The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (32 page)

As the Abbess of one of the most celebrated houses of ill repute in London, Charlotte had earned greater renown and a larger income than in her youthful heyday. However, in spite of her success, she was rapidly wearying of her profession. All bawds at some point dreamed of retirement, a graceful exit which would mark the official end of a long-suffered career. For Charlotte, who had been prudently counting her pennies, that occasion now did not seem so remote. By the beginning of 1769 she and Dennis had managed to save enough to make the much-desired move into the circles of landowning society. They had set their sights on the estate of Clay Hill in Epsom. While the couple had always been eager to demonstrate their wealth, there was something unusually urgent about the nature of this transactio. Something about Charlotte’s physical condition had begun to change.

15

‘
THE
LITTLE KING
OF
Bath’

WITH HIS CREDITORS
paid and his freedom secured, in the latter part of 1757 Sam Derrick was at last at liberty to roam the West End streets. The unexpected success of his
Harris’s List
had replenished his pockets, and such a windfall called for a round of celebrations. In his usual fashion Derrick headed for his tailor, hired smart lodgings and spread his wealth liberally around the Garden, throwing his money at the taverns, bagnios, gaming tables and whores who were usually in receipt of his benevolence. Sam had taken nothing away from his close brush with the horrors of debtor’s prison. Instead of saving the dividends from his portion of the
List
’s profits, he squandered them with his usual abandon. By the following year, he was writing again to his friend Faulkner in Dublin complaining of his penury. It was obvious that any advantage he might have gained from his efforts had simply slipped through his fingers. In spite of the promise of a reliable source of income editing the
Harris’s List
, when Boswell encountered him two years later, Sam’s finances were as stretched as they had ever been. Even with the secret success he had enjoyed, little had changed in
Derrick’s
life. The year 1760 still found him in circulation around the watering holes of Covent Garden, hunting for patrons and free favours from female ‘friends’.

Although it may not have been obvious to Boswell at the time, Sam’s years of perseverance and prostration before potential sponsors was at last beginning to bear some fruit. The net result of a life passed in coffee houses and taverns had provided him not only with his single literary triumph, but with an impressive array of acquaintances. Although many had turned up their noses at him, there remained a handful who found him charming, recognising at least a spark of talent beyond his roguish demeanour. By the end of the 1750s he could count among his admirers the Duke of Newcastle, as well as the Earls of Chesterfield, Charlemont, Shannon and Cork – the latter, according to George Faulkner, was ‘much yours and speaketh most affectionately and friendly of you’. With Faulkner actively promoting Derrick’s name within aristocratic circles, the gilded doors to some of the most illustrious drawing rooms in England and Ireland were at last unbolted. In the early 1760s, Derrick found himself the guest of the Earl of Chesterfield, who undoubtedly enjoyed his ribald Covent Garden tales. Similarly, invitations to visit his noble patrons across the Irish Sea were also forthcoming, one of which was followed by a commission to compose a history of Ireland. Who precisely his benefactor was on this occasion is not entirely clear, but for some time John Boyle, the 5th Earl of Cork and Lord Thomas Southwell, who was in the habit of praising Sam ‘with raptures and panegyricks’, had been soliciting his company. A substantial advance had been paid and the business of subscription-raising already commenced when Derrick departed for the shores of his homeland in September of 1760. He had been away for nearly ten years.

Derrick had decided that his long-overdue visit to Ireland would mark the belated making of him. Setting sail from Liverpool and landing in Kinsale, he would then travel over land to Dublin via Killarney, Kilkenny, Carlow and Naas, visiting potential patrons and those who had requested his entertaining company. As he travelled he scribbled furiously, taking notes for what promised to be his
magnum opus
, detailing the characters he met and the sites of natural beauty he observed. His ultimate destination, where he would arrive two months later, was
Dublin.
In the decade he had been away, the city, like Derrick, had acquired a veneer of polish. The streets had been widened, a new crossing spanning the Liffey had replaced the old Essex Bridge, while the interiors of Dublin’s public buildings had been embellished with elaborate rococo plasterwork. In his youth, Sam had abandoned Dublin for its lack of promise, but now, with some maturity, he returned to his beloved ‘Eblana’ in the hope that she would yield to him what had once been denied. Derrick had always envisioned his return to the city of his childhood – he would ride into the centre triumphantly, a celebrated bard. He had not quite arrived at that situation upon the occasion of this visit. Instead he had hoped to re-establish relations with those who might possibly assist him in achieving his goal. Unfortunately, by virtue of the season, he found many of his former acquaintances unavailable, and claimed disappointedly that ‘Bath, and the vacation of Parliament’ had ‘robbed me of my purposed pleasure’. Nevertheless, Sam amused himself at the theatre, passing the hours with his friend, the actor Thomas Wilkes. He also paid a visit to Mrs Creagh.

Since the day of Sam’s disinheritance some three years earlier, not so much as a letter had passed between the two. After such an expression of condemnation, it is unlikely that Sam expected his words to adequately sooth away Mrs Creagh’s concerns with regard to his moral character. With some luck and finesse, however, reinstatement in her will might not wholly be out of the question. At any rate, Sam felt that he owed his childhood guardian an excuse or explanation, or at least an opportunity to see him standing before her as a favoured poet of the Irish gentry. In November, he appeared in his aunt’s drawing room with his hat in hand. Whatever words he had chosen to effect a reconciliation had at least partially assisted in healing the wound. As the two remaining members of a dwindling family, emotional ties may have spoken the loudest, surmounting mistrust and disapproval. Derrick later wrote to Faulkner that he had been accepted back into Mrs Creagh’s company. ‘I am extremely glad of the good agreement between you and your Aunt, and wish a continuance of it’, replied his friend. Whether this agreement included some sort of financial reward is unknown. Certainly, if it did, not a hint of it remained at the time of Derrick’s death.

Mrs Creagh was not the only person Sam managed to charm during his Irish excursion. His universally positive reception in Ireland was largely responsible for the enormous kiss of good fortune landed upon him in the following year. Undoubtedly, Derrick had been on his most refined behaviour, playing his best-known role as the silver-tongued gallant, the one that had won him such approbation in other circles. True to his more predictable nature, however, the promised
History of Ireland
, the
raison d’être
for his voyage, never manifested itself. Instead, the material he had assiduously gathered during his travels was put to use in the one work that earned him praise in the realm of respectable literature, his
Letters Written from Leverpool, Chester, Corke, the Lake of Killarney, Dublin, Tunbridge Wells, and Bath
. Although judged to be an elegant collection of correspondence between himself and members of the aristocracy, Derrick’s
Letters
was more of an exercise in the promotion of his image as a discerning gentleman than a feat of literary genius. It appeared in print seven years after his trusting patrons had advanced him funds for his intended publication. Nevertheless, those in high places who had enjoyed Sam’s company during his several-month sojourn across the sea continued to think and speak highly of him. The Earl of Shannon appeared to be so convinced of the deep-rooted gentility of Derrick’s character that he offered him a living in the Church. Sam had never before received such an accolade for his acting ability. The offer of the position, which he made a public show of declining as proof of his worthiness, caused him some embarrassment:

I am not hypocrite enough to sport with sacred matters for a livelihood; and I think it would be a little better, at least I should feel it so, If I accepted a living in the church, when my heart dictated my being unfit for it: unless I was certain I could by my example enforce the precepts of Christianity, I would not enroll myself amongst its pastors.

While the Earl of Shannon may have been the only member of the titled class to have believed the author of the
Harris’s List
worthy of holding a place within the Church, others thought him perfectly qualified to fill an important position elsewhere.

Outside of Covent Garden, the only other location in the eighteenth century as noted for its diversions and social interaction was Bath. Tucked into the verdant hills south of Bristol, Bath’s percolating hot springs, lively assembly rooms and fashionable crowd enticed the wealthy and titled from their London townhouses and country estates in the pursuit of pleasure. Bath was as much about excess and elegance, display and theatricality, as it was about curing gentlemen of their gout and women of their vapours. Like Covent Garden, it was a seat of frivolous fun, a place where the hours of the day were whiled away in parties and social occasions under the auspices of Bath’s Master of the Ceremonies. Until February 1761 it was Richard ‘Beau’ Nash who had lauded over the assemblies in this role, reprimanding inappropriately attired ladies and leading the evening’s first dances. As ‘King of Bath’, Nash, since the early years of the century, had been single-handedly responsible for maintaining Bath and its sister town, Tunbridge Wells, as resorts for the genteel. He had put in place a series of rules which governed with a clockwork-like regularity the etiquette and practices of the city’s social whirl. Although hardly a paragon of virtue, Nash, in his unmistakable white hat, cut a formidable and respected character as he trod the streets and crescents. By the end of 1760, however, the King of Bath was ailing, and who might succeed him was a question that no one seemed capable of answering.

As one who constantly chased the tails of potential patrons and felt compelled to keep in step with the movements of the fashionable set, Bath seemed as natural a home to Sam as Covent Garden. When the great patrons abandoned London for the green vistas of the spa town, Derrick followed closely behind, along with many theatrical, artistic and literary personalities. At certain times of the year, it was as if the entire West End with its assorted personages had been transplanted into the assembly rooms of Bath. Still riding on the crest of his favourable reception in Ireland, Sam had decamped to the resort in the hope of building on his successes elsewhere. With a clutch of letters of introduction from the Earls of Cork and Chesterfield, he once more plied the spa’s drawing rooms for potential benefactors. With the requisite seal of approval from such high-profile members of the landed class, Sam experienced an unrivalled success worming his way into the company of those who, just months earlier, would have turned the malodorous, malnourished poet away at
the
door. While the increasingly frail Nash had taken to surveying his kingdom from a wheelchair, Derrick was engaged in his most prolonged dramatic engagement to date, wooing with elaborate artifice the good graces of those who truly ruled Bath: the aristocracy.

The death of Beau Nash on 3 February 1761 took no one by surprise; the Master of the Ceremonies had reached the supreme age of eighty-seven before retiring to his grave. After the stately progress of his funeral and interment in Bath Abbey, much of the leisured population was prepared to carry on under the rule of Nash’s hastily appointed replacement, who rather unfortunately is remembered only as ‘The Frenchman, Monsieur Collette’. Beyond his being French, there was not much in the character of Jacques Collette to which the general subscription-payers of Bath could object. He liked walking and a good game of shuttlecock. He also made an unusual show of dancing with children in the assembly rooms, although by virtue of his towering height he loomed over them rather menacingly. When compared with Nash, Collette did little to impress or annoy anyone other than the owners of the assembly rooms who, since the day of his appointment, had kicked up a storm of disapproval at the unfair practices employed in electing him to the office. The situation degenerated rapidly and soon, in order to soothe frayed tempers, the Corporation of Bath was forced to call a new election. ‘The Frenchman’ would be made to defend his title against another nominee, a dark horse who raised far more eyebrows than the long-legged Collette.

The strange turn of events during the spring of that year would be something that Derrick himself claimed as ‘an event most improbable and most unexpected’. As Sam told the story, sheer accident lay at the foundation of his unanticipated rise to a position of prominence. While engaged in broadening his spectrum of patrons in Bath that winter, he had the good fortune of attaching himself to the entourage of a certain unnamed Lady —. After several weeks of attending her levees and waxing lyrical about the beauty of her daughters, Lady—had grown fond of Derrick, who, like any necessitous poet, had made himself indispensable to his patroness. With his charm, impeccable manners and thoughtfulness, Sam had turned her into a devoted sponsor who sang his praises loudly to all who might listen.