Free The Damnation of John Donellan by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

1760s was a place of marked contrasts. Visiting the city in 1780, the Prussian traveller Johann Wilhelm Von Archenholz wrote that London was markedly divided between east and west: to the east, along the Thames, were old, narrow streets of cramped houses, the scene dominated by wharves, and yards. ‘The contrast between this and the West End is astonishing,’ he wrote,’ the houses here are mostly new and elegant, the squares superb, the streets straight and open.’ 5 Now was the time when Georgian London’s most imposing developments came into being: Portman Square, Bedford Square and Portland Place were all built between 1764 and 1778.
    London was crowded, rapacious, bawdy. The seat of royalty and at the very heart of trade and government, it was, at the same time, a city of drunks, whores and desperate poverty. Its houses were overcrowded and its slums, like St Giles, stank; its roads were mostly unpaved and unlit. It was a place where children as young as seven or eight were plied as prostitutes, where Hogarth’s Gin Lane was a living reality, and street singers on every corner were applauded for songs that would be regarded as obscene even today. There were, Von Archenholz records, 8,000 alehouses and over 50,000 prostitutes in the city.
    Yet the capital city also had a spirit of grace, of Reynolds beauties, of ceremony and wealth, and it prided itself – as all England did – on being strong and powerful. England had the largest navy in the world and was engaged in wars on various fronts; it was afighting machine, hardy and ingenious. Its countrymen were represented not only by the swagger of the ex-military man, but also by the rake and the fat alderman gorging himself on beefsteak and porter at breakfast. Visitors to London were sure to see three qualities that summed up England: a fighting, brawling, industrious spirit; conspicuous greed and sensuality; and abject poverty.
    More than anything else, London was a city of social mobility at every level. But you would have had to have been a very dull man indeed not to understand that every strata of society had its grades. There was a gulf between the lowly baronet and the elevated duke, between the poor curate and the bishop, between the colonel and the foot soldier: but the hurdles were there to be jumped. Most difficult of all to bridge, however, was the chasm between an ordinary gentleman and a titled aristocrat. There was one obvious way to circumvent that: marry into a titled family.
    Marriage might have been an alluring passport to high society for a man like Donellan, but it was not needed at all for a few low-born girls. These rose to fame, if not a lifetime’s security, as the mistresses of wealthy men. In the Restoration Court of Charles II a hundred years before, it was said that no man could achieve power or recognition unless he had a mistress. That air of manly potency was vital to his reputation. In the Georgian era, a wife’s infidelity was grounds for divorce, but a man’s was not – although divorces were rare, since they required an Act of Parliament. Mistresses were widely accepted, even for men of the church. One astonishing example was Archbishop Blackburne, who brought his mistress, Mrs Cruwys, to live under his own roof, where she queened it at the head of the table whenever his wife was absent. Man of letters Horace Walpole recalled an occasion on which Cruwys was at dinner with Blackburne’s illegitimate son by another liaison. Blackburne’s affairs were ignored, however: he was chaplain to royalty. According to Walpole, the illegitimate son later became the Bishop of London.
    So illegitimacy was not frowned upon then as it was to be in later years. As mentioned, John Donellan himself was illegitimate; Philip Stanhope, the adored son to whom Lord Chesterfieldaddressed his numerous letters, was illegitimate; Joseph Addison, friend of the Boughton family, had a son by the Countess of