The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (31 page)

Plagued by Dennis’s financial inconsistencies, Charlotte found that she had no choice but to continue in her position as King’s Place Abbess for the foreseeable future. Once a reckless spendthrift of men’s money,
she
quickly acquired the art of shrewd accountancy, balancing her own books and drawing up bills. She also learned the necessity of innovation. Charlotte’s successful new brothel was being watched from all sides by her competitors. Nancy Banks, Charlotte’s closest rival on Curzon Street, had been one of her own nymphs before going into business for herself. Elizabeth Mitchell, an old hand in the Covent Garden flesh trade, set up first on Berkeley Street before moving next door to Charlotte in 1770. By the 1770s, the entire passage was taken up with superior-standard brothels, each calling themselves ‘nunneries’. When the Baron D’Archenholz visited London in 1773, he was amazed at the ‘line of Coaches which could be seen driving up to the narrow King’s Place’. In order to maintain her position at the head of the queue of newcomers to the area, Charlotte had to market her attractions as actively as possible.

It was no good sitting indoors all day and night, waiting for men of wealth and prestige to call. Even the best repositories of female flesh had to advertise in order to attract custom. At any one time, Charlotte’s exclusive house would have had no less than two and no more than five
filles de joye
in residence and, as the
Harris’s List
indicated, these occupants were frequently singled out for high-keeping by gentlemen. The best method by which Charlotte could promote her stock of ladies was to parade them in public, to dress them in exquisite gowns and float them under the gaze of all London. She promenaded them through St James’s Park, where the
bon ton
strolled in the afternoons, displaying their fine clothing, their horses and lacquered coaches. They sat amid the most fashionable names in the theatre boxes, under the ogling eyes of the peerage and the disapproving gazes of their jealous wives. Charlotte took her nuns to any location where their beauty might be admired and the curious might be allowed to approach them. Pleasure gardens, assembly rooms and balls were some of the prized haunts of the great impures. Here they could display their plumage to the most artful effect, dancing in the centre of a room and moving with the grace that they had learned in Madam Hayes’s own parlour. Charlotte and her nuns, as subscription-holders to the most glamorous of venues, appeared regularly at places such as Mrs Cornelys’s masked balls at Carlisle House, where married ladies of esteemed character rubbed
shoulders
with their husbands’ lovers beneath paste masks and veils. When her best clients retired to Bath and Cheltenham for the season, Charlotte followed them there with a travelling exhibition of her wares. Her ladies could be spotted everywhere, bobbing in the steamy waters, perambulating through the magnificent crescents and fluttering their fans in the assembly rooms. One can only imagine the anguish of a tormented wife who had hoped to leave the cause of her husband’s distractions in London. Wherever the respectable world went, the shadow world of the disreputable followed at its heels, encountering only occasional protest at its presence. As Charlotte’s ladies serviced the most influential men in the land, there were few who could offer any real opposition.

At the height of her renown, the nunnery of the ‘Saintly Charlotte Hayes’ hosted the leading lights of Georgian society in its bedchambers. The Earl of Sandwich, Viscount Falmouth, the Duke of Richmond, and the Earls of Egremont, Uxbridge and Grosvenor were only a handful of the names who regularly bestowed their favours on her establishment. Scores of lesser gentry and wealthy city gentlemen of all religions, including numerous aldermen and Lord Mayors, were known customers. In later years, through Dennis’s racing connections, most of Charlotte’s nuns would have benefited from intimacies with the Prince of Wales and his libertine companions, an accolade that was certain to be one of the Abbess’s crowning glories. There was no one of the
beau monde
to whose predilections and requirements Charlotte did not cater. In addition to the women she had readily at hand, it was not uncommon to bring in others to appease various tastes. Actresses, singers, fallen ladies of the fashionable set, and other reigning ‘toasts of the town’ made appearances in Charlotte’s salon to entertain and be seen in the highest company. It was their talents in the bedroom as much as the drawing room that were solicited for the night’s events. It was Charlotte’s endeavour to ensure that all of her clients’ needs were addressed, even those with rather unorthodox tastes. Like Harris the pimp, the great Abbess would have kept a record of her patron’s most lewd desires and ensured that the appropriate mistress of that skill was at hand on the night. The
Nocturnal Revels
records one such occasion that Charlotte had planned with meticulous care. Although the event it
documents
and the names used have undoubtedly been fabricated for the readers of the
Revels
, the range of delights on Madam Hayes’s menu would have been an accurate sampling of those available. As the author prefaces, this ‘specimen from Charlotte’s bill of fare’ was intended to ‘give the reader some idea of the manner of her conducting business’.

On this particular occasion, an average night in January 1769, it was claimed that ‘Alderman Drybones’, with ‘Nell Blossom, a maid … about 19’ whose virginity had recently been restored to her, were ‘crammed into the chintz bed-chamber, which though small is elegant’. For this pleasure the Alderman gladly parted with twenty guineas. Just adjacent, in the ‘high French bed-room’, could be found ‘Lord Spasm’ who had paid five guineas to spend the night with a black prostitute, one ‘of the first rate of St. Clements’. For the mere cost of ten guineas, Sir Harry Flagellum was being seen to by ‘Nell Handy from Bow Street’ with her bunch of birch twigs in the nursery, ‘Bet Flourish from Berners Street’ or ‘Mrs. Birch herself from Chapel Street’ being unavailable. ‘Colonel Tearall’ had requested ‘a modest woman’ for his pleasure, and Charlotte accommodated him by drafting in ‘Mrs. Mitchell’s cook-maid, being just come from the country’. For the price of a banknote, the Colonel was prepared to take ‘his chance in the parlour upon the settee’. ‘Doctor Frettext’, a clergyman getting on in years, came to Charlotte ‘after church was over’ specifically to have his needs gratified by ‘a very white soft hand, pliant and affiable’, belonging to either ‘Poll Nimblewrist’ of Oxford Market ‘or Jenny Speedyhand of Mayfair’. Madam Hayes had this quick piece of work completed in the servants’ quarters, up ‘the three pair of stairs’, for an easy two guineas. ‘In the drawing room and [on] the sopha’ could be found the discreet ‘Lady Loveitt’, who had paid Charlotte fifty guineas to allow her to meet with her lover, ‘Captain O’Thunder’, in secret. Meanwhile, next door in the card-room, ‘Lord Pyebald’ was charged five guineas to innocently ‘play a party at piquet … and the like without coming to any extremity but that of politeness and etiquette’ in the company of ‘Mrs. Tredrille from Chelsea’. ‘His Excellency, Count Alto’, on the other hand, in the adjoining salon, had come for a one-hour dalliance with ‘a woman of fashion’ at the expense of ten guineas.

The nunneries on King’s Place were known for the lengths their Abbesses would go to in order to accommodate their elite guests.
Virtually
no request was refused, even by those who were not specifically seeking the services of a prostitute. Charlotte’s residence was frequently offered as a type of safe house for couples pursuing illicit affairs and seeking somewhere to meet for their sexual encounters. The
Revels
would also have readers believe that Madam Hayes procured well-endowed men to satisfy women who were disappointed in the matrimonial bed. However, perhaps one of the strangest requests that Charlotte received came from ‘a certain young nobleman’ whose wife ‘was having criminal intercourse’ with his friend. Upon learning of his friend’s betrayal and his wife’s infidelity, he bet his rival ‘a thousand guineas that he would once within this month be confined with a certain fashionable disorder.’ He then approached Charlotte and requested that she procure for him a whore from whom he might infect himself with the clap. By passing the disorder onto his spouse, he claimed he could then ‘be completely revenged of my wife for her infidelity, and of my rival for his’. His Lordship, meaning no offence to Charlotte by implying that she kept ‘rotten cattle’ under her roof, ‘took out his pocket book and presented her with a thirty pound bank note’. The plot was then put into motion and the Abbess went to work rooting out a suitably diseased harlot for the job. Within two weeks, upon discovering himself infected with the clap, the young nobleman’s duplicitous friend, ‘in order to avoid a further discussion of the affair’, grudgingly paid out the £1,000 wager he had now lost.

More frequently, requests were submitted not for hackneyed whores riddled with disease, but for clean virgins whom the best-paying clients might have the pleasure of deflowering. This presented quite a problem. Procuring an untouched girl was extremely difficult. Those Charlotte had rescued from the street, although as young as twelve or thirteen, had in many instances already been the victims of a seduction. Luring girls away from their families, schools or the households where they worked could be not only a lengthy process but a dangerous one as well. If the girl had a sufficiently influential or vocal family behind her, as the procuress Mrs Nelson learned, the law was liable to become involved, and her once tight-lipped neighbours might suddenly ‘propose indicting the house for a disorderly one’. Nevertheless, bawds and pimps were pestered incessantly to procure genuine maidenheads. In part the
demand
came from those who enjoyed the sexual thrill of intercourse with a young virgin, but also from those who believed that relations with an unspoiled girl would cure them of venereal disease, or would ensure a ‘safe sex’ experience. Rather than waste time searching London for unsullied maidens, it was easier to simply recycle those ‘virgins’ already to hand. Those in the procuring trade stood to make hearty sums of money by passing off a very young recruit ‘for a maidenhead’ several times to unwitting men who might pay fees as high as 100 guineas for the privilege of spending the night with a thirteen-year-old. At a time when the pubescent female (and male) body was highly sexualised, a girl of this age would have been deemed, although extremely youthful, an appealing object of lust. Given such tastes, it should also be added that in the eighteenth century, what passed for the normal sexual predilections of a significant portion of men would today be enough to send most of them to prison.

In the face of such demand, Charlotte’s establishment was able to forge a name for itself as a purveyor of maidenheads. When questioned by George Selwyn as to how she was able to produce so many, so often, Charlotte replied that ‘As to maidenheads, it was her opinion that a woman might lose hers a hundred times, and be as good a Virgin as ever’, and assured him ‘that a Maidenhead was as easily made as a pudding’. At any time, Charlotte claimed that she had enough ‘maidenheads now in possession, as would serve a whole court of Aldermen, aye and the Common Council in the bargain.’ This was not the idle assertion of an emboldened bawd, but rather a boastful recognition of one of the successful brothel-keeper’s best-kept secrets. Even the least literate bawd would have had on the shelves of her establishment a worn copy of John Armstrong’s
Oeconomy of Love
. The work, which could loosely be considered a kind of sex manual, contained poetically written advice as well as a recipe for the restoration of virginity. Armstrong had put into writing what had been common knowledge among women and practitioners of medicine for centuries. To tighten the walls of the vagina, a concoction of herbs was needed which included the myrtle’s ‘styptic Berries’, the roots of a caper bush, oak bark stripped ‘bleak and bear’, in addition to ‘Bistort, and Dock and that way-faring Herb, Plantain’. The
collection
was then to be ‘boil’d in wine’ so that the herbs would ‘yield their astringent force’, in order to produce ‘a Lotion … Thrice powerful to contract the shameful Breach’. If applied several times a day, the desired outcome would be the illusion of an unruptured entry. Bawds added their own particular touches to this deception, some inserting a small ‘bladder’ of animal blood into the vagina to produce the effect of a broken hymen. Others, as suggested by John Cleland’s character Fanny Hill, might use a blood-soaked sponge by ‘squeezing it between the thighs’ so it ‘yielded a great deal more of the red liquid than would save a girl’s honour’. Whatever the precise method employed, it would be Charlotte who gained the last laugh. Even after parting with copious coins and banknotes, clients could never be absolutely certain that the girl who lay underneath them had been a genuine virgin, or if she, like Charlotte’s nun Miss Shelly, had ‘gone through twenty-three editions of vestality in one week’.

In addition to those who demanded a constant supply of virgin sacrifices, another contingent of well-paying patrons who required special services frequented her establishment. ‘The noted houses … in King’s Place’, wrote the Baron D’Archenholz, included among their useful possessions ‘… every Device to restore old men and debauched youths’ who otherwise experienced difficulties in consummating their earthy desires. It was at this feat that Charlotte truly excelled. ‘She … Makes old dotards believe themselves gay, vigorous young fellows …’, Chase Price boasted, in addition to turning ‘vigorous young fellows into old dotards’. This expertise was achieved through the invention of a device Charlotte called her ‘elastic beds’. According to the
Nocturnal Revels
, these apparatuses had been ‘invented by that great creative genius Count O’Kelly and constructed by that celebrated mechanic and upholsterer Mr. Gale’. Undoubtedly, Dennis had been inspired by the motions felt while astride one of his galloping horses, and alighted upon the idea of a spring-loaded bed frame which replicated the sensations, thereby minimising the effort involved in the act of copulation. Charlotte, until her attempt to retire in 1778, was the sole owner of these unique contraptions, credited with giving ‘the finest movements and in the most extatic moments, without trouble or the least fatigue to either Agent or Patient … to the amazing gratification and sensation of the
Actor
and Actress’. The very existence of these beds drew in some of the most lecherous, ageing roués still in circulation – or, as Charlotte regarded them, ‘Peers who depended more upon art than nature’. This set, which included ‘impotent Aldermen and rich Levites, who fancied that their amourous abilities were not in the least decayed’, were considered her best customers and ‘her choicest friends’. Among these infirm rakes, none was so great a supporter as William Douglas, Duke of Queensbury, a man who through his unabated sexual appetite had earned himself the sobriquet of ‘the Old Goat’.