Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson. Paula Byrne
place of her birth affected her deeply. She took a solitary walk back to the scenes of her childhood: the schoolhouse, the green, the tombs of her ancestors. In the minster she once more crept under the wings of the huge brass eagle in the middle aisle, just as she had done as a child. ‘Language cannot describe the sort of sensation’ which she felt when she suddenly heard the peal of the organ ringing out as it had in her youth. But now the family home was a ruin: ‘The nursery windows were dim, and shattered; the house was sinking to decay.’ She remembered how she had walked in the cloisters that linked her old home to the minster: ‘“Here,” said I, “did my infant feet pace to and fro” … On those dark and winding steps, did I sit and listen to the full-toned organ, the loud anthem, and the bell, which called the parishioners to prayer.’6 As she re-entered the cathedral, she read and reread the monumental inscriptions, finding the grave of the actor William Powell, whose Lear had been her first experience of theatre. And she dropped a tear on the stone tablet that commemorated an old family friend. As so often in the Memoirs, this account is embellished with many a literary flourish, but there is no reason to doubt that when Mary returned to Bristol as Mrs Robinson she must have felt that her childhood was well and truly over, her innocence lost.
Her melancholy was no doubt exacerbated by the uncertainty over her future. Everything depended upon Thomas Harris’s generosity. Perhaps she even feared that her husband would abscond. Hope returned when Robinson sent a letter from Tregunter relating that his ‘uncle seemed disposed to act handsomely’. Mary learned that at first Robinson was too frightened to tell his father that he was already married, but upon revealing the truth, Harris expressed the hope that she was neither too young nor too beautiful, since ‘beauty, without money, is but a dangerous sort of portion’. Still, Harris had grudgingly accepted the inevitable: ‘If the thing is done, it cannot be undone.’7 He agreed to a visit. Robinson duly wrote with the news, instructing Mary to obtain funds for the journey by requesting a loan from one of his friends back in London – a man she had sometimes seen in his company.
‘One or two letters passed on this subject,’ she writes in the Memoirs. And then her husband returned in order to escort her to Wales. The man to whom she had written was the notorious John King, generally known as ‘Jew’ King, a young and ambitious money-broker. In the Memoirs Mary claims disingenuously that she was ‘an entire stranger to the transaction which rendered him the temporary source of my husband’s finances’.8 She represents herself as the very picture of innocence and passivity. The emphasis on her melancholy mood and her recollections of childhood as she waited in Bristol draws the reader away from any thought of her possible implication in her new husband’s messy financial affairs.
That phrase ‘one or two letters’ is, however, economical with the truth. To a greater extent than at any other point in the Memoirs, Mary was whitewashing her own past. The real story of her involvement with ‘Jew’ King reveals that she was by no means the naive newlywed she would have her readers believe in.
At the height of her fame, Mary was notorious not only for the love letters sent to her from the Prince of Wales under the signature ‘Florizel’, but also for a much sleazier correspondence with King. In 1781, as part of a concerted press campaign to blacken her name, there appeared a slim quarto volume, published at two shillings, which purported to contain copies of real letters that passed between Mrs Robinson and a ‘certain Israelite’ between 21 September and 30 November 1773. Her letters were all dated from Bristol and addressed to King in London. In one of them, dated 9 November, she says that on the previous Tuesday Mr Robinson had set out for Carmarthenshire, where he intended to stay a week, and that he would then send for her to join him. The circumstances fit precisely with the account in the Memoirs of how Mary waited at Bristol with her mother while Robinson went forward to pave the way for her reception in Wales. Many details in the published letters are so specific that it is impossible to suppose that the volume was merely a malicious fabrication. What is more, as will be seen in a later chapter, Mary and her then lover, Lord Malden, made strenuous efforts to recover the original letters. This attempt strongly suggests that in reality more than ‘one or two letters’ passed between Mary Robinson and John King in the first year of her marriage. Though in all probability King spiced up the text for the purposes of publication, Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite, and his Answers to them gives us the very voice of the young Mary with an immediacy that is altogether lacking in the carefully self-censored retrospective narrative of the Memoirs.9
The letters reveal an intimacy that would never have been guessed from the casual passing reference to King in the Memoirs. The first of them reads as follows:
Bristol, 21st Sept. 1773
Sir,
I never deemed myself happier, than I found myself those few Days you accompanied us upon the Road; indeed your Company, from the first Moment of our Acquaintance, has been so agreeable, that I scarcely know how to spare you. Shall we expect you at Bristol? Write me soon; write the Style you know I like; let it be plaintive; sooth the Wanderings of my pensive Breast.
Your humble Servant, M. R—
Just as the Robinsons were accompanied at the beginning of their honeymoon not only by Hester Darby but also by Hanway Balack, so they set off for Bristol with King as well as Mary’s mother. The information that Mary has found King’s company highly agreeable ever since their first acquaintance reveals that she must have spent considerable time in his company in the five months since her marriage. What is more, the preface explaining the circumstances of the correspondence includes the information that – on the basis of Thomas Robinson’s prospects of inheriting an estate – King had already lent the couple a substantial sum of money.
The extent of their involvement is further exposed in Mary’s second letter, in which we discover that King was with the Robinsons when they stopped for their sightseeing in Oxford:
Bristol, 29th Sept. 1773
With Pleasure I take this Opportunity of answering my worthy Friend’s obliging Epistle. R—is not yet gone to Wales, but as he will go soon, it makes me uneasy; you know how I love him, therefore will excuse my mentioning him. The Weather is extremely fine, and nothing but your Company is wanted to enliven the Place. We hope by this Time you have seen dear little George, and that he is well. You cannot conceive with what Regret we parted with you at Oxford; the Three last Days were not spent half so agreeable as the first. I am quite ashamed of this intolerable Scroll, but I hope you will pardon it, for I am fatigued almost to Death. Mrs Darby begs her respects.
Your Friend.
King, then, not only travelled with Thomas, Mary, and Hester as far as Oxford: he was also asked to keep an eye on George, Mary’s younger brother left behind in London. King’s response to this letter was flirtatious and literary. Mary wrote again a week later. She, too, flirts in one sentence and moralizes in the next. She was missing him and missing the buzz of London still more:
I wish you were sincere in what you say, I do not think you are, but still I believe myself happy in your good Opinion; you treat me so much in a Style of Compliment, that I really do not know in what Manner to return it; you express so much Friendship, that the hardest Task, I ever undertook in my whole Life, is how to return Thanks suitable to the Favours I have received from you … I long to be in Town. Do not forget our intended Party to Drury-Lane Theatre; you know I am passionately fond of Plays, and I was going to say, I envy you, but Envy I detest.
But then she comes to the main point:
not that I think Generosity consists in throwing Money away at Random, without Distinction or Judgment, but in bestowing it in proportion to the Merit and Condition of those who stand in need of our Assistance. I agree with my favourite Author, who says, in Trust, Intimacy and Confidence, be as particular as you can; in Humanity, Charity and Benevolence, universal. I shall depend on your Promise this Week for I am really distressed.
A