The Covent Garden Ladies (28 page)

After hearing about the success of her competitor, Charlotte was determined to create a
sérail
even bigger and more splendid. Dennis, it was decided, would assist her by ‘furnishing the money’ while Charlotte, with her considerable experience, would ‘furnish the nuns’.

On 24 June 1760, the pair was given their chance. It was reported in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
for that month that ‘Upwards of three hundred prisoners from Ludgate, the two Compters and the Fleet were discharged at Guildhall by the Lord Mayor’. By the grace of the Insolvency Act, any prisoner who could produce the small sum necessary to secure their release was absolved of their debts and free to begin their lives afresh. This, however, did not prevent creditors with grudges from coming after the newly liberated, waving unpaid bills. Immediately after their release, Charlotte and Dennis temporarily went their separate ways in order to re-establish themselves in their respective professions. Charlotte, it seems, was still hiding from those to whom she owed money. She took unassuming lodgings in Scotland Yard and asked her former lover, Sam Derrick, to write her an entry for the 1761 edition of the
Harris’s List
. As Derrick tactfully relays, three years of the Fleet, even on the Master’s side, had noticeably taken its toll: ‘Time was’, he reminds the reader, ‘when this lady was a reigning toast;… She has been, however, a good while in eclipse …’. He then ever-so-gently comments: ‘Were we to enter into an exact description of this celebrated Thais; that is, were we to describe each limb and feature a part, they would not appear so well as taken altogether’.

Before Elizabeth Ward had launched her daughter into the
demimonde
she would have warned Charlotte to make the most of her beauty while it remained in flower. There could be no more cruel fate for a courtesan then to observe how deeply time and misfortune had worn away the face that earned her a living. Now in her mid-thirties and without the support of the annuity she had expected from Tracy, Charlotte’s future security was questionable. In order to survive financially, her only hope was to build a successful business where younger women provided pleasures that she could no longer demand high prices
for bestowing. Now, more than ever, she required the assistance of someone like Dennis. His successes were required to compensate for her inability to lure the town’s most fashionable bucks into her bed. Dennis instead had to lure them to the gaming tables.

To contemporary sensibilities, the arrangement that existed between Dennis and Charlotte appears weird in the extreme, but to O’Kelly and his inamorata, this was simply the nature of their situation. In the eyes of the eighteenth century, a whore would always be a whore, and any man who loved a whore must first be resigned to what her profession entailed. Dennis never questioned what Charlotte was, or the method by which she derived her only means of income, and like Sam Derrick, who could not provide for her comfortably, he had no choice but to consent to share her, at least temporarily. As the author of the
Nocturnal Revels
explains, ‘policy induced her to see them [her clients] with complaicency’, regardless of the fact that ‘Her affections were still centred in her hero’. Ambition for a better life meant that Dennis and Charlotte had to use the means available to them in order to raise the capital that would ensure their future comfort. Both worked for their mutual benefit: he shared his profits with her, and ‘on him were all the pecuniary favours, which she received from others, bestowed with unbounded liberality’.

By contrast to Charlotte’s experience, after his release, Dennis appears to have hit the ground running. When he set out to do it, O’Kelly had an almost miraculous ability to find money and put it to use. To many, it seemed as though the Count had never been in prison at all; they had become so accustomed to seeing him at all of the usual places. According to one source, he ‘was not released from prison many days before he appeared at the Tennis Court and some of the polite coffee houses in the west end of the Town’, dressed in finery, with a sword strapped to his hilt. He also had managed to procure himself fashionable lodgings in St James’s, ‘and absolutely wore gold buckles on his shoes’. Once fitted out convincingly as a gentleman and carrying a few guineas worth of winnings in his pocket, O’Kelly proceeded to work his way into the best circles of sportsmen. ‘He became’, as his
Memoirs
state, ‘intimately acquainted with a class of beings commonly known by the denomination of
black legs
, that is those equestrian heroes who are invariably seen at every capital horse race in England’. Not surprisingly,
once ‘among those, he acquired and irresistiable taste for the same avocation’. Providence had led Dennis to horse racing, the one occupation that was destined to make him more money than all of his card-counting tricks and deceptions put together.

Through pooling their resources, Charlotte and Dennis were prepared to launch a small brothel by 1761, roughly a year after they had seen the last of the Fleet. They had taken a house together on Great Marlborough Street, in Soho, then a mixed bag of an area, one that played home not only to upstanding members of the gentry and the secure middle classes, but to tradespeople, small merchants and artists. Even during the mid-eighteenth century, Soho was beginning to acquire what might be called a bohemian reputation: not everything that occurred there nor everyone who lived there was considered to be on the right side of respectability. Soho had been built comparatively recently as part of the westward sprawl that filled out London’s edges. Its orderly, grid-based streets were lined with single- and double-fronted brick terraced houses, whose insides were illuminated by fanlights and generous sash windows. With front and back parlours, such abodes offered ample entertaining space for small, merry parties. This was a first step on the ladder for Charlotte and Dennis. Based on Great Marlborough Street, they were only a few doors down from Mrs Goadby’s famous
sérail
, and in the appropriate neck of the woods to catch the interest of those seeking that sort of entertainment. It is likely that in the first instance the couple shared their home with two or three hand-selected nymphs and operated on a modest scale. At this early stage, Dennis’s involvement in the business of promoting their new enterprise as well as in the duties of brothel management would have been crucial. His gaming companions, those dissolute black legs (called so for the tall black riding boots in which they tramped about the turf and the town), were just the sort of cash-laden clientele that Charlotte was seeking. He, as much as Charlotte, would have been responsible for steering them into her drawing room. The Count’s other role was equally important. Without the presence of a male figure, female-run establishments were never truly secure from unpredictable behaviour. Whether it was the brutality of drunken culls or the exploitative tendencies of the night watch, it was always useful to have a ‘bully’
lurking somewhere within shouting distance. Thus, in this manner O’Kelly not only assisted Charlotte ‘in the double capacity of lover’, but also as ‘a
flash-man
, which was nothing more than a generous protector from the violence of modern buckism’.

Even in the infant days of her operation, Charlotte had her eye on far wider horizons. Soho, by comparison with the elegant neighbourhood of St James’s, simply did not exude the same cultivated ambiance. Having spent her childhood at her mother’s establishment near the Haymarket, she would have remembered what advantages were to be wrought from trading so close to the royal court, a place where bored aristocrats longed for fleshy distractions. By the mid-1760s, the entire pull of pleasure-seeking gravity had shifted westward. Many of the Covent Garden faithful had begun to abandon the upstairs rooms and illicit gambling offered at the Shakespear and the Bedford for the exclusive gaming tables and assembly rooms of Almack’s. St James’s had become the centre of fashionable entertainment, enticing the
bon ton
to the new theatre on the Haymarket and to private parties held in stone-faced townhouses along the recently laid out squares. Charlotte’s vision of a grand Parisian-style
sérial
, or
nunnery
, as it would later be called, was not suited to her current middle-class surroundings. In order to exceed Goadby’s establishment in grandeur, an appropriate setting at the heart of the
haute
world would be a necessity.

13

Harrison’s RETURN

IN 1761, IT
was John Harrison’s turn to emerge from prison into the blazing light of day. What his intentions might have been upon his release from captivity it is impossible to say; what is known about how he chose to conduct the remainder of his life does not indicate that he was moved by the spirit of character reformation. Harrison did however choose to live more carefully and more surreptitiously. He had been born into the world of the tavern, and that trade and everything it entailed comprised the extent of his skills. Therefore, not surprisingly, he returned to Covent Garden to pick up his life from the point at which it had been unfortunately interrupted.

When Packington Tomkins learned that the vitriolic Harrison was once again at large, it is unlikely that he slept easily. Tomkins would have known the strengths of his enemy and his scheming temperament. For three years Harrison had sat in Newgate stewing in his anger, contemplating his next move and how he might exact his revenge. Even after the publication of his anti-Tomkins tirade, the owner of the Shakespear’s Head could not have guessed whence Harrison’s vengeance would come, whether he might resort to violence or to some other insidious means of injuring him. As it happened, Harrison sought to hit his adversary in his purse, where it would wound him the most.

The convenient and highly visible location of the Shakespear’s Head tavern had always been one of the establishment’s greatest assets. Its signboard would have been visible to those passing in both directions hoping to quench their thirsts and lusts. It was almost as ideally situated
as the Rose Tavern, directly next door to the Drury Lane theatre, at the edge of Russell Street and Brydges Street (now Catherine Street). As the two largest, most notorious taverns in the area, patrons made an evening of fumbling their way between the two in search of more enlightening or entertaining company. Like the Shakespear, the Rose also played host to casts of actors hot from performances and in need of refreshment. The prospect of carousing with adored actresses Peg Woffington, George Anne Bellamy, Sophia Baddeley and the celebrity patent holder of the adjoining theatre, David Garrick, was an attraction to many, although most would have come simply for the drink and to delight in the uninhibited debauchery of the place. Undoubtedly it was shortly after Harrison’s reappearance, when the proprietor of the Rose (and Tomkins’s chief business rival) Thomas Watson took the pimp into his employment, that Tomkins genuinely began to worry.

The reputation that the Rose established for itself was born long before Thomas Watson assumed his position as manager. As early as 1672, the Rose was known for its ‘constant scene of drunken broils, midnight orgies, and murderous assaults by men of fashion who were designated Hectors and whose chief pleasure lay in frequenting taverns for the running through of some fuddled toper, whom wine had made valiant’. By the beginning of the eighteenth century it had gained a reputation as a haunt for ‘women of a certain freedom of character’. Even to William Hogarth, the artist familiar with scenes of misery and degradation, the Rose represented the ultimate sink of iniquity. In 1735, when painting his multi-scene moral tale ‘The Rake’s Progress’, Hogarth chose to feature the Rose’s principal room as the setting where his character, Tom Rakewell, displays one of the lowest ebbs of his degeneracy. The artist’s astute eye created an image that accords with written accounts of the tavern’s notoriety, depicting half-clad and poxed whores, picking pockets, spitting, defacing the room’s décor and soliciting business. As with many of Hogarth’s moral scenes, several of the figures depicted in his work would have been recognisable individuals. The face of Richard Leathercote, the Rose’s porter, makes an appearance, as does one of the tavern’s infamous ‘Posture Molls’, who is seen preparing to perform her party trick, one which will entail pushing a candle up her vagina while standing over a reflective pewter plate, to
better enable the view. The Rose never lost its reputation as the prime venue for posture girls who, totally nude, struck lewd poses on tables for the testosterone-charged clientele. Much like today’s lap dancers, posture girls titillated patrons but left the copulation to whores, who lay in wait after a performance. It has been suggested that before she was discovered, the inexperienced Amy Lyon, who would one day become the famous Emma Hamilton, mistress to Lord Nelson, started her career naked and spreadeagled on a tavern table.

Not unlike John Harrison, the Rose had failed to remedy its character over the years. By the time that he began waiting on tables there its reputation was as nasty as ever. On hanging days, when the guilty were carted down Oxford Road (now Oxford Street) to Tyburn, the Rose was the place that the rowdy crowds congregated to drench themselves with drink before proceeding to the execution. The same could be said for major civil disturbances; the tavern was likely to contribute a team of rough, intoxicated bruisers to any property-smashing event that erupted within the west end. Like the Shakespear, the Rose was a cavernous place with numerous upstairs rooms and plenty of dark spaces in which to fornicate or pick pockets. As a contemporary commented, its ambiance and the behaviour of its patrons rendered it ‘no better than a barn’.