Eclipse (16 page)

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The rules of the race put Eclipse at an apparent disadvantage. The contest was for six-year-olds; younger horses did not get the weight concessions available in other types of contest. Eclipse, who was five, carried the same weight – twelve stone – as his older rivals.

⁶⁷
The title is
Eclipse with Jockey up Walking the Course for the King's Plate
. The identification of Eclipse as a five-year-old is the clue pointing towards one of his two 1769 walkovers.

⁶⁸
He was still, officially, a five-year-old. Racehorses in this era celebrated their birthdays on 1 May. Now, they all become a year older on 1 January.

⁶⁹
By Regulus, out of Mother Western – but see Appendix 2.

⁷⁰
Horses are described as related if they have ancestors in common on their dams' sides. Horses are half brothers or sisters if they have the same mother; but they are not described as such if they have the same sire, perhaps because sires are so prolific.

⁷¹
For a fuller discussion of Stubbs's painting, see chapter 18. Stubbs later identified the jockey as Samuel Merriott. Perhaps John Oakley, if Eclipse's ownership had already changed, was no longer involved. One report describes Oakley as Eclipse's ‘constant groom'; another asserts that he was a jockey riding for various owners. It is hard to know what to conclude. See Appendix 1.

⁷²
An amusing rhetorical emphasis. In fact, Eclipse earned £2, 157 that year. Charlotte's monthly turnover – if not her profit – from her ‘honest industry' was probably greater than that.

⁷³
Betting in running is another feature of the eighteenth-century betting market that has made a comeback in the internet era. The same odds with a betting exchange such as Betfair would be 1.01. A winning bet would return a one penny profit on a £1 stake.

⁷⁴
Jenison Shafto, overburdened with gambling debts, shot himself in 1771.

S
EX FOR A LIVING IS
a pursuit that Eclipse and Charlotte Hayes had in common. As Eclipse embarked on his remunerative second career as a stallion, Charlotte was already the undisputed ‘first lady abbess of the town'. Her Marlborough Street establishment in Soho, though thriving, had not satisfied her ambition, which was to set up a brothel that was still more lavish, and that would adorn the most prestigious district of London. So, in the late 1760s, she set up in a street in St James's called King's Place,
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a narrow thoroughfare within sight of the royal residence St James's Palace. Fashionable clubs such as White's and Boodle's were nearby. The grandest members of society had their homes in the parish, and were all – including a few of the women – potential customers, who might visit a brothel as they would a gambling club, as part of an evening's entertainment.

Number 2, King's Place was a smart town house of four floors. You could pass a complete evening there: listening to musicians and watching dancers, conversing with the delightful residents, gambling, dining and drinking, before repairing upstairs. A night with one of the ‘nuns' might set you back £50, .
sometimes more; if you had enjoyed all the extra amenities as well, you were looking next morning at a bill of at least £100.That kept out the riff-raff. It was at least a third of what many professional London men, such as lawyers and civil servants, earned in a year.

Cheaper options were available, however. A ‘bill of fare' for an evening at Charlotte's – as reported in
Nocturnal Revels
, a scandalous account of the lives of Charlotte and her contemporaries – included the hiring of ‘Poll Nimblewrist' or ‘Jenny Speedyhand' for ‘Doctor Frettext, after church is over' (the doctor's fee for this brief business was a modest two guineas). ‘Sir Harry Flagellum' was down to pay ten guineas for the severe attentions of ‘Nell Handy', ‘Bet Flourish' or ‘Mrs Birch herself': it was gruelling work, as the woman eventually entrusted with it complained. ‘Two long hours, ' she groaned, ‘have I been with this old curmudgeon; and I have had as much labour to rouse the Venus lurking in his veins, as if I had been whipping the most obstinate of all mules over the Alps.'

Nocturnal Revels
alleged that the most valuable customer of the evening was ‘Lady Loveit, just come from Bath, much disappointed in her amour with Lord Atall'. Keen to be ‘well mounted', her ladyship was assigned a fee of 50 guineas for the services of ‘Captain O'Thunder, or Sawney Rawbone'. For the evening dramatized in the book, O'Thunder got the job. He and his lady neglected to lock their door, and were interrupted
in flagrante
by one Captain Toper, who was reluctant to leave. ‘By Jasus, ' O'Thunder exclaimed, ‘this is very rude and impartinent to interrupt a Gomman and a Lady in their private amusements!' He set about the interloper, but when the question of a duel came up, declined to test his honour. Lady Loveit, dismayed by his lack of gallantry, favoured Sawney Rawbone thereafter.

According to E. J. Burford, author of several books set in this milieu, Lady Loveit was Lady Sarah Lennox, and Lord Atall was Lord William Gordon, for whom Lady Sarah had abandoned
her marriage to Sir Charles Bunbury. It is tempting to imagine that Captain O'Thunder was Dennis O'Kelly (who was a captain in the Middlesex Militia by this time), performing stud duties for Charlotte and relishing a liaison with the former wife of the first Dictator of the Turf, the man who was to be responsible for excluding him from the inner circle of horseracing. But the author of
Nocturnal Revels
seems not to have been making this connection, and later introduced ‘the Count', a new figure, to the scene.

Nocturnal Revels
portrayed Dennis as a general man about the house, and credited him with dreaming up ‘elastic beds', specially designed for the delight of Charlotte's customers, who experienced on them ‘the finest movements in the most ecstatic moments'. When Charlotte retired, a bawd called Mrs Weston bought these beds, winning for her house great popularity among ‘peers and peeresses, wanton wives, and more wanton widows', for whose satisfaction she provided ‘some of the most capital riding masters in the three kingdoms'. Charlotte employed males in various capacities too. A satirical sketch in the
London Magazine
reported an auction for ‘Cream-coloured Tommy – In plain English, a pimp deep in the science of fornication and intrigue … He will cringe, fawn and flatter like a Parisian. A guinea for him! Well spoke Charlotte! A true whore's price! Charlotte Hayes has got him, to be chaplain at her nunnery.'

Charlotte's name appeared in the public prints, in memoirs, and in topical verses – a level of fame that her modern counterparts would prefer to avoid. Cynthia Payne, who held ‘parties' at her house in Streatham, and Heidi Fleiss, ‘the Hollywood madam', became celebrities who appeared on chat shows, but they did so after scandals and court cases had ended their sex industry careers. Charlotte was a celebrity when she was in her prime. As would be the case in our own age, her status quelled moral considerations; that she provided titillating copy was the main thing. But, entertaining as her story is, it cannot be dissociated from its basis in exploitation and its association with misery.

Consider Charlotte's employees. Although well-known molls catered to Doctor Frettext and Sir Harry Flagellum,
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the chief attractions of Charlotte's establishment were her own protégées, whose recruitment often involved distressingly underhand methods. One, tried and tested in the business, was to lurk at register offices, dressed modestly and purporting to be in search of a young woman to attend to a lady. On snaring an appropriate candidate, Charlotte would take her to a house that, under a false name, she had rented specially, and wine and dine her. The young woman, perhaps up from the country, would retire to bed, only to find her sleep interrupted by one of Charlotte's customers. ‘In vain she laments the fraud that has been played upon her, '
Nocturnal Revels
explained, with a mixture of prurience and compassion. ‘Her outcries bring no one to her relief, and probably she yields to her fate, finding it inevitable; and solaces herself in the morning with a few guineas, and the perspective view of having a new gown, a pair of silver buckles, and a black silk cloak. Being once broke in, there is no greater difficulty in persuading her to remove [from] her quarters, and repair to the nunnery in King's Place, in order to make room for another victim, who is to be sacrificed in the like manner.'

For the privilege of raping this virgin, ‘Lord C-N, Lord B—ke, or Colonel L—e' would have paid a handsome sum. Deflowerment was a highly prized pleasure, and was the subject of a certain amount of fraud. ‘A Kitty Young or a Nancy Feathers … could easily be passed off for vestals, with a little skilful preparation.' Charlotte seemed to be happy to convince herself that she was operating with essential honesty, arguing that, ‘As to maidenheads, it was her opinion, that a woman might lose her maidenhead 500 times, and be as good a virgin as ever. Dr O'Patrick had assured her, that a maidenhead was as easily made
as a pudding; that she had tried herself, and though she had lost hers a thousand times, she believed she had as good a one as ever … She had one girl, Miss Shirley, just come from the play with Counsellor Pliant, who had gone through 23 editions of vestality in one week; and being a bookseller's daughter, she knew the value of repeated and fresh editions.'

Charlotte would also place advertisements in the press, seeking young women to go into service, and would meet the applicants herself at the specially rented house. Sometimes, the nuns would come, or be brought, to her. Betsy Green arrived in the care of a Captain Fox, who clearly thought that he was doing his charge a favour. A sickly girl in her early teens, Betsy had been soliciting on the street when Fox found her, and had been placed by him in the care of his friend Lord Lyttelton. Since Lyttelton was later to earn the title ‘The Wicked Lord Lyttelton', Fox's arrangement showed a lack of insight. However, when he learned of Betsy's mistreatment at Lyttelton's hands, he rescued her and entrusted her to Charlotte. ‘Under [Charlotte's] care and tuition her wonderful beauty was brought out, ' Burford quoted. ‘No age or clime has ever produced such a perfect model of voluptuous beauty.' Betsy became the mistress of Colonel John Coxe, who doted on her. When Coxe (whose name Betsy assumed) was away, though, she regularly summoned ‘all her most abandoned companions of either sex and converted his house into a temple of debauchery'. Reports of these orgies got back to Coxe, who threw Betsy out. Later, she acted in Drury Lane, and boasted lovers including Lord Falkirk, the Earl of Craven and the Earl of Effingham. But the relationships did not endure, and she eventually returned to brothel life.

Betsy's decline was the fate of most prostitutes, even when they had the contacts that employment by Charlotte afforded them. Nevertheless, some had the beauty, charm and determination to make good lives for themselves, above all enjoying the luck to find men who did not suddenly abandon them to poverty. A
gentleman of means might take one of the ‘nuns' as his mistress, setting her up (after compensating the madam) in fine apartments, with servants and a carriage. As long as he did not vulgarly flaunt her, as the Duke of Grafton did Nancy Parsons, it was a dashing way to behave. In that respect, Captain Fox had taken Betsy Green to a woman who offered her better prospects of advancement than almost any other employer in London.

A ‘shaggy-tail'd uncomb'd unwash'd filly of 14 … bought from her industrious painstaking mechanick of a father for a song' blossomed, under Charlotte's care, to become Kitty Fredericks, ‘the veritable Thais
⁷⁷
amongst the
haut ton
, the veritable flora of all London'. Harriet Lamb, seduced by an aristocrat and abandoned at Charlotte's, became another favourite: ‘Kind Charlotte Hayes, ' wrote the poet Edward Thompson, ‘who entertains the ram / With such delicious, tender, nice house-lamb!' Though well trained in how to behave in society, these women were usually bereft of education. A possibly apocryphal story about Polly Vernon, who adorned the parties that Captain Richard Vernon (‘Old fox Vernon') held for his racing chums, told how she reacted to Wicked Lord Lyttelton's enquiry about whether she knew Jesus Christ: indignantly, she protested that ‘she wondered at his Lordship's imperence [
sic
] … she never had no acquaintance with foreigners'.

In the modern era, prominent mistresses such as Antonia de Sancha (who had an affair with the Conservative minister David Mellor) and Bienvenida Buck (whose lover was the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Peter Harding) achieve tabloid celebrity. In the eighteenth century, you could be a courtesan (the paid mistress of a grand figure) and former prostitute, and become a subject for the most prominent artist of the day. Emily Warren was walking the streets with her father, a blind beggar, when she met Charlotte; she was then twelve years old, and illiterate. Charlotte
did not correct that deficiency, but taught Emily deportment and manners that ‘attracted universal admiration wherever she appeared abroad'. Emily modelled for the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who portrayed her as Thais and declared that ‘he had never seen so faultless and finely formed a human figure'.
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