Julia Storer was born on 11 August 1777, probably in St James’s Palace where George III held his London court and her mother was maid of honour to Queen Charlotte. While there is a question mark over whether Harriette rose or fell to her position of celebrity, there is no doubt that when Julia first took her place in the salons of the demi-monde she was on her way down. Julia Storer belonged at the heart of the English Establishment and had it not been for what she would call her ‘faux pas’, her story would have been entirely different. She grew up in the royal household under the gaze of the King, but following her descent into the underworld she is as hard to see as Euridice.

The voice Julia left to posterity lacks charm or warmth; she comes across as disappointed, moralizing and unforgiving. But she was also Harriette’s friend and a successful courtesan in her own right, which suggests that she cannot have been entirely without appeal. Harriette presents Julia as having been ordinary, but she had the courage to rebel and when she was forced to cross to the shady side of the sword, Julia did so with determination. There was nothing ordinary about Julia’s life, and there was a great deal more at stake in her fall than there had been in Harriette’s.

One of her first cousins, Elizabeth Chichagov, fell in love with and married a Russian admiral before sailing off to live happily in St Petersburg; nothing so dramatic had happened before to a woman in Julia’s family. Other cousins lived quieter lives. A letter from Lady Sarah Lyttelton to her brother, Robert Spencer, describes a meeting with Julia’s relations at a soirée hosted by her aunt, Lady Carysfort, in 1811:

Had she stayed on the right side of the sword, Julia would have been presented at court aged seventeen or eighteen along with the other debutantes before embarking on the exhausting round of balls, parties, dinners and breakfasts that comprised the London season. This would have marked her entry into adulthood, society and conspicuous virtue. As a debutante, she would have worked hard during her first two seasons to meet an eligible peer or son of a peer to whose country estate she would retreat following her marriage, and from which she would emerge in May for the next London season to begin the rounds of depositing and collecting calling cards at the homes of other married ladies. How would ‘a woman of very violent passions’, as Harriette described Julia, ‘combined with an extremely shy and reserved disposition’, have coped with this life? She saw herself as neither witty nor bright – ‘My mother-wit is not much,’ Julia admitted, comparing herself with Harriette2 – and she would not perhaps have shone as a hostess in London circles. Julia would have raised her children quietly and seen her daughters well matched in marriage during their first season, some time after which her body would be buried with that of her lord and the fact of her death recorded in stone.

Her parents were the Honourable Elizabeth Proby, daughter of the First Lord Carysfort, and Thomas, second son of Thomas Storer of Belle Isle, Jamaica, and Golden Square, London. Julia’s mother was brought up in Elton Hall, the family seat in Huntingtonshire; a charming manor house built around a fine fifteenth-century tower, extended over the centuries and surrounded by acres of parkland. Through Julia Storer’s maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Allen, the Probys also had extensive estates in Ireland from which Lord Carysfort took his title when he was created Baron in 1752. John Joshua Proby, Julia’s uncle, married another Elizabeth, the daughter of the eminent statesman George Grenville and sister of Lord Grenville and the First Marquis of Buckingham. John Joshua Proby was given an earldom. His and Elizabeth Proby’s paternal grandmother had been Jane Leveson-Gower, daughter of the First Baron Gower, which connected Julia’s family to a fine aristocratic line and made her the niece of Lord Granville Leveson-Gower and, most importantly, of his sister, the Duchess of Beaufort, whose son would become a vital player in Harriette Wilson’s life.

The Storers had grown rich from slavery and for generations Julia’s paternal collaterals in Jamaica had married into other ex-patriot colonial families. Julia’s uncle was Anthony Morris Storer, the fashionable man about town and antiquary who left his fabulous library and collection of prints to Eton College. From childhood Anthony Morris Storer had been great friends with the Earl of Carlisle, Byron’s guardian, and as an adult he was intimate with Charles James Fox, George Selwyn, Lady Craven and the other leading characters of the eighteenth-century scene. On his death in 1799, he left to his nephew, Anthony Gilbert Storer, his house at Purley Park near Reading, his Jamaican estates, and an income of £8,000 a year – the equivalent today of half a million pounds. Julia Storer received a bracelet.

Thomas Storer died ‘in embarrassed circumstances’ in 1792, at his family’s Belle Isle home. Julia said she never saw him, but as the eldest of four children, the youngest of whom, Anthony Gilbert, was born when she was five, she must have had some recollection of her father being around. She was educated at a boarding school near Eton and a convent in the South of France. Aged thirteen, she returned to the royal household to have her schooling completed by a governess, after which she waited for her presentation at court and first London season.

Julia had developed into an unhappy, uncomfortable figure whose features, Harriette Wilson said, ‘were not regular, nor their expression particularly good’.3 The one sketch of her that survives (plate 6), drawn to be a frontispiece to her Confessions, shows an attractive woman, with a nice figure, fair skin, almond eyes, dark, curled hair and rosy lips. Harriette says she had pretty arms, hands and feet but that her teeth were crooked. Growing up in the suffocating etiquette of George III’s ‘cheese-paring’ court seems to have affected quite severely the children of King and courtiers alike. Along with the Prince of Wales and his ducal brothers, who reacted to their father’s bourgeois domesticity by spending and whoring on a fabulous scale, Julia loathed the ‘gloom’ of St James’s, which had about it all the excitement of a rainy Sunday afternoon. Sitting down in the presence of the King was forbidden, even for heavily pregnant women; palace food was unappetizing, and socializing each week consisted of a continuous round of stiflingly formal Levees and Drawing Rooms.

Before long Julia declared herself against ‘the starched and stately manners of the Anglo-Germanic school’ represented by the court and for ‘freedom and independence’. In her account of what happened next, she suggests that she fell out with her mother over her refusal to learn German and that she burst out of St James’s like a diver gasping for air. ‘What a fortune is my mother’s,’ she exclaimed as she packed her bags, ‘such a one will never do for me.’ Having made up her mind to leave for ever, Julia bade the Honourable Elizabeth farewell and sped away. ‘Adieu daughter,’ came the reply, and never again were the twain to meet.4

Julia’s carriage rolled down Piccadilly and some fifteen miles out of London before arriving at Hampton Court Palace on the banks of the Thames:

Another palace, thought I, pray heaven it prove less gloomy than the one I have turned my back upon … I was handed out of the carriage by a military officer; the sight inspired me with unusual pleasure, a hussar’s cap and feather gives such fillip to the spirits of a young miss in her teens … In a very elegant drawing room I found a lady of superior cast, looking sour as a crab, and surrounded by a family of smiling young cherubs … the duenna looks of Mrs Cotton (for such was her name) made me freeze: in about an hour, Colonel Cotton was announced, a tall handsome man, below the middle age, advanced and took me by the hand.5

It is an important part of her story that Julia be seen as ‘abandoned to the care of strangers’. Unlike Harriette, she would take no responsibility for her fall. Julia claimed that she lived with Colonel and Mrs Cotton as one of their children, but according to Hampton Court records the Honourable Mrs Storer had a suite of her own in the Palace, numbers 19 and 27, where she retired when not needed at St James’s. The Cottons themselves do not appear on the Palace records before 1797, by which time Julia was twenty years old and already the mother of several children, and then Colonel Cotton occupied suite 21, almost next to Mrs Storer’s rooms, until his death in 1843. Harriette Wilson recalls Julia’s saying that she had been wooed by Beau Brummell – whose father had suite 17 – when they were both growing up at the palace, and she also recounts a story told by Julia about living at Hampton Court with her mother and hiding Cotton under her bed. So it seems as if Julia may not have been living with the Cottons at all and may not even have left home when she found herself confronting the icy Mrs Cotton and melting in the arms of her husband.

Whatever the circumstances of her introduction to Colonel Cotton, ‘At the age of sixteen I fell victim to my own inexperience, and the impassioned solicitations of a man, one of the handsomest and most accomplished of the age.’6 And on a stone staircase at Hampton Court, Julia Storer’s descent began. ‘Let no one condemn me,’ she wrote later of the loss of her virtue, ‘who has not been placed in a similar situation; neglected from my childhood by those who ought to have nurtured my infant mind; abandoned to the care of strangers at the most critical period of a young girl’s existence; with a warm and grateful heart; and passions, though not wild as the wave, certainly too strong for me to keep under control without the advice of a friendly mentor – I must have been more than mortal to have withstood temptation.’7 Julia’s experience – unhappiness, seduction, ostracism – is described by all courtesans (apart from Harriette Wilson) in their memoirs.

In one of Harriette’s more dramatic tableaux, she tells of Julia, nine months pregnant and attempting to conceal her condition, going into the first stage of labour as she curtsied to Queen Charlotte. Mrs Cotton, only now noticing the critical nature of Julia’s state, called her a ‘monster’ and a ‘wretch’ and left her to deliver her son alone, which Julia duly did. Harriette says that Mrs Storer then hurried her daughter away to the country leaving Julia’s brother to fight a duel with Cotton; Julia says that far from protecting her, Mrs Storer ‘received the news of my disaster with the greatest apathy and contented herself with writing me a note to say I must expect no further assistance, but live upon my own small fortune of £4,000 left by a relative. My brother was at the time abroad, and consequently the duel was an imaginary one of Miss Wilson.’8 Julia, love-sick, wrote to her Colonel threatening to kill herself if he abandoned her; he declared his devotion, and the two were reunited.

Julia had been brought up under strict regulations. No unmarried woman under thirty with a reputation to keep could, under any circumstances, be alone with a man unless chaperoned; no member of a family stained by scandal could be received at court. By becoming pregnant, Julia had brought ruin not only upon herself but on the Storers’ unblemished reputation. ‘I was truly sensible of the value of all I had lost,’ she wrote of her ‘faux pas’. ‘The world is very uncharitable! Man may commit an hundred deviations from the path of rectitude, yet he still can return, every one invites him; in sober truth he gains an éclat by his failings, that establish him in the Ton, and make him envied, instead of pitied or despised. But woman, when she makes one false step … becomes a mark for the slow-moving finger of scorn …’9

The birth of one bastard child might have been forgiven by the Storers, had Julia disappeared abroad with a suitable companion for the duration of the pregnancy and given the baby up for adoption. But the chances of being received into society again were slim. In 1820, the Duke of Devonshire gave a ball in the hope of welcoming back into the world his transgressive cousin Harriet, who gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock but was now the wife of a respectable aristocrat. While the ball was attended by most of the town the Duke failed in his task; Harriet was ceremonially cut by all.

Julia’s pregnancy was on full display. Rather than save what reputation she had left by adopting a life of public shame, she became Cotton’s mistress. Disowned by her mother and brother, she and the Colonel took for themselves and their child the name Johnstone, most likely from her aunt, Elizabeth Johnstone of Anchovy Valley, Jamaica. Cotton then found for her a cottage near Primrose Hill, a rural village north of the New Road, where she lived in seclusion for nine years and raised an ever increasing brood of young Johnstones. Colonel Cotton would visit her twice a week, striding over the fields to the back of the house so as to avoid being seen. Harriette wrote that the scandal cost him his regimental position, but it seems that it was only Julia’s name that suffered. Colonel Cotton did not leave the 10th Dragoons until 1799, when Julia was twenty-two, and then it was he who tendered his resignation, selling his colonelcy on to George Leigh (the husband of Augusta, Byron’s adored half-sister). The 10th Dragoons being the most fashionable regiment, Cotton was able to pocket the profit and at the same time buy himself a less expensive position elsewhere.

It was while Julia Johnstone was living in Primrose Cottage that she met the dazzling Harriette Wilson and emerged from retirement once more to face the world. The year was 1803, and Harriette was living in Duke’s Row, trapped between the lower-class dreariness of Somerstown and the middle-class dreariness of Bloomsbury. ‘There was a very elegant-looking woman residing in my neighbourhood,’ Harriette wrote,

Harriette wasn’t an entire stranger to Julia, who had admired her from afar. ‘Do you believe’, Julia told her, ‘that I should have asked you to dine with me, if I had not been particularly struck and pleased with you? I had, as I passed your window, heard you touch the pianoforte with a very masterly hand, and therefore I conceived that you were not uneducated, and I knew that you led almost as retired a life as myself.’11

Harriette returned to the cottage that evening and noted her new friend’s fine taste: a harp, a piano, needlework, her firescreens ornamented with extracts from Thomas Moore’s melodies; even Julia’s handwriting was beautiful. There was ‘something dramatic’ about Julia, Harriette observed; her life was arranged like the scene of a play. She lived in anticipation of guests who never came; her dress was studied and fashionable, her lifestyle was graceful, her lamps were soft, her rooms were perfumed, and nothing ever happened to disturb this appearance of perfection. Julia was without doubt ‘one of the best mannered women in England, not excepting those of even the very highest rank’, Harriette thought. But all the same, ‘she is not a bad woman – and she is not a good woman, said I to myself. What can she be?’ Mr Johnstone arrived as they were sitting down to dinner. ‘He was a particularly elegant handsome man, about forty years of age. His manner of addressing Mrs Johnstone was more that of an humble romantic lover than of a husband.’12 Following supper, Harriette played with the children in the nursery, dressing their dolls and teaching them to skip.

There are very few occasions in which Julia Johnstone’s Confessions seem credible and the account she gives of meeting Harriette Wilson is one of them. Julia dismisses out of hand what she calls Harriette’s ‘very romantic unaccountably well got up tale, that I, whom you say had not spoken to anybody but my servants for four years and was the mother of five children, should at one glance of your basilisk features throw aside years of discretion and maternal retirement and plunge into familiarity with a heedless and giddy girl, whose face was as familiar to all on the streets as a bill of the play or the walking advertisement of a lottery office.’13 What Julia tells us is that Colonel Cotton was introduced to Harriette through Tom Sheridan, and that the two women first met when Cotton brought Harriette and Tom to Primrose Cottage for dinner one Sunday. ‘I do not deny’, Julia recalls, with a generosity not typical of her, ‘that I was actually fascinated by your lovely features and arch vivacity; and as the Colonel told me you had never made a faux-pas with any other than Fred Lamb, whose name you then bore, I imagined your case and my own to be very similar and I became sympathetically attached to your fate.’14 Julia was always anxious to prove that her profession was the result of a moment of weakness while Harriette was born a whore.

The two women soon formed a partnership in which Julia lent the class and Harriette the sex appeal. ‘We were as friendly as two sisters,’ Julia wrote, ‘and every evening when Fred Lamb left her alone, which was four out of six, she came to me, danced to my music, romped with my children; she was all animal spirits, and I believe nothing could have made her grave for an hour but the loss of her beauty.’15 Before long Julia had been introduced to Harriette’s sister Fanny. The three women became ‘sworn friends’. ‘Most people believed that we were three sisters,’ Harriette wrote. ‘Many called us the Three Graces. It was a pity that there were only three Graces! – and that is the reason I suppose, why my eldest sister, Amy, was cut out of this ring, and often surnamed one of the Furies.’16 Amy, meanwhile, was entertaining Julia’s uncle Lord Proby.

Shortly after she met Harriette, Colonel Cotton, Julia says, wrote to her through his attorney terminating their arrangement. She was alone for the first time in her life. The Johnstone boys were sent to boarding schools; the girls were given a small annuity and left to their mother to dispose of. ‘As for me, I was left to shift as I thought proper,’ Julia wrote and she moved from Primrose Cottage to share with Harriette a furnished house near Bedford Square. She took the first floor and Harriette had the ground floor.

It was late 1803 when Harriette and Julia Johnstone moved into their Bloomsbury house, with the rent, bills, food, servants and carriage all paid for by Harriette’s glamorous new protector.

Notes

1 Quoted in Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Harriette Wilson: Lady of Pleasure, p. 71.

2 Confessions, p. 27.

3 Memoirs, p. 21.

4 Confessions, p. 9.

5 Ibid., p. 10.

6 Ibid., p. 12.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 16.

9 Ibid., pp. 52–3.

10 Memoirs, p. 20.

11 Ibid., p. 21.

12 Ibid., pp. 20–21.

13 Confessions, p. 14.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 21.

16 Memoirs, p. 30.