Hester Davenport - The Princes Mistress, Perdita: A Life of Mary Robinson

I n the churchyard of Old Windsor, not far from where I live, lie the remains of the beautiful Mary Robinson, actress, royal mistress, poet and novelist. The grave is shaded by trees on the north side of the church and the stone is green from damp; the area has a melancholy feel. This is not the only tomb on the shady side, but nevertheless it seems cut off from the crowded gathering in the sunshine, as if she is shunned by the morally righteous in death as in life. An old photo shows that wrought-iron railings once protected the tomb, but they disappeared in the Second World War. Shortly afterwards the inscription changed too; it originally read Mrs Mary Robinson, Author of Poems and other Literary Works, died the 26th December, 1800, at Englefield Cottage, in Surrey, aged 43 years, but in 1952 a great-great niece had it re-inscribed:

MARY ROBINSON

BORN 27TH NOVR 1758

DIED 26TH DECR 1800

PERDITA

(BORN DARBY)

She imposed the nickname by which Mary is certainly best known, but which would not have been her choice for her monument. Two poems on either side of the tomb, one of hers and a tributary verse by a friend, Samuel Jackson Pratt, were renewed then and again more recently by an anonymous admirer. So the lost girl, as her nickname translates, is not forgotten.

It was therefore as a sort of neighbour that Mrs Robinson first claimed my attention, and I wrote a short article about her for a local history journal. Then, when researching a book about the novelist Fanny Burney at the court of King George III, I realised that a portrait of Fanny by her cousin, Edward Burney, was a mirror image of one by his tutor, Sir Joshua Reynolds, of Mary Robinson. Perhaps after the good girl I should turn my attention to the bad?

There needs little justification for writing an account of such an interesting personality and dramatic life as Mary/Perditas, a woman whose lovers or admirers include some of the foremost men of the late eighteenth century: George, Prince of Wales, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charles James Fox, William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. David Garrick tutored her in acting, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney all painted her portrait. Of course her history has been told before, but early biographies were semi-fictional and sentimental, or, like Marguerite Steens The Lost One (1937), unacceptable; for Steen she is an empty-headed doll, a woman possessing neither brains nor strength of character, and she is so patronising about Marys poetry that it is surprising she wrote about her at all. Philip Lindsay in both The Loves of Florizel (1951) and A Piece for Candlelight (1952) presents her as a saucy little madam. No full-scale biography has been published since Robert D. Basss 1957 The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson, in which Mary takes second billing to the man who was her lover for fifteen years, a British hero, Yankee villain, of the American War of Independence. Bass struggles to understand Mary and is nave in taking her on her own terms, though his book is an invaluable source on Tarleton and includes a great deal of material about Mary; he prints many poems, letters and newspaper references in full. However, he is not always reliable. There have been scholarly short biographical studies in recent times; M.J. Levy, who also usefully edited Mary Robinsons Memoirs, has an informative chapter in his The Mistresses of King George IV (1996), while Judith Pascoes biographical section in her introduction to Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (2000) is the best short account to date.

Marys relationship with the Prince of Wales ensured her place in history, though it destroyed her chance to be immortalised as an actress and arguably denied her the laurels of authorship too. Pascoe, in the introduction to the Selected Poems, writes that It is probably impossible to overplay the role of Robinsons affair with the Prince of Wales in her later literary and social reception (). I have explored the relationship as far as records allow, looking beyond the stereotype image of scheming whore which appears in biographies of George IV and other histories into which she makes her way, if only in a footnote. But before she became the scandalous Perdita, there was Mary Robinson the serious actress whose career, if not a long or prestigious one, is of considerable interest in illustrating how a young woman could progress within the theatre. Because it was as Perdita that she caught the Princes eye, that is the role by which she is remembered, but she played many others; moreover, that she played Perdita in The Winters Tale does not convey to a modern reader that The Winters Tale in which she appeared was very different from the one performed today, and in very different theatrical circumstances. I have aimed to present these aspects of her life, and to correct a misconception which has found its way into articles about her. I have also been able to throw further light on her date of birth and on the writing of her memoirs, and have been fortunate to be able to print some previously unpublished material.

The publication of a modern anthology of her poems is an indication of the upsurge of interest in Mary Robinson the writer, the role she forged for herself after a devastating illness left her a helpless cripple. In contrast to dismissive accounts by historians, literary scholars have given serious consideration to her as Romantic poet, novelist, feminist and autobiographer; in 2000 an academic conference marked the bicentenary of her death. However, this is not a literary biography. I have not attempted to shift the emphasis from her social life to the literary one; for most readers it would be pointless to do so since her works are hard to come by. But I have tried to give some idea of their nature, to suggest how they were received at the time, and to use them to help understand and illustrate the life of a woman whose chameleon career encompassed so many different roles. Her fame as a writer mattered to her; at the end of her life she longed for literary recognition as she had once wanted theatrical applause. To that end she fought against the stigma of immorality with which she had been marked since her brief affair with the Prince of Wales. But though she allowed Coleridge and others to think her a penitent Magdalen, I do not believe that she was ever ashamed that once upon a time she had been wooed and won by a handsome Prince.

It has been fascinating to follow her life as it was presented in the newspapers of the day and these have been an important source of information. There are obvious comparisons to be made with todays media treatment of celebrities (not to mention attention-seeking behaviour by such celebrities, royal scandals, the sale of royal love letters, and so on). But these I have left to the reader. When journalists and pamphleteers wanted an image for Mary Robinson at the height of her fame they looked to the heavens, comparing her to a comet, meteor, star or sun; I have tried to convey something of the brilliancy that so dazzled her contemporaries.

With quotations I have followed modern practice in printing them as they were originally, though it was tempting to remove some of the capital letters from the poetry. Mary was addicted to them as a device for emphasis they are there on her gravestone but they can make her poems read with the insistency of an old-fashioned telegram. Nor have I tried to represent prices in current terms. The 20,000 promissory note which she received from the Prince should probably be thought of as the equivalent of 2,000,000, but simply to multiply all prices by 100 not only ignores inflation over the period of her life-time, but also the difference in values of goods between then and now. The top price for a ticket to Drury Lane then, for example, was five shillings [25p]: this would become 25, cheap in comparison to todays prices, but not startlingly so. Apply the same rule to the cost of a copy of Marys 1791 volume of poems and the guinea price converts into 105! (A guinea was a pound and a shilling [1