The Sailor King: The life of King William IV by Tom Pocock

Author:Tom Pocock [Pocock, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2021-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

IX

What Girl but Loves the Merry Tar

The idea of a love affair with an actress was exciting to the Duke of Clarence as to all young men of his stamp. By definition she was desirable, not only because she was almost certainly attractive and amusing, but because she would be desired by most of the other men in her audiences. There was a sexual piquancy about her profession, which shocked their elders and delighted them, in that she was probably intelligent and elegant, with the appearance of ‘a lady’, but exhibited herself on stage in what could seem a mild form of prostitution.

This theory seemed to find substance in the life of the famous actress, Mrs Jordan. Firstly, that was not her real name, which was Miss Bland. She had picked her stage surname after crossing the water – ‘the Jordan’ – from Ireland and had assumed marital status to cover the presence of her illegitimate children. Yet this was misleading: Dorothy Jordan was neither flighty nor promiscuous, but as good-hearted and jolly off the stage as on.

The illegitimate daughter of educated parents – Francis Bland, son of an Anglo-Irish judge, and Grace Phillips, daughter of a Welsh clergyman and herself an actress – Dorothy had been born in London on 22 November 1761. Four years older than the Duke, she was also more mature, having had to make her way through emotional shoals such as he had never had to navigate. As a pretty young actress in Dublin, she had been seduced by the domineering manager of her company, Richard Daly, and had escaped his clutches by fleeing to England in 1782, pregnant and destitute.

Joining another company, she soon made a mark as an ingenue with a talent for comedy. Accompanied by her mother and infant daughter, Fanny, she toured in the provinces before finding acclaim in London. By 1786, she was regarded as the equal of, and rival to, Sarah Siddons, the tragedienne, but as Mrs Jordan was anything but tragic the two complemented each other. In that same year, while performing at Drury Lane, she met a young lawyer with a fondness for the theatre, Richard Ford. She became his mistress, lived with him and bore him three children over four years. He spoke of marriage, and she sometimes called herself ‘Mrs Ford’, but he never proposed, probably because he had political ambitions and marriage to an actress might have proved a handicap in polite society. It was while living with him at Richmond that she met the Duke of Clarence.

Soon after their first meeting she appeared at Drury Lane in a farce called The Spoil’d Child, which opened in March 1790. She played the part of ‘Little Pickle’, a girl who disguises herself as a sailor. So dressed, she sang a winsome little song, which must have won William’s heart:

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