The terrible lie Harriette Wilson (a real Regency courtesan) told in her memoirs

Last week I discussed whether or not Harriette Wilson’s memoirs were true. This week I will share two of the lies she told. They are the most heart-wrenching lies I have ever heard. I cried when I found out about this. The truth is really disturbing. But before I tell you the truth, here is the background for this short series of posts looking behind Harriette Wilson’s memoirs to discover the things she didn’t say. If you’ve already read this, read on from the line of bold type.

If you have been following my blog for a little while, you will know that Harriette Wilson, the real Regency courtesan who published her memoirs in 1825 as a kiss and tell series, inspired the first novel in the Marlow Intrigues series, The Illicit Love of a Courtesan, I have been sharing the version of her life she told in her memoirs here for about a year, but over that year so many times people have told me – but it’s known she lied in them.

Well recently, I discovered the work of someone who has researched Harriette’s real life, and so I can now share with you some of the things she did not include.

As to whether or not she lied, well I will also cover that… But… I will say now, I have used her memoirs as a wealth of insight into the Regency world, her writing is like looking in through a window to see how life was for someone who lived then, and yes, you can definitely spot the scenes where there is some embellishment, either because she was writing for an audience, or because she wished to hurt someone who had hurt her… But overall, many of her scenes are from truth. Plenty more of this in the next couple of weeks, including some insights which I have found really upsetting.

Gosh, I was so upset by this story, that I have no idea how to begin…

Okay, just begin…

I first read Harriette Wilson’s memoirs, published in 1825, probably nearly ten years ago, and when I read them the part I found most moving, was her relationship with Lord Ponsonby. Harriette fell in love. There is no doubt about that. It was not a lie.

It was this part of her memoirs that inspired me to write the first novel I succeeded in publishing. The Illicit Love of a Courtesan… So that is partly why I have found the true story she didn’t tell, compared to the lies she wrote, really upsetting. Because it was this part of her personal story that made me want to write a happy ending for a courtesan who fell in love…. Harriette’s real love affair had a terrible ending…

In her memoirs, Harritte tells her readers that she fell in love with Lord Ponsonby when she did not even know who he was. She saw him in Hyde Park, walking his dog. Throwing a stick for it. Once she’d seen Lord Ponsonby, she went back to the park night after night, with anyone who she could persuade to accompany her, or even alone… just to see him. Then she found out where he lived and followed him. For weeks this non-relationship persisted. She was in love, but she had not even spoken to him. But then one day, he rode past her house on his horse. She ran up to the roof of her house so she could spy on him, and saw him turn his horse at the end of the street and ride back along it, past her house.

That was Harriette’s first indication that Lord Ponsonby returned her interest.

At the time I think Harriette was in her early twenties, certainly she was young, she might have even only been nineteen, but she was at the height of her fame. She was well-known, and embedded among the most senior members of the aristocracy in Britain. It was when he attended the opera, that she discovered his name, and then she wrote a letter to him, and he wrote a letter back to her. Then he came to meet her… They did not make love on the first occasion, he was too tired, he had been sitting at his father’s bedside, night after night, through a long period of ill-health. But the next time he visited Harriette, she records the visit as something extremely special.

Throughout her memoirs she refers to Lord Ponsonby as the only man she truly loved. She constantly looks back to the three years she spent with him as the best time of her life, and compares every man who came after him to him. He became her yard stick of what she was looking for in a man, and no one successfully competed. (okay so maybe you can hear a little reflection of Robert in The Passionate Love of a Rake – yes Harriette’s voice and memoirs have influenced an awful lot in my books).

So why did she part from him, well here is the lie… She said in her memoirs he developed a conscience and decided to end their affair so he could be faithful to his young, beautiful, wife.

He did not end their affair for that reason.

So how do we know the truth? Lord Ponsonby was a man who kept his letters, and in the collection of letters at his stately home, are letters between himself and others, and even from Harriette to him. So there is not doubt at all about the real truth Harriette did not tell.

Frances Wilson researched and published the truth in 2004. Frances’s view on Harriette’s words about her love affair with Lord Ponsonby was that Harriette did not know how to write about it, so she stole a style of writing from other works and used that in her memoirs. I don’t think that. The language Harriette uses in her memoirs always changes when she mentions Lord Ponsonby, her words become heartfelt, because they were heartfelt, he broke her heart. Not only that but he ripped it in half and ripped it out… and left her in pain for the rest of her life.

The love she had for him, had been love at first sight, and right from the beginning it was that all-consuming love that can turn a sensible person – possessive, jealous and even deranged… She was MAD for him, and that is the position she writes from. I guess maybe you can only really understand that sort of love, that can endure for a lifetime, even if the person was cruel to you and let you down irrevocably, if you have experienced it. I have, and I can hear that in Harriette’s words.

So what was the truth that Frances discovered. Harriette did have a three-year relationship with him. They were close, so close he told Harriette secrets about a former mistress of his, and gave Harriette letters from a former lover, so at some part of their relationship, he had thrown his whole self into it. But I would say it is extremely unlikely that he actually loved her back.

Did she watch him in Hyde Park for weeks before she spoke to him? Probably yes, certainly letters he had kept from friends tease him about the things Harriette wrote about him. So it is likely that they could well be true.

When they parted did she refuse to take an envelope containing the money he owed her as an end-of-relationship-settlement? That we also know is true, as I said last week, when she was writing to him asking for money at the point she published her memoirs, she raises this money that she did not take from him at the point they separated.

Did that conversation take place in the early hours of the morning in a carriage outside Parliament, as Harriette said it did, after she had sat and waited for him in his carriage, while he attended Parliament? We don’t know.

Was he agitated the day he parted from her, and quieter than normal all day, so that she sensed something was wrong but did not know what? Again we don’t know.

Did she know the true reason why he was leaving her at the point he did? We don’t know.

But what we do know – is that he did not leave her to be more loyal to his wife. He left her to commence an affair with Harriette’s quite possibly virgin, thirteen year old sister… Sophia!

Yes, that sister…

I said at some point when I was retelling Harriette’s memoirs, that so much of what she said about Sophia rang with nastiness, that I was never sure if it was true. Again, my only judgement was based on the style of language Harriette used, but whenever she speaks of Sophia,she is vicious in a really strange way… Well now I know why!

In her memoirs, Harriette said that Sophia was stolen from the nest at her parents’ house, at the age of thirteen by Lord Deerhurst, who followed her around and tempted her away with valueless trinkets. That was clearly not true. Lord Ponsonby came before Lord Deerhurst. So was Lord Ponsonby a seducer, did he go out of his way to win over a naive thirteen year old. Or had Sophia already made up her mind to follow the path of her sisters. Frances implies, Sophia had already made the decision, but she doesn’t evidence that… I am not convinced. Lord Ponsonby could easily have met Sophia through Harriette, he obviously liked young women,even his wife was young. So perhaps he fancied plucking Sophia before anyone else could.

Harriette constantly depicts Sophia as dull, stupid, and having no wit at all. Yet Sophia did win Lord Ponsonby from Harriette who was known for being an extremely fun girl to be with. Harriette swore like the men, and cracked jokes like the men, as well as being able to do all the ladylike things. She loved her pianoforte. I was never sure if anything

Attingham Park – Sophia’s – Lady Berwick’s home

she wrote about Sophia was true, because it sounded so callous and twisted. Now I am even less sure. Sophia, may well have been bright and utterly charming. Sophia is the sister who also went on to win respectability, to marry a Baron, and live in a huge stately home at Attingham Park, and bankrupt her husband.

Harriette must have truly hated her… I have never seen where the story comes from. But there is a story, which I am sure is true, that sitting in a box above Sophia at the opera, Harriette spat on her hair. I had thought it was done out of jealousy, now I understand why. Sophia stole the man Harriette loved. Many men passed between the sisters in the time they were working, but Harriette did not keep her infatuation for Lord Ponsonby a secret, and this for her was different from sharing a man she was indifferent to.

Quite frankly I don’t blame Harriette at all…

Frances Wilson also records that the first episode of Harriette’s memoirs were delayed for a considerable period, because Sophia was in consultation with the publisher, about a sum to take her name out of Harriette’s book. I wonder if Harriette’s answer then was to write a vicious fairytale of lies for her sister, if she wrote lies, she could take out the truth and be paid for it, but still ruin her sister’s respectability and have some form of revenge.

But then… As I said last week… Lord Ponsonby was out of the country when Harriette published the part about him. He did not have chance to buy his name out at that point, and even when he was threatened by Harriette, that she might tell stories about the other women he’d had affairs with, he refused to pay up, and there are letters from him to his friends, telling people to give her nothing… So he definitely did not pay her, or her publisher, any money.

Why then did she not at least tell the truth about him?

I wish I knew for certain, I don’t.

But my guess…

Okay, so if Sophia bought the truth out of the memoirs… you say of course Harriette could not have included it. But why not show the same vindictiveness for Lord Ponsonby that she did for Sophia then?

One word LOVE. She still loved him. She still would have taken him back if he’d wanted her. The letters she wrote to him, when he returned after her memoirs were published, which he kept, all allude to the fact she still had feelings for him.

I shared one letter last week, where she declared if he said on his word he did not have two hundred, she would accept one. Because she was always kinder and more considerate of Lord Ponsonby. She was still in love, even after him leaving her for a sister who was younger – still a child really. Even twenty years on from when it had happened.

How heartbreaking is that?

I think I find it so particularly moving because having lived with Harriette through her words for years, to discover this horrible secret that she kept to herself, is really sad.

But Lord Ponsonby must have been one of those men who was very clever at charming women, as his other former mistress Lady Conyngham, who was now the mistress of the King, and whose letters Harriette had been given and still kept, when she was told the King had sent Lord Ponsonby abroad to help silence Harriette’s threats, someone recorded at the time. ‘Lady C, throws herself back on the sofa and never speaks, and the opinion is (which I don’t believe) that she hates kingy.’

What truths do we know. Frances Wilson quotes a letter Harriette wrote to Lord Byron, dated 1823, which is still in existence. ‘Lord, if you could only suffer for one single day the agony of mind I endured for more than two years after Ponsonby left me… you would bless your stars and your good fortune, blind, deaf and lame, at eighty-two, so that you could sleep an hour in forgetfulness or eat a little bit of batter pudding. Heavens! How I have prayed for death, nights and days and months together, merely as a rest from suffering...’

And there is a letter to Lord Ponsonby dated 1832, ‘My indignation expressed in many letters is quite real and quite natural – were I to swear to you that I considered your conduct (in cutting me to attach a young stupid sister not half as handsome) with my feeling short of strong resentment and disgust you would not (if you know anything of human nature) behave thus – during three months of severe painful illness – I had time for reflection- and with a good deal of benevolence in my motive I could not but wish to think of you with less bitterness and dislike. It mattered not to you my opinion – but to myself hate was feverish and a bore. The result of calm candid inward reasoning on the subject brought me to this conclusion...’

Sorry that is not me ending it there, but Frances Wilson… But I think the conclusion is – she forgave him…

And why on earth write and say that so many years after the event, unless you are still carrying a torch Harriette?

So many times when I read historical true stories, I see incorrect judgements made, as people do not understand the world that person was living in… But here, in this…Harriette’s long lasting pain, her broken heart, and her hatred of her sister, and her undying love for Lord Ponsonby are obvious…

I am glad I did not know this truth when I read Harriette’s memoirs. The Illicit Love of a Courtesan was inspired by the adoration and infatuation she felt for Lord Ponsonby – these were words I read between her lines… I would not have been moved to write the story of Ellen Harding, in The Illicit Love of a Courtesan, if I’d known their story ended with so much pain…

John Ponsonby, you are a complete and utter blackguard! If I ever come across your grave I shall dance a jig on it!

There won’t be a Harriette post for a couple of weeks, as I am away, but when I am back I’ll share how Harriette spent the rest of her life after she wrote her memoirs… Did she have a happy ending of her own after all?

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional Historical and New Adult Romance stories, and the author of a No.1 bestselling Historical Romance novel in America, ‘The Illicit Love of a Courtesan’.

Look at the index to discover all the true stories Jane has discovered during research, and to find links to excerpts and a FREE novella ~ A Lord’s Desperate Love

Click here to find out more about Jane’s books, and see Jane’s website www.janelark.co.uk to learn more about Jane. Or click ‘like’ on Jane’s Facebook page to see photo’s and learn historical facts from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras, which Jane publishes there. You can also follow Jane on twitter at @janelark

The impact of a courtesan’s kiss and tell memoirs on the elite of Regency society

Next week will sadly be the last part of Harriette’s memoirs I have to share on my blog 😥 Shedding a little tear… I will miss sharing her stories, but that will then give me an opportunity to tell you some of the things I’ve discovered about her life which she left out of her memoirs, and don’t worry after that, I still have lots of other true Regency life stories to move on to.

But this week, I will share what Harriette has to say about the kick back and the judgement which befell her, in response to her kiss and tell memoirs being published. As always though, before this, here is the background to this series of posts, for anyone joining the blog today (all the titles are listed in the index), and for all those who have been following this series of posts, I have highlighted the place for you to skip to in bold.

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.

At the point that Harriette brings her memoirs to a close, the full flourish of the Regency era was drawing to a close. Beau Brummel who had been a leading light of fashion within the aristocracy, including the Prince Regent, defining what people wore and the way they should act, fell into disgrace when he set up a scam to obtain money from influential men, who were not tolerant of being duped – that left him bankrupt and fleeing to the continent.

Then Lord Byron’s – who Harriette claims right at the end of her memoirs she befriended and saw frequently – marriage broke up, with accusations of inappropriate behaviour and he too fled Britain to avoid arrest.

So at the point Harriette decided to sell her life story, the men she had spent most of her life befriending and servicing, were all moving on, and becoming more staid developing political careers. The era of the courtesan was beginning to die out…

‘To proceed with my disasters: the next was a pressing letter form Stockdale (Harriette’s publisher)… declaring that he must have the rest of my memoirs, because folks began to think it was all a hoax…

…Arrived at Mr Stockdale’s house, ‘willa’ I would call it were it at all Cockneyish, I handed him over, as a plenipo-pacificator, the chief part of my delectable memoirs. I conceived that my disasters were now completely at an end, and I looked forward to a rich harvest, with unbounded applause.

Unfortunately Stockdale, in a courteous fit, acquainted the immortal Wellington that I was about to publish part of his private life, under the impression, of course, that every act which relates to so great a hero must be interesting.

Will it ever be believed? His Grace, in the meek humility of his heart, has written to menace a prosecution if such trash be published. What trash, my dear, Wellington? Now, I will admit, for an instant, and it is really very good of me, that you are an excellent judge of literature, and could decide on the merits or demerits of a work with better taste and judgement than the first of Edinburgh reviewers. Still, in order to pronounce it trash, we should fancy that even Wellington himself must throw a hasty glance on one of its pages at least. Quite the contrary. Wellington knows himself to be the subject, and therefore wisely prejudges the book trash one fortnight before it sees light! So far so good! But when my own Wellington, who has sighed over me and groaned over me by the hour, talked of my wonderful beauty, ran after me, bribed Mrs Porter over and over again, after I refused to listen to her overtures, only for a single smile from his beautiful Harriette! Did he not kneel? And was I not the object of his first, his most ardent wishes, on his arrival from Spain? Only it was a pity Argyle got to my house first. No matter! Though Argyle was not his rose, he had dwelled with it; therefore, what could my tender swain Wellington do better than stand in the gutter at two in the morning, pouring fourth his amorous wishes in the pouring rain, in strains replete with the most heart-rendering grief, to the favoured and fortunate lover who had supplanted him, as Stockdale has indulged me by getting so inimitably delineated. When I say, this faithful lover, whose love survived six winters, six frosts, six chilling, nay, killing frosts, when Wellington sends ungentle hint to my publisher, of hanging me, beautiful adored, and adorable me, on whom he had so often hung! Alors je pends la tete! Is it thus he would immortalize me?

I’ll e’en make my will, and so good-bye to ye, old Bombastes Furioso.

There is surely something harsh and unmanly in threatening a woman with any kind of law or prosecution, unless we were to do something much worse than telling the truth: and there is a double want of gallantry in threatening a fair lady, whose favours have been earnestly courted! N’est-ce pas?

Yet, if all the laws, and law givers are like Wellington, in the habit of threatening poor devils of authors and booksellers with prosecution, hanging, and destruction, as often as they are about to publish any facts which do not altogether redound to their honour and glory, while they modestly swallow all the applause which may be bestowed on their luck or their talents for killing men and winning battles, I can no longer be surprised that even Beaufort has maintained his good character up to this present writing, since publishers will quake when heroes bully.

There’s no spirit nowadays.

Another hero in a passion! Another lover threatens prosecution! No less a personage than the most prolific plenipo, the Hon. Frederick Lamb, who yesterday called on Stockdale to threaten him, or us, with prosecution, death, and destruction, if his conduct towards me in times auld lang syne was printed and published in any part of my Memoirs, after Part 1, which he acknowledged that his counsel informed him he could not lay hold of. No wonder that he is sore. I have certainly told, as the Hon. Frederick Lamb was well aware must be the case, harsh truth about him, I confess: but then it will disgust one to think that a man would feel such violent passion for a girl, without the heart to save her from absolute want afterwards. Yet I never deceived him, and I endeavoured to live on nothing, at my nurse’s in Somerstown, pour ses beaux yeux, as long as I possibly could. When I say nothing, I mean nothing, in the literal sense of the word. Frederick had never given me a single shilling up to the time when hard necessity obliged me to accept the Duke of Argyle for my lover.

As to Frederick Lamb’s rage at my publishing these facts, he was fully acquainted with my intention; and had he, now that he is in better circumstances, only opened his heart, or even his purse, to have given me but a few hundreds, there would have been no book, to the infinite loss of persons good taste and genuine morality, and who are judges of real merit.

Harriette’s legal adviser at the time was Mr Brougham, (another former lover who she was blackmailing to support her, as he sought to be Priminister and did not wish his name included in her memoirs). This is the conversation she records holding with him, revealing his opinion on it all…

‘I express half the gratitude I feel, and shall entertain to the end of my life, for the steady, active friendship Mr Brougham has invariably evinced towards me, actuated, as he is, solely by a spirit of philanthropy. When I see a man of such brilliant talents pleading the cause of almost all those persons whose characters I have sketched in these pages, with such honest warmth and benevolence of feeling, as Brougham did yesterday, to say I look up to him and love him, is but a cold description of the sentiment he inspires in my heart.

‘A pretty list indeed,’ said Brougham, alluding to my characters, as advertised in the newspapers by Stockdale. ‘Almost everyone of my particular friends is among them! The poor Duke of Argyle! What has he done? I am very angry with you. I don’t really think I can shake hands with you.’

‘I have strictly adhered to the truth.’

‘Yes; but then, who wants to have their secrets exposed! Secrets, some of them, sixteen years old.’

‘Who do you think would have entrusted me with their secrets fifteen years ago? Besides, why don’t my old friends keep me among them? They are all rich. I have applied to them and they refuse me the bare means of existence. Must I not strive to live by my wits? You say you have not read even the first page of my book. How do you know that it is severe?’

‘Well! perhaps not! The Duke of Leinster tells me that it is not severe, nor does it, he says, contain any libel.’

‘To be sure not! Why, as his Grace goes on, he will find that I give him credit for a little more intellect than even a Newfoundland dog?… But I wish to explain the Duke of Beaufort’s conduct, certainly.’

‘Aye! True! The Duke of Beaufort treated you shamefully. You are very welcome to tell the world that I am your counsel in that business; that I said then, and repeat now, that he took shameful advantage of your generosity. There, you behaved only too well.’

‘Thus then, though many of you are angry with me, you all agree in being disgusted with the heartless selfishness of the Duke of Beaufort… if Beaufort means to fight all those who call his treatment of me infamous, he may gain the high-sounding epitaph of fighting Bob before he knows where he is: so farewell Beaufort. I would not change hearts with you. May you meet with all the respect you merit here, and forgiveness hereafter. I have certainly deserved better form you.’

‘Well! never mind Beaufort,’ said Brougham, ‘tell all the truth of him; but, as to the others, pray don’t be severe. Write something from your fancy, I cannot endure the idea of all this. You perhaps do not address your letters correctly when you want money. You are so careless. I was once desired to send you some in a great hurry, and there was no date to your letter! I am sure these old friends of yours would provide for you, if applied to civilly.’

‘I tell you, you judge of them by your own excellent heart: you who have never refused me any assistance I asked you for, nor any act of friendship in your power, while I have not nor never had any claim upon you…’

I am told time and time again in my life I am a good judge of character… What I love about Harriette’s writing is how her mood seeps through the words she writes. You can hear her frustration, bitterness, and anger as she must have scribbled all this down in a rage. Then she concludes, after threatening another set of memoirs about another set of named people who were among the elite during the Regency era…

‘… let me conclude, or rather let us proceed to draw these anecdotes into something like the form of a conclusion, because I their writer am tired of them, if you the reader of them are not…’

She does go on to tell us one more story though – which I will share next week…

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional Historical and New Adult Romances, and the author of a No.1 bestselling Historical Romance novel in America, ‘The Illicit Love of a Courtesan’ and ‘I Found You’ a bestselling novel in the contemporary chart. Currently reduced to $1.99 in the USA from $7.

Book 3 in the Marlow Intrigues series, The Scandalous Love of a Duke, will be published on the 3rd April, and is now available for pre-order, click on the cover on the right-hand side to order. Jane’s novels, The Passionate Love of Rake and I Found You, will also be available in Paperback on 17th April and are available to pre-order. The Illicit Love of a Courtesan and I Found You, are already available in print in the USA.

Why not also read A Lord’s Desperate Love the story of two of the characters from The Passionate Love of a rake which Jane is telling for free here, there is a link to each part in the index of posts.