A real 19th Century Courtesan, Harriette Wilson, seeks wealthy protector – The Duke of Wellington.

Having last week told the tale of how Amy, Harriette’s sister, picked her next conquest… This week we’ll look at how Harriette chose her next protector. But first I’ll just say, Amy having agreed an arrangement of two hundred pounds per month with a man she did no particularly like, took the first payment paid off her debts and then never saw him. Claiming one of her other followers had told her he couldn’t stand to see her throw herself away on his less admirable competitor.

But before I begin Harriette’s story for this week, let’s have a quick recap on the background of this series of blogs for anyone following for the first time today – if you’ve read it before, pick up after 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.

Harriette, as I said last week had a favoured man, whom she’d seen when out walking. She says he was attractive, but neither young, nor fancily dressed, an unlikely favourite for a young woman. But she couldn’t seek his company because she didn’t know who he was. So, like Amy, with debts to her name Harriette couldn’t be choosy and had to take what came her way.

At the time, having become a part of fashionable Regency society Harriette had a number of men she might seek to interest. But she has always struck me as a girl who wanted to aim for the best. She was competitive. And so when she was on the hunt for a financially profitable arrangement, and an arrangement which would lift her reputation, well then she was going to aim high. So she turned her interest on the Duke of Wellington.

The Duke of Wellington was well known for his womanizing. It’s reported but not confirmed that he even took up with Napoleon’s mistress in Paris, at the end of the war generated by the French Revolution.

However, before I tell this tale I will put a warning on it. I don’t doubt Harriette had a relationship with him but her memoirs tell two mocking stories of the Duke of Wellington which may or may not be true. When Harriette printed these stories before she wrote them she tried to blackmail money out of men she’d had relationships with asking them to pay her not to speak about them. The Duke of Wellington refused to pay, saying “publish and be damned” but then he sued her for liable, dragging her through the London courts.

So, perhaps her mean stories, mocking the Duke Wellington, may not be true, but farcical, and designed only to antagonize him.

But I’ll tell you anyway.

The Duke of Wellington

She claims that a woman who ran a brothel Wellington attended approached her, saying she had an admirer who wished to meet Harriette at the brothel, for a considerable sum. She would not tell Harriette the name of her proposed lover. Harriette claims she didn’t go but sent an old hag wearing a black veil, and that Wellington was fooled until the hag lifted the veil up.

Harritte says that following this snub, Wellington was not put off, but merely more determined to win the current prize of the demimonde, Harriette, so he sent the procuress off to meet with Harriette again. And as she was probably going to take her cut for the introduction she was extremely encouraging, insisting Harriette give the Duke a chance and meet him.

In Harriette’s memoirs she rarely openly states what she was meeting a man for, the detail sits more in her implications, and this tale is no exception in that. The procuress is described as saying, when having admitted that Harriette’s unnamed admirer is the Duke of Wellington, that he is anxious to meet her, and stated that all he wants is to do is meet Harriette, because his situation prevents him having any regular introduction. My assumption from what is implied is that he was offering payment for a single liaison and not an extended arrangement.

Harriette admits freely that her decision was only made out of her need for a friend who would keep the bailiff away.

When Harriette meets Wellington, her words imply he was a blunt no frills man, which I believe is probably true, you can imagine it of a man whose skill came to the fore and a battlefield.

He immediately takes her hand and calls her a ‘beautiful creature’, and basically asks if they will be alone. Then when Harriette asks why he has come he says it is for her beautiful eyes. But when she does her usual seeking for compliments his response is that he is a man who has better things to do than make fine speeches for women.

He doesn’t sound Harriette’s type at all does he? 🙂 But then this is a financial decision, and also as I said in the beginning a move which would lift her status, after all the Duke of Wellington was famous, and Harriette therefore wished to associate with his fame, just as someone might sleep with a pop-star or sports-star today. In Harriette’s words, comparing Wellington to her previous protector, Lord Loren, ‘What was a mere man, even though it were the handsome Duke of Argyle, to a Wellington!!!!’

But Wellington must have been happy with the outcome of his visit, because although he did not contract her in a permanent arrangement, he became a regular visitor of Harriette’s, and Lord Lorne, hearing of this, wrote to Harriette and threatened to take up with other women in Scotland to spite her. Harriette ignored his protestation, she had bills to pay and a busy social life she wished to keep.

But as I guessed Harriette was not happy. She says although the Duke of Wellington was constant visitor, he was ‘a most unentertaining one, Heaven knows!’

So her eyes continued to look for the stranger she favoured but did not know, as she endured her relationship with the Duke of Wellington to support her lifestyle.

Next week I will tell the story of Harriette meeting her stranger…

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

See the side bar for details of Jane’s books, and 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 tale of Kitty Hunter – another of my stories of scandalous women

The picture of Kitty Hunter I saw at Longleat House

I was walking about Longleat House a couple of weeks ago, when I saw this picture. It was not particularly obvious. It was hung above a door in one of the rooms in the house and unless you turned and looked back you wouldn’t notice it.

I always look at the portraits in historic houses because they give me ideas for clothing and hairstyles and a sense of potential characters for my writing. Some portraits just scream a tale to be told.

There is one of a very sly looking chap at Stoneleigh Abbey, he’s from the 19^th Century and has a moustache and a wicked twinkle in his eyes. None of the guides there have ever been able to tell me who he is, but he looks awfully like a Mr Wickham. However…

When I looked up at this picture I had that sense that this woman had a story to be told. I don’t know why. There was just something in the way she was holding her head and smiling, all confidence and come hither. I looked at the list of portraits I held in my hand which were left in each room and scanned through the list, but the name of the woman in this portrait wasn’t on it. So I turned to the guide who was sitting in the room and asked, “Who is that?”

“Kitty Hunter, the mistress of the Duke of Pembroke,” he answered.

Well now of course my interest was piqued, especially as Pembroke is a name I have borrowed for a character in my book. So then I had to discover her scandalous story.

Here it is…

Kitty Hunter

Catherine (Kitty) Hunter was the daughter of Thomas Orby Hunter, an Admiralty Lord, so very respectable, or should have been, had she not run off with the Earl of Pembroke.

At the end of this blog are elements of transcripts of letters, written by Horace Walpole at the time. These tell the story and express the horror, excitement and gossip which spun around London high society when the elopement occurred.

The couple did not decide to have a discreet affair. In Horace Walpole’s letters he describes witnesses to the intrigue (the 18^th Century word for affair) at a ball on the Wednesday evening, as though it was plainly obvious to the whole room what was going on. I can just imagine the twenty-eight year old Earl of Pembroke eyeing the twenty-two year old Kitty with a lustful look while she batted her eyelids and flirted, not doubt outrageously, if it drew so much attention.

Henry Herbert, 10th Earl of Pembroke

Can you picture him leaning in close and perhaps touching a little too much and a little too openly. Maybe they were laughing and drawing the eyes of the whole room as they danced. Certainly they must have spent considerable time with one another for their interest in one another to have been noted so particularly, in a period where only two dances were supposed to be allowed to any one man in a night.

The elopement followed the next night, so at some point in the hours they had been flirting at the Middleton ball, they had arranged the details of their elopement.

The Earl is noted in Walpole’s letters below to have arrived home, having arranged for his wife to have plenty of company that night, with a bundle containing a disguise.

He ate in his rooms, and then donned the disguise of a sailor and black wig and apparently he and Kitty then left on a packet boat for France.

Other accounts say that the Earl’s family sent a man to find them and bring them back again, but having offered for his wife to join them (Shelley style), the Earl merely disappeared to France again with Kitty.

Walpole joked in one letter; ‘As Pembroke as horseman by most is accounted/ Tis not strange that his Lordship a [Kitty] Hunter has mounted’

When Kitty returned to England at the end of their whirlwind six month affair in November 1762, she was pregnant with his child.

Henry, the Earl of Pembroke stayed abroad and was reappointed to his commission as a General (and was rumoured to elope with another woman whom he ran away with on her wedding day).

Kitty’s and Pembroke’s child was named Augustus Retnuh Reebkomp – Retnuh an anagram of Hunter – Reebkomp an anagram of Pembroke.

The Earl arrived in England a few months behind her in the February of the following year and made peace with his wife in the March, paying Kitty off. He did continue to support and favour the child though who was brought up in Pembroke’s home for most of his life. Reebkomp did cause further arguments between Pembroke and his wife though. Especially when Pembroke attempted to have Reebkomp appointed in the army as a lieutenant under the name Augustus Herbert. Lady Pembroke immediately ensured Reebkomp kept his own surname, she did not wish him having his father’s family name which belonged to her own son. However Reebkomp was later renamed Montgomery.

Kitty must have had quite a character. I would guess she was fun-loving and not a woman to hold back. I should imagine she spoke animatedly and never cared about causing offence. I only make these assumptions because of the words Walpole recorded that the Earl of Pembroke wrote when he left his wife, he’d said he was bored with her ‘goodness and sweetness’. I assume then, Kitty was neither good nor sweet, and as the Earl also recorded in his letters, to tell everyone he was going, that he had ‘long tried in vain to make is wife hate and dislike him’ I am also assuming that Kitty must have been able to hold her own against such a man.It must have been fun and exciting to set everyone’s tongues wagging at the Middleton’s ball, while plotting to elope, you can just see that look of expectation in the eyes of her portrait which I saw at Longleat.

They fled at night in darkness, in disguise and on a boat, to go abroad. Well what could have felt more romantic and exhilarating than that?

I would also assume it was her character Pembroke fell for, as Walpole comments on how beautiful Pembroke’s wife was, more beautiful than Kitty. (although if you continue reading Walpole’s letters there are several further comments on Lady Pembroke’s presence at parties, and her beauty, so Walpole obviously had an eye for her himself.)

Augustus Hervey later Lord Bristol

Kitty cannot have disliked the life of a courtesan. Soon after her affair with Lord Pembroke ended she took a new lover, Augustus Hervey, later 3^rd Lord Bristol – this was probably the point her son by the Earl of Pembroke, was taken into his father’s house. She certainly did not need to take on a new lover for financial support as the Earl of Pembroke had settled and annual annuity on her to support her – which was a common practice when men of good birth set aside a lover.

There is not so much known about her affair with Hervey except it produced another child, a boy, named Augustus for his father. A miniature of the child, painted by Gainsborough, is at Ickworth House.

Alured Clarke, Kitty’s Husband

Kitty was one of my luckier scandalous women. She found contentment in later life. She married Field Marshal, Sir Alfred Clarke in 1770.

Horace Walpole wrote at the time of Kitty’s elopement with the Earl of Pembroke, on February, 22^nd, 1762;

‘In all your reading, true or false, have you ever heard of a young Earl, married to the most beautiful woman in the world, a Lord of the Bedchamber, a general officer, and with a great estate, quitting everything, resigning wife and world, and embarking for life in a pacquet-boat with a Miss? I fear your connexions will but too readily lead you to the name of the peer; it is Henry Earl of Pembroke, the nymph ‘Kitty Hunter.’ The town and Lady Pembroke were but too much witnesses to this intrigue, last Wednesday at a great ball at Lord Middleton’s. On Thursday they decamped. However, that the writer of their romance, or I, as he is a Noble Author, might not want materials,’ the Earl has left a bushel of letters behind him; to his mother, to Lord Bute, to Lord Ligonier, (the two last to resign his employments) and to Mr Stopford, whom he acquits of all privity to his design. In none he justifies himself, unless there is a justification, that having long tried in vain to make is wife hate and dislike him, he had no way left but this, and it is to be hoped he will succeed; and then it may not be the worst event that could have happened to her. You must easily conceive the hubbub such an exploit must occasion. With ghosts, elopements, abortive motions…’

Kitty Hunter after she married Lord Clarke

Later in the letter Walpole jokes that ‘no soul could have read a line’ in some books ‘unless I had changed the title page, and called them, ‘The Loves of the Earl of Pembroke and Miss Hunter’ obviously society in London had been a buzz with gossip about the story.

Horace Walpole was so moved by the story he told it to another friend in a letter, in which he declared;

‘Lord Pembroke – Earl, Lord of the Bechamber, Major General, possessed of ten thousand pounds a-year, Master of Wilton, husband of one of the most beautiful creatures of England, father of an only son, and himself but eight-and-twenty to enjoy this assemblage of all good fortune – is gone off with Miss Hunter, daughter to one of the Lords of the Admiralty, a handsome girl with a fine person, but silly and in no degree lovely as his own wife, who has the face of a Madonna, and, with all the modesty of that idea is dotingly fond of him… it is not yet known whither this foolish guilty couple have bent their course; but you may imagine the distress of the Earl’s family, and the resentment of the house of Marlborough, who doat on their sister… but did ever one hear of an Earl running away from himself?’

On February 25^th, Walpole then said;

‘No News yet of the Runaways… but all that comes out antecedent to the escape is more and more extraordinary and absurd. The day of the elopement he had invited his wife’s family to and other folk to dinner with her, but said he must himself dine at a tavern; but he dined privately in his own dressing-room, put on a sailor’s habit, and black wig, that he had brought home with him in a bundle, and threatened the servants he would murder them if they mentioned it to his wife. He left a letter for her, which the Duke of Marlborough was afraid to deliver to her, and opened. It desired she would not write to him as it would make him completely mad. He desire the King would preserve his rank of Major-General, as some time or the other he may serve again.’

He concludes their story with a note in a later letter dated, March, 29^th, 1763;

‘Lord and Lady Pembroke are reconciled, and live again together. Mr Hunter would have taken his daughter Kitty too but upon condition she should give back her settlement to Lord Pembroke and her child : she replied nobly, that she did not trouble herself about fortune, and would willingly depend on her father; but for her child she had nothing left to do but take care of that, and would not part with it; so she keeps both, and I suppose will soon have her lover again too, for my Lady Pembroke’s beauty is not glutinous…’

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