The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (7 page)

Spring Garden, a location that would one day be consumed by Trafalgar Square and its surroundings, was a quiet and genteel spot, just off the lip of St James’s Park. It was near enough to Pall Mall to assume an air of exclusivity, but also close enough to the new Little Theatre that had sprung up in the Haymarket to attract a more indulgent and lascivious crowd. Above all, it was the modest nature of the area that appealed most. Elizabeth Ward’s business was a small-scale one but with a preferred collection of patrons, quite possibly drawn from those contacts she had made while residing in Genoa. Only those who knew of the brothel’s existence were able to identify it behind the façade of shop fronts. To the unannounced visitor who arrived at her doorstep, Mrs Ward’s establishment appeared as a simple milliner’s business, not unlike that operated by Mrs Cole, the madam featured in John Cleland’s novel
Fanny Hill
. At Elizabeth Ward’s, young ladies innocently toiled away in the front room ‘making capuchins, bonnets, &c’, a useful cover for ‘a traffic in more precious commodities’.

But in spite of the tidy and welcoming appearance of her operation, the realities of life under her roof would not have been a pleasant experience. As any bawd knew, whores were not to be trusted and had to be observed at all times. Money and gifts should never be placed directly into their care; they should not be permitted to slip away on errands or enjoy the company of visiting friends. Granting liberties had a way of leading to trouble – namely, employees cheating their employer, rather than the other way around. If Mrs Ward was in any way intent on securing her and her daughter’s future, the ship she ran needed to be a tight one. An effective madam used all means available in order to keep her women on board, including various forms of punishment and coercion. In the eighteenth century, those in the procuring trade also employed the law in order to keep that which they felt belonged to them within their rightful possession. Any girl foolish enough to bolt from her madam’s premises was likely to be hauled before a magistrate and prosecuted for the theft of her clothing. In most cases, the items with which
she
absconded were those given to her by her procuress as suitable apparel in which to see clients. Such was the case with Ann Smith, who in 1752 was accused by Mrs Ward of running off with ‘one holland gown … one pair of laced ruffles … one pair of silk stockings … one satin hat and one pair of paste earrings …’ – essentially, the clothes on her back. After only a short period in practice, Elizabeth Ward had gained a notoriety among the brothel-hopping set for the severity of her methods. What catalogue of horrors prompted Ann Smith’s hasty flight from there can hardly be imagined.

As a very young girl, Charlotte would have stood on the periphery of these dramas. For many years she would be far too inexperienced to understand that what Mrs Ward did, every penny she prised out of her harlots’ hands, she did in order to ensure Charlotte’s comfort and future. A brothel must have been a strange nursery for a growing child. Her earliest memories would be of her small but irregular family of females, who sat and embroidered, gossiped and occasionally giggled. Men would come and go like shadows, while animal grunts and gasps swept under doors and passed through walls. Sometimes great storms of emotion would buffet the home, and these faces seen previously simpering and sewing would heave into sorrowful wails and acts of violence. Charlotte may also have remembered the tempest of her mother’s anger, and how their fatherless family would have cowered at its appearance. As a child she would have learned much through the observation of her mother and of the well-ordered routines of her strange home, but the life Mrs Ward envisioned for her daughter required a more appropriate education than this.

As evidenced in her later life, Charlotte’s schooling bore the hallmarks of a slightly more privileged background. Whereas the curriculum at local charity schools would have been based entirely on comprehension of the basics – reading, writing, figuring, religious study and preparation for an apprenticeship – the slightly more up-scale, although not necessarily more academically rigorous, academies for young ladies would have included inculcation in female ‘accomplishments’. In addition to literacy and numeracy, pupils would have received instruction in French, dancing, deportment and music. If especially fortunate, they might also be exposed to Italian, needlework,
accountancy
and perhaps a hint of history, geography and the works of classical antiquity. As the social reformer Francis Place mentions, Georgian London contained a number of ‘respectable day schools’ for girls that offered just such an academic regime, for a small fee. However, given the manifest pitfalls of her mother’s profession, it would have been in Charlotte’s best interest if she were to attend school as a boarder.

Mrs Ward would not have been the first procuress or courtesan to place her daughter into the care of a school’s matrons. Given gentlemen’s predilections for pubescent virgins, simply the presence of a nubile girl in the indecent surroundings of a brothel would have raised too many temptations. Elizabeth Ward did not want her daughter’s most precious commodity squandered in a rape, or through the softly-whispered persuasions of a love-struck but penniless suitor. Instead, the disposal of Charlotte’s maidenhead would have been planned in meticulous detail, as one of her mother’s greatest business transactions. For approximately fourteen years Mrs Ward would have cultivated her daughter’s charms and funded her education, in preparation for what would become the most important day of her life: her initiation into the rites of Venus.

When the time was deemed appropriate, usually upon the onset of womanhood, Charlotte, like any society daughter, would have been introduced into a public whirl of spectacle and entertainment. As a new face seen beside Mrs Ward at the theatre or in the pleasure gardens, the signals would become clear: Charlotte was the latest object on offer. Although her airing would have aroused interest from a variety of curious parties, Mother Ward would have had her own shortlist of especially wealthy, high-ranking customers already in mind to perform the two essential roles ahead.

No sexual experience was more coveted in the eighteenth century than intercourse with a virgin. A genuine maidenhead was a delicacy to the carnal connoisseur and commanded a hefty price. As untouched young women were not in the habit of wandering accidentally into disorderly houses, any bawd would know that the expense of procuring such treasures was considerable. The going rate for the privilege of spending the night with a chaste girl could vary from £20 to 50 guineas. Particularly skilful bawds with especially beautiful young recruits might
even
manage to raise this sum to £100. And it was not simply the selfishly erotic pleasure of introducing an innocent to the sin of fornication that commanded these fees; it was also the guarantee of what might be considered the only truly safe sexual encounter available. Whoever he was, Charlotte’s deflowerer was likely to have been comfortably wealthy, and certainly not of her personal choosing. As the author of the
Nocturnal Revels
would have his readership believe, with regard to the pawning of her daughter Mrs Ward’s devious reputation was not unfounded. Charlotte, it seems, was ‘passed off as a virgin’ several more times to the unsuspecting, undoubtedly for similarly exorbitant prices.

Upon her entrance into the profession Charlotte was passed around like a dish to be sampled by the ranks of her mother’s clients. Even one night with the brothel’s novice would have brought Mrs Ward a healthy ladleful of cash, in addition to gifts of jewels and other bits of frippery. Enticing as these first proofs of her success were, her mother sought the ultimate prize for her daughter; an offer to be placed in ‘high keeping’.

In the eighteenth century, all whores were not created equal. Some came into the profession by chance, others through a specific determination to scale the ladder of society. Those of the meretricious sisterhood ranged in rank from the destitute and diseased ‘bunter’ or ‘bulk-monger’ at the bottom, to the high-living, silk-and-jewel-bedecked ‘kept mistress’ (later more commonly referred to as a courtesan) at the top end. Like a luxury item, the company of an accomplished, charming and beautiful mistress might be borrowed for an exclusive price, but could be owned outright, at least in theory, if her lodgings and living expenses were covered by an admirer. If the admirer was very wealthy, a young woman fortunate enough to ‘enter into keeping’ could have access to any extravagance money could procure. In order to demonstrate his own financial prowess, fashion demanded that a gentleman of influence keep a mistress as lavish in her spending habits as he. Kept mistresses were given free rein with shop-keepers and dressmakers, at the gambling tables, taverns and theatres, placing all expenses on their lovers’ generous credit accounts. Much to the dismay of the era’s moralists, kept mistresses lived as well as the noble wives they mirrored, dressing in the same clothing, wearing the same jewellery and riding in the same private coaches. They lived at some of the most
modish
addresses, in lodgings decorated with gilded furniture and walls lined with damask. They kept entire households of servants, often attired in their own unique livery. They threw lavish dinners and parties and offered an alternative existence to the more staid world inhabited by virtuous wives and daughters. It was for this life that Mrs Ward was equipping her daughter, not for one of street-trawling, or even dependency upon a bawd. Prostitution of this sort presented the only means by which a low-born, illegitimate daughter of a whore might raise herself from the chamber pot of society, as it was not entirely unknown for devoted keepers in time to become legal husbands.

While Charlotte was to be the primary beneficiary of a life in high keeping, her mother stood to gain as well. Brothel convention dictated that in order to compensate a madam for parting with a woman who earned her house great repute among the debauched, a sufficient gratuity was required. Bawds preferred these parting gestures to be paid in banknotes – the higher the amount, the better. Even after the event, this would not be the last favour that Mrs Ward received from her daughter. Any devoted child was sure to provide for a parent from her lover’s unbounded pocket, making expensive gifts of clothing and food as well as paying the bills. Most ladies in keeping had entire retinues of needy family members and friends who followed closely behind, living off the scraps of her endowment. A bountiful lover would have permitted such expenses in moderation, but Charlotte’s uncomfortably close association with the notorious Mrs Ward would not have sat easily with her patrons. Instead, they would have been apt to watch her with a sceptical eye, wary of the tricks that mother may have instilled in daughter. The choice of a professional name, free from associations with the bawd who commandeered the brothel in Spring Garden, was necessary to ensure Charlotte’s success in the pleasure-seeking arena.

The shedding and altering of names was by no means an unusual practice among women of Charlotte’s profession. Without a direct association with a great lineage or a family of rank, a surname was a negligible, valueless thing. It was far better to call oneself something suitable, a moniker which conveyed a sense of allure, which alluded to an illustrious birth or to one’s special talents. If she was fortunate enough to be placed in keeping, she might also elect to adopt her lover’s surname, a
practice
which conferred on her the status of a
de facto
wife while simultaneously outraging respectable society. Why Charlotte alighted on the name of Hayes as a replacement for Ward is unknown. It may perhaps provide us with a clue as to who her first paramour might have been, although any evidence of a Mr, Lord or Captain Hayes has not been recorded in the annals of her history.

In 1740, at about the time Charlotte Hayes made her appearance, two other girls ‘came upon the town from obscurity’: Lucy Cooper and Nancy Jones, who, along with the courtesan Fanny Murray, would prove to be her greatest rivals. The most business-minded bawds of the day were like horse trainers, constantly in search of young, promising blood from which they might be able to mould a winner. While Mrs Ward poured her resources into preparing her daughter for entry into the stakes, other procuresses cultivated their own favourites. At the time that Charlotte entered her profession, Fanny Murray had already established a name for herself as mistress to Beau Nash, the reigning Master of the Ceremonies at Bath, but it was Lucy Cooper who looked to be her greatest rival. Like Charlotte, she too had been the daughter of a bawd, born straight into the arms of a whorehouse. There were no aspirations for Lucy’s future though. If nature hadn’t blessed her with such overwhelming beauty, it is probable that she would have sunk into obscurity along with the others who lodged under her mother’s second-rate roof. It was only through the insight of Elizabeth Weatherby, one of Covent Garden’s ‘super-bawds’, that Lucy was polished and presented, a finished product ripe for high-class whoring in her early teens. Although lauded as being ‘perfection … amongst the great impures’ and deliciously ‘Lewder than all the whores in Charles’ reign’, Lucy never learned to exude the slow-burning charm that sustained Charlotte’s light. She and Mrs Weatherby, who acted as a kind of manager-cum-mother-figure, rowed bitterly and frequently. Choosing to ignore her procuress’s advice, Lucy eventually exhausted her good fortune, ending her days in debt and destitution at the period when Charlotte’s star was most in its ascendant. Nancy Jones’s fame was also short-lived. After only a few seasons, her handsome features were destroyed by a bout of smallpox. Robbed of the single attribute responsible for her livelihood, she too fell from the front row of leading lights
and
into the degradation of the back streets. From there, the grasp of syphilis is said to have pulled her into a pauper’s grave before the age of twenty-five. It only required poor judgement, or a stroke of bad luck, to capsize an otherwise profitable career as an exclusive lady of pleasure. Of the three who began the race in that year, only Charlotte managed to sustain her stride and amass a triumph of riches.