The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (36 page)

As she began to blossom into womanhood, the dangers that Mary faced from any association with her mother would have increased. As Charlotte sought to raise her daughter respectably and to endow her
with
the hallmarks of gentility, the problem of appropriate schooling would have reared its head. Knowledge of Charlotte’s name and face among the upper ranks of society would have prevented her from placing Mary at one of the more elite schools for young ladies. The only truly safe haven for her daughter lay outside England, where she might enjoy the advantages of anonymity. Among wealthier parents, it was a common practice to place one’s daughters in convent schools across the Channel, in France and Belgium. Ironically, it was at such an establishment that the Abbess of King’s Place decided to educate her own child, entrusting her virtue to the care of a bona fide sisterhood. Perhaps swayed by the sentimentality of the occasion of her daughter’s departure for school, Charlotte took the risky decision of personally delivering Mary to the convent in Ostend. Believing that she was unlikely to encounter any of her London acquaintances on her journey, Charlotte, Mary and two of her King’s Place nuns set out for Margate in her carriage. Unfortunately, and much to her chagrin, she encountered William Hickey, his brother and a number of their associates, who had come to the coast for a few weeks of diversion. Hickey, when spotting her ‘smart landau with four post horses’ from his window at an inn, immediately set out to greet them. The pitfalls of Mary’s precarious situation became apparent during a meal they enjoyed together, after the gentlemen ‘made rather too free with the champagne’. Hickey’s brother, described as being ‘beastly drunk’, could not prevent himself from making overtures towards the twelve-year-old Miss O’Kelly, ‘at which the mother was greatly enraged’. Regardless of Charlotte’s anger, Joseph Hickey ‘continued his nonsense, swearing the young one’s bosom had already too much swell for a nun, and no canting hypocritical friar should have the fingering of those plump little globes’. Hickey’s brother then lunged at the girl, ‘clapping his hand upon Miss’s bosom’. Much to the male guests’ surprise, Charlotte was visibly horrified. Shaking with anger, she entreated that ‘he would cease to use such indecent language and action before her innocent child’. ‘Innocent’, echoed Joseph Hickey, ‘oh very innocent to be sure; but she knows a thing or two. However I’ll take her to bed with me and ascertain how matters are’. With that, a struggle ensued; Joseph Hickey attempted to pull the
girl
away from the table, while Charlotte, parting with her usually polite demeanour, immediately jumped from her chair and with a wrathful voice ‘bestowed some tolerably vulgar abuse upon us all’. Wresting Mary from the clutches of Hickey’s brother, who at that point had collapsed upon the floor, ‘she seized rudely hold of [her daughter] and made her exit’. It was unlikely to have been the first of such scenes, and sadly it served as a reminder as to why they were
en route
to Ostend in the first place.

Although the birth of her daughter and the purchase of Clay Hill allowed Charlotte some respite from the duties of her profession, the great Abbess of King’s Place was not yet in the position that she had hoped for. By the 1770s, Charlotte had begun to weary of her role, particularly as the houses and streets that surrounded her were beginning to fill up with competitors. Although only in her mid-forties, within her profession Charlotte was considered old and began to speak more earnestly about severing the ties that kept her tethered to her position. Her thoughts were increasingly in Epsom, where Clay Hill was becoming a venue for entertainment to rival her houses on King’s Place. Unfortunately, her rural residence was also giving her some anxiety. There were expenses involved in maintaining the lifestyle that Dennis had created for them. Their gatherings, although popular, were expensive events, and the stabling and training of horses still too young for racing (and therefore earning) had begun to wear holes in their pockets. To complicate matters, Dennis’s passion for the gaming tables continued to bring about as many wins as it did losses. Although Charlotte was growing impatient, if she were to make an exit from her lucrative career neither she nor Dennis would be in a position to pay their expenses. During the mid- to late 1770s, finances were stretched to their thinnest point. Every transaction that passed between a nun and her devotee assisted in maintaining that which the O’Kellys had built for themselves; every guinea earned by a ‘Polly Nimblewrist’ or banknote brought in for a night with ‘Nell Blossom’ was transubstantiated into horse feed or servants’ pay. For the first time since her imprisonment at the Fleet, Charlotte found herself in debt. In what must have been a mortifying incident, she was apprehended while in the company of Dennis’s nephew Andrew, then a
young
man in his late teens. The debt, which she had acknowledged on 1 August 1776, had been accrued as a business expense and amounted to a mere £50, not an exceptional sum for an establishment like Charlotte’s, which might make that in an evening. According to the haberdasher James Spilsbury, who accused the Abbess of bankrupting him, the bill had been for ‘making fitting adorning and trimming divers cloaths Garments and Masquerade dresses’, in which Charlotte dressed her nymphs. By the time that Dennis, who had been at York races, learned of the situation, Charlotte had already been thrown into the Marshalsea Prison. It was only upon his arrival that her bail was raised.

That Charlotte landed in debtor’s prison for the trifling sum of £50 was an alarming indication of the state of affairs. The author of O’Kelly’s
Memoirs
writes that Dennis too, notwithstanding the prodigious influx of money derived from racing and horse breeding, was yet again ‘streightened in his circumstances’, forced ‘to borrow money on his diamond ring’ simply to meet ‘the enormous expenses of his stud, his house and his donations of friendship’. Charlotte would have been approaching fifty, and having reached such an age would have been in no state of mind to suffer the indignation of returning to the pit of poverty she had clawed her way out of nearly twenty years earlier. For all of her acquired gentility, for all of what male chroniclers called her ‘delicate and agreeable’ conversation, ‘conciliating’ manners and her overall ‘gentleness and modesty’, Charlotte was no soft touch. Whatever horrors her return visit to a prison may have conjured in her memory, it was nothing she had not seen or contended with before. If anything, the untimely incident convinced her of the need to become more enterprising and more competitive in the face of her rivals.

By 1779, the
Nocturnal Revels
commented that every house on King’s Place had been converted into a brothel, making the entire street appear as ‘a constellation of nunneries’. Elizabeth Mitchell’s ‘bevy of beauties’ next door boasted of girls just as glamorous as Charlotte’s. Harriott Lewis, a former East Indian slave, specialised in exotics, while Sarah Prendergast, Sarah Dubery and Catherine Windsor were constantly vying to outdo one another, playing host to
Covent
Garden’s most famous actresses and staging eye-poppingly lewd events guaranteed to reel in London’s lechers. One of the most memorable of these was conceived of by Mrs Prendergast. She entitled it her
Grand Ball d’Amour
. Not to be outdone by Theresa Cornelys in Soho Square, who was beginning to siphon off business through her frequently held masquerades, where the
demi-monde
and respectable classes could scandalously meet and mingle, Sarah Prendergast offered an even more exciting entertainment. Invitations were sent to her most devoted patrons boasting that ‘the finest women in all Europe would appear in
puris naturalibis
’, and included a list of those whose unclothed bodies promised to be on view. In addition to notable courtesans and actresses like Charlotte Spencer, Gertrude Mahon and Isabella Wilkinson, there were also aristocratic ladies of ill repute. Guests arrived by carriage and sedan chair in revealing costumes like those sported by Lady Henrietta Grosvenor and Lady Margaret Lucan, who both came ‘disguised as Mother Eve’, covering their faces with fig leaves and leaving their more shameful parts exposed. After the initial excitement of ogling had worn off, the assembled naked guests danced, dined and copulated to their heart’s content, leaving Mrs Prendergast at the end of the evening nearly £1,000 richer. The
Grand Ball d’Amour
had been a King’s Place coup like none other, that is until Charlotte decided to throw her hat into the ring.

When the worst of their financial storm had cleared, Charlotte resolved that she would bid a farewell to King’s Place at the end of 1778 and turn her attention exclusively to life at Clay Hill. In a last attempt to increase business and to provide some of her most loyal clientele with an unforgettable grand finale, Charlotte planned a ‘Tahitian Feast of Venus’. Captain Cook’s recent voyages to the South Pacific had captured the imagination of the public, who had read the details of his excursions to far-flung islands with keen interest. Of the many discoveries made during Cook’s travels, none fascinated the male population so much as the lurid tales of sex among the ‘noble savagery’. Dr Hawkesworth, who documented the experiences of those who sailed on the
Endeavour
, recorded one occasion where a young girl underwent a rite of sexual initiation. Hawkesworth
was
pleased to report that the ceremony, which involved a gratuitous amount of nudity and fornication, was completed without so much as a hint of embarrassment on the part of the participants. Greatly inspired by these discoveries, Santa Charlotta decided to capitalise upon them by recreating the scene in her King’s Place salon. Like Sarah Prendergast, she too had formal invitations printed:

Mrs Hayes presents her most respectful compliments to Lord – and takes liberty to acquaint him that to-morrow evening, precisely at seven, a dozen beautiful nymphs, unsullied and untainted, and who breathe health and nature will perform the celebrated rites of Venus, as practised at Otaheite, under the instruction and tution of Queen Oberea in which character Mrs. Hayes will appear upon this occasion.

Just how ‘unsullied and untainted’ Charlotte’s uninitiated girls were is highly suspect. She claimed to have sought out a variety of new recruits specifically for this event, but it is more likely that those already on-hand ‘restored’ themselves with the usual
Oeconomy of Love
concoction. To enliven the show further, the Abbess spiced up the sex with some assistance from Aretino’s
Postures
, a well-thumbed sex manual which, like the
Kama Sutra
, explained the joys of penetration from a number of different angles. In the days leading up to the performance, suspense grew among the select group of invited guests. Charlotte put it about that she had spent the past fortnight, twice every day, putting her recruits ‘through their exercises’ and training them ‘for a new species of amusement’. To partner her nymphs, she had also ‘engaged a dozen of the most athelectic and best proportioned young men that could be procured’. This included life models plundered from the studios of the newly founded Royal Academy of Art, as well as a handful of strapping lads considered ‘well qualified for the sport’.

On the night of this ‘salacious olympic’, her efforts had managed to attract the highest ranking in the land. ‘She had’, as the
Revels
reported, ‘no less than three and twenty visitors, consisting chiefly of the first nobility’, in addition to ‘some Baronets, and but five Commoners.’ In
the
largest room of her establishment, chairs and sofas had been arranged for the audience facing a large carpet where ‘all the apparatus for the various attitudes in which the votaries of Venus were to appear, according to the Aretin system’ was laid. As the clock struck eleven, the festivities began:

The males had presented each of their mistresses with a Nail of at least twelve inches in length, in imitation of the presents received by the Ladies of Otaheite upon this occasion, giving the preference to a long nail before any other compliment, they entered upon their devotions, and went through all the various evolutions, according to the word and the command of Santa Charlotta, with the greatest dexterity, keeping the most regular time, to the no small gratification of the lascivious spectators, some of whom could scarce refrain till the end of the spectacle, before they were impetuous to perform a part in this Cyprian game, which lasted near two hours and met with the highest applause from all present.

Following the main event, the male audience, now piqued to the extreme of sexual arousal, selected female devotees to repeat ‘the part they had so skilfully performed’. In addition to the champagne which ‘briskly circulated’ in post-coital celebration, Charlotte ensured that her revellers were touched for contributions while spirits were remained high. As a result of a good evening’s work, ‘a handsome purse was subscribed upon the occasion’ for the benefit of her Thaises.

In the months that followed Charlotte’s success, the author of the
Nocturnal Revels
draws the curtain down on Santa Charlotta’s career. As planned, by the end of the year she had begun to wind down her business, putting on the market a number of the implements of her profession, including Dennis’s specially designed ‘elastic beds’, for which there was a great scramble among the Abbesses of King’s Place. Catherine Matthews, Charlotte’s number two who ran her annexe across the street, also inherited the larger premises. By 1779, having sold up and moved on, Charlotte at last found herself the resident mistress of Clay Hill. However, in many respects, the fabric of her daily life was not significantly altered by her departure
from
King’s Place. Although no longer on the front line of nunnery management, Charlotte maintained a number of smaller brothels scattered throughout St James’s and Piccadilly, which she entrusted to her appointed assistants. The profits of her enterprises were then employed in funding the entertainment enjoyed by her patrons at Clay Hill. During the racing season, she and Dennis threw themselves into hosting an unrelenting round of parties, dinners and gatherings at their home. It was remarked that ‘Keeping company was one of O’Kelly’s chief delights, and with the help of the faithful Charlotte Hayes he made Clay Hill at Epsom renowned for its hospitality’.