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Despite his sordid profession as a moneylender, King had a reputation as a man of culture. John Taylor, an oculist who moved in the very best circles and who was himself a poet and a friend of Mary Robinson, recorded in his memoirs that he had known King for forty years and always found him honourable, hospitable, and attentive, and that he especially liked having men and women of talent at his table.
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Mary’s letter accords with this image: King is presented as a companion for theatregoing and literary talk, associated with poetry and the language of sensibility. The reference to her own efforts at poetry suggests that, with her stage debut forestalled by her marriage, she is already thinking of a literary career. Robinson, meanwhile, is anything but a sensitive literary man: he is a ‘stupid Thing’ and Mary effectively admits that she only married him because of his supposed financial prospects. Because of his deception on this front, he has forfeited any right to strict conjugal loyalty.
For King, this was sufficient encouragement. His reply brings him to a pitch of excitement:
I will not think you sincere, when you say you love; yet if you are not in earnest, you have given too serious a Testimony of it for one only in Joke; but it is almost Blasphemy to suspect one of such heavenly Form, so beautiful, such Symmetry of Features, such delicate welformed [sic] Limbs, such panting snowy Breasts, such – Oh! What Raptures ineffable seize my delighted Imagination, when I recollect the delirious Transports that throbbed to my very Soul, when that beauteous Form stood confessed in all the resistless Power of – Nakedness. I must stop till my enraptured Fancy returns from the ecstatick Thought.
Is this a ripe fantasy or had he really caught a glimpse of a naked Mary in Oxford or on some other occasion?
With the flirtation getting this far out of hand, Mary cooled the temperature in her following letter – though she still needed to keep King sweet, because she was, as she put it in a postscript, ‘rather short’. The correspondence had by now lasted for a month. On 1 November, King wrote with further references to ‘the mystick Meaning of thy wanton Love’ and his ‘melting Senses’ drowning in ‘delicious Transports’, while at the same time delivering a rebuke: ‘You little Prodigal, you have spent £200 in Six Weeks: I will not answer your Drafts.’ King’s refusal to forward any more funds, despite a further request, brought the correspondence to an abrupt end in the final week of November. Mary’s last letter is in a very different tone from the preceding ones:
I Find you have not yet answered my Draft. I do not wish an Acquaintance with any Man who professes so much Love, but who gives so little Proof of it. I wish I could recall those imprudent Moments when I suffered your deluding Promises, and seductive Tongue, to betray me into Sin; but unless you give me the Token of your Sincerity that I ask for, I will take care how I trust you again. I am astonished that you should scruple to lend me such a Sum as £100 when it was the last I should borrow, and should have repaid it faithfully. Now you have an Opportunity of shewing your Love, or I shall see that you have all along deceived me.
King responded with a long and vitriolic letter on the evils of ambition and avarice, and the correspondence ended. His failure to recover either his original loan or his subsequent advances, together with a not unjustifiable sense of having been taken for a ride by Mary’s flirtatious manner, accounts for his action in publishing the letters in 1781. There is no evidence that King himself had any further dealings with Mary thereafter, though by a curious twist his daughter became a passionate fan of her poetry.
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Late in November, Robinson returned to Bristol to fetch his wife. They left Hester and headed across to Wales. They endured a hazardous crossing at Chepstow in an open boat in the midst of a fierce storm. In the Memoirs, Mary novelistically interprets this as an ill omen, akin to the storm that coincided with her birth. Throughout the journey Robinson tried to prepare his refined young wife for her first meeting with his family. Still denying that Harris was his father, he asked Mary to ‘overlook anything harsh that might appear in the manners of his uncle’. But she was busy absorbing the beauties of the landscape as they drove into the remote Welsh countryside: ‘We passed through a thick wood, the mountains at every brake meeting our eyes covered with thin clouds, and rising in a sublime altitude above the valley. A more romantic space of scenery never met the human eye!’
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With a shift of tone typical of Mary’s mercurial nature, the narrative of her visit to the in-laws then turns from romantic novel to comedy of high and low life, with the sophisticated townies meeting the country bumpkins. Mary was fabulously dressed, as usual, in a dark claret riding habit and a white beaver hat trimmed with feathers. She looked askance at the odd couple that waited to greet her, her father-in-law, Thomas Harris, and his daughter, Elizabeth. Harris, evidently pleased with the elegant Mrs Robinson, kissed her ‘with excessive cordiality’, while his daughter led her into the house ‘with cold formality’. ‘She could not have taken my hand with a more frigid demeanour,’ Mary adds, clearly relishing the memory.
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The young women sized one another up. Elizabeth was not a great beauty and must have felt threatened by her brother’s fashionable wife. She was cold and haughty and took an instant dislike to her new sister-in-law. To Mary’s sharp eyes, she looked a fright. Elizabeth seemed older than her twenty years, moved stiffly, without grace or elegance, and was short and clumsy looking. She had a rustic face with a snub, upturned nose, and cheeks ‘somewhat more ruddy than was consistent with even good health’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her countenance, Mary thought, was ‘peculiarly formed for the expression of sarcastic vulgarity’. The elegantly dressed Mrs Robinson was equally appalled by Elizabeth’s vulgar attire; she wore a cheap gaudy chintz gown and a ‘thrice-bordered cap’ decked with a profusion of ribbons. Her initial impression of retired tailor Thomas Harris was just as dismaying: he wore an unfashionable brown fustian coat, a scarlet waistcoat trimmed with gold, a gold-laced hat, and – instead of the silk stockings that befitted a gentleman – a hideous pair of woollen ‘spatter-dashes’. He cuts an engagingly comic figure, his manners coarse and boorish, but kind of heart – the very embodiment of Squire Western in Fielding’s Tom Jones or Goldsmith’s Mr Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer.
Harris was, in fact, an influential figure in Glamorganshire. He was the squire of two large estates, Tregunter and Trevecca, and was a Justice of the Peace. One of his brothers was Howel Harris, a well-known Methodist reformer. Possibly through his brother’s influence, the religious reformer Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, had established a seminary at Trevecca House for the training of ministers. Elizabeth Robinson was a convert to Lady Huntingdon’s ‘sect’, and sometimes took Mary with her to Trevecca. Squire Harris preferred the local church where he could throw his weight around and fine the rustics for swearing, even though ‘every third sentence he uttered was attended by an oath that made his hearers shudder’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Harris spent most of the days on his estate, riding his small Welsh pony, only appearing at meal times.
Mary was thoroughly bored by her husband’s family. She quickly discovered that the real ruler of the household was Molly Edwards, the housekeeper. She heartily disliked her: ‘a more overbearing, vindictive spirit never inhabited the heart of mortal than that which pervaded the soul of the ill-natured Mrs Molly’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Miss Betsy and Mrs Molly were jealous of Mary, who supped ale with the squire and soon became his favourite: ‘They observed me with jealous eyes; they considered me as an interloper, whose manners attracted Mr Harris’s esteem, and who was likely to diminish their divided influence in the family.’
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Mary often alienated other young women, who were left feeling dowdy and dull in her presence. She was naturally flirtatious and men were captivated by her charm, but she was perhaps less keen to cultivate the friendship of other women, if she did not think it worth her time. She noticed the ‘side-long glances’ of Miss Betsy and Mrs Molly when she entertained visitors who praised her ‘good looks, or taste in the choice of my dresses’. The women taunted her for acting like a duchess with her fine clothes and her accomplishments – ‘a good housewife had no occasion for harpsichords and books’.
(#litres_trial_promo) They reminded her that she had no money to support her fancy ways. But Mary did not care. She had her beauty and her elegance and her humour to protect her. When she went riding with Miss Betsy, she laughed at her odd appearance: ‘Miss Robinson rode on horseback in a camlet safe-guard, with a high-crowned bonnet. I wore a fashionable habit, and looked like something human.’
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More disturbingly, Harris seemed to have fallen in love with her even though in his sixties he was old enough to be her grandfather. When he declared that he should ‘have liked me for a wife, had I not married Tom’, she decided it would be prudent to leave. She feared that ‘through the machinations of Miss Betsy and Mrs Molly I should lose the share I had gained in his affections’. Betsy and Molly were duly furious when the squire insisted upon accompanying Mary to Bristol: ‘he swore that he would see me safe across the Channel, whatever might be the consequences of his journey’.
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In Bristol, meeting the charming Hester and getting a taste of her active social life, Harris decided to stay a while. Hester introduced him to her friends and he was invited to several dinner parties. Mary danced with him and, after he had supped his evening draught, she would sing to him. He was flattered by the attention and dropped hints to the effect that Tom would inherit the estate. He asked for advice on refurbishments for Tregunter House, and together they picked out smart marble chimney-pieces: ‘Choose them as you like them, Mrs Robinson, for they are all for you and Tom when I am no more.’
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(#ulink_296888a7-cba2-5736-8ac0-4640a6dc00c0)He later changed his name to Hanway Hanway. He was related to philanthropist Jonas Hanway, who campaigned against boy chimney sweeps and was one of the first men to carry an umbrella.
(#ulink_8a58abc3-8622-5221-beae-9d058652147f)He later changed his name to Hanway Hanway. He was related to philanthropist Jonas Hanway, who campaigned against boy chimney sweeps and was one of the first men to carry an umbrella.
CHAPTER 4 Infidelity (#ulink_0bb91965-ad58-5a9e-a9df-37ed745ffd2e)
The town still full of alluring scenes, faro tables, assemblies, to say nothing of Ranelagh, the opening beauties of Kensington, and the morning lounge of St James’s street.
Mary Robinson, The Widow
We are taught to cherish deceit, indifference, vanity, contempt, and scorn; we cannot bear neglect, because it awakens our self-love; we think not of the natural fickleness of man; but we tremble, lest the world should suppose, that a husband’s infidelity proceeds from our own want of attractions to hold him faithful.
Mary Robinson, The False Friend
As soon as Harris had left Bristol, the Robinsons set out for London. According to Mary, they adopted young George Darby and brought him up as their own, until he was old enough to be sent abroad to a merchant house, like his elder brother, John. Elated by the great expectations that Harris had held out for them, the Robinsons threw themselves into London life. The first step they took was to move to a newly built house in Hatton Garden, a location in the ‘city’ at the east end of London as opposed to the more fashionable ‘town’ (or ton) in the west end. Close to Smithfield Market and St Paul’s, the Hatton Garden district was home to newly prosperous merchants and Jewish moneylenders, jewellers, and lawyers – it was conveniently placed for the Inns of Court.
The Robinsons furnished their new property lavishly and bought a phaeton, the modish open-top carriage that was the same kind of status symbol as a modern convertible. Thomas Robinson also got to know the local jewellers and silversmiths. He bought his wife an expensive watch, enamelled with musical trophies.
From where did they get the money? In her Memoirs Mary claimed ignorance about her husband’s financial affairs and debts (which she always described as his debts rather than hers), but according to King she devised a scheme – played out by Robinson and a group of fellow swindlers – that involved raising ‘immense Quantities of Goods on the Credit of foreign Letters, which they had transmitted them for the Purpose, from Holland, Ostend and France’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Whatever the truth of this allegation, the handsome house in Hatton Garden would have been enough to persuade traders and lenders that the Robinsons’ credit was good.
With a smart address, a flashy phaeton, and Mary’s dazzling good looks, they burst upon the social scene, determined to get themselves noticed. Mary knew how to use her sex appeal: ‘A new face, a young person dressed with peculiar but simple elegance, was sure to attract attention at places of public entertainment.’
(#litres_trial_promo) She describes her entrance into society as making her debut ‘in the broad hemisphere of fashionable folly’. She might have lost her chance to perform at Drury Lane, but she saw the metropolis as a great urban stage where she could still be a star.
Her first stop was the pleasure gardens at Ranelagh. Pleasure gardens ranked high in London’s recreational activities, but the two most popular were those of Ranelagh in Chelsea and Vauxhall in Lambeth. Here, in the open air, people gathered to stroll, chat, and listen to music. By day they could walk amongst the grottoes, groves, and waterfalls, and by night look at the brilliant lights strewn in the trees, attend concerts, balls and masquerades, and see the fireworks. Ranelagh was the classier venue: at two shillings and sixpence, its entrance fee was more than twice that of raucous Vauxhall. It had Chinese buildings, temples, statues, a canal, and a bridge. It also boasted the rotunda, an enormous circular hall for concerts, ringed with fifty-two boxes. An orchestra played whilst the ladies and gentlemen strolled around the main floor. Regular concerts were held in the summer; the 8-year-old Mozart performed there in 1764. After the concert, one would sit and eat a light supper. It was a place to be noticed and to join the smart set. The royal princes were known to frequent the pleasure gardens with their aristocratic friends. Women of fashion promenaded the main walks to show off their latest gowns and hats, and to make a stir. Prostitutes, dressed in their finery, plied their trade in the wooded groves. In Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina, the innocent heroine mistakes the Ranelagh prostitutes for ladies of fashion and is herself mistaken for a whore when she wanders onto a wrong path.
Mary chose her outfit carefully. She wore a simple Quaker-style, light brown silk dress, with close cuffs. Breaking with the convention of powdering her hair, she perched a plain round cap and a white chip hat on her tumbling auburn locks. She wore no other accessories – no jewellery and no ornaments. She was simplicity itself. Never one to follow fashion slavishly, she had confidence in her individual style and panache. Needless to say, she cut a figure: all eyes were fixed upon her.
The Robinsons’ next outing was to the indoor equivalent of Ranelagh, the Pantheon in Oxford Street. It had only opened a couple of years before, when it was described by Charles Burney as the ‘most elegant structure in Europe, if not on the globe’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the main it was a musical venue, housing concerts, balls, masquerades, and dances. It also had a central rotunda where visitors could play cards or take supper on ordinary evenings. Tickets for masquerades were expensive and exclusive: by subscription only, at two guineas (the equivalent of about a hundred pounds in today’s money). Mary described it as ‘the most fashionable assemblage of the gay and the distinguished’. As though at court, visitors dressed formally in large hoops and towering headdresses. The women’s hair was raised high with padding and false hair, and then greased with pomade before being powdered. Mary spent hours preparing herself, wearing an exquisite gown of pink satin trimmed with sable, and arranging her suit of ‘rich and valuable point lace’, which was given by her mother. By this time, though, she really was pregnant: ‘my shape at that period required some arrangements, owing to the visible increase of my domestic solicitudes’.
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Mary was overwhelmed by the Pantheon rotunda: ‘I never shall forget the impression which my mind received: the splendour of the scene, the dome illuminated with variegated lamps, the music, and the beauty of the women, seemed to present a circle of enchantment.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was the women who made the strongest impact upon the impressionable young girl, four of them in particular: the celebrated beauty Lady Almeria Carpenter (‘the admiration of the men, and the envy of the women’
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‘Their fixed stare disconcerted me,’ wrote Mary in her Memoirs. ‘I rose, and, leaning on my husband’s arm, again mingled in the brilliant circle.’ One cannot help thinking that this little promenade also had the effect of showing off her frock to its best advantage. The gentlemen set off in pursuit, despite the presence of her husband. As she mingled in the crowd, they asked, ‘Who is that young lady in the pink dress trimmed with sable?’ ‘My manner and confusion plainly evinced that I was not accustomed to the gaze of impertinent high breeding,’ Mary says in the Memoirs, with due propriety, but even in this account written so long after the event – and after the accident that crippled her – one can still sense her pleasure in the power of her looks.
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She noticed that the men were joined by a third party, whom she recognized as Robert Henley, the son of her godfather, the politician Lord Northington. The latter had died in 1772, so Henley now had the title Lord Northington himself. He approached her, ‘Miss Darby, or I am mistaken?’
(#litres_trial_promo) She informed him of her change in status and introduced him to her husband, and together they strolled round the rotunda and chatted. Northington asked after her father, and complimented her on her appearance, asking that he be permitted to call on her. A notorious rake and womanizer, he must have been surprised by the transformation of his late father’s lowly godchild Miss Darby into the lovely Mrs Robinson.
Feeling faint with the heat of the rotunda, and fatigued with the promenading, Mary requested tea, but there was not a single seat available in the tearoom. She finally found a sofa near the door, but her husband refused to leave her for a moment, even to bring refreshments. Henley brought her a cup of tea and introduced his two friends, the gentlemen who had been flirting with the Marchioness Townshend before pursuing Mary around the room. They were cousins: Captain George Ayscough and Lord Lyttelton. Both had highly respected fathers: Ayscough senior had been Dean of Bristol Minster during the 1760s when Mary was growing up, while the elder Lyttelton was a distinguished politician and one of Mary’s favourite poets. The sons were not so virtuous: they, like young Northington, were notorious rakes. Lyttelton junior was known as ‘the wicked’ Lord, in contrast to his father, ‘the good’. Mary described him as ‘perhaps the most accomplished libertine that any age or country has produced’.
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Robinson set off to find the carriage, giving Lyttelton another opportunity to ingratiate himself with Mary by offering the use of his own vehicle. She declined and returned home with her husband. The next morning, the three men called on Mary, whilst she was home alone (it was conventional once an introduction had been made at an evening party to call the next day to enquire after the lady’s health).
Lyttelton was by far the most persistent of the three. In Mary’s version of events, she was entirely the victim of his unwanted attentions: ‘Lord Lyttelton was uniformly my aversion. His manners were overbearingly insolent, his language licentious, and his person slovenly even to a degree that was disgusting.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But her abhorrence did not prevent her from being drawn into his lordship’s circle. Lyttelton cultivated her husband’s friendship in order to gain access to her. He gave her presents, which she accepted – contrary to the advice of the conduct books on such matters. Among the gifts was the latest volume of poetry by the ‘bluestocking’ Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Lyttelton knew how to flatter Mary’s intellect as well as her beauty.
Mary was beginning to write poetry herself at this time. Barbauld’s poems fired a spirit of emulation: ‘I read them with rapture; I thought them the most beautiful Poems I had ever seen, and considered the woman who could invent such poetry, as the most to be envied of human creatures.’ She added to her praise a wonderfully derogatory and deflating codicil: ‘Lord Lyttelton had some taste for poetical compositions, and wrote verses with considerable facility.’
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Lyttelton introduced the couple to his wide acquaintance, cultivating Tom Robinson as a friend and companion. The Robinsons were beginning to rub shoulders with aristocrats, politicians, and actors. Mary met and was dazzled by the intelligent and cultivated Imperial Ambassador the Count de Belgeioso, but was less impressed by the rake Lord Valentia (who later eloped with a courtesan). One of the most controversial figures Mary met during this heady time was George Fitzgerald, an Irish libertine and duellist, known as ‘Fighting Fitzgerald’. Other new acquaintances included an Irish gamester called Captain O’Byrne and the actor William Brereton. The latter would subsequently share the stage with Perdita and marry her childhood friend Priscilla Hopkins.
Lord Northington continued to call and some female friendships were also established – with Lady Julia Yea, a prominent figure in West Country society, and the talented and witty writer Catherine Parry. At a party hosted by Mrs Parry, Mary met the actress Fanny Abington and was captivated by her charm, beauty and exquisite dress sense. Mary began again to harbour dreams of acting.
In the midst of all this socializing, Lyttelton was always at the couple’s side: Mary describes him as her cavaliere servante, a fashionable male companion, a sort of ‘mere Platonic cicisbeo – what every London wife is entitled to’, as Sheridan mockingly wrote in The School for Scandal. But Lyttelton wanted to be more than Mary’s friend and companion. He expected a payoff for the investment he had made in the Robinsons. When he realized that flattery was not the way to her bed, he tried a more perverse route: he insulted her in public and ‘affected great indifference’ in a vain attempt to excite her interest. He mocked her for being young and insipid and when she lost her temper he would apologize for making the ‘pretty child angry’. He would repeatedly call her ‘the child’ in public to humiliate her. He mocked her literary endeavours and her thwarted plans to play Cordelia at Drury Lane. His final resort was to get to her through her weak husband. He embarked upon a strategy of ruination and bankruptcy for Robinson, taking him to gaming houses and brothels, ‘the haunts of profligate debasement’.
(#litres_trial_promo) They were seen often at the races, at Ascot and Epsom.
Whilst Robinson led a riotous life, gambling, drinking, and womanizing with his aristocratic friends, his pregnant wife was left neglected and alone. She missed the counsel of her mother, who had repaired to Bristol with young George to help him recuperate from illness. Mary blamed Lyttelton for the change in her husband’s behaviour. In her Memoirs she said that she reacted by devoting her time to poetry, but this picture of her confined existence devoted to literary pursuits is contradicted by her own claim that ‘Dress, parties, adulation, occupied all my hours.’
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As her pregnancy advanced in the summer of 1774 she felt resentful that she was being left alone without protection or companionship. One of the most pernicious effects of her husband’s neglect was the temptation opened up by her countless admirers. The ‘most dangerous’ rake was George Fitzgerald, whose ‘manners towards women were interesting and attentive’. He sympathized with her plight of being left without her husband, then proclaimed his devotion. Though ‘surrounded by temptation, and mortified by neglect’, Mary did not waver.
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It was not long before the couple plunged into debt. For all her claims that she knew little about their financial affairs, Mary was quite aware that they were living beyond their means – though when she did make enquiries about their financial position, her husband assured her that they were well provided for. Lyttelton promised to procure advancement for his young friend, though Thomas was sceptical that he would do anything for them.
Lyttelton tried one last desperate attempt to win Mary away from her husband. With her usual aplomb for setting a scene, she describes the day when Lyttelton called upon her for a meeting, pleading important business. He told Mary that he had a secret to reveal about Robinson. Lyttelton then confessed to his part in alienating her husband’s ‘conjugal affections’, revealing that Thomas Robinson had a mistress, ‘a woman of abandoned character’ who lived in Princes Street, Soho. He told Mary that Robinson spent money on his mistress, money that they should have been saving for the birth of the baby. He even named the other woman: she was called Harriet Wilmot. Robinson visited her every day.
Lyttelton made Mary promise not to tell her husband who was the source of the revelation. If she did, there would have to be a duel. Having reduced her to tears of sorrow and mortification, Lyttelton suggested that Mary should take revenge on her husband by placing herself under his protection: ‘You cannot be a stranger to my motives for thus cultivating the friendship of your husband; my fortune is at your disposal. Robinson is a ruined man; his debts are considerable, and nothing but destruction can await you. Leave him! Command my powers to serve you.’
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Mary was mortified at the proposal, but she was also angry and determined enough to face her rival. Perhaps she was spurred by the memory that her mother had had to endure a similar revelation. The encounter in Soho is described in the Memoirs in the style of sentimental fiction. Needless to say, the virtuous young wife vanquishes the profligate mistress. With her novelist’s eye for detail, Mary recalled the dirty servant girl who let her into Miss Wilmot’s apartment, the incriminating new white silk underwear spread out on the bed, her beating heart as she heard Miss Wilmot’s footsteps approach the room.
Mary’s rival was a handsome older woman who was visibly distressed by the presence of her lover’s pregnant young wife. Her lips were ‘as pale as ashes’. She did not deny the charges levelled against her, and as she drew off her gloves to cover her eyes, presumably from shame, Mary noticed Tom’s ring on her finger. Harriet tried to return the ring, to no avail. Mary refused to take it. Harriet said, ‘Had I known that Mr Robinson was the husband of such a woman—’ As Mary rose to leave, Harriet spoke, ‘I never will see him more – unworthy man – I never will again receive him.’ Mary swept out of the room without a further word. As usual, Mary remembered her costume for the occasion, as though she were an actress playing her part: she wore a morning dress of white muslin, with a white lawn cloak and a straw bonnet. Her rival was dressed in a printed Irish muslin and wore a black gauze cloak and a chip hat trimmed with lilac ribbons.
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Devastated by the encounter as Mary claimed to be, she accompanied her husband to Drury Lane that evening with Lord Lyttelton. She concealed her true feelings and participated in the fun with her usual gusto. It was only in the morning that she confronted Robinson. He did not deny the charge. Mary learned that he had had another mistress at the time of their marriage, and that his infidelities were public knowledge. The extent of his debts also became clear to her. Robinson had got himself caught in the invidious position of borrowing money from loan sharks to pay off his creditors. He was deeply involved with King the moneylender. Indeed, ‘the parlour of our house was almost as much frequented by Jews as though it had been their synagogue’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mary’s protestations that she was a ‘total stranger’ to the business transactions were, of course, untrue – John King had the proof of that.
Despite Robinson’s infidelity, he is not depicted in Mary’s narrative as the outright villain of the piece. She presents her husband as weak and impressionable, rather than vicious. It was Lord Lyttelton she blamed. She despised him for the way he treated women, in particular for his contemptuous behaviour towards his estranged wife and his mistress, a Miss Dawson. The press suggested that Mary and Lyttelton were having an affair, a claim that she vehemently denied: ‘he was the very last man in the world for whom I ever could have entertained the smallest partiality; he was to me the most hateful of existing beings’.
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Handsome George Fitzgerald was quite another matter: ‘his manners towards women were beautifully interesting’. He tried to seduce Mary on a warm summer’s evening at Vauxhall. The Robinsons stayed until the early hours of the morning and then while they were waiting for their carriage to take them home, Fitzgerald made his move. A late night quarrel broke out between two men and Robinson and Fitzgerald took off to view the commotion. Mary tried to follow but was soon lost in the throng of people. Later, only Fitzgerald returned. He took Mary towards the exit to wait for her husband. To her alarm, Fitzgerald’s carriage appeared as if out of nowhere and he tried to bundle Mary in. As the door swung open, she noticed a pistol in the pocket of the door. His servants, who were clearly in on the attempted abduction, kept at a discreet distance, while Fitzgerald grabbed Mary around the waist. She struggled free and ran back towards the entrance to the pleasure gardens, where she found her husband. Fitzgerald acted as though nothing had happened: ‘Here he comes!’ he exclaimed with an easy nonchalance, ‘we had found the wrong carriage, Mr Robinson, we have been looking after you, and Mrs Robinson is alarmed beyond expression.’ ‘I am indeed!’ replied Mary.
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She decided to say nothing to Robinson for fear of repercussions: an advanced state of pregnancy was no time to lose one’s husband in a duel. ‘Fighting Fitzgerald’ was a brilliant shot. He killed eighteen men in the course of his duelling career, before being hanged. From that point on, Mary avoided Fitzgerald’s company despite – or because of – his charisma: ‘he was too daring, and too fascinating a being to be allowed the smallest marks of confidence’.
As on so many occasions in the Memoirs, the veracity of this story cannot be taken for granted: the abduction and rape of young women at public places had been a standard twist in the romantic novel ever since the attempted abduction of Harriet Byron in Samuel Richardson’s hugely influential Sir Charles Grandison. We cannot be sure that Mary was not indulging here in a novelist’s licence with the truth.
As with the trip to Bristol and Wales, there is another version of the story of these months – which the Memoirs may indeed have been consciously attempting to erase. Again, it was the Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite that made the case for the prosecution. According to John King, Mary was no innocent that first night at the Pantheon. He claimed that she made a play for the three fashionable aristocrats:
At every fashionable Place of Resort, [the Robinsons] appeared as brilliant as any in the Circle; the Extravagance of the Diversions was no Check to their Vanity. At a Masquerade one evening, she was noticed by Lord Lyttelton, Lord Valencia, and Lord Northington; her Pride was highly gratified to be distinguished by Three such fashionable Noblemen; and that an Acquaintance so fortunately begun should not be lost, she wrote the following Note to each Gentleman the next day. ‘My Lord, a Lady in the Character of an Orange Girl that had the Honour of being distinguished by your Lordship last Night at the Masquerade, was a Mrs R—, of Hatton-Garden, who will esteem herself further honoured if your Lordship should condescend to favour her with a Visit.’ – On this singular Invitation, the Gentlemen came, and paid their respective Addresses to her; but it was the intrepid persevering Lord Lyttelton that most succeeded, it was the Splendor of his Equipage that seduced her vain Heart, till at length his Familiarity with her became the Topic of the whole Town. They were continually together at every Place of Amusement; and the Husband trudged after them, as stupid and as tranquil as any Brute of the cornuted Creation.
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King left his readers in no doubt that Mary and Lyttelton had a full-scale affair. He told of how they would engage in amorous dalliance in a closed carriage, with Robinson riding ‘a Mile or Two behind on Horseback’. Far from taking umbrage at the intimacy, the husband ‘continually boasted among his Acquaintance, the Superiority of his Connections, and his Wife’s Ascendancy over every fashionable Gallant’.
(#litres_trial_promo) This was the kind of story that gave Robinson a reputation as little better than his wife’s pimp.
A garbled and exaggerated version of this story about Mary making love in a moving coach with the full complaisance of her husband also found its way into the muckraking Memoirs of Perdita published in 1784. Here, though, her high-speed dalliance is with a well-endowed sailor who gives her ‘a pleasure she never could experience in the arms of debilitated peers and nobles’. He takes her four times, with Thomas Robinson riding not on a horse somewhere behind, but on the roof of the very carriage.
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King also claimed that Lyttelton intervened to save Robinson from prosecution when his fraudulent financial dealings were on the point of being exposed. According to this account, Lord Lyttelton dropped Mary on discovering that she and her husband were mere swindlers out to fleece him for all they could get. The truth of the matter is probably somewhere in the middle between Mary’s picture of aristocratic villainy and King’s far from disinterested portrayal of sexual misconduct for financial ends. There can be no doubt that the Robinsons lived way beyond their means: was it only the Jewish moneylenders who gave them the capacity to do so? Or did Lyttelton dig deep into his pocket? And if he did, was it in expectation of sexual favours or as payment for delights already delivered?
Whatever the precise means, Mary’s beauty, wit, and connections were taking her well on the way to the achievement of her ambition of fame: ‘I was now known, by name, at every public place in and near the metropolis.’
(#litres_trial_promo) At the same time, the Robinsons were becoming notorious for their debts. In the autumn of 1774, in the final weeks of her pregnancy, their creditors foreclosed on them and an execution was brought on Robinson. The couple were forced to flee Hatton Garden for a friend’s house in Finchley, which was then a village on the outskirts of London. They were deserted by all of their staff with the exception of a single faithful black servant. Mary barely saw her husband, who spent most of his time in town.
In the meantime, Hester returned from Bristol with George and helped her daughter to prepare for her confinement. They sewed baby clothes, and Mary continued to read and write. Robinson acquired the habit of taking George with him on his ‘business trips’ to London, but George, who adored his sister, confessed that they called upon disreputable women. He also told her that her valuable watch, which Mary presumed had been taken by the bailiffs, had actually been given to one of Robinson’s mistresses. When confronted, he did not bother to deny the infidelity.
Despite Robinson’s indifference, which was particularly insensitive so close to the birth of his first child, Mary continued to blame others more than her husband for their predicament. Perhaps she felt guilty for contributing to his debts by her expensive taste. She blamed Lyttelton, their creditors and even Robinson’s father: ‘had Mr Harris generously assisted his son, I am fully and confidently persuaded that he would have pursued a discreet and regular line of conduct’.
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It was to Harris that Robinson turned in desperation. He decided to leave London and head for Tregunter, where he could plead for his father’s help. Robinson insisted that Mary accompany him, despite the discomfort and danger of travelling all those miles in her condition. He no doubt anticipated that the presence of his favoured young wife heavy with a future grandchild would help to soften up old Harris. Mary, for her part, did not want to leave her mother when she needed her during the trials of labour. Childbirth was traumatic at the best of times for women in the eighteenth century: it was common for mothers to write their unborn children farewell letters to be read in the event of their death during labour or its aftermath. Mary feared that she might die in Wales and the baby be left amongst strangers. With her youthful pride, she also dreaded the sneers she would have to face from Elizabeth Robinson and Mrs Molly upon returning to Tregunter in debt and disgrace.
CHAPTER 5 Debtors’ Prison (#ulink_3d8dbb5e-f911-5683-985c-4fd000fbfac7)
‘Tis not the whip, the dungeon, or the chain that constitutes the slave; freedom lives in the mind, warms the intellectual soul, lifts it above the reach of human power, and renders it triumphant over sublunary evil.
Mary Robinson, Angelina
