April 1822 was a stormy month; for four days it hailed, after which the evenings were ominous and overcast. Irritated by Robert Elliston’s failure either to return her drama or to pay her for it, Harriette took a night walk. ‘I felt that my health required that I should leave the house and breathe a little fresh air, yet I wanted courage to make the attempt. Suddenly a certain, odd presentiment came over me that if I went out something desirable in the shape of a novel adventure would occur to enliven me. I had more than once been seized with the like superstitious sensations and they had not deceived me.’1 She wrapped herself in her pelisse and walked down to Baker Street, where she stopped to do some shopping, and then turned into Oxford Street, heading towards Orchard Street where, on the Bond Street side of the road, her novel adventure appeared in the form of a man sporting a ‘superlative wig’2 and an enormous black moustache. ‘His air was decidedly foreign, independently of his moustaches, and his age might be six and twenty. His dress was black, without any relief or variation: so very black, indeed, that I fancied he must have worn a black shirt too. The sleeves and body of his coat were made very tight, in order, no doubt, to set off to the best advantage and render more striking, the fine symmetry of his manly person. His bust was so high, and so strikingly beautiful, that one could scarcely avoid noticing it … his carriage was
lofty and soldier-like, which made one fancy him at least six feet high, although in fact he was only five feet nine or ten.’3

The night was pitch black, unillumined by moon or stars, and Orchard Street was deserted. The ‘terrible looking fellow’ stopped to examine Harriette. She hurried on ahead, afraid that he might have caught her examination of him, and then she heard the menacing sound of footsteps on the pavement behind her. ‘I had been blue-deviled for the last week, and now I was frightened out of my wits. My breath was almost exhausted by over-haste, yet I made a last desperate effort to increase my pace without turning my head round to ascertain what or who my tormentor was.’4 Harriette gathered the courage to turn round and confront the mustachioed stranger – for it was he – who was alarmed at her fear. She realized by his accent that he was not foreign at all and she expressed her surprise; he offered to accompany her home in order to avert her night fears. Harriette accepted. ‘In our progress we chatted on various subjects. My companion’s manner was graceful, and the tones of his voice acted, like a charm, against earlier prejudices, till my reserve gradually vanished. There was a careless, successful air about him, it seemed to be the natural result of that beauty, which might easily be supposed to have caused our sex many heart-aches …’5

The Moustache told Harriette that he was penniless and that women disgusted him; as he spoke the moon appeared from behind the heavy clouds and illuminated his ‘brilliant, ivory-like teeth’. His tone reminded Harriette of Tom Sheridan, whom she had not seen now in nearly twenty years, and while she was in awe of the stranger’s beauty – ‘such as we seldom meet with’ – she thought his character ‘odious’.6 The idea ‘flitted across’ her mind, however, that this odiousness might lessen with a kiss, and while a kiss would satisfy her curiosity about his evident appeal to women, it need not be an altogether unpleasant experience in itself, ‘since the man was in the habit of cleaning his beautiful teeth’, and anyway, she did not expect to ever see him again.7

The couple arrived at Harriette’s cottage at Regent’s Park where she decided that rather than retire they might take advantage of the moonlight and continue walking. This they did until the watchman called out one in the morning and Harriette, growing alarmed, ‘thought a little hypocrisy was quite necessary in order to rid [her]self at once of her beau’. She told him she needed rest but would be happy to see him on another occasion. The Moustache then left her, but not until the kiss had been tried and tested. While it was ‘a very good kiss … all a kiss ought to be … sweet, and ardent, and thrilling’, it was still ‘wanting in magic to me’.8 Harriette then told her maid that a gentleman with a tremendous moustache would call the next day and he was on no account to be let in.

Various gentlemen did call the next day – Harriette was also being courted by Lord Boringdon, Lord Clonbrock and the Marquis of Graham – but there was no sign of the Moustache. Nor did he appear the next day, or the next. It was three weeks until Harriette saw him again and by then he had been forgotten by her. She was lying on the sofa with a cough on the night that he called, and had been bled by leeches, which left her exhausted. It was ten o’clock and Harriette did not know her visitor in the darkness, thinking that this black-faced man must be either a dustman or delivering coal. Only when the moonlight fell on his moustache did she recognize her stranger. She was faint and ill; he was melancholic and mysterious. He did not return the next day, nor the next. Another three weeks passed until she heard from the Moustache again, and this time he sent her a note apologizing for his elusiveness, but before he had time to receive Harriette’s proud and offhand reply, telling him to contact her no more, he was knocking on the door of her cottage. He told her that night that he was Colonel William Henry Rochfort and that he was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet Prison; every time he came to see her he went beyond the boundary known as the Prison Rules. He had ‘fought a duel with a noble lord, got a certain lawyer’s daughter with child while he was pleading at the Old Bailey, slept with the said lord’s wife, by previous appointment, on the very night after her marriage … and lastly, in a fit of despair, proposed marriage to an old woman, backing his proposal with a copy of pathetic verses on her eye-brows’. Harriette thought he was ‘one of the most manly, interesting, and lovable beings I had ever met with in my life’.9 The Moustache was the nearest thing to gentlemanlike perfection Harriette had met with since Lord Ponsonby.

The Fleet Prison, medieval in its age and administration, stood on Farrington Street in the City of London. There were 660 inmates in 1821, 113 of them, Rochfort included, living within the ‘Rules’.10 The ‘Rules’, whose original purpose had been to allow debtors – the majority of its prisoners – to leave the prison confines and conduct their affairs with creditors, now simply allowed the prisoner, for a price, freedom to roam abroad at specific times. Along with his liberty to wander, certain ‘rulers’, like Rochfort, were allowed to rent their own lodgings within a limited area around the prison. The Rules went as far as Ludgate Hill on the south, Cock Alley to the east and Fleet Lane to the Old Bailey in the north. In 1824, the year after Rochfort was released, they were extended to include Chatham Place, St Paul’s and Shoe Lane, but the Moustache ignored his restrictions anyway and went out when and where he chose. He enjoyed privileges, but he also incurred expenses. All debtors were required to support themselves as well as pay the warden for their keep and provide a security, but as a ‘ruler’ Rochfort had to pay more for his lodgings – which, due to the competition to get good rooms in a rough area, were not cheap – than he would do for his room as a prison inmate. He also had to finance his daily freedom. If ever he was caught in the city at large without express permission, he would be fined. Given that he was imprisoned for debt and would not be released until his debts had been settled, these additional fees were onerous and his financial situation was not improving.

During his midnight excursions, Rochfort and Harriette became lovers. He occasionally declared that he wanted her to give up Clanricarde and her other admirers and be his alone, but Harriette remained cautious, still knowing nothing about the stranger, even where he lived (she addressed all her letters to him to the coffee-house in Ludgate Hill), and refusing to believe in the constancy of any man so handsome. ‘As to your thoughtless plan’, she wrote to him, ‘of our living together forever, it is downright nonsense; for all men grow tired and were I young and dearly loved by you but steadily, for a year, I should die a slow perhaps, but miserable death when you left me. Once I suffered what now would surely destroy me. Since that time, it has been my prayer, the object of my life, to avoid all steady attachment.’11

She was faced with a dilemma. ‘If Clanricarde and I meet again as lovers,’ Harriette realized, ‘I lose this proud, fine looking creature for ever … It is true Lord Clanricarde is rich, independent, and appears to be, just now, waxing tender and inclined to be loving!’12 She was honest with Clanricarde about her new beau, and he teased her about her infatuation. ‘I am obliged for Rochfort’s verses; like them very much,’ he wrote to her, ‘– only don’t mix quite so much prose about him. In your two letters there were three sheets of nothing else besides the verses, and you are too clever to throw so much of a letter away on a subject. To you, I perceive, it is a very, very interesting one, more than I wish …’13 Should she give up her young beaux for the Moustache? Harriette measured all the fine and noble dandies she knew next to Rochfort. ‘Having weighed thus in my mind the merits of all the gay Lotharios of my acquaintance in the fashionable world, I decided that poverty with the Moustache would be more to my taste than a good annuity with Lord Clanricarde, or any other of the set.’14

Her decision made, Harriette examined her wardrobe, putting aside all the finery that would be unbecoming to a ‘a poor but faithful wife’ who was about to go and live within the Prison Rules.15 She ordered two neat coloured gowns which looked both modest and seductive. She then received a letter from the Moustache urging her not to exchange Clanricarde’s money for his poverty. She replied that she would not be a mere instrument of pleasure to Clanricarde. Rochfort seemed more interested in keeping up Harriette’s income and prestige than in claiming her for himself. His vacillations made Harriette ill; still knowing nothing about the Moustache, she rose from her sickbed on a rainy night and went with her maid in a hackney cab to the Rules, determined to find out where he lived and who he was, ‘in short, all and everything about him’.16

It was a Saturday night and the shops were open. The territorial confines of the Rules meant that the area around the Fleet became part of the prison community. It was stinking and seedy, the filthy streets populated by slaughter and gaming houses, taverns and innumerable brothels teeming with prostitutes. Guards stood on the street corners to prevent prisoners escaping; what they could not prevent was the number of debtors who found their way in, so as to escape their creditors. Harriette sat in a pastry cook’s shop in Newgate Street while she waited in trepidation for her maid to make enquiries about the Moustache in the local coffee-houses and taverns. ‘Never, in my earliest youth, having been thought vain, though always very proud, and of a fearless independent spirit, I was now, more than ever, disposed to think meanly of my personal attractions and as I stood shivering and watching the drops of rain, enveloped in my old furred cloak, a sort of stubborn pride took strong possession of my mind, arising out of the very excess of my humility … I have had my day, and am but a poor shadow, weak and unequal to him in every pleasing quality.’17

Harriette’s maid returned with the information that the Moustache – whom everyone knew by sight – lived above an undertaker’s at 1 Fleet Street, but she did not discover whether he ‘slept single or double’. Convinced that another woman was the cause of his elusiveness and opacity, Harriette posed as a dressmaker to whom the Moustache’s mistress owed money and in this guise she made enquiries of the local apothecary and greengrocer as to where the lady might be found. The greengrocer knew Rochfort’s mistress well; she passed as his wife and often ordered vegetables to be delivered to their lodgings. Harriette and her maid made their way to 1 Fleet Street, and Harriette waited in the doorway while her maid went upstairs and knocked; Rochfort’s servant told her that his master and mistress were in bed.

Harriette determined to forget Rochfort and wrote to introduce herself to Lord Ashley, the son of the Earl of Shaftesbury and an undergraduate at Christ Church – as Meyler, Worcester and Clanricarde had been – who was ‘well made, clever, proud, cold, gentlemanly, and ugly’. ‘For heaven’s sake, since you are the first youth in the land,’ she wrote, ‘let me see you directly to cure my attachment for a most unworthy object who treats me ill. For the good of the nation, come and cure me!’18 Ashley replied that he would call on Harriette next time he was in London, hoping that her skin would be less yellow than her writing paper.

The affair with Ashley came to nought and Harriette continued to be in contact with the Moustache. She discovered from his greengrocer that he had lived with the woman for two years or thereabouts, which she found easier to forgive than his having formed another attachment since meeting her. She confronted Rochfort with her discovery and he wrote begging Harriette to stay loyal to him until he became free, which would not be long; Harriette replied that she would always love him. She sent him a lock of her hair, curled, perfumed and tied in a blue ribbon; he wrote telling her that he would keep it for ever. That same day there was a knock on the door and a messenger delivered a letter for Harriette which contained the same lock, dirty, dishevelled, ingrained with sand. ‘The insult was so coarse and unmanly that I felt my blood freeze in my veins. My heart sickened as I thought on the time I had lost and the tender friendships I had thrown away on this heartless coxcomb … Enough of folly and the Moustache, said I to myself, rising with a certain dignity and walking towards my little library for the purpose of selecting some sensible and amusing book.’19

The lock, Harriette later discovered, had been soiled and returned by the Moustache’s mistress. Harriette remained in ignorance about the identity of her rival, and was still in the dark about the Moustache. ‘You shall learn all and everything about me when you are decided to become mine,’ he told her ominously.20 It is at this point that Harriette’s narrative about Rochfort comes to an end. The reader is left with the impression of a cloak-and-dagger pantomine villain; it was Harriette’s habit to describe her most significant moments and complicated emotions as tuppenny melodramas. Her considerable narrative abilities were cut short by the challenge of seriousness and self-reflection.

The Rochforts were descended from the De Rochforts of Poitou; by the marriage of one of their clan to a daughter of King Aedred of England, they also claimed descent from Alfred the Great. The family settled in Ireland in the twelfth century and gained extensive properties and land in Westmeath, which county they reigned over for generations in the two hundred years before William Henry Rochfort’s birth. Rochfort’s grandfather, George Rochfort, sired a tempestuous brood. In 1736, his eldest son, Robert, who later became the First Earl of Belvedere, fell in love with and married Mary, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Third Viscount Molesworth. This made Rochfort a cousin of Ponsonby whose own mother, Louisa, was Mary Molesworth’s half-sister. Seven years after the marriage, Robert Rochfort locked his wife up, believing she had been adulterous with his younger brother. She was confined for thirty years in Gaulston Park, a gloomy fourteenth-century mansion, allowed neither to leave the grounds nor to receive visitors. Even her four children were eventually banned from seeing their mother. The ‘guilty’ brother, Arthur Rochfort, fled to England with his devoted family, where the Earl followed him with a gun.

Lord Belvedere was a handsome, tasteful, occasionally charming man, a distinguished soldier much admired by George II, but prone in his private life to jealousy and vindictiveness on a grand scale. When Arthur Rochfort eventually returned to Ireland sixteen years later, Belvedere sued him for adultery and won £20,000. While he was converting his old house into a prison for his wife, Lord Belvedere built himself a new seat, five miles away, above Lough Ennell near Mullingar. Another of the Earl’s brothers, George, built his own house next door, which he called Rochfort. When the Earl eventually quarrelled with George as well, he built in his garden a magnificent sham ruin to obstruct the view.

Belvedere inevitably also fell out with his youngest brother, William, against whom he brought a lawsuit – later decided against him – by which he severely lessened his sibling’s fortune. The third of William Rochfort’s sons was also called William and two months after Harriette Wilson was baptized there, the young William, who had grown up with the injustice incurred on his father by the behaviour of his uncle, married in St George’s, Hanover Square, the daughter of Henry Sperling, of Dynes Hall, Halstead, Essex. On 11 September 1795, after seven years of marriage, the couple were blessed with their only child, and he too was called William. William Henry Rochfort – ‘the Moustache’ – was born into a family branded by the violence and greed of the the First Earl of Belvedere, and the boy inherited from his father and grandfather his sense of deprivation. But this seems not to have been his only legacy. It is from his uncle, the wicked Earl himself, that Rochfort inherited his ability to hold a grudge and his grasp of melodrama.

The Second Earl of Belvedere was childless, as were his brothers. The title, which William Henry Rochfort believed he should now inherit, died with the Earl in 1814. The estates in Kilbrenan, Midan, Tyrrell’s Pass, Templeoran, Garryduffe, Leghegare and Bloomfield and his house in Dublin were divided between the Earl’s sister, the Countess of Lanesborough, and his second wife. The only other male in that generation of the Rochfort family to have had children was Rochfort’s bachelor uncle Henry, and it was on his good will – in both senses – that Rochfort depended.

When Rochfort’s father died in 1798, he left his own considerable estates to his widow, under the trusteeship of his brother; only after her death would they revert to William Henry. Rochfort, who lived in poverty while his mother basked in wealth, consequently hated her with a passion worthy of the nephew of the First Earl of Belvedere, and the terms of his father’s will resulted in legal complexities and family feuds sustainable only by those of the Rochfort clan. Believing that his mother swindled him out of his inheritance ‘by a system of fraud and concealment almost unprecedented in the annals of maternal turpitude’,21 Rochfort saw himself as a long-suffering victim, an aristocrat deprived of his natural station, the offspring of an unnatural parent, an outsider. Due to the past negligence of assignees, he claimed to have ‘lost an entire estate, value £20 to £25,000 and for which there is no adequate remedy as the law stands at law or at equity …’22 Another of his potential estates was also ‘fraudulently concealed from my knowledge by my own mother to favour the offspring of [her] pauper second husband …’23 Rochfort never stopped hoping that he would wake up the next day a landowner, someone to whom other men touched their hats. As a poor man only by default and only for the moment, he lived as a rich one, borrowing extensively against the estates he expected one day to inherit, and falling into deeper and deeper debt.

The Rochfort family was distinguished by its production of good soldiers and profitable marriages. William Henry had failed in both areas. Following military college in Sandhurst, he had a brief and unremarkable career in the artillery corps in India under the commands of Major General Thomas Gage Montresor and the Honourable Colonel Lincoln Stanhope. Rochfort’s own claim to be a colonel was at this point completely unfounded, and nor had his charms managed to attract an heiress. He had been pursued by a Miss Scarlett who was due to inherit £1,700 a year on the death of her mother, but Rochfort broke off the engagement on discovering that this annuity was all he was to expect – there being no other estate besides – and there was a long enough wait for that.

William Henry Rochfort’s achievements by the time he became Harriette’s lover were to have attracted in the space of a few years two of the most notorious figures of his day. In 1818, when he was twenty-three, he went to South America as aide-de-camp to General Gregor MacGregor, who a few years later established himself as a fraudster of some brilliance. MacGregor was born in the same year as Harriette, and came from an ancient Highland family; he was descended from Rob Roy, his grandfather was ‘Gregor the Beautiful’ of the Black Watch and Laird of Inverardine. He served briefly in the British Army until 1811 when Simon Bolivar, the Venezuelan liberator, came to London looking for British protection against the Spanish presence in the Americas. Bolivar was considered a hero (Byron named his boat after him); his dream was an English form of constitution for ‘Greater Colombia’, a federation of the modern neighbouring countries of Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. The British took a sympathetic interest in South America’s struggle for independence and recruits to join the revolutionary cause were never hard to find. MacGregor duly offered his services and was put under the command of the ageing General Miranda. He distinguished himself as a soldier and, together with Bolivar, MacGregor inflicted a series of masterly defeats on the Spanish, among which was the independence of Venezuela and Colombia. Bolivar acknowledged MacGregor’s heroism by offering him the hand of his niece.

Rochfort probably first became involved with MacGregor when the General was recruiting a task force to liberate Portobello, on the isthmus of Panama. The expedition would have appealed to Rochfort’s spirit of adventure and to his greed: ‘glory and gold’ are what a soldier was presumed to bring home from South America. The attack on Portobello turned into a massacre; the troops who survived suffered atrociously. And there was no gold to be found.24 Following Portobello, Rochfort returned home, having become a good friend of MacGregor.

After 1820, Bolivar and MacGregor followed different paths. Bolivar’s next plan was an invasion of Ecuador, MacGregor’s was no less extreme. He took a boat, landed at the Mosquito Shore on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, and persuaded the chief of the Poyais Indians who had settled there to grant him a concession to the land. By the time MacGregor returned to London later in the year he had reinvented himself as Prince Gregor of Poyais. While being supportive of South American struggles, the British knew nothing about the place. The scam MacGregor pulled was dependent on this ignorance. The bleak and empty Mosquito Shore which he claimed was his kingdom became the mythical paradise of ‘Poyais’, a heaven on earth. Its grand boulevards, lined with banks, government buildings, churches and opera houses, were surrounded by mountains which abounded with mahogany and cedar trees and rocks veined with gold. The land was fertile, the cattle were fat, the fantastical country produced everything from cotton to coffee. Prince Gregor invited all he met to emigrate to this nirvana and experience wealth and happiness beyond their wildest dreams. George IV, Gregor’s ‘brother sovereign’, gave him a knighthood and welcomed Sir Gregor’s ‘Chargé d’Affaires’ – a scoundrel called William John Richardson – to St James’s Palace. Never thinking to doubt the credibility of anyone received by the King (or perhaps knowing when he was on to a good thing), a City banker and one time Mayor of London, Sir John Perring, floated a loan of £200,000 ‘for the purpose of consolidating the State of Poyais’.25 Shares were printed and sold. Poyais immigration offices were set up in London and Edinburgh and land on the Mosquito Shore was purchased by the prospective émigrés. The first boatloads set sail into their new life in September 1822, arriving four months later to find a deserted wasteland without a building or human being in sight. A hurricane then swept away their ships and the homeless settlers were left to the mercies of malaria and yellow fever. One man killed himself when he realized the extent of his losses. It was not until the autumn of 1824 that the prospective settlers returned to British shores and revealed the truth about Poyais, by which point MacGregor, now rich, had disappeared to Paris, where he began to sell the same story to any Frenchman who would listen.

At the time that MacGregor was selling his shares for Poyais, Rochfort had landed himself in the Fleet and was taking his nocturnal excursions along Orchard Street. He was still on the lookout for gold and adventure.

What is apparent in Harriette’s attraction to and subsequent relationship with Rochfort is not that he was the mysterious ‘other’ to her she describes, but that she had, for the first time, fallen for her double. Rochfort was like her: alluring, unfaithful, a player of masquerades, vengeful, energetic and a spinner of yarns. He should have inherited the earth but he languished instead in a debtor’s prison. He was someone who would have greatly enjoyed wealth; an extravagant fantasist, he loved clothes and adventure and courted the company of fashionable people. He was obsessed, as, increasingly, was Harriette, with justice and revenge, and they recognized in one another themselves. Rochfort was a familiar figure in other ways too. Harriette described him as another Ponsonby but rather he resembled her father, who had also been a charming, disreputable fallen gentleman, a wanderer, social climber and magnificent failure.

Rochfort cuts an unusual and engaging figure. He had great imagination and ability and his money-making schemes were invariably inventive. He was endlessly optimistic, never becoming jaded or losing enthusiasm for any of his ventures despite repeated pitfalls, setbacks and disappointments. In his own writing, he comes across as neat, methodical and diligent (his letters look as though they were typed in italics), boyish and somewhat hair-brained, keen to please and comically ill-fated. People liked Rochfort; his looks were attractive to women while men admired his virility and energy; it was hard not to respect his determination. He was a chancer and a thorn in the side of those he pestered, but wanted to be neither. Rochfort longed to belong, and his attraction to Harriette was his sense that she ‘belonged’ to the world from which he was excluded. Her catalogue of powerful lovers he must have found vertiginous and while he identified with her anger at the way in which she had been treated, his future communications with men such as Palmerston, Wellington and Brougham suggest that he saw Harriette not as a conduit for his bitterness but as a bridge into a better world. Harriette actually regarded Rochfort as more of a hopeless child than a dashing hero and she mothered him in much the same way as she did Lord Conyngham.

When Harriette met Rochfort she came full circle and returned home. Rochfort was her friend, they were equals, they could do better together than apart. They admired and protected one another. In 1823 they announced that they had married; she was thirty-five, he was twenty-eight. Much as her Memoirs fictionalize their relationship, if Harriette had indeed married – and no evidence exists either way – she was acting realistically. Her decision to become a wife, or to represent herself as such, was the result of considered thought. It is clear that she was attracted to and thought highly of Rochfort, but it was not because of love alone, or at all, that she would have married him. It was usual for courtesans to marry as a sign that they had retired and Harriette was no more likely to become a traditional wife now than at any other time; nor would she have married Rochfort had that been the deal. Harriette had decided in the wake of Ponsonby that the object of her life was ‘to avoid all steady attachment’, and her relationship with Rochfort met these terms. They were an unconventional couple, rarely living in the same country, let alone the same house. Their marriage resembled the aristocratic arrangements of which Harriette had seen so many. Neither party had bourgeois illusions about the other, or about domesticity and fidelity; being married suited their legal and financial needs. Harriette’s old friends and the power she potentially had over them could get Rochfort support in high places, while being married offered her vital protection. As a wife, she had to surrender her property rights to her husband, and this must have been a major factor in Harriette’s decision to become known as Mrs Rochfort. Having no money of her own, she could be neither sued nor declared bankrupt; were she to obtain any, she had an agreement with Rochfort whereby she could keep it.

Harriette settled enough of Rochfort’s debts to get him out of prison. They then lived for the summer of 1824 in lodgings at Warwick Court, Holborn, where an acquaintance of Harriette’s reported being spied by the couple from the window and called up to their rooms.

Harriette continued to tell Mr Crony that she had been writing some sketches of her life and to ask if he could recommend a publisher. He suggested that she try Henry Colburn, which she duly did. She had embarked on the first stage of her plan to storm London once more and hold the British aristocracy to ransom.

Notes

1 Memoirs 1831, vol. 5, p. 423.

2 The English Spy, vol. 2, p. 50.

3 Memoirs 1831, vol. 5, p. 425.

4 Ibid., pp. 428–9.

5 Ibid., vol. 7, p. 7.

6 Ibid., p. 9.

7 Ibid., p. 10.

8 Ibid., p. 11.

9 Ibid., pp. 57–9.

10 See Roger Lee Brown, History of the Fleet Prison, London: The Anatomy of the Fleet, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1996, p. 280.

11 Memoirs 1831, vol. 7, p. 126.

12 Ibid., p. 139.

13 Ibid., p. 318.

14 Ibid., p. 144.

15 Ibid., p. 145.

16 Ibid., p. 156.

17 Ibid., p. 159.

18 Ibid., p. 195.

19 Ibid., p. 205.

20 Ibid., p. 212.

21 Brougham: 21,680.

22 Brougham: 21,769.

23 Brougham: 21,680.

24 Sir John Berant, Narrative of the Expedition under General MacGregor against Portobello, London: C. & J. Ollier, 1820.

25 Egon Larsen, The Deceivers, London: John Baker, 1966, p. 78.

26 The English Spy, vol. 2, p. 52.