Other Women (7 page)

Here again Mary’s memoirs differ from most histories of Mrs Robinson. The common story is that her husband had abandoned her and helped himself to her earnings because, as her husband, he owned everything she had. Her own story is that they were still living as a couple and that, yes, he did spend too much of her money but it was with her own consent.

A trip to Wales followed in which Mr Robinson would prove he was the heir to his uncle’s estate (and he kept insisting on it being that relationship):

Mr. Robinson, on his arrival at Tregunter, despatched a letter informing me that his ‘uncle’ seemed disposed to act handsomely, but that he had only ventured to avow an intention to marry, fearful of abruptly declaring that he had been already some months a husband. Mr. Harris, for that was the name of my father-in-law, replied that ‘he hoped the object of his choice was not too young!’ At this question Mr. Robinson was somewhat disconcerted.

They again visited Mr Harris in Wales, hoping that he might decide to be generous and bail his son out of debt. While not a penny was forthcoming, Mary’s own welcome was a lot better than her previous one. Harris appreciated her efforts to earn money and congratulated her on it.

On their return to London Robinson was arrested yet again for debt, this time to a supposed friend of his, Mr Brereton. Brereton tried to blackmail Mary into becoming his mistress, saying he would let her husband off the charge if she did so. He told her he would await the pair of them in Bath so that she could pay her part of the bargain. Mary didn’t tell her husband what had transpired, but when they got to Bath Mr Brereton was seen by them parading with his wife and her sister. Realising he was putting himself in a compromising position, Brereton let the matter drop and dismissed the debt.

Mary’s acting career was blooming; she was becoming increasingly popular. Robinson began to despise her for it although he was always happy to spend her money. Soon Mary would take on the role of Perdita from Shakespeare’s
A Winter’s Tale
, the role in which the young Prince of Wales, later to be George IV, would first see her and fall in love with her.

Robinson begins to bow out of the story at this point. According to Mary’s memoirs he is still living with her but is openly having affairs with women or visiting prostitutes.

The Prince of Wales saw Mary as Perdita and began to pursue her. They began an intense correspondence that lasted for four months before they actually spoke to one another. Mary writes about how she implored the prince to think hard about his passion for her, what the consequences for both of them would be, what his parents would think and how she could leave her husband.

These words of Mary’s tend to make the reader think that she was trying hard to rectify a social mistake. She is too ardent in protecting the prince’s interests and claiming that his attachment to her and his endearments were all given through real affection for her. She says it would be impossible for him to have been trying to ‘trick her’. Mary ends her memoirs at the point when the prince is trying to get her to meet him at his apartments with her in disguise as a youth. Mary is adamant that she will not.

Perhaps Mrs Robinson was naive about the prince and his sincerity. Would she have given in to his demands if she had known that he and his gambling friends were having a wager on him getting her into bed?

Mary may have broken off telling her story at this point because of the deal she made with the royal family about her affair with the prince, which will emerge later in this story. To hear the end of the tale we must resort to the accounts of others. Some say that Mary got so sick of her husband’s philandering ways that when she caught him with the maid, doing what he shouldn’t, she finally threw him out; at least when she came to the decision to dine with the Prince of Wales she was no longer living with her husband. To attend her assignation Mary went in carnival costume, cloaked and masked. She dined not just with the prince but his younger brother, and told them her whole woeful history.

The prince decided the time was right for him to make her an offer that she would find hard to refuse. If she consented to live with him as his mistress then he would pay her the extraordinary sum of £100,000 (around £6 million today!). How Mary didn’t get suspicious of such a large offer seems a bit odd but in the end she agreed to it. Further incentives may have clinched the deal. Mary was worried about her young daughter and her future. The prince would accommodate them, have her daughter educated and provide a good dowry for her on her marriage.

To her credit Mary insisted on the prince having a legal document drawn up with the payments and conditions as stated. He was to sign in front of witnesses. He tried to wriggle out of doing it and tried to threaten to kill himself if she didn’t move in with him. She had wised up since she married and told him the deal was off unless she got the documents.

Thus, signed and sealed, Mrs Mary ‘Perdita’ Darby Robinson moved into luxury accommodation with her dashing young beaux, the Prince of Wales. Living as the prince’s mistress did not seem to damage her reputation at all. It drew more crowds to see her at the theatre and she was always in demand for parties and other social events to which she might take the prince.

Underneath the surface of their beautiful relationship, and unbeknown to Mary, things were not all they seemed. She didn’t realise that the prince was one of the worst gamblers in England; he played for high stakes and frequently lost. He would lose his temper and behave badly and he also had other women he was seeing besides Mary.

Mary decided to break her contract with the Drury Lane Theatre so that she could spend more time with the prince, who was claiming she never had enough time for him. Sheridan told her that if she did back out of her contract it would not be offered to her again. She nodded but continued to have it cancelled.

If only Mary had waited a while longer she would have discovered that her ardent lover was playing away from home and was on the point of dumping her entirely.

While she was out shopping for a party for the prince, the royal removalists moved into her apartment and packed up everything. When she returned she thought she’d been burgled. Neighbours told her what had happened and she traced her personal possessions to her husband’s residence, but he was not going to let her have them back. The prince had terminated the lease on the flat (he always had his men put clauses into a lease so he could wriggle out when he wanted to). And, worst of all, Mary had just lost all chance of getting work on the stage to support herself. There was only one course of action and that was to go to the king, George III, to tell him what his son was capable of.

The king was more than aware of his eldest son’s bad behaviour and, in his view, duping an actress – who he viewed as little better than a prostitute – paled into insignificance. For his part, the king was more worried about the enormous debts his son had accumulated through gambling. The signed document that Mary waved around as evidence of the prince’s duplicity was nothing more than an irritation.

However, Mary had in her possession something far more damaging and which posed a real threat to the security of the monarchy: the prince’s sexually explicit love letters to her. She wrote out a sample of some of the juiciest titbits and sent it along with her letter of complaint to the king. She was careful not to say anything that would suggest she was openly blackmailing the family, but it was inferred that if her demands were not met then the letters might happen to find their way into the hands of a journalist. And the public would have loved it.

Mary wanted the £25,000 that was only one-quarter of what she was originally promised. And if the prince’s misdeeds weren’t enough to scare His Majesty then Mary had another little scandal up her sleeve if necessary. Prince Frederick, the younger brother, had an illegitimate child with a common serving girl. The child had been placed with a decent family and Mary knew which one.

There was one big hurdle to Mary’s plan, which was that the prince was already so in debt that his inheritance at 21, though still a little way off, was already spoken for. Lord Malvern, who was in love with Mary himself, tried to negotiate with her. In the end Mary settled for an immediate payment of £1,000 in exchange for a dozen of the letters. Later she would receive another amount for another dozen, and so forth. As she was desperate for money she felt she didn’t have much option.

In order to squeeze more money out of the prince, Mary enlisted the help of Charles James Fox, a lawyer and politician. He too was attracted to Mary and tried to see what he could do. In the end, the best that could be got was an annual income of £500 plus £250 for Mary’s daughter, to be paid to her annually for life. The letters were returned and destroyed. When George became king, still fearful of Mary’s ability to damage his shaky reputation, she was also made to promise never to publish anything defamatory about him, which is probably why her memoirs end where they do. A small print-run of the memoirs was published after Mary’s death and was made available only to close friends and family. It is now available as an e-book from
www.gutenberg.org
.

Mary had a brief fling with Fox, who was as cunning as his name. Although she quite enjoyed his witty company it was to the stalwart if rather dull Lord Malvern that she turned for further security. In return for a comfortable lifestyle and protection, Mary moved into his lavish London house and became his mistress. She made sure that her young child was kept close to her and was as amply provided for as Mary was herself.

Perhaps Mary would have spent the rest of her life as the privileged lover of Lord Malvern, but unfortunately she gave into temptation and spent a night of passion with Captain Banestre Tarleton, a friend of Malvern’s. Mary’s interest was aroused when she discovered Tarleton was an aspiring author, working on a history of the American War of Independence. This was the lure she could not resist. Her own ambition was to live by her writing, a most difficult thing to do in those times, especially for a woman. What she didn’t know was that the charming captain had made a bet with his drinking friends that he could easily get into bed with her.

Mary gave her new lover two locks of hair, one from her head and one from her pubic area. Oddly, she didn’t question that he asked for this (especially after the same thing had been requested so long ago by the Prince of Wales). They were, of course, trophies to be held aloft in the club where Lord Malvern became the butt of jokes; his beautiful mistress was nothing but a whore.

Mary got into her phaeton (one of the presents she had received from the prince) and raced off to find Malvern to see if the damage could be limited. On the way, the carriage crashed and Mary was pinned underneath it for more than an hour. It was Tarleton who came to her rescue. She was uninjured but in complete shock. Tarleton, to give him his due, was struck with remorse at having been the cause of such a nasty accident and drove her home to his own house. On settling and soothing her they discovered that they had a lot more in common than their one night stand.

Like so many men of his station, Tarleton was deep in debt and his family offered to pay off all his creditors if he took himself to France, without Mrs Robinson, and lived quietly for a while. Not seeing any other option Tarleton wrote to Mary explaining his situation but left without saying goodbye to her. Mary, anxious to keep hold of the man with whom she had so much to share, raised the funds to pay off his debts herself and chased after him to Dover to see if she could catch him before he embarked for France. Another pressing matter was the fact that she had discovered she was pregnant with his child.

The rough trip to Dover was too much for Mary, along with the anguish of losing yet another friend, and on the way she went into premature labour, losing the baby and then contracting rheumatic fever. She nearly died of it and was left very weak and permanently disabled afterwards. Tarleton returned as soon as he heard what had happened. When Mary was well enough the two of them went to live in France, where it was considerably cheaper to live comfortably.

Once across the Channel, Mary and Ban (the shortened form of his name) settled down to a life of writing. Mary helped Ban finish his manuscript of the war in America and then found a publisher for it. Mary herself kept writing poems and brought out a volume when the couple returned to London. Captain Tarleton became Colonel, although this did not help his financial situation, nor did his entering Parliament.

Mary was contented. She could not have any more children after her illness, which had also left her weak in the legs. Mary and Tarleton were together for fifteen companionable years. And then Tarleton did a most astonishing and underhand thing: he married a young woman who would give him an heir. It was done to please his parents but he neglected to tell Mary; she learned of his engagement through the newspaper.

It was the ultimate betrayal: worse than her father’s, worse than her husband’s, much worse than the prince’s – this was the end of her relationships with men. She wrote a novel
The False Friend.
In it she warned young women to beware of the romantic suitor. The book became a success and a second edition was published. Sales rocketed when it became known that the author was none other than Perdita Robinson who had been a stage sensation and mistress to the Prince of Wales.

Mary ‘Perdita’ Darby Robinson died in 1800.

George IV kept up the family tradition of having a stack of women at his disposal. Some of them were no more than prostitutes, paid in cash for their services, others were longer-term arrangements. George and his brothers began this habit while they were all still in their teens; between them they fathered numerous illegitimate offspring.

This is the story of a woman who was particularly hard to get into bed and had to be tricked into what she thought was a legitimate marriage before she would sleep with him.