The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  Like Tom Wilson, another of Sam’s correspondents given to moralising had wished him congratulations on his appointment to office, but also offered an interesting benediction. He ‘hoped with great sincerity’ that ‘… whatever you publish hereafter will be an honour to your name and character.’ Derrick chose to ignore these well-intentioned words. After 1762, there was no need for Sam to continue as editor of the Harris’s List; his duties as Master of the Ceremonies would have consumed most of his time. Moreover, his connection with such a publication was not an ideal one, in light of his recent promotion in society. With his comfortable life and the income of a gentleman, he would no longer have been reliant upon the revenue generated through the List’s sale. However, the Harris’s List had been for Derrick not merely a money-spinning opportunity that had broken him out of a spunging house but, remarkably, it also became a responsibility that he owed to a community of women. His role in the List’s creation was one he took seriously and regarded as a contribution to the betterment of the lives of the women who over the years had become some of the truest friends he was ever to know. For all that Bath offered, Derrick felt that he owed something more significant to those in the Garden. He never forgot the filles de joye who not only supported him but to whom he owed his first and only literary success.

  For most of his reign, Derrick led a double life, appearing upstanding in the eyes of his subjects and continuing in much the same vein as he always had in the company of his loose-living friends. If anything, he had become better at concealing his true nature. When not under the gaze of his public, he joined in the spirited fun of Bath’s drinking and dining societies and dabbled in producing plays at Bath’s Theatre Royal (much to the annoyance of its theatrical manager). Now at liberty to travel in his own carriage, he also made frequent visits to London, where he called upon both male and female friends from his past. In spite of his posturing and attempts to hide his slightly rough-edged personality behind deep bows and flattery, he had no more abandoned his vices than he had gained religion. Inevitably, Sam could not prevent the wags from revealing his secret side to the public, although thankfully they waited until he was comfortably in his grave to blow his cover. If there had been any doubt as to the true nature of the seemingly well-polished Master of the Ceremonies, then Derrick’s Jests soon put an end to it. This was the man who many of the male visitors to Bath remembered from the Bedford Coffee House: a slightly ludicrous beau-nasty with poor personal hygiene and a sparkling wit. This was a man with a foul mouth, who in this compendium of quotes revealed a disdain for the elaborate codes of propriety, who liked to abandon formality with the claim that he ‘was only paid for being ceremonious in the Long-room’. This Sam Derrick revelled in his sharp retorts to dreary matrons, and announced with no pretension ‘when I … die, I desire only a foot-stone to my grave, inscribed, Pray don’t piss here!’ What Derrick’s Jests laid bear was that this Sam Derrick, in spite of his convincingly polished demeanour, was in his heart more at ease in the disreputable circus of Covent Garden than the glorious parade of Bath.

  There were those, of course, who in spite of Derrick’s elaborate posturing never failed to recognise this and shunned his company. He was no gentleman and never would be. On more than one occasion Sam complained bitterly of ‘being used extremely ill’ by those he believed to be allies. Friends from his long-buried Dublin past had refused to acknowledge him, and when certain individuals who had willingly subscribed to his sham politeness caught wind of his true nature they abandoned him. More than any other treachery inflicted upon him, Sam was unable to forgive Jane Lessingham for her behaviour on what was to be their final encounter. In the years following his appointment as King of Bath, at a time when Jane’s theatrical career was also flourishing, Sam thought it an appropriate moment to effect a reconciliation between them. While in London, he had called upon her at her fashionable lodgings in Pall Mall. Arriving at her door, he presented his card to her manservant, who returned to inform Derrick, ‘His mistress knew no-one of that name’. Sam had not expected such a curt rejection from a woman who had once adopted the name of ‘Mrs Derrick’. Offended and shocked, he barged into her apartments. An argument ensued; Jane burst into terrified tears, hurling caustic insults, before the constable was called and Derrick, fearing a brush with the law, fled in disgrace. It was a blow from which Sam was thought never to have recovered.

  Although a wistful coda to his story, his altercation with Mrs Lessingham was hardly likely to have been the reason for his decline of health in his forties. At some point, a penchant for excessive drinking, careless sex and periods of living rough was guaranteed to take its toll on a body weakened by years of poor nourishment and exposure to the elements. As early as 1760, Derrick was complaining of illness to George Faulkner, although whether this was the same disorder that would later claim his life is unknown. It would not be unreasonable to believe that Derrick may have suffered from a variety of venereal afflictions, not uncommon in men who chased whores around Covent Garden Piazza. Such was the fate of Derrick’s so-called friend, James Boswell, who eventually died from the complications of syphilis. Whether it was the presence of one of these ailments that accounts for his slow deterioration later in life is left to conjecture. Whatever his complaint, it appears to have caught up with him during the summer of 1768. Derrick suffered through that autumn and winter, supposedly nursed by a young actress called Maria Hedges, whom he had seen at the Haymarket in a performance of The Spanish Fryar. Not unlike Nash before him, Derrick’s choice of fresh-faced mistress set Bath tongues tutting. It was whispered that she had worn him out with her extreme sexual appetite and that the poor forty-five-year-old Master of the Ceremonies was forced to take stimulants to keep up with her.

  Mercifully for the Corporation of Bath, their second Master of the Ceremonies took several months to expire. It provided them with ample time to locate and elect a replacement, while Sam languished on his deathbed in Tunbridge Wells. Such was the importance of the position in the eighteenth century that the London newspapers provided their readerships with regular updates as to the King of Bath’s condition. Finally, on 28 March 1769, when the pleasurable reign of Samuel Derrick had come to a close, the ‘wits of Bath’, who had restrained themselves so politely for eight years, took off their gloves. The satirical press had a field day exposing the shadowy side of their deceased king’s character. As no one knew the true cause of Sam’s fatal illness, ‘the wits’ were all too eager to step into the breach and offer their own explanations. One claimed that he had caught a chill in the early months of autumn when a fellow Irishman whipped off the Master of the Ceremonies’ wig and exposed his delicate pate to the cold. Others pointed to Sam’s notorious libido as the root cause, suggesting that he had accidentally poisoned himself by ingesting ‘a surfeit of cantharides’ (or aphrodisiacs). It is hardly surprising that the general public were more inclined to believe the latter.

  In life, Sam Derrick had never adhered to the conventional or the practical and in death he chose to remain consistent. In spite of his handsome income, enough to maintain a household, his stables and a well-appointed table, Sam Derrick never bothered to file a legally valid will. On his deathbed the dawn broke over an embarrassing revelation: the King of Bath was penniless. As he lay dying, the man who never abandoned his hope of one day becoming a celebrated poet was forced to raise yet one more subscription. This one would be to pay for his doctor’s bills and for the expenses of his funeral. Perhaps the wealthy sojourners of Bath who had contributed to his comfortable living as Master of the Ceremonies had tired of supporting Derrick and his literary flights of fancy; in his time of need, they failed to come to his assistance. The parsimonious gentry raised, in total, five shillings. By the time of his death, his borrowing had exhausted the goodwill of friends and shop-keepers alike. He had no proper assets, no land, no stock, no true wealth. He had virtually no possessions that he could lay claim to owning outright. Everything belonged to his creditors, from his sil
verware down to his set of false teeth. Everything, that was, but for his yet unpublished, newly updated Harris’s List for 1769.

  That belonged to Charlotte Hayes.

  16

  ‘WHORE RAISING, OR Horse Racing

  HOW TO BROOD A MARE OR MAKE SENSE OF A FOAL-LY’

  DURING THE EARLY months of 1769, while London’s carriage wheels and shoe heels still skidded across icy streets, Charlotte’s thoughts were not on the usual matters of her business. As the purchase of the Clay Hill estate neared its final stage, a number of concerns preoccupied her thoughts. There were promissory notes still to be paid, bills from victuallers, vintners and dressmakers accruing rapidly. Although Santa Charlotta’s clientele expected her ladies to be dressed in the finest gowns and to be fed at a genteelly laid table, such lavish entertainment cost dearly. While her exclusivity entitled her to prise banknotes from her gentlemen’s purses, not all of those hefty sums reached the donation box of the King’s Place nunnery. ‘The Friar’ was known to dip his hand into the coffers before joining his cronies on the turf or at the gaming tables. The result was a precarious cash flow, one that had Charlotte frequently sitting with some discomfort on the edge of her seat. Although financial worries tended to feature with regularity in Charlotte’s and Dennis’s lives, this year they would merely form the backdrop to a whirlwind of affairs, both trying and exhilarating.

  The year was to begin with two surprises: one of death and one of life. Only a few months into 1769, the news of Samuel Derrick’s death found her. True to his theatrical nature, Sam’s expiration had been a laboriously protracted affair, something that had dragged on for weeks and then months as society waited for the King of Bath to take his last breath. For Charlotte, the final announcement that came at the end of March could not have been a surprise, but the events that followed it would have been. Sam had been like so many other men that Charlotte had known; what little they had was spent immediately, sometimes before it was even in their hands. Men like Sam Derrick always left a trail of insolvency behind them and were forever hounded by a pack of avaricious creditors, who chased them to their graves. In the end, nature had swallowed Sam up as it had yielded him: with no legitimate heirs to his blood and no significant possessions to his name. While he lived Sam had never allowed circumstances dampen his sense of humour. As the hour of his death approached, his outlook was no different. As a parting gesture to the world he penned an unofficial will: a final piece of spurious writing by which his friends might remember the Master of the Ceremonies at Bath. Whether this was intended to be seen by anyone other than Derrick’s most intimate companions is questionable. Invariably, the hands into which it fell viewed it as a fitting tribute to the true, but carefully hidden nature of the former King of Bath. Upon its publication, all of England was free to learn of its contents, including Derrick’s confession that he authored the notorious Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies.

  Of the few items to which he could lay claim, his yet-unpublished writings of a bawdy nature, which he had become accustomed to secreting from the general knowledge of his subjects at Bath, he bequeathed to ‘My Old friend and mistress, Charlotte Hayes’, in the hope that she might be able to profit from their appearance in print. Among these works he included, cleverly, ‘My new edition of Harris’s List’, of which ‘the profits of the sale of the first impression’ were reserved for Charlotte. It is unlikely that his hungry creditors would have scented this ploy. Lumped in with Derrick’s usual worthless catch-penny pamphlets was a nugget of pure gold. If contemporary claims are to be believed, the Harris’s List had a circulation of approximately 8,000. If each copy sold for its stated price of two shillings and sixpence, then the entire production would have generated no less than £2,400, an astronomical profit to be split between the publisher and the author, or, in this case, the author’s beneficiary. The lures of Covent Garden’s ladies evidently didn’t appeal to the worthy gentlemen and tradespeople who had extended credit to Sam Derrick. Thankfully, they had never been acquainted with the Master of the Ceremonies’ other occupation, nor the popularity of his work. He had slipped this one by them and they were none the wiser. Charlotte, on the other hand, who knew the price of flesh and the sums its sale commanded, would have recognised the generosity of this gesture immediately.

  As Charlotte aged, the tide of the years would have rubbed away many sharp memories of earlier lovers. This abrupt reminder of her past, and the decease of a man with whom she had been intimate, would have stirred her thoughts. In her days of foolish extravagance, Sam Derrick offered her the adoration that she desired, but without the funds by which to support it. They had loved and assisted one another as much as was possible under the circumstances. Charlotte had always proved generous to Sam when others remained tight-fisted. She indulged him, fed him, sheltered him and lent him money, which he promised to repay once in receipt of his ever-elusive inheritance. In return he could only offer affection and occasional protection from the law. After the passing of so much time, Derrick’s gift would have been wholly unanticipated. It would have come as an unwarranted act of kindness, a repayment for a debt that, in the comfort of her position in St James’s, she had long since forgotten.

  Whether the profits of the List assisted Charlotte out of a tight spot in 1769 is unknown. It is likely that the bequest became simply another contribution to the maintenance of her empire. As one who expressed genuine concern for the condition of ladies of town, in the end, Sam may have gained some satisfaction in the temporary equation he had created, whereby the proceeds of prostitution were recycled back into the hands of those who practised the profession.

  While Sam Derrick’s death and his unexpected gift would have unsettled Charlotte, the revelation that came hard on its heels completely overwhelmed her. She was pregnant. It was a turn of events that neither she nor Dennis could have foreseen. If she proved fertile in her early forties, then it is more than likely that this was not her first encounter with potential motherhood, although evidence suggests that this pregnancy may have been one of the few that she decided to keep. In mid-eighteenth-century London, infant mortality was approaching fifty per cent, a tragic statistic implying that nearly half of all children born within the metropolis were dead by the age of three. Many of these deaths may have been intentional; others would have been brought about by a proliferation of diseases and untimely accidents. Furthermore, many pregnancies never made it to the stage of producing a live birth, especially those conceived in a prostitute’s line of work. The city was filled with surgeons, midwives and quacks willing to perform abortions, or peddling potions that promised to ‘remove obstructions’ from the womb. Every prostitute would have learned what combination of powders and herbs was required from an apothecary’s shop to bring on miscarriages, or what solutions could be used after the sexual act to douche away ‘the pernicious seed’. When these measures did not work and nine months of discomfort and fear ended with an unavoidable birth, the desperate resorted to infanticide. There were, however, other options for those who did not want to risk their own necks by committing murder, or who could not bring themselves to leave their child in the cold or smother it in its sleep. The practice of abandoning babies on the steps of parish churches was superseded, if only temporarily, by the establishment of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital in 1741. Within the first four years of opening its doors, 15,000 infants were placed into its care. Those who could manage to secure a place for their progeny in the overcrowded sanctuary of the Foundling Hospital were among the fortunate few. For those not so lucky, there were other means of disposing of babies. Nursemaids, frequently described as being ‘indigent, filthy and decrepit women’, would take infants into their homes for small fees. Once a mother had left her swaddled child in the arms of one of these untrustworthy matrons, who made their living by farming babies, she was not obliged to return. London was large enough to swallow up the anonymous. As a result, regardless of the good intentions of Captain Coram, the metropolis remained
awash with begging, starving, parentless boys and girls, a fair number of whom had been the fruit of a union between a prostitute and her pleasure-seeker.

  Sexually active since her early teens, in order for Charlotte to have remained childless after roughly thirty years of frequent intercourse she too would have been forced to resort to a number of these measures. In an era devoid of effective contraception as well as prophylactics, the menace of undesired conception, and how to rid oneself of it, would have been a constant worry for ladies of the town. A pregnant prostitute, unless guaranteed of the continuing support of a keeper, would suddenly have found herself with no means of earning an income. Only fetishists sought out the services of those with swollen maternal bellies. When men paid for sex with women, they weren’t interested in the consequences or being reminded of them. Callous, wealthy keepers might even be tempted to cut their mistress loose in order to avoid complications that threatened to involve their families and inheritances. Kinder ones might embrace the prospect of fatherhood with joy, but which of these reactions a mistress might meet with was entirely unknown. It was easier to simply terminate the pregnancy than to run the risk of starvation and homelessness.

  Whether Charlotte had brought any of her previous pregnancies to term is a mystery. So are the fates of the children she may have born. One thing is for certain, until 1769, there is no evidence that any of them lived with her and Dennis. It seems, however, that she had every intention of keeping this pregnancy. From the outset, plans were made for the child’s birth. Charlotte announced her desire to retire towards the end of the year and made arrangements to leave ‘the direction of the seminary to a trusty deputy.’ Publicly, she claimed that her intention was to live quietly for a while, but those closest to her recognised the coded meaning in the phrase. Her lying-in was to take place at the couple’s original residence in Great Marlborough Street. According to Town and Country, she and Dennis took two contiguous houses ‘in order to have a door of communication to one another, and by that means, confer with greater ease’. It is more likely that one house was intended as a nursery, a place where, after the birth of their baby, the child might be reared with a degree of discretion, removed from the bustle of wanton associates and activities that were bound to take place next door.