Eclipse (3 page)

Dennis was nonplussed. Surely this woman had no claim on him? ‘By Jasus, ' he replied, ‘but she never gave me a single guinea.'

The woman smiled complacently. ‘Come, my dear creature, ' she said (pronouncing it ‘creter'), ‘come along with me, and I'll show you the difference.'

She took him by the hand, and led him to the front parlour. On the wall was a small looking glass. She removed it, revealing an aperture, and invited Dennis to look through. He got a fine view of the back parlour, and particularly of the part of it near the fire. Resignedly, he reached for the purse, looked inside, and saw that it contained an enormous sum: twenty-five guineas. ‘'Tis only my right that I take ten, ' the woman told him, ‘as I must account for it to my mistress.' Dennis knew when he was cornered. He handed over the money.

This dampener did not submerge his enthusiasm for the affair, which continued happily for several months. It was both delightful and profitable. But Dennis was not Lady —'s only sideline. The
Genuine Memoirs
said that she took lovers among her own set, too; and, unfortunately, Lord — was not as liberal in his attitudes to such behaviour as were some eighteenth-century husbands. He threw her out of doors, and divorced her. With Dennis's mistress went Dennis's job.

After a taste of life in Hanover Square, Dennis was not inclined to return to hauling a licensed sedan chair. He might continue to enjoy the high life, he reasoned, if he lived by his wits. He frequented the Vauxhall pleasure gardens, where, for a shilling a ticket, people gathered to walk, eat, listen to music, and stare at one another. He spent many hours in coffee houses, at tennis courts, and at billiard tables, where he picked up some money as both marker (keeper of the score) and player. He made notable
friends, among them the Duke of Richmond and Sir William Draper, the soldier. Everyone was clubbable – while he had money.

As the money ran out, Dennis continued to spend. He had discovered an addiction to extravagance, and he thought he could charm, or dupe, his creditors. But there was a way of taking revenge on people who did not honour the money they owed: you could get them jailed. Dennis's creditors sued, and saw him confined to the Fleet, the debtors' prison.

The year was 1756. Five years would pass before Dennis regained his freedom. It was the disaster of his life. But it led him to the woman who would be both his lifelong companion and his partner in making his fortune.

The Whore's Last Shift
. A once-fashionable ‘Cyprian lass' (one of the arch phrases by which Charlotte Hayes and her contemporaries were known) is down on her luck. On the table is
Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies
, first compiled by Charlotte's sometime lover, Samuel Derrick.

¹
Canaletto's version may be underpopulated, however, as a result of his use of a camera obscura, which failed to capture many moving objects.

²
From the
Genuine Memoirs
. I have amplified some of the details of the story of Dennis and Lady —.

³
Dennis styled himself ‘Kelly' – the anglicized version of his name – during his early years in London.

C
HARLOTTE HAYES FLOURISHED
in what one writer described as the ‘golden age' of prostitution. It was golden for the clients, perhaps, particularly for the ones who could afford to frequent the splendid serails (harems – French terms and practices were fashionable in this world) that adorned eighteenth-century London. It was golden for a few, a very few, of the prostitutes. But there were ten thousand of them in the capital, according to Roy Porter; Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, a contemporary visitor, put the figure at fifty thousand. For most of these women, beginning their careers in a kind of slavery and ending up in destitution and disease, gold was elusive.

You could not miss them. Von Archenholz wrote, ‘At all seasons of the year, they sally out towards the dusk, arrayed in the most gaudy colours, and fill the principal streets. They accost the passengers, and offer to accompany them: they even surround them in crowds, stop and overwhelm them with caresses and entreaties. The better kind, however, content themselves with walking around till they themselves are addressed.' It was a happy hunting ground for James Boswell, who, like a bat or an owl, would set out as darkness fell. Sex in the open air gave him a particular frisson. He disported with a ‘strong, plump,
good-humoured girl called Nanny Baker' in St James's Park, and, armed with a condom, ‘At the bottom of the Haymarket I picked up a strong, jolly young damsel, and taking her under the arm I conducted her to Westminster Bridge, and then in armour complete did I engage her upon this noble edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below amused me very much.'

What a rogue! We might regard Boswell's lusty antics indulgently, as mere boisterous transgression, from our vantage point two and a half centuries later. This was not a jolly industry, though. Von Archenholz saw the seamy side:‘I have beheld with a surprise, mingled with terror, girls from eight to nine years old make a proffer of their charms; and such is the corruption of the human heart, that even they have their lovers.' He also observed, without much sympathy, the fate of prostitutes later in life: ‘Towards midnight, when the young women have disappeared, and the streets become deserted, then the old wretches, of 50 or 60 years of age, descend from their garrets, and attack the intoxicated passengers, who are often prevailed upon to satisfy their passions in the open street with these female monsters.'

In
A Harlot's Progress
(1732), William Hogarth depicted one method of recruitment to the profession. Moll Hackabout, young and fresh of face, arrives in London on the York wagon, to be met by an ingratiating woman. The woman offers lodging and a position; but in fact Moll's immediate future is to be raped by the leering man in the background.
⁴
The woman in Hogarth's print has been identified as the bawd Mother Needham (madams were often, ironically, ‘mother'), and the leering man as Colonel Francis Charteris, who bore the unappetizing sobriquet Rape-Master of Great Britain. Both had died the year before the print appeared, Charteris of unknown causes and Needham following an appearance in the pillory, where she had received an enthusiastic pelting
by the mob. In Hogarth's subsequent prints, Moll Hackabout tastes a brief period of prosperity as the mistress of a rich Jewish merchant before declining into poverty, the workhouse and death.

Charlotte Hayes was (like Dennis O'Kelly) born in about 1725, possibly in Covent Garden – one historian has found a Joseph Hayes living in Tavistock Street at the time. She rose from obscurity alongside two other beauties, Nancy Jones and Lucy Cooper, whose fans congregated at venues including the Bedford Arms on the Strand and Ben Jonson's Head on Little Russell Street. Nancy's and Lucy's stories illustrate the precariousness of their calling. Nancy lost her looks, along with her ability to command admirers, to smallpox, and died of syphilis at the age of twenty-five. Lucy, ‘lewder than all the whores in Charles's reign', found a rich protector in Sir Orlando Bridgeman, a wealthy baronet. Thanks to him, she was ‘exalted from a basket to a coach' (a basket was a cheap seat on a stagecoach). But in 1765 Bridgeman died, leaving Lucy an annuity with the stipulation that she quit her profession. She ignored his wishes, with decreasing success. After several periods of imprisonment, she died impoverished in 1772.

The trick was to find a wealthy lover, be kept by him in style, but to hold other men in reserve should he go off you, or die. If you had the entrepreneurial skills, you could try setting up as a madam. Both routes offered golden rewards for the most skilful and the luckiest, in an era when keeping paid mistresses and visiting brothels were stylish activities, as long as they were conducted in the manner of a gentleman. Beautiful and charismatic courtesans such as Nancy Jones (briefly) and Lucy Cooper, as well as the likes of Fanny Murray, Kitty Fisher and Harriet Powell, were celebrated figures of the day, and had many aristocratic admirers. Nancy Parsons was the lover of the Duke of Grafton, Prime Minister during the 1760s – although the Duke went beyond the bounds of propriety by entertaining her in his box at the theatre, just a few seats away from his estranged wife. A few years later,
Mary Robinson and Elizabeth Armistead were lovers of the Prince of Wales, the future George IV. Sometimes these affairs ended in marriage. Elizabeth Armistead became the wife of Charles James Fox, the Whig politician, while Harriet Powell bagged the Earl of Seaforth.

Charlotte found no such happy outcome to her career as a courtesan, but, blessed with great entrepreneurial and marketing skills, she picked herself up, to go on to triumph as a madam.

She came of age as the protégée of one Mrs Ward, whose methods of keeping her girls subservient she would emulate. She received an education, because a patina of culture would be an asset in her destined career.
⁵
When Charlotte reached maturity, she came up for sale. Mrs Ward would have been able to charge up to £50, maybe even £100, for brokering a night with a beautiful young virgin; and she may have done it several times. Refreshing her charges' maidenhoods was another ploy that Charlotte would copy.

Although a young woman might claim to be deflowered more than once, she could not keep doing so indefinitely, and the time came when the ambitious and talented hoped to find wealthy lovers. A mistress could expect lavish apartments and the equivalent of a platinum credit card. She insisted on acquiring the finest clothes, jewels, hats, gloves and other accessories, and on mixing with people of fashion and position. But she maintained this lifestyle only for as long as she continued to bewitch her lover. Fortunately, Charlotte was bewitching. She had brown hair and grey eyes; her features were rounded and girlish, and at their most alluring with very little make-up. Hers was ‘a countenance as open as her heart', and her deportment was dignified without affectation.

A bawd is necessarily a cold and sometimes a cruel person, but Charlotte earned indulgence even from chroniclers of the most scandalous episodes of her career. Looking back at the
contemporary records, one wishes that they contained a little more venom, which might have drawn out more of her personality. Dennis O'Kelly leaps off the pages of those who describe him, while Charlotte – perhaps because she suppressed true feeling, or perhaps because she is portrayed only by men – is unfathomable.

Her greatest conquest was Robert Tracey, usually given the moniker ‘Beau', applied to the most dashing bucks of the era. Tracey had accomplishments. ‘Abstract him from women, and he was a man far above mediocrity'; he possessed a good library, and felt that reading was so important that he would always take a book to study while having his hair cut. He was also a libertine, and, from Charlotte's point of view, a delightful spendthrift. Still more delightful was his submission to her. Hitherto a man of fleeting affections, he found in Charlotte the love of his life. ‘She had him so much at her command that she could fleece him at will' – in the words of the ribald chronicle
Nocturnal Revels
. Craving some extra cash, she would call on Tracey at his chambers in the Temple, tell him that she would not stay unless he play dice with her at a guinea a throw, take his money at each throw she won, and neglect to pay up at each throw she lost. After about a quarter of an hour, once she had amassed a reasonable sum, she would ‘bounce away and laugh at him'.

Her other lovers included the poet Samuel Derrick, who offered no pecuniary attractions, as he never made a living from his verse. His most profitable venture, and his magnum opus, was
Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies
, a publication with a distinctively eighteenth-century flavour. Appearing each year in a style we associate with more conventional guidebooks, it offered Derrick's intimate and witty pen-portraits of the finest prostitutes in London, along with warnings about ones to avoid.
⁶
But his
involvement with the bestselling annual came after his affair with Charlotte had ended. While it was going on, he was simply a man ‘of a diminutive size, with reddish hair and a vacant countenance', and with no funds. Perhaps Charlotte loved him. Certainly he was always fond of her, referring to her as ‘my old friend and mistress Charlotte Hayes'. And no wonder he was grateful. In addition to enjoying her charms, he received entertainment from her ‘in the most sumptuous manner' at the Shakespeare or Rose taverns, with Tracey picking up bills of up to £40.
⁷