Mrs Jordan's Profession by Claire Tomalin

Author:Claire Tomalin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141933191
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

But George and his friends knew he was not a prince, let alone crowned with laurels. On the one hand his father was a duke and he was the grandson of the King; on the other, there was something mysterious and shameful about his parentage. For a boy of fourteen, anxiety about such things would be enough to make him behave badly, stop working and decide he had to prove himself by heroic deeds.

Sophy also became difficult. Her mother was understanding, telling the Duke that his eldest daughter had headaches, that ‘her constitution will shortly undergo a change’ – she was thirteen – and that ‘it is with the greatest difficulty that I can get her to stir out of her bedroom or hit on anything to amuse her’.14 Sophy was upset by the departure of the two brothers who were her closest friends, and still more upset when she heard of the possibility of her father also going to sea. She too was old enough to understand that the idyllic life of Bushy was built on something the world disapproved. In a letter George wrote after her death about his ‘oldest playmate’, he made it clear that she had suffered: ‘no one but myself knows the painfulness and difficulty of her early life’, he wrote.15 Her mother might give her love and attention, but she could not remove the difficulty for which she was responsible in the first place.

The serpent had entered paradise, at any rate for the older children, and they went willingly out of its gates. The Duke took George to Portsmouth, where he was to embark for Portugal; and told a party of naval officers that he devoted his son to the service of his country, having so far volunteered in vain himself. George sailed towards Corunna on a fair wind, in high health and spirits. ‘The distress of Mrs Jordan is not to be described… however, like what she is, one of the best and one of the ablest of women, she sees the propriety of his going,’ wrote the Duke to the Prince of Wales.16 Dora sent her fourteen-year-old off with her blessing, assuring him he was a fortunate boy, and offering him one of the most unusual pieces of advice ever offered to an officer: ‘as you are now a Lieutenant and employed on actual service it would be more appropriate if in future when you mention the Duke, that you should say my father, or the Duke: it may prevent any little ridicule that might be excited by your saying Papa’.

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