Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  The pro-Fox Morning Herald celebrated her every public appearance during the month of April, when the canvassers were out daily, pulling in the voters: ‘Mrs Robinson’s equipage was yesterday exhibited in the environs of St James’s, with the additional splendour of new liveries: in the room of the cockade militaire, a favor inscribed with Fox and Freedom struck the eye.’5 The Rambler’s Magazine also made a point of noting how her celebrated carriage was now sporting the motto ‘Fox and Freedom’.

  Soon after the end of the dramatic campaign a day-by-day account of its vicissitudes was published. It gives a fine sense of the highs and lows of Perdita’s involvement. Thus one day: ‘Henrietta-street is now become the resort of all the fashionable reps. Perdita attends constantly, and throws out Fox’s colours. Query, How many voters may Perdita’s fair face gain over to the cause?’ Then another: ‘Notwithstanding the assiduity of our modern Venus, in her canvass of yesterday, to her great disappointment, she could not secure a single plumper.’6 And when the voting went badly: ‘Perdita seems to have lost her bloom as well as her spirits. Is the P—still insensible? Or does she lament the decay of the party?’7

  Mary herself contributed not only with her presence on the streets but also with poems, squibs, and songs praising Fox and the Duchess of Devonshire and condemning Pitt and Sir Cecil Wray. The poems, published in the Morning Herald, are anonymous, but bear the hallmarks of her style. One of them, ‘Stanzas in Season’, is written in praise of Georgiana:

  She saw, she conquer’d: Wray shrunk back;

  Court mandates we no more obey;

  Majorities no more they pack;

  And Fox and Freedom win the day!

  Who can deny when beauty sues?

  And where’s the tongue can blame her Grace?

  Not timid slavery can refuse

  Her life’s as spotless as her face.

  Let Pitt and Wray dislike the fair,

  Decry our DEVON’S Matchless merit;

  A braver, kinder soul we wear

  And love her beauty, love her spirit.

  Let distant times, and ages know,

  When TEMPLE would have made us slaves,

  ’Tis thus we ward the fatal blow,

  ’Tis Fox that beats – ’tis DEVON saves!8

  Another witty little verse celebrates the fox’s brush as a fashion adornment:

  To adorn with its beauty, the hat of a beau,

  Or when sew’d to a muff, it makes a fine show.

  The brush of a Fox is the height of the taste,

  And beautiful now, much as rouge or as paste;

  Fair Devon and Portland, and Melbourne agree,

  That the brush is by far the best branch of the tree.

  So Kepell’s and Waldegrave’s, together unite,

  And support with their interest, the Fox and his right.9

  A more explicitly political song was set to the popular tune of ‘Ballynamona Oro’,

  Let liberty, mirth, and good humour abound,

  Let Fox, our brave Champion with laurels be crown’d.

  In bumpers of claret the toast shall go round,

  While a Man of the People is still to be found.10

  The latter two songs, in which Mary puts her muse in the service of populist politics, were published on the final two days of the seven-week polling. Admiral Hood won, as expected, and Fox just squeezed into second place, only for there to be further controversy when instead of returning the two candidates highest on the poll the High Bailiff granted a ‘scrutiny’ (in modern parlance, a recount). It was confirmed that Fox had come in above Wray, and a jury in the Court of Common Pleas later fined the Bailiff £2,000 for his high-handed action in questioning the result. Fox was paraded through the streets on a chair and received in triumph at Devonshire House. He was back in Parliament, but facing long years on the Opposition benches.

  Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Tarleton was narrowly defeated in his own election campaign. He returned to London to join in the celebrations on behalf of Fox. The Prince of Wales hosted a party at Carlton House with 600 guests, who overflowed into the gardens. Nine marquees were erected and refreshments consisted of the finest fruits of the season, confectionaries, ices, creams, and ‘emblematical designs, ornamented with mottoes and other devices, in honor of the triumph which they were to celebrate’. Four bands of instruments were placed at different parts of the garden, and the company were ‘entertained with various novelties of a comic kind’.11 Tarleton was certainly there and, given her prominence in the campaign, Mary surely would have been, too.

  Supporters of the Foxite cause had rallied behind Mary in the course of the campaign. The Morning Herald carried a serious defence of her probity:

  Nothing, says a correspondent, but female envy could give birth to the scandalous paragraphs frequently inserted in a certain morning paper [i.e. the Morning Post] respecting Mrs Robinson; there is a marked propriety in every part of her conduct that ought to disarm even malice itself; but the rancorous slanders of her own sex are not to be appeased. It is shameful to see this lovely and amiable woman ranked with notorious characters under the familiar appellation of Perdita. There is not, continues our correspondent, a woman in England so much talked of and so little known as Mrs Robinson, and while those who are acquainted with her private life admire and applaud her conduct, her good sense will teach them to despise the envious attacks of slander and malevolence.12

  To call her ‘Perdita’, it is implied here, was to rank her among the courtesans, which was a gross injustice to her true status. In a sense, the transition from ‘Perdita’, actress and royal mistress, to ‘Mary Robinson’, woman of letters and political campaigner, began during the heat of the Westminster election.

  She paid a heavy price for her personal and political commitment to Fox. Throughout the campaign she was pilloried mercilessly in caricatures, pamphlets, squibs, and newspaper paragraphs.

  A caricature called ‘The Goats Canter to Windsor or the Cuckold’s Comfort’ (14 March) shows her being driven by the Prince of Wales in a high gig drawn by six goats, one of them ridden by Fox. Three men on goats ride beside the gig: Thomas Robinson, wearing his customary cuckold’s horns and facing backwards (which is to say that Mary has left him behind), Lord North (almost certainly not a lover, but perceived as such in the press), and Tarleton in military dress. A different caricature published the same day, showing Fox vomiting into a chamber pot, is captioned with some ribald verses that begin

  Mr Fox Mr Fox

  If you had the *** [pox]

  What a blessing t’would be to the nation;

  If Perdita Would

  For once do some good

  She’d Secure you a tight Salivation.

  In another caricature, ‘A Race For A Crown’, published a few days later, Fox, North, and others ride a race mounted on lions, cheered on by the Prince and Mrs Robinson. The triangle of Fox, Prince, and Perdita is also the subject of ‘The Adventure of Prince Pretty Man’ (see p. 156), in which a Falstaffian Fox supports on his shoulders the Prince of Wales, who is stuffing the Great Seal of England into a burglar’s swag bag. Perdita, wearing a trademark feathered hat and with her hands in one of her celebrated muffs, looks on, in the company of a bare-breasted Armistead. It is noteworthy that Perdita is the more decently dressed, not exposed in the manner of a whore.

  In the course of the polling weeks there were many more caricatures of this kind, several of them associating Perdita with Georgiana, all linking her to Fox. So, for example, ‘The Last Dying Words of Reynard the Fox’ (early April, when Fox was behind in the poll) has him saying ‘Perdition catch that Wray! I am lost for ever! … curse on all the World but my dear Perditta; oh! I am now nothing.’ Mary’s fame in The Winter’s Tale merges nicely into the mesh of Shakespearean quotation.

  Because Mary was so much more famous than Elizabeth Armistead and because she played such an active part in the campaign (Fox’s ‘dearest Liz’ remained out of town at his country residence in Surrey), she wa
s the one who was labelled ‘The Woman of the People’ and assumed to be Fox’s mistress. Squibs on the Whigs would typically end with Fox saying that he was off to visit Perdita in Berkeley Square.

  Sheridan was a close ally, so one satirical pamphlet took the form of a parody of his most famous play, entitled The School for Scandal, A Comedy in Five Acts, As it is Performed by His Majesty’s Servants, etc. The title page mimics the typography of the authentic edition of the play so exactly that the British Library copy of the pamphlet is miscatalogued as Sheridan’s own work. The characters are the usual crew: Boreas for North, Reynard for Fox, and so on. In the funniest scene – which was extracted and printed independently in the April issue of the Rambler’s Magazine – Perdita enters alone and complains about how the affairs of state are depriving her of her Charley. The dialogue is full of references to his portly figure and hirsute features: ‘With him I am in heaven – To gaze upon his patriarchal face, and lean upon his dear black bosom, is Elysium to me! – The covering of his breast resembles the downy plumage of the raven – The prickling of his manly beard, how grateful to my chin … the easy rotundity of his figure excels in excellence the well-turned nine-pin!’ Reynard then enters and there is a discussion about Perdita’s desirability. ‘Do you know that princes have sighed for me, and sighed in vain!’ she asks, to which he replies, ‘That princes have sigh’d for you, is not at all improbable, but that they have sigh’d in vain, I cannot so readily admit.’ Perdita then complains that her coach-maker is threatening her over unpaid bills. Reynard says that he cannot do anything until he is in ‘place’. Perdita then makes her demand: ‘Either produce me the ready, or you and I must be hereafter strangers to each other.’ Reynard storms out and she confides in soliloquy that she is not really afraid of losing him because he cannot keep away from her above twenty hours at a time.

  The satire here is innocuous enough. Far more damaging was a series of articles that began appearing in the Rambler’s Magazine. They were advertised as extracts from a recently published book called Annals of Gallantry. The book itself, if it ever existed, has not survived, but the serialized extracts are identical to passages in the scurrilous Memoirs of Perdita: the account of her purported first love-tryst in the inn at Richmond, her encounter with the well-endowed sailor in the moving coach, the Prince in her bedroom, a gift of champagne from a wealthy merchant, the affair with Malden, an unsavoury incident involving a Jew at Margate. It can reasonably be assumed that the surviving Memoirs of Perdita is a reprint of the Annals of Gallantry with a new title page (still dated 1784). This strongly suggests that the first full-length ‘biography’ of Mary was written at the time of the Westminster election with the specific purpose of discrediting her because of her political activities on behalf of the Foxites. In this sense, her political commitment cost her dearly in respect of her long-term reputation.

  The Memoirs of Perdita was published by a politically engaged bookseller named Lister. Around the same time, he also attacked Fox via his sex life in a very similar work entitled The Amours of Carlo Khan. Elizabeth Armistead is the main female interest here, but one chapter provides a fictionalized account of Fox’s affair with Perdita, rendered in a style more comic than lascivious. Perdita spends most of her time complaining that she has failed to seduce Edmund Burke: ‘though I admire the sublimity of his oratory, I neither look upon him as the man of business, nor the man of pleasure: for were I disposed to grant him the last favour, instead of coming to the point, he would read me a lecture upon the beautiful protuberance of my bosom, or the elegant variations of the curves in my limbs’.13 As a helpful footnote indicates, the language parodied here is that of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.

  Lister also published The Effusions of Love: being the Amorous Correspondence between the Amiable Florizel, and the Enchanting Perdita, in a series of letters, faithfully transcribed from the original Epistles and Billets-doux in Possession of the Editor. Again, the satire is handled with a light touch. The epistles mock the language of sensibility which the original correspondence between the Prince and the actress unquestionably did use; ‘Florizel’ frequently drops into French, as the Prince indeed would have done; the opportunity is taken to mock Perdita for her succession of lovers from Sir John Lade to Fox to Tarleton, and for her extravagant taste, particularly in the matter of transportation; but the material never approaches the salaciousness of the Memoirs of Perdita. The purpose was to entertain male readers as much as to chip away at the credibility of the Foxites and the heir-apparent.

  Mary was reputedly being maintained by a combination of the Prince’s annuity and subventions from Fox, but in reality she was struggling financially. At the beginning of May it was reported that she had a sheriff instead of a prince in her house and that her thousand-guinea vis-à-vis was to be sold. The Morning Herald issued one of its denials, combined with some fresh double entendres: the carriage was still in the possession of the fair one, but she had dispensed with ‘one of her flaunting footmen’. ‘The body,’ continued the report, ‘still appears well hung, and the wheels run as free as ever.’14

  Rumours of one sort and another continued to abound, for instance that she had designed a ‘toilet’ or dressing area of a circular form, contrived so that when she sat in the middle of it she could see all parts of her person at one view – she was supposed to be expecting ‘a patent for the sale of it’.15 Needless to say, this accusation of vanity was published in the Morning Post, where there was also an article saying that Mary was now so short of money she could neither afford to attend the masquerade nor to pay her tame editor for a newspaper puff concerning her appearance there. The pro-Pitt Morning Post simply could not forgive or forget Mary’s public support for Fox in the streets of Westminster. Well over a month after the end of the campaign, it was reported that the white silk banner ‘Sacred to female Patriotism’ that had been sported in Fox’s victory procession to Whitehall was ‘to be given to the Perdita for her memorable exertions in the service of the people!’16 And again, two weeks later: ‘The Cyprian divinity of Berkeley-square is said to be on her last legs. Thus the fate of the Buff and Blue extends through all their connexions; famine and disgrace bringing up the rear!’17 The invective against ‘the Perdita’ as leader of ‘the electioneering petticoat squad’18 filled the pages of the Morning Post throughout the summer.

  That phrase ‘on her last legs’, an allusion at once to her illness and her financial embarrassment, inspired a particularly cruel caricature which served as frontispiece to the August issue of the Rambler’s Magazine. Entitled ‘Perdita upon her last legs’, it shows her as a streetwalker, wearing a ragged low-cut dress. Her legs are thin and shrivelled. Posters advertising Florizel and Perdita and Jane Shore (the tragedy of a rejected royal mistress) are pinned on the wall as a reminder of the stage career in which those same legs had been so admired. She is begging from the Prince, who hands her a purse. An accompanying article, with the subtitle ‘the lamentations of a Magdalen’, has her complaining that she has been ‘Forsaken by my P—, neglected by my c—l’, that she is losing her looks to disease, and that her admired eyes are no longer shining so brightly.19

  Tarleton and Mary spent the summer season in Brighton. It was not only fashionable – the Prince was there, with the Dukes of Chartres and Lauzun – but also afforded opportunities for treatment of the acute rheumatic fever, which had recurred. They stayed at the Ship Inn, from where a desperate Mary, knowing that the Prince was in town, appealed to him for help. His reply expressed his concern, but was cautious about any further financial assistance. He promised to visit her late in the evening. We do not know whether he made good on that assurance.

  Mary kept the letter and treasured it for the rest of her life. Since she had been forced to return the ‘Florizel’ correspondence, this was the only letter of the Prince’s that was hers to preserve. It is now bound together with the original manuscript of her Memoirs:

&nb
sp; Dear Mrs Robinson

  I have receiv’d your Letter, and it really quite overcomes me, the scene of distress you so pathetically paint. I will certainly wait upon you, but I am afraid it will be late before I can come to the Ship, as I have company with me. Should it be within the compass of my means to secure you from the abyss you apprehend that is before you, and for which you mention Mr Brent, I need not say that the temptation of gratifying others and at the same time, and by the same means, making one’s self happy, is too alluring to be neglected a single moment; however you must allow me to be thus explicit and candid, that it must in great measure depend upon the extent of what will be necessary to be done for your service, and how far my funds may be adequate, as well as my powers equal to attain that object. In the mean time only rest assured of my good wishes and good intentions. I am dear Mrs Robinson, very sincerely yours George.20

  ‘Mr Brent’ was presumably one of the creditors beating on Mary’s door. For all the tenderness expressed here, neither the Prince nor anyone else bailed her out this time: the abyss opened before her.

  An execution on her property was placed by the Sheriff of Middlesex, and her belongings were auctioned off by Messrs Hutchins, Boulton, and Philips of King Street, Covent Garden. The famed vis-à-vis was finally disposed of; her Gainsborough painting went for just over thirty guineas. The sale also included other mementoes such as the Prince’s lock of hair. Before starting the proceedings, the auctioneers stated that if anyone would pay or give security for £250 the goods would be returned to their owner. But no one came forward. The one valuable that Mary was able to hold back from the sale was the diamond-encrusted miniature portrait of the Prince that she had worn next to her bosom for so long.

  The combination of bankrupty, ill repute, and degenerative disease was enough to drive her from the country. On 13 August 1784 it was announced that ‘Mrs Robinson has been obliged within these few days to leave England for the Continent for the recovery of her health. She has lost almost the use of her limbs, and upon her journey was lifted in and out of her carriage. Her disorder is a rheumatic gout of so obstinate a nature that her recovery is doubtful.’21 When it came to the time for embarkation, she would have been carried into a rowing boat and then lifted onto the cross-Channel ‘packet’.