Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson

Garrick’s knowledge of Mary’s marriage put increasing pressure on Robinson to make the union public. Every day that passed with a disavowal from him put Hester under increasing strain, and Mary’s reputation at greater risk. She could fall pregnant at any time, a plight that Garrick and George Colman the Elder had exploited in their popular comedy of 1766 The Clandestine Marriage. In this play, the lovely young heroine Fanny Sterling is persuaded by her new husband, against her better judgement, to keep her clandestine marriage secret, even though she is heavily pregnant. Despite her condition, she is pursued by many suitors, especially the lecherous aristocrat Lord Ogleby. Mary hints at a similar dilemma in her Memoirs, though it was her mother who was furious with Thomas: ‘The reputation of a darling child, she alleged, was at stake; and though during a few weeks the world might have been kept in ignorance of my marriage, some circumstances that had transpired now rendered an immediate disclosure absolutely necessary.’2 There is, however, no evidence that Mary was indeed pregnant at this time. Her daughter was born a full year later.

Perhaps this was an example of Mary’s penchant in her Memoirs for conflating fact and fiction, drawing upon a literary cliché of secret unions and swollen stomachs. She was writing with the memory of having drawn attention from the press for playing the part of the pregnant Fanny Sterling in The Clandestine Marriage whilst she herself was heavily pregnant with her second child. Another possibility is, of course, that Mary and her mother used a feigned pregnancy as a final card to force Thomas’s hand and frighten him into submission. If that was the trick, it seems to have worked: Hester confronted her son-in-law and demanded that he make the marriage public before Mary’s reputation was irrevocably damaged.

Finding Hester inexorable, Robinson resolved to leave for South Wales to avow his marriage and present his young bride to his ‘uncle’ – he still stubbornly disputed the fact of his illegitimacy, though his secret was now out. Hester insisted on travelling with the couple as far as Bristol, ostensibly in order to visit her old friends in the city, but no doubt also to keep an eye on developments. In the absence of her husband, she was determined to protect her daughter’s honour. The journey to Bristol was enlivened by a stopover in which they visited the Oxford colleges and took a guided tour of Blenheim Palace – ‘with the hope of soothing my mother’s resentment, and exhilarating my spirits, which were now perpetually dejected’.3

Robinson went on alone from Bristol to the family seat in Tregunter, Wales. He assured his wife that he would be smoothing the way for her eventual cordial reception at Tregunter House, but, in truth, neither was at all confident that Thomas Harris would sanction the union. On the surface, it seemed a very peculiar marriage. Thomas and Mary had now been married for six months without living together under the same roof. Now Mary was being left again so that Robinson could persuade his father, from whom he had been estranged for some time, to give his blessing to a marriage without prospects or money. It was an inauspicious start to domestic life. Still, they both wanted money and status, and wanted to live well. Mary was prepared to let him go to do his best to win round his father. She insists that although she did not feel overwhelmed with love, she was nevertheless attached ‘to the interest as well as to the person of my husband’.4 Though she later came to despise him, she was aware of his qualities, his easy-going temperament and affability.

Nor was she willing to sit and mope whilst their future hung in the balance. She was gratified by the homecoming she received at Bristol. News had spread that Mary Darby had made a good marriage ‘to a young man of considerable expectations’ and she was once again ‘received as the daughter of Mr Darby’. Given her father’s marital infidelity and her husband’s true circumstances, she saw the irony in the way that she was deriving respectability from her status as a wife and a daughter. She was struck by the numerous invitations she now received, in stark contrast to the time when she and her mother had left Bristol in humiliation: ‘I found that fortune was, to common minds, a never-failing passport.’5 She was in a sense returning in triumph, restoring her mother and herself to the respectability that had been lost when Nicholas Darby walked out. Friends who now greeted Hester and Mary warmly had turned their backs when they had most needed friendship. They could turn again. Mary rarely forgot a social slight, and felt it keenly if someone wronged her – a reaction which perhaps stemmed from those Bristol years when the family had endured social ostracism.

Her return to the place of her birth affected her deeply. She took a solitary walk back to the scenes of her childhood: the schoolhouse, the green, the tombs of her ancestors. In the minster she once more crept under the wings of the huge brass eagle in the middle aisle, just as she had done as a child. ‘Language cannot describe the sort of sensation’ which she felt when she suddenly heard the peal of the organ ringing out as it had in her youth. But now the family home was a ruin: ‘The nursery windows were dim, and shattered; the house was sinking to decay.’ She remembered how she had walked in the cloisters that linked her old home to the minster: ‘“Here,” said I, “did my infant feet pace to and fro” … On those dark and winding steps, did I sit and listen to the full-toned organ, the loud anthem, and the bell, which called the parishioners to prayer.’6 As she re-entered the cathedral, she read and reread the monumental inscriptions, finding the grave of the actor William Powell, whose Lear had been her first experience of theatre. And she dropped a tear on the stone tablet that commemorated an old family friend. As so often in the Memoirs, this account is embellished with many a literary flourish, but there is no reason to doubt that when Mary returned to Bristol as Mrs Robinson she must have felt that her childhood was well and truly over, her innocence lost.

Her melancholy was no doubt exacerbated by the uncertainty over her future. Everything depended upon Thomas Harris’s generosity. Perhaps she even feared that her husband would abscond. Hope returned when Robinson sent a letter from Tregunter relating that his ‘uncle seemed disposed to act handsomely’. Mary learned that at first Robinson was too frightened to tell his father that he was already married, but upon revealing the truth, Harris expressed the hope that she was neither too young nor too beautiful, since ‘beauty, without money, is but a dangerous sort of portion’. Still, Harris had grudgingly accepted the inevitable: ‘If the thing is done, it cannot be undone.’7 He agreed to a visit. Robinson duly wrote with the news, instructing Mary to obtain funds for the journey by requesting a loan from one of his friends back in London – a man she had sometimes seen in his company.

‘One or two letters passed on this subject,’ she writes in the Memoirs. And then her husband returned in order to escort her to Wales. The man to whom she had written was the notorious John King, generally known as ‘Jew’ King, a young and ambitious money-broker. In the Memoirs Mary claims disingenuously that she was ‘an entire stranger to the transaction which rendered him the temporary source of my husband’s finances’.8 She represents herself as the very picture of innocence and passivity. The emphasis on her melancholy mood and her recollections of childhood as she waited in Bristol draws the reader away from any thought of her possible implication in her new husband’s messy financial affairs.

That phrase ‘one or two letters’ is, however, economical with the truth. To a greater extent than at any other point in the Memoirs, Mary was whitewashing her own past. The real story of her involvement with ‘Jew’ King reveals that she was by no means the naive newlywed she would have her readers believe in.

At the height of her fame, Mary was notorious not only for the love letters sent to her from the Prince of Wales under the signature ‘Florizel’, but also for a much sleazier correspondence with King. In 1781, as part of a concerted press campaign to blacken her name, there appeared a slim quarto volume, published at two shillings, which purported to contain copies of real letters that passed between Mrs Robinson and a ‘certain Israelite’ between 21 September and 30 November 1773. Her letters were all dated from Bristol and addressed to King in London. In one of them, dated 9 November, she says that on the previous Tuesday Mr Robinson had set out for Carmarthenshire, where he intended to stay a week, and that he would then send for her to join him. The circumstances fit precisely with the account in the Memoirs of how Mary waited at Bristol with her mother while Robinson went forward to pave the way for her reception in Wales. Many details in the published letters are so specific that it is impossible to suppose that the volume was merely a malicious fabrication. What is more, as will be seen in a later chapter, Mary and her then lover, Lord Malden, made strenuous efforts to recover the original letters. This attempt strongly suggests that in reality more than ‘one or two letters’ passed between Mary Robinson and John King in the first year of her marriage. Though in all probability King spiced up the text for the purposes of publication, Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite, and his Answers to them gives us the very voice of the young Mary with an immediacy that is altogether lacking in the carefully self-censored retrospective narrative of the Memoirs.9

The letters reveal an intimacy that would never have been guessed from the casual passing reference to King in the Memoirs. The first of them reads as follows:

Bristol, 21st Sept. 1773

Sir,

I never deemed myself happier, than I found myself those few Days you accompanied us upon the Road; indeed your Company, from the first Moment of our Acquaintance, has been so agreeable, that I scarcely know how to spare you. Shall we expect you at Bristol? Write me soon; write the Style you know I like; let it be plaintive; sooth the Wanderings of my pensive Breast.

Your humble Servant, M. R—

Just as the Robinsons were accompanied at the beginning of their honeymoon not only by Hester Darby but also by Hanway Balack, so they set off for Bristol with King as well as Mary’s mother. The information that Mary has found King’s company highly agreeable ever since their first acquaintance reveals that she must have spent considerable time in his company in the five months since her marriage. What is more, the preface explaining the circumstances of the correspondence includes the information that – on the basis of Thomas Robinson’s prospects of inheriting an estate – King had already lent the couple a substantial sum of money.

The extent of their involvement is further exposed in Mary’s second letter, in which we discover that King was with the Robinsons when they stopped for their sightseeing in Oxford:

Bristol, 29th Sept. 1773

With Pleasure I take this Opportunity of answering my worthy Friend’s obliging Epistle. R—is not yet gone to Wales, but as he will go soon, it makes me uneasy; you know how I love him, therefore will excuse my mentioning him. The Weather is extremely fine, and nothing but your Company is wanted to enliven the Place. We hope by this Time you have seen dear little George, and that he is well. You cannot conceive with what Regret we parted with you at Oxford; the Three last Days were not spent half so agreeable as the first. I am quite ashamed of this intolerable Scroll, but I hope you will pardon it, for I am fatigued almost to Death. Mrs Darby begs her respects.

Your Friend.

King, then, not only travelled with Thomas, Mary, and Hester as far as Oxford: he was also asked to keep an eye on George, Mary’s younger brother left behind in London. King’s response to this letter was flirtatious and literary. Mary wrote again a week later. She, too, flirts in one sentence and moralizes in the next. She was missing him and missing the buzz of London still more:

I wish you were sincere in what you say, I do not think you are, but still I believe myself happy in your good Opinion; you treat me so much in a Style of Compliment, that I really do not know in what Manner to return it; you express so much Friendship, that the hardest Task, I ever undertook in my whole Life, is how to return Thanks suitable to the Favours I have received from you … I long to be in Town. Do not forget our intended Party to Drury-Lane Theatre; you know I am passionately fond of Plays, and I was going to say, I envy you, but Envy I detest.

But then she comes to the main point:

not that I think Generosity consists in throwing Money away at Random, without Distinction or Judgment, but in bestowing it in proportion to the Merit and Condition of those who stand in need of our Assistance. I agree with my favourite Author, who says, in Trust, Intimacy and Confidence, be as particular as you can; in Humanity, Charity and Benevolence, universal. I shall depend on your Promise this Week for I am really distressed.

A plea for funds is dressed up as a moral duty and spiced with literary allusion. King’s response begins in a similar high-minded tone: ‘Morality is that great fundamental Tie that forms and preserves the Peace and Welfare of Society.’ But it quickly turns to an admonition that Mary’s ‘immoderate’ desire for material wellbeing is in danger of leading her to ‘Indiscretion’ and exposing her to ‘the destructive Stratagems of some libidinous Profligate’. Having warned her against the seductions of fashionable society, King then lets his own emotions speak:

That fair youthful Frame is such an Invitation to Love, as no moral or platonic Tenets can restrain. How I pant to be at Bristol, to accompany you through the verdant Meads to the Side of some Silver Stream, slow wandering its Meanders down the Glade, or to the cool Recess of a shady Grove, where every Gale whispers Pleasure, Contentment and Love! Your Breath will add new Fragrance to the Amaranth; the Rose will receive a deeper Hue from the Reflection of those florid Tincts that adorn thy blooming Cheeks, while you melt my Soul to all the soft Attainments of Love.

The expression of such sentiments was King’s price for the payoff signalled by the end of the letter: ‘Adieu! Be ever happy as you are good. Inclosed £50.’

The next letter purportedly from Mary would severely damage her reputation when King published the correspondence eight years later:

I wish you would not write, for while you endeavour to inculcate such good Doctrine, you know I am charmed by your Letters to a Sin. How call I love that stupid Thing R—! yet I am his, Fortune has made it so; but I cannot think I am bound to abide strictly by an Engagement that I was trepanned into, for you know he deceived me. Shall I ever write as well as you do? I am fond of Poetry, and you shall correct some Attempts in that Way, when I come to London. My Friend, you know I esteem you: is it a Crime to say I love you? I feel an Inclination to love Somebody; and how can I love him who is too stupid to return it? Why then, I will love you. Write again, write every Evening, or I shall be melancholy.

Despite his sordid profession as a moneylender, King had a reputation as a man of culture. John Taylor, an oculist who moved in the very best circles and who was himself a poet and a friend of Mary Robinson, recorded in his memoirs that he had known King for forty years and always found him honourable, hospitable, and attentive, and that he especially liked having men and women of talent at his table.10

Mary’s letter accords with this image: King is presented as a companion for theatregoing and literary talk, associated with poetry and the language of sensibility. The reference to her own efforts at poetry suggests that, with her stage debut forestalled by her marriage, she is already thinking of a literary career. Robinson, meanwhile, is anything but a sensitive literary man: he is a ‘stupid Thing’ and Mary effectively admits that she only married him because of his supposed financial prospects. Because of his deception on this front, he has forfeited any right to strict conjugal loyalty.

For King, this was sufficient encouragement. His reply brings him to a pitch of excitement:

I will not think you sincere, when you say you love; yet if you are not in earnest, you have given too serious a Testimony of it for one only in Joke; but it is almost Blasphemy to suspect one of such heavenly Form, so beautiful, such Symmetry of Features, such delicate welformed [sic] Limbs, such panting snowy Breasts, such – Oh! What Raptures ineffable seize my delighted Imagination, when I recollect the delirious Transports that throbbed to my very Soul, when that beauteous Form stood confessed in all the resistless Power of – Nakedness. I must stop till my enraptured Fancy returns from the ecstatick Thought.

Is this a ripe fantasy or had he really caught a glimpse of a naked Mary in Oxford or on some other occasion?

With the flirtation getting this far out of hand, Mary cooled the temperature in her following letter – though she still needed to keep King sweet, because she was, as she put it in a postscript, ‘rather short’. The correspondence had by now lasted for a month. On 1 November, King wrote with further references to ‘the mystick Meaning of thy wanton Love’ and his ‘melting Senses’ drowning in ‘delicious Transports’, while at the same time delivering a rebuke: ‘You little Prodigal, you have spent £200 in Six Weeks: I will not answer your Drafts.’ King’s refusal to forward any more funds, despite a further request, brought the correspondence to an abrupt end in the final week of November. Mary’s last letter is in a very different tone from the preceding ones:

I Find you have not yet answered my Draft. I do not wish an Acquaintance with any Man who professes so much Love, but who gives so little Proof of it. I wish I could recall those imprudent Moments when I suffered your deluding Promises, and seductive Tongue, to betray me into Sin; but unless you give me the Token of your Sincerity that I ask for, I will take care how I trust you again. I am astonished that you should scruple to lend me such a Sum as £100 when it was the last I should borrow, and should have repaid it faithfully. Now you have an Opportunity of shewing your Love, or I shall see that you have all along deceived me.

King responded with a long and vitriolic letter on the evils of ambition and avarice, and the correspondence ended. His failure to recover either his original loan or his subsequent advances, together with a not unjustifiable sense of having been taken for a ride by Mary’s flirtatious manner, accounts for his action in publishing the letters in 1781. There is no evidence that King himself had any further dealings with Mary thereafter, though by a curious twist his daughter became a passionate fan of her poetry.*

Late in November, Robinson returned to Bristol to fetch his wife. They left Hester and headed across to Wales. They endured a hazardous crossing at Chepstow in an open boat in the midst of a fierce storm. In the Memoirs, Mary novelistically interprets this as an ill omen, akin to the storm that coincided with her birth. Throughout the journey Robinson tried to prepare his refined young wife for her first meeting with his family. Still denying that Harris was his father, he asked Mary to ‘overlook anything harsh that might appear in the manners of his uncle’. But she was busy absorbing the beauties of the landscape as they drove into the remote Welsh countryside: ‘We passed through a thick wood, the mountains at every brake meeting our eyes covered with thin clouds, and rising in a sublime altitude above the valley. A more romantic space of scenery never met the human eye!’11

With a shift of tone typical of Mary’s mercurial nature, the narrative of her visit to the in-laws then turns from romantic novel to comedy of high and low life, with the sophisticated townies meeting the country bumpkins. Mary was fabulously dressed, as usual, in a dark claret riding habit and a white beaver hat trimmed with feathers. She looked askance at the odd couple that waited to greet her, her father-in-law, Thomas Harris, and his daughter, Elizabeth. Harris, evidently pleased with the elegant Mrs Robinson, kissed her ‘with excessive cordiality’, while his daughter led her into the house ‘with cold formality’. ‘She could not have taken my hand with a more frigid demeanour,’ Mary adds, clearly relishing the memory.12

The young women sized one another up. Elizabeth was not a great beauty and must have felt threatened by her brother’s fashionable wife. She was cold and haughty and took an instant dislike to her new sister-in-law. To Mary’s sharp eyes, she looked a fright. Elizabeth seemed older than her twenty years, moved stiffly, without grace or elegance, and was short and clumsy looking. She had a rustic face with a snub, upturned nose, and cheeks ‘somewhat more ruddy than was consistent with even good health’.13 Her countenance, Mary thought, was ‘peculiarly formed for the expression of sarcastic vulgarity’. The elegantly dressed Mrs Robinson was equally appalled by Elizabeth’s vulgar attire; she wore a cheap gaudy chintz gown and a ‘thrice-bordered cap’ decked with a profusion of ribbons. Her initial impression of retired tailor Thomas Harris was just as dismaying: he wore an unfashionable brown fustian coat, a scarlet waistcoat trimmed with gold, a gold-laced hat, and – instead of the silk stockings that befitted a gentleman – a hideous pair of woollen ‘spatter-dashes’. He cuts an engagingly comic figure, his manners coarse and boorish, but kind of heart – the very embodiment of Squire Western in Fielding’s Tom Jones or Goldsmith’s Mr Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer.

Harris was, in fact, an influential figure in Glamorganshire. He was the squire of two large estates, Tregunter and Trevecca, and was a Justice of the Peace. One of his brothers was Howel Harris, a well-known Methodist reformer. Possibly through his brother’s influence, the religious reformer Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, had established a seminary at Trevecca House for the training of ministers. Elizabeth Robinson was a convert to Lady Huntingdon’s ‘sect’, and sometimes took Mary with her to Trevecca. Squire Harris preferred the local church where he could throw his weight around and fine the rustics for swearing, even though ‘every third sentence he uttered was attended by an oath that made his hearers shudder’.14 Harris spent most of the days on his estate, riding his small Welsh pony, only appearing at meal times.

Mary was thoroughly bored by her husband’s family. She quickly discovered that the real ruler of the household was Molly Edwards, the housekeeper. She heartily disliked her: ‘a more overbearing, vindictive spirit never inhabited the heart of mortal than that which pervaded the soul of the ill-natured Mrs Molly’.15 Miss Betsy and Mrs Molly were jealous of Mary, who supped ale with the squire and soon became his favourite: ‘They observed me with jealous eyes; they considered me as an interloper, whose manners attracted Mr Harris’s esteem, and who was likely to diminish their divided influence in the family.’16

Mary often alienated other young women, who were left feeling dowdy and dull in her presence. She was naturally flirtatious and men were captivated by her charm, but she was perhaps less keen to cultivate the friendship of other women, if she did not think it worth her time. She noticed the ‘side-long glances’ of Miss Betsy and Mrs Molly when she entertained visitors who praised her ‘good looks, or taste in the choice of my dresses’. The women taunted her for acting like a duchess with her fine clothes and her accomplishments – ‘a good housewife had no occasion for harpsichords and books’.17 They reminded her that she had no money to support her fancy ways. But Mary did not care. She had her beauty and her elegance and her humour to protect her. When she went riding with Miss Betsy, she laughed at her odd appearance: ‘Miss Robinson rode on horseback in a camlet safe-guard, with a high-crowned bonnet. I wore a fashionable habit, and looked like something human.’18