Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  Throughout that January, rumour and counter-rumour swirled in the press. She was reconciled with the Prince. She was not reconciled with the Prince. She was posturing arrogantly in her box at the opera. She was behaving with becoming dignity in her box at the opera, setting herself apart from the common courtesans of the day. There can be no doubt that, however far Mary was or was not attempting to orchestrate the press campaign herself, she read the papers with an eagle eye. In one issue of the Morning Herald a report about her appears in close proximity to the news that a woman called Ann Randall, possibly a prostitute, had been arrested for shoplifting. The name seems to have stuck in Mary’s mind: sixteen years later she published her feminist treatise, A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, under the pseudonym Anne Frances Randall.

  Mary’s own shopping expeditions – and even her airings in the park and the fashionable parts of town – had hazards of their own: ‘Mrs Robinson drove two or three times up and down St James’s street on Saturday, during the cavalcade at St James’s. She attempted to stop once, or twice to view the procession, but her admirers crowding numerously round her, she was obliged to make a farewell bow, and drive home.’24 The affair with Tarleton was now fully public and they were rapidly becoming London’s leading celebrity couple. During the day they rode together in the park; in the evenings they were spotted strolling in the pleasure gardens, dancing at the masquerade, showing themselves in boxes at the theatre and the opera.

  One day in March, the skirts of Mary’s dress became caught as she dismounted from her horse in Hyde Park. Despite the best efforts of Tarleton, the watching crowd saw more than they should have done. The incident was duly reported, illustrated (Tarleton, a groom, and two fat gentlemen, one of them holding a perspective glass, are shown looking up her skirt), and dramatized in a sketch entitled ‘The Discovery, a new comedy, acted in Hyde-Park; or, the downfall of Perdita and the uprise of her s—k [smock]:

  Alderman: ‘I saw such a perspective which makes my mouth water.’

  Colonel T.: ‘A fine view it must be owned; but there is no novelty in it to me.’ …

  Colonel T.: ‘Egad here is fine work, I shall have her covered, and before my face – what account shall I give to Florizel. Faith I may as well cover her myself.’25

  ‘Cover her’ is slang for have sex with her.

  The Opera House was being rebuilt and the ton rushed to subscribe for the best seats. Mrs Robinson promptly put down her name for four seats, thus ensuring that she would have a whole box at her disposal. ‘In regard to this circumstance,’ observed the Morning Herald, ‘though she appears four times over, we cannot have too much of a pretty woman! There is also a plan of the new Opera house with the names of the subscribers in each box. She is number 69, next to Lady Essex and Lady Maynard, and fairly close to the Prince of Wales.’26 The name of Colonel Tarleton appeared beneath hers. Lady Essex was Malden’s mother, which suggests that Mary’s relations with him were still cordial.

  Having subscribed for an entire box, Mary was entitled to fit it up in her own style. She chose pink satin chairs and wall-to-wall mirrors. Her detractors in the press and among the courtesans assumed that this was a monstrous act of vanity calculated to ensure that her reflected image would be visible to all parts of the house. It may have been Mary herself who fed the Morning Herald a response to this accusation: ‘Mrs Robinson’s box at the Opera has created universal envy and confusion among the frail sisterhood, who are ignorant that in Paris nothing is so common as a looking glass, which is placed not for the benefit of those in the box, but for the convenience of seeing the stage from every part of it.’27 This is a brilliant piece of spin, which at once portrays her as a loyal woman of the theatre, interested in the stage and not the house, and a sophisticated innovator of the latest Paris fashion, leaving her provincial English sisters far behind.

  The aura of Parisian sophistication that surrounded her was intensified by the arrival in town of the Duke of Chartres: ‘one of his first visits will be to the fair Perdita; as during her residence of last year in Paris, there seldom passed a day in which he did not endeavour to pay court to her’.28 A further sensation was caused by the Perdita’s importation of French stockings embroidered with ornamental patterns (known as ‘clocks’) in golden silk: ‘The gold-clock’d stockings, introduced by the lark-heeled Perdita occasions various disputes in the fashionable circles; the moneyloving tribe reprobate so extravagant a fashion, while certain ladies of solid understandings, revile the fair inventor, with more than serpent tongues! If we may judge from her train of followers at the last masquerade.’29

  Tarleton was on half-pay, awaiting a new military posting. He was gambling heavily, to the alarm of his family back in Liverpool. The papers, meanwhile, could not get enough of the glamorous couple. At each ball or masquerade, they paired off early in the evening. Their dress was always singled out as the most fashionable. Mary would wear a Quaker-style domino and go hatless in order to display a finished headdress, or she would set off pink and brown ‘relieved and decorated with the greatest taste’, as she ‘reclined on the arm’ of Tarleton while he strutted in the full regalia of a hussar. Blue jacket and waistcoat embroidered with silver (and small sugar-loaf silver buttons), buckskin breeches, boots of uncoloured leather reaching to the knee and fitted as tight as silk stockings, a buff belt over the jacket with a full-length scimitar hanging from it, a helmet on his head. Tempers flared late one evening: the Morning Herald revealed that there was an ‘amorous fracas’ between the lovers, causing a piqued Perdita to take comfort on the arm of Mr John Townshend. ‘The Prince of Wales was present,’ the reporter pointedly added.30

  Mary was in love. She blossomed: ‘The Perdita is so much improved within these last two years, that she scarcely retains a resemblance of her former self; chiefly owing to her appearance being more en bon point, than she formerly did!’ The Hoppner portrait, which probably belongs to this period, gives her breasts and cheeks a certain fullness that had not been apparent when Gainsborough painted her looking rather gaunt at the time of the stressful business of the Prince’s letters. The naturalness of her beauty ‘challenged universal admiration’; the favoured terms for newspaper descriptions of her dresses were ‘neatness’, ‘delicacy’, and ‘decency’. When other women tried to ape her style, they failed miserably. So, for example, a courtesan known affectionately as ‘Our Bridget’: ‘What was in the Perdita the result of a good natural taste, improved by Parisian refinement, is in poor Bridget intolerable affectation and as ill becomes her as a fine dress!’ Bridget also made a terrible hash of her attempt to copy Mary’s innovation of a mirrored opera box: ‘The whole train of inferior frails are close copyists of the resplendent Perdita; viz. her Opera box copied by Our Bridget; her Carmelite Coach, by old Friar Lawrence; her phaeton and ponies by the mistress of Sir Jacky Jehu; her starry harness, by Mrs Byne, the Swan, etc. etc.; her mode of dress by the whole corps.’ The Armistead alone had the taste ‘to approach nearer the Perditean hemisphere, than any other in the Paphian circles’.31

  There was news that once again Sir Joshua Reynolds was painting Perdita, in a manner totally different from formerly. Commentators waited eagerly to see what new image she would project.

  Her celebrity reached its high-water mark. Inevitably the tide would soon turn against her. Despite the fact that her affairs with the Prince and Fox were over, she continued to be linked with them in the satirical press and began to receive seriously bad publicity. Charles Fox’s increasing closeness to the Prince of Wales was a matter for great concern both in the conservative press and at court. Fox’s political ambitions depended in part on the capacity of the Prince to bankroll him. He was, therefore, acutely conscious that in August the Prince would come of age, receive a substantial fortune – and be liable to pay the £20,000 bond that he had promised to Mary. As a former lover who remained on excellent terms with Mary, Fox took it upon himself to negotiate a deal that would satisfy her witho
ut damaging the Prince to the full extent of £20,000 (a sum, it should be remembered, that was the equivalent of nearly a million pounds in today’s terms).

  At the same time, Fox was engaged in a much bigger negotiation. In February 1783 the Government of the Earl of Shelburne fell, following defeat in debates on proposed peace treaties to end the American and French wars. The loss of the colonies had to be acknowledged, but the terms of surrender were so humiliating that it was impossible for the Government to survive. The fall of Shelburne was precipitated by an unholy alliance of left and right: Fox and Lord North had formed an unlikely partnership in order to bring him down. It was a devastating blow to the King that his devoted lieutenant North should have entered into a coalition with Fox, the debauched radical, the misleader of the Prince. For six weeks, the King procrastinated, refusing to summon the Duke of Portland (who was to be the nominal head of the Fox-North coalition) to take office.

  During this period of political vacuum, the press enlivened their coverage of the extraordinary political manoeuvring with reports of an equally unlikely alliance between those old rivals the Perdita and the Armistead: ‘An amorous coalition is just formed between the Perdita and the Armstead, in consequence of which the former heroine has solemnly renounced all pretensions to the engaging person of Mr C—F-x and the latter to that of the H—r A—nt.’32 In reality, Elizabeth Armistead was by this time well established as Fox’s lover and Mary’s only ‘pretensions’ to the Prince were of the financial kind. Fox was no doubt pleased with the opportunity to assist the ex-mistress who had relinquished him to his ‘dearest Liz’ without a fight, while at the same time helping the Prince of Wales out of a potential financial mire.

  The first press reports that Mary was once again in negotiation with the Prince had surfaced back in January in a new monthly publication called the Rambler’s Magazine, which followed Perdita’s progress with avid attention. This journal’s full title was The Rambler’s Magazine; or, The Annals of Gallantry, Glee, Pleasure, and the Bon Ton; calculated for the entertainment of the Polite World; and to furnish the Man of Pleasure with a most delicious banquet of Amorous, Bacchanalian, Whimsical, Humorous, Theatrical and Polite Entertainment. It presented itself as a very different ramble through society than that of Dr Johnson: it was devoted exclusively to pleasure and amusement, free from ‘dry Reasoning, Metaphysical conjectures, or Essays on Morality’. It promised accounts of female misbehaviour, graphically depicted in copperplate illustrations. The editor appealed to his readers to provide stories, in return for which they would receive a free copy. He was rewarded with such items as ‘Mr Nisbett detects Captain Totty in bed with his wife’ and ‘Mrs H—n amusing herself with her black servant’ (who is shown in an accompanying illustration lying on top of her with his hand on her naked breast).

  Mary figures prominently in each issue throughout the year 1783. As her political engagement became more apparent, the treatment of her became conspicuously more scabrous. The first Rambler’s Magazine began with ‘An Eccentric Lecture on Procreation’ and then proceeded to ‘A singular lease of certain premises, from Perdita to Florizel, for a valuable consideration’, accompanied by an engraving of ‘Florizel granting Independence to Perdita’. This caricature makes its point by the traditional device of a picture within the picture: on the wall behind Perdita is an image of the mythological figure Danae (who is naked) receiving a shower of gold into her lap. The premises in the mock lease are ‘Bushy-Grove, lying in between East-Ham and West-Ham’, an allusion that simultaneously evokes a royal property (Bushy House) and Perdita’s genital area. The Prince will get all the ‘chambers, ways, paths, passages, shrubberies, water courses, cascades, ponds, rivers’ thereon, together with everything else ‘heretofore held, used, occupied, enjoyed by Charles Reynard [Fox], late occupier thereof. He will have to keep the premises in good repair, and in return for his rent he can ‘enter, and come into’ her twice a week or oftener.33

  This is innocuous stuff in comparison with some of the snippets about Mary published later in the year. A piece by one ‘Tattle’ told of how on one occasion before the affair with the Prince, Tom Robinson came in while Perdita was making love to someone else and merely said with sang-froid, ‘I beg your pardon, I did not know you were engaged.’ Her simultaneous affairs with the Prince and Malden were also dredged up: a report tells of how one evening at the Pantheon she was greeted overfam-iliarly by a known whore: ‘Pray,’ asked Perdita, ‘how long has the Pantheon been a thoroughfare to St Giles [the haunt of prostitutes]?’ To which the other replied, ‘Ever since the way to Wales was through Malden.’34

  Fox’s role as intermediary between the Prince and Perdita led to the perception among caricaturists that they were engaged in a sexual threesome. Gillray’s ‘Paridise [sic] Regain’d’, published in February, shows Fox making his addresses to a demure mobcapped Perdita while the Prince looks on from behind a tree, saying, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Poor Charley.’ The main purpose of this caricature was to discredit Fox in the period when he was forging his alliance with North, but it had the inevitable side effect of undermining Mary’s reputation. Unapologetic in her support for the new coalition, she began sporting the Fox and North colours of blue and buff in her dresses and on her coach, and lending ministers her house in Berkeley Square: ‘From the number of meetings held by Mr Fox and his coadjutors, at the house of the gentle Perdita, the apartment where they resort may with the strictest justice be called the new ministerial cock-pit!’35

  A spate of satirical caricatures played on these relationships. The new Government was established at the beginning of April, with North as Home Secretary and Fox as Foreign Minister. Within a few weeks, a caricature appeared under the title ‘Scrub and Archer’, an allusion to two characters in George Farquhar’s popular Restoration comedy The Beaux’ Stratagem. Portly Scrub is Fox and Archer – a gentleman playing the role of a gentleman’s gentleman – is Lord North. The scene is one in the play where Scrub and Archer agree to become ‘sworn brothers’, a satire on the coalition between the two politicians and the way that Fox was the junior partner in terms of rank and experience, but the senior one in power and charisma. The maid who stands behind them is Perdita. Above her on the wall is a rendering of Reynolds’s portrait of Tarleton. Archer/North says ‘And this Col. I am afraid has converted the affection of your Perdita’, to which Scrub/Fox replies, ‘Converted, ay perverted my dear friend, for I am afraid he has made her a whore.’

  It was unseasonably warm that May, so Perdita was constantly out in Hyde Park driving her carriage decorated with the blue- and buff-coloured cockades of Fox and North. Her new-found political prominence gave caricaturists and pamphleteers a fresh incentive to attack her.

  One of the most damaging blows to her image was her connection with the sex therapist, Dr James Graham. His notorious Temple of Health and Hymen in Pall Mall (admission two guineas) was decked out with silver and crystal ornaments, gilded mirrors and lamps. Clients were sensualized with soft music and spices redolent of an Arabian seraglio. Graham delivered lectures, wearing doctoral robes; audience members would then receive an electric jolt from under their cushions. He claimed that his electrical charges were a cure for impotence, infertility, and lack of libido. The Temple’s main attraction was the ‘Celestial or Magnetico-electrico bed – the first and only ever in the world’, an electrified bed on which jaded couples could lie beneath a mirrored canopy and rediscover their appetites with the assistance of ‘magnetico-electrical fire’ (hire charge: £50 per night). This contraption was fuelled by a combination of electricity and 15 hundredweight of compound magnets. Back in 1781 a satirical pamphlet called The Celestial Beds had suggested that Mary was using Graham’s methods to become pregnant by the Prince:

  And shall she not, his joy and pride,

  Be for a pledge electrify’d?

  Yes, Graham shall exert his art,

  And give a bantling to her heart!

  The Muses’ darling it shall be,

  Th
e flow’r of royal progeny.36

  Dr Graham’s lectures, advertised almost daily in the Morning Herald and delivered with help from a scantily clad female assistant known as Vestina, attracted huge audiences – though many ladies veiled themselves in order to disguise their identities. The Prince of Wales, Charles Fox, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, and Mary Robinson were all patrons of the establishment, which gave satirists an opportunity to attack all four of them. In a caricature of February 1783 called ‘The Doctor Himself Pouring out His Whole Soul for 1 s[hilling]’, Mary, together with Fox and her husband Thomas, is represented standing in the audience as Graham lectures on hygienic sex, the importance of bathing the genitalia and the fundament both before and after congress, and the evils of masturbation (which constituted the squandering of humankind’s ‘vivifying elementary fire’).

  Later in the year another caricature, entitled ‘The Aerostatick Stage Balloon’, engraved by the pseudonymous ‘Hanibal Scratch’, showed a balloon about to rise from the ground, carrying an array of fashionable passengers sitting in three tiers of galleries protected by railings. At the top are Perdita, Dally the Tall, and an adulterous aristocratic lady. Mary is clapping her hands with delight. In the middle are Fox and North, snuggled up in friendly coalition and holding a thread attached to the nose of the Duke of Portland, the nominal Prime Minister who was but their puppet. On the bottom row sit an assortment of quacks and other London characters, Dr Graham and his ‘Vestina’ among them. The caption numbers Perdita among the ‘Fillies free’, flashing her ‘Lunar Vis à Vis’; it also alludes to North realizing his dreams and Fox pursuing ‘his golden schemes’. The implication is that the Fox-North coalition is a piece of charlatanry, an effusion of hot air no better than Dr Graham’s lectures and – by virtue of the presence of Perdita and her sisterhood – equally charged with sexual shenanigans. There were even rumours at this time that Mary was simultaneously having affairs with both Fox and North. Given North’s rectitude and Fox’s loyalty to Elizabeth Armistead, this is calumny, but it reveals how closely she was associated with the unlikely coalition.