Harriette’s description of a stay in a small ‘apology for an inn’

So this week, we are back to Harriette’s affair with her under age lord. The Marquis, Lord Worcester. But before I continue their tale, let me do the quick recap for anyone joining my blog today. As usual, if you’ve read it, skip to the end of the italics.

In 1825 Harriette Wilson, a courtesan, published a series of stories as her memoirs in a British broad sheet paper. The Regency gentleman’s clubs were a buzz, waiting to see the next names mentioned each week. While barriers had to be set up outside the shop of her publisher, Stockdale, to hold back the disapproving mob.

Harriette was born Harriette Debochet, she chose the name Harriette Wilson as her professional name, in the same way Emma Hart, who I’ve blogged about previously, had changed her name. Unlike Emma, it isn’t known why or when Harriette changed her name.

She was one of nine surviving children. Her father was a watchmaker and her mother a stocking repairer, and both were believed to be from illegitimate origin.

Three of Harriette’s sisters also became courtesans. Amy, Fanny and Sophia (who I have written about before). So the tales I am about to begin in my blogs will include some elements from their lives too.

For a start you’ll need to understand the world of the 19^th Century Courtesan. It was all about show and not just about sex. The idle rich of the upper class aspired to spending time in the company of courtesans, it was fashionable, the thing to do.

You were envied if you were linked to one of the most popular courtesans or you discovered a new unknown beauty to be admired by others.

Courtesans were also part of the competitive nature of the regency period too, gambling was a large element of the life of the idle rich and courtesans were won and lost and bartered and fought for.

So courtesans obviously aspired to be one of the most popular, and to achieve it they learnt how to play music, read widely, so they could debate, and tried to shine in personality too. They wanted to be a favoured ’original’.

The eccentric and outspoken was admired by gentlemen who liked to consort with boxers and jockeys, and coachmen, so courtesans did not aim for placid but were quite happy to insult and mock men who courted them, and demand money for any small favour.

So, to Harriette and Worcester. The last we heard of Worcester, Harriette had packed him off to charm his father, the Duke of Beaufort and his mother. Fortunately for Harriette while he was there, to be persuaded to drop the courtesan he’d fallen far too deeply for, his uncle advised his father of a new plan. Which Harriette only learned of years later (so she says). But his parents’ new plan, was to stop trying to persuade him to leave Harriette if he swore he’d never marry her, in the hope that his love/infatuation would die out with time. He wrote and told Harriette what they wished him to swear to, saying he’d refused, but she urged him not to let himself be cut off (there by taking away her income and any chance she would want to marry him), and so she said swear what they want you to.

After he had made that promise, he was allowed to return to her in Brighton and the two of them were left to live in peace for ‘six or eight months’ Harriette says, ‘during which time nothing very remarkable occurred, except that Worcester’s love and passion absolutely did increase daily.’

So of course when the Duke of Beaufort’s plan B did not work either, he grew angry again. Apparently according to Harriette they came to Brighton and called on him hourly, and a maid reported to Harriette his mother had actually said she’d prefer to see him dead under his horses hooves than married to the courtesan.

Lord Worcester’s answer to that was to beg Harriette to dress in disguise and travel with him to Gretna Green. (I’ve said before, as those of you who follow my blog will know that I think Harriette secretly hoped he would marry her, but she would not wish to be married to a man who had been cut off and lost his wealth even if she’d still be a duchess eventually). She reminded him of his promise. But Worcester claimed it to be invalid as it had been conditional and his father had not kept his side and left the two of them alone.

The Marquis of Worcester. 7th Duke of Beaufort. in later life

Worcester did escape his father though when he was posted to a village near Portsmouth to guard prisoners. But even then he would not leave Harriette, he begged her to come with him, which she did. She claimed to have never once argued with him. But instead of travelling there in the carriage he’d hired with four post-horses to pull it, Harriette says she rode among the officers, with him, all the way, dressed in her ‘regimental cap and habit, like a little recruit.’

While they stayed in the village she even lived with Worcester and the other officers in a ‘pot-house,’ ‘Our bedroom served us for parlour, kitchen, and hall, and we dined together in the only spare room there was.’

She gives us a fascinating view of what the inn looked like too. She speaks of heavy high-backed leather chairs, and the wainscot adorned with pictures of a fox-chase, the Virgin Mary, Bellingham the murderer of Perceval, King George III, a county map, and then the holy apostles eating the last supper, and finally a poll parrot done in cloth work. It sounds as eclectic as some pubs I’ve gone in today. There was also plenty of sand on the floor, and ‘wine glasses, toothpicks, and cruets on the sideboard’.

And beyond even that description she describes the smell of tobacco and beer, and that the sign outside was continually rocking in the wind, creaking constantly as it rained and blew up a storm for the first fortnight they were there.

Even in this, what Harriette describes as an ‘apology for an inn,’ though, Lord Worcester’s love endured. She describes him, one evening, wiping away the sour beer which fantastically varied the top of a mahogany table, (all her words, but jumbled up), and laying his ‘lordly head’ upon it, to say ‘Oh Harriette, my adored, delicious, lovely divine Harriette, what perfect happiness is this! Passing, thus, every minute of the day and night, in your society!! God only knows, how long I shall be permitted to enjoy all this felicity; but it is too great, I feel, to last. Nobody was ever been thus happy long.’

What brought their idyllic times, in a less than idyllic setting, to an end was a trip to the Theatre in Portsmouth, Harriette says the officers had hired a stage-box (see my post on the theatre in Bath to find out exactly what that looked like) but basically it was a box, but instead of being in front of the stage it would have been on the stage, above it and to the side, which of course put them in clear view of the audience, who were mainly sailors and took a dislike to the men in the dress uniforms of the Hussars. As I said in my post on the theatre in Bath sometime ago, audiences then were not like audiences now, they talked and shouted through a performance, and in this situation they threw oranges at Harriette’s and Lord Worcester’s party.

This picture shows one of the boxes built at the side of the stage, which is still in situ, look up to the left

When this story reached the Duke of Beaufort, he was of the view that the only thing that could have caused the crowd to be offended was the fact that Worcester had attended with a courtesan, and so once again, poor Worcester was at the mercy of his father’s anger.I’ll tell what happens next, next week…

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional love stories.

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A theatre trip shows up the contrast between a courtesan and a prostitute

We are going to have a little comma in Harriette’s and Lord Worcester’s story today, as he’s gone off to see his father, and she is in London alone. So, on her own again, but still under the promise of fidelity to Lord Worcester, Harriette visits the theatre with a friend and gives us a rare insight into the difference of the world of a courtesan and the world of a prostitute.

But before I tell Harriette’s story of today let me recap on the history of this series of posts for anyone reading them for the first time, if you’ve already read this, as usual, skip to the end of the italics.

She was one of nine surviving children. Her father was a watchmaker and her mother a stocking repairer, and both were believed to be from illegitimate origin.

You were envied if you were linked to one of the most popular courtesans or you discovered a new unknown beauty to be admired by others.

It was not one of Harriette’s – fast – friends, other courtesans, but what Harriette terms a prudish friend who she went to the theatre with regularly. I picture this as a moment Harriette took off work. Most of her life she spent on show, being a larger than life figure to capture the interest of men, trying to be the prettiest and the wittiest. So, perhaps these nights out with a ‘prudish’ friend were escapism. They did not sit in a box, so they were not seeking to draw attention to themselves. They went dressed in blacks, and sat on the benches in one of the balconies, purely to enjoy the play.

Of course though, Harriette being Harriette, could go nowhere unnoticed. She speaks of several men watching her during the play, and her friend complaining that, wherever she went, why and how did she draw so much male attention.

There was one young man who watched Harriette, who she believed she recognized, because he had the look of his brothers, a Stanhope.

Of course while they watched the play and everyone was in their seat on the benches the fact that men ogled her was only an irritation to her friend. Harriette admits she didn’t care, she was flattered. But the problem came when the performance had ended…

Harriette tells us how she and her friend got lost in the theatre and ended up following others to find a way out, all the time sensing the young Lord she’d recognized from his family appearance following her. But they went the wrong way and found themselves in a room full of men, but not the sort of men Harriette usually entertained the interests of – these were no gentlemen.

The difference between being a courtesan and a prostitute was that the gentlemen Harriette traded with treated her as they would their wives, sisters or mothers, apart from one obvious difference in that they had a physical relationship, for which they paid. But the men she discovered in the lobby were of a lower class, a class who treated whores as whores. There was no kindness or building of a relationship. When a man hired a prostitute it was just a transaction exchanging money for the act with no need to charm.

There were two forms of high-society in the early 1800s. The beau monde – those who were deemed the elite in society, the aristocracy mainly, and the demimonde , who contained members of the men from beau monde and their favoured courtesans, but excluded any baser relationships with prostitutes. The demimonde lived in their style of elite society and had just as many rules about what was and was not done. The behaviour Harriette encountered in the lobby they ‘d stumbled into was not the sort of behaviour she was used to. If she attended the theatre alone, or with any of her male friends, she was just as much above this class, as the aristocracy.

Her friend’s bonnet was lifted as she was asked if she was ‘the bawd.’ Then asked what she’d ask ‘for the pretty black-eyed girl.’ While the man who asked the question touched Harriette indecently. Harriette says ‘I resisted these disgusting liberties with all the strength of my little hands, they only fell into roars of laughter.’

When Harriette’s prudish friend said, ‘Are there no constables here?’ The men in the lobby only insulted them more.

One walked over to the constable at the door, telling him ‘I say, my boy, that woman insists on having you to go home and sleep with her; but she is perfectly welcome, so that she leaves me her daughter.’ Then this man tried to pull Harriette away with him.

Harriette describes herself as angry, but that there are tears in her eyes, and that she was shaking and blushing, implying she was totally out of her depth. Over hearing the prostitutes that probably were in the lobby, although she only describes them as women, she speaks of them using language that made hers and her friend’s ‘blood run cold’ and says that with each step they were subjected to ‘fresh insult of the grossest and most disgusting nature.’

All the time the young Stanhope was following them, but at a distance, and Harriette prayed he’d come forward and protect them. It took a man to try to slip his hand into her bodice to finally bring the young lord forward. Harriette said she knew him, and he confirmed himself to be the brother of the Stanhopes she was acquainted with, and begged him to escort them to a Hackney Carriage.

He in fact escorted her all the way home, and took her to the theatre on several nights after this, considering himself infatuated with Harriette. Well that was until Harriette’s sister, Amy, spotted the competition and of course won him for herself, disappearing off to a country inn with him for an affair that lasted a week. Bless Amy, forever the jealous schemer.

Next week back to Harriette and Worcester…

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional love stories.