The Damnation of John Donellan (12 page)

For Donellan, it would have been a leisurely walk back from here to the Pantheon. From Rathbone Place, which still had its windmill in 1770, he would have walked down to Oxford Street, with Soho Square directly in front of him. To his left was Hanover Yard and slightly beyond that the crossroads at Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, an area known for its coaching inns and which still today retains its Georgian facades and the remnants of large curved arches to admit horse-drawn coaches. One of the inns was the Boar and Castle Hostelry and Posting House, which dated back to 1620; another was called the Blue Posts.

At this point, where Rathbone Place meets Oxford Street, small shops and pastry houses would have edged the street. Turning right and crossing the unpaved road, Donellan would have been able to see the roof of the Pantheon ahead of him, occupying a large plot between Oxford Street and Great Marlborough Street, which runs parallel with it on the other side. Philip Turst had owned the land on which the Pantheon was built, and he had at first tried to interest Teresa Cornelys, owner of Carlisle House, in his venture,
but the negotiations broke down. This is where a Miss Ellice, who knew Cornelys, stepped in. She had ‘conversations with some of the Nobility' as to whether a winter evening entertainment venue would be popular, and Turst asked her to be a shareholder with him. The estimated cost of the building was £15,000 (£955,000 in today's money), which was to be raised by the sale of shares at £300 each. Ellice – who may have entertained hopes of marrying Turst after the death of his wife, although if so she was to be disappointed – bought thirty, and building began on 5 June 1769. When rumours started circulating that the project was over-ambitious, Ellice lost her nerve (or possibly her hopes of marriage) and sold back nineteen of her shares to Turst.

The building costs now rose to £25,000 and Turst proceeded to sell fifty more shares at £500 each. It is recorded that John Donellan paid £600 (£38,000 in today's money) for his share, and the list of his fellow shareholders both in 1771 and again in 1774 reveals the tradesmen, artisans and minor nobility who threw in their lot with this brash new venture. The Pantheon might have been built to entertain the upper classes, but its finances were solidly rooted in trade and the professions, the rising middle class.

Among Donellan's fellow shareholders were Albany Wallis, David Garrick's executor and a prominent London lawyer; another lawyer, Henry Dagge, who had a quarter share in the new Covent Garden Theatre and Royal Opera House; Paul Valliant, a prominent bookseller and printer; and John Cleland, the author of
Fanny Hill
. Other shareholders who took on the 61-year lease in August 1774 were William Franks, who was responsible for building houses at the upper end of Rathbone Place; Sir Thomas Robinson, who had built Prospect Place next to the party-loving Ranelagh Gardens; and one William Hamilton. This could have been the man who had painted Elizabeth Hartley (but aged only nineteen in 1770, he was too young to have sustained a wife or mistress in Rathbone Place, thus excluding him from being the ‘cuckold' referred to in local newspapers).

Alternatively, this shareholder could have been the far more famous Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), who joined the Society of Dilettanti before it transformed into the Hellfire Club. Other
founder members of the society included the painter Joshua Reynolds and Charles Greville, who was the lover of Emma Lyon, later Emma Hart, later Hamilton's wife. In 1743 Horace Walpole said of the society, ‘the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk'. The Hellfire Club, with the lecherous and violent Francis Dashwood at its helm, was the Bad Boys Club of Georgian England. In his younger days William Hamilton may well have raised hell with the worst of them, but by now he was far more interested in the geology of real-life fire and brimstone, in particular Vesuvius. He returned to Italy to study it and there married the one-time whore Emma. Educated, wry, forgiving and sociable, he may well have invested in the Pantheon during his brief years in London. His wives do not fit the profile for ‘Mr H', however: he was devoted to his sickly first wife Catherine Barlow, and he did not marry the lascivious Emma until 1791.

There is one final traceable ‘Mr H' from the list of shareholders: Edward Hoare, Second Baronet and MP for Carlow 1768–9; but, newly married in 1771, it is unlikely that his wife Clothilda, from Ballycrenan Castle, Ireland, would have taken a lover like Donellan, even if he were a fellow countryman. Therefore it would seem that Donellan's lover's husband, if a shareholder as the newspaper suggested, is not on the surviving shareholders list.

Donellan was a member of the committee, convened in August 1771, that supervised the building and running of the Pantheon, along with Henry Dagge, Tomkyns Drew, William Franks, Robert Ireland, Thomas Moore, Edmund Pepys, Sir Thomas Robinson, Paul Valliant, John Wyatt and Turst himself. John Wyatt (according to the
Monthly Magazine
of October 1813) had encouraged the scheme from the beginning and his brother James was the designer. Another brother, Samuel, was the builder, while yet another brother, William, was the treasurer in both 1771 and 1772.

Johann Von Archenholz describes the building thus: ‘The construction of the Pantheon, which in grandeur and extent exceeds that of Rome, proves that Mrs Cornelys' lessons were not thrown away on the English … everything is great, majestic and
magnificent …' The entrance was through a sheltered portico with four columns to the front, which in turn opened out into a hall 50 feet wide and 15 feet deep. Doorways opened into card rooms and then on to the grand staircases and corridors which gave access to the rotunda. This large assembly room was inspired by the church of Santa Sophia in Istanbul, with its enormous circular dome, some 60 feet in diameter, occupying the centre. The famous architect Robert Adam called it ‘the most beautiful edifice in England'.

A print from 1810 included in Ackerman's
Microcosm of London
shows the main assembly room painted pale green, with colonnaded upper walkways, a lavishly painted ceiling, large chandeliers and a huge crush of people engaged in what looks to be a frenetic dance, with more than one ankle being flashed among the ladies. At the back of the vast hall are an elevated stage with an orchestra and six private boxes overlooking the throng.

Despite rumours emanating from Horace Walpole that the Pantheon had cost £60,000 (£3.8 million), the actual cost was much lower. Turst continued to clash with some of his shareholders, and in the 1770s filed a suit in Chancery which listed the bills: the building itself had cost £27,407 2s. 11d.; there was £2,500 for expenses connecting it to Poland Street; and the furnishings, paintings, statues, the organ, and James Wyatt's 5 per cent fee for designing the furnishings came to £7,058 16s. 6d. The total for the whole building was therefore £36,965 19s. 5d. – or £2.354 million in today's money.

Donellan, still manager despite the debacle with Sophia Baddeley, must have felt that he was at the centre of the social universe. Not bad for a bastard son who had found it necessary only a year before to plead for a half-pension from the army. He now had an obliging mistress and a share in a wealthy venture; so perhaps the figure lounging casually against the column in the Lewis Walpole library print really is him – master of all he surveyed. But he was living on his wits and a slightly dubious reputation; to be truly secure in society, he needed respectability.

The stage was set for the next part of his story: the seduction of Theodosia Boughton.

‘Wilt thou go with me, sweet maid,
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
Through the valley-depths of shade'

John Clare, ‘An Invite, to Eternity' (1847)

IN THE MAGAZINE
ALL
Year Round
which Charles Dickens owned and edited, an anonymous contributor recounted the John and Theodosia story in 1871, over ninety years later, in an article entitled ‘Old Stories Re-Told. An old Rugby story. the Little Bottle of Laurel Water'. In it, John Donellan and Theodosia Boughton's first meeting is described. Anna Maria and her daughter were travelling to Bath and stopped at a roadside inn for the night, only to find that every room had been taken. ‘There he was in all his glory,' it continues. ‘Smooth, graceful, stealthy as a snake … butterfly King of all that sham world … young, handsome, soft of speech he came, he saw, he conquered.' The captain insinuated himself into the ladies' lives by offering them his own room. A kind gesture, but one which is given the melodramatic overtones of a premeditated plot.

A more objective version of the story was given by Arthur Griffiths and John Howard in
Mysteries of Police and Crime
in 1899, by
which time the account of the lovers' meeting seems to have been accepted, even if the ‘roadside inn' has been transmogrified into the finest hotel in Bath:

Lady Boughton was unable to find accommodation in the best hotel, and Donellan, who was there, promptly gave up his rooms. The acquaintance thus pleasantly begun grew into intimacy, and ended in his marrying Miss Boughton.

To haunt fashionable society in London and the chief pleasure resorts in search of a rich partie was a common enough proceeding, and implied self-seeking, but not necessarily criminal tendencies.

In fact, despite these two seemingly authoritative versions, there is no reliable account of John and Theodosia's first meeting. These two were written around a century after the event; contemporary newspapers cast a differing light. The consensus seems to be that the Boughtons were in some fashionable social setting when they crossed Donellan's path. Whether it was by happy accident, or by design by John Donellan, is impossible to know.

On the face of it, Donellan was an attractive suitor. He was an ex-military man whose courage had been confirmed by none less than Clive of India. As Master of Ceremonies at the Pantheon, he would have known everyone who mattered. He was charming and sociable – a fact never denied. He had no wife in tow, no bastard children to support. He did not, however, have a title or an annual income. Anna Maria would probably have seen him as an entertainingly acceptable acquaintance, but not in any way an equal. A man one could speak to or acknowledge, and a man who might well introduce one to a true nobleman, but not marriage material.

Theodosia evidently thought differently.

What young woman, flattered and amused by the kind of attention she never received in the depths of the country, excited by being at parties and balls, exhibited freely by her mother as wanting a husband, would really care about his exact status if a handsome military man seemed to adore her? Every girl yearned
to be feted by an officer. In
Pride and Prejudice
(1813), when the frivolous, headstrong Lydia Bennet (who was eventually to elope with an ex-soldier) visited Brighton: ‘She saw the streets of that gay bathing place covered with officers, saw herself the object of attention to tens and scores of them at present unknown.'

Donellan was so different from the country squires Theodosia had previously encountered, or even the titled folk of Warwickshire like the Denbighs. He had, after all, seen the world; he could speak of his adventures in India. In addition to his military service Donellan knew everyone in London. Even the aristocracy recognised him.

The first meeting escalated into an affair. For Donellan's part, the lure was not only money: Theodosia was ravishingly pretty. A miniature portrait of her, painted in 1774 when she was seventeen,
¹
shows a dark-eyed girl with an abundance of long dark hair and a sweet expression; Edward Allesley Boughton Ward-Boughton-Leigh, her grandson, described her in 1882 as a ‘good-looking young woman'. To meet such a girl from a wealthy family would have been attractive indeed to the increasingly impoverished Donellan.

The relationship with Donellan was, however, fatal to Theodosia's reputation. Even four years later, when she was the mother of two young children and respectably married, the
Nottinghamshire Gazette
of Saturday 14 April 1781 felt fit to dredge up the scandalous circumstances of her marriage, contending that the couple met at the Pantheon and within a very short space of time they had eloped and were secretly married in June 1777. This has a ring of truth.

Elopement was a word that struck cold terror into the hearts of aristocratic parents: centuries of tradition and money, not just their daughter's honour, were at stake. That was why girls were so tightly chaperoned, a task at which Anna Maria had somehow failed. Either married or single, elopement was never forgotten in the women who succumbed. Lady Sarah Bunbury eloped with Lord William Gordon in 1769; Lord Sussex's daughter did so in 1771; Admiral Millbanke's daughter eloped with a Mr Tilman in 1786; and Lord Southampton's son with Miss Keppell in 1784.

The whole extended Boughton tribe rose up to condemn Theodosia's marriage. ‘The resentment of the lady's relations were too
violent to be soothed by apologies,' claimed the
Nottinghamshire Gazette
. ‘The rage continued for some time unabated and the delinquents were abandoned to the world.'

‘Abandoned to the world.' This was serious stuff: if the Boughton clan had abandoned Theodosia, it would have followed that she would have been left without a penny and Donellan would have been forced to look after her. For a rake who had only been interested in deflowering a virgin, that would have been that – Theodosia would have been left in some seaside watering hole while her seducer high-tailed it back to London (and his accommodating mistress). For a man who had eyes only on Theodosia's money, there might even have been a headlong dash to Warwickshire to persuade his new wife's family to settle an amount on the now-ruined girl. Interestingly, Donellan did neither of these things. The couple stayed away from Warwickshire and fended for themselves, which could not have been easy. It would have been impossible to be accepted even within the walls of the Pantheon if the union were considered to be a seduction. It seems that Donellan was in it for the long game, and his protection of Theodosia at this time points to a relationship based on something a lot more meaningful than money alone.