Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  Needless to say, a few days later the editor of the Morning Post found himself unable to resist a bout of moralizing on the news:

  The example of the Perdita, which two or three years ago was of the most dangerous kind to the beautiful and the thoughtless of her sex, is now as salutary; a life of wanton dissipation has reduced her to penury and distress; poverty, with all its horrors, surrounds her; her constitution and the use of her limbs are gone; death stares her in the face, and no comfort is left but the recollection of such actions as contradicted the general tenor of her conduct. To view the Perdita now, would be a lesson indeed!22

  PART THREE

  Woman of Letters

  CHAPTER 17

  Exile

  Mrs Robinson lived chiefly on the continent for nearly five years, and on her return home in 1788, she commenced her literary labours. We congratulate herself and the public that her mind took this more satisfactory turn; because it afforded not only an improved use of time, but has been the cause of engaging her attention to general delight.

  William Godwin, ‘Character of Mary Robinson’

  Wrapped in fur and fleecy hosiery, Mary huddled close to Tarleton on the deck of the Brighton – Dieppe packet boat. The Colonel and his lover, accompanied by her mother and young Maria Elizabeth, were setting off for the Continent in search of health cures and freedom from their creditors. They arrived in Paris with hardly any money and Mary in very poor health.

  In October 1784, Tarleton’s brother John crossed the English Channel and traced them to the Hôtel de Russie on the rue de Richelieu. He sent a report back to his mother:

  The Colonel and myself have met several times, and we seem to be on friendly terms – I have dined with him and he has returned the compliment. Mrs R. is in a bad state of health and cannot in my opinion survive the Winter, as she is most dreadfully afflicted with the Rheumatism. I had the satisfaction of dining with him on Friday last, and was informed that she intended to reside here the whole season if her health would permit her.1

  The newspapers back home still took an interest in them: there were paragraphs referring to Tarleton’s boast that he had ‘killed more men, and ruined more women, than any other man in Europe’ and to how ‘the lovely, though ill-fated Mrs Robinson’ was ‘the now too verified Perdita’ – in other words, she really was ‘the lost one’. With the onset of winter, they seem to have headed south to the Côte d’Azur. The Morning Post reported that Perdita was ‘in the South of France’, wintering ‘upon the scanty pittance gleaned from the Remnant of her amorous treasures’.2 They apparently stayed for a few weeks in the resort of Villefranche, near Nice.

  By mid-January they had returned to Paris. From there, Mary wrote one of her very few surviving letters to the Prince. It is, of course, about money:

  Jan[uar]y 17th 1785, Hotel de Russie, rue de Richelieu, Paris

  My dear Sir,

  Colonel Hotham will perhaps inform your Royal Highness of my having apply’d for the last quarters annuity, if it is more convenient to you to pay it half yearly, I will with pleasure wait till that time, wishing in every respect to do what is most agreable [sic] to your Royal Highness.

  I should not have made any application to Colonel Hotham, but being in want of money (on account of Lord Maldens neglecting to pay his annuity these fifteen months past,) – will I trust be deem’d a sufficient apology. –

  As I fear I shall not dare return to England for some time, I shall be infinitely happy in executing any orders your Royal Highness will honor me with during my residence in Paris. I have the honor of subscribing myself

  Your Royal Highness’s affectionate and faithful servant

  Mary Robinson3

  It was a shrewd move to prick the Prince’s conscience by telling him of Malden’s failure to keep up with his annuity.

  Another ex-lover, the Duke of Lauzun, came to Mary’s assistance. In February she was reported to be at his chateau in the country, ‘much invalided’.4 All this travelling won Colonel Tarleton and Mrs Robinson a new nickname back home: ‘The Wandering Lovers’.5 They considered the possibility of wandering south to Italy, where Mary’s merchant brothers lived. John, her elder brother, had offered to take her in; she seems to have seriously contemplated a permanent move to Leghorn, far from the ‘calumny and persecution’ of her life in England.

  Despite her absence, Mary remained in the public eye in London for a few more months. That summer Thomas Rowlandson completed a watercolour panorama of the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. It was engraved and widely circulated, becoming an iconic image of the fashionable world. It depicted an evening scene, with full orchestra and a famous soprano singing from a balcony. In the supper box beneath the orchestra sits Dr Johnson (who had actually died the previous year) with his friends James Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith (also dead), and Mrs Hester Thrale. In the foreground are the Duchess of Devonshire and her sister Lady Duncannon arm in arm. On the right stands the Prince of Wales, whispering to Mrs Robinson. Her arm is linked with that of her husband – unflatteringly shown as short and stooped, ugly and elderly. Mrs Robinson is beautifully dressed, wearing one of her trademark hats. She is imagined in her prime, slim and lovely, with no sign of her lameness.

  Mary’s doctor suggested that the spa town of Aix-la-Chapelle in Germany would be a more suitable destination than Italy. Now known as Aachen, it retains the status it had then as one of Europe’s leading health resorts. Mary and Tarleton took up residence there and started on a joint literary work: an account of the Colonel’s military campaigns in America. According to the testimony of 10-year-old Maria Elizabeth, who was with them, these were the most tranquil and in many respects happiest months of her mother’s life. In their four years together, Mary’s relationship with Tarleton had been beset with difficulties. As well as coping with the intense public interest in their lives, Mary was continually aware of the fact that Tarleton’s family disapproved of the union. Other pressures were of their own making. The lovers were known for their fiery temperaments, both were flirtatious and attractive to the opposite sex, they were extravagant and struggled financially in keeping up with their aristocratic friends. Mary’s accident and ensuing paralysis had forged a bond between them, but was it strong enough to withstand poverty and exile?

  Love affairs between famous people can be severely put to the test when they are out of the public eye, but in this case Mary and Tarleton’s relationship strengthened during their years abroad. Mary had her lover to herself, her health was improving, and they were working together, sharing each other’s talents: as they pored over the source documents for the History of the Campaigns – pamphlets, order books, memoranda, letters from commanding officer Cornwallis – she became intimate for the first time with his military life, his courage and endurance, while he had the opportunity to share in her gift for writing.

  For young Maria Elizabeth, time abroad provided an opportunity to learn foreign languages and read widely: she was tutored by a Frenchman, an ‘excellent master’ who was ‘acquainted with all the modern languages’ and who brought a certain frisson to the household by virtue of his claim to have been the tutor of the young woman who was the real-life original of Charlotte, the epitome of the sentimental heroine in Goethe’s hugely influential novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.6

  They did not devote themselves exclusively to the quiet life of the writer. There was plenty of new society in the fashionable spa town. The Duke and Duchess of Chatelet became particular friends. ‘Balls, concerts, rural breakfasts, succeeded to each other in gay and attractive variety’, not least in order to take Mary’s mind off her physical pain: ‘when compelled by severer paroxysms of her malady to seclude herself from their society, a thousand kind stratagems were planned and executed to relieve her sufferings, or soften the dejection to which they unavoidably gave rise’. The baths afforded the best available relief and they were made as inviting as possible: ‘Sometimes, on entering her dark and melancholy bath, the gloom of which was increased by
high grated windows, she beheld the surface of the water covered with rose-leaves, while the vapour baths were impregnated with aromatic odours.’ The Duke and Duchess’s nephews and niece did everything they could to cheer her spirits: when Mary could not sleep for pain, they stood beneath her window and sang her favourite songs to the accompaniment of a mandolin.

  News of her literary endeavours filtered back to London. The Morning Herald announced that she had written a comic opera set in Villefranche, the principal character being ‘a pretended experimental philosopher, who is visited by Ladies of all nations to learn the effect of animal magnetism’.7 This would presumably have been a satire on James Graham and his Celestial Bed, though the setting suggests that she may have encountered some further fashionable eccentricities during her brief residence on the French Riviera. The work was never finished.

  In December 1785, Mary’s father, Nicholas Darby, who had become a Captain in the Russian Navy, died and was buried with full military honours. From the whale fisheries of Labrador via the assault on Gibraltar to the Navy of Catherine the Great: it had been a colourful life. He garnered some respectful obituaries, though Mary always resented the fact that he was accepted more fully into the Russian Navy than the British. She wrote a long and somewhat verbose elegy to his memory. On a foreign shore herself, she was acutely aware that her father had died an exile and that she might suffer the same fate herself. As far as is known, her mother Hester lived with her on the Continent – she would have looked after Maria Elizabeth when Mary was working – but there is no record of her reaction to the news of the death of her estranged husband.

  During this time, Tarleton made periodic trips home in order to deal with his parlous financial affairs and pursue the possibility of new postings. Nothing came his way, but he no doubt returned with all the latest society gossip. The ton was agog with news of the Prince of Wales’s affair with an older woman of the Roman Catholic faith, Maria Fitzherbert. Their clandestine marriage was an open secret in high society. The Prince’s relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert provoked a new round of caricatures, in which Perdita frequently appeared in the role of a jilted lover.

  On 14 July 1786 London society reacted with shock to the news of the sudden death of Mary Robinson in Paris, where she had been living in exile with her lover. The story was broken in a full-column report in the Morning Post: ‘Mrs Robinson, the once famous Perdita, died a few days ago at Paris.’8

  The obituary told of her rise from her obscure origins as an illegitimate child to her brief moment of fame as renowned actress and first mistress of the Prince of Wales. Courted by the rich and famous, she had enjoyed many love affairs before securing her place as a leader of the fashionable world and a dabbler in poetry. But once she retired to the Continent, the obituarist continued, her admirers lost interest in both her life and her poetry. She was abandoned by her lovers, sank into obscurity, and died in poverty.

  The Morning Post described her as ‘genteel in her manners, delicate in her person, and beautiful in her features’. It also acknowledged her literary abilities and her humanity, citing her kindness to her fellow actress Mrs Baddeley when she was at her lowest ebb. Had Perdita ‘walked in the paths of virtue and peace’ she ‘would have been an ornament to her sex … but a strong propensity to dissipation and the haut ton overcame her virtue and her sense’. In mock-tribute to her reputation as a poet, the Morning Post added the following verse couplet ‘as a good natured hint to the Cyprian multitude’: ‘Let coxcombs flatter, and let fools adore, / Here learn the lesson to be vain no more!’

  But Mary Robinson had not died in Paris. She was alive and well in a spa town in Germany. Three weeks later the Morning Post printed her witty response to the obituary:

  Aux Bains de la Rose

  Aix-la-Chapelle, Germany, July 20, 1786

  SIR,

  With astonishment I read in a Morning Post, of the 14th instant, a long account of my death, and a variety of circumstances respecting my life, equally void of the smallest foundation.

  I have the satisfaction of informing you, that so far from being dead, I am in the most perfect state of health; except a trifling lameness, of which, by the use of the baths at this place, I have every reason to hope I shall recover in a month or six weeks. I propose passing my winter in London, having been near two years upon the continent, though not at Paris half the time.9

  Mary had not lost her keen sense of the best way to handle the press and its readers. She had long been accustomed to dealing with scandal and gossip. The renewal of the old allegations about her sexual dissipation must have stung, yet the characteristically good-humoured opening sentences of her letter deflated the overblown vitriol of the Morning Post’s report. Having gained the readers’ sympathy and support, she made no attempt to deny the cruel and lewd remarks levied against her. She simply corrected the erroneous facts regarding the circumstances of her birth, pointing out that she was not illegitimate but was the daughter of the recently deceased Captain Darby. Her mother was not an innkeeper, as the obituary had asserted, but was descended from a highly respectable family, the Seys of Boverton Castle in Glamorganshire. She was from the mercantile hub of Bristol, not, as had been suggested, the Somerset backwater of Ilminster (‘a place to which I am a total stranger’). Her schooling, she reported, had been under the tutelage of the moralist and Evangelical writer, Hannah More.

  Mary ended her letter with an appeal to the finer instincts of the editor: ‘As a man of feeling, I request you to contradict the report, with candour, and all possible expedition. I have brothers in Italy, who will experience the greatest anxiety, should such a detail reach their ears.’ She also stressed that her absence from home made her especially vulnerable: ‘I am fully convinced, that your knowledge of the world, and liberal sentiments, will induce you to render justice to a person, whose absence requires an advocate.’ The Morning Post made no apology or retraction, but at least it printed the letter.

  In January 1787 Tarleton was back in London. He was spotted at a levee (morning party) and the papers reported that his ‘History of the Campaigns in Virginia and the Neighboring Provinces is well spoken of by those who have seen the manuscript’. The Morning Herald quipped: ‘on this occasion we may say with Shakespeare “What, the sword and the pen, – do you study both, Mr Colonel?”’10 It was widely assumed that Mrs Robinson’s pen had done much of the work on her lover’s behalf. The book was published in March and well reviewed. But the History of the Campaigns did not make Tarleton’s fortune. He tried another course, becoming a professional gambler, with his own ‘faro bank’ (casino) at Daubigney’s Tavern. Though he professed to despise affairs of honour, he also became involved in a duel, acting as second to the adventurer and man about town, Colonel Hanger.

  Still struggling with her lameness, Mary decided to try the hot mud baths at St Amand les Eaux in Flanders (now near the border between France and Belgium). Though a smaller and less fashionable resort than Aix, it was prettily located on the edge of a forest and had the advantage of specializing – as it still does – in the treatment of rheumatism. Mary made several visits to the mud baths before she could be persuaded to enter the ditches. She was horrified by the experience of being immersed in mud and by the ‘reptiles, unknown to other soils, which fasten on the bodies of those who bathe’.11 But she eventually submitted herself to the treatment, encouraged by the reports of her fellow visitors on the ‘wonderful efficacy’ of the cure.

  She rented ‘a small but beautiful cottage near the springs’ and passed the summer of 1787 there. Pasted into the original manuscript of her Memoirs there is a neat sepia sketch of the cottage, probably the work of her teenage daughter. It shows a long low building, with five windows at the front and four dormers above; two awnings are pulled down to provide shade; there is a picket fence, a grove of trees to the right, and a little arbour in front. The painting has the feel of Marie Antoinette playing the role of a shepherdess. Mary was always aware of the fleeting quality of things,
whether fame or tranquillity. The cottage that had given her such a sense of peace and serenity subsequently became the headquarters of a republican French General during the revolutionary wars that swept across Europe in the 1790s: ‘These peaceful vales and venerable woods were, at no distant period, destined to become the seat of war and devastation.’12 Having completed her work on Tarleton’s book, she had more time for her own poetry. A ‘Sonnet to the Evening’ that was ‘written under a tree, in the Woods of St Amand, in Flanders’ gives a sense of her mood at this time. It begins with pensive reflection in the ‘sweet balmy hour’ of dusk, but then turns in the sestet to a tone of melancholy:

  Oft do I seek thy shade, dear withering tree,

  Sad emblem of my own disastrous state!

  Doom’d in the spring of life, alas! like thee,

  To fade, and droop beneath the frowns of Fate;

  Like thee, may Heaven to me the meed bestow,

  To shelter sorrow’s child, and soothe the tear of wo[e].13

  By the autumn of 1787 her health was supposedly ‘entirely recovered’.14 She returned to Paris and stayed in the Hôtel d’Angleterre. Whilst there, she published some well-received poems in the French press. The New Year brought reports of her imminent return across the Channel, though now it was said that she was still in very poor health: ‘The return of Mrs Robinson to England is an event that may be expected in a week or little better. She has appealed without success to every remedy on the continent for the restoration of her limbs, and has now the contemplation to try the Bath waters.’15 Come the end of January, she was installed, together with mother and daughter, at 45 Clarges Street in Mayfair, very close to Devonshire House, the London home of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. Number 45 was at the end of the street closest to Piccadilly, just opposite the entrance to Green Park. Tarleton was lodging a few doors away at number 30. The Morning Post took a pessimistic view of her health, both physical and mental: ‘Mrs Robinson, though better than when she left England, has returned in a very weakly situation, and appears deeply affected and oppressed in spirits.’16