Jane Austen (8 page)

The adultress was a year older than Jane herself, and had married at sixteen. Seven years later her husband, Edward Jervis Ricketts, discovered love letters to his wife from Charles William Taylor, andMary-Cassandra went home to her mother. In June 1798 the Bishop of London granted Ricketts an Episcopal divorce, which did not allow remarriage; in January 1799 the House of Lords granted a civil one, which did. The hearing was newsworthy: Mary-Cassandra had been seen furtively visiting Taylor’s house in Margaret Street and had boasted to her maid, in lurid detail, how much better he was in bed than her husband. The Austen sisters knew all about this. Indeed, Jane openly expressed opinions about scandals of which she had heard. She was far from being sheltered from learning of the immorality of society.

For example, Jane told Cassandra in a letter in January 1801 that Fulwar Fowle’s wife Eliza, née Lloyd, had seen Lord Craven and ‘found his manners very pleasing indeed. The little flaw of having a mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance about him.
³
The mistress was fifteen-year-old Harriette Wilson, who later became a notorious courtesan. When Harriette fell on hard times, she wrote her memoirs and tried to blackmail her former lovers. Her price for silence was £200 (now worth at least 200 times as much) per lover. It was to Harriette that the Duke of Wellington is said to have uttered his famous challenge: ‘Publish and be damned!’ Lord Craven in 1807 married an actress called Louisa Brunton. When
Emma
was published in 1815, Jane Austen wrote that Lady Craven admired it very much, but did not think it equal to
Pride and Prejudice
.

Nearer home, the diminutive Revd Charles Powlett, curate of Winslade, who had tried to give Jane a kiss at a ball in January 1796, gave a rowdy party, disturbing the neighbours. His father was an illegitimate son of the third Duke of Bolton. Illegitimate children were numerous. Sometimes called ‘accidental’ or ‘natural’ children, they were often recognized and reared by their paternal relatives. Charles spent much time at his grandfather’s seat, where he acquired expensive tastes and ran seriously into debt, finally leaving England for Brussels to avoid his creditors. He married a young, extravagant wife, who appeared at a ball ‘both nakedly and expensively dressed’. She caused Jane some amusement by referring to her husband in Italian as her
‘Caro sposo
,' a detail Jane was to put to use when she created the affected Mrs Elton in
Emma
.

Another Mrs Powlett caused even bigger ripples. Colonel Thomas Norton Powlett was a distant relative of Charles and had at the age of thirty-one married Letitia Mary Percival, ten years younger. When Jane was living in Southampton in 1808 she was shocked to learn that Colonel Powlett’s wife had had an affair with Charles Sackville Germain, second Viscount Sackville, later fifth Duke of Dorset. This continued until after the Powletts had moved to Southampton where Mrs Powlett took communion with Cassandra and Jane. Twelve days before Jane wrote to tell her sister all about it, the Viscount and Mrs Powlett had been caught together. The
Morning Post
the previous day (21 June) had announced, ‘Mrs P’s
faux pas
with Lord S e took place at an inn near Winchester/ Three days earlier it had announced, ‘Another elopement has taken place in high life. A noble Viscount, Lord S, has gone off with Mrs P, the wife of a relative of a noble Marquis.'

Colonel Powlett brought an action for damages against Lord Sackville. The case was reported in the
Hampshire Chronicle
five weeks later. The story was this. Lord Sackville met Colonel and Mrs Powlett at the Stockbridge racecourse on 9 June, when Sackville overheard the Colonel arrange to go yachting with a friend the next day Next morning, after the Colonel had gone to Southampton Quay, Mrs Powlett ordered post horses for her carriage and drove to the White Hart Inn, Winchester. When she arrived she took a room upstairs. Lord Sackville arrived soon afterwards, and was given a room downstairs where he ate a light breakfast, lounged at the open door of his room and chatted with the landlord, Mr Bell. Mrs Powlett came downstairs and walked about a little but said nothing. When she went upstairs again Lord Sackville soon followed her. They went into her room and closed the door. Mr Bell, growing suspicious, asked his wife to investigate. She knocked on the door, but was told not to come in. Mrs Bell went to another room with a connecting door and as it had been locked from Mrs Powlett’s side insisted that it be opened. After some delay, it was. Shutters and curtains were closed, and Lord Sackville was huddled at the far side of the bed. Mrs Powlett indignantly demanded an explanation for the intrusion. Mrs Bell said nothing but when Mrs Powlett grew shrill Mrs Bell accused her of immorality. Lord Sackville stepped forward and asked Mrs Bell to hush the matter up. Mrs Bell said this was impossible as one of her chambermaids knew all about it. Mrs Powlett burst into tears. Lord Sackville ordered Mrs Bell not to upset Mrs Powlett. He left the room and drove away in his carriage. Mrs Powlett went back in hers to Southampton. The subsequent court case resulted in Colonel Powlett being awarded damages of £3,000. Jane Austen was to use a similar story for the Henry Crawford-Maria Rushworth elopement in
Mansfield Park
, though in less salacious detail. In the novel there is merely a newspaper paragraph which uses initials.

During Jane’s lifetime, divorce was rare and consequently newsworthy. Just before she died Jane wrote to her niece Fanny Knight, ‘If I were the Duchess of Richmond, I should be very miserable about my son’s choice. What can be expected from a Paget, born and brought up in the centre of conjugal infidelity and divorces? I will not be interested about Lady Caroline. I abhor all the race of Pagets.’ Charles, fifth Duke of Richmond, was engaged to Lady Caroline Paget, whose father Lord Paget later became Marquis of Anglesey. He famously lost a leg at Waterloo, and the Duchess of Richmond, Lady Caroline’s future mother-in-law, had given the celebrated ball on the eve of the battle.

In 1795 Lord Paget, Lady Caroline’s father, had married Lady Caroline Elizabeth Villiers, daughter of the Earl of Jersey and a former mistress of the Prince Regent. Jane Austen detested the thought of both people. Lord Paget had an adulterous affair with Lady Charlotte Wellesley, sister-in-law of the Duke of Wellington. Lady Charlotte’s husband was awarded £20,000 in damages and divorced his wife. Family and friends tried to mediate between Lord Paget and his wife, but he had run away with Lady Charlotte. The Pagets were divorced in 1810. Lord Paget remarried and fathered six children, in addition to four by his first wife. Here were conjugal infidelity and divorces indeed! Jane was not exaggerating.

There was a family connection, however, and the Austens owed the Pagets a favour. Jane’s brother Charles served on the frigate
Endymion
under Captain Charles Paget, who became Admiral Sir Charles Paget and whose recommendation got Charles a promotion. Jane knew the facts of service life. In
Pride and Prejudice
a private in the militia is flogged. Sailors on one of Frank Austen’s ships were flogged for mutiny and sodomy. Both could be capital offences. Mary Crawford in
Mansfield Park
is making an outrageously rude joke when she says that as an admiral’s niece she has seen enough of ‘rears and vices’. She laughingly adds, ‘Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.’ Such brittle coarseness is completely in character.

Marital infidelity was not the only social vice of which Jane was aware. At the same time she spotted the ‘Adultress’, she added coolly, ‘Mrs Badcock and two young women were of the same party, except when Mrs Badcock thought herself obliged to leave them, to run round the room after her drunken husband. His avoidance and her pursuit, with the probable intoxication of both, was an amusing scene.’

Drunkenness was common, and not only among men. This scene took place a few days after Jane’s arrival in Bath when the family took up residence there in 1801. ‘The waters’ at Bath were considered good for gout, a common eighteenth-century complaint. Symptoms are painful swelling of the joints, restlessness, irritability, cramp, indigestion, constipation and thirst. It is commonly associated with heavy drinking, especially of port, but though its eighteenth-century prevalence may have been due to the drunken habits of the time, it has more recently been suggested that, like the gravel and kidney stones which also afflicted Jane Austen’s contemporaries, gout may be in part caused by dietary deficiencies. Teetotallers can and do get gout. Whatever his drinking habits, Jane’s maternal uncle James Leigh-Perrot suffered from gout, which was his original reason for visiting Bath. He had added ‘Perrot’ to his name in order to inherit a house and land. He knocked down the house, sold the land and built a new house, Scarlets, near Maidenhead.

Scandal of another kind touched the ultra-respectable Austen family when Mrs Leigh-Perrot was arrested for shoplifting on 8 August 1799. She walked down Stall Street, Bath, from their home in Paragon to Smith’s haberdashers on the corner of Bath Street. Mrs Leigh-Perrot bought some black lace to trim a cloak. She gave the man a five-pound note. He took it with the goods to the back of the shop while she turned from the counter to the door to look for her husband. When the purchase was wrapped and her change given to her, she took the parcel out of the shop. She walked towards the route her husband generally took on his way to drink the waters and soon met him. They stopped to pay a tradesman’s bill and were on their way to the Post Office to post a letter when they passed Smith’s, where Mrs Leigh-Perrot had bought her black lace an hour previously. Miss Elizabeth Gregory, part-proprietor of the shop, dashed out into the street.

‘I beg pardon, madam, but was there by mistake a card of white lace put up with the black you bought?’

Mrs Leigh-Perrot said that as she had not been home and the parcel had not been out of her hand, Miss Gregory could examine it herself. Miss Gregory opened the parcel and found not only the black lace but a card of white edging which she took out and said, ‘Oh, here it is.’ She went back into the shop. Mrs Leigh-Perrot, writing to her cousin Mountague Cholmeley, said this did not surprise her as she assumed a mistake had been made in the shop. On the corner of Abbey Churchyard the young man who had taken the black lace away to wrap approached, stopped the couple and insisted on taking Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s name and address. In some alarm, she gave it. Hearing nothing, she concluded a mistake had been cleared up but a few days later she received an anonymous, undated letter through the mail, addressed to ‘Mrs Leigh-Perrot, Lace dealer’. It said, Tour many visiting acquaintance, before they again admit you into their houses, will think it right to know how you came by the piece of lace stolen from Bath Street a few days ago. Your husband is said to be privy to it.’

Miss Gregory and her assistant had been to the Guildhall and laid charges of attempted theft against her, swearing they had seen her take the lace, worth one pound, and had found it in her possession. The Mayor and magistrates, who knew the couple, acted according to the letter of the law and Mrs Leigh-Perrot was committed to Ilchester Jail to await her trial at Taunton Assizes. The charge was serious as punishments for offences against property were heavy. If found guilty, this woman of fifty-five, deaf and bronchitic, could suffer the death penalty. In practice, the sentence would probably be commuted and she would be transported to Australia, then a giant penal colony, for fourteen years.

Her husband, two years older and accustomed to gentlemanly comfort, declared that if she was sent as a convicted criminal to Botany Bay he would sell his land and houses and go with her. He was in poor health, with a foot enlarged by gout, and only able to walk with two sticks. He retained a barrister to defend her and drummed up witnesses prepared to swear that she was in no way unstable or dishonest. He moved to Ilchester to be with her. Their money and social position helped: they were lodged not in stinking cells but in the house of the jailer, Edward Scadding. ‘Nothing can have been more respectful than his behaviour.' Mrs Leigh-Perrot reported to Mountague Cholmeley. But one of her worst miseries was seeing what her ‘dearest husband was going through: the ‘vulgarity, dirt, noise from morning till night’. Her husband was in constant pain, and the only medical man available combined his profession with dealing in coals and manufacturing tiles, suggesting his practice was less than successful. Greasy toast laid on her husband’s knees by the children, and a smoking chimney, did not help. Worse, Mrs Scadding licked her knife. Family and friends rallied round and visited but there was no privacy. Chambers, Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s maid of long standing, had died, and Mrs Leigh-Perrot missed her attendance.

On 11 September, a month after the incident, an application for bail was made. But as Mrs Leigh-Perrot had been found with the white lace in her possession, bail was refused. Mrs Austen offered to send either or both of her daughters to keep their aunt company. Presumably this generous gesture was made with their agreement. If it was so, it involved heroic sacrifice on Jane’s part, as she never liked her aunt very much. Mrs Leigh-Perrot, to her credit, refused, saying she could never allow ‘these elegant young women’ to be ‘inmates in a prison’.

Mountague Cholmeley had promised to attend the trial but was laid up (or claimed to be) with the gout himself. The trial was held on 29 March 1800, eight months after the offence was said to have been committed. Mrs Austen again offered her daughters as support but their aunt again nobly refused. ‘To have those two young creatures gazed at in a public court would cut me to the very heart.’ Their brother James, always a favourite with the childless Leigh-Perrots, would have gone but his horse had fallen on him and he had a broken leg.

Charles Filby, who had served Mrs Leigh-Perrot at the haberdasher’s, swore he had seen her take the lace and conceal it under her cloak. Cross-examined, he admitted he had been a bankrupt. Sarah Rainer, who also worked there, swore she had seen Filby pack the parcel and that he had put into it only black lace. Elizabeth Gregory swore she had found the white lace on Mrs Leigh-Perrot. The judge invited the prisoner to make her defence. At the time defence counsel were not allowed to address juries on their clients’ behalf, only to examine witnesses for their own side and cross-examine those for the prosecution.