The Damnation of John Donellan (10 page)

The London that Donellan returned to from India in the 1760s was a place of marked contrasts. Visiting the city in 1780, the Prussian traveller Johann Wilhelm Von Archenholz wrote that London was markedly divided between east and west: to the east, along the Thames, were old, narrow streets of cramped houses, the scene dominated by wharves, and yards. ‘The contrast between this and the West End is astonishing,' he wrote,' the houses here are mostly new and elegant, the squares superb, the streets straight and open.'
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Now was the time when Georgian London's most imposing developments came into being: Portman Square, Bedford Square and Portland Place were all built between 1764 and 1778.

London was crowded, rapacious, bawdy. The seat of royalty and at the very heart of trade and government, it was, at the same time, a city of drunks, whores and desperate poverty. Its houses were overcrowded and its slums, like St Giles, stank; its roads were mostly unpaved and unlit. It was a place where children as young as seven or eight were plied as prostitutes, where Hogarth's Gin Lane was a living reality, and street singers on every corner were applauded for songs that would be regarded as obscene even today. There were, Von Archenholz records, 8,000 alehouses and over 50,000 prostitutes in the city.

Yet the capital city also had a spirit of grace, of Reynolds beauties, of ceremony and wealth, and it prided itself – as all England did – on being strong and powerful. England had the largest navy in the world and was engaged in wars on various fronts; it was a
fighting machine, hardy and ingenious. Its countrymen were represented not only by the swagger of the ex-military man, but also by the rake and the fat alderman gorging himself on beefsteak and porter at breakfast. Visitors to London were sure to see three qualities that summed up England: a fighting, brawling, industrious spirit; conspicuous greed and sensuality; and abject poverty.

More than anything else, London was a city of social mobility at every level. But you would have had to have been a very dull man indeed not to understand that every strata of society had its grades. There was a gulf between the lowly baronet and the elevated duke, between the poor curate and the bishop, between the colonel and the foot soldier: but the hurdles were there to be jumped. Most difficult of all to bridge, however, was the chasm between an ordinary gentleman and a titled aristocrat. There was one obvious way to circumvent that: marry into a titled family.

Marriage might have been an alluring passport to high society for a man like Donellan, but it was not needed at all for a few low-born girls. These rose to fame, if not a lifetime's security, as the mistresses of wealthy men. In the Restoration Court of Charles II a hundred years before, it was said that no man could achieve power or recognition unless he had a mistress. That air of manly potency was vital to his reputation. In the Georgian era, a wife's infidelity was grounds for divorce, but a man's was not – although divorces were rare, since they required an Act of Parliament. Mistresses were widely accepted, even for men of the church. One astonishing example was Archbishop Blackburne, who brought his mistress, Mrs Cruwys, to live under his own roof, where she queened it at the head of the table whenever his wife was absent. Man of letters Horace Walpole recalled an occasion on which Cruwys was at dinner with Blackburne's illegitimate son by another liaison. Blackburne's affairs were ignored, however: he was chaplain to royalty. According to Walpole, the illegitimate son later became the Bishop of London.

So illegitimacy was not frowned upon then as it was to be in later years. As mentioned, John Donellan himself was illegitimate; Philip Stanhope, the adored son to whom Lord Chesterfield
addressed his numerous letters, was illegitimate; Joseph Addison, friend of the Boughton family, had a son by the Countess of Warwick; Lady Harley had so many children by her various lovers that her offspring were called ‘the Harleian Miscellany'; and the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole married Lord Walde-grave and, later, the Duke of Gloucester.

Marriage among the aristocracy was rarely an affair of the heart – the idea of romantic love had yet to take precedence as a reason for wedlock – and when that new form of entertainment, the novel, talked of romance the very concept was howled down as derisory and dangerous. Marriage in high society was an alliance of families designed to ensure that land, revenue and power remained within the grip of the few. An aristocratic woman was required to be chaste before she married, but in society in 1760 she was merely required to be discreet after the wedding; husbands maintained mistresses and wives took lovers, and the whole understanding of the way society worked was based on a wife providing heirs rather than emotional support, and of husbands procuring, maintaining and often abusing ordinary women.

The Victorians did indeed subsequently feel ashamed of the raucous sensuality of their ancestors, and tried to erase it. Leading radical Francis Place, born in London in 1771, spoke in his autobiography of conversation even in his home being ‘coarse and vulgar' and ‘remarkably gross'. His son actually tore some pages from his papers when they were donated to the nation, leaving the embarrassed comment ‘much licentiousness'.

Women who made their name through sex dominated society and were known as the ‘Toasts' – the toasts of the town. They are relevant to Donellan in more ways than one, for the work that he was about to become engaged in required that he knew the distinction between aristocrats and fantastically wealthy courtesans.

The captain did not go unnoticed. In fact, he deliberately drew attention to himself. Although he maintained that he was not in any way at fault during his time in Masulipatnam, and was prepared to testify that not only did he take no booty of war from the city but he had also had his £50 fee taken from him at the court martial,
he seemed to have enough money not only to mix in high society in London and dress well, but also to sport a large diamond ring that earned him the nickname ‘Diamond Donellan'. At the trial, local Warwickshire and Northamptonshire newspapers would say that this ring was part of his spoils of war from India. ‘He returned to Europe with a large sum of money and several valuable gems,' noted the
Nottinghamshire Gazette
in 1781. ‘To his companions he used to boast of Secret Services … ambition was his ruling passion … play and gallantry he pursued …' However he had come by his money, Donellan was now wealthy enough to buy a part share in a new business venture – the Pantheon.

The Pantheon had been devised and the process of building it begun by Philip Elias Turst, the owner of some land on the south side of Oxford Street, and a ‘lady of means', Margaretta Maria Ellice. Ellice claimed that she had been connected with another extravagant place of entertainment just a few hundred yards away, Carlisle House in Soho Square, which had been started by a famous courtesan, Teresa Cornelys, in 1760. Initially, Carlisle House had the relatively innocent objective of providing genteel entertainment for the aristocracy, but it rapidly became as infamous as its occupant as the delights turned from dancing and card-playing to exotic masquerades. Capable of holding 500 guests in its mirrored rooms hung with chandeliers and Chinese wallpaper, for luxury it ‘surpassed all description'.
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In the previous decade, the
Gentleman's Magazine
had said of such establishments: ‘Masquerade houses may be called shops where opportunities for immorality and almost every kind of vice are retailed.' They were right.

Probably the most famous masquerade of all was held in 1779 by the notorious brothel-keeper Mrs Prendergast of King's Place, near St James's Park. She came up with the idea after revealing in court that the Earl of Harrington had routinely visited her establishment every Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, enjoying the lowest kind of rough girl. This public revelation had sent him into a hypocritical rage (‘he flew into a great passion, stuttering and swearing, waving his cane and shouting, Why! I'll not be able to show my face at Court!') not just at the bawd's casual
admittance that he was a customer, but, far more damagingly, that he was often impotent.
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For Prendergast had declared that no one in her establishment could arouse the earl and that she had had to send out for two other girls, who had spent nearly an hour ‘with great labour and much difficulty bringing his Lordship to the zest of his amorous passion'.
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These two girls, on returning to their own madam, had been so fed up at their less-than-interesting hour and a fee of only three guineas that they had refused to pay their own house 25 per cent commission. The resulting uproar made the newspapers and culminated in Harrington's outburst. To make amends to him, and to repair the amorous reputation of her own girls, Prendergast organised the ‘Grand Bal D'Amour' – the lewdest public event that year in a very lewd city.

She invited subscriptions for the night's events, to include famous beauties displayed ‘
in puris naturalibus
'. Harrington himself paid over 50 guineas when he heard what she had in mind; in all, she raised over £84,000 in today's money from Harrington and his friends, all of whom were agog at her plans. She also recruited female aristocrats such as the Hon. Charlotte Spencer (who charged £50 a night), the courtesan Harriet Powell and Lady Henrietta Grosvenor to entice further customers. It is not known whether Harrington's wife attended, who had an even worse reputation than her husband: her nickname was ‘The Stable Yard Messalina', after the nymphomaniac wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and she had both male and female lovers.

The night was a wild success. The ladies danced nude, except for their masks, while an orchestra played facing the wall to spare any blushes the women might still have left. Afterwards the entire throng retired to couches provided ‘to realise those rites which had been celebrated only in theory'. In the midst of the orgy it is said that Lord Grosvenor enjoyed his own wife by mistake, but was so pleased with her performance that the couple – previously separated – were reconciled. After their exertions the guests were treated to a banquet. The evening was deemed such a success that the aristocratic whores donated their fees to the servants, and the
lower-class girls were given three guineas each and their cab fare home.

But masquerades were not the only kind of entertainment that high-class brothels could offer to gallants like Donellan – especially those like him, who were keen to flash their money around. In 1772, the notoriously successful bawd Charlotte Hayes threw a ‘Tahitian Feast of Venus' to celebrate Captain Cook's revelation that the natives of the newly discovered Pacific island made love in public. (It was also her commercial response to the opening of the Pantheon.) She invited twenty-three ‘gentlemen of the highest breeding' to watch as twelve athletic young couples provided a floorshow. Hayes was a canny administrator as well as an impresario: unlike most of her contemporaries she retired with a reputed fortune of £20,000 (£1.27m), all of it gained from gentlemen of breeding blessed with considerably more money than sense.

The Pantheon opened on 27 January 1772. Occupying a prime position on Oxford Street between Poland Street and Ramillies Street (the site now occupied by Marks & Spencer's Pantheon store at 173 Oxford Street), it had fourteen vast and richly decorated rooms, although its mock Roman and Byzantine style was criticised by some as being cold and ‘church-like'. It was supposed to be not only a more refined version of the rapidly degenerating Carlisle House, but a winter version of the famous Ranelagh Gardens, whose season ran from April to November. During its building, however, the scheme had run into financial trouble, and its founder, Turst, lost his control of it to a committee of eleven men, Donellan among them.

In late 1771 the committee published a plan of how the Pantheon would be run. They would open three nights a week only, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, to provide musical concerts, balls and card-playing – although high stakes would not be allowed. It seems that the proprietors were trying to establish a respectable venue for the aristocracy, and to this end they devised a system whereby only peeresses or their nominated guests could be admitted – a kind of elite backstage pass on which the lady had to write the name of the person she was recommending.

The plan backfired in a most dramatic way. On the first night, it was obvious that some of the prized tickets had found their way into the hands of ‘ladies of easy virtue' (according to the magazine
Town and Country
). The following Wednesday, this was confirmed by the arrival of the actress and singer Sophia Baddeley. Baddeley was wildly famous: the Duke of Ancaster had said that she was ‘one of the wonders of the age' and Lord Falmouth had told her, ‘Half the world is in love with you.' One night in 1771, the audience at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket had risen to applaud her beauty in a standing ovation that lasted fifteen minutes. But despite rumours that Lord Melbourne was wont to leave wads of banknotes under her pillow, she was always short of money. When, during a temporary lapse of funds, it was suggested that she cut down her clothing allowance to £100 a year (£6,300), she retorted, ‘Christ, that is not enough for millinery!' A mercurial spendthrift, spoiled, over-generous, rapaciously sexual and extremely high-profile, the early years of the 1770s belonged to Sophia.

It says something for Donellan's own reputation that he knew Baddeley well enough not only to approach her when she entered the Pantheon but to take her to one side and tell the goddess that she was not welcome – a daring move which shows the expectations that the proprietors had of him as well as their own inflated ideas of their influence.

It did not work. Baddeley was back the following week, this time with George Hanger in tow. Hanger, who was actually the son of Lord Coleraine, would become a favourite of the Prince of Wales, visible in many caricatures and cartoons of the age. In a Boyne drawing of 1786 he is shown in a boat with the Prince being shipped off to Botany Bay as a debtor; in another one he cavorts about while the Prince spanks one of the society beauties, Mrs Sawbridge; in a Townly Stubbs drawing of 1786 Hanger is shown pimping for the Prince and distributing his ‘favours' in the form of feathers he is taking from a handcart, while the Prince is depicted as a balding cock of the walk.