The Covent Garden Ladies (7 page)

As evidenced in her later life, Charlotte’s schooling bore the hallmarks of a slightly more privileged background. Whereas the curriculum at local charity schools would have been based entirely on comprehension of the basics – reading, writing, figuring, religious study and preparation for an apprenticeship – the slightly more up-scale, although not necessarily more academically rigorous, academies for young ladies would have included inculcation in female ‘accomplishments’. In addition to literacy and numeracy, pupils would have received instruction in French, dancing, deportment and music. If especially fortunate, they might also be exposed to Italian, needlework,
accountancy and perhaps a hint of history, geography and the works of classical antiquity. As the social reformer Francis Place mentions, Georgian London contained a number of ‘respectable day schools’ for girls that offered just such an academic regime, for a small fee. However, given the manifest pitfalls of her mother’s profession, it would have been in Charlotte’s best interest if she were to attend school as a boarder.

Mrs Ward would not have been the first procuress or courtesan to place her daughter into the care of a school’s matrons. Given gentlemen’s predilections for pubescent virgins, simply the presence of a nubile girl in the indecent surroundings of a brothel would have raised too many temptations. Elizabeth Ward did not want her daughter’s most precious commodity squandered in a rape, or through the softly-whispered persuasions of a love-struck but penniless suitor. Instead, the disposal of Charlotte’s maidenhead would have been planned in meticulous detail, as one of her mother’s greatest business transactions. For approximately fourteen years Mrs Ward would have cultivated her daughter’s charms and funded her education, in preparation for what would become the most important day of her life: her initiation into the rites of Venus.

When the time was deemed appropriate, usually upon the onset of womanhood, Charlotte, like any society daughter, would have been introduced into a public whirl of spectacle and entertainment. As a new face seen beside Mrs Ward at the theatre or in the pleasure gardens, the signals would become clear: Charlotte was the latest object on offer. Although her airing would have aroused interest from a variety of curious parties, Mother Ward would have had her own shortlist of especially wealthy, high-ranking customers already in mind to perform the two essential roles ahead.

No sexual experience was more coveted in the eighteenth century than intercourse with a virgin. A genuine maidenhead was a delicacy to the carnal connoisseur and commanded a hefty price. As untouched young women were not in the habit of wandering accidentally into disorderly houses, any bawd would know that the expense of procuring such treasures was considerable. The going rate for the privilege of spending the night with a chaste girl could vary from £20 to 50 guineas. Particularly skilful bawds with especially beautiful young recruits might
even manage to raise this sum to £100. And it was not simply the selfishly erotic pleasure of introducing an innocent to the sin of fornication that commanded these fees; it was also the guarantee of what might be considered the only truly safe sexual encounter available. Whoever he was, Charlotte’s deflowerer was likely to have been comfortably wealthy, and certainly not of her personal choosing. As the author of the
Nocturnal Revels
would have his readership believe, with regard to the pawning of her daughter Mrs Ward’s devious reputation was not unfounded. Charlotte, it seems, was ‘passed off as a virgin’ several more times to the unsuspecting, undoubtedly for similarly exorbitant prices.

Upon her entrance into the profession Charlotte was passed around like a dish to be sampled by the ranks of her mother’s clients. Even one night with the brothel’s novice would have brought Mrs Ward a healthy ladleful of cash, in addition to gifts of jewels and other bits of frippery. Enticing as these first proofs of her success were, her mother sought the ultimate prize for her daughter; an offer to be placed in ‘high keeping’.

In the eighteenth century, all whores were not created equal. Some came into the profession by chance, others through a specific determination to scale the ladder of society. Those of the meretricious sisterhood ranged in rank from the destitute and diseased ‘bunter’ or ‘bulk-monger’ at the bottom, to the high-living, silk-and-jewel-bedecked ‘kept mistress’ (later more commonly referred to as a courtesan) at the top end. Like a luxury item, the company of an accomplished, charming and beautiful mistress might be borrowed for an exclusive price, but could be owned outright, at least in theory, if her lodgings and living expenses were covered by an admirer. If the admirer was very wealthy, a young woman fortunate enough to ‘enter into keeping’ could have access to any extravagance money could procure. In order to demonstrate his own financial prowess, fashion demanded that a gentleman of influence keep a mistress as lavish in her spending habits as he. Kept mistresses were given free rein with shop-keepers and dressmakers, at the gambling tables, taverns and theatres, placing all expenses on their lovers’ generous credit accounts. Much to the dismay of the era’s moralists, kept mistresses lived as well as the noble wives they mirrored, dressing in the same clothing, wearing the same jewellery and riding in the same private coaches. They lived at some of the most
modish addresses, in lodgings decorated with gilded furniture and walls lined with damask. They kept entire households of servants, often attired in their own unique livery. They threw lavish dinners and parties and offered an alternative existence to the more staid world inhabited by virtuous wives and daughters. It was for this life that Mrs Ward was equipping her daughter, not for one of street-trawling, or even dependency upon a bawd. Prostitution of this sort presented the only means by which a low-born, illegitimate daughter of a whore might raise herself from the chamber pot of society, as it was not entirely unknown for devoted keepers in time to become legal husbands.

While Charlotte was to be the primary beneficiary of a life in high keeping, her mother stood to gain as well. Brothel convention dictated that in order to compensate a madam for parting with a woman who earned her house great repute among the debauched, a sufficient gratuity was required. Bawds preferred these parting gestures to be paid in banknotes – the higher the amount, the better. Even after the event, this would not be the last favour that Mrs Ward received from her daughter. Any devoted child was sure to provide for a parent from her lover’s unbounded pocket, making expensive gifts of clothing and food as well as paying the bills. Most ladies in keeping had entire retinues of needy family members and friends who followed closely behind, living off the scraps of her endowment. A bountiful lover would have permitted such expenses in moderation, but Charlotte’s uncomfortably close association with the notorious Mrs Ward would not have sat easily with her patrons. Instead, they would have been apt to watch her with a sceptical eye, wary of the tricks that mother may have instilled in daughter. The choice of a professional name, free from associations with the bawd who commandeered the brothel in Spring Garden, was necessary to ensure Charlotte’s success in the pleasure-seeking arena.

The shedding and altering of names was by no means an unusual practice among women of Charlotte’s profession. Without a direct association with a great lineage or a family of rank, a surname was a negligible, valueless thing. It was far better to call oneself something suitable, a moniker which conveyed a sense of allure, which alluded to an illustrious birth or to one’s special talents. If she was fortunate enough to be placed in keeping, she might also elect to adopt her lover’s surname, a
practice which conferred on her the status of a
de facto
wife while simultaneously outraging respectable society. Why Charlotte alighted on the name of Hayes as a replacement for Ward is unknown. It may perhaps provide us with a clue as to who her first paramour might have been, although any evidence of a Mr, Lord or Captain Hayes has not been recorded in the annals of her history.

In 1740, at about the time Charlotte Hayes made her appearance, two other girls ‘came upon the town from obscurity’: Lucy Cooper and Nancy Jones, who, along with the courtesan Fanny Murray, would prove to be her greatest rivals. The most business-minded bawds of the day were like horse trainers, constantly in search of young, promising blood from which they might be able to mould a winner. While Mrs Ward poured her resources into preparing her daughter for entry into the stakes, other procuresses cultivated their own favourites. At the time that Charlotte entered her profession, Fanny Murray had already established a name for herself as mistress to Beau Nash, the reigning Master of the Ceremonies at Bath, but it was Lucy Cooper who looked to be her greatest rival. Like Charlotte, she too had been the daughter of a bawd, born straight into the arms of a whorehouse. There were no aspirations for Lucy’s future though. If nature hadn’t blessed her with such overwhelming beauty, it is probable that she would have sunk into obscurity along with the others who lodged under her mother’s second-rate roof. It was only through the insight of Elizabeth Weatherby, one of Covent Garden’s ‘super-bawds’, that Lucy was polished and presented, a finished product ripe for high-class whoring in her early teens. Although lauded as being ‘perfection … amongst the great impures’ and deliciously ‘Lewder than all the whores in Charles’ reign’, Lucy never learned to exude the slow-burning charm that sustained Charlotte’s light. She and Mrs Weatherby, who acted as a kind of manager-cum-mother-figure, rowed bitterly and frequently. Choosing to ignore her procuress’s advice, Lucy eventually exhausted her good fortune, ending her days in debt and destitution at the period when Charlotte’s star was most in its ascendant. Nancy Jones’s fame was also short-lived. After only a few seasons, her handsome features were destroyed by a bout of smallpox. Robbed of the single attribute responsible for her livelihood, she too fell from the front row of leading lights
and into the degradation of the back streets. From there, the grasp of syphilis is said to have pulled her into a pauper’s grave before the age of twenty-five. It only required poor judgement, or a stroke of bad luck, to capsize an otherwise profitable career as an exclusive lady of pleasure. Of the three who began the race in that year, only Charlotte managed to sustain her stride and amass a triumph of riches.

The more often Charlotte’s face appeared in the front boxes of the theatres, the more frequently she was seen on the arms of her fashionable lovers, the more jewels they wrapped around her neck, the more her name was spoken by the raffish ‘in-crowd’ of Covent Garden. Gossip could be a courtesan’s best friend and, if its flames were stoked appropriately, could be used to her advantage. The more she appeared to be the dish
du jour
, the more desirous gentlemen of means became of making her acquaintance, although unlike Lucy Cooper and Fanny Murray, it was not necessarily Charlotte’s beauty about which her admirers raved. There was something in her person far more bewitching than simply a pleasing arrangement of features.

Although no one of her contemporaries would have disputed that Charlotte Hayes was attractive, if not very pretty, the words used to praise her appearance are sparing and judiciously applied. She was, according to admirers, ‘buxom’ and ‘fair’. The poet Edward Thompson commemorates her not only for her ability to preserve her youthful features but for her admirable use of very ‘little paint’, while Sam Derrick, always favourable in his appraisals of her, remarks simply on her ‘grey eyes and brown hair’. These attributes were only partially responsible for what the devoted believed to be her true beauty. Charlotte, as one lover wrote, ‘shined’. Her composure, dignity and gentility made her unlike the majority of the foul-mouthed sisterhood. How a woman of such low birth could behave with the honesty and kindness of a virtuous wife was a mystery that gentlemen found both enthralling and sexually thrilling. One observer wrote that:

She is extremely genteel … all her features [are] elegant, her air is fine, her address polite, and her taste in dress indisputably genteel; she is a woman of good sense, but talks less than most of her sex, except when she is perfectly well acquainted with her company; then few women can be more agreeably entertaining.

Throughout her life, hardly an unfavourable word was uttered against her. To men like Edward Thompson who fell under her spell, it was Charlotte’s unaffected candour that was most enchanting, making her appear in his eyes at least ‘as honest as a saint’. Sam Derrick was also hooked by this, and praised her for ‘never learning to deceive … not withstanding the varieties she has seen in life’. To him, she would always possess ‘a countenance as open as her heart’.

But the flattery of lovers and pundits says more about Charlotte Hayes’s impeccable professional skills than it does about her true qualities. She did not become an affluent courtesan or one of London’s most influential brothel-keepers by being either kind or honest. If, by chance, one of Charlotte’s female associates had left some jotted memory, some scrap of her life spent in the shadowed company of such a complicated creature, a truer picture of the woman might be have survived. Where her male patrons may have seen her exterior, a fellow female traveller would have seen the inside, the efforts to slowly extinguish her sense of sympathy, to unplug her emotions and to stuff the empty spaces with false smiles and theatrical tears. Her seemingly effortless deception of men is a testament to her mother’s early teaching, although in the first decades of her career, there were many more lessons still to be learned.