the stories of the women in the life of the Duke of Grafton give a fascinating insight into the way society treated scandal, especially aristocratic scandal. Anne, and also Nancy, were born survivors and they saw off the criticism thrown at them with dignity and quiet aplomb.

  * * *

  So, what do these snapshots of adulterous unions say about adultery in the eighteenth century? First (and no surprise here) that men generally fared better than women. Laws were made by men (there were no female MPs); laws were administered by men (there were no female judges) and the cases reflected the prevailing view that it was the carnal appetites of women which lay at the root of the problem. A man could commit adultery and keep his place in society, a woman could not. If an errant wife was legally separated from her husband, she lived in a sort of limbo, her character stained. Only if her husband divorced her could she re-marry and regain respectability. But these considerations only applied to the aristocracy – no-one else could afford to sponsor a Private Members Bill through Parliament and so for the vast majority of the population divorce was never an option.

  The rising numbers of what we now call the middle classes looked on with amazement at the antics of their supposed betters, aghast at the gambling and hedonism that marked the aristocracy. The backlash would come with the Victorians, but for the Georgians, they simply devoured the stories in the Press, and enjoyed seeing them ridiculed in prints, ballads and ditties.

  Chapter Eight

  Sex Crimes – Rape, Bigamy, Murder, Suicide and Sodomy

  FRANCIS CHARTERIS – aka ‘The Rape-Master
General’

  Image 68 shows a mezzotint of Francis Charteris, one of the most loathsome creatures in Georgian history. Beneath the portrait are the heavily ironic words:

  Blood!--must a colonel, with a lord’s estate,

  Be thus obnoxious to a scoundrel’s fate?

  Brought to the bar, and sentenc’d from the bench,

  Only for ravishing a country wench?

  For some people the word ‘rake’ is applied almost as a compliment – a recognition of hard-living and hard-drinking, with an almost heroic life spent on gambling and fornicating. But there was nothing heroic about Francis Charteris – he was not just a rake, he was a rapist, and a serial one at that. There are few men from the eighteenth century who come across as so totally devoid of decency and morality. Here was a thoroughly nasty piece of work – Swift described him as ‘a most infamous, vile scoundrel.’