The Damnation of John Donellan (11 page)

In 1772, Hanger was in his early twenties, and Sophia Baddeley was just a little older. At the doors of the Pantheon, surrounded
by a crowd of friends who had drawn their swords in defence of Sophia, Hanger demanded that the proprietors explain why she had been excluded. Neither the proprietors nor Donellan were willing to do so in public, and Baddeley was admitted. The
Town and Country
recorded soon afterwards that ‘ladies of easy virtue were indiscriminately admitted without any interrogatories concerning their chastity'. In one stroke, Donellan had been demoted to a mere doorman, and not a very effective one at that. (Baddeley's glory, incidentally, was to be short-lived. She died aged only forty-four in Scotland, impoverished, debt-ridden and addicted to laudanum. Hanger had set up home with her in Dean Street, but had left her when the money ran out.)

Donellan's position as moral guardian of his customers was probably untenable from the start. When the
Town and Country
reviewed his life after his trial, they said that he had been promoted to Master of Ceremonies at the Pantheon because he had been having an affair with the wife of one of the other proprietors, who presumably had pressured for his appointment: ‘It is believed that whilst H … was devoting a building to the gods, Donellan was devoutly sacrificing at the altar of Venus and fabricating for him a pair of antlers' – in other words, making a cuckold of him. Similarly, an article in the
Nottinghamshire Gazette
of 4 April 1781 says revealingly: ‘[Donellan's] universal intercourse with polite prostitutes was well known … his connexion with Mrs H … in the vicinity of Rathbone Place is on the recollection of most people. The house, the table, the servants, the carriages of this lady were at the captain's constant disposal; and it is suspected that his attendances were rewarded in the most liberal way, which enabled him to continue his appearance in public and gave him the opportunity of being acquainted with the unhappy family into which he married.'

This single article brings Donellan to life in an unparalleled way. The picture of the badly treated but noble patriot painted by Donellan himself to the directors of the East India Company fades; he becomes not only a gallant, a rake and a frequenter of brothels, but a kept man.

But who was Donellan's lover, ‘Mrs H'? The
Town and Country
identifies her only as the wife of one of the Pantheon's proprietors – one of the original builders, in fact. But there was no obvious ‘Mr H' among either the builders or the known subscribers. The newspaper article suggests that ‘Mrs H' was perhaps a ‘polite prostitute' living near Rathbone Place – either the mistress or the wife of a man wealthy enough to run liveried servants and carriages, or a bawd running one of the dazzlingly wealthy brothels in the area, with income in her own right.

There are several contenders. Rathbone Place is on the north side of Oxford Street directly opposite Soho Square. Teresa Cornelys ran Carlisle House from Soho Square. Lady Harrington, the ‘Stable Yard Messalina', was one of her patrons. But even if the indefatigably lecherous Lady Harrington was not Donellan's protector, there were plenty of other candidates among the courtesans and society women who frequented the place.

Donellan's lover might have been Charlotte Hayes (then in her late forties), who had set up a successful brothel in Great Marlborough Street in 1761, just south of Oxford Street and a little to the east of Soho Square; but Charlotte was never directly identified with the Pantheon. She and her husband did, however, have many influential friends, including the Duke of Richmond and the Earls Egremont and Grosvenor, all of whom paid 50 guineas a night for Charlotte's girls. Charlotte and her husband were said to have been worth £40,000 (£2.55 million) in 1769 – more than enough for her to pay for a little pied-à-terre for a favourite captain in Rathbone Place.

There were other prostitutes who might also fit the bill as Donellan's lover, though the connection is tenuous at best.
Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies
records two working out of the narrow streets abutting Rathbone Place: Mrs Lowes (‘she expects three guineas for a whole night') and Miss Townsend (‘she refuses no visitors that will afford a couple of guineas and a bottle').
⁹
Though a street of respectable houses to the front, Rathbone Place housed poorer communities at its rear and came to be known as a haunt of artists, engravers and sculptors. The girls who worked the area, however, were not always ‘happy with a pretty fellow':
Harris's List
of 1773
also mentions the pathetic, abused Polly Jackson, ‘a little fluttering child about fourteen years of age debauched about ten months ago … under the direction of a lady who directs her to play her part'. Polly sold herself – or was sold – at No. 22.

Two women do, however, stand out above all others as Donellan's possible mistress. One is the actress Elizabeth Hartley. The incomplete list of investors in the Pantheon in 1770–71 might well have included Mrs Hartley's husband, an actor. As the actor-manager David Garrick described their relationship: ‘She has a husband, a precious fool, that she heartily despises …' In fact, there is no record of any marriage, but Elizabeth had been with him for some years and they had toured the provinces and Ireland together. As Elizabeth seems to have been that rare breed of actress/prostitute, one who actually saved her money, it is quite feasible that her ‘husband' thought it a good investment to buy a share in the Pantheon. A ‘Mr Hartley' was certainly well-heeled enough to have his portrait painted by George Romney in 1785 and pay £18 18s. for it.

Elizabeth had been born in 1750 and had made her debut in Covent Garden in 1772. She was a stunningly beautiful woman whose appearances on stage sent the audience into raptures – until she opened her mouth, that is. The
Covent Garden Journal
actually described her voice as ‘monstrous'. But she exuded sexual availability, with her ‘slovenly good nature that renders her prodigiously vulgar', according to Garrick, who became her employer.

However, Elizabeth's story exudes more than sex. She had sense. She had started her career in Little St James Street, Haymarket, with the bawd Mrs Kelly and, as bawds did not give free lodging, it is likely that Elizabeth earned her keep. When Kelly moved to Arlington Street, in Piccadilly, in 1771, the painter Joshua Reynolds noted that Hartley was with her; but Elizabeth was soon to move on. Once she had been spotted by Garrick, she took her own lodgings in Queen Street, Haymarket. Reynolds used Mrs Hartley as a model several times, reinforcing the sexual titillation by painting her both as a Madonna in 1772 and as the fifteenth-century courtesan Jane Shore in 1773.

By 1773, Elizabeth Hartley was pursued wherever she went. One
night at Vauxhall Gardens – the ultimate place for fashionable assignations, where a woman could be manhandled or worse in the suffocating crowds – she was jostled by several men. The character who came to her rescue – it is not clear whether he was already with her or not – was Sir Henry Bate. Bate held several church livings but left most of the work to his curates: he was far more interested in stirring up controversy in London. Bate knew Elizabeth's employer Garrick well, and had written some moderately successful farces for the stage, but he had made his name principally as the editor of the scandal-touting
Morning Post
. In the fracas at Vauxhall Gardens, Bate accepted a challenge to a duel thrown down by one of Elizabeth's assailants. The next morning, his rival substituted a professional boxer, but Bate was not to be outdone: he stripped to the waist and pummelled the man into submission, thereby earning himself the title of ‘the fighting parson'.

Bate's relationship with Elizabeth Hartley lasted for years – in fact, he married her sister – but he also had a strong link to John Donellan. In January 1777, just eighteen months before Donellan married Theodosia Boughton, Bate had a duel with the notorious Andrew Robinson Stoney, and John Donellan was his second, even lending Bates his own sword for the purpose. The duel, over the honour of the heiress Mary Bowes, has the hallmarks of being set up between Bate and Stoney so that Stoney could fake a life-threatening injury that would bring Mary running to his side. But even if Bate and Donellan were perfectly innocent of the ruse, it still shows them conducting battles of ‘honour' in the mainstream of society – or rather, battles engineered by cash-poor gallants to part wealthy young women from their money and potential rivals.

By 1775, Elizabeth Hartley, now firmly placed in Garrick's favour and a well-known figure about town, had a lover, a fellow actor called William Smith; by 1778 she was reported to be living in Bath recuperating from an illness (the same year that Donellan married Theodosia, also in Bath). The rest of her life fades from public view, but, in contrast to the sad end of someone like Sophia Baddeley or Teresa Cornelys, who died in the Fleet Prison, she kept her finances and emotions under control. The ‘prodigiously
vulgar' Elizabeth Hartley died in her own home in King Street Woolwich in ‘easy circumstances'.
¹⁰

The other woman who fits the bill as Donellan's mistress was Anne Parsons (nicknamed Nancy). Born in 1729, she was the daughter of a Bond Street tailor. In her late teens or early twenties she had married a slave trader, a Captain Horton, and had gone to live in Jamaica. But by 1764 she was back in London and mixing in aristocratic company. Although her reputation was racy, she was not a common-or-garden whore; she was much cleverer than that. In the late 1760s, she became the acknowledged mistress of the Duke of Grafton, with whom she lived openly from 1764 to 1769. The noble duke became prime minister when William Pitt fell ill in 1768, although he was outstandingly useless in the post. The
Spectator
magazine said of him that he was ‘unsteady, capricious and indolent, with ‘hardly any quality of a statesman'. Nevertheless, George III liked him and awarded him the Order of the Garter. He was married to Anne Liddell, daughter of the First Baron Ravensworth, but unhappily, and the affair with Mrs Horton finished off the relationship. The couple divorced in March 1769.

For a while, Mrs Horton ruled all she surveyed, despite a lack of aristocratic title. Society was hardly likely to snub the companion of the prime minister. A portrait by Reynolds shows her leaning reflectively on her left hand as she gazes away from the viewer: even-featured and pale skinned, she is no roaring beauty, but she has a certain acute, intelligent look about her. This cool charm had obviously carried her far, and it did not desert her when a series of obscene verses called
Henry and Nan
, about herself and Grafton, circulated London in 1769. Grafton went to pieces and resigned from office in 1770. But he did not marry Mrs Horton. Pressured by the age-old imperative to produce legitimate heirs, instead he married Elizabeth Wrottesley, who bore him thirteen children in sixteen years.

Anne Horton turned her attentions to another aristocratic suitor, the Duke of Dorset. It was these two famous associations that led Horace Walpole to remark acidly: ‘The Duke of Grafton's Mrs Horton, the Duke of Dorset's Mrs Horton, everybody's Mrs
Horton.' Anne was forty; the duke was twenty-four. The duke, who had just succeeded to his title on the death of his uncle, had a reputation as a womaniser, a gambler and a sportsman. Anne must have known she could never keep him: for one thing, he became besotted with the ballerina Giovanna Zanerini, who became all but mistress of Knole House, his family seat. By 1776, Anne's relationship with him was over but she was forty-seven and not ready to be put out to pasture just yet. She set her sights on Charles, the Second Viscount Maynard, and they were married – with what must have been considerable relief on Anne's part – that same year. Although she and the viscount did eventually separate, Anne lived to a ripe old age, dying just outside Paris in her eightieth year.

A much adored, much envied woman: was Anne Horton Donellan's lover? She, more than anyone else, fits the description given in the
Nottinghamshire Gazette
of a lady with a house, table, servants and carriages. Such a woman had wealth and status – carriages alone were notoriously expensive to run, not just the vehicles themselves but the grooms, stables, liveried footmen and drivers that went with them. Hers were emblazoned with a noble lord's coat-of-arms – the ultimate status symbol. The woman who stepped out of such a carriage either ruled her lover's heart, his bed or his house – and sometimes all three. The famous, well-kept mistress of a still more famous aristocrat whose attentions were often elsewhere – either in Parliament or with his other women – would have suited Donellan perfectly. Unlike Elizabeth Hartley, Anne Horton had a high-society profile but not a reputation that could be damaged by having a personal favourite. And lastly, Viscount Maynard and his new wife lived at No. 36 Soho Square – which fits the description of ‘in the vicinity of Rathbone Place' – the two were a minute's walk apart.

(Anne Horton
née
Parsons is often confused with another Mrs Horton, born Anne Lutrell, who married the Duke of Cumberland. She was the widow of Christopher Horton and married the Duke in Calais in 1771 in what was popularly viewed as a very clever romantic campaign by her to become ‘Her Royal Highness' – the duke was the uncle of the Prince of Wales. But the marriage enraged the king, resulting in the Royal Marriages Act of 1772,
which forbad any member of royalty from marrying a commoner. This Anne Horton died in Trieste in 1808 aged sixty-six. Although a beautiful woman with many admirers, and with a father who had a shameful reputation of his own, she is often erroneously and unfairly labelled ‘anybody's Mrs Horton'.)

Whoever the elusive ‘Mrs H' was, Donellan would have known the geography of Rathbone Place well. It was just a few minutes' stroll from the Pantheon. A map of 1840 shows the houses on its eastern side set back in gardens. An account by Edward Walford shines a light upon this lost semi-rural part of London. Built by a Captain Rathbone in 1718, Rathbone Place had previously been pasture; at its northern end was a windmill (now commemorated in Windmill Place). Walford quotes an old resident of the street, Mr Smith, as saying: ‘at the top of that street was a long pond with a windmill … a halfpenny was paid by every person at the hatch to the miller for the privilege of walking in his grounds … another halfpenny hatch was between Oxford Street and Grosvenor Square.'
¹¹