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The Prince's Mistress
A Life of Mary Robinson
By Hester Davenport The History Press
Copyright © 2011 Hester Davenport
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7204-1
CHAPTER 1
Bristol Belle
She possessed surprising beauty, such as I have rarely seen equalled in any woman, and might well rescue her and my native city, Bristol, from the imputation of producing females deficient in that endowment.
(Nicholas Wraxall, Historical and Posthumous Memoirs)
According to her own note, it was on Sunday 14 January 1798 that Mrs Mary Robinson began to write her memoirs. A striking-looking woman in her early forties, tall and elegant, she was living with her daughter Maria at 1 Clifford Street in London's fashionable West End. The furnishings of the room where she sat would have matched the elegance of her appearance. But she was not to be envied, for she was pitiably crippled. Even with crutches she could scarcely move around, and she was dependent on servants to carry her up and down stairs, or to her coach for an outing. Frequent bouts of illness incapacitated her further; only ten days later a newspaper, the Oracle, reported that she was in bed 'with a nervous fever, which threatens the most serious consequences'. There are few women whose health is the subject of press bulletins, but Mrs Robinson was a celebrity, in the news for her fifth and most ambitious novel, Walsingham, which the Morning Post described as 'one of the most entertaining [novels] ever published ... full of interest, full of anecdote of fashionable life', its satire rendering 'a service to society'. The paper printed extracts, and on 3 January a 'tribute of praise' to her verse (which was also appearing regularly in the Post) by one 'FRANCINI', a pseudonym of the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mrs Robinson sent him a set of the four-volume Walsingham by way of thanks.
But she was only too aware that the Morning Post, the newspaper most loudly trumpeting her literary fame, had nearly two decades earlier been equally loud in vilifying her. In 1780 she had left her husband and her profession as an actress for an affair with the seventeen-year old George, Prince of Wales. Predictably it had not lasted, but the scandal while it did, Mary's flamboyant behaviour and the liaisons she subsequently engaged in, had not only fuelled the gossip columns but had left a residual stain, however hard she sought to remove it through her poetry, and as a novelist peddling conventional morality and satirising the fashionable follies in which she herself had once indulged (though she had never been guilty of gambling, principal target of attack in Walsingham). She thought herself misunderstood, and planned her memoirs to be a 'vindication' of her life.
The impulse for this self-justification may have stemmed from talking with William Godwin, whose Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft were published shortly after she began her own. Mary knew Godwin and had known his wife, who had died the previous autumn after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley. She too had had a notorious reputation, as a supporter of the French Revolution and as the author of the feminist A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Godwin thought that an honest presentation of his wife's life story could not fail to rouse public sympathy; instead, his revelation that she had had an illegitimate child by an American businessman, Gilbert Imlay, that she had twice thereafter attempted suicide, and that she was pregnant before her marriage to Godwin, proved a disaster. Even former supporters were horrified, and the hostile press Godwin received may have given Mary pause. Too much honesty might be counter-productive. Nevertheless, she declared in the Memoirs that 'These pages are the pages of truth, unadorned by romance'.
Precept and practice are two different things however. Most autobiographers require some rose-tinting to the mirrors in which they observe themselves; memory is fickle, and 'truth' compromised when untruths have been claimed for years. The laudanum which she took to dull the pain of her illness must also have blunted her sense of reality. Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson, posthumously published, has to be approached with caution, though it is the primary source of most of the information about her early life. She once addressed a poem to a friend 'who desired to have my portrait', offering a verbal one instead. In it she recognised her faults and virtues – quick-tempered, ambitious, particular in friendship and unforgiving if betrayed, readily sympathetic, sometimes obstinate but never self-interested, a lover of Genius. All of this is true, but it is to a biographer's raised eyebrows that she also declares:
E'en from the early days of youth,
I've blessed the sacred voice of TRUTH;
And Candour is my pride:
I always SPEAK what I BELIEVE;
I know not if I CAN deceive;
Because I NEVER TRIED.
She had probably convinced herself of the truth of what she wrote: tales repeated often enough become established fact. And, of course, truth is to be found in the Memoirs; 'unadorned' however, her memories are not, in either content or style.
* * *
Bristol, where Mary's story begins, was second only to London as a trading port, and likewise river-based; its ships fanned out to Ireland, France, Spain, Africa, America, the Baltic and the Caribbean, and it was better placed than London for the cross-Atlantic trade. It served as a distribution point for West Country raw materials and was itself heavily industrialised with glass manufactories and sugar refineries. Horace Walpole, who disliked its mercantilism, described the city as 'the dirtiest great shop I ever saw, with so foul a river, that had I seen the least appearance of cleanliness, I should have concluded they washed their linen in it'. But Bristol had another identity, being also an ancient city; the towers of religious foundations matched the belching chimneys of its manufactories and the forests of masts in its river basins. Even Walpole admitted that the cathedral was 'neat ... and has pretty tombs', and with prosperity the town was pushing out beyond the city walls and creating elegant squares and streets of houses. A further aspect of Bristol life and money-making was found a mile downstream where the Hotwells attracted invalids to drink the mineral waters, and fashionable society to attend its summer season. However, Bristol's wealth had its sinister side; until 1747 when it was overtaken by Liverpool, it was the foremost port engaging in the slave trade. But Mary's merchant father, Nicholas Darby, was unconnected with that trade of human degradation, making his endeavours in the chilly waters of the North Atlantic with its abundance of fish, furs and seal oils.
Mary says that her father's family was originally Irish, with the name of MacDermott, altered to Darby for the sake of an estate. But Nicholas appears to have been born around 1720 in what is now Canada, then part of America. He engaged as a ship's captain in the Newfoundland fishing trade, at some time coming to Bristol where he established himself, the town serving as a winter base. There was great rivalry with the French over the fishing gounds and, during what became known as the Seven Years War, Darby represented the Society of Merchant Venturers of Bristol (set up in 1552 and still in existence) in informing the British Board of Trade of French activities in the region. He made useful contacts with influential men, such as the elder Pitt, the Earl of Bristol, Sir Hugh Palliser (who was appointed Governor of Newfoundland), and the Lord Chancellor, Robert Henley Earl of Northington, who became Mary's godfather. Nicholas was a fearless, single-minded man from whom Mary inherited her ambitious streak: her liaison with the Prince might be called her own bold merchant venture.
Mary describes her mother, Hester Vanacott, as the 'mildest, the most unoffending of existing mortals'; she took her vivacious manners from her and, the other side of the coin, the melancholy which she stresses in the opening pages of the Memoirs. Hester came from Bridgwater in Somerset, though it was in the tiny village of Donyatt near Ilminster in the same county that, on 14 July 1749, 'Hatty Venecot' married 'Mr Nicol's Derby of Bristol'. In writing about her ancestry on her mother's side Mary emphasises the female line, proud that 'My mother was the grand-child of Catherine Seys, one of the daughters and co-heiresses of Richard Seys, Esq., of Boverton Castle in Glamorganshire' (to the west of Cardiff, now demolished). She also makes much of a very slight connection through the marriage of Catherine's sister with a nephew of the philosopher John Locke. This Catherine Seys, whose daughter (Mary's grandmother) was called Elizabeth, must have married a man with the surname of Petit since on 30 July 1723 Elizabeth Petit married James Vinicot (spellings of surnames show much variation at this period) in St Mary's Church Bridgwater; on 22 May in the year following Hester was baptised. A son, James, was born the following year. Mary was fond of her grandmother but says nothing about her grandfather or great-grandfather, probably because their births and occupations were nothing to boast of: Petits and Vinicots seem to have been small-town tradesmen in Bridgwater. She lets it be known, however, that the godmother of her grandmother Elizabeth was Lady Tynt of Haswell (south of Bridgwater), and that she spent her days in good works with her godmother, visiting the sick and indigent.
Nicholas and Hester went to live in Bristol, where John, their first-born, was baptised on 9 June 1752; a daughter Elizabeth was baptised 12 January 1755, but at only eighteen months she died of smallpox. She was buried on 29 October 1756, only three weeks after a Mary Darby had been interred, perhaps likewise a smallpox victim and possibly Nicholas's mother; that would explain why the next daughter to be born was called Mary. After her would come two more brothers, William, baptised on 13 October 1760, and George, for whom no baptismal record was found. Except for William's, all these births and deaths were recorded at the cathedral church of St Augustine the Less, and the family in fact lived in Minster House, hard against its walls; it was thought to have been the Prior's lodging of the Augustinian Abbey, whose church became Bristol cathedral after the dissolution of the monasteries. This building straddled past and present in combining new construction with the old, and though Mary writes of it 'sinking to decay' in 1798, a painting of 1821 shows a cheerful little house with small front garden giving onto the Green, with a blend of Georgian sash and Gothic dormer windows. Minster House was demolished in 1868 when the cathedral was given a nave, which it had previously lacked.
Mary herself would still recognise the chancel and transepts of the cathedral, its monuments and flagstone memorials, its cloister and ancient chapter-house, and it is these surroundings which she invokes when describing the night of her own birth:
In this awe-inspiring habitation ... during a tempestuous night, on the twenty-seventh of November 1758, I first opened my eyes to this world of duplicity and sorrow. I have often heard my mother say that a more stormy hour she never remembered. The wind whistled round the dark pinnacles of the minster tower, and the rain beat in torrents against the casements of her chamber. Through life the tempest has followed my footsteps; and I have in vain looked for a short interval of repose from the perseverance of sorrow.
That ominous storm is all too convenient to her theme. As many have observed, this is the language of a Gothic novel, and much in the mode of Walsingham whose eponymous hero-narrator declares: 'I was born to sorrow; I was nursed with tears'.
Mary's date of birth seems innocent enough, but in this 'world of duplicity' it proves not so. In 2002 Alix Nathan published her discovery that Mary Darby was not born in 1758. She quotes a baptismal register of St Augustine's which for 19 July 1758 reads 'Polle Daugh. of Nicholas and Hester Darby', with the added note: 'Born nov.27.th 1756' (Polly is a diminutive of Mary). It thus appears that Mary took two years from her life, the assumption being that she wanted to suggest that at the time of her marriage she was only fourteen, scarcely out of the nursery and a passive participant in a ceremony into which she had been thrust by her mother. The problem with this, however, is that in the Memoirs she indicates that her age at marriage was fifteen (in 1773), while on her tombstone it is given as forty-three years, both of which imply a date of birth in 1757. It is then startling to discover that the date 1758, quoted above and for 200 years the accepted year of birth, does not appear at all in the manuscript of the Memoirs. Mary herself actually wrote that 'during a tempestuous night on the twenty-seventh of november [sic], I first opened my eyes to this world of duplicity and sorrow', giving no year at all. She is therefore not guilty of claiming that she was born in 1758, a date which must have been wrongly calculated by her daughter and added before publication.
Was Mary nevertheless lying in taking one rather than two years off her age by implying, if not stating, that she was born in 1757? The situation is further complicated because it turns out that what Nathan saw was a copy of the baptismal register, not the original which records the baptism on 19 July 1758 without any note of birth-date. There are a number of cases where the actual date of birth was considerably earlier than baptism (perhaps because fathers were away at sea); in these cases it is recorded in a line underneath, and the copyist follows that practice, except in Mary's case where, because it was not in the original register, he squeezed it in as an afterthought at the end of the line. All that can confidently be stated therefore is that Mary Robinson was not born in 1758.
One has the choice consequently of believing her, or the copyist. The fact that no actual date was given in the original register might be taken as an argument that she was still a babe in arms at baptism. But since the copyist knew the day and month of Mary's birth it would be logical to assume that he knew the year too; moreover, he had no reason to lie, while Mary did have reason to want to be thought younger than she was. The fact that she does not put 1757 as the year of her birth when it would have been logical to do so, has been taken in this biography as a strong indication that she shied away from telling an absolute lie, and that 1756 is accurate. But it is open to those wishing to exonerate Mary from deception to choose the later date.
This confused situation illustrates the difficulty in considering Mary's childhood, since evidence apart from her own is sparse. She portrays herself, for example, as being different in both appearance and nature from her brothers. The boys were 'fair and lusty, with auburn hair, light blue eyes, and countenances peculiarly animated and lovely'; she however was 'swarthy', with large eyes and 'features peculiarly marked with the most pensive and melancholy cast'. Maybe, but she grew up with blue eyes and auburn hair like her brothers, and donated them to most of her heroines. (A further red herring is that she claims a 'striking likeness' to the family of her godfather, Lord Northington, as if hinting that he was her natural father; this must be counted part of a tendency to fantasise – in The False Friend (1799), written in the same year as the Memoirs, the heroine's guardian does indeed prove to be her father.) Mary also conveys a marked difference of temperaments, her brothers outgoing and active while she was sensitive and inward-looking. When they played on the Green, she sought out the cathedral gloom, where she crouched under the eagle lectern and thrilled to the deep tones of the organ and the chanting choristers; after she had learned to read, her 'great delight' was of memorising the inscriptions on Walpole's pretty tombs.
The mixture of modern commercialism and ancient spirituality, present both in the nature of the home and in the city at large, must have helped to shape the woman she became, but since she had been labelled a commercial adventuress she wanted in her memoirs to distance herself from the trading elements of her background. Claiming the studious cloister as her natural environment, she cast herself in the same childhood mould as her fellow-Bristolian, the poet Thomas Chatterton, born in 1752. He took the pillared aisles of St Mary Redcliffe as his boyhood playground, and later claimed to have found the poetic works of a medieval monk, 'Thomas Rowley', among its ancient lumber. These poems are remarkable creations, even if forgeries, and Chatterton's apparent suicide in his London lodgings at the age of eighteen made him for Mary the model of neglected genius starving in an attic. She too was a Chatterton before she was a Nicholas Darby.
Nicholas was an indulgent father, however, and ambitious for his daughter. He engaged various tutors, including a distinguished organist, Edmund Broderip, who taught her to play and sing on an expensive Kirkwood harpsichord. Though she is vague about dates, she was also educated at a boarding-school, a popular alternative to a live-in governess or privately hired tutors. Such schools provided women teachers with an opportunity for independent income, but were hit-and-miss affairs for the pupils; had Mary been unlucky she might have found herself at such a one as the Bristol school where
YOUNG LADIES are genteelly boarded, and carefully taught to read their MOTHER-TONGUE with PROPRIETY and CORRECTNESS, and are also instructed in all kinds of NEEDLE-WORK, and every other branch of polite and useful Education; of which the forming their tender Minds in Sobriety and Virtue will be most strictly attended to.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Prince's Mistress by Hester Davenport. Copyright © 2011 Hester Davenport. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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