Dorothea Jordan’s mother was an actress from Wales who married a young Irish army captain by the name of Bland. The young couple were married in Ireland by a Catholic priest but, because they were both minors, Bland’s father objected to the match and was able to have the marriage annulled. Despite this, the couple continued to live together and produced a large family, including Dorothea (always known as Dora), who was born near Waterford.
When Dora was still a young child her father walked out and the family was plunged into poverty. For Dora’s mother, survival became her daily grind and she was forced to call upon her children’s help in order to put bread on the table. As there was an acting tradition in the family – as well as her mother, two of her aunts had also trodden the boards – Dora was introduced to the stage very early. In 1777, at the age of fifteen, she was already employed full-time playing tomboyish comic parts at Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre. She was billed as Miss Francis – her mother’s maiden name.
Portraits of Dora show a kind, pretty and expressive face. Her speaking voice was mellow and her singing voice extremely beautiful. She was good-natured rather than acerbically witty, and possessed easy charm in abundance. She was always popular with male theatregoers and was a big hit when she went on tour with the Crow Street Theatre Company. Dora’s mother – an early example of a pushy stage mother – rejected several offers of marriage on her daughter’s behalf because it was obvious to her that Dora would go far in her chosen career.
After this promising start, Dora ran straight into trouble. The manager of Crow Street was a particularly unsavoury character named Daly who liked using intimidation, and occasionally force, to gain sexual favours from his actresses. The newly married Daly set his sights on young Dora, and soon she was pregnant. As a result, she had to get away from Ireland. Dora, her mother and several siblings fled Dublin and the attentions of Daly in 1782, and Dora went to work for the great English actor-manager Tate Wilkinson in Yorkshire.
She lived the hard life of the travelling player. Heavily pregnant, she walked the hills and dales in all weathers as the company moved from one town to the next; the horses were used only to move the equipment. However, Wilkinson was good to her; he was the father figure Dora had been missing, especially as he singled her out for praise both for her acting talent and for her post-performance singing. Eventually, she threw off the name Francis so as not to upset her mother’s family and took on the name Jordan; she threw off the title Miss when her baby was born and thereafter was known as Mrs Jordan.
Dora stayed with Wilkinson until 1785, then she moved to Drury Lane Theatre, Covent Garden, London. She did so against the advice of the great tragedienne Mrs Siddons who thought she simply wasn’t good enough and told her so. But Dora proved Mrs Siddons wrong. She was an immediate success in London and played all the leading comedy roles of the day. A coterie of fans gathered around her, including Lord Byron, Charles Lamb, Sir Joshua Reynolds and William Hazlitt. In London, Dora was ‘all gaiety, openness and good nature’, according to Hazlitt; she was an actress who ‘gave more pleasure than any other actress, because she had the greatest spirit of enjoyment in herself.’ The loyal Dora was to stay at Drury Lane for the rest of her career.
During this time, in the late 1780s, Dora continued to be unlucky with men. She fell for a man named Ford and stayed with him five years. She had two daughters by him before he, like her father, absconded to marry an heiress. But her luck changed in 1790 when she met William, Duke of Clarence, son of King George III.
The lonely duke fell passionately in love with Dora at first sight, attracted by her straightforwardness, her generosity and her warmth. For her part, she was fond of him and was dazzled by his royal connections, although not so dazzled that she could resist an opportunity to make fun of him. When, early in their relationship, the duke reduced her promised annual allowance of £1,000 to £500, Dora sent him the bottom of a playbill bearing the words: ‘No money returned after the rising of the curtain’. Dora continued to produce children at a phenomenal rate throughout this liaison. She suffered at least five miscarriages, but reared ten of the duke’s children over twenty years. The duke installed Dora, her three daughters and their own ever-increasing brood at a beautiful estate in Bushy, Hertfordshire.
Dora had the classic working-mother problem: her family missed her if she were not at home; fans and managers were resentful if she were not at work. She did the best she could by continuous letter-writing to her family while on tour in the autumn/winter theatre season, and when something serious cropped up, like an illness, she cancelled performances and came hurtling home. Once, when the duke was ill, she performed a marathon mercy dash from Scotland to Bushy, which took several days by coach, with no time to stop even for a hot meal.
Throughout her relationship with the duke, Dora was earning vast amounts of money and giving it away almost as quickly as she got it. The duke was a particular drain on her: although he was a prince of the royal blood, he was penniless and was dependent on the charity of his father, George III, and his brother, the Prince Regent. The rest of the royals were quite happy to let Dora bail William out, but she was never acknowledged or accepted in royal circles, except by the Prince Regent.
Eventually the duke’s money troubles got so bad that he was obliged to look for a rich wife and this, together with the fact that after two decades together he was probably tired of the now middle-aged Dora, meant the end of their relationship. Dora got the bad news in a letter from the chivalrous duke saying that he wanted to meet her to organise a separation. She was on tour in Cheltenham at the time and had promised to play for another actor’s benefit. As she knew she was a major draw and that her absence would adversely affect the takings, she hid her broken heart and went on – though at one point she did burst into tears on-stage instead of the scripted laughter.
After the loss of her protector, the press wolves closed in on Dora and a storm of criticism broke over her. She stoutly defended herself and – generously – her duke. She persisted in seeing the best in him until her dying day, attributing his shoddy treatment of her to his parents’ parsimony. But then, as she herself wrote in a letter, ‘what will not a woman do who is firmly and sincerely attached?’
William had made Dora promise she would not go back on the stage; the maintenance money she received and the custody of her five daughters were contingent on that promise. But for once Dora disregarded the duke’s wishes and, at the age of fifty, returned to the stage with gusto, thereby forfeiting the maintenance and her daughters. She thought it best for the girls to be with their royal father, and, in any case, she couldn’t afford not to work. Back at Drury Lane, Dora was as popular as ever and could command large fees.
All would have been well for Dora Jordan’s old age were it not for two factors: a conspiracy against her on the part of the royal accountants who failed to sort out her tax and thereby allowed her to get into financial trouble; and her boundless generosity to her sons-in-law who ran up enormous debts in her name. When they finally came to light, the debts in Dora’s name were so huge that she had no hope of paying them off.
In 1815 she was forced to leave the country to avoid arrest and imprisonment. Poor Dora lived in France in complete seclusion, under the assumed name of Johnson, first in Boulogne, then in Versailles and finally in St Cloud in a dilapidated old house. Deprived of the audiences which had been her oxygen for nearly four decades, her only comfort was receiving word from home. But despite all she had done for family and friends, the letters came infrequently and finally stopped altogether. Pathetically, Dora was reduced to sending a messenger to the post office specifically to look for any communication from home. When none was found, she would throw herself down and weep pitifully.
She pined away less than a year after arriving in France, not from actual want but from loneliness and homesickness. After her death her public couldn’t quite believe she was gone and – not unlike certain other superstars since – reports that she had been spotted continued for years. Her children by the duke all did very well for themselves, and their eldest son eventually became the earl of Munster.