Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  It would seem, then, that not only the theatregoing public but also the King and Queen were aware that something might be brewing between Perdita and Florizel. According to Mary, her correspondence with Florizel lasted for several months before she agreed to meet him in person. ‘There was,’ she says, ‘a beautiful ingenuousness in his language, a warm and enthusiastic adoration, expressed in every letter, which interested and charmed me.’20 His ardour was doubtless increased by her elusiveness.

  Meanwhile her career flourished and Sheridan made the most of it. During the holiday season she opened the festivities with Viola, and then played almost constantly over the Christmas week as Viola and Juliet. She closed the year with Viola. In the new year, capitalizing on the buzz that surrounded her, Sheridan made sure that she played regularly, especially in her cross-dressed roles. She added Rosalind to her repertoire. The Morning Chronicle suggested that she was trying just a little too hard to impress:

  Mrs Robinson last night acquitted herself very respectably in the character of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s beautiful comedy, As You Like It. Her figure was perfectly proper, and her deportment sufficiently graceful. She will, however, improve her performance of the part, if she in the future uses less labour in her oratory, and does not aim at the emphatic so much.21

  A good many ladies and gentlemen in London society thought they knew exactly who she was aiming at – but the situation was becoming complicated.

  The Prince went to the theatre to watch Mary whenever he could. On one occasion he sent a lock of his hair from his box to her dressing room in an envelope on which he had written ‘To be redeemed’. Florizel’s letters arrived almost daily, delivered by Malden. He brought a miniature portrait of the Prince by the artist Jeremiah Meyer, set in diamonds. ‘This picture is now in my possession,’ she writes in the Memoirs. Within the case was a small heart cut in paper, which she treasured all her life. On one side was written ‘Je ne change qu’en mourant’ and on the other ‘Unalterable to my Perdita through life’. From that day on, she wore the miniature picture pinned onto her bosom whenever she went out in public.

  As usual, there is an alternative account which is less flattering to Mary. According to Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, the miniature was not an offering sent via Malden, but a prize brazenly claimed by Perdita herself:

  To describe how confin’d he was in the early part of this connection, when he wanted to give Mrs Robinson his picture, he sent for a painter in miniature whilst he was dressing, who on a card was to sketch the likeness he was afterwards to render in ivory.

  This the P. of Wales assur’d the painter was destin’d for a present to some German relation, but during the sitting a page was posted at the door to give the allarm [sic] in case of intrusion. The next day as the painter was finishing the picture, Mrs Robinson, anxious to claim her prize, came to see it.

  Some time after her disgrace, preserving it as a relick, she set it round with diamonds to £900 value, and an inscription round it of gage de mon amour, which the Prince had written on its back in pencil when he gave it her.22

  Georgiana was gossipy and occasionally malicious, but she was nevertheless a friend of Perdita. If she is to be believed, Mary’s doctoring of the evidence of her past extended beyond the text of the Memoirs to the very token of the Prince’s affection.

  According to Mary, the correspondence lasted throughout the spring of 1780, with the Prince constantly pressing for an interview. She wrote back, reminding him of his royal duty, of the need not to displease the King, the fact that she was married, and that if they were to have a ‘public attachment’ she would have to abandon her profession and would then be financially dependent on him (which would not be a good idea, since, not having come of age, he had limited financial resources). What would her fate be if she relented and then found herself cast off? He replied with ‘repeated assurances of inviolable affection’.23 Malden piled on the pressure, telling Mary that the Duke of Cumberland had come to warn him that the Prince was most wretched on her account, and that things must come to a head. Cumberland had met the Prince in Hyde Park and they had struck up a friendship, despite the King’s abhorrence of his brother.

  Malden was beginning to regret his own part in the business, as he had fallen in love with Mary himself. As Mary put it, ‘he had himself conceived so violent a passion for me that he was the most miserable and unfortunate of mortals’.24 Gossip was spreading that Perdita had, in fact, become Malden’s mistress.

  In April she attended a masquerade with him on one side and Tom on the other, fuelling scandalous rumours that her husband was happy to act as her pimp, as he had supposedly done with Sir John Lade. The Morning Post reported: ‘Mrs R—n, with a pink jacket and coat, with a loose gauze thrown over it, appeared melancholy from the provoking inattention of the company, and after a few pouting parings round the room, retired with her pliant spouse on one side, and the Malden hero on the other, who sympathetically sulked with his acknowledged half.’25 Two weeks later she was seen again with Malden during a fabulous ridotto at the Opera House where 700 masqueraders danced through the small hours of the morning – he sported a ‘black domino’ and she was ‘transparently veiled, in the antique style’ (a ‘domino’ was a loose cloak with a mask for the upper part of the face, worn to conceal the wearer’s identity at masquerades). The event almost broke up at half past five in the morning when two officers started fighting and the guard was called in with fixed bayonets, but the ferment happily subsided ‘and the diversions continued as usual with tea, country dances, headaches, and morning qualms’.26 A few days after this, the gossip columnist of the Morning Post confirmed that Sir John Lade had been replaced in Mary’s retinue by Malden (Lade was now in pursuit of another actress).

  The manuscript of Mary’s autobiography breaks off shortly before her first private meeting with the Prince. The published text of the Memoirs narrates the rest of her life in the form of a ‘Continuation by a Friend’, which was almost certainly written by Mary’s daughter Maria Elizabeth. The latter refers to ‘the constant devoirs of Lord Malden, whose attentions were as little understood as maliciously interpreted’,27 but there is a body of evidence that he and Mary were, indeed, lovers.

  At the beginning of each month, new issues of an array of monthly magazines would appear in the booksellers. The Town and Country Magazine was always eagerly awaited. Many readers would turn first to its column ‘Histories of the Tête-à-Tête annexed’: this consisted of a pair of oval portraits of a man and a woman, accompanied by a ‘history’ of their sexual liaisons, usually concluding with a description of their current romantic relationship and an estimate of its likely duration. The combination of image and text gave ‘Tête-à-Tête’ a double meaning: the subjects are head to head in the pictures while the story concerns their intimate affairs. It is the nearest the eighteenth century comes to the modern juxtaposition of paparazzi snapshots and tabloid titbits of gossip. In Hannah Cowley’s 1780 comedy The Belle’s Stratagem, a character called Crowquil is introduced as an author of Tête-à-Têtes; a porter says to him, ‘Oh, Oh, what! You are the fellow that has folks nose to nose in your sixpenny cuts, that never met anywhere else.’ But the editors refuted the accusation of inventing liaisons that did not exist. Crowquil suggests a more likely scenario – servants revealing information about their employers in exchange for money.

  On 1 June 1780, the Tête-à-Tête was subtitled ‘Memoirs of the DOATING LOVER and the DRAMATIC ENCHANTRESS’. It was adorned with engravings of a very fetching Mary Robinson and a youthful-looking Malden. His Lordship is described as a handsome womanizer who got his young bed-maker pregnant while he was an Oxford undergraduate. He then went on his continental tour where he slept with many women, until his purse and his constitution suffered. On returning to England he went through ‘a variety of amours’ before falling in love with Mrs Robinson.

  The account of her is reasonably accurate. ‘The daughter of an eminent tradesman, who, from a variety of unfo
reseen accidents and disappointments, was obliged to become a bankrupt’, she had a ‘genteel education’ with ‘the improvements of dancing, music, and similar accomplishments’. From an early age, her personal charms were ‘almost irresistible’. There is a list of her roles at Drury Lane, praise of her talents as an actress, and a defence of her honour in the face of improper advances: ‘She was disgusted with the persons and address’ of the ‘suitors of the first rank and fortune’ who ‘treated her with as little ceremony as if she had been a prostitute by profession’.

  An account is given of how a ‘lady-abbess’ tried to procure her for a Lord upon the pretence of buying tickets for her benefit. The ‘abbess’ had been instructed by Lord B—to give Mary a hundred pounds ‘for the pleasure of passing a few hours with her’; she laid down the money, ‘thinking the temptation was irresistible’. To her surprise, ‘Mrs R—desired her to retire and return her tickets, as she should be greatly mortified to have any money in her possession from a woman of her complexion.’ She also had a call from a lady known as ‘Vis-à-vis Townshend’ (that is to say, a woman whose sexual favours had been bought in return for a fashionable new carriage). She told Mary that Sir William S—had given orders for a new chariot to be built for her at Hatchet’s. It would have her cipher on it – the equivalent of a personalized numberplate – and he would call in a few days. However,

  Even this bait did not take; Mrs R—n listened, shook her head, and retired. Mrs T—d rang the bell, and when the servant entered, was so nettled at the reception she had met with, as to say, ‘I think your mistress is the rudest woman I ever saw in my life.’ ‘No, madam,’ replied she, ‘I am bold enough to say, you are the rudest woman I ever heard in my life, for I overheard all your conversation.’28

  Mary seems to have inspired remarkable loyalty in her servants. She treated people who worked for her with great respect. Some years later, when she was at the height of her fame, a labourer was accidentally killed while doing some building work at her house in Berkeley Square. She paid for the funeral, which began from her house, and gave the man’s widow a cash sum and an annuity. She wanted her generosity to be kept quiet, but like almost everything else in her life the story leaked out.29

  The Tête-à-Tête suggests that the Dramatic Enchantress ‘was not so easy a conquest as many imagined’. It denies the supposed affair with Sir John Lade. But when Malden wrote her a polite billet enclosing a carte blanche, then followed up with a pair of valuable diamond earrings, ‘she surrendered at discretion’.30

  Two very different sources corroborate the affair. In September 1782, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire scribbled a manuscript note to the effect that

  Mrs Robinson was a natural daughter of Lord Northington’s, and had been driven to the stage to support an extravagant husband, who was willing likewise to share the fruits of her ill conduct. She then liv’d with Lord Malden, Lord Essex’s son. Her agaceries were soon level’d at the young Prince, and she especially lorgnee’d him in the part of Perdita, which, as it was afterwards suppos’d to be the name by which he call’d her, she was distinguish’d by it in all the public prints and the P. of Wales by that of Florizel.31

  By this account, Mary was already intimately acquainted with Malden prior to the famous night when she played Perdita before the Prince.

  According to the anonymous Memoirs of Perdita, Malden was captivated by Mary’s performance as Ophelia in Hamlet; he supposedly set her up in ‘an elegant habitation’ in Clarges Street and presented her with a handsome red and silver carriage that was ‘the admiration of all the charioteering circles of St James’s’.32 The latter details actually belong to a subsequent phase of Mary’s relationship with Malden, but there can be no doubt that there was a widespread belief that she was mistress to the Prince’s man before the Prince himself. So it was that Malden came to be represented as ‘Lord Pander’ to his own mistress.

  The Prince raised the stakes. He asked Mary to come to his private apartment disguised in the boy’s clothes that she had worn on stage in the character of the Irish Widow. She ‘decidedly objected’ to the plan. But she was beginning to relent, not least because her husband was spending all his time with mistresses and whores. Even the servants were victims of Robinson’s lechery. On one occasion, Mary returned from rehearsal and found her husband locked in the bedroom with a dirty, squat housemaid. A short man himself, perhaps he felt more comfortable with her than his tall and beautiful wife. Of course, we only have Mary’s word for all this – the more she writes about her husband’s grossness and infidelity, the less likely the reader of the Memoirs is to condemn her for finally agreeing to meet the Prince.

  Mary was playing a cool game. Without granting an interview, she continued to write to the Prince, giving him sisterly advice rather as Mary Hamilton had done. The Prince’s love letters were ardent and beautifully written, but he was also indiscreet about his family. He told her how he hated his life at Kew Palace, that he and his brothers were prisoners there. The King was unkind to him. He called his sister, the Princess Royal, who was in poor health, ‘that bandy-legged b[itc]h’.33 Mary advised him to be patient until he became his own master at the age of 21, not to do anything premature that would incur the displeasure of the King, and to wait until he knew her better before engaging himself in a public attachment to her.

  It was common practice for a man to make a formal financial offer to an actress or a courtesan he wanted to keep. Sometimes there was a proper legal document, sometimes a more casual arrangement. Mary’s references to the position she would be placed in should she accept the Prince and then be rejected reveal that she was at some level negotiating the terms of the relationship as shrewdly as she had negotiated her acting contract at the Haymarket two years earlier.

  The Prince had hoped to see Mary at the masked ridotto in Covent Garden, but he had been prevented from attending. So he sent her jewels from Grey’s instead, and two days later the Morning Post was reporting that ‘Mrs Robinson shone with unusual lustre, exhibiting a rich suit of diamonds beautifully contrasted with a ruby head’.34 It was reckoned that they were worth a hundred guineas. She was not, however, a woman to be bought for such a sum.

  It was a different matter when he enclosed in one of his letters ‘a bond of the most solemn and binding nature, containing a promise of the sum of twenty thousand pounds, to be paid at the period of his Royal Highness’s coming of age’. Twenty thousand pounds was an enormous sum – the modern equivalent would be around a million pounds or more than a million and a half American dollars. The paper was signed by the Prince and sealed with the royal arms. ‘It was expressed in terms so liberal, so voluntary, so marked by true affection, that I had scarcely power to read it.’35 When she did so – she told a friend in a letter written in 1783 and printed in the ‘Continuation’ of her Memoirs – her eyes filled with tears of conflicting emotion. The Prince had said that it wounded his dignity that she was forced to earn a living on the stage, and he was desperate for her to separate from her wretched husband. The bond was both a sign of her suitor’s utter seriousness and a document that had the power to convert her into a courtesan. For nearly six months, she had held back, writing of virtue though hinting at the possibility of surrender. Now the gulf was before her.

  She agreed to a meeting. Malden proposed his own house in Dean Street, Mayfair, but the Prince was being closely watched from within the royal household, so this was ruled out. There was talk of a visit to Buckingham House, but she thought this too dangerous. They finally agreed to meet at Kew, close to the residence of the Prince and his brother Frederick Duke of York.

  Malden took her to the river and they were rowed out to Eel Pie Island, not far from Kew. They dined at the inn on the island. A signal had been arranged: when the Prince was ready, he would wave a white handkerchief and she would cross in the boat. They could only just make out the handkerchief through the dusk. She stepped into the boat with Malden and they were soon ‘before the iron gates of old Kew palace�
��. The Prince and his brother were walking down an avenue towards them. He uttered a few barely audible words before they were startled by the noise of people approaching from the palace. The moon was rising and they were terrified of being seen. The Prince spoke a few words ‘of the most affectionate nature’ and they parted.

  After this, there was no stopping them. They met many times at this ‘romantic spot’. Mary claims that their respective chaperons, Lord Malden and Frederick Duke of York, were always present at these meetings. She no longer felt afraid of the Prince’s royal stature: ‘The rank of the Prince no longer chilled into awe that being, who now considered him as the lover and the friend.’ It was his ‘sweet smile’ and ‘melodious yet manly voice’ that won her over. During their midnight rambles, dressed in a dark habit to conceal herself, she learned about his unhappy and secluded childhood. The men were dressed in greatcoats to disguise themselves, with the exception of Frederick who insisted upon wearing a buff coat – ‘the most conspicuous colour he could have selected for an adventure of this nature’. The Prince would sing to her, his voice ringing out in the air of the warm summer nights. She was charmed by his polished manners and ‘lamented the distance which destiny had placed between us’. ‘How would my soul have idolized such a husband,’ she wrote.36