‘Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.’
Henry James
‘LONDON,’ WROTE THE DIARIST BOSWELL in December 1762, ‘is undoubtedly a place where men and manners may be seen to the greatest advantage. The liberty and whim that reigns there occasions a variety of perfect and curious characters …’ If London was driven by liberty and whim, and populated by curious characters, John Donellan must have felt quite at home. Not that he wanted to stand out as a curiosity; rather that he was perfectly placed to take advantage of the time and the place. A former officer in the Indian Army, he still went by the title of captain when he met Theodosia. She and her mother would have seen a man in the prime of his life: slim, handsome, sociable, a ‘gallant’, a man of the world. And, if his stories were to be believed, an outstandingly brave one, too, who had gained a reputation for courage in the service of the East India Company.
John Donellan was also a good storyteller – and he had to be. Back in England in the mid 1760s, he had had to fight for his entire reputation. Having served in the Indian wars with the French, he had argued his case against a court-martial ruling made against him for accepting bribes for passing on looted goods that had resulted, according to Donellan, from a chain of misunderstandings.
In his evidence to the directors of the East India Company,1 he presented a version of the battle of Masulipatnam in the Indian province of Golconda in 1759 – and, tellingly, a version that appears in no other record of the event – that showed him in an extraordinary light. He had, he said, rescued his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Forde, from a tight spot during the battle and then had, with the aid of a French spy, entered the French headquarters and single-handedly persuaded its commander, the Comte de Conflans, to surrender.2 Donellan admitted in his statement to the court that his version might sound immodest – ‘how ill a grace [is] a man who is the blazoner of his own deeds,’ he acknowledged, ‘but there are occasions where modesty would be culpable and silence an injustice to oneself.’
His story was not just immodest, it was unbelievable. But then Donellan was nothing if not imaginative – inventing and reinventing himself was one of his major skills. His version of events was not quite the one that made it to the history books. The battle was a decisive victory for the English, after which Forde negotiated with the Indian ruler, the Nizam of Hyderabad, to maintain the territory free of French troops in return for an annual income of 400,000 rupees. The region thus secured, the English went on to win the Siege of Madras, and the French were subsequently driven from India, allowing the English Crown to seize this massive and lucrative subcontinent.
In his evidence to the directors, Donellan undoubtedly felt that he ought to be given considerable credit for the victory, and was evidently prepared to face down any gasps of astonishment. ‘Mr Donellan,’ he said, referring to himself in the third person and as Mr, not Captain, ‘cannot but consider this important service as principally resulting from his presence of mind.’
He then went on to justify his subsequent actions, for which he had been brought to court. He and some fellow officers had commandeered a large cache of valuables and ‘were proceeding to turn them to best account for their employers [i.e. the East India Company] when they received a verbal order from the Colonel to deliver certain black merchants such effects as they should claim for their property.’
Donellan claimed that these men were not Armenian traders caught in the conflict, as Forde suggested, but French in disguise. He refused the order. ‘A warm altercation ensued’, and it became obvious that the ‘order’ was a ruse by the Bannyan3 and the ‘merchants’ to obtain the booty. Nevertheless a written order came back from the colonel, and vast amounts of loot, ‘some marked with the cipher of the French East-India Company, and chests of treasure’, were taken away.
In court Donellan protested that this was an outrage; to make things worse, Forde would not speak to him. Although the goods were returned to the merchants, Donellan accepted £50 from them for his trouble. It was for this that he was being court-martialled. He could be forgiven here for feeling that he was being unjustly treated – the booty of war was considered fair game for the badly underpaid British army officers in India.4
Donellan then testified to a really extraordinary twist of events. The defeated French general, Conflans, apparently asked him to join his own army. Conflans made ‘many tempting offers and opened to him the most alluring prospects’, Donellan insisted, but despite all the injustices he had suffered, he stayed loyal to the British Crown. He paints a noble picture of himself: ‘But neither the resentment for the wrongs that had been heaped upon him – over-looked, degraded, every studied indignity thrown upon him – could make him for a moment forget his duty to the Company or his allegiance to his natural Sovereign.’
Donellan, along with several other officers, was found guilty and stripped of his rank. Although the others were later reinstated to their rank, Donellan was not. He returned to England. For a while he nursed his ‘injustices’ – for, it would appear, at least eight years – but then he decided to try for a commission in the cavalry in 1767 or 1768. He could not, however, obtain this without a clean bill of military health. The East India Company sent a verbal message that his conduct had been considered blameless in India. His commission was returned; however, he still needed his commanding officer Forde’s ‘certificate of good behaviour’. He wrote to Forde saying that he hoped ‘a trifling misconduct would not bar his advancement in life’. But Forde refused to endorse him.
It would not be the last time that Donellan pleaded his innocence in the face of intransigent authority.
Donellan was put on the half-pay list and for ever afterwards referred to himself as captain; but he never completely removed the stain to his character. Forde, in opposition to his senior commanding officer, Lord Clive, would not say outright that Donellan’s behaviour was unacceptable; but neither would he put pen to paper to agree that Donellan had been ‘courageous’. (Clive, at least, did send a letter to Donellan in September 1761 saying that he had showed courage in an expedition to Golconda.) There is no evidence that Forde ever supported Donellan, or even forwarded the verdict of the original court martial at Masulipatnam to the East India Company. As a result, Donellan did not apply for another military posting: his career as a serving officer was over.
He was now forced to apply his talents in another direction.
John Donellan had been born on 6 November 1737 in County Clare, Ireland, the illegitimate son of Colonel Nehemiah Donellan who was the commanding officer of the 39th Regiment. The O’Connor Donellan estate papers of County Galway list the family pedigree: one James Donellan was Nehemiah’s father, and Nehemiah himself pursued an active military career, having been wounded at the battle of Fontenoy in May 1745 in the War of the Austrian Succession. John Donellan was acknowledged and treated well by his father, who obtained him his post in the East India Service.
A surviving print of Donellan, drawn at the time of the Boughton trial, with the title ‘Published as the Act directs, 1st May 1781 by I. Walker’ shows him in profile: he has a clean-shaven and youthful face, with a high forehead, and he is wearing a fashionable cutaway coat and a white stock with a small frill at his throat. Another penand-ink drawing shows him facing the artist with a rather bemused smile. Donellan looks like an intelligent, even kindly, person. In 1882 Edward Allesley Boughton Ward-Boughton-Leigh, Theodosia’s grandson, described him as a ‘good-looking man … very handsome’. Another print, currently in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, of the Pantheon Assembly Rooms shows a figure leaning on a column in the left foreground who is generally believed to be Donellan. Rather shorter than average and slight in stature, he stands with one hand slightly behind his back and the other in his breast pocket, reminiscent of popular depictions of Napoleon. He is looking towards a couple who are talking to his left; his air is proprietorial, and he has the same slight smile on his face.
The London that Donellan returned to from India in the 1760s was a place of marked contrasts. Visiting the city in 1780, the Prussian traveller Johann Wilhelm Von Archenholz wrote that London was markedly divided between east and west: to the east, along the Thames, were old, narrow streets of cramped houses, the scene dominated by wharves, and yards. ‘The contrast between this and the West End is astonishing,’ he wrote,’ the houses here are mostly new and elegant, the squares superb, the streets straight and open.’5 Now was the time when Georgian London’s most imposing developments came into being: Portman Square, Bedford Square and Portland Place were all built between 1764 and 1778.
London was crowded, rapacious, bawdy. The seat of royalty and at the very heart of trade and government, it was, at the same time, a city of drunks, whores and desperate poverty. Its houses were overcrowded and its slums, like St Giles, stank; its roads were mostly unpaved and unlit. It was a place where children as young as seven or eight were plied as prostitutes, where Hogarth’s Gin Lane was a living reality, and street singers on every corner were applauded for songs that would be regarded as obscene even today. There were, Von Archenholz records, 8,000 alehouses and over 50,000 prostitutes in the city.
Yet the capital city also had a spirit of grace, of Reynolds beauties, of ceremony and wealth, and it prided itself – as all England did – on being strong and powerful. England had the largest navy in the world and was engaged in wars on various fronts; it was a fighting machine, hardy and ingenious. Its countrymen were represented not only by the swagger of the ex-military man, but also by the rake and the fat alderman gorging himself on beefsteak and porter at breakfast. Visitors to London were sure to see three qualities that summed up England: a fighting, brawling, industrious spirit; conspicuous greed and sensuality; and abject poverty.
More than anything else, London was a city of social mobility at every level. But you would have had to have been a very dull man indeed not to understand that every strata of society had its grades. There was a gulf between the lowly baronet and the elevated duke, between the poor curate and the bishop, between the colonel and the foot soldier: but the hurdles were there to be jumped. Most difficult of all to bridge, however, was the chasm between an ordinary gentleman and a titled aristocrat. There was one obvious way to circumvent that: marry into a titled family.
Marriage might have been an alluring passport to high society for a man like Donellan, but it was not needed at all for a few low-born girls. These rose to fame, if not a lifetime’s security, as the mistresses of wealthy men. In the Restoration Court of Charles II a hundred years before, it was said that no man could achieve power or recognition unless he had a mistress. That air of manly potency was vital to his reputation. In the Georgian era, a wife’s infidelity was grounds for divorce, but a man’s was not – although divorces were rare, since they required an Act of Parliament. Mistresses were widely accepted, even for men of the church. One astonishing example was Archbishop Blackburne, who brought his mistress, Mrs Cruwys, to live under his own roof, where she queened it at the head of the table whenever his wife was absent. Man of letters Horace Walpole recalled an occasion on which Cruwys was at dinner with Blackburne’s illegitimate son by another liaison. Blackburne’s affairs were ignored, however: he was chaplain to royalty. According to Walpole, the illegitimate son later became the Bishop of London.
So illegitimacy was not frowned upon then as it was to be in later years. As mentioned, John Donellan himself was illegitimate; Philip Stanhope, the adored son to whom Lord Chesterfield addressed his numerous letters, was illegitimate; Joseph Addison, friend of the Boughton family, had a son by the Countess of Warwick; Lady Harley had so many children by her various lovers that her offspring were called ‘the Harleian Miscellany’; and the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole married Lord Walde-grave and, later, the Duke of Gloucester.
Marriage among the aristocracy was rarely an affair of the heart – the idea of romantic love had yet to take precedence as a reason for wedlock – and when that new form of entertainment, the novel, talked of romance the very concept was howled down as derisory and dangerous. Marriage in high society was an alliance of families designed to ensure that land, revenue and power remained within the grip of the few. An aristocratic woman was required to be chaste before she married, but in society in 1760 she was merely required to be discreet after the wedding; husbands maintained mistresses and wives took lovers, and the whole understanding of the way society worked was based on a wife providing heirs rather than emotional support, and of husbands procuring, maintaining and often abusing ordinary women.
The Victorians did indeed subsequently feel ashamed of the raucous sensuality of their ancestors, and tried to erase it. Leading radical Francis Place, born in London in 1771, spoke in his autobiography of conversation even in his home being ‘coarse and vulgar’ and ‘remarkably gross’. His son actually tore some pages from his papers when they were donated to the nation, leaving the embarrassed comment ‘much licentiousness’.
Women who made their name through sex dominated society and were known as the ‘Toasts’ – the toasts of the town. They are relevant to Donellan in more ways than one, for the work that he was about to become engaged in required that he knew the distinction between aristocrats and fantastically wealthy courtesans.
The captain did not go unnoticed. In fact, he deliberately drew attention to himself. Although he maintained that he was not in any way at fault during his time in Masulipatnam, and was prepared to testify that not only did he take no booty of war from the city but he had also had his £50 fee taken from him at the court martial, he seemed to have enough money not only to mix in high society in London and dress well, but also to sport a large diamond ring that earned him the nickname ‘Diamond Donellan’. At the trial, local Warwickshire and Northamptonshire newspapers would say that this ring was part of his spoils of war from India. ‘He returned to Europe with a large sum of money and several valuable gems,’ noted the Nottinghamshire Gazette in 1781. ‘To his companions he used to boast of Secret Services … ambition was his ruling passion … play and gallantry he pursued …’ However he had come by his money, Donellan was now wealthy enough to buy a part share in a new business venture – the Pantheon.
The Pantheon had been devised and the process of building it begun by Philip Elias Turst, the owner of some land on the south side of Oxford Street, and a ‘lady of means’, Margaretta Maria Ellice. Ellice claimed that she had been connected with another extravagant place of entertainment just a few hundred yards away, Carlisle House in Soho Square, which had been started by a famous courtesan, Teresa Cornelys, in 1760. Initially, Carlisle House had the relatively innocent objective of providing genteel entertainment for the aristocracy, but it rapidly became as infamous as its occupant as the delights turned from dancing and card-playing to exotic masquerades. Capable of holding 500 guests in its mirrored rooms hung with chandeliers and Chinese wallpaper, for luxury it ‘surpassed all description’.6 In the previous decade, the Gentleman’s Magazine had said of such establishments: ‘Masquerade houses may be called shops where opportunities for immorality and almost every kind of vice are retailed.’ They were right.
Probably the most famous masquerade of all was held in 1779 by the notorious brothel-keeper Mrs Prendergast of King’s Place, near St James’s Park. She came up with the idea after revealing in court that the Earl of Harrington had routinely visited her establishment every Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, enjoying the lowest kind of rough girl. This public revelation had sent him into a hypocritical rage (‘he flew into a great passion, stuttering and swearing, waving his cane and shouting, Why! I’ll not be able to show my face at Court!’) not just at the bawd’s casual admittance that he was a customer, but, far more damagingly, that he was often impotent.7
For Prendergast had declared that no one in her establishment could arouse the earl and that she had had to send out for two other girls, who had spent nearly an hour ‘with great labour and much difficulty bringing his Lordship to the zest of his amorous passion’.8 These two girls, on returning to their own madam, had been so fed up at their less-than-interesting hour and a fee of only three guineas that they had refused to pay their own house 25 per cent commission. The resulting uproar made the newspapers and culminated in Harrington’s outburst. To make amends to him, and to repair the amorous reputation of her own girls, Prendergast organised the ‘Grand Bal D’Amour’ – the lewdest public event that year in a very lewd city.
She invited subscriptions for the night’s events, to include famous beauties displayed ‘in puris naturalibus’. Harrington himself paid over 50 guineas when he heard what she had in mind; in all, she raised over £84,000 in today’s money from Harrington and his friends, all of whom were agog at her plans. She also recruited female aristocrats such as the Hon. Charlotte Spencer (who charged £50 a night), the courtesan Harriet Powell and Lady Henrietta Grosvenor to entice further customers. It is not known whether Harrington’s wife attended, who had an even worse reputation than her husband: her nickname was ‘The Stable Yard Messalina’, after the nymphomaniac wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and she had both male and female lovers.
The night was a wild success. The ladies danced nude, except for their masks, while an orchestra played facing the wall to spare any blushes the women might still have left. Afterwards the entire throng retired to couches provided ‘to realise those rites which had been celebrated only in theory’. In the midst of the orgy it is said that Lord Grosvenor enjoyed his own wife by mistake, but was so pleased with her performance that the couple – previously separated – were reconciled. After their exertions the guests were treated to a banquet. The evening was deemed such a success that the aristocratic whores donated their fees to the servants, and the lower-class girls were given three guineas each and their cab fare home.
But masquerades were not the only kind of entertainment that high-class brothels could offer to gallants like Donellan – especially those like him, who were keen to flash their money around. In 1772, the notoriously successful bawd Charlotte Hayes threw a ‘Tahitian Feast of Venus’ to celebrate Captain Cook’s revelation that the natives of the newly discovered Pacific island made love in public. (It was also her commercial response to the opening of the Pantheon.) She invited twenty-three ‘gentlemen of the highest breeding’ to watch as twelve athletic young couples provided a floorshow. Hayes was a canny administrator as well as an impresario: unlike most of her contemporaries she retired with a reputed fortune of £20,000 (£1.27m), all of it gained from gentlemen of breeding blessed with considerably more money than sense.
The Pantheon opened on 27 January 1772. Occupying a prime position on Oxford Street between Poland Street and Ramillies Street (the site now occupied by Marks & Spencer’s Pantheon store at 173 Oxford Street), it had fourteen vast and richly decorated rooms, although its mock Roman and Byzantine style was criticised by some as being cold and ‘church-like’. It was supposed to be not only a more refined version of the rapidly degenerating Carlisle House, but a winter version of the famous Ranelagh Gardens, whose season ran from April to November. During its building, however, the scheme had run into financial trouble, and its founder, Turst, lost his control of it to a committee of eleven men, Donellan among them.
In late 1771 the committee published a plan of how the Pantheon would be run. They would open three nights a week only, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, to provide musical concerts, balls and card-playing – although high stakes would not be allowed. It seems that the proprietors were trying to establish a respectable venue for the aristocracy, and to this end they devised a system whereby only peeresses or their nominated guests could be admitted – a kind of elite backstage pass on which the lady had to write the name of the person she was recommending.
The plan backfired in a most dramatic way. On the first night, it was obvious that some of the prized tickets had found their way into the hands of ‘ladies of easy virtue’ (according to the magazine Town and Country). The following Wednesday, this was confirmed by the arrival of the actress and singer Sophia Baddeley. Baddeley was wildly famous: the Duke of Ancaster had said that she was ‘one of the wonders of the age’ and Lord Falmouth had told her, ‘Half the world is in love with you.’ One night in 1771, the audience at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket had risen to applaud her beauty in a standing ovation that lasted fifteen minutes. But despite rumours that Lord Melbourne was wont to leave wads of banknotes under her pillow, she was always short of money. When, during a temporary lapse of funds, it was suggested that she cut down her clothing allowance to £100 a year (£6,300), she retorted, ‘Christ, that is not enough for millinery!’ A mercurial spendthrift, spoiled, over-generous, rapaciously sexual and extremely high-profile, the early years of the 1770s belonged to Sophia.
It says something for Donellan’s own reputation that he knew Baddeley well enough not only to approach her when she entered the Pantheon but to take her to one side and tell the goddess that she was not welcome – a daring move which shows the expectations that the proprietors had of him as well as their own inflated ideas of their influence.
It did not work. Baddeley was back the following week, this time with George Hanger in tow. Hanger, who was actually the son of Lord Coleraine, would become a favourite of the Prince of Wales, visible in many caricatures and cartoons of the age. In a Boyne drawing of 1786 he is shown in a boat with the Prince being shipped off to Botany Bay as a debtor; in another one he cavorts about while the Prince spanks one of the society beauties, Mrs Sawbridge; in a Townly Stubbs drawing of 1786 Hanger is shown pimping for the Prince and distributing his ‘favours’ in the form of feathers he is taking from a handcart, while the Prince is depicted as a balding cock of the walk.
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
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.